American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (16 page)

SEVEN

BILLY PAYNE

(MAY 1919 TO SUMMER 1920)

Journalists who interviewed Rockwell invariably took note of his penchant for physical cleanliness. A reporter who visited his studio in May 1919 found him dressed in “a well-daubed white sailor’s suit.” During the interview, Rockwell puffed on his pipe and stood at the sink washing up “a few thousand odd brushes.”
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Rockwell, the article noted, was not a Greenwich Village type with long hair and a flowing smock, but an antibohemian. At age twenty-five, he seemed indifferent to the European ideal of the artist as a demiurgic creative force, preferring to ally himself with practical and industrious American types. Asked how one becomes an artist, Rockwell replied, “I agree with Thomas Edison when he says that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

His studio, too, which then occupied two rooms at 78 North Avenue, was a distinctly American place. Anyone, technically, could pose for a painting. To qualify as a Rockwell model, you didn’t have to be classically beautiful, a Venus or a ballerina. You need not have founded a railroad company or be in possession of a vast fortune. Of course, having freckles was a definite plus.

When people thought of the typical artist’s studio, they were likely to think of a carnal space, a setting where women displayed themselves in various stages of undress. Rockwell, by contrast, purged the studio of its sexual overtones. Instead of a pear-shaped woman reclining on a divan, he passed his days in the company of schoolboys like Billy Payne. No one posed in the buff in Rockwell’s studio, no one swilled whiskey and chomped a cigar. An afternoon modeling session was less likely to end with a round of drinks than with Billy Payne remembering to do his math homework.

True, there were grown-up models as well, like Dave Campion, a lean, wisecracking man who owned a newsstand on Centre Avenue that Rockwell passed every day on his way to work. It was where he could go to see his own
Post
covers. It was his museum.

When interviewing kids for the job of model, Rockwell always asked one question: Can you raise your eyebrows? The test, he believed, was simple but infallible. Those who could raise their eyebrows halfway up their foreheads could do most anything. Their faces were sufficiently mobile to assume most any expression.

In the spring of 1919, when Rockwell tapped fifteen-year-old Eddie Carson for a Boy Scouts recruiting poster of which more than a million would be printed, he praised the boy’s skill as an actor. Eddie was Billy Payne’s best friend and the son of a jeweler. Billy could not help but feel a little jealous when the
Evening Standard
did a whole story on Eddie, describing him as “an intelligent model who falls naturally into the pose as soon as the idea is given to him. He does not have to be shifted and told to hold his hand ‘so,’ to raise his right eyebrow and lower his left ear.”
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Although Eddie posed in full Scout regalia, he was not in fact a Boy Scout, which no one found objectionable.

*   *   *

Why did Rockwell paint so many images of boys? people wondered. At least one (female) reader posed the question directly to the artist, in writing. His wife, Irene, kindly answered:

Dear Miss Evrett,

That was a very nice little letter Mr. Rockwell received from you and he thanks you … No, he doesn’t dislike girls. In fact he very much likes them but he likes to paint boys better. They are easier for him to paint. He is doing a picture now for the Saturday Evening Post and the girl has the prominent part in it.
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When you look at Rockwell’s pictures of boys, you’re aware of the pleasure he took in drawing them. He was extraordinarily observant and he had a precise feel for clothing, skin, and the surfaces of things. He found evident satisfaction in rendering corpulent boys and rail-thin boys, in the everyday formulations and deformations of the male body. True, he favored certain types—boys with the right allotment of freckles and red hair, the right expression of innocence and grit. When he first moved to New Rochelle, he recalled, he would “hang about the grade schools at recess … and stop little boys on the street, turning them around and sideways to see if they were the type I wanted.”
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Today, with our awareness of pederasty scandals, this kind of behavior might sound problematic, but there is nothing to suggest that Rockwell’s love of boys ever spilled over into inappropriate touching.

Billy Payne’s best friend, Eddie Carson, posed for a Boy Scouts recruiting poster, which also ran as the cover of the July 1919 issue of
Boys’ Life
.
(Courtesy of the National Scouting Museum, Irving, Texas)

Girls, by contrast, he hardly seemed to notice. In 1919, for instance, he produced an impressive output of eleven covers for the
Post
, eight of which portray boys or old men alone or together. None of the covers portray a female figure by herself, but in three covers girls are given supporting roles. The girls are less vivid than their male counterparts. They tend to be bland, boneless figures, as vague as clouds, with none of the descriptive richness you find in Rockwell’s renditions of boys. They take the substantiality out of what Rockwell does best.

*   *   *

By 1919 Billy Payne had posed for several dozen of Rockwell’s works, including fifteen covers for the
Post
. He had posed for the very first one, for all three figures in it, the shamed boy pushing a baby carriage and the two boys laughing at him. It had been five years since he and Rockwell met—at Edgewood Hall, the boardinghouse where they both lived with their parents. Rockwell had since married and moved into an apartment of his own, but Billy still lived at Edgewood Hall and remained
NORMAN ROCKWELL’S FAVORITE BOY MODEL
, as a headline in the local paper put it, in July of 1918.
5
Billy had just appeared in a Rockwell painting on the cover of
Life
, a popular humor magazine unrelated to the Henry Luce publication of the same title that was founded years later. The
Life
cover showed Billy dressed up for his middle school graduation, in a blue serge suit with a stiff collar and a red tie.

Billy was about to enter New Rochelle High School, and his relationship with Rockwell had changed over the years. When they first met, Billy had been ten years old, a redheaded lad of Scottish descent, rowdy and seemingly fearless. But now Billy was fifteen and, in Rockwell’s eyes, he had outgrown his role. It wasn’t something Rockwell cared to admit, that he tired of even his favorite models after a while, needed new ones to excite his gaze.

Rockwell poses with his model Billy Payne, circa 1917.

During his freshman year of high school, Billy still frequented Rockwell’s studio, where he might see a friend on the modeling stand. He made his peace when Eddie Carson posed for the Boy Scouts poster in the spring. But what he could not abide was the apotheosis of chubby Buddy Ogden, who appeared on a
Post
cover on September 6, 1919. It portrays a moment of summer languor: a farm boy sits outdoors snoozing, in the middle of the day. With his hippo’s neck and sweating cheeks, his mouth hanging open, the farm boy might not seem likely to incite envy. But Billy was “terribly jealous,” as Rockwell recalled, materializing at his studio on North Avenue demanding to know why he would use “a lunk” like Buddy Ogden as a model. Why wasn’t Rockwell using him instead? “Don’t need you,” Rockwell curtly told him, hoping Billy would leave him alone.
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But Billy was furious and inconsolable. He stalked Buddy Ogden, who was four years younger than he, and beat him up.

Billy’s parents, distressed to see their only son picking fights and turning into a discipline problem, decided to send him to boarding school. He was pulled out of New Rochelle High School that September, just a few weeks into his sophomore year. On October 6, Billy started classes, a bit late, at a private school in rural Maryland: the Tome School for Boys, which was isolated on a high bluff overlooking the Susquehanna River and the town of Port Deposit.

When Billy’s father filled out the Tome School application, he was asked to provide references. He listed five. Rockwell, curiously, was not among them.
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Perhaps Mr. Payne, an insurance agent, thought that artists were social liabilities whose names could only jeopardize an application. Or perhaps he was cross with Rockwell; Billy’s experiences as a “favorite boy model” had no doubt hampered his academic progress. Billy had missed countless days of school posing for Rockwell, who was too absorbed by his work to give any thought to the problem of Billy’s attendance. In his freshman year at New Rochelle High, his grades were mixed, at best: a B
+
in science, but a C– in English, an F in Spanish, and an incomplete in plane geometry.
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Mr. Payne was possibly not the most sensitive father. The application for the Tome School asked parents which of the four churches in town they wanted their sons to attend—Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Catholic. He scrawled in response: “Not Catholic.”

Billy had been at the Tome School for two months when he returned home, to Edgewood Hall, for winter break. It is not known how he fared at the new school, only that he left for vacation on December 10 and planned to return in January. On New Year’s Eve—an icy Wednesday night—he stayed in. But then, at some point, he decided to climb out of the window of his third-floor room, onto a little ledge, reportedly to play a prank on a little girl by sneaking into the window of her room and hiding her box of candy.
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In the midst of the high jinks, he slipped and fell to a concrete porch on the ground floor.

“No one saw him fall,”
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the paper reported, but two maids in the house heard his body strike the porch. They went outside to look and saw him lying there in a pool of blood. He had cracked the base of his skull but was still alive. Sadie Miller, who ran the boardinghouse, rushed him in her car to New Rochelle Hospital.

An operation was performed and Billy remained hospitalized for nearly a month. At the end of January, he was sent home and seemed to be improving, but he was having frequent headaches. Doctors were summoned from New York; they advised against a second operation. Early in the morning of February 26, he died from acute meningitis, in his bed at Edgewood Hall.
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The funeral was held on Sunday, at Trinity Church in New Rochelle, and Billy’s friends served as the pallbearers.
12

*   *   *

Eddie Carson was Billy’s best friend and, as Rockwell recalled, “he was grief-stricken. I never saw a kid take on so; he mooned about for weeks, wouldn’t pose or eat much, just sat in his room.” Rockwell himself was more measured. “I was sort of struck by Billy’s death, too,” he noted in his autobiography. “He was a swell kid, a regular rapscallion. I missed him a whole lot.”
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It was a cool response, a nonresponse. He does not mention when he last saw Billy or whether he attended his funeral. He does not say whether he paid a sympathy call to the grieving parents, William and Mabel Payne, whose only other child was a grown daughter from Mr. Payne’s first marriage. Moreover, Rockwell makes many careless errors in the section on Billy in his autobiography. He misspells Billy’s last name as “Paine.” He says he he died “a few days” after the accident, when in fact it was eight weeks later. He claims Billy was then thirteen years old, when in fact he was almost sixteen.

The history of art abounds with tales of cast-off models who met tragic ends, such as Camille Claudel or Dora Maar, who posed for Rodin and Picasso, respectively. The experience of an artist’s model can amount to its own intense drama: the thrill of capturing an artist’s gaze, the pain of losing it.

Rockwell, by his own admission, abruptly rejected Billy after cultivating his affection for five years. He made Billy a cover boy and then he made him invisible. Perhaps he felt a sense of self-reproach for refusing the boy the friendship he needed, for ignoring him when he could no longer turn him into art. It is possible that Billy’s fall from the rooftop was not an accident, but a suicide. As the papers reported, no one saw him fall.