Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  It’s a ghastly or something-or-other shame when … the number of candidates is shockingly low. Are we a school of “little boys” and non-patriots? … We want a winning team and we are positive that every loyal student of Manual does too.

  Around the same time, Jackson was ambushed in the hall at school by a group of football players. Probably incensed by his appearance as much as his slack school spirit, they pinned him down and cut off his long hair. Then they dragged him into a nearby bathroom and forced his head into the toilet. If it was humiliation Jackson wanted, he had finally found it.

  Soon afterward, he was hauled before Coach Sid Foster, a “mean, short-tempered” man who also happened to be the head of the physical education department. Whether Jackson was there to explain his refusal to play for the team or because he had once again run afoul of the school’s phys. ed. requirement isn’t recorded. What is recorded, by Jackson himself, is that the confrontation eventually “came to blows.” (It was the third time in as many years Jackson had lashed out at an authority figure: the ROTC officer at Riverside, his father at Santa Ynez, now Coach Foster). Within minutes, he found himself in the office of the principal, Dr. Albert E. Wilson, known to faculty and students as “the Czar.” To Dr. Wilson, a humorless, stiff-necked man of Scandinavian rectitude, no crime was worse than tardiness and, according to a school chronicler, “no alibi had validity.” (He was also known for his interest in and sympathy toward the arts—a sympathy that would later work to Jackson’s benefit.) If Jackson had not come to Wilson’s attention before, his record of absences, tardiness, and incomplete semesters spoke too eloquently now. Wilson expelled him. “He was too thick to see my side,” Jackson complained to Charles and Frank. “He told me to get out and find another school.”

  Despite Jackson’s boast to Charles and Frank that “I have a number of teachers backing me so there is some possibility of my getting back,” only Schwankovsky and Jackson’s English teacher came to his defense. Stella, only recently returned from Iowa, also met with Wilson and asked him to reconsider. Frank Pollock recalls that he was shocked when he learned that his mother had pled on Jackson’s behalf: “That’s the first time that mother ever took part in any school activity.” Yet even if such efforts had been successful, Jackson must have realized, after four of the last five semesters had ended prematurely, that high school was no longer a viable option; he had used up his last chance. His speculations about returning alternated between resignation and unreality:

  If I get back in school I will have to be very careful about my actions. The whole outfit think I am a rotten rebel from Russia. I will have to go about very quietly for a long period until I win a good reputation. I find it useless to try and fight an army with a spit ball.

  Speculation aside, Jackson seemed bent on self-destruction. Only days after being expelled, he was in trouble again. He and “another fellow loaned two girls some money to run away,” he dutifully reported to Charles and Frank:

  We were ignorant of the law at the time. We did it merely through friend ship. But now they have us, I am not sure what the outcomes will be. The penalty is from six to twelve months in jail. We are both minors so it would probably be some kind of a reform school. They found the girls today in Phoenix and are bringing them back.

  In all likelihood, the other “fellow” was Phil Goldstein, a notorious “ladies’ man.” Goldstein began the year as art editor of the Weekly, but was abruptly and inexplicably demoted to “assistant” after the October 1 issue—almost precisely the time that the episode with the two girls was discovered by school authorities.

  The dire consequences Jackson feared never materialized. Instead, from the end of October through the first part of 1930, he withdrew into another period of seclusion and depression. A year of rebellion had left him humiliated at school, alienated from his family—especially his father—and still unable to make a pen move gracefully across a piece of paper. Instead of “growing like the Lotus” he was stumbling from one crisis to another, troubled by his own moroseness and plagued by nightmares. Old feelings of inadequacy and guilt, never far beneath the mask of political posturing and Theosophical resignation, welled to the surface. He toyed fatalistically with the idea of running away to Mexico City, “if there is any means of making a livelihood there.”

  Only the letter from Charles held out hope. As the Manual Arts football team ground through a disappointing season, and Sande lit out in his brand-new Ford for the big white house in Riverside, and the country skidded toward financial collapse, Jackson languished in the bungalow court off Vermont Avenue, reading and rereading the small pages of his brother’s elegant, High German calligraphy. With the letter as inspiration, old fantasies were revived. He dutifully subscribed to Creative Art magazine, as Charles had recommended—“it gives me a new outlook on life,” he enthused—and sought out the articles on Rivera, Orozco, and Benton (although he found only the first). Inevitably, more recent fantasies were discarded. “I have dropped religion for the present,” he wrote Charles in submission. “Should I follow the Occult Mysticism it wouldn’t be for commercial purposes.”

  Between brief spells of optimism, Jackson’s depression lingered through Christmas and into the New Year. As if on cue, the nation plunged past him. Longer and longer lines of the unemployed, homeless, and hungry formed outside private missions in the city’s slum sections to receive their ration of rancid scraps from restaurant garbage (city officials refused to set up soup kitchens, convinced they were breeding grounds of unionism and socialism). The crash itself disregarded such fine distinctions, crushing bourgeoisie and proletariat indiscriminately. In tony Pasadena, the first of seventy-nine people—most of them bankers, stockbrokers, and real-estate speculators—jumped to his death from the scenic bridge across the Arroyo Seco, soon nicknamed “Suicide Bridge.” In the spirit of indefatigable boosterism that characterized Los Angeles, a fiesta was planned, with floats, evangelists, and movie stars, in the hope that it would “lift the city out of the commercial doldrums by lifting its spirits.” After all, the Times reported, “much of the Depression is psychological.” For Jackson, even being readmitted to school on a part-time basis in January—due to some combination of Schwankovsky’s influence with Dr. Wilson and Stella’s insistent pleas—did little to lift his spirits. “This so called happy part of one’s life youth to me is a bit of damnable hell,” he wrote to Charles at the end of January:

  if i could come to some conclusion about my self and life perhaps there i could see something to work for. my mind blazes up with some ill[u]sion for a couple of weeks the[n] it smoalters down to a bit of nothing[. T]he more i read and the more i think i am thinking the darker things become.

  As he approached his eighteenth birthday, Jackson was feeling increasingly embarrassed by his lack of a girlfriend. Charles, after all, had never been without female companionship, and school friends like Phil Goldstein were already in a position to be “choosy about girls.” “Jackson just didn’t have girlfriends like the rest of them,” recalls Don Brown’s sister Alma. In late 1929, as the peer pressure mounted, Jackson received word through Stella, the family news broker, that Charles had met the woman he would eventually marry, Elizabeth Feinberg, in New York. Within a year, Arloie Conaway would press Sande into serious discussions about marriage, and Frank would begin courting Marie Levitt, his future wife. Jackson, meanwhile, remained conspicuously celibate.

  Sometime in the fall of 1929, Harold Hodges invited him to a party in the big house on the corner of Gramercy and Forty-third Street where Hodges boarded. The party turned out to be a “musical jam,” a small gathering of high-minded young musicians who performed for an audience made up of other “artsy kids” from Manual Arts. At some point during the evening, Jackson watched as a short, serious-looking girl in a severe dress adjusted herself at the piano and began to play. Her black hair, extravagantly long, fell over the back of the bench. She played with an intense, authoritative touch and, when she finished, walked stiff and uns
miling back to her chair. Jackson was attracted by her talent and the confidence it gave her; she found him handsome, “clean,” and charmingly awkward. Besides, her long, plain face and direct manner had won her few looks from the other handsome boys at school. At a deeper level, each undoubtedly recognized a fellow rebel.

  The girl was Berthe Pacifico, a junior at Manual Arts. She had been born Bertha, but despised the name and readily agreed to her concert agent’s suggestion that she change it to Berthe, which she pronounced in a single syllable, “Burt,” without the fussy schwa. Her conversation was similarly brusque and unadorned. She tended to pounce on questions as if they were small fires”—Holy Cow, no!” Forthright and full of opinions, she hardly fit the coquettish image of the other girls at Manual. “In fact, she was overly serious,” recalls a classmate, “without much of a sense of humor.”

  Berthe Pacifico

  Although attracted to Jackson—she had recognized him from campus immediately—Berthe wasn’t about to let him interfere with her rigorous five-hour-a-day practice schedule. “Right after school Jack would come over and listen to me play till dinner,” she recalls. “He was like a mouse, so quiet you wouldn’t even know he was there.” And so persistent that Berthe occasionally felt “like I had to kick him out.” Sometimes he tagged along to lessons and recitals. Everywhere he went he took a small sketch pad in his shirt pocket. “He’d sketch my head, my hands, my face,” Berthe remembers, “but he especially liked to draw my hair. I had long, heavy hair.” With what little money he could earn or borrow, Jackson bought her gifts: a small gold locket in the shape of a cross with enamel inlay and matching earrings that she never wore; a pair of silk lounging pajamas piped in black satin. In her rough way, Berthe was touched by the gifts. “It must have taken all the dough he had,” she remembers thinking.

  Soon Jackson began staying for dinner at the big Victorian house on Dalton Street only six blocks from school. The Pacifico family generally approved of him—“He was always a good polite boy; clean as a whistle and never showed dirt,” recalls Berthe’s sister, Ora Horton—and eventually let him drive the family Hudson up to the Baldwin Hills, a site for the upcoming Olympics that was still just rolling fields and swampland. There, he would stop the car, pull a package of tobacco from his pocket, and roll his own cigarettes in brown paper. At times like these, says Berthe, or when they were alone on the piano bench of the mahogany Kranich & Bach in the parlor, “all he was interested in was smooching if he could.” Only once, when they were sitting on the bench, did she allow him a kiss.

  Berthe may not have satisfied all of Jackson’s romantic needs, but for a while, at least, she satisfied the most pressing one. Returning from his afternoons of Beethoven, Chopin, and Gershwin, he regaled his mother and Sande with stories that were gradually disseminated through Stella’s letters to the rest of the family. He brought her proudly to the bungalow court to introduce her to Stella—“she was always pleased to see me,” Berthe recalls—and to share the dinner table, two-by-two at last, with Sande and Arloie. Eventually, he would show her off to all the brothers. Yet the sketches he drew of her, hundreds of them presumably, remained hidden—even from Berthe. “All the time I was playing, that darn old pencil never stopped,” she recalls. “But he would never let me see what he did.” At times, he would go off by himself with his pencil and pad and work furiously while Berthe watched from a distance.

  The harder he tried, however, the more frustrated he felt. “I am doubtful of any talent,” he wrote Charles in October, “so what ever I choose to be will be accomplished only by long study and work. I fear it will be forced and mechanical.” In the Pacificos’ parlor, in Manuel Tolegian’s chicken coop, and in Schwankovsky’s drawing classes, he continued to sketch, but his thoughts turned more and more to other media in a desperate effort to reconcile his ambitions with his inadequacies. “Architecture interests me,” he wrote Charles, “but not in the sense painting and sculptoring does.” The reference to painting was largely wishful—no one at Manual Arts taught oil painting, and Jackson never enrolled in Schwankovsky’s watercolor class. In “sculptoring,” however, Jackson found a thread of hope. “I have started doing some thing with clay,” he reported to Charles in January, “and have found a bit of encouragement from my teacher.” The teacher, Hazel Martin, although not a particularly accomplished sculptor herself, apparently saw that the undisciplined Jackson needed encouragement more than honesty. According to another student, Martin was never sure when Jackson had completed his sculptures: “There was a group of figures Jack had done but they were very, very vague, almost abstract, and she said, ‘Why don’t you get hold of Jack and tell him to finish these so I can fire them.’” Jackson informed her that they were already “finished.”

  Most of his fellow students were similarly baffled, although a few had begun to see, especially in his sculptures, signs of an oblique, unconventional talent. “Some of his work had a lot of energy and we admired that,” recalls a classmate who later became an artist.

  But the pen still frustrated him. On the last day of the winter term, he wrote Charles:

  … my drawing i will tell you frankly is rotten it seems to lack freedom and rhythem it is cold and lifeless. it isn’t worth the postage to send it … the truth of it is i have never really gotten down to real work and finish a piece i usually get disgusted with it and lose interest … altho i feel i will make an artist of some kind i have nver proven to myself nor any body else that i have it in me.

  When the second semester began on February 3, 1930, Jackson was permitted to enroll only in Schwankovsky’s life drawing class and Mrs. Martin’s clay modeling class, and only on an ungraded basis. Despite the opportunity to concentrate his efforts, his inadequacies were only further underscored by the arrival that term of a new classmate, Harold Lehman.

  Lehman was everything Jackson Pollock wasn’t: brash, self-confident, erudite, articulate, and extraordinarily talented. He could also be, like Goldstein, self-impressed and supercilious. Having just moved from New York to Hollywood, he concluded that California in general, and Manual Arts in particular, was a cultural wasteland. His talent, however, was undeniable. Trained in a world-renowned casting studio at age fifteen, Lehman was an accomplished sculptor and a master caster by the time he arrived in Martin’s clay modeling class. “She had never seen anything like it,” he recalls. “It was just unbelievable that a young kid like myself could do all this technology. Nobody in the school knew anything about it.” Technology aside, the sculptures themselves were in the best academic tradition: lifelike in detail, flawless in execution. His sketches displayed an astonishing precision of line and sensitivity to shape, proportion, and shading. Of all the artists Jackson had encountered, and perhaps ever would encounter, Lehman came closest to that ideal of effortless accomplishment expressed in the term “gifted.” There was no doubt: Harold Lehman was extravagantly gifted. At his first show in Los Angeles a few years later, he would be hailed by newspapers as “a great genius” and “unbelievable talent.” During his two years at Manual Arts, art teachers from other districts would approach him with inducements to change schools—“as though I was a football player.” For months, his bust of Abraham Lincoln was prominently displayed in a glass case outside the school auditorium.

  For most of his classmates, Lehman felt only contempt; but for Jackson, with his guileless admiration and athletic body, he felt the impatient, possessive affection of an older brother. The unlikely pair went browsing through the bookstores along Broadway and Spring Street in lower Los Angeles, hunting for bargains on art books and secondhand magazines. In Lehman’s neighborhood, Hollywood, they visited Stanley Rose’s bookshop and gallery, where the very latest in controversial avant-garde literature (James Joyce, Luigi Pirandello, Gertrude Stein) was always available, along with books on the modern European masters. Lehman took Jackson to the Los Angeles County Museum and the tiny handful of galleries—Daltzell-Hatfield and Stendhal—that exhibited modern French paintings. J
ackson took Lehman to Manuel Tolegian’s backyard to see the chicken coop, which Lehman called “picturesque” but declined to enter because he “didn’t like to draw in groups.”

  Like Charles, Lehman was an unapproachable figure, at home in a world from which Jackson felt excluded. If, on a trip to a bookstore or museum, Jackson tended to forget the distance that separated them, he had only to put pencil to paper to remind him. The scraps of knowledge he had gathered from Charles’s articles and Schwankovsky’s class were lost in Lehman’s lavish monologues on the Renaissance, Matisse, Picasso, and Cubism, which he “didn’t really get.” In the spring of 1930, Schwankovsky arranged for Lehman and Phil Goldstein—not Jackson—to take an evening class in life drawing at Los Angeles High where the models posed nude. In June, the Weekly announced that Goldstein had been awarded a scholarship to the Otis Art Institute for the coming fall. It would be another year before the two prodigies began holding meetings to play Stravinsky recordings, discuss the filmmaking theories of Eisenstein and Dovchenko, or give reports on philosophical tracts. But Jackson’s comfortable little family of fellow students was, largely due to Lehman’s dervish intellect, already drifting in that direction and, with each drift, leaving Jackson further behind.

  Bas relief of Schwankovsky by Harold Lehman

  In mid-June, Charles and Frank returned from New York in a 1924 Buick. Their arrival at the bungalow court off Vermont Avenue marked the beginning of one of the Pollock family reunions that invariably foreshadowed an upheaval in Jackson’s life.

  Charles had changed considerably since his departure in 1926. Four years in New York had taught him the rudiments of humility and accommodation. He was no longer the high-handed, thin-skinned dandy who would shoo his youngest brother away or burst into self-righteous indignation at the dinner table. In his long, careful letters to Jackson, as well as his commitment to Elizabeth Feinberg, he seemed prepared at last to care about somebody other than himself. In that new spirit, he sat down and told Jackson his story.