Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Buoyed by Southgate’s empathy and encouragement, Lee returned to her studio and began to work consistently for the first time in years. Since the illfated show at Betty Parsons in 1951, she had barely touched a brush, fearing perhaps that, as in the past, Jackson would retaliate with a weeklong binge. Drawing was apparently safe, however, and during the long hours of waiting for him to return, she would draw on paper with brush and black ink, following the example of Jackson’s black-and-white paintings. In 1953, soon after meeting Southgate, she began a series of collages, tearing her drawings into shreds and rearranging the pieces on canvas or Masonite to create intricate, black-and-white mosaics. Small, workmanlike, and self-effacing, the new works fell far short of the broad, gestural abstractions she had created in 1950 and 1951, but at least she was working again. Over the winter, the collages grew in size and complexity. She introduced patches of color, brushwork applied over the collage elements, scraps of canvas, and even, in some of the larger vertical works, an insinuation of landscape. By the spring of 1954, when she exhibited in an all-women-artists show in Amagansett, she had cautiously reasserted herself as an artist, creating works that seemed to reflect her determination to reassemble the fragments of her past in a new, more satisfactory way, no matter how painstaking or jigsaw-like the solution.

  On the eve of summer 1954, Southgate helped Lee arrange a solo exhibition of her new work at the House of Books and Music, an East Hampton bookstore-gallery where Southgate worked. With memories of the debacle at Bertha Schaefer’s apartment undoubtedly in her mind, Lee began final preparations for the June show.

  One morning in mid-June, Jackson drove to Bridgehampton and found the red house nearly deserted. De Kooning, Kline, and Sander had gone to East Hampton to help Carol and Donald Braider, the owners of the House of Books and Music, settle in. Already “two sheets to the wind,” Jackson helped himself to two or three more beers, then offered to carry boxes of books to the basement where the Braiders were storing them. Sensing trouble, Elaine de Kooning called her husband in East Hampton. When de Kooning and Kline arrived, “they threw their arms around Jackson,” Elaine later recalled, “and began to horse around.” Locking each other in a rigid embrace, Jackson and de Kooning staggered blindly around the yard until they stepped into the path that led from the back door to the garage and the outhouse. Worn down by years of use, the path had become a virtual “trench,” recalls Philip Pavia, who was standing nearby, and it caught Jackson by surprise. He stumbled and fell heavily to the ground. De Kooning fell on top of him. Under their combined weight, Jackson’s ankle snapped.

  Kline and Pavia rushed to help as Jackson writhed inconsolably on the ground. “He was in terrible pain,” recalls Pavia, “Jesus! Terrible pain.” He was also “absolutely indignant,” according to Elaine de Kooning. “He said, ‘I’ve never broken a bone.’ He felt it was insulting; his myth of invulnerability was shattered.” With Jackson cursing and sputtering at every step, they loaded him into the Braiders’ station wagon and rushed him to the East Hampton Clinic.

  No one dared to face Lee. The accident only seemed to confirm what she had been saying for months, that the “New York gangsters” were out to kill her husband. Instead of taking Jackson home, they took him, in full cast and crutches, to Conrad Marca-Relli’s place next door. “We were afraid to bring him to Lee,” recalls Pavia. When the news finally reached her, Lee stormed the little house in a biblical rage, hurling accusations—they were “trying to beat him up”—and threatening to call the police. Only de Kooning had the courage to speak up. “[Jackson’s] a big boy,” he said. “If he wants to take some beer from the refrigerator, I’m not going to stop him.”

  By that afternoon, everyone in the art world had heard the news: de Kooning had broken Jackson’s leg. The war had dragged on for a year and a half and now, at last, a palpable hit.

  Jackson missed the opening of Lee’s show. Confined to the upstairs bedroom for the rest of June and most of July, he languished in idleness and despondency, alternately feeling sorry for himself and lashing out at Lee. Unable to move around, he gained weight and grew a beard. Letters of sympathy from friends like James Johnson Sweeney and Reginald Isaacs failed to cheer him. Tony Smith, ever optimistic, wrote to suggest that Jackson market his paintings in Germany. “[There are] a great number of German millionaires right now,” he effused, “and I think a showing might even lead to some sales.” An offer of a teaching position at New York State College for Teachers not only failed to raise Jackson’s spirits but probably triggered an outburst against artists who taught, a favorite target.

  For all the expressions of sympathy, however, there were remarkably few visitors. Even Stella, despite the convenience of a ferry from Saybrook, Connecticut, directly to nearby Three Mile Harbor, failed to make an appearance. Sande came once, in early July, but returned home the next day. That left Lee alone most of the time to deal with Jackson’s anger and self-pity. She tried encouraging him to draw to pass the time. Marca-Relli remembers her pep talks: “She’d say, ‘Look at Matisse. He was in bed all the time he was making those beautiful collages. Why can’t you at least keep drawing?’” But Jackson, perversely, refused to do work of any kind. He did occasionally look through art books, but mostly, it seemed, as an exercise in self-pity. One day Lee heard a crash and ran upstairs to find Jackson “sitting, staring,” and fuming in bed, and her Picasso book on the floor on the other side of the room. “Goddamn it,” he griped, “that guy has done everything. There’s nothing left.”

  With Jackson safely confined upstairs, Lee moved her studio to the living room and resolutely continued painting. Over the summer, her collages grew larger. She used fewer and larger elements and introduced more color. Her brushwork opened up with “new bravura.” If anything, convalescence only brought Jackson closer to the reality he seemed so desperate to deny. During the weeks of idleness, he knew Lee was working downstairs, and later, when he began testing his leg in mid-July, he passed her work every day in the living room. Conrad Marca-Relli remembers that, during this time, Jackson became “irritated” at the sight or mere mention of Lee’s paintings.

  With Jackson unable to leave, Lee no longer felt bound to the house—to be there “just in case” something terrible happened. Her friends noticed the change. At parties, she argued more forcefully and with more relish; she seemed more “lively and easily amused.” For the first time in years, she joked about life with Jackson, about his mean pet crow, Caw-caw, and the goat who got drunk on fermented apples, doing, according to one friend, “a hilarious imitation of a drunken goat.” When Marian Cook, the wife of a prominent local businessman, asked her to give a talk on the “new painting” to her church circle, Lee accepted eagerly. “She was poised and really quite interesting,” recalls Ed Cook.

  But the major step was learning to drive. For years Lee had relied on Jackson for almost every errand. No matter how drunk or vicious his mood, if she wanted to go to the store, she had to climb into the Model A next to him, close her eyes, and pray. “[She] was trapped in the house,” said Patsy Southgate. “Jackson didn’t want her to [drive], but he had mobility.” Cynthia Cole had tried to teach her, but Lee had been hopelessly confused by Cole’s lectures on “what happens when you step on the clutch,” and the experiment ended in a “series of funny episodes.” Now it was Southgate’s turn. To overcome her student’s “complete lack of self-confidence,” she put Lee behind the wheel and her two children in the back seat. “That showed I had faith in her,” says Southgate, “and it did the trick.” By the end of August, Lee was confident enough to drive alone to John Marquand’s little bungalow in Wainscott to demand payment for a drawing Jackson had given him while drunk. “I’ll never forget the sight,” recalls Marquand. “Coming through a potato field with dust flying, this old car pulls up and out steps Lee Krasner looking rather aggrieved and aggravated, and she says, ‘Look, what do you think we do? We have to pay for groceries, too, you know!’ I said, ‘You’ve got a point,’ and wrote a c
heck.”

  Lee made herself pay a high price for her new freedom. Over the summer, her insides erupted again with ulcerous colitis. Strong and self-assertive in public, in private she suffered the relentless humiliating pain of cramps, constipation, and chronic bouts of blood-filled diarrhea. Drawings from the past were not the only things she was tearing up.

  As the summer of 1954 came to an end, the mood on Fireplace Road was both ominous and melancholy. With his ankle still stiff, Jackson would hobble down the road to watch the red house gang play softball in Admiral Zogbaum’s yard, or drive to the beach and watch the swimmers in the surf from a distance. Becky Reis saw him there. “Jackson, what’s this I hear about you not painting these days?” she ventured cautiously. Jackson looked pained. “My wife’s having a show,” he said, half to himself. “At least someone in the family is working.” He tried at least once to return to the red house, sneaking out of a dinner with Conrad Marca-Relli with the excuse of going to the store for more beer. “He wanted to see the boys,” says Marca-Relli. “I tried to call and tell Lee where we were, but he wouldn’t let me. He said, ‘You can’t let her know where I am.’” Hopping around in his cast in pursuit of de Kooning and Kline, Jackson tried to fit in, but they treated him “like an orphan,” recalled Marca-Relli, “like an outsider. It was very sad to watch.” Finally, he gave up and came home.

  With his sore ankle, Jackson found the Model A’s stiff clutch painful to use. So when Martha Jackson came by in search of new painters (and paintings) for her small gallery, Jackson gladly traded two black-and-white works for the dealer’s green 1950 Oldsmobile convertible.

  Then the storms began.

  The first one, the one outside, arrived on August 31 when Hurricane Carol swept across Long Island. Winds of more than ninety miles an hour pushed tides to record highs, felled great elms on Main Street in East Hampton, ran ships aground, and blew the roofs off houses and motels.

  Paradoxically, Carol’s black clouds brought Jackson, after months of inactivity, a last chance to feel purposeful and needed. Neighbors flocked to the Pollocks’ house on high ground, as rain downed power lines, lights flickered off, and the waters of Accabonac Creek rose ominously. James and Charlotte Brooks arrived early, escaping from Montauk just before the swollen sea cut it off from the rest of the island at Napeague Harbor. In anticipation of flooding, Jackson helped neighbors like Robert and Barbara Hale move appliances into upstairs rooms while Lee, struggling to control her dread of storms, prepared a vast pot of spaghetti. Their wet, cold guests huddled in the living room listening to the radio. Not since the great hurricane of 1938 had Barbara Hale seen the water higher or more trees uprooted. That year, her husband had looked out the window and remarked on “the boat going by,” before realizing that it wasn’t a boat at all but a neighbor’s house. As bad as that was, she thought, this would be worse.

  About noon, the rain stopped unexpectedly, the sky cleared, and the sun broke through. Just as the Pollocks’ guests began returning to their houses, Wilfrid Zogbaum arrived with news that the storm had changed directions. “It’s coming back again,” he warned. Jackson ran to the Marca-Rellis’ house, the one he considered most threatened by the rising waters and tried to convince Marca-Relli of the danger. But Conrad just pointed at the sky and said, “What are you worried about? The sun’s out.” Moments later, the storm returned. The creek flashed over its banks, raced across the lowlying marshland and into the Marca-Rellis’ house. Suddenly, “the car was underwater, there was two feet of water in the house, and we were wading around in it,” Marca-Relli remembers. The floodwaters spilled onto Fireplace Road, trapping people and cars in dark, cold, boot-high water. For hours, Jackson and “his crew” patrolled the neighborhood freeing cars stalled in the water or caught in the slime left behind. When the work ran out, Jackson rushed to Louse Point where Joe and Millie Liss, facing out to sea, had taken the worst of the storm’s fury. “I’ve come to save you,” Jackson announced. “Save what?” asked Joe Liss sardonically, gesturing toward the remains of his devastated home.

  That night, while the cold rain and fierce winds lingered over Springs and most houses remained dark, Jackson sat around the big oak table in Nicholas Carone’s kitchen enjoying the warmth of Carone’s kerosene heater and the forbidden companionship of Kline, de Kooning, Carone, and his wife, Adele. “They talked about painting and what was going on in the art world and where it was headed,” recalls Adele Callaway. “It went on for hours and I remember wishing I had a tape recorder.”

  The next day, reality reasserted itself. On the trip back to Montauk with the Brookses, Jackson and Lee began to fight. “Lee wouldn’t leave him alone,” recalls James Brooks. “She yelled at him and nagged and nagged the whole way.” Finally, Jackson turned on her. “If you don’t shut up,” he warned, “I’m going to hit you with a brick.” At that, Charlotte Brooks, who had been sitting in the back seat growing increasingly distraught at the ugliness of the fight, burst into tears. When the car stopped on the bluff at Montauk overlooking the Brookses’ house, they saw that the storm had swept the studio out to sea, carrying with it an entire summer’s worth of paintings. “When Jackson saw that,” James Brooks remembers, “he broke down and cried like a baby.”

  Even a year before, the sight of Jackson in tears would have moved Lee. But not anymore. Still stewing from the fight, she refused to get back in the car with him. Instead, she stayed with the Brookses, accompanied them into New York later that day, and spent the night in their apartment.

  Jackson returned alone to Springs, where he joined Franz Kline in his just-bought 1937 Lincoln Roadster to survey the damage. Going south on Main Street, Kline pulled out to pass some slow-moving cars, not realizing that the road ahead was blocked by one of the trees felled in the storm. The Lincoln crashed through the tree and ran head on into a line of north-bound cars waiting on the other side. Jackson, with a cut lip, was the only one hurt.

  In late November, Stella suffered a heart attack. Then another. Then a third. None was severe, but, as Jay wrote Charles, “that many attacks in a row is serious and at mother’s age [it] could end very suddenly.” Even in Deep River, where Sande was struggling to save his print shop from bankruptcy and Arloie had opened a small cleaning and alterations business to supplement the family income, Stella’s attacks came as a surprise. Although immobilized, she had seemed strong and healthy up to the first stroke of pain.

  When the news reached Springs, on the eve of Thanksgiving 1954, Jackson went on a rampage. At a holiday party given by Peter Scott, another “fisherman” like Peter Matthiessen, he stormed out of the house in a rage triggered, other guests thought, by Lee’s instruction to “give him some milk” when he demanded a drink. A few minutes later, they heard a loud crash outside. Jackson had rammed his car through the blue-and-white lattice fence Scott had built for his wife. When the guests rushed outside to gape at the damage, Jackson put the car in reverse and drove back through the fence, destroying what little remained. Before speeding off, he stopped in front of the open-mouthed crowd and screamed, “Fuck you.” “He said it to the whole group of us,” recalls Millie Liss, “including Peter’s mother, who had made this marvelous dinner. We couldn’t believe it.” As the guests wandered back into the house, Lee commented innocently: “All I said was give him some milk.”

  But Lee knew what the real problem was. Over her objections, Jackson had already sent a check for $25 to Stella, as well as checks to both of Sande’s children. After a summer and fall strung out on the slim allowance Janis provided, Jackson finally saw the proceeds of a major sale: Ocean Greyness to the Guggenheim in early November. In Deep River, the money was received with a combination of gratitude and resentment—why had it taken so many years and such a dire turn of events to prick Jackson’s conscience?

  Once again, Jackson wanted Stella. And if, confined to bed, she couldn’t come to him, he would go to her. Although in pain with colitis and opposed, as usual, to any plan that included her in-laws, Lee acquie
sced—convinced, undoubtedly, that life alone with him in Springs would mean endless replays of the incident at Peter Scott’s. They arrived in Deep River on Saturday, December 11. They came again at Christmas, bringing with them expensive presents—by Pollock standards—and relentless antagonisms. When Jackson gave Jason a bicycle, Lee insisted that Karen should “have a present as nice” and took her to Hartford to buy a coat. They came again in January and stayed almost two weeks on cots set up in the living room while Sande glumly arranged to liquidate his failing business and Arloie kept the family afloat with the meager earnings from her shop. Finally, Lee had had enough. In mid-January, she and Jackson returned to Springs, blaming their hasty departure on a forgotten dinner invitation in East Hampton. Jackson promised to return, but when the time came, Lee pled her colitis and the trip was canceled.

  Besides, Lee had a better solution. Worn out, tired of caring, too sick to do anything but nag, involved with her own work again, fearful of Jackson and contemptuous of his family, she had decided that the time had come to give Jackson back. They had created this monster, now they should take care of him. In early February, she called Sande and asked once again for Stella to come to Springs—“East Hampton is where Stella should be,” she said—at least for the rest of the winter. Emphasizing Jackson’s recent generosity, she argued that he had finally accepted his responsibility to Stella and now she should accept her responsibility to him. If things went well, Lee suggested, the arrangement should be made permanent. The words were courteous, but the message was firm and unmistakable: Jackson’s painting was the only worthwhile thing the Pollock family had produced and now, in return, they owed him Stella.

  This time, it was Arloie who said no. After years of quiet suffering, recalling the nightmares she had seen in the Eighth Street apartment, for the first and only time in her long, adoring subservience to Sande, Arloie “put her foot down.” “I think it was the only time I stood up and was very positive about my feelings,” she recalls. “And I said absolutely not. I wouldn’t let Stella go. This woman was eighty years old and had just had a heart attack. She didn’t need to go and fight Jack’s battles at this point in her life.” Daughter Karen recalls that Arloie’s stand sparked a conflagration at home and in Springs: “There were a lot of fights and a lot of anger, and Lee was furious with my father for letting this happen.” But Arloie was unshakable. “[Stella] didn’t need the aggravation or the strain—it would have been unbearable.”