American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (48 page)

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As it so happened, a marriage was about to take place in the Rockwell family. Tom, the middle son, returned home from Bard College for the summer with his fiancée, Gail Sudler. As he had done the previous summer, Tom opened a bookshop in a narrow building, this time on Main Street in Stockbridge; his inventory consisted of used books he had purchased by the pound, at auction. Peter, who had recovered from his fencing injury, manned the clunky black cash register up front. Sue Erikson, the daughter of Rockwell’s therapist, also put in time as a clerk.

Rockwell painted a witty sign to hang outside the shop. It portrays a stern, bespectacled man engrossed in a book, in the style of a turn-of-the-century poster by Edward Penfield. “Rockwell Brothers: Books & Prints” the wooden sign announces in faux-Victorian lettering, making it sound as if the boys had been in business for at least two-and-a-half generations.

Within only a few weeks, everything fell apart. “That was the summer my mother had a nervous breakdown,” Tom recalled. It had been six years since her previous collapse and it took the family by surprise. “Mother was managing the house, and there were all those people there, and it must have been a terrible burden on her. My father never told us what happened. We came home in the afternoon and she was gone. Bang. I always had the idea that she had tried to commit suicide.”
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Indeed, she had taken an overdose of pills. Deemed too troubled to continue to be treated at Riggs, she was sent off to a different hospital, a place of straitjackets and electric shock therapy. She told her therapist, Dr. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, that her goal had been to “revenge myself on Dr. K.”

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On June 30, Mary entered the Institute of Living, a grand-looking psychiatric hospital set high on a riverbank in Hartford, Connecticut. Landscaped a century earlier by Frederick Law Olmsted, the nation’s preeminent park artist, it catered to well-off patients who could afford long-term care. Mary would remain hospitalized for four months. As summer faded into fall, she lived in Ellsworth Cottage, “a nice old white house” where she took her meals with other patients and read and reread her favorite Jane Austen novels on the screened porch. Sometimes, as the afternoon progressed, she longed for a cocktail, but had to settle for iced tea. At night, before the lights were turned out, a Mrs. Plude brought a first sedation and a second sedation and maybe a third. “I break one and only one rule consistently,” Mary confessed in a letter. “I do smoke in bed.”
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In a letter to Dr. Brenman-Gibson composed five days after her arrival, Mary sounded displeased with her surroundings. There were so many rules and restrictions; she couldn’t even go for a short stroll in a nearby park without “signing out,” and the nightly lockdown took place at eight o’clock sharp. Moreover, she felt that the staff was no match in sophistication for the doctors at Riggs. In Hartford, “there are no analytical men on the staff (a large shock)”—she respected the wisdom of psychoanalysts even if her own treatment never went much beyond counseling. “It’s just as well you didn’t describe the Retreat or I might never have come here,” she noted to Dr. Brenman-Gibson, “though I did feel a little resentment that you hadn’t, and I do need the respite.”

She was, by her own admission, still obsessed with Dr. Knight, who had been in contact with Dr. William Zeller, her new psychiatrist in Hartford. She was touched to hear that the doctors at Riggs were conferring about her, and “tears did come to my eyes when Dr. Z. told me Dr. K. had written a letter to him about me—I felt guilty to feel so pleased.”

She was trying to sound positive, even when the subject turned to suicide and her recent overdose. “I’ve found and proved that what you said was true. I have no black hostility in me because no matter how much I thought about it and I certainly examined every possible method, I am constitutionally incapable of committing suicide.”

She claimed that her depression was ebbing, as if such matters were simply a matter of making up one’s mind. But a week after her arrival in Hartford, she capitulated to electric shock therapy. She was taken to a special room and given general anesthesia before receiving a massive electric jolt to her brain. “I had my first treatment” she wrote to her sister, on July 12, “and it was not at all difficult—though odd when you wake up at first.”

Just four days later, on Saturday, Tom married Gail Sudler. Mary left the hospital for the day to attend her son’s wedding, in New York. The ceremony was held at the Little Church Around the Corner and the bride’s parents, who lived on the Upper East Side, hosted a reception at their apartment. Janet and Arthur Sudler tried to be understanding, but it was a sorry spectacle. Mary consumed too many cocktails and embarrassed everyone, not least of all herself.
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The next morning, as the newlyweds set off for a honeymoon in Mexico, Rockwell drove his wife back to the hospital in Hartford. Then he continued in his station wagon on the long road to Stockbridge, arriving home to an empty house. “Exhausted from Tom’s wedding,” he jotted on his calendar. “Mostly slept.”
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By then Rockwell was also trying to absorb a review that ran in
The Washington Post
on July 10. It represented a negative milestone—it was the first article in a major newspaper to deride Rockwell as a hack. Leslie Judd Portner, the art critic for the
Post
, argued that the paintings and drawings in his show at the Corcoran could hardly be considered art and, even as illustration, “have no more than a sentimental and topical appeal.” The article was accompanied by a reproduction of
Marriage License
, which took a direct hit. “No view of an interior could be duller or more pedestrian than Rockwell’s marriage bureau scene.”
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Her review compared the Rockwell show to a second show then at the Corcoran,
The Family of Man
, a historic show of contemporary photography organized by Edward Steichen. Mixing apples and oranges, Portner wrote that Rockwell’s paintings “have none of the emotional impact of Steichen’s show.”

This was something new. A decade earlier, Rockwell had been America’s artist in chief, the noble champion of
The Four Freedoms
. Now, it was decided that his work lacked “emotional impact.” The problem was that emotion comes in many varieties and, in the fifties art world, angst was the preferred form. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and their fellow Abstract Expressionists glamorized direct and unmediated gestures—the drip, the splash, the juicy brushstroke that didn’t try to stay inside an outline.

Their paintings, it might be said, went against the shiny surfaces proliferating in new appliances. What was Abstract Expressionism? In a way, it strove to be the opposite of a vacuum cleaner—devoid of practical value, spewing out particles of color rather than pulling them in, unaccompanied by user directions, incomprehensible to the average person.

By those measures of artistic greatness, Norman Rockwell failed to qualify. The Corcoran review was the first of many hits he would take in the fifties, when realism was written off as retrograde. And if realism was suddenly passé, illustration—a subdivision of realism that came with the added stigma of a regular paycheck—was sub-passé.

Of course, there was no shortage of independent-minded artists who remained unfazed by fashion and rhetoric. But they didn’t get much media attention. That summer, Rockwell met Lyonel Feininger, a leading abstract painter, New York born, Europe addicted, whose woodcut
Cathedral
had served as the cover of the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto. By now Feininger was in his mideighties, a hyperarticulate man with furry white eyebrows. He and his wife, Julia, a German-Jewish immigrant, rented a summer house in Stockbridge and later recalled that they first met Rockwell when he knocked on their door, collecting money for an Austen Riggs fund drive.

“We’ve met Norman Rockwell several times, and we like him first-rate,” Feininger noted on August 13, in a letter to the artist Mark Tobey.

I think it “takes some doing,” “some sterling quality,” to envisage humans as kindly and subtly as he has kept on doing ever since forty years, leaving exhibitionism to those whose urge pushes them into that track … He achieves what certainly no photograph ever could in an expressively human way, and that compels my admiration and respect. There’s nothing “arty” about the work or the man: a pure miracle, when one considers the epoch we are undergoing.
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Rockwell did not have the sturdiness to withstand much criticism, even now, when he had Erik Erikson to hear him out and provide perspective. The old doubts that were never far below the surface led him to wonder anew whether he should leave the
Post
and try to become a fine artist who exhibited in galleries and was part of the art world, whatever that was. Pan Am, by a nice coincidence, had offered Rockwell an advertising gig that promised two months of expense-paid foreign travel. Erikson, who had wandered Europe as a young artist and continued to regard the nomadic life as a source of self-enlightenment, encouraged Rockwell to take the trip despite Mary’s hospitalization. Rockwell was amused when Erikson speculated, in his German-accented English, “Perhaps you will have a revelation over the Formosa Straits.”
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Not that Rockwell’s trip exactly qualified as a
Wanderschaft
, to borrow Erikson’s lofty term. Pan Am was then trying to broaden the audience for its round-the-world Clipper flights, to convince middle-class Americans that foreign air travel did not have to be an exclusive affair. The air carrier turned to Rockwell to help Americanize the image of foreign travel. He was commissioned to do a series a sketches that would be used in a Pan Am advertising campaign, linking the local corn-fed boy to the world across the Atlantic.

Rockwell saw Erikson not only for twice-a-week therapy, but on social occasions as well. They both belonged to the Marching and Chowder Society, a small and somewhat goofy men’s club that gathered over lunch every Tuesday at the Morgan House in Lee. The group’s stated mission was to converse about politics and current events. It had been founded by Harry Dwight,
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a Stockbridge blue blood who lived across the street from Rockwell and served as president of the Housatonic National Bank. Rockwell, who liked to refer to himself as “the world’s worst businessman,” admired Dwight’s financial savvy. He was tickled when Dwight presented him, as a going-away present, with a “short snorter,” a chain of taped-together banknotes that began as a tradition during World War II.
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Rockwell socializing with Erik Erikson and other members of the Marching and Chowder Society, circa 1960

It might seem surprising that Rockwell would choose to go abroad for two months when his wife was hospitalized, struggling for sanity. But Erikson put Rockwell’s interests first and the trip came less than a year after Erikson had argued in that letter to Dr. Knight that Rockwell deserved to travel abroad without his wife.

Before leaving for Europe, Rockwell spent three days in Hartford, visiting Mary. He stayed at the Hotel Statler, in a room overlooking the leafy expanse of Bushnell Park. He and Mary met for walks around the sylvan duck pond. Once word of his presence got around, a reporter from
The Hartford Courant
requested an interview. Rockwell actually assented and met the reporter in a quiet corner of the Statler lobby. Asked what he was doing in Hartford, he said that he had come to “limber up” his sketching arm, in preparation for the Pan Am trip.

“Why Hartford?” the reporter persisted, knowing nothing of Mary Rockwell’s hospitalization.
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“Hartford has a foreign atmosphere,” Rockwell bluffed. “The State Capitol could be another Taj Mahal if it were located in India or Siam.”

He paused to pack some tobacco into his straight brown pipe, and then continued: “The Hartford High School with its pointed spires are reminiscent of early French architecture. I’m not really a landscape man and need a little practice on scenes like these.”

If Mary resented her husband for leaving the country during her hospitalization, she was not likely to say so. Her son Peter was struck by her jarringly positive attitude. “Shock treatment makes you lose your memory, and she couldn’t remember things,” he recalled later. “What was depressing was her pretending that shock treatment was a good thing. She always had this thing, that everything was for the best.”
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On September 2 Rockwell boarded a Pan Am Clipper at Idlewild Airport in New York. In those days, it took twelve hours to cross the Atlantic. He was traveling with two chaperones provided by Pan Am, one of whom, Blackie Kronfeld, was the company’s in-house photographer. Their first stop was London, where he stayed at the tony Savoy Hotel for five days and then, apparently, repacked his bags with his usual haste. “A blue shirt, a white shirt, and a vest were found in the room you occupied here,” the hotel manager informed him in a letter the day after he left. A funny detail. So often in his paintings of travelers there is something—a pajama string, whatever—poking out of their suitcases.