Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  Eventually, Dr. Abrahamsen determined that after two years in exile, Dragon was well enough to return to East Hampton. As part of his fee, according to Dragon, Ossorio gave him at least one Dubuffet painting.

  Dragon’s misadventure was the scandal of the decade in East Hampton. He certainly found out who his friends were. Lee Krasner, for one, thought Dragon’s heists were “terrific” and wanted to hear every detail. Others pulled away; some were downright mean. The Guild Hall—Maidstone crowd, whose acceptance and respect Ossorio had painstakingly earned over the years, began to call The Creeks “The Creeps.” For a proud man like Ossorio, nothing could have humiliated him more than a public scandal. But he was outraged at the suggestion that he sever his relationship with Dragon or that Dragon should not return to East Hampton. “My dear, nothing human is strange to me,” he repeatedly said. “One is always sorry at one moment of one’s life for everything one has done.”

  What’s more, he knew that he was at least partly responsible for what happened. He had asked the young dancer to give up everything for The Creeks and had diminished him in the process. He had taken a young man who loved to dance and turned him into a concierge. He would never think of turning his back on Ted now. He told B. H. Friedman, “Bob, you mustn’t ever think it was one of my charities. This was an act of love.”

  The incident “cemented our relationship,” Dragon said. “The sword forged in fire is often the strongest. How could you ever turn away from a person who has stood by you like that?”

  It took a measure of even greater bravery for Ted Dragon to return to East Hampton in 1961. But it wasn’t as if Dragon was prepared to fade, humiliated, into the woodwork. “I never stopped feeling ‘This is who I am, and if you don’t like it, you can go away.’” In some odd way his newfound notoriety gave him even more license to express himself, and he began to wear caftans and sarilike robes, accessorized with clunky costume jewelry and headpieces, or to don multicolored wigs, one day blond, one day brunette. No matter what Dragon looked like, Ossorio never uttered a word of criticism. “You’re like one of my paintings” was his only comment.

  The Summer Colony, and the artist community as well, was unabashedly fascinated with Dragon. Nobody seemed to know how to behave around him, so Dragon decided to show them. Not long after his return, Harry Acton Striebel, a successful fashion designer and a friend of Dragon’s, threw a party for several hundred people at the height of the summer. When the party was going full blast, a large hoop with a sheet stretched over it was carried out of the forest and doused in kerosene in front of the curious guests. Then Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was put on the loudspeaker system, and the hoop was set on fire with torches. Suddenly, Ted Dragon burst through the flames, leaping through the air in a dramatic costume of gold brocade, greeted by a tumultuous roar of approval from the guests.

  2

  PERHAPS NOT COINCIDENTALLY, about the time of Dragon’s crisis Ossorio experienced a creative breakthrough that dramatically altered the direction of his work. It was almost as if Dragon’s petite fou had freed him to take a leap of faith in his art. Since falling under the spell of Pollock and Dubuffet ten years earlier, Ossorio’s work was mired in abstract, emotional canvases, whorling wax-and-watercolor paintings derivative of the two men he so admired. But when Dragon returned to East Hampton, Ossorio had begun to experiment with the technique of pasting objects onto his paintings, turning them into three-dimensional collages, much the way Dubuffet had used wire and “found” objects on his canvases. Soon Ossorio did away with canvases altogether, using instead pieces of wood as a background—amorphous shapes or slabs of plywood on which he would mount myriad objects and paint them bright colors. These objects consisted of what Ossorio called the “residue of life,” or what one critic described as “dead things, remnants and left-overs.” Ossorio called them “congregations,” and they became his trademark.

  In their own way, the congregations were just as peculiar as his drawings of body parts but were even more mesmerizing and phantasmic. Their most recurrent features were brightly colored extrusions of congealed plastic, reminiscent of the entrails of his earlier work. Ossorio made regular visits to industrial factories to hunt for these organlike globs, which he bought by weight. The plastic lumps became a thematic component of the densely filled congregations, which also frequently comprised hat blocks, animal bones (“The house smelled from the dinner bones boiling in ammonia on the stove,” said Dragon), human teeth bought by the bucketful from a dental school, doorknobs, garden scythes, rusted rakes, antlers, religious iconography, and most of all, glass eyeballs. Glass eyeballs abounded in all his congregations, peering out from under objects or tucked away as surprises in dark corners. He was so enamored of glass eyeballs that when he heard the eyeball manufacturer was going to switch to plastic, he bought out the entire factory’s stock and warehoused it on tables in his studio. It all created a general feeling of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. He was in constant need of fresh matériel, and friends and neighbors brought him care packages full of oddities; a local fisherman would turn up with a shark’s jaw, or artist Louise Nevelson would drop by with a plastic garbage bag of wooden shoe lasts discarded from her own work.

  Once these objects were affixed, they were painted in carnival-like enamels of red, blue, and white. These were the colors of medieval Christian symbolism, Ossorio said—red for charity, blue for hope, and white for faith—and they became his trademark colors. But the colors looked garish, not symbolic, and the resulting, writhing, overspilling congregations—although in retrospect an extraordinary personal invention—at the time seemed vulgar and cheap. One wag said that they looked as if a pin-ball machine had thrown up. Grace Glueck, the art critic of the New York Times, reported they appeared to be “what was left after cannibals feasted on Balkan royalty.” Another New York Times critic called them “exuberant models of excess and bad taste.” The New Yorker dismissed them as a pop-art “footnote.”

  But Ossorio had never been dissuaded by critics. He decided instead to abandon all other methods of work and make congregations exclusively. He began to churn them out at a prolific rate, developing an assembly-line method by making small pieces on individual shingles and storing the components on racks, waiting to be popped into a larger whole. The walls and tabletops of the studio were covered with taxidermied animal heads, bleached bones, plastic blobs, finials, and newel posts. “He made so many congregations,” said Dragon, “they began to fill the walls of the house. Quite literally. “Pollocks, de Koonings, Krasners, Dubuffets, wall to wall, floor to ceiling—with barely half an inch of space between them. When we ran out of wall space, we began to hang them inside of closet doors. Next thing, we did the unthinkable—we hired a carpenter and had some of the windows boarded up in the dining room so we could have more hanging space.” Finally, in 1970, at Dragon’s suggestion, most of the interior walls of The Creeks were painted jet-black, and the dining room, where Lavender Mist hung, purple, “so the paintings would stand out,” Dragon said, “like diamonds on a jeweler’s black velvet tray.”

  The black walls were part of a process that turned the entire house itself into a congregation. The task of interior decoration had been left to Dragon. He had only one caveat from Ossorio: not to place anything in front of the paintings. Both men were acquisitive; Dragon had an eye for good antiques, and Ossorio liked the oddball trinket. Over the decades The Creeks began to fill with a phantasmagorical collection of objets d’art, thousands of things, statues, tchotchkes, hobo art, paintings, junk—all stacked on tables, hung, leaned—the divine intermingled with trash, the precious with the tawdry. Every day more was added, another piece, another doodad, until it went way beyond clutter as a decorative style and into a sort of madness. “A house is never finished until the hearse is at the door,” Dragon said. Architectural Plus magazine described the interior of the house as a work of art unto itself, like Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, and said it made Salvador Dalí’s bizarrely decorated house
at Port Lligat “look like a San Diego motel by comparison.”

  There was also a motif of Roman Catholic iconography throughout the house, every imaginable kind of santo and representation of Christ, crucifixes of all sizes and dimensions, so many that one day Lee Krasner, sick of looking at them, told Ted, “Why don’t you just put all of it in one room and build yourself a damn basilica.” Dragon did just that; on the second floor he designed a dramatically decorated chapel by draping the walls and windows in sheets and setting up an altar with a large statue of Christ and pictures of Mary flanked by gold incense burners and a hidden tape recorder that played soft Gregorian chants. It looked like a Gypsy fortune-teller’s storefront.

  In some ways, more remarkable than the collection of objects was that Ted Dragon moved these things, every day, from room to room, or just to opposite sídes of a table. “It wouldn’t have been interesting to see them in the same place every day,” he said, aghast at the thought. “Many years ago my piano teacher told me that wherever the eye falls in a room, it should find something pretty or unusual or different to look at.”

  Also integrated into this Dadaesque crush were Dragon’s beloved standard poodles, hundreds of plants and flowers, and forty birds, a whole squawking aviary of them—lovebirds, mynahs, and parrots, one of which relentlessly cried out, “Alfonso? Where are you? Stop it, you fool!” Ossorio threatened Dragon, “If I see one more bird, I’m going to wring its neck!” There were so many pets that Dragon consecrated his own pet cemetery on the property, just west of Ossorio’s studio, where he installed a small burbling fountain and a statue of the Virgin Mary. Whenever a pet died, Dragon would order a handcrafted little coffin, and the animal would be buried with full Catholic rites and regalia.

  3

  BEFORE LONG, the interior design of the house began to creep right out the front door, like a trailing vine, one tendril at a time, first covering the outside of the building, then all over the grounds of the estate itself. It began in 1970 when Ossorio built a controversial, 300-foot concrete retaining wall to protect The Creeks from the annual overflowing of the pond. This kind of retaining wall is illegal now, as it denudes the shoreline, but by putting it in when he did, Ossorio saved the foundation of the mansion from certain ruin. Every spring, the swollen waters of the pond turn much of the surrounding land into swamp, filling the basements of the mansions on its shores with water so high that some residents keep rowboats in their cellars. The brackish water also floods the septic tanks, adding an unpleasant urgency to bringing the water down. The simple solution is to “let” the pond into the Atlantic, via a dug channel, every six months, but environmental and wildlife protection laws prohibit disturbing the area’s natural ecological balance—health problems and foundations of the mansions be damned. In 1991, in frustration, one of the many millionaires who live around the pond secretly paid to have a trench dug in the dark of night to spare his house from flooding that season. There was a celebration when the other residents awoke in the morning to find the pond let and the waters receding; the police are still looking for the wealthy gentleman in question.

  Ossorio might have saved The Creeks by building the huge retaining wall, but he also regretted having to look at 300 feet of unadorned concrete every day. His friends encouraged him to relandscape, but after studying the sweeping gray shape, Ossorio decided instead to accent the wall with an outdoor sculpture. This first outdoor piece was a soaring metal thing, twenty feet tall, triangular, painted the usual red, white, and blue enamel, as if one of the components of his congregations had become supersized and escaped from the house. It was in its own way hideous, as much of his work was, and disturbed everyone so much (it was visible from all over the pond) that Ossorio made dozens more—massive, giantsized statements planted throughout the grounds of The Creeks. About 200 feet from the main entrance on Montauk Highway, Ossorio installed a stepped red-and-white sculpture so startling that it slowed the traffic with gawkers. Along the driveway at one point were three giant spheres of bright red, white, and blue poured concrete, ten tons’ worth, like mammoth billiard balls erupting from the earth. Some of the sculptures were actually put into trees, hammered into the branches, or the treetops would be bluntly amputated and crowned with a barbed necklace of wheel rims. “That’s to remind you that you don’t always get what you want,” Ossorio explained of the lopped-off trees. “It’s an interplay between the truncated and the successful. Oh, it’s a very moralistic landscape.”

  When Ossorio was included in a group show at Guild Hall one summer, his contribution was a large breastlike cement protrusion that spurted into the air a red liquid from the nipple. “Look, Mommy, blood!” a five-year-old boy shouted at the opening, and a woman in the crowd muttered, “He must be kidding.”

  It seemed only to follow when in 1974 the entire exterior of the house was painted black, with the trim and landing steps in the signature red, white, and blue enamel of the congregations; the circular swimming pool was also painted black, with a radiating pattern of red and blue petals around it.

  It was the outdoor sculptures that first brought the trees to Ossorio’s attention. One of the pines got in the way of his sculpture, so he had it pruned, then moved. Later he decided to move two or three more trees, and it occurred to him that it was possible to paint with the trees themselves. “I looked around and realized that most of what I had outdoors was flowers,” said Ossorio. “I live here year-round and I wanted color in the winter. I started by putting in a few evergreens by the road, and before you know it, I was hooked.”

  “Hooked” was the operative word, for like everything else Ossorio took on, conifers became a fetishistic preoccupation. He ordered three textbooks a day on evergreens and forestry and studied them through the night, taking notes and keeping files. He conferred with every landscape designer on the East End, and when his knowledge surpassed theirs, he hired the greatest experts in the field to tutor him, including Dr. Rupert Barneby, the curator of the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx. He became so knowledgeable that he invented his own method of planting mature trees without trapping gas in the root ball that is to this day universally used by horticulturists.

  Ossorio discovered that it was possible to import odd-looking conifers from all over the globe, in different shapes and colors, weeping or bent or dwarfed. He began to visit nurseries around the world to see specimens, just as he had visited art galleries searching for new talent years before. Over the next decade Ossorio covered more than fifty acres with conifers, a lush forest of more than 100 different species. As the plantings became increasingly complicated, each tree was identified with a brass placard indicating its origin and date of planting.

  However, even the gardens had Ossorio’s special touch, for he planted these specimens not by genus, but as he would attach objects in a congregation, for their texture or color. Ossorio’s forest was a jumble of shapes and colors, a short-cropped golden juniper grew next to long, silvery blue Thomasen spruce, intersected by a wedge of splendid Atlas cedars. He even took to mutilating the trees for effect, forcing them into odd positions. He had a perfect example of what tinkering with nature could produce sitting right outside his window: the extraordinary red cedar “organ tree” that the Herters had planted. Lopped off at ten feet for more than fifty years now, the cedar was still healthy and beautiful, despite its needing crutches to keep the elongated branches from falling.

  Through his newfound botanical knowledge, Ossorio discovered that it was possible to alter specimens bizarrely and create Frankenstein-like aberrations. He amused himself by grafting four different species; he mixed and matched different colors and shapes into horticultural anomalies. These creations were anathema to serious horticulturists (not unlike the way many artists felt about his congregations), and one respected botanist from Japan actually fainted when she first saw what Ossorio had done at The Creeks. He loved to show off his landscaping and on occasion would find strangers who had wandered in off the highway thinking The Creeks wa
s a public park, gawking at the trees. A few of these unexpected visitors were invited to lunch and sampled some of his best wines.

  Trees were an expensive hobby, it turned out, even more expensive than collecting art. Ossorio didn’t have the patience to grow trees from saplings (“I’m not young enough to see things mature,” he complained), so he almost always bought adult specimens, sometimes for $15,000–20,000 each. Dragon estimated that with the cost of importing rare specimens from around the globe, Ossorio may have spent as much as $300,000 a month on his trees. He dug into his principal savings so deeply that eventually his trust fund began to run low and he had to sell off paintings to support his tree habit. First he sold some of his Stills, then some of the Dubuffets, and finally, in a move that took away the breath of all those who knew him, in 1976 Ossorio sold Pollock’s masterpiece, Lavender Mist, for $2 million to the National Gallery. Although a German private collector offered him far more than $2 million for the painting, Ossorio refused to see it leave the United States, where he believed it belonged.

  The relationship of the trees to the sculpture, of the sculpture and the trees to the house, of the estate to the pond, all became part of a larger piece. Even the way Dragon looked and dressed was part of it. In some ways, in the tradition of the Herters, Ossorio and Dragon achieved one of the highest aspirations of any artist: almost every aspect of their life was art. As the decades passed, the stories about the odd couple on the pond took on mythological proportions. Some were true. Ossorio did amass one of the largest private collections of pornography in the world: movies, books, and magazines, each one dutifully read or watched and safely stored away. But the cocktail chatter that Dragon and Ossorio kept a black man chained to a wooden support beam in the basement of The Creeks; that young men were drugged and disappeared, never to be seen again; or that small animals were sacrificed in the second-floor chapel is, of course, apocryphal. Dragon giggled deliriously with glee at the thought.