The house that love built
Frank LloydWright’s Taliesin was a refuge for illicit romance. Tragedy tore it apart.
The architect Frank LloydWright and a former client stood a few yards apart amid the ashes of a bungalowon aWisconsin hillside. NeitherWright nor Edwin Cheney looked at the other as their loved ones’ remainswere prepared for burial or cremation on that mid-August day in 1914. Wrightwas grieving for his lover, Mamah Borthwick. Cheneywas mourning two children he had with Borthwick fromtheir onetime marriage.
Wright and Cheney had separately been in Chicago when each had gotten the news. The previous day, Aug. 15, a servant at Taliesin, Wright’s famed sanctuary, had set it on fire and attacked the occupants with a hatchet as they fled. Seven people died fromtheir injuries.
“Three days ago, when I last sawhim, he seemed perfectly normal,” Wright told detectives about servant Julian Carlton, according to the Tribune. “He must have lost his mind— and yet I cannot believe the news is true.” Carlton, whowas taken into custody after swallowing acid, died several weeks later.
Five years earlier, Wright and Borthwick had left their mates and secretly run off to Europe in whatWright called a “spiritual hegira.” The international press called it scandalous, the condemnations continued when they returned, andWright built the southwesternWisconsin residence the press dubbed their “love bungalow.”
The pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Oak Park, where theWright family lived, putWright in the crosshairs of a Sunday sermon in October 1910.
“When a man who has bound himself to awoman as a life partner sees in another woman something that is more attractive than he sees in his wife, his judgment has becomewarped and he is on the verge of deeper deeds,” the Rev. George Luccock told his parishioners.
Wright, responding to the community backlash in a statement a year later, referred to himself as “the man” and to Borthwick as “thewoman.” Catherine Wrightwas “the wife,” and Edwin Cheney was “the husband,” in a narrative that reads like a medieval morality play.
“Then the thing happened to them which has happened to men andwomen since time began— the inevitable,” Wright wrote. “Out of this the so-called bungalow grew on the hillside.”
TheWrights and the Cheneys met as young married couples in Oak Park. Wright’s studio and family homewere there, and Catherine TobinWright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney belonged to the town’sNineteenth CenturyWoman’s Club.
Their wives’ connection led Edwin Cheney, an electrical engineer, to ask Frank LloydWright to design a home for the Cheney family on East Avenue in 1903. For years, Wright and Borthwick managed to keep from their spouses the relationship that blossomed over his drafting table. But townspeople claimed to have known all along.
“All the clubwomen and the mutual friends of the two families appeared to be just aswell posted,” the Tribune reported, “but therewas a general understanding all around to keep the facts sequestered as long as possible.”
Something CatherineWright told the Tribune suggests she hid the truth from herself. “I can name you a number of prominentwomen of Oak Park withwhom hewent automobiling, but those tripswere purely business matters,” she said. “Those womenwere architectural clients, and he toldme about every one of them.”
She firmly believed that her husband would return to her. In her mind, hewas an innocent led astray by a schemingwoman.
“Hewill control his infatuation for her and come home,” she said.
Her dreamwas sustained by her husband’s request that their 18-year-old son Frank Jr. meet him in Florence, Italy. CatherineWright hoped itwas her husband’s way of asking for reconciliation, but she was mistaken. Wrightwanted his son’s help in preparing architectural renderings for a German publisher.
After a year abroad, Wright and Borthwick separately returned to Oak Park. He came first, as the Tribune reported in 1910.
“Hewalked through the station with his head up and a firm tread,” the Tribune quoted witnesses as saying. “And hewas much improved. His black hair is touched with gray at the temples now, and while he was abroad he had it ‘bobbed’ so it hangs down over his collar and just misses his shoulders.”
WhenWright showed up at the family home, his wife assumed he had broken up with Borthwick.
“Our family is reunited,” Catherine Wright told a Tribune reporter.” I knew he would come back. He is the soul of honor.”
In fact, Wright had done no such thing. Hewas there only because Cheney asked his wife andWright towait a year before doing anything to sever the two families.
“For a year thewoman continued in her household separate fromher husband; the man likewise continued in his household separate fromhis wife,” Wright wrote of that chapter of their story. “Allwaswretched, all false, allwasted.”
Borthwick passed her time apart translating a book by EllenKey, a Swedish feminist. TheTribunewas struck by the overlap betweenKey’s advocacy of sexual freedom andWright’s protest that marriagewas slavery. “(Wright’s) contempt for ordinary notions of parental duty is here put in strong terms,” theTribune wrote of the book.
Wright built a partition straight through his family home. “He lived on one side of it and Mrs. Wright on the other,” the Tribune reported. “Six months later the partition was torn down and itwas reported that a full reconciliation had been effected.”
But shortly before Christmas, Wright embarked on a “second hegira,” as the press dubbed it, moving into Taliesin, which he built in 1911. (The bungalow’s purpose, though, went beyond serving as a refuge forWright and Borthwick. It nurtured his experimentation with architecture and design and is often described as his autobiography inwood and stone.)
Borthwick joinedWright at Taliesin, prompting neighbors to tell the sheriff that he had better do something about the love cottage. SheriffW.R. Pengally said he wouldn’t tolerate any vigilante violence. He didn’t think Borthwick andWright’s relationshipwas all that remarkable.
“I sawthem skating over near the first bridge the other day where he carried her over the highwater,” he told the Tribune. “Shewaswearing one of theseMackinac jackets. They seemed to be enjoying themselves as much as two kids.”
For close to three years, Wright and Borthwick lived quietly at the bungalow.
“I have oftenwondered if they could have gone on forever had they not been blinded by the glowof their love that they sawnothing of the night about them and heard not the rumble of the approaching storm,” John LloydWright wrote in “My Father, Frank LloydWright.”
Instead, Carlton, the servant, turned the lovers’ sanctuary into a killing ground. Some thought itwas because he and his wife had been discharged. The house, though, survived the tragedy. Itwas rebuilt, both then and after an electrical fire in 1925, and became home to an architecture school, which has run into its own troubles.
Even in his grief over Borthwick, Wright realized that a funeral for her “could only be amockery,” he recalled in his autobiography. So he had someworkers dig a grave in his family’s burial ground not far from Taliesin, and his carpenters built a coffin of freshly felled white pine.
He cut down the flower garden that she cultivated and filled the coffin with blossoms that had brought her joy. His son John helped him lay Borthwick atop the flowers.
“Then the plain, strong boxwas lifted on the shoulders ofmyworkmen and they placed it in our little springwagon, filled, too, with flowers,” Wright recalled.
“We made the whole a mass of flowers. It helped a little.”