Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  A few hours after the last painting was hung, the crowd arrived. “It was bigger than ever this year,” wrote Jay, the only family member to attend, “and many important people in the art world [were] present.” A few succeeded in elbowing their way back from the walls to view the paintings from a distance, but most gave up trying, muttering under their breaths that the works were “too big or too strong.” Lee stood near the doorway, one eye always on Jackson, greeting guests “with a big smile,” tenaciously upbeat despite the ominous events of the previous week. Many guests, ignoring the paintings altogether, stood in line just to shake hands with “the Life painter.” Betsy Zogbaum’s companion, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, was one of many who insisted on an introduction. “Like everybody else, she treated Jackson like some exotic animal in a zoo,” recalls Zogbaum. “I was embarrassed for him.” Jackson stood dutifully in the center of the crowd, dressed in tie and coat, looking, according to one witness, “absolutely ashen and hideously sober.” There hadn’t been time to get drunk before the show. Now and then he would glance toward the entrance to see if Stella or Sande had decided at the last minute to attend. Neither did. The anonymous admirers continued to squeeze in.

  Jackson, as the critic Thomas Hess noted, held nothing in reserve. His collapse, when it finally came, was total. There was no gradual slide back to the self-destructiveness of the forties, no buffer of slow deterioration that would have given him, or Lee, or somebody, a chance to effect a rescue. By the time most people saw him slip, he had already hit bottom. Even as fans crowded the Parsons Gallery to see the grand visions of summer, Jackson was stumbling through the dark, familiar streets of the Village haranguing strangers and howling at the moon. It was like the old days, only he drank bourbon now instead of beer—fewer drinks in fewer bars to get drunker and sicker. There were also fewer old friends to besiege. Joe Meert, one of Benton’s original Kansas City boys, and his wife, Margaret, lived on Cooper Square, and Jackson soon found his way there. “He would yell up at the window, ‘Take me in. Take me in, Joe. I’ve got no place to stay,’” Herman Cherry remembers. When it was too late for yelling, he would collapse in the phone booth at a bar and call old friends, insisting in a quavering, plaintive voice, “I am a great artist. This is Jackson Pollock and I am a great artist.” One startled wife replied, “I don’t care if you’re Rembrandt, you don’t call up people in the middle of the night.”

  At first, Lee tried to look the other way. Comfortably settled in the MacDougal Alley house (Ossorio and Dragon left for Paris soon after the opening), she threw herself into the usual round of gallery-going and holiday parties as if Jackson’s agony were a passing storm that, given time, would spend itself. Maintaining the appearance of normalcy, she coaxed him to shows: Buffie Johnson, Richard Pousette-Dart, James Brooks, Mary Callery. But the sight of his contemporaries being productive only depressed him further. A Picasso exhibition aroused old rivalries and a Gorky memorial retrospective at the Whitney only made him think of death. “More than 90 percent of the work I’d never seen before,” he wrote Ossorio. “[Gorky] was on the beam the last few years of his life.” Jackson apparently knew he needed help, but was afraid to accept it. In a drunken stupor, he barged into Violet de Laszlo’s office while she was seeing another patient. At Lee’s urging, he spent several sessions with the crusty, inflexible homeopath, Elizabeth Wright Hubbard, but after each session he would detour to a bar and not return to MacDougal Alley until the next morning, drunk and reeking of the gutter.

  Desperate to prevent another public imbroglio like the one at Bertha Schaefer’s, Lee kept such incidents to herself. In a letter to Ossorio, she referred only obliquely to the “drunken howlers” that kept her awake at night. At Christmas time, she breathed a sigh of relief when Jackson refused to join his family in Deep River.

  As quickly as it had come together, Jackson’s world began to fall apart.

  Greenberg had been right: the show didn’t sell. “People came to see a famous painter,” says Betsy Zogbaum, “but no one dreamt of buying anything.” Perhaps the big paintings were too intimidating, as Parsons complained, or the gallery was “overhung,” as Greenberg argued. Perhaps the asking prices were too high: $4,000 for Lavender Mist; $5,000 for the black-and-white Number 32; $7,500 each for One and Autumn Rhythm, although even the little ones, the “mementos,” most of them priced at $300, were passed over. Whatever the reason, the result, Parsons later admitted, was a disaster. Out of thirty-two works, only one, Lavender Mist, sold—to Alfonso Ossorio for a humiliating $1,500 “spread over a considerable period.” “For me it was heartbreaking,” said Parsons. “For Jackson it was ghastly.” Greenberg called it “a terrible down,” although he himself had failed to appear at the opening. Despite the warning signs, Jackson seemed surprised by the turn of fortune. Friends described him as alternately “deeply bitter” and “furious.” He phoned Greenberg late at night to complain, “All you’ve written about me hasn’t done me any fucking good, and I was foolish enough to believe it,” and when he heard that Sidney Janis had complimented the show, he called him at three in the morning and screamed, “This is Jackson Pollock and I hear you like my work. Why don’t you buy one?”

  Unfortunately, the show stirred no such passions among reviewers. Most ignored it completely—a silence even more devastating than scorn. “The downtown people came up, and they thought the show was a dud,” recalls Greenberg, who didn’t write a review that year. “That was the consensus. Even though I suspected it, I was flabbergasted.” In the Times, Howard Devree raised the old accusation of fraud. “More than ever before,” he wrote, “it seems to me that Pollock’s work is well over toward automatic writing and that its content … is almost negligible.” Only Robert Goodnough, writing in Art News, managed to generate some enthusiasm for Jackson’s “enormous” canvases. “Pollock has found a discipline that releases tremendous emotive energy combined with a sensitive statement that, if to some overpowering, can not be absorbed in one viewing—one must return.” Goodnough singled out the black-and-white Number 32 for special praise, describing how its “open black rhythms … dance in disturbing degrees of intensity, ecstatically energizing the powerful image in an almost hypnotic way.”

  One by one, the grand visions of the summer began to unravel.

  When Ossorio left for Paris, the plans for a chapel decorated with Pollock murals fell into the enthusiastic but dilatory hands of Tony Smith. Ossorio offered to have a model built in Paris if Smith sent the necessary drawings, but warned Jackson of the need to “prod Tony from time to time.” Meanwhile, Peter Blake’s ideal museum remained just that, an unrealized ideal. Except for Lavender Mist, the show’s big paintings had failed to sell, and not a single mural commission had materialized—from California or anywhere else—since the one for the Geller house. All the great expectations of the previous summer, encouraged by Tony Smith, had come to nothing—although no one, especially Jackson, was yet willing to admit it. In February, he turned down a commission to illustrate a book for Alexey Brodovitch, lamely explaining to Ossorio that “the concentration here is toward wall painting.” And he continued to insist that there was still a great, untapped interest in his work “out there”—if not out west, then in Chicago. In anticipation of a show at the Chicago Arts Club set for the following October, he wrote Ossorio: “It is a new gallery designed by Mies Vanderoie [sic]—I think there might be some good reaction to my stuff out there.”

  Betty Parsons was another of Jackson’s troubles. The shotgun wedding between farmboy and socialite had always been rocky, even in the best of times. Now that the paintings were no longer selling themselves, Betty’s inadequacies rankled. Both Jackson and Lee complained bitterly that she took on too many artists, especially from among her amateur friends; that she didn’t push sales, had no long-range plans, treated artists cavalierly, kept slipshod records, and ultimately cared more about her own art than about selling. Lee later called her a “gallery dabbler” and accused her of mounting “ego trip
shows.” By the end of the 1950–51 season, a year before his contract with Parsons expired, Jackson was already secretly sounding out other dealers and directing his friends away from “Betty’s bins.” “There is a lot of unrest among the painters in her gallery,” he wrote Ossorio. “I don’t know what, if anything, is the solution. … There is an enormous amount of interest and excitement for modern painting there—it’s too damned bad Betty doesn’t know how to get at it.”

  The critical backlash following the November show gave new license to Jackson’s old enemies. Critics and fellow artists who had been stewing privately ever since the Life article could now vent their resentments openly. His paintings were conspicuously missing from the Art Students League’s seventy-fifth anniversary exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. His name was included in a list of lesser-known artists associated with the League, but the hostility directed his way at the opening in March was “palpable,” according to Peter Busa. “He might have been more offended by the way they treated him,” says Busa, “but he was too drunk to notice.”

  Nowhere were the insults more obvious than at the Club. Seeing the power that had accrued to Greenberg and eager to make a name for himself, Thomas Hess, the new editor of Art News, had begun championing Willem de Kooning, declaring him, in a bold swipe at both Greenberg and Pollock, “the best artist of the group.” “Hess was playing a power game,” recalls Conrad Marca-Relli, “pushing de Kooning and trying to get rid of Jackson in the number one spot.” By early 1951, he had rallied many Club members, still resentful of Jackson’s success, to what was being called “the de Kooning camp.” The few times Jackson showed his face in the smoky loft on Eighth Street, he “became a target,” recalls Philip Pavia. “He came into so much ridicule.” After one particularly drunken, profanity-laden altercation, he stormed out the door, roaring, “I don’t need a club.”

  The final insult came when Jackson attended a talk by Hess at the Club. The subject was Hess’s recently published book, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase. To Jackson, drunk and defensive, everything about the book seemed a slap in the face: the jacket, endpapers, and frontispiece all featured Gorky’s The Betrothal II; the order of illustrations and text put Pollock last—out of alphabetical order. One witness remembers how Jackson “sat clutching the book as if he wanted to crush it.” Several times during the discussion, he jumped to his feet, let out a string of obscenities, then succumbed to the jeering and sat down again, shifting in his chair and continuing his protest in an angry mumble. Finally, unable to bear it any longer, he stood up and hurled the book at de Kooning. “Why’d you do that?” de Kooning asked. “It’s a good book.” “It’s a rotten book,” Jackson replied. “He treats you better than me.”

  By mid-January 1951, Lee could no longer hide the truth—either from herself or from the outside world. Jackson was out of control. In his rare lucid moments, even Jackson admitted it. “I really hit an all-time low—with depression and drinking,” he confessed in a letter to Ossorio. “NYC is brutal. … Last year I thought at last I am above water from now on in—but things don’t work that easily I guess.” In the same letter, he insisted that Elizabeth Wright Hubbard had been “extremely helpful” and generally indicated that the problem was safely behind him. But Lee knew otherwise. At the opening of the “Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America” show at the Museum of Modern Art penthouse in late January, Jackson drank so much champagne that he fell out of his chair several times and, when asked to say a few words to the assembled artists, panicked and fled the building. For Lee, it was a nightmare come true, exactly the kind of public spectacle she was desperate to avoid. Chasing him through the exhibit and out onto the street, she prevented him from driving off in the Cadillac only when Linda Lindeberg, who happened to be passing by, agreed to drive them home—all the way to Springs. Jackson was too drunk to protest, but forced Lindeberg to stop at practically every bar on the ride across Long Island. In his letter to Ossorio, Jackson admitted that he “couldn’t get any idea of the [MOMA] show,” but didn’t explain why.

  More and more, Lee was torn between New York, where liquor was accessible, and Springs, where the car was accessible. Fearing for her own life as well as Jackson’s, she canceled her plans to accompany him on a car trip to Chicago in February. A group of Chicago artists who called themselves “Momentum” had invited him to serve on a panel of jurors that would select works for the group’s annual exhibition. Despite his objections to the idea of a “contest,” Jackson accepted the offer, which included an all-expenses-paid trip to Chicago. “I think seeing Chicago and the experience might do me good,” he wrote Ossorio, “at any rate I’ll try it.” When Lee pulled out, he decided to fly.

  Without Lee for the first time in a decade, Jackson lost all control. On the flight out, he drank until the stewardesses refused to serve him any more. From there the trip descended into one prolonged binge. According to Greenberg, who had recommended Jackson for the jury duty, “He was drunk all the time he was there.” The jurying quickly turned into a farce as Jackson, drunk and belligerent, squared off against James Lechay, a hard-nosed “middle-of-the-road Romantic” who held the title of visiting artist at the school where Phil Guston had taught, the University of Iowa. (The third judge, seventy-year-old Max Weber, stayed out of the fracas.) “Between the two of them [Jackson and Lechay], they threw out most of the submissions,” recalls Greenberg, who later heard of the debacle from participants. Out of 850 submissions, the jury rejected all but 47, despite the fact that the exhibition could have accommodated as many as 200 admissions. The sponsors were infuriated. “By rights a jury should fill every available spot,” says Greenberg, who had judged the show the previous year. Jackson later described the competition as “disappointing and depressing” because “nothing original [was] being done.” But most participants saw it differently. “Jackson and this other guy were competing,” says Greenberg, “competing to see who could be the most rigorous—who could be the least charitable.” Despite nonstop drinking, Jackson did manage to meet a few important collectors during his short stay, including Maurice Culberg, a prominent patron of Dubuffet. He also paid a reciprocal visit to Reginald Isaacs’s apartment where Number 2, 1950 hung in the place of honor. But mostly he drank. Bombed and restless during the pre-dinner speeches at the awards banquet on February 10, he lunged at his neighbors, muttered obscenities, and yawned ostentatiously. As the speeches droned on, he began playing with the heavy, gold-embossed plate on the table in front of him. He held it up to his face as if examining it closely, fanned himself with it, spun it like a top. Finally, he heaved it over his shoulder, turning back to the speaker with a look of deep concentration just as the plate crashed to the floor behind him.

  By March, Lee was desperate. Hubbard’s stern, grandmotherly advice and homeopathic remedies had proven inadequate. Jackson didn’t need herbs or sympathy; he needed to stop drinking—soon. On Hubbard’s recommendation, Lee consulted Ruth Fox, a fifty-six-year-old psychiatrist who specialized in the treatment of alcoholism. Fox’s approach involved a combination of intensive psychotherapy (two or three sessions a week of “depth analysis”), and group support through Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Fox, who knew of Jackson through the Life article, responded quickly, believing that “the motivation to seek help for a drinking problem often evaporates within 24 hours.” She arranged an initial interview and invited Lee, as part of “the treating team,” to sit in on part of it. For two hours, Fox, a handsome, self-possessed woman, questioned Jackson, alternately sympathetic and firm, respectful and chastening. It couldn’t have been long before she realized how closely he conformed to the alcoholic profile she had developed: egocentric, masochistic, withdrawn, impulsive, dependent, with a low tolerance for tension, low self-esteem, “longings for omnipotence,” and “problems in the sexual area.” His recent preoccupations with his image as a great artist confirmed another of Fox’s theories: that the alcoholic tends to build

  an unconscious
fantasy that he is whatever he wishes to be. … Then, regarding himself as unique and special, he thinks he is entitled to preferential treatment. The arrogant pride, the inordinate claims for special and unlimited privileges, the feeling of being entitled to unconditional happiness and love, the conviction that he should be free of responsibility for his actions—all these elements operate unconsciously, for the most part, [even] when the individual is not drinking.

  Like her predecessors, Wall, Henderson, de Laszlo, and Hubbard, Fox considered such traits “vestigial traces of infancy” and sought their roots in childhood. She also believed that alcoholism had a genetic component, that an inability to metabolize alcohol could be inherited, so she undoubtedly probed into Roy Pollock’s history of drinking. But the most important factor, Fox believed, the one that allowed the alcoholic traits to “completely dominate the personality,” was the pharmacological property of the drug itself. “The predisposing traits urge the individual to the use of alcohol,” she wrote, “alcohol emphasizes and enhances the traits themselves, and so the individual has recurrent recourse to the magical substance.”

  For Fox, chemistry was at the root of the problem, and therefore chemistry was the place to begin treatment. She insisted unequivocally that the first step toward recovery was abstinence. Unlike her predecessors, she considered analyzing a drunk “a waste of the analyst’s time and the patient’s money.” Too often, she had seen patients who thought that simply by recognizing the source of their alcoholism—whether psychological, domestic, financial, or occupational—they had done their part. “The alcoholic then feels perfectly justified,” she wrote, “in postponing the start of abstinence, that first, all-important step toward recovery, until the physician or other therapist has magically removed or solved the problems.” For those patients who had trouble abstaining, Fox prescribed Antabuse, a brand of disulfiram, a new drug that, when taken in combination with alcohol, caused nausea and vomiting—chemistry to fight chemistry.