Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  But Jackson didn’t need a car when he was bent on self-destruction. At a party in early July 1948, he picked a fight with William Phillips, the editor of Partisan Review. Herbert Ferber, who was sitting nearby, remembers that “William went very pale when he realized Pollock was ready to jump on him. He was very drunk and very violent. Before dinner, Pollock reached across the floor and grabbed a shoe from Sue Mitchell, the woman that Greenberg had brought—she had the most expensive-looking shoe in that gathering. And Pollock just tore it apart.” While the rest of the guests stared at the broken shoe, Jackson ran to an open window and started to jump to the street far below. Phillips and Mark Rothko lunged after him and eventually wrestled him inside. Throughout the commotion, Arshile Gorky stood impassively by, moodily fingering his whittling knife. He wore a neck brace as the result of an automobile accident in which his neck was broken and his painting arm temporarily paralyzed.

  A few weeks later, at the age of forty-four, Gorky hanged himself in his studio.

  In the fall of 1948, after the debacle with Bertha Schaefer, Jackson looked as if he might follow Gorky down the path of self-obliteration. Yet, within a few months, he would begin the most productive two years of his life—two years in which, for the first and only time in his adulthood, alcohol played virtually no part; two years in which his art finally bodied forth the full power of his imagination. The reversal began inauspiciously enough on a late autumn day on the way back from Dan Miller’s store. The Model A had refused to start, and Jackson, tipsy on beer, was trying to pedal his bike while carrying a case of beer under his arm. The bike hit a patch of gravel in the road and slid out from under him. He fell backwards and sideways, landing on the case of beer. Bottles exploded and shards of glass flew in every direction. When he stood up, cursing and shouting and kicking the bike, his arm was dripping blood. A few minutes later, he was sitting in the East Hampton Medical Clinic, being bandaged by a new doctor in town named Edwin Heller. To Jackson’s surprise, Heller knew all about his drinking problem.

  And he said he had a cure.

  35

  CELEBRITY

  By 1948, the art world was ready for a star.

  The market was ready. The postwar tidal wave of consumer spending that put two cars in every garage and meat at every meal had finally reached Fifty-seventh Street. Between 1940 and 1946, the number of private galleries in Manhattan nearly quadrupled. After 1944, sales at many galleries doubled and tripled every year. Art was no longer an indulgence for the rich only—the Mellons, Fricks, Baches, and Wideners—it was a consumer good, as available to the middle class as canned beer, nylon stockings, and golf balls. “For the first time in history,” writes Marxist historian Serge Guilbaut, “art became a part of everyday life, a part of the environment, a decoration in middle-class homes.” In 1942, when Gimbel’s department store offered for sale items from William Randolph Hearst’s collection of old master paintings, Gimbel’s rival, Macy’s, countered with its own “sale,” announced in the New York Times: “authenticated paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, etc. … A $130,000 collection of paintings at our lowest prices. … Pay only one third down on Macy’s cash time, take months to pay, plus the service charge.” When Macy’s sold Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Man for $6,894, Gimbel’s countered with his Portrait of a Child at the “amazingly low price” of only $9,999.

  America was ready. In 1946, with Europe still half buried in the rubble of war, Walter Lippmann announced the dawn of “the American century.” “Fate has willed it,” he proclaimed in a Paris magazine, “that America is from now on to be at the center of Western civilization rather than on the periphery.” The year before, View magazine had bragged that “New York is now the artistic and intellectual center of the world,” to which the critic Germain Bazin replied with prescient derision: “Will the Paris School become the New York School?” Some Europeans saw the future more clearly. “American painting … is developing rapidly,” warned critic Léon Degand in 1946. “Young painters are throwing themselves into their work with such intensity that it is impossible that [America] … will not one day achieve an original style of its own. … I am convinced that the Americans are on the way toward a period of greatness in art.”

  The media were ready. The vast armies of new consumer-collectors needed advice on what to buy. They knew they wanted art; they wanted American art (wartime patriotism was still in vogue); and some even wanted avant-garde art (because that’s what the Rockefellers and Blisses wanted). But within those broad parameters, many of the new collectors lacked the confidence to make their own distinctions. Only a handful could attend the gallery shows, like Bertha Schaefer’s “The Modern Home Comes Alive” and Samuel Kootz’s “Modern Painting for a Country Estate: Important Paintings for Spacious Living,” which were mounted to help educate (and sell) them on the new art. Instead, most turned for advice on how to buy art to where they turned for advice on how to buy everything else: the media—especially the magazines. And the magazine of choice was Life. “The magazines defined taste,” writes Guilbaut; “[and] Life became the buyer’s arbiter elegantiae.”

  In October 1948, Life convened a “round table” of sixteen critics in the penthouse of the Museum of Modern Art and asked them to comment on various works by French and American painters. For hours, the sixteen experts solemnly traded pronouncements while tape recorders hummed and shutters clicked. Their remarks, heavily edited, were published along with reproductions of the works in the October 11 issue. When Jackson’s Cathedral came up for consideration, Greenberg called it “a first-class example of Pollock’s work, and one of the best paintings recently produced in this country.” Meyer Schapiro of Columbia University, James Johnson Sweeney, and, more surprisingly, Francis Henry Taylor, the director of the Metropolitan, agreed. But Aldous Huxley, Theodore Greene, a professor of philosophy at Yale, and, also surprisingly, Alfred Frankfurter, the editor and publisher of Art News, disagreed. Sir Leigh Ashton, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, quipped: “It would make a most enchanting printed silk. But I cannot see why it is called the Cathedral.” It may have been responsible art criticism, but it was inconclusive advice and, worse still, boring journalism.

  The problem was that the needs of magazines were not the needs of art. Experts could give them the veneer of expertise, but expertise wasn’t enough. In art, as in everything else, the media cared about only “the story”: Was it visual? Did it have impact? What was the “human interest” angle? They were looking not for ideas or movements, but for people—or, better yet, personalities: good looks, charm, charisma, or, in a pinch, idiosyncracy. They were looking for controversy. Artists as different as Salvador Dali and Thomas Hart Benton had discovered that, and had commanded media attention not because of what they said but because of how they said it, not for their views but for their gall. Better to elicit anger, shock, or outrage from the reader than nothing at all. The media were looking for the romance of art—the outcast genius, the tortured soul, the artistic (and visual) equivalent of James Dean or Ernest Hemingway. And, as Clement Greenberg understood, they were looking for winners—not pluggers, not exemplars, not team players, but winners. Any excuse for superlatives. Anything to satisfy an ambitious nation’s appetite for invidious comparison. Whether rookies-of-the-year, Nobel laureates, or Academy Award winners, they wanted the number one—the best, the first, and the only. “Everyone was waiting for the great American painter,” says Budd Hopkins, an artist who was beginning his career in 1948. “It was just a matter of time.”

  To have his chance at the spotlight, however, Jackson would have to stop drinking.

  The incident at Bertha Schaefer’s apartment had sounded an alarm. Lee could no longer pretend—for Jackson’s benefit or her own—that he was under control. Not that she didn’t try. Soon after returning to Springs, she prompted Jackson to write a note of apology: “Thank you so much for being so nice to us while we were in New York. I hope you will forgive me for my inconsiderate behavior and
for the inconvenience I caused.” But, unlike so many others, Schaefer wasn’t about to forgive. Within weeks, she descended on East Hampton like an avenging angel, hurling accusations (later retracted) that Jackson had assaulted her, threatening to have him arrested and thrown in jail, and vowing to sue for damages (a prospect almost as terrifying to Lee as jail). It wasn’t long before exaggerated reports of the incident and of Schaefer’s fury spread through the art community, confirming what dealers like Sam Kootz had been saying for years: Jackson was a drunk and more trouble than he was worth.

  Eventually, after days of pleading by Clement Greenberg, Betty Parsons, Roger Wilcox, and Lee, Schaefer relented and dropped the charges. But the trauma had alerted Lee and others to the new reality. Jackson’s drinking was no longer just a threat to his sobriety and safety, nor was it any longer just Lee’s personal cross. Suddenly, it was an imminent threat to his productivity, his reputation, and his very real chance for celebrity.

  Faced with a crisis, Lee finally loosened her grip enough to seek outside help. On a routine visit to the East Hampton Medical Center, she confided in her young doctor, Edwin H. Heller, that Jackson was, “just then, drinking heavily,” she recounted later. “He suggested I try to send Jackson over to see him.” Lee explained that “one didn’t tell Jackson to do these things but that a moment would come …” It came not long afterward when Jackson fell off his bike and ended up on Dr. Heller’s examining table. Heller was a local boy from Sag Harbor who had only recently graduated from Cornell Medical School and returned to the South Fork of Long Island to practice. Never having treated an alcoholic before, he took an interest in Jackson’s problem that was more than medical but less than psychoanalytic. In simple, matter-of-fact terms, he explained that alcohol was Jackson’s “personal poison.” “Some people can’t eat spinach,” he said, “and you can’t drink booze.” He explained that Jackson wasn’t addicted to alcohol, he was addicted to the feeling that alcohol induced. To help him achieve the same feeling without alcohol, Heller gave him a prescription for tranquilizers—phenobarbitol and Dilantin, according to Roger Wilcox—and told him to “take these whenever you feel the need for a drink and they’ll calm you down. But under no circumstances should you combine them with alcohol.” He arranged for Jackson to return to the clinic every week so that Heller could monitor his progress, adjust the dosage if necessary, and “just talk about his problem.” Finally, he told Jackson: “Whenever the urge to drink gets too strong, just pick up the phone and call me.”

  To Lee’s amazement, the prescription seemed to work. Jackson reported feeling calmer than he had in years. Soon afterward, he called Sande in Deep River and announced that he had “quit for good.” “When Sande heard that,” Arloie remembers, “he hung up the phone and said, ‘If Jack can do it, I can do it.’ And he did.” (Jackson neglected to tell Sande or anyone else in the family about the tranquilizers.) By the time Jackson and Lee arrived in Deep River for the Christmas holidays three weeks later, “Jack’s new leaf” had become the Pollock family cause célèbre—“The best news of all,” Stella called it. “Jack and Lee were here and we had a very nice Christmas,” she reported to Charles.

  And there was no drinking. We were all so happy. Jack has been going to a Dr. in Hampton and hadn’t drank anything for over three weeks at Christmas hope he will stay with it he says he wants to quit and went to the Dr. on his own, the Dr. told him he would have to leave it alone everything wine to beer for they were poison to him. … The Dr. says it is up to him.

  But Jackson had yet to be tested. The late fall and early winter had been unusually kind. With the show largely ready, he had spent most of his time preoccupied with the renovations on John Little’s new house. When Little broke his arm and work was suspended, Jackson turned his attention to his own house, tearing out the partitions between the dining room and the kitchen and the hall and the stairs, to create a spacious area for entertaining—something that Lee was doing more of every summer. Nor was the Christmas with Stella a real test. In all the years Lee had known him, Jackson had never lost control in Stella’s presence.

  The real test would come in January. Even Stella, for all her optimism, was apprehensive: “When he has his show will be a test and a hard one for Jack,” she wrote Charles. “If he can go through that without drinking will be something I hope he can and will.”

  For the first three weeks of January, Jackson busied himself with last-minute preparations. On Friday morning, January 21, he drove into the city with Lee, carrying a bundle of laths for making stretchers and the last of the paintings rolled up in the back of a borrowed station wagon. That night, Sande and Arloie arrived from Deep River. It was Sande’s first vacation in two years, but he stuck to his pledge of abstinence, as did Jackson. Lee had arranged for them to stay at Grace Hartigan’s small apartment on Thirty-third Street near the East River (Hartigan had moved in with Harry Jackson for the duration of the Pollocks’ visit), but Jackson spent most of the weekend at the gallery, working long hours with Tony Smith and a crew of fellow artists to finish stretching and hanging the show in time for the Monday opening. When Parsons stopped by to check on their progress, Jackson tried to persuade her to hang the pictures unstretched by simply stapling them to the wall (the way he did in the studio), a procedure that would have halved the hanging time. But Parsons, whose look of cultivated indifference concealed an adamantine will, “put her foot down,” recalls Herbert Ferber, one of the artists on Jackson’s crew, “and said they had to be stretched.” Despite their disagreement, Parsons came away impressed by Jackson’s calm, professional—and sober—attitude.

  The opening, coming in the middle of a spell of “lovely winter weather,” attracted an unusually large crowd into Betty’s already claustrophobic gallery. According to Harry Jackson, who shadowed him before the show, Jackson “was very nervous, very, very antsy, the opposite of the bucolic, quiet, straw-chewing fella I knew.” Jackson must have taken one or more of Dr. Heller’s tranquilizers just before the crowd arrived, because Herbert Ferber remembers seeing him standing “stone sober” in the middle of the crowded gallery a few minutes later, looking surprisingly “calm and detached.” “All the other people who had openings at Betty’s would keep a bottle in the back room,” says Ferber. “But not Jackson.” Even after the crowd left and he accompanied a group of friends, including Harry and Grace, to dinner, there was no drinking, as there had been after every previous show. It helped, of course, that the public response—despite complaints about the use of numbers instead of names—was unusually favorable. (Eventually, eleven of the show’s fifteen paintings sold.) There was no denying that Jackson had passed the test. “Jack had a wonderful show best yet,” Stella exulted in a letter to Frank, “[and] best of all he hasn’t touched a drop of liquor since the first of Dec. he feels so much better and seems so much happier, we were all so glad he had such good luck.”

  No one was happier than Lee. Eager to rehabilitate Jackson’s reputation before the rumors of drunkenness and the related jokes about peeing on the canvas crippled it irreparably, she immediately launched a campaign to spread the good news: Jackson Pollock was, at last, securely on the wagon. At every opportunity, she planted the story of Heller’s “miracle cure.” “He was the first man who was really able to help Jackson stop drinking,” she said, insisting that Jackson hadn’t “touched” alcohol since their first meeting. (Like Jackson, Lee always omitted any reference to tranquilizers.) To dramatize the new regime, she stopped serving liquor of any kind, even to guests—a revolutionary move in a social circle heavily dependent on alcohol. “Promptly the gloomy prognosis spread,” wrote May Rosenberg of a dinner party at the Pollocks’, “that [Lee] intended to serve no liquor this night. The thought settled like smog on parched throats.” The campaign succeeded brilliantly. Before long, Jackson’s abstinence had attained mythic status. Years later, people who had barely known him would talk authoritatively about the “dry years” during which Jackson’s art flourished because he “
never took a single drink.”

  Lee must have known from the beginning that it wasn’t true. She had been up and down on Jackson’s roller coaster too many times to believe in miracle cures. The myth was, at best, a convenient oversimplification, a screen behind which she could hide the more complicated and less flattering truth.

  In fact, according to an account Lee gave years later, Jackson never quit drinking. It was true that, during the dry years, he could go weeks between drinks, withdrawn in tranquilized serenity, and that when he did sneak a drink—he later admitted that he kept a bottle of cooking sherry buried in the backyard throughout this period—it seldom led to the kind of uncontrollable binge that Lee feared most. When it did, the binge tended to be a private affair rather than a public display. “He would go up to the guest bedroom,” Lee later confided to a friend, “and just sit there and have fits, be completely crazed for a while.” “All that stuff that people try to say about two-year periods without drinking was bullshit,” says John Lee, an intimate of Lee’s after Jackson’s death, recounting her revised story of the “dry years.” “She said he was always a binge drinker. Given a couple of weeks of normal existence he would just go off the deep end … and he was always that way.”

  Nor was Dr. Edwin Heller, thoughtful and supportive as he was, the lone miracle worker Lee painted him to be. As Lee knew all too well, other competent, conscientious doctors—Wall, de Lazslo, Hubbard—had told Jackson not to drink and would again. Clearly, there was something else, a motivational element that made Jackson want to reach for pills instead of the bottle, that made him want to keep his frequent appointments with Heller, and, when he fell off the wagon, made him want to hide his binges in an upstairs bedroom.

  Roger Wilcox, like Lee, had been awakened to the danger of Jackson’s drinking by Bertha Schaefer’s threats. He had played a decisive role in negotiating with Schaefer and ultimately placating her. “I realized then that he was really an alcoholic,” says Wilcox, “and that I was hurting him by drinking with him, that his work and his health were suffering and it would kill him eventually if he didn’t stop.” In the past, when Wilcox had tried to warn him about the dangers of alcoholism, Jackson had always snapped back: “Oh, that’s a lot of crap. If I feel like drinking, I’ll drink, goddammit.” But Jackson, too, was sobered by the Schaefer incident. This time, he came to Wilcox for help. “He asked me to find out what was wrong with him,” Wilcox remembers. “He said, ‘I want to work but I can’t. I’ve got this need to get drunk. It’s something I can’t explain. Tell me what’s wrong.’” Wilcox, an overt, self-reliant man who considered psychoanalysis “stupid mystical bullshit” and believed most people’s problems were their own fault, was unsympathetic at first. “I said, ‘Why can’t you work? You’ve got paint, you’ve got canvas. Who’s stopping you? Go ahead. So you’re a drunk. The only person who can stop you from being a drunk is yourself.’” According to Wilcox, Jackson “felt bad about his lack of control over himself. He didn’t want to be that way. He believed he needed to stop drinking in order to continue his work.” Convinced that Jackson’s career was at stake, Wilcox finally softened. For the next two years, he would act as Jackson’s therapist. Characteristically, he couched the task in its most pragmatic terms: “I wanted to know why the hell this guy, who had all this talent and capability, and was really a very nice person, why he was so troubled. Why was he getting this reputation for being a horrible person, a drunk, a wildman?”