The Parmelees became family friends of the Rockwells, their association lasting through both men’s lifetimes. Although Parmelee’s office was in New Rochelle, he actually lived in Mamaroneck, close to Rockwell’s old home at 95 Prospect Avenue, where he had relocated a few years earlier from Tennessee. Just before her death, Dean Parmelee’s youngest daughter, Betty, recalled the friendship in some detail: “I think my father was more the social type than my mother; he played tennis or golf while my mother gardened. And New Rochelle was so social in those days. My dad went to the Beach club all the time. He liked to play, and so he provided good distractions for Rockwell, who worked too hard.” Rockwell’s recreation was often publicly tracked; a local publication even noted when the illustrator ordered a new set of sails for his small sailboat, called Little Dipper, which he enjoyed taking out on the Sound with Dean.
By now, though Rockwell could travel elsewhere undisturbed, in Westchester County people often recognized him on sight, so Dean quickly figured out respites from the burden of local celebrity. “My father loved to go camping in Vermont too,” Betty remembered, “and he’d take Norman along. They’d put on old clothes and go hiking for several days. On the other hand, my father drove an open-top roadster, Cadillac roadster, and then a Pierce Arrow roadster. He frequented the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. He and Norman enjoyed doing so many things together.”
The Parmelees also socialized frequently as a couple with the Rockwells. “Both my parents went to the Glen Island Casino, also along the Sound, in the Pelham area; there was a famous dance band and sometimes swing bands, and even young people would go there to socialize. My mom and dad and Norman and Irene often drove up to the supper clubs in Manhattan for dancing and dinner,” their daughter recalled. “I heard that Norman loved to dance. I can still see them all in my mind’s eye, going out together, the women wearing their long skirts then and strings of pearls down below their waists, everybody laughing—whenever Norman was around, there was always fun. But my mother didn’t have a lot in common with Irene—Mother liked making clothes for all four of her girls, and simple things like canning preserves and jams in the basement.”
Betty Parmelee always believed that Norman enjoyed hearing about her father’s unconventional path to his status as one of New York’s highest-paid architects, as if Dean’s lack of prestigious degrees reflected well on Rockwell’s own earlier choices. And, just as the illustrator had learned to draw through Waring’s nightly example, Dean’s father, an architect in Knoxville, Tennessee, had also inspired his son, who eschewed the formal route of architecture school and learned the trade in the older man’s office. After high school Dean went to Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago, apprenticing briefly with each of the great architectural firms and studying with the great resident architects, such as Frank Sullivan. Akin to Norman even in his religious patterns, he refused to go to church as an adult—overzealous Baptist regimentation during his Tennessee childhood, he suspected.
Norman also got a kick out of listening to Dean’s accounts of the great palatial homes he built on Orienta Point—where Mrs. Constable had befriended the illustrator years earlier—especially the stories about D. W. Griffith’s end of the development, where Griffith maintained a movie studio throughout the 1920s. Betty Parmelee’s recollections about the opulence of the area are reminiscent of the impression it had made on the boy determined to earn his art school tuition by delivering mail to its privileged inhabitants nearly twenty years before: “Orienta Point was so beautiful; the kids who lived there even got to come to school in a limousine, driven by a chauffeur.”
As the two men swapped stories, Dean became a substitute brother for the illustrator, albeit only for a few years. By 1927, Jerry’s income was escalating dramatically as a result of having started his own bond trading company; increasingly, he and Norman found they had no time for each other. For the next two years, he and Carol lived more extravagantly than Norman and Irene, and the two brothers continued to drift apart, mostly out of lack of interest in each other, according to Jerry’s son Dick. More dramatically, Carol’s newly discovered passion for couture clothes, glamorous parties, and rendezvous with other men seduced her away from Jerry as well. She was finding her children and her husband inconveniently “boring.” In 1930, she would scandalize her relatives when, chastised by the stock market crash, she wrote a revealing article for Cosmopolitan magazine in which she discussed the moral failures that her wealth had engendered—although Nancy, oddly feisty herself when the occasion moved her, was impressed as well as mortified by her daughter-in-law’s gutsiness.
If Carol was not the ideal mother, her grandson, Nick Rockwell, remembers her husband as pretty unappealing himself. “I thought it kind of odd that my dad and his brother grew up calling their parents by their first names, Jerry and Carol, from the time they could talk,” Dick’s son recounts. “But it’s easy to see that my grandfather rejected intimacy, preferring to maintain the distance between his children and himself, though he pretended that the supposed closeness in age was the reason for preferring first names over the conventions. Frankly, at least when I knew him, Jerry Rockwell was racist, anti-Semitic, and told nasty jokes that enraged my father [Dick Rockwell] and got them into fights. He was cold and didn’t seem like a happy man; and I don’t think he and my grandmother Carol were too fond of children. All their lives, by the way, they maintained separate bedrooms.”
But in 1927, the couple was riding high. “I remember how proud they were of an article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal referring to Jerry as one of the ‘Young Lions of Wall Street,’ ” Dick Rockwell recalls. His parents rented two expensive apartments in exclusive Blind Brook Lodge in Rye, and restructured them into one large home. They spent most of their time, however, in the Manhattan hotel suite they leased in place of their earlier efficiency, and they began enjoying the theatre on a regular basis—when they weren’t attending the fancy parties to which they were now routinely invited. A hired couple took care of running the household, and a part-time maid, according to Carol’s own account, took “John and Dick entirely off” their mother’s hands. Jerry bought his wife a Cadillac Eight, gave her a generous clothing allowance, and provided membership at three new clubs, including the American Yacht Club. The couple began attending separate parties, and Carol initiated a series of intrigues. On the rare occasions when the two found themselves alone together, they were “bored and restless,” and Carol joined Jerry on a trip to Paris only in hopes of meeting interesting people. She did, including a handsome man who asked her to marry him, and whom she refused, it appears, only because he wasn’t rich enough.
Yet for all of Carol Rockwell’s bad behavior, Irene’s actions were far more flagrant. Family gossip included snippets of information about her party conduct. Dick Rockwell remembers that as a little boy, whenever he walked into a room and heard the name “Irene” among the buzz of conversation, all talk mysteriously ceased as soon as the adults noticed him. “Baba [the children’s name for Nancy] would tell me stories about the parties Irene attended—without Norman—and that she misbehaved, that she was ‘quite a party girl.’ ” Dick remembers Irene as “pretty, brunette. But she would do such truly outrageous things. She registered at a hotel in Pennsylvania or New York with a guy once under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Norman Rockwell. It was a pretty stupid thing to do, as you might imagine, because Norman knew where he was that night, and it wasn’t there!”
Odds are that Norman was in his studio, working. The Little Acorn, a local paper, reported in November 1927 that Rockwell “has closed a long time contract with The Saturday Evening Post.” The following January, the paper claimed that “the bidding for the product of [Rockwell’s] brush [had run] high with ‘Liberty’ pushing the ‘Post’ to the limit.” Over thirty years later, Rockwell recounted the events differently. Setting the event back several years earlier, he explained that the new, lavishly underwritten magazine Liberty had indeed
courted him, just as it had many other writers and illustrators associated with the Post. Irene and Clyde Forsythe, in the illustrator’s version, both urged him to defect to the new publication, where he would be earning twice what he made at the Post. After all, they reminded him, Lorimer had given him only measly raises along the way. Why worry about the repercussions for the Post?
Rockwell, who had recently executed a plum assignment—a cover of Charles Lindbergh to accompany the pilot’s Post tell-all about his flight—couldn’t decide what to do, and, in the middle of a sleepless night, he jumped up, boarded a train to Philadelphia, and when the Curtis Publishing company opened its doors, he sped in to present his dilemma to the Boss. Lorimer looked down, unwilling to beg or bargain for his premier illustrator’s loyalty, and only when Rockwell announced that he was staying, immediately doubled his salary.
The account in The Little Acorn, circulated either by Rockwell, Irene, or one of the magazines involved, is surely the more accurate one, given the public and timely nature of its revelations. Whether Rockwell incorrectly remembered his response to the challenge, changing his reaction to loyalty that overcame the seduction of money, or deliberately reconstructed the scene to make such a point to his audience of 1960, the contrast between the strict commercialism of the actual event and the emotional overtones of the “memory” reflect ways that the illustrator’s values or his desire to be valued changed over the decades.
By 1960, American readers would not have responded with the same wonder that such a close call commanded in 1927. At the time of Rockwell’s autobiography, the Post was gasping for air, and leaving it for a rival magazine that paid more money sounded eminently sensible. But the 1920s were a different story: Will Durant, Henry Ford, Vachel Lindsay, Groucho Marx, Rube Goldberg, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Al Smith—they all contributed to the Post during this decade. As one analyst commented: “I often think a thing is not really published in the United States until it appears in The Saturday Evening Post.” True, urban sophisticates prided themselves on reading The New Yorker, whose debut in 1925 as an omnibus humor, literary, and nonfiction magazine featured cover illustrations more fashionably decorative than the Post’s. But enough of a crossover audience existed at this point that the Post, resolutely middle-class as it was, remained an acceptable magazine in the homes of the literati.
The Little Acorn’s assertion about Rockwell’s contract with the Post was, in any event, misleading. It is highly unlikely that he signed any kind of conventional, legally binding deal with the publishers; instead, Lorimer and he agreed that he would not work for other magazines without the Post’s approval, and that his first priority, even before accepting advertising commissions, was to produce their covers. This was no small constriction: in the 1920s, between them Leyendecker and Rockwell produced one third of all covers for the Post. Only the two men were allowed to submit mere sketches to Lorimer for cover approval; other artists had to produce a finished painting for the editor’s vote. And Leyendecker’s pay was a model for the younger man. During his most productive years, during World War I, Leyendecker got from $1,500 to $2,000 per cover. Now, as the 1920s came to an end, Rockwell already commanded from $250 to $500 per cover, depending on the painting’s complexity. And, since he followed Lorimer’s injunction to ask for twice his Post salary before accepting an advertising commission, his income rapidly began shooting upward.
Such productivity cut into Rockwell’s newly found enthusiasm for the whirling social life that Irene plotted for him. His popularity demanded that he work extended—if, nowadays, too often uninspired—hours. He explained to a journalist the erroneous ideas people have about the “leisurely lot” of artists, his opening reference striking what was, for him, an oddly social tone: “I don’t even have time to play golf. Every morning from 7:00 to 8:30 I take a brisk walk with a friend out in the country and this, with a little tennis, is all the exercise I get. For ten years I have promised myself to take Sundays off, but it is still a matter of conversation and not of realization. I am in the studio daily until after five and two nights a week. Joseph Leyendecker works every day from 10 in the morning to 10 at night and probably will the rest of his life. I do on an average of two pictures a month.” He continues with a rush of words to explain, apropos of no apparent provocation, that if he weren’t an artist, he’d like to be a surgeon or, particularly, a movie director.
When not going out socially or working in his studio at night, the illustrator explained, Irene read aloud to him, so that Rockwell was happily gaining an education through volumes of Russian, French, Swedish, and American literature—just as “Howard Pyle said that that was how he received his education.” Especially since an artist’s eyes are so tired by the end of the day, the system served him perfectly, he explained. Rockwell loved hearing the classics, especially the sweeping historical epics charged with heightened emotion; Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and, of course, Dickens particularly restocked his imagination every evening, making the studio encounter inevitably more fruitful the following morning.
But he also hid behind the emotional catharsis that densely textured great novels provide, substituting the imaginative release of fiction for the drama of daily life. Only when caught unawares did he let spontaneous emotion escape him. In 1928, Rockwell started to offer to a local journalist a controlled, dry narration of child model Billy Paine’s death. Eddie Carson, Billy’s best friend, had accompanied Rockwell to the interview, and Rockwell, joking good-naturedly with the boy about the trouble he and his friends too often stirred up, momentarily forgot where the topic would lead him. He began merrily to discuss Billy’s tendency to play tricks in the studio, finding himself stammering within seconds: “Billy Paine was the worst of all and—.” The interviewer explains that “both smiles faded. For some time neither [Rockwell nor Eddie] seemed able to speak.” Then the artist recovered enough to continue talking: “Billy was the worst of all. Full of mischief every minute. A few months ago he started to play one of his good-natured tricks on another boy. He climbed out of one window at his home and started to climb into another. He fell three stories. When they picked him up they found his skull was fractured.” “There was silence again for a time,” the writer notes solemnly.
When Rockwell took Eddie out to the car after the interview was over, the writer peeked out the window and observed that “they were clambering into the car like two kids—talking, laughing, taking a swat at each other as occasion offered.” Such mimicry of boyish playfulness remained a constant of Rockwell’s mature life. Engaging in childishness helped the artist avoid connecting on a deeper level, enabling him to forestall potential emotional intimacy. This pattern functioned at a particularly overdetermined psychological level, since Rockwell was imitating the idea of boyhood, rather than the real life he himself had been granted as a child.
The type of admiration that Rockwell’s worshipful journalist exudes is exactly the kind of thing that created a backlash of resentment in the New York art world. Terming the illustrator a young man “in the very front rank of American artists” did not engender affection among the New York cognoscenti, who assumed such populist laurels to indict those they crowned. Similarly, during this same period, when Judge magazine gave Rockwell its “High Hat” award, citing him “for having become, while still a young man, a tradition in art,” the epithet damaged him far more than benign neglect would have. Usually implied in the encomiums was a nod toward Rockwell’s distinguishing mark of sincerity, an old-fashioned virtue in the magazine world. The freestanding covers of the early New Yorker also depended on humor and even, according to at least one of its art directors, timelessness as their milieu, but irony, not earnestness, was the juggernaut of the new.
Phoebe Waring Rockwell, NR’s paternal grandmother, c. 1890.
John William Rockwell, NR’s paternal grandfather, c. 1890.
Anne Elizabeth Patmore Hill, NR’s maternal grandmother, c. 1882.
Jarvis Waring Rockwell (“Waring”), NR�
�s father, December 24, 1887.
Anne Mary (Nancy) Hill Rockwell, NR’s mother, c. 1882.
NR (left) and his brother, Jarvis (“Jerry”), 1895.
Jerry (left) and Norman catching frogs at Lippincott’s farm, c. summer of 1904.
Clockwise from upper left: Norman, Jerry, Waring, and Nancy Rockwell, c. 1905.
Summer boardinghouse, c. 1899. Jerry and Nancy are second and third from the left in the back row; Waring stands at the far right; Norman sits in front, at the far right.
Family portrait, December 1911: Waring, Norman, Jerry (left to right), and Nancy.
Norman and his first wife, Irene O’Connor (right), on a picnic, c. 1916.
Jerry Rockwell’s wedding to Carol Cushman, 1916. In the back row, Waring stands at the far left, Norman at the far right; in the middle row, Nancy stands at the far right, with Irene beside her; Jerry is seated, to the left.
Norman (left) and his buddies during his three-month stint in the Navy, Charleston, South Carolina, 1918.
NR at work outside his New Rochelle studio at 40 Prospect Street, 1921. The boy is Franklin Lischke.
Norman Rockwell Page 25