Norman Rockwell (32 page)

A few days after Mary described Paris as paradise to her parents, the dutiful daughter—who would apologize to her parents if she went two days without writing them—nearly gushed in her excitement that her husband seemed to be breaking through the depression that had plagued him throughout their two-year-long marriage: “And now the best thing of all that I have to tell you is about Norman’s work. The preliminary struggle—nearly two years long, has ended at last and he knows what he wants to do. He sent a final cable to Snyder and Black, refusing to do the Coca Cola, but letting them use his name. (He couldn’t do less as he had seesawed between yes and no so long.) He has indefinitely postponed his
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covers. I personally rather doubt if he’ll do any more. (Private, all this—I know you wouldn’t tell it anyway.)”

Such news is astonishing indeed; the
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covers have always been considered Norman Rockwell’s bid for as much creative license as his vocation warranted. That he not only now found them cumbersome, appropriating too much of his talent and time, but that he discussed his new resolve with Mary persuades us of his seriousness, in going to Paris, to chance a dramatic new direction. The mess he got himself into with Coca-Cola typified what became a lifelong quandary when he refused to say no to a persistent client, then found himself unable to complete the project on time. Apparently, Coca-Cola worked out an arrangement with the artist by which several ads from this period were published under Rockwell’s name but were largely executed by an anonymous second party. In the future, when Rockwell felt the need to renege on a professional commitment, he would simply bow out of a project completely or convince the company to postpone or abbreviate the assignment. His fame and good intentions compensated for the chance that hopeful corporations knowingly took (his reputation for delays and cancellations became legendary, the price for consorting with someone so popular) when they commissioned him anyway. But Rockwell never stopped agonizing over deadlines, and his tendency not to meet them.

He had actually made his radical decision to leave the
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before the couple sailed for Europe. Mary explained to her parents that he got scared of the idea of “so complete a change,” and worked “furiously” to get four cover ideas completed as his security before they departed. She happily notes that she didn’t think he’d actually paint the ideas once they settled in Paris, but she wisely kept this opinion to herself; proudly, she opines that her work to know her husband has paid off, since she can “prophesy” what he will end up doing “way ahead of time.” Rockwell did find himself relying on her loving knowledge of him and his work before making professional decisions. To the extent that he could license such emotional luxury, Norman Rockwell was intimate with Mary. And until now, intimacy had been a stranger to him.

A week before Mary’s excited revelation to her parents, Norman had made six separate beginnings on a
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cover, finally too discouraged to continue. Thoroughly bored with trotting out the “same old thing” for the
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he believed the only way he’d be allowed to do something different was if he painted in an entirely new style. The artificiality of his attempts was all too apparent; he wasn’t painting out of a conviction that the style under way felt right, but that it might be more contemporary. As Mary confides, “He kept worrying because he didn’t really like most modern things and so wasn’t going with the trend.” He took the day off, hired a new model for the morrow, and spent several hours wandering around the Louvre as well as a modern gallery. Energized, he rushed back home to insist that Mary return with him to several exhibits, and they took the model as well, so that she could see the source of inspiration for the project she would be working on.

Unfortunately, neither the art he was scrutinizing nor the painting he then executed is ever named. Mary, unlike the New Rochelle sophisticates who a few years earlier had considered a second trip to the museum redundant, found the Louvre, always Rockwell’s favorite museum, “the most thrilling place I think I’ve ever been.” After two more hours studying the paintings, they left, and Rockwell told his wife that on the following morning, he was going to begin the first of three days sketching around Paris. Taking his time and allowing his imagination to roam freely felt like a luxury to the man bound for over a decade to deadlines and correspondingly rigid work habits. “For the first time in his life he is going to be a free man and do every thing he really wants to do. Oh it’s glorious!” his thrilled wife exclaimed.

At times, Mary Rockwell’s relentless enthusiasm becomes tedious. Too aware of her good intentions, Rockwell would have hesitated to suggest she shape her life according to her own wishes as well as to his. Emotionally independent, used to fulfilling many of his needs without spousal help, he would have assumed she, too, had needs best addressed outside their marriage. Yes, he hoped for participation in his career, but he showed no signs of demanding the complete immersion that she gave. Eventually, inevitably, habit bred expectation. On the one hand, Mary’s complete immersion in her husband’s career connected them from the start at the level most important to him; at the same time, however, it set up a pattern, whereby her husband unconsciously assumed their intimacy to occur on the very level where his person and his work were indistinguishable. Since Mary was determined to be a good wife, many years passed before she could acknowledge that her enthusiasm for the terms of their intimacy had waned.

One wonders about her parents’ reactions to the ceaseless and circular theme of her husband’s mental well-being: did they try to warn her that she was losing herself in the “we” she had started to invoke when speaking of Rockwell’s work? On April 26, she wrote the Barstows a particularly convoluted, telling letter, explaining that Norman “has found the courage to do what he wants . . . which is experiment with all sorts of things for the next six months to become an artistic artist instead of a commercial one.” She tells them not to fear that he will “go modern,” since “[T]hat is his last thought. Never.” For a time, she admits, that possibility worried him, until he made peace with his preference for the Old Masters. Now, “he’s decided to be the thing that is in him to be—to do what he did, only in a much finer way.”

To his credit, Rockwell tried hard to reinvent himself as someone free of the compulsion that drove his work—the desire for crowd adulation, for assurance that his work was seen by the masses and appreciated by many. Validation through his art was what kept him from regressing to the pigeon-toed beanpole of a nonman. But he also feared that the Golden Age of Illustration was dead, and that the divide between a “real” and a “commercial” artist was now absolute. His concerns were not that he lacked the talent to do the real art; instead, the ghost of apprehension flitting over Mary’s letters is fear of the cost. He had achieved great fame, respect, and income; now, to risk being unappreciated or ignored must have terrified him as much as the thought of decades of more
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covers. And when, in an aside, Mary tells her parents that the magazines reassuringly keep contacting her husband, even in Paris, we know by now that she speaks for them both in these letters, not even primarily herself: “I must say it is gratifying to get cables from the
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and the
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even though you [we, Rockwell] aren’t doing any work.”

The turmoil created by Rockwell’s roller-coaster moods about his work surfaces in the near frantic shifts in Mary’s correspondence, sometimes wildly contradicting the previous day’s confident information. A week after the explosive news of her husband’s change of direction, which must have shocked her parents, she wrote them that “. . . the important thing is about Norman’s work. I last told you about how he decided to experiment. That didn’t satisfy him for long so he and I thought and talked a great deal more, went to the Louvre and he decided that the only thing he really wanted to do was the same sort of thing he’d always done so we felt much better.” He had restarted one of the canvases discarded a few weeks earlier, applying to it new ideas, and he was mollified (although her parents surely know by now, even if their daughter doesn’t, that this, too, will change). And, Mary adds, they decided to move out of New Rochelle “the minute” they can find a colonial house in Connecticut situated on large grounds. “We couldn’t stand going back to New Rochelle! But I honestly look forward to getting back and finding our place.” Who really knows if Mary wanted to move to Connecticut, when she herself probably didn’t?

The Barstows can’t be blamed if they came to dread the mail; just noticing the manic swings in their child’s married life would have justified any fears they had of their daughter marrying an older artist set in his ways. Perhaps they started worrying, too, about the reference to Rockwell’s obsession with work that had been published as the grounds for Irene’s divorce petition; it did sound as if all the man valued was work. No return letters to Mary exist, and very few comments in hers about them, to apprise us of their response. All that Mary’s younger sister recalls are her parents’ concerns that their child was a quick solution to the older man’s wounded pride, and that she would not prove up to being in the limelight anyway.

But Mary had adapted well, to the extent that she ends up maternally reassuring them, a few weeks later, to calm their fears: “Please do not be worried about Norman, because there is really nothing to worry about. I meant to make it clear that he is just going through a period of transition which is necessary to an honest artist when he is changing the purpose or direction of his work. Before he had few thoughts beyond
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covers. Now he wants to do much finer things, but of the same human sort, and probably he will do some covers again when he gets straightened out. . . . Neither of us is worried at all down at the bottom. We both know that he has to go through this to get out in the clear again. And because he has the courage to do it, he’s bound to come out.”

Week after week, as if enmeshed in ongoing negotiations of the most delicate, crucial sort, Mary reported on Norman’s state of mind and progress. It is easy to imagine the readers on the other end making a game of opening her letters at some point, just to leaven the unending seriousness of the saga. Soon even biological and aesthetic procreation become coequals in the Rockwell household: “I have one big tremendous announcement to make—no, not another child—but its equivalent—a picture finished. . . . He worked terribly hard on it, but it doesn’t look worked at all. [N]ow he feels he has something he can develop and go on and on with instead of working right up against a flat wall all the time as he has since we have been married. So it has all been worth while, all the agony and struggle he has been through.”

Incredible as it seems, the family had resisted mentioning the obvious, though others had apparently urged upon the couple a recognition of Rockwell’s state of mind: “By the way I give you people a tremendous long mark of credit, not one word have you said about depression and no one else has missed mentioning it. But then you’re not a depressed kind of family, praise Heaven.” In such praise lies the root of Mary’s own denial of negative emotions, a habit that meshed neatly if dangerously with her husband’s own.

Other than managing Norman’s crisis, which was her priority, Mary concentrated on doing right by the baby—and, after her duties to both family members were done, enjoying her new life in a foreign country. She explained to her parents that Jerry was the best baby imaginable, but that because of Norman’s needs, she found it impossible to give him her undivided time. On July 15, she detailed for the Barstows the precise schedule by which she tended her child. In the middle of this letter, she reaffirmed their newest arrangement to return to New Rochelle in October rather than to stay on in Paris (an earlier plan), partly because Norman felt that he should see his mother. Also, she commented incidentally, “my longing for familiar things and sudden eschewal of drink and cigarettes would point to the fact that another member of the family is on the way, which I am very glad about as I am very fit—and much thinner—and feel even better than last time, and especially because Norm is SO tickled.” After thus casually announcing her pregnancy, she immediately added: “I have other even better news. The day I have been waiting for two years arrived yesterday and Norman came home with the definite knowledge and feelings that his problem is completely solved and that whole new worlds are opened to him.” Her husband had found a new method of executing the
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covers: “It will take him perhaps five days at most to do a
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cover now whereas before it took two weeks time, out of all proportion to their value.” She exults: “And do you realize how entirely remarkable what he has done is? What perseverance and patience and every other good quality it has taken?”

It is amazing that at this juncture—the twenty-four-year-old woman pregnant with her second child—Mary considered it “even better news” that the anxiety over Norman’s career was resolved. More astonishing still, she seemed to believe this resolution in spite of all evidence pointing to the continuance of the drama. Predictably, by the end of July, she was writing that they were now considering going to Manhattan to live: “We are thinking—only thinking so far—of taking an apartment in New York this winter which would be loads of fun. I’ve always wanted to live in New York in the winter.”

By early August, her hopes were high: “Norm has just sent off two
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covers, and, now, having found a different technique in which he feels there are possibilities, he feels free to experiment to his heart’s content, which means he is really going to be an artist.” The real issue—and we can only imagine how it hung over the little household—was what Lorimer would say about the new technique. “Of course, privately speaking, it is going to be perfect if the
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approves of his new covers and I’ve not the slightest doubt that they will; it will be so much velvet because it takes him about one third of the time it did to do them, so he can depend on one a month for income and spend the rest of the time painting from which there will also be income of course. So the struggle is really won.” Not yet, of course.