Part 2

Frank Lloyd Wright
by Ada Louise Huxtable

(Page 3 of 4)

In his account of the breakup of the marriage, written years later, after his mother's death, Wright accepted her claim of abandonment, although he had to have been keenly aware of what was really going on. Her version was probably the only acceptable story at a time when a divorced woman's place in society was somewhere between polite ostracism and total disgrace. If he knew the truth, why didn't he tell it, almost a decade after she was gone? Was the memory of a deeply disturbed and obviously unhappy childhood too painful to revisit? Whatever his motivation, it seems unlikely that he would have willingly revealed those traumatic early years. Forms had to be observed and reputations mattered; the time had not yet come for popular soul-bearing confessions and poisonous, mommy-dearest revelations. When he wrote about the divorce in the Autobiography, he said "that he never got the heavy thing straight." This was probably not the calculated evasion that some have made it out to be. The children of acrimonious divorce carry a load of conflicted loyalties, of grief and guilt; they never get "the heavy thing straight." He let his mother's story stand, consciously no doubt, and perhaps opportunistically as well; it would also be the most acceptable one, and he reinforced it with his own claim of alienation from his father.

The truth, as usual, was more complex. In that home, dominated by the mother's anger and resentment, it would have been difficult or foolhardy to take sides. Favored and protected by his mother, he could not have forged a close and lasting bond with a father who sought refuge from his wife's abuse by retreating from his family. The Lloyd Joneses had closed ranks to rescue Anna from a failed marriage; it would have been unthinkable for him to stand alone against them. There was no question about where his loyalties lay. William left with only his clothes and his violin, and there was never any contact between father and son again.

After the divorce, William seems to have been in perpetual motion, moving back and forth, from Nebraska to Missouri and Iowa, and finally to the home of a son by his first marriage, near Pittsburgh, where he died in 1904. In the last part of his life, he passed through twenty towns and seven states. The children of his first family remembered a sweet and cheerful man reduced to depression and despondency with the continuous downward spiral of his life. Those who saw Anna as the unfortunate victim of a bad marriage dismissed him as a self-centered dreamer pursuing personal fulfillment. It is more likely that he was a charming and impractical man whose real virtues and abilities lay in the music and literature he loved, pursuing an elusive livelihood in an unremunerative profession in hard times, with none of the survival skills later perfected by his son. When William was buried in Wisconsin with his first wife, Frank did not attend the funeral; it is known, however, that he made solitary visits to the grave in later years. One can read in Wright's memoirs the mixed memories of the father who grew more remote, the two joined only by the music they shared.

But Frank was clearly William's son. He had his father's fine looks and his small stature - he always claimed 5 feet 81?2 inches, which may have been a stretch (he was closer to 5 feet 7 and occasionally wore built-up heels). His easy charm came from his father, and so did his musical ability and abiding love of music. He told the tale of pumping an organ, to the point of total exhaustion, while his father played on, unconscious of the son's fatigue - his carelessness with the boy the source of another fight with Anna. Whatever else was lacking in his youth, and it was almost everything, there was always a piano, and for Frank, in the future, there would always be a piano - in Tokyo during the construction of the Imperial Hotel, in the Arizona desert at his winter camp, in the suite at the Plaza hotel that he kept in New York when he built the Guggenheim Museum.

One suspects that the breadth of his sensibilities as an artist, photographer, and designer of furniture, graphics, books, and all the elements of his buildings, his patronage of Chinese and Japanese art, his obsession with every aspect of his surroundings, his dedicated collecting of beautiful things, owed much to his father, who could never afford more than the books to which he retired in defeat. Wright could not afford these things either - his resources were always subsumed by his self-indulgences - but he bought anyway, running up debts with lordly unconcern. He would use his fees to buy works of art instead of paying his bills. The financial brinkmanship that the son displayed throughout his life equaled and surpassed his father's economic woes, but he made extravagance an art form.

Wright's relationship with his mother was one of mutual dependence; she would accept his transgressions, tolerate his lapses, and stay close to him until she died. He makes the repeated observation that she always "understood." When an overactive imagination led to an invitation to schoolmates for a party that existed only in his own mind, she made instant molasses candy and produced popcorn and cookies. Later, there would be tacit and total acceptance of far more serious indiscretions. She bought the land for the first Taliesin, the home built for his mistress after he abandoned his wife; her generosity brought him back to the family valley, and the house he would build there would inevitably have a place for her. She tolerated and lived with subsequent mistresses and wives. She traveled to Japan in her eighties to care for him when he was ill, even though he had another woman by his side. He could count on her sympathy when the rest of the world considered him an outcast. She was always there, through guile, persistence, uncritical devotion, and sheer determination - that eternal motivational mix called mother love. She co-opted his loyalty through single-minded possessiveness and support.

He must have been deeply affected by the insecure, impoverished, unhappy household of his childhood, although he describes evenings around the piano during the Madison years, before the divorce, laughing and singing the Gilbert and Sullivan songs that were then the rage. In his Autobiography, he walks a careful line between describing the trials and hardships of a seriously troubled home, and painting a warm picture of old-fashioned nineteenth-century family pleasures. But there is a less attractive account of family life given by William's daughter by his first marriage, Elizabeth, who called Anna a cruel and abusive stepmother. She tells in her diary of a horrifying experience, when Anna, standing at the stove, hit and burned her in a fit of anger, and of being rescued, screaming, by her father. The children he brought with him were eventually sent to his relatives for care. Anna's tantrums were severe enough for William to make inquiries to her family about her mental condition. Some later observers believe that she was emotionally unstable, and the severest of her critics, Wright biographer Brendan Gill, was convinced that she was slightly mad. Given her temperament, frustrated ideals, and the stresses of an emotionally and financially doomed marriage, it is more likely that she was driven into bitter and furious rages through disappointment and unrelenting fatigue.

This gives us some reason to believe that Wright's presentation of a patient, sainted mother as guardian angel of his future - pursuing prenatal architectural influences by putting tastefully oak-framed engravings of English cathedrals on his nursery walls in her determination that he should become an Architect (always capitalized in the Autobiography, but so is Mother) - was romanticized and embroidered with willful hindsight by her son. That is, if she did any such thing; it has been suggested by those busily engaged in questioning the legends of his life that it would have been more likely, at that time and in those straitened circumstances, that the newborn's cradle would simply have shared the parents' room, and Edgar Kaufmann Jr., whose father commissioned Fallingwater, Wright's masterpiece of the 1930s, the great house over the waterfall in the Pennsylvania woods, questioned whether there would have been any money for frames. The pictures could have been cut from the easily available Harper's Weekly. But the scholarly rush to "truth" underestimates Anna: she would have managed the frames - Frank remembered framed pictures in his boyhood homes - and arranged for her son to have his own space. Let her have the cathedrals; she probably found a way.

© 2004 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Ada Louise Huxtable is a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic. She is the author of several books, including Inventing Reality, Pier Luigi Nervi, and, most recently, The Unreal American. A MacArthur fellow, Huxtable is the architecture critic of The Wall Street Journal and was the architecture critic for The New York Times from 1963 to 1982.