A bill that survives among Rockwell’s papers indicates that in December 1958 he and two of his sons had separate therapy sessions with Erikson. “You know, I think your family has logged more hours of psychiatric care than any other family in America,” Erikson joked to Rockwell.15
In Rockwell’s mind, no one needed a special reason to go into psychotherapy. His children went to their therapy appointments the way other children went to the dentist. There was something admirable about his openness to therapy, with its implicit quest for emotional clarity. On the other hand, therapy, too, at times seemed like a form of emotional avoidance, a way for Rockwell to outsource responsibility for the mental well-being of his wife and sons. “He wanted someone else to take care of it,” his son Tom recalled years later.
TWENTY-THREE
ROCKWELL TELLS HIS LIFE STORY
(1959)
By now Rockwell was working on his autobiography, at the suggestion of Ken McCormick, the editor in chief of Doubleday. The project had begun haltingly. In May 1957 McCormick invited Rockwell to lunch in New York. Although Rockwell had never cared for writing, McCormick, who described him as an “old sweetie,” suggested that he do a book that would require no writing. He could tape-record his large store of anecdotes and someone else could assemble them into book form.
A few days later, the editor had a Dictaphone shipped to Stockbridge, a bit too optimistically. Rockwell ignored the deadline for his book much as he ignored any deadline that did not pertain to his Post covers. In a letter to Rockwell in November, McCormick nudged: “How does it go with the patent word machine? I visualize you with a brush in one hand and a microphone in the other—I do hope the sound inscriber hasn’t turned into a sound torture machine.”1 Six months later, Rockwell still had not turned on the Dictaphone. His editor thought a ghostwriter was needed and signed on Hawthorne Daniel, who had written some old-style biographies of explorers and seafarers, and who spent the first two weeks of July 1958 interviewing Rockwell at his home in Stockbridge. But Rockwell found it discomfiting to confide his life story to a relative stranger, and Daniel was ditched in short order. “Thank you for being a gentleman and understanding our position,” McCormick wrote to the dismissed biographer.2
Instead, Tom Rockwell, the writer in the family, was brought in to cowrite his father’s book. Tom was then twenty-five and working as an editorial assistant at Flower Grower magazine. He was glad to have a job at least nominally related to writing. He and his wife, Gail, lived in a renovated barn in Poughkeepsie, New York, about an hour and a half from Stockbridge. They would drive up on weekends so that Tom could interview his father, whom he found entertaining if not quite credible as he sat at the kitchen table, recounting a lifetime’s worth of anecdotes. As Tom put it, “His memory was the Norman Rockwell version of his life.”3
In place of introspection, Rockwell narrated his adventures with a folksiness that was perhaps meant to recall Mark Twain or one of the fiction writers at the Post, like Ring Lardner. He wanted his book to be a pageant of Americana, with childhood gangs, boardinghouses, and Model T’s. He takes us through Prohibition, the two world wars, McKinley and all the other presidents.
Rockwell was loath to reminiscence about the more personal aspects of his past. “He said hardly anything about his relationship with his parents,” Tom recalled later. “It was sort of startling. I had to push to get even what is in there.” Indeed, his loyal son, who spent countless hours listening to his anecdotes, chuckling at his jokes and writing it all up without delay, was about as much family as he could take.
* * *
On Friday night, February 6, 1959, Rockwell was interviewed on Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person, a hit television talk show that invited viewers into the well-appointed living rooms of the famous, nearly all of whom chose to appear on their upholstered chintz sofas, in front of floor-length floral drapes. Person to Person was criticized in its time as too lightweight for a newsman of Murrow’s depth and his interview with Rockwell was indeed fluffy.4
The excitement began the day before the telecast, when CBS sent a twenty-five-man crew up to Stockbridge along with truckloads of equipment. A large van containing five cameras was parked in Rockwell’s yard and would serve as a makeshift control booth during the show. Murrow, as always, remained in his Manhattan studio—his custom was to appear on camera sinking into a comfy armchair, leisurely “visiting” his guests by chatting them up long-distance, starting at 10:30 p.m. He smoked throughout the show, favoring Kent, “with its full filter action,” as the commercials boasted.
The first guest that evening was Fidel Castro, who along with his rebels had overthrown the Batista government only a month earlier. Dressed in his pajamas, with a straggly beard, Castro stared cockily at the camera. Then came the feature on Rockwell, which lasted for eleven minutes and implicitly reassured viewers that no one was about to topple the machinery of American democracy, not least because the streets were quiet and devoid of Communists. The black-and-white segment opened with a long shot of Main Street in Stockbridge, which looked poetically deserted, the bare tree branches casting shadows on the empty sidewalks. The road was encrusted with snow, and the rows of windows at the Red Lion Inn, which had closed for the winter, were dark.
Soon viewers could see Rockwell in his library, an attractive, well-lighted room filled with bookshelves and antique American furniture. His framed reproduction of Pieter Bruegel’s The Peasant Dance had been moved for the occasion out of his studio and into the library, as if to reiterate his regard for the European masters. In addition to Rockwell and Mary, their son Tom appeared on the show, joshing with his father and giving the impression that the normal tone of their family conversations was one of intense affection and wit.
Tom, as Murrow informs viewers, “is helping Pop with his autobiography.”
“It’s going to be a long one because he is sixty-five,” jokes Tom. Rockwell, who is wearing a jacket and striped bow tie, fake scolds: “Did you have to tell?”
“Good evening, Mr. Murrow,” Mary says in a soft voice, looking a bit heavy as she sits in a wing chair. Her reticence emphasizes her husband’s volubility.
The idea here seemed to be to talk about the house.
“I think the house is prerevolutionary,” Rockwell volunteers. “They tell us Aaron Burr lived here. I don’t know if that is much of a distinction inasmuch as he was the man who killed Alexander Hamilton.”
Then he goes outside and walks along the short path to the studio. Inside, the wooden floors are polished to a high gleam and paintings and sketches from different periods of his life lean against the white walls.
When asked by Murrow how he spent his evenings, he gave the most clumsily personal answer. He confessed to spending countless hours tearing bolts of diaper cloth into paint rags. “We use a lot of rags to wipe the paint off with,” he explained. “I use this diaper cloth. It’s a wonderful cloth. It’s not only absorbent, but it doesn’t go through.”
Murrow replied, “But I’m sure you’re eager to get back to doing it right now!” And that was the end of the interview.
Three weeks after the show, a humorous “Talk of the Town” item in The New Yorker reported that the Aaron Burr Association had taken offense at Rockwell’s televised comments. Rockwell received a thick packet of information from the group, “whose members are dedicated to revising upward the generally low opinion in which our third vice-president is held.”5
The show also generated what might be called the Rockwell-Nabokov mystery, which continues unabated. At one point during the interview, Murrow asked: “Who’s your friend there beside you?” He was referring to a long-limbed dog curled up at one end of the Victorian couch. “We call her Lolito—Lolita,” Rockwell replied, correcting himself, in a moment of televised gender confusion.
None of his children recall a dog named Lolita. What led him to summon up Vladimir Nabokov’s nymphet? Surely he had read his novel Pnin, which includes many clever asides on modern art,
including this one: “Dali is really Norman Rockwell’s twin brother kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood.”6 What was intended as a put-down of Salvador Dalí is also an implicit elevation of Rockwell, whom Nabokov, in a brilliant if acidic insight, viewed as the equal of Dalí. They both used a style of impeccable realism to render imaginary worlds—be it the hypersexual fantasies of Surrealism or Rockwell’s desexed Americana.
And surely he had read Lolita, or read about it. It had been published in the United States the previous summer and generated a firestorm of controversy. Apparently, it inspired Rockwell to nickname a dog after Nabokov’s twelve-year-old seductress. He didn’t appear to be joking. In a way Rockwell was Humbert Humbert’s discreet and careful twin brother, roused by the beauty of children but (thankfully) more repressed.
* * *
In the summer of 1959 the house in Stockbridge filled up once again with visitors. Peter arrived in mid-June with Cinnie, who was pregnant with their first child. He had just completed a year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and was still passionate about sculpture. “My hero was Donatello,” he recalled, adding that he rented a studio in Stockbridge that summer and continued his work in clay.
Mary was gracious to her daughter-in-law and appreciative of her company. The two women could often be found in the kitchen, the sun flooding through the curtained windows as they read the local news in The Berkshire Eagle and talked. Cinnie smoked Viceroys and Mary had switched to Pall Malls. “We talked about the coming baby,” Cinnie recalled. “Mary was loving and permissive. I had this feeling that she wished me well, as in, you should do your thing.”7
Cinnie knew not to expect too much of her mother-in-law, who avoided the subject of her personal problems but could not completely conceal them, either. “There were times when you could tell she was fragile,” she recalled. “Toward the end she developed this funny thing where her tongue was moving about of its own accord, as if she didn’t have control. The speech was slightly slurred.” Her family assumed the dragging words were a side effect of too many drugs. She had been using sleeping pills (Seconal) for years and they had taken their toll.
At lunchtime, Rockwell would promptly appear in the kitchen doorway, creating a certain tension as the women turned their attention to him. Mrs. Bracknell, a cheerful, snowy-haired woman in her seventies, came in every day to cook for the family when they moved to Stockbridge. In addition to steak, roast beef, and lamb chops, her repertory included Yorkshire pudding, which Rockwell described as “a marvel—soft on the inside, crisp on the outside.” Those recipes were reserved for dinner, over which Rockwell was likely to recount amusing stories and needle his son Peter as if he were still a schoolboy. Later, after the dishes were cleared and put back in the cabinets, Mary would drive Mrs. Bracknell home.
* * *
For most of that summer, Rockwell had been working on a single cover for the Post, his clever and intricate Family Tree, in which twenty-three small, bouncy heads chart a fictional American family over three centuries. The tree starts chronologically at the bottom of the page with “a good, strong pirate head right out of Howard Pyle,” as Rockwell described it.8 It meanders through several generations of long-gone relatives in bonnets and tricorn hats, and ends in the glorious present with a nine-year-old boy (born 1950) grinning at the top of the heap.
Rockwell decided to make the last chapter of his autobiography a diary of a painting in progress. He would record his Family Tree. It is understandable that he wanted to draw attention to his process. Fashionable opinion in the fifties held that a picture was not just something to hang on a wall but a record of a performance, “an arena in which to act,” as Harold Rosenberg famously wrote. Magazine feature articles about Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and their Abstract Expressionist ilk inevitably dwelled on the angst of creation. In that department, the department of doubt, Rockwell could compete with the best of them.
He started his diary on April 27, 1959, and the tone is one of constructive misery as he attempts to generate an idea for a new work. Three days later, he still hasn’t found one. “Groped around awhile. Found nothing. No ideas, not even a glimmer of one. Gave it up early and tore some paint rags from a bale of diaper cloth to distract myself.”9
Through that summer of 1959, Rockwell spoke into a Dictaphone every few days—this was the form his diary took. His comments were transcribed by his son, who picked out short, salient excerpts for the autobiography. The Dictaphone recordings run to more than eight hours and provide a valuable glimpse into Rockwell’s creative rhythms. They amount to a badinage with himself, in which he describes, only half-jokingly, how the sense of possibility he feels every morning is overtaken by regret and discouragement by the day’s end. So many afternoons seemed to end the same way: He laments that he did not “get anywhere with the picture.” He couldn’t solve this pictorial problem or that, often one having something to do with the correct proportions of a figure or an object.
He usually recorded his comments in the evening, after dinner, sitting alone in his studio with his Dictaphone recorder. He found it easy to speak without notes. When he signed off, he might say, “Good night, my friend,” or “I will bore you no longer. Good night all.”10 Or, if he was feeling playful, he might sign off on hot summer nights by saying, “Merry Christmas, my friends.”
The recordings reveal, among other things, the degree to which Rockwell depended on “my dear friend” and “my great counselor” Erik Erikson to help him think through a particular painting. Erikson’s early training as an artist made him a perfect sounding board for Rockwell. During this period, their sessions were held away from Austen Riggs, in Rockwell’s studio. And their conversations sounded less like a session of traditional psychotherapy than an art-school crit.
Typically, speaking into a Dictaphone on July 25, a Saturday, Rockwell mentioned that Erikson dropped by the studio at ten that morning to push their scheduled eleven a.m. appointment back by one hour. Then Erikson returned at 12:20, prompting Rockwell to joke about his therapist’s chronic lateness. For the duration of their fifty-minute session, the two men contemplated Family Tree and talked about specific problems Rockwell was having with it. Erikson had suggested in a previous meeting that Rockwell reduce the size of the tree and Rockwell now showed him the results. “It doesn’t obtrude,” Rockwell was pleased to note, referring to the tree. “It doesn’t look as if these heads are hanging on a live tree. Now it looks like they’re more or less on a document,”11 a piece of old parchment.
Rockwell’s conversation with Erikson that day also covered more general problems. As Rockwell recalled: “I ask him, What is it anyway? Why do I have all this trouble with these pictures? He’s very comforting. He says just what I want him to say. He says, Well, that’s the way it is. You want to be an artist? You have to suffer like this.” Rockwell concluded: “This is the old crap, but I guess it’s true.”12
By August, four months after he started the picture, Rockwell wasn’t sure whether Family Tree was finished or not, an inevitable coda to his every composition. Mary had been through this too many times to give much weight to his reservations. “Norman,” she told him, “Wrap up the picture. You’re being silly.” Ernie Hall, who ran the local taxi service and was at times enlisted to deliver finished paintings to the Curtis Building in Philadelphia, was summoned to Rockwell’s studio. This was on August 19, 1959, at ten in the evening. The autobiography ends there, on that night. In a conspicuous omission, there is no reference to the tragedy that befell the Rockwell family six days later.
* * *
August 25 fell on a Tuesday, a day reserved for meetings and routines. In the morning, Rockwell was visited by his longtime bookkeeper, Chris Schafer, who, as usual, sat at the desk in the studio and calmly sifted through piles of bills. At noon, Rockwell and Schafer drove to Lee to have lunch with fellow members of the Marching and Chowder Society. When Rockwell returned from lunch, his daughter-in-law told him that Mary had been feeling unusually fatigued and h
ad gone upstairs for a nap.
At 2:30, Mary received a phone call and Norman went upstairs to wake her. He saw her lying very still in their rumpled bed. He could not bring himself to look for more than a few seconds. He went downstairs. Cinnie, who was six months pregnant, was in the kitchen.
“I think there is something wrong,” he told her, and he asked Cinnie to go back upstairs with him.13
“Mary looked as if she was asleep, but very thoroughly asleep,” Cinnie recalled years later. “She was so still. She didn’t seem wake-up-able. We both kind of knew. He was flustered, not really knowing what was going on, fearing the worst. We called the doctor, and he came right over.”
* * *
On her death certificate, the cause of death is listed as “coronary heart disease.” That was the official explanation that was furnished to the locals in Stockbridge and the interested parties in the wider world: Mary Barstow Rockwell had suffered a heart attack at the age of fifty-one, dying peacefully in her sleep.
Friends wondered whether she had taken her own life. “We never knew the cause of her death,” wrote her friend and neighbor Helen Morgan. “It was obviously unexpected, and whether she had taken an overdose of some medication or whether her heart had just stopped, we never knew.”14 At Rockwell’s request, no autopsy was performed; the quantity of drugs in her bloodstream at the end remains unknown.
Suicide was not out of the question. In the past, she had taken at least two overdoses and been sent off to psychiatric hospitals. At the time of her death, however, Mary was on the wagon and her family believed that she was feeling better, looking forward to the birth of her first grandchild.
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 35