Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  By far the craziest of the lot was Cannastra. Williams called him “one of the aboriginal ‘beats,’” a “beat before there were ‘beats.’” Setting out from Beck’s studio around midnight, Cannastra would lead a group of six or eight, including Jackson, out into the deserted streets of Provincetown in search of open windows or parted curtains through which they might catch a glimpse of sexual activity. “We would go up and down fire escapes, looking at people screwing,” Bennett remembers. “This guy knew exactly where everybody was, where sex was going on in Provincetown. Not just man and man, but regular sex.” According to Williams, Cannastra was similarly familiar with the environs of Harvard. “He had a map of the town of Cambridge with X’s marked to indicate the location of window shades that were likely to expose an exciting peep show.” Each nocturnal tour was “carefully mapped-out,” and Cannastra would return, “rocks off, about 2 A.M.—sometimes with rapturous reports on intimacies he had witnessed through those lucky windows.” In Provincetown, another of Cannastra’s favorite haunts was the Catholic cemetery behind the Pilgrim Monument where, one night that summer, a local girl broke her leg while cavorting with “that gay bunch” from out of town, and Jackson and Cannastra were arrested.

  Jackson may well have been attracted to the gangling, dark-haired, light-eyed Cannastra, whom friends described as “beautiful” and “poetic looking.” Certainly, the two men shared the same demons. Sober, Cannastra was “extremely quiet and terribly sweet,” according to his friend Nell Blaine, and spoke with a disarming stammer. Like Jackson, he was fond of “spinning fantasies,” Blaine recalls, only his medium was words not paint. Drunk, he was “completely altered, a wild man with a death wish.” “When Bill was drunk,” says Blaine, “his poetic imagination came out in absolutely bizarre ways. He crashed a costume party I gave and he came as a ghoul, with his face and his feet painted silver. He brought his valuable collection of opera records and scattered them on the floor, then turned a beer keg on and started dancing on the records with his bare silver feet. He was jumping around on the broken records covered with beer and his feet were bleeding. Then he went into the kitchen and turned on the oven and stuck his head in to see how long he could last. Then he went outside, jumped up on the hood of a car and started leaping from one car to another.”

  Cannastra’s friends called him a “frustrated artist” and blamed his self-destructive antics on “sexual problems.”

  For Jackson, too, the summer quickly turned to self-obliteration. The nights out with Williams and Cannastra, the bizarre scene at Julian Beck’s studio, the desires that he may have felt, even the sporting with Williams in the surf, all demanded punishment or denial of some kind. Sex always had a price, but forbidden sex proved particularly costly. Even as he continued his nocturnal visits to Captain Jack’s Wharf, he began frequenting the local bars—the Old Colony Tap, Cookie’s Tap near the boatyard on Commercial Street where the fishermen drank, or Mac’s Bar on the east side—anyplace where he could drink his way into oblivion, or, better yet, into a fight. Chaim Gross crossed his path at the Lobster Pot. “I was with a friend, and [Jackson] was drunk and belligerent,” Gross recalls. “He insulted me without any reason, trying to pick a fight. He was an angry person.” In the same angry mood, Jackson ran into Leland Bell, his friend from the Museum of NonObjective Art. “It was a horrible scene,” Bell remembers. “He was drunk and he started talking about Klee and Arp and sneering, egging me on. He said, ‘If you like that shit you’ll never be a painter,’ and I just said, ‘Fuck you, to hell with you, Jackson.’” When people started avoiding him, Jackson moved to the front of the bar, sitting near the windows, “so he could see everybody,” says Gross. At the slightest provocation, he would leap up, fists clenched, knocking over glasses, swearing at the top of his voice, and “begging for a punch.” Ward Bennett recalls the sight of Jackson, dead drunk, pissing defiantly in the middle of a crowded barroom floor, daring anyone to stop him.

  By August, Lee was frantic. Between the escapades with Williams and Cannastra and the drinking binges, she seldom saw Jackson anymore. They still swam together occasionally, but most of her nights were spent in a hollow-eyed search from bar to bar. Maria Piacenza remembers the poignant sight of Lee “wandering around town trying to look unconcerned saying, ‘Have you seen Jackson?’ She spent the summer, every minute of it, vaguely looking for Jackson. It couldn’t have been easy.” When he finally did appear, usually in the early morning hours, his condition confirmed all Lee’s worst fears. “Jackson was in such shape in Provincetown,” recalls Ward Bennett, “that Lee just brought him home and cleaned him up and put him to bed, and then got him going again the next day.” The rolls of canvas that she had arranged to have sent up from New York sat in the studio unopened.

  In desperation, Lee turned to Jackson’s family. On the way back from a visit to her ailing father in mid-August, she stopped at Sande’s house in Deep River. Within two weeks, the entire family, including Stella, descended on Provincetown. As Lee hoped, Jackson’s nightly forays stopped. By Labor Day, Tennessee Williams was gone (he accompanied Bill Cannastra back to Harvard where he finished The Glass Menagerie in Cannastra’s law school dorm room surrounded by headstones stolen from local cemeteries), and Jackson rounded off the summer with two weeks of sunbathing, reminiscing, and “damn swell swimming” with Sande in the waning cape sunlight under Stella’s oblivious gaze.

  Jackson had won. He had not only alienated Lee from her mentor Hofmann but also effectively prevented her from doing “a goddamned bit of work” all summer. Even more remarkably, his antics had brought Stella and Sande from Connecticut to rescue him. In more ways than either Jackson or Lee could have known, the summer had been a glimpse into the future. Like Sande before her, Lee was firmly locked in Jackson’s ambivalent embrace. She had spent the summer in an agony of uncertainty, searching and waiting, worrying and listening and, after the ordeal, still cared.

  Jackson’s future was written more obscurely in the fate of Bill Cannastra, whom he never saw again. After graduating from law school, Cannastra found “a very strong woman” and, for a time, stopped drinking. But it was a short-lived victory. On the eve of their marriage, the woman “had second thoughts,” according to a friend, “and went away to Chicago.” Cannastra returned to drinking. Soon afterward, on a subway train in New York, he leaned out a window as the train rushed forward and was decapitated by a column.

  31

  ESCAPE

  Only a few weeks after Jackson and Lee returned from Provincetown, the 1944–45 season began. Peggy reopened her gallery, the parties recommenced, and Jackson, brittle and rootless as ever, was quickly swept up in the resumed flow of alcohol and anxiety. By October, he was “getting just as drunk as he ever had been getting,” according to Reuben Kadish, who had seen Jackson hit bottom before. At a dinner with the Hofmanns arranged by Lee to patch up the summer rifts, Jackson drank, sulked, drank, fulminated, drank some more, and finally passed out. It was a familiar routine: listless days and long nights out—Lee never knew where—ending in a ritual of forgiveness when Jackson appeared at the doorway “filthy dirty and falling all over himself.”

  As winter came on and the trees around the corner in Washington Square turned charcoal gray, Jackson virtually stopped painting. A large canvas—There Were Seven in Eight—begun the previous spring in the afterglow of the Guggenheim mural, leaned unfinished against the living room wall. It was all he could do to accompany Reuben Kadish to Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 diagonally across from the Eighth Street apartment. There, in a nondescript loft, the two old friends etched copper plates, pulled proofs, and shared reassuring silences. During the day, the workshop was a mecca for European artists like André Masson, Joan Miró, and Marc Chagall, who had worked with Hayter at his workshop in Paris before the Germans put a bounty on his head for printing leaflets that described “how to make a Molotov cocktail to throw at German tanks.” But Jackson “couldn’t work with people around,” according to Kadis
h, so they came only at night and on weekends when the studio was deserted. (Kadish had worked for Hayter as a printer and kept a key.) Hayter himself, a warm but peripatetic man “filled with brio,” would occasionally join them for a beer at one of the local bars favored by Atelier artists or at Hayter’s house on Waverly Place.

  In the smoky darkness of the White Horse Tavern, the Hotel Albert bar, or the Cedar, in the momentary transition between sobriety and forgetfulness, Jackson talked “about the source of inspiration and about the limits of working from the unconscious,” Hayter recalled. Obsessed with the months of impotence, artistic and otherwise, since the Guggenheim mural, “he pointed out that there is a problem when you have plumbed the depths in how to go beyond that level and produce further content.” But such flashes of introspection were rare and fleeting. After just a few beers, Jackson was “lost” again—where he apparently wanted to be.

  By November, even the local bartenders refused to collaborate in his headlong run at self-obliteration, and he was forced to recruit friends as intermediaries. John Little recalls coming home to find Jackson sitting, shivering on the stoop, waiting for him. “The first words out of his mouth were, ‘Let’s go and have a beer.’” They went to the bar at the Hotel Albert, but as soon as they sat down, the bartender came charging out, yelling at Jackson, “You get out of here or I’m calling the police!” Outside, Little asked, “What did you do to him, Jackson?” “Well, I was in there yesterday,” Jackson explained with a sheepish grin. When they tried a “crummy nightclub”, just across the street, the same thing happened. “They took one look at Jackson and said, ‘Oh, no, you’re not coming in here!’” Little recalls. “This would happen five or six times a night, so he was pretty well known.” Despite the obstacles, Jackson always found a way to drink. By the first snowfall, he was wandering the streets again, as he had done in the thirties, stumbling over dirty snowbanks, stopping cars, and yelling at passersby. One friend remembers seeing him urinating in the snow, “spraying the stream from side to side, and bellowing, ‘I can piss on the whole world!’”

  As the days grew shorter, the binges grew longer. “He spent a lot of time disappearing,” recalls Kadish. “Not just for hours but for days.” There was one difference from the thirties. Now when he fell down on a bar counter or a snowbank, it was Lee’s name, not Sande’s, that he called out as he drifted into unconsciousness. And it was Lee, not Sande, who waited at home, alternately sullen and hysterical, angry and terrified, listening for his voice in the street or his footfall on the stairs. “Every time Jack disappeared,” Kadish remembers, “Lee would get frantic and start making excuses, looking for someone to blame. She would pace around the apartment saying, ‘Jackson will be here any minute.’”

  In fact, Jackson was slipping away, and nothing Lee or anyone else did, apparently, could stop him.

  When Lee turned to the Pollock family for help, she received only tempered sympathy. Sande and Arloie had already begun barricading themselves against the unpleasant memories of their six-year ordeal with Jackson, and Stella, at Sande’s insistence, remained largely oblivious to the problems. Occasionally, she would come to the city and “babysit” Jackson during Lee’s trips to see her family on Long Island—trips that became increasingly frequent after her father fell ill in 1943—but Jackson never misbehaved while Stella was there. Lee never ceased to be amazed at the strange tranquilizing power, first demonstrated in Provincetown, that Stella held over Jackson, and would have installed her permanently in the apartment if Sande had permitted it. No one else seemed capable of slowing Jackson’s fall.

  Instead, she did the next best thing: she found another Stella.

  Even before the summer, Lee had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Jackson to resume therapy. The debacle in Provincetown only redoubled her determination, and the experience with Stella suggested a solution. Sometime in the fall of 1944, she persuaded him to visit her doctor, Elizabeth Wright Hubbard. Although officially an M.D., Dr. Hubbard was far more than a family doctor. Her unconventional “holistic” approach to treatment took her well beyond the realm of physical ailments. “She believed that her job was half psychology,” recalls her daughter, Elizabeth Wright Hubbard II, “and she alienated many patients when she said things like ‘the reason your son has asthma is because of you, madam.’” Hubbard preferred to treat whole families (sometimes including family pets) instead of individuals and was eager to receive Jackson as a patient. His first interview began with a series of “psychological” questions such as “Do you like thunderstorms?” and “How do you feel about your mother and father?”

  Normally, Jackson would have fended off such efforts to probe his psyche, with a combination of charm, evasion, and belligerence. Instead, as Lee must have anticipated, he was transfixed by Hubbard. With her “enormous bosoms,” somber clothing, steel-gray hair, tight corset, square jaw, erect posture, and deep, masculine volice (on the phone, people invariably said, “Yes, sir”), Elizabeth Hubbard was Stella Pollock. “She reminded me of Stella from the first time I saw her,” says Reuben Kadish. “She had the same stature, the same stance, the same feeling that a lot of western women have—not saying much, but when they say it they mean it.” Although a product of Manhattan, not the West, Hubbard was indeed a formidable woman who had made a place for herself in the overwhelmingly male world of medicine. A member of the first graduating class at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons to include women, she had won a coveted residency at Bellevue—also the first ever awarded to a woman. Defying the contumely of her colleagues, she had left the mainstream of medicine to study homeopathy in Geneva, then returned to teach its immunological principles at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia. “She was in the vanguard of women who did something,” says her daughter. “She had the power. She was like a good witch, a white witch.” From her office at 20 East Eighty-fourth Street, Hubbard provided free treatment to the poor and tended to the holistic needs of a patient list that included, at various times, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Alexander Calder, Lily Pons, Marlene Dietrich, and, by early 1945, Jackson Pollock.

  Elizabeth Wright Hubbard

  Hubbard’s help came just in time. With only a few months remaining before the scheduled March exhibition at Art of This Century, Jackson had virtually nothing to show. In the months immediately after finishing the Guggenheim mural, he had produced only a handful of exhibition-quality paintings, all of them in the same dense, rhythmic, abstract style. He had tried variations: sharp, jagged lines instead of great, flowing curves in The Night Dancer; smoky, turbulent browns instead of bright teal and turquoise in Night Ceremony. In Night Mist, he even stepped back across the line of abstraction toward the fragmented imagery of Pasiphaë. But by summer, the creative momentum of the previous year had dissipated completely. His perfunctory efforts at Hayter’s workshop in the fall had produced more frustration than art. “He discovered that [etching] wasn’t his medium,” Reuben Kadish remembers. The resistance of the material, the reversal of the image, the intervention of the acid, and the general intractability of the process were all unsuited to Jackson’s abrupt, impatient muse. “He was separated from the final product and he found it very frustrating.” In early 1945, Jackson learned that Peggy had scheduled his one-man show at the Arts Club of Chicago for March, the same month as the New York show. He now had two shows to paint.

  With no new art to exhibit, Jackson had forfeited a prime pre-Christmas slot at Art of This Century. The first show of the season went to William Baziotes, who had emerged from a long creative slump in time to take the place of a postponed Giacometti exhibition. Three days after the Baziotes show closed, Robert Motherwell’s multimedia extravaganza opened (featuring forty-eight works compared to Jackson’s fifteen). If the fecundity of his fellow artists didn’t rankle Jackson, then surely their reviews did. Baziotes’s work was “spontaneously designed and painted in a fever of inspired intent,” wrote Maude Riley in Art Digest, and his gouaches revealed a “boundless wealth”
of color. Even Clement Greenberg raved, calling Baziotes “unadulterated talent,” a “natural painter and all painter,” and Motherwell “almost too much of a good thing.” But no success galled like financial success, and in the booming wartime economy, both shows, especially Baziotes’s, were solid sellers.

  With his shows and contract renewal approaching, his studio empty, and Peggy’s receipts languishing far below the $2,800 break-even point, Jackson watched his colleagues’ successes from a sinkhole of envy and depression, consoled only by Greenberg’s dictum that “the future of American painting depends on what [Motherwell], Baziotes, Pollock, and only a comparatively few others do from now on.”

  Hubbard’s support couldn’t reverse Jackson’s decline, but it did provide the eleventh-hour fix of emotional energy he needed to rescue the March shows. Reuben Kadish recalls being stunned when he walked into the studio a few weeks before the opening. “It had been empty only days before. He did everything at the last minute. … For months there was nothing, and then suddenly there were a dozen paintings. There had been this tremendous, explosive kind of work period.” There was no time to break new ground. Subject matter, size, color, and complexity were decided by the exigencies of speed. For the Chicago show, he painted a series of horses—a familiar subject in an equally familiar Picassoid style, more draftsmanlike than painterly. For Art of This Century, he did a number of simple Miró-like works in which vivid monochromatic backgrounds describe images in bare canvas with accents in pastels and sgraffito (by scratching the wet paint to reveal the white ground, he could avoid waiting for the paint to dry). Not all was lost in haste, however. In the sgraffito paintings especially, speed and economy produced some stunning effects. In one, a gangly horse, lying on its back, legs in the air, appears suspended like a sculptural void in a block of brilliant purple. The few larger paintings that Jackson scrambled to finish by March were also more recapitulation than exploration: Totem Lesson 1 harked back to the fragmented imagery of Pasiphaë, only this time in confectionery shades of purple and salmon; while Totem Lesson 2 and Two echoed the totemic forms and confused personal mythology of Guardians of the Secret and Male and Female. In the long-unfinished There Were Seven in Eight, Jackson’s review of the past reached a frantic climax. Almost every style from the previous five years, from Magic Mirror to Gothic, appears in this sprawling, desperate, cacophonous canvas. Only a year after the perfection of the Guggenheim mural, Jackson had lost his way.