That summer, the Porters were again on Great Spruce Head Island, leaving the Southampton house in Jimmy’s care. Not wanting to leave him alone again, Fairfield and Anne tried to think of someone who could share the house and its responsibilities with him. After approaching several of Jimmy’s friends, they finally came up with Ruth Kligman.
Kligman was famous as the girlfriend of Jackson Pollock, who had been with him in 1956 when he drove, drunk, into a tree in Springs, New York, killing himself and a friend of Ruth’s who was with them. Frank O’Hara cruelly dubbed her “Death Car Girl.” A beautiful, vivacious, and sensual woman, she was attracted to famous and successful painters and writers, and they to her. Anne Dunn recalled meeting her around this time at Jane Freilicher and Joe Hazan’s New York apartment, where she was wearing a dress of white broderie anglaise, and thinking she was “staggeringly beautiful.” To Harry Mathews, who had a brief but intense fling with her, she was “the greatest courtesan of our times.”
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