Franz Kline anecdote Elaine de Kooning

On the TV broadcast Franz Kline Remembered, Elaine de Kooning tells the story of how in Greenwich Village in the late 1930s artists such as Kline would live primarily on heavily sugared coffee. Kline was taking care of the German Shepherd of a friend of his who had left New York for a time. One day, Kline came home and found the dog dead on the floor with a half eaten bar of soap next to its body. Elaine de Kooning says that Kline's reaction was, "It just shows you that a bohemian can survive where an animal can not."