Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  As Lee watched her last chance to avoid a catastrophe slip away, her fury knew no bounds. She had never forgiven Jackson’s family for failing to appreciate his art; now, and for the rest of her life, she would fulminate against them for “leaving her alone with him,” for not helping when he—and she—needed them most.

  Jackson reacted in his own way. Only a few days later, when Sheridan and Francile Lord, friends of the Matthiessens, visited, he challenged Sherry Lord to a wrestling match. “Jackson was already drunk,” recalls Cile Lord, “and he said, ‘Come on, let’s wrassle.’” Over Lee’s protests, Sherry politely grappled with Jackson in the middle of the living room, “trying to keep him from falling down and yet not really engage him.” Hoping to end the embarrassment quickly, Lord put his foot behind Jackson’s leg and pushed him. Jackson fell backwards and hit the floor with a heavy “clunk.” He came up clutching his ankle and crying out in pain, “I broke my ankle. I broke my ankle!” At first, no one believed him. “Oh, Jackson, come on, get up,” they said. Furious, he yelled back, “Goddammit, I know I broke it. I heard it snap. I know when my ankle’s broken.” In fact, it was the same ankle he had broken eight months before at the red house. “How typical of Jackson,” thought Cile Lord. “It was such a dumb thing to do, I wasn’t even sorry for him.”

  The ensuing month in bed offered Jackson no rest, nor did the usual expressions of sympathy slow the seemingly inexorable ebbing of his support. In early March, Lee brought the latest bad news to his bedside. In the spring edition of Partisan Review, Clement Greenberg had repudiated him.

  The break had been building for some time, beginning with Greenberg’s conspicuous failure to review either the 1952 or the 1954 show. Since then, his visits to Springs had trailed off and his few encounters with Jackson had invariably ended with explosions like the one at Bennington. But no one, not even Lee, who had continued to nurture the relationship despite Greenberg’s obvious disdain for her painting, expected the end to come so soon, so definitively, or so publicly. In the article, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” Greenberg—using words like “forced,” “pumped,” and “dressed up”—elaborated on the view he had already expressed to Jackson in private. The “peak of his achievement,” according to the article, had been the 1951 show, “which included four or five huge canvases of monumental perfection.” In his more recent shows, Jackson had become “an accomplished craftsman,” but at the expense of energy and inspiration; a creative cul-de-sac at the furthermost reaches of Analytical Cubism who used color “pleasingly,” Greenberg argued, only because “he was not sure of what he wanted to say with it.”

  The article not only formalized the break, it also named Jackson’s successor in favor: Clyfford Still. In words that cruelly echoed his earlier praise of Jackson, Greenberg called Still “one of the most important and original painters of our time—perhaps the most original of all painters under fifty-five, if not the best.” Still, said Greenberg, had “liberat[ed] abstract painting from value contrasts” and “as Pollock had not, from the quasi-geometrical faired drawing which Cubism had found to be the surest way to prevent the edges of forms from breaking through a picture surface.” Behind Greenberg’s elaborate effort to distinguish Pollock as a “late cubist” from Still as the leader among “post-cubists” (later dubbed “color-field” painters), many artists saw the article as a simple trade-in: Pollock for Still. Greenberg had decided that Jackson’s American cowboy roots were, in his own words, “a lot of crap” and had found a new, real American hero. “He dropped the cowboy and picked up the old man of the mountain,” says Budd Hopkins. “He went for a visionary screwball, like Ryder, somebody who could be seen as naive and American, like Pollock, someone who could be condescended to by the cultivated critic.”

  To Lee, the article represented not only a personal betrayal but also a failure of perception, a wanton misrepresentation of Jackson’s art. Without the long history of personal antagonism that inflamed her reaction to Rosenberg’s article, however, she was able to restrain her wrath. Realizing that Greenberg still exerted enormous influence in the art market, both she and Jackson were forced to express their displeasure in small, untraceable ways, like boycotting Greenberg’s wedding and offering, as a present, only a small gouache on cardboard from WPA days. But Greenberg remained unapologetic. “I hear there’s been a ruckus over my piece in Partisan,” he wrote the Pollocks in May. “I hope that you two, at least, read the piece carefully; I weighed every word.”

  Jackson spent most of March 1955 confined to the upstairs bedroom, lashing out when Lee approached, knowing that she was at work downstairs, watching from his window as the trackless snow disappeared from around the studio. At some point, his anger over Stella’s absence turned to despair. He stopped eating and turned away visitors. When he could move around again, instead of returning to the studio, he spent long afternoons at the movie theater in East Hampton or helped Robert and Barbara Hale renovate the old house they had bought. More than once, he drove all the way to Montauk and appeared unannounced on the doorstep of James and Charlotte Brooks. “He showed up in a rainstorm, soaking, and said his car broke down,” recalls James Brooks. “He obviously had an impulse to get away from Lee.”

  That spring, people often saw Jackson wandering from house to house “like an abandoned child,” according to Patsy Southgate. “He was patrolling the neighborhood looking for someone to visit,” recalls Cile Lord. “He would come to your door in the middle of the day and just want to sit around, looking lonely and needy. You’d offer him a cup of tea and he’d want whiskey in it.” Lee had given every neighbor instructions not to let Jackson have liquor, but, says Lord, “not letting Jackson do something was the neatest trick of the week.” When friends like Lord grew impatient, Jackson would “get sort of hurt and we’d have to be sympathetic with him.” He seemed especially drawn to friends with children: the Matthiessens, the Braiders, the Coles, the Carones, the Littles, the Talmages, the Gribitzes. He would spend hours wistfully watching their kids at play, bemoaning his own childlessness, and, at times it seemed, reenacting his own childhood. The Carones brought their twin sons, Christian and Claude, for Jackson to babysit. “He would take them upstairs and put them in his bed,” Adele [Carone] Calloway remembers, “and he tucked them in and made everybody shush so no noise would bother them. … When he saw them drinking milk, he had a sudden craving for milk and he drank up all the milk in the house. Then he felt so bad he insisted that we jump in the car and he drove ninety miles an hour to Miller’s store to buy them some more milk.” At the Matthiessens’ house half a mile north on Fireplace Road (and later in a converted barn on Jeffrey Potter’s farm), Patsy Southgate found him “charming … like a little boy … very young, very threatened and vulnerable all the time.” He visited Donald and Carol Braider so often they named their next baby Jackson. “With children,” said Carol Braider, “he would be as gentle and lovely as a mother.”

  If children brought out Jackson’s longing for Stella, Lee brought out his rage at her. By May, their battle had reached an unprecedented pitch. Convinced that Lee, like Stella, was abandoning him, increasingly resentful of her productivity, Jackson fought his fears with anger. Convinced that Jackson still needed her, increasingly addicted to the daily collisions, Lee satisfied her needs with anger. The result was a fierce, round-the-clock battle royal that neither one could win but neither was willing to lose. Fights no longer stopped and started, they merely passed from phase to phase, from screaming bouts to sputtering rages to bitter silence to random sniping and back again. Jackson was “crazed,” recalls Ronald Stein, who had witnessed many fights over the years. “He was reaching into a part of his psyche that was not even rational or even human. He would shout, ‘Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch!’ until the house shook.” Lee would wait until the storm had passed to retaliate. “When he wasn’t in a rage, she would pick at him,” a friend recalls. “‘Jackson, do this; Jackson, do that.’” She would put food in front of him and he would
refuse to eat it. “Now, Jackson,” she would say, “it’s good for you. Eat it.” “I don’t want food, I want tea,” he would say. But when Lee brewed the tea and put it in front of him, he would say, “I don’t want tea,” and pour a shot of whiskey instead. Lee did manage to coax him into several “marriage counseling” sessions with Elizabeth Wright Hubbard, but she offered only herbs and platitudes.

  On Friday, the thirteenth of May, Sam and Edys Hunter arrived in Springs for a weekend stay and were immediately plunged into the thick of battle. “Jackson played the hi-fi at decibels that would give you an earache,” recalls Edys Hunter, “and Lee screamed at decibels that would give you an earache. That was the family scene.” Sam Hunter thought Lee treated Jackson “like a lion tamer approaching a lion.” Edys, who was pregnant at the time, made the mistake of getting in the car with Jackson. “It was a wild ride, and he would watch to see if you flinched,” says Sam, who later called Jackson “a real psychopath.” But Edys saw the method in his madness. “He wasn’t reckless. He meant me no harm. He knew what he was doing. He only wanted to hurt Lee, not the rest of us.” When the Hunters returned to New York, Edys wrote a tactful thank-you note describing the weekend as “memorable” and canceling plans for a return visit.

  By summer, Jackson and Lee’s life together had become an endless round of thrust and counterthrust, rage and retaliation. On a trip into the city with the Lords, Jackson vanished from the parking lot across from the Museum of Modern Art. “He just said, ‘I’m going to see somebody,’ and walked off down the block,” recalls Cile Lord. “Lee knew anything she asked him to do, he’d do the opposite, so she implored us to get him to come back. But he just walked off. We came back without him.” When Lee made arrangements for them to have dinner with the Hunters in New York, Jackson simply didn’t appear. “He didn’t want to spend the time with Lee,” says Edys Hunter. But the next morning, he came around with orchids (and without Lee) to apologize. When Lee demanded more money for clothes and a larger share of the allowance from Janis, Jackson responded by lending $100 to Paul Brach and Miriam Schapiro for the deposit on a barn adjacent to The Creeks. Rebuffed by Lee in the bedroom, Jackson “went around asking various women he knew if they would have his baby,” recalls a friend.

  No opportunity to inflict pain, no matter how remote or fleeting, went unseized. When the catalogue for the “New Decades” show at the Whitney in May mistakenly reported that he had studied with Hans Hofmann, Lee’s former mentor, Jackson flew into a calculated rage, indignantly demanding an apology from the museum and a correction in subsequent printings. In June, he threatened to desert her and go to Paris, following in the footsteps of de Kooning, who was scheduled to leave in July. Lee undoubtedly understood the dark insinuation: de Kooning’s marriage to Elaine, as everyone knew, was teetering on the edge of collapse. As if to make good on his threat, Jackson drove to Riverhead and applied for a passport.

  The summer, an unusually hot one, offered little relief from the heat of domestic combat. David Budd, a worshipful young painter from Florida who was spending the summer at The Creeks, came to the house one day on what he later described as a “pilgrimage.” He found Lee “sitting on top of the store,” but Jackson warm and welcoming. “That was a turning point in my life,” says Budd. “He was a hero to me.” Budd in turn introduced Jackson to his former teacher, Syd Solomon, on the beach one day. Forewarned of Pollock’s volatile temperament, Solomon expected the worst but instead was “moved” by “the strong sense of tragedy that surrounded him.” Roaming over the summer landscape, Jackson would drop in on young painters like Brach and Schapiro who were busy painting at the Bossey farm near the Green River Cemetery (they didn’t begin renovating the barn that Jackson had helped them buy until the following summer). After passing Jackson’s “shit test” (“He’d say ‘shit,’ and if you couldn’t stand ‘shit,’ then you didn’t pass the test”), Schapiro warmed to him, while Brach, who was uncomfortable around heavy drinkers, kept his distance. Jackson still visited The Creeks occasionally, although not as often as before. Over the winter, before the sale of Ocean Greyness, he had proposed to Ossorio that he and Lee sell their place and move into the big house with Alfonso and Ted. Ossorio had politely turned him down. “Our relationship wasn’t quite the same after that,” he later lamented.

  In the meantime, someone else had moved into The Creeks: Clyfford Still. Supplanting Jackson in yet another way, Still had taken a small cottage near the main house for the summer and set up his studio in an adjacent barn. When Jackson came to visit, however, Still was usually too busy painting or tinkering under his cherished Jaguar to entertain company. Jackson had no way of knowing that Still, like Greenberg, had already turned against him. Earlier that year, he had written Ossorio expressing his disappointment in Jackson and accusing him of cowardice, wretchedness, and destructive self-hatred “second only to that of Mark Rothko.” What prompted Still to send such a backbiting outburst to Jackson’s long-standing patron isn’t clear, although, as Still’s friend Jon Schueler notes, “there wasn’t a soul on earth who didn’t get on his shit list at some point.” According to Jane Smith, whose husband, Tony, was snubbed by Still for no apparent reason upon his return from Europe, “Still didn’t approve of the fact that Jackson was accepting the help of certain New York dealers. He thought that was a sellout.” While it was true that Jackson had toyed briefly with the idea of abandoning Janis and moving to Martha Jackson’s gallery (as de Kooning had done), their secret correspondence had come to nothing. More likely, Still’s reversal was based on artistic—that is, moral—grounds. “He was determined to create a new American art,” recalls Jon Schueler, “an art that was absolutely American. He thought we had to get rid of, to lacerate, to cut out European influences like a cancer. What was left would be an American art.” The primary cancer, according to Schueler, was Jackson Pollock, whose art Still had concluded represented “nothing but tired Impressionism.”

  Whatever his private reasoning, in public Still continued to curry Jackson’s favor. Soon after Greenberg’s article appeared, he wrote a mollifying note, giving Jackson and Lee “major credit” for Greenberg’s “interest and favorable attitude” toward his work and taking care to note how uneasily Jackson’s old crown sat on his rebel head: “May I add that I wish [Greenberg] had never seen my work or heard of it?” It would be another few months before Jackson learned of Still’s true feelings.

  In July, the battle with Lee came to a head when Clement Greenberg arrived in Springs to see his new psychoanalyst in Barnes Landing and stay the weekend with the Pollocks. Convinced apparently that Greenberg could still be useful to Jackson’s career—and possibly to her own—Lee stifled her outrage at the recent article and played the dutiful hostess. Jackson, however, saw a clear provocation in the appearance of Lee’s longtime ally. While Greenberg sat in the kitchen and watched with horror, the fighting reached new heights of ferocity. “Jackson was in a rage at her from morning till night,” Greenberg recalls. “He had a sharp sense of how to find someone’s sore spot and he was out to wreck her.” When Greenberg began to take Lee’s side in the running battles, Jackson sensed a conspiracy and lashed out even more desperately. He called her a “Jewish cunt” and announced that he had “never loved her.” At every insult, Lee “howled” back in wild indignation. Finally, unable to bear another minute of the emotional fire-storm, convinced that “the marriage was killing both of them,” Greenberg insisted that Lee see an analyst immediately and recommended Jane Pearce, a member of a group of analysts who summered in Barnes Landing.

  The next day, Lee appeared in Pearce’s office. “Clem pushed her to do this because he saw that Jackson was killing her,” recalls Pearce. “Or allowing her to kill herself. It was a moment of absolute crisis.” Pearce recommended that Lee seek therapy immediately. Lee agreed. Short of divorce, it was the ultimate act of independence, made easier, no doubt, by the fact that Patsy Southgate had entered analysis earlier that year. Jackson railed against it, bu
t when Lee persisted, he quickly followed her to Pearce’s office, confessed to being “seriously ill,” and volunteered to reenter analysis. “Jackson couldn’t stand the idea of Lee and me in therapy without him,” recalls Greenberg. “He didn’t want to be left out.”

  In September 1955, Jackson began formal therapy for the fifth time in his life. The weekly sessions with Pearce’s associate, Dr. Ralph Klein, a young psychologist, brought him once again into the city, where he soon retraced old routes to the bars in and around Greenwich Village and, in particular, to the Cedar Tavern.

  43

  THE LAST ACT

  It was just another nondescript neighborhood bar: a long narrow room with a bar in front and brass-studded leatherette booths in the back, a place of perpetual twilight, filled with smoke and the stale smell of beer. Most of the other bars along University Place near Eighth Street made some effort, however pathetic, to distinguish themselves: a jukebox, a television set, good food. Some even offered live entertainment and called themselves nightclubs. But not the Cedar. There were no paintings on the walls, no travel posters, no “arty emblems of Greenwich Village bohemia.” Just “interrogation green” plaster, flaking imperceptibly in the fluorescent glare. If the Cedar had any distinction at all, other than its artistic clientele, it was the clock on the back wall that every now and then ran backwards.