American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (36 page)

The paradox is that Rosie, a worker, is pictured in the painting not working. She is on her lunch break, relaxing. Her knees, instead of being crossed in a ladylike fashion, are spread apart, as red waves pulsate in the background. Her protective goggles are pushed up on her head to reveal her closed eyes (a departure from Isaiah’s downcast but open eyes), and her expression is one of intense satisfaction.

Mary Doyle was stunned and a little hurt when she first saw Rockwell’s cover. She was expecting to see an attractive young woman, not a female behemoth sprung from the dark lagoon of Rockwell’s imagination. “Mary has slender arms,” reported the
Bennington Banner
on June 3, in a page-one exposé that noted that her head had been grafted onto someone else’s body, with arms that could have belonged to Jack Dempsey.
2
Rockwell called her up to apologize for making her look so mannish. Mary Doyle, he said, “should sue me.”

Outside of Arlington, Rockwell’s Rosie was immediately popular and, like the
Four Freedoms
, was turned into a poster advertising war bonds. Her muscular physique served the national cause. As the playwright David Mamet puts it, “The American icon, for me is Rosie the Riveter. Rosie the Riveter beat Hitler.”
3

*   *   *

On June 4, 1943, with the citizens of Arlington still consumed by the controversy over Mary Doyle’s upper arms, Rockwell impulsively purchased a new house. It had been three weeks since the fire, and instead of rebuilding on the ashes of his old studio, he had decided to flee the scene. Unlike his first house in Arlington, which was sequestered on a dirt road and too isolated for his taste, his second house, an eleven-room Colonial dating to 1792, was located in the town’s social hub. When he opened his front door, he could see a charming New England view: the West Arlington Green, with its steepled church and one-room schoolhouse. Just beyond lay a historic covered bridge that spanned the Batten Kill and surfaced on Vermont-themed postcards and travel posters.

Rockwell already knew the family next door, the Edgertons, who owned a dairy farm. He liked Jim Edgerton and his handsome, square-jawed son, Buddy, who was thirteen and would be the first boy to pose for Rockwell in his new studio. The Edgerton house was the architectural twin of Rockwell’s and stood just fifty feet away, separated by a strip of grass. As a result of the fire, Rockwell wanted neighbors living as close by as possible, a family he could depend on. In the coming decade he was always walking over to the Edgertons’ house, seeking help from Jim or Buddy or Buddy’s two sisters and paying them to pose for him or perform myriad errands.

Mary depended on the Edgertons, too, Clara especially, who had blond hair that fell to her shoulders and was about as sturdy as a farm wife could be. In a photograph from this period, Clara Edgerton stands outdoors, wearing a bulky, red-plaid hunting jacket and smiling as she displays her kill: a dead buck hanging upside down in a tree, its antlers almost grazing the ground. After the Rockwells moved in, Mary would make her way to the Edgertons’ at all hours to talk to Clara, sitting down at the kitchen table and speaking in a way that led their children to believe that moms had more secrets than anyone. Clara was a good listener. She was amused when Mary went through her “church hopping phase,” sampling a different denomination every few weeks and claiming each was as unfulfilling as the next.

The Edgertons quickly realized that Rockwell was more tightly wound than his genial manner suggested. Buddy sometimes spotted him standing at the incinerator in his yard, a lean man in a blue chambray work shirt discarding canvases he had already cut up, the pictures he deemed to be failures. “He would throw pieces of his paintings in the incinerator,” Buddy Edgerton recalled. “Partially burned pieces of canvas would blow through the fields.”

Rockwell, he also noticed, was constantly straightening up the studio, as if nothing was ever right. “He would sweep the studio floor four or five times a day,” Edgerton recalled. “He would take walks to get away from things.”
4

*   *   *

With the arrival of 1944, Rockwell found himself mired in depression. On January 17, he was “getting over the flu,” according to an item in the local paper. The excitements of the previous year—the
Four Freedoms
,
Rosie the Riveter
, the fire, the radio interviews, the sacks of fan mail deposited on his doorstep—had left him physically and emotionally exhausted. To compound his unease, on February 3, he turned fifty.

To be sure, in the immediate aftermath of the fire, he had rallied. But his usual efficiency eluded him now. He tried to produce covers for the
Post
, but nothing emerged from his labors. He spent January and February on a single cover,
The Armchair General
, thinking it wasn’t very good. “Norman had been having one of his monumental depressions for three months,” Mary reported in a letter to her sister in March, betraying a slight impatience with his problems. “Two covers in four months is the total of work lately!”
5

The Rockwell family: Norman, Mary, Jerry, Tommy, Peter, and Raleigh, circa 1940

Writing to Clyde Forsythe, Rockwell corroborated Mary’s assessment: “Seems as tho every once in a while I get into one of those slumps.”
6
His confidence was at a low ebb, and the one person who might have helped was not around. “Mead Schaeffer has been in New York all winter so it’s been lonesome up here … Next winter tho I swear we’re going to New York. I miss having someone to help me with criticisms and encouragement.” Even his dog was gone. He was heartbroken when Raleigh, his thirteen-year-old German Shepherd, was put to sleep by a veterinarian a week after the fire, a victim of smoke inhalation.

*   *   *

In July 1944 a new illustrator settled in Arlington, largely at Rockwell’s behest. He and John Atherton had met just that year at a Society of Illustrators event in New York. When he heard that Atherton was a passionate fisherman, Rockwell insisted that he drive up for a weekend with his rods and fly-tying gear and test the trout in the Batten Kill. Atherton and his wife, Maxine, were then living with their daughter in Ridgefield, Connecticut, whose atmosphere, he believed, had been despoiled by a plethora of socialites. His daughter Mary later remembered his indignation whenever he drove past the local country club, which had a “Restricted” sign posted outside the front gate.
7

And so he moved away with only minimum inducement. “Brand-new Vermonter,”
The Saturday Evening Post
announced in the July 8, 1944, issue, whose cover featured an Atherton illustration that still feels clever and contemporary. It shows a clown’s large, grinning face springing into close view from behind the ripped surface of a circus poster.

Atherton disliked having to bend his talent toward commercial art, which he did to pay the bills. He thought of himself as a fine artist and he won deserved support in the art world. Julien Levy, the Manhattan art dealer, gave him a one-man show in 1938 and a second one in 1942, and described Atherton in his memoir as “a top commercial artist who suddenly was converted to serious Surrealist painting.”
8
Disdainful of the term
Surrealism
, Atherton preferred to call himself a Magic Realist. Even as a magazine cover artist obliged to paint farm scenes, he leaned toward the hyperreal. He played around with the scale of objects, painted giganticized ears of corn.

Atherton, who was six years younger than Rockwell, was a great defender of his work in public. But privately, he would razz him about his Boy Scouts calendars. Atherton had distrusted commercial art ever since his Bon Ami calamity—he had been assigned to create a series of drawings of a blond housewife cheerfully scrubbing her sink with Bon Ami, the cleansing powder. The drawings came back to him with instructions to revise them—to redo the woman and give her red hair and a more voluptuous chest. “That really floored Jack,” his wife, Maxine, recalled. “They wanted a big, bosomy redhead using Bon Ami. He said, ‘To hell with commercial art.’”
9

Rockwell included a likeness of Atherton in one
Post
cover—the 1945 April Fool’s cover, which contained a slew of errors. (That was the joke.) Atherton, a tall, blue-eyed, prematurely bald man, is shown slouched against a tree trunk with his banjo and his books, his fishing rod and his skis. He is smoking both a cigarette and pipe. He looks certifiably crazy. It is, admittedly, one of Rockwell’s goofiest covers and Atherton grumped about the likeness. “Jack had no sense of humor about that at all,” his wife, Maxine, later recalled. “Norman gave him the picture and Jack gave it back to him.”
10

The previous year, Mead Schaeffer had posed for a far better painting. In
Tattoo Artist
, he is shown from the back, seated on a stool, a short, shaggy-haired man in a pink striped shirt, a vest, and matching socks. He leans forward with his tattoo needle, decorating the muscled arm of a consenting sailor. When Schaeffer saw the finished painting, he complained that Rockwell exaggerated the size of his rump. (See color insert.)

On weekends, if everyone was in town, the illustrators and their wives would gather for drinks and dinner. Usually they met up at the home of Mead and Elizabeth Schaeffer, for five o’clock cocktails. Rockwell, whose drink was a rum and coke, referred to the soirees as “children’s hour.” Drinks might be followed by dinner at the Green Mountain Pine Room, on the southern edge of town. Frank Hall, the owner of the restaurant, hung the main room with paintings and drawings by the famous illustrators in town. There were now four of them—Rockwell, Atherton, Schaeffer, and George Hughes—and everyone agreed that Arlington had reached critical mass as an art colony.

Rockwell’s reputation was larger than that of his friends. Early in 1944 he signed a one-year contract with the
Post
, “at a swell figure.”
11
He would now receive serious money ($2,500 per cover) in exchange for working exclusively for Curtis Publications. After the success of the
Four Freedoms
, the
Post
wanted him to itself. His contract allowed him to continue with only one other illustration commitment, the Boy Scouts annual wall calendar, which he had been doing since the first one was published in 1925, by Brown & Bigelow, the calendar company in St. Paul, Minnesota. It certainly paid well. At this point Rockwell was earning about $50,000 a year, and the Scouts calendar—which required just one painting from him every year—guaranteed him a minimum of $10,000 for reproduction rights. (He got to keep the painting.) By the 1940s the Boy Scouts calendar was the nation’s bestselling calendar, outstripping the one featuring the Dionne Quintuplets, those five Canadian girls whose birth in 1934 had inspired a craze for photographs of them. “As the girls got older, the interest in them waned,” explained William D. Smith, then president of Brown & Bigelow. But the Scouts that Rockwell portrayed stayed the same age from one year to the next, those beautiful boys with clear skin and caring expressions bandaging the paw of a dog or teaching each other how to tie knots. Every year another boy, different but the same.

In the forties Scouts calendars were hung on the walls of 2 million schoolrooms, offices, bakeries, dairies, life insurance companies, clothing stores, and funeral homes. The calendars designed for homes (meaning kitchens) were smaller than the poster-sized ones displayed in stores and public places, but both types consisted of a piece of cardboard with a Rockwell painting reproduced on the top and a tear-off pad of Januarys, Februarys, and the rest stapled to the bottom.

Rockwell often expressed annoyance with his Boy Scouts assignments, which had to be conceived nearly two years before the calendars were published. Dr. James West, who was chief Scout, and the rest of the Boy Scouts of America’s executive committee didn’t hesitate to dictate subject matter to Rockwell or demand the most picayune changes. In each painting, the Scout’s uniform had to be immaculate no matter what ordeal he was facing, and his neckerchief had to be tied correctly.
12
For the 1941 calendar, for instance, Rockwell, shaken by the hurricane of 1938, roughed out a sketch of a Scout carrying a child to safety in the midst of a lashing storm. But Dr. West vetoed the idea of a Scout in a wet uniform, perhaps because there is something fundamentally unheroic about soggy clothing. In the end,
A Scout Is Helpful
shows a Scout walking through knee-high water in the tranquil aftermath of a storm, his sandy-colored shirt and shorts perfectly dry and crisp.
13

On the other hand, every Scout uniform as rendered by Rockwell had to look convincingly lived in and not like a costume acquired that day. Buddy Edgerton, the boy who lived next door to Rockwell, appeared on the 1945 calendar, in a tan uniform and navy neckerchief as he solemnly raised his right hand and took the famous oath (“On my honor I will do my best to do my duty”). When he modeled for the picture, Buddy changed into a uniform that came out of a box and Rockwell’s assistant Gene Pelham snapped photographs. At one point, Rockwell told Buddy to take a break and go outside and do Boy Scout things, so the uniform would look less stiff and more natural. “I didn’t have a clue what a boy in a Boy Scout uniform would do,” Buddy later recalled, “because I was never a Boy Scout.”
14