by Deirdre Bair
Sigrid “Gigi” Spaeth was born in Baumhelder, Germany, on August 9, 1936, which made her twenty-two years younger than Saul Steinberg. Her father was a midlevel bureaucrat for the German railway and her mother was a housewife. She was born long after two older siblings: a brother, whom she despised, and a sister, who married an American GI and moved with him after the war, first to Columbus, Ohio, and then to the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood. When Gigi was still a child her father was transferred to Trier, where the parents and the two elder children lived during the war while she remained with her grandparents in Baumhelder. Her mother was often confined to hospitals for clinical depression, and Gigi did not rejoin the family until she was fifteen, to live with them until she was nineteen.
Gigi was fond of shocking people at elegant New York dinner parties by saying that her father had joined the Nazi Party in order to keep his job, which was the same reason he had dutifully signed the papers and then averted his eyes when the transports carrying Jews to the camps went through the Trier rail yards. She liked to joke that her parents’ only participation in Nazi activities had perhaps been to throw a stone or two through the window of a Jewish business on Kristallnacht. Because Mrs. Spaeth was so often hospitalized, Gigi’s maternal figure was Uschi, as her sister Ursula was nicknamed. Uschi was particularly important during the “terrible years of the war and just after,” and the two sisters remained devoted to each other throughout their lives, especially because Uschi protected Gigi from the harshness of their mother’s constant criticism.
Gigi’s parents were elderly and settled when their independent and exuberant third child was born, and her relationship with them was difficult and strained. Her teen years were full of rebellion against a mother who dismissed her as “evil or bad” during the brief periods when she was not hospitalized. Her father stood for “authority and establishment,” and because her mother was so often absent from the family home, he became the one who (as she recalled in one of the many diaries she kept) was always “ordering me, forbidding, disapproving of all I want and like. Telling me how to speak, dress, behave, etc.” In the four years she lived in her parents’ home, she could usually be found on the town’s main street, “hanging out after classes and cruising on Saturdays.” At one point she hitchhiked to Cologne to find a boy she had a crush on and together they hitchhiked to Holland. “It didn’t work out,” she told her parents when she returned.
She was one month short of her twenty-fourth birthday when she met Saul Steinberg and had been on her own since she was nineteen, when she had run away to Paris to work as an au pair. Her parents made Uschi tell them where she was and sent money to persuade her to come home; instead she used it to hitchhike to Avignon, and then throughout Spain. She returned only when the money was gone, and ran away again in the spring to Paris and another au pair job. She was now twenty and spent her free time “looking for love” at the pick‑up plaza in front of the statue of the Vert-Galant. When she didn’t find it, she hitchhiked to Lapland, and when she ran out of money again, she slunk back to her parents. They sent her to a school in the Saar District to study photography, for which she had a genuine talent, and after the course ended she went back to Paris, hoping to land a job. She didn’t find one, so she went to Brussels in 1958 to photograph the World’s Fair, but she did not encounter Steinberg there and had no recollection of his murals. On September 11 and on the spur of the moment, she went to Frankfurt and bought a ticket to New York. She was later vague about how she had paid for all these doings, and she was always vague about money except to say that she “took” some from her “Tante Else,” who also lived in Trier.
The flight to New York lasted seventeen hours, and when it landed at Idlewild Airport, she vomited with fear and relief. She knew of several other young Europeans in the city, who took her in and introduced her to Greenwich Village. She never explained how she survived until January 1959, when she met Joe Rivers and began a brief affair, which lasted until the end of March. On June 20 she had an abortion, and on the thirtieth she began to hitchhike across the country to California. She was hitchhiking back to New York when she was forced into a van by several men and raped in El Paso, Texas, an event she wrote about from time to time in a matter-of-fact, dismissive manner, with no further detail. By August 1959 she was back in New York and drifting, noting in a series of diary writings that she was alone on Christmas in the Cedar Tavern and on New Year’s Eve 1960 in Times Square.
She was vague about what she did until she met Steinberg on July 9, 1960, except to say that she was crashing in a friend’s apartment. She never forgot their first exchange, how in her “stupid and innocent enthusiasm” she raved about having admired him for a great many years. “So have I,” he replied. At the time she thought it was his cute way of trying to impress her. And then, just as suddenly as he had caromed into her life and let her take over his during August, everything cooled while he dealt with various catastrophes in September.
HEDDA CALLED TO ASK HIS ADVICE about a house she wanted to buy on Hog Creek Road in Springs, not far from the one they had shared, and she asked him to meet her early the next morning on the property. He left late that night and on the drive hit another car and “smashed the Jaguar.” No one was hurt, but there was significant damage to his car. While he was dealing with police reports and insurance documents and lining up inspectors for Hedda’s house, he received word from Lica that his father had died suddenly in the early morning hours of July 30.
Steinberg had been hemorrhaging money since he had moved and met Gigi, most of it on the Roman family’s house in Cachan. The house had to be gutted to a shell before installing bathrooms and outfitting a kitchen, and every room needed furnishings. There was also a continuing stream of local fees and tax charges connected with the purchase, which Steinberg had not been told of when he bought it, and they seemed certain to continue for the indefinite future. There had also been significant expenses connected with moving Moritz and Rosa to Cachan and then having to pay for an apartment (which he was already doing for the Roman family) until the house was ready. He was also sending money for an excursion to a French spa where Rosa insisted she had to go if she were to recover from the ailments that plagued her. Steinberg wrote checks for everything, including the $100 he had been sneaking to his father every three months.
There was no indication that Moritz was seriously ill before he and Rosa left for the spa. Rosa was, as usual, commanding all the attention, insisting that she suffered such pain that she would already have committed suicide if she was not afraid of being called “a neurasthenic mother” who brought shame to her children. Moritz told this to Saul as he described his daily routine of shopping, cooking, and cleaning, and then “poor woman and poor me, who must sit with her all day.” Still putting his wife first, in his very last letter, on July 28, Moritz wrote that “Mom doesn’t feel very well. Maybe the air will cure her.”
When Rosa didn’t nudge him awake at night to listen to a litany of her ailments, he usually slept soundly until morning, but around 3 a.m. on Saturday, July 30, he woke up, asked for water, and then stopped breathing. Rosa screamed for help and a doctor soon came, pronounced him dead, and took charge of removing the body from the hotel. A telegram was dispatched to Lica and Rica, and they arrived on Sunday afternoon. Despite the Jewish tradition of burial within twenty-four hours, French law forbade Sunday funerals, so interment was delayed until Monday. “You can’t imagine my pain,” Rosa wrote, genuinely shocked by an event over which she had no control, the unexpected death of her husband of forty-nine years.
An energized Rica took charge of the family’s logistics. His health had improved dramatically, and the doctors assured him that by the end of the year he could work. Steinberg used his contacts with Dominique and Jean de Ménil, who gave Rica an introduction to Jean Riboud, the director of the French branch of the Schlumberger oil company, Dominique’s family’s corporation. With the promise of a job on top of seeing his family securely settled in a good
home, Rica told Saul that he had given Rosa two alternatives, “either to remain in Nice and come [to Cachan] in mid September or move in right away on September 1st.” Rosa chose the latter, and they installed her in a comfortable pension where she would not be bothered by the children’s noise or subjected to the dirt and confusion of work on the house. However, they had to tell her that it cost 300 fewer francs than the actual rent, because she needed “the impression that she’s getting a bargain.”
Once the move to Cachan was completed, Rosa never stopped complaining. In her version, the house was filthy and Lica either ignored or berated her when she was not arguing rudely (Lica had secured a job as a graphic designer for the Jewish publication L’Arche and was wildly happy with her general good fortune). The children behaved like savages and kept the television on too loudly for Rosa’s taste (they were both well-mannered and highly intelligent; Stéphane had been admitted to the prestigious Lycée Henri IV in Paris, Dana was excelling in the local grammar school, and neither had time for television). Rosa begged Saul to take her away. Now that Moritz was gone, her memory of their ten years in Nice was far from reality: “We loved each other and lived beautifully in Nice … He was very satisfied with his beautiful life.”
Lica told Saul to ignore their mother’s complaints because the entire family was bending over backward to make her happy, even buying her a seat in the local Jewish temple so she could observe Rosh Hashanah. Eugène Ionesco’s wife, Rodica, had become Lica’s good friend, and she visited Rosa frequently to bring her treats and speak Romanian. Hedda’s mother and brother came too, and invited her to gatherings of other Romanian immigrants, but nothing assuaged Rosa. For Lica, content in her job and happy to live in the new house, it was “like being on a permanent vacation. Only poor Mom is trapped in her miserable universe.”
STEINBERG DID NOT GO TO FRANCE when his father died. He stayed in New York and afterward sent frequent checks but did not write letters. When he had lived with Hedda, it was she who wrote the chatty, news-filled family letters that he was too irritated to write. Now it was easier not to write at all than to reply to Rosa’s tales of misery and woe. He did not tell his family that he and Hedda had separated, and neither did she. She made a quick trip to Paris to tell her mother and brother but asked them to keep her visit secret from Rosa and the Romans. She also stopped writing to them, in effect removing herself from the lives of Saul’s family and leaving it up to him to decide when or what to tell them. At the end of November, when Gigi was busy moving into Saul’s apartment, Rosa was still wishing him and Hedda “lots of health” and “a long and contented life together.” In almost every letter to Saul, she wondered why Hedda no longer wrote the chatty letters that had been her only connection to her son’s life and work.
Hedda had gone through a humiliating period after Saul moved out. Although she initially insisted that they had to part as friends, it was he who, uncharacteristically, did the hard work of ensuring that their postmarital relationship evolved into “his idea of friendship, what it was he thought friendship was.” They had shared all their friends, and most were at a loss about how to keep both of them in their lives. The friends were puzzled about the separation, but it was not a subject they could raise with Saul, who sent the clear and unspoken message that everyone was to welcome Gigi and no one was to ask questions about Hedda. Some friends felt that they had to choose one or the other, and they usually chose Saul, because he was the more social of the two and the one they saw most often. As Hedda described it, everyone “found it a little difficult because all Saul ever did was to go live in another apartment. We were always in contact. We never formally separated. We always stayed married. Only his body left the house and the marriage.”
Friends were sheepish about how to greet Hedda when they encountered her on the few occasions that she appeared in public, at large parties such as museum or gallery openings or in the Hamptons during the summer season. Over the years many drifted back into her life by simply showing up on 71st Street to sit and talk in her kitchen and stay for one of her excellent meals. There was a fairly large group who insisted throughout their lives that they stayed friendly with both Sterne and Steinberg, but years later, when many were long dead, Hedda Sterne edited the list to a small group: Betty Parsons, the art critic Dore Ashton, and Tino and Ruth Nivola.
Hedda admitted in retrospect that she probably added to the initial confusion over how others were to behave by withdrawing into hermetic seclusion. She continued to live as she had always done, painting for twelve hours every day: “I did that with or without a man, but in spite of that, I didn’t think of what I was doing as a career. I always had a man to take care of me and that freed me to do what I wanted, which was to paint without having to go around to the galleries and enter into that art museum–gallery world.” After the separation, she did have “one unfinished love affair that lasted about a year and a half, but after that I decided it wasn’t worth it: too much loss of energy and time [from painting]. To the horror of all my friends, I became celibate.”
GIGI MOVED INTO WASHINGTON SQUARE VILLAGE in November, when Steinberg was busy nonstop with launching The Labyrinth. She could not have been happier as she thanked him for changing her life: “I was a zombie when you met me and made me into a person.” She set to work at once to assume all the duties of organizing his daily life that Hedda had previously performed. However, there were several major differences between Gigi and Hedda: Hedda was Saul’s wife and always would be, and Hedda had her own money and her own career, while Gigi had neither, and also no legal standing. When Gigi moved into Saul’s apartment, they had not discussed the status of their relationship beyond the fact that they would live together. She put any worries she might have had aside, simply assuming that if they stayed together, he would eventually divorce Hedda, marry her, and let her have children. As for work and money, she was totally dependent on his beneficence for both.
He did try to get work for her, and his friends did fulfill their promises to help her find it. Every now and again a commission to design a book jacket came in, but over the period of the years they spanned, the projects were few and far between, and many could be considered quid pro quo, such as the jacket Gigi designed for Steinberg’s friend John Hollander, which featured one of Steinberg’s drawings. Steinberg did make his phone calls and sent his letters to Gigi’s prospective employers, but then he more or less closeted himself in the bedroom he used as his studio to work on final preparations for launching The Labyrinth. That left her on her own for long stretches of time, and in her loneliness she sent him a postcard that poignantly illustrated her situation. It showed Ellis Island, and on the back she wrote, “To you my darling from this Ellis Island of my mind. Missing you a lot in the other room.”
THE REVIEWS FOR THE LABYRINTH WERE universally good, but Steinberg did not think the important one, Grace Glueck’s in the New York Times, was a selling review. It was short and more about him than about the book. Glueck described him in a way he found offensive, as a “relentless recorder of urban types, graphic punster who can put a single line to double or quadruple purpose, and Picasso of the art form known as the doodle.” As if at a loss for what more to say, she filled the rest of the space with his biography—his Romanian birth, Italian education, and American navy service—and ended with the facile comment that one of his line drawings might not be “the shortest distance” between two points, but it was certainly the wittiest. Glueck’s review appeared too close to Christmas, when busy buyers of gift books could easily miss it. Some months later, the Times of London almost made up for her review by dealing more with Steinberg’s art than with the artist, praising the book for “even greater inventiveness than its predecessors.” The reviewer called attention to E. H. Gombrich’s analysis of Steinberg’s art in his influential Art and Illusion before touching on Steinberg’s talent for making straight lines perform multiple functions within a single drawing and his ability to use words and images to create the idea of
sound. There was a degree of damning with faint praise: the reviewer wrote that because the drawings were so “deliciously comic,” they probably kept Steinberg from being recognized as “far more imaginative than the surrealists … and one of the most versatile and accomplished of living draughtsmen.”
Steinberg was furious about both reviews, thinking that they “failed to grasp the essential quality” of the book. He demanded that Cass Canfield phone the review editors of both publications and lambast them for their reviewers’ obtuseness. He was enraged when he made the call, and it left Canfield “feeling sick.” To make sure that Steinberg had calmed down when he tried to address his complaints, Canfield wrote instead of telephoning. He said that he regretted that the book was published so close to Christmas, which in retrospect was too late to spark demand for an unusual coffee-table gift book that had been reviewed only in New York and not in the regional or local papers. He tried to offer a gentle apology for the bad news that as early as January booksellers were already returning copies to the publisher because it could “hardly [be] considered a new fresh item for 1961.” As for Steinberg’s insistence that Canfield complain to the book review editors, he tried to explain the futility of such an action and hoped that Steinberg would let the matter rest. The book sold around six thousand copies and shortly after went out of print, leaving the publisher with a large overstock of almost fifteen thousand copies, which were still unsold five years later.
Despite Steinberg’s opinions, every review was positive and encomiums poured in from individuals as well. It was not sufficient to mollify him, not even when Edmund Wilson and Lewis Mumford lavished praise, or when Canfield told him how useful Aldous Huxley’s admiration would be in promoting the book after Huxley wrote to say it was “a treasury of spidery fancies.” Canfield planned to use the phrase prominently in advertising. He was still trying to placate Steinberg three years later. “Let’s face it,” he wrote, “we were all disappointed … but there is no point in looking backwards.”
