GOING OFF TO THE OSS

This applicant has about everything disqualifying that could exist. However an officer went from here [D.C.] to get him. He is physically disqualified and not a citizen. Is urgently wanted by VCNO for special duty in conjunction with activities of a schizophrenist, and being the pick of New York, is eminently qualified for duties for which wanted.Very nice fellow. Quiet and shy in appearance. Looks older than age … The man will never be a leader and is rated satisfactory only because his services are apparently urgently needed by the Navy Department. William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS, confided to his close friend the New Yorker editor Harold Ross that the military had an urgent need for skilled artists and cartoonists who could perform a variety of services. The most basic need was for artists who could draw simple pictures that explained various aspects of military life for soldiers who could not read or understand simple texts. The services also needed pamphlets, booklets, and flyers that could be used to communicate with the native population in countries where no Americans could speak the language. The OSS itself wanted to make propaganda to distribute behind enemy lines and needed natives of other languages and cultures to create it. Steinberg fit Donovan’s requisites on all fronts: he spoke Romanian and Italian fluently, French and Spanish decently, and English haltingly. He had lived in Italy and knew it well, and he could do his work with a few ordinary materials: all he needed to make simple and expressive drawings was a pencil or a bottle of India ink and a pen and whatever paper was at hand. Steinberg also filled a need for the canny Harold Ross: he could send drawings back from the front so that the folks at home would have a bird’s-eye view of what their boys faced every day.

Several weeks before that momentous first Sunday in February 1943 when Saul Steinberg met Hedda Sterne, paperwork of all kinds was zooming through bureaucratic channels on his behalf. Efforts were under way either to make him a naturalized American citizen or to waive the requirement so that he could be sworn directly into the navy as a commissioned officer as swiftly as possible. Other requirements, such as graduation from Officer Candidate School and fluency in English, were also waived so that he could be rushed into an assignment under the aegis of Naval Intelligence. He found all this activity slightly puzzling, because he had spent the last months of 1942 and the beginning of 1943 waiting to be drafted by the army as an “acceptable alien”; watching as his Selective Service classification changed from 4F (unsuitable) to 1A when his local draft board decided that even though he was a resident alien whose command of English was poor, he was “otherwise qualified for service in the Armed Forces.” He thought his destiny was to be a foot soldier in the infantry, and he had been waiting every day for his call-up, but once again influential friends were working on his behalf.

Everything in his prior life made him a prime candidate for the OSS Morale Operations (MO) Branch, the organization’s propaganda arm in the European theater. However, in its unfathomable bureaucratic omniscience, someone in Washington decided that Saul Steinberg was better suited to the navy than the army and that his talents could best be put to use with a landlocked naval unit in western China. He was assigned to the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, a group known by the acronym SACO, ostensibly a division of the OSS but one that worked mostly independently of it. As Steinberg knew nothing about SACO, he told Hedda Sterne that he was “going off to the OSS, to teach Chinese people, explaining things with drawing.” He was as bewildered by the assignment as she was.

Donovan wanted Steinberg so badly that he began the complicated vetting process that would lead to his commission by carefully looking for an evaluating officer with significant clout who would be willing to overlook Steinberg’s only dubious qualification: his complete ignorance of anything connected with the navy, from leadership to seamanship. Donovan made a highly unusual arrangement for the assistant chief of staff for readiness, on the staff of Admiral Ernest J. King, the CNO (chief of naval personnel), to send an officer to New York for the sole purpose of testing Steinberg. The officer gave Donovan the report he wanted, writing that “Mr. Saul Steinberg of New York city” was the “artist and cartoonist needed for a special project … the most suitable available individual.” The officer also agreed that Steinberg’s “completion of naturalization be waived,” as should the need for fluency in spoken and written English.

Despite the officer’s positive report, Steinberg’s appointment appeared to be jeopardized because he spent the next several weeks undergoing a series of mental and physical examinations by various navy doctors who found “everything disqualifying that could exist.” Mentally, they diagnosed him as having, in navy parlance, “PSN-mild-ND,” a mild psychoneurosis that had never before been diagnosed. Physically, the first doctors who examined him found “valvular [sic] heart disease, mitral systolic murmur,” and “visual defects” (he wore glasses for nearsightedness). These were disqualifications and obviously would not do; when Donovan read the report, he told the doctors to schedule a second exam. Several weeks later a new group of physicians pronounced Steinberg’s heart normal and his eyesight within accepted parameters. There was no mention of any mental disorder, and the original diagnosis was dismissed as nervousness over the exam and frustration at his inability to express himself in English. After all this, there was another hurdle: the director of naval officer procurement in New York, well aware of “the special circumstances surrounding the case,” ruled that Steinberg was not qualified to become a naval officer and therefore “prefer[red] to make no recommendation.”

Much debate and discussion followed between the New York procurement office and the several offices in the Washington Navy Department who were vetting Steinberg’s case, until everyone agreed to override the evidence and induct him. The rush was on to have all documentation finalized by the week of February 18, 1943. Everything was crammed into the same day, February 19, and in one swearing-in ceremony after another, Saul Steinberg took the oath to become a U.S. citizen, was commissioned as an ensign in the Naval Reserve, was assigned to the Morale Operations Branch of the OSS, and received orders to report for duty at the landlocked naval base in Chungking, China. Everyone was astounded but James Geraghty, the art director at The New Yorker, who expressed what they all thought: “God knows how your knowledge of the Italian people will benefit you in China, but perhaps the Navy knows best.”

Not knowing how to transport its new recruit to China, the navy covered all possibilities by requesting a special passport from the State Department, which included visas for Trinidad, Venezuela, Brazil, the continent of Africa, Egypt, the Sinai, Trans-Jordan, Arabia, Iraq, Iran, India, and his ultimate destination, China. He was in a frenzy to put his life and work in order, starting with updating the life insurance policy he had prudently bought several months earlier when he had registered for the draft. He was working in his steady and methodical manner to finish all his outstanding commitments to magazines when an entirely new set of orders arrived: the navy was not sending him to China immediately, but to Washington for “temporary active duty under instruction.” He thought he was going to Officer Candidate School after all, to become a “ninety-day wonder,” but first he was ordered to outfit himself with uniforms and wear them in public.

All his life, Steinberg was meticulous about the quality of his clothes and how they were tailored, and his uniforms were no exception. He had them fitted to his slim figure and was careful to keep the brass buttons polished and the shoes spit-shined. The first time he felt ready to be seen in public, he dressed nervously at Hedda’s apartment and together they took a walk through midtown Manhattan. Whenever they passed sailors on one of the avenues, Saul noted that they were raising their hands to their caps, but he was not sure what, if anything, he was supposed to do. Hedda stopped the next sailor they saw to ask him, and he explained how enlisted men were required to salute officers, who were supposed to return it. She asked him to go around the corner onto a quiet street with her and Saul, where he instructed the brand-new Ensign Steinberg, USNR, in the proper way to receive and return a salute. After a short practice session, Steinberg shook the puzzled sailor’s hand. He and Hedda continued on their walk, but they were disappointed not to pass another person in uniform he could salute for the rest of the afternoon.

THERE WAS A LOT OF WORK to finish before he went to Washington, and he concentrated on getting it all done. He also concentrated on teaching Hedda as much as he could about his personal relationships and business affairs so that she could intercede for him whenever it became necessary. He introduced her to Victor Civita, who had landed a prestigious and remunerative commission for Steinberg to design the jacket and create the illustrations for Chucklebait: Funny Stories for Everyone, a children’s book by the noted author Margaret C. Scoggin. Steinberg had commissions to fulfill for PM and The New Yorker, and he made a list for Hedda of the portfolio of cartoons he had amassed for them and other publications to draw on while he was away. Their editors liked the way he ridiculed bombast and gave a comic twist to the seriousness of war, as in his cartoon of an easily recognizable Hermann Göring, festooned in full Nazi regalia and covered with glitz that included flashing rhinestone swastikas on each epaulette. He was also preparing for the first American exhibition of his work, in April at the Wakefield Gallery on 55th Street in New York, where a young woman named Betty Parsons had taken an interest in his work.

Steinberg and Sterne before he was sent to China. (illustration credit 9.1)

As with so many other introductions to people with whom Steinberg formed meaningful friendships, the one with Betty Parsons came through Constantino Nivola. Steinberg was so close to the Nivolas that they were the first friends to whom he introduced Hedda Sterne, taking her to their apartment four days after he met her and urging her to value their friendship as much as he did. Hedda took to them at once and they became friends for life. Tino was the art director of Interiors, and through their welcoming hospitality at home, he and his artist wife, Ruth, were responsible for what would in later years be called networking: artists dropped in informally, as did gallery owners, museum curators, magazine editors, art historians, and book publishers. The New York art scene during World War II and the decade that followed was small enough that everyone knew everyone else, and the Nivolas could always be counted on to make something happen. Betty Parsons championed Steinberg and Nivola by giving them a dual show, and the reviews for “Drawings in Color by Steinberg, Paintings by Nivola” were favorable. Hedda was miffed that Betty took Saul’s work “more seriously” than her own, but not for long, because she recognized why: “Each week he was in The New Yorker brought him more fame. His rise was extraordinary.”

Steinberg and Betty Parsons with two unidentified guests at the opening of his first gallery exhibition. (illustration credit 9.2)

Saul introduced Hedda to Betty, and when Betty opened her own gallery, they both became her devoted clients. Through her they formed individual friendships with the glittering litany of painters whose work defined postwar American art, particularly Robert Motherwell, James Brooks, Jimmy Ernst, Ad Reinhardt, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, Theodore Stamos, Wilfred Zogbaum, and John Graham. John Graham introduced them to Elaine and Willem de Kooning, but Hedda and Saul soon had to limit their socializing: “Bill and Elaine lived at night and we lived in the daytime, so we had to stop seeing them. We didn’t have the stamina.” As for the other artists, they saw them on their own terms but “never at the Cedar Tavern. They were all changing partners down there and we never went in for that.”

Hedda already had her own friendships among artists and took care to share them with Saul before he went overseas. She had known Peggy Guggenheim since the late 1930s, when Hans Arp saw her work in Paris and urged Victor Brauner to send it to Galerie Guggenheim Jeune in London. The war forced Peggy Guggenheim to relocate to New York, where she renamed the gallery Art of This Century. When Hedda arrived, she reintroduced herself, and Peggy became her “first friend” and included her in several important group shows. Like all the other “recent Americans, refugees all,” Hedda found herself swept into the whirl of parties that Peggy held every night in her large house on Beekman Place. There she formed friendships with other émigré artists, among them Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, and André Breton. By the time she took Steinberg to meet them, “all these male artists were calling me ‘one of us.’ ” She made the mistake of taking him to the kind of party he detested, one of Peggy’s bashes, where at least “four hundred to five hundred people, all the European intelligentsia, wandered through the house during the night.” Saul went with her to several more before he refused to go again. He disliked the large drunken crowds and particularly the French refugees, who he thought had no interest in anything American and were only in the United States until the war was safely over and they could go back to France. He, who had no real sense of himself as belonging to any patria, found that “back home for me is not very clear [because] I have many backhomes.” He was keen to understand his adopted country, particularly now that he was about to fight and perhaps die for it.

AS SAUL’S RUSH TO TIE UP loose ends before leaving New York intensified, Hedda played an increasingly important role in his life. Remembering Saul at that time, she reflected that he always required someone to look after him, and “there was always someone, always lots of people who took care of Saul, helped him out, made things easy for him.” She listed all those in Italy who had helped him escape, all the Romanian refugees in Santo Domingo whom he had known from childhood and who made him part of their families, all the relatives who pooled their money and influence to get him to New York, and all the professional contacts who kept him out of the army infantry and saw to it that he was a commissioned naval officer in the fortunate position of being able to continue to practice his civilian profession while serving in the military. She was impatient whenever she listed this huge collection of people who loved and cared for Saul only to have him reject it and insist that he had no one to catch him when he fell through the cracks, as he was sure he would do at any given moment. He became angry when Hedda passed this off as his “Jewish fatalism, Romanian superstition,” and he refused to accept her rational dismissal of feelings that were deeply imbued in him.

He needed someone to provide a buffer and support, and he decided that Hedda was the one to do it. He reflected upon his relationship with Ada, who had done all sorts of favors and services for him despite her mysterious comings and goings, especially in helping him to leave Italy, but he insisted that she had never been “truly there” in the sense of devoting her life to fulfilling his needs and wants. Saul believed that Hedda could do this, and that her most important quality was to make him feel solidly grounded for the first time in his life. It was something she found both puzzling and amusing for the rest of hers.

“I was always overly protected,” Hedda remembered. “Someone always took care of me. I never did a tax return, paid a bill. I suppose I was able to take care of Saul because Fred [Fritz Stern] Stafford took care of me.” The security that her marriage to Fritz provided allowed her to keep “Saul’s neurotic needs” in perspective, but more important, permitted her to keep an emotional distance from him and from them: “When he was in the navy and before we were married, there were no promises between us. I was still married. We were not engaged. And I had a big affair while he was away.”

Despite Hedda’s extremely independent lifestyle, which she never tried to modulate or hide, Saul convinced himself that she was as besotted with him as he was with her and that she would give up her independence in a minute to take care of him. Without asking, he put her in charge of everything he wanted or needed, from shopping trips to buy more India ink and drawing tablets to preparing herself to take over all his dealings with Victor Civita and various magazine publishers. There was also a new possibility in the works when the publisher Duell, Sloan and Pearce wanted to collect all Steinberg’s drawings and cartoons for a book because of the success it had just had in publishing a work by another New Yorker cartoonist, William Steig’s The Lonely Ones. Steinberg had never heard of the publisher, but in early March he told Civita to proceed with negotiations but to confer with Hedda in every instance. He prepared to leave for Washington, thinking that the contract would be settled before he finished Officer Candidate School and pleased that everything was in Hedda’s capable hands. This led to their first major quarrel, during which they sat in silence over cocktails at the Beekman Tower Terrace on a dreary Sunday afternoon. She objected to the way he was using her, and he agreed that she was right to blame him, but as usual he had an excuse: it was the beginning of springtime and he was always unhappy at that time of year, and besides, he “was leaving and didn’t know how to take it, things were happening too fast.”

IN WASHINGTON, HE DID NOT GO through OCS as he had expected, because the length of time it would take for “such training would hamper and restrict the war effort.” He remained as uninformed about and unfamiliar with naval practices and procedures as he was in New York when he had to ask the sailor to teach him to salute. He was assigned instead to a “specialized billet” at the Interior Control Board, where he was supposed to use his “specialized skill or knowledge” to “prepare equipment needed for artwork on psychological warfare.” He was billeted in a hotel apartment, where the other residents were as closemouthed as he was about what they were doing, so he made no friends and was often lonely. Every day he reported for duty at Morale Operations, much as if he were going to work in a nine-to-five civilian business office. His training consisted of learning about different kinds of propaganda and different kinds and qualities of paper and ink, and listening to general lectures on the psychology of the native populations and occupying armies in the different theaters of war. Mostly he learned about the kinds of printing facilities he could expect to find, supply links for products he needed, and how his group was to communicate and cooperate with other MO facilities.

Much of the time he spent sitting in the corridor outside the office of Kay Halle, who worked in Morale Operations and thought Donovan must have forgotten all about Steinberg moments after he recruited him. “What are you doing?” she asked him one day. “Nothing,” he replied, so she put him to work creating cartoons that were subsequently distributed in Germany and Italy. When he drew a uniformed Nazi, it was with the head of an animal with a pointed snout and lizardlike tongue, and his Japanese soldier’s head was a crocodile with vicious teeth who wore a baseball cap and little round eyeglasses. It was one of his earliest drawings of what became a totemic animal.

On weekends he took the train to New York, passing the time by reading magazines and making his own drawings on top of articles and pictures in Life, Time, or the Saturday Evening Post, his favorite because of its many illustrations. Sometimes Hedda went to Washington to spend a week. During the day, while he went to the office, she went to museums or spent rainy afternoons tucked up in bed drawing or reading. When he came home, there was always “scotch & wine & apple pie,” foods he remembered while he was overseas and which for the rest of his life always made him think of her.

The spring passed pleasantly enough, and the work he was doing made the war seem far away and distant. One of his most enjoyable assignments was illustrating a pamphlet the OSS distributed to all new recruits. The pamphlet covered everything from how candidates were chosen to what they should take with them to foreign lands, how they should expect to live while there, and, most of all, how they should keep their mouths shut about the work they did and where they did it. Steinberg created an homage to Hedda with his illustrations. For the first one, “You Are Chosen,” he drew easily recognizable cartoons of the two of them preparing to throw objects at maps of Germany and Japan, he a book titled Background and Research and she a larger-than-life fountain pen with a wickedly sharp point. Under “Packing and Shipping,” he has them up to their necks in boxes festooned with shipping labels, and under “Learning to Live with Next to Nothing,” he drew their heads emerging from thimbles.

Saul thought of Hedda always, and it gave him pleasure to insert something of her into his work. Having her in his life, the routine of his weekday work, and the weekend train trips back to his old life in New York all lulled him into a false sense of complacency. If this was war, it was not so bad. Thus on April 18, he was completely unprepared for the change-of-duty orders that fatally disrupted his easy life. He was given eight days to prepare to fly to San Francisco, where he would board a ship that would not be identified until the proper time came for him to depart for the long, roundabout journey to China.

The pamphlet he illustrated with drawings of him and Hedda took on fresh new meaning, not just to remind him of her but also to help him get through the bureaucratic rigmarole that was about to begin. The pamphlet advised:

Let this be your stock answer to any leading questions:I haven’t any idea where I will be stationed.I am going to be doing some background and research work for the war effort. I understand, but I don’t know anything about the details.I haven’t the faintest idea where I am going. CHAPTER 10

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