On December 23, 1979, Peggy Guggenheim dies of a stroke in Italy at the age of eighty-one. She’s lived much of her adult life in a palazzo in Venice, a patron of the arts, sleeping under a silver headboard fashioned by Alexander Calder, attended by Lhasa apsos and feted by celebrities who flock to her cocktail parties. She’s said to have slept with a thousand men.
