PEGGY GUGGENHEIM
The Life of an Art Addict
ANTON GILL

To Marji Campi (who started all this)

with admiration, gratitude and love

London, New York, Paris, Venice; 1997–2001

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Family Tree

Foreword

Prelude

Part 1: Youth

1: Shipwreck

2: Heiress

3: Guggenheims and Seligmans

4: Growing Up

5: Harold and Lucile

6: Departure

Part 2: Europe

7: Paris

8: Laurence, Motherhood and ‘Bohemia’

9: Pramousquier

10: Love and Literature

11: Hayford

12: Love and Death

13: An English Country Garden

14: Turning Point

15: ‘Guggenheim Jeune’

16: Paris Again

Intermezzo: Max and Another Departure: Marseilles and Lisbon

Part 3: Back in the USA

17: Coming Home

18: Art of This Century

19: Memoir

Part 4: Venice

20: Transition

21: Palazzo

22: Legacy

23: ‘The last red leaf is whirl’d away …’

Coda

Acknowledgements

Source Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Family Tree

Foreword

This book is made up of material derived from private and public archives and collections, published works, unpublished works, letters, diaries, interviews, gossip, e-mails, telephone conversations, videotapes, faxes, websites and so on. Despite the fact that the subject is recent, a number of discrepancies of spelling have cropped up in proper names. Where that has happened, I have used the version most commonly used by others.

I have not tampered with usage, grammar or spelling in direct quotations from original material such as letters, though I have tidied up typographical errors – for many years Peggy Guggenheim used an ancient typewriter with a faded blue ribbon, and her typing was not accurate. I have left eccentricities of spelling alone (Peggy habitually spelt ‘thought’ ‘thot’, and ‘bought’ ‘bot’), and have provided an explanation only if the level of obscurity seemed great enough to warrant one. Round brackets in quoted passages belong to the passage; glosses within such passages are in square brackets.

Titles of artworks in Peggy’s collection are generally the same as those used by Angelica Z. Rudenstine in her catalogue of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Other paintings and sculptures are given the names they’re most commonly known by.

I’d like to express my thanks here at the outset to all who helped. A lot of people had a profound personal contact with Peggy, and shared their memories of her with me generously. I am most grateful to them – their names are in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. I have had to be selective in the use of some tangential detail for reasons of both focus and of space. Readers interested in further exploration of the background to this book are referred to the bibliography. Inevitably what I have written will lead to a certain amount of disagreement. Some of the material conflicted, and some was clogged with gossip and rumour. I can only say that to the best of my ability I have checked all the matter I have used for correctness, and that I have tried to keep speculation to a minimum. I thank Marji Campi, Barbara Shukman and Karole Vail for looking over the manuscript, but I alone am accountable for any errors. I have not, however, consciously sought to mislead or offend anyone in this record of the life of a complex, anarchic, remarkable woman.

Anton Gill

London, 2001

Prelude
A Party

‘Her obduracy in contention and her warmth in friendship, her generosity and her stinginess, her plunges into gloom and wholehearted abandonment to laughter, her puritan streak and her reckless addiction to the erotic were all contradictions of the essence of her personality.’

MAURICE CARDIFF, Friends Abroad

The rain, which had not stopped for a week, ceased in the late afternoon of 29 September 1998, so that by the evening the flagstones in the garden were dry. The heat and the humidity relented too, so that as the crowd gathered the atmosphere and the temperature were perfect.

The garden was that of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an eighteenth-century pile in Dorsoduro, on the Accademia bank of the Grand Canal in Venice, between the Accademia Bridge and Santa Maria della Salute, close to where the Canal Grande debouches into the Canale di San Marco. The palazzo is exotic. It was never finished. It only has a sub-basement and one storey, with a flat roof that doubles as a terrace; but the garden is one of the largest in Venice. The trees are huge. When Peggy Guggenheim owned and lived in the palace, the garden was muddy and overgrown, and the sculptures planted in it – the bronze trolls of Max Ernst, the minimalist, organic forms of Arp and Brancusi – inhabited it as mysterious beings might lurk in a wood, waiting for the traveller to come upon them unaware.

Several hundred guests were gathering that Tuesday evening twenty years after her death in a more manicured space: neatly flagged and gravelled, with the sculptures openly displayed. Not all of the sculptures now belong to the art collection which Peggy Guggenheim brought here in the late 1940s. Many are part of the collection of the Texan collectors Patsy and Raymond Nasher.

The crowd has assembled in the electrically lit, mosquito-free night. The garden is full. Dress ranges from super-elegant to T-shirt and jeans, but everyone is stylish. Le tout Venise is here to mark the opening of an exhibition commemorating the centenary of Peggy’s birth. Organised by one of her granddaughters, the exhibition has come here from New York, where it opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Solomon was Peggy’s uncle, though their two art collections were separate entities during most of her lifetime. The granddaughter, Karole Vail, is the only Guggenheim grandchild to work for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She is among the guests, in a Fortuny dress, elegantly echoing the Fortuny dress Peggy often wore. Her sister Julia and her cousins are there too – six of the seven surviving grandchildren. Mark has not come. Fabrice died in 1990.

Philip Rylands is the curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. He has been in charge since the palazzo became a public gallery in 1980. Philip is English, and originally came to Venice from Cambridge University to research a doctoral thesis on Jacopo Palma (il Vecchio). He makes a speech in impeccable Italian. During it, as the light through the trees throws changing shadows on the people below, Mia, Julia’s daughter, the only one of Peggy’s great-grandchildren present, twenty-one months old, clambers onto Untitled (1969) by Robert Morris – a huge rectangle of steel balanced on a massive section of steel dowelling, stretched horizontally on the ground. Mia runs up and down. Her activity turns a few heads.

After two hours, people have begun to filter away, and in another hour the garden will be empty. In a corner a stone slab set into a wall marks the resting places of Peggy’s ‘beloved babies’ – fourteen little dogs, until almost the end all pure-bred Lhasa Apsos, which in a series of generations shared Peggy’s life in the palace. Next to it is another plaque. On it is written: ‘Here rests Peggy Guggenheim 1898–1979’.

The party in 1998 filled the garden. Eighteen years earlier, on 4 April 1980, only four people were present for the interment of Peggy’s ashes. She had died an isolated death just before Christmas the previous year.

Although Peggy’s claim to fame is as one of the foremost collectors of modern art of the first half of the twentieth century, her ‘offstage’ life as a restless combination of wanderer and libertine has attracted so much gossip, obloquy, scandal and delight that it has overshadowed her influence as a patron of painters and sculptors. When she was at the peak of her career, feminism was in its infancy and, apart from the Suffragette movement, not organised on any major scale. Men took it for granted that they had precedence over women, and it would be hard to find a more sexist bunch than the male artists who flourished between 1900 and 1960. Peggy took on their world with a mixture of low self-esteem and aggression, aided by money. She couldn’t enter that world as an artist – a difficult task for any woman at the time – but she could use her money to buy a position in it. In her endeavours she never quite found herself, but she supported three of the most important art movements of the last hundred years: Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract-Expressionism.

It took Peggy some time to come to modern art. She was twenty before she held a contemporary painting in her hands, at the photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s boundary-breaking 291 Gallery in New York City – a picture by Stieglitz’s wife-to-be, Georgia O’Keeffe. If she was flirting with Bohemia as early as that – the introduction to Stieglitz stemmed from work in a cousin’s avant-garde bookshop – it would be another twenty years, one husband and many lovers later before she started work on her own account.

At twenty-one, Peggy came into the first slice of what was a relatively slender fortune. In the years following the First World War, Europe beckoned young Americans, and Peggy, used to childhood holidays on the Continent, and for other reasons too, was among the first to go. There she plunged into the world to which she was to belong for the rest of her life, and in which she was to be a star.

The Second World War forced her, as a Jew, to retreat to America. There, in New York, she created a gallery the like of which had not been seen anywhere before, and through it and the salons – if such a word can be applied to the whiskey-and-potato-chips parties she held – in her house overlooking the East River on East 51st Street, she created a forum where young American artists could meet and confront the old guard of European modern art in exile.

The war over, and another marriage unhappily over too, she returned to Europe, and made her home in Venice. It was there that she set about the task of consolidating her collection. She’d been a flapper, she’d been a profligate, she’d been a Maecenas, she’d been a wife, she hadn’t been much of a mother. Now it was time to become a grande dame. Inside, there had always been an inquisitive and lively girl who had never been able to find love.

When I first visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection I was struck by the refreshing contrast to the splendours of Renaissance and Baroque art in which Venice is so rich. It was a palate-cleanser after which one could return happily to the glories of the Scuola San Rocco or the Frari. Peggy herself, hesitating to name any picture in her own collection as her favourite, did have a favourite painting: The Storm by Giorgione (c.1505), in the Accademia, a stone’s throw from her palazzo. She once said she would swap all of her collection for it.

The festa to mark her one hundredth birthday would have amused Peggy by its contrast to her lonely departure from this world, and it would have touched her that so many people were there. She would also have been appalled at the expense.

Later that evening it began to rain again.

1 Youth

‘I was born in New York City on West Sixty-Ninth Street. I don’t remember anything about this. My mother told me that while the nurse was filling her hot water bottle, I rushed into the world with my usual speed and screamed like a cat.’

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM, Out of This Century (1979)

CHAPTER 1 Shipwreck

Things had been going badly for Benjamin Guggenheim for a long time. The fact that his marriage was falling apart was something he’d got used to a while back, and, as he admitted to himself, there had been ample consolation – though through it all a nagging lack of satisfaction – for the rapid cooling of his relationship with his wife. The business was another matter. He’d left the family firm eleven years earlier, in 1901, full of injured dignity at what he saw as the high-handed attitude of most of his brothers, determined to go it alone and show them: after all, the expertise he’d picked up in mining and engineering should have stood him in good stead. And, to be fair, it had. Wasn’t his International Steam Pump Company responsible for the lifts that now ran all the way to the top of the Eiffel Tower? And Paris hadn’t been a bad alternative, this past decade, to a loveless, even inimical, New York. If it weren’t for his daughters, Benita, Peggy and Hazel, the three unlikely products of his and Florette’s rare moments of passion (informed by duty) over the first eight years of their union, he might well have cut loose altogether.

But the business was going downhill, and he could see no way of turning it round. He’d never been a businessman, any more than he’d been an enthusiastic student – though the family never failed to remind him that he was the first of the first-generation American Guggenheims to go to university. The failure of his business was worse than the failure of his marriage. Excluded from the family concern, how could he ignore the vast strides that it had made since he’d left at the turn of the century, drawing a modest $250,000 a year from his then-existing interests? Now, in April 1912, he’d decided to return to the States. It would be Hazel’s ninth birthday on the thirtieth. He’d be home for that. And he might drum up some extra capital once home, too, though asking his brothers for a loan would be a long shot, and his wife’s money was too tied up for him to reach, even if he’d had the courage to ask for it. At least no one in the family but himself knew how bad things were. Mismanaged capital, shaky investments and an extravagant lifestyle were to blame.

He’d married Florette on 24 October 1894. She was twenty-four, he was twenty-nine. He’d played the field beforehand, and he was handsome enough to have attracted a better-looking partner; but she was a Seligman, and therefore, though her family looked down on his, a real catch. The Seligmans didn’t have the kind of money the Guggenheims had, but they had the New York cachet the Guggenheims needed, and at that time Ben was still a paid-up member of the family.

Since the birth of his youngest daughter, Ben had spent more and more time in France, looking after his business interests and several mistresses. He’d hardly seen his children in the past year, and not at all in the last eight months, though a letter survives from him to Hazel, written from Paris in early April 1911, which testifies to the affection he had for them. It also indicates that he wanted to see his wife again, though its tone is more dutiful than sincere:

Have just received your letter, am sorry it takes so long for the doll to get through the custom house but when he does reach you I am sure you will like him. We had quite a lot of snow and cold weather yesterday so you see that even in Paris we sometimes are disappointed. However it is again pleasant today and I think we will soon see the leaves on the trees. Tell Peggy I have just rec’d her letter of the 30th Mch but as I just wrote her yesterday I shall not write again today. Tell her also I was very glad to receive this her [?]kind letter and hope that she and you will frequently find time to write me. I am writing Mummie asking if she wants me to rent a beautiful country place at Saint Cloud near Paris. If we take it she can invite Lucille and [?]Doby, and can remove there for July.

With much love from your

Papa

He missed his children, especially the younger two, who adored him and were rivals for his affections. His oldest, Benita, named for him, was almost seventeen – already a young woman, self-possessed, a little cool, beautiful, unlike her mother, but showing signs of wanting nothing more than the moneyed, inactive life of bridge, tea-parties and gossip that Florette enjoyed. Ben was well aware that Florette regarded him as a loser. She had her own means, but she liked money, and she liked acquiring it more than spending it.

What a pity they hadn’t produced a son. But that was something the Guggenheim clan was seldom capable of.

The closest Ben had to a son was his nephew Harry, one of the five boys the seven brothers had managed to produce to carry the family name forward – though Ben’s sisters also had sons. Ben had had lunch with Harry in Paris on 9 April, shortly before leaving for Cherbourg to pick up his ship for the States. Harry was a shade strait-laced already at twenty-two, but Ben talked to him about his business affairs, playing down his difficulties; Harry’s father was Daniel, the most dominant, though by no means the richest, of Ben’s brothers. Ben steered clear of personal observations. A few years earlier, when Harry was fourteen or fifteen, Ben had got into hot water by offering him this piece of advice: ‘Never make love to a woman before breakfast for two reasons. One, it’s wearing. Two, in the course of the day you may meet somebody you like better.’

Shortly before the meeting with Harry, Ben had a problem to deal with. The ship he was booked on, with his chauffeur, René Pernot, and his secretary-valet, Victor Giglio, was suddenly unable to sail, owing to an unofficial strike over pay by her stokers. Ben was one of a number of irritated passengers who were forced to find alternative berths, but after a number of wires to London, New York and Southampton, luck appeared to favour him. He managed to get two first-class cabins, for his valet and himself, and a second-class berth for his chauffeur, on the White Star Line’s new flagship, RMS Titanic, which was making her maiden voyage, stopping at Cherbourg on the evening of 10 April, en route from Southampton to New York via the French port, and Queenstown (now Cóbh) in Ireland. It wasn’t cheap – the first-class cabins cost $1520 each one-way – but the ship was very fast, at the cutting edge of technology and, in first class at least, the last word in elegance. Ben, used to the good things in life even in adversity, was pleased that the switch had had to be made. And when he looked at the passenger list and saw in what august company he’d be travelling, he wondered whether the manner of his crossing the Atlantic might send a message to his brothers that he was doing better than he actually was.

Ben was the fifth of seven brothers. Only William, the youngest, might have been sympathetic, but William had cut loose from the family firm at the same time as Ben, and while he shared Ben’s love of the good life, he was a self-absorbed young man. Like Ben, he had become a ‘poor’ Guggenheim. Each of the two brothers had given up a capital interest of $8 million when they’d left the business – something else Ben had kept secret from his wife.

Nevertheless, as he settled into his cabin on B deck, Ben could reflect that ‘poor’ was a relative term. He still had plenty of money by most people’s standards, and his older brothers, as far as he could see, had yet to make serious money themselves. In his forty-seventh year, Ben still had time to turn his fortunes round.

But it was not to be. We don’t know where Ben was at 11.40 p.m. on the night of 14 April, but the chances are that he had already retired to his cabin. Wherever he was, he would have felt the faint, grinding jar that came from the bowels of the ship at that moment. He may well have seen the iceberg as it glided past. But like most on board, he did not feel any concern. After all, the Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable. Relying on this, and ignoring ice warnings which had come from other ships in the area throughout the day, the captain, Edward J. Smith, a veteran sailor making his last voyage before retirement, had continued to sail virtually at full speed. Egged on by J. Bruce Ismay, White Star’s president, he was attempting to set a new transatlantic record.

At about midnight, by then joined by Giglio, Guggenheim was being helped into a lifejacket by the steward in charge of that set of eight or nine cabins. Henry Samuel Etches urged Guggenheim against the latter’s protests to pull a heavy sweater over the lifejacket (few aboard, cocooned from the elements in the well-heated, brilliantly-lit liner, had any idea of how cold the North Atlantic was), and sent him and his valet on deck. As first-class passengers, their places in lifeboats were assured. However, in the next hour or so, as confusion mounted and it became clear that women and children might be left aboard the sinking ship as the inadequate (and in the event woefully underfilled) lifeboats began to be cast off, Benjamin Guggenheim and Victor Giglio did a stylish and brave thing: they returned to their cabins, changed into evening dress, and then set about helping women and children into the boats. Ben is reported to have said, ‘We’ve dressed in our best, and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.’

The rest of the story may belong to the corpus of Titanic myth, but it’s reasonable to believe some of the details of Ben’s last moments. However, as neither Giglio nor the chauffeur, René Pernot, survived either, it is impossible to verify them. The first-class cabin steward, Etches, was ordered to take an oar in a lifeboat, and did survive. He subsequently made his way to the St Regis Hotel in New York, where several members of the Guggenheim family had apartments, and asked to see Ben’s wife, as he had been entrusted with a message from her husband. Florette, who already knew that Ben was missing, was too grief-stricken to see him; he was received by Daniel Guggenheim. The encounter was widely reported, but the fullest account of Etches’ story appeared in the New York Times on 20 April:

… I could see what they [Ben and Giglio] were doing. They were going from one lifeboat to another, helping the women and children. Mr Guggenheim would shout out, ‘Women first’, and he was of great assistance to the officers.

Things weren’t so bad at first, but when I saw Mr Guggenheim and his secretary three-quarters of an hour after the crash there was great excitement. What surprised me was that both Mr Guggenheim and his secretary were dressed in their evening clothes. They had deliberately taken off their sweaters, and as nearly as I can tell there were no lifebelts at all.

It is possible that Etches concocted a tale of heroism with an eye to a reward of some kind from the wealthy family; but in view of the fact that Ben and his valet were not the only men who went down with the ship rather than take what could have been seen as the cowardly expedient of getting into lifeboats, it seems unlikely. Other newspapers reported that among the prominent people on board, John Jacob Astor IV, of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, President Taft’s military aide, Major Archibald Butt, and Isidore Straus of Macy’s department store also helped others into the boats and thus sacrificed their own lives. Etches added that Ben had told him, ‘If anything should happen to me, tell my wife in New York that I’ve done my best in doing my duty,’ and that ‘No woman shall go to the bottom because I was a coward.’ Significantly, Bruce Ismay, who did save himself, was profoundly affected from the moment he was taken aboard the rescue ship, Carpathia. As the chronicler of the disaster, Walter Lord, records in his book A Night to Remember: ‘During the rest of the trip Ismay never left [his] room; he never ate anything solid; he never received a visitor … he was kept to the end under the influence of opiates. It was the start of a self-imposed exile from active life. Within a year he retired from the White Star Line, purchased a large estate on the west coast of Ireland, and remained a virtual recluse until he died in 1937.’

Ben’s family was devastated by his loss. Strangely, eight hours before the Titanic struck the iceberg, Florette and her three daughters were returning home from the eighty-ninth birthday party given for Florette’s father, James Seligman, when Benita’s attention was drawn to a newsvendor shouting, ‘Extra! Extra!’ By some clairvoyance, she urged her mother to buy a paper, insisting that ‘something terrible must have happened to Poppa’s boat’, as Hazel later recounted to a Guggenheim family chronicler, John H. Davis.

Though there is no reason to disbelieve Etches’ account, many apocryphal stories did grow up around the disaster. The newspapers had a field day, and this was not surprising. In the days before film, pop and sports celebrities figured largely in the public consciousness, it was the rich, the great and the good who filled these roles, and the Titanic had taken a fine crop of them to the bottom with her. There was another element too, which only became apparent months and even years later. The sinking of the unsinkable was a defeat of Humankind by Nature. Total and assured belief in technology foundered. The same year, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party died on their return journey from the South Pole: their bodies were discovered in November, another blow to the world’s confidence in itself. The First World War would soon decisively break down the old order.

In the rush to report the news of the sinking, various journalistic errors occurred. On 20 April the Daily Graphic brought out a commemorative edition focusing on the disaster, in which a photograph of Ben’s younger brother Simon appeared over the caption, ‘Benjamin Guggenheim’ – a further source of distress to the family. Etches is referred to as ‘James Johnson’ – another steward – in several accounts, and, most wildly of all, it was claimed that Ben had left a fortune of $92 million, ‘mostly to his family’. As his family had no idea of how much he was actually worth, this news aroused mixed feelings; but any optimistic reaction must have been tempered by the fact that Ben had only carried a life insurance policy of $23,000. Not a bad sum in itself – as a comparative guide, the prominent British journalist and sex-reformer William T. Stead, who also drowned in the disaster, was insured for $10,000; but the highest level of insurance of those on board was $50,000.

There were other myths. Throughout her life Hazel, who lost her father a few days short of her ninth birthday, was profoundly affected by the experience. At her own funeral in 1995, she had arranged for ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’ to be played – but despite popular belief, the hymn was never played as the great ship died. The ship’s band bravely played on until the end – and not a single musician survived – but what they played was ragtime. Another myth which affected the Guggenheims was the story of a ‘Mrs Guggenheim’ being on board with her ‘husband’, a story which quickly inflated to produce a ‘blond singer’, a mistress of Ben’s whom he’d brought aboard at Cherbourg. No such person appears on the Titanic’s passenger list, and it is highly unlikely that even the womanising Ben would return home for his youngest daughter’s birthday, expecting to be met at the New York quayside by his family, with a woman in tow. (It is possible, though unlikely, that he picked someone up on board.)

For a time, Florette continued to cling to the hope that her husband was not dead, but simply missing – the first survivor lists issued were confusing, and the Carpathia aroused press anger by refusing to wire ahead a definitive schedule of whom she had picked up. This was not mischievous or malicious: Captain Rostron was giving wireless priority to ship’s business and survivors’ messages to their families. However, the Carpathia was a slow ship, and she didn’t reach New York until the Thursday following the Sunday night which had seen the Titanic sink.

There is no record of Benita’s reaction to the loss of her father, but Hazel and Peggy left behind their own testimonies. Hazel, who became a painter, was almost always concerned with ships and water in her pictures, and as late as 1969, on the anniversary of the sinking, she produced a five-stanza poem, ‘Titanic Lifeboat Blues’. A year later she had it set to music and recorded it, singing the words herself. The first stanza will suffice to give an impression. Despite its shortcomings, there’s no doubting its sincerity:

Half four score and seventeen years agoMy father stood on deck, declined towards safety to row.Gave his place in lifeboat to the weaker sex.That ship that sank midst wreck of trunk and bunk,Titanic was her name; Titanic was her shame!All this to win Atlantic speeding fame,That ocean sport; near coast of HalifaxHad nearby ship been lax?Who knows, not even writer Walter Lord.Perhaps He knows – Almighty God our LordCan tell what caused death’s knell.

Peggy, approaching fourteen at the time of her father’s death, is more succinct in her autobiography, written in the mid-1940s: ‘My father’s death affected me greatly. It took me months to get over the terrible nightmare of the Titanic, and years to get over the loss of my father. In a sense I have never really recovered, as I suppose I have been searching for a father ever since.’ It is hard to determine how far either woman in later life was being disingenuous. Each may have needed an excuse for the wildness in their lives. However, neither was particularly introspective.

Amidst all the press speculation, Florette and her daughters were to discover the true extent of Ben’s fortune. But it would be a long process.

CHAPTER 2 Heiress

After Ben’s death his powerful brothers, Daniel, Murry, Solomon and Simon, put aside the differences they’d had with him during his life, and pulled together to help his widow and her family. Ben’s International Steam Pump Company, together with a variety of lesser business interests, not to mention his lavish personal tastes, the maintenance of his staff, his mistresses, and a Paris apartment, had absorbed almost all his capital.

As a temporary measure, without her knowledge, the brothers discreetly advanced money from their own pockets to Florette via a private account, and set about the business of unravelling Ben’s affairs. It took seven years to sort everything out and pay off the many creditors. By the time this had been done, all that remained was about $800,000 for Florette and $450,000 for each of the girls. The brothers estimated that Ben had run through about $8 million.

Although the inheritances were no mean sums, they were small compared with the wealth of the Guggenheim empire, and they dictated a change in Ben’s family’s way of living. Florette was proud, and when she discovered that the income she’d been receiving had come from her brothers-in-law, ‘she nearly had a fit’, according to Peggy. (When Florette’s father died in 1916, leaving her $2 million, her circumstances improved considerably, and she was able to repay the loan.) Since Ben had more or less permanently absented himself in 1911, the family had moved into a residential suite at the St Regis Hotel – a Guggenheim stronghold – and the house on East 72nd Street had been let to an aunt of Peggy. Now, in 1912, the St Regis became too expensive, and Florette moved with her daughters to a more modest place on the corner of 5th Avenue and 58th Street – though it did have a 5th Avenue number. Evidently the Seligman family couldn’t or wouldn’t help, and Florette reluctantly started to live on her own money. It is possible that her blood relatives thought she had quite enough to survive on, or perhaps, as she had married into the Guggenheims, it was felt that her maintenance was their responsibility. Either way, no one was going to starve.

But it was a blow to find out just how little Ben had left them with. Hazel Guggenheim told a friend, somewhat melodramatically, that ‘my mother made eggs by the hot water from the faucet’. Servants had to be dismissed, and paintings, tapestries and jewellery sold. Hazel remembered that her father bought paintings by Corot, and ‘owned gorgeous suits and shoes and ties, and wore slippers of Moroccan leather’, and that ‘my mother and he went to the opera every night’. That way of life was gone, and Peggy wrote, ‘from that time on I had a complex about no longer being a real Guggenheim. I felt like a poor relative and suffered great humiliation thinking how inferior I was to the rest of the family.’

The context in which she felt this is best understood by making comparisons. The oldest Guggenheim brother was Isaac. When he died in 1922 he left $10 million. Murry died in 1939 leaving $16 million; Dan in 1930 leaving $6 million. Although Peggy and Hazel were to inherit a further $500,000 apiece from their mother on her death in 1937 – their beloved older sister Benita having died ten years earlier – they still saw their cousins, Murry’s children Edmond and Lucille, coming into $8 million each, and Dan’s children Robert, Harry and Gladys getting about $2 million apiece. Everybody lived in close proximity in New York City and on Long Island, and it isn’t surprising that Peggy, at least, wanted to get away – with Hazel following suit. Benita, at seventeen significantly older at the time of Ben’s death, and gentler and more conventional than her sisters, would follow a different path.

‘After his death,’ Hazel recalled much later to Virginia Dortch, who compiled a portrait of Peggy through the reminiscences of her friends, ‘in order not to offend the Guggenheims, my mother would never marry or even sit alone in a room with a man. I suppose, if father had lived, Peggy would have married bourgeois men and I would have stayed married to them.’ However, this may be disingenuous, and does not take into account Florette’s own eccentricity, however mild it was by comparison with her own brothers’ and sisters’. In any case it isn’t helpful to speculate on what might have been. Peggy and Hazel were rivals for their father’s love and for Benita’s love; later they were rivals for fame and notoriety. For the moment, they turned to religion. ‘After my father’s death I became religious,’ wrote Peggy. ‘I attended the services in Temple Emanu-El regularly, and took great dramatic pleasure in standing up for the Kaddish (the service for the dead).’ The family went into mourning, and Peggy felt ‘important and self-conscious in black’.

Ben’s death as a hero when they were both young girls, and the mythic element lent his death by the fact that his body was never recovered, led Peggy and Hazel to idolise his memory more than they might otherwise have done; but it is doubtful whether his death fundamentally affected the course their lives were to take. More important was the comparative lack of money. The youngest of the Guggenheim brothers, William, sued his older siblings in 1916 over what he considered his illegal exclusion from profits from ventures which had flourished since his departure, specifically a fabulously profitable foray into copper mining in Chile. Unfortunately, he and Ben had signed a disclaimer to participation in the mining ventures of the family firm in January 1912. Florette, loyal to the Guggenheims because of their kindness to her, would have nothing to do with William’s case. The other Guggenheim brothers settled out of court for $6 million, which William, with a reputation for poor investments which led Wall Street to nickname him ‘Willie the Plunger’, and a taste for starlets and beauty queens, big cars, a large staff and a big house, as well as a flirtation with vanity publishing, managed to reduce over the next twenty-five years to virtually nothing. After his estranged wife and her son by him had successfully claimed their rightful shares under New York State law, and after debts and taxes had been deducted, all that the two chorus-liners and two beauty queens who had hoped to be William’s principal heirs at his death in 1941 received was about $1000 apiece. Fortunately for William’s descendants, Simon Guggenheim, knowing his younger brother’s ways, had set up a $1 million trust for his heirs after the lawsuit.

Ben and William had been born and brought up under a less onerous burden than their brothers, to the latters’ resentment; but with hindsight they had cause to be grateful for their father’s severity. Ben and William were the ones singled out for university education before joining the family firm. William, for all his failings, had a sensitive and intellectual streak, and a sense of history which prompted him to write an eccentric but nevertheless important memoir of himself and, more importantly, the early days of the Guggenheim empire. And although Solomon Guggenheim was to demonstrate that an artistic sensibility existed within the family, it was Ben who was the principal inspiration for his middle daughter’s decision to live in artistic circles, and for her love of Europe.

Above all, despite all attempts at assimilation, Peggy was marked by her Jewishness. She belonged to a family within the Jewish New York community which was still regarded as arriviste despite its great wealth, and she was a member of the poorest branch of that family. She experienced anti-Semitism early on, and understood the refugee society’s eternal need to stick together and find security in money – Peggy was only second-generation American. Both her grandfathers had come from the middle-European Jewish peasantry and had started out in America as peddlers. From them she inherited two basic characteristics of the successful trader: a love of money and a disinclination to part with it without good reason. If she didn’t set out to make money, in the end what she invested in pictures repaid itself a thousandfold. In leaving Peggy without the fortune her cousins enjoyed, Ben, ironically, did her a favour.

CHAPTER 3 Guggenheims and Seligmans

Both Peggy’s grandfathers left Europe – Meyer Guggenheim in 1847, James Seligman in 1838 – to escape the financial and professional restrictions placed on Jews in the Old World. The Jewish communities of Europe were centuries old, but since the Crusades Jews had found themselves increasingly the object of mistrust, suspicion and fear. The communities defensively kept to themselves and did not integrate, but the countries in which they lived regarded them as at best unwelcome guests, and promulgated laws which ensured that life for them was as difficult and uncomfortable as possible. The majority of them lived in small rural settlements in eastern Europe and Russia, and were not allowed to farm or own land other than their own homes; even such ownership was subject to tariffs and taxes Christians were exempt from. Jews were not allowed to engage in mining, or the smelting of metal, or any other major industrial enterprise, or to practise in any of the professions outside their faith. The only jobs that remained open to them were tailoring, peddling, small-time retail in commodities, and moneylending. The Church permitted them to deal in moneylending because it considered Jews exempt from two tenets, ironically enough from the Old Testament: Exodus 22, verse 25: ‘If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury’; and Deuteronomy 23, verse 19: ‘Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury.’ Pragmatically, the Church acknowledged the necessity for moneylending, but also saw that it was unpopular, and so, with political acumen, accorded the right to practise it to the Jews.

The origin of the Guggenheim family is uncertain, but it is possible that they originally came from what is now called Jügesheim, to the south-east of Frankfurt-am-Main. By the end of the seventeenth century the Guggenheims had moved to Switzerland from Germany, where the treatment of the Jews was harsher. In Switzerland the Jewish community enjoyed a monopoly on moneylending; but as commerce grew and money increasingly began to be used as capital for ventures, the advantages of lending it on interest began to be seen as sound business practice, and the Church’s prohibition on Christian usury was relaxed at the Fifth Lateran Council of 1512–18. The principal function of Jews in Switzerland thus became superfluous, and, with a growing Christian population, the cantons began to expel them. By the end of the eighteenth century the Jewish population of the entire country was reduced to two small communities, in Ober Endingen and Lengnau.

It was in Lengnau, a small village about twenty-five miles north-west of Zürich, that the Guggenheims settled. The earliest of Peggy’s ancestors on her father’s side whom we can trace for certain was a man called Jakob. Jakob Guggenheim was an elder of the synagogue and a respected local scholar of the Talmud, whose acquaintance was sought by a relatively enlightened Protestant Zürich pastor called Johann Ulrich, who had taken his arthritic wife to the nearby spa town of Baden in about 1740. As a result of their meeting Ulrich, already interested in Judaism, became a friend, but unfortunately the pastor’s proselytising zeal led him to persuade one of Jakob’s sons, Josef, to convert to Christianity. The procedure took sixteen tormented years as the sensitive and intellectual Josef struggled with his conscience. It broke up the friendship; but the Guggenheims had had their first brush with the politically dominant religion. Jakob’s protest at his son’s conversion was so angry that he incurred the wrath of the Christian community, which obliged him to pay a massive six-hundred-florin fine in order to remain in Lengnau. That he could afford it shows how prosperous the family was.

Jews were still allowed to lend money, and another of Jakob’s sons, Isaac, displayed a particular gift for the business. When he died in 1807 at an advanced age, he left 25,000 florins in coin, plate and goods; but life continued to be hard for the Jews of Lengnau, and by the time Isaac’s grandchildren reached maturity his patrimony had all but disappeared.

One of them, Simon, worked as a tailor in the village for thirty years without any significant financial gain to show for it. He lost his wife in 1836, and had to bring up a son, Meyer, and four surviving daughters alone. By 1847 Meyer was nearly twenty and worked as a peddler, travelling in Switzerland and Germany. The younger daughters, though, presented a problem: Simon didn’t have enough of the money required by Swiss law (as applied to Jews) to provide them with dowries (which would then be taxed), so they were not allowed to marry.

The problem of matrimony touched Simon personally. He was fifty-five in 1847, but had become attached to a widow, Rachel Weil Meyer, fourteen years his junior. She had three sons and four daughters, but she also had a reasonable amount of capital. This, together with the value of Simon’s home and contents, should have been enough, they hoped, to persuade the authorities that they themselves had sufficient money to get married. But the authorities were unimpressed. Simon and Rachel had had enough. They began to look for a solution away from home.

In 1819 the Savannah, built at Savannah, Georgia, the first steam-assisted sailing ship designed to cross the Atlantic, had made the passage from her home port to Liverpool in twenty-five days. The ship had a full rig of sails, and only used her steam-driven paddles for the small proportion of the voyage when there was no wind; but her successful crossing suddenly brought the young republic of the United States much closer to Europe, and foreshadowed an era of relatively cheap, quick and reliable crossings of the ocean. Other, more sophisticated ships soon followed. America sought talent, labour and immigrants to bolster its still comparatively small European population, and to people its huge virgin territories. For the Jews of Europe the country had one massive attraction: there were no ghettos, and no discriminatory restrictions – unless, of course, you were a native American.

Jews from rural Germany, especially rural Bavaria, a very hard-pressed region, started emigrating early on, and their letters home carried nothing but praise for the New World. It was a huge step for Simon and Rachel, by the standards of the time already both well advanced in years, and rural Swiss-Germans with no other experience of the world; but repression at home offered them little alternative. Here was a place where they could live freely, not as barely tolerated and exploited ‘guests’, even though their family roots reached back centuries. They sold Simon’s property, pooled their resources, and set off with their children overland for Koblenz.

From there they continued to Hamburg, where they spent only a short time before taking steerage berths on a sailing ship – the cheapest passage they could find – bound for America. The voyage took eight weeks, the conditions were cramped and the travellers had to share them with a flourishing population of rats. Although dried fruit was supplied, the food was basic – chiefly hard-tack – and water was rationed very strictly. There was no privacy.

For Simon’s son Meyer and Rachel’s fifteen-year-old daughter Barbara, however, the discomfort of the journey was eclipsed by something far more important: they fell in love. By the time the American coastline rose on the horizon, they had decided – as soon as they could afford it – to marry. This strengthened Meyer’s resolve to do well. He was a small, energetic man, with strong features and a bulbous nose which many of his descendants, including his granddaughter Peggy, would inherit. Capable of kindness, and not averse to the finer things in life (good cigars and fine white wine featured in his later prosperity), he had a liberal side and a certain sense of humour. As a businessman, however, he was habitually mistrustful, cold and acute. He was obsessed with making money, and though he had an aptitude for it, he also worked at it relentlessly.

The joint families’ destination was Philadelphia, where they may already have had friends or relatives – it was the usual method for second- or third-wave immigrants to follow to where cousins or neighbours from the old country had already established bridgeheads, one reason being that few immigrants spoke the language of the new country when they arrived. Away from the north-east, the United States in 1848 was still more or less unexplored: the rapid colonisation and urbanisation of the next seventy years or so was only just getting under way. Philadelphia, however, founded by William Penn in 1682, was by now a prosperous and important city of some 100,000 people, including 2500 Jews. The Jews were integrated into the local community, but only held positions of minor social and financial standing.

Once they had disembarked, organised their modest baggage and adjusted to the unfamiliar, exciting and frightening environment, the large family set about finding a place to live. They rented a house in a poor district outside the city centre, and immediately Simon and Rachel married. The next thing to do, before their slender savings were exhausted, was to find work. Rather than seek employment, Simon and Meyer decided to work for themselves. As it would take more capital than they could afford to set up a tailor’s shop for Simon, they both took to peddling, the work Meyer already had experience in. Stores were few and far between and transport was hard, so most people, especially in outlying areas, tended to buy whatever they needed from travelling salesmen. Old Simon worked the streets of the town, while young Meyer left home each Sunday with a full pack for the country districts, not returning until the following Friday. It can’t have been easy, walking miles on foot, sleeping in the cheapest lodgings, with robbery and abuse a constant worry, but before long he had established both routes and a routine.

The Guggenheims had to learn fast – both the language and local business practice – but on the other hand they were free of all the laws and taxes imposed on Jews back in Switzerland, so there was a sense of liberation which made the graft easier to bear, and also motivated them. For Meyer especially this new beginning was stimulating, and he quickly discovered within himself a great aptitude for business. Iron stoves were rapidly replacing the old open hearths, and one of his best-selling lines was a form of blacklead for cleaning them. Meyer saw that if he could find a way of making his own polish, rather than buying it from the manufacturer, he could make a far greater profit while keeping his retail price low. In those days there was no law restricting such a practice, and history doesn’t relate how the manufacturer reacted to the loss of one small client, but Meyer took a can of the stuff he was buying to a friendly German chemist, who analysed it for him. Thus armed with the recipe, and after several messy experiments in his scant time off, Meyer not only produced his own stove blacking, but improved upon the original by making a version that would stay on the stove, but not on the hands of the person cleaning it. Before long he was selling his polish in such quantities that Simon gave up his own round and stayed home to produce it, using a second-hand sausage-stuffing machine. Soon Meyer was making eight to ten times the profit he had formerly made.

He didn’t stop there. Coffee was already taking hold as the favourite drink of America, but real coffee was extremely expensive. Poorer people drank coffee essence, a liquid concentrate of cheap beans and chicory. Meyer’s step-brother Lehman had already started to produce some of this at home, and now Meyer added it to his list of wares. By this time he was an experienced salesman with a reliable body of customers who trusted him. Four years after getting off the boat he was, at twenty-four, an established figure in the stoveblack and coffee-essence businesses. He married Barbara at Philadelphia’s Keneseth Israël Synagogue and the newlyweds set up house for themselves. It was a good match and a successful marriage. Barbara’s gentle and selfless personality made her the perfect complement to Meyer. She never questioned his authority and always supported him. She was a good mother to their children, and if she had a fault at all it might have been to over-indulge her younger offspring. Meyer, on the other hand, could be a stern disciplinarian. His youngest son, William, recalls in his memoirs that his father had ‘no tendency to spare the rod. Whippings were not infrequent; he employed a leather belt, a hairbrush, or any convenient paddle whenever the need suggested itself to him … None was allowed to doubt for long that his father’s word was law or to think that that law might be broken with impunity.’

From the start, Barbara showed an inclination to charitable work, which increased as her means did, though throughout her life she showed no inclination to use the money her husband earned to spoil or pamper herself. Just as Meyer established the business empire, ruthlessly developed by the more able of his sons after his death, so perhaps did their mother’s influence incline them to set up the charitable foundations for which the family remains famous, after they had made their fortune.

In the course of the next twenty years, Meyer and Barbara produced eight sons, including twin brothers, and three daughters. One of the twins, Robert, died in childhood, and their daughter Jeannette only lived to be twenty-six. But the survivors would grow up to be the heirs and developers of a business empire which was among the biggest half-dozen in America a century ago, and which was gathering strength when Meyer’s granddaughter Peggy was born.

Meanwhile, Meyer expanded and diversified his business interests, always driven by the desire to increase the security of his position in society by making ever larger sums of money. He didn’t necessarily cling to it – the years following his marriage would be punctuated by a series of house moves which tracked his rise in Philadelphia society – but he was extremely careful with it, and would never spend it unless there were some material, political, business or social gain to be made. One of his favourite proverbs came straight from the rural peasantry of his birth: ‘Roast pigeons don’t fly into your mouth by themselves.’ This dictum was one which he tried to inculcate into each of his sons: with Isaac, the oldest, born in 1854, he was not altogether successful, but with the three middle sons, Daniel (1856), Murry (1858) and Solomon (1861), he had greater success. The surviving twin, Simon (1867), also remained within the family fold; the surviving daughters, Rose and Cora, born in 1871 and 1873, following nineteenth-century practice both made good marriages and remained a credit to their parents. Benjamin (1865) and William (1868), however, followed their own paths, as we have seen.

As for education, Meyer, unlike his wife not particularly observant of his faith, chose the best for his children, regardless of religious affiliation, and they were sent to Catholic day schools, which paved the way for their disassociation from the religion and mores of their forefathers. Though Ben and William enjoyed the advantages of further education, only William showed any serious propensity for scholarship; the others were encouraged by their father to enter the family firm as soon as they could, and learn business through hands-on experience. The older boys, who worked hard alongside their father, were later aggrieved when Meyer decided to divide profits equally between all his sons; but Meyer countered their objections by pointing out that in time it would be the younger ones who would carry the burden of the work. He alluded to another piece of peasant wisdom: a bundle of sticks cannot be broken: individually, the sticks can be broken. The older boys knuckled under, but were not reconciled.

In the 1870s, having made small fortunes by the standards of the time in ventures as diverse as lye (used in soap-making) and the burgeoning railroads, Meyer turned his attention to lace. In 1863, all proscriptive laws against the Jews in Switzerland had been repealed, and one of Barbara’s uncles had established a lace factory back home. With a supplier established, Meyer now entered the lucrative lace business. His flair for diversification once again paid off, to the extent that by 1879 he was worth approaching $800,000. But his greatest gamble was yet to come. Two years later he was offered a third of the interest in two silver and lead mines outside the boom town of Leadville in Colorado by a Quaker friend, Charles Graham. Graham had borrowed money to buy two-thirds, but the mines, called the ‘A.Y.’ and the ‘Minnie’ after the original prospector and his wife, who had sold out for very little, were not doing well, and Graham couldn’t afford to repay the loan on half his share when it became due. William Guggenheim records that Graham’s price was $25,000, though it may have been as little as $5,000 – sources differ. In any event Meyer, who knew nothing about mining, thought it was worth the risk. His other partner was one Sam Harsh.

Before too long Meyer made his way to Leadville, in the wake of the disturbing news that the mines were flooded. To pump them out would cost $25,000, more than his two partners could afford. Meyer hesitated, but reflected that after all the investment in relation to his capital was still relatively small – and maybe too he was following what had so far proved to be an unerring instinct. He had steam-pumps developed for the job, the forerunners of a hydraulic power system which would be the cornerstone of his son Benjamin’s later business interests. He bought out his partners, had the mines cleared and repaired, watched the expenses mount, and worried and waited. But he didn’t have to wait long. In August 1881 rich seams both of lead and silver were struck. Soon the mines were bringing in $200,000 a year; by the end of the decade the yield had risen to $750,000.

Based on his experience with stove polish, Meyer saw that if he established his own smelting business, he need not pay anyone to process his ore for him. With the help of his then twenty-three-year-old son Benjamin, a smelter was established at Pueblo at the end of 1888. In the same year the family moved to a new home and new offices in New York, which had by now gained the ascendancy over all other cities in the east as the centre of commerce.

Lace was forgotten. Mining became the centre and the soul of the Guggenheim firm. The world was its unexploited oyster, and with the funds available to them over the years that followed they would gain control of the American smelting industry, and expand their mining operations to Mexico, Chile, Alaska and Angola. Profits would run into the hundreds of millions. They were not always good or ethical employers, their business practice could be sharp, and in those days nobody gave a damn about the ecological effects of mining operations; but they were phenomenally successful. Simply as a family they were formidable: Meyer and Barbara had to remember the birthdays of twenty-three grandchildren. The Guggenheim fortunes would continue to prosper until Peggy’s generation, less interested in business, came into its own.

Barbara, who had contracted diabetes, died on 20 March 1900. Ben and Will pulled out – and were partly pushed out – of the family firm soon after. The other brothers were only too happy to be rid of the interference of their pampered, college-educated siblings, whose ideas of how to run the business clashed with their own. Furthermore, Will, who fancied himself something of a ladies’ man, had blotted his copybook by making a very ill-advised marriage late in 1900, to a woman of dubious virtue. The older brothers coerced him into divorce, but then had to stump up a hefty $78,000 to satisfy the aggrieved ex-wife, although the whole business dragged on for another thirteen years, and in 1904 even threatened to bring scandal upon Will’s second and only slightly more successful marriage. Ben and Will were left with handsome incomes and some interest in the business, but only as far as it had come by the turn of the century. They were cut off from the vast amounts that would accrue to the Guggenheim companies after 1900.

Meyer, growing old, increasingly left the reins of the business to his son Daniel, dabbling in the stock exchange as a means of recreation. ‘When my grandmother died,’ Peggy wrote, ‘my grandfather was looked after by his cook. She must have been his mistress.’ This is a typical Peggy-ism, and need not necessarily be true – she always loved amorous intrigue. ‘I remember seeing her weep copious tears because my grandfather vomited. My one recollection of this gentleman is of his driving around New York in a sleigh with horses, he was unaccompanied and always wore a coat with a sealskin collar and a cap to match.’ The cook-mistress may be an exaggeration by Peggy, but a woman servant called Hannah McNamara sued Meyer for $25,000 shortly after Barbara’s death, claiming to have been his mistress for the past twenty-five years. Meyer denied the whole thing, and the unfortunate business blew over; but the servant’s allegations are not outside the bounds of possibility, and most of Meyer’s sons had one mistress or more at some stage in their lives.

But if there was someone who consoled him during his final years, Meyer kept her secret. He died in Florida, where he’d gone to recover from a cold, in 1905, nearly five years to the day after Barbara.

When Ben Guggenheim successfully wooed and won Florette Seligman in 1894, his family was already substantially richer than hers. But the Seligmans, though they had only arrived in the States about ten years earlier than the ‘Googs’, formed part of the Jewish élite of New York, and looked down on the family which had made so much money from mining and smelting. A Seligman family telegram to cousins back home in Germany may have been deliberately miswritten to show their contempt: ‘FLORETTE ENGAGED GUGGENHEIM SMELT HER’. However, no objection was raised to the match. No one could fail to respect the Guggenheim wealth, or the speed with which it had been made. Benjamin was a bit of a dandy and a bit of a womaniser; he had a warm personality and a delightful smile. Florette was on the plain side and her temperament was difficult. But from each family’s point of view, the union was advantageous.

Despite the difference in the status of the two families in New York, the story of the Seligman origins is remarkably similar to that of the Guggenheims. The little town of Baiersdorf lies midway between Bamberg and Nuremberg in Franconia, Germany. There was a Jewish community there from at least the mid-fourteenth century, and the last Jews belonging to it were deported to a concentration camp in Poland, where they died, in 1942. A large Jewish cemetery remains, and the town, as so many in Germany do, has its Judengasse – Jews’ Street. The Seligmann family – they would drop the second ‘n’ on arrival in America – arrived in Baiersdorf around 1680. In 1818 David Seligmann, a local weaver, married Fanny Steinhardt. The couple set up house in the Judengasse, and over the next twenty years produced eight sons and three daughters, just as the Guggenheims had done. Today there is a Seligmannstrasse in Baiersdorf, and a David and Fanny Seligman Kindergarten, endowed by the family.

Using some of her dowry, Fanny bought a stock of bed linen, bolts of cloth, lace and ribbons. With them she set up a small shop in the family home, and did so well that David’s none-too-impressive fortunes improved. He called himself a wool merchant, and started a sideline in sealing wax. He had to travel frequently on business, so that the upbringing of the children was left, to his misgiving, to his wife.

Travellers from outside Baiersdorf started to use Fanny’s shop, and by the mid-1820s their oldest son, Josef, had begun a modest currency-exchange business. In those days much of Germany consisted of small principalities, and coinage was not standardised, so Josef did a brisk trade, taking a small profit from each exchange. It was a short step from changing money for the convenience of users of his mother’s dry-goods store to running a regular currency exchange, and by the age of twelve the precocious Josef was even handling the occasional US dollar, among other truly foreign coinage.

Fanny was ambitious for all her children, but Josef was the apple of her eye. However, by the mid-1830s, the German rural economy was declining, as more and more people migrated to the increasingly industrialised cities, and Jews, subject to severe legal restrictions, found it ever harder to make ends meet. Some moved to the cities, but received no welcome there. Others began to look outside their native land. As Jewish migrants moved through the country westwards from oppression farther east, in Poland and Russia, word spread about the opportunities awaiting those who could afford, or who dared, to emigrate to America. In time, so great was the emigration that a duality arose in New York Jewish society not only between the insiders and the outsiders, but between those ‘older’ emigrants with German names, and those who mainly came later, with Russian and Slavonic names – these last being at the bottom of the social heap.

Fanny Seligmann had a strategy. Joseph was now fourteen, and she took the unprecedented step in her family of sending him to university in nearby Erlangen, where for two years he studied German literature, and learned some Latin, Greek, English and French. By the time he had graduated at sixteen he wanted nothing more than to spread his wings and go to the United States. Father David, now forty-six years old, a conservative, dour man, raised objections: emigrants were widely regarded as failures, and besides, there were rumours that Jews in America lost sight of their religion. But Fanny was adamant, and although it took her some time to persuade her husband, Josef was allowed to set off, aged eighteen, in July 1837, in the company of eighteen other men, women and children from the town. Fanny had managed to scrape together the money for his passage, and from somewhere too – possibly relatives in her home town of Sulzbach – she’d obtained $100 in US currency, which she carefully sewed into Josef’s knee-breeches. Then she waved him goodbye. She would never see him again. In 1841, aged only forty-two, Fanny died. She had given birth to her eleventh child, a daughter, two years earlier. It was clear that Fanny had been the backbone of the family. Soon after her death, her widowed husband, with several children still at home to look after, ran into financial difficulties.

The journey from Baiersdorf to Bremen, where Josef’s party was to take ship, took seventeen days, travelling overland in two wagons. The crossing on the schooner Telegraph took a further sixty-six days. Including Josef’s party, there were 142 people crammed on board. Passage cost $40, and included a cup of water and one meal a day – which unfortunately consisted of pork and beans, so Josef quickly had to ignore his father’s parting injunction not to forget the Jewish dietary laws. Even so he lost weight on the journey – no bad thing, as he always had a tendency towards corpulence. On the journey he also fell in love, with the daughter of his group’s leader Johannes Schmidt. But unlike Meyer’s, it was simply a shipboard romance, ending in a tearful parting when the Telegraph docked at New York.

Josef, who immediately anglicised his name – to Joseph Seligman – on arrival in America, as all his brothers who followed would, had more on his mind than regretting the girl. He was a young man driven by ambition, and with a similar motivation to Meyer’s: in money lay security. Soon after his arrival he set off on a hundred-mile hike – he wasn’t going to waste any money on transport, and must have been innocent of the perils of the road – down to Maunch Creek, Pennsylvania, where he had an introduction to a cousin of his mother’s. Maunch Creek wasn’t much of a place, but Joseph quickly got a job, at $400 a year, as financial clerk to a canal-boat building company. He made friends with the boss; the Seligmans would always have the knack of striking up good relationships with the right people, in this case Asa Packer, a small-town businessman who would prove to be an invaluable contact. Packer went on to become a multi-millionaire, the founder of a university, the president of a railroad, and a US Congressman.

After a year, Joseph turned down the offer of a generous pay-rise and invested the $200 he’d saved in various portable goods. With them he set off on foot, carrying a two-hundred-pound pack, peddling to farms in the region. It was hard and sometimes dangerous work, but Joe was tough and single-minded. He was also a brilliant salesman, and within six months he had made a profit of $500, part of which he sent off to his two next-eldest brothers, Wolf and Jakob, who were longing to join him, as their passage-money.

Wolf and Jakob – renamed William and James on their arrival in America – were not all-rounders like Joseph. William was idle, and liked the good life, which annoyed his older brother. James however, while not particularly good at accountancy, turned out to be the best salesman of all of them. By 1840 the brothers had bought a place to use as their headquarters in Lancaster, fifty miles west of Philadelphia; the following year the next brother, Jesaias (who became Jesse), came over aged fourteen, and quickly proved to be the accountant the enterprise needed. Over the next two years, growing profits enabled Joseph to get the rest of his family, including his father, over to the New World.

James, handsome, confident and intelligent, showed an aptitude for salesmanship which surpassed even his oldest brother’s, and in 1846 he was delegated to open the New York branch of the family’s fast-expanding dry-goods business. At about the same time Jesse and his youngest brother Henry (Hermann) were establishing another branch at Watertown, in upstate New York. There, Jesse made friends with an army lieutenant stationed nearby. This would turn out to be another fortunate relationship, since the lieutenant’s name was Ulysses S. Grant.

The Seligmans continued to live modestly, even after their business expanded to cover most of the country. As a result of the Gold Rush to San Francisco in the 1850s they were able to reap mighty profits, since gold fever led to enormous price hikes. A blanket bought for $5 could sell for $40, and a quart of whiskey went for $25. Profits from California became the mainstay of the Seligman organisation.

But a new dimension soon crept into their interests. Much of the profit from the west coast took the physical form of gold bullion, which the New York branch used not only to buy new stock, but also to trade on the market. Banking in the United States didn’t become formally regulated until after the Civil War, and there was no bar to anyone entering the field. It didn’t take long for the Seligmans to realise that interest never stopped earning. They loaned, bought and sold IOUs, and eventually offered deposit accounts. By 1852 Joseph, aged thirty-three, was a major New York banker and investor. The only mistake the family made, based no doubt on their traditional thinking, was to avoid tying anything up in property: by and large, they rented. Thus at one point they passed up the chance to buy about one-sixth of Manhattan.

The Seligmans were now solidly established. During the Civil War they sold uniforms to the Union Army, and took the risk of being paid in Treasury Bonds. It paid off, and when the war was over, with their old friend Grant a Yankee hero, they were able to cash in on the post-war boom. Although New York high society was riddled with elaborate rules and regulations, which tacitly excluded Jews from its inner sanctum, no one in business could afford to ignore them. By the mid-1860s the Seligman brothers and sisters had produced about eighty children between them. When Grant became president in 1869, he offered Joseph the post of Secretary to the Treasury. For the first time Joseph faltered. He may have been a millionaire at fifty, but at heart he was still an immigrant Jewish kid, and his confidence failed him. On his own turf, however, he remained king, and the linchpin of the clan’s business activities.

Although by no means on a par with the Astors, Morgans, Vanderbilts or Whitneys, the Seligmans continued to expand. They never had as big a break as the Guggenheims had in mining, but like them they diversified into railroads, and, famously, into the Panama Canal venture. After the builder of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, failed to achieve the same success in Central America, the Seligmans were able not only to divert interest from a rival canal construction in Nicaragua, but to finance a revolution for Panamanian independence from Colombia in return for the canal contract.

The Guggenheims were always out-of-towners, and were thus less affected by the implicit anti-Semitism of New York society than the Seligmans were. As the Seligmans’ wealth increased, so did their desire to be accepted. Joseph had long since forgotten his father’s injunctions to be strictly observant of his faith, and he and his brothers wanted nothing more than to be accepted by the great and the good. Being Jewish and having a German accent didn’t help, no matter how much money one had, and however much one learned which knives and forks to use when and how to hold them properly, and the correct manner of presenting a calling card. As in the Great Plague of the Middle Ages, so in the temporary financial panic year of 1873, Jews were blamed.

Oddly enough, Sephardic Jews were more likely to be accepted. Moses Lazarus had been one of the founders of New York’s Knickerbocker Club, second in exclusivity only to the Union Club. His daughter Emma even wrote the verse that adorns the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give me your tired, your poor …’ For Ashkenazi Jews, especially those from Germany, it was a different matter. Just as in time they would look down on the Slav and Russian Jewish immigrants, so now they were the newcomers, and their financial acumen meant that they were the victims of envy and its attendant spite.

Still they longed to be accepted. Their synagogue, the Temple Emanu-El on 5th Avenue, was reformed and Americanised. But they also took pride in their old country. They founded their own exclusive clubs: until 1893 the Harmonie Gesellschaft hung a portrait of the Kaiser on its walls. And although the Seligmans had anglicised their first names, they wouldn’t touch their surname (except for dropping the second ‘n’). When William once suggested it, Joseph retorted that if he wanted to, he had better change his to schlemiel. By the late nineteenth century the Ashkenazi Jews of New York comprised a formidable group, including the Contents, the Goldmans, the Kuhns, the Lehmans, the Lewinsohns, the Loebs, the Sachses and the Schiffs. However, when it came to names for their children, Gentile and patriotic American ones were chosen. The thing to do for prominent Jews was to play down their Jewishness. But whatever they did, anti-Semitism remained a core element of society, and Jewish new arrivals found it impossible to avoid or ignore. That it rankled long with Joseph is proven by one dramatic incident.

The Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga had been owned by one Alexander T. Stewart. On his death in 1876 Stewart had left its management to a friend, Harry Hilton, who shared his right-wing views. Stewart had envied Joseph Seligman from the time that Seligman had turned down the Treasury post, which Stewart coveted. It hadn’t helped that Stewart’s subsequent application for the job had been rejected by the Senate.

The hotel had begun to lose money even before Stewart’s death, and Hilton and he believed this was because the Gentile clientele didn’t like the admission of Jews. It wasn’t uncommon for expensive hotels, clubs and even restaurants to refuse admission to Jews in those days, and Saratoga was a major resort for the wealthy. It isn’t clear whether the Seligman family actually went to the hotel in the summer of 1877, or whether they were forewarned: it seems highly unlikely that they would not have booked beforehand. It is possible that Joseph arrived with his family and his baggage in the knowledge that he would provoke a rejection. If so, the humiliation he received must have been half expected. Whatever the truth of the matter, they were rebuffed.

There was a storm in the press, and a furious exchange of letters. Seligman sued Hilton. The liberal elements in society took up Joseph’s cause. But Hilton stuck to his guns: he didn’t like Jews, and they were bad for business. The courts did not find in favour of Seligman, and several other hotels in the Adirondacks, emboldened by Hilton’s move, also introduced a ‘no-Jews’ policy. The only satisfaction Joseph could derive from the affair was the successful boycott of the largest New York department store, also formerly owned by Stewart and now managed by Hilton, which closed as a result. The effect of the case on Joseph was profound: he never recovered from it, perceiving it as the ultimate rejection by a society he had striven all his life to belong to, and into which he had put so much. He died at the end of March 1879, in his sixtieth year. A sad postscript is the resignation as late as 1893 by Jesse Seligman from the Union League Club, his favourite, which his brothers Joseph and William had also been involved in, when, extraordinarily, Jesse’s son Theodore was refused membership on anti-Semitic grounds. Like his older brother, Jesse found that New York was soured for him, and that he had never been truly accepted, even after forty-odd years in the city. He died a year later, leaving $30 million.

While Joseph had sought a wife back home in Germany, and married his cousin Babet, his younger brother James married into one of New York’s oldest and most established Jewish families. The Contents, originally of Dutch-German stock, had been in America since the late eighteenth century. To marry one of them was to gain an entrée into the best circles of Jewish New York society; but that society was small and closed. Despite wealth and respectability, the Jewish élite remained in an unofficial ghetto, without walls or other tangible demarcations to fence it off, but no less real for all that – and it may be that it was one which they did not choose to leave. A disinclination by Gentiles to marry into it was matched by a disinclination to marry out, and even if such a thing had been possible, it would have meant social anathema for the couple involved. The inevitable result was inbreeding. Cousins married cousins, and their children intermarried, so that within a couple of generations physical and psychological problems inevitably occurred.

The Contents looked down on just about everybody, although James was not the first German parvenu to marry one of them. On 4 December 1851, in the presence of Rabbis Isaacs and Merzbacher, he took the hand of Rosa Content. He was twenty-seven, and she was a slender, dark girl of seventeen. They hadn’t known each other long, and didn’t know each other well.

James was easy-going, but he knew the value of money and he was careful with it. Peggy, his granddaughter, describes him as ‘a very modest man who refused to spend money on himself’. Rosa was far from easy-going, and very extravagant. From the first she felt that she had married beneath her, and the wealth the marriage brought did little to mollify her. Throughout her life she would trade on her superiority: she habitually referred to her husband’s family as ‘the peddlers’. The couple’s English butler was also called James. Rosa would call him ‘James’ at all times, and in his presence would refer to her husband as ‘Jim’. This calculated humiliation caused James Seligman great hurt. He wasn’t a good dancer; she was. ‘Germans are so heavy on their feet,’ she complained.

Still, he must have loved her, at least at first, because he indulged her as far as he could bear to, compensating for the expense by stinting himself. His nature led him to take the line of least resistance, and although it was never a happy one, for some time the union worked reasonably well, producing eight children. One of them, Florette, born in 1870, went on to marry Benjamin Guggenheim and become the mother of Peggy.

With time Rosa became increasingly eccentric. As they grew up, the children were not allowed to bring their friends home, on the grounds that they would be of a lower social order ‘and probably germy’. Rosa didn’t like children anyway, not least her own, and her horror of germs was such that she had a habit of spraying everything with Lysol, a practice Florette and Peggy would inherit. She also began to spend more and more of her time shopping. Eventually, James took a mistress. As a result of this, Rosa would astonish shop assistants by asking them out of the blue, and with a dark expression in her eyes, ‘When do you think my husband last slept with me?’

In the end, James could stand it no more and moved out of the family home and into the Hotel Netherland. There he spent his remaining years, and became something of an eccentric himself. He had a horror of new technology, and always had an assistant place his telephone calls. He lived to be ninety-two, and when he died in 1916 he was the oldest member of the New York Stock Exchange. A reporter who interviewed him for the New York Times in his rooms at the Netherland on the occasion of his eighty-eighth birthday found an

old gentleman clad in black, with snow-white, flowing locks and [a] long, spare, white beard, deeply immersed in the contents of a newspaper, his slippered feet extended before him on a velvet hassock. Perched upon his shoulder was a bright yellow canary bird, which sang at intervals, and it fluttered between its open cage and its master.

Rosa, having herself moved to a hotel in the latter part of her life, predeceased her husband, dying of pneumonia at the end of 1907. Peggy remembered her as her ‘crazy grandmother’.

Although Peggy’s Guggenheim uncles and aunts were, with the possible exceptions of her own father and her uncle William, what one might call solid citizens, it is hardly surprising, given their background and their mother’s inbred genes, that the same cannot be said for her Seligman relatives. Despite James’s injection of new blood, despite their tuition as children by the novelist Horatio Alger (though the fact that he’d been sacked by the Unitarian Church for tampering with choirboys may not have helped), Peggy’s Seligman uncles and aunts were all, in her own words, ‘very eccentric’. Unlike her Guggenheim uncles, none of the children of James and Rosa Seligman achieved anything much. They lived on their incomes and lived out their lives. But what lives they were, as Peggy wrote:

One of my favorite aunts was an incurable soprano. If you happened to meet her on the corner of Fifth Avenue while waiting for a bus, she would open her mouth wide and sing scales trying to make you do as much. She wore her hat hanging off the back of her head or tilted over one ear. A rose was always stuck in her hair. Long hatpins emerged dangerously, not from her hat, but from her hair. Her trailing dresses swept up the dust of the streets. She invariably wore a feather boa. She was an excellent cook and made beautiful tomato jelly. Whenever she wasn’t at the piano, she could be found in the kitchen or reading the ticker-tape. She was an inveterate gambler. She had a strange complex about germs and was forever wiping the furniture with Lysol. But she had such extraordinary charm that I really loved her. I cannot say her husband felt as much. After he had fought with her for over thirty years, he tried to kill her and one of her sons by hitting them with a golf club. Not succeeding, he rushed to the reservoir where he drowned himself with heavy weights tied to his feet.

Another aunt, who resembled an elephant more than a human being, at a late age in life conceived the idea that she had had a love affair with an apothecary. Although this was completely imaginary, she felt so much remorse that she became melancholic and had to be put in a nursing home.

There is much more along these lines in Peggy’s autobiography, and there are interesting indications of her own personality in the characters. The operatic Frances was also a good cook and read the ticker-tape, as well as having a mania for Lysol; the morose Adeline’s lover was entirely a figment of her imagination. But the list by no means ends there. Peggy’s uncle Washington Seligman lived principally on whiskey, and charcoal and ice cubes, which he kept in the zinc-lined pockets of a specially-designed waistcoat. This hideous diet was apparently dictated by chronic indigestion, but notwithstanding that and his black teeth, he maintained a mistress in his room in the family house, and threatened to commit suicide if ever the talk turned to her eviction. He was also an inveterate gambler. In the end, in 1912, he did kill himself, not because of the girlfriend, but because he was unable to bear the pain of his indigestion any longer. His father James Seligman, then eighty-eight years old, showed a certain tenderness but shocked the congregation when he walked up the aisle at the funeral service with his late son’s mistress on his arm. Washington’s death was followed by another suicide: a second cousin, Jesse II, shot first his wife, for presumed infidelity, and then himself. Yet another relative, Peggy’s second cousin Joseph Seligman II (old Joseph’s grandson), committed suicide at about the same time because he couldn’t cope with being Jewish. This is a measure of how much strain the Jewish society-within-a-society was under, striving for acceptance from without and riddled with snobbery within.

James’s next two sons were Samuel, who was so obsessed with cleanliness that he spent all day bathing; and Eugene, who was so bright that he was ready for Columbia Law School at eleven, but put it off until fourteen in order to avoid being conspicuous. He graduated with high honours and practised the law subsequently; but he was so mean, a trait he shared with many of his siblings, that he would constantly arrive in their houses unannounced at mealtimes in order to freeload. By way of recompense, he would delight the children of the house after the meal by arranging a line of chairs and then wriggling along them, an act which he called ‘The Snake’.

The remaining brothers were Jefferson and DeWitt. Jefferson married Julia Wormser, a cultivated woman who took Peggy to the opera when she was little, but he neglected his wife and soon left her to live alone in a small hotel apartment on East 60th Street. There he devoted himself to showgirls, or rather, to clothing them. He bought armfuls of dresses and coats from Klein’s Department Store and kept them in the wardrobes in his rooms. When his nieces visited him, he’d invite them to take their pick; on at least one occasion his sister Florette helped herself, saying, ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t have some too.’ Jefferson had further interesting traits: he considered shaking hands insanitary and advocated kissing instead, and he was a firm believer in the beneficial effects of plenty of fruit and ginger. Every day he would turn up at the Seligman offices (none of James’s sons contributed significantly to the family business) and distribute them to everyone, starting with the partners and working down to the office boys. DeWitt, Peggy’s own favourite, took a law degree but never practised, preferring instead to devote his time to the writing of unactable plays, none of which was ever produced, in which the characters, brought by their creator into impossibly complicated situations, are all invariably blown up at the end – the only way DeWitt could cut through the Gordian knot of his entanglements.

Of the eight children, the ones closest to normality were arguably Samuel, DeWitt and Peggy’s mother Florette. Florette’s eccentricities were slight but palpable. She shared the family trait of meanness, and had a habit of repeating certain words and phrases three times. On occasion she would wear three cloaks, or three wristwatches. There are stories of Florette which sound apocryphal: stopped for driving down a one-way street the wrong way, she told the policeman: ‘But I was only going one way, one way, one way.’ Another time she told a milliner that she wanted a hat ‘with a feather, a feather, a feather’, and was given one with three. Her habit of triple repetition used to drive her husband Ben mad.

A picture emerges of a wan figure, in love with her handsome husband but unable to reach him, and only secure in the strict confines of the society she’d been brought up in, acknowledging its mores and happy not to move outside its social calendar or its topics of conversation. On the other hand, she had the strength to live with her unhappiness over her husband’s infidelities, and to carry on alone for the twenty-five years she survived him, especially in the difficult few years of belt-tightening that followed his death, before her own father’s death rescued her financially. Then at least Florette had shown herself capable of adapting, though nothing in her upbringing had prepared her to fend for herself without the help of servants in even the simplest domestic matters, such as bedmaking, cleaning and cooking. Nor could she pass on any such skills to her daughters. In more important matters of upbringing, too, neither she nor Ben was a good parent; but Ben had been spoilt, and Florette had been given no good example of motherhood. In her eyes, probably the most successful daughter of the three she bore her husband was the oldest, Benita, who conformed to her ideal. Perhaps Benita would succeed in her marriage where Florette had failed in hers.

If Ben and she had been able to be happier together, the story would have been different. Ben, coming from a less strait-laced background, and himself more relaxed than his brothers, might have been able to liberate Florette from the constraints of her upbringing; but by the time he met her it was too late for that, and in any case theirs was a marriage of powerful families as much as of two individuals. Almost as soon as they had set up home together, Ben resumed his philandering. So it was a suffocatingly well-heeled, desperately genteel, and very unhappy world into which Peggy was born.

CHAPTER 4 Growing Up

‘Not only was my childhood excessively lonely and sad,’ Peggy wrote, ‘but it was also filled with torments.’ And again: ‘My childhood was excessively unhappy. I have no pleasant memories of any kind. It seems to me now that it was one long protracted agony.’

She was born on 26 August 1898 at the family home, which was then an apartment in the Hotel Majestic on West 69th Street, New York City. Her parents gave her the name Marguerite, not a family name, but not a Jewish one either, and disguised their disappointment that she was not a son. The Guggenheims had a habit of bearing daughters, to the extent that there was already some mild worry about the future of the surname.

Marguerite would have had a ‘Baby’s Record’ book similar to her younger sister Hazel’s, which is still extant. From it we learn that baby’s first gifts included $500 from Grandpa Seligman, and diamond buttons and a bracelet from his wife. Aunts Fanny and Angie provided a perambulator. Hazel’s nurse was Nellie Mullen, and her first teacher (in 1909) was Mrs Hartmann, who commented, ‘a very clever child’. Baby Hazel’s first word was ‘Papa’. Older sister Marguerite gave her a music box for her first birthday.

Peggy – as she soon became, via her father’s pet name for her of ‘Maggie’ – was the second child. Her sister Benita was nearly three years old, and as soon as Peggy was able to focus emotionally, she settled her affections on Benita, rather than her remote mother and her frequently absent father.

‘She was the great love of my early life. In fact of my entire immature life. But maybe that has never ended,’ Peggy wrote getting on for fifty years later in her autobiography. It’s difficult not to suspect her motives here, because although she and her younger sister both claimed to be rivals for the affection and attention of their older sister, as they did for the affection and attention of their father, it is probably true to say that Ben and Benita provided no more than a focus for a rivalry that was innate between the younger sisters. Both Peggy and Hazel were highly individualistic, both chose unconventional paths through life, and each always wanted to outdo the other – Hazel, as the younger of the two, forcing the rivalry more than Peggy. They were never close. Hazel suffered not only from being the younger, but from having less talent for self-publicity.

Both came to hanker for what the father and the elder sister represented: Ben was a typical absentee father, especially for Hazel, who had not even reached adolescence when he died, and as time went on his increasingly rare and brief visits to the family home, accompanied by presents and an exotic sense of travel, made him a more glamorous figure in their eyes than if he had been a humdrum, day-to-day, office-bound kind of father. Benita took on the standard role of adored older sister. She was more docile and conventional than either of her younger siblings, able to slip uncomplainingly and even gladly into the milieu her mother was at home in. Perhaps that, too, was an object of admiration and even envy for the younger two. There was something else as well: both Ben and Benita died young. A martyr’s death, in these cases through heroism in a shipwreck, and through a striving for motherhood, can attract acolytes. But there are also simpler explanations. Peggy was four and a half when Hazel was born, and ‘I was fiendishly jealous of her’.

Within a year of Peggy’s birth the family had moved out of the Majestic and into a ‘proper’ home. Ben had not yet split with his brothers, the Guggenheim fortunes were riding high, and, with little of the financial caution most of his brothers had learned from their father, he set up his family in style at 15 East 72nd Street, near Central Park. Not only was it an expensive place – Rockefellers, Stillmans, and President Grant’s widow were neighbours – but Ben had it completely redesigned and renovated in the best late-nineteenth-century taste.

Peggy revisited the house with her daughter Pegeen when she returned to America from Europe, after a prolonged absence, in 1941. Her Aunt Cora, to whom it was rented in 1911, still lived there, and Pegeen all but let Peggy down when they were admitted by the butler. As Peggy tells it, ‘When we were in the elevator, my daughter of sixteen, who was accompanying me, suddenly burst out with, “Mama, you lived in this house when you were a little girl?” I modestly replied “Yes,” and to convince her added, “This is where Hazel was born.” My daughter gave me a surprised look and concluded with this statement: “Mama, how you have come down in the world.” From then on the butler, who was ushering us upstairs, looked upon me with suspicion and rarely admitted me to the house. However, my memories alone warranted my admission.’

The house is still there, with its imposing façade. When Peggy lived in it, you entered through a glazed door to a porch, from which further glazed doors led to what Peggy called a ‘small’ lobby, though it had a fountain, dominated by a stuffed bald eagle which her father, strictly against the law, had shot at the family’s summer retreat in the Adirondacks. The eagle had its heraldic broken chains at its feet, which showed either that Ben had a keen sense of irony, or none whatsoever.

The vestibule, marble-clad, contained a marble staircase which led to the piano nobile, where a large dining room ‘with panels and six indifferent tapestries’ looked southwards, while to the rear there was a small conservatory. The main floor also contained a reception room dominated by another tapestry, of Alexander the Great, and here it was that Peggy’s mother gave a weekly tea-party for the other ladies of the New York Jewish haute volée. Peggy, forced to attend these functions as a child and already feeling rebellion stirring within her, found them excruciatingly boring. This is not hard to understand, because the conversation, informed by the participants’ obsession with social standing and correctness, was always about which people were on or off the visiting list, the quality of one’s silver – it should be heavy but not look heavy – the quality but lack of ostentation of one’s dress, what jewels to wear, what colleges were really acceptable for one’s sons (Harvard and Columbia yes, Princeton no), and so on. Also important was whom to marry, and whom not to. You couldn’t marry a Gimbel or a Straus, because they were ‘storekeepers’. At the same time, because Gimbel’s and Macy’s were great rivals, no Gimbel ever married a Straus either. Then there was the question of the ‘old’ New York Jewish families and the ‘new’ ones – approximately pre- and post-1880 – a stratified snobbery which mirrored the English concept of ‘old’ and ‘new’ money, and which still exists today. The Guggenheims, arriving in New York relatively late, after the older Jewish clans had already formed their group, had to contend with this despite their wealth.

The chronicler of Jewish New York of the time, Stephen Birmingham, paints a telling picture of this closed society:

In the evenings the families entertained each other at dinners large and small. The women were particularly concerned about what was ‘fashionable’, and why shouldn’t they have been? Many of them had been born poor and in another country, and now found themselves stepping out of a cocoon and into a new and lovely light. They felt like prima donnas, and now that their husbands were becoming men of such substance, they wanted to be guilty of no false steps in their new land. They wanted desperately to be a part of their period, and as much as said so. Beadwork was fashionable. One had to do it. It was the era of the ‘Turkish corner’, and the ladies sewed scratchy little beaded covers for toss pillows. At one dinner party, while the ladies were discussing what was fashionable and what was not, Marcus Goldman rose a little stiffly from the table, folded his heavy damask napkin beside his plate, and said, ‘Money is always fashionable’, and stalked out of the room.

In her reaction to all this, shared with her father who, significantly, not only got out of it, but returned to a much more relaxed Europe, specifically France, Peggy’s individualistic nature found itself – and she was a rebel too, though a reluctant one. Hers was a mixed nature and a mixed nurture: she was born into a nouveau riche bourgeoisie, but she had peasant roots. She never succeeded in shaking off either influence, though she had more success with the former, which was imposed, than with the latter, which was inborn.

The first floor of the house contained a further grand room – a Louis XVI ‘parlor’, complete with mirrors and more tapestries. Even the furniture was covered in fake tapestry material, and every window in the house was draped with claustrophobic lace curtains in the German manner. Reading between the lines of Peggy’s reminiscences, one can sense the repugnance she felt even as she wrote her descriptions almost half a century later. The parlour also contained a bearskin rug, whose snarling, open red mouth still contained its teeth and a plaster replica of its tongue, which kept breaking off, giving the head a ‘revolting appearance’. The teeth worked loose from time to time as well, and had to be glued back in.

But this room and this floor contained poignant memories for Peggy. Apart from the moth-eaten bearskin, ‘There was also a grand piano. One night I remember hiding under this piano and weeping in the dark. My father had banished me from the table because, at the tender age of seven, I had said to him, “Papa, you must have a mistress as you stay out so many nights.”’ This innocent but perceptive remark was undoubtedly true, and in its precocious directness it gives a foretaste of the person Peggy was going to grow up to be. But there is another, pleasanter memory, which is described with keenly remembered yearning: ‘The center of the house was surmounted by a glass dome that admitted the daylight. At night it was lit by a suspended lamp. Around this was a large circular winding staircase. It commenced on the reception floor and ended on the fourth floor where I lived. I recall the exact tune which my father had invented and which he whistled to lure me when he came home at night and ascended the stairs on foot. I adored my father and rushed to meet him.’

Peggy’s parents had separate bedrooms and dressing rooms (Ben’s dressing room adjoined Florette’s bedroom, with its twin beds, in the approved nineteenth-century manner) on the third floor, and here too was the library, a necessary room in any well-heeled establishment whose owners wanted to make a good impression, though neither Florette nor Ben was a great reader. The room had a tiger-skin on the floor and four faux-ancestral portraits of Peggy’s grandparents on the walls. In this dismal place, Peggy was condemned to eat. As a child she had no appetite, so a maid stood over her while she sat at a glass-topped Louis XV table and toyed with her meal. Peggy cried in protest as the food was spooned into her, and then threw up.

Apart from her parents’ conventional and sometimes vulgar taste, it wouldn’t take a Freud to deduce that Peggy’s later love of vivid abstraction in art was a reaction to that gloomy library where she was force-fed, overseen by depressing portraits of her immediate forebears. Ben was a collector himself, and on this floor of the house a number of good paintings by Corot and a couple by Watteau hung. And the bright spot in Peggy’s day was early in the evening, when she was allowed to play in her mother’s room, lined in pink silk, as Florette had her hair brushed before dinner by her French maid, ‘or by a special hairbrusher who came in for that purpose’. She does not say if she ever shared this moment with Benita or Hazel.

The fourth floor of the mansion contained the children’s rooms, and temporarily provided a sanctum for James Seligman during his retreat from his own home to the Netherland Hotel. Here the girls were attended by a succession of governesses and nurses, and given private tuition; Peggy didn’t attend a school until she was fifteen, and in consequence looked back on a lonely and restricted childhood. Like her own mother, Florette never invited friends’ children to her house, and the sisters had only each other’s company. Benita must have been the loneliest of them, being those significant three years older than Peggy; and Peggy and Hazel seem to have been locked in a more or less unfriendly rivalry from their very earliest days.

The girls’ unhappiness was compounded by the remoteness of their parents and the severity of their upbringing – a fate shared by so many children of that era. The narrow-minded and strait-laced Prince Albert had set the tone in Victorian England, and German ideas of education and disciplinary training had crossed the Atlantic with the Jewish German immigrants. The folk-stories collected by the Grimm brothers, never intended for children, and containing a great degree of sadism and depravity, were routinely sold as nursery tales; Heinrich Hoffmann’s admittedly satirical Struwwelpeter was first published in 1845 (it is still in print) to inculcate in children a proper sense of behaviour by illustrating the dire consequences which await those who don’t toe the line. A similar tone was taken by Wilhelm Busch in Max und Moritz twenty years later. Hideous punishments await the children who in the stories commit hideous crimes.

The violence implicit in the stories was often visited on children in real life. Ben and Florette may have cared for their children, but they were content to leave them for most of the time in the hands of their nurses and governesses, and these women proved at times to be as awful as the monsters of fiction. Peggy’s cousin Harold Loeb vividly remembered a governess who would lock him in a cupboard and then insult his family through the door. Peggy remembered ‘a nurse who threatened to cut out my tongue if I dared to repeat to my mother the foul things she said to me’. She was brave enough to ignore this injunction, and, to her credit, as soon as Florette knew the truth, the nurse was dismissed. But it is small wonder that the dark and narrow staircase that led to the fifth floor and the servants’ quarters filled Peggy’s childish imagination with dread. As for the tutors, while it was Ben’s intention to give his daughters the best education possible, there is little evidence in Peggy’s or Hazel’s later grasp of grammar that he got value for his money.

Discipline and education were not the only trials that had to be survived:

I was not at all strong and my parents were perpetually fussing about my health. They imagined I had all sorts of illnesses and were forever taking me to doctors. At one period of my life, when I was about ten, they decided I had some intestinal disturbance and found a doctor who ordered me to have colonic irrigations. These were administered by Hazel’s nurse and, as she was quite unqualified for her task, the result was catastrophic. I got an acute attack of appendicitis and was rushed off to hospital at midnight and operated on. For days I was kept in ignorance of the operation since they thought I was too young to be told. However, I did not believe their silly stories and insisted that my stomach had been cut open.

Soon after this, my sister Benita developed the whooping cough and we had to be separated lest I catch it and cough open my newly healed, and let me add, enormous wound. My mother took a house in Lakewood, New Jersey, for herself and Benita, and I was sent to a hotel with a trained nurse. Needless to say I passed a lonely winter and only occasionally was I permitted to speak to Benita on the street and at a great distance. My mother had several nieces who were marriageable and she was perpetually giving house parties for them while she shut poor Benita up in a wing of the house. As a result Benita became melancholic.

There were compensations. Peggy added a note which indicates something of her future: ‘I must have been very precocious and spoiled, since I was allowed to visit my mother and entertain her visitors. I fell in love with one of them. His name was Max Rossbach and he taught me to play pool.’ She also mentions taking lessons with a girl called Dulcie Sulzberger (of the New York Times Sulzbergers); ‘she had two brothers who fascinated me, one in particular, Marion’. At fourteen, Peggy fell in love with her riding teacher, ‘a fascinating Irishman who flirted with all his pupils’, after she had taken up riding again following an accident. Her horse had bolted when disturbed by some roller-skating boys, thrown her and dragged her by the stirrup where her foot was caught. She damaged an ankle, broke her jaw and lost a tooth. The rest of the story is another testimony to her early confrontation with pain, and there is a significant reference to her undergoing a ‘process of being beautified’, which provides a clue concerning her lifelong preoccupation with and selfconsciousness about her looks:

A policeman, finding the tooth in the mud, returned it to me in a letter, and the next day the dentist, after disinfecting it, pushed it back into its original position. This did not end my troubles. My jaw had to be set. During the operation a great battle took place among the attending [dental] surgeons. Finally, one of them triumphed over the other and shook my poor jaw into shape. The vanquished dentist, who was called Buxbaum, never got over this. He felt he had superior rights over my mouth, as he had been straightening my teeth for years. The only good that came out of this was that it put an end to the agonies I had been suffering in the process of being beautified. Now that had to end. The first danger incurred was the possibility of being blood-poisoned. When that passed, the only risk I ran was of getting hit in the mouth and losing my tooth again before it was properly implanted. In those days my sole opponents were tennis balls, so that when I played tennis I conceived the bright idea of tying a tea-strainer in front of my mouth. Anyone seeing me must have thought I had hydrophobia. When it was all over, my father received a bill for seven thousand five hundred dollars from the dentist who had never admitted his defeat. My father persuaded this gentleman reluctantly to accept two thousand.

The young Peggy had other difficulties to surmount. All her life she suffered from weak ankles, and when, as a child, she was forced to go ice-skating in Central Park, her memories of the agonies of both cold and pain were such that she avoided the park ever after – though during her reluctant return to New York in the Second World War her friend and colleague the art historian and curator Alfred Barr did persuade her to visit it once more – ‘but everything had changed. Only the Ramble with its old castle remained, true to my childhood memories.’ But the park wasn’t all bad. Peggy remembered driving in it when very young ‘in an electric brougham’ with her mother. She liked the look of ‘a certain rock on the East Drive that resembled a panther about to spring. I called it “the cat” and whenever we passed it I pretended to telephone to it to say hello.’ There were other diversions. The actor William Gillette wrote and starred in a popular play about the Civil War called Secret Service in 1895, which played in New York when Peggy was a child: ‘I went to all his matinées and virtually screamed to warn him when I thought he was going to be shot by an enemy.’ And there were other early delights, which may not have compensated for the horrors but certainly prompted fond memories later:

The only toys I can remember were a rocking horse with an enormous rump and a doll’s house containing bearskin rugs and beautiful crystal chandeliers. The doll’s house must have left me with a fearful nostalgia, because for years I tried to reproduce it for my daughter. I spent months papering walls and buying objects to furnish her house. In fact I still can’t resist buying toys. I immediately give them away to children but I must buy them for my own delight. I also remember a glass cabinet filled with tiny hand-carved ivory and silver furniture, which had an old-fashioned brass key. I kept the cabinet locked and allowed no-one to touch my treasures.

The presence of an early car, and the casual knowledge of a telephone, as well as access to riding and tennis, to a little girl at the beginning of the twentieth century are indications of the world of privilege into which Peggy had been born. She enjoyed other benefits, which may not have compensated for the loneliness of her life and the nastiness of those in authority over her, but did widen her horizons. From very early on the girls were taken to Europe for the summers. Florette had plenty of Seligman relations – the family concern was by now an international merchant bank – in London and Paris, and they also took in the fashionable watering-places and spas of France and Germany, Monte Carlo and Vienna. Benita and Peggy especially benefited from this, as by the time Hazel was born Ben was beginning to show a greater preference for travelling alone. By 1904 Peggy’s father had begun to take mistresses. There was even a live-in nurse, perhaps the first of many amours, whose job was to massage Ben’s head, since he suffered from neuralgia. Florette, never quite sure that the girl was her husband’s lover, nevertheless blamed her for being an evil influence, and in the end she was dismissed. But Ben’s sisters remained on good terms with the nurse, which turned Florette against them, and led to family rows. ‘All this affected my childhood,’ remarks Peggy dryly. ‘I was perpetually being dragged into my parents’ troubles and it made me precocious.’ She adds: ‘I adored my father because he was fascinating and handsome, and because he loved me. But I suffered very much as he made my mother unhappy, and sometimes I fought with him over it.’

Her troubles also made her an intolerable and rude little girl. Ben was not the only one whom she insulted by her outspoken behaviour. She told one of her parents’ friends that she knew her husband had run away from her, and asked another, whose command of English was not perfect, why he couldn’t learn to speak it better. Hazel later reported that Florette tolerated this behaviour adoringly, but she may have been influenced by childhood envy. Both the younger girls desperately needed the attention of an adult: their older sister Benita, calm, beautiful, kind and a little bit remote, was all that was available. Hungrily, they vied for her attention.

On early European tours the two older girls, Peggy and her adored Benita, had their portraits painted in Munich by Franz Lenbach, a well-known and fashionable portraitist. He painted Peggy when she was four, and also did a double portrait of Peggy and Benita a year or so earlier. Peggy, while saying, probably truthfully, that the pictures were ‘the greatest treasures of my past’, also complained that Lenbach ‘gave me brown eyes instead of green, and red hair instead of chestnut’. But the great man was getting on by the time he met Peggy, and by that stage of his career he was increasingly finishing his portraits from photographs, which in those days were black-and-white. The portraits still exist, and are duly stately and decorative. Later in life Peggy, since Lenbach had dated one of them, had an artist friend paint out the date, for fear that people would see it and realise that she was older than she wanted to admit to. Later still, discovering that Lenbach was most famous for his paintings of Bismarck, she had the same friend paint the date back in, for fear that people would think she was older than she was. If this story sounds apocryphal, we have the assurance of the artist concerned, Peter Ruta, that it is not.

While Florette’s meanness got her into trouble with hotel staff – she wouldn’t tip, and that meant porters would mark the family baggage with discreet white crosses to ensure minimal service at their next destination – Ben was still taking care of his daughters’ education. He had their tutor Mrs Hartmann accompany them to Europe on their tour in about 1909. Mrs Hartmann had a wide remit: she took the girls to the main museums of Paris, and to the châteaux of the Loire, in those days not suffering from tourist-saturation. She taught them French history and had them read the English nineteenth-century classics, as well as treating them to ‘a complete course in Wagner’s operas’. Peggy’s mind, however, was elsewhere. She’d fallen for a friend of her father’s called Rudi, who was travelling with them, as Florette was trying to matchmake between him and an older cousin of Peggy’s, also brought along on the trip. Peggy became wildly jealous and wrote a series of letters, sadly lost, in which she went in for expressions like ‘my body was nailed to the fire of the cross’. Despite these effusions – had she been reading The Lustful Turk secretly, along with Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot? – she was still enough of a little girl to collect wax dolls and dress them, in clothes designed and made by herself, in a manner inspired by the ultra-chic ladies of both the high society and the demi-monde of Trouville.

There were other distractions. While having tea with Benita and their governess at Rumpelmeyer’s in Paris, Peggy couldn’t help noticing a woman at the next table who seemed equally interested in them. She must have had an intuition about the identity of the woman, and she knew her father had a mistress, so that months later, after she’d been on at her governess for some time about the mistress’s identity, and the governess finally replied, ‘You know her,’ Peggy realised she meant the woman at tea.

She was Countess Taverny, whom Peggy refers to as the Marquise de Cerutti in the first edition of her memoirs, and simply as ‘TM’ in the second; and there was more than one embarrassing and unplanned meeting between them. Unsurprisingly, people of fashion and money visited the same shops, and there was a disagreeable encounter between Florette and the Countess at Lanvin’s on one occasion. On another, when Florette was with Ben and they ran into Taverny in the Bois de Boulogne, Florette noticed her rival’s expensive lambswool suit, knew who’d bought it, and protested to her husband at his extravagance. Ben, humbled, gave his wife a similar sum so that she could have a suit made for herself. Florette invested the money instead. But by the time of the Countess, Florette and Ben were virtually estranged. Divorce had already loomed when Ben had fallen for the sister of a brother-in-law, Amy Goldsmith. On that occasion disaster had been averted by the intervention of the Guggenheim family, who dissuaded Ben from being foolhardy, bought Amy off, and placated Florette. But by the time Ben died in 1912 the family had, effectively, broken up.

The Regis Hotel had been a centre for great Guggenheim family get-togethers, a ritual performed every Friday evening; but once Florette had moved out she was set at one remove from the centre of the Guggenheim clan, though she was still part of the family. Naturally for some time the idea of Atlantic crossings – quite apart from the expense – did not appeal, and so the family spent their summers at one or other of the more or less hideous Victorian-Gothic piles Guggenheims and Seligmans had built as country retreats at Jewish resorts just outside Manhattan like Deal Beach, Elberon and West End. Peggy remembered the relatively modest pile belonging to her Seligman grandfather: ‘It was completely surrounded by porches, one on each floor. The porches were covered with rocking chairs where the entire family sat and rocked all day. It was so ugly in its Victorian perfection that it was fascinating.’

This was nothing new; as children they had spent the summers that they did not go to Europe ‘on this horrible [New Jersey] coast’. But the stifling atmosphere of these places bred in Peggy an abiding dislike of America, which was abetted by the still-prevalent anti-Semitism which had forced families like hers into self-imposed wealthy ghettos. Uncle Isaac Guggenheim, refused membership of the Sands Point Bath and Golf Club, built his own nine-hole golf course at his nearby estate of Villa Carola. When the hotel in nearby Allenhurst, which did not admit Jews, burned down one summer, the children watched the conflagration with delight.

By 1913 Florette was taking the girls back over to England to visit her Seligman relatives in Ascot, Berkshire. But then came an interruption to European travel in the form of the First World War.

In the meantime Peggy left off private tuition and started going to the Jacoby School, a private establishment for rich Jewish girls on the west side of Central Park, across which she walked to school every day. It was more of a finishing school than a place of learning, for it was not considered that the girls who attended would ever have to do much; what was important was how to behave, how to be decorative, and how to navigate the intricacies of etiquette and social convention that permeated New York society. Peggy would have quickly become bored if that had been all the place had to offer, but by luck the Jacoby’s drama teacher, Mrs Quaife, took to the mawkish fifteen-year-old, encouraged her to read Browning, and gave her the part of Amy in a school production of Little Women. In addition, Peggy began what was to become a lifelong love affair with books. In her loneliness she had discovered the comforts of literature, and at the Jacoby she became acquainted with, and read and re-read, most of the modern classics, from J.M. Barrie to George Bernard Shaw. More daringly, she also read Ibsen, Strindberg and Wilde, as well as Tolstoy and Turgenev. Soon she would develop a passion for Dostoevsky and Henry James that would never leave her, and in later life she would take periods of illness or enforced inactivity as opportunities to explore new authors such as Lawrence or Proust in depth. These literary interests might have taken her further. For a time she was tempted by the idea of going on to college, but Benita talked her out of it. Benita by now had an odd relationship with her younger sister. Although she was still the object of Peggy’s adoration, it was becoming clear that Peggy was the dominant partner. Peggy took Benita’s advice, but she regretted it. A lifelong autodidact, she always longed to be more learned than she was – or than she perceived herself to be; with her hunger for knowledge, it is a pity that she forewent such a chance.

Another important thing happened at the Jacoby: she began to make friends. This process was sadly interrupted almost immediately when she succumbed to whooping cough and had temporarily to be withdrawn from the school. As her illness coincided with Benita’s ‘coming out’ as a debutante – an event which occupied Florette’s every waking minute – Peggy, swamped in self-pity, spent a ‘lonely and neglected’ winter. During it she read a lot; reading in bed was something she always loved. Meanwhile her mother, always paranoid about infection, doused the place with Lysol and tried to take her daughter’s temperature, with panic-stricken inefficiency.

Once she’d recovered, Peggy returned to school and re-entered its cultural and social life with a vengeance. She’d already discovered boys: one of her first loves was Freddy Singer, of the sewing-machine family, whom she met in England while staying at Ascot. This was innocent fun – she and Benita, who’d conveniently fallen for Freddy’s older brother, had spent an agreeable early summer in 1914 playing tennis and dancing. War broke out in Europe at the end of July, and a darker side of the sexual corrida manifested itself later in the year, in Kent, where Peggy’s family were staying with other Seligman relatives. The man in question was a German medical student of American birth – and thus not interned. He played on Peggy’s quivering and untried emotions, making her half terrified of being, and half longing to be, seduced. They later met again in New York, where he resumed his Svengali-like role. But by this time Peggy had wised up, and diverted him to a nice cousin of hers, fifteen years his senior, whom he fell for and married. The marriage was a success, and they had twin girls.

In her second year at the Jacoby, Peggy organised a dance club which held a monthly ball. The girls were allowed to invite a couple of eligible young men to each dance, the choice being made from a list of boys who were auctioned off by Peggy; the two or three who received the highest bids were duly invited by the girls who’d bid successfully for them: ‘These parties were gay and really not at all stuffy.’ At the same time she developed a heavy crush on a friend called Fay Lewinsohn. In her autobiography, Peggy, always keen on a chance to épater les bourgeois, hints heavily at lesbian undertones, at least on her part. In later life Peggy’s opportunistic and rare forays into homosexuality are not in question, but Fay ‘was interested in young men’. In fact she seems to have been a flibbertigibbet, but the two girls had one thing in common: a profound dislike of the constrictive society in which they lived.

Peggy had her first kiss in the summer of 1915, with a young man of whom Florette disapproved because he was ‘penniless’. She probably disapproved of him even more because every evening he’d borrow her car to take Peggy out for a ride. Once he’d brought Peggy back, he’d keep the car to drive himself home, returning it early the next morning on his way to work in New York City. Things reached a crisis on the night of the first kiss. The young man and Peggy had driven back after their evening out and were in the car in the garage at the Guggenheims’ out-of-town summer retreat. As he reached for her he inadvertently leaned on the horn, and its noise awakened Florette, who threw a tantrum: ‘Does he think my car is a taxi?’ The young man fled, never to return. But Florette’s judgement of him as penniless turned out to be ill-founded, as he went on to inherit a million dollars. Florette’s social antennae were out of tune for once. Peggy was not turning out to be the prettiest of girls, her fortune was not spectacular, and any decent match should not have been sneezed at.

Peggy left school in 1916 and made her own debut into society. The venue was the Ritz Tent Room, but though she enjoyed the dancing, she found the life that followed vacuous. She took a course in stenography but gave it up after being frozen out by the poorer girls in the class, who resented her. The idea of getting a war job had, however, been planted in her mind. She never mastered typing (or spelling) very well, though she laboriously typed all her letters on a venerable Remington until relatively late in life.

The same year, her grandfather James Seligman died, and with what he willed Florette the family’s fortunes improved. They moved to 270 Park Avenue, near the corner of 48th Street. Here Peggy’s wild streak led her into more trouble: ‘My mother permitted me to choose furniture for my bedroom, and I was allowed to charge it to her. But unfortunately I disobeyed her and went shopping on the sacred Day of Atonement, the great Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. I had been expressly warned not to do this and I was heavily punished for my sin.’ Her mother refused to pay for the furniture. Benita bailed her out, and not only that, she stood her a makeover at Elizabeth Arden.

The United States entered the First World War in April 1917, but before that Peggy had already been supporting the war effort. She began knitting socks for soldiers, and the activity became an obsession. She took her knitting with her wherever she went, even to dinner and to the theatre. Before his death, her aged Seligman grandfather had complained at the expense of all the wool she bought. On a vacation to Canada she missed most of the scenery because she sat in the back of the car and knitted. Her attention was distracted only twice: by the nice Canadian soldiers in Quebec, and on the way home when, as Jews, the family was refused more than overnight accommodation (obligatory by law) at a Vermont hotel.

Peggy took an official war job in 1918. Her duty was to advise and help newly-recruited young officers to buy uniforms and equipment at the best rate – a job for which her family contacts made her eminently suitable. She shared it with a close schoolfriend, who dropped out owing to illness. Peggy took on her workload, and with what was becoming typical application – anything to keep away from those suffocating salons – she overworked herself into a nervous breakdown. It’s more than possible that her imagination cued the thought that some of the young men she was equipping would never return. Sent to a ‘psychologist’, she told him she thought she was losing her mind. ‘Do you think you have a mind to lose?’ quipped the doctor, who evidently had not yet read the recently translated works of Freud. But Peggy provided a serious comment on the encounter, which gives a significant key to the future workings of her mind: ‘Funny as his reply was, I think my [concern] was quite legitimate. I used to pick up every match I found and stayed awake at night worrying about the houses that would burn because I had neglected to pick up some particular match. Let me add that all these had been lit, but I feared there might be one virgin among them.’

Florette asked her late father’s nurse, a Miss Holbrook, to look after her disturbed daughter. Slowly, this sensible woman weaned Peggy off what had become a fantasy-identification with Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, and brought her back to what passes for most of us as normal. During this psychological rite of passage, however, Peggy had – if she can be believed – become engaged to a pilot yet to be transferred overseas. But she adds: ‘I had several fiancés during the war as we were always entertaining soldiers and sailors.’

Peggy turned twenty in August 1918, and two and a half months later the war came to an end. New York society settled back with relief. The fight was over, the danger was past, and the USA was much too far away from the carnage to have suffered any physical damage. Except for the bereaved families of the fallen, the distant European war seemed unreal – an awful event, better forgotten; and Jewish Germans were most anxious that no taint of the Kaiser should attach to their names.

In one more year Peggy would reach her majority. Then she could really spread her wings.

CHAPTER 5 Harold and Lucile

Although there wasn’t a general penchant for marrying well-placed Englishmen among the Guggenheim girls, several did manage it. There was a pronounced anglophilia in some branches of the family. Uncle Solomon adored Great Britain. He went grouse-shooting in Scotland and set up his aristocratic elder son-in-law as a beef farmer in Sussex by giving his daughter Eleanor what she later described as a ‘useful little cheque’. Eleanor married Arthur Stuart, the Earl Castle Stewart (the family seat was in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, until it was blown up by the IRA in 1973), and lived most of her life in England, a pillar of the Women’s Institute and a great contrast to her cousin Peggy, though one of her sons recalls that she had even less time for Hazel. Solomon’s daughter Barbara married Robert J. Lawson-Johnston, who, though brought up as an American citizen, had been born in Edinburgh (he was the son of the founder of the company that makes Bovril) and educated at Eton. Their son Peter was later raised to the captaincy of the Solomon Guggenheim concerns by his mother’s cousin Harry.

Uncle Solomon’s third daughter, Gertrude, also lived in England, in a house specially built for her by her father – Windyridge in Sussex, where Eleanor’s son Simon now lives – though few concessions were made for her in its design. Gertrude was disabled and well below average height. She gave her life to good works; during the Second World War she took in evacuees, and she habitually made it possible for underprivileged children from London’s East End to take summer holidays with her in the country. ‘She used to take them through the millpond to get the lice off them,’ her nephew Patrick, Earl Castle Stewart, remembers.

This love of Britain and Ireland was partly motivated by a desire to disguise Jewish mainland European peasant antecedents, and went along with the desire to assimilate, to cease to be the target of anti-Semitism, against which no amount of wealth was proof. Within the society in which Peggy grew up, the marriage one made was crucial. It’s probable that Florette and Ben, though less conventional than Ben’s brothers, wished for similar marriages to those their cousins had made, for their three daughters. And Peggy and Hazel did grow up to feel a great affection for England.

But marriage was the last thing on Peggy’s mind in 1918, and already she was showing signs of having no intention of following her mother and older sister into the social round of the New York Jewish upper crust. One influence in particular must have made Florette shudder, yet it was one which profoundly shaped Peggy’s thinking, though she was never overtly political, at least until her middle years. Religious belief never played any role in her life whatsoever.

After her couple of years at the Jacoby School were over, Peggy was at a loose end. Her active mind had been stimulated in a way which could never now be satisfied by the narrow bounds of the society into which she had been born, and she took private courses in economics, history and Italian. Through them she met a teacher called Lucile Kohn.

Kohn was Peggy’s first mentor. In her mid-thirties by 1918, she had initially been a supporter of the Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, but, becoming disaffected with him during his second term of office, she had embraced the Socialist cause. Kohn may have seen a disciple in the rebellious teenager before her, a poor little rich girl from a conservative background; but if she did, she sought to persuade by example rather than by proselytisation. Kohn was a pragmatic Socialist, believing that Socialism was the only way to improve the lot of humankind. Peggy was not an immediate convert, but Lucile planted seeds in her mind which would grow and bear fruit in the future, though not in the way the teacher imagined. Later on, when Peggy had come into her inheritance and moved to Europe, she sent Kohn ‘countless $100s’. Kohn was the first of many individuals whose talent Peggy thought worth supporting for a greater or lesser period of their lives, and Peggy’s subsidy changed Kohn’s life more than Kohn’s influence changed hers, for it enabled her to devote herself to her chosen cause full-time. ‘As I look back over my long life (ninety years) I list the few people who made a tremendous change in my life,’ Kohn wrote to Peggy in 1973, ‘– a change for the better – and Peggy Guggenheim is one of the four.’ She told Virginia Dortch, ‘I really think we learned and felt together that people like the Guggenheims had an obligation to improve the world.’ This was an obligation to which the Guggenheims responded through a number of foundations and trusts set up when the various family fortunes had been made.

Peggy was politically influenced by Kohn, but still she didn’t know what to do with herself. Together with a desire for education had come a desire to work, to occupy her life positively. She had had a run of boyfriends – whom, as we’ve seen, she called ‘fiancés’ – during the war, but she was dismissive of them. Benita’s marriage in 1919 to an American airman, Edward Mayer, who had just returned from Italy – a marriage of which Florette disapproved because Mayer did not come from the right background and had only a modest fortune – only affected Peggy in the sense that she felt abandoned by her sister. She disliked Mayer, and is profoundly unkind about him in her autobiography, though she was a witness at the City Hall wedding, together with a lifelong friend, also called Peggy (who would later marry Hazel’s second husband after his divorce and one of the most traumatic episodes in the entire Guggenheim family story). Benita and Edward, who seems to have been, if anything, rather strait-laced, had a successful marriage, marred only by Benita’s inability to have children. The marriage ended only with Benita’s untimely death in 1927, following another unsuccessful pregnancy. Edward was even blamed for this, since it was felt that Benita should not have been permitted to try again for a child.

An outlet for Peggy’s energies still didn’t suggest itself, and in the summer of 1919, passing her twenty-first birthday, she came into the money she was due to inherit from her father. The timing was good, for it was seven years since Ben’s death, and it had taken her Guggenheim uncles exactly that long to sort out his affairs. Half of the inheritance had to be maintained as capital in trust. The uncles sensibly suggested that the entire amount be absorbed into the Trust Fund, and Peggy just as sensibly agreed, with the result that her capital yielded an income of about $22,500 a year – not bad in those days, even for a ‘poor’ Guggenheim.

Hitherto in 1919, apart from Benita’s wedding, the only major excitement had been winning first prize at the Westchester Kennel Club dog show with the family Pekinese, Twinkle – one of the first of many small dogs that Peggy would keep throughout her life. Now, things could really take off. Above all, she was legally independent, and could free herself of her mother’s influence – much to Florette’s distress.

Peggy decided to embark on a grand tour of North America, taking as her companion a female cousin of Edward Mayer. They travelled to Niagara Falls, and thence to Chicago and on to Yellowstone National Park. After that they spent time in California, visiting the nascent Hollywood, which didn’t impress her: she dismissed the film industry people she met as ‘quite mad’. Then they dipped into Mexico, before travelling north along the west coast all the way to Canada. From there they returned to Chicago, where they rendezvoused with a demobbed airman, Harold Wessel, whom Peggy described as her fiancé. He introduced her to his family, whom she proceeded, perhaps deliberately, to insult, telling them with typical forthrightness that she found Chicago, and them, very provincial. As she prepared to leave on the train to New York, Wessel broke off the engagement, which didn’t cause Peggy distress. She probably only became engaged to him to copy Benita, and was relieved to get out of it.

Peggy’s allusions to fiancés and boyfriends and romantic – though still platonic – attachments are frequent and insistent enough to make one suspect that she was either protesting too much or trying to prove to herself that she was genuinely attractive to the opposite sex. If that were the case, the cause is not far to seek. All three sisters had been very pretty children, but while Benita and Hazel grew into beautiful women, Benita with a placid temperament, Hazel with an unruly and scatterbrained one, Peggy lost the early delicacy of her looks. With her lively eyes and a personality to match, her long, slim arms and legs, and her too-delicate ankles, her attractiveness was not in doubt; but she had one very serious flaw: she had inherited the Guggenheim potato nose. Now she decided to have something done about it.

Plastic surgery wasn’t perfected until the Second World War, was in its infancy early in 1920, when Peggy went to a surgeon in Cincinnati who specialised in improving people’s appearances. She had set her heart on a nose that would be ‘tip-tilted like a flower’, an idea she’d got partly from her younger sister’s pretty nose and partly from reading Tennyson’s Idylls of the King:

Lightly was her slender noseTip-tilted like the petal of a flower.

Unfortunately the surgeon, though he was able to offer her a choice of noses from a selection of plaster models, wasn’t up to the job. After working on his patient for some time he stopped. Peggy was only under local anaesthetic, which wasn’t enough to prevent her from suffering great pain, so when the surgeon told her he was unable to give her the nose she’d chosen after all, she told him to stop, patch up what he’d done, and leave things as they were.

According to Peggy, the result was worse than the original, but to judge by the photographs taken of her in Paris by Man Ray only four years later, the nose is not as offensive as she makes it sound, though in the years which followed it coarsened, and she was careful to avoid being photographed in profile. She made light of the whole experience, which was brave of her, given that she also tells us that her new nose behaved like a barometer, swelling up and glowing at the approach of bad weather. It is hard to judge from ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures whether the surgeon actually altered her nose all that much. Its shape was inherited by her son Sindbad. One person who knew her well in later life wonders if the whole story of the nose job wasn’t an invention, but this seems unlikely. Peggy was obsessed with the shape of her nose, and with the idea that because of it she was ugly. It has been said that she was still thinking of having a fresh operation late in life, though her nose never impeded her sex life (something which was extremely important to her); and by the 1950s, when cosmetic surgery was much safer and more predictable, she had moved on emotionally and psychologically from serious concern about such things.

People were cruel about Peggy’s nose throughout her life. In the thirties Nigel Henderson, the son of her friend Wyn, said that she reminded him of W.C. Fields, and the same resemblance was called to mind by Gore Vidal decades later. The painter Theodoros Stamos said, ‘She didn’t have a nose – she had an eggplant,’ and the artist Charles Seliger, full of sympathy and regard for Peggy, remembered that when he met her in the 1940s her nose was red, sore-looking and sunburnt: ‘You could hardly imagine anyone wanting to go to bed with her, to put it cruelly.’ Peggy’s heavy drinking during the 1920s, thirties and early forties didn’t help. And however much she made light of what she regarded as an impediment, there is no doubt that the shape of her nose reinforced her low self-esteem.

Notwithstanding his failure, the surgeon relieved her of about $1000 for the operation. Bored and in need of consolation, Peggy took a friend to French Lick, Indiana, and proceeded to gamble away another $1000 before returning to New York, still with little or no idea of what to do with herself, though some of the seeds Lucile Kohn had planted were showing signs of sprouting. Margaret C. Anderson, founder-editor of the then six-year-old Little Review, perhaps prompted by Kohn, approached her for money and an introduction to one of her moneyed uncles. Peggy didn’t help with cash, but sent Anderson off to Jefferson Seligman, in the hope that even if she didn’t get the $500 she sought, she might at least get a coat out of the uncle.

The Little Review was one of the most important and long-lived of the literary and arts magazines that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, before most of them were superseded by television. It moved home in the course of its fifteen-year life from Chicago to San Francisco, thence to New York, and finally to Paris, publishing many of the great names of contemporary literature, including T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford and Amy Lowell. Ezra Pound was its foreign editor from 1917 to 1919, and its major claim to fame was its serialisation, beginning in 1918, of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It may seem odd that Peggy was not keener to associate herself with a review which was concerned with so many of the people and ideas she was soon to embrace; but it wasn’t long before she became involved, albeit tangentially, with the literary world.

Needing above all to work, and to meet people outside her immediate social circle, Peggy took a job with her own dentist as a temporary nurse-cum-receptionist, filling in for the regular girl who was off sick. The work came to an end when the proper nurse returned, much to Florette’s relief; she hadn’t liked the idea of her friends and acquaintances discovering that one of her daughters was working as a dental nurse. Florette’s relief was, however, short-lived. Peggy now took a much more significant, though unpaid, job, as a clerk in an avant-garde bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, not far from home, in the Yale Club Building on 44th Street. The bookshop was run by Madge Jenison and Mary Mowbray Clarke. Clarke was the dominant partner, and ran the store as a kind of club. She only sold books she believed in, and literati and artists were constantly dropping in and staying to talk. Peggy quickly found that here was a society to which she wanted to belong.

She’d got the job through her cousin Harold Loeb, seven years her senior, who had injected $5000 into the Sunwise Turn when it ran into financial difficulties, and was now a partner in the enterprise. Harold was the son of Peggy’s aunt Rose Guggenheim and her first husband, Albert Loeb, whose brother James was the founder of the Loeb Classical Library.

Harold inherited a strong literary inclination. He joined the great exodus of young Americans to Europe in the early 1920s, published three novels and an autobiography, and founded and ran, first from Rome and then from Berlin, a short-lived but immensely important arts and literature magazine called Broom, which published, inter alia, the works of Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, John Dos Passos and Gertrude Stein. Aimed at an American readership, Broom also ran reproductions of works by such artists as Grosz, Kandinsky, Klee, Matisse and Picasso, all then little-known in the New World, and many of whom were still struggling for recognition in the Old. It was always a struggle to keep Broom afloat, and at the outset Harold appealed to his uncle Simon for funds. This may not have been tactful. Harold belonged to another ‘poor’ Guggenheim branch – his mother had been left only $500,000 by her father. Uncle Simon had given him a well-paid job with the family concern as soon as he graduated from Princeton, but a life in business had not suited Harold at all and he had left to become, to all intents and purposes, a bohemian. His request was frostily rejected: ‘I have since discussed with all your uncles the question of the endowment you wished for Broom, and I am reluctantly obliged to inform you we decided we would not care to make you any advances whatsoever. Our feeling is that Broom is essentially a magazine for a rich man with a hobby … I am sorry that you are not in an enterprise that would show a profit at an earlier date.’

Harold had already left for Europe, where his uncle’s letter reached him. He replied sharply: ‘From what little I know of your early career, it seems to me that you have more than once chosen the daring and visionary to the safety-first alternative …’ He did not get a reply.

The biographer Matthew Josephson was an associate editor of Broom as a young man, and a recollection in his memoirs provides an interesting footnote to this contretemps:

The curious thing about this episode is that a while later those same hard-boiled Guggenheim uncles of his wound up by imitating their poor relation Harold Loeb, and becoming patrons of the arts on a gigantic scale. Beginning in 1924, Uncle Simon donated some $18 million to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation [named for one of his sons who had died of pneumonia in 1922 aged seventeen] which provided fellowships for hundreds of artists and writers, including quite a number of contributors to Broom whom Simon Guggenheim had formerly been unable to understand.

Broom ceased publication in 1924, and it was then that Harold went to Paris to work on his first novel. There he met the young Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had had a few stories and poems published, but was still feeling his way as a writer. He was ambitious and insecure. What started as a friendship developed into rivalry and ended in unpleasant schism.

The bottom line is that Hemingway was envious of Loeb, who was both better educated and richer than he was. Loeb could and did outbox the boastful Hemingway, and he was a better tennis player. He also had more success with women, and at the time it looked as if he would outstrip Hemingway as a writer. When a party was made up to go to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, which Hemingway had attended before, and on which he held himself to be an expert, Loeb actually grappled a bull, was lifted aloft as he gripped the animal’s horns, then managed to disengage successfully, landing on his feet, eyeglasses still securely on his nose. The crowd roared their approval.

Hemingway, whose association with bulls was limited to talking about them and watching them die (something Loeb found distasteful), couldn’t forgive the perceived humiliation – the more so since Harold was making headway with Lady Duff Twysden, whom Hemingway had also hoped to impress.

Loeb did not set out to needle Hemingway, but the younger man’s resentment ran deep, and spilled out in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), in which a number of those present on the Pamplona trip in the summer of 1925 are cruelly portrayed; but none more so than Loeb, who appears in the book as Robert Cohn. Written in hot blood – Hemingway finished the novel in late September 1925 – The Sun Also Rises appears today so anti-Semitic (even when one allows for a period when anti-Semitism was, in certain circles, semi-acceptable) as to beggar belief. The real focus for Hemingway’s hatred of Cohn lies in the fact that he was in all ways bested by Loeb. Loeb rose above it, but never in his long life (he died in 1974) got over the betrayal.

The extent to which Hemingway caused offence is best described by Matthew Josephson:

After The Sun Also Rises came out, Harold said no more about Hemingway. Their friendship was ruptured. It seemed that in completing his story of the so-called ‘Lost Generation’, the young novelist had painted his circle of friends in Paris from life … there were at least six of [the novel’s] characters who recognised themselves in its pages and set off in search of the author in order to settle accounts with him, according to the reminiscences of James Charters [Jimmie the Barman], a retired English pugilist who was Hemingway’s favorite barman in Paris …

I had paused for a moment at the bar of the Dôme for an apéritif, and stood beside a tall slender woman who was also having something and who engaged me in conversation, at once informed and reserved. She had a rather long face, auburn hair, and wore an old green felt hat that came down over her eyes; moreover, she was dressed in tweeds and talked with an English accent. We were soon joined by a handsome but tired-looking Englishman whom she called ‘Mike’, evidently her companion. They drank steadily, chatted with me, and then asked me to go along with them to Jimmy’s Bar near the Place de l’Odéon, a place that had acquired some fame during my absence from France. In a relaxed way we carried on a light conversation, having three or four drinks and feeling ourselves all the more charming for that. Then Laurence Vail came into the bar and hailed the lady as ‘Duff’. At this, I began to recall having heard about certain people in Paris who were supposed to be the models of Hemingway’s ‘lost ones’; the very accent of their speech, the way they downed a drink (‘Drink-up-cheerio’), and the bantering manner with its undertone of depression. It was all there.

Suddenly Harold Loeb himself strode in vigorously, saw Duff, and stood stock-still; he had evidently heard she was in town and gone looking for her. He sat down at our table and said little, but looked his feelings much as Robert Cohn was described as doing. Duff’s English friend then made little signs of irritation at Harold’s presence (quite as in the novel). Laurence Vail ventured the remark: ‘Well now, all we need is to have Ernest drop in to make it a quorum.’

Laurence Vail was one of the people Peggy met and was fascinated by during the time she worked at the Sunwise Turn, and he was the one destined to have the most profound effect on her life; but at the time there were plenty of others: the poets Alfred Kreymborg and Lola Ridge were frequently there, as were the painters Marsden Hartley and Charles Burchfield, and, among the writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Peggy idolised Mary Mowbray Clarke, who became a role model for her as a liberated woman and a friend of artists.

Peggy, though she had no idea of how to mix with these new and intriguing people, and though she came to work swathed in scent, wearing pearls and ‘a magnificent taupe coat’, still had to work. And it wasn’t always fun. Her mother was suspicious of the bookshop and constantly popped in to check up on her daughter, embarrassing her by bringing her a raincoat if the weather turned bad, and irritating her with her questions. Equally embarrassing, though welcome to the bookshop (which throws a sidelight on Clarke), was a succession of Guggenheim and Seligman aunts who ordered books by the yard to fill up the shelves of their apartments and houses. These books were never intended to be read: they were a kind of wallpaper.

The work itself was mainly dull, routine filing, but Peggy did it willingly, for the joy of being in such a place more than compensated for the grind. One thing she did resent, however, was that she was only allowed down into the shop itself, from the gallery where her desk was, at lunchtimes, and even then she was only allowed to sell books if no one else was on hand. Whether Clarke considered her too much of a greenhorn or too much of a liability if let loose on the floor of the shop is unclear.

However, Peggy did gradually get to meet the people she wanted to meet, and she softened any reservations Clarke had by being not only a good employee but a good customer. In lieu of a wage, she was allowed a 10 per cent discount on any book she bought. To give herself the impression of getting a good salary, she bought modern literature in stacks and read it all with her usual voraciousness.

Among the other luminaries who frequented the Sunwise Turn were Leon and Helen Fleischman. Leon was a director of the publishers Boni and Liveright, and Helen, who like Peggy came from a leading New York Jewish family, had embraced the bohemian life. Following one of the fashions which succeeded the social upheaval marked by the end of the First World War, Leon and Helen played at having an open marriage. Peggy, who latched on to them as substitutes for Benita, whom she still missed bitterly, promptly fell for Leon. In a passage omitted from the bowdlerised 1960 edition of her autobiography, she tells us: ‘I fell in love with Leon, who to me looked like a Greek God, but Helen didn’t mind. They were so free.’ We do not learn whether or not the crush led to any kind of affair. Peggy then was more interested in settling into and being accepted by an artistic milieu.

The Fleischmans introduced Peggy to Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz, then in his mid-fifties, was a pioneer of photography and the founder of the avant-garde Photo-Secession group. Leon and Helen took Peggy to meet him at 291, his tiny gallery on 5th Avenue. How formative the meeting was at the time for Peggy we do not know, but Stieglitz, whose interests were not confined to photography, was the first to show Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse in the United States, and at the time of their meeting was increasingly interested in modern abstract art. The 291 Gallery became an important centre for avant-garde painting and sculpture, and on this occasion Peggy had her first experience of it. She was shown a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, later Stieglitz’s wife. We are not told what the picture was, but it was clearly an abstract, because Peggy ‘turned it around four times before I decided which way to look at it’. Her response must have been positive, because the reaction of her friends and of Stieglitz was one of delight. Peggy further tells us that although didn’t see Stieglitz again for another twenty-five years, ‘when I talked to him I felt as if there had been no interval. We took up where we left off.’ By then, of course, Peggy had become a doyenne of modern art herself. But was seeing the O’Keeffe her epiphany? Or did abstract painting simply provide a focus for her rebellious spirit, symbolising as it did the unconventional and questioning psyche of her new friends, with whom she was beginning to feel more and more at home? It would still be a long time before her own association with modern art began, and as she was never a reflective person, it’s possible that epiphanies, whether conscious or unconscious, were not in her line.

What she wanted was to belong. What got in the way was her own inability to give.

Laurence Vail was also a friend of the Fleischmans. He was the son of an American mother and a Franco-American father, and although he was an American citizen, he had been brought up in France and educated at Oxford, where he read modern languages. Fluent in English, French and Italian – he served as a liaison officer in the US Army with the heavy artillery during the war – European in manner, speaking with an Anglo-French accent, he could be charming and debonair. He turned twenty-nine in 1920, but still had not found his way into any particular artistic field, though there was no doubt that it was in the arts that his talents lay, being both a passable painter and, which seemed to be his forte, a writer. Based in Paris, he was in New York because a short play of his, What D’You Want? was to be produced by the Provincetown Players, an innovative group with their roots in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but who by now were producing work at the Playwrights’ Theatre in Greenwich Village and at the Greenwich Village Theatre. Vail’s one-acter was to be performed as a curtain-raiser to a Eugene O’Neill play. In Vail’s cast was a woman who would later play a significant part in Peggy’s life, Mina Loy. Vail also had a bit-part in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, already a Provincetown success, now playing in New York.

Greenwich Village had begun to fill with artistic life. Rents were low, and word spread. Perhaps the most striking single symbol of the new order in New York, though far from the most important, was a German, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She had drifted from an unhappy and poor home into prostitution, but later managed to enrol as an art student in Munich, whence she moved via a wretched marriage into German literary circles. A colourful lover brought her to America as he sought to escape the clutches of the police at home, but he abandoned her in Kentucky in 1909. The thirty-five-year-old Elsa made her way to New York, where she married the impoverished exiled German baron from whom she got her title. He left her at the outbreak of war and killed himself in Switzerland at its end. Remaining in New York, she drifted into modelling for artists, lived hand-to-mouth, was adopted as an occasional contributor and cause célèbre by the Little Review, and turned herself into the living embodiment of the age. To visit the French consul she wore an icing-sugar-coated birthday cake on her head, complete with fifty lit candles, with matchboxes or sugarplums for earrings. Her face was stuck with stamps as ‘beauty-spots’ and she had painted her face emerald green. Her eyelashes were gilded porcupine quills and she wore a necklace of dried figs. On another occasion she adopted yellow face-powder and black lipstick, setting the effect off with a coal-scuttle worn as a hat, and on yet another – and this was in 1917 – she met the writer and painter George Biddle dressed in a scarlet raincoat, which she swept open ‘with a royal gesture’ to reveal that she was all but naked underneath:

Over the nipples of her breasts were two tin tomato cans, fastened with a green string about her back. Between the tomato cans hung a very small birdcage and within it a crestfallen canary. One arm was covered from wrist to shoulder with celluloid curtain rings, which she later admitted to have pilfered from a furniture display in Wanamaker’s. She removed her hat, which had been tastefully but inconspicuously trimmed with gilded carrots, beets and other vegetables. Her hair was close cropped and dyed vermilion.

This true original could not last. Living as she did in squalor, and always in trouble with the police, her popularity faded with her looks, and her mind gradually crumbled. Abandoned by all but a few, one of them being the novelist Djuna Barnes, she made her way back to Europe, where she ended up in dire poverty in Potsdam. Her body was found shortly before Christmas 1927, her head resting in a gas oven. Peggy never knew her; but she heard of her, and was fascinated and scared of such a complete personification of non-conformity.

It wasn’t just in Greenwich Village that America was enjoying the sense of relief and the economic boom that followed the war. This revolution had started before the war, finding its greatest expression in the visual arts and in music. Modern art really was new then. In the time of the frock-coat and the hobble-skirt, of the horse-drawn carriage and the steam engine, Cubism was born and Stravinsky wrote The Firebird. There had never been an artistic revolution quite like it.

It was fired by the First World War, which speeded up similarly revolutionary technological progress, but Picasso and Braque were painting Cubist pictures well before 1914, and in Italy Balla and Severini were experimenting with arresting the visual impression of movement while motion photography was still in its infancy. The period either side of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was one of frantic technological progress, yet in 1920 the bicycle was still one of the fastest modes of transport, air travel was unknown to all but a few, and cars, telephones and radios were rare. The telegraph had been developed further during the war, but was not yet in common use. The RMS Titanic was the first to transmit SOS distress signals as she sank. There was no television yet. Computers as we know them lay far in the future.

Peggy was born in the Victorian age. By 1920 she was in the jazz age; her life had been contemporaneous with the transition, and, having the will, she moved effortlessly with the times.

In the meantime, a party was in progress. In the few years following 1918, American women changed their wardrobe by 45 per cent: the sartorial revolution typified by the flapper showed how strong the desire was to get away from the pre-war atmosphere, with its restrictive morals, its nationalism, class-divisiveness and provincialism. When the conservative establishment tried to curb the new and alarming tendencies, most obviously in a fundamentally puritanical America by introducing the prohibition of alcohol nationwide in 1920, the result was an unprecedented crime wave and a record increase in the consumption of alcohol.

Nothing could stopper the bottle again. The genie had been let out. Peggy was a child of her time; and along with many young Americans, she didn’t just bob her hair, wear short skirts, and dance and drink – she left.

CHAPTER 6 Departure

Peggy, still living at home, began to feel that the boundaries of the Sunwise Turn were also too narrow. She liked Laurence Vail, responding to his European manner and finding him less daunting than most of the habitués of the bookshop. Now, to Florette’s great relief, her daughter announced her intention of giving up work. Instead, she wanted to travel. She had been to Europe frequently as a girl, but not yet as a woman. The idea seemed to Florette to chime more harmoniously with her idea of what Peggy should be doing. Florette was unaware of the influence Laurence’s acquaintance had had on her; though it is just as likely that Peggy’s decision to go abroad was based on her cousin Harold’s own imminent departure.

Greenwich Village had been an undiscovered country for Peggy, but her sympathies lay with those who lived there. Many young male artists had been hardened in the fire of the war, but everyone was enjoying the euphoria that followed it, and many were also enjoying the economic boom it had created. Men who had served either in the army or with the ambulance corps in Europe had had their first experience of the old world, and had liked what they saw.

There had been precursors. Henry James had left America for Europe in 1875, and Gertrude Stein settled in Paris in 1902. The painter Marsden Hartley had lived in Berlin before the First World War, and when his German lover, an infantry officer, was killed during it, his death inspired Hartley to carry out a moving series of paintings. To someone from provincial America, New York was stunning enough, and provided a kind of halfway house; but for the artist the attractions of such cities as Paris, Rome, Berlin and London were irresistible.

It was Paris that most of them had got to know, and it was to Paris that they wished to return. France quickly became the focus of artistic expression in Europe after the war – an expression which reflected both disenchantment with the established order which the war had called into question, and the joy of freedom which succeeded it. Paris was at its centre, and for young artists from America there was an added, practical dimension: in the 1920s one dollar bought twenty French francs, and though this dropped back to fourteen francs, there it stabilised. You could live easily and even well on five dollars a day in France, including hotels and travelling expenses. The cost of living in general was half that of the USA. Matthew Josephson reports that a litre of Anjou wine could be had for nine centimes, and a good meal for two would only cost between two and three francs; John Glassco and his friend Graeme Taylor stayed at the Hôtel Jules César in Paris for the equivalent of twenty dollars a month, and breakfast in bed only cost fifteen cents a day on top of that.

Peggy, with a private income of over $20,000 a year, could look forward to living as well as she pleased. But the money was a mixed blessing. Unlike the people with whom she sought to associate, she had no need to earn a living.

Three of Peggy’s close contemporaries with whom her life was to interact, the poet and designer Mina Loy and the writers Djuna Barnes and Kay Boyle, were all aware of nascent feminism, in the form of women’s suffrage and a consciousness that women artists should achieve the same recognition as men. In 1913, as an eleven-year-old, Boyle had been taken by her ambitious and artistic mother to the Armory Show in New York, an influential exhibition staged by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, of which Alfred Stieglitz was honorary vice-president, that put on show more than 1100 international modern works of art. Peggy, rising fifteen at the time, did not have the advantage of such a parent, and was scarcely feeling her way towards an artistic sensibility then. The somewhat older Mina Loy (she was born in London in 1882) was living in Florence when the Armory Show was on, but her friend, the iconoclastic Mabel Dodge, was closely involved in its inception. Mina, furthermore, had already spent some time, in 1900, at the Künstlerinnenverein in Munich, the academy for women artists founded in the year of her birth.

The real point here is that all these women had an early association with the artistic world, wanted to join it as active artists, and had to work for a living. Barnes never married, but Boyle and Loy did and, like Peggy, were poor mothers. Had they been born in a later age it is open to question whether they would have had families at all. They were essentially independent spirits, and they would not be fobbed off with the ‘image’ of emancipated womanhood portrayed in the drawings of Charles Dana Gibson. The Gibson girl may have been self-assured and vivacious, but she was still an idea of women as men would like them to be. She had none of the muscle of the suffragette. Women had a long struggle ahead of them, and it would take at least another sixty years before they even began to enjoy some truly equal rights, in the Western world at least. In artistic circles as elsewhere, men held sway, and male artists were more often than not sexual chauvinists. Peggy has been presented as a proto-feminist. She was never anything of the sort. But she did make her presence felt, and asserted her independence.

But not yet. Nor was she as free of her mother as she would have liked to be, or cared to admit. When she started her preparations for departure to Paris, her plans included Florette and a cousin of Peggy’s Aunt Irene, Valerie Dreyfus, as travelling companions. Nor of course were they destined for the Left Bank.

2 Europe

‘Soon after, I went to Europe. I didn’t realise at the time that I was going to remain there for twenty-one years but that wouldn’t have stopped me … In those days, my desire for seeing everything was very much in contrast to my lack of feeling for anything.’

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM, Out of this Century

CHAPTER 7 Paris

The first trip was a toe-in-the-water affair – Peggy isn’t being entirely truthful when she says she didn’t return to the United States for twenty-one years. What is more important is that, whether the encounter with the Georgia O’Keeffe abstract kindled an interest in modern art or not, a desire to know more about painting was growing within Peggy by now.

She sailed with her mother and Valerie to Liverpool. From there they visited the Lake District, then took a tour of Scotland, and meandered through England before crossing to France and ‘doing’ the châteaux of the Loire. By the time they arrived in Paris Florette was exhausted and only too happy to settle down in the Crillon, then as now one of the most expensive and most agreeable hotels in Paris, and a far cry from the Left Bank as it was then. Peggy had quickly developed a passion for travel and the new experiences it brought. Valerie, already an experienced traveller, shared her enthusiasm, and guided her through Belgium and Holland, and afterwards Italy and Spain. In 1920–21, they were in the vanguard: Europe lay before them unspoilt and unexplored.

Above all, their exploration was centred on art. Just as she had felt at home among the people who had frequented the Sunwise Turn, now Peggy felt at home in Europe, the land of her grandparents, which she had liked as a child, and after four years’ separation because of the war, now found that as an adult she adored. ‘I soon knew where every painting in Europe could be found, and I managed to get there, even if I had to spend hours going to a little country town to see only one.’

Valerie may have been a valuable cicerone, but as far as art was concerned another figure was more significant. He was Armand Lowengard, the nephew of Sir Joseph Duveen. (Duveen, later elevated to the peerage, was a noted art dealer and a friend of the English branch of the Seligman family. His name is commemorated in the Duveen Galleries at the British Museum, his gift to that institution, which house the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon.) Armand was a great aficionado of Renaissance Italian painting, but when they met in France, he told Peggy that she would never be able to understand the work of the art historian Bernhard Berenson. This fired her up: ‘I immediately bought and digested seven volumes of that great critic.’ She read about what to look for in a painting – tactile values, space-composition, movement and colour – absorbed her lessons and tried to apply them. Later in life she met the great man himself, who was horrified by modern art (though he noted a tapestry-like quality in the work of Jackson Pollock), and was able gently to tease him.

No doubt Peggy was sincere in her desire to learn, but she was also no slouch when it came to self-aggrandisement. From the well-used library she left at her death, one can see that she’d read all the great art historians and critics of her day, but along with her interest in paintings, she was becoming equally interested in sex. She was certainly too much for Armand: ‘My vitality nearly killed him and though he was fascinated by me, in the end he had to renounce me, as I was entirely too much for him.’

In Paris there were other diversions and at least one other boyfriend. Peggy mentions a boy called Pierre who was ‘a sort of cousin of my mother’s’. Whoever he was, she boasts that she kissed him on the same day as she kissed Armand, and displays a naïve guilt at being so daring. There were the fashion houses to explore and enjoy with a Russian girlfriend she had made, Fira Benenson. Peggy took Russian lessons so that Fira could have no secrets from her, but did not get very far. They visited Lanvin, Molyneux and Poiret, dressed to kill and vied with each other in collecting proposals of marriage. But they had a good, conventional, rich-girl time at the Crillon, under the protective eye of Florette. As far as Peggy’s interest in art was concerned, there was no problem. Uncle Solomon’s wife, Aunt Irene (Valerie’s cousin), was a collector of Old Masters and had a good eye.

This pleasant idyll, which lasted the better part of nine months, was interrupted by a brief return home to attend the wedding of Peggy’s younger sister Hazel. Hazel was marrying within ‘the Crowd’: Sigmund M. Kempner was a respectable graduate of Harvard, and Florette was probably relieved to see her maverick youngest daughter safely wed. Peggy remained a bit of a wild card, but with luck she would soon follow her sisters’ examples. Meanwhile, Benita was failing to produce an heir, and, given her delicate constitution, that was a worry.

Hazel’s wedding took place at the Ritz-Carlton in New York at the beginning of June 1921. The marriage lasted a year, and for her it was the first of seven. For the moment, though, Florette was content.

Back in New York, Peggy renewed some old acquaintances, among them the Fleischmans. Leon had by now resigned from Boni and Liveright, and the couple had produced a baby. They had little money and no clear idea of what to do next, so when Peggy suggested that they join her when she returned to Paris, they accepted her invitation gladly.

Peggy couldn’t wait to get back. In Europe, and especially in Paris, she had encountered none of the stuffiness and none of the anti-Semitism she associated with home. It is true that she hadn’t entered the vie bohème at all, but the Fleischmans would be more stimulating companions than her mother or even her second cousin. However, Florette and Valerie were not left behind when Peggy returned to Paris, and the only immediate change was of hotel – instead of the Crillon, they stayed at the Plaza-Athénée.

Paris itself was changing fast. Americans of Peggy’s generation were forming colonies in Montparnasse, where the rents were low, and around what was then the Hôtel Jacob in the rue Jacob just north of the boulevard St Germain, but as we’ve seen, arrivals in 1921 were still in the vanguard. US land forces had only taken an active part in the fighting for the last four or five months of the war. The traumatic losses sustained by the British, French and Germans over four years had not been experienced by the Americans, who came to the Old World fresher, richer and more innocent than the people they discovered there. In return for their curiosity they learned to be more cosmopolitan, to shed prejudices and to lose their fear of the unknown. They came into contact with the artistic influences that were part of their heritage, but from which distance had set them apart. The United States, just over 140 years old in 1920, was confident enough to start tracing its own roots. The people born around 1900 were the ones to do it, and at the same time to throw off the bourgeois and materialistic values of their parents. More prosaically, they could live very well indeed on a very few dollars, and unlike at home they could get a decent drink without risking their livers on bathtub gin. Many of them lived on allowances from those same ‘rejected’ parents.

The war had shaken many beliefs to the core. No longer could anyone say that ‘history is bunk’, or get away with a blind belief in scientific progress. The flower of young European manhood had been killed off. There was a surge of interest in mysticism. Theosophy, which leant towards Buddhism in an attempt to synthesise man’s aspirations with the greater forces of nature and the supreme being, and theories of universal brotherhood, already promoted in the nineteenth century by Helen Blavatsky and later on by Annie Besant and Sir Francis Younghusband, was much in vogue. Brancusi, Kandinsky and Mondrian were all Theosophists; there were few practising Christians among the modern artists. Besant declared the Indian Jiddu Krishnamurti to be the new saviour, and for a time he enjoyed a huge following. Charlatans like Ivan Gurdjieff and Raymond Duncan (the brother of Isadora) flourished as the idea of communes and a return to the simple life took root. Spiritualism became such a vogue in the United States that Harry Houdini made a second career out of exposing fake mediums. The Dadaist movement, born in Zürich during the war, mocked and questioned everything, but the old order was its particular target. There were other potent influences. The Communist revolution had taken place in Russia, and in 1913 Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, which was to have such an influence on the Surrealists, appeared in an English translation.

The term ‘lost generation’, which was applied to the young post-war American émigrés in Europe, to whom Peggy was soon to attach herself, derives from a disparaging remark Gertrude Stein made to Hemingway when he and the painter André Masson and the poet Evan Shipman arrived late and drunk at one of her salons. As Masson and Shipman later related the story to Matthew Josephson, Stein had said, ‘Vous êtes tous une génération fichue.’ Stein got the expression from her garage mechanic, who used it to describe his apprentices.

Stein had arrived way ahead of the post-war émigrés, and as a patron of painters she quickly established friendships with many of them, notably Picasso, Matisse, Masson, Picabia, Cocteau and Duchamp. Among the other pre-war arrivals in Europe were the poets Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Hilda Doolittle (‘HD’) and Robert Frost. In England Eliot integrated completely and later became naturalised, but few of the others cut their links with their home country. The Americans who arrived en masse after the war stuck together. The Right Bank crowd was led by F. Scott Fitzgerald, while the Left Bank attracted the poorer artists and writers. By all logic Peggy should have belonged to the former group, but luckily for her, fate was to decree otherwise. There were two other American groups: the old-established rich patrician community, to which Laurence Vail’s mother belonged, and the casual tourists who quickly filled all the restaurants that got into the guide books.

In the forefront of the artistic post-war immigrants were John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings (later ‘e.e. cummings’) and Hemingway, all three of whom had worked as volunteer ambulancemen during the war. Ambulancemen enjoyed greater freedom of movement than regular soldiers, and had more contact with local people. Dos Passos did make contact with French writers, though Cummings, despite his fluent French, did not. The writer and critic Malcolm Cowley, alone in Montpellier writing a thesis on Racine, also managed to bridge the gap, as did Matthew Josephson, who became friendly with a broad group of writers and artists including Jules Romains, Tristan Tzara and Louis Aragon. There was some reciprocation: Aragon and his friend the poet Philippe Soupault both read English, adored America, read all the ‘Nick Carter’ dime novels they could find, and were committed fans of Charlie Chaplin.

The quiet streets and dim bars recorded by the pioneer photographer Eugène Atget before the war were giving way to noisy thoroughfares and brassy cafeterias. Workers’ cafés, such as the Dôme, quickly became the stylish haunts of young American drinkers; but the charm of the old Paris didn’t disappear overnight. John Glassco, who lived in the rue Broca district, wrote that ‘in the rue de la Glacière I met a man with a flock of goats, playing a little pipe to announce that he was selling ewe’s milk from the udder.’ And in A Moveable Feast Hemingway recalled a similar scene when he was living in the rue Cardinal Lemoine in 1921: ‘The goatherd came up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the floor above us came out onto the sidewalk with a big pot. The goatherd chose one of the heavy-bagged, black milk-goats and milked her into the pot while his dog pushed the others onto the sidewalk.’ In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway lamented how things had changed four years later: ‘We ate dinner at Mme Lecomte’s restaurant on the far side of the island. It was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place. Someone had put it in the American Women’s Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table.’ Elsewhere in A Moveable Feast he records poignantly that the old waiters at the Closerie des Lilas, Jean and André, had been forced to shave off their drooping moustaches and don white ‘American’ jackets to serve their new clientele. With flashy new establishments like the Coupole opening only a few hundred metres away along the boulevard du Montparnasse, and Americans flocking to the Sélect and the Rotonde, something had to be done to smarten up the Lilas’ image.

Up on the boulevard St Germain the Flore and the Deux Magots are still there, side by side, dispensing expensive but good cognac to Frenchman and tourist alike, the Magots just having an edge over the dingier Flore; but many of the other bars Peggy was soon to be frequenting around what is now the Place Pablo Picasso, the junction of the boulevard du Montparnasse and the boulevard Raspail, have either disappeared or changed beyond recognition. The Dôme is an expensive fish restaurant, though its bar is still there. The Sélect and the Rotonde still have a slightly seedy charm, while La Coupole is as grand a piece of art déco as ever it was. The Falstaff is now a cheap restaurant, and the Jockey and the Dingo have disappeared.

In the 1920s, though, this was the centre of ‘Bohemia’ for the American expatriates in Paris, and it was waiting to be introduced to Peggy.

Leon and Helen Fleischman had taken up with Laurence Vail, now back in Paris, and through them he met Peggy again. Laurence was an original. He looks bad-tempered and intense in photographs, though those who knew him well were fond of him, and many think that as an artist he sold himself short. By modern standards he looks physically weak, though he was an expert skier and alpinist. By the standards of the day he wore his blond hair long, and he avoided hats. He dressed extravagantly, buying curtain or furniture material in Liberty prints to be made into shirts, with yellow or blue canvas or corduroy trousers, and white overcoats, or jackets all the colours of the rainbow. As he was pigeon-toed he preferred sandals to shoes, but made a great fuss over buying any kind of footwear, to the extent that Peggy suspected him of having a mild complex.

Vail was a handsome man, despite a beaky, aquiline nose, with a volatile and childish personality which overshadowed his better points. Seven years Peggy’s senior, he had been born in Paris. His mother, Gertrude Mauran, came from a wealthy New England family, and was every inch a Daughter of the American Revolution. His father, Eugene, was the product of a New York father and a Breton mother, and a moderately successful landscape painter (particularly of Venice and Brittany) by profession.

From his mother Laurence had inherited a love of the mountains. She was one of the first women ever to climb Mont Blanc, and had encouraged her son to be a mountaineer from an early age. From his father he inherited the less attractive traits of advanced neurosis, and an egotism which manifested itself in temper tantrums when he thought he was not the centre of attention. Eugene Vail was also a hypochondriac with a strong suicidal tendency. It was from his father that Laurence inherited his artistic sensibility, and a sense of humour which never had enough of a chance to show itself. And if Peggy’s family had its share of eccentrics, mention should be made here of Laurence’s Uncle George, Eugene’s brother. George was a great aficionado of roller-skating. Roller-skates had been around for over a hundred years, but with the introduction of the ball-bearing in the 1890s their efficiency was much improved, and it was possible to go very much faster on them. George added to his speed by holding on to the backs of lorries, and thus it was that he would meet his end, when in his sixties. He was also a great lover, and made an album collection of his mistresses’ pubic hairs.

Neither parent – Gertrude cold and domineering, and Eugene self-obsessed – had much time for Laurence or his younger sister Clotilde, and the children in consequence were drawn close together. Though suggestions of incest are without foundation, their relationship did inspire William Carlos Williams’ 1928 novel A Voyage to Pagany, in which an American doctor and writer, Evans, returns to Paris to see his sister, who is pursuing a career as a singer (Clotilde had a brief career as an actress and opera singer herself).

… differing [physically] as the brother and sister did, they had grown up intimately together, almost as one child. They had shared everything with each other … The thing which had always kept them together was the total lack of constraint they felt in each other’s company – a confidence which had never, so far, been equally shared by them with anyone else.

Elsewhere in the book, a minor character called Jack Murry, a writer, is given a description based on Laurence:

The firm, thin-lipped lower face, jaw slightly thrust out, the cold blue eyes, the long downward-pointing, slightly-hooked straight nose, the lithe, straight athletic build … [Evans] loved his younger friend for the bold style of his look at life. Often, when Jack demolished situations and people with one bark, Evans smiled to himself at the rudeness of it, the ruthlessness with which so much good had been mowed down.

Both Eugene and Gertrude had private money, though Gertrude, with an income of $10,000 a year, was considerably the richer of the two. From this she paid her husband’s hospital and medical consultancy bills (he had already run through his own patrimony on such things), and gave Laurence a small allowance of about $1200 a year – just enough to live on without working, and enough to make him rich in comparison with the artists with whom he associated. This, coupled with a great love of the bottle, was the main reason why Laurence never exploited to the full what artistic talents he had. On the other hand, a streak of humorous self-awareness runs through his own writings and recorded pronouncements. ‘I take my medicine;’ he writes in his autobiographical novel Murder! Murder!, ‘gulp down without a murmur a tumbler of imported New York whiskey. My stomach sinks, bravely reacts. And suddenly I know that I have it in me to do great things. But what great things? Just what?’ His son-in-law Ralph Rumney, who was also a friend, has remarked that as far as he is concerned, Laurence was never given his due as an artist or as a man. Peggy loyally said that Laurence ‘was always bursting with ideas. He had so many that he never achieved them because he was always rushing on to others.’

Peggy and Laurence met again at a dinner party given by the Fleischmans. At the time he had a minor reputation as an artist and writer, but a much greater one as a man-about-town and roué. He was very popular with women, and when Peggy met him again in Paris he was in the middle of an affair with Helen Fleischman. It was an affair which her husband Leon had encouraged, since the thought of such a thing excited him, and Helen warned Laurence not to flirt with Peggy – for fear of offending Leon. She may, however, also have realised that Laurence found Peggy attractive. Peggy’s dark brown hair was parted at the centre and worn short and waved. Her light blue eyes had a pensive, intelligent look. She was young, very pretty despite her nose, which had not yet coarsened, and had a beautiful, long-limbed body. She was charmingly naïve but eager to learn, and had a private income twice as big as Laurence’s mother’s.

For Peggy, not only was Laurence an artist and a good-looking and charming man, he embodied the cosmopolitan sophistication she admired. He knew Paris backwards. He knew about art, and he had friends in the world of modern art. He wasn’t a callow youth from a similar background to her own, and his world had little connection with Jewish New York. Here was the teacher she sought. They got on very well at dinner. Laurence owed no woman any loyalty at the time, and was well aware of the casual nature of his affair with Helen.

A few days later, Laurence rang the Plaza-Athénée, where Peggy was staying with her mother and Valerie, and asked her out for a walk. Laurence at thirty was still living with his sister and their parents in a large flat close to the Bois-de-Boulogne. Peggy dressed for the date in an outfit ‘trimmed with kolinsky fur’, the most expensive kind of mink, in order to advertise her material charms. She and Laurence walked up the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe and then along the Seine. Dropping into an ordinary bistro for a drink in the course of what was a very long walk, Peggy ordered a porto flip – a cocktail which wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow at the Plaza but which hadn’t reached the Left Bank in 1921.

But Peggy had other things on her mind, and didn’t see Laurence as a teacher simply in terms of art. In another passage omitted from the 1960 version of her autobiography she remarks candidly:

At this time I was worried about my virginity. I was twenty-three and I found it burdensome. All my boyfriends were disposed to marry me, but they were so respectable they would not rape me. I had a collection of photographs of frescos I had seen at Pompeii. They depicted people making love in various positions, and of course I was very curious and wanted to try them all out myself. It soon occurred to me that I could make use of Laurence for this purpose.

Unaware of Peggy’s thoughts, but preparing to woo her, Laurence decided to leave the parental apartment and find himself an independent place. He told Peggy his plan, and she immediately suggested that she move in with him and share the rent. Balking at this – even in the progressive and permissive 1920s Peggy was going a bit too fast for his taste – he settled on a room in a hotel in the rue de Verneuil, between the Seine and the boulevard St Germain, and only a block south of the bohemian rue de Lille. Not wanting to lose the initiative, however, he soon visited Peggy in her room at the Plaza-Athénée, choosing a time when her mother, whose own room was nearby, was out with Valerie. Laurence took advantage of the situation and immediately made his move, only to be taken aback at the speed of Peggy’s acquiescence. But she stopped him anyway, saying that her mother might return at any moment and interrupt them. He suggested a tryst at his hotel sometime, but had his breath taken away when Peggy immediately fetched her hat. She later observed dryly that she was sure Laurence had not meant things to happen so quickly. Laurence was caught and cornered, and they both knew it. It would not be the last time, and it would be the cause of many violent rows in the future.

What could Laurence do but give in? He had, after all, made the first move. So she got her wish and lost her virginity, and in just the way she wanted. Peggy, typically, jumped in with both feet: ‘I think Laurence had a pretty tough time because I demanded everything I had seen depicted in the Pompeian frescos. I went home and dined with my mother and a friend gloating over my secret and wondering what they would think of it if they knew.’

Peggy had launched herself on a long sexual career, which she makes much of in her autobiography. She had lovers in such numbers that individually they were of no consequence. What is significant is how few relationships she had. Some of the bons mots associated with her sexual profligacy are well-known. When the conductor Thomas Schippers asked her, ‘How many husbands have you had, Mrs Guggenheim?’ she replied, ‘D’you mean my own, or other people’s?’ There is also the allegation, which Peggy denied in later life, that she had a thousand lovers. The number of abortions she may have had reaches seventeen, though other sources give seven. The true number is almost certainly three.

Peggy’s sexual voracity is well-documented, and there can be no doubt that for periods in her life she was extremely promiscuous. The reasons for this are complex. In part she was always looking for love, and she sought it through sex. It has been said that she had no interest in courting or even foreplay: she liked to go directly to the act of making love, and once it was over her detachment could be abrupt. In part she was both using sex as an expression of her own liberation, and in part she was conforming to the prevailing non-conformity. She was far from the only ‘liberated’ woman in artistic circles to behave in this way. In part, getting men (and occasionally women) into bed with her reassured her that she was not as ugly as she thought herself to be. In part, sex was a hedge against loneliness. It is significant that as she became established as an art collector of great standing in the middle decades of the twentieth century, she was increasingly known as ‘Mrs Guggenheim’. She approved of the name. But despite the fact that there were to be two real husbands, innumerable lovers, and one great love, the isolation symbolised by that name tells its own story.

Laurence and Peggy’s affair continued discreetly throughout the rest of 1921 and into 1922. As their romance blossomed, he introduced her to his world. Peggy, completely in his thrall, dubbed him ‘the king of Bohemia’, although he was that in her eyes only. Early on in their relationship, she speaks of him as playing a heroic central role in the move by the American artistic fraternity from the Rotonde to the Dôme. In This Must be the Place, the memoir of James Charters, the Liverpudlian ex-boxer who became the most famous expatriate cocktail provider in Paris in the 1920s, ‘Jimmie the Barman’, the story is rather different:

This came about because, back in those moralistic days, a ‘lady’ did not smoke in public. Neither did she appear on the street without a hat. But one Spring morning the manager of the Rotonde looked out on the terrasse, or sidewalk section, of his establishment to discover a young American girl sitting there quite hatless and smoking a cigarette with a jaunty air. Her hatlessness he might have overlooked, but her smoking – No! He immediately descended on her and explained that if she wished to smoke, she must move inside.

‘But why?’ she asked. ‘The sun is lovely. I am not causing any trouble. I prefer to stay here.’

Soon a crowd collected. The onlookers took sides. Several English and Americans loudly championed the girl. Finally the girl rose to her feet and said that if she could not smoke on the terrace she would leave. And leave she did, taking with her the entire Anglo-American colony!

But she didn’t move far. Across the street was the Dôme, which up to that time had been a small bistro for working men, housing on the inside one of those rough green boxes which the French flatteringly call a billiard table. Accompanied now by quite a crowd, the young lady asked the manager of the Dôme [a lucky man by the name of Cambon] if she might sit on the terrace without a hat and with a cigarette. He immediately consented and from that time the Dôme grew to international fame and became the symbol for all Montparnasse life.

Laurence threw big parties at his parents’ large apartment when his mother was away. Peggy has left us a recollection of one of them – her first. She sat on the lap of an unknown playwright, and self-consciously remembers the drunken ardour of Thelma Wood. (Wood was a native Kansan, at the time a pretty and slim twenty-one-year-old; she was a notorious lesbian and the then lover of Djuna Barnes, whose path was to cross Peggy’s often in the coming years.) The party provided other sideshows to titillate Peggy: two young men weeping together in one bathroom, two ‘giggling girls’ in another – all of which caused considerable distress to Laurence’s father, cast adrift among all this jeunesse dorée, and completely unable to cope with it.

Soon afterwards Peggy met two of Laurence’s ex-mistresses, Djuna Barnes, recently arrived in Europe as correspondent for McCall’s magazine (thanks in part to a subsidy of $100 for her fare from Leon Fleischman, who’d borrowed the money from Peggy), and Mary Reynolds, a woman of great integrity who would become the long-time mistress of Marcel Duchamp. Both were great beauties; both had attractive noses. Neither, however, was as well off as Peggy. Djuna in particular was strapped for cash and Peggy, at Helen Fleischman’s suggestion, gave her some lingerie. This caused a row. According to Peggy, Djuna was affronted at the gift, since the underwear, from Peggy’s own wardrobe, was not even her second-best and was darned; she goes on to describe an odd scene in which she bursts in on Djuna, who was seated at her typewriter, dressed in the offending garments. In a letter to Peggy much later, in 1979, Djuna explained that the insult was in Peggy’s mind: ‘if you are “correcting” the re-issue of your book, you might remove the remark that I was “embarrassed” by being “caught” wearing the handsome (mended) Italian silk undershirt – I was not annoyed at that, (or I should not have worn it). I was annoyed, and startled, that someone had come into my room, unannounced and without knocking.’

Peggy, who clearly felt guilty about her meanness at the time, made amends by the gift of a hat and cape, and the incident did nothing to damage what turned out to be a lifelong relationship, though never quite a true friendship, since Djuna was forever financially needy, and Peggy supported her for most of her life. This aspect of their association was not helped by the fact that Djuna considered herself in every way an infinitely superior being to Peggy.

Meanwhile the affair with Laurence continued apace. In order to give themselves greater freedom of movement, Peggy persuaded her mother to take a trip to Rome; although Valerie was left behind as chaperone, she was easier to outwit than Florette. Matters came to a head soon afterwards, when Laurence took Peggy to the top of the Eiffel Tower – did she tell him that her father was responsible for the elevators? – and proposed to her. Quite how ardent the proposal was, we don’t know; but she accepted him immediately, and he promptly got cold feet.

Laurence continued to dither and Peggy continued to hang on. As soon as she got wind of the engagement, Laurence’s mother, disapproving of a liaison with a Jew, however rich, packed her son off to Rouen to think things over, sending Mary Reynolds with him (and paying her fare) in the hope that old embers might be rekindled, or at least that Mary might talk some sense into her former beau. Her plan misfired: Laurence and Mary did little but row, and Laurence sent Peggy a telegram telling her he still wanted to marry her after all.

Peggy pressed home the advantage by letting her mother in Rome know that she was engaged. This brought Florette back to Paris in a panic. She disapproved of Peggy’s ‘marrying out’, and in any case knew nothing of Laurence’s credentials. He wasn’t rich, that was for sure. Laurence was, however, able to come up with the names of one or two people who would speak on his behalf: one of them was King George II of Greece, whom Laurence, with his wide circle of acquaintances, had once met at St Moritz. Luckily, Florette didn’t follow up any of the references, but she mobilised Peggy’s relatives and friends to dissuade her.

Despite this the couple went ahead with their plans, Peggy taking care that the lawyer they engaged ensured that her money should remain in her control, and the banns were posted. Laurence promptly started to dither again, but this only strengthened Peggy’s resolve. Then, when it looked as if he might be going off to Capri with his sister, and Peggy would be bound to return to New York with Florette, he turned up at the Plaza-Athénée, where Peggy was sitting in the unlikely company of her mother and his, and asked her to marry him ‘the next day’.

Peggy accepted this new proposal, but decided only to buy a hat, not a new outfit, for the ceremony, just in case there was another hitch; and there was what looked like a final hiccup when Gertrude rang Peggy on the morning of the wedding to tell her, ‘He’s off.’ Peggy took this to mean that Laurence had done a bunk, but his mother only meant that he was on his way.

The civil ceremony took place at the town hall of the sixteenth arrondissement on 10 March 1922. Later there was a party at the Plaza-Athénée, attended by a mixed bag from four different backgrounds: Florette invited a phalanx of Seligman cousins and friends from the Right Bank; Gertrude asked members of her set, the old-established American community; Peggy asked her new friends, mainly drawn from the circle of suitors she had established with Fira Benenson – one of whom, Boris Dembo, wept at the thought that he was not marrying Peggy himself; Laurence’s guests were a motley band of poor expatriate American writers and artists along with his French friends.

After a champagne reception at the Plaza, the party moved on, collecting all manner of people as it passed various bars on the way to the Boeuf-sur-le-Toît and Prunier’s. The next morning Peggy, the worse for wear, was visited by Proust’s doctor, who gave her a ’flu injection.

She awoke to find herself disappointed in marriage. Her disaffection was reinforced at lunch with her mother. Florette asked loudly about the finer points of the wedding night, drawing attention to the smell of Lysol Peggy had about her, making the waiters prick up their ears. This caused Peggy some embarrassment, but Florette approved of her daughter’s inherited belief in the curative and disinfectant properties of Lysol, especially in getting rid of the nasty smells and risks of infection that sex involved.

Before the honeymoon, Florette brought Peggy a passport in her new name. As a married woman, Peggy was now on Laurence’s passport, but with this independent one she could run away if Laurence became too much for her. This action of Florette’s may have been prompted by Peggy herself, since Laurence had already, even before the wedding, begun to show a less attractive side. When drunk, which he often was, he could become violent. He would make scenes in restaurants, smash bottles, wreck furniture in hotel rooms and attack Peggy physically. The worst of this was yet to come. Although there is no excuse for Laurence’s extravagant behaviour, Peggy sometimes consciously taunted him into it, knowing exactly how to provoke an angry reaction. It was one way of satirising the male dominance she instinctively despised, and she deployed it often in her life, despite the violence she brought on herself. At this stage, however, no one could have accused Peggy of not indulging him. He was so depressed at the thought of being separated from Clotilde that Peggy suggested his sister should join them in Capri, where they were to spend most of their honeymoon. But when Peggy also suggested that she bring along her Russian teacher, Jacques Schiffrin, Laurence refused.

En route to Capri, the newlyweds stopped in Rome, where Peggy’s cousin Harold Loeb was running his magazine Broom. Laurence had already published one or two pieces in it, and Harold now asked him for a poem. Laurence had already taken against the Guggenheim family, specifically the brothers who controlled the family firm, and was to remark that he would happily throw them all over a cliff. His dislike was probably prompted by the fact that Peggy’s capital was carefully protected; but it found an outlet in the poem he submitted:

Old men and little birdsToo early in the morningMake squeaks.

Little birds are more brazen;Primly, they dip their feet in puddles.Old men have delicate feet.

Old men have delicate bowels,Little birds are careless,Near love of neitherIs sweet.

Little birds chirp, chirp, chirp, chirup;Old men tell stories, tell stories;Both die too late.

When the piece appeared in the September 1922 edition of Broom, it provoked a querulous reaction from Peggy’s cousin Edmond. Loeb calmed him down, but Laurence felt a flicker of grim satisfaction.

Peggy and Laurence, bare-legged and besandaled to underline their contempt for anything bourgeois, proceeded on their expensive honeymoon. Privately, Peggy continued to nurse her sexual and personal disaffection with marriage; but at least getting married had achieved one goal for both of them: independence from their families.

Capri in the early 1920s was a beautiful and still isolated place, a resort for the rich and the eccentric. Here a young French nobleman consorted with the goatherd he had adopted as his boyfriend, had educated, and introduced to opium; here lived the German industrialist Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach in a magnificent mansion; and here too, more modestly, lived the Compton Mackenzies. An old lady, reputed to have been the lover of a former Queen of Sweden, sold coral in the streets; and during the season before Peggy’s arrival Luisa Casati, an exotic figure who became the mistress of the poet, womaniser and war hero Gabriele d’Annunzio, had wandered the island in the company of a pet leopard. Casati owned a palace in Venice, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, which thirty years later would become Peggy’s final home.

Despite the exotic nature of the place, Peggy didn’t enjoy it much, since her style was cramped by the presence of Clotilde. If Laurence’s mother had accepted Peggy – though Peggy was never allowed to address her as anything other than ‘Mrs Vail’ – Clotilde was not going to relinquish one iota of her hold over her brother. It was humiliating to be treated as the unwelcome third person on one’s own honeymoon, and as Peggy put it, ‘[Clotilde] always made me feel that I had stepped by mistake into a room that had long since been occupied by another tenant, and that I should either hide in a corner or back out politely.’ Peggy also, despite her own ambitions in that direction, found her sister-in-law’s libertinage shocking. She was also envious of it. To make matters worse, Clotilde’s lovers drove Laurence into a jealous frenzy. Clotilde was three or four years older than Peggy, more attractive and more worldly. She delighted in making Peggy feel inferior, but resented Peggy’s wealth. Peggy quickly came to realise what a weapon her money was.

She had enough obduracy not to let herself be undermined by the Vails’ snobbery and anti-Semitism. At the end of the summer they left Capri, travelling to St Moritz via Arezzo, San Sepolcro, Venice, Florence and Milan. By then the two sisters-in-law seem to have come to some kind of accommodation. Laurence and Peggy played tennis together so well that they won a tournament, and they seemed, if not passionately in love, at least genuinely fond of one another. Nevertheless, when the autumn came, Peggy left for New York for a long-arranged visit to Benita, while Laurence took Clotilde off on a tour of the Pays-Basque on a motorbike which Benita had given him as a wedding present.

In New York, Peggy arranged for the publication of Laurence’s short work Piri and I, and had an enjoyable time with her sister despite the jealousy she still felt for Benita’s husband.

Before she returned to Europe and her own husband, she discovered that she was pregnant.

CHAPTER 8 Laurence, Motherhood and ‘Bohemia’

At the end of 1922 Peggy returned to Europe with her Aunt Irene. Laurence was at Southampton to meet the ship. The couple were delighted to see one another again, and Laurence behaved himself right through a visit to Peggy’s cousin Eleanor in Sussex, where she lived with her cattle-farmer husband, the Earl Castle Stewart. But the Vails were an ill-matched pair, and no sooner were they back in Paris than they began to quarrel. Laurence had boundless energy and great, if misused, intelligence. He would invite anyone he met on the street, including whores and clochards, to parties, he would spend up to three days on binges, and he was deeply frustrated by Peggy’s apparently placid nature.

Peggy, however, knew exactly how to provoke him, and frequently did so. She was still in touch with her former teacher Jacques Schiffrin, and had advanced him money to help set up his imprint Les éditions de la Pléiade. When she told Laurence she was in love with Schiffrin he went berserk, smashing an inkpot and the telephone in their suite in the Hôtel Lutétia, where they were living. The splattered ink ruined the wallpaper, which had to be replaced, and Peggy had to engage a man to remove ink from the carpets and floors, which took weeks. There is nevertheless a hint of enjoyment in Peggy’s recounting of the story, as if this were all part and parcel of the anarchic, artistic life she believed she was living. And she retaliated in a way which was calculated to stir up Laurence further, by reminding him that it was she who held the purse-strings. Through that she controlled the relationship. Laurence was too weak to break free, and revenged himself for his humiliation by harping on Peggy’s lack of finesse, education and sophistication. In fact Peggy, a natural autodidact, was continuing to educate herself through the artists and writers she came into contact with, though it was a slow process, and her real relationship with the artistic life of Paris was not to come until much later.

Peggy had an acute perception of both the situation and her husband’s character:

Laurence was very violent and he liked to show off. He was an exhibitionist, so that most of his scenes were made in public. He also enjoyed breaking up everything in the house. He particularly liked throwing my shoes out of the window, breaking crockery and smashing mirrors and attacking chandeliers. Fights went on for hours, sometimes days, once even for two weeks. I should have fought back. He wanted me to, but all I did was weep. That annoyed him more than anything. When our fights worked up to a grand finale he would rub jam in my hair. But what I hated most was being knocked down in the streets, or having things thrown in restaurants. Once he held me down under water in the bathtub until I felt I was going to drown. I am sure I was very irritating but Laurence was used to making scenes, and he had had Clotilde as an audience for years. She always reacted immediately if there was going to be a fight. She got nervous and frightened, and that was what Laurence wanted. Someone should have told him not to be such an ass. Djuna tried it once in Weber’s restaurant and it worked like magic. He immediately renounced the grand act he was about to put on.

These tantrums often got Laurence into trouble with the police, but it was a mania that stayed with him for most of his life. In 1951 he got into a row in the dining room of the Hotel Continental in Milan with a friend of Peggy, Carla Mazzoli. As Maurice Cardiff, who knew Peggy and was there at the time, remembers: ‘When he had worked himself into what seemed a simulated rather than genuine frenzy, he left the table to return with a pot of jam he had taken from the restaurant kitchen. Dipping his finger into the pot he tried, unsuccessfully, for we all intervened, to rub the jam into Carla’s hair.’

Ample reasons for his pique at Peggy’s behaviour can be found in Laurence’s novel Murder! Murder!. Written in the closing years of the marriage, it is an account of the near-hysterical relationship between its protagonists, Martin Asp and his wife Polly (in Vail’s unpublished memoir Here Goes, Peggy appears under the equally thin guise of Pidgeon Peggenheim). Even allowing for the prevalent anti-Semitism of the time, the novel is particularly unpleasant about the Jews, and though at its most extravagant it shows the influence of Lautréamont’s Maldoror, the 1868 novel which had such a profound effect on the Surrealists, and describes a man possessed of a singularly nasty imagination, it nevertheless also displays a rather dutiful attempt to ‘horrify the bourgeoisie’. But while the book is honest, and skilfully exposes some of Peggy’s less attractive traits, such as an obsession with the details of petty spending, and an obstinate, ingrained selfishness, a huge resentment is apparent. Laurence (in the character of Martin Asp) describes how his sleeping wife’s lips ‘move as she dreams of sums’, and says ‘it makes her nervous to follow one train of thought for any length of time. She goes in for action. She tries to reckon out how much money she has spent on tips since the first of June.’

In their own recollections, each partner paints the other in darker colours than they deserve, but one longer passage from the novel can be quoted without comment (except to express the hope that some of it is meant ironically) to complement that quoted above from Peggy’s autobiography:

Suddenly, even while I speak and drink, my brain expands, parts, opens. It will be a great thing, the great thing I shall do – a very great thing. A little later, when I am kindly drunk, I shall, magnanimously, fundamentally, make it up with my young wife. It will be a great thing – this making up. For we have been quarrelling for nearly fifty hours.

Forty-six hours ago I had been reading one of my poems to a friend. Now it is not often that I thus hazard friendship. On this occasion, however, the friend had particularly insisted. Three times I met his odd request with fairly firm refusals. The fourth, I weakened. Too much false modesty, I argued, is bad for the morale; I may suddenly feel modest. And why not, just this once, give myself a treat? Besides, my friend might not ask a fifth time.

And now to Poll. Since Sunday noon she had been reading a novel of Dostoyevsky. She had read 114 pages on Saturday, 148 on Sunday, 124 on Monday, on this day, Tuesday, 96. Still the night was young. She was in form. She might still break her record.

Meanwhile, disrespectful of these facts, I settled myself in my chair, happily began reciting:

Some who believe in GodTake pills.

Some patient womenLean perhaps with stout hopePerhaps behind their hungry featuresHopeless …

It was at this moment that I became aware of a loud continuous whisper. I glanced up. Polly was leaning over her book, her lips were moving. My recital, it was evident, interfered with her concentration; still, by murmuring the words quite loud, she could manage not to hear me. She still hoped, if not to achieve a record, to equal her daily average of 130 pages.

Abruptly, I stopped reciting. My silence, I thought, will certainly move her to repentance and confusion. I was mistaken. Now, unimpeded by my own gloating voice, I could hear the words of the immortal Russian …

Suddenly I lost my temper. Then, with sarcasm:

‘Sorry, if I disturbed you.’

She glanced up with bright friendly eyes: ‘Oh not at all. Do go on with your poetry.’

My friend laughed lightly. ‘Don’t you like Martin’s poem?’

‘A lot. But, you see, I’ve heard it once already.’

I bit my tongue. ‘My mistake. I thought you could stand a second reading.’

‘Go on,’ said my friend. ‘Let’s hear the rest of it.’

I shook my head. Who was I, after all, to compete with Dostoyevsky? … My temper rose. Carefully tearing my manuscript in two parts, I turned my back on both friend and wife, concealed the fragments in my pocket.

When finally after ten minutes my friend left, I gave vent to my indignation:

‘You should have married a Wall Street broker. Or a Russian taxi-driver.’

I continued in this strain for upwards of two hours, including in my torrent of reproach my wife, her mother, her sisters, her cousins, her aunts, her uncles, in short, a considerable part of the Jewish people. Still, had she at any time during this period knelt or wept, I would, eventually, have vouchsafed her my forgiveness. Not once, however, did she show the slightest sign of ardent love, of deep, complete repentance. Several times, probably noting I was embarked on a symphony of abuse whose themes to develop must take at least some minutes, her eyes would quickly stray towards ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. Once, having turned my back, I heard, or thought to hear, the dry sound that a page makes when a hand turns it over.

In the meantime, though Peggy does make one reference in her memoirs to anxiety on its behalf, their child crouched in the womb, its welfare largely unheeded.

In the meantime, too, Laurence carried on his role as King of Bohemia, largely by virtue of having enough money to throw parties, and through him Peggy immersed herself more and more in the expatriate cultural life of Paris. The waves of newcomers continued unabated as the 1920s progressed. Matthew Josephson, who had returned to New York after the collapse of Broom in 1923, but, disliking the respectable Wall Street job he had taken, went back to Paris with his wife in 1927, was struck by the speed of the change wrought upon the Left Bank by the new influx of Americans: ‘Our ship alone had brought 531 American tourists in cabin class … There were certain quarters of Paris that summer where one heard nothing but English, spoken with an American accent … The barmen [were] mixing powerful cocktails, dry martinis, such as one never saw there in 1921 or 1922.’ Away from Prohibition, Americans relaxed. Everybody drank. Most people drank too much at one time or another. Drinking was part of the culture, and one regret was that the French authorities had banned the sale of true absinthe, the ruling drink of the 1890s. True absinthe has a spirit base in which the flowers and leaves of wormwood are instilled, together with star anise, hyssop, angelica, mint and cinnamon. Dull green in colour, the toxic qualities of absinthe led to its proscription: it had a percentage proof of between fifty and eighty-five. John Glassco, who managed to get hold of some in Luxemburg, left a vivid reminiscence of its effect:

The clean sharp taste was so far superior to the sickly liquorice flavour of legal French Pernod that I understood the still-rankling fury of the French at having that miserable drink substituted for the real thing in the interest of public morality. The effect also was as gentle and insidious as a drug: in five minutes the world was bathed in a fine emotional haze unlike anything resulting from other forms of alcohol. La sorcière glauque, I thought, savouring the ninetyish phrase with real understanding for the first time.

By 1928, Scott Fitzgerald could write that Paris ‘had grown suffocating. With each new shipment of Americans spewed up by the boom the quality fell off, until towards the end there was something sinister about the crazy boulevards.’ The Dôme, which had been the social centre and bush-telegraph office, the place you went to find a job or a place to stay, became so swamped by Americans that ‘real’ artists moved down the road to the Closerie des Lilas, where Hemingway sat and wrote. A literary crowd centred on the Hôtel Jacob; its numbers included Djuna Barnes, Sherwood Anderson, Edna St Vincent Millay and Edmund Wilson. The photographer Man Ray and his mistress, the model Kiki (Alice Prin), who wore extraordinary make-up designed by him, also formed part of the circle: ‘Her maquillage,’ wrote Glassco of Kiki, ‘was a work of art in itself: her eyebrows were completely shaved and replaced by delicate curling lines shaped like the accent on a Spanish “n”, her eyelashes were tipped with at least a teaspoonful of mascara, and her mouth, painted a deep scarlet that emphasized the sly erotic humour of its contours, blazed against the plaster-white of her cheeks on which a single beauty-spot was placed, with consummate art, just under one eye.’

Peggy was not the only member of the American artistic circle in Paris who was not herself an artist; many others used their money to encourage and subsidise creative but impecunious talents. Though hardly a champion of the avant-garde – she favoured the arts of the belle époque – Natalie Clifford Barney had inherited $3.5 million from her father and in 1909, when she was thirty-three, bought number 20, rue Jacob, a vast seventeenth-century mansion in which she lived very stylishly for the next half-century. As an early arrival she, like Gertrude Stein, was able to make contacts within the French cultural arena, though her house became a specialised centre for lesbian culture – Natalie had known she was a lesbian since the age of twelve, and she is the original for Valerie Seymour in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928. Thrifty like Peggy, she was also a benefactress to Djuna Barnes, though unlike Peggy, she never supplied the novelist with a regular stipend.

Mary Reynolds, one of the circle’s most striking members, was the widow of Matthew Reynolds, killed in 1918 while fighting in France with the US 33rd Infantry Division. She moved to Paris to escape pressure at home to remarry. Her group of friends included Cocteau, Brancusi and the American author and journalist Janet Flanner, who wrote the New Yorker’s ‘Paris Letter’.

Later in the decade the heiress Nancy Cunard founded The Hours Press, which she ran between 1927 and 1931; she was the first person to publish the young Samuel Beckett: Whoroscope appeared in 1930, in a hand-set edition of one hundred, followed by a second edition of two hundred. She also published, among others, Robert Graves, Ezra Pound and Laura Riding. Nancy had acquired her first printing press from William Bird, who ran the Three Mountains Press on the Île St Louis.

Perhaps the Left Bank’s most famous artistic haven was the bookshop Shakespeare and Co., at 12 rue de l’Odéon (it has since moved to rue de la Bûcherie), founded by Sylvia Beach, the daughter of a minister from Princeton, New Jersey, in 1919. In this literary Mecca could often be found Allen Tate, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, Hemingway and, on occasion, the great literary lion of the expatriate community, James Joyce.

It was at the bookshop that Robert McAlmon founded his Contact Editions Press in the early 1920s, the title deriving from William Carlos Williams’ mimeographed poetry magazine, Contact. Early in 1921, in New York, McAlmon married the English novelist ‘Bryher’ – the nom-de-plume (taken from the name of one of the Scilly Isles) of Winifred, the daughter of the vastly wealthy English shipping magnate Sir John Ellerman. McAlmon said he was unaware of Winifred’s true identity (and therefore of her money) until after they were married, but this seems unlikely, since it was from the first a marriage of convenience: both parties were homosexual, but in those days Bryher needed the cover of marriage in order to be able to travel freely and to adopt when necessary a respectable place in society (according to Matthew Josephson she was at odds with her family, though McAlmon was received by her father in London). By marrying, she also made herself eligible to inherit a fortune. The couple scarcely lived together; Bryher was a friend of the Sitwells, and was already involved in a long-term relationship with the more considerable poet and novelist ‘HD’, Hilda Doolittle, a native of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who had followed her friend Ezra Pound to Europe in 1911.

While his wife travelled, McAlmon stayed in Paris, drinking too much and indulging in some minor writing and a memoir, later revived by his friend Kay Boyle, of his life and of the artistic life of the time.

McAlmon was a fine editor, with a well-developed sense of what was best in the new writing, and used the money he derived as an ‘income’ from his marriage to set up his small publishing house. Despite personal differences between the two men (McAlmon could be very bitter), he was the first to publish Hemingway, and he also produced volumes of verse by William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy and Marsden Hartley. Though he had dreaded the thought of being destitute once Bryher – as she inevitably did, after about six years – divorced him, he found himself in fact with a handsome settlement of about £14,000, which led his friends Bill Williams and Allan Ross Mcdougall to dub him ‘Robert McAlimony’.

Gertrude Stein, though she stood apart from the 1920s set, having been in Paris since 1903, was among the first great female collectors of modern art. As patrons in America, Katherine Dreier and the Cone sisters were not far behind her. The Cones were distant cousins of Stein, and Etta Cone had typed the manuscript of Stein’s first book, Three Lives. At Stein’s home at 27, rue de Fleurus, crammed with paintings and sculpture, many of the new arrivals rubbed shoulders with the older established expatriates and some of their French colleagues too. Any given salon might include Virgil Thomson, Hemingway, Pound, Duchamp, Cocteau, Picabia, Matisse, T.S. Eliot (on visits from London), Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and Robert McAlmon. And Picasso, of course, whom Stein’s friend Nelly Jacott called ‘a good-looking boot-black’.

In the early days, Picasso had exhibited his work in a little furniture shop; and Leo and Gertrude Stein had been able to pick up Matisse’s Femme au Chapeau for 500 francs from the dealer Vollard. Things were changing fast, though. Daniel Kahnweiler, the great pioneer modern art dealer, had set up shop in Paris a couple of years before the First World War. Ignoring Picasso’s advice to become a French citizen (he was married to a Frenchwoman but had already done national service in his native Germany and didn’t want to have to go through it a second time, especially with a war looming), Kahnweiler had his effects sequestered at the outbreak of war and all his pictures were auctioned off – notably most of the Cubist work painted between 1911 and 1914. When he returned to Paris soon after the war, his former artists except Juan Gris had become ‘too successful to have need of him’, Stein tells us. Certainly the three other great Cubists, Picasso, Braque and Léger, had begun to be seriously collectable by this time, though the prices asked for their work remained low compared to the levels they subsequently reached.

Hemingway quoted Gertrude Stein, whose family-derived income was comfortable but not great, with a respect born of admiration: ‘ “You can either buy clothes or buy pictures,” she said. “It’s that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode … and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.”’ But not all the new arrivals treated Stein with particular reverence. The poet, artist and film-maker Charles Henri Ford called her ‘Sitting Bull’, while John Glassco wrote that she

projected a remarkable power, possibly due to the atmosphere of adulation that surrounded her. A rhomboidal woman dressed in a floor-length gown apparently made of some kind of burlap, she gave the impression of absolute irrefragability; her ankles, almost concealed by the hieratic folds of her dress, were like the pillars of a temple: it was impossible to conceive of her lying down. Her fine close-cropped head was in the style of the late Roman Empire, but unfortunately it merged into broad peasant shoulders without the aesthetic assistance of a neck; her eyes were large and much too piercing. I had a peculiar sense of mingled attraction and repulsion towards her. She awakened in me a feeling of instinctive hostility coupled with a grudging veneration, as if she were a pagan idol in whom I was unable to believe.

As backdrop and inspiration to all the artistic activity that was going on, there was the city itself. The writer Malcolm Cowley has observed:

Prohibition, puritanism, philistinism and salesmanship: these seemed to be the triumphant causes in America. Whoever had won the war, young American writers came to regard themselves as a defeated nation. So they went to Paris, not as if they were being driven into exile, but as if they were seeking a spiritual home. Paris was freedom to dress as they pleased, talk and write as they pleased, and make love without worrying about the neighbours. Paris was a continual excitation of the senses.

And if you were lucky enough to be working for an American publication as a correspondent and were paid in dollars, all the better.

How close to all of this were Peggy and Laurence? Given that they were caught in an unsatisfactory marriage and expecting their first child, it is understandable that they had little time to immerse themselves fully in the cultural life of the time; but there seems to have been no profound connection at all, other than through parties and jaunts through the bars and bistros of the Quartier Latin. They were generous hosts – though Peggy secretly resented the amount of money spent on entertaining – and the guests came largely because of the prospect of free food and drink.

Although Laurence’s slim output of work shows the influence of the Surrealists, he was never seriously involved with them, and Peggy had yet to show any hint of the interest in modern art that was to define her life later. She had as yet no conscious sense of purpose. If Laurence told her, as she attests he did in order to humiliate her, that ‘I was fortunate to be accepted in Bohemia and that, since all I had to offer was my money, I should lend it to the brilliant people I met and whom I was allowed to frequent,’ his remark at least planted another seed – but it took time to grow.

The Vails’ money set them apart, but they did not hold salons like Stein or Barney, nor did they patronise the arts. They lived in the grand Hôtel Lutétia, far from the Left Bank. Peggy did make friends within the artistic community, and might have become more involved with that world earlier in her life had it not been, paradoxically, for the presence of her husband, who partly facilitated and partly inhibited her entrance to it. She had not forgotten the lessons and the principles instilled in her by her teacher Lucile Kohn, but she was handicapped by her lack of confidence, something which Laurence was at pains to undermine anyway, on account of his own sense of inadequacy and inferiority, which stemmed from a similar source to Peggy’s: parental neglect.

That they saw themselves as doyens of artistic life, however – Laurence more so than Peggy – is clear from contemporary observations of them during the 1920s. The contradictions in Laurence’s character – charm and intelligence struggling with petulant egotism – are noticeable too. Matthew Josephson remembered that

A few Byronic figures loomed among us; they owned private incomes and showed no great urge or haste to fill many volumes with their written words. Laurence Vail was such a one, who wrote and also painted a little, but more often and more seriously seemed bent on painting the Left Bank of the River Seine red … With his long mane of yellow hair always uncovered, his red or pink shirts, his trousers of blue sailcloth, he made an eye-filling figure in the quarter. Moreover he was young, handsome, and for all his wild talk, a prince of a fellow; whenever he came riding in, usually with a flock of charming women in his train, he would set all the cafés of Montparnasse agog.

Laurence literally ‘knew everyone’; and even if he didn’t, would buy him a drink. His vivacious sister, Clotilde, who resembled Laurence in appearance as in high spirits, would usually be one of his café-crawling party, a band of Dionysiacs gathering followers at one bar or another.

Marriage to Peggy curtailed Laurence’s freedom; she knew it, she was jealous of his company, and yet felt unable to satisfy him. So they took it out on one another. They were caught in a vicious circle which it would take a long time yet to break. Meanwhile, their incompatibility invaded every part of their lives. Laurence says that he tried to teach Peggy about the things which interested him, but as she had a perfectly biddable mind and profited happily from the education of other male companions, his allegation that ‘she knew nothing when I met her and doesn’t know much now’ is more a reflection of the failure of their relationship than of her. The sharpness of his tongue didn’t help. He was particularly unsparing about Florette. Once, flirting with his mother-in-law at dinner, he tickled her playfully. ‘Shush,’ she is reputed to have replied, ‘Peggy will see, Peggy will see, Peggy will see.’ Florette’s mannerism of repeating things threefold is exploited in Murder! Murder!:

Without waiting for outside encouragement the door caves in. Is it the mistral? The police? No, it is Flurry, my mother-in-law, paying an informal morning call.

‘What’s this about murder, ’bout murder, murder …’

Agitatedly, Flurry proceeds to make herself at home. Having flung one of her two extra cloaks on a chair, she places the other one on the bed. Then, having removed the cloak she wears, she puts on the lighter of the two extra cloaks. Then, having found the lighter one too light …

And so on in a similar vein. Shortly afterwards, Laurence goes on to mock Florette’s meanness, and writes of her ‘large, flabby face … All the woes of Israel seem to be assembled on her dark face.’

After a visit late in the year from Peggy’s sister Hazel, who was already divorced from her first husband and about to marry number two, a London-based American journalist called Milton Waldman, the Vails took a house on the Riviera for the winter of 1922–23, where Peggy became ill and spent her time re-reading Dostoevsky. The fighting continued. Peggy was always able to use her money as a stick to beat Laurence with; indeed it was her only defence, and whenever he wanted to be generous with her money (since he had relatively little of his own) it gave her a perverse pleasure to frustrate him. This time it was over a loan of $200 to their friend the writer and art critic Robert Coates, to enable him to return to the United States.

Peggy was well aware of the power her money gave her, and she used it throughout her life, often cruelly, to bolster her low self-esteem and to help her stand up to the sexism which many of her men displayed. Often generous in important matters, she was nearly always – but by no means consistently – mean in the little things. This was a trait acquired from her forebears, which she could no more help than the shape of her nose or her weak ankles. But at this period she might have felt a sense of justification. It was she who paid for most of their expenses. Now she purchased a second-hand Gaubron from ‘one of my cousins in the automobile business’. The car wasn’t up to much, but they hired a chauffeur and Laurence learned to drive, which immediately caused him to fall in love with fast cars. They returned to Paris in the New Year, exchanged the Gaubron for a new Lorraine-Dietrich, one of the most expensive marques available, and welcomed Peggy’s older sister, who had come over from the States to be with her for the birth of her child, now only two months away. Benita was horrified at Peggy’s manner of living.

In the following month, April, the family crossed the Channel to London. It had been decided that the baby, who had been given the provisional nickname ‘Gawd’, should be born outside France to avoid the later risk of French national service should it turn out to be a boy. Peggy and Fira Benenson found a house to rent in Holland Park, while Benita and her husband Edward, joined by Florette, took rooms at the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly. Florette had been kept in ignorance of the pregnancy until now, to minimise the chance of her making too much of a fuss over the imminent arrival of her first grandchild.

Michael Cedric Sindbad Vail put in his appearance on 15 May 1923. Peggy nursed him for a month, until her milk gave out. A month later, she and Laurence were back in Paris with their little boy for the 14 July celebrations – a three-day binge for Laurence – which featured a drunken attack by Malcolm Cowley, Laurence and others on the unfortunate patron of the Rotonde. Once the partying and the vandalism were over, the Vails took a house in Normandy for the summer. Peggy missed Benita, who had returned to New York, but they had a constant stream of visitors, including Man Ray and Kiki; Harold Loeb; Clotilde and her latest lover; the poet Louis Aragon; and, on one occasion, James and Nora Joyce, en route to visit their daughter Lucia, who was attending a boarding school on the coast.

Their rootless life continued. Sindbad (as he came to be called – the name was Laurence’s choice), attended by an English nanny called Lilly who, Peggy noticed, had a magnetic effect on men, went with them. They travelled back to Capri in the autumn, where Laurence got into yet another fight, with a new lover of Clotilde’s, broke a policeman’s thumb and was sent to jail for ten days. Laurence’s bad behaviour, exacerbated by alcohol, continued throughout his life until age mellowed him; but he behaved, as far as one can judge, worse during his marriage to Peggy than at any other time. He constantly longed to get a reaction out of her, but she maintained an almost glacial and calculated indifference. It was however an indifference that extended to almost everything about her, as if she were watching life rather than participating in it; and though such an attitude was a fashionable pose at the time, Peggy was like a sleeping beauty, waiting to be woken up by the right stimulation. Laurence wasn’t her Prince Charming.

The Vails spent the winter in Egypt with just Lilly and Sindbad in attendance, and while Peggy followed the prevailing fashion and collected large numbers of pairs of earrings, a habit she never abandoned, Laurence bought himself brightly patterned bolts of cloth in the souks and had coats-of-many-colours made up. He also indulged himself, with Peggy’s consent, in a night with a Nubian belly-dancer who, he told her later, wore white underwear and ‘had a very high bed. When he could not climb up to it she took him under the armpits and lifted him up like a doll.’ She also gave him crabs, which not unnaturally horrified Peggy.

Apart from Laurence’s habitual tantrums and Peggy’s quibbling over money, this seems to have been a relatively happy period for the couple. Leaving Sindbad in a hotel with Lilly, they explored Upper Egypt before returning to Cairo and, again leaving Sindbad and Lilly, travelling to Jerusalem. Peggy had responded enthusiastically to ancient Egyptian art and architecture, but in Jerusalem she was repelled by the sight of Orthodox Jews at the Wailing Wall: ‘It mortified me to belong to my people. The nauseating sight of my compatriots [sic] publicly groaning and moaning and going into physical contortions was more than I could bear, and I was glad to leave the Jews again.’ In the New Year they returned at last to Paris, successfully smuggling in all the wares they had bought, together with a gigantic rag-doll stuffed with four hundred illegal Turkish cigarettes.

Owing to the arrival of Sindbad, the rooms at the Lutétia were now too small, and Peggy, whom motherhood suited when it suited her, had already promised Laurence ‘a girl next time’. The family moved to a rented apartment on the boulevard St Germain, at the heart of the Left Bank, appalling their aristocratic landlord by shifting all his good Louis XVI sofas, tables and chairs into a back room and replacing them with fashionable rustic French furniture. They stayed for six months through 1924, holding another round of wild parties, though this was seldom to Peggy’s liking. She was scared that some of the guests (Laurence, it will be remembered, tended to invite all and sundry) might make off with the silver, and she hated having to clean up people’s vomit the following day, or to change the sheets on her bed after someone else had made love in them. On the morning after she would purge the apartment, Lysol bottle in hand. Insult was added to injury by the fact that at the time Peggy scarcely drank; there can be nothing more boring to a non-drinker than a drunk, and she found herself frequently surrounded by them. For similar reasons, the long nights idling on the terraces of bars bored her to sleep.

Florette, back in Paris to hover over her daughter and grandchild, attended one or two of these parties, and on the whole enjoyed them, though she became enraged when Kiki once drunkenly called Man Ray ‘a dirty Jew’, and made her feelings known. By now she had made friends with Gertrude Vail, but the two women’s attempts to lure their married offspring back into the wealthy fold of the American colony in Paris came to nothing, though in the years to come Peggy accepted annual presents of either a fur coat or a new car from her mother, and noted gratefully that Florette was ‘forever putting money into trusts for me’.

Laurence encouraged Peggy to continue to shop at Poiret’s, and in 1924 she bought herself a flowing dress in Oriental style that she liked so much, now she had got her figure back after her pregnancy, that she wore it again and again. To go with it she had Stravinsky’s fiancée, Vera Sudeikin, design a golden turban. Man Ray took a series of photographs of her in it, which she adored. Except as a little girl, Peggy never looked more attractive. So pleased was she by the dress that she ordered one for Mary Reynolds too. Mary had by now become a good friend, and was a frequent guest at the Vails’ parties. She was enjoying a wild sex life, partying all the time, but such pastimes were soon to be brought to a halt by a closer encounter than hitherto with someone she already knew – Marcel Duchamp. Mary had been unable to get home after a party and spent the night with Duchamp, who generally disapproved of her way of life, but the next day, out of cash and unable to bring herself to ask him for more than 10 francs towards the fare she needed for a cab home, she called on Peggy to rescue her.

Throughout his life Duchamp was an éminence grise. Aged thirty-seven in 1924, he had returned to France a year earlier after three sojourns in the United States (he first visited New York in 1915), but though he aligned himself with the Surrealists, his work remained independent, and he was never a member of any specific artistic party. As much a theoretician as an artist, he had long since abandoned obviously creative work for chess, of which he was a master. Ascetic and essentially solitary by nature, his life would be bound up with Mary’s until she died, and his aesthetic influence on Peggy was to be profound.

In 1924 the cultural life of Paris was enriched when the Comte de Beaumont initiated a ballet series at La Cigale in Montmartre, producing work by Stravinsky, Milhaud, Honegger and Satie among others, with decors by Picasso, Ernst, Picabia and Miró. Peggy liked ballet, especially as a backdrop to socialising, but she was never much of a one for the performing arts, and the couple grew restless. She had her hair bobbed, which occasioned another outburst from Laurence, and then later in the spring another visit to Europe from Benita and Edward provided a welcome means of escape for a time. Peggy, with Florette in tow, joined her sister in Venice.

She had been there three times before on her trips through Europe with Laurence. Equipped with a little knowledge of her own, she proceeded to act as the family guide. At the end of spring she returned to Paris to find that Laurence had had an affair. His mistress had a baby nine months later, but Peggy reports that they never discovered whether it was Laurence’s doing or, rather improbably, Robert McAlmon’s, or – a welcome possibility – the woman’s husband’s. Peggy forgave Laurence, but the fighting went on as relentlessly as ever. Once, when they were staying at his mother’s flat, they yelled at each other so loudly that Clotilde came in from the next room, immediately took her brother’s part, and told Peggy to get out of the apartment. ‘I was so upset,’ said Peggy, ‘I began rushing around the flat as I was, quite naked.’ The situation was saved by the appearance of Gertrude, who said, ‘This is my apartment, not Clotilde’s, and you are not to leave.’

Restless still, the Vails set off for another holiday, with Clotilde, Lilly and Sindbad, heading first for the Austrian Tyrol. They would spend the row-ridden summer partly with Laurence’s family and partly with Peggy’s. They went hill-walking with the Vails, which Peggy loathed, played tennis and swam. When they joined Peggy’s family poor Benita, still on her European tour with Edward, showered affection on Sindbad; her own attempts at having a child had ended in a series of miscarriages.

Finally shedding their various relatives, Peggy and Laurence made their way back to Venice with Lilly and Sindbad, and here there was a lull in the storm. Laurence knew the city well, as his father had often painted there. Throughout their relationship Peggy had a high regard for Laurence’s intelligence – something she always generously and unreservedly admired in others, thinking as she did so little of her own – and, as she responded positively to the city herself, so she responded to what he taught her about it: ‘Laurence knew every stone, every church, every painting in Venice: in fact he was its second Ruskin. He walked me all over this horseless and autoless city and I developed for it a lifelong passion.’ They started to buy antique furniture for the home they hoped they would some day have – among other things, a thirteenth-century chest, which would end up immured in a country cottage in England. Peggy conceived the idea of buying a palazzo, but was prevented from doing so because her capital remained locked in trusts. Sindbad became rather a bore when Lilly fell ill and Peggy had to look after him ‘every day instead of on Thursdays, as was my habit’.

From Venice they went to Rapallo, where they played tennis with Ezra Pound, who lived there and who had become a friend of sorts; but the place bored Peggy, and the rows with Laurence resumed. On one occasion he smashed a tortoiseshell dressing set that she had acquired after what she calls ‘months of bargaining in the Italian fashion’. Dressing sets were important to Peggy: as a child she had bought an ivory set in Paris, which had long since disappeared, and this one had been intended to replace it. Many years later, in Venice after the Second World War, she herself smashed some tortoiseshell: an anonymous male friend, wishing to patch up a quarrel he’d had with her, brought her a tortoiseshell box as a peace-offering. ‘As she took it from him,’ Maurice Cardiff recalls, ‘she remarked that if it was genuine it would be almost unbreakable. Putting her theory to the test she hurled it onto the marble floor where it predictably shattered.’

Having spent New Year in Rapallo they set off early in 1925 in a leisurely way for Paris. Peggy was pregnant again, her new baby expected in August. As they drove along the Provençal coast they came across a hamlet called Le Canadel, on the Corniche des Maures towards Cap Nègre. It was an enchanting place, and they decided that it was here they would like their home to be. As luck would have it, a tiny, primitive hotel was for sale nearby – La Croix Fleurie, which had artistic associations, since Cocteau had used to spend his winters here with his lover Raymond Radiguet. It was irresistible anyway: ‘a nice little white plaster building in the Provençal style. It had a double exterior staircase ascending to a balcony which gave access to three spacious rooms … The wing consisted of one large room with a huge fireplace and three French windows that reached to the high ceiling and gave out on a lovely terrace with orange trees and palms, forty feet above the sea.’ There may have been no telephone or electricity, but there was a mile of private beach. Impetuously they bought it, but then got cold feet about the price. They managed to wriggle out of the ensuing difficulties and got the sum reduced by a third, provided that they undertook never to use the house as an inn; and they were obliged to repudiate the right to call it La Croix Fleurie.

They returned to Paris in triumph, but as the house would not be ready for them to move into until the summer, when Peggy was expecting her baby, they put off moving until the autumn. In the meantime Peggy decided to visit Benita in New York. Laurence, by now immersed in writing what was to become Murder! Murder!, did not at first want to go, but was persuaded to join her. With them they took a selection of flower collages by Mina Loy to sell.

Mina had arrived in Paris at the turn of the century, and had returned there in 1923 after extensive travels and a chequered, romantic and sometimes tragic life had taken her to South America, Florence, Berlin and New York. Born in London in 1882, she was a highly talented poet – published in the Little Review and by McAlmon’s Contact Editions – as well as a designer and painter. Having very little money, she had to work hard to make a living without compromising her creativity. Her latest idea had been born of frequent visits to the Parisian flea-market, in those days more a place of genuine wonder than it is today, but still only if you could see the potential beyond the junk. Mina had a superb eye, and one of her aims was to train her two daughters, Fabi and Joella, to develop their own. ‘One had to buy the real thing, a piece of old lace,’ she explained, ‘or something funny, but nothing from a department store.’

In the course of several such expeditions Mina had got hold of a number of Louis-Philippe picture frames for a price well below their real value. As her biographer Carolyn Burke explains:

Her latest fantasy, devised to earn the money for a larger apartment, crossed the traditional still-life with Cubist collage. She cut leaf and petal shapes from coloured papers, layered them to form old-fashioned bouquets, and arranged these pressed flowers in découpé bowls and vases painted with meticulous attention to surface texture. These ‘arrangements’ were then backed with gold paper and set in Mina’s flea-market frames: instant antiques, they looked expensive but were made from the cheapest materials. She had created a medium that lived beyond its means.

Mina had known Eugene Vail in Paris twenty years earlier, and had got to know Laurence and Clotilde in Florence – it was they who had encouraged her to go to New York to sell her designs. Once in America she had played a role, though not one to her liking, in Laurence’s play What D’You Want?, and had met and fallen in love with the extraordinary pugilist-poet Arthur Cravan (who claimed to be a nephew of Oscar Wilde, a relationship that was never proven). She later followed him to Mexico, where they married. Towards the end of 1918 Cravan, as erratic as he was romantic, conceived the plan of purchasing a boat and sailing it to Chile. He took up a collection and bought a hulk, which he proceeded to patch up. When it was ready he went for a test sail in the Gulf of Mexico, and was never seen again. Whether he was wrecked or whether he ran away is not known, but he left behind a pregnant wife. Mina was still grieving for him when the Vails agreed to take her work to New York for her and try to sell it in 1925.

Laurence invented a title for the collection, ‘Jaded Blossoms’, and Peggy organised exhibitions for it at department stores and art galleries, as well as having a showing of Mina’s drawings and portraits on Long Island. The catalogue, written anonymously by Laurence, boasted of Mina’s grand English background – in fact it was relatively humble. But the portraits sold, as did the Jaded Blossoms, and the reviews were good. More importantly for Peggy, she had discovered a gift: although most of the clients were friends or members of her extended family, she found she was not only quite good at selling, but had an appetite for it. There was no need for her to make use of her gift, because she had money already, and in any case her upbringing militated against her working seriously in any kind of commerce. That was a field better left to the Guggenheim and Seligman men.

The Vails wanted to avoid having their new baby in France, for the same reason as before, and set about looking for a place to stay temporarily in America, but both of them quickly became fed up with New York (neither of them ever liked living in America), and preferred to return to the greater freedom of Europe. Once again, Florette came too. This time, in an attempt to stop her fussing, they’d told her the baby was due much later than in fact it was.

At the end of July they settled at Ouchy, near Lausanne in Switzerland. Gertrude Vail organised a doctor, an easy task for her, since her hypochondriacal husband had frequented practically every sanatorium in the country, and the Vails, with Florette and now Clotilde in attendance, moved into the Beau Rivage hotel, taking an extra room for the midwife they’d engaged, a handsome woman whom Peggy later (mischievously?) wrote that she’d felt attracted to.

The physician had told Peggy that she would give birth between 1 and 18 August, but the baby took its time. True to form, on the night of the seventeenth Laurence flew into a temper in the hotel restaurant, and tipped a plate of beans into Peggy’s lap. Perhaps he was just desperate about having to compete for attention with yet another person. Whatever the cause of his anger, its effect was to trigger his wife’s labour. Laurence attended the birth, which took place the following evening at about ten o’clock. Peggy, who had had a hard time giving birth to Sindbad but who refused chloroform on this occasion, went through such pain that in the end she had to beg the midwife for ‘a few whiffs’, although she didn’t scream once. Laurence and Peggy now had the daughter she’d promised him. They named the baby Pegeen Jezebel.

Peggy was convinced that she would never have another child. It was eight days before she could get out of bed and transfer to a chaise longue. One day when the midwife was out and Peggy was alone with Pegeen, ‘she began to cry. I could hardly walk across the room to her and I felt as if all my insides would fall out. I nursed her for a month and then I couldn’t any more.’

By now Peggy and Laurence had had enough of Ouchy and Lake Geneva, and were impatient to get down to their new home on the Corniche des Maures, which was ready for them. The plan was that Laurence would drive there (the Lorraine-Dietrich, which he’d collected from Paris in the meantime, was a two-seater), while Peggy and the children, together with Lilly, the midwife and most of the luggage, would travel down by train. They got as far as Lyon, where they had to change, and were told that there would be a wait of forty-five minutes before the onward train left. Depositing the midwife, the baby and the luggage – fifteen suitcases – in their compartment, Peggy and Lilly took Sindbad with them in search of some lunch. But when they returned, the train had gone – it had left a few minutes early. The midwife had never travelled anywhere before, and Peggy was beside herself. She got the station master to telegraph ahead to the next station and have the train stopped there long enough to deposit her party and her luggage. She picked them up on the next train, which also obligingly stopped for two minutes. However, the shock of the experience had the immediate effect of drying up her milk, and the hungry Pegeen had to make do with powdered milk for the rest of that day.

The new house was on the edge of the little village of Pramousquier, no more than a railway station and a handful of houses on the St Raphaël – Toulon line, and still an attractive seaside resort. Pramousquier was to be the scene of some happiness and one tragedy, and the stage on which a liberation took place which would radically alter Peggy’s life.

CHAPTER 9 Pramousquier

‘Promiscuous’ was what Florette called the place – a laboured but still witty pun which Peggy chose to attribute to her mother’s inability to pronounce the village’s name. As it lay four hours by train from Toulon in one direction, and four hours from St Raphaël in the other, the Vails bought a little Citroën runabout to use as a workhorse, in which Peggy learned to drive. The nearest town of any consequence was Le Lavandou.

It wasn’t idyllic at first. Food had to be kept in an old icebox, which was constantly running out of ice. The beautiful but rocky Provençal countryside was not the place for dairy farming, so regular forays had to be made for milk. They hired Italian maids, who were illegal labour and worked for cash, and were therefore cheaper than regular French employees. They were, however, sluttish and lazy. On the other hand, Peggy’s money and Laurence’s taste ensured that their comfort was not otherwise compromised. They imported the furniture they had bought in Venice, to which Laurence added sofas and armchairs. He’d already had a studio built for himself near the main house, and in time they added a library, another studio over the garage for Clotilde, and later a small house for their friend Robert Coates and his wife.

When the local railwaymen went on strike for more pay, the Socialist precepts inculcated in Peggy by her old teacher Lucile Kohn paid off in an unexpected way. Peggy had been sending Lucile $100 at more or less regular intervals since she had come into her inheritance. Laurence objected to this, and disapproved of Peggy’s Socialist tendencies, believing that all political movements, especially those of the left, were ‘so boring’. Despite this, Laurence, who understood the French character well, proposed that they subsidise the strikers to the tune of $1000 – a suggestion which Peggy was happy to go along with. The strike was more like a ‘work-to-rule’, since the trains continued to run; but as a result of their support only the Vails benefited from the railway’s services, which included a daily delivery of ice for the old tin icebox. This was thrown off the train in a sack near where the line passed their house, but sometimes the railwaymen threw it out near the neighbouring village of Cavalière by mistake, and Peggy had to leap into the Citroën and fetch it before it melted. Once the strikers had brought their action to a successful conclusion, in gratitude the Vails were given the right to travel free on the branch line which connected Pramousquier with Cavalière, where there was a grocery, and Le Canadel, where they often drank a few pastis at Madame Octobon’s little bar-restaurant, which also let out a few rooms, made use of by Vail guests when there wasn’t enough space at Pramousquier.

Gradually they settled down to a sort of routine. Peggy enjoyed being the mistress of the first real home she had ever had in her own right, and promptly began to annoy Laurence with her habit of keeping precise, even anal, household accounts. No centime could be left unaccounted for, and no groceries went unremarked. It wasn’t simply meanness: Peggy enjoyed accountancy, and a sense of the value of money was in her blood.

At Pramousquier, for the first time since she had left the family home in New York, Peggy was able to indulge her fondness for animals, and very soon she had established an eccentric menagerie. One of the first arrivals was Lola, a half-wild sheepdog who was the unwelcome gift of Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, wife of the painter Francis Picabia and one of the earliest champions of modern art. Lola turned out to be perfectly friendly to anyone not in uniform, so that only the postman was ever bitten; though local farmers suffered too, since she produced a litter as undisciplined as she was. The Vails frequently had to pay compensation for chickens which had met their end in the jaws of the dogs. Subsequently, Lola and her pups were joined by nine cats, but the dogs often ate the kittens which the unspayed queens produced.

There was also a pig called Chuto, who rooted amiably about everywhere. Chuto was especially devoted to Joseph, the gardener, who fed him on the choicest scraps and even gave him wine. Alas for Chuto, it was a false friendship: Joseph was fattening him for the pot. Peggy, who had the tenderest heart where animals were concerned, for once shows herself in a harder light: ‘It was painful to have to kill and eat Chuto and see his blood turned into black sausages.’ But Chuto had his revenge from beyond the grave. As Laurence and Peggy drove up to Paris in a car laden with his ham, the bitterly cold winter weather turned the meat, making it inedible.

The dogs drove Joseph mad, tearing up the flowerbeds and defecating everywhere in the extensive gardens. Unable to confront his employers directly, he tried to hint that the dogs were a nuisance by shovelling up their excrement and depositing it at dawn around the table on the terrace where the family breakfasted, but it was months before the Vails realised that the dogs hadn’t actually dumped it there themselves.

Though Peggy kept a sharp eye on the day-to-day accounts, in those days she didn’t stint on entertaining. They employed professional chefs from Paris, persuading one to stay by buying a whole set of expensive copper cooking pots, and they kept a well-stocked cellar. Among the first guests was Mina Loy, with her young daughters. She decorated her bedroom with a mural of lobsters and mermaids.

Laurence, who’d begun to work on a series of collages glued to empty wine bottles, enjoyed the role of local seigneur, and the pace of country life agreed with him. He continued to write Murder! Murder!, his most sustained piece of published writing, and there are few records of major rows.

Winter in Provence was not for them. At the end of 1925 they set off for Wengen in Switzerland, with Clotilde, to ski. Laurence and Clotilde were expert skiers and loved the sport, but Peggy, who not only had weak ankles but a poor sense of balance, couldn’t master or enjoy it. So brother and sister set off each day for the slopes, while Peggy sat around at the hotel with the children and grew bored. The one day she took Sindbad out sledding, they had a spill and she cracked a rib.

That settled it for Peggy. She announced that she was leaving for Paris, and met with no objection. Once there, with Sindbad and Pegeen and the new nanny (Lilly having returned to England) safely installed in the Lutétia, where Peggy’s money continued to make her a welcome guest despite her husband’s excesses, she set about looking for a good time. She was fed up with playing second fiddle to Clotilde, and fed up with Laurence’s patronising attitude, while taking advantage of her money. She decided to find herself a lover.

She gave a party in Laurence’s studio, which he had retained. It was an old workshop in a cul de sac, ideal, she thought, for bohemian parties. This was the first party she’d given alone, and at the end of it, pretty drunk, she fell into bed with someone whose identity is unknown. The act itself meant nothing to her except in terms of getting even, so she made sure Laurence heard about it. He turned his fury at first on the entirely innocent Boris Dembo, Peggy’s former swain who’d become a friend, with whom she was dining on the night of Laurence’s unexpected arrival in Paris. Dembo withdrew immediately, but Laurence set about demolishing her hotel room yet again, throwing her shoes out of the window, hammering at the door of the children’s room (fortunately the nanny had locked herself in with them) and then rushing out into the night on what was the start of a four-day binge.

Laurence continued to brood, and exploded again one night when he, Peggy and Clotilde were having dinner with some friends at Pirelli’s. Working there at the time was James Charters, ‘Jimmie the Barman’, who knew the Vails well, having frequently been engaged by them for their private parties. In his memoir he describes what happened:

… at the further end of the room were five Frenchmen, chatting and laughing. Vail, who was sometimes taken with sudden tempers, decided the Frenchmen were making fun of him and his guests. Coming to the bar, he picked up a bottle of vermouth and a bottle of Amer-Picon and threw them in rapid succession at the back of the room. One man just missed being killed by a fraction of an inch, and the dent in the wall could still be seen at the College Inn [as Pirelli’s later became] the last time I was in Paris!

Although this story varies slightly according to the teller, the essentials are the same, and all are agreed on the outcome. The police were called and Laurence was arrested and taken to jail to cool off. The victims of his outburst, all army officers, wanted to press charges, but Clotilde managed to persuade most of them to drop the matter. Unfortunately one went ahead, and Laurence was given a six-month suspended sentence, which under French law would be added on to any subsequent conviction.

One of the other victims, Captain Alain Lamerdie, was so smitten by Clotilde that soon afterwards he proposed marriage. She refused him, but he persisted, undaunted by the very different world Clotilde belonged to – he himself came from an old military family. In the end, yielding to sheer pressure, she did accept him, but not until 1932, seven years later. Her marriage would drive Laurence into a frenzy of jealous rage.

Peggy tells us that she spent the remainder of the night following Laurence’s bottle-throwing stunt wandering the streets of Paris with Marcel Duchamp, whom Clotilde had enlisted to help her plead Laurence’s cause with the officers. They were ‘longing to go to bed together, but we did not consider it an appropriate moment to add to the general confusion’. This is an interesting early glimpse of Peggy’s desire to seduce artists, perhaps in the hope that their creativity might rub off on her. Just as in some cultures it was believed that if you ate the heart of the enemy you killed in battle you would obtain his strength, so Peggy used sexual intercourse as a means of associating herself with people whose imaginative resourcefulness she admired, but could never hope to emulate. In this case, the thought of bed was in Peggy’s head only. Duchamp kept her at arm’s length, and it would be twenty years before she slept with him – although we only have her word for it that she actually did.

In the morning Peggy collected Laurence from the police cells and took him home. Soon afterwards, according to Peggy, he abruptly announced that they were returning to Provence there and then; but once they were on the train, waiting for it to leave, he changed his mind and they wandered off into the streets of Paris (he was in the habit of going out in search of night-life after Peggy had retired to bed). He pushed her through a doorway into a brothel, where fifteen girls set about importuning them both. Peggy’s desire to appear mondaine carried her through the experience, and in her memoirs she is at pains to let us know that this wasn’t her first visit to a brothel anyway.

One of the girls struck up a friendship of sorts with Peggy, and the following summer turned up at Pramousquier whilst holidaying in Provence, proceeding to bore Peggy with a long disquisition on the prices of things. Peggy may have liked money, but wasn’t interested in it as a topic of conversation. Laurence’s own recollection of the visit to the brothel was that his action was provoked by finding Peggy drunk and dancing on a table at the Sélect, her face covered with lipstick-warpaint, and that his original intention was to take her back to the Lutétia, not Provence. Neither version sounds especially trustworthy.

Laurence drank less at Pramousquier than he did in Paris; his behaviour always worsened when he reached the capital. Matthew Josephson, an associate of the Surrealists and one of the few Americans to make friends with French artistic counterparts, recalled a row he had with Laurence in 1927 which shows the two most significant facets of Laurence’s character:

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