Norman Rockwell (34 page)

The summer proved full of distractions for the artist; Mary’s family visited from California, Ma Rockwell continued to find new ways to place demands on Norman and Mary, and the Provincetown vacation itself, accompanied by a toddler and a baby and a palette, was far from total relaxation. Norman’s focus was under constant siege. One indication that the summer left too much stress behind is the trip he made with Fred Hildebrandt into the Canadian wilds soon after. Uncharacteristically, during the weeklong journey he kept a diary, which yields unexpectedly sweet, personal insights into the private man. The little journal is especially significant, because no mention of the trip exists otherwise; nor did Rockwell share the diary publicly. More of a sportsman than he ever admitted to being, and prone to missing his family and worrying over children not his own, the artist seems markedly less theatrical when writing for his eyes only. The account also captures Rockwell’s impressive intelligence, his quick and shrewd assessment of situations and people, and his limitless curiosity and detailed observation of the world around him.

He and Fred arrived in Montreal on September 3, hoping to start their trip off with a baseball game, but finding instead that they had to board a train for an eleven-hour ride immediately. For the next seven days, the two men and their guides canoed through gales “blowing right in our faces,” confronting “rain squalls and continuous wind.” Sometimes the going was especially rough, or the environs awesome: “Hard paddling against it [the weather]. Kept thinking of Jerry’s remark ‘Hard work, Daddy.’ One guide saw moose, we saw a mink and a muskrat. All this country has never been timbered. Virgin forest and innumerable lakes and connecting rivers.”

The small group broke camp every day or so, paddling furiously to arrive at the next location where they hoped to bag a moose, and where Fred anticipated unparalleled trout fishing. Rockwell was far more interested in the former than the latter, although the guide’s ability to stalk partridges and bring them down with a rock—“by the way, we have no firearms”—commanded his greatest respect. At one point, he wrote that “before lunch, I was terribly low, wished I was home, lonesome of [
sic
] Mary, Jerry and Tommy. Tried to figure out how I could get home without losing face altogether.” Then, with the whimsical wryness characteristic of his humor, he notes, “but after the weather cleared and I caught the fish, I loved my family no less but I was more content.”

The subject of family was not far from the artist’s thoughts throughout the trip. When an owner of the camp company brought his children to bunk with the men one evening, Rockwell noted with concern the children’s apparent poor health; they were too thin and coughed too much. He observed worriedly that “[the parents] seem very fond of the children but take no care of them. . . . One by one the kids practically collapse of fatigue and sleepiness and they are stowed in the rough camp beds. . . . They are all girls but one and all but two are very sickly looking.” His own charges back in New Rochelle had been much on his mind just before picking up the five children at the landing; while fishing that afternoon, the group had heard someone calling out to them, and Rockwell was “afraid it was a telegram from home.”

At the end of the weeklong, seven-mile canoe camping trip “all upstream,” Rockwell concluded his diary with the type of jocular adieu he habitually adopted when he felt happy: “Here we sit writing the final words of this testament and how are you?”—akin to Robert Browning’s cheerful “God’s in his Garden and all’s right with the world.” Twenty-five years later, he would end tapes he recorded after a day of studio work similarly—if he was pleased with the work.

Back home, working in the midst of a supportive spouse and two small sons who adored him, Rockwell soon had even more cause to appreciate his good fortune, even as he mourned someone else’s sad fate. On November 4, 1934, his ex-wife Irene O’Connor drowned in her bathtub, a probable suicide. For the previous two years, the poor woman had been a patient at McLean Sanitarium, whose manicured lawns and Adirondack chairs, with upper-class clientele to fill them, failed to suggest the degree of suffering behind the expensive walls.

She and her aviator husband had barely been married for two years when she entered the institution, located within an hour’s drive from their home, a widely regarded sanitarium and Harvard University teaching hospital associated with Massachusetts General. Although it had undergone some rough financial times in the twenties and would face harrowing financial constraints in the decades ahead, the thirties were an especially strong period for McLean, whose policies were by and large among the most liberal and humane of early and mid-century hospitals for the mentally ill. At this point, very little existed between the two extremes of treatment facilities—expensive private institutions such as McLean, and state-subsidized asylums. At the upper end, treatments were still based largely on whatever method seemed to placate the patient best, whether it be playing tennis, hydrotherapy treatment (jet streams of water aimed at their bodies), or basket weaving, contributing to such institutions being sneered at for their country club airs. Very little medication was available, and trained psychoanalysts were just beginning to inhabit the scene.

Within the subsequent decade, insulin shock treatment and electroshock therapy would be employed, and the first significant line of pharmacological intervention developed around the same time. But none of these methods was available in the early 1930s. Serious, rigorous, and humane medical intervention was, however, consistently attempted at McLean. The year of Irene’s death, the annual report announced that “three patients had been treated by [the new method of] ‘orthodox’ psychoanalysis.” At the time of Irene’s admission in 1932, she and her family would have been informed of the talking cure. But those treating the mentally ill with every resource they could muster often expressed despair at their low rate of success, and with the still primitive state of their knowledge of mental disease.

Given the confidentiality of such medical records as well as the lack of surviving family, no way exists to confirm Irene’s diagnosis but, at the time, the majority of McLean’s 250 patients were determined to be suffering with manic depression, then classified as a psychosis. Years later, this diagnosis would be refined to reflect the various faces of depression, of bipolar disease, and of mild schizophrenia, in the process downgrading all but the last to neuroses. Still, being hospitalized at McLean for two years suggests that Irene was seriously ill, whatever her condition was called. She must have despaired of her future, since the modalities of treatment would have implied its probable bleakness: as the hospital history explains, and the yearly bulletin made clear even then, “Recently admitted patients with acute illnesses [are] more likely to receive substantial psychotherapeutic attention than the presumed chronic or demented for whom there [is] scant hope of improvement.”

Although newspaper accounts—inevitably noting her connection with Rockwell—claimed that she had drowned in her bathtub at McLean, her death certificate makes it clear that she died in her tub at home in Brookline, Massachusetts, near Boston, where she lived with her husband. The death certificate also rules the death from water in the lungs an accidental drowning, but those who have researched the circumstances all believe that Irene committed suicide. Only four months earlier, the forty-one-year-old patient, heavily dependent on her mother all her life, had faced the death of the older woman. Possibly Irene had finally left the hospital in order to attend the funeral, declining to return. In any event, she died at home.

It seems likely that Irene had suffered with some symptoms of her disease during her fourteen years with Rockwell. Pictures of her in her early twenties as well as associates’ accounts of her behavior suggest a personality that alternated between extreme melancholy and wild bursts of energy and activity. Her erratic behavior toward money—on the one hand, holding it up as her god, on the other, investing her husband’s $10,000 in a boardinghouse acquaintance’s scheme—matched her refusal in late 1929, on Rockwell’s frantic entreaties, to consider her probable new financial situation if she left Rockwell for a chemist. Nor could the new life she traded for the one in New Rochelle have come close to granting her the prestige she had previously enjoyed as Rockwell’s spouse. For more than a decade, Irene could claim the center of attention easily, as the wealthy, attractive young wife of a famous man who would have happily remained faithful to her and their marriage had she been interested. It is unlikely that the hard-hitting risk taker Francis Hartley, bound for the 1938 Olympic Games, shared the same virtues as Irene’s gentler first husband.

Even if Rockwell somehow avoided the plentiful newspaper accounts and the gossipy friends eager to fill him in, he undoubtedly would have been informed of Irene’s death by her brother, Howard. Hoddy, unlike the rest of his family, had remained in New Rochelle, and he bragged of his closely sustained connection to the artist, decades after it had in fact been rent asunder. “His assertions weren’t exactly true,” attests Tom Rockwell. “I got the feeling my dad thought Hoddy was a character, and he always enjoyed such larger-than-life people. But that was all. I myself went to meet Hoddy when I was trying to piece together Pop’s life. He was just as Pop had described him, including his huge hamlike arms, which he showed off to me as proof of his strength; and he told me one of the most vulgar jokes I’ve ever heard in my life.” Hoddy, alone of those who knew Irene, insisted that his sister could not have killed herself.

Thirty years later, the perfectly lucid illustrator would feign forgetting that he had ever been married to “that pretty girl who lived in my boardinghouse,” to the astonishment of those present. Whatever the fourteen-year marriage had meant to Rockwell, his illogical, complete denial of Irene’s existence in itself hints at the significance that her leaving him held. Her bizarre death, given Rockwell’s propensity for avoiding exactly this kind of ugliness and in the context of their divorce having occurred only four years earlier, must have been “unsettling,” to use his favorite word for circumstances he tried to avoid.

Major life changes seemed consistently in Rockwell’s purview during this period, including the professional leadership he took for granted. For the first time unsure of the country’s pulse, George Horace Lorimer found himself responding defensively to his critics, who incorrectly reduced his politics to knee-jerk conservatism.

Although worried whenever word went out that the
Post
was experiencing turmoil, Norman was far more engaged in the public’s response to his art than in their reaction to Lorimer’s leadership. Every bit as entwined with the readership as was the Boss, Rockwell took the measure of his success through his fan mail. At the end of 1934, concluding the year on the same note that it had begun, Mary Rockwell wrote her family happily about the latest signs that her husband’s now four-year-long depression had run its course: “At the moment I am awfully excited. I’ve just opened the mail. Altogether in the last three days Norman has gotten at least twenty letters on his last
Post
cover—the most appreciative letters—which is only another indication that he’s all straightened out at last—life is interesting not to say exciting.” It would never be anything less.

17

Reconfiguring

Mary’s optimism aside, her husband still saw no way to escape what he considered his dead-end path—churning out, with enormous expenditure of energy, cover after cover for
The Saturday Evening Post,
receiving the praise of readers grateful that “their” artist wasn’t like those “real” modern artists. Years later, after this line of praise became constant, he told his youngest son ruefully, “Just once, I’d like for someone to tell me that they think Picasso is good, and that I am too.” Instead, he received praise such as that lavished by the Heritage Club’s monthly publication to its mainly well-educated middle-class members: “Although some may say that Picasso is a better artist than Norman Rockwell, although some will say that Thomas Hart Benton is a better artist than Norman Rockwell, it cannot be denied that Norman Rockwell is the best known artist in this country: his name is known in household, cabaret or farm. And this is because he paints like an imp.”

Infrequently, an artist whom the illustrator respected would dare to assert a contrarian opinion of Rockwell’s value. George Grosz, the German Expressionist, insisted, “He has excellent technique, great strength, and a clearness of touch that the old masters had.” Grosz, whose earlier roots in Berlin Dadaism and whose harsh caricature of the German bourgeoisie would not have made him an immediately obvious choice to defend Rockwell, believed that “his things are so universal that he would be appreciated anywhere.”

In 1935, Rockwell was offered a prestigious commission that reminded him of the historical antecedents that had motivated his love of illustration. The chance to place his name next to those heroes who had illustrated the classics helped to reinvigorate his stride. The occasion was the centennial year of Samuel L. Clemens’s birth, and one of Rockwell’s greatest admirers, George Macy (of department store fame), decided that his Heritage Press should publish new editions of
Tom Sawyer
and
Huckleberry Finn.
Although a few well-known illustrators had taken their turn at the books, a stellar performance akin to that achieved by H. K. Browne or Edward Kemble for Dickens had eluded them. Even Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth had illustrated a few of Twain’s texts, but nobody had gotten his two most famous works quite right yet, at least as far as George Macy was concerned.

Rockwell could even claim that Clemens, or Mark Twain, as he was known to his public, already flowed, albeit weakly, through the bloodlines of the illustrator’s family: Twain had been a weekend houseguest of Uncle Sam Rockwell’s wife around the time that Waring and Nancy were getting married. A more specific kinship surfaced when Rockwell discovered that Twain seemed at least a blood brother to himself, another artist who created out of the same compensatory needs that Rockwell did. The match of raconteurs, author to illustrator, seemed ideal. Almost in wonder, Rockwell related to a contemporary writer the story of an old judge who had known the author as a young boy: “He told me that Sam Clemens was really a sickly, sensitive boy, so what he put into his stories were the things that he would have done had he been stronger—things that he no doubt dreamed of doing. If he had actually done these things, possibly he would have been such an extrovert that he could not have written about them.”

Part of the project’s appeal to Rockwell was the mandate (from the ghost of Pyle as well as the very alive George Macy) to make such classic illustrations historically accurate. Rockwell set out to explore Hannibal, Missouri, making much of the fact that no previous artist had bothered to authenticate his illustrations for Twain. As if this assignment fueled his confidence in his future, Rockwell finally justified to himself using the camera to prepare properly for the final oil paintings. Now, when he was following in the footsteps of Howard Pyle, and joining a very select club of those chosen to illustrate the classics, he could appeal to his own instincts, and his own desire to move forward and transform his talent into the next stages.

He developed a routine, wherein he drew from live models back home and relied primarily on photographs on site. Quickly, he learned the merits of the camera over live modeling in almost any context. Previously, a painting had required an average of three days with each model; when the models were animals or young children, the process stretched out even further. Relying on live posing also limited the contortions he could demand; a child, especially, could only hold a difficult position for a short period of time. He was correct that his reputation would suffer when word got out that he had caved in; Edward Hopper was to say that he had “nothing but contempt for Norman Rockwell,” whose paintings were all done from photographs “and they look it, too.” But, as usual, the artist simply decided to do what would serve his art best and turned a deaf ear to the critics.

Rockwell read the Twain texts carefully, sketching in the margins his concepts for the scenes he considered most vivid. From the often tiny gestures he scribbled, his accretive method of working shows clearly. A moment here, another one a few paragraphs later, and within a few pages, a full-concept sketch emerges. Certain constraints were clear from the start: he needed to spread the color plates fairly evenly throughout the books, and Macy had limited the number of illustrations to eight color plates per book. Other than these requirements, he was free to collaborate with the muse of Mark Twain.

The illustrations are generally considered a great success, and Rockwell himself was very happy with the results. The
Tom Sawyer
collection, published the following year, employs the caricature of Rockwell’s 1920s paintings of children and their adventures, while the
Huck Finn
series, published in 1940, leans far more in the direction the illustrator would travel in the late thirties, toward a grittier, detailed realism expressed in a more painterly fashion. Rockwell’s contrasting treatment of the two stories clearly aims at implying the duality of Twain’s texts; those who do not admire the results usually find the cartoony
Tom Sawyer
figures unworthy of the subterranean pressures of childhood implied in Twain’s work. Nonetheless, Rockwell’s illustration of, in this case, the perhaps too aptly named whitewashing scene in
Tom Sawyer
remains one of his most widely circulated illustrations: in 1972 the U.S. Postal Service issued the picture as a stamp.

The town of Hannibal, Missouri, expressed no reservations either, and George Macy was truly delighted with the illustrations, especially for
Tom Sawyer,
which were delivered in a more or less timely fashion. Hannibal’s Chamber of Commerce begged Rockwell more than once to loan the original oils to its local Mark Twain museum. In January 1939, when the town museum was forced to send the paintings to a temporary exhibit in New York, local civic leaders wrote Rockwell detailing what a loss it represented to their institution: “Last year we had more than thirty-four thousand visitors who took the time and trouble to register at the museum,” they explained. Groups planned their vacation around Hannibal, the letter informed Rockwell, because they’d heard that the oils were on display. Please, the Chamber of Commerce entreated the artist, return the oils to their temporary home as soon as possible.

At the end of a year crowned by this jewel of an assignment, Norman Rockwell felt that he might be back on track again. Mary, naturally, was thrilled that her husband was in such good spirits and that his friendly nature was coming to the fore as a result. She had always enjoyed being around other people, and the years of her husband’s depression had too often been emotionally lonely ones for her. Rockwell, aware of the sacrifice his work exacted from her, set about making more of an effort to socialize. On December 31, 1935, the Rockwells were guests at a wild New Year’s Eve party at the Waldorf Astoria, where they enjoyed themselves enough that they mentioned the event in future years to their children, including their youngest, who was conceived, they believed, on that very night.

That magical evening did indeed mark a turn for the better. In 1936, the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey, commissioned Rockwell to do what would be his only mural, a detailed historical vignette of Yankee Doodle, 60 by 152 inches. Closer in spirit to Hogarth than anything else the illustrator did, the painting proceeded by starts and spurts, while Rockwell continued to work on the Mark Twain paintings alongside the
Yankee Doodle Dandy.
During the nine months that he worked sporadically at the Princeton project, finally mounted in 1937 onto the wall where it remains, he also began work on a series of literary figures, including a mannered, eerily compelling Ichabod Crane that would have unnerved Washington Irving himself. Regrettably, the paintings were never published, but Rockwell’s new confidence shone forth in their execution. Keeping company with authors he considered worthy of the best art could offer had proven to be the jolt to his system he’d been looking for.

His newly elevated spirits allowed his lighter side to take over for a while, and events that would have stung him earlier actually amused him for a while. He and the artist Rockwell Kent had, for some years, been regularly confused for each other. Especially since the openly left-wing Kent was viewed suspiciously by many of the conservative Americans who embraced Rockwell, the confusion had continued to amuse both sophisticates, far more than their publics. Both men wrote an amusing and good-natured vignette for the spring 1936 volume of a quarterly for “bookmen,”
Colophon,
contrasting the perils and pleasures of being mistaken repeatedly for each other.

Such a forum proved particularly gratifying in light of the (admittedly short-lived) feature inaugurated that year by the
Post,
a book-review section defiantly called “The Literary Lowbrow.” A kind of reverse snobbism, Lorimer’s anti-intellectualism seemed to be going out of its way to offend the literati. And yet there could be no doubt of the cultural clout the
Post
still carried. For instance, although every noted illustrator in New York had practically begged Hollywood to take a look at a model in consistent demand for magazine cover poses, Mardee Hoff, only after Norman Rockwell used Hoff on the
Post
in March 1936, posing her as a movie star on tour, did the studios take notice. The day the
Post
hit the stands, three movie companies wired Lorimer to get the model’s name, and Twentieth Century–Fox had placed her under contract by the end of the following week. When asked by one of the Fox executives why he hadn’t been told of her earlier, Hoff replied, “You have. I’m the girl Mr. Rockwell and Mr. [Joseph Medill] Patterson have been telling you about for two years.”

Regardless of the cachet the
Post
conferred in certain circles, Rockwell understood by now that critical respect and his own personal satisfaction would largely lie elsewhere. He spent the summer working on the mural in Princeton and on sketches for various American classics that he hoped could be produced as a series. Usually a time when he tried, however unsuccessfully, to slow his pace, summer this year was a time to focus even more than usual on his work, as the Rockwells’ third child was due in early fall, and he wanted the security of finished work by the baby’s arrival. His extra efforts and Mary’s saintlike patience with them seemed worth it when, on September 16, 1936, Peter Barstow Rockwell was born.

Over the next few months, Rockwell heard rumors that some big changes were about to occur at the
Post.
He couldn’t allow himself to worry about what the gossip portended, because he had too many commissions he needed to focus on. Having another baby in the household didn’t affect him very much, since he allowed nothing to throw off his daily work routine. But thinking about the future of the
Post
could really trip him up, so he put such thoughts aside.

Toward the end of the year, however, a few days after the nearly three-month-old Peter had been baptized at the neighborhood Episcopal church, Lorimer tearfully explained to Rockwell that the board wanted a younger man to take over the leadership of the magazine.
The Saturday Evening Post
had lost touch with the nation’s mood, and its publishers believed that new blood was needed to realign the magazine with its age. During the twenties and thirties, Lorimer had stridently promoted his vision of a nativist America just emerged from its Old World cocoon. Determined to convince the nation to embrace isolationism and to bandage the wounds of the Great Depression locally rather than through federal intervention, he had ended up sounding more melodramatic than romantic in recent months. And yet, when the December 26 edition of the
Post
informed its readers, through the first signed editorial in its history, that the Boss was retiring, it was easy to understand the ambivalence even of those who had sought the change. Lorimer’s politics had always been far more complicated than categorical, as this crazy mosaic of liberal and reactionary measures reflects:

For many years we have advocated the protection of investors; proper regulation of child labor, particularly in the mills, the factories and in some farming operations; slum clearance; the conservation of natural resources, and other reforms.