Steffens was married to Ella Winter. Recently reissued volume by Stephen Koch on Willi Munzenberg, the legendary Comintern operative, killed under suspicious circumstances 'sez http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/12/nov93/koch.htm >...In America, one might add to the list the name of Ella Winter, who began her career in politics being introduced by Felix Frankfurter to Lincoln Steffens in the midst of the Versailles Conference. Steffens fell in love with her, and their relation lasted the rest of his life. Throughout the Twenties, Winter moved more and more obviously into the role of a classic fellow traveler, resolutely guiding the famous muckraker into the paths of her Stalinism as she did so. By the time of his death, it must be said that Lincoln Steffens had become a creature, an intellectual abject.
After Steffens’s death, Winter proceeded to another marriage that was exceptionally useful from the apparat’s point of view. This one put her in a leading position managing the networks of Stalinist fellow travelers in Hollywood, a long-standing special concern of the apparatus, with much attention from Gibarti, Katz, and many others. Winter met and married a very successful Hollywood screenwriter, Donald Ogden Stewart—a companion to Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos; a runner with the bulls at Pamplona in the company of the circle immortalized in The Sun Also Rises. Stalinism and Hemingway aside, Stewart was an attractive but malleable guilt-ridden lightweight. And at his side, Ella Winter was ideally placed for an active life among networks of Stalinist opinion in the film colony.
Ella Winter worked closely with Münzenberg’s men, especially those who were active in Hollywood. She knew Otto Katz well, and Gibarti referred to Ella Winter as “one of the most trusted party agents for the West Coast.” Gibarti had every reason to know...
A more recent study of Munzenberg is, "The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willy Münzenberg, Moscow's Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West, 1917-1940, " by Sean McMeekin.
-- Michael Pugliese