American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  * * *

  On May 18, 1935, it was reported that Rockwell and his family were on their way to California, where they expected to stay for five months. For the first time, they traveled by airplane. “Fred Hildebrandt,” the article noted, “also an artist and a close friend of the Rockwells, left in their car, taking their dog, and will join them there.”6 They stayed, once again, with Mary’s parents in Alhambra, which was fine with Rockwell. With two sons under the age of four, a wife who tended to feel overmatched, and a widowed mother who looked upon babysitting as hard physical labor bordering on punishment, he was receptive to his in-laws’ generosity and calm, uncomplicated company.

  Besides, Los Angeles was its own trove of humorous story ideas. Rockwell’s oft-repeated plaint about being unable to paint a glamorous woman was instantly disproved in Movie Starlet and Reporters, a wonderfully vivid painting that graced the cover of the Post on March 7, 1936. (See color insert.) A redheaded Hollywood star, who is traveling to promote her latest film, is shown in an unnamed city, being interviewed by the local press corps. Six male reporters in fedoras and dusty overcoats form a tight circle around her. You know from the actress’s bouquet of welcome roses that she arrived in town only moments earlier, perhaps after a transcontinental rail journey. Her monogrammed suitcase and matching hatbox declare her point of origin in crimson type: HOLLYWOOD. The reporters’ faces, for the most part, are blocked from view, but their eagerness is conveyed in the choreography of their leaning bodies, raised pens and note pads held at the ready. To the right stands a radio reporter, a bulky man in a black trench coat with a ragged hemline. He holds up a mic—a silvery circular thing, an old-fashioned carbon microphone that hovers in the center of the composition like a metal screw holding it together.

  David Rakoff, the writer and essayist, wittily observed: “The reporters all seem poised to ask the same question, which is, ‘And how do you like it here, Miss Film Star?’”7

  Will she answer their query? Or will she imperiously decline to be interviewed? The painting pits the evolving technology of sound transmission against the possibility of sound failure; the actress reserves the right to say “no comment” and thereby defeat old media (pencils and note pads) and new media alike. You could say that Rockwell here uses the press (that is, the cover of the Post) to poke fun at the press. His send-up of the celebrity news business has lost none of its relevance in the seventy-five-plus years since it was painted.

  The starlet, it has often been noted, bears a resemblance to Jean Harlow, but Rockwell used an aspiring actress, Mardee Hoff, the daughter of illustrator Guy Hoff, as his model. In general, he disliked using famous people as models. Their presence in a painting was distracting and constraining and kept him from making stuff up. Besides, he could hardly expect Harlow and her celebrated ilk to stand in his studio for four days, holding her head at the requested angle until he was done trying to render it as accurately as pencil will allow.

  That August he visited the Paramount lot in search of a model for a new painting. He could have picked anyone, but he picked Charles King, an older, underused Broadway actor and vaudevillian who was milling around the set of the movie Annapolis Farewell. Rockwell was delighted by his big belly. He hired him to pose for a week, seated on top of an English stagecoach that looks like something out of Dickens.

  Dover Coach, as it was called, is a six-foot-long, horizontal painting that ran as a two-page spread inside the Post’s Christmas issue that year. Here they come: a rotund coachman swaddled in his ankle-length traveling coat, a few women in bonnets, a bony gentleman who is clearly in agony as a boy blasts a trumpet in his face. They’re crowded onto the outside of a stagecoach like a row of figures arrayed on a Greek frieze.

  Later, in 1939, Rockwell donated Dover Coach to the Society of Illustrators, in honor of its new building, an elegant limestone edifice on East Sixty-third Street in New York. For years the painting hung on the fourth floor, on the wall behind the oak-wood bar, between shelves stocked with drinking glasses. It became a local landmark, especially among illustrators, who, when trying to figure out where to meet one another, were known to suggest, “Let’s meet under the Rockwell.”

  * * *

  By his own account, Rockwell claimed he fell into a depression in the early thirties and didn’t come out of it until 1935, when he returned home from California and embarked on a project that had nothing to do with The Saturday Evening Post. George Macy, an independent publisher and scion of the department-store family, had just started the Heritage Press as a division of his Limited Editions Club. His goal was to bring out illustrated classics and he thought Rockwell would be perfect for Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

  Rockwell initially declined, or rather said that he needed at least a year before he could even think about such a daunting project, which would require eight color paintings as well as drawings for the chapter headings. Macy said he would wait. Rockwell had not attempted book illustration since his art student days some twenty years earlier. It paid far less than magazine work. But it allowed him to reconnect with his childhood reverence for illustration, his belief that he had embarked on a noble pursuit enlarged by its proximity to literature. And he felt especially connected to Twain. Rockwell’s mischievous boys are descendants of Huckleberry Finn, the most famous of all Missouri boys. He is “free of school, free of female relatives, of houses, of manners … free from having to grow up,” as the critic Noel Perrin writes of Huck. “He was to remain forever prepubescent.”

  In mid-October, Rockwell mentioned in a letter to Macy that he was planning on visiting Twain’s Missouri on his way home from California. Conveniently, he had his station wagon with him in California and so was able to drive at the end of the month to out-of-the-way Hannibal, the old river town where Twain had spent much of his childhood and set Tom Sawyer. Rockwell’s goal was to gather “authentic details” for his illustrations, and he considered it a point of pride that he was the first in a long line of Twain illustrators to conduct research in Hannibal.

  During his stay he visited the mandatory pilgrimage sites—Twain’s white frame home, the old picket fence (still standing, with a little help from restorers), and the cave with its winding passageways where Tom and Becky had gotten lost (it was on private property and cost fifty cents to enter). He sketched the bedroom window from which the young Sam Clemens used to climb, perhaps remembering the window in New Rochelle from which his model Billy Payne fell to his death fifteen years earlier.

  Within a few days he had filled his sketchbook with hundreds of “authentic details,” as he called them. He had also acquired an assortment of costumes to bring home for his models. Huck, as described by Twain, was always dressed “in the cast-off clothes of full-grown men.” Rockwell loved to tell the story about how he persuaded the citizens of Hannibal to sell him their old clothes. Young men and old men thought he was kidding when he stopped them on the street and offered them as much as five dollars for their threadbare overalls. Among his purchases was a floppy straw hat that was, as he noted, “in a beautiful state of decay—sun-bleached, ragged.”

  In reality, the clothing that Rockwell glimpsed in Hannibal in the autumn of 1935 had nothing to do with the clothing worn by Twain’s characters. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is set in the 1830s and 1840s—a century before Rockwell arrived in Hannibal and collected clothing and props. But he did enjoy acquiring clothing from men who caught his eye, as if it were possible to acquire the less tangible parts of them as well.

  As to his own wardrobe, he was by no means a dandy. He tended to dress neatly but inconspicuously, in Brooks Brothers shirts and khakis and loafers. He dressed, in other words, like a man who was far more interested in looking at people than in being seen. Revealingly, a tax return from this period indicates that he spent $423 on costumes in seven months and $12 on his own clothing.8

  * * *

  On November 19, 1935, Pete Martin, the art editor of the Post, wrote to Rockwell from his office in Ph
iladelphia: “Don’t let anyone sidetrack you from POST cover work for the next few months, because we need some more Rockwell covers very badly.”

  A new year arrived, and Martin wrote again: “We are looking forward in 1936 to seeing you complete the swell array of ideas Mr. Lorimer okayed on your last visit. I hope you don’t get sudden flashes of inspiration on other ideas that will interfere with the program you mapped out.”

  Indeed, by now Rockwell was consumed with his work on Tom Sawyer and it would take him a year to finish. He knew whom he wanted to pose for Huck. He was driving through New Rochelle when he first spotted him, milling on a street corner with a group of boys, ice skates slung over his shoulders. Charlie Schudy was short and athletic, with red bangs that fell in a straight line across the forehead of his sweet, round face. Pulling over to the side of the road, Rockwell invited Charlie to his studio. The boy declined.

  “Those were the years of the Lindbergh kidnapping,” Schudy later recalled, “when you weren’t supposed to talk to strangers.”9 Intent on persuading the boy to come with him, Rockwell suggested that he bring along his friends, who happily piled into his station wagon.

  Charlie was then a sixth-grader at Holy Family, a Catholic parochial school in New Rochelle, and for the rest of that year Rockwell would regularly summon him from classes. The nuns would inform Charlie that he had a visitor and he would head outside to find Rockwell parked at the curb, sitting alone in his car. Unlike most of the other children who modeled for Rockwell, Charlie Schudy disliked the process. When Rockwell asked a kid to hold a pose, he expected him to listen. And Charlie could not for the life of him understand why he had to stand for two consecutive thirty-minute sessions with a matchbox tucked under his big toe. The point of the matchbox was to make his toe curl away from the rest of his foot, as if it were being tickled by grass. “It was a horrible ordeal,” he later recalled, only half-jokingly. On the plus side, Rockwell paid well. Charlie’s sessions of modeling netted close to one hundred dollars, which he used to purchase a Schwinn bike.

  Another twelve-year-old, Richard Gregory, posed for Tom Sawyer. He first met Rockwell in November 1935, when his younger brother Don, a Post delivery boy, fell ill and asked him to fill in for him on his route. It happened to be raining hard. Richard, not wanting to toss the magazines into puddles, knocked at front doors and handed the magazine to whomever answered. Rockwell answered at 24 Lord Kitchener Road.10 He was delighted by what he saw. A boy in a shiny rain slicker, a wet boy with blond hair and a wide grin and a chipped front tooth (the result of a sledding accident). On the spot, Rockwell asked, “Would you pose for Tom Sawyer?”

  Richard Gregory wound up posing on Saturdays over the course of six months, an experience about which he had mixed feelings. He, too, found posing to be physically arduous and developed a crick in his neck after standing in place for three thirty-minute sessions with his head tilted back, his mouth agape, awaiting the spoonful of castor oil which Aunt Polly was about to deliver. He never actually met Aunt Polly, who posed in separate sessions.

  Of all the illustrations, surely the most interesting is the one that shows Tom Sawyer sneaking out of the upstairs window of a white-shingled house in the middle of the night. As he perches on a window ledge, shadows cast by tree branches reach toward him like dark, elongated fingers. The piece sends a shiver down your spine, mainly because it harks back to the death of Rockwell’s model Billy Payne, who had climbed out a window and fallen to his death fifteen Aprils earlier.

  An illustration for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer harks back to the tragedy of Billy Payne.

  Tom Sawyer’s window charade is hardly a major scene in the novel, and in fact is mentioned only passingly (“a single minute later he was dressed and out of the window and creeping along the roof of the ‘ell’ on all fours. He ‘meow’d’ with caution once or twice, as he went”11). It is interesting that Rockwell chose to depict it. His interpretation of it departs dramatically from Twain’s story line. In Rockwell’s illustration, Tom is transported to a suburban house with another house visible next door and, as he climbs out of the window, he pauses and cries out into the night.

  * * *

  In later years, in the seventies, Rockwell received an admiring letter from Cyril Clemens, a cousin of Twain and the editor of the Mark Twain Journal, in Kirkwood, Missouri. He had seen Rockwell’s Tom Sawyer as well as the Huck Finn volume that followed, and he wrote to “applaud your wonderful work in the memory of Mark Twain.”

  But Rockwell would have none of it. “As much as I loved the books,” he replied in a letter to Clemens, “it was a long time ago and I did not realize the deep significance in them and did not portray, particularly Huckleberry Finn, with the depth of understanding that I should have.”

  That was true. The Heritage editions of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn each contain eight color plates and they do not represent the artist’s best work. They are more impressionistic than his Post covers, and the facial expressions are cartoony. But soon he would find his mature voice.

  THIRTEEN

  HELLO LIFE

  (FALL 1936 TO 1938)

  In September 1936, George Horace Lorimer retired as the editor of The Saturday Evening Post after a reign of almost four decades. He handpicked a successor who inherited his corner office on the sixth floor of the Curtis Building in Philadelphia. Wesley Stout was forty-seven, a dark-haired, preppy-looking newsman from Junction City, Kansas, who had been with the Post for more than a decade. He shared Lorimer’s Republican politics and animosity toward the New Deal. “To succeed squarejawed, hardworking, conservative Mr. Lorimer,” Time magazine reported mockingly, “the Curtis directors ratified the retiring editor’s own choice of a squarejawed, hardworking, conservative colleague.”1

  Wes Stout would stay on as editor of the Post for five years and make a remarkably small dent. Unlike Lorimer, he was not paternal and lacked what is probably an editor’s most important attribute: the ability to create an atmosphere in which writers can do their best work without distraction. As F. Scott Fitzgerald noted bitterly in a letter to his wife, Zelda, “The man who runs the magazine now is an up and coming young Republican who gives not a damn about literature.”2 Rockwell disliked Stout, too, and considered him a cold, conventional bureaucrat who was was insensitive to the needs of artists.

  Rockwell claimed there there was always something that Stout wanted changed in a cover when it was started and something he didn’t like about it when it was finished. Once Rockwell was told that a painting was perfect, except for the shoes. Without explanation, Stout requested that a boy’s brown shoes be changed to black. “I wasn’t able to paint a cover with any conviction because I knew that some little thing would be wrong with it,” Rockwell recalled. “His constant nagging sapped my inspiration, made me unsure of myself.”3

  Stout hoped to attract a new generation of young readers, the coveted demographic for advertisers, and it did not occur to him that Rockwell could help do that. He began his tenure by tearing into Rockwell’s Ticket Agent, which shows a clerk with a thin, tired face on a regular work day, inside his little booth, his head resting in his hands, a patch of white scalp visible beneath his combed-over strands of brown hair. Sitting behind a barred window, he is caged in every way, tethered to his ho-hum job and unable to avail himself of the kind of vacations advertised in the posters surrounding him. Seven or eight travel posters thumbtacked around the window conjure the pleasures of mountain resorts and blue skies, of cruises to Europe and even the Orient. You suspect that transatlantic cruises and maybe love affairs were not so easy when the ticket agent was young. It was one of Rockwell’s abiding themes: the feeling of having missed out on something.

  Wes Stout did not care for the painting. His criticisms were passed along in a letter to Rockwell on December 4. The ticket agent, Stout complained, was “a hick” in a ramshackle office. “We feel it would be more typical of millions of our citizens,” Stout wrote, “if he worked in a town of between ten and fifty tho
usand inhabitants and not such ‘Mi gosh’ and ‘by-heck’ surroundings.”4

  Now that’s funny. Although Rockwell’s detractors have often accused him of being a propagandist for the Post’s beneficent fantasy of small-town America, even the editor of the Post thought his images were too provincial. What Stout did not understand is that Rockwell had zero interest in tailoring the content of his paintings to the demographic particulars of Mr. Typical Post Reader. Rockwell was well aware that most Americans, in 1936, did not live in small towns, that there were bigger and grander lives out there, not least of all his own in New Rochelle, New York. But the genius of his narratives lies in their seeming familiarity. In contrast to the countless magazine covers that portrayed a vision of affluence and aspiration—tuxedoed men and their dates swirling drinks in high-ceilinged rooms—Rockwell’s covers refer to a plainer America. This is not a life you aspire to have, but the one you already have, and most any adult in America could think of someone he or she knew who had a ho-hum job like the ticket agent.

  The Ticket Agent, 1937

  Why did Rockwell work for The Saturday Evening Post? If you said he desired fame and attention, you would not be wrong. His longing for reassurance was insatiable. But since the outset of his career, Rockwell had been able to do the double duty of fulfilling the requirements of magazine illustration while staying true to his artistic instincts. On most days, he didn’t see his work for the Post as a soul-crushing endeavor in which his need for self-expression was constantly being sacrificed to the opposing needs of a profit-driven magazine. Rather, the thrill of his work is that he was able to use a commercial form to thrash out his private obsessions, to turn a formula into an expressive personal genre.