Norman Rockwell (21 page)

Among the social events that Rockwell recalled somewhat ruefully in later years, when he recounted the Jazz Age in New Rochelle, was the summer party he and Irene attended in Westport, Connecticut, “a raucous affair . . . where all the guests were dressed in pink jackets and riding habits.” Although his autobiography places it much later in the decade, the early morning site of poolside debaucheries and drunken displays of sodden wit must have occurred in 1920, since Fitzgerald played in Westport then, not in the late twenties when he stayed in Europe. In his middle age, the circumspect illustrator noted wryly that “everyone was drunk and a woman fell into the swimming pool and I thought it was all very grand because I met F. Scott Fitzgerald, the famous writer, and heard him sing a rowdy song.”

At least at the beginning of the decade, Rockwell still felt extremely uncomfortable among high society, even though he could comport himself expertly when required. Far more enjoyable were the trips he and Irene took across the state to her childhood haunts near the St. Lawrence River. Her parents had a wooden “love shack” as they called it, basically a run-down three-room cabin in a small resort area called Louisville Landing, directly across the river from Aultsville, Ontario, a Canadian point of entry from the United States. Today under water as a result of the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s, at the time the “camp” provided a summer respite for Rockwell, who rented a studio in Massena, six or seven miles away. Often he used local settings for the paintings he worked on during these periods, such as the amalgam of the nearby stone church and the Gibsons’ clapboard house on the Christmas 1925 cover of the
Post,
which also included a local resident as the main character.

Rockwell’s immediate use of the “real people” in the neighborhood engendered tremendous goodwill, and his gratitude for the need they filled was usually misinterpreted as a stronger affection for the person than really existed. He loved hanging around the camp with the customs officer, Eugene Gibson; the two became “great friends,” and sat on Eugene’s porch “for hours smoking their pipes and swapping stories,” according to Eugene’s family. Rockwell did a lot of fishing on the St. Lawrence in spite of his later protestations of being no sportsman, and one of Eugene’s relatives frequently served as his guide on the fishing trips. According to his great-granddaughter, Connie Lewis Reitz, Eugene was the only person at Louisville Landing with a phone, which allowed him and his family an embarrassing glimpse into the dynamics of his marriage. When Irene was in residence and her husband was in New Rochelle, “Norman would call and ask Aunt Jess to go down the lane and get Irene to come to the phone. Aunt Jess said she always felt so sorry for Norman. He was so nice and Irene was so mean to him. Jess would tell Irene that Norman wanted to speak to her on the phone. Irene would refuse to come to the phone. Jess would go back and tell Norman that she couldn’t locate Irene.”

The marriage politely limped along, and Rockwell enjoyed Irene’s companionship in the evenings, as well as the pleasure of working hard all day at a job he enjoyed and coming home to a meal cooked by his pretty wife. As long as he was allowed to paint undisturbed, he was content and easy to be around; but when family or friends intruded too often on his studio time, he grew irritable. Such a territorial response to his workaday schedule was necessary or he would never finish all of his commissions; inevitably, he overextended himself by accepting too many offers.

In 1921, he discovered what would become the antidote to vocational exhaustion: travel. The art director of the Edison Mazda ads, who felt that he and Rockwell were kindred spirits, invited the artist to accompany him on a company trip to Venezuela, the art director’s barely disguised excuse for a vacation. The trip was Rockwell’s first foreign travel, and he realized almost from the first day of his adventure that even the act of relocating to a place outside of work reinvigorated him. And the more exotic the locale, the better. From this point on, whenever he felt overwhelmed by stress, Rockwell dropped his work, in spite of pending deadlines, and took a trip.

In his autobiography, Rockwell described the adventures the two men shared in terms that suggest the trip was truly dangerous at times. Including everything from a fearsome ocean crossing aboard a ship with a drunken crew, to bullfights and local boundary skirmishes conducted by terrorists, the journey to South America appealed to the curiosity that existed alongside of Rockwell’s loyalty to his own community. Paradoxical though it may be, Rockwell’s cosmopolitan spirit, the citizen-of-the-world mentality that revivified his aesthetic energies, fueled the creation of six decades of what would be variously praised and condemned as “universal,” “timeless” pieces of “Americana.” Without the foreign travel Rockwell undertook throughout his life, the “American” dream of tolerance and liberality and general goodwill would have withered before he was forty.

Certainly as soon as he reached his own city limits, he was inevitably embroiled in some family drama, either with his parents or with Irene’s family. In 1921, Nancy and Waring, who had moved at least three times since their sons’ weddings in 1916, moved yet again, leaving Brown’s, where they had relocated in 1920. Now they rented an apartment at 145 Center Avenue in New Rochelle, owned by George Peck, a social acquaintance of Norman and Irene’s, who probably helped his friends quietly subsidize the older couple’s home. Certainly, by now Rockwell’s parents could afford to live in a style typical of the solid middle class; Waring’s income hovered around $7,700, and the following year, he even purchased his first car, a Chevrolet sedan, according to the luxury tax he had to pay. Yet signs point to their conscientious son ensuring that they didn’t have to watch their budget.

If Norman was accustomed to being put upon by his parents, Irene herself felt overburdened by her husband’s expectations. Assuming that because she was married to a well-known illustrator and no longer had to support herself, she could devote her time to cultivating society, she had been surprised to find that Norman assumed she would handle his business correspondence and fan mail, and that she would read to him at night as well. Explaining to her college magazine editor why she was late with her dues, she wrote a note that was published in 1921 in their annual volume: “I am always busy with writing, etc., as I do most of Mr. Rockwell’s work. He is on a trip to South America now, so I am doubly busy attending to everything while he is away.” By this point, Rockwell had established the routine of having someone—usually Irene—answer each piece of fan mail he received, the number of which spanned from ten to two hundred letters per cover. Unflattering responses were almost nonexistent.

Two paintings that Rockwell produced for the
Post
in the autumn after he returned from his trip abroad reflect his new awareness of the release that travel provided: the cover published on January 14, 1922, shows a pigeon-toed boy agog over the pictures inside his exotically labeled three-dimensional viewer; and, a month later, on February 18, an office worker is seen reading, open-mouthed in amazement, a letter or card that transports him from the present moment of workplace tedium.

The theme of escape continues to permeate Rockwell’s paintings during the twenties and early thirties, though suspension of time, not place, is most often their foundation. The April 29, 1922,
Post
cover,
Boy Lifting Weights,
summarizes neatly Rockwell’s consistent ideology that impels him to omit indications of the present moment. The painting’s beanpole boy with the round-lensed glasses is, we know, part of Rockwell’s past: the Francis X. Bushman–type masculine pinup on the wall in front of him, the slogan “it’s easy” (to be a man) written next to his bulging biceps—an image of what could, in theory, have become the transformed adult of the future. A representation of Rockwell in the here and now, however, is absent.

Franklin Lischke, whose father owned Rockwell’s studio and who, as a boy, modeled for the illustrator, remembers that Rockwell called himself “Francis X. Bushwah” during this period, a self-mockery that referred to the he-man of the times, the silent-movie actor Francis X. Bushman. (Typical of Rockwell’s rich accretive method of association, the “Francis X.” also happened to be the name of Joe Leyendecker’s brother, the “other” Leyendecker.) Bushman was the first screen matinee idol, whose tanned, muscular body made women swoon. The movie star’s celebrity was short, lasting from 1911 to 1915, the period when Rockwell was leaving adolescence behind, along with any hopes he’d had of late blooming. This April 29
Post
cover of the skinny, pigeon-toed adolescent pumping iron in front of a mirror, with a muscleman’s picture pasted to the wall for inspiration, was motivated by the illustrator’s own fledgling attempts in his teens to reconfigure his gangly body and regain some standing among his athletically inclined friends.

Oddly, such an emphasis on what could become, or what is going to happen, or on something that already occurred for which people now yearn ineffably and ineffectually, sustains a narrative desire that transforms the ordinary into the universal, even at the same time that it seems to emphasize the individual. Desire as the underlying motif sanctifies viewers’ belief that what they are responding to is applicable to any person anywhere—even as the audience assume the experience to be very specifically rooted to their own moment in time.

Critics sensitive to the dangers of false universalizing, of claiming attention to the individual when in fact most of the complexities of culture are obliterated in the name of that particular “universal” creature, consider such narrative strategy an act of bad faith. And certainly the role that Rockwell’s humanism plays in maintaining a culture’s preferred view of itself should be held to close and constant scrutiny; art must be accountable, at least if one believes in its relationship with and importance to a society. But there is another side to the same coin: for one thing, it has proven impossible to travel to parts of the world where one might expect Rockwell not to translate hospitably, and fail to be surprised at the Chinese, Pakistani, or Sudanese response to the “human moment” common to Rockwell’s American fans. Too, the act of holding up a mirror to some of a culture’s best impulses—to present an idealized portrait as if its positive values are within reach of every citizen—may possess merit more complicated than a typically disapproving historical analysis will allow. Would the nation have been better served had Rockwell painted the social realities that loomed at least as large as the space of desire he created instead? Perhaps. But it is naïve to insist that anyone knows the answer.

12

Building a Home on a Weak Foundation

In the spring of 1922, Rockwell decided that he wanted to study abroad for a few months. Despite his pleading with Irene to join him on what would be the first trip to Europe for either of them, she elected to stay home. Rockwell remained in Paris for eighteen days, attending art school in the morning in an effort to expand his vistas. He lived in a small students’ hotel in the Latin Quarter, spending afternoons at the galleries and museums and sketching everywhere he went (unaccountably, leaving most of the results in Paris). At the end of this period, he spent another two weeks traveling in southern France and along the Italian Riviera, then into Switzerland.

Speculation abounds that Irene chose to spend Rockwell’s weeks of absence in local dalliances of her own. One longtime explorer of Rockwell’s trail, Robert Berridge, interviewed two of Irene’s closest friends thirty years ago and, as a result, hints that she stayed behind because of the “seven-year itch.” No hard evidence proves extramarital involvements by either party in the early twenties, but the likelihood is high, given the marital openness she and Norman would pledge within several years. And Irene’s careless lack of interest in her husband, other than as a companion to exciting social events and as an excellent wage earner, was always embarrassingly obvious to suburbanites in New Rochelle.

Margaret McBurney, a highly credible source whose family knew the O’Connors and whose good friend was close to Irene as well, insists that at one point during this period Rockwell’s wife “ran off with the chauffeur.” In light of the illustrator’s method of bowdlerizing the events in his autobiography, it seems probable that his slightly incongruous story about a profiteer’s chauffeur working as a go-between to bilk Rockwell of his savings is in fact a subtle reference to the affair. Rockwell explains that once when he was “away”—this time, supposedly in the hospital—the chauffeur led his wife to the shady investor, who convinced her to turn over $10,000 the couple had saved from Rockwell’s work. Even more pathetic than it would have been anyway, the story manages to victimize the innocent painter for his ineffectiveness; instead of spending any time recovering from a nose operation, he had to go to work immediately to remake their fortune. To make matters worse, Irene was recklessly indiscreet, and Nancy Rockwell began to get fed up with the public gossip trailing her son’s marriage around town.

Rockwell ignored his mother’s warnings about family propriety and focused on the professional definition he had struggled with abroad. The School of Paris was flourishing, a disparate, loosely knit conglomerate of international artists that encouraged various forms of representational art, especially since analytic Cubism, Picasso’s major contribution, had waned in influence. At the least, the aesthetic atmosphere was more congenial now to a figural painter than it had been before the Great War. Nonetheless, during the classes, he explained in his autobiography, students had approached him and accused him of being behind the times; his attention to drawing marked him immediately, they told him, as passé.

Visiting American artists insulted him more ambivalently than the European students had: Rockwell recounted that several friends from his student days approached him and lamented that he had gone over to the enemy—“You have sold your art! You had good possibilities but you have sacrificed your talent by descending to a level that satisfies the multitude. You are lost!” Before he left for the States, however, these same “advocates of the new art” cornered him to ask if they too could find some advertising jobs back home.

Rockwell was well aware of the trend of American artists taking up residence in Paris, and he ensured that he’d never be mistaken for an expatriate in the making: upon his return, a local newspaper reporter noted happily that “Mr. Rockwell went to Paris this spring, but he didn’t remain long. If the boys were fond of him before he left, their affections were increased many times when he said on his return, ‘America is the place for me, boys!’ ”

As if determined to anoint the young man the patron saint of local boys, the journalist practically emasculated the artist whom mothers in New Rochelle preferred over Sunday school for their sons: “Mothers are wont to remark that they would as soon have their sons in Norman Rockwell’s care as in church—so great, so good, so uplifting, is his influence on little boys.” Asked to account for his success with the youngsters, Rockwell responded politically: “Perhaps it was that satisfaction I received from having my work accepted together with an intimate love I’ve always had for children that directed me toward the work that has now become a hobby with me—that is, painting little boys, and having them for my models, thereby enjoying their youthful and inspiring dispositions.”

Within a year, Rockwell had massaged his foray into foreign venues into a refinement of his mythical Americanness, establishing an image that would ward off the thing he feared most: being forgotten. Writing admiringly of the homespun artist, his interviewer explained: “Before leaving home, he had thought to remain abroad perhaps a year and carry on his work, but he wished to continue with American subjects and there he found not enough characters typically American from which to work. . . . The simple, genuine qualities of American life present unlimited subjects, to his mind, for the painter who will but see and understand and properly value his own people.”

By this point, Rockwell’s aspirations to reach beyond his earlier achievements in style and content had been doused with a splash of cold reality, at the hands of George Horace Lorimer. When the illustrator returned from his spring 1922 journey abroad, he excitedly carried to the Philadelphia office at least one painting done in the “modern style,” which Rockwell later recanted as a very poor imitation of Matisse. Lorimer thought it over for a while, then turned and gave one of his top two cover artists a little speech about sticking to the simple stuff he did best. Rockwell was plagued already with fears that during his travels his public (including the Boss) would defect, and Lorimer’s dislike of the new material frightened him. Exploring new territory, risking leaving a proven success, is scary under the most supportive circumstances; the combined pressures of Irene’s emphasis on income and Lorimer’s on continuity conspired to keep Rockwell firmly in his place.

Within a few years of this first trip to Paris, his friend Clyde Forsythe would explain that whenever Rockwell’s schedule overwhelmed him, he just peremptorily jumped up and left—took an unplanned trip to a “far-off land”—“astonished to find upon his return that his clients still remember him.” His surprise at his continued success moved Forsythe to remark, with some satisfaction, upon Rockwell’s “inferiority complex,” proof of which is Rockwell’s consistent dissatisfaction with every painting he completed, believing that “the fine thing is always yet to be done.”

Although decades later in his autobiography Rockwell professed his awe of George Horace Lorimer, the truth was more complicated. (His canny modesty deceived at least one otherwise astute Lorimer scholar, however, who explains that other artists were not quite as “dominated” as Rockwell was by the crusty editor.) In 1922, Lorimer was busy interpreting America to itself, frequently in thoughtful, complicated ways. He supported the repeal of Prohibition, even as he insisted that Americans obey the oppressive law until they changed it. Farm prices, taxes, the current state of the theatre, crime statistics, town and highway construction, the Ku Klux Klan—it seemed that little escaped the
Post
’s scrutiny. On one of the most controversial subjects, war debts, Lorimer was adamant: he believed that the European nations that had incurred war debts should pay them, instead of depending on the open purses of underappreciated Americans whom the Old World dared still treat condescendingly. It was the right, even the responsibility, of individuals to make their own way, he argued, limited only by their willingness to work hard.

Lorimer’s earlier wartime isolationism, his diatribes against immigration, and his contempt for the popular idea of a melting-pot stew were a few of the positions that did not sit easily with Rockwell. Maintaining a formal but cordial relationship over the years helped the artist to retain a sense of philosophical detachment from the
Post
’s editorial content. After all, his covers were remote from the content within, their major objective the creation of a visual story whose narrative could be read at a glance. He respected the editor, but he did not agree with his politics, solving the uncomfortable schism by retreating behind a claim of being apolitical.

Such an assertion was meant to ward off demands that he pick sides on any issues that would, in the end, only encroach on his work schedule. But his “apolitical” and charitable demeanor encouraged people to ask too much of him at times; and his preoccupation with his painting frequently was mistaken for passivity, allowing his goodwill to be abused. When Irene’s father, Henry O’Connor, died of liver disease on August 10, 1922, the Potsdam grocer had made no arrangements for the financial future of his bewildered wife or three unmarried children. In short order, Rockwell found himself supporting them all under his own roof. For the next two years, though the arrangements would alter slightly, the four O’Connors occupied more of Irene’s attention than did Rockwell, who found himself alternately amused by Hoddy O’Connor, Irene’s brother, and repulsed by his profligate appetites.

Although Rockwell had coexisted with several generations under one roof most of his life, he did not refer to the actual experiences in his paintings. Instead, he idealized the contrast of ages in his art. Two covers alone in the year following the onslaught of in-laws,
A Meeting of Minds
on February 3, 1923, and
The Virtuoso
on April 28, develop the contrast between a youngster interacting with an aged man. The February cover shows a little girl listening admiringly to the older cellist, who is facing the audience. The second picture reverses the order, foregrounding dramatically a handsome prodigy playing his violin before an awestruck older musician at his feet, eclipsed by the full-size representation of the young man who clearly is destined to take his place. In each painting, a theme of connecting through what is unvoiced, through an imaged arena of longing, conveys the scene’s power—the girl and the old man, separated by too many years to bridge with words, are united in the unspoken realm of beautiful sound; the virtuoso, by contrast, reminds the elderly admirer, holding his own instrument, of what he has lost, if only the potential versus its realization.

Consistent with his reluctance to focus on the time at hand, Rockwell addressed the prospect of change by developing a theme that valued retrospectively and appropriately something from the past, while optimistically implying the equally satisfying substitution of a future. This perspective purchased a complete denial or avoidance of a present that would otherwise demand introspection. The “timelessness” that fans and despoilers alike ascribe to Rockwell’s art resides largely in this implication of a charitable timeline, with life’s vagaries made bearable through the promise of history’s ultimately benevolent march.

By avoiding the present during these years, except through the most reassuring references, Rockwell spoke to the anxiety underlying the nation’s buoyancy. The audience Rockwell played to was, in many ways, as culturally uneasy with the moment at hand as he was with its psychological weight. As at the turn of the century, technology was transforming the culture at a breakneck speed, from mass productions in print to the proliferation of movies, radio, and the ultimate instrument of change, the automobile. Even the emotional energies required to make the transition to the new information age fomented stress; many of Rockwell’s largely middle-class audience had been born into an antebellum or Victorian sensibility. To reflect on the past and to project a positive future had the effect, paradoxically, of slowing things down long enough to make sense out of what threatened otherwise to disintegrate into cultural disarray.

This dynamic was not, in the end, nostalgia, though Rockwell’s narratives were often appropriated to such an end. His distaste for pausing from his assignments long enough to register fully the life of the moment apparently reflected the agitated depression driving his obsession with work. His father’s storytelling through the heart and narrative voice of Charles Dickens had provided the first meaningful escape from the incoherence of his family life; the early popularity he gained through his ability to draw took over later on. Rockwell realized when quite young how to be well liked, and though he developed fully his most rewarding personality traits—his humor, his spontaneity, his warmth, his easy tolerance of others, his native intelligence—he sought most of all to be loved through his skill as an artist. His career was motivated by such a need; audience response validated his art. On those rare occasions when he failed to elicit the communal chord he had expected, Rockwell took the disappointment as a spur to aim higher on the next project. The popular perception was correct: the painter cared greatly what his untutored viewers thought. The reasons for such reciprocity between artist and audience were less than salutary, more complicated than the image created by the media. Rockwell admitted that his entire identification as a worthwhile human being resulted from sustaining his art as the conduit to love. If he stopped painting, or if people stopped liking his work, he would resume his identity as the eternally pigeon-toed youth who saw repeated reincarnations throughout the decades of canvases. His painting bought him love; and with his extreme intelligence, the man never doubted the connection between people wanting his art and wanting him. On Rockwell’s side, his role soon enough became a responsibility, a duty that he felt he owed his audience. From his father he had learned the honor of being dutiful, but he could never quite shirk the sense of duty’s confinement as well.