Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Steinberg was not actually sick of the publicity merry-go-round, but it was a mixed blessing. He was no longer just an artist whose work was easily recognized on sight (primarily by readers of The New Yorker); he had become famous and he was a celebrity. On the popular television program College Bowl, contestants were asked to identify “the line philosopher-artist-cartoonist.” Without even seeing a drawing, they all answered, “Saul Steinberg.”

  Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of him. Groups and organizations that recognized the cachet of using his name invited him to lend it; others simply wanted to welcome him among them. The Romanian Socialist Republic requested his company after the opening of the eighteenth session of the United Nations General Assembly; he was horrified by the invitation and ignored it. SACO (the Sino-American Cooperative Association), the organization of those with whom he had served during the war, invited him to the annual reunion; he never joined, never paid dues, and ignored this one too. Those he did not ignore tended to be political, but he was cautious about how he showed his support. A committee known as Angry Arts, whose members included David Dellinger, Paul Goodman, Grace Paley, and Robert Nichols, invited him to join a protest against the Vietnam War by appearing in support of those who planned to burn their draft cards in Central Park. He supported the protest but did not attend, and when this same group wrote to Picasso to ask him to withdraw Guernica from the Museum of Modern Art, Steinberg offered vocal support for that as well, but he did not sign his name to the letter. He had never hidden his support for civil rights and was pleased when a drawing he donated to support the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., was put on view in the Museum of Modern Art; when the Congress of Racial Equality asked him to join other artists in donating one of his works to raise funds, he sent a drawing of a knight on a horse aiming his spear at a tiny alligator. His support for Jewish organizations was always unwavering, and when Brandeis University’s Women’s Committee asked him to contribute to its annual auction, he sent ten signed catalogues of the Maeght show, which they estimated would bring in a minimum of $500, a substantial sum at the time.

  There were too many invitations, and because he still did not have a gallery assistant to help with the work or a full-time secretary to help with correspondence, he tended to ignore anything he did not want to do. A committee that included Philip Pavia and Lester Johnson felt the need for a new place where artists could gather and invited him to join the Second Street Workshop Club (formerly the 8th Street Club). He did not respond. When he ignored a letter from the Guggenheim Museum inviting him to lecture on his affinity with Paul Klee—a facile association that was beginning to irritate him more and more, and one that he did not want to promote—he not only ignored the initial letter, he also ignored the several that followed.

  Everything went well in 1966, and 1967 augured to be much the same. “I go on working (like the winners of lotteries),” he told Aldo, “recognizing that it’s the only valid pleasure.” To Aimé Maeght he described what he would be doing next: “I’m going to live in Washington for three months, in grand style in an elegant house, with a Chinese cook, etc. etc. Come see me!” He was not as welcoming to Sigrid, telling her to stay in New York and keep herself busy, as he would not have time for her. This time she did not confront him but confided her anger and dismay to a collection of diary jottings.

  Her insecurity pervaded what she wrote about how he had dictated every aspect of the relationship and she had gone along with whatever he wanted just so it would continue. Now she found “the constant fear of insults … unbearable.” It was “amazing” to see how unkind he could be, but she warned that if he continued to be so cold and undemonstrative, he would have no problem getting rid of her: “I may be slow and sticky, but even I slowly accumulate enough resistance to resign myself … As long as I am with you, I am dependent and my misery is at least partly your responsibility.” She blamed him for “getting me down, putting me down, and making me miserable.” Their relationship had disintegrated into “a constant watch on either side, for the offense from the other, or …” Unable to finish her thought, she left it there.

  She was alone on New Year’s Eve and saw very little of him before his departure on January 25. By February, even though there had not been anything like a separation, she was begging him to take her back, telling him she was “down” and not sure she should be writing at all: “Don’t mind my vocabulary. I’ll never be a pleasant or elegant letter writer—or probably person—for that matter.” When he did not respond, she tried a different tack. As he was in Washington, she asked, “How does the whole Viet Nam story look from there? Here it becomes more and more unbelievable. Maybe everybody including me should do something.” He did not respond to that either. He was conscious that he was not American by birth and careful not to make any overt gesture that might bring criticism. He had been reading Henry James and found a quote that he particularly liked: “It is a complex fate to be an American.” It came to mind often during his three months in Washington.

  CHAPTER 32

  SUCH A DIDACTIC COUNTRY

  The Washington experience is over now and I see it’s left me with a bad taste. It’s my fault. I went there to meet the chic, political world, a world I already knew to be a fake but which awed me. Now, having overcome the monster, it’s not that I feel better. But I worked well, or at least a lot.

  Ah, America—such a didactic country!” Steinberg said this every year when he was summoned like clockwork for jury duty in East Hampton as well as in New York. It was a blessing to be excused in 1967 when Charles Blitzer, the director of education and training at the Smithsonian, wrote a letter attesting that he was on “official duty” at the institution.

  The Smithsonian took care of all Steinberg’s arrangements for the move. His stipend for the three months was a handsome $25,000, with an extra $3,000 for the “unavoidable expenses of relocation.” In an article about local celebrities, the Washington Post featured his glasses (but not his full face) and said that he would live in the grand Georgetown mansion of Mrs. Harold Coolidge. As soon as word got out that he was coming, requests of every kind flooded the Smithsonian’s publicity office, all from local organizations and individual taxpayers who thought they were entitled to get something for their money from Steinberg.

  These were in addition to the requests from the local media and those in even greater number from international correspondents, who were delighted to have something other than politics as usual to write home about. A recalcitrant artist like Steinberg was grist for their mill, and the chase was on. The reporters’ letters literally begged him for interviews, and he declined them all. A headline in the Washington Star described their frustration: “Smithsonian’s Steinberg: An Artist Not-in-Residence.” Technically, he had no duties at the institution; he was simply to be there and do his own work, with the hope (but not the promise) that he would consent to give some sort of public program during his tenure, of his own choosing and in his own time. He was quite within his rights to ignore all the requests except for one that he could not legitimately refuse, from Mary Krug, the managing editor of the museum’s house organ, the Smithsonian Torch.

  With the Washington Post, Steinberg was “an easy interview…quotes just spilled out of him,” but it took several months of Krug’s reminding him firmly and persistently that he was “a subject of interest to Smithsonian personnel” before he would talk to her. Steinberg was capable of exuding tremendous charisma whenever he wanted to charm someone, but if he did try to impress Krug, she did not fall under his sway. She barely hid the tension between them in an article bound to raise the hackles of everyone who read it, including Steinberg. Krug called him “the Steinberg enigma” and quoted what the New York Times said about his place in the art world: that there were “mixed feelings about him among his colleagues, even among his friends. Some … consider him a major artist; but a few will not concede that he is an artist at all.”

  T
hey met in the Coolidge residence, a detached four-story mansion, “one of the elite of the elite in that high rent district [Georgetown],” where all Steinberg’s needs were catered to by four Chinese house servants, a couple and their two daughters—who were asked by the neighbors to go through his trash and give them anything with his writing or drawing on it. Steinberg called the house something akin to a “Norwegian Palace,” as it belonged to the widow of a zoologist who had specialized in “large anthropoid apes.” The library had an excellent collection of zoology books, classics, and many nineteenth-century travel writings, and the voracious Steinberg read his way through most of them. As for the Chinese servants, the husband “cooks pretty badly,” so Steinberg survived on boiled eggs and toast when at home, which was seldom, because he dined out every night and most days for lunch. The high living took a toll on his digestion, and he had to consult a doctor, who put him on a strict 2,000-calorie-a-day diet that he did not follow until he returned to New York.

  He met so many people that he had to keep a notebook of their names and jot brief descriptions to help remember who they were. Senator Edward Kennedy was “Teddy K—no gossip.” Other political luminaries included Averell Harriman, William Fulbright, and Eugene McCarthy. He liked “Mrs. Longworth: 83 yrs dtr of Roosevelt.” From the press, he met “Kay Graham, pub Wash Post,” “Herb Block [Herblock],” and “Scottie Lanahan, Scott Fitz daughter.” Gore Vidal rated only his last name without a capsule description, but Joe Alsop did better, earning a parenthesis: “(good food, snob).” Steinberg drew an arrow from the names of “Polly & Joe Kraft” to the word “HORRIBLE!” He renewed his friendship with the heiress Kay Halle, whom he knew from his navy days in Washington, and he also met a number of eligible and attractive women, whose names were on the list with no other identification, except for one who had a “bed w[ith] bells.”

  He did not meet President Lyndon Johnson, but Vice President Hubert Humphrey took him to a recital at Constitution Hall, where he met “the famous daughters,” Lynda Bird and Lucy Baines. Every embassy in Washington had him on the guest list, and he made false documents or diplomas for many of them, including the Venezuelan ambassador, who thanked him effusively for “the most admired diploma from the great philosopher, architect, and social critic, Saul Steinberg.” He did not meet any of the Supreme Court justices, but he went to the Court to sit in the gallery and sketch. He made a list of the justices’ names, collected their photos and signatures, and used some of both with only slight changes for his imaginary writings and documents.

  The one document that truly spurred his imagination was the Smithsonian stationery, which featured an engraving of the 1855 building known as the Castle, a huge red sandstone pile built in the late Romanesque–early Gothic style of the twelfth century, tailor-made for Steinberg’s imagination. By the time he left Washington, he had made countless drawings that incorporated the logo, but he left only thirty-six for the museum’s collection. He included the logo on drawings of teapots, dinner plates, and a drafting table; in another drawing, a dog stands on the edge of a cliff and dreams of it in a thought bubble above his head; in another, it graces a moonshine jug, top-heavy on a spindly table; and in still another, the logo adorns a bottle of India ink.

  All these drawings were play, as was the thirty-foot-long scroll whose inspiration Steinberg thought might have come from his daily contact with the Chinese house servants. He called it “a diary in drawings” on which he recorded the events of each day, working faithfully until he realized it had “enslaved” him. He abandoned it when he thought he had ruined it by “trying to make it too beautiful.

  All the reporters who denounced the “artist not-in-residence” might have been kinder had they known how hard he worked every single day. His output was steady, especially when juxtaposed with the constant socializing, which started in the afternoon and ended every evening with him in formal dress. And just because he was in Washington, it did not mean that he had left behind all the work that originated in New York. He had to put the finishing touches on the drawings for the Tillich book and deal with the details for the Brussels exhibition and the subsequent shows when it traveled to Holland and Germany. There was the usual flood of requests from publishers, corporations, and cultural institutions, which he had to ignore or reject, and the preliminary negotiations for agreements pertaining to an exhibition in Venezuela the following year, and several others in the year after that. He was also working on a vast new project, four curtains for Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat commissioned by the Seattle Opera Company. Steinberg was captivated by the task, because it was for a traveling company that performed in “remote fishing, lumber, and farm communities,” and he had fond memories of seeing some of them firsthand when he was in the northwestern states. He was quite pleased with the project and boasted of it in his interview with Mary Krug, telling her that “nothing is ever created in Washington except in a political sense” and that painting the opera curtains was the first boon of his residency: “In the short time I’ve been in Washington something has been created here.”

  WHEN STEINBERG WENT TO WASHINGTON, he and Sigrid had not been together for months. She was still attending classes at Columbia, working sporadically for a design firm, and occasionally doing the lettering for a book jacket. She continued to have relationships with other men which she initiated, then ended, and then usually resumed, almost lethargically and almost always in tandem with the ups and downs of her emotional state. Saul arranged for money to be deposited in her bank account at regular intervals, and he also paid the many bills sent directly to him by Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s, incurred by “Mrs. Saul Steinberg,” as her name on the charge accounts read.

  He planned not to return to New York until his residency ended, but he had to make an abrupt trip when his accountants advised him to protest another IRS audit. The bureau claimed that he owed an additional $5,956.02 for the years 1964 and 1965, which meant that he and Hedda had to appear at a hearing on a weekday. He did not want Sigrid to know he was in the city, but he feared that someone would see him and tell her, so he broke his silence and sent a polite letter telling her he was well and well looked after and that he might have to return to New York for a short time. She replied swiftly, but not until after she tried to phone and could not reach him because he had given her the wrong number. It was a disjointed letter in which she first asked if she could come to Washington for a weekend and then crossed out her next sentence: “Maybe I should take the hint and leave you alone.” She ended with the hope that she would hear from him again and with the poignant observation, “There isn’t anything else I can do.” A pattern of behavior was forming between them: whenever she was depressed or her mood swings made her act out in unseemly behavior, he always responded with alacrity to try to get her back onto an even keel. In this instance he phoned and told her that a ticket was waiting and she should fly down for the weekend. She was ecstatic.

  The only part of the weekend when they had “a good time together” was when they were “hiding under the blanket.” She found his affection “reassuring” and looked forward to his visit to New York the following weekend. Unfortunately, when he was there she asked him to clarify their status, and a violent argument ensued. Sigrid began by saying that since he was in almost daily contact with his accountants and his lawyer, and since he would be in Hedda’s company because of the audit hearing, she thought now was the time for him to ask Hedda for a divorce so he could marry her. She was thirty-one years old, she was tired of being his “sidekick,” and she wanted to have children. To calm her down, he told her that divorce would not be a simple matter, not only because of the laws in New York State but also because of the complexity of his and Hedda’s financial ties. He told Sigrid that he would have to consult the head of Neubauer and Berman, the firm that handled his investments, to see if divorce would be possible. It provoked her to rage: “Why do you behave like a hysterical old woman and go hiding behind Neubauer? Why do you have to
tell me what he thinks and sort of add that’s what you feel, too? Why can’t you be straight ever like a man!”

  He returned to Washington after the audit hearing, and except for the occasional letter or phone call, there was no real contact between them until he was back in New York at the end of April, and even that was usually only when she needed to discuss money.

  WHILE STEINBERG WAS IN WASHINGTON, he had a ringside seat for the controversy over Vietnam. He had been against the war from the start and quietly, gradually, met other people who shared his view. There were certain homes where they gathered to talk about what they might do, and there was such a feeling of hiding out in the face of danger that it brought back memories of “the way we met in air-raid shelters during the war.”

  The first major battle of the war began that November at Ia Drang and lasted for three days, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth; the U.S. Seventh Calvary was ambushed on the seventeenth, and a national protest was scheduled for November 27. On that day 35,000 protesters gathered at the Washington Monument and surrounded the White House. By the time of Steinberg’s arrival in Washington several months later, the war had given him back the “outrage” he thought he had put aside when he took off his navy uniform and returned to civilian life.