by Deirdre Bair
Preparing the Maeght book was fun for Steinberg, but it was also hard work because of the exhibition connected with it. He had to choose drawings and ship them to France, and to choose titles, set prices, and determine the order in which he wanted them hung. For the book he had to determine the content and the order of the pages, and in many instances arguments ensued when his wishes conflicted with those of the publisher, Jacques Dupin. It was quickly apparent that not everything Steinberg wanted could be included in the book, so he postponed decisions about the final choice for later but remained insistent and even more specific about the masks. He drew them on brown grocery-bag paper and wanted them mounted “on canvas perhaps,” where they would be shown alongside Inge Morath’s photographs and hung in a grouping that represented “a temporary sculpture recorded by photography … psychological and social definitions of Western Europe and America.”
Steinberg worked on the book’s mise-en-page and maquette sporadically throughout 1964, still hoping for an exhibition in November 1965. It soon became clear that there was so much work to do for both that nothing could happen before early 1966. With the book, progress was hampered by Steinberg’s perfectionism, which made it a constantly changing entity. At a time when air mail was expensive and took five to seven days, time passed and the book was stalled until Steinberg was satisfied with each individual change in the visual content, with the written texts taking as much, if not more, time to settle.
Without hesitating, Steinberg chose Harold Rosenberg to write the preface, but there was another request he was hesitant to make himself: he wanted Maeght to ask Jean-Paul Sartre to write the introduction. Steinberg believed that his drawings were “quite similar” to Sartre’s thinking, but if Sartre chose not to write it, Steinberg suggested Nabokov, “who knows how to see.” He explained his reluctance to ask them himself because the fear of being refused would bring back old memories of other “celebrities who wrote crap about my drawings.” Sartre and Nabokov both refused, and Jacques Dupin suggested Samuel Beckett, who declined as well. Steinberg then suggested André Breton, whom Dupin refused to ask, saying that his reputation was passé and would not enhance Steinberg’s. Instead, he suggested Michel Butor, describing him as one of the most talented and respected postwar “new” novelists in France whose philosophizing was on a par with Sartre’s and whose fiction placed him with Baudelaire, Balzac, and Victor Hugo. It was enough to convince Steinberg, and Butor wrote the preface, entitled simply “Le Masque.”
Then there was the adjunct publication that accompanied each of Maeght’s major exhibitions, an issue of Derrière le Miroir, which required another selection of drawings plus a special lithograph to be inserted in the publication, which could be removed and framed. As for the dates of the exhibition, Steinberg insisted on mid-April or later, while Maeght insisted that it had to be early March. Steinberg reluctantly agreed but in his usual careful yet suspicious manner had Alexander Lindey prepare a veritable blizzard of contracts, agreements, and other documents. To soften the blow of what appeared to be a barrage of distrust, Steinberg apologized for Lindey’s “lawyer-ese,” even though he was responsible for it.
All the work he had to do for the Paris show galvanized Steinberg into dealing with other projects, such as finding a way to stall Sidney Janis, who insisted that he was Steinberg’s primary dealer and demanded that any show in Paris had to be preceded by or concurrent with one in New York. Steinberg was reluctant to offend Janis because his gallery brought in higher prices and better sales than the others; Janis was not pleased with the compromise Steinberg offered but eventually accepted it, to hold a joint exhibition at his and Betty Parsons’s galleries in December 1966.
Work was melded into a frenzy of activity and travel that began in February 1965, when Steinberg went to Paris for the first time to work on Le Masque. Much of it was social, as always, but he was clearly attending to furthering his public image and his income. In Paris he met Jean Folon, who wanted to make a film using his drawings. A week later he was in Rome, seeing Aldo Buzzi and dining with Mary McCarthy at Nicola Chiaromonte’s but also seeing Italo Calvino, whose writing he admired and who later wrote the introduction for Steinberg’s fifth Derrière le Miroir. When he returned to Paris, he called on Marguerite Duras to discuss a project that was never realized. On an impulse, he flew to London to meet with his British publishers in the hope of persuading them to buy his two forthcoming books. His friend and fan Michael Davie, the editor of the Observer, was eager to “milk the [paper’s] exchequer” for a lucrative commission and made him the guest of honor at party that included “two Astors” and his good friends the Australian artist Sidney Nolan, and his wife, Cynthia, whom Steinberg had known and liked since his first postwar trip to London.
Back in New York, March passed in a whirl of personal and professional activity. He was Gigi’s witness at the March 2 ceremony at which she became an American citizen, and immediately after, he made frantic preparations for a trip to Cocoa Beach, Florida, where he was an official NASA artist at the launch of a Gemini rocket. His diary was filled with mundane things to do (“buy toothpaste, razor blades”), which filled him with resentment toward Gigi, who did none of the housewifely things Hedda had always done. When Gigi asked him one night to open a tight jar lid, he snapped, “Be your own gauleiter.” Off he went to Florida, hobbled by indigestion after writing another note to remind himself to try whole-grain brown rice on his return.
HE RETURNED TO NEW YORK IN a calmer frame of mind and with his digestion improved enough to accept dinner invitations from Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who was famous for the unrecognizable concoctions she served at dinner parties. Steinberg was fond of the couple but fastidious about food and could not bear the glop she doled out. It irritated him that they always crowded ten people around the table, who all talked at once, shouting over each other in loud and spirited conversation, and at one especially lively gathering he sat glumly silent. Jeanne-Claude asked him why. “They are all talking and I am not,” he said. “And I am not a listener, I am a talker.” With Christo, he had “a real refugee affinity,” admiring him “as an artist who invented himself … not only himself but his art, and even more amazing, he invented his public.” Steinberg liked even more that they had both studied architecture but never practiced it.
Perceptive friends recognized Steinberg’s desire to hold forth and took care to create social situations in which he could. Priscilla Morgan usually had eight at her round table, and if Isamu Noguchi was there, he and Steinberg alternated in dictating the tone and tenor of the conversation. Jean Stein made sure that a congenial group surrounded Steinberg, managing gracefully to seat him among guests who let him do all the talking. She remembered his monologues as “more than enjoyable. You wanted to hear what he had to say.” Saul Bellow had a slightly different impression: “Conversation seemed to make him awkward…you felt, when you met him for drinks or dinner, that he had prepared himself, had gotten up a subject from his very special angle. You were careful not to disturb him by introducing terms of your own and spoiling his planned effects.”
Jeanne-Claude and Steinberg at one of Priscilla Morgan’s famous dinner parties. (illustration credit 30.1)
FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL MONTHS, STEINBERG’S calendar was full of invitations proffered by a list of glittering hosts from the worlds of high society and the arts, from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Arthur Schlesinger to Günther Grass and Muriel Spark. In short, he was out every night, impeccably dressed in bespoke clothing, always bearing the perfect hostess gift and always on his own, without Gigi. By July thunderclouds were threatening the relationship, and she proposed one of her favorite ways to get rid of them: to ignore them through a haze of recreational drugs. This time it was LSD.
On July 7 they drove to the Foundation Castalia in Millbrook, New York, made notorious by Timothy Leary, to take LSD under his supervision. Gigi was a steady user of drugs, mostly whatever was being sold on or near the Columbia campus, while Saul generally made
do with the occasional marijuana cigarette. She was so insistent that LSD would give him a far better experience than the mescaline he had taken six years previously that he gave in and decided to try it. Steinberg initially described the experience as one in which the drug was administered so that doctors could observe him while he was in the process of creating: “They wanted to see what I would do—brushes and pens supplied and so on, put on records. Listening to western music, even Mozart, became a nightmare.” He described something different to Aldo, saying that LSD had given him “a day of such happiness that the memory of this possibility existing in me makes everything else unimportant, reduces miseries to their proper scale.” He said he was convinced that the drug would become “something very important that can change the meaning of life.” Interestingly, although he took other drugs from time to time, there is no record that he ever used LSD again. The euphoria dissipated when the drug wore off, and when he went home, his disposition returned to what passed for normal: the gloom of depression. It coincided with his sister’s first trip to the United States.
Lica came alone in July 1965 to the overwhelming heat and noise of a New York summer, so they spent most of the time in Springs. She was content to laze away the days sitting outside in the sun with a stack of old newspapers and magazines, or to ride bikes to Louse Point for a late-afternoon swim, then go home for a quiet dinner, usually of grilled fish and vegetables from Gigi’s garden, followed by an evening of listening to music and eventually reading herself to sleep. When Saul described Lica’s visit to Aldo, he said that it had been pleasant to have the time and tranquillity to renew and deepen their friendship in ways they had never done before, but what intrigued him most was when he studied her as a scholar and saw “certain differences and suspicions caused by a simple fact: that we now belong to different social classes.”
SAUL’S LEASE WAS UP FOR RENEWAL again when Lica returned to Paris, so he went to see an apartment at the elegant Beresford on Central Park West, though he immediately ruled it out because the Upper West Side was a foreign territory. Gigi had never liked Greenwich Village and often expressed the desire to return to the Upper West Side, where she had lived when she first arrived in New York, and on September 23, 1965, she moved there. After she became Saul’s companion and while he lived in Washington Square Village, she gave up on the idea until they were driving home after Christmas with the Millers in 1964, when he said something that shocked her so much she began quietly to prepare herself to leave both him and her own apartment in the Village. Gigi asked Saul if he planned to marry her and let her have children. He told her, for the first of the many times he said it over the years, that he did not love her, and besides, Hedda was still his wife and even the thought of children was beyond the realm of possibility.
When she recovered from the shock, Gigi’s first objective toward achieving independence was to get a job, which she did, in a design studio where she was mostly assigned to do hand lettering on preliminary sketches and to draft layouts. The pay was certainly not enough to support her, so she remained financially dependent on Saul’s largesse and stuck in the Village. When she complained once too often about how far Waverly Place was from her work and her classes at Columbia, he told her to find an apartment wherever she wanted to live and he would buy it for her. She jumped at the chance to have a permanent home, mortgage-free and legally in her name, and chose one in a fine prewar building at 375 Riverside Drive, on the corner of 110th Street. It was on the second floor, where she could see the Hudson River only when the leaves were off the trees, and then only if she stood just so at the proper side of the large bay window in the light-filled corner room where she set up her drafting table, unpacked her books, and considered herself divinely happy. She lived there for the rest of her life.
Gigi kept busy on her own until the holidays were approaching, when she realized that it had been several months since she had seen Saul and made a note asking herself, “No Xmas?” She had been as social as he, renewing her friendship with Richard Fedem, a young instructor at Columbia who had married and divorced since their first encounter, and she became close to some of the neighbors in her building, particularly Jay Fellows, a young professor at Cooper Union, and his wife, Courtney. She also had several lovers, telling them all straightforwardly that she was the sometime mistress of Saul Steinberg and dependent on his support, and if he called she would have to leave to go to him. Most of her lovers still wanted something serious, among them “Bill,” who told her a relationship could only be what she made it, and “Peter,” who urged her to let him take their affair to a new level. As Christmas approached and she did not hear from Saul, Gigi was upset about being alone. She considered accepting Harriet Vicente’s invitation to join her and Esteban in Prince-ton, but in the end she stayed on at Riverside Drive and waited for the phone to ring. When she sent her regrets to Harriet, she signed her name as Sigrid, and Harriet replied that she was glad to know her true name. It was the one decision Gigi was capable of carrying out alone, without Saul Steinberg’s support or approval: from now on she wanted to be known as Sigrid Spaeth.
Meanwhile, Saul continued to make his social rounds and the rest of the time to stay alone in Washington Square Village. He renewed the lease for another year, until September 1966, because of lethargy over the thought of moving all the possessions he had acquired, from the “junque” he brought back from his travels to the large collection of art he was informally amassing. Bill de Kooning gave him a drawing and Sandy Calder exchanged a mobile for one of his drawings. When Sidney Janis owed him $400, Steinberg asked for a Magritte instead. Lacking energy to work, he mostly read, finishing War and Peace and rereading Tolstoy’s short stories. He marveled at Tolstoy’s ability to write in what he was sure must have been a state of “ecstasy.” Steinberg told Aldo that upon reflection, he could remember drawing in a state of “well-being” for two or three unspecified years, a satisfactory enough state until he realized that “well being doesn’t count—what’s needed is ecstasy.” Thinking about it left him sadly convinced that he had never known creative ecstasy, which deepened his depression as the year ended.
He berated himself for being a semirecluse who worked sporadically and produced little of lasting importance Even going to Springs gave him no pleasure: “I seldom go to the country, alone I don’t like it. Even the landscape is sad, trees with red leaves, like the painted old women of America.” He had always liked to drive fast to East Hampton on the empty roads of wintertime, but this was no longer a thrill. Being alone in the house did not provide the same contentment as sitting alone in one room when he knew that someone else was in the next and available if he wanted her.
Quite simply, Saul Steinberg did not know what he wanted. He was fifty-one years old and at several crucial junctures in his life and work. Gigi, now known as Sigrid, was happy to be settled in an apartment of her own but nervously awaiting his summons to play out the next chapter of their relationship—to be dictated by him and complied with by her. He had brought in enough money to be so financially secure that he no longer had to work four to six months of every year to meet his responsibilities. There was enough money to work only when he wanted to, and only on what he wanted to do. He could buy anything that caught his fancy and still be generous to family and friends, especially Ada, whose sole support he had now become.
From the mid-sixties on, his commercial work—if it can be called commercial—was mostly for nonprofit organizations which he supported by donating drawings, or for individual friends who asked him to provide book jackets or illustrations. In both cases, he sometimes designed posters, but here again he did the work in his own time and on his own initiative, and everyone had to take what he gave them. Even George Plimpton, who flattered him by asking him to “look around for something that might do for a Paris Review poster,” had given up waiting for it by the time Steinberg finally got around to doing it. He did, however, manage to contribute a drawing in time for a benefit concert by a chamber music
group with which Alexander Schneider was involved, perhaps as his way of responding to a harsh letter Schneider wrote that rankled deeply. Schneider was critical of the “new” Steinberg, who was so busy accepting invitations from the wealthy and privileged that he had no time to spend with the old friends who cared about the “man” Steinberg rather than about how the “artist” Steinberg could be used to enhance the dining and drawing rooms of the rich and famous.
Steinberg was never one to brood over snide comments, but he paid attention when Hedda sent one of her little unsigned squib notes saying much the same thing. He had gotten into the habit of telephoning her frequently, sometimes daily, and as it had been during their marriage, the conversation was always about him.
“Why do I feel the need to talk to you every single day?” Saul asked in one of their rambling telephone conversations. “Oh, that’s easy,” Hedda replied. “It’s because we are the two people in the world who love you most.”
