Olga von Root

In 1925, while performing in Yalta, von Root was introduced to the Jewish American millionaire industrialist Armand Hammer. The two fell in love and, after von Root obtained a divorce from her first husband in Moscow, she and Hammer were married in a civil ceremony in 1927. They had one son, Julian Armand Hammer, who was born in Moscow in 1928. Prior to her marriage to Hammer, von Root was given permission to leave Russia on multiple occasions to accompany him on business engagements between the Soviet Union and the United States. There was speculation during this time that she was agent of the Joint State Political Directorate. The family left Moscow in 1930 and took up residence on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. She and Hammer divorced in 1943.

Baroness Olga Vadimovna von Root (1901–1967) was a Russian stage actress and singer. Born into a noble family of German, Polish, and Greek background, von Root was educated at the Smolny Institute of Noble Maidens in Russia. As a teenager, she ran away from home and travelled with a Romani family, studying their music and dance. During the Russian Revolution, while her father served in the White Army, von Root performed in cabarets and nightclubs to help support her family. After the war, she performed in Russia and other European countries as a stage actress and singer under the stage name Olga Vadina. She later married American industrialist Armand Hammer and moved to the United States, taking up residence in Manhattan. While living in New York, she worked to transcribe numerous Romani ballads. Von Root is the grandmother of American businessman Michael Armand Hammer and the great-grandmother of American actor Armie Hammer.

Baroness Olga Vadimovna von Root was born in Sevastopol, Crimea in 1901. She was the daughter of Baron Vadim Nicholaievitch von Root, a Czarist military officer and nobleman, and Lubov Karlovna Kostsyushko-Valyuzhinich, a member of a Polish landed gentry family. Von Root's paternal ancestors were Volga German nobles who came to Russia during the reign of Peter the Great to serve in the Imperial Russian Army. Her maternal grandfather, Karl Kazimirovich Kostsyushko-Valyuzhinich, was Catholic and the founder of the Archeological Museum in Chersonesos. Her maternal grandmother, Maria Pavlovna Revelioti, was a Russian Orthodox woman of Greek descent and the granddaughter of the landowner, Russian general, and Greek revolutionary Theodosius Revelioti. Through her mother, von Root was also a descendent of the Polish military leader Tadeusz Kościuszko.