If Howard Pyle’s death in 1911 had occurred auspiciously for an ambitious student who now could fantasize taking the great man’s place, in retrospect, Pyle’s untimely demise almost immediately had become a symbol of an entire age on the wane. Already Rockwell’s nod in the great man’s direction conveyed subtle elegiac overtones for the profession whose greatest modern credibility rested on Pyle’s reputation.
Had he come to these conclusions courtesy of his father’s intervention during the terrible winter two years earlier, as he re-trod the countryside of his youth? It had taken a full-fledged depression to allow Rockwell the luxury of undirected thought, and now it seemed as if the floodgates had opened wide. “I am working like a dog,” he continued, explaining that, though he tries to wring every bit of imagination from the texts that he can, too often he is “continually being limited and bounded by the author, because your illustrations must agree with the text, and sometimes the author hasn’t the least idea what he is talking about.” Good student of George Bridgman to the end, he laments that an author “will have the man raise his left foot and throw the boulder with his right hand, which is an absolutely unnatural position, you know.”
Yearning to do “real” art, and admitting that he is growing tired of illustration, the artist nonetheless concludes with the ambivalence that underlies such bravura: “I know a little hamlet on the coast of Cape Cod where a man can live on three dollars a week, if he likes fish. Now, I don’t care anything about society—people taken collectively are a sham—singly they are companions. I think that it does a man good to be poor, especially an artist, he has a greater incentive to work. So this little hamlet would be ideal, if I liked fish. I don’t like fish, and there is always that eternal if in every man’s life.”
As Michele Bogart notes, Rockwell signals throughout his life that he enjoyed investigating modernist ideals; his aesthetic standards were, ironically and tragically, in fact similar to those of the very critics who ignored or belittled his work. But, so frozen was he in his own fear of leaving what he knew he could do and be loved for, he became the ultimate symbol of the reaction against Modernism and an escape from its ills.
And it is true that Rockwell was fundamentally at odds with contemporary notions of what an artist should be. Savvy art historians, realizing that the majority of celebrated modern artists from Monet to Jackson Pollock underwrote their bohemian, anticommercial posture with someone else’s money, have long smiled at the Romantic myth of the starving artist. In contrast, painters such as Rockwell, whose background had neither inured him to material desires nor allowed him the luxury to disdain them, openly sought financial success. If the day-to-day industriousness of illustrators as a class seemed plebeian to those artists who sought more ethereal rewards, Rockwell himself was wed to his desire for financial security. And such pursuit of economic stability allowed him a self-respecting way out of confronting the fear of failure that often plagues successful public figures interested in swerving from their expected paths.
At the same time that Rockwell gave this soul-searching interview, he was keeping long hours producing illustrations for St. Nicholas, Youth’s Companion, and Boys’ Life. Some pieces, like the charcoal sketch for George M. Johnson’s “A First Class Argument,” provided rewards beyond the monetary: Waring modeled for Rockwell’s drawing, information the illustrator wrote into his inscription on the piece fifty years later to the friend who bought it. Periodically throughout his life Rockwell would flirt with changing professional course, but he never again approached the crossroads that he did during the years from 1912 to 1914, before he had solidified the image that encouraged Americans to think they owned him.
To some extent, the beginning of World War I forestalled the urgency to make clear decisions about his career’s direction. All America was keeping watch, even though the majority of the country agreed that isolationism was its proper path. New Rochelle felt the European war’s presence particularly keenly, because Fort Slocum, located on Davis Island six hundred yards from the town’s shore, processed the most recruits east of the Mississippi. All around him, Rockwell’s acquaintances, hearty, strapping young men, enrolled in the armed services. And those who didn’t—the illustrators who comprised the New Rochelle Art Association, for instance—joined forces in the “poster” campaign, imitating luminaries such as James Montgomery Flagg, who had created the compelling image “Uncle Sam Needs You.”
Jarvis Rockwell was thinking about joining the Navy, but in 1914 he was just getting his job with a cotton goods company, C. E. Riley, under way. He had fallen in love with fellow boarder Carol Cushman, a lively, well-liked fledgling actress, whose few small roles in films had already gained her the beginnings of a reputation. “Actually, my mother was Willard Skinner’s girlfriend—he was one of the boardinghouse gang of friends—and then on the way back from taking Willard to the train for the Navy, my dad and mom decided they were made for each other,” Dick Rockwell says. Actually, to be more precise: according to a personal log Jarvis kept between September 19 and Willard’s departure on September 26, he actively pursued Carol, stealing his “first hug” at Willard’s going-away party, and his “first kiss” after taking Willard to the station the next evening.
Love letters between the two from 1914 to 1916 fill in the quotidian details of the Rockwells’ days, revealing, for instance, that Jarvis and Norman’s circle of friends all played golf. They walked a lot, too; in fact, much to his chagrin, the day after a sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner, Norman and Waring had ambled off, while Jarvis got stuck storing summer clothes for Nancy: “I expect to feel called out for further duty any minute. Ma certainly can find lots of things to do when she starts puttering.” Consistent parental patterns finger Norman as Waring’s favorite, and Jarvis as Nancy’s.
On February 27, 1915, Carol’s parents gave a dinner party in honor of her engagement to Jerry, notice of which appeared in The New York Times, The New York Herald, and The New York Press a few days earlier. The following month, Jerry received a congratulatory note from an old friend, reminding the newly engaged man to tell “Norman not to do any stunts right away,” since everyone first needed time to get used to Jarvis’s engagement. Such advice implies some knowledge of the younger brother’s impulsiveness, the possibility that he would rush out and get married himself.
By the summer of 1915, the Rockwells were able to relocate from Brown’s to an even more upscale establishment at 39 Edgewood Place. Edgewood’s, as the boardinghouse was called, appealed especially to single teachers and other young professionals, so that opportunities for the sons to develop same-age friendships seemed limitless. Waring and Nancy themselves had developed into a more outgoing, social couple after Father Rockwell’s death in 1913. According to Jerry’s letters to Carol, his parents had taken dancing lessons the previous fall; and now Edgewood’s spirited camaraderie encompassed even the parental generation. Letters from Willard Skinner, the Rockwells’ good friend who had shipped out to Cambridge University Officers Training Center in England, emphasize his thwarted expectations at receiving so little correspondence from “the bunch” at Edgewood’s. Taking pity on the lonely Englishman, Nancy and Jarvis wrote him. Willard responded appreciatively, thanking them for their attention, and especially grateful for the local gossip they shared, but he suggested wistfully that it would be nice to hear from Norman. Indeed, when Norman mentions Willard in his autobiography, he simply notes that he was killed in action—and then he passes quickly on, missing not as much as a beat at the memory.
Norman’s failure to continue relationships once the friend was gone reverberated particularly loudly for the injured parties, because the artist so clearly enjoyed socializing in general. References by family, friends, and even newspaper reporters make it clear that he was one of the first to join a party. But he had already developed his striking tendency to concentrate only on the moment at hand; regardless of someone’s importance in his life, once the man or woman disappeared physically, the illustra
tor basically jettisoned the relationship. When Jerry writes to Carol on September 23 that he is meeting one of the Rockwells’ boyhood friends for dinner—“he and Norman and I are old friends. We were really brought up together”—it is understood that Norman will be too busy to join them. “He just never looked back,” his good friend and fellow illustrator Mead Schaeffer once reflected.
Sometime during the year, Rockwell had met fellow boarder Clyde Forsythe, a successful cartoonist ten or twelve years his senior. Together, the two men arranged to rent Frederic Remington’s old studio. A corrugated iron barn previously used for mammoth sculptures, the structure was uncomfortable year-round. But for Rockwell, the associations from those formative weeks in the country, where his first in-the-flesh artist, Ferdinand Graham, had alternated painting with flamboyantly galloping away on his steed, found perfect expression in this chance to inhabit the literal space of the great artist of the West. At least unconsciously, working in Remington’s shadow validated the illustrator, and his willingness to put up with the studio’s distracting temperature extremes attests to the psychological trade-off Remington’s aura provided.
Clyde (Vic) Forsythe played a pivotal role in Rockwell’s early professional growth. Soon after he and Norman teamed up, for instance, they presented a show of their work at the New Rochelle Public Library, whose program stated that Rockwell was available for portrait commissions. More important, the older, successful, and conventionally masculine man believed in the boy’s talent, and he convinced him he was ready for the big time. Forsythe drew a daily comic strip, “Axel and Flooey,” whose characters engaged in some side-splitting absurdity every day of the year, as Rockwell painfully noted. He appreciated his friend’s success—and his work ethic—though he disliked the genre he worked in; he complained that the daily grind of forced humor wore down not only the cartoonist, but also his studio mate, who was forced to guffaw convincingly at every day’s punch line. Years later, Rockwell confessed to his son Tom that the most appalling part of Forsythe’s work was the aftermath of the comic strip’s termination a few years into its production. An oversight in Clyde’s contract forced the company to pay him, even when they stopped using the cartoons, as long as he sent them in as originally specified. Rockwell was repelled by his friend’s willingness to churn out the work for several years under these conditions, which consigned his art to the trash bin even before its execution.
But the silly humor of the shared studio space lightened up what was becoming the otherwise intolerable certainty that he was heading for a dead end. Rockwell knew that he wanted to ratchet up his success, but he didn’t know how. Instead of pursuing the obvious path and staking out the editors of the adult monthlies, he resorted to painting the exhortation “100%” in gold on the top of his easel. He just had to work harder, he decided—he must give his very best. Only after Clyde put his foot down on his studio mate’s daily agonizing did Rockwell dare admit what he really wanted—the big time, particularly the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Because Clyde Forsythe was a loyal friend to Rockwell over the years, and since the story reflects favorably on the cartoonist, it’s impossible to gauge the accuracy of Rockwell’s insistence that only Clyde’s aggressiveness convinced the illustrator to approach the Post. Obviously, Rockwell considered his action somewhat presumptuous, and by the time he spun out the account, he was enmeshed in his own self-construct of modesty.
At first shocked (or pretending that he was) at Clyde’s effrontery—imagine, urging him to submit his work to the Post!—Rockwell didn’t take long to be persuaded, though he had to be coaxed into abandoning what Forsythe considered the ineffectual “pretty girl” theme he had begun to pursue in imitation of Post artists Harrison Fisher and Coles Phillips, formidable practitioners of the subgenre. The dashing Gatsbyesque Phillips was often mentioned in the same breath as Rockwell, largely because the two men were in the same age range: “One might see the handsome, debonair Coles Phillips walking along a New Rochelle street, or, one street over, the friendly, curly haired young Norman Rockwell,” announced the New Rochelle Standard-Star. As if unwilling to compete, Rockwell appeared to cede to the slightly older Phillips, determinedly single-minded in his eroticization of women, the right to “sex up” female characters.
Against Rockwell’s worried insistence that “pretty girl” paintings represented the major trend of the Post covers, Clyde encouraged him to return to the topic he did best—kids. The cartoonist patronizingly explained that Rockwell lacked the ability to draw beautiful, seductive women—an observation somewhat at odds with the evidence of several illustrations over the next decade. But from this point on, Rockwell relates this supposed innate inadequacy as the rationale for his choice of subjects.
Forsythe did have reason to suspect his friend’s capacities. In 1916, for instance, Rockwell painted the first of what would be, over the next three years, six covers for Leslie’s, an illustrated weekly. Published as the January 11, 1917, cover, Fact and Fiction, or Old Man and Young Woman Reading, the painting suggests the odd difficulty female beauty sometimes presented him. A vibrant-looking elderly man, his face sketched in detail that manages to convey age, geniality, intelligence, and physical attractiveness, sits beside a female companion in her twenties, drawn fastidiously and evocatively, the pile of her fur coat, the vividness of her white daisy clearly suggesting the freshness of youth versus the maturity of age—until one examines the face itself. A lovely blandness is articulated from a fairly flat plane, suggesting Rockwell’s reliance on Leyendecker’s women, not the master illustrator’s greatest strength either.
Rockwell’s attitudes toward pretty women were complicated in often admirable ways that could not be represented adequately in a painting. Certainly he blossomed in their presence and made a point of pronouncing publicly the pleasure he took in their company. Predictably, their archetype was his mother, whose outstanding characteristic apart from her hypochondria was her vanity. “Aunt Nancy wanted the best of clothes and shoes no matter what the financial situation, even when she was at the very end of her life,” recalls Mary Amy Orpen. “She had to have beautiful things to wear, and it was clear that her prettiness was what had attracted Waring to her originally, and what made him such an attentive husband throughout their married lives.” Waring’s uxoriousness bothered his son, who believed his father’s near servitude to his wife harmful to his health and manhood: “People used to say my dad was a saint [for treating Nancy so well], and I’d pretty much have to agree,” he dryly informed an interviewer. Tom Rockwell believes that his father developed a tendency to disdain men who appeared passive in the face of their wives’ power, in contrast to his general tolerance of others’ family life.
Without excessive psychological speculation, it is fair to connect Rockwell’s ambivalence toward his mother—the cost to others of her vanity, her desire to be tended, her physical weakness, and her unattractive if enviable ability to get what she wanted—with his longtime championing of the cultural or economic underdog. The child, the lower-middle-class “everyman,” the homebody just short of worldly sophistication, these Rockwellian types evolve from what his children have described as his lifelong identity with the outsider, stemming from the mixed messages Nancy gave him as he grew up. The artist was uncertain how pretty women, whom he appreciated on a personal level, fit into a healthy society. Tomboys and older women, by contrast, were allowed—expected—to have wrinkles and other imperfections, and so their larger-than-life figures, such as his wartime Rosie the Riveter, gained perfect expression. He found such strong females interesting and, paradoxically, nonthreatening. But the conventional pretty girl frequently eluded him, and his odd unwillingness (that he named an inability) to represent this traditional feminine icon was noticed by his fans.
Related to the complicated ways that Rockwell took pleasure in the company of beautiful women is his lifelong appreciation of handsome, especially rugged-looking men. But part of the price Rockwell paid to purchase the loyal companionshi
p of rougher-hewn men than himself was the implicit right they had to be judged bawdier, more sexual, more conventionally masculine than their beanpole friend. Quickly in the presence of his League teachers, then with friends such as Clyde, and eventually among his naval associates, Rockwell took his place as a purveyor of mostly wholesome, noncompetitive, but clearly heterosexual goods. From our contemporary point of view, his pattern of relying on masculine surrogates to supply the missing alter ego he lacked inevitably raises the possibility of homoeroticism at the very least. And yet, though Rockwell seemed to react with less shock or dismay at the “specter” of homosexuality than did most men of his day, there is no hint of such attachments in his own relationships. He appreciated beauty, objectively, in men and women; and he regretted that he lacked something he so enjoyed observing in others. His much-vaunted charisma was partially the result of learning to compensate for the conventional attractiveness he yearned for.
So when Clyde Forsythe gently ridiculed his earnest attempts to paint seductive women and kindly told his friend to stick to what he did best—children and animals—Rockwell listened. And, as if to blunt further his boldness in approaching the Post and to ward off charges of arrogance, Rockwell told the story (after George Horace Lorimer’s death) of his first meeting with the formidable editor of the Post so that he came off as overly eager, earnest in his everyman way that effectively engendered sympathy, not envy, in his listeners. On one level—and it never changed—Rockwell failed to believe that he had the right to assume the status and stature of the chosen. His compulsion to place himself at the mercy of others (even if he was the aggressive one) not only perpetuated modesty as his primary virtue; it also obscured a grandiosity, a certainty that he was at least as good as anybody else. Without such an underside to his formidable insecurity, the artist would not have come into existence.
Norman Rockwell Page 17