Rockwell, as always, kept himself free for his work, even when he could no longer work. She could see that he was frustrated, but tried not to dwell on disappointments. “Norman is slipping into more and more confusion,” she wrote to a friend on April 16, 1975, “and it’s harder to avoid irritation, though it passes very quickly.”11
* * *
In his last years, Rockwell was also afflicted with emphysema, a lung disease likely brought on by his pipe-smoking. It saddled him with colds and coughs that were hard to shake. Few people knew what Rockwell was facing, in part because he was portrayed in the media as a paragon of elderly stamina. GOING STRONG AT 82, a headline announced wishfully in the February 23, 1976, issue of People magazine.12 In a photograph, he sits in a wheelchair at his easel, leaning forward, implicitly avid. His painting arm—the right one—is extended to add a detail to a portrait in progress. The caption emphasizes his American-style industry and resourcefulness. He still paints “seven days a week,” using a wheelchair to move about his studio.
Although the article acknowledged some of the inconveniences of aging—it reported that Rockwell had become a bit “reclusive” since he stopped riding his bicycle two years ago—it did not mention his memory problems. Only that Molly sometimes mangled recipes. “We always have a whisky sour,” she notes amusingly of their evening ritual, “and I always forget one ingredient.”
Rockwell did not say much and his comments were a bit disjointed. Oddly or not, he mentioned Billy Payne out of the blue. “He posed for all three boys,” Rockwell intoned, referring to Boy with Baby Carriage, his very first cover for the Post. Billy Payne had posed for the shamed schoolboy who pushes the baby carriage and also for the two chubby bullies laughing at him. Suddenly, Rockwell is thinking of Billy, the beautiful New Rochelle boy who tragically tumbled from a third-story window ledge at the age of fifteen. The boy whose death he almost never mentioned.
In one of the photographs accompanying the article, Norman and Molly are shown from the back hobbling along the broad upstairs hallway in the house, arms around each other. Sid, their adorable corgi, sits at the top of the stairs with his head turned, watching them intently, ears perked, as if waiting to lead them downstairs.
By then, Rockwell’s illness had progressed to such a degree that he had trouble recalling events that had transpired within the hour. He suffered from “a really severe lack of memory,” as Molly wrote to her old friend from Milton Academy, Kitty More.13 “He still goes regularly to the studio, but tends to do and undo minor details, and to put off major and important matters, and this, of course, makes him as distressed as the rest of us.”
He took his last trip in May 1976, when he and Molly flew to Rome to visit his son Peter. David Wood accompanied them. On the Pan Am flight out of New York, a stewardess mentioned that she would love to have Rockwell’s autograph but was prohibited by company policy from asking favors of customers. So Wood asked on her behalf. Rockwell drew a wonderful sketch of a dog and signed his name and gave it to her.
Somewhere, at the margins of his consciousness, he might have been aware of honors and awards that continued to come his way. He did show up when the town selectmen declared a holiday, Norman Rockwell Day, and held a parade on May 23. He watched the proceedings from a white-wicker chair atop a flatbed truck, alongside Molly and two of his sons, Jarvis and Tom, who by then were living nearby with their wives and children.
He still went into the studio every day but he no longer felt comfortable painting. He puttered around, listened to classical music on the radio, neatened up the drawers where he kept his brushes. “He would clean and do everything … anything to stop painting or not to paint,” Louie Lamone later recalled.14 He still washed his brushes with Ivory soap, and once, when he was shown an old painting of his that the museum had purchased—Checkers, with its wonderful clown—Rockwell told Louie, “It looks awfully dark. Let’s go out and scrub it with Ivory soap.”15
Lamone would say, “‘Norman, you have got to get these paintings done.’ He had one painting there that he had been working on, the Rev. Sargeant, and he never did finish that. He would keep saying, ‘Well, I have not sold this thing.’ Finally, one day, he told me that he was kind of afraid to paint, which shocked me.”
* * *
November 2, 1976, was Election Day. President Gerald Ford was running against a newcomer from Georgia, Jimmy Carter. Norman and Molly went to the polls and before he entered the voting booth he turned to her and said, “Now who is it I am supposed to vote for?”16
In January 1977, just ten days before leaving office, President Ford awarded Rockwell the nation’s highest civilian honor. He was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his “vivid and affectionate portraits of our country and ourselves.” Rockwell would have been gratified to join Joe DiMaggio and his long-ago detractor, the poet and and cultural custodian Archibald MacLeish, at the ceremony in the East Room of the White House. Unable to travel to Washington to accept the medal, he sent his son Jarvis in his place.
Every few days that fall, Rockwell would announce to Molly that this was the day he was going back to the studio to finish the painting of the Reverend John Sargeant and Chief Konkapot; it was still resting on his easel. But the trip along the flagstone walkway from his house to his studio was no longer easily navigated. It required the effort of two people to maneuver his wheelchair along the path, especially when there was ice underfoot.17
Lamone left his longtime job working as Rockwell’s studio assistant early in 1977. He believed that Rockwell wanted him to stay, but there wasn’t much for him to do. Probably no one worshiped Rockwell more than Lamone, who once said, “He was a prince. They don’t make them any better.”18
Another winter came and went. The spring of 1978 arrived, by which time he was cared for by around-the-clock nurses. But he was still insistent about going out to the studio. Wood recalled a disturbing afternoon when he and Molly pushed Rockwell in his wheelchair through the yard, unlocked the door of his red-barn studio, and let themselves in. The room was immaculate, the paint tubes and brushes in their proper places, but the air was chilly and pervaded with the exaggerated stillness of a shut-down establishment. Rockwell sat for a while and appeared to survey the contents of the room. It held some of his fondest memories, but sadly, he could no longer access them, and the room itself had in fact become terra incognita.
“But I want to go to my studio,” he said.19
* * *
He died that autumn, on November 8, 1978, at home in Stockbridge. It was late on a Wednesday, close to midnight. His cause of death was officially given as emphysema. He was eighty-four years old. Neither Molly nor his sons realized it was time to gather at his side, so no one was with him at the time. “Norman died peacefully in bed and asleep, just as the nurses were changing shift,” Molly wrote to a friend. “We were all thankful. He had very little physical pain, only the pain of weakening strength and the inability to communicate.”20
For the rest of the week, flags in Stockbridge flew at half-mast. The funeral was held on Saturday afternoon and shops along Main Street closed from two to three. The whole town, it seemed, descended on St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, which could accommodate only a few hundred people. The sky was overcast, but the air was unseasonably warm for a November day, and outside the church, a crowd estimated at four hundred people stood silently, paying their respects, until the service ended. It lasted thirty minutes, which some felt was surprisingly brief. But then Rockwell had never been eager to spend time in church.
The bells tolled as the crowd streamed out of St. Paul’s on that autumn afternoon, one of those days when color seems to have been drained from the world. Rockwell’s sons and his daughters-in-law and his seven grandchildren walked west along Main Street, beneath the giant elm trees, toward the entrance to the Stockbridge Cemetery. None of them had been asked to speak at the funeral. Molly, who had planned the service, bestowed the honor on only one person: her friend David Wood, who stood up
and read a poem that Rockwell liked, “Abou Ben Adhem” by Leigh Hunt, a nineteenth-century Englishman. It was not a service that left Rockwell’s sons feeling very included, but then Molly was not their mother, just their busy and sometimes insensitive stepmother. The boys hardly needed to be reminded that the world they inhabited was not the one shining forth from their father’s work, but the real world, where people don’t always notice you or care about your feelings.
It was, in the end, Rockwell’s great theme: the possibility that Americans might pause for a few seconds and notice each other. The people in his paintings—the daring schoolboys and rumpled old men, the black schoolgirl in New Orleans and the white schoolgirl with a black eye, the young runaway seated in the diner, and bride-to-be in the yellow dress standing on her toes as she signs her marriage license—they all require the presence of another pair of eyes to complete their story. The interested gaze might belong to someone eating lunch in a diner, or a neighbor, or to anyone at all who cares enough to interrupt what they are doing and glance up.
* * *
Norman Rockwell had never been enamored of farewells, especially of the flowery sort. Friends who had known him in his earlier years, whether in New Rochelle or in Arlington, Vermont, had puzzled over the abruptness with which he moved away and his failure to come back and visit. Unlike the figures in his work, who have all the time in the world to linger and talk, he was a man given to sudden flight. He died much as he lived—essentially alone, with no time for love, and no time to say goodbye.
Boy with Baby Carriage, 1916, was Rockwell’s first cover for The Saturday Evening Post. Billy Payne posed for all three boys.
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Gary Cooper as The Texan, 1930
(Collection of Steven Spielberg)
Movie Starlet and Reporters, 1936
(Collection of Steven Spielberg)
Freedom from Want, 1943
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Tattoo Artist, 1944
(Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York)
Shuffleton’s Barbershop, 1950
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Marriage License, 1955
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
The Connoisseur, 1962
(Collection of Steven Spielberg)
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES
MR
Mary Barstow Rockwell
My Adventures
Norman Rockwell as told to Thomas Rockwell, Norman Rockwell: My Adventures as an Illustrator (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960)
NR
Norman Rockwell
NRM
Archives of the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA
INTRODUCTION: WELCOME TO ROCKWELL LAND
1. Deborah Solomon, “In Praise of Bad Art,” The New York Times Magazine, January 24, 1999, pp. 32–35.
2. Harold Johnson, “Why Parsley?” The Boston Sunday Globe, September 5, 1948, p. 43.
3. Kai Erikson, e-mail to the author, August 8, 2012.
4. NR, letter to Dr. Robert Knight, January 13, 1955, fMS Am 2249, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
5. My Adventures, p. 49.
6. Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 391.
1. THE BIRD MAN OF YONKERS (1830 TO 1888)
1. Donald Walton, A Rockwell Portrait: An Intimate Biography (Kansas City, MO: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1978), pp. 29–30.
2. NR, letter to Joseph Kelly at Parke-Bernet, February 28, 1967, NRM.
3. Birth certificates of Susan Ann (born October 1852, can’t read date) and baptized on January 2; Thomas (born October 24, 1855); and Amy Eliza.
4. New York Tribune, April 28, 1865, p. 4.
5. Classified ad, The New York Herald, March 8, 1869, p. 2. See also ads on August 9, 1869, and December 1, 1868, p. 12.
6. 1870 U.S. Census.
7. Yonkers City Directory, 1877, lists him at 285 Woodworth.
8. He was included in the spring annuals at the Academy in 1881, 1884, and 1885, according to catalog entries, and in the winter show of 1883.
9. Ann Hill’s death certificate, April 25, 1886; courtesy of Yonkers courthouse.
10. He died on Tuesday, August 17, 1886. The funeral was held on Friday at 3:30 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
11. Howard Hill’s death certificate, March 6, 1888; courtesy of Yonkers courthouse.
12. Yonkers City Directory, 1886, p. 27.
13. According to the 1880 census, Waring was twelve and two “servants”—an Irish maid and a butler—were living in the family’s house.
14. “Rockwell-Hill,” The Yonkers Statesman, July 24, 1891, p. 1.
15. Genealogy courtesy of Edward Mendelson; see also Auden’s “Family Ghosts” website.
16. Rockwell never met Captain Perceval, who died in 1902.
17. Rockwell’s mother, letter to her daughter-in-law, February 26, 1946, NRM.
2. NOT A NORMAN ROCKWELL CHILDHOOD (1894 TO 1911)
1. NR, unpublished interview with Thomas Rockwell, 1959, compact disk, NRM.
2. Rockwell said they moved in after the death of his grandfather’s mother, Mrs. Orilla J. Sherman Rockwell, who died on January 30, 1902, aged ninety-four. His grandmother Phebe died on March 28, 1903.
3. NR, unpublished essay, 1952, from a writing class in Bennington with Francis Golffing; courtesy of Thomas Rockwell.
4. Obituary of Grace W. Johnson, The New York Herald, February 19, 1901, p. 1.
5. Grace was married to Ephriam Sherman Johnson.
6. They belonged there until October 1906, according to records from St. Thomas Episcopal in Mamaroneck, to which they then switched.
7. NR, unpublished interview with Thomas Rockwell, 1959, compact disk, NRM.
8. My Adventures, p. 41.
9. Phebe Jessup Taylor, letter to The Saturday Evening Post, April 9, 1960, p. 6.
10. My Adventures, p. 48.
11. Ibid.
12. The New York Herald, December 31, 1905, Magazine Section, p. 16. The item mentions that he was living at 832 St. Nicholas Avenue.
13. Quoted in David Michaelis, N. C. Wyeth: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 35.
14. Ibid., p. 36.
15. Ibid., p. 37.
16. He claimed in his autobiography that he moved to Mamaroneck in 1903, which is incorrect. He was still in New York in December 1905, when he won the Herald contest.
17. At the time, the address was 121 Prospect Avenue.
18. “Norman P. Rockwell Making a Success at Illustrating,” Evening Standard (New Rochelle), February 19, 1916, p. 1.
19. Office of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, e-mail to the author, January 20, 2012. The Rockwells joined the church on October 24, 1906; Norman was confirmed on April 15, 1908, when he was fourteen years old.
20. My Adventures, p. 52.
21. My Adventures, p. 54. According to the 1910 census, Frank F. German lived at 102 Prospect Avenue; the Titus family lived at 108.
22. My Adventures, p. 49.
23. Quoted by Michiko Kakutani, in The New York Times on August 10, 2001, in a review of John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and The Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).
24. “Norman P. Rockwell Making a Success at Illustrating,” Evening Standard (New Rochelle), February 19, 1916, p. 1.
25. “Noted Artist has Regular ‘Audience’ of 6,000,000 People,” February 4, 1931, unidentified newspaper clipping from the artists’ files of the New Rochelle Public Library.
26. NR, unpublished interview with Thomas Rockwell, 1959, compact disk, NRM.
27. According to his Mamaroneck High School transcript, he completed his junior year.
3. THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE (SEPTEMBER 1911 TO 1912)
1. NR, unpublished interview with Thomas Rockwell
, 1959, compact disk, NRM.
2. My Adventures, p. 75.
3. League registration cards; courtesy of the Art Students League.
4. Quoted in Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 39.
5. My Adventures, p. 72.
6. Ibid., p. 68. Art Young later became a well-known political cartoonist whose work appeared in The Masses.
7. Fogarty lived on West Seventy-first Street, according to the 1910 U.S. Census, within walking distance of the League.
8. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 17, 1912. Also, “News and Notes of the Art World,” The New York Times, May 19, 1912, p. SM15. In his autobiography, Rockwell incorrectly described his winning drawing as that of a boy confined to his bed with mumps on July 4, watching as fireworks explode in the sky outside his window. It would be one of Rockwell’s abiding themes: a kid’s feeling of having missed out on something, of being unable to experience pleasure except as an observer on the sidelines.
9. In 1912 the Rockwell family was listed in the Mamaroneck City Directory at 269 Palmer Avenue, which was then a nursery owned by John and Victoria Hallett. The Rockwell family rented rooms here for a brief period before moving back to New York City.
10. My Adventures, p. 97.
11. Thomas Rockwell, in a letter to Ken McCormick, on September 8, 1959, assured him, in reference to the boardinghouse: “all the names but Mrs. Frothingham have been changed”; box 115, the Ken McCormick Collection of the Records of Doubleday & Company, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 48
