Norman Rockwell (28 page)

A rose window designed and carved by Peter Rockwell, from sandstone quarried by the artist in 1982, Tuscany chapel, Italy, mid-1990s.

NR having tea on the “Escapebo,” the private extension he and Molly built onto their house to escape gawking tourists, early autumn 1978. Though weak and confused in the last months of his life, Rockwell still had a sense of humor: note the tea cozy he’d placed on his head. To his right: his nurse, Mary Quinn, and Molly, holding Sid.

14

Losing His Way

For someone who, “while still a young man, [was] a tradition in art,” Norman Rockwell at the age of thirty-four was feeling very much otherwise. He certainly was succeeding in his juggling act, appearing to be the stolid, highly respectable artisan-workman during the day and the enviable dandy by night. Still, the dichotomy seemed to wear down his imagination. A listless spring left him determined to find a solution to a growing sense of professional staleness, but he packed up as usual for a summer break at Louisville Landing, where the locals took him out fishing on the river and sat around with him afterward on their porches, smoking tobacco and sharing tall tales. Although Irene was not very popular around town—she was considered a “socialite,” someone who carelessly answered the door in mud packs that implied that she did not like being disturbed—her husband was accepted as a real guy by the small group of regulars. The pace relaxed Rockwell, and he usually found that he painted better after such a respite.

During the summer of 1928, the camp break among Irene’s family and friends didn’t work the expected antidotal magic. From their circumstances by the end of the season, it appears that the Rockwells agreed at some point in July to take separate vacations during the following two months. Rockwell joined the Larchmont Country Club as a special summer member, living there while Irene was away. At that time, the club was very much a male bastion, inhabited by rich Manhattanites who spent summers in Larchmont to escape the city’s heat.

Irene stayed in Potsdam, only fifteen miles from the Landing, at least for part of the late summer. On August 29, she gave a luncheon at the Potsdam Country Club for her mother, sister, and two local friends, ensuring that a notice was printed in the local papers, citing her as “Mrs. Norman Rockwell, wife of the famous magazine illustrator.”

During this summer of apparent discontent, Rockwell decided that Dean Parmelee’s hilarious vision of a stag trip to Europe, joined by Rockwell’s wealthy Manhattanite friend, the politically leftist and highly vocal Bill Backer, was just what he needed. At the end of the summer, the three men sailed on the same ocean liner that Rockwell had taken to Paris in 1922. Before the irrepressible threesome ever got to the Continent, they found themselves engaged in minor adventures with interesting fellow travelers. Once abroad, the three ran the gamut from visiting “every known cathedral,” according to Betty Parmelee, to stumbling—once again, accidentally—into a brothel, where—once again, innocently—the men befriended the naked women, convincing two of them to get dressed and go out for a night on the town. A few weeks later, when back in Paris, the men revisited the brothel to see how their new friends were faring, and they were hailed as conquering heroes, so unusual had their “no strings attached” generosity seemed.

To the question of the autobiography’s accuracy regarding their father’s sexually pure encounter with the prostitutes, Tom and Peter Rockwell returned two opposing answers. “I just don’t think, given the state of his marriage and the marital agreement about open sexual relationships, that Pop simply took the women shopping,” the youngest son responded. In contrast, Tom Rockwell believes that “my father bore a particular innocence about him in such matters—willful innocence, that is certainly possible, given that he was a deeply intelligent and sophisticated man. But I find it totally in keeping with his character to imagine that scenario of the brothel exactly as he told it.” Rockwell was no prude, and he had been living the life of a Jazz Age swell, but his deep sense of self-possession, affability, and respect for women and for himself combined to make it out of character for him to trade sex for money. And his early experience with the fruits of prostitution—watching his Uncle Sam in the agony of final-stage syphilis, and hearing the cause of death declared “being with too many women”—made such encounters especially unappealing.

The men traveled from Paris to another site where masculinity was a subtext, a duel in Heidelberg. After watching the episode end with one man bloodied enough to earn a reprieve if not respect, they took the train to Austria, recovering through extended hikes in the Alpine clouds the American self-reliance they’d lost sight of below. Alternating museum study with athletic feats, they toured the Prado in Spain, where, during a careless moment, they lost Rockwell’s thick, fully stuffed sketchbook that he’d busily worked in during their entire trip. Instead of the tantalizingly complete book of European drawings the illustrator had expected to bring home, the cartoon postcards he sent to friends, including one buddy at Louisville Landing, comprised the bulk of his oeuvre. The postcard shows three traveling companions walking single-file down the road, a dachshund trailing alongside. Dressed as a hiker, Norman is carrying a stein of foam-laden beer.

By this point, Irene no longer even tried to maintain the appearance of interest in her husband’s life; Rockwell mentions briefly in his autobiography that he failed deliberately to tell her when he planned to return. In lieu of typical spousal affection, Rockwell’s dog became the centerpiece of stories about keeping the home fires burning. According to an absurdly sentimentalized account that Irene’s brother, Howard O’Connor, provided after the illustrator’s death, “Raleigh Rockwell” refused to eat while his master was in Europe. Almost dead by Norman’s return, Raleigh was brought back to life by the “caring person” that Norman was, and the illustrator refused to ever leave him again till the dog died of old age. “Norman was kind. He was probably the kindest man in the world. He never changed. He wouldn’t even let his dog down,” Hoddy explained to reporters almost fifty years later.

One possible twist on Rockwell’s desultory remark that the men had decided against telling anyone when they would dock is suggested by a September 22, 1928, column in
The New York Times.
Among the illustrious passengers disembarking from the Lloyd Sabaudo liner
Conte Biancamano,
which departed from Genoa and Naples, are Norman Rockwell, followed in the report by Mrs. Dorothy Caruso, the very attractive young widow of Rockwell’s old friend Enrico, returning to Manhattan after five months in Italy. It is irresistible to speculate about the possible friendship between the two acquaintances—both, in their different ways, unattached to a mate. Although he provided meticulously detailed notes on other aspects of his travel, Rockwell failed to include mention of taking an Italian ocean liner home, or of encountering the widow Caruso on board. Ordinarily one to revel in happy social coincidences, the illustrator’s silence about this chapter of his journey is unusual.

While their son was living a life that looked to them like a step away from morbid decadence, Waring and Nancy Rockwell were capitulating in their own way to the jazzed-up culture of the Roaring Twenties. In 1928, Waring’s income from George Wood and Sons had reached $8,700, allowing the couple to move to 62 Milton Road, in Rye, New York, not far from Jerry and Carol’s expensive apartment. A year earlier, in 1927, a luxurious new country club had opened at Milton Point, an exclusive area of Rye. Known as the Peningo Club, in honor of the Native Americans who had settled the region, the fancy, exclusive beach, sports, and social organization had as one of its first presidents none other than Waring Rockwell. The following fall, on November 4, 1928, the Westchester Sunday newspaper published a picture of the club’s president and his wife dressed up in flapper outfits for the Halloween party held in the clubhouse. Nancy and Waring look about fourteen years old, their youthfulness a spillover from the odd innocence of their faces as well as their frivolous costumes.

Jerry and Carol Rockwell sometimes socialized with the older couple, while Norman and Irene remained at a conspicuous distance, outlawed from communication most likely because of Irene’s inability to make peace with her difficult mother-in-law. With Jerry reaping superb returns from his holdings in a French bank, he made enough money to provide for any extras his parents wanted. He had even bought a thirty-foot yawl, which he proudly named the
Nancy R.
He raced the sloop four times in the next year, winning twice. Nancy and Waring’s grandson Dick was nine years old at the time, and he remembers that his athletic father used to sail the boat into the harbor and show off by lassoing the buoy with a hook in order to slow his speed as he went by.

The family theatricality that seemed to run through the Rockwells’ veins enhanced the illustrator’s value as a public performer, as Rockwell made good money using his name for other than artistic purposes. Years earlier, he had participated in judging a Miss America contest; now, in early 1929, he was asked to join a prominent group of illustrators taking turns discussing their concept of “beautiful women.” John Held, Charles Dana Gibson, Penrhyn Stanlaws, McClelland Barclay, and James Montgomery Flagg had delineated their individual aesthetics of feminine beauty, the artistic reflections prominently underwritten by Hind’s Honey of Almond cream. Rockwell cannily used the January 10 broadcast to forward his belief that beauty could not be adjudicated.

First, he recalled briefly the beauty contest he had judged a few years before with Clare Briggs the cartoonist and Nell Brinkley the actress. People rarely agree on what constitutes beauty, he emphasized, and he himself had never painted a conventional “pretty girl” in his life, surely a grand overstatement. This oft-repeated lamentation masquerading as self-criticism is a polite way to indict the cultural norm of beauty as hackneyed and artificially limited. Rockwell, like most artists, enjoyed heightened visual awareness of the world around him: without a trace of self-consciousness, he would comment on a man’s beautiful facial structure, a woman’s compact musculature, the various skin tones and colors among Americans.

In his radio talk on feminine beauty, Rockwell explained that he disliked the day’s prevailing formula—arched eyebrows, enlarged eyes, no shadows on the face, no nostrils, Cupid’s-bow mouth arranged in a sort of suppressed yawn, no gums showing. In contrast, Rockwell explains, he delights to see a woman laugh: “The best artist’s models are not the classic beauties; they are girls with good looks and enough personality to put life into their faces. . . . Let me say too—that there is nothing more satisfying to this particular artist than the sort of beauty that is made by care, and by character. It takes an awful lot of character for some girls to make the most of the features they are endowed with. That character may find its source in their work, or it may spring from their particular talent, or it may simply be a fierce, self-respecting pride that is determined to make the most of their endowment of beauty. Their classic charms may be their eyes—only—or a well-turned chin, or a smooth skin, or a combination of such matters—but the woman whose beauty I like to paint is the woman whose character has given her a quality which simply makes the classic pretty-girl look forlorn and helpless by comparison.” Characteristically, Rockwell ended the talk by modestly undercutting the very authority he had just confidently asserted, since of course he himself lacked both beauty and brains, and so on.

Over the next six months, Rockwell accepted fewer professional requests for his attention and instead upped the pace of his socializing, trying to match the urbane disregard for propriety of the circles he now frequented. He found it harder to come up with fresh ideas for his cover illustrations, which demanded a relaxed mental space where he could create whole narratives from scratch. Instead, he did some of his finest story illustrations during this period, including one of a writer’s circus memories,
Playing Checkers,
published in the July 1929 issue of
Ladies’ Home Journal.
To this day Rockwell’s oldest son’s favorite, the oil, thirty-five by thirty-nine inches, holds its own as a first-rate painting. The careful and complex spatial composition, the unsettling use of vivid scarlets and scalding yellow, the brilliantly painted surfaces—all these are, finally, unspoiled by Rockwell’s typical compulsion to wrench at least one character’s expression into caricature, in the name of quick access to a story line. This painting shows the force with which he could paint, the energy he could convey through even a static scene, that would become a mainstay in the painting he would do in the late 1940s and into the 1950s.

After he finished
Playing Checkers,
he took off for what he assumed would be another inundation in the European Masters such as he had previously undergone during his museum stops abroad. This time, however, he would learn to go for cocktails at the London Embassy and pass up the Louvre as outré, barely able to keep up with the affectations of his traveling companions, who believed that once you’d visited a museum, there was no reason to return.
Westchester Home Life
led off its spring column by noting that “a sextette made up of socially prominent people in New Rochelle are embarking on a European cruise. This party will include Mr. and Mrs. Norman Rockwell, who are making their annual visit to the continent, accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. William Monroe Young and Mr. and Mrs. Peter Rathbov.” The party was to depart on May 24 on the S.S.
France,
and in Paris they would rendezvous with Mr. and Mrs. Fred Peck of Wilmot Road. This last arrangement seemed made-to-order for the Rockwells; they had socialized for years with the Pecks, who lived nearby. But the Westchester newspaper got at least one detail wrong: the Rockwells were truly modern. The artist would once again travel solo, while his wife stayed behind. Perhaps Rockwell consoled himself that the Pecks would relieve his loneliness, since they were all especially good chums.