Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Their basic dispute with Freud was over the nature of man. Where Freud saw human nature as essentially predatory and in need of control, Pearce and Newton argued that human nature was essentially beneficent and creative and in need of freer expression, not more repression. They preferred the word “dissociation” to “repression.” “We believe that what is dissociated in most people, infants and adults, is their energy,” says Pearce. “Their spontaneity, their creativity, their capacity for tenderness get repressed, and this frustration leads to a certain amount of hostility.” To alleviate the hostility, it was only necessary to remove the repression. Within a decade, “Sullivanian” theories would be used to rationalize free love, sexual communes, and other more exaggerated forms of “association.” (“Everyone was encouraged to have babies,” recalls one former patient. “Saul Newton had some kind of bee in his bonnet that the world should be full of children—his children.”) But even as early as 1955, when Jackson began seeing Klein, the message was already clear: “If it feels good, do it.”

  In therapy, Klein hewed to Pearce’s theories with the tenacity of youth and inexperience. “I think that he probably saw the doctrinaire principles more clearly than he saw the person in front of him,” says a colleague. Although he routinely took detailed psychological histories, Klein didn’t believe in the significance of traumatic incidents and undoubtedly dismissed most of Jackson’s oft-told memories out of hand. He must have quickly identified Jackson’s troubled relationship with his mother, however, for soon friends were startled to hear Jackson “letting out his hostility” toward Stella, calling her “that old womb with a built-in tomb,” and speculating that “maybe I paint because I want to sleep with my mother.” (Lionel Abel’s response: “You want to sleep with somebody, Jackson, but I don’t think it’s your mother.”) He told Clement Greenberg straight out that he “hated his mother,” and Lee saw in his continuing refusal to eat—typical of advanced alcoholism—a silent protest against Stella’s most potent instrument of control.

  Nothing felt better, of course, than drinking, and Jackson took Klein’s injunction to “express himself” as a carte blanche at the bar. “He would say, ‘What the fuck, everybody should always do what they want to do,’” Ted Dragon recalls, “‘and if I want to dump Lee at home and sit with the guys down at the bar, so what?’” In fact, Klein complained to Pearce privately when Jackson began showing up drunk for sessions, but Pearce, no teetotaler herself, advised him that Jackson’s drinking was beyond his purview; that he could only “put up with it, pray and hope that Jackson will come to therapy and deal with his anxieties in a better way.” By Jackson’s account, Klein never mentioned drinking again, never counseled against driving when drunk, and never suggested that Jackson seek help from other sources, such as Alcoholics Anonymous. When Conrad Marca-Relli asked, “Did you tell Klein you have a drinking problem?” Jackson replied, “Yes, but he says, ‘That’s your problem.’”

  By the spring of 1956, as Jackson’s health deteriorated and the drinking binges grew impossibly longer and wilder, Marca-Relli wasn’t the only friend who began to question Klein’s competence. Patsy Southgate called him a “pipsqueak.” She wondered why somebody didn’t say, “Hey, wait a minute—how about a second opinion?” Ben Heller was stunned when he called Klein to complain that Jackson still wasn’t eating well and Klein responded glibly, “Look at the stuff that’s in beer, the grain and so forth.”

  But Jackson clung to Klein—if anything, more desperately as the rest of his life disintegrated. At one point, at Marca-Relli’s urging, he tried to break off the relationship; he even called Klein and told him, “Go screw. I’m not coming any more.” But the next week at the appointed hour, he disappeared, and Marca-Relli knew where he had gone. “Maybe he was scared of not going in or maybe he just wanted a drink, but he couldn’t break free.” “Jackson was so desperately insecure,” says Patsy Southgate, “he needed someone who was bowled over, someone who was nothing but supportive. That’s what he found in Ralph Klein.”

  Jackson’s problem, according to Klein, was that he hadn’t lived enough. He was too focused on the past, especially the destructive relationship with Lee (with whom, Jackson said, he had not had sex in three years.) The solution? He needed to stop repressing his feeling and “act out his sexual impulses,” to get back in touch with his creative energy. In other words, he needed a woman.

  Soon Jackson began regaling his friends, male and female, with the wonders of the opposite sex and how much he loved them. He told Cile Lord that he had “discovered” women’s bodies. “They’re so beautiful,” he said, “their breasts, their shoulders, their ears, their ankles, their noses, their wrists,” and on and on until Lord couldn’t help but laugh. He told Jeffrey Potter, “A lot of times I’d rather quietly hold a woman, just lying there by her, than screwing.” When he and Tony Smith passed Greta Garbo walking on the Upper East Side, he turned to Smith and swooned, “I don’t know about love … I’ve only experienced it three times. … one of them was when we passed that woman.”

  For practice, he took Joan Ward to dinner at a romantic Italian restaurant on Thompson Street. But “he had no small talk,” Ward remembers, and the silence was so awkward that he finally retreated to some friends across the room and stayed so long that Ward got up and walked out. (He called later to apologize.) At a party, he begged Budd Hopkins to introduce him to a young, attractive female friend, Josie Wilkinson. “Jackson, she doesn’t know anything about art,” Hopkins warned. “I don’t care,” said Jackson. “I’ve got to meet her.” When Hopkins made the introductions, Jackson, who had been wheeling through the party grabbing breasts as usual, was suddenly very polite. “He sort of shifted gears and was calling her ‘Miss Wilkinson,’” Hopkins recalls. Soon afterward, however, Jackson turned away from the conversation, unzipped his pants, and relieved himself in a nearby potted plant. “Then he zipped himself up and resumed the conversation,” says Hopkins. “The girl was totally stunned.”

  So were Elinor Poindexter and her daughter Christie when they met Jackson, drunk, coming out of an opening and he invited nineteen-year-old Christie to dinner at the Cedar Bar. “She didn’t even really accept,” recalls Poindexter. “He just said, ‘Let’s go, come on.’ What could she do?” At the Cedar, with the elder Poindexter acting as chaperon, Jackson tried to “express his romantic feelings toward women.” But all that came out was self-pity. Budd Hopkins remembers seeing Jackson sitting in a booth with the two women, tears running down his face, “telling them what a fraud he was, that he had never done the things he wanted to do, that he felt helpless.”

  He propositioned Jane Smith “any number of times,” made passes at Patsy Southgate, and terrified Marisol Escobar in an effort to kiss her. When he grabbed Joan Ward at a party, Budd Hopkins remembers, Ward “just wrenched his hand off her while she was still talking to me.” Drunk at Jungle Pete’s one night, he stumbled around the crowded dance floor with Miriam Schapiro, pawing her roughly until, just as the music stopped, she shouted, “Cut it out, Jackson, or I’ll kick you in the balls!” David Budd saw him walk up to a girl at the Cedar and say, “You got great tits—let’s fuck.” When she fled in disgust, he called after her, “What’s the hurry?” One night in the Cedar Bar, he made a “beeline” for Audrey Flack, a rambunctious young art student in a bomber jacket and tight jeans. Although no “babe in the woods,” Flack was terrified. “This huge man tried to grab me, pinched me in the behind, and burped in my face. He wanted to kiss me, but I took one look at him and I realized that this man whom everybody idolized was sick—sick, debauched, and desperate. I couldn’t imagine kissing him. It would be like kissing a derelict on the Bowery.”

  Frustrated in the real world, Jackson turned increasingly to fantasy. He bragged to B. H. Friedman that he had “fucked Rita Benton.” With others, he added Mercedes Matter and Vita Peterson to the list of fictitious conquests. To Jeffrey Potter: “Dames got their hooks out for us and if they’ve got dough, watch out … they�
��re all over me, always were.” He called Sande to titillate him with stories, mostly innuendo, all false, about “being involved with a lot of women.” He told Reuben Kadish that he wasn’t interested in painting anymore, only in women. Concerned that some might question the virility of a man married ten years and still without children, he insinuated Lee was infertile. The stories came so suddenly, so torrentially, that even admirers like Friedman thought perhaps Jackson protested too much.

  According to one story emanating from the Cedar Bar, Franz Kline and some friends grew so tired of Jackson’s drunken advances and sexual braggadocio that they hired a call girl and set her within his range. When he approached her with the inevitable “Wanna fuck?” the woman jumped up, grabbed her coat, and offered, “Let’s go.” According to the story, Jackson collapsed instantly. When David Budd brought to the Cedar a young female friend from Idaho—“a real dish, a real tomato, she looked like Daisy Mae in ‘Dogpatch’”—Jackson, “who was as famous as a movie star then,” says Budd, turned to her and growled, “Let’s go to my place and fuck.” “She didn’t bat an eye,” Budd recalls. “She just calmly said, ‘No, not now. I don’t have the time,’ and went on talking. Jackson got up and said, ‘Well, I don’t either!’ and walked off in a huff.”

  As Kline and Budd discovered, it was all an act: a desperate fantasy as false as the stories Jackson told. “I could have been a cow,” says Terry Liss of Jackson’s groping. “The way he reached out to touch was not touching. It had no relationship to feeling.” The girls he lunged after in the street would just laugh, Clement Greenberg recalls. “He was drunk, so they didn’t feel threatened.” Which was exactly the point. Drunk, he never ran the risk of success. The brutish grappling, the childlike weeping, the grossness, the menace, were all forms of protection, ways of insulating himself from the very intimacy he professed to crave. Paul Brach wasn’t the only friend who thought Jackson’s approach was intended, at some level, to “assure that there would be no sexual action. To guarantee it.” Drunk was an excuse for not being able to perform. Drunk was a way to forget the questions that his inability to perform always raised. The more he drank, the less likely success; the less likely success, the greater his anxiety; the greater his anxiety, the more he drank.

  But if drink protected him from the anxiety of sex with women, what would protect him from the even greater anxiety of sex without them?—an anxiety that increasingly overtook him in the darkness outside of bars, especially in East Hampton, when he found himself in the company of strangers.

  Around two o’clock in the morning on a frigid night in early 1956, Nick Carone was awakened by a telephone call from Lee Krasner. “Nick, you’ve got to come over,” she said in the choked, stoic voice she always used to cover her near panic. Carone protested, “I’m asleep,” but Lee insisted. “Nick, you’ve got to make an effort. Jackson has been gone all day.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” she said with an inflection that Carone thought signaled a special dread, not just the usual anxiety over Jackson’s drinking. “Some guys came around, some rednecks, and they came by and took him away. He hasn’t come back. Please come and stay with me. I’m worried.”

  When Carone arrived at the Pollock house, he found Lee sitting in the ice-cold kitchen drinking coffee. He asked her again what had happened. “These guys came around and took him,” she repeated with the same tone of dread. When he pressed—“Well, what’s so unusual about that?”—she muttered something about “what they might do to him.” Carone recalls: “She never came right out and said it, but it was clear she was frightened that they were going to rape him. I sensed that this was triggered by something in the past. … There was something strange there, something hidden.” What Lee was afraid to say, no doubt, was that this was not the first time Jackson had disappeared under similarly bizarre circumstances. On several previous occasions, a group of strange men had taken him away, only to return in the middle of the night to “dump him on the doorstep”—bruised and shaken in ways that alcohol alone couldn’t explain—then speed away.

  Without taking off his coat and muffler, Carone joined Lee’s vigil in the freezing kitchen, sipping coffee, rarely talking, waiting. “Every now and then, Lee would get up and look out a window and ask, ‘Where is he?’ Every time a car passed, she would say, ‘Maybe that’s him.’ She was obviously terrified that they had done something awful to him.”

  Suddenly the kitchen door flew open and Jackson came in “like a wild animal.” He looked at Carone and demanded, “What the fuck are you doing here?” “Waiting for you, Jackson,” Carone replied, thinking, “He’s going to kill me.” Lee tried to calm him. “Jackson, are you okay?” she asked. “Would you like a glass of hot milk?” Jackson responded with rage. “Fuck you, you fucking cunt, what the fuck do you want from me anyway?” Rage. Rage. Rage. “This was going on with the greatest profanity I had ever heard in my life,” Carone remembers. “‘You motherfucking cunt bitch’ and on and on and on. And all I could think was, ‘Jesus, I hope he’s not going to kill me.’” Lee retreated across the kitchen, “silent and receptive, rather than fighting back,” careful not to provoke, deaf to the hail of insults. Then he went slack for a few minutes, walked to the window, sat at the table, stood up. “He couldn’t stay still,” says Carone. Seeing an opening, Lee advanced cautiously. “Would you like that glass of hot milk now?” she asked. Something tripped the detonator and the tirade began again. “I’ve done it! Fuck! I did it!” Jackson roared. “What the fuck do they want from me anyway? What the fuck do they want from me? What the fuck! I’ve done it! What more do they want?”

  Just when the rage should have begun to dissipate, it intensified. “Lee was getting seriously worried,” Carone recalls. As Jackson stumbled toward the stairs, she moved in close with stunning fearlessness. “She did it to protect him from himself,” says Carone, but he pushed her away as though he couldn’t stand to be touched. “What the fuck are you doing to me?” he screamed over and over. “What the fuck are you doing to me?” “He was going like a madman. He got so angry, screaming and screaming. It was like he was losing his mind right there.” Suddenly, he reached up and grabbed a chandelier that hung in the hallway at the foot of the stairs. Carone rose to stop him, but Lee motioned him to stay back. “No,” she commanded. “Don’t go near him. He might attack you.” With a great heave, Jackson yanked the chandelier from the ceiling. It came off too easily, sending him tumbling over backwards into the corner of the room, where he landed on a big flowerpot, which exploded underneath him.

  For a moment he lay so still that Lee thought he might be dead. “He was sprawled out and bleeding,” says Carone, “and Lee didn’t know what the hell had happened.” Then he began to moan. Lee knelt down beside him and started again. “Are you all right, Jackson? Can I get you something?” The rage broken, he began to whimper, “It hurts. It hurts.” “Where does it hurt?” Lee asked. Jackson rubbed his buttocks. “That got her worried again about what they had done to him,” Carone recalls. “Was he sore from that?” “Come on, Jackson,” she finally said. “I’ll take you upstairs.” She turned to Carone. “It’s all right, let me take care of it,” and she shouldered Jackson up to bed.

  Not long afterward, Jackson was brooding in a booth at the Cedar Bar when a pretty young brunette sat down beside him. Her name was Ruth Kligman.

  44

  ESCAPE VELOCITY

  By early spring 1956, Jackson and Lee both knew it had to end. The only question was how: “Who would break? “Who would let go first? Lee had grown strong enough to conceive of leaving. Jackson had grown self-destructive enough. They hurled challenges at each other. He beat her. She called the police. He threatened to leave her. She threatened to have him committed to a mental institution. He screamed, “I’ll kill you.” She screamed, “You’re killing me.” But still they clung to each other: unable, unwilling, afraid to escape; lashing out, Clement Greenberg recalls, “like a wounded anima
l tearing at its own entrails”; addicted to abuse and abusing; circling each other in ever tighter, more self-destructive orbits; preparing themselves for the inevitable collision that would end it all—or the miracle that would set them free.

  No one wondered why Jackson was attracted to Ruth Kligman. She was, everyone agreed, a voluptuous twenty-five-year-old-woman: porcelain skin, big breasts, sensuous lips, lustrous brown hair, a warm, seductive voice and a flattering girlish way with men. The harder question was why was she attracted to him? “Why wasn’t she, like Audrey Flack and a dozen other young women who had felt Jackson’s grope, disgusted by his swollen face, blotchy skin, and Bowery breath? It wasn’t enough to say, as Ruth herself did later, that she was a young painter and he was simply “the great master.” Flack and the others were also young painters, no less worldly than Ruth, no less ambitious, no less aware of Jackson’s stature. (“He was like a movie star to me,” says Flack.) Yet they had fled his debauched advances, the menace, and the pain that “radiated” from him. Why did Ruth Kligman, sitting close to him in the booth that night in the unflattering glare of the Cedar Bar, move even closer?

  Like Lee Krasner, Ruth Kligman had come from a family in which abuse was often mistaken for love. Her father, a handsome local con man whom she knew by his professional name, “Bootie,” had married her mother when she was eighteen and promptly abandoned her. “My father didn’t come to the house,” says Ruth. “He came in my mother and that was it.” Disowned by her well-to-do Russian Jewish parents over Bootie, Mary Kligman raised her twin daughters, Ruth and Iris, alone, always on the edge of poverty and paranoia. “My mother was always crying,” Ruth later wrote. “She cried, I cried, and my twin sister cried, we all cried in a kind of horrible unison. I never knew what was wrong. But the outside world represented terror.” Their only escape was the little movie house in Newark, New Jersey, where Ruth developed an obsession with fame, stardom, fantasy love, and distant, celluloid men. At one point, Mary Kligman dressed up her two dark-haired, brown-eyed little daughters and took them to a local Shirley Temple look-alike contest. She was “convinced we would win,” Ruth recalls, “but they wouldn’t even let us enter. No brunettes allowed.” Most days were spent “waiting for Daddy.” On the rare occasions when he appeared in his fancy clothes, Ruth felt a strange, electrifying mixture of terror, disgust, and ecstasy—“Daddy was always the desirable one,” she would later admit.