Norman Rockwell (45 page)

Murder in Missis-sippi
(also known as
Southern Justice
), oil on canvas, 53" x 42", sketch for an article in
Look
magazine, June 29, 1965.

Triple Self-Portrait
, oil on canvas, 44.5" x 34",
Saturday Evening Post
cover, February 13, 1960.

The Connoisseur
, oil on canvas, mounted on board, 37.75" x 31.5",
Saturday Evening Post
cover, January 13, 1962.

24

Signs of Stress

By the fall of 1948, crying scenes had started occurring within Peter’s hearing. Before, the boys had occasionally heard their parents arguing behind closed bedroom doors, but nothing was ever said that scared them. In fact, their parents usually got along so well that they had been shocked a few years earlier when their father good-naturedly laughed at Mary’s disastrous attempts at a new pancake recipe, causing her to flee upstairs in tears. “We’d never seen Pop make Mother cry, and it was shocking,” Jarvis has stated.

One evening, his brothers both away at boarding school, Peter sat on the top of the stairs and listened to his parents down below. “My mother was sobbing, and my father, obviously bewildered and upset, said ‘Why don’t you just stop drinking?’ and Mother answered, ‘Because I can’t.’ ” Records from a doctor in nearby Bennington suggest that, for the last year at least, Mary had been seeing a psychologist. And the neighbors certainly were well aware that there were problems. “I remember going in to visit with Mary one day,” Joy Edgerton recollects. “I liked to talk with her; she always read so much, I think often an entire book every day. So she had interesting things to share. This one day, she was all excited about some psychology book she had been reading; I got the feeling her doctor had recommended it. Maybe it was Erich Fromm, the
Art of Loving
? And she urged me to read it. I did, but when I returned it and tried to discuss it with her, she became distant, even defensive, and that was that.” Nearly a decade later, doctors would detail the severe mood swings that Mary suffered, and her confusing reaction to Joy seems a manifestation of the problem that only worsened with time.

The same neighbor remembers that at the dinner parties the Rockwells hosted during the late 1940s, Mary, who had promised her husband to swear off alcohol, would sneak next door to get a drink from the Edgertons’ liquor cabinet to “settle her nerves.” And by this time, Nancy Rockwell had started telling tales in Providence of Mary’s reaching down to the side, when she was driving her mother-in-law back to Rhode Island, and swigging quickly from a flask.

Mary’s car trips soon incorporated a new ritual, driving from Arlington to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to receive psychiatric treatment from Dr. Robert Knight, the director of the well-regarded private mental institution Austen Riggs. Founded in 1919 by Dr. Austen Fox Riggs as the Stockbridge Institute for the Study and Treatment of Psychoneuroses, the humane, forward-looking, and extremely expensive residential center was only an hour and a half from Arlington. Mary could leave in the morning and be home before Peter got back from school. A few times, he remembers, she would set up a Friday and Monday appointment and take him out of school to accompany her, enabling the two of them to stop off in Stockbridge for Mary’s first appointment, then drive to Poughkeepsie, two and a half hours through the Taconic mountains, to see Tommy and Jerry at Oakwood. They simply reversed the order on the way home. On other occasions, when Mary felt too nervous to drive, Clara Edgerton from next door would take her to Stockbridge.

Seriously undercutting Mary’s attempts to strengthen herself emotionally just now was the notice from the I.R.S. that they planned to conduct yet another audit of the Rockwells’ taxes, this time for 1945. The family lawyers pleasantly explained to Mary that she’d need to locate a long list of records in order for them to work effectively with the I.R.S. agent. She found them, but, according to family and friends, the auditor announced that he had never seen financial records kept so poorly, a cruel indictment of the woman who had proudly insisted that she could handle the finances all by herself. Her sons remember the tremendous stress the situation put on everyone; photographer Gene Pelham, frequently impatient with Rockwell’s wife anyway, took matters into his own hands after the audit was finished and arranged for the Rockwells’ friend Chris Schafer—formerly an accountant in Chicago—to take over the family’s financial records. Schafer was incredulous when he discovered, during his first week on the job, that the Rockwells had accidentally paid their federal income tax twice that year.

Mary surely sensed Gene Pelham’s contempt for what he considered her incompetence. “She was always flitting around,” the man recalled decades later, infirm and by his own admission unable to remember the past clearly anymore. “She would disappear for days, never any idea where she’d go. Just a socialite, I think.” That Pelham, who worked so closely with Rockwell, held such erroneous ideas about the woman whom sympathetic neighbors remember desperately grinding the car gears as she tried to drive off quickly in pursuit of the latest prop needed by her husband speaks volumes about what went unspoken between the artist and his “intimates,” as well as Pelham’s own territorial feelings toward his boss. “She wasn’t that deep a part of Norman, not a big part of him at all,” Pelham sniffed as he recalled the late forties.

From her sons’ accounts, the I.R.S. audit accelerated Mary’s problems. By late autumn, when Rockwell was ready to head out to Los Angeles for one of his near regular winter retreats, he’d had enough. He told Mary that she could follow with Peter only when she had the drinking under control. To Peter, and perhaps to his mother, it felt a little like desertion. “I was twelve years old, and he left me alone with a mother who was falling apart. It doesn’t seem to me to have been a very responsible thing to do.” Mary drove her husband to the train station, and on the way home she asked Peter if he’d like her to take him and a friend to the movies. “It was a bit of a distance,” her youngest son still remembers, “and we rarely got to go. I was bewildered, but happy, at this turn of events.” The child’s uneasy feeling that something was “off” received confirmation once they were back home, when Mary suggested that Peter sleep with her in his father’s stead. Not only would being together ward off their mutual loneliness, but she was scared of noises outside. “It wasn’t exactly the wisest thing to do, for a mother to put her pubescent son in bed with her,” Peter says. “I have no memories of anything untoward, but still, it makes me cringe. She was just so lonely, and I guess it made her feel less abandoned.”

Although it felt a bit like that, Rockwell had not abandoned them, of course, and before Thanksgiving, mother and son made their way out west, leaving the older boys to spend the school holiday with the Edgertons. “On the train trip to California,” Peter remembers, “my mother just broke down. I had been walking around the corridors, finding them fascinating. When I got back to our compartment, I found porters and attendants swarming around my mother. To this day, I’m not sure what happened, except that she may have gotten drunk for the first time in a month or so, and perhaps she collapsed from that.” Peter was fighting his own demons by this point. They had stopped in Chicago long enough for mother and son to catch yet another movie, and the subject, a wicked woman who fakes being good, scared him into begging his mother to reassure him that she wasn’t like that, too. Jarvis Rockwell believes that he and his brothers felt that their mother had no personality; “she was insubstantial, but like a sweet lady who wanted to do all these things for us. She was like an actress in a play, and try as we all might, we couldn’t ‘see’ her, and I don’t think my father could at all. It was as if Pop and us were her only means of expression.”

When the two bedraggled Rockwells arrived, neither told the artist about Mary’s collapse on the train. The artist had arranged to work in Hollywood for some months, and it was easy for Mary and Peter, who was excited at the thought of attending school there, to concentrate their attention on the stylish Roosevelt Hotel, where they would stay for the next four months. Located across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, the hotel attracted Hollywood’s most important figures, including movie stars whose glamour proved a useful distraction to the Rockwells just now. Peter needed no inducement to settle in; he was excited at the new surroundings. Mary tried to be.

Within a week of their arrival, she wrote the older boys one of her feverishly positive letters, this time smacking of her desperation to smooth everything over. She described how relaxed “her husband” (an odd locution to use with their sons) was, and then launched into a description of the uproarious antics of a Laurel and Hardy taping they had all just attended. She wanted to laugh so hard she choked, but she held back, because everyone had been instructed to be quiet. The letter, meant to reassure her children that all was back to normal, was instead frightening in its near hysterical good cheer. The older boys rejoined the family at the beginning of their Christmas break, at which time, as they recall, the problems that had recently broken through the surface were just brushed under the table again, although in retrospect they realize that their mother had begun seeing a psychiatrist in Los Angeles. “I know that later doctors claimed that the California psychiatrist ruined Mary,” Nancy Barstow Wynkoop said in 1999, the ninety-five-year-old woman speaking passionately about her adored older sister. “I think the Los Angeles doctor told Mary she should blame Norman for her problems, and everyone else wanted her to blame my mother.” But Mary actually kept many of her troubles from her sister. Asked about the unhappy woman’s struggle with alcoholism, the sister to whom so many cheerful letters were written drew a blank. “I never heard about that,” she replied honestly. “Mary had a drinking problem?”

From what Nancy could reconstruct, the California psychiatrist Mary frequented from 1948 to 1949 told his patient that she needed the space to become “self-actualized,” to reject being a mere extension of her husband. And Nancy was correct in remembering that other mental healthcare professionals would maintain that the California doctor had severely harmed Mary by giving her what they considered to be a false and easy way out of examining mental problems that instead stemmed from her childhood: her severe mother had demanded constant proof of her daughter’s love and competence. From his comments to his children and to friends, as well as the evidence of extant correspondence, Rockwell himself, true to his practical nature, was interested most of all in what could be done to help his wife, not in why she was troubled. And while he never flinched from agreeing if lamenting that his absorption in his work was complete, even to his family’s detriment, he also continued to believe that Mary could get well if she figured out what would make her happy.

In a letter that Mary sent from Los Angeles to a friend in Arlington, she mentioned how much more relaxing it was to be in Hollywood than enmeshed in the old routine of Alhambra and later Pasadena, visiting with her parents. Apparently, her husband agreed: according to newspaper articles, he negotiated a prolonged ten-month visit when, in late fall, he approached his friend the dean of the Los Angeles Art Institute (later renamed the Otis Institute of Art) about finding a good studio space in the city. After thinking it over, the dean decided to create the space Rockwell needed by offering him a position as the school’s first painter-in-residence. Because the institute, attracting mostly illustration and design students, had recently decided to place more emphasis on the fine arts, Rockwell’s presence was originally low-key. Nonetheless, news spread of his amazing work techniques as well as word about his charm, and, before long, he had agreed to teach a Saturday class. Throughout the past two decades he had become accustomed to giving after-dinner speeches as well as formal talks on art; besides, he had taught an occasional class at the Phoenix Art Institute in Manhattan, and he knew he came off well, whether in front of a classroom or on an auditorium stage.

Rockwell thrived under the praise of ambitious, young, talented students, and from the chance to mingle with new colleagues from the generation or two after his own, Joe Mugnaini especially. Movie-star handsome, Mugnaini was a bit of a peacock, used to getting all the local attention for his impressive oil paintings as well as his intimidating good looks. The painter was commissioned to do the artwork for many critically and commercially successful books, and in later years he would become known as the best illustrator of Ray Bradbury’s science fiction. The two colleagues became friends, and just as the interactions with the Vermont illustrators nourished Rockwell’s work, the artistic mutuality in Los Angeles helped him produce several exceptional
Post
covers during his year’s tenure in California.

After their first four months at the Roosevelt, the Rockwells rented a handsome house for three hundred dollars a month from old friends, Gordon and Clara Griffith, which they kept until their scheduled return to Vermont in September. Tommy and Jerry had their own great adventure: on their way back to their Poughkeepsie boarding school after their winter break, the boys got stuck in a blizzard in Green River, Wyoming. For three days, they camped out in their train as if pioneers in the wilderness, radio accounts terrifying their mother but thrilling the boys and consuming young Peter with envy.

Determined to create a space for himself within the always busy family that seemed rarely to listen to the youngest child, Peter Rockwell asked to attend a nearby Catholic junior high, a first in his secular family’s experience. His concerned mother wrote to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who disdained the authoritarianism of the Catholic Church and had shared with Mary a column on a book burning in Ireland, the sort of incident to which adherence to Catholicism led. Fisher wrote back a reassuring letter about Peter, however, explaining that the Church’s high ritual and exoticism typically attracted children, as it had even herself during her youth.