Sande spent three weeks in the hospital, a Pollock record that would stand until Jackson broke it ten years later at a sanitarium in New York. The only lasting damage was to Roy, who was forced to sell the little cabin near Wrightwood to pay the hospital expenses. Without that anchor, he drifted back to his old friends Louis Jay and Fred Wiese, who were still working near the Grand Canyon. From Arizona, he arranged jobs for his two youngest sons on the expanded summer road crew in the area.
It was the answer to Jackson’s prayers. In late June of 1927, after weeks of trying to put the Model T in working order, he and Sande left Riverside, crossed the mountains near Wrightwood, and headed down into Barstow and the white summer heat of the Mojave. On one particularly barren stretch of road, Sande looked out and saw a wheel rolling alongside, passing in the next lane. It took him a few seconds to realize that the wheel was from his car. The Model T was cruising comfortably on three wheels.
Jack and Sande at the rim of the Grand Canyon
For two months, Sande and Jackson lived and worked near the Grand Canyon, visiting it—often just for a look—almost daily. From the North Rim, where they camped, it was eighteen miles to the opposite rim, a mile to the canyon floor, and fifty-six miles from east to west. Within those walls stood black volcanic peaks, vermilion buttes, and “contorted” rock formations that had once been lofty mountains before the river whittled them down to precarious columns. Of the geology of the canyon, the Pollock boys probably knew very little, but hours of sitting and watching, as the sunlight moved through the cliffs and cloud shadows drifted over and rain turned the gray to black and the red to umber, created impressions that lasted a lifetime. “That experience was etched in Sande’s memory,” Arloie remembers. “He always talked about sitting on the rim and watching thunderstorms down in the canyon.”
The real drama of the summer, however, was played out in the unsettled strata of Jack and Sande’s relationship. During the day, they saw each other only occasionally. With an experienced surveyor guiding him, Sande drove a “reconnaissance truck” out ahead of the main survey party, identifying landmarks, roughing in the road’s centerline on a strip map, and marking the spots where the surveyors should set their instruments. Jackson stayed behind with the main party of four or five men, marking with stakes the line of levels along the centerline and, while the transit man and chain man moved to the next station, roughing out the course of the roadway with more stakes.
With the long summer light, workday evenings at the camp were short—barely enough time for one or two stories from Louis Jay before the lights began to go out in the hip-roofed tents. Roy Pollock, perhaps intentionally, had arranged to work on a different crew from his sons, so Jack and Sande saw little of him that summer. When there was enough daylight left after work, they usually spent it at the canyon rim, smoking calabash pipes like the ones that Roy and Jay and the other men smoked. Only on the weekends was there time for play. As the youngest members of the crew, Jack and Sande were inevitably the butt of some cowboy humor, especially from Louis Jay, who had taken a mischievous liking to the Pollock boys. “Jay was rough and ready and playful and teasing,” says Frank, who knew him from Wrightwood. “He would try to get a laugh out of you with some kind of monkey business.”
Jackson with the two “cowboys” who taught him to drink, Louis Jay and Fred Wiese
It was in that spirit of Saturday night shenanigans that Jay, himself a drinker, began to push the bottle at Sande and Jackson. “‘What the hell?’” Frank remembers his attitude. “‘You work all week, what are you going to do for fun on the weekend?’” Alone among these older men, anxious to prove their manhood—both to the crew and to each other—Jack and Sande eagerly joined in the fun. From the start, Jackson had a lower tolerance for alcohol than Sande. Later in life, various doctors would describe his “chemical vulnerability” and friends would marvel at how little liquor it took for him to lose control. The road workers noticed the difference right away, and the sight of fifteen-year-old Jackson reeling around the campfire pie-eyed on a Saturday night became a favorite source of amusement. For Jackson, such indignities seemed a small price to pay. “He was becoming one of the boys,” says Frank, who had undergone a similar initiation in Phoenix, “which is especially important when you’re the youngest.” Drunkenness was humiliation, but it was manly humiliation. Besides, when he stumbled too close to the fire or stayed down too long, Sande would pick him up and put him to bed. After months of neglect in Riverside, almost no price was too high for Sande’s attention.
Toward the end of the summer, with the long trip home approaching, probably while cutting stakes with a hatchet, Jackson’s hand slipped and the blade went into his leg. For a while, it looked as if the bone might be broken, but the wound healed well enough, and he left for home on schedule.
In September, Jackson joined Sande at Riverside High. For the first time in years, the two brothers walked to school together and even took some of the same classes—in particular, a woodworking class where they made simple pieces of furniture. But it wasn’t enough to reverse their growing estrangement. Reunited again, Sande and Robert Cooter resumed their campaign of troublemaking and roughnecking. Classmates dubbed them “the Gold Dust Twins” after the twins pictured on packages of Gold Dust cleanser—not, as Sande preferred to tell it, after a pair of Wild West bandits. The two boys also resumed their weekend expeditions into the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains—without Jackson again.
Without Sande, Jackson was adrift. His grades, which had already begun to falter at the Manual Training School, slipped even further. The facade of cowboy machismo that had been his pass into Sande’s world began to crumble, exposing the timid, frightened little boy who used to hide behind the screen door in Phoenix. Old feelings of isolation and abandonment returned, resurrected in part by the intimidating immensity of Riverside High School and exacerbated by his failure, through years of obsession with Sande, to make other friends. When forced to choose between football, physical education class (both relatively brutal activities in an agricultural community in the 1920s), and ROTC (a harmless routine of marching and meetings), Jackson chose the latter. His decision surprised and disappointed not only his classmates, who had assumed that any boy Jackson’s size would play football, but especially his brothers. Too small to play themselves, Frank and Sande had been counting on their big baby brother to relive the gridiron heroics of Jay “Punk” Pollock in Chico. “I wondered,” says Frank, “why a big guy like that wouldn’t want to go out for football and prove his manhood.”
The answer became clear to Sande on one of the by now rare reunions of the Pollock and Cooter brothers for a camping trip into the mountains. As Jackson recounted the story to a friend years later, the four boys had gathered at the high school to set out when they were confronted by three or four classmates looking to settle an old score—hardly a surprise, given the Gold Dust Twins’ reputation. Sande and Robert Cooter were ready to “mix it up,” but Jackson refused to fight. After failing repeatedly to rouse his little brother to action, Sande, frustrated and angry, accused him of being “yellow.” Thirty years later, Jackson had forgotten the outcome of the confrontation, but not the accusation.
Stripped of his macho pretenses, Jackson reverted to the needful, self-jeopardizing behavior that had always guaranteed his brother’s attention in the past. Sometime during the first semester, with memories of the Grand Canyon undoubtedly fresh in his mind, he began to drink. In Riverside, as in most small, conservative towns during Prohibition, liquor was hard to come by, but not impossible. And to find an example of secretive drinking, he didn’t have to look far.
Unknown to his friends, Frank Pollock continued to drink throughout his years as a leader and model student at Riverside High. “The truth of the matter is I used to get terribly drunk,” Frank remembers. “But I was senior class president and I didn’t want anybody to know. I’d get home and I’d be so damn sick, I would head for the toilet and vomit and vomit and vo
mit.” Jackson, who spent a great deal of time alone at home, may have heard Frank staggering to the bathroom late at night and felt in some way vindicated in his own furtive drinking. As the episodes became more frequent, however, and the need for alcohol more urgent, Jackson’s secret inevitably escaped. Robert Cooter remembers discovering that Jackson was making his own crude liquor by putting raisins in apple cider to speed fermentation. If Cooter knew, Sande knew, which was undoubtedly what Jackson intended.
Also in the fall, probably in response to Sande’s accusation and clearly under the influence of alcohol, Jackson slugged one of the student officers in the middle of ROTC parade drill. According to Sande, the officer dressed Jackson down in front of the other students because his “leggings were falling apart” (the cadets wore the wind-around leggings common in World War I). Instead of shrinking, as he had before, Jackson grabbed the officer’s coat and sputtered, “You’re a god damned son of a bitch,” in front of the whole platoon. For that infraction, according to Sande, he was court-martialed and “kicked out” of ROTC. In hindsight Sande may have exaggerated the confrontation, especially Jackson’s bravado, but the fact that he remembered it at all indicates how successfully Jackson accomplished his real goal.
Soon after the ROTC incident, Jackson began to think about quitting school. (Leon Cooter, his only friend, had dropped out earlier in the year to work for Western Union.) By late November, the notion had developed to the point where either Jackson or Stella felt obliged to write and tell Roy. From his road camp in Hemet, California, only twenty-five miles southeast of Riverside, Roy responded in a letter that arrived at the beginning of Jackson’s Christmas break on December 18. In the seven years the two had been separated, it may have been the first letter Jackson received from his father.
Dear Son Jack—
Well I have just gotten in and I have been thinking of you a great deal your case is sure a problem to me. I would so much like to see you go on through high school as I know if you could you would be in a better position to start into something. Education should really be a mind training—a training to make you think logically. The problems you solve today give you strength to solve a little harder ones tomorrow and so it goes. It takes a lot of application and concentration and interest in your work in fact a hunger for knowledge and power of mind.
Then, in a remarkable confession that only hints at the agonies of self-deprecation and depression he had suffered in seven years of homelessness, Roy opened his heart to his youngest son:
I am sorry that I am not in a position to do more for all you boys and I sometimes feel that my life has been a failure—but in this life we can’t undo the things that are past we can only endeavor to do the best possible now and in the future with the hope that you will do what is best for your own good.
I am your affectionate
Dad
In the short term, the letter served its purpose. Jackson returned to school on January 3, 1928, and hung on for another two months. Ultimately, however, it proved counterproductive. In a brief letter, Roy Pollock had expressed more concern and affection for Jackson than in all the previous sixteen years. From the heights of inaccessibility he had revealed himself in intimate detail to a son who grew up reveling in a casual glance—all in response to a threat to quit school.
On March 8, Jackson made good on his threat, telling Fred McEuen, the vice principal, that he was headed for Arizona, although with Sande still in Riverside and his father in the Jacinto Mountains not far away, it’s unlikely that he went anywhere.
For the next six months, Jackson Pollock virtually disappeared. During that time, Sande, who graduated on June 18, left for Los Angeles where brother Jay had arranged a job with the Los Angeles Times; and Frank, who also graduated, worked for few months at his old job in Big Pines before buying a $135 ticket on the S.S. Manchurian and sailing to New York City to rendezvous with Charles.
Jackson, by contrast, from the day he quit school until the day he reenrolled in Los Angeles the next fall, left only one trace—a summer job at a road camp in Crestline, just north of Riverside—and only one clue to why the intervening six months were “lost.” On a night when school was still in session, about one o’clock in the morning, Frank was awakened by a knock at the door. “It was a schoolmate from another class,” he recalls, “and he said, ‘Jack’s down at the restaurant drunk and raising hell.’” The student led him to a small cafe in downtown Riverside where Jack was “all over the counter.” “I guess he went in there to get a cup of coffee,” says Frank. “He was cutting up with the waitress and having a helluva time. That’s the first time I remember Jack being smashed.”
9
LIGHT ON THE PATH
By the time he arrived in Los Angeles in the summer of 1928, Jackson Pollock was, for the first time in his life, virtually alone. A process that had begun inconspicuously in Chico, when Charles and Jay stayed behind to finish high school while the rest of the family lurched ahead to Janesville, ended in a nondescript bungalow on West Fiftieth Street near Exposition Park, in the concrete wasteland of south Los Angeles.
Stella had accompanied him on the short drive from Riverside, with her few possessions piled unceremoniously in the back seat of the Studebaker. Upon arrival, in what was by now a ritual of threadbare dignity, she spread her crocheted doilies, hung her lace curtains, and nailed to the living room wall the prized pictures by Charles—“they were the first things she would show when anyone came in,” recalls a visitor. Largely deserted by her husband and sons, she had seen her life whittled down to little more than window-shopping by day, sewing and letter-writing by night. She gave the impression, even to strangers, that she felt her maternal duties had been discharged.
For a while, Sande, too, shared the West Fiftieth Street house. Instead of joining his brother on the summer work crew at Crestline, he had come to Los Angeles, eager to begin his lucrative job at the Times and to be closer to Arloie who, while recovering from a bout of anemia, was staying with her cousin in Long Beach. Over the next two years, Sande would spend most weeknights at the Fiftieth Street house, sleeping on the living room sofa to save rent, but his days were devoted to the job, his evenings to a new set of friends, and his weekends to Arloie. As Jackson surely saw, the days of “Jack and Sande” were over. “In Los Angeles, they lived in the same house,” says Arloie, who visited occasionally, “but they had nothing to do with each other.”
As usual, school offered Jackson little comfort. Like Riverside High, Manual Arts was a sprawling education factory punching out diplomas on a double-time schedule. Its 3,200 students, drawn largely from the thousands of new homes that stretched to the horizon down dozens of new streets, were insistently middle class and upwardly mobile, reflecting—and often embodying—the dreams of their parents, most of whom had migrated within the previous decade to what L. Frank Baum first called “the land of enchantment.” All but a handful were white, well-manicured, and as indistinguishable as their parents’ bungalows, dressed in the unofficial uniform of corduroy pants and V-neck sweaters for the boys, belted dresses and “dress-low heels” for the girls. “School is a business,” the rule book advised, “and clothes appropriate for business should be worn.” Editorials in the school paper exhorted boys to clean their “cords” regularly, and girls to “desist” from wearing makeup. A boy could be given demerits for combing his hair in the hall while a girl with long hair was expected to keep it pinned up and out of sight.
From his first day, September 11, Jackson’s career at Manual Arts was an unfolding disaster. Having grown up competing for his family’s special attention, he had learned to stand out, not blend in. Antagonistic to athletics, ill prepared and unmotivated for academic work, uninterested in girls, and socially inept, he was a misfit in a school and a community that prized fitting in above all else.
It was this sense of alienation as much as his interest in art that brought Jackson into the erratic orbit of Manual Art’s most eccentric faculty member: Frederick Jo
hn de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, the head of the art department.
Schwankovsky—or Schwany, as the students called him—was a handsome man with a distinguished profile and dark brown hair swept back from his high forehead. Most students, as well as faculty, considered him a benign “kook,” a charlatan, or an “extremist,” depending on whether they were discussing his personal habits, his art, or his politics. “He was on one side of the wall and the entire school on the other side,” recalls one of Jackson’s classmates. “Very few sympathetic confreres. They would have gotten rid of him if they could have.” They nearly succeeded when Schwankovsky brought nude male models into his drawing classes, igniting a furor that subsided only when he agreed to cover the models from the waist down.
For Schwankovsky, eccentricity was a family legacy. His father’s father had been an Anglican minister of Polish-Russian ancestry who lived in Catholic Ireland for years before coming to Quaker Pennsylvania in the nineteenth century. His father, Frederick, Sr., a seller of pianos and sheet music in Detroit, had tried to train his son for the family business but succeeded only in turning him into “an unhappy young man.” Somewhere along the line, Frederick, Jr., had inadvertently acquired a consuming passion for art. So in 1908, he fled to the East Coast in search of training, first at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, then, in 1910, at New York’s Art Students League.
Schwankovsky’s wife, Nellie Mae Goucher, introduced him to mysticism. Her parents often held seances and spoke to spirits. (The ghost of Charles Dickens was a frequent visitor on such occasions and Schwankovsky came to think of him as “their guiding spirit.” Later in life, Nellie Mae—whom her children considered “the practical one in the family”—would read tea leaves, consult a Ouija board, and list “out-of-body experiments” as her favorite hobby.) Soon after marrying, Schwankovsky brought his wife to the home of fantasy, Hollywood, where he found a job as a set designer at the old Metro Studios working on silent movies. When Metro was absorbed into the new movie giant Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Schwankovsky was laid off and forced to take a job—temporary, he told himself—at Manual Arts High School.
Jackson Pollock Page 17
