Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (21 page)

Frank Lloyd Wright would have made an exceptionally strong candidate for an overt form of narcissistic personality disorder. The childhood narrative he relayed in his reminiscences—whether factual, fantastical, or somewhere in between—reads as a case study for several key factors linked to the development of the condition. Early interactions between parent and child are especially significant, and are often rooted in neglect. In some cases, a parent may be cold or unavailable. But the neglect may also emerge out of an overindulgence that results in a disregard for the child's own sense of self, says Elsa Ronningstam, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry and narcissism expert at Harvard Medical School. A parent might, for example, assign a specific role to a child—he or she will be a great actress, a doctor, or, in Wright's case, an architect—which ends up disrupting healthy development. Heaped with expectations, a child thinks, “If I don't follow this path, I don't exist,” says Ronningstam.

Often, this destination is set by a parent whose own quest for greatness is never brought to fruition and who may harbor narcissistic traits of his or her own. Anna Wright believed that she was capable of far more than she was able to achieve, according to biographer Secrest, and this was “clear evidence that she had transferred to Frank her unfulfilled ambitions.” Frank's sister Maginel later recalled that her mother did not view Frank as a typical child: “He was her protégé, her legacy. He would accomplish what she and her husband could not.” Such presumptions can fuel a child's tenacious determination to succeed. But they can also spawn deep levels of insecurity. In some cases, the bravado and bluster of narcissism may mask an underlying vulnerability or lack of self-esteem, says Ronningstam. As Secrest notes, Wright may have believed that “he was not lovable for who he was, but only for the person Anna wanted him to be.”

Anna clearly cherished her son, but too much adulation can backfire. A spoiled or “golden” child may develop a sense of entitlement, believing that he is better than everyone else and deserves special treatment—one of the core characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder. Often, a parent indulges a child by stepping in to save him from disagreeable circumstances (an argument with a friend) or from defeat (questioning a judge at a musical competition). The problem is that overindulgence can interfere with a child's ability to build resilience in response to the normal bumps and pitfalls of life. This is how vulnerability can be spawned. Instead of building healthy self-esteem, these children develop a kind of helplessness because they have not learned to integrate the pluses and minuses in their life, says Ronningstam. “They're not prepared for a rainy day.”

One of Wright's childhood memories flawlessly illustrates his mother's indulgence. When he was about 11, he concocted a party for his three country cousins. There would be surprises and presents for the boys, he told them, and “the possibilities grew as he talked until expectations were boundless.” The boys rushed home, changed clothes, and arrived early for the festivities, not realizing that the party existed solely in Frank's imagination. Although initially surprised, his mother quickly came to her son's rescue, providing the children with molasses candy, popcorn, and ginger cookies. She even unearthed a few presents and convinced her husband to play “Pop Goes the Weasel” on the violin. Later, when Anna asked Frank why he wanted to fool his cousins, he turned the blame on them, accusing the boys of ruining all the fun by believing him in the first place. “And Mother understood,” Wright asserted. “Nobody else.”

By the time Frank was 18, his parents' marriage was over. Anna stopped sharing her husband's bed, moved him into the coldest room in the house, and told him she hated the “very ground” he
walked on; William reported that he had suffered “violence, indignity and abuse” for years, described his wife as “violently angry,” and left. By all accounts, father and son never saw each other again.

Determined to pursue the architectural path he and his mother had mapped out, Wright began working part-time as a junior draftsman for a civil engineer and took classes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. But he bridled at the rules and regulations of conventional schooling; although he claimed to make it halfway through his senior year, records reportedly show that Wright completed only two semesters. His real education, he would later state, came from the wooden blocks and brightly colored strips of paper he played with as a child, made by the renowned childhood educator Friedrich Froebel, and the summers he spent on a Lloyd Jones family farm near Spring Green, Wisconsin. It was there, where he milked cows, hauled wood, dodged hornets, and got sore, that Wright would learn the merits of strenuous labor—and there that he would inhale the delights of nature: the milkweed blossoms, the deep blue of the nighttime sky, the feel of mud between his toes.

To pursue his calling, Wright knew that he needed to live in a place where architects worked. In early 1887, he pawned the books his father had left behind (including a favorite copy of Plutarch's
Lives
) and the mink collar his mother had sewn into his overcoat. He bought a train ticket to Chicago. It was time to fulfill his destiny.

N
INETEEN-YEAR-OLD
F
RANK
L
LOYD
W
RIGHT
arrived in Chicago at an opportune time. A massive fire had eviscerated much of the downtown in 1871, and the city was undergoing rapid new development. Still, Wright was not overly impressed. Hurrying from one office to the next as he looked for a job, he showed contempt
for the work of other architects and was not ashamed to say so years later. The Palmer House looked like “an ugly old, old man whose wrinkles were all in the wrong place,” he wrote in his autobiography; the Chicago Board of Trade was a “thin-chested, hard-faced, chamfered monstrosity”; the Interstate Exposition Building, a “much-domed yellow shed on the lake front.” The cityscape had nothing to offer, Wright concluded, but rank-and-file monotony.

As he worked his way up from apprentice to virtuoso, Wright showed a flair for ingratiating himself with people who could help him, then moving on when they had nothing left to offer—a classic trait of narcissistic personality disorder. Despite his lack of an academic degree, he landed his first job with Joseph Lyman Silsbee, a prestigious architect who was designing a high-end subdivision in the city—and, conveniently, a new church for one of Wright's uncles, Jenkin Lloyd Jones. Wright claimed that Silsbee did not know the family connection when he hired him, but historians dispute this, chalking it up to yet another one of Wright's historical tweaks. By then, Wright had also developed some drawing skills at his part-time job back home. Either way, his interactions with Silsbee illustrated Wright's sense of entitlement, which would infuse every aspect of his behavior throughout his life.

Just a few months after he started, Silsbee gave Wright a raise, bumping him from $8 to $12 a week. But Wright wanted more. When Silsbee refused, Wright quit on the spot, got himself a job at a competing firm, quickly decided that the new place didn't suit him, and informed his new boss that he was going back to Silsbee. Wright later acknowledged how his behavior must have come off to his employer. “I think he thought me a young coxcomb,” he wrote in his autobiography—but his own advancement mattered more. As is the case for any narcissist, the ultimate question is not “What is my obligation here?” but instead “How can I profit from this situation?”

And profit he did. Silsbee agreed to take him back, increased his pay, and allowed Wright to take on his first commission, designing a school for two of his maternal aunts who had inherited their father's farmland in Wisconsin. But once again, Wright set his sights elsewhere, this time on the firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, which had received a commission to build Chicago's tallest building, a 17-story tower with offices, shops, a theater, and a concert hall designed to rival the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. Wright would make as much use of Sullivan, a brilliant young architect, as Sullivan made of him. Within just a few months, Wright managed to get his boss to agree to a five-year contract and a loan so that Wright could build a home in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park for himself and his new bride, Catherine Tobin, the daughter of one of Uncle Jenk's parishioners. The two men developed a close relationship—Wright would later refer to Sullivan as his
lieber Meister
, or beloved master—but that did not stop him from betraying Sullivan's trust. Despite the fact that his contract explicitly forbade moonlighting, Wright started building his own “bootleg” houses, enraging his boss. A few months before his contract expired, Wright recollected, “I threw my pencil down and walked out of the Adler and Sullivan office, never to return.”

Wright's personal relationships were similarly fractured and scarred. Narcissists feed on admiration and expect it from the people around them. Catherine Tobin, a tall lively redhead, was just 18 when she married Wright on June 1, 1889; he was one week shy of his 22nd birthday. Kitty, as she was called, may have adored Wright early on, but her devotion would not last. The couple's six children arrived in rapid succession: three boys and two girls in the first eight years and a final baby boy in 1903. As a father, Wright was entertaining at times, but he could also be remarkably detached. He built his children a playroom with a fireplace and a
barrel-vaulted ceiling and filled it with toys and colored balloons. He played the piano and entertained guests. The couple's second son, John Lloyd Wright, remembered his father throwing him in the air and tickling his toes. “He was an epic of wit and merriment that gave our home the feeling of a jolly carnival,” he wrote in a memoir. But Wright was also unencumbered by fatherly devotion. He described watching another son, a toddler at the time, stuck in a mud puddle and gasping for air as a sprinkler doused him with water. “ ‘All right,' I thought cruelly. ‘Let's see what stuff he's made of!' ” Wright recalled in his autobiography. “I let him lie there half drowned, literally, to see what he would do.”

Impatient with the constant hubbub of children, Wright made it clear that any “father-feeling” he had was for his work, not his offspring. “The children were their mother's children,” he wrote. “I hated the sound of the word papa.” Architecture consumed him. Having honed his skills working for others, Wright began building his own architectural practice while Kitty dedicated herself to raising and educating their children. Her husband took on bold new design projects, including his famed prairie houses with their horizontal lines, low-pitched roofs, open floor plans, and centrally located hearths, which he began building at the turn of the century to blend in with the flat midwestern landscape. Kitty, meanwhile, developed her own interests in social causes and literary groups. The two, inevitably, grew apart. The dissolution of a marriage is always complex, but Kitty's shift in allegiance away from Wright and toward their children could not have satisfied a man who demanded attention. Middle-aged by then, he was also restless.

In the fall of 1909, 42-year-old Wright abandoned his wife and children and set sail for Europe with Mamah Cheney, a married client and a friend of Kitty's with whom he was having an affair. Mamah, who had left her husband and two children to be with
Wright, was highly educated and fluent in French and German. The two were soul mates, the architect declared. Wright departed quickly one night, his son John recalled, and “didn't even say goodbye.” He did, however, leave his family with something to remember him by: an unpaid $900 grocery bill.

Wright seemed to have no compunction about abandoning his commitments of matrimony and fatherhood. Conventional rules didn't apply to him. As biographer Ada Louise Huxtable put it, “he simply created his own moral code.” When Wright returned from Europe in the fall of 1910, he found that the denizens of his hometown, Oak Park, would have none of his scandalous affair; neighbors shunned him, clients abandoned him. Kitty refused to grant her husband a divorce, insisting that they would reunite. But none of this stopped Wright from creating a new life with his mistress, who followed him back to the States the following summer.

Wright now needed a retreat, a place to build the next phase of his personal and professional life. His mother, Anna, had conveniently acquired a plot of land in Wisconsin, near the Hillside Home School that Wright had helped build for his aunts. Throughout his life, Wright juggled his finances like the overseer of a three-ring circus—requesting advance payments from clients, using a prized Japanese print collection as collateral for loans, and borrowing from creditors. With land now in hand, Wright called on wealthy businessman Darwin Martin, a client and one of his loyal moneymen, to help finance construction of a home for him and Mamah.

Initially, Wright claimed that the residence would be for his mother. Martin agreed not only to provide a loan but to help finance the mortgage payments Wright owed on the Oak Park home where Kitty lived with their children. This is almost impossible to fathom. But it speaks to the beguiling effect narcissists can have on others. Exceedingly alluring and charismatic, they
effectively seduce the people who serve them. This was certainly the case for Wright, whose creditors continued to lend him money despite his bombast and his debts. “The fact is that he was a confidence man of infinite charm,” writes biographer Gill, “and nobody could refuse him anything for long.”