American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  * * *

  Norman Rockwell: A Sixty Year Retrospective opened at the Brooklyn Museum on March 22, 1972, and stayed up for two months. It was accompanied by a glossy catalog of the same title, which acknowledged up front that the show had been organized not by the museum, but by Danenberg. Abrams stood to profit from the show as well. In addition to publishing the exhibition catalog, he conveniently became a Rockwell collector moments before the show opened, acquiring a cache of Rockwell paintings whose value was likely to rise as a direct result of the exhibition.28 (No painting ever went down in value by being put on view at an art museum.) Six paintings in the exhibition catalog were identified as belonging to the “Collection Harry N. Abrams,” among them The Flirts, Weighing In, and A Time for Greatness, which depicts JFK in a room jammed with delegates, receiving the acclamation of his party at the Democratic National Convention. Abrams presumably acquired the paintings with the intention of selling them and, over time, the Rockwells he lent to the show would find their way into the first-rate art collections of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

  Although Rockwell missed the opening reception, the PR department at the museum was eager to have him pay a visit. A staff publicist drew up a memo entitled, in earnest, “Luring Norman Rockwell to the Brooklyn Museum.”29 The memo noted, “If we can get him down here for one day, we can arrange a Channel 5 interview … perhaps a Gabe Pressman interview.”

  Rockwell never did see the sixty-year retrospective. Perhaps he and Molly felt uneasy about the commercial thrust of the show, which was less an homage to his artistry than his potential salability. Or perhaps his absence was more of a reflection of a general exhaustion with the madding crowd. On some days he felt as if his memory was going and it did not take much to make him feel overmatched.

  * * *

  The most important review of the retrospective appeared long after the show closed at the Brooklyn Museum. Peter Schjeldahl, a poet-turned-art-critic in his early thirties who lived on St. Marks Place in the East Village and was known as a champion of new art, reviewed the show in his Sunday column in The New York Times on June 24, 1973, beneath the amusing headline STILL ON THE SIDE OF THE BOY SCOUTS—BUT WHY NOT?30

  By then the retrospective had traveled to nine museums and become “an abbreviated remnant” of its original self. Schjeldahl saw it at its final stop, the Danenberg gallery on Madison Avenue. His review was groundbreaking, a litany of firsts—the first nonhostile review of Rockwell’s work by a hip young art critic, the first to find an exhibition catalog as “irresistible as a can of salted peanuts,” the first to acknowledge the commonalities between Rockwell and the seventies art scene, one of them being that Rockwell’s method of rendering from projected photographs was similar to that of the Photo-Realists, whom Schjeldahl described as “the most radical wing of current American painting.”

  Nimbly dismissing a line of (unnamed) critics going back at least to Clement Greenberg and snobs who believed that art should be limited to the happy few, Schjeldahl calmly concluded that “the gap between Rockwell and modernism is just a gap, not a battle line.”

  His comment implicitly acknowledged the respect that Rockwell commanded among a new generation of artists. Photo-Realists, Pop artists, and at least one stray Abstract Expressionist had seen his debut gallery show in 1968 and come away impressed. Schjeldahl was personally acquainted with de Kooning and later recalled visiting him, circa 1972, at the artist’s studio-barn in East Hampton. Noticing a hefty new monograph lying on a table, he asked with more than a bit of surprise: “Rockwell?”

  De Kooning replied in his accented English, “Yes, Rockwell,” and proceeded to open the book and show him something. He handed Schjeldahl a magnifying glass and made him look at the almost infinitesimal but energetic brushwork in the corner of one reproduction. “See?” de Kooning said, “Abstract Expressionism!”31

  THIRTY-THREE

  “BUT I WANT TO GO TO MY STUDIO”

  (1972 TO 1978)

  In 1972 Rockwell was well aware that he was losing his memory. He often felt confused and discombobulated. It has been widely reported that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, but the only reliable test for determining Alzheimer’s is a biopsy of brain tissue; no autopsy was performed when Rockwell died. It does not diminish his disease to refer to it as plain, lowercase dementia.1 However it is characterized, it descended like a dense fog and he drifted in and out of it.

  Magazine editors, aware of his condition, no longer called much. Nor did the art directors at advertising agencies who had pursued him for years. But there were a few people who wanted to have their portraits painted. In the past, Rockwell had declined such requests; there was not enough time for them. But Molly now welcomed the interruptions, so long as the sitters could afford his fee, which started at around $5,000. While some of Rockwell’s friends criticized Molly for committing him to unchallenging work, she did, to her credit, bring in assignments that enabled him to keep working for most of the last six years of his life. It was not a glorious conclusion to his career, but it helped stave off despair.

  And so they came, American icons who wanted to have their portrait done by an American icon. In August 1972 Rockwell was contacted by the golfer Arnold Palmer, who had been hoping for a full-length likeness. “I can only do a head and shoulders,” Rockwell replied.2 Two weeks later, Arnold and Winnie Palmer traveled to Stockbridge by private jet and brought along an entourage of Winnie’s awestruck female friends, housewives from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where Palmer’s operation was based. The portrait session lasted for a few hours, during which time Rockwell told Palmer to turn his head this way and that as Louie Lamone took photographs that would be used as reference material.

  In one of the photographs from that day, Rockwell and Palmer are standing outside his studio, straddling bicycles. Palmer is wearing a spiffy golfer’s cardigan. He is in his prime, his early forties, a well-built man with massive shoulders. Rockwell is waif-thin and has wavy white hair. He stares dully at the camera. No more humor in the eyes.

  An inexplicable chunk of time—two years—elapsed before Rockwell finished the painting. It is a decidedly imperfect object that shows Palmer dressed in a white button-down shirt, with a disproportionately large seventies-style collar rising up like an iceberg from the oceanic surface of his chest. His carmine-red cardigan is unbuttoned at the top. The background, which appears unfinished, consists of three horizontal bands of green. It consists, in other words, of enough green to cover a golf course. Palmer loved it and hung it outside his office.

  Dementia, it is generally believed, damages the portions of the brain required for forming and storing new memories and planning complex tasks. By 1973 Rockwell still had enough motor control to hold a pencil and draw with relative fluidity. But his work depended on a high degree of organization and he no longer had the patience or concentration to undertake the series of descriptive refinements his work required of him. When he lost that, he pretty much lost everything, because no form had ever moved him until he captured it with as much verisimilitude as a pencil would allow.

  Dementia, of course, does not necessarily prevent an artist from working. Willem de Kooning is the famous example of an artist whose dementia was accompanied by a remarkable period of fecundity. When he was in his eighties, he produced a group of paintings that were hailed as genuinely inventive. They spawned intense questions about the link between a faltering brain and creativity. Some doctors speculated that the deficit in semantic memory that characterizes Alzheimer’s was offset by backup memory systems, such as working, procedural, or episodic memory.

  In Rockwell’s case, there was no final eruption of creativity, only a slow and frustrating decline. Perhaps abstract painters afflicted with dementia have a better chance of continuing their work than realist painters do. An abstract painter can mold space intuitively and go wherever his hand takes him, whereas a realist painter is obliged to track already-existent structures, to make trees that look like trees a
nd not like sailboats.

  On September 18, 1972, just two weeks after Palmer’s visit, Rockwell was visited by Frank Sinatra. A photograph that appeared in The Berkshire Eagle shows the artist in the doorway of his studio, pipe dangling, holding open the screen door as he shakes Sinatra’s hand.3 Rockwell appears tired, but Sinatra is grinning and visibly pumped. He has just flown in from Palm Springs to sit for a portrait. He was fifty-six years old, a generation younger than Rockwell. “When I found out Rockwell was going to paint me, I felt like I was dipped in gin,” Sinatra later noted in a letter, using a Vegasoid metaphor to express his delight.4

  Since Rockwell was too weak at this point to leave his home for out-of-town portrait sessions, celebrities from all over the country made their way to western Massachusetts to sit for him. If they stayed overnight, Jane Fitzpatrick, who owned the Red Lion Inn, provided accommodations. She later recalled seeing John Wayne on the premises. “What a wonderful guest,” she said. “I saw him walking down the front steps on a Sunday morning, buckling on a gun. He was nice to all the kids, whereas Frank Sinatra was just awful. He came into town in a long black limousine, spent twenty minutes over at Norman Rockwell’s posing for pictures, and left.”5

  Colonel Harland D. Sanders, by her estimation, was an exemplary guest. “He stayed at the Red Lion Inn and gave out Kentucky Fried Chicken gift certificates to the kids he ran into.”6

  * * *

  Rockwell had never been nostalgic for his own childhood and the process of aging did not change him in that regard. He had only one sibling and he did not go down to Florida for his brother’s last illness or funeral. In 1955 Jarvis had written that astounding letter to his brother, the one in which he lamented not knowing where Norman lived or where his sons went to college. When Jarvis died, on May 9, 1973, the brothers had not spoken for a long time. Rockwell jotted on his calendar: “Jarvis died in Florida, Dick”—who was Jarvis’s son—“called and told me.”

  Although Rockwell declined to articulate his feelings over his brother’s death, he did make a painting during this period that seems to hint at their complicated relationship. He referred to it as his Reverend and Indian picture. It would consume him for many years and might be seen as a symbolic portrait of Rockwell (the prissy Reverend) and his brother (the strapping Indian).

  Rockwell began the painting in 1972, but a year later, had made almost no progress on it. As he noted on his calendar page for May 12, 1973: “Very mixed up today but I will work it out. Tomorrow I get to work on Reverend and Indian picture. Bewildered.”

  The painting, which remains untitled and unfinished, is based loosely on an incident in Stockbridge history. It shows the Rev. John Sargeant in his house, a Colonial-era gentleman sitting on a hardwood chair across from his visitor, Chief Konkapot, a bare-chested Indian in fringed white pants. In his ruffled white shirt and buckled shoes, Sargeant appears diminutive and almost doll-like beside the Indian chief. In the fireplace behind them, embers glow and the stones are stained with soot, suggesting that the two men have been talking for a while. These are familiar themes in Rockwell’s work: two men, one disproportionately larger than the other, bond in a realm sealed off from women. In a typical Rockwellian gesture involving an onlooker, Sargeant’s wife, Abigail, in a little white bonnet, peeks in on the scene from the next room, her face a mask of worry.

  He turned eighty on February 3, 1974. To avoid the inevitable fuss, the people traipsing into his studio with oversize cakes, he and Molly took refuge in Little Dix, in the British Virgin Islands, on the long, skinny island of Virgin Gorda, which they had first visited four years earlier as guests of friends. Rockwell did some sketching on the trip and he could still get a likeness with ease. A small drawing of a rocky shoreline looks as if it was done quickly, with a soft pencil.

  Rockwell’s last painting portrays a scene from local history, and brings together a missionary and an Indian.

  One evening, he set off on a bicycle ride by himself. After the sun went down and the hotel gates were locked for the night, Molly went out in search of him—she found him sitting on a rock, exhausted. He seemed to have no idea of how to get back to the hotel. His bicycle was still at the bottom of the ditch where it had landed after he steered off the edge of a rutted road in the half-light of the evening.

  Once he returned to Stockbridge, Rockwell tried resuming his bicycling on a curtailed basis. “Took first bike ride down to Town Hall only,” he noted on March 11. The next day, he was bicycling again when he took another fall, this one very serious. He apparently fractured his pelvis. He lay flat in bed for much of March and April, under the care of private nurses. When he stood up, his legs felt weak and he worried about falling over. A stationary exercise bicycle was installed in the back of his studio, bolted to the floor. To get around, he began relying on a walker.

  * * *

  One day, Rockwell received a phone call from David Bowie, the British rocker, who was in his late twenties and about to release the album Young Americans. Although he had never met Rockwell, he needed a portrait for the cover and was hoping Rockwell could produce one quickly. It was Molly who answered the phone. “I am sorry,” she said in a voice that struck him as elderly and quavering, “but Norman needs at least six months for his portraits.” Bowie was impressed to learn that an artist could spend that much time on a single painting. “What a craftsman,” he recalled later. “Too bad I don’t have the same painstaking passion. I’d rather just get my ideas out of my system as fast as I can.”7

  As Rockwell’s condition deteriorated, Molly hired a few people who lent a certain cheer to the house. In June 1974 she chose a new director for the Old Corner House: David Wood, a former English teacher at the Lenox School for Boys, who was in his early fifties. He moved into the little apartment above the garage that Rockwell had offered in previous years to various young doctors and trainees at Austen Riggs. As much as Rockwell relished the company of doctors, Molly preferred the company of teachers. She was gladdened immeasurably by Wood’s presence and proposed to him that they cowrite her long-postponed grammar. “She was always irritated by the quality of grammar books,” Wood recalled, although her own book never did get done.

  Evenings, around six, when Rockwell hobbled in from the studio and sat down for tea in the library, he and Molly were now joined by Wood. “Tea,” of course, was shorthand for an event that typically involved one and possibly two whiskey sours consumed in front of a crackling fire. “Well, professor,” Rockwell used to say to him, perking up, “what went on today?” And Wood would chat about developments at the Old Corner House, which was still a very modest museum. His first goal was to buy back The Problem We All Live With, the Ruby Bridges painting. It had been sold by Bernie Danenberg, for $15,000 at the time of Rockwell’s gallery show in 1968. Danenberg said he could get the painting back—for $35,000. Molly wrote the check.

  That summer, Wood supervised a group of new volunteers at the museum. He thought they should meet Rockwell and see the sacred space of his studio. “The guides felt this added a dimension to their work,” he later recalled, “to be able to get into his workplace and actually meet the man. Because he never came to the Old Corner House, or almost never.”

  * * *

  In December 1974 Molly hired a new cook, Virginia Loveless, a graceful woman with three grown children. Just a few weeks earlier, she had finalized her divorce from David Loveless, a potter who oversaw the art-therapy program at Austen Riggs and who had run off with the weaving teacher. With the collapse of her marriage, and her unattached status echoed uncomfortably by her last name, Virginia Loveless, at forty-six, was relieved to obtain the job of Rockwell’s cook. It provided her with an identity as well as a new circle of acquaintances whom she found very likable if admittedly elderly. She was inordinately appreciative of both Norman and Molly, so much so that she would stay on at the house after he died, to become Molly’s caretaker and companion.

  True, the cooking part of her job was not exactly easy. She quickly
realized that Rockwell was a fussy eater and adhered to a dietary regimen that left no room for experimentation or even normal variety. Every morning he had the same thing: two soft-boiled eggs, cooked for precisely six minutes. He would chop them in a bowl, along with his toast.

  His lunchtime menu had barely evolved from the time he was a schoolboy. It didn’t matter whether it was Monday or Tuesday or Easter Sunday; for lunch he liked a cup of Campbell’s tomato soup and a peanut butter sandwich with raspberry jam on toasted whole wheat bread. For dessert he would have an oatmeal cookie, just one. Loveless baked the cookies in medium-sized batches and kept them in the freezer.

  “He was very difficult to feed,” she commented.8 “He didn’t like anything with too many things in it. Nothing too complex. No casseroles or sauces.” He made an exception for lamb stew, Craig Claiborne’s recipe, which she considered her best entrée. It was the one she usually prepared when relatives or other guests came for dinner. On those occasions, she might serve ice cream for dessert, though Rockwell liked only one kind, Breyer’s vanilla.

  After the dinner plates had been washed and before she left for the day, Virginia Loveless would carry a silver tray laden with coffee and trimmings upstairs and leave it in the hall outside Rockwell’s bedroom. She had already measured out the coffee grounds and cups of water, and he or Molly had only to turn on the coffee pot the next morning to set everything percolating. She made sure to lay out “enough sugar lumps for Norman,”9 who preferred his beverages on the sweet side. As often as not he found himself up at first light, eager to get going, and he would go fetch Molly from across the hall, from her room with a narrow bed.

  Molly was sturdy and adroit and uncomplaining. She was the one seated behind the steering wheel whenever she and Norman went out for a drive in the green Chevy. Earlier that year, when Pitter, the part-beagle, died, Molly visited her friend Elizabeth Blodgett Hall, the founder of Simon’s Rock College and an amateur dog breeder, and came home with a new puppy10—Sid, a corgi, in keeping with her predilection for all things British. It was she, and not her husband, who walked Sid, in the morning and after supper.