Slaving away with pleasure

To work, I must isolate myself. It’s a weakness of mine. I also find it very difficult to accept things from other people. I prefer to exchange gifts, or even to pay excessive sums to get exactly what I want. I realize it’s a kind of arrogance: I want to be the person in charge, the person steering the car, the one in control. If anybody does something for me, I feel used, manipulated, no longer free. Hedda was in France in the winter of 1948, ostensibly to prepare for settling Saul’s parents, while he stayed in New York to work on the many commissions that had spring deadlines. That was the reason Hedda gave to friends to explain her long absence, but in reality it was one of the many times she went away to give Saul time to think about the state of their marriage and the responsibility he bore for the problems within it. From the moment she left, he missed her and reverted to the wartime lover who could not live without her and worried that she would leave him, a far cry from the dominating and domineering husband who took her for granted when she was at home. He wanted to join her in France as soon as he could get his various commissions under control, but he claimed to be afraid of commercial airliners and refused to fly, insisting that he had to sail in a first-class cabin on the best ocean liner. It was difficult to secure passage when the completion dates of so many projects (most notably of the Cincinnati murals) were indefinite.

He was surprised to find how upsetting it was to be alone in their apartment without her. At night the building was full of noises he never heard when she was with him, and sometimes he woke up in a panic when he reached for her and found her side of the bed empty. He even ate his meals in her seat at the table so that he didn’t have to look at her empty chair. He wrote to her almost every day and in each letter told her how much he loved her and how she was his dearest friend and the best thing ever to happen in his life. He wrote these letters during the time that he was at the height of his philandering; Hedda was well aware of it, and it was the cause of the first and thus far most dangerous period of tension between them.

Many years later, when she was an incapacitated woman in her nineties, Hedda spent much of her time reflecting on her marriage to Saul. She described it as “highly interesting, occasionally wonderful, very often difficult. Saul was not prepared for conjugal life; he wanted total freedom from every point of view.” Hedda knew from the beginning that hers would be an open marriage, with “Saul having casual affairs every two minutes if he could have managed,” and she had no choice but to accept it. She did not need to read the appointment books he always left open on his desk to know when he was in the midst of an infatuation, when his only nod to discretion was to note his assignations in an easily recognizable shorthand or code with cryptic notations of single initials, room numbers, and times. Even though Hedda always considered herself unconventional, she still resented it when he casually described “interesting things” about other women’s bodies, such as “her ankles as seen from the left,” or “the inside of her upper arm,” or her “nice earlobes.” Only much later, when she forced herself to accept that his idea of marriage was “Fellini’s 8½,” was she able to feel more compassion than anger toward him: “In a way, sex was his life. He deprived himself of true union because he was not ever in love.” It took her years to arrive at this understanding, but in the beginning it was hard.

Hedda had gone to Paris earlier than she needed to and was staying longer than she had originally planned just to give Saul time to realize what she brought to the marriage. It was the first of the many separations she instigated in order for her absence to make his heart grow fonder—a difficult course to take the first time she did it, but one she used repeatedly during the years they lived together. Indeed, as soon as she was gone, he broke off several of his more persistent liaisons with women who wanted him to commit to more than casual and occasional sex, for without the security of Hedda’s presence, they frightened him. Worried that she might retaliate by initiating a relationship of her own in Paris, he told her that they should both remember that they were married to each other and should not “harm” themselves or their marriage in any way. Now that she was gone, he realized how much “self-confidence” she gave him, and the reason he missed her so much was that he truly loved her.

HE WENT OUT ALMOST EVERY NIGHT just to avoid the loneliness of being in the apartment without her, but he curtailed his womanizing and socialized mostly with male friends, particularly Richard Lindner, to whom he and Hedda had become close. Within minutes at their first meeting, they both knew that Lindner would become their lifelong friend, and he did. Like them, he was a refugee who embraced all things American from the moment he arrived in 1941. They were all approximately the same age and had many things in common, from their personal backgrounds to their political underpinnings. Lindner was born in 1901 to German Jewish parents, and his upbringing in a cultured middle-class household in Nuremberg was similar to Sterne’s. Like Steinberg, he was always aware that as a Jew, he was an outsider in a precarious situation in his birth country. Lindner was educated at art academies in Nuremberg and Munich and worked for a short time in Berlin before becoming the art director of a Munich publishing house. He resigned in 1933, the day after Hitler became chancellor, and went into exile in Paris, where he became active in the Resistance, served in the French Army, and was briefly interned before he made his way to the United States. When he met Steinberg and Sterne in 1945, he was working as an illustrator for books and magazines, among them Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, but he was eager to devote himself to painting. In 1953 he put his friends into one of his most famous paintings, The Meeting, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1954, when he had his first solo exhibition, he followed them to Betty Parsons’s gallery.

They and Lindner shared the same idiosyncratic but insightful responses to much of contemporary American art and artists. Steinberg credited Lindner with a “proto-pop [art] color sense,” one that he shared. They had many friends in common, both abroad and in New York, which further deepened their bond. Saul was a dedicated poker player and spent many pleasant evenings playing at Sasha Schneider’s apartment with Lindner and Gjon Mili. Lindner introduced them to the set designer René Bouché, and Saul and Hedda befriended him as well.

Invitations continued to pour in while Hedda was in Paris, and Steinberg accepted most of them, but only if he was in the mood. He saw a lot of his old friends, the writer Niccolò Tucci and the photographer Dave Sherman, but he dismissed them as his “old bores” on the rare occasions when he felt like staying home alone. When Hedda was in New York, she generally accompanied him, but after she returned from the Paris sojourn, she told him she did not like the constant round of parties and dinners and preferred to spend her evenings at home reading or painting. She liked it when friends dropped in for casual suppers in her kitchen because she liked to cook and enjoyed intellectual conversations, but only one-on-one or with two or three people she knew well.

Saul, on the other hand, liked to get dressed up and go out, to places where more and more he could count on holding the floor. He liked to dine at the home of the dancer Sono Osato and her real estate developer husband, Victor Elmale, because they always deferred to him for conversation. It was always a pleasure when the Covarrubias were visiting them from Mexico and he could steer the dinner table conversation to Hedda and her work, which they all admired. Irving Penn invited him to an opening of his photographs, where he chatted with Tatiana and Alexander Liberman about future projects he might do for Vogue, and soon he was one of their favorite dinner guests. These occasions soothed the paranoia that always lurked in his mind, that he would be a penniless failure because at any moment everyone might stop buying his work; in this instance, because he had just done a series of drawings for the magazine that did not “come out well” and Liberman had rejected them. No publication had done this in recent years, and the Libermans’ invitations assuaged his fear that Vogue might become the first of many.

He was working hard every day and drawing constantly, but much of what he submitted to publications that had hitherto accepted everything he sent was now being culled, sometimes with a high percentage of rejections. When a politically themed drawing he was trying to make for a New Yorker cover during the forthcoming election cycle was rejected—“something corny with eagles and floating allegories”—it made him look back with the eye of a critic at the earliest drawings he had done for the magazine; he concluded that they were “mediocre,” and he could not see any genuine progression or development in his work since then. He worried that he might become “forced by necessities to perfect my mediocrity.” A qualified joy came when various commercial firms accepted without comment a dozen advertising drawings because they made “lots of money (no Victor [Civita] involved).”

Every morning he went to his studio and worked on commercial projects and his own drawings; each afternoon he returned to the apartment, where he took over Hedda’s workspace and tried to paint with oils to amass enough canvases for a show at Betty Parsons’s gallery. He told Hedda he was amazed by how much he had to learn about using oils and how difficult it was. He was pleased when he taught himself to spread color with a knife and with the tricks he picked up from studying the work of other painters in museums, particularly Matisse. When he was invited to a “private selected pre-preview” of his friend Joan Miró’s show at MoMA, he went to see what techniques he might copy, but he left after ten minutes, sure that he would learn nothing while surrounded by a “sad bunch of snobs.”

WITH HEDDA AWAY, HE HAD LOTS of time to worry about his general health, as he had still not fully recovered from the illnesses and bad diet of the war years. He tended naturally toward hypochondria, and so he took care to give Hedda the details of each whinge and twinge in every letter as a ploy to elicit her sympathy and perhaps an earlier homecoming. Without her, it also seemed as if every illness that made the rounds of the city felled him, and he had various forms of “flu” or “grippe” throughout the winter. Worst of all were the problems with his teeth, which had been seriously neglected for years. He was now consulting dentists, endodontists, and dental surgeons for months on end, a situation that lasted every year for the rest of his life. Because his teeth gave him his worst “real hell,” he was delighted when his primary dentist took a skiing vacation and he got a respite from the several-times-weekly sessions, which sometimes lasted several hours. When the dentist returned, his only relief came on the several occasions when he went to Cincinnati to supervise the installation of the Skyline Restaurant mural in the Terrace Plaza Hotel.

Steinberg took Constantino Nivola with him, because he needed help with the installation. He had absolute trust in Tino’s vision of how it should be hung but was irritated by his old friend’s devotion to his wife and children, who were the main subjects of his conversation as they worked. He believed he had to baby Tino by listening, and he found it a little boring, especially after long days of being polite to the local people, who treated him with “silence from the upper classes and big insulting laughter and scorn from the uncultured.” It made him furious when they asked how much he was paid for the mural and what it represented. He told Hedda that Cincinnati was a miserable city and thanked God that they did not “have to depend on or flatter people like that … ruthless, fat, and strongly intent on the most modest and vulgar things of life.”

Of the mural itself, he went back and forth with the usual gamut of emotions he felt during large and long projects, first liking it enormously, then wishing he could make significant changes, and finally throwing up his hands and wanting to walk away from it. Eventually he decided that he liked the way it turned out, because he could stand in the enormous room and see almost the entire length of the mural with a single sweep of the eyes, and “that’s a pleasant surprise.” It inspired him with new ideas about adding to and improving everything about it, but it was too late to make changes, so he left it as it was and caught the train back to New York.

It was beginning to seem as if murals were going to be the most constant form of expression in his career, as Henry Dreyfuss was pestering him to come to lunches and meetings to discuss the ones for the four ships. When Steinberg compared the murals for the ships to those for the Cincinnati restaurant, he felt more secure about the new project, because the shipboard setting was on a smaller scale. He thought he could do the full-scale drawings while he was in Europe with Hedda and have them shipped back to New York, so he began to investigate a definite sailing reservation. Just as he started, a request for another mural came from an architect in Washington, D.C., who wanted him to make a large one for a hotel there. Even though Steinberg was worried about not having enough money to be able to spend two or three months in Europe in fairly affluent comfort, he turned down the offer.

There were, however, lucrative smaller commercial assignments that he thought he could dash off quickly before he left. House and Garden editors asked for twelve drawings they could use to advertise their magazine in The New Yorker. They told him what they wanted, but he thought their ideas were silly and convinced them to use his, which were “a lot funnier.” Holiday magazine wanted to sign him to a contract that would guarantee him a certain amount of work each year. He wanted to do it but thought he should first consult the editors at The New Yorker, who let him know they disapproved of his working for any other magazine on anything but a freelance basis. He gave up the idea, but only after they gave something in return: correspondent credentials that he could use whenever he traveled.

Steinberg was unable to secure the May 7 passage he wanted and had to wait until the fourteenth, when the only space available was a cabin on the Queen Mary that he had to share with a quiet businessman, who used the room only to sleep and had no interest in pursuing a friendship with the famous artist. Steinberg was jubilant that the crossing would take a swift five days and put him in Cherbourg on May 19. He worked furiously to tie up all the loose ends in New York, but there was also a lot of socializing, as everyone wanted to wish him bon voyage. Monroe Wheeler invited him to dinner with two other good friends, Russell Lynes and Loren McIver, and Sasha Schneider gave a dual farewell party, because he was leaving on a concert tour. After a dinner at the home of the architect Ben Baldwin, Saul was able to give Hedda the good news from Betty Parsons, who was another guest, that two of Hedda’s large paintings of agricultural machines had been selected for a national tour of museums and for the prestigious exhibition of American painting at the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh. “Very important,” Saul declared. Parsons gave him the even better news that she had just sold one of Hedda’s larger canvases for a good price. “Congrats, Pig, and worst,” he wrote, using one of his pet names for her (“Rabbit” was the other) and taking care to avoid the evil eye by invoking the Romanian custom of wishing the worst of luck instead of the best. He told her he would bring her some fine brushes that Leo Lerman sent as a gift so that she could keep on working.

Hedda had been staying with her brother and his family in Paris, but once Saul arrived they wanted to rent an apartment that was big enough to work in, and Schneider thought he had the perfect solution. He wanted them to exchange apartments with Agnes Capri, a multitalented actor, singer, and theater producer, who had a stunning duplex on the Quai Voltaire, overlooking the Seine and the Louvre. At first the idea excited Saul, but the more he thought about it, the more it upset him. He did not know Agnes Capri, and even though her apartment was spectacular and she was vouched for in the highest terms by his trusted friend, Steinberg’s paranoia came to the fore and he rejected the exchange. He told Hedda he could not bear to think of a stranger prowling among their things and possibly laughing at their possessions or sneering at their way of life.

He did, however, make one significant rental when Schneider agreed to take the Packard convertible for $100 a month. Saul was ecstatic, because he loved the car and didn’t want to sell it, but he was even happier when Igor Stravinsky (who had come to Schneider’s dual farewell party) agreed to sell him a Cadillac convertible he no longer needed, as he and his wife were going to California. Saul couldn’t wait to get to Paris, but he was already anticipating coming home and taking his first road trip in the Cadillac.

IN HIS LAST LETTER TO HEDDA before he sailed, Saul wrote that he could not bear to think of being separated from her ever again, and once they were together he was going to tell her all the intimate things he had been unable to say since they were married. He wanted to take her “on the biggest and noisiest honeymoon, in France (or maybe go somewhere else, we’ll see).” The Berlin airlift had begun, and Hedda wrote back that she was terrified the Russians would start bombing and something would happen to him on the voyage to France or to her if she got on a ship to return to New York. She was sure there would be a nuclear war, but Saul told her not to worry because wars always started in the fall and they might as well enjoy a Paris honeymoon before then.

In Paris they stayed in a hotel on the Boulevard Raspail rather than an apartment, just long enough to visit the galleries, where Steinberg thought “a lot of bad art [was] running around.” He called it “the famous artistic climate of Paris, shit that makes good lettuce grow.” He would have stayed longer if Aldo had been able to come (he sent money for him to make the trip), but Aldo and Bianca were working in Mantua on one of Lattuada’s films, so Aldo suggested that Saul visit him instead. Saul and Hedda started out in a rental car for Italy via the French Jura and Geneva, but the fog was thick and the mountains frightening, and it took them several days to get there. After a few days they left the car and took a very slow train that meandered through Provence to Toulouse and finally Biarritz, where Saul felt “indifferent and stupid.” The town and the people made him want to find someplace ugly where he could work, but first he had to go back to Paris to await his parents’ arrival.

SINCE FEBRUARY HE HAD BEEN BRACING himself “for the big Romanian cloud” that he expected to envelop him and that made him, a true skeptic, think he needed to get himself “psychologized.” It reassured him to think he could always talk to a psychologist for those “moments when I feel really low,” but despite the worry about supporting so many people, he never fell that far down in the dumps. He told Aldo that “it’s no small matter, the thought and sight of five or maybe seven new dependents arriving from Romania.” Before he left New York, he had already been helping various Romanian refugees, either those he befriended in Santo Domingo or those from Bucharest who had come directly to the United States in the Romanian quota. He knew that they considered him a soft touch who could be counted on for financial help, but he never complained and gave generously, quietly, and willingly. Still, it got so that he hated to answer the phone, because so many times the caller greeted him in Romanian and he knew that a plea for money would follow. He was tired and depressed by the thought that once his family arrived, his burden of responsibilities would not only increase but also remain constant. To add to his depression, he was still tired from the frenetic work schedule he had kept in the first half of the year, and so it was probably not surprising that the joyous honeymoon he envisioned was less than satisfactory for either him or Hedda. By the time they left Biarritz, Saul was his usual intense, controlled, unemotional self, while Hedda continued to play her role of the agreeable and complacent wife. They were tanned but tired of killing time and eager to go home.

THEY RETURNED TO NEW YORK IN October, on a good ship in a calm ocean, where they “ate bad meals on massive gold plates.” Using the Milanese variant of a vulgar Roman expression, Saul told Aldo that he had wasted enough time playing and if he hoped to lead a happy life next summer, he knew he had to dedicate himself to industry and commerce for the entire winter.

His parents had arrived in Paris shortly after Christmas Day, his mother’s birthday. Hedda’s brother and his wife were both slightly overwhelmed by Rosa’s needy and demanding behavior, but they did everything possible to make her and Moritz comfortable and to keep the unpleasant details from Saul. He was relieved that their arrival, although “forced” on him, turned out to be straightforward and without complication and that all his fears were unfounded. He wanted to put off seeing them until the spring.

Once he was back in the States, his work went well; he was “slaving away at it with pleasure,” particularly three new color designs for the Patterson Fabric Company, one of the best firms in the country, with which he had an ongoing commission until the mid-1950s. He began the new year, 1949, by looking for a new and larger studio, a single space where he could combine an office and a workplace, and he found a large room on the tenth floor of a building at 38 Central Park South that had impressive views overlooking the park. He did a series of drawings in preparation for the first large-scale work, a new mural called “An Exhibition for Modern Living,” curated by Alexander Girard for the Detroit Institute of Arts and later hung at the J. L. Hudson department store. As all the other architects involved in the project were exhibiting “the best design (in their opinion) of the past twenty years,” Steinberg decided to depict “all the ugly or stupid things that have been done.” He drew “the panorama of a whole city, with buses, stores, houses, cottages, skyscrapers, etc.,” as well as cross-sections of various buildings and houses that showed the different kinds of life that went on inside them. By the time he finished, he had twenty-four drawings, which were later put into a small exhibition at the art institute, where he hoped for a good sale. The show drew record crowds, but not a single one was sold. Girard was sorry to relay the bad news that the people in Detroit did not understand “values.” Steinberg decided to concentrate on the positive: he had “a bunch of cartoons” in the works, mostly for The New Yorker, and was beginning to collect old material and make new drawings for a still untitled book commissioned by “a rich publisher.”

All these projects made Steinberg realize that work was “therapeutic” for him, “but still more therapeutic are the money and success that come with it.” He told Aldo that he doubted he would have the strength to give up money and success, so what he gave up instead was the possibility of devoting himself purely to his art, especially to painting. If his own work did not actually take a back seat to commercial projects, it was certainly coequal with it until the early 1960s.

SIMON MICHAEL BESSIE WAS “the rich publisher” at Harper & Brothers who wanted a book of his drawings and cartoons, and who wooed him with fine lunches and dinners in order to persuade him to prepare one. Steinberg thought he had enough drawings among those he had published earlier, all of which he could reuse, because he always entered into the same agreement with other publications that he had insisted on from his earliest dealings with The New Yorker: he sold the rights for first-time reproduction but kept the originals and the right to use them as he wished. He had more than enough material ready to hand, and with some new drawings to unify them around a theme, he knew he had a book.

The new book presented the same problem he had had with All in Line: coming up with a title. He thought about “Wrong Century, Maybe,” or simply “The Wrong Century,” but he decided that this was an important title that had to be saved for a good novel, as it could be better explained through a written story. For a short time he liked “Rapid Transit,” but after much “searching and indecision,” he settled on The Art of Living, chosen because it was “an old and honored title that means nothing (it makes me laugh).”

Unlike the case of All in Line, the reception for The Art of Living was tepid. The book was published in early fall in an edition of 20,000 copies, but despite favorable reviews, by Christmas only 10,000 had been sold and Steinberg feared the book would be remaindered. All the reviews were positive and he thought some of them were “even intelligently written,” but he still found it “a mystery what makes a book sell.”

True to his decision to favor money over art, he spent the winter concentrating on tried-and-true projects he could fulfill without having to think too much or too hard about them. He was now hiding from new work far more than accepting it, as he was reluctant to take offers from prestigious publications for which he would have to come up with something that consumed both time and energy. Carol Janeway at Harper’s Bazaar, Leo Lerman at Mademoiselle, and several editors at Knopf as well as other publishers and publications made offers. Art News hounded him with phone calls because he didn’t answer the editors’ letters, and worst of all, other artists, from college art students to wannabe illustrators, sent him their work or pounded on his door with portfolio in hand to ask for “the maestro’s” opinion. He complained of having to work like a businessman for eight to ten hours every day, especially after he had to hire a Miss Elinor to take care of much of the detail. He wasn’t used to having anyone in his studio while he was working, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t even like having to give her directions about how to respond to the many requests before sending her off to take care of them elsewhere. Miss Elinor didn’t last long, and over the years there was a succession of others, who didn’t last either.

One of the few professional highlights of the early spring was the visit to New York of the Italian architect Ernesto Rogers, with whom Steinberg was delighted to renew a prewar acquaintance that became an abiding friendship, although a qualified one at the start. Steinberg thought Rogers was one of the tourists who went home and wrote a book about “Me and America” after three weeks in the country. He changed his mind as their first luncheon lengthened to fill five hours. When Rogers became intrigued by Steinberg’s description of Hedda’s latest paintings of machines and buildings, Steinberg took him to Betty Parsons’s gallery to see them. Rogers left with “great admiration” for Hedda and invited Saul to bring her to his home in Bergamo when they went to Italy in July. Yet again Saul was pleased to be married to an intelligent, talented, and beautiful woman and proud that others recognized her extraordinary qualities. He could tell her so in letters, but unfortunately he was unable to convey these feelings when they were alone together.

She had gone to France again, and this time her reasons were far more serious. For the second year in a row, he wrote in letters what he simply could not say in person: “I made up my mind in your absence that I’m forever attached to you and all the talk about betrayal, not enough love, divorce, etc. was all nonsense, yours or mine, and it’s time to stop it.”

He had plans to join her in early July but something tragic happened that made him forget his fear of flying and try to book passage in June on an Air France plane: Hedda knew she was pregnant when she left New York, and her reason for going to Paris was to sort out her feelings about what to do. In Paris, she discovered that the pregnancy was ectopic and she needed abdominal surgery to repair the damage it had caused. A flurry of telegrams ensued during the ten or so days she was in a Paris hospital, and when she left to convalesce on the Riviera, Saul wrote frantic letters. He told her he had consulted their family physician in New York for reassurance that the French doctors were giving her proper treatment, while she wrote from Juan-les-Pins urging him to stay in New York and finish his work because there was nothing he could do for her. She knew how many commissions he had and how difficult it would be for him to leave them unfinished, and also she knew by now that his work always came first.

He and Hedda had never really discussed the idea of having children. It was unspoken between them that Saul was the equivalent of their child and all their energies and attentions were to be focused on him. He thought they were complete as a couple and did not need the distraction of a child, and besides, children irritated him. When he was forced to be around them, he did not know how to behave. Hedda remembered when the proud mother of a newborn took them into the nursery during a dinner party, insisting that they admire her sleeping baby. Saul rubbed his shoe back and forth on the carpet, then touched his finger to the baby’s nose to produce an electric shock. The child woke up screaming, the mother was upset, and Saul (innocently and truthfully) said all he wanted to do was to create a situation where the child would always remember him. He didn’t understand his friend Tino Nivola, who had bought an old farmhouse in the village of Springs in eastern Long Island, where “he works three hours a week and the rest of his time brings up his children.” Saul’s incomprehension of Tino’s deep and loving attachment often resulted in cutting remarks that were hurtful to his old friend, who always ignored them and forgave him.

Hedda was thirty-nine in 1949, a time when most women had their children in their early twenties, and thus she was more of an age to be a grandmother than a mother. She and Saul had never really discussed the possibility that they might become parents, and once the pregnancy ended and the scare over her health was gone, they treated it as if it were akin to a ruptured appendix and just got on with their lives.

STEINBERG DIDN’T WANT TO TAKE THE time to go to Europe, nor did he want to spend two or three months there. He was worried about The Art of Living and used it as an excuse to delay the trip and evade his real reason for not wanting to go, the first face-to-face meeting with his parents since his 1944 furlough in Bucharest. “I brace myself for seeing [my] parents,” he told Hedda, knowing that no matter what he did or said, it would offend them. He was so afraid of lashing out that he told Hedda he could not see them unless she was with him to act as the go-between: “I can’t talk my mind to them because they are able to understand but they’ll refuse to. If I’ll break down and tell them my mind it’ll be a real breakdown for me.” Hedda told him that every time she saw Rosa there was constant prying, as Rosa tried to find out how often Saul wrote to each of them. He replied that the best way to distract Rosa was for Hedda to buy her something, preferably a sewing machine. “If it were not for the parents,” he concluded, “I’d write you to come home. I wouldn’t even go to Europe.”

Work was piling up to the point where he would have to take it with him, even though he badly needed a break. For the first time in his life he suffered from insomnia and found himself drinking scotch heavily in order to relax and get to sleep. The increasing amount of business-related details made him realize he would have to find a lawyer he could put on retainer, adding one more person to his professional payroll.

He wasn’t thinking clearly when he decided that the best way to avoid or evade all his work and responsibility was to leave New York. “We really have to move to the country,” he told Hedda, and this became a recurring theme in his letters. The Nivolas invited him to spend a weekend in their farmhouse in the Springs section of Amagansett; Saul was the only guest, and he spent the time enthralled by Claire, their “really beautiful” daughter, while ignoring her brother, Pietro, “a very dignified little child.” The next day he visited Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in their “curious old house and a barn where he paints on the floor. She paints, too, things that look like labels on trunks that have traveled a lot.” He told Hedda that they might think of renting a house in Springs for several weeks in September but that Long Island was not for them, because there were too many artists and they needed to be “not near painters.”

In a spurt of energy after his Long Island weekend, Steinberg hired Alexander Lindey as his lawyer and made an agreement with Betty Parsons that allowed her to sell his work directly from her gallery for a 25 percent commission, with the rest coming to him. There followed a “very trying evening” with Cesar Civita, who was in New York ostensibly on other business but mostly to persuade Steinberg to renew his contract. Steinberg resisted and went home dead tired to drink a lot of scotch to get to sleep.

He gave himself the brief respite of a week off by not answering the phone or the doorbell at his studio and ignoring his correspondence. He also declined all social engagements and spent his evenings in the apartment “drinking lightly and walking up and down the floor, thinking, worrying,” mostly about himself and his emotional state. Even though he did little to change his behavior, his self-analysis was perceptive: he knew that being around people made him “false, scared, formal, competitive.” When he was alone he was “more harmonious” and more “at peace” with himself, because he was able to assess his actions and interactions honestly and sincerely. Such thinking further convinced him that the only way to lead a peaceful and harmonious life was to leave New York entirely and get a house in the country that had two floors, one for him and one for Hedda. He wanted Hedda to help him make moving plans when they were together in Europe, so they could “do things right” when they returned.

ONE WEEK OF SOLITUDE WAS ALL he could spare and, more truthfully, all he could stand, and he jumped right back into his frenetic, activity-filled schedule. He went to Detroit and was a guest in Alexander Girard’s home, “an architect’s own dream house.” He loved his room, with its Mexican pottery, a small Henry Moore sculpture, an Italian ex-voto, and an Eames chair. On the way home he stopped in Cincinnati to check on the murals before rushing back to New York for a flurry of appointments. In a single day he declined an unnamed department store’s invitation to do its Christmas windows, then went to Harper & Brothers to “help their ignorant editors make a blurb” for his book jacket and from there to a luncheon with the businessman roommate on the Queen Mary, who was organizing everything from their reservations for deck chairs to dining room meal seatings. He hurried back to the studio to write the checks to pay his bills, because Miss Elinor had quit, then had to make phone calls in answer to a pile of letters from the Detroit staff because there were too many questions and talking was faster than writing. And after he crammed all that into business hours, he had to return calls to friends such as Betty Parsons, Leo Lerman, and Hawley Truax at The New Yorker. It was a typical New York workday, but it made him feel “like a parasite who hadn’t manufactured anything, just blahblahblah.”

Naturally—at least to him—several of his teeth chose this time to erupt in infections. The dentist prescribed penicillin, after which he would need at least one extraction, if not two. Penicillin calmed things down, but he worried constantly about a flare‑up when he boarded the train for another working trip to Detroit, to stay again with the Girards. They entertained him with the most interesting guests they could gather for their elegant dinner parties, but mostly he spent several days on his own, walking around downtown Detroit because the mural needed details of the city itself.

One evening Steinberg was invited to dine at the home of “an architect called Saarinen,” who wanted him to think about creating a mural for the Ford Motor Company’s research institute, which he was designing and building. Steinberg was interested in principle, but for Hedda and not for himself. He left the publicity photos Betty Parsons had made of Hedda’s paintings with Saarinen because he wanted him to commission her to make a mural of the machines, motors, electricity, and chemistry that she was then painting. The two men liked each other, especially after they discovered how much they had in common, starting with service in the OSS during the war. Although Hedda’s part in the project never came to fruition, Steinberg and Saarinen’s friendship endured.

In New York, he deliberately cultivated another new acquaintance, the journalist Ruth Gruber, who was much respected for her dedication to rescuing Jews during World War II and who had been instrumental since the war’s end in helping displaced European Jews emigrate, first to Palestine and then to the new nation of Israel. Because of her connections at the highest levels of the United States government and the United Nations, the desperate Steinberg wanted to enlist her to help get his sister and her family out of Romania. Gruber was eager to help and wrote “most convincing letters” to various “big shots.” She also took him to meet other influential people, and at “a big party of rich Jews,” he saw “more old women and jewels than ever in my life.” It was his introduction to the world of Jewish fund-raising at the highest levels, and for the rest of his life he gave as much as he could to every Jewish organization that asked. Gruber was willing to do what she could for Lica and Rica Roman, but she wanted something from Steinberg in return. He groused that he had to go to dinner with her and her publisher because it was “payback” time and she wanted him to design the jacket for her new book. He tried to plead having too much other work before leaving for Europe, but “it’s too late now and I promised I’d do it.” After a “dull evening,” he hastily designed a “dull” book jacket.

HE WAS TO SAIL ON THE Queen Mary on June 21, 1949, arriving in Cherbourg on the twenty-sixth, but his teeth threatened to derail the departure. When he saw the dentist the week before, the dentist told Steinberg to go to a surgeon that very day for an extraction. Instead he went to lunch with Jim Geraghty and got very drunk. After he drank so much liquor and became incoherent with nervousness, Geraghty could barely get him into the surgeon’s office. The surgeon examined him and said there was no need for extraction, only for larger doses of penicillin. Steinberg sobered up immediately and got himself back to his office, where he fell into a deep sleep and did not wake up until late afternoon, when he heard Leo Lerman pounding on his door. Then it was back to business as usual. After Lerman there was a succession of visitors that ended with Geraghty, who wanted to make sure he was all right and, if he was, to look at the preliminary drawings of the Detroit murals, as he was interested in buying some for a spread in The New Yorker. Steinberg pulled out all his drawings and behaved as if this were his first meeting of the day with Geraghty, even though he wanted to go home and sleep “for about 20 hours.”

In general he got little sleep, because there were too many parties and dinners he had to attend before his departure. Hedda worried about him and chastised him for behaving like “a loose man dancing with depraved de Kooning” at one of Bill and Elaine’s raucous parties in their downtown apartment. He insisted that it had been a sedate evening during which he mostly chatted with Wilfredo Lam (whom he liked) and Stanley William Hayter (of whom he was wary). He liked de Kooning, who he insisted was “a nice man,” and as that friendship deepened, Steinberg became convinced that through him he had found the key to understanding American abstract painters: “They’re primitives.”

As the date to sail approached, he was so busy that he limited his social engagements to the good friends he called his “old bores,” paramount among them René Bouché and Richard Lindner (who always babysat the Steinbergs’ cats). Russell Lynes gave a small dinner where Monroe Wheeler and Loren McIver were the only other guests, and Steinberg was able to enjoy the rarity of a serious conversation that was all about art. He was not so enthusiastic when Wheeler gave another dinner where two of the guests, McKnight Kaufer (“a mediocre artist of posters”) and Glenway Westcott “kissed on both cheeks like girls.” Rosa and Miguel Covarubbias were in town and he had to sit through Miguel’s documentary film about Bali, “very boring but grand for him.” He took Mel and Mark Rothko to lunch at a neighborhood French restaurant, and to keep the conversation flowing with the taciturn Mark, he got them “happy with martinis.” Isamu Noguchi, another good friend, was the honored guest at a number of parties before he left New York again “to go away forever,” as he always said and never did, so Steinberg went to all his farewell parties. He cut short an evening with Bernard Rudofsky because he didn’t feel up to the serious arguments over architecture and city planning that he knew would ensue.

The social encounters were interspersed with a great deal of work and intense reading, all of which combined in ways that eventually showed up in his drawings. From Melville’s Moby Dick to Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, he turned to Havelock Ellis and Balzac. Always searching for “the real America,” he read Ring Lardner’s short stories and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, which made him want to jump into the Stravinsky Cadillac and take to the open roads of the American Southeast in search of hillbillies and moonshine. To his great surprise (and delight), aspects of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine made him “excited” about the Detroit murals in a way that he had not been excited about any work “in months or years.”

He envisioned the murals as a panorama that began with the impression of speed, in keeping with Detroit as the Motor City, where the streets were named Packard, Ford, and Chrysler. The first image was a cluster of cars and trucks roaring off after having been stopped at a traffic light. They led the eye into several very small houses with huge billboards above and behind, all festooned with the word EAT. He was very pleased with “the trick” he used for the next house, “you know, the cute little whitewashed board house with a verandah and a man sitting on a rocking chair.” The cute little house became a dozen when he made photostats and pasted them in a sequence so that “same house, same man” became the generic equivalent of every middle-class suburb in any American city. They led the eye to an A&P supermarket and a bank that he drew as a “classic temple.” These were balanced by more photostat images of the middle-class house and man, which led directly into the industrial age. Factories were surrounded by thousands of cars that belonged to the workers inside, all of it encircled by “smoke stacks, gazometers, railways, etc. then slums.” Steinberg deliberately rendered them in “bad and clumsy drawings” to show the poverty of spirit and misery of life such urbanization inspired. He insisted they had to be “bad” in the sense of sloppy and amateurish, because otherwise such misery “became cute.” To enforce his point to the casual viewer, he made blotchy ink spots, left his fingerprints scattered here and there, and put some of the drawings on the floor so he could dirty them by stepping on them and leaving the imprint of his rubber-heeled work shoes. To take this section of the mural one degree further away from reality, he did not use the original drawings but had them reproduced photographically. After this he veered back into repetitions of the “cute house” (as he was now calling it) until the viewer’s eye stopped at a Moorish gas station, which Steinberg used to introduce a city that was all brownstones and shops until it came to a “6th Avenue like” center. Here, at street level he had movie theaters, drugstores, burlesque houses, and Italian restaurants, while above them were the offices of everyone from dentists and chiropodists to tree surgeons and passport photographers. This would lead to a skyscraper “with a fancy store on street level and about 500 floors of offices.” He planned to exaggerate the height and to shape the building like a cathedral, with windows evenly distributed throughout and showing activity inside them. After this there would be a plaza with a World War I monument and a post office “with socialist murals, etc.” He planned to complete the murals with views of the rich suburbs and cross-sections of the houses that populated them, in which the carefully measured and modulated activities of the wealthy and pampered residents could serve as a counterpoint to the frenetic activity that began the panorama.

He was so excited to have the project fully envisioned and mostly drawn that he apologized to Hedda for writing an entire letter about it without commenting on her health. While recovering from the ectopic pregnancy, Hedda fell sick again with an unnamed ailment. Saul’s only comment was to say he was sorry and would phone their family physician, Dr. Hurd, to see if he had any useful advice for the French doctors.

By the time he sailed on June 21, the couple’s letters had become a terse and tense exchange, with Hedda scolding him for destructive behavior, particularly heavy drinking. She accused him of using liquor as an escape from life, but he disagreed, saying that the only time he drank was to avoid the terror of the tooth extraction. He did agree with her “about the stupid boring results of drinking” and hoped that when they returned in August, everything would be conducive to “a year of good work with very little drinking or smoking.”

He was so worried by the coldness of her last few letters that he proposed a new way to demonstrate how much he loved her. She should go to a European city small enough for him to run into her as if by accident, and they would pretend to be strangers meeting for the first time. He would court her for several days, until (“because I couldn’t take this game [any longer]”) he would end it by asking her to marry him. Even in such a love letter, he could not resist bragging about how well he had worked that day: “I made a big skyscraper with a few persons jumping from the roof. Entire families falling with dignity.”

FAMILIES FALLING FROM ROOFS COULD WELL have been the metaphor for his meeting with his parents in Paris. Moritz was silent to the point of catatonia, overwhelmed by the variety and color of daily life in Paris after the drab monotony of Bucharest, but mostly rendered speechless by Rosa’s constant litany of complaints. Nothing pleased her; she even complained about the gracious hospitality of Hedda’s family in snide and oblique ways that made it all but impossible to contradict her. Saul was stunned to hear her bemoan all that she had given up and left behind in Bucharest, only to fall into such constrained circumstances in a city that was supposed to be the most comfortable and cultured in the world. Unspoken but inferred was her only son’s lack of concern for her plight and his callous indifference to her needs. Hedda sensed that he was at the breaking point and quickly invented imaginary projects for which he needed to go to the South of France and Italy. Instead they hid out for a week in the studio she had been renting in one of the outer arrondissements, far from her brother’s residence, and which Rosa and Moritz knew nothing about. Being there gave them time to see friends and visit galleries and for Saul to tend to details pertaining to work in New York that arose after his departure. They resurfaced long enough to take Rosa and Moritz to a spa, but it did not measure up to Rosa’s memories of holidays by the Black Sea and was not successful. They knew they would have to do something drastic, because Paris as a final destination was not working out.

It was a relief to head to Milan, where they renewed acquaintances with colleagues from the Politecnico and discussed the possibility of future collaborations in architectural design and film. Ada was living alone in Milan after an “Italian divorce” in which she and her husband simply agreed to go their separate ways, since the country had no legal divorce. Saul decided that he would have to do more than send the occasional check, and he helped her financially for the rest of her life with regular contributions of money. He and Hedda left Milan for Bergamo and the first of a number of pleasant visits with Ernesto Rogers, and then they went to Venice. Saul took rooms at the Grand Hotel for himself and Hedda and also for Aldo and Bianca, who joined them for a happy reunion. Saul spent much of the reunion with Aldo sitting in the piazza throwing out various ideas and possibilities for work that Aldo could do in New York. He was determined to get Aldo a visa for a long stay, but nothing concrete came of it.

By mid-August, after a meandering journey through the Alpes-Maritimes and the Alsatian route des vins, Saul and Hedda were back in Paris, unsure of what to do about a permanent home for Moritz and Rosa and eager to escape from their clutching neediness. They decided that the parents had to go to Nice, where there was a sizable contingent of Romanian Jewish refugees from their old neighborhood, who could offer companionship and, better yet, commiseration. Saul had to harden himself to overcome Rosa’s initial recalcitrance, but shortly after, the senior Steinbergs made the move.

Hedda had been away from home for almost ten months, and she wanted to go back to New York and get to work. Saul was not all that eager to resume the life he led there, but now there were even more people who depended on him financially, and he knew he needed to keep the money coming in to support them.

That fall he was prone to a general malaise. He cut his three-pack-a-day nicotine habit down to almost nothing; he was not sure if he had “tobacco poisoning or mental stuff,” but he was afraid to go to a doctor to find out. He was trying to amass a collection of drawings and cartoons that would assure a steady income for the better part of a year, but the work was “hard and depressing.” It would have been easy and even enjoyable to do “variations on the same theme,” but none of the publications who bought his work wanted what they called “repetition.” Coming up with a single good idea gave him little satisfaction, because he had to change his thinking completely in order to find the next original one. He thought of himself as working and working, but “inertia” still came back, and with it insomnia. All his obligations seemed insurmountable, and he had no energy to deal with them. “I’d rather lie awake at night over unanswered letters than make the effort to write,” he told Aldo. Still, when he added up all he had done, a partial list showed “To Vogue 6 large, 8 Venice Medium, 7 Paris Color, 6 railways, 13 misc. Total 40. Gave Glamour 17 dr.” There were even more that went to The New Yorker, plus designs that went to the two fabric companies, Patterson and Stehli, and a host of other smaller commissions. He had achieved his objective for the year, and there was enough money coming in to support all his obligations.

Steinberg’s parents in Nice. (illustration credit 13.1)

Saul and Hedda went off to celebrate Thanksgiving, Steinberg’s favorite American holiday, with Sandy and Louisa Calder in their Roxbury, Connecticut, farmhouse. It was the first of many holiday invitations with the Calders that they accepted, for they loved the way Sandy and Louisa and their daughters gathered all the guests in the kitchen to eat and drink to excess, to dance, sing, and in general make merry. Steinberg loved Calder, “the dancing man,” and on one of these happy occasions, when Saul could not hear what Sandy was telling him, he sat on his knee to hear him better. “I thought afterwards that I had not sat on a man’s knee in sixty years! And that this was the only man so happy and so innocent to give me and everybody the simple and loving familiarity.” It was exactly what he needed to get him to the end of a dispiriting year, and he returned to New York energized for the usual round of holiday festivities.

Unfortunately, there was no prospect of any new, different, and interesting work on his horizon, only more of the same for the usual publications, and the new decade seemed likely to start as the old one had ended. Several years earlier, when Steinberg first went to work for The New Yorker, Jim Geraghty astutely assessed his personality by saying he needed “excitement.” It was never truer than it was in 1950.

CHAPTER 14

Дата добавления: 2015-10-30