Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Lee dreaded returning to New York. Despite Kadish’s bad influence, the summer had at least succeeded in reversing Jackson’s long decline. He had been drunk on the porch at Louse Point, at times very drunk, but without a car and with no bars around the corner, he was at least controllable. There was none of the awful uncertainty, the hours of waiting that had consumed so many nights the previous year. Without Kadish and the distractions of summer, she apparently concluded, Jackson might be able to work again. Sometime in late August, while accompanying the Kadishes on a preliminary tour of some of the local houses for sale, she made inquiries about winter rentals in the area. Soon after their return to New York, she popped the question. “I said to Jackson, ‘What do you think of the idea of our going out there and trying it for the winter? We could rent the Eighth Street apartment, bring some canvas and see how we like it.’” Jackson was stunned. “He said, ‘Leave New York? Are you crazy?’”

  A few weeks later Jackson announced, “We’re leaving New York.” It was Lee’s turn to be stunned. “In just that short time, he had completely flipped,” she recalls. “I had no idea what happened.”

  Jackson later said that he changed his mind suddenly after spending several sleepless nights on the sofa at Eighth Street waiting for James Brooks to find another apartment. It was a typical Pollock explanation: terse, pragmatic, unsubtle, and utterly adrift from the truth. In fact, the reasons for his reversal were many and complex, with roots reaching back to childhood. Like marriage, the country offered Jackson a chance to emulate his brothers, Charles and Sande, who had left New York to start their families. The country was where Roy Pollock had lived. (In the fall of 1945, Frank, too, moved to a farm to take up where Roy had left off.) The country was the place to have children, and after a summer of playing with the Kadishes’ children and Patia Rosenberg, Jackson was eager to be a father. The country was also escape, a place where Jackson could deny the dark corners of his life in the city. “Pollock didn’t basically move to [the country],” said Dan Miller, “he was moving away from something. … He told me that himself. … There were conditions in New York that had developed that he wanted to get away from, associations.” But finally, the country was just someplace new, someplace different, someplace else, a blank canvas where Jackson could try again to make his world right. Like Stella, he had to believe that anything was possible further down the road.

  Once Jackson agreed, Lee moved with startling swiftness. Axel Horn saw Jackson in a bar that fall, staring into a mug of beer and looking “slightly stunned.” “I said, ‘What’s the problem, Jackson?’ and he said, ‘You know we just got a house, but I don’t know how we did it,’” Horn recalls. “He couldn’t figure it out.” Within days, perhaps hours, of Jackson’s volte-face, Lee telephoned the real-estate agent who had shown the Kadishes several houses during the summer. “Jackson liked one house in particular,” Lee remembers, “and he said, ‘That’s the house we’re going to live in.’” When she learned that house had been sold, she contacted Robert Motherwell, who had been recruiting other artists to join him in the East Hampton area. Motherwell quickly arranged a meeting with Ed Cook, a part-time real-estate broker.

  Among the places Cook showed them was a two-story, turn-of-the-century farmhouse on Fireplace Road in Springs, a small community near Amagansett. It was a handsome, solid-looking house set on five open acres, with old trees in the front yard, a barn and several outbuildings in back, and a breathtaking sweep of grass down to Accabonac Creek and the harbor beyond. With its asymmetrical, shingled facade, wide eaves, shutters at the windows, broad front porch, and bay window on the side, it was a house Stella Pollock could have loved. The inside, however, was only a modest improvement over the “shack” at Louse Point. There was electricity, at least, and running water in the kitchen, but no bathroom and no heat. The rent was $40 a month or, if they chose to buy, $5,000—all in cash, non-negotiable. Cook considered it “a steal.” Lee was ready to rent, but, to her astonishment, Jackson wanted to buy. “Well, of course we didn’t even have the forty dollars to pay rent,” Lee said later, “not to speak of buying a house, so I said, ‘Jackson, have you gone out of your mind?’ His answer was: ‘Lee, you’re always the one who’s saying I shouldn’t let myself worry about the money; we’ll just go ahead and do it.’” They settled on a compromise instead: they would rent the house for six months with an option to buy within that period. Perhaps by the following April, Jackson seemed to think, a miracle might happen—or Lee might make one happen. Stella had bought houses on slimmer hopes. When they signed the contract, they had to borrow the forty dollar security deposit from Cook.

  Lee’s next hurdle, marriage, proved more daunting. Like Sande, who had demanded a black minister at his wedding, Jackson insisted on a last minute test of devotion. “He wanted a church wedding,” Lee recalls. When Lee suggested simply going down to City Hall and getting a license instead, Jackson shook his head. “Uh-uh. I’m not a dog. No license. A church wedding or nothing.” Grimly, Lee began a citywide search for a church that would marry a “non-practicing Jew and an unbaptized Presbyterian.” She enlisted May Rosenberg to help in the search. “We called every church in the phone book,” says Rosenberg, who couldn’t remember the name of Jackson’s religion and referred to it as “some small western denomination.” Even the rabbis said no. Finally, May called a Dutch Reformed church “where I heard the minister was liberal, and I said to the man, ‘I have a real problem and I expect you can solve it because you’re Dutch. Unless these two people are married in a church there will be no wedding, and it’s a sin that they should continue living together without being married, so it’s up to you.’” To her amazement, the minister, Charles J. Haulenbeek, agreed—“God will understand,” he said. (He was less sure about his congregation. According to Lee, he asked that the couple “be very quiet about it, not [make] an issue out of it.”)

  Jackson had one last hoop. He wanted May Rosenberg as one of the two required witnesses. Lee wanted Harold Rosenberg and Peggy Guggenheim, but Jackson wouldn’t have Harold, only May. (Neither wanted any family member present.) When asked, Peggy responded frostily: “Why are you getting married? Aren’t you married enough already?” She wanted to know who else would be there. When Lee told her May Rosenberg, Peggy refused to attend. (She confused May with another woman with whom she had had editorial disputes over the manuscript of her memoirs.) Lee went back to Jackson. “If May isn’t there, I won’t be either,” he bluffed. So on Thursday afternoon, October 25, 1945, only Jackson, Lee, and May Rosenberg met under the Gothic arches of the Marble Collegiate church at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street. The church’s custodian, August Schulz, who lived in the building, provided a second, somewhat dispassionate witness. Lee was exhausted—she and May had spent the morning in a frantic, last-minute search for a hat to wear, as required by the pastor. Jackson was sober—Lee was not about to have the debacle of Peter Busa’s wedding repeated. Of the three, May was by far the most elated. “It was a beautiful ceremony,” she recalled. “The minister made a beautiful speech. He spoke about religion, and their religions, and God. It was beautiful. I was transformed.”

  After May treated them to a celebratory lunch, Lee and Jackson returned to the apartment, which was in the final, chaotic stages of moving. Within minutes, Ray Eames, Lee’s friend from the Hofmann school and now the wife of designer Charles Eames, arrived unannounced from California. “I told her we had just gotten married,” Lee remembers, “and she turned around and went back down and came back with champagne, and we celebrated.” Jackson called Jay and his wife, Alma, who were living temporarily in Flushing, to share the good news. “It was a total surprise,” Jay remembers. Later that afternoon, they arrived at the apartment to congratulate the newlyweds. “Jack looked the same to me,” Jay recalls, “except maybe a little more sheepish.” Amid the crates and boxes and rolls of canvas, the talk of a new house and a new life in the country confirmed a theory Alma Pollock had had for some time. “The marriage did
what it was supposed to do,” she remembers thinking, “it gave Lee more control.”

  A week later, the final preparations were complete. The apartment had been rented (James Brooks took the front room, Jay and Alma the back). The paintings had been packed off to Art of This Century, either for safekeeping or because, under the terms of Jackson’s contract, they belonged to Peggy. Only sketchbooks, unfinished canvases, a few gouaches, and a mountain of supplies would make the trip to Springs. Separately, Lee had packed a few of her paintings for the trip. With Putzel dead and his gallery closed, there was no place else to put them. The ones that weren’t worth moving she had long since destroyed. At the last minute, forewarned of the frigid winter winds off Block Island Sound and the rigors of a heatless house, Jackson bought Jay’s collection of a dozen Indian blankets and rugs. Jay accepted a painting in return, but because all the paintings were packed away, he would have to pick it out later. (He never did. After Jackson’s death, Lee refused to honor the arrangement.)

  Finally, on the weekend of November 3, as a “northeaster” blew in and swept the streets black with rain and sleet, Jackson and Lee climbed into the cab of a butcher’s truck they had borrowed from May Rosenberg’s brother and set out into the midday darkness.

  Self-portrait, 1933, 7 1/4” x 5 1/4”

  Seascape, 1934, 12” X 16”

  Naked Man with a Knife, 1938-41, 50” X 36”

  Bird, 1938-41, oil and sand on canvas, 27‘1/2” X 24”

  Stenographic Figure, 1942, 40” X 56”

  The Moon Woman, 1942, 69” X 43”

  Male and Female, 1942, 73” X 49”

  The She-Wolf, 1943, 41 7/8” X 67”

  The Guggenheim mural, 1944, 7′11″ X 19’ 9 1/2”

  The Tea Cup, 1946, 40” X 28”

  Shimmering Substance, 1947, 30 1/8” X 24‘1/4”

  Full Fathom Five, 1947, oil on canvas, with nails, tacks, buttons, key, coins, cigarettes, matches, etc., 50 7/8” X 30 1/8”

  Number 1A, 1948, 5′8″ x 8′8″; note the handprints across the top.

  Lavender Mist (Number 1, 1950), oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas, 7′3″ X 9′10″

  Blue Poles (Number 11, 1952), enamel and aluminum paint on canvas, 6′11″ X 16’

  Easter and the Totem, 1953. oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on paper, 82 1/4” X 58”

  32

  STARTING OVER

  Dan Miller, the one-eyed airplane pilot and country savant who presided over both the Springs General Store and the local Masonic lodge, told many stories about the “wild-hide” Jackson Pollock. But his favorite was the one about Jackson’s encounter with an old farmhand named Charlie who “didn’t know much but could drive horses and mow.” One day, just as Charlie was reining his team to the porch post outside Miller’s window, Jackson clattered by in his Model A. Charlie watched him pass and shook his head. “That old Pollock,” he said to Miller, “lazy son of a bitch, ain’t he, Dan?” Miller, who liked his new artist neighbor, said, “What do you mean he’s lazy?” Charlie shook his head again for emphasis. “Why I never seen him do a day’s work,” he said, “did you?”

  If Jackson came to Springs, a loose cluster of houses just across Accabonac Creek from Louse Point, looking for an escape from the prying eyes, public rebukes, and private alienations of New York City, he came to the wrong place. He would have fared much better just a few miles south of Springs in the tiny summer community of East Hampton where the residents—patrician relics, mostly—understood artists. For a hundred years, a parade of painters and sculptors, including Thomas Moran, Childe Hassam, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Winslow Homer, had been tutoring them in the idiosyncratic ways of creativity. From the Tile Club of the 1870s, which met weekly to paint on eight-by-eight-inch Spanish tiles, to the Quonset hut of Robert Motherwell, artists and their eccentricities were woven into the loose summer fabric of East Hampton life. (Thomas Moran helped found the Maidstone Club, an exclusive retreat for tennis, swimming, and golf where Hassam and, later, Motherwell were active members.) In 1931, the town even erected a handsome white brick building, Guild Hall, to showcase their contributions: Impressionist oil paintings of bathers at the seashore, watercolors of the “almost English” countryside, sketches of clambakes and fishermen and local scenery. Even the Surrealists, with their European hauteur and bizarre games, had been accepted there. Max Ernst, Jean Helion, Fernand Léger, even Breton, had strolled the beaches and streets of East Hampton and nearby Amagansett, admiring the “Parisian” sky, without attracting attention—except from the occasional gauche tourists who would stop at a local gas station to ask, “Where can we find the Surrealists?”

  But Springs was another world entirely. Where East Hampton was diverse and cosmopolitan, Springs was inbred and backward: a proud, petty, introverted community of fishermen and farmers held together by a dense thicket of intermarriage, a place where the toilets were still outdoors, artists were still slackers, and men’s fortunes were still more closely tied to nature than to the stock market. East Hampton had Guild Hall; Springs had the Masonic Lodge. East Hampton had golfers’ brunches at the Maidstone Club; Springs had potluck suppers at Jungle Pete’s Bar and Grill. To East Hamptoners, anyone or anything from Springs was “below the bridge”—said with an inflection that made it sound like the dark side of the moon.

  It had always been that way. Despite its proximity to East Hampton, Springs had always been closer in spirit to its northern neighbor, Gardiners Island, a mysterious crescent of land lodged between the fork tines of eastern Long Island. In 1639, an English engineer named Lionel Gardiner who already owned most of the South Fork, including the early settlements of Southhampton and Springs, bought the island from the Indian “sachem,” Wyandank. For most of the three hundred years since, Gardiner and his descendants had ruled their private fiefdom from the huge manor house on the southern tip of the island. The English sailors who accompanied Gardiner settled not on the island, Lionel’s private reserve, but in Springs, the nearest “mainland” town, where they proved to be just as proud and insular as their laird. When Jackson Pollock arrived in 1945, Springs was still dominated by the same handful of families—Bennett, Miller, King, Parsons, Lester, Talmage—who still made their living from the sea and still spoke with the cockney accent of Lionel Gardiner’s crew. Everyone was “bub”—as in, “Yessir, bub.” Women were always “dolly,” and children were “yowns.” Words were often doubled for emphasis: “Yes, yes.” About the only thing Springs residents had borrowed from the new world in three hundred years was their name. They called themselves Bonackers after the tribe of Accabonac Indians that had once inhabited the land around the harbor and creek that also bore their name.

  Even the Great Depression and World War II had left Springs relatively untouched. Neither had much affected the yearly harvest of clams and scallops from the sea and potatoes from the fields. Roosevelt’s unemployment compensation had somewhat eased the seasonal cycle of abundance and scarcity, but at the general store, Dan Miller still spent half the year taking cash and the other half giving credit. Lee Krasner assumed that the hardship and dilapidation she saw around her were just remnants of the Depression. “She felt cast down by the fact that these people were living in such conditions,” recalls a friend. “Even though the rest of the country had recovered, here these people were stuck in dire poverty.” Soon after her arrival, Lee offered to paint the postman’s cart—“just to spruce it up and give it a gay appearance”—but to her astonishment, the offer was refused. A coat of paint wouldn’t have made it better, only different. “Bonackers are Bonackers,” went one favorite East Hampton saying, “and that’s enough for them.”

  In such a small, placid, constant community, Jackson’s arrival attracted considerable attention. Charlie the farmhand wasn’t the only one of Dan Miller’s customers who followed the exploits of “the newcomer with two last names.” In the first few weeks, rumors flew. It was said that he worked only after midnight; that he slept till noon; that
he was backed by big money from New York; and, hardest to believe, that he planned to make Springs his year-round home. At Jungle Pete’s, Merton Edward told how Jackson had arrived in the middle of a nor’easter only to discover that his house was locked and he had lost the key. So he came to Edward’s door, dripping wet, figuring that Merton might have a key that worked “since Merton’s house was the same age as Jackson’s.” That story was always good for a laugh or two and another round of drinks. For weeks thereafter, people often talked about “the strange city couple that had moved into the old Quinn place” and were struggling through the winter without a car or coal. They would point Jackson out to their neighbors and say, “There goes that crazy artist” when he rode by on his bicycle to Miller’s store. Young boys would sneak up to the windows and peer warily through the icy glass hoping for a glimpse of him. “Did you see the way he wears a rope instead of a belt to hold up his pants?” one neighbor asked another, or “Did you notice that he never shaves, dresses up, combs his hair, or goes to church?” They noted how often he bought booze at Dan Miller’s store, how often he appeared at Jungle Pete’s—only a mile down the road from his place. They listened sharply to the first reports from his neighbors: that he didn’t act “uppity” like artists were supposed to; that he seemed like an “ordinary guy.” One of them even ventured a Bonacker compliment, calling Jackson “common as dirt.” By the time Bonackers like Ed Hults finally said “helloo” to their new neighbor, he was already a local celebrity.