Norman Rockwell (33 page)

At least while the Rockwells awaited Lorimer’s judgment, Mary had a few weeks of hoping for “normalcy,” whatever that must have come to look like to her. She confessed that she felt that she and “Norm” were starting out on a “normal sort of life” for the first time since they’d gotten married, because now, at last, Norman was straightened out. In an unusually self-conscious moment, she notes how “amusing” they must appear for changing their minds constantly; they’d decided to find a nice little New England town in place of Manhattan for the winter.

While Mary seems to have taken at least this brief moment to ponder her personal journey, by mid-August the Barstows were once more receiving letters centered on their son-in-law, although the writing reeks with anxiety that threatens to break through their daughter’s optimism: “Everything he does now shows new advancement and new possibilities until I feel that he is really going to do great things. I know it and he must have every possible chance. Of course our present decision rests on what we hear from the
Post
concerning the two covers he just sent over. I have no doubt what we’ll hear. Of course he has.” She proceeds at a near manic pace to explain again the difference it will make if Norm can spend just five days a month producing income (doing a
Post
cover) and devote the rest of his time to painting whatever he wants. Believing himself liberated from the past as a result of his tenure in Paris, he has suggested that they stay there at least for the winter. If they were to return to New York, Mary clearly parrots her husband, it would mean being in New Rochelle for at least a month before moving to Manhattan, and seeing all their friends again would drag down the work.

But of course, within a few days, the Rockwells are again undecided. “The difficulty is that we are still awaiting word from the
Post
about the two covers, which makes Norman just as upset as possible, though he is bearing up nobly and working on the Boy Scout calendar.”

According to American friends who stopped in to visit, the artist was working nonstop, nobly or otherwise. Leah Parmelee and her four girls were on their way back to New York after a year of living abroad, and they arranged to visit with the Rockwells on their return to New Rochelle. Daughter Betty Parmelee recalls how happy Mary seemed, taking care of her baby; she also remembers that they didn’t get to visit with Norman at all: “He was always off working, like usual; we never saw him.” Mary eagerly prepared a lunch for them all, noting that her grapefruit cocktail, cold chicken and tomato, string bean, pea and cucumber salad (made, she told her mother lovingly, just like you make it), homemade biscuits and ice cream and cake all do her proud. Sounding incapable of being anything but giddy with happiness, the woman remembered by her children as rarely going near a stove if she didn’t have to concluded her letter: “I really do adore cooking.”

Social distractions such as the Parmelees’ visit sprinkled Mary’s days with some relief from her husband’s relentless worry about Lorimer’s reaction to his new paintings. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a good time to appeal to the Boss’s more liberal instincts. At the
Post,
workers were noticing the dark cloud Lorimer carried with him. He worried that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal would be disastrous for the country in the long run; though he often explained that he agreed with some of the objectives, the president’s methods for obtaining them were at the heart of the problem. More worrisome still, the muscular shape the
Post
exhibited at the opening of the decade had already gone flabby, as Lorimer published too many ghostwritten memoirs from stage, screen, radio, and government celebrities designed to stanch his audience’s interest in glossier publications. Rockwell represented a failproof winning commodity, and the Boss was in no mood to indulge his major illustrator’s wish to experiment.

As long as he worked for Lorimer, not only was Rockwell hampered in his desire to try new formal directions in his art; his subject matter was circumscribed as well. In particular, nothing controversial was to be part of the cover illustration. Such intransigence over the illustration topics fueled Rockwell’s need to find other ways to avoid repeating himself.

Apparently, though there is no record of the actual transaction, Lorimer rejected both of Rockwell’s new works, nor do we even know what the pictures looked like. Whether the illustrator was devastated or relieved—most likely, at some level he experienced both emotions—he decided that he had to follow the path others thought of as his, and his little family returned to New Rochelle in October after all, taking the S.S.
Berengaria
back home.

Within a few months of their return, Rockwell learned that he was being included in the 1932–33 edition of
Who’s Who.
Any hope Mary entertained that the honor would boost her husband’s aesthetic energies quickly proved another chimera. At 24 Lord Kitchener Road, everything returned, way too soon, back to normal.

16

No Solution in Sight

Mary Rockwell spent the first part of 1933 getting a room ready for the child due in early spring; her husband plowed on in his studio, the weight of increasing financial responsibilities beginning to unnerve him. He had been earning around $40,000 annually for the past couple of years, which should have allayed his anxieties. He knew no one was immune from the Depression’s reach, however, and he had learned how easy it was to burn through money. And his expenses were high; his itemized expenses actually amounted to about one hundred dollars more than his total income. His household costs totaled over $12,000; his insurance and taxes and dependents (including his mother) another $12,000; his studio expense almost $9,000; and household additions and painting over $6,000. And although he and Mary did not live acquisitively, they enjoyed being able to tend to their growing family’s needs without having to cut corners. If they decided to take a trip, for instance, they wanted the money easily available, even on a whim. And when Mary saw the perfect transitional bed for little Jerry, she enjoyed buying it without worrying about the price.

On March 13, 1933, an unseasonably cold day, Mary gave birth to the Rockwells’ second son, Thomas Rhodes Rockwell. Tommy’s father had turned thirty-nine the month before, enabling him to joke that his energy for a baby did not equal that of a young man’s. The drain on his physical resources came not from fatherhood, however, but from work, which in turn left him less to give as a father and husband than everyone in his family, including himself, would have preferred. But the painter knew no other way; his art came first, babies or not.

Mary’s hope that her husband would become happy with his work after their return from Paris went unfulfilled, in spite of the ripe cultural moment that Rockwell, arguably, could have seized. During the thirties, a loosely termed movement that celebrated close ties to one’s roots developed, a quasi-Romantic American regionalism. Among the painters who influenced such artistic currents at various phases were John Stuart Curry, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton. In their own way, the gritty American Ash Can painters of the twenties, whose stylized naturalism hovered over some of the
Post
covers a few decades later, served as precursors to these new realists.

If Rockwell had wanted to enter the world of “real art” according to his own lights, and leave illustration behind, it seems logical that he might have found a way to do so exactly here, among the Regionalists. In wealthy Westchester County alone, the aesthetic efforts of the government’s intervention—the 1933 Public Works Administration and its offshoot, the Works Project Administration, two years later—left their imprint on everything from murals in post offices to the newly redesigned parks and graveyards. The kind of art that thrived under such patronage tended to be regional in nature, dedicated to representing somberly the reality of the ordinary person.

Mary Rockwell’s letter of 1932 had reassured her parents that “Norm” would stick with representation—his trips to the Louvre had convinced him to be true to himself—but it would be a new art-full representation. As the
Washington Post
critic Paul Richard noted in 1978, Rockwell could be said to stand halfway between the bookends of American realism, Thomas Eakins and Richard Estes. Why did the artist ignore the obvious possibilities suddenly open to him in the 1930s?

In light of the identity Rockwell later assumed as an avatar of the New England homestead, an integral part of the mythological landscape of rural America, it is startling to confront the lack of rootedness that lay at the heart of his art. He had not developed a strong sense of grounding in any one place either by temperament or through childhood experience. In spite of having spent almost all of his childhood in New York City, he limned that experience as a lack rather than the fullness that urban identities provided to other artists. And rootedness was integral to Regionalism. Historian William Graebner has argued convincingly that the artist was not comfortable with the local, relative quality of the individual embedded in a particular society. Previously a master of mass culture in the 1920s, when the absence of strong ties to family, friends, and a particular community, accompanied by pleasure in social mobility, defined the period’s common values, Rockwell lost his way during the following decade, when his dependence on the individual-as-universal lost its meaning in the context of the Depression.

“What was missing [in Rockwell’s paintings of the thirties] were the grounded, placed, and ultimately political voices of the Great Depression: the cotton farmer in Alabama, the steelworker in Gary, the retired couple in Long Beach, the housewife in Des Moines,” Graebner comments. But what else would we expect, the historian shrewdly points out, from an artist whose autobiography uses a Dickensian lens to focus on the importance of the grounding he himself lacks, and therefore idealizes: “My address,” said Mr. Micawber, “is Windsor Terrace. . . . I live there.” In choosing this line as his autobiography’s first quotation from Dickens, Rockwell implicitly reminds us of his own childhood traversed by too many moves and too much uncertainty to root the artist to his landscape.

Taking the measure of things through the surface fits well the tasks of an illustrator, and Rockwell’s distant father, difficult mother, and first marriage whose emotional heft barely registered over fourteen years set him up neatly for his job. He would explain in 1959 that “the surface of things is very important in illustrations—the kind of clothes people are wearing, the houses they’re living in, what they’re talking about.” To enter the world of “fine art” proper, even through the apparent friendliness of Regionalism, would have required a psychology the painter lacked.

Although not a superficial person in the ways the epithet is most commonly invoked, Rockwell continued throughout his life to live on the surface of things. Now, in 1933, he conscientiously tended to his mother’s needs, for instance, by assigning her personal care to his wife, while he made sure to pay her bills—and tactfully at that. In early November, the month that Mary turned twenty-six years old, she and Norman installed Nancy in a boardinghouse in New Rochelle. After a year of the sixty-eight-year-old woman living in Kane, her oldest son and his wife had had enough of her—or at least Carol had. Nancy’s habits and relentless whining, interspersed with praise of whatever family members lived anywhere but here, proved far too much for Carol Rockwell’s own demanding personality. “She paced up and down, relentlessly, making a very hard to describe sound with her throat all day long. My mother just couldn’t stand her. Plus she demanded such attention and care all the time,” Dick Rockwell recalls.

Without complaint, after her expulsion from Kane, Norman had immediately set his mother up in Providence, Rhode Island, with her cousins. But “Ma” had quickly tired of that arrangement, and she wanted to be near one of her sons. Mary, determined to make her happy, ensured that the querulous woman spent much of her time at their house. For her daughter-in-law’s birthday, Nancy gave her a new copy of
Anthony Adverse,
a Victorian novel that the grateful young woman immediately began reading aloud to her husband. She wrote her own parents that her little New York family was happier than ever, especially, she adds, “as I really feel Norman’s work is going to go well.” Clearly the major theme that determined the tone of the household remained Rockwell’s attitude toward his work.

Mary had helped Nancy Rockwell organize her belongings in Providence for the move to New Rochelle, and she unpacked for her once they were back in New York. Although she admitted that “everyone in Providence [the cousins] said that she was difficult etc.,” Mary believed, after three weeks of being around Nancy Rockwell, that all the older woman needed was a little “thoughtfulness,” and she committed herself to making her mother-in-law happy. “I can do anything to keep Ma happy—and she is so darling and grateful for anything I do—and adores the children so that it is a pleasure to do it.” Although Mary Rockwell’s determined good cheer commands respect, her sons’ uneasy sense that it came at a cost—that she, in a different way from their father, flinched from reality—seems consistent with the positive spin that pervades her letters regardless of the subject. Still, the natural goodness that the admiring Rockwell always believed to characterize his wife seems a valid appraisal from the evidence of her correspondence as well as acquaintances’ memories of the way she treated those around her.

Mary’s determination to emphasize the positive in her mother-in-law didn’t rub off on her husband, who found Nancy’s presence a real hindrance to his work. When she wandered out back to his studio and forced him to paint to the tune of her throat noises, he asked her to sit outside instead, if she really wanted to be near. She perched on his studio steps, a presence just beyond his door. More than once, she volunteered her son to speak at local women’s associations in which she participated. Mary’s enthusiasm, endless as it seemed, dissipated under the pressure of her mother-in-law’s relentless requirement for “thoughtfulness,” so that within the next year or so, Nancy Rockwell was shuffled back to Providence.

By early 1934, Rockwell needed even more mental room than usual to focus on his work anyway, now that he was allowing himself the occasional license to take photographs from which to paint, instead of depending exclusively on live models. After Franklin Roosevelt became president, the federal funding of various arts, especially as they documented government activities, furthered an emphasis on documentary-type realism, which in turn helped elevate photography into the art that Alfred Stieglitz had pioneered years before. As the younger illustrators incorporated the use of the camera into their designs, creating more sophisticated work than was possible from real life, Rockwell was torn; eager, on the one hand, to experiment with the new angles and perspectives that his colleagues were achieving, he couldn’t shake his feeling, on the other, that the camera was a kind of cheater’s tool. This line of thinking was undergirded by Joe Leyendecker’s distaste for the very idea of using photographs; Rockwell shared his friend’s concern that art students just starting out would start neglecting their drawing skills.

Regardless of the justice of this latter fear, the noise about cameras inauthenticating the illustrators’ work was illegitimate from the start. Too many examples of brilliant artists’ dependence on some variant of photographic reproduction—from Vermeer to Ingres and Matisse—are well known to imply otherwise. Rockwell developed his own ways of distancing himself from the helpmate, conjoining the best of two traditions. As a result of his lifelong ambivalence toward using photographs in lieu of live models, he not only paid others to take all the pictures—unlike most illustrators, he took none of his own—he nearly always hired unskilled workers unrelated to the art world, and then taught them how to take pictures for him, as if to emphasize that anyone could do this part of the job. He legitimized his use of the camera by deemphasizing its importance to the enterprise.

During this period of agonizing over how to move his painting forward, including incorporating photography into his process, Rockwell decided that he would enjoy returning to book illustrations, especially since that was the venue for the greatest illustrations of ages past. Although his published series of figures from American literature, including most notably paintings of Louisa May Alcott, author of
Little Women,
dates from the late 1930s, his friend’s daughter Betty Parmelee dated at least some of the work from this year: “I recall that I posed for Norman a few times during 1934 for a series of characters in American literature. Mary would sit and read to him while he worked; she was so sweet and dear, always.” Because the Parmelees had shared the sad news with their friends that they were moving to Florida—the Depression had dried up Dean’s sources of income in New Rochelle—Betty believed the artist wanted to use her before he lost the chance. Such a contingency of painting from live models—their availability—was another factor urging Rockwell to succumb to the camera.

Two years after Mary’s buoyant letters to her parents about the Paris visit meant to relaunch her husband, he was still searching for his way. For their first family vacation, he asked Mary to spend several weeks in Provincetown, where there would be other painters to inspire him. Site of the painter’s Cape Cod summer idyll almost twenty years earlier, it was a perfect place for swimming and sailing, both of which Mary loved. In a letter to her parents anticipating the trip, Mary earnestly explained that “[Provincetown] is an artists’ colony into the bargain which means it and the people will be quite unlike an ordinary summer place and thoroughly interesting.”

No notes on the summer remain, but a later neighbor and friend of the Rockwells, Leah Schaeffer Goodfellow, recalls that both Fred Hildebrandt, Rockwell’s favorite male model, and Leah’s father, illustrator Mead Schaeffer, met with Rockwell during the vacation. They all were at Provincetown together, which may have been the result of deliberate planning or simply a case of like people choosing the same vacation. Schaeffer and Rockwell both used Fred frequently enough that the illustrators ended up consulting with each other before working the model into their schedules. Rockwell may have ensured that Fred was in residence; combining work and supposed summer plea-sure was a pattern that had been firmly in place during the decade of vacations at Louisville Landing.