Confessions of an Art Addict Read online

  In the summer of 1919, I came into my fortune. I was an heiress and I was independent. My mother was greatly upset. She could no longer control me. The first thing I did was to make an extensive trip all over the United States. I invited Benita’s new husband’s cousin to chaperon me. We went from Niagara Falls to Chicago and from there to Yellowstone Park, all through California, down to the Mexican border and up the coast to the Canadian Rockies, and then back to Chicago, where I was met by my aviator fiancé, who had been demobilized. He introduced me to his family, who were all Chicagoans, but I did not make a hit. I complained too much about the provincialism of Chicago. As I was leaving on the ‘Twentieth Century’, he told me it was all off. I was very unhappy because I thought I was in love with him and was patiently waiting for him to make a fortune in the loose-leaf paper business so that he could marry me.

  In the winter of 1920, being very bored, I could think of nothing better to do than have an operation performed on my nose to change its shape. It was ugly, but after the operation it was undoubtedly worse. I went to Cincinnati where there was a surgeon who specialized in these beauty operations. He made you choose a plaster model of the nose you preferred. He never was able to give me what I wanted, a nose ‘tip-tilted like a flower’, something I had read about in Tennyson. During the operation (performed under a local anaesthetic), when I was suffering the tortures of the damned, surrounded by five nurses in white masks, the doctor suddenly asked me to choose again. He could not do what he had planned. It was all so painful I told him to stop and leave things as they were. As a result of the operation my nose was painfully swollen for a long time and I didn’t dare set foot in New York. I hid in the Middle West, waiting for the swelling to go down. Every time it rained I knew it beforehand, because my nose became a sort of barometer and would swell up in bad weather. I went to French Lick, Indiana, with a friend and gambled away nearly another thousand dollars, the operation having cost as much.

  If Lucile Kohn was responsible for my radical beliefs, my actual liberation came about quite differently from any manner she might have foreseen. One day when I was at my dentist’s, I found him in a predicament. His nurse was ill and he was doing all his work alone. I offered to replace the nurse as best I could. He accepted my help, for which he paid me $2.35 a day. I opened the door and answered the telephone. I held instruments for him and boiled them. I also learned which of my acquaintances had false teeth.

  Myself aged fourteen

  John Holms

  Laurence Vail

  Yves Tanguy

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art of This Century

  Presently I left this job and offered my services to my cousin, Harold Loeb. He had a little radical bookshop near Grand Central Station. I became a clerk and spent my afternoons on the balcony writing out checks and doing various boring jobs. I was only permitted downstairs at noon, when I had to replace the people who went to lunch, at which time I sold books. When I complained of my fate to Gilbert Cannan, who came often and sat for hours in the bookshop, he said to me, ‘Never mind, Lady Hamilton started out as a kitchen-maid.’

  Though I was only a clerk, I swept into the bookshop daily, highly perfumed, and wearing little pearls and a magnificent taupe coat. My mother disapproved of my working and came often to see what I was up to and to bring me rubbers if it was raining. This was embarrassing. My rich aunts also came and literally bought books by the yard to fill their bookcases. We had to bring out a tape measure to be sure the measurements coincided with their bookshelves.

  In the bookshop I met many celebrities and writers and painters, among them my future husband, Laurence Vail, and Leon Fleischman and his wife Helen, who later married James Joyce’s son. Laurence was about twenty-nine at this time, and to me he appeared like someone out of another world. He was the first man I knew who never wore a hat. His beautiful, streaky golden hair streamed all over as the wind caught it. I was shocked by his freedom, but fascinated at the same time. He had lived all his life in France and he had a French accent and rolled his r’s. He was like a wild creature. He never seemed to care what people thought. I felt when I walked down the street with him that he might suddenly fly away—he had so little connection with ordinary behaviour.

  The Fleischmans became my great friends. They practically adopted me. One day Leon took me to see Alfred Stieglitz, one of the earliest promoters of modern art in the United States. They put the first abstract painting I had ever seen into my hands. It was painted by Georgia O’Keefe. I turned it around four times before I decided which way to look at it. They were delighted.

  Soon after, I went to Europe. I didn’t realize at the time that I was going to remain there for twenty-one years, but that wouldn’t have stopped me. In those days my desire for seeing everything was very much in contrast to my lack of feeling for anything. That was born, however, as a result of my curiosity. I soon knew where every painting in Europe could be found, and I managed to get there, even if I had to spend hours going to a little country town to see only one. I had as a great friend Armand Lowengard, the nephew of Sir Joseph (later Lord) Duveen. He was a fanatic about Italian painting. Seeing what a good subject I was, he egged me on to study art. He told me that I would never be able to understand Berenson’s criticism. This remark served its purpose. I immediately bought and digested seven volumes of that great critic. After that I was forever going around looking for Berenson’s seven points. If I could find a painting with tactile value I was thrilled. Armand had been wounded in the war and was rather badly done in. My vitality nearly killed him and though he was fascinated by me, in the end he had to renounce me, as I was entirely too much for him.

  I didn’t see the Fleischmans again until I returned to America for a brief visit in the spring. I then persuaded the Fleischmans to come and live in Paris. As they had a child and little money, it was all very complicated. But they came. It changed their life as much as they had changed, and were still to change, mine.

  Through the Fleischmans I again met Laurence Vail. A few days later he took me out for a walk. We went to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and then we walked along the Seine. I was wearing an elegant costume trimmed with kolinsky fur, that I had designed for myself. He took me into a bistro and asked me what I wanted. I asked for a porto flip, thinking I was in the kind of bar I was used to. In those days I led only the most expensive sort of life and had never set foot in an ordinary café and had no idea what to order.

  Laurence lived with his mother and his sister Clotilde in a very bourgeois apartment near the Bois. When his father was not in a sanatorium having a crise de nerfs, he was living at home upsetting his entire family. Laurence’s mother was an aristocratic New England lady. His father was a painter of Breton ancestry, half French, half American. He had been neurasthenic for years and his family had no idea what to do about him. They had tried everything, but he was the world’s great incurable neurotic.

  Laurence wanted to get away from home. His mother gave him a small allowance of one hundred dollars a month and, considering her income was ten thousand dollars a year, she wasn’t over-generous. But she preferred to spend it on her husband, whose capital had long since vanished paying doctor’s bills. He had been in every sanatorium in Europe. Laurence might have taken a job, but he didn’t like working. He was a writer of considerable talent, but as yet unknown.

  He now told me he was about to take a little apartment, and as at this time I was worried about my virginity—I was twenty-three and I found it burdensome—I asked if I could pay half the rent and share it, hoping by this manæuvre to get somewhere. He said yes, but soon changed his mind. The next time I saw him he told me he had taken a hotel room in the rue de Verneuil on the left bank in the Latin Quarter. He came to see me at the Plaza-Athénée Hotel, where I was living, and started to make love to me. When he pulled me towards him I acquiesced so quickly that he was surprised by my lack of resistance. However, I told him that we could not do anything there as my mother might return
at any moment. He said we would go to his hotel room sometime. I immediately rushed to put on my hat and he took me to the rue de Verneuil. I am sure he had not meant to. That was how I lost my virginity. It was as simple as that.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MARRIAGES

  Laurence was considered the King of Bohemia. He knew all the American writers and painters and a lot of French ones too. In those days they met at the Café de la Rotonde in Montparnasse. But Laurence had a row with a waiter or the manager of that café and he made everybody move opposite to the Dôme. For years they never returned to the Rotonde.

  Laurence gave wonderful parties in his mother’s apartment. The first one I went to was very wild. I took with me a bourgeois French playwright, and in order to make him feel at home in the midst of Bohemia, I sat on his lap most of the evening. Later I received a proposal (I can hardly say of marriage) from a girl who got down on her knees in front of me. Strange things were happening everywhere. Laurence’s father was at home and was very annoyed by the confusion the party caused. In desperation he retired to the toilet, where he found two delicate young men weeping. He retired to the bathroom where he disturbed two giggling girls.

  One day Laurence took me to the top of the Eiffel Tower and when we were gazing at Paris he asked me if I would like to marry him. I said ‘Yes’ at once. I thought it was a fine idea. As soon as he had asked me, he regretted it. In fact, from then on he kept changing his mind. Every time I saw him look as though he were trying to swallow his Adam’s apple I knew he was regretting his proposal. He got more and more nervous about our future and one day he ran away to Rouen to think matters over. But soon he wired that he still wanted to marry me.

  After the banns were posted I began to think we might really marry, but suddenly Laurence decided to go to Capri and postpone the wedding. I was to return to New York, where he would join me in May if we still felt like marrying. One afternoon, when he was all packed, he went to buy the tickets for his trip. His mother, my mother and I sat in the Plaza-Athénée, each with her private feelings about the future. Suddenly Laurence appeared in the doorway, looking as pale as a ghost and said, ‘Peggy, will you marry me?’ Of course I said, ‘Yes’. After that I was still not at all sure that Laurence would not run away, so I decided not to buy a dress for the wedding. I bought a hat instead.

  The morning of the wedding Laurence’s mother phoned me to say, ‘He’s off.’ I thought she meant Laurence had run away again. He hadn’t. She merely meant that he was on his way to fetch me. We went in a tramcar to the Mairie of the Seizième Arrondissement at Avenue Henri-Martin, where the ceremony was to take place.

  We had all invited lots of friends. There were four distinct elements among the guests. First of all, Laurence had invited all his Bohemian friends, but as he was rather ashamed of marrying me, he had written them petit bleu notes briefly asking them to be present, as though he were asking them to a party, and he did not even mention who the bride was to be. My mother invited all her French Seligman cousins who lived in Paris, and all her bourgeois friends. Laurence’s mother invited the American colony, of which she herself was a well-known hostess. I invited all my friends. They were very mixed at that time. They were writers and painters, mostly from a very respectable milieu, and there was Boris, a Russian friend of mine, who came to the wedding and wept because I wasn’t marrying him. Helen Fleischman was my witness and Laurence’s sister was his. After the ceremony my mother gave us a big party at the Plaza-Athénée.

  As soon as I found myself married, I felt extremely let down. Then, for the first time, I had a moment to think about whether or not I really desired the marriage. Up to the last minute Laurence had been in such a state of uncertainty that I had been kept in suspense and never questioned my own feelings. Now that I had achieved what I thought so desirable, I no longer valued it so much.

  This marriage to Laurence Vail, which was extremely stormy, in fact, often much too much so, lasted for seven years. It brought me into the intellectual world of the ’twenties, which was terribly exciting. It also liberated me completely from my early Jewish bourgeois upbringing. The only permanent things I got out of it were my two children, Sinbad and Pegeen, and a lifelong friendship with Laurence. But then I have always found husbands much more satisfactory after marriage than during.

  My second husband, to whom I was never legally married, was John Holms, of whom Edwin Muir said: ‘Holms gave me a greater feeling of genius than any other man I have met, and I think he must have been one of the most remarkable men of his time, or indeed of any time.’

  John opened up a whole new world of the senses to me, a world I had never dreamed of. He loved me because to him I was a real woman. At first I refused to listen to him talk, and he was delighted that I loved him as a man.

  Although in the beginning I refused to listen to him talk and fell asleep at night while he was holding forth to me, little by little I opened my ears, and gradually, during the five years that I lived with him, I began to learn everything I know today, with the exception of what I have learnt about modern art. When I first met him I was like a baby in kindergarten, but by degrees he taught me everything and sowed the seeds in me that sprouted after he was no longer there to guide me.

  I am sure that during the first two years of our life I was purely interested in making love, but when that lost its intensity I began to concentrate on all the other things that John could give me. I could pick at leisure from this great store of wealth. It never occurred to me that it would suddenly come to an end. He held me in the palm of his hand and from the time I once belonged to him to the day he died he directed my every move, my every thought. He always told me that people never got what they expected from a relationship. I certainly never dreamed of what I was to get from him. In fact, I never knew that anyone like John existed in the world. I don’t know what he expected from me, but I don’t think he was disappointed. His chief desire was to remould me, and he felt in me the possibilities that he was later to achieve, although he admitted that he got many other things he did not expect.

  John not only loved women: he understood them. He knew what they felt. He always said, ‘Poor women’, as though he meant they deserved extra pity for being born of the wrong sex. He was so conscious of everybody’s thoughts that it was painful for him to be in a room with discordant elements. Therefore he was supremely careful whom he chose to invite together. He had a wonderful gift of bringing out people’s best qualities. He spent most of his time reading, and his criticism was of a quality that I had never before encountered. He was a great help to his writer friends, who accepted his opinions and criticisms without reserve. He never took anything for granted. He saw the underlying meanings of everything. He knew why everybody wrote as they did, made the kind of films they made or painted the kind of pictures they painted. To be in his company was equivalent to living in a sort of undreamed of fifth dimension. It had never occurred to me that the things he thought about existed. He was the only person I have ever met who could give me a satisfactory reply to any question. He never said, ‘I don’t know.’ He always did know. Since no one else shared his extraordinary mental capacity, he was exceedingly bored when talking to most people. As a result, he was very lonely. He knew what gifts he had and felt wicked for not using them. Not being able to write, he was unhappy, which caused him to drink more and more. All the time that I was with him I was shocked by his paralysis of will power. It seemed to grow steadily, and in the end he could hardly force himself to do the simplest things.

  All this ended in 1934, when John died under an anaesthetic for a very minor operation on a broken wrist. When the doctors told me he was dead it was as though I was suddenly released from a prison. I had been John’s slave for five years and I imagined for a moment I wanted to be free, but I didn’t at all. I was absolutely bankrupt. In desperation I went to live with a friend of John’s with whom I had been physically and secretly in love for a year, but whom I had ceased to see because I was afraid o
f ruining my relationship with John. This union, which was not a legal one, but from which I acquired a lovely step-daughter, Debbie, whom I brought up with Pegeen, was completely ruined by the fact that I had never recovered from John’s influence. This ‘marriage’ ended after three years, as my husband became a communist.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GUGGENHEIM JEUNE

  Feeling bored and lonely, living in the country in England by myself, I began to think of ways of occupying myself and of being useful, if possible. My friend, Peggy Waldman, suggested I should go into publishing, but fearing that would be too expensive, I accepted her other alternative, to open a modern art gallery. Little did I dream of the thousands of dollars I was about to sink into art. My mother had just died and left me about as much as I had inherited from my father, but this was also in trust, alas.