Norman Rockwell (43 page)

Although Jarvis believes his father enjoyed, in one sense, the scars and war stories that served as the aftermath of the accident—“it was the boy thing, the way it was all so typical of being male, that’s what he liked about it”—Rockwell spent long hours over the next year in the dentist’s chair. The accident cost him income—that year, his earnings dropped to $37,000—and money out-of-pocket as well, for the expensive medical repairs. Typically, he made a joke of the experience, claiming that he was one of the only people he knew who went to the dentist so often that he fell asleep in the chair.

The rest of the family enjoyed their vacation immensely. As Tommy’s end-of-summer note to Baba made clear, they spent their time swimming as much as possible. Mary’s childhood summers at California beaches paid off, according to Peter Rockwell. She was such a good swimmer that she’d swim “way out beyond the surf and keep going, occasionally taking me with her.” When Rockwell healed enough to go out of the house, the family awoke at three
A.M.
to catch a ride on the commercial fishing boats, so they could see what real fishermen did for a living. And, in the late afternoons, the boys would sit on a bench with the local old men and learn to whittle pieces of wood into rowboats. But Rockwell himself spent a frustrating summer, his jaw wired for months. Back home, even more than usual Mary found herself picking up the professional slack that her husband’s injury created.

In spite of moving Nancy Rockwell back to Providence, Rhode Island, Mary’s household duties seemed to expand in the fall as well. She found herself frequently driving her mother-in-law back and forth between Arlington and the cousins’ home, since the older woman’s health actually did seem to be deteriorating and the bus and train were difficult for her to manage. Mary often hosted the Providence relatives en masse, partly because she was too busy at home to provide transportation for her mother-in-law or to facilitate the older woman’s visits to the Rockwells’ house. She also coordinated the schedule for students touring Rockwell’s studio, whether for the occasional visitor from a professional school, or the group of sixth-grade students from Burlington who happily selected Rockwell’s studio as their yearly field trip. Soon afterward, when one of the girls from the class died of leukemia, Mary would ensure that Rockwell’s memorial gift to the school arrived safely, his painting for the November 8
Post
cover,
The Babysitter.
And she engaged throughout the second half of that year in discussions with Rockwell’s lawyers over the feasibility of continuing to hold the mortgage on the Modern and Colonial Theatres, whose owner was typically unable to make his monthly payments.

Infrequently, Mary got away from her home duties by traveling on location with her husband. As part of the illustration series of Middle America and small-town occupations that Rockwell, at Ken Stuart’s behest, was still doing for the
Post,
he went to Portland, Indiana, in early November. From what her sons remember, she didn’t like Ken Stuart, and she wasn’t partial to her husband’s work being yoked to Stuart’s ideas. When the Athertons and Mead Schaeffer’s family got together with the Rockwells for the Thanksgiving holidays, Jack and Norman were able to practice what they would preach about too-powerful art directors at their joint talk, the coming week, at the Society of Illustrators. Strategically, Rockwell had shared a place on the same stage that spring with Ken Stuart himself, discussing other challenges that illustrators faced. As her husband would tell Mary repeatedly, it was important to create alliances, and to choose your battles carefully.

As if afraid that his growing reputation would create animosity toward him, Rockwell determined that it was more important than ever to get along with everyone. He had decided to initiate a new line of calendars, to be published by Brown and Bigelow, the same company that issued the Boy Scout calendars so successfully. Rockwell approached the Minnesota manufacturer about illustrating a yearly product based on the four seasons; he would provide four quarterly scenes for each year’s calendar. The first copy would come out the following year, and from 1948 to 1964, the series would compete only with the Boy Scouts calendar for first place in sales. But the commission meant yet more demands on Rockwell’s time, and other overcommitments he had made had to be backed out of as gracefully as possible by his wife, acting on his behalf.

Also looming was his potential involvement in a correspondence school for illustrators that his friend Al Dorne was trying to set up. By the end of December, Rockwell’s lawyers had decided the enterprise was legitimate and worth their client’s participation. During the school’s early planning stages, Rockwell was supposed to survey the market for such a program among the artists manqué of Hollywood when he made his next trip to California, and his interest was keen enough to start putting out feelers.

Fortunate at least since the early thirties in eventually devising interesting new venues—or, perhaps, industrious in his efforts to prepare for such good fortune—Rockwell rarely had the need to conjure up excitement. Mary Rockwell, in contrast, read books primarily to satisfy her desire for adventure, and the less demanding her household responsibilities became as the boys grew older, the more time she had to lose her sense of self. Nobody remembers when she first started drinking too much. Certainly, by the beginning of 1948, she was showing signs of mental fatigue. She was only forty years old, and her two oldest sons were spending most of their time away from home, Tommy having recently joined Jarvis at Oakwood. And her youngest was only six years away from entering college himself. It was time for her to reestablish herself outside the roles of mother and wife, and she began participating in local writing classes. At this stage, Mary’s sons sometimes wondered why their mother worried so much; but, looking back, Jarvis recalls seeing her hunched next to a visiting teacher on their living room couch several years before, earnestly talking to the other woman about her own unfulfilled ambitions and fears of inadequacy.

It is easy, so much so that the ease urges caution on us, to posit Mary Rockwell’s problems, the subsequent years of alcohol abuse and mental illness, as integrally connected to her husband’s career and his consequent emotional distance. Like Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, we could surmise: the talented woman, forced to play second fiddle to her famous husband, languished in the wake of his fame. And Mary Rockwell did dedicate herself to ensuring that her husband’s work could always proceed unimpeded, from cooking the food he preferred to keeping the hours he worked best by to spending her days taking care of his professional and domestic needs.

But it is also true that Norman Rockwell was not averse to hiring people to do the chores Mary performed instead. He had admired her brains and competence and social extroversion from their first meeting; and nothing suggests that he enjoyed her sacrificing any of them on his behalf. He just didn’t want her needs to stand in the way of his career, and she knew no other way to meet such a requirement than through making herself indispensable to him. What is saddest about such a tale is the evidence suggesting that he found indispensable what was in fact easiest for her to give—emotional support, belief in his talent, and honesty in her criticism. The rest—the running of errands, the housekeeping, the answering of fan mail, the tending of his mother—all this he found easy to replace with professional help, when Mary finally had no more ability to provide it.

After George and Casey Hughes were released from the responsibility of the farm that they’d sold to Chris and Mary Schafer, they moved closer to West Arlington and found themselves free to socialize more frequently. Jarvis Rockwell recalls the suave, dashing, man-about-town figure that George Hughes cut; he remembers, too, his sense that his mother had developed “a crush” on the urbane illustrator. “I can’t recall all the clues,” he says. “But even a picture I’ve seen brings those memories to mind—my mother, looking really pretty and kind of dolled-up, when ordinarily at this time she didn’t make much of an effort. And it was to be with the Hugheses.”

During an interview in 1986, George Hughes spoke not of Mary Rockwell but of Mary’s husband’s disconcertingly obvious habit of discounting the younger man’s artistic judgment. Rockwell solicited his advice in order to determine what not to do on a painting in progress. He’d ask him something, turn to Mary and say, “See, George likes that,” or “George doesn’t” and then immediately do the opposite. Whether a real response to what he saw as Hughes’s limitations, or a spouse’s jealous rejoinder to his wife, Rockwell’s jovial nastiness was out of character.

Yet he could also be kind to Hughes, who considered him a particularly thoughtful man. When Hughes’s daughter was getting married and her tense father was preparing to go to New York City for the wedding, Rockwell unexpectedly called, saying the situation might be stressful for him, since he would be seeing so many old friends from his first marriage as well as giving away his little girl. Rockwell declared that he and Chris Schafer, now their mutual friend, wanted to go with Hughes to keep him company. “Their presences made it easier for me but I never would have asked. It was like Norman to offer without being asked,” Hughes recalled.

Rockwell spent a good deal of time in New York City that year, for occasions far afield from girding up shaky friends at family weddings. According to F.B.I. informants, on February 28, 1948, Rockwell was listed on a sponsoring committee for a mass meeting to be held at Madison Square Garden, its aim to raise funds to aid the ten Hollywood writers and directors fired after being cited for contempt by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Publicity about the event appeared in the
People’s Voice,
which the California Un-American Activities Committee had cited as “communist initiated and controlled or so strongly influenced as to be in the Stalin Solar System.” Rockwell was among those who had invited John Gates, editor of the
Daily Worker,
to join a meeting to be held in the Gold Room of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. The rationale of the meeting was to combat censorship.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1948, Rockwell worked on several ads, including a first-rate oil painting for The Watchmakers of Switzerland. An old watch repairman is meticulously rendered, from his wrinkled, crepey hands, to his overgrown eyebrows. The rest of the canvas is more loosely painted, with the oil thinly applied as though for a sketch. The crowded pictorial space of the work points to what will be a hallmark of Rockwell’s remarkable achievements in the next decade for the
Post.
In this ad, the total effect dramatically exceeds what corporations were accustomed to getting from the commercial artists they paid.

Although meetings among illustrators had begun, by now, to include worried murmurs about the postwar shifts in taste, including far greater dependence on photography for magazine art, Rockwell’s popularity remained undiminished. Among the rash of summer publicity, however, including
Boston Globe
pictures of him and Mary at the local square dance, and Newark, New Jersey, newspaper articles about his life as a “teener” (teenager), there was the ambivalent note struck about his right to status among the educated.
Time
magazine, for instance, ran a picture of him helping Grandma Moses, a Vermonter herself, celebrate her eighty-eighth birthday. After commending the shrewd, practical woman for professionally striking “a pose that even her most critical dealer would accept as an authentic American primitive,”
Time
notes the helping hand lent her at the party by “Norman Rockwell, who also paints, after his fashion.” Playing the smug, categorical journalists far more adroitly than they realized, Rockwell touted Moses as the “most exciting figure in 20th century art.” These days, he continued, you had to stand in line to buy her work, a product of “using housepaints.” A
Los Angeles Times
journalist hardly knew what to make of Rockwell’s genial patter.

In the late summer, before Jerry and Tommy returned to Poughkeepsie for Oakwood’s fall semester, Rockwell painted his
Christmas Homecoming,
the
Post
cover to be published on Christmas Day. The painter’s firstborn is the centerpiece, a near prodigal son whose community welcomes him en masse. All the Rockwells, and Grandma Moses too, appear in the painting: Mary joyously hugs her son, and Peter and Tommy stand at the side, while Rockwell looks the part of the proud father, pipe in mouth, sage smile on face. Mary seems slightly frazzled, however, and it turns out that Rockwell was not taking artistic license.

NR’s 1912 scholarship drawing, Art Students’ League, unpublished illustration of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Deserted Village.”

The Quarry Troop Life Guards
, for a story in
Boys’ Life
, September 1915.

The End of the Road
, for a story in
St. Nicholas
, November 1915.

Vinegar Bill
, for a story in
Boys’ Life
, January 1916.

The Lucky Seventh
, a 1914 illustration for the book by Ralph Henry Barbour, published in 1915 by D. Appleton and Company.

Checkers
, oil on canvas, 35" x 39", 1928, for a story in
Ladies’ Home Journal
, July 1929.

Love Ouanga
, oil on canvas, 30" x 62", for a story in
American Magazine
, June 1936.

Peach Crop
, oil on canvas, 16" x 36", for a story in
American Magazine
, April 1935.

Strictly a Sharpshooter
, oil on canvas, 30" x 71", for a story in
American Magazine
, June 1941.

Boy with Baby Carriage
, oil on canvas, 20.75" x 18.625",
Saturday Evening Post
cover, May 20, 1916.

And the Symbol of Welcome Is Light
, ad for Edison Mazda, oil on canvas, 40" x 28", 1920.

Bridge Game
,
Saturday Evening Post
cover, May 15, 1948.