Remembering Saul Steier

I took a Humanities class my first semester at UCLA, and the teaching assistant who conducted it scared me half to death. He wasn’t much older than I, I didn’t think, and wasn’t a rugby type, but he nearly blew the roof off the small auditorium in which he taught. He raged. He roared. He scoffed cinematically at the facile observations my bolder classmates (there must have been close to 60 of us) made about the works of literature we were discussing. He was terrifying, and spell-binding, and gorgeous, and dizzyingly arrogant. He was a rock star. 

He was Saul Steier, who I now learn died last year.

He’d been on my favourite TV programme of the early 1960s, Mr. Novak. He’d acted in several productions directed by the guy who “discovered” me as a writer, and started me, in the arts supplement of the UCLA Daily Bruin, on the path to universal fame and acclaim from which I have never strayed. For years, said discoverer, whose encouragement changed my life, didn’t dare confide his homosexuality, with every good reason. (At the time, one who didn’t, uh, present as homophobic risked being thought "queer" himself, and God knows I felt enough of an outsider already.) I found out years later that he’d ached for Saul without ever letting on, and it broke my heart a little bit.

A couple of months after I began writing, in my senior year, I spent part of a Saturday with Discoverer, Saul, and Saul’s breathtaking girlfriend, who looked to me like a combination of Brigitte Bardot and all of the Beatles’ wives. Remembering how Saul had loved eviscerating cocky little freshmen who a few months before had been the apples of their high school English teachers’ eyes, I barely dared speak. When the subject of my recent review of the Beatles’ White Album came up, and Saul bemoaned my not having explicated why "Blackbird" featured actual birds tweeting, in the pre-Twitter sense, I was nearly overcome with shame. At that point, having not yet interviewed Procol Harum, I’d never been in the presence of as luminous a star.

Several weeks later, I encountered Saul’s girlfriend on campus and was of course tongue-tied and shy, and made a fool of myself. Discoverer soon thereafter informed me that she and Saul had split up, and that Girlfriend had fancied me. I was beside myself with self-recrimination for weeks. No, hold that thought. I think I still am.