The rages that drinking brought on were neither accidental nor arbitrary. Elizabeth remembers that Jackson “coldly and deliberately worked himself up into these rages in order to say the insulting things he said.” Deliberate or not, they managed to hit with uncanny accuracy at the sources of Jackson’s greatest frustrations: at those who stood in the way of his ambitions. To his more accomplished classmates he could still be reticent and deferential when sober; but when drunk, he became a provocateur, critical of their work and skeptical of their manhood. Sometimes, one classmate recalls, “he’d look you over real quick, almost as if he was deciding whether to punch you in the nose or not.” The more clearly he recognized another’s talents, the more likely he would.
In the case of brother Charles, the ultimate source of frustration, Pollock family protocol required that Jackson find more indirect ways of expressing his resentment. “Outside, he could be very charming and lovely in his manners,” Elizabeth remembers, “but once he was in our house, he was sulky and lazy. He didn’t want to be cooperative. Jackson gave about as much back in the way of gratitude as if Charles had been some kind of strange landlord that he rented from.”
Women were Jackson’s other, special victims. Handsome, shy, and boyishly charming when sober, he turned “pugnacious and ornery” toward women with the least excuse of alcohol. His natural inarticulateness was transformed into cold, subversive silence; his macho pretensions into wildly offensive language; and, occasionally, his emotional rage into physical abuse. “He’d walk up to a woman at a party and stick his big face in hers and say something in a rough, threatening way,” one classmate remembers. As his reputation spread through the League—“He made the women afraid,” Philip Pavia recalls—Jackson was forced to rely increasingly on fantasy instead of drunkenness to appease his sexual ambitions, spinning out in lunchroom tales the sexual mastery that eluded him in reality. “He bragged about a lot of conquests,” one classmate remembers. “But it was pretty evident that they didn’t culminate to the extent that he claimed they did.”
Only rarely did other members of the Pollock family glimpse Jackson’s darkest side. On a visit to the Tenth Street studio-apartment early in 1932 with Frank, Marie brought along a girlfriend, Rose Miller, a quiet, modestly attractive girl—“bubbling, not dramatic,” according to Marie—with dark curly hair, olive skin, and “no particular interest in the arts,” but eager to meet new men. On the way to Jackson’s apartment, the two women “made the mistake of buying a bottle of whiskey,” Marie remembers, “not knowing what the effect was on Jack, not knowing about the Pollocks and alcohol. This was kind of early in the game. It was just the smart thing to do—this was in the days of Prohibition. We bought it to have a little party and to be friendly with Jack.”
The “party” began well enough. Rose took an instant liking to the brooding, awkward boy with the hazel eyes and quizzical squint. At first she thought the handsome paintings around the walls were Jackson’s, forcing him to explain that his paintings were the ones turned to the wall. With an ax, Jackson cut small pieces of hard-to-come-by wood and fed them to the potbellied stove. In the warmth and glow, Marie quickly forgot her lingering annoyance at Jackson (on her last visit, he had put her new hat at the bottom of the closet, then piled a party’s worth of coats on top of it). As the whiskey was passed around, Frank shared the latest family news (Sande’s job at the Times was in jeopardy), complained about New York (the Depression might defy optimistic predictions and drag on for another year), and lamented the prospects for a career in journalism.
Before anybody realized what was happening, Jackson was drunk.
He began to paw at Rose menacingly. She tried to brush it off, but the more she ignored him, the bolder he became. “He got very rough,” Marie remembers, “not saying sexual things, just being abusive to her, manhandling her, pushing her. I’d never seen him that way before—he was usually this sweet young guy.” Marie grabbed Jackson and tried to pull him away. This wasn’t the tantrum of a petulant little boy deprived of his way, Marie recalls thinking, “it was just mean. I was afraid he would hurt her.” His face already red with anger, Jackson turned on Marie and exploded. A winter of discontents spewed out in one volcanic rage. For all his self-inflicted suffering, nothing and nobody would bend to his will, not even pencils and brushes. For all the spinning ambition that he had brought back from the summer, he was more isolated and embattled than ever. For all the work, and the years of wanting, he was still the last and least, the little brother yearning for the attention of an increasingly cold and distracted family in an increasingly cold and distracted world.
In an instant, he grabbed the ax from beside the stove and held it over Marie’s head. “You’re a nice girl, Marie, and I like you,” he spat at her. “I would hate to have to chop your head off.” After a few seconds of frozen silence, he turned and brought the ax down into one of Charles’s paintings hanging on the wall. The force of the blow split the canvas and buried the ax in the wall behind it.
Jackson had chosen, half consciously perhaps, not only one of Charles’s best paintings, but also one of the few that he had managed to sell. It was in the studio only because Charles had borrowed it back from the buyer to show at an exhibition. Even Charles—unemotional, unmovable Charles—was visibly angry when he returned. With Elizabeth’s approval, perhaps at her insistance, he told Jackson to find another place to live.
But the family could never desert Jackson entirely. When one brother grew tired of caring for him, or resentful of the imposition or of Jackson’s ingratitude, another one took his place. It was a pattern that would be repeated often in the next few years, as each brother, in turn, served his term as Jackson’s keeper. “Jackson’s four brothers behaved toward him as if he had been a disabled child,” Elizabeth remembers, “as if one leg was shorter than the other, or one arm withered, or he had a speech impediment. All four brothers recognized that he was flawed in some way, and that they had to protect him.”
Now it was Frank’s turn. Although comfortably settled in an apartment on West 114th Street only blocks from both his day job peeling potatoes and his night job at the Columbia law library, Frank moved to Midtown and took a room with Jackson. In a cramped, windowless space hidden in a dilapidated warehouse building not far from Macy’s, the two brothers spent the rest of the winter and spring. “It was on a corner and there was a small speakeasy on the ground floor,” Frank recalls. “In the middle of the night, maybe two or three o’clock, they’d bring barrels of beer and drop them through the sidewalk to the basement. You’d hear the thump. It was illegal, of course.” The room was only large enough for a double bed and a chest of drawers, but between Frank’s two jobs—beginning at five in the morning and ending at midnight—and the long commute, the two brothers hardly noticed each other. “We were there together only the few hours of the night that I slept,” Frank remembers.
One night, stumbling through the dark toward the edge of the bed, Frank found someone else in his place. Rose Miller had returned to Jackson’s life.
After the night at Charles’s studio, no one could have been more surprised than Jackson at Rose’s persistence. While not a beautiful girl, she was, to Frank’s eye, “attractive and wholesome.” And also, apparently, very lonely. Before being introduced to Jackson, she had frequently accompanied Marie and Frank to the movies. “Frank would hold my hand during the first act,” Marie recalls, “and Rose’s hand during the second act. She didn’t have a boyfriend.” Although “reserved” and “feminine,” Rose was, like Marie, a headstrong Jewish girl who had crossed the country on her own—the two had met at a residence for working women in Los Angeles—and was never without a job or money in her purse. She approached Jackson with the same calm determination and pioneer sense of purpose. “There’s no question in my mind,” says Frank, “that she seduced him.” In preparation for one late-night rendezvous in Jackson’s room, Marie bought a dozen red roses and put them in a milk bottle on the chest next to Jackson’s
bed. “I left them there for Rose and Jack,” Marie recalls, “because they were going to have their big encounter that evening.”
What happened that evening is not recorded, but the relationship soon sputtered out. Although Rose had money, the two never went out or joined Frank and Marie for dates, nor did Jackson ever venture to her parents’ house. Their liaison was bounded by the low-ceilinged space above the speakeasy. “She was only with us two or three evenings,” Frank remembers. On the last occasion, Frank returned from work, rapped softly on the door, and was surprised when Rose appeared, alone and dressed and obviously eager to leave. “I wouldn’t have turned her out of bed to go home alone from that address in the middle of the night,” Frank remembers thinking. “It was midnight. I would at least have taken her to the subway. At least. But Jack didn’t even get out of bed. He didn’t stir. I just climbed in in her place.”
By summer, the relationship was dead. “Rose wrote me and said she didn’t know what happened,” Marie recalls. “The interest just wasn’t there—on his part, that is, not hers.”
15
INTO THE PAST
The rescue effort continued through the spring of 1932. Alerted by Charles and exhorted by Stella, the Pollock family responded with an outpouring of letters to shore up Jackson’s sagging spirits. From Wrightwood, Roy made the usual apologies and recommended several articles in the Nation to his son’s attention. Sande complained that he had been cut to part-time status at the Times. Even the long-silent Jay, who had thrown himself into union activities that would eventually lose him his printing job, wrote a homiletic letter about “finding himself.” Stella sent several letters, inquiring in characteristically circumspect terms about the adequacy of his diet, his sleep, and his wardrobe. The subject of Jackson’s coat became a momentary cause célèbre, Stella apparently believing that his problems could be traced, at least in part, to an ancient, tattered blue coat he had worn since high school. Eventually, Frank dutifully stepped forward and, despite being deeply in debt, took Jackson to Macy’s and bought him a new corduroy coat for twelve dollars. Stella also sent money, scarce as it was, and Sande enclosed a reproduction of a painting. Perhaps at Stella’s instigation, Charlie Brockway, a family friend from Riverside, came down from Boston and visited Jackson in his small room over the speakeasy.
Out of Jackson’s hearing, a consensus emerged in the family that he was having “growing up” problems, exaggerated by the easy availability of bootleg liquor and a decadent New York life-style, but nothing beyond the normal pangs of adolescence—“the usual stress and strain of a sensitive person’s transition from adolescence to manhood, a thing he would outgrow,” according to Charles. The best antidotes, the family agreed, were wholesome activity and close supervision, provided by Charles and Frank respectively. Even with more than a million jobless in New York City, Charles managed to find Jackson part-time work as a janitor at Greenwich House. But it was only a temporary solution. With Charles applying for a fellowship in Los Angeles, and Frank planning a trip to the West Coast with Marie in June, what would become of Jackson alone and jobless in the emotional hothouse of a New York summer?
Everyone breathed easier when, in April, Charles’s fellowship fell through. Rather than spend a summer babysitting Jackson under Elizabeth’s wrathful glare, however, Charles arranged for him to join Frank and Marie on their trip west. To cover his expenses, Jackson persuaded Whitney Darrow, Jr., the Princeton graduate, budding cartoonist, and distant cousin of the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow, to come along, citing the salubrious effects of “getting away from the suffocating, closed-in city and out into the green countryside again.” His share of expenses would be “$25 to $30,” Jackson told him, less than he earned for a single cartoon. “I had never been west of Geneva, New York, and I saw it as a wonderful, unique opportunity,” Darrow remembers. J. Palmer Schoppe, another League student, wanted a ride only as far as his home in Salt Lake City.
On May 29, 1932, the five set out in a bright yellow 1926 Packard 6 touring car that Marie had bought for $165 and the Pollock boys had done their best to put in working order. With Frank and Jackson taking turns at the wheel, they followed the northern route through New York, Ontario, Michigan, Illinois, across the Mississippi and out onto the warped tabletop of Iowa farmland. They passed within fifty miles of Tingley without stopping. The high point of the trip came in the unlikely town of York, Nebraska, about a hundred miles southwest of Omaha, where Marie’s uncle was shocked to find his young niece traveling with four unshaven, unmarried young men “looking very wild and woolly.” “He was president of the Rotary Club and owned half the town,” says Marie. “I think we embarrassed him.”
In Cheyenne, Wyoming, a sudden gust of wind tore the canvas top off the Packard. As if on cue, the skies over the Medicine Bow Mountains, usually cloudless in June, turned dark, and heavy rain followed them all the way to Salt Lake City where Schoppe disembarked. Turning south, they stopped at Bryce Canyon National Park where, five years earlier, Jackson had come with Sande, Robert Cooter, and the cowboy Louis Jay. Unfortunately, Jackson spent most of the visit in a pool of mud, struggling in the rain with one of an endless succession of flat tires. The rest of the trip retraced a familiar route: from the Arizona border near the Kaibab Plateau, down into the Mojave, then up again into the San Gabriel Mountains and the familiar pine smells of Wrightwood. They spent the last night at Roy’s old road camp. “There were no beds,” Darrow recalls, “so we slept on the floor. We didn’t bring any warm clothing, and the cabin was on top of a mountain. I’ve never been so cold in my life.” The next morning, they descended into the valley of orange groves around Riverside.
Like the trip, the summer that followed was a step back into the past. Without the remotest possibility of a job, Jackson spent most of the summer at Stella’s house on Montecito Drive overlooking Los Angeles. It could have been the Chestnut Street house in Riverside: Sande, whose increasingly precarious job paid the rent, shared a bed with Jackson; Frank slept on the couch in the living room; and Roy came down from the mountains occasionally to share a meal with his family. One night, Darrow, who had rented a place in Santa Monica, came for dinner. “They were very simple people,” he remembers, “and I felt out of place as the stranger from back east. Jackson’s mother was a solid woman and obviously the power in the family. His father was a hard worker and a drinker, from what I could tell. The dinner conversation was on the simplest level.”
One of Jackson’s few joys that summer was the reunion with Reuben Kadish. The two would sit for hours in the kitchen on Montecito Drive earnestly talking art and politics while Stella preserved fruit and vegetables in mason jars. Kadish’s conversation was filled with the revolutionary rhetoric of the exiled Mexican muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros, who had come to Los Angeles in 1931 and formed a small “workshop” of young painters. Stirred by Siqueiros’s Communist politics (he had been jailed for anti-government trade union activities in Mexico) and by the visceral power of his paintings, Kadish had become his ardent disciple, assistant, and occasional chauffeur. “He was a vigorous, charismatic man,” Kadish recalls, “and I was happy to do anything for him.” In the year since Jackson’s last visit, Kadish had assisted Siqueiros on several outdoor murals that tested both traditional painting techniques and public tolerance in a city where unions were still anathema. One, Crucifixion, depicted the Latin American peoples bound to a cross and, above them, perched like a vulture, the eagle of American capitalism.
Through his “workshops,” Siqueiros hoped eventually to build an international “syndicate of painters” that would serve the workers’ revolution with inflammatory public works like Crucifixion. (Kadish signed his next mural, for a Communist club in Los Angeles, “Syndicate of Painters,” raising a howl of protest from local papers.) Kadish had already introduced Siqueiros to a number of his friends, including Phil Goldstein and Sande Pollock, so when Jackson arrived for the summer, he eagerly arranged a meeting. In preparation, the two trekked across to
wn to the Chouinard School of Art to see Siqueiros’s murals depicting a labor organizer rousing a crowd. But Jackson reacted coolly both to the art and, when they finally met, to the artist. “Jackson dismissed Siqueiros,” Kadish remembers. “‘Orozco is the real artist,’ he said,” referring to Siqueiros’s more prominent countryman, José Clemente Orozco, “‘and his Prometheus is really the thing to look at.’”
Although deeply impressed by the strength and immediacy of Orozco’s work, Jackson continued to struggle with Tom Benton’s notions of form and control. Buttressed by Sande and Kadish, he passed the summer in relative calm, producing yet another round of tortured drawings. Even after two years at the League, sketching was still not an easy process. Every new piece of paper was another battle with spontaneity, every line laden with risks. Nothing “right” happened automatically. Even his most successful attempts were little more than crude, jagged imitations of Benton’s sure, undulating lines. At a time when Kadish was proselytizing for Siqueiros and Benton was painting alongside Orozco, Jackson must have sensed the affinity between his errant imitations and the work of the Mexican muralists—in their energy, their directness, and their emotional freedom. Where Benton insisted on cerebral control, the Mexicans offered a broader range of possibilities, an acceptance of risk. Where Benton denied the spontaneous, they embraced it. Jackson had admired Orozco’s Prometheus from the moment Charles showed it to him, but at some point he must have begun to feel a kinship with it that Charles, in all his Bentonesque refinement and exquisite sensibility, could never know.
Jackson Pollock Page 30