With no idea how to proceed—“I had never questioned people before,” he admits—Wilcox turned for help to the back pages of his favorite magazine, Astounding Science Fiction, where he had seen an announcement of a forthcoming book by one of the magazine’s frequent contributors, L. Ron Hubbard. The book, called Dianetics, promised “to reduce psychotherapy to a simple set of principles, which were corollaries to engineering principles.” For Wilcox, the engineer, the appeal was obvious. “There was no mysticism, no bullshit,” he recalls. “Just a few straightforward principles that anyone could apply.” Hypnosis (Hubbard called it “reverie”) was a key part of the therapy. Through hypnosis, one could delve into the past and discover critical, long-suppressed, and often painful events that prevented the full realization of the self. Only by dragging those events into the light of consciousness and overcoming them, only by discovering “what caused those dark and unknown fears which came in nightmares as a child” could a person make true progress toward self-knowledge and ultimate enlightenment.
Wilcox had successfully tried Hubbard’s methods on other friends before, but only as a kind of parlor game. With Jackson, he was deadly earnest. “I would pose a mental problem,” Wilcox remembers, “then tell him to count backwards from one hundred. That required some concentration and focused his attention on the problem. Then I would say, in a soft voice, ‘When you reach such and such a number, you will be asleep, and you will sleep very calmly and very soundly, but you will still be able to hear my voice.’” Jackson resisted at first—“the first time we did it, he told me he wasn’t really in a trance,” Wilcox recalls. Gradually, however, as Jackson relaxed, the trances grew deeper and longer, and the memories that surfaced during them reached further and further into his past. He recalled the bullies in high school who had taunted him for his long hair and his refusal to play football. “He said it hurt when they called him a coward,” Wilcox remembers. “If he had been small, like his brothers, they wouldn’t have expected him to turn out a big macho man. But he was the biggest one in the family. He had to become what he was told to be, big and tough.”
At each revelation, Wilcox took Jackson back another step. “You’re seven years old now,” he would say, “what does it feel like?”
“I was always walking along, looking at this and looking at that,” Jackson said. “But the other guys thought that was sissy.”
Year by year, each one more traumatic than the last, Wilcox guided Jackson back through his turbulent childhood. “He had a lot of traumatic experiences when he was a child,” Wilcox concluded early in their sessions, “and he never got over them. He was scared to death, he was afraid of people—particularly afraid of men—and the only way he could escape from that fear was to drink.”
The last and earliest memory Wilcox uncovered was by far the most traumatic. It was Jackson’s memory of riding in his mother’s wagon.
I said, “You’re five now, Jackson. What do you remember?” And he told me about riding in his mother’s wagon on the way into town to sell vegetables in Arizona. They were going along the road and there was a bull in the field, rushing toward the wagon, and a man on horseback coming at an angle, trying to intercept the bull. Jackson saw the bull coming, but there was nothing he could do about it. When the bull got close, the horse reared up and the wagon turned over and Jackson and his mother were thrown clear. He looked up and saw his mother lying there on the ground. At that moment, the man came up and got off his horse, picked Jackson up by his shirt with one hand and slapped him with the other, and said, “Why were you lying there crying? Boys aren’t supposed to cry.” He repeated that story several times under hypnosis. It had stuck in his mind forever, and as he was telling it to me, he started to really relive it. He was so terrified he actually started crying with me, big tears. I promised him that as long as he lived, I would never tell anybody this story because he didn’t want anyone to know.
The long, cathartic sessions with Wilcox undoubtedly appeased Jackson’s demons, but by spring 1949, his store of traumatic memories had been exhausted and neither man had any interest in the remainder of Hubbard’s glib self-help philosophy. “Neither of us really believed in it,” Wilcox recalls, “so Jackson said, ‘Let’s just forget that shit.’” In its place, Wilcox proposed a methodology even more suited to his pragmatic bent. He referred to it simply as “keeping Jackson occupied.” “I said, ‘Jackson, whenever something is bothering you and you really feel like going on a bender, just come and see me.’”
Throughout the spring and summer, Jackson took advantage of Wilcox’s offer. Several times a week at least, sometimes once a day, he walked or drove the two and a half miles to the Wilcox house, where Lucia greeted him with lavish hospitality and Wilcox dropped whatever he was doing. From there the two men would head into the woods or to the beach, walking absently and talking. “We went exploring all the beaches from here to Montauk Point, all the remote beaches,” Wilcox remembers. “He didn’t like to be around people when he was in that kind of mood.” Each time, they wandered farther and farther down the shore, past the bluffs at Barnes Landing, past the noisome, weather-bleached fish factories that rimmed the “Promised Land” basin, and out onto the spit of heavy sand that had once been open sea but now connected Long Island to the former island of Montauk. They spent weeks on the east side of Napeague Harbor, meandering through the “walking” dunes and the saltwater marshes of spartina grass and blossoming wildflowers. But Jackson’s favorite spot was farther still, where the shore turned in and the bluffs of Montauk began to rise from the sea and the beach turned rocky. “Where the rocks were,” Wilcox remembers, “that’s where we used to go any time he wanted to get calmed down.”
Jackson’s “beach” sculptures, c. 1949
A trip could last the whole day. Lucia packed a picnic lunch, and the two men would sit on the beach till close to sundown. Wilcox did most of the talking, regaling Jackson with stories about his eerily similar childhood of paternal strife and high school rebellion. Jackson listened and played with beach rocks, making small sculptures in the sand. “Many times, we would carry a cooler with four or five beers all the way down to this beach that he liked,” Wilcox recalls, “but we wouldn’t drink them. We’d have our lunch and talk, and then we’d come all the way back, still carrying this damn cooler.” After the third round trip, Wilcox packed orange juice instead of beer. “Aren’t you going to take any beers?” Jackson asked as they set out. “Hell, no,” said Wilcox. “Every time I do, we bring them all back, so what the hell’s the point?” To Wilcox’s astonishment, Jackson agreed. “You’re right,” he said, “we can do without it.”
The long afternoons with Wilcox allowed Jackson to “do without it” for the first time in his life. On trips into the city or in the evenings when Roger was unavailable, tranquilizers filled the gaps. Lee, who distrusted Wilcox, clung to a mystical faith in doctors and pushed the pills on Jackson at every opportunity. “She would hold them out to him and say, ‘Take these and everything will be all right,’” Wilcox remembers. ”’[Heller] is a great doctor, he’ll take care of you.’” But it was largely Wilcox’s brotherly support, unqualified and uncorrupting, that for almost two years kept Jackson from being overwhelmed by the onrushing tide of celebrity.
The summer of 1949 began slowly, deceptively slowly, with the usual visits from Stella and Clement Greenberg. There had been nothing new in Greenberg’s effusive praise of the January show—except perhaps the overtly self-congratulatory tone. The big white painting, Number 1, he wrote, “quieted any doubts this reviewer may have felt—and he does not in all honesty remember having felt many—as to the justness of the superlatives with which he had praised Pollock’s art in the past.” What was new was the degree to which other reviewers were beginning to echo Greenberg’s formalist rhetoric. “Of the Hieroglyphics School, this is an exciting display,” wrote Margaret Lowengrund in Art Digest. “It seems to strive to eliminate spatial form in favor of line and surface interest alone.” Willem
de Kooning’s wife, Elaine, reviewing the show for Art News, showed her Greenbergian colors by admiring how “planes separate from the original flat surface of the canvas are not suggested.”
The “popular” press was proving more resistant to Greenberg’s ideas. In the World-Telegram, Emily Genauer reacted with exasperation. “Most of Jackson Pollock’s paintings at the Betty Parsons Gallery resemble nothing so much as a mop of tangled hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out.” She even complimented several paintings because “their less ‘accidental’ development and their spatial depth suggest how good a painter Pollock could really be.” In the Times, Sam Hunter complained about “the disintegration of the modern painting” and “a disappointing absence of resolution in an image or pictorial incident”—complaints that Greenberg would have considered compliments. But even skeptics like Hunter admitted that the paintings had an impact. “What does emerge is the large scale of Pollock’s operations, his highly personal rhythm and finally something like pure calligraphic metaphor for a ravaging, aggressive virility.”
A short review in the February 7, 1949, issue of Time opened with a broad swipe: “A Jackson Pollock painting is apt to resemble a child’s contour map of the Battle of Gettysburg.” As proof, the editors included an impenetrable black-and-white reproduction of Number 11, 1948. “Nevertheless,” the review continued, “he is the darling of a highbrow cult which considers him ‘the most powerful painter in America.’” Unwilling, or unable, to dignify the show with its own review, Time took advantage of the opportunity to lambast avant-garde critics as well as avant-garde artists by quoting, at length, Sam Hunter’s equally impenetrable review in the Times, pulling out a particularly abstruse phrase, “cathartic disintegration,” to caption the painting.
Stella’s visit in late March—her first since the birth of grandson Jay—coincided with spring planting. “[Jack and Lee] were getting ready to put in a garden,” she reported to Charles, “they have good soil Lee loves to dig in the dirt and she has green fingers.” During her stay, Stella took special pleasure in meeting Jackson’s cultured friends, like Clement Greenberg. “Whenever I started to say anything about art or culture,” Greenberg remembers, “Stella would tell everyone in the room to shush.” To Stella’s delight, Jackson was still on the wagon, although he had to drink “tons of coffee” to counter the effects of Heller’s tranquilizers. By her report, Jackson and Lee seemed prepared for the onslaught of summer. “So nice to be there and see them so happy and no drinking,” she wrote. “He can serve liquor to others. He feels so much better says so.”
By late May, the house on Fireplace Road was filled every weekend with people from Lee’s growing list of artists, critics, museum directors, dealers, and collectors who had been—or might prove to be—helpful to Jackson’s career. Among the first of the guests was a wealthy young Philippino collector and artist, Alfonso Ossorio, who came with his companion, Ted Dragon. Ossorio, who also showed at Betty Parsons, had bought Number 5, 1948 from the January show but postponed delivery until he moved into his new house at 9 MacDougal Alley in April. When the painting was badly damaged in delivery, Jackson agreed to do the necessary “repair” work if Ossorio would return the painting to his studio. The following month, Ossorio and Dragon drove to Springs with the painting and stayed the night at the Pollock house. Dragon, a twenty-seven-year-old ballet dancer whom Ossorio had met the previous year, thought the town looked like his native New England and “fell in love with it instantly.” A month later, when they returned to pick up the repaired canvas and look for a house to rent, they were surprised to find that Jackson had radically altered the painting with a layer of red paint.
After moving into the large Hellmuth house on Jericho Lane, Ossorio and Dragon continued to see the Pollocks “two or three times a week,” often bringing big boxes of food and other gifts, mistaking the Pollocks’ Spartan country life-style for genuine poverty. Lee accepted such handouts gratefully and even encouraged the impression—no longer accurate—that she and Jackson were living on the financial edge. Ossorio was also welcome in Jackson’s studio, where his admiration for artists and his patrician bearing combined in a ritual of flattery. “When Alfonso came to look at your paintings,” recalls another artist’s wife, “he did it with such grace and style. Instead of coming in like a shopper and just looking for something to buy, he made you feel like he was a patron who considered it a privilege to acquire one of your paintings.” Jackson expressed his gratitude by taking the newcomers exploring along the beaches and, occasionally, spending an evening at the Hellmuth house. Shy and tranquilized, he made a poor guest. “He would say maybe three words all evening,” Ted Dragon remembers. “He would sit there like a mummy the whole time.” More enjoyable were the weekly trips, Ossorio’s treat, to the movie house in East Hampton, where Jackson “loved the westerns and science fiction,” Dragon recalls.
Ossorio and Dragon were merely the first in a long line of collectors who made it a point to visit “the darling of a highbrow cult” that summer. The guest list included established local lights like Valentine and Happy Macy and Roseanne Larkin, the sponsors of avant-garde art at Guild Hall, as well as newcomers like Jeffrey and Penny Potter. Potter, the aloof and aristocratic scion of a blue-blooded family, was looking to quit his job as a Broadway stage manager and move to East Hampton to get back in touch with nature, and to write. Around the beginning of the new year, while maneuvering to buy the Stony Hill Farm in Amagansett from the recalcitrant widow Hamlin, he had met Jackson cruising the farm’s back roads in his Model A and was intrigued. “His mouth was half open,” he later wrote, “his long heavy forearms hung from a soiled T-shirt, and his glassy look straight ahead was for something far from the Stony Hill Farm woods.” To Potter, Jackson embodied the elusive blend of artistic sensibility and hands-on, masculine efficacy (he could fix a car and wield a hammer) that Potter himself, the would-be writer-engineer, aspired to. By summer, intrigue had turned to infatuation. Potter began making notes of his encounters with Jackson, recording every “wry half-smile” and every awkward silence for use in a planned novel to be called The Outsider, and then, when he abandoned the novel, in an oral biography that would chronicle the two men’s “personality equivalents.” To Jackson, Potter’s Lincoln convertible, patrician bearing, and beautiful wife bespoke only one thing, money, and he spent the rest of the summer cultivating Potter’s breathless attentions in the hope of a sale.
Reginald Isaacs, then a professor of city and regional planning at Harvard, was visiting in East Hampton when friends brought him to the Pollocks’ house for a clamming expedition into Accabonac Harbor. Isaacs thought Jackson was just “a hired hand or some local fisherman just hanging around.” It wasn’t until afterward, sitting in the kitchen, that he caught a glimpse of Jackson’s paintings in the dining room and exclaimed, “My God! “Who made those?” For both men, it was a serendipitous encounter. Isaacs, who was equally taken with Jackson and with his art, bought a painting that very afternoon—the first of three—and went home touting Pollock as “the greatest painter of the century.”
Not every visitor was so enthusiastic. “When Clement Greenberg brought Peter and Chloe Scott, an eager young couple, and Robert Motherwell to a daytime gathering with several other couples, Jackson reluctantly agreed to lead the crowd through his studio. After an awkward silence and a few perfunctory “They’re terrifics,” Chloe Scott was heard to mutter ambiguously, “Oh dear, it’s just too much to absorb in one afternoon.”
That was rousing praise compared to the indignant comments that ricocheted through Guild Hall when three of Jackson’s paintings appeared there in July. The event was “17 Eastern Long Island Artists,” a show of local artists’ work organized by John Little and sponsored, against bitter resistance from “the Maidstone Club Irregulars,” by Roseanne Larkin and Enez “Whipple, the director. “That was a breakthrough show, and a near breakdown of Guild Hall,” said Gina Knee. The show included works by James Brooks, Alexander Brook, Jo
hn Little, Wilfrid Zogbaum, Balcomb Greene, the Soyer brothers, Julien Levy, Ibram Lassaw, and Lee, but Jackson and his “incomprehensible drippings” were the center of attention. ““White-gloved hostesses pouring tea and serving punch” recoiled at the sight of Jackson’s paintings, embedded with cigarette butts and other debris. Compared to Guild Hall’s usual fare of watercolors, seascapes, and still lifes, the show seemed a “horror chamber” and the artists in it, “barbarians and radicals.” (One patron ran to the rest room to wash after shaking hands with an artist.) Jackson hardly looked like a barbarian or a radical, standing in front of his paintings in a tweed coat, tie, and polished loafers, looking thinner than he had in years. Few people dared approach him. Most stood at a safe distance and pointed surreptitiously, whispering, “That’s him. He’s the one.” But Jackson seemed imperturbable, standing for hours in a cigarette fog, studying the floor in an effort to avoid the curious and often angry stares of regular patrons like Mrs. Harry Hamlin who, upon seeing one of his paintings, huffed that artists like that must live in trees. The most venomous comments came from the more traditional local artists for whom Guild Hall had long been a closed shop. They accused Jackson of being a fraud or, worse, a jokester—charges that sparked more than one fistfight during the show’s three-week run. Jackson had the last laugh, however. By the time the show was over, all three of his paintings had sold.
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