Norman Rockwell (19 page)

Reporting to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Rockwell found himself on a ship bound for Queenstown, Ireland, where as “landsman for quartermaster” he would varnish decks. Ordered to change course within hours because of a submarine ahead, Rockwell’s crew diverted to the Charleston Navy Yard, where the artist pulled guard duty and burial squad, both of which frightened him. Soon assigned to create cartoons and layouts for the camp newspaper,
Afloat and Ashore,
Rockwell coasted through the next few months. When he took ten days’ leave and attended an illustrators’ dinner at the prestigious Salmagundi Club in Manhattan, he misbehaved in the boyish mode he resorted to throughout his life, especially when uncomfortable about the trappings of his environment. On this occasion, famous illustrators and artists had gathered in support of the poster war they were waging, and, according to Rockwell, one of his friends pinched him, causing him to yelp loudly—as if they were back in the church pews warding off boredom. Reprimanded soundly by a lieutenant commander present among the guests, who, according to Rockwell’s recollections, termed him a disgrace to his uniform and to his profession, the illustrator thereafter “resolved to stop trying to be a sailor and just be myself. It was the only safe solution.” Such aw-shucks modesty veils the strategy Rockwell had almost perfected: when he felt in danger of becoming, as he put it, the “beanpole without the bean,” he acted out in a childish fashion. His antics supposedly illuminated his own inadequacy (thereby ameliorating any pressure to perform as an adult) but also implicitly (since he was such a nice guy) indicted those around him as supercilious or less “authentic” than he.

Within a few months of his enlistment, the Armistice was declared, causing a temporary freeze on discharges. Rockwell chafed at the delay in getting back to his job and maneuvered to have himself judged “inapt” for naval work. Still an honorable discharge, the solution was less than elegant, embarrassing the illustrator enough to flavor his accounts with an unmistakable chagrin and contributing to his disguising his actual service record by an entire year in hopes of averting the appearance of cowardice or of a lack of patriotism.

Within days of his November 12 discharge, Rockwell was back at work in his New Rochelle studio. He picked up his pace, not only producing cover art for the
Post, Leslie’s,
and
Judge,
but also beginning to exert almost as much energy painting advertisements as he did working on his magazine illustrations. One way that he could defend himself against the fear of prostituting his art was to ensure the quality of his advertisements, which were often as painterly as his other work. In many cases, such as two illustrations he produced for Del Monte canned vegetables, the ads actually ran in
The Saturday Evening Post,
giving him extra reason to be cautious of how he used his talent.

He had accepted that he would have to depend on advertisements for the bulk of his livelihood, particularly given the lifestyle the young couple had embraced. As soon as Norman secured the income, he and Irene moved into the smaller half of a fancy house on a pretty New Rochelle side street, a residence they both enjoyed for its understated elegance. Irene was not an inexpensive wife; fairly soon into their marriage, the illustrator recognized the tacit agreement that ruled their marriage: she would be his companion, sexual partner, and hostess, as long as he provided an affluent style of living. Rockwell later acknowledged that he quickly recognized Irene’s lack of real love for him, but that he enjoyed their friendship and found it gratifying to have someone managing his social life. The couple gave parties envied by others, and they were invited to many reciprocal social events. Early in their marriage, rumors began circulating around town about Irene’s flirtations, but the disapproving accounts Nancy related to relatives about her daughter-in-law’s eager extramarital socializing with handsome escorts contrast with the memory of one old-time resident of New Rochelle, who remembered hearing that Irene was “prudish.” Given the social mores of the community, which changed dramatically as the 1920s progressed, it seems likely that Irene behaved conventionally in public for at least the first five or six years of the Rockwells’ marriage.

Rockwell himself lodged no complaint against moving up the social ladder, in spite of his earlier protestations of hating society. Their community, wealthy even in notoriously well-off Westchester County, was entering the age of consumerism gone mad, and Norman watched his father finally start to make good money as a manager for George Wood. Less satisfying, Jerry was improving his own fortunes at an alarmingly impressive rate in the city, where he was trying his hand at business as he trained to become a trader on Wall Street. Keenly aware that his brother was pulling in $4,500—the equivalent of more than $43,000 in 2000—Rockwell felt motivated to shore up his own social status. When Irene suggested that they make a greater effort to hobnob with “society,” her husband offered little resistance.

In spite of his new marriage and his stint in the Navy, between 1916 and 1919 Rockwell executed twenty-five
Post
covers as well as an abundance of story illustrations. In 1916, he produced five black-and-white illustrations for
American Boy;
the following year, he executed eight more, some of which, such as
Dory Mates,
in which a polar bear attacks a rugged fisherman bearing aloft an ax, or
Jim of the Reef,
where a terrified elderly man confronts a young boy, exhibit a new range of emotion. His greatest effort was nonetheless reserved for the sixteen illustrations he created for
St. Nicholas
during the teens; after all, even Howard Pyle had considered this publication worthy of his work, and it still enjoyed a reputation as the premiere children’s magazine. Considered the most distinguished of a post–Civil War group of excellent children’s literature, its cultural level has never been equaled.

By 1919, Rockwell was enough of a national phenomenon to be used in a
Life
magazine solicitation of new subscriptions. The illustrator is the youngest artist featured in the full-page ad that printed photographs of the heads of important and popular writers and illustrators, Charles Dana Gibson among them, who contributed to the magazine. The text at the top of the page reads: “These are only a few of the regular weekly contributors,” and a caption is placed beneath each photograph. Under Rockwell’s picture is the phrase: “Whose
Life
colored covers are known all over the world.”

Only twenty-five years old, Rockwell should have been deeply satisfied. The art director for
Boys’ Life
for the past six years, he had exhibited his paintings on the cover of the
Post
for the last three. He had achieved the reputation he had sought as a wunderkind, and art directors predicted great things for the unflaggable young man. True, his workload was staggering, though it was fairly typical of successful illustrators. In 1916 alone, he published six covers on the
Post.
In 1917, there were four; four more the next year; and, in 1919, eleven. Twenty-five years old, twenty-five covers, and he was starting to feel worn out, not energized as he had expected. True, he’d won both the job and the girl of his dreams, but they were taking too much out of him to leave enough room for happiness.

11

A Stab at Adulthood

Success would always prove a palliative for Rockwell’s vocational fatigue, and by 1920 he had hit his stride. Developed for
The Country Gentleman
back in 1917, his series on Reginald, the overdressed, “sissy” city boy, and the Doolittles, the unruly country brothers, had run its successful course, and now Rockwell’s illustrations began to assume a new painterly sophistication.
The Shadow Artist,
for instance, executed for the February 7 cover of
The Country Gentleman,
evinces more richly articulated, less caricatured figures. As the decade proceeded, Rockwell’s greater talent for rendering the body and facial contours of elderly characters than those of children would become clear, the distinction perhaps a result of George Bridgman’s emphasis in life drawing on more mature bodies. More likely, however, Rockwell’s complicated relationship to the reality and ideals of childhood encouraged him (albeit unconsciously) to homogenize his drawings of boys, especially, in accordance with his own repetitive fantasy.

Nonetheless, Rockwell would return to children’s themes frequently throughout the twenties, his increased assignments outside of childhood’s realm gradually appeasing his fear that he would be known only as someone who drew for kids. Among the most gratifying signs that he was now considered a serious contender was the respect shown him by New Rochelle’s coterie of famous illustrators. And when he was invited to sit at the speaker’s table at a celebration held by the New Rochelle Art Association, he knew he was a somebody. The Association, committed to raising money for a monument to the soldiers who had fought in the Great War, had arranged for a benefit dinner. According to his autobiography, he was seated between J. C. Leyendecker and Coles Phillips, while his friends such as Clyde Forsythe stared enviously in admiration at the stars in the front of the room. Rockwell felt momentarily gratified. No longer under his mother’s thumb, he was now a man of the world, sanctioned by the brightest lights of a prestigious local arts society. What could be a more auspicious sign of the new decade’s promise?

Probably because Rockwell was a relative newcomer to the organization, the toastmaster, Charles Dana Gibson, inadvertently passed over him when it was his turn to be introduced. The young man was mortified; Gibson’s refusal to rectify his mistake, in spite of a note that the gracious Coles Phillips quickly passed to the speaker, just embarrassed him further. But Rockwell pulled a triumph out of the occasion anyway; he felt almost justified in asking the Leyendecker brothers to dinner, since now, after all, they had already eaten one meal together. As he himself appreciated, if only out of an attempt to mollify a publicly humiliated colleague, the famously courteous men accepted.

Excited but nervous, the Rockwells cooked what was basically a Thanksgiving dinner in July, perhaps in homage to the turkey farm that the Leyendeckers rather whimsically maintained on their grand property. The young couple reasoned that they couldn’t go wrong by re-creating the quintessential American meal, and so they decided to risk the unusual choice for a hot summer evening. Unfortunately, when the Leyendeckers first entered the Rockwells’ home, stiffness overtook everyone. Neither Norman, usually loquacious in social gatherings, nor Irene, conversationally adept by now, could budge the painful silence in their living room. After what seemed an interminable awkwardness, the maid they had hired for the occasion called them in to the dining room, and as the foursome took their seats, she started to set the turkey platter on the table.

It never got there. The maid slipped, and once again, in front of his local hero, Rockwell found himself feeling exceedingly foolish. Under the table he dove, reaching for the turkey, at just the moment that Leyendecker himself went for it. Even allowing for Rockwell’s typical embellishment in recounting such episodes, some such event clearly broke the ice, and the men bonded over the absurdity of it all.

Becoming friends with Joe Leyendecker contributed tremendously to Rockwell’s self-esteem. To be found worthy by a man he admired in so many ways—professionally, most important, but personally as well—seemed to Rockwell like an imprimatur of his own worth. What did it mean, exactly, for Norman Rockwell to spend his early professional days in the midst of the New Rochelle illustrators and artists? The degree to which living among one’s peers affects one’s art is always a complicated measure. Traditionally, the presence of talented people engaged in similar types of activities is assumed to exert a leveling influence on art, nudging it toward a recognizable cultural shape. The Abstract Expressionists, for instance, drank and drew and slept together over the sprawl of New York City, and a certain identifiable template emerged that registered seismically in the art world.

For Norman Rockwell, living in New Rochelle during the 1920s, the presence of J. C. Leyendecker and, to a far lesser extent, his brother Frank, encouraged his intuition that illustration was a supremely worthy use of artistic talent. When Rockwell later told the inquiring student that Leyendecker didn’t really have much “impact” on his work, his judgment was rendered in the immediate aftermath of a contingent statement, “apart from . . . his technique, his painting, his character and his diligence.” Not much is left out of such a “qualification.” And, in truth, Leyendecker’s versatility, his superb draftsmanship, his steadfast nature, and his dedication to his art confirmed for Rockwell the values he himself had held since his student days.

Less obviously, Joseph Leyendecker served as a personal role model to his young admirer. He and Frank were modest, courteous, and hardworking, in spite of the fact that they lived in the kind of ostentatious splendor more often at odds with such virtues. Although they tended to keep to themselves, both brothers were, in fact, the city’s top celebrities. “People used to come down to the railroad station in New Rochelle in the middle of the morning just to watch J. C. Leyendecker and his brother Frank emerge from their limousine and walk to the platform in their matching outfits—e.g., double-breasted blue blazers, white flannels, black-and-white saddle oxfords and ebony-and-white walking sticks—in transit from their 14-room Franco-Suburb chateau to Studio Leyendecker in New York,” remarks Tom Wolfe, in an essay review of contemporary books about illustrators. And, as he notes, those New Rochelle gawkers had included in their ranks Norman Rockwell, determined to get rich and famous “the Leyendecker way.”

The Leyendeckers lived on a five-acre estate on Mount Tom Road, their 1914 pseudo-Norman mansion accoutred with five bathrooms, four fireplaces, and two large center reception halls. Two studios were attached to either side of the three-story structure. Barely visible from the road, the property—adorned with a rose garden, hemlocks, massive twin oaks, a fountain, and a fish pool—faced Long Island Sound. The lands were so lavishly landscaped that in 1952 the shrubbery alone was estimated to be worth $25,000. If the townspeople bore any resentment toward the brothers, its roots evidently lay in their wealth, though at least one old-timer remembers that their “obvious” homosexuality heightened the sense of exclusivity around them, signaling to many of New Rochelle’s middle class that the artists “were too rich and special to mix with the likes of most of us.” And yet the self-effacing but funny young Rockwell bonded immediately with Joe Leyendecker the night the two men met under the table.

Throughout the years, the only complaint about Leyendecker that Rockwell ever voiced publicly was about the older man’s refusal to monitor the grasping behavior of his lifelong partner, Charles Beach. Tom Rockwell says that his father understood that the two men were lovers, but that he felt uncomfortable bringing up what was culturally still a controversial topic in his 1960 autobiography: “Pop knew that the Leyendeckers were gay,” Tom Rockwell says. “But in 1960, it seemed better not to get into that. It wasn’t necessary in order to make the points Pop wanted to make.” Even before homosexuality was treated liberally, however, Rockwell himself was unconcerned about someone’s sexual orientation; it was Beach’s steel grip on Joe Leyendecker that bothered the illustrator, perhaps playing out Rockwell’s fear of his mother’s oppressive neediness and ceaseless demands. Insinuating his way into every professional corner of Leyendecker’s life, according to Rockwell, the handsome, chisel-faced lover eventually pushed both the gentle Frank Leyendecker and their loving sister Augusta out of Joe’s life. Except for his relationship with Beach, Joe turned into a near hermit, losing touch with the contemporary world, a solitude that Rockwell believed, finally, sapped his brilliant art of its vitality.

According to Leyendecker’s biographer, Rockwell exaggerated his friend’s reclusiveness as well as his relationship to the movie-star-handsome model. It is true that Rockwell’s scornful description of Beach’s possessiveness and excessive influence rings of personal resentment, perhaps because within a year of that infamous turkey dinner, Beach had begun to refuse to let others, including Rockwell, see Leyendecker without his presence. (In fact, no one at
The Saturday Evening Post
would ever meet Leyendecker, including Lorimer.) Usually polite, Rockwell chafed at being controlled by others, and he doubtless wanted to speak his piece to Beach, an impossibility given the disloyalty and disrespect to Joe such behavior would have implied. Unfettered, Beach barely veiled his contempt for Leyendecker’s visitors behind a grating obsequiousness, until he had gained so much power that he even began to treat Frank rudely in the presence of Joe and his guests.

One of the few places, at least in the early twenties, that the Leyendeckers could socialize without Beach intruding was at the Art Association, and Rockwell quickly gained stature among the cognoscenti when his growing friendship with Joe and Frank was noticed. But the slight vestige of high society that clung to the edges of the Art Association led Rockwell to keep himself at some distance from the organization most of the time. Even at this early stage in his career, he had developed a way of portraying people as if he easily identified with the “human condition,” and he molded his public image the same way. In truth, at a deep level he really was ambivalent toward upper-class culture—the inflections of education, of money, of taste, of general intellectual superiority that denizens of high society assumed as their natural right. If as a teenager he had lamented his lack of such things, by the time he finished art school he had acquired a certain honest disdain for the pretense he believed such privileges often implied.

Nonetheless, the Art Association proved a perfect communal conduit for the city’s pool of artists. In 1921, the Association decided to beautify the approaches to the city, thereby furthering New Rochelle’s interests at the same time that they were promoting their suburb as an enviable bastion of artists. The group divvied up the assignments, deciding on twelve wrought-iron-upon-concrete bases with which to stud the city’s boundaries. Two years later, only ten were complete, Rockwell’s among them. As undistinguished as the rest, his was called “Rich in History,” a series of three revolutionaries watching out for the enemy. Initially, at least, the Art Association’s concept earned the artists, who volunteered their services, points for community spirit.

Rockwell also created his own goodwill by relying upon local people for his models. As early as 1919, a local journalist had written up the lucky children who posed for “one of the best and most popular of the top-notch magazine artists of today.” The writer quotes the artist: “Billy Paine is my favorite model. . . . He has posed five years and is a dandy little actor, he understands moods and expressions no matter how complicated.”

In general, Rockwell dispensed with professional models whenever he could, believing their studied body language scotched his creativity. To use the world, in effect, as his agency, invigorated his work far beyond what a dial-a-type professional could provide. In the twenties, according to Clyde Forsythe, he would walk around New Rochelle, sparing “neither time nor expense in finding the right model or object needed to fit into the subject he is painting; he never fakes. All the dogs in town know him. Along the street he is greeted by schoolboys and their granddads and grandmothers. They all love him; they are his models first; then his friends.” Rockwell’s consistency—he was affable, seemingly unflappable, and promiscuously curious, whatever the subject—encouraged the people he encountered to believe their exchanges with the illustrator more meaningful to him than they in fact were. He simply treated everything and everybody the same way.

Looking at people—observing the man on the street up close—seasoned Rockwell’s early, usually half-shaped concept for an illustration into its fully realized final form. A policeman’s flagrantly protruding ears might motivate one theme, a fireman’s beautifully shaped head another; a housewife’s consternation at the grocery store yet a third. Sometimes his process of association would pull together all three disparate scenes into one coherent narrative. Rockwell never underestimated the part in his success that such real people played, and his gratitude toward them was genuine. But for those lucky enough to be chosen as his models, the connection inevitably felt deeper: accounts they would offer journalists decades later revealed that they never again would feel valued so highly as when they modeled for Norman Rockwell. Mary Whalen, who was Rockwell’s favorite girl model, describes the way that the painter made her feel: “He cared about my twelve-year-old imagination. He felt that if I understood what he was trying to accomplish in a painting, the picture would be good, but if I didn’t, there was something wrong with his idea. We were all in it together, somehow. At least he made me feel that way.”