Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (22 page)

It is mind-boggling that a man who asked to borrow money to build a home for his mother would dream up what amounted to a kingdom in the hills for himself and his mistress. But as always, Wright's grandiosity and fantasies of unlimited success played out in full. Even when money was tight, he refused to waver from the “organic” architectural vision that would drive him throughout his life.

Steeped in Ralph Waldo Emerson's view of nature as spiritual expression, Wright's vision required that man-made structures meld harmoniously with the trees, hills, water, and sky that surrounded them. “I knew well that no house should ever be
on
a hill or
on
anything. It should be
of
the hill,” he wrote. “Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.” Emerson's tenets of nonconformity, combined with the religious dissenters in Wright's mother's family, fueled the architect's approach to his work. Indeed, the Lloyd Jones family motto, “Truth Against the World,” could not have been better scripted for Wright's weighty ideals. “The sort of expression we seek,” he wrote, “is that of harmony, or the good otherwise known as the true, otherwise known as the Beautiful.”

This dogma inspired Wright's vision for his Wisconsin estate and studio, which he named “Taliesin” after the Welsh bard whose name translates as “shining brow.” In his autobiography, Wright laid out his grand conception of a house built atop a hill overlooking expansive vineyards and fruit trees. He envisioned apple and plum trees, bushes with their “necklaces of pink and green
gooseberries,” asparagus and melon, honey hives, cows, sheep, and horses. “I looked forward to peacocks Javanese and white on the low roofs of the buildings or calling from the walls of the courts,” he wrote. There would be no gutters so that icicles could drip and beautify the look. “Taliesin in winter was a frosted palace roofed and walled with snow, hung with iridescent fringes.”

In the fall of 1911, Wright and Mamah moved into Taliesin. Their scandalous relationship did not, however, go unnoticed. On Christmas Day, after articles about the couple's cohabitation appeared in the papers, Wright held a press conference at his home. He told reporters that he had married too young and that his marriage had unraveled; he hoped to fulfill his life as an artist with Mamah. Wright may have intended his remarks to be an honest account for an inquiring public, but they were infused with righteousness. “The ordinary man cannot live without rules to guide his conduct,” Wright said. “It is infinitely more difficult to live without rules, but that is what the really honest, sincere, thinking man is compelled to do.” In the end, the relationship would not last, ending tragically in the summer of 1914, when a deranged servant set Taliesin afire and murdered Mamah, her two children, and several other guests while Wright was working in Chicago. Wright filled Mamah's coffin with flowers and, in despair, set out to rebuild Taliesin. “Her soul has entered me,” he wrote in a letter to his neighbors, “and it shall not be lost.”

Wright's personal tumult continued after the Taliesin calamity. Soon after Mamah's death, a condolence note from a sculptress named Miriam Noel caught Wright's attention—she, too, had suffered in love, she told him. Could they meet? Conspicuous and spirited, Noel matched Wright's sartorial style. He carried a walking stick and wore flowing capes and a porkpie hat; she draped herself in necklaces, capes, and turbans. Within days of their meeting, she addressed
him in a letter as “Lord of my Waking Dreams!” Wright, still struggling to recover from Mamah's death, was taken in by what he called Miriam's “enlightened companionship.” But their relationship was tumultuous from early on. Miriam, Wright would soon discover, was a morphine addict and may have suffered from schizophrenia. Still, after nine years together, the two were married in 1923 (one year after Kitty Wright finally granted her husband a divorce). Wright hoped that marriage would improve their relationship; instead, as he later wrote, it “resulted in ruin.” Within months, Miriam walked out, and the two were officially divorced several years later.

It didn't take Wright long to move on. In 1924, a Montenegrin dancer, Olgivanna Lazovich, caught his eye at a performance of the Russian Ballet in Chicago. She was 26; he was 57. Neither was divorced when they began living together, and they would soon have two children to care for—Olgivanna's own young daughter and an out-of-wedlock baby girl of their own. In 1926, Wright, along with Olgivanna and the children, spent two nights in jail for committing adultery and violating a law that prohibited the transport of women over state lines for any “immoral purpose.”

Wright's professional trespasses were no less astounding. Worshipping his aesthetic design ideal above all else, he showed little concern for the most basic structural mishaps. Stories about the notorious leaky roofs he designed are as entertaining as they are confounding. As historian William Cronon recounted in an essay published by the Museum of Modern Art, water poured onto the heads of congregants during the first High Holy Days celebrations at the Beth Sholom Synagogue outside of Philadelphia in 1960. The roof of the Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin, held up by 21-foot-tall “lily pads”—slender columns that spread into circles at the top—dripped so frequently that workers kept five-gallon buckets on their desks to catch the splashes. And then
there's the famous dinner party story. One night, Herbert F. Johnson, of Johnson Wax, called Wright from the middle of a soiree at his elegant 14,000-square-foot home, which the architect had also designed. As Cronon described it, the party “had been interrupted by a steady drip onto Johnson's bald head.” Wright suggested that “the irate owner solve the problem by moving his chair.”

Wright's clients were expected to feel grateful to dwell in one of his rarefied homes, no matter the inconveniences, and they needed to embrace his aesthetic vision. The architect equipped some of his houses with custom-designed wooden furniture as part of his plan for “organic simplicity,” making it challenging for people to bring their own. Artwork and decoration were unwelcome with the exception of his Japanese prints, which Wright savored as the purest form of art. Clients were not supposed to tinker with any of it. Even gardening required his approval. If the ceilings were low—he claimed to be five feet, eight inches, but may have been shorter—so be it. Not enough closet space? Time to get rid of excess. As his son John described it, Wright “builds a romance about you, who will live in it—and you get the House of Houses, in which everyone lives a better life because of it. It may have a crack, a leak, or both, but you wouldn't trade it for one that didn't.”

Wright's encounter with Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe is a classic example of the architect's self-serving vision. In 1957, the couple invited Wright to design a home for them in Roxbury, Connecticut. Wright climbed to high ground to take in a view of the hills that stretched out from their old farmhouse. “He took one look and then peed and said, ‘Good spot,' and we walked down the hill,” Miller recounted in a letter to one of Wright's apprentices many years later. The couple wanted a place where they could live simply, not entertain, but Wright took little interest in their needs. When his plans arrived, they featured a circular living room
with stone columns, a conference room with 12 chairs, and a stone swimming pool. Sleeping space? Not much. It was a house fit “for a corporation and not two people in the country,” wrote Miller. “He simply had us all wrong.” Not only that, Wright “had no actual idea” what the house would cost, Miller reported. “He said something about $250,000, which was absurd even in the mid-Fifties for that kind of construction.”

Hardly surprising. Wright was perpetually irresponsible with money, both his own and his clients'. It was no secret that he lured in commissions with lowball estimates and then unabashedly upped the price. A church Wright promised for $60,000 rang in at more than $200,000. The price of Fallingwater, the vacation home he built for department store owner Edgar Kaufmann and his family, soared from $35,000 to $155,000. He routinely requested advance payments, then neglected to put them toward the project. Instead, he might buy a grand piano—there were 11, he claimed, at Taliesin—or another Japanese print to add to his vast collection. Money didn't have value, other than getting him what he wanted, his son John later reflected in his memoir. “He carried his paper money crumpled in any pocket—trousers, vest, coat or overcoat. He would have to uncrumple a bill to see its denomination. He never counted his change,” John wrote. “He either paid too much or too little for everything.”

Although quick to spend, Wright was delinquent about paying back, whether it was a grocery bill or taxes owed on his estate. “This love for beautiful things—rugs, books, prints, or anything else made by art or craft or building—especially building—kept the butcher, the baker and the landlord always waiting,” Wright confessed. “Sometimes waiting incredibly long.” John, also an architect, experienced this firsthand when his father hired him with the promise of a regular salary. Wright would take him out for a meal and stuff
a $20 bill in his pocket every now and then, but he never followed through with a paycheck. When John raised the issue, his father looked at him reproachfully. “He then proceeded to figure out what I had cost him all during my life, including obstetrics,” John wrote. “Whatever the amount was, which I could not comprehend, if I never received salary from him for the rest of my life it would still be too much, and he would be justified in the matter.” John continued working with his father, even traveling to Tokyo, where Wright would live for four years while he built the famed Imperial Hotel. When a client's payment arrived, John took the opportunity to deduct the amount he was owed. He received a cable from his father the next day: “You're fired! Take the next ship home.”

Despite this behavior, Wright continued to attract admirers. In 1932, they began flocking to Taliesin, where Wright had launched the Taliesin Fellowship for young architects—and a kingdom of his own. The program was conceived out of monetary necessity during the Great Depression. The 1920s had been especially rough on Wright's finances: His commissions had dried up during his tenure in Japan, a second fire had destroyed the living quarters at Taliesin, and he had barely managed to hold on to his estate after failing to pay his mortgage. Olgivanna, whom Wright married in 1928, was his staunchest defender and a true devotee. It was she who helped dream up the program—a moneymaking venture—in the name of education. As biographer Ada Louise Huxtable describes it, “out of ingenuity and desperation, a brilliant scheme was formed to turn penury into profit.”

Wright, then in his mid-60s, and Olgivanna, in her mid-30s, touted the fellowship as hands-on living and learning in a working cooperative. Appalled by conventional colleges, which he charged were churning out “creatively impotent” and sedentary students, Wright was adamant that his apprentices engage in physical labor.
At Taliesin, apprentices took part in running the day-to-day operations of the 200-acre estate with its fruit trees, vegetable garden, and artificial lake stocked with fish. They hoed the fields, tended the manure pit, cooked meals, did laundry, hauled stones, cut trees, and built their own lodging. There was no formal instruction; instead, apprentices were awarded the opportunity to work alongside Wright in his studio. The annual price tag for this privilege was steep. Initially set at $650—more than Ivy League tuition—it quickly grew to $1,100. Wright had no trouble filling his spots.

Depending on whom you asked, the Taliesin Fellowship was either “a clever con game serving Wright's total self-interest, or a profound preparation for a life in architecture,” as Huxtable put it. Many apprentices, tasked with everything from making homemade Christmas gifts for the Wrights to preparing Russian stews under Olgivanna's watchful eye, left in the first few years, frustrated that Wright was providing little architectural training. His harshest critics viewed the fellowship as a cult with Wright as its leader, and Olgivanna as domineering matriarch. But others appreciated the labor—not to mention the concerts, films, and lectures that were a required part of their cultural education—and stayed for years. Some became loyal acolytes, even working with Wright on later projects.

None, however, would ever gain the stature that Wright achieved and that Olgivanna glorified for eternity. “He stands as a giant among the generations of men,” she wrote in a book about her husband published one year after his death. “His projection left on earth will speak for thousands of years to those who understand.”

T
HE WORD
“
NARCISSISM
”
COMES
from a Greek myth about a beautiful hunter, Narcissus, who scorns those who love him. One day,
Narcissus is followed into the woods by a nymph named Echo, who tries to embrace him. Narcissus throws Echo to the ground, rejecting her; she flees the woods and dies of a broken heart. Only her voice, her echo, remains. Narcissus, meanwhile, is lured to a pool by Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, where he becomes mesmerized by the exquisite face he sees in the water, not realizing it is his own reflection. Transfixed, but unable to obtain the object of his desire, Narcissus dies.