Jackson Pollock (42 page)

Pollock first met Ruth in March 1956 when he spotted the pretty brunette sitting in
a booth at the Cedar with a friend. Emboldened by his drinking, Pollock barged into
the booth and took her hand in his.

“You have such warm eyes,” he told her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t thank me,” he said, “it’s true.”

After that brief encounter, Ruth, a twenty-five-year-old art student, couldn’t stop
thinking about Pollock, who by now was forty-four. The following Monday she called
up the Cedar, asked to speak to him, and invited him over to her apartment, on Sixteenth
Street. When Pollock arrived a few minutes later he seemed very tense. “I’m married,”
he blurted out awkwardly. Then he broke into hysterical sobbing. Moved by this outburst,
Ruth vowed to herself that she “would always love him and be there no matter what.”
Pollock saw Ruth on Mondays after finishing with the doctor.

As far as Lee was concerned, the less she knew about Pollock’s affair with Ruth the
better. She never asked him why he stayed over in the city every Monday night, nor
did she say anything about the dozens of long-distance calls between Springs and New
York listed on their phone bill. But it eventually became impossible for her to ignore
the affair. In June, Ruth moved to Sag Harbor, and Pollock visited her often, taking
her out to local restaurants and driving her around town in his Oldsmobile convertible.
One July morning Lee stepped out on her back porch and there they were, walking out
of the studio, where they had spent the previous night. “Get that woman off my property
before I call the police,” Lee shouted. Pollock and Ruth ran off laughing. Lee was
furious, but after calming down she assured herself that the
affair would never last. It would only be a matter of months, she figured, before
Ruth realized that caring for Pollock was no more glamorous than caring for any other
drunk. To give things time to cool off, Lee decided she would go to Europe for a month
or two. “When I get back,” she told Pollock, “that girl better be gone.”

On July 12 Lee sailed on the
Queen Elizabeth
to Le Havre, en route to Paris. A few minutes before the boat was scheduled to leave
she almost backed out. “I can’t go,” she told her friend Day Schnabel, who had taken
her to the dock. “Jackson needs me.” She wanted to talk to him. She called him up
in Springs and pretended that she had left her passport at the house. A few minutes
into the conversation Lee told him, “Oh, I just found my passport.” They hung up,
and she boarded the boat.

Ruth moved into the farmhouse. She couldn’t believe how pretty it was, especially
the kitchen: the polished copper pots hanging on wallboards, the fancy canned foods
lining the shelves, sunlight pouring in and making everything bright. She and Pollock
spent most of their time sitting at the kitchen table, smoking and drinking and ignoring
the knocks on the front door. Pollock talked about getting back to work, but both
of them knew he never would, and the more he talked about it, the gloomier the house
became. One day when they were sitting around doing nothing Pollock said, “You know
I’m a painter, don’t you?”

Postcards and letters from his wife arrived regularly. “I miss you and wish you were
sharing this with me,” Lee wrote after a week in Paris, during which time she visited
all the galleries, went to a flea market with Pollock’s old friend John Graham, and
saw the Louvre, describing it as “overwhelming—beyond belief.” She went on to the
south of France, where she visited Van Gogh’s “last painting place” and found the
country “unbelievably beautiful.” She had planned on continuing to Venice and staying
with Peggy Guggenheim in her palazzo on the Grand Canal, but Pollock’s former dealer
refused to see her. Peggy Guggenheim felt that Pollock and Lee had “minimized what
I had done for him,” never sending her so much as a thank-you note for showing Pollock’s
work abroad. So Lee skipped Venice, heading back to Paris
at the end of July. Since all the hotels were booked, she stayed with the painter
Paul Jenkins and his wife in their apartment on the Rue Decrès, a short walk from
the Montparnasse Cemetery. “It would be wonderful to get a note from you,” she reminded
her husband.

In Springs Ruth was finding it harder to live with Pollock every day. Sitting around
the house got to be boring after a while, especially since he was always feeling sorry
for himself. To divert herself from his misery she tried to paint, working in Lee’s
studio. But she promptly abandoned her efforts after calling Pollock upstairs one
day to look at her work. He studied a painting in silence, then let her have it: “Why
the hell do you want to be a painter?” Ruth wished they could go out more often, but
Pollock rarely wanted to go anywhere. One night they went into town to see a movie,
a grade-B war picture about a man who is discharged from the army and can’t find a
job. Halfway through the movie Ruth glanced at Pollock and noticed that he was crying.
Soon he was sobbing loudly. Ruth led him out of the theater and asked him what was
wrong. “The movie,” Pollock said, “the guy in the movie, he was so lost, so disconnected.”
Ruth decided she needed to get away. A month after moving in, she concocted a story
about having to go to New York to see her psychiatrist, and she left Springs on a
Thursday morning, promising she’d be back Saturday.

That Saturday, August 11, dawned hot and humid. In the morning Pollock drove to the
East Hampton train station to await the 7:05 from New York. Ruth got off the train
with a friend, Edith Metzger, a twenty-five-year-old beautician from the Bronx whom
she had invited out for the weekend. On the way back to the house Pollock pulled over
at Cavagnaro’s. “Why are we stopping here?” Ruth asked innocently. The two women ordered
coffee, and Pollock had a beer.

Back at the house, Ruth and Edith changed into their bathing suits and asked Pollock
to take them to the beach. Pollock said he didn’t feel like going to the beach. He
helped himself to some gin and spent most of the afternoon crying.

By evening Pollock was feeling a little better. He made his
guests a steak dinner and offered to take them to hear pianist Leonid Hambro of the
New York Philharmonic, who was performing that night in East Hampton. On the way to
the concert Pollock pulled over to the side of the road. Roger Wilcox, a neighbor,
recognized the Oldsmobile convertible and walked over to see what was wrong. Pollock
was sitting behind the wheel, with Ruth and Edith beside him. “Hey, Jackson, aren’t
you going to the concert?” Wilcox asked him. “I feel pretty sick,” Pollock told him.
“I’m just going to stay here and think about it.”

Pollock decided he wanted to go home. By the time he reached Fireplace Road, he was
speeding. He started driving recklessly, taking the curves much too fast. “Let me
out!” Edith screamed, but it was too late. As Pollock was rounding a sharp bend about
a quarter of a mile from his house, he lost control of the car. He crashed into two
small elms.

The first call came into the police station at 10:15
P.M
. Officer Earl Finch was dispatched to Fireplace Road. “Two dead at scene of accident,”
he reported. Edith Metzger was found crushed to death beneath the car. Ruth Kligman
was thrown clear and was taken to Southampton Hospital with major injuries; she survived.
Pollock was killed instantly when his head hit a tree.

Clement Greenberg placed the call to Europe. After trying to locate Lee in Venice,
he called Paul Jenkins in Paris to ask him if he knew where Lee might be. Yes, Jenkins
said, she’s standing right next to me. “Stay calm,” Greenberg told him, then he relayed
the bad news. Lee could tell from the way they were talking that something terrible
had happened. Instinctively she sensed what it was. “Jackson is dead,” she screamed,
breaking into uncontrollable sobbing.

Pollock’s death was reported in every major newspaper and magazine.
The New York Times
ran the story on page one.
Newsweek
listed it in its “Transition” column, beneath news of Ed Sullivan’s rib injury, Gene
Kelly’s separation, and Edward G. Robinson’s divorce.
Time
magazine called him the “shock trooper of modern painting,” and
Life
titled its obituary, “Rebel Artist’s Tragic Ending.” His death in a car crash at
the age of forty-four helped enhance his public image as a paint-flinging cowboy who
came out of nowhere to shock the civilized world with the rawness of his vision.

Lee flew home from Paris on Monday, August 13. She immediately set to work planning
the funeral, and friends who visited her to offer their condolences commented on her
remarkable self-control and composure. No detail escaped her attention. When the painter
James Brooks mentioned that he didn’t have a dark suit to wear as a pallbearer, Lee
gave him one of Pollock’s. Friends and neighbors who tried to console Lee found themselves
consoled by her. Cile Lord remembers walking into the house to find it crowded with
friends. Lee walked up to her and told her, “Don’t say anything,” and then put her
arms around her.

Thomas Hart Benton and Rita Benton first heard the news on Sunday afternoon. They
were sitting on the porch of their home in Chilmark when Herman Cherry and de Kooning,
who were summering in the area, stopped by the house and said they had something to
tell them. Benton invited the two men inside and offered them chairs, but no one sat
down. Benton took the news hard. De Kooning offered to fly him to the funeral, but
Benton just shook his head and said that he “couldn’t take it.” Before the two visitors
left, Rita opened up a drawer and showed them a heap of clippings about Pollock that
she had saved over the years.

The funeral was held on August 15 at the Springs Chapel, a nondenominational church
down the road from Pollock’s house. Lee had asked Greenberg to deliver the eulogy,
but he declined, refusing to praise “this guy who got this girl killed.” Greenberg
told Lee to get someone else. “Get Tony Smith,” he said, “get Barney Newman!” Lee,
as protective of Pollock in death as in life, thought no one else besides Greenberg
deserved the honor, so no friends spoke at the funeral. The brief service was conducted
by a Presbyterian minister who had never met Pollock, and afterward the two hundred
people crowding the small church dispersed to the nearby Green River Cemetery, in
Springs. Pollock was buried at the far end of the cemetery, apart from the other graves,
on a grassy hill shaded by white oaks. Later a huge, sloping boulder was erected on
his grave, a reminder of his early ambition to “mould a mountain of stone . . . to
fit my will.” A plaque on the stone bears only his name and dates.

Among the mourners at Pollock’s funeral was his mother. At eighty-one, suffering from
phlebitis, Stella managed as always to remain composed. “He is gone and we cant bring
him back his work is over and he is at rest but we cant forget him,” she wrote to
a cousin, while marveling at the outpouring of sympathy. “I never saw so many lovely
flowers at a funeral yard and house full of friends. Cable grams Telegraph letters
from all over the world.”

Lee, in the weeks following the funeral, stayed in Springs and tried to make sense
of events. She lived in the house on Fireplace Road, surrounded by Pollock’s paintings
and memories of their marriage. But being in Springs without him was more than she
could bear. When she tried to paint, she found she couldn’t even get started. She
decided to rent an apartment in New York City, where she remained for the next two
years.

At first she was tormented by the thought that she was somehow responsible for Pollock’s
death. The accident would not have happened, she felt, if only she hadn’t gone to
Europe. “I had to realize,” she later said, “that things would have happened in the
same way even if I had been sitting right here in my living room.”

The period following Pollock’s death turned out to be the most rewarding of Lee’s
career. In the first eighteen months alone she produced seventeen new canvases—large,
radiant abstractions that mark a decisive break from the frustrated small-scale pictures
of her past. Her paintings of the late fifties are distinguished by brilliant bursts
of color and bold, swooping lines, as if the tight, coiled gestures in her earlier
“Little Images” had suddenly uncoiled and sprung into action. The paintings have titles
such as
April, Earth Green
, and
Easter Lilies
, metaphors for Krasner’s artistic renewal. When the works were shown at the Martha
Jackson Gallery in 1958, the critics were admiring.