Beyond Dribble and Splash : ‘WHAT DID I DO?’ The Unauthorized Autobiography of Larry Rivers, By Larry Rivers (HarperCollins: $30; 498 pp.)

True artists so rarely write their autobiographies that the mind virtually has to cast back to “The Life of Benvenuto Cellini” to think of another one. Like Cellini, Rivers is apparently in love with himself. Written with Rivers’ poet friend Arnold Weinstein, “What Did I Do?” is nearly 500 pages of confessional anecdote detailing most of the nearly 69 years of his life.

Beginning with his early years in the Bronx as Larry Grossberg, the book ends with Rivers thinking he may no longer be the hot artist he was in the swinging ‘60s (a decade that actually began in the late ‘50s). Back then, Rivers delighted young bohemians by stumbling across a way out of the monopoly the Abstract Expressionists held over art for a decade. Even those of us who admired Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and the rest of Manhattan’s Cedar Bar saboteurs were waxing weary of dribble and splash.

How about a little recognizability around here? How about the human figure again for a change? The problem was how to do it and still be hip.

Two guys came along to show the way. Around 1956, the Californian Richard Diebenkorn painted the figure using the gestural brush stroke of the Action Painters. More conservative in style than Diebenkorn, Rivers nonetheless seemed hip. There was something radical about painting the same figure twice in one composition--as he did in the 1955 painting “Double Portrait of Berdie”--especially when that figure was the artist’s aged mother-in-law, naked. Rivers talked her into posing by insisting she was the oldest woman to be painted in the nude since Rembrandt worked.

He exhibited his work in L.A. at the old Dwan Gallery. He painted Lucky Strike packs with the passion of a Franz Kline. He rendered female nudes with the body parts labeled in French. He did a version of “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”

What was this guy up to? He dealt with the culturally off-limits, sneered at the sacrosanct, went all gooey and sentimental over forbidden subjects like having incestuous feelings for your wife’s mother or obliquely entertaining a sense of thrill over patriotic kitsch. For this he was eventually classified among the ancients of Pop Art, even predating Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

There. You’ve so far read more about the historical significance of Larry Rivers’ art than you will find in this book, which has something to offend just about everybody.

Scholars and bibliophiles will be maddened by its innocence of index. Feminists will be infuriated by Rivers the satirical and satyrical sexist pig. He married twice and fathered five children without dropping a stitch in a web of promiscuity that kept him bouncing from girl to boy to girl like a kangaroo on a pogo stick.

Neopuritans will wax indignant over a life casually laced together on a steady stream of alcohol punctuated with jolts of heroin for real relaxation. It seems about the only thing Larry Rivers never did was smoke. Except grass, of course.

Rivers’ writing style is engaging, but for the first half of the book he drives you crazy by telling you everything about what he did but nothing about what he felt, aside from what he characterizes and Jewish guilt and adolescent neurosis. Wait. The psychological tendency to recount experiences but not the feelings that ought to go with them is thought by some to be at the core of artistic inspiration. It’s a way of hanging on to your identity while avoiding the pain that goes with it. Another way out is to trade your identity in for a new one.

Rivers’ childhood had to be even tougher than he lets on. Clearly bright, he was raised by well-meaning, ignorant parents. His father substituted stoicism for feeling; his mother trafficked in hysteria. His favorite place to escape was the zoo. He loved to watch the big cats. One day when he was about 9 the neighborhood bully forced him into fellatio behind the cages.

By the time he was a teen-ager he no longer wanted to be either Jewish or white. He wanted to be a black saxophone player. He did his best, but even shooting up drugs in a zoot suit didn’t quite get him there. He plays his sax to this day.

During World War II he toured on bebop gigs, married a phobic girl named Augusta so they could copulate with their clothes off, and served just enough time in the military to qualify for the GI bill. That bankrolled a growing interest in art, leading him to enroll in Hans Hoffman’s famous school. He met a lot of fledgling painters, including a stunning fellow student who was also married. They both started cheating. Together.

It often comes as a surprise to young art freaks that serious artists are regarded as intellectuals and had therefore better develop some credentials along those lines. Rivers’ came through the medium of the poets he met around the scene. William Carlos Williams, who was both doctor and poet, once did an abortion for one of Rivers’ embarrassed girlfriends.

The poets had a kind of wit, style, knowledge and wisdom the artist admired. Numerous of them were homosexual and so, having failed to become cool and black, Rivers had a fling at being gay. His friends characterized it as a form of social climbing. It was that and more.

By now you are about halfway through the book and beginning to think that Larry Rivers is a type everybody has known, a talented, exhibitionistic, ambitious, smart-ass pain who underneath it all is really quite a lovable guy. That only augments irritation at his persistent refusal to reveal his feelings.

Then he meets Frank O’Hara, the beloved artists’ poet and curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and the book changes. Rivers and O’Hara have an affair. Rivers is uncomfortable but carries on with it partly because he likes the poet and partly because the cultivated O’Hara knew everybody worth knowing in New York. They go the the theater and ballet. O’Hara introduces Rivers to the glitterati. Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg widen Rivers’ circle. He already knows all the artists. It sounds like more career-building, but the bond between the men is real, outlasting the affair until O’Hara’s silly, untimely death, bowled over by a dune buggy in the Hamptons.

The rest of this book is more than bearable. The anecdotes become lyrical. We begin to see Rivers in three dimensions. Larry behaves unforgivably and his friends and lovers forgive him. He marries a Welsh au pair named Clarice. They have kids, break up and remain close. In his 40s he takes up with a 15-year-old. After a huge fight he urinates on her clothes. She works for him to this day as his main studio assistant.

It is a life few people dare to live. It’s the life that believes, with Oscar Wilde, that in the end we only regret what we did not do.