American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  In a letter to Rockwell, Mary’s kid sister contemplated the possibility of an overdose. “You know, Norm,” she assured him, “even if an autopsy had shown that Mary had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, nothing could have convinced me that it happened in any way but by accident … Nothing could be easier than to take too much by accident, when already doped up.”15

  Her sons felt that their mother’s death was almost certainly natural and that it was terribly unfair. It occurred at a time when blessings were piled up around her.

  * * *

  Sympathy letters poured in, including one from Mary’s therapist, Dr. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, who at the time was away on vacation. “I wept when I heard of Mary’s death and thought then for several days of her valiance,” she wrote to Rockwell. “I thought too of the pleasant phone conversation she and I had had the week before when she told me a little of the development in her painting.”16

  Rockwell, who was then sixty-five, spoke little about his wife in the weeks and months following her death, perhaps because he was generally unable to talk about death. After three turbulent decades of marriage, Mary had been eradicated from his life without warning, without even time to say goodbye. She went upstairs after lunch and never came down for dinner. “He didn’t talk about his feelings,” recalled his son Peter. “He did some of his best work during that period. He did some fabulous paintings. I think we were all relieved by her death.”

  If he was unable to articulate a sense of loss, he did make a charitable gesture in his wife’s memory. Before the year was out, he donated one thousand dollars to the Stockbridge Public Library for the purchase of children’s books.

  He drew a lovely pencil-and-ink sketch of Mary and arranged for it to run as the dedication page of his soon-to-be-published autobiography. The drawing shows her in profile, a graceful woman in a buttoned white blouse, her hair pinned up. She turns her back toward the viewer, as if turning away from the demands of the world and into a cocoon of solitude. She appears to be around forty, a slender and youthful version of her later self. He based the drawing on a set of photographs that had been taken of her in 1948, when she posed for The Gossips.

  By mid-September he had submitted the drawing to Doubleday, just as the book was going to press. It would appear on an otherwise blank page, framed in a rectangle of powder blue, above a line of appreciative prose: “To Mary, whose loving help has meant so much to me.”

  The dedication is a bit misleading. It does not acknowledge the fact of Mary’s death; it does not say “in memory of.” In coming months, the thousands of readers who picked up Rockwell’s brand-new autobiography—a substantial work running more than four hundred pages—would have no reason to doubt that Mary was anywhere but at home in her kitchen in Stockbridge, chuckling at her husband’s droll anecdotes and offering her “loving help,” as always.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  WIDOWHOOD, OR THE GOLDEN RULE

  (1960)

  In the autumn of 1959 Rockwell settled into the life of a widower. But settled is not the right word. Unsettled is closer. For all his misgivings about family life, he was reluctant to be alone in his drafty Colonial house in Stockbridge and asked people to stay with him. His son, Tom, and Tom’s wife, Gail, remained until the end of October, sleeping in the guest bedroom, across the hall from his. Tom was helping him make the final corrections on the proofs of his soon-to-be published autobiography.

  In the process, Rockwell grew closer to his son and shared confidences that sometimes seemed overly personal. He liked to report on what had transpired in his therapy sessions, as if his conversations with Erikson were of universal interest and his children were expected to receive them attentively. Tom was surprised when his father complained that Erikson confiscated a pistol he had purchased in the interest of keeping Rockwell from visiting harm upon himself. “I’m so mad at Erik,” he used to say. “He took my gun and won’t give it back.” Tom couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

  Once, during one of Rockwell’s therapy sessions at Austen Riggs, Erikson glanced out the window and commented neutrally that someone they knew was walking by. That, too, became fodder for a joke. “When I talk to Erik,” Rockwell would lament, “he is always looking out the window.”

  Rockwell very much liked his daughter-in-law, the former Gail Sudler, a distinctly beautiful artist with green eyes, porcelain skin, and light brown hair cut in a pageboy style. During this period, she took over the job of running the household and helped Rockwell in the studio as well. He painted a portrait of her that ran in the Post, to illustrate a sexy short story called “Another Man’s Wife.”1 She wondered if Rockwell had a crush on her, a perverse desire to steal her away from his son. Once, when he spotted her silk slippers in the hallway, lined up neatly outside the bathroom, he mentioned “how cute”2 they looked. Soon after, he asked her to marry him and she considered it for at least ten minutes before declining.

  Anxious about Tom and Gail’s departure, Rockwell imagined having a family board with him. In short order, he converted a space on the second floor of his house into a two-bedroom apartment. It required that he empty out Mary’s former studio, the large room over the garage, which became the central room of the unfurnished apartment. A small kitchen was built and outdoor stairs were constructed to provide an entrance from the yard.

  Rockwell asked Dr. Knight to offer the apartment to one of the young doctors at Austen Riggs. A family moved in almost immediately. “I’ve fixed up the rear of the house as an apartment and a Dr. and Mrs. Philip are occupying it,” Rockwell wrote to Clyde Forsythe.3 “I’m just no good at living alone in this big house.”

  His new boarder was Anthony F. Philip, who had moved to Stockbridge to continue his training at Riggs. A soft-spoken man of thirty-two, he was, officially, a postdoctoral fellow in clinical psychology. (He later became the director of counseling services at Columbia University.) He and his wife and two young daughters would stay in Rockwell’s house for three years. Although the artist had them sign a lease (rent: sixty-five dollars a month), what he sought from the arrangement was hardly financial. He desired to have an emissary from the field of psychology sleeping in the bedroom down the hall from his, available should he find himself, in the middle of the night, in need of rescue. Rescue from what, exactly? An accidental fire, a heart attack, his own agitated thoughts—it hardly mattered. “He didn’t want to be alone,” Dr. Philip recalled. “He felt shaky and it made him feel better to have someone from Riggs around. It was somehow reassuring for him.”4

  Dr. Philip came to see Rockwell as an extremely sympathetic and complicated man. In the beginning, Rockwell would sometimes come upstairs to have tea with him and his family. Dr. Philip had heard on the grapevine that his wife had been a handful, had shuffled along Main Street reeking of whiskey and cigarettes. He imagined what he must have endured and did not hold Rockwell accountable. “I was at Riggs and I heard about Mary Rockwell,” he later recalled. “I don’t think it was a direct suicide, but she was depressed, and sometimes people just want to die.”

  Despite his genial exterior, Rockwell, the doctor could see, was a panicky man who demanded a lot of himself not only as an artist but even in his relatively unimportant obligations as a landlord. Once when Dr. Philip mentioned that the stairs to his apartment were slippery, Rockwell arranged for them to be covered in outdoor carpeting by the end of the day. Another time, a new clothing dryer arrived with similarly confounding speed. “He was a very compulsive guy, very organized. Everything had to be in its place. He had an obsessive-compulsive character style.”

  Asked if Rockwell was obsessive-compulsive in medical terms, the doctor replied, “As a style, I don’t mean as a disorder. They key thing is control. People who are obsessive want to be in control of themselves and their impulses.”

  In later years, when Dr. Philip thought of Rockwell, the same picture always came to mind. He thought of him on the phone in his studio arranging to have someone come help him with one thing or
another. “He paid people well to do things,” Dr. Philip recalled. “He wanted someone he could depend on.”

  He certainly had a good deal of help. In addition to his twice-a-week sessions with Erikson, he had Mrs. Bracknell to cook his meals. Chris Schafer still drove down from Vermont on Tuesdays to sift through Rockwell’s bills and get his books in order. Louie Lamone came in on weekends to stretch canvases and build sets and move stuff around. Bill Scovill, the clinically depressed photographer, had been joined by Clemens Kalischer, a German-Jewish émigré and accomplished photojournalist. While Scovill was a quiet man who lived alone, collected camera equipment and claimed to be afraid of taking trips, Kalischer had worked all over the world. He, too, became accustomed to answering his home phone and hearing a male voice inquire, “Are you free? Can you come over?”

  Kalischer later recalled Rockwell as “a limited man” who seemed terrified of touching pencil to paper without having a black-and-white photograph to consult. “He had very good art books,” Kalischer recalled. “Once, he took out a book of Flemish paintings and said to me, ‘Can you make a photograph of one foot?’”5 Kalischer was puzzled by Rockwell’s request, his desire to draw a foot only from the greatest possible remove.

  * * *

  In February 1960 Rockwell’s autobiography, Norman Rockwell: My Adventures as an Illustrator, was published in hardcover by Doubleday—price, $4.95. It was a new decade, and the senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, had just announced his bid for the presidency, but in many ways the fifties remained intact. For starters, Eisenhower was still in the White House and he sent Rockwell a personal note the day he received My Adventures as an Illustrator. “While I have not yet had an opportunity to more than glance at the book,” the president wittily wrote, “I understand, with some regret, that I have been indirectly at least responsible for several of your memorable experiences with pills of one sort or another.”6 He was referring to the now-famous incident when Rockwell’s last Dexamyl disappeared down the hotel-sink drain.

  My Adventures as an Illustrator struck a modest tone, starting with its title, which made it clear that Rockwell did not think of himself as an artist with a capital A or even an artist with a lowercase a. No, he was an illustrator, preferring to link himself in his book and in his insecure mind with a history of American illustrators that went back to Howard Pyle and his swashbuckling pirates.

  The reviews of the book were mixed, at best, and reflected probably less on Rockwell than on an era in which abstract art was still believed to be more emotionally authentic than realism. Phoebe-Lou Adams of The Atlantic Monthly found the book “good-humored” and “clever,” but was disappointed that Rockwell did not expose more of himself and his creative agonies.7 The harshest review was by Benjamin DeMott, who, writing in The Nation, branded Rockwell an apologist for capitalism. Forcing Rockwell’s career into a Marxist frame, DeMott charged that the artist’s subjects—working-class people in plain, thrifty-looking settings—were designed expressly to distract Americans from the reality of their growing affluence and provide “a device to quiet their guilt.”8

  Under instructions from editor Ben Hibbs, The Saturday Evening Post gave the book a generous launch by serializing it in eight installments that kept it on the minds of readers through the spring. The first excerpt, on February 13, 1960, came with a wonderful cover illustration: Triple Self-Portrait (see frontispiece), a triumph of self-burlesque in which Rockwell portrays himself in the midst of painting his self-portrait and taking liberties with the truth.

  Although the artist is shown from the back, at his easel, his anxiety is conveyed with full frontal force. His black socks are falling down. A glass of Coke tips precariously on an open art book whose bookmark-studded pages attest to the hours spent searching other artists’ work for ideas. Postcard reproductions of four master self-portraits—a Dürer, a Rembrandt, a van Gogh, a Picasso—are tacked in a vertical row along the right edge of his canvas, contrasting the lofty accomplishments of the European past to his limited American self, an identity indicated by the gilded bald eagle crowning his reflection in the mirror. (In reality, the mirror in Rockwell’s studio was eagle-less.)

  The joke lies in the comical perfection of the self-portrait resting on his easel. The artist has cast himself, in the easel self-portrait, as a self-possessed prince of the studio. His glasses are gone, and his expression is one of manly self-control and suaveness. He projects an absence of fear. Even his pipe seems more assured, rising from its once-dangling position into an erect horizontal. Triple Self-Portrait deserves to be seen as the artist’s manifesto. His “realism,” he is saying, has nothing to do with the reflection in the mirror. Art is not a mirrored version of reality. It is an invention, an idealization, a willful falsification. What makes Triple Self-Portrait so winning is that Rockwell outs himself as a maker of illusions, allowing the viewer to feel superior by seeing through his act of deceit.

  Tellingly, the lenses of the artist’s glasses are opaque—he can’t see out. In his visually incapacitated state, he debunks his own supposed powers of vision; he declines to embrace the popular myth of artists as heroic seers.

  * * *

  What was perhaps the most disturbing attack on Rockwell appeared in April 1960, just as the Post was about to run the last of the eight parts of his autobiography. Dwight Macdonald’s now-famous essay, “Masscult and Midcult,” was published in two parts in Partisan Review, the influential literary magazine. The essay, as the critic Louis Menand notes, “was not Macdonald at his most coherent or persuasive,”9 but it tends to be reissued and anthologized at regular intervals, perhaps out of nostalgia for an era when intellectuals were public figures who could afford to live in Manhattan.

  Briefly: Macdonald’s takedown of Rockwell came in the context of a sweeping denunciation of mass culture, which he believed contaminated the air around it. He refused to consider the possibility that a painting made for a wide audience might reflect artistic impulses. Moreover, he was the type of critic who would burn most anything to fuel an argument and he uses even Rockwell’s artistic sincerity against him. “There seem to be two main conditions for the successful production of Kitsch,” he writes. “One is that the producer must believe in what he is doing. A good example is Norman Rockwell.”10

  As many critics have since pointed out, Macdonald’s article is reminiscent of Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” which had appeared in Partisan Review a generation earlier and similarly argued that culture is an elite affair reserved for the happy few. While Greenberg divides culture into opposing halves (high and low) and emphasizes the unbridgeable distance between them, Macdonald focuses more on the spongy, everyone-onto-the-bus center—that is, middlebrow culture, or midcult as he called it, which he believes is wrecking cultural values.11

  Astoundingly, Macdonald initially wrote the article, in a shorter form, for The Saturday Evening Post. The magazine killed the piece over an editorial disagreement.12 The problem was that editor Ben Hibbs felt it was unfair for Macdonald to criticize The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine in his article as examples of middlebrow magazines without mentioning The New Yorker, where Macdonald was a staff writer and maintained an office. Asked to consider including The New Yorker, Macdonald declined.13

  Once he realized his article would be killed, Macdonald asked to be paid for it in full—$2,500. But he received only the kill fee, $1,000. On November 9 he composed several drafts of a long, grieved letter to Ben Hibbs: “I’ve waited a week to write this letter, not wanting to trust the heat of the moment. But I still feel ill-used.”14 Claiming he was capable of assessing The New Yorker despite his status as a staff writer, he charged that “the Post and not I is at fault and the Post owes me $1,500.”

  Journalists, as everyone knows, are supposed to avoid conflicts of interest, as well as the appearance of conflict. A critic who goes to great lengths to demolish the star illustrator at a magazine that killed his story and declined to issue a check for $1,50
0 he thought he was owed—this is a critic who has a conflict.

  But even if one were to give Macdonald the benefit of the doubt and assume that his opinions of Rockwell’s work were based on nothing besides the pure force of his taste and reasoning, his article is tainted by outlandish snobbishness. His pronouncements are sour and unkind. He is too much concerned with classification and categorization, and not enough with the pleasures of looking.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1960, almost a year after Mary’s death, Rockwell began dating Peggy Worthington Best, an artist herself and an old family friend. An attractive and charismatic divorcée in her late fifties, with dark hair and large glasses, she owned the Peggy Best Studio and Gallery. It occupied the ground floor of a light-blue clapboard house on Pine Street and its commodious front room served as the site of both art classes and exhibitions of contemporary art. The gallery also had a little alcove where visitors could sit and browse through exhibition catalogs and oversize art books and it was the closest thing Stockbridge had to an art school.

  Peggy Best had initially moved to Stockbridge with her two children in 1949, after separating from her husband, the editor Marshall Best. She was hired by Austen Riggs to start an art program. A warm, well-read woman whose searching ways led her to convert to Catholicism,15 she quickly befriended Mary Rockwell, among other patients. In May 1957, when Peggy opened her own studio-gallery and offered her first sketch class—which was not a class so much as a casual gathering where everyone drew from a (clothed) model seated in the center of the room—both Mary and Rockwell attended.16 “I go to Peggy Best’s class on Wednesday afternoon,” Rockwell had announced to the entire nation when he appeared on Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person in 1959. The statement brought her so much attention she had to hang curtains and close them when Rockwell was on the premises.