KILLED - Episode 9: The Stranger

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

A nuanced piece about the estranged daughter of one of the deadliest men in history gets offed by Vanity Fair—twice. Featuring Nicholas Thompson.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com. 

I wrote a story about Svalana Stalin. Stalin's beloved daughter. She's, you know, the Sasha Obama of the Kremlin. And then she has a falling out, you know, at about the time of World War II, where she falls in love with the Jewish man who then Stalin sends to a gulag. And so eventually she comes to each of her defects. She has enough of the Soviet Union. She defects. There's a lot of heartbreak, there's a lot of trauma.

A lot of us have complicated feelings about our fathers, but many of them are bad few of them killed 30 million people. And so I wrote it, and they never ran it. And actually, they killed it twice. and actually, we killed it twice. From Justine Harmon and Audio Chuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Episode 9, The Stranger. Episode 9. The Stranger

Nick Thompson is a pretty serious guy. He's the former editor-in-chief of Wired and the current CEO of The Atlantic, which means he has ideas and also solutions. Very rare in editorial types. Nick's also a devoted runner. A topic he routinely discusses on his Instagram and LinkedIn and in interviews. I do think that my running is very closely connected to the way I work. There's a psychological theory that disciplinary and your hobby detracts from the rest of the day and a psychological theory that the opposite is true And I'm very much in that camp. I do think that Nick likes his runs like he likes his journalism

Long running or anything. I hold the American record for running 50 kilometers faster than any guy over 45 ever If you were wondering that's 31 miles five more than a marathon at under six minutes a mile. And he's actually getting faster as he gets older, which suits Nick just fine. For over 20 years, Nick has kept pace with the ever-changing media industry. I started working as a magazine editor in 1999 so that would be 23 years. The Washington Monthly. That was really my first job in journalism. I was 24 years old and it was a funny job where you got a lot of responsibility and you have to work in say an hour, like a hundred hours a week. And you weren't paid much.

It was a very intense job. And I can't remember the first time I had to tell an author that we were killing his or her story, but happened all the time. Then he honed his story skills at Wired, the dense tech mag during its absolute heyday. And then I was an editor at Wired from 2005 to 2010. It was at Wired that Nick became well-versed in the fine art of magazine murder.

So that's probably the era where we killed the most stories because we had eight features editors, we didn't have a website where we were publishing stories. You're only running for features a month. You have all of these editors. So people are assigning stories that don't run. So I think the reason why there's so many more killed stories in the period up to, let's say, 2012 is that magazine publishing is much more profitable. You can hire many more editors, you can assign stories, you can assign higher-word rates to writers, you can take risks, you can assign 10 stories

knowing that only three will run because you can afford it. In 2006, if an advertiser wants to reach people who care about tech, what are they gonna do? They're gonna buy an ad and wire it. people who care about tech, what are you gonna do? They're gonna buy an ad and wire it. Mm-hmm. Nick was raised on hard and fast rules,

editorial higher arcies, and fiercely competitive editors vying for meaty back-of-book real estate by any means necessary. Take the absolutely unhinged, wired magazine pitch meetings back when Nick was a senior editor, circa 2007. Wired pitch meetings, circa 2007.

Toxic? No, just incredibly complex. I mean, the sort of version, no, they weren't toxic at all. They were amazing. They were absolutely toxic. What we did is all the editors, so I was one of the senior editors, all the editors would write up their pitches, and then the pitches would be distributed to the entire staff, and then everybody on staff would grade the pitches,

and then there would be a meeting where the grades would be presented and the standard deviations, and then the pitches would be presented by the editor and reverse order of the scores. And so the idea was to create democracy under autocracy, so the editor-in-chief still makes all the choices. But you have a little bit of democracy. You can kind of knock out the stories that score terribly, give an easy green light to the ones that score wonderfully. Because in a conversation, if you have 10 people sitting

around a table, you could have an idea that nine like and one doesn't, and it could seem like it's one to one because only two people are talking, or you could have an idea that, you know, nine don't like and one does like and can seem like one to one, right? But if you actually have the votes, it's very helpful. The standard deviations help too. The problem with that process that we had at Wired is that, you know, you pitch scores the lowest in the group, and you feel pretty bad. You know, I pitched all the time, and I feel like at one point there was like a year, every single meeting, I had the lowest score in pitch.

But is it a time where I was doing pretty well? Like I assigned a bunch of stories, I assigned a story that became the movie Argo. Like I assigned a lot of good stories. I got an idea. There are Canadian film crew for a science fiction movie. That's right. Argo.

We all fly out together as a film crew. The man pitched the magazine article that eventually became the Oscar-smoking movie Argo, with Ben Affleck. But the pitch barely got Greenland. It scored only a 4.0 on Wired's 1-6 scale of editorial excellence. It came in fifth out of 12 ideas that day. You know, I had a lot of stories with very low scores.

So Nick's stories weren't always the easiest to digest. They were more like long yarns you had to unspool. And besides, Nick had more to worry about than Machiavellian pitch meetings. Because outside of the hallowed halls of Wired, he had stumbled down another decades-old rabbit hole. While going through the personal papers of his grandfather, Paul Nitsa,

a famously bullish Cold War strategist and national security expert, he'd come up with something, or rather someone unexpected. I was writing a book about George Cannon and Paul Nitsim. It's called The Hawk in the Dove. It's a history of America during the Cold War. And Cannon was a Russian scholar. He's the dove in the story. And he had had a very close relationship with Svetlana. And so I had never heard her name

before I began working on the book. And I learned that she was living in America, which is of course an interesting fact, Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp Stomp in 1946, effectively kicking off the Cold War. Former US ambassador George Kennen, personally helped Joseph Stalin's only daughter, Svetlana, defect to the US, and her arrival was major news. She holds this big press conference

and denounces the Soviet Union, the legacy of her father, and his successors. For those horrible things, healing people, I'm just this. I feel that responsible for this. The May 1st, 1967 cover of Newsweek is Svetlana grinning above the headline, Stalin's daughter chooses the US. She's 41. She's left her

children behind. All of a sudden, she's an American superstar and she plays it fast and loose. She gets in a relationship, she gets upset, she drives her car through the person's living room. She goes out, she joins, I don't know, she would call it a cult, other people would call it a community, and she writes a book that becomes the best seller. According to The New York Times, Svetlana's 1967 autobiography, 20 letters to a friend, earned her more than $2.5 million.

But in that cruelly American way, the media quickly moved on from the story. And then she sort of runs out of money, runs out of luck, and ends up stuck in the middle of Wisconsin. And 40 years later, when Nick's researching his book on the Cold War, she's living off welfare at a home for elderly women in Wisconsin. See, I told you, long yarns. I wrote her a letter, and because I had written her about George Kennon, not about her father,

she will back. Eventually, Nick picked up the phone. Hello? Hello, Miss Peters. Yes? Hi, it's Nick Thompson writing the book about Kennen. How are you? Hello, hello.

Fine, fine. Is this an OK time to talk? This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Back in 2006, while researching his book on America's involvement in the Cold War, Nick Thompson had stumbled upon an unlikely source for insight into former US ambassador, George Kennan. Nick played some of his tapes for Killed. When you're writing a history about a person, you can get bored doing the interviews because you hear the same stories in the same way. And then I wrote to Svetlana and she just, she was brilliant. Svetlana was a dream subject. She lived to

talk and she cut right through the BS. She saw the real George Kenan more than most observers. She saw what he wanted, she saw what he needed, she saw the tensions in his life. That was why I kept writing to her. Even when I was done writing my book about Kenan and I had nothing more to learn from her about Kenan, I wanted to know what she thought about everybody. Which is why, about a year later, Nick pitched his not at all wired story to Vanity Fair.

So let me tell you what you wrote about that magazine. What is the name of it? Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair. His house to meet for other strange things. Vanity Fair. Like 19th century something to Vanity Fair was, hey, did you know Stalin's daughter lives out in a sort of retirement home in the middle of Wisconsin, I'm going to go see her.

What do you think? They were into it. And it was initially assigned by Vanity Fair as a, I don't know, 600 word little piece. And so I wrote it. Until they weren't. And they never ran it. Pieces killed. But what happened is after I went out and visited her for that first piece, we started just writing letters. And I ended up getting hundreds of letters from her. And some of them were, you wonderfully evocative about her life, about her father. Some of them she was incredibly belligerent to me.

Some of them she was kind of like a grandmother to me, giving me advice on my marriage. But it was a very funny, interesting, emotionally fraught series of conversations we had. I think she wanted me to marry her daughter. So we had this very intense correspond, I was not gonna marry her daughter. I was happily married to my wife, have been since the very beginning of this process.

In case she clearly, she didn't have a lot of people to talk to and she liked talking to me. And I liked talking to her, not just as a reporting subject. I liked, she was giving me interesting material. I liked talking to her. Svetlana worried to Nick on the phone about missing phone calls from her daughter about a scrapped move to California that had caused her much distress. In the following clip, she's worrying about the original vanity fair piece.

It's been 40 years, she says. Maybe I should sit quietly, you know, and not pop out. Many people have forgotten that I exist. Many people think that I'm dead longer ago. Good. Good. Good. And you know sometimes you want to be forgotten, you know, so people don't bother you with that stupid idea. And we have elections coming, so everybody is excited about that.

More and more people are into elections. It does decide me because I don't see one person who I would like. So maybe I should just sit quietly and not to pop up. Well we'll see, the editors haven't, you know, I don't have their final version, so I should get that sometime in the next week. Svetlana was wary of the story. Of editors getting it wrong. Now, you mentioned in your letter that, of course, there will be editors. Of course, as with the whole.

Yes, there are editors. They're not going to say you're a millionaire. They're not going to have the old lies. Do you have a chance to deny that? You know, that my father never left anything for me. Oh, that's in the article. Oh it is. Yeah, that's definitely in there.

It's the first sentence. Well, they might throw this out. If they threw that out then, then I'll stop the article. But I think it's going to, I want to make people realize that, you know, you're a normal person. You're trying to make money like other people that's not like there's money in Swiss banks. Well they don't think that I'm normal towards them like others. They think that I'm exactly like my father and that absolutely you know makes me walk on the walk. But anyway you will see, of course, what they will make with it.

As they kept talking, the shape of a different story began to emerge. One of a deeply wounded figure, whose father was literally Joseph Stalin. A woman for whom a scorched earth mentality had long ago become a vital defense mechanism. I had written her a letter about the tender subject, then she wrote me a letter saying, I was a horrible person and that I had fallen into the same traps that everybody who ever wrote about her had fallen into, which is to use her as a way of trying to understand her father instead of looking at herself and her mother. I wrote back to her and apologized

And then I evadedly remember opening the mailbox in the fire of our apartment building and it was thick and I was like oh great She said me something long and I opened it up and was my letter unopened She said all your letters would be returned the same way unopened and unread It was crushing. I remember going in and like, my wife was like, you look passionate. And I showed her because it doesn't feel good to make anybody that angry. And you know she has temper tantrums.

And like, she wasn't my mother. I don't know her anything. She's not part of my life. You can sever that relationship. It still feels crappy. I'm a middle child. She's not part of my life. Like you can sever that relationship, but it still feels crappy. I'm a middle child. I like to get along with everybody. And like, I made this woman so angry.

She sent me my letter unopened. And then it also meant, you know, like, of course, maybe sometime I thought I would write about her like, okay, I'll let it blew that. But then, you know, a few weeks later, she sent me another letter apologizing. And then we were back on. But I remember, I just remember, I've been

being very shaken. What was interesting to me is she's deeply erratic, right? And in a way, you can't blame her, father of Stalin, her father of center of birth, boy from the Goulog, right? So you can't blame her in some way. I was sympathetic to that part of her personality. About a year after his original piece was killed... Did you know Stalin's daughter lives out in a retirement home in the middle of Wisconsin? Nick began to crack the story further. It wasn't about the fallen from Grace's daughter of the Kremlin who spent all her money. It was about a woman who no one ever really cared to understand because of what she represented.

They don't think that I'm normal person. They think that I'm exactly like my father. Nick decided to go back to Vanity Fair one more time. I said, hey guys, I have a better idea. I've gotten all this new material let's turn it into a 5,000 work piece and they said sure that sounds great. And so I rewrote it and refiled it and then in 2010 they killed the 5,000 work piece. So in a way Vanity Fair killed it twice.

This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. After Nick's portrait of Stalin's daughter was killed for the second time, Nick got paid for his troubles. I was paid twice, two kilfies. My contact with Vanity Fair was for 5,000 words at $2.40 a word. So I would have been $12,000. And then I got a 50% kill fee, so I got $6,000.

When the long story was killed. But the payday didn't suit the burn. The first vanity fair story had been a few hundred words, but this, this was a fully fleshed profile of someone he actually knew and cared about, someone with whom he had spent hours and years straining to understand. This wasn't just some hasty stitch job pulled from 34 minutes at a press junket. Thank you for calling. Alright, well it's good to talk to you. I'm looking forward to getting your latest letters.

I always like getting letters from you. He had written Spetlana in all of her glory and rage and contradictions. And they had just said, no thank you. I looked at the note and it didn't, you know, it doesn't work with the mix advertising is down 30% with a few of features. It was just the story's not good enough. What was hard for me when the story was killed is that I knew I had a good topic, right?

Hey guys, I had discovered that Stalin's daughter lives in a cornfield in Wisconsin. What's interesting? And yet somehow I had taken that interesting fact. I had gone out and seen her. I had written all these letters. And I still hadn't written something good enough. That's tough.

It makes you think, gosh, I'm not very good at observing. I'm not very good at writing or I'm not very good at writing or I'm not very good at reporting. When you write a piece that's personal, getting it killed has even higher stakes because in a way they're rejecting your story, they're rejecting your writing, they're rejecting your reporting, but they're also rejecting you in a small way. The worst kind of story to kill is like a memoir about yourself. Brutal, like your life is not interesting enough, or you haven't written it well enough. And the Settlana story wasn't fully personal, but it was partly personal.

After Vanity Fair dropped the axe on his story. Twice, Nick regrouped and eventually left his job at Wired. He'd later return as editor in chief. And his Fetlana story? Well, he left that in the rear view. When it was killed, I didn't keep working on it. I didn't touch it for four years. I didn't think about it as a piece.

I didn't work on it. I didn't revise it. And that's partly due to, you know, to be killed by that any fair, maybe it's not that good. He went to the New Yorker where he'd been hired to edit the intellectual magazine's website. So I had taken this job with the New Yorker where it had been made very clear to me that my job was to edit not to write. And not to pitch his lovely balls of yarn. Nick and the magazine's longtime editor-in-chief, David Remnick came to an agreement. You know, the New Yorker has a problem

where it hires people to come in as editors, copy editors, fact-checkers, photographers, and then everybody wants to write features for the magazine. And it's frustrating because it means they're distracted from the thing they're supposed to actually do. And so when I came in for my job, I essentially had to promise in blood to Remnick, you know, while sitting on his couch during the job interview that I was not going to pester him with my personal feature ideas.

And he was going to hand me a stack of drafts and I was going to make those drafts better and then they were going to appear in the magazine and that was the deal. So Nick put his head down. He edited pieces by heavyweights like Cannelletta and Ryan Liza. He watched the magazine win awards and he ran his miles, sometimes running two and from the office, commuting as exercise as clever time optimization hack and Svetlana and all of her drama receded into the background. On November 22, 2011, Svetlana died colon cancer. She'd been mostly known as Lana Peters after her fourth husband her kin. Her New York Times obituary read, Lonna Peters, Stalin's daughter, dies at 85. So I really didn't want to, I mean I'd been in the job four years and I was exceptionally close to David and everybody and I was still, I felt like no I'm not going to

impose, I'm not going to write, I'm not going to present my feature idea and then I finally did. I'm not going to write. I'm not going to present my feature idea. And then I finally did. And I can't remember exactly the sequence of events that led me to pitch it. I'm having a little bit of memory recalls happening right now. So it was in the fall, I guess would have been the fall of 13. And so Vellana was now had long had long died. She'd been dead for a year. And one night, I went into the vanity fair file. And I remember looking at the vanity fair draft and changing it and just having one of those creative flurries where you're stalled for a long time and then suddenly you write something decent.

One of the things that happened to me at the New Yorker is that I unquestionably got better at writing. I'm editing some of the best writers in the world. I'm really focused on trying to improve as a writer and it's just such a part of the culture of that place. In any case, I think that by 2014, the reason why I brought it up, you know, four years after it got killed was

more self-confidence in my abilities and then lots of confidence in the story and then also the fact that she had passed away and therefore wouldn't be reading it. And with her gone, it was much easier to write. When she was alive, I didn't want to write a story, but with her gone, I thought, okay, well, maybe I should do it.

He wrote about Svetlana's rye sense of humor, her memories of her father and her mother, of her off the charts IQ, bad decisions, paranoia, love affairs, and strained relationships with her children. I wrote different versions of the stories for the different publications. And certainly, the version I wrote for Vanity Fair was angled more at what I thought Vanity Fair would like,

like there's a lot more sex and celebrity in that version. Beni Orker is, it's more narrative, it's more chronological, it's more emotional. He wrote about the letters, the emotional outbursts. He wrote it all and he wrote it from his point of view. I transformed it so that much more of the story was about my relationship to her. And then I sent it to Amy Davidson, my very close colleague on the New Yorker website. And then I think she suggested, I suggested to her writing it as a three-part piece to the

web. She said, make it one part. And then I must have taken it at some point to Daniel Zalasky, the features editor there, and then he must have said, take it to Remnick and I must have taken it at some point to Daniel Zalaski, the features editor there, and then he must have said, take it to Remnick, and I must have taken it to Remnick. So it took a little while to get the courage to even present it as a print feature to Remnick. Nick's nearly 7,000 word piece,

finally ran in the March 31, 2014 issue of The New Yorker, along with a portrait of an unapologetic-looking spet Lana wearing a black sweater. Honestly, she looks like a lot of fun to talk shit with. David Remnick, who was and still is the editor of The New Yorker, didn't respond to Killed's requests for interview. Do you have other questions for everyone? I have a few other questions. Okay. We read your long letter again. I just got your new letter too. It killed requests for interview. It's a beautiful piece about a complicated relationship between a woman and her father,

the past and the present, a journalist and his subject. When I read the final version again before this podcast, every time I read one of her letters, you know, I kind of lit up because her voice is so wonderful, her insights are so powerful. In fact, when CIA people called him, you know, I actually went through and I read the initial draft that I sent in. And in that draft, I included many more of the things that she wrote to me, like about my children, about my wife, about my life, about my personality flaws. And we took all those out. And I actually think that was the right choice.

I wanted to ask you how was everything going with you? It's going very well. You know, I'm doing a lot of things. And I think we struck the right balance of having me as a character, but not being too much the central focus of it.