American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (69 page)

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Authors: Deborah Solomon

Tags: #Artist, #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Norman Rockwell, #Retail

BOOK: American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

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November 2, 1976, was Election Day. President Gerald Ford was running against a newcomer from Georgia, Jimmy Carter. Norman and Molly went to the polls and before he entered the voting booth he turned to her and said, “Now who is it I am supposed to vote for?”
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In January 1977, just ten days before leaving office, President Ford awarded Rockwell the nation’s highest civilian honor. He was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his “vivid and affectionate portraits of our country and ourselves.” Rockwell would have been gratified to join Joe DiMaggio and his long-ago detractor, the poet and and cultural custodian Archibald MacLeish, at the ceremony in the East Room of the White House. Unable to travel to Washington to accept the medal, he sent his son Jarvis in his place.

Every few days that fall, Rockwell would announce to Molly that this was the day he was going back to the studio to finish the painting of the Reverend John Sargeant and Chief Konkapot; it was still resting on his easel. But the trip along the flagstone walkway from his house to his studio was no longer easily navigated. It required the effort of two people to maneuver his wheelchair along the path, especially when there was ice underfoot.
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Lamone left his longtime job working as Rockwell’s studio assistant early in 1977. He believed that Rockwell wanted him to stay, but there wasn’t much for him to do. Probably no one worshiped Rockwell more than Lamone, who once said, “He was a prince. They don’t make them any better.”
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Another winter came and went. The spring of 1978 arrived, by which time he was cared for by around-the-clock nurses. But he was still insistent about going out to the studio. Wood recalled a disturbing afternoon when he and Molly pushed Rockwell in his wheelchair through the yard, unlocked the door of his red-barn studio, and let themselves in. The room was immaculate, the paint tubes and brushes in their proper places, but the air was chilly and pervaded with the exaggerated stillness of a shut-down establishment. Rockwell sat for a while and appeared to survey the contents of the room. It held some of his fondest memories, but sadly, he could no longer access them, and the room itself had in fact become terra incognita.

“But I want to go to my studio,” he said.
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* * *

He died that autumn, on November 8, 1978, at home in Stockbridge. It was late on a Wednesday, close to midnight. His cause of death was officially given as emphysema. He was eighty-four years old. Neither Molly nor his sons realized it was time to gather at his side, so no one was with him at the time. “Norman died peacefully in bed and asleep, just as the nurses were changing shift,” Molly wrote to a friend. “We were all thankful. He had very little physical pain, only the pain of weakening strength and the inability to communicate.”
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For the rest of the week, flags in Stockbridge flew at half-mast. The funeral was held on Saturday afternoon and shops along Main Street closed from two to three. The whole town, it seemed, descended on St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, which could accommodate only a few hundred people. The sky was overcast, but the air was unseasonably warm for a November day, and outside the church, a crowd estimated at four hundred people stood silently, paying their respects, until the service ended. It lasted thirty minutes, which some felt was surprisingly brief. But then Rockwell had never been eager to spend time in church.

The bells tolled as the crowd streamed out of St. Paul’s on that autumn afternoon, one of those days when color seems to have been drained from the world. Rockwell’s sons and his daughters-in-law and his seven grandchildren walked west along Main Street, beneath the giant elm trees, toward the entrance to the Stockbridge Cemetery. None of them had been asked to speak at the funeral. Molly, who had planned the service, bestowed the honor on only one person: her friend David Wood, who stood up and read a poem that Rockwell liked, “Abou Ben Adhem” by Leigh Hunt, a nineteenth-century Englishman. It was not a service that left Rockwell’s sons feeling very included, but then Molly was not their mother, just their busy and sometimes insensitive stepmother. The boys hardly needed to be reminded that the world they inhabited was not the one shining forth from their father’s work, but the real world, where people don’t always notice you or care about your feelings.

It was, in the end, Rockwell’s great theme: the possibility that Americans might pause for a few seconds and notice each other. The people in his paintings—the daring schoolboys and rumpled old men, the black schoolgirl in New Orleans and the white schoolgirl with a black eye, the young runaway seated in the diner, and bride-to-be in the yellow dress standing on her toes as she signs her marriage license—they all require the presence of another pair of eyes to complete their story. The interested gaze might belong to someone eating lunch in a diner, or a neighbor, or to anyone at all who cares enough to interrupt what they are doing and glance up.

* * *

Norman Rockwell had never been enamored of farewells, especially of the flowery sort. Friends who had known him in his earlier years, whether in New Rochelle or in Arlington, Vermont, had puzzled over the abruptness with which he moved away and his failure to come back and visit. Unlike the figures in his work, who have all the time in the world to linger and talk, he was a man given to sudden flight. He died much as he lived—essentially alone, with no time for love, and no time to say goodbye.