Building Taliesin Read online

  CHAPTER 1

  FROM TUSCANY TO TALIESIN

  Fig. 8. Elaine DeSmidt and Ron McCrea arrive at the doorway to the Villino Belvedere in Fiesole, where Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick lived from late March 1909 to mid-September 1910. The walled garden at left is part of the residence, which overlooks Florence on the other side.

  “How many souls seeking release from real or fancied domestic woes have sheltered in Fiesole!”

  —Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobigraphy

  By the time Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick reunited in a garden residence overlooking Florence, Italy, in the spring of 1910, they faced a challenge. How would they proceed with their lives?

  Each had made a break with their families in the United States the previous fall when they had met in New York and sailed for Europe. Mamah had started the clock on her own divorce in June 1909, when she left for the West and made it clear to Edwin Cheney she was not returning. Wright wrote to Darwin Martin, his client and patron, on September 16 to tell him that he was “deserting my wife and children for one year, in search of a spiritual adventure. You probably will not hear from me again.”1

  Fig. 9. Wright and Mamah Borthwick enjoyed this view of Florence and the Arno River valley from all levels of the Villino Belvedere. He called their home “this little eyrie on the brow of the mountain above Fiesole—overlooking the pink and white Florence, spreading in the valley of the Arno below.” He would later use similar terms to describe Taliesin.

  Fig. 10. Bougainvillea cascades from the crannied wall that supports the Villino Belvedere and its garden, above, on the valley-facing side of the house. The photo is taken from the lower Via della Doccia.

  Fig. 11. Taylor Woolley took this photograph of the drafting work room of the Villino Belvedere in 1910. A draftsman, possibly Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., is hunched over a drawing at left. The view from the desk beside him is blocked by a potted plant that Woolley may have placed there for effect. The drawings on the wall that they are retracing for the Wasmuth Portfolio are identifiable. From left: Plate XIX, ground plan and site plan, Emma Martin House (Fricke-Martin), Oak Park, Illinois; Plate XXVIII, ground plan and site plan, Francis W. Little House, Peoria, Illinois; Plate XXXI(b) (behind the plant), ground plan, Susan Lawrence Dana House, Springfield, Illinois; Plate XXIII (top), “A Small House With Lots of Room in It,” Ladies Home Journal, 1901, described in the portfolio as “Typical low-cost suburban dwelling’; Plate LV (bottom), ground plan and site plan, Yahara Boat House, Madison, Wisconsin.

  Wright and Borthwick were exposed when a Chicago newspaper reporter found them registered as husband and wife at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. They traveled to Paris and temporarily parted ways, with Mamah going to Nancy, France, and then Leipzig. There she found work teaching English as a second language.

  Although his business was in Berlin, Wright went to Florence. There, in an apartment of the villa Fonte della Ginevra overlooking the Arno River, he was joined by his son Lloyd Wright, 19, and Taylor Woolley, 25, who had come to assist him with the prepress work for a lavish two-volume compendeum of his pioneering architecture. Its title was Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright (Studies and Executed Buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright). Its publisher was Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin, and it became known as the Wasmuth Portfolio.2

  In February 1910, anticipating Borthwick’s arrival, Wright moved the studio and living quarters to the two-story Villino Belvedere in the hillside town of Fiesole. The garden residence enjoys a panoramic view of Florence and the Arno River Valley. The entrance is on the upper level, on the Via di Montececeri, which splits off from the Via Verdi below the larger Villa Belvedere next door. A thick door and a brick wall protect the home and garden.

  From the Villino Belvedere it is a two-minute walk to the town plaza, where in 1910 one could catch an electric tram for a 30-minute ride down the hill into central Florence. It is also a two-minute walk from the Fiesole main plaza to a beautiful archaeological park set in a natural bowl. Wright could stroll among the remains of a Roman amphitheater, walk a Roman road, climb Etruscan steps, and imagine the pleasures of what once had been a Roman spa with hot and cold baths and lap pools. At this cool and inviting altitude, visitors to the classical retreat enjoy a refreshing view of Tuscan hills framed by cypress trees.

  It was in this setting that Wright and Mamah reunited to ponder their future together. Wright’s work on the Wasmuth Portolio was well along. He told his mother, “The work of the publication has prospered. It is going to be all I expected and more. There will be twenty-five plates from my own handwork done here beside all the redrawing, retouching, arranging, the editing, etc… . There will be one hundred in all. I am depending upon this to give my feet a secure footing when I come back … The financial return from it should be considerable.”3

  In February, with Mamah’s arrival imminent, he sent his two young draftsmen off to tour Italy. Lloyd continued on to France and sailed for New York on March 12. Woolley returned to Fiesole and lived with Wright and Borthwick until mid-June. Then he departed, carrying with him a gift of dictionaries from her and a letter of recommendation from Wright praising him as a “faithful and an effective draughtsman.”4 After that, the couple had the house and garden and Italy to themselves.

  Even 20 years later Wright could summon up detailed memories of that time. “Walking together up the road from Firenze to the older town, all along the way the sight and scent of roses, by day. Walking arm in arm, up the same old road at night. Listening to the nightingale in the deep shadows of the moonlit woods… trying to hear the songs in the deeps of life: Pilgrimages to reach the small solid door framed in the solid blank wall in the narrow Via Verdi itself. Entering, closing the medieval door on the world outside to find a wood fire burning in the small grate. Estero in her white apron, smilingly, waiting to surprise Signora and Signore with, ah—this time as usual the incomparable little dinner, the perfect roast fowl, mellow wine, the caramel custard—beyond all roasts or wine or caramels ever made. I remember.”5

  “[Mamah] told her husband one year before she went away with me that she would go with me married or not whenever I could take her.”

  —Frank Lloyd Wright to his mother, July 4, 1910

  It was an idyllic time in an idyllic setting. Wright told his mother he wished she and her sisters could “take a cottage for three months here in this garden spot of the earth. I would know how to tell you how you could get the most out of it.” But as good as life was, both Wright and Borthwick worried about the future. “I have been so troubled and perplexed that I have not known what to write,” he said. “It might be one thing one day and another the next.”6

  Borthwick wrote to Ellen Key, her feminist mentor in Sweden, “My perplexity and doubt is great that perhaps that path was not after all the one I should have taken—perhaps it is not mine. Your torch however will also light me to the true path—the path true for myself—if I have mistaken it.”7

  Fig. 12. Steps built by the Etruscans in the fourth century BCE lead up to the site of a former Etruscan, and later Roman, altar. The religious site has a privileged view of the valley and hills beyond. The vista resembles Frank Lloyd Wright’s scenic backdrop for the puppet theater he built a year after he left Fiesole.

  Key’s writings gave them a rationale for their relationship. In Love and Marriage and Love and Ethics, Key argues that the only moral basis of marriage is love—not law, not religious sanction, not family custom; and that marriage based on anything other than love is dangerous to the health of society and children and the progress of the human race. (Key was a dedicated social Darwinist.) Borthwick translated Love and Ethics from German with help from Wright, who had a flair with English, during their summer in Italy. It was published in Chicago in 1912 at Wright’s expense with both of them listed on the title page as translators.8

  Fig. 13. Houses are built organically into the side of the hill on the street just above Wright’s Villino Belvedere.

  N
O GOING BACK

  At some point in their Tuscan summer, Wright and Borthwick devised a plan to reenter the United States and resume their life together in one year. It worked: In August 1910 they were together on a hillside in Italy, and in August 1911 they were together on a hillside in Wisconsin.

  Fig. 14. Taylor Woolley photographed the Villino Belvedere in Fiesole in 1910. He stayed there with Frank Lloyd Wright, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, and Lloyd Wright, and worked in the studio.

  Fig. 15. Etruscan steps, retaining wall, and terraces grown with olive trees resemble the landscaping of the hill garden above Taliesin’s forecourt and the steps to the Tea Circle. This site was used in a scene in Franco Zeffirelli’s Tea With Mussolini (1999), in which Lily Tomlin plays an American archaeologist.

  For them to return to Oak Park, Illinois, and resume the status quo ante was out of the question. In Wright’s letter to Anna Lloyd Jones Wright on July 4, he says he can just imagine their reception: “I am the prodigal whose return is a triumph for the institutions I have outraged. A weak son who, infatuated sexually, has had his passion drained and therewith his courage, and so abandoning the source of his infatuation to whatever fate may hold for her.”

  For Mamah, life will become “a hard, lonely struggle in the face of a world that writes her down as an outcast to be shunned—or a craven return to another man, his prostitute for a roof and a bed and a chance to lose her life in her children, [so] that something—some shred of self-respect, may clothe her nakedness. While I return to my dear wife and children who all along ‘knew I would’ and welcomed by my friends with open rejoicing and secret contempt.”

  Fig. 16. Taylor Woolley, 25, stands in the garden behind the Villino Belvedere in 1910, wearing his protective smock. The draftsmen used crow-quill pens and India ink made from lampblack in their work. This photo was previously thought to be of Lloyd Wright, but Anthony Alofsin confirms that it is of Woolley.

  Fig. 17. The Villa Medici, shown in a tinted postcard from the 1920s, interested Frank Lloyd Wright with its terracing and hillside views. It has been called a possible inspiration for the siting and gardens of Taliesin.

  Wright finds this idea unbearable. He accuses his family members of making return impossible through their failure to tell the simple truth about the rupture of two marriages. Rather than admit to the press that the breakups were expected and long in coming, he says, they gave credence to the story that Wright had suddenly and deceitfully “eloped with the wife of my friend.” He spells out the true story as he sees it:

  [Mamah] had left her home forever three months before she went away with me, as her husband knew. You knew and Catherine knew that I was going to take her away with me as soon as I could, as I had declared openly to you both and her husband a year before I did take her. There was no deception that makes the ‘runaway’ match of the Yellow Journal anywhere. She went with me knowing what you and Catherine knew, that I would in any case have separated from Catherine—though I might have continued under the same roof with her for the sake of the children—even that I told you I was determined not to do.

  Fig. 18. Roman arches frame the hills and a monastery in Fiesole. The arches were part of the bath complex built by Augustus and expanded by Hadrian In the first century AD. They housed the cold, warm, and hot baths, called the frigidarium, tepidarium, and caldarium. Beyond are long swimming troughs resembling lap pools.

  She told her husband one year before she went away with me that she would go with me married or not whenever I could take her. Marriage was never a condition with her any more than it was with me—except that in order to work I felt this must take place when it might, if it might. It seemed at one time (owing to the requests of her husband solely) as though this were to be made a condition—and so I misunderstood it myself for a time, but this was never her stipulation nor did she ever hide behind it.

  I may be the infatuated weakling, she may be the child-woman inviting harm to herself and others—but nevertheless the basis of this whole struggle was the desire for a fuller measure of life and truth at any cost, and as such an act wholly sincere and respectable within, whatever aspect it may have worn without. This by my return I discredit because I seemingly endorse the character made for it publicly by those whom by my returning to them I seem to endorse. This bitter draught seems to me almost more than I can bear … I turn from it in disgust.9

  What is the alternative? Wright drops a broad hint to his mother: He would like to buy land in her Wisconsin valley, next to his sister Jane and her husband Andrew Porter’s farm. “I would like to farm it beside him—with that tract of Reider’s and Uncle Thomas’ farm joined together.” He has just described the site of Taliesin.

  “But my situation is too discouraging to contemplate such luxury,” he adds. “I must earn at least $5,000 every year [$115,000 in 2010 inflation-adjusted dollars] to keep two boys in college and pay household expenses at the rate they have gone in my absence—this with no account of my own needs … This doesn’t look much like a farm to me.”

  He says that he has spent money to bring Lloyd to Europe and has just sent money to bring their daughter Catherine, 16, to England to spend two months with Charles and Janet Ashbee, “which will be more to her than a college education, I am sure.” The younger children “have their pony still—and what they can have lacked in money or luxuries is beyond my imagination.” Wright reports that his wife is spending $275 [$6,353] per month “for household expenses merely,” and that he has provided cash totaling $4,500 [$104,000]. “It is a constantly increasing load.”10

  “I would like to farm it beside him—with that tract of Reider’s and Uncle Thomas’ farm joined together.”

  Wright’s first mention of the site of Taliesin, next to the Porter farm, written in Italy, July 4, 1910

  Then he makes a threat: If it comes down to his life or theirs, he will cut the family loose. “The personalities of the children are dear to me—just the same, and I must make the struggle—I can see in no way how I can do otherwise than let this load drop and die to them one and all if I [am] to find the happiness in the life I planned and hope to lead anew.”

  Wright’s threat may have been calculated to mobilize his mother to help him acquire that Wisconsin land. Ten months later, she would. He never made good on his threat.

  SISTERLY ASSISTS

  The elements of Wright and Borthwick’s one-year plan were simple but would demand stealth. Wright, pretending to give up Mamah, would reassemble his architectural practice in Oak Park and Chicago. He would quietly set up a separate income stream to support Catherine and the children. He would quietly build a new home far away from Chicago.

  Mamah would stay behind in Europe, out of sight. When the way was clear she would come back through New York, spend time with her children in Canada, divorce her husband, and quietly join Wright at their new home.

  Both of them found support from their sisters. Wright’s sister Jane (Jennie) Porter named her newborn son Frank on May 29. “Jennie certainly nails her colors to the mast and such courage to name the child after a brother in disgrace,” Wright wrote to his mother. “It was like her, though, and through this perhaps we see Jennie as she really is.”11 When Borthwick arrived at Taliesin, she stayed initially with the Porters at Tanyderi. “She has championed our love most loyally, believing it her brother’s happiness,” Borthwick wrote of Jane to Ellen Key.12

  Fig. 19. Wright designed a house for himself in the Italian manner with the Via Verdi in Fiesole as the site. The writing over the drawing says, “Studio for the architect / Florentine study, Florence 1910.” The writing below says, “VILLA: Florence Italy—Via Verdi. Madame Illingsworth—1910. Feb.” She was the owner of the Villa Belvedere and the Villino next door. Wright’s plan has a walled garden on the street side—visitors walk through it to the house in an enclosed entryway that also contains a work space. The home is of two stories and opens to a garden in the rear.

  Mamah’s sister was Elizabeth V. (Lizzie) Borthwic
k, a teacher who lived in the Cheney household in Oak Park and looked after Mamah’s children. “Only my sister’s being there made my absence possible,” Mamah wrote to Key. It has recently come to light that Lizzie Borthwick traveled to Europe in the summer of 1910. No doubt she had a serious consultation with her sister about the course ahead. “We do not know when and where the two sisters met,” writes Filippo Fici, the Florentine architect who made the discovery, “but we know that Lizzie left from the port of Rotterdam for New York aboard the ship Noordam on August 20.”13

  She would have had just enough time to get back to Oak Park for the opening of the brand-new Washington Irving Elementary School, where she was one of three founding teachers.14

  HOMECOMING

  On October 12, 1910, Catherine Wright wrote Janet Ashbee to say that her husband was home again. “Mr. Wright reached here Saturday evening, Oct. 8th, and he has brought many beautiful things. Everything but his heart, I guess, and that he has left in Germany.”