Saul Steinberg: A Biography Part 9

His guide in Tbilisi was a young boy, a "beginner" who was only too happy to take Steinberg wherever he wanted to go. Finally he was able to see what he had come to see, an old town with "Turkish verandas on art nouveau or neocla.s.sical houses, a narrow street bordered with trees, beautiful small piazzas." There was a funicular that took him to the top of a mountain, where he saw a "splendid" cathedral, a castle, and a bustling university. There were "more shops, restaurants, and sweets than anywhere," and he bought accordingly. He loved the food, which had smells and flavors that reminded him of Bucharest-lamb shashlik, olives, cheeses, and delicious local white wine-and he was entranced by the market's "rich variety, old smells." Unfortunately, the guide became a "bore, embarra.s.sed, timid," but Steinberg knew what he wanted to see and made the reluctant fellow take him to the old capital of Mtskheta.

Some of the holiest places in the country were there, all of them with architectural significance. He saw the Cathedral of Sveti-Tskhoveli, built between 1010 and 1029 on the spot where, legend had it, Christ's burial robe had been brought by a Jew who accidentally let it touch the ground. When a tree sprang up on the spot and could not be cut down with the sharpest ax, the place became one of the country's holiest sites. Inside the cathedral, Steinberg studied everything so intently that an old woman who had helped to restore the exquisite old murals and icons hovered over him, fearing that he was a vandal, until the guide told her that he was a trained architect. They went on to the Ivari Monastery, filled with religious paintings and iconography, and afterward to the sixth-century Jvari Cathedral, generally considered the prototype for Georgian ecclesiastical architecture. Steinberg made a special effort to find and buy as many books as he could about the local architecture, for even though he had never practiced the profession for which he was trained, it held lifelong fascination.

That afternoon, despite being "embarra.s.sed" or perhaps even frightened by the liberties Steinberg took in walking anywhere he wanted in Mtskheta, the "bore" of a guide gave up trying to stop him from taking photographs, especially of people who wore the old-fas.h.i.+oned peasant dress and headgear. He ate shashlik at every lunch and dinner in Tbilisi, where his evening entertainment was the opera. This time it was "Turks, slave girls, nuns, monastery on fire, fights, murders, flags, scimitars, rugs, tent, castle, and the hairdo of the orchestra conductor." It was so bad that he spent his time studying and sketching the opera house architecture onto his program, enjoying "style a la Caucasus."

The next morning he was at the airport for a 7 a.m. flight to Kharkov that made a stopover in Vladivostok. His seatmate was a naval officer who entertained him with his memories of wartime British and American airplanes, conversing through the Armenian cabin attendant, who spoke English. Steinberg was glad for the diversion, because the flight took the entire day. In Kharkov, his guide was another "young amateur," who took him for a quick dinner and then on to the theater for a play distinguished only by "jumping, fighting." He was "picked up by girl in intermission" and left early. The next morning, in a different-colored ink, he recorded a cryptic conversation in his diary wherein someone asks when the plane leaves and someone else responds "At five."

The next day he flew from Kharkov to Moscow, where his first order of business was to go to the American emba.s.sy to see about extending his visa. The plane arrived too late in the day to start the process, so he called one of the correspondents he had met earlier and joined him for a single drink. He went to bed early to read The Brothers Karamazov, and was delighted to read in the introduction that Dostoevsky's father had been a.s.sa.s.sinated during a peasant revolt. Early the next morning he began the visa extension process, saying that he needed to stay longer because he had not seen enough of the country's variety. He wanted to go to Asiatic Russia, particularly to Samarkand, a city that had long intrigued him because of its history as an ancient crossroads between East and West.

Since he was a schoolboy he had been interested in how one civilization superimposed itself on another, and especially in how so many invading cultures had melded Romania into the modern state in which he had grown up. He wanted to compare traces of the conquest of the Ottoman Empire with what he had experienced in Romania, and because what he had seen of modern Russia thus far was primarily Slavic, he wanted to see the oriental countries that cl.u.s.tered on the southern and eastern borders.

Steinberg was originally scheduled to spend his last week in Moscow and fly home from there on March 14, but instead of making preparations to leave, he was determined to see as much as he could of ordinary daily life while waiting to hear about his visa. To his surprise, it was issued the day after he submitted the application, so fast that he almost missed it. He was directed to remain in Moscow until March 16, after which he had until March 22 to go wherever he wanted in Uzbekistan, where Samarkand was located. He set out with a vengeance to capture the life and spirit of Moscow.

He was now allowed to move about the city without a full-time guide, so the first thing he did was to learn his way around the subway system, spending the better part of his first day joy-riding from station to station and making spontaneous stops to go out onto the streets and see what different neighborhoods looked like. He caught a bad cold in the process but pressed on, taking notes and making sketches. He bought more old books from a dealer one of his American contacts put him in touch with, and the old man told him where to go quietly and discreetly to see prerevolutionary paintings by Russian artists. He was most taken with the portraits but thought they and everything else were merely "good," curiously dated, and severely limited by lack of contact with outside influences.

He walked repeatedly through Red Square, even though he remained overwhelmed by "Russian scale," because that was where he could see the greatest variety of people. When he drew it, he conveyed a slice of Russian life with deft subtlety, leaving vast stretches of empty white s.p.a.ce at the center of the page with a fly speck here and there, meant to be ordinary people who clung to the edges of the mammoth plaza. In the background he drew a hodgepodge of onion-domed church architecture competing with brutalist Communist buildings for domination of the skyline.

Steinberg was so engaged by the historical museums holding treasures that dated from the eighteenth-century reigns of the two empresses, Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, that he returned to them several times to study the "Napoleonic uniforms, poetic peasant art, wood relief ornaments on houses (lion & siren)," and particularly the gates of an old monastery. He got to see ordinary daily life when he walked alone on the foggy streets and took photographs and made sketches. On one of his subway forays, he found an unnamed "beautiful old street in dark popular neighborhood," but Gorky Street (which his guides told him he was supposed to praise) was "depressing, out of scale." The little side streets provided better material. He noticed the paucity of goods in food shop windows and described the meager displays as having "dignity." He used a different-colored pencil in his diary to note how Russians p.r.o.nounced English words: "They have s.h.i.+t (for sheep); burned (for buried). I am Joe (Jew)."

On his earlier stay in Moscow, he had been such a charming raconteur that all the bored American correspondents clamored for his company. On his return, he learned quickly which invitations to avoid, particularly after a disastrous drunken dinner with "a mean vulgar couple" who engaged in "public screaming." News of his wartime service with the OSS had gotten around, and he thought that might be the reason for some of his invitations. He enjoyed the company of Jack Raymond of the New York Times, who taught him how to navigate various Russian bureaucratic intrigues and who introduced him to the young historian Priscilla Johnson, whom he liked and whose knowledge of Russian political history impressed him. Steinberg accepted invitations to parties at the British and Danish emba.s.sies because it would have been impolite to refuse, and he went to lunch with the French, Canadian, and Swedish amba.s.sadors, who were eager to hear about what he had seen and what he had learned about Russia.

At a time when it was not prudent for Russian artists and intellectuals to fraternize with Americans, Amba.s.sador Bohlen quietly arranged for Steinberg to meet some of the leading dissidents. On a frigid Monday afternoon when all the stores and museums were closed, Steinberg stood outside his hotel and waited for a car bearing the amba.s.sador and his wife to take him to an apartment where a half-dozen people had gathered surrept.i.tiously. There he saw "sensitive and brutal faces" with one belonging to the dissident writer Vladimir Maximov, the only name he confided to his diary. He was careful to describe the others with coded phrases: an architect who traveled to Egypt, the architect of a wooden arch built in 1942, another architect who spoke English, and a painter. His interpreter, "Natasha," was sympathetic to Americans, and she translated rapidly and fluently. He was not surprised to learn of the difficulties these people endured to practice their professions, for he had been hearing much the same from his sister for many years. Exchanging stories gave Steinberg and the Russians much in common and the conversation continued until well after midnight. As he was leaving, they presented him with copies of the satirical magazine Krokodil, which he added to the overloaded duffel bag.

The next day Amba.s.sador Bohlen arranged for Steinberg to meet the opposites of the dissidents, the government officials who oversaw culture and the arts. Among them were the minister of culture, the director of the Moscow Puppet Theater, and the manager of the Bolshoi Ballet. Bohlen also arranged an interview with the editor of the official Soviet journal for cultural relations, G. A. Zhukov of Voks, and it became one of the more bizarre interviews Steinberg ever gave. He was ushered into "an enormous Empire room, longest table, piano, easel," where he faced a "mute specialist, ashen, writing all the time, taking notes." Zhukov silently pushed a list of questions written in English across the table for Steinberg to read, after which his translator turned what he said into acceptable propagandistic answers, whether he actually gave them or not.

His evening entertainments were varied: Sol Hurok invited him to the Moiseyevich troupe of folk dancers, and unnamed diplomats took him to the theater and the opera. He left La Traviata after the second act: "Girl from Swedish emba.s.sy," he wrote in his diary.

On March 15, before his visa could be officially extended, Steinberg had the required conference with an Intourist representative. The man could not understand why he wanted to go to Samarkand and kept repeating, "There are no toilets there." Steinberg insisted that he knew what he was doing, and the next day he was at the airport for the 4:30 a.m flight to Tashkent via a long stopover in Aktyubinsk, where an interpreter who was "in a panic" for reasons he never explained was waiting. He made Steinberg sit in an airport shed at one of the longest tables he had ever seen, plunked down several little plates, and commanded that he eat his breakfast, which Steinberg dutifully did. Afterward the fussy little man loaded him onto a sledge pulled by a donkey and drove him into the town for a quick tour.

He arrived in Tashkent in the early evening and found the weather much warmer than anywhere else he had been. He had another "scared" interpreter, but the hotel was pleasant enough. He knew what the Intourist interviewer had meant about plumbing when he saw the "horrible toilet in the corridor." When he stood on the balcony outside his room and looked down at the street, he realized that the town had no plumbing or sanitation except for a steep gutter that divided the sidewalk from the road and ran deep with sludge and effluvium.

He took an evening walk and found a mob in front of the town's only movie theater. A man was beating a woman who held a crippled baby; another man, whose legs had been amputated at the knee, walked on two sticks and begged. A Black Maria police wagon was leaving as he arrived, sent on its way by "screams, whistles, loud speaker, moaning." That night he had a nightmare that his head had been shot so repeatedly that it flew off his shoulders. Still, all of this was exactly what he had come for, and he sprang out of bed the next morning, eager to meet his guides and get under way.

There were two of them, an unnamed guide and "Mary, a girl from Omsk," who "together try hard." He told them what he wanted to see and they more or less tagged along, first to the bazaar, the old town, and the other parts of the town that were, in his words, the "slumming" sections. He hoped to see camels but there were none, so he shopped and bought two of his favorite things in the market, a cap in the local style and all the primitive old postcards that were for sale. For lunch he ate a meal reminiscent of his Romanian childhood: green onion, radishes, sour cream, and thick slices of black bread. He was leaving for Samarkand the next morning, but his most lasting memory of Tashkent was its smells and the "hotel toilet incredible."

In Samarkand it was much the same. His interpreter was a distinguished middle-aged gentleman who said he was a former professor of history and "teacher of English." Steinberg found his attempts to be erudite comic, but he enjoyed the man's company and never corrected him. He was amused when the guide insisted they had to make a courtesy call at the local university and his hosts, as a sign of respect, offered to let him use the ladies' toilet. The rest of his days pa.s.sed in a blur as the guide took him to towns and villages where he saw cemeteries, parks, bazaars, cathedrals, churches, mosques, and ruins. In bazaars he bought more souvenir caps and watched men hammering teapots out of sheets of copper. Everywhere he went, he was frightened by people running up and shouting in his face "Harry Manchu." Steinberg had no idea what they wanted until his interpreter found the words to tell him they were asking "whether [Averell] Harriman was Jewish," a subject of general interest since the war, when Harriman had been the American amba.s.sador.

Steinberg was intrigued by the local interest in all things Jewish. He stole the telephone directory, convinced that he had taken a great risk by stealing sacred state property. After he found the name Goldberg, the only Jewish one among the hundred or so citizens lucky enough to possess a phone, Steinberg told his guide that he was Jewish and wanted to see the Jewish quarter, where he learned a new expression for the Yiddish word goy (gentile): to the Jews of Samarkand, they were all "Uzbek."

When it was time to leave, all flights were indefinitely grounded because of heavy fog, so his guide took him to the overnight train for Tashkent, where he could catch a plane to Moscow. As they said their goodbyes, Steinberg leaned forward with outstretched hand to give the man a generous tip. The guide, with what he thought was the polite English response, said, "Thank you my darling. I must go now." He tipped his hat and bowed, and Steinberg said and did the same.

On the train he sat with three other pa.s.sengers, including a woman who was taking it all the way to Moscow, a journey of five whole days. Back in Tashkent, he was given the same miserable hotel room. The weather had turned, and once again there was snow and frigid cold. He was not as happy to be there the second time, seeing b.e.s.t.i.a.lity in everyone and finding everything primitive and ugly. Once again he was aware of a strong Jewish presence, of rug dealers from Bokhara, of peddlers hawking tinfoil pictures, of dervishes and women who covered their heads and faces. Drunks rolled around the streets while pedestrians laughed and policemen ignored the mess and confusion. He went back to the hotel, took a nap, bought a bottle of vodka, and headed for the airport, where several regional flights eventually took him to Aktyubinsk and then back to Moscow.

Whether because of a combination of disappointment and depression or simple exhaustion, he did not want to see anyone when he returned to Moscow. As he digested his experiences over tea and caviar in his hotel room, he realized what had characterized his five weeks in the country: "The smell of fear, a curious smell. You cannot even describe it." It reminded him of "the smell [and] the old fearful atmosphere of Romania," and it made him shudder. Later that evening he exchanged his last few rubles, then dined alone and slept fitfully until he left for the airport at 3 a.m. He had to take a roundabout route to Paris, flying via Vilnius and Prague and not arriving until late afternoon on March 22. He went directly to the Pont Royal, where he had an early dinner and slept well. The next day he boarded the overnight flight to New York, where he arrived in the midst of a blizzard.

His immediate task was to translate the Russian experience into sketches that would fulfill his commitment to The New Yorker. As he sat at his drawing table, he recalled the five weeks of "frozen snow, Bolshoi, caviar, by airplane over Siberia, camels and veiled women. Black Sea and the smell of fear, etc." It made him feel "like [an] authority, inscrutable, benevolent smile." As he worked, he remembered the experience as "a trip for my nose" that reminded him of the Eastern European smells of his childhood: "beautiful ones of winter and also of elementary school, police station, disinfectant, the terrible odor of fear which at that time, with Stalin only recently gone, permeated Moscow and Leningrad and even the countryside."

He worked from notes, most of which were comments about the buildings he had seen, for if there was one single thing that made the greatest impression, it was the architecture. He made a handwritten list ent.i.tled "Comments about buildings in USSR," prominent among them his favorite structures, the "XVIII [century] wooden houses in Moscow," which were very rare, as most of them had burned down because of household cooking and heating fires during the reigns of the two empresses. He had other "questions about places" and answered them by consulting various globes and atlases; he studied books on subjects as diverse as "Pushkin drawings" and "19th & 20th Century Foundry catalogues of Russian typography," which he first learned about in the Lenin Library. These showed up in his Russian drawings, but mostly they came later, in the diplomas and the mock writing.

He devoted a separate page of notes to comments about "How [the Russian] artist functions," and, not content with the trunkload of books he had s.h.i.+pped home, he resolved to find a good secondhand bookshop on Russian architecture in New York and buy more. He consulted his daily diary to draw on memories of what he had seen, but he also filled two legal-size yellow pages with notes about everything from Russian politics to culture. Armed with all this information and, relatively speaking, in no time at all, he produced so many drawings that the editors decided to feature them in two separate segments under the heading "A Reporter at Large." The first, "Samarkand, USSR," appeared on May 12 and the second, "Winter in Moscow" on June 9.

Both portfolios were immediate hits with an American audience eager to learn whatever they could about the secretive Soviet society. A columnist at the San Francisco News thought Steinberg deserved a Pulitzer Prize for "the best reporting to come out of Russia this year." He echoed the general opinion of other readers and reviewers when he wrote that Steinberg's "pen and ink sketches in The New Yorker some months ago told more about life in Russia from Moscow to Samarkand than ten million words. Uncensored words even."

Unlike his previous European voyage, when Steinberg had gone in search of self-discovery and personal resolution but had come home with every aspect of his life still unsettled and uncertain, the Russian trip gave him the professional renewal that he worried he might have lost, or that he might never even have had. While The New Yorker's readers were avidly embracing what he told them about Russia, he was thinking ahead to something new, to an interpretation of what it meant to be an American. He thought it was time to refresh his knowledge of the American landscape and to observe the daily life of the people who lived in the very different parts of it. Almost two decades before, he had willingly become a citizen of this polyglot society and accepted it as his true patria, and now, if he wanted to interpret it, he needed to find out what it meant to be an American in the late 1950s. If he wanted to observe the daily life of the average American, the best way to do this was to get Hedda, get in his car, and start driving.

CHAPTER 20.

COVERING 14,000 MILES.

Back from Alaska ... Covered 14,000 miles like a good Babbit, saw the whole country including part of Mexico.

The first order of business was to get his financial affairs in order so he could take the cross-country trip he had promised himself. While he was away, much had happened that required his attention, starting with his annual first-of-the-year a.s.sessment of finances (postponed because of the Russian trip), which he had to complete before he could decide how much time he could afford to devote to travel and his own work. A check had come in from the Swiss magazine Du for drawings it had used in its January edition, so that was a start. His annual $10,000 stipend from Hallmark Cards was safely deposited, as were several other routine payments and retainers. Added to all these, his lawyer, Alexander Lindey, had settled two infringement claims, against Time and the Grey Advertising Agency, which together brought close to $3,000.

Steinberg made it clear to anyone for whom he worked, whether advertising agency, business firm, or publication, that he would not sell the owners.h.i.+p, only the rights to use his drawings, and only in the manner Lindey specified in his meticulous contracts. With the exceptions of Hallmark and the various fabric companies, which insisted on holding the copyrights, everyone accepted this stipulation. Every year, for example, The New Yorker sent him a contract made "in consideration of the sum of one dollar," in which the magazine agreed to receive credit as the original publisher of the drawings while Steinberg retained the rights to resell the work as he saw fit.

The two infringement cases Lindey settled were about contract violation. In the first, Time used several drawings originally commissioned to ill.u.s.trate a single article for multiple and different uses besides the one originally contracted for; in the second, Grey did the same, but in a far more egregious manner.

Grey had commissioned Steinberg to make several drawings for its client, the television division of Emerson Electronics. The Grey campaign, unveiled under the general t.i.tle of "Wherever you look ... there's Emerson," was aimed at women who were housebound and therefore most likely to be watching television at any hour of the day. Steinberg's first drawing was a striking departure from the realism of previous campaigns aimed at women, all of which routinely depicted a human model smilingly doing household ch.o.r.es while wearing a crisp dress, starched ap.r.o.n, and high heels. His drawing was of a deliberately noncontroversial caricature woman, middle-aged and s.e.xless, having breakfast in bed while watching television. The set she watched was a popular Emerson model with a man's face on the screen, rolling his eyes discreetly upward and not looking directly at her. It was completely without innuendo and eminently successful in every print medium, but it was Grey's use of the second ad that inspired Steinberg's lawsuit.

In that one, Steinberg drew a naked woman seated in a bathtub, similar to his drawing of the Paris bathtub. Instead of reclining in full frontal nudity, however, the cartoon woman is seen from behind, as she scrubs her back with a long-handled brush and watches a television set placed at the foot of her tub. On the set is a photograph of a real man with a monocle and a slightly lascivious expression on his face, holding up a book he does not read because he is too busy glancing sideways at the woman. Like the "Woman in Bed," the "Lady in the Bathtub" was a huge success in whatever print medium Grey placed it, which Steinberg's contract permitted. However, the contract did not permit the agency to place it, without his knowledge or permission, on forty-five billboards across the country, where it drew complaints of obscenity from various civil and religious groups. Lindey settled the case for $1,500 and Grey's agreement not to use Steinberg's future work in any way other than what was specified in his contracts.

Steinberg's work for Grey was typical of the commercial work he did throughout the 1950s, particularly in the last half of the decade, when he was one of the artists at the forefront of the creative revolution in advertising that dominated the 1960s. His contribution to the genre's evolution was with innovative drawings that departed from the expected and took the viewer into the realm of the surprising and unexpected. Although a Steinberg ad might have seemed at first glance to be a drawing chosen mainly for its shock value, in reality it was the lead-in for a carefully orchestrated plot to make the viewer read the copy that went along with it. "Operation Steinberg," as the Swiss critic Manuel Ga.s.ser dubbed his commercial work, was replete with "advanced nonsense." There was no smiling housewife pus.h.i.+ng a vacuum cleaner or loading a was.h.i.+ng machine; instead, his whimsical cartoon people stopped just short of being grotesque when he juxtaposed them with real objects (the lady scrubbing her back while watching an Emerson being just one example). Many of the ads Steinberg drew appeared in The New Yorker, and most of them for one time only, so that each week brought something new for viewers to chuckle over. When House and Garden advertised itself as a publication "for the House Proud," one week's ad showed a little man smelling a vase of flowers on a table and the next week's featured a woman climbing a ladder propped against a tree to pick an olive for her martini.

Steinberg's ads for Simplicity, the largest manufacturer of home sewing patterns, ill.u.s.trate just how integral his nonsense drawings were to the sensible copy that came below them. A headline beneath his elaborately curlicued and swirled caricatures of women proclaimed "And she did it all by herself." The copy that followed explained what the product could do, but the product was not pictorially represented. In the ads he designed for Comptometer, the largest manufacturer of adding machines, he showed a man lying on a chaise longue in a garden, fanning himself on a hot summer day while an umbrella shades him and a pitcher of cold drinks rests on the table beside him. "It isn't the heat," the caption reads, as the copy explains how the man can afford to relax because his Comptometer is doing the work for him. If the picture is puzzling, the text explains it, so that, as Manuel Ga.s.ser noted, "in the final a.n.a.lysis, the picture is the riddle and the copy is the answer."

In one ad for Noilly Prat vermouth's highly successful "Don't Stir Without Noilly Prat," Steinberg has an elegant thin hand stirring circles and squiggles that rise above a photo of the bottle in a crescendo of imaginary writing. Only the vermouth bottle beneath the slogan is literal; everything else is conceptual. For Schweppes, he created a comedic double take when he drew a man and a woman in a living room whose furnis.h.i.+ngs resemble one of his interiors in The New World. They hold gla.s.ses as they stand, each with one leg hitched onto a low bar rail-but there is no bar between them, just the rail.

Perhaps the most wildly imaginative print ads were those Steinberg created for Lewin-Mathes, the St. Louis firm that manufactured copper pipes and tubing under the general heading "We Teach Copper New Skills." In one, a man's head very much like Steinberg's is turned into an angel who sports a halo made of copper tubing; in another, circular rows of copper pipe look like the repet.i.tive writing exercises grade school children were taught when they learned the Palmer Penmans.h.i.+p method.

The agencies that commissioned Steinberg's ads generally sold them first to The New Yorker, where sophisticated readers lapped them up as if they were part of the magazine's visual content rather than a commercial adjunct. The art editors were well aware of the enthusiastic response to Steinberg's commercial work, and Jim Geraghty's impa.s.sioned letter of several years earlier in which he had expressed frustration that the magazine and Steinberg could not reach an agreement where the magazine's "demands coincide with your aspirations" still rang true. With the exception of the two Russian spreads, most of Steinberg's artistic contributions to the magazine were still "spots" or "spot-pluses," the filler drawings editors pulled from the files to round off a page or fill a column. Ever since Steinberg had completed a last-minute a.s.signment to make the portrait drawing that accompanied a profile of Le Corbusier, William Shawn and the art editors had fallen into the habit of sending a.s.signments that had strict deadlines, because they knew they could count on him to meet them; but when it came to printing the kind of work he wanted to do, such as his spreads of daily life in the segregated South, it seemed as if he and his patria had not yet found the common pathway that would allow his aspirations and their demands to go forward in harmony.

All Steinberg's ads were print, with only one exception, a television commercial for Jell-O. In the days of black-and-white transmission, his line drawing of a woman has her shuffling along on a treadmill while a frazzled female voice-over intones, "Busy, busy, busy." The woman runs faster and faster as images bombard her: of a demanding child, a ticking clock, a man whose needs she is obviously not meeting. A black scrawl swirls across her and becomes deeper and darker until the screen fades to black while a sonorous male voice tells the viewer that there's no need to be embarra.s.sed or ashamed about not making dessert on a busy day now that Jell-O has a new line of instant puddings. The scene cuts from Steinberg's obliterated cartoon woman to the midsection of a real woman, who pours milk into a bowl of powdered pudding and whips it with an egg beater so easily that even "the children can make it themselves."

Steinberg's contributions to advertising were not only easily recognizable but also ubiquitous. His work was so well known that Hallmark featured him as one of its famous artists in ads touting contributors to their "Hall of Fame" collection, a campaign that featured photographs of artists such as Norman Rockwell and Winston Churchill. Described as a "comic draughtsman of outstanding genius," Steinberg stands out in a sea of dark suits, looking stiff and uncomfortable in a beige deerstalker hat and matching tweed jacket, in a pose reminiscent of something between an English country gentleman and Sherlock Holmes.

Unquestionably he had arrived commercially, and the boxes and boxes of business correspondence he saved throughout his life attest to his commercial popularity. Requests literally poured in daily, with offers of complete freedom for him to create whatever he wanted, if only he would agree to create it. Clearly he ignored Marcel Duchamps's advice either to answer or to burn letters as soon as he received them, for often the initial requests led to a series of increasingly impa.s.sioned others in which the writers begged Steinberg please to respond, if not by mail, then by telephone or telegram. In most instances he was given the option of naming his fee, choosing his delivery date, and setting any other condition he wished to impose. His talents and abilities placed him in a fortunate situation: because he could deliver the goods, so to speak, he had the luxury of being selective, taking only those commissions that were intellectually appealing or so financially rewarding that he could not afford to refuse them.

At the same time as the demand for his commercial work rose, so too did the demand for his creative drawings. Only The New Yorker remained picky and selective, while galleries throughout the United States were eager to exhibit his work. He planned to visit several of them on his upcoming auto trip. International collectors were lining up to buy, and European offers for exhibitions and projects were also coming in a steady stream. All in all, much of the financial pressure that had contributed to his flight from New York the year before was fast becoming a thing of his past. He was on the verge of becoming a very wealthy man who had the luxury of doing exactly what he wanted to do.

MOST OF STEINBERG'S FRIENDS DID NOT understand his desire to leave New York so soon again, especially for a rambling drive across the United States, which, as far as they were concerned, had no real purpose. He and Hedda were ready to go by the end of May but hung around until June because they wanted to see Aldo Buzzi as he pa.s.sed through New York on his way to Mexico to work on a film with Alberto Lattuada. Steinberg promised Buzzi to try to time his driving for a visit to the Mexican location before the film wrapped. By the nineteenth, he and Hedda were finally ready to go, and he made the last entry in his datebook until their return on August 16: "Left by car."

For Hedda, driving across the country made real most of the dream she had envisioned of what their marriage should be; although they were not working together in a room, they were at least alone together in a car. For her, the trip was "the beauty of an eventless life...quiet working and real understanding." At the time of her marriage, Hedda had believed that happiness came from being with Saul in "some room, any room...forgetting about the other for half an hour and then coming back and seeing you and remembering reality: that you are right there and are going to be there and were there before-and it's just too wonderful." She thought they were like-minded, that Saul hated "lies and over-statements and sentimentality (not sentiment)" as much as she did. Hedda was sure that an "understanding between [two] people is possible, and real friends.h.i.+p and complete relations.h.i.+p and mutual confidence." Now, a decade later, she wanted to persuade Saul that such a relations.h.i.+p could exist between a man and a woman, even if they happened to be married, and even if the man held what she gently accused him of having: "a rather bad att.i.tude about women."

In the car, with just the two of them driving for long days, it was much the same as being alone in a room together. They talked constantly, each saying whatever came to mind without fear of offending the other. They had no set itinerary, and everything about the trip was spontaneous and subject to change at a moment's notice. As they drove along one of the main highways, a mere twist of the steering wheel might take them onto a dirt road just because it looked interesting. A sign pointing to a place with an unusual name they never heard before was one that simply had to be investigated.

On their way through the northern mountain states en route to the West Coast, they saw a sign for a Native American reservation, so they made an impromptu detour and went to see it. The tribe was not one that catered to the tourist trade but consisted of poor people who were not used to seeing other Americans, let alone those with foreign accents whose big car had a backseat filled with enough equipment for two artists to set up easels whenever the urge struck. To get there, they had driven down a rutted, rock-strewn road that was little more than a path, so far out in the middle of nowhere that the tribal elders insisted they had to spend the night for their own safety. When they left the next morning, it was with the certainty that they had experienced something profoundly spiritual and moving. As they drove on, Hedda tried to put the experience into philosophical perspective by entertaining Saul with tales from the writings of Lin Yutang, Confucius, and several New Age lecturers whose talks she had heard and books she had read. They both vowed to investigate Native American myths as soon as they returned to New York They had the same sort of reaction when they drove through British Columbia to reach the boat that would take them to Alaska. Ever since they left New York, Saul had been filling the car with the "junque" that always caught his fancy. In the Pacific Northwest, masks and totems joined the other purchases, with everything from the cheapest roadside souvenirs to examples of arts and crafts from galleries and museum shops. In Alaska he photographed all the local objects he saw, from kitsch to high culture, and much of what he saw later found its way into his drawings, the ones in which seemingly random objects-a blue-and-white Chinese vase, a can of pistachio nuts, a paper bag mask, a tin of tea, or a telephone-originated in a personal biographical moment that resonated in a multiplicity of meanings for those who saw it.

Driving down the California coast led to inevitable conversations about the place of pure art in a philistine culture. There were long conversations wherein Saul and Hedda swapped stories about their relations.h.i.+ps with their artist friends. Saul spoke of Joseph Cornell, who preferred to talk about esoteric eighteenth-century French writers rather than make observations about daily life on the magically named Utopia Parkway, the street where he lived in the borough of Queens. Saul said that like Cornell, he relished conversations about literature, but he was more interested in "direct experience, and spontaneous inventions of the moment." Hedda was closer to Mark Rothko than Saul was, and they had had many intense conversations when Saul was away and Rothko dropped in unannounced to stay for casual suppers in her kitchen. Rothko's insistence that he painted himself with blanked-out eyes because he was not "visual" puzzled her as she filtered his perceptions into her own thoughts about portraiture, particularly when she painted Annalee and Barnett Newman. Hedda made Annalee larger than life to fill a long narrow canvas that showed a strong, beautiful woman in command of the world before her; she painted Barney (whom Annalee supported until his work began to sell) smaller and seemingly crouched at the bottom of the canvas, the s.p.a.ce above him largely white and open. Hedda had enjoyed the challenge of conveying the individual personalities and circ.u.mstances in each portrait, and the mutuality of the relations.h.i.+p when they were viewed together.

When Hedda painted the Newmans in 1952, she was torn between wanting to do more portraits and doing none at all. This conflict led to discussions in 1956 as she and Saul talked at length about what they wanted to achieve in their art, and if they were at cross-purposes on any subject at all, it was what they expected from their work: she insisted that she had no ego and no ambition for public recognition, while these things governed everything he did. Her recent painting had evolved to the point where she believed there was no "vanity" to be seen in it, no personal, social, or political agenda, and nothing that could call attention to the glamorous woman and brilliant artist who created it. With her large-scale machines and spray-painted cityscapes, she had removed everything pertaining to her biography from the viewer's consideration. Her semi-abstractions were raw and brutal, far different from, say, the color fields of Helen Frankenthaler or the big blowsy blobs that Joan Mitch.e.l.l slapped onto huge canvases in thick layers and wedges. Hedda Sterne believed that something "interesting" had happened to her personally that was responsible for the departure of vanity from her paintings; "very little ambition" remained in her, and she was no longer interested in scrambling for success. Saul could not understand her indifference to showing or selling her work, but as no agreement seemed possible they did not dwell on the subject.

On the other hand, Hedda spoke often about Saul's work, usually claiming that she could write the definitive book on it. She thought his type of humor, which she called "mostly comic," was different from others because of how he "deflavourized" emotions, ideas, and situations. She equated his "humour" (she always used British spellings) to "poetry" because of his ability to bring "a tender smile upon things one never looks twice at." Steinberg brought "magic" instead of taking it away by making viewers see the world as he did. "The humour is in the line [her emphasis], and most of all, the love that transfixes your affirmative att.i.tude, accepting good and bad of life never as one a.s.suming the right to judge." Hedda found "one and the same att.i.tude toward life" in all his drawings, what she called the "deeply intelligent and understanding" ability to make his point "in the simplest and best way and impose [his] point of view without violence but with force and grace." For lack of a better phrase, she called it his "sense of humour," which she insisted was evident in his drawings but "not in what I know of you as a person." This too was a subject they did not dwell upon.

They did not stay long in Southern California and made no attempt to see the many friends who lived there. It was as if they did not want outside influences to spoil the purity of their intensely personal experiences. They dashed across the southwestern desert states into northern Mexico but were too late to connect with Aldo and the film crew, so they meandered back through the southern states and eventually headed for the mid-Atlantic coastline, New Jersey, and New York.

BACK ON 71ST STREET, THERE WAS an inevitable feeling of letdown after two months of getting up every morning with a sense of urgency to get started on whatever the adventures of the day would bring. They were tired from the constant movement and New York was still hot, so they decided to spend the next few weeks in Wellfleet. Hedda liked Cape Cod well enough for vacations but was not enthusiastic about buying property there. Neither was Saul, but somehow he managed to persuade himself that it was the thing to do. He found a house on the outskirts of Wellfleet and impulsively decided to buy it, making a significant nonrefundable deposit and then hiring a team of house inspectors from Hyannis to make a report. Because he had locked himself into an iron-bound contract to buy the property, it was a shock when the report came back showing that the property was "a disaster-everything was in poor shape, no direct access to the house except through someone else's property, termites, etc. etc." Lindey engaged a local law firm to handle the matter, even though Steinberg claimed he didn't want to know anything about the deal except that Lindey had gotten him out of it. The Ma.s.sachusetts lawyer told Lindey that they were "charming clients really in need of the protection you requested we give them," and "it was a relief to know that they had decided after all not to buy trouble and expense." However, it still took both lawyers to get Steinberg out of the mess.

Meanwhile, Louisa and Sandy Calder invited them again for Christmas, and they went, sending a huge ham before them as their gift. Steinberg, who had never really liked Connecticut, now decided that Roxbury would be a fine place to buy a house and asked Calder to help him find one. Calder said they never knew of houses until they were already sold and told him to engage a realtor and take several days to look at properties. Steinberg declined, and the idea of living in Roxbury fell by the wayside.

Tino Nivola heard of Steinberg's quest for a country home and told him of a house in Springs, near his, that was for rent. Again acting impulsively, Steinberg rented it. It turned out to be a good decision, and everything about the place made him happy. He liked the two-hour drive across Long Island to get there, which was then mostly along an easy highway bordered by potato fields and the occasional farmhouse. He liked the physical activity of country living: "I enjoy chopping wood for the fireplace, and once I've made this effort and the wood has been burned I go back to New York." There was a whole colony of artists and writers in what was loosely called "the Hamptons," among them Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, and May and Harold Rosenberg. The Nivola house was the gathering place for every visiting or transplanted European, and the warmth and vitality of the Nivolas' hospitality was always available to Saul and Hedda. Even though Saul had told Hedda the last time they had been weekend guests of the Nivolas that he could never live in the Hamptons because there were too many artists there, he changed his mind and was relieved to think that he had finally found the perfect location for a second home. He planned to look seriously for one to buy, but this happy prospect was still not enough to keep his galloping insecurities at bay, and he did nothing about it just then.

By the end of the year he was in a "bad mood because I'm dissatisfied with my work and also my behavior or whatever it is. During the night I think of what I've said or done during the day and it doesn't seem true to me." Shortly after the 1957 New Year, everything he did was "a great waste of time, with people who are indifferent or worse, but they're around."

It was time to go traveling again, and this time he planned a complete vacation, no work at all, and he asked Hedda to choose where they should go. She suggested Spain because neither of them had been there, and by April they were on their way.

CHAPTER 21.

SIX PEOPLE TO SUPPORT.

Latest news: sister out of Romania, finally ... A nightmare, six people to support.

The trip to Spain was just short of disastrous. The cities were clogged with tourists, the food was appalling, and Saul complained that it took two days to digest a meal. The only beauty was at the seaside, where dilapidated grand hotels in Anglo-Arab style fronted deserted beaches. The scenery was not enough, however, to make up for the ha.s.sles involved with the two accidents Steinberg had while driving his brand-new "never-seen-before Citroen DS19," a car that drew crowds and made him and Hedda objects of curiosity wherever they went.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was in New York on September 25, 1957, when Moritz wrote to send greetings for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It was a great relief to learn that Rica had withdrawn money from the account without incident, the Roman family was settled in the apartment, and the children were enrolled in a French school that they liked. Moritz told Saul that Rosa was "on cloud nine" when they came to her apartment every evening to watch television, and he blessed his son for everything he had done for them. But despite her happiness at seeing her daughter, Rosa was still Rosa, and she had complaints: the children were "very cute but also too energetic and spoiled." Lica was too thin, and Rosa was upset that she did not look like the "princesses in [Paris] M