Norman Rockwell (60 page)

In the middle of Rockwell’s forward-looking efforts on behalf of Common Cause, his popularity continued to be revitalized by the nostalgia wave sweeping a country sick of the present. During the summer, in a nod toward the resurgence of the artist’s reputation, the
Saturday Review
published a significant article on illustration’s place in American culture. The latest interest in the country’s recent past was encouraging the reissue of Old Broadway musicals, of vintage fashions, and of forgotten comic strips, and it included a bid in Norman Rockwell’s direction. But without the validation of mass culture that Andy Warhol’s ethic had helped promulgate, little room would have been available for such retrospective evaluation. What was kitsch according to
The Nation
’s art critic Clement Greenberg, and later camp under Warhol, was evolving into “popular culture” in the wake of the Vietnam generation. Each transmutation granted the subsequent genre new credibility, until, upon its maturity, it would be institutionalized as a university discipline. The Brooklyn Museum’s retrospective of Rockwell’s career reflected such institutional imprimaturs.

In 1973, Ted Kennedy visited with the Rockwells at their home early in the new year, touring the Corner House as well, no doubt Molly’s idea in hopes of securing the Massachusetts senator’s patronage for expanding the collection. Kennedy enjoyed their hospitality as much as the paintings, and he assured them that he would bring his children back to delight in the exhibition just as he had. A few days later, the Rockwells attended an annual celebration at the Waldorf Astoria sponsored by the printing industries of New York, where the illustrator received a prestigious award given in honor of Benjamin Franklin. In the myriad photographs of the event, he appears to be as proud of having Molly at his side, her bright eyes focused on the speakers as if they were intoning Shakespeare, as he was to win the citation.

Around this time, Erik Erikson asked “Norm” to do him a favor and accept a commission from a sponsor of the Montessori Women Teachers’ Association in Vienna, a group to which Erikson had early ties. The anonymous member had already approached Rockwell about doing a medallion, and the illustrator’s lukewarm reaction had induced him to seek out Erikson, who, amazingly, urged his busy friend to take on the work. If he did so, no one connected with the archives has seen a copy of the medal, implying that Rockwell might have learned to say no, even to Erik Erikson. He and Molly decided around this time to escape the Massachusetts cold by spending a few weeks in Rome with Peter and Cinny, and travel always provided the illustrator with a graceful way to turn down hopeful supplicants.

On May 9, Rockwell’s brother died, “a man commonly known as a misanthrope,” a mutual acquaintance told one of the illustrator’s sons. Rockwell noted the event in his calendar with the terse remark, “Jarvis died in Florida. Dick called and told me.” A few weeks later, the Rockwells traveled to Minneapolis for a Boy Scout ceremony honoring the artist’s lifelong contributions, and, while there, he felt forced to meet with representatives from the Green Giant company, for whom he had painted major ads decades earlier. Representatives from the corporation pleaded with him to grant them an interview for an upcoming issue of the company magazine. Although Rockwell was clearly reluctant to accept yet more demands on his time while dealing with the Boy Scouts, he agreed, requesting that the company limit their talk to the briefest possible time frame.

As he grew older, Rockwell was finding himself a victim of the years spent establishing his accessibility. By the time he got home from the various business activities this time, there were signs that he would soon be forced to start limiting his appearances. Within a few days of his return from Minneapolis, his calendar includes an entry that hints at the changes taking place in his brain. “Felt lousy can’t remember what else I did,” he noted on May 31; the next day, Dr. Frank Paddock gave him a complete checkup and recommended a major rest. On June 3, he and Molly set off for Little Dix. The Rockwells stayed at the Bay Hotel, a luxury beachfront resort. A note that Molly wrote to Margaret and John Batty, codirectors of the Old Corner House until David Wood took the helm in 1974, makes it clear that even on vacation, Rockwell showed impatience when he was forced to do nothing. All ready to go for a swim, he and Molly were stranded in their room while it rained and thundered, but the lack of lightning irritated her husband, since now there was no good reason why they were prevented from going into the water.

By the end of August 1973, Rockwell was feeling increasingly “off,” and he was distressed enough to begin recording his bouts of mental confusion on his calendar pages: “all ‘mixed up,’ quit at 5 p.m.” he writes on August 20. One month later, he “went to bed then hospital in bed until the 27th.” The day after he was discharged, he “came out to studio twice but did not work. Took walk to where Erickson used to live. Trying hard to get normal.” A week later, on October 5, he still records “feel lousy.” Trying hard to normalize his declining health, the artist notes on October 11, when he didn’t feel well again, that “after all I am in my 80th year.”

He and Molly departed for Little Dix again in November, and on their return, in hopes of turning their domestic life into their own again, Molly designed what she called an “escapebo” for the south side of his studio and had it built in short order. The outdoor patio was part escape from the gawking tourists out front, and part gazebo. The closeness of their house to the street not only encouraged too many unannounced visitors, but the constant noise from the traffic irritated the Rockwells increasingly as they aged. The escapebo proved a lifeline to privacy, and Molly and Norman began spending as much time in it as they could, sitting there in the evenings after he had finished work and was ready for a hot toddy, and Molly for her own gin and tonic.

Rockwell had little opportunity to miss the significance of his eightieth birthday, since newspapers and magazines all over the country anticipated the February date before 1973 was over. Even Peter Rockwell’s latest efforts were, he had announced, studies of his father in honor of his upcoming eightieth birthday. Proud and gratified at the young sculptor’s major exhibition at the Shore Galleries in Boston, Rockwell nonetheless felt too frail and overwhelmed by work to risk the crowds.

In early 1974, a birthday interview emphasized the amazing routine the elderly painter maintained, devoting most of his seven-day workweek to portraiture. As if shocked at the prices he commands, and as in awe of them as the population will be, he proudly announced that the Franklin Mint will pay him $30,000 for their bicentennial medal, and that the portraits now go for $8,500. Asked why he doesn’t take it easy nowadays, he answered that “I want to be working on a picture and just fall over dead. That’s my ideal.” Generalities about the “hell” of growing old pepper his responses to journalists this next year; and the handwriting of his calendar notes becomes noticeably smaller and tighter. On January 10, he writes “very confused”; the next day, simply, “I am confused.” He and Molly escape to Little Dix at the end of the month, determined to avoid any large birthday celebrations in early February.

His health had clearly deteriorated by this point, at least judging by the number of midnight trips his quiet, loyal neighbors, Helen and Ernie Hall, made to the hospital with him when he had accumulated water in his lungs. Throughout the years, Rockwell had suffered from bouts of pneumonia, and his lung X rays indicated the presence of emphysema for several decades. He exercised regularly, rarely exhibited shortness of breath, and mouthed his pipe, using it for ritualistic distractions while he worked, far more often than he ever really smoked it. It seems likely that Rockwell’s debt to his Grandfather Hill, the artist whose fascination with detail made the illustrator wonder if such obsessions can be hereditary, extended to his health. After tubercle bacilli first enter the body, they usually remain lodged in the host until death, capable of causing clinical disease at any time. The germs can be activated by stress as well as by other contributors to a weakened immune system. Nancy Rockwell, survivor that she was, nonetheless almost certainly harbored the germ, and in the aftermath of Susie and Samuel Orpen’s deaths, when their children lived with the Rockwells, Norman and Jarvis Rockwell probably filed away the unwanted calling card in their young bodies as well.

Until his eightieth year, Rockwell’s attempts to outrun his increasing fragility by traveling more and more, finding himself at least temporarily rejuvenated by his trips, had worked fairly well. But this time, during his late January 1974 retreat to Little Dix to escape Stockbridge’s attempts at a birthday celebration, he fell off his bike in an unexplained accident that bore all the marks of a minor stroke. He and Molly had ridden out for their usual afternoon trip, with Molly leading. Only after she arrived back at the hotel and turned, anxiously awaiting what she assumed was her unusually winded husband, did she realize something was wrong. Summoning help from the office, she retraced their path with a staff member in tow, until they came across Rockwell sitting on the side of the road, dazedly surveying the vista. By the time they were back at the hotel, his confusion had passed, and the couple nervously decided he had just taken a tumble and hit his head. But neither one of them really believed that.

Back at home, Molly arranged for Virginia Loveless, the ex-wife of the Riggs art director, Dave Loveless, to help out at the house. Everyone in the Stockbridge intellectual community knew about Virginia’s cooking, and Norman had begun to lose his appetite. Molly hoped to improve it by arranging for Virginia to cook for the couple on a daily basis, and before long, the warmhearted, discreet woman felt like family to the Rockwells. “Even that year, I knew Norman wasn’t really okay,” Virginia says. “He just wasn’t always on cue, sometimes perfectly fine, other times somehow ‘off.’ ”

Molly and Norman both refused to acknowledge that there was a problem, however, and in a desperate attempt to get things back to normal, the orderly schoolteacher began to rely more heavily than ever on sticking to the routines she’d set up for them both, aimed at regularizing Norman and securing his good health. Her own lifelong insomnia worsened, and she began to inch toward sharing Norman’s reliance on Miltown, Seconal, and alcohol to keep sleeping through the night.

When David Wood, a member of St. Paul’s and a well-educated English teacher, took on the position of museum director that year, he quickly became such good friends with the Rockwells that they suggested he move into the little apartment that Mary Rockwell had created upstairs in the South Street house. He agreed, and he paid the Rockwells $150 rent each month. His presence was reassuring to both Norman and Molly, since he tactfully combined the role of family watchman with that of friend and tenant.

During 1975, Rockwell was approached, predictably, by dozens of prominent organizations that hoped he could be induced to represent the upcoming bicentennial for them. But by now, the artist’s color sense had altered dramatically enough that he could no longer keep up the pretense. Until this point, he had insisted all was well: “I remember once when I showed him an original oil we had bought back for the Corner House,” curator David Wood says. “He remarked how dirty it was, and that he was going to take it inside and wash it and then retouch it. I was horrified: his judgment was so off, with the eye problems he was having, that I knew the picture would be ruined. I had to mumble some excuse and get it out of there.”

Frank Paddock claims that Rockwell had a special eye condition that affected his sense of color only, but from the reports of Rockwell’s vision, it seems that he basically was affected by cataracts or the macular degeneration common by his age. “His distinctions between the range of oranges and yellows became particularly enfeebled,” recalled Peter Rockwell. “Color had always been a source of pride to him too, his command of its clarity and values.” Worse than the color confusion was the ever-worsening dementia that plagued the artist. Frank Paddock had become Rockwell’s doctor largely by default; when he and Mary had first arrived in Stockbridge, Frank’s father, located in nearby Pittsfield, had long led the medical group of choice for high-profile figures. Many in Stockbridge came to believe that Frank Junior was more interested in conducting explorations of exotic places, such as the edge of the Peruvian rain forest, in search of the ruins of Gran Pajaten, than in practicing medicine.

Controversy erupted between Paddock, not known as the expert diagnostician that his famous father had been, and researchers on Alzheimer’s disease, who came to Stockbridge in crude hopes of making Rockwell their poster child. Virginia Loveless even took a special course on the disease, in hopes of understanding her adored friend’s confused mind better. In retrospect, the artist’s mental degeneration exhibited many of the classic symptoms of the disease, then still in its early stages of public awareness and medical exploration.

Rockwell knew something was terribly wrong. On June 2, 1975, he recorded only three words in his calendar notes: “I’m all confused.” On August 19, he lost his balance and fell, injuring his back. He paused on October 25 to note that “today is Molly and my 14th anniversary.” But one week later, on November 1, he is again baffled: “no Louie [Lamone, his assistant], he said I said he was not to come today? Quitting 4 pm going for ride Mary.” The Rockwells had not yet employed the nurse Mary Quinn, and the artist never called Molly by the name of his dead wife. On November 5, he records the word “puzzled,” and on the tenth, he writes “bewildered.” Christmas Day, he ends his calendar notes for 1975 with the simple notation, “I’m mixed up.”

Over the next few years, as Rockwell’s lucidity became more precarious, Peter visited from Rome, and the two sons within easy driving distance frequented the family home. Tom and his wife Gail made overnight visits from their home in Poughkeepsie, and Jarvis, divorced in 1972, brought his young daughter Daisy most afternoons or evenings to sit in the library, where one of his own abstract paintings hung over the fireplace, with David Wood, Molly, and his father sharing tea or predinner drinks, the old illustrator often downing two of his favorite whiskey sours. Daisy Rockwell, now a professor of Hindi, recalls that Molly and David did most of the talking, while she, her father, and her grandfather sat listening to their erudite discourses on whatever literature was the topic of the day. David, who felt somewhat uneasy at the sense of exclusion of others, remembers that Norman may have gently paid him back by signing his holiday cards to him as “to David, our neighbor, tenant, and friend,” carefully keeping David in his place.