Michael Graves Page 6

  The stockyards and an old office building were as likely places as any to find inspiration in 1940s Indianapolis—though there was one bit of culture that Erma did enforce upon her son, much to his displeasure. As a teenager, Mike was frog-marched by his mother into a ballroom dancing class. He was expected to take the bus downtown every week, head directly to Mrs. Gates’s Dancing School, and then take the same bus directly home afterward. The entire excursion—home, bus, class, bus, home—took about two hours, after which time his mother expected to see him walking through the front door on Indianola. But Mike and his childhood friend Rick Williams had other plans.

  Piranesi’s “Carceri d’Invenzione,” frontispiece to the second edition, 1760

  Regularly, week after week, they would hop on the bus at the prescribed time—but instead of getting off at the dance school, they continued on to the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, dashed to the top of the obelisk, took in the view for as long as they dared, and then clambered back down as fast as they could, grabbing the bus home. Erma was none the wiser: their timing was perfect, and Michael feigned just the right quality of put-upon, post-foxtrot annoyance. Their cover was blown only when Mrs. Gates called Erma to find out if Mike was sick, since he hadn’t been to class for some time. His attendance record thereafter was stellar.44

  Little did Mike imagine that one day the Washington Monument scaffold—a system, in essence, for getting up an obelisk—would be one of his best-known creations.

  INTRIGUED AS MIKE WAS by the stockyard catwalks, his interest in his father’s (and his grandfather’s, and his great-grandfather’s) line of work weighed in at exactly nil. With the provisional blessing of his mother, he had already decided upon being an architect. Even had he not done so, he was hard set against any career involving sheep and cows.

  It hadn’t been expected that he would take that path: his older brother Tom was next in line to take over the trade. But it soon became apparent that Erma and Bud’s firstborn—a brilliant if slightly remote boy, whom Michael remembered once angrily shunning his mother’s embrace for no particular reason—was destined for other things. Bud was incensed.45

  Their father’s sulks didn’t always spill over into visible anger—only when such things as the continuation of the family legacy seemed at risk. Escape was his preferred strategy. On a few occasions, driving Mike back from one of those visits to the pens, Thomas would stop the car partway back to Broad Ripple Village, not far from a small bar.

  “I’m going to go see a man about a horse,” he would tell Mike.

  It seemed a plausible story—his father was, after all, a livestock agent. It took a number of such visits, and many hours spent alone in the car, before Mike realized what his father was up to and that there was no horse trading going on in the bar.

  Even had Tom or Michael been inclined to enter the family business, the business was not quite the family’s anymore. The Graves Commission Company was now the Shannon Graves Commission Company, one of Bud’s partners having assumed greater authority in light of his chronic absenteeism. The company office was still the same as it had been in T. S. and Max’s day: Michael recalled it as being “like the old West,” a stuffy, saloon-like atmosphere, filled with wood paneling and spittoons. Perhaps sensing that this way of life belonged to a fading past, Bud did not waste too much breath trying to badger his younger son into the livestock profession.

  But Mike found other ways to twit his easily irritated father. In his midteens, he befriended a classmate at Broad Ripple High School who was a member of a local Episcopalian church, St. Paul’s. The friend persuaded Michael and a group of six or so other boys to accompany him one Thursday night to a service officiated by a young priest there, perhaps only ten years older than the boys themselves. The group took to him right away. The cleric’s youth, but also his maturity, his kindness and quiet seriousness, all seemed to inspire confidence and loyalty in the high schoolers. “Especially me,” recalled Michael, who saw in the priest a model of manhood not available back home. “It was the fact that he was a grown-up. I didn’t consider my father capable of being in charge of his own life.”

  The young priest invited Mike and the boys to come on Sundays and attend services as altar boys. “They told me what I had to do,” Michael said, “where I had to kneel and stand and how to move the Bible from one side of the altar to the other. And I adored doing that.” Every week, Mike got up at dawn (which he didn’t adore), dressed in his vestment, a long gown secured with countless buttons, and walked over to St. Paul’s. His mother knew where he was going; his father, as per norm, was not even aware that Mike was out of the house on Sunday mornings.

  One evening at dinner, his mother said, “Mike, why don’t you tell your father what you’re doing at the church?”

  “What church?” asked Bud.

  “St. Paul’s,” Mike said.

  “What’s St. Paul’s?”

  “It’s the Episcopal church over on North Meridian.”

  His father looked stricken. “You’re not a member of St. Paul’s. You were baptized as I was baptized, as a Presbyterian.”

  Bud wanted to know everything: What was it Mike was doing there, and why, and with whom? Mike said he was going because he liked it. As Michael recalled, Bud claimed not to know what Episcopalianism was, or what Communion was. And when he told his father that the services at St. Paul’s were conducted by a priest, “the word,” Michael said, “made his hair stand up.”

  His father began shouting and pounding the table in rage. “Is this one of those cults?” Bud demanded. “I mean, do you have to break a glass?”

  It is, needless to say, absurd that one of the oldest denominations of American Christianity—the one to which nearly all of the country’s Founding Fathers belonged—should incite in Michael’s father such a bout of ill-informed paranoia. It is the more absurd given Bud’s conspicuously irreligious deportment, not to mention the fact that the Graveses’ ancestors back in Lexington, Kentucky, had been Baptists, not Presbyterians.46 But none of that mattered to Bud.

  Provincialism of a most orthodox variety was the order of the day, not just in the Graves household, but for many of their neighbors. Few people traveled, fewer still studied back East at the older American universities. The Graveses once did—Bud’s poor uncle Edward, before his self-inflicted death, had been a graduate of Cornell—but that was in the past.47 There was no getting too big for your britches in Bud Graves’s house. In truth, Michael’s father knew perfectly well what an Episcopalian was, and what it represented: ivy-covered walls, people who spoke foreign languages. From there it was only a short step to barefaced treason and losing China to the Reds.

  As oppressive as the atmosphere at home may have been, it did not as yet engender in Michael the express desire to escape. Where could he escape to? Some of his friends and classmates might have had it better than he, others worse, but whatever their separate struggles, getting out was never a major topic of discussion in the locker-lined hallways of Broad Ripple High School. With a few notable exceptions, very few of its graduates did. Fifteen years separated Michael from his best-known co-alumnus, the talk show host David Letterman.

  Looking back, Michael said of his school that it was a place where “you had to play three sports a year, or you were considered a nerd.”48 Given his poor eyesight, he was seriously handicapped from the start, and well into his teens he was an object of fun on the playground: a meager boy with one eye that seemed to wander off at will and a broad, sleepy smile. Michael always felt himself to be a step behind, and it bothered him. But he had already learned from Erma Graves how to bear up under pressure.

  Broad Ripple High did make it slightly easier in one respect, affording Mike an educational opportunity extremely rare in the 1940s Midwest—or, for that matter, in any school anywhere, even today: a course in construction and architecture. It seems almost inexplicable that a middle-class suburban high school, even one of reasonably good repute, should include such a course as par
t of the general curriculum. Design classes at the pre-undergraduate level, in those days and later, have tended to be the stuff of more progressive (and more posh) institutions on the order of Michigan’s Cranbrook School, which could draw on the resources of an actual undergraduate program nearby. Doubtless Broad Ripple established its architectural program not in a spirit of liberal arts–ish creativity but more in the way of vocational training, to provide a solid, practical skill that might prepare a young man for a life spent delineating oil derricks.

  Mike, with his parentally sanctioned career already settled upon, took the course in the first semester of his sophomore year, and his progress was astonishing. His native ability for drawing, which had yet to be directed into any particular channel, was quickly honed into a talent for architectural draftsmanship. Before the year was out, he’d learned how to prepare vertical elevations to represent buildings’ facades, how to create perspective renderings to picture them as they might appear in the real world, and how to make basic plans, shading in the poche to indicate the thickness and shape of the walls. When he’d finished the course, he was ready for more, and once again Broad Ripple came through: an instructor was found to work with him one-on-one for months, drawing building after building. Other classes of young people would come in for the first-semester course, and there would be Mike, sitting in a corner, sketching the floor plan of a house.

  If the architecture course gave Mike a little relief from the prevailing dullness of his milieu, it was also the only bright spot in an academic career that did not show any immediate promise of leading to a tenure-track position at Princeton. Math, science, literature (he was an appalling speller until the day he died)—Mike’s failures were not confined to the athletic field, and this was a source of still more tension in the home. Feeling himself in competition with his brother, Michael said he was forever coming in second place for Erma’s approval. “He was in the so-called honor society, which I wasn’t,” Michael said of Tom, “and he also got a letter in track in his sophomore year, which is unheard of.”49 Even six decades later, with both his mother and brother long dead, Michael’s envy was as fresh as though he and Tom were only then turning in their report cards, knowing already what Erma would say.

  MIKE DID, EVENTUALLY, join the football team, and earned his varsity letter. He tried wrestling and track. But his greatest success, besides at the drafting table, was in a very different field of endeavor.

  “We called him François,” recalled his friend Lois Hickman (now surnamed Rothert).

  The zesty Gallic moniker stemmed from Mike’s putative success as a ladies’ man. Rothert had known Mike (or François, or “Mox,” as she also called him) since grade school and had dated him briefly in junior high. “He gave me his Boy Scout ring,” she remembered.

  A token of his affection—but not, as she found out, his constancy. “I kept it on my finger with a pound of adhesive tape,” Rothert continued. “Then what happened: in the eighth-grade Indiana basketball tournament, everybody went to the sectionals, and Mike Graves went to a ball game and ran into a girl from the county school named Eleanor Hackemeyer. A vamp!” Shortly thereafter, Rothert said, “he asked for his Boy Scout ring back.”50

  Even after that, Mike still had the effrontery to try to kiss Rothert on a streetcar back to Broad Ripple Village following a midnight showing of Frankenstein on New Year’s Eve. His louche tendencies became legend, but did nothing to affect a friendship that would last for decades and grow to include Rothert’s subsequent boyfriend, whom she began dating a short while thereafter, fellow classmate Jay Hanselmann.

  Hanselmann was the quarterback for the football team; periodically Mike was put in at center, where he would routinely forget the snap signal. In addition to his superior athletic prowess, Hanselmann was also a far more successful student, getting straight As to Mike’s mingled Bs and Cs. He took the same architecture course shortly after Mike, who confessed one day in class to Hanselmann that this—this mapping out of buildings silently in the corner—was what Mike wanted to do for a living. Hanselmann explained that if that was really what he wanted, he had better start working on his grades. Mike replied that the only reason he had bad grades was because he was inattentive. He promised to straighten up.

  Not long thereafter, Erma came into her younger son’s room and saw Mike engaged in an unfamiliar activity. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m studying!” he replied.51

  In an effort to catch up, Mike took summer classes. His grades improved, at least somewhat, and he began to assume an air of somewhat greater seriousness.

  Even François, it seemed, was ready to hang up his beret.

  “I MET HER at a high school party,” Michael remembered. Broad Ripple Village had, in a manner more common to American universities, its own fraternities and sororities, and Mike was in one of the former—“a very big deal,” he would claim.52

  The fraternities usually gathered one night out of the week at the family home of one member or the other. Following one such get-together during his junior year, Mike and his brothers went to one of the houses where a sorority meeting was being held (they always made sure to know where those meetings were taking place), and there Mike was “fixed up,” as he claimed, with Gail Devine, a petite, attractive young woman one year behind him in school.

  They had much in common, especially in the context of down-to-earth Broad Ripple Village, where both stood out for their creative ambitions—he an aspiring architect, she an aspiring artist. Their backgrounds were likewise comparable, both from bluish-collar families. Gail’s father had owned a gas station before quitting to join local engine manufacturer Allis-Chalmers as a jet mechanic. “He was a good guy,” Michael remembered, “and her mother was a sweetheart.”53

  The two would go on double dates with Jay and Lois, out for Cokes in the afternoon or movies in the evening. Reserved but sweet-natured, possessed of an unmistakable warmth, Gail made an excellent counterweight to Mike’s playful space-cadet act, buttressing his efforts to become more grounded and mature. That her family life was somewhat more stable than his must have seemed an added perk, as did a nurturing quality that Erma was not always able to provide in sufficient quantity.

  Whatever François’s reputation, this was still Indianapolis in the years just after World War II, and Mike and his high school sweetheart were usually under the watchful eye of one or both sets of parents, to say nothing of their own quaking consciences. “Scared to death,” Michael said, the two quickly began to look forward to marriage, as all their friends did, as the conventional next step, the only acceptable form for an adult relationship to take.54

  Michael always maintained that the idea of starting a family was not, for him, a means to flee from his own, but only “what you did.” Things in the Graves home had in actuality taken a surprising turn for the better toward the end of Michael’s high school years: Bud and Erma moved out of the Indianola house and into a slightly more ample one on College Avenue, and Bud entered Alcoholics Anonymous, giving up drinking for life. By that point, however, enough damage had been done. The years of neglect, punctuated by instances of genuine cruelty, meant that Michael was effectively estranged from his father for life—though not untouched by his father’s persistent angst, in ways that would become clear only later.

  JUST BEFORE MIKE GRADUATED from Broad Ripple High School in 1952, he received word of a competition for high-school-age artists and designers sponsored by Purdue University in nearby West Lafayette, Indiana. The contest was aimed at rising seniors who aspired to careers in engineering—precisely the group Broad Ripple’s architecture course was meant to nurture. Most of the prizes were to be awarded to schematic drawings and technical documents—the kinds of things that interested Mike least when he first heard from Erma what an engineer does. But there was one prize category that was more of a free-for-all, a miscellaneous brief that invited applicants to draw whatever building they liked. Opting for this more artistic challenge, Mi
ke created a rendering of the Parthenon, the most famed Greek temple of them all, built in Athens in the fifth century BCE. He copied his drawing from a photograph in a library book.

  Why he chose that particular subject is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it reminded him of the stern grandeur of the World War Memorial downtown; perhaps he had heard it mentioned, or heard mentioned its great patron, the Athenian ruler Pericles, in one of those high school history lectures he had felt it prudent to pay attention to. Perhaps he’d accidentally chanced upon it while flipping through the book. Despite having acquired a facility as a draftsman almost unheard of for a person his age, Mike had not up to this period received anything approximating an education in the history of architecture. He did not know, except for what little the book he copied from could have told him, how important the Parthenon was to the whole development of building design, from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier. He did not yet even know who Le Corbusier was, much less Vitruvius.

  Mike won the competition and received as a prize a mechanical drawing set—a full suite of compass, protractor, and other handy tools that he had been making do without all through his early years of drawing and drafting. “For a kid like me,” he said years later, “it seemed like a very big deal.”55 It convinced him that he was on the right track. If Erma still looked somewhat askance, it also convinced Gail, who never once questioned Michael’s pursuit of architecture through all the years that followed. Together they decided that Michael should attend architecture school at the University of Cincinnati and that Gail would follow him there the year after, once she too had graduated. With the recent improvement in his GPA, Michael applied and was accepted.56