Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  By the summer after his studio burned to the ground, Rockwell’s new one, modeled—with only minor variations—on the old, was well under way, in spite of wartime restrictions on materials. Permits from 1943 reveal the exemptions the illustrator obtained because of the nature of his work, much of it related to wartime illustration, though he still had to use nonpriority materials. In late July, he explained to a journalist from The Boston Globe that his neighbors were building him a new studio behind the recently purchased farmhouse, making it sound in the process as if the old site was too haunted by sad memories of his losses for the family to rebuild there. Instead, the less romantic truth was that he had been thinking about relocating to a less isolated residence anyway, and this move was enabled financially by the insurance policy he had held on the studio that was destroyed. Rockwell’s focus throughout the interview resolutely remains on the virtues of the townspeople, his models. He testifies “earnestly” to the interviewer that “lots of states have mountains, but only this has Vermonters.” He continues by extolling the character that the “folks” around the Batten Kill river share and that city people by and large lack.

  Rockwell’s admiration and loyalty are sincere, and no doubt he believes what he is saying. But he also was adeptly continuing the public relations campaign he waged throughout his life, battling the public’s eventual fatigue with his success by representing himself as an average and even ingenuous talented man in awe of the (implicitly) better people around him. He had set himself up with an enormous challenge: presenting himself as accessible to his fellow citizens, and seducing them into helping him whenever he needed assistance to meet his deadlines, while maintaining the energy, time, and empty space in which to create. Finessing the impression he gave others that he thought they were special, or at least highly worthy of his attention, with their sometimes subsequent misunderstanding of their claim to his friendship, required careful thought and masterful manipulation.

  By October, the Rockwells had finished renovating their eighteenth-century farmhouse, largely to Mary’s specifications, and the studio had been in use for a couple of months. Life felt more manageable in this location; the covered bridge led from the main road over the river and onto the village green, where the Grange Hall, a popular community church, and the little one-room schoolhouse dotted the expanse of well-tended grass. The Rockwells and the Edgertons lived in the houses on the hill, overlooking a near perfect bucolic landscape two hundred feet in front of them. In the middle of the month, Nancy Rockwell came for a two-week visit; her great-niece Mary Amy Orpen, eager to see the new house, accompanied her on the bus from Providence. Rockwell was sending his mother around $350 a month now, as well as paying the cousins for her expenses, but she felt that she never had enough money to do the things she wanted. His own income had skyrocketed this year to $49,000, largely because of the Four Freedoms, but his professional costs alone totaled more than $14,000. If it would have been cheaper for his mother to live with the family in their new large farmhouse on the Batten Kill, Rockwell didn’t care: “The general attitude toward Baba that I felt in the household was of pity and a slight contempt,” Jarvis remembers.

  Mary Amy Orpen remembers that, as usual, Norman was busy working the whole time they were visiting. He also was dealing with an exciting request by the composer Robert Russell Bennett, who wanted to turn the Four Freedoms into a symphony, as well as the general commotion surrounding a popular national tour of well-respected artists’ paintings on the theme of freedom, with Rockwell’s four representations occupying the starring role in the exhibition. Requests for interviews and for commissions of all sorts multiplied, and by December 1943 the artist had every reason to feel particularly independent and secure about his future. The Society of Illustrators sponsored a wildly successful evening at the end of the year with Rockwell and Jack Atherton discussing the dangers of the power art directors were wielding at magazines. Rockwell had even recently completed another movie promotion project, which he always enjoyed, this time for The Song of Bernadette. Although he sent the painting in on time, Twentieth Century–Fox had to hound him to find out when he and his wife would arrive for the movie’s premiere, occurring on January 25, 1944.

  But in spite of his status as America’s most popular artist, cited repeatedly in press coverage from all over the country, Rockwell had begun to suffer another bad emotional spell. Mary later wrote her sister that she had expected something like this as a delayed reaction to the fire; throughout 1943, he had “sailed easily” through his work, only beginning to stumble as the new year began.

  The first sign that the artist was emotionally out of sorts occurred when he decided against attending the Hollywood premiere in favor of spending more time in January 1944 hiking the land behind their house, renovating tired spirits in their own backyard. The couple spent the mornings navigating the gentle mountains that surrounded them, walking a mile and a half up the road, then climbing upward until Mary found herself out of breath, her fit, 135-pound husband not missing a beat. But they both felt the span of “white birches and meadows and fences and walls below” with the “red barns against the snow” to be a peaceful respite from the “sound and the fury” going on in the rest of the world.

  It was hard for Rockwell not to think often about the war, given his prominent place on the roll of artists available to help with government propaganda. The OWI, by February, had dampened its earlier enthusiasm for emphasizing the skills of “fine” artists over illustrators, unlike their strategy for World War I; the illustrators proved more effective with the people. The talent pool of artists’ names that the OWI sent to the poster division in New York included many of Rockwell’s friends, including the stylish painter Constantin Alajalov, Harry Anderson, Andrew Wyeth, Pruett Carter in Hollywood, and all of Walt Disney’s cadre of artists. Rockwell’s characteristic choice to domesticate World War II for those left behind stressed not the ugliness and violence of battle but the human need for connection and gratitude that didn’t pause even under such extreme conditions. From Rockwell’s point of view, the war was eminently worth fighting, and so the only question for those not in the service was how best to contribute. Willie Gillis sought to validate the duty that Americans had to accept as they fed their young men to death in exotic places. Supporting the soldiers by a show of solidarity was the gift they could offer up, and Rockwell’s wartime painting emphasizes that conviction. Ensuring that Americans understood the more abstract philosophy behind such sacrifices, however, demanded a more overtly political statement, and it was in the Four Freedoms that the painter rendered the democratic ideals he believed in deeply.

  But Rockwell’s obvious idealization of things American, regardless of the care he took not to portray other citizens of the world as evil (except for Hitler), reverberated worrisomely with some of his audience, including the teenager Neil Harris, later an art curator and historian involved in mounting a major Rockwell exhibition. After all, the larger-than-life posterization of the noble citizenry, and Rockwell’s typical celebration of a pastoral society, felt distressingly akin to the pictorial propaganda favored by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes. True, Rockwell had never pretended to paint the strictly real, but he had established as an audience a near cult following that apparently wanted his vision of America to be real. Native New Yorkers such as Harris felt their own experiences denied; and, indeed, when only a handful of Rockwell’s hundreds of covers for a magazine published in urban Philadelphia even acknowledged America’s great cities, their citizens tended to feel marginalized in Rockwell’s vision of America. The occasional city scenes that do appear position their protagonists in resistance to the obvious disorder generated around them. Only by reducing the scenes to vignettes of enclosed community—so that the city is reduced to a small town—does Rockwell seem willing to plot his stories around an urban center. As Harris observes, “Rockwell defined the city more emphatically by contrast or withdrawal from it.”

  The heightened collegiality i
mposed by the common cause shared by the nation’s finest illustrators would probably have honed the insecurity always lying in wait for Rockwell. He could see up close the changes being effected by the next generation of talented young illustrators who had grown up educated by the possibilities of the camera. By 1944, the Post cover graphics as altered by Ben Hibbs’s leadership had been in place for two years. In contrast to the pattern of the covers Rockwell executed under Lorimer, the backgrounds had become as important as the central image, largely because photography had enabled easy access to all types of location scenes; now, an empty music hall, a backyard in Troy, accidents of light, daringly unusual angles, could all easily comprise the drop against which a central subject might be painted.

  As Susan Meyer points out, Rockwell had taught himself a lot about photography, and he was able to “pull off any number of tricks in the darkroom if needed,” yet he wasn’t even interested in looking through the lens at a photo session, let alone in taking the picture himself. He knew he didn’t want professional effects, which he would have been tempted to go for if wielding the camera; he preferred working from gray middle tones in the black-and-white photos, so that he wouldn’t be seduced into photographic effects he didn’t want. He usually had three prints made for each subject—one normal, one very dark for highlight details, and one very light for details in dark areas.

  Gene Pelham, who took most of the photographs for him, used a four-by-five-inch camera generally set at f8, and he typically developed the film and prints in Rockwell’s darkroom at the back of the studio immediately after the shoot, so that the next morning the illustrator could choose the best ones and get to work. Pelham loved working for Rockwell, who encouraged the man’s own work, helping him get two paintings published in The Saturday Evening Post. In a phrase eerily repeated by the photographers who worked extensively with Rockwell, Pelham felt that Rockwell was “almost like a brother to me.” Such intimacy came at a cost; Rockwell expected Pelham to be available whenever he needed him, even though the man had a wife and children. He would remember the way that Rockwell made him feel so necessary to the artist’s success and even his emotional well-being that he dared not refuse him: “I’d get a call most any time of the day or evening and the minute I recognized Norman’s voice, I knew what would come right after the hello. It would be ‘Gene, I need you.’ Norman could never rest or put anything off when he had a new project started.”

  But one time, at least, he was able to resist Rockwell’s blandishments. “It was Christmas Day, and I was home opening my gifts with my family. The day before, [Rockwell] had begged me to come help him for a few hours. I told him he was crazy, that he needed to take the day off too. But he kept pleading, desperate. Well, this morning, Christmas Day, I heard a knock. I couldn’t believe my eyes—it was Mary Rockwell, and he’d sent her to beg me. I could tell she was unhappy doing it, too, but I still said no.”

  Rockwell compensated for yielding to the camera’s efficiency by constructing a veritable piece of theatre, himself producer and director. Days were spent collecting costumes, props, the best lights, and the finest available models before the shoot began. When it was time to take the pictures, Rockwell had the photographer take shots of individuals, of groups, close-ups of the set, of pieces of the props, of someone’s hands. He varied his requirements, sometimes asking for a hundred photos of a staged scene, sometimes three or four of independently choreographed moments. Usually he would act out the expressions he wanted assumed by the “actors,” as he thought of his models.

  His use of the townspeople created tremendous rapport between them and the artist. An illustrator who later studied with Rockwell, Don Spaulding, observed that “he treated [his models] like ‘honored guests.’ ” Rockwell made them know how much he valued their work and that the success of his paintings depended on them. Never patronizing or condescending to his models, he advised other artists: “If your models feel that you are their friend instead of their boss, and if you make them feel that they are very important to the success of your pictures, they invariably will cooperate. You cannot get people to do things for you that are difficult, no matter how much you pay them or order them about, unless they like and trust you.”

  He paid his models more than the other local artists did, to the grumbling of these friends. And when the townspeople volunteered to model for free, as they inevitably tried, he insisted on paying them his standard fees: five dollars for children, ten dollars for adults, and for special assignments, such as the woman who posed for Freedom to Worship, fifteen dollars, knowing that she had eight kids in her house to feed. After thanking his models profusely, he’d send out for Cokes for the kids and give everyone their check in a sealed envelope, a gracious detail they appreciated.

  Such workdays were long, and the rural respites he’d imagined enjoying, the waterhole and the extended bike rides, occurred more infrequently for him than even for Mary, who at least had the excuse of taking the kids for recreation. As soon as the spring thaws seemed imminent, much to everyone’s dismay, Nancy Rockwell decided to return to Vermont. This time, the Rockwells situated her in an upscale boardinghouse in nearby Bennington. In late spring, the twenty-year-old Mary Amy Orpen visited her relatives, and Rockwell used her to model for his projected August Post cover of a young woman lying indisposed in her bed. What she remembers most about the trip, however, is her surprise at her aunt Nancy’s “liberated” reaction to a sketch that Mary Amy drew of herself skinny-dipping under the bridge next to the village green, the first swim of the season. “Aunt Nancy wasn’t disturbed at all by my nakedness or my friends either,” explained the budding artist. “She was just irritated that I had risked catching a cold when the weather was still so unpredictable.”

  Rockwell continued to paint more war-related themes, however obliquely they related to actual fighting. Soldier lovers, ration boards, mail from home, European refugees—all took shape in his quest to domesticate, for ordinary people, the reasons Americans were fighting. When government officials sent him wires asking if they could reproduce images they saw published in various magazines, he answered swiftly and with pride that of course they could, free of charge, but that he would ask only to reserve the ownership of the painting and image after their use was finished.

  The apparently nonstop growth in his popularity wore out his wife, and even his children found themselves more annoyed by the steady stream of tourists gawking at their house. By November 1944, Mary Rockwell was tired out from answering fan mail from Post readers, even though only one cover had appeared over the past four months. In the past, she writes her sister, she never knew if a particular cover would elicit much response, but for whatever reason (one suspects the new popularity from the Four Freedoms), the letters seemed to come nonstop these days—and it was her job to answer them all. She enjoyed the chance to retreat to her sunny little office for such a chore, but she dreaded trying to keep up with the correspondence in a timely fashion. On the positive side, she successfully hosted the Rockwells’ little social group for Thanksgiving, pulling off cooking the entire turkey dinner herself for the Schaeffers and the Athertons.

  Most promising, she was relieved that her husband seemed to have conquered the depression he’d been fighting all year, though it had been particularly difficult in the past three months. She believed the emotional aftershock from losing his past in the studio fire had played itself out, and now he could rev up the pace at which he’d been finishing paintings, instead of doing them over three or four times before he was satisfied.

  23

  As High as He Could Fly

  At the beginning of 1945, Rockwell’s national fame was confirmed when The New Yorker contacted him for an extensive interview they planned to conduct in the early spring for one of their famous in-depth profiles. By the time the piece ran on March 17 and March 24, the Rockwells had traveled to California, where Rockwell took occasional time off to contribute to good causes, such as the Easter Seals for Crippled Children of L
os Angeles County poster contest. The rest of the time, he worked on projects, including the complicated Homecoming, which would be published on May 26 and become Ben Hibbs’s favorite Rockwell cover. This painting, showing the joyous reactions of lower-middle-class apartment dwellers to a soldier’s return, includes two boys who have climbed up the tree outside the building, the one on the top a black child, as well dressed as his white friend.

  It is tempting to speculate on the reaction to the article of those around him in California. All the sons remember is their shock at learning, especially through such a public forum, of their father’s previous marriage. The interviews said little new about his art, but in reading the news that Rockwell had been married for fourteen years before his union with Mary Barstow, the country got its first glimpse of a more complicated artist than the national image had conveyed. The writer, Rufus Jarman, mentions Rockwell’s “melancholy brown eyes” and his “boyish” stringy pleasant looks, and the good-natured air. Jarman is respectful but distant, fair but never fully engaged, almost as if he is picking up on a similar lack of connection from Rockwell’s side. He explains that Rockwell has turned out an average of one cover every six weeks for the Post, earning the country’s gratitude, and the “professional art critics’” contempt, though as a class, the writer explains, they tend to dismiss illustration. Such critics term Rockwell’s work “dull, flat, and uninteresting,” and, Jarman notes, Rockwell is represented in the Metropolitan Museum only by accident, with a historical waistcoat he sent for evaluation and ended up donating instead. “Gosh” and “Gee” are two of Rockwell’s favorite locutions, the journalist notes a bit dubiously, as if unsure if he is being duped by a subject cannier than himself. (He was.)