Norman Rockwell (23 page)

As usual, his mental state was enacted in several
Post
covers, the first published on June 7, 1924.
The Daydreamer
shows a bored office clerk, sitting at his desk but escaping his environment by dreamily recalling things past, the fantasy image of an old ship positioned over the
Post
logo as if to suggest the magazine itself as a means of escape for the bored middle classes. He would reprise the theme of the enervated worker on his May 16, 1925, cover,
Man Playing Flute,
in which an elderly clerk indemnifies the tedium of his dull desk job by stealing a few minutes to play the flute in his office. That workers would find their jobs so stultifying as to require compensatory fantasies or music breaks to get through the day proved an inevitable component of Lorimer’s American dream, the consolidation of a heterogeneous nation into one economically and culturally secure entity, unified against any outside threat. Rockwell valued the recompense over the job, implying that if man—specifically—is forced to confront the present moment without access to the imagination, it will prove unbearable.

The year was taking its toll on Rockwell. His enthusiasm toward his work waned, especially the overload of advertising he had accepted, and toward his personal life as well. By the end of 1924, Rockwell decided he had enough of sharing his home and wife with her mother, sister, and two brothers. Hoddy alone was too much for Norman’s peace of mind: a decorated war hero, the large man suffered from nightmares that would cause him to fall out of bed at least once a night, hitting the floor with a loud thud that reverberated through all three floors. The larger-than-life brother-in-law felt himself entitled to whatever Rockwell could provide. “Pop also told me he had to finance two abortions for Hoddy,” Tom Rockwell recalls, his tone suggesting that his father thought the situation morally shaky.

Perhaps a sense of being overwhelmed by so many family claims on his resources contributed to his decision in 1924 to separate from Irene when she refused to live alone with her husband after he requested that they find a place to live by themselves. “And leave my family?” she asked her husband in surprise. On affirming that he was asking her to choose, she didn’t hesitate to name everyone except her husband as her priority, as surely her husband knew would happen. The reality was that he needed an escape, and he put the responsibility on Irene; he realized that she would never kick out her family, and that she would have no desire to accompany him to Manhattan.

Rockwell moved out of his own home, happy to have an excuse to return to the art world where he had established his identity ten years before. He installed himself in the Salmagundi Club, a house founded in the late nineteenth century by National Academy of Design students as a temporary home for artists, by this point located at 47 Fifth Avenue. The membership, dating from 1880, included Howard Pyle and, more recently, Charles Hawthorne, currently in residence at the League. Still an all-male institution in 1924, the club allowed Rockwell a few weeks, at least, to revel in the solidarity of his own kind—men who were doing art, and who gathered in the evenings to talk about it over their pipes and cigars.

True to his belief that one’s craft was well served at any stage by study and practice, he registered at the Art Students League for the upcoming 1925 winter term, choosing an etching class taught by master Eugene Fitsch. George Bridgman, Joseph Pennell, and Charles Hawthorne were all teaching during this school year, but only Fitsch taught in the evening hours, from seven until ten, when Rockwell had finished his own work. Too, Rockwell had to calibrate carefully the distinction between presenting himself as a well-established professional and one of his teachers’ success stories. It would not do to appear too much the neophyte again. Etching was a return to a technique redolent of Dickens, not of Rockwell’s own art school days.

Within weeks, Rockwell supposedly came down with a severe case of tonsillitis that landed him in the hospital; because Rockwell had his tonsils removed when he was a little boy, his use of the pseudo-illness probably substituted for a less seemly ailment. Either he or Irene seized the opportunity for a reunion, and as soon as Rockwell agreed to his wife’s demands for an expensive new house, she immediately convinced her family to return to Potsdam as her part of their deal. Rockwell thought the O’Connors had belonged in their spacious colonial homestead all along, instead of confusedly camping out with him and Irene to stave off loneliness and to escape what they considered too rural a location. After they left, Norman and Irene climbed into their shiny new roadster and drove to their “camp,” their little love shack on the St. Lawrence River, where the illustrator rested for a few weeks to regain his strength. He would come to rue the devil’s bargain he had struck with Irene: he regained his wife, but at the proverbial cost of his soul. However hard he had tried to escape becoming immersed in the moment, he was now firmly committed to being a creature of his day, which happened to be the Roaring Twenties.

In
The Great Gatsby,
Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel about the very rich among whose types Rockwell now traveled, Nick Carraway describes memorably the new context for the illustrator’s narrative imagination: “The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.

“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute.”

Rockwell gave it his best shot.

13

Cutting a Fine Figure

The next five years were Norman Rockwell’s experiment with decadence. Irene wanted a prestigious address, so he arranged to build a cheap but chic residence on the most expensive property he could afford, Premium Point. In the middle of the decade, he capitulated to Irene’s wish to be a part of high society. He knew how to shine. After all, as one typical newspaper column noted, his “wise cracks and burlesque” kept any party “in an uproar.” Careful not to forget his beanpole image that was always at risk of being exposed, the illustrator became adroit at the preemptive first strike: “His funniest moments are when he is making fun of himself.” Rockwell became a master at self-effacement.

Much has been made of Norman Rockwell’s theatrics, his hammy acting out of the characters he wished his models to convey. He liked thinking through his body, working from the outside in. Such histrionics are often intuitive for visual storytellers; Rockwell’s historical mentor Charles Dickens himself was an amateur actor whose celebrity followed in part from his theatrical personality, which rewarded him financially as well as psychologically through his exhausting series of often sold-out public readings.

Such a theatrical bent is predictable for those whose natures lead them to narrate life to the masses, a category that includes illustrators. As one scholar of the great Howard Pyle explains, “A strong histrionic strain was the motive force that breathed life into his pictures, but it was scarcely a rare possession for an illustrator of ability. The gifted illustrator usually finds it working for him involuntarily—an instinct of his genes so native that he accepts it as a matter of course. At times the artist may become conscious that he is grimacing as he works, his face is contorting with all the passing emotions he is trying to depict, or that his muscles are twitching into the shapes he is trying to form on the canvas. . . . The performance might well seem odd and dubious to an uninitiated spectator, but the artist knows he is tapping a source of power that will help to sweep him through and over many obstacles. If he can feel and act out in his own muscles the movement that concerns him, he is likely to be able to animate his drawing, impart a swing or rhythm to it and lift it above mere mechanical competence.”

Becoming a social player was just more acting, a role repeated enough that it became natural. Norman and Irene became charter members of the Bonnie Briar Country Club, housed in a monolithic mock Tudor structure to the north of New Rochelle. Built just a few years earlier, the club was noted for attracting more of the “younger people” than such clubs usually did. (The year before, on the exceptionally hot late morning of July 18, 1924, the two-and-a-half-story wooden structure that housed the New Rochelle Yacht Club had gone up in flames. At least temporarily, the Bonnie Briar was the biggest game in town.)

Rockwell had already learned to play tennis, and now he became good at it, his eye-hand coordination honed by the years spent at his easel, and his long lanky frame conditioned by his spartan diet and a brisk daily walk of at least three miles. His son remembered years later that his father beat most players, even those better than he, by virtue of his absolute resolve. He played with a ferocity that hinted at the revenge he exacted on those childhood boys whose athleticism excluded him. At least one good friend recollected that Rockwell also played a good game of bridge but a bad set of checkers—this latter “weakness” probably feigned to maintain his self-effacing image, in light of the actual prowess his family recalls.

Every year Rockwell’s personal and professional profile had climbed in tandem, both sides of his life feeding off each other. In late 1925, he was honored with the significant assignment to produce the
Post
’s first four-color illustration, for the February 6, 1926, issue. He played the image of the magazine’s founder, Benjamin Franklin, hovering over the magazine against the idea of change, with a colonial figure painting out one tavern sign and installing another. The magazine’s unprecedented subscription and circulation success had actually stymied the
Post
’s attempts to move from two-color to four-color printing until they could obtain presses with high enough speed; by 1926, when the magazine made the switch, Curtis’s
Ladies’ Home Journal
had already been using the more advanced technology for several years. The
Post,
at four million circulation by now, simply took longer because of the daunting logistics. The verisimilitude that Lorimer had valued since his renovation of the
Post
at the turn of the century now became visually much easier to accomplish. Possibly as much a psychological as a practical boost to production, the innovation helped the
Post
and George Horace Lorimer regain their momentum as leaders in the field.

In later years, when Lorimer’s individualist politics would seem particularly dated, one reflective critique insightfully teamed Benjamin Franklin and the editor of the
Post
as “arch-Americans in their profound belief that the meaning of life is not hidden but wrinkled on its surface; that its secrets come out in the astute living of it; and that its supposedly ineffable values merely make for confusion and failure in this responsible world. This defense of the surface they do not hold naively, but as an archly integral social philosophy. . . . Franklin was our first pragmatist and behaviorist, the forerunner of Dewey and Watson and our Big Business leaders, who would recondition all reflexes into the best means of living and call it a life. Mr. Lorimer helped to manipulate this philosophy into an American folklore.”

Rockwell’s manipulation of his own image had produced somewhat of a bifurcation, creating tension between him and his parents. Nancy and Waring were not pleased with the rumors about their son’s Jazz Age marriage, and, for reasons never clarified, they became estranged from him for several years—as many as seven, according to one account—in spite of living within a few miles of each other. Rockwell was busily juggling several identities: the social circle he inhabited with Irene delighted in his ribald behavior among the hedonists; his slightly off-color jokes and his impersonation of a bon vivant at the country club parties reassured the parents of the children who modeled for the artist that he was no better at heart than they were.

Rockwell later lamented “tricking” his public, especially the children, by hiding behind a patina of respectability that was false. Particularly onerous to him were the extramarital freedom his social group espoused and the heavy drinking that eventually eroded his previous sacrosanct schedule. In the references to the period that he made many years later, his regret is greatest for the hypocrisy of presenting himself daily to his child models as a trustworthy man whose actions matched his words, as opposed to someone who might be sleeping with the child’s mother. Rockwell’s preference for acting in ways he considered honorable was dramatically reinforced as a result of the Roaring Twenties, especially because he felt that the cost of maintaining a divided identity had vitiated the integrity and energy of his art.

Not only Norman’s parents backed off from him at this time; Jerry and Carol, still living in New Rochelle, were also busy with their two sons, Dick and John, born within the first five years of their marriage. His responsibilities motivated Jerry to put in even more time at work than Norman. While the famous illustrator first hobnobbed with high society and with the “artsy” set, the other Rockwells were scraping along the best they could. Jerry worked on Wall Street as a bonds salesman, with his earnings averaging $100 a week. As his income gradually rose, he had earned a total of almost $10,000 in 1924, the increase enabling him and Carol to buy a car, and rent a pleasant if “unpretentious” apartment in Pelham, near New Rochelle, where they spent weekends, and a modest Manhattan efficiency where they lived during the week. Before long, the salesman’s long hours began to pay off handsomely, and the couple joined a beach club in New Rochelle and hired a part-time maid and nurse for the boys.

Because Norman’s brother and his wife were spending most of their time in Manhattan, they could legitimately claim few opportunities to visit. And on the weekends when Jerry and Carol returned to Westchester County, they spent their family time with Waring and Nancy, with whom Jerry was determined to stay close. According to Dick Rockwell, his father and mother began mixing with a social crowd as stylish as the illustrator’s, though it didn’t intersect much with Norman and Irene’s.

Norman compensated for the lack of his own family by taking advantage of Irene’s mother’s standing offer to use the family camp at Louisville Landing whenever he wanted a break from his routine. On August 13, 1926, he traveled to the O’Connor cabin, where he combined a few hours of fishing with days of painting at the studio he rented nearby. He planned to stay for two months as a change of pace from New Rochelle, where the constant social engagements messily fragmented his work schedule. He had the skylight enlarged before he began working, and once it was installed, he insisted that “the studio [be] absolutely barred to visitors until 5:00 pm.” At the end of August, he returned prematurely to New Rochelle, suggesting that his dictum had gone unobserved by the townspeople. Back home in their expensive, prominent residence, Rockwell felt more secure about the increased public awareness of him after he and Irene bought a German shepherd, Raleigh. The dog quickly became his faithful companion, walking with him to and from the studio every day.

A few months later, Clyde Forsythe wrote an article on his friend that was published in the December 18, 1926,
Post.
Because of Forsythe’s up-close knowledge of his studio mate and good social companion, his comments are more revealing than most. Forsythe praises the illustrator’s art as “kindly, whimsical humor and . . . quiet, loving interpretations of life, painted in [a] naive and wholesome manner”—all of which quickly attracted “advertisers galore” as well as editors. “How brilliant!” you might think, Forsythe continues; but no, “Not at all! A plugging, plodding student in his studio. There has never been a period of brilliance in the course of Norman Rockwell’s advance. The answer is Work! After work, more work. After work in the studio, work at home, reading worthwhile literature on art and life, thinking out ideas—studying—work. Rockwell’s hobbies are work and work. The only aggravating thing about him is work.” This extraordinary praise-that-damns seems manipulated to please Lorimer, with his unfaltering belief in the superiority of business and personal application to intellectualism and aestheticism.

But even if Forsythe was preening for the Boss, the article returns to the theme too doggedly for the cartoonist’s combined awe and irritation at his friend’s work ethic to ring false. Without a doubt, he admires him: “He studies the work of Howard Pyle and goes back to Rembrandt looking for counsel; then to Abbey and Millet or Cellini. . . . His art library is large and growing; there are no books of twaddle. His knowledge of the lives of past masters is great and his respect for them profound.” He ends the piece by claiming yet again that in spite of the other pieces of the man—his sense of fun, his charm, his modesty—most characteristic is that “after all—work, work, work.”

But all was not work, at least not compared to what Rockwell was accustomed to in the early part of the decade. A lack of energy, a stasis, informs many of his illustrations during the last few years of the twenties, reflecting the lack of mental nutritives in his life, as well as the vast reserves of time and effort required by his social life. Peter Rockwell, the artist’s youngest son, recalls his father’s bawdy account of a seduction attempt he made during this period. “My father had probably had a bit too much wine one evening, and so he told me the story of a young woman he’d had his eye on during the ‘wild’ period of his first marriage, after Irene and he had decided to have an open arrangement. He spent several weeks working to impress the woman, and finally she agreed to a private liaison in his studio one night. But when she undressed, she turned out to be entirely flat-chested, her bosomy image entirely the result of ‘construction.’ My father, never worried about being able to perform, was so shocked that he couldn’t exactly ‘rise to the occasion,’ and in total humiliation he got in the car and started to drive her home. He was so preoccupied with his embarrassment that he drove in reverse and hit some flower beds when he meant to go forward, and he kept driving like this all the way to her house. The whole seduction attempt ended in one of those nightmare messes.”

Other women came into Rockwell’s purview, including, at least tangentially, the widow of his colleague. In 1927, the debonair Coles Phillips succumbed to the degenerative kidney disease he’d been fighting for several years and died at his home in New Rochelle’s Sutton Manor. “As an artist his line was accurate and firm, his sense of color sumptuous, his taste fine, and his standards constantly higher,” claimed one eulogist. He was “a splendid technician and a prolific though conscientious producer.” Much praise was aimed at the seriousness with which he openly took advertising as a career, and at his “acute business sense [that] gave him an advantage over many of his fellows, and [that caused] business men . . . to treat him with marked consideration.”