American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (37 page)

All this Boy Scout role playing was not lost on Rockwell’s illustrator friends in Arlington, who cast a mocking eye on his work for the Boy Scouts and could not understand why he persisted in taking assignments from them. “Norman did it with ease,” Schaeffer recalled. “He could turn around and do a Boy Scouts calendar. He would close the door and hope I wouldn’t come around.”
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Schaeffer, like Atherton, split himself between commercial art and fine art. The way they saw it, the commercial part was what you did to finance your real work, your painting, the pictures you made to satisfy no one besides yourself. “I could not imagine that Rockwell would ever do that,” Schaeffer said, “wake up in the morning and have some fun playing around with shapes.”

They found it incredible that Rockwell remained an artist at the
Post
while leaving himself with no time to make art on his own. Whether such art would have been aesthetically superior to his
Post
covers is a question no one asked. Or whether his
Post
covers might themselves be art was another never-raised possibility. The assumption was, even among his fellow illustrators, that art occupied a higher plane than illustration, and they wondered why he did not reach for it.

It’s not as if his
Post
covers paid all that well. For a magazine illustrator, Rockwell was cursed, or rather blessed, with a lack of efficiency. It took him so long to complete his large and obsessively worked covers for the
Post
that he wound up losing money on paintings that were supposedly commercially driven. The Boy Scouts calendars—those were profitable, but not the magazine covers.

Still, Rockwell was loathe to undertake a painting that wasn’t assigned to him by a magazine or an advertising agency. He could work only when he was facing a deadline, fulfilling an obligation.

One evening, Rockwell’s son Peter, who was sick in bed, asked his father to entertain him by drawing some clowns. Rockwell resisted his son’s entreaties, claiming he could not draw without looking at a model or a photograph. He needed to gather objects in front of him, an array of things to look at. He went cold when he tried to draw an image from his head, as he said. He was afraid of what might come out if he allowed himself to fall prey to his imaginings. He was the most nervous of realists, a painter who felt vulnerable when he shut his eyes.

*   *   *

In October 1944 Rockwell purchased a cabin and twenty acres in Sunderland, a few miles from his house.
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It consisted of one room and allowed him to go into seclusion when his studio became too chaotic. Sometimes it was all he desired: a refuge from his refuge, to be alone again, to be in bed by ten, to fall asleep without having to hear the noise—the late parties, with their laughter and slamming car doors—coming from the village green. It was widely reported that Rockwell was an excellent square dancer, and served as an officer of the West Arlington Grange, which planned the dances. Even so, he was likely to take to his cabin on Saturday nights, when the dances and live music went on until midnight.

The Rockwell and Schaeffer families socializing in Arlington, Vermont

He was interviewed in great depth that fall for a profile in
The New Yorker
. It was written by Rufus Jarman, a gifted young journalist from Tennessee.
The New Yorker
was aimed at an urban readership rather than what editor Harold Ross called “the old lady in Dubuque”—the comment was presumed to be a jab at
The Saturday Evening Post.
Rockwell himself was the first to agree that the
Post
lacked literary substance and sparkle. “He always read
The New Yorker
,” his son Jarvis recalled, adding pointedly, “He never read
The Saturday Evening Post
.”

The first part of
The New Yorker
profile ran in the March 17, 1945, issue, the second part a week later. Perhaps no one was more surprised by it than Rockwell’s three sons. The piece made passing reference to his first wife, Irene O’Connor, “an upstate girl,” whose existence came as news to his children. Tommy, the middle child, then a sixth-grader and the most studious of the Rockwell boys, read every column inch of the article and provided a careful synopsis for his incredulous brothers. It seemed beyond belief that their father, with his penchant for storytelling, had somehow neglected to mention the story of his fourteen-year marriage to a woman named Irene. Now when they looked at him, they saw a man with an elaborate hidden past, a stranger.

Rockwell emerges from the profile as a man given to amusing anecdotes, especially of the kind told at his own expense. In a typical moment, he relates a story about a time when he was visiting Los Angeles and received an invitation from the office of Josef von Sternberg. The stylish European director was apparently eager to make his acquaintance. So Rockwell showed up on his film set and a publicist perkily introduced him, saying, “Meet Norman Rockwell!” Sternberg appeared horrified. “Not Rockwell Kent?”
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Over the years, Rockwell Kent often provided Rockwell with a convenient punchline. In interviews and lectures, he insisted that he had benefitted royally from the comedy of errors that led countless people to confuse him with Kent, his hugely gifted contemporary. Kent was a painter, book illustrator, and self-proclaimed socialist.
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The two artists never met, but for years kept up an amiable correspondence. Every so often, Kent would forward Rockwell a packet of letters, most of them praising
Post
covers he had neither painted nor seen.

Rockwell claimed in
The New Yorker
article that he had “hung around southern California off and on for quite a while,” but no longer went there. Actually, he was in Southern California when
The New Yorker
profile appeared.
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As usual, he stayed with his in-laws and set up an easel at 22 Champion Place, in Frank Tenney Johnson’s former studio. He presented himself as a Yankee artist, a self-reliant Vermonter living on a village green and shivering through another winter when in fact he was nowhere near snow.

*   *   *

Rockwell was still in Los Angeles on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt, who was visiting his second home in the resort town of Warm Springs, Georgia, complained of a pain in the back of his head and collapsed at his desk. He was sixty-three years old and his death came as a terrible shock. That evening, Vice President Harry S. Truman of Missouri, standing gravely in the Cabinet Room of the White House, his wife, Bess, beside him dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, put his hand on a Bible and took the oath of office.

On May 8 President Truman announced that the Germans had surrendered. By then, Rockwell was back in Vermont and had already delivered a resonant, extra-timely cover for the May 26 issue of the
Post. Homecoming G.I.
shows a Yank soldier-son who has just walked up to an apartment building and whose relatives are ecstatically rushing out to greet him. (Their beagle is a few steps ahead of them.) In the center of the composition, a redheaded grandmother opens her arms as if to welcome not just her boy, but all the sons who served in the war. America welcomes you home, she seems to be saying.

Interestingly, the soldier stands with his back to us and we cannot know his precise mood. The painting is less about his feelings than the burst of joy his safe return inspires among a small crowd of neighbors who pause at what they are doing to observe him. A workman fixing a shingle on the roof turns around, a married couple appears in a door frame, faces gaze down from second-story windows. Schoolboys climbing a tree freeze. They are part of the same circle, one that implicitly includes not only the folks looking at the soldier but a wider circle comprised of
Post
readers looking at the folks looking on the cover.

Homecoming G.I.
was used by the federal government to help promote the final War Loan Drive.

Homecoming G.I.
is Rockwell’s first painting to be set in a scrappy urban neighborhood. He found the building in Troy, New York, near Albany, after trolling the city for two days with John Atherton.
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The painting is often described as a scene in which a redheaded soldier is being greeted by his redheaded relatives, but the sixteen figures dispersed across the stagelike space cannot be so easily categorized. The schoolboy waving hello from the top of the tree is African-American, as is the repairman on the roof. The three dark-haired women leaning out of a second-floor window are supposed to be Jewish.
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It seems almost certain that Rockwell conceived the painting after looking closely at Eastman Johnson’s well-known
Negro Life at the South
of 1859, a sympathetic portrayal of a group of American slaves on an ordinary day in Washington, D.C. Rockwell borrowed many elements from the Johnson painting: the back alley, the dingy red bricks, the wooden overhang in need of repair.

If Rockwell was becoming sensitized to the plight of minorities, it would be a while before race became an explicit subject of his work. For now, even his own children posed for him infrequently and accused him of favoring facial types. They believe he preferred the sons of the plumber or the coal dealer or the insurance agent in town. “Increasingly, as we grew up, we came to seem more dissatisfactory to him,” Jarvis Rockwell said years later. “He wanted freckles and red hair.”

Jarvis, a future artist, was the oldest of the Rockwell boys and the one who had the prickliest relationship with his father. In September 1945, his parents sent him off to a Quaker-run boarding school, the Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie. Two Septembers later, he was joined there by his brother Tom. When Mary filled out the application, she gave Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who was on the board, as a reference. Asked about the family’s church membership, Mary wrote: “None.”

“My father didn’t want us to grow up to be Vermont people,” Jarvis said. “He was using Vermont for his gene pool. He was using it for his models. The minute he saw someone, either they became part of a painting, or he had no use for them. As a family we stood shoulder to shoulder, and faced out. There was a hollowness where the family was supposed to be.”

*   *   *

In the fall of 1946 Arthur L. Guptill published the first-ever monograph on Rockwell. Entitled
Norman Rockwell, Illustrator
, it was better than it had to be. Guptill, an artist-professor with a goatee, was an authority on art technique. His book on Rockwell remains useful as a look at Rockwell’s process, stroke by stroke.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher furnished the preface. She was the first writer to assert that Rockwell created his work from “inner necessity.” Defending him from the disdain of unnamed snobs, she argues that the humor and optimism of his work should be viewed as a courageous stand against aesthetic fashion. He is original, goes his own way, shrugs off critics. If he were merely trying to please and pander, she posits, he would portray “the beauty of Nature,” trees and red barns and glowy pink sunsets, the sort of rustic imagery that remained alien to his work.

The book sold poorly, perhaps because Guptill could not be bothered to advertise it. Moreover, it was expensive (ten dollars), about four times as much as your average nonfiction book. In a letter to Rockwell, Guptill mentioned his disappointment at having sold only fifteen thousand copies.
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*   *   *

At some point when no one was looking, Mary Rockwell began drinking heavily. Later, her sons were vexed to think how little notice they had taken of their mother’s alcoholism, which they attributed to a variety of factors. Besides being relegated to the background of her marriage, she was overwhelmed with tasks that Rockwell expected her to perform. She still managed the business side of his career, which required that she answer his correspondence and get him out of assignments he regretted accepting. She also took care of his finances. Working in a small office behind the dining room, she recorded his credits and debits in the ruled columns of ledger books, the kind with red imitation-leather covers. Four times a year, she would submit her books to an accountant, who would calculate the estimated tax and invariably send her stern letters asking for receipts that she could not locate and making her feel wholly inadequate to the task.