American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (31 page)

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The first painting he completed in Vermont,
Marble Champion
, graced the cover of the
Post
on September 2, 1939. A redheaded girl of perhaps eleven or twelve kneels on the ground and prepares to pitch a gray marble, her face tense with concentration. Two schoolboys peering over her shoulder look a little worried, not least because by 1939 girls had begun to receive acknowledgment in citywide marbles tournaments. Rockwell’s detractors accuse him of catering to the stereotypes of a mass market, but in fact he helped topple stereotypes. His marble-shooting girl, with her pigtails and worn leather shoes, is not some delicate sugar-spun creature, but a toughie, a reflection of his sense of women as forceful competitors.

Marble Champion
represented a break from Rockwell’s magazine covers of the previous decade. Once he acquired his house in Vermont, he shifted away from his Colonial obsessions, from Yankee Doodle and Ye Olde Sign Painters, from patriots with their wigs and ruffled shirts and buckled shoes. Instead of burrowing into American history, which he had done for about a decade, he now favored contemporary (albeit invented) scenes featuring people who lived in a New England town, his town. It was the
Our Town
view of America, and it seems likely that Thornton Wilder’s play helped him forge a way forward in his work by reminding him of the drama and meaning that inheres in everyday life.

Wilder’s masterpiece,
Our Town
, had opened on Broadway in February 1938 and won a Pulitzer Prize that spring. It is set in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, the most famous nonexistent village in New England. Staged without scenery and with the curtain always up, it relates the stories of Emily Webb and George Gibbs and life among such staple characters as a milkman, a town doctor, and a newspaper editor. It prompted an inundation of articles about the virtues of New Englanders, who, purportedly, were understated and self-sufficient, who stoically accepted their freezing winters.

Wilder, who was three years younger than Rockwell, had little in common with the characters in
Our Town
. Born in Wisconsin, he was reared in China and spent a good amount of time in Hollywood. He lived for many years with his unwed sister, on Deepwood Drive in Hamden, Connecticut, and enjoyed close friendships with younger men.

Rockwell, too—he did not resemble the characters who inhabit his paintings. Like Wilder, whom he knew in later life as a casual acquaintance, Rockwell created a body of work that says something about an odd-duck artist yearning for normalcy and community. He began identifying himself, starting now, as a man who lived in Vermont, a New Englander just like his neighbors, although he invariably made his point in the nasal and accented voice of a Noo Yawker.

What does it mean to be a New Englander? In contrast to the characters who would proliferate in his paintings—people who live in towns where time passes slowly and idle away afternoons playing checkers—Rockwell didn’t have ten seconds to spare. Not the most typical Vermonter, he drank Coca-Cola for breakfast and declined to swim in the Batten Kill River flowing through his front yard, insisting that the water was too cold.

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When September came, the summer people dispersed. Rockwell and Mary decided to stay in Vermont through the fall. They left the radio on all the time to follow the urgent bulletins out of Europe. Poland was burning to the ground and Britain finally declared war on Germany. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain broke the news (“You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggles to win peace have failed”) in a voice that sounded unnaturally calm.

That September, Rockwell and Mary enrolled their sons in public school, a quaint one-room schoolhouse on the West Arlington Green. It had “two grades totaling forty-eight children in one room,” as Mary noted. Rockwell agreed to be a guest lecturer at a monthly PTA meeting. It was held on a Thursday evening in October. He delivered his talk perched casually on the top of a desk, with one knee clasped in his hands. “I’m not a public speaker,” he began, with the charm and adroitness of a born public speaker.
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Mary was glad to be away from New Rochelle, where her neighbors, she felt, were “not interesting.” In Arlington everyone was new and she couldn’t believe how nice the people seemed. Although the Rockwells did not join a church, Mary became a member of the guild of the St. James’ Episcopal Church. In September she was elected to the board of the Martha Canfield Library and over time she would help expand the children’s section. In photographs from the period, she wears skirts that fall below her knees, ankle socks, saddle shoes, and large glasses. She could pass for a librarian.

For a small town of only fourteen hundred residents, Arlington had a sizable creative population. “There are lots of artists and writers up here but they are all serious people and not at all the Greenwich Village type,” Rockwell wrote approvingly on October 11, 1939. He mentioned Mead Schaeffer, “one of my best friends.” Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a novelist and critic, “is the patron saint of the village, and her vigilance has kept the town as simple and lovely as it is. It is not a tourist or summer place, but a genuine American New England town.”

His comments were made in a letter to Clyde Forsythe, on stationery engraved with his wife’s name. “I’ve been doing much better up here in Vermont,” Rockwell continued. “It is getting colder up here but we love it so much we just can’t leave until we are frozen out. The kids are going to school here and look like real country-folk.”
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Two days later, the local newspaper announced that Rockwell was a “permanent resident” of Arlington.
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But that depends on what you mean by the word
permanent
. By the end of October, Rockwell and Mary had decided to pull their sons out of school and return to New Rochelle for the winter, largely because their new house had no source of heat besides two wood-burning Franklin stoves. Throughout that winter, he and Schaeffer would drive up to Arlington about once a month to supervise the renovation of their homes. They stayed with Miss Sadie F. Hard, a sixtyish spinster who owned a cozy boardinghouse on Main Street and was famed locally for her recipes, most of which called for one cup or more of Vermont maple syrup.

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Rockwell had no difficulty finding friends who were inordinately devoted to him. He had the pull of celebrity, and people were flattered when he asked for their help. “I never had a friend I loved more,” Schaeffer later commented. He was four years younger than Rockwell, a trim adventurer with blue eyes and a Charlie Chaplin mustache. Although relatively unknown today, he was once prominent as a book illustrator. Much as Charles Scribner’s Sons had enlisted the formidable N. C. Wyeth to illustrate the classics it published, Dodd, Mead & Company initiated a similar series with Schaeffer doing most of the titles, starting with
Moby-Dick
in 1922. His illustrations, Rockwell once noted with admiration, “gave one a real sense of robust, swashbuckling manhood.”

Their friendship had begun in New Rochelle, and was sufficiently evolved by May 1939 to merit a mention in
Time.
A reporter who spotted Rockwell at the latest Society of Illustrators annual costume ball in Manhattan noted: “He and Mead Schaeffer, his good friend and fellow romancer, turned up at last week’s ball in costumes they were then engaged in painting.”
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A confusing sentence. Presumably the reporter meant that Rockwell was wearing a theatrical costume from his own collection, a costume in which one of his models had posed. Something Colonial, perhaps a ruffled white shirt and long waistcoat, a tricorn hat. “He really liked costume parties,” the illustrator George Hughes recalled of Rockwell.
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After the two men settled in Arlington, Rockwell would frequently call Schaeffer for advice on a particular painting in progress. Schaeffer would be in his studio within minutes, in front of his easel. “He wanted confirmation,” Schaeffer later said, “not an opinion. He was so boyish.”

As Rockwell became closer to Schaeffer, his friendship with Hildebrandt frayed. Hildebrandt felt hurt, displaced. In addition to being Rockwell’s studio assistant for about a decade, he had posed for more than a dozen paintings, accompanied Rockwell across the country, taken him up to the peak of Mount Whitney, and shared a bed with him in a cabin in the Canadian wilderness. He had introduced him to Mead Schaeffer, and now Rockwell, it seemed, desired Mead’s company exclusively.

Perhaps it was just that Rockwell had tired of using him as a model, much as he had once tired of using Billy Payne. He needed new faces and figures to keep his art fresh. Whatever the cause of their rift, it was lasting. Rockwell failed to mention Hildebrandt in his autobiography, a conspicuous omission. And when Rockwell sold his house in New Rochelle, a few years after moving to Vermont, he left one painting in his studio.
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The new owners loved having it even if it wasn’t by him. It was a portrait of Rockwell painted years earlier by someone they had never heard of, Frederick Hildebrandt.

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In September 1940, the U.S. Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, inaugurating the first peacetime draft. Most Americans wanted nothing to do with the calamity in Europe. But as Hitler’s armies continued their invasions, President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw fit to prepare.

On October 4, 1941, an Army private by the name of Willie Gillis made his first appearance on the cover of
The Saturday Evening Post
. Willie was a soldier in the U.S. Army—a short, sweet-faced young man who is shown leaving an Army camp post office with a wrapped parcel. He peers nervously over his shoulder as a group of six (larger) officers walk in unison behind him, casting predatory glances at his booty. Is it a ham? The oval package is wrapped in white paper and tied with twine. It is addressed, in a mother’s neat script, to Private Willie Gillis, at the Army base in Fort Dix, New Jersey. And so Willie was introduced to America, name and all.

Willie is a boyish figure, an American innocent, and readers of the
Post
were enchanted. Here was their absent brother and absent son. When you look at his face—the chubby cheeks, the jug ears, the open, honest expression—it is unimaginable that anyone could think of harming him.

Rockwell decided to turn Willie into a regular character, which he had never tried before. There would be a series of Willie Gillis covers, eleven in all, spaced out over the war years. “The artist credits his wife Mary with the idea of repeating the Willie Gillis character and also with naming the inductee,” a reporter noted in 1941.
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Mary named Willie after a character in one of two books she read to her children. Some have made the case for
Wee Gillis
, an under-recognized picture book about a Scottish orphan that won the Caldecott Honor Award in 1939. But probably it was Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “Wee Willie Winkie,” whose protagonist is a soldier-naif. He does not use his real name—the dreaded Percival—any more than Norman Perceval Rockwell did.

At any rate, many
Post
readers mistook Willie for an actual resident of Vermont, though of course he was a fictional character. The boy who modeled for him, Robert Otis Buck, of West Rupert, Vermont, was a high school student of sixteen. Rockwell first spotted him in the summer, at one of the regular square dances held on the West Arlington village green, and could not stop staring. Buck stood five foot four, with a young face and a lock of brown hair falling down his forehead.

The life of Willie Gillis, as related by Rockwell, ran counter to the nation’s dominant military narrative. It shifted attention from glamorous military men—from marines and sailors and pilots seated in open cockpits with their long, white scarves fluttering behind them in the sky—to the lowly, unsung infantryman. Just two weeks after Willie Gillis made his debut, a young cartoonist named Bill Mauldin introduced a soldier named Willie into a strip that had previously featured only Joe,
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perhaps following Rockwell’s lead. In the next few years, Mauldin’s
Willie and Joe
moved to the military newspaper
Stars and Stripes
and its two disheveled “dogface” protagonists became household names. The journalist Ernie Pyle noted, “War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.”
Little routine men
—they were the heroes not only of war but of all of American life. That was Rockwell’s view certainly and it would acquire the force of a national credo in 1942, when Vice President Henry Wallace paid homage to the “Century of the Common Man.”

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In the fall of 1941 Rockwell was visited by a feature writer for
Family Circle
magazine. The article, “He Paints the Town,” characterized him as a beloved citizen of Arlington.
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Photographs taken on a crisp fall day showed the five members of the Rockwell family fetching their bicycles from the barn, the image of sporty togetherness. There were also photographs of Arlington residents who had posed for Rockwell—including Sheriff Harvey McKee; Bob Buck (of Willie Gillis fame); Dan Walsh, who drove a mail truck and did an occasional Santa for Rockwell; and Nippy Noyes, the town’s jowly and full-bellied postmaster, whose corpulence made him a favorite Rockwell model for doctors and judges. The article conveyed the impression that Rockwell’s work was a communal effort in which most of the town participated on a day-to-day basis. By the time it appeared, Rockwell had been basking in the California sunshine for four months.

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He left Vermont in early November, and missed the whole drama of a New England winter, staying away until the snow melted and the trees began to bud. By then, he had made extensive improvements to the house and hired live-in help, a capable middle-aged couple, just as he had in New Rochelle. In Vermont, Bessie Wheaton cooked and took care of the Rockwell boys, and her husband Thaddeus, a former sewing-machine salesman in his fifties, became Rockwell’s handyman and gardener and occasional model. But now that the house was finally winterized and fit to be occupied year-round, Rockwell decided he had to get out. Like most everything else he genuinely wanted, he also longed to be free of it.