The Apprentices

Frank Lloyd Wright was one of architecture’s most outlandish figures, a man who famously pranced around in a cape and ran off with a client’s wife. So a book like “The Fellowship” was probably inevitable. Written by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, it is a tawdry, often malicious and occasionally entertaining romp through Wright’s long life, focusing with particular glee on the cunning manipulations of his wife Olgivanna, their sex-starved daughter, Iovanna, and his many apprentices, who, according to the authors, ranged from sexual predators to doe-eyed innocents yearning to be exploited for the cause of Architecture.

The authors’ biggest insight, if you want to call it that, is that creative geniuses can also be abusive and self-absorbed. Their second biggest insight is that, isolated for years on end in the countryside, healthy, hard-bodied young men end up having a lot of sex, sometimes with one another.

Wes Duvall
THE FELLOWSHIP
The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship.
By Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman.
Illustrated. 689 pp. Regan/HarperCollins Publishers. $34.95.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: November 26, 2006

The NYTimes