Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Creatively, physically, emotionally, Jackson was falling apart. He had often said that life and art were inseparable. “You cannot separate me from my paintings—they are one and the same,” he told Lee, who refused to be convinced. “A man’s life is his work; his work is his life,” he mused to a friend about this time, locking his hands together to show what he meant. Now, as 1956 began, he seemed determined to prove it. In retrospect, Lee said later, “he seemed to be setting the stage for the last act.”

  Every morning throughout January and February, he trudged through the snow to the studio and lit the Salamander kerosene stove. The sound of it—“like a jet taking off” —would roar through the cold barn, smoke and flames would shoot from the exhaust pipe, and the frost on the windows would begin to melt, but Jackson never picked up a brush. Most mornings he would simply trudge back to the kitchen for another cup of coffee, or maybe a beer, and stare at the studio from the back door window. When Conrad Marca-Relli asked him why he continued to fire up the heater every morning, Jackson replied, “So the studio will be warm in case this is the day I can start to paint again.” But that day never came. When Sidney Janis saw the fearsome Salamander shooting flames in the “tinderbox” barn, he urged Jackson to move the paintings to a fireproof warehouse. But Marca-Relli advised against it. “Let them burn,” he said. “What do you care? You can paint some more, can’t you? Don’t let anybody take them. You need those paintings with you.” In the end, fearing the empty space they would leave behind more than fire, Jackson kept the paintings with him.

  Friends tried everything—pleading, consoling, cajoling—to start Jackson painting again. Marca-Relli asked him, “What’s the biggest painting you’ve ever done?” “Oh, eight by twenty-two, something like that,” Jackson replied. “You call that big?” Marca-Relli taunted. “Why don’t you do a really big one? What about forty by sixty?” For a moment, he could see “a sparkle of challenge” come over Jackson’s face. “I’m gonna do it,” he said. “I’m gonna do a big one.” He remembered the gymnasium at Tony Smith’s house in South Orange, and began to make plans to work there. But the next time Marca-Relli saw him, he was drinking scotch and didn’t remember a thing. Cile Lord suggested that she and Jackson set up a print shop together, like the one at the University of Iowa where she had worked. It was “all part of trying to get him working again,” said Lord. But the plans “were forgotten almost as soon as they were laid.” Reuben Kadish tried to interest him in working with clay, and Lee, knowing of his on-again-off-again interest in sculpture, would point to the large pile of junk iron in the backyard and suggest that maybe now was the time to start experimenting. Ron Gorchov remembers how many visitors to Fireplace Road “would come into the studio to talk about painting and end up making marks on his canvas.” In what must have been the ultimate degradation, even Lee had tried to prompt him by starting a canvas or two. (By the time of his death, so many people had done the same thing that the paintings in his studio had to be divided into three categories: those done by Jackson, those done by others, and “collaborations.”)

  On those rare mornings when he stayed in the studio and tried to work, the drawings and paintings he produced were nothing like the great dripped visions of previous years. Continuing a review of the past that had begun with Ocean Greyness and Ritual, he made figurative oil sketches that evoked the Mexican muralists, especially Orozco. “They were real throwbacks,” recalls Roger Wilcox, “really figurative, much more than the black-and-whites, and brushed, not dripped.” Another visitor to the studio described the figures as “sort of the outlines of the figures in Guardians of the Secret, done in black with a brush, but not yet filled in with color.” According to Wilcox, Lee was “appalled” by these retrogressive images, but Jackson apparently continued to work on them. Later that winter, Conrad Marca-Relli saw the same paintings “with the figures filled in with a multitude of colors.” (Other visitors saw them in the studio as late as summer, but by the following fall, someone had destroyed them.)

  Jackson’s health seemed to follow the fortunes of his art. Years of self-abuse had finally broken him. In the desperate effort to avoid hard liquor, he had gained almost fifty pounds from hundreds of gallons of beer. Knowing that both Stella and Sande despised obesity, he tried to hide his condition from his family. But big coats and baggy pants couldn’t conceal his swollen face, his sunken eyes, or his coarse, inflamed skin. His nerves were shot. At any loud noise—a truck backfiring, a tray falling, a crack of lightning—he would jump from his chair and pace the room in utter distraction for fifteen minutes or more. Somehow he had contracted hepatitis, which left him even more fatigued, irritable, listless, and despondent. And, in what was left of his liver, the slow scarring of cirrhosis was gradually killing him.

  But it was the deterioration of his mind, not his body, that posed the most immediate threat. When he brought home a hunting bow and began shooting arrows in the house, Lee was convinced she was the target. One day he barricaded himself in the studio with a bottle of scotch and a stack of Jimmy Yancy and Fats Waller records. Locking the doors and blocking the windows with canvases, he turned the volume on the phonograph as high as it would go—“obviously experimenting with his psyche full blast.” Panic-stricken, Lee called Ossorio and pleaded with him: “For God’s sake, you’ve got to come over and help me get Jackson out of there.” Even scarier were the days when he sat on the back porch or stood at the kitchen window “and just stared and stared and stared for hours,” Ted Dragon recalls. “At the end, he was turning into a very weird personality.” On a trip into New York, he ran out into the midday traffic on Madison Avenue as Budd Hopkins watched in horror. “He walked straight down the middle of the street,” Hopkins remembers, “down the white line between lanes, car horns blowing. I didn’t want to look, because I knew he was going to be dead in two seconds. It was a Russian roulette thing.” On another trip, he tried to jump out of a fast-moving taxi. When informed of the incident, Lee was sure it was a suicide attempt, but Jackson denied it.

  In Springs, during his last summer, 1956

  If Lee believed him, it was because there was never any doubt in her mind, or anyone else’s, how Jackson would die. She had spent too many nights “not knowing where he was, who he was with, if he was alive or dead”—half in a rage, wishing him dead, wanting to kill him herself, half in torment that he might be killed, that she would hear the wailing of an ambulance in the distance or see a policeman at the door bearing the inevitable news. After the drive out from New York at Christmas time, she knew: the car was Jackson’s weapon of choice. She insured the Oldsmobile “up to the eyebrows,” according to Paul Jenkins. But Jackson still refused to slow down, even after being sentenced to two years’ probation after the incident at Sam’s. One night he returned, pale with fright, from a near-accident in which his car had spun completely around on a deserted road. “God, I was scared to death,” he told Lee. But the next night he was back out on the road with a case of beer on the seat beside him. Of all his insanities, it was, in its own prosaic way, the most insane.

  At the Cedar Tavern, meanwhile, he was a star again. The crowds waiting outside under the round neon sign, many of whom had come just to see “Old Grizzly” in action, would greet him by name when he arrived. Inside, people at the bar, two and three deep, would part to make room for him, slap him on the back, punch his arm, offer to buy him drinks, touch him for luck. When he got up, they would announce his movements in excited whispers: “There’s Jackson!” or “Jackson just went to the john!” Among them were respectful admirers, “trying to get close to their king,” David Budd recalls, as well as mere spectators, filled with the delicious anxiety that maybe tonight he would do something truly outrageous so that tomorrow they could tell their friends, “You should have been at the Cedar last night. You should have seen Jackson.” To some, their attention looked like honest deference; to others, bear-baiting; to others, “nauseating sycophantic shit.” Whatever it was, Jackson devoured it. He would
ask the crowd, “Who’s the greatest painter in the world?” and they would answer back, “You are,” and he would echo, “It’s me. They know it’s me.” “It was Jackson’s bar,” recalls Gerome Kamrowski. “He was the main attraction.”

  Like his art, Jackson’s agony had become an act. In his desperation to regain his celebrity, to please the crowds, he had become a parody of himself. When he came to the bar in the middle of the day, he would sit so quietly among the secretaries and businessmen that “you wouldn’t know he was there,” according to Sam the bartender. Later in the evening, he would come by and peek in the window to check the size of the crowd. “If the audience wasn’t big enough for his big dramatic entrance,” Franz Kline recalled, “he would come back later, loaded slightly more.” Now, instead of the good clothes he used to wear into the city, he often wore jean jackets and T-shirts to enhance the cowboy image. For the first time since the early thirties, he bought a pair of cowboy boots. He began affecting a drawl and a cowboy walk for his “Tuesday-night shoot-outs at the Cedar saloon.”

  The booze was still real, the language still incendiary, the self-abuse still deadly serious, but the rages had turned into histrionics, the fights into spectator sport. Willem de Kooning found that out when he slugged Jackson for insulting Joan Ward, who had just given birth to his child. Instead of returning the punch, as those around him urged, Jackson shook his head and said indignantly, “What? Me hit an artist?” The next day, Jackson called Nicholas Carone and complained: “That son of a bitch doesn’t understand. I love him.”

  One night, Franz Kline scolded Jackson for berating Philip Guston. “You shouldn’t have laid into Guston that way; you really hurt his feelings.” Unrepentant, Jackson began to arrange the half-empty mugs on his table as if preparing to use them as ammunition. Before he could finish, however, Kline tipped the table up and the glasses tumbled into Jackson’s lap. Jackson let out “a bellow” and retreated behind the swinging door that led to the kitchen and the men’s room, where he wiped himself off. A minute later, he appeared in the doorway, his face flushed with what looked like rage. Tearing the swinging door off its hinges, he flung it across the room and stalked toward Kline. “Everybody stands up, it’s like the O.K. Corral, a showdown,” recalls Budd Hopkins, an eyewitness. “Jackson grabs Kline in a wrestling hold. Kline gives him a huge shove, pushing him back against the bar. Jackson lets out another roar and comes at Kline again. They grapple and fall to the floor.” Just when Kline, the more agile and sober of the two, had Jackson pinned, Jackson whispered in his ear: “Not so hard, Franz.”

  Even the sale of Blue Poles to Fred Olsen for $6,000—a spectacular success at the time—was reduced to just another pretext for barroom braggadocio. The Tuesday after the deal was completed, Jackson wheeled into the Cedar and slapped his wallet down on the bar. It was a brand-new one with the letters “JP” embossed on it in gold. He ran his thick fingers over it and announced to the crowd, “J.P. Those are the initials to have if you’re a painter.”

  Once again, Jackson was trapped in his own celebrity—as in Namuth’s film, playing a role; feeling, week by week, more like a fraud, more like the phony that his brothers had always accused him of being. Jackson “stormed” the Cedar Bar and tried to be “one of the boys,” said Clement Greenberg. “That can be killing, [trying to be] one of the boys.”

  But stardom at the Cedar Bar, despite its high cost, couldn’t begin to satisfy Jackson’s demons. The Cedar, after all, took up only one day of seven, even if the recoveries sometimes lasted until Thursday or Friday. “He was in a whole lot of pain,” recalls Nancy Smith, a friend of Clement Greenberg’s, “and he was kind of pleading all the time for someone to be sensitive to him and take him out of his miseries or to at least soothe him. The bumbling, bear-like act was just a cover-up for being so wounded.” Conrad Marca-Relli described him as “like a little boy, on the verge of tears all the time and afraid to be alone.”

  Yet more and more Jackson was alone. In the afternoons, he would go to the Edwards Theater in East Hampton and sit among the empty seats to watch Humphrey Bogart in The Desperate Hours or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Other days he would drive to Montauk, pausing to look at the skeletal ruins of an abandoned power station, or wander the familiar back roads around Jeffrey Potter’s farm. A year before, he would have stopped along the way to visit friends. But by now most friends had made it clear he wasn’t welcome. Peter Blake, fearful that Jackson would harm his pregnant wife, had cut off all contact. So had Lawrence and Roseanne Larkin and Joe and Millie Liss. Barbara Hale had barred him from the house that he helped renovate. Eleanor Hempstead had moved and pointedly kept her new address a secret from him.

  One of the few places where he was still welcome was Nick and Adele Carone’s old farmhouse in Three Mile Harbor—a house that Jackson had found for them. Carone was a handsome, earnest, familiar man with penetrating eyes—“If you painted with the intensity of those eyes,” Jackson had told him when they first met, “that would be something”—and the two could talk endlessly about paint—not theory, not history, not politics—just paint: the sheer material thrill of it. Jackson admired Carone’s gutsy articulateness—“Say that again,” he would demand, “say that again”—and Carone loved the way Jackson looked at his pictures. “My work was being judged by somebody very meaningful,” Carone recalls. “He would say marvelous things to me, like ‘You got it, got it good.’” Jackson raised his usual objections to Carone’s teaching (Carone’s response: “I don’t teach art, I teach a language”), but admired his work enough to offer to trade paintings.

  Nick and Adele Carone

  On Fireplace Road, the phone seldom rang. “He certainly wasn’t the toast of the town,” recalls Conrad Marca-Relli. “No one was calling him up or inviting him to anything, and he was bitter about it. He didn’t seem to understand that he had brought it on himself. He would complain to me, ‘What’s the matter? Why don’t they want me over? Maybe they think I’m a phony as an artist.’ Lee must have told him a hundred times, ‘Jackson you behave in such a way that people are afraid to have you over; it’s as simple as that.’” On the rare occasions when he was invited out, Marca-Relli recalls, he felt obliged to “make a scandal,” as he did at Paul Wiener’s house when he urinated in a potted plant. The phone didn’t ring for weeks after that.

  When he went into New York to visit galleries, Lee no longer went along. Friends saw him there—at the Alan Davie show, mumbling to himself about his influence on English painters; at Mark Tobey’s show, looking desperate; at Joe Glasco’s show, looking lost—but most kept their distance. Nell Blaine saw him wander drunkenly into a shoe store near Eighth Street “looking bloated and disfigured by alcohol.” Thinking he was “just another Bowery bum,” the manager threw him out. “I went up to the manager and said, ‘Do you know who that was?’ “Blaine recalls. “But the name Jackson Pollock meant nothing to him. It was heartbreaking.” Another night while in town, Jackson made the mistake of showing up, sober and uninvited, at a party given by Robert Motherwell for Phil Guston. Drunk and sensing Jackson’s vulnerability, Bill de Kooning and Franz Kline set upon him, calling him a “has been” and eventually hounding him out of the party. “He had every right to get drunk or to slug them,” Motherwell recalled, “but in fact he just took it.”

  On Thanksgiving, the Marca-Rellis and Carones brought their records to Jackson’s house for a night of music and dancing—Lee joined in; Jackson only watched. But laughter and conviviality were largely a thing of the past on Fireplace Road. Few of the old circle came by anymore. The split with Clement Greenberg, now two years old, had never really mended. At dinner one night, Carone asked Jackson, “Who understands your pictures? How about Clement Greenberg? He’s made a career on you. Does he understand?” Jackson thought for a moment before answering, with a touch of bitterness, “Not a fucking thing.” Far more painful to Jackson was the continuing (and, to Jackson, inexplicable) chill in his relationship with Clyfford Still. Furious
over Jackson’s complicity in the Janis retrospective—which he considered a moral outrage—Still seized on Janis’s failure to send him an invitation as an excuse to deliver a blistering attack on Jackson’s integrity. On December 3, he wrote:

  Dear Jack,

  I did not receive an invitation to your show. This makes me somewhat curious. Is it that you are ashamed of it? Or are you ashamed of what you are willing to take from those who know how to use you to express their contempt for the artist as a man? It’s a hell of a price to pay, isn’t it?

  Yours most sincerely, Clyfford S.

  The day it came, Jackson sat up until one in the morning, crying. He called a friend in New York City and read it, “but was beyond being comforted.” “I’m in a terrible state,” he finally said, and hung up.

  On January 28, Jackson threw himself a birthday party. Despite miserable weather conditions and Lee’s lack of interest, he called Barnett Newman, whose birthday was January 29, and insisted on a joint celebration. Newman, who saw Jackson almost every week on his trips into the city, tried to talk his way out of it, but Jackson pleaded, “You have to come.” The Newmans brought a recording of The Magic Flute as a present, and, eager for their approval, Jackson spent most of the evening sitting quietly and listening to Mozart’s opera of trial and redemption. He joked about “getting away from it all”—an increasingly common topic—either “back to the west” or perhaps to Spain, following Hemingway’s trail. Newman went along with the plans, mostly to humor Jackson. “It was just a dream,” he later admitted.