American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (68 page)

Although Rockwell declined to articulate his feelings over his brother’s death, he did make a painting during this period that seems to hint at their complicated relationship. He referred to it as his Reverend and Indian picture. It would consume him for many years and might be seen as a symbolic portrait of Rockwell (the prissy Reverend) and his brother (the strapping Indian).

Rockwell began the painting in 1972, but a year later, had made almost no progress on it. As he noted on his calendar page for May 12, 1973: “Very mixed up today but I will work it out. Tomorrow I get to work on Reverend and Indian picture. Bewildered.”

The painting, which remains untitled and unfinished, is based loosely on an incident in Stockbridge history. It shows the Rev. John Sargeant in his house, a Colonial-era gentleman sitting on a hardwood chair across from his visitor, Chief Konkapot, a bare-chested Indian in fringed white pants. In his ruffled white shirt and buckled shoes, Sargeant appears diminutive and almost doll-like beside the Indian chief. In the fireplace behind them, embers glow and the stones are stained with soot, suggesting that the two men have been talking for a while. These are familiar themes in Rockwell’s work: two men, one disproportionately larger than the other, bond in a realm sealed off from women. In a typical Rockwellian gesture involving an onlooker, Sargeant’s wife, Abigail, in a little white bonnet, peeks in on the scene from the next room, her face a mask of worry.

He turned eighty on February 3, 1974. To avoid the inevitable fuss, the people traipsing into his studio with oversize cakes, he and Molly took refuge in Little Dix, in the British Virgin Islands, on the long, skinny island of Virgin Gorda, which they had first visited four years earlier as guests of friends. Rockwell did some sketching on the trip and he could still get a likeness with ease. A small drawing of a rocky shoreline looks as if it was done quickly, with a soft pencil.

Rockwell’s last painting portrays a scene from local history, and brings together a missionary and an Indian.

One evening, he set off on a bicycle ride by himself. After the sun went down and the hotel gates were locked for the night, Molly went out in search of him—she found him sitting on a rock, exhausted. He seemed to have no idea of how to get back to the hotel. His bicycle was still at the bottom of the ditch where it had landed after he steered off the edge of a rutted road in the half-light of the evening.

Once he returned to Stockbridge, Rockwell tried resuming his bicycling on a curtailed basis. “Took first bike ride down to Town Hall only,” he noted on March 11. The next day, he was bicycling again when he took another fall, this one very serious. He apparently fractured his pelvis. He lay flat in bed for much of March and April, under the care of private nurses. When he stood up, his legs felt weak and he worried about falling over. A stationary exercise bicycle was installed in the back of his studio, bolted to the floor. To get around, he began relying on a walker.

*   *   *

One day, Rockwell received a phone call from David Bowie, the British rocker, who was in his late twenties and about to release the album
Young Americans
. Although he had never met Rockwell, he needed a portrait for the cover and was hoping Rockwell could produce one quickly. It was Molly who answered the phone. “I am sorry,” she said in a voice that struck him as elderly and quavering, “but Norman needs at least six months for his portraits.” Bowie was impressed to learn that an artist could spend that much time on a single painting. “What a craftsman,” he recalled later. “Too bad I don’t have the same painstaking passion. I’d rather just get my ideas out of my system as fast as I can.”
7

As Rockwell’s condition deteriorated, Molly hired a few people who lent a certain cheer to the house. In June 1974 she chose a new director for the Old Corner House: David Wood, a former English teacher at the Lenox School for Boys, who was in his early fifties. He moved into the little apartment above the garage that Rockwell had offered in previous years to various young doctors and trainees at Austen Riggs. As much as Rockwell relished the company of doctors, Molly preferred the company of teachers. She was gladdened immeasurably by Wood’s presence and proposed to him that they cowrite her long-postponed grammar. “She was always irritated by the quality of grammar books,” Wood recalled, although her own book never did get done.

Evenings, around six, when Rockwell hobbled in from the studio and sat down for tea in the library, he and Molly were now joined by Wood. “Tea,” of course, was shorthand for an event that typically involved one and possibly two whiskey sours consumed in front of a crackling fire. “Well, professor,” Rockwell used to say to him, perking up, “what went on today?” And Wood would chat about developments at the Old Corner House, which was still a very modest museum. His first goal was to buy back
The Problem We All Live With
, the Ruby Bridges painting. It had been sold by Bernie Danenberg, for $15,000 at the time of Rockwell’s gallery show in 1968. Danenberg said he could get the painting back—for $35,000. Molly wrote the check.

That summer, Wood supervised a group of new volunteers at the museum. He thought they should meet Rockwell and see the sacred space of his studio. “The guides felt this added a dimension to their work,” he later recalled, “to be able to get into his workplace and actually meet the man. Because he never came to the Old Corner House, or almost never.”

*   *   *

In December 1974 Molly hired a new cook, Virginia Loveless, a graceful woman with three grown children. Just a few weeks earlier, she had finalized her divorce from David Loveless, a potter who oversaw the art-therapy program at Austen Riggs and who had run off with the weaving teacher. With the collapse of her marriage, and her unattached status echoed uncomfortably by her last name, Virginia Loveless, at forty-six, was relieved to obtain the job of Rockwell’s cook. It provided her with an identity as well as a new circle of acquaintances whom she found very likable if admittedly elderly. She was inordinately appreciative of both Norman and Molly, so much so that she would stay on at the house after he died, to become Molly’s caretaker and companion.

True, the cooking part of her job was not exactly easy. She quickly realized that Rockwell was a fussy eater and adhered to a dietary regimen that left no room for experimentation or even normal variety. Every morning he had the same thing: two soft-boiled eggs, cooked for precisely six minutes. He would chop them in a bowl, along with his toast.

His lunchtime menu had barely evolved from the time he was a schoolboy. It didn’t matter whether it was Monday or Tuesday or Easter Sunday; for lunch he liked a cup of Campbell’s tomato soup and a peanut butter sandwich with raspberry jam on toasted whole wheat bread. For dessert he would have an oatmeal cookie, just one. Loveless baked the cookies in medium-sized batches and kept them in the freezer.

“He was very difficult to feed,” she commented.
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“He didn’t like anything with too many things in it. Nothing too complex. No casseroles or sauces.” He made an exception for lamb stew, Craig Claiborne’s recipe, which she considered her best entrée. It was the one she usually prepared when relatives or other guests came for dinner. On those occasions, she might serve ice cream for dessert, though Rockwell liked only one kind, Breyer’s vanilla.

After the dinner plates had been washed and before she left for the day, Virginia Loveless would carry a silver tray laden with coffee and trimmings upstairs and leave it in the hall outside Rockwell’s bedroom. She had already measured out the coffee grounds and cups of water, and he or Molly had only to turn on the coffee pot the next morning to set everything percolating. She made sure to lay out “enough sugar lumps for Norman,”
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who preferred his beverages on the sweet side. As often as not he found himself up at first light, eager to get going, and he would go fetch Molly from across the hall, from her room with a narrow bed.

Molly was sturdy and adroit and uncomplaining. She was the one seated behind the steering wheel whenever she and Norman went out for a drive in the green Chevy. Earlier that year, when Pitter, the part-beagle, died, Molly visited her friend Elizabeth Blodgett Hall, the founder of Simon’s Rock College and an amateur dog breeder, and came home with a new puppy
10
—Sid, a corgi, in keeping with her predilection for all things British. It was she, and not her husband, who walked Sid, in the morning and after supper.

Rockwell, as always, kept himself free for his work, even when he could no longer work. She could see that he was frustrated, but tried not to dwell on disappointments. “Norman is slipping into more and more confusion,” she wrote to a friend on April 16, 1975, “and it’s harder to avoid irritation, though it passes very quickly.”
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*   *   *

In his last years, Rockwell was also afflicted with emphysema, a lung disease likely brought on by his pipe-smoking. It saddled him with colds and coughs that were hard to shake. Few people knew what Rockwell was facing, in part because he was portrayed in the media as a paragon of elderly stamina.
GOING STRONG AT
82
, a headline announced wishfully in the February 23, 1976, issue of
People
magazine.
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In a photograph
,
he sits in a wheelchair at his easel, leaning forward, implicitly avid. His painting arm—the right one—is extended to add a detail to a portrait in progress. The caption emphasizes his American-style industry and resourcefulness. He still paints “seven days a week,” using a wheelchair to move about his studio.

Although the article acknowledged some of the inconveniences of aging—it reported that Rockwell had become a bit “reclusive” since he stopped riding his bicycle two years ago—it did not mention his memory problems. Only that Molly sometimes mangled recipes. “We always have a whisky sour,” she notes amusingly of their evening ritual, “and I always forget one ingredient.”

Rockwell did not say much and his comments were a bit disjointed. Oddly or not, he mentioned Billy Payne out of the blue. “He posed for all three boys,” Rockwell intoned, referring to
Boy with Baby Carriage
, his very first cover for the
Post
. Billy Payne had posed for the shamed schoolboy who pushes the baby carriage and also for the two chubby bullies laughing at him. Suddenly, Rockwell is thinking of Billy, the beautiful New Rochelle boy who tragically tumbled from a third-story window ledge at the age of fifteen. The boy whose death he almost never mentioned.

In one of the photographs accompanying the article, Norman and Molly are shown from the back hobbling along the broad upstairs hallway in the house, arms around each other. Sid, their adorable corgi, sits at the top of the stairs with his head turned, watching them intently, ears perked, as if waiting to lead them downstairs.

By then, Rockwell’s illness had progressed to such a degree that he had trouble recalling events that had transpired within the hour. He suffered from “a really severe lack of memory,” as Molly wrote to her old friend from Milton Academy, Kitty More.
13
“He still goes regularly to the studio, but tends to do and undo minor details, and to put off major and important matters, and this, of course, makes him as distressed as the rest of us.”

He took his last trip in May 1976, when he and Molly flew to Rome to visit his son Peter. David Wood accompanied them. On the Pan Am flight out of New York, a stewardess mentioned that she would love to have Rockwell’s autograph but was prohibited by company policy from asking favors of customers. So Wood asked on her behalf. Rockwell drew a wonderful sketch of a dog and signed his name and gave it to her.

Somewhere, at the margins of his consciousness, he might have been aware of honors and awards that continued to come his way. He did show up when the town selectmen declared a holiday, Norman Rockwell Day, and held a parade on May 23. He watched the proceedings from a white-wicker chair atop a flatbed truck, alongside Molly and two of his sons, Jarvis and Tom, who by then were living nearby with their wives and children.

He still went into the studio every day but he no longer felt comfortable painting. He puttered around, listened to classical music on the radio, neatened up the drawers where he kept his brushes. “He would clean and do everything … anything to stop painting or not to paint,” Louie Lamone later recalled.
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He still washed his brushes with Ivory soap, and once, when he was shown an old painting of his that the museum had purchased—
Checkers
, with its wonderful clown—Rockwell told Louie, “It looks awfully dark. Let’s go out and scrub it with Ivory soap.”
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Lamone would say, “‘Norman, you have got to get these paintings done.’ He had one painting there that he had been working on, the Rev. Sargeant, and he never did finish that. He would keep saying, ‘Well, I have not sold this thing.’ Finally, one day, he told me that he was kind of afraid to paint, which shocked me.”