Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  “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 b
rother 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.”

  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.