Norman Rockwell (17 page)

Clyde (Vic) Forsythe played a pivotal role in Rockwell’s early professional growth. Soon after he and Norman teamed up, for instance, they presented a show of their work at the New Rochelle Public Library, whose program stated that Rockwell was available for portrait commissions. More important, the older, successful, and conventionally masculine man believed in the boy’s talent, and he convinced him he was ready for the big time. Forsythe drew a daily comic strip, “Axel and Flooey,” whose characters engaged in some side-splitting absurdity every day of the year, as Rockwell painfully noted. He appreciated his friend’s success—and his work ethic—though he disliked the genre he worked in; he complained that the daily grind of forced humor wore down not only the cartoonist, but also his studio mate, who was forced to guffaw convincingly at every day’s punch line. Years later, Rockwell confessed to his son Tom that the most appalling part of Forsythe’s work was the aftermath of the comic strip’s termination a few years into its production. An oversight in Clyde’s contract forced the company to pay him, even when they stopped using the cartoons, as long as he sent them in as originally specified. Rockwell was repelled by his friend’s willingness to churn out the work for several years under these conditions, which consigned his art to the trash bin even before its execution.

But the silly humor of the shared studio space lightened up what was becoming the otherwise intolerable certainty that he was heading for a dead end. Rockwell knew that he wanted to ratchet up his success, but he didn’t know how. Instead of pursuing the obvious path and staking out the editors of the adult monthlies, he resorted to painting the exhortation “100%” in gold on the top of his easel. He just had to work harder, he decided—he must give his very best. Only after Clyde put his foot down on his studio mate’s daily agonizing did Rockwell dare admit what he really wanted—the big time, particularly the cover of
The Saturday Evening Post.
Because Clyde Forsythe was a loyal friend to Rockwell over the years, and since the story reflects favorably on the cartoonist, it’s impossible to gauge the accuracy of Rockwell’s insistence that only Clyde’s aggressiveness convinced the illustrator to approach the
Post.
Obviously, Rockwell considered his action somewhat presumptuous, and by the time he spun out the account, he was enmeshed in his own self-construct of modesty.

At first shocked (or pretending that he was) at Clyde’s effrontery—imagine, urging him to submit his work to the
Post
!—Rockwell didn’t take long to be persuaded, though he had to be coaxed into abandoning what Forsythe considered the ineffectual “pretty girl” theme he had begun to pursue in imitation of
Post
artists Harrison Fisher and Coles Phillips, formidable practitioners of the subgenre. The dashing Gatsbyesque Phillips was often mentioned in the same breath as Rockwell, largely because the two men were in the same age range: “One might see the handsome, debonair Coles Phillips walking along a New Rochelle street, or, one street over, the friendly, curly haired young Norman Rockwell,” announced the
New Rochelle Standard-Star.
As if unwilling to compete, Rockwell appeared to cede to the slightly older Phillips, determinedly single-minded in his eroticization of women, the right to “sex up” female characters.

Against Rockwell’s worried insistence that “pretty girl” paintings represented the major trend of the
Post
covers, Clyde encouraged him to return to the topic he did best—kids. The cartoonist patronizingly explained that Rockwell lacked the ability to draw beautiful, seductive women—an observation somewhat at odds with the evidence of several illustrations over the next decade. But from this point on, Rockwell relates this supposed innate inadequacy as the rationale for his choice of subjects.

Forsythe did have reason to suspect his friend’s capacities. In 1916, for instance, Rockwell painted the first of what would be, over the next three years, six covers for
Leslie’s,
an illustrated weekly. Published as the January 11, 1917, cover,
Fact and Fiction,
or
Old Man and Young Woman Reading,
the painting suggests the odd difficulty female beauty sometimes presented him. A vibrant-looking elderly man, his face sketched in detail that manages to convey age, geniality, intelligence, and physical attractiveness, sits beside a female companion in her twenties, drawn fastidiously and evocatively, the pile of her fur coat, the vividness of her white daisy clearly suggesting the freshness of youth versus the maturity of age—until one examines the face itself. A lovely blandness is articulated from a fairly flat plane, suggesting Rockwell’s reliance on Leyendecker’s women, not the master illustrator’s greatest strength either.

Rockwell’s attitudes toward pretty women were complicated in often admirable ways that could not be represented adequately in a painting. Certainly he blossomed in their presence and made a point of pronouncing publicly the pleasure he took in their company. Predictably, their archetype was his mother, whose outstanding characteristic apart from her hypochondria was her vanity. “Aunt Nancy wanted the best of clothes and shoes no matter what the financial situation, even when she was at the very end of her life,” recalls Mary Amy Orpen. “She had to have beautiful things to wear, and it was clear that her prettiness was what had attracted Waring to her originally, and what made him such an attentive husband throughout their married lives.” Waring’s uxoriousness bothered his son, who believed his father’s near servitude to his wife harmful to his health and manhood: “People used to say my dad was a saint [for treating Nancy so well], and I’d pretty much have to agree,” he dryly informed an interviewer. Tom Rockwell believes that his father developed a tendency to disdain men who appeared passive in the face of their wives’ power, in contrast to his general tolerance of others’ family life.

Without excessive psychological speculation, it is fair to connect Rockwell’s ambivalence toward his mother—the cost to others of her vanity, her desire to be tended, her physical weakness, and her unattractive if enviable ability to get what she wanted—with his longtime championing of the cultural or economic underdog. The child, the lower-middle-class “everyman,” the homebody just short of worldly sophistication, these Rockwellian types evolve from what his children have described as his lifelong identity with the outsider, stemming from the mixed messages Nancy gave him as he grew up. The artist was uncertain how pretty women, whom he appreciated on a personal level, fit into a healthy society. Tomboys and older women, by contrast, were allowed—expected—to have wrinkles and other imperfections, and so their larger-than-life figures, such as his wartime
Rosie the Riveter,
gained perfect expression. He found such strong females interesting and, paradoxically, nonthreatening. But the conventional pretty girl frequently eluded him, and his odd unwillingness (that he named an inability) to represent this traditional feminine icon was noticed by his fans.

Related to the complicated ways that Rockwell took pleasure in the company of beautiful women is his lifelong appreciation of handsome, especially rugged-looking men. But part of the price Rockwell paid to purchase the loyal companionship of rougher-hewn men than himself was the implicit right they had to be judged bawdier, more sexual, more conventionally masculine than their beanpole friend. Quickly in the presence of his League teachers, then with friends such as Clyde, and eventually among his naval associates, Rockwell took his place as a purveyor of mostly wholesome, noncompetitive, but clearly heterosexual goods. From our contemporary point of view, his pattern of relying on masculine surrogates to supply the missing alter ego he lacked inevitably raises the possibility of homoeroticism at the very least. And yet, though Rockwell seemed to react with less shock or dismay at the “specter” of homosexuality than did most men of his day, there is no hint of such attachments in his own relationships. He appreciated beauty, objectively, in men and women; and he regretted that he lacked something he so enjoyed observing in others. His much-vaunted charisma was partially the result of learning to compensate for the conventional attractiveness he yearned for.

So when Clyde Forsythe gently ridiculed his earnest attempts to paint seductive women and kindly told his friend to stick to what he did best—children and animals—Rockwell listened. And, as if to blunt further his boldness in approaching the
Post
and to ward off charges of arrogance, Rockwell told the story (after George Horace Lorimer’s death) of his first meeting with the formidable editor of the
Post
so that he came off as overly eager, earnest in his everyman way that effectively engendered sympathy, not envy, in his listeners. On one level—and it never changed—Rockwell failed to believe that he had the right to assume the status and stature of the chosen. His compulsion to place himself at the mercy of others (even if he was the aggressive one) not only perpetuated modesty as his primary virtue; it also obscured a grandiosity, a certainty that he was
at least
as good as anybody else. Without such an underside to his formidable insecurity, the artist would not have come into existence.

After Clyde convinced him to show his work to Lorimer, Rockwell spent several weeks working up five idea sketches, two of which he rendered as finished oil paintings in black, white, and red, the only colors that the
Post
’s two-tone process reproduced at the time. Next he designed a special wooden portfolio in which to carry his work to Philadelphia, where the Curtis Company headquarters building, housing the
Post,
was located. Ordinarily he wrapped his paintings in brown paper, but he didn’t want to fumble in front of the great George Lorimer, getting his hands or feet caught as he untied the string, a mortification he’d already endured while talking to art editors elsewhere. But his determination to avoid playing the fool backfired, when the carpenter heeded Rockwell’s instructions exactly, building an oversized, extremely heavy black box, twelve inches wide and thirty-three by forty-four inches otherwise. Although he bought a well-cut herringbone suit in hopes of looking accustomed to success, Rockwell was dismissively treated every time someone saw the “black coffin,” as he began to think of it. He wasn’t allowed on the subway with it—the box took up four or five seats, the conductor told him; once he got to Philadelphia, he was summarily dismissed from the fancy foyer and told to use the freight elevator on the other side of the building.

Rockwell had learned from his efforts to break into publication elsewhere how important it was to take the chance of just showing up, unannounced. The
Post
archives support his claim that he had not dared call for an appointment ahead of time, for fear that Lorimer would refuse to see him. Once in the inner sanctum of the
Post,
separated from George Horace Lorimer’s office by only a few doors, he was immediately humiliated by two writers he held in deep respect, Samuel G. Blythe and Irvin S. Cobb, who made him the butt of their joke about the body he must have hidden in the amazing black box. Apropos of nothing, the miserable illustrator suddenly recalled the voice of the friendly publisher at the
Tatler
telling him, months earlier, that he had the “eyes of an angel and the neck of a chicken.”

Fighting a severe attack of nerves, he explained to the receptionist that he had brought some paintings and sketches for Mr. Lorimer to see. No doubt impressed at the imposing “portfolio” Rockwell had lugged all the way from New Rochelle, the kindly woman asked Walter Dower, the
Post’
s art director, if he would see the illustrator. Dower came out to the waiting room, glanced at Rockwell’s work, and then quickly gathered it up, excused himself, and asked the painter to wait while he conferred with Lorimer. The Boss must have liked what he saw, because Dower returned within a few minutes, telling a dumbfounded Rockwell that they would accept the two finished pieces now, and the other three sketches on completion. The Boss could pay the young artist $75 per final painting, the equivalent of $1,145 in 2000.

Rockwell would interact with Lorimer for more than twenty years, in a manner redolent of his relationship to Waring, roughly Lorimer’s age. Very few people were known to have ever called Lorimer “George”; those who dealt with him as closely as Rockwell did over as many years inevitably called him “the Boss.” Rockwell instead never swerved from calling him “Mr. Lorimer” to the end of their oddly constricted but affectionate relationship. In spite of Rockwell’s extraordinary value to and popularity with the
Post,
he and Lorimer did not enjoy the friendship that the Boss developed with several of his writers, maintaining instead cordial interactions along the lines of Waring Rockwell’s with
his
boss named George.

In truth, George Lorimer was a near perfect editor to appreciate the young illustrator chafing under the constraints of
Boys’
Life
and suffering from the limited audience his work for the scouts’ magazine reached. Lorimer believed that as editor in chief, he had to emphasize the positive in American life, and address the negative (when a direct attack was untoward) through tactful if passionate admonishment. Such politics led him to issue occasionally contradictory statements—he once declared the need for fewer “Pollyannas” only a few weeks after appealing for more—as he sought to explain his vision for an American population of seventy-five million people. His
Post
would be “without class, clique, or sectional editing”—this last reference a blast at those magazine publishers who pandered to supposed regional tastes and mores by adjusting their contents according to the subscription area.

By 1916, Lorimer had created a flourishing weekly magazine packed with first-rate fiction and trenchant reflections on business and politics. And he was proud of his achievement: when Rockwell absentmindedly walked into the Boss’s office one day with an
Atlantic Monthly
tucked under his arm, Lorimer immediately asked why the artist bothered to read a publication whose stories were all rejects from the
Post.
Because Lorimer’s boundaries for what would appeal to his audience were sacredly maintained, regardless of his personal affection or professional appreciation of a particular writer or artist, would-be contributors who were more experimental or simply beyond the concerns of middle-class Americans found it easy to dismiss the popular magazine, especially since Lorimer, in their minds, spoon-fed the populace. That he felt honor-bound to respect the values of the millions who bought his magazine failed to impress them.