Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  At the time that Rockwell was working on The Art Critic, Erik Erikson sent a handwritten note on his behalf to Mary Rockwell’s therapist, Dr. Knight. He told Knight that, speaking for his client, he felt it imperative that Rockwell take a vacation to Europe that fall, a trip proposed by his son’s fiancée’s parents, which neither Rockwell nor the other couple wanted upended by Mary’s presence. Rockwell was very depressed, and at the point of suicidal ideas, behind which lay the realization that Mary would probably never be well enough to live with as a reasonable person, nor sick enough to reside in an institution. Instead, Rockwell would spend the rest of his life trying to help her and to compensate for her illness.

  Erikson explains that Mary has insisted to her husband, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that she can make the trip sufficiently; in fact, she has suggested that she could semi-officially represent Riggs by checking into Kessell Hospital in England when they reach that country. With the boys all leaving the house at the end of the summer, the timing for her to be left home alone is poor, she has pointed out. Erikson notes that while this is true, Rockwell is struggling with the same adjustment to missing his children. The analyst ends by imploring Knight to see what he can do to ensure that Erikson’s client gets this vacation that he desperately needs.

  While this negotiation on Rockwell’s behalf was going on, Rockwell signed papers to sell the Arlington house, for which he had spent over $20,000 on the studio alone, for $29,500. He began working on ads for products ranging from lifestock to gravestones to optical equipment. And Kellogg’s was getting such positive feedback from the set of ads Rockwell had finally delivered that they suggested another series, this time paying him $17,500 for four, though Rockwell had accepted an earlier offer of $16,000. The only assignment he accepted for other than commercial gain was the request from the National Conference of Christians and Jews to do a poster for Brotherhood Week.

  Whether Rockwell reneged on the trip to Europe because of the workload or because Mary Rockwell insisted on going along is unclear. But from a letter Mary wrote to Nancy in early September, it seems that she had become reconciled to her husband’s vacation without her. She told Nancy that he was going off to Europe for a month on October 13, and she invited her sister to come stay with her during that time to keep her company. In a good mood, Mary explained that the summer was wonderful, and that she was particularly happy that Tom (the diminutive nickname was dropped around this time) was engaged to a lovely girl whom he met at Bard—Gail Sudler—and that she and her daughter-in-law-to-be were “truly” good friends. Most important, she and Norman “are doing nicely, toots, I should say all crises were things of the past. Stockbridge is certainly a much better place for us than Arlington, more life and movement, if you see what I mean.”

  The only sign of instability arose when Mary mentioned that they almost bought another house that weekend, in the same fashion as they had impulsively bought the last one in Arlington. The yellow clapboard home purchased just six months earlier had already proven too small, she felt.

  Perhaps the financial pressures combined with his worry over Mary’s illness—or maybe in the end Rockwell was ambivalent about leaving her for a month. Perhaps Gail’s parents had to cancel the trip; Tom and Gail Rockwell remember only vague references to the plans. But the depressed artist ended up spending early October at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York, where, as his friend and accountant Chris Schafer wrote several correspondents, he was admitted for a rest.

  Throughout the next few months, Rockwell was dealing with matters as disparate as his nomination to New York City’s prestigious Century Club for high achievers in the arts (he never got around to completing his application), and his representation in a New Yorker ad for Chase Bank, in which he appeared as “the world’s worst businessman,” in need of such superior services as those of Chase. Perhaps at some level Rockwell courted looking naïve in financial matters, because he found it incompatible to yoke artists with wealth; appearing oblivious to such concerns in The New Yorker would prove a perfect forum to establish his purer mind-set, free from the moneygrubbing that accumulated wealth might suggest.

  For whatever reasons, his depression began to subside by the end of the year. Possibly the October hospitalization had done the trick. On January 13, 1955, a jubilant Rockwell sent a note to Robert Knight at Riggs: “Dear Dr. Knight,—I have complete confidence in you. Last night I slept twelve hours. Sincerely, Norman Rockwell.” Either he had seen Knight instead of Erikson because the latter was away, a frequent occurrence, or Rockwell had requested a chance to talk with Mary’s doctor about her progress, and she had granted permission. Whether the note refers to medicine or an optimistic evaluation—or even assurance that Rockwell wasn’t the cause of his wife’s problems—is unclear.

  Whatever respite from minor dramas had been granted was soon replaced by a trauma that shocked the whole family. Peter Rockwell, fencing for Haverford against Princeton, was pierced through the lungs and heart in a freak accident that “couldn’t happen”: the opponent’s épée, a rigid sword, lost its protective button and the blade pierced Peter’s right armpit, just above the edge of the chest guard. At first, no one, including the injured fencer, knew the injury had occurred, but when Peter tried to stand up and instead fainted, first aid attendants realized that something was wrong. They waited to see if he felt better, but when he kept falling as he struggled to get to his feet, they decided to call an ambulance, and he was taken to the hospital at Bryn Mawr. In the emergency room, the shocked doctors found the wound.

  Peter was in critical condition for several days, and the combination of his father’s fame and the freakishness of the accident made the event a subject of press coverage all over the country. His parents stayed calm, showing no signs of panic, he remembers, remaining at his side until he was totally out of danger. Mary took a hotel room in Bryn Mawr until he was ready to return home several weeks later. Family life was further complicated when the hospital visits left Tom with a staph infection, and he was admitted to Pittsfield Hospital near Stockbridge. Peter spent a month recuperating at home, motivating his old girlfriend from Putney to visit him often to help keep up his spirits. From that time on, Cynthia Ide and Peter were a team. And just as Mary thought that Gail Sudler, Tommy’s fiancée, was a wonderful young woman, so she found herself similarly enamored of Cinny.

  Peter remembers that for many years, the effect of what is now called post-traumatic shock would strike him unexpectedly, making him feel suddenly out of control and vulnerable to his environment. Mary’s fear and concern took a delayed course, as well; she managed to stay together emotionally during the period her son was still in danger, and then she began to fall apart. By the late spring, she was out of control. Even if Rockwell had wanted to mine his emotions concerning the near tragedy, such mental processing would have been self-indulgent; there was no room left in his family for him to show weakness or hesitation. He put one foot in front of the other, as he always did, and he wrote to someone he knew in New Zealand who got Sir Edmund Hillary’s autograph for Peter, who was quite taken at the time with the conquest of Mount Everest. By late March, Peter was back at Haverford, and Rockwell thought he could focus his attention exclusively on Mary.

  But first he had to attend to business. In the aftermath of all the publicity surrounding Peter’s injury, the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., announced that it was mounting a one-man show of Rockwell’s paintings that would open in the summer and run through September. At the same time that the news was circulating about the Corcoran’s planned exhibition, the Post published a twelve-color supplement of some of their most famous illustrator’s best-received covers. And through all this, Rockwell hardly missed a beat in terms of keeping to a strict schedule that ensured the bills got paid and the family’s other needs tended as best he could.

  Helping him stay centered was the great pleasure he gained from attending a “stag” dinner that President Eisenhower gave for a small group of
men at the White House. Rockwell had appreciated Ike’s casual, natural charm and disarming friendliness when he painted him as a presidential candidate. But the invitation to one of the former general’s small, no-press-allowed dinners for people he found relaxing or entertaining made the illustrator so nervous and excited that he got a prescription for a barbiturate, probably Miltown, to calm him down during the evening. Although he lost the pill, the evening was a personal success anyway for the always insecure artist, who seemed unable to believe the president could enjoy him as interesting company.

  In June, Rockwell was asked to attend the Corcoran opening, and he flew back to Washington, if with some trepidation, unsure if he would be ridiculed in the newspapers or ignored by the population. Instead, he was relieved on both fronts. As Selwa Roosevelt wrote in the Evening Star, hundreds of people stood in line to see the exhibition. Asked about his family’s interest in art, Rockwell began discussing his pride in Jarvis’s work, then surprised the interviewer by saying, “If I were starting now to be a painter, I’d be a modern artist too, I think. After all, it’s the new and the challenging.” To the startled looks that proclamation garnered, he quickly added that he would probably not include the abstract in such a career change. The featured painting for this show was The Art Critic, only recently published as a Post cover.

  Rockwell’s late spring and early summer activities made him unavailable, after all, to provide the daily reassurance that his wife wanted. But both Peter and Tommy were back in Stockbridge, running their summer bookshop, with Sue Erikson and Cinny Ide helping out. Tommy’s wedding was scheduled for July, and Mary looked forward to the event. Only two weeks before the ceremony, however, in spite of her obvious attempts to hold out, she fell into a dangerous depression.

  27

  In for the Long Haul

  Mary’s decline occurred during a period when mental illness was finally receiving national attention at the highest levels. It was not until 1955 that the Eighty-fourth Congress passed Joint Resolution 256, commonly known as the Mental Health Study Act, which in turn, finally, created the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health. At last mental illness was a real disease, worthy of medical attention; given the statistics with which it was provided, Congress called the scale of mental illness, both its damage and its scope, “staggering.” On the one hand, national sanction greatly eased the public stigma of diseases such as depression; but, on the other, the hard truths it acknowledged could discourage the strongest of heart. Little of a curative nature had been found; managing symptoms was about the best anyone could expect to do. Nor was the cause and effect clear with mental illness: the Joint Commission miserably admitted that professionals themselves differed on “what people ‘are’ when they are emotionally disturbed or mentally ill, on how they get that way, on what is wrong with them, on who should be placed in that category, on why they stay that way, and on what should be done about it. . . .”

  In a serious gesture that implied Mary may have tried to kill herself, Riggs acknowledged that she was too ill for them to treat at this stage, and they recommended that she be admitted to the Institute for Living, in Hartford, Connecticut, a gray stone monolith that some Harvard psychologists, fairly or not, joked darkly should be called the “Institute for the Dead.” Mary needed electroconvulsive therapy, otherwise known as shock treatments, or ECT. On June 30, she was admitted to the nonprofit but very expensive center.

  Although various media dramatizations have presented electric shock as inhumane medicine, the truth is more often otherwise. Severe in its effects, potentially lethal if administered poorly, it is a last, not first, line of defense against intractable depression. Explored in the 1930s by the Italian neuropathologist Ugo Cerletti as an effective challenge to certain resistant brainwave patterns assumed to induce or control depression, the treatment, which consists of deliberately inducing a major or tonic-clonic seizure in the patient, could be cruel if applied in state asylums—where, as one recent history of ECT puts it, “psychiatry’s job seemed to be no more than brutal custodianship.”

  But fears of the bone-breaking jolts also evaporating memory had dissipated under expert administration of the shocks, which, similar to a natural epileptic seizure, seem to alter synaptic patterns within the brain. Even under the best of circumstances, however—including the anesthesia eventually used to put patients to sleep during the procedure—short-term memory loss is predictable, just as it is for those with epilepsy. Most often, however, in the case of ECT, the memory is retrieved. And even when it is not, the vast majority of patients prefer the release from their devastating depression to an intact memory.

  By the time Mary Rockwell was scheduled for ECT, the method had been used in the United States to treat severe depression for well over a decade. Similar to induced insulin comas and other innovative treatments, ECT had originally been used to treat schizophrenia, with only equivocal results. For severe depression, however, it seemed to offer unheralded relief, and patients who received the shock treatments in competently staffed, updated, humane hospitals expressed gratitude for the first hope of a cure, or at least respite. And to its credit, the Institute for Living excelled in ECT, administering the treatments in as unthreatening and encouraging a way as possible.

  Within ten days of her admittance, Mary had undergone at least one shock treatment. In handwriting that had begun over the past year to sprawl uncharacteristically broadly and downward across the page, she once again, part fatuously, part with true courage, explains to her sister that she finds herself in a situation where she must make the best of things. Her distress is keenest because of the timing, “giving out” during such an important time in her son’s life. The Institute is fine; there is plenty to do, and she will try to get involved in activities. “But oh how I miss my husband, home and children,” she lets escape. She gratefully explains that she will attend Tommy’s wedding with Norman and then return to the hospital. And, she adds, almost incidentally, “I had my first treatment and it was not at all difficult—though odd when you wake up at first.” There are those who think that Mary Rockwell was “on the side of the angels,” her daughters-in-law included. Such a letter at a maximally stressful time grants a certain weight to their testimony.

  Mary also wrote to “my darling Tom,” trying hard to express how profound was her regret at missing all the prewedding festivities. “I held out as long as I could,” she tells him. She also explains how much she wants to write him and Gail a “proper magnificent letter” but that she lacks the resources at the moment; instead, she will simply say “I love you both dearly and wish you very very happy all your long lives.”

  Mary made it to the wedding; her husband picked her up, took her, and returned her to the Institute. Photographs show the divide between Gail’s attractive, happy parents, and the Rockwell parents, Norman trying to keep up his end, Mary looking ill at ease, as if just being there required every bit of willpower she could muster. From the vague accounts that loyal family members are willing to recall, she was unable to hide her mental state: her walk and her speech were unsteady. Professional associates from the Post, for instance, including Ken Stuart, whom she disliked, found it hard to hide their shock. While the wedding preparations were going on around him, Rockwell had to fulfill his requirement to show up in mid-summer at the Famous Artists’ School to help judge entries in a Hallmark card contest. The school director mentioned admiringly the prodigious number of paintings (meaning advertisements) that Rockwell was producing for a variety of publications these days, one reason that it was hard for the school to nail him down to keeping his commitment to teach there twice a year.

  During the early fall, while Mary was still undergoing treatments, Rockwell received a reward for the travails of the past year: he finally took his trip to Europe, a far more luxurious vacation than he’d planned for the previous autumn. Pan American Airways sponsored a round-the-world trip, with Rockwell doing illustrations for future publicity as well as promotional televisio
n shots on location. He drew an endorsement of the airline that pictured him riding on top of the Clipper, as if on a magic carpet. He loved it, since he was taken to favorite old places and to ones he’d never visited before, a total of sixteen cities, among them London, Paris, Barcelona, Nice, Rome, Istanbul, Beirut, Calcutta, Tokyo, and Honolulu. Reflecting on his father’s indiscriminate curiosity about the world, Peter Rockwell holds as one of his strongest images of his father hearing him lament on his return that he had not dared accept an offer to visit an opium den; Jarvis, by contrast, vaguely recalls his father suggesting satisfaction to the contrary.