Building Taliesin Read online

  Fig. 6. Grief-stricken townspeople mourn as Frank Lloyd Wright, sung by Robert Orth, places wildfowers on Mamah’s grave and pledges to rebuild Taliesin, in a scene from the Chicago Opera Theater’s Shining Brow. In the actual 1914 event, Wright buried Mamah alone after filling her casket with the flowers from her garden.

  Fig. 7. Mamah Borthwick’s grave marker in the Unity Chapel churchyard carries her married name. She stopped calling herself Cheney and reclaimed her maiden name even before she was divorced in August, 1911, before she arrived at Taliesin. She called herself Mamah Bouton Borthwick in all her published translations.

  Anderson published a tribute to the couple in October 1914. It was a piece of poetry that Wright said survived the fire only because he carried it in his pocket. Anderson’s preface says: “This fragment, a ‘Hymn to Nature,’ unknown to us in the published works of Goethe, was found in a little bookshop in Berlin and translated into English by a strong man and a strong woman whose lives and whose creations have served the ideals of all humanity in a way that will gain deeper and deeper appreciation.”8

  TURMOIL AND TRIUMPH

  That deeper appreciation was delayed until well after Wright’s death. Mamah’s memory was first buried under a heap of melodrama and scandal generated by Wright’s nine-year liaison and marriage with the volatile Miriam Noel that began in 1915. That bad pairing culminated in a brutal custody fight over Taliesin and an attempt by Miriam to have Wright’s new love, Olga (Olgivanna) Lazovich, deported.

  By the time the mess was sorted out, the professional cost to Wright had been heavy. Then the Depression hit, and Olgivanna became the undisputed heroine of Taliesin and Wright’s career. She pulled them through the hard times resourcefully, persuading her husband to pursue two moneymaking ideas: to write the Autobiography and to create a paying school of architecture.

  After the founding of the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932 there were new worlds to conquer, a new philosopher-guru to follow (George Gurdjieff), and a new “truth against the world” to proclaim: organic architecture versus the International Style. The eras of Mamah, Japan, and Oak Park were strictly Old Testament.

  When Wright died in 1959, Olgivanna concentrated the work and resources of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation at Taliesin West in Arizona, where business prospects were better for the foundation’s architects, where she had friends and felt at home—and where the house was not haunted. Taliesin East, as the Wisconsin campus was now called, went into 30 years of physical decline.

  In a final act, Olgivanna desacralized Taliesin by ordering Wright’s remains exhumed from the Unity Chapel churchyard, cremated, and shipped west to be mixed with hers at her death in 1985. Mamah, buried nearby, was given a stone marker reading “Mamah Borthwick CHENEY,” emphatically restoring to her the married name she had renounced when she began to live with Frank Lloyd Wright.

  A VOICE FROM THE PAST

  The recovery of Taliesin’s creation story and the revival of interest in Wright and Borthwick had to wait for the death of the last Mrs. Wright. Taliesin under Olgivanna had come to resemble China’s Forbidden City under the Dowager empress in some ways—insular, wrapped in intrigue, wary of outside scholars. Mamah Borthwick and the first Taliesin were off-limits topics.

  After Mrs. Wright’s death in 1985, that began to change. Taliesin and its archival treasures became accessible. An early result was the organization of Wright’s massive correspondence by Anthony Alofsin into the five-volume Index to the Taliesin Correspondence (Garland, 1988). The entire Wright letter archive was copied on microfiche and made available for research at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Taliesin archivist Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer issued a stream of original writings and renderings.

  Solid biographies and groundbreaking studies followed, including Meryle Secrest’s Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (HarperCollins, 1992), Alofsin’s indispensable Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910–1923 (Chicago, 1993), Neil Levine’s The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton, 1996), Julia Meech’s Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan (Japan Society, 2001), and Narciso Menocal’s edited Wright Studies volume, Taliesin I: 1911–1914 (SIU—Carbondale, 1992), which brought together all the known information at the time.

  Brendan Gill’s skeptical but admiring Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (Putnam’s, 1987) publicized Wright’s correct birth year (1867, not 1869) and possible original name (Franklin Lincoln Wright). His dossier on Wright’s mother, Anna, whom Wright had painted as a saint, revealed a cruel, controlling side to her personality.

  Mamah Borthwick’s comeback began with the discovery in the Swedish Royal Library of the letters written by her to Ellen Key between 1910 and 1914. The letters finally gave her a voice of her own. Lena Johannesson, a professor of art history at Linkoping University in Sweden, first revealed the contents in a Nordic women’s studies journal in 1994. An English version appeared in 1995, followed by a widely admired article published in 2002 by Wellesley architectural historian Alice T. Friedman.9 The Key archive also includes a wrenching letter written by Wright in December of 1914, replying to Key’s condolences.

  BACK IN THE SPOTLIGHT

  After scholarship, the second avenue through which the story of the first Taliesin was rediscovered was popular culture. Frank Lloyd Wright had been lost to a generation, a critic for the Los Angeles Times observed in 1988, speaking of “the dark ages for Wright designs, which preceded his death in 1959 and spanned the following generation.”10 Tastes in modern design had shifted to Bauhaus and Scandinavian styles, the writer said—an ironic development, since the mother of Scandinavian modern design was none other than Ellen Key. Her pamphlet Beauty for All (1899), expanded and published as Beauty in the Home (1913), set off the revolution, but Mamah Borthwick never translated it. It was not available in English until 2008, when the Museum of Modern Art published Modern Swedish Design: Three Founding Texts.

  It took another shift in tastes—to the glowing copper, fumed oak, matte-green pottery, and stained-glass glories of the American Arts and Crafts Movement—to revive interest in Wright’s early decorative objects and Prairie houses. Wright had been a major contributor to the Arts and Crafts campaign for domestic reform and simplicity in design, which peaked between 1890 and 1920. David Hanks’s The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright (Dutton, 1979) opened a roadmap to connoisseurship in the 1980s for star collectors such as Barbra Streisand; action-film producer Joel Silver; and the insatiable Thomas Monaghan, owner of Domino’s Pizza and the Detroit Tigers.

  Early Wright designs became big box office, commanding record prices at auction houses and prompting a wave of affordable knock-offs. Suddenly everyone was wearing “balloons-and-confetti” scarves and putting Midway Gardens sprites in their gardens—both products of Frank and Mamah’s Taliesin.

  Early Wright designs became big box office, commanding record prices at auction houses and prompting a wave of affordable knock-offs. Suddenly, everyone was wearing “balloons-and-confetti” scarves and putting Midway Gardens sprites in their gardens—both products of Frank and Mamah’s Taliesin.

  The run on Wright designs, which led some Wright homeowners to cannibalize their residences for prized windows, lamps, and pieces of furniture, led to the creation of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy in Chicago in 1989. Wisconsin caught the wave that same year, and Governor Tommy Thompson created the Taliesin Preservation Commission. In return for preservation funds the Fellows agreed to allow a nonprofit group, Taliesin Preservation Inc., to restore the buildings and run public tours. Taliesin tourism got its start.

  Stage and film productions came next. The Wright-Borthwick story was dramatized in Daron Hagen’s opera Shining Brow, written in 1989 and first performed by the Madison Opera in 1993. Their life together was a subject of Jeffrey Hatcher and Eric Simonson’s three-act play Work Song, which premiered in Milwaukee in 2000. Ken Burns included the story in his 1998 PBs documentary, The Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright.

  “The Murders at Talie
sin,” a cover story I researched and wrote for The Capital Times of Madison in 1998, attracted the attention of the E! Entertainment Network’s Mysteries & Scandals documentary series, which produced an often-repeated Wright segment in 1999. The BBC’s Channel 9 used the article for Frank Lloyd Wright: Murder, Myth and Modernism, an hour-long documentary that aired in 2005. And William R. Drennan built a book around the article, Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders.11

  The Wright-Borthwick saga hit the fiction bestseller list in 2007 with the publication of Nancy Horan’s novel Loving Frank. Horan, an Oak Park native with reporting experience, combined her own research with Mamah’s letters, Wright’s autobiography, other recent biographies, and her own imagination to produce a sympathetic retelling of the story from Mamah’s point of view.12 So popular has this story been that Taliesin Preservation Inc. in 2010 added a “Loving Frank Tour,” which until recently would have been simply unthinkable.

  NEWS FROM 1911

  In 1992, Anthony Alofsin wrote: “The photographic history of Taliesin I is very short.”

  In 1997, Kathryn Smith, another Wright authority, said: “Little is known of the details of Wright’s daily life with Mamah Borthwick at Taliesin between 1911 and 1914.”13

  Both statements were true when they were written. Neither is true today. Like Brigadoon, the mythical village that appears once in 100 years, Taliesin I is emerging from the mists.

  I expect—and hope—that the new images and information in this book will be eclipsed by even newer discoveries about the first Taliesin. It was Frank Lloyd Wright’s most personal creation—his labor of love—and deserves attention. But I am pleased, as a third-generation journalist, to be able to deliver some hundred-year-old scoops.

  This book began suddenly in February 2010 when I discovered an Internet reference to a Taylor Woolley photo collection at the Utah State Historical society that included photos of “Taliesen [sic] I under construction.” I ordered the collection and was amazed by what arrived. There was no descriptive information with the images, but Keiran Murphy, Taliesin Preservation Inc.’s knowledgeable historian, helped me fill in the blanks with thirty-seven pages of notes.

  Although many Taliesin views were new, I recognized others as being the same as pictures in the anonymous album titled “Taliesin” that the Wisconsin Historical Society had captured on eBay in 2005. After matching Utah negatives to a majority of the album’s pictures, I concluded that the photographer for both was Woolley.14

  I then discovered that Woolley had not been alone when he was present at the creation of Taliesin, but had a Utah friend with him, Clifford P. Evans, then 22, with whom he shared the rest of his professional life. The picture of both of them standing and holding brushes and buckets of wood stain outside Taliesin—two of the “young men in architecture” of whom Wright was so fond—was tucked away in Evans’s papers at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library. My researcher in Salt Lake City, Butch Kmet, who lives in a 1911 Woolley-designed bungalow, dug out that photo and others as well, helped me document Woolley’s illustrious Mormon pioneer family history. (Both the Taylors and Woolleys were eminent founding families. Taylor Woolley himself was not religious but benefted from his legacy.)

  Another discovery came closer to home. I had seen Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1900 photos of Jones Valley and his aunts’ progressive Hillside Home school in the Wisconsin Historical Society’s archives. But it took the sharp eye of my wife, Elaine Desmidt, to discover that three of Wright’s winter landscapes fit together into a single valley-wide panorama.

  Checking out leads buried in Mamah’s letters produced Floyd Dell’s previously unnoticed defense of her in the Chicago Evening Post, which she sent as a clipping to Ellen Key early in 1912. Dell, editor of the Post’s Friday Literary Review and leader of Chicago’s avant-garde, was incensed at the “hunting and harrying” of Mamah and worried that Wright would be ruined as an artist. There was no copy of Dell’s article to be found at any institution in Chicago, but Whitney Harrod, a tenacious journalism graduate student at Northwestern, tracked it down for me at Harvard.

  Another Mamah reference, to a visit in 1914 by women’s movement leader Charlotte Perkins Gilman, led me to reconstruct a meeting at Taliesin of three important feminists: Borthwick, the voice of Ellen Key in America; Gilman, Key’s arch-nemesis on the question of whether all mothers are born to raise children; and Zona Gale, a playwright and leader of the Wisconsin suffragist movement who had recently traveled from Chicago to Wisconsin in the company of Gilman and Margaret Woodrow Wilson, the president’s singing daughter.

  My biggest thrill was exploring a single photo, the picture of Wright’s newly-built puppet theater sitting in the unfinished living room of Taliesin. The only known photo of the theater was taken at Wright’s Chicago Art Institute show in 1914, where he labeled it “Marionette Theatre, Made for Llewellyn Wright.” The Taliesin picture speaks volumes about the father’s conflicted situation—building a lavish gift for his youngest son at the same time he is building a permanent home away from him.

  Studying the scenery in Wright’s color rendering for the theater, I saw that it depicts a villa with a low-walled terrace and cypress trees and hills in the distance—a memory from Fiesole, which I had visited in 2004. Feeling like the photographer in Antonioi’s film Blow-Up, I zoomed in. That revealed a tower with a balcony, and in the balcony the figure of a woman leaning over to listen. On the terrace stands a man delivering a speech.

  They are without a doubt Romeo and Juliet. Wright, as he builds a hillside refuge for himself and his beloved, has created “a world in little” depicting Shakespeare’s classic drama of impossible love. It is a play within a play.

  RON McCREA

  Madison, Wisconsin, November 15, 2011

  Notes

  1. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, undated letter. Ellen Key Archive, Royal Library of Sweden, Stockholm. The author is grateful to Nancy Horan for sharing her set.

  2. Frank Lloyd Wright to Taylor Woolley, July 10, 1912. Used with permission, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.

  3. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, July 10, 1912. Ellen Key Archive.

  4. “Taliesin, the Home of Frank Lloyd Wright and a Study of the Owner,” Western Architect (February 1913), v. 19, 16. To view Wright’s evolving drawings and plans, see Anthony Alofsin, “Taliesin I: A Catalogue of Drawings and Photographs,” in Narciso Menocal, ed., Wright Studies, Volume One: Taliesin 1911–1914 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 98–141.

  5. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (1932), reprinted in Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, v. 2, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed. (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1992), 221. Wright’s sole reference to Borthwick by name in this edition is the sentence “Totally—Mamah was gone.”

  6. Home News, Spring Green, Wisconsin, August 20, 1914. For the full text, see p.145.

  7. Pfeiffer, introduction to An Autobiography, 103

  8. “A Hymn to Nature,” The Little Review (October 1914), v. 1, 30. Wright published this poem in the Spring Green Home News on August 20 with his own introduction: “A fragment: A ‘Hymn to Nature,’ unknown to us in the works of Goethe, we found in a little bookshop in Berlin. Translated by us from the German—together—it comforted us. It is for the strong, and saved from destruction only because I carried it in my pocket. I give it here to those who cared for her.” A gold-stamped, color-illustrated edition of 100 copies of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Die Natur: Ein Hymnus was published by the Ernst Ludwig Presse of Darmstadt in 1910, while Wright and Borthwick were in Germany. It is the kind of little luxury Wright would have found hard to resist. Goethe’s Die Natur: Fragment was first published in 1783.

  9. Lena Johannessen, “Ellen Key, Mamah Bouton Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright: Notes on the Historiography of Non-Existing History,” NORA/Nordic Journal of Women Studies (Scandinavian University Press), No. 2 1995, 126–136; Alice T. Friedman, “Frank Lloyd Wr
ight and Feminism: Mamah Borthwick’s Letters to Ellen Key,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (June 2002), v. 61, No. 2, 140–151.

  10. Elizabeth Venant, “The Wright Time for Household Objects: The Great Architect’s Creations for Homes are Now Commanding Respect—and Top Prices,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1988, Calendar, 8.

  11. Ron McCrea, “The Murders at Taliesin,” Capital Times, August 15,1998, 1A. Drennan’s book was published in 2007 by the University of Wisconsin Press.

  12. Nancy Horan, Loving Frank (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977). Another novel, T.C. Boyle’s The Women (New York: Viking, 2009), offers vivivd portraits of each of Wright’s loves in reverse order and with a more ironic tone. Mamah is portrayed as a proselytizing feminist and seductress with a “carefree, rippling laugh that was calculated to freeze any woman to the core and make any man turn his head.”

  13. Anthony Alofsin’s quote is from Alofsin “Taliesin I, 124. Kathryn Smith’s quote is from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin and Taliesin West (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997), 49. In this book she is the first to publish Taylor Woolley’s 1911–1912 photos of the Taliesin dining area and the triptych of the living room (on pp. 54–55). In an e-mail to the author on January 31, 2012, Smith says that she did not see the original prints but “published a copy of a copy.”

  14. The reference number of the Taylor A. Woolley Collection at the Utah State Historical society is C-340 and the photos are in Folders 1–4. The society says it has no background information about how and when it acquired the collection, and notes that it would not be unusual for it to have sat for decades before being noticed. The society posted the Woolley Taliesin photos with identification information provided by Peter Goss for the first time on October 10, 2011. The Woolley photo additions to the Clifford P. Evans Collection at the University of Utah Marriott Library are under reference number P0002. The Woolley collection that includes photos from Italy is under P0025. The Wisconsin Historical Society Woolley and Fuermann collections may be accessed by keyword search at www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/. A combined gallery of Woolley images, showing sources and overlaps, appears in this book on pp. 109–113.