The Taming of Art’s Nasty Boy : If it was outrageous, Larry Rivers did it. What was meaningful, he debased. Why? So much attention led to the palace of access.

Molly Barnes was in good company. All around her were striking David Hockneys and imposing Morris Louises, but the most astounding work-in-progress at the museum gallery that evening was Larry Rivers.

Not the painting. The man.

Barnes was marveling that after all those years of hedonism and excess, after the heroin, the countless women and occasional man, the acclaim and the claim to history, that Rivers had turned out so, well, normal.

“Larry was the young kid among all these abstract Expressionists,” Barnes, an art dealer, says later. “He was wild. He was an alcoholic, he was an addict, but he grew out of it. He overcame these obsessions that fueled him. He’s really the ultimate survivor.”

And then, in a world where everything is relative, a newly tame Larry Rivers proceeded to read from his new self-expose, “What Did I Do?,” which he puckishly tags his “unauthorized autobiography.” Flanked by his co-author and longtime friend, the playwright Arnold Weinstein, Rivers adjusted the Gaultier glasses on his craggy face and looked out over a pond of sharply coiffed and heeled supporters of the Los Angeles County Museum.

Then he read a passage about his tumescent youth, when he had his way with the family armchair.

Rivers ultimately transmuted his raw experience into that rarefied commodity--art, that is, a painting soberly titled “Young Man in a Blue Velvet Chair.” But that evening, several relentlessly unedified people began to trickle out of the gallery anyway. And later, the 67-year-old artist puzzled over their response. “It wasn’t like that in San Francisco,” he mused.

Rivers has been reluctantly tagged the “father of pop art,” but he has always embraced the school of outrageousness. This is a man who shocked dinner party guests by serving them cat food and horrified his family by revving a motorcycle all the way to his own mother’s funeral. And when abstract Expressionism was all the rage, Rivers was bullheadedly insisting on realistic paintings of banal historical heroes--only to be vindicated by the coming groundswell for pop art. He did it, he writes, to curry the art world’s disgust.

“But if you’re very smart,” Rivers says with a sly smile, “that’s one of the ways to court them.”

And now with the publication of his memoirs, Rivers is again wooing an audience in his own perverse way. While the book paints the expected gossipy portrait of the ‘50s and ‘60s art world that crowned Rivers a star, it’s also rather trickily telling about its underbelly. The book is rife with sexually explicit stories, of the artist’s liaisons with potentially useful art dealers, of a sexual appetite that was so compulsive it ruined his important relationships.

“He’s always been a bad boy, adolescent outlaw,” says his daughter Emma. “If it makes him look bad, it makes him feel good.”

“His book and Madonna’s book opened the same week, and they’re really tell-all pornography,” Barnes notes. “It really seems to be a sign of the times.”

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Indeed, like Madonna, but long before her, Rivers was flaunting his eye-catching sexual style. Even Andy Warhol accused the artist of crafting a wild persona to make himself seem interesting. “What was to be gained?” Rivers writes. “Attention. Which leads to the palace of access. Access to where? The Whitney? MOMA? Studio 54?”

But in a way, Rivers’ dissolute style said volumes more about his generation. Unlike the current crop of artists who seem more careerist than bohemian, Rivers was a card-carrying member of the avant-garde that helped birth the licentious ‘60s.

“I think our generation was about experimentation,” he says. “If you could experiment with art, you could also experiment with life, with sex, with drugs.”

But lo these many years later, after the Me Decade and the Greed Decade, is it fair to say the results are in on those long-ago experiments?

The long-term returns on Rivers’ abrasive come-ons to the art world have resulted in a maturity blessed with $300,000 portrait commissions, albeit with the fluctuating favors of its fashion-minded critics. But Rivers now lives alone after two marriages and numerous other relationships. His latest long-term companion and former student, 35-year-old artist Daria Deshuk, has a Manhattan loft in his building, so that Rivers’ fifth child, their 7-year-old son Sam, can shuttle between them.

And on this day after the reading, Rivers has just surfaced from a deep funk to greet his visitor at the Four Seasons Hotel. It’s the same sort of gritty despair that once led to a suicide attempt and had him clutching at a heroin high until 20 years ago. Rivers was finally cured of his reliance by a bad dose that landed him in the hospital.

So is that all there is?

“Nobody who’s that obsessed with things can be happy, but artists don’t look at it that way,” says Barnes. “They really just want to create, and as long as they do, they’re willing to keep going. Because the fame and being on the cutting edge is really important to him.”

Larry Rivers was born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg, just about as far from the cutting edge as the Bronx could offer. His father was alternately a plumber and trucker and his parents’ taste in art ran to dime-store paintings.

But Rivers quickly moved beyond all that. He was a jazz saxophonist at 17 with a snappy American name--his peripatetic band was called Larry Rivers and His Mudcats. But when Rivers’ musician ties gave him a peek into the art world in his early 20s, he discovered a deeper passion.

“Music was like sex,” he writes. “I wouldn’t want it all the time. Painting was like living, a little lower-keyed than the life I lived, but something I wanted to hang on to.”

The rewards were swift. Rivers studied with the great Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann and worshiped Pierre Bonnard. His first show at 25 made him a star when the powerful critic, Clement Greenberg, declared him better than his hero.

(The affinity didn’t last. When they finally met, Greenberg asked Rivers about his name change. “Sounds like you’re ashamed of being Jewish,” Greenberg sniffed, flicking the tender nerve of Rivers’ own conflicts about his heritage. As for the critic, his assessment of Rivers’ work soon changed: “You can say now that I think he stinks,” he told a reporter years later.)

Despite Greenberg’s first blush of praise, it was Rivers’ later work that secured his claim to influence. The turning point was the 1953 painting, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Rivers had read “War and Peace” and wanted to produce a work with that sort of heroic, historic power. At the same time, he was amused by the absurdity of tarting up a mundane image memorized by millions of schoolchildren.

“Aside from trying to produce a visual ‘War and Peace,’ I wanted to do something the New York art world would consider disgusting, dead and absurd,” he writes. “I succeeded and was branded a rebel against the rebellious Abstract Expressionists, which made me a reactionary. I didn’t think it was true that I was against the New. Like many younger artists, I took modern painting seriously: it should be experimental and show curiosity. The idea of Larry Rivers was born with ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware.’ ”

“The idea of Larry Rivers” borrowed from Abstract Expressionist paint textures, blurred edges created by rubbing, and everyday images that later embraced the stunningly mundane--Dutch Masters cigar labels, Tareyton cigarettes, French money. His taste for the absurd resulted in a portrait of Napoleon that he wickedly titled “The Greatest Homosexual.” The art collector Joseph Hirschhorn offered to buy it if Rivers changed the name. Rivers refused. Hirschhorn bought it anyway.

Two years after “Washington,” Jasper Johns began painting his famous American flags.

Princeton art critic Sam Hunter summed up Rivers’ significance: He “converted a banal and unpromising bit of folklore into a source of riveting artistic interest 10 years before Pop Art turned its sights on popular Americana,” Hunter wrote.

“He’s a real seminal artist,” says longtime friend, art dealer Earl McGrath. “If it wasn’t for him a lot of artists wouldn’t exist. He’s been a tremendous influence on Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.”

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If Rivers’ artistic experiments were, for a time, a blazing success, his personal tests certainly were trials in many senses.

His hunger for women was so permeating that he even covered his wastebaskets with photos of nudes, an aesthetic lapse that mortified his daughter Emma when her classmates visited his studio.

Even Rivers’ idea of parenting encompasses his credo that art justified every tweak of common mores. His relationship with his two daughters, Emma, 25, and Gwynne, 27, took a beating over a film he made about their developing breasts. When the girls got older, they were horrified at his plan to show “Growing” in public, a response he dismisses as “middle-class.” Rivers is still so miffed at them he gave them a total of three paragraphs in his 492-page book.

And last Father’s Day, Rivers ignited another father-daughter firestorm with his quip to a Long Island magazine that “the best thing about being a father is you can fondle your children when they’re young without being thrown in jail,” says Emma. “It wasn’t true. He didn’t fondle us. It was bravado and heartless and totally missing the point of Father’s Day. He said it for effect.”

Emma, a sculptor who inherited her father’s gift, says their relationship has always been difficult.

“He’s a fundamentally selfish person,” she says. “Everything for art, and life takes second place. He’s been able to get away with it because he’s a famous artist. I think he’s different with his friends. Once you’re in his family you’ve had it.”

In fact, Rivers does write warmly of his close--and sometimes sexual--friendship with the poet, playwright and art critic Frank O’Hara. He was close to the artist Niki de Saint-Phalle, who once occupied a neighboring studio in Paris hung with balloons of paint that she would shoot with a hunting rifle but without warning. “When she used a cannon to color her sculptures . . . she was kind enough to tell us in advance,” Rivers writes.

(Piet Mondrian almost became another neighboring artist when Rivers was working in a loft on Second Avenue. But for the grace of competing real estate goes “Second Avenue Boogie Woogie,” he muses.)

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Rivers’ road to fame was marked by other strange side trips. His lucrative triumph on “The $64,000 Question” in 1957 led to his later being investigated--and exonerated--in the TV quiz show scandals. And when he went to Nigeria 10 years later to work on a documentary, Rivers was imprisoned for four days on suspicion of being a mercenary in the country’s civil war. “Mr. Rivers remembers making ‘the most babyish statement’ . . . ,” The New York Times reported at the time. “ ‘I said, ‘I knew we shouldn’t have come.’ ”

For all his excesses, Rivers is still filled with harsh self-appraisals. He writes chillingly of serving a heroin-and-Bon-Ami cleanser-filled syringe to some unsuspecting woman, of his complicity in gang-banging another compliant but retarded woman in his youth, of his “cowardly” dismissal of an adoring Frank O’Hara.

Says Emma: “I think the closer someone comes to the end of their life, I think in their way, it’s a big confession. I don’t know if he’s asking anyone in particular for forgiveness, but it’s almost like he’s getting something off his chest.”

But Rivers says it’s all in the name of art.

“I took seriously the calling to make life seem absurd. The book is in some way about that. Life is absurd. Once you’re alive, the quality of being alive constitutes the desire to stay alive, so no matter how crazy it is, we don’t walk away from it. We can’t walk away from it.”