Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  But celebrity had its dark side. Jackson may have rented for the winter, but he was still one of the summer people at heart. The Bonackers called them “drifts,” with a curl of the lip. Jackson may have been an artist, but, like the other drifts, “he didn’t go out and work with a hammer and saw,” said Ed Cook, a Springs resident at the time of Jackson’s arrival, “or go fishing or anything like that, so he was still a drift.” Drifts were a fickle, self-indulgent and useless lot who hogged the beaches in summer and fled before the first frost. Worst of all, they had money. “They could buy anything they wanted to,” Cook recalls. “And their kids, if they got in a little bit of trouble, they could buy their way out of it.” The proud Bonackers also sensed the reciprocal disdain of drifts like Balcomb Greene who found the locals “so dumb I didn’t want to spend much time with them.” Even well-intentioned drifts like May Rosenberg couldn’t find anything better to say about the Bonackers than that they were “unspoiled.”

  But the drifts, like the fish and the clams, were one of the area’s indispensable natural resources on which the Bonackers depended for part of their meager livelihood. Ultimately, it was that dependence that separated them from Jackson. He wasn’t disdainful (although Lee was) or rich (although rumors of rich backers persisted), but he certainly wasn’t a Bonacker. When, in a moment of unguarded enthusiasm, he said to George Sid Miller, “I’m going to be a Bonacker same as you someday,” Miller replied dryly, “You only got to wait four hundred years.” In Springs, as everywhere, celebrity had its price.

  When Jackson and Lee broke into their new home on a stormy November night in 1945, Lee finally had what she had always wanted: Jackson alone—no meddlesome family, no bars, no drinking buddies, no parties, no Peggy, no gays on the make. This time, she would make it work; this time, she would retake control of their lives and make it possible for Jackson to paint again.

  She soon discovered that nature was her most powerful ally. The winter of 1945–46 was one of the worst of the decade. When the winds blew from the northeast, they carried rain and snow from Canada; from the south, hurricanes. Even hundreds of miles out, a storm could hurl eighty-mile-per-hour gusts of wet wind across the open sea, into the mouth of Gardiners Bay, past Louse Point, across Accabonac Harbor, and against the first obstacle in their path—their house, rattling windows and whistling through the loose boards. All through November and December, the howling ocean winds turned trips to the outhouse into perilous adventures. “I opened the door this morning,” Jackson wrote friends in New York, “and never touched ground until I hit the side of the barn five-hundred yards away—such winds.” Not even a craving for liquor could drive him outside in such weather. It was everything he could do to keep the kitchen stove stoked with firewood, huddling in Jay’s Indian blankets, endlessly smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee to stay warm. “It was hell,” Lee recalled later, “[no] fuel, no hot water, no bathroom. It was a rough scene.”

  On the rare days when the weather let up and the sky brightened—it almost never turned blue—Lee had to rely on her wits to keep Jackson at home. For the first few weeks, there were always jobs that needed to be done around the house. The owners had left the place in a shambles, “stuffed with belongings,” and desperately in need of cleaning. To set up his studio, Jackson spent days clearing one of the upstairs bedrooms. Then the living room had to be readied so Lee could paint there (when a storm blew in, it was too cold to paint anywhere). No sooner was one job done than something else broke: after a heavy rain, the water pump in the basement gave out; the porch floor began to sag; the living room flue wouldn’t open. Jackson didn’t even have time to think about the outbuildings: a barn stacked to the rafters with cold, rusty farm implements and road equipment and a tool shed so full the door wouldn’t open. Besides, if they decided not to stay, or couldn’t raise the money to buy the house, all their work would be for nothing. In frustration, Jackson wrote Louis Bunce: “The work is endless—and a little depressing at times.”

  Even when the frustration and privation became too much to bear, Jackson had no place to go. Without a car, he was limited by the range of a bike: some days no more than a mile—the exact distance to Jungle Pete’s. He had been there several times in the first weeks, not for liquor but for the huge country breakfasts served by Nina Federico, the bar’s crusty owner. It was Federico who had lent Jackson two dollars he needed to buy the bicycle. Jungle Pete’s, like the Bonackers themselves, wasn’t given to public displays. There was none of the usual drinkers’ camaraderie that Jackson relished; only single men and occasional pairs, standing apart from one another in a swirl of cigarette smoke and be-bop music, as sentinel and unsmiling as coastal rocks. For months, no one even bothered to say hello and Jackson would sulk home after only a beer or two. “He wasn’t very friendly with the locals at first,” recalls Roger Wilcox, “and they were pretty unfriendly with him.”

  The only other convenient source of liquor was Dan Miller’s store a few hundred yards down the road—close enough to be accessible during all but the worst storms. Jackson bought paint and supplies there when he couldn’t hitch a ride into East Hampton with Julien Levy. It was easy enough to pick up a case or two of beer and “put it on the books” like everything else at Miller’s store, although in winter there was no place to drink it except at home under Lee’s disapproving glare.

  Jackson soon discovered that the most effective tranquilizer available at Dan Miller’s store wasn’t booze, it was Miller himself. Stern and “strictly business” with most of his customers, Miller took an instant liking to his new neighbor from the city. The two often spent hours together in the office next to the store. Miller, who loved the sound of his own voice, did the talking and Jackson listened: the more mystical and “highflown” the topic, the more enthusiastically Jackson grunted and nodded in agreement. A drinker himself, with a prodigious beer belly to prove it, Miller was a born psychologist who saw through Jackson’s gruff reticence. Before long, their talks had assumed the role of therapy—the kind of informal, nonthreatening therapy that Jackson responded to best.

  Lee didn’t try to prevent the meetings with Miller, but she didn’t like them. From the beginning, she eyed the Bonackers with a mix of suspicion and contempt: suspicion of their designs on Jackson and contempt for their bumpkin ways. Like Stella in Phoenix, she kept aloof. “Lee would just say hello and that was it,” recalls Ed Hults, a local plumber. “She holed up in there and never got very involved in the community.” Many of the local workmen who came to the house over the next ten years saw Lee Krasner for the first time at Jackson’s funeral. She did go to the store once or twice with Mary Louise Dodge, a neighbor who owned a car, and Allene Talmage saw her occasionally at parties, “but she stuck pretty much to her own group,” Talmage remembers, “and if you stopped by to chat, she sure never invited you in.”

  Bonackers weren’t the only ones that Lee turned away. Soon after arriving, Jackson wrote Reuben Kadish a letter filled with enthusiasm for the house and the rigors of country living. Fondly recalling the summer on Louse Point, he urged the Kadishes to come to Springs and look for a place of their own. When they arrived on a fittingly frigid day in January, however, it was Lee who met them at the door. “We were going to stay with them,” Kadish recalls, “but when we arrived, Lee said, ‘I guess you’re here to get Jack drunk again,’ and that was it.” Infuriated, Barbara Kadish said to her husband, “Let’s get away from this witch,” and the two stalked back out into the cold. They didn’t return to the house until Jackson’s funeral ten years later. In the spring, they bought a farmhouse in rural New Jersey instead. Jackson, apparently unaware of the encounter with Lee, wrote Kadish in February: “When can we expect you out?”

  Roughly the same scene was repeated when Jim Brooks and Charlotte Park came out, “despite Lee,” and camped in Montauk, where they later bought a house. William and Ethel Baziotes, also invited by Jackson, made it through the front door but had to leave soon afterward “because Lee wasn’t
feeling well.” Even Lee’s own family was banished temporarily. “We were close in New York, then she moved out [to Springs] and all of a sudden we were unclose,” says her sister Ruth. Jackson’s family fared slightly better. At Jackson’s insistence—he wanted to show off his new house—they came for Thanksgiving dinner. But otherwise only one guest regularly penetrated the emotional cordon sanitaire that Lee had thrown around Jackson: Stella Pollock.

  Lee was just beginning to understand Stella’s power over him. No matter how overmastering his rage seemed, no matter how inconsolable his depression, Stella could subdue him. Her mere presence had a hypnotic effect. At the sight of her tightly corseted body, bright shoes, and immaculate handmade clothes, Jackson became a child again. Self-obsessions flowed backward into their childhood tributaries and he was suddenly all adolescent apprehension and alertness, sensitive to her every look—charming or sullen, defiant or deferential, “bad boy” or mama’s boy, changing from minute to minute according to the imperceptible choreography of her approval. “Pollock had a strong face,” said Tony Smith, “… [but] next to his mother, he looked like a little boy.” Her arrival might be preceded by a wild one-night binge, her departure followed by an explosive rage—“as if he had been holding himself in check,” one friend observed—but as long as she was nearby, he was utterly, eerily quiescent.

  Lee both resented Stella’s power, and envied it. She considered Stella “an ignorant bore,” according to May Rosenberg, and bristled in her company. But Jackson’s needs came first, and in early 1946, Jackson needed to prepare for an April show at Art of This Century. Lee had managed to fill his first two months in Springs with household chores and endless repairs, but no painting. Now the storm season was past, the muddy footprints on the path to the outhouse were preserved in ice, snow had transformed the landscape, and Jackson was spending more and more nights at Jungle Pete’s. Even more troubling to Lee, he had begun looking for a cheap secondhand car. Meanwhile, the rolls of canvas they had brought from New York sat, still wrapped, in an upstairs bedroom. Thinking no doubt that Stella’s presence would ensure a week of untroubled workdays, Lee made the arrangements for her to visit in January. Jackson spent the entire day before her arrival baking pies and cakes “to prove to his mother he could do it,” according to Roger Wilcox. That night, he disappeared into the snowy darkness and stumbled in, drunk and delirious, near dawn. But when Stella’s train pulled in, he was there to greet her with a boyish grin.

  One afternoon, Jackson walked into the kitchen were Stella, Lee, and May Rosenberg were waiting to go to lunch. In the bright winter sunlight, he looked at Lee and his mood turned instantly black. “What is that on your face?” he demanded.

  “Just a little rouge,” Lee replied in the little-girl voice she often used to defuse such moments.

  This time it didn’t work. “Jackson hit the ceiling,” May Rosenberg recalls. “He shouted, ‘No wife of mine is going to wear makeup!’” Lee jumped up and shouted back, “But your mother uses rouge!” “That was it,” says May. “Then there was a real brawl. He became really violent. I had never seen him hit anybody, but he was getting very close. … His mother sat there watching as if in a theater. I was petrified.”

  Finally, Stella stepped in. “Sit down, Jackson,” she ordered, and he did. “It’s true,” she confessed, “I do use rouge.” “But you never used to,” he protested in what sounded to May like the hurt voice of a ten-year-old boy. “I did it for you, Jackson,” she explained. “When your father died, my eyes were swollen and I looked terrible. I didn’t want you boys to see me like that. I knew you would be frightened. I only did it for my boys.” At this point, according to May, “her eyes welled with tears.” “It was,” Stella said, “a sacrifice for you.”

  While Lee and May watched in astonishment, Jackson was transformed. “He reacted like someone soothed,” recalls May. “He sat next to her, put his head on her shoulder, and swayed back and forth with her, like a mother and her baby.” Lee and May were “speechless.”

  Stella’s visit was soothing in other ways. To Lee’s delight, Jackson began painting again for the first time since the move. During the week she stayed, he started four or five canvases, including the largest one since 1944. In The Child Proceeds, he painted a woman giving birth to a child—part fetus, part man—who stands facing his mother with an arrow through his heart. In Sun-Scape, he evoked the Arizona horizon in the background and, against it, the memory of chickens hanging on the line. A severed head lies on the ground, hidden in a tangle of denial. Finally, on the big canvas that Jackson himself named Circumcision, he explored his most private anxieties in his most private imagery, combining the horror vacui of Pasiphaë and There Were Seven in Eight with the even deeper horror that Jackson, who had escaped childhood uncircumsized, still felt in his mother’s presence.

  The Child Proceeds, 1946, 43” × 22”

  Lee had another reason to be delighted with Jackson’s productivity, no matter how troubling its source: she had decided to make the situation in Springs permanent.

  For Jackson, the country was still an excursion. “Lee and I are trying the country life for a while,” he wrote Louis Bunce early in 1946. “[It’s] a good feeling to be out of New York for a spell.” But Lee was sure she had found what she was looking for—and what Jackson needed. Since their arrival, he had remained more or less sober. If there were occasional lapses at Jungle Pete’s, at least the long decline of the last two years had been reversed. She still longed for Manhattan—“I’m a city person,” she confessed—but had grown used to having Jackson all to herself. For that, the hardships and deprivations of country living seemed a small price to pay.

  But with only three months left in the purchase option on the house, she still needed $5,000. The local banks weren’t much help. One of them had refused Jackson a $100 loan to buy a car. They would offer a $3,000 mortgage, but Lee would have to produce the $2,000 downpayment. There was only one place where she could find that kind of money: “Mrs. Moneybags,” Peggy Guggenheim.

  Perhaps anticipating such an emergency, Lee had been trying to repair her shaky alliance with Peggy ever since their last round over Jackson’s contract. As a conciliatory gesture, she agreed to edit parts of the manuscript for Out of This Century, the scandalous memoir that Peggy had written the previous winter. In a paroxysm of insecurity and exhibitionism, Peggy was distributing copies of the manuscript to members of her circle, hoping for a validation that never came. Lee was one of many who thought Peggy “could have done better to have gotten on the analyst’s couch rather than write the book,” but for diplomacy’s sake, she kept her opinion to herself and even arranged for Jackson’s work to appear on the front and back of the book jacket.

  When Lee finally came forward with her request for the $2,000 loan, however, Peggy relished the opportunity to say no, adding caustically, “Why don’t you go ask Sam Kootz?” Incensed, Lee did just that. “I went to see Kootz,” she recalled, “and he agreed to lend us the money but only with the understanding that Jackson would come over to his gallery.” That, of course, was precisely the answer Lee had hoped for, and she gleefully relayed it to Peggy, who reacted predictably. “How could you do such a thing,” she exploded, “and with Kootz of all people! Over my dead body you’ll go to Kootz.” Torn between her fury at Lee and her genuine concern that Jackson might desert the gallery, Peggy consulted Bill Davis, a collector and friend, and David Porter, both of whom advised her to make the loan. She even visited Springs in early February to assess for herself the truth of Lee’s claim that Jackson was “more happy and productive” in his new surroundings.

  By the following Friday, she had capitulated. “Things couldn’t have turned out better!” Jackson wrote Reuben Kadish triumphantly. “Peggy and Bill [Davis] were here over the weekend & she liked the place and got the spirit of the idea.” Once Peggy came through, the rest was easy. The East Hampton Bank agreed to provide a $3,000 mortgage and the sellers, the Quinns, agreed to throw in all the con
tents of the house and barn for an additional $150. Dealing with Peggy on the terms of the loan proved more arduous. She agreed to deduct $50 from Jackson’s $300 monthly allowance until the interest-free loan was repaid. In exchange, however, she insisted that Jackson put up three big paintings, including Pasiphaë, as collateral. By the end of February, the loan documents were signed and the sale was closed. For the first time in his life, Jackson owned a house. “All there is to it now is a hell of a lot of work,” he wrote Kadish, “and it doesn’t frighten me.”

  After the excitement of buying the house, the April show was anticlimactic. Almost half of the eleven paintings on exhibit had been painted the previous year, before the move to the country. Of those done in Springs, only Circumcision and The Little King spoke with full conviction. Jackson admitted as much soon after the show closed. “Moving out [to Springs] I found difficult,” he wrote to Louis Bunce, “change of light and space and so damned much to be done around the place. [B]ut [I] feel I’ll be down to work soon.” For Jackson, the show was primarily an excuse to see New York again and briefly reimmerse himself in the fast-flowing currents of the art world. In a quick survey of his fellow artists prepared for Bunce, who was in Oregon, he betrays a certain nostalgia for the more concentrated, center-stage life he had left behind.

  Joe Meert is in NY and getting some painting done between jobs—some exciting stuff, abstraction with a personal touch. Jim Brooks … is back from the army and painting abstractions. … Baziotes I think is the most interesting of the painters you mentioned—Gorky has taken a new turn for the better—from Picasso thru Miró—Kandinske and Matta. Gottleib and Rothko are doing some interesting stuff—also Pousette-Dart. The Pacific Islands show at the Museum of Modern Art—tops everything that has come thru this way in the past four years. Spivak is working toward abstraction. Byron Brown continues along the same slick pace. … Guston has fallen to repeating a formula—and of course his stuff gets weaker instead of growing.