Confessions of an Art Addict (5 page)

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 of 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.

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.

At this point of my existence I was practically ignorant of all art after the Impressionists. So when I started my new project I needed much help and advice, which I got from
an old friend, Marcel Duchamp, the forerunner of Surrealism, as Sir Herbert Read has described him, whom I had known for fifteen years. I don't know what I would have done without him. He had to educate me completely. I could not distinguish one modern work of art from another, but he taught me the difference between Surrealism, Cubism and abstract art. Then he introduced me to all the artists. They all adored him and I was well received wherever I went. He planned shows for me and gave me all his best advice. I have to thank him for my introduction to the modern art world.

I wanted to dedicate the first show of Guggenheim Jeune (the name given to my gallery by Wyn Henderson, my secretary) to the work of Brancusi, the only modern artist I knew. In fact, I had known him for sixteen years. But he was not in Paris, so Marcel Duchamp decided that we should invite Cocteau to exhibit instead.

The arrangements for the Cocteau show were rather difficult. First of all I had to tear myself away from Samuel Beckett, with whom I was terribly in love. To speak to Cocteau one had to go to his hotel in the rue de Cambon and try to talk to him while he lay in bed, smoking opium. The odour was extremely pleasant, though this seemed a rather odd way of doing our business. One night he decided to invite me to dinner. He sat opposite a mirror, which was behind me, and so fascinated was he by himself that he could not keep his eyes off it. He was so beautiful, with his long oriental face
and his exquisite hands and tapering fingers, that I do not blame him for the delight he took in his image.

His conversation was as fascinating as his face and hands, and I longed for him to come to London for the show, but he was not well enough. However, he wrote the introduction for his catalogue and Samuel Beckett translated it.

Cocteau sent me about thirty original drawings he had made for the décor of his play,
Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde.
He also made some drawings in ink in the same spirit as the others, and two on linen bed sheets that were specially done for the show. One was an allegorical subject called ‘La Peur donnant ailes au Courage', which included a portrait of the actor, Jean Marais. He and two very decadent looking figures appeared with pubic hairs. Cocteau had pinned leaves over these, but the drawing caused a great scandal with the British Customs, who would not release it. I asked why they objected to the nude in art, and they replied it was not the nude but the pubic hairs which worried them. Finally, they allowed me to take the linen sheet away, on condition that I promised not to exhibit it in public, so I hung it in my private office at Guggenheim Jeune. In fact, I liked it so much that in the end I bought it.

Max Ernst

Calder's bedhead

This was before I was thinking of collecting. But gradually I bought one work of art from every show I gave, so as not to disappoint the artists if I were unsuccessful in selling anything. In those days, as I had no idea how to sell and had never bought pictures, this seemed to be the best solution and the least I could do to please the artists.