American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  In the next decade, Rockwell would produce many Post covers and advertisements featuring pilgrims and founding fathers. In the process, he acquired an extensive collection of Colonial costumes. His studio became a place where models changed into long waistcoats and shoes with pewter buckles. Open a closet door and a tricorn hat might tumble out.

  * * *

  The Colonial Revival movement found its most powerful expression in the hands of home builders and architects, who turned it into the default style of the American suburbs. Fittingly, in March 1927, Rockwell purchased a Colonial house—an impressive, white-painted, four-bedroom house with green shutters and a grand curving staircase that rose up from the foyer, at 24 Lord Kitchener Road in New Rochelle. (The house is still standing.) It had been built just a few years earlier, as part of an upscale residential development called Bonnie Crest in the northern end of New Rochelle, whose street names paid tribute to the Allied victory in World War I.

  Irene poured all her energy into the new house. She retained a decorator and gave extended thought to wallpaper patterns. For the main hall alone, she chose wallpaper “with a reproduction of a quaint landscape,”2 and ordered thirty-six rolls of it, in addition to paste and lining paper.

  Rockwell, in the meantime, was consumed by the construction of a studio on the property, which became its own slowly evolving artistic creation. It was built onto the detached garage and remained entirely separate from the house. Dean Parmelee, the architect who had designed his house, returned now to design the studio. He and Rockwell came up with the idea of replicating an inn in Colonial America.

  This required historical research, and Rockwell happily obliged. He and Parmelee drove to the Boston area to look at restored houses including the Wayside Inn, in Sudbury, an old tavern that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had immortalized in his Tales of a Wayside Inn. They stayed overnight to better imbibe the atmosphere as well as Henry Ford’s renovations to the building. Rockwell slept in a room where Paul Revere had once supposedly slept. The next morning he joked to the desk clerk that the bed was so uncomfortable he could see why Revere chose to ride at night.

  Rockwell’s studio, in the end, was a two-story structure with rough fieldstone walls and a high beamed ceiling. A redbrick fireplace, much like the one at the Wayside Inn, was large enough to roast a pig. Rockwell’s easel and palette table occupied the center of the room. A staircase on the left side led to a second-floor balcony, with a protective railing composed of old wooden spindles. Upstairs, if you lifted the trap door, you would find a veritable storehouse of costumes and props he had amassed for his paintings, including a canon, a fireman’s ax, and an old rocking chair. “It ended up as a $23,000 love affair with antiques,” Rockwell noted of his studio, “and left me up to date in an antique way.”

  It was the spring of 1927, and Charles Lindbergh was monopolizing headlines, with his plan to fly nonstop across the Atlantic. Rockwell observed the milestone with a newsy Post cover, Pioneer.3 It shows the young, idealistic face of an aviator—not Lindbergh’s, as is commonly assumed—with his glasses pushed up on his head, centered against a radiant blue ground. To meet his deadline, Rockwell hired a model, located an aviator cap, and worked on the image for twenty-six consecutive hours before staggering off to bed. Lorimer was so pleased with the results that he offered Rockwell a raise. “My dear Rockwell,” he wrote on June 30, “‘Pioneer’ is just about [the] high water mark for Post covers and on the strength of it we are going to raise the ante $250 per.”4 In other words, the Post was doubling his fee, to five hundred dollars per cover. Probably there were other factors contributing to the raise. At this point, Rockwell had been at the Post for eleven years and other magazines were pursuing him, especially Liberty, which was stocked with art by Rockwell imitators.

  Irene, who still handled her husband’s business correspondence, penned a thank-you note to his boss. “Dear Mr. Lorimer, Your kind letter with the announcement of a raise was gratefully received. It comes too at a most opportune time for buying a house and building a studio does take a lot of cash.”5 Then she signed Rockwell’s name, a task he had entrusted to her along with every other part of his life that did not involve paintbrushes.

  That summer, Rockwell and his fellow illustrators in New Rochelle were shaken by the death of Coles Phillips, who was only forty-seven and had been suffering from kidney disease. He was famous for his Fade-Away Girls, with their crisp outlines melting into the background, and for which his wife, Teresa, had been his model. He died on a Sunday night in June and the next morning, his dear friend J. C. Leyendecker arrived at his home, on Sutton Manor Road, and insisted on helping. He took the four Phillips children into Manhattan to see what promised to be a historic event, the ticker-tape parade up Broadway welcoming Colonel Lindbergh back to the city from which he had begun his flight.

  * * *

  A year passed and Rockwell’s new studio was finally finished. Instead of inhabiting it, he went away for the summer. He and his architect, Dean Parmelee, sailed to Europe in grand style, leaving New York on July 21, 1928, aboard the Olympic, the sister ship of the Titanic. Rockwell would be gone for two months. It was the second time he was going abroad without his wife. Irene was happy to make her own summer plans. After Rockwell sailed, she accompanied Coles Phillips’s widow on a two-week trip to the home of friends in Loon Lake, in upstate New York, then continued on, by car and ferry, to her mother’s riverside cottage in Louisville Landing, on the Canadian border.6 News of her summer surfaced occasionally in the local paper, in connection with either her brothers’ duck hunting or luncheons she attended with her mom and sister at the Massena Country Club.

  In addition to Parmelee, Rockwell was traveling with Bill Backer, a well-to-do building contractor and neighbor of his. It is odd to think of three married men (two of whom had young children) leaving their wives for two months to frolic in Europe—the twenties sometimes seem too silly for words. Their fellow first-cabin passengers on the ship included William Randolph Hearst, whom Rockwell spotted “playing cards with his bodyguard, his long, unhappy, horse face bent over the table.”7 Also on board was Fred Astaire, who was on his way to London to start rehearsing for a stage production of Funny Face.8

  The trip, as Rockwell later described it, was “a sunny, carefree interlude.” He was glad to have a respite from his married routine of “deadlines, money, bills, the right flannel trousers, and the country club.”9 He had come to Europe, at least partly, to seek ideas for covers and would sketch copiously throughout the trip. He never went a day without sketching and developed a quick sketching technique. At night, in his hotel room, he would complete the rough sketches he had done during the day, adding little touches of watercolor here and there.

  At the end of the trip, he was in Madrid when he lost his sketchbook. He had used the same one throughout the trip and by then it was packed full of drawings of things he had seen, including paintings in museums. “Dean, Bill and I treasured it,” he later recalled. “I still almost cry when I think about it.” He had placed the sketchpad beside him on a bench in the Prado, but could not find it after he got up to look more closely at Velázquez’s Topers. Dating from 1627, it was one of his favorite paintings, an all-male paradise featuring six rugged townsmen who meet up with the Greek god Bacchus in a wooded area. You can see why Rockwell would love Topers—it’s the masterpiece version of a Boys’ Life cover.

  Rockwell and his two friends sailed out of the port of Gibraltar on September 14, 1928, in the first-class section of the Italian ocean liner Conte Biancamano. Although he cursed himself for losing his sketchbook, he had absorbed enough Old Master painting over the summer for the images to remain clear in his head when he got home. He immediately set to work on Doctor and Doll, one of his greatest early paintings, which would run on the cover of the Post on March 9, 1929.

  * * *

  Doctor and Doll shows a girl of perhaps six standing in a doctor’s office, holding an unlikely patient—her cloth doll—as the docto
r pretends to listen to its heartbeat. You assume the girl is there for her annual checkup. She probably arrived just moments earlier because she is still wearing her raincoat and rubbers. Her red beret is pulled down over her head.

  You can almost hear the conversation. The doctor, noticing the girl’s doll, inquires in a deeply concerned voice: “How is your doll feeling today?” The girl says that she isn’t sure. The doctor offers to check with his stethoscope. No doubt he will tell the girl that the doll is in excellent health, thanks to her ministrations.

  The furnishings in the office have their own tattered charm. The office is not the callously antiseptic chamber of modern medicine, but a comfortably lived-in place that could use a little straightening up. An area rug, instead of lying flat on the floor, is bunched up in one spot. The doctor sits on a Windsor chair whose black paint has rubbed off on the parts where his body makes the most contact, such as the arm rest. On top of the desk, a row of books is casually arrayed, the last two tilting haphazardly to the left. Pewter candlesticks hold half-burned tapers.

  The books and tapers are a nod to Dutch still-life painting, a point driven home by a work of art in the doctor’s office—a reproduction of what appears to be a Rembrandt, with a group of men in white collars. The prodding at Dutch painting is a bit heavy-handed, but it can be forgiven because Doctor and Doll was done by a relatively young (thirty-five-year-old) artist who is delighted to realize how Old Master painting, with its great contrasts of darkness and light, can inform popular illustration.

  Doctor and Doll, 1929, acknowledges Rockwell’s affection for Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

  As usual, there’s enormous intelligence in Rockwell’s picture construction, and it is not a coincidence that his doctor is facing in the same direction, with his head at the same angle, as the heads of the Dutchmen in the reproduction. And like the Dutchmen, the doctor is dressed in velvety black, with a white collar peeking out. Rockwell was always fond of doctors and felt like he needed one half the time, to attend to his ailments. He had painted an earlier, less satisfying doctor-and-doll in 1923, for the cover of The Literary Digest. In both his art and his life, he was perpetually returning to the doctor.

  * * *

  From the outside, it looked like a real marriage and no one but he and Irene needed to know that it wasn’t. In February 1929 their house was featured in Good Housekeeping, in a story called “A House with Real Charm.” Throughout that spring, Irene appeared in a national advertisement for Cantilever shoes. There she was “Mrs. Norman Rockwell, wife of famous artist,” as the copy said, standing at the stove in her apron, stirring a pot while wearing her sensible Cantilever shoes. “Their comfort is doubly appreciated on Thursday nights” the ad reads, because Thursday was the night when the maid was off and she prepared a little “artistic supper.”

  In June 1929 Rockwell sailed to Europe again. For the first time, he and Irene went abroad as a couple. She had an incentive. Three couples from New Rochelle were going abroad together; she thought it would be fun to travel with friends. “Again Irene stayed home,” Rockwell noted in his autobiography, perhaps because he wished she had. But U.S. immigration records reveal she was on the boat both ways.10

  It was as luxurious as a trip could be. They stayed at the George V Hotel in Paris and at the Ritz in London along with the other couples, whom Irene knew from bridge. Later, describing the trip in his autobiography, Rockwell devoted only one grumbling paragraph to it and made his traveling companions sound like philistines. One day in Paris he proposed to the group, “Let’s go to the Louvre.” And he was told, “We’ve been to the Louvre,” as if there was no point in seeing a museum more than once. The four couples boarded the ocean liner SS Paris in Plymouth, England, on July 5, and arrived in New York five days later.

  When they returned from Europe, he retreated to his studio and his mound of assignments and assumed that Irene would similarly return to where she left off. He assumed she would continue to host bridge parties and meet friends for lunch at the Bonnie Briar Country Club. He assumed that he would see her over dinner every night at home on Lord Kitchener Road, in that lovely white-painted Colonial where a certain kind of American life was supposed to unfold.

  But he assumed wrong. Irene was leaving him. They had been home from Europe for about a month when Irene told her husband she had fallen in love with a man she had met at the club. He was the older brother of her dear friend Edna (Hartley) Peck, one of the friends who had been on the trip to Europe. Francis Hartley, Jr., was a well-off chemical salesman in Boston. He held degrees from the best schools: Andover, Yale, and the Harvard Business School. He had flown combat missions in the war.

  He sounded formidable on paper, but Irene probably knew there was something off about him. At age thirty-four, he had never been married and his reputation was shadowed by an unsettling event that had occurred during his student days at Yale. One Saturday night, in a hotel lobby in New Haven, he was arrested when he accosted an actress after her performance that night. The incident was witnessed by J. J. Shubert, the famous theatrical producer, who smacked him in the face. Hartley was charged with breach of peace.11

  Rockwell was well-acquainted with Edna Peck, with whom he had chatted amiably on the cruise to Europe. But he did not know her older brother and was stunned by his wife’s request for a divorce. He asked her if she was sure. Although he knew he had been a lackadaisical husband, he did not want the marriage to end. He would have happily stayed married to Irene. No, not happily. But he would have stayed married. He was not a romantic.

  Irene informed him that her plan was to leave New Rochelle immediately and move into a furnished apartment in the Allerton House in New York City until the divorce came through. She intended to marry Hartley the moment it was legally possible.

  One night as they sat in the living room Rockwell asked once again if she was sure. She said that she had never felt more sure about anything. “How can you leave all this?” he asked, waving his hand at the furniture and then picking up a Royal Doulton porcelain figurine from the mantelpiece. “Can you really give all this up?”

  He found it dismaying, not that she would leave him, but that she would leave the furniture. It had taken so long to assemble, the handsomely appointed rooms with their patterned wallpaper and choice antiques. He had made it possible. The rooms had been decorated at great expense. He had fulfilled his husbandly obligations but now he saw it was all for naught. He threw the figurine at the wall.

  In mid-August she went upstate to be with family and this time Rockwell did not accompany her. She returned to New York three weeks later.12 She told Rockwell that she and her mother, Catherine O’Connor, widowed but still vigorous at seventy, had made plans to travel by train to Reno, Nevada, the divorce capital of America.

  And so ended his life with Irene. It came at one of those rare moments when one’s personal sorrows are echoed by events in the wider world. A decade was ending, as was the longest stretch of prosperity in the nation’s history. Irene had been in Reno for a week when the Wall Street crash, on October 29, further severed her from her life with Rockwell and made them see how innocent they had been, acting as if bridge parties and antiquing sprees and trips on luxurious ships could continue forever.

  Rockwell was among the fortunate. At the time, he banked at Chase National and owned stock in about a dozen companies, including American Telephone & Telegraph and Columbia Gas & Electric. In May 1930 his stocks and bonds were worth $38,000, and his portfolio would decline by about a third in the next year.13 He was not destroyed financially. Far from it. He had just rented out his house in New Rochelle to a family named Bliss and moved into an apartment in New York to begin his new bachelor life.

  * * *

  The Hotel des Artistes was not a hotel but an elegant apartment house at 1 West Sixty-seventh Street, with amenities including maid service, a swimming pool, and squash courts. Most of the units were spacious duplexes with dou
ble-height studios designed expressly for well-heeled painters and sculptors, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. In its early years, the building was also home to many writers and actors, including Rudolph Valentino and Isadora Duncan, both of whom met tragic deaths a few years before Rockwell moved in.14

  Rockwell’s new apartment was a two-bedroom duplex, but he had no interest in the sybaritic lifestyle that was supposed to go with it. He did not attend grand parties or stay up late. At thirty-five years old, he had lived alone only once before, when he was separated from his wife in 1925 and ensconced in Leyendecker’s studio building. In general he disliked being by himself, at least when he woke up and went to sleep.

  In the morning, when he got out of bed, he stepped out onto a little balcony that overlooked his studio. He would gaze at the things he had brought from New Rochelle—his wooden easel, his sturdy Windsor chair, his palette table. It was a perfect artist’s lair, but without another person to keep him company, he found the tranquility unnerving. It became his habit to consume his breakfast standing at the counter, “so as to get through with it as quickly as possible.”15 For dinner, he usually went to Schrafft’s, on Fifty-seventh Street, across from the Art Students League, sitting alone at a little table.

  That fall, when he visited the editorial offices of The Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia, everyone seemed familiar with the details of his personal life. George Lorimer asked him why he was getting a divorce. “My wife fell in love with another man,” Rockwell confessed. When Lorimer asked him what he was going to do about it, he replied, “Well, nothing.”

  “In my day,” Lorimer said sternly, “we’d have shot the man.”

  “That made me feel like a fool,” Rockwell later recounted. It was embarrassing enough to be cuckolded by your wife of fourteen years. It was even more embarrassing that he didn’t really care. And Lorimer knew he didn’t care.