Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  They had been through these scenes before, usually over Jackson’s drinking, but somehow had always found each other again. Jackson would sleep off the booze and wake up tame and needful. Lee would fix his drink of orange juice and raw eggs in the Waring blender and watch him drink it. She had learned to survive on such crumbs. But this time was different. Days passed and he didn’t come around for the usual measure of maternal sympathy and forgiveness. Panic-stricken, Lee searched for a last-minute, face-saving compromise. She didn’t have to leave for good, she decided; she could take the trip to Europe that she had long hoped they would take together. Her family supported the idea. “She was very sick with ulcerated colitis,” Ruth Stein recalls, “and he was killing her. She desperately needed to breathe. Getting away was like oxygen for her.” Instead of protesting, Jackson drove into town and bought Lee a ticket on the next ship. Despite the urging of friends, who were “anxious for the whole thing to come to an end,” she was easily dissuaded from filing divorce papers before leaving. “She sat here on the terrace and talked about finalizing everything before she left,” Ted Dragon remembers, “but I strongly advised against it. I told her, ‘You’re going away and you’re going to think about this whole thing.’” After consulting her analyst, Len Siegel, she stopped talking about divorce altogether and began referring instead to “a trial separation” and telling her friends, “We’ve been fighting so much, we just need to back away.” (When Jackson spoke to Ralph Klein, Klein said simply, “Let her go.”)

  As the departure day approached, in a final fit of masochistic fantasy, Lee begged Jackson to join her on the trip. When he refused, she offered to come back and “work something out”: no questions, no apologies, complete capitulation. She must have known it was too late, but apparently needed to reassure herself that she was indeed the victim, that what happened after she left would not be her fault.

  The night before the boat sailed, she dreamed of Jackson’s death. He appeared to her as Jesus Christ, dying on the cross, his hands covered with mold. The next day, July 12, Barney and Annalee Newman and Day Schnabel took her to the pier to board the Queen Elizabeth. Annalee Newman remembers how “devastated” she was “that Jackson had thrown her out.” On her way to the gangplank, she had a sudden change of heart. “I can’t go,” she cried, “Jackson needs me,” and ran to a phone to call him. When he answered, she pretended she had left her passport at the house. They talked haltingly for a minute or two before she gave up. “Oh, I just found my passport,” she said and hung up. After boarding, she went to the telephones and tried Jackson again, ship to shore. Unable to get through, she called her sister, Ruth Stein. “She was heartsick,” Stein remembers. “Then in the middle of the conversation, a call came through on another phone. She said, ‘Maybe it’s him,’ and hung up. A few minutes later, after talking to him, she called me back. ‘Oh, God, I can’t get him to come, I feel so …’ I said, ‘Well, what can you do? You have to survive.’”

  The following Tuesday, Alfonso Ossorio ran into Jackson at Penn Station. He had just come from his last session with Ralph Klein before Klein’s summer vacation, and he was trying to get down the steps to the tracks to catch the 4:19 for East Hampton. “He could hardly walk,” Ossorio remembers. “He had to hold Patsy Southgate’s hand. It was an appalling sight. He was half-blotted, extremely depressed and physically ill, body bloated, ankles swollen, face all red and blotchy.” Jackson looked at Ossorio and called out in a feeble voice, “My doctor’s on vacation and Lee’s gone. At last, I’m free.”

  Lee didn’t know it, but even as she made her last desperate phone calls to Jackson, Ruth Kligman had already moved into the house on Fireplace Road and unpacked her suitcase full of pink clothes. Like Jackson, she had gotten what she wanted—or what she thought she wanted.

  They slept late and ignored knocks at the door. Clad perpetually in panties, Ruth fluttered about the house, exploring every room, admiring the copper pots in the kitchen, the abundant plants, the white walls, and everywhere Jackson’s “awesome” paintings. “In my twenty-one years of middle class living and sharing crummy apartments,” she later wrote (understating her age), “this was really new to me.” She thrilled with excitement when Jackson called other “famous” artists like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, or they called him. During the day, they drove around the South Fork so Jackson could show her off, introducing her to those few friends who were willing to meet her and hadn’t already. At night, they cooked elaborate meals, went to the movies in East Hampton, watched television on the big red velvet couch in the living room, and drank. By bedtime, Jackson had either passed out or fallen to weeping. He talked of escaping with her and traveling the country “where nobody knows me.” In such moments of what seemed to Ruth emotional undress, she found him “very touching”—“He was wonderful as far as being able to cry and let out his emotions,” she recalls. To Terry Liss, Jackson bragged about “how he got rid of Lee and how nice it was to have somebody in the home who really was making him feel good.”

  The honeymoon lasted a week. Where before, Ruth had been his escape from Lee, now she was Lee, a target for the same abuse, the same loathing, the same fears, and the same insatiable needs. Ruth would spend hours preparing for a party only to have Jackson decide at the last minute not to go or, if they did go, drag her away in the middle of it. He cursed her little kitten, Blanche. He yelled at her for overdressing and wearing makeup. When she woke up in a particularly blithe mood, he would brood. When she wanted to play her jazz records, he barked, “I don’t like that kind of music.” When she became sick, he grew short-tempered and irritable. When she wanted to be affectionate, he would complain about the prying eyes of neighbors and push her away. When they went to the beach, he insisted on sitting far away from the ogling crowd. He snapped at her inexplicably in the presence of visitors like Friedel Dzubas, bullied her friends when they came to visit, and fought with her openly when James Brooks stopped by. When she tried to paint in Lee’s studio, Jackson snapped, “Why the hell do you want to be a painter?” He drank more than ever and started going to bed early in the evening.

  He wanted Lee.

  One day, about a week after Ruth’s arrival, he slipped off to East Hampton and arranged to send a dozen red roses to Lee’s hotel in Paris.

  When the flowers arrived at the Hôtel Quai Voltaire, Lee was out. Despite the beautiful view of the Seine and the Louvre from her balcony, she avoided being alone in her room as much as possible. She toured the museums and the Left Bank galleries (“the painting here is unbelievably bad,” she said), walked the parks and gardens, browsed the flea market, and spent the evenings going from nightclub to nightclub, “dancing like mad” with the legions of friends who by some kind coincidence were passing through Paris at the same time. In just one week, she had already seen Paul and Esther Jenkins (who had recently moved to Paris and acted as unofficial hosts), Betty Parsons, Ben Heller (who gave her some traveler’s checks in partial payment for Echo, which he had recently bought), Helen Frankenthaler, Sidney Geist, René Drouin, Michel Tapié, Rodolph Stadler, Charles and Kay Gimpel, Norman Bluhm, and John Graham. Although she rarely spoke of Jackson, it was clear that her thoughts never left him. She saw some rolls of canvas in Jenkins’s studio and muttered to herself, “As poor as Jackson and I were, we always had plenty of art supplies.” When she saw John Graham—acting very arch, very White Russian—“she was glad to see him because he brought a proximity to Jackson,” Jenkins recalls. At a small gathering, surrounded by quiet, sophisticated chatter, she turned to Jenkins suddenly. “My God!” she said with a marveling smile, “at this point, Jackson would do something utterly outrageous, like break a chair.” As unimaginable as it must have seemed, she missed him. “She lived and breathed and ate Jackson Pollock,” recalls Jenkins, “and only seemed happy when she was doing something that pertained to him.”

  Then the flowers came.

  On July 22 she wrote Jackson a postcard, ostensibly to inform him of a change in her itin
erary: the Gimpels had invited her to their house in Menerbes in the south of France. She would stop there on her way to see Peggy Guggenheim, delaying her arrival in Venice until early August. The real purpose of the postcard, however, was to acknowledge the flowers and their implicit message, and to send one in return. “I miss you & wish you were sharing this with me,” she wrote, “—the roses were the most beautiful deep red. … It would be wonderful to get a note from you. Love Lee.” At the bottom, she added a short postscript in parentheses: “How are you Jackson?”

  Ruth knew something was wrong. Although unaware of the flowers and Lee’s letters, she could sense the fantasy ending and what she called “the devilish game” beginning. She had come to Springs, according to B. H. Friedman, “thinking she was going to have a wonderful time and take over.” By the second week, however, she was often bored, sometimes miserable, occasionally frightened, and Lee’s hold on Jackson had, if anything, grown stronger. More and more, she found herself resenting him, resenting his fame, resenting his tantrums, and most of all resenting his hold on her. She resented the way he talked on the phone so much, especially to his mother. “He talked to her the way he talked to me,” she recalls, “very slow, very tentative. And I thought, ‘He doesn’t have another mistress, does he?’” She resented the way he treated her in front of company, the way he acted as if she wasn’t there, or apologized for her, or hemmed and hawed when talking about her on the phone. She resented the way he drove around, endlessly, recklessly, just to avoid stopping somewhere and being seen with her. On a visit to Nick Carone’s house, he simply left her in the car. When she complained—“Why have you turned against me, Jackson?”—he snapped back, “Are you a psychotic?”

  But most of all, she resented the way his friends treated her. She knew, of course, that many of them refused to see her at all. Out of loyalty to Lee, the “wives’ organization,” as Paul Brach called it, made it clear that they didn’t want Jackson bringing her around. Some of his friends, out of sympathy for Jackson’s plight, tried to be cordial. Conrad Marca-Relli and his wife paid a house call but found Jackson drunk and Ruth “hostile” and left after ten minutes. Sherry and Cile Lord came to Fireplace Road for dinner one night and found his meanness toward Ruth almost unbearable. Even for the well intentioned, the sight of Jackson, bloated and hurting, consorting with a woman half his age, was hard to bear. “It was a strain when they came to visit,” recalls James Brooks, “so we got them out as quickly as we could.” When Jackson took her to meet Paul Brach and Miriam Schapiro, Ruth pointed out that Schapiro’s palette “wasn’t laid out right,” Schapiro recalls. “We were furious … the absolute gall.” The word quickly spread that “Jackson’s girl” was “rather earthy and coarse,” “not East Hampton.” The judgment was conveyed to Ruth in sidelong glances, overlooked invitations, and whispered comments. “His friends obviously thought I was nothing,” she wrote, “which was the way I felt underneath my prettiness and clothes and makeup.”

  No one was crueler than Clement Greenberg, who with his new wife, Jenny, had rented a house in Springs for the summer. When Jackson and Ruth came for dinner, Jenny’s Bennington classmates, who were dressed in jeans, snubbed Ruth in her white linen dress and gold sandals, and Jackson treated her “like a piece of furniture.” Greenberg turned an abstract discussion of friendship into a pointed inquiry on a subject that no one else had dared bring up: Lee. “[Clem] asked [Jackson] his plans about me,” Ruth recalled, “and what his intentions were toward his wife.” Ruth was affronted by Greenberg’s accusatory tone—”[He] treated us as if we had done something bad, as if we were guilty of some sin.” Jackson broke down. Afterward, when Ruth demanded to know why Jackson hadn’t defended her, he could only say, “It’s very complicated.”

  It had become very complicated indeed. Unable to drive, Ruth felt increasingly trapped by Jackson’s unpredictable moods—especially his anger. Everything she did now seemed to anger him. Whole days would pass in mutual sulking. She would fix elaborate meals, big roasts, and he would refuse to eat them. Even more worrisome, he no longer talked of marriage. When Ruth did, Jackson would grow suddenly evasive—“I owe the woman something”—or rehash old fantasies: “We will all live together.” He had made no effort to change his will. (“He wasn’t that nutty,” says Alfonso Ossorio.) She thought more and more about what would happen when Lee returned, and feared being “cast aside and thrown away.”

  In fact, as Ruth must have sensed at the time and later told a friend, Jackson was already “bored to death” with her. On July 27, he arranged a party to celebrate B. H. Friedman’s thirtieth birthday—and, undoubtedly, to avoid another long weekend alone with Ruth. The Friedmans, the Brookses, and the Greenbergs gathered on Fireplace Road that night, and Jackson hid among the revelers, drinking at his new, furious rate of one case of beer a day. The Friedmans found Ruth “coquettish and affectionate” but couldn’t hide their surprise “that Jackson could have taken up with a woman like this.” At one point during the evening, he exploded at Ruth, “Fuck you,” and the party fell silent. “Don’t brag,” she cooed back. Yet, later that night when the celebration moved to the studio and Jackson gave Friedman his choice among a portfolio of drawings, he also gave Ruth a painting—one of the recent ones that Greenberg had condemned earlier in the evening. (The painting disappeared from the studio after Jackson’s death.)

  He must have meant it as a parting gift, because the next night, at a party given by Dorothy Norman, he humiliated her with a cruel determination that other guests took as final. After the party, Ruth—“in a white rage” and far drunker than Jackson—threw a furious tantrum. Between great swigs of scotch, she smashed glasses on the kitchen floor until the cupboards were bare, screamed and raved and sobbed until Jackson slapped her hard across the face and she fell at his feet “like a broken doll.”

  Jackson had slapped her before, often, and she had liked it. But this was different. Not long after the party at Dorothy Norman’s, Ruth called Terry Liss at the Elm Tree Inn and told her, in a desperate voice, how Jackson had “beat her up.” “She said there was real violence,” Liss remembers, “that Jackson had really knocked her around. And I said, ‘Look, I have a room in my house. Don’t be an ass. Stay with me. What do you need that for?’”

  But Ruth never came. Instead, she told Jackson that she had an appointment with her analyst—a lie—and, on Thursday, August 2, took the train to New York. She had been with him less than three weeks.

  For the first time in his life, Jackson Pollock was alone. From Stella to Charles to Sande to Lee to Ruth, the chain had remained virtually unbroken for forty-four years. Now he was “free,” and the strangeness of it seemed to overwhelm him. Friends saw him that week wandering on the beach, walking by the roadside, driving aimlessly around the dry-grass summerscape, or parked in front of familiar houses, searching for the courage to knock on a door. When they stopped to talk, the response was always the same: “He said he was very lonely,” recalls Millie Liss, “and he hadn’t been working.” “It was a very bad time for him,” according to Nick Carone. “I never saw him so sad.” At night, he clung to the phone as to a lifeline, talking for hours, shoulders hunched against the empty house, dialing anyone he thought might talk to him—even old, long-silent friends like Roger Wilcox. He called Tony Smith and eagerly accepted an invitation to New Jersey the following weekend, August 11. One day, soon after Ruth left, a dog appeared around the studio, lost and hungry. Jackson wanted to take it in, but it ran from him. Later that day, he saw the same dog lying by the Montauk road where it had been hit by a car and left to die. Tenderly, he loaded it in his car and rushed it to an animal hospital where he called Nick Carone. “He said he had found the most beautiful dog and asked would we want it if it pulled through. I said yes.” Two days later, he came to Carone’s house looking “like the walking dead, so, so low.” “The dog died,” he told Carone. “I’ve got to go home.” “He was unspeakably sad about this dog he didn’t even know—literally, so
unhappy that he couldn’t even talk, he missed it so.”

  What he missed was Lee. Clearly, he knew he had wronged her. When Carone visited soon after Ruth’s departure, he found Jackson “disillusioned with Ruth.” He realized the affair was “shit,” according to Carone, “that he’d made a horrendous mistake and he needed Lee back.” He laid plans to join her in Europe at the end of the month so they could come home together. But when he tried to call her in Paris, he was told she had left already for the south of France.

  Unknown to Jackson, Lee’s plans had changed once again. After spending a week with the Gimpels in the Midi, where she saw a Cézanne show, van Gogh’s last landscapes, and the Roman ruins at Arles, she had called Peggy in Venice, only to be spurned. Bitter over what she perceived as efforts to minimize or erase from the record “everything I had done for Pollock” and, undoubtedly, infuriated by reports of the sale of One for $8,000 (she had already given away eight of her eleven drip paintings), Peggy not only refused to extend an invitation to Lee, she refused to find a room for her anywhere in Venice. Flabbergasted, Lee returned to Paris in early August and stayed in Paul Jenkins’s apartment until she could find a hotel room.

  When he couldn’t reach Lee, Jackson called her friends, Betsy Zogbaum, Cile Lord, and Patsy Southgate. He took care not to call too late or too drunk. One afternoon, he wandered into the garden of Clement Greenberg’s summer house looking “lost” and found Nancy Smith. “He rumbled for a while and twitched around,” Smith recalls. “He just looked so miserable. Finally I said, ‘Look, what’s wrong?’” Jackson lowered his head and looked at her with baleful eyes. “Lee always cuts my fingernails,” he said, “and she’s away.” “The reason he was so miserable,” says Smith, “was that his fingernails were driving him crazy and he couldn’t cut them himself. He needed Lee for that. So I said, ‘If that’s all that’s bothering you, I’ll cut them. And I did. And he cried.” In a kind of apologetic offering, Jackson tried to stop drinking, or at least not drink as much. From a case of beer a day, he dropped to one or two cans on some days, and even these he occasionally left half full. When Lee came back, he must have told himself, she would be pleased to see how much better he was. And for all his hours of telephoning that week, he never called Ruth Kligman.