Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  Everywhere is Ossorio. Not just the congregations on the walls, but Ossorio himself, thick in the air, a complement to Dragon. Sitting in his large living room, Dragon seems left behind. They say Ossorio owned The Creeks, but it was Dragon to whom The Creeks belonged. “I can’t live in the past,” he warned when asked about The Creeks. He put a few logs on the fire, and a black-and-white cat, Annette (whom Dragon saved from Montauk Highway after she was thrown from a car), curled up on a chair with one of Dragon’s needlepoint pillows. Dragon scolded her, “I will not have it!” and put her in the kitchen. Then he nestled back into a corner of the sofa, tea in hand.

  “Ron Perelman isn’t the story of The Creeks,” Dragon said, shaking his head. “He’s the irony of what happened to The Creeks. The Creeks isn’t just a place, it’s a time, about creativity and wonder. For me, The Creeks begins in spring of 1949, when Alfonso Ossorio said to me, ‘You will be very surprised by the painting that’s going to be delivered today. I don’t think you’ll like it at all. It’s by a painter named Jackson Pollock, and it’s all drips.’”

  2

  IN 1949 Dragon was a twenty-five-year-old ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet. He had never heard of Pollock, but neither had he heard of Giacometti, whose sculpture was standing in the living room downstairs. Dragon and his lover, Alfonso Ossorio, thirty-three, were in the tall, sunny studio of the older man’s MacDougal Alley carriage house in Greenwich Village, with its two-story northern skylight, flower-filled balcony, and thick smell of paints and solvents. Ossorio, a tall, courtly man with gentle Eurasian eyes and a lilting British accent, knew about many things that Dragon did not. He had brilliant taste in art and was almost prescient in finding important new talent. He was a polymath with a Harvard degree and spoke eight languages, including ancient Greek; he read and retained a book a night. He was also heir to one of the largest sugar-refining fortunes in the world; Domino and Jack Frost both depended on his family’s operation for their processed sugar.

  But by vocation Ossorio was an artist, as passionate about his craft as the poorest artisans around the corner on Eighth Street. Surprisingly, in complete contrast to his buttoned-downed personality, his Dalí-esque illustrations of half-human forms, blood-spurting nipples, and screeching faces with sections missing—all heavily laced with Catholic symbolism—were so grotesque and peculiar that they were considered by many to be “outsider art,” the work of the estranged or insane. Although beautifully executed and a mesmerizing personal vision, his work was never fully respected, and he was far more appreciated as a wealthy collector than as a painter—a “gilded eccentric fluttering on the edges of postwar American art,” as The New Yorker once described him. But in his calm, philosophical way, Ossorio didn’t care. He was driven to create the images in his work; he had no choice—he believed the urge to create was a gift from God.

  For all his optimism and brilliant mind, he was a complicated man with many surprising tastes, including a voracious appetite for pornography, particularly of men of color. In his younger years, when he was in the U.S. Army, he had prided himself on his wildness and the variety of his sex partners. He was also obsessive in everything that held his attention, keeping meticulous notebooks filled with drawings and notations; unfortunately, none of them are autobiographical. He was one of six sons in an unusual union of a Filipino-Spanish-Chinese mother and a Spanish father, and he suffered an almost Dickensian childhood. His cold, selfish parents, obsessed with anglicizing their children, shipped him off to a series of strict Benedictine boarding schools in Europe. During one stretch he didn’t see his parents at all for five years. In 1941, at age twenty-five, after graduating from Harvard and attending the Rhode Island School of Design, he married Bridget Hubrecht, a family friend. Hubrecht, a tragic character, was an opium addict, and Ossorio talked himself into thinking he could save her. The troubled union ended in divorce, and Hubrecht died within a year. Ossorio was drafted into the U.S. Army and spent his three-year stint perched on a ladder above an operating table at Camp Ellis, Illinois, making detailed drawings of emergency operations for textbooks. His depiction of entrails and exposed muscle became a leitmotiv in his art and is an odd juxtaposition to his alternative theme of Christian symbolism.

  Dragon and Ossorio met in the summer of 1948 in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, where Ossorio had rented a house in which to paint and Dragon was on a scholarship to Jacob’s Pillow, an avant-garde dance troupe. One day Ossorio was sketching at an easel in a meadow brimming with wildflowers when Ted Dragon happened by, in shorts, picking nosegays. Ted Dragon Young (Broadway choreographer Agnes de Mille told him to drop the “Young” at an audition) was the handsome son of a tavern owner from Northampton, Massachusetts. Of French-Canadian extraction, he was handsome and angular, with the body of a dancer. The only formal dance training Dragon had received was at the local YMCA, yet his innate sense of drama and leonine physicality landed him roles in dance companies from the Paris Opera to Jacob’s Pillow. Their courtship was peripatetic. After passing the summer together, with a long separation after, the following spring Ossorio asked Dragon to move in with him at his newly purchased Greek Revival carriage house in Greenwich Village. “He wanted to settle down together for good,” said Dragon, “but we were so completely different, and I wasn’t certain either of us could settle down. But he was willing to try and, I guess, so was I.” Two weeks after Dragon moved in, the Jackson Pollock arrived.

  Dragon was frankly amazed when the canvas was unpacked. “Alfonso was right,” Dragon said, “I couldn’t believe it.” It was a four-by-eight silver-and-rust-colored field with great gobs of red, yellow, and white aluminum paint splashed across it. “You spent money on that?” Dragon asked Ossorio. “I can’t believe anybody would pay for that.” Ossorio laughed and told him the canvas was called Number 5 and that at $1,500, it was the only painting Pollock had sold from the show. “I understand why,” Dragon said.

  What Ossorio wasn’t telling Dragon at the moment was that he believed Jackson Pollock might be some sort of a genius, or as Ossorio is famously quoted, “a man who had gone beyond Picasso.” Pollock had been one of the Works Progress Administration–supported artists, a drunk and a so-called cowboy from Cody, Wyoming, who was notorious in New York art circles for eating with his hands and pawing women. He had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for alcoholic cures that never worked, and he could be found almost every night at the Cedar Tavern on University Place, getting drunk and picking fights. Pollock was a disciple of Thomas Hart Benton, but his handsome early paintings—surrealistic, figurative work with a Midwestern bent—never interested Ossorio, who didn’t consider them of particular merit.

  And now this. In January 1949, at a show at the Betty Parsons Gallery on West Fifty-seventh Street, Ossorio had discovered a reborn Jackson Pollock. The artist had moved out to a farmhouse in East Hampton, where he had miraculously sobered up and started painting these remarkable “drip” canvases—splattering, splashing, dripping paint from his brush like honey from a stick. Ossorio decided that the paintings were not only beautiful but important, and he snatched up the one called Number 5.

  Alas, “the painting arrived damaged,” Dragon said. “When they uncrated it, Ossorio found the paint had been smudged on the left side during shipping, although I told him I didn’t see how anybody could possibly tell.” Ossorio phoned Pollock personally and asked him if he would repair the painting. Pollock, encouraged by his wife, Lee Krasner, told Ossorio that he would be happy to fix the canvas, but only if Ossorio delivered it personally to East Hampton and spent the weekend.

  Ossorio was flattered. He had been all over the world—he was born in the Philippines, educated in Great Britain and Europe, and had lived in Paris—but had never been to East Hampton. “So it was a few weeks later,” Dragon said, that in early May 1949 “Alfonso and I loaded Number 5 into the back of a Ford Woodie station wagon and drove out to East Hampton for the first time.”

  3

  I
T TOOK FIVE HOURS to get there in 1949, bucking the endless lights on the Sunrise Highway for 100 miles along a seemingly endless four-lane blacktop that eventually narrowed into Route 27, lined with bait-and-tackle shanties. The small Long Island suburban towns gave way to dense pine forests and fields of produce, fields so tabletop flat that it looked like Kansas. Unexpectedly there were bursts of duck farms—white, foamy fields of feathers, brightly lit even at night to make the ducks fatten faster. Farther east the light seemed to change, the air smelled crisp, and the horizon began to sparkle.

  When they finally arrived in the small, sleepy village of East Hampton that May afternoon, it looked just as it had for almost 200 years. No history had really touched it. No wars had been fought there, there hadn’t been many local disasters (save a few hurricanes), and there had been little change to the town by way of commerce. Everything from houses to door hinges had been made locally and handed down from father to son for generations. There weren’t many places in the world where everything had been kept so intact, from the Yankee stubbornness to Puritan values.

  On Main Street there were still hitching posts to tether the occasional horse-drawn wagon. There was a brick police station; one movie theater with hard wooden seats (open only Friday and Saturday nights); a one-room telephone central on the corner of Main and Newtown, where the operator slept on a cot at night; and a pharmacy and soda counter, where a gentleman dared not ask the pharmacist for a box of prophylactics.

  Ossorio and Dragon stopped at the Bohack Supermarket on Main Street and bought bags of groceries and a turkey to take to the Pollocks. They found the artist and his wife not south of the highway with the Summer Colony but in a ramshackle farmhouse a few miles north of the town in a place called Springs—population then, 360—a section literally and figuratively on the other side of the railroad tracks, or “below the bridge,” as townsfolk would say. Springs (cognoscenti never use the article) was the backwoods of town, deep country, undisturbed fields, thick woods, gorgeous ponds with green saltwater meadows. It was a closed community, culturally and socially isolated from East Hampton, with bloodlines so intertwined that natives even had their own derisive nickname, Bonackers (after the Accabonac Creek), East Hampton’s equivalent of hillbillies. In present-day East Hampton they are known as “Bubs.”

  Bonackers are mostly descendants of Lion Gardiner’s less-well-to-do employees, the Bennets and Kings and Lesters, who unlike Goody Garlick and her husband couldn’t afford to build houses in town when they moved to the mainland 400 years ago. They wound up in a patch of rich land about three miles square between Accabonac “Crik” and Louse Point. Fifteen generations of Bonackers had lived on this land, untouched by the good fortune and spoils brought by the Summer Colony. They subsisted as dirt-poor, small-time farmers and fishermen. The most financially productive Springs had ever been was during Prohibition, when the nooks and crannies of its waterfront made it a favorite rumrunners’ drop. It had one saloon, Jungle Pete’s, and one grocery, Springs General Store. It didn’t even have its own fire department until 1965; when one newcomer asked what to do in case of a fire, the Bubs’ solution was “Don’t have a fire.”

  You can still tell true Bonackers in East Hampton because of their distinctive Bonac dialect, an accent and speech pattern whose roots can be traced back to Dorset, England. It’s an exaggerated Yankee twang, such as saying “yit” for “yet” and repeating words twice, “Yes, yes,” or adding syllables, like “hay-at” for “hat.” Bonackers were not apt to be “long in the mouth” with summer strangers, whose presence sometimes turned their little neck of the woods “catty-wumper” instead of “finest-kind,” the way they liked things. Strangers were “from away,” especially guys like Pollock who they thought didn’t work for a living—they were called “drifts” because they appeared for a season or two and then faded from memory.

  “We were shocked when we got to where Jackson and Lee were living,” Dragon said. “It was squalor.” Ossorio called it “lamentable borderline existence.” They lived in a 200-year-old house with no heat or hot water and only a coal stove in the kitchen to keep warm. Pollock told them that it got so cold in the winter that the water froze in the toilets, and they still used the outhouse. “Jackson was so poor,” Dragon said, “that he held his pants up with a string. They couldn’t even afford a car—he rode around on a bicycle.” Lee said they lived off the clams Jackson dug himself out of Accabonac Creek and vegetables she grew in the garden. The previous winter the owner of Springs General Store finally took pity on them and accepted a small painting from Pollock to pay off his sixty-dollar bill. The grocer hung the painting in the store and told customers it was an “aerial view of Siberia.” Ten years later he sold it for $17,000, and it’s likely worth a million today.

  “Lee and I unpacked the groceries in the kitchen and cooked dinner,” Dragon said. “We were from two different worlds, but somehow we just clicked. Part of it was that we were both hitched to the stars in the family. Also, Ossorio and I didn’t want anything from these people, just to like them, and for Lee, anybody who was good for Jackson was like gold.” Krasner was forty-one years old, four years older than Jackson and nearly twice the age of the young dancer who sat in her kitchen. Pollock sometimes made fun of how ugly she was. She was the daughter of an orthodox Jew who owned a fruit store in Brooklyn, and was perhaps as unlikely a mate for the alcoholic pseudo-cowboy as Dragon was for Ossorio. Krasner was an important artist in her own right, and her intricately painted abstract forms made her one of the few women respected enough to gain membership in the 1930s WPA art program. But her dedication to her work was easily surpassed by her passion for Pollock. “Of course, I saw right away that she was obsessed with him,” Dragon said. “It wasn’t just love, she had subjugated herself and her career to his. I didn’t think I could ever do that for Ossorio. But the art world was so macho then, and Lee saw that a woman would never achieve acceptance like a male artist, so she became the fire under her man. Her love for him was like a madness. She was his caretaker, blindly.”

  Out on the small back porch, drinking iced tea, the mandarin, starched Ossorio, with his international education, and the tongue-tied, uncommunicative Pollock, who wasn’t particularly fond of homosexuals, were getting to know each other. Pollock, a short, balding man with a cigarette dangling omnipresently from his lips, told Ossorio that he and Lee had come out to East Hampton to visit friends and had liked it so much, they decided to rent a house themselves. It was a pretty common experience, people coming out one time and feeling compelled to return. He said that Partisan Review art and literary critic Harold Rosenberg and his wife, writer May Tabak, had moved to East Hampton within the past few years, as had the Dutch painter Willem de Kooning, who moved to Springs from Manhattan. Robert Motherwell was out there too, but he had some family money (he was the son of a doctor) and was able to buy a four-acre plot south of the highway at Georgica and Jericho Roads for a whopping $1,200. He had commissioned a controversial house designed by French modernist architect Pierre Chareau, who had met Motherwell one night at the East Hampton home of Jane Bowles. The house, a celebration of industrial architecture, was built like a vast metal Quonset hut sunk into the ground, with sections of glass-brick walls and roof. It was quite ugly, actually, cold and drafty and in need of constant repair. The house was an object of scorn among the shingled enclaves of the Summer Colony, where it stood out like an icon of its time, daring and challenging, heralding the arrival of the abstract expressionists to the Hamptons. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe visited the house, and in 1964 Samuel Beckett spent a week there.

  “When it got to sundown,” Dragon said, “Lee and I went out on the back porch, and the four of us watched the waning of the light. Ossorio and I had never seen light like that before.” Artists have talked about the sea-distilled “wet light” in the Hamptons for more than 100 years. In the Hamptons, colors can appear more vivid or more muted than anywhere else in the world, yet on days when the sky is clear, the light see
ms to vibrate, virtually humming. The theory is that because the Hamptons are enveloped by sea and ponds and kettle holes, the luminous, rippling water patterns give off horizontal bands of light reflected by the water molecules, enchanting the ether.

  As the two couples watched the sunset on the back porch, the night grew still and the rest of the world seemed very far away. The only sound was crickets, and even the fireflies seemed to be having a hard time moving through the dense air. It was an indelible moment for Dragon. “The next day,” he said, “we were miserable to be leaving, and as we headed back to New York, driving through the town, Ossorio and I decided that we were going to come back and spend the rest of the summer. We just never thought we’d end up there for good.”

  4

  THE ARRIVAL of Motherwell, Pollock, Ossorio, and the hundreds of other artists who migrated to East Hampton in the late forties and early fifties was actually the third colony of artists to claim the town as its own. The first was in the 1870s, when a group of twelve highly spirited young artists called the Tile Club appeared out of nowhere and helped turn a sleepy little outpost into a chic resort. The Tile Club was a nineteenth-century artists’ Rat Pack, the up-and-coming art stars of their day, including William Merritt Chase and Stanford White (who would abandon art for architecture). They were brats and libertines, schooled in Paris and recently returned to New York, where they met once a week in a Greenwich Village townhouse to exchange scandalizing gossip about art and women, smoke tobacco, and paint large, square Spanish tiles (which were in vogue at the time), hence the Tile Club name. In the spring of 1877, they cleverly convinced Scribner’s Monthly to underwrite an expedition of the Tile Club to the eastern tip of Long Island, from which they would return with an illustrated record of their adventures. With Scribner’s blessings they packed their easels and palettes and, dressed in their brown velveteens, took the Long Island Railroad out to Sayville, where they all bought matching large straw hats. Then by rail to Bridgehampton, where they merrily had matching long red ribbons sewn on their hats at the local milliner’s. Then off by carriage to Sag Harbor, and later to Montauk, where they interviewed the dying Montauk chief, Pharaoh. Finally, the Tile Club arrived in East Hampton, where they became infatuated with the town’s elegiac beauty and the broad green lawn called Main Street. They lingered, reluctant to leave, staying at Miss Annie Huntting’s rambling boardinghouse next to the Presbyterian Church. When the parishioners arrived for services early Sunday morning, the Tilers were still up from the night before, smoking pipes and making a racket, and the Presbyterians dubbed the place Rowdy Hall. The name stuck, and forty years later, in July 1931, when the house was rented for the summer to John Vernou “Black Jack” Bouvier III and his wife, Janet, it was to Rowdy Hall that his daughter Jacqueline, the future first lady, was brought after she was born in Southampton Hospital.