Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict

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.