Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  For Roy, the appearance of Stella’s old ally, Charles, with his colorful stories, his spending money, and his carefree sexuality, turned out to be the final indignity. Charles made no attempt to hide his disdain for the failed venture of the hotel—“I had no idea what they thought they were doing with that place,” he recalls—and with the self-absorption of youth ignored his parents’ financial plight. Stella had laid down the rules in Phoenix: Charles’s money, whether paper-route change or lumber-boom wages, was Charles’s money, to be spent on silk pongee shirts, pearl-buttoned vests, or whatever else Charles’s cultivated tastes dictated.

  Soon after he arrived, Charles caught his father drinking in the darkened little bar downstairs.

  Stella must have suspected for some time: his long, unaccounted-for hours in the barn and the garden, his loud, late night carousing with the surveying crew, his deepening alienation and depression were all familiar warning signs. Even with Prohibition, home brew was as close as the next-door neighbor’s still. But to have the truth confirmed, and presumably relayed to Stella, by Charles, had to be more than Roy Pollock’s threadbare pride could take.

  His resentment spilled out at the dinner table. The occasion was a political discussion between Roy and a hotel guest about the upcoming presidential contest between Democrat James Cox, standing in for the ailing Woodrow Wilson, Republican Warren G. Harding, and Socialist Eugene V. Debs, a man whom Ray had held in awe since high school. Suddenly, Charles jumped into the debate. “I got up on my high horse,” he recalls, “and gave Dad a piece of my mind,” attacking Wilson and the League of Nations and parroting the antiunion views popular among his friends’ parents, whose farms depended on cheap transient labor. At that, Roy exploded. He lashed out in frustration at the repeated failure of the socialist cause. He lashed out at the country’s rejection of Debs. He lashed out at the critics of Woodrow Wilson, whom he had come to embrace in Debs’s absence, a man who, not unlike himself, was emotionally besieged and clinging desperately to a dream that was beyond salvaging. He lashed out at a son who had never really been a son in the way he wanted one.

  The final blow came from Roy’s youngest sons. Later that year when the sheep escaped from their barn, Roy confronted Frank, Sande, and Jackson and demanded to know who was responsible. All three claimed innocence. Even after Roy threatened to beat the truth out of them, they remained defiant, invoking, in their attitude if not in their words, their mother’s protection. Challenged by his own children, Roy erupted in a red-faced rage. Smashing an old barrel, he grabbed one of the long, curved staves and began beating all three of his defiant sons at once. “It scared the devil out of us when he jumped on that barrel,” Frank recalls, “and it hurt like hell.” When she heard of the thrashing, Stella warned her husband, “Don’t you ever lay a hand on those boys again!”

  In the end, of course, it was Stella who was the object of Roy’s rage. She had brought him to this abandoned hotel in this abandoned town and made him suddenly superfluous. She had uprooted him from the soil in Phoenix, sandy as it was, and tried to transplant him among the strange orchards in the alkaline soil of Chico. She had squandered the money in Cody on wallpaper and baby clothes. She had stolen his sons. In one form or another—in a word, a look, a political argument, a blind rage, at the dinner table or by the barnyard gate—everything spilled out, and all that was left was to leave. Says Frank Pollock, “My dad decided he wasn’t going to take any more of it.”

  It’s not clear exactly when Roy Pollock abandoned his family. He may have accompanied the surveying team that was staying at the hotel on short trips as early as the summer of 1920. He was certainly gone in October of the same year because the Lassen County voter registration records list him as a Republican, indicating that Stella registered in his behalf. He may have returned to Janesville several times to transact business, including the exchange of the hotel for a small farm near Orland, California, about twenty miles west of Chico. In any event, by the spring of 1921, he was gone.

  7

  LOST IN THE DESERT

  Almost from the moment Roy Pollock walked away from the Diamond Mountain Inn, Stella Pollock waged a determined campaign to deny, or at least conceal, the fact that her husband of nineteen years had left her. She planted articles in the Orland Unit announcing the family’s arrival and in the Lassen Advocate lamenting their departure. “L. R. Pollock traded off his place for a property in Chico [Orland],” the Advocate noted on July 15, 1921. “We understand that Mr. Pollock will make his home there soon. We should be very sorry to lose these neighbors.” For the move to Orland, she recruited Roy’s brother, Frank, now settled in Chico, to load the household goods onto a railroad car and accompany them on the circuitous, two-day milk run through Reno and Sacramento to Orland. When the car pulled into the Orland station filled like an ark with two each of horses, cows, pigs, and a pen full of chickens, the Orland Unit—“The Only Absolutely Honest Newspaper in California”—mistakenly announced the arrival of “F. Pollock … with a carload of household goods and other personal property, to make his home at this place.”

  The farm Stella had chosen, three miles east of Orland on the road to Chico, consisted of a handsome house, a dilapidated barn, a windmill, and a small orchard surrounded by eighteen acres of tired alfalfa that no farmer would have chosen. “It was an old stand,” Frank recalls, “and it should have been plowed under.” As always it was the house that attracted her. Neighbors described it as “one of the better houses around the countryside.” Although it had once been the hub of an active dairy farm, she made no effort to coerce Frank, dispirited by his father’s absence and disillusioned with farming, into assuming full-time farming duties. She had no intention of returning, even temporarily, to the life of a farmer’s wife. Between school, odd jobs, and visits to Charles and Jay in Chico, Frank desultorily tended the fields and milked the two cows: on rare occasions, Jack and Sande helped with the raking or picked listlessly at the orchard; and every few days Stella hand-churned the butter. Once or twice, she even put a sign by the road announcing “Hay for sale.” “We’d pick up maybe a few dollars,” Frank recalls. But the money that kept her family fed and clothed came from the check that arrived every month in the mail from the distant, unacknowledged Roy. The activity on the farm was merely a charade.

  In a sense, the land itself was a charade.

  Like so much of the Sacramento Valley, the land around Orland was flat, treeless, arid, and inhospitable—hardly the bountiful land promised by the railroads, land developers, and chambers of commerce. Water, rerouted from the mountains and stored behind the East Park Dam, lent to those farms that could afford to buy it the transitory appearance of fertility. But when the water dried up, as it had during the winters of 1919 and 1920, the desert quickly reasserted its claim. “They had to line the irrigation ditches with cement or the water would just disappear between here and there,” recalls one old Orland resident, “fifty yards from the creek to the farm and it would be gone.” In town, the workmen paving the main streets with blocks of Warrenite had to use mining bits to drill through the kiln-dried earth and the movie theater advertised “blocks of ice in the blowers.” The wealthy built a swimming pool while the poor, mostly farmers, talked of drilling wells or building another dam. Some, like LeRoy and Frank Birch, lost their farms and lived with their livestock in an abandoned bam—cows on one side, family on the other. Others, like the dairyman, Mr. Peterson, came in from a day in the sweltering sun, sank into a bathtub of cold water, and died.

  Then, in the spring of 1921, just before the Pollocks arrived, the rains finally came, “storm after storm,” enough to fill the East Park reservoir four times over. The talk of wells and new dams ebbed, exposing once again the myopic boosterism so characteristic of small western towns waiting for a boom that never came.

  Unable to support their families on the standard forty-acre plot, local farmers were often forced to take second jobs. But because cheap Russian pickers harvested most of the prunes
and almonds, many residents were forced to look outside the Orland area for additional work. Thus, no one thought much of it that Stella Pollock’s husband was never seen working his little plot of land along the well-traveled road between Orland and Chico, or that Stella always had money when she came to shop at Pearce & Frank’s or the People’s Store on Orland’s gap-toothed main street.

  At home, Stella maintained the pretense of a normal family life. “I knew their father wasn’t around,” recalls Stuart Cleek, a schoolmate of Jackson’s and one of the few friends who visited occasionally, “but they never spoke of him.” “Mother seemed to get along fine without Dad,” Frank remembers. “I never heard her complain. After all, she still had her boys. She had gotten what she always wanted.” Stella kept up the charade until the late fall of 1921 when she complained of pain and took to her bed. Frank rode the spring wagon into Orland and summoned a doctor, but never discovered the nature of her affliction. He wrote to Charles and Jay in Chico of their mother’s sudden illness, but neither one traveled the few miles to her bedside. Only when Roy made a brief appearance at Christmas did Stella’s health begin to improve, and then only for a few days.

  Just at the moment when Stella had finally “gotten what she always wanted,” her sons began to desert her. One by one, following their father’s lead, they forced themselves into various exiles as if to validate his departure with their own and, perhaps, in the process, reestablish a lost bond.

  On a frigid New Year’s weekend in December 1921, Charles appeared in Orland for the first and last time to announce that, with only three months remaining in his senior year, he had quit high school and was leaving for Los Angeles to “get involved in the art field.”

  The news couldn’t have been welcome. Even if her restlessness often interfered, Stella had always encouraged her sons’ education—“Get all of it you can,” she used to say, “because they can’t take it away from you”—and had always hoped that at least some of her sons would enter what she loftily called “the educated professions.” Just a few months later, Jay appeared in Orland. Mumbling vague protests about feeling “isolated” and searching for “something that seemed more important,” he announced that he too was quitting school. Roy arranged a surveying job for him in the mountains, and he returned to Chico at the end of summer to begin his junior year, but soon after the football season ended, he left school again, permanently this time.

  Frank was next in line. Although outwardly submissive, he, too, harbored grievances against his mother. “I hated the moves,” he remembers. “You make a bunch of friends, and then you have to leave them. It wasn’t good for me, and I’m sure it wasn’t good for Sande or Jack.” Too young to make a final break like Charles and Jay, he gradually removed himself from Stella’s orbit, hiring himself out to other farmers in the area: winnowing and raking hay for a few dollars a day and the excuse to stay away from home until dark. In the fall of 1922, when a neighbor offered him a daily ride into Chico, he leapt at the chance to attend high school, where he was particularly enchanted by Homer’s Odyssey and the adventures of its wandering king. Although still bound to a bare minimum of farm chores, he often spent nights in Chico with Uncle Frank and Aunt Rose and their distracting daughter Betty Nelson, putting Orland and Stella as far from his thoughts as Homer’s poetry and Betty Nelson’s breasts could take him.

  Despite his long absences, Roy remained blameless in his sons’ eyes. “The checks came without fail,” Frank remembers. “He was very responsible. You get used to not having your Dad around.” His rare visits were anticipated breathlessly and when he arrived, looking strong and weathered, the long absences were instantly forgotten. In November 1921, barely able to wait for his father’s Christmas visit, Sande wrote him a letter.

  My Dear Father:

  Sunday afternoon and it is kind of hot & not much to do so I thought I would write a line to keep me busy. Our gun had a rag caught in it and we got it out this morning and we went hunting Jack killed a owl and we shot at some rabbits but didn’t get any. The rabbits here are all jack Rabbits & they don’t sit up so we just have to shoot at them on the run I killed one on the run a few days ago … You asked me what school I liked be[s]t Lassen or here all of us boys like it here far the best our teacher is sick don’t know if she will be all right or not. … She Christian science and they don’t get better very fast some times. Well I guess I’ll have to close with lots of love.

  Santy.

  P.S. Christmas is coming slow isn’t it?

  Marooned on her little eighteen-acre island of parched, treeless land with no car, less and less money for shopping, and no electricity for late night sewing, Stella clung to the fiction of a family for as long as possible. The neighbors saw her only fleetingly, collecting eggs from the chicken shed in the morning, hanging laundry, pulling vegetables from the little garden out back. Through the scorching summer of 1922 and into the fall when Frank began school in Chico, she held out. But mortgage payments on the Orland farm were increasingly hard to meet. Sometime around the end of the year, just as Sande and Jackson began the long anxious vigil for their father’s Christmas visit, Stella once again set her mind to move. She would sell the Orland farm and take the remnant of her family back to Arizona, where Roy had found another surveying job.

  It was not an inevitable decision. Despite their financial dilemma, Stella didn’t have to follow Roy. She could have rented a house in Chico for far less than the Orland mortgage payments and maintained her charade on Roy’s monthly checks. By any measure, Arizona had been a humiliating ordeal for her; it was the last place she would have chosen for a home, no matter how temporary. The only explanation is that she had finally acknowledged that her family was falling apart and her sons needed a father after all.

  The trip to Phoenix in May 1923 was a reunion only out of desperation. The family lashed what possessions they could to the bumpers of a 1920 Studebaker Special 6 (partial payment for the farm) and consigned the rest, including Roy’s glass-front bookcase, to a Chico warehouse. “We were down to the end of the line,” Frank remembers. “None of us knew what Mother and Dad hoped to accomplish by going to Arizona.” Jay, who had fled to a cattle ranch after quitting school for the second time, returned home to help with the driving as far as Los Angeles, where Charles had found him a job. Gyp, the bull terrier, rode between two duffel bags tied to the front fender. “It was a rough trip for him,” says Frank recalling the time Gyp rolled off onto the side of the road when the car was going full speed on a straightaway. “But he was a tough dog—no pup, you know.”

  The weeklong trip was hard on the younger Pollock boys in a different way. A week was more time than they had spent with their father in years, and they were eager to make the most of it. But, sitting on either side of the stone-faced Stella in the backseat, they didn’t dare try. “He wasn’t exactly a stranger,” says Frank of those frustrating days on the road, “but we couldn’t be very intimate with him.” More than five hundred miles went by in silence.

  The Pollocks arrived at the Porter farm on the east side of Phoenix just after sundown in early June. The two families were together for only a few days—enough time for some celebratory group photographs—before Roy disappeared again, headed for the Tonto National Forest northeast of Phoenix, leaving Stella and her sons in a tiny rented house in one of the city’s grimmer neighborhoods. “We went there without knowing what the hell we were going to do,” Frank remembers.

  It may have been as long as several months before Stella paid a call on Jacob Minsch, a modestly successful local farmer and dairyman whom the Pollocks had known distantly during their earlier stay. Stella had learned from Charles (who stopped in Phoenix on his way to Los Angeles) that Mrs. Minsch had died the year before in a freak car accident and that Jacob was hard pressed to tend a 140-acre farm, a busy dairy, and a family of four without the help of a wife. Minsch, a rangy, “raw-boned” Kansan with a raucous laugh, appreciated Stella’s Teutonic reserve (his wife had been German, his paren
ts Swiss), and within days, the Pollock boys moved into the white frame bunkhouse out back with Wilbur, Orville, and young Jay Minsch. “It was an obvious arrangement,” recalls Dolly Minsch, Jacob’s only daughter, who was ten at the time. “They needed a home and my father needed a housekeeper.”

  Between the winter of 1920–21 when Roy Pollock walked away from his family and the summer of 1924 when the Pollock family, still without Roy, left Arizona for the second time, Jackson Pollock grew up.

  Just how remarkable a transformation took place in the interim can be seen in two pictures, taken only two years apart. The first shows Jackson with his fellow students at the Walnut Grove School in Orland in early 1922. He stands at the end of the second row, stiff and formal even compared to his self-conscious schoolmates: hands awkwardly at his sides, shirt hastily tucked in, pants pulled high, belt tightened, hair combed, cuffs buttoned. He has prepared elaborately for this confrontation. His expression is darkly inquisitive, almost pained, as he concentrates on the photographer as if looking from a great distance, squinting to rivet the details. He is still the “mama’s boy” from Phoenix, the sensitive child haunted by fantasies and insecurities, unsure and suspicious of the world, sifting every experience for threatening signs. While Sande looks over his shoulder with an impish, impatient smile and Frank stands in back with a wide open aw-shucks grin, Jackson looks out from his rigid body like a sentinel surveying hostile countryside.