A Complicated Marriage (21 page)

Had Still visited Clem before? I thought it unlikely. In an early review he'd written in the forties, Clem had marginalized Still as being “slack,” “undisciplined.” It wasn't until 1953 that Clem had had an epiphany and made his reversal official in 1955 in “American-Type Painting,” saying he was “. . . impressed as never before by how estranging and upsetting genuine originality can be . . . ” and called Still the “ . . . most important
and original painter of our time.” When I met Clem, he was reveling in his mistake. That was Clem's way. Still would always be Clem's touchstone when he talked about how important it was to look hard at art and even harder at the art you didn't take to at first. Now the touchstone was in the living room.

 

Still joined Clem in another drink. The wife and daughter drank nothing. I didn't know why they were here. It was obvious to me that this was not a social call. I somehow knew not to pull out my scant repertoire of social amenities and smiles. The occasion had taken on all the earmarks of a summit meeting where the agenda remains obscure. The men spoke. Still spoke a lot, using complex words to embellish simple opinions. The wife, being the wife, leaned in, drinking in each word. That was her way. She was the tape recorder, the note-taker. What was the daughter's way? Perhaps to be as unobtrusive as possible. I knew how to do that, too. I leaned back and tried to remove myself from this company, tried to think of anything but what was going on.

The Stills did not look at the art. They did not look at me. None of them spoke to me. They were as one. Finally, I ventured a word to the wife. I ventured a word to the daughter. There was no response, lest a word that passed between the men be missed. Nothing unusual, but never before to this chilling degree.

The voices went on—no banter, no chat. Still talked of polemics and issues and enemies. He reminded me of Barney Newman, that other painter of big pictures with big talk that could also numb my brain, but this man made Barney sound like a pussycat. I watched the women watching Still. Like chameleons, they had absorbed his coloration.

And then the conversation took a jolting turn to the personal. Now I, too, straightened in my chair and leaned in. Still was describing their living situation in Baltimore, his studio and their living quarters, his daughter's “room,” separated from theirs by a curtain. He was proud of this austerity. I learned that the daughter was his, one of two, and that his wife was their stepmother.

I looked at the girl, noticing for the first time that she was not really
a “girl,” but rather a young woman. Could she have been close to my age? I was twenty-four. They were so strange to me, this family. How did she manage with only a curtain between her and her father and her stepmother? I thought of my own stepmother and quaked. Before I could stop, I was in the anger of my own past. How had I ever managed to live in the same room as my brother when I was eight and he was thirteen? And when I was ten, how had I managed to share a room with my mother for the next three years? And I hadn't even had a curtain.

My self-pity disgusted me, and so I tried to refocus on these people in the room. It was difficult. I didn't want to identify with this daughter, but I did. I didn't want to hear this talk, but I did. I could see the curtain. It was not thick enough. It was rough homespun, but it was too thin. I looked at Still and he became a righteous crusader flailing at injustice, all the while mowing down those closest to him.

They had arrived at five and would stay until seven. They left on the dot, as if the time had been prearranged. I was surprised that they had even stayed that long. They rose as one. They didn't say good-bye to me. I don't think they knew my name. Nor did I know the women's names.

Later that night Clem and I went out with David Smith, a girlfriend, and Bill de Kooning. We hit the Five Spot to listen to jazz and met up with more people and then headed off to some parties. Bill drifted off, probably to the Cedar. We four wound up the night at the Chelsea Hotel, where David often stayed when he was in town from Bolton Landing. This time he had one of the penthouse rooms, huge and shabbily grand, and on an oversize low table, in a bowl as big as a salad bowl, was grass. Clem and I were new to all that, but we gave it a try—I more scared than excited, Clem ready to try anything new.

David made a production of rolling a joint. I was fascinated by his big beefy hands, hands that could weld monuments of soaring steel, now so deft at such a delicate task. He lit up and earnestly demonstrated how to inhale. We passed the joint to one another. I liked that ritual. It bonded us. I felt close to David that night. I had not been able to feel that way about him before. The more I inhaled, the more I swore over and over that I felt nothing. Everyone laughed, so I laughed, too. The more Clem inhaled, the more he muttered over and over that booze was better. Everyone laughed.
Clem was miffed. I sank back into the couch and drifted into thoughts of the couch I would have if we could afford a couch, big as a boat and soft as a bag of marshmallows. And I thought of the room I would live in, big and high and open to the air and to the light of the moon and the sun. It seemed like years later when Clem unearthed me from the couch, and I made my polite goodnights to David and his friend, thanking him for his hospitality. That was my way. Still going on about the grass and how we didn't see what all the fuss was about, we ambled our way home. There in the small foyer of our building was a dead-to-the-world drunk. I got a bit dithery and Clem reassured me that drunks were harmless; it was the junkies you wanted to stay clear of. I laughed. Clem, again, didn't get the joke. I couldn't stop laughing.

Why have I always remembered that? I don't remember David's girlfriend, or what went on at the Five Spot, or the parties, whose or where they were. But I remember the grass. And the drunk. And that it was all part of the same night that the Stills had come to visit, and how they had eaten up what light there was in the room and then left their shadows.

 

In an old Still catalog, I recently came across a long letter Still had written to Clem in May 1961—the tone dark and ominous. In it, Still dismisses
Art and Culture
as “. . . purveying downright lies, or worse—malevolent ignorance.” He later lumps Clem with Barney, writing, “There is something rotten in your impotent souls” that motivates you to tear down “. . . the work and purposes of your betters.” He concludes his litany of charges by referring to a dossier he has compiled that he will reveal at his discretion “. . . to correct your pedestrian perversions of the truth.'” The letter was signed by his wife, Pat Still, though for all the world, it would seem to have been written in tongues. Clem had never mentioned the letter to me, perhaps because it didn't surprise him.

Still died in 1980. True to form, his will was, in effect, an audacious challenge couched in stringent and labyrinthine terms. He bequeathed his enormous art estate, numbering some 750 paintings and 1,400 drawings, to the city that would build a museum dedicated solely to his work and maintain it in perpetuity, no deacquisitions permitted. He specified the required size of the museum, a minimum of twenty-five thousand
feet, and even the number of paintings and drawings that must be displayed on a rotating basis. For Still's widow, that patient guardian of the flame, it would take twenty-four years for the right suitor—the city of Denver—to appear and the terms to be met. She died a year later, and it would take another six years for the entombed oeuvre to be finally disinterred. I am sure Still will continue to manipulate the strings from above. With him, things had a way of never running smoothly. But then, he liked it like that.

FRANZ STAYS WITH ME. Yes, there are those raw, gut-wrenchingly honest paintings that when I first saw them made me gasp, the slashes, like black lightening, sending a shock down my spine. Oh, those pictures. But it is he who stays with me as well. Whenever I see one of his paintings or hear his name, I think of his dark-haired paleness, his deep melodious voice. And his soft brown velvet eyes with a smudge of sadness under a mesmerizing widow's peak. A romantic view. And why not? With his black fedora, thirties movie-star mustache, and flower-in-his-lapel ways, he certainly projected that image.

Franz's beginnings are so stark and bear so little resemblance to the man I knew, not well, but somewhat, from 1955 until his death in 1962. As so often happens, those who people our lives have stories we never hear until they are long gone. Only later would I think of the disparity between the open, fun-loving Franz, the Franz who was wild about dancing and took such bold strides that he took my breath away, and the Franz of the harsh early years. I looked for clues to link the two, but apart from that smudge of sadness, it was as if his past had left no trace. But, of course, that couldn't have been true.

His story rings of the gothic: extreme poverty, the father a dollar-a-day worker on the railroad who committed suicide when Franz was seven, and an orphanage in Philadelphia until he was fifteen. His interest in art started early, and after his mother's remarriage he was able to study at college and in England. While there he married Elizabeth, an elegant dark-haired woman who “dreamed of being a great lady.” Arriving in Greenwich Village in 1938, Franz became part of the impoverished artists' world, worked and lived in a small studio underneath Bill de Kooning's, and survived on coffee laced with sugar. Elizabeth, sucked under
by hardship and isolation, withdrew and took to her bed, until, in 1946, Franz had to put her in a state home for the mentally ill for the next fifteen years.

By the time I met Franz in 1955, he had already been for several years with another dark-haired woman, Betsy Zogbaum, the ex-wife of fellow artist Wilfred Zogbaum. Lively, strong, beautiful, she became his life partner. And in 1950, at age forty, Franz achieved “overnight success.” Evidently, one day he said to Betsy, “I've got it.” He had started his series of black and white paintings. He is also purported to have said, “I don't know what to make of them.”

Clem had played a pivotal part in Franz's career when, in 1950, he included him in the first show he ever curated. He and Meyer Shapiro picked up-and-coming artists for a show called “Talent” at the Kootz Gallery. This first showing of a Kline black and white picture garnered a lot of attention and got him his first uptown gallery, the Egan Gallery, where he had his first one-man show in 1951. In a rare gesture, Clem contributed a blurb for the show that dubbed Kline the “most striking new painter in the last three years.” He was also acclaimed by his fellow artists.

However, Franz, like all first-rate artists, would have to wait a while for most critics, museum people, and collectors to catch up with his work. Another critic of stern stuff who was not won over was Kline's mother. Evidently, upon seeing the show, she said to him, “Black and white—you always did choose the easy way.”

Whether from the establishment or from one's mother, acceptance was hard won in those decades. The better, the more honest, the work, the higher the wall of head-shaking skepticism. That came to be the standard. And the reverse was also true. Early in his career, I recall Ken Noland after an opening of one of his shows at Tibor de Nagy as he walked down the street, downcast because people had liked the pictures; he had concluded that the work wasn't very good. How soon that would all change when the art scene moved into a time of newness for newness' sake. No more time delay as collectors, afraid lest they miss the next “star,” paid top dollar. Wonderful for artists, but thoughts of Kline
and his slow but sure success at age forty made me hanker for a more discriminating time.

Clem's earlier familiarity with Kline's work might have suggested a more than casual relationship between them, but if that had been the case, it was no longer so by the time I came around. Not that Franz and Clem didn't get along—everyone got along with Franz. But, as with many artists, I was content with liking him from afar as our paths crossed and recrossed. That said, there would be a few exceptions.

The most unforgettable was in 1958, at a late-night gathering at his studio on East Tenth Street. The night had started at Barney's studio, where Annalee had arranged a viewing party, followed by dinner with Lee Krasner, then on to the Five Spot to hear Kenneth Koch read. It was the third time that week for us. We loved his poetry and kept taking whoever we were seeing on any given night to share the experience. De Kooning, also a fan of the Beats, was there and we joined up. After the reading, we all went over to Franz's place nearby. And there, to my astonishment, was Hedy Lamarr.

I was enraptured. Most of my memory of Franz and my surroundings was eclipsed by Hedy's dazzling presence as visions of “Samson and Delilah” danced in my head. Where was Betsy? Were Hedy and Franz having a thing? My mind boggled at the thought: a lowly painter—to my mind, all painters were pretty lowly—and a movie queen. I had no answers. I could only wonder how on earth a painter had snagged a movie star. Not any star, but the penultimate dark-haired beauty. A rather pedestrian explanation surfaced later that reversed my scenario. It seemed that Hedy had bought a picture of Franz's and written him a fan letter, and one thing had led to another. But still, as often as I saw evidence to the contrary, my imagination never would allow for the possibility that Hollywood might find the New York art scene glamorous.

Franz and Hedy must have continued to see each other, because there was an addendum to that evening a few months later, when we were invited to a small party at Franz's place and once again the movie star was there. That night I was a bit more alert. The room was large, very high ceilings, haphazard. The only place to sit was a long low sofa—more
likely a couple of mattresses piled up—along one wall. It was there that I sank down next to Hedy, smelled her perfume, and listened to the soft murmur of her foreignness, so familiar from the front row in the loge of the Rye movie house. I mused about Franz's attraction to luminous brunettes. It was Hedy who confirmed what I had always suspected: that all truly breathtaking beauties were brunettes. She was nice. She asked about my “husband,” a word I realized I never heard or used much. But I couldn't ask her about hers, because I couldn't remember who all she had been married to. Instead I told her that I had never seen Franz so happy. Her whole face lit up. It was true, and that night Franz was an exuberant host, smiling as if his face would burst. Adding to my fun was that I was hanging out with a whole new gaggle of art types, the Tenth Street guys. And we all danced, and drank and drank. Hedy, too.