Saul Steinberg

by Deirdre Bair

  The Labyrinth was such an important book for Steinberg that he continued to refer to it for years after its initial publication. In 1972 he was captivated by a student at Vassar College, Meera E. Agarwal, who wrote about his depictions of art and the artist for her senior thesis. When she was trying to determine the origin of his interest in the theme, he rushed to his bookshelf and opened The Labyrinth to the last two pages, which he called “very important … key drawings” that represented “the life of the artist.” The young interviewer wrote about how serious and absorbed Steinberg was while he studied his book and how when he finished, he snapped it shut and “walked around with feigned nonchalance.” He told her that the true artist goes on through “Asperity” or “Difficulty” in order to get to the stars, but sometimes he lands in “Stercus—which means shit.” Agarwal remembered that “he laughs at the cult of art and yet he calls his art his religion, a way of life.”

  PRAISE FROM HIS PEERS WAS NOT enough for Steinberg, who had counted on large sales because he needed the money. However, even more than money, he wanted the acclaim that would have come with a bestseller, as he was eager to impress his young companion. To keep his income on a steady keel, he had a lot of work to do in New York and many preparations to make for a trip to Europe in the spring. It was difficult to do it while in the throes of a passionate involvement with a beautiful woman who spent most of her days literally hanging around waiting to be noticed, eager to satisfy his every whim. It was both nerve-racking and distracting to have her underfoot all the time, and within a month or two of Gigi’s moving into Saul’s apartment, it was clear that something had to change or he would never get any work done. He told her she needed to go to Europe on her own, first to Trier to see her family and make as much peace with them as was possible. Then she should go to Paris, certainly to meet Lica, but not Rosa until Lica could figure out how best to introduce her. While in Paris she was to stay in a good hotel and use it as her base of operations for a complete makeover. She was to visit the finest couture houses and stores, to shop for clothes, jewelry, and accessories, to learn to use good makeup and get her hair styled. In New York she dressed like a hippie, and he didn’t like it. He could not show her off at the Park Avenue dinner parties where he was now a frequent guest until she became another elegant example of the beautifully dressed and groomed women he met at such gatherings.

  He should have known there would be trouble ahead when she wrote from Trier to tell him that she had spent all her shopping and traveling money, but not in Paris. She never explained what the money went for, as it was not until she reached Cologne that she bought a bottle of perfume and a “suit that looks more like a suitcase,” which she was sure he would not like. And she was most proud of the real “triumph” of her entire trip: “finally having my old coat relined.”

  CHAPTER 26

  I LIVED WITH HER FOR SO LONG

  Hedda and I have become friends, now perhaps more than before.

  It now seems to me something remote, like elementary schoolmates. And I lived with her for so long I’m amazed.

  The physical separation between Saul and Hedda was smooth: he simply found an apartment and moved out. The aftermath was more complicated. First there were the legalities: although they had separate bank accounts for income and savings, they shared a checking account and paid joint taxes in the names of Saul and Hedda Steinberg. Saul explained that the easiest way to deal with taxes for the year just past and the one to come would be to let his accountants, Neuberger & Berman, file their return as a married couple now living in separate residences. The house had always been in Hedda’s name, so that would not present a problem, but they owned two cars registered in both names, and their vehicle, medical, and household insurances were also in both names. Now that they had separate addresses, everything had to be modified. There was even a cat they both adored, and they joked that Hedda retained custody while Saul had visiting privileges.

  The actual question of divorce was never directly addressed. Everything was couched in terms of how best to deal with immediate legal requirements, while the main issue of when or how to bring a formal end to the marriage was left to drift without discussion. In later years, Hedda believed that they stayed married for almost sixty years because Saul “got all he wanted without formality.” She offered several explanations for why they never divorced, the first being Saul’s overdeveloped sense of responsibility. She thought this was a strange attitude for him to have since she had always supported herself, thanks mostly to her first husband and for a time to the robust sales of her paintings. She thought he was probably experiencing a combination of guilt and embarrassment over the way he had unceremoniously “dumped” her to “rob the cradle.” But Hedda believed the most important reason they never divorced was that she was “Saul’s Elaine [de Kooning, the legal wife], who protected Bill from ever having to marry any of his women.” As for Steinberg himself, whenever the question of marriage to Gigi was raised, either by her or by others, if he did not say, “I already have a wife,” he usually said, “The only purpose of marriage is to have children, and we don’t want any.”

  The legal issues dragged on because one or the other spouse always seemed to be traveling and unavailable to sign the papers. During the first year of their separation, Hedda Sterne had six exhibitions that took her away from New York, and she had to prepare for two more that came early the following year. She had also just fulfilled an important commission to paint her impression of tractor parts for the John Deere Company, photographs of which became a featured article in Fortune magazine and brought even more requests for sales, commissions, and shows. Her absence was responsible for most of the delays and missed deadlines for the numerous forms that had to be signed and notarized, and all the negotiations threw Saul and Hedda into closer contact than either had envisioned when they separated. Much of it was through letters, which provided enough of a buffer for both to make admissions that might not have been possible in face-to-face encounters.

  For an artist who shunned the limelight, Hedda Sterne was very much in it. Knowing of her preference for solitude, Steinberg monitored all her public activity and took care to ensure that no one took advantage and nothing untoward happened. When she went to Rome in March for a show at the Obelisco Gallery and caught the flu on top of what most artists describe as the usual problems connected with preparations for an opening, Steinberg wrote letters, made phone calls, and enlisted his Italian friends to give her whatever help she needed. “Please take good care and have courage. I am your friend and I care for you,” he wrote, signing his letter “Love, Saul.” And yet, even as he wished her his “best love,” he still pressed her to tell whether she had the original sale documents for her car, which he needed for the insurance company.

  Hedda’s trip to Rome overlapped with Gigi’s to Trier and Paris, and Steinberg was left on his own in New York. He spent a lot of time in Springs, which was different from all the previous times he had been alone. Now, with both women in his life unavailable, he had to become self-reliant. It led to his discovery “that having pleasure for a reason is no good (it brings counterpleasure, like a hangover) and that the only way to have pleasure or a good time is for no reason at all.” One of the ways he gave himself pleasure for no reason at all was to play tricks on friends. On impulse, he bought a carload of pink plastic flamingos at the local hardware store and at night sneaked around to his friends’ houses and planted them on the front lawns. When the rumor spread that Steinberg had played the joke, everyone wanted one: “It’s now a mark of distinction to have a flamingo planted by me!”

  HE WORKED IN SPRINGS BUT HAD very little time to do much thinking about new work when he returned to New York, where his social calendar was full. He had become close to Inge Morath since Cartier-Bresson had introduced them several years before in Paris, and now that she was with Arthur Miller, Steinberg befriended him as well. Morath often asked Steinberg to let her photograph him in his studio while he worked, but he a
lways stalled, insisting that he was bashful and uninteresting. She responded that there had to be something he was not shy about, which made him think about ways to show his work while hiding in plain sight. Eventually he let her capture him while wearing the brown-paper-bag masks he had been making for the past year to amuse himself and his friends.

  Much of his conviviality was with creative friends like Morath, who also wanted his cooperation on various projects, such as when Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen tried to persuade him over dinner to design posters for the Broadway play Do You Know the Milky Way? He accepted the dinner invitation because he was so fond of Hagen, but he still asked to be paid for his work and had a contract drawn up that stated his usual conditions. He went to parties at the homes of Thomas Hess, Philip Hamburger, and Walker Evans, lunched with the visiting Le Corbusier, and was the only luncheon guest Marcel Duchamp invited when he entertained Salvador Dalí (to whom Steinberg was more polite than he had been on the transatlantic crossing). Steinberg played gracious host to Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni when they came to New York, happy to repay the generous hospitality they showed him whenever he was in Rome. He went downtown to meet with Julian Beck and Judith Malina but found their version of theater too off-putting to contribute art to it. There were casual suppers with old friends as well, and the names of Bernard and Berte Rudofsky appear often in his engagement books, as do those of Charlie Addams and Isamu Noguchi and Priscilla Morgan, who were now a couple.

  Morgan was the American associate director of the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, for which she asked Steinberg to loan his de Kooning drawing “Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother.” He and de Kooning were good friends who exchanged their work, and Steinberg was exceptionally proud of this important drawing. He was happy to loan it but was upset when he learned that another good friend, Sid Perelman, did not like the drawing Steinberg had done for the cover of his forthcoming book, The Rising Gorge. The rejection came via the publisher’s art director, who thanked Steinberg for his “wish to present something abstract” and claimed that “Sid will not be happy with this treatment.” The art director thought it best to pursue “a different approach.”

  WHENEVER A COMMISSION FELL THROUGH, it always made Steinberg aware of how much money he was spending, and in this case he made an informal list of what he had earned since the start of the year: There was close to $1,000 from an Italian newspaper, several fabric companies, and Glamour magazine; another $210 came from investments in the stock market, and $25.50 from two weeks of jury duty, which amounted to a grand total of $1,306.36. He planned to use the money to cover what he was calling “a spur of the moment” visit to Paris in early June to see his mother, who was “in very bad shape,” and perhaps to meet Hedda, if she was still there. She was staying at the Hotel Aiglon on Boulevard Raspail, so he reserved a room next door at “the usual Pont Royal,” where they had formerly stayed together. He was especially eager to see her because she had become almost irrational about money and he needed to reassure her that she need not worry.

  He was finding it increasingly difficult to micromanage Hedda’s affairs via letters. Before she left, she arranged for the top floor of her house to be made into an apartment, and since then she had convinced herself that she could not afford to live in the rest of the place and would have to rent that as well. Steinberg sent a check for $1,000 to sooth her fears, but she mistakenly deposited it in the joint account they were supposed to close. With more patience than he had ever shown before, he instructed her in how to use the new account that he had carefully set up in the name of Hedda Sterne, rather than the Hedda Steinberg she had used before. His most pressing task was to persuade her not to lease the apartment to an artist friend who could pay only a minuscule rent. “It’s not fair; it’s too cheap,” he told her, but once again she ignored his advice. Most of all, he wanted to persuade her that she “should live well and live there … You have no reason to live in hotel rooms.”

  THE REASON HE WAS SO ANXIOUS about Rosa was that Hedda had finally visited and told his mother that she and Saul had separated. She made no mention of Gigi and left it to Saul to tell his mother whatever else he wanted her to know. Although Rosa was resigned to his uncommunicative ways, it had never stopped her in the past from demanding answers to her questions, and yet she was surprisingly timid about the end of his marriage: “I don’t know what the cause might have been and I won’t even ask. Besides, I know you won’t tell me.” Now that he was no longer living with Hedda, Rosa put aside all her earlier criticisms to declare that Hedda had always been “an angel … very kind and nice with us.”

  Steinberg’s main reason for going to Paris was not as spur-of-the-moment as he led Hedda to believe, nor was it his concern for Rosa’s health. He wanted to surprise Gigi and take her on a whirlwind, first-class vacation to the Riviera. He did not tell Hedda or Rosa that Gigi was in Paris, but he did arrange for Lica to come into the city to meet her. Whatever Lica’s initial reaction was to Gigi, she kept it to herself and was kind and cordial—indeed, almost motherly. This became her genuine attitude as years passed and Gigi became a good friend first to Lica and then to her daughter, Daniela, as she reached adulthood.

  Saul and Gigi drove south to the Côte d’Azur and checked into the posh Hotel Ruhl in Nice, which she found “all very glamorous,” particularly as their room was one of the most luxurious at the front of the hotel, with a balcony that fronted on the Promenade des Anglais and overlooked the beach beyond. Afterward he took her to Rome, Venice, and Milan, where he introduced her to as many friends as he could. Here again, everyone accepted her and there were no untoward incidents. “Happy times,” she recorded in her diary.

  THEY SPENT THE REST OF THE summer of 1961 fairly tranquilly, mostly in Springs. Gigi busied herself planting a garden and Saul learned the “instinct or new pleasure of taking care of the house.” He also learned to swim at nearby Louse Point, a quiet inlet just down the road from his home that became the inspiration for some of the landscapes he realized several years later in watercolors, drawings, and the faux canvases he later painted on Masonite board. He told Aldo that it was a “marvel” to speak of such simple country pleasures, “because they’ve always seemed to me things for other people.”

  But when autumn came and they were back in Washington Square Village, Steinberg found it difficult to settle down to work. In Springs, he and Gigi had the house, the garden, and the seven acres of property in which to keep busy independently. Their social life had been mostly with old friends who accepted them as a couple despite the discrepancy in their ages, so they faced none of the awkwardness they encountered in New York, such as when the shocked Connie Breuer invited Steinberg to bring his young friend “Sigfrid” to dinner.

  When they were alone together in the country, Saul and Gigi rode bikes to the beach at Louse Point for a late-afternoon swim, then went home to drink chilled white wine, grill some fish and vegetables, perhaps to read and listen to music, and then early to bed. Their passion was strong and steady, and their quiet life in the country sustained it. In the city, the apartment was spacious by New York standards, but it was too confining when one partner was engrossed in trying to work while the other had very little to do.

  Gigi was not a shopper, she had no friends her own age, and very few of Saul’s friends became hers. She was not one to visit galleries and museums, but she did like to read. Because of Saul’s voracious appetite for books, she wanted to educate herself to be a worthy conversationalist, but she found it difficult to concentrate on the English language, which she still did not know well, and often she didn’t finish what she started. It was good that he loved the movies and they went often, which gave them something to talk about. He liked to go to concerts, but she claimed not to understand music; he only went to the theater when one of his friends was involved in a production, and she never went alone to any kind of performance. Consequently, there was not all that much to talk about when they were together, and there were no
t many opportunities for Steinberg to have the apartment to himself to work.

  Gigi did like to decorate, so the apartment soon reflected many of her little domestic touches. As soon as they became a couple, Saul put her on his payroll as a studio assistant and gave her a separate and generous checking account. Because she spent relatively little on things for herself, she had enough every month to buy whatever caught her fancy for the apartment. Steinberg was not always pleased with her purchases, but in the beginning he managed not to let her know it.

  What she really wanted was for him to help her find a gallery to show her work and to use his contacts to bring in design projects that would let her demonstrate her excellence in the hand lettering that was her forte. Steinberg’s friends recognized her frustration over not being able to create, let alone advance a career, and some of them did try to help. When Sasha Schneider praised her drawings, she gave him one, and in return he bought another for $50; the editor Aaron Ascher gave her three book jackets to design after Steinberg asked him to look at her portfolio. These occasional sales and commissions were not enough to give her the financial independence she craved or to keep her from feeling like “the appendage in this relationship” and becoming depressed. She wrote about her feelings on the back of an envelope that she left next to Steinberg’s place at the large table that filled most of their living area, the only place they seemed able to communicate, and then only through brief notes: “I sit here all evening waiting for you to talk to me—until it started to drive me crazy—I wanted you so badly to talk to me—all day—give me a chance to talk—but I am to [sic] scared + stiff with panic and very ashamed and unhappy. I can understand if you had enough and don’t want to be bothered anymore just let me know—I would be very sorry—but then it is mostly my own fault—and maybe what I deserve.”