JOLLY GOOD FELLOWS: THE GURDJIEFF SECT, SEXUAL POLITICS AND OTHER REVELATIONS FROM TALIESIN’S GLORY YEARS
By Ron McCrea The Capital Times
The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin)
September 8, 2006 Friday
ALL EDITION
Just when you think the last word has been written about the life and
times of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, a book like "The Fellowship"
appears.
This new blockbuster cannot be good news for the senior fellows and new
arrivals now struggling to rebuild the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
and its school of architecture.
But it could help tourism.
Cultural sociologist Roger Friedland and historian-architect Harold
Zellman have packed plenty of sex and surprises into 603 pages, while
pretty much avoiding the cheap, tell-all hatchet job and settling
of scores.
This book has a lot of news.
Some of it is steamy — the chapter titled "The Sex Clubs" only begins
to describe the sexual intrigues of the community that one woman said
"made Peyton Place look like Utah."
Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, Wright’s last wife, micromanaged the romances
and couplings of the fellowship, begun in 1932, in part to keep
everyone on the reservation.
She made some gay men marry straight women. She sent some couples
with children away and tried to pay others to have abortions. She
encouraged what came to be called the "merry wives of Taliesin"
to sleep with unattached straight men. "I had them all," bragged one.
Olgivanna was not a stranger herself to gay love affairs, having had
one with literary editor Jane Heap, one of Armenian mystic Georgi
Gurdjieff’s "women of the rope," a group of lesbian disciples. At
Taliesin, with not enough women to go around, Olgivanna encouraged
the young men to try gay sex, on one occasion lining up apprentices,
pairing them up, and sending them out into the Arizona desert to
experiment.
The important role of gay men in sustaining and advancing the fortunes
of Taliesin and Frank Lloyd Wright — it was Edgar Kaufman Jr. who
paved the way for Fallingwater, for example, and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer
who established the priceless archives — is one of the major pieces
of news in "The Fellowship." The authors give Madison’s own Jack
Holzhueter credit for helping to develop this section.
But if Wright was not homophobic, he could be racist (exploding when
he learned that Paul Robeson had been permitted to visit Taliesin)
and anti-Semitic (once suggesting that Taliesin might become known as
"Talestine").
He also could be violent to women and neglectful of children; the
Wrights’ own daughter, Iovanna, was still unschooled and illiterate
at age 9.
But he was a great artist, and, as they say, you wouldn’t want to
live next door to Beethoven either.
The Capital Times figures prominently as a source in "The Fellowship,"
since its founder, William T. Evjue, gave the Wright community a
weekly column and also a weekly radio broadcast on WIBA, which the
paper owned.
But some news in "The Fellowship" didn’t make The Cap Times, like
the fact that four of the fellows were serving time in federal prison
for draft resistance.
And the column did not tell how Gurdjieff and his Institute for the
Harmonious Development of Man insinuated itself into Taliesin and
came to compete with its architectural mission.
Gurdjieff’s agent was Olgivanna, who underwent "voluntary suffering"
as part of her discipleship with him in Soviet Georgia. Gurdjieff’s
toughest test of her character: a demand that she send her 5-year-old
daughter Svetlana away. It broke her heart, but she complied.
Svetlana came to America.
Olgivanna idolized both Gurdjieff and Wright, considering them (and
later herself) bohdisattvas, advanced souls sent to improve the human
race. She drew many of the Taliesin fellows to Gurdjieff’s cause.
Wright’s architecture and "the work" of Gurdjieff, with its sacred
dances and movements, clashed publicly in 1953, when the Gurdjieffians
scheduled a show at Chicago’s Goodman Theater at the same time that
other Wright apprentices were feverishly preparing a major show of
Wright’s work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Olgivanna demanded that two dancer-architects come back from New York
for practice in Chicago and tried to snag an accompanist-architect
as well. The dancers went, but the accompanist refused.
Wright admired Gurdjieff and even allowed Iovanna to study with him
in Paris. But he drew a line. "You are not going to turn this into
a Gurdjieff Institute," he told Olgivanna. "Not while I am alive."
Wright died on April 9, 1959, just short of his 92nd birthday.
The authors note that when her daughter Svetlana died in an auto
accident, Olgivanna was immobilized for months, but "After Frank’s
death, she hit the ground running."
That’s "The Fellowship." Read all about it.
FIRST SHOWING
What: Ron McCrea will host the first local showing of the new,
60-minute BBC documentary, "Frank Lloyd Wright: Murder, Myth and
Modernism."
When and where: Thursday, Sept. 28, 7 p.m., Monona Terrace auditorium,
as part of the Frank Lloyd Wright Lecture Series. Free and open to
the public.
NOTES: E-mail: [email protected]
GRAPHIC: "The Fellowship" describes the entanglements of Armenian
mystic Georgi Gurdjieff (above) with the Taliesin architects. CARMIE
S. THOMPSON/THE CAPITAL TIMES Frank Lloyd Wright celebrates his 87th
birthday (he maintained it was his 85th) at Taliesin on June 9, 1954,
with (from left) daughter Iovanna Lloyd Wright, Katherine Lewis, Mrs.
Kenn Lockhart, Edgar Kaufman Jr. and Olgivanna Lloyd Wright.