American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (41 page)

Grandma Moses also makes an appearance in the painting, a petite old lady in wire-rimmed spectacles standing on the left. She is wearing the same black dress, with a lacy white collar and cameo pin, that she is wearing in the photographs from her eighty-eighth birthday party, suggesting that Rockwell used the party photographs to obtain his likeness of her. Unlike the other figures in the painting, with their Crest-white smiles, Grandma Moses appears meditative. Rockwell also offers a self-portrait, inserting himself into the scene with a pipe in his mouth. You can tell by the way his eyebrows are lifted that he intends some kind of merriment.

In reality, there was no family gathering for Rockwell that Christmas. There was only distance and separation. He was living out of a suitcase at a hotel in Hollywood while Mary was snowbound in Vermont, writing rambling personal letters to a principal she had not met.

Christmas Homecoming
, the defining image of holiday togetherness, appeared on the cover of
The Saturday Evening Post
on December 25, 1948.

Grandma Moses had her heartbreaks, too. In February, just six months after she had her cameo in the
Christmas Homecoming
cover, her son Hugh suffered a fatal heart attack. He was forty-nine years old. Although Grandma had been on the cover of the
Post
, in that picture showing a strapping boy coming home for Christmas, in real life, Hugh would never come home again.
20

*   *   *

At the end of December Mary Rockwell left Vermont to join her husband in California. She made the trip by train, and was accompanied by eleven-year-old Peter, who was well aware that his mother had promised to stop drinking. But soon after they were on their way, Peter took a walk through the train and returned to the Pullman car he was sharing with his mother to find her lying unconscious on the bed. Strangers were fluttering around her, speaking in grave tones. It seems she had passed out from drinking. Later, going over the incident countless times with each other, her children suspected it was brought on as much by the strain of their father’s absence as their mother’s nervousness about rejoining him in California.

The Rockwells remained in California for another eight months, eventually moving out of their suite at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and into a house they rented in the Hollywood Hills. Despite the balmy weather and lush scenery, little about their lives seemed to change. During her months in California, Mary haunted bookshops, continued drinking, and wrecked a Buick in an accident downtown.
21
And Rockwell became inseparable from a new, much-younger best friend—Joseph A. Mugnaini (pronounced moo-NI-ni), a handsome, Italian-born artist who taught life drawing at Otis and later became the primary illustrator for Ray Bradbury’s novels. Rockwell started spending most of his time with him. He mentored Mugnaini as he had once mentored Fred Hildebrandt and other male artists, loving them less for themselves, perhaps, than for the caring feelings they stirred in him.

Mugnaini makes a cameo appearance in Rockwell’s painting
Traffic Conditions
,
22
an operatic scene triggered by a simple incident. An obstructive white bulldog plants himself in the middle of a narrow alleyway, blocking a moving van and attracting a crowd of onlookers. Mugnaini posed for the mustachioed artist who leans out of a second-story window, pointing emphatically at the little dog. Some thirty Otis students and faculty members modeled for the picture, but Mugnaini was the one who Rockwell hoped would be given a shout-out in the
Post
. As he wrote to his editors: “Could you possibly mention his name? He is having a one-man show here this summer and it would mean a lot to him.”
23

Rockwell with his friend Joe Mugnaini, a teacher at Otis College of Art and Design

Rockwell was genuine in his desire to advance his friend’s career. When Mugnaini’s show opened in August, at the Chabot Art Galleries, the Pasadena
Independent
carried a photograph of Rockwell standing beside him. The caption explained, with more candor than was strictly necessary: “Let’s hope this is a boost. Rockwell asked the Independent to run this picture in order to bring attention to Mugnaini’s one-man art show.”

In the weeks before he left California, Rockwell completed one of his best covers.
The New Television Set
,
24
like
Traffic Conditions
before it, mingles figures and architecture, but it is airier and more inviting. A middle-aged man with suspenders leans out of the attic window of a Victorian house shouting to the young service guy installing an antenna up on his roof. The homeowner is so excited he has knocked over a pot of geraniums in the window box. A black-and-white TV is visible through the open window and you imagine the man is hollering, “The picture is coming in clear!” Rockwell understands the excitement. He is a maker of clear pictures that require no antenna.

The New Television Set
, 1949
(Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles)

The house is sharply outlined against the cloudy sky, which fills the top half of the painting. In the far distance, a Gothic church spire is visible through the mist. The church is ghostly, as if old pieties are about to be superseded by the new religion of television.

*   *   *

In Arlington, Vermont, a rumor circulated that the Rockwell family had moved to California and wasn’t coming back. Neighbors wrote to ask if the rumor was true. So did editors at the
Post.
“It is not impossible for you to work in California, but it is a long way,” Ken Stuart, the
Post
’s art editor informed Rockwell, “and if you do stay there, we’d better arrange for me to come out at least three times a year.”
25

It was hardly what Rockwell had in mind. He was angry at Stuart for overstepping his bounds and altering a painting without telling him. When Rockwell received an advance copy of the September 24, 1949, issue of the
Post
, he was in disbelief. Stuart had taken it upon himself to paint a horse out of the picture. This was
Before the Date
, a split-screen painting in which a man (right side) and a woman (left side) are shown in their own bedrooms, peering into mirrors, arms raised as they fix their hair. Rockwell had intended to suggest that the twosome were dressing for a country square dance; he had painted a horse outside the window, to emphasize the rural setting.
26

Rockwell called Stuart to let him know how unhappy he was. In a follow-up letter, the editor tried to defend himself by claiming that the disappeared horse was an isolated incident. Earlier covers, he contended, had remained untouched, more or less. “You will remember they were not changed at all except to raise your signature. We do that because we feel your signature is very important to the public. If it isn’t about three-eighths of an inch from the bottom in reproduction, it gets clipped off in seventy percent of the run.”
27

It was a lugubrious end to the California trip. On September 1 Rockwell boarded the train east. Three days later, he was back in his studio in Vermont. It is not surprising that he decided to return. You could live in the hills of Hollywood for only so long and still get away with calling yourself a Vermonter. And he was not sure what he would be, even to himself, without his Vermont address and the Yankee character it implied.

Besides, another birthday was rapidly approaching. Not for him, but for Grandma Moses, who was about to turn eighty-nine and was planning yet another birthday extravaganza. It had been a year since Rockwell met her and helped out with the cake. Now, in 1949, she was scheduled to have her party at a restaurant, the Green Mountain Pine Room, in Arlington. It would be a “surprise party,” as
The New York Times
announced the day before, more or less negating the possibility that anyone in the free world, Grandma included, could be surprised by it.
28
Apparently, Rockwell had become Grandma’s designated baker, and news photographs taken that day show him in a white chef’s hat, aiming a frosting gun at a cake that was thankfully smaller than the one from the year before.

Over the years, Grandma Moses has often been compared to Norman Rockwell, perhaps because they both painted idealized scenes of American life. By 1949 they were the two most famous artists in the country and they had made their reputations without any help from museums. Their fame owed almost everything to mass reproduction of their work. The millions of Americans who loved Rockwell’s covers never saw an original Rockwell painting.

Rockwell was a far better artist than Moses, whose work was relatively unsophisticated. She composed her pictures as if she were jotting down words, or keeping a diary, recording images of horses or sleighs and giant snowflakes as they occurred to her and giving little thought to how the parts relate to the whole. And her ground was white, like a sheet of paper. Her pictures are flat in the modern way, but “it is flatness by default,” as John Currin, the contemporary artist, once observed. “She is not a picture constructor with a grand sense of space, which is why you can only look at so many of her scenes before they start to seem alike.”
29

Rockwell was hardly oblivious to Grandma’s artistic limitations. He remarked, in a lecture: “The one problem I have with Grandma Moses is that there are two Grandma Moses pictures that sell. There’s a spring scene, where it is all green, with lambs gamboling and green and white farmhouses, and then there’s a snow scene. Both of those, as I understand, get $1,500 apiece. There’s a waiting list for them.” Although she occasionally strayed from her formula, her “whole family is devoted to one thing, to get Grandma back in the groove.”
30

Rockwell decorates a cake for Grandma Moses’s eighty-ninth birthday in 1949.
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

As it turned out, Grandma, “the real primitive,” as he said, was a bona fide art star with a list of New York collectors jockeying to own her paintings and a talent for turning her every birthday into a national media event. Rockwell noted the irony of it: the primitive artist earned more money for the sale of a painting than America’s most popular illustrator. It was hardly a crime or even an injustice. Just a reminder that the boundaries separating different kinds of art—primitive art, magazine illustration, fine art, etc.—can be flimsy indeed.