American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (56 page)

She could see that he had his dark moments, an “artistic temperament” that could bring on bouts of despair and distraction. “I doubt though,” she noted, “that many artists are so understanding and considerate and so
humanly
tempered by experience.”

In her letters to her friends from Milton, she mentioned his goodness, his house, even his help. An “extremely kind and attractive” woman came from Pittsfield three times a week to keep house and Mrs. Bracknell still came in every night to cook. Louie Lamone, “a big and able Lincolnesque man comes every Saturday and Sunday to do absolutely anything wanted—quite an order, since Norman suddenly wants a closet turned
immediately
into an open cupboard, all freshly painted and provided with magazines and objets d’art.”
16

When people commented to Molly that she married late, she always said the same thing: “Norman was worth waiting 62 years for,” coyly slicing three years off her age.

If Molly was delighted to find herself married, to be rescued from the prospect of spinsterhood, Rockwell felt gratified as well. At last he had found his feminine ideal: an elderly schoolteacher who was unlikely to make sexual demands on him. Instead of sleeping in his bedroom, as Mary had done, Molly slept across the hall, in a small, sparsely furnished room.
17
She satisfied his desire for intelligent companionship and asked little in return, perhaps because she had already enjoyed an estimable career and was not looking for excitement.

In an apologetic letter to Kate More, Molly confided: “Norman is frightened of meeting my Milton friends, and I can’t bring myself to put on pressure when he will probably be exhausted anyway. So I don’t know when we will get down there.”
18
Although she wrote the letter only nine days into 1962, her calendar for the next couple of months was swamped with his professional obligations: “February and March are already shot to pieces by long-since promised trips to Philadelphia, Atlantic City, New York, Boston.”

If there was one aspect of his life he was capable of sharing, it was his business affairs, into which she entered enthusiastically. She answered his correspondence, got him out of assignments he had never intended to accept in the first place, and pushed away callers whom she believed would take advantage of his generosity. She loved travel as much as he did and trained over time to be his official photographer when they were away from Stockbridge.

Rockwell reads a toast to Erik Erikson on March 31, 1962, at a dinner for the Berkshire Art Center. Molly is on Rockwell’s right, Joan Erikson is on his left, and Peggy Best, who organized the event, is sitting to the left foreground, back to camera.
(Courtesy of Jonathan Best)

His third marriage could not have come at a better time, coinciding as it did with the collapse of his career at
The Saturday Evening Post
.

TWENTY-SIX

ROCKWELL DEPARTS FROM THE
POST

(1962 TO 1963)

In the early sixties, as its advertising continued to decline,
The Saturday Evening Post
tried to reinvent itself. Its editors joined with members of the business staff in devising changes intended to attract advertisers. They made changes to the magazine’s cover, to its typeface, and to its content, and then changes back to the way things had been before the changes ever started. They changed the staff and even the city in which the editorial staff was based, moving their offices from Philadelphia to New York.

The magazine, of course, had always been a champion of Republican politics and the American Way. But even that changed. In the spring of 1961 Robert Fuoss, who replaced Ben Hibbs as editor in chief, went so far as to publicly apologize for the magazine’s endorsement of Nixon during the presidential campaign. “If I had been editor last fall, the Post would have voted for Kennedy,” Fuoss told
Time
magazine.
1

Could the
Post
recover? Unclear. Television had been siphoning advertising revenue away from magazines for about a decade. People in the magazine world, many of them shaken by the closing of long-established and seemingly invincible publications—
Liberty
magazine had shut down in 1950, and
Collier’s
in 1956—wondered if their industry had become unsustainable.

Circulation was not the problem. In 1961 the
Post
had more readers than ever. Its circulation surpassed that of any weekly magazine today—6.6 million paid subscribers, which placed it right behind
Life
(6.9 million subscribers) and
Look
(6.7 million subscribers). But advertisers were not about to place ads in all three magazines, and the
Post,
with its continued embrace of yesteryear, was out of step with the New Frontier.

In the summer of 1961 the top brass of the
Post
announced that a “new”
Post
would be coming in the fall. On August 14 Fuoss and Ken Stuart, the magazine’s art editor, gave a presentation at the Savoy Hilton Hotel, for “an audience of 264 top-level advertising executives,” as
The New York Times
reported. The idea was to offer the businessmen “a peek” at the new
Post
, and this is what was coming: “Innovation in art work accompanying the articles, which will reflect the ‘feeling’ of a story instead of illustrating an episode—i.e. a ‘clinch scene.’ Some of the art work will be considerably more abstract than anything that has appeared in the magazine.”
2

Interesting that this was considered progress, a selling point. The magazine thought it could attract advertisers by
claiming a devotion to abstract art
, by banishing from its pages the barbershops and drugstore counters and the reassuring light of storefronts, the small-town settings where Rockwell’s figures had flourished for four decades. In the place of realism, the magazine was promoting art about “feeling,” the implication being that art tied to a realistic setting was somehow less emotionally affecting than an image of a red rectangle or a cerulean square that made no reference to the world beyond its own edges. It says something about the rhetoric attached to abstract painting, and its fashionable status circa 1961, that an institution as conservative as the
Post
was promising its readers more abstraction.

It’s true that the younger generation viewed the quest for facts as passé compared to the quest for feeling. The popular art movements of that era—Abstract Expressionism, Beat poetry, bop, and hard jazz—glorified impulse and improvisation. Rockwell’s work was rooted in meticulous, even persnickety observation, the scrutiny of particulars. And what no one seemed to recognize is this: looking is a form of passion if you look long and hard enough.

*   *   *

It was against this backdrop that Rockwell created his masterpiece,
The Connoisseur
(see color insert). It takes us inside an art museum, where an older gentleman is shown from the back as he holds his fedora in his hand and contemplates a “drip” painting by Jackson Pollock. His gray hair, gray suit, and general air of quietude offer a sharp contrast with the crackling intensity of the Pollock.

Unlike most other covers,
The Connoisseur
doesn’t rest on a joke and its meaning is pleasantly elusive. The man gazing at the Pollock is a mystery man whose face remains hidden and whose thoughts are not available to us. Perhaps he is a stand-in for Rockwell, contemplating not only an abstract painting, but the inevitable generational change that will lead to his own extinction. Some writers have suggested that he is turned away to conceal his rancor over the growing popularity of abstract painting. But Rockwell had nothing against the Abstract Expressionists. “If I were young, I would paint that way myself,” he said in a brief note that ran inside the magazine.

At the time he made the comment, Rockwell could not have imagined that his work would one day be collected by some of the same museums and individuals who also collect Abstract Expressionism. Pollock had died in 1956, in a car wreck in East Hampton, New York, and his death at age forty-four seemed to seal his reputation as a renegade. In a way, Rockwell and Pollock represent opposite sides of the same coin: Rockwell exemplifies the American desire for safety and security as much as Pollock exemplifies the opposing need for flight and rebellion.

The Connoisseur
required, among other things, that Rockwell paint a fake Pollock as part of his preparatory process. He had seen the famous photographs in
Life
of Pollock in his denim jacket, tossing paint from a stick onto a sheet of canvas that had been laid on the floor. Now Rockwell tried to duplicate Pollock’s vaunted “drip” technique. As photographs reveal, he placed his canvas on the floor and created an imitation Pollock. He knew he was putting on a show and saw the inherent paradox of it—meticulously re-creating an image of free-wheeling spontaneity.

Pollock, in photographs, is invariably shown in his paint-splattered shoes. A photograph of Rockwell, by contrast, shows him padding around the studio in his stocking feet. Presumably he was trying to avoid getting paint on his shoes.

*   *   *

On September 16, 1961, the
Post
introduced its redesigned self, at a new price: twenty cents, a five-cent increase. To help readers acclimate, Rockwell did a witty cover illustration portraying graphic designer Herb Lubalin from the back, admiring the new logotype he has created for the
Post
. Everything about him, including the Plycraft bentwood chair in which he is seated, attests to his youth and sophistication. It reminds us, among other things, that Rockwell was a master of the human back and was able to convey character without showing a face.

The
Post
, as he knew it, vanished in June 1962, when the family of Cyrus Curtis lost control of the magazine and corporate raiders took over. Ken Stuart, the magazine’s longtime art editor,
3
was fired that month. “I left a dozen approved Rockwell cover sketches behind me, but the new editors decided not to use them,” Stuart recalled. “Instead they assigned Norman to a series of portraits of celebrities.”
4
Actually, he was assigned to produce portraits of politicians and statesmen and only one celeb (Jack Benny), but Stuart’s anger is justified nonetheless.

For decades, millions of Americans had looked forward to taking in the mail and finding a Rockwell cover. But now, when the
Post
arrived, one might find a color photograph of Elizabeth Taylor in emphatic eyeliner, decked out as Cleopatra in the film of the same title. Or a tightly framed close-up of Marlon Brando in the British-style naval bicorn he wore in
Mutiny on the Bounty
.

Rockwell had celebrated the small and local, not the global and cinematic. But the emphasis on the common man that was central to America’s sense of self in twentieth-century America gave way, in the television-centered 1960s, to the worship of celebrities, whose life stories and marital crises replaced those of the proverbial next-door neighbor as subjects of interest and gossip. Television provided its audience with a level of proximity to celebrity that could not be matched by magazines, whose fortunes continued to decline.

*   *   *

It was in this context that Robert Sherrod, the latest editor of the
Post
, asked Rockwell to join him on an international reporting project. Sherrod, a soft-spoken native of Georgia and former war correspondent, dozed through office meetings and was eager to return to the peripatetic life of a reporter. In 1962 he decided to write a series of in-depth profiles of foreign statesmen—Nehru in India, Tito in Yugoslavia, Nasser in Egypt—that would require extensive interviewing. He asked Rockwell to come along to produce a definitive portrait of each man.

It was, in its way, an enviable gig, providing Rockwell with expense-paid travel and privileged entry into the armored quarters of heads of state. Moreover, he and Sherrod had both just remarried and Molly Rockwell and Margaret Sherrod accompanied their husbands on the trips. But such perks were not enough to compensate for the loss of everything he loved. After forty-six years at the
Post
, he was no longer making stand-alone illustrations. He was no longer a storyteller, but a “portraitist,” as the
Post
announced, shoehorning him into an identity that did not fit.

Rockwell’s last cover for the
Post
appeared on May 25, 1963. It was a portrait of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, whom Rockwell later described as vain, a playboy enamored of his handsome face. During the sketching session in Cairo, Rockwell wanted him to hold his head a certain way and appear thoughtful, but Nasser ignored the stage directions. He kept turning to face Rockwell and flashing his broad smile, to display “his wonderful white teeth.” It was only when he was back at his easel in Stockbridge that Rockwell got to close Nasser’s mouth and arrange his face in sharp profile, like a figure in ancient Egyptian art.