Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  But before he could begin the trip, Rockwell needed to ensure that Mary would be safe while he was gone. The doctors at Riggs had agreed that Mary would be best off staying at Hartford, where she would be closely supervised until her husband got back, and she agreed. In early September, Rockwell stayed in Hartford for a week to spend time with her. One day, when he was downtown sketching during lunchtime, a reporter asked him his name, and he quietly told him. The news became a hot publicity item, with The Hartford Courant falling for Rockwell’s answers to their excited query, “Why Hartford?” He was there to limber up his arm for his foreign assignment, he explained: “Hartford, you know, has a foreign atmosphere. The State Capitol could be another Taj Mahal if it were located in India or Siam and the people walking by were dressed in tunics and turbans instead of shirts and ties.” The artist continued to point out the parallels between the city’s architecture and the various cities he’ll be visiting abroad. At the end of the article, called “Rockwell Limbers Up by Sketching City Scenes,” the writer concluded that “the illustrator’s visit to Hartford is a story The Courant almost missed.”

  Mary’s brother Al wrote Rockwell that he was concerned at the artist’s leaving Mary at the Institute for the month he’d be gone. Should Al send someone out from California to give a second opinion of the treatment she was getting? In alarm, Rockwell wrote him immediately on returning from his “limbering” session in Hartford that Mary was coming along fine, but that her doctors had informed him that her periods of elation and depression were incurable. (Tom Rockwell also recalls being told somberly by someone at Riggs that his mother was not likely to get well.) The shock treatments had seemed to relieve her depression the most, and they suggested that whenever she felt herself slipping, she return for a treatment as soon after the onset of the depression as possible.

  Rockwell reassured his brother-in-law of his complete confidence in the institution, and that he felt Mary would react poorly to bringing someone else into her case. He asked one of her doctors to write to Al. And, he reminded Mary’s concerned brother, he loved her deeply and sincerely and would make sure everything that could possibly be done for her would be.

  While Rockwell was preparing for his trip around the world, the Berkshire County Museum, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with his permission, mounted a show that included works by both Mr. and Mrs. Norman Rockwell; Mary’s contribution to the exhibit was an abstract oil. Most people who viewed her work regarded her as an unexpectedly competent but uninspired painter. Rockwell’s generosity in encouraging her to show with him is unusual in the annals of dual artists’ marriages. The illustrator was trying everything he could devise to help his wife, short of what might have made the most difference: turning away from his work and devoting himself to her. At this late stage, and perhaps all along, any more moderate compromise would still have failed to succor Mary. Erik Erikson noticed how hard his friend was trying to help his wife; the therapist wrote him during the monthlong Pan Am trip that they all missed him, and he reassured the artist that Mary was doing well. He also mentioned that he had heard about Rockwell calling Mary “regularly” from overseas, and that she appreciated it “ever so much.”

  Although he returned from overseas in late October, Mary stayed at the Institute until the end of November, when her doctors agreed she was strong enough to return home. Basic room and board was two hundred dollars a week, with all treatments and incidentals added to that base figure. She had been hospitalized this time for six months.

  The already dramatic year ended on a horrifying note. During early December, a well-respected magazine illustrator who had worked with Rockwell in California, Pruett Carter, shot and killed his wife and son, then turned the gun on himself. He had been struggling with mental problems for some time, and apparently very shortly before this climax, he had called illustrator Andrew Loomis about his despair. Loomis begged him to hold off his horrible plans, and to talk to Norman Rockwell, whom Carter practically idolized. Loomis got hold of Rockwell, who called Carter immediately to talk him out of the murder-suicide. One account claims that Rockwell was actually on the phone in between the events, begging Carter to put down the gun after he had already killed his family. In any event, there was no stopping him. Rockwell did not discuss this incident, but several other illustrators, including Fred Taraba and Stuart Ng, were told the details by people close to the situation.

  How Rockwell felt after this tragedy is hard to imagine. His friend artist Dean Cornwell sent him the news clippings from California, saying simply that he had received a card from Clyde (Forsythe) asking him to mail the articles to Rockwell. Especially in light of the emotional troubles plaguing Mary, the whole situation must have been even worse for Rockwell than it would have been for others. And Mary’s own illness was already shadowed by the end that his first wife, Irene, had met.

  In February, Rockwell enjoyed a few moments of lightness, and some pleasure at reversing the roles and being on the modeling end of a professional’s commission. The famous portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh was putting together a photo book of famous people, and he included Rockwell sitting at his easel in front of two of the Four Freedoms. (Kodak would also use one of Karsh’s photographs of Rockwell for an ad in 1959, the same year that Karsh’s book was published.) Although by now local Stockbridge photographer Bill Scovill, a talented amateur photographer of mood and nuance, had shot some impressive pictures of Rockwell, Karsh was one of the first national figures to represent the artist among the company of other equally famous and impressive figures.

  During the following months, Rockwell painted two Post covers, finished by the beginning of the summer. Both are minor works: Happy Birthday Miss Jones, an elementary school room’s homage to its teacher, and The Optician, a pouting preadolescent being fitted with glasses—and looking startlingly like Peter Rockwell had, eight or nine years earlier. Tellingly, both pieces centered on young children, as if memories had been stirred up by his almost grown brood’s mishaps and near disasters.

  By the late summer, Rockwell shifted to the kind of coverage the Post would increasingly request of him. After the two major political parties had confirmed their choice of presidential candidate, Rockwell arranged to paint the portraits of Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower. Pleading, whenever a reporter asked, that he himself was an independent voter (which he was), he nonetheless admitted that Ike’s sheer charm and personality overwhelmed him. And later, when reviewing favorably a book by Herblock, he demurred at the cartoonist’s negative rendering of Eisenhower, though he admitted that his distaste for the exaggeration might stem from being an Eisenhower Republican. By contrast, he explained, because he so disliked Joseph McCarthy, he applauded Herblock’s vivisection of that figure, leading him to conclude that judgments of aesthetics are often mired in partisan politics.

  Voters’ reactions to the portraits of the Democratic and Republican candidates neatly illustrated Rockwell’s putative impartiality in art, at least; both party’s supporters were pleased, with the Democratic National Committee even requesting that the Post present the portrait to Stevenson, which it did.

  Too busy tending to other more urgent problems, Rockwell had managed to postpone addressing a medical condition common to aging men. Now, almost exactly the same time of year that he was hospitalized in 1954 for a rest, the illustrator ended up in the hospital in 1956 for prostate and bladder problems. Ben Hibbs wrote him an encouraging letter about their mutual acquaintances who had come through such operations quickly, though he himself had found something similar extremely messy for himself. Ken Stuart had passed on to Hibbs the rumor he heard that Rockwell would be able to avoid surgery for now; and Hibbs asked if such news was true. It was, and Pittsfield Hospital discharged Rockwell in mid-October. He was back to business by the end of the month, traveling to and from New York for still more advertising work.

  High on his agenda, once he got out of the hospital, was to make time to paint his final Christmas cover for the Post. As R
ockwell Museum curator Linda Pero points out, it is hardly coincidental that he chose the primal scene of a boy discovering Santa Claus is just a trick, as the youngster stumbles across the Santa costume in his parents’ drawer, Rockwell capturing the very moment that the belief is demythologized for the child forever. This final Christmas cover, always a prestigious placement of an illustrator’s painting, appeared when his once-secure tenure at the Post had obviously evolved into an abbreviated yearly commitment, representing the old guard of illustrators, and his family life had crumbled into the very opposite of the tableau of security he had desired.

  Around the time that the December cover was published, the Rockwells received their invitation to President Eisenhower’s second inauguration in January 1957. Although he was still fond of the man, Rockwell was now less impressed with Ike’s presidency, and the couple decided not to travel to Washington for the event. Rockwell had too many ads to work on anyway, and he was looking at movie publicity commissions as well, including initial ideas for Walt Disney’s planned Old Yeller. Jerry was out in San Francisco at Erik Erikson’s suggestion. “I was trying to define myself, and my father wasn’t sure I should go on with art at this point, and Erikson encouraged me to, and told me to move to someplace interesting and far away from my family, like San Francisco. It was great advice.”

  Once Erikson promoted the idea, Rockwell was convinced, and he supported Jerry financially during the long periods he found himself unemployed. Still floundering, and feeling particularly unsettled about what was going on at home—“I didn’t want to know and no one talked about it anyway”—Rockwell’s eldest son had begun intensive psychiatric therapy himself. As well as paying the bills without complaint, Rockwell corresponded with Jerry’s doctor, seeking advice as to ways he might help his son. His letters show that he was very concerned that his parenting had led to Jerry’s problems, and in one touching response from Dr. Wheeler, the artist is assured that he was a good father. Rockwell even asked Erik Erikson, who was in Mexico for a few months, to go check on Jerry and his doctor in San Francisco. On sabbatical to write a new book, Erikson didn’t make it to California, so Jerry’s doctor came to him.

  Not surprisingly, given the recent announcement by Peter that he was going to marry his childhood sweetheart from Putney, Cynthia Ide, the presence of young love inspired the two Post covers that Rockwell painted in the spring of 1956. One dealt with a proud couple showing off their prom clothes at the local drugstore, the other with a picture of two wise cleaning women smiling at the hotel room detritus of a honeymoon. After the Prom, as Dave Hickey has thoroughly analyzed, is an impressive painting in the tradition of the European masters, particularly in its precise articulation of angles and the delineation of action achieved by careful use of color. Pure Rockwell, however, as Hickey points out, is the implication once again that the kids are just fine, instead of being threats to a postwar society that wanted, defensively, to close ranks.

  Just Married, lacking the technical achievement of the former piece, nonetheless shows the mastery of realistic painting that Rockwell displayed from the late forties to the early seventies. But it also encapsulates more clearly than most paintings the way that Rockwell yields to the temptation to make the audience seem superior to the content of his painting. The cleaning women look too sweet and content to worry us, but because they are also clearly amused and pleased by so little, we smile patronizingly at them. The final step in this dynamic is that the narrator of the entire visual act, which includes us as spectators, drawn into judging the scene, is in fact judging us. The uneasy sense that at times Rockwell feels contempt for his audience plays out in just such an economy. It is present, too, in After the Prom, where the picture’s potential achievement is effaced by the aura of narrative condescension that hovers over the story.

  Mary’s painting had also been invigorated lately by her family’s romantic pastimes; she seemed to embody the old saw about gaining a daughter-in-law, in the face of losing a son. She loved both Gail and Cinny, and they considered her a good friend. By late spring, Mary was feeling particularly cheerful about all aspects of her life. She sent her sister money to buy good supplies for her own work, and told her to let her know when she needed more materials. Every Tuesday, Mary went for a lesson with Peggy Best, and she claimed it was one of the few rules she made herself keep. She philosophized in a new way to her sister: “A woman’s life is quite different from a man’s—to be a real woman she needs to do all sorts of things, so that even something she may love as much as painting cannot be pursued as a profession the way a man does. Personally I like the variety of my life. I’d hate to feel I had to go to the studio every day.”

  During this year, Mary Rockwell finally got her wish to move to a bigger house, one that didn’t look out onto a cemetery, which had become too morbid a landscape for her to tolerate. One sign that her dislike of their location must have suddenly overflowed into a passionate hatred is implied in the bills for $34,000 that the Rockwells spent on renovations, only to end up moving that same year. Even for them, this was financial folly of the first order.

  At the end of the summer, the painter finished his work on Disney’s Old Yeller, and began more advertising for Upjohn Pharmaceuticals. And once again, he faced the “God damned calendar,” the yearly Boy Scout calendar cover. He had been complaining loudly about the calendar for years, but on getting up his courage to call the organization to resign the commission, he’d been told that they would double their pay for the one picture a year. He had planned to replace the loss of income with the pay and stock dividends from the Famous Artists’ School, which were averaging around five hundred dollars a month by the end of the fifties. But whenever he remembered that their pay was for one picture only, after all, it proved impossible to walk away from Brown and Bigelow’s monetary enticements. For the last ten years that he painted them, Rockwell was getting $10,000 for each year’s cover.

  As 1957 drew to an end, in place of a Rockwell Christmas cover, the illustrator was treated to the offering of a National Book Award–winning novelist who was himself a well-respected photographer. Wright Morris wrote an important essay in The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine read religiously by Rockwell every month, unlike the Post, which he rarely saw except for the issues that featured his own covers. The article, called “Norman Rockwell’s America,” reads as a thoughtful (unlike the usual knee-jerk) indictment of the insubstantial vision that continues to inform Rockwell’s painting, through which Middle America has learned to appreciate its idea of art. Tom Rockwell recalls that this was one of the few negative pieces that bothered his father: “For a few days, Pop was depressed over it, but then he realized it was just what he’d been getting all his life, and he got over it.”

  To make matters worse, Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s brother, Cass Canfield, was the editor of The Atlantic, and to have such sober criticism appearing under Canfield’s aegis rubbed old competitive wounds even rawer.

  Luckily, Peter Rockwell’s upcoming nuptials took his father’s mind off the embarrassment. On February 15, 1958, Peter and Cinny were married in an Episcopal service in Greenwich, Connecticut. Erik Erikson attended, and even Clara Edgerton came all the way from Arlington, though the weather would have thwarted less stalwart souls. Rockwell, afraid that the “kids” hadn’t arranged to have enough champagne to serve everyone, supplied an entire extra case at the last minute. Mary was in far better shape than at Tom’s wedding two and a half years earlier. Not only had she driven to New York City to buy the china the newlyweds wanted; she began a ritual of sending the couple a check every month to buy fresh limes and tequila for the daiquiris she knew they loved, an odd if loving gesture for a recovering alcoholic.

  The wedding proved to be prelude to a particularly fulfilling summer. Peter held a show of his watercolors and drawings in Peggy Best’s studio; finally, his father had capitulated to his youngest’s decision that he, too, wanted to pursue a career in art. Peggy Best was invaluable to anyone in Stockbr
idge interested in art. Throughout the summer, family members were keeping weekly appointments at Riggs; Mary was trying valiantly to stave off the gloom she felt start to descend, its cause unclear.

  Rockwell found himself challenged by two not unrelated questions during the fall: should Mary return to Hartford, and should he accept a major endorsement campaign that would pay him handsomely for lending his name to a home decorating project? It became apparent that Mary needed more shock treatments, and so he began driving her weekly for her sessions, a pattern, according to hospital bills, that continued unabated for the next year. His costs once again escalating, and Jerry still dependent on Rockwell’s financial support, the illustrator accepted the offer from Colorizer, in which he was presented in magazine ads as endorsing the company’s method of coordinating wall color and art. Such projects were anathema to serious artists, who routinely made jokes about those people who bought paintings to match their walls.