Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

When the Pollocks arrived in 1903, the old West had not entirely disappeared from the area. Small parties of Crow, Arapahoe, Shoshone, and Sioux Indians, keeping well out of the settlers’ paths, still came to the Stinking Waters as their tribes had done since 7000 B.C., to take advantage of their magical, curative powers. Old cowboys still hung around the schoolhouse to watch the pretty young schoolteacher. An occasional mountain lion strayed into town and startled an unwary shopper. Among Cody’s most popular “occupations,” according to the local paper, was “short range pistol practice with dudes and tenderfeet for targets, a dude being one who wears a white shirt, talks like a spelling book and refuses to go to bed with his boots on.” But no matter how hard they talked, how much they drank, or how often they emptied their six-shooters into the air, the cowboys, like the Indians, knew they were an endangered species. The spirit of pioneering and independence that had fueled the West for a century was being replaced by the spirit in which Cody was founded, the spirit of enterprise. Boasted one local paper, “There is more enterprise, energy, and public spirit in this community of half a thousand souls than there is in an eastern city of half a million.” Work had already begun on a canal and a dam on the Shoshone River to control flooding in the valley and bring water to neighboring areas. In the center of town, Buffalo Bill had just finished building the Irma Hotel, an $80,000 sandstone showcase, with stone sills, hardwood flooring, and a carved cherrywood bar sent by Queen Victoria as a gift to her favorite cowboy.

  Film companies had already come to Cody to make “documentaries” about the Wild West; “eastern gentlemen” enrolled in the Wild West Cavalry School to become “genuine western riders in a short time”; tourists admired the paintings by Frederic Remington on the walls of the Irma Hotel. There were even “school marm” tourist trips through the most rugged stretches of nearby Yellowstone canyon. The Cody post office received a letter from a girl in Indianapolis: “Dear Sir: Will you please send me a nice young cowboy.” The postmaster tacked up a notice that if he couldn’t find one, “he may go himself.”

  On November 1, 1903, the year the Pollocks arrived, a gunman robbed the First National Bank of Cody and killed the teller. Not far away, in Cody’s first movie house, The Great Train Robbery—the first western—was playing to a full house every night.

  In Cody’s boomtown economy, Roy Pollock was able to find a job almost immediately. He began by washing dishes at the Irma Hotel, but soon impressed the manager with his skill at plastering and carpentry and was promoted to building handyman. To good, solid citizens like Roy Pollock, with families, jobs, and the intention to stay for a while, the Lincoln Development Company made houses available in town for no money down, no interest, and no fixed mortgage payments. The house the Pollocks chose, which stood by itself on Salsbury Avenue at the north edge of the 1901 town plat with an unobstructed view of the river, was comfortable by frontier standards: a parlor, dining room, bedroom, and kitchen. Comparing it to the crowded farmhouses in which they had grown up, Roy and especially Stella must have felt themselves already on the road to a better life.

  When winter came to the Big Horn Basin, the stream of tourists taking the cure at the old Indian sulfur springs dried up, the influx of settlers slowed as the railroad changed to a lighter winter schedule, and the transient dam workers moved south to the big projects in Arizona and California. With business at the hotel slack and a second son, Marvin Jay, recently arrived, Roy was forced to look for small indoor construction and repair jobs: plastering, carpentry, wallpapering. By late winter, he was working on a surveying job for the Sunlight Copper Mining Company—hard, hazardous work even in good weather. On a late winter trek in the rugged Rattlesnake and Cedar mountains west of Cody, his surveying crew was caught in an unexpected snowstorm and Roy was one of three men ordered to carry a rare 500-pound sample of copper ore back to town as a mineral exhibit. On the return trip, the group ran into fifteen feet of snow and was “forced to dump the ‘exhibit’ there,” according to a newspaper account of the adventure. “Meantime, the public would just have to take their word for the size of the marvelous thing.”

  It was the first of many times that Roy Pollock strayed from home.

  Some time in the next year or two, Roy and a friend from Tingley, Tom Archbold, found regular work at a rock-crushing plant on the banks of the Shoshone River just above the depot bridge. It was dirty, exhausting work, but it provided a steady income and a daily escape. (The Pollock children grew up believing, inaccurately, that their father was a part owner of the plant—a notion advanced by Stella, perhaps, who urged her husband to find a more dignified job.) To supplement his income, Roy continued to do plastering work in the winter and masonry and cement work in the summer and earned a reputation as a quiet, solid worker. “People respected him,” says Francis Hayden, a Cody resident who remembers Roy Pollock. “I never heard anything bad against him, and at the time Cody was too small a town to keep any secrets.”

  Parlor of the Pollock house in Cody

  Whatever Roy Pollock could earn—as a dishwasher, handyman, plasterer, surveyor, or mason—Stella Pollock could spend.

  No matter how many extra jobs he worked, there was never enough left over to satisfy her extravagant aspirations. Most of the money went to decorating their little house in the ornate late-Victorian style that she had admired so much at her aunt’s house in Tingley: an Aubusson-style carpet ornamented with garlands and multicolored flowers for the parlor; photographs of Charles and Marvin Jay and small prints of country landscapes, each in its own heavy baroque frame; a wide wallpaper border echoing the intricate garland motif of the carpet; in the dining room, a floral wallpaper and two long collages of pansies; next to the kitchen, a sturdy dresser for displaying her collection of serving bowls and Sunday china. The windows were hung with sheer lace curtains scrolled at the edges. On every horizontal surface, she placed either a crocheted doily or an embroidered tablecloth, creating an intricately patterned, graciously cluttered environment—all of it her own handiwork. “She ran the house,” recalls Frank Pollock, “no doubt about that. Whatever was in that house was mother’s influence.” The results so pleased Stella that she arranged for a neighbor to take photographs of the interior and kept them until her death.

  Relieved of the rigors of farm life, she devoted more and more of her time to the decorative sewing and refined cooking she had learned from Aunt Stella. She subscribed to the Ladies’ Home Journal and studied each issue for new patterns and recipes. The Cody Trading Company (“The Big Store that Sells Everything”) never seemed to run out of meat, vegetables, canned fruit, milk, butter, all the things that had consumed her life back in Tingley. She would stroll for hours through the store’s four long aisles: one for groceries; one for dishes, furniture, and paintings; one for pots and pans; and one for clothing and dry goods, including yards of material in every conceivable color and pattern. When she wanted something still finer, she would walk across Sheridan Avenue to the Ladies’ Emporium where the aging and eccentric Nelli Bruce had “all the latest in summer fashions.” The former wife of a saloon owner who wore a small diamond embedded in her front tooth, “Poker Nell” could have found no more eager and knowledgeable a customer than the young Stella Pollock. Through her magazine subscriptions, Stella followed the developments in fashion with a keen eye, showing a particular fondness for the latest effusively lacy styles. In a formal picture of the Pollock family taken about this time, she sits closest to the camera, her head cocked proudly, smiling broadly, wearing a white lace blouse with pleated front, puff sleeves, high collar, and a profusion of crochet and lace. On the other side of the picture, his hair impatiently combed, staring resignedly into the camera, sits Roy Pollock.

  Roy, Marvin Jay, Charles, and Stella, about 1904

  In the same photograph, poised between their parents, are Charles and Marvin Jay—“Chas” and “Mart” in the family shorthand. Stella’s arm holds Charles close at her side while one-year-old Marvin Jay wears a frilly lace dress that mar
ks him unmistakably as his mother’s. Roy’s arm rests limply on the table beside him. The photograph both announces a battle and records its outcome.

  From the start, it was an uneven contest. Roy, who had never had a real father himself, knew little of fatherhood and treated his sons more or less as Matt Pollock had treated him: supervising their work, administering occasional discipline, and setting down a strict hierarchy of privileges. Stella, on the other hand, “would get up and do the cooking and the laundry and part of the milling and do all the baking,” boasts Frank Pollock. “She also made all of our shirts. We never wore store-bought shirts until we were fifteen or sixteen years old. She had the busiest hands of any person I’ve ever known.” In many ways, Stella was a child’s idea of a perfect mother—in part, no doubt, because her notions of motherhood had been formed when she herself was a child. She indulged her sons just as she had indulged her rambunctious brothers, never laying down rules and never punishing. On the rare occasions when Roy dared to spank them, she refused to speak to him for days. When four-year-old Marvin Jay threw a tantrum because Charles was attending school without him, Stella demanded that school authorities admit Jay to the class as well.

  Marvin Jay and Charles

  Only a few months after the family portrait was taken, Stella took Charles and Marvin back to the photographer’s studio, this time without Roy. This was to be a picture of her sons as she wanted to remember them. She had been grooming them in the interim, letting their hair grow long—Roy did the family barbering—and making the special long lace blouses with little lace wings that they would wear. In the spirit of Victorian sentimentality that shaped her aesthetic world, she posed them as the putti in a Raphael painting she had seen illustrated in one of her magazines.

  Roy Pollock didn’t surrender his children without a fight. When Charles was five, Roy took him on a buggy ride (a rare treat) up the newly opened canyon road to the site of the Shoshone dam. About the same time, he introduced Charles to the Orange Athletic Club in Cody where there was almost always a wrestling or boxing match to watch. None of this attention was lost on Charles, who for the rest of his life would mimic his father’s cocky walk, his macho mannerisms, his way of standing with his arms roguishly akimbo.

  In August 1907, a third son, Frank, was born.

  A year later, Roy Pollock moved his family to the north section of the Sant Watkins sheep ranch, at the base of the twin-peaked Hart Mountain three miles northeast of town. Stella couldn’t have been happy about the move. Life in Cody had been relatively easy, even gracious by Iowa farm standards, and the little house on Salsbury Avenue had finally begun to resemble Aunt Stella’s house in Tingley. The prospect of living on the Watkins ranch, even as the foreman’s wife, in a two-room frame house that was comfortable but hardly fine, must have left her cold. In a rare display of determination, however, Roy pressed ahead. A sheep ranch foreman was paid about $400 a year in 1908, more than a dam worker could earn in a construction season, and room and board were provided. Roy was also eager to return to the kind of work he knew best. The Roy Pollock who knew by heart the nesting behavior of sage grouse and loved the smell of just-turned soil had never felt at home in the din and dust of the rock crusher—or among the lace and garlands of his own house. Moving to the Watkins ranch, with its fields of alfalfa, barnyard stock, and long silences interrupted occasionally by the boisterous camaraderie of the sheepherders, was both an escape and a return to the only kind of home he had ever known.

  It was also a last chance to regain control of his family.

  Ever since the Johnson County War a decade before, sheep ranchers like Sant Watkins throughout Wyoming and as far away as Colorado had been jumpy. In that bitter sixteen-year feud over grazing rights between homesteaders and the “hired killers” of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, five people had been killed, all of them sheepherders. The killing had never reached Cody, but tensions still simmered beneath the placid sagebrush landscape. In 1907, cattlemen raided Linn’s Sheep Ranch on Trapper Creek in the Big Horn Mountains, tied up the herder, put dynamite under his chair, and “blasted him to bits.” Then they dynamited the 400 sheep he was tending. The next year, a similar raid in the same area killed 600 to 700 sheep, burned two wagons, and “ran the herder off into the brush.”

  Around the time of the last raid, Roy Pollock decided to accept Sanford Watkins’s offer of the foreman job. He must have been influenced in his decision by Watkins himself, a tall, distinguished-looking old-timer who had homesteaded near Cody before the turn of the century and who viewed the rising tensions with concern but not alarm. Roy was among those who admired Watkins, so much so that when his fourth son was born in May 1909, he named him Sanford, which Stella immediately shortened to Sande.

  Once settled on the ranch, Roy put Charles and Jay to work bottle-feeding the lambs who had lost their mothers. In summer, the two boys roamed the dry, treeless hills far from the ranch house, where Stella tended her two newest babies, Frank and Sande. “At every opportunity,” says Charles, “we would tear off down to the Shoshone river and listen to the coyotes off in the distance.” Herding sheep was lonely work. After shearing in the spring, a herder went out on the range for as long as six months, living alone in a four-by-eight-foot camp wagon with a bunk, a stove, and a water barrel, interrupted only once a week by a camptender who traveled from herder to herder with supplies of food, water, and the latest gossip. Winter brought herders, camptenders, and 10,000 sheep onto the ranch, transforming it into a community of colorful characters with stories to enchant and terrify small boys. “They were fascinating people,” recalls Jay, “with fascinating names like Rattlesnake Pete and Mosey Bill. They had beards, and told stories about life on the range.” The stories these hard, lonely men told, relayed and embellished by his older brothers, eventually became the basis of Jackson Pollock’s knowledge of a frontier he never experienced firsthand. Years later, when he enthralled friends with tales of cattle rustlers and prairie wolves, or painted images of frontier life—covered wagons, cowboys, and lost steers—he was only echoing the stories his brothers told and conjuring images from cowboy yarns spun late on a winter night long before he was born.

  In the late fall of 1909, Roy traveled to Tingley to stand vigil at his father’s deathbed and comfort his mother. The trip must have awakened old anxieties, because soon after his return to Cody in early 1910, he began to drink. He had probably been drinking steadily, if moderately and secretly, since coming west. While living in Cody, where there was one bar for every twenty people, he never lacked for opportunity. The local papers were filled with complaints about “16 year old boys buying whiskey at the back doors of saloons” and drunken cowboys “shooting up the town and making unusual and indecent noises on the street.” Community indignation peaked when a dam worker died “after an overdose of whiskey” outside the Thomas Saloon. The Woman’s Public Service League was formed—“ladies of the town on the trail of vice and corruption”—and the town paper published an editorial plea: “Let’s Trample Evil,” but the rate of consumption was unaffected. In 1908, according to the local census, alcoholism was the primary cause of death among Cody men.

  Roy did most of his drinking during the Cody years not in town, where he had to face Stella, but on his frequent hunting trips into Yellowstone with friends like Tom Archbold. “He was an outdoorsman,” remembers Frank Pollock. “He hunted for deer and bear and elk. He went with other fellas, ones that he worked with, and they didn’t leave town without a supply of booze with them.” Later, on the Watkins ranch, he was always ready to share a bottle with one of his workers, especially in winter when the hard-drinking herders congregated. Besides, “there was plenty of reason to drink,” says Frank, himself a recovered alcoholic. “It was so goddamned cold.” Stella apparently knew about Roy’s drinking, but as long as it was confined to hunting expeditions, didn’t object. When he drank at home, however, she “put her foot down,” Jay Pollock remembers. “She said, ‘No more.’” It was th
e first sign of a much deeper struggle that would erupt ten years later and tear the Pollock family apart.

  Sometime in the winter of 1910–11, Roy began to feel short of breath. He tired more easily and earlier in the day. At first he probably attributed it to the harsh winter—when the temperature was ten below zero, a sixty mile per hour wind could take anyone’s breath away—an explanation that seemed more credible when Tom Archbold developed the same symptoms. At the Cody hospital, Dr. Frank Waples couldn’t diagnose the problem with certainty, but he urged the Archbolds to leave Cody and make their home in a more forgiving climate. By the time they left in the spring of 1911, Tom’s health had deteriorated even further. Roy’s symptoms faded the next summer, and Stella was briefly optimistic, but they returned again with the cold weather and a visit to Dr. Waples brought the same advice: leave Cody.

  Roy Pollock

  The following winter (1911–12), Stella decided it was time to go. Roy’s health was the designated reason, but hardly the only one. Work on the Watkins ranch, although good, wasn’t the work Roy knew and loved from his youth; it wasn’t even a farm; and, most important, it wasn’t his. For Stella, ranch life was rough and lonely; winters made her trips to town—her lifeline —almost impossible; the Lower Sage School near the ranch was too small and poorly taught; and, as always, she yearned for something better. “My mother was the restless one,” recalls Charles. “She was always looking for greener pastures.”

  With the news of Tom Archbold’s death in early 1912, Stella made up her mind. As soon as possible, Roy would travel to California in search of a new home while she returned to Tingley with her sons for a last visit before moving farther west.

  But nothing could happen, none of these momentous changes could begin, until after the birth of their fifth child, which was due, according to Dr. Waples, in January 1912. Stella was hoping for a girl, finally, to take home and show off. Roy, too, wanted a girl “My dad always said, ‘I’ve got a house full of boys,’” Frank remembers. “‘How long am I going to have to carry on until I get a girl out of this woman?’”