Darwin Martin Archives - Keiran Murphy

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No, not the first time he violated it.

I wrote about that before when introducing you to the second Mrs. Wright.

In this post I’ll write about the second (and last) time.

As I wrote once before, information about the Mann Act is something you learn when working at Taliesin.

In particular, the Mann Act is related to what happened to Frank Lloyd Wright on October 21, 1926, at the cottage in the photo at the top of this post.

It started,

as things do with Wright,

in a story that got really complicated.

Let’s go back

to Wright’s second wife, Miriam Noel. She left him by early May 1924, then almost 6 months later, he met his future wife, Olgivanna. Their new relationship was practically tried by fire—Taliesin’s second fire 5 months after they met. Olgivanna had their daughter, Iovanna, in December while she was chased out of the hospital after giving birth. And, in the next year, Wright was having financial problems while struggling to find clients. What’s more, Miriam was still refusing to settle their divorce.

This was quite a problem for everyone.

Especially, where Wright lived.

Spring Green was dealing with the “Chicago boys”: those reporters from that city’s newspapers. They were around, writing about Wright’s problems with Miriam. She had shown up at Taliesin in early June 1926 trying to get in while the Chicago Boys took photos.

Taliesin was legally her home, after all.

So William Purdy, editor of Spring Green’s newspaper, The Weekly Home News, wrote about this sorry business in the June 10th edition.

Also, Purdy allowed Wright to publish an apology to the people of the village. Here it is in part:

Architect Makes Statement to Public

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT THANKS HOME PEOPLE.

To the Countryside:

Taliesin seems to be a storm center for conflicting human interests and emotions. Three times I have built it up from its ashes;¹ each time stronger and more beautiful than before tragedy destroyed it. The cooperation of the countryside was mine in all this and I have appreciated it more than I can tell. But I have never thanked my neighbors and townspeople directly for their friendship and forbearance. I want to do so now, particularly in consideration of their “hands off” attitude in this last attack—this attempt, made in hatred and a spirit of revenge, to destroy any usefulness I have and make what I have struggled to establish here useless to me or anyone….

Then, the last paragraph includes my favorite part:

Enough of that. What I want to say to you was that I like you people…. You all seem home-like to me. I’ve been about all over the globe and come back here with that feeling of coming “home” we all seek somewhere, and too often seek in vain…. I want to stay here with you, working until I die. I want to mind my own business and not be subject to public question if I can manage it. At the present times it looks as though I yet had some distance to go—and I might die before I got there. I must be patient and I hope those of you who don’t believe in me very much, perhaps, will be patient too—along with those who are closer to me and know better what I have had to contend with and what I would do if I could. I think the countryside deserves the best of me and if you who make it what it is give me the benefit of the doubt in all this for a year or two, I believe I will come through right side up and you may yet take pride in Taliesin as I have always hoped and believed you would do.

With affection, such as I am

Your—FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT.

If you didn’t see it above, check out the photo I put together below:

Photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright by Edward Steichen, Bequest of Edward Steichen. Located in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution — Photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright in the National Portrait Gallery. © Condé Nast. NPG.82.92

Honestly, I wanted to show this because it looks like a motivational poster that’s taken a bad turn.

Despite what he wrote to his neighbors in 1926, things for Wright would not get better in “a year or two.”

In fact,

they were going to get worse that fall.

At the end of August, one of Wright’s attorneys (Levi Bancroft) advised Wright to spend a while away from Taliesin. Bancroft and others were trying to settle things with Miriam and the Bank of Wisconsin.

So, Wright and his coterie —Olgivanna, her daughter, Svetlana, and Iovanna—eventually went to the cottage you see at the top of this post. It was on Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota, where they all lived for about a month.

But unfortunately,

as biographer Meryle Secrest wrote,

Wright could not have known that by driving Olgivanna across the Wisconsin-Minnesota state line, instead of having her get out and walk (presumably to demonstrate she was not a “victim”) he had given the bureau new evidence under the White Slave Traffic Act [a.k.a., the Mann Act].

Meryle Secrest. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1992), 327-328.

And, on October 21, 1926

there were at the cottage when they were apprehended and brought to the county jail for the night. They released everyone but Wright the next day. Then, he stayed for the weekend until they could all see the judge.

Although Svetlana’s father, Vladimir Hinzenberg, dropped the charges once he saw that she was no longer in trouble, the event caused a permanent rift between Hinzenberg and her. In fact, her son Brandoch Peters² later told the LaCrosse Tribune that this was why she always signed her name, “Svetlana Wright Peters”.³

A good thing about this is that the tide began to turn against the second Mrs. Wright. Around that time her lawyer, Arthur Cloud, said, “I wanted to be a lawyer… and Mrs. Wright [i.e., Miriam] wanted me to be an avenging angel.”⁴

One last thing about the cottage in Minnesota:

Its photo shows it with a hipped roof and apparently windows all the way in the back. When I first saw that photo over a year ago, I instantly remembered Graycliff, a home in Derby, New York. Wright designed it that year, 1926, for Isabelle Martin, wife of longtime client, Darwin Martin.

My photo of Graycliff is below:

I don’t know if there’s any connection, but I was really struck by the resemblance to this home against a lake.

Posted October 17, 2024.
The photo at the top of this post is here from the Digital Collections of the Hennepin County Public Library.

Notes

He says “three times I have built it from its ashes”, but Taliesin was only destroyed twice by fire: in 1925, but also 1914. I think Wright might have meant that the first construction was atop his former home/life in Oak Park.
Brandoch is seen talking about his grandfather in this video, Brandoch Peters Remembers, Part 1. Part 2 is here.
Susan Smith for Lee Newspapers. “Grandson of Wright offers his memories”, La Crosse Tribune, December 14, 2003.
Meryle Secrest. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, 331.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

A trickster, possibly.

maybe an s.o.b.

But not a con man (not even on the order of Harold Hill).

However, I know why you think Frank Lloyd Wright was like that.

After all—

He borrowed lots of money from people and couldn’t give it back.

And pulled so much money out of former client Darwin Martin.

Check out this documentary on Wright, Martin, and Buffalo that came out in 2016. It’s great.

Then,

In 1932, Wright convinced a bunch of kids (the Taliesin Fellowship) to give him money to learn about architecture when he had no clients.

But while they paid him,

they fixed his buildings both before and after he had clients again,

Apprentices working at Hillside probably in 1933. Yeah, chiseling stone without a shirt on (like the man pictured above) isn’t up to OSHA standards, but then again, I found newspaper stories around that time in which people had to be reminded not to throw cans of used motor oil into their fireplaces to get the fire going (and usually suffered burns from the resultant explosions).

And farmed

his land,

Apprentice Bill Patrick hoes squash in a photograph on page 66 of the book: A Way of Life: An Apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, by architect Lois Davidson Gottlieb.

While working in the kitchen and serving meals.

As well as,

BUILDING

his furniture

like his drafting tables for the Hillside studio.

You know, drafting? Like, doing something people should get paid for?

Although I get the feeling that becoming an architect is like becoming a doctor: you get the degrees, then you go and work in an office.

… which you get paid for…. C’mon: stay focused!

And later,

Even when things were on the up again, they built the “camp” in the Arizona desert starting in the late 30s.

a.k.a., Taliesin West.

And that’s not counting

the whole, “leaving his wife and 6-kids” thing.

Yeah yeah yeah: it was a lot, ok?

My fingers are too tired to copy/paste all of the stories that will come up. You can read about it if you put “frank lloyd wright” and “scandal” into a search engine.

But as I told architectural historian Kathryn Smith one time:

“with Wright, there’s a difference between the ideal and the reality.”

Then,

I read The Lost Years by Anthony Alofsin. Alofsin identified Wright’s desire to create an educational community back in 1909-11. Wright thought this education would transform architecture:

Recalling the training of artists in Japan or the practice of apprenticeship in the Middle Ages, he concluded that a new education was necessary for youth, incorporating the spirit of great architecture, “the study of the nature of materials, the nature of the tools and processes at command….”

The Lost Years, 1910-1922: A Study of Influence, 90.

Not only that:

Wright seemed to honestly believe that he could build beautiful homes for less money.

Even though the whole country didn’t take him up on that.

So, he wasn’t just full of it. I believe he actually did think it would all work out.

Moreover:

He honestly thought that, within a few years of its beginning, his apprentices wouldn’t have to pay tuition for being at the Taliesin Fellowship. He thought that the cost of their tuition would pay for itself while he created a self-sustaining community.

For example,

he wrote this in a brochure for the Taliesin Fellowship:

[T]he Fellowship has a two-hundred-acre farm, and as another there are yearly fees fixed at about what a medium-grade college education would cost plus work the apprentice can do. Eventually, paid services to Industry in architectural research will contribute substantially to put the tools needed into the hands of the workers and reduce or eventually abolish the fee so worthwhile young men and women may work for their living not as education but as culture.

The Taliesin Fellowship (brochure for the Fellowship), December 1933.

Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings, volume 3: 1931-39. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1993), 163.

And the work

in the self-sustaining community of the Fellowship would teach apprentices to be better architects. He wrote this in the 1943 edition of an Autobiography:

The field work is as important a responsibility as the work in the draughting room, or in the garden, the kitchen or the dining rooms. This seems very difficult for young America to accept. One of our young men could not see the work in the kitchen as anything but menial work to be done by a servant. When he was told he didn’t have to do it his conscience troubled him because all the others were going that work…. After the work in the kitchen he would sit and make drawings for the new arrangements he felt we needed. He would suggest new systems of serving, which would eliminate waste motions. He was just as interested in work as in any other. His knowledge of the working of a kitchen and dining room on whatever scale is instilled into his very being—a knowledge earned and gained by him by way of actual experience—not by way of a superficial inadequate theory of designing.

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 425.

otoh:

There’s no denying what Priscilla Henken witnessed when she and her husband David were apprentices during World War II. She wrote on August 6, 1943 about the inefficiency she witnessed in the Fellowship:

“plows, rakes, hoes, wire rusting in weather of all sorts – and forgotten; berries neglected on the bushes; man power used to dress up a house instead of to repair it—all to show off for guests. Potemkin’s false front and shabby rear.”
Taliesin Diary: A Year with Frank Lloyd Wright, by Priscilla Henken (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, London, 2012), 206.

Like I said:

With Wright, there is a difference between the ideal and the reality.

December 31, 2023.
The portrait at the top of this post is available online here from the National Portrait Gallery.
I added Wright’s quote in the photo. It came from a letter he wrote the people of Spring Green that was published in the Weekly Home News on June 10, 1926 while Wright was having problems with his second wife, Miriam Noel. When I found the photograph by Edward Steichen, I thought of putting the quote in it because it’s like one of those inspirational posters that has taken a turn. I laughed so hard I cried.

Notes:

1. “Shyster” is apparently based on a German word from the 18^th century. When I looked for “Shyster” on vocabulary.com, I found that:

A shyster is someone who might rip you off or do something unethical in order to get his way. A used car salesman might tell you a car is a thousand dollars, but when you read the fine print, it turns out you’ll pay a lot more. That salesman is a shyster — someone who lies and deceives for his own benefit.

Frank Lloyd Wright Violated the Mann Act

Tag: Darwin Martin

Frank Lloyd Wright Violated the Mann Act

It started,