American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (43 page)

Rockwell was worried about the gossip swirling around him in Arlington, where everyone, it seemed, knew about Mary’s crush on Dr. O’Neil. Dr. Knight assured him: “the gossip element in the situation will soon die down and you should not be concerned about that. All small towns are alive with gossip.” The doctor, responding to another of Rockwell’s stated concerns, advised him to feel feel free to embark on a trip to England he was considering at the time, assuming his health improved. Rockwell had “a touch of the flu,” and Dr. Knight noted sympathetically: “I am sorry to know you are laid up, especially when you have a deadline on a picture coming up.”
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Mary permitted her children to visit her at Riggs and every few weeks Peter made the ninety-minute bus ride from Arlington down to Stockbridge to see his mother. Usually he stayed for the weekend, in a room in a guest house, and enjoyed the visit. He played croquet with the patients and joined them for lunch in the dining room of the Inn, where the tables were set with good china and silverware and a warm atmosphere prevailed. Returning home on Sunday nights, Peter would report to his father on his mother’s state. “I would tell him how she was doing, and my father would bemoan his fate,” Peter recalled years later. “Sometimes, when I came back from Riggs, I would sleep in the same room as my father and we would talk. And one day he said to me, ‘Oh, I was so miserable today. If it weren’t for you boys, I would have committed suicide.’ But, my father was a self-dramatizer. I didn’t believe a word he said.”
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Still, there can be little doubt that Rockwell felt drained by the demands of trying to sustain his career while his wife remained hospitalized. Treatment at Austen Riggs was costly: room and board ran to $170 a week, which did not include such ancillary expenses as phone calls and medication. After years of declining outside work, Rockwell began to accept advertising assignments again to bring in extra revenue.

Through his meetings with Dr. Knight, Rockwell became aware of mood-lifting drugs and ways to tackle his own depression. He asked Dr. George Russell, his physician in Vermont, to write a prescription for Dexamyl, a small green pill of the combination sort, half Dexedrine, half barbiturate, wholly addictive. It was a perfect artist’s drug—both a stimulant and a relaxant—until you tried to get off of it and felt near-dead. Rockwell was so enamored of it he met with representatives from Smith, Kline & French Laboratories and agreed to help with a national marketing campaign. He produced six polished drawings “of your typical Dexamyl patient”
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—four women and two men looking like sad sacks—for use in glossy brochures and full-page advertisements in medical journals.

When he went to New York for his annual checkup, his longtime doctor was surprised to find him in poor health. “You have lost six pounds during the past year,” Dr. Twiss wrote in a follow-up letter on May 21, 1951, “and there was more evidence of exhaustion than I have seen at any time for many years.”
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He instructed Rockwell to stay on his “nerve medication”—the Dexamyl, perhaps not realizing that the pills could cause weight loss as well as exhaustion. Dr. Twiss also suggested that he avoid “undue exertion” and take off from work on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons, advice that was duly ignored.

Mary was released from Riggs in mid-June, in time to partake of another Vermont summer, with her husband and three sons around her. But she was not the same person. Mary, the supposed caretaker, needed extensive care herself. She returned to Riggs at least once a week to receive counseling from Dr. Knight and Rockwell occasionally joined her. The doctor instructed him to hire a business manager to free Mary of the onerous task of paying bills and balancing the books and rushing to assemble hundreds of receipts whenever his federal income tax was due.

“His books were a mess,” recalled Chris Schafer, a former Chicago banker (not to be confused with Mead Schaeffer) who lived on a farm in Arlington and now stepped in as Rockwell’s bookkeeper. He came into the studio a few mornings a week and sifted through the mounds of bills. “Norman wrote checks and kept no records,” he continued. “He depended on Mary to do it. But neither of them kept the books balanced.”
17

It was the summer of Dwight David Eisenhower’s presidential campaign and the
Post
wanted a portrait of him for its cover. Eisenhower was then far ahead of Adlai Stevenson in the polls, and a catchy jingle from an animated commercial—“Do you like Ike? I like Ike”—had become a national refrain. Commentators insisted that Americans craved change after twenty years of Democrats in the White House. One morning in mid-July, Rockwell received a phone call informing him that Eisenhower and Mamie were willing to sit for a portrait at 8:30 the next morning, presuming he could be in their suite by then, in the Brown Palace Hotel, in Denver, Colorado. So Rockwell hurriedly packed a bag, went to New York City, and caught a plane from La Guardia Field.
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It was Rockwell’s first portrait of a presidential candidate, an admittedly limited art genre. But he warmed instantly to Eisenhower and found him visually engaging as well, despite the bald pate and prominent forehead that made his head seem larger than it was. “Eisenhower had about the most expressive face I ever painted,” Rockwell recalled. “Just like an actor’s—very mobile. When he talked, he used all the facial muscles. And he had a great, wide mouth that I liked.” Not immune to personal vanity, he asked Rockwell to airbrush one of his gold fillings. Rockwell’s solution was to paint the future president with his lips closed (but smiling).

Rockwell received sad news on July 25, 1951. His onetime hero, J. C. Leyendecker, suffered a heart attack and died at his home, at the age of seventy-seven. Rockwell drove down to New Rochelle to pay his respects. “The coffin was in his studio,” he noted later, and the room had hardly changed since the long-ago days when he had been a regular visitor to the mansion on Mount Tom Road. Leyendecker’s smock was still hanging on the outside of the closet door; his brushes were laid out on the table. Hardly anyone turned out for the obsequies in the studio, just Charles Beach, Augusta Leyendecker, and a couple of cousins.

Leyendecker’s last cover for
The Saturday Evening Post
had appeared in 1943, eight years before his death. “And that was the end of it all,” Rockwell observed.
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“It scared me. Joe had been the most famous illustrator in America. Then the
Post
had dropped him, the ad agencies had dropped him, the public had forgotten him. He died in obscurity.”

Returning to his studio in Vermont, Rockwell glanced at the unfinished painting on his easel and thought, “it wasn’t a reassuring sight.” So few artists were able to survive over time and the number of illustrators was even smaller. It was chilling to contemplate how many of the brightest artistic reputations turned to dust.

*   *   *

It was in the shadow of Leyendecker’s death that Rockwell completed
Saying Grace
, which has been called his most popular painting. It is set on a drizzly afternoon, at a greasy-spoon diner at a train station, where an old lady in a daisy-bedecked straw hat and her small grandson count their blessings during the lunchtime rush. As they bow their heads and say grace, they attract the slightly stunned gaze of a handful of diners, a typical Rockwellian clan made up of well-intentioned strangers, men of different ages and backgrounds who look up from their conversations and their newspapers. The painting is a ballet of gazes, a delicate interplay of actions and reactions that together affirm the power, the jolt of connection, afforded by the act of looking.

The little boy is portrayed from the back, his white shirt glowing against the somber, tobacco-brown tones of the painting. He has taken off his blazer, which is bunched up behind him on the red cushion of his bentwood chair. Rockwell lavishes great tenderness on the back of the boy’s neck, the luminous, baby-soft skin extending from his white shirt collar up to the razored line of his reddish-gold hair and occupying the focal center of the composition. The boy seems to be breathing a purer kind of air than the figures around him. He harks back to earlier Rockwell paintings that offer a vision of youthful male beauty lying beyond reach. The cigar-smoking man in the lower left is a spatial marker, occupying the foreground and keeping the boy safely in the middle distance. Although only a sliver of the man is visible, the objects on his table—used silverware, a folded copy of
The New York Times
, a sludgy cup of coffee
—
suggest he has been sitting there for a while. He’s a watchman, keeping Rockwell at a distance from the warm, beating heart of the painting.

The cover ran on November 24, 1951—the date matters, because it was timed to coincide with Thanksgiving. The grandmother and grandson are dressed up for the holiday. Are they at the end of a train journey, or the beginning? Presumably the latter. The grandma has her knitting bag to keep her occupied for the ride. The boy’s railroad ticket is tucked into the ribbon of his hat, which he has taken off and hung on the handle of an umbrella. Outside the plate-glass window, a dense fog settles over the buildings in the railroad yard. A smattering of backward, Cubist-style lettering on the window—“TNARU”—spells the end of the word
restaurant
while containing the anagram UN-ART and suggesting the self-mocking message U R an ANT.

When the
Post
did a survey asking readers to name their favorite Rockwell cover,
Saying Grace
won hands-down.
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

To obtain authentic-looking details, Rockwell consulted a variety of sources. He made several trips to the train station in Troy. He arranged for an actual Automat in New York City to deliver an assortment of chairs, tables, and dishes to his studio. (“A truck pulled up, deposited the furniture, then took it away a few days later,” recalled his cook, Marie Briggs.) The painting did not come easily. He did only three
Post
covers that year and
Saying Grace
ate up months. The illustrator George Hughes remembered a night when Rockwell threw the canvas into the snow in a fit of disgust, only to retrieve it the next morning.

The seven figures who appear in the painting posed in his studio, in separate shifts. They included his photographer (Gene Pelham), his son Jarvis, and eight-year-old Don Hubert, Jr., whom Rockwell plucked out of a third-grade classroom at the Arlington Memorial School. The little boy turned out to be a fidgety model, unable to hold still even for a photograph. “He Scotch-taped my feet to the floor of his studio,” Hubert recalled later, without bitterness. And poor May Walker, the widow who posed as the grandmother, her hands clasped in prayer. She did not live to see the cover, dying just a few days before it appeared on newsstands.
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In 1955, when the
Post
did a survey asking readers to name their favorite Rockwell cover,
Saying Grace
won hands down. Perhaps it appealed to America’s sense of itself as a nation of believers, in stark contrast to the Soviet Union and its ranks of godless Communists. As President Eisenhower once remarked, “Our government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”
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*   *   *

The fall of 1952 saw the election of General Eisenhower to the White House, but in Arlington, Vermont, it was a season of loss and mourning. On September 15, Rockwell’s dear friend John Atherton died in a drowning accident in New Brunswick, Canada, where he and his wife, Maxine, had gone on a salmon-fishing expedition. He was only fifty-two.

Just the year before, Atherton had published
The Fly and the Fish
, which was dedicated to his wife, and would become a classic of angling literature. It was a love letter to the Batten Kill, on whose banks Atherton lived. There he built himself a house, “the most modern house in Arlington,” as Maxine described it, a low, horizontal structure that seemed to blend with the hillside.
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Maxine buried his ashes behind the house, beneath a maple on the riverbank. For a few weeks that fall, not wanting to be alone, she stayed with Rockwell and Mary. She found him diverting and appreciated his sense of humor. “Norman was very amusing,” she recalled. “He would call me in and ask for comments and I loved it. Once he took my advice by destroying a painting.”
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His marriage was a protracted struggle, however, and people in Arlington felt sorry for him. That fall, Mary had another car accident. It was Halloween; she was driving home from an appointment at Riggs at 5:30 in the evening when she rounded a curve and hit a stalled car. The front end of her brand-new Chevy station wagon was “badly smashed,” according to the accident report, and she suffered various cuts and bruises. After that, Rockwell arranged for her to take a car service to her appointments at Austen Riggs.