Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  Nonetheless, Rockwell would return to children’s themes frequently throughout the twenties, his increased assignments outside of childhood’s realm gradually appeasing his fear that he would be known only as someone who drew for kids. Among the most gratifying signs that he was now considered a serious contender was the respect shown him by New Rochelle’s coterie of famous illustrators. And when he was invited to sit at the speaker’s table at a celebration held by the New Rochelle Art Association, he knew he was a somebody. The Association, committed to raising money for a monument to the soldiers who had fought in the Great War, had arranged for a benefit dinner. According to his autobiography, he was seated between J. C. Leyendecker and Coles Phillips, while his friends such as Clyde Forsythe stared enviously in admiration at the stars in the front of the room. Rockwell felt momentarily gratified. No longer under his mother’s thumb, he was now a man of the world, sanctioned by the brightest lights of a prestigious local arts society. What could be a more auspicious sign of the new decade’s promise?

  Probably because Rockwell was a relative newcomer to the organization, the toastmaster, Charles Dana Gibson, inadvertently passed over him when it was his turn to be introduced. The young man was mortified; Gibson’s refusal to rectify his mistake, in spite of a note that the gracious Coles Phillips quickly passed to the speaker, just embarrassed him further. But Rockwell pulled a triumph out of the occasion anyway; he felt almost justified in asking the Leyendecker brothers to dinner, since now, after all, they had already eaten one meal together. As he himself appreciated, if only out of an attempt to mollify a publicly humiliated colleague, the famously courteous men accepted.

  Excited but nervous, the Rockwells cooked what was basically a Thanksgiving dinner in July, perhaps in homage to the turkey farm that the Leyendeckers rather whimsically maintained on their grand property. The young couple reasoned that they couldn’t go wrong by re-creating the quintessential American meal, and so they decided to risk the unusual choice for a hot summer evening. Unfortunately, when the Leyendeckers first entered the Rockwells’ home, stiffness overtook everyone. Neither Norman, usually loquacious in social gatherings, nor Irene, conversationally adept by now, could budge the painful silence in their living room. After what seemed an interminable awkwardness, the maid they had hired for the occasion called them in to the dining room, and as the foursome took their seats, she started to set the turkey platter on the table.

  It never got there. The maid slipped, and once again, in front of his local hero, Rockwell found himself feeling exceedingly foolish. Under the table he dove, reaching for the turkey, at just the moment that Leyendecker himself went for it. Even allowing for Rockwell’s typical embellishment in recounting such episodes, some such event clearly broke the ice, and the men bonded over the absurdity of it all.

  Becoming friends with Joe Leyendecker contributed tremendously to Rockwell’s self-esteem. To be found worthy by a man he admired in so many ways—professionally, most important, but personally as well—seemed to Rockwell like an imprimatur of his own worth. What did it mean, exactly, for Norman Rockwell to spend his early professional days in the midst of the New Rochelle illustrators and artists? The degree to which living among one’s peers affects one’s art is always a complicated measure. Traditionally, the presence of talented people engaged in similar types of activities is assumed to exert a leveling influence on art, nudging it toward a recognizable cultural shape. The Abstract Expressionists, for instance, drank and drew and slept together over the sprawl of New York City, and a certain identifiable template emerged that registered seismically in the art world.

  For Norman Rockwell, living in New Rochelle during the 1920s, the presence of J. C. Leyendecker and, to a far lesser extent, his brother Frank, encouraged his intuition that illustration was a supremely worthy use of artistic talent. When Rockwell later told the inquiring student that Leyendecker didn’t really have much “impact” on his work, his judgment was rendered in the immediate aftermath of a contingent statement, “apart from . . . his technique, his painting, his character and his diligence.” Not much is left out of such a “qualification.” And, in truth, Leyendecker’s versatility, his superb draftsmanship, his steadfast nature, and his dedication to his art confirmed for Rockwell the values he himself had held since his student days.

  Less obviously, Joseph Leyendecker served as a personal role model to his young admirer. He and Frank were modest, courteous, and hardworking, in spite of the fact that they lived in the kind of ostentatious splendor more often at odds with such virtues. Although they tended to keep to themselves, both brothers were, in fact, the city’s top celebrities. “People used to come down to the railroad station in New Rochelle in the middle of the morning just to watch J. C. Leyendecker and his brother Frank emerge from their limousine and walk to the platform in their matching outfits—e.g., double-breasted blue blazers, white flannels, black-and-white saddle oxfords and ebony-and-white walking sticks—in transit from their 14-room Franco-Suburb chateau to Studio Leyendecker in New York,” remarks Tom Wolfe, in an essay review of contemporary books about illustrators. And, as he notes, those New Rochelle gawkers had included in their ranks Norman Rockwell, determined to get rich and famous “the Leyendecker way.”

  The Leyendeckers lived on a five-acre estate on Mount Tom Road, their 1914 pseudo-Norman mansion accoutred with five bathrooms, four fireplaces, and two large center reception halls. Two studios were attached to either side of the three-story structure. Barely visible from the road, the property—adorned with a rose garden, hemlocks, massive twin oaks, a fountain, and a fish pool—faced Long Island Sound. The lands were so lavishly landscaped that in 1952 the shrubbery alone was estimated to be worth $25,000. If the townspeople bore any resentment toward the brothers, its roots evidently lay in their wealth, though at least one old-timer remembers that their “obvious” homosexuality heightened the sense of exclusivity around them, signaling to many of New Rochelle’s middle class that the artists “were too rich and special to mix with the likes of most of us.” And yet the self-effacing but funny young Rockwell bonded immediately with Joe Leyendecker the night the two men met under the table.

  Throughout the years, the only complaint about Leyendecker that Rockwell ever voiced publicly was about the older man’s refusal to monitor the grasping behavior of his lifelong partner, Charles Beach. Tom Rockwell says that his father understood that the two men were lovers, but that he felt uncomfortable bringing up what was culturally still a controversial topic in his 1960 autobiography: “Pop knew that the Leyendeckers were gay,” Tom Rockwell says. “But in 1960, it seemed better not to get into that. It wasn’t necessary in order to make the points Pop wanted to make.” Even before homosexuality was treated liberally, however, Rockwell himself was unconcerned about someone’s sexual orientation; it was Beach’s steel grip on Joe Leyendecker that bothered the illustrator, perhaps playing out Rockwell’s fear of his mother’s oppressive neediness and ceaseless demands. Insinuating his way into every professional corner of Leyendecker’s life, according to Rockwell, the handsome, chisel-faced lover eventually pushed both the gentle Frank Leyendecker and their loving sister Augusta out of Joe’s life. Except for his relationship with Beach, Joe turned into a near hermit, losing touch with the contemporary world, a solitude that Rockwell believed, finally, sapped his brilliant art of its vitality.

  According to Leyendecker’s biographer, Rockwell exaggerated his friend’s reclusiveness as well as his relationship to the movie-star-handsome model. It is true that Rockwell’s scornful description of Beach’s possessiveness and excessive influence rings of personal resentment, perhaps because within a year of that infamous turkey dinner, Beach had begun to refuse to let others, including Rockwell, see Leyendecker without his presence. (In fact, no one at The Saturday Evening Post would ever meet Leyendecker, including Lorimer.) Usually polite, Rockwell chafed at being controlled by others, and he doubtless wanted to speak his piece to Beach, an impossibility given the disl
oyalty and disrespect to Joe such behavior would have implied. Unfettered, Beach barely veiled his contempt for Leyendecker’s visitors behind a grating obsequiousness, until he had gained so much power that he even began to treat Frank rudely in the presence of Joe and his guests.

  One of the few places, at least in the early twenties, that the Leyendeckers could socialize without Beach intruding was at the Art Association, and Rockwell quickly gained stature among the cognoscenti when his growing friendship with Joe and Frank was noticed. But the slight vestige of high society that clung to the edges of the Art Association led Rockwell to keep himself at some distance from the organization most of the time. Even at this early stage in his career, he had developed a way of portraying people as if he easily identified with the “human condition,” and he molded his public image the same way. In truth, at a deep level he really was ambivalent toward upper-class culture—the inflections of education, of money, of taste, of general intellectual superiority that denizens of high society assumed as their natural right. If as a teenager he had lamented his lack of such things, by the time he finished art school he had acquired a certain honest disdain for the pretense he believed such privileges often implied.

  Nonetheless, the Art Association proved a perfect communal conduit for the city’s pool of artists. In 1921, the Association decided to beautify the approaches to the city, thereby furthering New Rochelle’s interests at the same time that they were promoting their suburb as an enviable bastion of artists. The group divvied up the assignments, deciding on twelve wrought-iron-upon-concrete bases with which to stud the city’s boundaries. Two years later, only ten were complete, Rockwell’s among them. As undistinguished as the rest, his was called “Rich in History,” a series of three revolutionaries watching out for the enemy. Initially, at least, the Art Association’s concept earned the artists, who volunteered their services, points for community spirit.

  Rockwell also created his own goodwill by relying upon local people for his models. As early as 1919, a local journalist had written up the lucky children who posed for “one of the best and most popular of the top-notch magazine artists of today.” The writer quotes the artist: “Billy Paine is my favorite model. . . . He has posed five years and is a dandy little actor, he understands moods and expressions no matter how complicated.”

  In general, Rockwell dispensed with professional models whenever he could, believing their studied body language scotched his creativity. To use the world, in effect, as his agency, invigorated his work far beyond what a dial-a-type professional could provide. In the twenties, according to Clyde Forsythe, he would walk around New Rochelle, sparing “neither time nor expense in finding the right model or object needed to fit into the subject he is painting; he never fakes. All the dogs in town know him. Along the street he is greeted by schoolboys and their granddads and grandmothers. They all love him; they are his models first; then his friends.” Rockwell’s consistency—he was affable, seemingly unflappable, and promiscuously curious, whatever the subject—encouraged the people he encountered to believe their exchanges with the illustrator more meaningful to him than they in fact were. He simply treated everything and everybody the same way.

  Looking at people—observing the man on the street up close—seasoned Rockwell’s early, usually half-shaped concept for an illustration into its fully realized final form. A policeman’s flagrantly protruding ears might motivate one theme, a fireman’s beautifully shaped head another; a housewife’s consternation at the grocery store yet a third. Sometimes his process of association would pull together all three disparate scenes into one coherent narrative. Rockwell never underestimated the part in his success that such real people played, and his gratitude toward them was genuine. But for those lucky enough to be chosen as his models, the connection inevitably felt deeper: accounts they would offer journalists decades later revealed that they never again would feel valued so highly as when they modeled for Norman Rockwell. Mary Whalen, who was Rockwell’s favorite girl model, describes the way that the painter made her feel: “He cared about my twelve-year-old imagination. He felt that if I understood what he was trying to accomplish in a painting, the picture would be good, but if I didn’t, there was something wrong with his idea. We were all in it together, somehow. At least he made me feel that way.”

  Those who have systematically collected the accounts of Rockwell’s models have awaited in vain any significant variation on this theme. Men and women, girls and boys, who posed for the illustrator believed themselves touched by a great man. To some extent, Rockwell did invest his models with the importance they assumed, but while they functioned for him primarily as props in his imagined world, to them he seemed closer to a creator.

  Sue Erikson Bloland, whose family became close to Rockwell and his children in the 1950s, believes that much of what she has concluded about her own father, Erik Erikson, was equally applicable to the illustrator—Erikson’s patient as well as a good friend. To believe that someone exists who is better than ourselves seems to be a basic human need, at least in Western societies. People seek fodder for the culture’s fantasy constructions of heroes. We want others to be bigger than life, to justify our own frequent sense of insignificance. Rockwell, similar to Erikson, filled this role for his public, though in the artist’s case, a matter-of-factness, in conjunction with his low-key but friendly affect, heightened his idiosyncratic charisma.

  Rockwell’s ordinariness, in other words, was the base of his celebrity. As part of his (simultaneously real and contrived) identifi-cation with the people who bought the magazines that subsidized his career, Rockwell fostered an image of normalcy from his earliest success. Especially amid the profligacy of the Roaring Twenties, Lorimer’s conservative—or, perhaps more accurately, libertarian—leanings devalued the Post among intellectuals, artists, and the social elite. A certain lack of fashionableness clung to it, even though the editor hired the best writers money could buy. For Rockwell, this meant that respect for his aesthetic achievement increasingly became concentrated among the striving, solidly middlebrow, middle-class readership, with the members of his own social and artist class admiring him more for his fame and income. What appeared to be his own propensity to depend on hard work instead of inspiration, his concern over tending those on his own doorstep instead of worrying about global issues, furthered the domestication of his image as an artist.

  But while his everyman persona created devotion among his middlebrow audience, it devalued him in the institutional art world. And the popular press inadvertently helped bury him in the eyes of serious critics. An interviewer from the Globe noted approvingly the “peculiar appeal in Rockwell’s work. His favorite subject is boys, good, wholesome boys not of the Smart Alec type, and he would rather catch some home-going subway rider smiling over the realism of his work than receive plaudits on his technique from a dozen fellow artists.” Misleading in its implication that Rockwell preferred “their” judgments to those in the art world proper, the comparison does represent accurately the illustrator’s early, almost obsessive desire that the public love his work.

  Repeatedly, he would be damned by the praise of journalists eager to celebrate his difference from “real” painters. One admiring interviewer observed that “Norman Rockwell is not a Greenwich Village artist who wears McDougal [sic] Alley airs, long hair and immaculate smocks with a silk tie carefully arranged. He hasn’t even the regulation Van Dyke beard. No, Norman Rockwell is just a plain, ordinary, clean, likeable young fellow.” Even Rockwell’s mundane brand of pipe tobacco is offered as an example of his normalcy.

  The following summer, the Sun chimed in: “If you should take a walk or a drive around New Rochelle, or if, by chance, you happen to live there, you probably will find nothing peculiar or anything smacking of Washington Square’s Washington Mew [sic] or Macdougal Alley. Yet New Rochelle boasts at least as many well-known artists and writers as Greenwich Village. You will notice no dreamy eyed, long haired, unpressed velvet trousered young m
en wandering about the streets of New Rochelle.” Instead, the writer continues, you might see a “laughing, curly-haired young man walking down North Avenue to his studio”—Norman Rockwell; or “on Main street, going home to his wife in Sutton Manor, a good looking, youngish man, without a hat and probably cleanly shaved”—the debonair Coles Phillips. The piece continues smugly to note the lack of patronizing attitudes or affectations among New Rochelle artists, who, except for once a year when the “arts people” gather for their annual Travers Island party and stay out all night, are a “healthy, normal New Greenwich Village.”

  Throughout the early twenties, popular journalists sought to rehabilitate the very idea of an artist at Rockwell’s expense, though they meant to do him a service. They were playing out a war of self-esteem, using Rockwell as their redemption. Major Manhattan critics were comfortably well informed about the modern artists in their midst; whether for or against the contemporary art largely inspired by European painters, such commentators on the current scene felt themselves to be in the know. Suburban journalists, however, assumed that the haughtiness or supercilious response aimed at them by urban artists showed them up as country mice to their city cousins; in truth, they often didn’t like or understand the new painting sanctioned by the New York art world.