Norman Rockwell (30 page)

Rockwell had no clear vision of where he was going, or even where he wanted to go, at this point. Most of all, he needed to reclaim some self-respect. He continued to give parties, determined to avoid the emptiness of his too-large new home as much as possible. At one all-night revel, after everyone had been drinking for a while, he found himself agreeing to a proposal he had rejected already in the past: art editors from
Good Housekeeping,
who had been harassing him for months to illustrate the Bible, convinced him this time to say yes. The next day, when someone from the magazine called, he reneged, but they warned him they would hold him to his legal oral commitment. Lorimer suggested Rockwell get out of town for a while until things cooled down.

As usual, there was probably more to the story than what Rockwell would admit. He mentioned several times throughout his life that he deeply admired the series his friend Dean Cornwell had done for
Man of Galilee,
published by the Cosmopolitan Book Corporation in 1928. The colors came from a browned palette of reds, golds, and beiges, and the figures were beautifully drawn as well as magnificently hued. Later reproduced in
Good Housekeeping,
the series motivated Rockwell to try something similar, even as it discouraged him from spending the time to compete with Cornwell’s enviable achievement. His complications with the magazine probably had to do with more of a promise than his “drunken” assent implies, and, as usual, his belated realization that he just didn’t have the time to produce something worthy of the assignment.
Good Housekeeping,
more than likely, wouldn’t let him out of the commitment, unlike the pliant clients whom he convinced in such cases with his abject mea culpa.

At the time of the noteworthy party, Clyde Forsythe, who with his wife, Cotta, had moved back to his native California, was on one of his annual visits to the East. The couple invited their old friend to return with them, an invitation Norman eagerly accepted. On the train trip out West, they told him of a young woman they wanted him to take out, and Rockwell, in spite of his supposed affirmation of bachelorhood as an easy way to avoid work disturbances, found himself eager to meet her.

But he had more pressing reasons to get out of New York than the fearful pursuit of
Good Housekeeping
’s art editors: as if he hadn’t already suffered enough publicly over the demise of his marriage, Irene was, insensitively as ever, bringing the debacle home to him again. The Rockwell marriage officially over, she headed back to Manhattan to begin a new one, meaning more publicity with his name attached.

Legal papers filed in the second judicial district court of the state of Nevada, county of Washoe, state that the divorce case was heard, without a jury, on mid-morning January 13, 1930. Irene, as plaintiff, appeared with her attorneys, the Reno lawyers Cantwell and Springmeyer. The defendant was not present but answered the complaint through his lawyers, Harwood and Diskin. Irene entered her testimony and other evidence on her behalf; the defendant none. The allegations were found to be true, and all settlement arrangements, conducted outside of court, were declared to be fair and just. In spite of the fact that at this point in history the reasons for a marriage’s dissolution had to be proffered, Irene’s presumably (according to Rockwell’s account) drummed-up charges bear the ring of truth. She claimed mental cruelty, declaring that her husband was always absorbed in his work and had persisted in telling her that they were not suited for each other and should get divorced. In light of Rockwell’s tendency to deny the unpleasant as long as it was possible, it seems unlikely that he had actually suggested the divorce; instead, he may well have agreed in his out-of-court settlement that these were terms she could present without his contesting.

Five days after the divorce was granted, just enough time to allow the newly single woman to pack, get to New York, and unpack, on January 23, 1930, the Associated Press announced the marriage of Mrs. Irene O’Connor Rockwell, former wife of Norman Rockwell, the illustrator, to Francis Hartley, Jr., of Boston, Massachusetts. The wedding took place in Manhattan at Marble Collegiate Baptist Church. Inevitably, newspaper accounts of the wedding began or ended by referring briefly to Irene’s recent divorce from the illustrator Norman Rockwell.

Rockwell could expect no sympathy or support from his parents, who, it appears, were still not speaking to him. Mary Amy Orpen remembers that “when Aunt Nancy spoke of the divorce, she’d say, ‘It’s just what you’d expect of that woman. I doubt that she helped Norman out much in the aftermath.’ ”

Because he showed so little emotion, it is hard to know exactly how deeply Irene’s leaving affected Rockwell. Based on his actions not only immediately following, but for several years thereafter, it seems likely that Rockwell’s inability to please his wife, to make her like him enough to stay with him, activated deep reservoirs of pain for him. He had earned his mother’s respect through his success as an illustrator, showing her that he was superior to her father as well as her husband, both in his amateur drawing and in his ability to make a good living. Now, as he confronted the specter of his socialite wife not finding “all this,” as he said to her in wonder—nor his fame besides—enough to keep her from running off with another man, he started doubting his talent and his work in a more profound way than he’d ever allowed himself.

And yet, when Rockwell later told the story of his first marriage, he spoke dismissively, as if the relationship hardly mattered, although, in fact, he had been married a total of fourteen years. Mary Quinn, Rockwell’s well-respected private nurse near the end of his life, will never forget her astonishment when she reached into the eighty-five-year-old man’s bedside drawer to retrieve medicine and pulled out two old love letters from Irene. “I thought I was seeing things, and so I looked at the dates, which were in the 1920s. When I went into the drawer two weeks later, the letters were gone.”

Whatever reason he had for keeping those letters for fifty years is a matter of conjecture. But in 1930, things were clear: Norman Rockwell was floundering, frantically looking for stopgap measures to help him avoid looking within.

15

A New Beginning

The blind date in California went well. On March 27, 1930, approximately two months after Irene O’Connor Rockwell married Francis Hartley, Jr., newspapers announced the engagement of Norman Rockwell to Mary Rhodes Barstow of Alhambra, a suburb of Los Angeles. The papers duly noted the whirlwind courtship of two weeks’ standing, as well as the social status of Rockwell’s twenty-two-year-old fiancée. A graduate of Stanford University and member of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, she was related to the famous Gary family of steel millions. Her mother’s cousin was Bertha Gary Campbell, daughter of Albert H. Gary, a lawyer for J. Pierpont Morgan and director of U.S. Steel.

Mary Barstow was fourteen years younger than her future husband. The sweet, smart, pretty, and innocent young woman had been teaching fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-grade mathematics in nearby San Gabriel, although what she really wanted to do was become a writer. She had enjoyed a few flirtations, but by and large she preferred books to boys. “Mary Sunshine,” as she was known around the community, had even dated Alan Hoover, Herbert’s son, once or twice. “Everybody knew who she was,” her younger sister Nancy recalls. “Partly because she always got top grades, that ‘S’ for superior they gave back then.”

The Barstows lived at 125 Champion Place at the east end of town, in a spacious brown wooden house with beautiful gardens and an avocado tree “half the size of the house.” Alfred Barstow, Mary’s father, was a lawyer. “He always reminded me of Humpty-Dumpty,” Jarvis Rockwell, the illustrator’s oldest son, remarks. “He was a sweet, nice man, but fairly ineffectual lawyer. His wife, my grandmother, seemed much more in command. And her family had been so successful that I think she was a little bit scornful of her husband, who retired early.”

According to Nancy Barstow, Norman was lucky that it was the school term when he arrived in California, since Mary ordinarily spent summers in Newport Beach and on the Balboa peninsula. Nancy remembers that Mary loved going out on the speedboat that a friend of hers owned, which she would drive around the bay. But now, in January, she was teaching school. A romantic by nature, she was ready to be swept off her feet around the time that Rockwell met her, and the idea of an older man and a dramatic courtship suited her just fine.

The illustrator recounted his relieved surprise upon first meeting the woman whom the Forsythes had been so sure of; she was every bit as impressive as they’d promoted. But he was discouraged when he called her afterward for a date and she begged off, saying she was busy. Until Clyde reassured his friend that Mary Barstow had indeed attended a P.T.A. meeting the night Rockwell had hoped to take her out, the illustrator was sure she couldn’t be interested in “an old codger,” a divorced man such as himself.

She was, and he pulled out all the stops to impress her. Since with Clyde’s help he had arranged several interesting commissions in Hollywood, Rockwell’s task was even easier. He had decided to do a
Post
cover about a “rawboned, glamorous cowboy . . . an actor dressed in chaps, boots, and spurs having his lips painted by a hard-bitten little makeup man.” The publicity director at Paramount proposed Gary Cooper, who was between pictures. The next morning, Rockwell remembers, “the door of the studio was quite literally darkened and Gary Cooper strode in. What a man! When I looked at him I actually
felt
my narrow shoulders and puny arms. He was a wonderful model and a very nice, easy guy. He was always playing some cute trick on Clyde and me—exploding matches, ash trays which jumped when you touched them.”

Norman made sure to regale Mary with stories of his glamorous new acquaintances, years later teasing her that he had planted stars in her eyes. The illustrator put his imposing social skills to work in Los Angeles, before long meeting Fay Wray, best known for her role in the movie
King Kong.
Another Hollywood celebrity, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, became Rockwell’s friend and ally as well. In spite of his predilection for “just folks,” the illustrator was savvy in the ways of self-promotion; by now, he had already developed his habit of whipping out his pipe as an identity prop whenever a photographer was in the area. And Rockwell respected, in a slightly obstinate fashion, the open artificiality of the Hollywood crowd; people here didn’t pretend to be something they weren’t, since their jobs were all about role-playing.

Although the
Los Angeles Times
had noted that Rockwell “was divorced recently at Reno,” the local reporters nonetheless played gently with the Yankee illustrator from back East, who appears in the photographs of this period to be caught up in a movie that is wrapping too fast. In newspaper pictures of the beaming couple applying for their marriage license, Rockwell looks shell-shocked: slightly wary, a little disdainful, a bit calculatedly debonair. The
Los Angeles Times
reported that Rockwell gave his age as thirty-three on his marriage application; either they made a mistake in their reporting, or Rockwell was displaying a bit of uncharacteristic vanity.

Mary, in contrast, embodies a joyful, young upper-middle-class woman who is absolutely certain that she is doing the right thing. Within a few weeks, pictures of the couple at the time of their engagement suggest that they are perfectly matched—the bride’s exuberance shedding more light into the illustrator’s guarded eyes with each passing photograph. By the time of their wedding on April 17, 1930, both seem to be romantically comfortable in a way new to Rockwell, at least. They touch naturally and easily, whether sitting out in the garden, at parties, or at city hall.

Their ceremony, held in the Barstows’ luxurious garden, was performed by a Presbyterian minister. The wedding was well attended by family and friends, 140 party guests spilling over the semitropical grounds. Once again, Clyde Forsythe served his old studio mate as the best man. By the beginning of May the couple had returned to Manhattan, which Mary had never seen, and taken up married life at the Hotel des Artistes, where they remained for three months. Whether to return in triumph to the site of his previous humiliation, or to please his new wife with a suburban spread akin to her homestead in Alhambra, Norman decided that the Rockwells would take up residence at 24 Lord Kitchener as soon as the tenants renting the house agreed to move.

Without a doubt, Rockwell was smitten with the outgoing, enthusiastic, and intelligent young schoolteacher he so quickly asked to become his wife. But he was also transparently relieved to meet someone to replace Irene, the first schoolteacher-spouse meant to substitute for his mother and father. It takes no navel-gazing to glean the complicated dynamics set into motion by Nancy’s critical, self-centered—yet, at some level, loving—mothering, and Waring’s distant, authoritarian, but well-intended fathering. Rockwell’s pithy self-pronouncements reveal much about his motivations. When, for instance, he said, as he did frequently, that one reason he became an illustrator instead of risking a life in “fine arts” was to please his parents, he told the truth. What he did not assess until much later, under the auspices of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, were the ways he kept trying to compensate for the childhood he lacked, by positioning his wives to play out the roles for which his parents had only auditioned. He wanted someone to take care of him and his household in the very ways Nancy had failed to do in his childhood home; and he deeply valued the chance to support such an orderly household through hard work that paid well, in contrast to Waring’s life at George Wood’s.

Little information exists about the couple’s early adjustment to their marriage or to the trials of living among the very New Rochelle society that Rockwell associated with wastrels and moral frauds. Rockwell had returned to the same house given national coverage in
Good
Housekeeping
three years earlier as his spousal home with Irene, bringing to it a new bride only six months after his first wife had humiliated him publicly. He encountered many associates from the old circles, the very atmosphere he felt had caused him to lose his way. Even when he had fled to Manhattan immediately after Irene’s departure for Reno, he had felt himself played as the fool, no matter what he did. And yet, other than a letter Mary Rockwell wrote to the Barstows two years after the Rockwells’ wedding, his only even oblique reference to the shame to which the divorce exposed him appears in his autobiographical account of feeling foolish in the eyes of others during his life in Manhattan immediately following the separation.

The return to Lord Kitchener Road also marked a sort of moral stubbornness as well as his characteristic denial of the unpleasant. Mary Rockwell racheted that denial up a notch, by virtue of her determined cheerfulness; and her emotional neediness found expression by making herself indispensable to her spouse, including living wherever he wanted. But the challenge of living in a community where he had been made to look extremely silly to many of the very people he continued to see professionally and personally fed Rockwell’s incipient depression. “You see,” Mary explained to her parents in the letter she wrote them in 1932, “for two years before we were married, while he was going with that crowd [Irene’s social group], he was drawing on all his past reserve. After the divorce and our marriage, he was a different person entirely, but his work went on being the same.” He tried very hard to “reconcile” the two—presumably the newly emerged man with the old art—but the attempt failed. Deciding that the memories and visual context Rockwell inhabited suffocated him—“the pressure of people and things in New Rochelle was too much, though we saw them seldom”—the couple became desperate to escape the oppression.

After a few months of such worries, other priorities claimed their attention anyway. In late October, just six months after their wedding, Norman’s father found out that he had stomach cancer. For unknown reasons, he and Nancy then moved a few miles away from their last rental, to Mount Vernon, New York, located within a half hour of Yonkers and New Rochelle, and an hour from New York City.

“It was the oddest thing,” Nancy Rockwell would tell her relatives more than once. “The doctor came to see me one day, and he took Waring out of the room to examine him instead, and found out he was sick and I was not. Who would have guessed?” That Christmas, Jerry and Carol drove from Kane with their sons, Dick and John, to meet Norman’s new wife and to say what they knew would be good-bye to Waring. They were struck by “how sweet Mary was, how truly gentle and sweet,” according to Dick Rockwell. From Dick’s admittedly vague recollection, it appears that the holiday was used to heal the rift between Rockwell’s parents and the illustrator. All the family had gathered in one place, and everyone knew Waring was very ill; he was now on a pension from George Wood, unable to work for the first time in his adult life.

At least Waring had lived long enough to enjoy his younger son’s extraordinary success. Six weeks after Christmas, the day after Rockwell’s thirty-seventh birthday, the
Standard-Star
published a lengthy interview that led off by positioning Rockwell as an anomaly in the history of art: “There probably never has been in the world’s history before an artist with a regular audience of at least 6,000,000 people, so may we please introduce you to Mr. Norman Rockwell, whose covers on
The Saturday Evening Post
are known, we venture to say, to every inhabitant of the United States.” Rockwell’s determination to be casual, relaxed, and “himself” early in his career paid off in the inevitable pleasure interviewers took in his company. But the authority and command behind the modesty failed to dampen his admirers’ determined infantilization of him; to the
Standard-Star
writer, for instance, he seems “like one of the whimsical, shamefaced urchins he paints so ridiculously true to life.”

What appearance does New Rochelle’s most famous “magazine artist” cut to the outside world? He is “tall, lean, and has bushy hair. He looks like an ad’s ideal of the clean-cut young business man, only his eyes are more alert than even the ad could make them and he permits himself to be more frank and natural than other young gentlemen would dare to be.” The description couldn’t have conformed better to Lorimer’s image of the perfect illustrator for his magazine if the Boss had written it himself.

A week after this interview, on February 10, Rockwell wrote Bessie Riddell, Lorimer’s longtime assistant and de facto art editor whose upcoming marriage would retire her from the
Post
offices, that he was “delighted that you are going to be married. Life is incomplete any other way, and I know you are going to be very happy. The other feeling is sincere regret that you are not going to be my art editor any more. We certainly did get along swell together, didn’t we? I hate to see you go. Believe it, it’s going to be a real empty spot for me.” He continues a bit later, “And I just want to say that the man you marry will get one of the finest women I ever knew. . . . Mary joins me in all the good wishes in the world.” Rockwell’s real fondness for the irrepressible Bessie Riddell, his own pleasure at being happily married, and his continuing friendship with “Joe Leyendecker” (implied in the postscript he appended)—this new abundance in his life receives testimony through the handwritten note. Only a year after he found himself adrift, it looked as if everything was on solid ground again. And he had recently been told the most exciting news of all: he was going to become a father.