Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Rosenberg was fast becoming the one friend whose “contagious intelligence” engaged Steinberg’s completely. Steinberg was enthralled by Rosenberg’s “rare gift for inventing and discovering ideas in your presence … Talking with him was always a surprise. One didn’t quite know what the talk was about, but it was extremely precise and efficient.” Rosenberg was a towering presence physically as well, over six feet tall and with a sweeping but awkward stride caused by “a leg that would no longer bend.” Steinberg, whose height was just below Rosenberg’s shoulder, would not let him begin to talk until he sat down, so they could have “a conversation of equals.”

  Interspersed with the New York friends were the many Europeans whose hospitality they enjoyed in Europe and were eager to return in New York. Many of Steinberg’s Italian friends were becoming luminaries in the burgeoning film industry, Vittorio de Sica prominent among them. Steinberg saw him in New York for several days before he too vanished into Hollywood.

  Because Hedda wanted to paint all day, her menus seldom varied. Most of the meal was improvised, based on whatever was in season and available in the market. The one constant was the meat course: large, choice roasts that she could put into the capacious ovens of her red stove in the morning and allow to cook all day long while she painted. Saul had become an aficionado of good wines, particularly dry white Italian vintages, and he took great pleasure in offering his new finds to his friends.

  When “the Steinbergs,” as friends had taken to calling them, were not entertaining at home, they were out somewhere being entertained. Hedda preferred to stay quietly alone at home and often did, but Saul was “a marvelous guest” who needed stimulation every night of the week. And yet, according to Hedda and the many friends who were with him, “he was just himself; he did not actually participate in the life of the party.” Many of the invitations came from “people he thought were obnoxious,” but he accepted them because the hosts were either collectors of his work or personally responsible for sending lucrative commercial commissions his way. Most of the time when he was a guest, he preferred to declaim rather than converse, to regale someone else’s dinner table with a monologue that was so witty, erudite, and fascinating that the other guests were content to let him hold sway because he was so charming. At other times he could be exceptionally rude. Hedda did not attend the dinner given by a media mogul who was trying to persuade Steinberg to accept a commission for a drawing that he thought was in bad taste. When he came home early, he told her proudly how he was so appalled by the banality of the conversation that he caused a scene. Saying, “This can only get worse,” he rose from the table, threw down his napkin in anger, and left. “He did things like this on purpose,” she recalled. “He did not hesitate to offend, because he was offended if something or someone was not in perfect taste.”

  It was the start of the years when he loved to scandalize people. One evening he sat glowering in the corner of Priscilla Morgan’s living room after what she thought had been a congenial dinner at her round table for eight. Morgan was celebrated for her ability to jolly her guests into conviviality, and indeed on this evening they were all talking and laughing except Steinberg. When she asked him why he was not having a good time, he replied loudly enough for everyone to hear, “These people are all talking!”

  “Yes, Saul, and isn’t it fun?” she replied.

  “No,” he said, “they should all be listening to me.” And with that he got up and walked out.

  THE ENERGY THAT STEINBERG PUT INTO his nonstop socializing was extraordinary, especially when viewed in tandem with all the commercial work he did during the same period, and all of his own work in preparation for a series of exhibitions that began in late March and took him away from home for the better part of the next two years. Two days before he finished moving into the house, on January 28, 1952, his first solo exhibition in two years opened—a major show in two galleries at the same time: with his longtime dealer, Betty Parsons, and with his new dealer in the space just across the hall from hers, Sidney Janis.

  Betty Parsons had been an early champion of many of the most successful American abstract artists since her earliest years, when she worked at two successive galleries before starting her own in 1946. She showed their work during the lean years before they became famous, but in the 1950s many were wooed away by gallery owners who promised them higher prices, Sidney Janis prominent among them. Most of these artists left Parsons completely, but Steinberg, who probably needed the money Janis promised more than most of them, refused to make the move unless he could continue to show with Parsons as well. He stayed with her because of his unmitigated loyalty to people who helped him when he needed help the most, but Betty had also become a close friend. She was one of the first people he met in New York in 1942, and one of the first to support his career. He returned her generosity when she was starting her gallery in 1946 by becoming one of the four friends who each contributed $1,000 toward the $4,000 she needed to rent the space at 15 East 57th Street.

  This personal quality of the friendship between Steinberg and Parsons made for a curious professional relationship, because Steinberg regarded art dealers with a somewhat jaundiced eye as “the intermediary between two of the most important things in life: money and fame.” Of his two dealers, he found it easier to deal with Parsons, a “fictional character” who was so other worldly that he thought of her as akin to Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov or Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, than to deal with Janis, who was “completely brass tacks.” “I liked her,” he said in 1985 (she died in 1982). “I miss her, even now, very much.”

  STEINBERG AND STERNE LEFT FOR THE San Francisco opening of a one-month exhibition of her paintings and his drawings, March 5 to April 5, at Gump’s store gallery, after which they made a quick turnaround so he could sail for England to supervise the installation of his work for the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He always traveled in first class, and on this voyage the one fellow passenger he wanted to meet but whom he had to eye surreptitiously was the comedian Jimmy Durante, traveling as Mr. James Durante, whose reserve did not invite familiarity. Steinberg knew two other people on board, a boring Scottish poet who alluded to previous meetings he did not remember and Hans G. Knoll of the furniture company, who was “gossipy and could be a treasure…but gossip needs a bit of spirit to transform it from sordid to anecdote.” By the time the ship docked, he felt he had been through a “six day long bar mitzvah organized by some aunt.” The crossing was tedious enough to get him over his fear of airplanes, and he vowed to fly next time to “avoid this concentration camp of pleasure.”

  He booked a room at the Hyde Park Hotel but stayed only long enough to do publicity before the show’s official opening on May 1. It made him so nervous that he calmed himself with long walks about the city. On one of them he ran into the Irish writer James Stern and his German-born wife, Tanya, on Piccadilly, and they invited him to tea. Stern had worked in journalism as a writer for Time and they were hungry for news of New York; giving it relaxed Steinberg enough to think he was still there and not in London. He was convinced the show was headed for disaster, so he planned to leave before it opened, to hide out for several days in Paris, and to gird himself to go on to Nice to see his parents.

  The exhibition room was smaller than he expected and disappointingly shabby. There was no room for many of the images he had planned to show, including a large photograph of the woman painted on the bathtub. He thought the eighty-eight small framed pictures were hung “all right,” but he was amazed at the kinds of questions they inspired in British journalists; for instance, one of them noticed that many of his drawings slanted to the right and wondered if they represented his political leanings. It made him vow “never no more” to submit to a press conference. The last one gave him several “jittery” days as he waited for “poisonous” reviews, and he felt “like a refugee again, imagining waiters and cops looking at me with suspicion.”

  He was particularly fearful of the the Lon
don Times, because the reporter had a grudge against all things American and considered Steinberg to be representative of the worst of them. The review had not yet appeared when, to his amazement, the “very monumental looking…Manchester Guardian and The Observer” gave him “fan” reviews and a flattering photo, both of which he found “a bit embarrassing.” And to his amazement, the Times review was as glowing as all the rest. The show was an enormous success, drawing unprecedented crowds every day, but it did not sell as much as he had hoped, because “people were horrified to hear of the prices.” He did eventually sell “two-three pieces” at prices starting around several hundred English pounds, but even that was considered “too expensive.” His consolation was that during the huge Picasso show that preceded his, not a single work was sold.

  He did steal away quietly to Paris before the official May 1 opening and stayed there for several days, mostly taking care of personal business, such as making sure that gifts ordered for Hedda’s mother and brother in London had been sent to them in Paris as scheduled. He lunched several times with a depressed Nicola Chiaromonte and was nonplussed to find that he had to do all the talking in order to keep the conversation going with his uncharacteristically silent friend. Steinberg’s efforts were rewarded when Chiaromonte took him for a walk that led to the discovery of several arcades, covered passages that he had not seen before, which he thought of including in a new book he was in the early stages of thinking about. He wrote several times to Hedda, asking her to send her sizes so he could buy the luxury items he adored and she disdained, especially handmade shoes and slippers, but she ignored him. Also, because there were so many more antique shops in London than in Paris that specialized in things he liked to collect, particularly antique clocks and watches, and he had not resisted buying several, he did not have his usual enthusiasm for Paris shopping. And besides, there was little time, because he had to go to Nice.

  HE BOUGHT A TRAIN TICKET ON May 5 for a six-day stay and took the precaution of booking a hotel room as well. He found his parents the same as always, with Rosa’s “cynicism” reminding him even more of the “real Balzac” than usual. Now she wanted a fur coat to replace the heavy astrakhan she had not been permitted to take out of Romania, claiming that it was the dearest thing she had ever owned and that she could not recover from its loss. She told Saul she had been saving for years (“starving probably,” he said sarcastically) to buy a “skimpy one” suitable for the Mediterranean climate, but before she would buy a coat she infuriated him by asking in false humility for his permission. Even Moritz got on his nerves this time, as he insisted on reading letters aloud from the poor cousins in Israel, “some moving, some sordid,” while Rosa pressed to know exactly how much financial support Saul was giving them. He bristled when she added slyly that it was going to cost him a fortune to keep her and Moritz on the Riviera, because people could live into their nineties in such a pleasant climate. Then she made the most irritating demand of all, telling him that she had invited other Romanian émigrés for Sunday lunch because she wanted to show off how rich and successful her American son had become. He had to brace himself to go through with it, but he knew it was easier to do it than to refuse, so he gritted his teeth and allowed himself to be put on display. He knew if he didn’t, her passive-aggressive behavior would make both her and Moritz “sick.” It made him realize how much of a “defense” Hedda always threw up between him and his parents and how grateful he was for it.

  To get away from Rosa’s constant carping, he invented the myth of business in Rome and went there for an overnight visit. When he arrived, the myth became truth during a happy reunion with Cesare Zavattini, who wanted to make a movie with him. Zavattini had proposed collaborations before for an animated cartoon or a documentary, but this time he wanted to do a full-scale feature film similar to his recent hit, Miracolo a Milano. Steinberg agreed in principle and waited for Zavattini to come up with a concrete proposal, hoping that it would be one that enabled him and Aldo Buzzi to work together. He thought he had the answer when another friend from their Milan days, the director Luciano Emmer, proposed six films of Steinberg’s drawings for both movies and television and agreed to hire Buzzi to direct at least one of them. Unfortunately, neither director’s ideas ever came to fruition, even though Zavattini made sporadic attempts to work with Steinberg for many years afterward.

  Otherwise, the Italian trip was disappointing on all fronts. Steinberg found Aldo depressed and living in poverty with Bianca Lattuada, who talked only of money and their lack of it. Her brother, Alberto, insisted on regarding Steinberg as “an American big shot” and conversing only in halting broken English, to which Steinberg always replied in fluent Italian. He was disgusted with how all his old friends treated him, and because he did not want to use a truly derogatory term, settled for calling them “Europeans.” He was upset that “as soon as money and business appear, friendship goes down the drain,” and although he hoped it would not be true in his case, he worried that it might be.

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, AFTER A STOP at the Cannes Film Festival, where everyone was amazed and disappointed that Lattuada did not win the prize, Steinberg was back in Paris. He met with Ernesto Rogers, who was there as a member of a committee of architects, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier among them, to select a design for the new UNESCO building. Rogers had several projects in mind for Steinberg to execute in Milan, starting with decorations for a swimming pool, and they dined together on several occasions. Rogers, who was also Jewish, talked freely about how he believed their shared heritage influenced their celebrity. He confessed that he got more enjoyment from promoting his fame than from actually doing the work to earn it, which Steinberg called an “ ‘I’ll show them’ ” attitude. He confessed to Hedda that hearing Rogers admit it brought him great relief, “because I have some symptoms of this vice myself.”

  On his last night in Paris he had a vastly different experience when by chance he ran into an architect he had always wanted to meet, Walter Gropius. Steinberg was already a friend of Marcel Breuer, which gave them something in common and led to their having a five-hour dinner together. The thirty-eight-year-old Steinberg, who had never wanted to practice architecture, was enthralled by the seventy-year-old Gropius’s discussion of the profession, whose challenges he still loved. Steinberg now began to think seriously that all the architectural drawings he had been making, of British railway stations, French arcades, and American buildings, might make a good subject cluster to include in a new book. The conversation with Gropius was one of the inspirations for some of the drawings he eventually included in The Passport in 1954.

  The next day he got back to London in time to watch a BBC documentary in which three critics discussed his ICA exhibition, pro and con, for an hour. When Penrose told him that there had been other television shows with “pictures and talker[s]” and that reviews from as far away as Scotland and Ireland were universally good, he realized that he had accomplished what he had set out to do in Europe and was ready to go home. He was in such a hurry that he decided to get over his fear of planes and fly, but his reservations were canceled for several days in a row because an oil strike and a shortage of aviation fuel had curtailed the number of scheduled flights by American carriers.

  There was another pressing reason he was so eager to return. As was his custom, he wrote loving letters to Hedda at least once every day and sometimes more often, but during this absence he had received very few letters from her in return. Early on she forwarded without comment a “personal letter, silly,” from a “fan,” a term he insisted was correct because he had never met the “girl” who wrote it. He remembered that she had once sent him some suggestions for cartoon gag lines, hoping it would lead to a “literary correspondence with [a] sensitive soul,” but he had never replied. He tried to explain to Hedda that he had had no personal dealings with the woman and that he had destroyed many such letters without showing them because he knew how greatly they disturbed her. He asked Hedda not to lose time
over suspicions and unjustified accusations, but she was still smarting from the knowledge of how many women he had been with before his departure and was unable to do so, because she had never really felt brave enough to address the way those encounters wounded her. Time and again he begged her to overcome her suspicions, saying he missed her so much he would take “any fly by night plane to get sooner home.” As she never replied, he did not know how he would find her when he got there.

  Unfortunately, the airplane strike continued and he ended up taking the Queen Elizabeth back to New York, not arriving until June 2. The situation with Hedda was still unsettled when he had to leave again one week later for Boston. He did not want to go and was “scared stiff” of the work he had to do there (a department store mural that was never realized), but he was scared even stiffer by how he had left Hedda.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE DRAFTSMAN-LAUREATE OF MODERNISM

  Your principal fear, I think, is caused by your great talent—facility—which becomes a burden (like too great beauty), particularly with a background that causes masochism, like feeling guilty.

  It was more than “a point of honor” for Steinberg to fulfill the Boston commission; he needed to do it for the money and was disappointed when it was canceled. His mood improved after he persuaded Hedda that her anger over the girl’s letter had been unfounded. He stayed in New York just long enough to pick up what supplies he needed before leaving for a New Yorker assignment in Chicago, where he was to attend the two 1952 political conventions and make drawings to accompany Richard Rovere’s reportage. Hedda went with him for the Republican convention, which came first, but she did not stay on for the Democratic one. By the end of July he had exchanged Chicago’s heat and humidity for the steam bath that was New York in pre-air-conditioned days. The rest of the summer passed in a lazy haze, too hot to do any real work, so he went to the movies every night just to sit in air conditioning. “I must have seen 200 films,” he exaggerated to Aldo, remembering nothing about any of them. He concluded that it was “a mistake to spend the summer at home” and vowed never to do it again.