Pollock was buried, as he wished, in Green River Cemetery out near the end of Accabonac Road. Green River is a bucolic country cemetery, deep in the heart of Springs, with a loose-gravel horseshoe driveway and lichen-covered tombstones, some 300 years old, chiseled with the names of the original Bonackers. Little was known about Green River Cemetery before Pollock was buried there, and even the cemetery trustees aren’t sure how it got its name (except that it might be named after a man named Sam Green Miller, who lived nearby). There is certainly no river anywhere. Krasner was able to buy three plots for $300. Pollock is buried on the top of a small knoll, and his friends dragged there, by truck and tractor and dint of will, a fifty-ton boulder called a glacial erratic, to mark his resting place. The boulder is half submerged in the earth, covered in moss and embedded with a modest plaque bearing his signature.
After Pollock died, Lee Krasner had few close friends, save Dragon and Ossorio. She remained a frequent guest at The Creeks. “Lee was afraid to sleep alone,” Dragon said, “and so she stayed with us, or I slept at her place. In a couple of years she took an apartment on Madison Avenue, and she asked me to help her with the decorating. She wanted it to look different and yet have the furniture work with her art and Jackson’s. One day we were in an antique store on Third Avenue when I saw the horned loveseat. It was such a perfect metaphor—for her life with Jackson, for my life with Ossorio—the twisting shape, the brutality and beauty of the horns, I insisted she buy it on the spot.”
Within two decades Pollock’s work and life and death became legend—and the subject of a dozen biographies and three movie projects, one developed by Robert De Niro, who wants to play Pollock, and one developed by Barbra Streisand, who wants to play Krasner. Green River Cemetery itself has turned into a mythical burying ground. The price of plots around Pollock’s grave began to escalate in value about as much as the price of his paintings. (The year after Pollock died, his Blue Poles was sold to pond resident Ben Heller for $32,000, who sold it a few years later to the Australian government for $2.2 million.) Within a decade of Pollock’s death, every creative artist of his generation wanted to be buried near him at Green River, and many were, including Ad Reinhardt, Wilfrid Zogbaum, Abraham Rattner, the journalist A. J. Liebling, composer Stefan Wolpe, avant-garde filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek (whose tombstone is a reel of film), Stuart Davis, Fredrick Edouard, the naturalist Merrill Millar Lake, and the poet Frank O’Hara, whose most elegant epitaph says, “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.” When O’Hara, a frequent visitor but not a resident of the East End, was buried at Green River, Lee Krasner was outraged. “He’s not even a summer rental!” she cried in protest.
The cemetery sold out in the late seventies, and in the late eighties the trustees were able to obtain an adjacent acre at the price of $50,000, which would allow for 1,500 more grave sites. These are now mostly gone.
Jackson Pollock and the Hamptons have become synonymous. Of all the celebrated figures who have lived in the East End, his fame is the most enduring. The house in Springs that Pollock and Krasner lived in has become a shrine, a national historical landmark, the only one of its kind that belonged to an artist, and is run by the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Tours are given by appointment to the public, who traipse in reverent silence through the house, past the table he overturned that Thanksgiving weekend, the porch where they watched the sunset that first night, and Jackson’s studio, where hardened brushes stand in coffee cans just as he left them the day he died. The floor on which he painted his canvases, splattered with layers of dripped paint, is in itself so valuable that visitors are requested to put paper booties on their feet before they are allowed to walk on it.
Lee Krasner spent the rest of her life nurturing the Jackson Pollock legend. Through her crafty manipulations, the price of Pollock’s paintings skyrocketed into the millions, and by the time Krasner died thirty-one years after Pollock, in 1987, she had amassed a personal fortune of $26 million. She was buried near Pollock, under a smaller yet still formidable glacial erratic. She left everything to a foundation—not a painting to a friend or a relative, except for one single object: the horned loveseat that she bought with Ted Dragon on Third Avenue three decades before.
Not many artists live in Springs now. It has become middle-class, mostly hardworking families with lots of kids, surrounded by vacation homes in the low six-figure range. It has the highest school tax of any community in the Hamptons. The generation of successful artists, like Brice Marden, Ross Bleckner, and Julian Schnabel, all live south of the highway in million-dollar homes. Robert Motherwell’s house, the icon of abstract expressionism in the Hamptons, was sold in 1952 to Grove Press president and First Amendment rights champion Barnet Rosset, who lived in it for thirty years and maintained it as a landmark. Eventually, in 1985, it was purchased by the Peck family, who claimed that the historic Quonset hut had degenerated until it was unsalvageable and had to be destroyed. In response to a public outcry, Stephen Peck offered the house to anyone who could cart it off, but it was impossible to disassemble without destroying it; eventually it was torn down, and the foundation filled in.
Barnet Rosset, for one, was outraged. “It would be fitting,” he said, “if all the trees and bushes and flowers that we planted with such great love and nourished from within that house would now wither and die from sorrow.”
When the New York Times contacted Motherwell in his New York studio to tell him that his unusual house had been bulldozed in favor of a postmodern weekend home by its current owners, he was “stunned.” “It reminds me of the title of that great Greek poem,” Motherwell sighed, “‘The Barbarians Are Coming.’”
Dragon
I DIDN’T COME to dinner,” Ted Dragon said, remembering those heady years at The Creeks. “You see, I’m a Taurian. I loved the idea of tables being set correctly and the menus being perfect, but the people… I just couldn’t care less.” Except for Lee Krasner, “most of the people who passed in and out of the house weren’t interested in me in the least.” Dragon surmised that they regarded him as “some kept thing.” It became a joke among their friends that Dragon and Ossorio were never seen together. “At one point,” said Sydney Butchkes, the artist, “Ted Dragon seemed to disappear.” Indeed, one acquaintance remembered actually watching Dragon “vanish into the distance as guests arrived for a party, not to be seen again for the entire night.”
“I never left the Creeks,” Dragon said. “Never. I really lived there all those years—summer, winter, and spring. Ossorio continued his exciting life in New York, he would go on trips abroad, but I just stayed at The Creeks. He liked the feeling that I was at home.” In the summer he had a few of his own social friends, discreetly gay men who spent the season in the Hamptons, but Ossorio showed no interest in knowing them, and in any event, they left by autumn, when a sense of deep isolation befell The Creeks.
The total population of East Hampton village dwindled to fewer than 2,000 people in the winter. Days ended about 4 P.M., when it got dark, and at night families stayed home. Just one restaurant operated throughout the rugged Northeast winter, and the movie theater was open only on Saturday night, when practically the whole town turned out. To add to the sense of remoteness, after New Year’s, the Long Island Railroad cut back its schedule, and on some nights the train ran only as far as Quogue. An hour could go by without even seeing a car on the highway. Weeks at a time Dragon sat alone in the mansion on the pond, the beach forbidding and eerie, the wind howling loudly day and night. “There wasn’t one light on Georgica Pond, except for our neighbors, the Larkins,” Dragon said, “and every night in the winter we’d flash our lights at six-thirty to let each other know we were okay, like a signal across Georgica Pond.”
One practical consideration in Dragon’s slavish dedication to The Creeks was security. An invaluable collection of art was on display at the house, including the historic Art Brut collection, more than 100 Dubuffets, and various Pollocks, Stills and Krasners. The
re was no such thing as home security alarms at the time, and The Creeks’ insurer, Lloyd’s of London, insisted that the house always be occupied—a demand taken seriously because of the frightening string of burglaries that were taking place in the East End.
Home burglaries were completely unheard of in the Hamptons, maybe one a decade, and even then it was never more than a stolen purse left near an open kitchen door. But from 1955 to 1959, at least twenty of the biggest homes in the Hamptons had been hit, all like The Creeks, standing alone down long driveways or isolated on the dunes. One by one they had been picked off, stripped of priceless art and antiques: Leo Castelli’s house on Jericho Road, Robert D. L. Gardiner’s mansion on Main Street in East Hampton, the Froelich and Frankau estates, the Condons’ and Hemings’ homes, and the Findlay estate in Southampton. The booty was museum quality, including Ming vases, Chippendale mirrors, original statuary, sterling candelabra, Kerman Oriental rugs, and a brace of rare antique dueling pistols. At the Love joy house in Amagansett, the summer residence of a wealthy physician, the entire contents of furniture was emptied out, a prodigious task, except for a set of china that the thieves had set aside but for some reason left behind.
And so Ted Dragon stood sentry at The Creeks as the police and insurance investigators set out to solve the crimes. People exchanged theories and gossiped at the post office. The combined wisdom of the Southampton and East Hampton police detectives working on the case was that because of the sheer bulk of furniture stolen at each heist—including heavy oak bedroom sets and dining room tables and chairs—the thefts were the work of a team of professional burglars with a small truck. They were more than likely armed and not to be approached. Everyone was on the alert for suspicious-looking vehicles, and the police methodically patrolled the estate areas, hoping to catch the burglars in the act.
The chief of police of East Hampton, Francis Leddy, and Carl Dordelman, a patrolman, were doing just that one wet day in February 1959. It was the second day of a relentless rain made icy by frigid gusts off the Atlantic. Leddy and Dordelman drove out to the windswept tail of West End Road, where it narrows to a slip of sand. At the tip stood Juan Trippe’s home, in front of which was parked a familiar-looking 1958 Oldsmobile. The two policemen pulled the patrol car out of sight and waited quietly for someone to appear. Presently, a second-floor bedroom window slowly slid open, and a burglar crawled out onto a sloping roof carrying a chair.
It was Ted Dragon.
Dordelman and Leddy were on him in a moment. He seemed surprised and dazed at first and then was clearly relieved to have been caught. “I knew you would be looking for me at night,” Dragon told Leddy, “so I did it in the daytime. Always on rainy days, because I read in Mickey Spillane that the rain would wash the footprints away.”
At the Newtown Lane jail, Ted Dragon Young was charged with grand larceny and put in a holding room. Ossorio was summoned at The Creeks, and the East Hampton Star was tipped off. Its editor, Everett Rattray, Jeannette Rattray’s son, rushed to the jailhouse to interview Dragon and take his picture even before Ossorio was able to get there to stop it. Dragon was in a pitiful state, terrified of what Ossorio would say. But there was not the slightest trace of reproach in Ossorio’s manner. He was dignified and courteous with everyone at the police station. He unfailingly met the gaze of all who greeted him, without a hint of embarrassment; most of all, he was kind to Dragon and solicitous of his comfort.
“He was a rock,” Dragon said, “the rock of Gibraltar. He said that I had nothing to worry about, no matter what it took, everything would be taken care of. He said to me, ‘I know that you’re very upset and that you didn’t know what you were doing, and it’s fine.’ He said that he had called his father to tell him what happened, ‘And you know what my father said? “That’s great! I always thought Ted Dragon was too good to be true!” ’” Then Ossorio arranged for dinner to be brought in from the Maidstone Arms restaurant, and stayed with Dragon until he was allowed to go home.
Dragon has never publicly been able to explain why he took all the furniture, and he’s still not sure himself. He didn’t do it for gain—he never sold any of it. “I just loved beautiful things so much, and sometimes I was appalled at how badly the furniture was being kept,” he said. He felt almost as if he were rescuing mistreated pets. He was also lonely and isolated. It started one day, he said, in late October, the most beautiful month in the Hamptons, when he took long walks with the dogs over the dunes. “I had those standard poodles,” Dragon said, “and one day I was walking them and passed Leo Castelli’s house.” Castelli was an art dealer, and Dragon had been there many times to visit the de Koonings when they had spent a summer with Castelli. A side door to the house had been left wide open, “flapping in the wind,” Dragon said. “In those days nobody locked their houses anyway.” He walked in with the dogs and sat down. He sat there for a while, looking around and admiring things, listening to the quiet, and then he picked out something he liked, a covered jar, and took it home. When Ossorio saw the jar and asked where it had come from, Dragon told him that a relative in Massachusetts had sent it.
After that, he couldn’t stop. He was just so bored—and angry with Ossorio for being left at The Creeks—that it became a pastime. One New Year’s Eve, on his way back to The Creeks from a party, he passed Robert Gardiner’s huge stone mansion and thought, “I wonder what’s in there?” Dragon climbed to the second story, entered through a French door off a balcony, and hunted around the vast house until he chose a mirror and walked off with it. “The reason for the acts of burglary is completely beyond my powers of comprehension,” he told the East Hampton Star shortly after his arrest. “I just like antiques.”
Indeed, Dragon repaired, refinished, and reupholstered the furniture in need. He did such a good job with it that the owners marveled at how handsome their furniture looked when they got it back, and some even wrote him thank-you notes. One pleased dowager from Southampton, upon recovering her chairs from the police, told Dragon, “I never would have thought to put rose and gold on that Empire set.” Some of the reupholstered chairs were used at The Creeks; on occasion, Dragon related, they were sat in by their unknowing rightful owners. Most of the stolen goods, however, was stashed in the attic. “That attic—you couldn’t move,” Dragon said, smiling. When Ossorio began to question where all the furniture stored in the attic kept coming from, Dragon insisted that relatives in Northampton, Massachusetts, were sending it.
As for the police theory that the burglaries were committed by more than one person because of the difficulty in lifting the furniture, Dragon agreed that it took superhuman strength to carry it all. “God, some of those marble pieces! An entire four poster-bed and an eighteen-by-twenty Oriental rug!” Dragon marveled. But, Dragon said, he had “ballet strength,” and anyway, he was committed to the furniture he stole—and that gave him the fortitude to lift even the heaviest pieces. Just one time, though, it got to be too much. “That’s why I left the china behind at the Love joy house,” Dragon said. “I was so tuckered out with the bed, chairs, rug, and so forth, I had no strength for the dishes.”
Ted Dragon was treated harshly for his crimes, considering that most of the furniture was returned in better condition than when it was stolen, and that only one of the aggrieved owners pressed charges—Robert D. L. Gardiner. The greatest inconvenience Dragon caused was embarrassment to the victims. The aggregate insurance claims of all the thefts topped $150,000, when the real appraised value of the furniture turned out to be only $35,000. Even Robert D. L. Gardiner dropped his charges when the antique mirror Dragon took was revealed to be not very old—“Brooklyn circa 1941,” said Dragon with a wink.
Yet public sentiment against Dragon was scathing, and local authorities were determined that Dragon be punished, perhaps even banished from the town. On the recommendation from Evan Frankel, the so-called Squire of East Hampton, Ossorio hired a noted New York psychoanalyst, Dr. David Abrahamsen, who had a summer home in East Hampton and was th
e author of the book The Road to Emotional Maturity. A criminal attorney in Riverhead that Ossorio also hired recommended that “the defense would be to claim I had a mental disorder,” Dragon said. “They said that I had to plead insanity, that it was the only way I could get off without any jail time.”
At Suffolk County Court in Riverhead, Dragon was painted by his attorney as an emotionally disturbed man who was seeking psychiatric treatment. The lawyer asked for the court’s leniency. Dragon kept his chin up while Ossorio sat in the first row of the spectators’ seats, five feet behind him, for moral support. In a plea bargain, Dragon said, it was determined that in exchange for a suspended jail sentence, he would be remanded to West Hill, a private sanitarium in Connecticut. Once released from the hospital, he would continue outpatient therapy with Dr. Abrahamsen in Manhattan, living not in the MacDougal Alley townhouse with Ossorio but with court-approved custodians in an apartment on the Upper East Side until, said Dragon, Dr. Abrahamsen determined when—and if—he was well enough to return to East Hampton. The bill for all, footed by Ossorio.
“I will do everything in my power to be helped,” a heartsick Dragon said before he was sent off to the hospital, “and I hope someday to return and live my life here.… When this is all over, I’d like to visit those places I burglarized again—if the people would let me in—and see how they’re taking care of that furniture.”
Dragon made the best of his time at West Hill. He needlepointed and taught the other patients ballet. He also thought a lot about his decision to give up his career to live at The Creeks with Ossorio. Ossorio and his younger brother, Robert, visited Dragon regularly at the clinic, sometimes bringing him bonbons. They sat on benches in the gardens with the other patients and their families, trying to make the best of it. Dragon remembered one of his happiest days at West Hill was when he received a note from the artist Grace Hartigan that said, “Thank God we have a Robin Hood out on Long Island.” Another woman whose home Dragon had burglarized felt so guilty that he was sent to a psychiatric hospital, she called him on the phone and asked if he wanted to keep the furniture as a gift. Dragon said no, thank you, but the gesture was worth more to him than any piece of furniture.
Philistines at the Hedgerow Page 15