Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  At the Bentons’, Jackson created a new, more affectionate family than the one he had left behind. Like Charles and Frank before him, he often sat with four-year-old T. P. when his parents were away, showering the pensive dark-haired boy with the kind of attention that had been so lacking in the Pollock house. Although taciturn around Tom and Rita, Jackson would blossom into long hours of animated conversation when alone with T. P., telling endless stories about “the spooky mythology of the West” that always made their way back to the Bentons the next day through T. P.‘s excited retelling. Such lavish attention wasn’t lost on T. P., whose own father seldom made time for him. “Jack became the boy’s idol,” Benton wrote in his autobiography, “and through that our chief babysitter.”

  Jackson also quickly became the Benton’s chief floor scrubber, window washer, and general fix-it man. “[Rita] was always finding little tasks for him to do,” remembers her niece. Whatever the job, Jackson was paid in cash (fifty cents for a night of babysitting, five dollars for a day of scrubbing) when cash was available, in food when it wasn’t. If Manuel Tolegian accompanied Jackson for chore duty, Rita invariably put him to work washing rugs—an assignment that Tolegian considered an ethnic slur. Elizabeth Pollock, ever-vigilant against exploitation, thought Rita “took advantage of the boys who formed a coterie around Tom. She used them.” If so, Jackson didn’t seem to mind. On Hudson Street, he not only competed with Charles, he became Charles—the oldest, the favored son—gradually taking the place in Rita’s eyes that he had always wanted in Stella’s.

  No woman could have satisfied Jackson’s fantasies of a mother more amply than Rita Benton. Like Stella in her youth, she was a robust, broad-hipped, big-breasted woman who loved to cook. But there the similarities ended. Where Stella was Scotch-Irish and German, Rita Piacenza was unmistakably Italian, the daughter of a coppersmith from a little town outside Milan, who had come to America as a girl but never lost her accent. (She considered English a barbaric language.) “She was a professional Italian,” says her niece, Maria Piacenza. “She always kept her accent. She knocked those WASP guys dead with it.” Where Stella’s features were broad, Rita’s were fine, if slightly boyish (“like something out of Michelangelo,” according to her niece). Where Stella withheld, Rita was profligate. Her clothes were always loose, her short chestnut-colored hair bounced, and her big hips swung from side to side when she walked. When she was amused, which was often, she let out a “beam-shaking” laugh. Where Stella glowered and congealed in reproval, Rita mocked and scorned and railed. Where Stella nodded and cut an extra piece of pie when pleased, Rita swooned and stroked and flattered, and made enough spaghetti for fifty. “She was the mother of the world,” recalls a neighbor on Martha’s Vineyard who often saw Rita walking barefoot through the dune grass, her breasts bouncing and her big skirt filled with sea breeze. “She was the eternal mother,” says Piacenza. “Mother with a capital M. She just adored and worshiped children, her children, all children.”

  Rita Benton

  For Rita, as for Stella, all men were essentially children—and none more so than Tom Benton. In 1917, he had been her teacher in a free art class sponsored by the Chelsea Neighborhood Association. She found his posturing very childish, very American, and very appealing. In his autobiography, Benton described Rita as a “slim, dark-eyed, and beautiful” girl who “wore a red hat.” Beauty or no, he gave her the same abbreviated treatment he gave all the women in his class. But Rita persisted. For five years, through Tom’s navy duty in Norfolk, through long summer absences and frequent trips to his mother’s house in nearby Great Neck, she pushed the relationship inexorably toward the altar. Lizzie Benton tried everything to prevent the marriage—railing, pouting, fainting. She called Rita’s Italian background unworthy of a Benton. But Rita was determined to wrest Tom from Lizzie’s lace grip. Finally, despite skepticism from every side—Tom’s friends “were certain, knowing about [his] experiments, that it would be impossible for [him] to live permanently with any woman”—Tom and Rita were married on February 19, 1922, at Saint Francis Xavier Church in New York. After a short reception at the Piacenza apartment, however, the newlyweds took a taxi directly to Lizzie Benton’s house in Great Neck where they spent the next three months under Lizzie’s reproachful glare. Eventually, Benton would come to call Rita “Mommie,” but he always referred to Lizzie as “Mama.”

  The evenings Jackson spent at the Benton apartment on Hudson Street provided him with a view of a marriage completely unlike the one he had grown up with. Instead of long silences and lingering tensions, there were frequent verbal skirmishes, mock rages, tirades of profanity, and fierce, sudden rebukes. Neighborhood children stopped routinely at the Benton door to expand their vocabularies. “They were always hollerin’ at each other,” recalls one of those children, Margo Henderson, “and he used words that made a child’s hair curl.” Another guest remembers Tom yelling to Rita from the kitchen when he wanted dinner, “Goddammit, woman, get in here,” and Rita calling back in a sharp, accented retort: “Don’t be vulgar, Tom.” “Whatever abuse she got from Tom,” says Maria Piacenza, “he got his back. She had her way of knocking him down—little things she would do in front of people to embarrass him.” Her favorite retaliation was to impugn his carefully cultivated macho image. “She would say things like ‘Poor Tom, he’s always so tired,’” Piacenza recalls, “with all the implications that carried. She got her own back.” When Tom drank too much, she would reprimand him firmly: “Italian men don’t get drunk!”

  The transparency and fireworks of the Bentons’ relationship must have shocked Jackson, but beneath the exaggerated repartee, he undoubtedly saw their unwavering mutual commitment. “Tom was Rita’s man, totally dependent, but acted as if he were not,” said friend and neighbor Roger Baldwin. “Rita had the European woman’s approach to marriage, was very possessive, but knew when to leave him alone.”

  Tom Benton presented himself in public as a model of masculine prerogative, but in private he “put everything in Rita’s hands,” according to a family friend. Even before their marriage, Rita surrendered her own artistic aspirations and turned her considerable skills as a bargainer and promoter to fulfilling her husband’s ambitions. In their early years together, she earned rent and food money by designing hats and posing for fashion periodicals. To keep him focused on painting, she would buy his clothing, cut his hair, and read his mail. Later, she placed paintings with collectors, solicited mural commissions, arranged exhibitions, negotiated fees, cultivated dealers, and always, in the midst of everything, tirelessly promoted Tom Benton. “In a business sense,” says a friend, “she made him.”

  Theirs was the exact opposite of the bargain struck by Roy and Stella Pollock. Where Stella had condemned Roy’s weaknesses and subverted his ambitions, Rita accepted Tom’s inadequacies and supported his aspirations. For Jackson, it became the model of what a professional marriage should be.

  Among the stories with which Jackson captured young T. P.‘s imagination were the adventures of a boy-hero named “Jack Sass,” adventures that took place in a world of “wild stallions, shadowy white wolves, lost gold mines, and mysterious unattended campfires.” “We received early reports of [such things] from our admiring son,” Tom Benton recorded in his autobiography, “and about the imaginary hero Jack Sass, who had explored, solved, or conquered all these mysteries.” No other record of these tales exists. Years later, Jackson would occasionally tell a story from his childhood to an intimate friend, but the tales of Jack Sass represent his first effort to take stock of his troubled past and put it in some order. In all likelihood, there were tales of unknown menaces lurking in deserted arroyos, runaway horses, Indian burial grounds, mountain bears, canyon thunderstorms and dangerous Indian ruins, herds of wild cayuse, axes in the barnyard, and wolves in Cody that only his brothers had seen—the whole range of unknowns and uncontrollables that had haunted his childhood, dredged up to be “explored, solved, or conquered” in fantasy. “Jack Sass,” Bento
n wrote, “was, of course, Jack Pollock without the frustrations.”

  14

  THE OLD LOVE

  In early June 1931, Jackson left New York for a hitchhiking trip to Los Angeles with Manuel Tolegian. Ostensibly, it was a sketching trip, fashioned after those that Benton took with chosen students to see the real “American Scene.” But in fact, like Benton’s annual expeditions, it had far deeper significance. In Tom Benton’s iconography, the road was the place to which all true men inevitably returned. “Inherent restlessness” was a prerequisite to masculinity; a longing for the road as natural as a longing for sex, and often related. “The bonds of marriage did not lay very heavily on my back,” he confessed in his autobiography, “but I began to feel rather too well tamed and to itch for freedom.” By exhortation as well as example, Benton had urged his male students to experience America as America and themselves as men, and Jackson was determined to answer the call. Finally, at age nineteen, he would stike off on his own—or very nearly—without Sande’s support or Charles’s supervision.

  At the farmers’ market in Union Square, Tolegian found a Pennsylvania truck unloading strawberries. “I just went up to [the driver] and said, ‘If we unload these strawberries from the truck would you give us a ride to where you’re going?’ And he said, ‘Sure, go ahead,’ … and we slept in the truck all night long.” Using the same strategy at subsequent stops, the pair hopscotched as far as Cleveland. Without pausing to record the hot, grim stillness of the factories along the Cuyahoga, they took a streetcar to the west side of town where the roads went due west to Toledo and Chicago and southwest to Dayton and Indianapolis—and they waited.

  Suddenly, they found themselves among the vast wandering population—almost two million people, most of them young—who had spilled out onto America’s roads in the first years of the Depression. For hours they waited, thumbs out, among the throngs of unemployed men and displaced families who dragged themselves from town to town “in search of a solvent relative or a generous friend,” according to a contemporary magazine account. In another two or three days of travel, much of it on foot, they reached Indianapolis, where the crowds of drifters who had collected for the recent Memorial Day car race were still lingering in the rail yards and the cheap coffee shops with no place to go.

  Tired and apparently frustrated by the slow progress, Jackson argued for jumping a freight train to St. Louis. To Tolegian, who was “terrified” of being robbed, the idea of entering the world of bums and hoboes—where, it was well known, people were murdered for less than a fiver—was sheer madness. “Manuel was afraid he’d get killed,” says his wife Araks. “It meant grabbing onto a moving train, and Manuel knew he couldn’t do it.” After only a week on the road, the two friends parted company. Tolegian arrived in Los Angeles only four or five days later with the help of several long rides. Jackson, truly alone now, missed the train: “I got thrown out of sight, the damn thing was going to fast,” he reported afterward. He had to settle for a slow ride to Terre Haute along Route 40 where the hitchhikers were so thick that the road looked like a parade route. Somewhere along the Indiana leg of the trip, he reported on a postcard to Charles: “… experienced the most marvelous lightning storm … I was ready to die any moment.”

  One night in Terre Haute, he had a run-in with the local police—undoubtedly while trying to live up to Tom Benton’s example. Exactly what happened isn’t known, but Jackson’s cryptic reference to “miners and prostitutes” in a letter to Charles and Frank indicates that it involved all the elements that, over the next ten years, would become a kind of formula for his most self-destructive binges: sexually available women; tough, abusive men (in this case, the dark-faced miners who worked the bituminous coal fields around Terre Haute); and the ubiquitous bootleg liquor. As in so many of the later episodes, the night ended with Jackson in jail.

  In St. Louis, he followed the other transients to the vast “Hooverville” that stretched along the city’s riverfront. In the confusion of corrugated tin shacks and driftwood lean-tos, thousands of homeless and unemployed, black and white, suffered through the heat, the stench, and the flies of summer. Heading out of the city on Route 40, he found the hitching even slower than before. The only cars on the road, it seemed, were “spavined Fords” crammed with destitute families and their bundled possessions. The poor who drove had no room, the still-employed couldn’t afford long trips, and the still-rich weren’t disposed to pick up nineteen-year-old boys traveling alone. Jackson was lucky to catch an occasional day-tripper commuting between neighboring towns: from St. Louis to Fulton (where he mailed a postcard to Charles); across the Missouri River to Boonville; to Sweet Springs where the traffic picked up into Kansas City. Beyond Topeka, the last ripples of the Ozarks flattened into the great endless plains—“where the curvature of the planet was apparent to the human eye.” Through Manhattan and Salina, past foreclosed farms, idle machinery, dry, overcultivated fields, and stretches of road where cars were as rare as trees, Jackson mostly walked. The great exodus was still to come, but the combined droughts of water and money had stopped all inessential movement across vast stretches of shadowless land.

  As the wait between rides grew longer and the summer sun hotter (record high temperatures and low rainfall were already loosening the soil that, in a few years, would be swept away in the “black blizzards” of the dust bowl), Jackson grew increasingly impatient. In southern Kansas, probably near Wichita, he tried again to jump a freight train. This time he succeeded.

  From the moment he climbed aboard, Jackson entered another world: “a new social dimension,” Eric Sevareid called it in his memoirs of a similar trip, a “great underground world” whose inhabitants “eat from blackened tin cans, find warmth at night in the box cars, take the sun by day on the flat cars, steal one day, beg with cap in hand the next, fight with fists and often razors, hold sexual intercourse under a blanket in a dark corner of the crowded car.” If Jackson had hoped to avoid the congestion of the highway shoulders by climbing into an empty boxcar, he soon discovered his mistake. Almost a million Americans, most of them young and male, inhabited “the jungle,” as it was called. “There were more people ridin’ the freight trains than they was ridin’ the passenger trains,” remembers Joe Delaney, Jackson’s classmate who rode the rails on and off throughout the thirties. It was a variegated crowd, as Jackson later wrote to Charles and Frank, including “cutthroats [as well as] the average American looking for work.” There were career hoboes like the famous Tex, King of the Tramps, whose insigne—“Tex-KT”—was carved on privy seats and penciled on flophouse walls from Maine to California. But there were also criminals and derelicts in the jungle, as well as truant teenagers, city hustlers on the move, evicted families, foreclosed farmers, and hundreds of thousands of young men who had no job and didn’t want to be a burden on their families.

  The trains carried Jackson south across the west-pointing finger of Oklahoma, then out onto the white griddle of the Texas panhandle. Four years before, as Jackson knew, Tom Benton had come the same route, sketching the boom towns and oil derricks that had found their way into the Changing West mural. Now Jackson watched as the train passed black oases of oil rigs shimmying in the heat and false-front shops on one-street towns in the middle of country as barren as a speculator’s promise. Inside the metal cars, the temperature climbed well past a hundred, forcing the whole population onto the roofs and the flat cars to feel the hot wind. Cause for celebration was the discovery of a refrigerated car, or “reefer,” carrying some perishable delicacy to an oil baron in Amarillo or Lubbock. A big chunk of pilfered ice, placed just upwind, could add a chill to even the hottest breeze. Across Texas and into the high desert of New Mexico, stopovers were rare. Hundreds of miles rolled by between Tucumcari, Santa Rosa, Albuquerque, and Gallup.

  For a boy like Jackson who had always been pampered and provided for in one way or another, the freights had to be a hard initiation. Unless he was willing to beg or steal, even the youngest and
most charming traveler went without food. A loaf of bread cost only a dime and a full meal only a quarter most places, but dimes and quarters represented hours of work, and work was the scarcest commodity of all. Some “boes” raced the sunrise and one another to be at the local A&P by 4:00 A.M. when the bread trucks left their morning delivery by the back door. Latecomers had to look for handouts at coffee shops or queue for hours in city soup lines. Most restaurants would give a bum a cup of coffee (“You didn’t have to say anything, they could see you were on the road just by lookin’ “); a few might even fix a sandwich with leftovers that weren’t worth saving.

  Like any demimonde, the jungle was controlled by unseen forces that preyed on newcomers. Communities were rated and itineraries planned according to the citizenry’s generosity with handouts and the temperaments of local railway “deeks” who patrolled the freight yards. Old boes knew which train operators deliberately left a few boxcars open and vacant to avoid the chaos of hoboes clambering over a moving train, jumping from car to car in search of an “empty,” or clinging to the tender, faces blackened by flying coal dust. Such generosity was rare, however. As Jackson undoubtedly discovered, most of the time nothing came easily on the rails. At most freight yards, the deeks were ready with clubs and revolvers to clear the trains of unticketed riders. Texas sheriffs in particular were notorious for rounding up bums and locking them away for months at a stretch.

  It was not a life for the timid or the vulnerable—and Jackson was both. “You almost hit bottom,” says Delaney. “As a matter of fact, you do hit bottom. When you’re out there with no money and no destination, you’re just another animal—and a dangerous one, too.” The most common danger for young boys like Jackson was the older men who prowled the populated railroad embankments and the crowded express runs—called “hot shots.” Sevareid describes his first encounter with homosexuality in the jungle: “[I] rather imagined it was something confined to certain boys’ schools in England and the Bohemian quarters of Paris. Suddenly it was all around me. I noticed men with glazed, slightly bulging eyes and uncertain voices who traveled in company with boys in their teens. The men were referred to as ‘wolves.’” There were, of course, young wolves as well as old—boys who rode the rails from town to town, seeking out the cafés where homosexuals congregated, separating a prosperous-looking one from the pack, and earning enough in a few nights to last for months in the jungle. Sevareid describes a “well-built, remarkably attractive” boy of sixteen who in a single night could coax his victims into giving him everything they carried—including their clothes. Almost every young newcomer was tested—by the old wolves if he was penniless, by the young ones if he had something of value. “If you were a lamb, they’d walk on you,” recalls Delaney, describing the inevitable confrontation. “If you were not a lamb, they’d find out quick. They’d look in your eyes and see from your pulsations that they’re gonna have trouble with you if they keep movin’ your way.”