American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (44 page)

On November 10 Rockwell joined the rest of Arlington in mourning the death of an eleven-year-old boy in a hunting accident near his house. Jon Stroffoleno was in the woods, raccoon hunting, when a shotgun carried by his twelve-year-old sister, Jo, discharged.
24
He was the nephew of Rockwell’s next-door neighbor, Buddy Edgerton, who later recalled that Rockwell attended the funeral and paid a sympathy visit to the boy’s parents carrying a parcel neatly wrapped in brown paper. It was a charcoal portrait of their son. “I’m sorry it’s not so good,” Rockwell stammered. “I did it from memory.”

*   *   *

He received a bit of good news that month when a painting of his was “purchased” by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was his first painting acquired by a museum; the negotiations had been more intricate than anyone could have imagined. He had first been contacted two years earlier by Frederic Price of the Ferargil Galleries, who was a friend of Robert Beverly Hale, a curator who had been hired by the Met to organize a department of contemporary American art. Although Hale was himself an abstract painter, he was sufficiently ecumenical as a curator to be sympathetic when Price, trying to drum up business, suggested that he buy a Rockwell for the collection.

In a letter intended to introduce himself to Rockwell, Hale offered effusive praise. “I feel that you are the most thoroughly American of all of our painters today,” he noted, then took a witty if unconvincing jab at artists who favored abstraction. “At this time, I feel, the so-called international style has overcome all the boys for better or worse and unless something is done about it nobody will ever know what our country looked like when we are dead.”
25

Rockwell offered the museum an oil-on-board study for
Freedom of Speech
, which, like the finished painting, portrays a Lincolnesque man standing up to speak at a packed town meeting. The rough sketch, as Rockwell called it, is twenty-one by seventeen inches, smaller than the finished version and more casually composed; the central figure is devoid of the looming quality that distinguishes the later work. But the sketch is lovely nonetheless, with a visceral feeling and relatively loose brushwork. Rockwell let it go for the severely reduced price of one hundred dollars.

The
Post
ran a photograph of him gaily waving a jumbo-sized palette beneath the headline,
ROCKWELL MADE IT
.
26
The item noted that Rockwell uttered “a gladsome yelp” when he learned that the Met had bought his painting, for an undisclosed price.

*   *   *

By now Rockwell’s contact with the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge had broadened considerably. Bills came in not only for Mary’s care but for that of eighteen-year-old Tom as well. As a freshman at Princeton, overwhelmed by academic pressure, Tom had developed an ulcer and dropped out midterm. “My mother wanted me to see her psychiatrist,” he recalled. So Tom went to see Dr. Knight, who recommended that he be admitted to Austen Riggs as an inpatient and be treated for an anxiety disorder. Tom entered Riggs on March 24, 1952, and would stay for four months. The upshot was that he left Princeton and transferred to the less orthodox Bard College.

In January 1953, alarmed to realize that Mary was drinking heavily again, Rockwell sent a letter special delivery to Dr. Knight at Austen Riggs. It was decided that Mary would return to Stockbridge and be admitted to Riggs as an inpatient for a few weeks, in order to dry out. Dr. Knight assured Rockwell, on the 29th: “I am trying to help her come to a redefinition of social drinking on a much reduced basis, and to accept the idea that there is to be no drinking at all except under legitimate social drinking conditions.”
27

Today, it might seem peculiar that a doctor would advise an alcoholic patient to continue her custom of pre-dinner cocktails instead of trying to get her off alcohol altogether. But such measures were standard in the bibulous fifties. Dr. Knight believed Mary was making “good progress,” and he seemed less concerned about her drinking than her dependence on sleeping pills. “At the present time she is taking more sedation than we would like to see continue very long,” he apprised Rockwell. “However, she apparently needs it. She is taking up to six grains of Seconal to get to sleep at night. She is also taking two dexamyl tablets a day.”
28

Rockwell’s mother, too, was ailing and making demands that struck him as impossible. At the time she was living in Providence, Rhode Island, with her nephew John Orpen, a retired ice dealer who owned a rambling old house on University Avenue. Rockwell sent him a weekly check of sixty dollars to cover his mother’s room and board. On February 17, after suffering a stroke that left her bedridden, she was moved into a nursing home in West Warwick, Rhode Island, where she died three weeks later, the day before her eighty-seventh birthday.
29

Rockwell left no comment about his mother’s death, and their relationship, which had been strained, at best, was misrepresented in the wire-service obituary that was published in newspapers across the country. “Mrs. Rockwell had made her home with her son in Arlington, Vt., until 15 months ago, when she went to live with a nephew in Rhode Island.” This was untrue. Whether the reporter made an innocent mistake or Rockwell provided incorrect information, Mrs. Rockwell never lived with her artist-son.

When Mrs. Rockwell died, her obituary left readers with a touching image, a vision of her milling about her son’s farmhouse, as integral to family life as the elderly figures who populate his paintings. In reality, he relegated responsibility for his mother’s care to his wife and the array of relatives and strangers with whom she boarded over the years. In a telling omission, he never painted a portrait of his mother, and her only appearance in his work is as a table guest in
Freedom from Want
.

*   *   *

In the weeks following his mother’s death, Rockwell completed a memorable
Post
cover,
The Shiner
,
30
which stands with
Rosie the Riveter
as an enchanting representation of female strength. It shows a girl with red braids and a black eye sitting in a school corridor, outside the principal’s office. You assume she is about to be reprimanded and possibly suspended for an infraction, perhaps a fight with a boy. Nonetheless, she smiles defiantly and occupies the center of the painting with the pluck and sturdiness of a true heroine. In the distance, behind an open door, a bespectacled principal and his pencil-thin secretary appear somber and even grave as they discuss the girl’s transgression.

The model for the painting was ten-year-old Mary Whalen of Arlington, Vermont, the daughter of Rockwell’s lawyer. In trying to furnish her with a black eye, Rockwell faced an unprecedented challenge. Initially he tried brushing charcoal over Mary’s left eye, but a bruise is composed of many colors, and his charcoal bruise didn’t look convincing. He checked the hospital in Bennington for eye-injured patients, but there were none, so he broadened his orbital search. He went to Pittsfield General Hospital, which led to an article in
The Berkshire Eagle
. He told a reporter that he would accept a black eye in any of its “ripe” stages of discoloration—brown, taupe, red, saffron, or yellow-green, “just so it’s vivid and realistic.”
31
Several hundred people responded, many of them prisoners. Finally, the father of two-and-a-half-year-old Tommy Forsberg, of Worcester, Massachusetts, who had fallen down a flight of stairs that left him with two shiners, drove the boy to Rockwell’s studio and had him pose.
32
The desired results were achieved when Rockwell painted a bruise onto Mary Whalen’s trusting young face.

*   *   *

In the course of discussing the psychological problems of his wife and their son Tom with Dr. Knight, Rockwell became increasingly interested in entering therapy himself. Dr. Knight, who had overseen Tom’s four-month hospitalization at Riggs the previous year, thought it would be inappropriate for him to treat so many members of the same family. He referred Rockwell to an analyst on his staff: Erik Erikson, a German émigré who had been an artist in his wandering youth and was one of the best-known psychoanalysts in the country.

The Shiner
, 1954, stands with
Rosie the Riveter
as a protofeminist representation of female strength.
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

In an internal memo written on July 15, 1953, Dr. Knight noted that Rockwell “is very happy at the prospect of working with a therapist who is also an artist. He is reluctant to give up time to appointments from his work, and prefers a late afternoon appointment so that the day will not be mixed up too badly.”
33
It was arranged that Rockwell, who was on a quick assignment in Northern California, helping to promote the Boy Scouts’ third National Jamboree, would phone Riggs and make an appointment with Erikson’s secretary when he returned.

His bookkeeper remembers an afternoon when Rockwell casually mentioned that he was thinking of relocating to Stockbridge for the winter. Schafer, who was about to leave for Cape Cod for the weekend, said, “Let’s talk about it when I get back.” By the time he returned on Monday, Rockwell and his wife had left Vermont and were living in the Homestead Inn, a boardinghouse in Stockbridge.

It was reported in the Vermont papers, a bit too optimistically, that Rockwell planned to return home in the spring. (“This is not the first time that this topnotch artist has been away from his Arlington studio for several months.”
34
) But in fact he would never return to the house on the village green, except to sell it a year later.

He had lived in Arlington, Vermont, for fourteen years and, in many ways, the town and its residents had served him well. In the eyes of millions of Americans, his scenes of everyday life in this typical-enough New England village said something important about our collective character as a nation. It was here that he had painted his epic
Four Freedoms
and become America’s painter in chief. Moreover, it was here that he had painted
Shuffleton’s Barbershop
in 1950 and
Saying Grace
in 1952, masterpieces of illustration that Americanized Dutch realism.

After he moved away from Arlington, Rockwell put its residents out of his mind almost instantly. “If someone had been a very close friend,” Chris Schafer recalled, “when Norman moved, or when they moved, it was as if they had never existed. Everyone complained that he never kept in touch. People said, We were his best friend, and now we don’t hear from him.”
35

Rockwell later claimed that he moved to Stockbridge so his wife could be treated at Austen Riggs. It became part of his chronology and his mythology, making him sound like a solicitous husband who put his wife’s interests ahead of his own. What he did not say is that he, too, now had a reason to go to Stockbridge, an inconvenient, ninety-minute drive from Arlington, Vermont. He moved to Stockbridge to begin his therapy with Erikson, to become an Austen Riggs outpatient, much like many other residents of Stockbridge. He could not have chosen to live in closer contact with psychoanalysts and psychiatric patients had he institutionalized himself.

TWENTY

THE AGE OF ERIK ERIKSON

(1954)

In mid-October 1953 Rockwell rented a studio in Stockbridge, in a second-floor space overlooking the little shops along Main Street. It was directly above Sullivan’s meat market, smack in the middle of town. His plan, he told a local reporter, was to stay for the winter and then return to Vermont in the spring. But probably he knew he was never going back north. He felt happy to be somewhere new, as if an invisible string had been cut. His neighbors were in disbelief when he had a mammoth hole hacked through the front wall of his studio and glassed over. They would have been more surprised yet if they knew that the picture window cost him five thousand dollars.
1

In coming years, he loved to stand at the window, puffing on his pipe and observing the street scene below, the ongoing hum of old-timers and schoolchildren and housewives steering their big cars into the angled parking spaces in front of the stores. The commercial part of Main Street was two blocks long and lined with the kind of shops whose doors had bells that jingled when a customer came in. Just one block over, to the west of the stores, was the Austen Riggs Center, whose principal building, a white-brick mansion set back on a scrubbed emerald lawn, gave it the aura of an unknowable fortress. Past Riggs, Main Street became residential and was lined on both sides with neatly kept-up wood frame houses, some of which had been standing since the days of the American Revolution.

“Norman’s studio is beautiful and serene with almost white walls where he has hung Degas prints, the drawings we got in Paris,” Mary wrote in a letter from Stockbridge.
2
“How he does love being right in the center of things, where he can look out and see people instead of mountains!”