American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (23 page)

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On February 11, 1930, a surprising headline appeared on page one of the
Los Angeles Times
:
ROCKWELL MAY DECIDE TO REMAIN
. He had arrived in Los Angeles by train the day before and, as the story reported, “began doing the town in tow of Vic Forsythe.” He had come west, he told the reporter, in the hope of finding new models and revitalizing his work. He acted as if his only goal was to colonize Hollywood as a subject for his
Post
covers.

Forsythe lived and worked in Alhambra, and that winter Rockwell stayed in his house on Almonsor Avenue; they shared a studio over the garage. They had worked side by side years before, when they rented Frederic Remington’s studio in New Rochelle. In those days, Forsythe had an impressive career as a newspaper cartoonist and Rockwell was just a tyro illustrator about to sell his first cover to the
Post
. Now, in 1930, Forsythe was still turning out a daily strip about a bumbling, bubble-nosed character, Joe Jinks, but continued to believe that his true calling was desert painting.

He had settled in Alhambra in the early twenties with his friend Frank Tenney Johnson, who is probably the most compelling and undervalued painter of the American West. Compared to the usual galloping horses and stop-action scenes, Johnson’s pictures of cowboys and Indians have a wonderful stillness about them. He is known for night scenes that capture the diaphanous beauty of moonlight shining down on a deserted street. But he also painted day scenes that might show a cowboy sitting on a palomino horse, smoking a cigarette beneath a sky whose intense light seems to frame and isolate him. You can’t imagine the Marlboro man (who was created later, in 1954) without him.

Johnson lived at 22 Champion Place, right off Main Street. His studio, an attractive space with an enormous two-story window and Indian rugs and artifacts on the walls, occupied the building next door. His address soon became shorthand for a fraternity of western painters who built homes and studios on the same street. Champion Place was just a block and a half long and surrounded by eucalyptus and pine trees. It offered an unobstructed view of the San Gabriel Mountains.

In the twenties, western paintings were snubbed by most art dealers, who preferred scenes of verdant French gardens to those of cacti and rocks. American artists were still regarded as uneducable yahoos compared to their European counterparts. To improve the image of local art folk, Johnson and Forsythe helped found a cooperative gallery in downtown Los Angeles.
16
The Biltmore Salon, as it was called, sounds like the name of a beauty parlor. But its mission was unquestionably noble. It opened in December 1923, in the then-new Biltmore Hotel on Olive Street, whose management had generously agreed to turn over a spacious, velvet-covered room to local artists, most of whom had no place else to show.
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Soon after Rockwell arrived in Alhambra, he became friendly with Johnson and his wife, Vinnie. Johnson was twenty years older than Rockwell, a handsome, soft-spoken aesthete who stood six foot two and who wore his jet-black hair parted down the middle.

When Johnson painted a night sky, he would usually put some stars in. They glitter like jewels from a distance, but when you look at the stars up close, you might be surprised to see, in the place of a crisply drawn object, a thick gob of white pigment. Johnson had his own idiosyncratic painting techniques. He would begin every painting, he once explained to Rockwell, by applying a white base mixed with a small amount of vermilion or Spanish red. That was the underpainting, and he would leave it to dry for one full year. Crazy but not crazy. He believed it accounted for the luminosity of his canvases.

Rockwell tried a version of the technique himself and in some ways it was the last thing he needed. He was constantly losing sleep over his encroaching deadlines and his anxiety over whether he could meet them. In contrast to other illustrators who learned how to be more efficient over time, Rockwell kept finding new ways to make his paintings harder to do and take longer to dry.

“If you see Frank Johnson,” he wrote a bit later to Forsythe, “tell him I’m using his sani-flat technique, which make the originals weigh about ten pounds more and also makes them look much more arty.” The Sani-Flat to which he refers was a type of oil-based house paint made by Benjamin Moore that could be washed with water over and over, without losing its “eggshell sheen.”
18

Besides his knowledge of new pigments, Rockwell came away from his stay in Alhambra with a clear understanding of the distance that separated him from western artists. They were constantly driving off to the desert with enough equipment to set up easels and paint anywhere. Rockwell, by contrast, did not get his material from the landscape. He got his ideas for his paintings by locking himself in a spartan room after dinner, sitting at a table with a pencil and sketchpad, and not letting himself out for three hours.

Besides, he had never done a painting of a horse. In truth he remained wary of horses. During his bachelor days at the Hotel des Artistes, to get some exercise, he would rent a horse at Dorlan’s Livery Stable and go riding along the bridle paths in Central Park. But he found the experience nerve-racking. One day his horse reared up and took off, galloping around the reservoir in the park as Rockwell held on for dear life. “Horses frightened me,” he later said. “It’s like eating dinner with a madman; every time he picks up a knife you don’t know whether he’s going to cut you or his meat.”
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In his paintings, he had no interest in glamorizing the lore of the West. He was too intent on poking fun at himself to pretend to be a potent cowboy, or a potent anything. He could laugh off the whole cowboy thing, and maybe laughing at cowboy legend was more authentically American than worshiping it. That is what happened on his trip to California. He did a great funny-debunking painting called
Gary Cooper as The Texan.

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Rockwell conceived the painting after contacting a friend of a friend at Paramount in search of a male actor, any actor, who might be willing to model for a
Post
cover. Gary Cooper jumped at the chance and arrived at the studio in Alhambra the next morning. He was in his late twenties, and his first talking picture (
The Virginian
) had come out the previous November, right after the crash and just in time to provide the country with much-needed reassurance. His new film,
The Texan
, would be out in May.

Cooper posed for Rockwell in his cowboy garb over the course of three days, entering fully into the spirit of the project. He preferred posing to giving interviews, which he found unbearably taxing. Cowboys were supposed to be lean and laconic, men of action and few words, which Cooper was by temperament. He managed to survive entire radio interviews saying little more than “yep” and “nope.”

As it happened, Cooper was the first-ever movie star to appear on the cover of
The Saturday Evening Post
. The issue came out on May 24, 1930, three weeks after
The Texan
opened. It was regarded as a publicity coup for Paramount, although today the painting is far more famous than Paramount’s movie. Rockwell chose to depict the actor in his dressing room, getting made up for a scene. Cooper leans forward, his lips pursed as he receives the finishing touches on his lipstick from a grizzled makeup man with a cigar stub in his mouth. Painted at a time when America’s relationship with the West was largely adoring,
Gary Cooper as The Texan
daringly pokes holes in the frontier myth. Cooper, the quintessential cowboy, is exposed as a guy who wears lipstick and whose virility is literally a put-on. (See color insert.) Note the hat in the lower left of Rockwell’s painting. Instead of crowning a male head, the Stetson lies on the floor, a cast-off object that appears to be tilting into our space. Cooper doesn’t need it. You can have it. It’s just a prop, a clunky, obstreperous cliché.

The hat, by the way, is physically closer to the viewer than anything else in the composition. Rockwell often does this. He inserts an object or a figure into the foreground of his painting, between the viewer and the scene that is unfolding in the middle distance. The cowboy hat is a marker of the impossibility of entering fully into the warmth of the picture.

It is one of the tensions in Rockwell’s art. He paints objects with the kind of fastidious realism intended to bring you closer to the touchable, handleable world. But then he paints a barricade in the foreground to keep you from touching. He cannot allow himself to touch what he wants.

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Even in the winter, when the temperature could drop below zero, Reno, Nevada, was jammed with new residents. The majority were women who were there to end unsuitable marriages. They wanted out and felt they had made at least one good decision as they sat in hotel lounges and counted the days until they could put on a hat and gloves and appear before a judge. In 1929 you could get an uncontested divorce in a relatively short time. A three-month stay and the ability to pay your legal costs were all that was required.

“Mrs. Irene O’Connor Rockwell has been in Reno with her mother for about two months and has engaged the services of counsel,” it was reported in the
Reno Evening Gazette
in December, one week before Christmas.
20

On Monday morning, January 13, 1930, Irene appeared at the Washoe County Courthouse with her attorney and presented her case to a judge. She was the plaintiff and Rockwell was the defendant. Rockwell did not appear and no evidence was introduced on his behalf.

MRS. ROCKWELL GETS DECREE ON CHARGE THAT ARTIST SAID THEY WERE UNSUITED TO EACH OTHER
, trumpeted
The New York Times
the next day.
21
The headline in the New York
World
was even more discomfiting:
ACCUSED ARTIST OF MENTAL CRUELTY
. Indeed, those were the grounds on which the divorce was granted. Irene charged that her husband was so absorbed in his work that he had barely looked at her in the fourteen years in which she had tried to share his life.

A property settlement was reached out of court and Irene received an undisclosed bundle of money. Rockwell kept the house on Lord Kitchener Road, the roomfuls of early-American furniture, the antique cherry clock, and the Duncan Phyfe–style dining table with the claw-and-ball feet.

She wasted no time in leaving Reno and beginning the next chapter of her life. Only five days after the divorce, on January 18, she married Francis Hartley, Jr., the chemical salesman from the Boston area. It was not easy finding a minister willing to perform the ceremony; her divorce stood in the way. After trying two other churches, the couple succeeded at the end of the day in getting a Dr. Moor to marry them at the Madison Avenue Baptist Church.
22

Irene’s wedding would have been hard for Rockwell to ignore. It was a headline in the morning paper.
MRS. IRENE ROCKWELL WED
, announced
The New York Times.
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She and her new husband settled near Boston, in Brookline, where they lived in Longwood Towers, a baronial apartment building that had just gone up. She had not wanted children with Rockwell and she would not have any with her second husband.

Rockwell never saw Irene again, but he remained on amiable terms with her brother George and was well aware of the fate that befell her. Only four years after the divorce, on a Friday in November, Irene’s lifeless body was found in the bathtub by her husband. Her death certificate lists the cause as “accidental drowning.”
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In reality, it is nearly impossible for an adult to drown in the shallow water of a tub because of the strength of physical reflexes that alert you to danger. But the firing of reflexes can be blocked by various factors, such as the consumption of too much alcohol. In Irene’s case, it cannot be known whether drinking played a role; no autopsy was performed. She was forty-one years old.

ELEVEN

MARY BARSTOW

(SPRING 1930 TO SEPTEMBER 1932)

Mary Barstow wore glasses and smoked Lucky Strikes. At twenty-two years old, she had a round face and frizzy hair that fell to her shoulders. She had graduated from Stanford the previous spring, in the class of 1929, a class composed mostly of men. That year, Stanford awarded 141 bachelor’s degrees to women, out of a total of 878 degrees, which led people who met Mary Barstow to assume that she possessed a great store of confidence. They assumed incorrectly.
1

Born in Wheaton, Illinois,
2
the oldest of three children, Mary had grown up in a prominent midwestern family. Her mother was the niece of Judge Elbert H. Gary, the chairman of U.S. Steel and also a native of Wheaton. Mary was still in grade school when her father, a lawyer, decided to move the family to Southern California. The Barstows lived in Alhambra at 125 Champion Place, in a house that was modern for its time, a long, low, prairie-style house at the end of the street where Forsythe and his artist-friends had their studios.

When Rockwell met her, Mary Barstow was living with her parents and teaching at a school in San Gabriel. She disliked the job and wanted to quit. The problem, she believed, was that she had been assigned to teach students in the seventh grade, the one grade she had skipped in her academically precocious girlhood. She had never learned fractions and now she had them coming out of her ears. Three-fourths is equal to how many eighths? She could not care less. She felt fragile enough without having to perform daily in front of a room of children and draw diagrams, on the blackboard, of circles severed into parts.
3

At Stanford she had studied creative writing with Edith Mirrielees, an authority on the short story whose students included John Steinbeck. Mary’s real interest was English literature and she imagined becoming a writer of fiction. Literature was the opposite of fractions; it combined the broken shards of daily experience into a seamless whole. She read voraciously and haunted bookshops, from which she usually came away with a few books at a time, purchases that filled her with a sense of possibility, a momentary belief that life grants you sufficient time to read everything you want.