Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  In a rare moment of candor, Sande confessed to Charles that he was “worried as hell” about Jackson’s condition.

  At the Eighth Street apartment, Arloie struggled to maintain her benign neutrality in the face of escalating indignities. One morning she walked into the kitchen and found the tablecloth cut to shreds. Jackson had attacked it with a butcher knife. The almost nightly scenes when he returned to the apartment had lost their ritualistic, postcoital calm. Jackson was often still violent and abusive when he came up the stairs, and the job of pacifying him took longer and longer. “He would come back wild,” Kadish remembers, “wild as can be. You can’t imagine how wild.”

  Even before the latest round of binges, Arloie had felt threatened and imprisoned by Jackson’s rages. She had vowed never to have children while living under the same roof with him. But the new threats required more direct action. Soon after returning from Bucks County—perhaps at Arloie’s insistence, certainly with her approval—Sande built a partition that closed off the front room from the rest of the apartment. He tried to soften the blow by explaining to Jackson that he would get “a private studio.”

  Even with a private studio, however, Jackson’s work slowed to erratic spurts. Every binge was followed by at least a day, sometimes several, in which he would lie in bed or sit motionless in a chair, petrified by “horrendous feelings of guilt.” “The remorse! Oh God, he was so remorseful!” Nene Schardt recalls. “He couldn’t remember what he’d done, but he knew by people’s silence that whatever it was, it must have been awful.” Arloie remembers walking by the door of the little bedroom at the end of the hall and seeing him sitting motionless on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. For hours, sometimes days, he remained in a state of suspended depression, never talking either about the binges or about his guilt and never apologizing—“just silent about the whole thing,” says Kadish. Nor did he paint. Except on rare occasions, he never painted while drunk or while suffering through the low, slow, silent decompression that followed. Eventually, he would come into the kitchen and begin to eat. It was the first sign of recovery. “Finally, he’d wiped himself clean,” Kadish remembers, “and then he could get back to work.”

  Before, the cycle of drinking and depression had usually permitted Jackson a few days of “calm sea” between binges, enough to do four or five paintings and dozens of drawings. But now the cycles were closing up, even overlapping sometimes; he would recover in the afternoon and disappear the same night. As a result, during the winter of 1937–38, the small explosions of activity that had sustained him in the past were fewer and briefer. He did manage, as usual, to transform some of the sketches and watercolors from the Vineyard trip into oil. (It was probably one of these summer watercolors that he exhibited at the opening of the new WPA Federal Art Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street—his only public showing of the winter.) To fulfill the increasingly onerous WPA requirements, he reached for the tranquil banality that eluded him in real life, painting feathery landscapes and lifeless Americana. In the midst of his private agony, these works must have seemed incongruously placid, almost as if they had been done by another hand. More cathartic were the harsh, angular, Orozco-like drawings and occasional paintings that continued to bubble up from his subconscious.

  In early December, the momentum of Jackson’s fall was broken by a visit from Tom Benton, who came to New York to receive an award from the Limited Editions Club. At a reunion of the Harmonica Rascals, he invited Jackson, Sande, and Manuel Tolegian to Kansas City for the Christmas holidays. To the Pollocks, the prospect of travel was always therapeutic, but for Jackson there was the additional lure of seeing Rita again. Only days before the scheduled departure, however, Tolegian, whose car was to provide the transportation, contracted mumps and Sande pulled out. Not to be denied, Jackson purchased a bus ticket and, with only change in his pocket, left from the Port Authority bus terminal on a thirty-eight-hour Greyhound bus ride through a bleak midwest winter to Kansas City.

  The reception at the Bentons’ two-story limestone house on Valentine Road was mixed. Rita was, as usual, warm and maternal, grown wider and more bosomy in the years since Jackson first met her. Benton, however, was harder and cooler than he had been on the Vineyard, due perhaps to a brewing political upheaval at the art institute where he was director. The self-conscious simplicity of earlier years had already begun its slow transformation into the grotesque caricature of Benton’s old age. He seemed to drink perpetually now; his short fuse had grown shorter, his language, impossibly coarser. His relationship with Rita had changed, too, as Jackson must have noticed. The reality of mother and son showed more clearly through the charade of husband and wife. “He would be yelling and drinking and carrying on,” recalls a Kansas City friend, “then Rita would yell downstairs, ‘Tom! Come to bed!’ And he would just stop and go upstairs.”

  For most of Jackson’s two-week stay, Benton was away at the art institute during the day, leaving Jackson virtually alone with Rita. T. P. received so little of his former babysitter’s attention that later he wouldn’t be able to recall the visit at all. Just as firmly and deftly as she managed Tom’s career, Rita took Jackson’s financial plight under her care, encouraging him to paint in the studio while Tom was away and, when he obediently produced four small winter landscapes, arranging to sell two of them to friends. The sales produced enough money to pay for Jackson’s return ticket.

  At night, when Tom returned, Jackson usually left the house and lost himself in a round of holiday parties with Benton’s students from the institute. One of those students, Lawrence Adams, remembered two parties, “stag affairs,” where “there was considerable drinking” and “feats of strength,” including Indian wrestling. Always more comfortable with horseplay than with conversation, Jackson happily joined in “the usual student brawls” and was “accepted as one of Benton’s boys from New York,” said Adams. Far from Sande and feeling daily closer to Rita, Jackson caught a brief glimpse of open sky, his drunken antics blending, for a change, into the background of seasonal high spirits and roughhousing.

  It was only a matter of time, however, before the desperate fantasy that had brought him to Kansas City broke through the polite pretenses. On the eve of his departure, made bold by liquor, he finally poured out to Rita the feelings that had been secreted in his imagination for so long. Seven years of forbidden longings and private looks, of envying her husband and caring for her child; seven years of watching her sunbathe nude on King’s Beach or probe the bottom of the pond with her foot in search of clams and, finding one, throw her head back and shake with laughter; seven years of maternal affection and sensual enticement were crowded suddenly into a few brief moments of breathtaking openness. He told her that he loved her and that he always had, that “she was his ideal woman and the only one he had ever loved.” Then, in a final spasm of fantasy, he asked her to marry him.

  How Rita responded to Jackson’s outburst is not recorded, except that “she turned him down.” Whether she did so gently, as Becky Tarwater had tried to do, or with a wise laugh and a dismissive toss of her head, the effect was devastating: seven years of fantasies erased with a nod.

  His first reaction was rage, directed not at Rita but at Tom, whose fame and facility, in Jackson’s tortured calculus, stood between him and the only woman who could bring him peace. According to an account that Benton later gave a friend: “After [Rita] turned him down, [Jackson] ran to Benton and said, ‘Goddamn you, I’m going to become more famous than you.’” The second reaction came that night when Jackson left the house on Valentine Street and plunged into the circuit of parties and bars and self-obliteration. He returned early the following morning, “so sick with overdoses of whiskey” that Rita immediately dressed and drove him to see a doctor. Even Benton finally recognized Jackson’s “disease.” “The doctor told me later that his habits were ‘confirmed,’” he wrote.

  The binge in Kansas City was only a prelude. After a perfunctory visit to Charles in Detroit, Jackson ret
urned to New York and threw himself back into the maelstrom. Within a month, Sande wrote Charles, and behind the grim optimism and the continuing reluctance to blame Jackson, his desperation shows:

  Our plans for the summer are very indefinite except for one important thing which is to get Jack out of New York. It has only been with a commendable and courageous effort on his part that he has held himself in check … [he] needs relief badly from New York.

  Shortly thereafter, probably at Charles’s urging, Benton invited Jackson on a six-week sketching trip beginning on May 28. During March and April, however, the binges continued and Jackson’s output slowed to a standstill. The new, more stringent WPA checkin and production requirements became an almost impossible burden. By 1938, the Project was under constant pressure to trim its rolls, and rules that had once been enforced loosely, if at all, were suddenly threatening. On a day when Jackson was supposed to submit a painting at the WPA office, friends remember seeing him running through the streets in his pajamas with a painting under his arm, racing to beat the deadline. Other days, sitting in his room “horrendously sick and absolutely immobile,” he missed the deadline altogether. Desperate to keep him on the Project, Sande let friends search the studio and pick paintings to submit on his behalf. When they couldn’t find an appropriate canvas, or missed the deadline, Burgoyne Diller, now supervisor of the easel division, would “cover” for him.

  Despite the continuing binges, Sande still hoped as late as May that the trip with Benton would reverse Jackson’s decline. When Jackson finally applied for a leave of absence later that month, however, his request was denied—he had been absent too many times already. It was, apparently, one setback too many. Sometime soon afterward, he disappeared.

  He was gone for four days on the longest and most determined effort at self-obliteration of his life. He may have hoped, or even intended, that it would be his last. For four days, he wandered the streets of the Bowery on the Lower East Side, drinking “sherry wine and rotgut” around the clock, passing out in the gutter, in other men’s urine, being nudged awake by police only to begin drinking again. On the fourth day—filthy, violent, incoherent, and sick—he was taken to Bellevue Hospital. The doctors told Sande that he had suffered “a breakdown.” With grim resignation, over Jackson’s objections, Sande sought Helen Marot’s help in arranging to have his brother committed to a mental hospital.

  It wasn’t until June 9, however, when he was formally dismissed from the Project for “continued absence,” that Jackson finally accepted the inevitable. “He had been on the Bowery and he knew that wasn’t for him,” recalls Reuben Kadish, who visited him at Bellevue. “He wasn’t just an ordinary slobbering drunk. He was going in a different direction entirely.”

  On Monday, June 12, Sande drove Jackson thirty-five miles north to the New York Hospital at White Plains and left him there.

  21

  RETREAT

  An extravagance of stone and plum-colored brick, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, the New York Hospital—or Bloomingdale’s, as it was called—loomed over the sleepy countryside around “White Plains like a dark Victorian fantasy. “It was a huge old asylum,” a patient later wrote, “a private asylum, less grisly in some respects than public asylums like Bellevue or Wingdale, but grisly enough.”

  Fearful of hospitals, deprived of alcohol, and cut off from his family, Jackson must have spent the first few days alternately terrified and despondent. Strangers in white coats gave him the first complete physical examination of his life, the first neurological exam, the first X rays. Bearing his folder marked “chronic alcoholic,” he was shuttled from clinic to clinic, specialist to specialist—internist, opthalmologist, otologist, laryngologist, dentist, urologist. In the men’s ward, nurses in white caps hovered like gulls, alert to signs of “tenseness, depression, anxiety, sexual preoccupation, hypochondriasis and compulsions [or] fear of insanity.” The hospital staff considered these the “outstanding mental symptoms” of alcoholism. Everyone, even the other patients, had been taught to watch for “suicidal preoccupation.”

  Jackson was classified a “voluntary patient,” although the doctors at Bloomingdale’s put little real stock in voluntarism; the temptation to leave was too great. So Jackson, like all voluntary patients, was required to sign an application for “inebriate certification.” After an examination by two outside doctors to verify that he was indeed “an inebriate and a proper subject for treatment,” the application was approved by a Westchester County judge, and Jackson was remanded to the hospital’s care “for a period not exceeding 12 months.” Although still officially a voluntary patient, he could no longer leave without his doctor’s permission.

  The first few weeks of therapy were “centered around the principles of rest, increased nutrition and fluid intake, and proper elimination.” Alcohol was strictly banned and patients were put to bed. Those who couldn’t sleep were given prolonged baths, steam-cabinet sessions, warm wet packs, ultraviolet light treatment, and massage, all of which were considered preferable to sedative drugs. Jackson was also placed on a diet “rich in calories” and “abundant fluid intake.” Proper elimination was ensured by the regular indignity of “colonic irrigations.” Although designated a “free” patient—meaning he could walk the halls and grounds at will—Jackson was never free enough to refuse treatment. Mail and packages were routed through the office where they were checked for contraband. Patients who refused a proper diet were forcefed or, if necessary, tube-fed. And for those who resisted the beneficial effects of warm baths and proper nourishment, who persisted in their “impulsive, stuporous, or negativistic behavior,” shock treatment was the ultimate form of enlightenment.

  New York Hospital in White Plains, New York; known as “Bloomingdale’s.”

  The second stage of treatment was “occupational.” Patients were offered a wide range of physical activities to keep their hands and minds occupied during the ordeal of withdrawal. From its founding in 1821, at a time when other asylums still relied on shackles, bars, and bloodletting, Bloomingdale’s had distinguished itself as a pioneer of “moral management”—a new, more humanitarian way of treating the mentally ill. Its well-to-do patients were given privacy, clean accommodations, spacious grounds, supervised outings, and otherwise treated “as rational beings insofar as possible.” Over the years, this benign handling of embarrassing family problems had earned the gratitude of many of New York’s richest families—Macys, Whitneys, Goulds—and their generous support had transformed the old asylum into a veritable resort. Luxurious facilities for bowling, shuffleboard, billiards, sunning, and cardplaying had been added, as well as two fully equipped gymnasiums, six tennis courts, and a golf course. Women usually joined supervised exercise and dance classes while male patients, many of them under thirty, participated in “competitive games and strenuous physical exercise,” often out of a belief that their recovery would be accelerated by “sweating out the poison.” Inside, in the spacious parlors filled with fine Oriental carpets and Victorian furniture, men and women in mufti read and relaxed. Around the pianos, knots of patients prepared for the frequent evening entertainments. In the barrel-vaulted assembly hall, patients rehearsed on stage for an upcoming play or operetta. During the day, free patients like Jackson could wander the grounds to enjoy the lush, exotic flora—reputedly planned by Frederick Law Olmsted—and inspect the lavish outlying “guest villas” that were reserved “for the insane of wealthy families.” In the evenings, staff members organized parlor games, dances, informal social gatherings—any activity that provided “a substitute for the relaxing effect of alcohol.”

  Except for a few charity cases like Jackson, most of the patients at Bloomingdale’s—the troubled but well-socialized black sheep of wealthy families—thrived in the familiar, spa-like atmosphere. One doctor described them as a “breezy, affable, argumentative, demanding and disarming” lot. Like voyagers on a long cruise, they made the best of their “voluntary” confinement together.

 
; But for Jackson it was a different story. Always intimidated and socially inept in groups, he suddenly found himself marooned in a sea of strangers, deprived of liquor to help assuage the awkwardness, afraid to participate in competitive games, and undoubtedly haunted by visions of Sande and Arloie spending the summer in Bucks County without him. Soon after arriving, he wrote Sande a brief note, concluding wistfully: “Imagine you are getting a lot of food off the farm by now.”

  The faint echo of childhood was no coincidence. In the real world, Jackson had retreated to the sylvan tranquillity of White Plains, but in his mind, he had returned to the forbidding sanitarium near the Phoenix ranch—the distant and terrifying place beyond the arroyo where people were sick and never got well. Recalling Jackson’s first few weeks at the hospital, one of his doctors later said, “[He] was rather anxious, as sensitive people often are, and suffering from depression. There was a lot of calming down to be done and building up of his self-esteem.”

  Although assigned to Dr. Edward Allen, a highly respected, New England-born and Harvard-educated staff doctor, Jackson’s case caught the eye of James Hardin Wall, the hospital’s assistant medical director and resident expert on alcoholism and its treatment. A courteous, genteel South Carolinian, Wall had come to Bloomingdale’s as a resident in 1928 and taken an early interest in the treatment of “alcoholic psychosis” at a time when alcoholics were still considered interlopers by the other mental patients. Since then, he had conducted several studies of alcoholic patients and was compiling careful records in preparation for a long-term study of alcoholism in men. Jackson suited perfectly the study’s protocol and soon became Dr. Wall’s special project.