Norman Rockwell (37 page)

Just before the Rockwells packed their belongings for their summer—and, this time, permanent—transition to the Green Mountains of Vermont,
American Artist
published an interview conducted in the New Rochelle studio. Opening with a reference to Rockwell’s inclusion in a group including “Cruikshank, Abbey, Frost, and Pyle,” the laudatory article hints at the laurels the artist wore throughout this next decade, consolidating his position as America’s most popular artist at the same time that the divide between the real painters and the commercial ones becomes the permanent sneer of class division. Different from previous interviews, however, the
American Artist
piece details Rockwell’s use of the camera in his work, emphasizing that photographs served the illustrator only as “supplementary aids to his drawings,” and that Rockwell deliberately made at least one out of every four illustrations without them.

Moving to Arlington resituated Rockwell among brethren who practiced as he did, using the camera in the process of making their art: not only did Mead Schaeffer live within a few miles of the Rockwells, but Jack Atherton would permanently relocate to the area within a year. J. C. Leyendecker remained an important voice in the back of Rockwell’s mind as the illustrator started his professional life anew in the Green Mountains, but he was liberated, too, by working among his contemporaries, instead of the generation before his. By 1940, the reputation of domestic realism among serious critics and artists was at its nadir, following a decline that dated at least to World War I. Realistic twentieth-century art had labored to prove it wasn’t part of the academic tradition exploded by the Impressionists, and the type of painting Rockwell did, which hearkened back to the genre scenes that had occupied the lowest hierarchical rung even in the nineteenth century, had by now transmogrified into the popular form of the people, the equivalent of vaudeville theatre in place of Samuel Beckett or, at least, Sean O’Casey.

Having sophisticated artist friends such as Mead Schaeffer nearby steeled Rockwell’s resolve that his kind of art was worthwhile, and proved of immense practical value when he needed a professional opinion that he trusted. Elizabeth (“Toby”) Schaeffer and Mary got along well, though the former participated more directly in her husband’s career than did Mary, having studied photography to take pictures for her husband. She and Mary became friends, often sharing the burden of shopping for props for their spouses’ latest paintings. Quickly the two families, not much more than friendly acquaintances in New Rochelle, became inseparable in the adventure they had undertaken. During an interview he gave at the end of his life, Mead recalled fondly their trips to the Brandywine territory, where they visited the N. C. Wyeth and Delaware Art Museum, the men in front talking art, the “girls in back happy to be able to talk about something else.” They frequently drove together to nearby Bennington to lecture to art students, often collecting useful assistants in the process. Mead was a good illustrator whose work was featured in prominent places, including the
Post,
but they both knew that Rockwell was better, and that no doubt oiled their relationship. “Schaef,” as he was called, worked more as the method actor to Rockwell’s careful attention to technique, Marlon Brando to Laurence Olivier. And, as usual, Rockwell was fond of Mead, but Schaeffer adored his friend.

It must have seemed a further sign that this move was the right thing when Rockwell, soon after unpacking his studio materials, went looking for a handyman. Tapping a gardener on the shoulder, he started with recognition when the man turned around: it was Gene Pelham, a young fledgling illustrator from New Rochelle who had modeled for Rockwell years before. The two men chatted, each equally excited to see the other, and within minutes Pelham had become not only Rockwell’s general assistant but his photographer as well. The illustrator showed Pelham how to take the slew of shots he needed, as well as how to develop them in the darkroom he set up at the back of his studio. The two men came to depend on each other’s company, although, once again, Gene ended up feeling more connected, assuming a deeper friendship than Rockwell did.

By the end of 1940, the Rockwells felt themselves settling into a Vermont way of life. They were proving that they could withstand winters where temperatures could drop to twenty below; and they showed the townspeople that they yearned to join their community. Mary and Norman had attended square dances during the fall, the ordinarily gangly man excelling at the moves, gracefully and joyfully dancing his way through the complicated calls. And they were earnestly learning about the town’s governance methods, including the sacrosanct town meeting.

As the new year began, the couple was feeling well grounded, in spite of Jarvis’s continued unhappiness at having left his best friends behind in New Rochelle. Even he no longer seemed shocked at the differences between suburban and rural culture, and Tommy and Peter were both happy. Convinced that they should solidify their commitment to their new town, the Rockwells decided to sell their New Rochelle house. They were so satisfied with their new life, in fact, that one evening at the Society of Illustrators meeting in Manhattan, Rockwell urged John (Jack) Atherton, complaining about the local prejudices of Ridgefield, Connecticut, where he lived, to bring his wife, Maxine, for a visit. Rockwell’s enthusiasm was persuasive; not only did the couple accept the offer of hospitality, they decided to move to Arlington themselves.

20

Another War to Paint

John Atherton’s presence in Arlington proved especially reassuring to Rockwell. Atherton was one of the few artists who seemed to be equally successful as an easel painter and a commercial artist. A talented jazz musician and sometime socialite, he did covers for
Fortune
and, after 1944 and his friendship with Rockwell,
The Saturday Evening Post
as well, but he also exhibited, in contests, his singular surreal pictures of what he called the inner workings of his mind. His work is now owned by major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, among others. Opposite in work habits from Rockwell, who depended on three times the preparatory sketches that Atherton did, he agreed with his friend that, whether professional or private, one’s routines should be conducted in a pleasant environment. He did not want any part of the suffering ethos of the fine artist; instead, he painted to be able to spend his leisure time, of which he had much more than Rockwell, trout fishing.

Atherton respected Rockwell’s talent and work ethic enormously, and the admiration was mutual. When Atherton urged Rockwell to do more painting for his own purposes, unyoked to commerce, the illustrator knew his friend was complimenting him, not implicitly criticizing his work. Atherton exploded at Rockwell about his compulsion to continue illustrating the “propaganda, sentimental trash” known as the “Boy Scout Calendars”; Rockwell basically agreed with his assessment, but insisted on looking at the practical side: tremendous money for little work. Even their arguments were fun: nothing about Atherton was restrained. When he wooed serious critical interest in Rockwell by inviting Robert Coates, an art writer for
The New Yorker,
to his friend’s studio, he expressed his dismay at the critic’s indifferent response to the work so passionately that Rockwell’s own disappointment was exorcised. Atherton and Rockwell frequently disagreed in their aesthetic opinions, but they provided invaluable services to each other.

Added to the presence of Mead Schaeffer, whose extroverted personality meshed perfectly with Rockwell’s blend of interiority and theatricality, the scene in Arlington (population twenty-five hundred) became Rockwell’s own little Golden Stage of Illustration. The men allowed one another the chance to let down their guard, to be off display in the midst of like souls. Often the Rockwells, Schaeffers, and, less frequently, the Athertons, followed in a few years by illustrator George Hughes and his wife, convened for cocktails after the day’s end, calling it the “children’s hour.” They talked shop: heated, engaged, lively common discourse. And they entertained art editors from out of town, proud at inspiring awe toward their intimate artists’ community. Schaef remembers his good friend as “A Will Rogers, if you know what I mean. . . . He was so boyish. . . . He had a curiosity and enthusiasm about everything.”

Around this period, the publicity that Rockwell received in national magazines and newspapers reflected the solidifying of his myth. Early in 1941, it was still possible for
Family Circle
magazine to assume its readers didn’t know what he looked like, “although you’ve been acquainted with him for years through his work.” A spread of Arlington photos stages the three boys on their bikes, in the midst of the participating father, “whose only vice, according to Mrs. R, is overworking,” but who takes “time out to cycle with his wife and sons.” Those sons laughed as adults at the frequency with which such spreads were arranged, believing that they spent more time playing with their father for publicity than they did in their daily lives with him.

The
Family Circle
article, “He Paints the Town,” sets out the associations that the name Norman Rockwell now invoked. He is called “a country boy at heart,” who retrieved his Vermont wife from her temporary California home. The couple, the article continues, are lauded throughout the town for their attendance at the monthly town meetings, the weekly square dances, and their participation in Community Fund projects; somehow, Mary had managed to chair the previous year’s street fair. And if overwork is Rockwell’s vice, he is seen to remedy the impression of overseriousness that it gives by invoking the childish play he and his boys engage in, including “water-throwing at my breakfast table,” according to his “lovely” wife, who “listens to her famous husband with the tender, whimsical smile of a wife who understands and loves [his boyish bad behavior].” Years later, Peter Rockwell would recall those bouts of play: “My father would suddenly act like a kid with us, picking up a bowl of Jell-O and smashing it in our face, allowing us to chase him down with whipped cream, exploding water balloons into each other’s bedrooms, including his and my mother’s. All she ever said was, ‘Don’t forget you have to clean it up!’ ”

But most of all, in contrast to other famous artists, Norman Rockwell is presented as everyman, no better, by implication, than all of us, in spite of his fame and fortune and talent. “Rockwell’s paintings represent his people as they look to him,” the article concludes, “and, glory be, he sees them even as you and I see them, and that’s why we appreciate his work.”

Occasionally, Rockwell strayed from the reinforcing images of “homely” Americans that such interviewers preferred. During the spring of 1931, one such foray for
The American Magazine
produced the fascinating illustration for the story “The Sharpshooter.” The commission to illustrate a story with a boxing match at its center gave Rockwell the chance to make a visit to the city, so he spent an evening at a boxing club at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, where he studied the appearance of a smoke-filled room and the types of people who inhabited it. In discussing the composition with Arthur Guptill (the writer of the first book on Rockwell), the illustrator explained that the chance to do a horizontal layout thrilled him, as most magazine covers were done vertically. He used strong parallel lines in the floor and the ring’s ropes to accentuate the horizontal expanse, and he invoked indistinct gray tones for the smoke-filled room, something he wouldn’t ordinarily do, he explained.

The opportunity to challenge himself artistically clearly invigo-rated Rockwell, and the result shows in the painting. A cross between the Ash Can realism of George Bellows and an anachronistic scene from a film noir,
The Sharpshooter
comes close to being museum worthy. The atmosphere and sense of great space in this painting were created by placing the strongest tonal contrasts in the foreground and reducing them as the subjects recede into background. Under the guise of providing immediate comprehension, however, Rockwell pushes the boxer’s face one step beyond expression and into caricature, and he manipulates the posture of the female spectator, a sinewy hard blonde, into body language that seems just one remove from reality, ensuring that we don’t think he is taking himself too seriously as a painter. The impact of such exaggeration in a potentially masterful painting becomes clear by comparing it to the restraint evident—though barely—in
Playing Checkers
four years earlier.

While the illustrator intended to use the move to Vermont to challenge his painting, Mary Rockwell also was eager to develop her talents more fully than she’d been able to the past ten years. Most of all, she hoped to become involved in literary projects, bringing her closer to her longtime desire of becoming a writer. Soon after the family had settled in, she met Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a well-known second-tier fiction writer and local philanthropist who had been one of the founding members of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Deeply loved and admired by many, Fisher seemed to cast an immediate spell on Mary Rockwell, who wrote to her sister Nancy about “Mrs. Fisher’s” latest kindness or advice, this first spring pertaining mostly to what she should plant in her garden. Rockwell wasn’t as persuaded by Mrs. Fisher as his wife was; when, after a party, he expressed his lack of enthusiasm for the writer, Mary told him that he just didn’t like someone else commanding the center of attention.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher was herself accustomed to being the leading cultural light in Arlington, in spite of earlier, brief forays into the region by Robert Frost and Rockwell Kent, both of whom Fisher had befriended and urged into the community. Rockwell’s de facto establishment of an illustrators’ colony may well have brought out her own sense of competition. In spite of her kindnesses, she tended to dispense her compassion as the noblesse oblige of royalty. Her cultivation of the common touch apparently smacked of patronization to Rockwell, who nonetheless paid her great respect in public and among his friends.

And, more important that any reservations Rockwell held about Fisher, he welcomed the chance for Mary to pursue her own interests, even if that meant Fisher mentoring her. His own life seemed in magnificent order, and his new sense of being properly centered encouraged Rockwell to accept more story illustrations from magazines outside of the
Post,
albeit within the Curtis Publishing group. Although he never employed an agent, he did rely on a central clearinghouse, American Artists, which acted as a liaison between well-known illustrators and top magazines. During a summer negotiation with
McCall’s,
the company clarified with “Norm” that, from past experience, they had identified his top two priorities: delivery time and type of story. Contemporary love scenes especially bored him, they informed editors, though if the magazine set back the illustration a hundred years, say, the challenge might woo him.

By mid-1941, the national mass-culture magazines, especially those aimed at women, were doing anything short of commissioning a story with his pick of subject, just to obtain Rockwell’s services. As a result, he gained more opportunities to illustrate challenging projects, including a story for
McCall’s
about Abraham Lincoln, one of Rockwell’s all-time personal heroes. His ever-increasing popularity brought its own negative side, however, as distant family members, such as Harold Hill, Nancy’s nephew (who, as an infant, had tragically lost his young artist father Thomas to consumption), began to make yearly requests for family portraits from their celebrity relative. And general fan mail, not only people with legitimate claims on his acquaintance, became ever more burdensome, even as it remained intensely gratifying. Now people sent Rockwell pictures of their legs—perfect, they were told, for one of his covers of young women; or letters of entreaty—how their father or mother would love to pose for the artist; or ideas for Rockwell’s next cover, another burden, rather than an inspiration, to the artist.

Even though Vermont created some of the distance he needed to elude his enthusiastic audience, Rockwell still needed periodic escapes from the place he associated with the pressure of deadlines. Although he rented a studio and worked just as hard when he went out to Alhambra and stayed with Mary’s parents, the change of pace allowed him to get away from art editors and publishers who knew too easily where to find him in Arlington, and gave him a respite from the cold—and his boisterous family as well. Every few years, Rockwell would take off for a few months, and when the Christmas break began, Mary would follow with the boys in tow. In 1941, feeling as usual the pressure of too many deadlines and not enough time, Rockwell fled to the Barstows’, where he holed up, having fed several patrons back East the line that he was sick and in a California hospital.

A measure of his fame came when the Hollywood and New York gossip chief Walter Winchell broadcast the sober news that Norman Rockwell, hospitalized, was gravely ill. Compassionate letters from companies that Rockwell owed artwork to—commissions whose work was overdue—arrived, begging him not to worry about anything but getting well. One letter from American Artists makes it clear that the excuse had worked to forestall the
McCall’s
assignment due January 1: after reading the “contents of your telegram,” the editor agreed to an extension of February 1. It was a ploy Rockwell used with some regularity, though ethically it was less bleak than at first glance. The artist drove himself regularly to the brink of what used to be called a nervous breakdown, and he had no vocabulary convincing enough to call off those (justifiably) hounding him.

Rockwell was already in Alhambra by November, and in early December, Mary took the boys out of school early so they could have a longer break from the Vermont winter. Just after they arrived at the Barstows’, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the boys got more excitement than they had imagined possible. “My grandfather was convinced that the Japanese were going to invade California any day,” Jarvis remembers. “My brothers and I began pulling metal wagons around the neighborhood, asking for tin cans for the war effort. The whole thing seemed like a lovely dream to us; I was the oldest, and I was only ten. Those beautiful streets, where the eucalyptus and orange trees made the place smell like a bower, because the area used to be a huge nursery—it just didn’t seem possible, as my grandfather kept insisting, that the Japanese were going to come attack us in the middle of the road.”