Norman Rockwell (18 page)

Such condemnation was hardly ideologically pure; Lorimer’s unheard-of practice of paying his contributors upon acceptance of their work—unlike other journals that paid months, even years after publication—engendered a roster of writers unmatched elsewhere. Still, the onus of writing for an unabashedly middlebrow, if often highly educated, audience proved too much for some contributors to bear. Dorothy Parker, for example, had written a successful humorous piece for the
Post,
but she remained ambivalent about Lorimer’s conservative politics. Yielding to his generous invitation to spend a weekend with his family at their country home, she was deeply offended when, as she and the Boss toured the lavish grounds of his estate, Lorimer spouted his fervent beliefs in capitalist enterprise. Back in New York, she bludgeoned the editor with nastily witty stories about his crass commercialism that she spread among her friends. When word reached Philadelphia, she was not asked to work for the
Post
again. The liberal assumptions about the magazine’s reactionary politics were a bit presumptuous in their own right: often unnoticed, Lorimer’s ventures frequently escaped such sweeping generalizations, such as his 1904 publication of Clarence Darrow’s workingman’s argument in support of the open shop.

Himself a dropout from Yale—to his parents’ disappointment, Lorimer had left school to work for the Armour meat packing business—he believed that the general level of excellence opened up to everyone by the world of commerce, as opposed to the elitism promoted by enterprises dependent on sequestering themselves from “everyman,” was the basis of the country’s greatness. He worked hard to teach his readers that their duty was to marry the latest innovation or technology that came down the pike with an American way of life—individualism based on tolerance. He was, in other words, a Yankee, born of the New England brand that underwrote American liberalism, whether Dorothy Parker and her ilk admitted it or not. Industry was the key to the future, and Lorimer wanted Americans to train themselves to be its thoughtful, well-informed captains.

While the editor had been busily shaping the country’s most popular opinion organ during the previous fifteen years, Rockwell was molding himself into the perfect illustrator for such a national, unified vision. His poetic appreciation of the communal trolley trips of his childhood had hinted at the artist to come. Rockwell would typically seek the thread that laced people together, and he would excise the discordant strands, or turn them into gentle caricature that, implicitly, granted him superiority over the story. The material appearing in Lorimer’s
Saturday Evening Post
emphasized passionate commitment to the country’s communal welfare at the same time that it gave readers a sense of control over their world. Some sleight-of-hand was involved, since the “specious sense of mastery,” as cultural historian Jan Cohn points out, allowed readers to think themselves too sophisticated to get caught up in the ideology they were being presented. Others might fall for simple idealizations, but they wouldn’t. Norman Rockwell himself would rarely mistake the ideal for the real, but his audience’s confusion of the two sustained his career for more than fifty years.

Although few accounts exist of the editorial reaction to Rockwell’s first
Post
cover, Lorimer’s publication of six paintings by Rockwell between May 22, 1916, and the end of that year suggests the editor’s great pleasure in his new hire. Since the response of the
Post’
s readership to an artist or a writer largely determined who got the most assignments, it seems clear that Rockwell’s art was popular from the start with the middle-class Americans who waited eagerly each week for the latest
Post.

Rockwell’s first cover depended strongly on his audience’s embrace of childhood stereotypes. Consisting of a sissified boy pushing a baby carriage, the infant’s sex ambiguous, the painting is full of self-revelation that would pass unnoticed even in later critical commentary. Two delighted, slightly rough-looking “boys’ boys” taunt the aggravated baby-sitter. As art historian Eric Segal notes, Rockwell begins here to construct a complicated maleness that reflects and repudiates, or at least complicates, mainstream America’s preconceptions. The nipple protruding from the bottle in the boy’s breast pocket calls attention to his “female” role as caretaker, and his dandified outfit mocks both his assumption of his father’s role and his lack of proper masculinization. But the two boys harassing him hardly recommend boyhood either, even on their terms: the least fully articulated boy is made to look like a goon, while the majordomo leaning on the carriage is oddly feminized to match his target—his hair is elaborately curled, his finger is curved in an imitation of a lady holding her cup of tea, and his face resembles oddly that of the girl-boy.

Stylistically influenced by Leyendecker in their strong, at times exaggerated vertical lines, the personalities implied through the picture’s broad strokes—the boy who knows and dislikes that he comes off as a sissy, the bullies who make life hell for anyone not like themselves—drew from Rockwell’s earlier Dickensian lessons in creating “types,” or representations that with one visual intake proclaimed who and what they stood for. Just as Dickens advanced his plots through such theatrical characters that they strained credulity, so Rockwell developed a narrative strategy of telling even a fairly complicated tale quickly and fully through portraits pushed to the edge of caricature.

Fueled by his own abject memories of being ridiculed in his grandfather’s oversized, too-grand hand-me-down coat, Rockwell played with the boundaries of proper male attire and attitude in this initial
Post
cover. Here, a “Percevel” has been forced to adopt an adult male’s role and attire, diminishing his real masculinity as he mimics the grown man. The dominant cultural code of this period enabled Rockwell’s audience to grasp the meaning of the picture at once. Popular books on manners routinely emphasized the humiliation a child experienced at being dressed “in an outlandish fashion that renders him conspicuous. . . . A boy should be dressed like a little boy.”

Eric Segal points out that within nine months of his first
Post
cover, Rockwell was commissioned to illustrate “Percy” in the story appearing in
St. Nicholas
’s July 1917 issue called “Making Good in Boys’ Camp.” Here, the “Percy,” the fancy newcomer to camp, is the object of scorn to the “real boys.” “Percy” is again dandified, a repeat of the 1916 baby-sitter, except that this time he is dressed in knickers, standing at the side of a chauffeur. The caption to the picture reads, “Percy arrived in camp the most dressed-up lad you ever saw in your life.” In an ad appearing the following month in the
Post
for Black Cat hosiery, Rockwell is careful to show well-dressed young schoolboys who nonetheless demonstrate the restlessness he means to connote the all-American boy. The message is clear: it’s fine for a boy to dress properly if he has to, but at heart he’s really home on the farm instead.

Rockwell’s romance with American boyhood is more complicated than the mythology surrounding his person has allowed. Lacking any suggestion of what contemporary sleuths first look for—pedophilia—it instead seems to have been an attempt to catch up on what he never had, to represent his ambivalence toward the simple stereotypes available for early-twentieth-century masculinity. Finally, however, it became a commercial trap that he resented deeply.

Sue Erikson Bloland, an analyst who spent her own adolescence among Rockwell’s New England community, observes that “often energies spent in the name of re-creating boyish pleasures speak of times not past, but never enacted in the first place.” Rockwell quickly became known in New Rochelle for his easy affinity with the young models he hired. Even his innovative method of paying them—four rolls of pennies that he stacked by increments of ten onto the models’ “side” of the table, motivating the restless youths to hold their poses to earn more pennies—speaks of his easy connection. Still very young himself, he delighted the boys especially with his pranks (“girls were far easier to deal with,” he recalled; “more polite and disciplined”), though he made the division between work and play clear.

Strategic in his appeals to the parents and townspeople, he perfected careful quotes to hand out to local reporters that cemented his reputation as a safe, even avuncular figure to have around town. Press attention for at least a decade following 1914 emphasizes the real-boy nature of his paintings and of his affectionate but properly distant relationships with the children. To some extent, and perhaps necessarily, in light of the number of models he used, Rockwell commodified the children into marketable figures, on which he expended very little emotion. When he recounts the story of his favorite young model, Billy Paine, falling to his death at the age of fourteen from a windowsill in the boardinghouse where the boy and his family lived, he expresses more shock at Billy’s friend’s depth of grief than at the boy’s untimely end. Rockwell never pretended that he was deeply invested in his models, but, over the years, their stories would assume a remarkable similarity: models of all ages felt their short time with the artist to be a major highlight of their lives. The illustrator came off as commanding, yet authentically “human,” warm, and modest—kind of like them in many ways, all of which was true. But Rockwell painted tableaux, filling them with authentic pieces from the period. It was as objets d’art, not living people, that his models proved the most valuable props on which to project his own unfinished boyhood.

Although he admired his father’s steadfastness and loyalty, Rockwell based a major element of his personality on Nancy’s childishness—she got what she wanted, after all, by acting as if she had never left girlhood behind. Childhood was romanticized; adulthood infantilized. To remain a child was all things good; Waring’s adulthood seemed dreary by comparison. It can come as no surprise that in later years Rockwell’s most admiring acquaintances would append to their praise of his genuine friendliness, “make no mistake, though; he always got what he wanted. He didn’t let
anything
stand in his way.”

10

Becoming Somebody

If Norman was focused on making his reputation by the time he took the train to the Curtis headquarters in Philadelphia, Jerry was trying to figure out ways to make something of himself, too. In 1916 he joined the National Guard, where he was stationed in a cavalry unit. As an elderly man, he would enjoy chiming in when war stories were being bandied about: “I was wounded in the battle of Fifth Avenue,” he would explain. “The occasion? The Victory March, and I fell off my horse, in front of everyone. I had to walk back to the stable.” At this point, according to Rockwell, he himself was considered physically unfit to serve in the war because he was underweight: though he was between five feet nine inches and five feet ten and a half inches tall (his medical records vary), he weighed only 130 pounds. Claiming a fuzzy memory about the exact reasons he had not been inducted into the armed services, he added that his many dependents might have kept him at home, a totally illogical explanation that belies his apparent nonchalance about not enlisting along with the other young men his age.

During these years of Rockwell’s early success, Jerry was irritated that his younger brother was getting more attention from the girls than he was; financial and social stature now mattered as much as looks and physical strength. He was chagrined to see Norman pulling ahead of him in earning power, and he decided to try his luck at business. Dick Rockwell, Jerry’s son, repeats the family lore about Carol, his mother, preferring Norman to Jerry at the beginning of their acquaintance: “Norman was more sophisticated, and my mother had graduated from Smith a few years earlier, in 1914 or 1915, and she was somewhat worldly herself.” But Carol’s friends convinced her that an artist’s future was extremely uncertain, and so she redirected her attentions to Jerry instead. Practical about matters of the heart, Rockwell quickly began to date another pretty boarder, Irene O’Connor, a schoolteacher three years older than he. But he made a point of punishing Carol for her decision: “When Norman got his first
Post
check, he converted it into one-dollar bills and came home and piled them in front of my mother to show her how much money he made,” Dick says. Although Dick Rockwell’s parents handed down to their sons some obviously envious accounts of their famous relative’s actions, this story, its hint of vindictiveness at odds with Rockwell’s personality, does accommodate believably his penchant for practical jokes.

Rockwell’s own recollection mentions nothing of actress Carol Cushman but admits that, flushed with his success at the
Post,
he precipitously proposed to Irene O’Connor, calling her from Philadelphia. She rejected him at first because she was in love with an agricultural student at the University of Michigan; unwisely, Norman kept pleading his case until she relented, largely because the
Post
commissions promoted his future prospects. (In his private reflections to his son Tom in 1959, he suggested more duplicity on Irene’s part: “I didn’t know about the agricultural student at the time,” he said. “But we weren’t unhappily married—well, she was, I wasn’t.”)

Interviews published in the next decade, before the marriage had soured and the facts went through revision, make it clear that Rockwell’s decision to marry Irene was one of those oddly impulsive gestures he would make throughout his life. Jerry and Carol had been planning to wed for the past two years, waiting only until they felt financially able. Norman preempted them by marrying first. By early 1916, Norman’s parents had announced that they were slated to move for at least a short period to New Brunswick, in order for Waring to manage a New Jersey branch office for George Wood. Rockwell abhorred being alone; as much as he needed solitude in order to paint, feeling protected emotionally by a nearby family member was crucial to his mental well-being. Jerry as well as his parents were leaving; Rockwell would have panicked at the thought of being left behind.

Like the last boy to be chosen for the team, isolation created a sense of emptiness and inadequacy he could never expunge except by looking outward, to a spouse or parent. As long as such a loyal intimate was at hand, he did not have to turn inward, confronting a giant hollowness; nor did he have to examine the world outside in ways that caused him further distress. “I have the ability to shut myself off from unpleasant or disturbing experiences. Or, rather to shut off the part of me which paints,” he explained.

If it had been up to him, Rockwell would simply have discounted this first spouse from 1916. He later “forgot” to mention his previous marriage to his children from his second wife; the three boys learned of it from a
New Yorker
article in the 1940s. He had to be pressed by his wife in 1959 to discuss the earlier relationship in his autobiography; left to his own devices, he would have written as if Irene O’Connor never existed. Yet they were married for fourteen years! Two of Rockwell’s strongest personality traits—his denial or avoidance of pain and the accompanying lack of interest in emotional retrospection—combined to turn Irene O’Connor into nothing but a hard-earned footnote in Rockwell’s history.

Irene, born in Watertown, New York, near the St. Lawrence River, was twenty-five years old when she married Rockwell, the same age as Nancy Hill when she wed the younger Waring Rockwell. Irene’s Irish-Canadian family, of far greater pretensions than their means, had moved inland to Potsdam, about sixty miles from Watertown, when she was a child. Henry O’Connor, a self-described “Canadian not Irish” grocer, took great pride in belonging to the local country club, which, as one acquaintance remembers, was a modest enterprise open to anyone who could pay the dues. Irene attended Potsdam’s Normal College for teachers, a subsidized course of higher education for those willing to teach a specified number of years in return.

Newspaper accounts vary even on the date of the wedding, which was in fact held on the morning of July 1, 1916, at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, though in the pastor’s study as opposed to the conventional sanctuary. The ceremony is described in the Potsdam paper as “a quiet one” that took place on June 30, the too-early date reflecting Irene’s own uncertainty about how and when the interfaith union would occur. Marie O’Connor, Irene’s sister, was her maid of honor; Jerry served as Norman’s best man. Both sets of parents attended, as did Rockwell’s best friend and his wife, Victor Clyde and Cotta Forsythe. Because mid-decade weddings tended to be modest affairs in deference to the increasing awareness of the war, the low-key occasion attracted less attention than it might have. Still, Irene’s traveling suit of blue silk faille, her large white hat, and her white sweet peas hint at a certain lack of festivity. At least she adorned the simple wedding outfit with the gold watch and sapphire ring her husband had given her.

Following the ceremony, the gathering moved to Edgewood Hall for a wedding breakfast, after which the newlyweds “motored” with the Forsythes and Marie O’Connor to Jersey City, where the couple boarded the train to Lake Minnewauskie, New York. About two hours away, this Catskills resort catered to the upper middle class. It was a wisely chosen spot for a honeymoon, in light of the heat wave New York was experiencing in early July.

Even when Rockwell does finally mention Irene in his autobiography, he omits the reality that their marriage was fraught from its beginnings: because Irene was Roman Catholic, he had to agree to raise any offspring of their union in his wife’s faith. “They kept trying to convert me, but they didn’t succeed,” he confided. “It didn’t matter much anyway, because Irene hardly ever went to church herself.” What Rockwell fails to add when he mentions their lack of children is the disagreement between the two on this very subject. According to a model whose family was friendly with the artist, Irene did not want to have children, and her husband did.

Nancy Rockwell, who would have been displeased at the specter of her younger son going childless, must have been further agitated that her daughter-in-law was Irish; although Irene’s parents hailed from Canada, the ancestry was clear, and to Nancy’s high Anglican blood, it was just bad lineage. Even her genial, kindhearted brother Tom had, in correspondence during his sea voyage, evinced signs of prejudice toward the Irish. Even more worrisome to Nancy than her daughter-in-law’s heritage, however, were the pretty young woman’s social aspirations. Her friendliness to her new husband seemed genuine, but any deeper attachment appeared to be to his financial prospects, and she troubled little to hide her desire to join high society. After only two weeks of life in the newlyweds’ stuffy, tiny third-floor apartment near the center of New Rochelle, Irene huffed off to spend the subsequent two months with her parents, moving back into the family’s impressive colonial house.

In the meantime, Rockwell lacked a proper studio, a problem more pressing than his bride’s disappointment in their humble apartment. He rented the top of George Lischke’s garage on Prospect Street behind Brown’s Lodge, an area near “Pill Street,” where the town’s doctors and lawyers lived in one of the oldest and most beautiful parts of town. With the landlord’s permission, he knocked out the north wall of the garage in order to install floor-to-ceiling glass that would guarantee the best light. Now he felt ready to compete with his peers.

The saturation of so many illustrators within the boundaries of New Rochelle proved particularly salutary after America entered the war. The Committee on Public Information, the propaganda ministry charged with moving the American public from an isolationist position to a militaristic one, turned to the Society of Illustrators to promote these goals. As a result, illustrators enjoyed a new self-esteem as they saw their art become, however temporarily, the means of doing social good. But the very effectiveness of using first-rate illustrators to visualize what were, in the end, government ads eventually backfired in terms of positioning illustration among the serious arts. Advertising took up residence under its rubric instead, while illustrators themselves quickly discovered that the real money lay in doing the ads, not in executing limited editions of classics.

Better-known artists from the generation just prior to Rockwell’s got the plum assignments anyway, a hierarchy that allowed Rockwell to concentrate his efforts on his own commercial career, seeking venues outside the United States government. Shrewdly, he began to pass along the sketches that Lorimer rejected for
The Saturday Evening Post
to
Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper,
a popular national magazine that lacked the prestige and the pay of the
Post.
Of the seven covers Rockwell provided for
Leslie’s,
the most famous is probably the October 5, 1916,
Schoolitis,
where a boy feigns illness to avoid going to school.

A week after
Schoolitis
appeared, Rockwell’s first visual reference to Hollywood took shape on the October 14, 1916,
Saturday Evening Post
cover. In a gesture that typified the dynamics of many of his future covers, Rockwell focuses on a crowd’s reaction to an event rather than the event itself. Theatregoers are shown enjoying a silent movie, possibly Charlie Chaplin in
The Little Tramp.
This cover was scheduled to appear roughly a month before his brother’s wedding to Carol Cushman. Perhaps it was a present, a tribute to Jarvis’s bride, the actress; the lag between the artist’s submission of a finished painting and its publication was usually two to three months, so that Rockwell would have been able to estimate the timing of the cover. Even if not meant as a gift, the painting was probably inspired by the upcoming ceremony, since the subjects for Rockwell’s covers often emerged from the events occurring around him.

By the time of his brother’s nuptials, marriage was proving problematic to the young artist. In light of his trouble adjusting to Irene’s expectations of companionship and of normal work hours, he may well have needed to get away as a kind of temporary escape. In July 1918, when the war’s end seemed in sight, Rockwell joined the Navy. Until now, George Lorimer’s rabid isolationism had given him pause; he would not have wanted to offend the Boss. But all around him, men of every age had been signing up—in many cases, when they were too young or old or physically unfit to meet the government’s standards—going to heroic lengths to get Uncle Sam to let them in. Previously, shame at not serving had eluded the illustrator; suddenly, he felt embarrassed at his lack of patriotism. Decades later, discussing his time in the service, Rockwell lied even to his son, telling him that he’d enlisted a year earlier than he actually did—July 1917, instead of 1918. And, although he claimed to have been refused during an earlier try because of his weight, the twenty-four-year-old was still seventeen pounds under naval standards. He recalled stuffing himself (with the military doctor’s approval and encouragement) in order to weigh in, the bananas, doughnuts, and water finally enabling him to meet the minimum weight requirement, but his enlistment folder still records, under “remarks,” the notation “underweight.”