American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (42 page)

NINETEEN

SHUFFLETON’S BARBERSHOP

(1950 TO 1953)

He felt exhausted much of the time and wondered if he was anemic. In January 1950, visiting his physician in New York for a general checkup, he complained of stomachaches and “abdominal tension.” Dr. Russell Twiss, writing to Rockwell on January 20, diagnosed the problem as a “a spastic, irritable colon.” He wrote a prescription for antispasmodic pills and advised him to take the vitamin Theragran as well, to offset his feelings of fatigue. Rockwell, who had always accused his mother of hypochondria, could be similarly consumed by his aching body and spent a good deal of time visiting doctors up and down the East Coast.

On February 3, 1950, he turned fifty-six, apparently without fanfare. “Norman Rockwell has been confined to the house by illness for several days,” the
Bennington Banner
noted that week.
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Through the winter, he worked on a painting that ranks as one of his five or six best works. It marks a sharp break from his earlier work, reflecting a desire to erase the element of caricature from his work, to banish the grimacing faces, the boys with their saucer eyes and elastic mouths twisted in surprise. He turned to the great realists for guidance. In the course of the fifties, Rockwell would produce his most contemplative paintings, the first of which was
Shuffleton’s Barbershop
, which graced the cover of the
Post
on April 29, 1950. (See color insert.)

A barbershop is, among other things, a site of licensed physical contact between men, a place where men touch other men. Yet Rockwell has chosen to depict the barbershop at a moment when the leather chair is empty. It is evening, and the shop has been closed for the day. The picture’s action occurs in a small, lit room behind the main barbershop, where three older, silver-haired men sit playing music. You imagine they do this regularly, perhaps once a week. Rob Shuffleton, who actually owned a barbershop on Maple Street in East Arlington and cut Rockwell’s hair, has traded his scissors for a cello—he’s the player with his back to the viewer. Bernie Twitchell is on the violin, and Germ Warner is at the clarinet. Is their ensemble credible? Not very. Music historians point out that clarinet, violin, and cello trios are exceedingly rare.

In real life, Shuffleton did not in fact play cello,
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did not play any instrument at all. Perhaps Rockwell invented the detail of the musical ensemble to underscore the harmony that prevailed at the barbershop. Shuffleton was seventy when Rockwell’s picture was published, and was perplexed by the black cat portrayed on the premises, another fictional embellishment.
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Shuffleton’s Barbershop
is remarkably evolved for a magazine cover. With its cigar-box-brown tones and meticulous detail, it transports seventeenth-century Dutch realism into a mid-twentieth-century town in New England. Some viewers look at the painting, with its shaft of lemony light spilling into a darkened shop, and think of Vermeer. But the picture is probably closer in spirit to Vermeer’s contemporary Pieter de Hooch, who loved to paint distant views of a room behind a room and extracted a surprising pictorial drama from the play of multiple windows and doors.

It can also put you in mind of American trompe l’oeil painting, with its catalog of humble detail. The novelist John Updike, himself a master of descriptive realism, confessed that he had a poster of
Shuffleton’s Barbershop
hanging in his bathroom and loved to rake its surface for old-fashioned details—the wooden broom; the white towel draped over the arm of the barbershop chair; the big combs submerged in the jars of Barbicide; the clippers and scissors and tonics on the shelves.
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On the newsrack in the lower left corner, you can make out the covers of several then-current magazines and comic books, including
Crime Does Not Pay
and the December 1949 issue of
Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories
, in which Donald Duck peers over a fence at his mischievous nephews.
5

Although the painting is typically described as a meditation on the coziness of small-town life, it can also be viewed as a painting about loneliness and exclusion. The viewer, standing on the sidewalk on a winter night and looking through the window, is shut out of the magic circle inside: the toasty-warm, lighted room where embers glow in a coal stove and men make beautiful music. The painting suggests that looking is not the same thing as living, that looking is a kind of exile or death.

*   *   *

When summer arrived, Rockwell could no longer depend on the company of Mead Schaeffer. After a decade in Vermont, Schaeffer longed to be near the ocean and moved to Sea Cliff, Long Island.
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In his stead, Rockwell had the company of his son Jarvis, who had become an art student. Rockwell, with his love of renovating buildings, converted a former chicken coop on the property into a private studio for him. Claiming that Jarvis could benefit from the presence of fellow students, Rockwell also decided to start an art school in the shuttered one-room schoolhouse on the West Arlington Green. He asked William McNulty, an instructor at the Art Students League, to hand-pick some students for the coming summer. In July six young men moved into the schoolhouse. They found Rockwell to be immensely likable, if not exactly a born teacher. He invited them to join him at tennis—he had built a clay court beside his studio a few years earlier—and to accompany him on his treks along the Batten Kill.

As amiable as Rockwell could be, Jarvis felt his father’s sense of artistic identity was too precarious to allow him to tolerate potential rivals, particularly among his children. “It was clear that my father didn’t think it was a good idea that I make art. He thought N. C. Wyeth was a nut. He thought the Wyeths were even crazier than we were.”

The comment refers to N. C. Wyeth, the brilliant illustrator who had looked upon art as a kind of ecstatic family business. He educated his five children in his studio in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and insisted that they stay around afterward. When Andrew Wyeth decided to marry, his father offered him a bribe to delay it. He went ahead with the wedding, but remained under his father’s watch, moving into a converted schoolhouse near the foot of N.C.’s driveway.

Rockwell had a good deal in common with N. C. Wyeth, who was a bit older than he and best known for his illustrations of books like
Treasure Island.
He and Wyeth belonged to the same extended art family spawned by Howard Pyle, with whom Wyeth had actually studied. By the time Rockwell started his “art school” in Vermont, N. C. Wyeth had died, the victim of a car accident (in 1945) at a railway crossing near his home. Rockwell had once visited him in Chadds Ford, driving down with Schaeffer to see the Brandywine Valley. In his autobiography, Rockwell took an uncharacteristic jab at N.C.’s work, claiming that it lacked the “authority and research,” the factual amplitude, one finds in the work of Pyle.

But then, the Wyeths were hard on Rockwell, regarding him as a commercial artist whose work could not possibly endure. It’s relevant that N. C. Wyeth denied the greatness of his own illustrations, had a separate career as a fine artist and sourly maintained: “Painting and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from one into the other.” This was a common plaint among twentieth-century illustrators, for whom discomfort with illustration was nearly a career prerequisite. Wyeth’s unease over the aesthetic worth of illustration was not shared by Rockwell, who did not doubt the value of illustration, only his own ability to live up to its exalted past.

*   *   *

By now Mary Rockwell had turned for help to Dr. James P. O’Neil, a general practitioner in his early thirties who had recently settled in Arlington. He was one of the few people in Vermont whose conversation she enjoyed. He was better read than other men in Arlington, most of whom were blue-collar types who worked in farming or light industry. Once when Mary suffered an “acute episode,” Dr. O’Neil sped over to the house and gave her an injection of epinephrine, which she claimed saved her life.

Rockwell must have felt appreciative of the doctor as well. Early in 1951, when he was asked to make a poster for the National Committee for the Observance of Mother’s Day, he chose the doctor’s wife as his model. He depicted her as a fresh-faced brunette nuzzling her young son and daughter. The painting graced the cover of
Parents’
magazine in May 1951, and Rockwell, who frequently gave away his paintings to the people who posed for them, presented it to the family as a gift. “My best to the O’Neils,” he wrote in the lower right corner.

Mary and Dr. O’Neil occasionally had coffee together at George Howard’s general store, which had a little lunch counter. “My mother had a crush on him,” recalled her son, Tom, “and she would go to this coffee shop because he was there.” It seems unlikely that the physician might have returned her affection or regarded her as an object of romance. To him she was merely a patient, the troubled wife of a famous artist. One day Mary went to the lunch counter in the hope of seeing Dr. O’Neil, and when he failed to materialize, she was so distressed she started screaming and crying. She was taken by ambulance to Putnam Memorial Hospital in Bennington.

TOP
: Rockwell and Mary in his studio. With its knotty-pine walls and a reproduction of Pieter Bruegel’s
The Peasant Dance
hanging over the mantelpiece, the studio was more elaborately decorated than his home (
above
).
(
TOP
: photograph by Arthur Johnson;
ABOVE
: photograph by Bill Scovill, courtesy of the Famous Artists School)

Dr. O’Neil thought she needed to spend some time drying out at a retreat, and he referred her to the Austen Riggs Center, a small psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Unlike other institutions, with their straitjackets and locked wards, their electric-shock therapy and corseted nurses in white uniforms, Riggs was an open hospital. Patients could come and go as they pleased and the goal was to teach them to be responsible for their well-being. It catered to well-off patients who could afford months and even years of care. Rockwell drove Mary down for her first visit, on February 22, 1951, a Thursday, and they each went in to meet with Dr. Robert P. Knight, the center’s imposing medical director. Mary saw the doctor first, for an entrance interview from three to four; then Rockwell came in for a half hour.
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Mary was admitted the following Monday would remain at Riggs for four months, in treatment for alcoholism. Her children believed her stay was prompted by a suicide attempt, although their father did not discuss the matter with them and they did not feel comfortable pressing for explanations.

Mary was then forty-two, a stocky woman with tortoiseshell glasses and frizzy brown hair pulled into a ponytail. She dressed casually in button-down blouses and below-the-knee skirts. During her hospitalization, she lived in Foundation Inn—the Inn, as the patient residence was known, a white-brick mansion right on Main Street. Although she was not a candidate for analysis because she was still drinking, she did gain great comfort from her sessions with Dr. Knight, a handsome midwesterner who had graduated from Oberlin and taught high-school English in Ohio before becoming a psychoanalyst. Six years older than Mary, he shared her devotion to books as well as to smoking. He had a three-pack-a-day habit, and was known to smoke even in the shower.
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During the months when Mary was away, her two older sons were off at school. Rockwell remained in the house with Peter, who was now in tenth grade. In the evening, their cook, Marie Briggs, would set a couple of steaks on the table. As the weeks and then the months passed and the hillsides glowed with new growth, Rockwell barely took note of spring. His sons believed he was consumed by feelings of resentment and was vexed not only by Mary’s drinking but by the fact that she had, in effect, deserted him. With Mary gone, there was no one to screen his phone calls and track down props for his paintings and he felt overwhelmed. “He was a needy person,” recalled his son Tom. “He thought the world was unmanageable.”
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His children claim that their father never visited their mother in Stockbridge that spring. “She was at that period anti-my-father,” Peter recalled. “She wanted time apart. She believed he was not helpful to her recovery.”
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But we know from Dr. Knight’s appointment books that Rockwell frequently spoke to him by phone and drove to Stockbridge about once a month to meet with him in his office, sometimes sharing the hour with Mary.
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Just two weeks after Mary was admitted, Dr. Knight sent Rockwell a thoughtful letter on her progress. She was faring well in both her therapy sessions and overall adjustment to her new surroundings. Her stay, he noted, “takes a considerable burden off of Dr. O’Neil, I am sure, and also will probably cause that relationship to come into more realistic perspective on your wife’s part.”
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