Norman Rockwell (41 page)

But one time, at least, he was able to resist Rockwell’s blandishments. “It was Christmas Day, and I was home opening my gifts with my family. The day before, [Rockwell] had begged me to come help him for a few hours. I told him he was crazy, that he needed to take the day off too. But he kept pleading, desperate. Well, this morning, Christmas Day, I heard a knock. I couldn’t believe my eyes—it was Mary Rockwell, and he’d sent her to beg me. I could tell she was unhappy doing it, too, but I still said no.”

Rockwell compensated for yielding to the camera’s efficiency by constructing a veritable piece of theatre, himself producer and director. Days were spent collecting costumes, props, the best lights, and the finest available models before the shoot began. When it was time to take the pictures, Rockwell had the photographer take shots of individuals, of groups, close-ups of the set, of pieces of the props, of someone’s hands. He varied his requirements, sometimes asking for a hundred photos of a staged scene, sometimes three or four of independently choreographed moments. Usually he would act out the expressions he wanted assumed by the “actors,” as he thought of his models.

His use of the townspeople created tremendous rapport between them and the artist. An illustrator who later studied with Rockwell, Don Spaulding, observed that “he treated [his models] like ‘honored guests.’ ” Rockwell made them know how much he valued their work and that the success of his paintings depended on
them
. Never patronizing or condescending to his models, he advised other artists: “If your models feel that you are their friend instead of their boss, and if you make them feel that they are very important to the success of your pictures, they invariably will cooperate. You cannot get people to do things for you that are difficult, no matter how much you pay them or order them about, unless they like and trust you.”

He paid his models more than the other local artists did, to the grumbling of these friends. And when the townspeople volunteered to model for free, as they inevitably tried, he insisted on paying them his standard fees: five dollars for children, ten dollars for adults, and for special assignments, such as the woman who posed for
Freedom to Worship,
fifteen dollars, knowing that she had eight kids in her house to feed. After thanking his models profusely, he’d send out for Cokes for the kids and give everyone their check in a sealed envelope, a gracious detail they appreciated.

Such workdays were long, and the rural respites he’d imagined enjoying, the waterhole and the extended bike rides, occurred more infrequently for him than even for Mary, who at least had the excuse of taking the kids for recreation. As soon as the spring thaws seemed imminent, much to everyone’s dismay, Nancy Rockwell decided to return to Vermont. This time, the Rockwells situated her in an upscale boardinghouse in nearby Bennington. In late spring, the twenty-year-old Mary Amy Orpen visited her relatives, and Rockwell used her to model for his projected August
Post
cover of a young woman lying indisposed in her bed. What she remembers most about the trip, however, is her surprise at her aunt Nancy’s “liberated” reaction to a sketch that Mary Amy drew of herself skinny-dipping under the bridge next to the village green, the first swim of the season. “Aunt Nancy wasn’t disturbed at all by my nakedness or my friends either,” explained the budding artist. “She was just irritated that I had risked catching a cold when the weather was still so unpredictable.”

Rockwell continued to paint more war-related themes, however obliquely they related to actual fighting. Soldier lovers, ration boards, mail from home, European refugees—all took shape in his quest to domesticate, for ordinary people, the reasons Americans were fighting. When government officials sent him wires asking if they could reproduce images they saw published in various magazines, he answered swiftly and with pride that of course they could, free of charge, but that he would ask only to reserve the ownership of the painting and image after their use was finished.

The apparently nonstop growth in his popularity wore out his wife, and even his children found themselves more annoyed by the steady stream of tourists gawking at their house. By November 1944, Mary Rockwell was tired out from answering fan mail from
Post
readers, even though only one cover had appeared over the past four months. In the past, she writes her sister, she never knew if a particular cover would elicit much response, but for whatever reason (one suspects the new popularity from the Four Freedoms), the letters seemed to come nonstop these days—and it was her job to answer them all. She enjoyed the chance to retreat to her sunny little office for such a chore, but she dreaded trying to keep up with the correspondence in a timely fashion. On the positive side, she successfully hosted the Rockwells’ little social group for Thanksgiving, pulling off cooking the entire turkey dinner herself for the Schaeffers and the Athertons.

Most promising, she was relieved that her husband seemed to have conquered the depression he’d been fighting all year, though it had been particularly difficult in the past three months. She believed the emotional aftershock from losing his past in the studio fire had played itself out, and now he could rev up the pace at which he’d been finishing paintings, instead of doing them over three or four times before he was satisfied.

23

As High as He Could Fly

At the beginning of 1945, Rockwell’s national fame was confirmed when
The New Yorker
contacted him for an extensive interview they planned to conduct in the early spring for one of their famous in-depth profiles. By the time the piece ran on March 17 and March 24, the Rockwells had traveled to California, where Rockwell took occasional time off to contribute to good causes, such as the Easter Seals for Crippled Children of Los Angeles County poster contest. The rest of the time, he worked on projects, including the complicated
Homecoming,
which would be published on May 26 and become Ben Hibbs’s favorite Rockwell cover. This painting, showing the joyous reactions of lower-middle-class apartment dwellers to a soldier’s return, includes two boys who have climbed up the tree outside the building, the one on the top a black child, as well dressed as his white friend.

It is tempting to speculate on the reaction to the article of those around him in California. All the sons remember is their shock at learning, especially through such a public forum, of their father’s previous marriage. The interviews said little new about his art, but in reading the news that Rockwell had been married for fourteen years before his union with Mary Barstow, the country got its first glimpse of a more complicated artist than the national image had conveyed. The writer, Rufus Jarman, mentions Rockwell’s “melancholy brown eyes” and his “boyish” stringy pleasant looks, and the good-natured air. Jarman is respectful but distant, fair but never fully engaged, almost as if he is picking up on a similar lack of connection from Rockwell’s side. He explains that Rockwell has turned out an average of one cover every six weeks for the
Post,
earning the country’s gratitude, and the “professional art critics’” contempt, though as a class, the writer explains, they tend to dismiss illustration. Such critics term Rockwell’s work “dull, flat, and uninteresting,” and, Jarman notes, Rockwell is represented in the Metropolitan Museum only by accident, with a historical waistcoat he sent for evaluation and ended up donating instead. “Gosh” and “Gee” are two of Rockwell’s favorite locutions, the journalist notes a bit dubiously, as if unsure if he is being duped by a subject cannier than himself. (He was.)

Already, in 1945, Rockwell was willing, however, to let seep some of his boredom with the Boy Scout calendars. He explains to Jarman that he’d been having trouble coming up with a new subject each year, and that the Boy Scouts “are simply going to have to devise some new good deeds or Brown and Bigelow will be in a hell of a fix.” Rockwell tells the story of how he and leftist sympathizer Rockwell Kent have to send mail to each other frequently, since their names confuse their audiences. As at other times, when an anecdote about the two “Rockwells” unfolds from either man, a sweet warm generosity seems to suffuse the moment, though the two men never met. Rockwell explains about the studio fire—how he suspects he left a pipe burning near the curtains, and hot ashes ignited the cloth. Jarman, suspicious of the artist’s upbeat attitude toward the event, asked Mead Schaeffer his opinion, which ended with Schaef’s joke that Rockwell almost convinced him to burn down his own studio.

As the
New Yorker
profile was appearing, the new art editor at the
Post,
Ken Stuart, introduced himself to Rockwell and discussed his understanding of the contractual agreement in spirit, if not in print, between Rockwell and the
Post.
The two men would always maintain an uneasy relationship, though in later years Rockwell thought it best to feign otherwise. Throughout the last half of the decade, Stuart and Rockwell jockeyed for position in the
Post
’s hierarchy: would Rockwell continue to have unlimited access to Ben Hibbs as his first line of defense, or would Stuart’s opinions reign, in terms of the selections of the magazine’s art? Alternating between a slippery imperiousness and an obsequious display, Stuart worried Rockwell from the start, not least because the artist already believed that in the wake of World War I, the art world had suffered from such professionals dictating to the artists what they should paint. On April 17, Stuart sent Rockwell a copy of Ben Hibbs’s letter of agreement to continue their old terms, though Stuart reminded Rockwell, who must have requested the document, that he had already told the illustrator that the contract is “self-renewing” anyway.

Although Rockwell and the
Post
perpetuated the idea that Rockwell never was under contract to the magazine, presumably implying his superiority to the norm as well as his uncoerced faithfulness to the
Post,
a transitional period following Ken Stuart’s employment as art director included letters between Rockwell and the
Post
that clarify, indisputably, that however briefly, Rockwell did work under what he considered the onus of a contract. When he referred to this period a few years later in a letter to Ben Hibbs, he reminded the editor that when he was under the contract—presumably during Ken Stuart’s first few years—it had forbidden him from accepting any assignments from other magazines. As a result, his
Post
covers suffered, he explained, because he was suffocated by sameness. He needed the occasional outlet to stay fresh for the
Post—
exactly the reason he and Hibbs had returned to a no-contract agreement.

The
New Yorker
profile provided Rockwell with even more clout than he’d previously held, and by the time the Rockwells returned to Arlington from their California respite, the artist was feeling eager to tackle the challenge of creating the next good idea. Mary, relieved at the positive tone of the article and her husband’s (albeit temporary) optimism, decided to tackle projects outside the domain of his work. First, she took up the subject of selling—finally—their first Vermont house, which they were still paying for while holding a mortgage on the West Arlington farmhouse as well. She had decided to invest, with John Fisher, the husband of her increasingly good friend, writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher, in the local joint movie theatre enterprise, which was in danger of going under—the Modern and Colonial Theatres in nearby Manchester Depot. It is hard to imagine Rockwell’s enthusiasm for the risky venture (which eventually lost money for the Rockwells), especially because much of its allure for Mary would have issued from its association with the well-off, older Fishers, who enjoyed performing public good deeds. But Rockwell’s earnings were particularly strong this year; by the end of December 1945, he had earned over $52,000. Their increasing financial strength—including a small family inheritance on the Barstow side—allowed Mary some leeway to direct their investments, and so her husband concurred with her plan. While she delved into the earnings and losses statements of the theatre with John Fisher, her husband began gathering photographs for the reference division of the Metropolitan Museum, which had finally requested Rockwell’s work—photographs of it, for their files on illustration.

The boys, as usual, were thrilled to be out of school for the summer, and they spent most of their time on the village green, Tommy playing ball, Peter swimming in the nearby river, Jerry kind of wandering around, figuring out what was most interesting that day. One afternoon in early July, as the fourteen-year-old walked around the field where several boys were throwing a baseball, someone threw particularly poorly and hit a tree, the ball then ricocheting off and smacking Jerry’s head. He stumbled home, where several minutes of vomiting and the urge to sleep convinced his parents to call the doctor. Within the hour, he was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, his mother and doctor at his side. “My mother said that the doctor forced her to listen to him gossiping all the way to the hospital about someone they mutually disliked, just to take her mind off of my injury,” her son remembers.

Jerry’s skull was fractured, and he stayed in the hospital for several days until it was determined that the concussion he suffered was healing. His father must have been terrified, remembering the death of his favorite child model, Billy Paine, from the same type of injury. But Jarvis remembers that his parents emitted the calm and controlled aura the sons had come to associate with them in almost all circumstances, except when they were roughhousing or all playing loud “boy” games. Still, the family was frightened, and they were ambivalent about the private drama being publicized in national newspapers. Almost immediately, letters from professional associates of his father’s started pouring in, expressing their regret at the news. Many of them combined their best wishes for the son’s recovery with a request for an update on their commission’s progress, which Mary Rockwell dutifully provided. When the artist painted his October
Post
cover that summer, he made a point of including Jerry as one of the models in the scene of a returning Marine who sits among his neighbors sharing war stories.

Apparently, Rockwell was convinced of Jerry’s full recovery by August, at least according to F.B.I. reports. Scouting among artists for clues as to participation in the July 21 Manhattan convention for the New York State Communist party, the agency kept an eye on Rockwell. Entered into his file, alongside a report of the July convention, is a notice that an informant who has “furnished reliable information in the past” advised them that in August, Rockwell was mentioned as one of the 150 leading artists who had contributed to a collection of paintings and sculptures presented to the Soviet Union by the Art Committee of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship.

An entirely legal enterprise, the Council aimed at preventing the very Cold War that in fact ensued after World War II. The F.B.I. file makes it clear that the agency, under J. Edgar Hoover’s direction, would keep tabs on Rockwell from now on.

Mary spent much of August getting Jerry, his recovery complete, ready for boarding school. At Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s suggestion, he was entering Oakwood, the Quaker school in Poughkeepsie, where, everyone agreed, the boy who seemed always to keep his own counsel might thrive, though at $450 per semester, tuition was a bit steep. Certainly he had never felt authentic in the local Arlington school, where he was supposed to fit in with a rural population that had little in common with his own household, in spite of what he felt appearances were meant to suggest. “We didn’t even read the
Post
in our home,” he laughs. “My dad subscribed to
The Atlantic Monthly
and
The New Yorker,
more the kind of writing he enjoyed.” Tommy, luckily, managed to do well at just about anything. Popular with girls for his good looks, and with boys for the skills he learned with the kids next door, he also made high grades and followed his mother’s love of reading and writing. In the summer of 1945, the older boys, however temporarily, seemed well situated; Peter, by contrast, was having problems his mother didn’t know how to solve.

“Between fourth and ninth grades,” he remembers, “I just kind of dropped out mentally. Everything seemed boring to me; I was bright, quick, and I felt wrongly harangued by teachers who lacked imagination from what I could see. I made the worst grades possible, barely passing each year, even though the teachers knew I could have had the best grades in their classes. So I wasn’t exactly popular with them either, as well as the bullies outside the classroom who really enjoyed picking on me.”

The various stresses of the year were exacerbated by having Nancy Rockwell nearby in Bennington, even though Rockwell’s mother acted as though they lived hundreds of miles apart. She complained at how little they visited with each other, and sought ways to move to a more luxurious accommodation, in spite of the expensive residence she inhabited already. In February 1946, she wrote a lengthy letter to Mary, exclaiming that she at least read about Norman in the Bennington papers, and that she couldn’t listen to the radio shows her daughter-in-law suggested, because she was so deaf that the necessarily loud volume she used annoyed the other residents. She hoped to go to a movie with the good cousins visiting her from Providence, though she feared she could not if her check from Norman didn’t arrive that day. She was enjoying reading
Young Bess,
by Margaret Irwin, a fictional account of the romance between Thomas Seymour and the future Queen Elizabeth I, which reminded her happily of her own illustrious family heritage. She ended by ensuring that Mary knew how much the friends that Nancy made earlier in Arlington hoped that Rockwell’s mother will return in the spring to live among them, a prospect that surely aggravated the cold Mary was fighting at the time.

While Mary kept Nancy away from her son, he completed the painting the
Post
would use on its April 6 cover,
The Charwomen in the Theatre.
If Rockwell’s kindly presentation of many of the lower-class workers in his
Post
covers feels uncomfortably close to condescension, the cleaning women collapsed in exhaustion, but vivified by reading the
Playbill
after the show is over, evade such charges. Here, at least, the women look properly tired, not merely glossed over. And the intense interest with which they read the program inspires respect in the viewer for their refusal to be victims. Ken Stuart, in Rockwell’s view the still-new art director, urged the
Post
’s prominent artist to pursue his talent for tapping into the heartland of America. Over the next few months, Rockwell worked out special cover ideas with Stuart, including his participation in a grassroots journalism series that Stuart dreamed up. However proscriptive the art director’s newly enlarged role felt to the artist, it also relieved him of having to think up every idea himself. In May he traveled to Paris, Missouri, to judge poultry shows as part of the plan to describe America’s weekly newspapers, and then rushed home to receive several art students visiting his studio sporadically throughout the month.