Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Smith may have provided the impetus for change, the link to Orozco, and the appropriate materials, but the images that began appearing in late spring belonged entirely to Jackson; the demons were his alone. From beneath the tangles of poured black lines, anatomies emerged: arms, legs, hands, eyes, sometimes in confused piles, sometimes in ominous isolation. There were strange animals—two-and four-footed—totemic figures, reclining figures, a crucifixion; hulking females with huge dry breasts and blank faces. Faces were everywhere: some almost identifiable, rendered like portraits, some all but obliterated in a vandalizing fury. Sometimes the images overpowered him, fighting their way out from behind the veil with a will of their own: a child on its mother’s lap; a bull in a field; a stone-faced woman with her skeletal family. Some of the images he let come through; some he tried to conceal at the last minute by turning the image on its side or upside down when he signed it. He worked on long rolls of cotton duck, remnants from upholsterers and sailmakers, painting one image after another without stopping or cutting. When it came time to cut and sign, old fears took over. “He’d ask, ‘Should I cut it here? Should this be the bottom?’” Lee recounted. “He’d have long sessions of cutting and editing. … Those were difficult sessions. His signing the canvases was even worse. I’d think everything was settled—tops, bottoms, margins—and then he’d have last-minute thoughts and doubts. He hated signing. There’s something so final about a signature.” With practice, Jackson learned to pour an image exactly as he wanted it: from cryptic to explicit; from abstract to “Rubensesque;” from the harsh compression of November 14, 1951 to the open lyricism of Echo. To enhance his control, he started using glass basting syringes instead of sticks or hardened brushes. With them he could flood a line without reloading. “His control was amazing,” Lee marveled. “Using a stick was difficult enough, but the basting syringe was like a giant fountain pen.” And the canvas was like rice paper, bleeding and soaking to form intricate interplays of matte (where the paint soaked through) and glossy (where it accumulated) on the cream-colored surface. Jackson had turned drawing into painting, bringing old risks, old energies, and old insecurities to a medium that just a year before had seen his most self-assured triumphs. “He came over and wasn’t too certain about what he had made,” recalls John Little (who didn’t like the stark new images as much as Jackson’s “regular colors”). Carol Braider remembered how Jackson “was worried about the image having come back,” and Ibram Lassaw thought “he seemed terribly unsure of himself.”

  With Barnett Newman (left) and Tony Smith

  Echo (Number 25,1951), enamel on canvas, 91⅞” × 86”

  But painting wasn’t enough. Throughout the summer, between spasms of work, Jackson continued to drink. A binge could last two or three weeks, during which the studio sat empty and idle in the summer heat. It would start with beer, a six-pack or two bought at Dan Miller’s store and tossed into the back seat of the Cadillac. The beer fortified him for the bars. “He would sit in the car and drink the beers by himself,” recalls Roger Wilcox, who had returned from Mexico in May to find Jackson recuperating from a two-week binge. “By the time he had six beers, he was ready to face people.” Jackson quickly rediscovered the local spots that had sustained him in the past: Jungle Pete’s, where Nina Federico fed him stuffed striped bass and coffee to sober him up; Joe Lori’s bar in the East Hampton Hotel, where the hard-nosed management was likely to bring out Jackson’s abusive streak (“He didn’t like for anyone to tell him he’d had enough,” says Wilcox. “Boy, that set him off”); and the Elm Tree Inn, where the bartenders were so indulgent that he usually just “slumped over and fell asleep.” The manic energy with which Jackson threw himself back into the self-destructive cycle alarmed even the hardened Bonackers who shared the bar stools at Jungle Pete’s. One day when Elwyn Harris, the electrician, and Dick Talmage, the plumber, saw Jackson coming, they tried to hide their bottle of gin. “But Pollock got there first,” Harris recalled, “and drank it straight … about a half an hour later, I had a call from Jungle Pete’s to come pick up Pollock.” According to Ed Hults, another Springs resident, “He just couldn’t get it down fast enough.”

  Nothing, it seemed, could slow the fall. At Ruth Fox’s insistence, he attended several meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in Southampton, but that effort was doomed from the start. The confessional format was wildly ill-suited to Jackson’s reticent, suspicious nature. He derided his fellow alcoholics as “blabbermouths” and “lonelyhearts,” and boasted defensively, “They got to drink; me, I only drink if I feel like it.” One friend described Jackson as “too red-hot for AA.” He visited Fox occasionally for the ego massage of analysis, but resisted taking the Antabuse she prescribed. Without both psychological and chemical therapy, Fox knew that meaningful progress was impossible. (“Without Antabuse, alcoholics frequently cannot tolerate the frustrations of analysis,” she wrote, “and are apt to revert to drinking during difficult periods of the treatment.”) Finally, after a particularly alarming binge in June, Fox persuaded Lee to commit Jackson to a private clinic in Manhattan, the Regent Hospital, for detoxification. At least twice during the summer, Jackson pretended to “dry out” in the clinic’s East Sixty-first Street facilities, but kept a bottle of scotch hidden in the lavatory. After one such stay, Valentine and Happy Macy sent a consoling note: “Dear Jackson, Happy & I love you and believe in you, and in what you have done & what you will do—so we want to help you in as many ways as we can in getting over the temporary rough spots, like now.”

  Not everyone was so understanding. By midsummer, Jackson’s social life had come to a virtual standstill. Invitations to cocktail parties and dinners no longer poured into the house on Fireplace Road. Lee no longer wanted to risk having guests in. Larry Rivers, a young painter, and Helen Frankenthaler, came by to pay homage and dedicate themselves “even more determinedly and forever to ART,” but compared to the previous year, the house seemed deserted. “This has been a very quiet summer,” Jackson lamented in a letter to Ossorio, “no parties …” Stories of Jackson’s latest antics circulated around East Hampton: how he had insulted Mrs. John Hall Wheelock, wife of the Boston poet and grand dame, at the Guild Hall show (“She said how much she liked his work,” recalls Buffie Johnson, “and he turned to her and said, ‘Bullshit’ “); how he had burst into the Zogbaums’ house “absolutely roaring drunk and going on about how he was the greatest painter in the history of the world.” He was the worst kind of guest, alternately pathetic and menacing. “People didn’t want to touch him,” says Gerome Kamrowski, “because they never knew which way he would spring.” The stories dismayed some and pleased others, especially the Maidstone Club set, who found in them proof of their long-held suspicions. Locals, who had never stopped thinking his art was crazy—regardless of what Life said—now began to think that he was crazy. Friends who had welcomed him the previous summer pretended not to be home when they heard the roar of the Cadillac approaching. “Jeffrey would turn all the lights out,” recalled Penny Potter, “hoping he’d go away. And sometimes I’d turn them back on and Jeffrey would go upstairs in a snit—very angry. He thought [Jackson] was going to rape me, or pee on the floor.” At Roger Wilcox’s house, he did pee, not on the floor, but in the bed, after a night of carousing. The next morning, an enraged Lucia Wilcox chased him out of the house with a broom, calling him a “phony cowboy.” “She laid down the law,” recalls Wilcox. “She said, ‘I will not have you come to my house. You’re not welcome here when you’re drunk.’” Between Lucia’s banishment and Lee’s indignation (“She didn’t think Lucia had the right to treat Jackson that way,” says Wilcox), the two men seldom saw each other again, and when they did, “it just wasn’t the same.”

  Alfonso Ossorio in the music room at The Creeks

  About the only positive achievement of the summer was locating a house for Alfonso Ossorio. Before leaving for Europe, Ossorio had asked Lee and Jackson to reconnoiter East Hampton for a suitable property, but for most of
the summer, Jackson was too busy drinking and Lee was too busy watching Jackson to do much looking. In early August, Jackson wrote apologetically: “I think the house idea had better wait until you are here.” Soon afterward, Lee heard that “The Creeks,” a large, secluded estate on sixty acres of waterfront land had become available. The house, a picturesque if dilapidated Italianate villa, had been built for the painter Albert Herter in 1899 at the end of a spit of land between two creeks that emptied into Georgica Pond. Its unusual U-shape brought light and water views into almost every room. The estate included a boat house, a huge, bright studio, terraces, and a garden. After a series of transatlantic calls and cables, Ossorio flew back to complete the sale. To secure the necessary funding from his father, a “formidable sugar magnate” and the ultimate source of money in the family, Ossorio invited him to East Hampton to inspect the house and have lunch with the Pollocks. The plan, like so many that involved Jackson, ended in chaos. On the appointed day, Alfonso missed the train to East Hampton. Jackson, not finding him at the station, said, “Well, fuck it,” and, according to Lee, “went off to a bar and disappeared for the rest of the day.” When Miguel José Ossorio arrived at the house on Fireplace Road in a big chauffeured limousine, only Lee was there to greet him.

  In the midst of Jackson’s darkest year, Lee had never been stronger. After they returned to Springs in May, her paintings blossomed into large gestural abstractions. While Jackson etched out his demonic visions in black between self-destructive binges, Lee worked and reworked her big colorful canvases, strangely liberated from the claustrophobia that had plagued her work for a decade. It was as if his weakness gave her strength. The contrast didn’t escape Jackson: “Lee is doing some of her best painting,” he wrote Ossorio in June, “it has a freshness and bigness that she didn’t get before … [while] I’ve had a period of drawing on canvas in black.”

  If he hadn’t been so preoccupied with his own celebrity, Jackson would have seen the confrontation coming sooner. Lee had been gathering confidence for some time, first at the 1950 Guild Hall show, then, in May, at the Ninth Street Show where she showed alongside him. By the summer of 1951, she was no longer “the little lady who paints”; he could no longer save his smaller scraps of canvas to make stretchers “her size.” Her paintings were almost as big as his now. Pressing her advantage, Lee persuaded Jackson to invite Betty Parsons to Springs to see her work. Parsons was impressed but left without offering a show. Lee pressed again. “[Jackson] telephoned me and asked me to give [Lee] a show,” Parsons recalled. “I said I never showed husbands and wives but he insisted.” It was a victory for Lee—Parsons scheduled a show for the following October—but a costly one. Soon after Parsons’s visit, Jackson launched into a two-week bender that ended in the Regent Hospital. At first, it looked like a replay of the debacle at Bertha Schaefer’s. Except this time, Lee didn’t capitulate. Problems or no problems, she continued to paint.

  Jackson struck next where he knew Lee was most vulnerable.

  On a trip to New York, he left her at the MacDougal Alley house and disappeared on a bar-hopping expedition, only to return a few hours later with a woman on his arm. “This was some woman he had picked up,” recalls Annalee Newman who, with her husband Barnett, had stopped by while Jackson was gone. “He was embarrassed because he didn’t expect to see Barney and me there, not because of Lee. He wanted Lee to see them together. He was really trying to hurt her. … Of course, Lee was humiliated.”

  About the same time, rumors began to float back to Lee about Jackson and a young woman who had long been a member of the artists’ community in New York. They were credible rumors. She was a svelte, seductive, and stunningly beautiful woman, “at her best in languid poses of silent disdain.” Men considered her “untouchable,” according to Nicholas Carone, “so beautiful you dared not go near her.” Many did, however, including Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Wilfrid Zogbaum, Morton Feldman, and Jackson’s old rival, Phil Guston. “An affair with [her] came to be almost an initiatory rite into a society of the famous,” wrote the wife of one of the woman’s lovers, “a New York equivalent of the ceremonies of the French Academy.” Whether prowling Club meetings in the city and cocktail parties in East Hampton, she “could not wait,” recalled May Rosenberg. “She had to fall in love immediately.” One of the many men who caught her errant eye was Jackson Pollock.

  But Jackson was no match for such “knockout” looks and adhesive sexuality. As much as he would have liked to “play with the other boys,” to “count the notches on his belt” along with Guston and de Kooning, he was always either too drunk or too scared, and her fleeting attentions came to nothing.

  But that didn’t stop Jackson from using the rumors (and the woman’s reputation) to torture Lee. “He would say, ‘Boy, was she terrific,’ just to upset [Lee],” recalls Conrad Marca-Relli. “It was his way of playing a game. He had found her point of vulnerability, and he worked it mercilessly.” Betsy Zogbaum found Lee in the kitchen one day “in an absolute fury” over the same woman. Jackson had played on her paranoia before, flirting with other women in her presence, but this time a meanness had crept into the adolescent taunting and innuendo. He wanted to hurt her. Returning late one night from the city, he pulled into the driveway of the house that May and Harold Rosenberg had rented temporarily. He banged at the door and called for May in a drunken bellow. “He said terrible, terrible things,” May remembers, “threatening what he was going to do to me, using the foulest language, saying that I’d never have it so good.” She came to the window—Harold was in New York—and tried to hush him. “I told him he would wake Patia, that he should go home and get some sleep, but he just kept yelling. Then I saw Lee sitting in the car, obviously petrified, and I knew he was only saying it because she was there. He was taunting her and she was just taking it—Lee who was always so fierce. I realized that she was afraid. I had never seen him hit her, but she was obviously afraid that he would.”

  Just then, May heard a noise on the stairs. When she turned around, she saw seven-year-old Patia coming down in her nightgown, crying hysterically and carrying a huge kitchen knife. “Don’t you hurt my mother,” she called out to Jackson between sobs. “He had said he was going to lay me,” says May, “and Patia thought that meant he was going to hurt me.”

  By fall, Lee was willing to try anything.

  She had always had a “penchant for charlatans,” recalls John Myers, “a taste for daffy doctors that would send her to a Gypsy down the road for a special recipe for some kind of new sassafras elixir.” Jackson was no better. A summer of Ruth Fox’s trenchant analysis and hard choices had left him desperate for something more mystical—and easier. To friends, he continued to insist that he wasn’t an alcoholic, that he could “turn it on and off like a beer tap.” So when Elizabeth Wright Hubbard made a recommendation that Jackson consult a “biochemist” with a regimen that would “drive his thirst for drink away” by adjusting his body chemistry, both Jackson and Lee pounced on it.

  Certainly, only desperation and self-delusion could have brought them, in September, to the swank Park Avenue offices of Dr. Grant Mark.

  For someone who promised a longer and healthier life, Dr. Mark looked distressingly ill. With his anorexically thin six-foot-two-inch frame, blanched, gaunt face, albino-blond hair, and long fingernails curved grotesquely over the tips of his red, swollen fingers, he looked “like something out of a horror movie,” according to Alfonso Ossorio. Nor was he, in fact, a medical doctor, although he had on his staff six M.D.‘s—at one time including Hubbard—who made out prescriptions according to his directions. He may have been a Ph.D., but in his correspondence, he carefully avoided using “Dr.” and described himself merely as the “Business Manager” of a company called “Psychological-Chemistry, Inc.” Both at the office and on trips to East Hampton, he was frequently accompanied by his elderly mother, whom he described as his “best living advertisement” and to whom he assiduously fed biochemical drops and hot water with
lemon juice.

  Mark may not have been a doctor, but he had the requisite “Svengali air,” and Jackson quickly fell under his spell. He told Jackson exactly what he wanted to hear: that he wasn’t an alcoholic at all, he was merely the victim of “chemical derangement,” an imbalance of “metals” in the body that could be corrected with the proper diet: no milk products and vast quantities of fresh vegetables, fruit juice, and eggs. The only meat permitted was fowl, but it had to be wild (“eat no bird that can’t take off at fifty miles an hour”) and it had to have been shot within the previous two hours. (“Where the hell are you going to find wild turkey in the Hamptons?” asked Ted Dragon.) In addition, Mark prescribed daily baths in a solution of kosher rock salt, presumably to leach out harmful mineral deposits. The most important element of the treatment, however, was the soy-based “emulsion” that, coincidentally, Mark sold. The mysterious health juice (Ted Dragon called it “crazy milk”) came in quart bottles that had to be kept refrigerated “lest it lose its potency.” Mark provided an ungainly refrigerated box for transporting a week’s supply of the elixir, but getting Jackson and the container safely to and from New York once a week was, according to Ossorio who often drove, “a nightmare.” “The box would promptly get lost at the Cedar Bar or left in a taxi.” If Jackson stuck to the regimen and drank a quart of emulsion a day, according to Mark, liquor could no longer hurt him: the alcohol in his body would “find its own level.” Unfortunately, in Jackson’s wishful calculus, this came to mean that the more emulsion he drank the more liquor he could consume without ill effects. “He felt that a quart of liquor was equal to a quart of emulsion,” says Ossorio. Finally, Mark instructed him to return every week to the Park Avenue offices for “analysis”—not psychological but chemical. One of the staff doctors would take blood and urine samples, and inject Jackson with tiny amounts of copper and zinc. “Oh, dear God,” cried Roger Wilcox when he heard the news. “The treatment is worse than the illness.”