Norman Rockwell (15 page)

9

A Cover Celebrity

Rockwell returned to Manhattan in late 1912, determined to make up for lost time. Within a few months, John Fleming Wilson also reappeared and very briefly seduced Rockwell into accepting his excuses for his earlier unexpected departure. He invited Rockwell to a party at his Brooklyn home, but when the artist arrived with Eleanor Bordeux, his Mamaroneck girlfriend, the level of debauchery frightened not only his date; it alarmed her escort as well. Rockwell contrived a flimsy excuse to get away, leaving Wilson embarrassed in front of his guests. The Rockwell family consequently moved out of the Manhattan boardinghouse, largely, Norman said, to prevent Wilson from tracking him down. Just as relevant, surely, was his new involvement with
Boys’ Life,
which enabled the illustrator to help pay for improved accommodations.

Rockwell had performed his first few assignments so well that he was working steadily for the magazine in early 1913, operating as art editor as well as illustrating several of each issue’s stories. The part-time job left him free to pursue plenty of other commissions, and the $50 a month that
Boys’ Life
paid him allowed him to refuse the occasional unappealing job. By the time he left the magazine in June 1917, he had personally provided over four hundred illustrations. The early drawings for
Boys’ Life
are generally romantically rendered, evincing strong line but soft focus, elevating by their technical mastery the often plebeian stories they interpret. Howard Pyle hovers over many of the pieces, and even, at times, Pyle’s brilliant student, N. C. Wyeth. Rockwell ordinarily distanced himself from Wyeth, implying that unlike the Chadds Ford acolyte, he remained his own man.

Rockwell’s position in 1913 as art editor of
Boys’ Life
pegged him as a specialist in illustrating American boyhood, then a lucrative foothold in the commercial world. But if the potential financial security was reason to celebrate, the effect on Rockwell’s psyche was more equivocal, and he knew it. To some extent, the
Boys’ Life
job seemed to paralyze him into a permanent romance with childhood. The boy he had wanted to be, the guys he admired, the ones who got mistreated, the bullies, the lads clearly nurtured in the most ideal family settings—such themes reappeared over the next six decades, as if playing out a scene that he was determined to get right. His dissatisfaction with his childhood became the substance of his adult success, as he painted from his memories, often transforming the dross into golden scenes from an imaginary past. It is no accident that even in his old age, a word used commonly to describe his charm was
boyish.

Since he was fourteen years old, Rockwell had believed that financial security would afford him greater self-esteem. Now, as his own professional efforts enabled his family to move into a far more respectable residence, he began to relax into a more secure public image. The shift to tony New Rochelle, New York, massaged Rockwell’s bruised ego. Only a few miles from familiar Mamaroneck, New Rochelle’s aura of gentility and nature, of wilderness civilized, bestowed a sophistication on the community that its homier companion town lacked. Yet it determinedly clung to the local traditions that made it a place people returned to: between Huguenot and Main streets, for instance, a “most courtly Italian” roasted coffee at his popular shop; within easy walking distance of that stop stood Kerwin’s drugstore, Pete Donnelly’s restaurant, Charlie McGurk’s saloon, and even Coles Phillips’s studio in Sutton Manor. Ware’s department store, Hyman Frost’s clothing store, the National City Bank, Eddie Cordial’s laundry, the YMCA, Ed Carson’s jewelry store, and Chappie’s barbershop were their neighbors.

Directly bordering Long Island Sound, the lively city of thirty-five thousand had developed nine miles of waterfront into private and public beaches peppered with often luxurious homes. Seven public parks, 132 miles of paved public streets, six banks, a dozen social clubs, and, most of all, its status as having the highest per capita wealth in the state of New York were all statistics trumpeted by the local realtors. Undoubtedly of special interest to Nancy Rockwell, convinced even before her genuine medical crisis of a near daily new threat to her health, New Rochelle enjoyed the lowest mortality rate in the state as well. Balancing its determination to be contemporary with a Yankee attention to tradition, the city was solidified by moneyed stability. According to Tom Hochtor, the nonagenerian town historian, New Rochelle “hasn’t changed all that much since Rockwell lived here. Unlike those places whose populations just exploded after the world wars, New Rochelle got touched gently—more people, but not dramatically so. And the way of life pretty much evolved slowly, so the changes just don’t seem so big as they are elsewhere.”

For Rockwell, New Rochelle’s éclat stemmed from its repository of famous artists. Not only Coles Phillips resided locally; an enclave of celebrity illustrators and cartoonists who wanted to live outside of but conveniently close to Manhattan chose the lush city for their home, among them Clare Briggs, Victor Clyde Forsythe, and best of all, Frank and Joseph (J. C.) Leyendecker. Rockwell met the New Rochelle clique quickly, since his own profile was sharpening monthly. Of them all, J. C. Leyendecker impressed him the most.

Joseph Leyendecker was high on Rockwell’s list of heroes; his technical virtuosity, his range of styles, his narrative intelligence, all contributed to make him probably the best living illustrator, at least in Rockwell’s opinion. Several of the
Boys’ Life
charcoal sketches show Leyendecker’s ghostly traces in the elongated, elegant human figures, precise drawing, and modern thematic treatment of stories. Leyendecker’s first
Post
cover, the May 20, 1899, black-and-white drawing based on a Spanish-American War story, had been exactly the type of picture Waring enjoyed sharing with young Norman and Jarvis, so proud of their little military battalion at St. Luke’s. By the time Leyendecker’s second cover was published in 1903, Rockwell was working alongside Waring, copying illustrations from popular magazines. J. C. Leyendecker would complete 322 covers for
The Saturday Evening Post,
exactly the number that would prove the end-stop for his younger friend in 1963. During that decade, Rockwell would answer a student’s letter about Leyendecker’s influence on the younger illustrator this way: “Apart from my admiration for his technique, his painting, his character and his diligence, he didn’t have that much impact upon my work.”

Leyendecker’s talent was prodigious, especially his adroitness in shifting from one style to another. Particularly strong in drawing and composition, he created black-and-white sketches whose crisp execution inspired the sharper lines that appeared in Rockwell’s illustrations for
Boys’ Life
as of 1916. Leyendecker’s Arrow Shirt ads, which practically created single-handedly the look of the Roaring Twenties young man, combined elegance of line with a slight narrative superiority indicated in his characters’ barely perceptible aloofness, a technique Rockwell admired but did not emulate. Leyendecker’s careful but broad brushstroke was employed in the most masterful of color compositions, including ads such as the 1900 Rogers and Company printing service, with the rigorously drawn, glorious reference to Michelangelo’s Adam, and the 1917 Kellogg’s Corn Flakes ad in which a Dutch Masters–inspired little girl far exceeds the demands of the occasion. Her luminous skin and the glorification of the domestic deliberately refer to an age when lavishing painterly skill on a child at breakfast was considered a legitimate enterprise among the very best artists.

In moving to the same town as the luminary Leyendecker, Rockwell and other illustrators could join forces and reassure each other that they weren’t being written out of the history of art. Change, it was clear, radical change, was in the air—too rarefied for Rockwell to breathe easily. Oddly neglected in Rockwell’s accounts of this year, just as he was making his bid to enter America’s professional art world, the 69th Regiment Armory Show, an exhibition of over sixteen hundred pieces of American and European modern painting and sculpture, was being set up in New York City. February 17, the momentous opening date recorded in the consciousness of all art students of the period, came two weeks after Rockwell’s nineteenth birthday, and within five days of John Fleming Wilson’s debaucheries in Brooklyn. The first large-scale exhibit of contemporary art, including several notorious pieces by Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp, drew record crowds during its one-month New York run, and even larger numbers attended the smaller, edited show mounted afterward at the Chicago Art Institute. Artists and lay audiences alike could no longer avoid the new definitions of art contesting the age-old academic emphasis on representation. The picture plane could never again be taken for granted, and the subjectivity of the artist crowded other aesthetic priorities.

The Armory Show actually highlighted the broad spectrum of Provincetown talent: Oliver Chaffee, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Abraham Walkowitz, and Marguerite and William Zorach represented their own versions of what they thought modern art should be. Rockwell was right to realize that in theory, at least, he could join their ranks—if he would take the risk. At his own school during this period, Rockwell observed the League’s “inner circle,” the Fakirs, parodying Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase.
This highly social group, self-appointed art students who deflated the stuffy or the self-important, orchestrated their riotous annual year-end ball even more gleefully than usual in light of the changes clearly overtaking the art world. Parades and costume balls abounded, but Rockwell, in spite of his theatrical leanings, refused to budge from his work schedule. “They knocked on my [studio] door and I wouldn’t answer,” he later admitted. It was against this fevered panorama of expectations and excitement (League students were still fervently debating the Armory Show two months after it closed) that Rockwell urged his family to relocate to New Rochelle after Father Rockwell died in March, liberating Waring from any responsibilities for allaying the old man’s loneliness.

In New Rochelle, the family moved into Brown’s Lodge, owned by a lady reduced in circumstances, a “family hotel” that tried to blend the reassuring values of the past with awareness of contemporary culture. Its earnest attention to decorum relieved Norman’s anxieties. The boardinghouse organized the floors so that “young people” lived on a separate level from their parents’ apartments, an arrangement that encouraged unmarried single men and women to continue living at “home,” assuaging the guilt of parents who would rather pay others to create such an inviting domestic atmosphere than to do so themselves. Nancy and Waring promptly joined St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, but this time Norman opted out. By 1913, he’d had enough religion for a lifetime. He’d acquiesced all the way through last spring’s confirmation. Now, though still deferential to his parents in most things, the nineteen-year-old began to assert himself as his own man in matters such as religion, albeit proceeding cautiously as he did so. He disliked hurting people, even when he disagreed deeply with their values or behavior.

According to various articles in the New Rochelle newspapers, Brown’s enjoyed an even more substantial reputation than Rockwell acknowledged, functioning much like today’s upscale apartment complex. The boardinghouse even included several dining rooms where local clubs—Kiwanis, Rotary, and church groups—held monthly meetings. Rockwell’s life at Brown’s afforded him the first rewards for being considered a man of good prospects. Not even twenty years old, he was earning the early-twenty-first-century equivalent of $860 a month from
Boys’ Life
alone, an annual salary of $10,320. He began to squire various girls around town and polished his natural friendliness into a more suave but still accessible version that appealed to women.

But though Rockwell quickly developed cordial, even affectionate relationships, he usually implied more intimacy to those involved than he really felt. He procured studio space, for instance, at 360 North Avenue in the Clovelly building, next door to a brusque, good willed woman who ran the
Tatler,
a gossip rag for the city. The two struck up a friendship, and Rockwell tried to guide her to a less defensive stance that would net her easier social acceptance among New Rochelle’s elite. Describing her years later, in spite of the warm friendship they’d shared, Rockwell nonetheless discharged her in short order, explaining that she was snubbed because her father was a butcher, motivating her to turn catty. The digression was necessary for him to get to the important point of their fortuitous (and fortunate) acquaintance, as far as he was concerned: when she went out of business, he was able to rent her office and knock down a wall to enlarge his studio space.

While his brother’s reputation grew, Jarvis set out in his own directions. Continuing to act in the amateur theatrics he had begun three years earlier at St. Thomas’s, he also discovered new ways to exploit his athleticism. He enjoyed beating his brother in tennis matches, especially since Norman, no mean player himself, at least had a chance against Jarvis in this sport, by virtue of now being three inches taller than the older boy, as well as possessing a much leaner body. Jarvis was still clearly the athlete of the family. During the summer of 1913, he took advantage of New Rochelle’s proximity to the water and began racing, somehow even managing to buy his own boat. He entered his dory, the
Rocky,
in the Orienta Yacht Club’s regatta in August, but just as he positioned himself in second place, a dangerous squall struck, capsizing every boat but his. The newspaper account comments on the able rescue of the four other boats and their crew; Jarvis Rockwell alone, however, true to his brother’s memories of his physical prowess, rode out the squall in safety, “being driven clear across the Sound” and arriving home late that evening.