American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (12 page)

The Magic Football (“I thought you were wrong”)
ran as a story illustration in
St. Nicholas
, the best of the children’s magazines, in December 1914. The medium is oil on canvas
en grisaille.

Rockwell was pleased when he was given a full page in the Christmas 1914 issue of
St. Nicholas
magazine.
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His illustration, which accompanied a story called “The Magic Football,” shows a boy of perhaps twelve or thirteen perched on the edge of a Windsor chair, mesmerized by the appearance of a male fairy with pointy ears, a long nose, and a tall black hat floating a few feet above his head. Sunlight pours into the study from a window on the left and fades as it moves across the room, touching the boy’s face and the arms of his chair. The picture is astonishingly precocious. Departing from the text of the story he was purportedly illustrating, Rockwell furnishes the room with the trappings of a cultured life—there are leather-bound books arrayed above the mantelpiece, as well as framed reproductions of museum paintings, including a Rembrandt self-portrait and Jean-François Millet’s
Gleaners
. What’s interesting is how Rockwell takes an assignment for a commercial magazine and bends it to accommodate his own artistic preoccupations. Everything is here—his love of Millet and Rembrandt, his clarity, books, a boy, a magic hat. A story can be an opportunity for self-expression, even if the story was written by someone else.

*   *   *

In addition to its illustrators, New Rochelle also had an impressive population of cartoonists. They included Frederick Opper, Clare Briggs, and Clyde Forsythe, all of whom had gained a new visibility as a result of the circulation fight pitting Joseph Pulitzer’s
World
against William Randolph Hearst’s
New York Journal
. Like a character in a cartoon strip of his own devising, Hearst was constantly scheming to lure cartoonists away from
The World
. It was the age of “yellow journalism,” a phrase that originated from the popular
Yellow Kid
strip that for a while appeared—in competing versions—in both the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers.

Rockwell, who had drawn caricatures in his childhood and had a natural gift for comic anecdote, was well aware of the artistic possibilities of the Sunday funnies. He recognized that comic strips were not just a series of laugh-out-loud jokes; they represented a morally coherent universe. In what is probably his most-quoted statement about his art, Rockwell wrote in his autobiography: “Maybe as I grew up and found that the world wasn’t the perfectly pleasant place I had thought it to be I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and so painted only the ideal aspects of it—pictures in which there were no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers, in which, on the contrary, there were only Foxy Grandpas who played baseball with kids.”
4

Self-centered mothers? He certainly described his own that way. Foxy Grandpas? Rockwell was presumably referring to Carl Schultze’s
Foxy Grandpa
, one of the early classics of the Sunday funnies. It first appeared in
The New York Herald
in 1900, when he was six years old; its protagonist was a clever old man who, from one day to the next, outsmarts his two pesky grandsons, Chub and Bunt. Unlike other cartoon strips, whose humor derived from subversive acts or emotions—rage, madness, sloppiness, screaming, etc.—Foxy Grandpa offered up a gentler universe in which any threat of chaos was neatly resolved by its elderly hero.

*   *   *

Once he settled in New Rochelle, Rockwell quickly became best friends with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe, who happened to have a studio in the same building as he on North Avenue.
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At lunchtime, Rockwell would walk down the hall to talk to Forsythe, who would regale him with amusing stories. Then he would try to drag Forsythe back to his studio, so he could see what he was working on. Rockwell was always asking people what they thought of a particular painting. He had an enormous need for reassurance and found friends who could bolster him up, who were sufficiently accepting to find his insecurity charming. “Give it time,” Forsythe would tell him. “Hell, Lincoln was fifty-one before he was elected president.”

Forsythe was quite a bit older than Rockwell, nine years, and already established in his career. His daily strip about boxing,
The Great White Dope
, ran in Pulitzer’s paper,
The Evening World.
Soon he would create
Joe’s Car
, which in turn evolved into
Joe Jinks
, whose title character was a cartoon Everyman, a balding, agitated, henpecked husband with a passion for cars. The strip paid well, but Forsythe’s ambition was to be a painter of the southwestern desert. Every Christmas, he packed up a few canvases and as many rifles and went out west to work on his landscapes. He disparaged his cartoon work and was constantly threatening to give it up and move back to his native California.

At five each day, Forsythe would walk home to his house on Elm Street and be greeted by Cotta, his wife. Rockwell stayed in his studio until around six or, in the dead of winter, until daylight gave out, and then returned home to spend the evening with his parents. In the summer of 1915, after a little more than a year of life at Brown Lodge, they moved to a rooming house they considered a bit nicer: Edgewood Hall, at 39 Edgewood Park, near Webster Avenue and the trolley. It was run by a married couple, Fred and Sadie Miller, and advertised as “a quiet family hotel,” with “handsome furnished rooms.”
6

In October, the local paper reported that “Jarvis Rockwell, of Edgewood Hall, was tendered a birthday party by his fellow guests at the hotel.”
7
Some of the lodgers, including Jarvis’s girlfriend and future wife, were young women living on their own, but there were also families with school-age children. It was here, at Edgewood Hall, that Rockwell met Billy Payne, a young lodger who would come to play a large role in his work, a handsome, athletic eleven-year-old with reddish-blond hair and a generous smattering of freckles.

Rockwell was relieved to have found a model as talented as Billy, who soon was dropping by his studio almost every day after school. He didn’t have much family in town. His only sibling was a much-older half sister from his father’s first marriage; she lived in Indiana and saw him infrequently. Rockwell, by contrast, seemed to have unlimited time for Billy, so long as the boy was willing to hold still as Rockwell sketched.

To be sure, Billy was not the most disciplined model. He could tire of holding expressions and poses, or be overcome with a sudden and irrepressible desire to throw an object across a room. But Rockwell devised a way to help him concentrate. Instead of writing a check at the end of the day—the pay was fifty cents an hour—he piled up a stack of quarters on his work table. Billy received a quarter every thirty minutes, presuming he was still on the modeling stand and not making water balloons at the sink. The method was surprisingly effective and Rockwell used it with repeated success.

*   *   *

In February 1916 Rockwell turned twenty-two and appeared in a three-man show at the New Rochelle Public Library, along with Clyde Forsythe and a young artist named Ernest Albert, Jr. While his coexhibitors were represented by a few dozen landscapes—Forsythe’s entries included such western scenes as
Santa Monica Shore
,
Redondo Cliffs
, and
Twin Peaks
—Rockwell had zero interest in painting pictures devoid of people, which is how he thought of landscape painting. Art without a face. He had fifteen works in the show, a mix of illustrations from
St. Nicholas
magazine and portraits of acquaintances, including a sensitive portrait of his young friend Billy Payne.

The show generated a flurry of publicity, at least locally.
The New Rochelle Tattler
, which, conveniently, was located in an office adjacent to Rockwell’s studio, gave him a full page. It probably helped that Adelaide Klenke, who wrote the piece and edited the
Tattler
, already knew and liked Rockwell. She was a few years older than he, blond and still single, the daughter of German émigrés, and he found her amusing. He frequently quoted a less than flattering comment she had made about his appearance. She told him he had “the eyes of an angel and the neck of a chicken.”

In her article for the
Tattler
, she was not so mocking, describing Rockwell as tall and thin, with a “big, bass drum laugh.”
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Although he had never been west of New Jersey, his comments made him sound like a world traveler. “I intended giving up illustration this winter and going to Norway for several months and studying the Norwegian and Swedish genre painters,” he announced, “but my contracts interfered and my work piled up.” He added that he hoped to go to Norway in the spring. Perhaps he genuinely wanted to study the work of Adolph Tidemand and other nineteenth-century Norwegian genre painters, or perhaps he was merely letting readers know that he was the sort of man who was capable of taking off without warning.

Just a few days later, the
New Rochelle Pioneer
ran a front-page story with the perky headline:
NORMAN P. ROCKWELL MAKING A SUCCESS AT ILLUSTRATING
.
9
The article made no mention of Norway and, to the contrary, emphasized the substantial if unspecified income that Rockwell was earning from magazines. Rockwell, by contrast, claimed to be motivated by something more personal. “I like the boy stuff,” Rockwell told his interviewer. “There is not so much money in it as in adult stuff, but it is more interesting. I do many adventure stories and specialize in the historic.”

*   *   *

On March 1, 1916, Rockwell and Forsythe moved into a studio that had initially belonged to Frederic Remington. His former house, Endion, a so-called Gothic cottage, occupied three acres at 301 Webster Avenue.
10
A photograph taken before 1909, the year of his death, shows Remington standing on his front lawn in a derby hat, holding the reins of his horse, the bright winter sun casting long shadows on the grass. Remington had built a sculpture studio on the property, the “shanty,” as he called it, which was made of corrugated iron and was basically a big, generic shed. But the interior was spacious, with a seventeen-foot-high ceiling, and it was here that Rockwell set up his easel and worked for the next year. Forsythe decorated the place with relics of the American West he brought back from California, including cowboy saddles, sagebrush, and cacti. Rockwell did not care for the plants. “Every once in a while you’d go to grab something and you would grab a cactus,” he recalled.
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He was well-acquainted with Remington’s work and his sad ending. In addition to painting cowboys for his own pleasure, Remington was one of the biggies of magazine illustration. Toward the end of his life, he signed a lucrative contract with
Collier’s Weekly
and turned out cowboy centerfolds, two-page spreads that provided Americans with intimations of a shared heritage. In reality, their common heritage consisted less of lassoing horses in Cody, Wyoming, than in staying home and reading
Collier’s Weekly
.

Despite his success, Remington felt conflicted about his work as an illustrator. Shortly before his death, in 1909, he lit a bonfire on his property and incinerated sixteen paintings. He wanted to be a fine artist, not an illustrator. In his last decade, he had tried loosening up his brushwork and brightening his palette; he want to be admitted to the ranks of the American Impressionist painters who were his friends. Like so many illustrators, he was haunted by feelings of failure, believing that magazine work was trivial and possibly meretricious beside the lofty tradition of easel painting.

Rockwell, for now, did not have this conflict. He did not feel divided between illustration on one hand and landscape painting on the other. In this he was different from so many illustrators who split themselves in two, devoting one half to commercial art and the other half to art with a capital
A
. Such was the dilemma of Clyde Forsythe and Frederic Remington and even Rockwell’s hero Howard Pyle, who had died in Florence, where he had sailed in the last year of his life, despairing over his illustrations and deciding to study mural painting. It was the illustrator’s curse: you had something great, but pined for something you could never have. Rockwell, by contrast, wanted mainly one thing: he wanted to be a famous magazine illustrator. And once he was living in New Rochelle, it was clear to him that he had to get to one magazine in particular.

That, of course, was
The Saturday Evening Post
, which did not come out on Saturdays, but on Thursdays. No one waited until the weekend to open it. Husbands and wives and precocious children vied to get hold of the latest issue in much the same way that future generations would vie over access to the household telephone or the remote control.

Unlike other magazines, the
Post
didn’t come in the mail. After school let out every Thursday, thousands of
Post
boys across the country slung canvas bags over their shoulders and set out on their neighborhood routes. They tossed the
Post
onto wide front porches and narrow city stoops as moms in dresses stepped outside as if on cue to retrieve the latest issue and perhaps glance at the cover illustration as they walked back inside. The
Post
boys were the embodiment of the magazine’s belief in the American dream of upward mobility, proving that anyone—so long as he was at least ten years old—could improve his financial lot if he were willing to work for it.

A copy of the
Pos
t sold for a nickel and the boys could keep two cents of every copy they sold. They also delivered
Ladies’ Home Journal
, which paid them twice as much. Those who sold the most subscriptions were honored with the coveted title of Master in the League of Curtis Salesmen. As in so many other fields of endeavor, the successes were mythologized while the failures drifted off without a trace. It is impossible to know how many
Post
boys dreaded their routes, had trouble adding numbers, and feared for their futures as they searched the depths of their trouser pockets for missing nickels they swore they had put there just ten seconds earlier.