American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (27 page)

That night, he and Fred played gin rummy until eleven, sitting by the stove in the cabin and using a deck of cards that Rockwell had made himself. “Then Fred and I get into one very narrow bed,” he noted, referring to a rustic cot made from a hard board and a sprinkling of fir branches. The guides climbed into a bed above them, and “all during the night pine needles spray us as they drop from the guides’ bed.”

Two nights later, Rockwell and Fred played “rummy by candlelight til 9:30 p.m., then to bed. Guides insist on roaring fire in cabin stove, and window and door closed. Fred and I very hot and dream no end.”

On the morning of September 11, they went out for a swim. “We paddle to portage near waterfall. I strip and frollick about—see photos.” All of this is suggestive material, up to and including the “lick” in his spelling of “frollick.”

The trip raises a complicated question: Was Rockwell homosexual? It depends on what you mean by the word. He demonstrated an intense need for emotional and physical closeness with men. From the viewpoint of twenty-first-century gender studies, a man who yearns for the company of men is considered homosexual, whether or not he has sex with other men. In Rockwell’s case, there is nothing to suggest that he had sex with men. The distinction between secret desires and frank sexual acts, though perhaps not crucial to theorists today, was certainly crucial to Rockwell.

Granted, he married, but his first marriage and to some extent his second were not happy. They seem less like genuine unions than a strategy for “passing” and controlling his homoerotic desires, whose expression he confined to his art. He was afraid of all physical intimacy, male or female, but decidedly more comfortable in homosocial male groups than in any standard domestic role, be it that of husband, father, or man of the house.

*   *   *

As Rockwell caroused with his male friends, Mary felt as if he had slipped across some invisible divide. From one day to the next, she consumed large quantities of “caffeine pills,” a precursor of antidepressants. And she was constantly reaching into her purse or yanking open drawers in search of a Lucky Strike cigarette. Her children would come to think of her as more affectionate than their father and more curious about their day-to-day lives. But she, too, could be distracted. “She wasn’t interested in child-rearing,” her son Jarvis recalled without bitterness. She did not cook or keep house and she had enough money not to have to think about those things. A British couple, Florence and Jack Currie, had been hired to help her out. Mrs. Currie did the cooking and her husband, a former milkman, took care of the gardening. Mary seemed happiest when she was reading. At night she would snuggle up in bed with the boys and read aloud. At times she read to her husband as well, perched on a stool in his studio. They made it through
War and Peace
twice, according to family lore.

Around this time, Rockwell acquired a police dog, a massive German shepherd.
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He had owned a police dog once before, in the mid-twenties, before he acquired his collie Raleigh, the one that had sailed to Paris with him. Despite the plethora of playful mutts that appear in his paintings, when Rockwell got a dog for himself, he got a purebred. He named the new one Raleigh, the same as his previous dog. Raleigh II had a
Post
cameo in
Man Hiking with Dog
, one of those seasonal covers so beloved by Lorimer, who seemed ready to claim the arrival of fall as an American holiday.

Rockwell’s neighbors knew to stay away from Raleigh, who would growl when strangers stepped near. They assumed Rockwell acquired his new German shepherd because he felt spooked by the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, which was just being tried in court. “The dog had a tremendous head,” recalled Norman Kreisman, who was then a schoolboy living across the street from Rockwell.
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Kreisman had a dog, too, a small mutt, and one day it wandered onto the Rockwells’ front lawn. “My dog came within an inch of being killed,” he later recalled. “Raleigh took a real chunk out of him and he had to be hospitalized.” When the family received a very large bill from the veterinarian, Mrs. Kreisman called Rockwell and asked him whether he would pay for half. To her relief, he graciously assented.

*   *   *

On May 18, 1935, it was reported that Rockwell and his family were on their way to California, where they expected to stay for five months. For the first time, they traveled by airplane. “Fred Hildebrandt,” the article noted, “also an artist and a close friend of the Rockwells, left in their car, taking their dog, and will join them there.”
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They stayed, once again, with Mary’s parents in Alhambra, which was fine with Rockwell. With two sons under the age of four, a wife who tended to feel overmatched, and a widowed mother who looked upon babysitting as hard physical labor bordering on punishment, he was receptive to his in-laws’ generosity and calm, uncomplicated company.

Besides, Los Angeles was its own trove of humorous story ideas. Rockwell’s oft-repeated plaint about being unable to paint a glamorous woman was instantly disproved in
Movie Starlet and Reporters
, a wonderfully vivid painting that graced the cover of the
Post
on March 7, 1936. (See color insert.) A redheaded Hollywood star, who is traveling to promote her latest film, is shown in an unnamed city, being interviewed by the local press corps. Six male reporters in fedoras and dusty overcoats form a tight circle around her. You know from the actress’s bouquet of welcome roses that she arrived in town only moments earlier, perhaps after a transcontinental rail journey. Her monogrammed suitcase and matching hatbox declare her point of origin in crimson type:
HOLLYWOOD
. The reporters’ faces, for the most part, are blocked from view, but their eagerness is conveyed in the choreography of their leaning bodies, raised pens and note pads held at the ready. To the right stands a radio reporter, a bulky man in a black trench coat with a ragged hemline. He holds up a mic—a silvery circular thing, an old-fashioned carbon microphone that hovers in the center of the composition like a metal screw holding it together.

David Rakoff, the writer and essayist, wittily observed: “The reporters all seem poised to ask the same question, which is, ‘And how do you like it here, Miss Film Star?’”
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Will she answer their query? Or will she imperiously decline to be interviewed? The painting pits the evolving technology of sound transmission against the possibility of sound failure; the actress reserves the right to say “no comment” and thereby defeat old media (pencils and note pads) and new media alike. You could say that Rockwell here uses the press (that is, the cover of the
Post
) to poke fun at the press. His send-up of the celebrity news business has lost none of its relevance in the seventy-five-plus years since it was painted.

The starlet, it has often been noted, bears a resemblance to Jean Harlow, but Rockwell used an aspiring actress, Mardee Hoff, the daughter of illustrator Guy Hoff, as his model. In general, he disliked using famous people as models. Their presence in a painting was distracting and constraining and kept him from making stuff up. Besides, he could hardly expect Harlow and her celebrated ilk to stand in his studio for four days, holding her head at the requested angle until he was done trying to render it as accurately as pencil will allow.

That August he visited the Paramount lot in search of a model for a new painting. He could have picked anyone, but he picked Charles King, an older, underused Broadway actor and vaudevillian who was milling around the set of the movie
Annapolis Farewell.
Rockwell was delighted by his big belly. He hired him to pose for a week, seated on top of an English stagecoach that looks like something out of Dickens.

Dover Coach
, as it was called
,
is a six-foot-long, horizontal painting that ran as a two-page spread inside the
Post
’s Christmas issue that year. Here they come: a rotund coachman swaddled in his ankle-length traveling coat, a few women in bonnets, a bony gentleman who is clearly in agony as a boy blasts a trumpet in his face. They’re crowded onto the outside of a stagecoach like a row of figures arrayed on a Greek frieze.

Later, in 1939, Rockwell donated
Dover Coach
to the Society of Illustrators, in honor of its new building, an elegant limestone edifice on East Sixty-third Street in New York. For years the painting hung on the fourth floor, on the wall behind the oak-wood bar, between shelves stocked with drinking glasses. It became a local landmark, especially among illustrators, who, when trying to figure out where to meet one another, were known to suggest, “Let’s meet under the Rockwell.”

*   *   *

By his own account, Rockwell claimed he fell into a depression in the early thirties and didn’t come out of it until 1935, when he returned home from California and embarked on a project that had nothing to do with
The Saturday Evening Post.
George Macy, an independent publisher and scion of the department-store family, had just started the Heritage Press as a division of his Limited Editions Club. His goal was to bring out illustrated classics and he thought Rockwell would be perfect for Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Rockwell initially declined, or rather said that he needed at least a year before he could even think about such a daunting project, which would require eight color paintings as well as drawings for the chapter headings. Macy said he would wait. Rockwell had not attempted book illustration since his art student days some twenty years earlier. It paid far less than magazine work. But it allowed him to reconnect with his childhood reverence for illustration, his belief that he had embarked on a noble pursuit enlarged by its proximity to literature. And he felt especially connected to Twain. Rockwell’s mischievous boys are descendants of
Huckleberry Finn
, the most famous of all Missouri boys. He is “free of school, free of female relatives, of houses, of manners … free from having to grow up,” as the critic Noel Perrin writes of Huck. “He was to remain forever prepubescent.”

In mid-October, Rockwell mentioned in a letter to Macy that he was planning on visiting Twain’s Missouri on his way home from California. Conveniently, he had his station wagon with him in California and so was able to drive at the end of the month to out-of-the-way Hannibal, the old river town where Twain had spent much of his childhood and set
Tom Sawyer
. Rockwell’s goal was to gather “authentic details” for his illustrations, and he considered it a point of pride that he was the first in a long line of Twain illustrators to conduct research in Hannibal.

During his stay he visited the mandatory pilgrimage sites—Twain’s white frame home, the old picket fence (still standing, with a little help from restorers), and the cave with its winding passageways where Tom and Becky had gotten lost (it was on private property and cost fifty cents to enter). He sketched the bedroom window from which the young Sam Clemens used to climb, perhaps remembering the window in New Rochelle from which his model Billy Payne fell to his death fifteen years earlier.

Within a few days he had filled his sketchbook with hundreds of “authentic details,” as he called them. He had also acquired an assortment of costumes to bring home for his models. Huck, as described by Twain, was always dressed “in the cast-off clothes of full-grown men.” Rockwell loved to tell the story about how he persuaded the citizens of Hannibal to sell him their old clothes. Young men and old men thought he was kidding when he stopped them on the street and offered them as much as five dollars for their threadbare overalls. Among his purchases was a floppy straw hat that was, as he noted, “in a beautiful state of decay—sun-bleached, ragged.”

In reality, the clothing that Rockwell glimpsed in Hannibal in the autumn of 1935 had nothing to do with the clothing worn by Twain’s characters.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
is set in the 1830s and 1840s—a century before Rockwell arrived in Hannibal and collected clothing and props. But he did enjoy acquiring clothing from men who caught his eye, as if it were possible to acquire the less tangible parts of them as well.

As to his own wardrobe, he was by no means a dandy. He tended to dress neatly but inconspicuously, in Brooks Brothers shirts and khakis and loafers. He dressed, in other words, like a man who was far more interested in looking at people than in being seen. Revealingly, a tax return from this period indicates that he spent $423 on costumes in seven months and $12 on his own clothing.
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*   *   *

On November 19, 1935, Pete Martin, the art editor of the
Post
, wrote to Rockwell from his office in Philadelphia: “Don’t let anyone sidetrack you from POST cover work for the next few months, because we need some more Rockwell covers very badly.”

A new year arrived, and Martin wrote again: “We are looking forward in 1936 to seeing you complete the swell array of ideas Mr. Lorimer okayed on your last visit. I hope you don’t get sudden flashes of inspiration on other ideas that will interfere with the program you mapped out.”

Indeed, by now Rockwell was consumed with his work on Tom Sawyer and it would take him a year to finish. He knew whom he wanted to pose for Huck. He was driving through New Rochelle when he first spotted him, milling on a street corner with a group of boys, ice skates slung over his shoulders. Charlie Schudy was short and athletic, with red bangs that fell in a straight line across the forehead of his sweet, round face. Pulling over to the side of the road, Rockwell invited Charlie to his studio. The boy declined.

“Those were the years of the Lindbergh kidnapping,” Schudy later recalled, “when you weren’t supposed to talk to strangers.”
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Intent on persuading the boy to come with him, Rockwell suggested that he bring along his friends, who happily piled into his station wagon.

Charlie was then a sixth-grader at Holy Family, a Catholic parochial school in New Rochelle, and for the rest of that year Rockwell would regularly summon him from classes. The nuns would inform Charlie that he had a visitor and he would head outside to find Rockwell parked at the curb, sitting alone in his car. Unlike most of the other children who modeled for Rockwell, Charlie Schudy disliked the process. When Rockwell asked a kid to hold a pose, he expected him to listen. And Charlie could not for the life of him understand why he had to stand for two consecutive thirty-minute sessions with a matchbox tucked under his big toe. The point of the matchbox was to make his toe curl away from the rest of his foot, as if it were being tickled by grass. “It was a horrible ordeal,” he later recalled, only half-jokingly. On the plus side, Rockwell paid well. Charlie’s sessions of modeling netted close to one hundred dollars, which he used to purchase a Schwinn bike.