The Later Years 423
her. It seems that Cana, a party heroine, bore a grudge against “Comrade Marko”
and her influence within Tito’s entourage contributed to his downfall in 1966.^168
Pepca Kardelj told Dedijer that, after Zdenka’s death, Tito proposed a “menage
à trois” to her and her husband, but her husband had refused. Their common
friend, Zdenka Kidrič, commented caustically that this was pure fantasy: “Pepca
dreamt of being the Yugoslav first lady.”^169
Tito got over Zdenka’s loss quickly, falling in love with Zinka Kunc, alias
Milanov, a famous singer who returned home from New York after the war,
where she had been a star of the Metropolitan Opera. She was a majestic woman,
breathtakingly beautiful and with a regal manner. She refused him, preferring
to marry General Ljubomir Ilić, who had become famous during the Spanish
Civil War and later during the French Resistance. Although the chatter of the
women in his circle, who were hostile to newcomers in their elite group and
especially to opera singers, had no influence on him, Tito still did not insist on
his courtship, obviously because he could not do this to one of his generals.^170
Later, in 1946, he met one of the most popular Soviet film stars, Tat’iana
Okunevskaia, called the Russian Greta Garbo. It seems he told her that he was
unable to marry her immediately, but that he was ready to open all the Yugo-
slav theaters and studios to her. It was useless. In spite of her refusal, Tat’iana
paid dearly for Tito’s courtship: when he was excluded from the Cominform,
she found herself banished for years to a Siberian gulag because of her associa-
tion with him.^171
Jovanka BudisavljevićIt was a captain in the People’s Army, Jovanka Budisavljević, who would be-
come Tito’s last wife. She was a Serb, originally from Lika, an extremely poor
Croatian region. In 1942, at only seventeen years old, she joined the local female
Partisan unit and was wounded twice during the struggle, although not seriously.
She came from a modest peasant family and managed to complete primary
school, a rarity for country girls. At the end of the war she was a commissioner
at the hospital in Drvar, then in the same capacity in the surgery hospital of the
First Army. After the victory, as a trusted cadre, she worked at the General Staff
headquarters in Belgrade and later in the Serbian town of Niš. She was finally
chosen by the OZNA to be a housekeeper in the marshal’s residence at the end
of 1945 or beginning of 1946, which meant that she worked for the secret ser-
vice. She had some experience with household chores, as she had once worked
in a guest house owned by a relative, but her most important qualification was
Partisan militancy—she had been awarded several medals—and her total ded-
ication to the party and its leader. She came into direct contact with the mar-
shal as a member of his personal guard, created by NKVD agents, similar to