Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  In 1884, probably unknown to seven-year-old LeRoy, his real father died in a diphtheria epidemic in Butler County, Missouri. The reports Alexander McCoy had received in Iowa of a rich widow had proved true. His estate consisted of 360 acres of prime Missouri land, including hundreds of head of livestock and a large, white frame house. Under the terms of his will, LeRoy McCoy, perhaps forgotten by now, received nothing.

  By the time LeRoy was ten, Matt Pollock was hiring him out to Walter Edie and other farmers in Ringgold County to raise extra capital. He was not growing up as big as his father would have liked—it would be a few more years before he could handle a plow as well as his brother Frank—but he was strong for his size, and durable. Matt Pollock made his best money when he could offer a package deal: a horse, a plow, and a boy to work them.

  There was nothing unusual about young boys being farmed out as extra hands in rural Iowa. It was often the logical compromise between those with too much land and those with too many children. The arrangement proved so lucrative that entrepreneurs brought in trainloads of orphans from the East Coast who were adopted by local families for a fee and then hired out. Of course, profit wasn’t the only motive at work. “Sometimes a kid wouldn’t get along with the parents so he was farmed out to whoever would take him,” says one local historian. But for Matt Pollock, nothing was more important than the ascent from poverty. He sent young LeRoy as far away as Missouri and Arkansas to join the huge gangs that worked the big farms along the Mississippi. For years, Roy Pollock kept a picture of one of those gangs, a panoramic photograph of a dozen teams of horses, wagons stacked twenty feet deep with hay, an enormous barn, and a hundred men scattered through the field—black spots in a sea of grass. One of those spots was Roy Pollock.

  In fact, the work suited young LeRoy. In the fields, he could be alone with his thoughts and away from the people he feared. For him, work was easy; it was coming home that was hard. There are stories that LeRoy ran away from home during these years, but there was no need to run away. The work was escape enough. Far from resenting the furrow and the plow to which he was virtually chained, he learned to love the land and to love working on it: the feel of “the horses straining against the walking plow” turning up the fresh, black soil; the sweet smell of “new-mown hay, as the mower makes a swath into the tall strands of hay, scaring baby rabbits out of their nests.” Over the years, he became extraordinarily skilled in raising crops and breeding animals. His sons called him “a craftsman of the soil.”

  It was probably during his long trips to Missouri or Arkansas that LeRoy discovered an even more potent form of escape—alcohol. Liquor wasn’t easy to come by in Tingley. After drunken railroad workers started a disastrous fire in 1882, the town cracked down on saloons and bars. In 1894, decades before the Nineteenth Amendment, Iowa passed its own version of Prohibition. For the determined, liquor could always be found or made, but consuming it was a furtive, antisocial activity. LeRoy must have often heard his mother intoning the pledge of the WCTU, Tingley chapter: “We promise to abstain from all ferment, malt, and distilled liquors, including wine, beer, and cider … anything whereby thy brother stumbleth or is offended or is made weak.” Fearing her wrath, he undoubtedly refrained from drinking at home. But much of his youth was spent in other people’s fields, away from his mother’s reproving eyes. On a work gang, on the farm of a more tolerant neighbor, or with his brother Frank, LeRoy began his lifelong struggle with alcohol—a struggle that he hid from his mother, just as he would try, years later, to hide it from his wife and children; a struggle that his youngest son, Jackson, by some unknown mechanism, would eventually inherit.

  The same year that LeRoy began high school, 1892, James B. Weaver, the Populist candidate for President of the United States, polled more than one million popular votes, many of them in Iowa. Among those cheering Weaver on was LeRoy Pollock. Iowa had been a fertile field for populist sentiments since the early 1870s when it boasted the largest Grange membership of any state in the Union. Since then, the lot of the small farmer had gone from hard to intolerable. In addition to the familiar blights of crop disease, locust, flood, and drought which wreaked havoc on farm economies from 1880 to 1900, farmers felt themselves increasingly at the mercy of bankers, railroad profiteers, big-city commodities dealers, and other “nonproducers.” In many states in the West and South, the Populists organized local Farmers’ Alliances, which won regional and sometimes statewide political victories. In Iowa, however, landowning farmers like Matt Pollock, deeply suspicious of the Populist platform’s socialist subtext, its plan to nationalize the railroads, and its support for the emerging labor movement, resisted the new party. As a result, Iowa men voted safely Republican, as they had in every presidential election since 1856.

  LeRoy Pollock, on the other hand, enthusastically embraced the socialist implications of Populist reforms. From his first encounter with socialist ideas—probably among the work gangs in Missouri and Arkansas, both of which voted Populist in the 1892 election—LeRoy responded to their call for fairness and equality. For years he had worked hard to enhance other men’s profits and, unlike most Iowa sons, had no assurance that his foster father’s farm would one day be his. The big farms were worked by men who spent their lives performing “alienated labor”—a relatively rare phenomenon in family-farmed Iowa. He had seen how fluctuating grain prices and interest rates could destroy a man who gave his life to the soil. After the election of 1892, he followed the Populist cause through the depression of 1893 and the Pullman strike of 1894—the strike in which the world first heard of Eugene V. Debs. Over the next three decades, as his sons grew up, he would continue to support the causes of his youth: the labor movement—including even the radical Wobblies—and the populists in the name of their successors, the socialists. In 1917, he celebrated at the news that the workers of Russia had taken control of their government. Of his five sons, two would become active in the labor movement and one would join the Communist party. The other two would become artists.

  When he entered high school in 1892, LeRoy Pollock was a shy, withdrawn, and rather small fifteen-year-old boy with dark brown hair, hazel eyes, a prematurely developed body, and a perpetually serious expression. Three years later, when he graduated (a rare achievement matched by only 25 percent of the farmboys in Ringgold County), he was a darkly handsome young man who compensated for his diminutive size with masculine posturing and who yearned for adventure. He had several close friends among his classmates, an older girlfriend named Stella McClure, and a yen to see the world. He was also no longer LeRoy Pollock; sometime during high school he had decided to call himself simply Roy.

  After graduation in 1895, Roy and a classmate, Ralph Tidrick, laid secret plans for a raft trip down the Mississippi River in pursuit of their high school heroes Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. If Matt and Lizzie Pollock caught wind of the plans, they surely objected, but the two friends set out nevertheless in the summer of 1895. In Burlington, they caught a flatboat and rode it as far as Missouri where they stopped to work the September harvest and earn some money. They may have stopped again in Arkansas before reaching their real destination, New Orleans. It was a trip that lived in Roy Pollock’s imagination for the rest of his life, and one of the few stories from his youth that he shared with his sons—with each one individually, ritually—as they came of age.

  Tingley High School senior class, 1895: Ralph Tidrick, back row, second from left; Anna McClure, back row, center; and Roy Pollock, far right.

  When Roy and Ralph arrived in New Orleans, they found work at a hotel in exchange for room and board. They had been there just long enough to learn a little French when Ralph took sick with malaria. For a few days, Roy nursed him, unsure what to do, no doubt fighting the images of sickness, death, and guilt that must have welled up from his own past. Finally, Ralph sent a letter to one of his brothers explaining their dilemma and asking for ten dollars. The letter fell into the hands of Ralph’s father and within a few days, two train tickets
for New Orleans to Tingley arrived at the hotel. Upon their return, the doctor told Roy, “It’s a good thing you got him home when you did or you would have brought him home in a box.”

  Around Christmas 1896, Ralph and Roy again laid plans to leave Tingley. This time they sought adventure and escape in the 51st Volunteers of Iowa, Company M, a unit based in Red Oak, Iowa, just two counties west of Ringgold. The exact sequence of events isn’t clear, but Matt Pollock must have uncovered the plan because, on February 16, 1897, just nine days shy of Roy’s twentieth birthday, he and Lizzie formally adopted LeRoy McCoy. The brief handwritten “indenture” specified that “said Roy McCoy shall hereafter be called Roy Pollock [and] That said child is given to the said James M. Pollock and Lizzie J. Pollock for the purpose of adoption as their own child.” People in Tingley preferred to believe that Matt just wanted Roy to inherit part of his estate. More likely, it was Matt Pollock’s last attempt to control his dreamy ward: as an underage, legal son, Roy would need his adoptive parents’ consent to enlist.

  In April 1897, Ralph Tidrick boarded the train in Tarkio, Missouri, where he had been attending Tarkio College, and headed for Red Oak. Keeping it a secret to the last, he had written his family that on the way through Tingley, he would “throw his suitcase out the window of the train to let them know he had gone to the service.” Roy Pollock watched as the train passed and the suitcase landed next to the tracks.

  Roy Pollock and Stella McClure were formally introduced sometime prior to May 1895. For Stella, the slight, young-looking Roy was only a small step away from the boys she had been raising. In their company, she had always felt both comfortable and in control. The shy, introspective Roy allowed her to dominate, which she was used to doing; and to mother, which she liked to do. For Roy, the plump, big-bosomed, older-looking Stella must have seemed a feast of maternal love after years of hard crust from the bony, thin-lipped Lizzie. But Stella also must have recognized in Roy the same urge for something better that Aunt Stella had instilled in her. They were both dreamers; both were dissatisfied with their lives so far; both yearned, in their own way, for escape.

  The first time Stella brought Roy home to her parents, John and Jennie McClure were deeply disappointed. The McClures had spent years inching their way up Tingley’s strict social pecking order and now their eldest daughter was being courted by the foster son of a “ne’er-do-well” farmer. A socially prominent Tingley woman said some years later, “People considered that the Pollocks were a little on the trashy side. They were not one of the establishment. The McClures, on the other hand, were the establishment.” Even in a town of three hundred people, there were strict class lines, and Roy Pollock, knowingly or unknowingly, was trying to cross them.

  Gradually, however, the McClures warmed to the shy, boyish Roy. “He was a very quiet man who listened intently,” recalls one of his daughters-in-law. He “always seemed interested in what other people were saying.” Instead of treating him as the product of a bad family, they began to see him as the victim. The fact that he was in high school with their own bookish, fragile Anna may have been the key to their slow favor. “People were able to climb up by their own merits,” recalls a Tingley resident, “and I would say, by the time LeRoy was graduated from school, he was just as acceptable as anybody.” By 1895, John McClure had embraced his daughter’s suitor, teaching him the skills of masonry, plasterwork, bricklaying, and wallpapering and occasionally using him as an apprentice. Even Roy’s socialist ideas didn’t seem to trouble the McClures—an indication of just how winning and unthreatening he could be. For some time before and after the election of 1896, John and Jennie teased their daughter about being courted by the “lone Socialist in Ringgold County.”

  In 1896, like so many of their ancestors, Stella and Roy began a long journey west, although at the time neither was aware it had begun. That winter Stella’s sister Anna returned from Parsons College in Fairfield before the end of her first year. She had always been a sickly child, but when she was helped off the train in Tingley, the family could see she was dying. The diagnosis was tuberculosis. For a while Stella and her sister Mary, a practical nurse, cared for Anna at home, but she drifted closer and closer to death. Desperation in the McClure house ran so deep that when the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad distributed fliers boasting of the curative powers of the Manitou mineral springs in Colorado, the family determined that Anna should try the cure, and that, because she was too weak to travel alone, Mary should go with her.

  In 1898, after long but unsuccessful treatment, Anna returned to Tingley to die. While seeing to her sister’s final needs, Mary enthralled her family with stories of Colorado’s beauty and promise. She undoubtedly also told them about John Keicher, a young raihoad conductor whom she had met during her vigil in Colorado Springs. Soon after Anna’s death on January 31, 1898, Mary returned to Denver, and two years later, in 1900, a letter came announcing her intention to marry Keicher.

  Whether Stella traveled to Colorado to attend Mary’s wedding or simply to visit is not known. But once there, she found work and decided to stay. Roy must have been stung by her willingness to leave him in Tingley, but they apparently continued to communicate. Some time during late March or early April of 1902, as soon as the spring thaw made travel feasible, they were undoubtedly together because not long afterward Stella discovered she was pregnant. She wrote Roy, leaving him no real alternative but to marry her and legitimize the expected child. It was the first of many decisions that Stella would make for her family. Both Stella and Roy kept the awkward news from their families in Tingley. To everyone except Mary, who must have known the truth, Stella explained her condition by claiming, as she did for the rest of her life, that she and Roy had been married secretly in Denver early in 1902 but that he had been forced to return to Iowa on family business. In Tingley, Roy worked to set aside some money and made plans to join his premature family someplace where there were more economic opportunities—preferably someplace far away from Iowa.

  The plans must have taken longer than he expected because on Christmas Day 1902, Stella delivered a baby boy, whom she named Charles Cecil, while Roy was still in Tingley. It was another three weeks before he headed west to join his wife and new son. At about the same time, Stella boarded a train in Denver, probably carrying her new baby, and headed northeast. They met on January 13, 1903, in the little town of Alliance, Nebraska, near the junction of the Union Pacific and the Kansas Pacific mainlines.

  One can only imagine what County Judge D. K. Spracht thought when two strangers—a small, boyish-looking man and a large, buxom woman in her late twenties carrying a three-week-old infant—stepped out of the cold and into his law office. He must have wondered why “Estella May McClure” who listed her residence as Denver, and “Lea Roy Pollock,” of Tingley, Iowa, were applying for a marriage license in a little prairie town like Alliance, far from either place. Nevertheless, he issued the license, and the next day, Wednesday, January 14, 1903, Stella and Roy were married by Pastor Sanders at the Alliance Methodist Episcopal Church.

  Alliance was not only out of the way (no small matter, under the circumstances) it was also on the way to the new home that Roy and Stella had chosen. A few days’ train ride up the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy line was the brand-new town of Cody, Wyoming—the perfect place, they thought, to start a brand-new life.

  3

  STELLA’S BOYS

  Fifty years before Jackson Pollock wore cowboy boots on Fifth Avenue or threw what one critic called “lariats of paint” across the canvas, Buffalo Bill Cody stood in the saddle to acknowledge the cheering of the crowd in Covent Garden and tipped his Stetson to a smiling Queen Victoria. At every stop on his tour—Paris, Vienna, Rome, and Berlin—the response was tumultuous. His legend had preceded him. In dime novels and newspaper headlines, Buffalo Bill had become a symbol of the American West, a place where everything—the men, the danger, the emotion—seemed more vivid and more authentic than in real life, a place where legend an
d reality met.

  Like the man, the town that bore his name was caught between the real West and the legendary West. The Pollocks could have sensed the contradiction in the town’s character from the moment they stepped off the train. Unlike older western towns, Cody did not evolve from a crossroads, a train stop, or a bend in a river. It was invented by a group of wealthy landowners in the Big Horn Basin looking to cash in on the wave of young families in search of a fresh start, families like Roy Pollock’s. Unwilling to share the wealth with the Burlington Railroad, which already stopped at the DeMarais Hot Springs (called “Stinking Waters” by the Indians) on the north side of the Shoshone River and which owned much of the surrounding land, the developers picked a site on the south side of the river, leaving the station marooned in the middle of a treeless bench of sagebrush and sandy soil. When newcomers like the Pollocks asked the station master, “Where’s the town?” he would point south, past a trestle bridge over the Shoshone to a scattering of houses sprinkled on a grid of streets off in the distance so far that on summer days the heat waves coming off the ground obscured it altogether.

  Cody’s developers took pains to offer the familiar amenities of life in the East—a new schoolhouse with four classrooms, a hospital with two doctors on staff—but they also recognized that the new settlers had a yen to be a part of the Wild West they had read about in novels and travel journals. So they recruited Buffalo Bill Cody, also a local landowner, to join their company and lend his Wild West credentials and name to the new town. To heighten the romantic illusion, they warned newcomers to “look out for wild Indians” and advised women to carry smelling salts in case they accidentally came upon a raiding party.

  Cody, Wyoming, about 1908