Pete Hamill - Piecework

Most of the sketches were on heavy paper, but about a half-dozen were done on classified pages of the Times. I was staring down at one, a shape like a machine gun, done in lavender paint, when Franz came over and handed me a beer. “I like the grayness, that texture,” he said of the Times. “It looks like a sidewalk. Besides, someday soon I might need a job.”

He laughed, handed out more beers, turned on a radio (in my beer-blurry memory, it was Symphony Sid on WEVD). I walked around the dark studio, the way I’ve since seen actors prowl on empty stages or young ballplayers walk into Yankee Stadium, imagining myself in this loft, struggling heroically with paint and canvas. Stacked against the walls were paintings tacked on frames. Someone asked to take a look. Franz smiled: “Sure, why not? But they’re not all finished.”

He switched on some lights. And then we saw them, all mauves and greens and yellows and blues, with great bold structures on this canvas, more delicate and lush coloring on that one. Some had matte surfaces, thinned with much turpentine, the color as layered and luminous as Tintoretto. Others were glossy, the voluptuous color pre-mixed before going on the canvas, scraped with palette knives or sticks. A few were bright, but most had a dark brooding power.

“The gallery doesn’t want me doing them,” he said. “They want the real Franz Kline. Black and white, black and white …”

He shook his head and smiled in a sad way and sipped a beer. He was pleased that we liked what we saw, but insisted that he wasn’t finished with many of them. He probably wouldn’t show them at the Sidney Janis Gallery show scheduled for May. “They’re not there yet,” he said. Then he turned off the lights and we went back to drinking beer and talked for a while about prizefighters before we all went home through the gray New York morning.

Some of the paintings in color were shown at the Janis show, but most people were impressed by the ferocious Crow Dancer, which was another version of the mounted machine gun, a picture that I think now was called Siegfried. In later years, I saw different versions of what I saw that night, the shapes altered or refined, the colors overpainted. Among them, I’m sure, were the great painting Shenandoah Wall, along with Horizontal Rust and Andrus. Franz certainly didn’t intend to move through the ’60s or ’70s repeating what he had done in the ’50s. He had added color to his artistic weaponry. Like Guston (and in different ways, Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud), he might have returned to the figure. Franz was a man who loved to draw.

But like the Cedar Tavern, Franz Kline didn’t make it very far into the ’60s. In the spring of 1962, Kline, along with Mark Rothko and Andrew Wyeth, was invited by President Kennedy to a dinner at the White House in honor of André Malraux. The date of the dinner was May 11, a Friday. Kline didn’t make it. A week before, he suffered a heart attack and was taken to New York Hospital. While he was there, Janis opened a group show that included Scudera, Kline’s last painting, all deep rich blues, with some red and a broken black square. On Sunday, May 13, Franz Kline died, just short of his fifty-second birthday.

That night, I was working at a newspaper when the word arrived on the AP wire. I was first shocked, then filled with a kind of remorse. In my few encounters with Franz, he’d offered the same hand of friendship that he’d given to so many others. But out of stubbornness or empty vanity, I’d never really taken it. He was too famous and accomplished for us to enter as equals that private conspiracy called friendship. And I was too proud to serve as anyone’s acolyte. By 1962, I’d put painting behind me, with sorrow but no regrets, and gone my own way, into the world of words.

But when the night shift was over, I didn’t go home. At eight in the morning I walked up Rector Street to a newspaper bar called Page One and starting drinking beer. Around eleven, I went to the pay phone and called the World-Telegram and asked for Willard Mullin. When the great sports cartoonist answered, I told him my name.

“I don’t know if you saw the paper yet,” I said, “but Franz Kline, you know? The painter? He died yesterday. And he was a fan of yours. I just wanted to tell you that.”

“No kidding?” A beat. “What was his name?”

“Kline,” I said. “Franz Kline.”

There was another pause, then: “Oh, yeah. Franz Kline. He did those big black and white things, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You know,” the cartoonist said, “I bet that guy could’ve learned how to draw.”

ART & ANTIQUES,

May 1990

It is morning in the clubhouse at Huggins-Stengel Field in St. Petersburg and Keith Hernandez is moving from locker to locker, handing out schedules. He is the player rep of the world champion New York Mets; this is one of his duties. Still dressed in street clothes and sneakers, he says little as he hands the sheets to each of the players. At 33, he is young in the world of ordinary men; in baseball, especially on this young ball club, he is middle-aged. Kids and veterans nod and study the mimeographed sheets, which tell them when the bus will leave for the afternoon game and how many tickets they can expect for wives and friends. Hernandez explains nothing; he was out late the night before with a woman down from New York. “Too much goddamned wine,” he says. And besides, he has been here before, through 13 major league seasons; this is a time for ease, the careful steady retrieval of the skills of the summer game.

“It’s all about getting back in a kind of groove,” Hernandez says. “Not about getting in shape. Most of the guys are in shape, or they get in shape before coming down. I worked out with weights all winter, the first time I ever did that, ’cause I’m getting old.” He smiles, shakes his head. “At the Vertical Club in New York. Jesus, don’t go there at five o’clock. It’s fucking insane, a social — No, this is about getting your stroke right. About getting back your concentration. I don’t worry about it much until the last 10 games before the season starts. If I’m having trouble then, then I worry.”

In the clubhouse, Hernandez wanders among those who have made it to The Show and those who desperately want to. They all move with that coiled and practiced indolence that is unique to baseball, the style of a game where the most exciting action seems to explode out of the greatest calm. A large table is spread with food; there are boxes of Dubble Bubble and sugarless gum. Some players nibble as they dress; others knead and work new gloves, bad-mouth each other, talk about women, read newspapers and sports magazines, all the while stripping off street clothes and pulling on jocks and T-shirts and uniforms.

Kevin McReynolds, new to the team after a winter trade from San Diego, stares into space. Darryl Strawberry isn’t here yet (two weeks before the great alarm clock rhubarb); neither is Dwight Gooden. Hernandez leaves the mimeographed sheets on the small benches in front of their lockers and moves on. When he’s finished, he dumps the leftovers in a trash can, sits down at his own locker, lights a Winston and reaches for the New York Times crossword puzzle.

“We’ll talk later,” he says, takes a drag, and stares at the puzzle while unbuttoning his shirt. Hernandez examines the words the way fans examine stats. His own stats are, of course, extraordinary. One of the most consistent hitters in the game, in three full seasons as a Met, he has averaged .311, .309, and .310. Against left-handed pitching last year, he hit .312; against right-handers, .309. He hit .310 at home and .311 on the road. Last year, he had 13 game-winning RBIs, and his career total of 107 is the most in National League history.