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During the day I studied art at Pratt Institute, and in the chilly evenings I would wander to the Cedar Street Tavern on University Place to nurse a few beers on the thin leftovers of my G.I. Bill money. This was the great bar of the action painters, and of poets too, and visiting cowboys and a few stray seamen and too many rich girls from Bennington who lectured you about Selling Out. I went there because I wanted to see painters in the flesh, to see how they walked and moved and ordered their drinks. I was still something of a kid, unformed and green, and this information was much more important to me than theories of push-pull, color fields, plastic depth, the vital gesture, or the idea of the sublime.

Some insisted, of course, that the Cedar wasn’t what it had been; they always say that in Village bars. But about the Cedar they might have been right. In 1958, Jackson Pollock had been dead almost two years; de Kooning was not around much anymore; other regulars were moving uptown, never to return. But look: down past the end of the bar, in the first rough booth in the brightly lit back room: that elegant, beautiful girl is Joan Mitchell. Sitting with Alfred Leslie. And Philip Guston. And in that other booth, laughing raucously, that’s Grace Hartigan, looking like fifty miles of trouble out of a film noir. She’s talking to David Smith. And that huge fellow with the Zapata mustache: Harold Rosenberg. And over there, that’s Larry Rivers — he draws figures! — jittery-eyed, junkie-thin, fingers drumming on the table as if in time to a melody nobody else can hear. All were engulfed in a blue nicotine fog, drinking hard, laughing, having a great old time. And among them, every night, was the painter I admired most in the world: Franz Kline.

With Pollock and de Kooning, Kline was the third glittering star in the Big Three constellation. He sat in a booth facing the door, dressed in a camel’s-hair coat, with his rough, lumpy slab of a face made oddly elegant by a carefully trimmed mustache. A spear of hair fell across his brow like a brushstroke by that other Franz, Mr. Hals. When women came to the booth he always tried to rise and bow in greeting, like a boulevardier from the French films we saw around the corner at the Eighth Street or the Art. Franz was one of those bulky men who look taller sitting down. But when he rose to go to the John, he moved with an athlete’s grace, giving off the same muscular aura that emanated from the paintings. We all knew the legend: back home in the coal country of Pennsylvania, he’d played baseball and football, he’d been a boxer. In the age of Hemingway, such credentials were more important than they should have been. As he went by, through the door that Pollock had once torn off its hinges, he had a word and smile for everybody. Everybody called him Franz.

It was not in me, then or now, to fawn over famous men; by the tough code of the ’50s, that just wouldn’t be hip. But the Bennington girls had no such restraints, and they went for Franz the way sharks go for drowning sailors. So it was hard to be alone with Franz Kline; I suppose that’s why he went to the Cedar. But one night a painter friend named Haig Akmajian (he lived in my building) brought me over and introduced me. The great painter smiled and welcomed me to the booth and ordered the first of many beers; he treated me as if I were an established member of The Club. And we talked. And talked. Or rather, Franz talked and I listened. I wasn’t a reporter then, I made no notes; but I can hear him now. He had an elaborate, writerly way of speaking, with that rare tone that combines irony with affection. Nothing he said ever sounded bitter, except his references to Walter O’Malley, who had led the Dodgers out of Brooklyn with the Giants following timidly in their wake. “That s.o.b. will find a private place in hell,” Franz said of O’Malley. And then laughed, embarrassed by his own bitterness. It was difficult to believe that Franz Kline would send anyone on earth to hell.

He talked about Sugar Ray Robinson and Lester Young, Akira Kurosawa and Brigitte Bardot. He asked me about Pratt, where he had taught a few years earlier (as had Isamu Noguchi, George McNeil, Adolph Gottlieb, and Richard Lindner, among other stars of the New York art world). “You can help teach people how to draw,” he said, “but you can’t teach them to be painters. All you can do is let them know they better love it or get the hell out.”