Michael Graves Page 4

  “Empathy,” Michael would say, “is the magic word.” It was a quality he found in short supply in his new life. He had begun to notice the deficit in his first hospital room, and now he could see it everywhere, in the frustrated sighs of people trying to pass his wheelchair in narrow corridors, in the uncomprehending stares of old acquaintances seeing him for the first time in his altered state. The irony, of course, is that he had been—especially following his rapid rise to success in the 1980s—an exceptionally breezy personality himself, flitting from relationship to relationship almost as easily as he did from country to country. All that would have to change. He would have to rely on others as never before.

  At the same time, he would have to learn, or relearn, to return that empathy in kind through his work. In the last decade and change of his life, Michael would dedicate himself and his office to a vision of architecture as public service, and to design in the service of human life. It was to be his last, and perhaps most lasting, contribution to his profession—the more remarkable given his reputation as a notorious aesthete, a man who “drew like an angel,” as the critic Martin Filler once put it, but who was presumed to be unconcerned with the social dimension of architecture.27 It was a presumption that Michael himself had done much to fuel over the years, as his formalist commitments often came at the expense of the functional, and his knack for merchandising made him seem anything but politically engagé.

  Nevertheless, Michael was always socially minded, after a fashion, always cognizant of design’s empathic power. Part of what had prompted his transformation as an architect in the late 1970s was a feeling that architecture was failing to connect emotionally with the very people it purported to serve. Even his soft-hued vision of the world—the cerulean blue that filled his paintings and graced the handle of his iconic Alessi teakettle—grew from a deeply ingrained feeling that to be humane was a fundamental artistic duty. He had, after all, known adversity all his life, known the landscape of disability long before he was disabled. He’d grown up there.

  II

  THE RIVER AND THE COMPASS

  AT SOME POINT in the not-too-distant past, some misguided occupant redid the tiny house on the corner of Indianola Avenue and Kessler Boulevard in an unfortunate faux-masonry veneer. But it used to be like all the houses around it, a little wooden rambler in no particular style—a somewhat vulgarized American Craftsman perhaps—built in the 1920s, around the time when the surrounding municipality of Broad Ripple Village was annexed to the then fast-growing city of Indianapolis.

  Thomas Browning Graves, Bud to his family, bought this house shortly after 1940, moving there from a home of equally unarresting aspect in nearby Forest Hills.1 He brought with him his wife, Erma Lowe Sanderson Graves; their first son, also named Thomas, born in 1932; and their secondborn, Michael, who had arrived July 9, 1934.

  From left: Tom, Bud, and Michael, circa 1937

  Michael Edward Graves was named for his paternal grandfather, known as Max. At the time of Michael’s birth, Max was living not far away from his new grandson, on Washington Boulevard in the upscale division of Meridian-Kessler. The house there, in which Michael’s father, Bud, had spent a portion of his adolescence, was of markedly different character from the little rambler in Broad Ripple Village where Michael grew up: the Max Graves residence had been built expressly for him and his family, a decorously trimmed suburban villa that made the pages of the Indianapolis Star when it was completed in 1924. “In the south living room the furniture is upholstered in taupe and gold mohair, with taupe carpeting,” reported the paper.2 No such accoutrements were to be found in Michael’s boyhood home on Indianola.

  The Max Graves residence, designed by J. L. Holmes in 1924

  The course of the Graves family fortunes was not something on which the architect often dwelled in later life. Occasionally, on visits to the area with his daughter, Sarah, Michael would point out the car window in the general direction of Meridian-Kessler and grumble vaguely about how his grandfather Max “had one of those nice houses on one of those ‘big house’ streets.” He would go on in a similarly oblique vein to say that Max “drank his money away” and then trail off.3

  It is likely, given what would appear a familial penchant for taciturnity, that Michael himself did not know precisely how his family’s material circumstances had come about. And yet those circumstances, and an acute self-consciousness about them, were to be crucial factors in his life in design.

  BEFORE THOMAS SMITH (T. S.) Graves—the family patriarch and Michael’s great-grandfather—came to Indianapolis in the early 1870s from his native Kentucky, the city had not seemed destined for commercial greatness. The site on the banks of the White River had been selected for the state capital fifty years prior because of its central location, but the waterway was soon discovered to be too shallow for steamships, at least one of which ran aground there.4

  But in the years following the Civil War, things changed rapidly. No fewer than eight railway lines eventually converged at the city’s Union Station, the first such common passenger hub in the world. On a long, sloping line connecting St. Louis to New York by way of Columbus and Pittsburgh, Indianapolis was a perfect stopover point for agricultural goods heading east, and it was upon this strategic point that T. S. Graves shortly constructed a sizable business empire.

  The only extant photo of the old Indianapolis stockyards—not the yards themselves but the adjacent railroad entrance—in 1912

  Cattle, pigs, and other livestock arrived in Indianapolis at the Union Stockyards in the southwest corner of the city, there to be divvied up among the various meatpacking concerns for slaughter on site or transport elsewhere. And between the farmers or railroads shipping the animals and the companies acquiring them, there was the livestock agent: passing through the pens, he would appraise the livestock on behalf of the buyers and either bid in auctions or bargain directly with sellers for the best price. In return the agent received a commission, modest in itself but accruing to a tidy sum. Beginning with mules, T. S. launched himself in the commission-agent trade in Indianapolis, and within a few years of his arrival had risen to the position of partner in the firm of M. Sells & Company.

  He had had either the very good luck or the very good sense to fall in love with Miss Emma Sells, his employer’s daughter, and married her in the same year he assumed his partnership. When his father-in-law died some twenty-five years later, T. S. took on a partner of his own, founding the company of Graves, Nave & Company in 1903. Not just a local figure, T. S. soon wielded considerable influence over government policy and business practices across the state and the country, serving as president of the National Livestock Exchange from 1908 to 1910. The picture of success in the booming American Midwest during the Gilded Age, he was a Mason, a member of the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce, an active parishioner of his church, and the owner of a library that was, by the reckoning of at least one contemporary, “one of the finest and most complete in the city.” The same observer also pointed out that he was “an enthusiastic motorist.”5

  The marriage to Emma produced two sons—Edward, born in 1877, and Max, born three years later. To them Thomas bequeathed his Kentuckian taste for horses, as well as a sense of themselves as being perhaps a cut above the common herd, even if their fortune was born of hogs and sheep. By the standards of the time and place, the Graves clan had good claim to something not unlike aristocracy: T. S. was related to the celebrated frontiersman Daniel Boone and was a cousin on his mother’s side to the famed Confederate outlaws Frank and Jesse James.6 In his later years, the patriarch wintered in South Florida, just as the area around Miami was first becoming fashionable. His house there was a stone’s throw from the estate of three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, with whom he visited on occasion, coming back to Indianapolis with tales of the Great Commoner “dressed in workman’s clothes, with his trousers in boot tops…assisting a number of negroes in cleaning off the land.” T. S.’s return from
these annual pilgrimages was noted in the social pages of the Indianapolis Star.7

  By that time, however, the Graveses had already had their first brush with misfortune, in rather dramatic fashion. On the afternoon of March 13, 1894, Emma Sells Graves was cleaning the family home on North New Jersey Street; she was using gasoline, a common detergent in those days, and the canister somehow exploded. A young relative who happened to be visiting suddenly found himself surrounded by flames, and Emma ran to save him, her clothes catching alight in the process. She then ran into the street, where a deliveryman who was bringing a carpet to the house wrapped it around her in an effort to smother the fire. It was too late. Emma died the next morning after a brief hospitalization.8

  It is not known whether Max, Edward, or their father was home to witness Emma’s awful death, but the family was obviously devastated. T. S. did not remarry for ten years—and then to a woman who was also, oddly, named Emma, with whom he had no children.9 Almost forty years later, Edward Graves, by then a successful executive in Chicago, shot and killed himself at the age of fifty-five in his home library. “Relatives and friends,” his obituary read, “could give no reason for the act.”10

  AS FOR MAX, who remained in Indianapolis to head up his father’s firm, things did not proceed altogether well following T. S.’s death in 1922. At least in family lore, much of his difficulty was attributable to alcohol, although events beyond Max’s direct control were to compound his frustrations.

  Michael’s grandfather Max (center), great grandfather T. S. (right), and great great grandfather Michael Sells (left). The architect’s father would be the last Graves in the Indy stockyard.

  Scarcely two weeks after his father died, Max was named in a lawsuit by a former business associate, who claimed that the Indianapolis Livestock Exchange—on which Max had inherited a seat—was operating as an illegal trust. The plaintiff, who had been pushed out of the organization the year prior, sought $12,000 in damages (nearly $200,000 in today’s money), claiming that Max and his colleagues had conspired for years to fix livestock prices in order to benefit their private enterprises, to the exclusion of would-be competitors. There is no record that the case ever went to trial, the implication being that it was settled privately out of court for a large sum.11

  After this period Graves, Nave & Company showed signs of a general slackening. George Nave lived to the age of ninety-one, devoting increasing time to hobby farming while leaving the business largely in Max’s hands. The latter remained a member of the Indianapolis Livestock Exchange and continued to run the business, following Nave’s death, as the Graves Commission Company. But for Max there was to be no National Livestock Exchange presidency, no fraternizing with presidential candidates. The firm remained in the same aging office near the stockyard where it had been for decades. Neither the company nor its owner attracted much attention from the press.

  Part of this slackening was no doubt the result of Max’s drinking. But part of it was likely the fact that his father had, almost undoubtedly, been operating the business as part of a trust—and now it was over.

  The American livestock industry in the early twentieth century was rife with semi-licit monopolies, informal cartels designed to keep things profitable among the tight-knit, familial business elite that ran the nation’s stockyards.12 T. S. had been present at the creation of the modern livestock business in Indianapolis: he had married into the business, and he had been a founding member of the Indianapolis Livestock Exchange. He didn’t have to participate in anything so elaborate as a conspiracy—just a series of well-placed gentlemen’s agreements, father-in-law to son-in-law, neighbor to neighbor. The National Livestock Exchange itself had been accused, during T. S.’s tenure as president, of price collusion.13

  The Graveses’ wealth and social position up to the 1920s was likely the product of some form of trust, and it was just Max’s luck that the law of the land happened to catch up with the family in his lifetime rather than his father’s. New antitrust legislation governing the livestock trade had been enacted just two years prior to the lawsuit, and in an atmosphere of increasing litigation the Indianapolis Livestock Exchange could no longer play fast and loose with the rules.14 The good times were at an end.

  In any case, Max was busy with other concerns. After twenty-two years of marriage and the birth of their children, Thomas and Margaret, Max left his wife, Bessie, for a woman many years his junior.15 The divorce was extraordinarily messy: Bessie remarried, to her own in-law—the father of Margaret’s husband, to whom Max was obliged to make a large land transfer by way of settlement.16 Only a few years later, Max divorced his second wife and married yet again, further depleting his resources. The rest of Max’s time and money were given over to buying, trading, and riding horses—he was an active member of the local saddle club—and, of course, to drinking.

  By the end there was little left for Max to pass on to his son, Bud—certainly not the fine house he’d built for himself on Washington Avenue, with its taupe-on-taupe interior, which is presumed lost in one or the other of the divorces. Still less was left for Bud’s children. Max did give young Michael and his brother, Tom, a pony once, whom they named Tony the Pony, but despite the fact that Broad Ripple Village was only a few minutes away from Meridian-Kessler, the boys saw little of their paternal grandfather.17 Max died in 1946, when his namesake was twelve years old.

  THE TRAJECTORY OF the Graveses of Indianapolis does not adhere to the typical legends of class in the United States—neither the relentless upward march nor the slightly less common rags-to-riches-to-rags-in-three-generations narrative. Theirs was a story of a different sort: sliding from upper-middle-class privilege to lower-middle-class striving, it was a change in station subtle enough to go almost unnoticed but sharp enough to sting if anyone thought about it. No one could have thought about it as much as Michael’s father, Bud, who witnessed it firsthand. But he made sure everyone else felt his pain.

  The fine homes, the automobiles, the horses—all were gone. As in other cities, activity at the Indianapolis stockyards was in decline. The Depression was in its fifth year by the time of Michael’s birth, and with improvements in refrigeration on the one hand and the expansion of national highway networks on the other, the transportation of live animals by rail was becoming less and less economical. Livestock agents like Bud were by that time required to travel far from the city, out into the countryside around Indianapolis, to negotiate directly with farmers. Max had usually worn suits and ties; Michael never remembered his father in anything but work clothes.

  Erma Lowe Sanderson Graves, 1931

  The bitterness that Bud felt at his reduced state was unmistakable. “My father was certainly a bigot,” Michael said, “and certainly an alcoholic.”18 In addition to his time on the road, Bud would disappear on long drinking sprees, sometimes for weeks on end. Michael recalled an episode where he and his brother, Tom, sensing that their father was about to embark on a bender, hid his shoes. Bud reacted at first with laughter, but his joviality quickly curdled into rage, and he began shouting at the boys and storming around the house. Michael’s mother, Erma, finally insisted that Michael and his brother give the shoes back. As soon as he’d put them on, Bud left and did not return for several days.19

  During these absences Erma was usually oblivious to her husband’s whereabouts—though during one such episode, driving through Broad Ripple Village with young Michael, she pointed to a house near the end of the street. “That’s where your father is,” she said.20

  The plain suggestion was that he was with another woman. This would not seem out of character. For while the boys were hiding their father’s shoes, their father was hiding something far more serious from them: a previous marriage that had ended in divorce sometime in the late 1920s.21 Michael never knew about his father’s first wife. It is possible that Erma didn’t, either.

  If she did, she chose to remain silent about it, and this too would seem in character. Erma Lowe Graves was a formidable
figure, unshakable in her convictions and unshaken by the sometimes rocky course of her married life. She was descended from one of the first families to settle the area around Greensburg, just south and east of Indianapolis, her family of modest means but sounder reputation than the mercurial Graveses. In marrying into the enterprising Indianapolis tribe and moving to the big city, Erma might have entertained visions of a grander life, but the failure of those hopes never left her outwardly disillusioned. Remaining married to Bud for forty-two years, she was committed to her husband despite his obvious failings, and committed to her children despite having given up a career in nursing for which she’d gone to both college and hospital school.22 She was the whole world of Michael’s early childhood.23

  Michael around age twelve. The toy car he kept for decades, later giving it to the children of one of his associates.

  Erma performed all the usual parental offices: packing the school lunches, arranging the doctor’s visits, paying the piano teacher.24 But she was also the standard-bearer for morals in the family, and for morale. Keeping at bay her husband’s wrath, she single-handedly spared Michael from inheriting the full catalog of his father’s resentments. She had a seemingly bottomless reserve of fortitude and perhaps only one true vice: a slender, handsome woman in her youth, she was possessed of a well-deserved vanity.

  When Michael was eleven, his mother, doubtless with an eye toward her wayward husband, decided to have elective surgery to remove a varicose vein in her thigh. No one was ever sure what happened. During the procedure, the doctor cut the wrong artery, or perhaps the wrong nerve, or else allowed the incision to become infected. The doctors decided that her leg would have to be removed below the knee. In keeping with her stoic, midwestern mind-set, Erma never thought to sue the hospital, accepting the blow in silence.25