Norman Rockwell (29 page)

When Rockwell returned from the last trip he would take to Europe during the roiling 1920s, he realized that his wife had never once traveled abroad with him during the entire last decade of his marriage. And now, back in New Rochelle, he found himself alone even at 24 Lord Kitchener.

Irene had gone up to Fisher’s Landing, a fancier area than the family retreat at Louisville Landing, but still close by. Recently, the Rockwells had built their own little cabin a few miles from the O’Connors’ more modest site. Her presence sans Rockwell provided a few moments of confused excitement in September, when the left-wing artist Rockwell Kent was shipwrecked off the coast of Greenland. The local newspapers, mistaking the two artists for each other, claimed that Mrs. Rockwell had rushed off from camp to meet her stranded husband. The press would have found reality more intriguing than their fantasy rescue: if the stranded Rockwell had been Irene’s husband, “she would never have bothered to go to him,” according to what Robert Berridge heard when talking to Irene’s friends and neighbors.

Norman came home to an empty house, because his wife had fallen in love with Mrs. Fred Peck’s brother, and the only thing Irene wanted from him now was a quick divorce.

.  .  .

Norman had to feel that his wife’s new object of affection was everything that he was not. Machismo, not drawing skills, was the key to Irene’s heart. One year younger than the artist, strapping Francis Hartley, Jr., of Boston, Massachusetts, graduated from Phillips Andover Academy, followed by Yale University in 1917. After college, he immediately enrolled in the Navy and was sent to MIT for ground school, and then to Pensacola, Florida, for pilot training. During the war, he participated in night bombing raids, his fearlessness gaining him a certain renown. Although he was never shot down, about a month before the war ended he had to ditch his aircraft in the English Channel when the rudder of his plane broke. His wireless antenna was swept away in the crash, forcing him to seek aid by messages sent by the carrier pigeons he had with him. Seven hours later, he was rescued by a submarine.

Such masculine prowess sounds like material for a Rockwell caricature, not real life. And to add to Rockwell’s humiliation at having his wife leave him for such a genuine he-man, she had rendezvoused with Hartley through his sister, the same Mrs. Frederick Peck with whom Norman had toured Europe during the previous spring. Mrs. Peck had earlier introduced Irene to her brother when Mrs. Rockwell accompanied her to visit her family in Boston, where Francis worked in the family business as a chemist. Irene and Francis deepened their relationship while Norman and the Pecks were enjoying themselves in Europe.

By the time Irene leveled her husband with the news that she had fallen in love, Rockwell was a solid product of the emotional template laid down throughout his childhood, especially by his mother. Now, at this juncture of an adult crisis, his boyhood lessons guided his response. After all, observing his parents’ marriage had lubricated Rockwell’s acceptance of Irene’s self-centeredness. If a wife chose not to accompany her husband on his first—or on any—trip abroad, in spite of his entreaties otherwise, that just seemed part of the natural progression set in place by Nancy Rockwell, who was encouraged to think of herself before anyone else in the family. Rockwell grew up expecting no one but himself to satisfy his deepest emotional needs, which he finessed through his work.

In spite of Irene and Norman’s agreement to base their extramarital affairs on sex only, avoiding messy emotional entanglements, Norman knew that the frenetic pace they were keeping these days invited a dramatic climax. As a result, his wife’s announcement that she wanted a divorce did not totally surprise him. Initially, he responded out of his belief in the sustaining loyalty of marriage: duty was everything.

He tried to reason Irene out of leaving him, dangling their high standard of living as the bar she wouldn’t want to lower by marriage to a poorer man. He got nowhere. On October 10, borrowing Hoddy O’Connor’s Cadillac to pursue his wife to Louisville Landing, where she had fled to be with her mother, Rockwell sat down and negotiated the details of their marriage’s dissolution, which apparently included Irene’s proud announcement that she wanted neither alimony nor financial recompense for the life they’d shared since 1916. Family members have suggested that Rockwell might have invoked the quid pro quo of “forgiving” adultery in exchange for release of financial claims.

Two weeks later, on October 24, “Black Thursday,” when the bottom began to drop out of the stock market, Irene O’Connor arrived in Reno, Nevada, declaring her intention to file suit for divorce. The item was of course newsworthy, and the announcement, though small, appeared in the New York papers as well as being wired around the country via Associated Press reports. At this point, the cause was announced as “incompatibility.” Five days later, on “Black Tuesday,” October 29, the stock market collapse was complete.

Suddenly, other worries commanded Rockwell’s attention, and, far more dramatically, that of his brother and, by extension, his parents. Carol Rockwell remembered that “Jerry came home about five, looking drawn and much older. He sat down in the living room and stared at the rugs in unnatural silence. I was awaiting the delivery of two Paris gowns before dashing to a cocktail party at Greenwich. My wardrobe was already overstocked with expensive things, but a man who intrigued me for the moment had suggested that a cerise evening dress would look stunning on me.” When the gowns arrived, Jerry told her that they lacked the funds to cover the purchase. It was his way of announcing that they had been ruined.

Carol decided that she couldn’t make it without money, that she would not go back to the “hand-to-mouth” existence of the couple’s early years together. Whether she planned to kill herself or merely to desert her family is unclear; only Jerry’s sad rejoinder that he didn’t think he could count on her, that she had become too “soft and pampered” to start all over again jolted her out of her massive self-pity. Together they joined emotional forces, renovated their fractured marriage, sold their belongings, and worked toward making Jerry’s talent for woodworking into a viable source of income. She assured her worried, wealthy friends from the old social set that “making beds and sweeping” did not ruin her figure or break her nails: “[they] are no worse a strain on the body than sports, and not nearly so hard on the looks as three or four hours of dancing on a crowded night-club floor.”

In later years, Jerry glossed over his losses as reflective of his more sensitive character, one that was not truly cut out for Wall Street: “When the 1929 panic ruined so many people, I decided it would not ruin me. Two of my business friends killed themselves, and I felt that I should finish life in a less dangerous occupation. It was exciting to work on corporate structures, but they can be destroyed overnight by strangers. I wanted to create useful things that were durable.” Thus, he explained, it was logical to enter the educational-toy field, where lasting materials are valued.

What he omitted from this account, which explained that his heart had always been attuned to the tender needs of children, was the fruitless year after the Crash when he and Carol tried to set up a brokerage firm in Rye. Only after that failure did he move his family to Kane, Pennsylvania, where he converted his boyhood passion for carving wooden ships into a career of designing toys for Holgate and then Playskool, eventually becoming one of their principal designers. Especially in light of the cold personality that his relatives recall, including his distant, at best, treatment of his own children, Jerry’s attraction to the things of childhood strikes a chord redolent of his brother’s idealization of youth.

.  .  .

After his humiliation at the hands of his wife, Rockwell packed his bags and fled to the city, where he could lick his wounds in private, even as he was comfortingly close to that which never failed to sustain him: the Art Students League. The moniker itself was a reminder that he was first and foremost a student and practitioner of art. He rented out the Lord Kitchener house, taking a luxurious apartment at the Hotel des Artistes instead. Untouched by the Crash, and more determined than ever to prove himself a man of the world, he promptly spent enormous sums of money on the internal reconstruction of rooms and walls, enabling him to throw a lavish party that assured all his society friends back in the suburbs that he was not vanquished. Temporarily, he enjoyed the company of artist Emil Fuchs, but when Fuchs’s daily lunches cut too deeply into Rockwell’s working hours, he curtailed such socializing. Later, he came to realize that Fuchs was somewhat of a failure, someone who lived on the laurels of his past. When Fuchs shot himself, supposedly because he had terminal cancer, Rockwell seemed to infer that his has-been status played an equal part in the man’s suicide. But the suicide also must have reminded him of the inability of his own talents to ward off desertion and win loyalty—from boyhood friends years ago and from his wife even now.

In his autobiographical account of the painful months from October 1929 to January 1930, Rockwell narrates some of the funniest episodes in the anecdote-packed book. He recounts the travails of his horseback riding lessons in Central Park, where the combination of his English gentleman’s riding habit and his complete ineptitude on the horses turns every encounter into a comic production. But he fails to explore why, of all activities to distract him from his grief, he chose horseback riding. Along with golf and tennis, both of which Rockwell had mastered to the satisfaction of his New Rochelle friends, horseback riding would have been the mark of a gentleman. Perhaps he hoped to hide behind the identity of a “Percevel” at last.

Rockwell remembers, even three decades later, that his overriding awareness during this period was of how foolish he looked to others. Instead of associating such feelings with the very public humiliation Irene had handed him, he generalizes it into an inner state of turmoil he can’t quite understand. In contrast to the hilariously vivid accounts of runaway horses and amused spectators—who patronize the rider as a clown of a man—Rockwell ascribes his sadness to walking outside his building and stumbling into the “bums and drunkards” littering the park benches. Twenty-five years later, Rockwell would ruminate aloud about how much he presently enjoyed rambling around the Bowery whenever he visited Manhattan, in order to absorb the vivid atmosphere of the colorful bums in the neighborhood. But in 1929, the sight of such people upset him so much that he holed up in his apartment for the next few days. He fails to mention that their presence reproaches him with the possibility of a similar future—or, at the very least, for living so grandly while others suffered so greatly. As an interviewer had noted in the
Globe
six years earlier, “[Rockwell] believes that too close contact with the things he pictures would cause him to lose his perspective.” The same writer approvingly observed: “The strangest thing about [his] realism is the fact that Rockwell has never done himself what he pictured his boys as doing. And he attributes whatever success may be his to this fact.”

Such park bench scenarios gone awry surely felt like frightening rebukes to the artist who had previously used similar material in lighthearted ways. As the historian William Graebner notes, the Depression may well have triggered Rockwell’s anxieties about being able to continue earning enough. But at this point, the time of the Crash itself, the economic crisis unmanned him in a highly paradoxical fashion, cruel in its caprice: in spite of Rockwell’s impressive prospects of sailing through an economic depression unscathed, his wife—the woman to whom money and social standing were supposedly everything—had left him for another man, less affluent but the very embodiment of masculinity.

At the tail end of the twenties, Rockwell had many reasons to be depressed. In addition to the humiliation of Irene’s departure and his genuine sadness at being bereft of his best friend, as he once put it, and quite aside from the fear that the Crash had instilled about his financial future, he had moved to Manhattan just as the Museum of Modern Art mounted its second exhibition, from December 13, 1929, to January 12, 1930, in honor of nineteen living American artists said to be representative of the principal tendencies in contemporary painting. Rockwell Kent, whose narrow escape the summer before when his boat capsized in Greenland had misled New Yorkers into thinking that it was Norman Rockwell who had adventured so far from home, was represented by five pieces. Although Rockwell and Kent, both of whom had studied with William Chase, were frequently confused by the public, the men usually pretended to find it amusing. Given Rockwell’s present state of mind, the show at MoMA emphasized his second-rate status as an illustrator; he couldn’t even make the cut among nineteen living American artists. According to what he told friends three decades later, he was hurt that he was not included.

His desire to provide the standard of living Irene thought appropriate had motivated his acceptance of too many advertising jobs during the twenties, commercial work that cut into time he might have used to paint “for himself.” From
Encyclopaedia Britannica
to Fisk tires, from Sun-Maid raisins to Jell-O, from Black Cat hosiery to trousers, needles, and chambers of commerce, he had done it all, rarely skimping on quality, while he was also consolidating his position as the coequal of Joe Leyendecker as
The Saturday Evening Post
’s number-one cover artist.

But becoming the country’s best-known illustrator was not quite as meaningful to him as he had expected it to be. Paradoxically, the popularity of the
Post
(its circulation at the end of the twenties was nearly three million), its status as the signpost for American middle-class prosperity, awareness, and modernity drained its artists of any claim to serious consideration among the critical elite who defined aesthetic hierarchies. As twentieth-century art became more and more depen-dent on the middleman role of the critic to teach and interpret nonnarrative, nonanecdotal art to America’s bewildered middle class, the very kind of representational painting used to illustrate even the finest books and stories lost any claim to its status as art. And even as this schism became apparent at the upper echelons of the institutional art world, middle America was blurring the boundaries between art and illustration, framing
Post
covers to decorate the walls of their homes.