Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Finally, and perhaps most important, de Kooning reciprocated the respect his colleagues lavished on him. “When he came over for dinner,” recalls Eleanor Hempstead, “it didn’t matter if you had an El Greco or a Rubens or a Rembrandt on the wall, he went right for your work. Even if it was just some little watercolor, he would go and look at it and make a nice remark like ‘Did you do this?’ in an admiring way. He always commented.”

  For all Lee’s efforts, for all the rising talk of “civil war” and the art world dividing into opposing camps, there was, as John Myers pointed out with a touch of sadness, “only one camp, really, and that was de Kooning’s. … It was Jackson against the world.”

  Throughout the winter of Rosenberg’s article, while Lee waged her war by telephone, Jackson felt increasingly isolated and besieged. “The whole art world was talking about de Kooning,” recalls Nicholas Carone. “Jackson was all through. They were building up de Kooning and slaughtering Pollock.” Friends described him as “hurt” and “bitter.” “It was disastrous for him,” says Carone, “because he loved painters and he loved paintings.” On the few occasions when the two reluctant protagonists confronted each other in public, they tried to recapture the barroom camaraderie of earlier days. One night they were seen sitting on the curb outside the Cedar Tavern passing a bottle back and forth. “Jackson, you’re the greatest painter in America,” de Kooning would say, slapping Jackson on the back; to which Jackson would reply with another slap, “No Bill, you’re the greatest painter in America.” “They played a game,” recalls Conrad Marca-Relli, “getting in some digs, trying to be playful.” But beneath the surface, Marca-Relli and others noticed, the barbs now seemed “loaded,” the game more serious, “as if they knew the stakes were higher.”

  On March 16, 1953, Jackson attended the opening of de Kooning’s show at the Janis Gallery. Around the walls were five large paintings and several drawings, all of women: aggressive, tortured, vehemently brushed images; part Marilyn Monroe, part Medusa. “The turbulence,” Elaine de Kooning later said, “came from his image of women, from his consciousness of their role—and it was not sweet.” (Like Jackson, de Kooning had used his mother as a model. Cornelia de Kooning was an iron-willed woman who “could walk through a brick wall,” according to Elaine, or serve as a figurehead “on the prow of a ship, breaking gigantic ice flows.”) More perhaps than anyone else, Jackson recognized the power of de Kooning’s women. They were, in a way, his paintings: his tortured vision of women, his turbulent sexuality, his emotionally charged figuration, painted with the power and conviction he had once possessed. Before Tom Hess declared his love for them, before Rosenberg pronounced them “acts of genius,” before the Museum of Modern Art bought one, before the art journals proclaimed them “the final direction of the New York School,” before Time magazine (Jackson’s implacable enemy) roared its approval, Jackson knew they were masterpieces.

  At the party afterward, Jackson tried to drink himself into obliviousness. Lee’s friend George Mercer had seen him drunk before “but never this out of hand.” At one point, Jackson yelled across the room to de Kooning, “Bill, you betrayed it. You’re doing the figure, you’re still doing the same goddamn thing. You know you never got out of being a figure painter.” De Kooning, anxious to defuse the situation, yelled back good-naturedly, “Well, what are you doing, Jackson?” intending perhaps to remind Jackson of the figures that had appeared in his paintings two years before. But Jackson took it another way, apparently: as a cutting reference to his continuing work block. As de Kooning and everyone else knew, Jackson was no longer “doing” anything.

  The drinks were not coming fast enough for Jackson, so he stormed out of the room in search of a bar. Mercer turned to Lee and asked, “Should I go with him?” “Lee said, ‘There’s nothing you can do,’” Mercer remembers, “‘but it couldn’t hurt to follow him and watch him.’” Jackson soon found a bar, but before he even sat down, “there was an electric hostility” in the room, according to Mercer. “He exchanged looks with a fellow at the bar, and they started to have a fight.” Before it could develop, however, Jackson stalked out the door. Standing on the curb, he paused for a moment, waited for an approaching car, then, just as the car was about to speed by, stepped into its path. The car swerved wildly, missing him by inches.

  The summer brought no peace. At Leo Castelli’s big house on Jericho Lane, Willem and Elaine de Kooning again set up studios and entertained a steady stream of guests including the Rosenbergs, Conrad Marca-Relli, Philip Pavia, Wilfrid Zogbaum, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and a changing cast of awestruck younger painters. With Rosenberg towering over them “like a scout master,” they horsed around on the beach during the day (except for de Kooning who claimed “he would just get hot and sticky and sandy and sunburned”) and crowded around the festive supper table in the evenings.

  On Fireplace Road, the scene was very different. Depressed and embittered, Jackson passed the summer largely in solitude. For the first time in several years, he planted a garden, although, according to Ted Dragon, he “had no patience for it. If a plant wasn’t doing well he’d just kick it up.” George Loper moved from reshingling the studio to reshingling the house, although neither Jackson nor Lee knew where they would find the money to pay him. Despite his idleness—so unusual for the summer months—Jackson found painting a struggle. The three or four works he managed to finish reflected his mood: gray, sullen, elegiac. Even those that started out brightly with Jackson’s favorite palette of yellows and reds, were soon transformed by the double prism of depression and retrospection. Ocean Greyness, with its multiple eyes and mask-like islands of color, invoked the troubled images of the early forties: Picasso’s bestiary, Graham’s African masks, Jung’s archetypes. In Greyed Rainbow, he concealed the painting’s colorful beginnings (confined to the lower half of the canvas) behind a heavy lattice of brushed and dripped black and white evocative of the great shimmering curtains of Cathedral and Number 1, 1948.

  Interruptions that summer were rare, the Pollock’s social circle having dwindled to a handful of regulars: the Littles, the Potters, Alfonso Ossorio, Ted Dragon, and the odd passing visitor. In August, Sidney Janis paid an obligatory call to review Jackson’s latest work and to persuade him to give up the confusing numbering system and go back to conventional titles. It was a sign of his defeatism that Jackson acquiesced so readily. In the face of mounting debts, he was agreeable to anything that Janis thought might improve his dismal sales. High-minded talk about the neutrality of numbers and “pure painting” was the relic of an earlier, more idealistic time.

  Jackson also urged Janis to recover the paintings from the Paris show (and the money from Tapié‘s elusive sales) but needed an advance in the meantime—“just a few dollars,” Janis recalls, “to tide him over. It was the first of many times.” Money was increasingly on Jackson’s mind—perhaps as a symbol of fame’s evanescence. (On a brief visit to the city that summer, Jackson saw Robert Motherwell at a Schrafft’s men’s bar and “talked angrily of how in America one never permanently ‘makes it,’” Motherwell remembered, “that each new show is an absolute test, despite whatever one has done in the past.”) One night at The Creeks—one of the few places outside the house where Lee felt Jackson was safe—Ossorio offered to give him ten thousand dollars “just so he could relax for a year.” The next morning, more sober and lucid, Ossorio withdrew the offer.

  Increasingly, Jackson found comfort in his unlikely friendship with Ted Dragon, whose deference and gentleness seemed to have a soothing effect on him. “He was like a great big shaggy dog,” says Dragon. “He followed me everywhere. He gave me a small painting and named it Dancing Head for me.” Jackson also gave the young dancer flowers and vegetables from his garden. (When Dragon told him just to put them on the table, Jackson seemed hurt. “Oh, no,” he replied, “I raised these. I’m going to wash them and dry them and make an arrangement of them.”) In the afternoons, the two men would sit on the terrace overlooking Geo
rgica Pond and talk about gardening or cooking or music. “He wanted to know all about the great opera houses of Europe,” Dragon remembers, “especially about all the behind-stage intrigues that went on.” When Dragon carried on too long about Robert and Clara Schumann or Liszt, Jackson would cry out in mock exasperation, “Well, play the goddamn thing!” Chopin “bored the pants off him,” Dragon recalls, but Liszt he found “fucking in’eresting.”

  Ocean Greyness, 1953, 57¾” × 90⅛”

  Jackson’s mood that summer brightened with the appearance of a new neighbor: Conrad Marca-Relli. A de Kooning partisan, Marca-Relli moved into the small house next to Jackson Pollock’s place with considerable trepidation. Friends had warned him, “You’re out of your mind. He’ll destroy your house.” Thus when Jackson stumbled in one day during a particularly delicate stage in the rebuilding of a fireplace, Marca-Relli went stiff with apprehension. “Let me help,” Jackson offered. “I’m pretty good at that kind of stuff.” “Oh, God, please don’t,” Marca-Relli snapped, motioning to his wife, Anita, to hurry and fetch Lee to take Jackson home. Moments later, when Jackson noticed Anita’s absence, he turned to Marca-Relli with a baleful look. “She didn’t go get Lee, did she? You didn’t have to do that. I wasn’t going to do anything wrong.” Marca-Relli, who “felt like a heel,” vowed that “from then on, I would treat him square, whether he was drunk or not.” Not long afterward, in a gesture of reconciliation, Jackson rode over on the little tractor Jeffrey Potter had given him and offered to mow Marca-Relli’s yard. “He started mowing in designs—all over the place! I mean, it was like his painting—he’d take it this way, that way.” Marca-Relli shouted to him over the roar of the tractor, “How the hell do you expect to cut the grass that way?” Jackson shouted back, “Why? How would you do it?” Marca-Relli made right angles with his hands, but Jackson waved him off. “That’s your way. This is my way.” “By the time he got through,” Marca-Relli recalls, “he had all the grass cut, no question about it. We were mowed.”

  With Conrad Marca-Relli

  Of the other guests whose appearance Jackson would have welcomed that summer, Lee turned most away. On several occasions Franz Kline, Philip Pavia, and even de Kooning himself drove over from East Hampton to extend an olive branch, but Lee “didn’t want us in the same room with [Jackson],” says Pavia. She would either refuse to open the door or stand on the porch and say she didn’t know where he was. Once, he appeared in the doorway behind her and there was “a big, awkward silence,” Pavia recalls. “So we went home.” Lee called them “the New York gangsters.”

  When Lee wasn’t home, however, Jackson eagerly invited them in and, for just an evening, was back on the Phoenix Ranch with his brothers—“one of the boys” again. They drank, caroused, and played poker into the early morning hours. “Jackson started off sober as a judge,” recalls Ronald Stein, who was visiting on one such occasion, “and played really good poker. But as he drank, his poker deteriorated and he got infuriated because other people were winning. He got more and more abusive until it wound up in this terrific, funny fight where they all tried to abuse each other.” Around three in the morning, someone suggested going to the beach for a swim. The idea met with immediate drunken approval and they set out on bicycles for Louse Point. “You can imagine what it was like,” says Stein. “Jackson could barely stand up, much less ride a bike. He crashed at least ten times within the first ten seconds.”

  At one point, he fell over and didn’t get up. “He just lay there on his side and kept pedaling,” Stein recalls. “He was wearing shorts, and his bare leg just ground against the road like sandpaper. He wouldn’t let anybody touch him, and he was obviously just taking the skin off his legs and elbows. Finally they grabbed him and restrained him and dragged him into the house. He was walking around in bandages for about a month.” After that, Lee redoubled her guard, and soon “the boys” stopped coming by.

  Occasionally, fortified with enough liquor to defy Lee, Jackson would roar up to the Castellis’, leave the Model A running in the driveway, and storm through the house “looking for de Kooning.” “When he was in a mood like that,” recalls Leo Castelli, “we all felt terrorized.” Guests would scatter, Ileana Castelli would hide the breakables, and de Kooning would disappear. Sometimes, when he didn’t have the courage to stop, Jackson would just speed through the driveway in the Model A, honking his contempt. Once, he came tearing by blindly and almost destroyed a large, concrete sculpture that Castelli had commissioned from Larry Rivers.

  One day that summer, Charles Boultenhouse returned from the movies to the little house he and Parker Tyler rented behind Dan Miller’s store. “I found this note from Parker saying that Jackson had picked him up. Parker usually had this gorgeous handwriting, but this note was written in a horrible scrawl, which conveyed his absolute panic at having been taken to the Pollocks’ place.” When Boultenhouse came to rescue his friend, he found Jackson “in his cups” fulminating against action painting and Harold Rosenberg, and Tyler “in sheer terror.” “Jackson had this huge kitchen knife,” Boultenhouse recalls, “great for dicing and mincing, which he was playing with and muttering ‘action painting’ with utter hatred, and Lee was standing behind him, stroking his head and trying to soothe him, saying, ‘Now, you know you’ve gotten over that, Jackson, you’ve gotten over that.’”

  When Harry Jackson stopped by to announce that he was abandoning abstract art to “paint realistically and study painting technique,” Jackson took it as a personal betrayal. “He got black,” Harry recalled, “like [I] was after his goddam family jewels.” He said, “Ah, shit, Harry. You can’t go back to all that.” “Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can or can’t do!” Harry shot back. After a frosty farewell, Harry left for Europe to “study painting in a formal way” and “really look at the old masters.” The two men would not see each other again for three years.

  When Jane Smith returned from Europe for a few weeks, she and Tony drove their little Volkswagen to Springs for a weekend visit. Jackson took them on a scenic tour to Montauk and back—without the usual terror tactics—and afterward offered to give Jane the giant Blue Poles. (She politely refused the extravagant gift—“It was too big to belong to a private person,” she told him, “it should belong to a city”—but accepted a black-and-white portrait instead.)

  As soon as his wife was gone, Tony Smith could contain his long-simmering sexual desires no longer. After years of frustrating intimacy, of hinting to Jackson that “Lee wasn’t right for him,” of disguising his passion in poetic metaphors, of drawing Jackson out in discussions of “perverse sexuality,” Smith finally made an outright pass—several passes, in fact. Or at least that was how Jackson interpreted them. Recoiling in horror, Jackson immediately sent a cable to Jane in Germany. “It said Tony was very depressed and missed me,” recalls Jane Smith. “Jackson felt very strongly that Tony should come to Germany. So I made sure that Tony did come. And [Jackson] told me to destroy the cable after I read it. He must not have wanted Tony to know that he had sent it.”

  Bradley Walker Tomlin, a more recent friend, had been one of Jackson’s staunchest, if least consequential, defenders in the days following the appearance of Rosenberg’s article. Over the winter, he had allied himself closely with Lee, assisting in her campaign and admiring her paintings. That summer, when the house next door to the Pollocks’ (the one Conrad Marca-Relli eventually bought) came up for sale, Jackson and Lee persuaded Tomlin to come out for a week and look it over. One night while he was there, Lee arranged a party—or the closest thing she could manage from her short list of safe guests. Giorgio and Linda Cavallon came, along with Marca-Relli. After dinner, Jackson drank too much, and what began as an “animated conversation” about action painting soon turned into “a heated, violent argument,” according to Marca-Relli. At one point, infuriated at Lee, Jackson turned up the volume on his record player “until the house shook.” Anticipating fireworks, Marca-Relli left early. The Cavallons, seeing that Tomlin
was “quite tired” and “feeling sorry for him,” said their good nights “hoping that would break the thing up,” Giorgio Cavallon remembers. Instead, Jackson just went on, playing record after record at maximum volume until long after midnight while Tomlin, who had only recently recovered from a heart attack, sat on the couch that was supposed to be his bed, looking pale, sickly, and exhausted.

  The next morning, after Tomlin, looking even worse, left to sign the papers on the house and while the Cavallons were preparing lunch, Jackson and Lee came down the stairs in full battle. “Lee got frantic and started yelling,” Cavallon recalls, “and Jackson got so mad he took a butcher knife to her and said, ‘You bitch, go upstairs.’ Then Lee started screaming: ‘Jackson, put that knife down!’” The Cavallons stood “frozen” until the ebb and flow of battle carried Jackson and Lee back upstairs. As soon as they had gone, Cavallon said to his wife, “I think we better get out of here.” When Tomlin returned and heard the story, he asked to join them. That night they drove into the city and dropped Tomlin at his apartment on Third Street downtown where Wilfrid Zogbaum was staying. Two days later, Zogbaum called Cavallon to tell him that Tomlin was dead. “That night after you left, he got sick and went to the hospital. He had a heart attack.”