Poor(ish) little rich girl

She lived in an unfinished Venetian villa that looked like a barge. Everyone assumed Peggy Guggenheim was rich beyond the dreams of avarice, then called her cheap when her legendary generosity didn't meet expectations:

"...Djuna Barnes was one of the people who benefited most (indeed, for much of her life) from Peggy’s generosity—and who grumbled bitterly about her stinginess. From the 1920s on, Peggy sent Barnes a monthly stipend, ceasing only temporarily when Djuna exhausted her patience or when Peggy felt it would be more helpful for Barnes to try and survive on her own. She sent her former teacher, Lucille Kohn, “countless $100s.” She lent Berenice Abbot the money to buy a camera, gave the poet Margaret Anderson five hundred dollars to publish the Little Review (which serialized James Joyce’s Ulysses), raised funds to enable the anarchist Emma Goldman to write her autobiography, paid for Emma’s friend Margaret Fitzgerald to travel to Europe for her health, and sent an annual sum to the indigent widow of Peggy’s lover, John Ferrar Holms. 

"In 1925 Peggy financed the opening of a shop in Paris to showcase the highly original lampshades made by her friend the poet Mina Loy; the store also sold underwear and hosted an exhibition of Laurence’s paintings. Though the boutique on the rue du Colisée failed, it represented Peggy’s first attempt to exhibit and sell art. 

"During the German occupation, Peggy donated enough money to get André Breton and his family out of France, and she supported Max Ernst long after they arrived in the United States. Years after their divorce, she continued sending an allowance to Laurence Vail, and when Robert McAlmon, a friend from her Paris days, fell ill with tuberculosis, she wrote him a monthly check. These, of course, were direct contributions, given without any expectation of repayment or compensation. An even greater fraction of her inheritance was spent supporting painters and sculptors by buying their work. 

"Yet everyone seemed to have a story about her pennypinching, her awkward (but not unreasonable) insistence on adding up the checks that arrived at the end of the meals to which she treated her friends. Early in her friendship with Djuna Barnes, she made the writer the odd gift of some old, much darned lingerie, a present that Barnes found insulting but which she nonetheless wore when she wrote..."