"According to her 1943 memoirs, "Always Room at the Top," Walska had tried every sort of fashionable mumbo jumbo to conquer her nerves and salvage her voice," reported "The New York Times" in 1996. "Nothing worked. During a performance of Giordano's "Fedora" in Havana she veered so persistently off key that the audience pelted her with rotten vegetables. It was an event that Orson Welles remembered when he began concocting the character of the newspaper publisher's second wife for "Citizen Kane"."