Saul Steinberg: A Biography Part 11

CHAPTER 25.

CHANGES AND NEW THINGS.

I haven't written to you in all this time because I've been too busy with the changes and new things in my life.

Steinberg did phone Barbara Baekeland to say that he would not mind meeting the German girl again. On July 9, 1960, he wrote in his daily diary that he saw "Gigi" in the afternoon but left her after a few hours to spend the euphemistic "all evening" with "Ala." Steinberg made no other entries until July 21, when he wrote the lyrics of a popular song, "Catch 'em young treat them rough tell 'em nothing" and then added "Gigi" at the bottom of the page. He continued to see her concurrently with "Ala" until July 30, when he wrote something that caused him to tear out all the pages until August 2. After that, "Ala" disappears from the diary, and on August 5 he wrote "Gigi non-stop," with her name from then on surrounded by exclamation points and decorated with fireworks, rockets, and shooting stars.

If Saul Steinberg's descriptions of his affairs are studied, from the mundane one-night stands to the more serious and long-lasting encounters, the most intensely s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p he ever had was with Sigrid "Gigi" Spaeth. Those who were present at the start of the long liaison used adjectives like "bowled over," "thunderstruck," and "blindsided" to describe how besotted he was. He was in the midst of several personal crises throughout the month of August, but he put them all aside and concentrated on seeing Gigi almost every day. They went to the movies, to concerts at Carnegie Hall, and to the Jazz Festival on Randall's Island. He even gave in to her plea to take her drinking at the Cedar Tavern, where she wanted everyone to see that she was with Saul Steinberg and where he was embarra.s.sed to be seen hanging out with a woman half his age in a bar he never patronized. He did it anyway, because she wanted it. When she told him she was planning to hitchhike to Provincetown for a vacation, he gave her money for the train and a good hotel. When she became ill and had to cut her stay short, he brought her to Was.h.i.+ngton Square Village and put her to sleep while he went to the pharmacy for medications. And when she was well enough to go to the apartment she was temporarily sharing on 57th Street, he made the trek uptown to take care of her and bring clean clothing and more medicine.

Saul Steinberg and Sigrid Spaeth, shortly after their first meeting, dancing at Benjamin Sonnenberg's Gramercy Park mansion. (ill.u.s.tration credit 25.1) It was a far different relations.h.i.+p from the one he had had with Hedda, wherein she took care of all the details of their daily life. With Gigi, he was also the caretaker, responsible for the happiness and well-being of a girl who had become his ward as well as his lover. In the short time he had known her she became the center of his existence: when he listed his "engagements for the week," he noted that she left for Provincetown on Sunday and he must write to her on Monday; on Tuesday he had to design a record jacket for RCA and lunch with Russell Lynes of Harper's Magazine; on Wednesday he had to follow her instructions to shop for new s.h.i.+rts, handkerchiefs, and a hat because she didn't like the ones he wore. Also he also had to have a photo she liked enlarged to give her as a gift when she returned. On Thursday, when she was back and recovering from her illness in his apartment, he had to find a book on Mozart because she wanted it, then take her to a movie, and afterward "buy Gigi something." On Friday he had to follow her command "Don't drink too much." On Sat.u.r.day he drove her to the house in Springs, and on Sunday he had to do something that shocked everyone who knew him: to shave his mustache, because she didn't like it. He said he would take her anywhere in the world she wanted to go for her birthday, and off the top of her head she said Niagara Falls. They went, "but I never got to see the Falls," she told her diary. And in the week following, he phoned everyone of any importance whom he knew in the world of art and design to see if they would give her work as an artist or graphic designer.

"GIGI" WAS THE NICKNAME SIGRID SPAETH insisted on being called, and if people to whom she was introduced slipped and called her Sigrid, she would correct them in a voice that was a raucous and irritating nasal whine, so at odds with her stunning physical beauty. Friends described her as "cla.s.sically Nordic, Teutonic, with lovely rich thick brown hair, large dark brown eyes, and a beautiful complexion-so healthy." She was slightly taller than Saul, between five-eight and five-ten, with a heavier bone structure, which gave her the appearance of being much larger and stronger than his thin, fine-boned self. Her body was as curved and sculpted as a fine marble statue, and Steinberg showed her off proudly, unembarra.s.sed because her physical appearance represented his idea of Eros. "She was everything he wanted from a woman in bed," Hedda recalled many years later. "He knew he was robbing the cradle but he didn't care."

Sigrid "Gigi" Spaeth was born in Baumhelder, Germany, on August 9, 1936, which made her twenty-two years younger than Saul Steinberg. Her father was a midlevel bureaucrat for the German railway and her mother was a housewife. She was born long after two older siblings: a brother, whom she despised, and a sister, who married an American GI and moved with him after the war, first to Columbus, Ohio, and then to the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood. When Gigi was still a child her father was transferred to Trier, where the parents and the two elder children lived during the war while she remained with her grandparents in Baumhelder. Her mother was often confined to hospitals for clinical depression, and Gigi did not rejoin the family until she was fifteen, to live with them until she was nineteen.

Gigi was fond of shocking people at elegant New York dinner parties by saying that her father had joined the n.a.z.i Party in order to keep his job, which was the same reason he had dutifully signed the papers and then averted his eyes when the transports carrying Jews to the camps went through the Trier rail yards. She liked to joke that her parents' only partic.i.p.ation in n.a.z.i activities had perhaps been to throw a stone or two through the window of a Jewish business on Kristallnacht. Because Mrs. Spaeth was so often hospitalized, Gigi's maternal figure was Uschi, as her sister Ursula was nicknamed. Uschi was particularly important during the "terrible years of the war and just after," and the two sisters remained devoted to each other throughout their lives, especially because Uschi protected Gigi from the harshness of their mother's constant criticism.

Gigi's parents were elderly and settled when their independent and exuberant third child was born, and her relations.h.i.+p with them was difficult and strained. Her teen years were full of rebellion against a mother who dismissed her as "evil or bad" during the brief periods when she was not hospitalized. Her father stood for "authority and establishment," and because her mother was so often absent from the family home, he became the one who (as she recalled in one of the many diaries she kept) was always "ordering me, forbidding, disapproving of all I want and like. Telling me how to speak, dress, behave, etc." In the four years she lived in her parents' home, she could usually be found on the town's main street, "hanging out after cla.s.ses and cruising on Sat.u.r.days." At one point she hitchhiked to Cologne to find a boy she had a crush on and together they hitchhiked to Holland. "It didn't work out," she told her parents when she returned.

She was one month short of her twenty-fourth birthday when she met Saul Steinberg and had been on her own since she was nineteen, when she had run away to Paris to work as an au pair. Her parents made Uschi tell them where she was and sent money to persuade her to come home; instead she used it to hitchhike to Avignon, and then throughout Spain. She returned only when the money was gone, and ran away again in the spring to Paris and another au pair job. She was now twenty and spent her free time "looking for love" at the pickup plaza in front of the statue of the Vert-Galant. When she didn't find it, she hitchhiked to Lapland, and when she ran out of money again, she slunk back to her parents. They sent her to a school in the Saar District to study photography, for which she had a genuine talent, and after the course ended she went back to Paris, hoping to land a job. She didn't find one, so she went to Brussels in 1958 to photograph the World's Fair, but she did not encounter Steinberg there and had no recollection of his murals. On September 11 and on the spur of the moment, she went to Frankfurt and bought a ticket to New York. She was later vague about how she had paid for all these doings, and she was always vague about money except to say that she "took" some from her "Tante Else," who also lived in Trier.

The flight to New York lasted seventeen hours, and when it landed at Idlewild Airport, she vomited with fear and relief. She knew of several other young Europeans in the city, who took her in and introduced her to Greenwich Village. She never explained how she survived until January 1959, when she met Joe Rivers and began a brief affair, which lasted until the end of March. On June 20 she had an abortion, and on the thirtieth she began to hitchhike across the country to California. She was. .h.i.tchhiking back to New York when she was forced into a van by several men and raped in El Paso, Texas, an event she wrote about from time to time in a matter-of-fact, dismissive manner, with no further detail. By August 1959 she was back in New York and drifting, noting in a series of diary writings that she was alone on Christmas in the Cedar Tavern and on New Year's Eve 1960 in Times Square.

She was vague about what she did until she met Steinberg on July 9, 1960, except to say that she was cras.h.i.+ng in a friend's apartment. She never forgot their first exchange, how in her "stupid and innocent enthusiasm" she raved about having admired him for a great many years. "So have I," he replied. At the time she thought it was his cute way of trying to impress her. And then, just as suddenly as he had caromed into her life and let her take over his during August, everything cooled while he dealt with various catastrophes in September.

HEDDA CALLED TO ASK HIS ADVICE about a house she wanted to buy on Hog Creek Road in Springs, not far from the one they had shared, and she asked him to meet her early the next morning on the property. He left late that night and on the drive hit another car and "smashed the Jaguar." No one was hurt, but there was significant damage to his car. While he was dealing with police reports and insurance doc.u.ments and lining up inspectors for Hedda's house, he received word from Lica that his father had died suddenly in the early morning hours of July 30.

Steinberg had been hemorrhaging money since he had moved and met Gigi, most of it on the Roman family's house in Cachan. The house had to be gutted to a sh.e.l.l before installing bathrooms and outfitting a kitchen, and every room needed furnis.h.i.+ngs. There was also a continuing stream of local fees and tax charges connected with the purchase, which Steinberg had not been told of when he bought it, and they seemed certain to continue for the indefinite future. There had also been significant expenses connected with moving Moritz and Rosa to Cachan and then having to pay for an apartment (which he was already doing for the Roman family) until the house was ready. He was also sending money for an excursion to a French spa where Rosa insisted she had to go if she were to recover from the ailments that plagued her. Steinberg wrote checks for everything, including the $100 he had been sneaking to his father every three months.

There was no indication that Moritz was seriously ill before he and Rosa left for the spa. Rosa was, as usual, commanding all the attention, insisting that she suffered such pain that she would already have committed suicide if she was not afraid of being called "a neurasthenic mother" who brought shame to her children. Moritz told this to Saul as he described his daily routine of shopping, cooking, and cleaning, and then "poor woman and poor me, who must sit with her all day." Still putting his wife first, in his very last letter, on July 28, Moritz wrote that "Mom doesn't feel very well. Maybe the air will cure her."

When Rosa didn't nudge him awake at night to listen to a litany of her ailments, he usually slept soundly until morning, but around 3 a.m. on Sat.u.r.day, July 30, he woke up, asked for water, and then stopped breathing. Rosa screamed for help and a doctor soon came, p.r.o.nounced him dead, and took charge of removing the body from the hotel. A telegram was dispatched to Lica and Rica, and they arrived on Sunday afternoon. Despite the Jewish tradition of burial within twenty-four hours, French law forbade Sunday funerals, so interment was delayed until Monday. "You can't imagine my pain," Rosa wrote, genuinely shocked by an event over which she had no control, the unexpected death of her husband of forty-nine years.

An energized Rica took charge of the family's logistics. His health had improved dramatically, and the doctors a.s.sured him that by the end of the year he could work. Steinberg used his contacts with Dominique and Jean de Menil, who gave Rica an introduction to Jean Riboud, the director of the French branch of the Schlumberger oil company, Dominique's family's corporation. With the promise of a job on top of seeing his family securely settled in a good home, Rica told Saul that he had given Rosa two alternatives, "either to remain in Nice and come [to Cachan] in mid September or move in right away on September 1st." Rosa chose the latter, and they installed her in a comfortable pension where she would not be bothered by the children's noise or subjected to the dirt and confusion of work on the house. However, they had to tell her that it cost 300 fewer francs than the actual rent, because she needed "the impression that she's getting a bargain."

Once the move to Cachan was completed, Rosa never stopped complaining. In her version, the house was filthy and Lica either ignored or berated her when she was not arguing rudely (Lica had secured a job as a graphic designer for the Jewish publication L'Arche and was wildly happy with her general good fortune). The children behaved like savages and kept the television on too loudly for Rosa's taste (they were both well-mannered and highly intelligent; Stephane had been admitted to the prestigious Lycee Henri IV in Paris, Dana was excelling in the local grammar school, and neither had time for television). Rosa begged Saul to take her away. Now that Moritz was gone, her memory of their ten years in Nice was far from reality: "We loved each other and lived beautifully in Nice ... He was very satisfied with his beautiful life."

Lica told Saul to ignore their mother's complaints because the entire family was bending over backward to make her happy, even buying her a seat in the local Jewish temple so she could observe Rosh Hashanah. Eugene Ionesco's wife, Rodica, had become Lica's good friend, and she visited Rosa frequently to bring her treats and speak Romanian. Hedda's mother and brother came too, and invited her to gatherings of other Romanian immigrants, but nothing a.s.suaged Rosa. For Lica, content in her job and happy to live in the new house, it was "like being on a permanent vacation. Only poor Mom is trapped in her miserable universe."

STEINBERG DID NOT GO TO FRANCE when his father died. He stayed in New York and afterward sent frequent checks but did not write letters. When he had lived with Hedda, it was she who wrote the chatty, news-filled family letters that he was too irritated to write. Now it was easier not to write at all than to reply to Rosa's tales of misery and woe. He did not tell his family that he and Hedda had separated, and neither did she. She made a quick trip to Paris to tell her mother and brother but asked them to keep her visit secret from Rosa and the Romans. She also stopped writing to them, in effect removing herself from the lives of Saul's family and leaving it up to him to decide when or what to tell them. At the end of November, when Gigi was busy moving into Saul's apartment, Rosa was still wis.h.i.+ng him and Hedda "lots of health" and "a long and contented life together." In almost every letter to Saul, she wondered why Hedda no longer wrote the chatty letters that had been her only connection to her son's life and work.

Hedda had gone through a humiliating period after Saul moved out. Although she initially insisted that they had to part as friends, it was he who, uncharacteristically, did the hard work of ensuring that their postmarital relations.h.i.+p evolved into "his idea of friends.h.i.+p, what it was he thought friends.h.i.+p was." They had shared all their friends, and most were at a loss about how to keep both of them in their lives. The friends were puzzled about the separation, but it was not a subject they could raise with Saul, who sent the clear and unspoken message that everyone was to welcome Gigi and no one was to ask questions about Hedda. Some friends felt that they had to choose one or the other, and they usually chose Saul, because he was the more social of the two and the one they saw most often. As Hedda described it, everyone "found it a little difficult because all Saul ever did was to go live in another apartment. We were always in contact. We never formally separated. We always stayed married. Only his body left the house and the marriage."

Friends were sheepish about how to greet Hedda when they encountered her on the few occasions that she appeared in public, at large parties such as museum or gallery openings or in the Hamptons during the summer season. Over the years many drifted back into her life by simply showing up on 71st Street to sit and talk in her kitchen and stay for one of her excellent meals. There was a fairly large group who insisted throughout their lives that they stayed friendly with both Sterne and Steinberg, but years later, when many were long dead, Hedda Sterne edited the list to a small group: Betty Parsons, the art critic Dore Ashton, and Tino and Ruth Nivola.

Hedda admitted in retrospect that she probably added to the initial confusion over how others were to behave by withdrawing into hermetic seclusion. She continued to live as she had always done, painting for twelve hours every day: "I did that with or without a man, but in spite of that, I didn't think of what I was doing as a career. I always had a man to take care of me and that freed me to do what I wanted, which was to paint without having to go around to the galleries and enter into that art museumgallery world." After the separation, she did have "one unfinished love affair that lasted about a year and a half, but after that I decided it wasn't worth it: too much loss of energy and time [from painting]. To the horror of all my friends, I became celibate."

GIGI MOVED INTO WAs.h.i.+NGTON SQUARE VILLAGE in November, when Steinberg was busy nonstop with launching The Labyrinth. She could not have been happier as she thanked him for changing her life: "I was a zombie when you met me and made me into a person." She set to work at once to a.s.sume all the duties of organizing his daily life that Hedda had previously performed. However, there were several major differences between Gigi and Hedda: Hedda was Saul's wife and always would be, and Hedda had her own money and her own career, while Gigi had neither, and also no legal standing. When Gigi moved into Saul's apartment, they had not discussed the status of their relations.h.i.+p beyond the fact that they would live together. She put any worries she might have had aside, simply a.s.suming that if they stayed together, he would eventually divorce Hedda, marry her, and let her have children. As for work and money, she was totally dependent on his beneficence for both.

He did try to get work for her, and his friends did fulfill their promises to help her find it. Every now and again a commission to design a book jacket came in, but over the period of the years they spanned, the projects were few and far between, and many could be considered quid pro quo, such as the jacket Gigi designed for Steinberg's friend John Hollander, which featured one of Steinberg's drawings. Steinberg did make his phone calls and sent his letters to Gigi's prospective employers, but then he more or less closeted himself in the bedroom he used as his studio to work on final preparations for launching The Labyrinth. That left her on her own for long stretches of time, and in her loneliness she sent him a postcard that poignantly ill.u.s.trated her situation. It showed Ellis Island, and on the back she wrote, "To you my darling from this Ellis Island of my mind. Missing you a lot in the other room."

THE REVIEWS FOR THE LABYRINTH WERE universally good, but Steinberg did not think the important one, Grace Glueck's in the New York Times, was a selling review. It was short and more about him than about the book. Glueck described him in a way he found offensive, as a "relentless recorder of urban types, graphic punster who can put a single line to double or quadruple purpose, and Pica.s.so of the art form known as the doodle." As if at a loss for what more to say, she filled the rest of the s.p.a.ce with his biography-his Romanian birth, Italian education, and American navy service-and ended with the facile comment that one of his line drawings might not be "the shortest distance" between two points, but it was certainly the wittiest. Glueck's review appeared too close to Christmas, when busy buyers of gift books could easily miss it. Some months later, the Times of London almost made up for her review by dealing more with Steinberg's art than with the artist, praising the book for "even greater inventiveness than its predecessors." The reviewer called attention to E. H. Gombrich's a.n.a.lysis of Steinberg's art in his influential Art and Illusion before touching on Steinberg's talent for making straight lines perform multiple functions within a single drawing and his ability to use words and images to create the idea of sound. There was a degree of d.a.m.ning with faint praise: the reviewer wrote that because the drawings were so "deliciously comic," they probably kept Steinberg from being recognized as "far more imaginative than the surrealists ... and one of the most versatile and accomplished of living draughtsmen."

Steinberg was furious about both reviews, thinking that they "failed to grasp the essential quality" of the book. He demanded that Ca.s.s Canfield phone the review editors of both publications and lambast them for their reviewers' obtuseness. He was enraged when he made the call, and it left Canfield "feeling sick." To make sure that Steinberg had calmed down when he tried to address his complaints, Canfield wrote instead of telephoning. He said that he regretted that the book was published so close to Christmas, which in retrospect was too late to spark demand for an unusual coffee-table gift book that had been reviewed only in New York and not in the regional or local papers. He tried to offer a gentle apology for the bad news that as early as January booksellers were already returning copies to the publisher because it could "hardly [be] considered a new fresh item for 1961." As for Steinberg's insistence that Canfield complain to the book review editors, he tried to explain the futility of such an action and hoped that Steinberg would let the matter rest. The book sold around six thousand copies and shortly after went out of print, leaving the publisher with a large overstock of almost fifteen thousand copies, which were still unsold five years later.

Despite Steinberg's opinions, every review was positive and encomiums poured in from individuals as well. It was not sufficient to mollify him, not even when Edmund Wilson and Lewis Mumford lavished praise, or when Canfield told him how useful Aldous Huxley's admiration would be in promoting the book after Huxley wrote to say it was "a treasury of spidery fancies." Canfield planned to use the phrase prominently in advertising. He was still trying to placate Steinberg three years later. "Let's face it," he wrote, "we were all disappointed ... but there is no point in looking backwards."

Steinberg, however, could not put the bad sales and mixed reception behind him. The misinterpretations of The Labyrinth still rankled five years after it was published, when Steinberg did something highly uncharacteristic. He seldom replied to his critics and hardly ever explained what his intentions were in a particular drawing, as was evidenced in the vast volume of fan mail to The New Yorker that he never answered. He was in Paris in 1966 when a letter reached him that he thought was so wrong he had to correct the writer, a "Mr. Kunz." Steinberg objected to Kunz's description of the various mazes in the book as full of "rich humour or ironic self-mockery." Steinberg said that the only place this could possibly be true was in "the prejudice caused by the context (humor book, etc.)." His line, he corrected, was "a fantasy [that] causes pleasure that is often confusing to the scholar." He was particularly offended by Kunz's comparison to the satire of "R.G." (unnamed, but this may have been Steinberg's friend Red Grooms) and insisted that his drawings were "not a satire on anything but only an indispensable way of showing a poetic invention." "Notice the drawing," Steinberg commanded Mr. Kunz: "The maze is made of all possible lines: crooked, ugly, elegant, calligraphic, orderly & parallel, etc. Some are traced with a ruling pen, others with a compa.s.s. Meaning that a labyrinth contains order (prejudice, bureaucracy) and disorder or poetry of any sort, good & bad-both indispensable."

The Labyrinth was such an important book for Steinberg that he continued to refer to it for years after its initial publication. In 1972 he was captivated by a student at Va.s.sar College, Meera E. Agarwal, who wrote about his depictions of art and the artist for her senior thesis. When she was trying to determine the origin of his interest in the theme, he rushed to his bookshelf and opened The Labyrinth to the last two pages, which he called "very important ... key drawings" that represented "the life of the artist." The young interviewer wrote about how serious and absorbed Steinberg was while he studied his book and how when he finished, he snapped it shut and "walked around with feigned nonchalance." He told her that the true artist goes on through "Asperity" or "Difficulty" in order to get to the stars, but sometimes he lands in "Stercus-which means s.h.i.+t." Agarwal remembered that "he laughs at the cult of art and yet he calls his art his religion, a way of life."

PRAISE FROM HIS PEERS WAS NOT enough for Steinberg, who had counted on large sales because he needed the money. However, even more than money, he wanted the acclaim that would have come with a bestseller, as he was eager to impress his young companion. To keep his income on a steady keel, he had a lot of work to do in New York and many preparations to make for a trip to Europe in the spring. It was difficult to do it while in the throes of a pa.s.sionate involvement with a beautiful woman who spent most of her days literally hanging around waiting to be noticed, eager to satisfy his every whim. It was both nerve-racking and distracting to have her underfoot all the time, and within a month or two of Gigi's moving into Saul's apartment, it was clear that something had to change or he would never get any work done. He told her she needed to go to Europe on her own, first to Trier to see her family and make as much peace with them as was possible. Then she should go to Paris, certainly to meet Lica, but not Rosa until Lica could figure out how best to introduce her. While in Paris she was to stay in a good hotel and use it as her base of operations for a complete makeover. She was to visit the finest couture houses and stores, to shop for clothes, jewelry, and accessories, to learn to use good makeup and get her hair styled. In New York she dressed like a hippie, and he didn't like it. He could not show her off at the Park Avenue dinner parties where he was now a frequent guest until she became another elegant example of the beautifully dressed and groomed women he met at such gatherings.

He should have known there would be trouble ahead when she wrote from Trier to tell him that she had spent all her shopping and traveling money, but not in Paris. She never explained what the money went for, as it was not until she reached Cologne that she bought a bottle of perfume and a "suit that looks more like a suitcase," which she was sure he would not like. And she was most proud of the real "triumph" of her entire trip: "finally having my old coat relined."

CHAPTER 26.

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 att.i.tude 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 embarra.s.sment 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 doc.u.ments 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 Dali (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 a.s.sociate 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 rea.s.sure 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-cla.s.s 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 att.i.tude as years pa.s.sed 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 Cote 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 pa.s.sion was strong and steady, and their quiet life in the country sustained it. In the city, the apartment was s.p.a.cious 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 appet.i.te 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 a.s.sistant 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 relations.h.i.+p" 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 Ill.u.s.trated 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 psychoa.n.a.lysts 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 grat.i.tude 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 Ill.u.s.trated 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 Ca.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trata. 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute 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 pa.s.sing 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.

BOREDOM TELLS ME SOMETHING.

I get slightly bored with my work, I don't find the excitement, real excitement, now this boredom tells me something, it's a message.

Once Gigi had moved into her own apartment, Steinberg believed that they were developing a genuine friends.h.i.+p such as he had never known with a woman before. He found that he liked living alone and especially liked being able to fit her into his life on his own terms and in his own time: when he wanted to be with her, she was available, and when he wanted to be alone, she went her own way. s.e.x remained a major bond between them, but she was introducing another level of communication into their relations.h.i.+p because of how eagerly she looked forward to studying at Columbia in the fall. She was preparing for courses in comparative literature by reading many of the books Steinberg recommended, among them Madame Bovary, which he cheerfully reread in order to discuss it with her. They also increased their moviegoing, especially to European films such as the latest Bunuel and Bergman pictures, so that between her reading and their mutual love of cinema, they were able to communicate intellectually in a far more relaxed manner than when they had been living together.

Shortly after Gigi moved to Waverly Place, her mother came from Trier on the first stop of an extended visit to her other daughter, Uschi, in Ohio. Things were so good between Gigi and Saul that when she asked to borrow the Jaguar to drive her mother to Columbus, he agreed. When she returned, he also agreed to pay for her to spend the summer traveling alone throughout Europe. Once again she went first-cla.s.s, staying in grand hotels in London and Paris, taking the Train Bleu to the Riviera, and then renting a Citroen DS-19 for a leisurely drive from Menton to St. Tropez. Eventually she wound her way to Trier, where she kept her father company while her mother remained in Columbus. Steinberg was happy to see Gigi go, because the more she was happily occupied, the less likely she was to become depressed and create problems.

In June 1962 he went to Appleton, Wisconsin, to receive his first honorary degree, from Lawrence College. When it was first offered, he questioned the selection committee's wisdom in choosing him and intended to decline until the college president a.s.sured him that he deserved the honor and would not regret accepting it. In all his travels across America, Wisconsin was one of the few states Steinberg had not been to, and he was curious to see the Dairy State and meet the people who lived there. Much fuss was made of him in Appleton, and when a reporter for the local newspaper interviewed him, he s.h.i.+ed away from personal revelations with the excuse that he could not answer "conventional" questions because he himself was "so unconventional." When the reporter asked if he was pleased with the honor, he responded evasively that he was "curious about the process." He insisted that he had no idea why he had been chosen, but the degree citation provided the answer, saying that Steinberg never wasted time asking "what is reality?"; he simply presented the reality of "the crooked mirror where we find ourselves distorted into truth."

STEINBERG TOLD ALDO BUZZI THAT RECEIVING the degree initially made him feel stupid, but in reality he was flattered by what he believed was an invitation from the intellectual community to join its company. Always a voracious reader, he found himself more at home in the company of writers, where the exchange of ideas and opinions was intensely verbal, swift, and sharp, than in the company of painters, where words were not as important as physical activity, which often led to aggressive or outlandish behavior as a subst.i.tute for conversation. Writers sat around the dinner table and exchanged verbal barbs that could be deeply wounding to the psyche, but painters were more likely to get falling-down drunk at the Cedar Tavern or at Max's Kansas City and start throwing punches at each other. To Steinberg, the abstract expressionists who ruled the art world in New York were "artists of gesture," and "the stronger the gesture ... the greater the fame." He placed Jackson Pollock at the top of this list, saying that he painted "in cahoots with the law of gravity ... He used it as a companion." With the exception of the old friends who were painters (among them Mary Frank, Bill de Kooning, Sandy Calder, and Ad Reinhardt), Steinberg made few new ones among the up-and-coming generation in New York, because, with the exception of some "girls, all are timorous and conventional people, especially the so-called painters." Among his old friends, Louisa Calder disapproved of his separation from Hedda, so he and Gigi were not invited to Connecticut as often as before, but he enjoyed the outings to Princeton, New Jersey, where Esteban Vicente lived and worked. Their closeness deepened when Gigi and Harriet Vicente developed their own close friends.h.i.+p.

A decade later, in the 1970s, when an interviewer asked how Steinberg had experienced the art scene of the fifties, he described the painters who were his friends then as "the survivors," saying that he remained friendly with them "but we are separated now, divided by a variety of reasons, among them changes in the social cla.s.s." He used "social cla.s.s" as a euphemism for money: in his mind, those artists who made a lot of it became different from those who did not. He insisted that it was not like this for European artists, for whom money was not the princ.i.p.al determinant of cla.s.s and status, and although he did not overtly use himself as an example, he implied that he had succeeded in both worlds. Steinberg, who was born into the working cla.s.s and now moved easily within the upper cla.s.ses, not only because of his talent but also because of his ever-increasing wealth, thought of himself as "some sort of link between the Europeans and the Americans." When asked to describe this link, he said it was primarily because he shared with French painters the general quality of being literary. There were three with whom he was extremely close, all of them as immersed in philosophy as they were in literature: Geer van Velde, Jean Helion, and Joan Miro. Van Velde lived in Cachan, as did Lica and her family, so there was ample opportunity for conversations about his personal philos