"Edith started screaming, 'Stop the car, let me out!' [Jackson Pollock] put his foot all the way to the floor. He was speeding wildly."

The Oldsmobile 88 convertible threw Ruth Kligman clear of the death wreck and back into a long life, in which she was not only able to write that description of how her lover Pollack killed himself and her friend Edith Metzger, but she got to paint her own abstract expressionist paintings and to become — if I am to believe this NYT obituary — a great muse:

Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe made portraits of her; Willem de Kooning, with whom she was romantically involved, titled a 1957 painting “Ruth’s Zowie,” supposedly after she made that exclamation upon seeing it...

"It" being the painting, right? Or are these buried sex jokes? "Ms. Kligman said that de Kooning had called her 'his sponge'" — supposedly because she absorbed so much learning about art from him. I'm thinking a man calling a woman "his sponge" — presumably the quote is "my sponge" — is thinking about spewing something other than information.

Andy Warhol mentions her in his diaries several times, and she wrote that they “had a terrific crush on each other” for many years; she was friendly with Jasper Johns, to whom she once proposed, and with Franz Kline, whose former studio on 14th Street became her home and the studio where she continued to paint almost to the end of her life.

The full text of Andy Warhol's diaries ought to be on line.  That's what the internet is for. But you can go to Amazon and do a "search inside the book" for Kligman. So let's check out the substance of that terrific crush. Page 7:

I read the Ruth Kligman book Love Affair about her "love affair" with Jackson Pollock — and that's in quotes. It's so bad — how could you ever make a movie of it without making it a whole new story? Ruth told me she wants me to produce it and Jack Nicholson to star.

In the book she says something like, "I had to get away from Jackson and I ran as far as possible." So do you know where she went? (laughs) Sag Harbor. He lived in Springs. So that's — what? Six miles? And she was making it like she went to the other side of the world. And then she said, "The phone rang — how oh how did he ever find me?" I'm sure she called hundreds of people to give them the number in case he asked them. 

Ha. Terrific crush. Page 17:

Read the Ruth Kligman book again, she was driving Jackson Pollock crazy in the car and that's when he ran into the pole.

Page 19:

Ruth Kligman had called me that afternoon and I told her I was seeing Jack Nicholson and I would talk to him about starring in the Jackson Pollock movie. She asked me if I would take her to meet Jack and I said no. (laughs) I wouldn't take her anywhere after reading her book. She killed Pollock, she was driving him so nuts.

Terrific crush. Terrific crash.

Page 35:

Ruth Kligman kissed me and I didn't know what she was doing, she started talking all about a love affair she and we had had together, apologizing for breaking it off, kissing me, and it was all a fantasy, so I thought if she could do that with me, then she probably never had a love affair with Pollock. She looked good. She was in a velvet Halston. 

Terrific crush. Can I bitch about the accuracy of the journalism in the New York Times when it's the lady's obituary? She died at — not 88, like the Oldsmobile — 80.

She never got her book made into a movie, but they did eventually make a movie "Pollock" — and Kligman sued the filmmakers for ripping off her memoir. The obit doesn't say if she won, lost, or settled. (And I'm not seeing a reported case.) Jack Nicholson never played the role. It was Ed Harris. Kligman — who looked, it was written,  like one of those "earthy, voluptuous movie stars of the era, such as Elizabeth Taylor or Sophia Loren" — was played by Jennifer Connelly:

"Heathers," etc.

1. The Daily News has a where-are-they-now photo essay on the various actors from the great 1989 movie "Heathers."

2. I didn't know Jennifer Connelly turned down the Winona Ryder role, though I did know that Ryder has done nothing of note since her 2001 arrest for shoplifting. That poor woman paid such a heavy price for her crime. Come on, everyone. Forgive Winona.

3. I didn't know Kim Walker/Heather Chandler died of a brain tumor in 2001. (Classic "chainsaw" video clip — language alert.) ("Please send Heather to Heaven.")

4. I was happy to see that Glenn Shadix/Father Ripper is still a busily working actor. ("I love my dead gay son.")

5. And look what became of the nerdy boy.

6. "Betty Finn" was a real Estevez.

7. They're working on the Broadway musical version of "Heathers." The new Veronica Sawyer might be Kristen Bell. What do you think of the idea of "Heathers," the musical? Is the movie popular with Broadway fans? Sort of like "Hairspray"? I loved the movie and I loved the original movie "Hairspray," but I had no interest in seeing the show "Hairspray" or the movie made from the show. But that's just me. I guess I don't want to see any Broadway shows made from movies, though I did see "Nine" many years ago... when Raul Julia played Guido.

8. I miss Raul Julia! But what the hell was going on here?

One reason I enjoy blogging so much is that there's something about my brain that visualizes everyone as beautiful.

If I don't see your photograph or hear some description that stops me, I picture the men looking like Cary Grant and the women looking like... No, not Myrna Loy!



Myrna Loy today would look frumpy. That hairstyle! I picture the women looking more like Jennifer Connelly.

What's wrong with me?! I like to think I'm an optimist. But it's a problem when I try to step out of this life of the mind — oh, come on, humor me, blogging is the life of the mind — and interact with real people. I believe I'm swanning around at a posh cocktail party in a 1930s Hollywood movie, and it's quite a shock to see that things don't look like that at all.

This is a topic upgraded from my Twitter feed, where I've also been talking about my other cognitive quirk: I visualize things outside of my immediate physical sphere as much smaller than they are. For example, I "small-visualize" government, industry, geography, historical time, and outer space. My theory is that this is a natural consequence of evolution: We're hard-wired to understand a world that has the scope it had when we lived in a small, walkable place, when the things we knew about had a human scale.