American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (24 page)

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By Rockwell’s accounting, he met her at dinner at the home of Clyde and Cotta Forsythe. She was wearing “a bright orange dress,” he recalled, skimping on his usual outlay of anecdotal detail. He called and asked her to dinner. She was busy. He asked her again. They went out. He had known her for exactly two weeks when he asked her to marry him. He had wed his previous wife with similar haste, as if the notion of a proper courtship was simply a pointless expenditure of time.

On March 19, 1930, he and Mary went downtown to the Los Angeles County Courthouse to apply for a marriage license. When he filled out the form, he gave his address as 1 West Sixty-seventh Street, in New York, the Hotel des Artistes. That part was true. He gave his age as thirty-three, chopping off three years, perhaps because he could not imagine why a fetching woman like Mary Barstow would want to marry a panic-stricken divorcé who had already crossed the divide separating thirty from forty.

News of the engagement was carried in newspapers around the country. the
Los Angeles Times
noted, “Miss Barstow, a graduate of Stanford University and member of Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority, met Rockwell here through mutual friends two weeks ago.”
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In a picture accompanying the article, they stand side by side, gazing directly at the photographer. Readers must have felt a quick moment of happiness for her, this local girl who had won the affection of a famous artist from New York. He towers over her in his suit and tie, a long man with a high forehead. Mary is blooming. In gloves and a floppy felt hat, she is lovely, lit up, her face as round as an apple.

News of their two-week courtship could have led anyone to imagine a whirlwind romance. He was, after all, an artist, with all that implied about a passionate nature and a willingness to flout convention. “Visitor’s Romance Disclosed.” So read the caption beneath the photograph, as if the relationship had been conducted clandestinely.

Norman and Mary in Los Angeles, on March 19, 1930, the day they applied for a marriage license

Yet readers who saw the announcement in the
Times
and then read the rest of the paper might have been surprised to find Rockwell mentioned in a second story. As it happened, he had spent the evening of his wedding engagement at a Boy Scouts event in Alhambra. The occasion was the awarding of Eagle Scout badges to two men in the same family, a troop leader and his teenage son, which was apparently some kind of first. “The presentation was made by Norman Rockwell,” the paper reported, “who is spending the winter here.”
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Mary had reason to feel slighted, but surely she held her tongue. She was good at putting on a cheerful front. She had been engaged for less than twelve hours and already he had to miss dinner and be somewhere else.

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They were married on April 17, 1930, late on a Thursday afternoon, at her parents’ house on Champion Place. It was a radiant day, and the ceremony was held in the garden, beneath the branches of pepper and eucalyptus trees.
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The minister was Presbyterian, in deference to Mary’s religion. Her sister Nancy was her only attendant. Clyde Forsythe was the best man.

Afterward, Mr. and Mrs. Barstow hosted an informal reception in their garden, where they received about 140 of their friends and relatives. Most of the guests had known Mary since she was a little girl, but were just meeting Rockwell for the first time. His parents did not come west for the wedding, nor did his brother. There were no plans for a honeymoon. The newlyweds were leaving immediately for New York, where Rockwell was to resume work. Already she must have known that artists are high matrimonial risks who save the best part of themselves for their art.

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Arriving in New York, they settled into his apartment at the Hotel des Artistes. It was spring and the Upper West Side was leafy and bright. The Great Depression seemed to be happening somewhere else. Mary, who had never been in Manhattan before, was amused by the sight of men wearing black top hats in the middle of the day. “People didn’t wear top hats in California,” Rockwell explained on her behalf. Within two months, he was feeling restless. He missed his studio in New Rochelle and wanted to return to it. Since his divorce, he had rented out the house to a Mr. and Mrs. Edward Leicester Bliss. They must have been quite good-natured because now, at his request, they agreed to let him use the studio.

For sleeping arrangements, he rented yet another commodious white Colonial directly across the street from his own.
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But within six months, he managed to oust the Blisses from his house altogether. “He could not find another house with a studio he liked as well, so we broke our lease and we moved two streets away,” Muriel Bliss, the couple’s daughter, noted in a letter.

So there he was, back at 24 Lord Kitchener Road, with a new wife and the same old collie, the same telephone number (7383), the same early-American tea tables, the same antique candlesticks. Mary did not bother to redecorate, leaving everything the way it had been when Irene was last there less than a year earlier. One reporter who visited mentioned “dozens and dozens of genuine hook rugs strewn around on apple green velour carpeting.” An insurance appraisal from 1931 confirms the presence of “high-pile Wilton carpet, green”
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throughout the house, including the master bedroom, conjuring visions of a golf course.

Their first summer together should have been a season of possibility. Instead, Rockwell entered what he described as the worst depression of his life. It would not lift completely for four years. As had happened at various points in his past, he felt beset by feelings of inadequacy and unable to make even the smallest decision. “I began to go out to the studio at all hours to look at my picture and reassure myself that it wasn’t as bad as I’d suddenly remembered it to be,” he recalled. “But when I’d get out there, I couldn’t tell whether it was good or bad. Or if I decided that it was bad I couldn’t figure out why.”
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Within the first year of their marriage, Mary began to feel excluded from her husband’s company. It wasn’t just that his work required him to close the door of his studio and make himself unavailable. It was also that he seemed to need a male artist to buck him up. He derived something intangible from his assistant Fred Hildebrandt that she could not provide.
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Fred, a young artist in New Rochelle who earned his living modeling for illustrators, was attractive in a dramatic way, tall and slim, his luxuriant blond hair combed straight back. “He had marvelous bone construction,” recalled the illustrator Mead Schaeffer. “He was a lifesaver for Norman.” Like Leyendecker, for whom he frequently posed, Fred was the son of German immigrants, Chicago-reared, and had settled in New Rochelle with his parents.

In 1930, Rockwell hired Hildebrandt to run his studio, which required that he help with all manner of tasks, from building stretchers to answering the phone to sitting on a hardwood chair for hours, holding a pose. Rockwell turned thirty-six that year, and Hildebrandt turned thirty-one. In photographs from the period, Hildebrandt is the image of athleticism, a handsome, well-built man in a checkered flannel shirt, smiling gamely as he puts a worm on a hook or tosses his fishing line into a lake.

He and Rockwell had first met at Forsythe’s house out in Los Angeles, and Rockwell, jittery spouse that he was, had invited Fred to accompany him and Mary on the rail journey back to New York. But Hildebrandt declined to join the honeymoon. As he later recalled, Rockwell “was about to start a
Post
cover for which he wanted me to pose. However I felt the competition was too strong as Gary Cooper had posed for the one he had just finished. Anyway I had a date in Mexico, so I told him I’d see him back home later.”
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The following year, they did travel together to California. In April 1931, by which time Mary was four months pregnant, she and Rockwell returned to her parents’ house in Alhambra. During their three months in California, Mary made no mention of her pregnancy in letters to girlfriends but acknowledged her husband’s wanderings. “Fred is with us a good deal,” Mary noted to her friend Muriel Bliss on May 7. “He and Norman play squash after work and go off hiking in the mountains.”
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At the end of May, Rockwell and Fred went off on a camping trip that lasted for two weeks.
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They were trout fishing in Bishop, near Yosemite, when they decided to go climb Mount Whitney, which has an elevation of about fourteen thousand feet. It was enough of an accomplishment to merit a mention in the local newspaper: “Many people attempt the climb through the snow, though few gain the top, but the two men persisted in overcoming the difficulties of altitude and gained the highest point in the United States to gain a view of the surrounding country. Mr. Rockwell and Mr. Hildebrandt then started on their trip to Mexico where they are at present.”
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Fred Hildebrandt took pictures of Rockwell on their treks through the San Gabriel Mountains.
(Courtesy of Alexandra Hoy)

Later that summer, the
Post
published a new Rockwell cover,
Colonial Couple
(July 25, 1931), in which a slender, poised man in a tricorn hat and stockinged legs tilts forward to kiss a blond milkmaid. It is the only
Post
cover by Rockwell in which a man and a woman kiss. He later noted with amusement that Fred, apparently a famous ladies’ man, had kissed three women while posing for him—the first in New Rochelle; the second in Chicago, where they had stopped on their way out west; and the third when they reached Hollywood.

Fred Hildebrandt, an artist, worked as Rockwell’s studio assistant and model for a decade.
(Courtesy of Gary Hallwood)

Mary was less appreciative of Fred, describing him as “a dead drag as far as work goes.” But looking back on the trip out west, she did not regret it. The following spring, writing to her parents, she noted appreciatively, “California last year came in the nick of time, but that was only a temporary respite.”
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