After Clyde convinced him to show his work to Lorimer, Rockwell spent several weeks working up five idea sketches, two of which he rendered as finished oil paintings in black, white, and red, the only colors that the Post’s two-tone process reproduced at the time. Next he designed a special wooden portfolio in which to carry his work to Philadelphia, where the Curtis Company headquarters building, housing the Post, was located. Ordinarily he wrapped his paintings in brown paper, but he didn’t want to fumble in front of the great George Lorimer, getting his hands or feet caught as he untied the string, a mortification he’d already endured while talking to art editors elsewhere. But his determination to avoid playing the fool backfired, when the carpenter heeded Rockwell’s instructions exactly, building an oversized, extremely heavy black box, twelve inches wide and thirty-three by forty-four inches otherwise. Although he bought a well-cut herringbone suit in hopes of looking accustomed to success, Rockwell was dismissively treated every time someone saw the “black coffin,” as he began to think of it. He wasn’t allowed on the subway with it—the box took up four or five seats, the conductor told him; once he got to Philadelphia, he was summarily dismissed from the fancy foyer and told to use the freight elevator on the other side of the building.
Rockwell had learned from his efforts to break into publication elsewhere how important it was to take the chance of just showing up, unannounced. The Post archives support his claim that he had not dared call for an appointment ahead of time, for fear that Lorimer would refuse to see him. Once in the inner sanctum of the Post, separated from George Horace Lorimer’s office by only a few doors, he was immediately humiliated by two writers he held in deep respect, Samuel G. Blythe and Irvin S. Cobb, who made him the butt of their joke about the body he must have hidden in the amazing black box. Apropos of nothing, the miserable illustrator suddenly recalled the voice of the friendly publisher at the Tatler telling him, months earlier, that he had the “eyes of an angel and the neck of a chicken.”
Fighting a severe attack of nerves, he explained to the receptionist that he had brought some paintings and sketches for Mr. Lorimer to see. No doubt impressed at the imposing “portfolio” Rockwell had lugged all the way from New Rochelle, the kindly woman asked Walter Dower, the Post’s art director, if he would see the illustrator. Dower came out to the waiting room, glanced at Rockwell’s work, and then quickly gathered it up, excused himself, and asked the painter to wait while he conferred with Lorimer. The Boss must have liked what he saw, because Dower returned within a few minutes, telling a dumbfounded Rockwell that they would accept the two finished pieces now, and the other three sketches on completion. The Boss could pay the young artist $75 per final painting, the equivalent of $1,145 in 2000.
Rockwell would interact with Lorimer for more than twenty years, in a manner redolent of his relationship to Waring, roughly Lorimer’s age. Very few people were known to have ever called Lorimer “George”; those who dealt with him as closely as Rockwell did over as many years inevitably called him “the Boss.” Rockwell instead never swerved from calling him “Mr. Lorimer” to the end of their oddly constricted but affectionate relationship. In spite of Rockwell’s extraordinary value to and popularity with the Post, he and Lorimer did not enjoy the friendship that the Boss developed with several of his writers, maintaining instead cordial interactions along the lines of Waring Rockwell’s with his boss named George.
In truth, George Lorimer was a near perfect editor to appreciate the young illustrator chafing under the constraints of Boys’ Life and suffering from the limited audience his work for the scouts’ magazine reached. Lorimer believed that as editor in chief, he had to emphasize the positive in American life, and address the negative (when a direct attack was untoward) through tactful if passionate admonishment. Such politics led him to issue occasionally contradictory statements—he once declared the need for fewer “Pollyannas” only a few weeks after appealing for more—as he sought to explain his vision for an American population of seventy-five million people. His Post would be “without class, clique, or sectional editing”—this last reference a blast at those magazine publishers who pandered to supposed regional tastes and mores by adjusting their contents according to the subscription area.
By 1916, Lorimer had created a flourishing weekly magazine packed with first-rate fiction and trenchant reflections on business and politics. And he was proud of his achievement: when Rockwell absentmindedly walked into the Boss’s office one day with an Atlantic Monthly tucked under his arm, Lorimer immediately asked why the artist bothered to read a publication whose stories were all rejects from the Post. Because Lorimer’s boundaries for what would appeal to his audience were sacredly maintained, regardless of his personal affection or professional appreciation of a particular writer or artist, would-be contributors who were more experimental or simply beyond the concerns of middle-class Americans found it easy to dismiss the popular magazine, especially since Lorimer, in their minds, spoon-fed the populace. That he felt honor-bound to respect the values of the millions who bought his magazine failed to impress them.
Such condemnation was hardly ideologically pure; Lorimer’s unheard-of practice of paying his contributors upon acceptance of their work—unlike other journals that paid months, even years after publication—engendered a roster of writers unmatched elsewhere. Still, the onus of writing for an unabashedly middlebrow, if often highly educated, audience proved too much for some contributors to bear. Dorothy Parker, for example, had written a successful humorous piece for the Post, but she remained ambivalent about Lorimer’s conservative politics. Yielding to his generous invitation to spend a weekend with his family at their country home, she was deeply offended when, as she and the Boss toured the lavish grounds of his estate, Lorimer spouted his fervent beliefs in capitalist enterprise. Back in New York, she bludgeoned the editor with nastily witty stories about his crass commercialism that she spread among her friends. When word reached Philadelphia, she was not asked to work for the Post again. The liberal assumptions about the magazine’s reactionary politics were a bit presumptuous in their own right: often unnoticed, Lorimer’s ventures frequently escaped such sweeping generalizations, such as his 1904 publication of Clarence Darrow’s workingman’s argument in support of the open shop.
Himself a dropout from Yale—to his parents’ disappointment, Lorimer had left school to work for the Armour meat packing business—he believed that the general level of excellence opened up to everyone by the world of commerce, as opposed to the elitism promoted by enterprises dependent on sequestering themselves from “everyman,” was the basis of the country’s greatness. He worked hard to teach his readers that their duty was to marry the latest innovation or technology that came down the pike with an American way of life—individualism based on tolerance. He was, in other words, a Yankee, born of the New England brand that underwrote American liberalism, whether Dorothy Parker and her ilk admitted it or not. Industry was the key to the future, and Lorimer wanted Americans to train themselves to be its thoughtful, well-informed captains.
While the editor had been busily shaping the country’s most popular opinion organ during the previous fifteen years, Rockwell was molding himself into the perfect illustrator for such a national, unified vision. His poetic appreciation of the communal trolley trips of his childhood had hinted at the artist to come. Rockwell would typically seek the thread that laced people together, and he would excise the discordant strands, or turn them into gentle caricature that, implicitly, granted him superiority over the story. The material appearing in Lorimer’s Saturday Evening Post emphasized passionate commitment to the country’s communal welfare at the same time that it gave readers a sense of control over their world. Some sleight-of-hand was involved, since the “specious sense of mastery,” as cultural historian Jan Cohn points out, allowed readers to think themselves too sophisticated to get caught up in the ideology they were being presented. Others might fall for simple idealizations, but they wouldn’t. Norma
n Rockwell himself would rarely mistake the ideal for the real, but his audience’s confusion of the two sustained his career for more than fifty years.
Although few accounts exist of the editorial reaction to Rockwell’s first Post cover, Lorimer’s publication of six paintings by Rockwell between May 22, 1916, and the end of that year suggests the editor’s great pleasure in his new hire. Since the response of the Post’s readership to an artist or a writer largely determined who got the most assignments, it seems clear that Rockwell’s art was popular from the start with the middle-class Americans who waited eagerly each week for the latest Post.
Rockwell’s first cover depended strongly on his audience’s embrace of childhood stereotypes. Consisting of a sissified boy pushing a baby carriage, the infant’s sex ambiguous, the painting is full of self-revelation that would pass unnoticed even in later critical commentary. Two delighted, slightly rough-looking “boys’ boys” taunt the aggravated baby-sitter. As art historian Eric Segal notes, Rockwell begins here to construct a complicated maleness that reflects and repudiates, or at least complicates, mainstream America’s preconceptions. The nipple protruding from the bottle in the boy’s breast pocket calls attention to his “female” role as caretaker, and his dandified outfit mocks both his assumption of his father’s role and his lack of proper masculinization. But the two boys harassing him hardly recommend boyhood either, even on their terms: the least fully articulated boy is made to look like a goon, while the majordomo leaning on the carriage is oddly feminized to match his target—his hair is elaborately curled, his finger is curved in an imitation of a lady holding her cup of tea, and his face resembles oddly that of the girl-boy.
Stylistically influenced by Leyendecker in their strong, at times exaggerated vertical lines, the personalities implied through the picture’s broad strokes—the boy who knows and dislikes that he comes off as a sissy, the bullies who make life hell for anyone not like themselves—drew from Rockwell’s earlier Dickensian lessons in creating “types,” or representations that with one visual intake proclaimed who and what they stood for. Just as Dickens advanced his plots through such theatrical characters that they strained credulity, so Rockwell developed a narrative strategy of telling even a fairly complicated tale quickly and fully through portraits pushed to the edge of caricature.
Fueled by his own abject memories of being ridiculed in his grandfather’s oversized, too-grand hand-me-down coat, Rockwell played with the boundaries of proper male attire and attitude in this initial Post cover. Here, a “Percevel” has been forced to adopt an adult male’s role and attire, diminishing his real masculinity as he mimics the grown man. The dominant cultural code of this period enabled Rockwell’s audience to grasp the meaning of the picture at once. Popular books on manners routinely emphasized the humiliation a child experienced at being dressed “in an outlandish fashion that renders him conspicuous. . . . A boy should be dressed like a little boy.”
Eric Segal points out that within nine months of his first Post cover, Rockwell was commissioned to illustrate “Percy” in the story appearing in St. Nicholas’s July 1917 issue called “Making Good in Boys’ Camp.” Here, the “Percy,” the fancy newcomer to camp, is the object of scorn to the “real boys.” “Percy” is again dandified, a repeat of the 1916 baby-sitter, except that this time he is dressed in knickers, standing at the side of a chauffeur. The caption to the picture reads, “Percy arrived in camp the most dressed-up lad you ever saw in your life.” In an ad appearing the following month in the Post for Black Cat hosiery, Rockwell is careful to show well-dressed young schoolboys who nonetheless demonstrate the restlessness he means to connote the all-American boy. The message is clear: it’s fine for a boy to dress properly if he has to, but at heart he’s really home on the farm instead.
Rockwell’s romance with American boyhood is more complicated than the mythology surrounding his person has allowed. Lacking any suggestion of what contemporary sleuths first look for—pedophilia—it instead seems to have been an attempt to catch up on what he never had, to represent his ambivalence toward the simple stereotypes available for early-twentieth-century masculinity. Finally, however, it became a commercial trap that he resented deeply.
Sue Erikson Bloland, an analyst who spent her own adolescence among Rockwell’s New England community, observes that “often energies spent in the name of re-creating boyish pleasures speak of times not past, but never enacted in the first place.” Rockwell quickly became known in New Rochelle for his easy affinity with the young models he hired. Even his innovative method of paying them—four rolls of pennies that he stacked by increments of ten onto the models’ “side” of the table, motivating the restless youths to hold their poses to earn more pennies—speaks of his easy connection. Still very young himself, he delighted the boys especially with his pranks (“girls were far easier to deal with,” he recalled; “more polite and disciplined”), though he made the division between work and play clear.
Strategic in his appeals to the parents and townspeople, he perfected careful quotes to hand out to local reporters that cemented his reputation as a safe, even avuncular figure to have around town. Press attention for at least a decade following 1914 emphasizes the real-boy nature of his paintings and of his affectionate but properly distant relationships with the children. To some extent, and perhaps necessarily, in light of the number of models he used, Rockwell commodified the children into marketable figures, on which he expended very little emotion. When he recounts the story of his favorite young model, Billy Paine, falling to his death at the age of fourteen from a windowsill in the boardinghouse where the boy and his family lived, he expresses more shock at Billy’s friend’s depth of grief than at the boy’s untimely end. Rockwell never pretended that he was deeply invested in his models, but, over the years, their stories would assume a remarkable similarity: models of all ages felt their short time with the artist to be a major highlight of their lives. The illustrator came off as commanding, yet authentically “human,” warm, and modest—kind of like them in many ways, all of which was true. But Rockwell painted tableaux, filling them with authentic pieces from the period. It was as objets d’art, not living people, that his models proved the most valuable props on which to project his own unfinished boyhood.
Although he admired his father’s steadfastness and loyalty, Rockwell based a major element of his personality on Nancy’s childishness—she got what she wanted, after all, by acting as if she had never left girlhood behind. Childhood was romanticized; adulthood infantilized. To remain a child was all things good; Waring’s adulthood seemed dreary by comparison. It can come as no surprise that in later years Rockwell’s most admiring acquaintances would append to their praise of his genuine friendliness, “make no mistake, though; he always got what he wanted. He didn’t let anything stand in his way.”
10
Becoming Somebody
If Norman was focused on making his reputation by the time he took the train to the Curtis headquarters in Philadelphia, Jerry was trying to figure out ways to make something of himself, too. In 1916 he joined the National Guard, where he was stationed in a cavalry unit. As an elderly man, he would enjoy chiming in when war stories were being bandied about: “I was wounded in the battle of Fifth Avenue,” he would explain. “The occasion? The Victory March, and I fell off my horse, in front of everyone. I had to walk back to the stable.” At this point, according to Rockwell, he himself was considered physically unfit to serve in the war because he was underweight: though he was between five feet nine inches and five feet ten and a half inches tall (his medical records vary), he weighed only 130 pounds. Claiming a fuzzy memory about the exact reasons he had not been inducted into the armed services, he added that his many dependents might have kept him at home, a totally illogical explanation that belies his apparent nonchalance about not enlisting along with the other young men his age.
During these years of Rockwell’s early success, Jerry was irritated that his younger brother was g
etting more attention from the girls than he was; financial and social stature now mattered as much as looks and physical strength. He was chagrined to see Norman pulling ahead of him in earning power, and he decided to try his luck at business. Dick Rockwell, Jerry’s son, repeats the family lore about Carol, his mother, preferring Norman to Jerry at the beginning of their acquaintance: “Norman was more sophisticated, and my mother had graduated from Smith a few years earlier, in 1914 or 1915, and she was somewhat worldly herself.” But Carol’s friends convinced her that an artist’s future was extremely uncertain, and so she redirected her attentions to Jerry instead. Practical about matters of the heart, Rockwell quickly began to date another pretty boarder, Irene O’Connor, a schoolteacher three years older than he. But he made a point of punishing Carol for her decision: “When Norman got his first Post check, he converted it into one-dollar bills and came home and piled them in front of my mother to show her how much money he made,” Dick says. Although Dick Rockwell’s parents handed down to their sons some obviously envious accounts of their famous relative’s actions, this story, its hint of vindictiveness at odds with Rockwell’s personality, does accommodate believably his penchant for practical jokes.
Norman Rockwell Page 18