The fall 2007 issue of The Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly (vol. 18, no. 4) is devoted entirely to Taliesin, the famous architect’s retreat upon which he had begun construction in 1911 and to which he would invite apprentices to work and live in fellowship with him starting in 1932. (Perched just beneath the crest of a hilltop in southwestern Wisconsin, Taliesin derives its name from the Welsh word meaning “shining brow.”) To the delight of Wright aficionados, The Quarterly overflows with dozens of new photographs of this recently refurbished “national treasure” rendered in bright, luminescent color. One older photograph captures Wright and his third wife, Olgivanna, clothed in fresh white outfits, strolling on an emerald slope that sits within the Taliesin compound (she carries a black parasol to shade her from the brilliant sun). The contrast between this idyllic depiction of Wright within his pastoral wonderland and the repellant characterization of the Taliesin Fellowship as a corrupt and perverse realm could not be sharper. Yet it is exactly in the latter manner that the authors of The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship enlist their considerable combined talents to document in comprehensive fashion the hidden secrets of Taliesin, dragging them out of the metaphorical closet and throwing them into—not illumination—but the deep shadows cast by the exposing light of contemporary reality.

It is not so much the validation that Roger Friedman and Harold Zellman bestow on all those recycled legendary tales of Wright’s egomaniacal hucksterism that bothers the reader. We all know that Wright could be a prevaricating scoundrel. What makes this latest attempt to chronicle Wright’s life and work so unsettling is the unceasing and cheerless sense of doom that the authors cast over the whole of both Taliesins (construction began in 1937 on Taliesin West as Wright’s winter retreat in Arizona), as if they and the Fellowship they housed existed in a perpetual state of preternatural gloom. Even the design of the book—its somber jacket, the black sectional divider pages, and its multitude of tonally dark black-and-white photographs—adds to the dreariness.

Knowing that they possess the means by which to shatter any lingering empathy one might hold for such a deeply flawed architectural genius, the authors, risking resounding condemnation by other Wright scholars, carefully build a formidable bulwark of documentation that is difficult to attack factually but easy to snipe at over matters of interpretation and exposition. Even the most controversial parts of their narrative—the bigotry, the scandals, the deceits, the abuses, the recriminations, the sex clubs—are supported by voluminous citations of interviews, letters, and other accounts that withstand any claims that this book is nothing more than a muckraking campaign to recast Wright’s true persona as morally bereft and his legacy as lifeless. The authors leave no stone unturned in their quest for the untold story and, more importantly, for the substantiation of the underlying motivations of its major protagonists. In addition to the standard archival repositories, they consulted, among others, a sociologist, a dance historian, a musicologist, and a psychiatrist who helped them better defend what they establish from the very start as a journey into the conflicted and battling psyches of Wright, Olgivanna, and her mentor, the Greek-Armenian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff.

The entire thesis of the book is encapsulated early on in the text when the authors quote a passage from Wright’s Princeton lectures in which he talks about ridding the house first of its attic and next of its basement: “Wright was describing his revolutionary Prairie house designs, which eliminated a house’s most hidden spaces—places where memories and the material detritus of the family are stored. But he was also opening an extraordinary window into the fundamentals of his aesthetic—and, beyond that, into his very psyche” (149). The authors allow us to stare shamelessly into the windows they have opened. In a quick survey of Wright’s childhood and young adulthood, they broach the matter of Wright’s sublimated sexual desires. It is not the sort of usual psychoanalytic interpretation by which historians have typically endeavored to explain the maturation of Wright’s distinctive style. While the stories of his mother’s etchings hung above Wright’s crib are still present, Wright’s formative childhood play with Froebel blocks is mentioned only in passing and not until the narration has carried us to the year 1931 when Wright was already in his sixties (164).

That the authors should have approached their subject from not just an alternative but a decidedly unorthodox perspective is not unexpected given their credentials. The architect Zellman is also a “historian of modernist architecture and communitarian movements,” while the cultural sociologist Friedland, the jacket’s back flap tells us, is “a student of the intersections between culture, religion, and eroticism.” Everyone concedes that Wright, in his dress and demeanor, was something of a dandy; but the rather persistent resurfacing of inferences in this book that his behaviors were manifestations of some sort of latent sexual appetite eventually become distasteful.

More tiresome is Gurdjieff, a looming specter throughout most of the book once the authors have introduced us to a young Olga Ivanova Lazovich Hinzenberg, who falls under his hypnotic powers well before she ever meets Wright. If there is one truly epiphanic dimension to Zellman and Friedland’s tale, it is the extent to which this mystic’s peculiar philosophy informed the Fellowship—its foundation and its full sphere of activities—through his instrument, Olgivanna, one of his favored (if not also ultimately traitorous) disciples. Even after Gurdjieff dies, he never entirely departs our consciousness as we read on to the end of the book and learn, for instance, of the titanic struggle that developed between Wright and his wife for control of the Fellowship’s extracurricular agenda (including homosexual couplings and “oriental” dance lessons orchestrated by Olgivanna herself). There is the poignant story of the suicide of Tal Davison, the son of Olgivanna’s confidant, apprentice Kay Schneider Davison. It was Olgivanna’s cruel deployment of a Gurdjieffian “shock” technique on Taliesin’s “lost boy” that backfired and precipitated his self-inflicted fatal gunshot wound. That she was manipulative there is no question. She held her gatherings of Wright’s apprentices while he was away or napping; she pulled them out of the studio to work on her projects; and her domineering control of her husband in his last years made him appear more the doddering old fool than the resilient elder statesmen of American architecture. In many ways, this book is more the story Olgivanna Wright than it is the story of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Nonetheless, the turbid texture of the book settles long enough here and there for us to see clearly down to the old familiar Wright shining through, satisfying our desire to hear once again some of the more favored fables about the ultimate quipster that render him much more eminently human and likeable. “The architect carries his own plans” (299), he tells his apprentice Edgar Tafel when they head off to make a presentation to Herbert Johnson. It is to the authors’ credit that they can reiterate so refreshingly the hackneyed account of Wright’s unchecked bravura as he strolled beneath a test-loaded Johnson Wax Building column. In like fashion, the image they construct of Baroness Hilla Rebay, Solomon Guggenheim’s curator, tripping and “rolling down the staircase [at Chicago’s Union Station] step by step, like a Turkish carpet” (405) after having been deposited there by Wes Peters, is pure lighthearted entertainment at its best. Heartbreaking, too, is the portrait the authors paint of Wright alone in the empty Taliesin drafting room after the death of his stepdaughter, Svetlana Peters, “sitting at a far-off drawing board, lost in design” (415). His personal grieving process revealed in that singularly quiet moment speaks more eloquently to the man’s psyche than all the tabloid-styled assertions found throughout the rest of the book or, indeed, any of his storied self-aggrandizing braggadocio.

And therein lies the rub. The marked contrast between these two very different portrayals of Wright may reflect more of our own character today than his, for we live in an exploitative culture that seems to relish and demand published stories spotlighting the most lurid behaviors of talentless celebrities. It is not that the authors have catered to the basest common denominator of celebrity infatuation, but could this exposé have been written in any earlier era and not been soundly rejected? The manner used to document Wright’s grossest quirks is not pandering, yet it does cunningly expropriate the mechanisms fueling current popular culture in order to drive the story. It represents yet another disconcerting step in the direction toward what might be termed the novelization of history.

The Fellowship reads more like fiction than history. Whole conversations (or what sound like conversations) are fabricated on the basis of recollections that, however essentially accurate, should not always be taken as verbatim quotations. Nevertheless, interjected within them are dialogue descriptors intoned with emotions and motivations—not always the neutral reportage phrasing of a “he said” but on occasion a “she whispered” or a “[he] angrily replied.” Some passages, like one late in the book when Olgivanna threatens to leave Wright and the octogenarian falls to his knees begging her to stay, are so melodramatic that one might confuse them for excerpts from a bad 1950s motion picture—The Fountainhead, for instance. It hurts to see an icon so bowed.

The fictionalization began with Wright himself, who often articulated his perception of the truth of his own life in ways that are intermittently contradicted by the unearthing of the actual facts (consider the matter of his birth year, for instance, which he asserted fell two years later than it actually did). In 1981, Meyer Levin’s novel The Architect (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) borrowed heavily from Wright’s life; although its protagonist bears a different name, he moves among real historical figures such as Louis Sullivan and Jane Addams. Most recently, Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank: A Novel (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007) unabashedly reconstructs a romanticized account of the love affair between Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Either one of these novels is suitable for immediate transfer to celluloid. Like the epic 1997 film Titanic, The Fellowship’s main storyline is bracketed (a prologue and a coda) by the cinematic device of the vocalized reflections of an elderly woman, Rosa, who turns out to be that young girl known by another name who shows up in the middle of the narrative voyage—in this case, as Frank Lloyd Wright’s daughter by Olgivanna, Iovanna. She is the first person (and the last) to utter a word in Zellman and Friedland’s story: “‘It’s a miracle you found me,’ Rosa is telling us. ‘Don’t let them stop you. Don’t let those bastards stop you. Don’t let them tell you I am too ill to talk to you’” (ix).

As The Fellowship rushes to its conclusion, some questions about the extent of the hypocrisy and corruption are answered dramatically, as when, upon the death of Olgivanna, her closets are opened wide to reveal an extraordinarily expensive and colorful wardrobe that leaves one breathless. The darkness seems to lift and we are brought back to a more familiar realm. Yet, for those looking for extended descriptions of post-Wright Taliesin activities, they are largely absent or too dismissive of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s current challenges and accomplishments to be genuinely informative. The same can be said of the bulk of The Fellowship if it is one’s hope to learn from it more about the day-to-day functioning of Taliesin as a working studio. The genesis behind any particular commission, like the Guggenheim, can be quite detailed but primarily as it relates to the materialization of a Gurdjieffian philosophical tenet. Other commissions, like the Price Tower, are hardly mentioned at all.

There are better, less prurient sources of information on the workaday architectural practices at Taliesin. Nevertheless, there is a place even for this account and its detailing of the perverse personal practices within the Fellowship. This dark tale of its hidden lives forms a very different sort of contextual backdrop against which to view Wright’s more public spectacles as he traveled the world to propagate his enlightened architectural visions. Those who fear that this book unjustifiably assails Wright’s character will have to be patient enough for countervailing narratives to come along and right a situation that might seem at the present to have swung too far to one extreme. Meanwhile, the prodigious amount of scholarship that underlies The Fellowship and the seductive manner in which it unfolds have earned this book the right to sit on shelves side-by-side with other great tomes about Wright, but perhaps just not right at the top center.