Stuff You Should Know - The Taliesin Massacre

Episode Date: December 10, 2020

Everyone knows who Frank Lloyd Wright is, but did you know there was a grisly massacre at his home in 1914? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here.

And this is Stuff You Should Know. Um, the long-awaited Frank Lloyd Wright edition. Sort of. Yeah, kinda. I mean, you know, it's not a full biography, but it has definitely covered some of his, a very dark period of his life. Oh yeah, one of the darker periods

that any artist could have. And make no mistake, Frank Lloyd Wright was an artist. He was an artist of architecture. Yeah, have you ever, how many houses of his have you seen, or buildings? I've seen a bunch. I've been to Holly Hawk in Los Angeles. I've been to a Usoni, and I can't remember which one

in Washington by the, one of the, I can't remember what other historic house it's by. They moved it. I've been to, there's a Usoni in an Alabama, Chuck, in Florence, Alabama, which is really neat. Been to Fallingwater, been to Talias in West. I think that's it. Yeah, I've been to a handful myself.

I've been to one in Tulsa, and a couple in LA. Of course, the Guggenheim. I think we've both been there. I have not. I have not. Really? Yeah. All the times you've been to New York,

and all the museums, have you never stepped foot in the Guggenheim? It's true. I've never been in the Guggenheim, sadly enough. I saw a movie where there's a shoot out in the Guggenheim. I highly recommend going to the Guggenheim. It's great.

Okay. I thought it was George Costanz of it, designed the Guggenheim. Not Frank Lloyd Wright. That's right. He always wanted to be an architect. That's right. He's had my favorite line for that episode,

is when he talks about the redesign plans of the Guggenheim, and they go, really? He goes, yeah, it really didn't even take that long. That's right. Yeah. He's saying that he was the one who redesigned it. Like, it's impressive that it was just a really quick job. Right.

Yeah, that's classic. But we're not talking about the Guggenheim today, Chuck. We're not even talking about Holly Hawk House. We're talking about specifically Talleessen, which is widely regarded as Frank Lloyd Wright's genuine bonafide masterpiece, like his greatest work ever. I think it said that it's his autobiography written in wood and stone, that it's just him.

And not just him in a specific time and place, but for like decades where the work, his earliest work to his latest work all showed up and appeared over time at Talleessen. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there. It was his home at times. It was his studio of school, an 800 acre estate. This was family land.

It was his favorite hill in Wisconsin in the river valley there, where his Welsh grandparents originally homesteaded. And so it was very personal to him. So he did things like make the roof so it doesn't leak water into the offices below, like some of his other properties. Exactly.

Yeah, he wasn't one to just move his desk, right? Right. So this particular house, and it still is, it's a huge, enormous house. I think it's 21,000 square feet. It's a classic example of what's called the prairie style, which is a style of architecture considered to be the first genuine American style

of architecture that Frank Lloyd Wright founded back in the 1890s, maybe the late 1890s. And it takes its inspiration from the surrounding environment. It's meant to blend in with the environment and work with the environment rather than to dominate it. So there's a lot of horizontal lines, a lot of natural materials, a lot of woodworking. And Taliesin is very much in that style.

I think it has 524 windows, which is a lot of windows. And it also has no gutters. There's a lot of cantilevered roofs, which kind of overhang pretty far. So there was necessarily a need for gutters. But I read that Frank Lloyd Wright specifically didn't want gutters because he wanted icicles to form on the eaves of the roof so he could look out

of those 524 windows in the Wisconsin winter and see all the icicles hanging. Ed, do you like the prairie homes, that style? Yeah, yeah, I do. My problem with Frank Lloyd Wright's work is that it's so dated and old-timey that it almost makes me a combination of scared and nauseous. You know what I'm talking about?

Sure. Have you ever looked at a wicker wheelchair from like the turn of the last century? Yeah, yeah. You just kind of get the creeps from it for some reason. Okay, you get that same, I mean, this, you know, he did the bulk of his work a hundred years ago, right, you know, somewhere in that range.

But it was also like, it was also very technologically advanced and like, he was just doing some really interesting stuff, so the way that a very dated, once technologically advanced piece of work can kind of cull that weird feeling out of you. But at the same time, I'm like in genuine awe of the stuff he did, like falling water is one of my favorite houses in the entire world.

Sure, I mean, it's gorgeous. I mean, it's just amazing. What about you, do you like the prairie style? I like them all right, they're fine. Some of them, and you know, I have some here in the neighborhood that pop up on the street, some here in the neighborhood that pop up every now and then some newer builds are in the prairie style.

And I like them more than some other kinds and less than some other kinds. Let's just say that. You like craftsmen? Well, sure, I live in a craftsman. That's just my favorite, but. I like craftsmen too, I think they're good. I just, I mean, I love a highly slick modern home.

I don't want to live in one, but I love them. I would not want to live in one either. Those are hit or miss with me. Like some of them are just too, just God awful. Some of them are just, when they hit the nail on the head, you're like, wow, that's one of the best houses anyone's ever designed and built. But they miss, it's almost like documentaries

and horror movies. There's a lot of them, but only very, very few like are truly great. That's my impression of modern homes. Yeah, I'm into, we're into architecture though as a couple, Emily and I, and we watch a couple of. I'll put you in my ear and me. Great, well, us too.

It's a triad. Well, I guess throw you and me in there. I guess we'd be a course. It's quadred. But we have a couple of shows that we love to watch that are, this is one called Grand Designs on Netflix that I highly recommend. And oh man, what's the other one?

There's this cup, not a married couple, but a pair that travels the world. The Great British Architecture Bake Off? No, that's not it. I can't remember what it's called, but Grand Designs is really good. I mean, and they follow these, you know, sort of impossibly built houses designed and built

by these incredible lunatic dreamers who are obsessed with sort of a thing. It seems to be the common thread is these obsessives. And it leads to something beautiful and great, you know, usually. For sure, yeah. So one of the things about Frank Lloyd Wright is that he is, including during his lifetime,

he's considered one of the greatest architects to ever live. Certainly the most popularly well-known, maybe I guess you'd put it, like anybody who's ever heard of any kind of architecture, even vaguely, is probably familiar with Frank Lloyd Wright. Agreed. So when he put all of himself into tally, yes, and he was building a home for himself,

and I think it was completed in 1911. And like it's worth pointing out, he was returning to his childhood home, to the valley where his clan settled. Like if you look around Spring Green, Wisconsin, everybody's got the name Lloyd in there somewhere. Like his maternal ancestors settled that area. And he was literally building on this hill,

his favorite hill when he was a child, like you were saying. But he was doing this in the midst of one of the biggest scandals, like any architects ever gone through. Yeah, so as you'll see through this show, and if you know anything about the man, Frank Lloyd Wright had a bit of a wandering eye and a bit of a philandering habit.

And he had an extramarital affair with a woman named M-A-M-A-H, Mama? Mama? Boorthwick, huh? I don't know, I've been testing it out too. I said Mama? Mama? Sure.

Boorthwick, and she was, you know, they met in 1903, Wright was in his mid-30s at the time. He was already really famous as an architect. And he was commissioned to design a house for her and her husband, Edwin Cheney. And they were, it was gonna be built there in Wisconsin, pretty close to Chicago, where Frank Lloyd Wright was at the time.

She was pregnant in her mid-30s at the time with her second child, and got really involved in sort of working with Frank Lloyd Wright very closely. And that sort of, you know, the classic story, at first it starts out platonic, one thing leads to another, and before you know it, they're bumping uglies.

That's right, smashing, as the younger kids say, from what I heard. Yeah, I just heard that for the first time the other day. Didn't know that was a thing. So it's a thing now. So Frank Lloyd Wright, by this time, had six kids of his own, and he had made a name for himself,

like around Chicago, building homes, designing homes for the well-to-do, especially in the Oak Park neighborhood. Apparently just between 1900 and 1910, he designed 50 prairie houses. So he'd made a name for himself. But apparently by the time, I think 1908 was when he, no, 1907, when they started their affair.

By the time 1907 rolled around, he was getting kind of tired of doing the same thing. It's kind of like he was cursed, like this school of architecture that he developed was so popular that he, that's all anybody wanted. And he had gotten bored with it by that time. So he seems to have been unfulfilled professionally

and kind of took it out on his family in about the worst way you could possibly take things out on your family, sort of cutting them up with a machete. Yeah, by 1908, it was a pretty much well-known open secret in Chicago and of that high society in Chicago that this affair was going on. And he was sort of looked down on from his friends and his neighbors and his peers,

different colleagues, his poor wife Kitty was long suffering because she kind of stood by his side anyway. And he realized that he really wanted to leave his family and he did so. He said, I did not know what I wanted. I wanted to go away. And he did in September of 1909, Frank left with her,

went to Europe, left his wife and his six kids behind. And here's one of the more selfish quotes I've ever seen from a husband and father. And this was in his autobiography. So when family life in Oak Park in that spring of 1909 conspired against the freedom to which I had come to feel every soul entitled, I had no choice. Would I keep myself respect,

but to go out of voluntary exile? So he really felt, and you know, those were his words in his autobiography. So he wasn't, he had no illusions about himself, but he very much felt that, you know what, Frank Lloyd Wright and I'm a man and I deserve this by my right. Yeah, so those are two key points.

He's a man, so he deserved it, but more than anything, he was a legend in his own mind, which was sustained and verified by the public at large, but he was Frank Lloyd Wright. So more than anybody, he deserved that to go do whatever he wanted. And you know, whatever the consequences were for other people emotionally to hell with that.

One other thing that I think is worth pointing out is that he had money problems, basically his entire life, despite the fact that, I mean, this man designed the Guggenheim. He designed some of the most iconic buildings and houses in the United States. And he had money just coming in by the truckload, but he would spend it as fast as he could get it

and then some. So at this point in time, when he was, when he left his family, he apparently left them in financial straits as well. There was, there's a biographer named Paul Hendricks. And Paul Hendricks in, I'm sorry. And he points out that there was a $900 grocery bill that was laying on the kitchen counter

when Frank Lloyd Wright walked out on his family, which, I mean, at least pay the grocery bill so the family that you're leaving in a lurch can eat, you know? Yeah, so his mistress left her two kids with her husband. She went on a train to New York City, met Frank at the Plaza Hotel. They had a few days there of, I guess, smashing.

And then went to Europe and, you know, he was famous the world over. So it's not like he could lay low. Very famous face, very famous dresser of fine clothing in those hats. So he didn't exactly blend in anywhere he went. So he was found out in Berlin. Chicago Tribune had a headline that said,

leave families, semicolon, nice little switch there. Elope to Europe. And this whole time, poor kitty, she says it appears like any other ordinary mundane affair with the trappings of what is low and vulgar, but there's nothing of that sort about Frank Wright. He is honest and sincere, I know him. My heart is with him now.

I feel certain that he will come back. And that's one of the saddest parts about all this is she was sort of like, he's just flandering a bit and he'll come back to us. Yeah, it is sad, but also, you know, whatever his kids were thinking too, like, well, I guess dad didn't love us enough to stick around.

Another, I think kind of telling clue about Frank Lloyd Wright's enormous arrogance was he called his and, where are we gonna call her, Chuck? Mama? I'm calling her mama. Okay. His and mama's flight to Europe

after abandoning their families. He called it a spiritual Hegira, or Hegira. And I had not seen that word before and it turns out Hegira or Hegira, H-E-G-I-R-A, is what Muhammad's exodus from persecution in Mecca was called and he left Mecca to go to Medina where he founded Islam. And to Frank Lloyd Wright,

this is what he and his mistress were doing when they abandoned their families and fled to Europe. Yeah, he thought a lot of himself. He was an SOB man, plain and simple. I don't, like, he's a classic example of like, having to compartmentalize the genius of the work and just to complete horribleness of the person, you know? I know, I know.

But it can be done, it can be done. I disagree with anybody who says, you know, there's certain exceptions, I'm sure. But anybody who says, well, this person held some pretty terrible views. So we shouldn't pay any attention to their work from that point on. I disagree with that.

I think that there are tons of exceptions to that rule, although there are tons of exceptions to the exception to that rule too, if that's not confusing enough. Well, I think it's a personal decision. If someone wants to never gaze upon falling waters again, then that's their choice. Totally, it's not like I'm gonna, you know,

grab them by their hair and like making them look. But I would disagree with them in a lot of cases. Yeah, like Manson's music, fantastic. Just beautiful stuff. Really good stuff. For sure. So Frank Lloyd Wright returns to Chicago in 1910. Mimol stayed behind.

She stayed there in Europe for another year because she was getting a divorce from Edwin Cheney. And so she stayed there wrapping that up. Frank moved back with Kitty. He had no intention of staying. And I think it was pretty clear to Kitty at this point because she said, Mr. Wright, I wonder if he made her call her that.

Mr. Wright reached here Saturday evening, October 8th, and he has brought many beautiful things, everything but his heart, I guess, and that he has left in Germany. But he came back a bit of a pariah. Oh, just a tad. They were pariahs before. There was a woman who grew up living next door

to Mamon, her children. And she, years later in her diary, recounted a time when her mom refused to give Frank Lloyd Wright cream when he came over from next door to borrow some and said that they were sinners and she wasn't going to help them out at all. So when they left for Europe,

made headline news for leaving their families, and then he returns, moves back in with his family, just long enough to plan his next home for him and Mama. Like, yeah, the people in his social orbit did not take very kindly to that. Professionals, neighbors, friends, gossip colonists, basically everybody in the Midwest who had anything to do with anything,

like rejected him and Mama. Yeah, and to boot when he gets back because he needed seed money for his new home, he had a benefactor named Darwin Martin, and he said, hey, listen, I want to build this great cottage, and this affair is long over, and this is going to be a cottage for my mom,

and I promise it's not going to be our little smash shack. And so give me $25,000 to get this project going. He got it, he moved into the home with his mistress, and I think by Christmas 1911, they were officially living together there in Greenspring. Yeah, he said, thanks, Chump, thanks for the money. And because just trashing Frank Lloyd Wright as a person is a lot of fun,

I want to add this detail too. Darwin Martin, his benefactor over the course of Frank Lloyd Wright's career, lent Frank Lloyd Wright $75,000 total. And when the stock market crashed in 1929, Darwin Martin lost everything, like he was flat broke, went from an extraordinarily wealthy man

to just flat broke for the rest of his life. Frank Lloyd Wright never repaid any of that money, but he made sure that when his autobiography came out, that Darwin Martin got a free copy. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, he really pulled that out the last minute, didn't he? All right, so let's take a break, and we'll come back and talk about things taking a turn

for the worst a few years later in August of 1914. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so let's just go ahead and get in the way back. Well, I don't want to see this.

We'll just talk about it. We'll leave the way back machine out of this one, okay? So on Saturday, August 15th, 1914, around lunchtime, actually exactly at lunchtime, Mama Borthwick, Frank Lloyd Wright's mistress, longtime mistress, was sitting down for lunch on a terrace at Taliesin with her two kids. To his great credit, Edwin Cheney,

her ex-husband by this time, was not interested in keeping Mama from seeing her children as punishment. So they went to visit pretty frequently. And this was a time when they were visiting. So the three of them were sitting down to lunch. John, I think he was 10, and her daughter, Martha, who was eight, and Mama, Mama, were sitting down to lunch on the terrace, okay?

Just put that in your pin. Put that pin in your hat and smoke it. So, wow, really mixing metaphors. So they're out on the terrace inside in the dining room. There are five of Frank Lloyd Wright's employees, Emile Burdell, Thomas Brunker, David Lindblum, Herbert Fritz, and William Weston, and then Weston's son Ernst.

So they were all sitting down to eat. I think put a pin in maybe both of these scenes, and we'll tell you a little bit about the handyman of the property named Julian Carlton, who in the weeks and months leading up to this date had been acting really weird. He was aggressive. He was getting in arguments with other people.

He was acting very strangely. He started sleeping with a hatchet and a sack beside his bed. He was married and his wife verified this stuff. He was talking about killing people, and there was rumor that he was being let go and that he and his wife were already had basically a trained book to Chicago to look for other jobs.

So this is sort of the mindset of what's going on with Julian Carlton at the time of this lunch. Right. So Julian was actually, so he was a handyman, but at this point he also helped out, helped his wife Gertrude when she was cooking, he would serve. So he served lunch to Mama, and then he served lunch to the five employees

in the dining room. And then as they started to eat, he approached William Weston, the foreman of the whole jam. William Weston was a pretty important guy around Taliesin and asked if he could go get some gasoline out of the shed, I guess, because he was gonna clean some rugs with it. With gasoline.

With gasoline, yeah. Guess that was the thing back then. Sure, that's some old timey rug cleaning if I've ever heard of it. But so Weston should, sure, of course, go ahead. And things went really, things went downhill really quickly from that moment on. Yeah, so I appreciate you leaving this part to me.

Carlton comes back. Oh, I'll fill in, don't worry. He's got the gasoline, and he also has an ax. And the sequence is a little bit unclear. I've seen both ways of which happened first, but he slaughtered Mama Borthwick and her kids on the porch and then poured gasoline under the dining room doors and trapped them in the room

and set the dining room and therefore the house on fire with everyone trapped inside. It gets even worse than that, though. After he had slaughtered Mama and her kids with the ax and set the house on fire, he went around to a window, a dining room window, where the people who were trapped in the dining room that had just been set on fire were jumping to safety from.

And as they jumped to safety, he ran after them and killed them with the ax. He would finish them off. Sometimes they were on fire and he would hit them in the head with the ax and killed them. And there were nine people who were dining that day. And he managed to kill seven of the nine.

Three people survived the initial assault, the fire and then the picking off with the ax. The first guy who got away was named Herb Fritz. He was a draftsman, a younger guy. I think he was still a teenager who went on to become an architect, I believe. But he was the first one to jump through the window. And so he was able to get pretty far away

from Julian Carlton before Carlton noticed that people were jumping through the window and came around to pick them off with the ax. That's right, William Weston got out of the window. Carlton hit him with the ax, thought he was dead, but he wasn't dead. In the meantime, Fritz, like you said, he didn't even, Carlton didn't even know he was gone.

So he actually managed to get to the neighbors and contact authorities, which ended up being, ended up sort of saving a lot of the house because they helped put it out. And the other guy who managed to at least get out the window was David Lindblom. He escaped with Fritz. So Fritz and Lindblom, like when they ran to that house,

it was like a half a mile away, which is really significant that Lindblom was able to do it because he was burned so badly that he died from his burns. And yet one of the last things he did on earth was to run a half a mile to get help at the nearest house with a phone. Yeah, so people get there, they put out the fire. Hours later, Carlton was discovered

in the basement of the house in an asbestos-lined boiler room. He went down there to die in the fire, but also doubled up by drinking a bottle of hydrochloric acid to make sure he did the job. And neither one of them worked. He actually survived both of those things. I actually saw that he was in the furnace

because he was trying to survive the fire and he didn't drink the acid until he knew he was discovered. Oh, see, I saw the opposite, that he went down to the furnace because he wanted to die in the home. Huh, yeah, the reason the furnace made sense to me or that he was trying to survive in the furnace is that if he couldn't escape from the house,

that would be the safest place because it was the middle of August and the furnace wasn't on. So it would've conceivably protected him or else it would've turned into that bronze bowl torture thing. You know, the bronze bowl that you put a human being in and light a fire into the bowl? Yeah, I remember that.

Sounds like a pretty horrible way to die. Either way, yes, it should be restated that Julian Carlton drank what he thought was a lethal dose of hydrochloric acid. Like that's how he chose to try to end his life. Yeah, so there was never any motive really rooted out. Clearly looking back now, he suffered from some kind of mental illness.

I don't think you can just all chalk it up to a grudge over being fired because of his behavior over the previous weeks and months. And you know, it was just one of those things. It was a time where they weren't diagnosing things like that. So he clearly had some form of mental illness, I think. And they never conclusively determined a motive. But like I said, his wife testified that said,

you know, we were headed to Chicago, we were going to get work. And he ended up dying, but he couldn't eat basically because he had torn up his stomach lining in his throat so badly with that hydrochloric acid. He died seven weeks later in jail from starvation. Yeah, another interpretation I saw is that he had purposefully starved himself

because the acid didn't work, that it wasn't just that he couldn't eat, but that he wouldn't eat and that he died from self-imposed starvation. Either one's pretty terrible stuff. Just a brutal, brutal crime. Yeah, and I mean, I agree with you. I think he clearly was mentally ill,

not just from the act that he carried out, but also the fact that he'd been ranting and sleeping with an ex for weeks leading up to it. But I think his perceived treatment or outright treatment around tally acid, coupled with the idea that they had been dismissed and that was gonna be their last day, is I guess what drove him over the edge.

Yeah, so Frank, you've noticed we haven't mentioned him. He was in Chicago at the time. He was working, kind of finalizing everything on the construction of midway gardens there in Chicago, working with his son, John Lloyd Wright, who was his second oldest, and in the autobiography of John Wright,

called My Father Who Was On Earth, said he remembered an unnatural silence when the phone call came in, except for his father's labored breathing. And then he came back in the room and said, he said, what's happened, dad? And his father said, John, a taxi, tally acid is on fire.

Right, and if you're not too big on Frank Lloyd Wright, you might be like, well, what about the people who were murdered? In his defense, he apparently hadn't learned about that yet, and he learned that there were some grisly murders of a lot of people he cared about, but from reporters who were shouting questions to him as he was going to the train station

to take the train from Chicago over to Spring Green. Yeah, so Chicago newspaper headline reads, the end of lawless loves, you know, sort of a sensational and cold way to treat these murders, I think, but they had been all over their affair for years now. And then Chuck, one other thing about Julian Carlton, have you ever been on that site, findagrave.com?

Yeah, sure. Okay, so I was on findagrave.com. Part of the purpose for those who don't know is like to kind of memorialize, like leave a tribute or something to the person, the dead person. And sometimes it's very sweet, but other times it's very awkward.

And this was an awkward case because there was like a little icon that clearly shows up on every page on findagrave, but it said, what's one thing you'll always remember when you think of Julian? I'm like, probably the axe murder slash arson, killing of seven people. See, I would have put-

That's what I'll always remember. He could really get a stain out of a rug. Right, with gasoline. Yeah, very, very good at that. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit about Frank's later years right after this.

["Stuff You Should Know"] Stuff you should know. Wash and show. Woo! Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going

to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams,

canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas

are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So this murder really and, of course, the fire really, really took a toll on Frank Lloyd Wright. For the next 20 years, he really struggled with his work. He struggled for his freedom from the press, obviously. I mean, he was always in the press,

but it was worse now than ever. And he did not suffer long romantically, though. He took up very quickly with a woman named Maude Miriam Hicks Noel. She went by Miriam. And she was an artist. She was a morphine addict. She was a fangirl.

They had a terrible, terrible, abusive relationship. It seems like kind of both ways. Like a bit of a Sid and Nancy type thing going from everything I could read. There were terrible people on both sides. Yeah, so he met when she was very young. She said, he hadn't been with me 10 minutes before he said, you're mine.

And they had a 10-year courtship that was very, very dysfunctional, very miserable. And when he got divorced in 1922 from Kitty, he decided at some point to marry, I think about a year later, to marry Miriam with that old mistake, thinking things would be different once they get married. And that's not at all how it went. They ended up splitting up, I think, six months later,

something like that. He said that to oppose her now in the slightest degree meant violence. That's how bad the relationship had become. So I get the impression from this biographer, Paul Hendrickson. The book he wrote, by the way, is called Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright. And it's like 600 pages, I believe.

But he does not paint a very flattering picture of Miriam at all. No, no, not at all. And like I said, they were not good for each other, it seems like. In 1924, after his divorce from Miriam, he gets married a third time to Olga Ivana. Her name was Olga Lazovic-Hinzenberg.

She was married. She was a dancer. They met at a ballet where she was performing. And they actually had another kid. Frank had a seventh child with her, a little girl in 1925. And Miriam comes back, though, and kind of tries to wreck their marriage, too. Yeah, when they had their baby, she showed up at the hospital

and made a scene, which is a pretty nasty move. She refused to give him a divorce. She would talk to the papers about him. She teamed up with Olga's ex-husband, her soon-to-be ex-husband. She definitely worked against him. But I guess eventually either got bored or was bought off or just kind of went away.

Because from what I can tell, Olga and Frank managed to carve out a happy, married life for themselves. From the 1920s, yeah, 1924, when they got married onward, I guess by the time, once Miriam left the picture, they were able to kind of settle in until Frank's death in 1959. Yeah, and Miriam actually got him arrested at one point under the MAN Act, M-A-N-N, which was a law, federal law, that prohibits

transport of women and children across state lines for the purposes of debauchery or prostitution. And I'm not really sure how that happened. It did not stick, obviously. He spent a couple of nights in jail, and then the charges were dropped. But he went into a long dry spell work-wise, did not get hired a ton over a certain period of time.

And then from the 30s to 59 when he died, he did some of his best work, maybe perhaps of his career. Absolutely. It was during that time he did Taliesin West, which, like I said, you mean I went to, we went out to Scottsdale and visited with our friends Blair and Aaron out there, who are Scottsdale peeps. And we went to Taliesin, and it was just Chuck, dude.

Have you been to that one? Haven't been to Taliesin West, no. It's really, really cool, just the little, just so many details about it. And there's a lot of fountains, which is really refreshing in the desert. It's just a really great, neat little place for sure. And a little, I use that in the absolute wrong way.

It's pretty big, but it's a charming place for sure. Yeah, and of course he did the Guggenheim after that. He did Falling Water. Yeah, so it was a very productive period of his life. Maybe, should we do more in Frank Lloyd Wright in the future, or is this it? No, no, we'll do the, in true stuff you should know style and just chip away at different parts about his life

and then do a full biography on them years down the road. All right, that sounds good. I thought of another place I went to Frank Lloyd Wright place, there's a Florida Southern College, or university, I'm sorry, is Frank Lloyd Wright designed campus. It's amazing. You have to check that out too.

You should check it out. There's like this really great covered walkway that you walk around everywhere. And it's just, it's really neat. You just feel immersed in Frank Lloyd Wright. It's not just one building or one house, it's a whole campus. I love it.

If you want to know more about Frank Lloyd Wright, then just go out after the pandemic ends and start visiting some of his houses. And since I said after the pandemic ends, let's optimistically go on to Listener Mail. No, no, sir. No Listener Mail today. I think today we should take a little bit of an opportunity

to talk for a few minutes about our book. Everyone's been really patient while we've plugged the presale of this book. I think by the time this comes out, the book will be out, is that right? Is this after the 24th, probably? Yeah. Jerry can make it so.

I think it is, but if not, it's just before. And I finally got the books delivered to my house in hardcover edition. And I got to hold it in my hand, as have you. And dude, it's great. I'm really proud of the work that we did, along with Flatiron, our co-writer Nils, who's just an amazing dude.

Yes, in our illustrator, Carly Monardo, who did just an amazing job throughout the book of bringing just passages that you didn't even think of just suddenly came to life through our illustrations. Yeah, I mean, there's an illustration of Momo. There's an illustration of my daughter. There are nice little Easter eggs in there. We haven't talked a lot about the contents of the book.

There are, we had a lot of fun with the notes at the bottom, the footnotes. It's really became kind of a fun part of the book. We mentioned, I don't even have to lost count how many podcasts we mentioned, but we've notedate those in the end. Yeah, and there were plenty that we missed. I did another, like, I shouldn't have done this,

but I did another, like, fine-tooth comb, like just scrape through of every word in the book. Of course you did. To see, you know, what podcasts we needed to link to, and I was like, oh man, I found like 50 of these so far. And I emailed them and was like, is it too late to add footnotes or podcasts, footnotes? And they're like, yes, that time has come.

So maybe in the second edition. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Can we get these reprinted? But maybe in a second. I have the number here, actually. We have listed in the book, or referenced in the book, we have 274 references to other podcasts. But here's a few of the chapters.

We did one on Murphy beds, one on back masking, one on aging, one on donuts. That's a great chapter. I love that chapter. What else, kamikaze, demolition derbies? It's like stuff you should know in book form. It is, definitely. And as we've said, none of these

are just like an entire podcast. It's more like we took maybe the history of something or just one aspect of one of the things and kind of dove into it and flesh it out like that. So hopefully we'll be able to turn these into full-size podcast episodes one day. That's kind of our intent. But even if we don't, I think the book really covers them

in an enjoyable way. Totally. Jack of Orchian. That was a good one, too. Keeping up with the Joneses, that's one of my favorite ones. Yeah, yeah. There's like 27 just amazing chapters in there. Each one's better than the last.

And then astoundingly, it starts back over and somehow chapter one is better than chapter 27. But if you haven't bought it yet, I highly encourage you to. It makes a great gift, even if the person doesn't even know who we are. It's in the great tradition, I think, of the great bathroom readers. You can pick it up at any point in the book

and read any chapter. And it's just a lot of fun. My daughter even likes it because of the pictures. And she loves looking at the back and going, there's you and Josh. I know. It's very cute. It is cute.

So one other thing I want to say is we really appreciate you guys who have already pre-ordered the book or who will buy the book or who bought the audio book that's available, too. But if you can't, if you're like, I just don't have the money right now, or I don't feel like spending the money, I just like the podcast, that's fine, too.

We're not mad at you. But we appreciate the people who have supported us by buying the book. So thank you very much to everybody who has or will buy our book, because that's very kind of you, and it means a lot to us. And you can look forward to a kid's version coming soon. Yes.

Right? Yeah, eventually we're taking the same 27 chapters and kidifying it, but without being patronizing. So that'll be a really queer book. Yeah, we just had a bunch of swear words. No, we're taking the swear words out. The chapter on Ms. Cal didn't make the cut in the kids book. I know.

I mean, I think this book is appropriate for kids as young as, like, probably a 12-year-old. It's not like it's dirty or anything. It might just be a little advanced for younger kids. But we're going to make sure that the younger kids have their version, too. Yes. It'll make every 12-year-old who reads the adult book

really want Ms. Cal. So anyway, thanks to everyone who's bought it. It's called Stuff You Should Know, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. You can get it wherever books are sold. Of course, we encourage you to buy from independent bookstores if you can to try and keep them in business. Yep, for sure.

I guess that's it, huh? That's it. OK, well, thanks, everybody, for hearing us out about our book spiel. And if you bought the book or the audiobook, thank you. If you can't, again, we love you anyway. So don't worry about it. And if you want to get in touch with us,

you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars

of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.