"In fact, she was Hildegarde Loretta Sell of Milwaukee, Wisc. Her persona was almost total fiction, concocted with the aid of her friend and agent, Anna Sosenko. Sosenko was relentless in promoting her, creating stories of her escapades and feeding them to a hungry American press. She had learned to sing in French, Russian, Italian, and German, as well as in English: she developed "a precise diction which made every word clearly audible and which reduced her accent to an unidentifiable exotic flavoring"