Before “Baba” could go live with her son and daughter-in-law, Norman had to loan Jerry the money to buy a house. During their first year in Kane, Jerry had rented a house on the south side of town, but the one they bought now was much nicer, with its large front porch, grand piano, and four bedrooms upstairs, the “huge” one for Baba. The combination of feeling responsible for both his mother and a new child added to the stresses that he was registering from other sources. Not at ease about his own finances, Rockwell realized that his investments were showing the effect of the Depression. The same portfolio of stocks valued at $38,000 the year before had now declined by 30 to 40 percent.
Yet for all his worry, Rockwell was better positioned both personally and professionally than he’d ever been. In accordance with the times, as well as in keeping with his own strict adherence to the domain of the studio, he did virtually no childcare. “He bragged about not knowing how to change a diaper even after I was born,” his grandchild Daisy Rockwell remembers. Mary delighted in caring for little Jerry, however, though her first concern remained her husband’s welfare, which meant, essentially, his career satisfaction. Luckily, in light of the Depression, it was a good time to be associated with The Saturday Evening Post. As if the Post, along with the rest of the country, had recovered from the long party of the 1920s, in 1931 a leaner, more aggressive magazine suggested a new direction for the next decade. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s exquisite melancholic story “Babylon Revisited” was published, and Sinclair Lewis returned to the Post’s pages as a Nobel laureate. Most startling, Lorimer had chosen to serialize Leon Trotsky’s The Russian Revolution, granting a cachet of unpredictability at the very least. Perhaps the Post would prove capacious enough to give Rockwell room to grow.
Still, the artist found himself unable to kick his depression, the conviction that he was at a dead end, unsure where to take his talent, unconvinced he had staying power. From letters Mary wrote to her parents the following year, as well as from comments Rockwell himself made in the decades ahead, during the early thirties his ideas weren’t coming like they used to; he felt his work for the Post to be stagnant, and yet even such disappointing results took him longer than ever.
Tom Rockwell, the artist’s middle son, believes that the illustrator had never paused to calculate the costs of dealing with his failed first marriage, adjusting to a new one, confronting his father’s death, and welcoming the birth of his first child. Instead, he exerted prodigious efforts to detour anxiety via his art—essentially the insight the illustrator himself maintained openly throughout his life. He focused his emotions in his paintings. Sometimes, in a circular movement, the work diminished as a result, making him feel even worse.
Rockwell’s books on the life of the long-suffering Rembrandt were well-thumbed from the illustrator’s earliest years. In his self-definition as a perpetual underdog and outsider, as Tom Rockwell puts it, Rockwell enjoyed identifying with others of similar psychological cast. Rembrandt had experienced deep periods of depression when his first and second wives died, ceasing his painting entirely for years. At other times, just like Rockwell, he scurried to take on as many heinous commissions as he could find, in order to make the payments on the lavish house he had built in Amsterdam to prove to others, including his parents-in-law, that he was more than “just a painter.” As one critic notes, “after years of trying to break out of portraiture and into history painting, he had condemned himself . . . to portraiture, to an endless scrambling for money, to a perpetual sensation of being behind, to an interminable scurrying for commissions to paint people he didn’t like and a ceaseless avoiding of people to whom he owed money.” Rockwell did not, so far, have to evade bill collectors, but he worried that such a fate might be his if he let up on his work.
Mary Barstow Rockwell, whom at least one of her sons would always think of as a kind of Pollyanna, had progressed overnight from the protected status of a sheltered young woman living with her parents to being the wife of a world-famous illustrator. To her everlasting credit, she proved herself up to the demands of marrying a depressed artist carrying a great deal of emotional baggage. In February 1932, when the exhausted illustrator decided that a dramatic shift of location would jump-start his imagination, his loyal wife promptly agreed, with only two weeks’ notice, to move to Paris. On February 1, 1932, two days before Rockwell’s thirty-eighth birthday, the artist had written his sister-in-law about the recent exhibit of Diego Rivera that he and Mary had seen in Manhattan, stressing Rivera’s solid groundedness before the Mexican painter had dared risk studying in Paris. The illustrator also wanted to paint “his own art,” informed by the best lessons of his elders and contemporaries as well. As his thoughts jelled, he had decided to follow the course so many young men had two decades earlier—he would chuck it all to live in Paris. Of course, he was not a young man, and it was 1932. The relocation was unlikely to result in radical artistic reorientation, and in his heart he must have realized that.
Fully aware of the challenges of moving to a foreign country, and armed with nothing but good intentions, adequate income, and a baby and family dog, Mary nonetheless encouraged her husband to seek his professional rejuvenation. Yes, she told him, we’ll go to Paris, and there you will find inspiration.
What must Rockwell have felt, now that he had a helpmate who put his needs above her own? Mary’s behavior contrasted starkly with that exhibited by both his mother and Irene, and the grateful illustrator, always generous with his laurels, would have shared his pleasure with her. His gratitude, deeply and sincerely felt, would have egged her on, rewarding her for her complete focus on Norman’s needs, on Norman’s feelings, on Norman’s life. Mary not only organized his home life so that he could work whenever he wanted, but she was available to him emotionally and socially the minute he called. The result? The couple grew to trust Mary’s intuitive response to any crisis or more mundane aesthetic expression that Rockwell encountered.
They packed for at least six months abroad and sailed with five-month-old Jerry and Raleigh, the loyal German shepherd, to Paris aboard the R.M.S. Mauretania on February 28. Even though Mary Barstow had grown up comfortably, the social level of this shipboard experience dazzled her. From the “fried smelts rémoulade” to the “roast Pheasant à l’Anglaise,” everything seemed exotic. In her letters to her family, the twenty-four-year-old woman wrote of the people they met and of her attempts to keep her husband company on deck while also tending to the often upset baby below. Mary especially worried about the artist’s back, which caused him constant discomfort from an injury he received when he had tried to lift their Ping-Pong table on his birthday. Throughout the fall, he would require the ser-vices of an osteopath, and his daily work at the easel would literally pain him.
But for now, on board the ship, Rockwell felt new enthusiasm for his profession, armed with the certainty that something good would befall him abroad. And in truth, this trip, with his firstborn son and, finally, the adoring wife he had sought at his side, must have promised a kind of rebirth.
The results of his own self-consciously pursued renaissance, predictably, fell short of his hopes. Even in 1922, over a decade after Picasso had inaugurated a revolution in art, Paris had provided a near surfeit of pictorial riches, it is true; the variety of representational and figurative art expressed by those loosely grouped under the name School of Paris would seem a dispensation for the kind of work most congenial to Rockwell’s imagination. But by 1932, the climate toward such painting was shifting, and critics were restless for something new. Rockwell again had waited to make his bid to join the “real” art world just long enough that he was out of sync.
They docked at Cherbourg, arriving in Paris by train in the early evening. Before the couple even considered sight-seeing, the first order of business was finding Rockwell a studio. By the end of the first week in March, as Mary shares in her letters to California, the couple had found the “perfect” place, an old building being renovated, on the avenue de Saxe. “It ha
s a direct north light, grey walls, and a coal stove and—piece de resistance—a couch and shelves in a corner all covered with deep wine colored velvet. It’s really nice and the woman had an easel Norm could use. He bought a table, a stool, put out his sketches and a clothes tree with costumes until it looks very homelike and exactly the place to work.” The couple had been staying at the Hotel Wagram on the rue de Rivoli until this point, and since they had now located Rockwell’s workplace, they had a better sense of where to look for housing. Even without a home of their own, however, Mary found the radical change from New Rochelle wonderful: “I am beginning really to enjoy Paris. There is NOTHING like it. There isn’t the rush and hecticness there is in America.”
After a month and a half of looking for an apartment, on April 11 Mary and Norman found a “little villa with a garden,” at the end of a “funny little street that ends against a pair of gates, where the only sounds you hear are convent bells and roosters.” Complete with bowers of spring flowers, a fig tree in bloom, and wicker garden furniture, the furnished apartment within easy walking distance from the studio seemed perfect to the young, eager housewife. Although they signed a six-month lease for the furnished house at 12 Villa de Saxe, paying 3,500 francs a month, she imagined they would stay even longer, “as it is the absolutely ideal place for Norm’s work.”
It also seemed the ideal place for Mary, who wrote her parents that “I love Paris more and more and feel I could be perfectly happy here pretty nearly always. It is about seventy times as nice as New Rochelle and I think I feel more at home already. We never want to go back there again, I am sure.” The young woman merges her identity with her husband’s consistently, a habit she would refer to ironically many years later, but one that, for the moment, granted her security. Her emotional dependency is understandable: not only had she married a man she barely knew; according to her sister, she had been warned by well-meaning relatives and friends that the famous artist had just gotten divorced, that it was dangerous to risk being salve for his wound—being a transitional relationship, a trophy for a man on the rebound. And, Nancy Barstow has explained, Mary grew up winning love from her stern, imposing mother by being the good oldest child, tending the others, making good grades, earning affection. Described as sweet and giving by almost everyone who knew her, Mary’s goodness tends to obscure the reality that while her husband was often absentmindedly blind to her suffering, he did not ask, even implicitly, for the level of self-sacrifice she rejoiced in giving. Nor did he reject it. Whatever made her happy and did not get in the way of his work was okay by him.
A few days after Mary described Paris as paradise to her parents, the dutiful daughter—who would apologize to her parents if she went two days without writing them—nearly gushed in her excitement that her husband seemed to be breaking through the depression that had plagued him throughout their two-year-long marriage: “And now the best thing of all that I have to tell you is about Norman’s work. The preliminary struggle—nearly two years long, has ended at last and he knows what he wants to do. He sent a final cable to Snyder and Black, refusing to do the Coca Cola, but letting them use his name. (He couldn’t do less as he had seesawed between yes and no so long.) He has indefinitely postponed his Post covers. I personally rather doubt if he’ll do any more. (Private, all this—I know you wouldn’t tell it anyway.)”
Such news is astonishing indeed; the Post covers have always been considered Norman Rockwell’s bid for as much creative license as his vocation warranted. That he not only now found them cumbersome, appropriating too much of his talent and time, but that he discussed his new resolve with Mary persuades us of his seriousness, in going to Paris, to chance a dramatic new direction. The mess he got himself into with Coca-Cola typified what became a lifelong quandary when he refused to say no to a persistent client, then found himself unable to complete the project on time. Apparently, Coca-Cola worked out an arrangement with the artist by which several ads from this period were published under Rockwell’s name but were largely executed by an anonymous second party. In the future, when Rockwell felt the need to renege on a professional commitment, he would simply bow out of a project completely or convince the company to postpone or abbreviate the assignment. His fame and good intentions compensated for the chance that hopeful corporations knowingly took (his reputation for delays and cancellations became legendary, the price for consorting with someone so popular) when they commissioned him anyway. But Rockwell never stopped agonizing over deadlines, and his tendency not to meet them.
He had actually made his radical decision to leave the Post before the couple sailed for Europe. Mary explained to her parents that he got scared of the idea of “so complete a change,” and worked “furiously” to get four cover ideas completed as his security before they departed. She happily notes that she didn’t think he’d actually paint the ideas once they settled in Paris, but she wisely kept this opinion to herself; proudly, she opines that her work to know her husband has paid off, since she can “prophesy” what he will end up doing “way ahead of time.” Rockwell did find himself relying on her loving knowledge of him and his work before making professional decisions. To the extent that he could license such emotional luxury, Norman Rockwell was intimate with Mary. And until now, intimacy had been a stranger to him.
A week before Mary’s excited revelation to her parents, Norman had made six separate beginnings on a Post cover, finally too discouraged to continue. Thoroughly bored with trotting out the “same old thing” for the Post, he believed the only way he’d be allowed to do something different was if he painted in an entirely new style. The artificiality of his attempts was all too apparent; he wasn’t painting out of a conviction that the style under way felt right, but that it might be more contemporary. As Mary confides, “He kept worrying because he didn’t really like most modern things and so wasn’t going with the trend.” He took the day off, hired a new model for the morrow, and spent several hours wandering around the Louvre as well as a modern gallery. Energized, he rushed back home to insist that Mary return with him to several exhibits, and they took the model as well, so that she could see the source of inspiration for the project she would be working on.
Unfortunately, neither the art he was scrutinizing nor the painting he then executed is ever named. Mary, unlike the New Rochelle sophisticates who a few years earlier had considered a second trip to the museum redundant, found the Louvre, always Rockwell’s favorite museum, “the most thrilling place I think I’ve ever been.” After two more hours studying the paintings, they left, and Rockwell told his wife that on the following morning, he was going to begin the first of three days sketching around Paris. Taking his time and allowing his imagination to roam freely felt like a luxury to the man bound for over a decade to deadlines and correspondingly rigid work habits. “For the first time in his life he is going to be a free man and do every thing he really wants to do. Oh it’s glorious!” his thrilled wife exclaimed.
At times, Mary Rockwell’s relentless enthusiasm becomes tedious. Too aware of her good intentions, Rockwell would have hesitated to suggest she shape her life according to her own wishes as well as to his. Emotionally independent, used to fulfilling many of his needs without spousal help, he would have assumed she, too, had needs best addressed outside their marriage. Yes, he hoped for participation in his career, but he showed no signs of demanding the complete immersion that she gave. Eventually, inevitably, habit bred expectation. On the one hand, Mary’s complete immersion in her husband’s career connected them from the start at the level most important to him; at the same time, however, it set up a pattern, whereby her husband unconsciously assumed their intimacy to occur on the very level where his person and his work were indistinguishable. Since Mary was determined to be a good wife, many years passed before she could acknowledge that her enthusiasm for the terms of their intimacy had waned.
One wonders about her parents’ reactions to the ceaseless and circular theme of her husband’s mental well-bein
g: did they try to warn her that she was losing herself in the “we” she had started to invoke when speaking of Rockwell’s work? On April 26, she wrote the Barstows a particularly convoluted, telling letter, explaining that Norman “has found the courage to do what he wants . . . which is experiment with all sorts of things for the next six months to become an artistic artist instead of a commercial one.” She tells them not to fear that he will “go modern,” since “[T]hat is his last thought. Never.” For a time, she admits, that possibility worried him, until he made peace with his preference for the Old Masters. Now, “he’s decided to be the thing that is in him to be—to do what he did, only in a much finer way.”
Norman Rockwell Page 29