American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (38 page)

So, too, Mary was responsible for any errand that involved driving. Rockwell, in general, disliked driving. But because he owned a station wagon, he, or rather Mary, was the first person teachers thought of when they needed a parent to do the chauffeuring on a school trip. Additionally, Mary drove her sons to school every day and picked them up and, in the hours in between, she frequently drove around trying to locate whatever latest crazy prop her husband needed for a painting. Sometimes Mary actually delivered a finished painting to the
Post
, which entailed driving to the Albany train station and getting on the train to Philadelphia.

On top of all this, Mary oversaw the care of her mother-in-law, who was still living in Providence, Rhode Island. She liked to spend her summers in Vermont, and Rockwell always paid to lodge her in the area, anywhere but in his house. It was Mary who drove to Providence to ferry the senior Mrs. Rockwell to Vermont every spring and to take her back at the end of the summer. Four hours each way. The Mass Turnpike did not yet exist, so she took local roads as she crossed from Vermont into western Massachusetts and zoomed clear across the state, toward Boston, and then down into Rhode Island, smoking her Lucky Strikes and keeping her eyes peeled for cops.

Baba, as she had taken to signing her letters, was almost eighty now. She rented a room in Providence from the Arnold sisters, four middle-aged spinsters who still lived in the same narrow Victorian house at 25 Blackstone Boulevard, where they had grown up. In February 1946, as snow tumbled outside her window panes, Baba lamented in a letter to Mary, “I don’t hear the radio unless Florence wishes.” Even if she owned her own radio, which she didn’t, “I would have to shut myself in my room, for I have to have it loud, being deaf, and that irritates them.”
23

That spring, Baba suffered a paroxysm of “upset nerves” and “had a sort of exhaustion trying to throw it off,” as she wrote. She was eager to return to Vermont. On May 10 Mary dutifully drove to Providence to fetch her. It was arranged that the old woman would live that summer at a nursing home in North Bennington. “This is a grand location—in the mountains,” Baba wrote to her niece, “about 15 miles from Norman and Mary, but she comes down very often.”
24

*   *   *

Mary’s drinking began to spin out of control early in 1947. Although Arlington, Vermont, was a dry town without any bars, she and Rockwell would sip cocktails at home before dinner. Mary usually had daiquiri or two, which helped her to relax. But her drinking was not confined to cocktail hour. The Edgertons’ daughter, Joy, later recalled a night when Mary came over after her parents had gone to sleep, walking over to the liquor cabinet and pouring herself a drink.
25
“Norman is busy with people,” she said sadly, waving her hand in the direction of the studio and sitting down at the kitchen table to talk to Joy into the night.

On February 3, a Monday night and her husband’s fifty-third birthday, she drank so much she passed out. She was taken to Putnam Memorial Hospital, in Bennington, and remained hospitalized for a week. Rockwell told the local paper that she was there for “ear trouble.”
26

Mary was then thirty-nine years old, and among her frustrations was her lack of progress with her writing. During her college days, she had come to believe she was one of those people meant to write stories. But in the years since, her efforts had been erratic, at best. She belonged to a writing group in Bennington that met on Tuesday evenings and, in a letter to her sister, mentioned reading one of her stories aloud. “When I read it last night at the writing group, they all said I should send it to the New Yorker or Atlantic or etc.—at least for a criticism.”
27
She enclosed a carbon copy of the story, soliciting her sister’s opinion.

The story recounts a train ride that turns into a nightmare for its protagonist, a girl whose name and age are not given. She is in her “red plush seat” when she has an anxiety attack. She stands up and runs down the aisle of the train, only to feel herself “falling, falling into the blackness of a night without a bed she knew, or any star beyond the window.” The reader is left with an image of her “heavy, tear-stained face.”

A poem written by Mary during this period, “The Question,” is similarly desolate. It describes the collapse of a clapboard house that cannot “defend” itself against the weather. Again, there is imagery of things tumbling down: “Slowly fell the picket fence.”

*   *   *

Rockwell decided they would go away for the summer, for a real vacation. The plan was to leave his mother in the nursing home in Vermont and take Mary and the boys to Cape Cod, to Provincetown, where he had gone as an art student so many moons earlier. Although Rockwell had no affinity for the ocean, Mary had sailed in her girlhood and could captain a Portuguese sloop by herself. They rented a house at 75 Commercial Street, right in the middle of everything. But they had barely unpacked when the problems began.

During the long fourth of July weekend, at 7:30 on Sunday evening, Mary was stopped by the police in the town of Orleans for drunken driving.
28
The report said she “operated a vehicle in an improper fashion.” It was not her first offense and, on July 31, her license was suspended in the state of Massachusetts for one year.

Rockwell had his own misadventure. On July 19, the
Bennington Banner
reported in a page-one headline:
NORMAN ROCKWELL WON’T BE ABLE TO TALK FOR AWHILE.
He had rented a bicycle in Provincetown and taken a bad spill. “He landed on his jaw, fracturing it. He had to go about 30 miles to a good surgeon.”
29
Indeed, he broke his lower jaw and had to have his mouth wired shut by an oral surgeon in Hyannis.

Two days later, the newspaper amended its report, saying he had suffered “a slight mishap on a bicycle.” Clearly, Rockwell wanted to downplay his injury and not turn his jawbone into a subject of national media attention. His vacation turned out to be a month shorter than planned. At the end of July, after Rockwell honored a long-standing promise to help judge a grand costume ball organized by an all-male artists’ group called the Beachcombers, he returned to Vermont.

By coincidence, that was the summer in which Rockwell painted
Going and Coming
, a casual masterpiece that captures something profound about family outings. A two-panel, before-and-after affair, it is one of his very few
Post
covers that portrays three generations of a typical-seeming American family and it is probably telling that no one is talking or looking at anyone else. The family consists of a mother, a father, two boys dressed in matching orange-and-blue striped T-shirts, two girls, and a grandmother. There is also a springer spaniel—Butch, who was Rockwell’s new dog. In the top panel, you see a buoyant clan starting off on a trip, presumably to a lake; a rowboat (
Skippy
) is tied to the roof. In the bottom panel, the same seven people reappear, sitting in basically the same seats but facing the opposite direction, heading home, their faces drooping with fatigue.

The grandmother is the exception. She is the only one who stays the same both ways. Shown in profile, in her little hat and wire-rimmed glasses, she is as immobile as a statue, unchanged by her day at the lake.
30

The mother, by contrast, is less resilient. On the ride back, she sleeps, her head resting heavily against the window frame. She is absent even when she is present.

The car, a 1933 Ford Model B, was borrowed from John Benedict, who built cabinets and stairs for Rockwell. Which means that the car was fourteen years old when it appeared in the painting and suitably unflashy.

Rockwell frequently chose to depict the prelude or the afterward of a scene instead of the scene itself. He paints the moments at the periphery of the action—the tensely expectant slip of time before the prom, or before the date, or before a boy dives into a pool. Maybe he thinks that anticipating an event can be more dramatic than the event itself. Maybe the anxiety that comes before an event
is
the event. He also did his share of after-the-event scenes, such as his
Homecoming G.I.

Rockwell’s new dog, a springer spaniel named Butch, appeared in
Going and Coming.
This is a charcoal sketch for the painting.
(Collection of George Lucas)

In
Going and Coming
, you get both at once. A twofer. Before the fall and after. The joke, of course, is that there’s nothing more exhausting than a day off with your family. You leave home refreshed; you return home needing a break from your break.

Going and Coming
remains one of Rockwell’s most popular paintings and it had the unintended consequence of piquing interest in Rockwell’s summer vacation. A
Post
staffer wrote to him to request information about his trip and also asked for “a summer photograph of the Rockwells,” thinking it would make for an interesting article. Not surprisingly, Rockwell declined to send one.

SEVENTEEN

“WE’RE LOOKING FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO DRAW”

(OCTOBER 1948)

After the war, home-study courses came into vogue. Magazine advertisements exhorted readers to fill out the coupon and become a success, to earn “big money,” to train for a career in radio repair, watchmaking, or “plasticating” (plastics?), to imagine themselves earning their livelihood engraving jewelry or raising hardy “chinchilla rabbits.” It was not just the dream of a well-paying job that was newly available. It was the chance to become someone new, to make yourself over as a gracious and cultured presence. You could take dance lessons from Arthur Murray, correct your stammer, master a musical instrument in six weeks.

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Rockwell was a founding member of the Institute of Commercial Art, which officially opened on October 4, 1948, and later changed its name to the Famous Artists School.
1
It was located in Westport, Connecticut, in the old Sasco mill, a low, rambling red-painted building overlooking a brook, and described itself as a school “whose campus is the U.S. mail.” Advertisements that became ubiquitous in the back pages of magazines and comic books showed Rockwell in his studio, paintbrush in hand, gazing out warmly and beckoning the reader to join him on his merry art adventure. As the text read:

Norman Rockwell Says:

We’re Looking for People Who Like to Draw

The ads took many different forms but usually included a tiny coupon where you could write your name and address on three black lines that weren’t long enough and left you squeezing the last five letters into the margins. Then you cut out the coupon, went rummaging in a drawer for a three-cent stamp and an envelope, and mailed your request for more information to the Famous Artists School, no apostrophe, in Connecticut. Some aspirants were actually turned down. “I couldn’t seem to draw a simple fish to their satisfaction,” recalled the design critic Steven Heller, who was crushed when he received a rejection letter in his youth.
2

Despite the hucksterish advertisements and much-derided status of correspondence schools in general, the Famous Artists School had something substantial to offer.
3
In coming years, it would instruct tens of thousands of children and adults in the rudiments of art, illustration, and cartooning, helping to raise the level of visual literacy in America. Its students ranged from housewives and small business executives to Carol Burnett, Tony Curtis, and museum founder Joseph Hirshhorn, all of whom received in the mail overly large, four-ring binders and twenty-four lessons intended to make them proficient at drawing the figure, the foundation of all art education.

Veterans could use their G.I. benefits to cover the tuition, which was initially two hundred dollars, payable in monthly installments. It entitled students to have their work graded and critiqued on a regular basis. They would mail their finished assignments to a team of artist-instructors who would “correct” them on an overlay of tracing paper, then promptly send them back. The enterprise was intriguing enough to inspire J. D. Salinger to make the protagonist of his short story, “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” just such a mail-order instructor, poring over student work and laboring to draw “recognizable trees” on overlay paper.
4

The Famous Artists School could have been called, if factual accuracy had been the goal or even a vague concern, the Somewhat Famous Artists School. Rockwell was the only household name among the original faculty members, a group of accomplished illustrators who were more familiar to the profession than to the public. Most of them lived near the school’s headquarters in Westport, on the fashionable Connecticut shoreline, and turned out illustrations for the
Post
or
Collier’s
or
Ladies’ Home Journal.
Some (such as Stevan Dohanos) favored Rockwell-style genre scenes, but others pursued more glamorous subjects, such as sinewy cowboys (Harold von Schmidt); race cars (Peter Helck); stylish mother-daughter couples (Al Parker); or sexy blondes with powdered noses and too much lipstick (Jon Whitcomb).