American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (19 page)

He broached the subject with Irene one morning over breakfast. She gave him a funny look. She reminded him that he owed some ads to his friend Tom McManis at Edison Mazda. She liked her life in New Rochelle and the fall bridge season was just about to begin.

Besides, her father had recently died and, as the oldest of her parents’ four children, she felt she should stick around and help her widowed mother.
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In August, her parents had been on vacation upstate when her father fell ill with “liver trouble.” He died in the hospital two weeks later, at age sixty-five.

No matter. Rockwell decided that he would sail to Paris by himself and stay for the winter. He left at the end of October, at which point his mother-in-law closed up her house and moved to New Rochelle, where, as the papers announced, she “will spend the winter with her daughter, Mrs. Norman Rockwell.”
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On his first night in Paris, he walked for hours, getting his first glimpse of Sacré-Cœur and the Opéra and the Louvre, which struck him as “immense and silent.” Rockwell had been in Paris less than twenty-four hours when he bumped into a friend from the Art Students League, Edmund Greek Davenport, who, along with his wife, Sarah, had come to Europe to study and travel for a year. They invited him to accompany them to Italy and tour churches and tombs, so he took a detour. His goal was to practice sketching the figure, to draw from life, which he could do anywhere.

Back in Paris, he enrolled in one of the “free academies” that charged a small fee for the chance to sketch from a model. The Académie Colarossi offered little more than a space to work in—it is here that Rockwell enrolled. On his first day of school, he was shocked to look over at other students’ drawings and realize he could not discern any heads in them. The student on his left had painted a picture contrived from a jumble of mud-colored cubes. The student on his right had produced a Fauvish landscape dominated by a cadmium red tree trunk. But of course he had enrolled precisely for this, for the chance to be shocked by the tilting planes of abstract art.

By the end of the day, Rockwell had thrown away his drawing and decided he needed to learn more about modern art. All in all, he stayed in Paris for six months, and he did not record much information about the trip, never even indicating where he lived during this period or how he continued to furnish the
Post
with occasional covers. It is one of the least documented phases in his life and is memorable mainly as a time when Rockwell confronted the illustration versus abstract art question. He had made his first trip to Europe and taken in the latest developments. The future of art was here and it did not look like the Boy Scouts manual.

On April 21, 1923, Rockwell sailed out of Cherbourg, France, aboard the RMS
Aquitania
, a grand Cunard ocean liner.
15
It took six days to cross the water. The trip served as the queasy inspiration for his
Man in Steamer Chair (The Cruise)
, a
Post
cover that would appear in the fall. It shows an elderly man sitting in a deck chair, holding his stomach and looking uncomfortable, a red-plaid blanket spread over him.

His studio was still in the barn on Prospect Street and he was welcomed home by his assistant Franklin Lischke. He later recalled that the first painting he completed post-Paris was an abstract composition. He was eager to go to Philadelphia to show the canvas to George Lorimer. He thought it could make for an interesting
Post
cover.

Lorimer, however, was nonplussed when he saw the painting. He did not care for abstract art, which he viewed as a European import and thereby deficient. “I don’t know much about this modern art,” he lectured, “but I know it’s not your kind of art. Your kind is what you’ve been doing all along. Stick with that.”

Rockwell later described it as one of the most shamed moments of his life. It wasn’t just that he had let down the boss. He had tried something different and daring—made an effort at Art with a capital
A
—and it had failed. It was as if Lorimer’s comment confirmed Rockwell’s fears: he was not a real artist with a vision, just an illustrator of boys and dogs. He had gone to Paris for the first time and tried his hand at fine art, but his efforts had been laughed off.

*   *   *

In September 1923 he was invited back to Atlantic City to judge the Miss America contest for the second time. Once again, the contestants paraded along the boardwalk behind the sea god Neptune, and once again the winner was announced on a Saturday night in the Million Dollar Pier Ballroom. The judges decided to recrown the previous year’s winner, Miss Columbus, who was not a flapper with bobbed hair, but “had an abundance of long tresses.”

The next morning, as a perk, Rockwell and the other judges were offered free rides in a brand-new seaplane that took off from the pier and generated much excitement. Rockwell went up with his friend Dean Cornwell, the president of the Society of Illustrators, and it was his first time on a plane—the kind of plane that was so bumpy it required that he don a helmet and sign a preflight release form. After they landed, he and Cornwell relaxed by standing on the boardwalk with a crowd of onlookers and watching the plane go up again. But within seconds, everything turned catastrophic. The plane flipped over on its side, floated down like a spiraling leaf and crashed in a meadow, killing the two men inside.
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Later, Rockwell was surprised when Cornwell showed him some sketches he had drawn of the wrecked plane, a tangle of metal and debris.
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“It seems cruel, but this is how an artist looks at life,” Rockwell later commented. “You realize the suffering, but you are always thinking, ‘Would this make a picture, or wouldn’t it make a picture?’”

In this case, Rockwell decided it would not make a picture.

NINE

THE ARROW COLLAR MAN

(1924 TO 1925)

During his early years in New Rochelle, when Rockwell was working mainly for
Boys’ Life
magazine, he had little contact with the famous illustrators who lived in town. They were a generation older than he and infinitely more established. Most daunting of all was Joseph C. Leyendecker and his younger brother, Frank X. Leyendecker, who continued to live reclusively in a hilltop mansion on Mount Tom Road.

Like the Brontë siblings, the Leyendeckers were very much of the nineteenth century in the abundance of their domestic eccentricities. Their devotion to each other was touching. Joe and Frank shared their home with two pet collies and their sister, Augusta, who was slightly older than they and was charged with the job of family hostess.

The Leyendeckers posed for few photographs, and granted few interviews. But in 1918 they permitted photographs of their house to appear in decorating magazines.
1
The pictures from
House & Garden
still astound: the cavernous living room with its dark wood paneling and hand-carved oak tables, its massive fireplace and tapestries everywhere—a handsome example of Arts and Crafts design that gives off a whiff of haunted-house creakiness.

The living room opened onto a wide terrace that overlooked a sunken garden composed of hundreds of pink and red rosebushes. For his daily exercise, J. C. Leyendecker would walk back and forth across the terrace then down the steps to the garden, strolling briskly on a brick path laid in a herringbone pattern, past the long rows of hedges, past the gazebo and the fountain and the shallow reflecting pool stocked with water lilies. The house was frequently likened to Versailles, for lack of a more precise metaphor.

Rockwell first met Leyendecker in the summer of 1920 at a charity dinner organized by the New Rochelle Art Association to raise money for the construction of a local war memorial. Two days later, after “picking up and putting down the telephone a hundred times,” Rockwell invited J.C. to dinner. He arrived on a Tuesday evening with his brother Frank, inaugurating a friendship that would always matter enormously to Rockwell and had the traits of both an artistic apprenticeship and an unclassifiable romantic crush.

At the time they met, Rockwell was a twenty-six-year-old contributor to the
Post
who was known for amusing scenes of freckled boys and their mutts. Leyendecker was forty-six and at the peak of his career, a gay, German-Catholic immigrant whose identity left him perpetually on the margins of the vision of holiday togetherness he promoted in his work.

*   *   *

In a reversal of the usual hierarchies, it was Leyendecker’s advertising images, as opposed to his
Post
covers, that proved to be his most enduring work. He was the brand name who created brand names. His Arrow Collar Man was a bona fide sensation—a handsome, square-jawed man in a freshly pressed shirt, his hair glinting like blond metal. A generation of college men regarded him as the go-to authority for fashion advice. Leyendecker single-handedly changed advertising by switching the emphasis from text to image and making his pitch in emphatically visual terms. Earlier, in the nineteenth century, most printed advertisements had been crammed with tiny, hard-to-read type imploring you to buy effective or ineffective remedies for your headaches and nerves and itchy skin. The Arrow Collar Man, by contrast, was selling a vision as much as a product. He was selling the notion that any man could acquire instant class by spending twenty cents on a detachable collar.

What should an American male aspire to be? In the years when Rockwell was growing up, President Theodore Roosevelt made manhood almost indistinguishable from a love of nature and the outdoors. Real men, he seemed to say, went hiking and knew how to pitch a tent, a vision that Rockwell had helped promote in his years as art editor of
Boys’ Life
magazine. But the Arrow Collar Man reframed masculinity in urban terms. He does not own a rifle. He does not wish to shoot every elephant in Africa. His idea of being shipwrecked is to find himself on the cusp of a date without a freshly ironed shirt. He looks less like an explorer than a business major, a lean, clean guy with polished shoes who might be portrayed in a college lounge, reading a newspaper or even a book. F. Scott Fitzgerald refers to the Leyendecker ideal of male beauty in his short story “The Last of the Belles,” which ran in the
Post
in 1929. In it, a young woman mourns her dead athlete-brother: “She showed me his picture—it was a handsome, earnest face with a Leyendecker forelock.”
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The Arrow Collar Man, as created by J. C. Leyendecker, was selling not just a shirt but the promise of urban sophistication. This advertisement appeared in 1912.

The Arrow Collar Man predated
The Great Gatsby
by almost twenty years, and you wonder if he exerted any influence on Fitzgerald’s conception of male glamour. With his pomaded hair and gray eyes, Fitzgerald himself looked like an Arrow Collar Man. “Scott, sober, was certainly the most attractive man I can find in my whole gallery of memory images,” Arnold Gingrich of
Esquire
once wrote, “short of the idealized Leyendecker creation, the original Arrow Collar Man, for whom indeed Fitzgerald might have posed.”
3

Leyendecker created the Arrow Collar Man in 1905 for the menswear manufacturer Cluette, Peabody & Company. In those days, men’s shirts came without collars. The detachable collar—a swatch of linen that you affixed to your shirt with buttons—was a sign of good grooming, implying, however nonsensically, that the shirt beneath the gentleman’s jacket must be equally clean.

Over the years, several men posed for the Arrow Collar Man, but the one most associated with him was Charles Allwood Beach. He was Leyendecker’s longtime lover. In addition to the house in New Rochelle, Leyendecker maintained a studio in Manhattan, in the Bryant Park Studio Building at 80 West Fortieth Street, where he led another life, a freer life perhaps. Beach lived in the studio and served as his secretary. He was a striking, broad-shouldered Canadian who spoke in a clipped British accent. It was Beach who always answered the phone and talked to art directors and arranged for models to come pose. George Horace Lorimer, the editor of the
Post
, once remarked, “I never met Leyendecker. All our business was conducted by phone with his agent.”

In the beginning, the Leyendecker brothers struck many people as almost interchangeable. Although Joe was two years older, they were known as the illustrator twins. Born in Germany, raised in Chicago, they both studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Académie Julian in Paris before beginning their careers in adjoining studios in New York. They both specialized in advertising posters and, during World War I, when Germany was the enemy, volunteered to make patriotic posters for the U.S. government.

But by the early 1920s dramatic differences came to mark them. Joe Leyendecker was rewarded with meaningful work and love. Frank Leyendecker was not so fortunate. He suffered from depression and developed a ruinous morphine habit. He was erratic in his work habits and seldom able to meet a deadline, which left him short of cash.