American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (32 page)

He flew out west by himself. “Norman, who has badly needed a vacation for some time, suddenly decided he would like it in California,” Mary wrote in a letter, on November 11, 1941. “So he is on his way and the children and I leave Friday.”
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It was his first trip to California since 1935 and, as usual, he stayed with his in-laws in Alhambra. The local art scene had changed since his last visit and lost its most talented painter. Frank Tenney Johnson had died suddenly of spinal meningitis, in 1939, at age sixty-four. He supposedly contracted the disease one week after kissing the hostess of a Christmas Eve party, an anecdote that has somehow outlived medical plausibility.

Vinnie Johnson, the artist’s widow, was still residing on Champion Place, next door to the building that had served as her husband’s studio. This is where Rockwell now settled in, 24 Champ, sharing the space with Forsythe and displaying his usual gift for transplanting himself and his artistic production to a new atelier three thousand miles from his home without missing a day of work. He could burrow in anywhere. He was astoundingly portable.

His friendship with Forsythe had been sustained without effort since the long-ago days when they had rented Frederic Remington’s studio in New Rochelle. Now they were in the studio of another painter of the Old West and Frank Johnson’s paintings as well as his cache of Indian artifacts—jugs, blankets, arrowheads—were still there. The memorabilia was freighted with meaning for Forsythe, a painter of desert landscapes.

Rockwell, by contrast, had no interest in romanticizing the West in his paintings. He spent a good chunk of his life among western painters who were fixed on visions of distant horizons and heroes on horseback, and who never could have anticipated that Rockwell would be the one whose work came to define the essence of America.

It was on this trip that Rockwell inaugurated a casual friendship with Walt Disney, who was seven years his junior. Then forty years old, Disney was at his creative zenith, a middle-aged wunderkind whose film studio had released a string of animation hits:
Pinocchio
,
Fantasia
, and
Dumbo
. His first feature-length animated film,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, of 1937
,
had landed him on the cover of
Time
, where in a photograph he is both dashing and amusing. He sits at a desk in an open-necked shirt, a dark-haired man with a long, lean face and a toothy smile, playing with figurines of Happy, Grumpy, Doc and the rest. Like Rockwell, Disney was an intuitive populist who had enormous faith in the taste of the American public. When asked if he was an artist, he inevitably demurred, claiming his only goal was to enchant the public.

Although Disney seemed to derive pleasure from little besides work, he did have at least one pastime: he played polo, describing his skill as middling to poor. He gave it up in 1938, after injuring his neck in a match.
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Instead, at the invitation of Forsythe—friend and fellow cartoonist—he joined Los Rancheros Visitadores, a riding club that allowed wealthy businessmen to play at being “cowboys” and apparently was less dangerous than polo. Once a year the group took a weeklong camping trip along the old trails in the Santa Ynez Valley, north of Santa Barbara. Rockwell, who was afraid of horses, was not a member, but Disney harbored a great admiration for his artistry and asked Forsythe to bring him by for a tour. So Rockwell went to see the sprawling, state-of-the-art Disney studio compound in Burbank, a horse-free zone.

While he was in California that winter, Rockwell undertook portraits of Walt’s two young daughters. Eight-year-old Diane Disney and five-year-old Sharon posed for a photographer in their father’s office and in a matter of days Rockwell had finished and delivered two lovely charcoal drawings. Diane, the dark-haired daughter, gazes out with a curious, almost pinched somberness, while Sharon smiles sweetly beneath her blond bangs and big hair ribbon.

Writing to Rockwell on December 31, Disney thanked him for “the swell portraits of my kids,”
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which he hung in his office. He seemed more moved by the portrait of Diane. “You captured a mood in my older daughter that I think is wonderful because at times she is such a serious thing and has often given me that same look that brings me off my high horse.”

Rockwell also gave Disney a copy each of
Tom Sawyer
and
Huck Finn
, the Heritage editions he illustrated, and Disney shelved them with care. As he wrote: “You may rest assured that they are in good company, along with the works of Pershing, H. G. Wells, Mussolini and many other famous guys!”

Benito Mussolini? “Good company” is not the first phrase that comes to mind. The attack on Pearl Harbor had occurred only three weeks earlier. The day after President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan, Hitler and Mussolini announced they were at war with the United States.

*   *   *

In March 1942 Rockwell returned home to Vermont and the quiet of the countryside. “Well, I’ve been back a week and it’s fine but I sort of miss all the excitement of the Champion Place studio,” he wrote to Forsythe on the 23rd, using his wife’s engraved stationery as usual.
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“Everyone seems less excited about the war here than out there. When I do get the dope on the poster situation, I will let you know.” He and Forsythe were itching to contribute to the war effort by designing recruitment posters.

His letter continued: “I guess you read about the big shake-up at the Post. Everyone out and a whole new editorial staff in.” Wesley Stout, whom Rockwell had always disliked, had been fired on March 12, after displaying an egregious lapse of judgment. He had somehow allowed into print a foolish and offensive article, “The Case Against the Jew.”
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It was written by Milton Mayer, a thirty-three-year-old journalist, left-winger, and conscientious objector who himself was Jewish. It excoriated Jews for abandoning their ancient faith to assimilate into America’s materialistic gentile culture, and claimed they had sacrificed their soul in the process. A tone-deaf “editor’s note” at the start of the piece read: “Mr. Mayer’s scorn for his fellow American Jews is exceeded only by his scorn for the gentiles.”

Overnight, subscriptions were canceled, advertisements were pulled, and the board of directors of Curtis Publications held an emergency meeting at which it was decided to sack Stout, effective immediately. Newspaper accounts of his departure were vague, claiming he resigned because of “a firm but friendly disagreement with the Curtis Publishing Company on policy.”
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In came Ben Hibbs, who would turn out to be a surprisingly effective editor. He was relatively young (forty-one), unpretentious and sensible, a former Kansas newspaperman who moved over from
The Country Gentleman
, another Curtis publication.

His first task was to try to regain the trust of readers. He wrote a formal apology that was published in the
Post
as well as in costly three-quarter-page advertisements in
The New York Times
and other major newspapers. “The Post never has been, is not now and never will be anti-Semitic in belief or expression,” Hibbs wrote in the ad. “It is not anti to any group.”
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He pledged to publish articles that would affirm the magazine’s commitment to racial and religious tolerance.

To compensate for the loss in advertising, the
Post
was forced, for the first time, to raise the price of a newsstand copy. It went from a nickel to ten cents, starting with the issue of May 30. Far more ominous was the loss of the
Post
’s circulation lead. In 1942
Life
pulled into first place and became the largest-circulation weekly in the country, with 3.4 million subscribers. The
Post
had 3.3 million and it would never regain the lead.

*   *   *

For Rockwell, the contretemps over the article was deeply disturbing, in part because there were rumors that the
Post
was about to fold. When he thought about the
Post
going under, he wasn’t sure whether his career would be over, or whether he would be better off. At least his life would be in his own hands. Tired of answering to
Post
editors, he wanted to do something major, to alter his fate. He imagined doing a poster that could define his times, his country in wartime.

He saw, in retrospect, that he had acted immaturely during World War I. Unlike Clyde Forsythe and the Leyendecker brothers and other artists he had known in New Rochelle, he had neglected to create war posters, had contributed nothing, besides his brief time drawing cartoons in the Navy. And what could be done now? Perhaps the moment had already passed. Anyone could see that the future belonged to photography. Looking back on his career, he thought of his paintings of boys and dogs and shuddered. He wanted to restore illustration to greatness. He wanted to be as heroic as Howard Pyle. He wanted to create one great image, and this is what he was up against: a world that had become far more image laden since the last war. A generation of
Life
photojournalists on the one hand and fine artists on the other, thousands upon thousands of image makers, were competing to abet the war effort.

FIFTEEN

THE
FOUR FREEDOMS

(MAY 1942 TO MAY 1943)

On May 21, 1942, Rockwell was in the other Arlington—Arlington, Virginia, threading through the halls of the new, low-lying Pentagon building. He had gone there seeking final approval for a poster design. Through an organization called the Artists Guild, he had been assigned to promote the U.S. Army Ordnance Department, which was responsible for distributing weapons.
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Rockwell’s poster was predictably martial. Actually, it’s more Leyendecker than Rockwell, a nighttime scene in which a hunky, helmeted solider crouches on a hill and fires his last round of bullets. “Let’s Give Him Enough and On Time,” the poster urges, referring to ammunition. Robert Patterson, the undersecretary of war, liked it enough, but requested that Rockwell portray the soldier in a pair of slacks rather than in juvenile breeches and leggings.
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That day in Virginia, Rockwell visited the Graphic Division of the War Department’s Office of Facts and Figures, which sounds like something out of George Orwell’s
1984
but was not at all nefarious. The agency oversaw the production of war-themed posters and billboards. Rockwell met with an official, Thomas D. Mabry, a former administrator at the Museum of Modern Art, who recalled telling him: “One of our most urgent needs and one that was most difficult to fill was a series of posters on the four freedoms.”
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He was referring to the Four Freedoms, a wartime variation on the Bill of Rights that had been laid out by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a ringing speech before Congress and incorporated, in the summer of 1941, into a declaration he drafted with Winston Churchill.

Rockwell returned to Vermont with a printed copy of the Atlantic Charter, as the declaration was known, intending to read it over and pick out choice sentences to illustrate. But when he read the text, the language was nebulous and abstract (“First of all, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other”) and hardly visual. What does a picture of “no aggrandizement” look like? Or, for that matter, how do you paint a defense of the democratic world? How do you visualize freedom without resorting to such staples of patriotic illustration as Uncle Sam in his top hat or Lady Liberty with her long Greek robe and outstretched arm? Those were the images that had beckoned from posters during World War I.

Rockwell often told the story of how he conceived his
Four Freedoms
in the middle of the night, how they came to him almost unbidden as he was lying in bed in Arlington, at three in the morning. He had recently attended a town meeting at which an acquaintance, Jim Edgerton, stood up to criticize a decision to rebuild a school that had burned down.
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Nobody agreed with him, but everyone listened. “That’s it,” Rockwell thought to himself. “That is Freedom of Speech.” He was in his studio at five that morning, roughing out sketches and spinning them into large drawings in which ordinary people (his neighbors) are shown doing ordinary things that affirm basic American freedoms and implicitly knock totalitarianism.

In mid-June Rockwell bundled up four oversize charcoal studies and set off with Mead Schaeffer on the long train ride back to the capital. Schaeffer, too, hoped to design war posters and had prepared some drawings of soldiers in action. They stayed at the Mayflower Hotel, near the White House, and were joined there by Orion Winford, an emissary from Brown & Bigelow, the company in St. Paul that published the annual Boy Scouts calendar. He had the odd, occasionally hellish job of having to coax a new painting out of Rockwell once a year and had come to Washington in the interest of oiling their relationship.

In the morning Rockwell and his entourage met with Patterson, the undersecretary who had admired his poster for the Ordnance Department. The poster of the machine gunner. But posters were no longer foremost in his thoughts and when he looked at the four charcoal drawings, he was distracted. So Rockwell visited another office. “The sketches were on big paper, which we would roll out like an Armenian displaying a rug, and then stand there grinning with expectation,” Rockwell later told an interviewer.
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At the time, President Roosevelt had just created the Office of War Information, a centralized propaganda agency that replaced assorted federal bureaus whose functions had overlapped. The OWI would exploit every available medium, from leaflets and pamphlets to radio programs and feature films, to foster support for the war.

One of the agency’s self-declared missions was “to assist American artists who wish to take part in the war effort.” But when Rockwell visited the office, he received a painful snub. An official declined to look at the charcoal studies he had brought with him. “The last war you illustrators did the posters,” the official said without apology. “This war we’re going to use fine arts men, real artists.”
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