Six people to support

Latest news: sister out of Romania, finally … A nightmare, six people to support. The trip to Spain was just short of disastrous. The cities were clogged with tourists, the food was appalling, and Saul complained that it took two days to digest a meal. The only beauty was at the seaside, where dilapidated grand hotels in Anglo-Arab style fronted deserted beaches. The scenery was not enough, however, to make up for the hassles involved with the two accidents Steinberg had while driving his brand-new “never-seen-before Citroën DS19,” a car that drew crowds and made him and Hedda objects of curiosity wherever they went.

They bought the car in Paris in early April 1957 and drove fairly uneventfully to Nice, where they spent several days paying brief duty calls on Rosa and Moritz before escaping to nearby villages to recover from Moritz’s silence in the face of Rosa’s nonstop complaining. When they could no longer endure Nice, they drove through northern Italy to Milan for a brief visit with Aldo. Then they headed directly toward Spain and were between Parma and Genoa when the first accident, a collision with a Fiat, happened. The other car was only slightly damaged, but the Citroën lost the left headlight, fender, and front bumper, and they had to wait several days for replacements to arrive. Once they reached Spain, they were engulfed by hordes of curious Spaniards, who surrounded the car just to touch it or climb on it and who made driving through narrow village roads and city streets difficult. In early June they arrived in Madrid, where the second accident occurred. “A gentleman of Madrid” who was trying to park scratched and dented the entire left side of the Citroën, causing an extraordinary amount of damage.

On their way home, they drove the car slowly and carefully to Paris, where Steinberg sold it and was happy to be rid of it. They were back in New York and settled in by the end of June. To recover from Spain, they planned to spend the rest of the summer in the quiet and empty city.

IN HIS LATER LIFE, STEINBERG DESCRIBED the way each year unfolded as either “important” or “obscure.” He placed 1957 in the latter category, claiming it had been an “obscure” year whose events he had trouble trying to remember. “What happened?” he asked himself twenty years later, unable to recall anything of lasting importance, but whether he wanted to admit it or not, things of lasting importance actually did happen.

For the most part it was a quiet summer with a number of interesting proposals awaiting his consideration. James Ivory asked about the possibility of a film project. There was a request from the Juilliard School for him to design the decor for a production of the Rossini opera Count Ory, and Life wanted him to go to Belmont Park to make a series about horse racing along the lines of the highly successful baseball drawings.

Otherwise Saul and Hedda saw friends with whom they were comfortable and relaxed, among them two Greenwich Village couples whose homes had become informal salons: the artist Ingeborg Ten Haeff and her architect husband, Paul Lester Weiner, and photographer Evelyn Hofer and her then husband, Humphrey Sutton. The Nivola household in Amagansett was, as always, the center of hospitality for Italian expatriates who lived and worked in New York, and Saul and Hedda quickly became mainstays at many gatherings. A friendship with Ugo and Elizabeth Stille blossomed so rapidly that they became frequent visitors to the Stilles’ Greenwich Village apartment. After an evening of spirited dinner-table conversation that covered everything from international politics to literature and music, both Hedda and Saul found it “difficult to wind down and go to sleep,” and the conversation would often continue into the wee hours once they were back home on 71st Street. Personal interactions often added an extra tension to the Stilles’ table, as guests with strongly held views sometimes carried their arguments over into flirtations, casual flings, or serious affairs.

The two couples, the Stilles and the Sterne-Steinbergs, developed an intense friendship that found them on the phone to each other every day whether or not they were going to see each other that night. Throughout Saul and Hedda’s marriage, their custom had been to form separate friendships with couples or individuals. Richard Lindner, for example, went to the Metropolitan Opera with Hedda and to the movies with Saul. When Katherine Kuh and Janet Flanner were in New York, they had casual suppers with Hedda in her kitchen if Saul was away, and if she was unavailable, he took them to dinner in one of his favorite neighborhood restaurants. If either Saul or Hedda simply didn’t want to go somewhere, the other went alone, such as to the cocktail parties given by the wealthy art collector Edgar Kaufmann (Saul) or the art director of Mademoiselle, Leo Lerman (Hedda).

But the friendship with the Stilles was different, because it was the first time that Hedda and Saul were so closely involved in a two-couple friendship. They were both so entranced by the Stilles that it was almost as if they were competing over who could become closest to them. The friendship began because of a natural affinity between the two men: Ugo Stille began life as Mikhail Kamenetzki, a Jew born in Moscow whose family fled persecution to live in Italy. Stille was educated at the University of Rome during the same years that Steinberg was at the Politecnico in Milan, and afterward they worked in journalism in their different cities. They had many friends and experiences in common, but what united them most was the disorientation they had experienced when racial laws forced them to give up the strong Italian identity each had forged. Each man had to learn how to re-create himself in a third language, culture, and society, but they did so in very different ways. Steinberg never gave up his love of the Italian language and spoke it whenever he had the opportunity, while Stille spoke it only professionally and refused to speak it at home to his wife and children.

A significant change happened as the friendship deepened, when it became triangular rather than square. Ugo often traveled for his job as a reporter for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, leaving Elizabeth in charge of entertaining the foreign friends who passed through New York whether he was there or not. As trusted friends, Saul and Hedda were often invited, and as friends do, they helped with the rituals of entertaining—serving drinks, preparing food, and staying afterward to help clean up and offer postmortems on the other guests. As the relationship among the three intensified, it was enlarged naturally to include Elizabeth’s children—first her infant son, Alexander, and later his older sister, Lucy.

Always before Saul had been irritated by the presence of very young children. His attitude gradually changed when he became fascinated with watching how charming Claire, Ruth and Tino Nivola’s daughter, became as she developed from a toddler into a bright and alert little girl. He was so smitten with her that he nicknamed her Chiaretta and showered her with special drawings and toys. One of his gifts was a very personal book he called an ABCedarian, which he told Aldo was his way to “avoid or postpone more urgent things … work without responsibility.” He was “enjoying it a lot” as he illustrated every letter of the alphabet with a special meaning that was in many cases known only to him. He reserved the letter E for Elizabeth Stille, with whom he had become so deeply infatuated that he was certain he was in love for the first time. Steinberg drew Elizabeth’s E as a swan that filled the midsection of the page. At the bottom, for reasons known only to him and her, he wrote the names Chiaromonte, Pollock, and Le Corbusier.

Elizabeth Stille had been born Elizabeth Bogert and had grown up in Chicago, where her father was a professor of law. She attended Cornell and joined a sorority, concentrating more on fraternity parties than on studying until her mother, who was otherwise a traditional housewife, “yanked her out of Cornell and made her go to a new school in Chicago, a reconstituted Bauhaus under Moholy-Nagy, unproven and unconventional.” This New Bauhaus, as it was originally called, became the Institute of Design, and it not only brought the world of European intellectuals into the life of the young midwestern sorority girl, it also changed her life entirely. She studied painting with Bob Wolfe, a married instructor who fell so deeply in love with her that he left his wife to marry her. They moved to New York, eager to live the life of starving artists, but the marriage did not last after Elizabeth met Ugo Stille, whom she married in 1948 and to whom she remained married until her death in 1993.

When Saul and Hedda became enmeshed in what Hedda called, many years later, “the Elizabethan triangle,” their marriage had already weathered too many of Saul’s infatuations, affairs, and flings to count. Their friends tried not to notice at parties and receptions when Hedda stood at one end of the room suffused with shame and deliberately ignoring Saul, who was deeply engrossed in persuasive seduction at the other end of it. These were the years when Hedda woke up every day with “the terror that grips the shoulders…the promise of a new day of torture, disaster, humiliation.” But she was a stoic who accepted that she could not change her husband’s philandering ways, and she consoled herself that no matter how often he strayed, she was his rock and his anchor and he would always come back to her. This was true until he met Elizabeth Stille, and by late summer 1957 he had told Hedda that he was in love with Elizabeth and they would have to find some way to resolve how they lived so that it would include his being with Elizabeth and her children.

His proposal was that he and Elizabeth should be permitted to be together as a couple, but that this would happen while they remained within their separate marriages. Hedda had come to love the infant Sandro (as Alexander was called), so Saul saw no reason that their triangle could not be enlarged from three to four (and, after Lucy’s birth, five). He was convinced that a ménage à cinq was not only a possibility but one that could become a happy reality. Hedda was stunned, but there was no time to digest his alarming proposal, let alone respond to it. In late August they received word that the Romanian government had finally processed the documents that would permit Lica and her family to leave, and he had to drop everything to go to meet them.

THE NEWS THAT THE ROMAN FAMILY was permitted to leave came as a total surprise to everyone, even the principals. Steinberg had given up hope after he asked Alexander Lindey to add his contacts to the host of influential people he had been importuning over the years and to do what he could to get them out. Lindey did so, and reported back in February 1957 that no one in the government could help because no exit visas were being granted by any of the Iron Curtain countries, and the Roman family could only leave if they “managed to slip out…without authorization.” Steinberg resigned himself to sending more packages than usual and hoping they would get through.

On August 20, Moritz and Rosa wrote that Rica, Lica’s husband, had been called into an official office and told he had been approved for departure on an unnamed date and to an unnamed destination. As this had happened so many times before, Saul did nothing. A telegram from his parents jolted him into action on August 26: “They leave on September 1st through Vienna Genoa. They want to come to France. We beg you to facilitate.” He was ready to fly to Europe, but the question was, to which city? He asked advice from everyone he could think of, starting in diplomatic circles with the American, French, and Italian embassies and consulates. They all told him to go to Genoa, because Vienna was merely the transfer point for Romanian refugees, who would be shuttled onto other trains as soon as the train arrived because the Austrian government did not permit them to stay in the country, no matter how briefly. No one knew for sure, but it was assumed that the Roman family had to go to Israel and had been directed to sail there from Genoa. Steinberg decided to fly to Genoa but was too nervous to wait for them, and as he had friends working on their behalf in Milan, he decided to go there to see what they had accomplished. Ernesto Rogers, “through an exchange of favors” with the French consul, secured a temporary French visa so Lica could have a brief reunion with her parents and introduce them to the grandchildren, especially Daniela, whom they had never seen.

By September 8, with a temporary visa valid only until the sixteenth, the Roman family was still in Bucharest while Steinberg fidgeted in Milan. The eighth was also Saturday and all the official offices were closed until Monday, but he still spent the weekend making “hundreds” of phone calls and sending cables to anyone he could think of who might prove helpful. In Nice, his parents were “frantic,” and while he was bombarding officials and friends with telegrams and phone calls, they were doing the same to him. He decided he had to do something, so he flew to Vienna after he sent wires to the station master at the main bahnhof, the International Refugee Committee, and the American consul, telling them all that he was on his way the next morning. Late that night his parents sent a telegram saying that everyone had arrived in Vienna and would be sent directly to Nice the next day. Shortly after, a telegram came from the Vienna station master saying that Ilie Roman and his wife and two children had arrived at 7:40 a.m. and would leave shortly by train for Genoa. More confusion ensued until phone calls to Vienna assured Steinberg that they would indeed board the train for Genoa. He left immediately and booked rooms there for them and himself in a quiet and genteel hotel where they could decompress for a day before going on to Nice.

IT WAS A DIFFICULT REUNION WHEN Saul saw Lica for the first time in so many years, as if they were strangers being suddenly forced into a false intimacy. Theirs was a childhood relationship forged twenty-five years before, and since then he had all but forgotten how close they had been. Still, he felt “a duty, a responsibility,” to take care of her and her family. Lica was haggard and thin, and to his surprise showed “a great desire to be alone.” Rica seemed “all right,” but at forty-nine, he was “not a strong or tough man,” and he suffered from high blood pressure. Saul didn’t know what to make of his nephew and niece, whom he called “the boy” and “the girl.” Stéphane was eleven, “tall for his age, intelligent eyes” and Daniela (called Dana) was “still too small and too Romanian.” He was surprised when they both occasionally overcame their silence, fear, and exhaustion and behaved like normal children, at which times he called them “savages, but not bad.” It took a few days, but he got along well with everyone and they “got to be friends again.”

Steinberg still had trouble believing that their documents were in legal order, so before he tried to take them across the border to France, he asked to see them to make sure everything was as it should be. He was distressed to find only a “Romanian and Russian piece of paper” that gave them a visa to Israel, with no mention of the temporary stay in France. He hid his concern, left them in the hotel with instructions to rest, eat, and watch television, and rushed to a Jewish agency that handled the steady stream of refugees that passed through Genoa. The agency personnel told him that the Roman family needed “a so-called passport” which the agency could not release, so they should simply board the train to Nice, which they did. One meeting after another with various bureaucrats in Nice failed to resolve the stalemate over how long they could stay in France. “It looks like Israel is the only solution,” he told Hedda glumly.

In Nice, “too many things” were going on, particularly Rosa’s euphoric hysteria over seeing her daughter after so many years. Saul wanted to get away from the family drama as much as from the problems the Roman family had unwittingly caused. He was convinced they would be allowed to stay in France, even if only for a few months, and to get them away from Rosa, he found several apartments for them, but they were stunned by the possibility of making choices, which they had never had to do in Romania. As they were unable to decide, Saul chose one and helped them move. He told them where and how to enroll the children in school but ended up doing most of the work himself. He transferred a sizable amount of money to the account he had set up in the American Express Bank in Nice for his parents and added Ilie Roman’s name as someone authorized to withdraw funds from it. As soon as he got to New York he planned to arrange for an increase in the stipend so it would cover four additional dependents, which made him worry about finding enough income to replenish the account every month. When he thought he had done all he could to get the family settled, he made tentative reservations to fly to New York on September 17, but one problem after another kept arising and so he had to stay on until the twenty-fourth.

He was in New York on September 25, 1957, when Moritz wrote to send greetings for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It was a great relief to learn that Rica had withdrawn money from the account without incident, the Roman family was settled in the apartment, and the children were enrolled in a French school that they liked. Moritz told Saul that Rosa was “on cloud nine” when they came to her apartment every evening to watch television, and he blessed his son for everything he had done for them. But despite her happiness at seeing her daughter, Rosa was still Rosa, and she had complaints: the children were “very cute but also too energetic and spoiled.” Lica was too thin, and Rosa was upset that she did not look like the “princesses in [ Paris ] Match. ” Only Stéphane passed Rosa’s muster, but the six-year-old Dana was a “scoundrel” who made too much noise and caused too much confusion. Lica’s interpretation of the family dynamic was more soothing, as she told Saul and Hedda that “the different generations are beginning to get along.” That was before everything shifted, when, on top of their unhappiness over having to become French, they became too expensive to support.

Once Saul added up all the costs involved in supporting six dependents in France, he told Rica to begin the process that would allow them (Rosa and Moritz included) to enter the United States as permanent residents. Rica was a lawyer trained to navigate bureaucratic byways, so he knew that he had first to secure an “extension of stay in France” before the long process of immigrating to the United States could happen. Also, less than a month after their arrival in France, the Roman family became unhappy with living there. On their own they made significant changes. The original apartment was too dark and noisy, so Rica found another because Lica had caught a cold and was too sick to get out of bed. Rosa’s attempt to be helpful was more obstructive than usual; in trying to cure Lica, she made herself sick with various aches and pains and had to take to her bed, which meant that the still-sick Lica had to get up to minister to her mother. The move to the new apartment meant the children had to attend a new school, which Stéphane accepted but which upset Dana, gave her headaches, and made her “antagonistic.” Lica and Rica found French too confusing after many years of speaking only Romanian, so they decided to learn English instead, in preparation for either the United States or Israel, which they still considered a viable possibility, much to Saul’s consternation.

They did, however, follow his directive to go to the American consulate for the medical examinations that would set in motion the long, involved paperwork process that might allow them to immigrate, and to the prefect of Nice, who needed to grant an extension of their stay in France until the American application was resolved. They dutifully began the process of swearing affidavits and gathering documents that would explain that they had never been members of the Communist Party, that Rica had been held in a Romanian detainee camp for continuing to practice law after Jews had been forbidden to do so, and that he had otherwise been a model citizen who would uphold the laws of the United States if he were permitted to live there.

All of this spurred Steinberg into action, starting with a visit to the Hallmark headquarters in Kansas City to negotiate new and more lucrative contracts. He resented having to put on “a good act as an artist according to the notions of the idiots” in a city he so disliked that he used one of his favorite expressions to disparage it, saying it smelled like Gogol’s nose. At the same time, more letters asking for help came from relatives in Israel, and Ada chose this moment to hint that she too could use a little money.

AT HOME, THINGS WERE CALM BECAUSE Hedda refused to address Saul’s obsession with Elizabeth Stille and also because he was unable to talk about it or decide what he wanted to do. It was actually a relief to be able to postpone thinking about it or coming to a decision after the United States government invited him to accept a prestigious commission to design a 100-meter mural for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels.

“I’m in trouble,” he told Aldo after he accepted it, as he lapsed into Spanish to say he would have to use his cabeza and think. His assigned subject was “ people in the U.S.” In 1957, long before the term came to be accepted popular use, he described the most important problem the creation of the mural would raise: “How do you draw the blacks?”

CHAPTER 22

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