Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  The resulting Scribner’s article, “The Tile Club at Play,” caused a sensation in trendy New York society. The illustrations and descriptions of bucolic life turned East Hampton into the stylish vacation destination of choice. That article, plus two sequels that followed, lured so many aspiring artists to East Hampton that by the turn of the century, the local constable had to clear easels from the fields and orchards so the farmers could do their work. It became, briefly, an American Barbizon, home to some of the best landscape and still-life painters of the day, including Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, who built a studio across from Town Pond, and Childe Hassam, who loved his house on Egypt Lane so much that when he was seventy-six years old and ill, he took an ambulance out to East Hampton so he could die there. Thomas Moran’s daughter, Ruth, wrote that the artists “took away with them on canvas, copper or paper, the essence that was old East Hampton to scatter it over the cities and towns… everywhere…”

  In time the migration of artists dwindled, and although East Hampton continued to grow as a summer resort for the very rich, the invasion of the art world wasn’t revived until the late 1930s by Sara and Gerald Murphy. The Murphys were the real-life models for Dick and Nicole Diver, the hedonistic couple in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Gerald was the heir to the Mark Cross leather-and-luxury-goods fortune and part of the Irish “Golden Clan” of Southampton, where he spent his childhood summers on an estate called The Little Orchard. Sara was the daughter of Frank B. Wiborg of Cincinnati, Ohio, a cofounder of Ault & Wiborg, the largest manufacturer of printing ink in America. At one point Wiborg was the richest man in East Hampton and owned several hundred acres around the Maidstone Club. In 1895 he built his Xanadu, Dunes, a voluptuous eighty-acre estate on Hook Pond, the most famous house of its time, a sensation for its walled gardens and many guest cottages, each with fanciful names like Swan’s Cove and Le Petite Hut. The main residence was so large, it required a minimum of six servants and was dubbed the Big House by the Wiborgs.

  In 1922 the Maidstone Club’s second clubhouse burned to the ground, and the board of directors decided to rebuild a new one closer to the Wiborg mansion. Wiborg threatened to resign from the club if they didn’t chose another site; when they built the clubhouse there anyway, he not only quit in a fury but planted a great wall of privet hedge, half a mile long, to block the view, called the Wiborg “spite hedge” by the Maidstoners. Years later, when the club intended to build a new driveway near the entrance to Wiborg’s estate, he offered the club $5,000 cash to move the road to the far side of the clubhouse, which they accepted. Old man Wiborg proved that he wasn’t always such a spoilsport when in August 1924 he entertained John Drew, Ethel Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford for lunch at Dunes. Fairbanks turned handstands on the beach and, the East Hampton Star was thrilled to report, pronounced East Hampton’s drinking water “marvelous”—a huge endorsement—and “went bathing in East Hampton Surf three times Sunday.”

  Meanwhile, Wiborg’s Francophile daughter, the lovely Sara, and her would-be painter husband, Gerald, lived the high life of American expatriates in Paris and the south of France, where they became great chums with Sergey Diaghilev and Sara was rumored to be one of Picasso’s plethora of lovers. During the Great Depression the Murphys were summoned to return to America so Gerald could take over the family company, yet every moment they could steal away was spent in East Hampton at Dunes, which Sara eventually inherited. They passed long weekends nursing cocktails on the covered porches in the summer, and in the winter they spent wet, windy evenings playing charades in the glow of one of the huge fireplaces, comforted with hot toddies and houseguests like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, John Dos Passos, Laurette Taylor, and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald.

  Still, the Murphys longed for the stimulation of the artists and writers of European café society and worried too for their friends as the pounding of the Nazis’ goosesteps on the streets drowned out Le Jazz Hot in the clubs and cafés. Quietly, with the help of heiress and art patron Peggy Guggenheim, Sara and Gerald began to pay the way to America for many of their European artist friends, forming an escape route first to Manhattan, then to their accommodating home and myriad guest cottages in East Hampton. One of the first artists the Murphys invited to East Hampton was Lucia Christophenetti, who arrived on the arm of her lover, surrealist Fernand Léger. The petite Lebanese-born artist was a mediocre painter but a first-class salonist and cook. At her Paris garret there was always room at her table, or in her bed, for a struggling artist. As she once slyly boasted, “I always have a bed for Marcel Duchamp or André Breton.”

  Once in East Hampton she soon ditched Léger, and with Sara and Gerald Murphy’s largesse, Lucia single-handedly helped lure practically the entire surrealist movement to East Hampton in the early forties, including Roberto Matta, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, André Masson, Piet Mondrian, Salvador and Gala Dalí, Wilfredo Lam, Isamu Noguchi, André Breton, Jean Hélion, and David Hare. According to folklore, the Hamptons became so well known as the American base of the European surrealist school that a visitor pulled into a gas station on Montauk Highway and asked the attendant, “Where do we find the surrealists?”

  It wasn’t hard. They spent their days mostly on Wiborg Beach, also known as Pink Beach, behind Pink House, the pink stucco chauffeur’s quarters of Dunes, where the women outraged the local community by making their own bathing suits twisted out of scarves, or just abandoning all pretense and going topless. They were a pretentious, supercilious group—poor but highly mannered intellectuals who mocked the kind of dogged conformity of a place like East Hampton, yet were still drawn to its wealth and beauty. They didn’t speak much English, or care to. They played intellectual games on the beach, including chess and charades, as well as a ruthless game of truth or dare called La Verité, over which they would get into titanic arguments about one another’s emotional honesty, causing scenes that could be heard up and down the beach. Other times they were more placid. Lucia Christophenetti, Maria Motherwell, and Dorothea Tanning dressed as satyrs and nymphs and frolicked in the woods at one party for the artist Max Ernst, much to the distaste of both the Bonackers, who considered them sissys and “drifts,” and the Maidstone crowd, who considered them flakes and hoped they would go away.

  They did. The war over, the surrealists deserted East Hampton, never to be heard from again. Only Lucia stayed. She married a local man, Roger Wilcox, an inventor who helped design some of the earliest stereo components but who became better known in the art community for his stories about being abducted by extraterrestrials. Lucia and Roger Wilcox moved to a roomy old farmhouse on Abraham’s Path in Amagansett, where for years Lucia’s kitchen continued to be a hub of the growing artists’ community. The Murphys never left East Hampton either, but in 1941 they were forced to sell the Big House, which Gerald now called the Big Bad House because it ate up so much money. It was torn down; a developer bought the property and subdivided it, renaming the once-fabulous Wiborg gardens Dune Meadows; and a series of prosaic homes on five-acre plots were built. The Murphys themselves moved into Pink House, on the beach where the surrealists once frolicked. They spent another twenty summers in East Hampton before they passed away and were buried in East Hampton side by side in their family plot in the South End Burying Ground, behind the large, handsome Hook Windmill that dominates the center of town.

  5

  THE SUMMER of 1949, Ossorio and Dragon rented a house “not in Springs like the Pollocks,” said Dragon, “but a proper summer cottage on Jericho Lane.” That July Guild Hall, East Hampton’s cultural palace, summer theater, and art gallery, broke with tradition of showing only still lifes and landscapes in its gallery and held an exhibition of what was gingerly referred to as “modern art.” Called “17 Artists of Eastern Long Island,” it included works by every major abstract expressionist living in East Hampton at the time, including Jackson Pollock, Balcomb Greene, John Little, Lee Krasner, Julian Levy, Ibram Lassaw, and Alfonso Ossori
o.

  The arts center had recently been criticized for presenting the “communist” show Finian’s Rainbow in its John Drew Theatre. According to Ossorio, “Guild Hall was so conservative, it didn’t show a nude until 1960.” Guild Hall was the creation of Maidstone member Mary Woodhouse, “East Hampton’s First Lady.” The wife of Lorenzo E. Woodhouse, president of the Merchant National Bank of Burlington, Vermont, she was a short woman with a double chin and maintained that a proper lady always wore a hat, day and night, indoors or out. A homebody, she once proudly wrote about herself that “the happiest people are those who have no history, therefore I may be classed in that category.” To her great credit, she was a passionate patron of the arts, generous but limited and unadventurous in her taste. Nevertheless, in 1931 she gave the community Guild Hall, which was run for forty years under the rigid doctrine of Woodhouse and her Maidstone friends, many of whom suspected that Pollock stuck cigarette butts to his paintings in an effort to make fools of them. The Maidstone’s spokesperson, the East Hampton Star’s Jeannette Rattray, couldn’t wait to mock Pollock and his friends by writing a satirical editorial in which the results of her niece’s spilled paint turns out to be just as good as a canvas by Pollock.

  “Of course, the artists were impossible,” Ossorio said. “They were rude and boring. The old-guard townspeople were polite and boring. They bought the abstract art out of duty but they never learned to love it.”

  Shortly after the opening of the abstract impressionist exhibition, a group called the East Hampton Protection Society formed and decided that Guild Hall and its gallery and little theater were attracting the “wrong kind” of people and perhaps should be shut down. Anti—Guild Hall petitions were circulated referring to certain “undesirables.” A public meeting was called, and the actor and summer resident Robert Montgomery demanded to know who the undesirable people were. When no one at the meeting would tell him, he said, “I’ll just say it for you. You’re talking about Jews and fairies, it’s as simple as that.” The Protection Society was disbanded the next day.

  The controversy caused by the Guild Hall show was nothing compared with the consequences of Life magazine’s August 8,1949, issue, which mockingly ordained Jackson Pollock the crown prince of the abstract expressionist movement, calling him a “phenomenon” but asking, snidely, in a bold, two-page headline, “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” The backhanded acclaim made Pollock more paranoid. “The one thing the Life article didn’t do was make Pollock rich,” Dragon said. He rarely sold canvases, except to Ossorio, upon whom he became almost totally dependent.

  In later years, The New Yorker would ungenerously describe Ossorio as being “a rear-wheel on the Pollock-Krasner cart.” Living just a few miles apart that summer, the two couples forged an unusual and intense friendship. “Jackson wasn’t really social,” said Dragon. “He didn’t talk too much. He was sullen. He spent most of his time listening to jazz. But he talked to Ossorio, because they had art in common. So they became real friends. Jackson hated to stretch canvas, and Alfonso would go over there to help him. At the same time, Lee and I became close. We were both lonely. Those macho artists weren’t interested in me very much, you know, but she showed me around town and introduced me to people. Lee really cared.”

  She also knew a golden goose when she saw one. Ossorio showered Pollock with money and lavish gifts, including monographs by van Gogh and Goya. He promised Pollock the use of his MacDougal Alley townhouse in the winter, and he pledged a $200-a-month stipend against the purchase of future paintings. By the end of that summer, a grateful Pollock presented the restored Number 5. To Ossorio’s amazement and horror, it was completely different, no longer the painting he had fallen in love with. “I brought you one painting, but you have given me back another,” Ossorio managed to say, while assuring Pollock that he liked the new one just as much.

  Although Ossorio talked all that year about buying a house in East Hampton, he never got around to it. He and Dragon didn’t return until the weekend after Thanksgiving 1950. They were on their way to Europe, Ossorio to paint and Dragon to dance with the Paris Opera. Friday night they were going to have dinner at the Pollocks’ farmhouse in Springs. “Eight were expected for dinner that night.” Dragon said. “Everybody was sick of turkey, so I went to the supermarket and bought a huge roast beef, and Lee and I cooked up a feast, with local potatoes and brussels sprouts that had just come into season. I don’t know where Ossorio went, he wasn’t even there most of the afternoon. Pollock spent all day out back being filmed for a documentary by Hans Namuth, the photographer.”

  There is much conjecture about what happened that afternoon while Namuth was photographing him that caused Pollock to return to the house and “head straight for the bottle and pour himself a drink,” said Dragon. Ossorio had arrived by then, and he remembered seeing Pollock walk in the back door and pour himself “a tumbler full of bourbon. Then he poured it down and Lee went white in the face,” Ossorio said.

  “The look on Lee’s face…,” Dragon said. “God. So I whispered, ‘Why are you so upset? It’s only one drink.’ She was furious with me. She gave me some look. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ she snapped. In the year and half we had known Jackson, we’d never seen him take a drink. But thinking back on it, he wasn’t really sober that whole time either. He was on the edge of the trigger. He was what alcoholics called ‘dry’—he wasn’t drinking, but all of his inner demons were waiting to come out, a walking time bomb. Jackson was one of those drunks who took one little sip and was three sheets to the wind. So ten minutes later we were sitting around the table cutting the roast beef when Jackson shouted, ‘Now? Now?’ We didn’t know what the hell he meant, when suddenly, bam! he tossed the table up into the air! He upended it, and everything went all over—the food on the floor, the dishes smashed… what a mess! Lee and I got down and cleaned it all up, and everybody went right on to dessert as if nothing had happened. Jackson went out the door and disappeared. We never knew what set him off. I looked at Lee’s face, and she was heartbroken. We never saw him sober again. Never. He was a completely different person after that. He also never painted another good drip painting.”

  Before leaving for Paris that winter, Ossorio bought one more of Pollock’s paintings, called Lavender Mist, for $3,000. This twelve-by-nine-foot field is considered by many to be Pollock’s masterpiece. A gray-toned action painting, it is neither lavender nor misty, and what makes it the more rapturously beautiful than all the rest of Pollock’s paintings is hard to say, but even when Ossorio bought it, both he and Pollock knew it was probably the pick of the litter. Ossorio wasn’t sure where he was going to hang such an important painting, so for the time being he had it crated and put into storage until he could find the right wall for it.

  The main reason Ossorio was off to Paris was that he was eager to meet the French avant-garde painter, Jean Dubuffet, whose work, like Ossorio’s, had been mocked for its ugliness. Perhaps Pollock’s greatest contribution to Ossorio’s art was introducing him to the paintings of Dubuffet, which Pollock liked so much that he kept a picture of one from a magazine article pinned to the inside of his outhouse door. Dubuffet, as it turned out, was assembling a collection of what he called Art Brut, “raw” art made by society’s outsiders, the kind of art with which Ossorio’s own work had been compared. Ossorio felt that he had found a kindred spirit in Dubuffet and wanted to spend time in Paris working and furthering their friendship.

  Neither Ossorio nor Dragon had any thoughts of returning to East Hampton and the drama of Jackson Pollock when in August 1951 Pollock and Krasner wrote to Ossorio in Paris to say that The Creeks was up for sale and that if Ossorio would ever seriously consider buying it, he should come back to the States at once and make an offer. Ted Dragon remembered the events more dramatically. It was a cable, not a letter, he said, and “the cable said that a bunch of nuns wanted to buy the place and that everyone who lived on Georgica Pond was pa
nic-stricken that they were going to have a girls’ school run by nuns in their midst and that Ossorio had better come to the rescue.”