Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict

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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