Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  But the film did whet both men’s appetite for a grander, more ambitious effort. After securing the collaboration of Paul Falkenberg, a film editor who had worked with Fritz Lang and Georg Wilhelm Pabst (and who provided $2,000 of working capital), Namuth returned to Jackson’s studio with plans for a longer film in color. With Lee’s concurrence, Jackson agreed unhesitatingly. He had something to prove, and Namuth would help him prove it. If he had apprehensions about the project’s artistic integrity—what Namuth called “the voyeuristic element”—they didn’t deter him. The old fears of phoniness had been replaced by far greater fears.

  From the first weekend of filming in September, Jackson surrendered himself completely to Namuth’s direction. “He knew that Hans knew a lot more about it from the point of view of showmanship,” recalls Conrad Marca-Relli, “and he knew that would make for a better film.” When, despite the oncoming winter, Namuth insisted that the filming be done outside to avoid the expense of lighting the studio, Jackson agreed. Namuth chose the spot, a concrete foundation slab, dressed the set—a long canvas, a small stool, several pots of paint—and directed the action. From eyewitness accounts and the finished film, the process can be reconstructed. Jackson enters from off-camera dressed in blue denim pants and denim jacket, sits on the stool, and changes from his shiny loafers into laceless, paint-spattered shoes. He sets the loafers aside and walks to the canvas. He looks at it thoughtfully for a moment, then picks up a brush. Cut. Because of a cloud, an intruding shadow, a gust of wind, the scene has to be repeated. Jackson puts down the brush, changes back into the loafers, and retreats to the side to wait for Namuth’s instructions: enter sooner, change shoes more slowly, look longer at the canvas before picking up the brush. Standing in the September breeze waiting for the film to be reloaded or the light to change, Jackson listens intently. Unsure of his cue, he asks Namuth, “Should I do it now, Hans?” Reshoots are followed by re-reshoots.

  Once the painting begins, there are stretches of genuine creativity; paint can’t be called back into the can. But the film runs out in mid-lariat and darkness interrupts even the most eloquent gestures. With reloadings and technical delays, a few minutes of painting stretches into a day, a weekend. The next weekend, Namuth returns with a list of fill-in shots suggested by Falkenberg: close-ups of “Pollock’s shoes, paint-spattered and unforgettable, the pebbles shaken out of them, the cigarette thrown away as the intensity of painting increases.” By the end of September, the filming disintegrates into bits and pieces of action. A can of paint has to be stirred again; a cigarette thrown away again; the shoes changed again. Namuth has decided on a close-up of Jackson signing his name to the painting. The simple act is shot and reshot.

  But Namuth still wasn’t satisfied. As he reviewed the rushes with Falkenberg, he sensed “somehow a main ingredient was missing.” That ingredient was Jackson. “I realized that I wanted to show the artist at work with his face in full view,” he later wrote, “becoming part of the canvas, so to speak—coming at the viewer—through the painting itself. How could this be done?” Namuth’s solution, which came to him in a dream, he claimed, was to use glass instead of canvas. By photographing the painting process from underneath the glass, he could capture the most important element: Jackson’s face. The art would be used only to frame the artist. Jackson approved of the idea—he had come this far; there was no turning back. Besides, during their conversations about the ideal museum, he and Peter Blake had already discussed doing “a painting that wouldn’t just be supported in midair but that was transparent, that you could see landscape through and beyond.”

  Jackson spent the next few weeks constructing the sawhorse supports for the glass, and a scaffold sturdy enough for him to stand on and high enough for Namuth and his camera to fit underneath. In the meantime, Blake secured from Pittsburgh Plate Glass a four-by-six-foot piece of Herculite, a strong, shatterproof glass used in automobile windshields. From the time shooting began, on a chilly day in late October, the project seemed jinxed. Namuth squirmed in the cramped space under the glass lying on his back, searching for a comfortable position in which to hold the camera. When the camera was right, the light was wrong. With the lens pointing directly up into the sky, the image was always in danger of burning out. When the sun came out, Jackson was in silhouette; when it went away, in darkness.

  Jackson contributed his share of “false starts,” according to Namuth. If it wasn’t the small group of onlookers milling around—more intent on moviemaking than art-making—that distracted him, it was the wind off Gardiners Bay playing havoc with his delicate lariats of paint. From six feet in the air, the sight of Namuth sprawled on the ground directly beneath him, struggling with the camera on his chest and shouting out directions, made concentrating even more difficult. The wind muffled his voice. “Now?” Jackson called out, unsure if the film was rolling. Several times, he “lost contact” with the painting and had to start again. Unlike canvas, however, glass could be wiped clean and reused. (With the money almost gone, Namuth couldn’t afford to buy another sheet.) One of Jackson’s false starts appears in the film’s final cut. After a minute and a half of arranging pebbles and wire mesh and lacing them together with paint, he suddenly stops and, looking exasperated, starts to wipe the plate clean. In the film, the glass is clear and he is painting again in a few seconds. In reality, it was a long, frustrating wait in the November cold, one of many starts and stops as the filming dragged deeper into winter.

  Between Namuth’s weekend visits—increasingly his only contact with the “real” world—Jackson withdrew further into himself, languishing in the studio, barricaded behind the huge canvases of summer, producing only an occasional small, convictionless work for the show that opened on November 28 at Parsons. His mood vacillated wildly between the arrogance of the previous year and the dark self-doubts conjured up by the family reunion. On one occasion, he pulled Lee into the studio and, pointing at Lavender Mist, asked, “Is this a painting?” (“Can you imagine?” says Lee, still marveling thirty years later. “Not ‘Is it a good painting,’ but ‘Is it a painting?’”)

  At a time of such vulnerability, Time’s review of the Venice Biennale in the November 20 issue hit particularly hard. “Jackson Pollock’s abstractions stump experts as well as laymen,” it began. “Laymen wonder what to look for in the labyrinths which Pollock achieves by dripping paint onto canvases laid flat on the floor; experts wonder what on earth to say about the artist.” The review went on to claim that Jackson had “followed his canvases to Italy” and that the Italians had “tended to shrug off his shows,” neither of which was true. Most infuriating, however, was the extensive excerpt from Bruno Alfieri’s essay, which included the disparaging reference to “chaos” but omitted the flattering comparison to Picasso. Stung, Jackson fired off a telegram to Time:

  Frames from Namuth’s color movie, 1950–51

  NO CHAOS DAMN IT. DAMNED BUSY PAINTING AS YOU CAN SEE BY MY SHOW COMING UP NOV. 28. I’VE NEVER BEEN TO EUROPE. THINK YOU LEFT OUT MOST EXCITING PART OF MR. ALFIERI’S PIECE.

  The fury of Jackson’s reply surprised his friends. “It wasn’t like Jackson to be defensive about cracks like that,” says John Little. “He had let far worse go by without getting worked up.” Gina Knee, who thought the review “wasn’t that bad,” saw Jackson on the street in Amagansett soon afterwards “very upset” and inconsolable. She remembered thinking, “There’s more than that churning inside of him.”

  On a weekend in November, Clement Greenberg came to Springs to view the pictures for the coming show. Sunday evening, Jackson drove him to the East Hampton station where the two men waited for the train together in the car, trading silences and talking about the future. Jackson was unusually subdued, Greenberg remembers. “He sensed something was coming.” The subject turned to the upcoming show, now only weeks away. “I told him I thought it would be his best show ever,” Greenberg recalls, “but I also said I didn’t think it was going to sell. He didn’t want to hear that.” When
the train pulled in and Greenberg turned to say good-bye, he avoided looking Jackson in the eye. “I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t want to think about it.”

  Number 29, 1950, the painting created for Namuth’s color movie, oil, enamel, and aluminum paint; mesh; string; colored glass; agates; and marbles on glass, 48⅛” × 72”

  By Thanksgiving, Jackson had reached the breaking point. Time, money, patience, and fair weather had all run out. But Namuth insisted on one last shoot. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, November 25, was a clear, blustery day with a wind out of the northwest so strong that it distorted Jackson’s face as he leaned over the glass and so “bloody cold” that his hand went numb around the brush. Namuth lay in the damp, leaf-covered grass, coaxing Jackson from one “final shot” to the next, through a mine field of “technical delays.” Standing alone on the platform, shivering in the biting wind, Jackson waited, smoking a cigarette against the cold while the anger, frustration, and self-loathing that had been accumulating over the last three months slowly boiled toward the surface. Namuth noticed that Jackson was “full of tension [and] it was not just the cold.” Finally, at about four-thirty, after the last rays of usable light had disappeared, Namuth announced, “We are done! It’s great, it’s marvelous.” As Jackson climbed down from the scaffold, Namuth tried awkwardly to embrace him, but Jackson headed straight for the house.

  Lee was in the kitchen preparing the turkey for a belated Thanksgiving feast. To celebrate the holiday and the last day of filming, she had invited a score of friends to an eight-o’clock dinner and recruited Peter Blake and Ted Dragon to help with last-minute preparations before the other guests arrived. When Jackson stalked in, followed closely by Namuth, he was “very blue,” according to Blake, “frozen from the hideous cold.” Without a word, he went straight to the kitchen sink, reached into the cabinet underneath, and pulled out a bottle of bourbon they kept for guests. Lee “went white.” The room went silent. Blake, who was standing at the set table, “tried to speak,” but couldn’t think of anything to say. Namuth, trying to brush it off, walked into the next room to warm himself by the fire. Dragon, who had never seen Jackson drunk, leaned over and whispered to Lee, “Why are you so upset?” Between clenched teeth, Lee whispered back, “You just don’t know. You don’t realize what you’re in for.” To her, it was clear from the moment Jackson walked in the door that the end had come; that the two years of productivity and relative calm since the catastrophe at Bertha Schaefer’s were over; that Jackson was determined to end them tonight—publicly, pathetically, spectacularly.

  He filled two large tumblers and downed one in a few gulps. Then he filled it again and summoned Namuth from the living room. He announced loudly, “This is the first drink I’ve had in two years.” Namuth broke the stunned silence. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. But Jackson wasn’t listening. He had been listening to Namuth’s directions for three months and that, apparently, was long enough. He downed the second tumblerful. By now Lee had recovered her composure enough to hurry Namuth out of the house, ostensibly to go home and change for dinner. Soon after he left, the phone rang and Jackson answered: Buffie Johnson was calling to invite the Pollocks for drinks. When she mentioned that Violet de Laszlo, Jackson’s analyst in the early forties, was her houseguest for the weekend, “you could see his face light up even over the phone,” Johnson recalls. “He said he’d love to come.” They would have to come early, she told him, because she and de Laszlo were going to the Macys’ for dinner. Jackson agreed eagerly. A few minutes later, however, Lee called back. “Jackson can’t come,” she told Johnson curtly. “He’s got to help me with dinner; we have guests coming.” Johnson had seen Jackson occasionally peeling vegetables for Lee’s dinner parties, but couldn’t help thinking, “he could have come if she would have let him off.”

  Lee’s effort to contain the damage backfired. He filled and emptied another tumbler. By the time the other guests started to arrive—the Namuths, the Potters, the Zogbaums, John Little, Alfonso Ossorio—Jackson was reeling. Everyone, especially Namuth, tried to ignore him; most had never seen him drunk. But Jackson was impossible to ignore. In a rage, he tore a belt of sleigh bells from the living room door and swung it at Namuth. “Jackson, put those back!” Namuth ordered.

  It was the wrong thing to say. At the sound of yet another “direction” from Namuth, Jackson imploded. All the repressed anger and self-hatred—from months of standing in the cold, waiting for the next shot, the next angle, painting on cue, stopping on cue, repeating on cue; the months of “Where do I stand?” “When do I come in?” and “Should I do it now?”—flooded back. All the phoniness and self-deception seemed suddenly, excruciatingly obvious. “Maybe those natives who figure they’re being robbed of their souls by having their images taken have something,” Jackson later told a friend. His brothers had been right. His desperate effort to prove them wrong by striking a Faustian bargain with Namuth—celluloid immortality for artistic integrity—by clinging to the image of the great artist, had only confirmed it: he was a fraud. Celebrity had betrayed him, just as his family had.

  Jackson fought the recognition with rage. “You’re a phony,” he sputtered at Namuth, pointing his blunted finger. “I’m not a phony, you’re a phony.” Lee tried to dispel the gathering storm by calling everyone to the table, but Jackson and Namuth brought their argument with them, carried on in ferocious whispers. They sat down, oblivious to the other guests, Jackson at the head of the table, Namuth at his right. The whispering grew more intense. “I’m not a phony, but you’re a phony,” Jackson repeated—they were the “tiresome, awful repetitions of a drunk,” recalls one witness—“You know I’m not a phony. I’m not a phony, but you’re a phony.” Suddenly, Jackson stood up, breathing heavily and glaring at Namuth. He clutched the end of the table with both hands. “Should I do it now?” he demanded in fierce self-mockery. “Jackson—no!” Namuth commanded. Yet another direction. One guest remembered wanting to throw something at Namuth or to shout, “‘Shut up, Hans.’ He was being so pompous and authoritarian.” Jackson never took his eyes off Namuth. There was a long pause before he repeated, louder this time, “Now?” Immediately, Namuth shouted, “Jackson—this you must not do!” One last time, in a roar, Jackson demanded, “Now?” but before Namuth could answer, he heaved the heavy table into the air.

  For a split second, no one spoke and nothing moved. Then suddenly dishes began to hit the floor. Dozens of plates, cups, saucers, forks and knives, gravy boats and serving bowls slid in slow motion down the length of the long table and crashed onto the floor. Some guests sat in disbelief, others reared back to dodge the turkey, dressing, gravy, wine, salad, and creamed onions that flew in every direction. For a minute it looked as if the table might upend on top of Lee who was sitting at the end opposite Jackson. Instead, it tilted to the right like a listing ship and fell on its side.

  When the last of the dishes stopped spinning, there was a long, anxious silence. It was broken by the crack of the back door slamming as Jackson left.

  “Coffee,” said Lee, “will be served in the living room.”

  Jackson must have been outside—in the cold again—before he realized that he had no place to go. Dr. Heller was dead. Roger Wilcox had left for a year in Mexico. Lee was inside. This time, there would be no reassuring office visits, no calming walks on the beach. He was falling, and no one was there to catch him. From a nearby bar, he called the Macys’ where Violet de Laszlo and Buffie Johnson had just sat down to dinner. “Violet got on the phone,” Johnson recalls, “and all we heard were shrieks and shocked laughter. ‘Oh, Jackson, no. Oh, Jackson, you didn’t.’ But knowing Violet, I had a sense of how serious it was.” Minutes later, Jackson appeared at the door, “lurching and very drunk indeed,” according to Johnson. “He just headed for Violet like a bird heading for its nest.” De Laszlo left the table and ushered him into another room. While the other guests listened to the muffled sounds through the door, Jackson poured out his agony in a tangled m
ass of words. “He was always inarticulate,” says de Laszlo, “but when he was drunk like that he was incomprehensible.” She tried to comfort him but sensed the futility of it. “There was nothing I could do,” she recalls. “I had a feeling this depression was permanent. It was like he was at the end of his life.”

  39

  THE UNRAVELING

  The storm descended with unexpected speed and fury. The filming had ended just in time. Within days, great black clouds rolled in from the Atlantic, turning day into night. Cars were flipped like toys, fallen power lines danced in the streets, old trees bent into impossible curves. On Fireplace Road, 108-mile-per-hour winds rattled the studio and uprooted two giant elms. Gray sheets of rain and snow lashed the abandoned scaffold in the backyard and blotted out the view of Accabonac Harbor beyond. Inside, Lee cowered behind a bed, as she had since childhood at the sound of thunder, convinced, like her mother, that storms were omens of impending disaster.

  Delayed by the bad weather, the Pollocks arrived in New York the day before the opening of Jackson’s show on November 28, 1950. None of the show’s thirty-two works had been stretched or hung—a process that normally took several days. With help from Giorgio Cavallon, Alfonso Ossorio, and Ted Dragon, Jackson stayed up all night unrolling the canvases from the huge drum that he used to transport them, and wrestling them onto stretchers. “They had never been stretched before,” recalls Cavallon, “so they were a bitch to work on.” Lee and Ray Eames watched while Parsons, smoking and pacing nervously, complained about the size of the paintings. “All you people,” she said, wringing her slender hands, “all you people are painting such big pictures and they’re so difficult to sell.” (Gerome Kamrowski, who stopped by the gallery that night, thought she sounded “like the Baroness Rebay.”) Miraculously, by the afternoon of the 28th, all the works were up, including the huge quartet from the summer: Lavender Mist, Autumn Rhythm, Number 32, and One. In Parsons’s close, windowless gallery, they covered the walls from floor to ceiling, corner to corner, overwhelming the viewer with images. “It was more than an exhibition,” said Lee, “it was an environment.”