Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  Major life changes seemed consistently in Rockwell’s purview during this period, including the professional leadership he took for granted. For the first time unsure of the country’s pulse, George Horace Lorimer found himself responding defensively to his critics, who incorrectly reduced his politics to knee-jerk conservatism.

  Although worried whenever word went out that the Post was experiencing turmoil, Norman was far more engaged in the public’s response to his art than in their reaction to Lorimer’s leadership. Every bit as entwined with the readership as was the Boss, Rockwell took the measure of his success through his fan mail. At the end of 1934, concluding the year on the same note that it had begun, Mary Rockwell wrote her family happily about the latest signs that her husband’s now four-year-long depression had run its course: “At the moment I am awfully excited. I’ve just opened the mail. Altogether in the last three days Norman has gotten at least twenty letters on his last Post cover—the most appreciative letters—which is only another indication that he’s all straightened out at last—life is interesting not to say exciting.” It would never be anything less.

  17

  Reconfiguring

  Mary’s optimism aside, her husband still saw no way to escape what he considered his dead-end path—churning out, with enormous expenditure of energy, cover after cover for The Saturday Evening Post, receiving the praise of readers grateful that “their” artist wasn’t like those “real” modern artists. Years later, after this line of praise became constant, he told his youngest son ruefully, “Just once, I’d like for someone to tell me that they think Picasso is good, and that I am too.” Instead, he received praise such as that lavished by the Heritage Club’s monthly publication to its mainly well-educated middle-class members: “Although some may say that Picasso is a better artist than Norman Rockwell, although some will say that Thomas Hart Benton is a better artist than Norman Rockwell, it cannot be denied that Norman Rockwell is the best known artist in this country: his name is known in household, cabaret or farm. And this is because he paints like an imp.”

  Infrequently, an artist whom the illustrator respected would dare to assert a contrarian opinion of Rockwell’s value. George Grosz, the German Expressionist, insisted, “He has excellent technique, great strength, and a clearness of touch that the old masters had.” Grosz, whose earlier roots in Berlin Dadaism and whose harsh caricature of the German bourgeoisie would not have made him an immediately obvious choice to defend Rockwell, believed that “his things are so universal that he would be appreciated anywhere.”

  In 1935, Rockwell was offered a prestigious commission that reminded him of the historical antecedents that had motivated his love of illustration. The chance to place his name next to those heroes who had illustrated the classics helped to reinvigorate his stride. The occasion was the centennial year of Samuel L. Clemens’s birth, and one of Rockwell’s greatest admirers, George Macy (of department store fame), decided that his Heritage Press should publish new editions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Although a few well-known illustrators had taken their turn at the books, a stellar performance akin to that achieved by H. K. Browne or Edward Kemble for Dickens had eluded them. Even Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth had illustrated a few of Twain’s texts, but nobody had gotten his two most famous works quite right yet, at least as far as George Macy was concerned.

  Rockwell could even claim that Clemens, or Mark Twain, as he was known to his public, already flowed, albeit weakly, through the bloodlines of the illustrator’s family: Twain had been a weekend houseguest of Uncle Sam Rockwell’s wife around the time that Waring and Nancy were getting married. A more specific kinship surfaced when Rockwell discovered that Twain seemed at least a blood brother to himself, another artist who created out of the same compensatory needs that Rockwell did. The match of raconteurs, author to illustrator, seemed ideal. Almost in wonder, Rockwell related to a contemporary writer the story of an old judge who had known the author as a young boy: “He told me that Sam Clemens was really a sickly, sensitive boy, so what he put into his stories were the things that he would have done had he been stronger—things that he no doubt dreamed of doing. If he had actually done these things, possibly he would have been such an extrovert that he could not have written about them.”

  Part of the project’s appeal to Rockwell was the mandate (from the ghost of Pyle as well as the very alive George Macy) to make such classic illustrations historically accurate. Rockwell set out to explore Hannibal, Missouri, making much of the fact that no previous artist had bothered to authenticate his illustrations for Twain. As if this assignment fueled his confidence in his future, Rockwell finally justified to himself using the camera to prepare properly for the final oil paintings. Now, when he was following in the footsteps of Howard Pyle, and joining a very select club of those chosen to illustrate the classics, he could appeal to his own instincts, and his own desire to move forward and transform his talent into the next stages.

  He developed a routine, wherein he drew from live models back home and relied primarily on photographs on site. Quickly, he learned the merits of the camera over live modeling in almost any context. Previously, a painting had required an average of three days with each model; when the models were animals or young children, the process stretched out even further. Relying on live posing also limited the contortions he could demand; a child, especially, could only hold a difficult position for a short period of time. He was correct that his reputation would suffer when word got out that he had caved in; Edward Hopper was to say that he had “nothing but contempt for Norman Rockwell,” whose paintings were all done from photographs “and they look it, too.” But, as usual, the artist simply decided to do what would serve his art best and turned a deaf ear to the critics.

  Rockwell read the Twain texts carefully, sketching in the margins his concepts for the scenes he considered most vivid. From the often tiny gestures he scribbled, his accretive method of working shows clearly. A moment here, another one a few paragraphs later, and within a few pages, a full-concept sketch emerges. Certain constraints were clear from the start: he needed to spread the color plates fairly evenly throughout the books, and Macy had limited the number of illustrations to eight color plates per book. Other than these requirements, he was free to collaborate with the muse of Mark Twain.

  The illustrations are generally considered a great success, and Rockwell himself was very happy with the results. The Tom Sawyer collection, published the following year, employs the caricature of Rockwell’s 1920s paintings of children and their adventures, while the Huck Finn series, published in 1940, leans far more in the direction the illustrator would travel in the late thirties, toward a grittier, detailed realism expressed in a more painterly fashion. Rockwell’s contrasting treatment of the two stories clearly aims at implying the duality of Twain’s texts; those who do not admire the results usually find the cartoony Tom Sawyer figures unworthy of the subterranean pressures of childhood implied in Twain’s work. Nonetheless, Rockwell’s illustration of, in this case, the perhaps too aptly named whitewashing scene in Tom Sawyer remains one of his most widely circulated illustrations: in 1972 the U.S. Postal Service issued the picture as a stamp.

  The town of Hannibal, Missouri, expressed no reservations either, and George Macy was truly delighted with the illustrations, especially for Tom Sawyer, which were delivered in a more or less timely fashion. Hannibal’s Chamber of Commerce begged Rockwell more than once to loan the original oils to its local Mark Twain museum. In January 1939, when the town museum was forced to send the paintings to a temporary exhibit in New York, local civic leaders wrote Rockwell detailing what a loss it represented to their institution: “Last year we had more than thirty-four thousand visitors who took the time and trouble to register at the museum,” they explained. Groups planned their vacation around Hannibal, the letter informed Rockwell, because they’d heard that the oils were on display. Please, the Chamber of Commerce entreated the artist, return the oils to their tempor
ary home as soon as possible.

  At the end of a year crowned by this jewel of an assignment, Norman Rockwell felt that he might be back on track again. Mary, naturally, was thrilled that her husband was in such good spirits and that his friendly nature was coming to the fore as a result. She had always enjoyed being around other people, and the years of her husband’s depression had too often been emotionally lonely ones for her. Rockwell, aware of the sacrifice his work exacted from her, set about making more of an effort to socialize. On December 31, 1935, the Rockwells were guests at a wild New Year’s Eve party at the Waldorf Astoria, where they enjoyed themselves enough that they mentioned the event in future years to their children, including their youngest, who was conceived, they believed, on that very night.

  That magical evening did indeed mark a turn for the better. In 1936, the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey, commissioned Rockwell to do what would be his only mural, a detailed historical vignette of Yankee Doodle, 60 by 152 inches. Closer in spirit to Hogarth than anything else the illustrator did, the painting proceeded by starts and spurts, while Rockwell continued to work on the Mark Twain paintings alongside the Yankee Doodle Dandy. During the nine months that he worked sporadically at the Princeton project, finally mounted in 1937 onto the wall where it remains, he also began work on a series of literary figures, including a mannered, eerily compelling Ichabod Crane that would have unnerved Washington Irving himself. Regrettably, the paintings were never published, but Rockwell’s new confidence shone forth in their execution. Keeping company with authors he considered worthy of the best art could offer had proven to be the jolt to his system he’d been looking for.

  His newly elevated spirits allowed his lighter side to take over for a while, and events that would have stung him earlier actually amused him for a while. He and the artist Rockwell Kent had, for some years, been regularly confused for each other. Especially since the openly left-wing Kent was viewed suspiciously by many of the conservative Americans who embraced Rockwell, the confusion had continued to amuse both sophisticates, far more than their publics. Both men wrote an amusing and good-natured vignette for the spring 1936 volume of a quarterly for “bookmen,” Colophon, contrasting the perils and pleasures of being mistaken repeatedly for each other.

  Such a forum proved particularly gratifying in light of the (admittedly short-lived) feature inaugurated that year by the Post, a book-review section defiantly called “The Literary Lowbrow.” A kind of reverse snobbism, Lorimer’s anti-intellectualism seemed to be going out of its way to offend the literati. And yet there could be no doubt of the cultural clout the Post still carried. For instance, although every noted illustrator in New York had practically begged Hollywood to take a look at a model in consistent demand for magazine cover poses, Mardee Hoff, only after Norman Rockwell used Hoff on the Post in March 1936, posing her as a movie star on tour, did the studios take notice. The day the Post hit the stands, three movie companies wired Lorimer to get the model’s name, and Twentieth Century–Fox had placed her under contract by the end of the following week. When asked by one of the Fox executives why he hadn’t been told of her earlier, Hoff replied, “You have. I’m the girl Mr. Rockwell and Mr. [Joseph Medill] Patterson have been telling you about for two years.”

  Regardless of the cachet the Post conferred in certain circles, Rockwell understood by now that critical respect and his own personal satisfaction would largely lie elsewhere. He spent the summer working on the mural in Princeton and on sketches for various American classics that he hoped could be produced as a series. Usually a time when he tried, however unsuccessfully, to slow his pace, summer this year was a time to focus even more than usual on his work, as the Rockwells’ third child was due in early fall, and he wanted the security of finished work by the baby’s arrival. His extra efforts and Mary’s saintlike patience with them seemed worth it when, on September 16, 1936, Peter Barstow Rockwell was born.

  Over the next few months, Rockwell heard rumors that some big changes were about to occur at the Post. He couldn’t allow himself to worry about what the gossip portended, because he had too many commissions he needed to focus on. Having another baby in the household didn’t affect him very much, since he allowed nothing to throw off his daily work routine. But thinking about the future of the Post could really trip him up, so he put such thoughts aside.

  Toward the end of the year, however, a few days after the nearly three-month-old Peter had been baptized at the neighborhood Episcopal church, Lorimer tearfully explained to Rockwell that the board wanted a younger man to take over the leadership of the magazine. The Saturday Evening Post had lost touch with the nation’s mood, and its publishers believed that new blood was needed to realign the magazine with its age. During the twenties and thirties, Lorimer had stridently promoted his vision of a nativist America just emerged from its Old World cocoon. Determined to convince the nation to embrace isolationism and to bandage the wounds of the Great Depression locally rather than through federal intervention, he had ended up sounding more melodramatic than romantic in recent months. And yet, when the December 26 edition of the Post informed its readers, through the first signed editorial in its history, that the Boss was retiring, it was easy to understand the ambivalence even of those who had sought the change. Lorimer’s politics had always been far more complicated than categorical, as this crazy mosaic of liberal and reactionary measures reflects:

  For many years we have advocated the protection of investors; proper regulation of child labor, particularly in the mills, the factories and in some farming operations; slum clearance; the conservation of natural resources, and other reforms.

  As we have often said, the curse of America has been our haste to develop and to overdevelop everything in sight for the sake of a quick private profit and a continuing public loss; to graze and to overgraze our ranges; to bring in hordes of aliens, regardless of their fitness or unfitness for Americanization, to meet the demand for cheap labor. . . .

  . . . in spite of this America has always forged ahead on the courage and initiative of its private citizens. . . . Could a paternalistic government have done better? I venture to doubt it. . . . character cannot be imposed from without.

  The tributes to Lorimer at this time, and even more the next summer, when he died of throat cancer, suggest the reasons Rockwell admired the Boss. His former competitors around the country wrote of him, “He was a man whose fairness and honesty established new and higher standards in the professions.” And, “He was the demonstrated success of our ideals. [He possessed] an integrity of purpose, an intellectual force, and a human quality.” “The Henry Ford of American literature” praised The New York Times, and the paper continued that the Post had “probably had more influence upon the cultural life of America than any other [publication].” The Herald Tribune declared that Lorimer “was the most notable magazine editor of our times,” shaping middle-class consciousness into a more thoughtful, mindful morality.

  One of the last editorial decisions of this complicated man whom critics sought from the beginning to pigeonhole was his acquisition of a series of articles by Gertrude Stein. Her topic was money, a subject usually far too sacred to assign to anyone except the economists or hard-core reporters. When his staff, opposed to his frivolity, asked him why he had made the move, he answered just as he would have more than thirty-five years before: because it amused him. This conviction that his own tastes would resonate with his millions of readers guided the decisions Lorimer made throughout his tenure, and it steeled even his final days. The integrity and good intentions that seemed always to have guided the editor convinced even his intellectual and financial enemies that the country should rightly mourn the passing of a great man. His death saddened Rockwell, who was already finding himself unsettled by Lorimer’s successor.

  18

  Plotting Escapes

  During the early part of 1938, Rockwell took his family out to Alhambra, where Mary and the boys could visit with the Barstows, while he w
orked his connections in Hollywood. Once again the artist painted Gary Cooper, this time for a promotional poster for his new movie, Samuel Goldwyn’s The Adventures of Marco Polo. At least every few years since 1930, Norman and Mary had managed to return to California, but now, with three little boys in tow, the trip was more stressful than previously. And the artist wanted a reprieve from extended family anyway; he’d spent money and time the previous year on his mother’s hospitalization in New Rochelle, for nothing of any consequence as far as he was concerned, and now he needed to locate some calm.

  Back in New Rochelle, the daily onslaught of ugliness that began in late February was the furthest thing imaginable from the peacefulness Rockwell sought. On February 24, 1938, a twelve-year-old boy, Peter Levine, started home from Albert Leonard Junior High School, taking his usual route. He stopped off at the candy store on the corner of Fifth and North avenues, then wandered over to the electric shop to get some wire to repair his skates. About the same time, his mother opened the door to her house and found a note on the step, telling her that by now, her son had been kidnapped and that those responsible expected $60,000 in ransom in exchange for the boy.