Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Farther down the canyon, they could see the cliff dwellings high above the treetops, sealed into a dark niche in the canyon’s sheer yellow sandstone walls about a hundred feet above the creek and sixty feet below the rim of the overhanging bluff. The climb up the face of the cliff was difficult and at times harrowing. Once on the ledge, Sande discovered a small doorway on the back wall leading to an enclosed room. He crawled into the darkness, followed by the beam of his father’s flashlight. Inside, he saw on the wall opposite the doorway the unmistakable imprints of human hands. Jackson scrambled in behind him and together they marveled at this unexpected sign of life in such a dead place, handprints left by cliff builders six hundred years before when the mud plaster was still soft. Sande placed his small hands in the imprints and was startled to find that they fit perfectly. Jackson thought that must mean that the dwellings had been built by a “race of pygmies,” but Roy explained that in tribes like this one, women did the masonry work.

  While Roy and the guide lit pipes and sat on the edge of the cliff planning the route down, Jack and Sande continued to explore. It was Sande who discovered the strange hole about eighteen inches in diameter in the ceiling of one of the back rooms and called his father. Roy found a precarious toehold on the back wall and climbed high enough to grab the lip of the hole and haul himself up to where he could see into the blackness above. According to Sande, Jackson became suddenly terrified and begged his father, “Don’t try to go in,” but Roy ignored the pleas and poked his head up into the hole, wedging his shoulder against the rim for support. After probing the darkness with a flashlight and discovering that the cave was big enough, he announced, “I’m going up.” At that, Jackson became “hysterical.” But before Roy could respond, he heard a rumbling from nearby in the darkness. Sande remembered him yelling “Look out below” in the instant before the stone hit him.

  He had thrown his arm up to protect his head, but both were now pinned against the rim of the opening. The impact knocked his feet from their precarious toeholds on the wall. For five long, anxious minutes, as Jackson and Sande watched helplessly, their father dangled from the opening, his legs beating the air above them, searching desperately for some support. Sande remembered vividly Jackson’s panicked screams: “Do something! Do something!” Finally, somehow, Roy found a foothold and the leverage he needed. With a great heave, he managed to move the stone just far enough to free his arm and drop to the floor. According to Sande, his father’s only comment as he stood up and brushed himself off was a laconic, “That was a close one.”

  On the long hike home, Roy said little, and within days the Studebaker with Jack and Sande in the back seat pulled out of the Carr Ranch without him.

  8

  JACK AND SANDE

  The only thing surprising about the Pollocks’ move to Southern California was that it had taken so long.

  In the twenty-five years since Stella McClure had left Tingley to visit her sister in Denver, thousands of her fellow Iowans had taken a more direct route to the golden valleys south of the Tehachapi Mountains. In the 1920s alone, some 160,000 Iowans (almost 7 percent of the state’s population), driven by skyrocketing land prices at home and seduced by the boosterism of Harry Chandler’s All-Year Club in Los Angeles, climbed into their Dodges and Oldsmobiles and headed west, joining like-minded refugees from other midwestern states in what became “the first great migration of the automobile age.” By the middle of the decade, the official button of the Iowa State Society, showing an ear of corn, a pig, and the motto: “Hog and hominy,” was a common sight throughout Southern California. Strangers greeted one another on the streets of Los Angeles with the question, “What part of Iowa are you from?” and an anonymous wag rewrote Rudyard Kipling’s famous quatrain:

  On the road to old L.A.,

  Where the tin-can tourists play

  And a sign says “L.A. City Limits”

  At Clinton, Ioway.

  For two blistering hot days in early September 1924—one of the years of peak migration—the Pollocks’ Studebaker took its place in the sorry parade of cars with Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, and Kansas license plates that inched and stalled their way toward the Pacific Ocean.

  About sixty miles east of Los Angeles, near the town of Riverside, the Pollocks fell out of line and found a campground.

  Riverside had to be Stella’s choice. Founded as a colony settlement in 1870 for “people of intelligence and refinement,” Riverside had grown into an island of considerable culture on the high, dry plains of south central California. The ideals of the founders had been reinforced around the turn of the century by an influx of English families following the establishment of two major English citrus farms in the area. While their numbers were never great, the Britishers’ influence, in a land starved for cultivation of both soil and spirit, was deeply felt. Homegrown patricians founded the Casa Blanca Tennis Club in 1883 and the Riverside Polo Club in 1892. Dressed in the latest London fashions, they took Sunday drives up Victoria Avenue to the Victoria Club on Victoria Hill to watch the real Englishmen take their Sunday strolls.

  In 1873, when the Department of Agriculture shipped two budded navel orange trees from Bahia, Brazil, to Mrs. Luther C. Tibbets of Riverside, the final, American ingredient of success was added to Riverside’s mix: money. As California’s population exploded, so did the local market for navel oranges, and as refrigeration methods improved, so did the national market. Riverside became a haven for culture and capital. Oranges became a source of both revenue and status. “To own a well-stocked corn-and-hog farm in the Middle West undeniably confers a sense of solid well-being and plenty,” wrote a local historian, “but to own an orange grove in Southern California is to live on the real gold coast of American agriculture.” Money and prominence brought civic pride and its manifestations in stone: an ornate city hall, a massive Beaux Arts courthouse, and, as Stella undoubtedly was aware, an excellent school system.

  With its perennial sun, Riverside attracted leisure-class vacationers as well as leisure-class farmers. By the time the Pollocks arrived, it was the premier winter resort on the West Coast, and the town’s premier hotel, the Mission Inn, was the finest tourist hotel west of the Mississippi. Its fairy-tale silhouette of dormers, arches, buttresses, and bell towers in the famous “mission style” gave Riverside a uniquely Old World flavor with a flamboyant, entrepreneurial twist—a mixture of old and new that would itself become a Southern California tradition.

  This was the small, prosperous, cultivated, highly literate, and deeply conservative community to which Stella Pollock brought her three sons in the fall of 1924. A week or two after their arrival, she found a suitable house to rent at the corner of Chestnut Street and Twelfth Avenue, only a few blocks from the tourist resorts, tree-lined boulevards, and Victorian facades of downtown. The house itself was another of Stella’s proud attempts to give her family at least the appearance of stability and prosperity. “I never thought of them as being poor,” says a friend who visited the Pollocks often at the Chestnut Street house, “because Mrs. Pollock was always so generous.” Built about 1910, the sixroom, one-and-a-half story bungalow may have caught Stella’s eye with its chalet-style bargeboards, spandrels, exposed rafters, and carved corbels. A deep porch with elephantine columns resting on fake-stone piers overhung the front door on the Chestnut Street side. The house was set high on its lot to allow for a street-level garage underneath the porch. Although built from the same basic plan as other houses in the neighborhood, number 1196 offered enough refinements—diamond-shaped mullions in the transoms, sidelights at the door, upper sashes in the windows—to satisfy Stella’s appetite for distinction.

  In Riverside, after five years of increasingly distant and halfhearted supervision in Roy’s absence, Stella finally gave up parenting altogether. According to Robert Cooter, a classmate of Sande’s who often accompanied the youngest Pollock boys on hunting trips, “If we wanted to ditch school and go rabbit huntin’, they’d go to Mrs. Pollock and say, ‘Mom,
we’re goin’ rabbit huntin’.’ And she’d just say, ‘Here’s fifty cents, get yourselves a box of shells.’ My mother wouldn’t do that.” Unlike Cooter, who delivered newspapers and telegrams and bagged groceries on Saturdays, neither Sande nor Jackson ever held a part-time job. According to Cooter, they didn’t need to: “[Stella] was always good to them and gave them spending money.” She didn’t even require them to perform chores around the house, despite the presence of several boarders, who always created extra work. The kids in the neighborhood were understandably envious: “I thought they were an ideal family,” Cooter recalls.

  In fact, the Pollock family was in the final stages of its slow death—and Stella wasn’t the only one trying to lower her emotional stake in its survival. For Frank, the self-destructive rages of previous years had been replaced by an eagerness to finish high school and get out with some dignity. By senior year, he had been elected president of his class—a long way from cactus-wrestling in the Arizona desert. As far as Jackson was concerned, however, he might as well have been gone. Between writing for the school newspaper and the yearbook, acting in school plays, and delivering groceries from the back of a Model T truck after school, Frank was seldom home. From his downstairs bedroom adjacent to the front door, he could slip in and out largely unnoticed. Saturdays he worked at Sevaly’s Market and summers on a maintenance crew emptying trash cans and cleaning latrines at camps in the San Gabriel mountains. “I didn’t pay any attention to Jack in Riverside,” Frank admits. “I didn’t even know he was around.”

  With all the other members of the family deserting him, in body or in spirit, Jackson clung ever more tenaciously to Sande.

  In later years, Jackson Pollock would win fame as “the cowboy painter,” an artist who twirled “lariats” of paint on a “cattle range” of canvas. At one point, after his death, a rumor would buzz through European art circles that he had actually been a cowboy, throwing his admirers “into rapture.”

  In fact, Sande, not Jackson, was the first “cowboy” in the Pollock family, just as Charles was the first painter. It was Sande who had been fascinated since childhood by stories of cowboys and Indians, gunfights and stagecoaches. It was Sande who, over the years, had mixed colorful scraps of family history, popular imagery from dime store novels, and bits of schoolboy gossip to create an idealized portrait of a Wild West he wished he had known. “Saddles and horses and boots and guns, all this was a very big part of our childhood experience,” he boasted to an interviewer in 1949. But it was only fantasy. In fact, neither Sande nor Jack ever owned a horse or a saddle (Jack was afraid of horses and never learned to ride); the guns they used were single-shot .22s, not six-shooters; and they rarely killed anything bigger than a rabbit on purpose. The closest either had come to the real Old West was Janesville, where, according to Sande, “the cowboys would get bored, and if there was a pretty teacher, they would go to school with us and sit next to the 8th grade … with their chewing tobacco, and boots, and six-shooters.” The surveyors who stayed at the Diamond Mountain Inn, although not exactly gun-toting cowboys, were mostly old-timers who had seen the West in wilder days and, like the sheepherders in Cody, enjoyed the adulation of a wide-eyed boy. “All the old codgers would sit around our stove and talk about gunfights and rustlers,” Sande told the same interviewer. “When we got there, it was all over, but it was just over.” At some level, Sande’s obsession with the past undoubtedly reflected the estrangement he felt from his own family, especially now that Roy had actually joined the surveyors and gone to live in what was left of the Old West. Like Jackson, Sande had come too late, falling just outside the favored inner circle of brothers who, for a while at least, in Cody and Phoenix, had been part of a real family. By the time he and Jackson arrived, “it was all over, but it was just over.”

  Sande, the first “cowboy” in the family

  The pool halls of Phoenix had given Sande a brief taste of the cowboy freedom he longed for—freedom from school, freedom from Stella and her needful baby, freedom to play with the big boys. But all that ended with the move to Riverside: Frank abandoned him, school corralled him, and Jackson, as always, clung to his shirttails. Jackson was bigger now—a full inch taller than Sande and bigger boned—so their wrestling contests were more evenly matched, but being “the runt of the family” didn’t sit well with Sande either, so he set out to find new ways of proving his manhood. A punching bag appeared in the backyard on Chestnut Street.

  Jack and Sande couldn’t have found a better proving ground than the countryside around Riverside. The town, with its close-cropped polo field and vast armies of citrus trees, may have been an island of cultivation, but all around it, just on the other side of the irrigation ditches was an ocean of dry, rocky wilderness. North of the Santa Ana River, the Jurupa Mountains heaved up from the Riverside plateau. Farther back, the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains heaved even higher. Beyond them, walled off from Southern California, was the great oven of the Mojave Desert. Without the mountains to keep out the heat and dust of the desert and to snatch moisture from the ocean winds coming off the Pacific, the area around Riverside would have long since baked to a barren crust. Even with the mountains, water was hardly abundant. The Santa Ana River, one of the three driest rivers in America, could have been the inspiration for Mark Twain’s comment that he had fallen into a California river and “come out all dusty.” But Pacific breezes refreshed the air even when the ground was parched, and the mountains spun clouds from their moisture. It was this combination of ocean air, arid terrain, and bald, brown, undulating mountains that made Southern California unique, a place where “the land does not hug the sky,” in the words of a local historian. “It is the sky that is solid and real and the land that seems to float.”

  The same air and light and openness that had lured farmers from the other side of the continent and made the fantasy business feel at home in Southern California now drew Sande Pollock, with Jackson in pursuit, into the wilderness to live out their fantasies. They bought wide-brimmed cowboy hats, buckskin jackets, and cowboy boots, borrowed a six-shooter and holster, and took each other’s picture. Except for weekend trips into the mountains, however, most of their hunting was done on school days in clean shirts and corduroy pants. Even within the city limits of Riverside there were more than 16,000 acres of unwatched orange groves where they could roam and hunt, as they had in Orland and Phoenix, for birds, ducks, quail, and the ubiquitous rabbits. A short five miles out Fourteenth Street, between Box Spring Canyon and the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe roadbed, the rabbit hunting was always good. “We used to get on our bicycles after school and ride out there and get rabbits for dinner,” Robert Cooter remembers. Jackson was a “pretty good shot,” better than Cooter, but “Sande was better than him,” Cooter recalls. At the end of the hunt, it was Sande who skinned and dressed the day’s kill.

  But Sande was Charles Pollock’s brother, and therefore an artist as well as a cowboy. Ever since Orland, when Charles’s copies of the Dial began arriving in the mail, Sande had been sketching off and on in spare moments. In Phoenix, he was often seen with a sketch pad in hand. “I thought Sande would turn out to be the artist in the family,” says Dolly Minsch. “He was always doing drawings. Jack wasn’t.” By the time he reached Riverside High, Sande had already become, like Charles at the same age, a young artist in training. “Sande was very, very talented,” recalls Claire Peterson, who attended Alice Richardson’s art classes at Riverside High with Sande. “Most of us were just doing watercolors, but Sande and one other girl were doing oils. They were just that advanced.”

  Striking a balance between hunting and troublemaking on the one hand, and being Mrs. Richardson’s favorite student in an art class filled with girls on the other, would have been far easier for the surefooted Charles than it was for Sande. To resolve these contradictory callings, Sande began packing a sketch pad on trips into the fields and hunting expeditions. “He would sketch a squirrel on a fencepost, or a coyote sittin’ in a fie
ld,” says Robert Cooter. Without the fussing and “fancifying” of art class, drawing could be a manly, outdoorsy pursuit that even Roy Pollock might approve. “We’d be out huntin’,” says Cooter, “and he’d just pick up a piece of brown paper and start drawin’ something.” Wherever Sande went, of course, Jackson followed. He, too, bought a sketch pad and pencils to go with his hat and boots. “Jack got inspired into drawing through Sande,” recalls a schoolmate and friend of Sande’s. “Sande was always drawing, and he was good at it. Jack just followed in his footsteps.”

  On Saturdays, Jack and Sande would walk the eight blocks from their house on Chestnut Street to the Mission Inn. “The Pollock boys and I used to go there and explore all the time,” Robert Cooter remembers. “All of us kids have been all over that place.” After sneaking past the doorman, they would pause to listen to Joseph and Napoleon, the macaws, in the lobby, then wander through the Cloister Court into the baronial music room with its elaborate Spanish Renaissance furniture, flags, full-length portraits, and antique statuary. Not far away they saw the Spanish Art Gallery where Rosa Bonheur’s splendidly romantic Old Darby and solemn Roman Warriors were displayed beside tiers of obscure portraits and landscapes. At one end of the long room hung William Keith’s wall-size painting, The California Alps, a huge, luminous canvas that must have caught a curious Pollock eye with its familiar terrain; the other end of the room was filled by a towering baroque altar from a Mexican church, its gilded profusion set ablaze by the sunlight angling in from clerestory windows. Other Saturdays, they saw the fantastically ornate furniture that the king of Bavaria had given his mistress Lola Montez, all ebony, brass, and mother-of-pearl; a great gilded Buddha from Japan; an eight-foot bronze dragon with gilded flames shooting from its mouth; Chinese porcelains and Italian ceramics; Tiffany lamps and Persian rugs; medieval armor, Spanish cannons, and ancient Chinese bells. Downstairs, in a maze of hallways known as “the catacombs,” there were Indian and Mexican artifacts as well as hundreds more paintings on display. “When a boy has been through there,” says Cooter, “he never forgets it.”