American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (25 page)

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His parents, in the meantime, were saddled with the problems that come with age. In the fall of 1930 Nancy Rockwell—then living in a rooming house called Barberry Bush, in Mount Vernon, New York—had summoned a “specialist” from Manhattan to her bedside. The doctor could find nothing wrong. He then had a chat with the good-natured Waring, who, in all his years of marriage, had been so preoccupied by his wife’s ailments that it did not occur to him to harbor any of his own. But in fact he was perilously ill with cancer of the esophagus. Though his chances for recovery were slender, he and his wife abruptly left home that winter and moved to sunny De Land, Florida, just north of Orlando.

Colonial Couple
, 1931
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

He died a few months later, on July 3, 1931, a holiday weekend. He was sixty-two. Although he had been the most solicitous husband, he unnerved his wife by neglecting to arrange for his final care. For this she enlisted her artist-son. Rockwell had just returned from his stay with his in-laws in Alhambra when he rode the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad from New York down to Orlando to help out his mother. According to the obituary that appeared on page one of
The De Land Sun-News
, “Mrs. Rockwell and Norman Rockwell were with Mr. Rockwell when death came.” A service was held at a church in Florida and then Waring’s body was sent back to his native Yonkers, where he was buried on July 8 on the grounds of St. John’s Episcopal Church, among the members of his wife’s family.

In a letter to Clyde Forsythe, Rockwell reflected on his father’s death with equanimity. “Pa was one of the gentlest and kindest men that ever lived, as you know. But he was suffering so much physically and he was so unhappy mentally because he could not work that his passing was really a blessing.”
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Nancy Rockwell was now sixty-five, a widow without a home. Unwilling to stay in Florida, she briefly moved in with her son Jarvis, whose own life was in a state of upheaval. After prospering on Wall Street in the twenties, he had been ruined by the Depression. Early in 1931 he and his wife and two sons settled in in Kane, Pennsylvania, a small lumber town in the western part of the state. He took a job as a toy designer for the Holgate Company, which was creatively satisfying but forced him to live more modestly than he wished.

No sooner had she arrived in Kane than Nancy Rockwell realized she did not want to live there. Her grandson, Richard Rockwell, a future cartoonist who was then a boy of eleven, recalled her as a difficult, self-absorbed woman with no discernible affection for children. One night when his parents went out, “she demanded a babysitter because she didn’t want to be left alone with the boys.”
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“Jarvis tried to prove that he was the more loving son,” Richard Rockwell continued. “He made the effort to have her come to Kane. But then she went back to Norman’s area, New Rochelle. She favored Norman, because he was the baby.”

Even so, there was no possibility that she might move in with Norman, who, like most artists, needed to avoid distractions in order to do his painting. She wound up moving back to Rhode Island, where she had lived briefly before her marriage and where she had a nephew she liked, John Orpen, who was in the ice-making business. Although Jarvis had supported their mother throughout the twenties, he no longer had the means to do so. The responsibility now fell to Norman, which created friction between the brothers.

On September 3, 1931, two months after his father’s death, Rockwell became a father himself. He named the baby after his father, Jarvis Waring Rockwell, no matter that it was also his brother’s name. To avoid confusion, Rockwell and Mary called their son Jerry. Rockwell was thirty-seven and glad to finally achieve some kind of paternal status after the ordeal of his childless first marriage. Mary noted that the two months before the baby arrived marked the first time she and Norman “were really on a normal sort of life.”

Over time he would prove to be an ineffectual and distracted father. In his autobiography, the birth of his first child elicited no more than a passing reference to “Jerry, our eldest son, born in 1932”—the date was off by only a year.

Unlike his first wife, Mary knew about art and its history and was interested in hearing his ideas about art. He subscribed to the values of a classical art education, which means that he viewed drawing from the human figure as supreme. Yet he was also open to the adventure of abstract art. When Nancy Barstow, his wife’s younger sister and an art student in California, mentioned in a letter that she was studying “abstract design,” Rockwell replied that abstraction was “something I missed almost entirely in my early training and which I am just beginning to get interested in.” That was on February 1, 1932. He dictated the letter and Mary typed it up, pleased that he was willing to respond so thoughtfully to her sister.

He added that he had recently been to the Museum of Modern Art, in Manhattan, where he saw the Diego Rivera show. It had opened the previous December, and Rivera was only the second artist to be given a full-dress retrospective at the two-year-old museum. (Matisse had been the first.) It may seem surprising that Rockwell was drawn to Rivera, a member of the Communist Party who intended his work as scathing social commentary. Yet the two artists had much in common. Both had a powerful narrative approach and saw themselves as storytellers. Both worked in a populist idiom, presenting common people in strong, legible compositions. The difference was that Rivera was a history painter, recording such key events as the Mexican Revolution, while Rockwell painted a history of the American people that had never happened.

Walking through the show at the Modern, Rockwell was particularly struck by Rivera’s early works, in which the artist wasn’t afraid to be derivative and jump into the minds of the masters he loved. “He has studied in Spain, France and Mexico, and in each case he has allowed himself to absorb the qualities of the schools of art in each locality and you can see in his work how he has experimented with them,” Rockwell notes in his letter.
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“But in the end you see him painting his own art, to which he has brought all this knowledge and experience.” He added that this is “a dangerous method,” because if an artist “isn’t strong enough,” he will be overpowered by outside influences and never develop his own sense of style.

Rockwell, who was eight years younger than Rivera, had studied in similar places—he had done a stint in Paris and visited Madrid, wandering the long halls of the Prado and admiring the smoky Goyas. But what had he learned from his travels? He had not “experimented” the way Rivera had experimented. The thought put him in a rueful mood. He believed his failure to test different styles had prevented him from finding his own style, his true voice.

The Rivera show, it appears, converted him virtually overnight to the power of new art. Not long after seeing the show, he was interviewed by a reporter from the New Rochelle newspaper. He and Mary mentioned that they had been up late the night before listening to a talk about modern art on the radio. “I find the radio is one of the things that keeps me modern,” Rockwell told the interviewer.
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“When I say it keeps me modern,” he continued, “I don’t mean in the sense of futuristic art. I mean an artist’s work has to keep abreast of the spirit of the times, no matter what his mode of expression may be. If he is unable to do this, it is a very sad thing.”

He decided suddenly they would pick up and go abroad. Within the space of just a few weeks, Rockwell would be living in Paris. As Mary wrote in a letter, he was hoping to “experiment with all sorts of things” and hence “become an artistic artist rather than a commercial one.”

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On February 26, 1932, Norman and Mary sailed for France, along with six-month-old Jerry and Raleigh, their long-haired collie. It was the bleakest winter of the Depression, with fifteen million men out of work and a third of the nation’s factories shut down. But the Rockwells, who didn’t have to worry about money, traveled in high style. They crossed the Atlantic in five days, aboard the luxurious RMS
Mauretania
, a British ocean liner on which Mary was delighted to discover such amenities as an oak-paneled reading room, a live orchestra that performed even in the morning, and the chance to play Ping-Pong on the promenade deck “to get up an appetite.”

For most of March, they looked for an apartment in Paris, during which time they stayed at the Hotel Wagram on the Rue de Rivoli, in two rooms overlooking the geometric greenery of the Tuileries garden. Rockwell wasted no time in renting a studio on the Avenue de Saxe, in the Seventh Arrondissement, a quaint space with “a couch and shelves in a corner all covered with deep wine colored velvet.”
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On April 11, they settled on a residence, signing a six-month lease for a furnished home at 12 Villa de Saxe, “just one long block” from his studio and complete “with a garden for Raleigh and Jerry.”
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About once a week, Mary would sit down with a pack of Lucky Strikes and confide in her “Dearest Mother and Daddy,” sending her parents detail-laden letters that sometimes ran to ten pages. About thirty letters survive from this period and they capture the strains of an artistic marriage. On most days, it seems, Rockwell was consumed by problems he was having in his work, while Mary took care of their baby and tried to maintain a cheerful tone. Most everything, as described in her letters, was “swell” or “grand” or “glorious.”

They lived well, with a retinue of paid help. A French housekeeper and cook, Amelian, “an absolute jewel,”
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arrived every morning to do the cleaning and laundry and marketing. She won raves from Mary for her
poulet blanc
and “kidneys cut up in gravy in some delectable way.” A tutor visited twice a week to help her master the French subjunctive. A tailor, “Paquin’s head cutter,” came by to fit her for a suit.

She visited the American Library in Paris, where she borrowed, among other things,
Robinson Crusoe
and
The Vicar of Wakefield
, favoring eighteenth-century literature with an emphasis on manners and morals. She wanted to do everything right—to read the classics, to dress smartly, to socialize with “interesting” people, to smoke less and exercise more, and “to lose some waist band,” as she wrote.

In her letters, Mary offered few anecdotes about her husband, perhaps because she wanted to share only good news. He could be irritable and judgmental about small things, and she felt hurt when he criticized her clothing: “Norman informed me this morning that the green suit … was never to be put on again, even in the remotest Brittany!”

Physical ailments added to his moodiness. His back was “still troubling him from the time he lifted a ping pong table” a few weeks before they left home. He suffered sharp shooting pains, lumbago as the doctors called it, and saw an osteopath once a day for some kind of adjustment.

To be sure, there were some cozy moments, such as a morning when Mary sprang from bed to check on little Jerry, cleaned him up, and carried him back into her room. “Norm was still in bed,” she noted, “with Raleigh in my place.” She rested the baby between her husband and the collie and “my three men had a beautiful time.”
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She had at least one friend in Paris, Louise Connett, a well-to-do American expatriate whose husband was in the export business. Rockwell and Mary met the couple coming over to France on the
Mauretania
. The Connetts entertained frequently, and it was Mrs. Connett who gave Mary her first taste of champagne, at a luncheon for the members of the American Women’s Club. Mary felt thrilled to be included in such an impressive group, “just as though I were a
person
,” as she noted in a letter.
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Perhaps she felt like less of a “person” with her husband, who resisted her efforts at socializing and who cared little for the patrician Connetts. “Norman was all down on society as represented by Mrs. C,” she reported. He preferred the company of Alan Haemer, an art student, “to any one in better circumstances.”

Indeed, no sooner had Mary settled into the apartment on the Avenue de Saxe than Rockwell gave up his studio on that street and acquired a new one in Haemer’s building. It was smaller than his previous studio, a ten-minute tram ride over the Seine, near the Pont de Grenelle. Although Mary was vexed by her husband’s attachment to yet another worshipful young friend who distracted him from his marriage, she tried to be understanding. It was “awfully nice,” as she wrote, for him to have “some one near him, a man, and an artist with whom to talk things over.”

Haemer, at the time, was twenty-two, a Brooklyn native with broad shoulders and a strong jaw. He was the sort of masculine artist Rockwell was always seeking out, a brother and protector. Haemer had made headlines when he arrived in Paris—paddling from Holland, alone in a flat-bottomed canoe, which took forty-one days and set a record of some sort.
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At the time, he had just graduated from Syracuse and won a fellowship to study painting at the Sorbonne. He eventually became an accomplished commercial artist, designing the jackets of hundreds of novels, including those of Howard Fast. But for now he had little in the way of income or reputation and all the time in the world to sit and puff his pipe with Rockwell. They would often talk late into the night and wander over to Les Halles after midnight for a bowl of onion soup.
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