Steven Naifeh - Jackson Pollock: An American Saga

For our parents

William and Kathryn Smith

and

George and Marion Naifeh

PROLOGUE

DEMONS

"I 'm going to kill myself."

Tony Smith recognized Jackson Pollock's whiskey voice. The late night call was not unusual for Jackson. Even talk of suicide had the air of ritual about it. Yet there was something in Pollock's voice that Smith hadn't heard before, a harder edge that alarmed him. With his ample Irish charm he tried to calm the distant voice, but Pollock was inconsolable. "Hold on," Smith finally said. "I'll be out." He put down the phone and drove off into the night in the middle of an early spring downpour. It would be hours before he could reach Pollock's house at the eastern end of Long Islandhours in which, knowing Jackson, anything could happen.

It was March 1952, only two years after Pollock's breakthrough 1949 show at the Betty Parsons Gallery gave the emerging avant-garde art world its first bright, bumptious triumph; only a little more than a year after the vast, luminous landscapes of Autumn Rhythm and Lavender Mist dazzled and confounded the critics; only five years after Clement Greenberg pronounced him "the most powerful painter in contemporary America"; only two and a half years after Life magazine thrust him into the spotlight of America's celebrity-mad postwar media, making him, virtually overnight, American art's first "star."

As the drive through the darkness and the downpour stretched into its fourth hour, Tony Smith must have wondered, as many others had, what strange, reverse alchemy could have transformed so much acclamation into such self-destructive agony.

Smith knew that Pollock was drinking again. After two enormously productive and relatively dry yearseven in the driest seasons he kept cooking sherry buried in the backyardJackson had gone back to the bottle. He had always been, in Greenberg's phrase, "an alcoholic in excelsis," but drinking itself was never the problem. Even when it began with beer in the morning and ended with bourbon at night; even when its roots reached back to junior high school, or further, to an alcoholic father; even when his life dissolved, as it had several times over the last twenty years, into a series of drunken binges punctuated by hospitalization, drinking alone could not explain what was happening to Pollock. It couldn't explain the long, plaintive discussions about suicide with friends. "It's a way out," he told Roger Wilcox one day, to which Wilcox replied, "How the hell do you know? You may get yourself into worse trouble."

Drinking alone couldn't explain why, just a few months earlier, Pollock's new Cadillac convertiblebought as a boast of successhad skidded off a dry road and wrapped itself around a tree. Jackson walked away unhurt, but those who knew him, like Tony Smith, knew that he would try againand not because of alcohol. There was something behind the drinking that was pushing at Jackson from within, tormenting him, even trying to kill him. Jackson Pollock had demons inside. Everyone could see that. But no one knew where they came from or what they wanted.