Next to the testimony of those closest to him, the most persuasive proof of Jackson’s homosexual involvement is the explosion of self-hatred that accompanied it. During the late winter and early spring of 1944, he reached an apogee of drinking and self-abuse unseen since the months preceding Bloomingdale’s. John Little remembers him picking a fight with a prizefighter in the Cedar Bay—“the guy turned around and grabbed Jackson, and said, ‘Would you like me to flatten your nose?’ “—then heading off down the street stopping at every bar. By two or three in the morning, he would be weaving and bellowing in the empty streets: “I’m gonna fuck you all, I’m gonna fuck the world.” “Fucking” became an obsession. “One thing he loved to do,” recalls Steve Wheeler, “was to take me around and knock on doors at night. These were women he knew. And he’d say, ‘I’m gonna get fucked tonight, Steve.’ And I’d say, ‘Go ahead, help yourself.’ So we would go through the Village and as soon as they’d hear Jack’s voice, and hear how drunk he was, they’d turn the lights out. … I think he was trying to prove to me that he could go out and get laid. But he never did. He’d wind up stewing in his beer at a bar somewhere.”
Usually at George’s Tavern. More and more often, Jackson’s nocturnal rampages ended in the gay company where they began. One night, Rita Benton’s niece, Maria Piacenza, found him at George’s and, at Jackson’s request, invited him back to her apartment to see her paintings. Once there, Jackson immediately found a bottle of whiskey and “practically swallowed that thing down within minutes,” Piacenza remembers, “and began reeling and rocking around the apartment.” Eventually, she managed to steer him out to a restaurant “to get some coffee or food into him.” But that, too, was a mistake. “As soon as we got inside, he began to literally break up the joint. He really tore that place apart before they grabbed him and me and threw us the hell out. It was so embarrassing.” On the sidewalk, several men came out of the shadows and gathered around Jackson. “I didn’t know what they were up to, but they acted like they knew him,” says Piacenza. Angry, humiliated, and certain that if she called the police, they would take Jackson to Bellevue, Piacenza walked away. “I just left the son of a bitch there,” she says. “That’s all. He had nothing to steal. And they didn’t look like they intended to rob him. They hung around him waiting for me to leave. What they did afterward I don’t know.”
Jackson’s forays into the gay demimonde, like the sexual fiasco with Peggy, betrayed his deteriorating relationship with Lee. The previous fall, on the recommendation of her friend Sarah Johns, Lee had begun regular visits to a homeopathic doctor named Elizabeth Wright Hubbard for treatment of persistent stomach pain. Part dietician and part psychoanalyst, Hubbard believed in the interrelatedness of emotional and physical health and often prescribed behavioral cures for physical ailments. It may have been at Hubbard’s urging that, soon after Jackson’s November show, Lee began to assert her independence. Almost single-handedly, she persuaded Peggy to mount a show in March for Hans Hofmann. Even with Putzel’s support, it was a hard fight. “Peggy was reluctant about Hans,” Lillian Olaney remembers. “As far as the Surrealists were concerned, Hofmann could drop dead. But Lee really took up arms for him.” Afterward, Peggy regretted her decision—“she was convinced [Hofmann] gave the gallery a bad image,” Lee said—but for Lee the show was an encouraging success.
Jackson apparently accepted this temporary diversion of Lee’s attentions. According to one account, he even helped persuade Peggy to mount the Hofmann show and subsequently accepted a share of the “blame.” But, as always, he found a way to make his objections known. When Putzel and Betsy Zogbaum came by the Eighth Street apartment to take him to the opening of Hofmann’s show, Jackson insisted on first going across the street to buy some supplies. He returned a few minutes later, stumbling drunk and covered with paint. “In that short time, he had gotten drunk,” recalls Zogbaum, “and the tubes of paint he bought had squeezed out all over his one good suit. It was a ghastly sight.”
Sometime in early 1944, Lee brought her easel back from Reuben Kadish’s studio on Twelfth Street, where she had taken it temporarily when Jackson tore out the wall of her studio to make room for the giant mural, and set it up in Jackson’s old bedroom. There, for the first time in two years, she started a fresh canvas. Much had changed in those years. Jackson had shown her a new way to paint and, as when Igor Pantuhoff came home from the Hofmann school, she was determined to try it herself. “I gave up the model and still life,” she recounted. “I began with a blank canvas and nothing in front of me.” Rejecting Hofmann and “the Cubist grid,” she tried, like Pollock, to paint “from the inside out.” “It was only after Pollock made some impression that [Lee] began to reorient herself,” recalls Steve Wheeler, another Hofmann student. “Instead of trying to make the perfect picture that Hofmann always talked about, she started doing what Pollock was doing—a little freehand drawing, a little smearing around.” When Lee reached inside, however, she came up empty-handed. Paint accumulated on the canvas—sometimes an inch thick—but the images refused to coalesce. “I was putting masses of paint on canvas and nothing would happen,” she recalls, “just tons of paint going nowhere.” She called it “sitting on the easel,” and later admitted, “It was all very frustrating.”
If Jackson never told Lee, “I don’t want you to paint” (as Lee later claimed), it was because he never had to. Two years before, they seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement: he would profess respect for her as an artist—“a good woman painter,” he often called her—and she, in return, would abandon her artistic ambitions. Despite Lee’s protest that “I didn’t hide my paintings in a closet; they hung on the wall next to his,” no one remembers seeing them there and a few visitors recall specifically that her work was “nowhere in evidence.” “Whoever came into that house came to see Jack’s work,” Reuben Kadish recalls, “not Lee’s.” Her return to the easel, frustrating and unproductive though it was, disrupted the delicate balance of egos. “It upset Jackson,” Betsy Zogbaum remembers. “He was always basically insecure, and when Lee started painting again you could see that it ate at him.”
In early June, Tom Benton came through New York on his way to Martha’s Vineyard. “The bell rang one day and I stuck my head out, looked down, and saw this foreshortened face of Benton looking up at me,” Lee recounted. Jackson ran down the five flights and greeted his former teacher, whom he hadn’t seen in two or three years, “effusively.” Almost immediately, at Jackson’s prompting, Benton asked to see Lee’s paintings, a prospect that horrified Lee. “I knew what was in my studio,” she recalled ruefully. “Jackson also knew … this is during the point at which my canvases were building up into gray masses and no image came through. It [was] not a good state of affairs.” Nevertheless, she led Benton to her studio and gamely showed him one of her “gray slabs.” “I stood in front of the canvas and from Benton there was no word,” Lee recalled. “The silence was brazen.” He stood there looking “a little awkward, a little embarrassed,” until finally, Jackson, having made his point, suggested that they get a beer.
Lee did her best to explain away the incident—“I was having a rough time and I didn’t care who knew it”—but Jackson’s hostility was impossible to ignore. Soon afterward, while Lee was out of her studio, Jackson took a brush and reworked one of her unfinished canvases. Years before, she had tested him in the same way, touching a brush to his canvas to probe the boundary between love and integrity. Now it was her turn to be tested. When she returned and saw the painting, she exploded in “total rage,” slashed the offending canvas and refused to speak to Jackson for days. Referring to the long chill in their relationship that followed, she later said, “at that time I didn’t really love people or things.”
The incident only brought to the surface resentments that had been brewing for two years. At that stage, “they were so competitive that they couldn’t even work in the same house together,” recalls Reuben Kadish, who shortly thereafter welcomed Lee back t
o the vacant room next to his studio. “He couldn’t stand having her around while he was working. She couldn’t stand being around him. It was suddenly like a male-eat-female thing, that kind of antagonism. She was being digested into oblivion by his presence.”
Just when a showdown seemed inevitable, Jackson and Lee decided to take a vacation. In mid-June, they sublet the Eighth Street studio to Bernard Steffen and left for Provincetown, Massachusetts. It wasn’t the first time—or the last—that they tried to solve a problem with a change of scenery.
But scenery was the only thing that changed. The isolation and exposure of a Cape Cod summer acted like a magnifying lens, focusing the anxiety and resentment of the previous winter to an incendiary point. Even the long drive up the coast turned out to be an ordeal. Lee had pointedly arranged for them to ride with her old boyfriend Igor Pantuhoff in his eye-catching, yellow-and-chrome Lincoln. Never comfortable around the glib White Russian, by the end of the all-night trip Jackson was bristling with jealousy. For a few days, the threesome enjoyed the panoramic view of Provincetown Bay from Hans Hofmann’s house on Miller Hill where John Little and Ward Bennett had rented a room. To Jackson, Hofmann was yet another reminder of Lee’s former life—and of her painting—whose mere presence could set him to sulking. On the day of their arrival, Jackson was forced to accompany Little and Lee into Hofmann’s studio where Sam Kootz, who had just signed up Hofmann for his new gallery, was choosing the paintings for Hofmann’s first show. Because of Lee’s role in arranging the show at Art of This Century, both Little and Kootz deferred to her eye in making selections. According to Little, Jackson watched the proceedings in “seething” silence.
Jackson retaliated by taking an inordinate interest in the charcoal drawings being done by Ward Bennett. “I was just a student,” Bennett recalls, “but he used to come over and see what I was doing all the time.” The two men often walked the beach together. At one point, to Lee’s chagrin, they even collaborated on a painting. “It was a piece of canvas that we found on the beach,” says Bennett. “We just put some paint on it. It was just a lark.” Lark or not, Lee was livid. She had not traveled three hundred miles to see Jackson spirited away by someone else, male or female. She made that point clear to Maria Piacenza, who was also visiting the Cape that summer. When Jackson saw her on the street, he rushed toward her “with great enthusiasm,” Piacenza remembers. “Why don’t you come over to the studio and have a drink with us?” he started to say before Lee interrupted. “Jackson, we have an appointment this afternoon.” “Well, how about coming over tomorrow?” he pressed. “Tomorrow, we are going to the gallery,” Lee countered. “She just fixed it,” Piacenza recalls. “It was clear by the third invitation that she wasn’t about to let this happen, so I said, ‘Well, Jackson, I’ll see you around,’ and I walked away and didn’t see him the rest of the summer.” A few days later, Jackson introduced Lee to Nene and Bernie Schardt. The meeting was cordial enough—the two couples even took pictures of each other—but it was clear to Nene Schardt, too, that “Lee didn’t think we were good enough for her,” and the foursome never got together again.
The guest arrangements at Hofmann’s house soon became unworkable, and, less than a week after arriving, Lee and Jackson agreed to move. It would be about the only thing they agreed on that summer. The new place was closer to the center of town—a small apartment on the second floor of an old boat house on Bradford Street, known as the “back road” of Provincetown because its houses were cut off from the town’s magnificent harbor view. From their narrow, one-room aerie, Jackson and Lee could see “only a sliver of blue between some of the houses if they craned their necks,” according to a neighbor. Otherwise, the house was a charming picturesque Cape Cod original, clad in mist-gray, rain-streaked shingles, and only a few minutes’ walk from the beach.
For a few days, Lee was hopeful. They went every day to swim and sunbathe at New Beach where Lee tanned while Jackson burned. “I’ve taken a crew cut and look a little like a peeled turnip—or beet,” he wrote Sande. In the late afternoons, they could watch the brightly painted boats of the Portuguese fishermen coming in from the “back side”—the local waters just offshore—and the “trippers” returning low in the water from their weeklong venture to the teeming deep waters of Stilwagen and Georges banks, their mid-decks heaped with a silver booty of haddock and cod. Or they could idle down Commercial Street, the town’s main street, where, to Jackson’s mortification, he was almost the only civilian male of military age. The lights no longer blinked out at sundown as they had at the height of the U-boat scare when Max Ernst was expelled from the town because jumpy officials feared he would signal submarines from his seaside windows. But gasoline allowances were still tight and cars were a rare sight. There was, as always, plenty of salt air, sunshine, and fresh fish, which the fishermen supplied free to local artists “to bring good luck.” “Provincetown looks much better to me now,” Jackson wrote Stella and Sande.
The summer idyll was soon shattered, however, by the arrival of two unexpected guests. The first was Howard Putzel, looking fluorescent pale, urban, and out of place among the leather-skinned locals. He had come to announce that he was quitting Art of This Century and establishing a gallery of his own. He was fed up with being Peggy’s “sandwich boy.” He also reported that Peggy was planning to close her gallery after the next season and give her collection to the San Francisco Museum. Still bound to Peggy by contract, Jackson was dazed by the news. Putzel had been his chief champion and protector in the face of his boss’s fickle pleasure. Now it appeared that Putzel would abandon him to Peggy, and, soon afterward, Peggy would abandon him to the unknown. Rumors about Peggy’s return to Europe, encouraged by Robert Motherwell, who was anxious to take other artists with him to a rival dealer, had been circulating almost since her arrival, but as of 1944, no date had been set and no disposition of the collection had been decided on. In this regard, Putzel’s report seems to have been the product of anxiety and wishful thinking rather than inside information. Nevertheless, Jackson received it as gospel. “Howard has quit the gallery,” he wrote Sande the day after Putzel’s arrival, “which I’m sorry to hear about. Peggy plans to close the gallery after next winter.”
But the news about Peggy couldn’t have been as painful as what followed: Putzel invited Lee to join his new gallery. In the midst of his renewed anxieties about the future, it was a devastating blow to Jackson and he struck back in the only way he knew how.
One obvious target was Hans Hofmann. Not only had Lee arranged his show at Art of This Century, she had shepherded him into the contract with Sam Kootz—a favor that seemed all the more galling to Jackson in light of Peggy’s imminent departure. Even worse, Lee had set up her summer studio in Hofmann’s house—another sign of independence that must have rankled. Socially, Jackson and Hofmann had always been “like sandpaper against one another,” according to George Mercer, and their first social contact of the summer had done nothing to improve relations. In one famous exchange, Jackson tried to draw Hofmann into an argument about art. “Jackson was trying to get across to [him] his concept of the image,” recalls Fritz Bultman, who was also in Provincetown that summer. “He said that if you painted out of yourself, you created an image larger than a landscape.” According to Lee, Hofmann responded by suggesting that Jackson “work from nature,” as Hofmann usually did, especially in Provincetown where he found the beach and sea great sources of inspiration. “I am nature,” Jackson responded defiantly, throwing a rare morsel of profundity to generations of writers and critics. Most versions of the exchange end with Pollock’s Cartesian pronouncement, but, in fact, Hofmann had the last word: “Ah, but if you work from inside you will repeat yourself.” Jackson, realizing perhaps how salient and prophetic a riposte it was, fell glumly silent.
Bested in verbal sparring, Jackson resorted to more familiar weapons. At a gathering at Hofmann’s studio early in July, drunk and determined, he clambered up to the balcony where Hofmann painted and
often slept. When Hofmann and one of his students, Fred Hauck, reluctantly pursued him up the stairs, Jackson grabbed the easel and hurled it down at them. Fortunately, his aim was off and the easel flew past. Hofmann was too startled to say anything but Miz Hofmann was furious. She instantly banished Jackson from the house, and neither Jackson nor Lee saw the Hofmanns again that summer.
The other unexpected guest that summer was Tennessee Williams. According to one story, he “dropped in” on Jackson and Lee and stayed, “living out of a suitcase,” for several weeks before renting a room over the garage of Karl Knaths, the American Cubist painter. “He was always a freeloader,” says John Myers, relating the story told him by Lee, “and he freeloaded on them until they couldn’t stand it anymore.” What Lee couldn’t stand, however, wasn’t the dozens of meals that Williams cadged, or the daily visits when he biked over on breaks from writing The Glass Menagerie, or even his cavorting with Jackson on the beach—“he used to carry me out into the water on his shoulders,” Williams wrote in his memoirs, “and to sport about innocently.” What really made Lee frantic with worry were the times, increasingly frequent, when Jackson and Williams would disappear together into the Cape’s cool, foggy nights.
Tennessee Williams, Santa Monica, 1943
As Lee feared, Jackson was being drawn back into the gay demimonde they had left New York to escape. The temptation came not directly from Williams—he called Jackson “just a little bit heavier from beer-drinking than was attractive to me”—but from the group of six or eight men who met every night at Julian Beck’s studio on Captain Jack’s Wharf just off Commercial Street near the center of town. A nineteen-year-old student at Yale University, Beck had been an aspiring painter until a year before when he met Judith Malina, his future wife. Malina had turned Beck’s head to the theater and converted one corner of his dilapidated studio into a makeshift stage. (Three years later, the two would found the influential Living Theater.) “They were always putting on little theatricals,” Ward Bennett remembers. “They were open to anybody who wanted to come in. It was very Parisian.” But there were other activities going on in Beck’s studio designed for a more select audience. The balcony was the designated place for sex, mostly male-to-male, although a female occasionally wandered in, and voyeurs were always welcome. “The whole place was quite homosexual,” Bennett recalls. The regulars on Captain Jack’s Wharf that season were Beck, Williams, a young Harvard Law School student named Bill Cannastra, and, by midsummer, Jackson Pollock. Around them floated an ad hoc “lunatic fringe,” which Williams described as “a collection [that] could not be found outside of Bellevue or the old English Bedlam.”
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