Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Robert Cooter was a short, curly-haired country boy with big ears, a mischievous smile, and a talent for trouble. From their first encounter in the ninth grade at Manual Training School in 1924, Sande and Cooter were, in Cooter’s phrase, “practically cleft together.” They spent most of their time on the hillsides overlooking Riverside, skating and sledding high in the mountains in winter; hunting rabbits lower down all year around. When they felt especially fearless, they sharpened their aim on the rattlesnakes that came out to sun on the hot rocks. At first, they were accompanied almost everywhere—even to church on Sunday mornings—by Jackson and Cooter’s younger brother Leon, a short, sweet, chubby boy. As a matter of necessity and symmetry, the two younger brothers, only a few months apart in age, developed a friendship although, unlike Sande and Cooter, they seldom ventured off on their own—“nothing more than bicyclin’ or maybe going skating,” Cooter recalls.

  Of these regular foursomes, Cooter remembers only that Jackson seemed in constant competition with Sande. From sharpshooting contests to “peeing competitions,” “he didn’t care about anything except Sande’s attention” and approval. “Jack was a different nature entirely,” says the easygoing Cooter, still puzzled after sixty years. “I just didn’t know what to think of it.”

  Sometime after his sixteenth birthday in May 1925, Sande bought a stripped-down Model T Ford. It cost only twelve dollars, and “there wasn’t much to it,” Cooter recalls: a flatbed frame with an engine, a steering wheel, a windshield, two leather seats, and a handsome set of all-white cornhusker tires. Making these remnants function, even with both Sande and Jackson working on it, was a never-ending challenge. According to Frank, the car spent more time in the backyard than on the streets. But it worked often enough to be an attractive alternative to the Market Street livery stable, which rented Model T’s at fifty cents an hour (Buicks at one dollar) for special occasions. Through several years of backyard tinkering, climbing mountain roads, and cruising through the fields of filaree around Riverside, the car became a pretext for togetherness. “Jack and Sande spent a lot of time in that stripped-down Ford,” Frank remembers. “Their life together revolved around it.”

  With the Model T also came a new kind of freedom. Weekend trips could now extend far up into the mountains, or even across them to the desert beyond. Most of their adventures, however, were centered around the small community of Wrightwood about forty miles north of Riverside in the San Gabriel Mountains where a few of Sande and Cooter’s classmates’ parents owned cabins. As soon as the Model T rattled out of sight of home, they would pull out a plug of Piper Heidsieck chewing tobacco and tear off a chaw. “It really felt free to be away from Mother,” recalls Frank, who had a summer job at nearby Big Pines.

  In spring, the slopes of the Pine Mountain Ridge were jumping with mountain quail (at other times of year the boys had to roll a rock down the mountainside to startle the quail and rabbits from their shady redoubts). In summer, the visits often stretched to a week or two—the piney mountain air was a welcome respite from the heat and dust of the mesa. To cool off, they would drive the Model T to the edge of Wrightwood, throw it out of gear and “just coast that thing down the six percent grade all the way from Wrightwood to Cajon Pass about twelve miles away,” Cooter remembers. “That was an experience.” Usually it was Sande who led the group in its most perilous adventures—like the time he found a shortcut down the mountainside. “He went over to the side of the mountain that was covered with sulfur shale,” Cooter recalls, “and he sat down on his butt and held his gun up in the air and he just slid all the way down to the bottom.”

  On overnight expeditions, the boys often stayed at a road camp in Lone Pine Canyon between Cajon and Wrightwood. Beside a gravel pit carved into the side of a hill, federal road builders had left a rock-crushing plant, a shed for graders and trucks, and a tiny community of “tent-shacks” (wooden floors, wooden sides, and screen windows with an army-style pyramid canvas top) around a crude, pine mess hall. From the camp, road crews could fill potholes, improve grades, and repair culverts after the spring runoff. The boys pitched their tent in a nearby clearing and ate with the road workers at the long table surrounded by stools. In the late dawns and early dusks of winter, the hall was lit by lanterns and warmed by an old-fashioned wood-burning stove.

  In this unlikely setting, Jackson and Sande were reunited with their father.

  Little is known of Roy Pollock’s move from Arizona to California in 1924 or 1925. By the summer of 1925, however, he was foreman of the Lone Pine Canyon road camp and had begun to put down shallow roots in the area, about a forty-five-minute drive from his family in Riverside. Within a year, he had held back from Stella enough of his paycheck to buy a small piece of hillside land near Wrightwood where, with the help of a friend, Lyndon Bement, he built a small cabin on stilts. During one of his summers at Big Pines, Frank came over to help dig out space underneath for a car. Roy spent many weekends and holidays alone in his cabin, reading mostly, venturing “home” to Riverside only for short visits at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even when Jack and Sande and their friends were visiting the road camp, he remained aloof. “They didn’t do things together,” Robert Cooter remembers. “He didn’t go on camping trips with us. He liked his job and he encouraged us to come up, but he couldn’t spend much time with us except to eat now and then.” After years of awkward reunions, apparently, a reticence had come between Roy Pollock and his sons. “It was hard for Dad to regain his past position,” says Frank. “When he just came in for holidays or between jobs, and when he’d been gone for so long, we wouldn’t likely confide in him.” Nor he in them. For the rest of his life, Roy would communicate his feelings to his sons only in letters, sometimes sent from camps as close as twenty or thirty miles away.

  During their stays at the road camp, the boys came to know the four or five year-round workers who served on their father’s crew. Louis Jay was, after Roy, the unofficial leader of the group, a tall Texan with a hard drawl who wasted few words at work but made up for it after a few shots of whiskey. Jay (everyone called him by his last name) had worked with Roy Pollock at other road-building sites and had even spent a few days at the house in Riverside, so he was no stranger to the Pollock boys. He claimed to be a cowboy—a real cowboy—a claim that Jack and Sande never doubted. With his broad, cured face, dark eyes, and vaguely malevolent lower lip, “he was certainly different than anything we had ever known firsthand,” Frank remembers. “He was rough, and he had a mouthful of white teeth.” Robert Cooter remembers him as “a strong, husky-looking guy who wore cowboy boots and big buckles on his belt.” Whether or not he was the genuine article, Jay certainly had the cowboy aura, sitting around the fire after supper, spinning vivid and often coarse tales from his cowboy past between long, dramatic draws on his pipe. Jay’s sidekick, Fred Wiese, also a Texan, was shorter, grayer, more reserved, and in general “not nearly as interesting” as Jay, according to Frank Pollock.

  Roy Pollock at his cabin in Wrightwood

  Emboldened by Louis Jay’s example and liberated by the Model T, Sande, Jackson, and the Cooter brothers began to venture farther and farther from Riverside, over the mountains and into the great Mojave. When Jay and Wiese transferred to a road maintenance gang near the Grand Canyon sometime in 1926, the boys jumped at the chance to join them. That summer, after fourteen years of wandering back and forth between barren, undistinguished pockets of cultivation, Jackson Pollock finally began to explore some of the great natural spectacles of the American West. In southern Utah, they drove the Model T to the sagebrush rim of Bryce National Monument and hiked into its mammoth white and orange amphitheaters cut through layers of limestone and sandstone by water erosion. They explored Zion Canyon, fifteen miles of carved rock given its name by Mormon settlers who were convinced that only God could have sculpted such a place. Farther north, near the small Utah town of Cedar City, they hiked and hunted on the high Markagunt Plateau, a game-rich cedar forest surrounding a 2,000-foot
escarpment of rosy limestone cliffs streaked with iron and manganese oxide that glinted silver and metallic white in the fierce summer sunlight.

  In Fredonia, Arizona, just across the Utah state line, the Model T hit the gravel road that led to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. They crossed the high plateau the Indians called Kaibab, or “reclining mountain:” a hunter’s extravaganza of wild turkey, coyote, fox, and deer. Thirty miles into the forest, eighteen miles shy of the canyon, they came to the road camp where Louis Jay and Fred Wiese worked maintenance on the North Rim road. After pitching their tents, they sat on the front porch of the V.T. Ranch lodge and enjoyed the hot, dry evening breeze as air from the unseen canyon, heated during the day, emptied into the surrounding night. With a pair of binoculars, Sande counted more than 200 deer grazing in the vast pasture that stretched toward the canyon rim.

  At the road camp, Louis Jay introduced his young band of followers to another cowboy-turned-road worker named simply “Red.” Red hailed from Provo, Utah, but he knew the North Rim country “better than an Indian.” “How’d you guys like to go mustang huntin’ before you go home?” Red asked. Cooter had heard of the big herds of wild horses, or cayuses, descended from the horses brought by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, that roamed freely in the high mountain meadows and inaccessible sagebrush plateaus of Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and the Pacific Northwest. They belonged to western legend, remnants and reminders of what the whole West had been once: “wild as a cayuse,” untamed, and by most accounts untamable. Like most legends of the West, the mustang herds were increasingly victims of progress. In the water hole “hideaway” where they were headed, a Los Angeles meatpacking company had built a corral so herds could be trapped and loaded into trucks for “processing.”

  With Red as a guide, the boys drove back across the Kaibab Plateau, out of the forest and into the hot sagebrush flats around Fredonia. Around noon, at Cain Springs, they turned off the road and headed west across the dry, rough ground. “Every once in a while we’d come to a wash and we’d have to dig the bank down with shovels and picks to cross it,” Cooter remembers. By sundown, they arrived at a ridge around the watering hole where, Red assured them, the herd would come to drink early the next morning. “We camped there,” Cooter recalls, “built an open fire on the ridge beside the hole, cooked and slept on the ground.” At first light, before the horses arrived, they descended to the narrow draw that served as a gateway to the hole. From there, Red figured, the shooting would be best. Before they could reach their positions, however, they heard the rustle of horses’ hooves echoing from deep within the canyon. “We was just a little late getting there,” Cooter recalls, “so Red says to get down and be real quiet or the horses might see us and get scared away.” On their knees, they crawled the final few feet into position as the tight knot of horses appeared in the draw and moved nervously toward the watering hole only a few dozen yards away. “They had long manes hanging way down,” Cooter remembers, “and tails that hit the ground. They were beautiful animals and they shook their long manes.”

  The mustang hunt: Jackson, far left; Sande, far right.

  Then the shooting began. At the first thunderlike volley, the herd exploded. A few horses fell almost immediately, the rest were at full gallop within seconds, stampeding through the draw, heads lowered, manes unfurled, a twister of muscle and legs and clouds of yellow dust passing just feet from where Jackson and Sande stood frozen in fear and startled wonder. They could hear the rumble of hooves for a long time after the last horse disappeared, leaving a thick haze of dust and three or four dark shapes on the canyon floor. “We killed a few,” Cooter recalls mournfully. “We just walked off and left them. They were beautiful horses, and I can’t believe we could just shoot them and walk off. But we did. And I’m ashamed of it to this day.”

  After a summer of exploration, the return to school in September 1926 wasn’t easy. Sande went off to high school while Jackson, who had just graduated from Grant Elementary School, moved on to the Manual Training School on Chestnut Street. The sense of alienation and dislocation was heightened by two quick family moves sometime in the first half of 1926—perhaps while Jack and Sande were away in Arizona. By September the Pollocks were living in a cramped bungalow on North Street—smaller, cheaper, and less desirably located than the Chestnut Street chalet, but just a quarter-mile southeast of Riverside High. Soon after school began, Sande and Robert Cooter went out for “soccer ball,” and the after-school rabbit-hunting expeditions of previous years came to an end.

  The most devastating blow, however, came in the fall of 1926, when Sande Pollock discovered girls.

  With his blue eyes, sandy hair, compact, muscular body, and masculine reticence, Sande had never been at a loss for girlfriends. “Sande was a ladies’ man,” says Cooter. “He could get any gal he wanted, pretty near.” In some ways, Riverside in the 1920s may have been a sophisticated enclave, but in others it was still a small town, a town dominated by the punitive sexual morality of conservative Calvinist Republicans. If a seventeen-year-old boy in Riverside hankered for something more than “kissing and petting,” he had to go to Los Angeles, or, if he didn’t want to drive so far and wasn’t particular, to D Street in San Bernardino on a Saturday night where the Mexican girls sat on their porches and called to passersby. In Riverside, the closest Sande came to sex was the attenuated symbolism of “weenie bakes,” chaperoned dances, and “button, button, who’s got the button,” a parlor kissing game at which he excelled. For the first few months of the school year, Cooter remembers, Sande “was never without a girl.”

  But he was often without Jackson. “Jack wasn’t in our little clique,” says Cooter.

  After years of hunting, drawing, driving, and playing cowboy, here, finally was something Jack couldn’t do with Sande. Not that he didn’t try. “We’d go on these dates to weenie bakes or to the movies,” Cooter remembers, “and Jack would come with us. Sande would have a girl and I would have a girl—but Jack, he would be alone.” After a while, no doubt feeling awkward and ignored, Jackson gave up trying and stayed home, “puttering” absently around the Model T, drawing occasionally, and waiting for Sande to return. Leon Cooter, who also liked to tinker with cars, joined him at first. “Now, Leon was slow on starting to date,” says his brother Robert, “but eventually he started bringing girls along with Sande and me and our dates. But Jack never did. I can’t remember Jack ever dating. I remember wondering, ‘Why isn’t Jack interested in girls?’ Just like that.”

  The final blow came in January of 1927 when Sande met Arloie Conaway, a pretty, slight girl with soft, bobbed hair, big eyes, and a way of looking up through her eyelashes that “made you want to put your arm around her.” He had been watching her appreciatively for some time, trying to devise a scheme to meet her when Robert Cooter invited him on a weekend outing in the San Bernardino Mountains, an outing that included Conaway. “I liked him when I first met him,” remembers Arloie, who was especially struck by his “beautiful blue eyes.” The feeling was mutual—Cooter called them “a matched pair”—and they began a relationship that would last the next thirty-five years.

  Jack and Sande had often passed the Conaways’ big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue, with the two giant palms in front, on their way out to Box Springs Canyon. Now Sande stopped there almost every day, always alone. “We saw a lot of each other,” Arloie remembers. “We used to go target shooting out in the hills around Riverside.” On weekends, they often relived their first blind date with trips into the San Bernardino Mountains, often accompanied by Cooter and his girlfriend, Margaret Lucius, but never by Jackson.

  If Sande had seen little of his brother before, he saw almost nothing of him now. Although he talked often about Jackson—“I sensed that he felt responsible for taking care of Jack,” says Arloie—he made no attempt to bring Arloie into the family. “I didn’t meet Jackson until after they left Riverside,” she recalls. Through the winter and early spring of 1927, Jackson stayed home while t
he Model T rusted in the yard, the guns and boots sat in the closet, and his sheaf of drawings grew thicker. “I suppose Jack felt neglected,” Frank recalls with characteristic Pollock understatement. “He may even have felt a little hurt. He certainly wasn’t getting the same cooperation from Sande he always had.”

  Riverside High School, class of 1928, left to right: Robert Cooter, Arloie Conaway, Frank Pollock, Sande Pollock

  In the spring, Jackson lost a “great companion” when Frank had to take Gyp out behind the house and put him to sleep with chloroform. A few weeks later, he almost lost Sande, too. At track practice one day, Sande started a cross-country run with Robert Cooter but collapsed halfway through. He was rushed to the hospital just across Magnolia from the school, where the doctors determined that his appendix had ruptured. “They got him to the hospital just in time to save him,” Cooter remembers. “He damned near lost his life.” Stella was summoned from the house not far away and, presumably, Jackson as well. (It was a week before anyone bothered to call Arloie.)