The Mad Sculptor (13 page)

By the spring of 1929, however, he found himself longing for more fulfilling ways to exercise his artistic gifts. Like other young sculptors before him, he was an ardent fan of the eminent Chicagoan Lorado Taft, responsible for some of the city’s most impressive monuments. He had read captivating accounts of Taft’s famed atelier
on the grounds of the 1893 World’s Fair. In the first week of May 1929, Bob packed up his ever-growing picture collection, along with a sample of his work—a small plaster bust of Charles Lindbergh—and hopped a freight train bound for Chicago.

There were some odd affinities between Lorado Zadok Taft and the former Fenelon Arroyo Seco Irwin, beginning with their parents’ habit of bestowing highly eccentric names on their offspring. Lorado and his siblings—his brother Florizel and sisters Zulime and Turbia Doctoria—were the children of Don Carlos Taft, a Congregational minister and teacher of geology at the University of Illinois (then known as Illinois Industrial University). Taft traced his fascination with sculpture to an incident that occurred in 1873, when a shipment of carelessly crated statues, destined for the university’s new art museum, arrived from Europe in badly damaged condition and thirteen-year-old Lorado was called upon to help his father reassemble them.
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After graduating from the university in 1879, he spent four years in Paris, mastering the traditional techniques of clay modeling at the venerable École des Beaux-Arts. Back in America, he eked out a living with whatever odd sculpting jobs he could land: everything from death masks and parlor statuettes to bas-relief fireplace screens and butter sculptures for county fairs. Gradually, as his reputation grew, he won larger and more lucrative commissions—portrait busts of prominent citizens, Civil War monuments, and other public memorials. None of this work, however, was especially fulfilling to a man with Taft’s exalted sense of calling, his determination to improve his fellow citizens by exposing them to the glories of classical art—statuary in particular.

His breakthrough came in 1893 when, at the invitation of Daniel Burnham, chief of construction for the Chicago’s World Fair, he helped design the facade of the Horticultural Building, one of the architectural splendors of the great “White City.” Other major commissions quickly followed: large-scale public monuments done in the classical Beaux Arts style and reflecting Taft’s belief that the purpose of art “was to convey a noble message, to teach, to uplift.”
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Typical of his lofty, allegorical approach was
The Solitude of the Soul
, a group of four idealized nudes—two male, two female—who, clutching at one another’s hands as they weave their way around a central core of stone, symbolize the poignant “truth that each one of us, despite the best will on all sides, must pass through life more or less alone.”
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As important to Taft as his sculpture was his role as cultural missionary—“an evangelist preaching the gospel of art,” in the words of his brother-in-law, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hamlin Garland.
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When he wasn’t in the studio, Taft was on the road, delivering lantern-slide lectures on art history and related subjects to rapt audiences throughout the Midwest and beyond. In his popular “clay talks”—performed, by his own estimate, more than 1,500 times in virtually every state of the union—he would set up a mock studio on stage and sculpt the portrait bust of a “Grecian beauty,” explaining the process of clay modeling as he went along. For more than four decades, he also taught classes at the Art Institute, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois. His lectures were collected in various volumes, and in 1903 he published his authoritative
History of American Sculpture
, which remained the standard text on the subject for more than fifty years.
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In 1906, Taft, needing a larger workplace for his increasingly imposing commissions, took a lease on an abandoned brick stable on the Midway Plaisance. Almost at once, he began expanding the space by annexing a pair of frame barns. Eventually, the structure housed thirteen separate studios; a roofed courtyard with a fireplace, fountain, and sunken goldfish pond; and two dormitories for his growing corps of assistants.

For the next two decades, Taft’s Midway Studio served as a mecca for aspiring sculptors throughout the country. Hardly a week went by without letters arriving from hopeful young artists, pleading for admission to his atelier. Others simply showed up at his door. No one with real talent was turned away by Taft, who cherished his role as mentor. Those accepted into Taft’s “studio family,” as he called it, could scarcely believe their good fortune. “If you can imagine yourself
transformed into a place people call Heaven, that will give you some idea of how I felt,” wrote the renowned sculptor and medalist Trygve A. Rovelstad, recalling his own induction into that privileged realm. “My dream had been realized.”
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When Bob first stepped through the front entrance of the Midway Studio on a radiant morning in May 1929, he found himself in an enclosed, cement-floored courtyard flooded with sunshine from a large roof skylight and suffused with the odor of damp clay, plaster, and stone dust. At the far end of the space loomed a statue that he immediately recognized from various magazine illustrations as the full-scale plaster model of Taft’s monumental
Fountain of the Great Lakes
—a dramatic grouping of five graceful maidens, allegorical symbols of the “inland seas,” each bearing a large scalloped basin.

No one was in sight, though the studio was clearly not deserted. From behind closed doors came the sounds of a busy workplace: hammering, footsteps reverberating on the stone floor, the slapping of clay upon armature, somebody whistling one of the popular tunes of the day, “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine.” All at once, the door to Bob’s right flew open and out strode a strapping young man, floppy cap on his head, long workman’s apron over his coveralls, his hands caked with clay—clearly one of Taft’s assistants. Spotting Bob, he asked if he could be of help, then offered to escort him to Taft.

They found him in the main workroom, supervising a half dozen of his helpers who were working on the figure of a colossal armored knight, a few perched on ladders, others on a wooden scaffold surrounding the half-finished statue. Tall, straight-backed, and still strikingly handsome in his late sixties, the elderly sculptor cut an elegant figure even in his shapeless linen smock. By contrast, Bob—who had hoboed his way from California—looked so unkempt that Taft initially took him for a “tramp.”
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“Honored to meet you, sir,” said Bob, extending his right hand. “I’ve come two thousand miles to study with you.”

After examining the sample that Bob had brought along and declaring
it “the best head of Lindbergh he had ever seen,” Taft invited him “to come and visit the Midway Studio for a week, and see how he should like the studio family, and how it would like him.”
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Between his innate abilities and the skills he had acquired during his year-long apprenticeship with Romanelli, Bob had no trouble impressing the members of Taft’s atelier and was quickly taken on at a pay of forty dollars a week. Besides his energy and raw talent, there was something else about the fresh-faced young sculptor that Taft warmed to. A product of the provincial West whose tastes ran to nineteenth-century neoclassicism, Bob cared nothing about avant-garde art—a sentiment he shared with the hidebound Taft, who viewed modernism with absolute disdain, deriding the work of Matisse, Braque, and their peers as “puerile effrontery,” “willful bungling,” and “sheer imbecility.”
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Within a short time, Bob had so worked his way into the older man’s affections that Taft began to regard him as his protégé. While his other assistants bunked in the barnlike dormitories, Taft found lodging for Bob at the home of his widowed stepmother, Mary.
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With forty dollars a week in his pocket—roughly equivalent to four hundred today—Bob felt prosperous for the first time in his life. He treated himself to a snazzy new wardrobe and, during his free hours, took advantage of the many leisure-time opportunities Chicago offered a footloose young man. A lifelong boxing fan whose ever-growing picture collection included dozens of photos of professional prizefighters, he attended matches whenever he could. He was particularly enamored of German heavyweight and future world champion Max Schmeling—“the best-looking man in the world,” in Bob’s estimation. He also enjoyed the movies and would see anything starring his favorite actor, the matinee idol Ramon Novarro, known to his swooning admirers as “Ravishing Ramon.” To Bob, Schmeling and Novarro (who would ultimately meet a grisly death at the hands of a pair of male hustlers he had brought home for sex) embodied opposite poles of his own character. “I have two sides to my nature,” he would later explain. “One is that I like force, and that’s why I like Schmeling. The other side of my nature is very spiritual—there’s
something very spiritual about Novarro. He is very much like Sir Galahad or Tristan.”
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Bob’s less spiritual inclinations found an outlet not only at the weekly fights but also in the city’s many brothels and burlesque houses. He would always remember a stripper named Sally Swan, endowed with “the most beautiful breasts I ever saw in my whole life. Her breasts were so big that they touched in the middle and yet they didn’t hang down one bit.” A “beautiful tableau” of topless women costumed as Indian squaws, one of the highlights of a show at the Star and Garter burlesque house, also left a lasting impression.
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When the weather turned warmer, he liked to swim in the lake. There was one stretch of beach he particularly enjoyed, a secluded spot on the South Shore where people routinely went skinny-dipping. One sweltering afternoon in midsummer, as Bob later told the story, he was lounging there naked when another man—blue-eyed, blond-haired, and “sort of a fairy”—“swam towards me and came over to me and without warning said to me, ‘Can I suck your cock?’ ”

“So I gave it to him,” Bob related. “I just said, ‘There you are, go to it,’ and he did it. I just sat there and enjoyed it. I came once and he just swallowed it up.”

Bob—who’d been “Frenched” by only one person before, the young prostitute in Los Angeles—decided that oral sex “was a million times nicer with a girl.” Still, he had to admit that getting “sucked off by that fellow wasn’t so bad.” Of course, he would never do anything like that himself. It was one thing to be on the receiving end of the act. But performing fellatio on somebody else was “an abominable business,” “the lowest and dirtiest thing a guy could do.” Before he would “suck somebody else off,” he would “kill himself.” If there was one thing that made Bob Irwin “so goddamned mad” that he was ready to kill anybody who suggested it, it was being mistaken for that most loathsome of all creatures, a “queer.”
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For a while, everything seemed to be going Bob’s way. Though his landlady, Mrs. Taft, was “so old and utterly wrinkled” that Bob found her “sort of repelling,” she treated him so kindly that
he would forever feel a filial tenderness toward her.
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Lorado himself—“Rady” to his intimates—continued to take a fatherly interest in him. When the Steuben Club, a 2,500-member organization of prominent German-American citizens, was looking for a sculptor to make a bust of Max Schmeling, Taft recommended Bob. The club’s vice president, Judge Walter W. L. Meyer—a power in the Chicago Democratic machine—was so pleased with the result that he offered Bob an even greater opportunity: the chance to do a portrait bust of New York State governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was scheduled to speak at the Steuben Club in the fall. There was already talk of a Roosevelt run for the presidency in the 1932 elections, and Bob, as he wrote in a letter, could foresee a glorious future for himself should FDR agree to pose for him: “If he did get elected, I could be personal friends with the President of the United States, with all kinds of political pull & right in line for a lot of commissions!”
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Bob had already done a bust of the man Roosevelt would ultimately defeat, Herbert Hoover. When a friend of Lorado Taft’s, a fellow named Wardlaw, sent a photo of the bust to the White House, Bob received a personal reply from the president’s wife, Lou Henry Hoover, commending him “for the high order” of his work. “You are indeed fortunate to have been recognized by such a man as Mr. Taft,” Mrs. Hoover continued, “and I hope that you will work long and hard and some day be a great sculptor.”
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For the first time in his life, Bob also had a large circle of friends. Taft’s quiet Hyde Park neighborhood was full of young men Bob’s age who shared his love of boxing. One of them owned some boxing gloves, and on warm summer days, they would gather in this fellow’s backyard and, stripping to the waist, hold amateur matches. Bob, proud of his physique and fighting prowess, almost always emerged victorious.

Some evenings, Bob and his buddies went to the Trianon in the hope of meeting girls. A palatial ballroom with mock-Versailles decor and a white maple floor big enough to accommodate more than a thousand twirling couples, the Trianon, situated on the South Side at Cottage Grove and East 62nd, was Chicago’s classiest dance hall.
It was there, sometime in late summer 1929, that Bob met Alice Ryan.

Apart from her age—twenty-two—and her love of the Charleston and fox-trot, virtually nothing is known about Alice. Bob himself assumed she was “fast,” since she readily accompanied him back to his room on one of their first dates. When he began to “neck with her,” however, he discovered that she was really “quite maidenly.” As soon as he fondled her breasts, she burst into tears and exclaimed, “Oh, you men are all alike.” Bob immediately desisted. Though his sex drive was as strong as any other young male’s, he was happy to keep their relationship platonic since making love to Alice was far less important to him than enlightening her about the great truth he had discovered: the awesome potentialities of visualization.