American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (47 page)

Breaking Home Ties
, 1954
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

Initially, in his pencil sketches, Rockwell pictured the boy sitting with his mother and his father. But as he combined photographs of the three models in an effort to compose the best painting, he dropped the mother from the picture and left a large void in her place, on the left. All in all, the rancher is probably the most sad-looking man to appear in a Rockwell painting and it seems relevant that he painted the picture at a time in his life when he was feeling “rather depressed, to the point of suicidal ideas,” as Erikson had written. No wife at his side, only a red flag, signaling for help.

TWENTY-ONE

CRACK-UP

(1955)

A new year arrived in Stockbridge, and the Rockwells spent the holiday at home, in the yellow house overlooking the town cemetery. It was an unhappy time for Mary. On January 12, a Wednesday, she staged a confrontation at her therapy session.
1
Rockwell accompanied her to her appointment, in the Purinton House, which was just a few doors away. It had been four years since Mary first met Dr. Knight, her dramatically tall (six foot five), always-calm doctor and the medical director of the Austen Riggs Center. A man with a large, compassionate face, his body leaning forward.

Mary was upset because she had learned that Dr. Knight, a husband and father, had fallen in love with his secretary, a much younger woman named Adele Boyd.
2
Mary was well-acquainted with Adele, an elegant brunette whose office was across the hall from Dr. Knight’s, and who said hello warmly whenever Mary walked by. “I remember that last appointment day when she—she really had a blowup,” Boyd recalled. “Clearly, she had a great transference problem.”
3

Rockwell did not hold the doctor accountable for Mary’s problems. On January 13, the day after the confrontation, he dropped off a letter that read in its entirety, “Dear Dr. Knight—I have complete confidence in you. Last night I slept twelve hours. Sincerely yours, Norman Rockwell.”
4

Mary refused to continue her therapy with Dr. Knight, for reasons that made sense to her, but probably not to her husband. Dr. Knight referred her to Dr. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, one of the younger doctors at Riggs and the only female psychotherapist on the staff. A short, curly-haired woman of Russian-Jewish descent, Dr. Brenman-Gibson was an earthy presence, her long sun dresses flowing about her solid frame. She met with her patients in her plant-filled home office on Clark Street. Mary Rockwell was already acquainted with her husband, William Gibson, who ran a drama group for Riggs patients. As he said of acting: “Being someone else is a great cure.”
5

Suddenly, it seemed to Rockwell, every member of his family was acting out and leaving him uncomfortably exposed. On January 19, just a week after the Dr. Knight incident, Peter Rockwell, a freshman at Haverford College, ran away from school with a friend. “We didn’t want to take final exams,” Peter later explained.
6
Rockwell was mortified when a local reporter called to ask if Peter had officially dropped out of college. Hanging up, he called Ben Hibbs, hoping the
Post
’s editor could use his influence to squelch the story. “After you telephoned me,” Hibbs wrote the next day, “I made some inquiries and quickly found that the story about Peter had already gone too far to stop. It had gone out on the wires to other papers, and the radio people also had it.”
7

Among the millions of Americans who heard the news was Rockwell’s brother, Jarvis, who was still working as a toy designer in Kane, Pennsylvania, and had never fully recovered from the indignity of losing his job on Wall Street during the Depression. Reading about his nephew in the local newspaper, he was taken by surprise. Norman Rockwell, he was grieved to realize, had never informed him that Peter was living in Pennsylvania, a student at Haverford, or even that the family had moved to Stockbridge. For all he knew, they were still in Vermont.

“Publicly I’m supposed to be very close to you,” Jarvis wrote on January 30, 1955, in a bitter letter.

To know when your next Post cover will appear. To know what schools your boys attend. To know where you live. Actually I don’t know any of those things. I suppose you don’t know similar things about me. About the only times we have met in recent years has [
sic
] been due to some family misfortune … This last newspaper story about Peter made me realize that you and your branch of the family are really more foreign to me than the families of my business friends. I’d like to think that we can correct this drift into nowhere … I’m happy to be “Norman Rockwell’s brother” but I cannot tell others how little it has meant to me. They would not believe me, or they would think we have had a serious family row.
8

They were painful accusations, but Rockwell had little time to dwell on them. On February 1, less than two weeks after his runaway escapade, Peter was injured in a fencing match at Haverford. A pointed blade “pierced his right armpit, just above the edge of the padded chest protector,” as the papers reported. Rockwell and Mary drove through the night to Bryn Mawr Hospital and, after four days there, Rockwell noted with relief: “Peter out of danger.”
9

He made the comment in his 1955 date book, which was spiral-bound with a faux-leather cover, a freebie from a Maryland insurance company. He became inclined at this point to record his daily activities, briefly and at times pungently. He spent his sixty-first birthday in Bryn Mawr and returned home to Stockbridge on a Monday, while Mary stayed on for another three weeks to oversee Peter’s hospitalization. She visited her son every day and, by chance, befriended an elderly patient named Betty Williams, in room 454, stopping by to chat with her and “bringing her paper and artist colors to work with.”
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It’s a touching image: the sick trying to comfort the sicker.

It was during this turbulent winter that Rockwell produced
Art Critic
, which ran as a
Post
cover on April 16. Set in an unnamed art museum, in a gallery of seventeenth-century Dutch portraits, it shows not an art critic, but a young art student in paint-splattered sneakers who is eager to learn from his predecessors. As he leans forward to better study a woman in a Frans Hals painting—she is the “critic” of the painting’s title—she returns his interest with comically exaggerated disapproval. With her raised eyebrows and wide, popping, cartoony eyes, she seems to be saying to the young painter, “How dare you?”

Art Critic
can be read in various ways. Many viewers see it as a mildly salacious joke about a young man who incites the scorn of a comely redhead in an Old Master painting by ogling her cleavage. But it seems more likely that Rockwell, who revered Rembrandt and the Dutch masters and drew so much inspiration from them, intended the picture as a form of self-mockery in which he sends up his overly fussy techniques. Rockwell has portrayed the art student as an egghead, a guy so consumed by the careful, close-up observation of particulars (note his magnifying glass and museum guide book) that he is blinded to the pleasures of oil paint, to all that is bold and immediate and sensual. No wonder the three bearded Old Masters in ruffled white collars, peering out of another painting, are laughing at him behind his back.

Art Critic
, 1955
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

Bill Scovill, who photographed the models for the painting, claimed that
Art Critic
gave Rockwell more trouble than any other painting ever.
11
At least twenty drawn and painted studies of the female head preceded the painting. Perhaps it was the risqué subject matter that threw him. His artist-son Jarvis posed for the art student and Mary Rockwell posed for the Dutch flirt. As was also true of Rockwell’s earlier
Christmas Homecoming
, the picture pairs mother and son in an encounter fraught with sexual innuendo and it would leave Jarvis incensed.

*   *   *

Everyone in his family, it seemed to him, wanted something from him, something he could not deliver, and he was beset with feelings of unhappy obligation. Readers of the
Post
, by contrast, could not praise him enough and he felt gratified by the attention. That spring, the
Post
organized a fresh round of tributes to Rockwell. The March 12 issue included a special insert called “Rockwell’s America,” a color album featuring reprints of nine golden-oldie
Post
covers. The issue sold out at newsstands virtually overnight. To promote it, the the
Post
volunteered Rockwell for everything from an appearance on
Arthur Godfrey and His Friends
—the CBS variety show whose host liked to strum his ukelele and sing jingles promoting his advertisers—to a museum exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Astoundingly, it was the
Post
’s marketing department that proposed the exhibition at the Corcoran. The museum, in turn, offered up the first available slot on its exhibition calendar, with the caveat that the
Post
was to foot the bill. In an internal memo on January 10, Corcoran curator James Breckenridge assured the museum’s director, Hermann Williams, Jr., that: “The
Post
frames and mounts the exhibition ready to install, and would pay all expenses connected with the show, including that of an opening. It is understood that the Gallery would be placed at no expense for the exhibition.”
12
These days, the idea of an art museum accepting an exhibition from a magazine whose marketing department chose the works and picked up the tab would be considered a serious ethical lapse. Museums are supposed to exercise their authority and connoisseurship without interference from the business world. But backroom compromises were standard practice in a more casual era of museological administration, and Rockwell’s show at the Corcoran said less about his artistic standing than about the
Post
’s deftness at PR.

On May 5 Rockwell dined at the White House at the invitation of President Eisenhower, who was throwing a “stag party” for nineteen guests. Most of them (such as Leonard Firestone of rubber-tire fame or Doubleday publisher Ken McCormick) were the sort of self-made, influential businessmen whose conversation and company Eisenhower preferred to that of politicians. Worried he would be tongue-tied at the party, Rockwell flew down to Washington with a Dexamyl in his jacket pocket. The story he told about that evening goes as follows: Before dinner, standing in the bathroom of his room at the Statler Hotel, he accidentally dropped the pill in the sink. To his dismay, it rolled down the sink, forcing him to face the president and sup on a meal of oxtail soup, roast beef, and lime sherbet ring in an anxiously unmedicated state.
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Rockwell returned to Washington a month later for the opening of his show at the Corcoran, on the evening of June 16. Accompanied by the
Post
’s top brass (Ben Hibbs and art director Ken Stuart), he was greeted at the museum by an appreciative throng. “Successful,” he noted that night in his date book. “1,400 handshakes.” As the
Post
intended, the reception seemed more like an Independence Day celebration than an art vernissage. A military band, compliments of the Marine Corps, was brought in to entertain and guests comparing notes on Rockwell’s paintings and charcoal sketches had to shout above the blare of trumpets and tubas. News stories singled out the least imaginative painting in the show—a campaign portrait of Eisenhower that had appeared in the
Post
in 1952 and now was owned by his wife, Mamie—as the highlight of the exhibition.

The most recent painting in the show,
Marriage License
(see color insert) had just appeared in the
Post
(June 11) and captured Rockwell at the peak of his talents as a realist painter. An aging town-hall clerk sits in his musty office, waiting as a young couple fill out an application for a marriage license. They’re happy to be playing their assigned gender roles. The woman, who is up on her high heels, reaching for the desk, is wearing a daffodil-yellow dress with a cinch waist and puff sleeves. Her strapping fiancé wraps his arm around her in a protective, ur-fifties way.

Most everyone in Stockbridge recognized the man who posed for the clerk, Jason Braman, who in real life ran a variety store. As he sits in town hall, a cat by his chair, his eyes averted from the marrying couple, he seems to be thinking about something else, perhaps with regret. He’s the epitomy of diminished expectations; note his collapsed socks. The image is humorous enough, but Rockwell is striving for more than a joke. With its cigar-brown hues and dramatic light-against-dark contrasts, the picture betrays his fondness for Old Master painting, his desire to transport the luminous interiors of Dutch painting onto an American magazine cover.