He had a scare on the last Saturday in October, when Butch, his black-and-white springer spaniel, disappeared. He walked several miles along the muddy banks of the Batten Kill, calling out the dog’s name. Returning home at nightfall, he learned to his immense relief that the police had found Butch—he was in the woods, ensnared in a fox trap. A reporter from the Bennington Banner called to get the story, and Rockwell relayed it with an empathy he found easy to summon for animals. Butch, he said, was curled up at home with “a contented look” as he nursed his injured paw.12
Just a few days later, Rockwell decided impulsively that he needed to leave home. He felt exhausted and depressed, and it pained him to think that, in 1944, he had signed a contract with the Post that obligated him to do at least six covers a year and made him feel like a kept man. Seeking to be released from his contract, he wrote a check for $10,500—the amount he had received in settlement of his previous year’s contract—and mailed it to the editor, Ben Hibbs. Responding with a lengthy, enormously caring letter, Hibbs returned his check and assured him: “We hit on the contract idea as the best possible method of proving to you that we loved you and wanted you to continue as our number one artist.”
It had been a long while—six years—since Rockwell had visited Los Angeles and worked on Champion Place, with its row of artists’ studios and eucalyptus trees. He decided to return to California now. His two older sons were at boarding school, and he told Mary, somewhat impatiently, that she and their youngest son, Peter, could join him in California if she stopped drinking. An impossible if. To justify the trip, he came up with several ideas for California-themed Post covers and submitted rough sketches to his editors. They gave him the go-ahead.
The day after Election Day, which returned Harry Truman to the presidency, Rockwell headed west. As usual he traveled in style and enjoyed the ride. In Chicago he boarded the Union Pacific’s City of Los Angeles, whose streamlined design and yellow exterior were regarded as a vast improvement over the squat, clanky trains of the past. “My boss is sending me to Hollywood because they’re tired of people in Vermont,” he told a reporter on the platform in Salt Lake City, where he managed to complete an interview in the space of a fifteen-minute stop.13
Arriving in Los Angeles on November 15, Rockwell checked into the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, which billed itself as the site of the first Academy Awards. From there he telephoned his mother-in-law in Alhambra and asked in a teasing voice, “Do you know who this is?” Mrs. Barstow had no idea. She was delighted when he invited her and her husband to join him for dinner that night at the hotel.
“He told us about the men he met on the train,” Mrs. Barstow reported of the dinner, in a letter to her daughter.14 “The friendly Jews and how they showed pictures of their families and regretted that he had none of his.” Mrs. Barstow urged Mary to remedy the situation by giving Rockwell “a leather folder with pictures of all of you” for Christmas. She did not realize that husband and wife wouldn’t be celebrating Christmas together that year.
* * *
During his stay in Los Angeles, Rockwell worked out of a spacious studio at what is now the Otis College of Art and Design,15 one of the country’s top art schools. The space was offered to him rent-free by the school’s longtime dean, E. Roscoe Shrader, an illustrator with whom he was casually acquainted. Rockwell was named the school’s first artist-in-residence. The title was strictly honorary, obliging him to do little more than show up at his third-floor atelier in the morning and tend to his own work. He was touched when the faculty mounted a small show of his paintings, which stayed up through December. It was a relief for him to be among people who admired him, who waved hello when he passed them in the hall, who knew nothing about his troubled life in Vermont.
Although Rockwell did not actually teach at Otis, he gave several well-received lectures that winter. One was held at the Art Center School in Pasadena; a surviving audiotape captures Rockwell as witty, raconteurish, and self-deprecating. His deep voice, New York accent, and frequent laughter, his habit of punctuating his observations with “See? See?”—at times he sounded as animated as a man recounting a run-in with a bear.
“I’m certainly not going to talk about ‘What is art?’ or anything like that,” he said at the opening of his lecture. “I am just going to tell you very briefly how I make pictures and you can learn from that horrible example at least how not to make pictures.”16
He alighted on his usual themes, such as his difficulty generating ideas. “I’ve never had one that came to me the way they’re supposed to come in movies and novels. I never woke up in the middle of the night and had a whole new idea.” Still, the gestation process was easier for him than it had been in the twenties and thirties. “I don’t do the stuff with the lamppost anymore that Mr. Millier spoke about,” he said, referring to Arthur Millier, the art critic for the Los Angeles Times, who introduced him that night and presumably based his comments on information gleaned from outdated articles.
Rockwell came as close as he ever would to articulating a philosophy of art when he said that he saw himself primarily as a storyteller in the Dickensian mode. He wanted his every daub and gesture in a painting to contribute to the story. A story that was funny but not too funny. “If it’s just a complete gag, it doesn’t stay with people at all. You have to have a little pathos in it. Dickens was the great man for that.”17
Of course, all this put him at odds with a generation of abstract artists who snubbed storytelling. “People tell me ‘You have no right to do that,’” Rockwell said. “I’ve actually had fellows tell me you can do that in watercolor, but you have no right to do things like that in oil.” The audience cracked up.
“It’s ridiculous. What I say is, ‘To deuce with them! I like to do it.’ That’s an awful thing to admit. The story is the first thing and the last thing.” He added that he often judged the success of a painting not by the strength of its composition or color, but by whether visitors to his studio laughed when they saw it. “If you came in,” he told the audience, “I would just wait to see if you laughed or not. I just love that. That isn’t what a fine-art man goes for. I don’t care whether it is art or not.”
Loud laughter, applause.
“And by the way, I always say that, and then I have to put in an argument that it IS art. You see, how many of the very finest paintings were superb illustrations? That is a gold mine, to bring that subject up.” But then he didn’t bring it up, he dropped it, not caring to identify the innumerable masterpieces from the Sistine Chapel ceiling on down that were conceived to illustrate a story.
* * *
Back in Vermont, Mary Rockwell was having an exceedingly difficult winter. Although Norman had often been absent, disappearing into his studio or leaving town for days and even weeks at a stretch, he had never been away for this long. Secluded in the drafty farmhouse, Mary read novels and wrote letters and chain-smoked her latest brand, Chesterfields, stubbing them out in clunky glass ashtrays. At least her driving privileges had been reinstated. When she walked outside to her car, she could see the red-painted studio, unoccupied now, the windows dark, the door padlocked.
For November and most of December, Mary lived in the house with eleven-year-old Peter. Her two older sons were away at the Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, and she drove there every so often to take them to dinner at a nice restaurant, along with a few chosen classmates. Jarvis, a high school senior, had been suspended for a few days the previous spring after he was caught smoking and now, in December, Joseph Shane, the new school principal, informed Mary that Jarvis had been caught again. Shane held Mary somewhat culpable, mentioning in a letter that “Jerry told me that he did smoke when he went out with you to dinner … and this made it harder for him to give it up.”18
The principal asked Mary to forbid her son from using tobacco. She answered in a touching six-page letter in which she strains to understand Jarvis’s behavior rather than to condemn it. “I most certainly am not going to for
bid him to smoke,” she wrote pointedly to Mr. Shane. “He’s got to decide that for himself and will only be a free person when he takes the responsibility for his own actions.”19
It was at this fraught moment that Christmas Homecoming, the defining image of toasty holiday togetherness, graced the cover of the Post. It is the one and only painting in which all five members of the Rockwell family appear—and are cast as themselves, more or less. A Christmas-day gathering is interrupted by the arrival of a son (Jarvis), whose back is turned toward the viewer. He receives a joyous hug from his mother (Mary Rockwell) as a roomful of relatives and friends look on with visible delight. Although you can’t see the boy’s face, you imagine he is a college student who packed his bags in a hurry (note the pajama string hanging out of his bulging suitcase). Rockwell tells the story by capturing the reactions of the onlookers; he switches the spotlight from the actor to the audience. The picture plane is a sea of smiling, bobbing heads, and the expressions are oddly undifferentiated. For once he is painting people he knows and cares about, but somehow he fails to individuate them. A sense of one-mood-fits-all warmth prevails, compromising the painting.
Grandma Moses also makes an appearance in the painting, a petite old lady in wire-rimmed spectacles standing on the left. She is wearing the same black dress, with a lacy white collar and cameo pin, that she is wearing in the photographs from her eighty-eighth birthday party, suggesting that Rockwell used the party photographs to obtain his likeness of her. Unlike the other figures in the painting, with their Crest-white smiles, Grandma Moses appears meditative. Rockwell also offers a self-portrait, inserting himself into the scene with a pipe in his mouth. You can tell by the way his eyebrows are lifted that he intends some kind of merriment.
In reality, there was no family gathering for Rockwell that Christmas. There was only distance and separation. He was living out of a suitcase at a hotel in Hollywood while Mary was snowbound in Vermont, writing rambling personal letters to a principal she had not met.
Christmas Homecoming, the defining image of holiday togetherness, appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on December 25, 1948.
Grandma Moses had her heartbreaks, too. In February, just six months after she had her cameo in the Christmas Homecoming cover, her son Hugh suffered a fatal heart attack. He was forty-nine years old. Although Grandma had been on the cover of the Post, in that picture showing a strapping boy coming home for Christmas, in real life, Hugh would never come home again.20
* * *
At the end of December Mary Rockwell left Vermont to join her husband in California. She made the trip by train, and was accompanied by eleven-year-old Peter, who was well aware that his mother had promised to stop drinking. But soon after they were on their way, Peter took a walk through the train and returned to the Pullman car he was sharing with his mother to find her lying unconscious on the bed. Strangers were fluttering around her, speaking in grave tones. It seems she had passed out from drinking. Later, going over the incident countless times with each other, her children suspected it was brought on as much by the strain of their father’s absence as their mother’s nervousness about rejoining him in California.
The Rockwells remained in California for another eight months, eventually moving out of their suite at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and into a house they rented in the Hollywood Hills. Despite the balmy weather and lush scenery, little about their lives seemed to change. During her months in California, Mary haunted bookshops, continued drinking, and wrecked a Buick in an accident downtown.21 And Rockwell became inseparable from a new, much-younger best friend—Joseph A. Mugnaini (pronounced moo-NI-ni), a handsome, Italian-born artist who taught life drawing at Otis and later became the primary illustrator for Ray Bradbury’s novels. Rockwell started spending most of his time with him. He mentored Mugnaini as he had once mentored Fred Hildebrandt and other male artists, loving them less for themselves, perhaps, than for the caring feelings they stirred in him.
Mugnaini makes a cameo appearance in Rockwell’s painting Traffic Conditions,22 an operatic scene triggered by a simple incident. An obstructive white bulldog plants himself in the middle of a narrow alleyway, blocking a moving van and attracting a crowd of onlookers. Mugnaini posed for the mustachioed artist who leans out of a second-story window, pointing emphatically at the little dog. Some thirty Otis students and faculty members modeled for the picture, but Mugnaini was the one who Rockwell hoped would be given a shout-out in the Post. As he wrote to his editors: “Could you possibly mention his name? He is having a one-man show here this summer and it would mean a lot to him.”23
Rockwell with his friend Joe Mugnaini, a teacher at Otis College of Art and Design
Rockwell was genuine in his desire to advance his friend’s career. When Mugnaini’s show opened in August, at the Chabot Art Galleries, the Pasadena Independent carried a photograph of Rockwell standing beside him. The caption explained, with more candor than was strictly necessary: “Let’s hope this is a boost. Rockwell asked the Independent to run this picture in order to bring attention to Mugnaini’s one-man art show.”
In the weeks before he left California, Rockwell completed one of his best covers. The New Television Set,24 like Traffic Conditions before it, mingles figures and architecture, but it is airier and more inviting. A middle-aged man with suspenders leans out of the attic window of a Victorian house shouting to the young service guy installing an antenna up on his roof. The homeowner is so excited he has knocked over a pot of geraniums in the window box. A black-and-white TV is visible through the open window and you imagine the man is hollering, “The picture is coming in clear!” Rockwell understands the excitement. He is a maker of clear pictures that require no antenna.
The New Television Set, 1949 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles)
The house is sharply outlined against the cloudy sky, which fills the top half of the painting. In the far distance, a Gothic church spire is visible through the mist. The church is ghostly, as if old pieties are about to be superseded by the new religion of television.
* * *
In Arlington, Vermont, a rumor circulated that the Rockwell family had moved to California and wasn’t coming back. Neighbors wrote to ask if the rumor was true. So did editors at the Post. “It is not impossible for you to work in California, but it is a long way,” Ken Stuart, the Post’s art editor informed Rockwell, “and if you do stay there, we’d better arrange for me to come out at least three times a year.”25
It was hardly what Rockwell had in mind. He was angry at Stuart for overstepping his bounds and altering a painting without telling him. When Rockwell received an advance copy of the September 24, 1949, issue of the Post, he was in disbelief. Stuart had taken it upon himself to paint a horse out of the picture. This was Before the Date, a split-screen painting in which a man (right side) and a woman (left side) are shown in their own bedrooms, peering into mirrors, arms raised as they fix their hair. Rockwell had intended to suggest that the twosome were dressing for a country square dance; he had painted a horse outside the window, to emphasize the rural setting.26
Rockwell called Stuart to let him know how unhappy he was. In a follow-up letter, the editor tried to defend himself by claiming that the disappeared horse was an isolated incident. Earlier covers, he contended, had remained untouched, more or less. “You will remember they were not changed at all except to raise your signature. We do that because we feel your signature is very important to the public. If it isn’t about three-eighths of an inch from the bottom in reproduction, it gets clipped off in seventy percent of the run.”27
It was a lugubrious end to the California trip. On September 1 Rockwell boarded the train east. Three days later, he was back in his studio in Vermont. It is not surprising that he decided to return. You could live in the hills of Hollywood for only so long and still get away with calling yourself a Vermonter. And he was not sure what he would be, even to himself, without his Vermont address and the Yankee character it
implied.
Besides, another birthday was rapidly approaching. Not for him, but for Grandma Moses, who was about to turn eighty-nine and was planning yet another birthday extravaganza. It had been a year since Rockwell met her and helped out with the cake. Now, in 1949, she was scheduled to have her party at a restaurant, the Green Mountain Pine Room, in Arlington. It would be a “surprise party,” as The New York Times announced the day before, more or less negating the possibility that anyone in the free world, Grandma included, could be surprised by it.28 Apparently, Rockwell had become Grandma’s designated baker, and news photographs taken that day show him in a white chef’s hat, aiming a frosting gun at a cake that was thankfully smaller than the one from the year before.
Over the years, Grandma Moses has often been compared to Norman Rockwell, perhaps because they both painted idealized scenes of American life. By 1949 they were the two most famous artists in the country and they had made their reputations without any help from museums. Their fame owed almost everything to mass reproduction of their work. The millions of Americans who loved Rockwell’s covers never saw an original Rockwell painting.
Rockwell was a far better artist than Moses, whose work was relatively unsophisticated. She composed her pictures as if she were jotting down words, or keeping a diary, recording images of horses or sleighs and giant snowflakes as they occurred to her and giving little thought to how the parts relate to the whole. And her ground was white, like a sheet of paper. Her pictures are flat in the modern way, but “it is flatness by default,” as John Currin, the contemporary artist, once observed. “She is not a picture constructor with a grand sense of space, which is why you can only look at so many of her scenes before they start to seem alike.”29
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 28
