Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  Taking the measure of things through the surface fits well the tasks of an illustrator, and Rockwell’s distant father, difficult mother, and first marriage whose emotional heft barely registered over fourteen years set him up neatly for his job. He would explain in 1959 that “the surface of things is very important in illustrations—the kind of clothes people are wearing, the houses they’re living in, what they’re talking about.” To enter the world of “fine art” proper, even through the apparent friendliness of Regionalism, would have required a psychology the painter lacked.

  Although not a superficial person in the ways the epithet is most commonly invoked, Rockwell continued throughout his life to live on the surface of things. Now, in 1933, he conscientiously tended to his mother’s needs, for instance, by assigning her personal care to his wife, while he made sure to pay her bills—and tactfully at that. In early November, the month that Mary turned twenty-six years old, she and Norman installed Nancy in a boardinghouse in New Rochelle. After a year of the sixty-eight-year-old woman living in Kane, her oldest son and his wife had had enough of her—or at least Carol had. Nancy’s habits and relentless whining, interspersed with praise of whatever family members lived anywhere but here, proved far too much for Carol Rockwell’s own demanding personality. “She paced up and down, relentlessly, making a very hard to describe sound with her throat all day long. My mother just couldn’t stand her. Plus she demanded such attention and care all the time,” Dick Rockwell recalls.

  Without complaint, after her expulsion from Kane, Norman had immediately set his mother up in Providence, Rhode Island, with her cousins. But “Ma” had quickly tired of that arrangement, and she wanted to be near one of her sons. Mary, determined to make her happy, ensured that the querulous woman spent much of her time at their house. For her daughter-in-law’s birthday, Nancy gave her a new copy of Anthony Adverse, a Victorian novel that the grateful young woman immediately began reading aloud to her husband. She wrote her own parents that her little New York family was happier than ever, especially, she adds, “as I really feel Norman’s work is going to go well.” Clearly the major theme that determined the tone of the household remained Rockwell’s attitude toward his work.

  Mary had helped Nancy Rockwell organize her belongings in Providence for the move to New Rochelle, and she unpacked for her once they were back in New York. Although she admitted that “everyone in Providence [the cousins] said that she was difficult etc.,” Mary believed, after three weeks of being around Nancy Rockwell, that all the older woman needed was a little “thoughtfulness,” and she committed herself to making her mother-in-law happy. “I can do anything to keep Ma happy—and she is so darling and grateful for anything I do—and adores the children so that it is a pleasure to do it.” Although Mary Rockwell’s determined good cheer commands respect, her sons’ uneasy sense that it came at a cost—that she, in a different way from their father, flinched from reality—seems consistent with the positive spin that pervades her letters regardless of the subject. Still, the natural goodness that the admiring Rockwell always believed to characterize his wife seems a valid appraisal from the evidence of her correspondence as well as acquaintances’ memories of the way she treated those around her.

  Mary’s determination to emphasize the positive in her mother-in-law didn’t rub off on her husband, who found Nancy’s presence a real hindrance to his work. When she wandered out back to his studio and forced him to paint to the tune of her throat noises, he asked her to sit outside instead, if she really wanted to be near. She perched on his studio steps, a presence just beyond his door. More than once, she volunteered her son to speak at local women’s associations in which she participated. Mary’s enthusiasm, endless as it seemed, dissipated under the pressure of her mother-in-law’s relentless requirement for “thoughtfulness,” so that within the next year or so, Nancy Rockwell was shuffled back to Providence.

  By early 1934, Rockwell needed even more mental room than usual to focus on his work anyway, now that he was allowing himself the occasional license to take photographs from which to paint, instead of depending exclusively on live models. After Franklin Roosevelt became president, the federal funding of various arts, especially as they documented government activities, furthered an emphasis on documentary-type realism, which in turn helped elevate photography into the art that Alfred Stieglitz had pioneered years before. As the younger illustrators incorporated the use of the camera into their designs, creating more sophisticated work than was possible from real life, Rockwell was torn; eager, on the one hand, to experiment with the new angles and perspectives that his colleagues were achieving, he couldn’t shake his feeling, on the other, that the camera was a kind of cheater’s tool. This line of thinking was undergirded by Joe Leyendecker’s distaste for the very idea of using photographs; Rockwell shared his friend’s concern that art students just starting out would start neglecting their drawing skills.

  Regardless of the justice of this latter fear, the noise about cameras inauthenticating the illustrators’ work was illegitimate from the start. Too many examples of brilliant artists’ dependence on some variant of photographic reproduction—from Vermeer to Ingres and Matisse—are well known to imply otherwise. Rockwell developed his own ways of distancing himself from the helpmate, conjoining the best of two traditions. As a result of his lifelong ambivalence toward using photographs in lieu of live models, he not only paid others to take all the pictures—unlike most illustrators, he took none of his own—he nearly always hired unskilled workers unrelated to the art world, and then taught them how to take pictures for him, as if to emphasize that anyone could do this part of the job. He legitimized his use of the camera by deemphasizing its importance to the enterprise.

  During this period of agonizing over how to move his painting forward, including incorporating photography into his process, Rockwell decided that he would enjoy returning to book illustrations, especially since that was the venue for the greatest illustrations of ages past. Although his published series of figures from American literature, including most notably paintings of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, dates from the late 1930s, his friend’s daughter Betty Parmelee dated at least some of the work from this year: “I recall that I posed for Norman a few times during 1934 for a series of characters in American literature. Mary would sit and read to him while he worked; she was so sweet and dear, always.” Because the Parmelees had shared the sad news with their friends that they were moving to Florida—the Depression had dried up Dean’s sources of income in New Rochelle—Betty believed the artist wanted to use her before he lost the chance. Such a contingency of painting from live models—their availability—was another factor urging Rockwell to succumb to the camera.

  Two years after Mary’s buoyant letters to her parents about the Paris visit meant to relaunch her husband, he was still searching for his way. For their first family vacation, he asked Mary to spend several weeks in Provincetown, where there would be other painters to inspire him. Site of the painter’s Cape Cod summer idyll almost twenty years earlier, it was a perfect place for swimming and sailing, both of which Mary loved. In a letter to her parents anticipating the trip, Mary earnestly explained that “[Provincetown] is an artists’ colony into the bargain which means it and the people will be quite unlike an ordinary summer place and thoroughly interesting.”

  No notes on the summer remain, but a later neighbor and friend of the Rockwells, Leah Schaeffer Goodfellow, recalls that both Fred Hildebrandt, Rockwell’s favorite male model, and Leah’s father, illustrator Mead Schaeffer, met with Rockwell during the vacation. They all were at Provincetown together, which may have been the result of deliberate planning or simply a case of like people choosing the same vacation. Schaeffer and Rockwell both used Fred frequently enough that the illustrators ended up consulting with each other before working the model into their schedules. Rockwell may have ensured that Fred was in residence; combining work and supposed summer plea-sure was a pattern that had be
en firmly in place during the decade of vacations at Louisville Landing.

  The summer proved full of distractions for the artist; Mary’s family visited from California, Ma Rockwell continued to find new ways to place demands on Norman and Mary, and the Provincetown vacation itself, accompanied by a toddler and a baby and a palette, was far from total relaxation. Norman’s focus was under constant siege. One indication that the summer left too much stress behind is the trip he made with Fred Hildebrandt into the Canadian wilds soon after. Uncharacteristically, during the weeklong journey he kept a diary, which yields unexpectedly sweet, personal insights into the private man. The little journal is especially significant, because no mention of the trip exists otherwise; nor did Rockwell share the diary publicly. More of a sportsman than he ever admitted to being, and prone to missing his family and worrying over children not his own, the artist seems markedly less theatrical when writing for his eyes only. The account also captures Rockwell’s impressive intelligence, his quick and shrewd assessment of situations and people, and his limitless curiosity and detailed observation of the world around him.

  He and Fred arrived in Montreal on September 3, hoping to start their trip off with a baseball game, but finding instead that they had to board a train for an eleven-hour ride immediately. For the next seven days, the two men and their guides canoed through gales “blowing right in our faces,” confronting “rain squalls and continuous wind.” Sometimes the going was especially rough, or the environs awesome: “Hard paddling against it [the weather]. Kept thinking of Jerry’s remark ‘Hard work, Daddy.’ One guide saw moose, we saw a mink and a muskrat. All this country has never been timbered. Virgin forest and innumerable lakes and connecting rivers.”

  The small group broke camp every day or so, paddling furiously to arrive at the next location where they hoped to bag a moose, and where Fred anticipated unparalleled trout fishing. Rockwell was far more interested in the former than the latter, although the guide’s ability to stalk partridges and bring them down with a rock—“by the way, we have no firearms”—commanded his greatest respect. At one point, he wrote that “before lunch, I was terribly low, wished I was home, lonesome of [sic] Mary, Jerry and Tommy. Tried to figure out how I could get home without losing face altogether.” Then, with the whimsical wryness characteristic of his humor, he notes, “but after the weather cleared and I caught the fish, I loved my family no less but I was more content.”

  The subject of family was not far from the artist’s thoughts throughout the trip. When an owner of the camp company brought his children to bunk with the men one evening, Rockwell noted with concern the children’s apparent poor health; they were too thin and coughed too much. He observed worriedly that “[the parents] seem very fond of the children but take no care of them. . . . One by one the kids practically collapse of fatigue and sleepiness and they are stowed in the rough camp beds. . . . They are all girls but one and all but two are very sickly looking.” His own charges back in New Rochelle had been much on his mind just before picking up the five children at the landing; while fishing that afternoon, the group had heard someone calling out to them, and Rockwell was “afraid it was a telegram from home.”

  At the end of the weeklong, seven-mile canoe camping trip “all upstream,” Rockwell concluded his diary with the type of jocular adieu he habitually adopted when he felt happy: “Here we sit writing the final words of this testament and how are you?”—akin to Robert Browning’s cheerful “God’s in his Garden and all’s right with the world.” Twenty-five years later, he would end tapes he recorded after a day of studio work similarly—if he was pleased with the work.

  Back home, working in the midst of a supportive spouse and two small sons who adored him, Rockwell soon had even more cause to appreciate his good fortune, even as he mourned someone else’s sad fate. On November 4, 1934, his ex-wife Irene O’Connor drowned in her bathtub, a probable suicide. For the previous two years, the poor woman had been a patient at McLean Sanitarium, whose manicured lawns and Adirondack chairs, with upper-class clientele to fill them, failed to suggest the degree of suffering behind the expensive walls.

  She and her aviator husband had barely been married for two years when she entered the institution, located within an hour’s drive from their home, a widely regarded sanitarium and Harvard University teaching hospital associated with Massachusetts General. Although it had undergone some rough financial times in the twenties and would face harrowing financial constraints in the decades ahead, the thirties were an especially strong period for McLean, whose policies were by and large among the most liberal and humane of early and mid-century hospitals for the mentally ill. At this point, very little existed between the two extremes of treatment facilities—expensive private institutions such as McLean, and state-subsidized asylums. At the upper end, treatments were still based largely on whatever method seemed to placate the patient best, whether it be playing tennis, hydrotherapy treatment (jet streams of water aimed at their bodies), or basket weaving, contributing to such institutions being sneered at for their country club airs. Very little medication was available, and trained psychoanalysts were just beginning to inhabit the scene.

  Within the subsequent decade, insulin shock treatment and electroshock therapy would be employed, and the first significant line of pharmacological intervention developed around the same time. But none of these methods was available in the early 1930s. Serious, rigorous, and humane medical intervention was, however, consistently attempted at McLean. The year of Irene’s death, the annual report announced that “three patients had been treated by [the new method of] ‘orthodox’ psychoanalysis.” At the time of Irene’s admission in 1932, she and her family would have been informed of the talking cure. But those treating the mentally ill with every resource they could muster often expressed despair at their low rate of success, and with the still primitive state of their knowledge of mental disease.

  Given the confidentiality of such medical records as well as the lack of surviving family, no way exists to confirm Irene’s diagnosis but, at the time, the majority of McLean’s 250 patients were determined to be suffering with manic depression, then classified as a psychosis. Years later, this diagnosis would be refined to reflect the various faces of depression, of bipolar disease, and of mild schizophrenia, in the process downgrading all but the last to neuroses. Still, being hospitalized at McLean for two years suggests that Irene was seriously ill, whatever her condition was called. She must have despaired of her future, since the modalities of treatment would have implied its probable bleakness: as the hospital history explains, and the yearly bulletin made clear even then, “Recently admitted patients with acute illnesses [are] more likely to receive substantial psychotherapeutic attention than the presumed chronic or demented for whom there [is] scant hope of improvement.”

  Although newspaper accounts—inevitably noting her connection with Rockwell—claimed that she had drowned in her bathtub at McLean, her death certificate makes it clear that she died in her tub at home in Brookline, Massachusetts, near Boston, where she lived with her husband. The death certificate also rules the death from water in the lungs an accidental drowning, but those who have researched the circumstances all believe that Irene committed suicide. Only four months earlier, the forty-one-year-old patient, heavily dependent on her mother all her life, had faced the death of the older woman. Possibly Irene had finally left the hospital in order to attend the funeral, declining to return. In any event, she died at home.

  It seems likely that Irene had suffered with some symptoms of her disease during her fourteen years with Rockwell. Pictures of her in her early twenties as well as associates’ accounts of her behavior suggest a personality that alternated between extreme melancholy and wild bursts of energy and activity. Her erratic behavior toward money—on the one hand, holding it up as her god, on the other, investing her husband’s $10,000 in a boardinghouse acquaintance’s scheme—matched her refusal in late 1929, on Rockwell’s frantic entreaties
, to consider her probable new financial situation if she left Rockwell for a chemist. Nor could the new life she traded for the one in New Rochelle have come close to granting her the prestige she had previously enjoyed as Rockwell’s spouse. For more than a decade, Irene could claim the center of attention easily, as the wealthy, attractive young wife of a famous man who would have happily remained faithful to her and their marriage had she been interested. It is unlikely that the hard-hitting risk taker Francis Hartley, bound for the 1938 Olympic Games, shared the same virtues as Irene’s gentler first husband.

  Even if Rockwell somehow avoided the plentiful newspaper accounts and the gossipy friends eager to fill him in, he undoubtedly would have been informed of Irene’s death by her brother, Howard. Hoddy, unlike the rest of his family, had remained in New Rochelle, and he bragged of his closely sustained connection to the artist, decades after it had in fact been rent asunder. “His assertions weren’t exactly true,” attests Tom Rockwell. “I got the feeling my dad thought Hoddy was a character, and he always enjoyed such larger-than-life people. But that was all. I myself went to meet Hoddy when I was trying to piece together Pop’s life. He was just as Pop had described him, including his huge hamlike arms, which he showed off to me as proof of his strength; and he told me one of the most vulgar jokes I’ve ever heard in my life.” Hoddy, alone of those who knew Irene, insisted that his sister could not have killed herself.

  Thirty years later, the perfectly lucid illustrator would feign forgetting that he had ever been married to “that pretty girl who lived in my boardinghouse,” to the astonishment of those present. Whatever the fourteen-year marriage had meant to Rockwell, his illogical, complete denial of Irene’s existence in itself hints at the significance that her leaving him held. Her bizarre death, given Rockwell’s propensity for avoiding exactly this kind of ugliness and in the context of their divorce having occurred only four years earlier, must have been “unsettling,” to use his favorite word for circumstances he tried to avoid.