Frank Lloyd Wright- The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns about the Architecture of Relationships

My mother, in her eighties, is more productive than I am in late mid-life.  I am reminded of a friend of mine’s comment on meeting my grandmother, my mother's mother, who was in her eighties at the time – he said that he hoped that he could be that clear minded when he was her age.  Then he corrected himself.  He said that he wished he were that clear minded now! 

In the last three years my mother has co-written, produced and directed four plays, each of which has been presented in a one night stand at her local theater.  The previous three were offered late on weeknights and travelling to her city two hours away and then back after a performance during the school year was daunting and we never managed it.  This year, however, the production was a Sunday matinee, so the reluctant wife and I were gladly able to make the trip.

Mom has been working with a theater group – they have sort of become an informal company – during this time.  They have worked on themes of plays that have struck their fancy.  This time, the local arts center that houses their productions was going to be hosting a display about a housing development that a Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiast built in the town in the 1960s.  This is an architecturally distinct neighborhood in a community that is, as a whole, divided between Olde New England style – with early 1800s buildings and buildings built to look them (including gas stations with cupolas required by the town zoning) and modern suburban split levels.  So the Frank Lloyd Wright inspired subdivision is a group of 20 or so homes that form a visually and even spiritually unique sub-community.  The houses don’t have clear boundaries between the plots, one is circular and one is a tower and each of the rest are in their own way unique yet vaguely reminiscent of the others because they have casement windows, parts that are underground, no gutters and downspouts, and that Frank Lloyd Wright look.  The theater group decided to celebrate this community by creating a work that described who it was that Frank Lloyd Wright was.  As they pulled together material to create the play, they read biographical material about Wright, but much of it was focused on the women in his life, and the play emerged as a description of the home makers who made the houses that Frank Lloyd Wright lived within.

The play, then, included six characters – the four central women in Wright’s adult life – his first wife, Catherine “Kitty”( Tobin) Wright, second, Maude “Mimi” (Noel) Wright and third wife,  Olga Ivanovna “Olgivanna” (Lazovich Milanoff) Lloyd Wright and also the woman he lived with, Mamah Bothwick Cheney, who was killed by their live-in cook, along with her children, while he was separated from wife #1 – a newspaper reporter, and the voice of Wright himself, which came from backstage.  It was staged as a series of monologues – each of the four women spoke twice – they went through in order – and the newspaper man interacted with them while Wright offered editorial comments – or pontificated.  The style at first felt like it might be stilted or preachy or too didactic, but as the play settled in, it clearly became a play and the sense of anticipation – of wondering what happened, what would happen, and why it all happened, emerged, but more importantly, the sense of a dramatic unfolding took place.  We were in the presence of people whose lives mattered - people about whose lives we cared.

It is interesting to note that Wright was born about 13 years after Freud and lived 20 years or so longer than Freud.  While he lived in the US, they were born into similar worlds, and worlds where the roles of women were quite similar.  Wright’s first wife was every bit the traditional wife, and played the traditional role that Freud’s wife did.  Though she was educated – she was a social worker as well as a socialite – she came across as terribly traditional in her gender identification.  She was portrayed in the play as saying something like “Frank built the house that I lived in, he made the furniture, and I found it no surprise that he designed the clothing that I wore.”  There was a sense that Wright, who was frequently absent, treated his first wife as an object to be housed, furnished and clothed.

Of course Freud’s interests and Wright’s could not have been more different.  Freud was interested in people – in their minds, in their products – their works of art and where they came from, and in their psychological health.  Frank was interested in buildings – in architecture, which he took to be the highest form of art.  And he was not particularly interested in the creature comforts of the people who lived in his works of art – his homes are notoriously cold and drafty – those single pane casement windows conduct the heat and the cold directly into the house – and Taliesin, the home where his second lover died and his third and fourth wife lived, was primitive, with only fireplaces to keep out the cold of the Wisconsin winters. 

Wright connected with the second, doomed woman, when she and her husband were clients of his.  She and Wright, who had been having numerous brief affairs, became proponents of free love, and she relied on the writings of a woman who was a spokesperson for the free love movement to support her decision to leave her husband and Wright's to leave his wife and children so that they could live together – they could not marry as neither spouse would grant them a divorce.  At least as portrayed in the play, this woman was a more suitable match for Wright, but was still quite traditional, while he was breaking architectural boundaries and creating a novel visual style.  She felt, at least on stage, as a slight move forward from wife #1, though Wright viewed her as more of an intellectual equal.  And Wright seemed less than invested in her (and her children) as individual people with particular minds than he might have been – even more than he was interpersonally somewhat distant from his own children.

This was an interesting period in which to have come of age.  In an earlier time, or at the same time in Europe perhaps, he and woman #2 might have simply had an affair.  But they made a bold and public break at a time when divorce was still relatively novel and had a morally repugnant tone, and they began to build lives together quite publicly – talking with the media about the decisions that they made – publicizing their otherwise “private” lives.  This took a macabre turn when the cook – who was I think from the Caribbean – set the house on fire and took an axe to the family members as they fled, killing Mamah and two of her children (Wright was away at the time).  What the cook’s motives were have never been clarified, though some have wondered whether he was driven by moral qualms over the living arrangements – whether true or not there was certainly plenty of room for a late Victorian public to feel that some justice had been served by the deaths, justifying their own sense of satisfaction at an event that otherwise would have appalled them.

Frank then got caught in a snare.  Wife #2 sought him out by writing long, long letters to him in the wake of the deaths at Taliesin, and he became enamored of her – or perhaps more accurately, he became enamored of how enamored she appeared to be of him.  He was dazed by her enough that he overlooked such things as her dependence on morphine – at least long enough to marry her.  Once married, he reasonably quickly became aware of what a burden she was.  The character, by the way, was one that was clearly quite fun for the actress portraying her to play.  She enjoyed that this histrionic woman turned every little interaction into drama, and it was an actress’s dream to have a part in which nothing could be too over the top – what a chance to act without abandon! 

The intriguing thing about the arc of this trio of women, though, is that it seemed to prepare Frank for the final relationship of his life.  The final woman to waltz into his life, wife #4, Olgivanna, was a dancer from Montenegro who had the mettle to match the distant and brilliant Wright.  I am not certain of this, but the plot of the play, which borrows heavily from novels tracing Wright’s wives, including one titled “The Women”, suggest that Wright needed to learn that a woman could be a match – that love could occur between two people with similar passions and with similar strengths.

Again, like Freud, Wright was the leader of a group of people who learned their craft at his feet.  He was an acknowledged genius within his lifetime and exercised his genius with impunity, treating lesser mortals with a certain amount of disdain.  Freud was able to stick with his wife – apparently quite faithfully (though he had a very close relationship with her sister who seemed more his intellectual equal and some have wondered whether they may have had an affair).  Freud was deeply invested in his children (maybe too deeply – analyzing his daughter Anna and helping her become the heir apparent in the family business).  He was deeply invested in his work with women patients and became a clueless and sometimes problematic icon in the development of a women’s movement toward equal footing with men.

At a time when, even in the privileged classes, women did not have anywhere near the same opportunities as men for such things as getting a good education, to expect equal relations between individuals so differently prepared to become adults required a tremendous amount of romantic (meaning fictional) support to work. Olgivanna was an accomplished artist in her own right and she was able to manage the farm that was their home, to keep Frank’s students in line, and to command the respect of those around her, including, I believe, Frank himself.

 My grandmother, the one whom my friend noted was such a powerhouse, was raised by her father, who trundled her across lumber towns in the Pacific northwest and she watched as her father engineered and built one lumbermill after another.  As an adult, engineer friends marveled at her ability to understand mechanical principles, yet she claimed never to have been taught about fractions and decimals and therefore claimed to be mystified by them.  She ended up being a college graduate, but she was an art history major – something for which she had great passion – but her apparent native mathematical and engineering talents could never have been tapped in the educational system available to her.

She, in turn, became the mother to my mother, whose training was pushed towards the humanities in part because of prejudice and what kinds of opportunities existed for women, though largely out of interest and aptitude.  She became a theater director, which meant someone who taught theater, and then her career was secondary to that of my father, who was seen as the de facto bread winner.  Perhaps because of that, her current productivity is particularly impressive.  Perhaps the arc of her life has mirrored in some ways the arc of the lives of the privileged through the first half of the last century and has led to a certain ownership of her gifts and talents that is continuing to reap rewards later in her life.

What would Freud – or Wright – have made of this?  I think that Wright came up against women of greater and greater strength as his life developed – OK the strength of wife number two was largely in her ability to be wacky, but that is a certain kind of strength, one that women have relied on when all else has been denied them for a very long time, and it may have taught Wright that you really want to have the strength of women working with you, not against you.  So find someone who can measure up, and he seems to have, at least at the end (Perhaps Mamah did as well – their relationship never had a chance to mature).  Freud, too, befriended and championed powerful women, including his daughter, throughout his life.  But it is also the case that women have taken what Freud had to offer, including his misreadings of women, and made them right – refusing to be cowed by a genius who had his blind spots.

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