American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (35 page)

He had been invited by the government to travel with the war bond show, in a caravan that would go to Philadelphia and Boston and cities fanning out across the country in the next ten months. He declined, an easy decision. On May 4, after a little more than a week in Washington, he returned to Vermont. The show at Hecht’s would close four days later on May 8, with local officials boasting that the sale of bonds had reached the $1 million mark, far surpassing the city’s quota for that period.

*   *   *

It was spring and he was glad to be back in his studio, his red-painted barn, with cool, pellucid mountain air streaming in through the open door. He had hired a carpenter to install a tall, two-story window that admitted the sort of light he favored (northern, shadowless). As always, he refused to paint by electric light, which played tricks with the colors on a canvas, made them harsh, lit up a picture like a Christmas tree.

When he wasn’t painting, it seemed, he was cleaning. He found it soothing to sweep the wide-plank floor of his studio and wash his brushes in a metal sink he had installed expressly for this purpose. He swept four or five times a day and tidied up at the sink just as frequently.

He was well aware that he was compulsive about cleanliness. He went through dozens of paint rags every day, using them for wiping his brushes and his palettes. He insisted on diaper cloth, claiming it was “more absorbent” than regular cotton. He ordered it by the yard and it arrived by mail, on a two-foot-wide bolt. His correspondence from this period refers to a product called Birdseye Diaper Cloth, which he purchased from the textile company where his father had worked. His children later recalled the sight of him sitting at the kitchen table on more nights than anyone would believe, tearing the cloth into six-inch-square swatches and then carefully picking off the linty fluff around the edges.
29

Samuel Beckett once said, “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”
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The mess, he implies, is a given. The mess is the content of art, the stuff of life. But what form does art assume if an artist is not at peace with the mess of art, keeps sweeping it away, refuses to let it show? Rockwell’s life is a reminder that a squeaky clean surface can contain its own unknowable depths.

In the week after returning from Washington, Rockwell finished work on a past-due painting called
Patriots on Parade
, for which his gardener had posed. A native of Vermont, Thaddeus Wheaton was then fifty-six and an obliging model, with an ability to hold a facial expression for several hours. When he put on a waistcoat and a stovepipe hat, you could not ask for a better Abraham Lincoln, of whom Rockwell would paint many likenesses.
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He had the canvas crated and shipped off on a Friday evening, May 14, 1943. He never forgot the date, because in the morning, when he went outside and gazed out over his property, his studio was no longer there.

*   *   *

On that Friday evening, Rockwell and Mead Schaeffer had gone into town to hear a lecture at the high school. They were well-acquainted with the guest speaker, Lee Wulff, an artist who trained in Paris and had a second career as an authority on salmon fishing. He wrote handbooks and designed hair-wing dry flies and lived on the banks of the Batten Kill, across the state line in Shushan, New York. After the lecture, the three men returned to Rockwell’s studio and talked until the party broke up at half past eleven.

In the middle of the night, Rockwell was abruptly awakened by ten-year-old Tommy, who was banging on his bedroom door, hollering. The boy had seen leaping flames out his window. Rockwell picked up the phone to call for help, but the line was dead; apparently, the wires had burned. As Mr. Wheaton came hurrying out of his bedroom, Rockwell asked him to drive to the nearest neighbor, a half mile away, and use their phone to call the fire department.
32
By the time Fire Chief Safford responded to the call, the studio was a ball of flames, lighting up the pitch-black countryside around it. By dawn, the chimney was all that was left of it.

Several years would pass before Rockwell publicly acknowledged the cause of the fire. Initially, newspapers stated: cause unknown. In an interview with
The Boston Globe
, Rockwell declined to speculate and Mr. Wheaton, who was with him at the interview, said, “It’s a mystery.”
33
Neighbors wondered if the fire had been caused by squirrels chewing on electrical wires.

In 1945
The New Yorker
reported that Rockwell believed the fire “started from a pipe he had left near some curtains when he went to bed.”
34
In his autobiography, he adjusted the story, suggesting that lit ashes had fallen out of his pipe and onto the cushion of a built-in window seat when he bent over to turn off the lights that night. “It was my fault,” he wrote, and there is no reason to disbelieve him. The ashes fell. He did not see them.

He lost about thirty original paintings and hundreds of preparatory sketches. He was no less upset by the incineration of some two hundred costumes he had stored in the upstairs loft of his studio, a handpicked collection of vintage costumes and (near) contemporary hats and clothing he had bought off the backs of strangers. He lost brushes in all sizes, countless tubes of pigment, his palette table, his easel, his Balopticon projector, all of which would have to be replaced. And then there was his reference library—books, hundreds of art books with good-quality full-page reproductions, books he had lugged home from Paris and elsewhere. “All my brains,” he lamented in a letter to Clyde Forsythe, describing his art books.
35

On May 17, a Monday, just a few days after the fire, Rockwell and Mary said goodbye to their children and left home for a week. They were headed to Washington, where he was eager to redo a series of sketches destroyed in the fire. He had done them on his last trip to the capital, in the White House waiting room, and still needed them for a forthcoming article called, “So You Want to See the President!”
36

My Studio Burns
, 1943, relayed news of a catastrophe as so many charming vignettes.

As the train rattled south, Rockwell sat and sketched with his customary mulish silence. He had to turn the fire into an amusing story, if not for himself, then at least for the readers of the
Post
. He did a wonderful drawing,
My Studio Burns
, that features a wide cast: a horrified Mr. Wheaton glancing out the window, volunteer firefighters rescuing bicycles from the barn, neighborly onlookers, the artist’s three sons, who appear in their pajamas, alternately gathered in front of the window or displaying faces spotted with measles.

*   *   *

On their way to Washington, Rockwell and Mary stopped in New York for a few days, to replace supplies destroyed by the fire. Receipts indicate that he went to Saks and bought a hat and five pairs of socks. He also visited Brentano’s book store, on Fifth Avenue, where he purchased fourteen art books. It had always been his habit to thumb through art books during the day, leaving two or three propped open on the floor, near his easel. It was one reliably positive thing he could do when he felt depleted and devoid of ideas. Among the books he bought that day were monographs on Pieter Bruegel, Manet, and Matisse. He had lost so much, his entire studio. But he could not be rendered ineffective or inactive if at least he had a hat and socks and art books.

At that point, the Four Freedoms War Bond Show had just opened in Philadelphia, at Strawbridge & Clothier, drawing huge crowds. As the show continued to travel that summer and fall, Rockwell’s reputation changed in substance. Once known as the Boy Illustrator, he now became enshrined as America’s leading Painter-Patriot. He had succeeded in his greatest desire, in making illustration matter. In the eyes of millions of Americans, his scenes set in the New England village where he lived amounted to an inspired defense of national values, a pictorial rebuke to fascists the world over. When his fellow Americans thought of Rockwell they thought of the man they had seen in the newsreel: a friendly and relaxed Vermonter. They thought of someone he did not know.

SIXTEEN

“SLOWLY FELL THE PICKET FENCE”

(JUNE 1943 TO SUMMER 1947)

Many people erroneously believe that Rosie the Riveter was created by Rockwell. It is true he turned her into a household name, but there were other Rosies before his. She made her first public appearance in a song composed in New York in the autumn of 1942 by John Jacob Loeb, with lyrics by Redd Evans.
1
The Four Vagabonds, an African-American vocal harmony group that had just emerged as a radio sensation, released a recording of the song on Bluebird Records in February 1943. The song begins:

All day long, whether rain or shine

She’s part of the assembly line

She’s making history, working for victory

Rosie, brrrrrrrrr, the riveter

Rosie was a symbol, of course, of the millions of women who took on factory jobs during the war years, while the men were away. Many of the slots were for riveters in aircraft factories and Rosie gained currency along with such now-forgotten characters as Winnie the Welder and Glenda the Glue Spreader. Rockwell began his cover in response to a government campaign. The War Advertising Council, a subdivision of the Office of War Information, was charged with persuading newspapers and magazines to run stories that would help recruit women for defense work. Rockwell’s editors requested that he produce a special cover about Rosie for the Memorial Day issue, which appeared on May 29, 1943.

The result was wild: a comically muscular redhead posed against a backdrop of red and white stripes, sitting on a crate eating her lunch, her riveting gun laid across her lap, her right penny loafer resting on a copy of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
as if to crush it. It was an incredibly inventive interpretation of a potentially clichéd theme. For help, Rockwell turned to the Hebrew prophet Isaiah as Michelangelo had depicted him on the Sistine Chapel ceiling circa 1509. Isaiah didn’t have a lunch box or buttons from the Red Cross, but he sits in the same twisting pose as Rosie, with the same dramatic torque.

The model for the painting, Mary Louise Doyle, was a petite, Irish-Catholic telephone operator in Arlington. She was nineteen years old and lived with her widowed mother, who managed the local office of New England Telephone (NET) out of their house on Main Street. Rockwell first spotted her when he came in to pay his phone bill. For the first sitting, she wore a white blouse beneath her overalls and a pair of saddle shoes. His studio assistant, Gene Pelham, took the photographs and after he saw them, Rockwell decided the clothes were wrong. He had Mary Doyle pose a second time wearing more convincing workaday clothes, namely, a short-sleeved denim shirt and scuffed penny loafers.

Rosie the Riveter
(Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas)
riffed on Michelangelo’s figure of Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (
opposite
).