American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (51 page)

Soon viewers could see Rockwell in his library, an attractive, well-lighted room filled with bookshelves and antique American furniture. His framed reproduction of Pieter Bruegel’s
The Peasant Dance
had been moved for the occasion out of his studio and into the library, as if to reiterate his regard for the European masters. In addition to Rockwell and Mary, their son Tom appeared on the show, joshing with his father and giving the impression that the normal tone of their family conversations was one of intense affection and wit.

Tom, as Murrow informs viewers, “is helping Pop with his autobiography.”

“It’s going to be a long one because he is sixty-five,” jokes Tom. Rockwell, who is wearing a jacket and striped bow tie, fake scolds: “Did you have to tell?”

“Good evening, Mr. Murrow,” Mary says in a soft voice, looking a bit heavy as she sits in a wing chair. Her reticence emphasizes her husband’s volubility.

The idea here seemed to be to talk about the house.

“I think the house is prerevolutionary,” Rockwell volunteers. “They tell us Aaron Burr lived here. I don’t know if that is much of a distinction inasmuch as he was the man who killed Alexander Hamilton.”

Then he goes outside and walks along the short path to the studio. Inside, the wooden floors are polished to a high gleam and paintings and sketches from different periods of his life lean against the white walls.

When asked by Murrow how he spent his evenings, he gave the most clumsily personal answer. He confessed to spending countless hours tearing bolts of diaper cloth into paint rags. “We use a lot of rags to wipe the paint off with,” he explained. “I use this diaper cloth. It’s a wonderful cloth. It’s not only absorbent, but it doesn’t go through.”

Murrow replied, “But I’m sure you’re eager to get back to doing it right now!” And that was the end of the interview.

Three weeks after the show, a humorous “Talk of the Town” item in
The New Yorker
reported that the Aaron Burr Association had taken offense at Rockwell’s televised comments. Rockwell received a thick packet of information from the group, “whose members are dedicated to revising upward the generally low opinion in which our third vice-president is held.”
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The show also generated what might be called the Rockwell-Nabokov mystery, which continues unabated. At one point during the interview, Murrow asked: “Who’s your friend there beside you?” He was referring to a long-limbed dog curled up at one end of the Victorian couch. “We call her Lolito—Lolita,” Rockwell replied, correcting himself, in a moment of televised gender confusion.

None of his children recall a dog named Lolita. What led him to summon up Vladimir Nabokov’s nymphet? Surely he had read his novel
Pnin
, which includes many clever asides on modern art, including this one: “Dali is really Norman Rockwell’s twin brother kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood.”
6
What was intended as a put-down of Salvador Dalí is also an implicit elevation of Rockwell, whom Nabokov, in a brilliant if acidic insight, viewed as the equal of Dalí. They both used a style of impeccable realism to render imaginary worlds—be it the hypersexual fantasies of Surrealism or Rockwell’s desexed Americana.

And surely he had read
Lolita
, or read about it. It had been published in the United States the previous summer and generated a firestorm of controversy. Apparently, it inspired Rockwell to nickname a dog after Nabokov’s twelve-year-old seductress. He didn’t appear to be joking. In a way Rockwell was Humbert Humbert’s discreet and careful twin brother, roused by the beauty of children but (thankfully) more repressed.

*   *   *

In the summer of 1959 the house in Stockbridge filled up once again with visitors. Peter arrived in mid-June with Cinnie, who was pregnant with their first child. He had just completed a year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and was still passionate about sculpture. “My hero was Donatello,” he recalled, adding that he rented a studio in Stockbridge that summer and continued his work in clay.

Mary was gracious to her daughter-in-law and appreciative of her company. The two women could often be found in the kitchen, the sun flooding through the curtained windows as they read the local news in
The Berkshire Eagle
and talked. Cinnie smoked Viceroys and Mary had switched to Pall Malls. “We talked about the coming baby,” Cinnie recalled. “Mary was loving and permissive. I had this feeling that she wished me well, as in, you should do your thing.”
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Cinnie knew not to expect too much of her mother-in-law, who avoided the subject of her personal problems but could not completely conceal them, either. “There were times when you could tell she was fragile,” she recalled. “Toward the end she developed this funny thing where her tongue was moving about of its own accord, as if she didn’t have control. The speech was slightly slurred.” Her family assumed the dragging words were a side effect of too many drugs. She had been using sleeping pills (Seconal) for years and they had taken their toll.

At lunchtime, Rockwell would promptly appear in the kitchen doorway, creating a certain tension as the women turned their attention to him. Mrs. Bracknell, a cheerful, snowy-haired woman in her seventies, came in every day to cook for the family when they moved to Stockbridge. In addition to steak, roast beef, and lamb chops, her repertory included Yorkshire pudding, which Rockwell described as “a marvel—soft on the inside, crisp on the outside.” Those recipes were reserved for dinner, over which Rockwell was likely to recount amusing stories and needle his son Peter as if he were still a schoolboy. Later, after the dishes were cleared and put back in the cabinets, Mary would drive Mrs. Bracknell home.

*   *   *

For most of that summer, Rockwell had been working on a single cover for the
Post
, his clever and intricate
Family Tree
, in which twenty-three small, bouncy heads chart a fictional American family over three centuries. The tree starts chronologically at the bottom of the page with “a good, strong pirate head right out of Howard Pyle,” as Rockwell described it.
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It meanders through several generations of long-gone relatives in bonnets and tricorn hats, and ends in the glorious present with a nine-year-old boy (born 1950) grinning at the top of the heap.

Rockwell decided to make the last chapter of his autobiography a diary of a painting in progress. He would record his
Family Tree
. It is understandable that he wanted to draw attention to his process. Fashionable opinion in the fifties held that a picture was not just something to hang on a wall but a record of a performance, “an arena in which to act,” as Harold Rosenberg famously wrote. Magazine feature articles about Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and their Abstract Expressionist ilk inevitably dwelled on the angst of creation. In that department, the department of doubt, Rockwell could compete with the best of them.

He started his diary on April 27, 1959, and the tone is one of constructive misery as he attempts to generate an idea for a new work. Three days later, he still hasn’t found one. “Groped around awhile. Found nothing. No ideas, not even a glimmer of one. Gave it up early and tore some paint rags from a bale of diaper cloth to distract myself.”
9

Through that summer of 1959, Rockwell spoke into a Dictaphone every few days—this was the form his diary took. His comments were transcribed by his son, who picked out short, salient excerpts for the autobiography. The Dictaphone recordings run to more than eight hours and provide a valuable glimpse into Rockwell’s creative rhythms. They amount to a badinage with himself, in which he describes, only half-jokingly, how the sense of possibility he feels every morning is overtaken by regret and discouragement by the day’s end. So many afternoons seemed to end the same way: He laments that he did not “get anywhere with the picture.” He couldn’t solve this pictorial problem or that, often one having something to do with the correct proportions of a figure or an object.

He usually recorded his comments in the evening, after dinner, sitting alone in his studio with his Dictaphone recorder. He found it easy to speak without notes. When he signed off, he might say, “Good night, my friend,” or “I will bore you no longer. Good night all.”
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Or, if he was feeling playful, he might sign off on hot summer nights by saying, “Merry Christmas, my friends.”

The recordings reveal, among other things, the degree to which Rockwell depended on “my dear friend” and “my great counselor” Erik Erikson to help him think through a particular painting. Erikson’s early training as an artist made him a perfect sounding board for Rockwell. During this period, their sessions were held away from Austen Riggs, in Rockwell’s studio. And their conversations sounded less like a session of traditional psychotherapy than an art-school crit.

Typically, speaking into a Dictaphone on July 25, a Saturday, Rockwell mentioned that Erikson dropped by the studio at ten that morning to push their scheduled eleven a.m. appointment back by one hour. Then Erikson returned at 12:20, prompting Rockwell to joke about his therapist’s chronic lateness. For the duration of their fifty-minute session, the two men contemplated
Family Tree
and talked about specific problems Rockwell was having with it. Erikson had suggested in a previous meeting that Rockwell reduce the size of the tree and Rockwell now showed him the results. “It doesn’t obtrude,” Rockwell was pleased to note, referring to the tree. “It doesn’t look as if these heads are hanging on a live tree. Now it looks like they’re more or less on a document,”
11
a piece of old parchment.

Rockwell’s conversation with Erikson that day also covered more general problems. As Rockwell recalled: “I ask him, What is it anyway? Why do I have all this trouble with these pictures? He’s very comforting. He says just what I want him to say. He says, Well, that’s the way it is. You want to be an artist? You have to suffer like this.” Rockwell concluded: “This is the old crap, but I guess it’s true.”
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By August, four months after he started the picture, Rockwell wasn’t sure whether
Family Tree
was finished or not, an inevitable coda to his every composition. Mary had been through this too many times to give much weight to his reservations. “Norman,” she told him, “Wrap up the picture. You’re being silly.” Ernie Hall, who ran the local taxi service and was at times enlisted to deliver finished paintings to the Curtis Building in Philadelphia, was summoned to Rockwell’s studio. This was on August 19, 1959, at ten in the evening. The autobiography ends there, on that night. In a conspicuous omission, there is no reference to the tragedy that befell the Rockwell family six days later.

*   *   *

August 25 fell on a Tuesday, a day reserved for meetings and routines. In the morning, Rockwell was visited by his longtime bookkeeper, Chris Schafer, who, as usual, sat at the desk in the studio and calmly sifted through piles of bills. At noon, Rockwell and Schafer drove to Lee to have lunch with fellow members of the Marching and Chowder Society. When Rockwell returned from lunch, his daughter-in-law told him that Mary had been feeling unusually fatigued and had gone upstairs for a nap.

At 2:30, Mary received a phone call and Norman went upstairs to wake her. He saw her lying very still in their rumpled bed. He could not bring himself to look for more than a few seconds. He went downstairs. Cinnie, who was six months pregnant, was in the kitchen.

“I think there is something wrong,” he told her, and he asked Cinnie to go back upstairs with him.
13

“Mary looked as if she was asleep, but very thoroughly asleep,” Cinnie recalled years later. “She was so still. She didn’t seem wake-up-able. We both kind of knew. He was flustered, not really knowing what was going on, fearing the worst. We called the doctor, and he came right over.”

*   *   *

On her death certificate, the cause of death is listed as “coronary heart disease.” That was the official explanation that was furnished to the locals in Stockbridge and the interested parties in the wider world: Mary Barstow Rockwell had suffered a heart attack at the age of fifty-one, dying peacefully in her sleep.

Friends wondered whether she had taken her own life. “We never knew the cause of her death,” wrote her friend and neighbor Helen Morgan. “It was obviously unexpected, and whether she had taken an overdose of some medication or whether her heart had just stopped, we never knew.”
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At Rockwell’s request, no autopsy was performed; the quantity of drugs in her bloodstream at the end remains unknown.

Suicide was not out of the question. In the past, she had taken at least two overdoses and been sent off to psychiatric hospitals. At the time of her death, however, Mary was on the wagon and her family believed that she was feeling better, looking forward to the birth of her first grandchild.

In a letter to Rockwell, Mary’s kid sister contemplated the possibility of an overdose. “You know, Norm,” she assured him, “even if an autopsy had shown that Mary had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, nothing could have convinced me that it happened in any way but by accident … Nothing could be easier than to take too much by accident, when already doped up.”
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Her sons felt that their mother’s death was almost certainly natural and that it was terribly unfair. It occurred at a time when blessings were piled up around her.

*   *   *

Sympathy letters poured in, including one from Mary’s therapist, Dr. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, who at the time was away on vacation. “I wept when I heard of Mary’s death and thought then for several days of her valiance,” she wrote to Rockwell. “I thought too of the pleasant phone conversation she and I had had the week before when she told me a little of the development in her painting.”
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Rockwell, who was then sixty-five, spoke little about his wife in the weeks and months following her death, perhaps because he was generally unable to talk about death. After three turbulent decades of marriage, Mary had been eradicated from his life without warning, without even time to say goodbye. She went upstairs after lunch and never came down for dinner. “He didn’t talk about his feelings,” recalled his son Peter. “He did some of his best work during that period. He did some fabulous paintings. I think we were all relieved by her death.”