American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (14 page)

In his boyhood, Rockwell had bemoaned his lack of aptitude for baseball and his overall exclusion from the realm of male athleticism. “The fear of being tagged and shamed as a sissy is the overriding concern in this picture,” the artist Collier Schorr observes, “and it is the story of Norman Rockwell’s early years.”
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You can also read the painting as a birth narrative, at least of the breech variety. Note how the infant is coming toward us feet first—he or she is hidden from view, except for the bootie-clad foot jutting out of a curving opening. The baby looks as if it is about to emerge from a birth canal; the shadowy recess of the carriage suggests a womb. Maybe Rockwell is saying that humiliation is the emotion out of which his art is born.

*   *   *

In those early days,
The Saturday Evening Post
did not have a letters-to-the-editor column. So readers were not given the chance to offer their opinions of Rockwell’s first cover in any forum more public than the street corners or grocery counters where they chatted with each other. But the reaction must have been wholly positive, because by the summer of 1916, Rockwell had published two more
Post
covers and was appearing in the magazine as regularly as J. C. Leyendecker. His accomplishments were noted by his local newspaper: “Some of the cleverest magazine covers this year have been designed by Norman P. Rockwell of this city. His two-color cartoons on the cover of the
Post
have made many laugh. They seem to catch the boy idea and are making a hit.”
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That item appeared on August 4, and by then his debut in the
Post
was hardly the only news in his life. A month earlier, he had decided on the spur of the moment to get married.

SIX

IRENE O’CONNOR, OR UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU

(1916 TO 1918)

On a Saturday evening in February, 1916, Rockwell attended an engagement party for his brother. Jarvis was now twenty-three and had risen from his first job as a shoe clerk to a well-paying position as a bond salesman on Wall Street. He and his parents still lived at Edgewood Hall, as did his fiancée, Miss Caroline Cushman. She was pretty and dark-haired, an aspiring actress who was just a few months younger than Jarvis. They had been dating for about a year and a half and seemed inseparable. Jarvis fell easily into the role of the romantic suitor.

Only a week after the engagement party, Norman made his fateful trip to the Philadelphia offices of
The Saturday Evening Post
. Perhaps his brother’s wedding plans left him yearning for a similar respectability. There was a sense in the boardinghouse, according to one observer, that Caroline had picked the “right” Rockwell brother—a bond salesman as opposed to a raffish artist. One never knew what an artist would amount to, assuming he amounted to anything at all.

Caroline later recalled a day when she was sitting in her room at Edgewood Hall, fixing herself up at her dressing table. Norman barged in, triumphantly carrying a hat stuffed with money. He had just returned from Philadelphia and changed his $150 check into one-dollar bills. Bond salesmen, he reminded her, were not the only ones who prospered. She was distressed to realize that he was proposing marriage to her.
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Norman and Jarvis looked nothing alike. Norman was pale and lanky and stood just under five foot eleven, with a long face and a pole neck. Jarvis was shorter and compact, five foot seven,
2
with handsome features. Together they had endured the frequent moves, the years in boardinghouses where they had shared cramped bedrooms and sat down to dinner in musty dining rooms, exchanging comments about their fellow boarders under their breath.

Nonetheless, Norman never felt close to Jarvis. Things came so easily for him. At the time of his wedding engagement, he was working in the bond department of William Morris Imbrie & Co., a brokerage house on Wall Street. On weekends, he enjoyed the diversions favored by privileged men, the sort he had never known in his youth. He raced his sailboat (
Rocky
) at the Orienta Yacht Club in Mamaroneck. He put on snazzy clothes to play golf, a young man in knee pants and a sweater knocking balls around a green.

He was constantly writing love letters to his fiancée. He sent her letters from his office. He dashed off mash notes while waiting for the evening train at Grand Central Terminal. When he had to leave town on business, naturally he wrote more, mailing his letters with two-cent stamps bearing the stony profile of George Washington. Judging from the mound of his surviving correspondence, Jarvis daydreamed about Caroline all the time and proclaimed his devotion as frequently as possible. He came to believe that his life was divided into two opposing halves: the long, dull years before he made her acquaintance and the contented moments since. “My dearest Sweetheart,” he cooed in a typical letter. “I don’t see how I ever had a good time before I met you. I am sure now that I never really had a good time.”
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Norman’s love life, by comparison, was predictably stark. Nothing that can be described as a love letter survives among his papers. It seems unlikely that he ever wrote one. He had his male friends for company, or rather, he had Clyde Forsythe, enlivening the atmosphere in his studio with his comic strips and his stream of jokes. And that was about as much intimacy as Norman seemed to need.

*   *   *

Norman, amazingly, would marry four months before Jarvis, as if marriage were simply another competition between brothers. He was twenty-two years old and not interested in a long courtship or even a short one.

Irene O’Connor was a third-grade teacher at the Weyman School in New Rochelle. He had seen her around the boardinghouse where she, too, lived, floating through the hallways in her ankle-length skirts and sitting down for dinner at the table next to his family’s. She had a large pretty face, with blue eyes and dark hair and thick eyebrows that she left untweezed. She was twenty-five then, a few years older than Rockwell.
4

She came from a tiny town upstate, Potsdam, New York, which was not near anything, other than Canada. Her father, Henry O’Connor, who was Irish-Catholic and Canadian-born, had owned a grocery store in Watertown during her girlhood.
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Irene was the first of his four children, and she proved to be an excellent student with a gift for writing. In 1911 she graduated from the State Normal School in Potsdam, which specialized in preparing women for careers as teachers.

Rockwell later claimed that he proposed to Irene on his way home from Philadelphia, after selling his first cover to
The Saturday Evening Post
. He got off the train in Atlantic City, the fabled seaside resort and, flush with excitement, called Irene from a pay phone. She declined his proposal, claiming to be engaged to another man. This was true. In September 1914 Irene’s local newspaper ran a short item announcing her engagement to one Merton S. Moore, of Potsdam, New York, who had studied agriculture and dairy farming at the University of Wisconsin.
6
She had known him for years and he had spent some time vacationing with her family at a summer cabin in Sylvan Falls, New York.
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In a matter of days, however, Irene came back with a yes to Rockwell. She would marry him. He suspected she was still in love with Merton Moore, but decided to marry him because he offered her the promise of a more worldly future.

She resigned her teaching position at the end of the school year, and that same week, on June 30, she and Rockwell applied for a marriage license.
8
It was a Friday and her birthday was coming up that weekend, and their plan—if that is the word—was to marry right away. Irene wanted to be married by a Catholic priest and Rockwell was happy to oblige her. He was not devout. He saw himself as a collection of frailties and deemed all faiths equally ineffective for his personal needs.

“The marriage of Miss Irene O’Connor … and Norman Rockwell, the artist, will take place today, the arrangements upon last night not being completed,” the local paper reported on July 1, 1916.
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Indeed, they were married that morning by the Rev. B. J. Eustace, in his “parochial residence” at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, in New Rochelle. In other words, they were married in the pastor’s modest house rather than in the church, perhaps because Rockwell was an Episcopalian.

With no time to be fitted for a wedding gown, Irene wore a navy-blue suit trimmed in white, and “a large white picture hat.” Her sister Marie was the maid of honor and Rockwell’s brother was his best man. There were only a handful of guests—Rockwell’s parents; his brother’s fiancée, Caroline; and Clyde and Cotta Forsythe.

After the ceremony, the newlyweds returned to Edgewood Hall for “a wedding breakfast” with their fellow boarders and friends. Then, Norman and Irene set off on their honeymoon—along with her sister and the Forsythes. First they “motored” to Jersey City, where they boarded a train for a mountain resort, Lake Minnewaska, near New Paltz, New York. Their final destination was Potsdam, where Rockwell belatedly met Irene’s parents and the rest of the O’Connor clan. He was amused by Irene’s two kid brothers, who liked to recount their duck-hunting adventures and whose presence ensured that he never had more than a moment alone with his new bride.

*   *   *

Returning to New Rochelle on July 15, the newlyweds moved out of Edgewood Hall and into their own apartment. There were problems from the beginning. The two-bedroom apartment, which was located on the third floor of a building at 31 Coligni Avenue, felt unbearably hot even with the windows open all the way. Irene decided to spend the summer the same way she had when she was single. She was going back to Potsdam, to stay with her parents.

Rockwell described the situation, give or take a few major facts, in his autobiography:

One week after we were married Irene left to visit her parents in Potsdam, New York, for two months, leaving me alone in the dingy third-floor apartment we’d rented in New Rochelle. Four days later, I discovered cockroaches in the ice box.

I mention the fact because it sort of typifies our marriage. It wasn’t particularly unhappy, but it certainly did not have any of the warmth and love of a real marriage.
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Rockwell viewed his wife as a defector. He claimed she abandoned him, leaving him stranded with nothing to eat. He had always seen his mother in similarly disappointed terms, believing that Nancy was too self-centered to give any thought to the duties of care.

*   *   *

Rockwell did make an early attempt to fit himself for the role of the conscientious husband. With the arrival of fall, he decided he would work at home. He optimistically moved his easel and paints out of Frederic Remington’s studio and into a spare room in his apartment. Irene resigned her teaching job at the Weyman School, with the intention of serving as her husband’s secretary.

They both thought it was a promising plan. Irene could take over for his teenage factotum, Franklin Lischke, and run his studio a thousand times more efficiently. She could answer the phone and talk to art editors and set up appointments with models. Moreover, he imagined her at her desk answering his correspondence, typing up short, concise letters that were free of spelling mistakes, attesting to her distinction as a former teacher.

But the home-studio arrangement didn’t last long. There were too many interruptions. The doorbell would ring and he would tense up. If it was the grocery boy, he had to lay his wet brushes on a hardwood chair and walk down the hall to let him in, thinking morosely that he would never regain his concentration. He decided he needed to return to the studio he had shared with Clyde Forsythe and Irene could continue to take care of his business correspondence at her desk at home.

Even so, Irene found that she was extraneous as she had never been in a classroom. The public stature that she garnered as Mrs. Norman Rockwell did not compensate for the empty space at the center of their marriage. His every waking moment, it seemed, was spent in his studio, with no time left for bridge parties or golf or the theater. Even on Sundays, when their neighbors went to church, he was in his studio by eight in the morning. “After we’d been married awhile I realized that she didn’t love me,” Rockwell later wrote.
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He never seemed to flip the question and contemplate whether or not he loved her.

*   *   *

In 1916 Woodrow Wilson had won a second term with the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” But on April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. Patriotic fervor gripped nearly everyone. The war, Ernest Hemingway wrote, was “the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied. So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.”
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The same was true of American painters and sculptors, many of whom were enlisted to create propaganda during World War I.

Posters were needed to sell Liberty Loan bonds and War Savings Certificate stamps, to assist the Red Cross with its fund-raising drive. They were needed to urge Americans to conserve coal and wheat. Posters were needed to persuade young men consumed by the fate of the Chicago White Sox or the New York Giants to think instead of the fate of their nation and to join the armed forces.

And so posters were printed by the millions and pasted up like national wallpaper. James Montgomery Flagg emerged almost overnight as America’s preeminent poster artist. As official military artist of New York State, Flagg (which was his real name, conveniently) designed some forty-six posters, including the iconic image of Uncle Sam sternly admonishing, “I Want YOU for the U.S. Army.”

There he was in every shop window, it seemed, Uncle Sam, a craggily attractive patriarch with deep-set eyes and fierce eyebrows and longish white hair. He points his finger a bit accusingly. Actually, he looks more like a man throwing you out of the Army for an infraction than someone welcoming you in.