American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  As Mary faltered, Rockwell took refuge in his studio, allowing the prod of deadlines to drive out rogue thoughts. Mary had not been cured by her years of therapy and he could hardly pretend that his own sessions with Erikson had led to life-changing disclosures. No, there had been no great revelation over the Formosa Straits. “Art heals,” the maxim goes, but Rockwell had no illusions about the curative power of art. Rather, he made art because he couldn’t be healed.

  At the same time, he valued his therapy sessions with Erikson, who was an indisputable ally. He could not say the same for Dr. Knight, who had treated Mary and Tom and was professionally obligated to stand beside them in family conflicts. Tom was about to turn twenty-three, and Rockwell wrote a witty birthday poem for him, part of which reads:

  Mosquitoes sting and bedbugs bite.

  Reminds me much of Dr. Knight.

  But thoughts that make me very lyric

  Come from good white-haired Uncle Erik.31

  TWENTY-TWO

  YOUNG MAN LUTHER

  (1957 TO 1959)

  Doctors and senior staff at the Austen Riggs Center were expected to divide their time between the care of patients and research. But sometimes the two could not be balanced. Erikson received a grant in 1956 that allowed him to leave Riggs altogether and tend to what he called “this writing business.”1

  On October 1, 1956, Erikson began a yearlong sabbatical. He arranged for Rockwell to be treated in his absence by Dr. Edgerton Howard, the associate medical director at Riggs. Unlike Erikson, Dr. Howard wasn’t well-known in intellectual circles or even in psychoanalytic ones; he was just a sturdy, self-effacing professional, all but unpublished except for a few book reviews.2 Although Rockwell was loath to switch therapists, he soon assured Erikson that he was making the best of things. “You told me not to underestimate Dr. Howard and you were absolutely right. He’s very fine but let’s be honest. There’s only one Erik Erikson.”3

  Erikson, at the time, was living in Mexico, in the tiny fishing village of Ajijic. This is where he wrote Young Man Luther, one of the first books to qualify as psychobiography. It offers a conceptually daring interpretation of the life of Martin Luther, who, according to Erikson, suffered a late-adolescent identity crisis of such mammoth proportions that the only way to resolve it was to reject 1,500 years of Roman Catholicism and invent a brand-new religion. The outcome of his identity crisis was not only a new Luther, but the Protestant Reformation, which favored inward soulfulness over the old regimen of rules and rituals.

  For all its obvious limitations, including the absurdity of attempting to psychoanalyze a German preacher five centuries after his death, Young Man Luther abounds with tossed-off profundities and entertaining asides. Some of Erikson’s thoughts spring from his status as a painter manqué attentive to the visual world. Thoughts on faces, for instance. He claims that the quest for religious faith represents an attempt to recapture the lost visual gratifications of infancy—in particular, “the smiling face” of an appreciative parent. The recognition bestowed by a welcoming face represents “the beginning of all sense of identity.”4

  The search for “mutual recognition, the meeting face to face,” he contends, is common to monotheistic religions. God is the caring face that religion projects onto the sky and that allows faith to flourish. “In the beginning are the generous breast and the eyes that care,” Erikson writes in reference to a mother’s love for her baby. “Could this be one of the countenances which religion promises us we shall see again, at the end and in another world?”5

  Countenances, faces, “eyes that care”—Erikson’s emphasis on the face serves to remind us that Rockwell was, among other things, a painter of faces. All his paintings are figure paintings, ones in which the facial expressions are likely to be distinct and legible. A Freudian might point out that Rockwell, who complained that his mother failed to look at him in his neglected childhood, made up for the loss by devoting his life to the creation of a gallery of interlocking, hyperattentive faces. In the process, he was able to direct the gaze of the American public onto himself and find a respite from the ache of invisibility.

  * * *

  On April 12, 1957, Erikson wrote to Rockwell from Mexico, and his tone is openly caring (“I miss you and Stockbridge”). He was enjoying his stay, sitting in his yard in the shade of banana trees, slowly making his way through Luther’s tracts in scholastic Latin. But the writing part of his efforts was more complicated. “The job is going well,” he informed Rockwell, almost deferentially, “but who knows the ups and downs better than you do?”6

  With the letter came a ten-page travelogue intended to be read aloud or merely circulated at the next gathering of the Marching and Chowder Society. (“It’s of course written primarily for you,” Erikson notes sweetly, “but I thought you would want to include the friends.”) Ajijic was then fashionable as an artists’ colony and Erikson was surprisingly critical of the American bohemians he met there. “Some of the ‘painters’ and ‘writers,’” he notes with patronizing scare quotes, “do seem arty in a homeless, pathetic way; and some of those who have money, drink themselves into a nostalgic stupor day after day; but there are also quite a number of people who do some work in apparently contented and heterosexual monogamy.”

  Interesting choice of words. He could have written that there were artists who do work in “contented monogamy.” Why the qualifier, why contented “heterosexual monogamy”? Perhaps he was trying to steer Rockwell away from his homoerotic desires. Like most psychoanalysts of his era, Erikson regarded homosexuality as a consequence of arrested development and believed it needed to be treated.

  Rockwell wrote back to Erikson in Mexico, in a letter in which he acknowledges his overly intense relationships with men. His latest adventure or rather misadventure was with his photographer Bill Scovill, a Riggs patient who suffered from severe depression. Although he was descended from the Scovill family of brass-button fame, his resources were not unlimited and he was crushed when he lost his job at the Riggs workshop, where he taught photography.

  “After threatening me with his self-destruction,” Rockwell wrote, “he swung over to the idea of my taking over the full responsibility for his financial and spiritual life. In fact he was forcibly crawling back into my womb but found it was already overcrowded. Now, believe it or not, he’s doing fine.”7 Rockwell had often joked in the past about feeling weak or womanish, and his very first cover for the Post, Boy with Baby Carriage, had derived its humor partly from the milk-bottle nipple poking out from the boy’s breast pocket. But the notion that Rockwell himself was equipped with female reproductive organs and the obligations of maternal care—this is a new one.

  Granted, he had been protective of Scovill, who continued to work as his photographer and to keep him company in the studio. “We built a darkroom up there,” Scovill recalled later, “and Mrs. Guerrieri was upset when we moved the enlarger in.”8 She was the landlord and perhaps it was the acrid, vingary scent of the photographic chemicals that made her unhappy. Rockwell’s relationship with her deteriorated so severely he felt he had to move out of the studio, which still occupied a second-floor space over the butcher shop on Main Street.

  Before the Shot, 1958 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

  On May 7, 1957, Rockwell signed the deed on the place formerly known as the Loomis house. It was just down the road from his house overlooking the cemetery. He moved partly to get away from the cemetery, the view of which his wife found intolerable. But his first priority was to put up a studio, or rather remodel the red barn tumbling down in the yard, which he expected to take two months. “We are having the studio finished first and when that is completed I am going to give a whiz bang party with two bars going full tilt,” he wrote to Erikson, “one in the studio and one on the lawn. It’ll be about July 1st.”9 The new studio would include a built-in darkroom for Scovill.10

  It had been only three years since he had acquired his previous house in Stockbridge a
nd he probably set some kind of record for buying and selling houses and moving around the New England countryside, which is supposed to be a place where you put down roots. On the other hand, his new house—it was on Route 7, which turned into South Street as it entered town—would be his last. It was the kind of house he had always favored: a chunky white-painted Colonial, creaking with two centuries of history and enhanced by the rumor that a famous patriot, Aaron Burr, had been a former occupant. It was across the street from the Red Lion Inn and as close to the Austen Riggs Center as a house could be.

  Moreover, his new house was near the Stockbridge elementary school, and he still, at this late point, was on the lookout for new child models. Escorted by the principal, he would wander the halls on weekday mornings and peer into brightly lighted classrooms, in search of boys with the right look. He would wait until the children had broken for recess or filed into the lunchroom before making contact with them, not wanting to intrude on their lessons.

  “He would come during our lunch hour and pull you into the hall,” recalled Eddie Locke, who first modeled for Rockwell as an eight-year-old boy, in October 1957. Locke is among the few who can claim the distinction of “posing somewhat in the nude,” as The Saturday Evening Post reported in a bizarrely sanguine item on March 15, 1958. The comment refers to Before the Shot, which takes us into a doctor’s office as a boy of around eight stands on a wooden chair, his belt unfastened, his corduroy trousers lowered to reveal his pale backside. As he nervously awaits an injection, he bends over, ostensibly to scrutinize the framed diploma hanging on the wall and reassure himself that Dr. Campbell is sufficiently qualified to perform this delicate procedure. (That’s the joke.) The doctor, a gray-haired man in a white coat who has his broad back turned to the patient as well as the viewer, is an ominous figure. He seems to have little in common with earlier Rockwell pediatricians, like the avuncular one from 1929 who indulges a schoolgirl by listening through his stethoscope to the pretend-heartbeat of her doll.

  Before the Shot remains the only Rockwell cover in which a boy exposes his unclad rear. Locke recalls posing for the picture in Dr. Campbell’s actual office on an afternoon when the doctor was gone. Rockwell asked the boy to drop his pants and had his new photographer, Clemens Kalischer, take the pictures. “He instructed me to pose how he wanted it,” Locke recalled. “It was a little uncomfortable, but you just did it, that’s all.”

  One night, Rockwell surprised the boy’s family by stopping by their house unannounced. He was carrying the finished painting and apparently needed to do a bit more research. “He asked for the pants,” Locke recalled years later. “This is what my parents told me. He asked for the pants to see if he had gotten the color right. They’re kind of a grey-green.”11 It’s an unsettling anecdote. Once again we are made to wonder whether Rockwell’s complicated interest in the depiction of preadolescent boys was shadowed by pedophilic impulses. But an impulse is not a crime. There is no evidence that he acted on his impulses or behaved in a way that was inappropriate for its time.

  At one point, he bought Louie Lamone a Polaroid camera and asked him to go around town taking pictures of potential models, children whom he might want to contact after seeing their photograph. Lamone found the process unnerving. “It was risky,” he recalled, “going around taking pictures of little boys and little girls and I almost got killed. People think you are a pervert or something.”12

  * * *

  A few months after Eddie Locke posed for Before the Shot, he posed for a second Post cover, The Runaway (September 20, 1958), one of Rockwell’s most beloved paintings. The theme is one he had first tackled in 1922, in an earlier Runaway, a mud-colored painting in which a boy who had hoped to join the circus sits crying as a sensitive clown dabs away his tears. The later Runaway is more austere. It takes us into an old-fashioned diner, where a boy of perhaps seven or eight is sitting at the counter with a beefy policeman. The boy’s possessions are on the floor, wrapped in a red bandana that is attached to a hobo-style “bindlestick” hinting at his cross-country fantasies.

  The Runaway, 1958 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

  At the time, On the Road had just been published. Unlike Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise, who takes a wild road trip across America, Rockwell’s runaway got no farther than the town limits before he was apprehended by a caring cop. Curiously, in an age when grown-ups and kids still went about their lives as if separated by a language difference, the cop decided against returning the boy to his inevitably scolding mother and sat down to talk things over with him at the diner.

  The boy and the officer are shown from the back, on adjacent stools covered in green vinyl. The officer gazes intently into the boy’s eyes and tilts his upper body toward him, as if to emphasize the bond of understanding and even tenderness that can form between a grown man and a little boy. To undercut the hint of homoeroticism, Rockwell includes the usual gimlet-eyed onlooker—in this case, a lanky counterman who leans forward with a lopsided grin, his thinning hair slicked against his skull, a ribbon of smoke rising from the cigarette stub pressed between his lips.13 In its time, the cover was received by readers of the Post as a touching tribute to American values. The officer represents the warm arm of the law, authority at its paternal best; he’s the quintessential Officer Friendly. On closer reading, however, the cop can also be seen as a figure of tantalizing masculinity, a muscle man in a skintight uniform and boots. There is something sensual about the expanse of his massive back, the sharp creases in his shirt formed where the fabric pulls. His tapered waistline is highlighted by the sheen of his wide leather belt and, all in all, the picture is infused with a sneaking admiration for uniforms and regalia.

  The model was Dick Clemens, then a thirty-one-year-old state trooper who lived down the road from Rockwell. After Rockwell called him at home one day, they arranged to meet at the Howard Johnson’s in Pittsfield. Clemens recalled that he posed for the photographs—in his own uniform, with his own .38 Smith & Wesson revolver—after his fellow model, little Eddie, went outside to play in the patrol car. “You could see the 28 flavors in the background, until Rockwell painted them out,” Clemens recalled later.14 Indeed, charcoal sketches for the picture offer a glimpse of the HoJo list, although Rockwell also had a few other restaurant interiors photographed for reference.

  For years, it was reported that the picture is set at Joe’s Diner, in the blue-collar town of Lee, a myth fostered in no small degree by Joe Sorrentino, who claimed his tiny eatery as the inspiration for the painting. You could always find a reproduction of The Runaway tacked to the wall. But that is true of many diners across the country, where The Runaway is displayed over the counter, usually in a cheap frame, reminding us that the American desire for on-the-road freedom has always been accompanied by an opposing desire for security and safety, a desire to find refuge at a welcoming counter where cherry pies gleam in a glass case.

  * * *

  In December 1957 Rockwell decided against sitting out the holiday in Stockbridge. Although he had moved into the house on South Street only six months earlier, all it took was an invitation to judge the Rose Parade to rouse his barely suppressed wanderlust and get him on a train bound for California. Not much is known about the trip, but details gleaned from news clippings provide some sense of his movements. On January 1, 1958, he was in Pasadena, selecting the best floats in the Sixty-Ninth Tournament of Roses Parade, whose theme that year was “Daydreams in Flowers.”

  A few days later, accompanied by a Hollywood photographer, Pete Todd, he visited the Santa Ana Park. There, he “made his first racing bet” and arranged for Eddie Arcaro, a celebrated jockey, to pose for sketches and photographs. Weighing In, which would run the following June 25, is one in a long line of Rockwell covers pairing physically opposite male figures. It depicts the jockey as a tiny, doll-like figure in a pink-and-white diamond-pattern jacket, standing on a scale as a beefy steward hovers over him, checking his weight.

  From there Roc
kwell continued north to San Francisco, where he spoke at the Art Directors’ Club and visited with his oldest son. Jarvis was then twenty-six, a shaggy-haired art student who was renting an apartment on Fillmore Street, the headquarters of beatnik culture. He had settled in San Francisco two years earlier at the suggestion of Erikson, who felt that Jarvis needed to put a protective distance between himself and his parents and enter therapy with someone unconnected to the family, or at least sort of unconnected.

  Peter, the youngest of the Rockwell boys, by then had become serious about art as well. He waited more than a year before disclosing his ambitions to his father. Finally he could not wait any longer. He had found his calling and it was sculpture. “That’s nonsense,” Rockwell told his son, without the least hint of irony. “Jarvis is a painter, Tom is a poet, and the only thing I can think of that is commercially worse than painting and poetry is sculpture. There aren’t more than three sculptors in the continental U.S. making a living from sculpture.”

  By now Erikson was back from his sabbatical in Mexico and Peter suggested that his father talk it out with his therapist. He was confident that Erikson, who had been an artist in his youth, would support him. “If Erik thinks it’s all right, will you relax?” Soon afterward, Peter himself became a regular visitor to Erikson’s office at Riggs, hoping to make his desires understood both to himself and his doubting father.