The Women - 9780670020416

Frank Lloyd Wright's life was one long, howling struggle against the bonds of convention, whether aesthetic, social, moral or romantic. He never did what was expected, and despite the overblown scandals surrounding his amours and very public divorces and the financial disarray that dogged him through his career, he never let anything get in the way of his larger-than-life appetites and visions. Wright's triumphs and defeats were always tied to the women he loved: Olgivanna Milanoff, an exotic, imperious Montenegrin beauty who was a student of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff and was known by Wright's apprentices as "the Dragon Lady"; Maude Miriam Noel, a passionate Southern belle with a mean temper arid a fondness for morphine; the spirited Mamah Borthwick Cheney, tragically murdered at Wright's Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, in 1914; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin, with whom he had six children.
Each of these four women's stories plays out in a surprising, comedic and ultimately poignant manner. Overseeing the action is a handsome young Japanese man, Tadashi Sato, who arrives at Taliesin in the fall of 1932 to begin an apprenticeship with Wright, and who is put to work right away - in the kitchen, peeling vegetables and washing dishes - and whose story provides a lens into the strange and tumultuous world of Taliesin at that time, when Wright and Olgivanna held sway not just over matters architectural, but over everything from the apprentices' diets to their clothes to whom they could choose to date or marry.
T.C. Boyle's account of Wright's life, as told through the tempestuous experiences of the four women who loved him, blazes with the author's trademark wit and invention.