Are Geniuses Worth it All? This is the Core of 'Loving Frank'

Review of LOVING FRANK (audiobook 2007) by guest blogger Star Lawrence
Author, Nancy Horan; read by Joyce Bean

When I was 14, I looked up camps in the library and sent an application to an artsy affair called Hill Top in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Turned out it was run by the wife of an architect who'd once been at Frank Lloyd Wright's studio. It had a studio on the premises and was across the road from Taliesin, Wright’s famous house above the Wisconsin River. Wright had died rather recently and the cult of personality raged—we counselors were told never, ever to read THE FOUNTAINHEAD, so of course that is when I read it.

The other day, I picked up the 12-disk reading of LOVING FRANK, seeing only casually that it concerned one of Wright's mistresses', Mamah (May-mah) Borthwick Cheney's, experiences.

About halfway through, it was getting a little chick-booky for me, until my subconscious told me, "Uh-oh, is this the woman who gets murdered on the Taliesin property?" If you don’t know the story—a true one—you can learn it in stages in this book.

The story takes place before women got suffrage in 1920 and is also interesting in that this rather spoiled Oak Park housewife with her maids and nannies runs off to Europe with the dashing Wright, who was quite the ego boy, always broke, swathed in a cape, and madly collecting Japanese prints everywhere he went. He felt genius was license and spent money willy-nilly until even Mamah became alarmed.

As to the reader, Joyce Bean, she does a fine job, but I must confess now for the first time that I prefer male readers. When women try to do the men’s voices all gruff and low, they sound like Shirley Temple being cross. To me, to me!

The book even mentions my Hill Top, which apparently was a Chappaqua camp for adults before being turned over to rich Chicago girls who loved to ride horses. But I do remember seeing the “Shining Brow” Taliesin above us as we swam in the river. And, of course, the dog-eared FOUNTAINHEAD was under my pillow.

Star Lawrence is a health writer and author of the blog HEALTH'Sass.