Norman Rockwell (52 page)

By the late summer, Rockwell shifted to the kind of coverage the
Post
would increasingly request of him. After the two major political parties had confirmed their choice of presidential candidate, Rockwell arranged to paint the portraits of Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower. Pleading, whenever a reporter asked, that he himself was an independent voter (which he was), he nonetheless admitted that Ike’s sheer charm and personality overwhelmed him. And later, when reviewing favorably a book by Herblock, he demurred at the cartoonist’s negative rendering of Eisenhower, though he admitted that his distaste for the exaggeration might stem from being an Eisenhower Republican. By contrast, he explained, because he so disliked Joseph McCarthy, he applauded Herblock’s vivisection of that figure, leading him to conclude that judgments of aesthetics are often mired in partisan politics.

Voters’ reactions to the portraits of the Democratic and Republican candidates neatly illustrated Rockwell’s putative impartiality in art, at least; both party’s supporters were pleased, with the Democratic National Committee even requesting that the
Post
present the portrait to Stevenson, which it did.

Too busy tending to other more urgent problems, Rockwell had managed to postpone addressing a medical condition common to aging men. Now, almost exactly the same time of year that he was hospitalized in 1954 for a rest, the illustrator ended up in the hospital in 1956 for prostate and bladder problems. Ben Hibbs wrote him an encouraging letter about their mutual acquaintances who had come through such operations quickly, though he himself had found something similar extremely messy for himself. Ken Stuart had passed on to Hibbs the rumor he heard that Rockwell would be able to avoid surgery for now; and Hibbs asked if such news was true. It was, and Pittsfield Hospital discharged Rockwell in mid-October. He was back to business by the end of the month, traveling to and from New York for still more advertising work.

High on his agenda, once he got out of the hospital, was to make time to paint his final Christmas cover for the
Post.
As Rockwell Museum curator Linda Pero points out, it is hardly coincidental that he chose the primal scene of a boy discovering Santa Claus is just a trick, as the youngster stumbles across the Santa costume in his parents’ drawer, Rockwell capturing the very moment that the belief is demythologized for the child forever. This final Christmas cover, always a prestigious placement of an illustrator’s painting, appeared when his once-secure tenure at the
Post
had obviously evolved into an abbreviated yearly commitment, representing the old guard of illustrators, and his family life had crumbled into the very opposite of the tableau of security he had desired.

Around the time that the December cover was published, the Rockwells received their invitation to President Eisenhower’s second inauguration in January 1957. Although he was still fond of the man, Rockwell was now less impressed with Ike’s presidency, and the couple decided not to travel to Washington for the event. Rockwell had too many ads to work on anyway, and he was looking at movie publicity commissions as well, including initial ideas for Walt Disney’s planned
Old Yeller.
Jerry was out in San Francisco at Erik Erikson’s suggestion. “I was trying to define myself, and my father wasn’t sure I should go on with art at this point, and Erikson encouraged me to, and told me to move to someplace interesting and far away from my family, like San Francisco. It was great advice.”

Once Erikson promoted the idea, Rockwell was convinced, and he supported Jerry financially during the long periods he found himself unemployed. Still floundering, and feeling particularly unsettled about what was going on at home—“I didn’t want to know and no one talked about it anyway”—Rockwell’s eldest son had begun intensive psychiatric therapy himself. As well as paying the bills without complaint, Rockwell corresponded with Jerry’s doctor, seeking advice as to ways he might help his son. His letters show that he was very concerned that his parenting had led to Jerry’s problems, and in one touching response from Dr. Wheeler, the artist is assured that he was a good father. Rockwell even asked Erik Erikson, who was in Mexico for a few months, to go check on Jerry and his doctor in San Francisco. On sabbatical to write a new book, Erikson didn’t make it to California, so Jerry’s doctor came to him.

Not surprisingly, given the recent announcement by Peter that he was going to marry his childhood sweetheart from Putney, Cynthia Ide, the presence of young love inspired the two
Post
covers that Rockwell painted in the spring of 1956. One dealt with a proud couple showing off their prom clothes at the local drugstore, the other with a picture of two wise cleaning women smiling at the hotel room detritus of a honeymoon.
After the Prom,
as Dave Hickey has thoroughly analyzed, is an impressive painting in the tradition of the European masters, particularly in its precise articulation of angles and the delineation of action achieved by careful use of color. Pure Rockwell, however, as Hickey points out, is the implication once again that the kids are just fine, instead of being threats to a postwar society that wanted, defensively, to close ranks.

Just Married,
lacking the technical achievement of the former piece, nonetheless shows the mastery of realistic painting that Rockwell displayed from the late forties to the early seventies. But it also encapsulates more clearly than most paintings the way that Rockwell yields to the temptation to make the audience seem superior to the content of his painting. The cleaning women look too sweet and content to worry us, but because they are also clearly amused and pleased by so little, we smile patronizingly at them. The final step in this dynamic is that the narrator of the entire visual act, which includes us as spectators, drawn into judging the scene, is in fact judging us. The uneasy sense that at times Rockwell feels contempt for his audience plays out in just such an economy. It is present, too, in
After the Prom,
where the picture’s potential achievement is effaced by the aura of narrative condescension that hovers over the story.

Mary’s painting had also been invigorated lately by her family’s romantic pastimes; she seemed to embody the old saw about gaining a daughter-in-law, in the face of losing a son. She loved both Gail and Cinny, and they considered her a good friend. By late spring, Mary was feeling particularly cheerful about all aspects of her life. She sent her sister money to buy good supplies for her own work, and told her to let her know when she needed more materials. Every Tuesday, Mary went for a lesson with Peggy Best, and she claimed it was one of the few rules she made herself keep. She philosophized in a new way to her sister: “A woman’s life is quite different from a man’s—to be a real woman she needs to do all sorts of things, so that even something she may love as much as painting cannot be pursued as a profession the way a man does. Personally I like the variety of my life. I’d hate to feel I had to go to the studio every day.”

During this year, Mary Rockwell finally got her wish to move to a bigger house, one that didn’t look out onto a cemetery, which had become too morbid a landscape for her to tolerate. One sign that her dislike of their location must have suddenly overflowed into a passionate hatred is implied in the bills for $34,000 that the Rockwells spent on renovations, only to end up moving that same year. Even for them, this was financial folly of the first order.

At the end of the summer, the painter finished his work on Disney’s
Old
Yeller,
and began more advertising for Upjohn Pharmaceuticals. And once again, he faced the “God damned calendar,” the yearly Boy Scout calendar cover. He had been complaining loudly about the calendar for years, but on getting up his courage to call the organization to resign the commission, he’d been told that they would double their pay for the one picture a year. He had planned to replace the loss of income with the pay and stock dividends from the Famous Artists’ School, which were averaging around five hundred dollars a month by the end of the fifties. But whenever he remembered that their pay was for one picture only, after all, it proved impossible to walk away from Brown and Bigelow’s monetary enticements. For the last ten years that he painted them, Rockwell was getting $10,000 for each year’s cover.

As 1957 drew to an end, in place of a Rockwell Christmas cover, the illustrator was treated to the offering of a National Book Award–winning novelist who was himself a well-respected photographer. Wright Morris wrote an important essay in
The Atlantic Monthly,
a magazine read religiously by Rockwell every month, unlike the
Post,
which he rarely saw except for the issues that featured his own covers. The article, called “Norman Rockwell’s America,” reads as a thoughtful (unlike the usual knee-jerk) indictment of the insubstantial vision that continues to inform Rockwell’s painting, through which Middle America has learned to appreciate its idea of art. Tom Rockwell recalls that this was one of the few negative pieces that bothered his father: “For a few days, Pop was depressed over it, but then he realized it was just what he’d been getting all his life, and he got over it.”

To make matters worse, Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s brother, Cass Canfield, was the editor of
The Atlantic,
and to have such sober criticism appearing under Canfield’s aegis rubbed old competitive wounds even rawer.

Luckily, Peter Rockwell’s upcoming nuptials took his father’s mind off the embarrassment. On February 15, 1958, Peter and Cinny were married in an Episcopal service in Greenwich, Connecticut. Erik Erikson attended, and even Clara Edgerton came all the way from Arlington, though the weather would have thwarted less stalwart souls. Rockwell, afraid that the “kids” hadn’t arranged to have enough champagne to serve everyone, supplied an entire extra case at the last minute. Mary was in far better shape than at Tom’s wedding two and a half years earlier. Not only had she driven to New York City to buy the china the newlyweds wanted; she began a ritual of sending the couple a check every month to buy fresh limes and tequila for the daiquiris she knew they loved, an odd if loving gesture for a recovering alcoholic.

The wedding proved to be prelude to a particularly fulfilling summer. Peter held a show of his watercolors and drawings in Peggy Best’s studio; finally, his father had capitulated to his youngest’s decision that he, too, wanted to pursue a career in art. Peggy Best was invaluable to anyone in Stockbridge interested in art. Throughout the summer, family members were keeping weekly appointments at Riggs; Mary was trying valiantly to stave off the gloom she felt start to descend, its cause unclear.

Rockwell found himself challenged by two not unrelated questions during the fall: should Mary return to Hartford, and should he accept a major endorsement campaign that would pay him handsomely for lending his name to a home decorating project? It became apparent that Mary needed more shock treatments, and so he began driving her weekly for her sessions, a pattern, according to hospital bills, that continued unabated for the next year. His costs once again escalating, and Jerry still dependent on Rockwell’s financial support, the illustrator accepted the offer from Colorizer, in which he was presented in magazine ads as endorsing the company’s method of coordinating wall color and art. Such projects were anathema to serious artists, who routinely made jokes about those people who bought paintings to match their walls.

At least Rockwell was able to turn to his work for the
Post
during the fall. Of his next three covers, one would become among his most popular:
The Runaway.
Its photographic realism gratifying, it suffers from the same compulsive sentimentality that compromised the potential brilliance of
After the Prom.
Beautifully composed, the triangular figure of vagrant little boy, kindly policeman, and kindly fountain worker overcompensates for
After the Prom
’s invitation to assume superiority to the participants; the patronizing goodness of the two older men in this scene is cloying enough without tempting Rockwell to further burden it with audience voyeurism.

At various times throughout the autumn of 1958, Rockwell told interviewers that he was planning a sabbatical the following year, in order to see what he would paint if he just worked for his own pleasure. Several times, journalists wished him well; occasionally, someone suggested that any gesture toward real painting was presumptuous on his part.

When the new year opened, few signs pointed to the sabbatical supposedly under way for 1959. Rockwell accepted a promotional assignment for Ford’s new Lincoln Premier Landau that, while not requiring his painting, forced him to let strangers into his studio to photograph him. Worse, he and Mary agreed to do a special with Edward Murrow for CBS. In February, not only their house but also the entire town was upended in order to produce the half-hour special. Worried sick over what Mary would say or do during the taping—by now, her behavior was too erratic to predict day by day—Rockwell and the boys basically just hoped for the best. The session went well, though it is hard to believe that viewers didn’t sense something wrong with the monotoned wife who, sitting in her armchair and infrequently addressed, looked dazed or sleepy.

More interesting than the television show, however, was the publisher Doubleday’s idea that Rockwell should write his autobiography for them. Although little hard evidence dates the concept to an earlier period, a few notes suggest that Rockwell might have planned this book the year before, in which case it motivated his “sabbatical.” Doubleday sent an interviewer to ghostwrite the book, but Rockwell found the writer impatient and controlling. A better system was developed: Tom, now a writer himself and already employed by Doubleday, would be the scribe to whom Rockwell told his story.

The plan proceeded well, though at first Rockwell found the claims on his time every evening cumbersome. But by the summer he was dictating into a recorder, making him freer than he could be even in front of his son, and allowing him a way to unwind at the end of the day by, in effect, talking to himself. Rockwell enjoyed doing new things, and talking to his audience in this fashion was definitely different from the usual visual relationship he depended on.