Not least for the serious emphasis it gave to the painterly qualities in Rockwell, Arthur Guptill’s book marked an important moment in Rockwell’s career. The text provided a brief glance at Rockwell’s charming rural life in Vermont, assessed the full force of his charm and wit, then devoted most of its pages to explaining how Rockwell painted his pictures. The explanations were technical and fulfilling, taking the reader through the photography sessions to the preliminary sketches to the painting itself. Even the brands of products are listed, from the eraser Rockwell used to degloss his sketching paper, to the fixative he used to keep his charcoal from smudging, to the brand of paints and undercoating. Guptill draws a picture of the way Rockwell sets up his palette, naming every color, from the alizaron crimson to cadmium orange to cobalt blue.
The book struck a respectful and affectionate tone, and it remains a classic for anyone wanting to understand Rockwell’s technique. That Guptill undertook the project, for which he accompanied Rockwell around the country on various photography shoots, as well as sitting with him in the studio, speaks to the artist’s national prominence in 1946.
Rockwell took a few days during the fall to promote the book, which generally received positive reviews, though just as frequent were remarks that its subject was outré among current painters. One tack commonly used among interviewers was that of The Cleveland News, where Rockwell’s superficial country airs were contrasted in surprise with his sophisticated conversation. Writing of the “people’s illustrator,” the editor exclaims “what a country boy Rockwell, the New York City born-and-educated man, looks! . . . lean, emaciated, homely, relaxed, with a humorous drawl and gentle good manners.” At a lunch in honor of Rockwell that the editor attended, before the amazed newspaperman knows it, the artist is discoursing with art directors about “Rivera and Orozco” or “telling art school students about the house-paint preparations which will save their canvases.”
The artist did not devote as much time to promoting Guptill’s book as the author had hoped for, since Rockwell could not afford the time off work. The family traveled to California for the holidays, where the local film industry lavished press attention on Rockwell for the extensive advertising he had created for Twentieth Century–Fox’s The Razor’s Edge, especially a full-color painting of actor Tyrone Power. Yielding more pleasure to both Mary and Norman, however, was their year-end realization that the earnings had reached $52,600 in 1946, news that relieved their worry over escalating costs such as Jarvis’s private school bills and Nancy Rockwell’s mostly imaginary health problems.
Mary was irritated over nonfamily members as well who, she felt, tried to claim too many of her husband’s resources. Most of all, she was growing jealous of Gene Pelham, whose indispensability Rockwell often and loudly proclaimed. Rockwell’s sincere and obvious appreciation of the photographer’s devotion to the artist’s needs, taking as many pictures as his boss needed, and staying as late as necessary to develop them, encouraged Pelham’s loyalty. Rockwell’s instinctive ability to make others protective of him engendered a sense of intimacy on the part of the caretaker that wasn’t necessarily felt by Rockwell himself. As an elderly man, Gene Pelham made some slightly contemptuous references to Mary’s flightiness that suggested he and Mary were competing to feel most important to the illustrator.
Two new acquaintances whom both Norman and Mary believed to represent real improvements to their social and professional lives were Mary and Chris Schafer, who moved from Chicago to Arlington this year because they wanted a rural place to raise their kids. They bought illustrator George Hughes’s farm, but they likewise decided that tending fifty cows was more work than they had bargained for, and they sold it but stayed in Arlington anyway. The bastion of illustrators nestled within the mountain community gave rise to a lively social life. “Any event was an excuse for a party,” Mary Schafer remembers. “Bastille day, a birthday, whatever. Conversation [was] amazing, its range—Rockwell familiar with subjects from baseball to literature, Jack so much about music. Norman [possessed such a] keen sense of humor.” The overabundance of wit led to many long nights of party games, including Charades, Twenty Questions, and something called “the Game,” where players wrote on a sheet of paper what they most liked and disliked. The papers were distributed and people guessed who had written what. Rockwell’s were always particularly telling, she recalls: what did he most like? Checks in the mail. And he liked least the extra edges of perforated white paper surrounding a sheet of new postage stamps.
It’s pleasant to think, at least, that the new vitality the family-oriented Schafers brought to the community inspired the Rockwells to seek more time to enjoy their own brood. In 1947, Norman and Mary decided that they deserved a real vacation again, one with no other relatives around. They hadn’t really taken one, except to go to California, since Peter’s birth. And, as the theme of children appeared in all six of his Post covers this year, Rockwell seemed to be especially aware of his sons, possibly, as Jarvis suggests, because the oldest one had been at boarding school. Since everyone in the family liked water sports, Provincetown conveniently suited them all, and they rented a house on the beach for at least a month, after Rockwell had secured use of a studio nearby. The family arrived to discover that, totally coincidentally, Mary Amy Orpen and her college roommate had rented the cottage next door. The Rockwells and the two young women went sailing together, where Mary Amy noticed how relaxed the water made Mary Rockwell. The girls left soon after the Rockwells arrived, which is when disaster, as the sons recall, struck. “My parents were riding bikes, and the front wheel of the bike my dad had rented collapsed suddenly, with no warning, throwing him over the handlebars,” Peter remembers vividly. Rockwell broke his upper jaw badly, a complicated fracture that involved a delicate repair to the maxillae as well as replacing the teeth he had knocked out. Because it was the Fourth of July, no dentist could be found, and Rockwell rode around in a taxi, ending up a few hours away in Hyannis before someone was found to wire the artist’s jaw shut. Luckily, a dental surgeon who had worked on veterans with war wounds was in the area, and the specialist operated on the artist. Although Rockwell pretended to be sick when he needed deadline extensions, he was especially reticent about real medical problems, and he strove successfully to keep this latest injury under wraps. Pictures of his face before and after the accident, however, show the slightly realigned bone structure.
Although Jarvis believes his father enjoyed, in one sense, the scars and war stories that served as the aftermath of the accident—“it was the boy thing, the way it was all so typical of being male, that’s what he liked about it”—Rockwell spent long hours over the next year in the dentist’s chair. The accident cost him income—that year, his earnings dropped to $37,000—and money out-of-pocket as well, for the expensive medical repairs. Typically, he made a joke of the experience, claiming that he was one of the only people he knew who went to the dentist so often that he fell asleep in the chair.
The rest of the family enjoyed their vacation immensely. As Tommy’s end-of-summer note to Baba made clear, they spent their time swimming as much as possible. Mary’s childhood summers at California beaches paid off, according to Peter Rockwell. She was such a good swimmer that she’d swim “way out beyond the surf and keep going, occasionally taking me with her.” When Rockwell healed enough to go out of the house, the family awoke at three A.M. to catch a ride on the commercial fishing boats, so they could see what real fishermen did for a living. And, in the late afternoons, the boys would sit on a bench with the local old men and learn to whittle pieces of wood into rowboats. But Rockwell himself spent a frustrating summer, his jaw wired for months. Back home, even more than usual Mary found herself picking up the professional slack that her husband’s injury created.
In spite of moving Nancy Rockwell back to Providence, Rhode Island, Mary’s household duties seemed to expand in the fall as well. She found herself frequently driving her mother-in-law back and forth between Arlington and th
e cousins’ home, since the older woman’s health actually did seem to be deteriorating and the bus and train were difficult for her to manage. Mary often hosted the Providence relatives en masse, partly because she was too busy at home to provide transportation for her mother-in-law or to facilitate the older woman’s visits to the Rockwells’ house. She also coordinated the schedule for students touring Rockwell’s studio, whether for the occasional visitor from a professional school, or the group of sixth-grade students from Burlington who happily selected Rockwell’s studio as their yearly field trip. Soon afterward, when one of the girls from the class died of leukemia, Mary would ensure that Rockwell’s memorial gift to the school arrived safely, his painting for the November 8 Post cover, The Babysitter. And she engaged throughout the second half of that year in discussions with Rockwell’s lawyers over the feasibility of continuing to hold the mortgage on the Modern and Colonial Theatres, whose owner was typically unable to make his monthly payments.
Infrequently, Mary got away from her home duties by traveling on location with her husband. As part of the illustration series of Middle America and small-town occupations that Rockwell, at Ken Stuart’s behest, was still doing for the Post, he went to Portland, Indiana, in early November. From what her sons remember, she didn’t like Ken Stuart, and she wasn’t partial to her husband’s work being yoked to Stuart’s ideas. When the Athertons and Mead Schaeffer’s family got together with the Rockwells for the Thanksgiving holidays, Jack and Norman were able to practice what they would preach about too-powerful art directors at their joint talk, the coming week, at the Society of Illustrators. Strategically, Rockwell had shared a place on the same stage that spring with Ken Stuart himself, discussing other challenges that illustrators faced. As her husband would tell Mary repeatedly, it was important to create alliances, and to choose your battles carefully.
As if afraid that his growing reputation would create animosity toward him, Rockwell determined that it was more important than ever to get along with everyone. He had decided to initiate a new line of calendars, to be published by Brown and Bigelow, the same company that issued the Boy Scout calendars so successfully. Rockwell approached the Minnesota manufacturer about illustrating a yearly product based on the four seasons; he would provide four quarterly scenes for each year’s calendar. The first copy would come out the following year, and from 1948 to 1964, the series would compete only with the Boy Scouts calendar for first place in sales. But the commission meant yet more demands on Rockwell’s time, and other overcommitments he had made had to be backed out of as gracefully as possible by his wife, acting on his behalf.
Also looming was his potential involvement in a correspondence school for illustrators that his friend Al Dorne was trying to set up. By the end of December, Rockwell’s lawyers had decided the enterprise was legitimate and worth their client’s participation. During the school’s early planning stages, Rockwell was supposed to survey the market for such a program among the artists manqué of Hollywood when he made his next trip to California, and his interest was keen enough to start putting out feelers.
Fortunate at least since the early thirties in eventually devising interesting new venues—or, perhaps, industrious in his efforts to prepare for such good fortune—Rockwell rarely had the need to conjure up excitement. Mary Rockwell, in contrast, read books primarily to satisfy her desire for adventure, and the less demanding her household responsibilities became as the boys grew older, the more time she had to lose her sense of self. Nobody remembers when she first started drinking too much. Certainly, by the beginning of 1948, she was showing signs of mental fatigue. She was only forty years old, and her two oldest sons were spending most of their time away from home, Tommy having recently joined Jarvis at Oakwood. And her youngest was only six years away from entering college himself. It was time for her to reestablish herself outside the roles of mother and wife, and she began participating in local writing classes. At this stage, Mary’s sons sometimes wondered why their mother worried so much; but, looking back, Jarvis recalls seeing her hunched next to a visiting teacher on their living room couch several years before, earnestly talking to the other woman about her own unfulfilled ambitions and fears of inadequacy.
It is easy, so much so that the ease urges caution on us, to posit Mary Rockwell’s problems, the subsequent years of alcohol abuse and mental illness, as integrally connected to her husband’s career and his consequent emotional distance. Like Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, we could surmise: the talented woman, forced to play second fiddle to her famous husband, languished in the wake of his fame. And Mary Rockwell did dedicate herself to ensuring that her husband’s work could always proceed unimpeded, from cooking the food he preferred to keeping the hours he worked best by to spending her days taking care of his professional and domestic needs.
But it is also true that Norman Rockwell was not averse to hiring people to do the chores Mary performed instead. He had admired her brains and competence and social extroversion from their first meeting; and nothing suggests that he enjoyed her sacrificing any of them on his behalf. He just didn’t want her needs to stand in the way of his career, and she knew no other way to meet such a requirement than through making herself indispensable to him. What is saddest about such a tale is the evidence suggesting that he found indispensable what was in fact easiest for her to give—emotional support, belief in his talent, and honesty in her criticism. The rest—the running of errands, the housekeeping, the answering of fan mail, the tending of his mother—all this he found easy to replace with professional help, when Mary finally had no more ability to provide it.
After George and Casey Hughes were released from the responsibility of the farm that they’d sold to Chris and Mary Schafer, they moved closer to West Arlington and found themselves free to socialize more frequently. Jarvis Rockwell recalls the suave, dashing, man-about-town figure that George Hughes cut; he remembers, too, his sense that his mother had developed “a crush” on the urbane illustrator. “I can’t recall all the clues,” he says. “But even a picture I’ve seen brings those memories to mind—my mother, looking really pretty and kind of dolled-up, when ordinarily at this time she didn’t make much of an effort. And it was to be with the Hugheses.”
During an interview in 1986, George Hughes spoke not of Mary Rockwell but of Mary’s husband’s disconcertingly obvious habit of discounting the younger man’s artistic judgment. Rockwell solicited his advice in order to determine what not to do on a painting in progress. He’d ask him something, turn to Mary and say, “See, George likes that,” or “George doesn’t” and then immediately do the opposite. Whether a real response to what he saw as Hughes’s limitations, or a spouse’s jealous rejoinder to his wife, Rockwell’s jovial nastiness was out of character.
Yet he could also be kind to Hughes, who considered him a particularly thoughtful man. When Hughes’s daughter was getting married and her tense father was preparing to go to New York City for the wedding, Rockwell unexpectedly called, saying the situation might be stressful for him, since he would be seeing so many old friends from his first marriage as well as giving away his little girl. Rockwell declared that he and Chris Schafer, now their mutual friend, wanted to go with Hughes to keep him company. “Their presences made it easier for me but I never would have asked. It was like Norman to offer without being asked,” Hughes recalled.
Rockwell spent a good deal of time in New York City that year, for occasions far afield from girding up shaky friends at family weddings. According to F.B.I. informants, on February 28, 1948, Rockwell was listed on a sponsoring committee for a mass meeting to be held at Madison Square Garden, its aim to raise funds to aid the ten Hollywood writers and directors fired after being cited for contempt by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Publicity about the event appeared in the People’s Voice, which the California Un-American Activities Committee had cited as “communist initiated and controlled or so strongly influenced as to be in the Stalin Solar System.” Rockwell
was among those who had invited John Gates, editor of the Daily Worker, to join a meeting to be held in the Gold Room of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. The rationale of the meeting was to combat censorship.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1948, Rockwell worked on several ads, including a first-rate oil painting for The Watchmakers of Switzerland. An old watch repairman is meticulously rendered, from his wrinkled, crepey hands, to his overgrown eyebrows. The rest of the canvas is more loosely painted, with the oil thinly applied as though for a sketch. The crowded pictorial space of the work points to what will be a hallmark of Rockwell’s remarkable achievements in the next decade for the Post. In this ad, the total effect dramatically exceeds what corporations were accustomed to getting from the commercial artists they paid.
Norman Rockwell Page 41