Houston launched career of complicated architect Philip Johnson He's the subject of a new biography that goes deep into personal and professional lives Photo of Diane Cowen Diane Cowen Dec. 21, 2018 Updated: Dec. 21, 2018 5:52 p.m. More Comments Print 30 1 of 30Houston developer Gerald Hines, left, and architect Philip Johnson are showen at a 2001 celebration of 30 years of their collaborations, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. They collaborated on numerous buildings, including Pennzoil Place, Williams Tower and Post Oak Central in Houston.Photo: David Handschuh, NY Daily News / SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE 2 of 30For the 64-story Williams Tower (originally Transco Tower), Johnson turned to New York’s prewar architecture for inspiration. It’s sheathed in reflective glass and has a monumental granite entry.Photo: E. Joseph Deering, staff / Houston Chronicle 3 of 30The twin towers of Pennzoil Place, designed by Johnson and Burgee in downtown Houston with the developer, Hines. Then CEO of Pennzoil, Hugh Liedtke had asked for a “distinctive” tower for his company and ended up loving the angled top floors so much that they considered them “prestige” floors and charged more for rent. Liedtke used the top Photo: Courtesy of Hines / Courtesy of Hines

When John and Dominique de Menil wanted to build a modern home in Houston, they asked their friend, artist Mary Callery, for advice.

“If you want to spend $100,000, get Mies (van der Rohe), but if you only want to spend $75,000, get Philip Johnson,” Callery told the French ex-pats who, after World War II, moved to Houston, where John de Menil would run the American division of Schlumberger Ltd., the oil-services company co-founded by Dominique’s father.

In the much told story, the de Menils chose Johnson.

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Their home, a long, flat box clad in brick, with few windows on its front, was unlike anything anyone in Houston in 1950 had ever seen. Now hailed by art and architecture historians as a thing of beauty, the de Menils’ modern ranch on San Felipe in River Oaks looked completely out of place among the more traditional Southern homes in Colonial or Tudor style, often with big antebellum columns out front.

The de Menils’ son, Francois de Menil, now an architect, was 5 or 6 years old when the family moved into the house. Though he didn’t quite appreciate its forward-looking style in his youth, he said Johnson’s design definitely affected his views on architecture and spatial relationships.

“In my mind, he was always a kind of master architect, the great wizard of the architecture world,” de Menil said. “He was very quick of mind and, I think, perhaps a little intolerant of those who were not.”

It was that house, and his relationship with the de Menils, that launched Johnson’s career, and he is now one of America’s best-known architects. When Johnson died at age 98 in 2005, he had designed hundreds of homes and buildings and won numerous awards, including the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1978 and, in 1979, the first Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious international architecture award.

“You can trace everything back — six degrees of separation — to the de Menils,” said Mark Lamster, author of the new Philip Johnson biography, “The Man in the Glass House” (Little, Brown; $35; 528 pp.), named after the New Canaan home Johnson designed and built for himself in the late 1940s.

The de Menils connected Johnson to Ruth Carter Stevenson, who secured a commission for the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. On that job, Johnson met Ike Brochstein of the renowned Houston millwork company Brochstein Custom Architectural Woodwork and Furniture, who later introduced Johnson to Houston developer Gerald Hines. Hines and Johnson worked together on many signature projects throughout their careers.

Lamster, architecture critic at the Dallas Morning News and associate professor in practice in the architecture school at the University of Texas, Arlington, gives the de Menils credit for elevating modern art and architecture, including boosting Johnson from second-tier status.

What will likely make “The Man in the Glass House” one of the most talked-about books of the year isn’t Lamster’s depiction of Johnson’s work but his focus on the man’s personal life: his early struggle to come to terms with being gay, the discovery that he was bipolar and his support for fascism and the Nazi Party that lasted more than a decade.

Lamster, 49, spent nine years researching and writing the book that published in November, and said he was drawn to Johnson because his story — both personal and professional — represented 20th-century history.

“To write about him, you get to write about the entire American century through the lens of this incredibly complex, fascinating and challenging person,” Lamster said. “This book isn’t your typical architect’s biography. It has everything: Nazis, insider trading, sex, prostitution, plane crashes, car crashes, Israeli nukes and Donald Trump. It’s got architecture, it’s got art. Whether you like him or hate him, Philip Johnson never lacks for entertainment.”

He interviewed dozens of people who knew Johnson; read Johnson’s World War II-era files from the FBI, Department of Justice and U.S. Army; and had access to letters that Johnson had written to friends and family members.

“I was so worried no one would speak to me, but the truth is, everybody did, and they were thrilled to do it,” Lamster said. “Philip Johnson was such a colorful person that there was no one who didn’t have a colorful story about him.

“I read the FBI files and other government documents; that’s where his secret life was hidden. He was a fascist, and he was a gay man when it was totally unacceptable. And he was bipolar, so he had up times and down times. It was a natural state for him to be many things at once, which makes it complicated to write about but also fun, a puzzle that needs to be put together.”

Lamster shows the conflicting sides of Johnson, who was generous and cruel, brilliant and insecure, elitist and populist, loved and loathed at various times in his life.

This isn’t the first time an author has written about Johnson’s complicated past. His Nazi sympathies have been documented, discussed and put in the rearview mirror, allowing the architect a generous second chance and opportunity for redemption.

“Some people accuse me of dwelling on fascism. I say, ‘I’m not the one who dwelled on it, he is.’ He spent an enormous amount of time and a considerable portion of his life on it,” Lamster said. “It wasn’t a youthful indiscretion as he occasionally liked to suggest. It was into his (mid-30s), when he was an adult and should have known better.”

Lamster’s research was a journey of incredible revelations about Johnson and how he lived, he said.

“I thought I knew the contours of the Johnson story. But as Mies (van der Rohe) said, ‘God is in the details,’ and with Philip Johnson, the details are juicy.”

Finding himself

Lamster summarizes Johnson’s Cleveland childhood as joyless; he never quite fit in at school and was raised by governesses to be an obedient son to his dour mother and emotionally distant father, a lawyer adept at making the right business and social connections. Perhaps the most important was his client, Charles M. Hall, who developed a process to extract aluminum from bauxite and launched what would become Alcoa, the original source of Johnson’s personal wealth.

As an undergrad at Harvard University, he struggled emotionally, eventually realizing that he was gay and discovering that he was bipolar, the source of his inability to fit in and focus. When he finally told his family that he was gay, his disapproving father told him to “buck up.” Johnson sought a leave of absence from school and headed to his family’s winter cottage in North Carolina.

Though always attracted to art and architecture, Johnson studied philosophy, returning much later as a graduate student to study architecture, after the Beaux Arts school of thought had given way to modernism and Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school in Berlin, had come to Harvard.

After college, Johnson used his connections to become the first director of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he earned acclaim for exhibits he curated. He and a friend, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, published “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922” as a catalog for a MoMA exhibit showcasing emerging modernist architecture; it ultimately became a textbook for architecture students.

Johnson traveled a good deal, and it was in Berlin’s Weimar culture — think of the film “Cabaret” — that he was introduced to fascism, launching years of right-wing political interest that today sounds unbelievable. Yet Lamster’s accounts are backed up with research — his book includes 32 pages of annotations documenting sources.

In 1934, Johnson and Alan Blackburn, a friend from school, left their jobs at MoMA to launch their own political movement — a single National Party inspired by Huey Long’s tight grip over Louisiana. Their plans were dashed when Long was assassinated in 1935.

That’s when he turned his sights on Father Charles E. Coughlin, a controversial Roman Catholic radio priest who cultivated millions of listeners with his pro-fascist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, before his own bishop and the start of World War II killed his show. Coughlin also had a newspaper, Social Justice, and Johnson volunteered to be an unpaid journalist, writing strangely upbeat dispatches from Germany as the Nazis invaded Poland.

William Shirer, a CBS correspondent who later published “Berlin Diary” about his wartime experience, singled out Johnson as a Nazi spy — an “American Fascist.”But was he a harmless propagandist or a real source of information for the Germans?

“I think he had every desire to have political power, to be that supreme political power,” Lamster said. “The evidence is clear that he was abetting the Nazi state. He was having meeings with very high figures with the Gestapo, German Foreign Service and diplomatic corps. Important figures met with him quite often, and sometimes surreptitiously. There is no question he was doing their bidding.”

But when America entered the war in 1941, Johnson wanted to help his own country. His political activities were well documented in at least five separate FBI cases and kept him from danger and from any meaningful contribution. Though Johnson spoke fluent German and hoped to be assigned to help interrogate German prisoners or to use his expertise in art to be part of the “Monuments Men” intelligence unit, he instead spent his military service scrubbing floors, cleaning latrines and peeling potatoes at Army bases in the U.S.

Johnson’s sex life — he once claimed that he needed to have sex every day — makes for juicy reading, too. Lamster writes about Johnson’s “open secret” affair with Jan Ruhtenberg, a handsome Scandinavian in Berlin who aspired to be an architect and who had a wife and three children.

There’s Jimmie Daniels, a young black singer once referred to as “the first Mrs. Johnson,” even though he was far from the first and the relationship didn’t last long. Other encounters went very badly, including the 15-year-old boy he took to the Times Square Hotel who turned out to be a blackmailer. Johnson paid up, and the problem went away.

He even had a dalliance with Texas socialite Jane Blaffer Owen for the prospect of a commission for a cathedral and possibly other buildings in New Harmony, Ind. Johnson later said of Blaffer Owen: “Her interest in me was physical, and that made for a stormy relationship. She was into sex to such a degree that it inhibited one’s architecture. But after a little hanky-panky, well, we got down to business.”

His brilliant side

Though Lamster pulls no punches on the seamier side of Johnson’s life, he also acknowledges the work that sprang from his subject’s creative genius, some of it in Houston.

In addition to her home, Dominique de Menil hired Johnson to create a master plan for the University of St. Thomas and complete several of its buildings: the academic mall, Chapel of St. Basil and the Edward P. White Memorial Plaza that thousands pass daily at the busy corner of West Alabama and Montrose.

At the university, Johnson had to deal with administrators who knew little about architecture or Johnson, except that he was chosen by their benefactor.