13 August 1956 - A letter from Gloria Granger -- Judith's partner at the time -- to Judith, while she was out of town. Includes a fascinating on-the-scene report from the Cedar Tavern at the moment the news of Jackson Pollock's death broke amongst his friends. A partial transcription:

Jackson Pollock had been killed the late night before in an automobile crash. Near East Hampton, on his way into Manhattan.

A few minutes after a group of us left Saturday night, Franz Kline (then on the second day of a sleepless bender) received the phone call. He and De Kooning have been the closest to Jackson, and Bill is yet out of town -- and Franz mourned uniquely and beautifully. He said -- He puts his chest against the sky. And he said -- Even the birds are appointed, and he creates all the stars. And then -- Do you think it'll rain? and again, while his own face was wet.

And I cannot now, moving ever closer to their unguarded warmth and sometimes all up-ending eloquence, scorn any of them -- least of all in their anguish.

The tales (some even familiar from other reportage) do here not only alter color for sympathy, but meaning -- and even Jackson emerges the lovable favorite son-of-a-bitch. As corrected -- on some, any Monday night, Jackson would walk to the table of a beautiful woman he did not even know and say -- I love you. She -- get away from me you drunken bastard. He -- well then fuck you. Then to go off to a table far in back to sulk, head in hands, hurt and ashamed, alone. Gigantic bluster covering an unimaginable terror; he was once faced down by Whetling's great big drunken wife and gave every one of the successive apologies she demanded. Frightening only to those who did not know him, they claim -- whisperingly attentive, self-effacingly sober. and credited with sporadic luminary eloquence.

Kline said -- that bastard came in here once and tore that john door right off its hinges -- then he disappeared into it for twenty minutes to cry.

And not at all the dolt, he is a lovely, even charming man, and speaks frequently in gratifying elliptical and ranging reference. After ten years, chiefly mourning a beautiful wife finally committed to asylum.

They are childlike all -- and spill themselves to be mended by one another.