A Complicated Marriage (22 page)

The following year we saw Franz in Provincetown, where he and Betsy had bought a house/studio. We were on one of our Labor Day visits to the Hofmanns'. How I treasured those few days in a place where all the spits and spats of the New York scene were swept clean by sea air. Where artists were like real people who just wanted to have a good time. More and more, the air in the city seemed to have gotten thick with competition and divisiveness among the artists. There was uneasiness; times were changing. Provincetown was like eternal adolescence, living in a neighborhood with a bunch of kids always at arm's reach, ready for the next adventure. The kind of fun I had known only in a hit-or-miss way, when my mother's ever-changing finances would land us in a “hang out on the street” kind of neighborhood: low-end/low-rent depression for her, bliss for me.

There was one particular day in Provincetown that centered on Franz. It started on New Beach, where we went with the Hofmanns each morning for a swim. It was there that we met up with Franz, Betsy, and David Smith. I had just gotten a camera and I took pictures of them all. Beach pictures were the best, especially when you took a bunch of indoorsy urbanites and plunked them in the sand and water. A “who would've thought?” innocence took over.

Later we went back to Franz and Betsy's, where the drinking began. As the afternoon drew on to evening, Mel and Mark Rothko, Sam Francis,
and others dropped by, and I helped Betsy miraculously improvise something to eat. Then it was on to Fritz and Jean Bultman's, where at one point a fiercely drunken and competitive game of charades took on a life of its own. Only art-related clues allowed, as one might expect. I was on Franz's team; Bob Motherwell headed up the other. How is it possible that I still recall one of my charades, Delacroix's
Horses Coming Out of the Sea
? Probably because I can still feel my panic. Who the hell was Delacroix? Had I ever seen a painting of his? I also remember the charade because Franz guessed it quickly and made me feel quite clever about my swimming-horse performance. Later, we all went to the Madeira House for dancing, followed by, as Clem would note in his daybook, “sundry parties.” And so it was.

As I got to know more artists and became more familiar with their work, I was always fascinated when I heard of their “aha!” moments, such as Kline's “This is it!” That heart-stopping breakthrough that comes unbeknownst, followed by the recognition that this is the first step over the next creative cliff. In every instance of discovery there had to have been that first seminal painting or sculpture that stepped into new territory. That supremely private moment between the creator and his art. For me, those hard-earned epiphanies linked the artist to his passion to his work in a new way; it made their process real to me and humanized the art.

Of course, I didn't know Kline when he found his black and white path, or Pollock when he painted his first all-over picture, but I do remember a particular Friday dinner at Esther and Adolph Gottlieb's in 1956. I know it was a Friday because I was introduced that night to the delectable treat of my first challah bread. At dinner, Adolph, a usually placid man, was almost shaking, too excited to eat. Later, in his studio, he showed us his first “burst” picture. Like Kline, he also said he didn't know what to make of it, that it had just “happened” late one night, and that the picture had “frightened” him. The images of the burst pictures would be at the core of his work for the rest of his life.

And then there was Morris Louis and his large “veils” of translucent luminous paint, rivers of cascading color poured onto unsized canvas. On this visit in 1958, one among many, to his suburban Washington, D.C.,
house-studio these pictures were simply and stunningly there, rolls and rolls of them. And just as simply, he seemed to know,
This is it
. He had his own pragmatic way of dealing with the breakthrough. He had gone on a painting frenzy. For an already obsessively prolific painter, that meant producing a staggering number of veils, over 125 in the next year.

On that day of our visit, one after another after another of the big canvases were unrolled in his small living room, often with me holding one side and a helper the other. Overwhelmed with their beauty, I was also overwhelmed with acrylic fumes. Eventually I had to go outside for air and just made it to the porch before I threw up.

Also in 1958, our good friend Ken Noland arrived one night from Washington, D.C., and walked into Bank Street with a roll of pictures under his arm. Nothing new. Ken often drove up to cruise the galleries, usually bringing a few new pictures to show Clem. On this visit he was edgy as he unrolled one, then another, of the three-foot square canvases, until they carpeted the floor. He seemed to know they were special, and, at the same time, he was unsure. He was still raw with the experience of having painted them. As Clem and I looked at them, Ken looked at them, too, but with wonder, as if he hadn't seen them before. Clem nodded and said, “Yeah.” And Ken exhaled. They had a shorthand. They were his first circle pictures, his “targets.” Ken had already had shows at Tibor de Nagy, but it was the targets that would eventually thrust him into the big time.

When it came to artists' breakthroughs, there seemed to be a common ground. They struck fiercely, and what happened in their aftermath? Well, that varied, but in some cases they could take a toll. Betsy Zogbaum would complain that Franz was surrounded by people wanting a piece of him—a not unusual woman's plaint as her mate's star rises. But also undoubtedly true, as I knew from my own experiences with Clem over the years. The delicious one-liner of Franz's chum Bill de Kooning, suggests a variation: “Franz and I had some success, and then we became a couple of drunks.”

In the years to come, whenever I saw Franz he was front and center in his unassuming way. A guileless magnet. Maybe that's how Hedy had found herself swept into him. Always in the middle of things: an opening,
a party, leaning on the long bar as you walked into the Cedar, standing with a group on the street, smoking, hat on, talking about whatever needed talking about . . . The beach day and the evenings with Hedy were different, special, because I could focus on his niceness and maybe he, for a moment, focused on me.

Kline would go on to have a ten-year run. He died of heart disease at fifty-one, asking from his hospital bed, “Will I ever paint again?”

CLEM NEVER REALLY enjoyed staying with people, but visiting Lee and Jackson was different. Clem felt at home there. From the time I met Clem until Jackson died, about once a month we would go out by train to their place in Springs. The weekends were predictable, each much the same as another. Jackson would pick us up at the station and we would head back to the house, often—depending on whether Jackson was on or off the booze—stopping for a drink at the locals' bar in town.

Once we arrived at the house, the routine was set in stone. No hi-how-are-you, no formalities of any kind. We would sit down around the small, beat-up kitchen table a few feet from the back door where we had entered. And that was that. Conversation would pick up as if the time lapse had been three minutes, rather than weeks. Coffee and gossip wrapped in cigarette smoke. Who was doing what, which shows were good and which bad, which paintings worked and which didn't and why, which reviews and reviewers passed muster and which were full of shit, who had sold what, for how much and to whom, who said what about who, who was being fucked over by their dealer and who was just plain fucking who. Business as usual. All the stuff that artists have probably talked about since the first cave painting. But in that house, with Lee at the helm, no matter how mundane, there was always an impending drama to be hashed over.

Lee was a master at fanning the flames of injustice, either art-political or personal, either real or perceived. Injustices all. The art scene may have been small, but there always seemed to be plenty of grist for the griping mill. For me the grist would go in one ear and out the other. I had learned early on to mentally detach. In the sixties, it would be called
“astral projection,” and I would laugh and say, “Hell, I've been doing that for years.”

 

I see Jackson white-knuckling his coffee mug, kept full to the brim by Lee, both stalling minute by minute the switch to beer and then, if it is one of those days, eventually to the hard stuff. During our visits that winter and spring, Jackson never tips into a full-out binge. Lee is taut, at high voltage, her eyes darting, animated, and compelling despite themselves. I try to measure her appearance by ordinary standards but fail. And her lack of vanity confuses me. I care too much about what people think of me and am envious of her “fuck everyone” arrogance. I am envious, too, of the passion that animates her: her love of art, and her commitment to the genius of “Pollock.” She always refers to Jackson as Pollock, whether he is across the table or on the moon. She is never in repose. Arms spread out on the table, she stretches into the conversation, thirsting for it as if she has been through a drought. She always thrusts herself into the action, into the talk.

Jackson slumps back, alert but at a remove. He never says much around that table—alone with Clem, that was something else. When Jackson speaks, it is in the muted mumble of a sober Jackson. His voice reminds me of David Smith's, both so surprisingly soft-spoken for such über-men in the studio. I never say anything at all.

Clem and Lee bat the ball back and forth for what seems like hours. Do I hear Lee laugh? No, there is never laughter. Lee is a loaded shotgun armed with black and white opinions—she doesn't believe in gray—all delivered in her inimitable gruff New York–ese. I hear her riffing on some affront, usually one that has been perpetrated against Pollock. Later, I will still hear her from the guest room where I lie half-dozing into the night, her voice growling up the stairs, interspersed with the contrapuntal murmur of men's voices. Life is scrutinized, carved up, chewed and digested, or spat out in anger, and that takes energy, all the energy of the day. No scraps go undissected.

One morning, we four again in our familiar positions around the table, Lee wants to talk about a dream she had the week before. She was in an old house reminiscent of a childhood house. She was looking for
something and went downstairs to the cellar. In the gloomy shadows she saw something move. She was terrified but moved closer. And then she saw it: a faceless, formless monster, not human, not animal. She couldn't move or scream. Then she woke up, panicked and so fearful she couldn't return to sleep.

Clem speaks often of his dreams, and she of hers. They offer these conduits from the subconscious with pride, as if they are trophies. Nightmares get the gold star. Lee and Jackson are both in analysis, but Jackson keeps his dreams to himself. Lee says it wasn't the first time she had had this dream, but this has been the most vivid and frightening version. She and Clem gnaw at its ramifications. Clem observes that the “monster” no doubt represents the concealed part of her—concealed not just from others but from herself—that had finally revealed itself. He saw it as a breakthrough dream, one to be excited and pleased about. She avidly drinks in what he says, considers it, then spits it out. If the dream is a breakthrough, she believes it to be a warning dream alerting her to danger around her. Clem shrugs. They both know they are right.

I find Clem's interpretation upsetting. I think of my own subconscious monsters waiting to reveal themselves and privately concur with Lee.

After lunch, Jackson and Clem cross the driveway to the studio. That is where the switch from coffee to the stronger stuff often takes place. If invited, I tag along. Usually, I am not. When I am alone with Lee, conversation stops. She busies herself with this or that, and I wander around or pick up a book. The silence in the house is thick. It never occurs to me to go outside. No one ever does. It is as if the house is an island.

 

From the moment I had first entered that house, there had been no question in my mind that an alcoholic lived there. An alcoholic and an alcoholic's wife. There was that tension, that desperate wariness. The alcoholic sunken into himself with defeat, his body warring between restlessness and inertia. The tiger in his cage, always the dead center of attention, making the room seem too small.

Of course I knew. Less than a year had passed since I had left home for good. While growing up, I had learned that drunks came in different varieties. There was the daily drinker, like my runaway father. Though I
saw him only occasionally, I knew him as a chug-a-lug, three-martinis-before-dinner drinker, disengaged, taciturn, his Arrow-shirt handsomeness glazed with apathy.

When I met Clem, I discovered a variation on the daily drinker: the end-of-the-day, slow-and-steady drinker whose appearance and behavior never changed and whose appetite for life remained undiminished, at least until the end of his long life. So it was that, early on, I decided that although Clem was a drinker, he was a drinker I could live with.

At the low end of the spectrum, there was the binger. One drink could send the binger off into a spiral of out-of-control days or weeks of occasional violent, delusional, even suicidal behavior. A frightening drunk. When sober he would become a so-called “dry drunk”: demanding, self-pitying, despondent, physically and emotionally shaking with remorse and debilitation from his ordeal. A sad drunk.

My stepfather Harry was a binger. I had known him since my mother first brought him around when I was twelve and had lived with him and his daughter Judy since I was fifteen. A “sometimes sister,” she was away at boarding school and camp most of the year. I never chose to live with Harry. I had pleaded and raged against that marriage, against that man who had more than once passed out in his vomit on our living-room rug. “Harry's not feeling well,” my mother would say, as I watched her clean it up and try to get him to his feet. But the inevitable happened. Over the years, Harry's abrupt and unpredictable swings left me on guard, my feelings frozen. One week I might be pushing my bureau in front of my bedroom door, just in case, listening to the muffled voices and, worse, the silence that masked possible violence. The next week I would stay out as much as I could, before tiptoeing back, hoping not to confront the sobered man riddled with self-hate and guilt. Sometimes he would say he was sorry. I probably said, “That's okay,” before fleeing from his remorse that stank up the house worse than whiskey. Through the next week I would watch him struggle back, his hands relaxing on the ever-present coffee cup as he tried to reengage with my mother and me. I recall only a handful of times when he and I were alone together. We had nothing, and everything, to say. We didn't know how.