Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  When the son he hoped would work beside him began to think of farming as “clawing in the dirt,” Roy Pollock must have known he was beaten. “He had dreams,” says Frank, “and I think that was the end of them.”

  But Stella had dreams too, for herself and for her sons, and by 1917 she was pursuing them openly. She sent away for brochures distributed by the chambers of commerce in dozens of California cities, looking once again for “something different, something better.” “She had it in her mind that the schools in California were better than those in Arizona,” Frank remembers, “and she thought her boys ought to have as good an education as she could get for them. She also wanted a better material life for us.” Whether or not Stella confronted Roy in a moment of uncharacteristic openness, the ultimatum was clear: either he would leave the farm or she would leave him—return to Tingley, perhaps—and take the boys with her. “She refused to stay in that environment any longer,” says Frank. “If he stayed, he would stay alone.” There was no question where his sons’ sympathies lay. “Mother was the dominant one,” Frank concedes. “She had the love of five boys behind her. If she wanted something better, if she wanted to leave, we were ready to go with her. It wouldn’t have been too much of a job to uproot us from that farm where we were just milking cows and feeding chickens.” Probably without a word of protest, Roy agreed to go and numbly set about the task of finding a buyer for the farm.

  On May 22, 1917, a public auction was held at the farm of L. R. Pollock on Sherman Street between the hours of nine and twelve in the morning. A large crowd turned out, kicking up dust in the barnyard as they milled around the implements that Roy had laid out neatly on the ground. Afraid of strangers and unused to crowds, Jackson sought refuge in the kitchen and watched the strange events from behind the familiar safety of the screen door. When the auction finally began, the bidding was fast as the cows, horses, pigs, and calves were brought one by one up to the auctioneer. The crowd was enthusiastic and the prices good—up to $2.25 for a laying hen—but the day went painfully slowly for a few of the spectators. “It was a sorrowful thing,” Frank remembers. “Your friends are the calves and the cows. But everything went.” Throughout the morning, Stella graciously passed out the last of the watermelon.

  Soon after the auction, the Pollocks boarded a train for the destination that Mother had chosen: Chico, California. To Frank, who watched the unfolding of the last days in Phoenix with sharp, guilty eyes, the significance of the departure was clear in his father’s face: “It was the end of my dad.”

  6

  ABANDONED

  Over the next six years, the Pollock family would fall apart—not slowly and inadvertently, but precipitously and deliberately—while Jackson watched in helpless silence. Driven by her restless yearning for “something better,” Stella would move her family, or what remained of it, in and out of seven houses in six years, as if the demons that plagued her could be left behind like bad soil or inclement weather. No matter where she went, however, faces continued to fall away from her dinner table.

  In the summer of 1917, the Pollock family stepped off a Southern Pacific train in Chico, California. At first sight, Chico must have seemed full of promise. Despite the discovery of gold (and then diamonds) half a century earlier in the mountains nearby and the successive waves of fortune hunters that followed, the town’s population had risen steadily to a respectable seven or eight thousand by 1917. Farming and churchgoing were still the primary local activities, although the Diamond Match Company maintained a mill nearby where huge timbers from the mountains were splintered into kitchen matches. The heat and dust of Main Street in midsummer must have reminded the Pollocks of Phoenix, but Roy, who had a farmer’s eye for nature’s subtle distinctions, could see clouds clinging to the low Sierra foothills off to the east and, beyond that, mountains green with pine and aspen and streaked with the August red of Indian paintbrush. Here, at least, rain seemed possible. Within the city limits, low, green rows of young almond, walnut, peach, and pear trees, stands of myrtle and pomegranate, and blue Brodiaea in the scattered grain fields attested to the fact that there had been a spring and a fall was on the way. If Roy Pollock could see beyond the emotional defeat that Chico represented, he saw a land that, even in the drought of summer, looked promisingly fertile compared to the dustbowl of Phoenix.

  Just across the Big Chico River stood the stately Bidwell mansion, home of John Bidwell, whose 20,000-acre estate, granted when California was still a Spanish possession, included all of Chico and most of surrounding Butte County. Bidwell had accomplished what Roy Pollock had once dreamed of: carving an empire out of the wilderness. Now his widow roamed the huge house and ruled Chico like a frontier dowager empress, dictating the town’s growth and character and treating the remaining Indians with Presbyterian noblesse oblige. Reviewing her stacks of promotional pamphlets, Stella must have figured, rightly, that over the years, Mrs. Bidwell had brought a measure of eastern culture and refinement to the town her husband founded.

  The Pollocks in Chico: Sande, Charles, Roy, Stella, Frank, Jay, and Jackson

  In February, more than half a year after arriving, Roy and Stella finally sold their farm in Phoenix and found a small place on Sacramento Avenue west of town for a price they could afford. Like Chico itself, the eighteen-acre plot of peach, prune, and apricot trees was Stella’s choice more than Roy’s. “It was the most unlikely place in the world for a dirt farmer to buy,” recalls Charles, then fifteen. “He really knew nothing about fruit trees.” But Stella knew something about houses. Built at the turn of the century when the craftsman movement was beginning and the new railroads offered cheap lumber to encourage building, it was a handsome frame house with a proper front porch, a parlor, pine floors, and—for the first time in Jackson’s memory—indoor plumbing. The builders had obviously taken some uncompensated care in finishing the window frames and the door surrounds; they even boxed the eaves, giving the house the refined, “dressed up” look of Aunt Stella’s house in Tingley. For Stella, the decision to buy was an easy one; she didn’t even bother to venture out back amid the long rows of peach trees to see the barn, the windmill, and the tank house. Roy, resigned to his wife’s will, made only a cursory inspection—if he made one at all.

  The Pollocks’ house in Chico

  The physical geography of Jackson’s life may have been dramatically altered by the move to Chico, but the emotional terrain remained ominously unchanged.

  As a teenager, Charles Pollock was an attractive, if incongruous, blend of his father’s small-scale machismo and his mother’s small-town sophistication. Like Roy, he was drawn to the easy camaraderie of other men (at five feet five, he was the runt of a high school gang known as “the dirty seven”). Yet he was also an artist and wanted the world to know it. “Charles looked like an artist,” recalls a neighbor and schoolmate. “He had long hair like an artist. Never saw a barbershop. We knew he was an artist from the first day.” Some days he played the rogue, posing in rumpled jeans and a chamois shirt with the sleeves turned up the way Roy wore them, hands akimbo, the brim of his cap carefully peaked so the shadow fell just so across his face—or, without the cap, letting his hair fall rakishly over one eye. Other days he played the dandy, strutting all day in a high starched collar and a broad silk cravat tied in a perfect cylindrical knot, with a tie pin and polished shoes, his pompadour carefully coaxed into place with a little grease and a meticulous combing. In a secondhand store in Chico, he found a fancy gray men’s dress vest with pearl buttons and wore it until it fell apart. “Charles always had a taste for elegant things,” says one member of the family. “That was his mother in him.” Like all the Pollock boys, he was obsessed with women’s breasts; yet, when the occasion called for it, he could spoon like a gentleman, writing love letters and decorating them with “lovely ornamental borders.”

  For Charles, this balance of masculine and feminine, precarious as it was, came naturally. Even at fifteen, he carried it off with such confidence and f
lair that it must have looked easy to an adoring and impressionable six-year-old Jackson, who for years afterward would mimic his oldest brother’s habits and mannerisms, his clothes, his life-style, even his choice of career, in a vain effort to replicate his success at life and love. Several years after leaving Chico, Jackson had his picture taken wearing the same cap that Charles wore, at the same rakish angle, the same worn jeans and the same chamois shirt with the sleeves turned up just so. But somehow the effect was never quite the same.

  Charles in Chico; Stella in background.

  Charles had long demonstrated an enthusiasm for any activity—from paper routes to art lessons—that took him away from home. In Chico, no longer saddled with farm chores, he became a virtual stranger. He still came to the dinner table from time to time and Stella still lovingly displayed his drawings and paintings around the house for her other sons to see, but the center of his life had moved elsewhere: to school, to new friends, and to his growing interest in art. His withdrawal was devastating to Jackson. In a poignant effort to prevent it, he tagged along wherever Charles went—even on dates. “Jack used to follow us around,” remembers Hester Grimm, one of Charles’s several girlfriends in Chico. “It didn’t occur to him that he couldn’t be with Charles any time he wanted to.” On such occasions, Charles could be cruelly dismissive. “He’d be tagging along with his nose always running,” Grimm recalls, “and Charles would snap at him, ‘Go home, Jack.’”

  Even as Jackson clung to Charles, another member of the family was slipping out of his life largely unnoticed. In the last year of World War I, Jay Pollock went into Chico with a friend and tried to enlist. The recruitment officer rejected him as too young, but Jay had other ways of courting danger. After school, he and his friends would walk west to the Sacramento River and see who could jump from the tallest tree. “They would dive out of those trees nude from forty or fifty feet,” remembers Frank, who sometimes tagged along. “It scared the devil out of me.”

  Charles the dandy

  Although short even for a Pollock, Jay was the athlete of the family. In his premiere football game as a 132-pound halfback, he “got so goddamned excited that I was in on every play. I was making a hell of a motion out there.” The next day, the school paper headlined: “Pollock Tore Up Campus Like a Wild Steer.” Teammates called him “Punk” and “Squirt.” “He was a fighter,” remembers a still-admiring Frank, “and quick and tough and hard as nails.” In his freshman year, he won Chico High’s annual boxing tournament, clobbering a series of older and beefier opponents. By the time he was a junior, nobody would fight him, so someone suggested having a “battle royal—eight men in the ring at once, last man standing takes the prize.” When the fight began, Jackson and his brothers watched from the stands as eight boys, weighing as much as 180 pounds, flailed away at one another indiscriminately in the crowded ring. When blood began to flow too freely, however, the officials stopped the fight. “What the hell’s the matter with these guys?” Jay demanded indignantly as the other fighters began to leave the ring. “Let’s finish this thing.”

  In Chico, Roy went about tending the orchard in an absent, melancholy way. Among the neighborhood children, he earned a reputation for moodiness. “I recall us boys avoided him when we were around,” remembers Wayne Somes, a regular playmate of the younger Pollock boys. “He was kind of distant—remote.” Family dinners, never conversational showpieces, became contests of silence. “After a brief time in Chico, Dad’s spirit was pretty well licked,” Frank remembers. “He couldn’t forgive Mother for pressuring him to give up their toehold in Arizona.” Even Charles, watching from a distance, understood his father’s frustration: “Chico was a fruit ranch and he didn’t know anything about almonds and peaches and apricots. He knew how to make crops grow—nothing at all about fruit.” Without conviction, Roy tried to learn. He attended pruning demonstrations offered by the county agricultural commissioner. He joined the growers’ cooperative on Sacramento Avenue where the neighborhood peaches, apricots, almonds, and plums were brought to be cleaned and dried—a laborious process even for the stalwart. For a season’s crop, Roy took home a few dollars a ton. Compared to the backbreaking job of cutting alfalfa or irrigating row crops, it wasn’t hard work, but “his heart wasn’t in it,” recalls Frank. “And no wonder. He didn’t know how to fit into that kind of economy. Mother would tell us, ‘Don’t bother Dad. He’s got the blues.’”

  Marvin Jay “Punk” Pollock

  In early 1918, Roy discovered an alkaline strip 200 feet wide and a half mile long running lengthwise through the farm. From the back door of the house at one end almost to the property line at the other, nothing except Sudan grass or maybe alfalfa would grow, certainly not the additional fruit trees that were needed to make the land profitable. Suddenly, the farm’s usable acreage—already the bare minimum—was cut in half. Frank remembers that his father had planned to plant more peach trees like those in front, or apricots or almonds, with pumpkins underneath, perhaps, for extra income. In obvious desperation, he took a job working the rice fields of nearby Willows, where he contracted a case of malaria that weakened his already frail health. At the Pollock dinner table, of course, nothing was said, but everyone knew that buying the Chico farm, like moving to Chico in the first place, had been Stella’s doing.

  Disregarding the mounting financial problems and the strained silence that had descended on her marriage, Stella clung tenaciously to her routine. She continued to spend money on the house, wallpapering for the second time in a year in the spring of 1919. Her meals were as lavish as ever and the baked goods as abundant. If she felt the accusing looks of her husband and sons, she never let on. “She wouldn’t show any of this to the family,” Frank remembers. “Her pride was impenetrable.” She blamed the family’s economic misfortunes on outside forces—the war, the armistice, the Wilson administration, the Jews. “I heard her say one time that the Jews have all the money,” one of her sons recalls, “and all we needed to do was get in on some of it.” The facade finally cracked in the summer of 1919 when she began to complain about severe headaches. She blamed them on the “Northerners,” the hot dry winds that blew through Chico during July and August, but the family knew that the winds that caused Stella’s headaches came from a quadrant not marked on any compass. “Mother didn’t really like the town of Chico for personal reasons,” Frank recalls. “She had sized it up and decided there was something better out there.”

  Despite the warning signs, Jackson’s world remained deceptively calm. In September 1918, to his great delight, he joined Sande at the Sacramento Avenue School, a neat clapboard structure a few hundred yards down the road from the Pollock farm, with two big rooms (four grades to a room), a shingled belfry, and a long front porch where the girls huddled together whispering and giggling, while the boys roared through recess. The teacher was a ferocious woman misnamed Grace Belle, known among the students as “the Tartar.” After school, Jack and Sande escaped into the flat, spacious country around Chico. If they were lucky, Frank could be persuaded to take them down to Grape Way and across the Big Chico Creek to the cookhouse on the huge Phelan Ranch. There, a Chinese cook, imported all the way from San Francisco, would give them each a slice of banana cream cake. In the summer, they could cool off in the creek out back or, if it was dry, hike down the road to the Sacramento River where the big boys jumped naked from the tall trees. There were ball games and slingshots (Roy forbade them to shoot at the mosquito-eating dragonflies) and “once in a great while” a movie in town at one of the theaters on Broadway.

  Meanwhile, events and forces far beyond Jackson’s control were propelling his family toward yet another financial disaster. The end of the war in Europe, marked by the Armistice on November 11, 1918, meant that millions of American soldiers no longer needed supplies and millions of European farmers could go back to their fields. The resulting drop in demand and surge in supply sent the price of farm goods around the world plummeting into a depression that would persist,
with only occasional relief, for twenty years—until the next war. Roy Pollock was only one of thousands of farmers who had been seduced by high wartime prices and government calls (delivered by President Wilson’s food administrator, Herbert Hoover) for increased production, and had borrowed commensurately. The $4,000 that Roy owed on his little plot of flawed land represented only a tiny piece of the $6.7 billion worth of farm mortgages in 1920—a figure that had doubled during the war years. In 1920, American farm families’ income accounted for 15 percent of the national total. Eight years later, the farmers’ share had dropped to 9 percent. Caught in this vast ebbing tide, Roy Pollock struggled to survive. “Dad had to put a third mortgage on the farm,” recalls Frank, the only brother who worked on the Chico farm. “It was the first time I ever heard of a third mortgage.”

  Seizing the excuse of financial necessity, Stella again determined that the family should move, that the answer to their problems was to start over, yet again, someplace else. “Mother was always willing to give up what she had for something beyond that might be more favorable,” says Frank. Of course, Roy had his reasons, too. His time in Chico had convinced him of the dismal long-term prospects for small farmers. For both Roy and Stella, moving was a way to avoid the terrible truth that their marriage and their family were on the verge of collapse.