Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Becky Tarwater

  Jackson’s instant infatuation did not escape notice. “It was very touching,” Reuben Kadish recalls. “Jack was like a dodo. He just stared and stared as if she’d hypnotized him.” Becky remembers only that he was a persistent listener. “I think he enjoyed the playing,” she says. When she stopped playing, however, Jackson continued to stare; and when she left, he followed her out the door. Although drunk as usual, something apparently prevented him from staging the usual drunken scene in the hallway. “He just followed me,” Becky remembers. “I would go down a few steps and he would follow, some steps back. When I stopped, he stopped.” On the street, “he stayed at a distance behind and when I would turn around to look, he would duck in a doorway. I think it was all teasing.” Finally, at the Astor Place subway station, she turned on him and said, softly but firmly, “Jack, I don’t want you coming home with me. I am perfectly all right.” A friend had arranged for her to stay at the Allerton, a hotel for young women on Fifty-seventh Street, and she feared his appearance there might cause a scandal.

  Jackson immediately began planning their next encounter, an event almost guaranteed because she had left her banjo behind in the Eighth Street apartment. He sat up at night picking at the five double strings and asked friends to recommend “a good instruction book” for the banjo. “All I’m able to do so far,” he wrote Charles in frustration, “is to get it out of tune.” But making music together was only the beginning of Jackson’s fantasy. Over the next several months, he began to construct in his imagination an intense, elaborate affair. To Arloie and Sande especially, and to friends like Kadish and Tolegian, he declaimed his infatuation. “He was very much in love with her,” Kadish remembers. “He was just crazy about her.”

  The reality, however, wasn’t nearly so intense. Although she returned to the apartment a number of times for dinner, Becky never thought of Jackson as anything more than a friend—“a tortured, sensitive person who was very touching.” In the four or five months of their acquaintanceship, Jackson never showed her his paintings or took her to galleries or museums or introduced her to his friends. Their only encounters, in fact, were several more dinners at the Eighth Street apartment where he could show her off to Sande. “We never went out on a date, or to dinner, or anything of that sort,” Becky says. On the rare occasions when they talked on the telephone, Jackson never spoke about his family, his past, his ambitions, or his paintings—“painting and anything of that sort just wasn’t on his mind,” she remembers. He never told her of his therapy or visited the converted church on Lexington Avenue where she sang the nightly entr’acte in a cabaret production of Naughty Naught. Nor could he have probed too deeply into Becky’s life or thoughts. If he had, he would have discovered that her childhood boyfriend and the man she intended to marry, Mason Hicks, was finishing his internship and residency at Bellevue Hospital and lived only a few blocks from the club where she sang.

  Despite such yawning gaps, Jackson and Becky shared enough moments both to sustain his fantasy and to give her some sympathy for his plight. He could be charming—especially when he showed up at the starched-shirt Allerton wearing “a great big cowboy hat”—but seldom laughed. “He was really almost like two people,” Becky remembers. “I found him a tortured and unhappy person, but also very sensitive and very sweet. He seemed so complicated. … I thought he had too much awareness for his own good.” Although she never saw him drunk, she occasionally felt the aftershocks. One day, while walking together, they saw a woman leading a tiny dog on a leash. “This infuriated him,” Becky recalls. “He walked over to the woman and started to kick the dog. He was infuriated that somebody could be so infatuated with a dog. I was terrified the police would come.” After that incident, fear crept into her fondness. “He was always gentle and sweet with me, but I was afraid to be with him in public, afraid he might create an awkward situation or embarrass me.”

  Kept alive by dinners and an occasional kiss, the fantasy carried Jackson through the winter. By spring, it had displaced reality altogether. The drinking continued, however, unseen by Becky and unchecked by continuing visits to the psychiatrist. Straining to be optimistic, Sande wrote Charles that he noticed “slight improvement in [Jack’s] point of view” after six months of therapy. But the situation was still critical—so critical that he couldn’t leave Jackson alone.

  Earlier in the year, Charles had moved to Detroit to take a job as a layout editor and political cartoonist for United Automobile Work, the weekly newspaper of the United Automobile Workers Union. Soon after arriving, he wrote and invited Sande to join him—hoping that with two solid incomes, they could afford to offer Stella a home. Despite the precariousness of his future on the Project and the hardships of New York, Sande rejected the offer. Jackson was his first responsibility. “Without giving the impression that I am trying to be a wet nurse to Jack,” he replied, “honestly I would be fearful of the results if he were left alone with no one to keep him in check.” Then, in a step back from the dire implications of his own words, he added, “There is no cause for alarm, he simply must be watched and guided intelligently.”

  In the wilderness of drinking binges, subterranean rivalries, ineffectual therapy, and arrested creativity, Becky Tarwater remained Jackson’s only oasis. “I always felt that I was with him at a time when he was so mixed up in his own life,” Becky remembers, “that he couldn’t find his way. He didn’t seem to know where he was. I think that’s why he was attracted to me.”

  When the time came for her to leave New York and return to Tennessee, she waited as long as possible to tell him. When she did, he asked for one last meeting to say good-bye. They met before lunch in the unlikely fluorescent glare of a White Castle restaurant not far from the Eighth Street apartment. He walked in carrying a single white gardenia and gave it to her. “It was so sweet,” she remembers. “That was the side of him that was so really wonderful.” Then, surrounded by white tile and the smell of hamburgers and onions, Jackson asked her to marry him. She paused for a minute before replying, thinking about the question without giving it serious consideration. It had no relevance to the relationship that had preceded it. “Our backgrounds, everything about us was so different,” she says. “I would have been the worst person in the world for him, and he for me, and I had the sense to know it. … I knew he was very troubled and I wasn’t that strong. I was too much of a coward. I couldn’t handle it.” She thought about Sande and Arloie. “They had a wonderful marriage and I thought he wanted to marry someone like [Arloie] who could provide something like that for him. … It would have been lovely if he could have had a life like Sande’s, with an adoring person like Arloie. That’s what he seemed to want, and I knew I wasn’t that person.” But instead of revealing her thoughts, she explained to him in the gentlest terms her plans for a career and how incompatible they were with marriage. If she did marry, she said, it would be to her childhood sweetheart from Rockwood, Mason Hicks. When she finished, she took the gardenia and walked away. Jackson never saw her again. “It was really poignant,” she recalls. “He seemed to understand how I felt about him and didn’t hate me for it.”

  Sitting with Becky in the White Castle, Jackson may have seemed understanding, but as soon as she was gone, he collapsed in despair. According to Manuel Tolegian, he “went berserk,” setting off on a drunken binge that lasted almost a week. Reuben Kadish remembers how Jackson would “sit in a corner and brood” over “the girl of his dreams who disappeared,” the pain made worse, no doubt, by the loneliness of an empty apartment—Sande and Arloie had moved to the country for the spring and summer. Never one to suffer in solitude, Jackson left to join them.

  Arloie, Musa Goldstein, Jay, Jackson, and Phil Goldstein in Bucks County

  This time, however, the green hills of Bucks County offered little solace. Except for Reuben Kadish, who visited occasionally, almost all of Jackson’s circle had broken up and reformed in twos. Sande had brought Arloie, Bernie Schardt had brought Nene, and
Phil Goldstein, who rented a house nearby, came by often to show off his beautiful young bride, Musa. To Jackson, their relentless coupling must have been a painful reminder of his own solitude. By mid-July, after a brief, uneasy stay, he left Bucks County to pursue the only fantasy that still held hope.

  The boat trip to Martha’s Vineyard was excruciatingly slow. If Jackson hadn’t been so despondent, or hadn’t come alone, the overnight steamer down the wide, dark corridor of Long Island Sound might have offered a brief moment of calm in a life skidding perilously close to chaos. The New Bedford Line’s night boat from New York was famous for its exuberant decor, luxurious accommodations, and sophisticated ambience, even in the more crowded steerage compartment, where passengers were segregated by sex. But Jackson was haunted by thoughts of Becky Tarwater, to whom he had just sent a furtive letter and, undoubtedly, by memories of the previous summer when he and Sande had escaped to the Vineyard together.

  Early the next morning, July 21, the boat arrived in New Bedford where Jackson transferred to a ferry bound for the Vineyard. Two and a half hours later, with the summer sun full up over the Atlantic, he stepped out on the long pier at Oak Bluffs. The town of gingerbread houses was already bustling with the activity of a holiday resort: children roller-skating on the boardwalk and riding the merry-go-round; couples strolling past the dance hall and sunbathing on the beach. In his desperation, Jackson had come for the first time unannounced and uninvited, so there was no one at the end of the pier to welcome him. Knowing that the Bentons had no phone, he called the general store in Chilmark and asked the clerk to carry a message to the Benton house, about a mile down the road. He addressed the message specifically to Rita, not Tom, asking her to pick him up at the Oak Bluffs boat landing.

  It was several hours before the clerk, who was alone in the store, found someone to relay the message up the hill. In the meantime, Jackson grew restless. While exploring the little Carpenter Gothic shops along Lake and Circuit avenues, he found a liquor store and bought a bottle of gin. He would later claim that it was intended as a present for Tom, but social niceties quickly yielded to private anxieties. “After a while,” Benton later reported, “he opened the bottle and took a swig—and he was off.” In Chilmark, Rita finally heard the news of Jackson’s arrival and rushed off in the family’s Stutz to fetch him. By the time she arrived at the boat landing, however, Jackson’s patience had long since run out. After calling the general store a second time, he had decided to get to Chilmark on his own. With the last of his money, he rented a bicycle and set out across the eighteen-mile-long island with drunken resolve. Before long, however, the gin started to “take hold.” When he saw a group of girls crossing the street ahead of him, “He promptly took out after them, yelling like a wild Indian,” according to Benton’s colorful retelling of the day’s events, “and chased them onto the sidewalk. After that, disregarding all remonstrances, he chased every girl he saw in the street.”

  This image of Jackson Pollock drunk on Martha’s Vineyard, his bag tied to the back of his bike and a bottle of gin in one hand, weaving down the quiet streets of Oak Bluffs, bellowing and scattering girls in front of him, became a regular source of amusement to Benton and later chroniclers. “When [Tom] heard what had happened,” writes Benton’s biographer, “[he] thought it was so funny, [he] almost wished he’d done it himself.” In fact, behind the picture of comic ineptitude and playful harassment that Benton painted was the reality of Jackson in a moment of genuine rage. The menace felt by the women who scrambled out of his path was real. It was the same menace that Pauline Pacifico had felt when Jackson grabbed her in the driveway on Montecito Drive, that Rose Miller had felt when he pawed her drunkenly, that Marie Pollock had felt when he threatened her with an ax, that the woman in the hallway had felt when he wrestled her into his room while Charles and Elizabeth looked on in disbelief.

  Eventually, Jackson lost his balance, fell from the bike, and gashed his face. The police, who had been summoned by one of his victims, arrested him for drunkenness and disturbing the peace. At the courthouse in Edgartown, he pled guilty to both charges. Unable to pay the ten dollar fine, he was led off to the empty county jail. That evening, the Edgartown sheriff called the Chilmark general store and told the clerk to inform the Bentons that Mr. Pollock had been arrested and would be spending the night in jail. The next morning, the entire Benton family, including eleven-year-old T. P., drove to Edgartown and brought Jackson home. After paying the fine, Benton dismissed the whole incident as “only a matter of fun.”

  Jackson spent the next three weeks suspended between Rita’s ambiguous affection, which had brought him to the island, and the despair that had followed him there. Alternately relaxed and moody, he spent most of the days with Rita: clamming in Nashaquitsa Pond, shopping in Menemsha, picking wild berries in the moors overlooking the sound. When not with her, he retreated into solitude, often walking the back route of cattle paths, past the scrub oaks and patches of wild strawberries, to view the Atlantic from the top of the Wesquobsque Cliffs. He painted a few small works, including a little oval picture of T. P.‘s sailboat that he gave to Tom’s visiting nephew, also named Thomas Hart.

  One day a letter arrived for Jackson at the little post office on Beetlebung Corner. Becky had written from Tennessee and, in even gentler terms, repeated all the things she had said that day at the White Castle, hoping, apparently, that further explanations might ease the pain. They had just the opposite effect. Soon after the letter arrived, he wandered onto a windy hillside and, with exquisite care, painted a tiny study of a wild tuberose—one of the thousands that grew in bouquets along the stone walls and in luxurious vines on the gray-shingled houses and barns.

  When, in mid-August, he returned to New York and an empty apartment—Sande and Arloie had left again for Bucks County—he carefully wrapped the little painting and sent it to Becky, along with a note:

  Darling Becky—

  You will excuse the stupid pencil. I received your letter at the Chilmark, with understanding I overstayed my vacation up there, I returned this week & I loved the island too well (life, flowers, and real love of the earth). It has been very depressing coming to this unnatural mass of human emotions, but am making all effort to settle myself to some good creative work.

  … About your plans, Becky, I am very glad you are doing what you want to do, and I feel you have showed much common sense by doing it. at this time I am going thru a tremendous emotional unrest. With the possibility that I will do better in the future. I realize very well now that I couldn’t have made a happy life for you. With the help of the broad Atlantic Ocean I have come to realize this too. [B]efore I forget—the passions of a tuberose—have you ever seen one—if not I send you [this] one. Becky I offer all my love, and happiness to your grand future. I hope you will drop me a line now and then, and when you are in town you will come to say hello …

  My fondest respect,

  Jackson

  In a postscript, he added: “I will do as you wish with the banjo—keep it love it send it etc. Jackson”.

  (Becky Tarwater never did claim her banjo. Only two months after receiving Jackson’s letter, she married Mason Hicks and returned to New York, where he started a practice. For the next twenty years, she followed Jackson’s career from a distance. She saw his picture in magazines and newspapers and thought, “Good for you, Jackson! Good for you!” But she never dropped him a line or came to say hello. Once, she saw an announcement for a Pollock exhibition. “I would love to go to that,” she remembers thinking. “I would have liked to see Jackson again, to walk up and say ‘Remember me?’” But she never did. “I had another life and it would have been foolish to go outside it. Once a relationship is over, it’s over.” According to Reuben Kadish, it was never over for Jackson. “If Becky had come up to him,” says Kadish, “he would have gone on a three-week drunk.”)

  By the time Sande and Arloie returned to the city in mid-September, Jackson’s binges had resumed with unprecedented
ferocity. According to Reuben Kadish, Jackson suddenly seemed intent on only one goal: “complete self-obliteration.” Neither Sande nor Kadish had thought it possible for Jackson’s mental state to sink any lower than it had the previous winter, but suddenly it seemed that he had finally slipped the last few notches into genuine madness. Six months of therapy had been undone in one frustrating summer. “He was going berserk every time he drank,” recalls Kadish, who often assumed Sande’s duties as “wet nurse.” “He was going berserk and doing awful things, getting himself in intolerable situations.” More and more often, his binges exploded in violence. Hardly a night went by that he wasn’t the cause of a fistfight, or the victim, or both. When he reappeared after a binge, his clothes would be “filthy and foul smelling,” as if he had slept in the gutter—which he often had. Many bars in the neighborhood refused to serve him, but he could never remember which ones because he could never remember what he had done, where he had done it, or when. As he ventured farther from the familiar hangouts, he became harder to retrieve at two or three in the morning. More and more often, strangers would find him passed out in the street. Most just walked by, taking him for a stray from the Bowery; some called the police. A few tried to help him home by searching for a phone number or address or by coaxing a name out of him. Some knew him already. “I was walking down Sixth Avenue with friends,” Nathan Katz recalls, “when I saw Jackson being thrown out of a bar—actually rolling out onto the street. I turned him over and said, ‘Jackson, what the hell are you doing? Get up! I’ll walk you around.’ And he said, ‘No. Leave me alone!’ With two big bouncers still standing in the doorway, he said, ‘The bastards just threw me out! I’m going back.’ I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ But no matter how much I pulled on him, he kept crawling back, dragging himself along the sidewalk back into this place they’d just thrown him out of.”