Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  The last picture of Jackson and Lee together, Springs, 1956

  At the age of five, Ruthie, as she was called, had her first nervous breakdown. She went into a catatonic state, refused to eat or sleep, heard strange noises, and saw “monsters with green fluorescent eyes” around her bed at night. The spell was broken only when an aunt took her into the bathroom, forced her to urinate in her own hands, then threw the urine in her face.

  Ruth found her escape in art and men. The connection was made early, at the age of seven, when she fell madly in love with a drawing of Beethoven. “His eyes were wild, his forehead high, full of energy. I decided I would be similarly artistic—and if not, the wife or mistress of a genius. Or better yet, both,” she later wrote. At thirteen, she went alone to the Metropolitan Museum and gazed in rapture at Rodin sculptures and a painting by Vermeer in which “the light was so clear and bright,” she recalled, “that I looked behind the picture to see if there was a lightbulb.” In school, she found real boys tiresome and frightening. Like Lee Krasner, she longed to get away from home, to flee to the city. She dreamed of “going into the backyard and jumping over the fence into a beautiful country with hills and green and sunlight and a man was there.” Out of high school, she found a job modeling in the garment district on Seventh Avenue where her cigar-chewing bosses used to say, “Ruthie has class.” When people asked about her past, she would tell them about her wealthy family, especially her rich, adoring father. She had a series of affairs with older men, but her real loves remained safely distant figures: “Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Rimbaud.” “Men were such frightening people to me,” she recalls, “that I could only manipulate them.” At twenty, she met an older, married man who could afford her expensive fantasies—“my rich daddy,” she called him. They went to the races in a limousine, to the Copacabana and the 21 Club, and Ruth “forgot about art for a while.” “I took advantage,” she later admitted. “I had him wrapped around my adorable little waist, I cried, got drunk when I didn’t get my way, he spoiled me.”

  The fantasy ended abruptly two years later with another nervous breakdown. She took up art again, enrolling in a painting class at the New School and taking a job at the Collectors Gallery where “she had such a persuasive way of talking about art,” recalls Audrey Flack, “that she could have been a great art salesperson.” She devoured movie magazines and Vogue, spent hours at beauty parlors and in front of the mirror, and started seeing a Jungian analyst. When she told her father, who materialized briefly in a milk-white Cadillac convertible, about the analysis, he flew into a rage. His face “went white” and he started screaming. “That’s for crazy people. … What the hell is wrong with you? Can’t you control yourself with men? What kind of a creep are you? Are you a lesbian or something?” Sobbing hysterically, Ruth pleaded, “I need help,” but Bootie was crazy beyond listening. “What are you, some kind of whore or queer?” he screamed as he opened the car door. “Get out of this car, you TRAMP.” Then he pushed her out into the gutter and sped away.

  Not long afterward, Jackson Pollock entered her life.

  Like Beethoven, he arrived first in the abstract. In her newfound obsession with painting, she had asked Audrey Flack to introduce her to important artists. “You want to know artists,” Flack said, “I’ll introduce you to artists.” Flack gave her three names: Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline. Ruth didn’t recognize any of the names, but she carefully wrote them down. Then she pressed, “Which one is the greatest?”

  “Pollock,” said Flack.

  She told Ruth about the Cedar Bar and wrote down the address, but refused to accompany her there—“I never wanted to go back to the place,” she said. Ruth later claimed that she met Jackson on her first visit to the Cedar, but others remember her coming often and sitting in the smoky light, almost always dressed in pink, waiting for him to come in. She went to see his paintings at the Janis Gallery where, she recalls, “the energy poured into me and I understood them totally on every level.” She may even have traveled to the bars of East Hampton and suffered the leers of locals in the hope of catching his eye. Terry Liss at the Elm Tree Inn remembers seeing her often the previous summer. Roger Wilcox saw her at the beach with her sister Iris. “Identical twins, like a surrealist event,” says Wilcox, “and they were both on the make for artists.” Long before she met him, Jackson was Ruth’s “hero,” an abstraction she adored “as other girls adored Brando or Elvis,” by her account.

  Finally, sometime in February 1956, she summoned her courage and “made a beeline” for him.

  She later claimed that “the first moment we looked at each other, I fell in love with him and he fell in love with me.” The reality, however, fell far short of the fantasy. Like Lee, Ruth found Jackson, for all his drunken advances and machismo bluster, a reluctant lover. After their first encounter, she waited breathlessly for his call. A week or more passed. Finally, she started calling the Cedar—“I couldn’t take being treated casually,” she said. When she reached him, drunk and distant on the other end of the line, he barely remembered her. She had to refresh his memory: Ruth Kligman, the “dark-haired girl” at the Cedar. But Ruth was “very persistent and aggressive,” according to a friend, “and she just wore him out.” It took almost two months, but her persistence paid off. One night she coaxed him, undoubtedly drunk, to her apartment on Sixteenth Street. By the next morning, Jackson was convinced that they had had sex.

  The rest was easy.

  Finally Jackson had something real to brag about, something to appease Ralph Klein and the boys at the Cedar. The next week, he paraded her in front of them. When David Budd saw her, dressed in a scarlet coat with a silver fox collar and “woozy with drink,” he thought, “I can see how that would drive anybody off the wall. She’s some cookie.” “Why, Jackson,” cried Willem de Kooning in astonishment, “do you have a girl?” Jackson waved him away with a warning: “Keep your hands off of her.” When they left that night, de Kooning ran after them, calling, “Can I see her, can I see her?” Jackson had their picture taken by the photo girl in another bar and proudly passed it around among his friends in Springs. “He showed off this snapshot of her and wanted to know what I thought,” Nick Carone recalls. “He was like a child.” He boasted to Jeffrey Potter, the car buff, about his “late model cream puff … barely broken in [and] loaded with extras.”

  Ruth had a very different vision. To her, they were “Brando and Monroe,” or “Bacall and Bogart.” Jackson served her fantasies well, taking her to nightclubs like El Chico and Eddie Condon’s, restaurants, and Broadway shows. They would enter and exit “like stars,” Ruth wrote. People “bowed in front of us. … We were very tall.” He treated her to taxi rides—“This is what women do in the real world,” she exulted—bought her presents, and dressed in his “rich-looking” clothes so she could feel “glamorous.” He bragged about the money he had made on the sales of Blue Poles and One. She talked about traveling together to exotic places and buying a pied-à-terre, preferably on Park Avenue, “instead of staying in some uncomfortable little room at the Hotel Earle when he came to town.”

  In return, Ruth served Jackson’s fantasy. In public, she flattered him, clung coyly to his arm, and played lovers’ games: finger games, eye games, jealousy games. At a club one night, he danced with another woman, so she danced with another man. Jackson slapped her and she swooned. On the rare occasions when they were alone, she avoided talking about art or his career—it invariably made him weep. That left Jungian analysis (they decided that he was the archetypal “Old Wise Man” and she, the archetypal “Lover”) and previous affairs, real or imagined. “He talked a lot of Rita [Benton],” Ruth recalls. “He said, ‘You remind me of her,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, she’s old.’” He insisted that she was a virgin when they met and she didn’t disagree. She said, in public, “I love you, Jackson,” and he said, in public, “I love you, Ruth,” and, according to Ruth, they both “loved the love.”

  Despite Jackson’s boasts and Ruth’s later clai
ms, there was little, if any, sex. When they were alone, Jackson still made sure to be drunk, or wept profusely. (Tears, he had discovered, turned any woman into a mother.) Ruth probably preferred it that way. The best sex, she had concluded, was “metaphorical”—everything else diminished the fantasy. For her, power was consummation enough. “I wanted everyone to pay attention to me,” she says, “and when I was with Jackson, they did.” For Jackson, apparently, the strange, delicious thrill of having a desirable woman at his side was enough.

  Far from hiding his relationship with Ruth, Jackson flaunted it, parading her in public places and professing his love for her on train rides with Patsy Southgate. At the house in Springs, he called her almost every day and talked for hours, with Lee in the next room. On the few occasions when he appeared with Lee in public, he dropped heavy, hurtful hints in rooms filled with knowing ears. “Just how old are you, Lee?” he shouted to her from across the room at a dinner party. In conversations with Lee’s friends, he talked about making “permanent arrangements” for Ruth and tested the waters of divorce, in the certainty that such hints would find their way back to Lee. “He viewed the whole thing as an amazing adventure,” Patsy Southgate recalled. “Like a little boy, his dream was to have both.”

  To some extent, such callous talk may have been simply Jackson’s clumsy effort to “express himself without guilt,” as Ralph Klein had urged him to do—or, as Clement Greenberg succinctly put it, to “fuck appearances.” According to Klein’s philosophy, Lee should have been pleased that Jackson was “expressing himself and enjoying the company of another person,” even if that other person was Ruth Kligman. But Jackson surely knew better. He knew Lee’s special vulnerability too well. He had tracked it through a whole series of fabricated affairs: Rita Benton, Maria Motherwell, Vita Peterson, Mercedes Matter. Now he had something real with which to hurt her. Says Greenberg: “He was out after Lee’s face.”

  Lee tried for as long as she could to ignore it, a response that only infuriated Jackson more and brought him more daringly into the open. Her friends were sympathetic. They avoided Jackson when they could and, when they couldn’t, ignored Ruth. To Jackson’s protests that “Lee doesn’t understand me,” most responded as Carol Braider did: “Oh, fuck off, Jackson.” When they brought reports of Jackson’s plans for divorce, Lee hardened against him. Where only a few months before she had been considering it herself, now she told friends: “I will never give Jackson a divorce.” In an effort at conciliation, she proposed that they take a trip to Europe, visit Peggy Guggenheim, and see the Venice Biennale, but Jackson refused. He couldn’t miss his weekly visit to Ralph Klein, he claimed, visits that now sometimes stretched to two or three days. It was clearly a standoff that could not last forever.

  In June, Ruth moved to Sag Harbor, only twelve miles from Springs. She claimed that she didn’t realize when she took the summer job as a monitor at the Abraham Rattner School of Art that it would bring her so close to Jackson, but in fact she was tiring of the life of a mistress: the indignities, the furtive phone calls, the condescending looks of Jackson’s friends. Where Lee struggled to avoid a confrontation and Jackson talked of “having both,” Ruth clearly understood that her only hope lay in confrontation. The very day she arrived, with a suitcase full of pink clothes—“in case someone invited me to a fancy-dress ball or to go yachting”—Jackson drove from Springs and took her to dinner at the Elm Tree Inn in Amagansett, just a few turns away from Fireplace Road. In the following weeks, he called every day and visited two or three nights a week. He displayed her at the crowded Coast Guard Beach where Ibram Lassaw and scores of others “stared at this zaftig chick with a curvaceous body walking next to Jackson.” He drove her over to the Stony Hill Farm where Jeffrey Potter remembers “his grin, his arm around her, and the finger with the missing tip caressing her shoulder, bare above the halter.” He even introduced her to Lee’s closest friends like Cile Lord. “I think he had come to assume that we were sympathetic to him in all things,” says Lord, who was not at all sympathetic in this. Soon he began spending nights away, no longer bothering with the pretense of visits to the analyst. Sometimes he spent them in Sag Harbor and, according to Ruth, would wake up “frightened-looking and nervous about the consequences” when he returned to Lee. Other nights he simply disappeared.

  But Lee refused to give him the satisfaction of her rage, and that, in turn, infuriated him more. He began to drink more heavily than ever—from morning to night when he was home, “juggling whiskey and beer as if they were two different drugs,” according to B. H. Friedman, “as if one counteracted the other.” Reginald Isaacs arrived in Springs in June and found him drinking White Horse so fast “he couldn’t keep up.” The plan had been for Jackson to paint a “lifelike” family portrait of the Isaacses, but he was “too involved with the bottle” for any coherent activity, especially painting. He said he expected to be “in shape to paint” by the fall and invited Isaacs to return then.

  Jackson began appearing for his appointments at Ralph Klein’s office drunk and belligerent—a revelation for Klein—raging against Lee and how she had “trapped” him, and demanding to know what he should do. According to Patsy Southgate, Klein told him, “You don’t have to do anything,” or simply asked more questions: “Why don’t you live with Ruth?” Privately, Klein and his colleagues (including Lee’s analyst) “talked about Jackson’s case a lot,” recalls a former patient of the Barnes Landing group, “but they didn’t know what the hell to do with him. He was overwhelming.”

  Meanwhile, Ruth Kligman was growing more impatient by the day, with both Jackson and Lee. She was beginning to think that perhaps her analyst, who had left for the summer, had been right when he told her to break off the relationship. It was going nowhere. Every time she broached the subject of their future to Jackson, he said that he hoped she would “understand,” that he owed Lee “something,” that he needed more time to resolve the impasse. But it wasn’t a matter of time, Ruth now realized; it was a matter of will. Without some prodding, Jackson would never leave Lee. He was too deeply involved in their destructive game, too tied to her in thousands of unarticulated, impervious ways. It was time for Ruth to take matters into her own hands.

  A few days later, Jackson announced that Ruth was pregnant.

  Bursting with pride, he boasted to friends like Greenberg and Heller that “he wasn’t shooting blanks” and grilled Ruth about her “family stock.” But the initial elation soon wore off, and he saw his dilemma straight on. The prospect of a baby shattered his vague dreams of keeping Ruth “on the side” while continuing to live with Lee. Sooner or later, he would have to confront Lee directly. He had threatened it, promised it, and avoided it as long as he could. Now he would have to face the reality of divorcing her.

  But Ruth had underestimated Lee’s grip. “Jackson was absolutely terrified of Lee,” she says, and even believing that a child was on the way, “he couldn’t face her with the truth.” Instead, he began to entertain alcoholic delusions of a life with both women: Ruth would move into the big house, and Lee would live in the shack out back that had already been designated as her studio. He suggested that they could “go to the house and talk about it with Lee,” Ruth recalls, “the three of us, like grown-ups. He said, ‘I know she’ll like you.’ Like Noel Coward or something, he thought we were all going to smoke and talk about it.” The idea horrified Ruth. She wanted a confrontation, but not that way. She wanted it safely offstage and accused Jackson of lacking the courage—or maybe the will—to confront Lee alone. To appease her, he asked her to marry him—another desperate fantasy. Ruth was “thrilled with the idea of being Mrs. Jackson Pollock,” but pressed again about what he planned for the current Mrs. Pollock. “She’ll be well taken care of,” he answered vaguely.

  That wasn’t good enough for Ruth. Caught between Jackson’s reticence and the inevitable revelation that she wasn’t, in fact, pregnant, she couldn’t wait. One night in July, she and Jackson found themselves in Jackson�
�s studio, drunk and giggling and trying, Ruth claimed, not to wake Lee, who was sleeping in the main house. The next morning when they emerged from the studio, Lee was standing at the back door, wrapped in a bathrobe and a towering indignation. “She was white with rage,” Ruth later recounted. “Her face distorted with anger, her body shaking. She stared at me, trying to utter something coherent, stuttering and finally screaming at us, calling out, ‘Get that woman off my property before I call the police!’”

  When Jackson returned from Sag Harbor, Lee hurled her ultimatum: If you don’t stop seeing Ruth, I’ll leave you. Bursting with deluded confidence and White Horse, Jackson flung it back in her face: Go ahead, leave. If she left, she warned, she wouldn’t return. But, for Jackson, there was no going back; too many lines had been drawn. Get out! he screamed.