E-mail a friendT.C. Boyle
airdate February 27, 2009
T.C. Boyle is the author of 21 works of fiction, including The Women—an account of the life of visionary architect Frank Lloyd Wright. He's also one of America's most accomplished short story writers and has published eight collections. His work has been translated into some 25 languages and won numerous awards. He also teaches at the University of Southern California, where he founded the creative writing undergrad program. Boyle is an alum of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and holds a Ph.D. in 19th-century British literature.
Celebrated writer talks about a part of architect Frank Lloyd Wright's adult life. (2:13)
Full interview. (12:17)
T.C. Boyle
Tavis: T.C. Boyle is an acclaimed novelist who's written nearly two dozen books during his distinguished career. His latest is one of the most talked about new books of the year; a fictional look at the personal life of architect Frank Lloyd Wright called "The Women." It is already a "New York Times" bestseller. T.C. Boyle, nice to have you on the program.
T.C. Boyle: Good to see you again, Tavis.
Tavis: You doing all right, man?
Boyle: I am doing great, but, of course, I've been on a book tour, so, you know, I'm the guy who has to wear dirty underwear. Not today, though. I'm okay today. I got into a hotel for two days and they were able to wash my underwear.
Tavis: (Laughter) But your shoes look clean, though. You see these shoes, Jonathan? You got your Chuck Taylors on.
Boyle: And I opened a new box just for this tour (laughter).
Tavis: You wear these Converse shoes all the time?
Boyle: Yes. As I was telling you earlier, a reporter gave them to me. Ten years ago, a journalist came to me and came in for an interview and laid the box on the table and said, "I thought you would need these."
Tavis: And you've been wearing them ever since.
Boyle: Yeah. But, of course, you got to change them every six months. They wear out.
Tavis: As a kid, I wore those every day. I love those Chuck Taylor shoes.
Boyle: Me too. I always felt that shoes should be red and so should automobiles. What do you think (laughter)?
Tavis: (Laughter) My dad has a red car, a little red Corvette, so my dad would agree with you. I think books should be read too, as in r-e-a-d.
Boyle: Absolutely (laughter).
Tavis: (Laughter) Let's talk about your new book. Let me start by asking the obvious question, at least for me. Why Frank Lloyd Wright? What makes him interesting enough to do this?
Boyle: Well, Tavis, you know, I've written - this is my 20th book and this was the third about a great figure of American history from the 20th century. I did Alfred C. Kinsey. I did Dr. Kellogg who invented the corn flake. And, by the way, Kinsey, as you know, invented sex.
Tavis: Indiana University.
Boyle: (Laughter) That's right.
Tavis: Where I went to school.
Boyle: Indiana University. I felt this figure fits right in with them. This is a kind of man who doesn't care about anyone except his own projects. He is a guru. He takes in everybody who comes to him; he creates a cult around him. So those figures interest me a lot because, of course, some TV hosts and some novelists are a little bit like this. Not you and me, of course. We're saints (laughter).
Tavis: Yeah, yeah (laughter). What originally - before you got into studying Frank Lloyd Wright to learn all of this, I'm interested in what piqued your interest, though, about him as a person, as a figure.
Boyle: Well, 16 years ago, we made our escape from Los Angeles up to Santa Barbara. We were looking for an old house to buy and a Frank Lloyd Wright house came up. By the way, I'm the only writer in American history only to have one wife (laughter).
My wife saw this house with her sister and called me sobbing on the telephone - I was living in Los Angeles at the time - thinking that I might not rush right up and buy that. Well, the next day I did and now I remain married, of course. That would have been the end of that (laughter).
Tavis: Smart move.
Boyle: So ever since, we've been restoring this house. Again, he fits into this sort of figure, this narcissistic figure I like to write about, so I felt I would write about him. Everything in its time, though. It turns out I wrote 12 other books in the same house before I got around to Frank Lloyd Wright.
Tavis: Why so long getting to this one?
Boyle: I don't know. You know, I'm lucky in that I can do whatever I want anytime I want. A story suggests itself to me and I follow it, so finally I got around to this one and I'm very happy that I did.
Tavis: You call it "The Women." Why?
Boyle: This is narrated by a fictional character, Tadashi Sato. Wright was famously influenced by Japanese architecture and he had apprentices in the 30's at Taliesin in Wisconsin, the grand house he built there. Tadashi is purportedly the writer of this, but there's a little joke in the book. He didn't actually write it. We don't know how much English he knows.
His grandson-in-law, Liam O'Flaherty, collaborated with him, so he gives introductions to all three major parts of the three major women of Frank Lloyd Wright's life. At the end of it, he gives a great talk about "God, this man was terrific," but what about his women? How did he treat them?
Tavis: How do you find your comfort zone when you take a real life figure and parts of his or her life that are real and fictionalize it? How do you find the comfort zone, the safety zone, that zone that's gonna keep you out of trouble or do you not even think about that?
Boyle: That's a great question because you are dealing with real people. In these historical novels - you know, I write all sorts of different things, but in the historical ones, it fascinates me, these bizarre aspects of history. You couldn't make them up.
For instance, Frank Lloyd Wright was a mama's boy. When he was building the Imperial Hotel in Japan in the teens and early 20's, he got sick with dysentery. His mother, then 80 years old, took the train from Wisconsin all the way across the U.S., took the boat for two weeks, to go and nurse her son.
You couldn't make stuff like this up. And that's just one of a hundred incidents in this story. So, yes, I'm writing about real characters and giving you the real history. But on the other hand, once I begin to write, they become my own characters and I forget that they ever existed because I'm entering inside them and dramatizing how they must have felt, what they might have said.
Tavis: Are you interested in educating me about Frank Lloyd Wright or -
Boyle: - absolutely.
Tavis: Okay. I'm glad you said that. My question was going to be and you answered already. I was gonna ask whether or not you're interested in educating me about him primarily or whether or not he just happens to be good fodder for a story.
Boyle: Okay. Now I'll change it. Both, both.
Tavis: Both. Okay (laughter).
Boyle: But if you know nothing about him, you'll get the full scope of his life here. You'll learn about the buildings he built and everything else. But I'm just more concerned with his interpersonal relations because that's what novelists do. That makes a great story.
His second wife, Miriam, is the one who just sort of took over this project. She was a very elegant woman. She'd lived ten years in Paris. She wanted an association with a great man so that she could also be famous, even though she didn't produce anything. And so what if she was a little mentally unstable and a morphine addict? Who isn't (laughter)?
No, it makes for great fiction and it is true. The accounts of her, I got out of newspapers of the day. There's been something like a thousand books written on Frank Lloyd Wright and his work. This is a whole cult. So there's a lot of information for me to sift through and to deal with and play it any way I want.
Tavis: The first one to fictionalize him, though?
Boyle: No. This was the third novel about Frank Lloyd Wright. In one of these coincidences, another one came out last year. I haven't read it because I didn't want to be put in the position of contrasting. It deals with the murder of his mistress, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, which I also deal with here. But, of course, I'm dealing with all of his women.
Tavis: Top line these other two wives for me. You mentioned Miriam, the second one. I don't want to give too much of the story away, but top line the other two for me.
Boyle: Frank Lloyd Wright married young. He was 21. His girlfriend whom he had met was still in high school. They waited until she was just short of 18 and they married. Her name was Kitty, Kitty Tobin. They had six children and he became quite prominent in developing his Prairie style houses in Oak Park, Illinois near Chicago.
Twenty years later, he ran off with the wife of one of his clients, Mamah Borthwick Cheney of the Cheney House in Oak Park. Ran off to Europe. She left her husband and two children behind. He left his six children and a $900 grocery bill. Imagine what that translates in today's dollars from 1909. That's like, what, $3 billion? And no bailouts, you know (laughter). Three years later, he came back to the United States. He was a pariah. Nobody would give him any commissions. You know, this is front page news in the tabloids.
So he built a house in the remote purviews of Wisconsin, Spring Green. It's 35 miles west of Madison. Purportedly for his mother, but in fact for Mamah, to move her in. Three years later, she was murdered there in the house, an ax murder. Her, her two children and four laborers were murdered. The house was burned down. Frank Lloyd Wright was not there. He was in Chicago building the Midway Gardens.
Six months later, he got this great sympathy letter from a woman named Miriam Maude Noel and they met Christmas Eve and she was this glamorous woman with this big hat, the seal skin cape, the beads, just came from Paris. They started talking about love and romance and everything and, after about an hour - this is in his autobiography, by the way - she said, "So what do you think of me?" He said, "I've never seen anything like you." Boom.
Tavis: Took off again (laughter).
Boyle: Yeah, and then he installed her as the mistress in Taliesin and the press went crazy all over again. Tavis, this is just great stuff that, I mean, you couldn't invent it.
Tavis: You mentioned a moment ago, seriously yet jokingly, about his $900 grocery bill. For all of his gift and for the regard that we now have for him, for the regard that people have for him in his life, he had money issues, didn't he?
Boyle: He was a con man essentially, but he had to be. You know, the metaphor here is to build a novel is like building a house. You know, you start with you don't have a design exactly, but you have an idea. You see something and you build it. Well, yeah, but for me to do what I do, I'm so old, I used to work on a typewriter, Tavis, before my kids introduced me to the computer. All I need is a computer and a plug.
For him to build his thing, you know, he needed some very wealthy patron to pay him to do it, so here's his artwork. It's a house and he was famously prickly about the people who paid for the house actually moving in because they spoiled the design. They brought all their crap with them, you know (laughter).
He was such a control freak. He even designed furniture for the house. He designed cutlery plates and, in some cases, he even designed the clothing for the woman of the house. Can you imagine (laughter)?
Tavis: Wow. That's intense.
Boyle: Yeah.
Tavis: Tell me about your house. You live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, as we established earlier. Tell me about your house.
Boyle: We live in the first one he built in California.
Tavis: The first one he built in California?
Boyle: Yeah. It's made out of redwood. We're only the fourth owner, so no one's stripped it and it's in pretty good shape or at least it was when I went off on tour two and a half weeks ago. But, of course, there's been nobody there to clean up after my wife in my absence, so, you know, we don't know.
Tavis: What year?
Boyle: 1909.
Tavis: 1909.
Boyle: You know, you look out through the windows and you see trees. It's very nice.
Tavis: I love architecture. Whether it's Frank Lloyd Wright's homes or Paul Williams', I just love it. It's good stuff. So is the book as evidenced by the fact that it's already on "The New York Times" best seller list. T.C. Boyle's latest is a novel called "The Women" about the life and dalliances of one Frank Lloyd Wright. Nice to have you here, man.
Boyle: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: It's good to see you. Thanks for the opportunity.
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