Jackson’s large family had come for the funeral. Throughout the party, his mother, Stella, sat on an upright chair in front of the TV. I approached her to offer my condolences. She nodded. I asked if I could get her anything to eat. She said she was fine. Her eyes barely strayed from the Democratic convention, a shoo-in for Eisenhower’s second term. Yet how engrossed she was. She was stolid, like a stop sign. I brought a plate of food and set it down near her, just in case.
A more lively attraction at the party was Sande’s five-year-old, Jay. Adorable and outgoing, he and I tossed a ball around. Later, when Sande asked if I would take Jay to the beach the next day, I was thrilled, if a bit aflutter, having never been around a child before. The family stayed for three more days, and each morning I picked Jay up and off we went to the Coast Guard and our world of sand castles. I loved our times together and loved driving through town with the top down and him next to me. I hoped people would think I was his mother. It was probably good they left when they did; my fantasies were running amok.
In the days and weeks that followed, Clem’s focus was on Lee. Her pace had slowed. She now made a mountain out of every decision. She talked endlessly to everyone in her circle about the ins and outs, the pros and cons, all the while knowing full well what her course of action would be. Her emotional state was something else. As fiercely strong and pragmatic as she appeared to be, she was also fiercely needy, especially at night, when her to-do list wasn’t an option. Unfortunately for me, Clem was her number one confidant. Her tantrum over the eulogy had flared and quickly fizzled, as her need for Clem superseded her grudge. He was at her house sometimes twice during the day and then again in the evening. Several times he spent the night there. Feeling very woe-is-me, I pouted and sulked. To no avail. The new bride didn’t stand a chance against the grieving widow.
Clem was stretched thin. He, who prided himself on never getting sick and never having had a doctor, caught cold. And then one night he got up to go to the bathroom and I heard a thud. I ran in and there he was, out cold. My first thought was that my stepmother, Marge, had been right; Clem would die long before me. But not this soon! A few splashes of water and a lot of yelling brought him around. He got up and returned to bed.
I was frantic. “What happened?!”
A shrug. “Must be my thyroid is low.”
Clem had a theory—on those rare occasions when his body felt a bit “off,” he blamed his thyroid and would down one of my thyroid boosters. Of course, being his own best, and only, doctor, he had never been diagnosed. He then turned over and went to sleep. I lay there like a zombie, my brain clattering for hours as it spiraled through sudden-death scenarios and funerals, the freshly minted bride turned widow weeping into the grave.
Not helping my frame of mind during those last weeks in August was Friedel’s latest obsession. Since the night of Jackson’s death, he believed Jackson’s spirit had taken up residence in him. He was Jackson. Given Friedel’s unstable physical and emotional state, Clem had tried to dissuade him from going to the funeral. But of course Friedel had insisted. He had managed the church without incident, but at the cemetery, with the ghoulish Marisol at his side, he had stood so close to the edge of the grave, sobbing, staring down at the coffin, that I was sure he was going to jump in. What a pair. He took to hanging around the cemetery and several times drove down to visit Ruth at the scene of his recent tortures, the South Hampton Hospital. Naturally, whether he was inhabited by God, Matisse, or Jackson, the scraggly beard remained.
Within a week or so, life in East Hampton flattened to a hum. As if the tidal wave that had engulfed us all had subsided and would not strike the town again. At least that summer. The out-of-towners returned to where they had come from. Parties were held, beach life continued, late nights of drinking and dancing at the dives, all that. But with a subdued air. Also in the air was the smell of Labor Day, and with it my release from the blissful summer I had imagined, the summer that had gone so terribly wrong. Self-protection led me to endow East Hampton with all the troubles that had eddied around us. That way, I could believe that, as we packed up and headed back to New York, the bad times wouldn’t be following us home.
A single mom with the kids, Green Haven, 1941.
With my father, Green Haven, 1938.
A Bennington sophomore, 1952.
Jackson Pollock memorial show at MoMA, 1956.
Our first photo, 1955.
The Kunsthistoriches, Vienna, 1959.
Stonehenge, 1959.
The afternoon at Barnett Newman’s studio (Barney in foreground), 1957.
(Photograph by William Vandivert)
Provincetown Labor Day, 1959, (L-R) Fritz Bultman, Miz Hofmann, me, David Smith, Hans Hofmann.
New family, 1963.
(Photograph by Cora Kelley Ward, courtesy of her estate)
On the town with (L-R) Everett Ellin, Karen Rubin, Ken Noland, Morris Louis, 1961.
A brief encounter, Florida, 1962.
At Ken Noland’s farm in Vermont, our home away from home. With Sheila and Tony Caro, and Ken, 1964. (© Barford Sculptures Ltd.)
Our living room at “275” in Vogue, 1964. (Photograph by Hans Namuth, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, © 1991 Hans Namuth estate)
A family jaunt to Paradise Island, with Stephanie Noland, 1968.
At opening of Pollock Retrospective at MoMA, 1967, in dress by my friend Susanne Moss.
(Photograph by Dan Budnik)
Family outing, 1967.
(Photograph by Esther Brown)
An unwelcome bride in “The Wedding,” 1964.
Wearing green paint and widow’s weeds for an anti-war play, 1965.
(Photograph by Steve Ruttenberg)
“Under Milk Wood,” 1966.
Vera in “Pal Joey,” Woodstock Summer Theater, 1969.
(Photograph by William B. Emmons, III)
Mom and daughter backstage at “Troilus and Cressida,” 1971.
Potluck at loft, (L-R) Beverly Magid, (center) Mark Turnbull, two friends, and me, 1970.
Earlville Opera House “Hernani” rehearsal, Albert Takazauckas at right, 1972.
(Photograph by Cora Kelley)
The editor-in-chief of Madison Avenue Magazine gets an office of her own, 1974.
With Charlie Mandel, publisher of Madison Avenue Magazine, 1975.
(Photograph by Lee Marshall)
“Yet another man’s world,” ad execs assemble for a Madison Avenue Magazine cover, 1978. (Courtesy of Wagner International Photos)
Goodbye Daddy, 1979.
Christmas at “257,” 1980. (Photograph by Cora Kelley Ward, courtesy of her estate
Norwich summer, 1981.
“Fine Line,” Ensemble Studio Theater, Roxanne Hart, Harris Yulin (director), Jill Eikenberry, and me (the budding playwright), 1984.
In L.A. with Russ Smith, 1982.
The playwright poses for an L.A. production, 1989.
The “kids” revisit Green Haven, 1996.
Our last photo, outside the Pollock house, 1992.
(Photograph by Elaine Grove)
part two
Artists & Wives & a Trip
HANS AND MIZ HOFMANN
IT WAS LATE Friday afternoon of Labor Day weekend in 1957 when I passed for the first time through the front gate of Hans and Miz’s house in Provincetown. As usual, when venturing off with Clem, I had no idea what to expect.
We had come a long way. The Cape Codder train to Woods Hole, then the long bus ride to the farthest tip of Cape Cod, and finally a taxi to the Hofmanns’ house near the end of Commercial Street, the town’s main drag. At first sight, it was like no artist’s house I could have imagined—a white colonial fronted by a picket fence with a brick path that invited us to the front door through a garden ablaze with flowers. But then we crossed the threshold. I thought I had stepped into Hofmann’s body and soul. The floors, the furniture, the stairs, everything, painted in his signature vibrant, primary colors. A hi
gh-gloss Technicolor toyland. Upstairs, in the large square guest room, the same. Here the late-afternoon light bounced off the sea and danced with the rainbow colors of the room. Never before had I been in a place that made me so happy to be alive.
The Hofmanns had spent twenty years of summers there by that time. There was an inherent stability in that house such as I had never known. My family had never lived anywhere longer than a few years. From place to place we carted our things, shedding bits and pieces along the way, but we never called the walls that contained them “home.” This was a home, one of impeccable order, run by Miz with precision and love. I sensed that Miz and Hans moved through those rooms on harmonious, parallel paths—Hans also had his own path, which led from the back of the house to his studio—each endowing their domains with complementary skill and passion.
The Hofmanns were then in their late seventies, my grandmother’s age, but there the similarity ended. That weekend I would learn that who we are is a reflection of the life we live on any given day, not the mere sum of the years we have lived. My grandmother lived the daily life of a sheltered, timid old lady and had done so for most of her life. The Hofmanns had the exuberance and self-assurance of people who knew how to enjoy life to its fullest. Each morning we were there, we would all go out to Race Point to swim in the ocean, which, thankfully, was calm enough even for me. I had never seen my grandmother swim, much less wear a bathing suit. And I had never had a grandfather. For generations the women in my family had managed at a young age to lose their husbands one way or another.
And then there was the German-ness. Again, so different from my family, who even as second-generationers still lived in an insular community and filtered their sensibilities, their views of people and the world around them, through their German-ness. The Hofmanns, in this country for only twenty-five years, kept their door always open. That weekend people streamed in and out—artists to have a chat, students to say good-bye to their teacher. The Hofmanns’ accents, still dripping of Munich, had at first put my supersensitized ears on red alert. But it didn’t take long to be seduced by the gemütlichkeit and Miz’s cooking.
That first evening, Miz and I engaged in a long talk about food. She probably asked me whether I liked to cook and whether, having grown up with German heritage, I had any favorite foods. I would have told her that no, I had never learned to cook, that my mother didn’t like to cook, and that my favorite dinner had been hot dogs, canned peas, and soggy rice. She no doubt would have noted the knockwurst connection, before adding that long-cooked rice was a wonderful German breakfast cereal, a dish she remembered fondly from her own childhood. I chimed in with my own memories of zucker butterbrot, a treat I loved when I was little. The next morning, there was the large pot of stewing rice on the stove. She ladled it out for me with dollops of butter and brown sugar, and, sure enough, slices of bread slathered with butter and sugar. Children together, we sat down and ate our porridge.
Hans had an extraordinary presence. His big, round, open-as-the-sun face still shines in my mind. And his feet, in the sandals of summer, large and square, the big toes raised up, as if ready to spring into action. For a thick-set man, his movements were unexpectedly agile and quick. There was a heat coming off him, a furnace at full blast. Even in repose, the fires burned. At times I saw him sitting alone in the backyard, plunged so deep inside himself that I wondered if he would be able to find his way back.
I had come to take for granted that artists took up all the available space and filled up the air with their single-minded passion for their work. Though I admired that passion, it didn’t make them particularly accessible. Sometimes I would try to discern the difference between self-absorption, which I could understand, and coldness, which I deplored. A fine line, and often I wondered if I was misreading the two. The distinction mattered, because in those days I was concerned about whether I liked those people and, more important to me, whether they liked me.
Many times I heard artists described by women as teddy bears, usually the burly types, like David Smith, Rothko, Hofmann, and even Pollock. Let me say that I never met an artist who was a teddy bear. All too often, the heat within did not spill over into warmth toward others. Hans was a hard call. As compelling as I found his robust energy, it was tamped down by an impenetrable layer of detachment. As if he were saying, What doesn’t serve my art doesn’t serve me. On the other hand, Clem, who never, to my knowledge, had been called anything even faintly resembling a teddy bear, and despite his relentless passion for art, was an outspoken believer in life before art. And how grateful I was for it.
Hans may have been uninterested in general conversation or, heaven forbid, small talk, but he was known as the greatest communicator. Just as his energy lit up his art and any space he was in, for his twenty-five years as a teacher it lit up all the artists who were fortunate enough to walk into his schoolyard, or be present at the renowned lectures he delivered in the late thirties. Clem had just moved into the city from Brooklyn and had begun to mix and mingle with the downtown artists. He heard some of those lectures and often spoke of the influence they had had on his perception of art. I could imagine Hans’s voice, guttural and booming—perhaps more booming by the time I met him, because by then he was quite deaf. Miz would often signal him to put in his hearing aids, signals he would usually ignore. Around Clem, he was interested in a dialogue and he would put them in. Around many others, not so, and at parties, never.
Hans was the first and most important star in my small, though rapidly expanding, firmament of painters. He and I shared a bond no one knew about, including him. In 1955, shortly before my college graduation, he had introduced me to art.
One night my new circle of art friends commandeered me into helping them prepare for the installation of some pictures by a painter called Hans Hofmann. I didn’t need coercing; I was in the middle of a brain-numbing attempt to index Finnegan’s Wake à la Kenneth Burke, an exercise that I would soon look back on as the absurdist dead end of the modernist spiral. My friends’ project would be an all-nighter in the Carriage Barn, the multipurpose arts space at that time. We unpacked the pictures, flipped them facedown, attached screw eyes and measured and strung wires, retacked stripping, and finally flipped them over again and stood them around the main floor of the barn.
Then came the good part. We broke open a quart of Mr. Boston’s gin and Ritz crackers, and talked through what remained of the night. And we played with the art. Moved the paintings around. What looked good next to what, and why. And which ones we liked more than others, and why. And in the process, I looked at art for the first time. I touched the paint, the textures of art, for the first time. With Hans, I learned how to handle pictures—with respect but not awe, carefully but not timidly. How to look at a picture separately and next to others. I learned that they had fronts and backs, that they were man-made, by someone who had something to say. And I had fun with art. Such was my night with Hans.
Now here I was two years later, sleeping in his house in Provincetown, being mothered by his wife. I hadn’t attended the opening reception of that Bennington retrospective. I would have considered myself too cool for that sort of formal folderol. Hell, I would have had to brush my hair. Clem would have been there. Hans and Miz, too, no doubt. Would Clem have fallen in love with my blauen augen across the crowded room? Unlikely. Everything in its own time.
That weekend on the Cape we lived moment to moment. During those last days of summer, Provincetown was a moveable party town. Oh, we had our quiet times with the Hofmanns on the beach or sitting around the kitchen table. Sometimes Hans and Clem would wander off to the studio while Miz and I hung out on the porch. But other times, Clem and I would stroll down Commerce Street, running into everyone we knew and then some, joining up and going back to this one’s studio or that one’s deck for a drink, then moving on, eating a bit here and there, parties forming on the spot—invitational parties were rare and never as much fun—and maybe ending the evening dancing at the Flagsh
ip or the Pilgrim Club, or wherever there was music, which was everywhere.
Oh, it was free and easy. People flirting the night away. Like New York, it never slept. A few men even flirted with me. Well, at least a little. Something that never happened in the city. The only time someone did make a pass at me was during an opening at Martha Jackson’s gallery. A young guy had crashed what he thought was a party, gotten drunk, and maneuvered me into a corner. He was quickly ushered out. I always figured I was off limits. After all, a wife was a wife, or at least Clem’s wife was Clem’s wife. Whatever. But that night confirmed what a small, tight-knit family I had married into. Another lesson learned: There were insiders and outsiders.
And how nice to be an insider in Provincetown. All the same people one saw in the city, but not the same at all. Everyone so laid back and glad-handing. Maybe because it was like a small-town neighborhood where people walked, everything and everybody just a shout away. I think of Milton Avery in front of his house, waving hello and inviting us in. He sat backlit by the sea. Pipe at hand. Sally nearby. Another soul-mated pair, like the Hofmanns. I was always on the alert for what a life partnership might look like. Were there clues I could learn from? If it was possible for others, maybe it would be possible for us.
A Complicated Marriage Page 11