The Guggenheims: A Family History [Paperback]

Most family biographies are hard to read and even harder to follow, as the generations begin to amass, narrative thrust seems to take a vacation. So it is with great pleasure that I can report THE GUGGENHEIMS by Irwin Unger and Debi Unger "good to the last drop." The authors begin with a panoply of anti-Semitism in Europe and make it clear just how limited career prospects were for Jews of the second millennium, when they were forbidden all but the very lousiest jobs, and the jobs most guaranteed to annoy their Christian "brethren" (such as collecting rents and taxes). Unike the other great Jewish families of "Our Crowd," the Guggenheims made their money primarily from mining, in the farawy and exotic paradise of Chile (mostly in copper, and silver and lead as well). By the turn of the century (1900) they were well on their way towards their legend.

The biography has sweep and a certain falling grandeur, but I liked best the authors' marvelous pen portraits of the many younger Guggenheims. I liked finding out that Gladys Guggenheim wrote two cookbooks and was named "nutrition commissioner" of New York by Thomas Dewey in 1934. There's the shocking battle between the sisters Hazel and Peggy, over who could score with the most men sexually--when each got up to a thousand, the numbers started to blur. I bet! And then the terrible story of Hazel's 1928 rooftop tragedy. She had taken her two little toddlers, Ben and Terrence, up to an unlikely section of her apartment's roof garden, and somehow the two tykes tumbled off t their deaths. She was suspected as being some kind of Alice Crimmins-type Medea, but the family turned up a window cleaner nearby who claimed to have witnessed the whole thing and said Hazel was innocent and had indeed tried to save the kids!

Who remembers now that Harry Guggenheim, the bigwig of the third generation of Guggenheims, once owned Dark Star, the horse that beat Native Dancer to the 1953 Kentucky Derby? Harry and his wife, Alicia Patterson, started NEWSDAY, the Long Island paper, and he seemed to share her with the Democratic also-ran Adlai Stevenson with whom she fell quite desperately in love.

The Ungers also tell the story of Diane, Harry's daughter, who sought escape from hr family in an unlikely place, the postwar "folk music boom" that led her to Ireland, of all places, where she began an intrigue with young Liam Clancy, then a teen and not yet famous for sparking the Clancy Brothers + Tommy Makem. Diane changed her name and began recording her own folk music, which made me curious to hear what she did with her career. She seems to have been kind of a Peggy Seeger, and just as adventurous.

The last half of the book brings forward Solomon, whose legacy was the Guggenheim museum, and Peggy, the art dealer who married Max Ernst, discovered Jackson Pollock, and invented "Art Of This Century." In each case, the Ungers surpass all previois biographical treatments of their very complicated subjects. Peggy in particular comes to life, not as a freak or a groupie, but as a woman with a particular historical and aesthetic mission which she graciously fulfilled. Good for them. I expect this book will do quite well, and may restore some of the tarnished luster of the Guggenheim name. In any case you'll be reading it all night long trying to get to the end before morning.

I can think of several reasons to read this fascinating story of an iconic American dynasty. A reader might want to know why the name Guggenheim is on a number of important art museums around the world and want to know how they got there. Another might know about the glory days of the seven brothers when they ruled copper mining and smelting. Another might know about the flamboyant Peggy Guggenheim and want to get more context for her life. Then there is Harry Guggenheim and his participation in and support of early aviation (he actually participated in air combat in BOTH world wars), his support of Robert Goddard's early rocketry research, and his friendship with Charles Lindbergh.

Personally, I am fascinated by multi-generational family stories. How was the success that founded the dynasty achieved? How is the next generation formed to continue that success? Because business changes, the family will have to adapt. Can they continue the success? How do they hold things together or why does it fall apart? Splits within the family are inevitable simply because people will want to establish their own lives apart from somebody else's path.

This book has a huge cast of characters because there were so many people coming in and out of this family. There is a great deal of divorce, faithlessness in the marriages that do occur, a shocking amount of suicide, and proof that money, fame, hedonistic sex, and intoxicants do not lead to happiness. This book does tell the story of certain members of the clan more fully. The story of the seven sons of Meyer Guggenheim (who founded the dynasty a $5,000 dollar investment in a mine in Colorado) is quite fascinating.

One of the sons, Ben, went down with the Titanic. The strongest son and the one who became the head of the family after Meyer was Daniel. However, another brother became a United States Senator, and all of them made their contributions to the family dynasty. Even so, the youngest brother, William, did split with the family and that has had repercussions to the present day.

Solomon lived the longest of the seven brothers and it is his name on the spiraled Frank Lloyd Wright museum in New York. The story of how that museum came to be is itself reason to read this book. What a strange cast of characters brought that loved and derided institution into being.

The second generation was ruled by Harry Guggenheim, younger son of Daniel. He led an amazing life, however unsuccessful in marriage. He was an early pilot in WWI and created a private foundation that accomplished a great deal to make commercial aviation safe and reliable (if not profitable). One of his friends was Charles Lindbergh and through Lindbergh's advocacy, he funded Robert Goddard's early work in experimental rocketry. He raised thoroughbreds and his horse, Dark Star, won the 1953 Kentucky Derby. Through his third wife he founded Newsday and ended up running that for many years and sold it at a huge gain. You will find his life very interesting and its pains awfully sad.

Of course, the most famous of the Guggenheims nowadays is the art collector and flamboyant socialite, Peggy Guggenheim. The book recounts her life and struggles. Her demons were many and it ends up being a sad story. Even her art collection, her life's triumph, is surrounded with a pathetic air because of the way her obsession with it walled her off from so much else in life.

There is so much more that this story has to offer that I will simply urge you to take the time to read about these lives and what happens to people, both ordinary and extraordinary people, when they find themselves in possession of a dream of great wealth. It seems that too often they end possessed by the money and it ends up doing them as much personal harm as it does anybody any good.

Of course, being miserable without money is fairly easy to accomplish as well. By the fourth and fifth generation most of the family has settled into comfortable lives in the various reaches of the middle class. Many do not have much personal connection to the Guggenheim story and that is also a very interesting story that this book tells.

Fine job, and recommended to everyone interested in business, American social history, and dynastic families as well as those personally interested in the Guggenheims.

initially i thought this was a poorly written book, too conversational, ungrammatical at times, reciting what twigs and leaves on the gugenheim family tree did or are doing in a linear, list-making sort of way.

but after a while, the book really grew on me and i became comfortable with the writers' colloquial style and found the book interesting, especially in telling the story of the building of the gugenheim fortune in copper, tin and other metals, and then the story of how, after that business went caput and the fortune with it, certain gugenheims, mainly solomon and peggy, became giants in the world of 20th century modern art, enabling the gugenheim name to live on forever.

the first part of this book tells how a german jewish immigrant, isadore gugenheim, and his seven sons built a fortune in copper and tin out west and in south america. the gugenheim's jewishness and way of dealing with it is a fascinating topic that recurs throughout the book, evoking stephen birmingham's "our crowd" and irving howe's "world of our fathers."

the gugenheims alternately embraced and denied their judaism, and their struggle with their own identity and the identity that gentile society imposed on them is a running commentary and reflection on the decrease in antisemitism over the decades in this country, as schools or clubs that excluded earlier generations of gugenheims eagerly admitted their descendants to where their jewishness became virtually a non-issue.

the gugenheims encountered less antisemitism than many similarly situated jewish families of the early to mid 20th century, partly because they picked their spots and tried to "pass" and sometimes succeeded and avoided potentially difficult situations, or maintained their jewishness and made it a point to befriend gentiles and assimilate and get along, which made for a smoother ride in business and socially for the family.

the middle part of the book tells how harry gugenheim, the most dynamic of founding father isadore's descendants, became a major figure, from the 1920's to the 60's, in trying to preserve the family fortune and good name, and a pioneer in american aviation and friend of charles lindbergh (ironic in light of lindy's favorable feelings for nazi germany, which harry glossed over) and rocketeer robert goddard, whom harry helped fund. but for harry's money and the influx of german rocket scientists after the war, our space program would not have gotten "off the ground."

harry was astute not only in the family metallurgy business but also the newspaper business, cofounding newsday with his second wife, alicia patterson, and as a sportsman, a horseman and yachtsman, with a hunting plantation in south carolina and baronial estate on long island that is now a museum.

harry was the most superior person of the whole gugenheim clan and one of the tragedies of the family is that it did not produce his like again -- and he was painfully aware of that as he got older and saw the family in decline and tried unsuccessfully to pass his mantle of leadership onto one or another of his heirs or even recruited surrogates such as bill moyers.

the book also tells the cautionary tale of the decline of the gugenheim fortune due to bad business decisions and less able successor family members in key positions, and finally, no gugenheims willing or able to take over and lead the family business or steward its fortune, much to harry gugenheim's chagrin. the authors tell this in a way that evokes the old saying of "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" -- although with the gugenheims, it took more like five generations to go from their aristocratic heights back down to the upper middle class...

the last part of the book tells of the family's foray into the arts, mainly painting, and particularly of solomon gugenheim, who wisely built the famous frank lloyd wright-designed museum in midtown manhattan, and the eccentric peggy, an expatriate who lived in venice, hobnobbed with the lost generation, collected empty booze bottles and lovers, married dadaist max ernst -- and astutely put together perhaps the finest private collection of modern art ever assembled.

the book wraps up reciting in laundry-list fashion the names and stories of current gugenheim heirs, some of whom are eking out livings in out-of-the-way places, not at all carrying on in the classic manner of descendents of robber barons or industrial titans or patrons of the arts, much less even still carrying the name of gugenheim. when one compares the gugenheims with the rockefellers or vanderbilts, their wealth has come and gone. but their name -- now associated with the arts -- remains, and that, in the end, has proven to be their lasting legacy.

by the time i was done with this book, i felt i had learned all i needed to know about not only the gugenheims, but in a broader sense, also about how family fortunes are made and lost and how families handle fame and fortune -- or don't -- and how all of this happened iduring the last century and a half, against the backdrop of all that was going on, here and abroad.

that was the real achievement of this book, and what made me think in the end that it was worth the read. i recommend it, along with the biographies of rockefeller and morgan by ron chernow and jean strouse, and edmund morris's two-part biography of teddy roosevelt, to gain a complete picture of what this era and this family was like.