By Patrick F. Cannon
As I wrote last week, I’ll be working on a new book on Frank Lloyd Wright’s surviving buildings in the greater Chicago area. As part of my preparation, I’ve been re-reading some of the biographies; and Wright’s own Autobiography, first published in 1932. He was 65 then, without work, and in need of any cash the book might bring.
To put it as kindly as possible, his book was a work of creative invention. From almost the first word of the chapter that describes his arrival in Chicago, he lies about almost every detail. He was unwilling to admit that he got his first job in architecture through his uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones, so he creates a story that asks us to believe that he got that job with the architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee entirely on his own. That Silsbee had designed his uncle’s Chicago church and the Lloyd Jones family chapel in Wisconsin is glossed over.
This is not the place to provide a catalog of Wright’s inventions. Once, when he was called out on one of them, it was pointed out to him that what he had just said couldn’t possibly be true. His response? “Well, there you are.” Then he changed the subject.
Although I was aware of him before I began volunteering at his Home and Studio in Oak Park in 1975, my knowledge was based mostly on his very public persona. I was in high school and college in the 1950s, and Wright’s flamboyant personality seemed made to measure for the expanding television universe. He was interviewed by Mike Wallace, Hugh Downs, and others. With his sonorous voice, he could make the most outrageous statements and get away with them. In one appearance, he was filmed walking up 5th Avenue in Manhattan, pointing out the sins of the International Style with his ever-present walking (or was it a swagger?) stick.
When I first started giving tours of his Oak Park home and other local designs in 1975, many of my fellow volunteers held him in a kind of awed reverence. He died in 1959, and the first of the impartial biographies, Brendan Gill’s Many Masks, wasn’t published until 1987. Since then, other biographies and related works have appeared with regularity. They generally paint a picture of a flawed genius, who created an enduring body of work, while shamelessly exploiting his family, friends, clients, and apprentices.
With the active participation of his third wife Olgivanna, he created what can only be described as a cult at his school of architecture that came to be known as the “Fellowship.” In the photo above, he is surrounded by his devoted students, who not only paid for the privilege of working for him, but did all construction and farm work on the property. His influence over them extended to his pacifist and anti-war opinions. He was a member of American First, and, although he denied it, was influential in causing many of his apprentices to refuse to register for the draft that was instituted just prior to World War II. Three of them subsequently went to prison, and others to conscientious objector camps.
Although he was investigated for his role in this, and was subsequently watched by the F.B.I., he escaped punishment. I doubt if he lost any sleep over it, as he didn’t over the debts he failed to pay throughout a life lived beyond his means. Perhaps the most unforgiveable was the approximately $50,000 (over $1 million in today’s money) that he still owed his friend and benefactor Darwin Martin when Martin – who had been responsible for several lucrative commissions for Wright – died nearly broke in 1935, having lost his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash.
In a review of one of the latest books about Wright, Paul Henrickson’s Plagued by Fire, a British reviewer described Wright as a “cad.” In this country we would perhaps not use that word, but it’s not such a bad description. But we’re inclined to overlook faults in artists of genius. When you look at Picasso’s Guernica, his misogyny isn’t the first thing that comes to mind; or Wagner’s antisemitism when you hear to prelude to “Lohengrin,” or indeed Wright’s character faults when you see Fallingwater for the first time, or enter the rotunda at the Guggenheim Museum, or – as I did many times – walk up into the sanctuary at Unity Temple.
In this era when we’re extremely ready to “cancel” someone for their failings, we should remind ourselves that the artist and his or her work are what matter most the end. “Well, there you are!”
Copyright 2026, Patrick F. Cannon
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I always thought of FLW as an original, innovative architect — one who broke the mold, so to speak, of building design and built houses you’d like to visit but wouldn’t want to live in. But not until your recap of how he invented a persona for himself, not to mention a cult following, did it dawn on me that he may well have been the inspiration for George Costanza, aka wannabe architect Art Vandelay.
Costanza lived by the motto, “It isn’t a lie if you believe it’s true.” In Wright’s case, however, it was indeed true that he was a formidable architect. He didn’t need to prove anything to his doubters. Just look at his work, and well, there you are.
His flippant phrase could have come in handy for weaselly, CYA bureaucrat Anthony Fauci, who created a persona for himself as Science personified, and built a cult following of his own in the press and a good part of the government-funded medical profession. We now know how sinister and damaging his deception was.
It may not have saved his reputation or spared him from being held in contempt of Congress, but it would have been a far better way of confounding his critics if, instead of pleading the Fifth more than one hundred times, he had answered his interrogators with a sly, well there you are! He had a pardon in his back pocket, money in the bank and plenty of supporters ready to defend him rather than be exposed as co-conspirators or worse, gullible dupes.
He might have pulled it off, even if there was no there there.
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