American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (18 page)

The main part of Franklin’s job was locating props. You never knew what crazy object Rockwell might need for a painting. It might be a Victorian couch or a rolltop desk that had to be carried up the creaky flight of stairs to his studio. It might be a cello or a rag doll, and not just any cello or doll, but the right one, the one that looked like it belonged to someone instead of looking like it had been purchased at a store and unpacked from a box three seconds earlier. It was what Rockwell had learned at school: to work from life, to seek “authenticity” above all else.

Once, Rockwell sent Franklin to the store to buy some fresh trout for a painting of a fisherman. Franklin obliged, but instead of thanking him, Rockwell, who had a sensitive nose, complained that the fish was smelling up the studio. He asked Franklin to take the fish home and bring it back the next day. “Put these in your mother’s refrigerator,” he said. Franklin once again complied, only to hear his mother shriek when she opened the fridge that night.

When Rockwell finally finished the painting, he instructed Franklin to bury the fish. “I did,” he later recalled, “but I did not dig deep enough.”
5

Sometimes Rockwell’s model was a mutt. When he sketched a picture of a dog, he used a real dog as a model. It would have been easier to draw dogs from memory, but Rockwell chose not to work that way. He liked having objects in front of him, stuff to look at; he liked observing the world’s rich physical evidence. Dogs could be made to hold a pose, or at least hold still, if plied with the right reward. Rockwell kept a sack of bones in the studio, although old dogs, he quickly learned, could not be so easily bribed. They’d snatch a bone and retreat under the sink, snarling when he came near.

Few of the readers of the
Post
could have realized how much effort and labor went into a Rockwell cover. Every cover was its own production, with all the theatrical activity that implies. He conceived his own stories, scouted out models, and tracked down props. He wanted his models to be dressed a specific way and he had a substantial costume collection that he stored in his studio.

If he could not buy the right props or costumes, he rented them. He and Franklin would sometimes drive into New York City, to a shop called Charles Chrisdie & Company, which was located behind the old Metropolitan Opera House. Rockwell was amused by the couple who ran the shop. In a matter of seconds, they could locate the perfect pirate’s cape or pilgrim’s knickerbockers in a room crammed with thousands of costumes hanging from racks in no discernible order.

One of Rockwell’s most famous paintings has less to do with putting on a costume than taking it off. Franklin Lischke became a symbol of American boyhood when he modeled for
No Swimming
, which ran on the cover of the
Post
on June 4, 1921. Set on a warm afternoon, it shows three boys who are perhaps twelve or thirteen on the run, fleeing an unseen pursuer. A hand-painted sign in the background clues you in on their infraction. Franklin is the central figure in the painting, the long-limbed boy who appears to be naked and is clutching his bundled-up clothes as he runs. He frantically turns his head and looks over his left shoulder to see if anyone is following them. His eyebrows are raised all the way up, and his lips are pursed in an
O
shape, as if he is thinking, “Oh no.”

What did the boys do wrong? You assume they’re trying to dodge an authority—a policeman, perhaps, and certainly an adult—who spotted them skinny-dipping in a private lake. Various scenarios are imaginable. Perhaps the boys are playing hooky from school. Or perhaps they violated Prohibition and bought a bottle of something alcoholic.

No Swimming
, 1921: One of Rockwell’s most famous paintings has less to do with putting on a costume than taking it off.

Technically speaking,
No Swimming
has its bumps. The critic Charles Rosen notes disapprovingly that the anatomy of the three male figures defies logic. Look at the left leg of the central figure: It extends behind the boy and stretches on for so long that if he brought it forward it would be twice as tall as his right leg.
6
Moreover, the thigh of the chubby boy looks swollen and undefined, as if he had contracted elephantiasis. Nonetheless, there’s so much going on in the boys’ faces—they’re alert with fear and vulnerability—that their expressions alone carry the piece and give it its striking immediacy. It’s a painting that wins you over by capturing the thrill of getting away with it.

*   *   *

As his fame at the
Post
increased, Rockwell received a steady influx of requests from advertising executives eager to commission him to help sell products. The work paid well and money struck him as a good enough reason to do something. With only minimal guilt, he undertook paintings to promote Orange Crush soda and Fisk tires and Interwoven socks. At this point he was getting three hundred dollars for a
Post
cover—an advertisement, by comparison, paid more, as much as one thousand dollars, and required less time. Many of the ads appeared first in the
Post
, where Rockwell was himself a trusted brand name, the illustrator who did boys. He could reassure consumers that Jell-O (“It’s So Simple” the type boasted) or Carnation milk or Grape-Nuts cereal would not lead to bodily or moral dissolution.

Unlike J. C. Leyendecker, who was happy to be known nationally as the Arrow Collar Man, Rockwell didn’t want to be associated with a particular consumer good. In 1923 the writer Malcolm Cowley published a witty collage, “Portrait of Leyendecker,” which consisted entirely of cut-up advertisements from a single thick issue of
The Saturday Evening Post
.
7
A portrait of Rockwell, by contrast, even a humorous one, could not reasonably consist of a medley of ads. Magazine covers were his priority and his great love. Ads and calendars would always be the part of his career that he liked least.

Unlike his magazine covers, for which he usually generated his own story ideas and presided over their progress from roughs to charcoal layouts to framed paintings, ad agencies furnished him with ready-made ideas and expected him to illustrate them to specification. For this reason, he believed his
Post
covers had creative integrity and the potential for some kind of greatness, while dismissing his ads as hackwork undertaken strictly for the money.

This is an important distinction, because the phrase “commercial art” can refer to an undifferentiated mass of magazine illustrations, brochures, greeting cards, advertisements—stuff printed on paper. But Rockwell put magazine covers on a higher creative plane and staked his career on them. The irony is that his
Saturday Evening Post
covers, which earned him his fame as an illustrator, are not in the technical sense illustrations: they do not illustrate a writer’s story. He had learned at art school that images were always subordinate to an author’s text, but when he did a
Post
cover,
there was no text
. Rather there was a stand-alone image of which he was the sole author, although at times he did take suggestions for story ideas from editors.

In the fall of 1921 Rockwell made his first trip to a foreign country at the invitation of an advertising client, Edison Mazda Lamp Works, which was part of General Electric. He had recently done some work for their advertising campaign—paintings whose subjects were generously lit by electric bulbs. Typical, perhaps, was
And Every Lad May Be Aladdin
, which shows a boy reading in bed at night beneath his patchwork quilt, his dog curled at his feet, light pouring out from beneath the crooked shade of his lamp, a twentieth-century magic lantern that makes every boy as lucky as Aladdin.

Tom McManis, the art director at Edison Mazda, invited Rockwell to accompany him on an extended expense-paid jaunt to South America, ostensibly to inspect Edison Mazda plants.
8
“Mac” as he was nicknamed, was the type of man Rockwell admired: a toughie like his brother, Jarvis, “a brawny, barrel-chested fellow with a face like an old-line Irish police sergeant,” as he later wrote.

Rockwell and Mac sailed south on November 5 on the USS
Philadelphia
, changing boats at Curaçao, in the Dutch West Indies.
9
Their destination was Venezuela, where most of their time would be spent up in the jagged mountains around Caracas. There, they attended a bullfight, peered across barricades at revolutionaries, and were trailed by secret-police men. Rockwell claimed in his autobiography that he had enough after nine days. “I’m going home” he told Mac, leaving his friend behind. But immigration records indicate that the two men sailed back together, from San Juan in Puerto Rico, on November 23, two and a half weeks after they left home.
10
A small lie. Perhaps he was embarrassed by the amount of time he spent away from Irene. Or perhaps with that first trip out of the country he realized he wanted to travel much more.

*   *   *

His growing renown as an illustrator also brought invitations to speak to groups and judge contests. On September 6, 1922, he headed to Atlantic City for the three-day Miss America beauty contest, which had been founded only a year earlier by a group of businessman hoping to extend the summer-tourism season into September. The board of judges was comprised of eight purported experts on female beauty, all of them male, including the illustrators C. Coles Phillips and Howard Chandler Christy and the theater producer Lee Shubert. That Rockwell should be tapped as a connoisseur of the female form might seem unlikely, and he did not give any interviews that weekend, gladly deferring to Phillips, his much-older friend and neighbor in New Rochelle. Phillips, the creator of the Fade-Away Girl, held forth in Atlantic City about female beauty and the search for a new, post–World War I ideal.

An implicit goal of the contest was to select a woman who defined “American-style beauty,” as if physical appearance, as much as a plate of food or a statue of a leader, could be uniquely American. This helps explain how the judges, after watching a bathing suit parade along the boardwalk led by the sea god Neptune, wound up tapping as the new Miss America sixteen-year-old Mary Katherine Campbell of Columbus, Ohio, “a real outdoor girl” who “swims, shoots and rides.”
11
In other words, she could not be mistaken for one of those jittering flappers who were modernizing womanhood. With their cutoff hair and androgynous bodies, flappers represented an assault on the model of elegant, cello-shaped womanhood defined a generation earlier by Charles Dana Gibson, and the Miss America pageant wanted nothing to do with them.

Later, looking back on his first pageant, Rockwell described a pathetic incident. One afternoon he went for a dip in the ocean with his fellow jurors. They were splashing around in the surf when a few of the beauty contestants sauntered by. The women, svelte and leggy, teased: “You’re judging us? Look at yourselves. Old crows and bean poles.” They laughed playfully. A harmless enough scene, but Rockwell felt mortified.

He had always been acutely self-conscious about his underdeveloped biceps and pigeon toes. He also had a pot belly that he wished he could flatten. Later that day, he visited a “corsetorium” in Atlantic City and tried on a few small corsets, as the female shoppers in the store giggled.

“After I had tried on four or five corsets,” he recalled, “I found one I liked. It was pink and laced up the middle but it wasn’t bulky and I decided that no one would be able to tell that I was wearing it.” Rockwell, naturally, tries to milk his purchase for laughs, and his story ends on a vaudeville-like note. A few weeks later, he threw away the corset after a friend was alarmed to spot “two tiny pink silk laces with metal tips” hanging out of his shirt.
12

The anecdote certainly invites interpretation and overinterpretation. If nothing else, it marks Rockwell’s official entry into the world of cross-dressing. And it brands him as an unreliable Miss America judge who felt threatened by the beauty contestants and spent the pageant fussing over his own physique.

*   *   *

In his youth, he had wanted to be a celebrated illustrator but, once he became one, he hardly felt like a hero. The rise of advertising had altered his field almost beyond recognition. On some days, he was not sure if illustration was (a) an art form, (b) an art that was tethered to commerce, or (c) pure commerce minus the art.

He had enough doubts about illustration in those days to wonder if he should try harder at fine art. Or at least go to Paris. He had never been to Europe, and he was eager to see the Louvre and wander through rooms lined with Old Master paintings. Everyone else, it seemed, was doing just that, going to Paris, not least because of the favorable exchange rate after the war. The dollar was stronger than it had ever been. American prosperity in the twenties served the interests of American bohemia and enabled a whole generation of kids to flee what they regarded as the barrenness of American prosperity.