The architect Frank Lloyd Wright and a former client stood a few yards apart amid the ashes of a bungalow on a Wisconsin hillside. Neither Wright nor Edwin Cheney looked at the other as their loved ones’ remains were prepared for burial or cremation on that mid-August day in 1914. Wright was grieving for his lover, Mamah Borthwick. Cheney was mourning two children he had with Borthwick from their onetime marriage.
Wright and Cheney had separately been in Chicago when each had gotten the news. The previous day, Aug. 15, a servant at Taliesin, Wright’s famed sanctuary, had set it on fire and attacked the occupants with a hatchet as they fled. Seven people died from their injuries.
“Three days ago, when I last saw him, he seemed perfectly normal,” Wright told detectives about servant Julian Carlton, according to the Tribune. “He must have lost his mind — and yet I cannot believe the news is true.” Carlton, who was taken into custody after swallowing acid, died several weeks later.
Five years earlier, Wright and Borthwick had left their mates and secretly run off to Europe in what Wright called a “spiritual hegira.” The international press called it scandalous, the condemnations continued when they returned, and Wright built the southwestern Wisconsin residence the press dubbed their “love bungalow.”
The pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Oak Park, where the Wright family lived, put Wright in the crosshairs of a Sunday sermon in October 1910.
“When a man who has bound himself to a woman as a life partner sees in another woman something that is more attractive than he sees in his wife, his judgment has become warped and he is on the verge of deeper deeds,” the Rev. George Luccock told his parishioners.
Wright, responding to the community backlash in a statement a year later, referred to himself as “the man” and to Borthwick as “the woman.” Catherine Wright was “the wife,” and Edwin Cheney was “the husband,” in a narrative that reads like a medieval morality play.
“Then the thing happened to them which has happened to men and women since time began — the inevitable,” Wright wrote. “Out of this the so-called bungalow grew on the hillside.”
The Wrights and the Cheneys met as young married couples in Oak Park. Wright’s studio and family home were there, and Catherine Tobin Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney belonged to the town’s Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club.
Their wives’ connection led Edwin Cheney, an electrical engineer, to ask Frank Lloyd Wright to design a home for the Cheney family on East Avenue in 1903. For years, Wright and Borthwick managed to keep from their spouses the relationship that blossomed over his drafting table. But townspeople claimed to have known all along.
“All the club women and the mutual friends of the two families appeared to be just as well posted,” the Tribune reported, “but there was a general understanding all around to keep the facts sequestered as long as possible.”
Something Catherine Wright told the Tribune suggests she hid the truth from herself. “I can name you a number of prominent women of Oak Park with whom he went automobiling, but those trips were purely business matters,” she said. “Those women were architectural clients, and he told me about every one of them.”
She firmly believed that her husband would return to her. In her mind, he was an innocent led astray by a scheming woman.
“He will control his infatuation for her and come home,” she said.
Her dream was sustained by her husband’s request that their 18-year-old son Frank Jr. meet him in Florence, Italy. Catherine Wright hoped it was her husband’s way of asking for reconciliation, but she was mistaken. Wright wanted his son’s help in preparing architectural renderings for a German publisher.
After a year abroad, Wright and Borthwick separately returned to Oak Park. He came first, as the Tribune reported in 1910.
“He walked through the station with his head up and a firm tread,” the Tribune quoted witnesses as saying. “And he was much improved. His black hair is touched with gray at the temples now, and while he was abroad he had it ‘bobbed’ so it hangs down over his collar and just misses his shoulders.”
When Wright showed up at the family home, his wife assumed he had broken up with Borthwick.
“Our family is reunited,” Catherine Wright told a Tribune reporter.” I knew he would come back. He is the soul of honor.”
In fact, Wright had done no such thing. He was there only because Cheney asked his wife and Wright to wait a year before doing anything to sever the two families.
“For a year the woman continued in her household separate from her husband; the man likewise continued in his household separate from his wife,” Wright wrote of that chapter of their story. “All was wretched, all false, all wasted.”
Borthwick passed her time apart translating a book by Ellen Key, a Swedish feminist. The Tribune was struck by the overlap between Key’s advocacy of sexual freedom and Wright’s protest that marriage was slavery. “(Wright’s) contempt for ordinary notions of parental duty is here put in strong terms,” the Tribune wrote of the book.
Wright built a partition straight through his family home. “He lived on one side of it and Mrs. Wright on the other,” the Tribune reported. “Six months later the partition was torn down and it was reported that a full reconciliation had been effected.”
But shortly before Christmas, Wright embarked on a “second hegira,” as the press dubbed it, moving into Taliesin, which he built in 1911. (The bungalow’s purpose, though, went beyond serving as a refuge for Wright and Borthwick. It nurtured his experimentation with architecture and design and is often described as his autobiography in wood and stone.)
Borthwick joined Wright at Taliesin, prompting neighbors to tell the sheriff that he had better do something about the love cottage. Sheriff W.R. Pengally said he wouldn’t tolerate any vigilante violence. He didn’t think Borthwick and Wright’s relationship was all that remarkable.
“I saw them skating over near the first bridge the other day where he carried her over the high water,” he told the Tribune. “She was wearing one of these Mackinac jackets. They seemed to be enjoying themselves as much as two kids.”
For close to three years, Wright and Borthwick lived quietly at the bungalow.
“I have often wondered if they could have gone on forever had they not been blinded by the glow of their love that they saw nothing of the night about them and heard not the rumble of the approaching storm,” John Lloyd Wright wrote in “My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright.”
Instead, Carlton, the servant, turned the lovers’ sanctuary into a killing ground. Some thought it was because he and his wife had been discharged. The house, though, survived the tragedy. It was rebuilt, both then and after an electrical fire in 1925, and became home to an architecture school, which has run into its own troubles.
Even in his grief over Borthwick, Wright realized that a funeral for her “could only be a mockery,” he recalled in his autobiography. So he had some workers dig a grave in his family’s burial ground not far from Taliesin, and his carpenters built a coffin of freshly felled white pine.
He cut down the flower garden that she cultivated and filled the coffin with blossoms that had brought her joy. His son John helped him lay Borthwick atop the flowers.
“Then the plain, strong box was lifted on the shoulders of my workmen and they placed it in our little spring wagon, filled, too, with flowers,” Wright recalled.
“We made the whole a mass of flowers. It helped a little.”
Have a Flashback idea? Share your suggestions with editors Colleen Kujawa and Marianne Mather at ckujawa@chicagotribune.com and mmather@chicagotribune.com.
