YUGOSLAVIA: Marriage to a Major

The capitalist world learned that Communist Marshal Tito was involved in what sounded like a typically capitalist romance. It was just another case of girl marries boss.

When British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, himself a bridegroom of only six weeks, paid a visit to Tito last week, he found a new Mrs. Tito* by the dictator’s side. She is a svelte and bronzed brunette, Jovanka Budisavljevic, 28, a major in the Yugoslav army who had been assigned last year to Tito’s secretariat. She had joined Tito’s partisans at 17 and by war’s end was a lieutenant. Last spring the dictator put aside his dictation long enough to get married. The wedding was held in deepest secrecy. The Yugoslav press has still made no official announcement of it, but invitations to the diplomatic reception for Eden last week were issued in the names of “Marshal Josip Broz Tito and Mme. Jovanka Broz.” At the reception itself, Major Jovanka played the part of hostess with poise and charm. One of the 400 guests present complimented her with the remark: “You are attracting more attention even than Mr. Eden.” “No,” gasped Yugoslavia’s new first lady. “How can that be?”

* Tito’s first wife was a Russian girl whom he met while in Omsk during the Russian civil war. She was loath to return with him to Yugoslavia, finally consented, only to leave him ten years later (in 1929) when he refused to settle down and give up his revolutionary activities. She is said to have died in Russia some time in the late ’30s. The second wife, Herta, whom Tito married in 1939, was taken prisoner four years later by Yugoslavia’s pro-Nazi quisling government. Tito, head of the Partisan government in the mountains, bailed her out by trading eleven Nazi prisoners for her freedom. They were divorced in 1947.