Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  22

  Square Dancing on the Village Green

  During the fall of 1942, when Rockwell was bearing down on the Four Freedoms, Mary was worriedly calculating whether to accept an offer on their New Rochelle house or to renew the renters’ lease instead. A prospective buyer had shown up, and it would be good to get out of paying on two mortgages; but she had little chance to consult with her husband on their financial matters, though the letters from the realtors became more pressing when she failed to respond in a timely fashion. Worse still, the Internal Revenue office had written of an impending audit. Correspondence from the Rockwells’ accountant reveals Mary frantically trying to find old records and checkbooks that she’d not kept track of in their move—the period the government was going to audit. In spite of her husband’s intermittent suggestions that they hire someone to take over at least the business finances, Mary had insisted that she could handle the monetary interests of both family and career. Now, tactfully, the accountant wrote the Internal Revenue of Mrs. Rockwell’s less-than-thorough bookkeeping, advising the office that the Rockwells would nonetheless do everything possible to comply.

  Photographs of Mary Rockwell from this period show her beginning to exhibit signs of stress. Circles under her eyes have become a permanent fixture, and, though ever mindful of her figure, she has begun to put on weight. An interview in Good Housekeeping describes her as wearing glasses regularly, which she explains she used to avoid when she could for the sake of appearances; now she thinks such vanity silly. Possibly a positive sign of independence, it seems just as likely that Mary’s flouting of old standards for her appearance stemmed from her inability to spend time on what now seems frivolous. Her sons are eleven, nine, and six years old, and her aging mother-in-law is still living nearby; her husband depends on her daily feedback and discussion, and expects her to answer his voluminous fan mail, collect props, and deliver his paintings, and she often has to take the train to New York or Philadelphia—all in addition to handling the finances. At least the Rockwells hired a couple to work part-time for them: Mrs. Wheaton as the cook, Mr. Wheaton as a handyman.

  Rockwell’s income was certainly high compared to that of most Americans, but he and Mary lived somewhat carelessly, making travel and household decisions impulsively in ways that caused them to pay premium prices where more cautious and timely buying would have cut their costs dramatically. Now they decided that it was foolish not to spend some of Rockwell’s earnings on hiring more outside help, since Mary was overburdened and Rockwell always behind. Again this year, at Christmastime, the couple found themselves unable to pay off a bank note for $1,500, electing instead to ask the bank to roll it into a larger loan for $2,500, tiding them over until the payments they expected at the beginning of 1943 arrived. Reprieved until January 10, when the entire note would come due, the Rockwells paused to notice that their year’s income had dropped to around $37,400, largely because of less income from ads, as Rockwell had cut back on these in favor of the Four Freedoms. Neither the Sunday dinners, with the uncompromisingly fine roast and vegetables, nor the yearly trip to the Ringling Brothers circus at Madison Square Garden, Rockwell’s treat to his sons, was threatened by the slight decline in their finances. Still, as 1943 opened, Mary Rockwell was stretched thin from solving one problem after another, with very little intervention from her husband. Even positive events required energy she felt short of: the household was turned upside down when the painter was honored in Washington by Under Secretary of the Treasury Daniel Bell, who presented Rockwell with the Distinguished Service Award for lending his talents so bountifully to the war cause. At least by late spring, Mary felt relief from the improvement of the family’s finances, when the Post check for $10,000 arrived, payment in full for the Four Freedoms.

  By mid-May, the harried woman had more than the usual reasons to feel pulled from all sides: the boys were home from school with the measles. At least they were going through it at the same time, and she only had to come up with one set of diversions for her bored sons. About a week into their quarantine, the Rockwells’ middle son, Tommy, sleeping restlessly either from the illness or because he’d napped so much throughout the day, groggily wandered into the bathroom around one A.M., when a desultory glance outside the window confused him; he thought he saw orange flames leaping out of his father’s studio next door. He woke his parents, and Rockwell, finding the phone out of order, drove to the next house, a half mile away, to call for help. By the time the fire department arrived, the entire studio had burned to the ground. Rockwell’s career-long collection of authentic period costumes, his extensive reference library, thirty original oils, all his materials, were gone. Neighbors gathered throughout the ordinarily dark early morning hours, sitting on the hillside with doughnuts and coffee Mary provided, comforting the artist and watching the smoldering ashes. Rockwell took the public and private attitude—which, as Mary later noted, had worried her—that the calamity was not so hard to manage after all.

  Fortunately, the last of the Four Freedoms had been shipped off only a few months earlier, and from comments Rockwell made, it is possible that the paintings, all published by now, had been stored in the studio until a few days earlier. Perhaps the near catastrophe of losing them made it easier for him to conduct himself stoically now, behavior that won respect from the Vermonters. He announced to his family the next day that since they were all tired of being so isolated anyway, they would find another house in town, rather than rebuild the studio.

  News of Rockwell’s studio fire was published nationally; Rockwell himself publicized the event by, naturally, working it out in his art. Copying closely the model his cousin Mary Amy Orpen had developed of sketching tiny cartoons on one page to illustrate a series of events, he created a page of whimsy, making it sound as if the barn burning was but another great adventure in the life of a country artist. The real cost to him went unexpressed, though Mary Rockwell, even at the time, believed her husband’s lack of dealing with his loss would come back to haunt him. As soon as the nation’s illustrators learned of the catastrophe, they banded together to replace much of what he had lost. Fans began sending him costume pieces, which he stored in the garage until even that overflowed.

  In the meantime, he and Mary had located a large, clapboard farmhouse three miles down the valley in West Arlington. Situated across from the village green where they square-danced on Friday nights, the 1754 residence sat fifty feet from its twin building, occupied by a well-respected local dairy farmer and his family, the Edgertons. Rockwell signed the mortgage within days, and began arranging for an old red barn out back to be converted into his new studio. Until it was completed, he worked in Schaef’s space, much smaller than what he was used to. And within a few years, he had a small cottage built in the woods about a mile from the house, so that he or Mary could escape the increasingly oppressive sense of being a tourist site, especially in the summers.

  The Rockwells would come to feel that the biggest blessing derived from the fire was the friends they gained next door. Jim and Clara Edgerton barely managed to support their four children through nonstop work on their small dairy farm, but their sense of fun, their dignity, and their tolerance of others resulted in the two families, as different as they were, becoming fast friends. In later years, when Rockwell was interviewed about the Edgertons, he explained: “Farming is a hard life in Vermont,” due to the short growing season, lack of flat land, and the rocky fields. He liked Jim and Clara, because “hard life and misfortune haven’t soured [them]. . . . I don’t think they know how to be mean-spirited or nasty.”

  Rockwell liked people in general, enjoying their idiosyncrasies, indulging their weaknesses, as long as they weren’t self-important or patronizing. A man like Jim Edgerton would have earned his deepest loyalty. The enviably handsome man was known for his gentle disposition and generosity. Always one to cosign for others’ loans even though he barely had enough money for his own family, he was too proud, his son Buddy believes, to bo
rrow money from anyone in his life except for Rockwell, and Buddy believes it a measure of the artist’s character that his father felt able to do so. Somehow, a relationship developed between Jim and Norman that allowed the farmer to freely borrow money until the milk checks arrived, when he’d promptly repay the loan. Buddy believes that Rockwell’s enormous tactfulness eased such matters. “One time, I know Norman wanted to paint their farmhouse. But my dad didn’t have enough money yet to do ours, and Norman didn’t want to make him look bad. So he just waited till we could both paint the twin farmhouses at the same time.”

  Clara Edgerton ran errands for Rockwell, becoming, after Mary, the person he entrusted most often with delivering his ad work to New York and his covers to Philadelphia, when there was no time to mail them. Joy Edgerton helped Mary with kitchen work and assisted her when she entertained out-of-town guests for dinners; the other two children baby-sat for Peter. Most of all, Buddy Edgerton hunted and fished and played ball with Tommy, even buying fishhooks with the money he earned from modeling for Rockwell.

  “I believe that Tommy kind of relied on my household for the normal things a boy often does with his father,” Buddy says. “His own father was always working and didn’t have the time to teach him to drive, like my father did, or go fishing. Sometimes it seemed as if Tommy lived at our house, and I loved it. He and I were close friends, even though I was a few years older.” What the Vermont neighbors thought of the frequent columns lauding Rockwell’s parental involvement, such as The Boston Globe’s May 30 spread that year, showing the artist “giving his son a baseball lesson: the artist will let a painting wait almost any time,” while he shows his son how to hold a bat, was never recorded. Certainly such public mythologizing confused at least the Rockwells’ oldest son, whom the Arlington community always thought of as “different,” Buddy recalls—“Jerry was more of a loner or outsider.” Jerry—Jarvis—Rockwell recalls his acute discomfort at feeling his family actually lived on the covers of Saturday Evening Posts, rather than in reality.

  And, while Rockwell’s sons agree that the Edgertons played a special role in their lives, Jarvis also believes that the relationship was necessarily compromised by the huge divide between the wildly successful New York illustrator and his life, on the one hand, and the native Vermont farmers, on the other. “That difference between us, that we all, especially my father, tried to pretend wasn’t there, created a subliminal tension,” Rockwell’s oldest son asserts. “People enjoy talking about how close everyone was to each other, how we fit in, and that’s not exactly true. I was well aware that the townspeople realized that my father was making a lot of money off capitalizing on their way of life, on semi-becoming one of them. There was no bad faith on anyone’s side, it was just the reality. What could you do about it? But it was like the elephant in the living room that everyone pretends isn’t there and steps around.”

  Hints of such tension surface in Buddy’s still envy-tinged reminiscence of the flagrant ill-treatment of expensive toys he witnessed next door. “The boys would own these incredible new bikes that I’d never even seen before, and they just left them outside. Once Tommy was given a very expensive .22 for Christmas, one I would have given anything for. And he left it outside and let it rust. I told him I couldn’t believe it.” Group snapshots of the Edgertons with Rockwell convey a sense of the painter’s slight awkwardness, especially in contrast to pictures of him socializing with his illustrator friends and their families.

  Rockwell’s professional success was never as wonderfully entwined with his personal life as during the mid-1940s. His tight community of illustrator friends fed his energies—intellectual, technical, social. During this year, Jack Atherton won fourth place in the “Artists for Victory” show, his painting The Black Horse receiving the $3,000 prize out of more than fourteen thousand entries. The Metropolitan Museum took the painting into its permanent collection; if the event stung a little, Rockwell also clearly received validation from working with and being friends with Atherton. When Rockwell could take the time off from his own work, Mead Schaeffer, the third of the regular trio, took his neighbor and colleague along with him for company on many of the tours of military facilities he conducted to paint his fourteen covers of combat forces. Bumping along on a dusty road in a jeep and examining the tanks appealed enormously to Rockwell. Such jaunts combined his desire to socialize with people who spoke his language with the practical need to soak up wartime atmosphere.

  Accompanying Schaef to the Army bases helped produce two of Rockwell’s best World War II pieces, the poster Give Him Enough and On Time and the Post cover Rosie the Riveter, published on May 29, 1943. The massive migration of women during the war into jobs previously held by men was nationally touted as patriotism at work. A year earlier, a popular song of this name made the rounds, as the sight of women in overalls and carrying industrial tools became routine. Rockwell’s particular contribution to the image was to combine so many significant iconic references into one portrait of a woman. Oversized, strong, and well-muscled, her powerful riveting gun lying provocatively across her heavy blue jeans, Rosie seems to be the Statue of Liberty come alive. Modeled obviously from Michelangelo’s Prophet Isaiah, the painting’s reference was immediately caught by Post readers, a few of whom questioned the propriety of appropriating Michelangelo. Rosie acquires additional moral weight through the placement of her foot on top of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, while the ham sandwich she holds domesticates her out of self-righteous monumentalism. Her red curly hair and upturned nose feminize her, even as her ruddy complexion keeps the portrait from becoming a patronizing twist on gender. This woman manages to be prepossessing, powerful, extraordinarily competent—and womanly, too. As another noted Post illustrator of the time, Pete Helck, wrote Rockwell in admiration, he had meant to write a condolence letter about the fire, but having just seen Rosie, “I could no longer procrastinate. I think it’s a beauty, and full of dignity in spite of its grand humor. And, Rosie’s right arm is a piece of painting that positively thrills me. Rosie’s swell bulk and design make her a contemporary Sibylle.”

  Norman Rockwell is not usually thought of in the company of gender-bending artists. Yet his quiet belief in women’s strength and their right to live active lives informs many of his paintings. Whatever lessons he learned from his mother’s manipulative weakness he may have saved for himself; as his youngest son insists, the artist was a master at getting women to take care of him, even to defend him, in spite of the fact that he was perfectly capable himself. He appreciated and turned to strong women who were players, who assumed their own competency. In his art, such attitudes took various forms, including the cliché, such as his well-known cover of the tomboy, the picture of the schoolgirl with pigtails who sits happily outside the agitated principal’s office, smiling broadly in spite of her badly blackened eye. More suggestively, the August 24, 1940, Post cover of the camper returning home from the summer had “raised a small tempest of dissension,” according to Post editors, because of the ambiguous gender of the child.

  Although the subject was painted as a girl—the long hair barely visible, at the least, gives the identity away—the accoutrements of frogs, tadpoles, plants, and the child’s general disarray, as well as the boyish suit and hat, confused the audience. A Girl Scout claimed that, in addition to the suspicious snake and field mouse, other markers of masculinity come from the “big feet, legs, hands, and ears.” But a Boy Scout insists that “no boy” would ever so “clumsily” apply a knee bandage, and that the youngster’s coat “is buttoned girl-fashion.” It is easy to impugn Rockwell’s cultural naïveté in pretending he could universalize the particular, but in cases such as this one, the joke seems to be on us: the artist is far too adept at delineating boys from girls to have accidentally failed to denote the gender. In this painting, the lack of Rockwell’s typical specificity gently indicts the audience that too often sentimentally homogenizes his art against the intention of the artist.

  As comically inc
ongruous as it seems, during the period when Rockwell’s Four Freedoms were blanketing the country with what some artists complained was an anemic and whitewashed vision of war, the F.B.I. decided to hunt bear in the Vermont woods. Whether the result of some specific concern—perhaps the public unhappiness Rockwell had expressed about the government not leaping at his initial offer to do the Four Freedoms for them, that matter commonly alluded to in the magazines of the period—or merely a routine secret inspection of someone speaking as an American diplomat of sorts, J. Edgar Hoover had decided to do a little investigating of the nation’s most popular artist. A Freedom of Information request reveals an F.B.I. folder on Rockwell that was initiated between the time of the studio fire and the publication of Rosie. An internal memo (with the writer’s identity blacked out) reads: “Pursuant to the Director’s instructions I spent a short while with Mrs. Norman Rockwell showing her the Exhibit Room this morning while Mr. Rockwell was taking the photograph of the Director.” The memo continues by detailing the interest Rockwell had shown in doing a picture sketch of the Bureau as well as executing the commission for Hoover’s portrait. If his fans and detractors both considered Rockwell domestically patriotic or prosaically apolitical at worst, the F.B.I. needed to assure itself that there was no Communist infiltration being perpetrated by a potentially Pied Piper artist capable of piping the nation into the sea. Within a few years, they would find more fodder for their files.