The only happily married couple

As artists, the Steinbergs pursue their separate ways … Both want to create a picture of America, but not the same picture. Says Hedda: “I am getting rid of images.” Says Saul: “I am unfit to do anything not funny.” At a party one night, Saul was introduced to an awestruck young architect who told him that he and Hedda had a near mythical reputation as the only happily married couple in New York. That a total stranger could express what so many people believed showed how well the very public couple kept their personal lives private. The architect made his remark at a time when their professional reputations were in the ascendant and they were too busy dealing with them to focus on their personal differences, which were mostly due to Saul’s inability to express emotion in person and his brief affairs and longer liaisons. However, whatever went on within the marriage stayed there, known only to the two of them.

The beautiful Hedda and the charismatic Saul certainly made a glamorous couple, admired and envied in equal measure. Most of the people they considered their friends were luminaries in the international worlds of high society, arts and letters, politics and culture, and increasingly within the rarefied atmosphere of the financial world, as wealthy collectors competed to buy their work. To outsiders looking in, their life was a constant round of enviable parties, dinners, country weekends, and long European holidays. With their professional reputations soaring, they were sought after for interviews by all the publications that mattered, and they were on almost every list of “promising” or “important” figures in the art world.

Much of the hoopla began when Hedda’s photograph appeared in Life in January 1950, the only woman among fourteen male artists, all of them lumped together under the sobriquet “the Irascibles.” The name was originally an adjective used to describe a disparate collection of painters and sculptors in an article that proclaimed them an “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists.” It became, for better or worse, their trademark when the critic Emily Genauer wrote an editorial for the New York Herald Tribune that grouped them together as a de facto school. Actually, the Irascibles could trace their origin to the first of a series of meetings organized by Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt asking other artists to join in composing a letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum protesting the conservative makeup of a jury selected to judge an exhibition of contemporary art. The Irascibles declared the judges hostile to every form of “advanced art” but to abstract expressionism in particular.

Hedda befriended Newman and Reinhardt at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery when she first arrived in New York, and she liked and respected them both, as did Saul when she introduced him. She thought Newman was “politically savvy about publicity” and admired Reinhardt for being “an abstract artist in the 30’s before everybody else, a very good political cartoonist and a … man with backbone.” Both painters wanted to assure maximum publicity for their campaign to get the Met to open its doors to modern art, so they invited thirty artists to the round-table meetings, but only eighteen attended. Hedda, as a painter, was invited, but Saul, seen primarily as a cartoonist and draftsman, was not. If he was miffed by his exclusion, he never expressed it to her. They both agreed wholeheartedly with the “social [that is, political] agenda” espoused by Newman, Reinhardt, and Adolph Gottlieb (who wrote most of the letter), so Hedda went to the meetings on behalf of herself and Saul. She thought he should have been invited, but he was too busy with the many commissions that were bringing increasingly large sums of money. Fleur Cowles was prominent among those who wanted to buy his work, as she was eager to woo him for her new magazine, Flair.

Although other women attended the Irascibles’ round-table discussions (among them Janice Biala and Louise Bourgeois), Hedda was the only one who showed up for the photo session staged by Nina Leen, along with the fourteen male artists brave enough to sign the letter and risk being photographed. Hedda didn’t hesitate to embrace the cause, because “in those days I signed any form of protest.” As the only woman in the photo, and a strikingly beautiful one at that, she was from that moment on most often classified as an abstract expressionist, despite her insistence on two major points: the Irascibles in the famous photograph were “not a school and it never was,” and the only thing they had in common was that most of them were represented by Betty Parsons and “were all considered avant-garde.”

Leen’s photograph was indeed striking, with Hedda Sterne dressed all in black and standing at the top of a pyramid formed by the fourteen artists seated below her. The photographer staged “the architecture” before the artists arrived by arranging fourteen chairs with name tags indicating where each man was to sit. Hedda arrived late, to the consternation of Leen, who thought she was not coming and did not have a chair marked for her. Hedda knew the omission “was not deliberate,” as Leen quickly found something for her to stand on which posed her on an elevated platform at the center of the photo and made her the focal point. The entire session lasted about ten minutes, but reverberations from it never ended: when Hedda first saw the picture, she said, “In terms of my career, it’s probably the worst thing that ever happened to me.” She never changed her mind.

Despite the fact that her method and technique were constantly changing, from then on she was branded an abstract expressionist, which meant that all too often her work was labeled and dismissed. Throughout the 1950s, when art historians looked for “sweeping trends” to define the contemporary scene and painters were embracing “signature styles, such as Pollock’s drips and Newman’s zips,” Hedda’s process was one of “uninterrupted flux.” While critics often deemed her willingness to embrace new ways of creating art “inconsistent,” Betty Parsons defended the constant change: “Hedda was always searching, never satisfied. She had many ways; most artists just have one way to go.”

Like Saul Steinberg, Hedda Sterne was primarily interested in process. She could well have been describing how he approached a drawing when she described how she approached a painting: “Painting for me is a process of simultaneous understanding and explaining. I try to approach my subject uncluttered by esthetic prejudices. I put it on canvas in order to explain it to myself, yet the result should reveal something plus.” When she did speak of Steinberg’s work, she said that what she most admired about it was his “ability to make ideas concrete with a symbol.” For her, the mystery hovering over his work was always “where did this come from?”

The idea of process was one they talked about constantly. Throughout the years they lived together, Sterne and Steinberg never lacked for conversation about making art, although they seldom spoke specifically about what they were working on at the time. Hedda explained how they were “filled with ideas, and even at the worst of times, when he was at his most remote, conversation about art was without end.”

Both were avid readers, and writing techniques often enriched their conversations about the process of making art. Sterne was keen on philosophy, particularly Schopenhauer and Hegel, and later Confucius, Lao-tzu, and other Eastern thinkers. She loved poetry, her favorites ranging from Rilke to Walt Whitman. She read fiction, but not to the extent that Steinberg did. His tastes were all-embracing and eclectic, veering from Stendhal and Manzoni to contemporary Italian novelists like Carlo Gadda, who wrote in dialect, to American regionalists such as James T. Farrell and Erskine Caldwell. He reread the Russian novelists repeatedly, from Gogol (his favorite) and Dostoevsky (whom he liked) to Lermontov and Turgenev (to whom he accorded lesser attention). He read through Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, engrossed in the turmoil and travails of the characters, and was moved by some of Zola’s novels, especially those that dealt with social inequities, like Germinal. He liked to read American history, particularly of the Civil War period and after, and he was keenly interested in the sociological and cultural studies written after World War II that he thought would help him to understand his adopted country.

Hedda Sterne and Saul Steinberg worked devotedly at the visual arts every day, sometimes for ten to twelve hours at a stretch, but when they paused, words became their chosen form of communication. They were constantly seeking to enrich their art through reading, and if there was one defining quality about their work in the immediate postwar decade, it was that they strove to make others see visual truths about their subjects that were hitherto hidden or unclear.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER LIFE SINGLED OUT Hedda Sterne as “one of our most promising young painters,” Vogue followed by placing her at number 11 on the magazine’s list of “53 Living American Artists [to watch].” The article described her as “the 34-year-old abstractionist who has in paint some of the airy balances of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.” Hedda set out to read Dickinson’s poetry to try to understand what the writer meant by the comparison. Another glowing review soon followed in the New York Times, describing her show at Betty Parsons’s gallery as composed of “extremely handsome” abstractions that “constitute an authentic and impressive document of our society.”

Hedda was pleased with the public response to her painting, but the attitude she expressed toward her own work during the war years had crystallized and hardened since her marriage. “Your work interests me much, much more than my own,” she wrote to Saul during the war, as she described the pleasure derived from a long, ten- to fourteen-hour day spent painting for her own pleasure and with no thought of presenting it for public consumption or comment. After the war, as her reputation rose steadily, she clung even more steadfastly to the idea of art as an example of personal expression rather than as a product meant for the world of commerce. In the mid-1950s, after an evening in the company of Katherine Kuh, the influential curator of modern art at the Art Institute of Chicago; the architect-designer Frederick Kiesler; and the painter Richard Lindner, all of whom she counted among her closest friends, she told Saul that she thought their “poor little ambitions: were ‘Lamentable!’ ” As were her own, she was quick to add, especially when she had a personal encounter with “an element of the public or of museums.” Whenever “real people” or a faceless institution became involved with her painting, she believed that “all the magic disappears.” She would have been content to paint quietly just for her own pleasure, and as a “kept woman” (her semi-ironic description of how she was supported by her husbands in her two marriages) she could have done so. However, the circumstances of the early years of her marriage to Steinberg, when she was half of one of the art world’s most dynamic couples, would not allow her to do so.

In 1951 she and Saul were featured together in Life in an article whose headline was “Steinberg and Sterne: Romanian-Born Cartoonist and Artist-Wife Ambush the World with Pen and Paintbrush.” Glamorous photos of the couple highlighted a large selection of their work, and the accompanying article was built on the several fanciful myths about his life that Steinberg had earlier created. Here he claimed that his penchant for drawing had begun when, as a young child, he watched a forger who lived in his Bucharest neighborhood make official-looking stamps and labels. He repeated the story of how he stamped his underwear “secret” while in the OSS, and added the delightfully fanciful story that the only work he did in China was to teach the peasants how to wiggle their ears. Hedda did her share of mythmaking, claiming that dancing had been her first love and she had studied it in Europe, where she had also been a stage designer. She claimed to be just returning to a career as a painter. Describing where and how they worked, Steinberg told the interviewer that every morning he went to his studio, where he often spent whole days doing nothing but lying down. Sterne said she worked at home “amid pebbles and firemen’s hats.” The only truth in their comments came when both admitted to a fascination with the United States, “he by the habits of people, she by machines and towering structures.”

The Life article appeared after another period of frenetic work and travel. Saul’s output during the first six months of 1950 earned enough for him to follow his usual custom of taking the summer off, but then an intriguing offer came. Alan Jay Lerner and Vincente Minnelli were filming An American in Paris, with Gene Kelly playing an artist there on the GI Bill. Someone at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came up with the highly original idea of hiring Steinberg’s drawing hand for close-ups of scenes featuring Kelly as he was supposedly painting, so Saul and Hedda went to Los Angeles instead of Europe. They rented the Bel Air home of Annabella, the French actress and ex-wife of actor Tyrone Power, and were eager to settle into the Hollywood film scene. Saul’s hand was supposed to became a movie star, but the rest of him lasted exactly three days.

He thought it was only his hand that they wanted to film, ostensibly drawing something amorphous, unrecognizable, and mostly unfilmed, until he read the letter of agreement he was expected to sign. He was to create “certain works of art, paintings, sketches, etc.,” all of which were to become the exclusive property of the studio, to be used to “exploit and exhibit” the movie. He was also expected to give the rights to use his “name, voice, and likeness for advertising and exploitation,” in perpetuity. And after he surrendered all rights to his own work, he was to understand and agree that the studio was giving him “special, unique, unusual, [and] extraordinary privileges,” and if he breached them, he could be held liable for damages.

Saul told Aldo that, having been courted with “great promises of ‘a free hand, do what you want,’ ” he spent his three days on the set dealing with “ gli eterni stronzi [the usual assholes] who make Technicolor musicals, stupid stuff.” He thanked the God who made it possible for him to find work elsewhere so he could refuse this contract, but he was still upset about “all those dollars I didn’t pocket.” It led to several gloomy days over “the conflict between money and honest work.

After that he decided that he liked California, particularly the “excellent climate” and an American landscape different from anything he had experienced in Vermont, Cape Cod, or the eastern end of Long Island. The climate was so seductive that he imagined living there forever, if not for all the “huge spiders, deadly poison” that he was sure infested the entire region. As was usual wherever he went, interesting people wanted to meet him. He met such diverse personalities as Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, and the acerbic Oscar Levant and formed a lasting friendship with Billy Wilder based on their similar sardonic wit, Mittel-European sensibility, and ironic perception of American culture and society.

Ray and Charles Eames became good friends and colleagues with whom Steinberg enjoyed several collaborations. When Charles saw some of the drawings Steinberg was making of Los Angeles, he wanted them for a movie, but the idea was abandoned when other projects took precedence, particularly one that became a spoof with public repercussions. Steinberg was particularly taken with the Eameses’ 1948 chrome and plastic chair, and he drew the outline of a big black cat lounging on one of them. He graced another with a naked woman’s torso similar to the nudes he drew in a bathtub and on the bathroom’s walls. Everyone who saw Steinberg’s nude-woman chair found it amusing, so the Eameses included it in a 1951 “Design for Living” show of their work at the Long Beach Museum, where it quickly caused a local scandal. The museum had a new director, whose relationship with her staff was colored by their affection for the former director, who had curated the show. The staff rebelled when the new director declared the chair to be “vulgar” and instructed them to turn it toward the wall so that only the undecorated back was visible. Each day when the new director arrived, she turned the chair to the wall, and immediately afterward someone on the staff turned it to face outward. Naturally the local papers had a field day, and the story soon became grist for regional and national amusement while viewers debated the pros and cons of obscenity and vulgarity and what constituted just plain art.

WHEN THE LEASE ON ANNABELLA’S Bel Air house ended, Hedda took the train to New York while Saul boarded a bus that took him first to Las Vegas and then across the midsection of the United States. It gave him time not only to see the vast spaces of the American Plains states and to try to fathom what influence those who lived there might bring to bear on the collective American psyche, but also to think about the series of drawings he wanted to make about his California experience. He was having trouble finishing them to his satisfaction, because capturing their “reality” was “too peculiar.” When he tried to describe what he had seen on the streets and highways of Southern California, he compared it to a circus, saying it was just as difficult to draw because he had to “keep making an effort not to fall into clichés.” He was eventually satisfied with the California drawings, which became a series titled “The Coast” when The New Yorker published them in January 1951.

Back in New York, he resumed the annual pattern of doing commercial work for the first three months of the year. One of the most lucrative but irritating commissions was a Neiman-Marcus catalogue cover and a design for the department store’s wrapping paper and other packaging. When the store’s art department, with the blessing of Stanley Marcus, made changes without Steinberg’s approval, he was furious. After that he was careful to retain full legal control of work done for Marcus (who had become a serious collector of his work and liked to think of himself as a good friend). There were various disagreements in the years they worked together, but Steinberg’s decisions about how his work would be presented were always final, even though Marcus was occasionally reluctant to accept them.

At the end of March, confident that he had earned enough to spend the next three to five months on his own work, Steinberg and Sterne boarded a transatlantic liner that took them to Italy. The filmmaker Carlo Ponti (not yet married to Sophia Loren) was on board and through a mix‑up ended up having to pay for a supper eaten by the three of them. Ponti insisted on a photograph of himself with Saul and Hedda as reimbursement for their share, and they obliged. They thought that would be the end of having to deal with Ponti, but on one of their first nights in Naples they met him by accident and he insisted that they dine together. They decided that he was not one of their favorite people, nor was Naples one of their favorite cities. They thought it was all robbery, graft, and “lousy food.” It was all “a little too much like Romania,” so they decided to head for someplace quiet where they had never been before and were unlikely to encounter anyone they knew.

Sicily offered the isolation and quiet they craved. They toured small towns and ruined temples for several days before settling in Palermo and setting up to work in a quiet hotel. For diversion they made brief forays or took longer ferry trips to the Italian mainland to explore southern Italian regions. In April they went to Florence, where their friend the American artist Richard Blow lent them the Villa Piazza Calda, a Renaissance structure he had bought and restored in 1927, where he had subsequently revived the art of pietre dure, the Florentine mosaic art that combined marble with colored stones. Steinberg thanked Blow for his generous hospitality with an especially fancy diploma that sported elaborate curliques and flourishes and a stylized green border similar to those that embellished stock certificates.

Steinberg and Sterne used Piazza Calda as the jumping-off point for short trips throughout central and northern Italy, often in the company of Aldo Buzzi, who was with them for several weeks. They went to Capri and San Remo, both of which were as beautiful as they had been touted, and then it was farewell to Aldo in Mantua as he changed for a train that took him home to Milan while they went on to France. Saul girded himself for visiting his parents in Nice by stopping first to gamble for several days at the casinos in Monte Carlo.

HEDDA MADE HERSELF A WILLING BUFFER in all of Saul’s dealings with Rosa and Moritz. She took care of fulfilling every need or desire (usually Rosa’s) conveyed in their letters. Hedda was not fond of shopping but spent countless hours and sometimes days looking for just the right winter coat or for stockings and underwear that fit Rosa’s exacting specifications yet never met them. She may have chafed at having to shop and then ship to Paris whatever Rosa wanted, as often as several times each month, but she kept her feelings to herself and took care of everything so that Saul seldom had to deal directly with his parents. However, he took an active role in trying to make sure that Lica and her family had the best chance of receiving the few things she requested.

The government of the PRR (People’s Republic of Romania) had instituted harsh new restrictions on gifts from relatives outside the country, so it became frustratingly difficult to help her. Each citizen was allowed to receive one package per month weighing one kilogram or less, which meant that most relatives no longer attempted to send goods but sent money instead. Funds had to be funneled through organizations that were supposed to be honest and reliable, but unfortunately, once the money crossed the Romanian border, this was often not the case. Frequently the amount was greatly reduced or, more often, never arrived at all; medicines, such as the ones Lica was desperate to have for her husband’s undiagnosed ailments and her small son’s scarlet fever, were never received.

The emotional travails of Lica’s family’s emigration swooped up and down like a roller coaster with no end in sight. There was a brief moment of hope when Lica received notice that her house had been officially allocated to another family, which in Romanian terms meant that her family had been cleared for a departure that could come at any time. They prepared to go by packing the few possessions they would be allowed to take and giving away many of their furnishings and most of their winter clothing, for Lica was certain they would be sent to Israel. When several months passed without official notification and no one came to claim their house, once again they resigned themselves to staying. “We are extremely stressed out by this way of departing,” she told her brother.

Rosa continued to make her usual peremptory requests, all conveyed in the most wheedling and irritating letters. Hedda shopped a number of times to try to find the right winter coat and then shipped several, but none pleased Rosa. Fearing her son’s ire over her pickiness, she changed tack and asked first for a new house in Nice, then adjusted her sights to a new apartment, and then decided to settle for household things, starting with a new refrigerator. Saul did what he always did: he fired off a check. What he dreaded most about the coming visit was answering the questions he knew Rosa would ask about what he was doing for his many relatives, both those waiting to leave Bucharest and those already in Israel. It was already a subject of general conversation in the immediate family, with Lica stuck in Romania and worrying about how much her brother had to earn to support them and their cousins as well, who were asking for money and then complaining about the amount they received.

The pleas for help took many forms and also came from relatives who had made it to Israel. One well-off cousin hid his money in high-interest European accounts and claimed he did not want to use it because the exchange rate was unfavorable, so could Saul please send him “a donut maker, a refrigerator, and some radios”? All these were to be a loan until the exchange rate stabilized, but until then he preferred to use Saul’s money rather than his own. Another cousin asked for enough to buy a truck, a taxi, or enough laundry machines to open a laundromat. Most of the others simply asked for gifts of money in heartrending letters that described poverty, illness, and deprivation. Saul Steinberg honored every request, sending enough goods or money to fulfill each request entirely or to come as close to it as he could. And if people asked a second or third time, he sent even more than they requested.

HE HAD A GOOD EXCUSE NOT to stay long with his parents in Nice: he had to go to London to meet Roland Penrose for discussions about a solo exhibition of his work that was scheduled for one year later at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Penrose had founded the ICA in 1946, along with Herbert Read and several others who wanted to offer the British public something different from the traditional kinds of art anointed by the Royal Academy. He was an early booster of Picasso and Jackson Pollock and featured both in one of the ICA’s first shows; he was a friend of Max Ernst, Henry Moore, and Joan Miró, all of whom he featured soon after and whose work he collected in his own impressive private collection. Penrose was married to Lee Miller, the American model who became an avant-garde photographer before distinguishing herself as a fearless war correspondent. They had just bought Farley Farm, 120 acres in a small village in the same area of Sussex where Virginia Woolf made her last home, and they invited Steinberg to come for the weekend.

Steinberg took an immediate liking to Miller and Penrose, and they to him. Penrose could not find enough superlatives to praise Steinberg’s talent and was eager to boost his reputation and make him feel welcome in England by introducing him to other artists and writers. Miller had been in Romania just after the war, and Steinberg listened avidly to the few things she told him about her experiences. Being at Farley Farm was a magical time for Steinberg. It was a house “filled with art and crammed with crazy people,” where he got fresh air and exercise, drank too much liquor and ate too much food for the good of his digestion, and observed with slight puzzlement the constant parade of exotic bohemian guests who drifted casually in and out. It might have been better if he had ended his tour of the British Isles there, for then he might not have taken away such a negative impression of most of England, Scotland, and the two Irelands.

His first impression of London was from one of the city’s red double-decker buses, where everything looked “trim and shining,” with no remaining vestiges of the war’s ravages. A side trip to Brighton and Rye reminded him of an “old fashioned Coney Island.” After eight hours on a train to Edinburgh, he could not wait to leave one of the “corniest” cities he had ever seen, full of “King Arthur, legendary heroes, fake castles, etc.… Roman temples made out of asphalt.” He promised himself to “think of the good parts of Edinburgh some other time.” He took the train to Glasgow, the ferry to Larne, and the train to Belfast, which he liked best, until he realized that as it was Sunday and raining too heavily to leave the hotel, he had nothing to do because all the pubs were closed.

His next stop was Dublin, where his first night was passed at a B&B filled with Irish Americans or the English, who came to gorge on eggs and butter. The next day he decamped for the Shelbourne, Dublin’s best hotel, and the day after that he took the ferry to Liverpool and went back to London. He stayed there for several days, determined to visit London’s eighteen railway stations, all of which he deemed “beautiful.” He went to the theater to see A Winter’s Tale, and although he was never a fan of Shakespeare, he was surprised by how much he liked both the play and the theatergoing experience. On his last day in London he went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he was entranced with the various sorts of “junque” that always appealed to him—best of all, “Queen Victoria’s banquet printed and embossed on silk.” The weather had turned so tropically hot that he drank beer to keep himself “alive.” As for the food, it was “so bad I can hardly touch it.” He had had enough of Anglo-Saxon attitudes, and it was time to go.

He went to Brussels for a few days, eager to put the British Isles behind him. Dublin and Belfast had reminded him of “the Eastern-type poverty” of his native Romania, and the only reason he stayed as long as he did in Edinburgh was “out of perversity … to see how it’s possible to build in such an ugly and stupid way.” The more he traveled around the British Isles, the more he realized how much he loved Italy. From then on he visited Britain only in connection with exhibitions of his work.

AFTER BRUSSELS, HE TOOK THE TRAIN to Paris, where he helped Hedda pack up for the boat trip home, including the new trove of rubber stamps he had picked up in his travels throughout Italy, France, and England. It wasn’t the happiest of his transatlantic crossings, for he was despondent throughout the voyage over having surrendered the Central Park South studio as an economy measure. He and Hedda had spent more money than he expected, and he knew he had to start earning as quickly as possible, so he fretted that it would take a month or longer to find a new workspace. This worry paled the minute they landed in New York, when a threatening crisis presented itself: the navy wanted to recall him to active duty because of the Korean War, and he was ordered to go to Washington. “I’m putting up a fight,” he told Aldo, and apparently he was successful, for he was not recalled, although he was not officially discharged from the Navy Reserve until three years later, on October 15, 1954.

By the end of October 1951, he had been working steadily from the apartment and was so tired that he needed another vacation, which he simply could not afford to take. One of the more intriguing invitations for commercial work came from the impresario Lincoln Kirstein, who wanted him to design sets for a ballet choreographed by George Balanchine. To prepare himself, he went to one ballet performance after another. Otherwise, everything had fallen into its usual pattern: “I smoke, I drink and work. I don’t even know if I’m happy.” He got what he thought would be the vacation he needed in late December through early January 1952, when he went to Palm Beach, Florida, to make drawings for Life and The New Yorker. He thought it was “frightful in its ugliness, stupidity, and vulgarity,” and disliked intensely having to draw “ugly things” that were akin to “pornography.”

He was tired of the peripatetic life, and tired of living in a small apartment without enough space for either himself or Hedda to work well. Since their stay at the Villa Piazza Calda and after his visit to Farley Farm, he was more insistent than ever that they needed to set up a permanent home. He had temporarily given up the idea of moving to the country, because of the sheer impracticality of living far from his major sources of income. Perhaps in the future they could think about a place for weekends and vacations, but what they needed now was something in the city with space enough for each to work, space for them to reciprocate the hospitality of their many friends, and space to welcome particularly Aldo (although he never came), whom Saul was eager to help professionally. Also, an increasing parade of strangers were being sent their way by European friends who thought they should all know each other. Penrose and Miller sent the prickly Sonia, widow of George Orwell, who spent the evening at a posh dinner party in high dudgeon after she learned that the Saul who sat next to her was not Bellow but only an artist she had never heard of named Steinberg.

AND SO SAUL AND HEDDA BEGAN to talk seriously about how much space they would need so that both could work at home. It would take a very large apartment to accommodate them, and soon they realized they would be better off in a house. When they examined their finances, it became clear that Steinberg, with all his obligations, could not swing the deal on his own. Fred Stafford, who was still hovering over Hedda to make sure that she was financially secure, stepped in and provided the money for them to buy a four-story town house at 179 East 71st Street. Steinberg was so eager to move in on January 31, 1952, that he cut the Palm Beach stay short by several days. He was excited about settling down for the first time in his life, looking forward to becoming a solid citizen of his adopted patria, a landowner and payer of property taxes.

The house was one in a row of brownstones on the north side of 71st Street, a quiet, tree-lined block between Lexington and Third Avenues. The first floor became their public area, a large room that combined a kitchen, dining, and living room. The focal point was a large oval table that could seat twelve comfortably and several more at a pinch. At the rear, French doors opened onto a walled garden. Two other points of interest were the large white porcelain sink and ruby-red enamel stove with two ovens; over each Hedda hung the two diplomas Saul made to proclaim her expertise in dishwashing and cooking. Throughout the next decade, Steinberg filled the room with the work of his friends, including a life-size white plaster nude by Tino Nivola, a Calder mobile, a painting by Josef Albers, two Giacometti drawings, a small dressmaker’s dummy, and some of his own “constructions” that resembled bits and pieces of pianos and clocks. They installed enormous flat wooden files to hold their work in an organized manner (the first time they had enough space for such a luxury), and on them they placed mattresses and pillows so they could climb up and lie down to nap or read after eating.

Saul took over the second floor, using the larger room at the rear of the house for his studio and keeping the one at the front for overflow storage until he found a billiard table that reminded him so much of the one he had played on at Il Grillo in Milan that he had to buy it. He thought he worked better once he was able to walk back and forth between the two rooms, alternating between playing billiards and making drawings. On the top floor, they kept the larger room at the rear of the house for their bedroom, because it was quiet, while Hedda crammed all her painting equipment into the smaller room at the front. It faced the sunny south, but she managed to work all day long despite the light that streamed in.

They were both proud of the house and wanted to show it to friends, so they began to give dinner parties once or twice a week, seating a dozen or more guests around the big oval table. Although the guests were an eclectic mix, most were what Hedda called “Saul’s New Yorker people,” and they were the ones most often invited. Saul was at his most relaxed and comfortable with James Geraghty, Joseph Mitchell, Geoffrey Hellman, A. J. Liebling, Niccolò Tucci, Charles Addams, Sam Cobean, and “their wives or girl friends.” Their other dinner guests were people they had known since their earliest days in New York, and unlike the glittering invitations from wealthy collectors and patrons of the arts that Saul was accepting more and more frequently, only their closest old friends were invited to sit around Hedda’s kitchen table. From the performing arts, these included Sasha Schneider, Uta Hagen, and Herbert Berghof; from the art world, their closest friends were Richard Lindner and René Bouché, and after them Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Berte and Bernard Rudofsky. Iris Barry brought them news of film, while Louisa Calder and Denise Hare listened intently as Sandy and David entranced the company with talk about sculpture. During their summers in Wellfleet, Saul and Hedda had befriended Marcel and Connie Breuer, with whom they exchanged dinners there and in New York. There was never a lack of conversation at the table, but their favorite evenings were those when everyone sat around until the wee hours listening to Harold Rosenberg declaiming while his wife, May Tabak Rosenberg, acted as moderator between him and Steinberg. May liked best the dinners when it was just the four of them and Harold and Saul pontificated like “two Irish rabbis.”

Rosenberg was fast becoming the one friend whose “contagious intelligence” engaged Steinberg’s completely. Steinberg was enthralled by Rosenberg’s “rare gift for inventing and discovering ideas in your presence … Talking with him was always a surprise. One didn’t quite know what the talk was about, but it was extremely precise and efficient.” Rosenberg was a towering presence physically as well, over six feet tall and with a sweeping but awkward stride caused by “a leg that would no longer bend.” Steinberg, whose height was just below Rosenberg’s shoulder, would not let him begin to talk until he sat down, so they could have “a conversation of equals.”

Interspersed with the New York friends were the many Europeans whose hospitality they enjoyed in Europe and were eager to return in New York. Many of Steinberg’s Italian friends were becoming luminaries in the burgeoning film industry, Vittorio de Sica prominent among them. Steinberg saw him in New York for several days before he too vanished into Hollywood.

Because Hedda wanted to paint all day, her menus seldom varied. Most of the meal was improvised, based on whatever was in season and available in the market. The one constant was the meat course: large, choice roasts that she could put into the capacious ovens of her red stove in the morning and allow to cook all day long while she painted. Saul had become an aficionado of good wines, particularly dry white Italian vintages, and he took great pleasure in offering his new finds to his friends.

When “the Steinbergs,” as friends had taken to calling them, were not entertaining at home, they were out somewhere being entertained. Hedda preferred to stay quietly alone at home and often did, but Saul was “a marvelous guest” who needed stimulation every night of the week. And yet, according to Hedda and the many friends who were with him, “he was just himself; he did not actually participate in the life of the party.” Many of the invitations came from “people he thought were obnoxious,” but he accepted them because the hosts were either collectors of his work or personally responsible for sending lucrative commercial commissions his way. Most of the time when he was a guest, he preferred to declaim rather than converse, to regale someone else’s dinner table with a monologue that was so witty, erudite, and fascinating that the other guests were content to let him hold sway because he was so charming. At other times he could be exceptionally rude. Hedda did not attend the dinner given by a media mogul who was trying to persuade Steinberg to accept a commission for a drawing that he thought was in bad taste. When he came home early, he told her proudly how he was so appalled by the banality of the conversation that he caused a scene. Saying, “This can only get worse,” he rose from the table, threw down his napkin in anger, and left. “He did things like this on purpose,” she recalled. “He did not hesitate to offend, because he was offended if something or someone was not in perfect taste.”

It was the start of the years when he loved to scandalize people. One evening he sat glowering in the corner of Priscilla Morgan’s living room after what she thought had been a congenial dinner at her round table for eight. Morgan was celebrated for her ability to jolly her guests into conviviality, and indeed on this evening they were all talking and laughing except Steinberg. When she asked him why he was not having a good time, he replied loudly enough for everyone to hear, “These people are all talking!”

“Yes, Saul, and isn’t it fun?” she replied.

“No,” he said, “they should all be listening to me.” And with that he got up and walked out.

THE ENERGY THAT STEINBERG PUT INTO his nonstop socializing was extraordinary, especially when viewed in tandem with all the commercial work he did during the same period, and all of his own work in preparation for a series of exhibitions that began in late March and took him away from home for the better part of the next two years. Two days before he finished moving into the house, on January 28, 1952, his first solo exhibition in two years opened—a major show in two galleries at the same time: with his longtime dealer, Betty Parsons, and with his new dealer in the space just across the hall from hers, Sidney Janis.

Betty Parsons had been an early champion of many of the most successful American abstract artists since her earliest years, when she worked at two successive galleries before starting her own in 1946. She showed their work during the lean years before they became famous, but in the 1950s many were wooed away by gallery owners who promised them higher prices, Sidney Janis prominent among them. Most of these artists left Parsons completely, but Steinberg, who probably needed the money Janis promised more than most of them, refused to make the move unless he could continue to show with Parsons as well. He stayed with her because of his unmitigated loyalty to people who helped him when he needed help the most, but Betty had also become a close friend. She was one of the first people he met in New York in 1942, and one of the first to support his career. He returned her generosity when she was starting her gallery in 1946 by becoming one of the four friends who each contributed $1,000 toward the $4,000 she needed to rent the space at 15 East 57th Street.

This personal quality of the friendship between Steinberg and Parsons made for a curious professional relationship, because Steinberg regarded art dealers with a somewhat jaundiced eye as “the intermediary between two of the most important things in life: money and fame.” Of his two dealers, he found it easier to deal with Parsons, a “fictional character” who was so other worldly that he thought of her as akin to Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov or Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, than to deal with Janis, who was “completely brass tacks.” “I liked her,” he said in 1985 (she died in 1982). “I miss her, even now, very much.”

STEINBERG AND STERNE LEFT FOR THE San Francisco opening of a one-month exhibition of her paintings and his drawings, March 5 to April 5, at Gump’s store gallery, after which they made a quick turnaround so he could sail for England to supervise the installation of his work for the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He always traveled in first class, and on this voyage the one fellow passenger he wanted to meet but whom he had to eye surreptitiously was the comedian Jimmy Durante, traveling as Mr. James Durante, whose reserve did not invite familiarity. Steinberg knew two other people on board, a boring Scottish poet who alluded to previous meetings he did not remember and Hans G. Knoll of the furniture company, who was “gossipy and could be a treasure…but gossip needs a bit of spirit to transform it from sordid to anecdote.” By the time the ship docked, he felt he had been through a “six day long bar mitzvah organized by some aunt.” The crossing was tedious enough to get him over his fear of airplanes, and he vowed to fly next time to “avoid this concentration camp of pleasure.”

He booked a room at the Hyde Park Hotel but stayed only long enough to do publicity before the show’s official opening on May 1. It made him so nervous that he calmed himself with long walks about the city. On one of them he ran into the Irish writer James Stern and his German-born wife, Tanya, on Piccadilly, and they invited him to tea. Stern had worked in journalism as a writer for Time and they were hungry for news of New York; giving it relaxed Steinberg enough to think he was still there and not in London. He was convinced the show was headed for disaster, so he planned to leave before it opened, to hide out for several days in Paris, and to gird himself to go on to Nice to see his parents.

The exhibition room was smaller than he expected and disappointingly shabby. There was no room for many of the images he had planned to show, including a large photograph of the woman painted on the bathtub. He thought the eighty-eight small framed pictures were hung “all right,” but he was amazed at the kinds of questions they inspired in British journalists; for instance, one of them noticed that many of his drawings slanted to the right and wondered if they represented his political leanings. It made him vow “never no more” to submit to a press conference. The last one gave him several “jittery” days as he waited for “poisonous” reviews, and he felt “like a refugee again, imagining waiters and cops looking at me with suspicion.”

He was particularly fearful of the the London Times, because the reporter had a grudge against all things American and considered Steinberg to be representative of the worst of them. The review had not yet appeared when, to his amazement, the “very monumental looking… Manchester Guardian and The Observer ” gave him “fan” reviews and a flattering photo, both of which he found “a bit embarrassing.” And to his amazement, the Times review was as glowing as all the rest. The show was an enormous success, drawing unprecedented crowds every day, but it did not sell as much as he had hoped, because “people were horrified to hear of the prices.” He did eventually sell “two-three pieces” at prices starting around several hundred English pounds, but even that was considered “too expensive.” His consolation was that during the huge Picasso show that preceded his, not a single work was sold.

He did steal away quietly to Paris before the official May 1 opening and stayed there for several days, mostly taking care of personal business, such as making sure that gifts ordered for Hedda’s mother and brother in London had been sent to them in Paris as scheduled. He lunched several times with a depressed Nicola Chiaromonte and was nonplussed to find that he had to do all the talking in order to keep the conversation going with his uncharacteristically silent friend. Steinberg’s efforts were rewarded when Chiaromonte took him for a walk that led to the discovery of several arcades, covered passages that he had not seen before, which he thought of including in a new book he was in the early stages of thinking about. He wrote several times to Hedda, asking her to send her sizes so he could buy the luxury items he adored and she disdained, especially handmade shoes and slippers, but she ignored him. Also, because there were so many more antique shops in London than in Paris that specialized in things he liked to collect, particularly antique clocks and watches, and he had not resisted buying several, he did not have his usual enthusiasm for Paris shopping. And besides, there was little time, because he had to go to Nice.

HE BOUGHT A TRAIN TICKET ON May 5 for a six-day stay and took the precaution of booking a hotel room as well. He found his parents the same as always, with Rosa’s “cynicism” reminding him even more of the “real Balzac” than usual. Now she wanted a fur coat to replace the heavy astrakhan she had not been permitted to take out of Romania, claiming that it was the dearest thing she had ever owned and that she could not recover from its loss. She told Saul she had been saving for years (“starving probably,” he said sarcastically) to buy a “skimpy one” suitable for the Mediterranean climate, but before she would buy a coat she infuriated him by asking in false humility for his permission. Even Moritz got on his nerves this time, as he insisted on reading letters aloud from the poor cousins in Israel, “some moving, some sordid,” while Rosa pressed to know exactly how much financial support Saul was giving them. He bristled when she added slyly that it was going to cost him a fortune to keep her and Moritz on the Riviera, because people could live into their nineties in such a pleasant climate. Then she made the most irritating demand of all, telling him that she had invited other Romanian émigrés for Sunday lunch because she wanted to show off how rich and successful her American son had become. He had to brace himself to go through with it, but he knew it was easier to do it than to refuse, so he gritted his teeth and allowed himself to be put on display. He knew if he didn’t, her passive-aggressive behavior would make both her and Moritz “sick.” It made him realize how much of a “defense” Hedda always threw up between him and his parents and how grateful he was for it.

To get away from Rosa’s constant carping, he invented the myth of business in Rome and went there for an overnight visit. When he arrived, the myth became truth during a happy reunion with Cesare Zavattini, who wanted to make a movie with him. Zavattini had proposed collaborations before for an animated cartoon or a documentary, but this time he wanted to do a full-scale feature film similar to his recent hit, Miracolo a Milano. Steinberg agreed in principle and waited for Zavattini to come up with a concrete proposal, hoping that it would be one that enabled him and Aldo Buzzi to work together. He thought he had the answer when another friend from their Milan days, the director Luciano Emmer, proposed six films of Steinberg’s drawings for both movies and television and agreed to hire Buzzi to direct at least one of them. Unfortunately, neither director’s ideas ever came to fruition, even though Zavattini made sporadic attempts to work with Steinberg for many years afterward.

Otherwise, the Italian trip was disappointing on all fronts. Steinberg found Aldo depressed and living in poverty with Bianca Lattuada, who talked only of money and their lack of it. Her brother, Alberto, insisted on regarding Steinberg as “an American big shot” and conversing only in halting broken English, to which Steinberg always replied in fluent Italian. He was disgusted with how all his old friends treated him, and because he did not want to use a truly derogatory term, settled for calling them “Europeans.” He was upset that “as soon as money and business appear, friendship goes down the drain,” and although he hoped it would not be true in his case, he worried that it might be.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, AFTER A STOP at the Cannes Film Festival, where everyone was amazed and disappointed that Lattuada did not win the prize, Steinberg was back in Paris. He met with Ernesto Rogers, who was there as a member of a committee of architects, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier among them, to select a design for the new UNESCO building. Rogers had several projects in mind for Steinberg to execute in Milan, starting with decorations for a swimming pool, and they dined together on several occasions. Rogers, who was also Jewish, talked freely about how he believed their shared heritage influenced their celebrity. He confessed that he got more enjoyment from promoting his fame than from actually doing the work to earn it, which Steinberg called an “ ‘I’ll show them’ ” attitude. He confessed to Hedda that hearing Rogers admit it brought him great relief, “because I have some symptoms of this vice myself.”

On his last night in Paris he had a vastly different experience when by chance he ran into an architect he had always wanted to meet, Walter Gropius. Steinberg was already a friend of Marcel Breuer, which gave them something in common and led to their having a five-hour dinner together. The thirty-eight-year-old Steinberg, who had never wanted to practice architecture, was enthralled by the seventy-year-old Gropius’s discussion of the profession, whose challenges he still loved. Steinberg now began to think seriously that all the architectural drawings he had been making, of British railway stations, French arcades, and American buildings, might make a good subject cluster to include in a new book. The conversation with Gropius was one of the inspirations for some of the drawings he eventually included in The Passport in 1954.

The next day he got back to London in time to watch a BBC documentary in which three critics discussed his ICA exhibition, pro and con, for an hour. When Penrose told him that there had been other television shows with “pictures and talker[s]” and that reviews from as far away as Scotland and Ireland were universally good, he realized that he had accomplished what he had set out to do in Europe and was ready to go home. He was in such a hurry that he decided to get over his fear of planes and fly, but his reservations were canceled for several days in a row because an oil strike and a shortage of aviation fuel had curtailed the number of scheduled flights by American carriers.

There was another pressing reason he was so eager to return. As was his custom, he wrote loving letters to Hedda at least once every day and sometimes more often, but during this absence he had received very few letters from her in return. Early on she forwarded without comment a “personal letter, silly,” from a “fan,” a term he insisted was correct because he had never met the “girl” who wrote it. He remembered that she had once sent him some suggestions for cartoon gag lines, hoping it would lead to a “literary correspondence with [a] sensitive soul,” but he had never replied. He tried to explain to Hedda that he had had no personal dealings with the woman and that he had destroyed many such letters without showing them because he knew how greatly they disturbed her. He asked Hedda not to lose time over suspicions and unjustified accusations, but she was still smarting from the knowledge of how many women he had been with before his departure and was unable to do so, because she had never really felt brave enough to address the way those encounters wounded her. Time and again he begged her to overcome her suspicions, saying he missed her so much he would take “any fly by night plane to get sooner home.” As she never replied, he did not know how he would find her when he got there.

Unfortunately, the airplane strike continued and he ended up taking the Queen Elizabeth back to New York, not arriving until June 2. The situation with Hedda was still unsettled when he had to leave again one week later for Boston. He did not want to go and was “scared stiff” of the work he had to do there (a department store mural that was never realized), but he was scared even stiffer by how he had left Hedda.

CHAPTER 15

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