If her intentions were to rekindle his interest, the ploy worked. In late August, Rockwell wrote her that
You’re greatly missed here in good ole Stockbridge. It just ain’t the same. It’s been a wild, busy summer. In fact I think I’ll spend next summer somewhere else. Maybe La Rochelle [Peggy’s village]. . . .
[T]he opening parties at the gallery just aren’t the same as when you preside. . . . I see the old gang but you’re the spark plug. (I mean this as complimentary.) So come home and cheer us all up. We sure miss you. Love, Norman.
Within a month of the (for him) markedly romantic letter, Peggy was back in Stockbridge, and Rockwell wrote to her again, though he could have walked to her studio or called her more easily. This time, his handwriting was a little shaky.
“Since we are such good friends, I just don’t want the news to reach you second hand. Molly Punderson and I are engaged to be married. I guess everyone in town will probably know this before long. I know you’ll be pleased for Molly and me.” His closing has modified: “Affectionately,” not “Love,” is the new nomenclature.
Jonathan and Mary Alcantara Best both believe that their mother was devastated—that she had really hoped she and Norman would get married. She had been deeply impressed by Norman’s unusually thoughtful nature, including his ability to enjoy himself at parties more than anyone, though drinking very little, even in a social crowd where getting drunk was considered a routine part of the evening’s festivities. In a community of intellectuals and artists, he stood out above the rest.
People who watched with some amusement the brief bachelorhood of Norman Rockwell in Stockbridge recall Molly’s shrewd strategy of outlasting her competition. She let Rockwell woo her, all the while winning him. It probably didn’t hurt that Erik Erikson chimed in with his opinion that Molly would be a more appropriate match for Rockwell than the fun-loving but vulnerable Peggy, who had already admitted that she needed at times to be able to lean on the illustrator for strength.
On October 25, 1961, sixty-two-year-old Mary Leete Punderson and sixty-seven-year-old Norman Percevel Rockwell were married in St. Paul’s, where Molly had a strong record of weekly attendance, in contrast with her new husband’s habit of confining his attendance there to weddings and funerals. Before the ceremony, Norman had sent Molly to pick out a ring and a trousseau; he wanted to pay for them both. She and her good friend Sally Sedgwick went to an expensive department store in Boston, and the schoolteacher shocked even the wealthy socialite with the eighteen sets of bras and panties and the dozen nightgowns she bought. “I didn’t see how she’d ever use them all!” Sally told a mutual friend. When Molly saw the ring she wanted, a large sapphire, she called Norman to ask his opinion, since it was twice the price they’d discussed. He told her to get whatever she wanted, and so she bought it.
Wedding pictures show a lovely, compact, trim older woman about five feet three inches tall, with clear, direct, infamously piercing blue eyes. She wore a navy blue suit and hat for the ceremony, and only when she heard Cinny and Peter’s toddler call out, “There’s Molly!,” as she walked up the aisle, did she relax her stiff carriage into her normally erect, confident posture. The newlyweds went to Rockwell’s beloved Plaza in Manhattan for the first three days of their honeymoon, then to California, where, strangely, they re-created favorite visits he had made before with Mary, including staying at the Hollywood Roosevelt and visiting Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley, one of Mary’s favorite vacation spots. When they returned to Stockbridge, Molly did not try to reinvent the house as her own—except for hanging a Punderson ancestral portrait—any more than Mary Rockwell had redecorated what had been Irene and Norman’s. But she did devise a clever plan by which she would not feel she was giving up her own life; for the next two years, she and Norman spent their days at the house on South Street, and their nights at Topside, the cottage her father had built her behind the Pundersons’ family house on Main Street, a few blocks from the Rockwells’ home.
The marriage would be extremely successful, as if the third time proved the lucky charm for the painter. Both Peter Rockwell and Molly’s good friend David Wood were told by Norman and Molly respectively that the couple’s sex life was especially gratifying. Certainly this marriage was one of equals more than the previous matches had been, whether from age or temperament or independence. Molly was not needy, as Mary had been; nor was she materialistic, her premarital buying spree to the contrary, or flighty, as Irene had proven. And she knew how to help her husband; just as important, with no children to raise and her own career conducted, she had the time to do so.
Some of the townspeople thought that Norman was really the lucky one to snag Molly as his bride; only a month before her death, Lyn Austin recalled darkly that “those of us who knew Molly well thought she was stepping down to marry Norman—he was beneath her. Her life of the mind was so intense and lively. He was no intellectual like she was; she lived for her poetry.” Insistent that a teacher from Milton Academy, “reminiscent of Gertrude Stein,” had been Molly’s longtime lover, Austin believed that the always curious teacher simply viewed marriage to a famous illustrator as another great adventure. “Her old school friends, including me, used to go over in the afternoons and have tea with her, so she could talk literature. Otherwise, she would have been bored just being with him.” It is extremely rare to find Norman Rockwell the man described by anyone who knew him as boring. More plausibly, Rockwell’s seemingly homespun aesthetics and apparent Boy Scout allegiances offended the less conventional theatre director; her disdain for Molly’s choice sounds at times as if she had a crush on her teacher and was angry at being betrayed by her liberal hero’s choice of a symbol of the Middle America Austin had rejected.
Without a doubt, it is true that Molly Punderson enriched Norman Rockwell’s later life. Their frequent trips to Tanglewood were taken at her behest; he, too, enjoyed classical music, but he freely admitted to being as interested in watching the musicians as in listening to them. And the staunch, openly political schoolteacher with a quixotic sense of humor that almost matched Rockwell’s own pushed her willing husband to go public with his beliefs, to stop hiding behind a banal banner of neutrality. Finally, the release that Rockwell had experienced through travel was matched by his spouse’s own passion for exploring new places. Rather than slowing down as he approached his seventieth birthday, Norman Rockwell, who never had a high school education, found himself energized by his marriage to his third schoolteacher, one whose joie de vivre matched his own.
Within weeks of their marriage, Molly had ordered Rockwell’s schedule into a far more manageable scheme; after her initial shock at how little he had saved, she arranged the family finances so that their investments climbed quickly; she found ways for them to take several major trips a year, usually three that were to foreign countries; and she learned to work as his photographer, hoping to reduce his dependence on his “man Friday,” the loyal Louis Lamone, who in fact would become even more important to Rockwell’s work after photographer Bill Scovill left in 1963. Molly took scores of photographs on their trips, eventually numbering five thousand prints, but Rockwell only occasionally painted from them. They converted the old icehouse/mural room into a permanent studio for her photography and her writing, so that she could continue working on the grammar textbook she had begun just before meeting Norman.
Molly remained a little jealous of Louis, in spite of his “demotion,” in much the same way that Mary had been of Gene Pelham; not only was Norman deeply dependent on him, but the photographer-assistant was territorial, protective of his boss in just the way Gene had been back in Arlington. Louis loved him deeply because he was so kind. “If something went wrong,” Louis said, “he always blamed himself, not the other guy. Once I made a terrible mistake about something and all Norman said was, ‘I guess you’re human after all,’ not angry with me for having fouled up his business.”
“Norman was incapable of complaining about anything. I never saw him angry
,” Buddy Edgerton said. He was thoughtful, too; he always brought back gifts for his friends and neighbors from his trips. And if Louis arrived early in the studio, before Rockwell’s breakfast, often the painter would think to take him coffee before he’d even had his.
Molly’s reasons for hoping to reduce her husband’s dependence on Louis Lamone were various. An unattractive underside to her motivation, according to two women who adored Molly and thought highly of her character, was the class issue: “There was a tiny bit of Molly that disliked Louie’s lack of learning—not the lack of a degree, but no appreciation, it seemed to her, of ideas and books. His roughness offended her, and probably she preferred that Norman not be influenced by him,” says Virginia Loveless, to which Mary Quinn assents. But, until his death, the artist wrote checks to Louis for performing various tasks, and he paid some of his medical bills as well. Most important, Louis took the majority of Rockwell’s photographs for the last fifteen years of the illustrator’s life.
Rockwell’s affection for Louis Lamone aside, it was nevertheless Molly who helped him to finish his commissions in a more timely fashion than before, mostly through being in charge of a schedule she ruled firmly. Louis’s careless disregard of the day’s schedule exasperated her; and soon older friends and extended family members from afar began at times to grumble at being held at arm’s length, rather than being granted the same access to the painter that they’d always had. Molly even asked Jarvis to call before dropping in, so that the couple’s days could assume more order. And she insisted that the time for her husband’s nap and his afternoon bike ride, which she now shared with him, were sacrosanct.
Just as in his previous marriages, Rockwell’s wife took the blame for managing his affairs as he, in fact, wanted; if someone managed to break through Molly’s corridor of influence and get to Rockwell, he acted as if he was delighted to be interrupted, though privately he flailed, as he always had, at too many pressures keeping him from work. “Everyone else was supposed to keep people and stresses away from my father,” Peter remembers. “We all did the dirty work to protect him, and my father never had to take the blame for being inaccessible.” His granddaughter Daisy recalls that the protection took the form, in the early seventies when she was old enough to notice, of a lack of responsibility for holding up his end of the socializing at a family dinner: “Everyone else would be louder than normal, almost desperate, in an attempt to make up for the ‘negative space’ my grandfather took up,” she says. “He didn’t feel the need to join in, and he’d just get lost in thought about his work if he wanted to, which was often.”
To be fair, there was a lot to think about. Rockwell’s professional as well as private life changed dramatically in 1961, when Ken Stuart resigned as art director from the Post. For the first year in its history, Curtis Publishing operated at a loss, and soon Ben Hibbs left the magazine as well. A totally revamped publication was announced, and Rockwell provided its inaugural cover showing the new art director at work redesigning the magazine. Eight covers followed at his hands, and they illustrate the dubious course the magazine had decided on. To achieve greater immediacy, the Post asked Rockwell to do portraits of international celebrities. His narrative abilities, his forte, fell into disuse.
But in 1961, the illustrator had reason to be flying high: Lane Faison, then the chairman of Williams College’s art department and respected in the art world, noted in The Norman Rockwell Album (basically Doubleday’s picture book accompaniment to the autobiography) that Rockwell was part of the tradition of humorous genre painters dating at least from seventeeth-century Holland, perhaps earlier, if some of the art appearing in the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts was included. Before 1961, others had frequently noted Rockwell’s shared lineage with Vermeer, but the ancestry began to solidify by this point. Almost forty years later, the critic Dave Hickey would use Vermeer and Dutch genre painting as a starting point from which to launch a reconsideration of Rockwell as a master of “democratic genre painting.”
Rockwell’s first painting of the new year surprised everyone, except the family members who had helped him create it. The Connoisseur, published as a Post cover on January 13, 1962, became the subject of compelling analysis in the late twentieth century, none of it certain of the painting’s meaning. The picture consists of a large drip painting—associated with Jackson Pollock’s style from the late forties and early fifties—which is studied thoughtfully by a middle-aged, prosperous-looking gentleman. The connoisseur’s expression is entirely hidden from us, as he faces the abstract painting, his back turned to us. The man and the painting form a kind of sandwich, with the space in between them—the judgment wrought by their meeting—left hanging in the air. The Pollock imitation is considered by most critics to be competently executed; certainly the intent is to represent the art respectfully, not to mock it. The expensively dressed spectator is accorded dignity as well. His stance is modest, his hands neatly clasped behind his back, in contrast to his rather dandified accoutrements of gloves and swell hat and suit. Clearly this scene between two culturally distinct quarters implies a confrontation—respectful and alert, quiet and contained. But instead of the all-too-obvious interpretive clue Rockwell usually provided, here the artist is mute.
Missed by recent commentators on the provocative painting, however, is Rockwell’s visual reference to an earlier Post cover from June 27, 1914, by Robert Robinson. Part of a narrative that Robinson had started in 1910, this painting uses variations on an “old codger,” as the cultural historian Jan Cohn states, to show the interaction of the modern and the old. The June 27 issue displayed the “geezer” facing off with a Cubist painting (then a new genre), the subject of which seems to be eyeballing him with even greater censure. Dressed in a hat, gray coat, and white gloves, the dated viewer holds a book on modern art in his left hand, using it as a study aid to the painting. In Rockwell’s version, the encounter is more of a tie; no one knows who won the standoff. Hat, gray coat, white gloves, older man, and reference book reappear—but this time, the man appears clearly educated, though presumably, given his attire, he may be no more receptive to the abstraction than the “geezer” was to Cubism.
The major difference between the two renditions lies in the ambiguity of Rockwell’s painting versus Robinson’s clearer narrative line. The baleful eye of the Cubist woman stares out reproachfully at the rube who can’t understand her, while the drip painting that Rockwell substitutes uses only the initials “JP” for any traditional narrative reference. And even here, at the moment most insistently Jackson Pollock’s, Rockwell’s presence intrudes; the usually affable man was known among illustrators and art editors for denouncing those art directors who omitted an artist’s signature.
But why the unusual (for Rockwell) narrative distance? As the cultural historian Wanda Korn explains, a strong influx of cartoons that mock viewers’ attempts to interpret abstract art, as well as the vagueness of the art itself, had by now become a staple of mainstream culture. Only a year earlier, for instance, a Peter Arno cartoon in The New Yorker had exemplified such a theme: two city gentlemen of the same type as Rockwell’s beholder study a Pollock painting and render a heavy-handed, silly, connoisseurial judgment. One says to the other, “His spatter is masterful, but his dribbles lack conviction.” And even in the late eighteenth century, cartoons that poked fun at those who bought art for reasons of prestige rather than from admiration proliferated.
Against this tradition, however, Korn sets out the equally potent one that honors the man (often an artist himself) who stares contemplatively at a piece of art. Daumier, for instance (significantly, best known as an illustrator himself), painted a man whose profile allows the spectator to see him admiring a reproduction of the Venus de Milo. He called the painting Le Connoisseur.
The Saturday Evening Post readers were confused by Rockwell’s cover: what was their man trying to tell them? One of the three printed letters to the editor expressed indignation at this foray into enemy territory,
one amusement that implied Rockwell was mocking the abstract painters, and one a sense of surprise that the illustrator had it in him to produce a reasonable imitation of real art.
It is impossible to appreciate the significance of Rockwell’s story on this January cover, however, without taking seriously the rueful statements he made to others about his place in the art world. “Often Pop would tell me that someone had come up to him and said, ‘ “I don’t know anything about art, but I sure like your stuff.” I wish it were the opposite—that they’d tell me, “I know lots about art and I really love your work,” ’ ” recalls Peter Rockwell. The illustrator had swallowed his unhappiness at being taken out of the category of “artist” long ago, but he was still capable of kicking up his heels in protest.
And he was too intelligent a painter and too capacious and inclusive a thinker to scorn things abstract or modern. He liked and admired modern art, but Post patriarch George Horace Lorimer’s disapproval had largely caused the painter to “realize” in 1932 that he was meant to continue along the path he had already taken. Not only is Rockwell the narrator recommending tolerance for aesthetic crosscurrents in The Connoisseur, he is championing the right of abstract painting to take its canonical place in the museums. Gently, Rockwell positions the ersatz Pollock as a wake-up call to those who have admired the illustrator’s work largely because they felt comforted by its anti-art implications. In this generous process, he is also implying his own contribution to the history of art, balancing the gently agonized, red dripping letters—JP—on the upper right portion of the canvas, against the traditional block signature, Norman Rockwell, positioned directly below.
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