Norman Rockwell (24 page)

Phillips was only forty-seven years old, and he left behind a beautiful, intelligent wife, the writer Teresa Hyde Phillips, and four children. Phillips’s final job had been illustrating stories that his wife had contributed to the
Post
and to
Collier’s Weekly
. Peter Rockwell remembers that at a talk he gave in the late 1980s, “a woman came up to me and said that everyone had expected my father to marry Coles Phillips’s widow. Maybe she’s the one he had the affair with.” Teresa Phillips was the sort of woman Rockwell admired: talented in her own right, she had arisen at six each morning in order to put in three hours writing for major publications until her sick husband arose at nine, when she tended him. She expertly managed the lives of their children and their business ventures, such as Coles’s pigeon farm, while maneuvering herself professionally so that upon her husband’s death she would be offered a high-paying job as Ray Graham’s assistant at the Graham-Page Motor Car corporation. Soon the tragic death of Graham, the president, left her on her own once again, and, refusing to play the role of victim, she procured an agent and provided for her family through her writing.

Teresa Hyde Phillips was also considered exceptionally beautiful—slender, with black wavy hair, blue eyes, fair skinned. She had served Coles Phillips as his primary model for most of their marriage. But her very vitality and maturity demanded a meeting of minds and lives that would have intruded too much on Rockwell’s need for solitude; he wanted loved ones physically nearby, ready to have an evening cocktail when evening came, but he did not have the emotional framework to incorporate the kind of intimacy that marriage with Teresa Phillips would have demanded.

Rockwell’s energies were being drained by more prosaic activities as well. The shabby construction of his nouveau riche house on Premium Point bought the couple more trouble than the prestige Irene had bet on. Neighbors complained about the inappropriately modest addition to the neighborhood, installing fences to protest the eyesore. And in spite of ten years of working as an artist, Rockwell still lacked his own studio, one built to the illustrator’s specifications. After the front yard more or less sank into the septic tank, he arranged a trade with an acquaintance who wanted trustworthy neighbors for his mother on the north side of New Rochelle, a wooded area of upper-middle-class homes.

The house at 24 Lord Kitchener Road was perfect for Rockwell. Isolated in comparison to the other neighborhoods he’d been inhabiting, yet bearing enough cachet to placate Irene, the colonial house with white shingles and green shutters—Rockwell’s dream home as a boy—was sited on a lot that could easily accommodate a studio. An article in
Good Housekeeping
emphasizes the Rockwells’ choice location in an “outlying section of New Rochelle, New York, on a large plot with considerable space around it, [which] thus satisfied [the artist’s] desire to live in the country and yet be conveniently near his friends and to have a quiet place in which to work.”

To complete their new home, the couple bought extremely expensive eighteenth-century American furniture from the Manhattan antiques dealer Ginsberg and Levy. Quickly, Rockwell engaged his friend the architect Dean Parmelee to design the perfect studio space, approximately twenty-three by twenty-five feet, built onto the garage and separate from the house. The studio’s interior was Early American, the current craze, and Rockwell and Parmelee traveled all over New England to gather authentic furnishings. The men found the perfect colonial model at the Wayside Inn in Massachusetts, which led to covering the studio’s outer walls with rough fieldstone. To take advantage of the best light, Rockwell installed in the north wall a window that began about three feet off the ground and extended upward for eleven feet. Opposite one window was a recessed fireplace with built-in bookcases on either side. Above the fireplace area was a railed balcony on which he draped things that he wanted to paint; behind it he could climb up to a storage area. A large ship’s wheel chandelier hung in the center of the room, where he set his easel and palette table.

The studio cost him $23,000, the equivalent of $216,667 in 2000. Although nothing suggests that his budget was overstrained by the extravagance at the time, the costly enterprise set a precedent that made such expenses seem reasonable to him later on, when his income was spread much thinner.

The Parmelees became family friends of the Rockwells, their association lasting through both men’s lifetimes. Although Parmelee’s office was in New Rochelle, he actually lived in Mamaroneck, close to Rockwell’s old home at 95 Prospect Avenue, where he had relocated a few years earlier from Tennessee. Just before her death, Dean Parmelee’s youngest daughter, Betty, recalled the friendship in some detail: “I think my father was more the social type than my mother; he played tennis or golf while my mother gardened. And New Rochelle was so social in those days. My dad went to the Beach club all the time. He liked to play, and so he provided good distractions for Rockwell, who worked too hard.” Rockwell’s recreation was often publicly tracked; a local publication even noted when the illustrator ordered a new set of sails for his small sailboat, called
Little Dipper,
which he enjoyed taking out on the Sound with Dean.

By now, though Rockwell could travel elsewhere undisturbed, in Westchester County people often recognized him on sight, so Dean quickly figured out respites from the burden of local celebrity. “My father loved to go camping in Vermont too,” Betty remembered, “and he’d take Norman along. They’d put on old clothes and go hiking for several days. On the other hand, my father drove an open-top roadster, Cadillac roadster, and then a Pierce Arrow roadster. He frequented the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. He and Norman enjoyed doing so many things together.”

The Parmelees also socialized frequently as a couple with the Rockwells. “Both my parents went to the Glen Island Casino, also along the Sound, in the Pelham area; there was a famous dance band and sometimes swing bands, and even young people would go there to socialize. My mom and dad and Norman and Irene often drove up to the supper clubs in Manhattan for dancing and dinner,” their daughter recalled. “I heard that Norman loved to dance. I can still see them all in my mind’s eye, going out together, the women wearing their long skirts then and strings of pearls down below their waists, everybody laughing—whenever Norman was around, there was always fun. But my mother didn’t have a lot in common with Irene—Mother liked making clothes for all four of her girls, and simple things like canning preserves and jams in the basement.”

Betty Parmelee always believed that Norman enjoyed hearing about her father’s unconventional path to his status as one of New York’s highest-paid architects, as if Dean’s lack of prestigious degrees reflected well on Rockwell’s own earlier choices. And, just as the illustrator had learned to draw through Waring’s nightly example, Dean’s father, an architect in Knoxville, Tennessee, had also inspired his son, who eschewed the formal route of architecture school and learned the trade in the older man’s office. After high school Dean went to Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago, apprenticing briefly with each of the great architectural firms and studying with the great resident architects, such as Frank Sullivan. Akin to Norman even in his religious patterns, he refused to go to church as an adult—overzealous Baptist regimentation during his Tennessee childhood, he suspected.

Norman also got a kick out of listening to Dean’s accounts of the great palatial homes he built on Orienta Point—where Mrs. Constable had befriended the illustrator years earlier—especially the stories about D. W. Griffith’s end of the development, where Griffith maintained a movie studio throughout the 1920s. Betty Parmelee’s recollections about the opulence of the area are reminiscent of the impression it had made on the boy determined to earn his art school tuition by delivering mail to its privileged inhabitants nearly twenty years before: “Orienta Point was so beautiful; the kids who lived there even got to come to school in a limousine, driven by a chauffeur.”

As the two men swapped stories, Dean became a substitute brother for the illustrator, albeit only for a few years. By 1927, Jerry’s income was escalating dramatically as a result of having started his own bond trading company; increasingly, he and Norman found they had no time for each other. For the next two years, he and Carol lived more extravagantly than Norman and Irene, and the two brothers continued to drift apart, mostly out of lack of interest in each other, according to Jerry’s son Dick. More dramatically, Carol’s newly discovered passion for couture clothes, glamorous parties, and rendezvous with other men seduced her away from Jerry as well. She was finding her children and her husband inconveniently “boring.” In 1930, she would scandalize her relatives when, chastised by the stock market crash, she wrote a revealing article for
Cosmopolitan
magazine in which she discussed the moral failures that her wealth had engendered—although Nancy, oddly feisty herself when the occasion moved her, was impressed as well as mortified by her daughter-in-law’s gutsiness.

If Carol was not the ideal mother, her grandson, Nick Rockwell, remembers her husband as pretty unappealing himself. “I thought it kind of odd that my dad and his brother grew up calling their parents by their first names, Jerry and Carol, from the time they could talk,” Dick’s son recounts. “But it’s easy to see that my grandfather rejected intimacy, preferring to maintain the distance between his children and himself, though he pretended that the supposed closeness in age was the reason for preferring first names over the conventions. Frankly, at least when I knew him, Jerry Rockwell was racist, anti-Semitic, and told nasty jokes that enraged my father [Dick Rockwell] and got them into fights. He was cold and didn’t seem like a happy man; and I don’t think he and my grandmother Carol were too fond of children. All their lives, by the way, they maintained separate bedrooms.”

But in 1927, the couple was riding high. “I remember how proud they were of an article that appeared in
The Wall Street Journal
referring to Jerry as one of the ‘Young Lions of Wall Street,’ ” Dick Rockwell recalls. His parents rented two expensive apartments in exclusive Blind Brook Lodge in Rye, and restructured them into one large home. They spent most of their time, however, in the Manhattan hotel suite they leased in place of their earlier efficiency, and they began enjoying the theatre on a regular basis—when they weren’t attending the fancy parties to which they were now routinely invited. A hired couple took care of running the household, and a part-time maid, according to Carol’s own account, took “John and Dick entirely off” their mother’s hands. Jerry bought his wife a Cadillac Eight, gave her a generous clothing allowance, and provided membership at three new clubs, including the American Yacht Club. The couple began attending separate parties, and Carol initiated a series of intrigues. On the rare occasions when the two found themselves alone together, they were “bored and restless,” and Carol joined Jerry on a trip to Paris only in hopes of meeting interesting people. She did, including a handsome man who asked her to marry him, and whom she refused, it appears, only because he wasn’t rich enough.

Yet for all of Carol Rockwell’s bad behavior, Irene’s actions were far more flagrant. Family gossip included snippets of information about her party conduct. Dick Rockwell remembers that as a little boy, whenever he walked into a room and heard the name “Irene” among the buzz of conversation, all talk mysteriously ceased as soon as the adults noticed him. “Baba [the children’s name for Nancy] would tell me stories about the parties Irene attended—without Norman—and that she misbehaved, that she was ‘quite a party girl.’ ” Dick remembers Irene as “pretty, brunette. But she would do such truly outrageous things. She registered at a hotel in Pennsylvania or New York with a guy once under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Norman Rockwell. It was a pretty stupid thing to do, as you might imagine, because Norman knew where he was that night, and it wasn’t there!”

Odds are that Norman was in his studio, working.
The Little Acorn,
a local paper, reported in November 1927 that Rockwell “has closed a long time contract with
The Saturday Evening Post.
” The following January, the paper claimed that “the bidding for the product of [Rockwell’s] brush [had run] high with ‘Liberty’ pushing the ‘Post’ to the limit.” Over thirty years later, Rockwell recounted the events differently. Setting the event back several years earlier, he explained that the new, lavishly underwritten magazine
Liberty
had indeed courted him, just as it had many other writers and illustrators associated with the
Post.
Irene and Clyde Forsythe, in the illustrator’s version, both urged him to defect to the new publication, where he would be earning twice what he made at the
Post.
After all, they reminded him, Lorimer had given him only measly raises along the way. Why worry about the repercussions for the
Post
?

Rockwell, who had recently executed a plum assignment—a cover of Charles Lindbergh to accompany the pilot’s
Post
tell-all about his flight—couldn’t decide what to do, and, in the middle of a sleepless night, he jumped up, boarded a train to Philadelphia, and when the Curtis Publishing company opened its doors, he sped in to present his dilemma to the Boss. Lorimer looked down, unwilling to beg or bargain for his premier illustrator’s loyalty, and only when Rockwell announced that he was staying, immediately doubled his salary.

The account in
The Little Acorn,
circulated either by Rockwell, Irene, or one of the magazines involved, is surely the more accurate one, given the public and timely nature of its revelations. Whether Rockwell incorrectly remembered his response to the challenge, changing his reaction to loyalty that overcame the seduction of money, or deliberately reconstructed the scene to make such a point to his audience of 1960, the contrast between the strict commercialism of the actual event and the emotional overtones of the “memory” reflect ways that the illustrator’s values or his desire to be valued changed over the decades.