American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  Rockwell later claimed that he moved to Stockbridge so his wife could be treated at Austen Riggs. It became part of his chronology and his mythology, making him sound like a solicitous husband who put his wife’s interests ahead of his own. What he did not say is that he, too, now had a reason to go to Stockbridge, an inconvenient, ninety-minute drive from Arlington, Vermont. He moved to Stockbridge to begin his therapy with Erikson, to become an Austen Riggs outpatient, much like many other residents of Stockbridge. He could not have chosen to live in closer contact with psychoanalysts and psychiatric patients had he institutionalized himself.

  TWENTY

  THE AGE OF ERIK ERIKSON

  (1954)

  In mid-October 1953 Rockwell rented a studio in Stockbridge, in a second-floor space overlooking the little shops along Main Street. It was directly above Sullivan’s meat market, smack in the middle of town. His plan, he told a local reporter, was to stay for the winter and then return to Vermont in the spring. But probably he knew he was never going back north. He felt happy to be somewhere new, as if an invisible string had been cut. His neighbors were in disbelief when he had a mammoth hole hacked through the front wall of his studio and glassed over. They would have been more surprised yet if they knew that the picture window cost him five thousand dollars.1

  In coming years, he loved to stand at the window, puffing on his pipe and observing the street scene below, the ongoing hum of old-timers and schoolchildren and housewives steering their big cars into the angled parking spaces in front of the stores. The commercial part of Main Street was two blocks long and lined with the kind of shops whose doors had bells that jingled when a customer came in. Just one block over, to the west of the stores, was the Austen Riggs Center, whose principal building, a white-brick mansion set back on a scrubbed emerald lawn, gave it the aura of an unknowable fortress. Past Riggs, Main Street became residential and was lined on both sides with neatly kept-up wood frame houses, some of which had been standing since the days of the American Revolution.

  “Norman’s studio is beautiful and serene with almost white walls where he has hung Degas prints, the drawings we got in Paris,” Mary wrote in a letter from Stockbridge.2 “How he does love being right in the center of things, where he can look out and see people instead of mountains!”

  When he first lived in Stockbridge, Rockwell was far from settled. Although he set up his studio in a matter of days, he and Mary were living at the Homestead Inn, two joined-together clapboard houses occupied mostly by Riggs outpatients. She liked the freedom of boardinghouse life, where she had “no responsibilities in the household sense,” as she noted. Curiously enough, Rockwell, who had lived in boardinghouses in his youth, with a mother who fell ill as frequently as opportunity permitted, was now living in somewhat similar circumstances—in temporary lodgings, with a woman who suffered from depression and left him longing for care.

  No sooner had he pulled up to the curb than he met Louie Lamone, who would be his devoted studio assistant until the end of his life. Lamone was then in his twenties and was doing repair work at the Homestead Inn. Rockwell enlisted him to unpack the station wagon, which was jammed with his easel and cartons of art supplies. Lamone had never heard of Rockwell. But he could see he was an artist. He told Rockwell that he was “kind of late” because all the shimmering autumn foliage had already vanished from the tree branches. Rockwell laughed, and politely explained that he wasn’t a landscape painter.

  Within a few days, Rockwell hired a photographer, Bill Scovill, who had moved to Stockbridge to be treated for severe depression at Riggs and taught a photography class there. A handsome man with prematurely white hair and thick black eyebrows, he harbored a fear of travel and was glad to confine his sojourns to Rockwell’s studio. For the next decade, he would shoot the reference photographs for Rockwell’s paintings and develop the film, the thousands of pictures of models dressed a certain way and working to hold this pose or that.

  When Rockwell moved to Stockbridge, with its old houses and views of the Berkshire Mountains, he went against the demographic trends of the 1950s. Americans who purchased houses then were more likely to wind up in a “major metropolitan area,” as the Census Bureau called it, referring to areas that lay within commuting distance of a city. The goal was to live an orderly suburban life that came equipped with a dishwasher and a washing machine and one of those new upright Hoover vacuum cleaners, to sport fresh-smelling clothes while you sat around your dust-free house wondering whether the world was just days away from burning up in a nuclear conflagration.

  The quest for self-improvement also spawned an interest in psychoanalysis among the educated middle class. Although Rockwell was never a suburbanite, he did exemplify America’s new fascination with Sigmund Freud. By coincidence, the November 30, 1953, issue of Newsweek carried a lengthy feature story on the Austen Riggs Center and the explosion of the mental health industry. A photograph showed a room with a helter-skelter of tall wooden easels and four “maladjusted patients,” as the caption said, standing absorbed in their work. Among them is Mary Rockwell, who, though shown from the back in her calf-length smock and black pumps, turns her head just enough to make her profile instantly recognizable.

  The headline of the article, A WINNING FIGHT ON “NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS,” was a revealing mixed metaphor, harking back to the national unity bred by war in the forties and the growing inclination of Americans in the early fifties to define their battles in psychological terms rather than in political ones.

  * * *

  Explaining the chaos of his living situation those first months in Stockbridge, Rockwell once said, “We stayed at the boardinghouse. I got sick of that. My wife went to live at Riggs, so I bought the little yellow house.”3 He purchased it on March 24, 1954, a sweet little clapboard on the west end of Main Street, a cane-yellow house with white shutters and a split-rail fence in front.4 He didn’t pay much for it ($19,000), mainly because it was adjacent to the town graveyard and required that he eat his breakfast while looking at a field of tilting white tombstones. Acting with his usual impulsiveness, Rockwell bought the house without bothering to dispose of his previous one. His farmhouse in Vermont would remain unsold for another six months despite the interventions of a real-estate broker who placed exclamatory advertisements in The New York Times (“The home of a famous artist!”) and dropped the price more than once.

  The new house was notable for its its proximity to Mary’s psychiatrist. Dr. Knight had his office on the same street, just three doors down, in the so-called Purinton House. It had been remodeled by Riggs as an administration building and was a short walk from the main campus. Rockwell felt reassured living in the midst of so much professional medical help. In addition to having Dr. Knight as a neighbor, Dr. Donald Campbell, the town’s much-loved family physician and a man whose office would prove handy as a setting for various paintings, lived directly across the street.

  By May 3 Mary had joined her husband in the yellow house and was sending off cheerful letters. “We LOVE our new house,” she wrote to her sister, on one of those country afternoons pervaded with a spring chill.5 “It’s a rainy day outside, but lights are on in the living room, and there’s a fire burning away in the Franklin stove, which is now complete with andirons with twinkling brass knobs on top, which we gave to each other on our 24th wedding anniversary.” She still wanted to believe that things could work out “for the best,” and her stated affection for the stove seems touchingly indicative of a family where warmth did not come easily.

  * * *

  As the citizens of Stockbridge became personally acquainted with Rockwell, many of them felt surprised by his unassuming demeanor. He did not look like one of the robust, sanguine people in his magazine covers. With his narrow face, receding chin and stringy neck, he was thinner than people expected and less sure of himself. “He was an extraordinarily modest man,” recalled the playwright William Gibson, whose major works include The Miracle Worker and Golda’s Balcony, and whose w
ife, Dr. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, was a psychoanalyst at Riggs. “He didn’t just act modest. He was modest. Everyone liked him because he was unpretentious and never imposed himself on you in any way.”6

  Mary Rockwell, by contrast, struck people as fragile, with no natural gift for small talk. “She was nervous about social encounters because she was struggling with alcoholism,” Gibson recalled. Her neighbors found her vague and elusive, a shadow walking along Main Street and disappearing into the buildings at Riggs. Knowing she was an outpatient who spent most of her time at the hospital, neighbors made a point to wave at her when she passed and to try to engage her in conversation. “But she wouldn’t stop,” recalled Elizabeth White, her next-door neighbor. “She would just keep walking. I imagine she had friends within that little unit, that family of Austen Riggs.”

  By now, Mary had taken up painting as part of her day-to-day treatment. She worked in an upstairs studio in the Lavender Door, a barn-shaped building that was home to the “activities program” (the term occupational therapy had been discarded). Mary’s artwork consisted of gestural abstractions, pastels and paintings undertaken without the reassurance of preparatory sketches. Most of her works are intense, churning compositions in which strokes of bright color—yellows and oranges flecked with white—toss and tumble in rhythmic circles. They evoke waves and hurricanes, nature at maximum force. Although well-informed about abstract art, she downplayed her painterly sophistication, as if to keep from intruding on her husband’s domain. “I feel very lucky to be the complete amateur,” she wrote to her sister, “and so able to follow each feeling that appears about my work.”7

  She made no attempt to exhibit her pictures, except on the walls of her studio, where she would tack up her finished works and mull them over. She once gave a painting to Dr. Knight and his wife and inscribed it wittily. “From Mary Rockwell,” she wrote on the back, “who couldn’t find a place to sign it on the other side.”

  * * *

  The Austen Riggs Center had only recently emerged as one of the country’s leading psychiatric hospitals. It had gotten off to a wobbly start, in 1913, under Dr. Austen Fox Riggs, a German-born internist who denounced Freud as a quack and subjected his patients to a regiment consisting largely of crafts (especially weaving) and rest. After his death, the Austen Riggs Center fashioned itself as a groundbreaking center of Freudian psychoanalysis. Dr. Knight—the medical director of Riggs and Mary Rockwell’s therapist—was responsible for the transformation. In 1947 he came to Riggs from the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, where he had served as chief of staff, and he brought along half the psychoanalysts in Kansas, or so it seemed. An impressive group, they represented the creative core of Menninger and included Allen Wheelis, David Rapaport, Roy Schafer, and Margaret Brenman-Gibson. In May 1951 Erik Erikson, who had just published his bestselling Childhood and Society, arrived at Riggs from Berkeley, drawn by the promise of a light clinical load and ample time to spend writing his next book.

  * * *

  Rockwell took an instant liking to “Mr. Erikson,” as everyone called him. Eight years younger than Rockwell, Erikson was then in his early fifties and a forceful physical presence: a handsome European émigré with blue eyes, a ruddy complexion, and a nimbus of white hair. He spoke English with a German accent and had an impish smile.

  It was Erikson who coined the phrase identity crisis, of which his own youth was a case study. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, to Danish parents, he was the son of a Jewish mother (Karla Abrahamsen) and a still-unknown man who disappeared before Erikson was born. He was just a baby when his mother fell in love with his pediatrician, Theodor Homburger, whom she married on Erik’s third birthday. He became a boy named Erik Homburger and grew up believing that the pediatrician was his biological father. “All through my earlier childhood,” he later wrote, “they kept secret from me the fact that my mother had been married previously; and that I was the son of a Dane who had abandoned her before my birth.”8 Perhaps that explained his wild blond hair. His acquaintances wondered how a Jewish boy could wind up with so much Scandinavian hair and, as he later wrote, “I acquired the nickname ‘goy’ in my stepfather’s temple.” As a teenager he began to glean the truth about his origins from relatives in Denmark.

  At that point, he saw himself as artistic and intractably different. After high school he studied art at the Kunst-Akademie in Munich. His specialty was woodblock prints, and he worked in the intense, unfiltered, figurative style of the German Expressionists. His broad interests eventually led him to Vienna, where he taught in an experimental school and met Anna Freud, who practically invented the field of child psychology. She selected Erikson for training as an analyst at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, where he was able to follow the path of lay analysis championed by Sigmund Freud in his later years.

  Erik Erikson, soon after he moved to Stockbridge, in his yard (Photograph by Clemens Kalischer)

  In October 1933, nine months after Hitler came to power, Erik Homburger sailed to America with his dancer-wife, Joan, a Canadian whom he met in Vienna. He was thirty-one, a German Jew fleeing his homeland, an artist turned “psychoanalyst,” a profession few had heard of or could define. He listed his occupation as “writer” in the passenger records he filled out on the ship. Six years passed before he was naturalized as an American citizen and it was then, on September 26, 1939, three days after the death of Freud, that he changed his surname.9 It was a dramatic gesture, an act of autogenesis. He made up his surname. The man with no father became his own father—Erikson, as in “Erik’s son.” In coming years, his great achievement was to turn his own identity crisis into that of the entire culture. He came into possession of his identity by acknowledging he had no identity.

  * * *

  Although Erikson worked mostly with children and adolescents during his decade at Riggs, he did have a handful of adult patients. Rockwell came into his office, which was located upstairs in the main medical building and looked out on Main Street, twice a week. Much of what Erikson did in the therapeutic hour resembled counseling. He guided and instructed based on his sharp insights into a patient’s needs. In contrast to Freud, who believed that childhood determines who you are, Erikson identified eight stages of development that unfurl over the length of a lifetime. This led him to pitch to a patient’s strengths and posit that change is possible. Moreover, his “capacity to understand the sense of crisis and confusion of those he treated was remarkable,” notes his biographer, Lawrence Friedman.10

  For Rockwell, the immediate crisis was his marriage. As Erikson now learned, Rockwell was tethered to an alcoholic whose drinking made her petulant and critical of his work. What distressed Rockwell the most was the absence of any known cure. It seemed to Rockwell that Mary’s illness had won. Her alcoholism negated any possibility of peaceful living, and yet she was not sick enough to be hospitalized on a permanent basis. And so he was mired in a debilitation that had no end. Moreover, her therapy and hospitalizations were expensive and to pay the bills Rockwell had grudgingly taken on advertising assignments, including a campaign for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. It required that he paint a series of smiling heads, boys and girls lit up by visions of breakfast cereal.

  Rockwell was a dependent man who tended to lean on men, and in Erikson he found reliable support. “All that I am, all that I hope to be, I owe to Mr. Erikson,” he once wrote.11 The sentence echoes a line from his favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, who once wrote in a poem: “All that I am, all that I hope to be, I owe to my mother.”

  Rockwell wrote the comment inside of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Heritage edition he illustrated in the thirties. In the copy he gave to Erikson, he also drew a droll sketch. It shows Tom Sawyer in his floppy straw hat and faded overalls, a grinning, gap-toothed boy smoking a corn pipe as he takes time off from his usual escapades to try to comprehend the eight stages of human development. Tom is avidly reading Childhood and Society, Erikson’s first and most popular book, which Rockwell now came to
know intimately.

  * * *

  Once he began therapy with Erikson, Rockwell’s work became more overtly psychological. Girl at Mirror,12 the first painting he completed in Stockbridge and one of his most beloved Post covers, appeared on March 6, 1954. It shows a girl on the cusp of what Erikson called Stage Five, adolescence, in the throes of “Identity vs. Role Confusion.” Mary Whalen Leonard, the red-headed girl in Vermont who had posed for The Shiner, was also the model for the far more somber Girl at Mirror, which Rockwell had begun before he moved to Stockbridge.

  A girl of twelve, scantily dressed in a white cotton slip trimmed in eyelet, is shown from the back, perched on a footstool in a shadowy attic. A comb and brush lie to the left of her bare feet, as does a tube of bright-red lipstick—note that the cap is off. She has just completed what is perhaps her first attempt at applying lipstick, and stares nervously at her reflection in a full-length mirror, as if waiting to step out of her skin and metamorphose into someone new, someone lovely, someone a man might want to kiss. An issue of Movie Spotlight magazine resting on her lap is flipped open to a full-page photograph (head only) of Jane Russell, who was celebrated for her bustline (38D) and who offered a vision of voluptuousness beside which no woman could measure up, especially the pancake-flat girl in Rockwell’s painting. Deploying the kind of self-referential cleverness today known as meta, Rockwell has given us a magazine image about a magazine image.

  Despite the painting’s popularity, Rockwell later said on several occasions that he regretted including the image of Jane Russell, who had recently appeared in her best film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and was added to the painting only as an afterthought.13 He came to feel that her presence seriously compromised the work, allowing only one interpretation of it—a story about a girl who realizes she will never be a movie star—and killing off any hint of metaphor or nuance.