Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  There are many playful drawings in which single words tell stories that depict plot, character, and setting, thus allowing Steinberg to fulfill his self-described role of “the writer who draws.” Letters, for example like those forming the word tantrum are diving crazily in the full throes of what they describe, while those in the word sick drape themselves along a hospital bed in languid weakness. Steinberg’s nod toward existentialism has his “thinker” poised on a bench, pondering a question mark which he holds before him. His male characters in particular are enveloped in mazes, labyrinths, and cages of their own making, either creating puzzles to explain themselves to themselves or in a panic as they try to find a way out of them.

  For every drawing that inspires a grin of surprise and delight, there are others that evoke wry recognition of the difficulties of balancing life and work while maintaining personal and professional relationships. Whether astride Don Quixote’s horse or not, each of Steinberg’s cartoon characters is, in his or her own way, jousting at windmills, and so too was he.

  IN EARLY APRIL 1960, JUST AS Saul accepted Hedda’s ultimatum that he had to start looking seriously for someplace to live, a series of unfortunate events struck his family in France. Rica Roman lost so much weight that he was hospitalized for three weeks with a combination of ailments that suggested exhaustion, depression, and a mild heart attack. When he was diagnosed with infiltrating pulmonary tuberculosis, he was sent to a sanatorium at Evreaux, where he stayed for three months, until the disease was brought under control. Even before the illness, when he was still at home, Lica was too depressed to cope with running the household; now that he was gone, she was initially paralyzed with fear and grief. Her version of coping was to tell Saul that she had moved herself and the children into an artist’s studio in the eighteenth arrondissement, on the Rue Caulaincourt, and that she had found a part-time office job nearby. She did not convince Saul, who heard another version from Rosa, which convinced him that his parents were unraveling and Lica was “disintegrating.”

  Rosa complained nonstop about the obstreperous children, insisting that Lica “doesn’t really work. She fights with the children all the time (who are almost their parents’ enemies).” Not so, Lica wrote to Saul, criticizing him for not writing to Rosa, thus making her totally responsible for having to “cheer Mom up.” She berated him for not helping, even though all Rosa’s letters could be described as “one futile moan” for his attention.

  Rosa had been diagnosed several months previously as a diabetic with congestive heart failure, and in her inimitable style, she milked the situation for all it was worth. She took to her bed and refused to get up until the day Moritz was too ill to get the mail and there was no one to bring it to her. Rosa got out of bed and went to the mailbox, where she found a brief note and a check from Saul for $500. As he had written earlier to say that he was sending $400, she knew immediately that Moritz had asked him for spending money, and she was furious. “Mom doesn’t let go of money as soon as she grabs it,” poor Moritz wrote to his son. “Please explain to her that one hundred dollars should be mine because I also need a buck.”

  Rosa wrote a separate letter to scold her “Dear Saul” and instructed him to ignore Moritz’s letters: “He has become childish. I have too many fights with him, only I know how many. I won’t go into details.” Not content with her letter, she threw a tantrum and “forced” Moritz to enclose a note saying that he had no need of spending money. When she was otherwise occupied, Moritz wrote a second time: “What a scandal she created in order to write you just as she dictated. She didn’t want to give me money because she already feeds me. Supposedly I don’t need anything else. It’s shameful for me to sink this low and be afraid of her.”

  Steinberg needed time to prepare himself to confront these family crises, so he decided to sail to France. He had to share a cabin, but he entertained himself by teasing his fellow passenger Salvador Dalí: “I gave it to him last night, blasting him here and there without letting him quite know it.” Baiting Dalí was his only enjoyment; otherwise, he worried about his sister and pondered his future. Even though he and Hedda were for all intents and purposes already separated, he still needed to confide in her and wrote to her every day. He told her, “I think of you often and I hope that you know how extremely important this part of your life is. Good luck to you, dear.”

  In Paris, Steinberg’s first order of business was to get Lica and her family out of the dismal apartment and into a house in a good suburb, where they would not be subject to the shocks and buffets of city life. The shift from Bucharest to Paris had been too abrupt, and he felt they needed more time to adjust to the freedom of Western culture. Before he sailed, he contacted the painter Janice Biala, who had lived in Paris long enough to be an excellent source of information about the city and the surrounding suburbs. He asked her to find a good real estate agent who would make appointments for him to see suitable properties, thus letting him avoid “loss of time and fatigue.”

  Finding a house was not easy: it had to be large enough to hold his parents in separate quarters on the ground floor, as they could no longer mount steps; it had to have privacy, with a good-sized yard and room for a garden; and it had to have good schools nearby for the children. His days in Paris dragged on because his agent found nothing suitable. The weather was inclement and he caught the flu, which left him bedridden for several days in his hotel. He was unable to resume the frenetic activity that usually characterized his time in the city, so he spent long afternoons sitting with Rica, who was back from the hospital. Steinberg found him “much improved as a person,” and the two recovering invalids found genuine companionship as they sat in the sunlight and discussed all the books Rica had read in the hospital. “He’s all right, or maybe I’m now all right,” Steinberg concluded.

  He was still generally irritable and blamed his mood on no longer being willing to tolerate phonies, particularly the people with whom he socialized in Paris. The only positive note was his deepening friendship with Jean Hélion, which became a sincere exchange of ideas about art and painting. Of two other good friends, Giacometti was “weak” and Ionesco was “suffering.” Steinberg accepted Aimé Maeght’s invitation to see one of Samuel Beckett’s plays, but when he was introduced to the author after the performance, he thought Beckett was “a coward and sick” and no friendship developed between them. Steinberg’s disposition suffered further when Maeght hosted another of his extravagant fish dinners and sent him back to his hotel with dyspepsia and a silk scarf for Hedda that featured a print by Giacometti.

  There was continuing trouble and confusion over real estate, as he was “almost taken in by crooks and saved by an honest lawyer.” He was convinced that everyone connected with any sort of financial transaction in France was dishonest but admitted that things were probably the same everywhere and he had always been insulated from them by Hedda’s protection. He was still optimistic that he could settle the Roman family soon so that he could go to Nice to see his parents. “I am not depressed yet and I hope I’ll never be, but this trip is tough,” he told Hedda.

  A house purchase was pending but nothing was resolved when he left Paris, and to his surprise, things in Nice were “better than usual.” Rosa was in good spirits because she had lost a great amount of weight and was able to move about more easily, and her mood made Moritz’s life easier as well. It also helped when Saul told them that he had found an excellent house in the Parisian suburb of Cachan and was negotiating to buy it. As always, he needed to apprise Hedda of how he felt when he was with his parents, and he wrote at length. He described his entire time in France as a trial and a test that he passed by being indifferent and remote to his family’s concerns. He discovered that instead of responding or reacting to a family crisis in the usual way, buying the house permitted him to determine the crisis’s outcome. Taking charge and making decisions let him understand for the first time “how it feels to be adult.”

  He flew on to Rome to spend three days
with “poor Aldo, fat, sad, very sad.” Aldo’s letters had been depressed, as he was going through many of the same emotional crises as Steinberg; he too was worried by the passage of time, the inability to work creatively, and his dissatisfaction with present circumstances and relationships. The only difference between the two friends was that Saul had the wherewithal to make changes while Aldo did not. There was no time for Saul to go to Milan to see Ada, but he sent her a sizable check and left another for Aldo. It felt good to be able to help his friends without worrying about when the next cash infusion might come and from where. It felt even better when, after “unbelievable complications,” the big house with the large garden in Cachan finally became his. He stayed in Paris long enough to sign all the papers and pass the keys to his sister and her husband, and to make arrangements for the remodeling that was necessary before Rosa and Moritz could move there. He left instructions with Rica to tell them to begin paying the rent in Nice on a monthly basis so Rosa and Moritz would be free to move as soon as the house was ready. He thought he had solved all the problems and flew back to New York.

  Naturally Rosa found fault with everything and did not hesitate to tell him. The house was surrounded by a large and verdant garden, but Rosa wanted to know, “Is this suitable for our age? How much does this type of garden cost?…It must be very pleasant in the summer but it must also be very gloomy in the winter.” As for Cachan, “Is it a village or a little town?…We’ll move there and won’t find any Jews. We’ll be the only Jews among Christians. Of course it would have been better in Paris because at least there we have some acquaintances … You acted too hastily,” she scolded. “A house cannot be bought so fast. I don’t want to upset you but I have to express my opinion.”

  HE HAD TO MOVE BACK INTO Hedda’s house in May because he had not had time to look for an apartment before he went to France. He found a real estate agent to help him, and when he was not looking at the places she found, he went to furniture stores to order basic necessities such as a bed, a sofa, and a dining table and chairs. Although the Upper East Side had been his home since he had returned from the war, he thought he needed to make a complete break from the life he had led as Hedda’s husband, but he did not tell anyone the reason that he decided to concentrate on Greenwich Village, where he had lived briefly before he was drafted. They would learn his reason later, but for now he just told everyone he was moving into Washington Square Village. It was a new development typical of 1960s architecture, massive, brutal, and without charm, but it did have light, space, a long terrace, and two bedrooms, so that one could function as a studio. It would not be available until mid-July, so he had to live in Hedda’s house until then.

  In his newfound freedom, his appointment book was filled again with the cryptic notations that usually indicated he was having another affair. Cass Canfield had become his editor at Harper and The Labyrinth was now scheduled to appear just before Christmas, so he needed to copy names and addresses into a new book in order to leave the old one for Hedda. He went alone to the house in Springs for a long weekend, during which he had dinner with May and Harold Rosenberg, who invited the activist and social critic Paul Goodman to meet him, and back in the city, he made sure he had an invitation to dine out every night. He spent a lot of time in the Village with Joan Mitchell, who was staying in her studio at St. Mark’s Place; Mary Frank invited him, as did the Nivolas, who kept an apartment on 8th Street. He had told no one that he was leaving Hedda, and none of his hosts suspected that anything was amiss because they were used to seeing him without her. He did not tell anyone that he was moving back downtown because of a woman who lived there.

  ON JULY 2, STEINBERG WAS INVITED to a party at Larry Rivers’s home, where he fell into conversation with a stunningly beautiful German girl who until recently had been the lover of Rivers’s son, Joe. Steinberg flirted, as was his wont, and she flirted back shyly, for he was forty-six, rich, and famous, and she was twenty-five, awkward, and insecure. He went home to 71st Street and a few days later received a letter from “Barbara” (Barbara Daly Baekeland), who had also been a guest at the party and with whom he had had an earlier relationship. Barbara enclosed a card and a drawing “by the beautiful young German girl” who was “so adorable” and “so dying” to talk to him. “Would you like to be reintroduced?” she asked. Barbara was upset that all the “1/2 men” she had hitherto introduced to the young girl ignored her, as did “everyone in fact.”

  “Call me,” Barbara directed. Saul Steinberg did as she asked, and “the thirty-five years’ war” between him and Sigrid Spaeth commenced.

  CHAPTER 25

  CHANGES AND NEW THINGS

  I haven’t written to you in all this time because I’ve been too busy with the changes and new things in my life.

  Steinberg did phone Barbara Baekeland to say that he would not mind meeting the German girl again. On July 9, 1960, he wrote in his daily diary that he saw “Gigi” in the afternoon but left her after a few hours to spend the euphemistic “all evening” with “Ala.” Steinberg made no other entries until July 21, when he wrote the lyrics of a popular song, “Catch ’em young treat them rough tell ’em nothing” and then added “Gigi” at the bottom of the page. He continued to see her concurrently with “Ala” until July 30, when he wrote something that caused him to tear out all the pages until August 2. After that, “Ala” disappears from the diary, and on August 5 he wrote “Gigi non-stop,” with her name from then on surrounded by exclamation points and decorated with fireworks, rockets, and shooting stars.

  If Saul Steinberg’s descriptions of his affairs are studied, from the mundane one-night stands to the more serious and long-lasting encounters, the most intensely sexual relationship he ever had was with Sigrid “Gigi” Spaeth. Those who were present at the start of the long liaison used adjectives like “bowled over,” “thunderstruck,” and “blindsided” to describe how besotted he was. He was in the midst of several personal crises throughout the month of August, but he put them all aside and concentrated on seeing Gigi almost every day. They went to the movies, to concerts at Carnegie Hall, and to the Jazz Festival on Randall’s Island. He even gave in to her plea to take her drinking at the Cedar Tavern, where she wanted everyone to see that she was with Saul Steinberg and where he was embarrassed to be seen hanging out with a woman half his age in a bar he never patronized. He did it anyway, because she wanted it. When she told him she was planning to hitchhike to Provincetown for a vacation, he gave her money for the train and a good hotel. When she became ill and had to cut her stay short, he brought her to Washington Square Village and put her to sleep while he went to the pharmacy for medications. And when she was well enough to go to the apartment she was temporarily sharing on 57th Street, he made the trek uptown to take care of her and bring clean clothing and more medicine.

  Saul Steinberg and Sigrid Spaeth, shortly after their first meeting, dancing at Benjamin Sonnenberg’s Gramercy Park mansion. (illustration credit 25.1)

  It was a far different relationship from the one he had had with Hedda, wherein she took care of all the details of their daily life. With Gigi, he was also the caretaker, responsible for the happiness and well-being of a girl who had become his ward as well as his lover. In the short time he had known her she became the center of his existence: when he listed his “engagements for the week,” he noted that she left for Provincetown on Sunday and he must write to her on Monday; on Tuesday he had to design a record jacket for RCA and lunch with Russell Lynes of Harper’s Magazine; on Wednesday he had to follow her instructions to shop for new shirts, handkerchiefs, and a hat because she didn’t like the ones he wore. Also he also had to have a photo she liked enlarged to give her as a gift when she returned. On Thursday, when she was back and recovering from her illness in his apartment, he had to find a book on Mozart because she wanted it, then take her to a movie, and afterward “buy Gigi something.” On Friday he had to follow her command “Don’t drink too much.” On Saturday he drove her to the house in
Springs, and on Sunday he had to do something that shocked everyone who knew him: to shave his mustache, because she didn’t like it. He said he would take her anywhere in the world she wanted to go for her birthday, and off the top of her head she said Niagara Falls. They went, “but I never got to see the Falls,” she told her diary. And in the week following, he phoned everyone of any importance whom he knew in the world of art and design to see if they would give her work as an artist or graphic designer.

  “GIGI” WAS THE NICKNAME SIGRID SPAETH insisted on being called, and if people to whom she was introduced slipped and called her Sigrid, she would correct them in a voice that was a raucous and irritating nasal whine, so at odds with her stunning physical beauty. Friends described her as “classically Nordic, Teutonic, with lovely rich thick brown hair, large dark brown eyes, and a beautiful complexion—so healthy.” She was slightly taller than Saul, between five-eight and five-ten, with a heavier bone structure, which gave her the appearance of being much larger and stronger than his thin, fine-boned self. Her body was as curved and sculpted as a fine marble statue, and Steinberg showed her off proudly, unembarrassed because her physical appearance represented his idea of Eros. “She was everything he wanted from a woman in bed,” Hedda recalled many years later. “He knew he was robbing the cradle but he didn’t care.”