Norman Rockwell (25 page)

By 1960, American readers would not have responded with the same wonder that such a close call commanded in 1927. At the time of Rockwell’s autobiography, the
Post
was gasping for air, and leaving it for a rival magazine that paid more money sounded eminently sensible. But the 1920s were a different story: Will Durant, Henry Ford, Vachel Lindsay, Groucho Marx, Rube Goldberg, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Al Smith—they all contributed to the
Post
during this decade. As one analyst commented: “I often think a thing is not really published in the United States until it appears in
The Saturday Evening Post.
” True, urban sophisticates prided themselves on reading
The New Yorker,
whose debut in 1925 as an omnibus humor, literary, and nonfiction magazine featured cover illustrations more fashionably decorative than the
Post
’s. But enough of a crossover audience existed at this point that the
Post,
resolutely middle-class as it was, remained an acceptable magazine in the homes of the literati.

The Little Acorn
’s assertion about Rockwell’s contract with the
Post
was, in any event, misleading. It is highly unlikely that he signed any kind of conventional, legally binding deal with the publishers; instead, Lorimer and he agreed that he would not work for other magazines without the
Post
’s approval, and that his first priority, even before accepting advertising commissions, was to produce their covers. This was no small constriction: in the 1920s, between them Leyendecker and Rockwell produced one third of all covers for the
Post.
Only the two men were allowed to submit mere sketches to Lorimer for cover approval; other artists had to produce a finished painting for the editor’s vote. And Leyendecker’s pay was a model for the younger man. During his most productive years, during World War I, Leyendecker got from $1,500 to $2,000 per cover. Now, as the 1920s came to an end, Rockwell already commanded from $250 to $500 per cover, depending on the painting’s complexity. And, since he followed Lorimer’s injunction to ask for twice his
Post
salary before accepting an advertising commission, his income rapidly began shooting upward.

Such productivity cut into Rockwell’s newly found enthusiasm for the whirling social life that Irene plotted for him. His popularity demanded that he work extended—if, nowadays, too often uninspired—hours. He explained to a journalist the erroneous ideas people have about the “leisurely lot” of artists, his opening reference striking what was, for him, an oddly social tone: “I don’t even have time to play golf. Every morning from 7:00 to 8:30 I take a brisk walk with a friend out in the country and this, with a little tennis, is all the exercise I get. For ten years I have promised myself to take Sundays off, but it is still a matter of conversation and not of realization. I am in the studio daily until after five and two nights a week. Joseph Leyendecker works every day from 10 in the morning to 10 at night and probably will the rest of his life. I do on an average of two pictures a month.” He continues with a rush of words to explain, apropos of no apparent provocation, that if he weren’t an artist, he’d like to be a surgeon or, particularly, a movie director.

When not going out socially or working in his studio at night, the illustrator explained, Irene read aloud to him, so that Rockwell was happily gaining an education through volumes of Russian, French, Swedish, and American literature—just as “Howard Pyle said that that was how he received his education.” Especially since an artist’s eyes are so tired by the end of the day, the system served him perfectly, he explained. Rockwell loved hearing the classics, especially the sweeping historical epics charged with heightened emotion; Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and, of course, Dickens particularly restocked his imagination every evening, making the studio encounter inevitably more fruitful the following morning.

But he also hid behind the emotional catharsis that densely textured great novels provide, substituting the imaginative release of fiction for the drama of daily life. Only when caught unawares did he let spontaneous emotion escape him. In 1928, Rockwell started to offer to a local journalist a controlled, dry narration of child model Billy Paine’s death. Eddie Carson, Billy’s best friend, had accompanied Rockwell to the interview, and Rockwell, joking good-naturedly with the boy about the trouble he and his friends too often stirred up, momentarily forgot where the topic would lead him. He began merrily to discuss Billy’s tendency to play tricks in the studio, finding himself stammering within seconds: “Billy Paine was the worst of all and—.” The interviewer explains that “both smiles faded. For some time neither [Rockwell nor Eddie] seemed able to speak.” Then the artist recovered enough to continue talking: “Billy was the worst of all. Full of mischief every minute. A few months ago he started to play one of his good-natured tricks on another boy. He climbed out of one window at his home and started to climb into another. He fell three stories. When they picked him up they found his skull was fractured.” “There was silence again for a time,” the writer notes solemnly.

When Rockwell took Eddie out to the car after the interview was over, the writer peeked out the window and observed that “they were clambering into the car like two kids—talking, laughing, taking a swat at each other as occasion offered.” Such mimicry of boyish playfulness remained a constant of Rockwell’s mature life. Engaging in childishness helped the artist avoid connecting on a deeper level, enabling him to forestall potential emotional intimacy. This pattern functioned at a particularly overdetermined psychological level, since Rockwell was imitating the idea of boyhood, rather than the real life he himself had been granted as a child.

The type of admiration that Rockwell’s worshipful journalist exudes is exactly the kind of thing that created a backlash of resentment in the New York art world. Terming the illustrator a young man “in the very front rank of American artists” did not engender affection among the New York cognoscenti, who assumed such populist laurels to indict those they crowned. Similarly, during this same period, when
Judge
magazine gave Rockwell its “High Hat” award, citing him “for having become, while still a young man, a tradition in art,” the epithet damaged him far more than benign neglect would have. Usually implied in the encomiums was a nod toward Rockwell’s distinguishing mark of sincerity, an old-fashioned virtue in the magazine world. The freestanding covers of the early
New Yorker
also depended on humor and even, according to at least one of its art directors, timelessness as their milieu, but irony, not earnestness, was the juggernaut of the new.

Phoebe Waring Rockwell, NR’s paternal grandmother, c. 1890.

John William Rockwell, NR’s paternal grandfather, c. 1890.

Anne Elizabeth Patmore Hill, NR’s maternal grandmother, c. 1882.

Jarvis Waring Rockwell (“Waring”), NR’s father, December 24, 1887.

Anne Mary (Nancy) Hill Rockwell, NR’s mother, c. 1882.

NR (left) and his brother, Jarvis (“Jerry”), 1895.

Jerry (left) and Norman catching frogs at Lippincott’s farm, c. summer of 1904.

Clockwise from upper left: Norman, Jerry, Waring, and Nancy Rockwell, c. 1905.

Summer boardinghouse, c. 1899. Jerry and Nancy are second and third from the left in the back row; Waring stands at the far right; Norman sits in front, at the far right.

Family portrait, December 1911: Waring, Norman, Jerry (left to right), and Nancy.

Norman and his first wife, Irene O’Connor (right), on a picnic, c. 1916.

Jerry Rockwell’s wedding to Carol Cushman, 1916. In the back row, Waring stands at the far left, Norman at the far right; in the middle row, Nancy stands at the far right, with Irene beside her; Jerry is seated, to the left.