Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (20 page)

Jorgensen's celebrity status has faded over the decades, but her legacy has not. In her pioneering quest to embrace her true identity, Jorgensen forged a path for millions of other people. Although she was accused many times of masquerading as a female, “the real masquerade would have been to continue in my former state. That, to me, would have been living the lie,” she wrote. “I found the oldest gift of heaven—to be myself.”

I
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UNE 1943,
F
RANK
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received an invitation he could not possibly pass up: his first commission in New York City. Hilla Rebay, longtime art adviser to businessman and collector Solomon Guggenheim, had sent the famed architect a letter asking him if he would design a new museum for Guggenheim's expansive collection of modern art, including abstract paintings by Chagall, Delaunay, Kandinsky, and Klee. “I need a fighter, a lover of space, an originator, a tester and a wise man,” Rebay wrote. “I want a temple of spirit—a monument, and your help to make it possible.”

In many ways, Wright was the ideal man for the job. Then 76, the flamboyant architect had been rousing the design world with
his bold and innovative buildings for more than 50 years. His artistic vision of “organic” architecture had produced breathtaking structures that melded with nature in a way never seen before. While others erected high-rises ambushing the sky, Wright built light-filled sanctuaries hugging the hills. Everything was novel. In his first independent commission, the Winslow House, built in River Forest, Illinois, in 1893, Wright defied the vertical bent of the time, building a horizontal home that would become an integral element of his trademark style. With Fallingwater, the dramatic retreat he constructed in Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains in the late 1930s, Wright accomplished the unthinkable: stretching a 5,330-foot residence over a 30-foot waterfall.

But as Guggenheim and his staff would quickly discover, Wright's extraordinary talent was intertwined with a supreme narcissism that played out in myriad ways with his clients. Rooted in nonconformity, the maverick architect pursued his artistic convictions with little concern for the utilitarian matters of stability, practicality, and cost. Organic simplicity and aesthetics mattered above all else, and Wright pushed the limits, using nontraditional materials and unusual designs to achieve his ideals. His buildings were notorious for their physical defects, including inadequately heated rooms and drooping beams. Leaky roofs, an unwelcome feature of his flat-topped buildings, were practically an architectural insignia. Even Wright's most resolute admirers could not help but pay homage to the depths of what sociologist and architecture critic Lewis Mumford described as Wright's “colossal self-admiration.”

Wright's ego did not wane as he aged—and indeed, took center stage throughout the planning and construction of the Guggenheim, exasperating everyone from Guggenheim himself to the contemporary artists whose works would be displayed. The
architect's early designs violated building codes and prompted ongoing feuds over excess expenses. It was Wright's conception of the museum, however, that fueled the greatest aggravation. Wright had made it clear that he wanted to “do away with the stilted, pretentious grandomania of the old-fashioned ‘art exhibit,' ” as he put it in a letter to Guggenheim. But his new-fashioned design was its own brand of grandomania. Rather than prioritize the art, Wright's plans required that the paintings be displayed at an angle to accommodate his dramatic and predominant spiral walkway. The project soon raised a fundamental question about what the museum would be showcasing: modern art or Wright's ego?

In December 1956, shortly after construction began, 21 artists, including Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, signed a letter stating that Wright's design indicated “a callous disregard” for adequate viewing of works of art. Ever confident, Wright paid little heed to his critics. “Somebody said that the museum out here on Fifth Avenue looked like a washing machine,” he told Mike Wallace in a television interview a year later. “But I've heard a lot of that type of reaction, and I've always discarded it as worthless. And I think it is.”

Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the most self-promoted and celebrated architects in history. Impertinent, pioneering, and dramatic, Wright embraced his ego throughout his life, used it to get ahead, and promoted it to the world without an ounce of modesty. Plenty of people are narcissistic. Wright's behaviors line up with a far more deeply entrenched mental health diagnosis: narcissistic personality disorder. “Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility,” he famously said. “I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.”

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fiddled with the truth—how he got his jobs, how much his buildings would cost, even the date of his birth. Records show that he was born on June 8, 1867, but Wright later declared the year to be 1869, presumably because he wanted to appear younger in his elder years. His birthplace was Richland Center, a Wisconsin farming town. But Wright was vague and often tight-lipped about the location, most likely because it betrayed his humble beginnings; to this day nobody is sure of the precise address. The architect even altered his middle name, changing it from Lincoln to Lloyd, a tribute to his mother's family, the Lloyd Joneses, who had emigrated over stormy Atlantic waters from Wales to America in the 1840s.

Wright's father, William Carey Wright, was a widower with three young children when he married Anna Lloyd Jones in the 1860s. Charming and well liked, William was “one of life's darlings,” according to his son's biographer Meryle Secrest. He was admired for his many talents and avocations—singing, playing the piano, practicing law (despite having no degree), and preaching. Highly skilled as an orator, he even gave a eulogy for Abraham Lincoln in Lone Rock, Wisconsin, in April 1865. Anna, a schoolteacher in her mid-20s and one of ten children, was a headstrong woman who took pride in her lineage of stoic and hard-working farmers. She strode like a man, Frank later wrote in an autobiography, refused to wear corsets, read Lowell and Longfellow to her children, made pie without peeling the apples, and cherished the beauty and sanctity of nature.

William Wright was more than a decade older than his second wife; Anna, at five foot eight, was taller. Those were the least of the couple's incongruities. Raised in New England, he was a Baptist with English roots; she was born in Wales and came from a long line of religious radicals who had formed their own brand
of Unitarianism. But it was their progeny that set them apart the most. Anna seems to have been overwhelmed by her sudden role as a caregiver for three small children, and the marriage grew more stressful with the births of Frank and his sisters, Mary and Maginel. Now there were six mouths to feed, a challenge exacerbated by William's habit of abandoning jobs and recklessness with money. With William's instability and Anna's frustration, there was little room for companionship. Some accounts suggest that Anna vied with her stepchildren for her husband's attention. Her stepdaughter Elizabeth Wright Heller, especially, did not harbor good memories. “I never could please her,” Heller wrote in a memoir, “no matter how hard I tried.”

One child, however, did please Anna over all the rest: Frank. Enamored of her firstborn, Anna doted on him to the exclusion of everyone else. “William Wright and his daughters were left in no doubt that the son was the mother's favorite,” according to Brendan Gill, another biographer. Wright's memories of his father are less than loving. Although he was proud of his father's preaching and shared his deep appreciation for music, Frank was also afraid of the man who rapped his knuckles during piano practice and didn't seem wholly invested in his son. “He never made much of the child,” Wright recollected in his detached third-person reminiscence. “Perhaps the father never loved or wanted the son at any time.” Young Frank turned to his mother for solace. Anna's worship of her son, her “extraordinary devotion,” as Wright described it, disturbed her husband and tainted the couple's relationship. “The differences between husband and wife,” he later wrote, “all seemed to arise over that boy.” The portrait that emerges is one of two fused allies: mother and son against husband and father.

Anna's relationship with Frank went beyond just favoritism, however. In his autobiography, Wright depicts his mother in almost
mythic proportions, as both his loyal protector and overseer of his destiny. He was, according to his reminiscences, his mother's great hope, “a means to realize her vision,” and she was single-minded about the path he would take. Even before he was born, she determined that he would become an architect. His mother's conviction was so strong that she hung a series of framed wood engravings of old English cathedrals on Frank's nursery walls. “The boy,” Wright recollected, “was to build beautiful buildings.”

Given his talent for masterfully reshaping the past, Wright's autobiographical recollections have been scrutinized by biographers. Gill, a friend of Wright's in his later years, called the architect a “hypnotist” who glorified his mother and diminished his father to elevate his own auspicious beginnings. In his biography, Gill picks apart the smallest details of Wright's account, including the portrayal of his room (how would there have been space for a separate nursery for Frank in the Wrights' small house?) and the engravings hung by his mother (Anna's family attended religious services in simple meeting houses and eschewed religious adornment). Wright's autobiography, according to Gill, is “an extended apologia—a fabrication that takes the form of a bittersweet romance, with Frank Lloyd Wright as its hero.” It is not, however, surprising. Rewriting one's past is characteristic of narcissistic people, who become adept at embellishing life stories to enhance their self-image. What matters is that Wright's account is the truth that he fashioned and wished others to believe.

Narcissism—a blend of conceit, self-centeredness, and rude behavior—pervades every facet of society, from the bleachers of Little League (“My kid should be pitching!”) to the highest positions of law, medicine, government, and business. Being narcissistic, however, is not the same thing as a clinical case of narcissistic personality disorder, one of ten personality disorders contained in
the
DSM
. A diagnosis is made when a patient exhibits at least five out of nine symptoms: a grandiose sense of self-importance; a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love; a belief in one's own special status, which can only be understood by other people in the same esteemed orbit; a need for excessive admiration; a sense of entitlement; exploitive behavior in relationships; a lack of empathy; an envy for others or a belief that others are envious in return; a demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors and attitudes.

Since narcissistic personality disorder first appeared in the
DSM
in 1980, the condition has been hotly contested. Plenty of confident, powerful people who might qualify for a diagnosis are doing just fine, thank you. Or at least
they
think they are. Why stick a label on them? Narcissism may even be necessary for survival in a society that ranks individual achievement higher than communal success. Just a few years ago, a brouhaha erupted over narcissistic personality disorder's very existence as its own clinical diagnosis. One group of experts tried unsuccessfully to eliminate it as a distinct condition in the
DSM
—in part because its symptoms so often overlapped with features of other personality disorders, like borderline.

Over the decades, a more nuanced definition has emerged. Narcissism has long been associated with an overarching grandiosity, but it isn't always rooted in confidence. This has led to the theory that narcissism may exist in two forms: grandiose or “overt” narcissism and vulnerable or “covert” narcissism. Overt narcissists are easier to spot, because they display their behaviors publicly with aplomb. Covert narcissists exhibit many of the same feelings—they dislike sharing credit, they're caught up in themselves, they're hypersensitive to criticism—but they are also likely to be anxious and introverted. Some narcissists may have characteristics of both.