Norman Rockwell (38 page)

In spite of sitting through too many of their ineffectual grandfather’s tirades against Franklin Roosevelt, the boys loved the change of pace when they visited California. But they failed to develop a close relationship to their grandparents, even though the Barstows were “perfectly nice” to all three young grandsons. A certain distance among the family members kept the emotional temperature in the household too cool for the rowdy Rockwell boys to feel connected to their California relatives.

They were quite fond of their grandfather, believing his wife to be much sterner than he. “It was clear that my grandmother ruled the roost,” Peter Rockwell believes. Their grandfather, by contrast, was a “Humpty-Dumpty figure, with his wonderful oval face and slightly silly, immature air. We all got the feeling that my grandmother, and then my father too, didn’t totally respect him, because he’d not been very successful at his law practice.” But what made the most impression on the children, according to Jarvis Rockwell, was the way that their mother’s parents expected everyone to ignore what to them were weird things—such as “Crazy Aunt Grace,” whom even their mother had been taught to regard as perfectly normal. “And with her mime-colored, white-powdered face and bright blue eye shadow, she wasn’t, as even we children knew,” Jarvis laughed. “This background of denial is how my mother grew up, so no wonder she had problems herself.”

After December 7 that year, the Rockwells spent the rest of the month talking about the war—what they thought would happen, and what they would be able to contribute, especially back in Vermont. The artist had begun his efforts the year before, when the first recruit call went out. Rockwell was eager to assume the position that J. C. Leyendecker had held in World War I, when the older illustrator had been among the most prominent of the wartime propaganda artists. This time, Rockwell would take on the challenge of showing the American people the ideals and ideas behind the gruesome realities they heard about in the newspapers, letters from soldiers abroad, and war correspondents writing in the mass magazines. What made the carnage of another European war worth more American lives? Through paintings that some critics would condemn for whitewashing the dirtiness of battle, Rockwell conveyed the small pleasures that made up the bulk of life back home, however much they contrasted with the size of suffering he felt unwilling to tackle.

If Rockwell’s practical sense of his own duty for World War II was to create images that would ensure the men and women fighting overseas got the logistical and emotional support that sentimental images would ensure, some of the soldiers in the front lines might have preferred that the ugliness of their daily lives be paraded instead. As Private David Webster of the 101st Airborne wrote, after he watched a friend die in combat in February 1945: “He wasn’t twenty years old. He hadn’t begun to live. Shrieking and moaning, he gave up his life on a stretcher. Back in America the standard of living continued to rise. Back in America the race tracks were booming, the night clubs were making record profits, Miami Beach was so crowded you couldn’t get a room anywhere. Few people seemed to care. Hell, this was a boom, this was prosperity, this was the way to fight a war. We wondered if the people would ever know what it cost the soldiers in terror, bloodshed, and hideous, agonizing deaths to win the war.”

Rockwell’s philosophy of wartime propaganda was based, however, on the effect such ugliness had on him; he turned from violence whenever he could, and his strong mechanism of denial sought less direct paths of working for the good of those who suffered, including the G.I.s. To ensure, as the government put it, that the soldiers got “what they needed, and on time,” he felt his talent lay in convincing the Americans at home that they were investing in their vision of what the country stood for in its very Yankee entrails: freedom. This time around, he would do better than his fledgling attempts during the Great War.

One of the first images Rockwell created for the war effort was Willie Gillis. In contrast to Leyendecker’s tall, handsome, masculine icon from World War I, Willie took shape as an unimposing, slightly goofy young man with a shock of reddish hair, a somewhat bewildered smile, and a still developing, gangly body. Rockwell had dreamed him up in a conversation with his wife, who suggested the name Willie Gillis because she’d just finished reading the children a book “about a Scotch boy, Wee Gillis” (not Wee Willie Winkie, as has often been printed). Over the next five years, Rockwell painted eleven
Post
covers with Willie as the central character, ranging from the first cover, where he was shown at the head of a group of hungry but happy young soldiers following him because he carried the food package from home, to the last, in 1946, where the teenage recruit has grown into a serious young man, attending college on the G.I. Bill. Readers loved the reassuring image of their everyman son, brother, lover, neighbor, or friend, who reminded them of the same guy they worried about daily. Gritty cover images supplied by Rockwell’s friend Mead Schaeffer brought home the size of their men’s challenges overseas; the solidity and predictability of Willie Gillis implied that the war was an aberration and that life would eventually resume its reassuringly trivial, domestic pleasures even though they had been disrupted by the second global conflict in thirty years.

In early 1942, once the family was settled back into their snowed-in farmhouse, Rockwell painted the third Willie Gillis cover, his most somber. Although Willie is at church, the scene takes on a slightly melancholic aura from the isolation of the boy. In the three pews shown, only Willie’s torso and face are visible; the shoulder of a man in front, and the arm of a man behind, their respective officer and upper enlisted stripes prominent, are the only other people represented. Willie’s eyes are sad, bright with unshed tears, though the pictorial ambiguity on this point is unusual for Rockwell. He could be sitting through an ordinary Sunday service; or he could be at a funeral. Whatever the occasion, he is no longer carefree.

As if confronting such realities wore Rockwell out, he decided by February to go back to California. His home life was peaceful and organized, and there was plenty of room after the renovations—four bedrooms upstairs, for instance—but the cold kept everyone indoors, and the artist often found it hard to concentrate. He enjoyed the regularity of their home life—the family rose at six-forty-five, breakfasted together, and, after the boys went off to school in a neighbor’s car, he and Mary biked or, in the snow, hiked the mountains behind their house. He went to the studio from nine to twelve, ate lunch with Mary at noon, then went back to work until five. By the time he cleaned up the studio one more time (to clear his mind as well as any actual clutter, Rockwell swept it three or four times during his work hours as well), it was time to have dinner. The Rockwells had their evening meal at six o’clock, putting Peter, now six years old, to bed shortly after, and leaving time for the couple to go appraise Rockwell’s work for the day, to read aloud, or for Mary to help the boys with their homework while the artist implemented a small change he’d just thought of.

The pleasures of such a life sustained him emotionally. He even encouraged his sons to wander out to the studio after school and sit on one of his cushioned benches or chairs, doing their schoolwork or painting or chatting, if Rockwell was not undergoing one of his frequent struggles with a particular picture. But because he was so plugged in to a seven-days-a-week work schedule in a location where everyone knew where to find him, he also found himself becoming exhausted far more easily at home than in Alhambra.

Rockwell indulged himself in California, if only a little, by playing the part of the celebrity illustrator, obtaining for his models the starlets and other actors from his movie contacts that ordinarily he’d eschew. He used such professionals for story illustrations, mostly, as well as for the myriad publicity materials the studios actually commissioned him to produce. As long as he was allowed to play with Hollywood on his own terms—briefly and as the famous but friendly illustrator from the East—he enjoyed the encounters, so distant from the daily substance of his life. Instead of admitting that these retreats to Alhambra were just that, Rockwell continued putting out the news of illness forcing him West, in order to slide on deadlines. Eventually, patrons considered Alhambra his second address, as did Henry Dreyfus, writing to the artist about
McCall’s
enormous pleasure in the Abraham Lincoln illustration that Rockwell had finally delivered. Whatever irritation Rockwell’s missed deadlines caused, when the companies received the paintings at last, their ill will faded in the face of their awe. He could have rushed to meet the deadlines and scrimped on quality, but he seemed constitutionally unable to give less than his best, except on advertisements that he ranked low in both importance and remuneration.

Rockwell stayed in Alhambra until early spring, tracked down even there by Broadway producers interested in putting Willie Gillis on the stage. Such unlikely prospects flattered the artist, but more significant by far to his self-esteem was the replacement of the critical, picky Wesley Stout with the affable, admiring Ben Hibbs, the man who would be Rockwell’s editor as long as he remained at the
Post.
Soft-spoken, kindly, but with iron in his soul, as Rockwell would say, the forty-two-year-old editor immediately intensified the written coverage of the war. In this first year that Hibbs took the helm, the immediate symbol of a new reign—the updated
Post
logo, streamlined into a rectangular bar with
POST
squared in the left half, the rest of the title printed in modest letters above—announced the change of guard. Unlike Stout’s philosophy, which had been to accept as many different illustrators as possible for variety, Hibbs standardized the covers with five or six major contributors. Rockwell was, bar none, anointed the preeminent.

Ben Hibbs’s encouragement ensured that Rockwell felt appreciated and liked again, the circumstances under which he did his best work. Under such leadership, Rockwell’s imagination relaxed enough to allow him some free creative thought, which he directed toward realizing a great painting for the war effort. During the spring of 1942, he pondered what project would be best, but, as usual, coming up with a good idea proved the hardest part.

21

“The Big Ideas”

What he finally devised relied on a speech President Roosevelt had made to Congress over a year earlier, on January 6, 1941. Roosevelt opened his talk with a somber reference to the danger the country faced: “At no previous time has American security been threatened from without as it is today.” After enumerating the liberal aims of a democracy, Roosevelt catalogued the more abstract principles that, he claimed, needed to be part of all societies. He ended each of these Four Freedoms, as they would be called, with the words “everywhere in the world” or “anywhere in the world.” Seven months later, on August 9, he met with Winston Churchill for the first time, the two sequestered aboard a warship in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. There they discussed ways the still-neutral United States could support Britain’s mission, and the means of assistance the British could offer to keep Japan from involving the United States. The outcome of the informal meetings was their joint statement, the Atlantic Charter, whose basic principles of nonaggression, the right to self-defense, and freedom of the seas echoed in principle the Four Freedoms.

Unwittingly swallowing whole the myth that the artist savvily created for them in the early stages of his career, commentators on Rockwell’s art have often avowed that the illustrator was apolitical. And by the forties, Rockwell had indeed grown comfortable sustaining the posture that Lorimer’s political fervor had encouraged him to adopt in order to maintain some distance from the imposing Boss. Frequently observing—truthfully—that he in fact did not enjoy partisan politics and that he wanted to appeal to all the people, Rockwell made few public gestures that clarified where he stood on the political spectrum. Yet he honestly believed that the Yankee virtues—tolerance for differences, courtesy, kindness, and the freedoms that FDR articulated—were the substance of a political creed that his paintings openly embraced. While the country’s remaining isolationists were angry at Roosevelt’s signing the Charter, for instance, Rockwell was pleased. Later, when the principles behind the Charter guided the founding of the United Nations, the artist would throw his support behind that organization. Of the beliefs he held most dear, tolerance—and the freedom necessary to ensure its flourishing—were most important to him. His habit of tacking favorite aphorisms on his studio wall prominently included one that read “The Real Test of a Liberal Is the Willingness to Listen Fairly to a Person with Opposite Opinions.”

That Americans would fight for freedom, whether for themselves or for others, sat well with his deepest beliefs. For reasons unclear—except that his explanation added drama—Rockwell would later say that he heard the Four Freedoms speech and pondered it briefly, then awoke with a three
A.M.
epiphany, the inspiration to paint the abstractions into clear narrative stories. In fact, over a year elapsed between Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech and Rockwell’s decision, but the year was crucial to the artist’s goal: during this period when Ben Hibbs had come in to replace Stout, the illustrator felt freer to suggest topics, surer of his status. Rockwell nonetheless crafted the story of the Four Freedom posters that he began painting during the summer of 1942 into one of rejection by the government and salvation by Hibbs.

The accounts vary depending on when he told the story, but basically Rockwell claimed to have hopped on a train to Washington with Mead Schaeffer, who wanted to sell the government on his own ideas. From office to office, the two men were bounced around, treated unceremoniously, Rockwell’s sketches rejected. Discouraged, the men rode back home, but suddenly realized, as they neared Philadelphia, that the
Post
might be interested. Indeed, it was, and Rockwell began work on the four articulations of abstract freedoms worth fighting for, all of which would be published consecutively in the
Post,
with writers’ essays reflecting other points of view as well.

As usual, the facts were somewhat otherwise. Maureen Hart-Hennessey, the assistant director of the Norman Rockwell Museum, explains that when Rockwell and Thomas Mabry, the assistant chief of the Graphics Division of the Office of War Information (OWI), met during the spring of 1942, it is unclear which man had initiated the meeting. But a letter from Mabry makes it clear that the OWI man had written Rockwell during this period, explaining that posters of the Four Freedoms were one of the government’s most “urgent needs.” Rockwell had traveled alone to Washington to meet with him that spring, and only after that did he have his “epiphany,” which was the realization of how he could present the subject effectively. He finished the sketches, then, with Mead Schaeffer and Orion Wynford from the Brown and Bigelow calendar company, returned to Washington, where the confusion at that time from three separate agencies combining into the one, monolithic OWI probably contributed to the shuffling around that the men encountered.

Whether Rockwell stopped impulsively in Philadelphia is not known; what is clear is that Ben Hibbs enthusiastically accepted the sketches, and Rockwell began work on the paintings by mid-summer, with a promise to deliver them in the late fall or early winter for publication. Late June letters from Hibbs about Rockwell’s plans for his war series contain a message to convey to Mead Schaeffer about the terrific sketches he brought down as well, noting additionally that the
Post
was excited about Schaeffer’s series. Thus, at the time of this note, June 24, the plans were in place to publish the work in the
Post.

But sometime during the fall, OWI reentered the picture, interested in using Rockwell’s Four Freedoms for the Victory Loan Drive, in the process rejecting Ben Shahn’s version. Shahn, a fine and commercial artist (who continued to be one of Rockwell’s greatest admirers) whose work was far grittier and less accessible to the untutored eye than Rockwell’s, had socialist leanings, which may have made him suspect to the OWI. Still, even after Rockwell was tapped by the OWI, its chief of the Graphics Division, Francis Brennan, was furious at the choice of Rockwell over Shahn, especially as Brennan had earlier dismissed Rockwell’s ideas. The agitation over the OWI’s choice of Rockwell culminated in the Writers’ Division resigning en masse, and Brennan and Shahn creating a poster of Liberty holding a Coke (a former Coca-Cola executive, with company ties to Rockwell’s illustrations from the early 1930s, had been the arbiter who chose Rockwell); the caption read, “The War that Refreshes—the Four Delicious Freedoms!”

Rockwell himself saw the chance to illustrate the Four Freedoms as his opportunity to produce the “Big Picture” that every artist dreams of. He hoped to clear the summer of other commitments, concentrating only on bringing home the abstractions to the American people. Under Lorimer’s avowals of isolationism, he had felt restricted from indulging his own passions. Although Rockwell’s low number of covers during World War I was due to his position behind the ranks of the older, accomplished illustrators James Montgomery Flagg and J. C. Leyendecker, he had also been too uncomfortable to go up against Lorimer’s beliefs. Not only was there a new editor now, but Lorimer was dead by the time Rockwell undertook his World War II covers. No paternal ghost threatened the sense of liberation that allowed Rockwell to create the lighthearted Willie Gillis series as well as the somber and more abstract Four Freedoms.

Hibbs gave Rockwell the license to exercise his fervent belief that freedom was due everyone in the world, even if Americans had to contribute to its global realization. But Rockwell also believed that most people reasoned through concrete images far more often and effectively than through abstract principles. His talent, narrating an entire story with one picture, was his tool, and the Four Freedoms, from his point of view, the ultimate challenge to which he would put it.

In spite of his determination to devote his time exclusively to the Four Freedoms, it proved impossible, predictably, to clear his schedule of everything else. At one point during the summer, he had to stop painting and go to Manhattan to see his doctor, Charles Gordon Heyd, who, according to old city records, had restricted his practice to gastroenterology during this period. Rockwell tried to keep medical problems confidential except when he found himself conveniently sick at deadline time, which may account for his not finding a specialist closer to home. A note the artist made to himself laments that the doctor had told him he needed an operation, but, Rockwell wrote next, he informed the doctor that he could not go into the hospital until September, when he would finish the Four Freedoms. What the operation was, or if it ever occurred, remains a mystery. Between illness, finishing commissions for other magazines, and fending off business complications from selling second reproduction rights to earlier artwork, the summer bumped along. Rockwell’s loyalty to the Four Freedoms project was absolute, whatever the reality of his life; the memo he made to himself after his doctor’s appointment included the poignant “Those 4F’s have grown larger and larger in my unfortunate time. I feel that they are worth everything that I can give them and more.
I have just got to do that first, it means everything to me
” (underlining his).

By now, Ben Hibbs must have known his man well enough not to be surprised when Rockwell told the
Post
’s art director that he couldn’t meet the fall deadline.

In early autumn 1942, the
Post
’s art director, Jim Yates, worriedly inquired about Rockwell’s progress, reminding him that they needed the paintings soon in order to publish them as they had planned. Rockwell’s recent admission to them that he had junked the complete first painting because he had overworked it, and now was redoing it, made them extremely nervous. Rockwell wrote back a pleading letter, explaining that while he realized they had a right to be concerned—that the writers (Booth Tarkington, Will Durant, Carlos Bulosan, and Stephen Vincent Benét) had all sent in their texts and he was very late on even the first painting—he wanted them to rest assured that he would get them all done soon. He worked exclusively on the first one,
Freedom of Speech,
for a month and a half, believing it to be the most challenging because it contained so many characters. He assured them that he now had it under complete control, that it would go quickly, and that he had cleared his calendar completely for the other three paintings,
Post
covers, and the “unavoidable Boy Scout Calendar,” which would only take a few days. Fervently, he concluded the letter by saying, “I just cannot express to you how much this series means to me. Aside from their wonderful patriotic motive, there are no subjects which could rival them in opportunity for human interest painting. Believe me, they deserve everything I can give them.”

In mid-November, the
Post
was even more worried than the OWI. Ben Hibbs himself wrote Rockwell to beg him not to redo the third picture,
Freedom from Want,
as Jim Yates had relayed to him was the artist’s plan. He wooed Rockwell into accepting his praise of the painting as it stood by explaining that the artist’s concern that his painting didn’t match the text of the Filipino laborer that would accompany it was irrelevant—the two were not supposed to reflect the same perspective, merely deal with the same subject. Cleverly, and truthfully, Hibbs appealed to Rockwell’s painterly side: the government was going to impose a restriction on four-color use inside the magazine, where the pictures would be published. If Rockwell didn’t get them the remaining pictures in the next two or three weeks, they might be stuck reproducing them in halftones at best. Politely, but urgently, Hibbs ended the letter with, “Time really is of the essence now, and I can’t help being deeply worried.”

At that point, probably in relief after the paintings had all been delivered, Jim Yates composed a parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” with two stanzas immortalizing Rockwell’s frightening habit with deadlines:

Just then did he remember, he had promised last September,

   Paintings of the Freedoms, said he would complete all four,

   Through weeks and months he pondered, he planned and thought

   and wondered,

   How to paint one on Religion, all the while he gently swore

He never had such trouble with any job before,

   Not with any job before.

Spoke Yates, I am in trouble, so I came up here to huddle,

   To beg, to plead, to coax, yes, to implore

Please don’t think I am nagging, as the time seems to be dragging,

   But our presses wait and wait, on almost every floor,

Waiting for the Freedoms, we expected long before

   Only that and nothing more.

Rockwell finished all four paintings by the year’s end, and the
Post
began publishing them on February 20, 1943. That same week, the OWI publicly announced its plan to issue several million poster reproductions of the series. The first picture,
Freedom of Speech,
conveys its abstract principle by showing a handsome, modern-but-rugged man standing in the midst of a group, having his say. Presumably based on Rockwell’s oft-quoted inspiration for the piece, this was a town meeting where his neighbor was politely listened to in spite of dissenting opinions, and the seated citizens looking up at the speaker have various opinions themselves. The American ideal that the painting is meant to encapsulate shines forth brilliantly for those who have canonized this work as among Rockwell’s great pictures. For those who find the piece less successful, however, Rockwell’s desire to give concrete form to an ideal produces a strained result. To such critics, the people looking up at the speaker have stars in their eyes, their posture conveying celebrity worship, not a room full of respectful dissent. The man sitting behind the speaker, as well as the speaker himself, could be staring toward the heavens instead of focusing on people in the room. Rockwell started the painting over four times, uncomfortable with the formal grouping until the last version. In the upper left corner of the painting, he included a partial view of his own face, his eye positioned at the highest point of view in the room full of ten citizens.