The Women by T. Coraghessan Boyle
44 This must have been especially trying. Wrieto-San was the world’s greatest self-promoter (with the possible exception of P.T. Barnum), and to walk down a street or step into a room without broadcasting the news was pure poison to him.
45 One can’t help wondering where Wrieto-San came up with the funds for this expedition, given that he was in debt for the rebuilding of Taliesin and Miriam’s upkeep at the Southmoor Hotel, not to mention legal fees. In all of 1926, he built only two very minor commissions.
46 Julian Carleton, 1888(?)-1914. Manservant, Barbadian, murderer. See below.
47 Of course, Wrieto-San was the apostle of home, his revolutionary Prairie houses built round a central hearth and the rooms open to one another so as to provide an integrated familial space. “A true home is the finest ideal of man,” he famously pronounced in An Autobiography (but concluded the maxim, rather schizophrenically, I’m afraid, with this: “and yet—well to gain freedom I asked for a divorce”).
48 Baron Kishichirō Ōkura, 1882-1963. Playboy, hotelier, motorcar enthusiast. As president of the Imperial Hotel and son of the head of the investment group formed to fund its construction (Baron Kishichirō Ōkura, the elder, 1837-1928), he was instrumental in awarding the commission to Wrieto-San. I met him twice, at receptions my father gave in Tokyo. He was a sleek, chillingly handsome man who favored Western dress and was interested in two subjects only, as far as I could ascertain: single-malt scotch whiskey and very fast automobiles.
49 I can’t speak for the authenticity of this usage. I have my doubts that the term was commonly employed in the 1920s, except perhaps among votaries of the game of poker—I certainly don’t remember having heard or used it in conversation myself—but O’Flaherty-San assures me of its accuracy. Of course, he wasn’t born until 1941. In a place called Tootler’s Falls, Virginia.
50 More likely it was some combination of grain spirits colored with caramel—or worse. It was possible to obtain la chose authentique from the French Canadian bootleggers who smuggled it across the Great Lakes or the gangsters who employed them, but that was only in theory. Most people—and I was among them—had to settle for the degraded product of amateur distillers, which was often laced with rubbing alcohol or antifreeze and occasionally resulted in blindness, paralysis and even fatalities. In my student days, I once obtained—for twelve dollars a quart—two bottles of what was reputed to be bonded Kentucky bourbon but which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a lethal combination of molasses and turpentine. If you knew where to look, however, sake was always available. Out of the stone jug, with the kanji lovingly inscribed on the round protuberance of its cool little belly.
51 I vividly recall hearing this batrachian vocalizing myself, during my first summer at Taliesin. It is, indeed, a dismal sound, depressing in the extreme, as if the earth were vomiting up its dead.
52 I’ve seen the newspaper clippings. What Miriam is overlooking here—or perhaps “suppressing” is a better way of putting it—is Wrieto-San’s counterattack under the headline WRIGHT HINTS AT SANITY HEARING FOR OUSTED WIFE.
53 House keys, that is. He never carried them, considered them a nuisance, and as for the keys to his various automobiles, the chauffeur of the moment could always be counted on to produce them when Wrieto-San felt like taking a spin.
54 She would have seen for the first time—and, I might add, the last—the garden room and decorative pool, for instance, off of Wrieto-San’s bedroom, as well as the new balcony and second-floor guestroom above the living room and the six-panel screen by Yasunobu (pine, birds, cherry blossoms) he’d installed on the wall beneath it.
55 Svetlana’s education was sketchy, a consequence not only of her constant uprooting, but of her mother’s artistic inclinations and Wrieto-San’s antipathy for formal instruction. Iovanna’s case was even worse. She was functionally illiterate when I met her in 1932 and she did not attend school until two years later, at the age of nine, when she had to be held back from the fourth grade in Spring Green because she hadn’t yet learned her alphabet.
56 Yes, and how much would that lamp be worth today?
57 Wrieto-San’s complaints over the chaos fomented by his six children with Catherine are legendary. For all his talk of the sanctity of family—and the conceit was central to his philosophy, along with a firm belief in independence of spirit, pioneer gumption and a don’t-tread-on-me mentality—he seems to have been the sort of man who preferred family life in the abstract to the actuality. But then what man hasn’t, at least on occasion, found himself deeply disillusioned with the distracted wife, the night alarums and the diaper pail, not to mention the expressive howls and systematic material destruction of the growing child?
58 Judge Levi H. Bancroft, who, along with Wrieto-San’s old friend Judge James Hill, was representing Wrieto-San’s interests in the divorce suit. Both he and Judge Hill were eminently capable men—as capable, some would say, as Clarence Darrow, who’d defended Wrieto-San against an earlier charge of violating the Mann Act (in transporting Miriam across state lines in 1915 for allegedly immoral purposes, if sexual congress between consenting adults on any side of any artificial boundary can be seen as immoral). But then, Wrieto-San always surrounded himself with the best of everything, including people.
59 Miriam, in a fugue of litigious ecstasy, had filed an additional suit against Wrieto-San for involuntary bankruptcy and pressed for his arrest on Mann Act charges, an irony that certainly wouldn’t have eluded her.
60 I’ve often wondered if Wrieto-San chose this pseudonym in honor of Henry Hobhouse Richardson, one of the luminaries of the Arts and Crafts movement, whose bold primitive stonework prefigures not only Taliesin but the Imperial Hotel and the Los Angeles houses as well. Unfortunately, I was never able to ask him, because, as you might imagine, it would have been awkward in the extreme even to make casual reference to this period of Wrieto-San’s life, when he was a plaything of the press, bankrupt and bereft of commissions, the “fugitive architect” fleeing the authorities in all the fullness of his white-haired glory.
61 Wrieto-San, in his ineffably charming and charismatic way, had persuaded the owner of the cottage (a Mrs. Simpson; we don’t have a given name for her) that she needed a vacation for a three-month period so that she might rent him her house, fully furnished, and rent him her housekeeper too. How he paid for this—or rather if he paid for it—remains a mystery.
62 Another of those felicitous American expressions, deriving, I presume, from the odor of suspect fish. Of course, we Japanese, as an island people, have a great respect for the utility of all the creatures of the sea, and we would never dream of preparing a fish for sashimi, sushi or even stock for ramen without either seeing it caught personally or giving it a good, long and thorough sniff. And while this isn’t the place for animadversions, I can’t help saying that what passes for “fresh fish” in America wouldn’t serve as offal for the cats in Japan—and our cats don’t really eat all that well.
63 Wrieto-San is not at his best in these photos, less master of the situation than mastered by it. He seems befuddled, as if he’s just realized that he’s put on some stranger’s coat and hat and taken up an ersatz cane. And I mean no disrespect, but in studying these pictures, I have to say that he looks woefully ordinary, like a podgy shoe salesman wandering the aisles or the owner of a delicatessen who can’t seem to remember what he’s done with the sliced bologna.
64 When I first acquired this term, I kept pronouncing it with an extra syllable, voicing the intercalary e, all but certain it must have been of Norwegian derivation. It is, in fact, a corruption of the Spanish: juzgado, sentenced, from the verb juzgar, to judge. In attempting to make light of what must have been among the most painful periods of his life, Wrieto-San had this to say of his decline and fall: he had gone “From Who’s Who to the Hoosegow.”
65 For five hours, according to the Chicago Tribune. One would like to have been privy to that meeting.
66 Carl Sandburg prominent among
67 Miss Tillie Cecille Levin. Presumably, at this juncture, Miss Levin was more attentive to her needs, both real and imagined, than Mr. Fake.
68 Wrieto-San valued the collection at $100,000, and though, as I say, he continually over-valued practically everything he owned, he was perhaps at least somewhat accurate here, as the government of my country, alarmed at the way in which foreign collectors were depleting the stock of indigenous art, had strictly limited the export of these prints, thus driving up the price of those already in private collections. Hiroshige’s masterwork, Monkey Bridge in Kai Province (Kōyō Saruhashi no zu), an exquisite double vertical ōban, was among the rare pieces up for auction, but Wrieto-San, because this was in effect a fire sale, actually received less for it than he’d paid some years earlier.
69 And how, one asks, did Wrieto-San expect to pay out this amount in cash? Ingeniously, and with the cunning that characterized his financial dealings throughout his life, he persuaded a group of friends to incorporate him—as Frank Lloyd Wright, Inc.—against future earnings, at a cost to each of $7,500. Which, needless to say, none of them ever saw again.
70 Wisconsin law at the time prescribed a one-year waiting period before remarrying.
71 Actually, at this point the bank still owned Taliesin, though Wrieto-San’s friends were negotiating for a grace period with regard to the outstanding debt. He was living with his sister Jennie in her house (Tan-y-deri) on the Taliesin grounds, however, and doing his best to repair damage from yet another fire that had occurred in his absence. (And what is it with this man and fire?)
72 This would have been at the instigation of Albert Chase McArthur, who hired Wrieto-San as consulting architect for the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix for the sum of $1,000 a month, which monies Wrieto-San must sorely have needed at this juncture. It should be said in this connection that while McArthur is officially credited for the design, which makes use of the textile-block construction Wrieto-San pioneered in the Los Angeles houses, anyone with the least sensitivity to architecture can see that this is quite clearly one of Wrieto-San’s buildings in all but name.
73 Niijima, possibly, popular these days with surfers.
74 She was fifty-nine at the time.
75 ARCHITECT WRIGHT MARRIES DANCER, the headlines read.
76 By the corporation, which was soon to go bankrupt.
77 Within three months of their arrival in the fall of 1928, they were off to Arizona (with a party of fifteen, including draftsmen, the cook and Billy Weston and the pie-in-the-sky prospect of a hotel, San Marcos in the Desert, which would, alas, never be built).
78 I wouldn’t want to indulge in amateur Freudianism, but perhaps the trials of these years were what molded her into the unsmiling and unyielding taskmaster of Taliesin, known universally among the apprentices as the Dragon Lady.
79 Woe betide the apprentice who let even one of them go dead on his shift.
80 Including Billy’s son, Marcus, who was born three months after the murder of his elder brother, Ernest, at Taliesin in 1914.
81 This adventure, of course, was to provide the seed for Taliesin West. I have concentrated memories of making the pilgrimage to Arizona each winter, Wrieto-San out front of a procession swollen to seven or eight vehicles and some twenty-seven people, his hair flowing like the fur of a pinniped in a heavy sea, going, as the expression has it, hellbent for leather. He always seemed genuinely surprised, if not shocked, by the presence of other drivers, as if the national matrix of lanes, cart-paths, thoroughfares, boulevards and interstate highways had been created for his use and pleasure alone.
82 1929, that is.
83 Welsh for father. Richard Lloyd Jones, Wrieto-San’s maternal grandfather—father, that is, of the clan—took the fortieth chapter of Isaiah as his personal testament and had Wrieto-San and his sisters memorize it. Its view of human life and endeavor is, I think, especially bleak. There is nothing like it in the Shinto tradition.
84 One of the local women had prepared the body, wrapping it head-to-toe in a pair of linen sheets in order to mask the outrages inflicted on it, the skull cloven, brains loosed, limbs and torso blackened by fire.
85 For Wrieto-San, every building at Taliesin was in a state of flux. When he accidentally set fire to the theater at Hillside one windy afternoon in the thirties (brush, kerosene, poor judgment), he took me aside with a wink and a nod and told me he’d been looking for an excuse to renovate the shoddy old thing for years.
86 Notable among them, the preliminary designs for the Imperial Hotel. Wrieto-San was then negotiating with a representative of the Emperor, using all his charm and persuasion in the hope of landing the commission.
87 Combative as ever, Wrieto-San’s statement to the Weekly Home News reads, in part: “You wives with your certificates for loving—pray that you may love as much and be loved as well as was Mamah Borthwick.”
88 Edward C. Waller Jr., initiator of the project, who’d raised $65,000 against a final reckoning of some $350,000. He was to declare bankruptcy two years later. Since he’d persuaded Wrieto-San to accept stock in the company in lieu of his fee, Wrieto-San was left holding the bag, as they say.
89 Wrieto-San, I’m afraid, was something of a mama’s boy (okāsan ko), and throughout his life, especially in times of duress, he sought the company of women.
90 Again, one wonders how Wrieto-San was able to come up with the financing to purchase materials and employ a cohort of some twenty-five masons, carpenters and laborers, many of whom had to be housed and fed on the premises. I can imagine him working his legendary charm, of course, and perhaps even trading off the sympathetic reaction to Mamah’s death as a wedge to separate friends, tradesmen and prospective clients alike from their resources, and yet still . . .
91 Having left Paris two months earlier in the expatriate exodus following the first Battle of the Marne.
92 Throughout his career, Wrieto-San made a point of arranging meetings in his studio, where he could feel both impregnable and masterful, rather like a tortoise encapsulated in a gilded shell.
93 Miriam was forty-five at the time. It may be interesting to note, for contrast, that Olgivanna was then a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl living in Tiflis with her sister, Hinzenberg and Gurdjieff not yet blips on the horizon. I imagine her fast asleep at that hour—it would have been three a.m. in the Russian province of Georgia—her hair splayed out over the pillow, girlish dreams revolving in her head.
94 See Welsh mythology, the Taliesin chapters of Pwyll Prince of Dyfed, beginning with “The Cauldron of Ceridwen.” Taliesin is often translated as “shining brow,” and Wrieto-San was fond of this designation for his Taliesin, the house on (of) the brow of the hill.
95 The book was Science and Health. Miriam was a devotee of the author’s “curative system of metaphysics” and “spiritual healing.” Wrieto-San, as I understood him, was somewhat more pragmatic.
96 Miriam’s second daughter. She also had a son, Thomas, who was a traveling man of some sort and didn’t seem to have much time for his mother. Or inclination either.
97 Miriam, as I understand her, did tend to be self-dramatizing, though perhaps O’Flaherty-San lays it on a bit thick here.
98 Wrieto-San adopted the square as his symbol because he understood it to represent probity, solidity, the virtues of the foursquare, and, of course, it is testamentary to the rectilinear patterns of his early and middle work. In contradistinction, we Japanese believe the circle to be the ideal form, as it is perfectly harmonious, sans the sharp individual edges of the square. But Wrieto-San was,
99 Why Albuquerque? No one seems to know. But Miriam’s pattern, as has been seen, was to go west rather than east, when the east, one would think, would have been a more natural destination. Perhaps—and I’m only speculating—she was imbued with a residuum of that great American pioneering spirit and a personal sense of manifest destiny.
100 See page 78n.
101 It seems a mystery how two such people could ever willingly come together again. O’Flaherty-San maintains that the adhesive was as much sexual as emotional, but we didn’t discuss the matter in any depth, because as you may imagine, certain subjects are strictly off-limits between the white-haired patriarch of an unimpeachable and time-honored clan (buzoku) and his grandson-in-law, even if—or perhaps particularly if—that grandson is an American.