American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (29 page)

The new
Life
was an instant sensation. Its print run, projected at 250,000 copies, had nearly doubled by the time the first issue appeared. A year later,
Life
’s circulation had spiked to 1.2 million, surpassing that of Luce’s own
Time
(672,000) and the elite
New Yorker
(135,000). But there was one magazine it couldn’t touch, at least not yet.
The Saturday Evening Post
remained the most popular magazine in America, with a paid circulation of more than 3 million.
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Even so, the founding of
Life
shifted the traditional balance between text and image in journalism, giving images a new prominence. Photographs had the advantage of instant authority (see for yourself). And they were sexy (showing skin). To be sure, magazines had been using photographs to illustrate stories for decades. “But using photographs to illustrate a periodical was not the same as making photographs the principal subject of a magazine,”
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as the historian Alan Brinkley notes in his biography of Henry Luce. Indeed,
Life
showed that journalism could be a purely visual medium, that sometimes the most compelling essay is a photo essay without any text.

Life
represented a direct threat to the tradition of magazine illustration. It signaled the triumph of the camera over the paintbrush, of the machine over the hand, of the darkroom over the atelier, of speed over slowness, of New York’s Rockefeller Center (where Time Inc. soon moved) over Philadelphia’s Independence Square, of Henry Luce over Cyrus H. K. Curtis, who had died in 1933 and been replaced as publisher by his son-in-law.

In homes throughout the country, Americans accustomed to looking at handmade illustrations were suddenly poring over big, glossy black-and-white photographs that offered a seemingly unimpeded glimpse into previously closed worlds. As its name proclaimed, here was LIFE, not some make-believe simulation of it, not drawings by Howard Pyle, with his pirates and trunks of stolen booty. Not Leyendecker’s fluttering putti. Not the Gibson Girl with her hair piled up to the sky. No, here were “things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to,” as the magazine’s credo boasted, in jazzy language written with the help of the poet Archibald MacLeish.
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How did Rockwell survive this? He did not, of course, claim to offer the rewards of factuality. He did not claim to bring news of dams and European kings and world summits to anyone’s doorstep. But “art is no less real for being artifice,” as the critic Clive James once observed.
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Rockwell offered engrossing fictions about everyday life and its comical bumps. He offered the rewards of a story well told, a story that could seem remarkably complete and true despite the absence of words. He felt that if a painting of his needed a title, he hadn’t properly done his work. Which did not keep his editors from titling his every painting.

*   *   *

The new trout-fishing season began in the Northeast in April, and Rockwell was still accompanying Fred Hildebrandt on regular trips into the woods. It had been a few years since their two-week sojourn in Canada and their outings were now closer to home. They liked to drive to northwestern Connecticut, to Mrs. Kirk’s place, as it was known, a camp with three cabins on the banks of the Housatonic River presided over by a woman who would cook that day’s catch for them.

Sometimes they made the trip with two friends, Mead Schaeffer and Charles DeFeo. The men knew each other through Hildebrandt, who seemed to be every illustrator’s favorite model. Schaeffer, who had a studio in New Rochelle, had already furnished the book illustrations for a popular edition of
Moby-Dick
. DeFeo was equally fish-minded. He lived with his cat in Manhattan and was known as a master flytier, which requires an ability to work with precision on frustratingly tiny objects. You make a fly by affixing bits of hair, fur, feathers, and other materials to a metal hook. DeFeo designed and tied thousands of visually striking flies in a style that has variously been described as rococo, Victorian, or just ridiculously complicated.

His friends considered Rockwell basically unserious about fishing. They were expert anglers and he, at best, was along for the ride. While they were off at the river casting for salmon, setting their dry flies on the water, he was liable to be walking around on his own. “Norman was no fisherman,” recalled Mead Schaeffer. “He liked to go with the boys, but his mind wasn’t on fishing. To us, fishing was our whole lives, outside of painting. We tried desperately to get Norman interested in fishing, but he just was not the material for it all. He liked walking uphill.”
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That view was confirmed by Hildebrandt, who could be patronizing about Rockwell’s lack of sportiness. In 1936, after the four men drove up to Connecticut, Hildebrandt noted in his diary that Rockwell declined to get a fishing license from the state. “Norm didn’t intend to fish and was a bit confused with all of the talk about fly fishing.”
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Rockwell did not care for drinking, either. He was the designated driver in the group. On April 14, after three days of trout fishing in rainy Connecticut, the men “started home about three p.m.,” Hildebrandt noted in his journal. “Norm driving and Schaef and I finishing up a half a bottle of scotch. Got back to Norm’s at about 7 p.m. and all had supper there.” You can imagine how much Mary Rockwell loved sitting down to dinner with her husband and his two inebriated, mud-caked friends.

*   *   *

Fred Hildebrandt was still Rockwell’s favorite model and that spring he posed for a painting of Yankee Doodle, which made them both chuckle. Rockwell had accepted a lucrative commission to paint a thirteen-foot-long mural for the eighteenth-century Nassau Inn, in Princeton, New Jersey. Edgar Palmer, an heir to a zinc fortune and Princeton alumnus, had read about the restoration of Williamsburg, Virginia, by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., which gave him the idea of showcasing Princeton’s own inheritance of Colonial structures, even if he had to build them himself. He decided on a sham-Colonial town square. This entailed moving the old Nassau Inn to a prominent spot on the brand-new Palmer Square and persuading Rockwell to festoon the taproom with an episode from Yankee Doodle’s life.

Today, the song “Yankee Doodle” conjures images of patriotic uplift, but it was originally a satirical ditty sung by British soldiers to poke fun at the provincialism of Colonial armies. Apparently, Yankee soldiers were such yahoos that they affixed feathers to their hats and thought they therefore looked as stylish as the Italian men known as macaronis.

Rockwell’s mural portrays Master Doodle in the midst of an awful pony ride. He’s an object of ridicule, a blond fop in an elegant green velvet waistcoat riding past a rowdy crowd. The British redcoats are hooting and jeering at him and clearly need to cut back on their drinking.

The mural was the subject of an amusing item in
The New Yorker
in July. Rockwell was planning to stencil the song lyrics across the bottom of the mural, and “couldn’t decide whether it should read ‘Yankee Doodle
came
to town, or
went
to town,’” as the magazine reported.
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Princeton’s board of trustees took a vote; it resulted in a tie. Rockwell settled on the word
came.
Interpret at your own risk.

*   *   *

Mary Rockwell, in the meantime, continued to be exposed to the neglect that marriage to a famous artist can create. Rockwell’s long disappearances into his studio, coupled with his convivial devotion to his male friends and all-around inattention to family life, made her feel invisible. Every so often she thought back to her teacher at Stanford, Edith Mirrielees, who had told her that she was sufficiently gifted to become a writer. Instead, she had become a suburban housewife who berated herself for too much smoking and drinking and for misplacing things. In addition to Raleigh, the Rockwells now had a mutt named Mostly and one afternoon there was a mishap with the dog. Mary was mortified when the local newspaper wrote it up: “Mrs. Norman Rockwell took him shopping Thursday. Somewhere en route he disappeared. The dog, whose return is anxiously awaited by the Rockwells, is about Scottie size, black, with straight hair.”
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The dog was never recovered.

In the winter she learned she was pregnant again. She already had three young children. Jerry was seven; Tommy was five; and Peter was two. It is not known whether it was she or Rockwell who started the conversation about abortion. It was 1938 and abortion was illegal in the United States, so they decided to take a “vacation” in the English countryside. No one in England read
The Saturday Evening Post
or knew who he was; it was safe. They would wind up staying out of the country for six weeks. Their middle-aged housekeeper, Mrs. Florence Currie, a proper Englishwoman, made the trip with them, primarily to care for the boys.
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They sailed on a wintery March evening, aboard the SS
Bremen
, a German ocean liner.
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Three years earlier, a group of Jewish protesters in New York had made headlines when they boarded the
Bremen
to take down its Nazi flag and throw it into the Hudson, but one assumes that Mary and Norman did not realize the import of such events. In a photograph taken at sea, Mary poses on the deck with her three boys and an unknown girl who jumped into the picture. She smiles broadly and appears amused, perhaps because she has put down her pocketbook to scoop chubby Peter into her arms. They docked in Southampton on April 7 and were discreet about their plans. Asked by British agents to provide their temporary address, they provided only Europe on Wheels, on Regent Street in London, which was not a hotel but a forerunner of the rental-car industry, allowing tourists to motor through England on their own. When Rockwell materialized at the office, he found a cable from his accountant about a left-behind suitcase. In his haste to catch the ship, he had failed to notice the suitcase standing on his front lawn, perhaps because he had been frazzled, or because he simply was the kind of man eager to jettison baggage.
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Mary Rockwell, her three sons, and an unidentified girl aboard the SS
Bremen
, en route to London, March 1938
(Courtesy of Jarvis Rockwell)

Mary disappeared into a hospital in Oxford, an hour northeast of London, and Rockwell and the boys and Mrs. Currie awaited her recovery at the Old Swan & Minster Mill, an inn with a long history. Located in the rolling countryside of the Cotswolds, it consisted of a Tudor mansion plus an eighteenth-century mill whose bedrooms abounded with the sort of “authentic” trimmings Rockwell loved—exposed beams, open log fires and worn stone floors. Mary came out of the hospital in mid-April, daffodil season. She and Rockwell decided to stay on at the inn, with the boys and Mrs. Currie, for a few added weeks. He later recalled the trip fondly, remembering bicycling along country lanes and wondering if he should leave New Rochelle and move to the countryside somewhere.

*   *   *

Passing through London toward the end of the trip, Rockwell thought he might contact a few British illustrators whom he had never met but whom he counted as his forebears. He had a small collection of illustrators’ work and wanted to buy a few pieces in England. He sat down in his hotel room and tried to summon the appropriately respectful tone with which to introduce himself to Arthur Rackham, George Belcher, and Edmund Dulac, the last of whom had just designed the coronation postage stamp for Queen Elizabeth, the wife of George VI. After producing “ten stiff and awkward drafts,” he threw them away and picked up the phone and called Rackham directly.

Rackham, at the time, was seventy, a vastly influential children’s book illustrator. No one brought a stricter sense of realism to scenes of fairies and gnomes. Invited to his studio late one afternoon, Rockwell found a poignant figure, “a little bit of a man with a thin face,” as he described him. The next day, May 6, Rockwell returned for tea. He purchased two ink drawings, one of which bore the unsettling title, “A House with Rats.” Rackham gave him a copy of a book he had illustrated,
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
by Edgar Allan Poe. “To Norman Rockwell,” he wrote inside, and then added a sketch of a man being woken from sleep by a devil looming at the foot of his bed.
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Rockwell kept the book to the end of his life, a reminder of a charmed encounter and also of his artistic allegiances. Revealingly, he had not called upon Britain’s modern artists, such as Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, who were living together in Hampstead. Nor had he attempted to look up any relatives—he was, after all, of English stock. The only family in which he could comfortably imagine himself was that of his fellow illustrators.

He and his family left England on May 12, sailing from Southampton aboard the SS
Europa
, the sister ship of the German liner on which they had come over. They were back in New Rochelle five days later, with their three small boys. Mary picked up Raleigh from a kennel in Ossining and her life resumed its normal shape. Summer was approaching and she frequently swam at the Wykagyl Country Club. She was relieved to see she would not be punished for what she had done, the unborn child. She could continue buying hats at Saks and browsing at the New Rochelle Book Store, from which she came away in those months with books on religion and George Meredith’s
Diana of the Crossways
, a protofeminist novel about an unhappily married woman.
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