Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict. Anton Gill
‘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.
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