[SIZE=4]Had to add him because his life was filled with affairs/murder I highlighted the interesting areas.[/SIZE]
Local gossips noticed Wright's flirtations and he developed a reputation in Oak Park as a man-about-town. His large family had grown to six children and the brood required most of Catherine's attention. In 1904, Wright designed a house for Edwin Cheney, a neighbor in Oak Park, and immediately took a liking to Cheney's wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah Cheney was a modern woman with interests outside the home. She was an early feminist and Wright viewed her as his intellectual equal. The two fell in love, even though Wright had been married for almost 20 years. Often the two could be seen taking rides in Wright's automobile through Oak Park, and they became the talk of the town. Wright's wife, Kitty,sure that this attachment would fade as the others had, refused to grant him a divorce. Neither would Edwin Cheney grant one to Mamah. In 1909, even before the Robie House was actually completed, Wright and Mamah Cheney eloped to Europe; abandoning their own spouses and children. The scandal that erupted virtually destroyed Wright's ability to practice architecture in the United States.
Architectural historians have speculated on why Wright decided to turn his life upside-down. Scholars argue that he felt by 1907-8 that he had done every thing he could do with the Prairie Style, particularly from the standpoint of the one-family house. Wright was not getting larger commissions for commercial or public buildings, which frustrated him as it would any highly skilled architect.
Wright and Mamah Cheney traveled extensively throughout Europe. In 1910, during a stop in Berlin, Wright, with virtually all of his drawings, visited the publishing house of Ernst Wasmuth, who had agreed to publish his work there. In two volumes, the Wasmuth Portfolio was thus published, and created the first major exposure of Wright's work in Europe. The later Bauhaus movement's founders claimed to have been inspired by these books.
Wright remained in Europe for one year (though Mamah Cheney returned to the United States a few times) and set up home in Fiesole, Italy. During this time, Edwin Cheney granted her a divorce, though Kitty again refused to grant one to her husband. After Wright's return to the United States in late 1910, Wright persuaded his mother to purchase land for him in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The land, purchased on April 10, 1911, was adjacent to land held by his mother's family, the Lloyd-Joneses. Wright began to build himself a new home, which he called Taliesin, by May of 1911.
On August 15, 1914, while Wright was in Chicago completing a large project, Midway Gardens, Julian Carlton, a male servant whom he had hired several months earlier, set fire to the living quarters of Taliesin and murdered seven people with an axe as the fire burned. The dead were: Mamah; her two children, John and Martha; a gardener; a draftsman; a workman; and the workmanâ??s son. Two people survived the mayhem, one of whom helped to put out the fire that almost completely consumed the residential wing of the house.
In 1922, Wright's first wife granted him a divorce, and the architect was required to wait for one year until he married his then-partner, Maude "Miriam" Noel. In 1923, Wright's mother, Anna (Lloyd Jones) Wright, died. Wright wed Miriam Noel in November 1923, but her addiction to morphine led to the failure of the marriage in less than one year. In 1924, after the separation, but while still married, Wright met Olga (Olgivanna) Lazovich Hinzenburg, at a Petrograd Ballet performance in Chicago. They moved in together at Taliesin in 1925, followed soon after by Olgivanna's pregnancy with their daughter, Iovanna (born December 2, 1925).
On April 22, 1925, another fire destroyed the living quarters of Taliesin. This appears to have been the result of a faulty electrical system.[1] Wright rebuilt the living quarters again, naming the home "Taliesin III".
In 1926, Olga's ex-husband, Vlademar Hinzenburg, sought custody of his daughter, Svetlana. In Minnetonka, Minnesota, Wright and Olgivanna were accused of violating the Mann Act and arrested in October 1926 (the charges were later dropped).
Wright and Miriam Noel's divorce was finalized in 1927, and once again, Wright was required to wait for one year until marrying again. Wright and Olgivanna married in 1928.
Turmoil followed Wright even many years after his death on April 9, 1959. His third wife Olgivanna continued to run the Fellowship after Wright's death, until her own death in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1985. In 1985, following the death of Olgivanna, it was learned that her dying wish had been that Wright, her daughter by a first marriage and herself all be cremated and relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona. During the nearly 30-year period prior to Olgivanna's death, Wright's body had lain interred in the Lloyd-Jones cemetery, next to the Unity Chapel, near Taliesin, Wright's later-life home in Spring Green, Wisconsin. (The Unity Chapel, designed by Joseph Silsbee, should not be confused with the much larger and vastly more famous Unity Temple, designed by Wright and located in Oak Park, IL. Wright was the draughtsman for the design of the Unity Chapel.) Olgivanna's plan to exhume her late-husband and cremate him, her daughter and herself called for a memorial garden, already in the works, to be finished and prepared for their remains. Despite the fact that the garden had yet to be finished, his remains were prepared and sent to Scottsdale where they waited in storage for an unidentified amount of time before being interred in the memorial area. Today, anyone who visits the small cemetery south of Spring Green, Wisconsin and a long stone's throw from Taliesin to look upon a gravestone marked with Wright's name will be visiting an empty grave.[7]
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Originally Posted by GrinReaper
