Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  STEINBERG’S MOOD WAS GREATLY LIFTED BY the enthusiasm that surrounded the “Prosperity” cover after it appeared, and it was further buoyed by his own sudden prosperity. There were several unsettling situations connected with his finances, one that brought money and one that did not. The latter concerned a promotional booklet commissioned by the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency for Lincoln automobiles. Steinberg pocketed a sizable fee for the drawings he made for the booklet but was incensed when the agency used one of them on the mailing envelope as well. He complained that the purchase order made no mention of a “direct mail piece,” which he believed the envelope to be, and that by sending it out as a mass mailing, the agency implied that Steinberg was personally endorsing the car. “It is repugnant to me to have my name linked with a deception,” he wrote, as he instructed Alexander Lindey to begin litigation. Lindey cautioned that no matter what “ethical considerations” Steinberg felt had been violated, there was not enough “reasonable probability” for a legal claim to succeed. He reminded Steinberg that a court case would seriously impair his lucrative advertising commissions, because “advertising agencies don’t like to deal with troublemakers.” Steinberg was disgruntled, but he accepted his lawyer’s advice and did nothing.

  In another instance he did not follow Lindey’s advice. This one was more delicate, because it involved Hallmark, his cash cow for more than a decade. Besides the usual stipend for cards, Steinberg agreed to design calendars for an additional annual fee of $20,000. For the calendars—unlike the cards, for which he had to surrender the copyright—he expected Hallmark to honor the same arrangement he had with The New Yorker, paying to use the drawings but designating that all other rights and ownership of the originals were his. Hallmark disagreed, saying that it had bought both the drawings and the rights. Steinberg argued that they had not compensated him for the drawings’ true value, which he set separately from the original fee-for-use at a minimum of $5,000 each. However, his strongest objection was not the extra money but the possibility that Hallmark “could authorize anyone—say a beer concern, a shoe manufacturer,” to use the drawings without his consent and without paying him for the additional use. “This is unfair and I cannot agree to it,” he insisted. After several rounds of increasingly tense negotiation, Hallmark withdrew its claim of ownership and the matter was settled in Steinberg’s favor.

  SUDDENLY FLUSH WITH MONEY, HE THOUGHT it was time to be serious about buying property away from New York. Hedda liked Cape Cod and would have been content to spend the summers in Wellfleet; Saul thought it pleasant enough but was not sure it was the ideal place. It was a haven for many of their friends in architecture and design, including the Breuers and György Kepes, and the summer home of a large community of writers, everyone from Edmund Wilson to Alfred Kazin and Ann Birstein, Mary McCarthy, and the Philip Hamburgers. Steinberg found himself increasingly drawn to the company of writers and became interested in exploring the genre himself. He went so far as to promise Kepes that he would write an article for Daedalus magazine, and Kepes began hounding him to finish it. Steinberg was stymied by his search for words to express the visual images he wanted to convey: “I find it impossible to write sentences containing ideas without their being mysteries that I’m the only one to understand.” It was much easier to draw what he meant and leave the multiplicity of interpretations his drawings inspired up to his viewers. As for writing, he decided to “give it up,” and at the same time he decided to give up on Cape Cod as well.

  In early spring, Ruth and Tino Nivola invited Saul and Hedda to spend a weekend at their house in the Springs section of the township of East Hampton at the eastern end of Long Island. The Nivolas had been in Springs since 1948, when they had bought a run-down farmhouse with a barn and chicken coop on twenty-eight acres. In the decade since, they had created a comfortable home in the midst of landscaped gardens and what Tino called “open air rooms” that he designed to function as extensions of the house. Bernard Rudofsky contributed ideas for the exterior design, particularly the layout of the walkways and the placement of some of Tino’s sculptures on walls that were built for him to paint on and others that were stuccoed with abstract murals of his own design. Inside the house, Ruth Nivola designed jewelry that was as at home framed and hung on walls as it was being worn, while Le Corbusier decided that two large walls in the house needed a mural, so he painted one.

  The Nivola household had become a gathering place for most of the poets, painters, writers, and artists who gravitated to the potato fields of eastern Long Island after Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner led the way. They lived nearby, as did many other artist friends of the Nivolas and the Steinberg-Sternes, among them Denise and David Hare, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Charlotte and James Brooks, and Carmen and Hans Namath. Architects who often came for weekend lunches included Bernard and Berte Rudofsky, Frederick Kiesler, and Paul Lester Weiner and his artist wife, Ingeborg Ten Haeff. So too did the photographer Evelyn Hofer and Humphrey Sutton; the philanthropist Dorothy Norman, who collected interesting people for her own gatherings; and May Tabak and her husband, Harold Rosenberg, who became one of Steinberg’s closest friends and to whom he turned increasingly for stimulating conversation and intellectual companionship.

  On this particular weekend at the Nivolas’, Steinberg mentioned casually how easy it was to relax in the setting and wondered if he should think about buying property there. Ruth and Tino spoke almost in unison: “The house across the road might be for sale.” It was a run-down farmhouse at 433 Old Stone Highway and belonged to the keeper of the Montauk lighthouse, who was seldom there. Over the weekend there were many jokes about what it would be like for the Steinberg-Sternes to live across the road from the Nivolas, but on Sunday afternoon, when it was time to drive back to the city, Saul told Tino he was serious and asked him to get in touch with the owner to see if he wanted to sell. He did, and several days later Steinberg was contacted by the lawyer representing the owner, with an offer to help resolve the sale. Steinberg paid $12,500 cash, and the property became his on May 22, 1959.

  “We’re neighbors now and have become closer friends,” he told Aldo when he thanked him for the Italian edition of Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard, which he passed along to Tino. Unlike the Nivola homestead, which was a constantly evolving artistic creation, Steinberg at first did nothing to his home, a simple house with two bedrooms upstairs, two rooms and a kitchen downstairs, and a front porch. The house was “not beautiful,” but he thought it “smelled good inside” and would be “ideal when in the winter I’ll need a prison.” He enjoyed everything about being there, particularly the two-and-a-half-hour drive across the island followed by “the best pleasure, the first mouthful or noseful of cold clean air, a visit to the ocean—at night, with the waves illuminated by the headlights of the car.” A weekend was usually enough to satisfy him and make him eager to return to the city, where he could once again become an anonymous cosmopolite. And besides, he was used to city noises and streetlights, not the darkness of the country, where he slept badly because of the night noises.

  BECOMING A HOMEOWNER WAS NOT ENOUGH to keep him settled, and to pass a restless summer he went often to the Bronx Zoo. “Too bad it’s full of children, and worse, parents,” he told Aldo. Still uncertain about which theme to pursue for the next book, he made repeated visits to draw monkeys, peacocks, vultures, and flamingos, and also to draw “Women—Portoricans [sic]—fighting in the Bronx.”

  In August 1959 he was beset by such anxiety that he left again, this time to roam for two months through the western states by plane, car, and bus. He flew from New York to Salt Lake City, where he called briefly on friends but did not stay because their children had mumps. His next stop was Denver and a visit to his Steinberg cousins, the children of his father’s brother Milton. They took him to a Shriners parade, where he chuckled at the men in funny fezzes driving tiny cars, but most of all he liked the cowboys
who sang songs for the Salvation Army. He rented a car and drove to Elko and Las Vegas, where he stayed in the Hotel Tropicana and was “disgusted” by everything he saw: “Even the cigarette machines are crooked … take money and give you nothing.” He drove to Los Angeles, this time “shook” by “the frightening desert.” He drove aimlessly for three days along back roads in the “most horrible landscape,” which made Monument Valley “seem like a bourgeois garden.” In Los Angeles, there was not much to see and no one he wanted to talk to, so he took a bus to Phoenix, where it was much the same. In a hurry, he flew to Tucson, where he was bored once again, and in an effort to stall, he continued on to El Paso by train. Suddenly ready to go home, he flew to San Antonio and then back to New York.

  His rambles may have seemed without purpose, but he knew what he was doing, and why: “Traveling has been for me a gift for avoiding solutions … I was traveling to forget! And I knew it but it was such a pleasure.”

  In New York, he found he could not settle down to work. All he could manage was to “continue to see people, to talk and drink.” He needed to unburden himself but was unable to do so, not even to Aldo, his most trusted confidant. He could only confess that he had “lost hope of having what you call character but maybe something sui generis can be saved.” The major cause of his anxiety was the unsettled relationship with Elizabeth Stille. Speculation and gossip about what it was—a full-blown affair or a flirtation, true love or mere infatuation—whatever he and she felt for each other, it was threatening to explode and shatter the marriages of the two couples and destroy their friendship with one another.

  If the memories of the last living spouses who participated, Hedda Sterne and Ruth Nivola, were true to the events as they happened, during the second half of 1959 the behavior of Saul and Elizabeth became too obvious for others to ignore. Hedda confirmed that she encouraged Saul to make the trip to the western states to give him and Elizabeth time to think about the consequences for the four adults and the two Stille children if their affair became public, and of the dual divorces that would certainly follow. But when Saul returned, neither he nor Elizabeth had come to any conclusion except to resume the relationship. It created a tremendous personal crisis in Elizabeth’s life and led both her and Saul to consult analysts. Hedda, as was her wont, ignored the resumption of the affair and went on with her painting. Ugo Stille seems not to have known about it until later, when it caused a severe marital crisis. However, as none of the principals took precautions to hide it, gossip among others was rampant.

  Ruth Nivola, who cared deeply for the two couples, felt that she could not stand by and watch two marriages fail, nor could she bear to have any of the parties suffer the gossip of outsiders. She confronted Saul and Elizabeth separately but directly, and they admitted their passion for each other and their inability to decide what to do. Both told Ruth that they loved their spouses and did not want to hurt them. Saul’s solution to their problem was for him and Hedda to live with Elizabeth and her children, a relationship that could be lived openly in the Springs house and more discreetly when they were in the city in their individual residences. He was confident that Hedda would agree to this arrangement, because she had learned to cope with and accept all his other infatuations, affairs, and one-night stands. He gave no indication that he was aware of the suffering it caused her.

  Ruth was horrified when she heard his plan and told Elizabeth and Saul that she would give them two choices: they could end the affair and she would say nothing; if they did not, she would tell their respective spouses before some unkind gossip did. If they forced her to do the latter, they must take the consequences. Apparently they did not end the affair, for Ruth did tell Hedda, who never forgave her for meddling.

  The year 1959 ended in a haze of uncertainty, of little work, little thought about the new book, and more aimless drifting. Elizabeth Stille disappeared from Saul Steinberg’s life quietly, without fuss or fanfare, and she and Ugo Stille remained married to each other for the rest of theirs. Although he saw Ugo from time to time, Steinberg had no meetings with Elizabeth until a chance encounter happened in 1984, when he was on his way to a dental appointment and she was walking down the same street: “She calls out to me. Unrecognizable. Fat face of businessman. Cruel. Talks about my fancy 75th Street [apartment].” He often wrote about the other women with whom he was involved in the many biographical jottings he made later in life, but this was the only time he mentioned Elizabeth Stille.

  Hedda, after the separation from Saul. (illustration credit 23.1)

  A NUMBER OF NEW INITIALS, dates, times, and addresses filled Steinberg’s appointment diaries, but otherwise he read constantly because he could not concentrate on anything else. He was happy to discover that he liked Colette, but mostly he reread Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, which he was happy now “to understand—in part. A great loss of time not to have understood it years ago.” He went alone to concerts of avant-garde and abstract music and was upset by “the impossibility of understanding” it. It made him feel like “an ape reading the newspaper.”

  Just after the start of the new year, 1960, he wrote to Aldo that “for some time I’ve been drawing up a balance sheet of lost years, mistakes, wrong paths, connivances, etc. etc., an endless list.” He did not write again until August, when he told his friend, “I haven’t written you in all this time because I’ve been too busy with the changes and new things in my life.”

  It had been a busy eight months: during the hiatus in their letters, Saul Steinberg left Hedda Sterne because she “kicked him out.” He moved to a new apartment, found a new companion, and settled in for what Hedda called “the thirty-five years’ war.”

  CHAPTER 24

  THE THIRTY-FIVE YEARS’ WAR

  If Saul wants pasta tonight, he gets pasta; if he wants separation, he gets it.

  He didn’t actually move out of the 71st Street house until the day after his June 15 birthday, which he celebrated on the sixteenth to honor Joyce’s “Bloomsday.” Hedda baked two cakes: one for his birthday and one for his new life, to wish him well and assure him that she hoped sincerely he would finally find the peace that had eluded him throughout the years they had lived together. She had asked him to leave because she could no longer endure “the terror that grips the shoulders,” nor did she want to live in the daily fear of saying something to provoke his cutting remarks or silent treatment.

  From January to April 1960, while he still lived in the house with Hedda, he would have withdrawn entirely from the normal routines of the marriage if she had not demanded that he behave otherwise. She insisted that as long as they lived in the same house, they must be more than civil to each other, they must be kind. Her fear was that if they did not behave cordially, they would part with such acrimony that they could never be friends again, and she actually wrote a letter to convince him that she meant what she said.

  Saul’s initial response to her ultimatum was to insist that she shared half the responsibility for the separation by not believing that no matter where he strayed, his ultimate loyalty was to her. She refused to accept it, saying, “I am afraid that all you have is a fear of my possible ill will toward you and the superstition that it might mythically affect you!” Her conclusion was poignant: “Just let me know and I’ll vanish from your life as if I had never been. With all my love (strange, isn’t it?).”

  AFTER HEDDA MADE HER POSITION CLEAR, Saul lived in a state of confusion that veered between embarrassment and shame. He was bewildered that things had degenerated to such a sorry pass that he could not think clearly about what to do next. Hedda had taken care of him for seventeen years, and he had forgotten how to manage the ordinary acts of daily life, starting with how to look for a new place to live. His response to her demand for civility and kindness was to be excessively polite when they encountered each other, and that was usually in the kitchen, for he spent most of his time sheepishly trying to avoid her by hiding in his studio and concentrating on the new book.

  The
theme had finally become focused on the idea of the passage of life as a labyrinth, and that became the book’s title. In its most basic conception, The Labyrinth was a continuation of Steinberg’s autobiography, a collection of drawings intended to show how one gets from point A (birth) to point B (death). Steinberg illustrated his life’s journey as it had been thus far, portraying his travels to foreign countries, his observations about American culture and society, and his interior musings on what both the life of the mind and the artist’s representation of the body (his own and others’, particularly women) meant. He asked himself questions such as “what is marriage,” made notes about “equality of sexes,” and dismissed existentialism as “balls.”

  These notes and a number of others provide allusions and insights into the drawings that fill the book, and the dust-jacket copy (which he suggested) confirms that the content is a “continuation” of Steinberg’s biography, wherein “he is discovering and inventing a great variety of events.” The dust jacket bears one of Steinberg’s most famous drawings, a man’s head with a rabbit inside; some of his women resemble the battle-ax Rosa had become, bullying their tiny husbands from within the massive furs and towering hats his mother favored; his couples are both poignant in the absence of emotional connection and unsettling in their barely controlled hostility toward each other.

  Steinberg wasted nothing, and when he put the book together, he gathered drawings from his disparate travels and adventures, some of which had appeared in other publications and others that he used for the first time. There are horses and jockeys from his stint in the paddocks at Aqueduct Raceway, baseball players from his time with the Braves, and main streets, motels, highways, and deserts from his travels crisscrossing the continent. Some drawings may have dated from his time in China, and others were from his travels in Samarkand. The Russian trip is there, as are vast European plazas and monuments, Greek street scenes, and French skylines. The crocodile is there in many guises, sometimes swallowing the artist at his easel, other times jousting at mathematical circles, squares, and geometric equations, and sometimes dressed up in medieval armor, sprouting wings, and riding a horse into battle. Mythical maps measure how to get from art through law and on to “prosperitas, caritas, and mediocritas.”