Gaggle of Googs
By Gerald Clarke
THE GUGGENHEIMS: AN AMERICAN EPIC by John H. Davis Morrow; 608 pages; $14.95
Like many patriarchs, Meyer Guggenheim loved to speak to his family in maxims. One was: "Roasted pigeons do not fly into one's mouth." Another required a little elaboration. Pulling out a bundle of seven sticks, one representing each son, he asked each to break it. When none could, Meyer pressed his point: "Together you are invincible. Singly, each of you may be easily broken. Stay together, my sons, and the world will be yours."
The lessons were not lost. Together, the Guggenheim sons--Isaac, Daniel, Murry, Solomon, Benjamin, Simon and William--made much of the world theirs. Building on the medium-size fortune left them by Meyer, a Swiss Jew who had immigrated to the U.S. in 1848, the seven sons stood fast to create the greatest mining empire of their time. With boldness and flair, they laid a railroad across moving glaciers to gouge out a mountain of copper in Alaska. They built a modern port and a 55-mile-long aqueduct to seize another copper mountain in the Chilean Andes. They raised the family flag over tin in Bolivia, silver and lead in Mexico, diamonds in the Congo. By the outbreak of World War I, they controlled 75% to 80% of all the silver, copper and lead in the world.
The Guggenheims, or the "Googs," as they were condescendingly labeled by New York's older, more staid Jewish families, exploited people as ruthlessly as they did minerals. Yet they could also be uncommonly generous, and before they exhausted their funds and energies, they set new standards for imaginative philanthropy. A list of their legacies includes the Guggenheim fellowships, Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, and foundations that helped finance Robert Goddard's pioneering rocket research and the Leakey family's exploration into the origins of man.
Author John H. Davis has discovered in the Guggenheims his own rich vein of biography; his book fails only in the leaden prose. But Davis' unerring eye for anecdotes surmounts most stylistic obstacles and makes The Guggenheims a consistently fascinating saga.
Of all the brothers only Isaac was a bore. Simon bought his way into the Senate, where as a Republican from Colorado he spoke against "cheap Spanish lead and also the Australian lead." Benjamin, the charming rake, went down on the Titanic, changing into evening clothes for the event. William, another wastrel, named the principal rooms in his house after the metals on which his fortune was based; the Salon d'Or was reserved for love. Solomon, who kept a suite at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, gave the doorman $1,000 tips so that he could keep his Fierce-Arrow parked permanently near the door, and once gave the captain of an ocean liner $10,000 to turn around in the English Channel and go back for his daughter, who had missed the sailing.
Once blessed by luck in almost every business enterprise, the Guggenheims later lost their magical touch. The family story was like the Rothschilds' in reverse: a third-generation Guggenheim, M. Robert, distinguished himself as Ambassador to Portugal by flipping a spoon down a guest's cleavage at a state dinner, then attempting to fish it out. Lisbon declared him persona non grata. Many lost all purpose, several died young, and a disproportionate number committed suicide. Simon's son George, for instance, bought a big-game rifle at Abercrombie & Fitch, checked into a hotel, and shot himself in the head. Pegeen Vail, Benjamin's beautiful and talented granddaughter, took an overdose of sleeping pills in Paris.
Some Guggenheim descendants have fared better, of course. Peggy Guggenheim was the patron of modern artists like Jackson Pollock, and with relatively small funds she has lined the walls of her Venice palazzo with one of the world's greatest collections of modern art. Roger Straus Jr. runs one of the country's best publishing houses, Farrar, Straus & Giroux; and Iris Love has won fame as an archaeologist. For the most part, however, the old Guggenheim daring has disappeared, and the family fortune, divided and divided again by succeeding generations, was made smaller still by nationalistic foreign governments that demanded more of the swag from their minerals.
Once the Guggenheims were the richest Jewish family in the U.S. Today, no males who bear the family's name still practice Judaism. Solomon's grandson, who now heads the shrunken business empire, is an Episcopalian with an archetypically Waspish name, Peter Lawson-Johnston. Meyer was right. His famous bundle was scattered by history, and the name Guggenheim is now celebrated only on the doors of museums and foundation offices.
-- Gerald Clarke
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