He walked the property on Fireplace Road, perhaps thinking about the wall he had planned to build to protect himself from the public eye. He had wanted a high earth barrier, like a dam, but Tony Smith had scoffed, “My God, it would take up half the lawn.” He had settled for a post-and-rail fence that Jeffrey Potter and his crew put up. Around back, he sat on the pile of boulders that Potter had dug up with his big tractor shovel and hauled there. James Brooks found him sitting in the grass and gazing at the empty studio, in anguish over “the work left undone.” He had said to Ruth, “You know I’m a painter and must get to work very soon now.” But he never did. And the sense of worthlessness and failure consumed him. “I’m no good,” he would cry out. “I’m no good. I’m a shit.” At times like that, staring at the studio, pacing the land, obsessed with moving earth and piling boulders, condemning himself for the months, now years, of idleness, he must have heard his father’s voice: “Your case is sure a problem to me,” Roy had written him thirty years ago. Roy Pollock had always known that his fifth son was a slacker, a ne’er-do-well: “the thing to do is to go to work at something where you can gain knowledge and training by practical experience.” Now it must have seemed, by a long circuitous route, Roy had been proven right. Certainly Jackson had never felt more slack, more useless: “I sometimes feel that my life has been a failure.” Only a few days before, Jackson had climbed to the top of the big pile of boulders and, facing the sunset, urinated on the rocks below, just as his father had done on a hot, bright summer day in the Arizona mountains while Sande’s feet played in the transparent stream. Memories arrested in space. “In this life, we can’t undo the things that are past. …” As if, even now, he could, Jackson ran into the house and called Ibram Lassaw, a metal sculptor. “He wanted to learn how to weld,” Lassaw remembers, “to work with metal. He didn’t talk about sculpture or anything, he just wanted me to teach him the skill.”
Thoughts of the past, of Roy, stern and disapproving, must have mingled with thoughts of the present, of Clyfford Still, stern and disapproving. Why else would Jackson have been drawn to the kitchen drawer where he kept Still’s letter from the previous December? He read it again, for the hundredth time, and sobbed uncontrollably: “Is it that you are ashamed of [your show]? 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?” He called Nick Carone and begged him to come over. To be alone with this letter, it was clear, was more than he could bear. Carone arrived to find Jackson “devastated.” “He was in an absolute state about this thing,” Carone remembers. “This touched his core. … I never saw such weeping.”
On Thursday night, August 9, Ruth called. She was coming for the weekend and bringing a friend. Would Jackson meet them at the train station on Saturday morning? Sounding “sullen” and “lost” on the phone, Jackson accepted the news passively; he had been alone long enough. He called Tony Smith to cancel their Friday rendezvous at Luchow’s, but Smith was out, taking a friend to the train station. Sensing Jackson’s desperation, Jane Smith held him on the phone. “We talked volumes,” she remembers. When conversation lagged, she sang to him in her warm, operatic soprano: “Du meine Liebe, du mein Herz, du meine Wonne, du mein Schmerz …” (“My love, my heart, my delight, my pain …”) By the time Smith returned, it was after midnight, but Jackson wouldn’t let go. “We talked on the phone for a long time … very late,” Smith said later, describing Jackson as “very tired and depressed.” Convinced that only work could reverse his friend’s despair, Smith urged him to “get into portraits.” “Do a lot of portraits of yourself,” he suggested, like van Gogh. “But do something!”
The next day, Jackson drove to Stony Hill Farm to return some tools Jeffrey Potter had lent him. Caught on his way out, Potter said not to bother and Jackson mumbled to himself gratefully, “Good. That’ll give me an excuse to come again.” Even so, he delayed his leaving as long as possible, watching Penny Potter cook and playing with her six-year-old son, Job. Although “obviously miserable,” Jackson seemed oddly sober. When he returned to Fireplace Road, however, something—the thought of Ruth’s return, perhaps, or just the emptiness—propelled him to El Harris’s store for four cases of beer. By the time Sherry and Cile Lord arrived for dinner, he was “drunk and babbling on.” After they left, he tried to sleep, but the world was spinning too fast. He stumbled through the clear summer darkness toward the lights in Conrad Marca-Relli’s house. Except for the aborted visit during Ruth’s stay, the two friends hadn’t seen each other in weeks. Marca-Relli was shocked by Jackson’s condition. “Now that Jackson really needs help,” Marca-Relli thought, “that damn doctor is on vacation.” Jackson ran his swollen hands gently over one of Marca-Relli’s paintings, barely touching the surface, feeling the texture, as if it were a strange new object just arrived on earth. “God, that’s a great feel,” he said with a combination of admiration and envy. Then he turned to leave. The last thing Marca-Relli heard him say as he faded into the darkness, looking up into the night sky with wide-open eyes: “Life is beautiful, the trees are beautiful, the sky is beautiful. Why is it that all I can think about is death?”
Ruth’s train arrived the next morning about nine. Jackson had slept fitfully, if at all, and had already fought with Jeffrey Potter over a building jack (to level up Lee’s new studio?) when Ruth stepped off the train with her friend, Edith Metzger. Ruth could tell instantly that Jackson was in a black mood. He had dressed in dirty clothes and looked “disheveled” next to the two women in their starched summer dresses. The campaign of sabotage began immediately. When Ruth tried to introduce Edith, Jackson merely grunted and walked away. “I hated the impression he was making,” she wrote. She wanted to go directly to the house, but Jackson stopped at Cavagnaro’s for an “eye-opener.” He seemed to take a perverse pleasure in telling her that Blanche, her kitten, had “disappeared.” Ruth was crushed. “Maybe Blanche will find her way home,” she offered hopefully. “Don’t count on it,” he countered.
In the bar, Jackson barely looked at Edith, a pretty, petite girl, twenty-five years old, with wide blue eyes, full lips, and short black hair in a feathery cut. A German Jew who had fled with her family from the Nazis before the war, Metzger had, like Ruth, survived a troubled childhood. That was their bond. Her father had died when she was a girl, and she, too, was attracted to older, married men, the most recent being the manager of the beauty salon where she worked as a manicurist and receptionist. That relationship, like Ruth’s with Jackson, had recently soured, sending Edith into a tailspin of depression and self-reproach from which she had yet to recover. (Ruth’s advice on the train coming out: “Let your fantasy take over, make your wildest dreams come true.”) If Jackson had bothered to ask, he might have heard Edith tell her story about “meeting” Hermann Goering. After a Nazi rally in Berlin, Goering had singled her out from the crowd, picked her up, and kissed her. In return, Edith bit him—so hard she could still remember the taste. But Jackson wasn’t interested in Edith Metzger.
The house, when they finally arrived, was a mess. Dishes from the previous night’s dinner with the Lords still sat in the sink. Despite Jackson’s pessimism, Ruth spent a few frantic hours looking for the missing kitten while he interrogated the dogs, Gyp and Ahab, as to Blanche’s whereabouts. When she finally gave up and prepared lunch, Jackson waved it away and, instead, pulled a bottle of gin from the cupboard. He seemed to be raising the stakes; she had never seen him drink gin before. Ruth wanted to spend the afternoon at the beach and she and Edith changed into bathing suits. The momentary rush of hard liquor and Ruth’s determined affections loosened Jackson enough for a photo session in the backyard. With Ruth’s bare leg draped suggestively over his knee, he smiled for Edith and the camera, his face so swollen by now that his eyes were mere slits. Then they drove off—but not to the beach. Jackson took them instead to Montauk where they visited James and Charlotte Brooks briefly. “He was re
ally a mess,” Charlotte Brooks recalls. “He was sad and very drunk, and he didn’t seem to have much feeling for life at all, or for her. We were anxious for them to leave as soon as they could. We didn’t know how to cope with him.” Coming back, Ruth and Edith expected to stop at the beach, but Jackson drove by without even slowing. As soon as they arrived back on Fireplace Road, he stalked up the stairs to bed, leaving Ruth and Edith alone. They never would get to the beach.
With Ruth Kligman, the last picture
Jackson grilled steaks for dinner again, but mostly he drank—more gin. Ruth made coffee, but he refused it. They fought over plans for the evening. Jackson had been invited to a benefit concert at The Creeks. The idea of a party, especially a society gala, thrilled Ruth. Jackson complained about the cost—three dollars per person—and called Clement Greenberg to ask if he was going. “He never talked about money before,” Greenberg says. “It was out of character. Then he said he wasn’t dressed well enough. I think he was just looking for an excuse.” The argument went back and forth for more than an hour: Ruth thought “maybe it would be fun”; he “didn’t want to face a couple of hundred people.” When she acquiesced, he changed his mind. They dressed—Ruth in her best white linen dress with “a lovely scoop neckline and back,” Edith in a blue print dress, Jackson in a black velvet shirt—and sped off toward East Hampton still bickering about whether to go or not.
By now, the gin and the sleepless night were beginning to show. The car accelerated and slowed as Jackson’s head bobbed up and down in a struggle to stay awake. The Oldsmobile, its top open to the muggy evening air, weaved back and forth on the road. Edith and Ruth exchanged worried glances as they lurched through the town and turned right onto the Montauk Highway. Edith whispered, “Ruth, he’s drunk. Let’s go home.” Finally, just across from the entrance to The Creeks, at the intersection of Airport Road, Jackson pulled off the highway and slumped behind the wheel. Soon a policeman appeared. “Good evening, Mr. Pollock. Is there anything the matter?” he asked. Jackson replied, suddenly alert, “Nothing’s wrong; we were just talking.” The policeman left, but moments later Roger Wilcox stopped on his way to the concert, which was scheduled to begin at nine. Alarmed by Jackson’s “pasty” look, Wilcox got out of the car while Lucia and their guest, Frederick Kiesler, waited. “Hey, Jackson,” he called. “What are you doing? Aren’t you going to this musical thing?” “I don’t feel so well,” Jackson replied faintly. “I feel kinda sick, I feel terrible. I’m not sure I’m going to the party.” At that, Wilcox noticed, Ruth and Edith squirmed. “They wanted to go to that party,” he remembers. “They were all dolled up, and they didn’t want to go back and be stranded with a dull evening.” By now, Ruth must have felt frustrated. She hadn’t brought Edith all the way to East Hampton to spend the night in front of the television set.
This time, apparently, Ruth prevailed. They would go to the concert. But first Jackson needed to recover; even by his standards, he was in no condition for company. Hoping that some food might sober him up, they drove to a nearby bar where Jackson, barely able to walk, found a telephone and called The Creeks.
Alfonso Ossorio was already in the music room introducing Leonard Hambro, a concert pianist, when the phone rang. The maid took the message: Mr. Pollock would be late.
But now there was a new problem: Edith Metzger wouldn’t get back in the car. Jackson’s day-long campaign of terror had succeeded too well, with Edith at least. “I’m going to call for help, call a cab; I must do something,” she told Ruth, her voice shrill and disapproving—like Lee’s. The argument threatened to explode into a scene until Jackson, finally overcome, passed out.
But in that sleep, he must have continued to hear Lee’s voice—fierce, mocking, independent—for he awoke in a blinding rage. He ordered the two women into the car and announced that they were going home. Edith again refused. “She was crying because she was so nervous and scared to death,” Ruth remembers. Her fear only infuriated Jackson. “Get her back in here,” he ordered Ruth, “or we’re not going anywhere.” Obediently, Ruth tried to coax Edith into the car. “But, Ruth,” Edith protested, “he’s drunk. I don’t want to drive with him.” “No, he’s not; he’s fine,” Ruth lied. “I promise you we’re going home. Come on! Get in!” When Edith finally relented and climbed into the back seat—as far away from Jackson as possible—he jammed the accelerator to the floor and the V-8 Oldsmobile rocketed into the street.
Edith began screaming almost immediately.
Within minutes, they skidded onto Fireplace Road, heading north, through the darkness, toward home. Edith screamed, “Stop the car, let me out!” But the screaming only seemed to make Jackson stronger, to make the car go faster. Ruth tried to calm her—“Edith, stop making a fuss. He’s fine”—but she, too, felt a rush of terror as the car accelerated onto the long stretch of straight, deserted road between North Main and Gardiner Avenue. Ruth had been in the car before when Jackson lost his senses, when he jettisoned the world and existed, for a moment, only in the furious forward motion of speed, bent, it seemed, on some destination in midair. She shouted, “Please. Jackson, stop! Jackson, don’t do this,” but she knew he was out of reach. Gripping the wheel in his big hands, he leaned forward and hunched his shoulders against the winds that roared around them, roared so loud that even Edith’s screaming seemed strangely diminished. In the hurling pandemonium, Ruth stared at Jackson in disbelief: his mouth drawn up in what looked like a laugh, but could have been terror, his eyes staring wide-open at the road ahead “as if he expected to lift off at any minute.” Edith screamed again and again, “Let me out. LET ME OUT.” She tried to stand up, as if to leap from the car, arms flailing, screaming—“LET ME OUT”—but the wind threw her back into the seat. Suddenly the road began to curve, just slightly, to the left, and the dark gray ribbon of concrete that whistled beneath them turned to oil-black asphalt. Locals knew that this innocent-looking bend in the road and the shift in road surface packed a “whomp” for any car that ignored it. Jackson himself had slowed down hundreds of times when approaching it. But not this time. The heavy Oldsmobile bottomed hard and jumped the high crown in the middle of the road. Once on the other side of that crown, nothing Jackson did could prevent the car from veering right. The right tires, front and rear, hit the soft shoulder in an explosion of gravel and dirt. Edith screamed. Jackson yanked the wheel to the left, too hard. The car careened across the road, leapt the crown again, and lunged sidelong into the brush on the left shoulder. For the next 172 feet, the big car danced at the edge of the roadway, on and off, brushing past big trees at sixty or seventy miles an hour. Edith buried her head behind the seat. Ruth thought, “This is it, it’s happening. It’s my death.” Jackson clutched the wheel and watched, frozen, as the world hurtled past him in the darkness, beyond control. Finally the car lost its tenuous grip on the pavement and plunged into the underbrush. About seventeen feet from the road, the left front fender caught two resolute young elms, and the car spun wildly counterclockwise. Still speeding, but backwards now, it lurched another twenty feet before flipping end over end, front end over back, like a tossed coin. Jackson and Ruth were catapulted out of the front seat and into the woods, where Ruth landed safely. Edith clung to the car and it fell, upside down, on top of her.
For an instant, everything was silent—except the air rushing by. Escape velocity: he had finally reached it. The car was gone, Ruth was gone, Edith was gone, Lee was gone, Stella was gone. He was free: not falling, flying; flung from the tumbling car in a straight trajectory fifty feet long and ten feet off the ground. He covered it in less than a second, but, according to the coroner’s report, was fully conscious, arrested in space, until he hit the tree.
It was nine o’clock the next morning in Paris when the phone rang in Paul Jenkins’s apartment. Clement Greenberg was on the line, his voice distant and hoarse from a night of grieving and explaining. Jenkins answered the phone. Lee was across the room, sitting near the door to the balcony. When Jenkins he
ard the news, he turned to her and started to speak. But Lee knew already. The message had flown across the Atlantic by another, faster route. “Jackson is dead,” she told him. Jenkins would never forget what followed. Lee started to scream—great, piercing, primitive screams, like the howling of a wounded animal, as if nothing so fine or so limited as human could contain her titanic grief. She “threw herself against the wall,” Jenkins remembers, “she wanted to hurt herself.” For a second, he feared she would fling herself off the balcony, to join him. “No, Jackson,” she wailed again and again, “Jackson, Jackson, Jackson,” as if to demand him back from the dead. How dare he go without her? How dare he leave her? Or had she left him? Jenkins grabbed her and pulled her onto the couch where the screaming, the heart-stopping screaming, went on—“Jackson, Jackson, Jackson”—until it was finally drowned out in a cascade of tears.
EPILOGUE
GLACIAL ERRATIC
A funeral service was held for Jackson Pollock at the Springs Chapel on Wednesday, August 15, 1956. Due to the extent of his injuries, the casket remained closed, although Hans Namuth tried to get a picture of the body while it was still in the funeral parlor. Lee, who had flown back from Paris on the first available flight, sat by herself in the front pew. She refused to sit with the Pollock family. Earlier that week, when Stella had tried to embrace her, Lee pushed her away, saying, “Where were you when he needed you?”
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