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