by Deirdre Bair
He gave himself the brief respite of a week off by not answering the phone or the doorbell at his studio and ignoring his correspondence. He also declined all social engagements and spent his evenings in the apartment “drinking lightly and walking up and down the floor, thinking, worrying,” mostly about himself and his emotional state. Even though he did little to change his behavior, his self-analysis was perceptive: he knew that being around people made him “false, scared, formal, competitive.” When he was alone he was “more harmonious” and more “at peace” with himself, because he was able to assess his actions and interactions honestly and sincerely. Such thinking further convinced him that the only way to lead a peaceful and harmonious life was to leave New York entirely and get a house in the country that had two floors, one for him and one for Hedda. He wanted Hedda to help him make moving plans when they were together in Europe, so they could “do things right” when they returned.
ONE WEEK OF SOLITUDE WAS ALL he could spare and, more truthfully, all he could stand, and he jumped right back into his frenetic, activity-filled schedule. He went to Detroit and was a guest in Alexander Girard’s home, “an architect’s own dream house.” He loved his room, with its Mexican pottery, a small Henry Moore sculpture, an Italian ex-voto, and an Eames chair. On the way home he stopped in Cincinnati to check on the murals before rushing back to New York for a flurry of appointments. In a single day he declined an unnamed department store’s invitation to do its Christmas windows, then went to Harper & Brothers to “help their ignorant editors make a blurb” for his book jacket and from there to a luncheon with the businessman roommate on the Queen Mary, who was organizing everything from their reservations for deck chairs to dining room meal seatings. He hurried back to the studio to write the checks to pay his bills, because Miss Elinor had quit, then had to make phone calls in answer to a pile of letters from the Detroit staff because there were too many questions and talking was faster than writing. And after he crammed all that into business hours, he had to return calls to friends such as Betty Parsons, Leo Lerman, and Hawley Truax at The New Yorker. It was a typical New York workday, but it made him feel “like a parasite who hadn’t manufactured anything, just blahblahblah.”
Naturally—at least to him—several of his teeth chose this time to erupt in infections. The dentist prescribed penicillin, after which he would need at least one extraction, if not two. Penicillin calmed things down, but he worried constantly about a flare‑up when he boarded the train for another working trip to Detroit, to stay again with the Girards. They entertained him with the most interesting guests they could gather for their elegant dinner parties, but mostly he spent several days on his own, walking around downtown Detroit because the mural needed details of the city itself.
One evening Steinberg was invited to dine at the home of “an architect called Saarinen,” who wanted him to think about creating a mural for the Ford Motor Company’s research institute, which he was designing and building. Steinberg was interested in principle, but for Hedda and not for himself. He left the publicity photos Betty Parsons had made of Hedda’s paintings with Saarinen because he wanted him to commission her to make a mural of the machines, motors, electricity, and chemistry that she was then painting. The two men liked each other, especially after they discovered how much they had in common, starting with service in the OSS during the war. Although Hedda’s part in the project never came to fruition, Steinberg and Saarinen’s friendship endured.
In New York, he deliberately cultivated another new acquaintance, the journalist Ruth Gruber, who was much respected for her dedication to rescuing Jews during World War II and who had been instrumental since the war’s end in helping displaced European Jews emigrate, first to Palestine and then to the new nation of Israel. Because of her connections at the highest levels of the United States government and the United Nations, the desperate Steinberg wanted to enlist her to help get his sister and her family out of Romania. Gruber was eager to help and wrote “most convincing letters” to various “big shots.” She also took him to meet other influential people, and at “a big party of rich Jews,” he saw “more old women and jewels than ever in my life.” It was his introduction to the world of Jewish fund-raising at the highest levels, and for the rest of his life he gave as much as he could to every Jewish organization that asked. Gruber was willing to do what she could for Lica and Rica Roman, but she wanted something from Steinberg in return. He groused that he had to go to dinner with her and her publisher because it was “payback” time and she wanted him to design the jacket for her new book. He tried to plead having too much other work before leaving for Europe, but “it’s too late now and I promised I’d do it.” After a “dull evening,” he hastily designed a “dull” book jacket.
HE WAS TO SAIL ON THE Queen Mary on June 21, 1949, arriving in Cherbourg on the twenty-sixth, but his teeth threatened to derail the departure. When he saw the dentist the week before, the dentist told Steinberg to go to a surgeon that very day for an extraction. Instead he went to lunch with Jim Geraghty and got very drunk. After he drank so much liquor and became incoherent with nervousness, Geraghty could barely get him into the surgeon’s office. The surgeon examined him and said there was no need for extraction, only for larger doses of penicillin. Steinberg sobered up immediately and got himself back to his office, where he fell into a deep sleep and did not wake up until late afternoon, when he heard Leo Lerman pounding on his door. Then it was back to business as usual. After Lerman there was a succession of visitors that ended with Geraghty, who wanted to make sure he was all right and, if he was, to look at the preliminary drawings of the Detroit murals, as he was interested in buying some for a spread in The New Yorker. Steinberg pulled out all his drawings and behaved as if this were his first meeting of the day with Geraghty, even though he wanted to go home and sleep “for about 20 hours.”
In general he got little sleep, because there were too many parties and dinners he had to attend before his departure. Hedda worried about him and chastised him for behaving like “a loose man dancing with depraved de Kooning” at one of Bill and Elaine’s raucous parties in their downtown apartment. He insisted that it had been a sedate evening during which he mostly chatted with Wilfredo Lam (whom he liked) and Stanley William Hayter (of whom he was wary). He liked de Kooning, who he insisted was “a nice man,” and as that friendship deepened, Steinberg became convinced that through him he had found the key to understanding American abstract painters: “They’re primitives.”
As the date to sail approached, he was so busy that he limited his social engagements to the good friends he called his “old bores,” paramount among them René Bouché and Richard Lindner (who always babysat the Steinbergs’ cats). Russell Lynes gave a small dinner where Monroe Wheeler and Loren McIver were the only other guests, and Steinberg was able to enjoy the rarity of a serious conversation that was all about art. He was not so enthusiastic when Wheeler gave another dinner where two of the guests, McKnight Kaufer (“a mediocre artist of posters”) and Glenway Westcott “kissed on both cheeks like girls.” Rosa and Miguel Covarubbias were in town and he had to sit through Miguel’s documentary film about Bali, “very boring but grand for him.” He took Mel and Mark Rothko to lunch at a neighborhood French restaurant, and to keep the conversation flowing with the taciturn Mark, he got them “happy with martinis.” Isamu Noguchi, another good friend, was the honored guest at a number of parties before he left New York again “to go away forever,” as he always said and never did, so Steinberg went to all his farewell parties. He cut short an evening with Bernard Rudofsky because he didn’t feel up to the serious arguments over architecture and city planning that he knew would ensue.
The social encounters were interspersed with a great deal of work and intense reading, all of which combined in ways that eventually showed up in his drawings. From Melville’s Moby Dick to Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, he turned to Havelock Ellis and Balzac. Always searching for “the real America,” h
e read Ring Lardner’s short stories and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, which made him want to jump into the Stravinsky Cadillac and take to the open roads of the American Southeast in search of hillbillies and moonshine. To his great surprise (and delight), aspects of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine made him “excited” about the Detroit murals in a way that he had not been excited about any work “in months or years.”
He envisioned the murals as a panorama that began with the impression of speed, in keeping with Detroit as the Motor City, where the streets were named Packard, Ford, and Chrysler. The first image was a cluster of cars and trucks roaring off after having been stopped at a traffic light. They led the eye into several very small houses with huge billboards above and behind, all festooned with the word EAT. He was very pleased with “the trick” he used for the next house, “you know, the cute little whitewashed board house with a verandah and a man sitting on a rocking chair.” The cute little house became a dozen when he made photostats and pasted them in a sequence so that “same house, same man” became the generic equivalent of every middle-class suburb in any American city. They led the eye to an A&P supermarket and a bank that he drew as a “classic temple.” These were balanced by more photostat images of the middle-class house and man, which led directly into the industrial age. Factories were surrounded by thousands of cars that belonged to the workers inside, all of it encircled by “smoke stacks, gazometers, railways, etc. then slums.” Steinberg deliberately rendered them in “bad and clumsy drawings” to show the poverty of spirit and misery of life such urbanization inspired. He insisted they had to be “bad” in the sense of sloppy and amateurish, because otherwise such misery “became cute.” To enforce his point to the casual viewer, he made blotchy ink spots, left his fingerprints scattered here and there, and put some of the drawings on the floor so he could dirty them by stepping on them and leaving the imprint of his rubber-heeled work shoes. To take this section of the mural one degree further away from reality, he did not use the original drawings but had them reproduced photographically. After this he veered back into repetitions of the “cute house” (as he was now calling it) until the viewer’s eye stopped at a Moorish gas station, which Steinberg used to introduce a city that was all brownstones and shops until it came to a “6th Avenue like” center. Here, at street level he had movie theaters, drugstores, burlesque houses, and Italian restaurants, while above them were the offices of everyone from dentists and chiropodists to tree surgeons and passport photographers. This would lead to a skyscraper “with a fancy store on street level and about 500 floors of offices.” He planned to exaggerate the height and to shape the building like a cathedral, with windows evenly distributed throughout and showing activity inside them. After this there would be a plaza with a World War I monument and a post office “with socialist murals, etc.” He planned to complete the murals with views of the rich suburbs and cross-sections of the houses that populated them, in which the carefully measured and modulated activities of the wealthy and pampered residents could serve as a counterpoint to the frenetic activity that began the panorama.
He was so excited to have the project fully envisioned and mostly drawn that he apologized to Hedda for writing an entire letter about it without commenting on her health. While recovering from the ectopic pregnancy, Hedda fell sick again with an unnamed ailment. Saul’s only comment was to say he was sorry and would phone their family physician, Dr. Hurd, to see if he had any useful advice for the French doctors.
By the time he sailed on June 21, the couple’s letters had become a terse and tense exchange, with Hedda scolding him for destructive behavior, particularly heavy drinking. She accused him of using liquor as an escape from life, but he disagreed, saying that the only time he drank was to avoid the terror of the tooth extraction. He did agree with her “about the stupid boring results of drinking” and hoped that when they returned in August, everything would be conducive to “a year of good work with very little drinking or smoking.”
He was so worried by the coldness of her last few letters that he proposed a new way to demonstrate how much he loved her. She should go to a European city small enough for him to run into her as if by accident, and they would pretend to be strangers meeting for the first time. He would court her for several days, until (“because I couldn’t take this game [any longer]”) he would end it by asking her to marry him. Even in such a love letter, he could not resist bragging about how well he had worked that day: “I made a big skyscraper with a few persons jumping from the roof. Entire families falling with dignity.”
FAMILIES FALLING FROM ROOFS COULD WELL have been the metaphor for his meeting with his parents in Paris. Moritz was silent to the point of catatonia, overwhelmed by the variety and color of daily life in Paris after the drab monotony of Bucharest, but mostly rendered speechless by Rosa’s constant litany of complaints. Nothing pleased her; she even complained about the gracious hospitality of Hedda’s family in snide and oblique ways that made it all but impossible to contradict her. Saul was stunned to hear her bemoan all that she had given up and left behind in Bucharest, only to fall into such constrained circumstances in a city that was supposed to be the most comfortable and cultured in the world. Unspoken but inferred was her only son’s lack of concern for her plight and his callous indifference to her needs. Hedda sensed that he was at the breaking point and quickly invented imaginary projects for which he needed to go to the South of France and Italy. Instead they hid out for a week in the studio she had been renting in one of the outer arrondissements, far from her brother’s residence, and which Rosa and Moritz knew nothing about. Being there gave them time to see friends and visit galleries and for Saul to tend to details pertaining to work in New York that arose after his departure. They resurfaced long enough to take Rosa and Moritz to a spa, but it did not measure up to Rosa’s memories of holidays by the Black Sea and was not successful. They knew they would have to do something drastic, because Paris as a final destination was not working out.
It was a relief to head to Milan, where they renewed acquaintances with colleagues from the Politecnico and discussed the possibility of future collaborations in architectural design and film. Ada was living alone in Milan after an “Italian divorce” in which she and her husband simply agreed to go their separate ways, since the country had no legal divorce. Saul decided that he would have to do more than send the occasional check, and he helped her financially for the rest of her life with regular contributions of money. He and Hedda left Milan for Bergamo and the first of a number of pleasant visits with Ernesto Rogers, and then they went to Venice. Saul took rooms at the Grand Hotel for himself and Hedda and also for Aldo and Bianca, who joined them for a happy reunion. Saul spent much of the reunion with Aldo sitting in the piazza throwing out various ideas and possibilities for work that Aldo could do in New York. He was determined to get Aldo a visa for a long stay, but nothing concrete came of it.
By mid-August, after a meandering journey through the Alpes-Maritimes and the Alsatian route des vins, Saul and Hedda were back in Paris, unsure of what to do about a permanent home for Moritz and Rosa and eager to escape from their clutching neediness. They decided that the parents had to go to Nice, where there was a sizable contingent of Romanian Jewish refugees from their old neighborhood, who could offer companionship and, better yet, commiseration. Saul had to harden himself to overcome Rosa’s initial recalcitrance, but shortly after, the senior Steinbergs made the move.
Hedda had been away from home for almost ten months, and she wanted to go back to New York and get to work. Saul was not all that eager to resume the life he led there, but now there were even more people who depended on him financially, and he knew he needed to keep the money coming in to support them.
That fall he was prone to a general malaise. He cut his three-pack-a-day nicotine habit down to almost nothing; he was not sure if he had “tobacco poisoning or mental stuff,” but he was afraid to go to a doctor to find out. He was trying to amass a collection of dra
wings and cartoons that would assure a steady income for the better part of a year, but the work was “hard and depressing.” It would have been easy and even enjoyable to do “variations on the same theme,” but none of the publications who bought his work wanted what they called “repetition.” Coming up with a single good idea gave him little satisfaction, because he had to change his thinking completely in order to find the next original one. He thought of himself as working and working, but “inertia” still came back, and with it insomnia. All his obligations seemed insurmountable, and he had no energy to deal with them. “I’d rather lie awake at night over unanswered letters than make the effort to write,” he told Aldo. Still, when he added up all he had done, a partial list showed “To Vogue 6 large, 8 Venice Medium, 7 Paris Color, 6 railways, 13 misc. Total 40. Gave Glamour 17 dr.” There were even more that went to The New Yorker, plus designs that went to the two fabric companies, Patterson and Stehli, and a host of other smaller commissions. He had achieved his objective for the year, and there was enough money coming in to support all his obligations.
Steinberg’s parents in Nice. (illustration credit 13.1)
Saul and Hedda went off to celebrate Thanksgiving, Steinberg’s favorite American holiday, with Sandy and Louisa Calder in their Roxbury, Connecticut, farmhouse. It was the first of many holiday invitations with the Calders that they accepted, for they loved the way Sandy and Louisa and their daughters gathered all the guests in the kitchen to eat and drink to excess, to dance, sing, and in general make merry. Steinberg loved Calder, “the dancing man,” and on one of these happy occasions, when Saul could not hear what Sandy was telling him, he sat on his knee to hear him better. “I thought afterwards that I had not sat on a man’s knee in sixty years! And that this was the only man so happy and so innocent to give me and everybody the simple and loving familiarity.” It was exactly what he needed to get him to the end of a dispiriting year, and he returned to New York energized for the usual round of holiday festivities.