Jackson Pollock by Deborah Solomon Page A

recognize
     their apartment from the street, for Benton’s living room studio was lit with blue
     bulbs. Through the windows it almost looked like a Regionalist scene: Benton, dressed
     in work clothes, stooped before his easel, the blue light floating around him like
     a shining midwestern sky from one of his paintings.
    No sooner had the Bentons settled into their new apartment than Pollock resumed his
     friendship with them. Having finished his schooling but not yet found a job, he took
     to spending most of his free time at their home. Afternoons, when Rita ran errands
     and Benton went uptown to the Art Students League to teach, Pollock would baby-sit
     for T.P., their six-year-old son. By the time Rita returned, Pollock had usually mopped
     the kitchen floor and cleaned the apartment from top to bottom; he couldn’t do enough
     to please her. “Jackson adored my mother,” one of theBenton’s children later said. “And my mother took care of him like a son.”
    To thank Pollock for his baby-sitting, Rita would have him to dinner a few times a
     week. Like all the members of the Benton household, he was expected to help with dinner.
     Carefully choosing an item within his budget, Rita suggested that he contribute to
     the meals by bringing a turnip. Pollock never failed to show up for dinner without
     a turnip in his hand.
    Pollock got along well with the Bentons’ little boy. During their afternoons together
     T.P. would climb up onto Pollock’s lap and ask to be told about their friend Jack
     Sass, a make-believe hero from the West. In his travels on a stallion Jack Sass had
     seen all the spooky sights of western folklore—ghost towns, abandoned gold mines,
     unattended campfires burning through the night. He wasn’t afraid of anything.
    After Pollock had gone home for the day, T.P. would excitedly relate to his parents
     the latest adventure of Jack Sass. Benton listened patiently to the stories while
     thinking to himself that Jack Sass was the hero Pollock would never be. “Jack must
     have told him some big tales,” he later wrote, “perhaps in compensation for his own
     poor and frustrated conditions. Jack Sass was Jack Pollock without the frustrations.”
    On the many occasions he ate at the Bentons’ house Pollock was unfailingly polite,
     even on the nights when wine was served with dinner. But stories came back to the
     family about his “wild behavior” when under the influence, and one night that fall
     Rita was summoned to St. Vincent’s Hospital after Pollock had injured himself in a
     drunken brawl. He had been returning from a party earlier in the evening when he spotted
     a wealthy-looking man walking a dog on lower Fifth Avenue. In a mischievous mood,
     he approached the man, got down on all fours, and petted the dog in a friendly manner
     but then jumped up suddenly with an angry look on his face. “You son of a bitch,”
     he shouted. “You feed that dog when I’m starving.” The man beat him up, and Pollock
     landed in the hospital suffering from head injuries and charged by the police with
     battery and assault. Though the charges were dropped, Pollock remained hospitalized
     for a few days, and itwas Rita who sat by his bedside and nursed him back to health. “My mother talked about
     that incident all the time,” her son T.P. later recalled. “She thought it was horrible.
     To everyone in my family Jackson seemed so gentle.”
    Besides stopping by for casual visits, Pollock showed up at the Bentons’ every Monday
     night to play in a band called the Harmonica Rascals. It had been founded by Benton
     a few years earlier after he had casually picked up a toy harmonica belong to T.P.
     and tried to play it. With the first few sounds he conceived a new ambition, deciding
     to collect folk songs on his trips across the country and teach them to his students
     and friends in New York. Using his own system of musical notation—he referred to the
     notes of the scale by