American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (21 page)

In June he was interviewed by a reporter from the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
, Ruth Brindze, who arrived at the Bryant Park Studio Building to find Rockwell sitting with a model who had posed for a good many of his “old-man pictures.”
20
Probably James K. Van Brunt. “Rockwell has a wide grin which makes him look younger than the thirty-one years of which he boasts,” the reporter noted. “He never seems to take himself seriously. He regards his skill as an illustrator as ‘something to knock wood about,’ and he often thinks, ‘I’m about through.’”

Asked about his artistic production, Rockwell said that he completed about twenty-five pictures a year. “That includes doing some pictures over two or three times.” He estimated that it took about ten days to paint a picture. “I really have it much easier than the cartoonists,” Rockwell said. “They have to get a good idea every day. I only have to get twenty-five a year. But that is even hard.”

Indeed, the gestation of ideas was arduous and his least favorite part of making art. He devoted two nights a week to it. On the first night, he went into a spare room free of distraction and stayed there from about eight to eleven, when, more often than not, he left in a fit of discouragement, convinced that he would never have an idea for a painting again.

The second night, after a few minutes, the thoughts began to present themselves. He had a trick to help him focus his mind, to access the storehouse of his imagination. Proust had his madeleine and Rockwell had his lamppost. He saw it clearly before him, a lamppost on a quiet street. Then he imagined what could happen to it. A boy climbs up it, a boy falls off of it; someone chases the boy around it. He did this all the time, envisioning the lamppost and waiting for a scene to emerge, a boy or two, a certain facial expression, a story. He sketched a bit with pencil and paper, but no real drawing was begun on the thinking nights.

Once he knew enough about the scene, he deleted the lamppost. Then he did a rough sketch—a rough, as he called it—which he submitted to an art editor at any one of a number of magazines, seeking permission to proceed.

He mentioned: “I can’t draw a pretty girl, no matter how much I try. I’m afraid that they all look like old men.”

The reporter noted: “He stuttered a little as he said this because he felt that he had said something that he should not have.” Perhaps he felt that he had confessed to his lack of interest in women.

Whatever he had hoped to find by leaving his wife eluded him. He claimed he had wanted to escape his in-laws. But in the process he found himself without anyone to depend on besides Leyendecker, who had his own obligations and hardly had time to minister to Rockwell. Leyendecker asked him whether he knew his skin was sallow, “sort of all yellow and green,” and exhorted him to take up exercise. So Rockwell joined the YMCA, but quit in short order, saying he felt painfully self-conscious in front of the other men at the gym. He later recalled that they stared at his spindly body in disbelief when he told them he was “reducing.”

He and Irene appear to have reconciled by May 1925, when they surfaced in society-news columns as guests at a surprise party for Emil Fuchs, a Viennese-born society portraitist whose studio was then in the Bryant Park Building.
21
By Rockwell’s account, the marital separation lasted seven months, until July, when illness brought them together. He complained of a sore throat that would not go away and landed in the hospital with tonsillitis. Irene promised to nurture him back to health. She suggested he spend the summer recuperating at her mother’s riverside cottage in Louisville Landing, up on the Canadian border, an invitation he accepted with relief. He got along well with his mother-in-law so long as their encounters took place in her home, not his, and he included her kindly, gray-haired likeness in several paintings from this period.

During the summer, Irene decided that she and Rockwell had spent too many years as renters. On August 28, they purchased their first house, a stucco number on the southern tip of New Rochelle, in an area known as Davenport Neck.
22
Rockwell spoke of it as a “cheaply-built imitation English cottage,” not exactly a propitious description. Irene’s signature is the only one on the land deed, perhaps because Rockwell was still recuperating upstate on the Friday morning when it was signed.

Rockwell’s plan was to resume working in his former studio in New Rochelle, the barn on Prospect Street behind Franklin Lischke’s house.
23
In a letter written late that summer, Rockwell informed his assistant: “Dear Old Franklin, I will be home Saturday the 12th. Will you telephone Bill Sundermeyer and tell him I want him to pose this Sunday the 13th at 9 am. Tell him to wear a Boy Scout uniform.”
24
The letter is written not in words, but as a pictograph and remains a singularly charming document, with a drawing of a deer substituting for the word
dear
, an eye substituting for the word
I
, a Franklin car substituting for the boy’s name, and so on.

Bill Sundermeyer was then fourteen, three years younger than Franklin.
25
Rockwell was using “Old Franklin” as a model less frequently. Franklin didn’t take it personally. Unlike Billy Payne, he could see Rockwell’s side. He knew that he had reached the point where he was “too old to be a kid model and not good-looking enough to be an Arrow Collar Man.”
26

TEN

DIVORCE

(1926 TO 1929)

On February 6, 1926,
The Saturday Evening Post
officially retired its duotone covers, the two-color affairs that required illustrators to limit their palette to red and black. Rockwell was tapped by George Lorimer to do the first four-color cover. For this he chose a humorous scene set in the ruffled eighteenth century: a New England sign painter who is maybe sixty, or a little past sixty, sits perched on a three-legged stool, tilting forward as he applies a final daub of pigment to his latest creation. He is painting a wooden sign, the kind that once swayed over the doors of inns. The sign includes a likeness of George Washington with a white flip wig and too much red paint on his lips, beneath the hand-painted letters: “Ye Pipe & Bowl Tavern, 1785.”

If the cover was the first in four colors, it was also the first in which Rockwell went Colonial. The twenties may be known as the era of jazz, bathtub gin, and late-night parties, but it was also distinguished, as if in a rite of expatiation, by a fashion for history and the trappings of eighteenth-century New England. Much was made of the sesquicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1926, which spawned a fashion for antiques. The rich began collecting early American furniture and the middle class began collecting reproductions of it. People who owned cars began setting out on weekends to visit restored houses in New England.

In Europe you could see castles and ruins. In America there were none, so business leaders and philanthropists competed to create instant historical sites. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., launched Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Henry Ford started Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, where he relocated or reconstructed some one hundred buildings including the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law. “The term
Americana
comes into the English language at this point,” notes the literary scholar William P. Kelly.
1
“There’s a desperate desire to find a there there.”

In the next decade, Rockwell would produce many
Post
covers and advertisements featuring pilgrims and founding fathers. In the process, he acquired an extensive collection of Colonial costumes. His studio became a place where models changed into long waistcoats and shoes with pewter buckles. Open a closet door and a tricorn hat might tumble out.

*   *   *

The Colonial Revival movement found its most powerful expression in the hands of home builders and architects, who turned it into the default style of the American suburbs. Fittingly, in March 1927, Rockwell purchased a Colonial house—an impressive, white-painted, four-bedroom house with green shutters and a grand curving staircase that rose up from the foyer, at 24 Lord Kitchener Road in New Rochelle. (The house is still standing.) It had been built just a few years earlier, as part of an upscale residential development called Bonnie Crest in the northern end of New Rochelle, whose street names paid tribute to the Allied victory in World War I.

Irene poured all her energy into the new house. She retained a decorator and gave extended thought to wallpaper patterns. For the main hall alone, she chose wallpaper “with a reproduction of a quaint landscape,”
2
and ordered thirty-six rolls of it, in addition to paste and lining paper.

Rockwell, in the meantime, was consumed by the construction of a studio on the property, which became its own slowly evolving artistic creation. It was built onto the detached garage and remained entirely separate from the house. Dean Parmelee, the architect who had designed his house, returned now to design the studio. He and Rockwell came up with the idea of replicating an inn in Colonial America.

This required historical research, and Rockwell happily obliged. He and Parmelee drove to the Boston area to look at restored houses including the Wayside Inn, in Sudbury, an old tavern that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had immortalized in his
Tales of a Wayside Inn
. They stayed overnight to better imbibe the atmosphere as well as Henry Ford’s renovations to the building. Rockwell slept in a room where Paul Revere had once supposedly slept. The next morning he joked to the desk clerk that the bed was so uncomfortable he could see why Revere chose to ride at night.

Rockwell’s studio, in the end, was a two-story structure with rough fieldstone walls and a high beamed ceiling. A redbrick fireplace, much like the one at the Wayside Inn, was large enough to roast a pig. Rockwell’s easel and palette table occupied the center of the room. A staircase on the left side led to a second-floor balcony, with a protective railing composed of old wooden spindles. Upstairs, if you lifted the trap door, you would find a veritable storehouse of costumes and props he had amassed for his paintings, including a canon, a fireman’s ax, and an old rocking chair. “It ended up as a $23,000 love affair with antiques,” Rockwell noted of his studio, “and left me up to date in an antique way.”

It was the spring of 1927, and Charles Lindbergh was monopolizing headlines, with his plan to fly nonstop across the Atlantic. Rockwell observed the milestone with a newsy
Post
cover,
Pioneer
.
3
It shows the young, idealistic face of an aviator—not Lindbergh’s, as is commonly assumed—with his glasses pushed up on his head, centered against a radiant blue ground. To meet his deadline, Rockwell hired a model, located an aviator cap, and worked on the image for twenty-six consecutive hours before staggering off to bed. Lorimer was so pleased with the results that he offered Rockwell a raise. “My dear Rockwell,” he wrote on June 30, “‘Pioneer’ is just about [the] high water mark for Post covers and on the strength of it we are going to raise the ante $250 per.”
4
In other words, the
Post
was doubling his fee, to five hundred dollars per cover. Probably there were other factors contributing to the raise. At this point, Rockwell had been at the
Post
for eleven years and other magazines were pursuing him, especially
Liberty
, which was stocked with art by Rockwell imitators.

Irene, who still handled her husband’s business correspondence, penned a thank-you note to his boss. “Dear Mr. Lorimer, Your kind letter with the announcement of a raise was gratefully received. It comes too at a most opportune time for buying a house and building a studio does take a lot of cash.”
5
Then she signed Rockwell’s name, a task he had entrusted to her along with every other part of his life that did not involve paintbrushes.

That summer, Rockwell and his fellow illustrators in New Rochelle were shaken by the death of Coles Phillips, who was only forty-seven and had been suffering from kidney disease. He was famous for his Fade-Away Girls, with their crisp outlines melting into the background, and for which his wife, Teresa, had been his model. He died on a Sunday night in June and the next morning, his dear friend J. C. Leyendecker arrived at his home, on Sutton Manor Road, and insisted on helping. He took the four Phillips children into Manhattan to see what promised to be a historic event, the ticker-tape parade up Broadway welcoming Colonel Lindbergh back to the city from which he had begun his flight.

*   *   *

A year passed and Rockwell’s new studio was finally finished. Instead of inhabiting it, he went away for the summer. He and his architect, Dean Parmelee, sailed to Europe in grand style, leaving New York on July 21, 1928, aboard the
Olympic
, the sister ship of the
Titanic
. Rockwell would be gone for two months. It was the second time he was going abroad without his wife. Irene was happy to make her own summer plans. After Rockwell sailed, she accompanied Coles Phillips’s widow on a two-week trip to the home of friends in Loon Lake, in upstate New York, then continued on, by car and ferry, to her mother’s riverside cottage in Louisville Landing, on the Canadian border.
6
News of her summer surfaced occasionally in the local paper, in connection with either her brothers’ duck hunting or luncheons she attended with her mom and sister at the Massena Country Club.

In addition to Parmelee, Rockwell was traveling with Bill Backer, a well-to-do building contractor and neighbor of his. It is odd to think of three married men (two of whom had young children) leaving their wives for two months to frolic in Europe—the twenties sometimes seem too silly for words. Their fellow first-cabin passengers on the ship included William Randolph Hearst, whom Rockwell spotted “playing cards with his bodyguard, his long, unhappy, horse face bent over the table.”
7
Also on board was Fred Astaire, who was on his way to London to start rehearsing for a stage production of
Funny Face
.
8