Melissa’s mother, Miliza Korjus, in 1941 signed a contract with a Mexican radio station to sing on the radio and perform at opera houses around the country. She also starred in a Mexican musical, Caballeria del Imperio, with several of the major Mexican movie stars.
The family moved from Los Angeles to Mexico City in 1941. Her father, Kuno Foelsch, stayed a while in Mexico and then moved back to Los Angeles. The nanny, Lia, whom they’d known for almost ten years, stayed in California.
Melissa would speak German with her mother and Spanish with her friends, who were a mixture of Mexicans and Europeans. For example, she played with the children of the house servants and with the son of the Austrian conductor of her mother’s orchestra. She forgot some of her English but would read books in that language. She accompanied her mother on all her concert tours around Mexico and would appear in newspapers with her or even by herself. Here are videos of Melissa speaking in German and Spanish.
Read Miliza Korjus distributed autographed photos in Mexico
Read El Norte newspaper of Monterrey interviewed Miliza Korjus with Melissa by her side, 1942
Read Mexican tabloid Radiolandia featured Melissa on the cover, 1943
“In Mexico there was no compulsory education in those days, and we lived quite a way outside of town in a beautiful home,” Melissa recalled in the ADST Oral History website. “I went to school, and my mother would give concerts and go traveling, and there was no way that she was going to leave me behind. So, I would disappear. I’ve always been tall for an eight, nine-year-old and I had very blonde hair in those days. She used to take me with her and the teachers didn’t seem to mind. I’d bring them back presents or something. I’d be gone for weeks on end because she would do tours [she even sang in Cuba]. Of course, everywhere she went she was feted, and she was interested in going to museums and things. I was the one who always wanted to go to the museum, and I must say my mother was wonderful, even though I hardly ever went to school I had read [William Hickling] Prescott’s Conquest of Peru by the age of nine. It was not usually a nine-year old’s reading material.”
She learned much about Mexico by visiting pyramids, museums and monuments instead of just studying about them. Miliza let her daughter buy any book she wanted. Even in her eighties, Melissa could list the names and location of all the Mexican states, something she couldn’t do for the US states.
Behind this veneer of glamour and travel, her family’s life was beginning to disintegrate. Her father spent long periods away from her mother. Melissa, in later years, could not recall any dinner conversations between her parents during this period. Her mother had several lovers. One was a very high-ranking Mexican government official and member of the ruling political party. He would come regularly to their home. After this relationship had ended, he sexually abused Melissa several times. This abuse traumatized Melissa for many years. A decade later, an Italian man helped her deal with this challenge and find true love.
Another of her mother’s affairs was with a Romanian who accompanied the court of King Carol II, who had fled that country during World War II. Miliza had a son with the second lover.
When it was clear that the US was going to win the war, Miliza moved back to there with her daughter, the cook and a nanny (both Mexican) in mid-1944.