Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  CHAPTER 40

  THE PASSION OF HIS LIFE

  Saul truly loved her. He said she was totally sincere in everything she did. She was the passion of his life but it was difficult to live with her.

  Perhaps Sigrid was not fated to find peace or happiness in this world, Aldo concluded after Saul told him how worried he was about her ill-mannered, erratic behavior and her heavy use of prescription drugs. She could not be accurately described as manic-depressive, for her usual condition was depression and the manic periods almost always stemmed from rage and humiliation when Saul effectively isolated her by cutting her out of his daily life or when she learned that he had taken up with yet another woman. These phases of flamboyant behavior occasionally led “Mrs. Saul Steinberg” (a name she used when she wanted to provoke him) to rack up enormous charges on credit cards whose bills went directly to him. More often, these episodes occurred when they were together in public, where Sigrid took perverse delight in embarrassing him and shocking others.

  Ruth and Tino Nivola invited her and Saul for dinner on a weekend when Dore Ashton and her husband, the Russian painter Adja Yunkers, were their houseguests. As they all sat around the Nivolas’ big table chatting after the meal, someone referred in passing to the Nazis. Despite everyone’s repeated wish that she not talk about it, Sigrid insisted on praising the wartime behavior of ordinary Germans like her parents, who were “not all that bad because they may have thrown a few stones on Kristallnacht, but that’s all.” Ruth gave Saul a hard look that meant he should do something to stop her, but Dore was aghast to see that the look on Saul’s face showed he was enjoying it. The outraged Adja left the table and stomped up the stairs to spend the rest of the evening in his bedroom. Both women recalled that Tino was very upset, but what upset everyone most was that Saul didn’t say a word.

  This was the era when stories (many apocryphal) about Sigrid’s erratic behavior, many of them concerning her German origin, proliferated. She allegedly enjoyed telling everyone that V-E Day was the worst day of the war for her family because her father was a member of the Nazi Party and from that day on their “comfortable” circumstances became “horrible.” Most of all, she was accused of taking perverse delight in teasing Saul about how he could “be with a Nazi’s daughter when he himself was such a Zionist.” There was truth, however, in the story that she would occasionally belittle his contributions to Jewish charities and other organizations, usually in front of a table full of stunned dinner guests who did not understand how he could sit there in composed silence. The general impression was that “he was very sweet to her in public, quite tolerant, but it must have been different in private.”

  Some of their friends who were able to observe how Saul and Sigrid interacted in private as well as in public agreed that “deep down, he loved how outrageous she could be.” Hedda Sterne said it was more than that: he himself was too timid to épater le bourgeois, and he took vicarious delight in how recklessly she could do it. One clue as to why he neither responded to nor engaged in her reckless behavior might lie in an undated page among the voluminous diary writings Sigrid began to keep sometime in the 1970s and in which she sought solace on and off for the rest of her life. She had no qualms about letting Saul read what she wrote, no matter how cutting and wounding the accusations she leveled at him were. However, there were other times when what she wrote was so personally painful that she hid the diaries in her room at the Springs house, where she thought he could not find them. For whatever his reason, he often snooped until he found them and read them. She would write about his snooping expeditions in one of her next entries, and according to her, the arguments they had when he defended himself against her accusations were frightening and ferocious. He told Aldo that she had the same temperament as Papoose, her cat: “Not bad, but fierce.” On one page, where it is not clear whether she gave him the diary pages or he read them without her permission, Saul wrote several numbers. He did not explain what they refer to, but the assumption is that he was trying to itemize the medical expenses he would have to meet, for next to the numbers she wrote: “The question is—who of us is sick. Why not check with Dr. Rosen before you tell me that I am insane.”

  To others, the overall impression Sigrid presented was one of “terrible loneliness.” She had picked up another of Saul’s habits, which in her case interfered with forging real friendships: she could not engage in conversation and wanted to do all the talking, and as she did not have his wit and intelligence, her efforts to hold the floor drove people away instead of bringing them closer. “She had very few friends because she drove people nuts,” said Mimi Gross, who was better able than most to put up with her wildly fluctuating behavior.

  Sigrid loved Springs and wanted to spend a lot of time there, but her ongoing battles with Saul often resulted in long periods when he “banished” her (to use her expression). Sometimes she was able to persuade him to relent and allow her to use the house when he was not at home, but as he was living there more and more of the time, these occasions were so infrequent that she was provoked into taking the train to East Hampton and staying in a rooming house in town. She confided to her diary about how she had to skulk about and hide as she darted in and out of stores for fear that she would accidentally run into him on the street and he would create an angry scene. At other times they reached a stasis when he would allow her to be in the house while he was there, just not anywhere near him. They ate their meals at separate times; he rode his bike alone during the day and spent his evenings in the studio listening to music and reading, while she sat alone at the large kitchen table until she was tired enough to go to her bedroom on the second floor in the old part of the house. Many of their friends knew they were “two people living together in the same house who don’t talk to each other.” More than one wondered, “How could they have managed that!?!”

  Sigrid loved the house but loved the grounds even more. She was the one who planted and tended large flower and vegetable gardens, and she always did the housework, heavy cleaning, and shopping herself. Even though she enjoyed every one of these activities, she complained bitterly about Saul’s lack of consideration for all the work she did, grousing that he did body-building exercises while she did the hard work of spring cleanup and getting the property ready for summer. Sigrid and Dana had become friends, and when Dana came to spend the summer, Sigrid tried to think of “girl friend” things they could do; even so, she was bitter that Saul spent the days sunbathing, riding his bike, exercising, and body-building while she had to cook for Dana and clean up after her. Sigrid was angry when she told the diary, “I’d rather be like Hedda. She may be married to you but she got more freedom than I, and less duties.” She noted that Hedda had houses in East Hampton and New York and no responsibilities except for herself and her work, but she did not acknowledge that Hedda was not indebted to Saul but fully independent, thanks to her first husband’s generosity and the sales of her paintings.

  It had been twenty-five years since Sigrid had left her parents’ home and more than twenty since she had become Saul Steinberg’s lover. She was now a middle-aged woman of forty-six who had no marriage, no house, no real income of her own, and therefore no independence. The year encompassing 1981–82 had been one of her better ones, as she made $6,000 designing book jackets; otherwise, she was totally dependent on him for her support. It made her feel “trapped, living month to month on handouts, as your sidekick.” She was outspoken with the few friends she had who were separate from his (mostly the other tenants in her apartment building on Riverside Drive) and told them how she resented the fact that he did so little to help her professionally; one of them later said, “She felt she was worthy of more attention, respect, and jobs. She was angry and disappointed, very serious about her art and feeling diminished that he didn’t help her.” The problem was that her talents were very modest, and Steinberg, who never took advantage of his friends in high places, was embarrassed to ask for favors. To do so might mean that they would bo
th have to face the possibility that her work would not be good enough, and it would be more devastating to her fragile psyche to experience failures instigated by his intercession than if he stayed completely out of her professional life.

  Because he paid the rent on the apartment, she claimed she had nothing to call her own, not even the little cabin just behind the house that he gave her to use as a studio. During one of the periods when she was banished from the house, she sent him a postcard begging to be allowed to use the cabin whenever she wanted. He did not reply. She was enraged by his silence on top of his ostracism and insisted that their relationship had to under go a major change: “I don’t want to subjugate myself my will [sic] to your will. This has always been your game unless I holler and scream. I don’t want to anymore. You drove me to those hysterics but please no more.”

  When she wrote this, Sigrid was trying to assess the relationship objectively, starting with her real feelings about his work. She did not think she was jealous of his talent, because she recognized and admired his genius and was envious that hers was not comparable. She did not resent the time he spent sequestered in his studio creating new work, because that was what geniuses did; rather, the cause of so much of her “anguish” was the obsessive attention he paid to his hobbies. If he devoted only a fraction of the time to their relationship that he spent practicing the violin or collecting stamps, she was sure everything would be better: “You see me in my hole, struggling and getting deeper into the mess, and all you can do is nothing.”

  What he did do was contact his accountant and ask him to send her a check for $3,000 for “all the extra work” she had recently done, and to increase her monthly stipend from $800 to $1,000. He also agreed to let his lawyers make significant changes to his will that would lessen taxes, but he insisted that Sigrid remain the beneficiary of one-third of his entire estate. He did not tell her about this significant change, but to her, the gesture of increasing her monthly stipend was a metaphorical slap in the face, another sop for the sidekick. She ended these pages with one affirmation uppermost in her mind, that she could not spend the next decade living as she had during the ten years just past—“not even the next ten days. I’d rather have nothing.”

  She set a goal for herself: one thousand days in which to make great changes. To get started, she counted her money. She estimated that she had enough on hand to support herself for one hundred days without needing to bring in any new work, but she hoped to find as many commissions as she could and save what she earned for another trip to Africa. Both her parents had died some years before, and each of her trips brought back touching childhood memories. She recalled how she and her father had often pored over maps of the continent and daydreamed together of visiting, and now she wondered if her fascination with Mali might have begun because her mother’s nickname, “Malli,” first sparked her interest in that country. Now that she had been there five times, she had such feelings of displacement in New York that she wondered how she could go on living there.

  A full year after she made the declaration of “1000 days to change,” she had not done any work or made any money of her own and was even more depressed than usual. Saul was worried about how the depth of her depression might have an impact on his own, which he now thought of as an “illness” that he named “the dread.” He thought he hid it well, but his friends noticed that “when she got horribly depressed, he got very sad.” At those times he tried to protect himself by keeping her at a distance, but this time he had another reason for wanting her out of the way: he had begun a serious affair with Karen van Lengen and wanted to concentrate on it. So he gave Sigrid enough money for her to spend two months in Mali, January through March of 1982.

  She made a long nomadic journey by road, rail, bush taxi, and truck throughout West Africa, from Algeria to Cameroon, before crossing the Sahara and ending in Mali. It was dangerous and difficult, but she was always happy going wherever adventure called, even though she came down with so many “bugs” that she teetered on the brink of permanently ruining her health. She did not care what afflictions ravaged her body, because being in Africa always repaired her spirit and her soul. She had made this trek so often that she was well known in the towns and villages along the way, and now that she was a middle-aged woman, she was granted authority and treated with respect, neither of which was the case in New York. It was only when she returned to what she sarcastically called “Western ‘civilization’ ” that life became “difficult and bizarre.”

  All her unresolved problems beset her as soon as she was back, the most important and pressing being the desperate need to change her life and not having the financial wherewithal to do it. Her dependence on Saul, both financial and emotional, meant that whenever he called on a whim, she usually dropped everything and ran to him. This time, however, she was so confused and ashamed of herself that she took the only refuge she knew, in drugs, which she did not name but which she had been using fairly steadily since her student years at Columbia. Saul joined her occasionally, but mostly drug taking was something she did alone, whenever she reached the point in their relationship where she thought that “nobody can live like this.” Her way of trying to cope was to “get stoned,” even though she knew beforehand that it would not solve anything. Still, she relied on drugs because they made life temporarily “tolerable.” These were periods when all she did was “juggle pills and dope … because I can’t do anything else.”

  Sigrid Spaeth with a friend in Mali. (illustration credit 40.1)

  Her “valium summer” began when Saul ignored her pleas to take her with him and went alone to Europe in late spring 1983. While he was away, she was “mostly stoned.” When he returned at the end of June, she telephoned to welcome him back and was stunned when he cut her short to say that he had been far happier without her and their relationship was finished. “It’s over,” he said, and she dosed herself with codeine and went to bed and slept for the rest of the day and all night. The next day was Sunday, and she took the train to Springs to confront him. She remembered it as a lovely day, probably made lovelier in her memory because she fortified herself by getting stoned on the train. Saul was “nice” to her and they had a pleasant dinner together, after which he sent her to her bedroom and he went to his. The next morning she was up early, expecting to prepare a breakfast they could eat together, but he told her to get her things and leave. He gave her the address of a motel and the money to pay for it and told her to call a taxi and get out.

  Instead of going to the motel, she went to Ingeborg Weiner’s house nearby, where she stayed “mostly stoned” for the next three days. Between July 4 and July 19, Sigrid went back and forth between New York and Springs despite Saul’s telling her repeatedly to stay away from him. She took a room in East Hampton, from which she phoned at all hours and begged to be allowed to visit; then she sneaked to the house when he did not answer the phone and was likely to be away, or after she happened to see him on the street in town. Mostly she stayed in her motel room, calling and crying when he hung up on her, then finding solace in drugs. He told her that their separation was permanent, and to prove that he meant it this time, he bought the Riverside Drive apartment and gave it to her, then made arrangements with his lawyers and accountants to see that “for the time being” she would be properly supported. He was sure that with the gifts he had given her (most of it expensive jewelry) and “a good amount of [his] good drawings well-chosen by her,” she would have “lots of capital.” His conscience was appeased, and he was confident that, having settled Sigrid financially, he could “avoid the errors of the past and steer clear of the shortcuts.” He hoped that she would accept the separation peacefully and amicably, “without drama.” He admitted that it was likely to be “difficult” for her, but she was “often logical and intelligent,” and that was “the good part of her” that he had always admired. All she wrote about what he had just done was to tell the diary that he bought the apartment in her name and had her old car, an Audi, fi
xed.

  SAUL WAS ALMOST AS HAPPY WITH his new freedom as he had been in 1960 when he left Hedda to be with Sigrid. Now that he had succeeded in slotting Sigrid into the niche in his life where he wanted her, he compared this new outlook to the satisfaction he felt after he ended the relationship with Karen van Lengen. He had been prompted to end that one because of his “indecision” about accepting Karen’s “habit of physical and spoken intimacy.” Karen was “used to being close,” while he preferred to keep his “distance from others.”

  He preferred distance on his own terms, which he kept changing: not even two weeks passed after he had told Sigrid it was over before he relented and told her she could come to the house while he was there if she first did his shopping and then prepared his lunch. He told her she would have to leave for a while later that afternoon because Inge Morath and Arthur Miller were coming to take him out to dinner and he didn’t want them to see that she was there. After they were gone, he permitted her to come back and watch television, but she would have to leave and go to the rooming house where she had taken a room before he returned for the night. She told the diary, “I feel like an outcast and cry for three hours, take valium & codeine.” She disobeyed his instructions, took a heavy dose of drugs, and stayed in the house that night. The next morning they walked together on the beach and he allowed her to join him for lunch at Warner LeRoy’s house, after which they went home and “had a nice nap together.” Later he made a movie of her dancing nude with Papoose. The day after that she was too stoned for him to make another movie and she stayed in bed, alone. After he put her on the train back to New York, Saul told Aldo that they had spent a “nice weekend” together and the separation was indeed “amicable.”