Meanwhile, her husband bought a farm in Pennsylvania, even though neither one of them knew anything about farming. “We had 5,000 chickens, 30 cattle, and just the two of us,” she said. “It was a hard, hard working life. He finally had to go back to work in government, because the farm did not do well. Fortunately, he could get a good position. But the farm fell on my shoulders completely. . . . I hated it. And there was no way for me to do what I was trained to do and liked to do. But my character is strong, so I just did it because it had to be done. My husband would be away at his job for days at a time and eventually he became involved with someone else. Now,” she said, “I could leave.”

Back then, it wasn’t easy to get a divorce. “One had to go to certain places to get it. I went to Las Vegas,” she said. “While I was still waiting there for my divorce, a friend of mine wrote a letter to the Groucho Marx show (You Bet Your Life) suggesting that I could be an interesting contestant. I was a foreigner, I lived an interesting life, and I photographed well.”

She moved to Los Angeles, and while appearing as a contestant on Groucho’s show, she said, a New York publisher “saw me and got in touch with me with a proposal that I wrote a book about my life. I replied that I happened to have 14 chapters already written.” In 1959, her first book, an autobiography titled Kyra, was published. “It became a best seller, allowing me to live off the earnings for quite a while,” she said. “My appearance on the Groucho show led to many other invitations for television or concert appearances. I sang mostly Russian songs.”