Given the great age that Wright attained and the variety of masks that he assumed from one decade to the next, we tend to think of his years of domesticity with Catherine and the children in Oak Park as amounting to a comparatively brief episode; in fact, the episode embraced what for many people amounts to an adult lifetime-almost 19 years.
One can say of the Wrights without gushing that they were, at the start, an irresistible couple, handsome and energetic and with a touching eagerness to play the role of distinguished grownups, though they were but newly emerged from their teens. In spite of how hard he was working and in spite of the numerous children that Catherine bore (and appeared content to bear), they were bent upon making a mark in the proud little cultural group that had established itself in Oak Park-”Saints` Rest,” as it was mockingly referred to, thanks to its profusion of churches and its aspiration to lofty moral standards.
The young Wrights were conventional in every respect save that of money, which according to Oak Park standards, was to be spent only after it had been earned, with a certain portion of it first to be put aside in the form of savings. The Wrights not only failed to accumulate savings, they lived habitually beyond their means, running up bills all over town in a way that made them the occasion of much head-shaking among their neighbors.
If the Wrights` attitude toward money was a notable aberration in the Oak Park of the `90s, so was their profligacy in respect to childbearing. Few of the ambitious young couples in that community were hurling child after child into the world; the white Protestant upper-middle-class world had achieved a few more or less successful methods of birth control by that time and six or more children were beginning to be regarded as evidence of a deplorable carelessness, not to say lubricity.
The eccentric nature of the ever-burgeoning Wright family is much heightened for us by Wright`s repeated claim to have had no vocation for fatherhood. In his autobiography, he wrote, ”Is it a quality? Fatherhood? If so, I seemed born without it. And yet a building was a child. I have had the father-feeling, I am sure, when coming back after a long time to one of my buildings. That must be the true feeling of fatherhood. But I never had it for my children. I had affection for them. I regarded them as with me-and play-fellows, comrades to be responsible for.” Wright notes that Catherine insisted upon the children calling him ”Papa,” which he disliked. ”There is a stuffy domesticity about the sound applied to the male that was always intolerable to me,” he wrote. And added, more benignly than one might have expected, ” `Father` is tolerable after 50. Papa never!”
Catherine played her several roles as wife, mother, kindergarten teacher, party hostess, patroness of the arts and dutiful daughter-in-law to the dragonish Anna Lloyd Wright with remarkable competence. Long afterward, Wright complained that she hadn`t known the names of his clients, but how on earth was she to accomplish that feat in the midst of accomplishing a dozen others? She had never known any other man and it is plain that she loved Wright ardently and from early in their lives together was willing to put up with a good deal of nonsense from him, including his dandified public preening and posturing, his pursuit of fame along with his pursuit of business, and his increasing attractiveness to other women.
In the running of the household, she depended much upon her mother and her maternal grandmother, both of whom, it appears, were not above enjoying an occasional bitter quarrel with Anna Wright. The children, intelligent and energetic, were encouraged to express themselves, and the turmoil in the house and adjoining studio was continuous; some clients found the experience of visiting the Studio nerve-racking. Others found it hilarious. What did Catherine make of the circumstances that she had helped to invent and over which she was obviously losing control? Perhaps she chose not to examine them, or perhaps, only half-examining them during the few moments of any day that she may have been able to claim for taking thought, she perceived that domestic commotion was the only means at her disposal for tethering, at least for the time being, the hypnotic genius that fate had brought her into passionate collision with.
For an architect still in his 20s, Wright was gaining an exceptional degree of attention. Colleagues many years older than he commended his designs and began to take seriously his utterances on arts and crafts and their relationship to the machine. Daniel H. Burnham, known to colleagues of all ages as ”Uncle Dan,” was the most prominent architect in Chicago in that period.
One evening after dinner together, Uncle Dan turned to Wright and made him an astonishing offer: he would send him and his wife and three children to Paris for the three years that it would take Wright to complete his courses at the Beaux-Arts; he would then treat the Wrights to a two-years` residence in Rome, after which Wright would be brought into the Burnham firm as a design partner. To the disappointment of Uncle Dan, Wright rejected the offer, saying that Sullivan had poisoned his mind against the Beaux-Arts and adding, ”I know how obstinate and egotistic you think me, but I`m going as I`ve started. I`m spoiled, first by birth, then by training and finally by conviction.”
Despite Wright`s penchant for exaggeration, especially in telling anecdotes of which he is the hero, the Burnham offer strikes me as having the ring of truth, in part because Wright ends it with the rueful confession, ”I helped Catherine on with her things and we went home. I didn`t mention to her what had happened until a long time afterward.” No wonder he kept silent, for Catherine, coming from a far wealthier background than Wright`s, would presumably have welcomed that fashionable thing, a European sojourn; moreover, she would have foreseen that, the sojourn ended, a position for Wright high up in the ranks of Burnham & Company would have spelled a lifetime of security for her and her growing family.
Instead, the Wrights remained in Oak Park, with Wright growing ever busier, ever more socially ambitious, and ever more spendthrift in his tastes. ”So long as we had the luxuries,” he would write later, half boasting, half in contrition, ”the necessities could pretty well take care of themselves . . . . This love for beautiful things-rugs, books, prints or anything made by art or craft or building-especially building-kept the butcher, the baker and the landlord always waiting . . . .”
The first additions to the Oak Park house had proceeded one by one out of family needs-a new dining room and kitchen, a servant`s room, a playroom. The Studio, with its entrance terrace immediately off Chicago Avenue, its complex double entrance and hall, its two-story-high drafting room (with a balcony at the clerestory level, supported by a seemingly miraculous disposition of heavy iron chains), its private office and its octagonal library, is of an altogether different order of architectural ambition.
It is laid out with a debonair disregard for the difficulty of its incommodious site and the equal difficulty of attaching it to the house proper. The mazelike entry to the Studio, decorated with sculptures by Richard Bock, implies that the effort of mastering it will provide visitors with a sufficient reward. The building as a whole possesses a dignity unlooked-for in the handiwork of a 30-year-old; one is reminded that genius rejoices to play tricks with time and that Wright, if he was capable of being grave in youth, was no less capable of being playful in old age.
During the last few years, at a cost of $2 million, the intricately joined buildings have been made to look much as they did in 1909; that was the year in which Wright abandoned his wife and children and decamped with his mistress, Mamah Cheney, the wife of a client and friend, Edwin Cheney. Some 10,000 people a year come to visit this shrine, located in a setting of quiet, leafy streets in the still enviably serene and prosperous suburb of Oak Park, just west of Chicago.
Even the most sympathetic feats of restoration carry the taint of an embalmment; nevertheless, the little house and the much larger studio beside it continue to bear plausible witness to Wright`s high spirits and
inventiveness. He was celebrated for the frequency with which, ignoring some task whose completion was already long past due, he would set about reorganizing the furniture in the house and studio, or would knock down walls and ceilings to gain some new and more pleasing esthetic effect.
In those days, the state of both house and studio was one of incessant, fruitful dishevelment, and the hushed decorum of the rooms through which the contemporary public is invited to pass serves to remind us that the mischievous genius who was the occasion for enshrining this house and studio was but a ghost in them for many decades before he died.
Public tours of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio are offered at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Tours are offered
continuously from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. For more information, call 848-1976.
THE ARCHITECT AS PHOTOGRAPHER
Some of the photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright`s home and studio accompanying this article are believed to have been taken by the architect himself.
Wright was an amateur photographer (at a time when photography was not as commonplace as it is today) and had a darkroom above the drafting room in his studio where he did his own developing. He used an 8-by-10 view camera to take his pictures.
Officials at the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio believe he took the photographs of the dining room and the studio, and the family portrait of his wife and son. The family photograph and the portrait of Wright were taken by unidentified photographers. The photograph of the playroom was taken by Henry Fuermann after Wright had left the house.
