While Joseph had sought a wife back home in Germany, and married his cousin Babet, his younger brother James married into one of New York’s oldest and most established Jewish families. The Contents, originally of Dutch-German stock, had been in America since the late eighteenth century. To marry one of them was to gain an entrée into the best circles of Jewish New York society; but that society was small and closed. Despite wealth and respectability, the Jewish élite remained in an unofficial ghetto, without walls or other tangible demarcations to fence it off, but no less real for all that – and it may be that it was one which they did not choose to leave. A disinclination by Gentiles to marry into it was matched by a disinclination to marry out, and even if such a thing had been possible, it would have meant social anathema for the couple involved. The inevitable result was inbreeding. Cousins married cousins, and their children intermarried, so that within a couple of generations physical and psychological problems inevitably occurred.
The Contents looked down on just about everybody, although James was not the first German parvenu to marry one of them. On 4 December 1851, in the presence of Rabbis Isaacs and Merzbacher, he took the hand of Rosa Content. He was twenty-seven, and she was a slender, dark girl of seventeen. They hadn’t known each other long, and didn’t know each other well.
James was easy-going, but he knew the value of money and he was careful with it. Peggy, his granddaughter, describes him as ‘a very modest man who refused to spend money on himself’. Rosa was far from easy-going, and very extravagant. From the first she felt that she had married beneath her, and the wealth the marriage brought did little to mollify her. Throughout her life she would trade on her superiority: she habitually referred to her husband’s family as ‘the peddlers’. The couple’s English butler was also called James. Rosa would call him ‘James’ at all times, and in his presence would refer to her husband as ‘Jim’. This calculated humiliation caused James Seligman great hurt. He wasn’t a good dancer; she was. ‘Germans are so heavy on their feet,’ she complained.
Still, he must have loved her, at least at first, because he indulged her as far as he could bear to, compensating for the expense by stinting himself. His nature led him to take the line of least resistance, and although it was never a happy one, for some time the union worked reasonably well, producing eight children. One of them, Florette, born in 1870, went on to marry Benjamin Guggenheim and become the mother of Peggy.
With time Rosa became increasingly eccentric. As they grew up, the children were not allowed to bring their friends home, on the grounds that they would be of a lower social order ‘and probably germy’. Rosa didn’t like children anyway, not least her own, and her horror of germs was such that she had a habit of spraying everything with Lysol, a practice Florette and Peggy would inherit. She also began to spend more and more of her time shopping. Eventually, James took a mistress. As a result of this, Rosa would astonish shop assistants by asking them out of the blue, and with a dark expression in her eyes, ‘When do you think my husband last slept with me?’
In the end, James could stand it no more and moved out of the family home and into the Hotel Netherland. There he spent his remaining years, and became something of an eccentric himself. He had a horror of new technology, and always had an assistant place his telephone calls. He lived to be ninety-two, and when he died in 1916 he was the oldest member of the New York Stock Exchange. A reporter who interviewed him for the New York Times in his rooms at the Netherland on the occasion of his eighty-eighth birthday found an
old gentleman clad in black, with snow-white, flowing locks and [a] long, spare, white beard, deeply immersed in the contents of a newspaper, his slippered feet extended before him on a velvet hassock. Perched upon his shoulder was a bright yellow canary bird, which sang at intervals, and it fluttered between its open cage and its master.
Rosa, having herself moved to a hotel in the latter part of her life, predeceased her husband, dying of pneumonia at the end of 1907. Peggy remembered her as her ‘crazy grandmother’.
Although Peggy’s Guggenheim uncles and aunts were, with the possible exceptions of her own father and her uncle William, what one might call solid citizens, it is hardly surprising, given their background and their mother’s inbred genes, that the same cannot be said for her Seligman relatives. Despite James’s injection of new blood, despite their tuition as children by the novelist Horatio Alger (though the fact that he’d been sacked by the Unitarian Church for tampering with choirboys may not have helped), Peggy’s Seligman uncles and aunts were all, in her own words, ‘very eccentric’. Unlike her Guggenheim uncles, none of the children of James and Rosa Seligman achieved anything much. They lived on their incomes and lived out their lives. But what lives they were, as Peggy wrote:
One of my favorite aunts was an incurable soprano. If you happened to meet her on the corner of Fifth Avenue while waiting for a bus, she would open her mouth wide and sing scales trying to make you do as much. She wore her hat hanging off the back of her head or tilted over one ear. A rose was always stuck in her hair. Long hatpins emerged dangerously, not from her hat, but from her hair. Her trailing dresses swept up the dust of the streets. She invariably wore a feather boa. She was an excellent cook and made beautiful tomato jelly. Whenever she wasn’t at the piano, she could be found in the kitchen or reading the ticker-tape. She was an inveterate gambler. She had a strange complex about germs and was forever wiping the furniture with Lysol. But she had such extraordinary charm that I really loved her. I cannot say her husband felt as much. After he had fought with her for over thirty years, he tried to kill her and one of her sons by hitting them with a golf club. Not succeeding, he rushed to the reservoir where he drowned himself with heavy weights tied to his feet.
Another aunt, who resembled an elephant more than a human being, at a late age in life conceived the idea that she had had a love affair with an apothecary. Although this was completely imaginary, she felt so much remorse that she became melancholic and had to be put in a nursing home.
There is much more along these lines in Peggy’s autobiography, and there are interesting indications of her own personality in the characters. The operatic Frances was also a good cook and read the ticker-tape, as well as having a mania for Lysol; the morose Adeline’s lover was entirely a figment of her imagination. But the list by no means ends there. Peggy’s uncle Washington Seligman lived principally on whiskey, and charcoal and ice cubes, which he kept in the zinc-lined pockets of a specially-designed waistcoat. This hideous diet was apparently dictated by chronic indigestion, but notwithstanding that and his black teeth, he maintained a mistress in his room in the family house, and threatened to commit suicide if ever the talk turned to her eviction. He was also an inveterate gambler. In the end, in 1912, he did kill himself, not because of the girlfriend, but because he was unable to bear the pain of his indigestion any longer. His father James Seligman, then eighty-eight years old, showed a certain tenderness but shocked the congregation when he walked up the aisle at the funeral service with his late son’s mistress on his arm. Washington’s death was followed by another suicide: a second cousin, Jesse II, shot first his wife, for presumed infidelity, and then himself. Yet another relative, Peggy’s second cousin Joseph Seligman II (old Joseph’s grandson), committed suicide at about the same time because he couldn’t cope with being Jewish. This is a measure of how much strain the Jewish society-within-a-society was under, striving for acceptance from without and riddled with snobbery within.
James’s next two sons were Samuel, who was so obsessed with cleanliness that he spent all day bathing; and Eugene, who was so bright that he was ready for Columbia Law School at eleven, but put it off until fourteen in order to avoid being conspicuous. He graduated with high honours and practised the law subsequently; but he was so mean, a trait