Ossorio had visited The Creeks the previous summer with Pollock, who had arranged for them to be shown around the old place out of curiosity. It was like visiting Mrs. Havisham’s bedroom, the mildew so thick that it made Ossorio gag. The pond side of the bulkhead was rotted away, and termites had all but destroyed the Happy Hour building. But the magnificent studio and small theater was left unscathed; Ossorio was fascinated by the giant rollers for canvas, twelve feet long, one built into the floor and another attached to the ceiling, with huge sheets of canvas on which Herter would paint his giant wall murals before rolling them up and shipping them off to Europe. It was inspiring for Ossorio to think of being able to work in such a studio. He was charmed by the tales of the Herters’ wonderfully eccentric world, with their musicales and Sunday teas, but it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to save The Creeks, and who in the world could commit financially to running a sixty-acre estate? And yet the huge studio haunted Ossorio, as did the view of the pond and the promise of what The Creeks once was and could be again.
Ossorio obsessed about The Creeks for days. “About a week after the cable,” said Dragon, “Alfonso asked me, ‘If I buy the Herter estate in East Hampton, will you give up your career in ballet and come live with me there?’ Well, I had never really seen The Creeks,” although one summer day he had picked flowers on its grounds. “I only heard stories about it, so living there really meant nothing to me. But I loved Alfonso, so I said, ‘Buy The Creeks and I’ll go there with you. I do not have the “disease” of the ballet. I have a “love” of ballet.’ I told him that before we left France, I wanted to dance one last time, a gala with Serge Lifar at the Nice Opera. I danced La Péri, by Dukas, a pas de deux, and I danced all done up, in diamonds and chiffon. And that was it. That was the last time I danced professionally.”
Ossorio returned to New York and bought The Creeks from Christian Herter for $35,000, “a song,” he said, and then immediately flew back to Paris to make arrangements to pack. “A month later we got on the Ile de France and came home,” Dragon remembered. Dragon got a little taste of what his future would be like when Ossorio spent the entire transatlantic crossing painting at an easel in their staterooms, emerging to join Dragon only for meals. Dragon passed the days wandering around the boat, chatting with strangers and shopping in the gift store, where he bought his first purchase for The Creeks: an Ile de France souvenir ashtray. A week later, when the boat docked on Manhattan’s West Side, “Jackson and Lee met us at the pier,” Dragon said, “and helped us collect our luggage. Then they drove us out to East Hampton to see our new house for the first time. I was sitting in the back of the car on Sunrise Highway when I showed Lee the ashtray I bought. She looked at it and laughed. ‘Oh, Ted,’ she said, ‘You have no idea.’”
Dragon agreed. “I didn’t have any idea. None at all, really. I knew it was a nice house, but… When we drove up that long road through the grounds, acres of flower gardens gone to ruin, the woods, the pines, and then, there in the distance, the ailing Creeks with the pond beyond it and the Atlantic Ocean beyond that, ‘My God,’ I said, ‘Holy shit!’”
Krasner turned around in the front seat and said to him, “Dragon, now you’re in for it!”
6
“WE STRIPPED the place from top to bottom,” Dragon said. “The Herters’ fourteen-karat-gold wallpaper, the hand-painted red enamel woodwork, the mandarin scenes on the panels of the doors—all gone, all painted white. We installed wall-to-wall gray carpeting and we put down an occasional area rug—a Bohkara on the polished floor of the music room, and a few palm trees and some rattan furniture.” It looked like a modern-art gallery, and indeed it was, as the walls were filled with Ossorio’s own work, a place of honor in the west sitting room for Lavender Mist, and six entire rooms on the second floor devoted to a display of the entire collection of Dubuffet’s remarkable Art Brut, which Ossorio had imported to America to make available to anyone who wanted to see it.
“Ossorio claimed Albert Herter’s bedroom, and I moved into Adele’s,” Dragon said. Albert’s studio was returned to working condition. “In the dressing rooms we found old costumes and props, as well as several unfinished paintings that the Herters had left behind,” Dragon recalled. “The paintings were already mounted in very valuable ornate frames, and Ossorio loved the frames and kept them, but he gave the paintings to Pollock, who painted over them. It’s altogether possible that underneath some of Pollock’s paintings there are Herter portraits.”
Under Ossorio’s aegis The Creeks became a Bloomsbury on the Pond, or as Newsday called it, “a Disneyland for esthetes.” The house was booked with guests all summer, and there were hundreds of legendary dinner parties given at The Creeks over the years, one every night during the busy summer season. Guests included art critics Selden Rodman, Henry McBride, Clement Greenberg, and Harold Rosenberg; artists Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Grace Hartigan, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Robert Gwathmey, Robert Motherwell, Roy Lichtenstein, Franz Kline, John Little, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Esteban Vicente, Jimmy Ernst, and Robert Dash. Truman Capote got drunk at The Creeks several times a summer. Jerome Robbins and Dina Merrill came for lunch. Buckminster Fuller was a houseguest and lecturer, and Norman Mailer was so taken with The Creeks that Ossorio loaned it to him as a backdrop for an “underground” movie Mailer directed called Maidstone. The controversial philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich was a frequent houseguest, as was Dr. Lewis Thomas, the chancellor of Sloan-Kettering hospital. Juan Carlos, the heir to the Spanish throne, came to see Dubuffet’s Art Brut collection, and Mrs. Douglas MacArthur arrived at The Creeks with a police escort after having been pulled over for speeding on the expressway. Louise Nevelson topped that entrance by pulling up the driveway on the back of an eighteen-foot, red hook-and-ladder fire truck, a stunt Ossorio arranged for her sixtieth birthday party, witnessed by 400 guests. Also, always in attendance at The Creeks, at every meal and every party, were Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.
To add to the general sense of The Creeks as a nurturing environment for the creative arts, throughout the 1950s each summer Ossorio generously loaned or rented inexpensively the original gatehouse and small barn of the estate to be used as living quarters and studio by up-and-coming artists. These “artists in residence” included painter Grace Hartigan, who one summer changed her name to “George” Hartigan in homage to George Sands and had an affair so torrid with sculptor George Spaventa that Ossorio was summoned from his bed one night by the East Hampton police to moderate their lover’s quarrel.
For two summers the painter Clyfford Still, with whom nobody could get along, not even the unflappable Ossorio, was the artist in residence. Midway through Still’s second season, some small event sent him into a fury and he packed to leave. On his way out he appeared at the main house and demanded back from Ossorio a painting he had sold him, claiming that it had only been on loan. Ossorio was incredulous at Still’s demand and refused to return it. The following month Still appeared unannounced at The Creeks one afternoon along with a lady friend, and while the young woman distracted Ossorio and Dragon in the front hallway, Still sneaked into the sitting room where his painting hung, cut out the inside with a razor blade, and hid the rolled-up canvas under his coat. Then he marched out the front door and into the backseat of a waiting taxi, his lady friend close behind. When Ossorio realized what had transpired, he jumped into his own car and chased the taxi to the train station. But by the time he arrived, the train was pulling down the tracks in the distance, and all that remained of the remarkable incident were flakes of paint on the station floor.
Ossorio obsessively kept notebooks that included not only the names of his guests but which rooms they stayed in, where they sat at the dining room table, the menu and wines that were served, even which china and crystal were used and what the table decorations looked like. Lunch never had fewer than three wines, dinner at least five. (“De Kooning on the wagon!” reads one notebook entry.) Oss
orio had the Herters’ wine cellar under the studio enlarged and modernized, and he began to amass a collection of 6,000 bottles worthy of the world’s greatest sommeliers. After each meal, the labels were soaked from the bottles and pressed into the pages of the daily diary.
The task fell to Dragon to run The Creeks like a five-star hotel. “It was like masterminding a living stage set,” said Dragon, who rose at dawn in the summer to direct the show from behind the scenes. “Each day there were three formal meals. At six-thirty in the morning I was out in our own vegetable gardens handpicking the greens and vegetables to give to the cook, Geneva. Ossorio was very particular about his food, and I knew exactly how he liked things.” Meals were never simple, not even breakfast, for which guests had a choice of hot and cold cereals, eggs Benedict or Florentine, Bloody Marys or mimosas to drink—served on china and in crystal. The celery was to be stringed and the carrots diced, not sliced. Potatoes were strained, not mashed. “He preferred heavy sauces and the richest of foods, even at breakfast, where his favorite meal was a thick slice of challah bread with a hole in the center, filled with two poached eggs, and a thick slice of pâté on top. Sometimes dinner went to the exotic. It’s true that we served stuffed heart, but not human—veal. They’re delicious parboiled.”
If Ossorio was going to be serving cocktails in the aviary before dinner, Dragon made sure that the ice bucket was filled and that Geneva served almonds—fresh-roasted and still warm—rolled in kosher salt. For each of the many luncheons, cocktail parties, dinner, and concerts, Dragon would prepare dozens of floral displays (which he personally cut from The Creeks’ own gardens, fields, and woods) and arrange them in a variety of vases that he placed in every bathroom, sitting room, bedroom, and cranny in the house. He also executed brilliantly conceived table settings worthy of Versailles, including one of antique-lace tablecloths strewn with petits fours and confetti, another of a bed of moss and autumn leaves for the place settings, with a centerpiece of little pears still on the branches.
After the details of the day’s social activities were arranged, Dragon began the Sisyphean task of watering the resurrected gardens. The new gardens that Ossorio and Dragon planted were not nearly as complex or fantastic as Adele Herter’s indulgences, but they still needed daily attention. Since The Creeks did not have an underground sprinkler system, and outside gardeners were brought in only twice a week to help, Dragon watered the entire sixty-six-acre estate by himself. Every day, following a complicated watering plan, Dragon drove a station wagon around the estate, setting up the hoses and sprinklers, turning them on and off, and rolling them up.
As busy a convocation of artists and intellectuals as The Creeks had become, Ossorio never neglected his own work. “I don’t understand the word ‘vacation’ for people to rest their brains who don’t have anything to rest,” Ossorio would complain. The Herters’ giant studio was an inspiration to him. In the 1950s he completed 300 ink, wax, and watercolor drawings alone. His output was so great, he was able to hold one-man exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951, 1953, 1956, 1958, and 1959. Unfortunately, the work only seemed to entrench him as what one critic called “the summer stock Dali.” In 1956 he sharply increased his role as benefactor to his struggling colleagues by arranging with his East Hampton neighbor, Evan Frankel, to use the lobby of his swank apartment building in Manhattan, the Executive House, as a gallery for emerging Hamptons artists; the unsuspecting tenants were treated to shows of the works of Pollock, Rothko, David Smith, and Richard Pousette-Dart.
In addition, in 1957 Ossorio cofounded, with the artists Elizabeth Parker and John Little, the now legendary Signa Art Gallery on Newtown Lane in East Hampton, the area’s first real avant-garde gallery, where he debuted the works of every important artist of the era, including Kline, de Kooning, and Brach—although the Signa might have hit the pinnacle of its accomplishments in the summer of 1957, when Marilyn Monroe, who was honeymooning with playwright Arthur Miller in the Hamptons that idyllic summer, would show up at the Signa Gallery daily to run her hands over the smooth marble curves of a David Slivka sculpture.
7
NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, the troubled artist Jackson Pollock would sit on the brick steps off the back patio of The Creeks and sullenly drink beer, staring at the pond or at Lavender Mist, which was visible in the dining room through the open terrace doors. His drinking bouts were more extreme than Dragon had ever seen. “One morning I looked out my window, and there he was sprawled out on the terrace, completely naked, unconscious from drink.” He also remembered Pollock doing things to purposely challenge and horrify his friends, like holding his hand over an open flame in the kitchen. On another occasion, “he drove his car into the surf,” Dragon said, “and sat there waiting for the tide to come in and cover him up. He passed out behind the wheel and was rescued by some people walking by on the beach.”
In one of Pollock’s most notorious performances, he appeared at The Creeks in the middle of a black-tie dinner party, stormed into the music room, and began to violently pound the keys of the Steinway piano in a vicious parody of Dragon. “Then he jumped up,” said Dragon, “got an ice pick from the kitchen, and chopped up all the ivory keys.” It cost Ossorio several thousand dollars to repair.
No matter how mischievous—or downright crazy—Pollock behaved, Ossorio was invariably forgiving. When Pollock binged on booze and had to be carried home from Jungle Pete’s, it was Ossorio whom Lee called to rescue him. When Pollock was hauled to the station house for drunken driving or fighting, it was Ossorio whom the police called to bail him out. When Pollock ran out of canvas, Ossorio not only bought a roll for him but went over to the farmhouse and helped him stretch it.
At one point, the Pollocks practically moved into The Creeks. “When Jackson was too drunk to drive home to Springs—and sometimes Lee was too drunk too,” Dragon said, “they slept in the middle bedroom, the Spanish bedroom, so called because of the three-tiered Spanish wrought-iron headboard. They were there so many nights, and so poor, that they asked Ossorio if they could move into The Creeks with us.” Ossorio for the first time in his life looked as though he was caught off-guard and fumbled for something to say. “You know I love you both very much…,” he managed to say before shrugging his shoulders hopelessly.
“Then Jackson began having an affair,” Dragon said, rolling his eyes. “It put Alfonso and me in a very difficult position. First of all, I was Lee’s friend, and Jackson’s having this affair was a mortal insult to her. Lee put up with a lot from him, but another woman was too much. It humiliated her.” The woman’s name was Ruth Kligman, and Pollock had met her at the Cedar Tavern. “He moved her out to Sag Harbor for the summer of 1956 for public display, and Lee was furious,” Dragon said. “He used to bring Kligman out to his studio right under Lee’s nose. She called me one day and told me that she was going to divorce him. She said she told Jackson, ‘It’s her or me.’ But I told her, ‘Don’t do it, Lee, don’t divorce him. You’d be crazy. If he keeps up drinking like this, he’s going to die anyway.” But Krasner did pack her bags and, for the first time in their marriage, went off without Pollock, to spend the summer with friends in Europe.
With Krasner gone, Pollock went out of control. He had Ruth Kligman move in with him, “which put us in a very embarrassing position,” said Dragon. “We didn’t want to be rude to Jackson, but we didn’t want to be disloyal to Lee.” However, Ossorio did invite Pollock and Kligman, as well as Lucia and Roger Wilcox, Clement Greenberg, and Wilfrid Zogbaum, among others, on Saturday, August 11, to be among the guests at one of his popular benefit recitals for Guild Hall, candlelit affairs that overflowed onto the terrace, where guests listened to concerts under the stars. But Pollock never showed that night, and about a half hour into the performance, there was the eerie sound of ambulances out on the highway. “It was a very still night,” Ossorio remembered. Then the phone rang sharply, and a frisson rippled through the audience. It was the artist Conrad Marca-Relli calling for Ossorio to say th
at there had been an accident on Springs Fireplace Road and that he better come quick.
Pollock had been in his green Oldsmobile convertible with Ruth Kligman and a friend she had asked to join her for the weekend, Edith Metzger, a beautician from the Bronx who had survived the Holocaust. Pollock intended to show up at The Creeks that night—he had even pulled over to a phone at the side of the road to say he was coming—but he had driven all the way to The Creeks’ main entrance when in a drunken rage he spun the car around and sped back toward Springs. The women screamed for him to slow down and stop, but their pleas only made him drive more crazily, and on a curve on Springs Fireplace Road the car skidded and somersaulted into the woods at ninety miles an hour. Ruth Kligman was thrown clear and suffered relatively minor injuries. Edith Metzger broke her neck and was killed on impact. Pollock was propelled out of the car and flew fifty feet through the air, flung headfirst, like a javelin, into a tree trunk. He hit it with such impact that his head was literally cleaved apart. When Ossorio arrived at the scene, Pollock’s car horn was still blaring and the headlights were pointing crazily up into the trees. Ossorio agreed to identify Pollock’s body for the police and was escorted to the spot in the woods. He wept at seeing his friend and covered Pollock’s face with a clean handkerchief monogrammed A O.
By the time Ossorio returned to The Creeks, the concert was over and the guests had left without ever knowing why Pollock hadn’t shown up. The next day Dragon and Ossorio had the presence of mind to go to Pollock’s house and clear out Ruth Kligman’s belongings so that Lee Krasner would not discover them when she returned from Europe. Ossorio was waiting for Krasner when she arrived home at La Guardia Airport later that day, and he took her by limousine directly out to East Hampton to help make Pollock’s funeral arrangements.
Philistines at the Hedgerow Page 14
