The Women (73 page)
14
Of course, O’Flaherty-San is flexing his imagination here, trying to see things as Miriam would have seen them. I suspect the driver was what is known as a Chicano, a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent—or, perhaps, as my Spanish dictionary has it, a
caudillo,
a member of the Latin American ruling class whose blood remains relatively undiluted, making for fairer skin, but one wonders what such a man would be doing behind the wheel of a cab. On the other hand, he may have been Italian, after all.
caudillo,
a member of the Latin American ruling class whose blood remains relatively undiluted, making for fairer skin, but one wonders what such a man would be doing behind the wheel of a cab. On the other hand, he may have been Italian, after all.
15
Née Caruthers, 1870- ?. A friend of Miriam’s youth in Memphis. They remembered each other’s birthdays and corresponded frequently, but never more voluminously or passionately than in the first few years of Miriam’s marriage—at fifteen—to Emil Noel, scion of a distinguished Southern family, who took her off to Chicago where he became a decidedly inartistic functionary at Marshall Field’s.
16
La Noire idole, Étude sur la Morphinomanie
, by Laurent Tailhade. Paris: Leon Vanier, 1907. A defense and celebration of morphine, written to counter the sensationalism of Maurice Talmeyr’s
Les Possédés de la morphine
, which chose to view the use of this medicinal drug in what Tailhade considered an erroneous and negative light. In Miriam’s defense, it should be said that during her days in Paris—roughly 1904-1914—the use of morphine was widespread, particularly in fashionable and artistic circles, and was considered, on the whole, no more remarkable in a young woman than smoking, wearing trousers or imbibing cocaine-infused beverages like the wildly popular Vin Mariani.
, by Laurent Tailhade. Paris: Leon Vanier, 1907. A defense and celebration of morphine, written to counter the sensationalism of Maurice Talmeyr’s
Les Possédés de la morphine
, which chose to view the use of this medicinal drug in what Tailhade considered an erroneous and negative light. In Miriam’s defense, it should be said that during her days in Paris—roughly 1904-1914—the use of morphine was widespread, particularly in fashionable and artistic circles, and was considered, on the whole, no more remarkable in a young woman than smoking, wearing trousers or imbibing cocaine-infused beverages like the wildly popular Vin Mariani.
17
Actual name. No need really to comment on these absurd juxtapositions of function and fate, but I did once consult a dentist in New Haven by the name of Dr. Hertz.
18
From 1914 to 1923. Wrieto-San took her up after the death of his previous mistress and first moved her into Taliesin in 1915, though he was still married to his first wife, Catherine, who refused to grant him a divorce. As indicated above, the people of the community—simple types, holding fast to their rustic mores and easily manipulated by tub-thumping editorial writers and backwoods preachers—were scandalized, treating Wrieto-San as a pariah. This animus may well have precipitated Wrieto-San’s decision to take on the commission for the Imperial Hotel and move—with his mistress—to Japan, a far more compliant and civilized country.
19
Metaphorically speaking, that is. At this stage of his life, in late middle age, Wrieto-San was growing stocky, devolving into the Welsh farmer he was born to be. By my reckoning, his shoulders were no wider than average.
20
To say the least. Typically his acolytes were allowed no more than four hours sleep a night and they spent the remaining twenty in the Master’s service, putting themselves through a routine of hard physical labor, dance movements and spiritual and psychological exercises designed to awaken them from the death-in-life of the closed consciousness. Some would call it slave labor, but in the end it wasn’t much different from what Wrieto-San would expect from his apprentices, though we did sleep, on average, an hour or two longer. And we didn’t dance. Not if we didn’t want to.
21
The Packard? I know Wrieto-San had one of these automobiles in 1929, a touring car he took with him to Arizona, but I’m not certain of the provenance of this one. Perhaps it was the Cadillac in which he fled to Minnesota in 1926 to escape prosecution on Mann Act charges. In any case, Wrieto-San changed cars the way most men change socks.
22
Amanatto,
made from adzuki (red beans). My personal favorite are
chitose,
sweet-bean dumplings covered with pink and white sugar representing the glow of sunrise and snow on Mount Fuji. Each year for Setsubun my mother would make tray after tray of them, even when we were living in Washington, and allow my brothers and me to gorge on as many as we could hold. Which was fewer than you might think—bean paste is surprisingly filling, especially when it’s been sweetened to perfection.
made from adzuki (red beans). My personal favorite are
chitose,
sweet-bean dumplings covered with pink and white sugar representing the glow of sunrise and snow on Mount Fuji. Each year for Setsubun my mother would make tray after tray of them, even when we were living in Washington, and allow my brothers and me to gorge on as many as we could hold. Which was fewer than you might think—bean paste is surprisingly filling, especially when it’s been sweetened to perfection.
23
La Miniatura, constructed in a ravine in Pasadena, was especially problematic. As were the flat roofs of all four of these unique, Mayan-inflected concrete-block houses, architectural treasures all. Leakage was to be expected—it was the fault of the climate, Wrieto-San would insist, nine months of desiccating sun, three months of monsoon rains—but he did personally see to the flashing for Mrs. Alice Millard, chatelaine of La Miniatura.
24
While he may have been the world’s greatest architect, Wrieto-San lacked expertise when it came to electrical devices. Half the wiring at Taliesin was jury-rigged and we were forever watching a lightbulb sizzle in the socket or plugging in a lamp or radio to the sound of an explosive pop and the odor of scorched wires.
25
No surname available. No one seemed to recall anything about him, except that he was called Mel.
26
One wonders if Wrieto-San ever stopped to think what he was doing. To create the fiction of Olgivanna as his housekeeper and almost immediately impregnate her begs the question.
27
By apprentices.
28
Martha (Mamah) Borthwick Cheney, 1869-1914.
29
A considerably inflated figure, it seems to me. But then Wrieto-San was always over-valuing his collections—his Japanese woodblock prints (
ukiyo-e
) especially—in order to raise money against them as a sop to the vast armies of his creditors.
ukiyo-e
) especially—in order to raise money against them as a sop to the vast armies of his creditors.
30
Three mistresses, three Taliesins. One can only imagine how Olgivanna must have felt with regard to the line of succession. Given her private education, certainly she must have been acquainted with Henry VIII.
31
I don’t know how far this homily would go in assuaging the fears of a young girl morbidly afraid of lightning, but I had it from a reliable source—Svetlana herself. And she was a perfectly well-adjusted (and quite fetching) girl in her teens when I knew her at Taliesin. Of course, she did run off at seventeen to elope with Wes Peters, incensing Wrieto-San.
32
True enough. Wrieto-San employed the same subterfuge with regard to Miriam’s role in the household when he moved her in ten years earlier, even going so far as to draw up a contract putting her wages at $60 a month, but it proved transparent. Within days, the papers were decrying the architect’s continued flaunting of convention, denouncing Taliesin as a “Sin Nest” and “Love Bungalow” and the like.
33
Jasper J. Jesperson, 3720 Figueroa, Los Angeles, California. Private Investigations of a Discreet Nature.
34
An indication that Wrieto-San was attempting to be discreet, if not deceptive. In recent years, he’d come to prefer the Congress, on Michigan Avenue (an undistinguished edifice, really, built in 1893 as an annex to Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Building across the street), perhaps because it was
the
place to be seen, its Pompeian Ballroom attracting the smart set as well as Chicago’s social elite. I never stayed there myself, even in later years when I could easily have afforded it—the only time I spent a night in Chicago during my apprenticeship was when Daisy Hartnett and I were able to get away on the pretext of her mother’s illness. The hotel we chose was inconspicuous, to say the least. And a whole lot cheaper than the Congress.
the
place to be seen, its Pompeian Ballroom attracting the smart set as well as Chicago’s social elite. I never stayed there myself, even in later years when I could easily have afforded it—the only time I spent a night in Chicago during my apprenticeship was when Daisy Hartnett and I were able to get away on the pretext of her mother’s illness. The hotel we chose was inconspicuous, to say the least. And a whole lot cheaper than the Congress.
35
Miriam was noted for the originality of her dress.
36
Magnesium oxide. Remember magnesium oxide? The famous photograph of myself and three other apprentices leaning over Wrieto-San’s shoulder as he plied the tools of his trade was taken during the flashbulb era, of course, but I still have the photograph my father insisted I pose for in commemoration of my return to the United States some four years earlier. The picture shows an earnest, slim (I wish it were so now) young man in jacket and tie and formally lubricated hair who is about to experience a coughing fit as the cloud of magnesium dust engulfs him on a wayward gust off the San Francisco Bay. I believe I spat up white phlegm for a week.
37
This was a private ceremony, in November of 1923. The reporter’s confusion may allude to Miriam’s comments to the press in 1915, shortly after it was discovered that she had moved into Taliesin as Wrieto-San’s mistress. At that time she quite forcefully expressed her contempt for the institution of marriage (“Frank Wright and I care nothing for what the world may think. We are as capable of making laws for ourselves as were the dead men who made the laws by which they hoped to rule the generations after them”).
38
As will be seen below, the yellow press of the day came to refer to Wrieto-San and his “affinities” in a kind of shorthand nomenclature, so notorious were their affairs and so public the airing of their laundry, as the saying goes.
39
Precise derivation of the nickname unknown. A Montenegrin endearment?
40
She’d allegedly been jailed for a brief period in Paris after attacking her ex-lover with a knife, and from the beginning she made it known to Wrieto-San that she was not to be trifled with. She kept a pistol. And she firmly believed that her scarab ring was invested with the power to reconcile her accounts in the supernatural sphere, almost in the way of the Voodooists of Haiti and New Orleans.
41
Vladimir Lazovich, a shipping agent living in Queens, New York. Olgivanna’s brother. Not to be confused with Vlademar, her former husband.
42
For Wrieto-San an uncharacteristic emotion.
43
Catherine “Kitty” Tobin Wright (1871-1959), Wrieto-San’s first wife. They married, against all sense and advice, when he was twenty-one and she just out of high school. The children—Lloyd, John, Catherine, David, Frances and Llewellyn—came in rapid succession, like plums dropping from a tree. By all accounts, Wrieto-San seemed bewildered by them. It is unlikely that he would have given much thought or consideration to Catherine’s pregnancies, beyond the obvious financial and architectural exigencies to which they gave rise.
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”).
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.
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.
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