Rockwell’s own recollection mentions nothing of actress Carol Cushman but admits that, flushed with his success at the Post, he precipitously proposed to Irene O’Connor, calling her from Philadelphia. She rejected him at first because she was in love with an agricultural student at the University of Michigan; unwisely, Norman kept pleading his case until she relented, largely because the Post commissions promoted his future prospects. (In his private reflections to his son Tom in 1959, he suggested more duplicity on Irene’s part: “I didn’t know about the agricultural student at the time,” he said. “But we weren’t unhappily married—well, she was, I wasn’t.”)
Interviews published in the next decade, before the marriage had soured and the facts went through revision, make it clear that Rockwell’s decision to marry Irene was one of those oddly impulsive gestures he would make throughout his life. Jerry and Carol had been planning to wed for the past two years, waiting only until they felt financially able. Norman preempted them by marrying first. By early 1916, Norman’s parents had announced that they were slated to move for at least a short period to New Brunswick, in order for Waring to manage a New Jersey branch office for George Wood. Rockwell abhorred being alone; as much as he needed solitude in order to paint, feeling protected emotionally by a nearby family member was crucial to his mental well-being. Jerry as well as his parents were leaving; Rockwell would have panicked at the thought of being left behind.
Like the last boy to be chosen for the team, isolation created a sense of emptiness and inadequacy he could never expunge except by looking outward, to a spouse or parent. As long as such a loyal intimate was at hand, he did not have to turn inward, confronting a giant hollowness; nor did he have to examine the world outside in ways that caused him further distress. “I have the ability to shut myself off from unpleasant or disturbing experiences. Or, rather to shut off the part of me which paints,” he explained.
If it had been up to him, Rockwell would simply have discounted this first spouse from 1916. He later “forgot” to mention his previous marriage to his children from his second wife; the three boys learned of it from a New Yorker article in the 1940s. He had to be pressed by his wife in 1959 to discuss the earlier relationship in his autobiography; left to his own devices, he would have written as if Irene O’Connor never existed. Yet they were married for fourteen years! Two of Rockwell’s strongest personality traits—his denial or avoidance of pain and the accompanying lack of interest in emotional retrospection—combined to turn Irene O’Connor into nothing but a hard-earned footnote in Rockwell’s history.
Irene, born in Watertown, New York, near the St. Lawrence River, was twenty-five years old when she married Rockwell, the same age as Nancy Hill when she wed the younger Waring Rockwell. Irene’s Irish-Canadian family, of far greater pretensions than their means, had moved inland to Potsdam, about sixty miles from Watertown, when she was a child. Henry O’Connor, a self-described “Canadian not Irish” grocer, took great pride in belonging to the local country club, which, as one acquaintance remembers, was a modest enterprise open to anyone who could pay the dues. Irene attended Potsdam’s Normal College for teachers, a subsidized course of higher education for those willing to teach a specified number of years in return.
Newspaper accounts vary even on the date of the wedding, which was in fact held on the morning of July 1, 1916, at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, though in the pastor’s study as opposed to the conventional sanctuary. The ceremony is described in the Potsdam paper as “a quiet one” that took place on June 30, the too-early date reflecting Irene’s own uncertainty about how and when the interfaith union would occur. Marie O’Connor, Irene’s sister, was her maid of honor; Jerry served as Norman’s best man. Both sets of parents attended, as did Rockwell’s best friend and his wife, Victor Clyde and Cotta Forsythe. Because mid-decade weddings tended to be modest affairs in deference to the increasing awareness of the war, the low-key occasion attracted less attention than it might have. Still, Irene’s traveling suit of blue silk faille, her large white hat, and her white sweet peas hint at a certain lack of festivity. At least she adorned the simple wedding outfit with the gold watch and sapphire ring her husband had given her.
Following the ceremony, the gathering moved to Edgewood Hall for a wedding breakfast, after which the newlyweds “motored” with the Forsythes and Marie O’Connor to Jersey City, where the couple boarded the train to Lake Minnewauskie, New York. About two hours away, this Catskills resort catered to the upper middle class. It was a wisely chosen spot for a honeymoon, in light of the heat wave New York was experiencing in early July.
Even when Rockwell does finally mention Irene in his autobiography, he omits the reality that their marriage was fraught from its beginnings: because Irene was Roman Catholic, he had to agree to raise any offspring of their union in his wife’s faith. “They kept trying to convert me, but they didn’t succeed,” he confided. “It didn’t matter much anyway, because Irene hardly ever went to church herself.” What Rockwell fails to add when he mentions their lack of children is the disagreement between the two on this very subject. According to a model whose family was friendly with the artist, Irene did not want to have children, and her husband did.
Nancy Rockwell, who would have been displeased at the specter of her younger son going childless, must have been further agitated that her daughter-in-law was Irish; although Irene’s parents hailed from Canada, the ancestry was clear, and to Nancy’s high Anglican blood, it was just bad lineage. Even her genial, kindhearted brother Tom had, in correspondence during his sea voyage, evinced signs of prejudice toward the Irish. Even more worrisome to Nancy than her daughter-in-law’s heritage, however, were the pretty young woman’s social aspirations. Her friendliness to her new husband seemed genuine, but any deeper attachment appeared to be to his financial prospects, and she troubled little to hide her desire to join high society. After only two weeks of life in the newlyweds’ stuffy, tiny third-floor apartment near the center of New Rochelle, Irene huffed off to spend the subsequent two months with her parents, moving back into the family’s impressive colonial house.
In the meantime, Rockwell lacked a proper studio, a problem more pressing than his bride’s disappointment in their humble apartment. He rented the top of George Lischke’s garage on Prospect Street behind Brown’s Lodge, an area near “Pill Street,” where the town’s doctors and lawyers lived in one of the oldest and most beautiful parts of town. With the landlord’s permission, he knocked out the north wall of the garage in order to install floor-to-ceiling glass that would guarantee the best light. Now he felt ready to compete with his peers.
The saturation of so many illustrators within the boundaries of New Rochelle proved particularly salutary after America entered the war. The Committee on Public Information, the propaganda ministry charged with moving the American public from an isolationist position to a militaristic one, turned to the Society of Illustrators to promote these goals. As a result, illustrators enjoyed a new self-esteem as they saw their art become, however temporarily, the means of doing social good. But the very effectiveness of using first-rate illustrators to visualize what were, in the end, government ads eventually backfired in terms of positioning illustration among the serious arts. Advertising took up residence under its rubric instead, while illustrators themselves quickly discovered that the real money lay in doing the ads, not in executing limited editions of classics.
Better-known artists from the generation just prior to Rockwell’s got the plum assignments anyway, a hierarchy that allowed Rockwell to concentrate his efforts on his own commercial career, seeking venues outside the United States government. Shrewdly, he began to pass along the sketches that Lorimer rejected for The Saturday Evening Post to Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, a popular national magazine that lacked the prestige and the pay of the Post. Of the seven covers Rockwell provided for Leslie’s, the most famous is probably the October 5, 1916, Schoolitis, where a boy feigns illness to avoid going to s
chool.
A week after Schoolitis appeared, Rockwell’s first visual reference to Hollywood took shape on the October 14, 1916, Saturday Evening Post cover. In a gesture that typified the dynamics of many of his future covers, Rockwell focuses on a crowd’s reaction to an event rather than the event itself. Theatregoers are shown enjoying a silent movie, possibly Charlie Chaplin in The Little Tramp. This cover was scheduled to appear roughly a month before his brother’s wedding to Carol Cushman. Perhaps it was a present, a tribute to Jarvis’s bride, the actress; the lag between the artist’s submission of a finished painting and its publication was usually two to three months, so that Rockwell would have been able to estimate the timing of the cover. Even if not meant as a gift, the painting was probably inspired by the upcoming ceremony, since the subjects for Rockwell’s covers often emerged from the events occurring around him.
By the time of his brother’s nuptials, marriage was proving problematic to the young artist. In light of his trouble adjusting to Irene’s expectations of companionship and of normal work hours, he may well have needed to get away as a kind of temporary escape. In July 1918, when the war’s end seemed in sight, Rockwell joined the Navy. Until now, George Lorimer’s rabid isolationism had given him pause; he would not have wanted to offend the Boss. But all around him, men of every age had been signing up—in many cases, when they were too young or old or physically unfit to meet the government’s standards—going to heroic lengths to get Uncle Sam to let them in. Previously, shame at not serving had eluded the illustrator; suddenly, he felt embarrassed at his lack of patriotism. Decades later, discussing his time in the service, Rockwell lied even to his son, telling him that he’d enlisted a year earlier than he actually did—July 1917, instead of 1918. And, although he claimed to have been refused during an earlier try because of his weight, the twenty-four-year-old was still seventeen pounds under naval standards. He recalled stuffing himself (with the military doctor’s approval and encouragement) in order to weigh in, the bananas, doughnuts, and water finally enabling him to meet the minimum weight requirement, but his enlistment folder still records, under “remarks,” the notation “underweight.”
Reporting to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Rockwell found himself on a ship bound for Queenstown, Ireland, where as “landsman for quartermaster” he would varnish decks. Ordered to change course within hours because of a submarine ahead, Rockwell’s crew diverted to the Charleston Navy Yard, where the artist pulled guard duty and burial squad, both of which frightened him. Soon assigned to create cartoons and layouts for the camp newspaper, Afloat and Ashore, Rockwell coasted through the next few months. When he took ten days’ leave and attended an illustrators’ dinner at the prestigious Salmagundi Club in Manhattan, he misbehaved in the boyish mode he resorted to throughout his life, especially when uncomfortable about the trappings of his environment. On this occasion, famous illustrators and artists had gathered in support of the poster war they were waging, and, according to Rockwell, one of his friends pinched him, causing him to yelp loudly—as if they were back in the church pews warding off boredom. Reprimanded soundly by a lieutenant commander present among the guests, who, according to Rockwell’s recollections, termed him a disgrace to his uniform and to his profession, the illustrator thereafter “resolved to stop trying to be a sailor and just be myself. It was the only safe solution.” Such aw-shucks modesty veils the strategy Rockwell had almost perfected: when he felt in danger of becoming, as he put it, the “beanpole without the bean,” he acted out in a childish fashion. His antics supposedly illuminated his own inadequacy (thereby ameliorating any pressure to perform as an adult) but also implicitly (since he was such a nice guy) indicted those around him as supercilious or less “authentic” than he.
Within a few months of his enlistment, the Armistice was declared, causing a temporary freeze on discharges. Rockwell chafed at the delay in getting back to his job and maneuvered to have himself judged “inapt” for naval work. Still an honorable discharge, the solution was less than elegant, embarrassing the illustrator enough to flavor his accounts with an unmistakable chagrin and contributing to his disguising his actual service record by an entire year in hopes of averting the appearance of cowardice or of a lack of patriotism.
Within days of his November 12 discharge, Rockwell was back at work in his New Rochelle studio. He picked up his pace, not only producing cover art for the Post, Leslie’s, and Judge, but also beginning to exert almost as much energy painting advertisements as he did working on his magazine illustrations. One way that he could defend himself against the fear of prostituting his art was to ensure the quality of his advertisements, which were often as painterly as his other work. In many cases, such as two illustrations he produced for Del Monte canned vegetables, the ads actually ran in The Saturday Evening Post, giving him extra reason to be cautious of how he used his talent.
He had accepted that he would have to depend on advertisements for the bulk of his livelihood, particularly given the lifestyle the young couple had embraced. As soon as Norman secured the income, he and Irene moved into the smaller half of a fancy house on a pretty New Rochelle side street, a residence they both enjoyed for its understated elegance. Irene was not an inexpensive wife; fairly soon into their marriage, the illustrator recognized the tacit agreement that ruled their marriage: she would be his companion, sexual partner, and hostess, as long as he provided an affluent style of living. Rockwell later acknowledged that he quickly recognized Irene’s lack of real love for him, but that he enjoyed their friendship and found it gratifying to have someone managing his social life. The couple gave parties envied by others, and they were invited to many reciprocal social events. Early in their marriage, rumors began circulating around town about Irene’s flirtations, but the disapproving accounts Nancy related to relatives about her daughter-in-law’s eager extramarital socializing with handsome escorts contrast with the memory of one old-time resident of New Rochelle, who remembered hearing that Irene was “prudish.” Given the social mores of the community, which changed dramatically as the 1920s progressed, it seems likely that Irene behaved conventionally in public for at least the first five or six years of the Rockwells’ marriage.
Rockwell himself lodged no complaint against moving up the social ladder, in spite of his earlier protestations of hating society. Their community, wealthy even in notoriously well-off Westchester County, was entering the age of consumerism gone mad, and Norman watched his father finally start to make good money as a manager for George Wood. Less satisfying, Jerry was improving his own fortunes at an alarmingly impressive rate in the city, where he was trying his hand at business as he trained to become a trader on Wall Street. Keenly aware that his brother was pulling in $4,500—the equivalent of more than $43,000 in 2000—Rockwell felt motivated to shore up his own social status. When Irene suggested that they make a greater effort to hobnob with “society,” her husband offered little resistance.
In spite of his new marriage and his stint in the Navy, between 1916 and 1919 Rockwell executed twenty-five Post covers as well as an abundance of story illustrations. In 1916, he produced five black-and-white illustrations for American Boy; the following year, he executed eight more, some of which, such as Dory Mates, in which a polar bear attacks a rugged fisherman bearing aloft an ax, or Jim of the Reef, where a terrified elderly man confronts a young boy, exhibit a new range of emotion. His greatest effort was nonetheless reserved for the sixteen illustrations he created for St. Nicholas during the teens; after all, even Howard Pyle had considered this publication worthy of his work, and it still enjoyed a reputation as the premiere children’s magazine. Considered the most distinguished of a post–Civil War group of excellent children’s literature, its cultural level has never been equaled.
By 1919, Rockwell was enough of a national phenomenon to be used in a Life magazine solicitation of new subscriptions. The illustrator is the youngest artist featured in the full-page ad that printed photographs of the heads of important and popul
ar writers and illustrators, Charles Dana Gibson among them, who contributed to the magazine. The text at the top of the page reads: “These are only a few of the regular weekly contributors,” and a caption is placed beneath each photograph. Under Rockwell’s picture is the phrase: “Whose Life colored covers are known all over the world.”
Only twenty-five years old, Rockwell should have been deeply satisfied. The art director for Boys’ Life for the past six years, he had exhibited his paintings on the cover of the Post for the last three. He had achieved the reputation he had sought as a wunderkind, and art directors predicted great things for the unflaggable young man. True, his workload was staggering, though it was fairly typical of successful illustrators. In 1916 alone, he published six covers on the Post. In 1917, there were four; four more the next year; and, in 1919, eleven. Twenty-five years old, twenty-five covers, and he was starting to feel worn out, not energized as he had expected. True, he’d won both the job and the girl of his dreams, but they were taking too much out of him to leave enough room for happiness.
11
A Stab at Adulthood
Success would always prove a palliative for Rockwell’s vocational fatigue, and by 1920 he had hit his stride. Developed for The Country Gentleman back in 1917, his series on Reginald, the overdressed, “sissy” city boy, and the Doolittles, the unruly country brothers, had run its successful course, and now Rockwell’s illustrations began to assume a new painterly sophistication. The Shadow Artist, for instance, executed for the February 7 cover of The Country Gentleman, evinces more richly articulated, less caricatured figures. As the decade proceeded, Rockwell’s greater talent for rendering the body and facial contours of elderly characters than those of children would become clear, the distinction perhaps a result of George Bridgman’s emphasis in life drawing on more mature bodies. More likely, however, Rockwell’s complicated relationship to the reality and ideals of childhood encouraged him (albeit unconsciously) to homogenize his drawings of boys, especially, in accordance with his own repetitive fantasy.
Norman Rockwell Page 19