Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Inspired by his sessions with Namuth, Jackson became obsessed with the subject of the artist as actor. Frequently during the summer of 1950, he quizzed friends like John Little, Clement Greenberg, and Harold Rosenberg on the “persona” of the modern artist, collecting fragments of a portrait like pieces of a puzzle to be assembled at the next session before Namuth’s lens. Penny Potter, a patron of theatrical companies and sometime actress, remembers “long, complicated conversations” in which Jackson asked about “creating a character role.” “He was interested in what it was to be an actor,” Potter recalls. Out of camera range, Jackson spent much of the summer rehearsing his new role: grumbling borrowed profundities and Bentonesque profanities; torturing guests with long silences and enigmatic stares; lacing his rare comments with references to sheep ranchers, cattle rustling, city slickers, and Indian lore; ridiculing the privileged eastern backgrounds and refined sensibilities of fans like Tony Smith, Jeffrey Potter, and Peter Blake; roaming the country roads around Springs in his Model A as if he were back in the sagebrush hills around Riverside with Sande, acting out—on a new, far grander stage—the old, irreconcilable fantasies of fencepost cowboy and sensitive artist.

  For Jackson, fame was a second childhood, a chance to replay his past to a larger, more attentive, and far more indulgent audience.

  Roger Wilcox remembers driving down Georgica Road with Jackson that summer and stopping in front of a house owned by William Seligson, a rich East Hampton businessman. It was a formal mansion, set on a vast, unbroken expanse of lawn. “Ten acres of flat perfection,” according to Roger Wilcox, “no trees, no shrubbery, just perfect, flat lawn.” “Did you ever see such a lawn?” Jackson gasped, gazing at the immaculate swath of green. “It’s a goddamn green canvas. God, I’d like to paint on that.” Later the same summer, after several days of rain and drizzle, he drove back to the Seligson house and onto the lawn. The Model A’s tires sank deep in the soggy grass, leaving long mud ruts in the green perfection. “He drove all over that lawn and made his marks,” Wilcox recalls. By the time he was finished and drove away, the lawn was crisscrossed with swirling black lines beginning to silver with rainwater.

  One of Namuth’s portraits

  When the police identified Jackson as the likely vandal, Seligson, a “stern, serious man with a big-shot look,” drove to Fireplace Road for a confrontation. To his astonishment, Jackson blithely confessed. “He simply told him it was the world’s biggest painting,” says Wilcox, recounting the story Jackson told him. When Seligson complained that it would cost $10,000 to repair the damage and insisted Jackson pay for it, Jackson suggested that he leave it as a work of art. He even offered to return and sign it, adding, “then you can pay me.” (When Seligson saw that Jackson couldn’t possibly raise the money, he dropped the charges.) Lee, like Stella, dismissed the incident and others like it, calling them merely signs of Jackson’s growing “assuredness.”

  At his critics, Jackson lashed out with petulant fury. In June, when Emily Genauer’s article on the Venice Biennale appeared in the New York Herald Tribune, he stewed for days. John Little found him on the beach “agonizing” over a crumpled copy of the paper. “He was trying to decide what to do,” Little recalls. “He had all sorts of nasty things he wanted to say in response, but all he said was ‘I’ll have to do something for her.’” A week later, Jackson bragged that he had sent the prim, rectitudinous Genauer a pair of lace panties with a note that suggested she needed “a good lay.” Several months later, when Time reproduced a few unflattering fragments from Bruno Alfieri’s Italian review under the headline, “Chaos, Damn It!” Jackson again reacted with exaggerated indignation, firing off a blistering reply to Time and complaining to a friend, “It isn’t just me they’re after. What they want is to stop modern art.”

  Jackson had always had a taste for the best, even in the worst of financial times, but now, as a celebrity, he deserved the best. On a trip to New York with Tony Smith, he suggested dinner at the Stork Club. “Come on, Jackson, we can’t get in there,” Smith protested. “You don’t have a tie. They won’t let you in.” But Jackson insisted, “I can get in.” “On what basis?” Smith asked. “On the basis of my reputation,” Jackson shot back. On the next visit, he set his sights on the “21 Club.” Whether or not he succeeded in these attempts is not recorded, but on many similar occasions he was unceremoniously ejected.

  Another regular stop on Jackson’s increasingly frequent trips into the city was the row of expensive men’s stores along lower Sixth Avenue. Lionel Abel remembers seeing him there “looking very dapper. He dragged me into the store with him,” Abel recalls. “I didn’t have any money at all at the time, and I had to watch him try on three or four suits, one after the other—and buy them all.” Friends like Willem de Kooning noticed that Jackson “began to dress with a great style” about this time, favoring especially fine Scottish tweeds. By the time of the November show, choosing clothes had become a “ritual,” according to Ted Dragon. “My God,” says Dragon, “he had to have the right sport coat with the right cut and the correct tie and the right chino pants and the perfect loafers. And everything had to be the best quality.”

  The same was true of everything from kitchen implements to canned goods to cuts of meat for Sunday barbecues (Porterhouse only). Jackson even complained to Betty Parsons about the poor quality of most exhibition catalogues and insisted that his own be “printed on paper coated on one side (photo side) and soft on the reverse,” because “it makes a very pleasant shape and size.” For his own materials, he abandoned the cheap house paints he had been buying from Dan Miller and began ordering advanced acrylics from the New York paint maker Leonard Bocour, a pioneer in the development of acrylic paint. “It was expensive,” Bocour remembers, “like forty or fifty dollars in the cadmium reds. He’d buy a gallon of this and a gallon of that. Seven or eight colors would come to three or four hundred dollars. But he never seemed to be concerned about the cost.” He never was—whether playing poker, grabbing checks, paying for cabs, leaving tips, or lending money to friends. “Jackson was a good poker player because he didn’t give a shit,” recalls a friend. “Money meant nothing to him.”

  Soon after the Life article appeared, Jackson looked at the battered Model A parked in his driveway and asked Tony Smith if a great artist didn’t deserve a better car. “What the hell kind of car do you want?” Smith asked. “Oh, I don’t know,” Jackson mused, “maybe a Cadillac or something.”

  Yet to the outside world, Jackson and Lee continued to maintain the pretense of poverty. Lee knew that for patrons like Alfonso Ossorio, who enjoyed seeing themselves as all that stood between the Pollocks and destitution and who served as a reliable safety net for Jackson’s excesses, the appearance of impoverishment was a crucial asset. To offset Jackson’s fine tweeds and chinos, she eschewed new clothes entirely, ostentatiously wearing the same “pathetic cloth coat” for several years. And even as Jackson consulted Peter Peterson on “how he should invest all his money,” she continued to accept gifts of food brought by Ossorio out of sympathy for the “lamentable borderline existence” of a great artist.

  Other than Lee, the only person who knew the full extent of Jackson’s secret extravagance was Betty Parsons. By the end of the 1949–50 gallery season, she had sent the Pollocks checks totaling $3,174.89 on sales of $4,750. In June, the total jumped to $4,741.55 with a payment from the Museum of Modern Art for Number 1, 1948 and, in July, to $5,841.55 with the final payment for the Geller mural. Sometime that same summer, Sam Kootz finally persuaded Roy Neuberger to pay the full asking price of $1,000 for Number 8, 1949 and the total reached $6,508.23. (Ironically, it was Kootz’s harping on the Pollocks’ supposed poverty that clinched the sale.) At a time when the average bluecollar worker earned $2,800 in a year and the average white-collar worker only $3,500, and the mortgage payment on the Fireplace Road house was only about $20 a month, $6,500 was a solid, even bourgeois, annual income, and gross sales of over $10,000 put Jackson among
the most profitable artists in America—certainly the most profitable avant-garde artist. In addition, as Parsons well knew, the Pollocks routinely supplemented their income and avoided paying commissions by bartering paintings for everything from kitchen appliances to dental services. Nevertheless, Jackson continued to plead poverty and badger Parsons to raise his prices. When Andrew Ritchie offered $1,000 for Lucifer (1947), Jackson defied Parsons and held out for $1,600, arguing, “I’m very fond of this painting—and this price is nearer to the price on my later work.” The sale fell through.

  In June, the battle broke into the open. “I am going to try and get some mural commissions thru an agent where I will pay a commission and that I feel it would be unfair for me to pay two commissions,” Jackson wrote Parsons. “I feel it important for me to broaden my possibilities in this line of development. But any painting shown in your gallery and mural commission gotten by you—you will receive your commission. I hope you will find this satisfactory—I feel it is the only hope for me to get out of my financial mess, and also to develop in this direction.” Parsons, in fact, did not find the proposal satisfactory and said so in unequivocal terms by return mail.

  I want, as you know, to be fair, as I am sure you want to be with me. Also, my experience has been that any artist that undertakes his own business, is inevitably taken advantage of. … As for a commission, I have discussed this kind of problem with a number of dealers and they all unanimously agree that as I pay all of your expenses, have built you up, as the market is limited, and since I am the only gallery that can show big pictures related to murals, I must take a commission.

  Strapped for money herself, Parsons accused Jackson of being “extravagant” and living virtually “rent-free” off her predecessor Peggy Guggenheim’s largesse.

  But even Parsons didn’t know what had happened to the-thousands of dollars she sent to the Pollocks during 1949 and 1950. Harris tweeds, Porterhouse steaks, and penny-ante poker could account for only a fraction of it. All she knew was that somehow, somewhere, Jackson had found a way to spend money, an unseen hole down which he had poured thousands of dollars in less than a year.

  The hole was his house. Between the winter of 1948–49 and the summer of 1950, almost every dollar that Jackson earned went into repairing, remodeling, furnishing, and decorating the Fireplace Road property. At first, there were old debts to payoff. He had started the work long before he could afford it. As early as the summer of 1948, Grace Hartigan remembers how he would “take Harry [Jackson] around the property and talk about all the plans he had for the place and what he wanted to do with it.” When neighbors like John Little and Betsy Zogbaum opened up their old houses, Jackson couldn’t resist any longer. In early 1949, still destitute, he began tearing out partitions between the dining room and the kitchen and the hall and stairs with the help of a local handyman and retired circus clown, George Loper. Jackson approached the job with childlike relish. “If you ran into a beam or something,” recalls another local workman, “you’d say, ‘Hey, Jackson, there’s something in my way,’ and he’d get a sledgehammer and knock it out of there.” Before long, Jackson’s enthusiasm outran his judgment. A workman arrived at the house one morning to find the second floor sagging ominously. “If we’d had a strong wind,” he recalls, “the whole second floor would have been in the living room.”

  The following summer, only a few months after the white paint had dried and Lee’s begonias and ferns had begun to thrive in the bright new open space, Jackson returned with his sledgehammer to install heating and plumbing. The Pollocks had suffered the discomforts of cold water and the vagaries of coal stoves for four years, and that, Jackson had decided—despite the continuing lack of funds—was long enough. With Ed Hults and Dick Talmage, two Bonackers who had worked on John Little’s house, he laid plans for a new full bathroom upstairs with all new fixtures and white tile, new fixtures in the bathroom downstairs, new pipes, new radiators, and a new boiler. Hults and Talmage, who had just opened their business, were excited by the potentially lucrative job and willing to work cheap, especially in winter when work was scarce, but skeptical of Jackson’s solvency. “I told him I’d be glad to advance the labor,” recalls Hults, “if he came up with the couple of thousand for materials. I didn’t want to get stuck.” By now the Life article had appeared, however, and with it, the first signs of prosperity. Within a few days, Jackson produced the “couple of thousand” and, over the next few months, another thousand or more for the labor.

  Even before the old debts were paid off, however, Jackson began work on the studio: shingling and roofing, running a new cold-water line from the house, replacing the old wiring so he could run his new motorized paint mixer, and hanging fluorescent lights with the help of Elwyn Harris, a local electrician. As always, Jackson contacted, negotiated with, and supervised the workmen himself. Few of them ever saw Lee. Jackson left the dealers, collectors, and the art to her; and, except for the plants and a few decorative touches, she left the house to him.

  The Pollocks in front of their house in Springs, c. 1949

  Outside, he planted shrubs and new flower beds, enlarged the garden, secured a small tractor to mow the lawn, and installed a pump in the garden to make watering easier. He also began to look with his newly acquisitive eye at the surrounding property. “He wanted to build a good studio, to add to the house, to get more land,” said Tony Smith. “He was talking about substantial additions, real investments.” When he discovered that a small wooded lot abutting his property had recently changed hands, he flew into a rage. “He came into my office and lit into me and called me all the fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that,” recalls Ed Cook, the local real estate agent who had bought the land. “I had this old-lady bookkeeper, seventy-five years old, and here he was shouting all these uncouth things, giving it to me right and left. Finally I got so mad I said, ‘You get the hell out of here and don’t you ever come back.’” (Cook eventually conveyed half the land to Jackson in exchange for a painting that his motherin-law wouldn’t allow in the house because she “couldn’t sleep under the same roof with it.”)

  Inside, Jackson repainted all the walls—white downstairs, yellow and white in the guest room—and began to edit the eclectic array of furniture that had accumulated in ten years of hard times, including everything from battered wicker chairs brought from the Eighth Street apartment to a huge round kitchen table donated by the Macys. Through the summer, he frequented local stores and flea markets in search of acquisitions. Jane Graves, who had opened an antique shop in East Hampton, recalls how he admired an expensive French Provincial sideboard in her window. “He came inside to ask how much it was,” Graves remembers, “and I got the feeling he would have bought it no matter what the price, but it wasn’t for sale.” He did, however, buy twin beds for the guest room, along with a wooden chest for blankets, a mirror, dresser, and chairs. “Whenever furniture arrived at the house, he would spend hours arranging and rearranging, moving and surveying, until every detail was just as he wanted it. “He did it all himself,” recalls Roger Wilcox, “and he made a beautiful house out of it.”

  Fame and prosperity had allowed Jackson the ultimate fantasy: to play Stella Pollock. Like Stella, he lavished attention on his house, making it his own, as if by decorating he could pile up a barricade of identity against a lifetime of emptiness and impermanence. For Jackson, the house was a way, as effective as distance or speed, to keep the demons at bay, to escape the noisy fear that his success was somehow a mistake—at best a fluke, at worst a fraud; that the spring of grand visions and summer of flattery would turn out to be as cruel an illusion as Stella’s mothering; that his fans would prove ultimately as uncaring as his family, his fellow artists, beneath their deference, as resentful; and that his second childhood would end, like his first, in betrayal and abandonment.

  In October, Jackson finally got the car he deserved: a dark blue 1947 Cadillac convertible. “Oh, how he gloried in that secondhand Cadillac!” said Berton Roueché. “It
was a status thing. … [He] didn’t want to maintain the Model A humility.” With its fish-tail rear lights and lance-like bumpers, the Cadillac was every bit as gaudy, noisy, and distracting as the fame that had made it possible—and, in Jackson’s hands, every bit as dangerous.

  38

  A CLAM WITHOUT A SHELL

  The East Hampton dump lay about two and a half miles north of town at the end of a gravel spur off Accabonac Highway. It commanded the crest of a hill with a spectacular view of Gardiners Bay. From the edge of the dump, on a clear evening, one could see as far as the Connecticut coastline, and the breeze off the bay blew the overripe smells southeast, toward the potato fields and away from the road. It was a lonely, unexpected place with an oblique charm few summer people appreciated. Except on weekend afternoons, when most locals did their dumping, visitors were rare. Late on a summer night in 1950, not even the gulls, who scavenged there during the day, were around to watch as a Model A pulled off the highway and crunched to a stop at the end of the gravel spur. Inside were Jackson Pollock and Clement Greenberg.

  They had left the party together. Without a word, by an unspoken understanding, they had recognized a mutual need to get away. “I didn’t tell him I was depressed,” Greenberg remembers. “I didn’t have to—he sensed it.” And Greenberg sensed that Jackson was terrified. He had seen Jackson in gatherings before, especially since the Life article appeared, gatherings of flatterers and admirers, sycophants and skeptics, gatherings in which he “looked like he wanted to crawl into a corner somewhere.” He had heard him complain, eyes lowered, “I feel like a clam without a shell.” “They didn’t see the man or the genius,” Greenberg remembers. “They saw only a freak.” Jackson confided in Penny Potter that “sometimes he felt as if his skin had been taken off.” It was the Life article that was at the root of his fears. Jane Graves recalls him in a moment of panic wishing it had never appeared. It had satisfied his old craving for approval and attention, but it had also stirred an even older fear. “They only want me on top of the heap,” he told Denise Hare, “so they can push me off.”