Books

Having read Loving Frank, I'll never see anything by Frank Lloyd Wright, not a house, not a stained-glass reproduction, not a pen bearing one of his designs, without thinking of Mamah Borthwick Cheney.

Such is the alchemy of the nearly flawless historical fiction that debut novelist Nancy Horan achieves with Loving Frank. Of course, she had a fabulously scandalous real-life story to work from, albeit one that has been neatly written out of most of the writing about, and oddly by, Wright.

In the early 1900s, Mrs. Cheney, married, the mother of two and custodial aunt to a deceased sister's young child, dove headlong into an affair with Wright, himself married and the father of six. The two had met years before, when Edwin and Mamah Cheney commissioned the rising architect to build their house in Oak Park, Ill.

They got reacquainted, and then some, when the Cheneys asked Wright to add a garage. As his affair with Mamah (pronounced "May-muh," a nickname for Martha) blossoms, Frank allows that it will be a stupendously magnificent garage but that it might take years to finish.

When he goes to Europe, Mamah, unable to tolerate her troubled marriage, flees to a friend's home in Colorado. There, she has plenty of time to contemplate what would happen to her life and pastimes, such as library volunteer work, if the affair became public. "No one wants Hester Prynne running the children's story hour," she remarks wryly.

Despite her misgivings, she would never again live with Edwin. From Colorado, she joins Frank in Europe, where she meets the Swedish feminist philosopher Ellen Key. Ms. Key's ideas on "free love" and her radical notion that a marriage without love was as morally reprehensible as divorce would greatly influence Mamah's future decisions. It was through a cache of Mamah's letters to Ms. Key that Ms. Horan says she was finally able to find Mamah's voice, after years of previous research had yielded unsatisfactory results.

Edwin Cheney eventually granted Mamah a divorce; Catherine Wright, however, steadfastly refused to divorce Frank Lloyd Wright (until 1922, long after his affair with Mamah ended) and maintained he would return to her.

Society's horrified reaction to Mamah and Frank's liaison caught up with the couple in Europe, via front-page stories in the Chicago press that clearly cast Catherine as martyred victim. One famous quote, which appeared in headline type on the front page of the Nov. 7, 1909 Chicago Sunday Tribune, had her referring to Mamah as a "vampire" who had lured the innocent Frank astray.

At one point, Frank leaves Mamah in Europe and briefly returns to Catherine. But when Mamah returns to the U.S., Frank sets about building her something akin to the marvelous Italian country villas they had fallen in love with, a notion that eventually became one of his signature creations: Taliesin in Spring Green, Wis.

Ms. Horan, who lived for 24 years in Oak Park, displays a remarkable gift for weaving in historical nuggets and sumptuous period detail. She brings the voices of Mamah and Frank alive with imagery and quotes that may be mostly her imagination but sound resoundingly authentic.

The end of the affair will shock and horrify those who don't already know the story. For those who don't, they'd do well to avoid Googling "Mamah and Frank" before finishing the book.

After all these years, the real scandal is that Mamah Cheney never got her due. She was quite possibly the love of Frank Lloyd Wright's life, and she certainly influenced his heart, mind and work. Loving Frank is a fitting legacy of her devotion. Ms. Horan has done Mamah proud.

Nancy Horan

(Ballantine Books, $23.95)

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