Norman Rockwell (10 page)

Unfortunately, his parents decided that Norman’s socializing would best be expressed through a demanding church schedule that would make the most devoted worshipper flinch. St. Luke’s had been organized in 1820, the first church in Greenwich Village, according to New York diocesan records. Known as “St. Luke in the Fields,” it was supported financially by Manhattan’s prestigious Trinity Church on Wall Street. An uptown parish offshoot—a Romanesque brownstone church on Convent and 141st Street—would dominate Rockwell’s “free time” throughout grade school, his country summer idylls the only exception. The boys joined the choir, where the choirmaster bullied them until, according to Rockwell, they “sang . . . like angels.” He raged at them, called them insulting names, and hit them, while they passively “perched [on their stools] silent, white-faced.” The boys were held to a punishing weekly routine of three rehearsals a week, a dress rehearsal on Friday, and four services every Sunday. Their putative reward was to graduate to singing at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the nearly completed bishop’s seat. In truth, the boys’ only pleasure derived from a church battalion motivated by the recent action in the Philippines; this warrior-inspired religious group was given authentic miniature uniforms complete with wooden swords and allowed to participate in parades under St. Luke’s banner.

Nancy’s own participation at St. Luke’s appears to have been impressive as well, at least for someone too weak to perform ordinary household duties. Church records show her to have been a particularly active parishioner. She was appointed as St. Luke’s representative to the St. John’s Cathedral building drive, and she served as a delegate on the Women’s Auxiliary to the Cathedral League. Such activity belies her nephew’s observation that she seemed “a typical Victorian woman—Waring did everything, she didn’t know how to do anything, even manage her finances, after he died.” Nancy’s “complete looniness” was somewhat selective, a matter of where she chose to spend her energies. Her mother’s pattern of seeking release from the demands of a busy household through church fellowship had imprinted itself on Anne Elizabeth Hill’s youngest daughter. From the early days of her marriage, she had found being a housewife tedious and exhausting. In contrast, church life invigorated her. Even Nancy’s love of needlework, her favorite way of showing affection, went most often toward beautifying the parish chapel (although one of the few remaining relics of the boys’ infancy is the first pair of booties that she knitted Jerry and then passed down to his brother).

From their earliest memories, Jerry and Norman Rockwell associated their mother’s giving of herself with her participation in the local church—and rarely with her relationship to their father or themselves, which lacked the easy warmth they observed in other homes. In 1900, New York City’s population was 85 percent foreign or had foreign-born parents, creating a mixed neighborhood that reflected family styles much more expressive than the New England and Victorian heritage dictating that of the Rockwells. Looking around them, the boys perceived that their mother poured into the church the affection that neighborhood women lavished on their households, and so religion became their competition for her attention.

The dangers that Norman felt he and his brother faced just getting from 832 St. Nicholas to 141st Street contributed even more reason to associate things religious with punishment. “A slum lay between our house and the church. We’d walk hurriedly through the dim, gaslighted streets. Gangs of ragged children taunted us. Drunken men lurched against us. We clutched rocks in our fists, expecting every minute to be set upon,” the illustrator later recalled.

Although the boys had been warned too vividly by their parents to be able to pause and assess the scene for themselves—no one ever did attack them—the local landscape varied bewilderingly. Up at the 155th Street station, where the Sixth Avenue El stopped, they’d hop off the clanging steel stairs and emerge into an odd mix of old picnic grounds and new housing developments. But the area most worrisome to Rockwell consisted of four-family row houses built next to overgrown lots with weeds too thick to walk through. He might have to pass an empty lot where rats scurried even in the daytime, while on the adjacent land construction for a business office would be under way. The competing bids for his attention merely added to the overall aura of violence he associated with the neighborhood. Peter Rockwell remembers his father’s recounting how “he used to climb up on the apartment roof and watch the Irish and Italian gangs fight each other with bicycle chains. He felt that this kind of violence kept him from ever really experiencing the proper innocence of childhood.”

To some extent, Norman’s lack of confidence in his physical prowess against such threats of violence was justified. He was not exactly growing up to look or act like the strongest boy in the class. Called “Mooney” by the other kids, who liked him because he was funny and quick and willing to play pranks, he wore round rimless glasses that made him appear owlish and that attracted attention to his dreaded oversized Adam’s apple. Increasingly, as physique and athletic talent came to matter, Rockwell felt himself losing ground. The cute pigeon-toed amble everyone commented on when he was little had worsened, not improved, as his mother had optimistically predicted. Worst of all, his willingness to draw for the guys had lost its magic; now, even Norman’s best buddies gravitated to Jerry, a real boys’ boy, strong and athletic. If there was competition between brothers under most circumstances, there seemed no reason for the younger boy to even try to win against Jerry: “[He] always came in first; I always came in last, puffing and blowing.”

“The New York public schools became athletically minded,” as Jerry admitted. “And we boys all became athletic”—all, the implication was, except for Norman. “My specialty was the high jump but I cannot remember Norman participating.” Part of the city’s self-imposed mandate to develop a unified idea of being an American involved the masculinization of boys—through athletics. Norman decided to develop his body into something closer to his brother’s, setting out on a self-improvement program of push-ups, deep-knee bends, and jumping jacks. As he explains in his autobiography, he performed them religiously every day in front of his bedroom mirror, until he decided that his embarrassing protruding Adam’s apple, his “narrow shoulders, jelly arms, and thin measly-looking legs,” weren’t willing to respond.

By the age of twelve, Rockwell had decided that he was in truth a “lump, a long skinny nothing, a bean pole without the beans.” Being a “nothing” stung. Like the protagonist of
David Copperfield,
who feels himself to be a “blank space” that “everybody overlooked,” the youth pondered ways to gain attention. Paradoxically refusing his victimization, he developed a bizarre trick that, he thought, made sense of the deformed appearance he felt himself to present. Walking along the street, he would stretch his shirt sleeve over his arm so that people passing thought he lacked a hand and would “feel sorry” for him. At other times, he’d practice a “crooked limp,” expedited by his severely turned-in feet. The parents so energetically tried to correct the young boy’s pigeon-toed stance with orthopedic shoes that the expense and continued effort convinced him he was “some sort of a cripple.”

Nancy encouraged her younger son to think of himself as weak and in need of her assistance. In light of her peculiar treatment of him, Norman would understandably have identified with David Copperfield, called “Daisy” by the masculine Steerforth who treats him like a girl, and whose own self-centered mother thoughtlessly engineers her son’s destruction through her silly preoccupation with ancestral caste. An outgrowth of his poor self-image during these years, Rockwell’s famous modesty, which included asking anyone nearby to critique his work in progress, became one of his most admired traits. Genuine on the one hand, it also bore the weight of insecurity’s backlash that whipped even the successful adult artist.

Rockwell’s dogged devotion to his art seems too extreme to be indebted solely, or even mostly, to its recompense for his physical shortcomings. Yet the very intensity with which he applied himself to his paintings—he worried even in his seventies that an art director might not like his work and would fire him—shores up the illustrator’s own compelling statements: “All I had was the ability to draw, which as far as I could see didn’t count for much. But because it was all I had I began to make it my whole life. I drew all the time. Gradually my narrow shoulders, long neck, and pigeon toes became less important to me. My feelings no longer paralyzed me. I drew and drew and drew.” Was work his antidote to depression? “I put everything into my work. A lot of artists do that: their work is the only thing they’ve got that gives them an identity. I feel that I don’t have anything else, that I must keep working or I’ll go back to being pigeon-toed, narrow-shouldered—a lump.”

But by 1905, his family would consider the problem of corrective shoes a luxurious distraction. Another drama began its run in the Rockwell household, one that lacked the comic dimensions of the gawky boy’s role. Uncle Samuel had been diagnosed with a degenerative disease that, though Rockwell would refer to it somewhat obliquely in his autobiography as “locomotor ataxia,” was syphilis, which in its advanced stage did go by the more exotic nomenclature. “My uncle got his illness from too many ladies,” the illustrator would whimsically toss off, ignoring the up-close view he had suffered of his father’s brother dying an agonizing and humiliating death. Since the tertiary phase of syphilis occurs anywhere from five to twenty years after the original sexual transmission of the disease, the date of Samuel’s ill-fated dalliance is unknown. At this point, he had been married to Susan Crampton for seven years, three of them “in secret.” Someone, probably his shocked wife, procured a home for him in Mamaroneck where he could deteriorate more privately than in New York or among the Yonkers relatives: the lack of muscular coordination, the spastic, uneven walk, and the loss of bladder and bowel functions were among the manifestations that played particularly poorly in public.

On November 21, 1907, Samuel Rockwell, forty-one years old, died. Spinal paralysis and heart failure were cited as the official causes of death for a man whose death certificate reads “no occupation” and “single”—in spite of Susan Crampton’s Manhattan directory listing in subsequent years as Samuel Rockwell’s widow. For the past two years, Father Rockwell, traveling between Mamaroneck and Manhattan, had helped care for his son, a burden that at least distracted him from his loss of Phoebe. Now Sam might be gone, but Waring’s brood would surely flourish in the country. The scant records that were not destroyed in the aftermath of Samuel Rockwell’s death suggest that Father Rockwell negotiated some arrangement with his son’s widow allowing the elderly man to retain the Mamaroneck house after Sam died.

Although Nancy ensured that the family history recorded a minor bout of malaria that Jerry was said to have caught during a summer spent at an outlying farm in Whitestone as the Rockwells’ reason for leaving Manhattan, Samuel D. Rockwell, Jr.’s ignominious demise actually occasioned their good fortune. In truth the itinerant, perpetually discontented Nancy was overripe for another move. Nor did Norman need much persuasion: at last he could experience living year-round among grass, trees, space, and sky. After almost thirteen years of a city boy’s life, he would walk away from the old neighborhood without looking back. He was not and never would be a nostalgic person.

6

Mamaroneck: An Interlude

Even Jarvis, far more content in Manhattan than Norman had ever been, agreed that Mamaroneck was a definite step up. “We still had to go a half mile to get to school, but now [we ran] thru fields and flowers,” he wrote in his memoir years later, affirming his younger brother’s darker urban vision. Today a town of twenty thousand, in 1907 Mamaroneck (located along Long Island Sound, only twenty-four miles from Manhattan) was a pleasant if sleepy commuter village of twenty-five hundred. The water lapped the shore within sight of the Rockwells’ home at 121 Prospect Street (eventually renumbered 415), the inland sea’s gentle rhythms seducing both boys into learning to sail. Gables jutted out at the top of their three-story house, enabling the Rockwells to see all the way down to the water, a view obscured in the coming decades by a large-scale apartment complex built to accommodate the growing population. With a large redbrick front porch, the residence held its own in a solidly middle-class neighborhood, its cheerful exterior matching the hominess of the pleasant surrounding houses. In 1986, town historians would erect a small plaque (its dates wrong) outside the door of the private residence: “Home of Norman Rockwell, 1903–1911.”

Jarvis—or Jerry, the nickname he now insisted upon—had his own reasons for recalling Mamaroneck so fondly, and, as usual, they involved his athletic prowess. The central school, built in 1889, housed all grades in its monolithic brick structure at 740 West Boston Post Road, later Mamaroneck’s town center. Predictably, he remembered the institution primarily for its football team, where he was the school’s star player. “Norman cheered for us,” he noted, testimony reinforced when Rockwell reenacted the Mamaroneck fight song almost sixty years later to the astonished delight of Dick Cavett’s television audience.

Norman failed to share his brother’s pleasure in their school: the courses bored him, his grades were again mediocre, and his participation in all-important sports was negligible. Barely pulling a seventy in drawing, in algebra—the class whose teacher he adored—he “of all things” made an A and ranked first in the class. He was happy, however, not only to be out of the city, but to escape the shame he had most recently experienced at P.S. 46. Before leaving, he’d exploited a chance to impress his mother by enlarging a story about the principal praising his exemplary sketch of the San Francisco earthquake. He’d transformed what had been, in truth, a simple show-and-tell in the man’s office to a starring role in the school assembly, where he was asked to stand and explain how he had made the drawing. His impulses were right, even if the truth was otherwise: his mother validated him fully, more than he’d bargained for. So impressed that she wanted to thank the principal for recognizing her son’s special talent, Nancy Rockwell visited the school the next day and, to the everlasting mortification of her red-faced son, carried on about the achievement in front of his astonished teacher.

The new school proved superior in other ways, mostly through the lack of tedious repetition that the early grades had demanded. Its improvement over its predecessor didn’t begin to compare with the happy contrast between the two churches, however. St. Thomas’s Episcopal parish, only a few walking blocks away, employed a far more relaxed, humane approach to religion, especially choir participation, than had St. Luke’s. Because their father had taken on heavy responsibilities within the church hierarchy, the Rockwell boys were fairly conspicuous within the church community. On December 3, 1907, Waring joined the vestry, the governing body of laypeople in the parish, specifically involved with church finances and the conditions of the physical plant. Within a week, he was elected vestry clerk.

Norman’s own religious life at St. Thomas’s proceeded far better than had his tenure at St. Luke’s. When the choirboy’s voice changed, he was assigned the role of crucifer, an honor probably beholden in part to Waring’s position. Every Sunday, Norman bore the cross aloft as he led the procession down the church aisle.

If his choir experiences here were less harsh than those administered by his earlier Teutonic master in Manhattan, the more casual St. Thomas’s nonetheless completed Rockwell’s disillusionment with organized religion. As crucifer, the adolescent saw up close the conflicts between values and actions that the people of the church sometimes embodied. The sexton, for one, disappointed him with his careless disrespect for the task he honored in public; when alone, the man spit on the crucifix, all the time grumbling as he polished it with a dirty rag. The choirmaster himself often turned up drunk, so that the irritable sexton and bewildered crucifer had to prop him up on his way to the altar.

What did Nancy, who at regular intervals rehearsed her disgust at her alcoholic father, think of this state of affairs? Did Norman tell her about it, and did she believe him or instead assert that he was not to accuse churchmen of such indecorum? At the least, the inconsistency between his mother’s condemnation of Howard Hill’s drinking and her ability at some level to look the other way when a church matter was involved encouraged Rockwell to abjure institutional religion.

Church did provide one major attraction. The thirteen-year-old’s hormones on alert, he especially enjoyed the new interactions with girls that St. Thomas’s facilitated. Boyishly aggressive, he interacted with them most easily by making any exchange into an adventure, such as the time that he and a friend climbed into the belfry after church to call down and tease the girls on the grounds of St. Michael’s, built in 1901 as a “wayward home” for troubled young women. In contrast to his more obvious responsible side, Rockwell frequently acted on impulse. One Sunday, he accidentally got locked into the belfry; after several hours of imprisonment, he was released, only to face greater torment at home. “Norman Percevel, you’re late,” his mother complained. “Dinner is spoiled. And after I worked so hard.” Since Norman lamented that illness had motivated his foray into the open air of the church tower, his conscientious father dosed the miserable boy with castor oil. Misadventures aside, much more fun percolated on Sundays in Mamaroneck than in Manhattan. When, for instance, the girls in the communion lines passed by his carefully chosen seat on the edge of the choir pew, Norman would pull at their skirts until they hissed, “Norman Percevel
Rockwell,
you let go of my skirt this minute or I’ll tell your mother on you.” “Tattletale,” he’d huff back—letting go. Boys were much easier to deal with: they could be predicted to pull hard to get away from Norman’s hold on their belts, until, when he suddenly released his grip, they’d tumble into the person ahead of them. His friends joined him in these games, making the weekly religious ordeal more fun, if less holy.

An easy camaraderie with boys was matched by his touching erotic awareness of girls. At the age of sixty-four, Rockwell recalled a coming-of-age encounter that presaged the wonder and genuine pleasure he would always feel in the presence of women. A sensual response to their alien presence marks his visual, almost tactile memory: “I remember walking into a room in a friend’s house during a swimming party one summer afternoon. . . . The sunlight was streaming through the open windows; a warm breeze curled in the curtains. All around the room, lying in disorder on chairs, tables, the window sills, were girls’ underthings—white bloomers, white bodices with blue frills, lacy slips. I stopped, utterly thrilled by a sense of femininity. I could hear the shouts of the bathers on the beach below the open windows. The pink ribbons on a bodice stirred in the breeze. I felt I had penetrated into the strange, secret world of girls which had heretofore been closed to me. I could hardly breathe, the sense of it was so strong.”

The adolescent absorbed two mind-sets that dominated his adult attitudes toward women: a reverence that stemmed from their sexual difference and inspired in him a sort of adoration, and the assumption that women were capable, strong, and could shore him up at least as well as the other way around. For all her faults, Nancy Rockwell’s complex blend of little-girl seductiveness and absolute imperiousness presented her son with the image of a many-sided woman, largely a positive bequest but responsible in part for his occasional ambivalence toward feminine beauty. Rarely persuaded by the conventions of the age that women by nature should look a certain way or inhabit particular social roles, Rockwell nonetheless often appeared nervous about his “right” to draw or to have intimate relationships with the women sanctioned by his culture as the most attractive. Even as a mature adult, the artist sometimes seems akin to the hypnotized monster in the classic 1954 horror film
Creature from the Black Lagoon,
whose libido is awakened and then chastened by the strong, beautiful woman swimming just beyond his grasp. And his own descriptions of early encounters with girls sound like poetic expressions of more primal emotions, similar to those that journalist David Wood recalls produced in him by the infamous
Black Lagoon
movie: “Early into my adolescence, I identified totally with the obvious feelings of the monster,” Wood writes. “Like him, I felt that the distance between the beautiful woman beneath him in the lagoon and someone like me was impassable.”

Female teachers provided an accessible, reassuring screen on which to project his nascent sexual feelings, and Rockwell paid much closer attention to the women heading his classes than to the subject being taught. As an adult, he recalled with chagrin the teacher, “Miss Genevieve Allen,” whom his class—led by him—tortured with their silly questions; and he recounted falling in love with Miss Helena Geer, she of the “trim little feet and ample hips,” whose skirts rustled as she walked by, a “cloyingly sweet perfume” wafting forth. Most of all, he felt understood by Miss Julia Smith, who asked him to draw holiday-colored chalk murals on the boards each season. (She also was his long-term math teacher, suggesting that her ready appreciation of his talents registered in his algebra grades.) After Rockwell’s fame was well established, the then-blind schoolteacher wrote him a letter, asking if he remembered her. The sweet correspondence that followed spawned the idea for Rockwell’s September 1935
Post
cover, a tribute to schoolteachers.

Teachers who valued high marks and conventional behavior would have overlooked Norman, but the occasional perceptive soul must really have enjoyed the unusual boy—spirited, good-humored, quick, talented, usually polite, and industrious on those few academic occasions when he chose to be. He figured out that, in spite of his “bean pole” appearance, friendliness went far, and so he made friends quickly. In truth, such efforts came easily: he seemed predisposed by nature to like people, and they tended to respond in kind. Before long, he and his new gang had devised more of the slightly subversive activities that he’d enjoyed in the city. But his mother unfailingly engineered some new indignity sure to reduce him to the absurd figure he feared being. One of her worst missteps was to insist that her hapless son wear Father Rockwell’s oversized floppy coat that dwarfed the boy’s thin frame. “Norman Percevel, that is a perfectly fine coat,” she responded every day as he begged her to reconsider.

“I hated that coat,” he later recalled. “[I’d walk to school,] my scrawny neck protruding from the high, upright collar of my grandfather’s paddock coat, which had been handed down to me. . . . At first I’d been sort of proud of it. No other kid in school had such a magnificent coat. But it was too big for me—the skirt swept around my ankles, the cuffs lapped against my knuckles—and pretty soon it became the laughingstock of the whole school. But my mother insisted that I wear it.” On the first day of spring, he “lugged it out to the back yard, poured turpentine on it, and burned it.”

Nancy and Waring cited the need to live frugally on those occasions when their sons protested such economies as wearing hand-me-down coats several sizes too big. And, at least according to their younger son’s memories, the boys rarely had the pocket money common to the other kids. Rockwell’s frequent references to his family’s modest circumstances are confusing, in light of Jarvis’s lack of similar complaints, as well as the reality of Waring’s solidly middle-class income. The vagueness with which the artist treats his grandparents and the actual first real homestead in Mamaroneck suggests that the source of the family’s financial difficulties receives strongest explanation here.

Norman Rockwell’s oldest son, Jarvis, recalls hearing stories about “someone, either Pop’s father or grandfather,” losing his business but electing to pay off all his employees rather than take with him the few remaining assets. Waring Rockwell’s position with George Wood was secure, and the company did not go under; the coal business, however, suffered great losses in the financial downturns of the 1890s as well as in the crash of 1909. It seems likely that Waring and Nancy Rockwell not only took care of Father Rockwell after his wife’s death but supported him financially as well. The most probable scenario appears to be one that includes Susan Crampton establishing a home in Mamaroneck for her syphilitic husband, Samuel Rockwell, followed by John Rockwell living with his dying son and eventually losing his own apartment in Manhattan, at which time Waring and Nancy moved to Mamaroneck and combined their households again, Waring paying all the bills. Earning around $2,500 a year from 1907 to 1909, roughly the equivalent of $44,500 in 2000, he could take care of family expenses, including his wife’s penchant for expensive clothes, but he would have had little left over with which to indulge his sons.