Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  In return for adoration, Charles gave Jackson the minimum attention necessary to transact family business—which, among the quiet and insular Pollocks, was little indeed.

  Of all the brothers, only Sande gave Jackson the attention he craved. Lumped together as the “Low Steps,” they became a single unit within the family, almost indistinguishable as individuals. “It was always ‘Jack and Sande,’” Frank remembers, “‘Jack and Sande this, Jack and Sande that.’ They were like two burrs on a dog’s tail.” As a role model, Sande was a world apart from Charles. Where Charles was refined and sensible, Sande was rough and hot-headed. Where Charles was detached and icily self-contained like his mother, Sande was adventurous and high-spirited. Where Charles cut pictures out of magazines, Sande shot birds off of power lines with his slingshot and, if he had been old enough, would have eagerly joined his father on hunting trips.

  Jackson’s joyous hours with Sande might have been enough to offset his deepening sense of alienation from the rest of the family if Stella hadn’t made the mistake of putting him in Sande’s charge—a task that Sande soon grew to resent. Around the house, Jackson needed constant supervision; in the fields, he prevented Sande from undertaking more responsible jobs for his father. In 1915, when Sande should have joined his older brothers at the Wilson School, Stella kept him home so he could continue to care for Jackson during the day.

  Sometime in 1916, the drama of “Jack and Sande” was played out in one brief, traumatic episode. It began in the barnyard of the Pollock farm amid the fluttering chickens and flying dust. For Jackson, it was an unusually quiet and lonely day: Dad Pollock was out in front of the house with the zanjero arranging for the next irrigation day; Stella was with her motherin-law, Lizzie Pollock, who had come to Phoenix for a visit. The three oldest brothers were all at school. Sande and an older neighborhood boy, Charles Porter, were playing in the barnyard around the chopping block—a half-stump where Dad and the High Steps split cottonwood for the kitchen stove—pointedly ignoring Jackson. Eager to be included, Jackson fetched a small log from the woodpile, carried it to the chopping block, and picked up the ax that lay nearby. According to Sande, “Porter saw Jack and said, ‘You’re too young to handle an ax. Tell me where you want it cut.’” Jackson placed his right index finger on the spot where he wanted the blow to fall, and Porter awkwardly raised the long-handled ax. “It was a regular man-sized ax that I was usin’,” Porter recalls. “I didn’t have too much control over it.” When the blade struck, it caught Jackson’s finger just above the last knuckle.

  The little fingertip hit the ground and almost immediately an old bull rooster—fourteen pounds and “almost a pet”—waddled over and began pecking at it. (No one actually saw the rooster swallow the fingertip, but when Charles Pollock returned from school and searched around the chopping block, it was gone.) It was a few long seconds before any of the boys realized what had happened. Porter threw the ax down and ran home. Jackson—who was “too shocked to cry,” according to Porter—stuck the “bleedy” stump in his mouth and followed Sande in search of their mother. Stella reacted with chilling Presbyterian calm. “It was just another one of those things that happened to the Pollock boys,” Frank remembers. “Mother was a realist, and whatever happened, she just took it in her stride.” After covering the wound with sugar and wrapping it in a bandage, she led a bewildered but still tearless Jackson out the front gate, commandeered the zanjero’s horse and buggy, and drove into Phoenix to see Dr. Manacle.

  Jackson in front of the chopping block where he lost his fingertip

  While Stella was calm and Jackson remained paralyzed, Sande was “the one who got sick,” he later admitted. Although he must have felt, at some level, that Jackson had gotten what he deserved, Sande had also faltered in his duty to take care of Jackson and, in so doing, had failed his mother. For years afterward he would harbor feelings of inadequacy and guilt as well as anger over the incident. For Jackson, too, the episode at the chopping block had a double edge, one that emerged only years later as he recounted the story in different ways to different friends. In 1923, when the Pollocks returned briefly to Arizona, he told Evelyn Minsch that he had “laid his finger on the block and dared Porter to ‘Cut it off.’” “The boy thought Jack would pull his finger away at the last second,” Minsch recalls, “but he didn’t.” In the 1940s, Jackson told Axel Horn that he and some friends “were bored and hanging around the chopping block when one kid picked up the ax and said, ‘Somebody put your finger down.’” “The way Jack told it,” says Horn, “it wasn’t an accident. It was a dare, and he took it.” Late in his life, Jackson told an East Hampton neighbor that it was Sande who had wielded the ax.

  And, in a way, it was. In a test of manhood, Jackson had offered his finger, and in his eyes Sande, not Porter, had cut it off. But the loss of a fingertip was a small price to pay for the bond that was created between them in that instant, a bond of love and guilt, sacrifice and resentment, that would hold them in the same unresolved embrace for the next forty years.

  From the moment she laid eyes on the tiny adobe house in the middle of the desert, Stella hated it—hated it in the same silent, tenacious way she had hated the farm where she grew up. She had left the Watkins ranch longing for another house like the one in Cody: simple but dignified, a house she could decorate to her ladylike taste. Instead, Roy had brought her to this shabby little mud hut with its rough walls, uneven floors, and a barnyard just outside the back door. Every summer her resentment was rekindled when the poorly built house began to molt like a desert insect. “The heat would strip the plaster off the outside,” Frank Pollock remembers, “and every damn year Dad would have to re-plaster sections of the house. Mother always insisted that he at least do that.”

  The Pollocks’ neighbors soon noticed that the new woman in their midst was not happy to be there. She seldom paid visits to nearby houses, never invited neighbors or their children into her house, and, except when she traveled into Phoenix, was seldom seen about. “She thought she was a little bit more society than the rest of the farm folks around there,” recalls Charles Porter. “She had a little bit of an air to her. I don’t think she appreciated farming too much.” Indeed, in later years she would refer to it as “low-down drudgery.”

  At night, Stella pored over her magazines, newspapers, and catalogues, following with furtive pleasure the genteel life of Henry Field’s family as related in the latest edition of the Henry Field catalogue, and wrote letters to relatives, especially her mother and Aunt Stella. During the day, she rarely ventured into the barnyard, preferring instead to tend her private flower garden where she grew rare flowers and rosebushes with seeds ordered from Iowa. The rest of her time was spent cooking, baking, and sewing—activities appropriate for a farm, but performed in a way that underscored her disdain for real farm life. When she cooked, she preferred new recipes taken from magazines, recipes that required extra time and special ingredients. For every meal she prepared a variety of foods, and always in extravagant quantities. She used only the best ingredients, whether store-bought or appropriated from Roy’s market wagon. “She boasted that she would take the best for herself and sell what was left,” recalls Stella’s daughter-in-law, Marie Pollock, “where farmers usually do it in the reverse.” When she sewed, she neglected the everyday mending chores, preferring to labor over the latest patterns from the Ladies’ Home Journal or to crochet another tablecloth for her collection. “She was an exquisite seamstress,” says another daughter-in-law, “and she wouldn’t work on any material unless it was the finest procurable—if it wasn’t, she did without.”

  As in Cody, Stella refused to discipline her brood. “If you did something that was kind of foolish she might say, ‘Where is your head?’ meaning you ought to know better,” says Frank, “but she never reprimanded or spanked us—ever.” In fact, she had other, more effective ways of maintaining her iron grip. Food, for example. In Stella’s hands, meals became a daily ritual of control. She prepared elabor
ate, enticing offerings which ensured that her boys would come home every evening. “If you had done something she didn’t like,” Frank remembers, “she might cut you out of a piece of pie or something. That would be pretty harsh.” Despite the modern facilities available in Phoenix, she refused to take her sons to doctors or hospitals even in the direst emergencies. (Jackson’s trip to Dr. Monacle was a rare exception.) No one, in fact, was allowed to come between her and her children. If they insisted on attending school events or going on Sunday trips, she would refuse to go along, perhaps fearing that the presence of other adults, including Roy, might dilute her authority. “Whenever Dad would read to us,” Jay remembers, “Mother wouldn’t participate. She would always find something else to do.” She urged them to stay away from neighborhood kids and, despite her own religious upbringing, kept them out of church. Whatever her sons’ needs—social, medical, even spiritual—Stella and Stella alone would take care of them.

  Far from encouraging the “independent and adventurous” boys Sande later bragged about, Stella’s protectiveness produced a family of timid, fearful sons, of such delicate sensibilities that any contact with the outside world produced near panic. On trips into Phoenix, they recoiled from strangers and kept close by her side. When a neighborhood Catholic family, the Schrecks, took Charles to church, he was terrified. “They were kneeling and crossing themselves,” he remembers, “and it just paralyzed me with fear.” When a rare argument broke out between Roy and Stella at the dinner table, Charles burst into tears. “At that time, the slightest raising of voices might have set me off,” he recalls. When Frank was finally confronted by a doctor—to have adenoids removed—he “ran for his life.” “They had to subdue me with chloroform,” he remembers. “I suppose I made Mother nervous.”

  To avoid making Mother nervous, the Pollock boys learned to read her moods with exquisite care and avert her displeasure at all costs. They all remembered one especially vivid and disturbing image of their mother from Phoenix. “She would tie chickens to the clothesline by their feet,” Charles recalls, “then she would grab them and cut off their heads one by one. That was pretty shocking.” Jackson especially could never forget the sight of his mother gripping a huge knife in her hand—the same hand that spun such delicate webs of lace—slicing off one head after another and throwing them into a pile, the blood draining from the suspended bodies, covering her hands and the knife blade, dripping onto her white apron, making shiny, dark spots in the dirt at her feet.

  No one needed Stella’s love or read her moods more acutely than her baby, Jackson. When he returned to her even after an afternoon’s absence, he would invariably ask, “Did you miss me, Mother?” Once, when Stella and Jackson were driving into town—one of their rare moments alone together—a huge bull, apparently escaped from its pen, charged their spring buggy. The horse reared in panic, overturning the buggy and throwing Jackson and Stella to the ground. Although they were quickly rescued by a passing farmer—who slapped Jackson to stop his crying—the incident so traumatized five-year-old Jackson that he had vivid nightmares of terrifying bulls and terror-stricken horses for the rest of his life.

  Far longer and more desperately than any of his brothers, Jackson clung to the needful childlike behavior that bound him to his mother. “He would always run to his mama crying,” recalls Akinabu Mori, who was two years younger and considerably smaller than Jackson. “He was a mama’s boy, always a crybaby, always running to the mama telling on me—‘Oh! He said something bad, Mama!’” But Stella paid little heed to Jackson’s special needs, treating him with the same hovering detachment as she did all her sons. Her reticence only confirmed Jackson’s vague but already powerful feeling that he had somehow disappointed her. Sande remembered his sadly telling a visitor one day: “[Mother] wanted me to be a girl, only I wasn’t.”

  A quarter-mile down the road, Jackson found a playmate to help him act out his reparative fantasies. Evelyn Porter, Charles Porter’s sister, was a year younger and, like Jackson, “a very timid child.” Evelyn, who was called Evie then, recalls that “we were the only agewise playmates in that area, so we became very close friends.” During Jackson’s daily visits to the Porter house, the two would “play house out under the trees,” Porter remembers. “I wore rompers and Jack wore the same thing. No shoes, of course. We were definitely barefoot kids. I had a little tiny puppy at that time, Trixie, and we had a little tea table. The doll would sit in one chair, Trixie in another, and Jack and I would sit down with them for a tea party. He was just a real sweet farmboy.” The tea parties at the Porters’ became such a regular event that when a photographer passed through, Evie and Jack dressed up in their Sunday best and recreated the scene for the camera.

  Jackson had seen Sande playing his own version of “house” out under the umbrella tree in the front yard. He had built a miniature farm with its own alfalfa field, a canal filled with water from a leaky bucket, a barn made from a crate, wagons made of matchboxes and spools, and cows and horses made out of sticks. Sande, of course, played the daddy. In the fantasy world he shared with little Evie, however, Jackson was free to recast his family and himself as he wanted them to be. “When we were playing house,” Porter recalls, “he always insisted on playing the mother. He was the momma, and I was the papa. One time I remember we argued about a little pair of blunt-nosed scissors. They were mine, and I wanted to play with them, but he insisted that the momma should have the scissors of the house and he was the momma.”

  As late as 1916, Jackson didn’t know that his family was heading for a crisis. Of all the brothers, only Charles, who rode to the farmers’ market every morning with his father, saw it coming. “We’d get up at four in the morning, hitch up the horses and go into the market with a load of produce. When it didn’t sell, Dad would have to start peddling it to restaurants door to door. That was a painful and humiliating experience for him. But Mother never knew. He would throw away what was left before we got home so she wouldn’t see it.”

  Jackson having a “tea party” with Evelyn Porter and her dog Trixie

  Even at age fourteen, Charles could see that the problem was “a glutted market.” What he couldn’t see were the complex forces—some within his father’s control, some not—that were driving the Pollocks toward bankruptcy. By 1917, due to the development of a long staple hybrid by big landowners and the explosion in demand following America’s entry into the First World War, cotton had replaced alfalfa as king of the Salt River valley. As more and more farmers went “cotton-crazy” or just diversified beyond alfalfa, the dairy industry declined. Between the big new consolidated dairies and the cheap dairy products being shipped in on an improved rail system, small farmers like Roy Pollock were being squeezed out of the dairy business. Besides, the unusually sandy soil on his farm could never have sustained the kind of intense cultivation necessary to compete in the new marketplace. “All the land around there was sandy,” remembers Akinabu Mori, who stayed on an adjoining farm for another thirty years after the Pollocks abandoned theirs, “but [the Pollocks’] place was even sandier than other farms in the same area. When the ground is like that, the water goes down fast and it doesn’t hold the fertilizer. The ground was so poor to start with it was a wonder he could grow anything.”

  Roy Pollock might have been able to hang on to his farm, as the Moris hung on to theirs, if his family had been willing to endure greater hardship. “There were times we went hungry for a week with no food at all,” Mori says, recalling his family’s plight during the Depression. “We would spend all our money for seed and have to wait for the crops to come up to eat.” In fact, the cotton boom in Phoenix fizzled three years after it started and those farmers who had stayed with dairy and truck farming during the craze became suddenly prosperous.

  But Roy Pollock had to contend with forces that other small farmers didn’t. Stella’s “big city” tastes were driving the family toward financial ruin. “Mother was a spendthrift,” Frank recalls. “When she went shopping, she w
ould buy yards of cloth and hundred-pound bags of sugar and flour. She loved to spend money.” According to Charles, Stella was “hopelessly extravagant. Any reasonable farmer would have considered it an outrage, but Mother didn’t see anything outrageous about it.” (Years later, daughter-in-law Marie discovered just how extravagant Stella could be. “She was staying with us, and even though Frank was earning $60 a week, she used to go out and buy a pound of butter every day for $1.05. She spent 10 percent of our entire income on butter. I said, ‘Stella, how about using some margarine for frying?’ And she said, ‘Absolutely not.’ It had to be real butter, and she used it like mad.”)

  Stella not only blithely spent the family money, she also steadfastly refused to help earn more of it. Although she spent hours crocheting and baking, “she never sold or tried to sell anything she made,” Frank recalls. “She wasn’t interested in selling.” Just as she distanced herself from barnyard chores, she refused to take part in marketing the farm produce. “She only went into town to go shopping,” says Frank. “My god that woman loved to shop!”

  As the financial noose closed tighter around Roy, it was inevitable, even in a family so atomized and uncommunicative, that tensions would surface. In November 1916, the Pollock boys were surprised and puzzled when their parents argued openly for several days, ostensibly over politics. “Dad was for Wilson and Mother was for Hughes,” recalls Frank. “Hughes was announced as the winner and Mother was gloating. The next day the decision was reversed because the votes from California put Wilson on top and it was Dad’s turn to gloat.” The real focus of the rising tensions wasn’t politics, however; it was, as always, control of the family. Having lost the struggle over Charles and Jay in Cody, Roy Pollock was determined to make a farmer and a father’s son out of Frank. He talked about sending him to agricultural school in Iowa and pushed him early into a farmer’s routine of hard work and responsibility. But the effort backfired. “When you’re a kid and you’re down there pulling sweet potatoes out of the sand, you get tired of it in time,” says Frank. “You’d never want to admit it. You’d never give up because you wouldn’t want your dad to think that you couldn’t do it. But after a while you resent clawing in the dirt.”