City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [77]
Although nothing interested her, she had a sense of her status, which in her eyes was something like the public position of a monarch. When a visiting big shot came to town, Peggy would give him or her a cocktail party and wear her Fortuny gown, which made her look all the dumpier (since it clung to every bump and declivity of her body), but the gown, too, had a historic significance. The dress was beige silk and made of hundreds of tiny pleats. Peggy told us that she would roll it up and tie it in a knot and mail it to London for cleaning. When she turned eighty, she posed for photographers and granted dippy interviews to the press. Smart or dumb, she was still Peggy Guggenheim.
In her heyday she’d lived with everyone from Samuel Beckett (who according to legend was always so drunk or depressed he refused to get out of bed, prompting Peggy to nickname him Oblomov, after the lazy Russian literary character) to Max Ernst (whom she’d spirited away on a plane to the States, where he quickly dumped her for the younger and more beautiful Dorothea Tanning). She’d been advised in buying art by Read, who’d drawn up a checklist of paintings to be acquired—and this she’d systematically followed. She gave Berenice Abbott her first camera. She’d opened a gallery in New York during the war years (Art of This Century) in which she’d given a first show to Jackson Pollock, whom she also slept with. Right after the war she’d brought Pollock to Venice for the Biennale. At gallery openings she’d wear one abstract earring and one surrealist earring to show—in her loopy way—how impartial she was. Now in Venice she hung all her earrings on the metal bedstead that had been designed for her by Alexander Calder. Like Gertrude Stein she’d gone on buying art after those first glory years, and for both Guggenheim and Stein, the later “geniuses” were all duds.
Peggy had the last private gondola in Venice. She was cheap, however, which meant she didn’t want to hire a normal gondolier who belonged to the union and earned high wages. Instead, every spring she’d look around for a retired gondolier who could be engaged for less and who would fit into her livery, which she didn’t want to modify. I remember that one summer David helped her line up a gondolier who’d conducted funeral boats to San Michele. If, after boarding, Peggy didn’t give him a specific goal, he’d automatically start heading for the funeral island and singing traditional dirges. Perhaps she was cheap because her father (who’d installed the elevators in the Eiffel Tower and who’d died in the sinking of the Titanic) had sold his share of the partnership to his brothers before the discovery of the family copper mines in South America. Peggy had inherited just half a million dollars, which she’d parlayed into a huge estate through her wise art investments. But she’d never been cash rich, not like her cousins.
In the gondola, she’d have something she wanted to show us—the Cima da Conegliano painting of St. John the Baptist at the Madonna dell’Orto, or the Carpaccio pictures of St. Jerome and his lion frightening the friars at the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. The gondolier would pull up next to the church and help us out. Red-faced Dutch tourists or camera-armed Americans would watch this strange event with bewildered curiosity. Or Peggy would sit back with her eyes half-closed and listen to David reading to her from Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, which she thought of as “her” novel—since it was about a rich