Norman Rockwell (40 page)

Norman Rockwell is not usually thought of in the company of gender-bending artists. Yet his quiet belief in women’s strength and their right to live active lives informs many of his paintings. Whatever lessons he learned from his mother’s manipulative weakness he may have saved for himself; as his youngest son insists, the artist was a master at getting women to take care of him, even to defend him, in spite of the fact that he was perfectly capable himself. He appreciated and turned to strong women who were players, who assumed their own competency. In his art, such attitudes took various forms, including the cliché, such as his well-known cover of the tomboy, the picture of the schoolgirl with pigtails who sits happily outside the agitated principal’s office, smiling broadly in spite of her badly blackened eye. More suggestively, the August 24, 1940,
Post
cover of the camper returning home from the summer had “raised a small tempest of dissension,” according to
Post
editors, because of the ambiguous gender of the child.

Although the subject was painted as a girl—the long hair barely visible, at the least, gives the identity away—the accoutrements of frogs, tadpoles, plants, and the child’s general disarray, as well as the boyish suit and hat, confused the audience. A Girl Scout claimed that, in addition to the suspicious snake and field mouse, other markers of masculinity come from the “big feet, legs, hands, and ears.” But a Boy Scout insists that “no boy” would ever so “clumsily” apply a knee bandage, and that the youngster’s coat “is buttoned girl-fashion.” It is easy to impugn Rockwell’s cultural naïveté in pretending he could universalize the particular, but in cases such as this one, the joke seems to be on us: the artist is far too adept at delineating boys from girls to have accidentally failed to denote the gender. In this painting, the lack of Rockwell’s typical specificity gently indicts the audience that too often sentimentally homogenizes his art against the intention of the artist.

As comically incongruous as it seems, during the period when Rockwell’s Four Freedoms were blanketing the country with what some artists complained was an anemic and whitewashed vision of war, the F.B.I. decided to hunt bear in the Vermont woods. Whether the result of some specific concern—perhaps the public unhappiness Rockwell had expressed about the government not leaping at his initial offer to do the Four Freedoms for them, that matter commonly alluded to in the magazines of the period—or merely a routine secret inspection of someone speaking as an American diplomat of sorts, J. Edgar Hoover had decided to do a little investigating of the nation’s most popular artist. A Freedom of Information request reveals an F.B.I. folder on Rockwell that was initiated between the time of the studio fire and the publication of
Rosie.
An internal memo (with the writer’s identity blacked out) reads: “Pursuant to the Director’s instructions I spent a short while with Mrs. Norman Rockwell showing her the Exhibit Room this morning while Mr. Rockwell was taking the photograph of the Director.” The memo continues by detailing the interest Rockwell had shown in doing a picture sketch of the Bureau as well as executing the commission for Hoover’s portrait. If his fans and detractors both considered Rockwell domestically patriotic or prosaically apolitical at worst, the F.B.I. needed to assure itself that there was no Communist infiltration being perpetrated by a potentially Pied Piper artist capable of piping the nation into the sea. Within a few years, they would find more fodder for their files.

By the summer after his studio burned to the ground, Rockwell’s new one, modeled—with only minor variations—on the old, was well under way, in spite of wartime restrictions on materials. Permits from 1943 reveal the exemptions the illustrator obtained because of the nature of his work, much of it related to wartime illustration, though he still had to use nonpriority materials. In late July, he explained to a journalist from
The Boston Globe
that his neighbors were building him a new studio behind the recently purchased farmhouse, making it sound in the process as if the old site was too haunted by sad memories of his losses for the family to rebuild there. Instead, the less romantic truth was that he had been thinking about relocating to a less isolated residence anyway, and this move was enabled financially by the insurance policy he had held on the studio that was destroyed. Rockwell’s focus throughout the interview resolutely remains on the virtues of the townspeople, his models. He testifies “earnestly” to the interviewer that “lots of states have mountains, but only this has Vermonters.” He continues by extolling the character that the “folks” around the Batten Kill river share and that city people by and large lack.

Rockwell’s admiration and loyalty are sincere, and no doubt he believes what he is saying. But he also was adeptly continuing the public relations campaign he waged throughout his life, battling the public’s eventual fatigue with his success by representing himself as an average and even ingenuous talented man in awe of the (implicitly) better people around him. He had set himself up with an enormous challenge: presenting himself as accessible to his fellow citizens, and seducing them into helping him whenever he needed assistance to meet his deadlines, while maintaining the energy, time, and empty space in which to create. Finessing the impression he gave others that he thought they were special, or at least highly worthy of his attention, with their sometimes subsequent misunderstanding of their claim to his friendship, required careful thought and masterful manipulation.

By October, the Rockwells had finished renovating their eighteenth-century farmhouse, largely to Mary’s specifications, and the studio had been in use for a couple of months. Life felt more manageable in this location; the covered bridge led from the main road over the river and onto the village green, where the Grange Hall, a popular community church, and the little one-room schoolhouse dotted the expanse of well-tended grass. The Rockwells and the Edgertons lived in the houses on the hill, overlooking a near perfect bucolic landscape two hundred feet in front of them. In the middle of the month, Nancy Rockwell came for a two-week visit; her great-niece Mary Amy Orpen, eager to see the new house, accompanied her on the bus from Providence. Rockwell was sending his mother around $350 a month now, as well as paying the cousins for her expenses, but she felt that she never had enough money to do the things she wanted. His own income had skyrocketed this year to $49,000, largely because of the Four Freedoms, but his professional costs alone totaled more than $14,000. If it would have been cheaper for his mother to live with the family in their new large farmhouse on the Batten Kill, Rockwell didn’t care: “The general attitude toward Baba that I felt in the household was of pity and a slight contempt,” Jarvis remembers.

Mary Amy Orpen remembers that, as usual, Norman was busy working the whole time they were visiting. He also was dealing with an exciting request by the composer Robert Russell Bennett, who wanted to turn the Four Freedoms into a symphony, as well as the general commotion surrounding a popular national tour of well-respected artists’ paintings on the theme of freedom, with Rockwell’s four representations occupying the starring role in the exhibition. Requests for interviews and for commissions of all sorts multiplied, and by December 1943 the artist had every reason to feel particularly independent and secure about his future. The Society of Illustrators sponsored a wildly successful evening at the end of the year with Rockwell and Jack Atherton discussing the dangers of the power art directors were wielding at magazines. Rockwell had even recently completed another movie promotion project, which he always enjoyed, this time for
The Song of Bernadette.
Although he sent the painting in on time, Twentieth Century–Fox had to hound him to find out when he and his wife would arrive for the movie’s premiere, occurring on January 25, 1944.

But in spite of his status as America’s most popular artist, cited repeatedly in press coverage from all over the country, Rockwell had begun to suffer another bad emotional spell. Mary later wrote her sister that she had expected something like this as a delayed reaction to the fire; throughout 1943, he had “sailed easily” through his work, only beginning to stumble as the new year began.

The first sign that the artist was emotionally out of sorts occurred when he decided against attending the Hollywood premiere in favor of spending more time in January 1944 hiking the land behind their house, renovating tired spirits in their own backyard. The couple spent the mornings navigating the gentle mountains that surrounded them, walking a mile and a half up the road, then climbing upward until Mary found herself out of breath, her fit, 135-pound husband not missing a beat. But they both felt the span of “white birches and meadows and fences and walls below” with the “red barns against the snow” to be a peaceful respite from the “sound and the fury” going on in the rest of the world.

It was hard for Rockwell not to think often about the war, given his prominent place on the roll of artists available to help with government propaganda. The OWI, by February, had dampened its earlier enthusiasm for emphasizing the skills of “fine” artists over illustrators, unlike their strategy for World War I; the illustrators proved more effective with the people. The talent pool of artists’ names that the OWI sent to the poster division in New York included many of Rockwell’s friends, including the stylish painter Constantin Alajalov, Harry Anderson, Andrew Wyeth, Pruett Carter in Hollywood, and all of Walt Disney’s cadre of artists. Rockwell’s characteristic choice to domesticate World War II for those left behind stressed not the ugliness and violence of battle but the human need for connection and gratitude that didn’t pause even under such extreme conditions. From Rockwell’s point of view, the war was eminently worth fighting, and so the only question for those not in the service was how best to contribute. Willie Gillis sought to validate the duty that Americans had to accept as they fed their young men to death in exotic places. Supporting the soldiers by a show of solidarity was the gift they could offer up, and Rockwell’s wartime painting emphasizes that conviction. Ensuring that Americans understood the more abstract philosophy behind such sacrifices, however, demanded a more overtly political statement, and it was in the Four Freedoms that the painter rendered the democratic ideals he believed in deeply.

But Rockwell’s obvious idealization of things American, regardless of the care he took not to portray other citizens of the world as evil (except for Hitler), reverberated worrisomely with some of his audience, including the teenager Neil Harris, later an art curator and historian involved in mounting a major Rockwell exhibition. After all, the larger-than-life posterization of the noble citizenry, and Rockwell’s typical celebration of a pastoral society, felt distressingly akin to the pictorial propaganda favored by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes. True, Rockwell had never pretended to paint the strictly real, but he had established as an audience a near cult following that apparently wanted his vision of America to be real. Native New Yorkers such as Harris felt their own experiences denied; and, indeed, when only a handful of Rockwell’s hundreds of covers for a magazine published in urban Philadelphia even acknowledged America’s great cities, their citizens tended to feel marginalized in Rockwell’s vision of America. The occasional city scenes that do appear position their protagonists in resistance to the obvious disorder generated around them. Only by reducing the scenes to vignettes of enclosed community—so that the city is reduced to a small town—does Rockwell seem willing to plot his stories around an urban center. As Harris observes, “Rockwell defined the city more emphatically by contrast or withdrawal from it.”

The heightened collegiality imposed by the common cause shared by the nation’s finest illustrators would probably have honed the insecurity always lying in wait for Rockwell. He could see up close the changes being effected by the next generation of talented young illustrators who had grown up educated by the possibilities of the camera. By 1944, the
Post
cover graphics as altered by Ben Hibbs’s leadership had been in place for two years. In contrast to the pattern of the covers Rockwell executed under Lorimer, the backgrounds had become as important as the central image, largely because photography had enabled easy access to all types of location scenes; now, an empty music hall, a backyard in Troy, accidents of light, daringly unusual angles, could all easily comprise the drop against which a central subject might be painted.

As Susan Meyer points out, Rockwell had taught himself a lot about photography, and he was able to “pull off any number of tricks in the darkroom if needed,” yet he wasn’t even interested in looking through the lens at a photo session, let alone in taking the picture himself. He knew he didn’t want professional effects, which he would have been tempted to go for if wielding the camera; he preferred working from gray middle tones in the black-and-white photos, so that he wouldn’t be seduced into photographic effects he didn’t want. He usually had three prints made for each subject—one normal, one very dark for highlight details, and one very light for details in dark areas.

Gene Pelham, who took most of the photographs for him, used a four-by-five-inch camera generally set at f8, and he typically developed the film and prints in Rockwell’s darkroom at the back of the studio immediately after the shoot, so that the next morning the illustrator could choose the best ones and get to work. Pelham loved working for Rockwell, who encouraged the man’s own work, helping him get two paintings published in
The Saturday Evening Post.
In a phrase eerily repeated by the photographers who worked extensively with Rockwell, Pelham felt that Rockwell was “almost like a brother to me.” Such intimacy came at a cost; Rockwell expected Pelham to be available whenever he needed him, even though the man had a wife and children. He would remember the way that Rockwell made him feel so necessary to the artist’s success and even his emotional well-being that he dared not refuse him: “I’d get a call most any time of the day or evening and the minute I recognized Norman’s voice, I knew what would come right after the hello. It would be ‘Gene, I need you.’ Norman could never rest or put anything off when he had a new project started.”