“Grace to Be Born and Live as Variously as Possible”
The afternoon of July 28, 1966, was hot and sunny, with temperatures in the low nineties. Frank O’Hara’s body was resting in a standard coffin from Yardley & Williams Funeral Home in Sag Harbor that was covered with white roses and ivy and supported above a four-plot grave on metal poles. One of the scrub oaks of Green River Cemetery in Springs, Long Island, cast its black shade nearby.
O’Hara never much liked funerals. When his Aunt Mary, a nun, had died in 1956 he did not attend her burial at a convent in Massachusetts. He commemorated it his way in “Poem” (And tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock in Springfield, Massachusetts):
When I die, don’t come, I wouldn’t want a leaf
to turn away from the sun—it loves it there.
There’s nothing so spiritual about being happy
but you can’t miss a day of it, because it doesn’t last.
He had once told a friend, though, that he wished to be buried in Green River Cemetery, a small, acre-and-a-half, nondenominational cemetery started in 1902. Not long after O’Hara’s funeral, Ad Reinhardt noted, “Everyone wants to be buried in the Green River Cemetery,” and over the next twenty-five years, Reinhardt, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Stuart Davis, Jean Stafford, and A. J. Liebling would all be buried there. O’Hara had always been particularly affected by the grave of Jackson Pollock, who had been buried in the cemetery on a hot August day in 1956. In 1958 O’Hara had visited Pollock’s grave with a neighbor’s daughter who had said about the boulder marking the grave, “He isn’t under there, he’s out in the woods.” Her remark, and the visit, inspired O’Hara to write a poem originally titled “Ode at the Grave of Jackson Pollock,” in which he asked Pollock for inspiration as if the Abstract Expressionist artist were a classical muse:
and like that child at your grave make me be distant and
imaginative
make my lines thin as ice, then swell like pythons
When he mailed the poem off to fellow poet Kenneth Koch, he wrote, “It seems to have sprung from seeing Pollock’s grave in the Springs, a subject which strikes me with considerable uneasiness, and I’m not joshing you. Grrrr.” Now his own coffin was lying on the expanse of green grass just beneath the upslope to Pollock’s grave. It was a juxtaposition that led Pollock’s widow, Lee Krasner, to remark that day somewhat combatively, “Frank’s head is at Jackson’s feet.”
O’Hara got his wish to be buried in Green River Cemetery, but not his wish that no one come. By 3:00 p.m. almost two hundred mourners had converged on the cemetery. The coffin was a reminder of the almost unbelievable facts. Frank O’Hara was dead at forty. He had been killed in a freak accident by a twenty-three-year-old summer worker taking a joyride with a young woman in a jeep on the Fire Island Pines beach at three in the morning. The fifteen years during which O’Hara had been so much a part of the creative life of New York as poet, Museum of Modern Art curator, Art News critic, and general catalyst were over. The subject of more portraits than any poet since Apollinaire—who as an art critic had championed the Cubists Picasso, Braque, Gris, Léger, Laurencin, and Picabia—was suddenly gone. O’Hara’s excessiveness and sheer hubris had always seemed striking to some of his more concerned friends. As the illustrator of Gothic tales Edward Gorey says more particularly of the O’Hara who had been his roommate at Harvard, “I sometimes felt that he was resolutely ignoring the consequences of what he did. He was living on the edge.”
To others, however, O’Hara’s escapades—diving in the ocean during storms, falling asleep drunk at a construction site—were simply signs of his exceptionally high-spirited passion for life. Writing home to his parents from the Navy when he was eighteen, he had asked rhetorically, “Why prefer the shadow to the sunlight, water to land? Life with its trials has a zest that a Utopia would never have.” One of his many updatings of the carpe diem theme of Latin poetry was the line in “Steps”: “the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won / and in a sense we’re all winning / we’re alive.” Another of O’Hara’s classmates from Harvard, the poet Kenneth Koch, grieved quietly as the cemetery began to fill up for this funeral of a man who was hardly a celebrity outside his own charmed circle at the time of his death. “Why does it seem so impossible to believe that Frank is dead?” he asked his wife, Janice, a few weeks later. “Maybe because he was so full of life,” she replied.
The mourners arrived from all points. Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler drove down from Provincetown (because small planes made Frankenthaler nervous). The poet Bill Berkson flew in from Newport. Alex and Ada Katz made the trip down from Maine. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky chanted “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama” all the way from Manhattan in Larry Rivers’s car. Barnett Newman had vowed never to return to the Hamptons after Pollock’s funeral in 1956, but he and his wife, Annalee, reneged and rented a limousine and driver. The painter Howard Kanovitz flew from Provincetown in a chartered plane. Al Leslie heard the news on the beach and came straggling to the cemetery in his swimsuit with towel. Larry Rivers’s wife, Clarice, walked in wearing a hat like a proper Welsh woman. Willem de Kooning wore splattered workclothes as did many of the other painters and sculptors. There were Adolf Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Alfonso Ossorio, Michael Goldberg, Norman Bluhm, Ibram Lassaw, Reuben Nakian. A yellow bus hired by the Museum of Modern Art made a sweltering three-hour trip from Manhattan filled with curators, directors, assistants, and secretaries. Waldo Rasmussen, having risen in the ranks with O’Hara, was annoyed when Elizabeth Shaw, the Museum’s Director of Public Information, tried to enlist him to identify celebrities as they entered—information she then passed on to the reporter from the New York Times, who wrote a snide line in an early edition about the “many bearded, tieless friends of Mr. O’Hara.”
The funeral began calmly enough. Expressions of grief were stifled. Many of those present wore sunglasses, as much to hide their tears as to block the glare of the relentless sun. As the young poet Lewis MacAdams wrote in “Red River,” “at the funeral friends stood in clumps / like people in galleries who know each other.” The Reverend Alex Renton, a sixty-year-old Scottish pastor from the First Presbyterian Church in East Hampton, officiated in his clerical robes and collar. Those delivering eulogies stood near him informally on the grass in front of a simple wooden fence, with the potato fields of the Hamptons stretching out into the distance. The collector B. H. Friedman, who had carefully packed a black sports-coat before flying down from Provincetown, was startled at how casual Larry Rivers looked in his white dinner jacket with no tie. Shuffling uncomfortably next to Rivers were René d’Harnoncourt, Edwin Denby, Bill Berkson, and John Ashbery.
Suddenly Joe LeSueur, O’Hara’s roommate of almost a decade, appeared weeping, supported on one side by the poet Barbara Guest and on the other by the painter Robert Dash. His loud sobbing as he came through the gate seemed to give others permission to let go. “I felt like I was on an LSD trip,” says LeSueur of his emotional state. While LeSueur and O’Hara’s relationship had been an ambiguous blur of friendship and love—a blur common in O’Hara’s complicated life—LeSueur had definitely been his home base. It was of his seersucker jacket that O’Hara had written in “Joe’s Jacket” in 1959: “it is all enormity and life it has protected me and kept me here.” Yet it had only been eighteen months since the two had fought more fiercely than usual and LeSueur had moved out of their loft on lower Broadway. That their friendship was close again after that shaky time only magnified LeSueur’s grief. He also found himself caught in cross fire. Typical was the comment a few weeks later by John Bernard Myers, the outrageous dealer at Tibor de Nagy Gallery who had published O’Hara’s first book of poems, A City Winter: “Who do you think you are acting as if you’re the only one griefstricken over Frank’s death?” There had indeed been much discussion over who was to speak at the grave. According to the composer Virgil Thomson, “After his death a dozen of his lovers turned up looking for the glory of being the chief widow.” Although he had finally been talked out of reading “Ode to Joy,” LeSueur did come to rest with his two bolstering friends near the other eulogists.
The presence of the Reverend Renton made many of O’Hara’s friends uncomfortable. O’Hara, after all, had once written, “It’s well known that God and I don’t get along together.” But Renton was required to officiate if they wanted permission to use the Springs chapel down the road in case of rain. A worse offense, it was felt, would have been a Roman Catholic priest, as O’Hara, having attended a Xaverian Brothers parochial school as a boy, was a renegade Irish Catholic of the most vehement sort. Renton opened with a few simple Presbyterian prayers and then went on to remark, “I never knew Frank, but from what I know of him he reminds me of the Scots’ poet Robbie Burns.” De Kooning later complained, “That minister seemed to think Frank needed some help to get to heaven.”
René d’Harnoncourt, the towering Viennese-born Director of the Museum of Modern Art who had recently worked with O’Hara on the first large exhibition of American sculpture ever to be sent to Europe, spoke officially. He opened, though, by commenting that everyone knew that O’Hara—who began at the Museum in 1951 selling postcards in order to see Alfred Barr’s Matisse retrospective more frequently—would soon have taken his own job. His comments were along the line of the letter he wrote to the New York Times a few days later to try to fill out their thin, slightly catty obituary: “Frank O’Hara was very much his own man; and precisely because of that, he belonged to us all.” Absent from the service was Alfred Barr, Jr., now getting on in years, the pioneer spirit of the Modern, whom O’Hara had described as “a god” of the artworld and who was rumored to have twice tried to have O’Hara fired. That O’Hara, while curator, was appearing in galleries in nude paintings by Larry Rivers and Wynn Chamberlain had not improved relations between him and the rather puritanical Barr.
Dance critic and poet Edwin Denby spoke almost inaudibly, “standing Lincoln-like and low-voiced under the big elm at Springs” as Bill Berkson later described him. Almost twenty-five years older than O’Hara, Denby had often accompanied him to performances of Balanchine’s New York City Ballet at City Center—both of them being committed and passionate balletomanes. Graced with a shock of white hair, Denby, who had ridden out on a Greyhound bus with the Katzes, opined frailly but surely that O’Hara had been “America’s greatest living poet.”
Bill Berkson, a strikingly handsome twenty-five-year-old poet and Kennedy look-alike, spoke for the younger protégés of Frank O’Hara. There was more controversy about his inclusion than anyone’s. Some felt the son of fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert was too “Uptown.” Others complained that he had teased and manipulated O’Hara, who wrote in “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)”—quoting the remark of a friend—of “a year and a half of trying to make him.” But Kenneth Koch, who had taught Berkson at the New School for Social Research and introduced him to O’Hara—according to Berkson—with the comic warning that O’Hara would become a “germ” in his life, nominated him. “Kenneth had a particular attitude about a lot of the gay people around Frank,” says Berkson. “It’s what Frank called his ‘H.D.’—‘homosexual dread.’ He didn’t want that to overwhelm the ceremony. Which may have been why he was being very strong for me to be the speaker.” Actually, Berkson was a moving voice for the many young poets present, their faces set like voodoo masks while Allen Ginsberg went about propping them from behind and humming “Ommmmm” so they wouldn’t buckle in the heat. Berkson said of O’Hara, “As a poet, a genius, just walking around, talking, he had that magic touch. He made things and people sacred.”
John Ashbery broke down trying to read the last several lines of O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster”:
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
Ashbery had met O’Hara in 1949 at Harvard, and the two had been very close ever since—as deeply affectionate as they were competitive. O’Hara had once compared them to the two brothers in East of Eden, choosing the bad-boy James Dean role for himself while giving Ashbery and his poems the compliment of being “full of dreams and a kind of moral excellence and kind sentiments.”
The painter Larry Rivers changed the tone by presenting a violent eulogy, full of raw fury. Rivers stormed forward with blazing eyes and a great shock of black hair, looking unkempt and wild. There was a tragic intensity to him. According to the curator Waldo Rasmussen, “Larry’s Raskolnikovian entrance was out of a Russian novel.” That afternoon Rivers remained true to O’Hara’s description of him as having been, in the early fifties, “rather like a demented telephone. Nobody knew whether they wanted it in the library, the kitchen or the toilet, but it was electric.”
Rivers had been as intimate with O’Hara as anyone. Although he was mainly involved with women, he had carried on a rocky stop-and-start love affair with the young poet when they were both in their late twenties. From their passion—based partly on bohemian fantasies of Rimbaud and Verlaine—came many paintings and poems. In 1954 Rivers had painted a well-known portrait of O’Hara nude in combat boots after Géricault’s Slave, to which the Times in its obituary referred, discussing “the question of when exposure of human anatomy in paintings is or is not offensive.” O’Hara had written his epic “Second Avenue” at Rivers’s plaster garden studio on Second Avenue while posing for a sculpture. Many of O’Hara’s early poems, filled with surrealistically coded images of pain and torment, of “yoyo-cartwheel-violences,” were written during his frustrating and highly romanticized affair with Rivers.
“Larry’s eulogy was searing, cauterizing,” says Henry Geldzahler, then a young curator at the Metropolitan. “He took us out of our bodies, threw us first into the grave and then into the sky.”
“Frank was my best friend,” Rivers began, his eyes fixed on the closed casket, his posture akimbo, his saxophone of a voice even and steady. “I always thought he would be the first to die among my small happy group. But I day-dreamed a romantic death brought about by too much whiskey, by smoking three packs of Camels a day, by too much sex, by unhappy love affairs, by writing too many emotional poems, too many music and dance concerts, just too much living which would drain away his energy and his will to live. His death was on my mind all the sixteen years I knew him and I told him this. I was worried about him because he loved me.”
Rivers then began describing O’Hara as he looked when he had visited him a few days earlier at Bayview General Hospital in Mastic Beach, Long Island, where O’Hara had survived for almost two days after his accident. The more Rivers went on, the more groans came from the mourners. Some yelled “Stop! Stop!” “He was purple wherever his skin showed through the white hospital gown,” Rivers continued. “He was a quarter larger than usual. Every few inches there was some sewing composed of dark blue thread. Some stitching was straight and three or four inches long, others were longer and semicircular. The lids of both eyes were bluish black. It was hard to see his beautiful blue eyes which receded a little into his head. He breathed with quick gasps. His whole body quivered. There was a tube in one of his nostrils down to his stomach. On paper, he was improving. In the crib he looked like a shaped wound, an innocent victim of someone else’s war. His leg bone was broken and splintered and pierced the skin. Every rib was cracked. A third of his liver was wiped out by the impact.”
A gasp stopped Rivers short. It was O’Hara’s mother. “People had acted as if Frank’s mother wasn’t there,” remembers Elaine de Kooning’s sister, Marjorie Luyckx. Suddenly they turned to take in the family scene. Katherine O’Hara, dressed in black and looking terribly frail, was standing by the grave. Curiously, she had been admitted that very week to a hospital in Westchester after a psychotic episode during which she was found disoriented, deranged, and wandering the streets. Drinking was the primary problem. Her brother Tom Broderick, a second-generation Irish workman, had gone to Westchester to pick her up to take her to her son’s funeral and return her immediately afterward. “What happened?” she had asked calmly when he told her the news. This afternoon she was standing next to her son Philip, who had fought to have O’Hara buried in his hometown of Grafton, Massachusetts. Nearby was her daughter, Maureen, and two cousins, Mary and Jane, who had crossed over on the ferry from Orient Point.
O’Hara had strained to escape his mother most of his adult life. Her alcoholism, following upon the sudden death of his father while O’Hara was a freshman at Harvard, had demoralized and infuriated him. He had not gone home for over ten years. Yet the habit of taking on others’ dreams and cares, that had made him so popular among the New York School artists, had begun with his frail, seductive, ambitious, and eventually alcoholic mother many years earlier. Rivers’s lashing out and her gasp constituted the jagged catharsis of the burial.
“Frank O’Hara was my best friend,” Rivers said, subsiding. “There are at least sixty people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend. Without a doubt he was the most impossible man I knew. He never let me off the hook. He never allowed me to be lazy. His talk, his interests, his poetry, his life was a theatre in which I saw what human beings are really like. He was a dream of contradictions. At one time or another, he was everyone’s greatest and most loyal audience. His friendships were so strong he forced me to reassess men and women I would normally not have bothered to know. He was a professional hand-holder. His fee was love. It is easy to deify in the presence of death but Frank was an extraordinary man—everyone here knows it.”
As the coffin was lowered into the ground, mourners filed by. Reuben Nakian, a white-haired sculptor, had attached to it a terra-cotta sculpture of his Voyage to Crete series, from a show then at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by O’Hara. Stephen Holden, a young poet, tossed in a laurel wreath. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky intoned Indian sutras, while Jack Smith, the auteur-director of Flaming Creatures, snapped photographs. Many then dispersed to a wake at Patsy Southgate’s house up the road, where she was forced for a few minutes to keep her two young children’s eyes averted from Orlovsky’s unbalanced brother, Lafcadio, recently released from a mental institution, who upset the tender occasion by masturbating between two slices of bread. The painter Jane Freilicher, an early muse of O’Hara’s, went on with Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery to Fairfield Porter’s house in Southampton where they reminisced quietly into the evening.
As Philip Guston and Joe LeSueur walked away from the grave, which would soon be marked by a slate stone inscribed with O’Hara’s line “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible,” Guston put his arm around LeSueur and whispered, “He was our Apollinaire.”