Jackson Pollock (41 page)

Unable to work, Pollock began a precipitous decline. He drank heavily and continuously,
consuming as much as a quart of whiskey a day. Sober, he abruptly descended into gloomy
depressions and was overcome with unabashed self-pity. A gesture as slight as a compassionate
glance from a woman could reduce him to tears. In a typical outburst Pollock started
to cry one night in the middle of a dinner party after Cile Lord, his neighbor, asked
him how he was doing. “I’m an old man,” he repeated between sobs as he reached for
her hand. On other occasions he confessed to feelings of utter worthlessness, announcing
to anyone willing to listen that he had never learned how to draw. One day he was
visited by the writer Selden Rodman, who planned on interviewing him for a book. When
Rodman and his wife Maia asked to see his work, Pollock led the couple outside to
the barn. Upon realizing the door was locked, he smashed two windows and climbed inside.
After a few minutes Rodman went back to the house, and Pollock, alone with Maia in
the studio, started to cry uncontrollably. She took his head in her hands and tried
to console him, which only made Pollock cry harder. As he wept he pointed to some
paintings leaning against the wall and asked her, “Do you think I would have painted
this crap if I knew how to draw a hand?”

Such desperate pleas for sympathy alternated unpredictably with outrageous displays
of arrogance. Greenberg recalls his disgust one day after showing Pollock a book on
Rubens. Glancing quickly at the reproductions, Pollock proclaimed, “I can paint better
than this guy!” At a dinner party one night at the home of Herbert Ferber the guests
were appalled when Pollock, gesturing toward a worn rug slung over the couch, announced
to Adolph
Gottlieb: “Your work is just like this rug. It’s full of holes.” Friends who had known
Pollock in better days began avoiding his company, refusing to subject themselves
to the obscene harangues that accompanied his drinking. But sometimes they didn’t
have a choice. Harold Rosenberg, who had emerged not long ago as de Kooning’s chief
champion, came to dread the sound of Pollock pulling up in his Model A, invariably
after midnight. With the engine still running and the headlights beaming, Pollock
would wander around the critic’s yard and holler at the house, “I’m the best fucking
painter in the world.”

Pollock, who had always eschewed the camaraderie of artists, became more social toward
the end of his life. Drunk, he sought out fellow artists, wanting to be part of a
group. He took up with de Kooning, forcing himself to ignore the fact that in March
1953 de Kooning had unveiled his
Woman
series at the Janis Gallery and replaced Pollock as the sensation of Fifty-seventh
Street. The art historian Sidney Geist recalls arriving at the Cedar one night to
find Pollock and de Kooning sitting outside on the curb, passing a bottle between
them. “Jackson, you’re the greatest painter in America,” de Kooning was mumbling drunkenly,
slapping him on the back. “No, Bill,” Pollock blabbered, “you’re the greatest painter
in America.” They kept at it until Pollock passed out. On other occasions, however,
Pollock and de Kooning were not so mutually admiring. One night at the Cedar, Pollock
started taunting his friend about his illegitimate daughter. De Kooning punched him
in the mouth, drawing blood. The crowd that had gathered around them urged Pollock
to hit de Kooning back, prompting him to utter his famous retort: “What? Me hit an
artist?” The two painters made up, but as Greenberg wrote to his friend Sue Mitchell:
“The reconciliation isn’t real. The fact is, they don’t like each other: Bill not
really liking anybody, & Jackson, with all his capacity for love, seeking out people
he doesn’t like . . . & then having trouble with them.”

The spring of 1954 was a particularly difficult time for Pollock. Ever since he had
moved to the country, the arrival of spring
had been a reminder that soon it would be time to return to his studio and prepare
for his next show. This time, however, there would be no show. Pollock went into the
barn almost every afternoon and stayed there until evening, but he couldn’t get down
to work. When he returned to the house at the end of each day Lee did not ask him
how it went; she could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t working. As if
to trick himself into working, Pollock ordered new art materials. He called up Rosenthal’s
in the Village and placed extravagant orders for fresh rolls of canvas and dozens
of tubes of oils. But the materials would remain unopened. As the weeks went by, it
became harder for Pollock to stay inside his studio. Sometimes he came back to the
house a few minutes after he’d left and headed for the refrigerator to get a beer.
On other days he didn’t go out to the barn at all but started drinking as soon as
he woke up, beginning with beer and graduating to whiskey by afternoon. His wife tried
to be gentle. “Remember how good your painting used to be when you weren’t drinking?”
she’d say, but her comments only reminded him of what he no longer was. Being in his
house was worse than being in his studio, for he hated having to suffer his wife’s
disappointment in him.

One June morning Pollock woke up early, drank some beer, and drove to Bridgehampton
to see de Kooning and Kline, who were sharing a red Victorian farmhouse on Montauk
Highway for the summer. He tried to get de Kooning to wrestle with him on the lawn,
but de Kooning, who wasn’t a morning drinker, didn’t feel like wrestling. Pollock
started sparring by himself, shooting his fists at an imaginary opponent. Suddenly
there was a loud snap and Pollock fell down. His ankle broken, he spent the rest of
the summer on crutches.

Pollock’s broken ankle was one more reminder of his rapidly deteriorating physical
condition. With his bloated face, hazy features, and swollen, nicotine-stained fingers,
he no longer was the commanding presence he had been only a year or two earlier. But
even in his ruined condition, Pollock’s reputation as well as his misery gave him
an aura of genius, and he found himself surrounded by various new admirers. The most
determined was
probably Ben Heller, a clothing manufacturer and fledgling art collector, who, on
his first visit to Pollock’s studio, offered to purchase
One
for eight thousand dollars—the top price that Pollock ever received for a painting.
Heller and his wife became frequent visitors, stopping by to sit with Pollock as he
listened to records or to take him to the beach, even though he could not swim because
of his broken ankle. Another devoted couple were Sheridan and Cile Lord, young artists
who had recently settled in Springs. Lord was a painter of realistic landscapes, and
though Pollock criticized his work—“You can’t do that kind of painting anymore!” he’d
insist—the young painter adored him anyway. In February 1955, eight months after he
had broken his ankle, Pollock was wrestling with Lord in his living room when suddenly
he sat down and clasped his ankle. He had broken it again.

Important people wrote to Pollock offering their condolences. “All my sympathy,” wrote
James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Guggenheim, while suggesting that Pollock visit
the museum to see his own work. Greenberg, traveling in Europe, hoped Pollock’s break
was “knitted by now” and, by the way, “Saw two Pollocks in Rome.” The art dealer Martha
Jackson—“I hear you have broken your leg again”—got in touch with Pollock about buying
a few of his paintings. One day she drove out to Springs to look at his work, and
as they were discussing prices, she offered to barter her car as payment. It was quickly
agreed: two “black” paintings for one dark-green 1950 Oldsmobile convertible.

On his good days Pollock talked about taking trips. He told his wife he wanted to
go out west, and he invited the Lords to come with them. So too he talked about going
to Europe. He had never seen the Louvre, after all, or the Sistine Chapel or the Goyas
or El Grecos he had admired for years in reproduction. He drove to Riverhead, the
county seat, and took out a passport, but then he wasn’t so sure. One day when the
painter Milton Resnick was visiting, Pollock told him: “What do you think? I’m going
to Europe.”

“Okay,” Resnick said, “well, so?”

“I don’t know if I want to go,” Pollock told him.

“What do you want to do?” Resnick asked.

“I hate art,” Pollock said.

“Sure,” Resnick said. “Everybody does. So you’re going to Europe. What do you want
me to tell you?”

He never signed his passport, never went to Europe.

As Pollock’s condition worsened, his career progressed on its own. His paintings were
exhibited in one group show after another, and honors accrued. In November 1955 Janis
organized a retrospective spanning fifteen years of Pollock’s career, and as
Time
magazine noted, “friend and foe alike crowded the exhibition in tribute to the champ’s
prowess.” The following May, Pollock learned that the Museum of Modern Art, which
was planning a series of one-man shows called “Works in Progress” for leading contemporary
artists, had chosen him to start the series. Curator Andrew Ritchie had originally
proposed that de Kooning go first, but Alfred Barr overruled him, arguing that Pollock
was “more deserving.” Museum directors were magnanimous and deferential to Pollock’s
reputation, in spite of his churlish behavior. When the Whitney Museum showed three
of his paintings in an important group show called “The New Decade,” Pollock became
livid upon noticing that the exhibition catalogue claimed he had “worked for a time
with Hofmann.” He telephoned the museum and angrily cursed at a curator, prompting
director John I. H. Baur to send him a polite apology.

Not the least among Pollock’s frustrations was that Lee had been painting steadily
since 1953, the same year he had begun having trouble. Though he had no reason to
resent her work, he did resent the fulfillment she derived from it. In the summer
of 1955 Lee was working particularly hard, preparing for a one-woman show at the Stable
Gallery. On most days she went upstairs to her studio in the morning and did not emerge
again until dinner time. She felt excited about her new work—large-scale, lavishly
colored collage paintings that she made by cutting up her early paintings and reassembling
the pieces into bold, arresting designs. As if in recognition of her accomplishment,
she changed her signature from the self-effacing “L.K.” to her full name. Her surge
in confidence owed little to her husband, who, while occasionally
supportive, could also be cruelly belittling. Cile Lord recalls her embarrassment
one night when Lee walked out of her studio wearing a bathrobe and asked Pollock if
he could go to the barn to get her some Sobo glue. Pollock refused. On another occasion
Pollock embarrassed his wife in front of Eleanor Ward, the owner of the Stable Gallery,
who visited Lee in Springs one day to select the paintings for her show. The threesome
went out to dinner that night, and Ward recalls her “shock” when Pollock complained
to her, “Can you imagine being married to that face?”

Though Lee was still determined to help her husband, Pollock would not allow it. Ashamed
of his condition, he resented her constant efforts to nurse and nurture him into health
and took to staging childish protests. One of his favorite games was refusing to eat
the food she put down in front of him. “I don’t want food, I want tea,” he told her
one afternoon while friends were visiting. After Lee had gotten up from the table
to brew him some tea, Pollock said, “I don’t want tea!” and he poured a shot of whiskey
into the teacup. He humiliated her often in front of friends, subjecting her to obscene
name-calling. “Don’t pay any attention to him,” Lee would say sternly as friends cringed
in embarrassment. She punished Pollock by ignoring him, refusing to give him the satisfaction
of even a disapproving glance. Deprived of her affection, Pollock would become remorseful,
apologizing profusely and insisting he could not help himself. In the summer of 1955,
in an effort to save their marriage, Lee went into analysis, and Pollock started seeing
Ralph Klein, a clinical psychologist who practiced in Manhattan. Every Monday Pollock
and Lee went into the city together to see their respective doctors.

Pollock’s Mondays in the city invariably ended at the Cedar Street Tavern, where,
unlike at home, he knew he could find an appreciative audience. The bar reverberated
with excitement whenever he walked in. “Pollock’s here!” people would say, looking
up from their dinners and drinks, watching as he stood by the bar and ordered a whiskey
or Scotch. Young artists he may or may not have known would walk up to him to say
hello. “Hiya,
Jackson,” “Hey, Jackson,” “Hey, pal,” they’d shout, slapping him on the back and punching
him on the arm as they offered to buy him drinks. To Pollock the camaraderie meant
more than it ever had in the past. At a time when he felt like a failure, he was still
a hero at the bar. And though his wife had practically stopped talking to him, there
were women who came to the Cedar just to get a glimpse of him. One of them was Ruth
Kligman.