Wright's dark side
Frank Lloyd Wright's wife manipulated the * lives of unwitting young proteges of the great architect of the Guggenheim Museum, forcing * and * students to have dalliances with each other and making them do manual labor on her husband's live-in utopian compound.
That's one of the many torrid revelations in "The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship," an upcoming tell-all from Regan Books, the New York Post reports. The 704-page tome by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman is due in bookstores Sept. 1.
Ten years in the making, the book details Mr. Wright's (1867-1959) bipolarity, his veiled anti-Semitism and his love-hate relationship with *. He called them "pansies" and "degenerates" but surrounded himself with them in the 1930s at his reclusive Arizona colony, Taliesin, where studly apprentices roamed the grounds in bathing attire and harem costumes. The book also describes scenes there of nervous breakdowns, drug usage, shady business dealings and interactions with flaky mystics. It also tragically chronicles how Mr. Wright's drug-addicted daughter, Iovanna, tried to kill his wife twice -- once with a meat cleaver -- and ended up in a mental asylum.