She could see that he had his dark moments, an “artistic temperament” that could bring on bouts of despair and distraction. “I doubt though,” she noted, “that many artists are so understanding and considerate and so humanly tempered by experience.”
In her letters to her friends from Milton, she mentioned his goodness, his house, even his help. An “extremely kind and attractive” woman came from Pittsfield three times a week to keep house and Mrs. Bracknell still came in every night to cook. Louie Lamone, “a big and able Lincolnesque man comes every Saturday and Sunday to do absolutely anything wanted—quite an order, since Norman suddenly wants a closet turned immediately into an open cupboard, all freshly painted and provided with magazines and objets d’art.”16
When people commented to Molly that she married late, she always said the same thing: “Norman was worth waiting 62 years for,” coyly slicing three years off her age.
If Molly was delighted to find herself married, to be rescued from the prospect of spinsterhood, Rockwell felt gratified as well. At last he had found his feminine ideal: an elderly schoolteacher who was unlikely to make sexual demands on him. Instead of sleeping in his bedroom, as Mary had done, Molly slept across the hall, in a small, sparsely furnished room.17 She satisfied his desire for intelligent companionship and asked little in return, perhaps because she had already enjoyed an estimable career and was not looking for excitement.
In an apologetic letter to Kate More, Molly confided: “Norman is frightened of meeting my Milton friends, and I can’t bring myself to put on pressure when he will probably be exhausted anyway. So I don’t know when we will get down there.”18 Although she wrote the letter only nine days into 1962, her calendar for the next couple of months was swamped with his professional obligations: “February and March are already shot to pieces by long-since promised trips to Philadelphia, Atlantic City, New York, Boston.”
If there was one aspect of his life he was capable of sharing, it was his business affairs, into which she entered enthusiastically. She answered his correspondence, got him out of assignments he had never intended to accept in the first place, and pushed away callers whom she believed would take advantage of his generosity. She loved travel as much as he did and trained over time to be his official photographer when they were away from Stockbridge.
Rockwell reads a toast to Erik Erikson on March 31, 1962, at a dinner for the Berkshire Art Center. Molly is on Rockwell’s right, Joan Erikson is on his left, and Peggy Best, who organized the event, is sitting to the left foreground, back to camera. (Courtesy of Jonathan Best)
His third marriage could not have come at a better time, coinciding as it did with the collapse of his career at The Saturday Evening Post.
TWENTY-SIX
ROCKWELL DEPARTS FROM THE POST
(1962 TO 1963)
In the early sixties, as its advertising continued to decline, The Saturday Evening Post tried to reinvent itself. Its editors joined with members of the business staff in devising changes intended to attract advertisers. They made changes to the magazine’s cover, to its typeface, and to its content, and then changes back to the way things had been before the changes ever started. They changed the staff and even the city in which the editorial staff was based, moving their offices from Philadelphia to New York.
The magazine, of course, had always been a champion of Republican politics and the American Way. But even that changed. In the spring of 1961 Robert Fuoss, who replaced Ben Hibbs as editor in chief, went so far as to publicly apologize for the magazine’s endorsement of Nixon during the presidential campaign. “If I had been editor last fall, the Post would have voted for Kennedy,” Fuoss told Time magazine.1
Could the Post recover? Unclear. Television had been siphoning advertising revenue away from magazines for about a decade. People in the magazine world, many of them shaken by the closing of long-established and seemingly invincible publications—Liberty magazine had shut down in 1950, and Collier’s in 1956—wondered if their industry had become unsustainable.
Circulation was not the problem. In 1961 the Post had more readers than ever. Its circulation surpassed that of any weekly magazine today—6.6 million paid subscribers, which placed it right behind Life (6.9 million subscribers) and Look (6.7 million subscribers). But advertisers were not about to place ads in all three magazines, and the Post, with its continued embrace of yesteryear, was out of step with the New Frontier.
In the summer of 1961 the top brass of the Post announced that a “new” Post would be coming in the fall. On August 14 Fuoss and Ken Stuart, the magazine’s art editor, gave a presentation at the Savoy Hilton Hotel, for “an audience of 264 top-level advertising executives,” as The New York Times reported. The idea was to offer the businessmen “a peek” at the new Post, and this is what was coming: “Innovation in art work accompanying the articles, which will reflect the ‘feeling’ of a story instead of illustrating an episode—i.e. a ‘clinch scene.’ Some of the art work will be considerably more abstract than anything that has appeared in the magazine.”2
Interesting that this was considered progress, a selling point. The magazine thought it could attract advertisers by claiming a devotion to abstract art, by banishing from its pages the barbershops and drugstore counters and the reassuring light of storefronts, the small-town settings where Rockwell’s figures had flourished for four decades. In the place of realism, the magazine was promoting art about “feeling,” the implication being that art tied to a realistic setting was somehow less emotionally affecting than an image of a red rectangle or a cerulean square that made no reference to the world beyond its own edges. It says something about the rhetoric attached to abstract painting, and its fashionable status circa 1961, that an institution as conservative as the Post was promising its readers more abstraction.
It’s true that the younger generation viewed the quest for facts as passé compared to the quest for feeling. The popular art movements of that era—Abstract Expressionism, Beat poetry, bop, and hard jazz—glorified impulse and improvisation. Rockwell’s work was rooted in meticulous, even persnickety observation, the scrutiny of particulars. And what no one seemed to recognize is this: looking is a form of passion if you look long and hard enough.
* * *
It was against this backdrop that Rockwell created his masterpiece, The Connoisseur (see color insert). It takes us inside an art museum, where an older gentleman is shown from the back as he holds his fedora in his hand and contemplates a “drip” painting by Jackson Pollock. His gray hair, gray suit, and general air of quietude offer a sharp contrast with the crackling intensity of the Pollock.
Unlike most other covers, The Connoisseur doesn’t rest on a joke and its meaning is pleasantly elusive. The man gazing at the Pollock is a mystery man whose face remains hidden and whose thoughts are not available to us. Perhaps he is a stand-in for Rockwell, contemplating not only an abstract painting, but the inevitable generational change that will lead to his own extinction. Some writers have suggested that he is turned away to conceal his rancor over the growing popularity of abstract painting. But Rockwell had nothing against the Abstract Expressionists. “If I were young, I would paint that way myself,” he said in a brief note that ran inside the magazine.
At the time he made the comment, Rockwell could not have imagined that his work would one day be collected by some of the same museums and individuals who also collect Abstract Expressionism. Pollock had died in 1956, in a car wreck in East Hampton, New York, and his death at age forty-four seemed to seal his reputation as a renegade. In a way, Rockwell and Pollock represent opposite sides of the same coin: Rockwell exemplifies the American desire for safety and security as much as Pollock exemplifies the opposing need for flight and rebellion.
The Connoisseur required, among other things, that Rockwell paint a fake Pollock as part of his preparatory process. He had seen the famous photographs in Life of Pollock in his denim jacket, tossing paint from a stick onto a sheet of canvas that had
been laid on the floor. Now Rockwell tried to duplicate Pollock’s vaunted “drip” technique. As photographs reveal, he placed his canvas on the floor and created an imitation Pollock. He knew he was putting on a show and saw the inherent paradox of it—meticulously re-creating an image of free-wheeling spontaneity.
Pollock, in photographs, is invariably shown in his paint-splattered shoes. A photograph of Rockwell, by contrast, shows him padding around the studio in his stocking feet. Presumably he was trying to avoid getting paint on his shoes.
* * *
On September 16, 1961, the Post introduced its redesigned self, at a new price: twenty cents, a five-cent increase. To help readers acclimate, Rockwell did a witty cover illustration portraying graphic designer Herb Lubalin from the back, admiring the new logotype he has created for the Post. Everything about him, including the Plycraft bentwood chair in which he is seated, attests to his youth and sophistication. It reminds us, among other things, that Rockwell was a master of the human back and was able to convey character without showing a face.
The Post, as he knew it, vanished in June 1962, when the family of Cyrus Curtis lost control of the magazine and corporate raiders took over. Ken Stuart, the magazine’s longtime art editor,3 was fired that month. “I left a dozen approved Rockwell cover sketches behind me, but the new editors decided not to use them,” Stuart recalled. “Instead they assigned Norman to a series of portraits of celebrities.”4 Actually, he was assigned to produce portraits of politicians and statesmen and only one celeb (Jack Benny), but Stuart’s anger is justified nonetheless.
For decades, millions of Americans had looked forward to taking in the mail and finding a Rockwell cover. But now, when the Post arrived, one might find a color photograph of Elizabeth Taylor in emphatic eyeliner, decked out as Cleopatra in the film of the same title. Or a tightly framed close-up of Marlon Brando in the British-style naval bicorn he wore in Mutiny on the Bounty.
Rockwell had celebrated the small and local, not the global and cinematic. But the emphasis on the common man that was central to America’s sense of self in twentieth-century America gave way, in the television-centered 1960s, to the worship of celebrities, whose life stories and marital crises replaced those of the proverbial next-door neighbor as subjects of interest and gossip. Television provided its audience with a level of proximity to celebrity that could not be matched by magazines, whose fortunes continued to decline.
* * *
It was in this context that Robert Sherrod, the latest editor of the Post, asked Rockwell to join him on an international reporting project. Sherrod, a soft-spoken native of Georgia and former war correspondent, dozed through office meetings and was eager to return to the peripatetic life of a reporter. In 1962 he decided to write a series of in-depth profiles of foreign statesmen—Nehru in India, Tito in Yugoslavia, Nasser in Egypt—that would require extensive interviewing. He asked Rockwell to come along to produce a definitive portrait of each man.
It was, in its way, an enviable gig, providing Rockwell with expense-paid travel and privileged entry into the armored quarters of heads of state. Moreover, he and Sherrod had both just remarried and Molly Rockwell and Margaret Sherrod accompanied their husbands on the trips. But such perks were not enough to compensate for the loss of everything he loved. After forty-six years at the Post, he was no longer making stand-alone illustrations. He was no longer a storyteller, but a “portraitist,” as the Post announced, shoehorning him into an identity that did not fit.
Rockwell’s last cover for the Post appeared on May 25, 1963. It was a portrait of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, whom Rockwell later described as vain, a playboy enamored of his handsome face. During the sketching session in Cairo, Rockwell wanted him to hold his head a certain way and appear thoughtful, but Nasser ignored the stage directions. He kept turning to face Rockwell and flashing his broad smile, to display “his wonderful white teeth.” It was only when he was back at his easel in Stockbridge that Rockwell got to close Nasser’s mouth and arrange his face in sharp profile, like a figure in ancient Egyptian art.
However compromising his relationship with the Post had become, the idea of leaving, of “cutting the knot,” induced in Rockwell something verging on terror. His acquiescence in the Post’s stratagems frustrated him, but he wasn’t sure he was capable of making a break. On May 19, unable to sleep, he got out of bed at 3:00 a.m. and took “2 more pills.” Feeling frazzled, he jotted six pages of notes in which he tried make sense of his situation. For a moment it all seemed clear: he longed to leave the Post, whose new editorial regime had treated him shabbily, and take up meaningful work—he was thinking, in particular, of doing a painting to honor the Peace Corps, which had been founded a few years earlier to send volunteers to third world countries.
“All of this debasement, depression, unsatisfaction. Isn’t this the answer—If necessary, die doing something worthwhile. A worthy end … not humiliating fear and groveling. Have I got the sustaining courage to cut it though? Cut the knot myself not die groveling.”5
His notes mention Harris Wofford, the future U.S. senator who oversaw the Peace Corps in Ethiopia and Africa and who had encouraged Rockwell to consider doing a painting in tribute to the organization. As Rockwell noted: “Isn’t a Peace Corps picture the answer? Youthful dedication. Something bigger than yourself. Maybe not art but my only answer.”
Molly’s belief in his work emboldened him, and he addressed her in his mind as his stream of notes continued: “You will help, be with me, admire me, I have the courage with you … Above and beyond all I have faith in you. Your steadfastness and courage. Have I the steadfastness? With you.”
Three weeks later, feeling more certain about the required course of action, Rockwell wrote to Sherrod and asked to be excused from future Post assignments. He cited health reasons. He told his editor that he had returned from Egypt “completely exhausted,” and was still recovering.6 “I write this letter only after a lot of thought and consultation with my doctor, Frank Paddock, and my friend Dr. Howard, who is a psychiatrist on the senior staff of the Riggs Foundation.”
In September, when the Post’s new art editor, Asger Jerrild, contacted him about illustrating an article on the Bible, Rockwell declined without hesitation. “I have come to the conviction,” he wrote, “that the work I now want to do no longer fits into the Post scheme.”7 It was the closest thing he wrote to a letter of resignation.
He had published 323 paintings on the cover of the Post, whose editors did not bother to announce or even acknowledge his departure. Neither did he. He was sixty-nine years old and, in interviews, he declined to cast stones at the Post. He had never felt comfortable expressing anger; in this case, it certainly would have been justified. He could have pointed out, had he been a combative person or even a nominally confident one, that the Post’s readers were still 7 million strong, and they consisted mostly of older readers who loved his work. He could have argued that, of all the contributors to the Post, he was the only one whose reputation had broadened into what marketing people call a brand. He was, in short, the only enduring creation of The Saturday Evening Post. When he left, he didn’t get a cent.
* * *
On the morning of November 19 Rockwell appeared again on the Today show. The segment was designed to showcase portraits of the Kennedys as well as their creators. Rockwell was joined by Philippe Halsman, the French photojournalist, and Milt Caniff, whose comic strip Steve Canyon included a character (Lt. Peter Pipper) fashioned after the president.
No footage of the show survives, but it is easy enough to imagine Rockwell on the set. You can bet money that he wore a bow tie and one of his tweedy jackets. A pipe—as integral to his body as his right hand—would have been present. Over a period of maybe fifteen minutes, there would have been some questions about President Kennedy and Jackie, some comments, general laughter, the sound of accomplished men chuckling at each other’s piquant observations. Maybe even chuckling a little too loudly in acknowledg
ment of the gratitude they felt at that moment, when they were on national television reminiscing about their personal encounters with the U.S. president and feeling unexpectedly connected to something larger than their anxious and itchy creative selves.
Three days later, the convivial banter on American television stopped abruptly. And television screens filled up with the never-to-be-forgotten images of the open-top limousine proceeding slowly through the streets of Dallas. The president and his wife were in the backseat, smiling gamely at the crowds, when the car delivered them into the crosshairs of a waiting assassin.
* * *
On December 14, 1963, The Saturday Evening Post put out a memorial issue to honor a slain president. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., his trusted adviser, wrote a moving eulogy and there was also an interview with the new president, Lyndon Johnson, to whom Americans were trying to reconcile themselves. Unlike competing magazines, which ran grisly photographs of the assassination, the Post went with an illustration—it reprinted the Rockwell portrait of JFK that had run in 1960, before he was elected president. There he was again, with his blue eyes and thick hair and boyish Kennedy grin that seemed to promise that all would be well in America.
Rockwell sent a charcoal study to Jacqueline Kennedy as a gift. “Dear Mr. Rockwell,” she responded, “I was deeply touched to receive your beautiful charcoal drawing of The President. It is an excellent likeness and a portrait that I shall especially treasure.”8
TWENTY-SEVEN
RUBY BRIDGES
(1964)
In the end, it was liberating for him to leave The Saturday Evening Post. At the age of sixty-nine, he could have retreated into retirement, or taken up golf, or made a fortune accepting commissions from the likes of Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope, whose portraits he had recently completed. Instead, he entered a new phase of his career. Call it his “late period.” Starting in January 1964, when his first illustration appeared in Look magazine, Rockwell began treating his work as a vehicle for progressive causes. Kennedy had been buried in Arlington National Cemetery and President Johnson had taken up the cause of civil rights as if it had been his mission all along. Rockwell, too, would help drive the Kennedy agenda forward. You might say he became its premier if unofficial illustrator.
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 39
