Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  His neighbors were Ruth and Constantino Nivola, who had also escaped from Italy and were living in a one-room sixth-floor walk‑up on Fifth Avenue between 14th and 15th Streets. He had known them in Milan before they fled, first to Paris, because Ruth was Jewish, and they were the first people he looked up in New York. Tino was filled with a zest for life, and when he suggested on the spur of the moment that he and Steinberg should go to see Niagara Falls, off they went. Tino was the art director for Interiors magazine and therefore high on the list of exiled artists and writers, who went to him in search of work as well as friendship. Through him Steinberg was introduced to other Italian refugees who spoke the same polyglot he did and who gave him the same sort of companionship and camaraderie he had enjoyed in Milan. It was an insular little group, whose members were as unsettled and disoriented as he was. There was no particular bar or café to gather in, as Il Grillo had been, but rather, in the New York way of the young and poor, they socialized over potluck dinners or drinks, usually in the Nivola apartment. Ruth Nivola remembered how “everybody brought something, food, drink, because no one had money enough to entertain a group.”

  Many of the Italians were anarchists who congregated around Carlo Tresca, the socialist who was later assassinated in front of the building where the Nivolas lived. All were intellectuals and avid collectors of every rumor and scrap of information about what was happening in Italy, for they thought of their time in New York as “a brief exile” and had “no curiosity about the USA.” They stayed late, talking into the night as they exchanged news and rumors and compared the horrors they had gone through, with everyone expressing “such a feeling of wanting to create a better world.” To the Nivolas, Steinberg “was then the way he was even later, quietly observant and saying little but very troubled by the persecution of the Jews.”

  Steinberg made many friends among artists, musicians, actors, and writers, initially through the Nivolas. Among those he cherished were the artists Alexander Calder and Philip Guston, the journalist Ugo Stille, the author and illustrator Leo Lionni, the violinist Alexander Schneider, and the critics Bernard Rudofsky and Harold Rosenberg. Despite such lasting friendships, he still believed that “true friendship, which is a provincial art, doesn’t exist in New York. It’s more a matter of seeing each other at parties and other daily, dissolute, alcoholic festivities.” He may have disparaged such socializing, but he gave good value to his hosts and became a sought-after dinner guest who dined out almost every night for the rest of his life. As his English became fluent, he preferred his own witticisms and entertained with monologues instead of engaging in actual conversations with other guests and for the most part held his audiences enraptured. He was quick to perceive what was missing in a host’s house or apartment and made something artistic to fill the space. In the Nivola flat, for example, he painted a mural on a wall that expanded their “one beautiful room with big windows but no kitchen and bath down the hall [into] an apartment with many rooms and much beautiful furniture.”

  WHILE STEINBERG WAS STILL IN SANTO DOMINGO, Cesar Civita, as his “attorney or agent,” paved the way for the start of his financial security by negotiating a contract with The New Yorker. It was signed by Ik Schuman, the managing editor, who became Steinberg’s friend and benefactor, and it gave the magazine the right of first refusal of all his drawings. As soon as Steinberg was safely in the city, Civita prepared another document that spelled out the terms of their agent-client agreement, giving him “exclusive right to place and sell, in all countries of the world,” any drawing that Steinberg made on his own “initiative and idea” or on Civita’s “special order.” The agreement unfairly gave Civita an unusually high 30 percent of all monies received, leaving 70 percent for Steinberg. It was valid for two years, beginning on July 1, 1942, and would be automatically renewed for another year on July 1, 1944. Civita also prepared a complementary document that named Victor and Charles Civita (his brother and father, respectively) as Steinberg’s “true and lawful attorneys.” It gave them power of attorney to make all decisions relating to Steinberg’s work, because of the likelihood that he would be drafted into the army as soon as he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

  More work soon followed, including an invitation from the Office of War Information for Steinberg to join other artists who were interested in contributing whatever work the government required “to help win the war,” despite the fact that he was still a man without a country. By November he was a consultant to the OWI’s Graphics Division and was being paid up to $10 a day by the Overseas Operations Bureau. He also responded to The New Yorker’s memo to its artists about the “important and immediate need for vacation art” that would ease “wartime vacations in the darkened city” for people “swelter[ing] in dim apartments or sunny penthouses.” The magazine was especially interested in cartoons pertaining to gas rationing and travel restrictions, which contributed to the “shortage of men [for] young women from Manhattan.” Several weeks later a second memo arrived, asking artists to disregard the August heat wave and start thinking about the Christmas issues, and Steinberg responded to that request as well.

  Now that work and a steady stream of income appeared to be assured, his immediate concern was to become an American citizen, although he knew he might be drafted as soon as he was naturalized, if not before. Thanks to Civita, he had been able to repay most of the money that had helped him leave Italy, and now that he was safely settled in New York, he wanted to see the Pacific Ocean. He took advances against future earnings from Civita and The New Yorker and prepared to set off by train for the West Coast. He was especially eager to get to California and see Hollywood, and here he was helped by Harold Ross, who told him that the first person to see was Joe Reddy, the publicity director of the Disney Studios, who would give him useful introductions. Even more important, Ross insisted, was to go to Chasen’s restaurant and introduce himself to the fabled owner, Dave Chasen. Another New Yorker editor, Ted Cook, also wrote to Reddy to ask him to show Steinberg “the works,” but especially to have him meet Walt Disney in person. Steinberg was already “famous in Europe,” Cook added, and was now “on a swing around the U.S.” Ross showed the high regard in which he held Steinberg when he sent four copies of a letter of introduction to him in care of general delivery at the main Los Angeles post office. Each carried the personal notation that Ross didn’t know Steinberg was really going to make the trip until the last minute or he would have done even more to try to help him.

  Steinberg took the southern route to Los Angeles and the northern route back to New York through Chicago. He went in style, in a one-bedroom roomette, “one wall a window speeding night and day. 4 days!” When he woke up in Gallup, New Mexico, and raised the shade, he saw “a large redskin face looking at me. Paradise!” The desert scenes he knew only from black-and-white movies were brilliant “red, orange, and Japanese sunsets.” The dining car was “splendid,” filled with old-fashioned Americans who looked like Herbert Hoover. He saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time at Santa Monica and thought, “Now I could die happy. I saw the two oceans.”

  This was the beginning of Steinberg’s inveterate traveling, which he had dreamed about since boyhood. From his earliest days as a schoolboy, no one was more aware of geography or more fascinated by maps than he was, even though geography was a subject poorly taught and badly explained in Romanian schools. In later years, after he had taken to drawing his own maps, he created mythical depictions of what he thought landscapes should reveal and what the people who lived there should represent. They became one of the most beloved categories within his artistic expression, bringing fan mail to The New Yorker in record number whenever one appeared.

  Before he owned a car, in order to experience the climate and culture of a place as directly as possible, he preferred to take buses, always heading for the front seat; he took trains only if there were no buses, because trains traveled through “the back side of cities” and he didn’t like what he saw there. Time was lim
ited on this trip, so he had to take the train, and once he arrived at his destination, he could not stay for long. He did not use most of the letters of introduction or take any exceptional memories away except for one: Mickey Mouse as a cultural icon.

  The talking rodent had intrigued him since his student days in Milan, when he decided that it represented something special about American society, although at the time he did not know what. When he got to Santo Domingo, he was struck by what he saw as the Mickey Mouse proclivities of a country with lush, overblown, blowsy feminine characteristics superimposed on a macho culture. As he was crossing the United States, he thought a lot about Mickey Mouse and decided that he was a negative “character … with a lot of influence on the street.” Steinberg, who was brought up in a country where Jews had no rights and were not even considered citizens until he was five, believed that Walt Disney had created Mickey Mouse out of his own prejudice.

  Steinberg was quick to recognize the situation of African-Americans in a segregated culture and to sympathize with the indignities society inflicted on them. He was convinced that “in Walt Disney’s head, Mickey Mouse was black … half-human, comic, even in the physical way he was represented with big white eyes … Comic and moving, but only human in some aspects.” In his own drawings, whenever Mickey Mouse appears, the figure is threatening, negative, or at the very least unsettling.

  ONCE BACK IN NEW YORK, STEINBERG was waiting for something to happen as the year ended. “Damn!” he wrote. “The New Year begins on a Friday,” always a bad sign. Nor was he pleased about spending “the stupid New Year’s Eve [at a Spanish restaurant] with Spaniards, Nivola, Calder.” Despite the companionship of cheerful good friends who always made him laugh, he insisted that he was “sad and alone as always since I left Adina.” He was despondent that the cross-country trip had been so rushed that it was unsatisfying and so depressed that he did not honor the Romanian custom of paying a New Year’s Day visit to his relatives at Harry Steinberg’s apartment. As always, work was his solace, and as there was nothing he could do to hurry events along, he got back to it and focused on passing his citizenship exam, which he fully expected he would have to take.

  He was still thinking of himself as alone, lonely, and pining for Ada when he received an invitation that literally changed his life. On the first Sunday in February, the Romanian painter Hedda Sterne “invited him to lunch and he stayed six weeks.”

  All she knew about him was that he too was a Romanian Jew in exile. She had no interest in him personally, as she was trying to put the earlier years of her life behind her and had little interest in anything or anyone Romanian. She was “familiar here and there” with Steinberg’s work in magazines, and she simply wanted to see more of it. He, on the other hand, was smitten from the moment she opened the door to let him into her apartment. The first time he saw her, he knew he wanted to marry her.

  She was born Hedwig Lindenberg and came to New York from Bucharest in 1941, after barely escaping a Nazi roundup of the Jews in her apartment building. She was a breathtakingly beautiful woman, with honey-blond hair piled high on her head, prominent cheekbones, and disarming periwinkle-blue eyes. There was only one impediment to Saul’s courtship of Hedda: half an hour into his first visit, she told him in her honest and forthright manner that she had been married since 1932 to a childhood friend, Frederick Stern, a wealthy Romanian businessman and financier. Hedda explained that hers was an “unorthodox union,” and told Saul how they had lived apart since 1938, when she chose to remain in their Paris apartment while Fred went to live in London for business purposes. She explained how she knew from the beginning that it would always be “an open marriage, a marriage blanc, because Fred Stern had a Madonna / Whore attitude toward women and could not distinguish between them.” Hedda was his wife and he treated her “with adoration and reverence” while he openly consorted with other women for sex. At the end of 1938, Fred recognized that war was inevitable and moved to New York to begin the process of bringing Hedda and his extended family to the United States.

  Frederick Stern changed his name to Fred Stafford when he moved to New York. He was one of six brothers who were “all energetic [over]achievers.” After graduating from the University of Bucharest, he had taken a law degree at the Sorbonne, then stayed in Paris long enough to amass a respected collection of classical and impressionist paintings and objects of ancient and Oriental art. Hedda married him when he returned to Bucharest, during the years when he was “a reader, an intellectual.” This changed shortly after the marriage, when he went to work for a financier and “learned how to deal with money, and became very, very successful.” He rose quickly to become head of the Romanian textile industry at Buhus¸i and a major stockholder in the company. At the end of 1938, when he knew the time had come to relocate his family and his art collection to New York, Hedda chose to stay in Bucharest with her mother and brother. Fred assembled the necessary documents anyway, and like Saul before her, Hedda had her own adventure stories to tell about how she had made her way to Lisbon, luckily missing her confirmed passage on a boat that was torpedoed shortly after it left the harbor, and how she had to bide her time and wait for space on another one before finally sailing. When she arrived in October 1941, Fred and his family were on the dock to greet her.

  Fred had great respect for Hedda’s talent and agreed to let her live separately in New York. Her ostensible reason was to concentrate on her painting, but she had already asked for a divorce when they first lived separately in Europe. Because of his “old world background,” Fred insisted that “there could never be a divorce,” and Hedda contented herself with this “limbo.” She asked again when she arrived in New York, and again he said no. She did not protest that time either, because her marital status was irrelevant to her; the only thing that mattered was the thrill of having the freedom to paint all day long. In the years of their separation, she had taken the occasional lover, but she was one of those rare (for that time) women who could form genuine friendships with men without the specter of sex rearing between them, and she much preferred friendship to love. As one example among many, when she met the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry through another refugee who had sailed on the same boat, he and Hedda established an “instant friendship” that she described as “entirely private, out of the ordinary world, soul-to-soul” and he as one of “spiritual assistance.”

  Hedda rented an apartment on the fifth floor of a walk‑up building at 410 East 50th Street and settled down to work. To enhance her feeling of independence, she changed her first name from Hedwig to Hedda and added an e to Stern to make it entirely her own name and not Fred’s. Still, she could not make up her mind about how she wanted to be known, so the name on her doorbell when Saul Steinberg came to call read “Hedwig Stafford,” a combination of her legal first name and the new name Fred Stern took to make himself seem more American. For the next several years she caused confusion for herself and Saul by using Hedwig Stafford interchangeably with Hedda Sterne and Hedda Stafford.

  Despite their separate residences and separate lives, Fred was a loving and generous benefactor. To Hedda, he was always “an extraordinary, true, loyal friend,” and throughout her long life, he made sure she never had to worry about financial security. She always described herself without irony or embarrassment as a “kept woman” who never had to concern herself with money because Fred gave her every form of support she needed or wanted. Such economic well-being allowed her to live free of the pressures faced by other artists and to say of her career, “I was what I became before I knew it was something to be.”

  By the time she extended her invitation to Saul Steinberg, she had become an unorthodox independent woman with a huge network of friends and (some would say) several intriguing lovers. She took no part in the fractious political maneuvering that went along with selling or exhibiting her work and was content to paint for ten to twelve hours every day, keeping quietly aloof from what then constituted the places in the art world to se
e and be seen. When she invited Saul to visit, it was because of genuine interest in his work and not in his person.

  Saul had never met a woman like Hedda, and the memory of their first meeting was so deeply etched in his mind that for years afterward the first Sunday in February was a sacred day in his personal calendar. A year after their first meeting, in one of the daily letters he wrote during his military service, he re-created the day in what Hedda called “those charming letters that boyfriends write to girlfriends.”

  He began at the beginning: “You explained me by phone how to arrive there by two buses so I said yes and took a taxi.” He told how the taxi let him off at the wrong end of 50th Street and how he walked the length of it to the East River before finding her building. When he read the name Hedwig Stafford on the mailbox, he decided that she must have a roommate. He had such trouble opening the door that he “ringed twice the buzzer.” Before he had gone to see her, he knew that she was a successful painter in Europe who was fast building a reputation in New York, but what he saw of her work was not what he expected: “I thought your paintings are around flowers and landscapes and groups of children. Maybe that’s the kind of art I was expecting from a girl from my native town. Instead it was different and it was confusing.”

  Hedda greeted her guest casually and asked him to entertain himself while she went to her studio to finish a painting. It gave Saul “time to look around and see the happiest room in the world, light and warm and strange objects on the wall and strange paintings (I felt inferior always because I didn’t understand some of your stuff and I still feel that way).” When he recollected the emotions that swirled in his mind, he described himself as “a good friend of yours before I saw you just in the few minutes I spent looking around with you drawing in the other room.” When she finished and came in to be with him, he realized that he may have been looking at her work, but he had really not seen it and certainly had not assimilated it. However, instead of talking about her work or his, which was the reason Hedda invited him, Saul asked question after question about her life, as he wanted to know everything there was to know about her.