“I was accused of saying I was the world’s greatest architect. If I had really said that, I don’t think it would have been arrogant,” Frank Lloyd Wright said without hesitation in 1957, at the age of 89. The Guggenheim Museum, now one of New York’s greatest landmarks, has still not opened its doors, even though he drew the first plans for it in 1943. But the work was coming to an end, as was the life of an architect who marked his time and ours not only with his remarkable buildings, but also with his personality. “Early in my life I had to choose between sincere arrogance and false humility. I chose sincere arrogance”, he explains his life’s guiding principle.
Others accused him of having at least a narcissistic personality disorder, but perhaps that was why he shone like a light that could easily blind women. Even Catherine Tobin found him magical, even though she was only 17 when she met him at a dance in 1889 and married him in June, despite strong opposition from both her families. The newlywed husband, a 22-year-old budding architect, built them a house in Chicago’s elite Oak Park neighbourhood, close to his divorced mother and the groom’s parents.
One by one the children came until there were six and Kitty, as Mrs Wright was called, was left at home to look after them while her husband climbed the social ladder in his native Chicago. Internships in well-known architectural firms bore fruit, but he ended up on the street.
Even then, he liked to borrow money, and he also borrowed money from Louis Sullivan for his house, only he forgot to tell him that because of the generous loan, he did not intend to work exclusively for his firm Adler & Sullivan. When the firm found out that he was secretly designing for his clients at home at night, he was sacked in 1893.
Frank Lloyd Wright Eccentric and Successful
But now Wright, 26, has blossomed. He opened his own studio and slowly made a name for himself with his prairie houses, characterised by long, straight lines, open spaces and flat roofs. Although he sincerely believed that a house should blend in and enrich its surroundings as nature enriches a building, his home in Oak Park was quite traditional.
Even five years later, when he started to expand it, he couldn’t change much, but he could make a big casino, where his wife set up a kindergarten for their children and a neighbour’s, and he could afford a studio for himself. In the spirit of architecture and nature intertwined, a tree proudly towered through the floor and ceiling of his office.
Eccentric, said people who knew him, and a word echoed by strangers who saw him walking around with a wide-brimmed hat, a red-lined palerino and a walking stick. “You could do it too, if you weren’t so uptight,” he said to a man who looked at him in amazement as he stood barefoot on the riverbank.
He enjoyed being the centre of attention, and his home was full of guests, music and laughter. And the neighbours were whispering. They couldn’t help but notice his flirtations with women who were attracted by his energy and confidence, and Kitty didn’t either, just discreetly drooped her head. Her husband was respectable and respected, she gave birth to their last child in 1903, and times were such that discreet cheating was acceptable, but divorce was not.
While the sixth newborn was crying in the Wright home, he was designing a new house. Edwin Cheney, a bored but successful businessman, wanted it for his educated and attractive wife Martha Borthwick Cheney, whom everyone called Mamah, and their first-born son John, born the year before. Edwin was fascinated by Wright’s ideas, his wife by his.
He was completely different from the man she married, because he didn’t let himself be pushed away, and at 30 she couldn’t put off getting married any longer. She didn’t feel bad, but she missed her old self when she was studying at the University of Michigan, teaching, running a library and dreaming of a future in which she would write an important book.
Frank Lloyd Wright reawakened in her a woman who championed early feminist ideas, so it’s not surprising that they soon became passionate about each other while planning her house. Kitty again discreetly narrowed her eyes, and Mamah soon looked away from Wright. When the house was finished, they lost touch and she was hoping temptation was behind her when, four years later, it struck again.
Frank Lloyd Wright gives a lecture in the city. She got in the car. He didn’t want to move. Whatever she did, the car wouldn’t go anywhere. It was snowing and drizzling outside. She did not think of going back to the “happy house”, as her husband called their home, where Martha, born in 1905, was now staying. She had to see it. Wright.
The high price of love
And it did. Four years after they finished the house, they started planning the garage. The execution was so “complicated” that they spent more and more time together. The hole Mamah had been carrying in her heart began to fill, say those who have explored the few known grains in the rich mosaic of a woman who spoke six languages fluently and was full of unfulfilled potential. With Frank Lloyd Wright, she could no longer push them in. She had to explore and experience them, but to do so she had to do the unforgivable – leave her husband and children.
Edwin Cheney resisted the divorce, but he was a kitten compared to Kitty, who convinced herself that her husband was the poor victim of a “vampire” and that “her love, her lonely devotion and her belief that everything would end happily” would bring him back. Instead, in 1909, he set off for Germany, even though Robie’s house in Chicago, now one of the finest examples of his prairie school, was not even finished.
The reason for the trip was legitimate, because he had to arrange the publication of his book Wasmuth Porfolio in Germany, but not his company – Mamah went with him. In Chicago, an unbridled scandal broke out. A spouse, victim of a vampiress, was just one of the headlines that dominated the front pages of the newspapers.
Kitty made no secret of what she thought of Mamá – including calling her a snot – and people rallied to her side. The lovers left not only a married couple, but nine children together, as Mamah was also caring for her late sister’s child. And such a sin cannot be forgiven, especially not by a woman, and especially not at the beginning of the 20th century.
“I think Wright saw in Mamah a very attractive woman, a woman who really had a lot to say – she was as interested in the world as he was”, Nancy Horan reflects on Wright, who always tried to be “real” in his work, even though he had many opponents with his bold and innovative ideas. But when he reflected on his private life, he had to admit to himself that he was a fraud. There was no going back.
Or is it? The lovers had to hide from the press even in Germany, separated and lived together again in Italy until Wright was forced to leave for America in September 1910. Will he return? Kitty had not yet put her hands up from their 21-year marriage, and his conscience was quite troubled by the children.
Mamah could only hope that her sacrifice had not been in vain. She could not return to America. Her reputation was completely ruined. She had been vilified in the newspapers and there was no way she could have survived on her own.
She found a glimmer of hope that she had done the right thing by leaving her children to save herself in the writing of Ellen Key. She celebrated, among other things, free love and loving partnerships, and declared marriage a relic of the past. Mamah met her, became her follower and started translating her texts into English. At first from German, but after only a few months of study, when she had mastered Swedish, she began to translate from the original.
At the same time, she taught. It was hard to get through the month, even though, as a former lady used to comfort and convenience, she lived as comfortably as she could. But she did not regret her decision, only the guilt about the children remained as bitter as in the first days.
Meanwhile, Frank Lloyd Wright was facing his own problems. A scandal had suddenly led the shining star of his career astray. There were no new commissions, and he was expelled from the company. Kitty refused to divorce him. She had long deluded herself that Mamah was just another one of his affairs, but now that she could no longer escape the truth, pent-up rage, resentment and vindictiveness came roaring to the surface.
It has achieved nothing, neither by ranting nor by raving nor by publicly smearing Mamah. Her 43-year-old husband has remained true to the family motto: Truth against the world. Even when he was professionally ruined and personally disgraced, he refused to return home. Perpetually penniless, he persuaded his mother, who had never liked her daughter-in-law very much, to buy a plot of land in the Helena Valley, near Spring Green, in April 1911. He knew it like the back of his hand. It was the property of Mum’s parents, who had moved to America from Wales.
Escape into solitude
“I looked towards that hill in the valley, just as my grandfather before me had looked towards America – it was hope, it was heaven.” He loved the nature of Wisconsin. Here, far from a judgmental society, he decided to build a home that would also be the best representation of his architectural ideas.
A house, named Taliesin after the mythical poet, magician and priest, began to grow in secret, and he returned to Germany. He wrote to his mother, quite on the floor, that he could not succeed when he was alone against everyone. But he was not alone. He had Mamah by his side. “I never loved Catherine, my wife, as she deserved. For some years I have loved another,” he confessed at the time.
In June 1911, he and Mamah returned to America and moved into Taliesin without any fuss. Edwin gave in and agreed to a divorce, and Kitty didn’t budge. “It is infinitely harder to live without rules, but a really honest, upright man is forced to do it”, Wright reflected, as he faced the consequences of his action and the crisis of a forced break, with no more large orders for him.
In January 1912, he made it clear that he was not thinking about his wife and her behaviour and never would again. “I have taken the right to act in accordance with my own sense of what is right, no matter how much it has cost her…” He could never live in marriage with her again, he continued. “Mrs Wright and I just annoyed each other and made fun of each other. The children were slaughtered because of the depressing atmosphere.”
He wrote the same thing about Mamá: “I love a woman who does not share her destiny with me wisely, but very well. She too has gainful work, as I have. She is quite capable of taking care of herself – and we work together.” Mamah was now Ellen Key’s official translator into English.
She wrote to her role model: “As I had hoped, I have made a decision in accordance with my soul – as far as I am concerned, I made it a long time ago – and have finally separated from Mr Cheney. I got my divorce last summer and now my maiden name is officially mine.”
She also told her that she and Frank were happy and that she was now looking after the house. They really had no major problems, except for their first Christmas together. Reporters from Chicago found out where they were and one of them sneaked onto the property. A worker from the estate knocked him to the ground, and the Dodgeville Chronicle reported in amazement that “eyewitnesses applauded, including local officials”, but that they “muttered something against ‘naive Chicago types'”.
To the Chicago townspeople, Mamah and Wright were living in mortal sin that had to be exposed on a regular basis, but the people of Green Spring left them alone. “I think you’ll be interested to know how we managed to do what we believed was right. I can now say that we both have, I believe, complete respect for the community in which we live. I have never felt any other view either, and the people around us have done many kind and thoughtful things for us”, Mamah wrote to her role model Ellen Key before she disappointed her when she began to celebrate motherhood.
At that time, the guilt about the children was again louder in Mum, and life with Wright was not easy either. He didn’t know how to handle money, and they had constant problems with him. He was desperately worried about not getting big contracts, even though experts who disliked him now claim that he had got away with his prairie houses before the scandal began.
But Taliesin was wonderful. Wright adored him and so did Mamah. He didn’t put the house on top of the hill, but up the hill, because “no building should stand on a hill or anything”. Even then he believed that buildings should blend in with nature. “The hill and the house must live together and each must be happier than the other,” he poetically explained.
Although no one was even thinking about sustainable living at the time, Wright made his house from local materials and plastered it with sand from the Wisconsin River to make it glow golden. It was not clear to the engineers what he was really doing, because according to their calculations the house should not have been standing at all, but it is still standing strong and upright today, even though it was given a new look in December 1914. It had to get it.
Why?
Edwin Cheney agreed to let the children spend their summers with their mother, while 8-year-old Martha and 12-year-old John enjoyed their holidays in the countryside. Saturday, 15 August 1914, was another fine day. Frank was not there. When he and Martha returned from Japan in 1913, he was commissioned to build Midway Park. They were just finishing the work and he spent the Saturday in Chicago.
In Taliesin, the locals have just sat down for lunch. Julian Carlton, a 30-year-old butler, set Mamah and her two children up on the open porch. He had only been with the house for a few months, but it was enough to get him into so many arguments that Mamah fired him. That Saturday was the last working day for him and his wife Gertrude, the house cook. They would serve their family one last time before taking the afternoon train to Chicago to look for a new job.
Carlton brought the soup and left. He came back. He was holding an axe. First he split Mamah’s head open, then her 12-year-old son John’s. Eight-year-old Martha ran away. He caught her and killed her too.
He went to the other side of the house and calmly served soup to six employees: estate manager Thomas Brunker (68), carpenter Billy Weston (35) and his son Ernest (13), draughtsmen Emil Brodell (26) and the similarly aged Herbert Fritz, and landscaper David Lindblom (38). Then he left.
He locked the door leading to the dining room. He poured petrol into the dining room through a slot under one of them. The men noticed the liquid, but “we thought it was nothing, just soup spilled outside.” As the liquid flowed under his chair, Herbert Fritz detected the smell of petrol. A moment later, “a flame rose from under the chair”.
Outside the door, Carlton lit a match, which he used to light his pipe. Within seconds, the room was on fire and the flames were trying to take over everyone in the room. They desperately tried to break down the door. It didn’t work. Herbert Fritz was the first to fly out of the window and roll on the floor to put out the fire that had engulfed his clothes. He broke his arm and was slightly burnt.
Others have not been so lucky. Carlton, 30, was waiting for them with an axe, hacking at anyone who managed to get out of the flaming trap. Even Billy Weston could not escape. The killer swung twice and set off in pursuit of more victims.
But the blows were not fatal. Weston got up, ran to the other side and helped extinguish the flames on the body of the burning and injured David Lindblom. Then he and Herbert Fritz ran for help. She arrived too late. The living area of the house had burned to the ground. Mamah, her two children and Emil Brodelle were dead at the scene. Thomas Brunker, David Lindblom and 13-year-old Ernest Weston were fighting for their lives. A few days later, they lost the fight.
Meanwhile, the killer has already carried out the last part of his plan. Hidden in the cellar, he drank hydrochloric acid, hoping it would kill him. It didn’t, and the sheriff found him still alive. If the townspeople had, he would have been dead quickly, but the sheriff and his armed escort protected him from lynching and took him to jail.
He received medical care and was personally fed by the sheriff’s wife, but there was no help for him. While the newspapers wrote about the black beast and the black madman, because he was probably from Barbados, he was slowly wasting away, without answering the question why. Why did he murder all these people?
His wife claimed she knew nothing about his plans, although he had been acting strangely and sleeping with an axe. Did he perhaps remember that Emill Brodelle had called him a black pig when he refused to saddle his horse and wanted revenge? Did he resent Mamah for forgiving him? Was he mentally ill?
The death of love and softness
Hypotheses and questions abound, but no one knows the answers. Seven and a half weeks after he murdered seven people, Carlton took them to his grave in a shroud. And Frank Lloyd Wright put the love of his life in it. With Mamah, what died in him was “what was loving and soft, what I knew and loved in my father”, as he wrote in his autobiography.
These words lead many to believe that he was still able to love at that time, even though his later life shows that he suffered from narcissistic personality disorder. It made him incapable of empathy and true emotion, and he believed himself to be a prophet, with a personality as magnificent as his talent for architecture.
But when he returned home on the evening train on that fateful day and saw the wreckage of the tragedy, it was for him “a scene of devastating horror”. He buried Mamah, aged 45, in the family cemetery next to his sister’s son, who died aged 10. He did not erect a memorial to her. “All that is left of the past five years of the struggle for freedom, which swept away most of my past life, is gone. Why mark the place where the devastation began and ended?” But these were not words of regret and a prediction of atonement.
He published a letter to his neighbours in the newspaper to defend the “brave and loving woman” against the lies the newspapers were spreading about her. He thanked his neighbours for seeing her ‘dignity and graciousness’ instead of seeing her ‘through the eyes of the press, which even now insists on adorning her death with facts, first and foremost that she was once another man’s wife, ‘a woman who abandoned her children’. But the well-known fact that the other now bears the name and title she once bore has no meaning.” Edwin Cheney married Elsie Millor in 1912, a year after his divorce from Mamah.
“This upright woman had a soul that belonged only to her – for her, being a woman was more important than being a wife or a mother.” He highlighted her capacity to love and to live, her courage and her ideals, for which she was forced to sacrifice everything that society considers sacred and basic. He stressed that they had lived what they believed in with honesty and sincerity and had tried to help others to live their lives in accordance with their ideals.
He touched children who may not have known the ideal love between a father and a mother, but who had everything else. “How many children have all this in conventional homes? Mamah’s two children were with her when she died. They were with her every summer.” He then denounced the society that forced her to choose between motherhood and womanhood.
“Only true love is free love – no other form is or ever will be free.The ‘freedom’ in which we united was infinitely more difficult than submitting to custom. Few will go down that road.” He mentioned that Mamah sometimes wrote to friends. Even when she wrote to them about happiness, they tried to persuade her to read between the lines how unhappy she really was. He concluded that people who live securely simply feel the need to see only unhappiness in circumstances they cannot understand.
He admitted that he and Mamah had argued, had different ways of looking at things, had sometimes suffered from jealous fear, but that this had only brought them closer together. “We were more than moderately happy even when we were miserable.” To him, Mamah was a real woman. “You know, wives, with your love certificates – pray that you can love as much and be as loved as Mamah Borthwick was!”
“Her soul has entered me and it will not be lost,” he added, but just three weeks after the tragedy, he reportedly threw a party for local scribes. The local newspaper said it had learned that “it was one of the most successful and entertaining gatherings the postmen have ever had”, leading some to conclude that Wright was untouched by the loss, others to say that he had got over it in his own way.
No end in sight to the problems
If the latter are right, he never got over it, because his life was truly special from then on. As he had promised in a letter to his neighbours, he renovated the house by December 1914. He enlarged the studio, added tall windows on the south and north sides of the house, enlarged the living spaces and filled them with statues, carpets and ceramics he had brought from Japan. For him, the choice of interior decoration was an integral part of the design of the house, so he chose everything himself, from the lights to the carpets.
But he did not spend Christmas 1914 alone in the house. Shortly after the tragedy, he received a letter from Miriam Noel, who adored him. He immediately became involved with her. “Something strange has happened to me. Instead of feeling how close the spirit of her, whose life had joined mine there on Taliesin, was, it finally disappeared!” Miriam, 45 years old, remained.
He couldn’t marry her because Kitty still refused to divorce him, but he could live with her when he was in America. The tragic year of 1914 was a good one, if only because the Emperor of Japan had written to him asking him to build a new main building for the magnificent Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.
Workers couldn’t believe it when he arrived on site in silk dresses and high-heeled shoes. Until 1922, he more or less lived among them and made a name for himself again with the Imperial Hotel, but when he returned from Tokyo, he had nothing to do in America again. Now the followers of Le Corbusier were on the march, and Frank Lloyd Wright, over 50, was considered a survivor. “You see I am bad, bad to the core,” he wrote to a friend when he sued him for renewed financial difficulties.
But at home at least, things seemed to be falling into place – in 1922 Kitty finally agreed to a divorce. In November the following year, Miriam, whom he had written to in 1914 when he met her that her “gifts to me are a ray of hope in the darkness”, finally became Mrs Wright. She remained so until 1927, although they separated only five months after their marriage.
Wright did not know that Miriam had become a morphine addict and that life with her would be a drama. In court, she accused him of neglecting her and being cruel to her, beating her and telling her she was mean, vulgar, indecent and exploitative. To divorce him? Oh, no, even though she attacked him once with a knife and threatened him once with a gun. And even though Mr Wright already had a new wife.
He met Olga (Olgivianna) Ivanova Lazović at a ballet performance in Chicago. The statuesque 26-year-old Montenegrin born in Cetinje came there with her seven-year-old daughter Svetlana to divorce her husband Vlademar Hinzenburg. Incidentally, she has found herself a new husband, or would have if Wright, 31, were not still married.
Now it was Miriam who was causing him problems. She had stalked her husband and his new chosen one, a disciple of the Armenian guru Georgi Grudjieff, all over the country, threatened them, harassed them by phone and letters, tried to confiscate the Taliesin Olga had moved into in 1925, broke into it and tried to destroy it with an axe …
A few days after Olga gave birth to her daughter Jovana (Iovanna), Wright’s last child, on 2 December 1925, she came to the maternity ward to see “my husband’s child”. The following year, when Olga’s husband claimed custody of their daughter Svetlana, Miriam helped him by reporting her husband for smuggling foreign prostitutes across the border. She and Olga were arrested but the charges were dropped, and Wright could only say to his wife: ‘I don’t think there’s anything more you can say to change what happened. I have nothing to say to you. Whatever I felt for you is absolutely dead – even the anger.”
Mentally and above all financially on the ropes, in August 1927 he managed to negotiate a settlement: he was willing to divorce Miriam for $6,000 in severance pay (about $80,000 today), a trust fund worth $30,000 (about $400,000 today) and $250 in alimony ($3,000 today).
Since he also had to pay these to his first wife and take care of their six children, he was once again out of pocket. It was a good thing he had Taliesin insured, because in April 1925 it burnt down for the third time. Lightning struck the wiring of the new telephone and started a fire. The living area was destroyed again, and the priceless art collection he had brought from Japan disappeared with it.
Wright’s home was given a new look for the third time when he added a balcony and raised the living room ceiling, enlarged the porch and partially glazed it to connect it to the living room, and raised the house by one storey.
He now lived there with his third wife, Olga. In 1928, they finally managed to get married, but money was still a problem. How to solve it? By paying for the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, they came up with an idea. They would invite 23 students to Taliesin, and they would not only study on the property, but also maintain it. In 1932, they put the idea into practice.
Cult of Taliesin
Many students were met with bitter disappointment. They had to grow their own food in the garden, cook their own food and clean up their own garden. They drew plans, made models and supervised the construction of some of Wright’s most important works. They were free labour, but their mentor paid them no attention in return.
“He is incapable of consideration and blind to the good qualities of others,” Austrian student Richard Neutra described him in a letter to a friend. “Nevertheless, I believe that a year in the studio will be worth the sacrifice”, he consoled himself. He described his collaboration with Wright as follows: “In reality, he is a child, but an uneducated child.” His self-absorption was legendary even then. He was once heard singing to himself, “I’m the greatest …”
But then why did they come and stay? “There was so much life and energy in it. He designed everything around him,” explained architect Wes Peters, who in 1935 married Olga’s daughter Svetlana, whom Wright adopted. But Wes was so devoted to the “Taliesin cult”, as outsiders called it, that he left his second wife and their baby for it. Svetlana, pregnant for the third time, was killed in a car accident in 1946 at the age of 29 with her son Daniel. In 1970, Wes married another Svetlana, the youngest daughter of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, who had defected to America in 1967.
Olga arranged the wedding. Since she and her husband opened the school in 1932, she has run Taliesin with a firm hand. She may not have had the skills of her teacher, the guru Georgi Grudjieff, who claimed, among other things, that he could make a woman orgasm by looking across the room, but she was excellent at manipulating and subjugating people.
It only really took off after her husband’s death, but even during his lifetime she forced students to submit to her. They had to sing, dance and play instruments because her guru insisted that this was part of a healthy life. The only good thing was that, bisexual herself, she had no prejudice against same-sex love and gay couples in Taliesin could breathe freely.
It was indeed like a commune, but Wright lived exactly as he saw fit. At the age of 65, he had reached the threshold of his greatest achievements, and so the ridicule heaped on him for his wife’s quirks did not get to him.
He preferred to make another home in Phoenix, Arizona. In 1937, he bought a plot of land cheaply with almost no neighbours. There was a reason why, because there was no water nearby. But Wright was stubborn. He hired a well digger and $10,000 later (about $170,000 today) found what he was looking for. Now he could finally set up his “desert camp” and call it West Taliesin. He spent his winters in large open spaces, furnished with carpets and low chairs to resemble Bedouin quarters.
With the students, of course, because they, all of them wealthy in their own way, sustained his lifestyle. Frank Lloyd Wright was the genius who, among other things, built the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan and the Fallingwater House near Pittsburgh. It was listed by the Smithsonian as one of the 28 places to visit before you die, and has been named the greatest work of American architecture of all time. At the age of 67, Wright conceived of it as partly standing over a waterfall. It was paid for by Edgar Kaufman, the father of one of his students.
The last thirty years were, surprisingly, the most fruitful of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life, and his commune continued to live on under Olga’s leadership even after his death in 1959 at the age of 91. Now there were no more obstacles for Olga. Stalin’s daughter Svetlana later reported that the only way you could live in Taliesin was to submit completely to Olga. Olga hoped to find her late daughter in Stalin’s daughter, but she brought her to Taliesin, introduced her to her former son-in-law Wesley Peters and arranged that they were married three weeks later.
Svetlana did fall in love with her husband, but after three months she wrote to a friend: ‘I am sad that once again, as long ago in my native cruel Russia, I have to force myself to silence, to force myself to be false, to hide my true thoughts and bow my head to false authority. All this is devilishly sad. But I will survive.”
The Montenegrin Olga demanded that everyone flatter her, confess their sins and never contradict her. When Svetlana became pregnant, she demanded that she abort the child because it would interfere with her communication with the dead. Svetlana did give birth to a daughter in May 1971 and named her Olga after her grandmother, but she left soon afterwards. Her husband stayed where he was. “Gosh, what I had to put up with in my life, but for me, the dictator-father was certainly more ‘normal’ in a way than this woman-dictator.”
Olga died in 1985. The end of the story? No way. Before she died, she wished her ashes to be mixed with her husband’s and scattered over West Taliesin. Jovana, the only child Wright had with Olga, decided to grant her wish. Some 25 years after her father’s death, she had his remains exhumed in secret, cremated, and transported to Arizona from the Spring Green he loved so much.
Her half-brother David called it grave-robbing, and other children also objected. Local authorities tried to get the ashes returned to them, but to no avail. Jovana guarded it diligently for many years until a memorial park was built and she was able to fulfil her mother’s wish.
Olga was used to getting what she wanted, but she failed at one thing. When she married Wright, she refused to let anyone talk about Mamá and the tragedy. She wanted to erase it completely from her memory, which is why she refused to open the Taliesin archives. After her death, however, researchers got their hands on them. Wright’s love story with Mamah was brought to life, and interest in Wright’s architectural achievements increased. “Olga would be turning in her grave if she ever heard of it,” quipped journalist Ron McCrea when he thought that Taliesin now even has a guided tour where visitors are told the story of the love of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life, Mamah.
