I LIVED WITH HER FOR SO LONG

Hedda and I have become friends, now perhaps more than before.

It now seems to me something remote, like elementary schoolmates. And I lived with her for so long I’m amazed. The physical separation between Saul and Hedda was smooth: he simply found an apartment and moved out. The aftermath was more complicated. First there were the legalities: although they had separate bank accounts for income and savings, they shared a checking account and paid joint taxes in the names of Saul and Hedda Steinberg. Saul explained that the easiest way to deal with taxes for the year just past and the one to come would be to let his accountants, Neuberger & Berman, file their return as a married couple now living in separate residences. The house had always been in Hedda’s name, so that would not present a problem, but they owned two cars registered in both names, and their vehicle, medical, and household insurances were also in both names. Now that they had separate addresses, everything had to be modified. There was even a cat they both adored, and they joked that Hedda retained custody while Saul had visiting privileges.

The actual question of divorce was never directly addressed. Everything was couched in terms of how best to deal with immediate legal requirements, while the main issue of when or how to bring a formal end to the marriage was left to drift without discussion. In later years, Hedda believed that they stayed married for almost sixty years because Saul “got all he wanted without formality.” She offered several explanations for why they never divorced, the first being Saul’s overdeveloped sense of responsibility. She thought this was a strange attitude for him to have since she had always supported herself, thanks mostly to her first husband and for a time to the robust sales of her paintings. She thought he was probably experiencing a combination of guilt and embarrassment over the way he had unceremoniously “dumped” her to “rob the cradle.” But Hedda believed the most important reason they never divorced was that she was “Saul’s Elaine [de Kooning, the legal wife], who protected Bill from ever having to marry any of his women.” As for Steinberg himself, whenever the question of marriage to Gigi was raised, either by her or by others, if he did not say, “I already have a wife,” he usually said, “The only purpose of marriage is to have children, and we don’t want any.”

The legal issues dragged on because one or the other spouse always seemed to be traveling and unavailable to sign the papers. During the first year of their separation, Hedda Sterne had six exhibitions that took her away from New York, and she had to prepare for two more that came early the following year. She had also just fulfilled an important commission to paint her impression of tractor parts for the John Deere Company, photographs of which became a featured article in Fortune magazine and brought even more requests for sales, commissions, and shows. Her absence was responsible for most of the delays and missed deadlines for the numerous forms that had to be signed and notarized, and all the negotiations threw Saul and Hedda into closer contact than either had envisioned when they separated. Much of it was through letters, which provided enough of a buffer for both to make admissions that might not have been possible in face-to-face encounters.

For an artist who shunned the limelight, Hedda Sterne was very much in it. Knowing of her preference for solitude, Steinberg monitored all her public activity and took care to ensure that no one took advantage and nothing untoward happened. When she went to Rome in March for a show at the Obelisco Gallery and caught the flu on top of what most artists describe as the usual problems connected with preparations for an opening, Steinberg wrote letters, made phone calls, and enlisted his Italian friends to give her whatever help she needed. “Please take good care and have courage. I am your friend and I care for you,” he wrote, signing his letter “Love, Saul.” And yet, even as he wished her his “best love,” he still pressed her to tell whether she had the original sale documents for her car, which he needed for the insurance company.

Hedda’s trip to Rome overlapped with Gigi’s to Trier and Paris, and Steinberg was left on his own in New York. He spent a lot of time in Springs, which was different from all the previous times he had been alone. Now, with both women in his life unavailable, he had to become self-reliant. It led to his discovery “that having pleasure for a reason is no good (it brings counterpleasure, like a hangover) and that the only way to have pleasure or a good time is for no reason at all.” One of the ways he gave himself pleasure for no reason at all was to play tricks on friends. On impulse, he bought a carload of pink plastic flamingos at the local hardware store and at night sneaked around to his friends’ houses and planted them on the front lawns. When the rumor spread that Steinberg had played the joke, everyone wanted one: “It’s now a mark of distinction to have a flamingo planted by me!”

HE WORKED IN SPRINGS BUT HAD very little time to do much thinking about new work when he returned to New York, where his social calendar was full. He had become close to Inge Morath since Cartier-Bresson had introduced them several years before in Paris, and now that she was with Arthur Miller, Steinberg befriended him as well. Morath often asked Steinberg to let her photograph him in his studio while he worked, but he always stalled, insisting that he was bashful and uninteresting. She responded that there had to be something he was not shy about, which made him think about ways to show his work while hiding in plain sight. Eventually he let her capture him while wearing the brown-paper-bag masks he had been making for the past year to amuse himself and his friends.

Much of his conviviality was with creative friends like Morath, who also wanted his cooperation on various projects, such as when Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen tried to persuade him over dinner to design posters for the Broadway play Do You Know the Milky Way? He accepted the dinner invitation because he was so fond of Hagen, but he still asked to be paid for his work and had a contract drawn up that stated his usual conditions. He went to parties at the homes of Thomas Hess, Philip Hamburger, and Walker Evans, lunched with the visiting Le Corbusier, and was the only luncheon guest Marcel Duchamp invited when he entertained Salvador Dalí (to whom Steinberg was more polite than he had been on the transatlantic crossing). Steinberg played gracious host to Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni when they came to New York, happy to repay the generous hospitality they showed him whenever he was in Rome. He went downtown to meet with Julian Beck and Judith Malina but found their version of theater too off-putting to contribute art to it. There were casual suppers with old friends as well, and the names of Bernard and Berte Rudofsky appear often in his engagement books, as do those of Charlie Addams and Isamu Noguchi and Priscilla Morgan, who were now a couple.

Morgan was the American associate director of the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, for which she asked Steinberg to loan his de Kooning drawing “Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother.” He and de Kooning were good friends who exchanged their work, and Steinberg was exceptionally proud of this important drawing. He was happy to loan it but was upset when he learned that another good friend, Sid Perelman, did not like the drawing Steinberg had done for the cover of his forthcoming book, The Rising Gorge. The rejection came via the publisher’s art director, who thanked Steinberg for his “wish to present something abstract” and claimed that “Sid will not be happy with this treatment.” The art director thought it best to pursue “a different approach.”

WHENEVER A COMMISSION FELL THROUGH, it always made Steinberg aware of how much money he was spending, and in this case he made an informal list of what he had earned since the start of the year: There was close to $1,000 from an Italian newspaper, several fabric companies, and Glamour magazine; another $210 came from investments in the stock market, and $25.50 from two weeks of jury duty, which amounted to a grand total of $1,306.36. He planned to use the money to cover what he was calling “a spur of the moment” visit to Paris in early June to see his mother, who was “in very bad shape,” and perhaps to meet Hedda, if she was still there. She was staying at the Hotel Aiglon on Boulevard Raspail, so he reserved a room next door at “the usual Pont Royal,” where they had formerly stayed together. He was especially eager to see her because she had become almost irrational about money and he needed to reassure her that she need not worry.

He was finding it increasingly difficult to micromanage Hedda’s affairs via letters. Before she left, she arranged for the top floor of her house to be made into an apartment, and since then she had convinced herself that she could not afford to live in the rest of the place and would have to rent that as well. Steinberg sent a check for $1,000 to sooth her fears, but she mistakenly deposited it in the joint account they were supposed to close. With more patience than he had ever shown before, he instructed her in how to use the new account that he had carefully set up in the name of Hedda Sterne, rather than the Hedda Steinberg she had used before. His most pressing task was to persuade her not to lease the apartment to an artist friend who could pay only a minuscule rent. “It’s not fair; it’s too cheap,” he told her, but once again she ignored his advice. Most of all, he wanted to persuade her that she “should live well and live there … You have no reason to live in hotel rooms.”

THE REASON HE WAS SO ANXIOUS about Rosa was that Hedda had finally visited and told his mother that she and Saul had separated. She made no mention of Gigi and left it to Saul to tell his mother whatever else he wanted her to know. Although Rosa was resigned to his uncommunicative ways, it had never stopped her in the past from demanding answers to her questions, and yet she was surprisingly timid about the end of his marriage: “I don’t know what the cause might have been and I won’t even ask. Besides, I know you won’t tell me.” Now that he was no longer living with Hedda, Rosa put aside all her earlier criticisms to declare that Hedda had always been “an angel … very kind and nice with us.”

Steinberg’s main reason for going to Paris was not as spur-of-the-moment as he led Hedda to believe, nor was it his concern for Rosa’s health. He wanted to surprise Gigi and take her on a whirlwind, first-class vacation to the Riviera. He did not tell Hedda or Rosa that Gigi was in Paris, but he did arrange for Lica to come into the city to meet her. Whatever Lica’s initial reaction was to Gigi, she kept it to herself and was kind and cordial—indeed, almost motherly. This became her genuine attitude as years passed and Gigi became a good friend first to Lica and then to her daughter, Daniela, as she reached adulthood.

Saul and Gigi drove south to the Côte d’Azur and checked into the posh Hotel Ruhl in Nice, which she found “all very glamorous,” particularly as their room was one of the most luxurious at the front of the hotel, with a balcony that fronted on the Promenade des Anglais and overlooked the beach beyond. Afterward he took her to Rome, Venice, and Milan, where he introduced her to as many friends as he could. Here again, everyone accepted her and there were no untoward incidents. “Happy times,” she recorded in her diary.

THEY SPENT THE REST OF THE summer of 1961 fairly tranquilly, mostly in Springs. Gigi busied herself planting a garden and Saul learned the “instinct or new pleasure of taking care of the house.” He also learned to swim at nearby Louse Point, a quiet inlet just down the road from his home that became the inspiration for some of the landscapes he realized several years later in watercolors, drawings, and the faux canvases he later painted on Masonite board. He told Aldo that it was a “marvel” to speak of such simple country pleasures, “because they’ve always seemed to me things for other people.”

But when autumn came and they were back in Washington Square Village, Steinberg found it difficult to settle down to work. In Springs, he and Gigi had the house, the garden, and the seven acres of property in which to keep busy independently. Their social life had been mostly with old friends who accepted them as a couple despite the discrepancy in their ages, so they faced none of the awkwardness they encountered in New York, such as when the shocked Connie Breuer invited Steinberg to bring his young friend “Sigfrid” to dinner.

When they were alone together in the country, Saul and Gigi rode bikes to the beach at Louse Point for a late-afternoon swim, then went home to drink chilled white wine, grill some fish and vegetables, perhaps to read and listen to music, and then early to bed. Their passion was strong and steady, and their quiet life in the country sustained it. In the city, the apartment was spacious by New York standards, but it was too confining when one partner was engrossed in trying to work while the other had very little to do.

Gigi was not a shopper, she had no friends her own age, and very few of Saul’s friends became hers. She was not one to visit galleries and museums, but she did like to read. Because of Saul’s voracious appetite for books, she wanted to educate herself to be a worthy conversationalist, but she found it difficult to concentrate on the English language, which she still did not know well, and often she didn’t finish what she started. It was good that he loved the movies and they went often, which gave them something to talk about. He liked to go to concerts, but she claimed not to understand music; he only went to the theater when one of his friends was involved in a production, and she never went alone to any kind of performance. Consequently, there was not all that much to talk about when they were together, and there were not many opportunities for Steinberg to have the apartment to himself to work.

Gigi did like to decorate, so the apartment soon reflected many of her little domestic touches. As soon as they became a couple, Saul put her on his payroll as a studio assistant and gave her a separate and generous checking account. Because she spent relatively little on things for herself, she had enough every month to buy whatever caught her fancy for the apartment. Steinberg was not always pleased with her purchases, but in the beginning he managed not to let her know it.

What she really wanted was for him to help her find a gallery to show her work and to use his contacts to bring in design projects that would let her demonstrate her excellence in the hand lettering that was her forte. Steinberg’s friends recognized her frustration over not being able to create, let alone advance a career, and some of them did try to help. When Sasha Schneider praised her drawings, she gave him one, and in return he bought another for $50; the editor Aaron Ascher gave her three book jackets to design after Steinberg asked him to look at her portfolio. These occasional sales and commissions were not enough to give her the financial independence she craved or to keep her from feeling like “the appendage in this relationship” and becoming depressed. She wrote about her feelings on the back of an envelope that she left next to Steinberg’s place at the large table that filled most of their living area, the only place they seemed able to communicate, and then only through brief notes: “I sit here all evening waiting for you to talk to me—until it started to drive me crazy—I wanted you so badly to talk to me—all day—give me a chance to talk—but I am to [sic] scared + stiff with panic and very ashamed and unhappy. I can understand if you had enough and don’t want to be bothered anymore just let me know—I would be very sorry—but then it is mostly my own fault—and maybe what I deserve.”

The only time Steinberg had ever been able to communicate with Hedda was through letters when they were apart, and now he was repeating the pattern with Gigi. When he wanted to be alone to work, he withdrew into bleak silences that shut her out completely. She searched for explanations for his behavior even though she could not accept them, accusing him of being “so wrapped up in his ‘art’ and the business of it, the administration, etc. that there is no room for life or pleasure.” And because she was “not devoted to art,” the more time they were together and his silences increased, she felt “more and more bored and distant.”

AS ALWAYS, TRAVEL PRESENTED A WAY for Steinberg to avoid problems, and he planned to take advantage of it by accepting a commission to execute a mural in a private home in the center of Milan, the Palazzina Mayer on the Via Bigli. While he was making preparations for the November 1961 trip, news came from Lica that their mother had died, on October 3. Rosa had been hospitalized since August 22 with a combination of ailments that included severe anemia, diabetes, and microbial flora in the lungs, most likely caused by cancer. In September she suffered a minor stroke, which left her bedridden and unable to speak, and shortly after, when she became unable to move or swallow, she needed gastric intubation. Her doctors said that the usual ravages of old age had been intensified by severe “delusional mental stress,” as she continued to worry about money and mourn her dead husband whenever she was semiconscious. Rosa was mostly unconscious in her last days, but when Lica tried to show her a letter from Saul, she brightened long enough to call out a garbled version of his childhood nickname, Sauly.

Knowing that Saul had work in Italy and Rosa had to be buried before he could get to Paris, Lica asked him not to change his travel plans. She told him not to be unduly upset that he had not been there when their mother died, because he had been “her miracle maker with boundless powers” and done so much for her throughout her lifetime. To make him feel better, Lica related the story of how she whispered to Rosa that the distinguished neurologist who was examining her was a “famous professor.” Rosa nodded and said, “Saul told him to care for me,” convinced that the doctor had come at her famous son’s bidding. Lica begged him to be comforted that he was his mother’s “myth until the end.”

It was a difficult time for both Saul and Lica as they dealt with their mother’s death and at the same time the death of their dear Aunt Pesa in Israel. Of the elder generation, only their aunt Sali Marcovici, Rosa’s last surviving sister, was left, and Saul, who had been sending her and her family money for years, increased his generosity toward them. Saul and Lica were drawn together in their sorrow and found a common bond in their mutual love of art. Through their work, they recaptured the closeness that had seemed forever lost when language and distance separated them for so many years. As adults without parents, they turned to each other for solace and became close and loving friends from that time onward.

Lica asked him to write to her in French, as she had all but forgotten Romanian, especially the vocabulary to describe aspects of her work. When he sent birthday greetings in April 1962, she told him she was undergoing a period of “great changes and renewal” in her art and implored him to try to do the same: “If you feel like your work has become routine or it bores you, try to change your technique. It’s amazing what you can discover through lithography and engraving. I’m truly my father’s daughter with the press … I stay in the studio for days on end.” She had created a studio within the house and urged him to bring Gigi for a holiday so they all could work together.

AFTER HE FINISHED THE VIA BIGLI MURAL, he returned to New York to find a welcome check from The New Yorker for $500 and the bad news that he needed a new roof on the house in Springs, which would cost $650. Good news soon followed when Sports Illustrated asked him to go to the Rose Bowl to create a portfolio of drawings. He started to make lists in preparation, starting with things to buy for Gigi (“bed, stockings, underwear”). He followed the notation to “work” with an arrow pointing to “make money.” There were also two notations to “write Gigi letter” (even though they were living together in the apartment) and “be nice to Gigi.”

While Saul was away, Gigi’s letters told him that she was feeling “low” and had resorted to a combination of brandy and sleeping pills to keep from being “depressed.” He was worried when she told him that she could not eat and was losing weight, but he was terrified when she described her great pleasure at driving her “new friend, the Jaguar,” especially after she told him that she left it parked on the street because she never got around to putting it in the garage. He knew about her mother’s crippling depressions and was torn between consoling her and scolding her for carelessness with his beloved car. He thought to solve both problems by buying her a car of her own, a four-door Chevrolet sedan, and by sending her to the first of the long series of psychoanalysts she would consult in years to come. And yet no matter how much he cared for her, he still had difficulty curbing his temper when she described falling into one of her self-absorbed depressions; he was only slightly relieved when she wrote in her imperfect English that it was actually “amazing” that she managed to be as well as she was: “No crying or spook. Feel cheerful etc. You have no idea how good you have done to me. I finally feel like a mensch.”

Gigi kept a sort of diary too, and while she was writing letters of gratitude for everything he gave her, she was also confiding to herself that she had “met a younger man.” She was not one to stay at home while Steinberg was away, and she frequented a succession of bars, where she liked to drink and pick up men. In later years Max’s Kansas City became a favorite, but at the beginning of her life with Steinberg, any nearby watering hole would do. She kept the incident of the “younger man” to herself when Steinberg returned and was thrilled to learn that they were going to Hollywood, where they would stay at the Beverly Hilton and spend New Year’s Eve with some of his fancy friends at a party given by Billy Wilder. She swam in the hotel pool, drove down Sunset Boulevard to the Pacific Ocean, and helped Steinberg drive the rented car across the desert to Las Vegas, where they both gambled.

Unfortunately, the trip was not all sunlight and roses: the Sports Illustrated accountants spent most of the following year refusing to pay the $106.47 for the rented car, which they had not approved in advance, and demanding that Steinberg return the $23 they had overpaid for unauthorized expenses.

IN NEW YORK, STEINBERG FOUND HIMSELF turning down more requests than he could possibly fill even if he had wanted to try. Lincoln Center wanted posters and programs for Claudio Arrau’s concerts, a British woman living in France wanted him to contribute to an “Artists and Writers Cook Book,” editors from Putnam, Knopf, and Harper all wanted books, and Cass Canfield was urging him to think seriously about a new collection that would remove the sour taste left by the non-selling Labyrinth. In Italy, Rizzoli wanted to publish a book that would lead off with the cartoons Steinberg had done for Bertoldo, Settebello, and other Italian publications before culminating with some of his current work, and the publisher Feltrinelli wrote to congratulate him on winning the 1962 Palma d’Oro per la letteratura illustrata. There were other foreign requests as well, particularly from Germany, where Rowohlt Verlag was pressing for a second book.

Despite the upheavals in his life, he still managed to produce two New Yorker covers in 1960 and three in 1961, and he was full of ideas for more to come. He had designed several book jackets and contributed cover drawings to periodicals such as Art in America and Opera News, and he was featured in a special all-Steinberg issue of the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, edited by his friend the artist Jesse Reichek. Steinberg had always been a popular subject for journalists and art historians, and depending on his mood, he answered their questions with thrusts and parries that sometimes veered close to the truth but never quite told it. Seldom did a questioner cause him to shut down completely, but the art historian and curator Katherine Kuh managed to do it.

Kuh had been a booster and friend to both Steinberg and Sterne from her days as curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Now she was living and working in New York and had become close to Sterne, frequently dropping in for the informal suppers and long conversations about art that were one of Sterne’s greatest pleasures in her post-Steinberg life. Kuh was collecting interviews with prominent American artists for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and she was eager to include Steinberg. He sat with her for an afternoon, patiently responding to her questions, after which he went home and wrote a letter explaining his reasons for not completing the interview. He told Kuh that “the man involved in his own history becomes himself a work of art. And a work of art doesn’t permit changes and it doesn’t paint or write.” To complete the interview would be his equivalent of the “planting of artistic ruins for present and future archeologists,” and it could only result in “predictable originality … and other catch-the-fleeting-moment arts.” By cooperating fully, he would be creating “a complicity in which I would play my part according to popular expectations.” He offered this explanation for “the sake of courtesy” to her and also for himself, so that he would not be “poisoned by unfinished business.”

ALL THE WHILE THAT HE WAS fulfilling his many commissions and professional obligations, he was also busy introducing Gigi to his New York acquaintances, most of whom had grown used to seeing them together. He was grateful for invitations from women, among them the painters Elaine de Kooning, Buffie Johnson, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, and Helen Frankenthaler. Steinberg took Gigi to large gatherings but left her at home when he attended small dinners where conversation was likely to be about ideas, literature, and art. He saw many friends alone, such as Bill Steig, with whom he was now exchanging recommendations for reading or having an occasional lunch after meetings at The New Yorker ’s art department. He joined Ad Reinhardt, who communicated with friends via “bellicose postcards that were an affectionate reminder of his constantly hostile presence,” for a gallery opening on the day the world was supposed to end according to “740 Hindu priests in New Delhi.” Aldo Buzzi was passing through New York en route to Los Angeles to work on one of Lattuada’s films, and although he had not yet met Gigi, Steinberg saw him alone at the Plaza Hotel. He did not take her to the dinner party hosted by the British publisher Lord Weidenfeld for one of his important collectors, Mrs. Henry J. (Ruth) Heinz, and he went alone to a dinner given by Otto Preminger, who tried from time to time to engage him in projects that were most often unrealized.

He was out almost every night, and most of the time without Gigi. She became deeply unhappy with living her life “on a stand-by basis” and forced a confrontation in which she accused him of taking no pleasure in her company and causing her to look for what she euphemistically called “other things.” She accused him of not liking her and disapproving of anything she might say “that was not originated by you or your interests.” When they argued about it, he accused her of a “lack of devotion,” while she retorted that there was too much loneliness involved in trying to live with him and she needed to search for something else. He thought it was a good idea, and suggested two ways she might go about filling her days with worthwhile interests: she could find her own apartment, one in which she could express her individuality and creativity on her own time and in her own milieu; and she could take some courses to broaden her experiences and educate herself to fit better into his world. He told her she could start by attending a school that would rid her of her heavy German accent, and he arranged to pay for her lessons in spoken English.

She attended several sessions but decided she could do better on her own. She wanted a real education, so she enrolled in comparative literature at Columbia University’s School of General Studies and began a rigorous program that, had she completed it, would have given her a master’s degree. To prepare for the fall term, she found her own apartment at 109 Waverly Place and moved there in April 1962.

Sigrid Spaeth and Saul Steinberg stayed mostly together for the rest of her life, but they never lived under the same roof again except for vacations in Springs or when they traveled. This was their first of many partings and probably the gentlest of all, but it still was not easy.

CHAPTER 27

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