Even though Vermont created some of the distance he needed to elude his enthusiastic audience, Rockwell still needed periodic escapes from the place he associated with the pressure of deadlines. Although he rented a studio and worked just as hard when he went out to Alhambra and stayed with Mary’s parents, the change of pace allowed him to get away from art editors and publishers who knew too easily where to find him in Arlington, and gave him a respite from the cold—and his boisterous family as well. Every few years, Rockwell would take off for a few months, and when the Christmas break began, Mary would follow with the boys in tow. In 1941, feeling as usual the pressure of too many deadlines and not enough time, Rockwell fled to the Barstows’, where he holed up, having fed several patrons back East the line that he was sick and in a California hospital.
A measure of his fame came when the Hollywood and New York gossip chief Walter Winchell broadcast the sober news that Norman Rockwell, hospitalized, was gravely ill. Compassionate letters from companies that Rockwell owed artwork to—commissions whose work was overdue—arrived, begging him not to worry about anything but getting well. One letter from American Artists makes it clear that the excuse had worked to forestall the McCall’s assignment due January 1: after reading the “contents of your telegram,” the editor agreed to an extension of February 1. It was a ploy Rockwell used with some regularity, though ethically it was less bleak than at first glance. The artist drove himself regularly to the brink of what used to be called a nervous breakdown, and he had no vocabulary convincing enough to call off those (justifiably) hounding him.
Rockwell was already in Alhambra by November, and in early December, Mary took the boys out of school early so they could have a longer break from the Vermont winter. Just after they arrived at the Barstows’, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the boys got more excitement than they had imagined possible. “My grandfather was convinced that the Japanese were going to invade California any day,” Jarvis remembers. “My brothers and I began pulling metal wagons around the neighborhood, asking for tin cans for the war effort. The whole thing seemed like a lovely dream to us; I was the oldest, and I was only ten. Those beautiful streets, where the eucalyptus and orange trees made the place smell like a bower, because the area used to be a huge nursery—it just didn’t seem possible, as my grandfather kept insisting, that the Japanese were going to come attack us in the middle of the road.”
In spite of sitting through too many of their ineffectual grandfather’s tirades against Franklin Roosevelt, the boys loved the change of pace when they visited California. But they failed to develop a close relationship to their grandparents, even though the Barstows were “perfectly nice” to all three young grandsons. A certain distance among the family members kept the emotional temperature in the household too cool for the rowdy Rockwell boys to feel connected to their California relatives.
They were quite fond of their grandfather, believing his wife to be much sterner than he. “It was clear that my grandmother ruled the roost,” Peter Rockwell believes. Their grandfather, by contrast, was a “Humpty-Dumpty figure, with his wonderful oval face and slightly silly, immature air. We all got the feeling that my grandmother, and then my father too, didn’t totally respect him, because he’d not been very successful at his law practice.” But what made the most impression on the children, according to Jarvis Rockwell, was the way that their mother’s parents expected everyone to ignore what to them were weird things—such as “Crazy Aunt Grace,” whom even their mother had been taught to regard as perfectly normal. “And with her mime-colored, white-powdered face and bright blue eye shadow, she wasn’t, as even we children knew,” Jarvis laughed. “This background of denial is how my mother grew up, so no wonder she had problems herself.”
After December 7 that year, the Rockwells spent the rest of the month talking about the war—what they thought would happen, and what they would be able to contribute, especially back in Vermont. The artist had begun his efforts the year before, when the first recruit call went out. Rockwell was eager to assume the position that J. C. Leyendecker had held in World War I, when the older illustrator had been among the most prominent of the wartime propaganda artists. This time, Rockwell would take on the challenge of showing the American people the ideals and ideas behind the gruesome realities they heard about in the newspapers, letters from soldiers abroad, and war correspondents writing in the mass magazines. What made the carnage of another European war worth more American lives? Through paintings that some critics would condemn for whitewashing the dirtiness of battle, Rockwell conveyed the small pleasures that made up the bulk of life back home, however much they contrasted with the size of suffering he felt unwilling to tackle.
If Rockwell’s practical sense of his own duty for World War II was to create images that would ensure the men and women fighting overseas got the logistical and emotional support that sentimental images would ensure, some of the soldiers in the front lines might have preferred that the ugliness of their daily lives be paraded instead. As Private David Webster of the 101st Airborne wrote, after he watched a friend die in combat in February 1945: “He wasn’t twenty years old. He hadn’t begun to live. Shrieking and moaning, he gave up his life on a stretcher. Back in America the standard of living continued to rise. Back in America the race tracks were booming, the night clubs were making record profits, Miami Beach was so crowded you couldn’t get a room anywhere. Few people seemed to care. Hell, this was a boom, this was prosperity, this was the way to fight a war. We wondered if the people would ever know what it cost the soldiers in terror, bloodshed, and hideous, agonizing deaths to win the war.”
Rockwell’s philosophy of wartime propaganda was based, however, on the effect such ugliness had on him; he turned from violence whenever he could, and his strong mechanism of denial sought less direct paths of working for the good of those who suffered, including the G.I.s. To ensure, as the government put it, that the soldiers got “what they needed, and on time,” he felt his talent lay in convincing the Americans at home that they were investing in their vision of what the country stood for in its very Yankee entrails: freedom. This time around, he would do better than his fledgling attempts during the Great War.
One of the first images Rockwell created for the war effort was Willie Gillis. In contrast to Leyendecker’s tall, handsome, masculine icon from World War I, Willie took shape as an unimposing, slightly goofy young man with a shock of reddish hair, a somewhat bewildered smile, and a still developing, gangly body. Rockwell had dreamed him up in a conversation with his wife, who suggested the name Willie Gillis because she’d just finished reading the children a book “about a Scotch boy, Wee Gillis” (not Wee Willie Winkie, as has often been printed). Over the next five years, Rockwell painted eleven Post covers with Willie as the central character, ranging from the first cover, where he was shown at the head of a group of hungry but happy young soldiers following him because he carried the food package from home, to the last, in 1946, where the teenage recruit has grown into a serious young man, attending college on the G.I. Bill. Readers loved the reassuring image of their everyman son, brother, lover, neighbor, or friend, who reminded them of the same guy they worried about daily. Gritty cover images supplied by Rockwell’s friend Mead Schaeffer brought home the size of their men’s challenges overseas; the solidity and predictability of Willie Gillis implied that the war was an aberration and that life would eventually resume its reassuringly trivial, domestic pleasures even though they had been disrupted by the second global conflict in thirty years.
In early 1942, once the family was settled back into their snowed-in farmhouse, Rockwell painted the third Willie Gillis cover, his most somber. Although Willie is at church, the scene takes on a slightly melancholic aura from the isolation of the boy. In the three pews shown, only Willie’s torso and face are visible; the shoulder of a man in front, and the arm of a man behind, their respective officer and upper enlisted stripes prominent, are the only other people represented. Willie’
s eyes are sad, bright with unshed tears, though the pictorial ambiguity on this point is unusual for Rockwell. He could be sitting through an ordinary Sunday service; or he could be at a funeral. Whatever the occasion, he is no longer carefree.
As if confronting such realities wore Rockwell out, he decided by February to go back to California. His home life was peaceful and organized, and there was plenty of room after the renovations—four bedrooms upstairs, for instance—but the cold kept everyone indoors, and the artist often found it hard to concentrate. He enjoyed the regularity of their home life—the family rose at six-forty-five, breakfasted together, and, after the boys went off to school in a neighbor’s car, he and Mary biked or, in the snow, hiked the mountains behind their house. He went to the studio from nine to twelve, ate lunch with Mary at noon, then went back to work until five. By the time he cleaned up the studio one more time (to clear his mind as well as any actual clutter, Rockwell swept it three or four times during his work hours as well), it was time to have dinner. The Rockwells had their evening meal at six o’clock, putting Peter, now six years old, to bed shortly after, and leaving time for the couple to go appraise Rockwell’s work for the day, to read aloud, or for Mary to help the boys with their homework while the artist implemented a small change he’d just thought of.
The pleasures of such a life sustained him emotionally. He even encouraged his sons to wander out to the studio after school and sit on one of his cushioned benches or chairs, doing their schoolwork or painting or chatting, if Rockwell was not undergoing one of his frequent struggles with a particular picture. But because he was so plugged in to a seven-days-a-week work schedule in a location where everyone knew where to find him, he also found himself becoming exhausted far more easily at home than in Alhambra.
Rockwell indulged himself in California, if only a little, by playing the part of the celebrity illustrator, obtaining for his models the starlets and other actors from his movie contacts that ordinarily he’d eschew. He used such professionals for story illustrations, mostly, as well as for the myriad publicity materials the studios actually commissioned him to produce. As long as he was allowed to play with Hollywood on his own terms—briefly and as the famous but friendly illustrator from the East—he enjoyed the encounters, so distant from the daily substance of his life. Instead of admitting that these retreats to Alhambra were just that, Rockwell continued putting out the news of illness forcing him West, in order to slide on deadlines. Eventually, patrons considered Alhambra his second address, as did Henry Dreyfus, writing to the artist about McCall’s enormous pleasure in the Abraham Lincoln illustration that Rockwell had finally delivered. Whatever irritation Rockwell’s missed deadlines caused, when the companies received the paintings at last, their ill will faded in the face of their awe. He could have rushed to meet the deadlines and scrimped on quality, but he seemed constitutionally unable to give less than his best, except on advertisements that he ranked low in both importance and remuneration.
Rockwell stayed in Alhambra until early spring, tracked down even there by Broadway producers interested in putting Willie Gillis on the stage. Such unlikely prospects flattered the artist, but more significant by far to his self-esteem was the replacement of the critical, picky Wesley Stout with the affable, admiring Ben Hibbs, the man who would be Rockwell’s editor as long as he remained at the Post. Soft-spoken, kindly, but with iron in his soul, as Rockwell would say, the forty-two-year-old editor immediately intensified the written coverage of the war. In this first year that Hibbs took the helm, the immediate symbol of a new reign—the updated Post logo, streamlined into a rectangular bar with POST squared in the left half, the rest of the title printed in modest letters above—announced the change of guard. Unlike Stout’s philosophy, which had been to accept as many different illustrators as possible for variety, Hibbs standardized the covers with five or six major contributors. Rockwell was, bar none, anointed the preeminent.
Ben Hibbs’s encouragement ensured that Rockwell felt appreciated and liked again, the circumstances under which he did his best work. Under such leadership, Rockwell’s imagination relaxed enough to allow him some free creative thought, which he directed toward realizing a great painting for the war effort. During the spring of 1942, he pondered what project would be best, but, as usual, coming up with a good idea proved the hardest part.
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“The Big Ideas”
What he finally devised relied on a speech President Roosevelt had made to Congress over a year earlier, on January 6, 1941. Roosevelt opened his talk with a somber reference to the danger the country faced: “At no previous time has American security been threatened from without as it is today.” After enumerating the liberal aims of a democracy, Roosevelt catalogued the more abstract principles that, he claimed, needed to be part of all societies. He ended each of these Four Freedoms, as they would be called, with the words “everywhere in the world” or “anywhere in the world.” Seven months later, on August 9, he met with Winston Churchill for the first time, the two sequestered aboard a warship in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. There they discussed ways the still-neutral United States could support Britain’s mission, and the means of assistance the British could offer to keep Japan from involving the United States. The outcome of the informal meetings was their joint statement, the Atlantic Charter, whose basic principles of nonaggression, the right to self-defense, and freedom of the seas echoed in principle the Four Freedoms.
Unwittingly swallowing whole the myth that the artist savvily created for them in the early stages of his career, commentators on Rockwell’s art have often avowed that the illustrator was apolitical. And by the forties, Rockwell had indeed grown comfortable sustaining the posture that Lorimer’s political fervor had encouraged him to adopt in order to maintain some distance from the imposing Boss. Frequently observing—truthfully—that he in fact did not enjoy partisan politics and that he wanted to appeal to all the people, Rockwell made few public gestures that clarified where he stood on the political spectrum. Yet he honestly believed that the Yankee virtues—tolerance for differences, courtesy, kindness, and the freedoms that FDR articulated—were the substance of a political creed that his paintings openly embraced. While the country’s remaining isolationists were angry at Roosevelt’s signing the Charter, for instance, Rockwell was pleased. Later, when the principles behind the Charter guided the founding of the United Nations, the artist would throw his support behind that organization. Of the beliefs he held most dear, tolerance—and the freedom necessary to ensure its flourishing—were most important to him. His habit of tacking favorite aphorisms on his studio wall prominently included one that read “The Real Test of a Liberal Is the Willingness to Listen Fairly to a Person with Opposite Opinions.”
That Americans would fight for freedom, whether for themselves or for others, sat well with his deepest beliefs. For reasons unclear—except that his explanation added drama—Rockwell would later say that he heard the Four Freedoms speech and pondered it briefly, then awoke with a three A.M. epiphany, the inspiration to paint the abstractions into clear narrative stories. In fact, over a year elapsed between Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech and Rockwell’s decision, but the year was crucial to the artist’s goal: during this period when Ben Hibbs had come in to replace Stout, the illustrator felt freer to suggest topics, surer of his status. Rockwell nonetheless crafted the story of the Four Freedom posters that he began painting during the summer of 1942 into one of rejection by the government and salvation by Hibbs.
The accounts vary depending on when he told the story, but basically Rockwell claimed to have hopped on a train to Washington with Mead Schaeffer, who wanted to sell the government on his own ideas. From office to office, the two men were bounced around, treated unceremoniously, Rockwell’s sketches rejected. Discouraged, the men rode back home, but suddenly realized, as they neared Philadelphia, that the Post might be interested. Indeed, it was, and Rockwell began work on the four articulations of abstract freedoms worth f
ighting for, all of which would be published consecutively in the Post, with writers’ essays reflecting other points of view as well.
As usual, the facts were somewhat otherwise. Maureen Hart-Hennessey, the assistant director of the Norman Rockwell Museum, explains that when Rockwell and Thomas Mabry, the assistant chief of the Graphics Division of the Office of War Information (OWI), met during the spring of 1942, it is unclear which man had initiated the meeting. But a letter from Mabry makes it clear that the OWI man had written Rockwell during this period, explaining that posters of the Four Freedoms were one of the government’s most “urgent needs.” Rockwell had traveled alone to Washington to meet with him that spring, and only after that did he have his “epiphany,” which was the realization of how he could present the subject effectively. He finished the sketches, then, with Mead Schaeffer and Orion Wynford from the Brown and Bigelow calendar company, returned to Washington, where the confusion at that time from three separate agencies combining into the one, monolithic OWI probably contributed to the shuffling around that the men encountered.
Norman Rockwell Page 36