Overview
When Frank Lloyd Wright’s mistress, Mamah Borthwick, and her children were found murdered at Taliesin, and his beloved Wisconsin home burned to the ground with them, his life reached its lowest point—up until then. Four months later, in December 1914, a divorced sculptress, Miriam Noel, reached out to the celebrated architect to offer him her support in his time of need.
What begins as a torrid love affair—Wright’s second while still married to his first wife—quickly turns toxic. As famous for his groundbreaking architecture as he was infamous for abandoning his family five years earlier, Wright and Miriam become national tabloid fodder from the day their relationship is revealed. They form a desperate alliance that takes them from Chicago to a rebuilt Taliesin, to Japan during construction of his Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, to California, and back. At the end of nearly a decade of accusations, recriminations, abandonments, and reconciliations, they marry, and almost immediately part ways. Enter the beautiful, twenty-six-year-old Olga Hinzenberg, and Wright falls in love, again. What follows over the next five years, as Wright pursues a divorce from Miriam and Miriam single-mindedly pursues her revenge on them both, is by turns infuriating, dismal, darkly ironic, and shocking.
Unearthing never-before-seen letters, documents, and Miriam’s own unpublished memoir, in Under So Evil a Star, author Randolph C. Henning reconstructs and contextualizes Wright’s forgotten second marriage and sheds light on the truth of who the misunderstood Miriam Noel was and the tumultuous, obsessive affair that turned both of their lives upside-down.
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