American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  Rockwell emerges from the profile as a man given to amusing anecdotes, especially of the kind told at his own expense. In a typical moment, he relates a story about a time when he was visiting Los Angeles and received an invitation from the office of Josef von Sternberg. The stylish European director was apparently eager to make his acquaintance. So Rockwell showed up on his film set and a publicist perkily introduced him, saying, “Meet Norman Rockwell!” Sternberg appeared horrified. “Not Rockwell Kent?”17

  Over the years, Rockwell Kent often provided Rockwell with a convenient punchline. In interviews and lectures, he insisted that he had benefitted royally from the comedy of errors that led countless people to confuse him with Kent, his hugely gifted contemporary. Kent was a painter, book illustrator, and self-proclaimed socialist.18 The two artists never met, but for years kept up an amiable correspondence. Every so often, Kent would forward Rockwell a packet of letters, most of them praising Post covers he had neither painted nor seen.

  Rockwell claimed in The New Yorker article that he had “hung around southern California off and on for quite a while,” but no longer went there. Actually, he was in Southern California when The New Yorker profile appeared.19 As usual, he stayed with his in-laws and set up an easel at 22 Champion Place, in Frank Tenney Johnson’s former studio. He presented himself as a Yankee artist, a self-reliant Vermonter living on a village green and shivering through another winter when in fact he was nowhere near snow.

  * * *

  Rockwell was still in Los Angeles on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt, who was visiting his second home in the resort town of Warm Springs, Georgia, complained of a pain in the back of his head and collapsed at his desk. He was sixty-three years old and his death came as a terrible shock. That evening, Vice President Harry S. Truman of Missouri, standing gravely in the Cabinet Room of the White House, his wife, Bess, beside him dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, put his hand on a Bible and took the oath of office.

  On May 8 President Truman announced that the Germans had surrendered. By then, Rockwell was back in Vermont and had already delivered a resonant, extra-timely cover for the May 26 issue of the Post. Homecoming G.I. shows a Yank soldier-son who has just walked up to an apartment building and whose relatives are ecstatically rushing out to greet him. (Their beagle is a few steps ahead of them.) In the center of the composition, a redheaded grandmother opens her arms as if to welcome not just her boy, but all the sons who served in the war. America welcomes you home, she seems to be saying.

  Interestingly, the soldier stands with his back to us and we cannot know his precise mood. The painting is less about his feelings than the burst of joy his safe return inspires among a small crowd of neighbors who pause at what they are doing to observe him. A workman fixing a shingle on the roof turns around, a married couple appears in a door frame, faces gaze down from second-story windows. Schoolboys climbing a tree freeze. They are part of the same circle, one that implicitly includes not only the folks looking at the soldier but a wider circle comprised of Post readers looking at the folks looking on the cover.

  Homecoming G.I. was used by the federal government to help promote the final War Loan Drive.

  Homecoming G.I. is Rockwell’s first painting to be set in a scrappy urban neighborhood. He found the building in Troy, New York, near Albany, after trolling the city for two days with John Atherton.20 The painting is often described as a scene in which a redheaded soldier is being greeted by his redheaded relatives, but the sixteen figures dispersed across the stagelike space cannot be so easily categorized. The schoolboy waving hello from the top of the tree is African-American, as is the repairman on the roof. The three dark-haired women leaning out of a second-floor window are supposed to be Jewish.21 It seems almost certain that Rockwell conceived the painting after looking closely at Eastman Johnson’s well-known Negro Life at the South of 1859, a sympathetic portrayal of a group of American slaves on an ordinary day in Washington, D.C. Rockwell borrowed many elements from the Johnson painting: the back alley, the dingy red bricks, the wooden overhang in need of repair.

  If Rockwell was becoming sensitized to the plight of minorities, it would be a while before race became an explicit subject of his work. For now, even his own children posed for him infrequently and accused him of favoring facial types. They believe he preferred the sons of the plumber or the coal dealer or the insurance agent in town. “Increasingly, as we grew up, we came to seem more dissatisfactory to him,” Jarvis Rockwell said years later. “He wanted freckles and red hair.”

  Jarvis, a future artist, was the oldest of the Rockwell boys and the one who had the prickliest relationship with his father. In September 1945, his parents sent him off to a Quaker-run boarding school, the Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie. Two Septembers later, he was joined there by his brother Tom. When Mary filled out the application, she gave Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who was on the board, as a reference. Asked about the family’s church membership, Mary wrote: “None.”

  “My father didn’t want us to grow up to be Vermont people,” Jarvis said. “He was using Vermont for his gene pool. He was using it for his models. The minute he saw someone, either they became part of a painting, or he had no use for them. As a family we stood shoulder to shoulder, and faced out. There was a hollowness where the family was supposed to be.”

  * * *

  In the fall of 1946 Arthur L. Guptill published the first-ever monograph on Rockwell. Entitled Norman Rockwell, Illustrator, it was better than it had to be. Guptill, an artist-professor with a goatee, was an authority on art technique. His book on Rockwell remains useful as a look at Rockwell’s process, stroke by stroke.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher furnished the preface. She was the first writer to assert that Rockwell created his work from “inner necessity.” Defending him from the disdain of unnamed snobs, she argues that the humor and optimism of his work should be viewed as a courageous stand against aesthetic fashion. He is original, goes his own way, shrugs off critics. If he were merely trying to please and pander, she posits, he would portray “the beauty of Nature,” trees and red barns and glowy pink sunsets, the sort of rustic imagery that remained alien to his work.

  The book sold poorly, perhaps because Guptill could not be bothered to advertise it. Moreover, it was expensive (ten dollars), about four times as much as your average nonfiction book. In a letter to Rockwell, Guptill mentioned his disappointment at having sold only fifteen thousand copies.22

  * * *

  At some point when no one was looking, Mary Rockwell began drinking heavily. Later, her sons were vexed to think how little notice they had taken of their mother’s alcoholism, which they attributed to a variety of factors. Besides being relegated to the background of her marriage, she was overwhelmed with tasks that Rockwell expected her to perform. She still managed the business side of his career, which required that she answer his correspondence and get him out of assignments he regretted accepting. She also took care of his finances. Working in a small office behind the dining room, she recorded his credits and debits in the ruled columns of ledger books, the kind with red imitation-leather covers. Four times a year, she would submit her books to an accountant, who would calculate the estimated tax and invariably send her stern letters asking for receipts that she could not locate and making her feel wholly inadequate to the task.

  So, too, Mary was responsible for any errand that involved driving. Rockwell, in general, disliked driving. But because he owned a station wagon, he, or rather Mary, was the first person teachers thought of when they needed a parent to do the chauffeuring on a school trip. Additionally, Mary drove her sons to school every day and picked them up and, in the hours in between, she frequently drove around trying to locate whatever latest crazy prop her husband needed for a painting. Sometimes Mary actually delivered a finished painting to the Post, which entailed driving to the Albany train station and getting on the train to Philadelphia.

  On top of all this, Mary oversaw the care of h
er mother-in-law, who was still living in Providence, Rhode Island. She liked to spend her summers in Vermont, and Rockwell always paid to lodge her in the area, anywhere but in his house. It was Mary who drove to Providence to ferry the senior Mrs. Rockwell to Vermont every spring and to take her back at the end of the summer. Four hours each way. The Mass Turnpike did not yet exist, so she took local roads as she crossed from Vermont into western Massachusetts and zoomed clear across the state, toward Boston, and then down into Rhode Island, smoking her Lucky Strikes and keeping her eyes peeled for cops.

  Baba, as she had taken to signing her letters, was almost eighty now. She rented a room in Providence from the Arnold sisters, four middle-aged spinsters who still lived in the same narrow Victorian house at 25 Blackstone Boulevard, where they had grown up. In February 1946, as snow tumbled outside her window panes, Baba lamented in a letter to Mary, “I don’t hear the radio unless Florence wishes.” Even if she owned her own radio, which she didn’t, “I would have to shut myself in my room, for I have to have it loud, being deaf, and that irritates them.”23

  That spring, Baba suffered a paroxysm of “upset nerves” and “had a sort of exhaustion trying to throw it off,” as she wrote. She was eager to return to Vermont. On May 10 Mary dutifully drove to Providence to fetch her. It was arranged that the old woman would live that summer at a nursing home in North Bennington. “This is a grand location—in the mountains,” Baba wrote to her niece, “about 15 miles from Norman and Mary, but she comes down very often.”24

  * * *

  Mary’s drinking began to spin out of control early in 1947. Although Arlington, Vermont, was a dry town without any bars, she and Rockwell would sip cocktails at home before dinner. Mary usually had daiquiri or two, which helped her to relax. But her drinking was not confined to cocktail hour. The Edgertons’ daughter, Joy, later recalled a night when Mary came over after her parents had gone to sleep, walking over to the liquor cabinet and pouring herself a drink.25 “Norman is busy with people,” she said sadly, waving her hand in the direction of the studio and sitting down at the kitchen table to talk to Joy into the night.

  On February 3, a Monday night and her husband’s fifty-third birthday, she drank so much she passed out. She was taken to Putnam Memorial Hospital, in Bennington, and remained hospitalized for a week. Rockwell told the local paper that she was there for “ear trouble.”26

  Mary was then thirty-nine years old, and among her frustrations was her lack of progress with her writing. During her college days, she had come to believe she was one of those people meant to write stories. But in the years since, her efforts had been erratic, at best. She belonged to a writing group in Bennington that met on Tuesday evenings and, in a letter to her sister, mentioned reading one of her stories aloud. “When I read it last night at the writing group, they all said I should send it to the New Yorker or Atlantic or etc.—at least for a criticism.”27 She enclosed a carbon copy of the story, soliciting her sister’s opinion.

  The story recounts a train ride that turns into a nightmare for its protagonist, a girl whose name and age are not given. She is in her “red plush seat” when she has an anxiety attack. She stands up and runs down the aisle of the train, only to feel herself “falling, falling into the blackness of a night without a bed she knew, or any star beyond the window.” The reader is left with an image of her “heavy, tear-stained face.”

  A poem written by Mary during this period, “The Question,” is similarly desolate. It describes the collapse of a clapboard house that cannot “defend” itself against the weather. Again, there is imagery of things tumbling down: “Slowly fell the picket fence.”

  * * *

  Rockwell decided they would go away for the summer, for a real vacation. The plan was to leave his mother in the nursing home in Vermont and take Mary and the boys to Cape Cod, to Provincetown, where he had gone as an art student so many moons earlier. Although Rockwell had no affinity for the ocean, Mary had sailed in her girlhood and could captain a Portuguese sloop by herself. They rented a house at 75 Commercial Street, right in the middle of everything. But they had barely unpacked when the problems began.

  During the long fourth of July weekend, at 7:30 on Sunday evening, Mary was stopped by the police in the town of Orleans for drunken driving.28 The report said she “operated a vehicle in an improper fashion.” It was not her first offense and, on July 31, her license was suspended in the state of Massachusetts for one year.

  Rockwell had his own misadventure. On July 19, the Bennington Banner reported in a page-one headline: NORMAN ROCKWELL WON’T BE ABLE TO TALK FOR AWHILE. He had rented a bicycle in Provincetown and taken a bad spill. “He landed on his jaw, fracturing it. He had to go about 30 miles to a good surgeon.”29 Indeed, he broke his lower jaw and had to have his mouth wired shut by an oral surgeon in Hyannis.

  Two days later, the newspaper amended its report, saying he had suffered “a slight mishap on a bicycle.” Clearly, Rockwell wanted to downplay his injury and not turn his jawbone into a subject of national media attention. His vacation turned out to be a month shorter than planned. At the end of July, after Rockwell honored a long-standing promise to help judge a grand costume ball organized by an all-male artists’ group called the Beachcombers, he returned to Vermont.

  By coincidence, that was the summer in which Rockwell painted Going and Coming, a casual masterpiece that captures something profound about family outings. A two-panel, before-and-after affair, it is one of his very few Post covers that portrays three generations of a typical-seeming American family and it is probably telling that no one is talking or looking at anyone else. The family consists of a mother, a father, two boys dressed in matching orange-and-blue striped T-shirts, two girls, and a grandmother. There is also a springer spaniel—Butch, who was Rockwell’s new dog. In the top panel, you see a buoyant clan starting off on a trip, presumably to a lake; a rowboat (Skippy) is tied to the roof. In the bottom panel, the same seven people reappear, sitting in basically the same seats but facing the opposite direction, heading home, their faces drooping with fatigue.

  The grandmother is the exception. She is the only one who stays the same both ways. Shown in profile, in her little hat and wire-rimmed glasses, she is as immobile as a statue, unchanged by her day at the lake.30

  The mother, by contrast, is less resilient. On the ride back, she sleeps, her head resting heavily against the window frame. She is absent even when she is present.

  The car, a 1933 Ford Model B, was borrowed from John Benedict, who built cabinets and stairs for Rockwell. Which means that the car was fourteen years old when it appeared in the painting and suitably unflashy.

  Rockwell frequently chose to depict the prelude or the afterward of a scene instead of the scene itself. He paints the moments at the periphery of the action—the tensely expectant slip of time before the prom, or before the date, or before a boy dives into a pool. Maybe he thinks that anticipating an event can be more dramatic than the event itself. Maybe the anxiety that comes before an event is the event. He also did his share of after-the-event scenes, such as his Homecoming G.I.

  Rockwell’s new dog, a springer spaniel named Butch, appeared in Going and Coming. This is a charcoal sketch for the painting. (Collection of George Lucas)

  In Going and Coming, you get both at once. A twofer. Before the fall and after. The joke, of course, is that there’s nothing more exhausting than a day off with your family. You leave home refreshed; you return home needing a break from your break.

  Going and Coming remains one of Rockwell’s most popular paintings and it had the unintended consequence of piquing interest in Rockwell’s summer vacation. A Post staffer wrote to him to request information about his trip and also asked for “a summer photograph of the Rockwells,” thinking it would make for an interesting article. Not surprisingly, Rockwell declined to send one.

  SEVENTEEN

  “WE’RE LOOKING FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO DRAW”

  (OCTOBER 1948)

 
; After the war, home-study courses came into vogue. Magazine advertisements exhorted readers to fill out the coupon and become a success, to earn “big money,” to train for a career in radio repair, watchmaking, or “plasticating” (plastics?), to imagine themselves earning their livelihood engraving jewelry or raising hardy “chinchilla rabbits.” It was not just the dream of a well-paying job that was newly available. It was the chance to become someone new, to make yourself over as a gracious and cultured presence. You could take dance lessons from Arthur Murray, correct your stammer, master a musical instrument in six weeks.

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  Rockwell was a founding member of the Institute of Commercial Art, which officially opened on October 4, 1948, and later changed its name to the Famous Artists School.1 It was located in Westport, Connecticut, in the old Sasco mill, a low, rambling red-painted building overlooking a brook, and described itself as a school “whose campus is the U.S. mail.” Advertisements that became ubiquitous in the back pages of magazines and comic books showed Rockwell in his studio, paintbrush in hand, gazing out warmly and beckoning the reader to join him on his merry art adventure. As the text read:

  Norman Rockwell Says:

  We’re Looking for People Who Like to Draw

  The ads took many different forms but usually included a tiny coupon where you could write your name and address on three black lines that weren’t long enough and left you squeezing the last five letters into the margins. Then you cut out the coupon, went rummaging in a drawer for a three-cent stamp and an envelope, and mailed your request for more information to the Famous Artists School, no apostrophe, in Connecticut. Some aspirants were actually turned down. “I couldn’t seem to draw a simple fish to their satisfaction,” recalled the design critic Steven Heller, who was crushed when he received a rejection letter in his youth.2