Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  Probably in 1950—the letter is undated, but evidence suggests the year—Norman Rockwell wrote what was surely the most important and perhaps the only love letter of his life: “Dear Mary,” it began,

  I love you devotedly and completely, Jerry and Tommy and Peter love you. They believe in you. They are fine boys due to your love and care.

  I love and need you always. I know I am extremely difficult at times due to my absorbtion [sic] in my work. Sometimes it takes everything I have and all my time.

  No one else but you could have helped and sustained me as you have for twenty years.

  We have come a long way and I know we can, as a team go further and higher.

  You are the finest person I have ever known. You are thoroughly and deeply good.

  You are surrounded by people who love you. Jerry, Tommy and Peter. The Edgertons, Miss Briggs, Mrs. Fisher, Jack and Max and every one in our valley and in Arlington. They all wish you well.

  But most of all I love you completely and want you always.

  If you decide you want to be free, I consent.

  But I earnestly believe we can have our best lives together.

  Norman

  Obviously Mary, residing at Austen Riggs, had suggested a divorce, and Rockwell had taken her seriously. Tom Rockwell recalls with pain what a difficult time this period was for the entire family; Mary decided, for reasons still unclear to the sons, that she would only allow Peter to visit her, and turned away her husband and two older children. Peter remembers that he knew, somehow, that he was not to mention the family at all until he was instructed to do so. How did Rockwell explain Mary’s problem to their sons? All three claim that the matter was, just as before, never discussed; everybody just dealt with it, though they weren’t sure what “it” was. “All we knew was that my mother had some problems. She’d come back and forth over the years from treatments, and things would feel weird around the house,” Jarvis says today. “The mood, or the atmosphere, or something, wasn’t right. But that’s all, nothing more specific. In a way, that was the worst of all, not understanding, and nobody saying a word to help us figure things out.”

  Still trying years later to figure things out, Tom Rockwell recalls, perplexed, that his father always encouraged his mother to do what she wanted, and that he urged her to hire people to help with his work and the household, instead of her taking on so much herself. “Pop just wasn’t the sort of man to boss someone around, especially his wife,” he says. “But my mother insisted on being in charge of things.”

  Nancy Barstow Wynkoop believes that in light of her sister’s position as the eldest of three children, and the impression that Mary gave off that she received her sense of importance within the Barstow family by nurturing them all, it is no surprise that she would transpose that psychology onto her marriage. The obvious conduit to her husband was through his work, since that was what was most important to him. She couldn’t give up the household duties, since she measured herself against a feminine ideal, but she wanted to curry Rockwell’s dependence on her management of his professional life as well.

  Studies of the differences between men and women alcoholics cite the surprising causal nature of women’s unfulfilled romantic or primary emotional relationships in their turning to drink to assuage their emptiness. The connection between depression and alcoholic abuse becomes circular in many cases, one breeding the other. And, as the psychiatrist son of Rockwell’s old friend and architect, Dean Parmelee, states, the biological factors for depression may well outweigh any cultural or social contributions anyway.

  In the early fifties, Austen Riggs profiled its typical patient as twenty-seven years old, and collectively highly intelligent young people who have not “found themselves in terms of identity, personal relationships, capacity to work and to learn through study, or in self-direction.” The minority, the older patients, tended to be people who had “accomplished a great deal” but couldn’t solve their marital or vocational problems. Austen Riggs took as the goal of its therapy to provide immediate help that enabled its patients to get back on track in the outside world, while thereafter continuing treatment to eradicate their crippling neuroses. Individual psychotherapy and limited psychoanalysis, medication, and group interaction formed the core of their treatment options. As the decade progressed, innovative programs in drama, art, and dancing were also developed under highly trained professionals. Patients constructed a greenhouse on the property and began a daycare/nursery school as well.

  In other words, Austen Riggs was one of the most humane, advanced institutions of its time. Since Irene O’Connor’s hospitalization at McLean in 1934, professional interest in mental health and strongly motivated attempts at new treatments had progressed, but governmental and citizen support were just beginning. In 1950, Riggs, McLean, and Chestnut Lodge outside of Baltimore, Maryland, were the only high-level treatment centers for the mentally ill. If you had little money, you went to state institutions, usually poorly staffed, underfunded, and behind the times in treatments. And in spite of Riggs’s impressively optimistic atmosphere and superb staff, at the time that Mary Rockwell needed it, its strength was in treating the young. Possibly because such a clinical profile was easier to treat—at the very least, for younger patients hospitalization tended to impinge less upon heavy professional and family obligations—the institution was gaining a reputation for suiting best the under-thirty crowd. Celebrities walked the hallways; two decades later, James Taylor would immortalize his treatment there in the phrase “from Stockbridge to Boston.” But whether the center served Mary Rockwell particularly well is hard to know; there was no better alternative.

  The mode of treatment at Riggs depended on an open institution: admission was voluntary only, and patients were free to leave the grounds when they wanted, mingling with townspeople and doing local shopping. Riggs’s treatment was aimed at the range of mental illness spanning severe psychoneuroses to character disorders, including mild schizophrenia. Mixing the sick with the well, it was hoped, would provide the former with useful reminders of good health, as well as reducing the stigma still attached to mental illness. Medication, a newly available treatment, was invoked when it was considered useful; especially in the 1950s and early 1960s, before more sophisticated therapies and drugs were developed, the medicines—thorazine, lithium, and tranquilizers such as Miltown and then Valium—were poorly understood and sometimes too freely administered. Mary Rockwell was put on Respermine, an early tranquilizer. Throughout the decade, it was often hard to tell whether her slurring of words was due to the drug, to alcohol, or to mixing the two; the dramatic dangers of the latter were not fully recognized at the time, and Mary felt it a triumph to confine her drinking to the evening hours.

  In 1951, Erik Erikson left Berkeley, where he had tangled with the administration over the loyalty oaths the university was demanding during the McCarthy era. His position at Riggs would prove an extended sabbatical of sorts before he would begin teaching at Harvard near the end of the decade. Riggs allowed him to take a small patient caseload (never more than four people at a time) and to concentrate on his research and writing. The year before, Erikson’s Childhood and Society had been published to great acclaim. The book explored the various identity stages human beings confront as they age, as well as the idiosyncratic inflections that different societies imprint on their children, nearly always restricting their emotional development as a result of every culture’s inevitable shortsightedness.

  Exactly when Mary Rockwell’s husband decided that he, too, would enter therapy at Riggs is unclear. Bills exist from 1953, and a letter the following year from Erikson speaks of him as Rockwell’s therapist. Erik Erikson would have been a good fit for Rockwell for several reasons: he had been a talented novice portrait artist in Austria before giving up art for psychology, after traveling to Rome to see Michelangelo’s work and concluding morosely that he couldn’t compete with such artistic brilliance. He possessed an expansive curiosity, which found a per
fect forum in studying cultural variations between societies: Childhood and Society ranged from studies of Sioux and Yurok Indian children to American Negroes; it ruminated on the stages of development each person traverses during a lifetime; and it analyzed the childhoods of Adolf Hitler and Maxim Gorky. Rockwell and Erikson shared similar personalities, according to Erikson’s daughter, Sue Bloland, who observed both men up close. And, although neither man had a professional degree, both had achieved celebrity status in their fields.

  Erikson’s research in Childhood and Society about the hard and rejecting American mother—a description that, according to Jarvis Rockwell, was appropriate to Bernice Barstow, Mary’s mother—might have helped Rockwell understand his wife better. Erikson explores what he considers the American identity problem—eternal adolescence—in light of the mother’s unwillingness to assume the proper adult role herself. And he relied heavily on his own strong wife, Joan Erikson, to enable his professional activities. Although the cost of Joan’s tending to her husband’s vocation may have been a certain neglect felt by her children, according to Sue Bloland, Erikson would have been sympathetic to Rockwell’s feeling of being deserted by Mary, who had become entirely unreliable in representing her husband in public. No one could be sure if she would have her drinking under control, or if she would talk coherently or even talk at all.

  But what may be most remarkable about this period in Rockwell’s life is his willingness, admittedly in a partial sense, to put his wife first, even ahead of his career. The general population, especially the one that Rockwell played to, was not sympathetic to the idea of mental illness or alcoholism. The artist would not have been the first important figure to try to cover up family information that might damage his career. And Rockwell, whose celebrity depended on the image he projected as the live embodiment of the covers he painted, had more to lose than most. Yet from the beginning of her problems he urged Mary to seek whatever treatment might help her, and he actively supported her attempts however he could. Rockwell’s sons remember their father as deeply concerned that he had somehow harmed his wife, and he was always particularly melancholic whenever Mary seemed down, affected sympathetically by her moods.

  Around the time that Mary apparently explored the idea of leaving her husband, he was working more heavily than usual on things he didn’t enjoy doing. He was spending enormous amounts of time on advertising campaigns, largely because of the prohibitive costs of the boys’ schools and Mary’s private therapy: Riggs alone charged about $1,800 per patient per month. The Post was not the highest-paying magazine, even for Rockwell, who was being paid between $2,500 and $5,000 a cover these days. Advertising was where the easiest money was, but such work failed to yield any aesthetic nourishment. He had recently worked on a poster for the American Red Cross, for instance, that paid $1,000 for a job easily and quickly executed, but the project provided absolutely nothing in the way of flexing his artistic muscles.

  When he subsequently reached out to find other magazine outlets worthy of what he considered his real painting, Ben Hibbs yelped too loudly to be ignored. A year earlier, Hibbs had protested Rockwell’s participation in the Hallmark Christmas card campaign, beginning with the artist’s inclusion in the 1948 series of the company’s “Gallery Artists” of celebrity figures. In late 1950, he had waylaid Rockwell’s assumption that he was allowed to paint for such magazines as Cosmopolitan, whose editor, Herbert Mayes, was eager for Rockwell to take on some first-rate stories. In rough drafts of pleading letters that Rockwell wrote Hibbs, trying to explain the urgency of having venues besides the Post covers that would allow him to do satisfying work, he scrawled across the bottom of the page in huge black letters, “PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE.”

  The Post was too important to antagonize, and Rockwell backed down when Hibbs continued to demur, but the stress of sparring with the editor, whom he liked and admired, following on the fracas with Ken Stuart, whom he didn’t, was wearing. And the outcome of this flurry of genteel altercations involved a large change in Rockwell’s life, though neither the Post nor the artist publicly acknowledged the shift: beginning in 1951, when Rockwell painted only three covers for the magazine, his yearly appearances were severely reduced. Apparently, the trade-off that allowed Rockwell to do so much advertising work during the fifties involved agreeing to a limited appearance with the Post.

  Steve Pettigrew, a staff member at the Curtis Company archives, believes that the polls the Post conducted, where people were stopped on the street and asked to rate that week’s contents and cover on a scale of one to five, may have influenced Hibbs’s willingness to let Rockwell’s number of covers decline. A newer, slicker, more urban look had surpassed the folksiness of Rockwell, in spite of the artist’s continued popularity. Of late, the audience for the Post was showing more diversified tastes, and Hibbs needed to cultivate a younger generation of subscribers.

  By spring 1951, Rockwell had at least received some news that cheered him up. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was doing a celebratory show for the Art Students League, and of the seventy-five famous artists who had studied there throughout the decades, Rockwell was represented by The Soldier’s Return. More gratifying yet was the letter from the Met’s curator of American paintings, Robert Beverly Hale, who lamented having no Rockwell in the museum’s permanent collection, saying that he planned to change that. Buoyed by such encouraging news, Rockwell accepted Joe Mugnaini’s offer to mount a joint show of their oils and drawings in Compton, California, in early June.

  Such confidence in the artist as these events suggested, especially following on the heels of the Post contretemps, shows up in the painting he completed that summer, published as the Post cover of November 24, 1951. Saying Grace celebrates the tolerance at the base of any democracy, Rockwell’s absolute conviction that self-righteousness is not only unattractive but undermining to a free society. Set in a diner outside a railroad yard, the scene centers on two slightly menacing young male types almost bent over a table as they observe the bowed heads of an elderly woman and her charge, a little boy. Cleverly, Rockwell reverses the conventions by which such liberal values typically were illustrated, positioning prayer, an activity most Post readers considered the correct cultural norm in 1951, as the anomaly in danger of being treated disrespectfully. The painting narrates the right of deviants to be respected for practices that don’t injure others. If Rockwell had refused to include the half-figure seeming to stand respectfully in the upper left of the picture, Saying Grace would be a masterly painting, devoid of the sentimentality with which the hat-in-hand spectator infuses it. From a technical point of view, the parallel rhyme of the grisaille alone is striking: the trainyard and beyond are seen through the plate-glass window in muted grays, echoed by the left foreground corner, where a sliver of a man is articulated in gray, his newspaper and coffee cup close to the center of the foreground. Rockwell’s virtuoso achievements in varying depth of field command our view; the theatrical effect of a proscenium stage is offset by the partial figure in the lower left of the painting, the half-glimpsed man helping to establish the distance between the table and the rest of the dining room. At the same time, the figure invites us into the room to take his place, to complete his presence.

  The implied threat of the young men, the sense that they are potential hoods or testosterone-laden twenty-year-olds looking for a fight, is undercut by their sense of curiosity and engagement, though they don’t appear to be converted into potential piety by the sight of the elderly woman praying. The championing of the young that the critic Dave Hickey points to as one of the greatest anomalies about Rockwell’s art—his message in the 1950s, when others were painting America’s youth as rebels without a cause, that the kids were all right—takes shape here. It will be Norman Rockwell who, in the late 1960s and the 1970s, when other commentators are lamenting the radical element among the nation’s youth, repeatedly stakes out the position that the “hippies and yippies are alright. They’re doing great, you just give them a chanc
e.”

  Hardly pausing to savor his achievement in the Saying Grace painting, Rockwell turned immediately to the advertising commissions once more piling up. Greeting the illustrator at the beginning of 1952 was an anxious letter from the agency that had arranged for Rockwell to do a four-painting campaign for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes that would pay $15,000. Since Kellogg was expecting final delivery in March, the agency needed an update from Rockwell. At least the bad news that Rockwell must report this time did not include his backing out of a promise; he had explained when the original contract was written that he could only “hope” to complete the paintings by March.