American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (28 page)

Another twelve-year-old, Richard Gregory, posed for Tom Sawyer. He first met Rockwell in November 1935, when his younger brother Don, a
Post
delivery boy, fell ill and asked him to fill in for him on his route. It happened to be raining hard. Richard, not wanting to toss the magazines into puddles, knocked at front doors and handed the magazine to whomever answered. Rockwell answered at 24 Lord Kitchener Road.
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He was delighted by what he saw. A boy in a shiny rain slicker, a wet boy with blond hair and a wide grin and a chipped front tooth (the result of a sledding accident). On the spot, Rockwell asked, “Would you pose for Tom Sawyer?”

Richard Gregory wound up posing on Saturdays over the course of six months, an experience about which he had mixed feelings. He, too, found posing to be physically arduous and developed a crick in his neck after standing in place for three thirty-minute sessions with his head tilted back, his mouth agape, awaiting the spoonful of castor oil which Aunt Polly was about to deliver. He never actually met Aunt Polly, who posed in separate sessions.

Of all the illustrations, surely the most interesting is the one that shows Tom Sawyer sneaking out of the upstairs window of a white-shingled house in the middle of the night. As he perches on a window ledge, shadows cast by tree branches reach toward him like dark, elongated fingers. The piece sends a shiver down your spine, mainly because it harks back to the death of Rockwell’s model Billy Payne, who had climbed out a window and fallen to his death fifteen Aprils earlier.

An illustration for
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
harks back to the tragedy of Billy Payne.

Tom Sawyer’s window charade is hardly a major scene in the novel, and in fact is mentioned only passingly (“a single minute later he was dressed and out of the window and creeping along the roof of the ‘ell’ on all fours. He ‘meow’d’ with caution once or twice, as he went”
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). It is interesting that Rockwell chose to depict it. His interpretation of it departs dramatically from Twain’s story line. In Rockwell’s illustration, Tom is transported to a suburban house with another house visible next door and, as he climbs out of the window, he pauses and cries out into the night.

*   *   *

In later years, in the seventies, Rockwell received an admiring letter from Cyril Clemens, a cousin of Twain and the editor of the
Mark Twain Journal
, in Kirkwood, Missouri. He had seen Rockwell’s
Tom Sawyer
as well as the
Huck Finn
volume that followed, and he wrote to “applaud your wonderful work in the memory of Mark Twain.”

But Rockwell would have none of it. “As much as I loved the books,” he replied in a letter to Clemens, “it was a long time ago and I did not realize the deep significance in them and did not portray, particularly Huckleberry Finn, with the depth of understanding that I should have.”

That was true. The Heritage editions of
Tom Sawyer
and
Huck Finn
each contain eight color plates and they do not represent the artist’s best work. They are more impressionistic than his
Post
covers, and the facial expressions are cartoony. But soon he would find his mature voice.

THIRTEEN

HELLO
LIFE

(FALL 1936 TO 1938)

In September 1936, George Horace Lorimer retired as the editor of
The Saturday Evening Post
after a reign of almost four decades. He handpicked a successor who inherited his corner office on the sixth floor of the Curtis Building in Philadelphia. Wesley Stout was forty-seven, a dark-haired, preppy-looking newsman from Junction City, Kansas, who had been with the
Post
for more than a decade. He shared Lorimer’s Republican politics and animosity toward the New Deal. “To succeed squarejawed, hardworking, conservative Mr. Lorimer,”
Time
magazine reported mockingly, “the Curtis directors ratified the retiring editor’s own choice of a squarejawed, hardworking, conservative colleague.”
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Wes Stout would stay on as editor of the
Post
for five years and make a remarkably small dent. Unlike Lorimer, he was not paternal and lacked what is probably an editor’s most important attribute: the ability to create an atmosphere in which writers can do their best work without distraction. As F. Scott Fitzgerald noted bitterly in a letter to his wife, Zelda, “The man who runs the magazine now is an up and coming young Republican who gives not a damn about literature.”
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Rockwell disliked Stout, too, and considered him a cold, conventional bureaucrat who was was insensitive to the needs of artists.

Rockwell claimed there there was always something that Stout wanted changed in a cover when it was started and something he didn’t like about it when it was finished. Once Rockwell was told that a painting was perfect, except for the shoes. Without explanation, Stout requested that a boy’s brown shoes be changed to black. “I wasn’t able to paint a cover with any conviction because I knew that some little thing would be wrong with it,” Rockwell recalled. “His constant nagging sapped my inspiration, made me unsure of myself.”
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Stout hoped to attract a new generation of young readers, the coveted demographic for advertisers, and it did not occur to him that Rockwell could help do that. He began his tenure by tearing into Rockwell’s
Ticket Agent
, which shows a clerk with a thin, tired face on a regular work day, inside his little booth, his head resting in his hands, a patch of white scalp visible beneath his combed-over strands of brown hair. Sitting behind a barred window, he is caged in every way, tethered to his ho-hum job and unable to avail himself of the kind of vacations advertised in the posters surrounding him. Seven or eight travel posters thumbtacked around the window conjure the pleasures of mountain resorts and blue skies, of cruises to Europe and even the Orient. You suspect that transatlantic cruises and maybe love affairs were not so easy when the ticket agent was young. It was one of Rockwell’s abiding themes: the feeling of having missed out on something.

Wes Stout did not care for the painting. His criticisms were passed along in a letter to Rockwell on December 4. The ticket agent, Stout complained, was “a hick” in a ramshackle office. “We feel it would be more typical of millions of our citizens,” Stout wrote, “if he worked in a town of between ten and fifty thousand inhabitants and not such ‘Mi gosh’ and ‘by-heck’ surroundings.”
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Now that’s funny. Although Rockwell’s detractors have often accused him of being a propagandist for the
Post
’s beneficent fantasy of small-town America, even the editor of the
Post
thought his images were too provincial. What Stout did not understand is that Rockwell had zero interest in tailoring the content of his paintings to the demographic particulars of Mr. Typical
Post
Reader. Rockwell was well aware that most Americans, in 1936, did not live in small towns, that there were bigger and grander lives out there, not least of all his own in New Rochelle, New York. But the genius of his narratives lies in their seeming familiarity. In contrast to the countless magazine covers that portrayed a vision of affluence and aspiration—tuxedoed men and their dates swirling drinks in high-ceilinged rooms—Rockwell’s covers refer to a plainer America. This is not a life you aspire to have, but the one you already have, and most any adult in America could think of someone he or she knew who had a ho-hum job like the ticket agent.

The Ticket Agent
, 1937

Why did Rockwell work for
The Saturday Evening Post
? If you said he desired fame and attention, you would not be wrong. His longing for reassurance was insatiable. But since the outset of his career, Rockwell had been able to do the double duty of fulfilling the requirements of magazine illustration while staying true to his artistic instincts. On most days, he didn’t see his work for the
Post
as a soul-crushing endeavor in which his need for self-expression was constantly being sacrificed to the opposing needs of a profit-driven magazine. Rather, the thrill of his work is that he was able to use a commercial form to thrash out his private obsessions, to turn a formula into an expressive personal genre.

Rockwell’s
Ticket Agent
appeared on the cover of the
Post
on April 24, 1937. Just a month later, in the issue of May 29, Stout tried putting a color photograph on the cover, the first ever, openly flouting Lorimer’s policy of reserving the cover for a hand-drawn illustration. The photograph, by Ivan Dmitri, was timely, but astonishingly dull. Coinciding with that year’s Indianapolis 500, it shows a race car driver sitting in his sleek red vehicle in the moments before the race begins. It is shot from above, and angled so that a taut stretch of red—the car’s hood—dominates the photograph.

Truth be told, it wasn’t just Rockwell’s fixation with small-town geezers that disenchanted Stout. It was the whole tradition of magazine illustration, which now had to compete with photography. Henry Luce’s
Life
magazine made its debut on November 23, 1936, inciting a state of alarm in the Curtis Building that could not have been greater had a meteor crash-landed in Independence Square.

Life
was priced at ten cents, twice as much as the
Post
. Physically, it was slightly larger. The first issue of
Life
measured fourteen inches tall by ten and a half inches wide. It was, revealingly, the same width as the
Post
but taller—half an inch taller, as if to ensure that it did not go unseen behind the profusion of competing weeklies on newsstands. The logo, a red box, can put you in mind of the geometric graphics of the Russian Constructivists. It remains the most recognizable magazine logo in history, that tomato-red rectangle with the word LIFE spelled out in blocky bright-white letters, as flat and striking as a stop sign.

For the first issue, the editors chose a cover image that was starkly modern and almost abstract: Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, which was then under construction, a key piece of President Roosevelt’s public-works projects. The photograph, shot at a wide angle, shows three concrete structures rising a bit ominously into the sky. Topped by turrets, the dam resembles nothing so much as the ramparts of a medieval fortress. Where are the thousands of WPA workers employed on the project? Not here. The image is spookily depopulated, like one of Giorgio de Chirico’s plazas. In that sense, it was a peculiar choice for a magazine that would soon become known for its close-ups of faces. On the other hand, the image of the impenetrable fortress says something authentic about Henry Luce’s Time Inc., the parent company of
Life
, which exuded a sense of power that was almost feudal.

If
The Saturday Evening Post
was known for one image, it was J. C. Leyendecker’s
New Year’s Baby
, which, since 1906, had been bouncing joyously onto the cover in top hats and various getups. Now
Life
had a baby, too. The first photograph inside the first issue, on page 2, showed a doctor in gloves and a surgical mask standing in a crowded delivery room. He is holding a newborn boy upside down by his feet. The caption ringingly declares: “LIFE Begins.”
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The caption might have read instead, in the interest of accuracy, “LIFE Begins Yet Again.” The magazine’s title was purchased from a previous
Life
, an inspired humor magazine founded in the 1880s in an artist’s studio in New York. The original
Life
was styled after
The Harvard Lampoon
, which itself was styled after the British magazine
Punch
. When he was just starting out, Rockwell published about two dozen illustrations in the original
Life.
Its covers featured a good amount of impressive artwork, including the sparely modern, pancake-flat drawings of flappers by John Held, Jr. But humor magazines faltered during the Depression and by 1936, the original
Life
was willing to part with its title and dismantle itself for a small, sad sum of money.
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