Posted by: mhertzberg at 10:30PM EST on August 21, 2008
Text and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg
If you tell people who do not know Frank Lloyd Wright’s work inside out that you recently detoured to Cloquet, Minnesota to see a Wright-designed service station, they will invariably ask you to repeat yourself. They are sure that either they misheard you or that you are pulling their leg.
Wright thought that gas station designs should be no less appealing than the homes he designed, writes Suzette Lucas in the Summer 2008 Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly. But, she continues, no oil company was interested in his standardized designs which he pitched as a way to save money, and help build up the brand with distinctive buildings.
The gas station Wright designed in the late 1920s and early 1930s for his Utopian Broadacre City project was finally built in Cloquet in 1956-1958, for R.W. Lindholm. He had built a house in for Lindholm in Cloquet in 1952.
The service station features a dramatic thirty-foot cantilevered, copper-covered canopy that projects north past the second floor lounge, or waiting room, and the bathrooms that are over the office. The lounge is glass-enclosed on three sides. There are skylights in the garage. Building codes precluded Wright from adding the overhead gas lines featured in his original concept. Wright had wanted motorists to be able to drive without having to navigate around conventional fuel pumps.
Wright’s design was built around an existing filling station and garage. Lindholm sold Phillips 66 gasoline. The 60’ pylon atop the roof originally said “Phillips” where Wright’s name is now painted. And “66” was at the base of the tower, where we now see his “F” and “L” initials.
Today the station is a Spur dealership. It is a full-service gas station. Gas is cheaper across the street, but it would be shoddy to buy gas at a self-service station, and then drive over to walk around and take pictures. There is a dry cleaner on the south side of the building.
These pictures were regrettably shot at midday. The lighting and architecture would be more dramatic at dusk, mixing ambient light with the lights of the building. The car in the service bay is a 1955 Studebaker Champion (which evolved from one of Raymond Loewy's wonderful designs for Studebaker).
Wright’s 1927 design for a service station is being built in Buffalo. It will be a full-scale building, but it will not be a working gas station.
Posted by: mhertzberg at 4:00PM EST on July 21, 2008
Text and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg
Robert Leary cooked himself a batch of popcorn (with real butter, if you please), and settled down to watch a movie in the book-lined library of his 1909 California craftsman-style house. He was not just a movie buff that Saturday night. He was an architectural archaeologist, researching Frank Lloyd Wright’s majestic and sprawling Ennis House (1924). There are two buildings at the Ennis House: the main house, and the garage and chauffeur’s quarters, west of the house. The “motor court,” which would be called a driveway today, separates the two.
My friend Robert Leary, at the Ennis House
Leary had heard that the 1933 film “Female,” starring Ruth Chatterton shows what the original doors and windows in the garage and chauffeur’s quarters looked like. He found what he was looking for, about eight minutes into the hour-long film, “I let out a yelp last night at 12:30!”
Ruth Chatterton in the movie
The 75-year-old black and white comedy romance movie confirmed that the original building had garage doors and French windows. “Thank God we had not done those windows (during the restoration)! It is a whole other project that involved money, but at least we have it! It’s clear as day!”
Leary wanted to call his friends, but it was too late at night. “I was jumping at the chance of sharing the good news. You can look at the Ennis House, and see all the terrible things that have happened. A lot of bad luck.”
The house has had a succession of private owners, including Charles and Mabel Ennis, who commissioned it. It has likely had few stewards like Leary, past president and current member of the Ennis House Foundation board of directors. He is passionate about the house and about the Foundation. Their efforts saved the house from sliding off the southern face of the hills of Los Feliz, defying the expectations of many people who thought the house would be lost forever.
The house is one of four that Wright designed for Los Angeles clients using his patented concrete textile block construction method. The numbers are staggering: there are some 27,000 blocks inside and outside the Ennis House, in 27 different varieties. Some are patterned on both sides; others on only one side; some are half blocks; and some are quarter blocks. Each block is 16 x 16 inches. The house is 4,000 square feet; the footprint of the property, including the retaining walls, the motor court, and the garage and chauffeur’s quarters, is about 6500 square feet.
Add to those statistics one more that is almost unimaginable: 400 million pounds of concrete have been poured in the last two years to stabilize the house. Just two years earlier, in 2004, the Ennis House had been named one of the Eleven Most Endangered Properties in America by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, after being nominated for that dubious distinction by The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.
The signature retaining wall is now a facade, rather than part of the structure of the house. It hides what Leary calls an “invisible superstructure under the house and the property.” The modern engineering included drilling pylons 57 feet into solid bedrock, behind the wall.
Leary first met the Ennis House when he was a docent for Wright’s Hollyhock House, across from Ennis. “We were taken there on a tour as part of our ongoing education. We were taken to a number of Wright properties around California. I had heard of it, and had clearly seen it from Hollyhock House.
“To actually see it is one thing, to go inside is a whole other experience. It was so large and it was so different from so many of the other lovely small Frank Lloyd Wright houses I’d seen in California and the East Coast area. Most of the houses I’d seen from outside were modest in scale and the Ennis House and Hollyhock House were so bombastic in their presentation. They were so audacious and grand and beautiful and just thereby being so unique. I could learn that this was Frank Lloyd Wright working on a grander scale.”
He was not disappointed. “My first impression was just overwhelming. I wanted to own it. I wanted to buy it on the spot.” The house was owned at the time by Augustus Brown, who was there during Leary’s visit.
The Northridge earthquake of January 20,1994 had recently struck the city. “The Ennis House at that time was in grave shape. It was deteriorating. You could see the effect of the earthquake, how they had to put up temporary shoring.
“He (Brown) was in process of trying to raise as much money as he could.” The money would be used to restore, rather than save the property. “It was hugely different, the realization was that it had to be saved, not restored yet. It was in immediate danger of structural collapse. I never dreamed that I would be in his position 11 or 12 years later!”
The house clung precariously to the side of the hill for the next 11 years, during which time Mr. Brown died. “A very dedicated group of volunteers led by Franklin DeGroot was doing everything they could to raise money, to raise awareness. The probability was that the house was facing imminent structural collapse.”
Diane Keaton, the actress, took up the cause of the Ennis House after the National Trust listing of it as one of the most endangered properties in the nation. She wrote press releases and gave interviews about the house. Her message was that the house “is” collapsing, according to Leary. Then, as if the house was not already in bad enough shape, 2005 brought rain, “catastrophic rain, like we had not had in one hundred years.”
It was a turning point for the house, Leary says. “Between Diane Keaton’s clarion call, the National Trust listing, and the rain of 2005, a new group was brought in to see what we could do immediately to save the house.” There was no time to waste, he says.
The Ennis House Foundation was formed, though the efforts of film producer Joel Silver (then owner of Wright’s Storer House, also in Los Angeles, and Auldbrass, in South Carolina); Ron Scherubel, executive director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy; the National Trust; and the Los Angeles Conservancy. Leary was invited to join the board. “I was really stunned that they wanted me, possibly because I had been so involved with Hollyhock House, and was a member of all three (organizations).” He was elected chairman.
They had to act decisively, “We did not have the luxury of ‘let’s really think this through.’” The board did not meddle in areas in which it had no expertise. “The board religiously stuck to the behind the scenes stuff, to let the architectural people and engineers do what they do best, and not get involved in the rigimarole.” They told the experts, ‘Go do what you can, and do it quickly.’
Leary singles out another group for praise. “It truly is the accountants and the lawyers that were the genius for this miracle that has taken place in three years. Yes, the architects and engineers were helpful, and historians and others, but it really was the lawyers and the accountants who were able to free up the money, some from FEMA, some from banks, some from loans. It really was a community effort, all volunteer.”
A diverse group of people, with varied talents committed to the rescue effort. “Everyone came together and has continued to come together pro bono because of the reality of the grave future of the Ennis House. We all came to the conclusion indeed, that if this house was lost, Los Angeles would never live down the shame. We would never live it down if something so extraordinarily important in the cultural history of the U.S. were lost.”
In spite of the problems the house had almost from the beginning, there have been bright spots, Leary says. Lloyd Wright, the architect’s son, was supervising construction, when he wrote to his father that the retaining wall was failing. Decades later, the house was badly damaged by the earthquake and rains, to be sure, but Leary says, “Conversely, at the same time, even ironically, there was so much good luck, the fact that the interior was never really mucked up at all.”
There were also some lucky finds. “When the Ennis House Foundation first started taking things over and cleaning out the house and ground in 2005, we were in the chauffeur’s quarters, just after disastrous rains. The ceilings were caving in. It was just abominable and abysmal, beyond gross. We were looking for anything we could salvage, anything that might be important. In the back of the room were these five file cabinets. Three of the five were completely drenched with water and had been there for a year after being drenched. All had to be chucked. In the bottom drawer of the last file cabinet, we found about 300 construction photographs.
“They showed every stage of the Ennis House through the years except a few we needed. There were dozens and dozens and dozens of historic construction photos of the Ennis House, the Freeman House, and Julius Schulman photos. Thank God. If they had been only 12-14 inches over to the right, they would have been lost forever. This was the first ball in our court. We don’t have money, the house is collapsing. This got me so jazzed.”
That was only the beginning. They found iron work, some of the latches from the gate (in an antique store). “We found gobs of stuff.” It has now all been photographed, scanned, and filed on discs.
Leary is especially proud of an artifact he found in the dirt under the house in late 2005. “I found one original mold (for the textile blocks) in the mud, when there basically was no southern retaining wall. I was under the house, literally in the cavernous underside of the house, crawling in the mud and the dirt, knowing this is a rare opportunity. I wanted to see how the house was supported.
“Wright called a lot of his supports ‘dead men,’ joists, support beams, load bearing walls under the properties. I wanted to see just how the Ennis House had originally been supported. I was crawling in the guts of the house in the mud and the dirt, and there was this rusted piece of metal that was just sicking out of the dirt. I was wondering what it was. I dug and dug more. I saw it was a square with metal supports on both sides, holding two pieces of wood. I realized it was a mold for the negative space or the inside of a block. Obviously, when the workers were finished, they just left it there, so we have this wonderful cultural artifact of the craftsmanship of these four wonderful (textile block) houses, but especially of the Ennis House, of the 27,000 blocks, produced one at a time. They were not cookie cutter, not mass produced. Here was material that they used; that they used to build the Ennis House!
“That sort of thing...is priceless. It is like finding the Raiders of the Lost Ark Holy Grail. Historians and researchers and craftspeople in the future can see that this was in effect just one on one, a worker producing his art.”
Leary is not ready to stop searching. “There’s more out there. There was a time last year where Steve (McAvoy, a fellow board member) and I were literally finding a piece of the puzzle once a week.” They traded phone calls. “Steve, you’re never going to believe this. Robert, you’re never going to believe this.” These kinds of finds helped them restore the Ennis bathrooms to their original colors. “Now the biggest example of this energy or luck is ‘Female’ (the movie) with the garage door and the French windows.”
Leary believes that the chauffeur’s quarters are overlooked in their importance. “I try to emphasize that the Ennis House property has two buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright. In actuality the chauffeur’s quarters was built first. It was built before the Ennis House. The geometrics of the chauffeur’s quarters are revelatory of where Wright is going with pre-Usonian ideas, like Residence A at Barnsdall Park. These are two buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright that get very little notice.
Wright completely redesigned the interior of the Ennis House in the 1940s for John Nesbitt, the second owner of the home. Not only did Wright suggest furniture and a fireplace designed in styles seen in his Usonian homes, but he also suggested renaming the house “Sijistan,” the Persian name of the Safavid Caliph’s palace, according to Prof. Neil Levine.1 “He completely reworks the scale and the proportions and the living spaces and dining. None of that came to be through Nesbitt’s tenure. They did add a billiard room downstairs in what had been storage space. In the upper part, in what had once been a garden, they added a lap pool and a few other minor alterations. Those were the only ones carried out in the 1940s. Plans for furniture, light fixtures, dimensions are in the Taliesin archives. Most of it was never carried out.”
The house has many leaded glass windows. Leary thinks only five were designed by Wright. They are not the most prominent windows in the house (one opaque one is between Mrs. Ennis’ bathroom and the signature hallway of the house). The more prominent windows, including those in the dining room and living room, may be the work of Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright, who supervised construction of the house. The extant dining room table dates to the 1930s. Wright designed one for the house in the 1940s, but it was never built.
Leary is asked about whether Wright might have had “a fit” about the furniture and light fixtures which he did not design. “I would imagine. They are Mediterranean, neo-Spanish of that period, which does work with the California southwest houses of that period, just not with the Ennis House.”
He has advice for people who want to experience Wright’s work. “Let the house speak to you. In my experience in visiting homes and buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the experience of other people I’ve talked to, it’s one thing to go into a Frank Lloyd Wright space on a tour or experience it for an hour or so. It’s completely different to spend large amounts of time in these spaces, quietly and let the house or building speak to you.
“There is nothing like the extraordinarily unique opportunity to spend time in one of the spaces with friends, good food, a good bottle of wine; a fireplace is working, the light changes. See how the character of these spaces are completely different from the day time into the evening. Encourage people to go to these buildings where you could spend time. Spend as much time as you can in these places. That’s when the real genius of Wright surfaces, 50 years or so after he died.”
Leary is an unshakable optimist. “As many stumbles, and as many heartbreaks, and God-awful stuff that you just want to tear your hair out, then there’s just been something that’s been incredible. It’s just going to go on. What could be more exciting? The house will be better studied, better researched, better catalogued than ever.”
The Ennis House restoration won a 2007 Preservation Award from the Los Angeles Conservancy. Leary was moved by the award, but knows the work is far from over. “I look at the work that has to be done. I think it’s a little early, but it’s nice, it gets out the perception that the Ennis House is not dead.” Leary is Roman Catholic, but turns to a Yiddish expression, when he talks about the effort to save the house, “It’s a mitzvah” (good deed). Indeed!
Movies and television shows that have been filmed on location at the Ennis House include:
Female (1933)
The House on Haunted Hill (1959) *
The Terminal Man (1974)
Day of the Locust (1975)
Blade Runner (1982) *
Black Rain (1989)
The Karate Kid, Part III (1989) *
Moon 44 (1990)
Predator 2 (1990)
Twin Peaks (1990)
Blood Ties (1991)
Grand Canyon (1991)
The Rocketeer (1991)
Fallen Angels (1993)
The Glimmer Man (1996)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997)
The Replacement Killers (1998)
Rush Hour (1998)
The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
* Indicates the three most famous uses of the house as a movie location
(Source: The Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/
which lists the house as the Ennis-Brown House. It is now known only by its original name, the Ennis House).
Wright tourism: Students from New Mexico stopped to see the house.
Many thanks to my colleague Scott Anderson, for his technical help producing the slide shows of my photos.
Posted by: mhertzberg at 3:30PM EST on July 16, 2008
Text and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg
Ann MacGregor and Bob McCoy hold a model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Park Inn Hotel and City National Bank building in Mason City, Iowa, in the lobby of the hotel building. The model was made by a local student.
MacGregor is executive director of Wright on the Park. The organization is negotiating to secure a $9 million Vision Iowa grant to help restore the building, in time for the 2010 centennial of Wright's last surviving hotel building. The group also proposes to build a vistor's center next to Wright's Stockman House, adjacent to Mason City's Rock Glen neighborhood. Rock Glen has a
wide variety of homes designed by architects including Walter Burley
Griffin and Barry Byrne.
$4.3 million in private funds would have to be raised, as a condition of the Vision Iowa grant. $7,500,000 of the grant would be for the hotel/bank building, $1 million for the Mason City Public Library, $250,000 for a performing arts pavilion in East Park, and $250,000 for the architectural interpretive center. This visitor's center would be near Wright's Stockman House, adjacent to the Rock Glen neighborhood.
I had the opportunity to speak in Mason City again, in May. The Mason City Globe-Gazette has supported the quest to secure the Vision Iowa grant, and quoted my remarks supporting the project, in advance of my talk. I had the pleasure of staying with Bob and Bonnie McCoy again, -in their Walter Burley Griffin-designed home. Dr. McCoy gave me an extensive tour of the hotel and bank buildings. A variety of slide shows of the buildings, as well as of the Stockman House, follow.
The hotel lobby:
The hotel was doomed when the Hotel Hanford, with 250 rooms, all with private bathrooms, opened in 1922. That building is now a residential apartment building. Dr. McCoy notes "In one fell blow it made the Park Inn with its 100 square foot rooms and shared baths belong to a bygone generation."
There is much work to be done upstairs in the next two years, but project organizers are not daunted. After all, they have made great progress in recent years. The basement will also be redone.
The law offices of James Blythe, who commissioned the building, were above the bank.
Wright on the Park acquired the City National Bank building when the clothing store occupying the ground floor moved across the street. The second floor will be removed during renovation, and the lobby will be open again.
Bob McCoy is keen to photograph the hotel and bank building at any opportunity. Here, he takes advantage of early morning light.
The Vision Iowa grant would also fund a visitors center next to Wright's Stockman House (1908). Photos of the Stockman House follow:
Posted by: mhertzberg at 8:14PM EST on July 13, 2008
Story and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg
George Mann Niedecken’s work is featured in an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, through July 20. The museum is home to the George Mann Niedecken Archive, formerly known as the Prairie Archive.
The exhibition includes furniture, windows, and exquisite presentation drawings for commissions in the Milwaukee area.
An article about the archives, which ran on this web site a year ago, is linked to, below.
Links:
(If the links do not work, please cut and paste the URL into your browser window)
Posted by: mhertzberg at 4:27PM EST on July 7, 2008
(c) Mark Hertzberg
There is a buzz about William Allin Storrer’s declaration that he, Richard Johnson, and Daniel Dominique Watts have identified 29 previously undocumented Frank Lloyd Wright-designed homes, with the promise of more on the way.
Wright scholars would welcome news of more Wright commissions, if they could be documented.
Storrer’s announcement about these homes was first detailed in a column by Blair Kamin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune.
Kamin’s piece, published on-line Thursday and in print Sunday, also quotes Dr. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, respected director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives at Taliesin West. Those archives are the widely accepted authority in determing which projects were actually done by Wright. Pfeiffer emphasized to Kamin the need for proof of the speculation that any house is or is not by Wright, “But unless we have a drawing to authenticate it, we can’t confirm it. The same goes for houses. The rest of it is all speculation.”
These newly declared commissions have not been documented as Wright’s work. Previous research and documentation pointing to Harry Robinson as the architect, which has been accepted for 35 years, cannot simply be dismissed without new documentation. In academics, the burden is on the new person to disprove the standing research and theory.
There is an irony in Storrer’s piece published on his website on Monday. On one hand, he criticizes Pfeiffer, “There was a fire at Taliesin around the time Wright might have been doing his first drawings for the William Street project. There were later disasters. Drawings have been lost, so lack of a drawing proves nothing.” He offers several other reasons why the lack of documentation may not mean anything in this case.
Then, at the end of his article, he insists on documentation from critics, when he invites feedback, “We expect there will be those who disagree with us. We welcome ideas that will help us refine our approach to identifying architectural works and their rightful creators. Please, if you do, make sure you quote chapter and verse exact details of design throughout the project of each and every collaborator you see in the project, and why that makes our decision faulty. ”Feels like” and “didn’t x do it this way?” don’t count with us, only specific identifiable characteristics of architects will carry much weight with us, unless you can produce a document with irrefutable proof of your assertions.”
So, Pfeiffer, the authority who says documentation is key to solving the mystery, is discredited by Storrer, the person who insists on documentation from anyone who disagrees with him.
Storrer’s website boldly asserts that “This is the ONLY independent, unbiased source of information on the world's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and his work.” This leaves no room for any of the many Wright organizations, scholars, researchers, or aficionados who have any of a number of fine websites of their own.
Do conjecture and similarities make a home a Wright house, or is documentation the absolute key to solving the puzzle?
Posted by: mhertzberg at 3:26PM EST on June 2, 2008
Text (c) Mark Hertzberg
The latest DVD about Frank Lloyd Wright is an oral history by his grandson, Brandoch Peters. Peters’ parents were architect William Wesley (Wes) Peters and Svetlana Hinzenburg, Wright’s adopted daughter from Olgivanna Lazovich Wright’s previous marriage. The Wrights helped raise Brandoch after Svetlana and his brother, Daniel, were killed in an automobile accident at Taliesin in 1946, when Brandoch was four.
Brandoch’s recollections are on the 90 minute presentation “Frank Lloyd Wright and his Inner Circle - A Grandson’s View,” produced by Bob Leff of Video Art Productions. Brandoch likens the countless books and films about Wright to “Rashomon,” the Japanese film in which four people give different interpretations of a terrible crime they witnessed. “I was there, and I know what happened. Others write about things they didn’t see happen.”
The film is filled with a wonderful variety of still photos and movies of the family and of Wright. Brandoch, who is now 67, talks about John Hill, Jack Howe, and Gene Masselink - all key people at Taliesin - as well as about his own family. “The multifarious talents available to my grandfather enabled him to go on, enabled him to make these designs...they came as very young men, and they never left.” He says that Howe, the best known draftsman at Taliesin, “could do what would take a person three days to do, in about three hours.”
He tells how his father, a gifted mathematician, who was enrolled at MIT, came to Madison with his family when his sister enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1932. Wes took a train to Spring Green, hoping to meet Wright. He walked three miles to Taliesin, and then walked the hills around the house, after being told Wright would see him in three hours. Wes was smitten, and never returned to MIT. He is considered the first apprentice in the Taliesin Fellowship.
His engineering skills were key to much of Wright’s success. Wes, whose father was a newspaper editor in Evansville, Indiana, wrote the check that saved Taliesin when Wright was about to lose his home to creditors. He headed Taliesin Associated Architects after Wright’s death in April, 1959.
Brandoch speaks with admiration and love for the Wrights. He infers that common criticisms of his grandparents, including Mr. Wright’s reported propensity to ignore his debts, are urban legends, “He is described as a non-paying man, but those stories are generally not true. If he had done such a stupid thing in Spring Green, they would have come after him with pitchforks.” Alas, this grandson’s loving memory does not square with the facts that, among countless other debts, Wright never paid back the thousands of dollars he borrowed over many years from Darwin D. Martin, his patron in Buffalo, New York, much less any of the money his own father put up to save Taliesin.
Brandoch also has loving memories of Olgivanna, his often-maligned grandmother. People noticed quickly that “she had two very intense eyes.” She was intelligent, “bright enough to challenge him (Wright) at any level.” She was, in short, “a most amazing person.” He strongly disputes the assertions that Olgivanna undermined Wright with her devotion to the mystic Gurdjieff, as some former apprentices insist. “She is painted as a Byzantine person. She was sometimes that way, but she did not just sit back and plot to take over from my grandfather. I don't think she did that. She was very human, she was so charming, and very sincere in that charm.”
She was influential, not divisive, he asserts. She was “so responsible for the entire running of the Foundation. She developed the running of the kitchen. She developed the system of work at Taliesin.” It was “not a commune, but a sense of doing the work to help the whole place along. People were pulled from the drafting room and put to washing pots and pans. The whole system worked like a well oiled machine” run by a lot of very combustible people.”
Some former apprentices, including Curtis Besinger and John Geiger would disagree. Both became disillusioned and disappointed as they watched Taliesin split into two camps in the 1950s, one more devoted to Mr. Wright and the study of architecture, and the other, arguably, more devoted to Mrs. Wright and the study of Gurdjieff.
Wright’s contempt for ideas that were not in accord with his own is legendary. So are stories about the couple’s anger. Still, Brandoch says that both taught him not to hate. “One of the greatest things she told me was never to hate anybody...it takes too much energy.” Wright, says Brandoch, “never lost his cool in tense situations.” He continues, “He never really hated anybody, got angry, got upset, but never really hated anybody.” He admittedly did not take criticism well. “It was hard to tell Wright, you're wrong.”
Brandoch credits the Nash automobile company for Wright’s iconic color, Cherokee red. Wright had been looking for a certain shade of red that he could imagine, but had never seen. Brandoch says that Wright was walking on Central Avenue in Phoenix with Gene Masselink, an apprentice and his secretary, when he spotted a car that was painted that very shade of red. “There it is! There it is!” Wright exclaimed. He told Masselink to chase the car, to find out the particulars about the color. The car turned into a Nash dealership, where Masselink learned that it was painted a factory color, “Cherokee red.”
Brandoch refers to the Nash “Rambler” car. This has become a familiar frame of reference for Nash cars, but for the sake of accuracy, it must be noted that the “Rambler” line of cars did not become part of the Nash brand until 1950, years after Wright starting using Cherokee red. Likewise, the color Nash publicity photo used in this segment is from the 1950s. Members of the Nash Car Club of America say that the color may have been a spin-off of Nash’s Cornelian Maroon, which dates to at least 1932.
Paul Ringstrom has written me about two additional errors which he noticed. "When talking about Jack Howe's drawings they showed Wasmuth drawings and when talking about Wes Peter's plans for the Princess of Iran they showed the living room of the Marilyn Monroe House."
Brandoch was interviewed over several days, at different locations. He clearly relishes the opportunity to tell his stories about life at Taliesin. The content of the film is interesting, but technically it is not as polished as many other Wright documentaries. The bright background in the first chapters is distracting, as are some of the zooms, and the off-center framing of Brandoch when he is interviewed at the Unitarian Meeting House in Shorewood.
Brandoch admires Wright’s tenacity. “People, I think, don't give him enough credit for plowing ahead [after the tragedies in his life, including the accident which killed Svetlana and Daniel].
“To understand him, don't read biographies. Read his books and see his buildings... An Autobiography is what I always tell people to read. Go and look at his buildings. Taliesin, and to a lesser extent, Hillside, are really Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, that's where he lived. The living room at Taliesin, if you can't appreciate Frank Lloyd Wright there, you won't appreciate him anywhere.”
Leff says he became interested in Brandoch’s story after reading Susan Lampert Smith’s profile of Brandoch Peters in the Wisconsin State Journal. “I saw it there on the front page, and wondered if it can be my next film. I’ve always loved Frank Lloyd Wright’s work. This is way I saw about making a movie about him.’
Leff said he had to “audition” for Brandoch, who still lives at Taliesin. “He invited me to lunch with him and his buddies in Spring Green.” He passed his test, and filmed the interviews in June, 2006. This is his fifth commercial film. All have Wisconsin themes: two are about the history of muskie fishing in northern Wisconsin; one is about Al Capone’s and John Dillinger’s “gangster holidays” in northern Wisconsin; and one is about the Evermor Sculpture Park near Baraboo.
Frank Lloyd Wight and his Inner Circle - A Grandson’s View
91 minutes. $25 + shipping
Video Art Productions, P.O. Box 44, McFarland, WI 53558
vapbob@juno.com
Posted by: mhertzberg at 6:28PM EST on May 23, 2008
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.
Dale Smirl and Nancy Horan
Myles Glasgow, left, joins the conversation. He is a friend of the Smirls.
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.
The garage is behind the house
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.
The billiard table has Cherokee red billiard balls.
“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.”
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.
