American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (46 page)

Rockwell was a dependent man who tended to lean on men, and in Erikson he found reliable support. “All that I am, all that I hope to be, I owe to Mr. Erikson,” he once wrote.
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The sentence echoes a line from his favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, who once wrote in a poem: “All that I am, all that I hope to be, I owe to my mother.”

Rockwell wrote the comment inside of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
, the Heritage edition he illustrated in the thirties. In the copy he gave to Erikson, he also drew a droll sketch. It shows Tom Sawyer in his floppy straw hat and faded overalls, a grinning, gap-toothed boy smoking a corn pipe as he takes time off from his usual escapades to try to comprehend the eight stages of human development. Tom is avidly reading
Childhood and Society
, Erikson’s first and most popular book, which Rockwell now came to know intimately.

*   *   *

Once he began therapy with Erikson, Rockwell’s work became more overtly psychological.
Girl at Mirror
,
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the first painting he completed in Stockbridge and one of his most beloved
Post
covers, appeared on March 6, 1954. It shows a girl on the cusp of what Erikson called Stage Five, adolescence, in the throes of “Identity vs. Role Confusion.” Mary Whalen Leonard, the red-headed girl in Vermont who had posed for
The Shiner
, was also the model for the far more somber
Girl at Mirror
, which Rockwell had begun before he moved to Stockbridge.

A girl of twelve, scantily dressed in a white cotton slip trimmed in eyelet, is shown from the back, perched on a footstool in a shadowy attic. A comb and brush lie to the left of her bare feet, as does a tube of bright-red lipstick—note that the cap is off. She has just completed what is perhaps her first attempt at applying lipstick, and stares nervously at her reflection in a full-length mirror, as if waiting to step out of her skin and metamorphose into someone new, someone lovely, someone a man might want to kiss. An issue of
Movie Spotlight
magazine resting on her lap is flipped open to a full-page photograph (head only) of Jane Russell, who was celebrated for her bustline (38D) and who offered a vision of voluptuousness beside which no woman could measure up, especially the pancake-flat girl in Rockwell’s painting. Deploying the kind of self-referential cleverness today known as meta, Rockwell has given us a magazine image about a magazine image.

Despite the painting’s popularity, Rockwell later said on several occasions that he regretted including the image of Jane Russell, who had recently appeared in her best film,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, and was added to the painting only as an afterthought.
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He came to feel that her presence seriously compromised the work, allowing only one interpretation of it—a story about a girl who realizes she will never be a movie star—and killing off any hint of metaphor or nuance.

Hardly.
Girl at Mirror
remains riveting as an image of ambivalent womanhood, with its sensitively rendered female figure. Actually, seen from the back, she could be a boy; her left shoulder bulges a bit, and her adjacent trapezius muscle (to the left of her spine) is also beefy. But glimpsed from the front—in her mirrored reflection—she is slim and unmistakably girlish. In other words, there are two girls in the painting. There’s the real girl, perhaps a tomboy, who has sneaked upstairs to the attic with her
Movie Spotlight
fanzine (do her parents even allow her to read it?), propped a mirror against a chair, and put on her mother’s lipstick. Then there’s the other girl, the reflected mirror image that she confronts across a dark divide.

Who is that girl in the mirror? Covering her breasts with both arms as she raises her hands to her chin, she appears vulnerable and even fragile. Her toy doll, dressed in layers of ruffles and tossed on the floor, is a bizarrely sexualized object. A series of oil sketches indicate that Rockwell originally situated the doll behind the mirror, sitting up primly, and it was only in the final painting that he moved the doll to her position of smashed innocence. She is shown bent over, legs splayed, her rump lifted into the air and pressed against the hard edge of the mirror. With her right hand buried in her petticoats, the doll could almost be masturbating. She adds to the sense that
Girl at Mirror
is a painting about a girl who seems both excited and shamed by the call of adolescent sexuality.

Girl at Mirror
, 1954
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

You wonder if Rockwell was influenced by Picasso’s
Girl Before a Mirror
, from 1932, which he would have seen on his many trips to the Museum of Modern Art. For all the glaring differences between Picasso’s and Rockwell’s mirror-gazing girls—one is an icon of Cubist fragmentation, the other of American realism—the paintings have a similarly Freudian feeling. Tellingly, Picasso’s sexy demoiselle appears in a bright room with vibrant wallpaper, while Rockwell’s girl is sequestered in an attic, a reminder of the secrecy and tension that once surrounded sexual awakenings in American life.
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Where exactly in America is this painting set? Rockwell never specifies, although you can be sure that his mirror-gazing girl is not in Levittown, New York, or any other postwar suburb. In 1950, when middle-class Americans were leaving their urban apartments for mass-produced tract houses with picture windows and backyard patios, David Riesman published his sociology classic,
The Lonely Crowd
, initiating a decade-long critique of suburban conformity and alienation. Although Rockwell’s work has often been viewed as an affirmation of suburban-style normalcy, this is a misconception. Much as he declined to chronicle the massive shift from the proverbial sticks to the city in the twenties, he never acknowledged the shift out of the city and into the suburbs in the fifties. His pictures continued to be set in a small-town arcadia of his own imagining, a place he was searching for not only in his work but in his life as well.

*   *   *

In the summer of 1954 the yellow house overlooking the cemetery filled up with visitors. Finally, it seemed, there was a family in sight. The Rockwell boys came home for what would be their first summer in Stockbridge. Although Mary had often felt overwhelmed by the infinite obligations of running a household, she decided to dispense with live-in help that summer in the interest of familial closeness and solidarity. In a letter to her sister, she put her customary gloss on her day-to-day life and sounded almost rhapsodic on the subject of her appliances: “I am hearing the heavenly sound of my new dishwasher in operation. This is a pleasure practically unparalleled in my experience!”
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Rockwell and Mary were amused when their two younger sons went into business that summer in the Berkshires. Tom and Peter opened a secondhand bookshop in a narrow building in Lenox, behind the Lenox Hotel. It was written up in the local paper, which noted: “An old antique shop started the boys in business by selling them 500 books for $4.”
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Their inventory expanded to include thousands more books arranged neatly in every available nook and cranny, and among the finds were first editions of works by Henry James and John Dos Passos as well as Arthur Guptil’s book on Norman Rockwell, which the artist happily agreed to autograph.

It was a classic New England summer, made all the more convivial by the appearance of a girlfriend. Tom returned home with Gail Sudler, a willowy art student at Bard whom he would marry a year later. Her father, Arthur Sudler, owned an advertising agency in New York (Sudler & Hennessy) and also dabbled in painting. Gail was welcomed warmly into the family by Mary, who seemed to enjoy having a female ally in the overwhelmingly male precincts of her household. She reported chirpily, in a letter to her sister: “Gail and I are really good friends—she made a great success of her first job, in the Buck’s gift shop.”
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She also made encouraging comments about the state of her marriage: “
We
are doing nicely, toots, I should say all crises were things of the past. Stockbridge is certainly a much better place for us than Arlington, more life and movement.”

In reality, Rockwell was not well at all. He was despondent over a bitter disagreement with his wife. It was set off when Gail’s parents, the Sudlers, invited him to Europe that September as their guest. Arthur Sudler was planning to stay abroad for a while, in connection with the expansion of his advertising agency. Rockwell had not been to Europe since the early thirties, and Mary liked the idea, too. She could see herself, in tantalizing glimpses, visiting the Cassel Hospital in Richmond, England, a pioneering force in the history of psychotherapy. It was at Cassel that Dr. Thomas Main had devised the concept of “therapeutic community.” Mary told Rockwell that she intended to visit the hospital as “an emissary” from the Riggs community.

But Rockwell believed she ought not undertake the trip, lest she resume drinking and prove unmanageable. Besides, he thought, she had trouble harmonizing with anyone besides psychiatrists. By now he had been in therapy for a year and Erikson was sympathetic to his feelings. Agitating on behalf of his patient, Erikson wrote a pointed letter to Dr. Knight, Mary’s psychiatrist, to ask for his assistance in persuading Mary to stay home.
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His letter begins: “Norman Rockwell is now rather depressed, to the point of suicidal ideas. Behind this is, of course, the general feeling that Mary will never be well enough to live with in reasonable peace, and never sick enough to be sent away.” Erikson explained that his immediate concern was preventing Mary from joining the trip to Europe. As Erikson states, “He desperately needs such a vacation
without Mary.
” (Italics his.)

Erikson’s letter is a startling document. He asks Dr. Knight to place Rockwell’s interests before those of Mary Rockwell. Moreover, he expresses little faith in the Rockwells’ marriage. An artist who emphatically refuses to take a vacation with his wife perhaps should not be married to her. Yet divorce is not touched upon. Rockwell regarded his marriage as his cross to bear.

In a fleeting acknowledgment of Mary’s situation, Erikson conceded that September was not an ideal month for travel—by then, the Rockwell boys would be back at school, leaving Mary alone in the house. “Yet this period will be a trying one for Norman, too, and I am now definitely worried for him,” Erikson wrote.

Mary did what her husband desired. She withdrew from the proposed trip. Writing to her sister on September 8, she noted calmly: “Norman is going off for a month to Europe on the 13th of October, and I am going to stay here and take a long breath. So—why don’t you come down in October…”
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Then, at the eleventh hour, Rockwell bowed out of the European adventure. Instead he took a sudden side trip to the hospital. He was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital in Pittsfield with “a painful condition” involving his back and was absent from his studio for a week.

*   *   *

During this period, Rockwell did one of his most affecting pictures,
Breaking Home Ties
, the defining image of empty-nest despondency.
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It appeared on the cover of the
Post
on September 25, 1954, to coincide with the new school year. Set at a railroad crossing in the Southwest, the painting shows an aging rancher and his son seated on the running board of an old Ford pickup, waiting for the train that will take the boy off to college. A red flag, and an old-fashioned red-globe lantern, rest on a trunk—they are there to get the train conductor to stop. The father, a hunched, weary figure dressed in a worn denim shirt and jeans, is losing his favorite ranch hand. Even the family collie, which rests its chin on the boy’s thigh, looks heartbroken. The son, by contrast, is a bright-eyed, straight-backed presence in a crisp beige-and-white suit, gazing down the railroad tracks with barely suppressed anticipation. The suitcase resting at his feet is already branded with a red STATE U decal. Best detail in the painting: the boy’s tie, a red-and-white polka dot eyesore, a mile wide and at least two years out of date, adding a trace of humor to this poignant scene of imminent separation.