American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (13 page)

In 1915, when Rockwell looked at an issue of the
Post
, any issue, he would have seen a magazine that offered a lot of entertainment value for a nickel, mixing journalism and financial investment tips with original fiction by authors who were famous or about to be. That year, he could have read the first story by P. G. Wodehouse featuring Jeeves and Wooster. Or one of Ring Lardner’s
You Know Me Al
baseball tales. Or a serialized mystery by Mary Roberts Rinehart that opens with the histrionic lamentation, “I’ve thought the thing over and over, and honestly I don’t know where it went wrong.”

Every issue of
The Saturday Evening Post
came with an illustrated cover that was a stand-alone work of art, unrelated to the stories that ran inside. When Rockwell looked at the cover, he saw an illustration that measured about eleven inches wide and fourteen inches tall and that, in his eyes, was the biggest thing in the world.

*   *   *

In order to vault his work onto the cover of the
Post
, Rockwell figured he would have to go against his instincts and paint at least one sample image that had a gooey romantic theme. So he tried painting a picture of a gentleman in a tux leaning over the back of a couch to flirt with a woman; then came a second painting in which a young ballerina takes a bow. When he showed the paintings to Forsythe, his friend offered his candid opinion: they were terrible. He wondered only half-jokingly why Rockwell seemed incapable of painting a female figure who gave off any hint of sensual allure. His ballerina looked like a schoolboy in a tutu.

“Do what you’re best at,” Forsythe counseled. “You’re a terrible Gibson, but a pretty good Rockwell.” So Rockwell called in Billy Payne, his young model. He started with a pencil sketch which he translated into charcoal. The painting was done in the required two-color palette: red and black oils and the surprising range of tones—diaphanous grays, salmony pinks—you can get by mixing in a few daubs of white.

He wound up with two excellent covers.
Boy with Baby Carriage
(see color insert after page 238) was followed by another painting for which Billy Payne modeled,
The Circus Barker (The Strongman)
. Both were around twenty-one by twenty inches, almost square, and larger than an actual
Post
cover. It was a lesson he had learned at school. The rule was to work one-third up from the size at which a picture is to be reproduced. You don’t want to work at actual size—to make your illustration the same size as the cover—because the image might look crude when it is reproduced, and you don’t want to work on too large a scale because then the project monopolizes too much of your time.

Years later, Rockwell wrote: “I didn’t start the vogue for
Post
covers of kids, Clyde Forsythe did.”
12
This comment has been misconstrued; much of the biographical material on Forsythe claims that he introduced the young Rockwell to editors at the
Post.
Yet Forsythe never worked for the
Post
and had no contacts there. What Rockwell meant, in that one sentence, is that he felt indebted to Forsythe for having pushed him to submit work to the
Post
.

*   *   *

By 1915 New York City was the book publishing capital of the country. But Philadelphia had the edge in magazines. It was home to Cyrus H. K. Curtis, a self-made, self-promoting showman who founded the Curtis Publishing Company and seemed to love his three magazines equally.
The Saturday Evening Post
came out once a week and its sister magazines,
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
The Country Gentleman
, came out at the beginning of each month. Curtis maintained that you could tell who read his magazines by looking at the ads. And when he looked through the latest issue of his magazines, he paused to look at each and every ad. He thought they were far more alive on the page than the dull gray articles wedged in between them.

Of course, most publishers set out to make money, and today we take it for granted that magazines are kept afloat by advertising revenue as opposed to circulation revenue. A magazine that costs five dollars an issue to produce (counting paper, postage, office rent, writers’ fees, etc.) can sell for a dollar and be vastly profitable if it attracts enough advertising. But this knowledge was something of an epiphany in 1897, when Curtis acquired
The Saturday Evening Post
and dropped the cover price to a nickel. At the time, the leading illustrated magazines—
The Century
,
Harper’s
, or
The Atlantic
—sold for thirty-five cents an issue in newsstands. Other monthlies, like
Pall Mall
,
Scribner’s
, or
McClure’s
, could be had for a quarter. But a mere five cents? Curtis wanted a mass readership rather than a class readership. Within a few years the
Post
was the largest-circulation magazine in the country.
*

Initially, when Curtis acquired the
Post
, it was a dying magazine with fewer than ten thousand subscribers. Its only bankable attributes were a nominally recognizable name and a dubious connection to Benjamin Franklin. To be sure, Curtis insisted that the
Post
had been “founded
A.D.
1728 by Benj. Franklin”—to quote the line that he added to the inside cover of every issue of the
Post
starting in 1899. Moreover, Franklin’s jowly face, his spectacles, and his flowing hair, became part of the logo on the editorial page. Franklin, of course, was a printer by trade; he ran his own print shop on Market Street and published
The Pennsylvania Gazette
, the best-read newspaper in the colonies. Its only connection to the
Post
was that it ceased publication in 1815—after Franklin’s death—in the same print shop where the
Post
would be launched six years later.

Curtis’s appropriation of Ben Franklin as a founding father of the
Post
was reinforced in concrete in 1911, when he put up a building in Philadelphia’s historic center. The Curtis Building, as it came to be known, took up a whole block of Walnut Street and was designed to echo Independence Hall, the national landmark across the street, a redbrick, white-trimmed Georgian structure summoning visions of parchment and ornate, old-fashioned signatures. Curtis made his building twelve stories high, so that it towered above Independence Hall. The birth of America, the birth of the
Post
—it is not clear which event Curtis considered to be of greater consequence.

Thankfully, he installed an editor in chief who was devoted to the labor-intensive demands of editing as well as to the financial welfare of writers. At the time he became editor, George Horace Lorimer was an unknown cub reporter. But he would rise to become the most celebrated magazine editor of his age. Born in Kentucky, the son of a well-connected Scottish minister, he studied at good schools (Colby and Yale) and was given to spouting folksy aphorisms. “The prime qualification of being an editor,” he said, “is being an ordinary man.”

If that were true, it would have disqualified him from day one. A patrician figure, he had a passion for “antiqueering,” as it was called. He owned, in addition to your average millionaire’s trove of Chippendale dining chairs with claw-and-ball feet, a peerless collection of British and American antique glass. He eventually bequeathed some six hundred glass objects—prerevolutionary pitchers and the like—to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was also a champion of the national parks and enjoyed touring the mountainous West, so long as he was driven every inch of the way by his chauffeur, George Smyth, with whom he proudly developed his own road maps.

Lorimer lived in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, a well-to-do neighborhood on the edge of Philadelphia, as did his boss, Cyrus Curtis. By coincidence, one of their neighbors was the young Ezra Pound, who grew up on nearby Fernbrook Avenue. Lorimer routinely took a shortcut through the Pounds’ backyard and paused for an affable chat with Homer Pound, the poet’s father. Lorimer was never a fan of modern art or experimental poetry, and one wonders if he read Pound’s future masterpiece,
Cantos.
In it, Lorimer makes a comic appearance as a self-absorbed editor proudly recounting how he stalked a U.S. senator to get a story out of him.

As Pound writes in Canto LXXXI:

George Horace said he wd/ “get Beveridge” (Senator)

Beveridge wouldn’t talk and he wouldn’t write for the papers

but George got him by campin’ in his hotel

and assailin’ him at lunch breakfast an’ dinner
13

*   *   *

From the time he was a young man, Rockwell had an ironclad rule that a finished painting must be framed, even if the frame consisted of the simplest wooden strips. He thought it was the proper way to treat any work of art. A framed painting, however, cannot fit between the two flat boards of your average artist’s portfolio, which helps explain why Rockwell designed a special wooden case in which to carry his work to the office of George Horace Lorimer. The box became an essential detail in the quasi-comic, oft-told story about how he made his first-ever trip to the editorial offices of
The Saturday Evening Post
. He had the box custom built by a harness maker in New Rochelle. It was covered in black oilcloth and measured three by four feet, about the size of a kitchen tabletop. It was this clunky object that Rockwell lugged on the train from New Rochelle to Grand Central Terminal. Unable to maneuver the box through the door of a bus or even a cab, he walked the long, crowded blocks to Penn Station and boarded the next train to Philadelphia.

Conveniently, the Curtis Building was just a short walk from the train station. You couldn’t miss it. It was raised a few steps above Walnut Street, with a row of white marble columns flanking the entranceway. The atrium was Vegasoid before Vegas existed. On the back wall, fountains and a goldfish pool provided the luxe setting for what was described as the largest Maxfield Parrish mural in existence. It was certainly the wettest mural in existence. Hanging above the fountains, forty-nine feet wide,
The Dream Garden
offered an iridescent view of mountains and greenery that had been translated by Tiffany Studios into glittering glass. Water from the fountains ran down the sides of the mosaic and oozed from openings in its surface.
14

As he made his way into the building and took in its opulent decor, Rockwell suddenly thought of a comment that Adelaide Klenke had made. That line about his angel eyes and chicken neck. He almost turned around and left.

Lorimer’s office was on the sixth floor, along with the rest of the editorial department. The hallways were covered in cork (for quiet) and the well-appointed reception area was much nicer than the anterooms at other magazines. It was there that Rockwell learned that one did not ever see Lorimer without an appointment. “I just stood there in that fancy room,” he recalled, “and I guess I would have cried if people weren’t watching me.”
15

A secretary suggested that he talk to Walter H. Dower, the art editor of the
Post
, an illustrator in his early thirties who had recently started his job. Dower stepped out into the reception area and took a look at the contents of the black case, saying nothing and maintaining a poker face as he assessed the work. Then he asked Rockwell to wait and carried off the two framed paintings to an office. The humor writer Irvin Cobb, chomping on a cigar, noticed Rockwell sitting there anxiously with his massive black case. He asked him if he had a body inside.

When Dower reappeared, he had excellent news. Lorimer had looked at the two paintings and liked both of them very much. Dower handed Rockwell a slip of blue paper. It was a check for $150, payment for the two paintings. Lorimer believed that a magazine should pay its writers and artists on acceptance, as opposed to on publication, and pay them liberally, which was virtually unprecedented and added to the crazy excitement of having your work accepted by the
Post
. As the writer Roger Butterfield once noted, in an observation that applies as easily to illustrators, “Writers dreamed of selling to the
Post
, whose scales turned Grub Street into Park Avenue.”
16

*   *   *

On May 20, 1916, Rockwell’s first cover appeared in the
Post
(see color insert). It remains one of his most psychologically intense works. A boy who appears to be about thirteen is taking his infant sister out for some fresh air when he bumps into two friends. The boy is mortified to be witnessed pushing a baby carriage. While his friends are clad in baseball uniforms and heading off to a game with their mitts, the babysitting boy is dressed formally, complete with a starched collar, derby hat, and leather gloves. A glass milk bottle protruding from his breast pocket endows him with an oversize female-looking nipple and makes his humiliation complete.

The image has a pleasing symmetry about it and is far more structured than you might expect of a magazine cover. The center of the composition is occupied not by a figure but by the wicker carriage. It is painted in a way that borders on obsession: the wicker is rendered in such detail that you can make out the individual strands of woven fiber and imagine the tiny paint brushes the artist used to lay out all those thousands of lines bundled together into a ribbed pattern. Great care has also been expended on the space inside the carriage—a shadow-filled, rectangular recess that divides the painting into two zones. The baseball players, one tilting forward, the other back, are on the left of the carriage. Their bodies appear lithe and elastic compared to the boy with the carriage, who holds his arms close to his sides. His eyes are averted and almost downcast as he hurries along, as if it were possible to physically escape the mocking gaze of his tormentors.