University Place Presents  Building Taliesin Ron McCrea  January 10, 2013 UP822   cc >> Welcome to University Place Presents. I'm Norman Gilliland. The most famous architect of the 20th century, one of the most famous architects of all time, is Frank Lloyd Wright, and mostly closely associated with Wright is the home that he built in southwest Wisconsin, Taliesin. But how much do we know about the way Taliesin was built? Until recently, the photographic record of its construction was scattered, but now much of it has been gathered in a book, and it tells the story of a decision made by two people to make a monument to their love. And it also tells a story of how their triumph turned into fire and murder and a resolve to go on. My guest today is Ron McCrea, the author of "Building Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright's Home of Love and Loss," published in 2012 by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Welcome to University Place Presents. >> Thank you very much, Norman. My pleasure. >> Now, was it the sudden, or relatively sudden, discovery of this collection of photographs that inspired you to write this book? >> Well, it was. 

I originally thought this would be a picture book. And the photographs came by accident. I was aware of a collection of photographs for Taliesin that Jack Holzhueter of the State Historical Society had captured on eBay in 2005. It was an album of photographs. But there was no identification of the photographer. He said at the time in the New York Times that it was a Rosetta Stone for the original building. There were about 35 images in that, and a lot of them were landscapes as well. And then, some years later, in fact in 2010, I was looking for a collection of photographs by a young man who had accompanied Wright to Italy to work with him there named Taylor Wooley. He'd been a draftsman at Oak Park, and he'd taken some photographs in Italy, and I wanted to look at them online at the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. I found another collection when I dialed this up, and it was a collection of Wooley photographs at the Utah State Historical Society. 

And they said student of Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin I, and images include photographs of Taliesin I under construction. And I had worked with this material long enough to know that there were no photographs of Taliesin I under construction. And this is where being a journalist matters because what I did next was to check it out. I called a friend in Salt Lake City and asked him to go to the historical society and look at these photographs and see what they had. And he called back and he said yes, these are construction photos and there are people in them and they're very colorful. And so I quietly sent for the entire collection, and what I saw just blew my mind because these were, in fact, Taliesin under construction. Most of them were described in the collection as being unidentified building. They did not know what they had out there, and somehow someone knew enough, maybe it was scribbled on the envelope with the negatives, because these had been negatives, that it was Taliesin I under construction But none of the photographs had any information. But, because I had seen Jack Holzhueter's album, I was able to see that 25 or 22 of the photos in this collection were the same pictures as the ones in the album. So, all kinds of connections started to be made, and that's when I thought it's time to write about this. 

>> Do we have pictures of other Frank Lloyd Wright structures being built? >> I think yes. Well, he did document a lot and he documented them with photographers like Clarence Fuermann of Chicago. In fact, this Fuermann, the Fuermann Company, came in in August of 1912, a year after these photos were taken, and took a very polished set of pictures of Taliesin, much different looking, very much ready for its screen test. The photographs that I found I like to call "sweating brow," on its way to becoming a "shining brow," which is what Taliesin means in Welsh. >> And what was the purpose of Taliesin? Obviously more than just a home for Frank Lloyd Wright and family. >> Well, historians of Wright often will say it was just this crazy decision he made when he was doing well in Chicago to put himself out into the wilderness, but in fact, I was able to determine that Taliesin was an architectural solution to a personal problem. And the personal problem was that he had started this love affair with Mamah Bouton Borthwick, and she had gone to Europe with him in 1909, and in the spring and summer of 1910 they were having to look about at how they would continue their lives together and, more specifically, how they could continue the beautiful life they had found together on a hillside overlooking Florence, Italy, in a little town called Fiesole. And the solution to both was to build a refuge on a hillside in Wisconsin overlooking another river valley. In Italy it was the Arno River, in Wisconsin it was the Wisconsin River. But he had, actually, the valley in mind in Italy, and this was the solution to their problem until he could get his affairs changed and get a divorce from his wife. 

She was able to get a divorce from her husband, but he was never able to get a divorce from Catherine Wright. And so this was to be their refuge. And I think they actually planned to build a townhouse in Chicago once they were married, but that never came about. >> Will get into that story a little bit later as we go along. >> Yes. >> But first let's get an overview of Taliesin in its valley that it overlooks here in southwest Wisconsin. >> The first photograph that I put up is one of Taliesin as it is now, and the one that we're going to talk about is about half the size of this complex and much more subtle. But Taliesin is in Iowa County, and it's overlooking the historic valley of the Wright family, actually of the Lloyd Jones family. And the interesting thing about looking at this photograph, which was taken from a kite by Craig Wilson of Madison who does this wonderful kite photography at an interesting intermediate altitude, is to see how important the countryside is in the whole composition of Taliesin. Taliesin would be really nothing without the landscape around it, and that was very intentional for Wright. 

He actually tended the landscape as much as he tended Taliesin. And one of the wonderful things about visiting Taliesin here in Wisconsin today is that sense of time travel you get, because there are still no wires, there's no development, there are no mansions or McMansions in the area. If you can imagine this with development around it, it would really lose a lot of its power. But right now it still looks much like it did when Wright built it 101 years ago. >> And here's another look at that complex. >> This is looking toward the Wisconsin River from the other side of the hill. This just shows you how Taliesin is wrapped around the crown of the hill. And, unfortunately, there used to be some very lovely tall oak trees sheltering it all at the very top, but they were all blown down or destroyed. But Wright always preached that you should never build anything on top of a hill, that you should build it on the side of a hill, and it should be of the hill rather than on the hill. But I think that there's also an interesting thing about this architecturally that he thought it was worth a little work to get the best view. 

And that if you'd always had the best view, you would start to take it for granted. So he'd say let people work to go to the top of the hill and see the rest of it. >> That's an interesting point. >> Yes, yes. If you always had the best view, you'll just take it for granted. It becomes borrowed scenery. This next photograph that I have offered you is my baby picture at the beginning of my Taliesin studies in 1987. And I'm standing on what is called the bird walk, which was built for the last Mrs. Wright so she could go out and stand and listen to the birds. It is built off the living room in roughly the same place where there was a porch in Taliesin I where Mamah Borthwick and her children were murdered. He re-engineered the building so that nothing was ever in the exact place of those crimes, but it's still a lovely place to visit. 

>> And we'll get a look here, I think, of more of what we say classic photographic look at Taliesin. >> Well, this was taken, this picture is taken outside Taliesin. It's outside the entrance. To the right is the driveway going up into Taliesin. And these farmers, these gardeners are working on a garden plot that you would see when you approach the building. And you can see that it's smaller than the other one was. And this would have been taken in about the summer of 1913. And I was very lucky to find this in a farm family album of someone who had a photograph for a dinner party. It was for some kind of fund-raiser for gardening, and I said that looks like a very old picture of Taliesin, and so I was able to dig that out. >> The year is so interesting It's the year of such transition in American lifestyles, 1912-1913. 

I have to ask what, at Taliesin what provision did Wright make for a garage? Because we're just into the era of the automobile but just coming out of the era of the horse and buggy. >> Well, this really was a horse and buggy place almost exclusively, I think. And he, and you can see in this very rough, early picture, this is a picture of the same entrance of Taliesin that you just saw before the flowers and everything were added. It's a muddy rut. There's a log lying on the ground. There were horse stables at Taliesin. And I suppose that if a car ever got up the hill, that was a garage. But I think it was really, even when he, and Wright was a great equestrian. He loved to ride. Liked to go horseback riding. 

And he writes about taking Mamah by horse and buggy around Spring Green. >> Even in the burgeoning era of the automobile? >> Well, it wasn't that burgeoning in Wisconsin. In fact, one of the interesting things you see in some of these pictures, teams of horses and long carts, and Taliesin was built by a large labor force using horses, horsepower and wagons and hand labor. And it was built in a really short amount of time. It was prepared in the spring of 1911. The deed was signed in April of 1911, and Mamah arrived in late August. And so it was habitable just a short time after that. And then it took a year to do all the rest of it and close it up on the following August. But they had a long building time for this. >> Is there something different about Taliesin in terms of design or material that Wright had not done before? >> Oh, yes. 

This was his first real natural house. It's not symmetrical. It is more a part of its lot than the prairie houses would, which would sit like monuments in the middle of the ground. >> Right. >> As someone said, I think it was Neil Levine, it's hard to take a picture of Taliesin. It's really a place to be photographed from, to look from rather than look at. >> Because it blends in so much? >> Beg your pardon? >> Because it blends in so much? >> It blends in so much and there's so many different angles. But he also used local stone. He used this pop-out masonry for the first time in Taliesin where you see the patterns of stone coming in and out and providing shadow and texture. And it was, so you see that and then also he used sand from the Wisconsin River in the mortar to give it that natural look as well. 

He tried to make it a piece of the hill. >> Well, let's get a little bit into the love story then. >> All right. >> Here's the young Frank Lloyd Wright. >> This is young Frank Lloyd Wright about 1906. This was a picture that actually was just recently sent to me from Sweden where he sent it to a woman whose works, Mamah Borthwick did a lot of translation for. And so he was about 39 in this picture. He and Mamah got together in Oak Park, and they had both asked their, they both had kind of hit a wall in their marriages, and they both wanted something creative and they saw a creative opportunity in each other. And so they asked for divorces in 1908. His wife said wait a year. 

So they did wait a year, and the answer was still no. This is Mamah Borthwick, and she's 45 in this photograph which was taken, and this is kind of exclusive because this has not been published. This is not in the book. We found this in Sweden just within the last few months, and it will be in the next printing which will be out in March of 2013. >> So she was actually then a couple of years younger, right? >> She was a couple of years younger. Of course, he actually, and I don't know when he started doing this, but he took two years off of his life. In his biographies he always said he was born in 1869, and it was not until after his death that it was determined that he had been born in 1867. So he may have wanted them to be age mates as well.  But in any event, they both saw in each other their kind of liberation, and they were both in their 40s. They arranged to go to Europe together for a year. 

I don't know how secret this was but it became well-known once they got there. >> He was already a celebrity then at this point. >> He was a celebrity, and he had built a lot of houses in Oak Park in Chicago and was quite well-known. But when they left New York, they stayed at the, in the fall of 1909, they stayed at the Plaza Hotel which had only been built two years earlier. They went to Germany and stayed at the new Adlon Hotel, which was a celebrity hotel which was just opened that year near the Brandenburg Gate. And some celebrity reporter for the Chicago Tribune found them listed as Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright, and a huge scandal erupted back home. So they split up and went apart for the better part of the winter, and he brought his son, Lloyd, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr, and a young draftsman named Taylor Wooley, who was 25, to Florence to work on the pre-press work for big deluxe two-volume edition of his works that he was going to have published in Berlin by Ernst Wasmuth, and it was called the Wasmuth portfolio. And he had them working on this until the spring of 1910, and then Mamah joined them in Florence, except that he bought, at that point moved up the hill to this wonderful picturesque little villino it was called. The Villino Belvedere. >> Is this the view that inspired him to build Taliesin? >> And this is, he took this picture actually directly in front of the Villino Belvedere. 

So this was Frank Lloyd Wright's view. And let me read to you what he wrote to a friend in England about this. "I have been very busy here in this little eyrie on the brow of the mountain above Fiesole, overlooking the pink and white Florence, spreading in the valley of the Arno below. The whole fertile bosom of the Earth seemingly lying in the drifting mists, or shining clear and marvelous in this Italian sunshine. Opalescent. Iridescent." And it still looks that way. >> Yes, I would say so. And some other aspects of Italy that might have inspired him and Mamah? >> Well, many, many things. In his autobiography, actually he writes very lyrically about their time in Italy, and he writes about how wonderfully natural the houses are. He said they just seem to sing themselves into creation. 

They're like a handful of moist soil. And they don't carry, they only carry the decoration that's natural to them. So he really got an idea of houses that communicated with nature. And, of course, in this next photo here, you can see the walled garden. The idea of a house on a hill communicating with a garden appealed to him a great deal, and he saw some very nice villas, one in particular that was terraced into a hillside that may have been the model for Taliesin. This is a photograph I've seen, I'm adding another photograph of the kind of wedge-shaped building that the villino was a part of. You go up the hillside, and the garden is on one level. The building goes down two levels, both looking forward into the Arno River Valley. It's not very far from an archeological park which would have been a wonderful, cool place for the Romans and Etruscans to go. It has an amphitheater and baths and Roman roads and a lot of interesting architecture that Wright could have seen and appreciated there. 

>> And so... >> He wrote about, in his autobiography, about having lunch under a little rose bower, the table set for two in the garden, and Taylor Wooley took a picture of just that table under those roses. >> And we also have a look at Taylor Wooley here too. >> Yes, this is Taylor. He's not in drag. [LAUGHTER] He's wearing a smock or a gown to protect his clothes from the India ink he was using to copy Wright's floor plans and drawings from pictures on a wall onto a regular standard format sheet that would be published in Germany. So this is a picture of him taking a break outside of the steps that go down into the garden. >> And where does Clifford Evans fit into the picture? >> Well, Clifford Evans, this is the first picture, Clifford Evans was a boyhood friend of Taylor Wooley. They both worked at the same architectural firm as apprentices in Salt Lake City. They were both non-observant Mormons. 

And Taylor got Evans to come to Oak Park with him. This is a picture that I've given you, Evans was not in Italy, but he was at Taliesin in September of 1911. Wright sent Taylor a telegram in California in 1911, asking him to come to Taliesin. And so he did and he brought his friend Clifford with him, and the picture here that I have that is in the collection, shows them both pitching in with buckets and probably stain for the studio wing of the building And the slab that Clifford has his foot on is still sitting there in the garden of Taliesin. You can walk on it tomorrow. And they became life long architectural partners in Salt Lake City, Evans and Wooley. Clifford is also in the next picture with a lineup of workmen in the courtyard with a big pile of trash and dirt and rubble. Clifford is the person who looks kind of preppy toward the right of the photograph. >> So, we have a sense that these photographs aren't particularly staged, it's just that they wanted to preserve that moment in the construction of Taliesin? >> That's right. Although I appreciate Taylor as a photojournalist, he does at least group these people, line them up and pose them. 

>> Right. >> Here and in other photographs. And he gets, even thought Taylor had a limp from either a horse accident or a childhood illness, he is able to do this and get up at a high perspective. I think this is from the top of the haymow, actually, looking down into the courtyard, and there's a huge mound of dirt and construction material that's been trenched out, probably to make way for heating pipes that are going into Taliesin. And what will be, from people who have visited Taliesin, the tea circle is what you see above it, and in this next photograph, you can see it completely strewn with trash. This will eventually become an upper garden looking down on the lower courtyard. >> So what's this body of water? Is that the river? >> Where's the body of water? >> Or is that not water that I'm seeing there? >> No, that's the roof. >> Oh, that is the roof, okay. You had me fooled there. I'm glad you explained that. 

>> That's the shining roof of shining brow. >> The angles are a little too sharp to be quite that natural. But all of this is part of the construction debris. >> These are the very earliest construction photographs of Taliesin coming together. This is a little later. You're looking up toward the tea circle, but even now you can see it's just a dirt path going up. There is no circle of this on the upper left. It is still kind of in mid-construction. If I may, at some point I'd like to read a little from Mamah Borthwick about her first impressions of Taliesin when she got here. It would have been about this same time. 

She's writing to the woman whose works on love and marriage and ethics have inspired her. A woman named Ellen Key, also pronounced "Kay" in Sweden, who was a very popular European philosopher but whose works had not been translated into English or made popular in the United States. And so Mamah wanted to be her American mouthpiece, as she said. So she got a contract with her to be her translator, and this is what she wrote from Taliesin in her first letter in the fall of 1911. "I have, as you hoped, made a choice in harmony with my own soul. The choice as far as my own life was concerned was made long ago, and that is absolute separation from Mr. Cheney." Edwin Cheney, her husband. "A divorce was obtained last summer, and my maiden name is now legally mine." So she is no longer Mamah Borthwick Cheney. She is Mamah Borthwick. And that's her byline. Unfortunately, it's not on her gravestone. 

"Also, I have since made a choice in harmony with my own soul and what I believe to be Frank Wright's happiness and am now keeping his house for him in this very beautiful hillside, and beautiful in its way is the country about Strand," the name of the mansion in Sweden. "He has been building a summer house, Taliesin. The combination of sight and dwelling, quite the most beautiful I've seen any place in the world. We were hoping to have some photographs to send you soon. I believe it is a house founded on Ellen Key's ideal of love. The nearest neighbor, half a mile away is Frank's sister where I visited when I first came here. She has championed our love most loyally, believing in her brother's happiness. I have been, thus far, very busy with the unfinished house, and because of the fact that workmen were boarded here in a nearby farmhouse, sometimes as many as 36 at a time. Mr. Wright's sister looked after this all summer, but when I came, it was turned over to me." So imagine this, a suburban housewife from Oak Park, Illinois, who is thrown over her family and her husband and has gone to live with Frank Lloyd Wright. And she is there really alone because he's still traveling back and forth between Oak Park and this construction site. 

She stays, because the place is not inhabitable, she stays with what would be her sister-in-law, Jane, Frank's sister, at Tenney Dairy which is the shingle style house on the Taliesin property. So she came and she was at first a house guest, and then she had the job of cooking for dozens of construction laborers on the site. This is quite a cinematic scene, I think. >> Yes. >> Of her having to pitch in. So she's becoming a pioneer woman all by herself. And she says, "Mr. Wright has his studio incorporated into the house and we both will be busy with our own work with absolutely no interest on my part. My children I hope to have at times, but that cannot be just yet." >> That reference to photographs, were you aware of that before? You were aware that the photographs actually existed? >> Yes. >> So, this was kind of a tease? >> There are a lot of teases in those letters. The original part that I brought to this was that I was able to  get the set of 10 letters that were discovered in the late '90s in Sweden in the Ellen Key archive. 

And some of them are half written. Half of them are typewritten from Taliesin. And these are the only information we have about Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright and the life they really lived. And so what I did was to go through and look at references and follow up leads that were buried in the letters. And the photographs, the idea that we have centuries of photographs is one of them. There are many others that were very valuable. >> We have a look here at the study, I think, in progress. >> This is his study, and it's being used as a... >> Studio. >> Yes, it's his personal drafting studio. 

And it is being used right now as a carpenter's workshop. >> And we'll go quickly to another one. >> This is for the drafting studio where his draftsman would work, and they also had, off of the studio, a bunk porch and a sitting room. I think he had a stream of professional draftsmen. He was not dealing with students. This was before the Taliesin Fellowship. These were professionals. And they would cycle in and out of Taliesin and do their work and then go back to Chicago. He had some in residence, like Herbert Fritz, Sr. >> This is pretty much the way the studio looks today or has it changed a lot? >> No. 

It has changed a lot. I think his studio looks very much like the previous picture. This is really the next picture of this remarkable object that looks like a Shinto shrine landed from outer space or something. Sitting in the unfinished living room of Taliesin is one of my very favorites because I had read some other articles about an object that Wright designed in 1911, which was a puppet theater for his youngest son. >> Wright designed the puppet theater? >> He designed it, yes. And I have the renderings in the book. He actually designed it, and then he had it built in the living room of Taliesin. I knew the object existed because there was a photograph from the Chicago Art Institute show of 1914 which features it, but no one knew anything else about this object, and now we discovered it was made at Taliesin in the fall of 1911 at the same time Taliesin was coming together, and it's made of the same materials as Taliesin. It's made of tied water red cypress, and if you look closely at the scenery, you'll see a cypress tree on the right and there's a tower on the left and there are hills in the background and it's really the scenery from Italy that he's created. In the drawing, there are stick figures that look very much like Romeo and Juliet. 

So he's created a little play within a play, and I'm sure he and Mamah saw puppet theater in Italy. >> Sure. >> The picture that I have next I got from the daughter of this little boy, who's still alive and living in France, Elizabeth Wright. And this was Llewellyn at age six, and I think he was a redhead. But he certainly is adorable. He was the youngest child, and I think he was about to turn eight in November of 1911. So I'm guessing this was a birthday present. >> So now both Wright's children and Mamah's children were at Taliesin? >> No, neither of them. None of them. >> None of them? >> None of them was at Taliesin. 

Mamah left her two children, Martha and John, in Oak Park with her husband and her sister, Lizzie, who had been their governess anyway. And there were nine people living in that household. And then there were still, Wright had six children. Two of them were out of the house, four were still at home,  and Llewellyn was the youngest. He was under the care of the mother, Catherine, who was several years younger than Wright. And, to some degree, the grandmother, Annie Lloyd Wright, who lived next door. So there was a lot of family looking after these children. He did provide for them. He created, he carved up his home and studio into a home and rental apartment so that she could have the income from that. And the Cheney children would come and visit every summer in August starting in 1912. 

And, unfortunately, they came in the summer of 1914 and were murdered in August of 1914. >> Wright's, I assume that his wife never came to Taliesin, but none of his children did either? To visit? >> His children came in later years. His children were unhappy with their father and I don't think wanted to visit very much. >> And also, of course, we overlook today the extent to which this was still a scandalous situation in southwest Wisconsin. This house apparently attracted, not just the house but the people, unmarried people living in it attracted a lot of negative attention from the neighbors. >> It did. Well, not so much from the neighbors as from the Chicago press. I have to say that small town Wisconsin looks pretty good to me in this history. They basically lived and let live. They didn't approve of Wright, but they basically let him alone, and Mamah, and she writes about how well she has been treated by the people of Spring Green. 

But the Chicago press, when they got wind that they were actually living together, right around Christmas 1911, they all descended on Taliesin and there was this huge spasm of scandalous publicity. And because they couldn't get any news, they started making things up. There would be stories that the sheriff was about to raid the place. There were agitation meetings and people were going to come up and tar and feather this couple and, by cracky, they were going to be thrown in jail, and none of it happened. It all lasted about 10 days. >> Was Wright on guard for that, though? >> He was on guard enough that he had his own laborers there to defend the place. There's one account of a photographer tried sneaking in and tried to get a fix on it, and one of his people wrestles him to the ground. And the interesting thing about that account, which is in the Dodgeville Chronicle, is that the reporter says that this guy was wrestled to the ground to the applause of local onlookers who included some local officials. And they said you can take this to be the measure of this community's attitude toward this eccentric man. So, basically, they were glad to see it against what they called in this story those smart Chicago boys. 

So they were the ones who really made the trouble. >> We have a look here, I think, and it's in three parts of the main living area in Taliesin. >> This is the signature triptych of the album that Jack Holzhueter found. And it is three separate images that have been trimmed to create a panoramic view of the Taliesin living room early in 1911. There's, I think, a light leak on the right one. And what was interesting about this was this is one of the ways in which I confirmed absolutely that Taylor Wooley was the photographer because in the Utah collection I found the negatives for each of these separate images, untrimmed. >> Smoking gun. >> Smoking gun and smoking fireplace. >> We'll get to that a little later too. >> Yes. 

>> Wright spent time in Japan, was fascinated by things Japanese, was a big collector of Japanese art. >> He was and one of the interesting things about the ways in which Wright and Borthwick really kind of blossomed creatively as a partnership was that they did go, she published many things, the published a book called "The Japanese Print" in 1912. And in 1913, they went to Japan together on a collecting trip with him being bankrolled by some brothers in Boston. And he also came back with a contract to build the new Imperial Hotel. >> Right. >> And, by the way, the manager of the Imperial Hotel was a guy who was a graduate at the University of Wisconsin. A man named Hayashi. So there was a Badger State connection that helped him out. But what is really true about the Japan part is that he actually made more money and had more business as a dealer in Japanese art for a period of time here than he did as an architect. And that's because, as a dealer in art, he was in the mainstream, and he had all the right connections. 

Whereas, as an architect, he was a solo architect, solo practitioner who was always against the wind, and, at this point, he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune that being an architect for people's homes, which is mostly what he did, is like being a family doctor, and you have to trust your doctor to be with these intimate matters. And a lot of them did not feel they could trust him. So a lot of the architecture during the five years until the destruction of Taliesin I is commercial architecture, including the Midway Gardens and some schools and other things like that. >> Yes, it's easy to say, well, you should be a free artist and creative and innovative, but you have to make a living by selling the art. >> That's right. And he had some very good clients who bankrolled him on a lot of things. He borrowed $10,000 to build Taliesin from Darwin Martin of Buffalo at the Larkin Soap Company. It's interesting. He's sort of the early version of the Johnsons of Johnson Wax, another soap company who were very good to him. >> Sure. 

>> But $10,000, I looked it up recently, $10,000 would be about $267,000 now, which is not a bad price to build a big country estate. The photograph that we see here shows the side of Taliesin. There's actually a workman down at the corner. You can see the scale, and it has this big cantilevered roof over the porch off the living room. >> Kind of a trademark, isn't it? >> It is. But this showed that there was a certain fortress-like appearance to Taliesin from outside. >> And we come also to another scene here that shows us some workmen, some stone masons at work. >> That's wonderful. This is another favorite photograph from the Utah collection. These stone masons are posing with their trowels, they're posed by Taylor Wooley, at the piers next to, if you go into Taliesin, on the left will be the waterfall, sort of spillway, and then you'll go to these piers. 

And what they have just done is cemented in place a plaque that says Frank Lloyd Wright, architect, that's been brought from his Oak Park studio and cemented here which means Taliesin is open for business. And one of the stories that was typical about my fortunes in writing this book was that after it came out I was contacted by a woman who had been married to a Taliesin architect, James Dresser, but she told me that she was also the daughter of Herbert Fritz, Sr, who was one of the two survivors of the Taliesin fire. But even more interesting than that, she was the granddaughter of a stone mason named Alfred Larson. I sent her these pictures and I said do you recognize anyone, and she said only my grandfather. So now I have one more ID in the book than I had before. >> Well, that's always going to be some detective work, isn't there? >> It continues. >> Lots of things to figure out. >> This photograph is going to the exterior of Taliesin I. Also a very intriguing photograph because it looks like a football field being laid out here. There are gardeners laying out a grid in chalk lines on the slope to prepare the place of its first spring planting. 

And this was a style of planting that Wright saw in Italy. >> I was going to say, it wouldn't be typical for Wisconsin. >> It was not typical. He used both contour and grid styles of planting which he had seen and liked aesthetically as much as anything in Italy. But it turns out that it's also a very common way of gardening on a slope. >> How much acreage at Taliesin? How much did he have to work with? How much could he control the landscape he'd be looking at? >> It grew. It grew from, I think, about 60 acres to more than three times that. This is the same if you look at the picture of the grid. This is taken by, the next picture was taken by Clarence Fuermann of the first harvest. And these are cabbages and other crops growing up in the next grid. 

>> And we come, pretty quickly, to some early completion pictures of Taliesin. >> Yes. These are among photographs that also our friend Jack Holzhueter also was able to capture just within the last year on eBay from a proof set of photographs, many of which had not been published before, by Clarence Fuermann of Chicago. And this, when you see the wonderful composition of the courtyard with a statue called Flower in the Crannied Wall, which was kind of the muse for the garden. >> Popular Victorian image. >> Yes. And a tea circle has been built up at the top of the hill. And if you look closely, at the very end under the hay mound, a little opening there, you see a Holstein calf and the calf's mother or another full-grown cow. >> And we have also here a look at the courtyard. A couple of looks, in fact. 

>> Yes. This is intriguing because this is the courtyard taken from the tea circle, from that perspective. And if you look closely, you can see that under the porte-cochere there are two children and a horse. One child on horseback talking to the other person on the ground. I don't know if I included the close up of this photograph. >> Yes, actually, we'll look at that. >> All right. Well, I thought it would be interesting to see this because this was not among the photographs that was published in the architectural record or the architectural journals in 1913 that were all about Taliesin. Architects loved to take what I call neutron bomb pictures. No people. 

>> Nobody in them. >> Nobody in them. Just the buildings. But in this picture, there are the two children. I think the likelihood is that they are John and Martha Cheney, and this was taken in 1912 during their summer visit while their father, Edwin Cheney, Mamah's ex-husband, was off on his honeymoon with his new bride. And the Cheney's had three more children and moved to St. Louis. But in the next picture you see, from the very same perspective, you can see the very same roof line had crashed to the ground. >> After the fire. Now we better get to the fire. >> Well, everything seemed to be going very well after the return of Wright and Mamah from Japan. 

He had gotten some good contracts. He had gotten some good work. Things had settled down, and he'd built this wonderful pleasure palace in Chicago called the Midway Gardens which had an indoor and outdoor concert gardens. And then all of the sudden on Saturday, August 15, 1914, the same day as the Panama Canal opened, to give you a historical perspective on this, a servant, a chef, set the place on fire and attacked all the people with a shingling hatchet and killed seven, including Mamah Borthwick, her two children who were seated at one end of the house, and several workmen at the other end of the house. There were only two survivors, and the residential wing was burned to the ground. One of the survivors, William Weston, came back and was able to get garden hose on the building in that breezeway between the residential and studio wings so that the residential wing alone was burned down. Wright said afterward it seemed like the fates had it in for my life but not my work because it was the living part that was burned down. The next picture is of people gawking at the ruins. >> Well, this seems like a mundane question, but I think it has something to do with Wright's ability to carry on. What was he using for money to build Taliesin and was it insured? >> Good questions. 

I think I mentioned that he borrowed $10,000 from Darwin Martin to build the place, and I think that before he was done he owed him $30,000. He also had contracts to build a school, a progressive school, the Coonley Playhouse it was called, and several other big projects, including the Midway Gardens. So that really lasted only a few years before because it was undercapitalized and it went down. And I don't know what money Mamah Borthwick might have had with her. There's one interesting thing where they send a print, a Hiroshige Japanese print in a Wright style frame to her in Sweden. I was able to find that picture, get it photographed, and get it into the book. But the recipient complains that it arrived postage due, like two dollars, which is probably a few more than two in 1910. But, in any event, Mamah got tired of waiting for Wright to make her whole, and so she said I'm sending you a personal check, which tells me that Mamah Borthwick was a little ahead of her time in that way too. >> Right. >> That she managed her own money, that she had her own money, and she came from some wealth. 

So I don't know about that. The next picture we've put up is of the killer. No question about it. His name was Julian Carlton. He said he was a Barbadian. That's unclear whether in fact he was or whether that was just something an African American in Chicago said to be of higher status. He had worked as a house servant in the home of the caterer for Midway Gardens, the father of a man named Vogelsang who had a restaurant in Chicago with his wife Gertrude. They were both young, but his motives are unclear. It certainly looks like he snapped. He became paranoid. 

They were supposed to leave on August 15th to go back to Chicago, and yet, after serving lunch, he just brought down the fires of hell on everybody there. And this was how it was treated in the papers, that Julian Carlton was really an avenging angel coming down to avenge, to bring justice and retribution on this couple... >> Pretty harsh. >> For their evil ways. Yes. The picture, the illustration in this picture shows something that did not happen. She was not climbing out a window with him waiting with a hatchet. He just rushed her sitting on the porch. >> And what became of him? Of the perpetrator? >> Well, he was treated pretty well in small town Wisconsin. He was taken to the Dodgeville jail. 

He had swallowed acid and really destroyed his esophagus, but he got decent medical care from very prominent physicians in and around Dodgeville. He also got due process. He was given a court-appointed attorney from Mineral Point by the judge. He had two court appearances, and he finally, he pleaded not guilty. A plea was entered for him of not guilty. And he died six days after that in the Dodgeville jail of starvation, essentially, because he couldn't take food because he had burned his esophagus. But the jail, at the time, was also the home of the sheriff and his family, and so the sheriff's wife cooked for him and looked after him. So he got as much compassionate care as possible. Wright, after this, it was tough for him to recover. He developed boils and blindness and other kinds of trauma, traumatic symptoms, but he wanted to start rebuilding right way, and he did rebuild. 

In fact, Taliesin was rebuilt in a different and larger version before the end of 1914. But in December of 1914, he received a letter of condolence from Ellen Key in Sweden. And one of the surviving documents in the Key file is this letter from Wright which I'd like to read because it gives you a sense of his state of mind, and one of the things that's very interesting about this period of Wright is he's a much kinder, gentler person than we are used to after having dealt with the irascible, arrogant Frank Lloyd Wright of his 80s and 90s. Here he is in his 40s. And he says, "Your kind words of Mamah are like balm to my heart. You will receive her picture under a separate cover." I've just shown you the picture. The full length portrait that appeared earlier is actually the picture he sent her. "I am sending it today. It was made as a surprise for my birthday last June. There is nothing to say. 

The lightning struck us. Why? No one can say. All that remains is to keep it from sinking me so deep that my usefulness will be gone. Or, rather, to take it as the heart of her would have me and put the soul of her into the forms that take shape under my hands." Which means I have a choice. I can give up. I can simply give up. I can just go down in despair. Or I can take her spirit and try to make it live in my architecture, in my art. "We lived richly," he continues. "She was taken suddenly, without warning or pain to her I am sure, just as we were beginning to feel that the bitter struggle was giving way to the quiet assurance of peace and the place we coveted together. 

I hope that I can see you sometime, and we can talk of her. You have been a strength and comfort to us both, and we have blessed you often with love and regard. Faithfully yours, Frank Lloyd Wright." >> I realize that your book is about what you call act one of the three acts of Taliesin. It's primarily about the building, but the other two acts, then, you would define how? >> Well, Taliesin is called, it has three iterations. Taliesin I, as a building, lasted from 1911 to 1914. Taliesin II, from 1915 to 1923 when there was another fire. And then Taliesin III, from 1925 to the present. And so those are the three acts, really, and different things happened in all of those periods. But the least known was act one and because there was so little documentation. How do you lose history, Norman? You lose it a number of ways. 

You can lose it with fire. You can lose it with murder. You can lose it with a loss of documents and lives and witnesses. You can lose it because people don't want to remember it. You can lose it because it's not covered by the news media. You can lose it because people in the future think they're the only people worth paying attention to, and what came before them is irrelevant so they have no interest in it. And so history becomes lost and so, luckily, with the Internet and other devices, other really investigative devices, I was able to reconstitute the history of the people at Taliesin and the building at Taliesin in this first act and what I liken it to because it is just about, it was a hundred years ago last year, is Brigadoon. That it is very much like the Scottish village of myth that appears out of the mist once in a hundred years. So, I think that with act one here, this is my act of Brigadoon, of bringing Taliesin I out of the mist. >> Well, Ron McCrea, thank you for bringing it out for us. 

>> Thank you very much. >> This session of University Place Presents. Ron McCrea is the author of "Building Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright's Home of Love and Loss." I'm Norman Gilliland. Thanks for joining me, and I hope you can be with me next time for University Place Presents.