Norman Rockwell (61 page)

David’s total commitment to ensuring Rockwell’s artistic legacy could not be denied by the artist, however, and he appreciated the efforts both Wood and Molly made to endow the Old Corner House. In the pursuit of such efforts, Molly had convinced him to allow various manufactures of porcelain plates to reproduce his images; in spite of the now common prices of $40,000 and above for his original oils, the Rockwells saw little of such money, since the artist had given away most of his works long before. By their natures, the couple lived modestly: Mary Quinn had to insist that Molly “splurge” on buying lobsters one day when Norman mentioned how much he loved them; she found such a purchase ordinarily too “dear” to encourage. By contrast, friends observed how unworldly the Rockwells seemed to be about most luxury items, such as the time Norman, abetted by Molly, began to empty a bottle of vodka into an expensive bottle of brandy someone had given them, until someone shouted “no!”

The disciplined woman worked hard to improve their family and estate finances, their frequent traveling the couple’s only real indulgence. But Rockwell could not effectively retain control over his commercial reproductions nowadays, and by mid-year, unauthorized companies had created such an overflow of plates that the Franklin Mint asked him to sign a public ad deploring the imitations. On November 11, 1975, a full-page disclaimer appeared in
The Wall Street Journal,
among other newspapers, sealing the impression that Norman Rockwell, artist, was not much more than a corporation. Whatever income he and Molly were ensuring through their commercial enterprises, they were mangling Rockwell’s artistic reputation.

.  .  .

In 1976, two years after Rockwell had fled to Little Dix to avoid his eightieth-birthday celebration, Stockbridge insisted on fêting the artist, and though he grumbled irritatedly at home, he had little recourse but to show public gratitude. The reality was that such celebrations called on resources he would rather have marshaled for other purposes. He had created the public’s monstrous appetite for him, however, and he knew that. He tried to live up to what his efforts to be liked had wrought.

Stockbridge organizations created floats, and he and Molly sat up on the grandstand, reviewing the parade in his honor. In many ways a repeat of the New Rochelle occasion four years earlier, this time it was more fun, because it was based on the present, and more exhausting because he had deteriorated so much in those few years. But he and Molly were used to their debt to the public, and neither felt it fair to have taken a lifetime of adulation and bow out when the nation’s praise became inconvenient. Rockwell lamented in print about the times he might forget to lock his studio, only to return to find a group of tourists happily inside, awaiting him. The most recent such occasion, he “had a hell of a time getting them out—politely.” Virginia Loveless remembers with near awe the studied courtesy that both Rockwells exhibited toward those who stepped over the boundaries of propriety: “They would be pleasant to people who just walked into the kitchen, not even ringing the doorbell,” she says. “And once, a couple parked in the driveway and took out a cooler and prepared their picnic! When Molly went out to walk her beloved smart, overaged Corgi, Sid (for the classical Sidereus), she simply nodded pleasantly and went her way. It was amazing.”

Other than the Boy Scouts calendar, which would be his last, he had taken on only one special commission for the bicentenary. His favorite art magazine,
American Artist,
had requested that he do their cover, a commission he accepted, though according to the magazine’s art director, it was clear that the effort took every bit of energy he could muster. “I felt so sad for him,” Susan E. Meyer says. “He and Molly both were lovely to work with, but he was clearly failing. He would ask me the same question repeatedly, and I’d call him and he’d not remember what we had talked about. In the end, he wasn’t happy with the cover, but I was just pleased we had it, not sure till the end that we would.” In spite of the diminished abilities in broad view, the occasion was apt for Rockwell’s last public painting. A broken but stalwart Liberty Bell, a ribbon imprinted with “Happy Birthday” being wrapped around it by the frail but determined artist of American iconography, staked their mutual claims to the status of historical relics.

To coincide with the country’s bicentennial, Thomas Buechner wrote the text for another well-produced Rockwell art book that was published in 1976. Less costly than its predecessor six years earlier, the thirty-five-dollar text sold as well as the first one. Other less honorable enterprises traded on previous success stories, such as the New England Telephone company, which distributed their 1976 phone books with an obvious (unpaid) takeoff of Rockwell’s famous
Gossip Post
cover from the late 1940s. David Wood publicly commented on the unseemliness of such a commercialization, but the sadder reality was Rockwell’s inability to fend for himself in such matters now, and the willingness of Lorimer’s business community, long thought to be Rockwell’s friend, to exploit unfairly the artist’s fame.

32

Rage Against Impotence

The bird would cease and be

    as other birds

But that he knows in singing

    not to sing.

The question that he frames in

    all but words

Is what to make of a diminished

    thing.

—Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird”

And yet Rockwell himself was able only at times to appreciate the success that he continued to accumulate. By the beginning of the next year, when President Ford was scheduled to present him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest peacetime award, Jarvis had to be sent in his place to the Washington ceremony. Basically, the artist was reduced to being taken out to his studio in his wheelchair, where he complained that it was hard to paint properly with the chair in between him and the easel. A painting of a missionary and an Indian remained in the studio from two years earlier, and there was an increasing air of disuse settling on the rooms, which was hard to escape. His legs refused to function predictably at all, the weakness he had cited as a boy never corrected fully by his dreaded orthopedic shoes of childhood. Previously embarrassed at what he considered his oafish-looking oversize feet, now he wanted only to reclaim the freedom they had afforded him to work. In public, he depended on a walker and cane, although they both were rapidly becoming inadequate. When tourists ran up to him to snap a photograph, whoever was helping the infirm artist would state politely that Mr. Rockwell would prefer his picture not be taken now, and almost always, they would deferentially turn away.

When it became clear that Molly needed full-time assistance to manage her husband’s failing health, she reluctantly turned to a friend, asking for a referral to a trustworthy nurse. After she met with Mary Quinn, whose husband was a well-respected podiatrist in town, she waffled, lamenting that Norman was adamantly against outside intervention. “The whole experience of being hired by Molly was fascinating, sad, and revealing,” Mary Quinn says now. “I hadn’t been interviewed in twenty-five years for a job—I was rather well known. But Molly insisted upon a formal interview. She told me she didn’t want to go against her husband’s wishes, yet she felt incapable of taking care of everything now. It broke her heart to do this to him, and the whole thing was really painful for everyone to watch.” Two weeks later, Molly gave in to the obvious and called Mary. After a few days, the elderly schoolteacher confessed that she felt she was losing control, that she had little to say about their lives anymore. “I tried to reassure her the best I could, that everyone felt that way in such circumstances,” Mary remembers. “But even in the midst of all this chaos, Molly was determined to present her best side to her husband. It always impressed me so much. Her belief in ‘doing yourself up’ for your spouse extended to me, when I was leaving on vacation and Molly reminded me to take a cosmetics supply. Every day, she made herself up for her husband, and she dressed as lovingly as if they were going out to dinner.”

In the house, Molly and David had had an automatic Hoya chair lift installed, which allowed the artist to get up and down the stairs without being carried by someone. “He hated that device,” David Wood recalls. “I don’t know why—I guess it made him feel inadequate, childlike. And perhaps he felt he would fall out; on the way down, it could be a bit frightening. For whatever reasons, he railed against it.” Although he tended to stay upstairs, in one of two bedrooms the couple used for themselves (Norman’s with twin beds, Molly’s a single), the artist managed to get downstairs every day for the three o’clock ride his wife took him on, in their oversized, decade-old Oldsmobile. “We all got so worried about this routine,” Virginia Loveless recalls. “Molly was a terrible driver, though her father had told her she was great, and she believed him. She was a tiny woman, and she could hardly see above the steering wheel of that car. And the two of them went out every day, even in the winter when the roads were bad.” Only when Norman started dozing off and falling against Molly as she drove did they give up their afternoon drives.

Many nights he was still able to sign the stacks of prints that the New York gallery handling this new project would send him. Molly had been convinced that one way to endow a permanent museum for her husband’s art was to allow a first-rate lithographer in Paris to issue a limited set of prints from several of her husband’s paintings. The grammar of prints is large, and the room to maneuver within the genre and still remain both legal and ethical is almost as alarmingly broad as well. Rockwell knew this, and he was extremely uncomfortable about such a method of fund-raising.

For Molly, though, he would do just about anything—and for his sons, too. Molly explained to him that he was ensuring the financial security of his family, as well as endowing the museum that would house his real paintings. Still, he hated the whole affair, and he disliked the brusque redheaded woman who strode through his house, leaving the prints on the table, and not bothering to speak to the household assistants whom she clearly regarded as “the help.” He showed his contempt by flipping through the stacks quickly, signing his name to imitations that he felt reflected little honor on his name or his art. One of his real worries about the enterprise was that tourists who bought the prints were misled into believing them to be artist’s proofs. As usual, Rockwell’s implicit contract with his audience about the integrity of his paintings was paramount in his hierarchy of ethics.

His discontent was only worsened by the irony of prostituting his talent at this late stage; he had always taken a perverse pride in underpricing his work. A few years earlier, he had told an interviewer that he’d just refused a commission for $25,000 to illustrate plates, offering to do the work, which would only take him one day, for $7,500. Otherwise, “it made no sense. I shouldn’t make $25,000 for a day’s work.” But Molly’s good-natured response to the journalist that she simply thought her husband’s attitude to be crazy belied her concern that there were so few financial resources to fund an endowment. Nonetheless, when she went away for a few days and returned to find the latest stack of prints untouched, and Mary Quinn explained that seeing how much the process upset Norman, she had refused to make him sign them, Molly terminated the agreement with the Manhattan dealer and her husband was left at peace.

The public relations image provided for Norman Rockwell’s death has it that he lived his last few years in serenity, admittedly in poor health, and that he died “peacefully at home,” the mantra repeated in essays and articles for decades. In truth, there was little peace in his death at all, nor in the long time that it took him to die. By the end of 1977, as Molly explained graciously and painfully to friends who wrote—including her onetime rival, Peggy Best—Norman was barely recognizable as his old self. Most painful for his wife were his rages, where the usually genial man screamed and shouted at the very people trying their best to help him. According to those caring for him, he would throw tantrums because no one seemed to understand his wish that they pack for him to go to Paris, and no one was willing to help him get to his studio. He couldn’t understand their lack of cooperation. Once he managed, in his fury, to lock Mary Quinn in the bathroom. “It made us cry, the tension and unhappiness upstairs when Norman lost control,” Virginia Loveless recalls. “Molly would look so stricken, so hurt that he was flailing out at us, and embarrassed for Norman’s sake. She’d try to settle him down, but it was hopeless.”

Jarvis remembers that when he would go upstairs to talk to his father, often the conversation would be pure nonsense, about the trip they were taking to the moon, and what the artist wanted his son to bring along. Once, Norman asked his son to accompany him to Paris. “He was completely gone,” the eldest son remembers. “I felt that Pop was using trips and travel as an escape metaphor from his intolerable life, the big journey in the sky, the ultimate one.” One day, Jarvis asked Mary Quinn if his father was going to die, and when she said yes, he sat down and sketched him in his bed. “I always liked watching Jarvis with his father,” the nurse recalls. “I sensed that he really respected him, and that Norman felt that too.”

For at least the last two years before Rockwell’s death, Molly curtailed her schedule except for her Sunday church activities, and spent most of the days upstairs with her husband, massaging his head for hours at a time. “They were so close,” Virginia Loveless remembers. Even though both Rockwells by now had their own bedroom, side by side, Molly often stayed overnight with Norman. “They were physically affectionate, and they looked out for each other.” Mary Quinn adds, “But I always thought that Molly put Norman first far more consistently than the other way around. I would have felt a bit put out if my husband didn’t treat me a little more special than Norman did Molly.”

At times, in spite of the dementia, Rockwell’s old raucous sense of humor would break through, and those around him would burst into laughter at his sly jokes. A year earlier, he had explained to an interviewer his belief that though it was better nowadays how they all got problems out in the open, unlike the old days when difficulties and “prejudices” were “pushed . . . under the rug,” it was sad that the tradeoff seemed to have been fun: “We laughed a lot more in the old days than we do now. Yes, I understand why we don’t any more, but I regret it just the same.” When the illustrator got into a particularly lighthearted mood, Virginia Loveless would find herself howling in laughter, partly because of the ham actor’s adroit delivery. “He used to repeat one rhyme particularly often,” she says, and two months before he died, Molly wrote it down so they could memorize it: “Little Willie Lager fell into an Anheuser Busch / Tore Schlitz in his pants / Came out a sadder Budweiser boy / Pabst yes, Pabst no.” At other moments, he’d repeat obsessively rhymes about lining up his shoes neatly, or about the military-style tactics needed to conquer the bathroom.

Sometimes, Mary Quinn remembers, when he was not lucid he would suddenly call out repeatedly for “Mary, Mary,” and she knew “it wasn’t me he was calling for.” The past resurfaced in other surprising ways, such as the time that the nurse found two old letters from Irene O’Connor in his bedside table, the one that had faithfully displayed a picture of his mother throughout his life. During short periods of sudden clarity, Norman would enjoy talking about his past. He’d reminisce about his ancestors and Molly’s, egged on by the portraits of their relatives that hung on the walls. The dining room especially, the walls and rug dark, dramatically red, the warm rich burn of the deep wood furniture casting a glow in the late afternoon sun, seemed to inspire his most complicated and romantic reveries.

One day when things weren’t going too well in the household, Norman’s yelling reached a crescendo that mobilized his loyal little entourage to carry him downstairs, tuck him into his wheelchair, and roll him into his studio. But now that the big day had come, and the artist was finally inside, he sat there for almost an hour, saying nothing, just staring at the picture on the easel. Finally, he spoke: “This is not my studio,” he said firmly. No one knew what to say.

He never asked to return, although his raging against his infirmities continued for a few more months. On the night of November 3, David Wood went up to bed before the Rockwells did. Settled in for the evening, a few hours later he glanced up from his reading to see Molly—still, slight, urgent, and commanding, standing in the doorframe. She had never before come to his room at night. “He is gone,” she said quietly.

He strode quickly down the hall toward the couple’s suite of rooms and, entering Norman’s bedroom, he immediately realized that Molly was right. Lying on his back, his hand on the coverlet turned gently so that his palm seemed to beseech heaven, the exhausted artist wore a look of repose on his face that reassured David even as it momentarily seized him with grief. He was happy that Norman Rockwell was dead; he hadn’t looked this peaceful in years.

.  .  .

Time
magazine would mourn the artist’s passing, ranking him with Margaret Mead, Hubert Humphrey, Golda Meir, and Edgar Bergen as among the most noteworthy people to have died in 1978. And the art critic Robert Hughes, in the same publication, would sensitively eulogize the man whom one of his profession had less generously nicknamed “the Rembrandt of Punkin Crick.” Norman Rockwell’s funeral was held at two
P.M.
on November 11, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where Mary’s funeral had taken place nineteen years before, and where he had married Molly two years later. Two hundred passes were printed and distributed by David Wood to parishioners and out-of-town friends. As the “neighbor, friend, tenant” explained to the newspapers, the family had realized that if they didn’t take some steps to control the crowds wanting to pay their respects, local people would have no chance to pay theirs.

The service was thirty-five minutes long, led with a reading of Rockwell’s favorite poem, “Abou Ben Adhem,” also printed in the program. Its author, Leigh Hunt, was a “middling” poet among the giant Romantics whose time he shared. The British writer was a generous, courageous, liberal, well-read man who, quite appropriately, reminds at least one major scholar of the period of—who else?—Mr. Micawber in Rockwell’s beloved
David Copperfield.
“Abou Ben Adhem” narrates the enfolding of one man’s love for his fellows into love of God; at first denied inclusion among the names of those who “love the Lord,” Ben Adhem’s “name led all the rest” “whom love of God had blessed,” after the angel has relayed the man’s love of his neighbors to the Lord.