by Deirdre Bair
She told him she had been born in Bucharest in 1910, which made her four years older than he, but for the rest of his life he never allowed her to admit her true age; he made her tell people she was born in 1916 and was therefore two years younger. From their first meeting, he insisted they speak only in English, because he still thought the Romanian language should be spoken only by “beggars and policemen.” Hedda recalled that “he had school English, the kind Eastern Europeans learn in school. He really didn’t know the language to speak it, he couldn’t properly order a dinner in a restaurant and if we walked down the street and people greeted him, he could not answer because he didn’t understand what they said.” Nevertheless, even when his command of the language failed him, he insisted that they must speak English, and Hedda complied, as she did with everything Saul wanted.
Saul tried to say it offhandedly when he told people that Hedda came from a family “socially on a higher level” than his, but he said it with pride rather than resentment. It pleased him that the “son of shopkeepers could be desired by such a sophisticated and cultured woman.” Her father, Simon Lindenberg, had been a high school teacher of languages before he inherited the pharmaceutical fortune of a brother who died at an early age. When Simon first took over, money poured in from the commercial laboratories, where cosmetics and drugs were invented and researched, but unfortunately he did not have his brother’s business acumen, and before long there was “a great family show over his lack of success.” Shortly after World War I began, Simon also died young, and his widow, Eugenie Wexler Lindenberg, took over the business. She ran it with Leonida Cioara, who had been Simon’s partner and became her second husband, and under their direction it prospered and they became wealthy.
Hedda had a brother almost three years older, Edouard Lindenberg, who graduated from Bucharest University, took his doctorate in Berlin, and became a prominent conductor throughout Europe. Hedda and Edouard grew up in luxury in “a big house, a happy home, dogs in the back yard, and travels to Paris and Vienna.” Because “with the Romanian language, you couldn’t go anywhere in the world,” both were taught French, German, and English and were fluent from childhood. Edouard was sent to private schools, but Hedda was homeschooled until she was eleven, after which she attended the Institute Française-Romanienne, the best school for wealthy young Jewish girls whose families did not want them exposed to public education. She enrolled in the University of Bucharest to study philosophy and art history but soon realized the limitations of the curriculum and dropped out after two years, preferring to study and read on her own, which she did all her life. Many of her friends thought she was better informed in philosophy and art history than their professors, and her views were respectfully considered by the Bucharest intelligentsia.
The Lindenberg home was filled with music because Edouard played the violin and the widowed aunt who lived with them was a gifted singer. Hedda was assigned to take piano lessons in the hope that the family would have its own trio, but as a “small but rather articulate child” she rebelled and demanded that her mother let her study what she really loved, drawing and painting. Several days later she was presented with an easel and paper and vividly remembered that “to this day, it was and is the happiest moment of my life.” By the time she was in high school she was taking classes in Marcel Janco’s atelier and had become the protégée of a family friend, the distinguished surrealist painter Victor Brauner. She was a teenager when she formed her first close friendship with men, Victor Brauner and his younger brother, Theodore.
Victor Brauner was the first to recognize Hedda’s talent, and when she was just fourteen, he honored her by making a linocut portrait, Hedei (To Hedda), which was used in the single issue of 75HP, the avant-garde magazine he cofounded. Later that year he used the linocut on the poster announcing a major exhibition of his work. Brauner’s linocut was done in a style “advocating a synthesis between literature and the visual arts … a hybrid of Constructivist, Cubist, and Futurist styles with rebellious Dada overtones.” He passed along all his knowledge of these subjects to Hedda Sterne, and their influence was present in the early work that so baffled and intimidated Saul Steinberg, who came from the “world of the comic press, a world all its own”—comic/satiric journalism that was grounded in the immediate social and political reality. His art education was based on commerce and utility and was totally unlike hers, which was based on a solid knowledge of the history of painting, literature, and philosophy.
During her teen years, Hedda spent the summers in Vienna with an aunt who lived there, taking art classes at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where she concentrated on ceramics in the mornings and visited other museums to look at paintings every afternoon. She made trips to England, where the Chelsea Flower Show left her imbued with a desire for color in her work, and she accompanied her mother and brother to Greece, where she was mesmerized with the fluid lines of classical sculpture and the forms of architecture. When she was seventeen, her parents sent her alone to Paris to enroll in Fernand Léger’s classes and attend André Lhote’s as a visitor in his Montparnasse atelier.
It was highly unusual for a girl from Hedda’s background to be allowed to live on her own, but her mother recognized her maturity and dedication to art and honored her independence. Hedda lived in a student hotel in Montparnasse, the section of Paris she liked best because “it was the place of strangers, and I was a stranger.” She did not, however, become a part of the bohemian influx that filled the quarter between the two world wars: “I was like a real good little Jewish girl. I could have been as free as possible, but I behaved all the time exactly as if my mother and my father, my aunt, all my relatives were right around there watching me.” It was as “a good little Jewish girl” that she married Fred Stern in 1932 and then returned without him to Bucharest in 1938, because she “could not think of anything else to do.”
She was just in time to see Romania becoming “super-primitive and anti-Semitic, like Poland but without the pogroms.” By the late 1930s, the entire country was “contaminated by Germany with a fascist contour to the whole of society.” Like Saul, Hedda always felt that “being Jewish was being an outsider, and an outsider was the normal thing to be.” The difference between her attitude’s and Saul’s was that she considered herself “an outsider by circumstances [of birth],” whereas he thought of himself as “an outsider by attitude [of an artist].” She believed that he was “a 100% original because of his approach to humor, which his audience did not know they needed it until he came along.” She marveled at his ability to make ideas concrete with a symbol, whereas she saw herself as merely the repository of a long tradition of art and ideas that she could only hope to express as intelligently as possible.
Everything about the two of them was different, even though there were so many similarities in their backgrounds, interests, and the facts and events of their lives. She was as entranced by him as he was with her, and later that first afternoon, when he kissed her for the first time, she asked why he had done it. He told her it was because he liked her “as a girl, a woman, a lover, and a very decent person.” A year later, when he wrote the “boy friend-girl friend” letter, he tried to explain it better: “I’m not like you. You are friendly and cooperative with people you barely know and you say open what you think. I’m different, new people are strangers for me and I have to spend a long time before I lose my self conscience [sic], the idea of hearing myself talking or seeing myself acting … I don’t know why I’m this way, maybe I didn’t have always around the right people, and making silly conversation for the hell of being normal when I feel myself losing vitamins in the effort I have to make.” He knew that none of this was news to her, but he wanted to tell her anyway because “I like much to write you and I’m much in love with you.”
Saul Steinberg pursued Hedda Sterne for the next eighteen months before he convinced her to accept his many and repeated marriage proposals. Throughout that time, theirs was a relationship dominated on his part
by passion and on hers by the desire to make physical passion coexist with a deep and important friendship that would not result in marriage. She was afraid that he was confusing passion and friendship with love because he and she were both “the products of refusals. We both refused what Romania had to offer. We didn’t want it, but we had no other comparison.” Despite the fact that they had both lived for more than a decade outside their native country, Hedda was convinced they were still “insular, provincial. How did we know to refuse what we had when we didn’t really know what else was out there?” She believed they had to find out what else was “out there” before they could begin to be serious about marriage. Other men before Saul had been infatuated with her, and she expected that his interest would wane over time, as theirs had. Hedda was always the sensible one where passion was involved, so she stalled. She told Saul they should enjoy whatever time they might have together because the moment he became an American citizen, he would surely be drafted. And, who knew what would happen after that?
CHAPTER 9
GOING OFF TO THE OSS
This applicant has about everything disqualifying that could exist. However an officer went from here [D.C.] to get him. He is physically disqualified and not a citizen. Is urgently wanted by VCNO for special duty in conjunction with activities of a schizophrenist, and being the pick of New York, is eminently qualified for duties for which wanted.
Very nice fellow. Quiet and shy in appearance. Looks older than age … The man will never be a leader and is rated satisfactory only because his services are apparently urgently needed by the Navy Department.
William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS, confided to his close friend the New Yorker editor Harold Ross that the military had an urgent need for skilled artists and cartoonists who could perform a variety of services. The most basic need was for artists who could draw simple pictures that explained various aspects of military life for soldiers who could not read or understand simple texts. The services also needed pamphlets, booklets, and flyers that could be used to communicate with the native population in countries where no Americans could speak the language. The OSS itself wanted to make propaganda to distribute behind enemy lines and needed natives of other languages and cultures to create it. Steinberg fit Donovan’s requisites on all fronts: he spoke Romanian and Italian fluently, French and Spanish decently, and English haltingly. He had lived in Italy and knew it well, and he could do his work with a few ordinary materials: all he needed to make simple and expressive drawings was a pencil or a bottle of India ink and a pen and whatever paper was at hand. Steinberg also filled a need for the canny Harold Ross: he could send drawings back from the front so that the folks at home would have a bird’s-eye view of what their boys faced every day.
Several weeks before that momentous first Sunday in February 1943 when Saul Steinberg met Hedda Sterne, paperwork of all kinds was zooming through bureaucratic channels on his behalf. Efforts were under way either to make him a naturalized American citizen or to waive the requirement so that he could be sworn directly into the navy as a commissioned officer as swiftly as possible. Other requirements, such as graduation from Officer Candidate School and fluency in English, were also waived so that he could be rushed into an assignment under the aegis of Naval Intelligence. He found all this activity slightly puzzling, because he had spent the last months of 1942 and the beginning of 1943 waiting to be drafted by the army as an “acceptable alien”; watching as his Selective Service classification changed from 4F (unsuitable) to 1A when his local draft board decided that even though he was a resident alien whose command of English was poor, he was “otherwise qualified for service in the Armed Forces.” He thought his destiny was to be a foot soldier in the infantry, and he had been waiting every day for his call-up, but once again influential friends were working on his behalf.
Everything in his prior life made him a prime candidate for the OSS Morale Operations (MO) Branch, the organization’s propaganda arm in the European theater. However, in its unfathomable bureaucratic omniscience, someone in Washington decided that Saul Steinberg was better suited to the navy than the army and that his talents could best be put to use with a landlocked naval unit in western China. He was assigned to the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, a group known by the acronym SACO, ostensibly a division of the OSS but one that worked mostly independently of it. As Steinberg knew nothing about SACO, he told Hedda Sterne that he was “going off to the OSS, to teach Chinese people, explaining things with drawing.” He was as bewildered by the assignment as she was.
Donovan wanted Steinberg so badly that he began the complicated vetting process that would lead to his commission by carefully looking for an evaluating officer with significant clout who would be willing to overlook Steinberg’s only dubious qualification: his complete ignorance of anything connected with the navy, from leadership to seamanship. Donovan made a highly unusual arrangement for the assistant chief of staff for readiness, on the staff of Admiral Ernest J. King, the CNO (chief of naval personnel), to send an officer to New York for the sole purpose of testing Steinberg. The officer gave Donovan the report he wanted, writing that “Mr. Saul Steinberg of New York city” was the “artist and cartoonist needed for a special project … the most suitable available individual.” The officer also agreed that Steinberg’s “completion of naturalization be waived,” as should the need for fluency in spoken and written English.
Despite the officer’s positive report, Steinberg’s appointment appeared to be jeopardized because he spent the next several weeks undergoing a series of mental and physical examinations by various navy doctors who found “everything disqualifying that could exist.” Mentally, they diagnosed him as having, in navy parlance, “PSN-mild-ND,” a mild psychoneurosis that had never before been diagnosed. Physically, the first doctors who examined him found “valvular [sic] heart disease, mitral systolic murmur,” and “visual defects” (he wore glasses for nearsightedness). These were disqualifications and obviously would not do; when Donovan read the report, he told the doctors to schedule a second exam. Several weeks later a new group of physicians pronounced Steinberg’s heart normal and his eyesight within accepted parameters. There was no mention of any mental disorder, and the original diagnosis was dismissed as nervousness over the exam and frustration at his inability to express himself in English. After all this, there was another hurdle: the director of naval officer procurement in New York, well aware of “the special circumstances surrounding the case,” ruled that Steinberg was not qualified to become a naval officer and therefore “prefer[red] to make no recommendation.”
Much debate and discussion followed between the New York procurement office and the several offices in the Washington Navy Department who were vetting Steinberg’s case, until everyone agreed to override the evidence and induct him. The rush was on to have all documentation finalized by the week of February 18, 1943. Everything was crammed into the same day, February 19, and in one swearing-in ceremony after another, Saul Steinberg took the oath to become a U.S. citizen, was commissioned as an ensign in the Naval Reserve, was assigned to the Morale Operations Branch of the OSS, and received orders to report for duty at the landlocked naval base in Chungking, China. Everyone was astounded but James Geraghty, the art director at The New Yorker, who expressed what they all thought: “God knows how your knowledge of the Italian people will benefit you in China, but perhaps the Navy knows best.”
Not knowing how to transport its new recruit to China, the navy covered all possibilities by requesting a special passport from the State Department, which included visas for Trinidad, Venezuela, Brazil, the continent of Africa, Egypt, the Sinai, Trans-Jordan, Arabia, Iraq, Iran, India, and his ultimate destination, China. He was in a frenzy to put his life and work in order, starting with updating the life insurance policy he had prudently bought several months earlier when he had registered for the draft. He was working in his steady and methodical manner to finish all his outstanding commitments to maga
zines when an entirely new set of orders arrived: the navy was not sending him to China immediately, but to Washington for “temporary active duty under instruction.” He thought he was going to Officer Candidate School after all, to become a “ninety-day wonder,” but first he was ordered to outfit himself with uniforms and wear them in public.
All his life, Steinberg was meticulous about the quality of his clothes and how they were tailored, and his uniforms were no exception. He had them fitted to his slim figure and was careful to keep the brass buttons polished and the shoes spit-shined. The first time he felt ready to be seen in public, he dressed nervously at Hedda’s apartment and together they took a walk through midtown Manhattan. Whenever they passed sailors on one of the avenues, Saul noted that they were raising their hands to their caps, but he was not sure what, if anything, he was supposed to do. Hedda stopped the next sailor they saw to ask him, and he explained how enlisted men were required to salute officers, who were supposed to return it. She asked him to go around the corner onto a quiet street with her and Saul, where he instructed the brand-new Ensign Steinberg, USNR, in the proper way to receive and return a salute. After a short practice session, Steinberg shook the puzzled sailor’s hand. He and Hedda continued on their walk, but they were disappointed not to pass another person in uniform he could salute for the rest of the afternoon.