Building Taliesin Read online

  Mamah had been a librarian and had studied with the novelist Robert Herrick at the University of Chicago.37 Herrick, who lived in a Prairie School building, wrote gritty stories of the city and its business culture’s corrupting influence. The central figure of The Common Lot (New York: Macmillan, 1905) is a Chicago architect who causes major loss of life by accepting shoddy building materials in return for kickbacks, and escapes conviction.

  Frank and Mamah each would bring something unique to enlarge the valley’s Progressive culture. He would bring his ideas on architecture and society, the natural house, and the role of space and freedom in the modern American home. She would publish books and articles on women’s liberation and marriage law reform, bringing Ellen Key’s controversial Scandinavian ideas to an American audience. They would attract a stream of international visitors.

  “While Frank Lloyd Wright set about ‘the destruction of the box’ that was the Victorian house,” a historian of Progressivism notes, “a host of other cultural boxes were tumbling down too. Standing in the ruins, people were free to move and look around as they never had before.”38 Frank and Mamah would have been in the right place at the right time. If only they had been married.

  THE MARRIAGE QUESTION

  Frank, though he had moved out, was still married to Catherine. Mamah was divorced. Their cohabitation under one roof was adultery. Each had also left young children at home, opening them to the accusation of abandonment. (Custody had been settled for Mamah as part of her divorce, but the newspapers ignored it. Wright had arranged an income for his family and some of his children were grown and working for him.)

  The Lloyd Joneses were not known to break ranks over divorce. They stood by Frank’s mother Anna after she pushed William Carey Wright out of the house and treated his three stepchildren so cruelly that they were also forced to leave.39 Wright’s sister Maginel and his son John were married more than once.

  “Divorce is common in my family, maybe because none of us sees marriage as the ultimate institution,” said architect Elizabeth Wright Ingraham, John’s daughter, in an interview years later. “We are all Unitarians and believe in a kind of freedom of choice. We aren’t brought up with a sense of guilt—at least for something like that. There was plenty of guilt if you didn’t produce. If you didn’t measure up, you’d know it.”40

  Wright and Borthwick, both in middle age, had been hoping that they might live quietly and enjoy their creative collaboration while they waited for Catherine Wright to release Frank to remarry. Wright told the Dodgeville Chronicle, “I had hoped, by minding my own business quietly, to protect everybody until the time came when I could set my life in conventional order.”41

  For a while it seemed to go that way. Mamah slipped into the Valley quietly in late summer, staying first with Jane Porter. She got along. She prepared meals for the workmen on-site. The wife of a draftsman sent her a magazine clipping she might like. Taylor Woolley probably gave her photos and kept her company in Wright’s absence, along with his friend Clifford Evans.

  But the peace was short-lived. When the storm came, it did not come from the village. “Spring Green disapproved of Wright, but it left him alone,” says biographer Robert C. Twombly.42

  The storm came from Chicago, the worst possible place. Worst, because Chicago was the source of a large portion of the enrollment of Hillside Home School. Hillside at that moment was in fragile financial condition after coming out of bankruptcy, and the debate over who should own and manage it had fractured the Lloyd Jones family in the closing months of 1911.

  The Taliesin “new romance” story hit the front page in Chicago on Christmas Eve.43 All the goodwill and support and Progressive solidarity that the Lloyd Jones family might have extended to Frank and Mamah was pushed aside by the terror that their beloved Hillside School might not survive the scandal.

  Jenkin Lloyd Jones wrote to his sister Jane: “This is a real calamity.”44

  NOTES

  1. Quoted in Lawrence Martin, The Physical Geography of Wisconsin (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 187–188.

  2. Frank Lloyd Wright, “Why I Love Wisconsin,” originally published in Industrial Wisconsin magazine in 1930. Reprinted in Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, Vol. 3, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (New York: Rizzoli and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 1993), 134.

  3. The 1880 census lists among residents at the James Lloyd Jones farm “Hired hands: John William Kritz, Frank Lloyd Wright.” Kritz became the coachman for Hillside. Edna Meudt, The Rose Jar (Madison, WI: North Country Press, 1990), 5, 177.

  4. Physical Geography of Wisconsin, 82.

  5. Martin Wright, An Autobiography, 224. The story of Romeo and Juliet is on 192–197.

  6. Julia Meech, Frank Lloyd Wright and the At of Japan: The Architect’s Other Passion (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 37. John’s memory of his father’s plate processing is noted in Jack Quinan, “Wright the Photographer,” in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fifty Views of Japan: The 1905 Photo Album, Melanie Birk., ed. (San Francisco: Pomegranate Press, 1996), 74. In an otherwise comprehensive review, Quinan makes no mention of Wright’s Hillside and valley photographs.

  7. Richard Lloyd Jones, “Cousin Frank,” transcript of a speech delivered in Quasqueton, Iowa, October 21, 2006, 2. www.unitychapel.org.

  8. Maginel Wright Barney, “The Family in the Valley,” excerpted from The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses in A Lloyd Jones Retrospective (Spring Green: Unity Chapel Publications, 1986), 19, 21.

  9. Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1992), 21–24.

  10. Ibid., 31–33.

  11. Robert L. Sweeney, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Annotated Bibliography (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1978), xxv, n. 26.

  12. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (Oxford University Press, 2005), Ch. 2, “The Radical Center,” 42. “The progressive middle class offered a radicalism at the center of American society; an ambitious program to halt the friction and conflicts of the industrializing nation.”

  13. Richard T. Ely, Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 237.

  14. John D. Buenker, The History of Wisconsin Volume IV: The Progressive Era, 1893–1914 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1998), 517–518.

  15. Cathy Tauscher and Peter Hughes, “Jenkin Lloyd Jones” (Unitarian Universalist Historical Society, 1999), 1–9.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Thomas Graham, “Jenkin Lloyd Jones and Tower Hill,” in A Lloyd Jones Retrospective, 26–27.

  18. Jane Wright Porter, “Tower Hill,” 1937 typescript memoir transcribed by Franklin Porter, Jane Lloyd Jones Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society. The Emerson Pavilion was named for Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  19. ”Hillside News,” Dodgeville Chronicle, February 2, 1906.

  20. ”The voice of Philip La Follette is always the voice of reason in Wright’s life, although the truth of what he had to say was sometimes more than his client could stomach.” Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright, 338.

  21. Franklin Wright Porter, “The Hillside Home School,” quoting from a statement in a Hillside graduation program in A Lloyd Jones Retrospective, 24.

  22. Porter, ibid.

  23. Florence Fifer Bohrer, ”The Unitarian Hillside Home School,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring 1955, 153.

  24. The quote is from Charles McCarthy, chief of the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, in Buenker, History of Wisconsin, 518.

  25. ”Biggest Grist of Laws Ever Ground Out,” Wisconsin State Journal, July 15, 1911, 1.

  26. Frederic C. Howe, Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), Cornell University Library reprint, 36–37. See also See also Buencker, ch. 12, “The Most Progressive State,” 515–568.

  27. Julie Hatfield, “Northwest vs. Southeast: Factors Affecting the 1912 Suffrage Vote in Wisconsin” (Histo
ry Seminar Paper, university of Wisconsin–Eau Claire Mcintyre Library digital resource, 2008). On temperance, see McGerr, Fierce Discontent, 84–85.

  28. Howe, Wisconsin: An Experiment, 159.

  29. Regent biographies courtesy the Office of the Board of Regents, university of Wisconsin System, Madison, Wisconsin, 2011.

  30. David Mollenhoff, Madison: A History of the Formative Years (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 284–285.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Ibid. Whatever support for “black rights” Richard Lloyd Jones professed in Madison vanished when he moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1919, bought the Tulsa Democrat, renamed it the Tulsa Tribune, and aligned it with the Ku Klux Klan. On May 23, 1921, the Tribune published an incendiary story and editorial that touched off the worst race riot in American history. As many as 300 people were killed. Eight thousand blacks were left homeless, and the African Amercan business district of Greenwood was torched. In the aftermath, Lloyd Jones editorialized that the destruction provided an opportunity for Tulsa to rid itself of future “niggertowns.” See Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 216. Also see Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).

  33. Stuart Levitan, Madison: The Illustrated Sesquicentennial History, vol. 1 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 206.

  34. Mollenhoff, Madison, 285.

  35. “Wright Case Agitation,” Dodgeville Chronicle, January 5, 1912, 1.

  36. Neil Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,1996), 105. Other sources on Wright and the Chicago Renaissance include Sue Ann Prince, The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), and Wright’s 1918 speech, “Chicago Culture,” reprinted in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. 1 (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 154–161.

  37. Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright, 193.

  38. McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 235.

  39. Brendan Gill, Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Putnam, 1987), 34.

  40. ”Granddaughter of Architect is a Talent in Her Own Wright,” San Diego Union-Tribune, September 30, 1990, F2.

  41. ”Wright Case Agitation,” Dodgeville Chronicle.

  42. Robert C. Twombly, “Frank Lloyd Wright in Spring Green, 1911–1932,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, Spring, 1968, 208.

  43. ”Architect Wright in New Romance With ‘Mrs. Cheney,’” Chicago Tribune, December 24, 1911.

  44. Jenkin Lloyd Jones to Jane Lloyd Jones, December 38, 1911. Jane Lloyd Jones Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society.

  CHAPTER 3

  BUILDING TALIESIN

  THE TAYLOR A. WOOLLEY PHOTOGRAPHS

  Frank Lloyd Wright summoned 26-year-old Taylor A. Woolley to Taliesin by telegram on August 31, 1911. “Come at regular salary. Wiring money by Western Union today [to] Lloyd at Olmstead [sic] San Diego,” the wire said. Woolley was in California, possibly lining up customers for Wright’s two-volume Wasmuth Portfolio of drawings. Wright’s son Lloyd, with whom Woolley had worked and traveled in Italy, had come west to work at the Olmsted and Olmsted landscape nursery. He was the contact point.

  Woolley returned to Chicago, staying at 1636 Monroe Street, about two and one-half miles from Wright’s office at Orchestra Hall. A second telegram from Wright arrived at that address on September 12, sent from Spring Green. “OK come along go to Mrs. Roberts for money wire train,” it said. Isabel Roberts was Wright’s office manager. Woolley was being instructed to pick up his fare and take a train to Taliesin.

  The September 12, 1911, telegram and a later one, sent by Wright to Woolley in Utah on July 10, 1912, bracket Woolley’s time at Taliesin. When he arrived, the basic site preparation and structural work was done, having begun in April. The walls were up and the roofs were on, though the windows of the studio wing were still open to the elements. Taliesin was still very much in the rough—trenches being dug for heating pipes, the courtyard strewn with building materials, the driveway little more than a dirt path. Inside, the drafting studio and main living room were carpentry shops. In Woolley’s photos, a dozen workmen line up outside for a group shot standing in rubble. Woolley poses himself in a photo with his 22-year-old fellow draftsman and Utah companion, Clifford Evans, as they pitch in with brushes and buckets to stain the exterior trim of the studio wing.

  Within a few months, Taliesin is much further along. Woolley’s photos show the drafting studio operating, the adjoining bunkroom furnished, outbuildings completed, and the southeast slope being laid out in a chalk-line grid for the first spring planting.

  Fig. 51. Taylor Woolley (left) and Clifford Evans pitch in with buckets and stain to finish the exterior trim of Taliesin in the fall of 1911. They are standing in the courtyard in front of the studio. The lower slab that Evans is standing on is still in place. Woolley is 26, Evans 22 in this photograph. They would go on to spend their architectural careers together in Salt Lake City.

  Mamah Borthwick has been in residence the whole time. Wright appears to have been living there on and off but moves in permanently before Thanksgiving, by Christmas at the latest. Woolley apparently never photographs them together, and there are no images of either of them in his archives, from either Italy or Wisconsin. There is one image of a woman on horseback who looks the right age to be Mamah, but she is unidentified.

  As a photographer, Woolley is willing to work to get the right picture. He has a limp from early life, but it does not stop him from climbing to a high vantage point to photograph the garden courtyard. It does not prevent him from walking or riding horseback around Taliesin’s acreage to shoot the house from below. He shoots the bend of the snow-laden Wisconsin River from a hilltop, then descends to the riverbank.

  Woolley shows a photojournalist’s nerve. He moves furniture. He corrals workmen in the courtyard. He groups laborers and draftsmen in front of a fireplace, and poses stonemasons next to the work they have just finished—cementing the plaque in place at the entrance to Taliesin that announces: “Frank Lloyd Wright— Architect.” He sometimes creates art—the moody expressionism of Fig. 59, the terrace where Mamah would be killed, is an example. But he is basically creating a record. By doing that, the young Taylor Woolley has added a new chapter to the story of an American landmark.

  Fig. 52. Frank Lloyd Wright summons Taylor Woolley back from California in a telegram dated August 31, 1911. He says he will wire funds to his son Lloyd Wright at Lloyd’s workplace, the Olmsted and Olmsted landscape gardeners’ nursery in San Diego. A second telegram, sent to Chicago on Sept. 12, tells Woolley to pick up money at the office and come to Taliesin.

  Fig. 53. The Taliesin construction crew poses for a group photo by Taylor Woolley in the forecourt, in front of the breezeway between the residential wing (right) and the studio wing. The man in the dark, buttoned jacket second from left is the carpenter seen holding a board in Fig. 60. Draftsman Clifford Evans, Woolley’s partner from Utah, is in the dark shirt and khaki pants in the front row, third from right. Behind him, looking over his left shoulder, is the mustachioed craftsman who appears in Fig. 57.

  Fig. 54. In what may be the earliest view of Taliesin, the road crosses a neighbor’s fence line, turns left, and makes a wide loop around and up the hill. Looking northwest from the base of the hill toward the living quarters of Taliesin, one sees in the background the Belvedere tower under construction, without a roof, in the fall of 1911. Wright has not yet completed the final leg of the carriage path to the house; the lighter soil at top left shows that he has built up this area to create a level area for the drive. This is the first of several photographs Taylor Woolley took from the same position charting the progress of the landscaping.

  Fig. 55. A dirt drive leads to Taliesin in the fall of 1911. Wright soon added a planting bed to the left and a ston
e curb to the right. The loggia, or breezeway, between the studio and residential wings appears complete in the distance but is still strewn with barrels and tools.

  Fig. 56. A worker walks through the littered courtyard of Taliesin, seen here in a northeast view from the hill crown. Another worker digs a trench, probably for steam pipes, in front of the area of the door into the drafting studio.

  Fig. 57. A distinguished-looking craftsman stands next to the heating pipes and dirt mound. The windows at his right look in on the kitchen. This man also appears in a group photo in the courtyard, Fig. 53.

  Fig. 58. A huge mound of soil fills the Taliesin forecourt in this high view from the agricultural wing. A trench has been dug on the left and a pile of steam-heating pipes can be seen to the left of the oak tree. The window frames are open, waiting to be fitted with glass. The major masonry has been completed, including a portion of the retaining wall for Taliesin’s hill crown. At right, a laborer can be seen moving a large slab of stone in front of an oak tree where the Tea Circle will be built.

  Fig. 59. An outdoor terrace off the living room is under construction. The wooden floors have not yet been covered with flagstone. The state of construction and the leaves on the trees to the southeast of the terrace suggest that this image was taken within a month of Taylor Woolley’s arrival at Taliesin in September 1911. Mamah Borthwick and her children were attacked and killed on this terrace while having lunch on August 15, 1914.