Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Gigi was an outspoken woman who never hesitated to vent her true feelings, even though she knew her eruptions would lead to ferocious arguments, black silences from Saul, and total separation as each waited stubbornly for the other to give in and apologize. Usually it was she, because she was dependent on his financial generosity, and that was why, when he announced suddenly that he was going around the world alone, she was miffed but said nothing. Now that he was back, she was restless. The term was ending and she wanted to go somewhere. Europe was out of the question this year, as he had to make money, so he promised her an auto trip through the western states, but not until late summer. Until then, he needed to catch up with everything that had happened while he was away and line up possibilities for future work.

  Steinberg had not published a new book since The Labyrinth in 1960. Like his previous two, it had not sold well, and now all four were out of print. There had been two other recent books, but they were mostly reprints, compilations of drawings taken from the earlier ones: The Catalogue appeared in the United States and Steinberg’s Paperback in Germany. Alexander Lindey was still handling all his book contracts, but he was overwhelmed by the barrage of requests that came to his office on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, mostly to reproduce Steinberg’s drawings in other publications. Lindey thought Steinberg’s financial interests would be best served if he continued to vet all contracts, but he insisted that the time had come for Steinberg to have an American literary agent who would deal specifically with publications, as Mrs. Jennie Bradley did in Europe.

  Steinberg was seeing a lot of Arthur Miller now that he was married to Inge Morath, and with their urging, he agreed to be represented by Phyllis Jackson at the agency of her name (where Miller was represented by Kay Brown). Jackson soon found that Steinberg was the kind of client who “needed a lot of hand-holding, a little too much for her,” which was how the young Wendy Weil, just starting out at the agency, was assigned to deal with what she called “Steinberg’s scut work,” the continuing flood of requests to reprint Steinberg’s drawings in other books and periodicals. Weil handled them all with such dispatch and efficiency that a cordial working relationship resulted, and when she left for the Julian Bach Agency around 1971, Steinberg followed her, first there and then to her own agency when she founded it some years later.

  Before Steinberg went around the world, Cass Canfield reminded him that he still owed a book to Harper & Row and urged him to come home with one. He thought about it while he traveled, and when he returned, the idea of questions of identity was uppermost in his mind. As he retraced his steps through places he had been during the war, he thought about who he had been in those days and was disappointed to realize that the man he had been previously was not the same man who had just returned as a tourist. He sensed that a new book would have to be far more autobiographical than the previous ones, and for that reason he was determined to call it “Confessions.” The book bore that title until the eve of publication, when he reluctantly changed it to The New World, fearing that he was in a profession where such a title as “Confessions” would leave him “vulnerable to the stupidity of critics and scribblers.” By the time the book was published a little over a year later, he found that he had indeed entered into a personal New World, so the title took on multiple meanings that became his own private joke, his veiled jest to the world.

  FOUR MONTHS HAD PASSED SINCE STEINBERG returned from Japan, and he told Aldo that he had resolved none of the issues that troubled him when he went away and was more confused than ever by “amorous delights and suffering.” Ostensibly he and Gigi were a couple, a status he wanted to maintain even though his behavior continued to be the same as it was when he lived with Hedda. Her observation from the early days of their marriage still rang true: “Saul thought he had the obligation to seduce every woman he met, no matter whose wife or girl friend she was.” He still slept with a succession of women with whom he had previous ongoing sexual encounters, even as they led separate lives and forged their serious and lasting relationships elsewhere. And he did not hesitate to have casual sex with any new woman who struck his fancy.

  Unlike Hedda, who suffered his infidelities in stoic silence, Gigi railed and ranted and then went off to have her own independent sex life. He was surprised by how much he resented it when she behaved exactly as he did. It created a troubling time in his life, and as he always did whenever disturbing events invaded his dreams, he kept a dream journal. In one, he and Gigi were in a forest where dogs barked to signal the approach of a hunter. The hunter morphed from a man into a long-haired reddish monkey about four feet tall and Gigi became a frightened cat who jumped into Saul’s arms. He had difficulty holding on to the Gigi-cat and felt it grow tense and ready to jump. Saul dreamed, “If she jumps now, lost forever.” He tightened his grip on the dream cat and woke up in bed to Gigi’s screams because he was squeezing her arm so tightly it hurt. In another dream he was in Venice, taking a water taxi around the lagoon, trying to catch up with an elusive Gigi, whose boat was always one stop ahead of his. He transposed his next dream into a drawing for the newsletter of the American Council of Learned Societies that featured a man with a bull’s-eye for his head and a woman with a square for hers. It was another in joke, but this one was not so funny: Saul told Aldo “at a crossroads with her and must decide—a mess.”

  They were at the first crossroads in their long, fractious relationship, and as Steinberg was in command, he chose the road forward. Again, quite unlike Hedda, Gigi chose not to follow but to go her own way. He chose to accept honors and invitations while she chose to become more of a hippie than ever. While he accepted accolades and entry into the highest echelons of society, she used drugs, got drunk, and picked up men. One of his honors came when Paul Rand invited him to become a fellow of Morse, one of the two new residential colleges at Yale designed by Eero Saarinen and featuring sculptures by Constantino Nivola. He was flattered when James Laughlin asked him for a blurb—not a drawing—for a book of Stevie Smith’s poems, as he thought it far more impressive to comment on a writer’s work than to illustrate it. Steinberg was invited to join the National Committee of Citizens for Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey as part of an august group that included Aaron Copland, Charles Eames, Martha Graham, Walter Gropius, and Calder and de Kooning. Jean Stein and William vanden Heuvel, to whom she was then married, invited him for cocktails in honor of John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who were speaking in support of Robert Kennedy’s senatorial campaign. He was also a sought-after dinner guest in the highest social circles: Mme. Helena Rubenstein invited him to dinner; Bert Stern invited him to meet the model Dorian Leigh; Amanda and Carter Burden invited him to a black-tie dinner for Geraldine Chaplin; and Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Sonnenberg invited him to meet Hedda Hopper, an invitation he accepted with disgust, as he abhorred her politics.

  He did all these things alone, as Gigi either sulked, brooded, and smoked marijuana at home or went bar-hopping with friends like the young Mimi Gross, who lived across the street from Steinberg on LaGuardia Place. Gigi had also become dependent on Evelyn Hofer and Humphrey Sutton, who treated her like an adult daughter, which gave her another kind of security. It was, however, a dangerous dependence, as Evelyn and Humphrey liked to play off one person against another; while swearing that they kept everything Gigi told them in confidence, they often repeated it to Saul. Ruth Nivola watched the drama play out from her house across the road and now and again brooked Saul’s wrath by trying to intercede. He dismissed her concerns as “the Nivola family spectacle, which is a cross between Balzac and Joyce.”

  Ruth Nivola was one of a number of mothers who worried about the attention Saul Steinberg paid to their teenage daughters. Steinberg had been captivated by Claire since she was a child, and now that she was a lovely and intelligent young woman, he found that he could engage in lively conversations with her about books and paintings. He called her “Chiaretta” and was generous about giving her everything from sp
ontaneous drawings of things that happened in daily life to special valentines or the carved wooden boxes he liked to make. He even had calling cards printed for her that announced “Chiaretta!” Ruth was an attentive mother who kept a stringent eye on the friendship, which remained correct for the rest of Steinberg’s life. Dore Ashton was another mother who became upset after she brought her fifteen-year-old daughter to a working lunch at Steinberg’s house to discuss an article she was writing. As they were leaving, he invited the girl, to whom he had said very little, to return the next day for a private lunch. Ashton was direct and to the point: “She is fifteen and cannot drive and therefore cannot get here on her own, and I certainly am not going to deliver her!” When Steinberg invited a third girl, who was just sixteen, to a lunch for just the two of them, her mother wrote a much harsher letter to Steinberg, saying that she had no idea what he was up to but would not allow him, “even in complete innocence … to put her in a situation of questionable taste.” She ended in sarcasm, telling him not to “put such temptation before her sociable little heart until she is considerably older.” These three invitations appear to be the only ones of this kind that he made; he never referred to why he made them in any of his occasional diary writings, and he left no explanation for such curious and uncharacteristic behavior.

  He did, however, frighten Anna, the nineteen-year-old daughter of his friend the Italian journalist Riccardo Aragno, when he invited her to spend a weekend in Springs. Anna Aragno was a ballet student who shared with Steinberg an “Italian affinity based on intellectual interests” and enjoyed it when he took her to the theater or the ballet. She felt no qualms about spending the weekend alone with him, because she assumed that his feelings were paternal because of his friendship with her father. In the middle of the night, she woke up, “petrified with fear,” to find him in her bed. He embraced her, but she “froze and wouldn’t budge,” until he eventually “just sort of gave up and went to his own bed.” The next day he drew her portrait, capturing her downcast face and hands crossed tightly over her thighs. It was the last time they were together other than on social occasions.

  SAUL AND GIGI LEFT FOR THE western states on August 4, 1964, driving long and hard the first day as far as Wheeling, West Virginia. As soon as they got onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a tire blew out and they had to buy a new one, which put a damper on the entire trip. Steinberg thought Wheeling was a rough town, distinguished only by a good army and navy store, where he bought a “smokey [Bear] hat.” He was not happy about making a detour to Columbus to stay with Gigi’s sister, Uschi, and her husband, Bill Beard, but it made Gigi happy so he did it. Between August 6 and her birthday on the ninth they drove from Columbus to Chicago, Des Moines, Council Bluffs, Omaha, and Ogallala, Nebraska. They spent her actual birthday on the road between Ogallala and Cheyenne, and she was ecstatically happy with everything about the day, from the scenery to Saul’s devoted attention. The rest of the trip took them through the desert of Utah to Navajo Indian reservations that made them feel as if they were in concentration camps. They drove across the desert with the windows open to the hot winds, speeding at 90 miles an hour or faster, both describing it as an experience unlike any other. They crossed Arizona through Caliente, Tuba City, Flagstaff, Window Rock, Phoenix, and Gallup, New Mexico before traversing Texas, from El Paso and Uvalde to San Antonio and Houston. Throughout the trip, the goal was to see how far they could go in a single day, so they could tire themselves out and not have to talk to each other as they crashed late at night in a roadside motel. They went to Natchez, Selma, and Montgomery, Savannah and Charleston, and over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to Washington. They did not stop in New York but went directly to Springs, where on August 26 they collapsed in exhaustion, each of them loaded with questions they dared not broach while on the road.

  Once back, Saul tried to avoid the major issue Gigi wanted him to decide by concentrating on the illustrations Aldo wanted for a short book he was writing, which was intended for a primarily Italian audience: a loosely woven description of his travels through America coupled with his philosophical musings on such topics as “the limitations of liberty.” The text fit Steinberg’s current concerns, and some of his quasi-philosophical drawings seemed appropriate as illustrations, but he dawdled unnecessarily over which to choose. Pretending to concentrate on Aldo’s book was a good excuse to evade Gigi’s question, a simple one which was not yet an ultimatum: When was he going to divorce Hedda and marry her, and then, would he let her have children? He didn’t answer, and for the time being she stopped asking.

  Several decades later, when she stopped calling herself Gigi and had become the mature Sigrid, she reflected back on her first ten years with Saul Steinberg and saw for the first time how lonely she had been throughout most of them. One of her strongest memories was of sitting alone in her bedroom most evenings and then going to sleep simply because she had nothing better to do, while he sat in his own room contentedly reading far into the night. When they walked up the road to Louse Point on lovely summer evenings, he refused to hold her hand, never putting his arm around her or giving what she lacked and needed, “the more primitive togetherness of people cuddling.” By the time she called herself Sigrid, she was a perceptive judge of character who described Saul as being satisfied with a “spiritual togetherness” that was not enough for her: “My life is not based on my intellect, rather on the senses.” She made another discovery as their relationship stumbled on: that actual sex, either as a single act or in quantity, was not of major import to her; rather, what mattered most was “the nearness, the pleasure of touching in passing that’s reassuring and satisfying, the sense of a body being there rather than a political figure.”

  They were both exhausted after the trip, and exhaustion was not the proper state in which to make life-changing decisions, especially after a month of driving dangerously fast to go as far as possible, as if eluding pursuers. Gigi went back to the city, because Saul told her what he had earlier told Aldo: “Tired now and, as always when I come back from these experiences, never sure that I’ll be able to resume my work.” She knew they were at a terrifying impasse and it was probably best to let things ride for now.

  CHAPTER 30

  I HAVE TO MOVE

  I have to move. I left everything to the last minute … I don’t find myself an apartment because I don’t have a clear idea of what I am or want to be. Husband? Painter? Old, young, uptown, downtown, man about town, hermit? Also: rich or poor?

  Steinberg knew for almost a year that New York University had taken over Washington Square Village. In December 1963 he was notified that present tenants would be allowed to renew their leases but that as apartments became vacant, they would be rented to the university’s faculty and staff. He did nothing about renewing his lease, and the following August he received a letter saying that as it was expiring and he had not replied to several previous letters, management assumed that he planned to vacate. He got as far as reading the real estate ads, but there as in everything else, he was crippled by malaise; at the last possible moment, at the end of September 1964, he renewed the lease. “I thought summer would last forever,” he told Aldo as he more or less drifted until Christmas, when he and Gigi went to Roxbury, Connecticut, to spend the holidays with Inge Morath and Arthur Miller.

  The relaxed informality of the Morath-Miller household provided a welcome buffer for Saul and Gigi, who were not quite on the outs but close to it. Good drink, excellent food, and pleasant company did much to relieve the tension between them. Inge was another of the older women to whom Gigi looked up as something between a substitute mother and an older sister, and it helped that Inge liked Gigi and enjoyed conversing with her in their native German.

  Whatever relaxation they found in the Connecticut countryside evaporated as soon as they returned to New York and began to snipe at each other before they were even out of the car. On the spur of the moment, Saul decided that they had to get out of the cold and announced that they would go t
o Santo Domingo, where he had not been since he lived there as a refugee. They went first to Jamaica for a week, which passed without incident, mostly on the beach, and then to Santo Domino for a brief day and a half, which gave him little time for sentimental journeys to old haunts. They flew home via Puerto Rico and were both in a much better frame of mind.

  Before they left, Steinberg had mailed to Maeght in Paris a collection of drawings plus the thirty-three photos that he and Inge Morath had decided upon for a publication that Maeght titled Le Masque. Morath had known of Steinberg through Cartier-Bresson, but Gjon Mili had actually introduced them by asking Steinberg to let Morath take his photo when she arrived in New York in 1956. For their first session in 1956, Morath was thinking of a formal portrait-of-the-artist-in-his-native-setting and Steinberg agreed to sit for it, so she was surprised by the man who opened the door of the 71st Street house he shared with Hedda, wearing a brown-paper-bag mask on which he had drawn a self-portrait. He was delighted when she laughed at his prank and took her into the big kitchen to meet Sterne. Morath noticed that the room opened onto a large backyard, and she asked Steinberg to stand against the fence or next to the statuary in various poses and to wear some of his other masks. The formal photo session never happened as a “wonderful game” began, with Steinberg changing his clothes and donning different masks and Sterne joining in as well. Steinberg was delighted with Morath’s perception that “different sartorial details and various positions or gestures influenced the impact of the mask.” The session, which was supposed to last for an hour, took the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening, as they moved into the house and up to Steinberg’s study, where he sat behind his desk or posed against interior walls, as did Sterne. It became a game all three liked so much that they enlisted their friends to help them play it throughout the next several years. By the time the book was in preparation, many of their friends in the city (Evelyn Hofer, Jean Stein, and Hedda’s dear friend, the artist Vita Peterson, among them) had donned masks; in later years, when they held photo sessions at the Springs house, Arthur Miller and Sigrid Spaeth were featured prominently.