Norman Rockwell (49 page)

At least he was able to enter therapy on a positive note: Robert Beverly Hale had gotten permission to accept Rockwell’s
Freedom of Speech
for the Metropolitan Museum’s permanent American art collection, with Rockwell being paid a nominal fee of $100 for the painting. Rockwell was really excited over this news, and he ensured the
Post
knew about it immediately. In later years, journalists’ contempt for his art would be expressed by sneering at the Met’s purchase price for an original Norman Rockwell, but the point was otherwise for those in the professional art world: except for the Old Masters or the traditionally valued modern art that the Met paid real money for, artists effectively lobbied to have the museum accept a painting as a donation. No one imagined that Rockwell belonged in the first category, and the acceptance of his offer, in light of the thousands of offers that were politely declined, was a testimony to his stature among certain experts in American art.

By October 1952, Mary was back home in Arlington, where she was busily engaged in a writing workshop. She wrote Tom a lengthy letter at Bard that rambles inconsequentially about her latest poem, assuring him that therapy aids the writing of poetry. She mentions that she drove to Stockbridge the day before on the mere assumption that Tom had an appointment at Riggs and she would see him; he did not, and so she attended Eisenhower’s campaign stop in nearby Pittsfield instead. She makes much of her solo political trip, perhaps because her husband had recently painted Ike, and the resultant
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cover had just appeared. The five-page typed letter describes without self-consciousness the reading and rereading aloud of her latest long poem to her husband, who had listened with interest, and who routinely critiqued her writing thoughtfully. After she made some changes, she reread the poem to Norman, some parts several times over when he failed to understand a point; and since Maxine Atherton was staying with them temporarily, she recited it to Maxine for feedback as well.

A month earlier, Maxine Atherton had suddenly become a widow. Jack Atherton, a hearty man in his sixties, dropped dead of a heart attack while salmon fishing in Canada. The Athertons had moved from Arlington to New York only recently, but on her husband’s death, “Max” had driven back to Arlington to stay with friends until she became emotionally centered again. Jarvis Rockwell recalls that his mother had always exhibited signs of jealousy over Maxine, who was exuberant, energetic, and funny, and whom the Rockwells felt sympathy toward even before Jack’s death; her husband’s gruff nature had often made Max’s home life difficult. Imagining Rockwell’s now extremely needy wife reading and rereading the tortured verses to her living room audience of two is somewhat uncomfortable, in spite of what was clearly Rockwell’s strong encouragement and appreciation. Mary informs Tom innocently that Maxine perceptively pointed out to her various segments of the poem that sound as if they’re in the wrong order; surely her son, a talented writer, cringed mentally.

For the first part of 1953, Rockwell worked hard on the Kellogg’s ads, getting them in shape for winter delivery. And although he no longer had to provide the detailed, exhaustive, and generous feedback that he’d earlier provided to the students of the Famous Artists’ School—the new name adopted two years earlier by the Institute of Commercial Art—he did fulfill his obligations to visit Westport, Connecticut, in order to tutor the panoply of young instructors the school had hired, offering them a window into his way of thinking about others’ illustrations. Rockwell enjoyed mingling with people of all ages, but he particularly liked being around “young people,” as he called those in their teens and twenties, and so this opportunity to interact with the latest generations to teach at the Westport school gratified him.

He particularly enjoyed visiting with his sons’ friends. This year, during the extended spring school break, when Peter brought home a few boys and girls from Putney, Rockwell put them into service to pose for his
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cover
The Soda Jerk.
Peter was the star of the painting, and his school companion Cinny Ide at least got her derriere included, as the family later jokingly remembered; Rockwell rubbed the rest of her body out and painted in that of another model.

At the moment, even
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covers seemed somewhat of a luxury to the artist. The bills coming at him from all quarters forced Rockwell to continue accepting more advertising work than “real painting.” In November 1953, he took on a long-term contract with Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance, and the next month, he worked hard at getting the long-promised Kellogg’s Corn Flakes campaign under way at last. Publicity photographs from such ventures show him looking increasingly hounded.

Part of his tension ensued from the ongoing drama of his home life. Throughout the year, Mary had been going back and forth to Riggs at least once a week, and frequently she would live there as a resident patient for a few months at a time. Peter Rockwell remembers that his father was frequently lonely; Jarvis Rockwell recalls watching his father standing by himself up on a hill near their house, when the Vermont weather was gray and the wind was blowing hard, and the “stick figure” that was Pop looked like someone sad because “it was all falling apart.” Once, he told one of his sons that if it weren’t for them, he’d kill himself. Perhaps he was being melodramatic, but Erik Erikson would believe him to be suicidal.

Rockwell’s family had always felt the burden of sustaining an image in Arlington, and now the almost grown sons realized the oddity of pretending things were fine, even though half the intellectual community knew otherwise. Often the boys felt they had to avoid dealing with the truth even with their father. Asked if they felt they could “relate” to Rockwell as they grew older, Jarvis answers, “as always, if it was on his terms. If you could stay on his psychological level, where he could deal with things. But not if you tried to swerve things in your own direction.” One of Jarvis’s strongest memories is his father’s strong reaction during this year to Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” “I got back from Korea in 1953, and my father just wanted to keep talking about how powerful that story was, how the village just chose somebody and stoned the person. He found the story really moving and potent.” Jackson’s vivid short story had been published in 1948 in
The New Yorker,
provoking such outrage that hundreds of readers canceled their subscriptions. Why Rockwell became fixated on “The Lottery” now, five years after its appearance, is perplexing, unless he had recently learned of the biographical underpinnings of the story and applied them to his own life.

The title, “The Lottery,” refers to a small New England town’s yearly ritual of drawing lots to see who will be the sacrificial victim stoned to death by the villagers. Until the story’s climax, daily life seems to hum along much as it does in small towns everywhere. But when the citizens are shown passively accepting the evil annual sacrifice of an innocent townsperson, readers are forced to reevaluate what lies beneath the tranquil surfaces of their communities.

The author of the story was married to one of the group eventually known as the New York intellectuals, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who taught at Bennington College in Vermont, about an hour from Rockwell’s home in Arlington and the site of several guest lectures that the illustrator gave. Smacking of the kind of superciliousness that Rockwell detested, Bennington’s social world treated outsiders such as Jackson and her Jewish husband with disdain bordering on contempt. Yet Bennington proudly flaunted its status as a good New England community in the fairy-tale state of Vermont, and the townspeople felt themselves immune from criticism, saving that for the New York city slickers instead.

By the end of 1953, the Rockwells would decide to leave their own Vermont idyll and move to Stockbridge. Although they had planned to make Arlington their lifetime home, and had even bought local gravesites, Rockwell assured his wife that, after employing two hundred residents from their town over the past decade, he had used up the model pool anyway. He also felt eager for more socializing than the mountain community could provide, especially now that the Athertons and, even more of a loss, Mead and Elizabeth Schaeffer had moved away. (Leah Schaeffer admits that Mary’s late-night depressed appropriations of her mother wore on Mead so badly that they moved to get out of her reach.) It seemed silly for Mary to be driving back and forth, as well as Rockwell, who was willing to expand his own treatments with Erikson, when they could live right there, within a lovely setting.

Major decisions, such as leaving the community you’ve lived in for ten years, are usually influenced by more than one factor. The Rockwells’ move to Stockbridge during a period when the illustrator seemed, to his son, obsessed by Jackson’s story may have reflected their recognition that Arlington was no Eden. Perhaps Rockwell’s
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cover of people gossiping madly, based on the rumormongering of local townspeople, spoke volumes about a rural nastiness that was capable of matching urban malaise any day.

26

On the Road Again

Partly to avoid awkward questions and answers, Rockwell had shared with no one outside the family the decision he and Mary made to move to Stockbridge. Gene Pelham recalls that he was in the studio, working with the illustrator, when the moving trucks pulled up. Only then did Rockwell explain the plans, and Gene started to cry. “That man was like no other,” he would say. “I don’t care what you say, no other artist will ever touch him. He did everything an artist could do.” Rockwell knew that Gene had come to depend on him for the major part of his family’s livelihood, and he gave him “several” good paintings, one of which Pelham sold only in the late 1990s to fund his pay-in-perpetuity at an elegant assisted-living home.

The Edgertons were shocked, too. “We just found out one day, and that was that,” Buddy remembers. “The Rockwells left lots of things behind—including a picnic table I remember my parents walking back to our yard. Tommy gave me his .22. We were all sad, but we knew why.”

Most people didn’t know, however, that the Rockwells wanted to be near Riggs. The Edgertons did, but they would not share their knowledge until 1999, when Peter Rockwell started speaking publicly about his parents’ problems. Their long-held discretion, and that of other Rockwell acquaintances from Arlington as well, attest not only to the hold that loyalty had over previous generations, but to the deep affection that the Rockwell family had engendered in others.

The Rockwells moved to Stockbridge just before the December holidays in 1953, and they spent a miserable, sad, and dislocated Christmas at the boardinghouse near Riggs where they were lodging until they found a more suitable residence. What Rockwell must have felt at revisiting the kind of “home” he had hated as a boy can only be imagined. But, as always, his first order of the day was to find an appropriate studio. He rented the space above the meat market on Main Street (a few blocks from Riggs), which he promptly renovated by replacing the wall with plate glass.

One high moment during the move occurred when Rockwell asked a local man, Louis Lamone, to help him move his belongings up the stairs into his new studio. The rough-spoken, energetic worker from the nearby General Electric plant had never heard of Norman Rockwell; he later would say he just wanted to make a dollar. As he helped Rockwell lift heavy boxes, he figured the skinny, plainspoken man in his khakis and blue work shirt couldn’t be an artist, because he lacked the flamboyant or self-centered temperament associated with them, and, besides that, he didn’t seem to have a lot of money, like the famous painters he’d read about. Later, after Rockwell had asked the man to become his assistant, taking over the role Gene Pelham had played in Arlington, Lamone came to feel the same ferocious loyalty and protectiveness toward Rockwell that Pelham had. He especially appreciated the respectful way that Rockwell treated him, never talking down to him, and picking up the slack for mistakes Lamone might have made. At the same time, Lamone was amazed at how hard the painter was on himself, always worried that his current painting wasn’t good enough. And, as Lamone recalled years later, his employer was willing to call him on his self-admitted tendency to get full of himself at times: Rockwell would tell his temporarily unbearable assistant that it was time for him to go shovel some doodoo (not the word that the earthy Rockwell would have used, for sure) that the dogs had left in the yard, and Lamone would shape up fast.

Stockbridge itself was a much more sophisticated community than Arlington. Only ten minutes east of the New York State border, just as the Rockwells’ last home had been, the determinedly small New England town had its beginning in 1737 when, as Sheffield village, the area became part of a land grant used to establish a missionary settlement for the Housatonic Indians. The Native Americans commingled peacefully with English settlers until 1785, when they resettled in western New York State. The community’s record of tolerance was a proud touchstone for its approximately two thousand residents, generally highly educated and supportive of liberal politics and upper-class cultural activities.

With no industry and served by only a smattering of local stores, the town had flourished economically, largely because of the tourist trade. Visitors spent money in the restaurants and inns; not infrequently, after spending a few seasons in the Western Berkshires, they bought summer homes in or around Stockbridge. A few miles away was Tanglewood Conservatory, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; and Canyon Ranch Spa was almost as close. At seven hundred feet above sea level, the cozy village nestled in the Berkshires seemed to many travelers to share the topography of England’s Lake District. During the time that the Rockwells lived in Stockbridge, its citizens included Reinhold Niebuhr, the famous liberal theologian; Thornton Wilder and William Gibson, both illustrious playwrights; and Erik and Joan Erikson. Just beneath such national prominences was a roster of professionals, all well known in their field.

By the time that the Rockwells moved to Stockbridge, Rockwell had already done some hard work on lifelong, persistent struggles with depression with Erikson, who had become his friend as well as his analyst. In social situations, both men made similar impacts on people around them, though in truth they often gave little of themselves. Sue Erikson Bloland has summarized her father’s effect in terms that apply equally to Rockwell’s: “He became the luminous center of attention at most social and professional gatherings, where people milled around him, obviously excited, doing their best to make conversation with one another while awaiting their turn to engage with
him.
.
.
.
Friends and admirers all seemed intent on idealizing my father, seeing in him someone much more important and powerful than themselves.” In a description exactly like that of Rockwell’s sons, she recalls how “people would ask me, ‘what is he really like?’ and I knew they wanted their fantasies confirmed, not an honest answer about a real human being.”

In January 1954, in spite of a workload aimed at compensating for not yet having sold the Arlington house, the painter took time to fête a longtime, aging executive at the
Post,
Jack Lyme, who was being honored by a Boston organization. Rockwell felt himself and the public well served by Lyme’s devotion and decency, and, in such situations, he was willing to put himself out. In contrast, a few years earlier, he had felt free to bow out of attending his cousin’s wedding in Providence, and Mary had protested attending yet another social function solo. Instead, the Rockwells hosted Mary Amy Orpen and her new husband at the little honeymoon cabin they owned down the road from their house. With floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, and a deck adorned by an Alexander Calder mobile (Calder’s daughter attended Putney with Peter), the site proved the ideal spot for the newlyweds’ postwedding celebration. Mary stocked its refrigerator with lobster and wine, and she apologized again for not making it to the ceremony in Providence. Her husband was willing to sacrifice his family’s and friends’ claims on him socially when his commissions were behind; shortly before their move, he had left a dinner party in Arlington early in order to go home and work, in spite of its being given in his honor.

In February 1954, when the Rockwells were still house hunting, Mary Rockwell wrote to her brother that she and Norman “are having a wonderful time together and besides that like Stockbridge so very much.” But at least one son, Jarvis—who, on finding that he had did not fit particularly well into the Air Force, hurried home as soon as he could—remembers how uncomfortable his parents looked together. “They really loved each other, I know that,” he says. “But it’s as if there was a kind of hollowness in my mother herself, and when they were together, I noticed my father especially seemed slightly uneasy, though he was trying to hide it. And I remember my father frequently at this time talking about that recurrent dream he had, that one about the empty lot, with rubbish all around, but a vast vacancy. He claimed it was New York City when he was young; I don’t know.”

By March the Rockwells had found a perfect yellow clapboard house to buy, priced at the exact price they were asking for their Vermont house. Next to the cemetery, a few blocks from downtown, the house was ready for them to move into by early spring, and Mary Rockwell began to feel more settled. She wrote to her sister that she was already planning the enlargements she’d like to make, and she explained the particular virtues of the new residence, including the way the “monster,” as Norman called the television set, was tucked away into an anteroom. She shared a studio space with Jerry downtown, above the pharmacy and not far from Norman’s, and found it rewarding to have a place to hang her work. She and Norman attended a weekly art group currently held on Wednesday mornings at Peggy Best’s studio on Pine Street. Her husband continued to enjoy his studio overlooking Main Street, where he could look out of the huge plate-glass front and see “people instead of mountains.” Only a week later, however, she wrote to Nancy that “we” (quotation marks hers) had been struggling with a
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cover.

From at least as early as their move out of the boardinghouse into their own home, the Rockwells felt sure that they had done the right thing by moving to Stockbridge. Here, unlike Arlington, the best of two worlds seemed at hand: small-town living in conjunction with a particularly vivid intellectual and artistic community. The social center of this scene was Peggy Best, an extremely talented artist whose close friendships with Wallace Stegner and John Cheever had introduced her to Marshall Best, one of the founders of Viking Press. A divorced mother of two, she had moved to Stockbridge to teach painting at Riggs in 1950. Peggy Best held salons and slide shows at her own little gallery on Pine Street, within walking distance of Riggs and all the Main Street shops; and she began holding a weekly sketch class that allowed the artists in town to pay for a communal chance to work from a life model and maintain their skills.

Norman and Jarvis were not the only painters in the family now; Mary had begun to produce abstract canvases from art classes at Riggs. She and her husband joined Peggy’s classes, and all three became good friends. Setting aside the times at Peggy’s studio as opportunities to experiment, free of all professional demands, Rockwell practiced looser brushstrokes as he once again worked from live models, while Mary was able to try a new form of expression. Rockwell encouraged her to keep painting, including her bent toward the abstract, and his praise seems remarkably free of the condescension one might be tempted to excuse in such a situation. Mary began seeking Peggy out as a friend, someone to talk to when what her son Jonathan Best recalls as her “severe bouts of depression” settled in. “I remember my mother telling me [Mary] would walk for hours around Stockbridge at times trying to shake the depression and suicidal urges. I think my mother performed a lot of handholding,” he says.

As usual, Rockwell himself was unavailable for much handholding. A few months after they had finished unpacking boxes and settling into the house on Church Street, he had to fly to Southern California for the Third National Jamboree of the Boy Scouts. He worried about leaving Mary before the family had had enough time to adjust to their new residence, but he also reminded himself that one of the motivations for their relocation was for times just like this: he could travel with the assurance of a nearby support community for his wife. Once he got out West, where he visited New Mexico as well, he became excited about the insights he was gaining for the increasingly burdensome calendars. On this trip, he noticed the unsung heroes of the organization, the leaders who gave up so much of their free time to direct the troops. His pleasure at this new observation allowed him to rekindle some enthusiasm for continuing the yearly calendar cover.

Around this time, a nonprofit advertisement was published, using a photograph of Rockwell, pipe in hand, bow tie at neck, accompanied by the caption, “An All-week, All-year, All-life thing.” The ad, promoting church attendance, must have provided a good laugh in the family who now lived, after all, next to a cemetery, a daily memento mori. A short text, supposedly written by Rockwell, explained that his family went to church together on a regular, not special basis. Since the Rockwells had rarely attended church at all except for the baptism of the boys as three-month-olds at St. John’s–Wilmot in New Rochelle, the ad constitutes one of Rockwell’s few arguably hypocritical representations. Although someone else wrote the copy, he had to approve it. In one sense, however, in light of the work that the attendance crusade was performing on behalf of “all creeds, races and classes of people,” Rockwell’s pro bono work for them is consistent with his fervid belief in the principle of tolerance.

He could not afford to do too many paintings or ads without reimbursement, however. During late spring 1954, as Rockwell worried about how he would pay for the new house, Tommy’s tuition at Bard, and Peter’s first year at Haverford, which would begin in the fall, he explored the possibility of Jerry attending City College in Manhattan, where tuition would be free after his eldest son established residency. Instead, Jerry decided to return to the Boston School of Fine Arts, and Rockwell had to figure in those costs as well. Throughout his life, he was sure to provide his sons with financial help, though he tried to balance cushioning their own load with encouraging their independence. When Peter and Tommy now decided to open a summer bookstore in nearby Lenox, for instance, Rockwell helped underwrite it, as well as paint the wooden sign for the door. The boys’ venture proved financially successful—they tripled their investment—and they were able to move the bookstore to Stockbridge the following summer.