Norman Rockwell (55 page)

He was, apparently, a “naughty boy” at these sessions, not hiding his amusement at their, for him, overly serious discussions of William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Once, when they were agonizing, as he saw it, over the meaning of a poem by Robert Frost, he pulled rank in order to show off for the teacher. “Why are we all sitting around, talking about what this poem means, when I can just call up Bob myself and ask him—I’ll go do it right now, if you want.”

Depending on what ending they preferred when telling the story, Molly and Norman might resolve it by allowing the artist to contact Robert Frost, whom he did know slightly, and hear Frost agree with Molly that the poem was deliberately ambiguous. Other times, they’d admit that Molly insisted Norman do no such thing. Eventually, the story assumed such apocryphal force, probably at the delicious thought of the two similar types of American artists—on the face of it—sharing a moment of domestic intimacy, that various intimates are sure they know the truth, although their versions are at odds with each other. But everybody’s account, including Norman and Molly’s, is consistent in calling that evening their first date.

On October 18, 1960, upon the occasion of her remarriage, Rockwell wrote to Ida Hill, Thomas Jenkins Hill’s daughter-in-law (married to the late Harold Hill who had been left fatherless at the turn of the century when young Thomas died of consumption): “I know it isn’t correct to congratulate the bride, but it was wonderful to know you are married to Mr. Cahn. This being a widow or widower isn’t any fun, and I wish you people a long and happy married life.”

He was too busy, however, to ponder for long the burden of being alone: he had barely finished the portraits of the two latest presidential candidates, Kennedy and Nixon, and he still had to complete a
Post
cover and finish another tedious Four Seasons calendar by the end of January. His family and friends remember him trying to outrun grief with ever more work—but all he seemed to them was gray.

29

Another Schoolteacher

In February 1961, the nation’s favorite father figure became a grandfather. Cinny and Peter’s son, Geoffrey, was born in Rome, where the couple had moved when Peter decided to pursue a career in stone carving. In celebration, Norman painted a tiny picture of Mary Rockwell holding the grandson she would never see into the top right-hand corner of his
Golden Rule
cover for the
Post.
While he was working on the picture, Peggy Best ended up in the hospital, mostly in need of a thorough rest. She was highly strung and emotionally somewhat fragile, the kind of woman Rockwell could not have thought good for his own mental health. At first, he wrote her a concerned note: “You work too hard [no irony apparently intended]. It’s wonderful to have ambition and nervous energy but you’ve gotta rest once in a while.”

She responded with too much zeal to his solicitous tone; alarmed, he quickly set her straight:

I got your letter. You and I have a good and valued friendship, that I greatly cherish. I wish I could be of more help but I am the kind of person who is of no use with other people’s problems. They upset me too much.

As you once said, I was a “Rock of Gibraltor” [
sic
] to Mary. I really wasn’t much of a rock as I had to have a lot of help from dear old Riggs.

I do think hope and prayer [sic] that our friendship, that I value so much, will continue forever but don’t think of me as a rock. I’m really jello.

A few days later, Peggy wrote him again, this time more strategically. Happy to be off the hook, he answered: “Got your bright letter. We all have problems but when I’m tired, sick or depressed they become fantastic mountains they ain’t. Get a good rest and come back to your friends.” He signed off with a flirtatious and relieved, “Your eternal, everlasting, unquenchable friend, Norman.”

Throughout this period, Molly Punderson was busy writing her friends at Milton Academy, telling them all about dating Norman Rockwell. She informed them that the artist had enrolled for a second session of her modern poetry class. From Peggy Best’s subsequent choices, it appears that one of the contenders for the town’s most eligible bachelor became aware of her rival within a month or so of returning from the hospital. She decided to go live in France for several months, perhaps partly to remind Rockwell what the town was like without her around. Townspeople still recall how shamelessly women were pursuing the newly single illustrator, and Peggy was savvy enough to put some distance between Rockwell and herself for a while.

If her intentions were to rekindle his interest, the ploy worked. In late August, Rockwell wrote her that

You’re greatly missed here in good ole Stockbridge. It just ain’t the same. It’s been a wild, busy summer. In fact I think I’ll spend next summer somewhere else. Maybe La Rochelle [Peggy’s village]. . . .

[T]he opening parties at the gallery just aren’t the same as when you preside. . . . I see the old gang but you’re the spark plug. (I mean this as complimentary.) So come home and cheer us all up. We sure miss you. Love, Norman.

Within a month of the (for him) markedly romantic letter, Peggy was back in Stockbridge, and Rockwell wrote to her again, though he could have walked to her studio or called her more easily. This time, his handwriting was a little shaky.

“Since we are such good friends, I just don’t want the news to reach you second hand. Molly Punderson and I are engaged to be married. I guess everyone in town will probably know this before long. I know you’ll be pleased for Molly and me.” His closing has modified: “Affectionately,” not “Love,” is the new nomenclature.

Jonathan and Mary Alcantara Best both believe that their mother was devastated—that she had really hoped she and Norman would get married. She had been deeply impressed by Norman’s unusually thoughtful nature, including his ability to enjoy himself at parties more than anyone, though drinking very little, even in a social crowd where getting drunk was considered a routine part of the evening’s festivities. In a community of intellectuals and artists, he stood out above the rest.

People who watched with some amusement the brief bachelorhood of Norman Rockwell in Stockbridge recall Molly’s shrewd strategy of outlasting her competition. She let Rockwell woo her, all the while winning him. It probably didn’t hurt that Erik Erikson chimed in with his opinion that Molly would be a more appropriate match for Rockwell than the fun-loving but vulnerable Peggy, who had already admitted that she needed at times to be able to lean on the illustrator for strength.

On October 25, 1961, sixty-two-year-old Mary Leete Punderson and sixty-seven-year-old Norman Percevel Rockwell were married in St. Paul’s, where Molly had a strong record of weekly attendance, in contrast with her new husband’s habit of confining his attendance there to weddings and funerals. Before the ceremony, Norman had sent Molly to pick out a ring and a trousseau; he wanted to pay for them both. She and her good friend Sally Sedgwick went to an expensive department store in Boston, and the schoolteacher shocked even the wealthy socialite with the eighteen sets of bras and panties and the dozen nightgowns she bought. “I didn’t see how she’d ever use them all!” Sally told a mutual friend. When Molly saw the ring she wanted, a large sapphire, she called Norman to ask his opinion, since it was twice the price they’d discussed. He told her to get whatever she wanted, and so she bought it.

Wedding pictures show a lovely, compact, trim older woman about five feet three inches tall, with clear, direct, infamously piercing blue eyes. She wore a navy blue suit and hat for the ceremony, and only when she heard Cinny and Peter’s toddler call out, “There’s Molly!,” as she walked up the aisle, did she relax her stiff carriage into her normally erect, confident posture. The newlyweds went to Rockwell’s beloved Plaza in Manhattan for the first three days of their honeymoon, then to California, where, strangely, they re-created favorite visits he had made before with Mary, including staying at the Hollywood Roosevelt and visiting Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley, one of Mary’s favorite vacation spots. When they returned to Stockbridge, Molly did not try to reinvent the house as her own—except for hanging a Punderson ancestral portrait—any more than Mary Rockwell had redecorated what had been Irene and Norman’s. But she did devise a clever plan by which she would not feel she was giving up her own life; for the next two years, she and Norman spent their days at the house on South Street, and their nights at Topside, the cottage her father had built her behind the Pundersons’ family house on Main Street, a few blocks from the Rockwells’ home.

The marriage would be extremely successful, as if the third time proved the lucky charm for the painter. Both Peter Rockwell and Molly’s good friend David Wood were told by Norman and Molly respectively that the couple’s sex life was especially gratifying. Certainly this marriage was one of equals more than the previous matches had been, whether from age or temperament or independence. Molly was not needy, as Mary had been; nor was she materialistic, her premarital buying spree to the contrary, or flighty, as Irene had proven. And she knew how to help her husband; just as important, with no children to raise and her own career conducted, she had the time to do so.

Some of the townspeople thought that Norman was really the lucky one to snag Molly as his bride; only a month before her death, Lyn Austin recalled darkly that “those of us who knew Molly well thought she was stepping down to marry Norman—he was beneath her. Her life of the mind was so intense and lively. He was no intellectual like she was; she lived for her poetry.” Insistent that a teacher from Milton Academy, “reminiscent of Gertrude Stein,” had been Molly’s longtime lover, Austin believed that the always curious teacher simply viewed marriage to a famous illustrator as another great adventure. “Her old school friends, including me, used to go over in the afternoons and have tea with her, so she could talk literature. Otherwise, she would have been bored just being with him.” It is extremely rare to find Norman Rockwell the man described by anyone who knew him as boring. More plausibly, Rockwell’s seemingly homespun aesthetics and apparent Boy Scout allegiances offended the less conventional theatre director; her disdain for Molly’s choice sounds at times as if she had a crush on her teacher and was angry at being betrayed by her liberal hero’s choice of a symbol of the Middle America Austin had rejected.

Without a doubt, it is true that Molly Punderson enriched Norman Rockwell’s later life. Their frequent trips to Tanglewood were taken at her behest; he, too, enjoyed classical music, but he freely admitted to being as interested in watching the musicians as in listening to them. And the staunch, openly political schoolteacher with a quixotic sense of humor that almost matched Rockwell’s own pushed her willing husband to go public with his beliefs, to stop hiding behind a banal banner of neutrality. Finally, the release that Rockwell had experienced through travel was matched by his spouse’s own passion for exploring new places. Rather than slowing down as he approached his seventieth birthday, Norman Rockwell, who never had a high school education, found himself energized by his marriage to his third schoolteacher, one whose joie de vivre matched his own.

Within weeks of their marriage, Molly had ordered Rockwell’s schedule into a far more manageable scheme; after her initial shock at how little he had saved, she arranged the family finances so that their investments climbed quickly; she found ways for them to take several major trips a year, usually three that were to foreign countries; and she learned to work as his photographer, hoping to reduce his dependence on his “man Friday,” the loyal Louis Lamone, who in fact would become even more important to Rockwell’s work after photographer Bill Scovill left in 1963. Molly took scores of photographs on their trips, eventually numbering five thousand prints, but Rockwell only occasionally painted from them. They converted the old icehouse/mural room into a permanent studio for her photography and her writing, so that she could continue working on the grammar textbook she had begun just before meeting Norman.

Molly remained a little jealous of Louis, in spite of his “demotion,” in much the same way that Mary had been of Gene Pelham; not only was Norman deeply dependent on him, but the photographer-assistant was territorial, protective of his boss in just the way Gene had been back in Arlington. Louis loved him deeply because he was so kind. “If something went wrong,” Louis said, “he always blamed himself, not the other guy. Once I made a terrible mistake about something and all Norman said was, ‘I guess you’re human after all,’ not angry with me for having fouled up his business.”

“Norman was incapable of complaining about anything. I never saw him angry,” Buddy Edgerton said. He was thoughtful, too; he always brought back gifts for his friends and neighbors from his trips. And if Louis arrived early in the studio, before Rockwell’s breakfast, often the painter would think to take him coffee before he’d even had his.

Molly’s reasons for hoping to reduce her husband’s dependence on Louis Lamone were various. An unattractive underside to her motivation, according to two women who adored Molly and thought highly of her character, was the class issue: “There was a tiny bit of Molly that disliked Louie’s lack of learning—not the lack of a degree, but no appreciation, it seemed to her, of ideas and books. His roughness offended her, and probably she preferred that Norman not be influenced by him,” says Virginia Loveless, to which Mary Quinn assents. But, until his death, the artist wrote checks to Louis for performing various tasks, and he paid some of his medical bills as well. Most important, Louis took the majority of Rockwell’s photographs for the last fifteen years of the illustrator’s life.

Rockwell’s affection for Louis Lamone aside, it was nevertheless Molly who helped him to finish his commissions in a more timely fashion than before, mostly through being in charge of a schedule she ruled firmly. Louis’s careless disregard of the day’s schedule exasperated her; and soon older friends and extended family members from afar began at times to grumble at being held at arm’s length, rather than being granted the same access to the painter that they’d always had. Molly even asked Jarvis to call before dropping in, so that the couple’s days could assume more order. And she insisted that the time for her husband’s nap and his afternoon bike ride, which she now shared with him, were sacrosanct.

Just as in his previous marriages, Rockwell’s wife took the blame for managing his affairs as he, in fact, wanted; if someone managed to break through Molly’s corridor of influence and get to Rockwell, he acted as if he was delighted to be interrupted, though privately he flailed, as he always had, at too many pressures keeping him from work. “Everyone else was supposed to keep people and stresses away from my father,” Peter remembers. “We all did the dirty work to protect him, and my father never had to take the blame for being inaccessible.” His granddaughter Daisy recalls that the protection took the form, in the early seventies when she was old enough to notice, of a lack of responsibility for holding up his end of the socializing at a family dinner: “Everyone else would be louder than normal, almost desperate, in an attempt to make up for the ‘negative space’ my grandfather took up,” she says. “He didn’t feel the need to join in, and he’d just get lost in thought about his work if he wanted to, which was often.”