American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  Rockwell rented a single room above a garage next door to his own studio on Prospect Street, hoping to provide Frank with an incentive to continue painting. Frank had his bedroom furniture moved in, incongruously furnishing a garage loft with a baroque Italian bed and hand-carved chairs of the same vintage. He hung a heavy medieval crucifix above the bed.

  Frank would materialize at Rockwell’s studio in the mornings, around ten, knocking on the door and politely asking if he could come in. He would sit quietly in the corner, sometimes with a book. It seemed to Rockwell that Frank was “watching the shadows crawling on the floor,” as he put it. Only later did he learn that Frank was addicted to morphine. When he stared at shadows, he was, perhaps, staring at the visions that morphine can induce, a profusion of darkness settling everywhere. At the end of the day, as Rockwell was sweeping out the studio in the half-light of dusk, Frank would ask the same question, “Do the dark corners bother you?”9

  Rockwell would reply, “What dark corners?”

  Frank: “Don’t the corners get all black, as if there was a pit behind them?”

  Frank X. Leyendecker moved back to Mount Tom Road shortly before he died, on April 18, 1924, a day after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. It was Good Friday and he was forty-eight years old. The newspaper obituaries were vague, attributing his death to an unspecified illness he had contracted four months earlier, perhaps referring to his morphine addiction. In his will, he slighted Joe and bequeathed everything he owned to his sister, Augusta. After his debts were paid, his estate amounted to a paltry $1,981.10

  That winter, Augusta organized a memorial exhibition at the New Rochelle Public Library. An opening reception was held on the night of December 8 and Rockwell and Irene were among the hundreds who crowded the library to pay tribute to Frank X. Leyendecker. Irene, in fact, was one of the handful of “selected hostesses.”11 The show consisted mostly of magazine illustrations, paintings of tall, well-built flappers who might be festooned with feathers and jewels. His best-known cover ran in Life in 1922 and shows a statuesque blonde sprouting a pair of resplendent butterfly wings that fill the page.

  In a brochure accompanying the show, Regina Armstrong, a friend of the Leyendecker family who lived in New Rochelle, wrote a touching tribute to Frank. “He found his metier in the pomp and pageantry of the court life of France before the 18th century, of the period of Watteau, with its shimmering beauty.”12 She could not imagine that he might ever be forgotten.

  * * *

  A new year arrived and, eager for some kind of break, Rockwell and Irene traveled to Southern California in January. Their departure was noted in the New York Herald Tribune, but little is known about the trip.13 They stayed with their friends Clyde and Cotta Forsythe, and two surviving photographs show the men palling around without their wives. They played golf at the San Gabriel County Club and visited a film set where Rockwell shook hands with the silent film star Buddy Rogers. When he returned from California, his marriage was in a state of serious disrepair. Irene’s mother, widowed since 1922, had decided to close up her house in Potsdam and spend the winter in New Rochelle. Irene’s three siblings, who were younger than she and still single, would converge on the house as well. “To tell you the truth,” Rockwell recalled, “I was supporting a good part of her family.”14

  On a visit to Clyde Forsythe (far right) in Southern California, Rockwell is introduced to the actor Charles “Buddy” Rogers, a silent film star. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

  One Sunday, when he was leaving his studio and preparing to head home for lunch, he noticed Franklin Lischke, his studio assistant and teenage landlord, standing with his mother and brother on the driveway, waiting for Mr. Lischke to back the car out of the garage. For some reason, the sight made Rockwell snap. “I can’t stand it anymore,” he thought to himself. “I can’t go home and sit down at the table with Irene’s brothers and sister and mother again.” He cites this moment as the turning point when he realized he could no longer live with his wife. He wanted a separation. He wanted a respite from family obligations. In a letter to Franklin Lischke, Rockwell canceled the lease on the studio, offered a few months extra rent, and assured him that if he ever returned to New Rochelle, “I will drop in and have a reunion.”15

  In February 1925 Rockwell took a studio in Leyendecker’s building in Manhattan, the Bryant Park Studio Building, on the southwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Fortieth Street. The 1901 landmark had been designed with the needs of easel painters in mind (think high ceilings). In the course of his work day, Rockwell would frequently trot down the hall to visit Leyendecker, whom he found amusing. On the occasions when Rockwell asked Leyendecker for his professional opinion of an illustration in progress, J.C. would usually study it in silence for a few seconds, then conclude he should destroy it. It was his idea of a joke.

  At the end of the day, they would have a drink together in J.C.’s studio. The building had a functioning dumbwaiter and although Prohibition was in effect, contraband liquor continued to be delivered from the Beaux Arts Café in the basement to the studios upstairs. Not wanting to brand Leyendecker a Prohibition violator, Rockwell later described visiting an unidentified “friend” in the building who would help himself to drinks as they rumbled upward on the dumbwaiter. On one occasion, the friend reached for a bottle of champagne, commenting, “I don’t know, but let’s not let an opportunity like this pass unmolested.”16 Interesting choice of words. It raises the question of whether J.C. was referring to the champagne or to Rockwell himself. Clearly Leyendecker had a teasing way with words and could be flirtatious with Rockwell. After their drinks, J.C. would return home to his estate in New Rochelle and Rockwell would be left to face the evening alone.

  By then, Rockwell was appearing in the Post at least as often as Leyendecker. In 1925 Leyendecker had six covers for the Post. Rockwell had ten. The two artists used some of the same models. Rockwell’s favorite was James K. Van Brunt, a small, slight man in his seventies, with a formidable white mustache that drooped at both ends. In his prime, Van Brunt had been a real-estate agent in New Rochelle, which no doubt added an extra layer of irony to his first appearance in a Rockwell cover, in October 1924, as a homeless tramp. Seated by a tin-can fire, he is holding a stick and roasting two hot dogs, one for himself and one for the black-and-white mutt that is squeezed between his legs and straining to get the best view possible of the grill.

  In addition to the hobo, Rockwell did covers during this period in which elderly men variously appear as an office clerk, a storekeeper, a train conductor, and a fisherman. In Bookworm of 1926, Van Brunt poses in front of an outdoor bookstall, a distracted-professor type in mismatched shoes, his nose buried in a book. Presumably he is meant to be on his way to the grocery store, to pick up a few things for his wife. (“Don’t forget matches and cheese,” she admonishes in a note pinned to his basket.) Rockwell’s old men tend to be meek and wispy. They have less in common with the elders in high-art paintings, the biblical prophets with their streaming beards, than with the henpecked husbands who populate newspaper cartoons.

  When Rockwell painted a figure, he always worked from a model. And old men, he thought, made for superior models. They were infinitely more patient than the schoolboys who had horsed around in his studio. Van Brunt didn’t fidget in his chair. He didn’t wonder why he had to hold his right arm above his head or squat on the modeling stand for another thirty minutes. Sometimes, if a pose was less strenuous and didn’t involve his face, he closed his eyes and took a nap as Rockwell sketched him. His wife, Ella, had died suddenly in December 1923 and he had no children, so he was never in a hurry to leave the studio.17

  Both Rockwell and Leyendecker did humorous paintings of him that involve cross-dressing. Some of the pictures are mere one-liners, but Rockwell achieved something genuinely quirky in Three Gossips of 1929, in which Van Brunt is disguised as three different women, all of them homely, middle-aged busybodies dressed in old-fashioned petticoats and crin
oline. They sit in a tight circle, leaning forward to exchange gossip, their heads almost touching. The women’s faces are barely visible, but somehow you know them from their body language, or think you do.

  All in all, it is one of Rockwell’s more Leyendeckerish covers. While Rockwell tended to concentrate on faces and (later on, ultimately) backgrounds, Leyendecker concentrated on cloth and sinuous necks. He used to say that a really essential thing in a pretty woman was a nice back of the neck. With their white skin and shiny clothing bent into so many sharp folds, his figures can put you in mind of Meissen porcelain figures.

  Leyendecker’s champions habitually insist that Rockwell stole the older artist’s ideas without acknowledgment or credit. They characterize their relationship as a kind of All About Eve rivalry that began when Rockwell moved to New Rochelle “to be near Leyendecker.” They state that Rockwell carefully studied Leyendecker’s subjects, style, and technique, and “imitated Joe so completely the public became confused as to the source. Leyendecker’s career stumped thereafter.”18

  Every young artist borrows from other artists, absorbs and synthesizes various influences. Rockwell took from Leyendecker’s work what he needed and ignored the rest. He was moved by the vividness of Leyendecker’s figures and the storytelling aspect of his work. But he ignored the Gothic part of Leyendecker, the elongation of the figures and spiky line. He basically Americanized him.

  * * *

  In later life, looking back on his separation from Irene, Rockwell spoke of it as “a terrible time.” At first he had relished his freedom, the release from familial obligations. But he had no talent for living on his own. Eating dinner alone in restaurants, he would order a main course and then feel inexplicably self-conscious, hurry out “before the waiter brought it to the table.” His level of anxiety was punishing and he did not want to think about its possible sources. When he wasn’t painting, he seemed to have no idea what to do with himself.

  To help keep himself sane, he arranged to teach an evening class on illustration, at the New School of Design, a short-lived institution at Broadway and Fifty-third Street.19 The class met five nights a week, but Rockwell had to be there only for the twice-a-week crits. During that term, Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky, the future Abstract Expressionists, were enrolled as students. It is unlikely that they signed up for Rockwell’s class. But perhaps they passed him in the hall and took note of him, a cover artist for The Saturday Evening Post who, despite the humor quotient in his work, could be every bit as gloomy as themselves.

  In June he was interviewed by a reporter from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Ruth Brindze, who arrived at the Bryant Park Studio Building to find Rockwell sitting with a model who had posed for a good many of his “old-man pictures.”20 Probably James K. Van Brunt. “Rockwell has a wide grin which makes him look younger than the thirty-one years of which he boasts,” the reporter noted. “He never seems to take himself seriously. He regards his skill as an illustrator as ‘something to knock wood about,’ and he often thinks, ‘I’m about through.’”

  Asked about his artistic production, Rockwell said that he completed about twenty-five pictures a year. “That includes doing some pictures over two or three times.” He estimated that it took about ten days to paint a picture. “I really have it much easier than the cartoonists,” Rockwell said. “They have to get a good idea every day. I only have to get twenty-five a year. But that is even hard.”

  Indeed, the gestation of ideas was arduous and his least favorite part of making art. He devoted two nights a week to it. On the first night, he went into a spare room free of distraction and stayed there from about eight to eleven, when, more often than not, he left in a fit of discouragement, convinced that he would never have an idea for a painting again.

  The second night, after a few minutes, the thoughts began to present themselves. He had a trick to help him focus his mind, to access the storehouse of his imagination. Proust had his madeleine and Rockwell had his lamppost. He saw it clearly before him, a lamppost on a quiet street. Then he imagined what could happen to it. A boy climbs up it, a boy falls off of it; someone chases the boy around it. He did this all the time, envisioning the lamppost and waiting for a scene to emerge, a boy or two, a certain facial expression, a story. He sketched a bit with pencil and paper, but no real drawing was begun on the thinking nights.

  Once he knew enough about the scene, he deleted the lamppost. Then he did a rough sketch—a rough, as he called it—which he submitted to an art editor at any one of a number of magazines, seeking permission to proceed.

  He mentioned: “I can’t draw a pretty girl, no matter how much I try. I’m afraid that they all look like old men.”

  The reporter noted: “He stuttered a little as he said this because he felt that he had said something that he should not have.” Perhaps he felt that he had confessed to his lack of interest in women.

  Whatever he had hoped to find by leaving his wife eluded him. He claimed he had wanted to escape his in-laws. But in the process he found himself without anyone to depend on besides Leyendecker, who had his own obligations and hardly had time to minister to Rockwell. Leyendecker asked him whether he knew his skin was sallow, “sort of all yellow and green,” and exhorted him to take up exercise. So Rockwell joined the YMCA, but quit in short order, saying he felt painfully self-conscious in front of the other men at the gym. He later recalled that they stared at his spindly body in disbelief when he told them he was “reducing.”

  He and Irene appear to have reconciled by May 1925, when they surfaced in society-news columns as guests at a surprise party for Emil Fuchs, a Viennese-born society portraitist whose studio was then in the Bryant Park Building.21 By Rockwell’s account, the marital separation lasted seven months, until July, when illness brought them together. He complained of a sore throat that would not go away and landed in the hospital with tonsillitis. Irene promised to nurture him back to health. She suggested he spend the summer recuperating at her mother’s riverside cottage in Louisville Landing, up on the Canadian border, an invitation he accepted with relief. He got along well with his mother-in-law so long as their encounters took place in her home, not his, and he included her kindly, gray-haired likeness in several paintings from this period.

  During the summer, Irene decided that she and Rockwell had spent too many years as renters. On August 28, they purchased their first house, a stucco number on the southern tip of New Rochelle, in an area known as Davenport Neck.22 Rockwell spoke of it as a “cheaply-built imitation English cottage,” not exactly a propitious description. Irene’s signature is the only one on the land deed, perhaps because Rockwell was still recuperating upstate on the Friday morning when it was signed.

  Rockwell’s plan was to resume working in his former studio in New Rochelle, the barn on Prospect Street behind Franklin Lischke’s house.23 In a letter written late that summer, Rockwell informed his assistant: “Dear Old Franklin, I will be home Saturday the 12th. Will you telephone Bill Sundermeyer and tell him I want him to pose this Sunday the 13th at 9 am. Tell him to wear a Boy Scout uniform.”24 The letter is written not in words, but as a pictograph and remains a singularly charming document, with a drawing of a deer substituting for the word dear, an eye substituting for the word I, a Franklin car substituting for the boy’s name, and so on.

  Bill Sundermeyer was then fourteen, three years younger than Franklin.25 Rockwell was using “Old Franklin” as a model less frequently. Franklin didn’t take it personally. Unlike Billy Payne, he could see Rockwell’s side. He knew that he had reached the point where he was “too old to be a kid model and not good-looking enough to be an Arrow Collar Man.”26

  TEN

  DIVORCE

  (1926 TO 1929)

  On February 6, 1926, The Saturday Evening Post officially retired its duotone covers, the two-color affairs that required illustrators to limit their palette to red and black. Rockwell was tapped by George Lorimer to do the first four-color cover. For this he chose a humorous scene
set in the ruffled eighteenth century: a New England sign painter who is maybe sixty, or a little past sixty, sits perched on a three-legged stool, tilting forward as he applies a final daub of pigment to his latest creation. He is painting a wooden sign, the kind that once swayed over the doors of inns. The sign includes a likeness of George Washington with a white flip wig and too much red paint on his lips, beneath the hand-painted letters: “Ye Pipe & Bowl Tavern, 1785.”

  If the cover was the first in four colors, it was also the first in which Rockwell went Colonial. The twenties may be known as the era of jazz, bathtub gin, and late-night parties, but it was also distinguished, as if in a rite of expatiation, by a fashion for history and the trappings of eighteenth-century New England. Much was made of the sesquicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1926, which spawned a fashion for antiques. The rich began collecting early American furniture and the middle class began collecting reproductions of it. People who owned cars began setting out on weekends to visit restored houses in New England.

  In Europe you could see castles and ruins. In America there were none, so business leaders and philanthropists competed to create instant historical sites. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., launched Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Henry Ford started Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, where he relocated or reconstructed some one hundred buildings including the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law. “The term Americana comes into the English language at this point,” notes the literary scholar William P. Kelly.1 “There’s a desperate desire to find a there there.”