He was a narcissist and control freak, a spendthrift and adulterer who led a life marked by scandal, debt and even murder.
Along the way, Frank Lloyd Wright designed the most innovative buildings of 20th Century America — or, as he’d tell you, the whole world. Open kitchens, central hearths, homes built over waterfalls: All flowed from his ability to dream in 3-D. Nearly 60 years after the architect’s death at 91, in 1959, 400 of his works still stand, including the Guggenheim, that swirling, snail-shaped museum in the middle of Manhattan.
His notoriety and genius inspired countless biographies, several novels and, peripherally, a pop song: “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright,” which Paul Simon wrote for his departing partner (and architecture major) Art Garfunkel.
Now, 150 years after his June 8, 1867 birth, there’s “Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archives,” at the Museum of Modern Art. Opening June 12, it boasts 60 years of drawings, building fragments, textiles and TV clips, including a 1957 Mike Wallace interview that shows Wright as what MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll describes as “both a social progressive and incredible curmudgeon.
Wright’s entire life was a study in extremes. A house builder and a home wrecker, he wore capes and lived large.
As Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in 2004’s “Frank Lloyd Wright,” the architect had two lives, “the one he created and the one he lived.” Both, she said, were “too melodramatic” to make up — and full of lies.
Early on, Wright shaved two years off his age and changed his middle name from Lincoln to Lloyd, to honor his mother’s Welsh heritage. It was she — his musician father she abandoned soon after Frank’s birth — who pushed him toward architecture, filling his childhood room in Wisconsin with engravings of English cathedrals. Worried he was becoming effeminate, she sent him to her brothers’ farm to work the land and man up.
Despite his mother’s fears, Wright was rarely without a woman. First wife Catherine was tall, rich and, when they met, 16 to his 20. Wed two years later, she gave him four sons and two daughters. Though he worked for one of Chicago’s top architectural firms, he spent lavishly, moonlighting to make ends meet. He filled one room of his home with chandeliers, an “Arabian Nights” mural and a balcony for theatricals. And that was just the playroom.
But Wright wasn’t engineered for play or, it seems, fatherhood. In 1909, now working for himself, he left his projects, wife and kids and ran off with a client’s wife.
Her name was Martha Cheney, but everyone knew her as Mamah. She left her own two children to be with the charismatic man she considered her soul mate. After meeting at the Plaza Hotel, they journeyed to Europe, where Wright worked on his portfolio while Mamah waited for her divorce to come through.
But Catherine refused to divorce Wright, even after he and Mamah returned to America in 1911. The lovers settled in Taliesin, the rural, Spring Green, Wisconsin, retreat Wright had started to build on land close to his uncles’ farm. Taliesin, from the Welsh for “shining brow,” was one of the great loves of Wright’s life.
It was also the site of his biggest nightmare.
One awful day in 1914, while Wright was in Chicago, Mamah and several workmen stayed behind. Her children were visiting, and houseman Julian Carleton had just served them lunch when he slipped outside and set the place on fire.
As Mamah and the others tried to flee, Carleton hacked them to death. After the smoke cleared, Mamah, her children and four others lay dead. Their killer, whom Mamah reportedly had fired and was clearly deranged, died in jail soon after.
In 1909, now working for himself, he left his projects, wife and kids and ran off with a client’s wife.
Wright was distraught. Joined by his and Catherine’s 22-year-old son, John, he filled Mamah’s casket with flowers he picked from her garden and buried her himself.
He found relief only in rebuilding Taliesin and designing Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, which would later secure his fame.
He wasn’t single for long. A wealthy, 40-something stalker named Miriam Noel sent him steamy sympathy notes, calling him “Lord of my Waking Dreams.” Catherine finally granted him a divorce in 1922, and Wright and Noel wed the next year. It was a brief and brutal union, during which Noel contrived to have Wright charged with violating the Mann Act, for transporting a woman (herself) across state lines for “immoral purposes.”
Their divorce was still pending when Wright, then 57, met Wife No. 3. Olga Hinzenberg, whom Wright nicknamed Olgivanna, was a dancer follower of the mystic Georgi Gurdjieff.
She was also nearly 32 years younger than Wright, married and a mother, but that didn’t stop her from bearing him a love child, Iovanna. In 1928, they wed and, four years later, hit on a genius way to pay the bills: by founding the Taliesin Fellowship, where for the next three decades, architect wannabes labored on Wright’s home for less than nothing.
“They not only worked in the drawing room but farmed his crops, made his food, cleaned . . . and paid tuition for it,” Roger Friedland, co-author of 2006’s “The Fellowship,” told The Post. “It was brilliant, because Wright was broke,” after years of expensive living.
Huxtable called it “a shameless scam, a form of indentured servitude.”
Because there were so many men and so few women at Taliesin, Friedland said, the Wrights dictated their workers’ sex lives, rotating the few women as needed. On the plus side, Friedland noted, many young gay men found the compound a safe space during homophobic times.
All the while, Wright’s star continued to rise. When an earthquake toppled much of Tokyo in 1923, killing more than 100,000, his Imperial Hotel remained standing. (It finally fell in 1967 to a wrecking ball.)
Wright’s designs sometimes outstepped the technology needed to support them. Then again, he didn’t care if some of his buildings leaked. When someone complained that water was falling on his desk, Wright told him to move the desk.
“He was constantly experimenting — with materials, with ways of assembly,” MoMA’s Bergdoll told The Post. “He wanted to push American technology faster than it was willing to go.”
And yes, Bergdoll continued, Wright was a “bundle of contradictions.” While sifting through the archives, Bergdoll discovered that Wright designed a school for African-American children in the South, then boasted that he was “doing something for ‘darkies.’ ” Friedland said that while many of Wright’s clients were Jewish, he agreed with Charles Lindbergh that America’s entry into WWII “was engineered by the Jews.” Then again, biographer Huxtable noted, he was an equal-opportunity basher: “[His] long list of fools and rogues made no distinctions of race or ethnicity.”
He could be scathing to rivals, living and dead. He called the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill “Skiddings, Own-More and Sterile,” and suggested Le Corbusier make paintings, not buildings.
A dandy who never passed a mirror he didn’t peer into, as biographer Meryle Secrest noted, Wright’s self-regard was monumental. Look magazine reported that he once identified himself in court as “the world’s greatest living architect.” When Olgivanna chided him for such immodesty, he replied, “You forget … I was under oath.”
In many ways, Bergdoll believes, Wright was a publicity hound who deserved to be famous: “Here’s someone who was inventing whole new systems of architecture in his 80s, who holds a press conference at 88 to propose [building] a mile-high skyscraper.”
Wright never made his tower in the sky. Nor did he see the Guggenheim completed: He died three months before it opened, shortly before his 92nd birthday. Even then, he didn’t rest: After Olgivanna’s death, his body was removed from its resting place in Wisconsin and cremated, his ashes and hers scattered together in Arizona, where the couple had erected Taliesin West. It was their idea of heaven.
“I believe in God,” Wright liked to say, “only I spell it Nature.”
