Rockwell’s Ticket Agent appeared on the cover of the Post on April 24, 1937. Just a month later, in the issue of May 29, Stout tried putting a color photograph on the cover, the first ever, openly flouting Lorimer’s policy of reserving the cover for a hand-drawn illustration. The photograph, by Ivan Dmitri, was timely, but astonishingly dull. Coinciding with that year’s Indianapolis 500, it shows a race car driver sitting in his sleek red vehicle in the moments before the race begins. It is shot from above, and angled so that a taut stretch of red—the car’s hood—dominates the photograph.
Truth be told, it wasn’t just Rockwell’s fixation with small-town geezers that disenchanted Stout. It was the whole tradition of magazine illustration, which now had to compete with photography. Henry Luce’s Life magazine made its debut on November 23, 1936, inciting a state of alarm in the Curtis Building that could not have been greater had a meteor crash-landed in Independence Square.
Life was priced at ten cents, twice as much as the Post. Physically, it was slightly larger. The first issue of Life measured fourteen inches tall by ten and a half inches wide. It was, revealingly, the same width as the Post but taller—half an inch taller, as if to ensure that it did not go unseen behind the profusion of competing weeklies on newsstands. The logo, a red box, can put you in mind of the geometric graphics of the Russian Constructivists. It remains the most recognizable magazine logo in history, that tomato-red rectangle with the word LIFE spelled out in blocky bright-white letters, as flat and striking as a stop sign.
For the first issue, the editors chose a cover image that was starkly modern and almost abstract: Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, which was then under construction, a key piece of President Roosevelt’s public-works projects. The photograph, shot at a wide angle, shows three concrete structures rising a bit ominously into the sky. Topped by turrets, the dam resembles nothing so much as the ramparts of a medieval fortress. Where are the thousands of WPA workers employed on the project? Not here. The image is spookily depopulated, like one of Giorgio de Chirico’s plazas. In that sense, it was a peculiar choice for a magazine that would soon become known for its close-ups of faces. On the other hand, the image of the impenetrable fortress says something authentic about Henry Luce’s Time Inc., the parent company of Life, which exuded a sense of power that was almost feudal.
If The Saturday Evening Post was known for one image, it was J. C. Leyendecker’s New Year’s Baby, which, since 1906, had been bouncing joyously onto the cover in top hats and various getups. Now Life had a baby, too. The first photograph inside the first issue, on page 2, showed a doctor in gloves and a surgical mask standing in a crowded delivery room. He is holding a newborn boy upside down by his feet. The caption ringingly declares: “LIFE Begins.”5
The caption might have read instead, in the interest of accuracy, “LIFE Begins Yet Again.” The magazine’s title was purchased from a previous Life, an inspired humor magazine founded in the 1880s in an artist’s studio in New York. The original Life was styled after The Harvard Lampoon, which itself was styled after the British magazine Punch. When he was just starting out, Rockwell published about two dozen illustrations in the original Life. Its covers featured a good amount of impressive artwork, including the sparely modern, pancake-flat drawings of flappers by John Held, Jr. But humor magazines faltered during the Depression and by 1936, the original Life was willing to part with its title and dismantle itself for a small, sad sum of money.6
The new Life was an instant sensation. Its print run, projected at 250,000 copies, had nearly doubled by the time the first issue appeared. A year later, Life’s circulation had spiked to 1.2 million, surpassing that of Luce’s own Time (672,000) and the elite New Yorker (135,000). But there was one magazine it couldn’t touch, at least not yet. The Saturday Evening Post remained the most popular magazine in America, with a paid circulation of more than 3 million.7
Even so, the founding of Life shifted the traditional balance between text and image in journalism, giving images a new prominence. Photographs had the advantage of instant authority (see for yourself). And they were sexy (showing skin). To be sure, magazines had been using photographs to illustrate stories for decades. “But using photographs to illustrate a periodical was not the same as making photographs the principal subject of a magazine,”8 as the historian Alan Brinkley notes in his biography of Henry Luce. Indeed, Life showed that journalism could be a purely visual medium, that sometimes the most compelling essay is a photo essay without any text.
Life represented a direct threat to the tradition of magazine illustration. It signaled the triumph of the camera over the paintbrush, of the machine over the hand, of the darkroom over the atelier, of speed over slowness, of New York’s Rockefeller Center (where Time Inc. soon moved) over Philadelphia’s Independence Square, of Henry Luce over Cyrus H. K. Curtis, who had died in 1933 and been replaced as publisher by his son-in-law.
In homes throughout the country, Americans accustomed to looking at handmade illustrations were suddenly poring over big, glossy black-and-white photographs that offered a seemingly unimpeded glimpse into previously closed worlds. As its name proclaimed, here was LIFE, not some make-believe simulation of it, not drawings by Howard Pyle, with his pirates and trunks of stolen booty. Not Leyendecker’s fluttering putti. Not the Gibson Girl with her hair piled up to the sky. No, here were “things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to,” as the magazine’s credo boasted, in jazzy language written with the help of the poet Archibald MacLeish.9
How did Rockwell survive this? He did not, of course, claim to offer the rewards of factuality. He did not claim to bring news of dams and European kings and world summits to anyone’s doorstep. But “art is no less real for being artifice,” as the critic Clive James once observed.10 Rockwell offered engrossing fictions about everyday life and its comical bumps. He offered the rewards of a story well told, a story that could seem remarkably complete and true despite the absence of words. He felt that if a painting of his needed a title, he hadn’t properly done his work. Which did not keep his editors from titling his every painting.
* * *
The new trout-fishing season began in the Northeast in April, and Rockwell was still accompanying Fred Hildebrandt on regular trips into the woods. It had been a few years since their two-week sojourn in Canada and their outings were now closer to home. They liked to drive to northwestern Connecticut, to Mrs. Kirk’s place, as it was known, a camp with three cabins on the banks of the Housatonic River presided over by a woman who would cook that day’s catch for them.
Sometimes they made the trip with two friends, Mead Schaeffer and Charles DeFeo. The men knew each other through Hildebrandt, who seemed to be every illustrator’s favorite model. Schaeffer, who had a studio in New Rochelle, had already furnished the book illustrations for a popular edition of Moby-Dick. DeFeo was equally fish-minded. He lived with his cat in Manhattan and was known as a master flytier, which requires an ability to work with precision on frustratingly tiny objects. You make a fly by affixing bits of hair, fur, feathers, and other materials to a metal hook. DeFeo designed and tied thousands of visually striking flies in a style that has variously been described as rococo, Victorian, or just ridiculously complicated.
His friends considered Rockwell basically unserious about fishing. They were expert anglers and he, at best, was along for the ride. While they were off at the river casting for salmon, setting their dry flies on the water, he was liable to be walking around on his own. “Norman was no fisherman,” recalled Mead Schaeffer. “He liked to go with the boys, but his mind wasn’t on fishing. To us, fishing was our whole lives, outside of painting. We tried desperately to get Norman interested in fishing, but he just was not the material for it all. He liked walking uphill.”11
That view was confirmed by Hildebrandt, who could be patronizing about Rockwell’s lack of sportiness. In 1936, after the four men drove up to C
onnecticut, Hildebrandt noted in his diary that Rockwell declined to get a fishing license from the state. “Norm didn’t intend to fish and was a bit confused with all of the talk about fly fishing.”12
Rockwell did not care for drinking, either. He was the designated driver in the group. On April 14, after three days of trout fishing in rainy Connecticut, the men “started home about three p.m.,” Hildebrandt noted in his journal. “Norm driving and Schaef and I finishing up a half a bottle of scotch. Got back to Norm’s at about 7 p.m. and all had supper there.” You can imagine how much Mary Rockwell loved sitting down to dinner with her husband and his two inebriated, mud-caked friends.
* * *
Fred Hildebrandt was still Rockwell’s favorite model and that spring he posed for a painting of Yankee Doodle, which made them both chuckle. Rockwell had accepted a lucrative commission to paint a thirteen-foot-long mural for the eighteenth-century Nassau Inn, in Princeton, New Jersey. Edgar Palmer, an heir to a zinc fortune and Princeton alumnus, had read about the restoration of Williamsburg, Virginia, by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., which gave him the idea of showcasing Princeton’s own inheritance of Colonial structures, even if he had to build them himself. He decided on a sham-Colonial town square. This entailed moving the old Nassau Inn to a prominent spot on the brand-new Palmer Square and persuading Rockwell to festoon the taproom with an episode from Yankee Doodle’s life.
Today, the song “Yankee Doodle” conjures images of patriotic uplift, but it was originally a satirical ditty sung by British soldiers to poke fun at the provincialism of Colonial armies. Apparently, Yankee soldiers were such yahoos that they affixed feathers to their hats and thought they therefore looked as stylish as the Italian men known as macaronis.
Rockwell’s mural portrays Master Doodle in the midst of an awful pony ride. He’s an object of ridicule, a blond fop in an elegant green velvet waistcoat riding past a rowdy crowd. The British redcoats are hooting and jeering at him and clearly need to cut back on their drinking.
The mural was the subject of an amusing item in The New Yorker in July. Rockwell was planning to stencil the song lyrics across the bottom of the mural, and “couldn’t decide whether it should read ‘Yankee Doodle came to town, or went to town,’” as the magazine reported.13 Princeton’s board of trustees took a vote; it resulted in a tie. Rockwell settled on the word came. Interpret at your own risk.
* * *
Mary Rockwell, in the meantime, continued to be exposed to the neglect that marriage to a famous artist can create. Rockwell’s long disappearances into his studio, coupled with his convivial devotion to his male friends and all-around inattention to family life, made her feel invisible. Every so often she thought back to her teacher at Stanford, Edith Mirrielees, who had told her that she was sufficiently gifted to become a writer. Instead, she had become a suburban housewife who berated herself for too much smoking and drinking and for misplacing things. In addition to Raleigh, the Rockwells now had a mutt named Mostly and one afternoon there was a mishap with the dog. Mary was mortified when the local newspaper wrote it up: “Mrs. Norman Rockwell took him shopping Thursday. Somewhere en route he disappeared. The dog, whose return is anxiously awaited by the Rockwells, is about Scottie size, black, with straight hair.”14 The dog was never recovered.
In the winter she learned she was pregnant again. She already had three young children. Jerry was seven; Tommy was five; and Peter was two. It is not known whether it was she or Rockwell who started the conversation about abortion. It was 1938 and abortion was illegal in the United States, so they decided to take a “vacation” in the English countryside. No one in England read The Saturday Evening Post or knew who he was; it was safe. They would wind up staying out of the country for six weeks. Their middle-aged housekeeper, Mrs. Florence Currie, a proper Englishwoman, made the trip with them, primarily to care for the boys.15
They sailed on a wintery March evening, aboard the SS Bremen, a German ocean liner.16 Three years earlier, a group of Jewish protesters in New York had made headlines when they boarded the Bremen to take down its Nazi flag and throw it into the Hudson, but one assumes that Mary and Norman did not realize the import of such events. In a photograph taken at sea, Mary poses on the deck with her three boys and an unknown girl who jumped into the picture. She smiles broadly and appears amused, perhaps because she has put down her pocketbook to scoop chubby Peter into her arms. They docked in Southampton on April 7 and were discreet about their plans. Asked by British agents to provide their temporary address, they provided only Europe on Wheels, on Regent Street in London, which was not a hotel but a forerunner of the rental-car industry, allowing tourists to motor through England on their own. When Rockwell materialized at the office, he found a cable from his accountant about a left-behind suitcase. In his haste to catch the ship, he had failed to notice the suitcase standing on his front lawn, perhaps because he had been frazzled, or because he simply was the kind of man eager to jettison baggage.17
Mary Rockwell, her three sons, and an unidentified girl aboard the SS Bremen, en route to London, March 1938 (Courtesy of Jarvis Rockwell)
Mary disappeared into a hospital in Oxford, an hour northeast of London, and Rockwell and the boys and Mrs. Currie awaited her recovery at the Old Swan & Minster Mill, an inn with a long history. Located in the rolling countryside of the Cotswolds, it consisted of a Tudor mansion plus an eighteenth-century mill whose bedrooms abounded with the sort of “authentic” trimmings Rockwell loved—exposed beams, open log fires and worn stone floors. Mary came out of the hospital in mid-April, daffodil season. She and Rockwell decided to stay on at the inn, with the boys and Mrs. Currie, for a few added weeks. He later recalled the trip fondly, remembering bicycling along country lanes and wondering if he should leave New Rochelle and move to the countryside somewhere.
* * *
Passing through London toward the end of the trip, Rockwell thought he might contact a few British illustrators whom he had never met but whom he counted as his forebears. He had a small collection of illustrators’ work and wanted to buy a few pieces in England. He sat down in his hotel room and tried to summon the appropriately respectful tone with which to introduce himself to Arthur Rackham, George Belcher, and Edmund Dulac, the last of whom had just designed the coronation postage stamp for Queen Elizabeth, the wife of George VI. After producing “ten stiff and awkward drafts,” he threw them away and picked up the phone and called Rackham directly.
Rackham, at the time, was seventy, a vastly influential children’s book illustrator. No one brought a stricter sense of realism to scenes of fairies and gnomes. Invited to his studio late one afternoon, Rockwell found a poignant figure, “a little bit of a man with a thin face,” as he described him. The next day, May 6, Rockwell returned for tea. He purchased two ink drawings, one of which bore the unsettling title, “A House with Rats.” Rackham gave him a copy of a book he had illustrated, Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe. “To Norman Rockwell,” he wrote inside, and then added a sketch of a man being woken from sleep by a devil looming at the foot of his bed.18 Rockwell kept the book to the end of his life, a reminder of a charmed encounter and also of his artistic allegiances. Revealingly, he had not called upon Britain’s modern artists, such as Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, who were living together in Hampstead. Nor had he attempted to look up any relatives—he was, after all, of English stock. The only family in which he could comfortably imagine himself was that of his fellow illustrators.
He and his family left England on May 12, sailing from Southampton aboard the SS Europa, the sister ship of the German liner on which they had come over. They were back in New Rochelle five days later, with their three small boys. Mary picked up Raleigh from a kennel in Ossining and her life resumed its normal shape. Summer was approaching and she frequently swam at the Wykagyl Country Club. She was relieved to see she would not be punished for what she had done, the unborn child. She could continue buying hats at Saks and browsing at the New Rochelle Bo
ok Store, from which she came away in those months with books on religion and George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, a protofeminist novel about an unhappily married woman.19
Rockwell immediately turned his attention to a painting called Blank Canvas.20 His first (known) self-portrait, it shows him as a painter-goofball trying in vain to generate an idea for a Post cover as a deadline looms. He portrays himself from the back, in his studio, a skinny man in a Windsor swivel chair, scratching his bony head in puzzlement. There he sits for the thousandth time, with his paints and his rags and his long maulstick, and there rests his large canvas in all its glaring whiteness. It’s not completely “blank,” as the title suggests. The logo of The Saturday Evening Post has been stenciled across the top, cleverly so, an image of a magazine cover framed by an actual magazine cover.
You can tell, even from the back, that the neck of Rockwell’s powder-blue shirt is open wide. The left collar is sticking out and pointing westward, as if it were eager to depart from the studio. Discarded sketches are heaped on a wooden crate that serves as a side table. How does he get ideas? Perhaps by swiping them; art books are propped open to images he has consulted in desperation. Real artists purportedly cull their inspiration from their experience of the world, as opposed to thumbing through a fat volume of readymade images of DOG CLIPS, the title of a book whose spine is visible in Rockwell’s wooden crate.
It is interesting that Rockwell was moved to paint his first self-portrait after the ordeal of his wife’s abortion. The painting abounds with covert references to pregnancy, such as “due date” affixed to his easel as well as the little kachina doll tacked to the top, inside a curvy horseshoe-womb. Perhaps the experience in England had made him feel that he, too, was consumed by questions of conception and creative birth. And sometimes he could not deliver.
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 20
