Smoking and Frank Lloyd Wright
Photo of Wright by the photographer Yousuf Karsh. His photos of notable people have become as famous as the subjects pictured.
I have been unsuccessfully trying to figure out why I wanted to write this post:
Wright and Smoking
in September.
The only thing I can think is that it has something to do with my mother.
Her birthday is this month.
She mostly smoked More cigarettes.
Mom smoked them for so long it never occurred to me how they were distinctly marketed to women.
And I’ve been thinking
about cigarettes lately because of my continued love of Old Time Radio drama, like I wrote in my post, “Sunday Nights with OTR“.
I’ve been starting my nights with OTR by listening to Gunsmoke,
the radio and television series about Marshall Dillon in Dodge City, Kansas, with his deputy, Chester; Miss Kitty, the smart-headed proprietor of one of the saloons in Dodge; and Doc, who attends births, but mostly performs autopsies on anyone who crosses the wrong side of the path with the Marshall.
I access the episodes
This version leaves in all of the cigarette commercials.
Srsly, even though I grew up with bubblegum cigars and candy cigarettes,
and remember Mom telling me about the commercials that talked about the brand of cigarettes that are “so round, so full, so fully-packed…”
they had banned tv and radio advertising for cigarettes while I was still a little kid.
So,
as I listen to radio episodes broadcast in the 1950s, I’m struck by all the cigarette commercials.
After all, these brands were the sponsors of the shows. so that’s all you had.
I mean,
I stopped smoking over a decade ago, but when I listen to the commercials, I think how damned hard it was, for decades, for people to NOT WANT TO SMOKE.
Check this out:
this link brings you to a page of radio commercials for one of Gunsmoke’s sponsors, L & M cigarettes; shows what you heard during commercial breaks.
p.s.: I’m sorry that if you listen to these commercials and “Live! Live! Live! Modern — get L & M, toDAYYY!” starts unexpectedly going through your head later on.
Of course,
I can also report that the work done by the anti-smoking campaigns means that once I stopped smoking, I saved so much money that I quickly had enough to
Yes
buy something related to Frank Lloyd Wright.
OH, Keiran! You decided to talk about Frank Lloyd Wright again – thanks so much!
You’re welcome.
With the money I saved I bought the three-volume set of books called Frank Lloyd Wright Complete Works that came out in 2010-11:
Volume 1 covers the years 1885 to 1916,
Volume 2 covers 1914-1972, and
Volume 3, 1943-59
So, let’s talk about Frank Lloyd Wright and smoking.
But he didn’t smoke!
Ah, but No, Grasshopper: that’s where Olgivanna (Wright’s widow), the Taliesin Fellowship,
and Wright himself
did a good job with PR.
Because
Wright DID smoke.
Maybe not all of his life and certainly not in the 1950s, but there are photos of him smoking and not just those posed by professional photographers.
Here’s one photo of him at Taliesin standing outside with architects Erich Mendelsohn and Richard Neutra when they worked for Wright at Taliesin—
Erich Mendelsohn (left), Wright, and Richard Neutra on the right. Printed in Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture, by Robert Twombly, p. 185.
In this photo, Wright’s holding his cigarette between his index finger and thumb.
In addition,
there’s a photo of him holding a cigarette by the fireplace in Taliesin’s living room in the Taliesin 2 era:
Wright at Taliesin living room fireplace with cigarette. Published in Frank Lloyd Wright, by Daniel Trieber. From the Musee d’Orsay, PHO 1983 3.
And there’s one of him on the Hill Crown at Taliesin:
Published in The Wright Style,2 by Carla Lind, p. 19.
The close-up below of the cig in his fingertips shows you it’s in between his index and middle finger:
But
while putting this post together I realized that these photos of him smoking all come from the time in which his relationship with Miriam Noel Wright (his second wife) was dissolving or had just finished.
And I have subsisted enough on cigarettes and coffee upon the end of relationships to know what that might have been like for the man.
Still,
there are photos of him smoking in Architectural Forum mag that came out devoted to his work in 1938 (check the issue out here at Archive.org)
I also linked to Architectural Forum in the post I wrote last year: “The Abandoned Stairway at Taliesin“
Although the photos in the magazine may well have been marketing, which you can tell in one of them, below.
And the photo at the top of this post may also have been marketing, because it was taken in 1945 and by that time I think he was against apprentices in the Fellowship smoking. Plus, Wright was vociferous enough on his distaste of cigarette smoking in the late 1950s during his Mike Wallace interview.3
But, Wright looks so appealing in the Karsh photo that years ago—even while I still smoked—I thought there should be something better in Wright’s hand than a smoldering cigarette.
So I Photoshopped it with Wright holding a rose, instead. I was proud of the way I added the color and got rid of the signs of smoke:
Like I’ve said, I’ll take 10% of profits on sales if you decide to put his on merch.
First published September 16, 2025.
The photograph of Wright holding a lit cigarette can be found on this webpage: https://karsh.org/photographs/frank-lloyd-wright/
Notes
- Yes, there are “the Monographs” – one edition of 12-volumes in Hardcover and Paperback released in the late 1980s early ’90 that sell for about $250 a piece; but the Completed Buildings books are so pretty!
- The Wright Style: Recreating the Spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Carla Lind (Simon & Schuster, Archetype Press, Inc., Washington, D.C., 1992).
- People have told me that Wright didn’t like smoking in part so that he could stay away from it; but I also had people say that Wright was ragging on Mike Wallace for his smoking during the interview because he (Wright) was angry at the show’s sponsor.
