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Life for Smith is a continuing drama and a continuing ordeal. Teaching, though he has been at it since 1946 (at N.Y.U., Cooper Union, Pratt, Bennington and now Hunter), is still "an exercise in sheer hysteria. I sometimes think I'm going to pass out before I get going." Friends' trials move him deeply. In addition, since a 1961 auto crackup, he has developed a blood disease that causes frequent nosebleeds, and fogging out. What mainly sustains him nowadays is the heady thrill of success, the joy of being called upon to create bigger and more exciting monuments—and alcohol. He consumes at least half a bottle of Old Crow or vodka a day.
Prefab Isolation. Oddly enough, the man whose work now dominates rooms —and demands to live outdoors—grew up in a room all his own, in fact a whole house. Smith was born in 1912 in South Orange, the grandson and namesake of a waterworks manufacturer whose name, A. P. Smith, still decorates hydrants in half a dozen major cities. Tony's father inherited the business, and when the boy contracted TB, the family was wealthy enough to build him a prefab isolation ward in the backyard and provide him with his own nurse. Tony joined the family only on holidays, which was fine with him. He hated household smells.
"Everything was as bare as it could be," he recalls. "My medicines came in little boxes. I would construct pueblo villages out of them." On Saturdays Tony's father took him to the factory, and the boy could hardly tear himself away from its airy, oily expanses, its machinery and materials. "There's no question," says he, "but that there's a direct connection between the factory, my little house, and my approach to sculpture."
Lace-Curtain Whiskers. Schooling was a perfunctory affair. There were private tutors, four years at a Jesuit high school (after the TB had cleared up), two years at Georgetown University, which Tony hated. He came home, bought a bookstore, studied at the Art Students League by night and worked in the factory by day. In 1937, he moved to Chicago to study at the New Bauhaus, found it "awful." After a semester, he drifted into an apprenticeship with Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, traveling from project to project as "clerk of the works." "Wright," he now believes, "kind of brought me home. I discovered myself as a person."
Wright teased Smith about his intellectual pretensions and his Irishness ("Good morning, Sullivan," he'd say. Or "I see you're still wearing the lace curtains," referring to Tony's then red beard). But Wright also taught Smith the elements of good architecture and the drama of the flow of space. Though Smith never acquired an architecture degree or license, he decided to strike out on his own, designed several houses, which visitors say are "logical, livable, not fancy, but in perfect dimension."