The Journal Times Online - Racine, Wisconsin

Photos and text (c) 2008 Mark Hertzberg

   

 

     “This is where Mamah and Frank sat!” exclaims Nancy Horan as she sits on a couch next to the south windows of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Cheney House in Oak Park.  Horan is the author of Loving Frank, a fictionalized account of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Wright’s love affair.

 

    Horan begins their physical intimacy on that couch by the south windows. “This is where the Belknap’s daughters saw them spooning. In those days that was considered making love.”  The neighbor’s children had been watching the lovers from a window in their house. “I’ve thought of this room so many times,” says Horan.  

    The affair was the stuff of scandal in 1909 when the iconoclastic architect ran away to Europe with one of his clients. They were both married. He left his wife, Catherine, and their six children, and she left her husband, Edwin, and their two children. Their love ended in unimaginable horror five years later, when seven people, including Mamah and her children, were massacred at Taliesin, the home that Wright built near Spring Green for Mamah and himself. A servant had set the house on fire, and butchered the victims as they tried to escape.

    The Cheney/Wright love affair has been mentioned in countless books about Wright. Horan’s tale has many more layers. Indeed, it is more than 300 pages long, as opposed to the brief references in most of the Wright bibliography.

    Horan was a freelance writer when she started writing the book seven years ago. She lived seven blocks south of the Cheney House. She walked past it with friends on their daily three-mile walk. She particularly remembers one aspect of the house, “You could see the light glinting off the stained glass windows, and that image appears in the book.”

 

    Horan talks about the book in a conversation in the living room of the Cheney House, where the real life story began. This is only her second visit to the house. The first was on a Wright Plus home tour a dozen years ago. Our hosts are Barbara and Dale Smirl, who are the owners and stewards of the house.

    Residents of Oak Park are bombarded by signs of Frank Lloyd Wright, but Horan did not set out to write yet another book about him. “I was initially drawn by Mamah.”  Horan’s book is about love and the sacrifices people make for love. It is about the questions people have about those sacrifices. It is also about a woman’s quest to realize her own potential, beyond the traditional roles of devoted wife and mother. The book is controversial, for some Wright scholars, because Horan had to imagine so much of the story.

        The Cheneys and the Wrights were friends. Wright designed their house in 1903 and supervised its construction. The board and batten garage behind the house was added later, after the village cited safety concerns and would not let him place the garage in the lower level of the house. In the book, the love affair develops as Wright and Mrs. Cheney consult on plans for the garage. Ambiguity about the date the garage was built gave Horan a context in which to bring architect and client together again, after the house was finished.

 

    She wrote some 300 pages before throwing out her first draft. “What I had in mind, at first, was an unfolding story told from the points of view of four people who would each contribute something to it.” She calls the draft a “Rashomon approach” to the story, referring to the 1951 Japanese movie in which four people each give their own perspective of a crime they witnessed.

    “Catherine (Mrs. Wright) was one point of view. I felt enormous sympathy for her.” The other three were Mamah; a boy who lived next door; and Marion Mahony, an architect and draftswoman in Wright’s Oak Park studio. “I wanted her voice, because she did good work for Wright and ultimately did not get the credit she deserved.”  Ernest Hemingway, another famous resident of Oak Park, had a cameo role in that first draft, as the Cheney’s paper boy.

    The book evolved into a complex tale about more than just the scandal that destroyed Wright’s career for many years. “That first draft turned out to be a commentary on divorce and its impact on a community.  I wasn’t getting close to the real story I wanted to tell. I realized that the questions that most engaged me had to do with Mamah and her relationship with Wright. Who was she, and how does a woman leave her children for a lover?”

    Horan continues, “I wanted to tell her story as she would have told it and I would not judge her. The reader could judge her choices, and her life and decisions. I felt that the story was more complex than it looked on the surface. The people involved were flawed and they made difficult, sometimes flawed decisions.”

 August 6, 1911: The Chicago Daily Tribune reports the Cheney divorce.

An article from the Racine Daily Journal in November, 1913, asserts that their love may have grown "cold" because their visits were said to be less frequent.

    Horan faced contradictory perceptions of Cheney. The negative has been well documented in many newspaper stories written after a Chicago Tribune reporter first wrote about the affair after discovering the couple’s names on a hotel register in Berlin. Still, there was a strong basis for Horan to conclude that Cheney had many positive qualities.  “I could tell she was a woman who enjoyed a glass of wine, enjoyed a laugh.”  Her conclusion is reinforced when the Smirls show us a 1994 letter from the Belknap’s daughter in which she writes, “She was very thoughtful - and a very happy person herself.”

 

Dale Smirl shows Nancy Horan the letter from the Belknap's daughter. The billiard table is the only original furniture left in the house.

 

    “I was curious about what motivated Mamah. Neighbors reported she would play hide and seek with the children in the front yard--she engaged with her kids. How could she leave them?”  The questions that Mamah Borthwick Cheney had about her own life are still relevant for many women, says Horan. “The struggle for women to fulfill themselves as mothers and also to fulfill their gifts and potential is a struggle that has not gone away in 100 years.”

    When Cheney was in Europe with Wright, she met the Swedish suffragette Ellen Key (pronounced Kigh). Cheney stayed in Europe a year after Wright returned to America, to learn Swedish and to translate Key’s work into English. “Cheney became somewhat disillusioned about Key when the philosopher questioned her choices well after Mamah Cheney had divorced her husband,” says Horan.

    “Cheney had idolized the woman who had previously written that a great love has its own rights. Continuing in a miserable marriage may be less moral than a pursuing a loving relationship unsanctioned by a marriage certificate;  that a woman should be free to have children, without necessarily being married.”

    Horan did extensive research as she worked to accurately recreate the settings for Wright and Cheney’s story. For example, we read about their voyage across the Atlantic, on their way to Berlin in 1909.  “I studied ships, how long it took to cross the Atlantic in a ship, how people might have lived on board.”

    In the novel, Cheney enjoys the company of Modernist artists and poets at the Cafe des Westens in Berlin. “I knew Modernism was happening when Mamah was there.”  

    Horan did not visit Berlin when she was writing the book, “I knew Berlin now, would not be like it was.”  A friend who works at the Oak Park Public Library found a 1908 guide to the city for her. Berlin came alive as Horan unfolded the “tremendously thin” onionskin maps in the guidebook.  When she researched the cafe, and looked at the maps, she realized it was just two blocks away from where Cheney was living.  “Bingo!” she thought, “Mamah is going to the Cafe des Westens!”  Horan also decided that Cheney should meet poet Else Lasker-Schuler at the cafe, “Her life was interesting. It was the reverse of Mamah’s. She was abandoned by her husband. I decided I should have Mamah meet her, and experience the sadness of a woman who had been abandoned. Plus, she wrote beautiful poetry.”

    She found a memoir by the daughter of the man who had built the Hotel Adlon, where the lovers first stayed in Berlin. “The Adlon was fabulously lavish. Think about that. Think about Wright leaving his wife and children and going to a sumptuous hotel.”

    A night at the opera for Horan in Chicago led to a night at the opera in Berlin, for her Cheney and Wright characters. “I went to see “Mefistofele” in Chicago, with Samuel Ramey as the devil. I was staggered by the production. It was fabulous! I came home and said, ‘I am sending them to the opera.’ I checked to see if “Mefistofele” was performed in Berlin. It turned out it had been performed in Germany around the time Wright and Cheney were there.  The great Chaliapin had performed the Samuel Ramey part [that she had just seen]. “When I began to write the scene, I could not explain why I wanted it in. I realized later it was my unconscious at work.”

    There is a strong parallel between the story of the opera and the Cheney/Wright story, explains Horan. “The opera is the Faust story, a man selling his soul to the devil, so he could say for one brief moment, ‘I was happy,’ and that was Mamah’s story. The opera scene was one of the earliest I wrote.”

    Horan is asked if the story is a Greek tragedy. “Absolutely, except that with a classical Greek tragedy, the disaster that occurs grows out of the flaws of the main character.  Bad things happened because of Wright and Cheney’s flaws, but Mamah’s death was a case of random violence, perpetrated by a mentally ill man. Of course, it was construed at the time as God’s retribution against sinners.

    “I heard that the Belknap’s daughter (the young girl who had seen the lovers from the window in her house next door) and her family were in a church when news of the deaths came, and word went in whispers from pew to pew up to the front.” ”

    Horan knew that the book had to end with the massacre at Taliesin. “I wrote the ending midway through the writing process because it bore heavily on me.” Then came another challenge, “How do I inhabit Frank Lloyd Wright?” She decided to change from past tense (Cheney’s point of view) to present tense (Wright) after the murders. “Changing tense was part of changing points of view.  By writing in the present I suddenly felt pretty good about being in his head. It felt right.”

    Horan did not think she would be accepted by Wright scholars when she was working on the book because she was “an untested, unknown writer.”  She went to the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles, rather than to Taliesin West, to read Wright’s letters. “I flew under the radar in terms of research.”

    She has been well regarded in official Wright circles since the book was published. “Ironically, and happily, the Home and Studio [Wright’s home in Oak Park] sells my book. Taliesin West was so receptive and warm to me. I had a special tour. I signed tons of books for them.” Horan will help mark Wright’s birthday with a talk at Fallingwater on June 8.

    Although Horan’s publisher had arranged for a 20-city book tour when the book was published last August, nothing was planned for the actual day of publication. She created her own event, which ended up with an unexpected surprise. “I live in a little town of 1200 people [on Puget Sound]. I didn’t know a lot of people. I went into the bookstore there -it’s locally run- and said, ‘it’s too late to advertise or anything, but I would like to have a signing here.”  Word of the signing spread.

    “The first person through the door at the signing, and the first person to buy the book, was John Ottenheimer.”  He was an apprentice to Wright, who worked on the Guggenheim Museum commission. “John Ottenheimer sat down next to me and told me stories about Mr. Wright.”

    The book has now been published in paperback, as well, and there are people who have inquired about producing a Loving Frank movie. All in all, not a bad start for “an untested, unknown writer.”

Links:
Loving Frank website:
http://http//www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/lovingfrank/

Samuel Ramey performing in “Mefistofele”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PZS_L6mH1M

The Cheney children could play above the first floor of the house, by climing out a window along the bedroom hallway.

This conversation with Nancy Horan would not have been possible without Dale and Barbara Smirl graciously allowing us to talk in their home. I had told Nancy that the house was the ideal place for me to interview her, rather than on the phone or anywhere else, even in Oak Park.