Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Onto this invitingly neutral backdrop, patrons could project their private dramas. To Norman Bluhm, one of the many young artists who congregated there, the Cedar was “the cathedral of American culture in the fifties”; to Mercedes Matter, who for two years spent virtually every night there, it was “the most wonderful place and best time of my life.” To Clement Greenberg, who rarely visited, it was “awful and sordid,” a place where “washouts” and “doomed artists” herded against the tide of obscurity. To Jackson Pollock, who came every Tuesday after his appointment with Ralph Klein, it was yet another stage on which to play out, in ever shorter and more self-destructive cycles, the central drama of his life, a place to recreate his family and relive the past, trying, one last time, beneath the backward-running clock, to make it right.

  He did it with a display of drunken antics that surpassed anything in his past; a weekly display that combined, in typical Pollock fashion, belligerence, petulance, profanity, pathos, self-destruction, self-deprecation, cowboy machismo, and even, occasionally, charm; a display so exaggerated, so singular, that people began coming on Tuesday nights just to see it; a display so memorable, so widely witnessed and reported, that for decades afterward, Jackson’s reputation rested almost entirely on the wild tales emanating from the Cedar Bar. “Jackson would come in as though he were an outlaw coming in with two pistols,” recalls Mercedes Matter. “You know, he’d say, ‘You fucking whores, you think you’re painters, do you?’” One night, he would sweep a dozen glasses off the table, a week later dump food on fellow patrons—friends or strangers, it didn’t matter. He pulled tables from the wall, lunged at passing women, and shouted insults indiscriminately, his vocabulary sinking deeper and deeper into obscenity as the evening wore on. “He just had to provoke someone,” recalls Conrad Marca-Relli. To John Myers, he made licking motions with his tongue and asked, “Sucked any good cock lately?” To Larry Rivers, he bared his arm and pantomimed shooting up. To a female painter, he snarled, “You may be a great lay, but you can’t paint worth a damn.” To a black man: “How do you like your skin color?” To anyone of the dozens of young painters who frequented the Cedar: “What the fuck are you involved with?” or “What the fuck do you do?” or, in one strangely benign twist, “What are you doing to bring notoriety to your name?” To Jackson, gays were always “fags,” women—and men—always “whores” (pronounced “whoors”), and fellow artists always “worms”—his nastiest epithet. “Every night Jackson was there,” says Herman Cherry, “it was a contest of cojones.” More than once, after breaking a table full of glasses and china, he would sit conspicuously in a corner booth and play with the sharp fragments, casually making designs as his fingers dripped blood onto the tabletop.

  For Jackson, it was a weekly trip back in time, back to the rim of the Grand Canyon to entertain the road crew with his drunken stumblings, back to the Artists Union parties in the thirties where, in cowboy hat and boots, he had picked fights and passed out with Sande at his side. Like the road crew, friends at the Cedar fed him drinks “just to see what he would do next,” recalls Milton Resnick. “Then they loaded him up with more whiskey to get rid of him.” When “Sam” DiLiberto, the bartender, got fed up with his desperate antics and ordered him to leave, Jackson would linger outside the door, his liquor-swollen nose pressed against the window. “There’d be this bear’s head outside looking in the little panes in the door,” recalled Sam, “wanting in with his buddies.”

  Jackson’s “buddies” were the young artists and writers who congregated at the Cedar to find support, to talk art (often returning from the nearby Club), or increasingly, to be entertained by Jackson. Among them were Lionel Abel, Norman Bluhm, Paul Brach, David Budd, Herbert Ferber, Budd Hopkins, Paul Jenkins, Conrad Marca-Relli, George McNeil, Milton Resnick, Irving Sandler, Jon Schueler, Syd Solomon, and Herman Somberg. But if they were all his brothers, Franz Kline was his Sande. Much more than Jackson, Kline was a Cedar regular, “one of those people who always got there before you did and was still there after you left,” according to Larry Rivers. Tormented, like Jackson, by an unhappy childhood and a disintegrating marriage (his wife had recently entered an insane asylum), Kline, too, came to the Cedar to escape into the buzz and blur of alcohol and barroom camaraderie. Only occasionally would he disappear from the bar for a weeklong “working binge” of twenty-four-hour days in the studio, slashing out the bold calligraphic canvases that had, so far at least, brought him only slightly more notoriety than his prodigious capacity for beer.

  Every Tuesday night, Jackson would roar in and, first thing, scan the room for Kline’s big, rough-hewn face and Bentonesque mustache. Friends remember him as being “hungry” for Kline’s comradely, if indiscriminate, affection. “Jackson liked to be near him,” recalls Syd Solomon, and he showed it in all the ways he had perfected with Sande: baiting, challenging, teasing, tormenting, scrapping, and conspiring in a running parody of sibling rivalry. When Jackson broke his plastic swizzle stick into little pieces and began to chew it, Kline did the same. They stared at each other “like they were playing High Noon,” recalls Esteban Vicente, “while crunching on these plastic sticks.” One night, finding Kline deep into a baseball story, Jackson elbowed him roughly. “Be right with you,” Kline shot back impatiently in his truck-driver New Yorkese. When the story dragged on, Jackson elbowed him again. “Do that once more,” Kline warned, “and I’ll knock your clock off.” When the story dragged on still further, Jackson snatched Kline’s cap, threw it onto a shelf high up behind the bar, and ran out the door. (The next week, by way of apology, he came in and, in front of Kline, flung his own hat onto the shelf.) On other occasions when Kline tried to ignore him, Jackson poured soup on his head or threatened to throw beer mugs at him. In return, when Jackson’s mood turned black, Kline could always defuse him. “Franz would say something amusing,” recalls Mercedes Matter, “and this grin would come on Jackson’s face, this adorable grin, and all the menace would disappear.”

  As the winter of 1955 approached, however, such salutary moments were increasingly rare.

  While Jackson’s studio sat idle, Lee prepared furiously for her October show at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. The upstairs room overflowed with big vertical canvases, many over six feet tall. Since the previous summer, her images had grown even bolder, looser, more colorful, and self-assured. The little mosaic-like collage elements had evolved into larger, more linear fragments: pieces from her own previous work, jagged shards of heavy black paper, and, for the first time, scraps from Jackson’s discarded paintings. Clement Greenberg, no fan of Lee’s work, considered them “the best paintings that she had ever done.” Also for the first time, she began to sign her full name, substituting a stylish script for the small block-letter initials she had been using. When Constantine Nivola brought Le Corbusier to Fireplace Road to meet Jackson, the French architect came away more impressed by Lee. “Pollock is like a hunter who shoots before he aims,” he told Nivola afterward. “But his wife has talent. Women always have too much talent.”

  Bald Eagle, Lee Krasner, 1955, oil, paper, and canvas on linen, 77” × 51½”; among the collage elements are fragments from a black-and-white Pollock painting.

  Not long afterward, Lee broached with Jackson a subject that had been on her mind for some time: a bigger studio. She already had one picked out—a little two-room shack set back from Fireplace Road just north of the house. Neither one said what both must have been thinking: Jackson already had a beautiful studio that he wasn’t using.

  In thinly veiled retaliation, Jackson berated collage as a medium, contending that he had done all there was to do with it in his single attempt in the early forties. He accused Lee of mimicking their neighbor Conrad Marca-Relli, who had begun experimenting with collage at about the same time. “Jackson didn’t pay Lee’s work much mind or respect,” according to Cile Lord, and never missed an opportunity to demonstrate his contempt. When Eleanor Ward came to Springs to help Lee select the paintings for her show,
Jackson asked her—within Lee’s hearing—“Can you imagine being married to that face?” One night when Cile and Sherry Lord were visiting Jackson, Lee, who had been upstairs finishing the last canvases for the show, came down with an empty jar of Sobo glue in her hand and asked Jackson, in a plaintive voice, to please get her a refill from his studio. She was dressed for bed, pale and gaunt from yet another flare-up of colitis, and in no condition to brave the cold. As Lee must have expected, he refused to go. Lord thought, “He doesn’t want her to be an artist.”

  In October 1955, Lee’s show opened at the former horse stables on Fifty-eighth Street and Seventh Avenue that Eleanor Ward had converted into a gallery. Except for Betty Parsons, few in the opening night crowd bought pictures, but the reception was, even by Jackson’s telling, favorable. Lee, who undoubtedly feared the worst, must have been surprised when Jackson appeared well dressed, completely sober, and, by one account, “glowing.” All heads turned to look and marvel. “He was wearing a pinstriped suit and bench-made shoes, and he looked even taller than usual,” recalls Ronald Stein. “I looked at him and thought, ‘Wow, what a feeling that must be.’ Women gravitated toward him, and everybody wanted to shake his hand.” But Lee, like Stein, must have realized what Jackson was doing. “After Jackson walked in like that, it wasn’t Lee’s show any longer. He knew that’s what would happen, and that’s why he did it. Coming in sober, no breaking things up, no punching people in the nose, taking control away from Lee—it was the most sonofabitch thing he could have done.”

  Later, Jackson wreaked his revenge on Eleanor Ward in a more predictable way. Staggering into her gallery, he approached one of Ward’s best clients, Kay Ordway, a “wraithlike, genteel spinster,” and blurted out, “What you need is a good fuck.” Ordway “fled in terror,” Ward recalled. “It was ghastly.”

  The vigor and freshness of Lee’s show must have haunted Jackson the next month when his own show opened at the Janis Gallery. Partly to defuse Jackson’s rage and partly to keep his name before the art-buying public, Lee and Janis had pressed ahead with the show despite Jackson’s apprehensions and despite the fact that he had virtually nothing new to show. Of the sixteen paintings exhibited (some of them on the ceiling due to lack of space), fourteen had been shown before and the other two—White Light, a heavy icing of white paint evoking the allover canvases of 1946; and Search, a disjointed amalgam of soaked-in black, brushwork, and spattered color—had been painted long before. (Search may have been an old painting merely turned on its side and redated.) Janis called the show “15 Years of Jackson Pollock,” trying perhaps to avoid the dread term “retrospective,” but no one was fooled. Supported by rumors from the Cedar Bar, the truth was everywhere now: Jackson had stopped working—or at least stopped creating. Respectful in public, friends privately lamented his eclipse. “There was a lot of feeling that the work was falling apart,” recalls Budd Hopkins. “I think everyone shared my feeling that Pollock was physically, psychologically, personally in terrible shape and that the art as art was in terrible shape, too.”

  The reviewers were not so discreet. In the New York Times, Stuart Preston threw up his hands in exasperation at the “gruff, turgid, sporadically vital reelings and writhings of Pollock’s inner-directed art,” concluding that it would remain incomprehensible “until psychology digs deeper into the workings of the creative act.” Art News and Arts Magazine made similar apologies (“A Pollock painting, charged with his personal mythology, remains meaningless to him for whom Pollock himself is not a tangible reality”), but the tone was unmistakably elegiac; none of the reviews mentioned either of Jackson’s new works. Hearing the news of Jackson’s plight and smelling blood, Time’s Alexander Eliot wasted no time in attacking. “The bush-bearded heavyweight champion of abstract expressionism, shuffled into the ring at Manhattan’s Sidney Janis Gallery, and flexed his muscles for the crowd,” wrote Eliot in an article titled “The Champ” in the December 19, 1955, issue. Dismissing the earliest work, inaccurately, as “imitating imitations of Picasso” and describing the famous drip paintings as “Pollock’s one big contribution to the shlosh-and-spatter school of postwar art,” Eliot gloated shamelessly over Jackson’s fall and mocked those reviewers who were still making excuses for his “gaudy drippings.” Two months later, Eliot returned to print to give Jackson one last kick, dubbing him “Jack the Dripper,” a phrase that, according to Jeffrey Potter, “caused Jackson to spend days of saying ‘shit’ and Lee to utter outraged shrieks.”

  Despite their battles, Lee took no joy in Jackson’s defeats and carefully avoided displays of her own modest success. Although, clearly, she no longer loved him in any tender sense, she still considered him a great artist, clung to his cause, and bewailed his creative block as a waste, an injustice, and a tragedy for art. But she was no longer willing to throw herself on his pyre. “Lee had been to the shrink and had gotten some improvement,” recalls Cile Lord, “and for the first time was able to detach herself from Jackson. His childish tantrums designed to keep her on the hook were not working the way they had.” Now, instead of confronting him, she would simply retreat, assuming a defensive posture designed to placate, not provoke, and to preserve what little energy she had left for her art. Fed up with his troubled sleep, bedwetting, and setting fire to the mattress, she moved the double bed out of the master bedroom and replaced it with twin beds. When he flew into a rage, she would simply leave the house, taking Ted Dragon’s advice to “remember the Russians.” “I told her they never shot a gun at Napoleon,” says Dragon, “they simply went north. And many a night she did just that and left him in his rages.”

  For the first time, both Jackson and Lee began to talk seriously to outsiders about divorce. After a year of surreptitious visits to psychiatrists (“People started going to New York for dentist appointments, which turned out to be psychiatric appointments,” recalls Cynthia Cole), many of Lee’s friends were, according to Cole, euphoric with a new feeling of “I’ve got to take care of me.” More than a few were already “one foot into divorce court.” Among Jackson’s friends, Willem de Kooning had split with Elaine and brother Charles had announced his separation from Elizabeth after more than twenty years. For Jackson, however, talk of divorce was still only talk. He was less able than ever to care for himself, more firmly bound than ever by what Ronald Stein called “the grim pact of mutual assured destruction” that had kept them together for more than a decade. “Without Lee,” he told a friend in a rare moment of honesty, “I wouldn’t have survived [this] long.”

  For Lee, on the other hand, talk of “dissolving the marriage” was more plausible, and therefore more chilling. Although increasingly confident that she could live without Jackson, she knew, as he did, that he couldn’t live long without her. Increasingly, the choice seemed to be to live without him or die with him. Years later, she would recount a dream that haunted her during the long winter of 1955. “Jackson and I were standing on top of the world. The earth was a sphere with a pole going through the center, I was holding the pole with my right hand, and I was holding Jackson’s hand with my left hand. Suddenly I let go of the pole, but I kept holding on to Jackson, and we both went floating off into outer space.”

  Two days before Christmas 1955, while the Janis show was still running, Lee and Jackson left the Earle Hotel in the Oldsmobile convertible to return to Springs. On the way out of the city, they picked up Ronald Stein outside his apartment on East Seventy-ninth Street. Unknown to Jackson, who was drunk and in a black holiday mood, Lee had instructed Stein to talk Jackson out of driving. But Jackson had other ideas. Before Lee was settled in the back seat, he jammed the accelerator to the floor and the V-8 Oldsmobile screamed away from the curb “like a bat out of hell,” Stein recalls. “Lights meant nothing to him. He just put his foot right down on the floor and we crossed Park Avenue like a bullet.” Everywhere cars braked and honked and skidded to avoid him. He veered from lane to lane, around slow-moving vehicles, into oncoming traffic, always accelerating. Cars
drove onto the sidewalk to avoid a head-on collision. “It was like a chase scene in a Hollywood movie,” Stein recalls. Jackson turned onto the East River Drive and headed north, “tear-assing” toward the Triborough Bridge through heavy midday traffic, even passing a police car. Seeing the bridge ahead, Stein thought, “He’ll never make it through the tollbooths. He’ll never get through those narrow openings. We’ll go off the bridge and into the river for sure.” Stein was convinced Jackson “was trying to kill himself, and me, just to spite Lee. This was real serious madness. The guy should have been in a mental institution.” Stein tried to grab the wheel, “but Jackson was strong and I couldn’t get it away from him.” Finally, just as the car was flying onto the approach ramp to the bridge, Stein lunged across the seat and turned the ignition key.

  When the car finally coasted to a stop, Lee was the first to speak. “Jackson,” she said evenly, “let Ronnie drive.” Jackson shook his head no. “Then I’m getting out right here,” she said. Jackson apparently didn’t believe her. Why should he? Hadn’t she always stayed in the car, no matter how drunk or how reckless he was? But this time she meant it. Without another word, she got out and started walking down the shoulder of the busy roadway, looking for a place to cross. Stein watched her disappear. “Are you coming or going?” Jackson asked gruffly. “I’ll go with you,” Stein said, “but if you do that again, I’m going to take the key again.” “After that he drove like a perfect gentleman all the rest of the way,” Stein recalls. “He was a little drunk, but there was no more madness.”

  The next day, however, when Lee arrived on the train, “all hell broke loose. It was like a bomb had exploded.” Stein, exhausted by the screaming fights, left later the same day. That night, loaded on liquor from every bar in the surrounding area (most refused to serve him more than two drinks), Jackson stumbled into Sam’s, a bar in East Hampton. “He was having trouble with his wife,” recalled George Schaefer who was sitting at the bar that night, “and was probably lonely.” (On Christmas Eve, he may also have been thinking about his distant family, about Stella, and about how she had killed her husband.) When Jackson tried to start a fight, the bartender ordered him out; then, when he resisted, threw him out. Enraged, Jackson turned and put his fist through the glass in the door. By the time the police arrived, he had passed out on the sidewalk. He spent the rest of the night, Christmas Eve, in the East Hampton jail.