American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  Indeed, no sooner had Mary settled into the apartment on the Avenue de Saxe than Rockwell gave up his studio on that street and acquired a new one in Haemer’s building. It was smaller than his previous studio, a ten-minute tram ride over the Seine, near the Pont de Grenelle. Although Mary was vexed by her husband’s attachment to yet another worshipful young friend who distracted him from his marriage, she tried to be understanding. It was “awfully nice,” as she wrote, for him to have “some one near him, a man, and an artist with whom to talk things over.”

  Haemer, at the time, was twenty-two, a Brooklyn native with broad shoulders and a strong jaw. He was the sort of masculine artist Rockwell was always seeking out, a brother and protector. Haemer had made headlines when he arrived in Paris—paddling from Holland, alone in a flat-bottomed canoe, which took forty-one days and set a record of some sort.25 At the time, he had just graduated from Syracuse and won a fellowship to study painting at the Sorbonne. He eventually became an accomplished commercial artist, designing the jackets of hundreds of novels, including those of Howard Fast. But for now he had little in the way of income or reputation and all the time in the world to sit and puff his pipe with Rockwell. They would often talk late into the night and wander over to Les Halles after midnight for a bowl of onion soup.26

  During the day, Rockwell, who was zealous about sketching, might invite his friend on a sketching trip. One memorable afternoon, they lugged their portable easels and paint boxes to the banks of the Seine. Haemer began work on a “random landscape,”27 as Rockwell undertook a portrait of a French fisherman who had agreed to pose for him. By late afternoon the light was fading and Rockwell, not yet finished with the portrait despite his concentrated effort, asked the fisherman to surrender his hat. He figured he could take it back to his studio and complete the painting there. The hat was badly stained and he felt he hadn’t rendered the stains as accurately as possible. “Monsieur,” Rockwell proposed, “I would like to offer you a day’s wages for your hat.” The fisherman declined, so Rockwell, visibly agitated, offered him a week’s wages. When the fisherman again declined, Rockwell became enraged. It was one of only two or three times in his life when anyone saw him lose his temper.

  He did not get the hat.

  * * *

  He had gone to Paris, the international capital of art, to reinvent himself, to escape his pressure-cooker schedule and nonstop cycle of deadlines. He was tired of owing things to magazine editors and art directors at advertising agencies. He wanted to be a “real” painter, as Mary noted in a letter, to strive for something large instead of batting out covers.

  On the other hand, he did feel genuinely connected to the Post. One day when he ducked into the gift shop at the Louvre, he bought Mary a miniature sculpture, “a six inch reproduction of Benjamin Franklin by Houdon,” as she noted. It had more significance for her husband than for her—Ben Franklin was purportedly the Post’s founder, as it said on the cover every week. Perhaps the bust was a symbol of Rockwell’s career, one he wished his wife could enjoy.

  Mary, however, did not regard the Post highly. In her letters, she comes across as a woman who harbored the upper-class biases of her time, which led her to dismiss magazine illustration as a small, coarse thing. She remarked in one letter, rather insultingly, that the two weeks Rockwell allotted to complete each of his covers was too long, “out of all proportion to their value.”28 It is not clear if she was referring to financial value or aesthetic value. Either way, she seemed to believe commercial art was trivial, and her attitude exacerbated Rockwell’s already substantial insecurities about his chosen métier.

  On some days, it all seemed perfectly clear to him. He imagined breaking his relations with the Post. He swore he would never open another letter from an advertising agency. Such a moment occurred on April 26, two months after he arrived in Paris, when Mary noted that “the preliminary struggle—nearly two years long, has ended at last, and he knows what he wants to do.” Or rather what he did not want to do. After much deliberation, he sent a telegram to Snyder & Black, the advertising agency, “refusing to do the Coca Cola.” In earlier years he had done several calendar illustrations for the company, painting a series of country boys with bare feet and sandy coloring, grinning from beneath straw hats as they held up their bottles of Coke.

  Moreover, Rockwell notified his editors in Philadelphia that “he has indefinitely postponed his Post covers,” as Mary put it. “I personally rather doubt if he’ll do any more.” Indeed, there would be a hiatus of ten months, the longest of his career, when his work did not appear in the Post.

  Instead he resolved “to experiment,” to leave the cocoon of the Post and cross a threshold into an unknown world. He imagined trying his hand at portraits that had some of the bravura brushwork of French Impressionism or the drunken color contrasts of Fauvism. But the problem continued to be that he found himself blocked in the absence of a deadline. He could produce when he had assignments, but was paralyzed without them, as if afraid of what he could lose if he chose to paint for his own pleasure. The hazards were substantial. He could lose his hard-earned reputation as a painter. He could lose his shirt. He could lose a system of belief that was premised on his genuine reverence for Howard Pyle and the Golden Age of Illustration.

  Or perhaps his resistance to experimentation was rooted in his general cautiousness. Prim and repressed, he had no use for modernism’s inside-out forms and disrupted narratives. He wasn’t interested in cracking open the surface of art, exposing it as artifice. He had more in common with premodern artists, such as the British Pre-Raphaelites, whose detail-laden surfaces conspired to create beautiful facades and illusions.

  As the months passed, Mary continued to assure her parents that Rockwell was trying new things in his work, even if only in his Post covers. “Norm is simply getting along marvelously now,” she noted in August. “He just sent off two Post covers, and now, having found a different technique in which he feels there are possibilities, he feels free to experiment to his heart’s content, which means he is really going to be an artist.”

  In the course of 1932, Rockwell completed only three covers for the Post. They were not memorable, except as a reflection of his discontent. The Puppeteer (October 22, 1932), shows an elderly craftsman standing in the center of the composition, his sleeves rolled up and his shoulders hunched as he demonstrates his handiwork. He is pulling the strings of two wooden marionettes, a Colonial-era man and woman dressed like George and Martha Washington, who face one another as they hover slightly above the ground. Rockwell’s friend Alan Haemer carved the heads of the puppets, and also posed for the hands of the puppeteer.29

  The male puppet, dressed in ruffles and a red waistcoat, has removed his hat and bends toward the woman at a sharp angle. The female figure, who is wearing a big, puffed-up Creamsicle-orange dress, responds with a curtsy. You can read the cover as an allegory of an unhappy marriage, capturing a man and a woman who are forced to play roles and bow to social conventions that are not of their choosing.

  * * *

  On September 17, a week before Alan Haemer left Paris and returned to the States,30 Rockwell and Mary and their son and their collie sailed out of Cherbourg aboard the SS Berengaria. They arrived at the port of New York six days later. Rockwell was, by his own admission, “in a worse state than before.” Despite Mary’s much-stated optimism, here he was, back in his studio on Lord Kitchener Road in New Rochelle in the cool, crisp days of early fall, thinking that his eight months in Paris had been for naught. He had failed to experiment, to become a modernist, to be freed from his indenture to the Post.

  TWELVE

  THE NEW DEAL

  (1933 TO 1935)

  March 12, 1933, fell on a Sunday. At ten that night, the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, delivered the first of his fireside chats, a radio broadcast from his study in the White House. “My friends,” he began in his reassuring voice, “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States abou
t banking.”

  Among the millions of listeners was George Horace Lorimer, who was now sixty-five, an enormously wealthy man still living in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, in a house cluttered with pressed-glass pitchers and other Colonial-era antiques. In his three decades as editor of The Saturday Evening Post, he had thickened considerably, perhaps because he prided himself on always having a box of Wilbur Buds chocolate candy within reach. Lorimer was responsible for the weekly editorials that ran on page 22 of the Post and he could be bitterly partisan. Although he had initially devoted his magazine to championing the interests of businessmen, he became more doctrinaire as time went on. He was unhappy to see President Herbert Hoover succeeded by a Democrat and insisted that Roosevelt’s image as a protector of the common man was nothing but a sales job. He wrote off the New Deal as a raw deal, so much “socialist claptrap” that went against the American belief in free enterprise, individualism, and self-reliance.

  Lorimer’s altercation with President Roosevelt set him at odds with the progressive minds of his generation. And it put Rockwell in an awkward position, which is not to say that he was a crusading Democrat. His political sensibility, at this point, was nonpartisan and almost nonexistent. According to election records, when Rockwell registered to vote in the 1932 presidential election, he registered as a Republican, as did Mary Rockwell.1

  But his Post covers were always small-d democratic, which is true of genre painting generally. It is, by definition, egalitarian at its core, lavishing attention on ordinary people and suggesting that every life deserves its own spotlight. That message hardened into an official art movement during the Depression, when regionalism became the prevailing “ism.” The farmers who populated the work of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood were extolled as evidence of the workaday heroism of midwesterners and the can-do spirit that would rescue America from its economic woes.

  For Rockwell, whose work was in sync with the populist core of regionalism, the Depression years should have been a productive period. Yet they turned out to be a singularly fallow time for him. He claimed to be racked with his own depression, consumed by “an all-around feeling of dissatisfaction,” as he put it. His editors at the Post regularly sent him flattering telegrams and imploring letters, hoping to pull more covers out of him. He confessed to friends that he had no idea what to paint—humorous illustrations seemed irrelevant, indecent, when the rock-hard realities of the Depression had left so many people suffering.

  Moreover, he was grappling with the pressures of a marriage and children and the suspicion that he did not feel any more attracted to his second wife than he had to his first wife. He still cultivated close relationships with men outside of his family, men who put him at ease and, during this period, his studio assistant Fred Hildebrandt assumed a central role in his affections.

  On September 3, 1934, Rockwell and Hildebrandt headed off on a two-week fishing trip in the wilds of Canada. Oddly or not, the day he left was his son Jerry’s third birthday. Mary stayed behind in their white Colonial house on Lord Kitchener Road, to take care of the boys. In addition to Jerry, there was now eighteen-month-old Tommy—Thomas Rhoads Rockwell, born at New Rochelle Hospital on March 13, 1933, the day after President Roosevelt held his first fireside chat.

  Rockwell brought along a medium-sized spiral sketchpad that he wound up using as a diary on the trip. Perhaps he was taking his cue from Hildebrandt, who kept a journal of his fishing exploits and liked to catalog his every catch, to specify whether he landed a brown trout or a red trout, a pike or a walleyed pike, whether it measured twelve inches or fourteen, whether the weather had cooperated or whether a cold lashing rain had forced him to fish from the safety of the river bank. Rockwell’s journal is a different creature altogether, providing a revealing glimpse into his jumpy and obsessive state of mind.

  As Rockwell noted, he and Fred began their sojourn in Montreal, walking around in the rain while awaiting a train that was scheduled to depart that afternoon. Consumed by the cleanliness of his shoes, Rockwell stopped to have them polished, more than once. As he noted in his diary, “had shoes shined 3 times”—a perhaps unnecessary start to a trip that would take them trekking through untold quantities of mud.2

  From Montreal, they rode an overnight train that took them four hundred miles farther north, to the tiny Bourmont rail station in the middle of the unspoiled wilderness of Quebec. The area was inaccessible by road. There they stayed at a camp run by a Mr. Segouin, who, Rockwell was amused to learn, “was not sure whether he had 10 or 11 children.” To judge from Rockwell’s diary entries, the trip was genuinely rugged and devoid of further shoe shines. He and Fred, accompanied by a pair of French-speaking guides named Dan and Pete who knew almost no English, used a log cabin at the Segouin camp as their base and did a lot of canoe paddling in the rain, most of it in high and remote lakes rimmed by dense forest.

  Rockwell shows off a moose head outside his cabin at the Segouin camp in Quebec, where he was assisted by two French-speaking guides. (Photograph by Fred Hildebrandt; courtesy of Alexandra Hoy)

  Although Rockwell lacked Hildebrandt’s stamina, complaining of sore muscles and needing to nap every day after lunch, he seemed to enjoy the trip. From one day to the next, he and Fred set out in their canoes, paddled for miles and caught fish. Their meals were predictably heavy on fish. Rockwell might wake to find “pike frying in the pan,” and then end the day with “a swell dinner of trout, potatoes and baked beans” that had been cooked by the two guides.

  Rockwell was then a married man of forty. Fred was a single guy of thirty-five. Reading through their diaries, it is hard to ignore the homoerotic aspects of their camping trip. On September 6, his second day at the camp, Rockwell is delighted to wake up in the early morning cold air and spot his friend lounging around in a new outfit. “Fred is most fetching in his long flannels,” he notes appreciatively.3

  That night, he and Fred played gin rummy until eleven, sitting by the stove in the cabin and using a deck of cards that Rockwell had made himself. “Then Fred and I get into one very narrow bed,” he noted, referring to a rustic cot made from a hard board and a sprinkling of fir branches. The guides climbed into a bed above them, and “all during the night pine needles spray us as they drop from the guides’ bed.”

  Two nights later, Rockwell and Fred played “rummy by candlelight til 9:30 p.m., then to bed. Guides insist on roaring fire in cabin stove, and window and door closed. Fred and I very hot and dream no end.”

  On the morning of September 11, they went out for a swim. “We paddle to portage near waterfall. I strip and frollick about—see photos.” All of this is suggestive material, up to and including the “lick” in his spelling of “frollick.”

  The trip raises a complicated question: Was Rockwell homosexual? It depends on what you mean by the word. He demonstrated an intense need for emotional and physical closeness with men. From the viewpoint of twenty-first-century gender studies, a man who yearns for the company of men is considered homosexual, whether or not he has sex with other men. In Rockwell’s case, there is nothing to suggest that he had sex with men. The distinction between secret desires and frank sexual acts, though perhaps not crucial to theorists today, was certainly crucial to Rockwell.

  Granted, he married, but his first marriage and to some extent his second were not happy. They seem less like genuine unions than a strategy for “passing” and controlling his homoerotic desires, whose expression he confined to his art. He was afraid of all physical intimacy, male or female, but decidedly more comfortable in homosocial male groups than in any standard domestic role, be it that of husband, father, or man of the house.

  * * *

  As Rockwell caroused with his male friends, Mary felt as if he had slipped across some invisible divide. From one day to the next, she consumed large quantities of “caffeine pills,” a precursor of antidepressants. And she was constantly reaching into her purse or yanking open drawers in search of a Lucky Strike cigarette. Her children would come t
o think of her as more affectionate than their father and more curious about their day-to-day lives. But she, too, could be distracted. “She wasn’t interested in child-rearing,” her son Jarvis recalled without bitterness. She did not cook or keep house and she had enough money not to have to think about those things. A British couple, Florence and Jack Currie, had been hired to help her out. Mrs. Currie did the cooking and her husband, a former milkman, took care of the gardening. Mary seemed happiest when she was reading. At night she would snuggle up in bed with the boys and read aloud. At times she read to her husband as well, perched on a stool in his studio. They made it through War and Peace twice, according to family lore.

  Around this time, Rockwell acquired a police dog, a massive German shepherd.4 He had owned a police dog once before, in the mid-twenties, before he acquired his collie Raleigh, the one that had sailed to Paris with him. Despite the plethora of playful mutts that appear in his paintings, when Rockwell got a dog for himself, he got a purebred. He named the new one Raleigh, the same as his previous dog. Raleigh II had a Post cameo in Man Hiking with Dog, one of those seasonal covers so beloved by Lorimer, who seemed ready to claim the arrival of fall as an American holiday.

  Rockwell’s neighbors knew to stay away from Raleigh, who would growl when strangers stepped near. They assumed Rockwell acquired his new German shepherd because he felt spooked by the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, which was just being tried in court. “The dog had a tremendous head,” recalled Norman Kreisman, who was then a schoolboy living across the street from Rockwell.5 Kreisman had a dog, too, a small mutt, and one day it wandered onto the Rockwells’ front lawn. “My dog came within an inch of being killed,” he later recalled. “Raleigh took a real chunk out of him and he had to be hospitalized.” When the family received a very large bill from the veterinarian, Mrs. Kreisman called Rockwell and asked him whether he would pay for half. To her relief, he graciously assented.