American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (40 page)

The story ran in papers across the country:
ROCKWELL IS BAKER FOR GRANDMA MOSES
, one headline read.
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Rockwell purportedly spent Labor Day weekend designing a cake—a white-sponge, seven-layer confection that measured two feet across, weighed fifty-five pounds, and contained 228 eggs.
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It was actually baked by the pastry chef at the Green Mountain Pine Room, in Arlington, one of Rockwell’s haunts. Frank Hall, who owned the restaurant, was not related to Joyce Hall, except by virtue of their business transactions and Hallmark’s willingness to pick up the tab for Grandma’s elephantine cake. It was decorated with a scene from one of her Hallmark cards, “Bringing in the Xmas Trees,” complete with ice skaters and horse-drawn sleighs rendered in the slippery, hard-to-control medium of cake frosting.

September 7, 1948, fell on a Tuesday. When Rockwell arrived in Eagle Bridge that morning, the two front parlors in Grandma Moses’s house were mobbed. Her son Hugh, a farmer, helped Rockwell maneuver the bulky cake out of the car and through the narrow door of the farmhouse. The guests included Joyce Hall from Kansas City; Otto Kallir, the art dealer with the Austrian accent from Manhattan; and a throng of reporters and photographers.
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As Grandma entertained her guests, a cameraman from Paramount shot footage for a newsreel. “Every visitor was treated to a piece of a seven-layer cake brought by Norman Rockwell,”
The New York Times
reported the next morning, making him sound like the kind of guest who never went anywhere without bringing a homemade dessert.
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Although their acquaintanceship began as a PR stunt, Rockwell genuinely liked Grandma Moses. She was the only female artist he ever counted as a friend. Her advanced age removed any risk of sexual entanglement and allowed him to feel comfortable in her presence. He gave her his highest compliment when he gushed to a reporter, “Grandma Moses is the cleanest-looking woman I have ever seen. Her skin is clear as a young girl’s.”
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It amused him to recall the first time he asked to see her studio. She flatly declined, joking that no respectable woman would allow a gentleman in her bedroom. Rockwell eventually did gain access to her sanctum. Instead of standing at an easel, Grandma worked sitting down at a table in front of a window. Rockwell told her she was doing herself a grave disservice by allowing light (southeastern) to pour into the room and cast shadows all over the place. He also expressed his disapproval of her thrifty materials—she favored pint-size cans of regular house paint.

He sketched a wonderful portrait of her at work, depicting her in perfect profile, a studious woman sitting at her little table, a coffeepot at her feet. He was surprised to realize that “she drank black coffee incessantly.”
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When his drawing was published in a magazine, Grandma complained. She was unhappy about the presence of the coffeepot, not caring to disclose her caffeine habit to all the country.

*   *   *

By October, the summer people had vanished from the Vermont hills and the air was surprisingly chilly. On some mornings, when Rockwell walked along the short path from his house to his red-painted studio in the yard—always at the same hour, shortly before eight o’clock—the grass was stiff with frost and he could see his breath. The studio was his true home, but it no longer offered the usual sense of refuge. Mary’s drinking problem could no longer be ignored and was increasingly the topic of town gossip.

That month, Mary appeared on the cover of
The Saturday Evening Post
, as the protagonist of another illustrator’s work. George Hughes, a neighbor in Arlington of whom she was fond, specialized in light comedies that had a period look. Mary posed for his cover,
Readying for First Date
, which shows a mother (in cinch-waisted green dress, her hair pulled back in a ponytail) in her teenage son’s unkempt bedroom, helping him with his bow tie.
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Inside the magazine, in an editor’s note, the models are identified as Mary and Tommy Rockwell. It unsettled Rockwell, perhaps because he had failed to give Mary a similarly prominent role in his own work. So far, the only cover in which she could be conclusively identified was
The Gossips
, which had appeared earlier that year and remains his most mordant cover. It features five rows of adult heads—a frieze of busybodies, most of them middle-aged and lumpy-looking and taking a bit too much pleasure in receiving and repeating a rumor that in the end circles back to the original busybody. Rockwell said he included a likeness of Mary to dispel any suspicion among his neighbors that he was mocking them.

He had a scare on the last Saturday in October, when Butch, his black-and-white springer spaniel, disappeared. He walked several miles along the muddy banks of the Batten Kill, calling out the dog’s name. Returning home at nightfall, he learned to his immense relief that the police had found Butch—he was in the woods, ensnared in a fox trap. A reporter from the
Bennington Banner
called to get the story, and Rockwell relayed it with an empathy he found easy to summon for animals. Butch, he said, was curled up at home with “a contented look” as he nursed his injured paw.
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Just a few days later, Rockwell decided impulsively that he needed to leave home. He felt exhausted and depressed, and it pained him to think that, in 1944, he had signed a contract with the
Post
that obligated him to do at least six covers a year and made him feel like a kept man. Seeking to be released from his contract, he wrote a check for $10,500—the amount he had received in settlement of his previous year’s contract—and mailed it to the editor, Ben Hibbs. Responding with a lengthy, enormously caring letter, Hibbs returned his check and assured him: “We hit on the contract idea as the best possible method of proving to you that we loved you and wanted you to continue as our number one artist.”

It had been a long while—six years—since Rockwell had visited Los Angeles and worked on Champion Place, with its row of artists’ studios and eucalyptus trees. He decided to return to California now. His two older sons were at boarding school, and he told Mary, somewhat impatiently, that she and their youngest son, Peter, could join him in California if she stopped drinking. An impossible if. To justify the trip, he came up with several ideas for California-themed
Post
covers and submitted rough sketches to his editors. They gave him the go-ahead.

The day after Election Day, which returned Harry Truman to the presidency, Rockwell headed west. As usual he traveled in style and enjoyed the ride. In Chicago he boarded the Union Pacific’s City of Los Angeles, whose streamlined design and yellow exterior were regarded as a vast improvement over the squat, clanky trains of the past. “My boss is sending me to Hollywood because they’re tired of people in Vermont,” he told a reporter on the platform in Salt Lake City, where he managed to complete an interview in the space of a fifteen-minute stop.
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Arriving in Los Angeles on November 15, Rockwell checked into the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, which billed itself as the site of the first Academy Awards. From there he telephoned his mother-in-law in Alhambra and asked in a teasing voice, “Do you know who this is?” Mrs. Barstow had no idea. She was delighted when he invited her and her husband to join him for dinner that night at the hotel.

“He told us about the men he met on the train,” Mrs. Barstow reported of the dinner, in a letter to her daughter.
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“The friendly Jews and how they showed pictures of their families and regretted that he had none of his.” Mrs. Barstow urged Mary to remedy the situation by giving Rockwell “a leather folder with pictures of all of you” for Christmas. She did not realize that husband and wife wouldn’t be celebrating Christmas together that year.

*   *   *

During his stay in Los Angeles, Rockwell worked out of a spacious studio at what is now the Otis College of Art and Design,
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one of the country’s top art schools. The space was offered to him rent-free by the school’s longtime dean, E. Roscoe Shrader, an illustrator with whom he was casually acquainted. Rockwell was named the school’s first artist-in-residence. The title was strictly honorary, obliging him to do little more than show up at his third-floor atelier in the morning and tend to his own work. He was touched when the faculty mounted a small show of his paintings, which stayed up through December. It was a relief for him to be among people who admired him, who waved hello when he passed them in the hall, who knew nothing about his troubled life in Vermont.

Although Rockwell did not actually teach at Otis, he gave several well-received lectures that winter. One was held at the Art Center School in Pasadena; a surviving audiotape captures Rockwell as witty, raconteurish, and self-deprecating. His deep voice, New York accent, and frequent laughter, his habit of punctuating his observations with “See? See?”—at times he sounded as animated as a man recounting a run-in with a bear.

“I’m certainly not going to talk about ‘What is art?’ or anything like that,” he said at the opening of his lecture. “I am just going to tell you very briefly how I make pictures and you can learn from that horrible example at least how
not
to make pictures.”
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He alighted on his usual themes, such as his difficulty generating ideas. “I’ve never had one that came to me the way they’re supposed to come in movies and novels. I never woke up in the middle of the night and had a whole new idea.” Still, the gestation process was easier for him than it had been in the twenties and thirties. “I don’t do the stuff with the lamppost anymore that Mr. Millier spoke about,” he said, referring to Arthur Millier, the art critic for the
Los Angeles Times
, who introduced him that night and presumably based his comments on information gleaned from outdated articles.

Rockwell came as close as he ever would to articulating a philosophy of art when he said that he saw himself primarily as a storyteller in the Dickensian mode. He wanted his every daub and gesture in a painting to contribute to the story. A story that was funny but not
too
funny. “If it’s just a complete gag, it doesn’t stay with people at all. You have to have a little pathos in it. Dickens was the great man for that.”
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Of course, all this put him at odds with a generation of abstract artists who snubbed storytelling. “People tell me ‘You have no right to do that,’” Rockwell said. “I’ve actually had fellows tell me you can do that in watercolor, but you have no right to do things like that in oil.” The audience cracked up.

“It’s ridiculous. What I say is, ‘To deuce with them! I like to do it.’ That’s an awful thing to admit. The story is the first thing and the last thing.” He added that he often judged the success of a painting not by the strength of its composition or color, but by whether visitors to his studio laughed when they saw it. “If you came in,” he told the audience, “I would just wait to see if you laughed or not. I just love that. That isn’t what a fine-art man goes for. I don’t care whether it is art or not.”

Loud laughter, applause.

“And by the way, I always say that, and then I have to put in an argument that it IS art. You see, how many of the very finest paintings were superb illustrations? That is a gold mine, to bring that subject up.” But then he didn’t bring it up, he dropped it, not caring to identify the innumerable masterpieces from the Sistine Chapel ceiling on down that were conceived to illustrate a story.

*   *   *

Back in Vermont, Mary Rockwell was having an exceedingly difficult winter. Although Norman had often been absent, disappearing into his studio or leaving town for days and even weeks at a stretch, he had never been away for this long. Secluded in the drafty farmhouse, Mary read novels and wrote letters and chain-smoked her latest brand, Chesterfields, stubbing them out in clunky glass ashtrays. At least her driving privileges had been reinstated. When she walked outside to her car, she could see the red-painted studio, unoccupied now, the windows dark, the door padlocked.

For November and most of December, Mary lived in the house with eleven-year-old Peter. Her two older sons were away at the Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, and she drove there every so often to take them to dinner at a nice restaurant, along with a few chosen classmates. Jarvis, a high school senior, had been suspended for a few days the previous spring after he was caught smoking and now, in December, Joseph Shane, the new school principal, informed Mary that Jarvis had been caught again. Shane held Mary somewhat culpable, mentioning in a letter that “Jerry told me that he did smoke when he went out with you to dinner … and this made it harder for him to give it up.”
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The principal asked Mary to forbid her son from using tobacco. She answered in a touching six-page letter in which she strains to understand Jarvis’s behavior rather than to condemn it. “I most certainly
am not
going to forbid him to smoke,” she wrote pointedly to Mr. Shane. “He’s got to decide that for himself and will only be a free person when he takes the responsibility for his own actions.”
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It was at this fraught moment that
Christmas Homecoming
, the defining image of toasty holiday togetherness, graced the cover of the
Post
. It is the one and only painting in which all five members of the Rockwell family appear—and are cast as themselves, more or less. A Christmas-day gathering is interrupted by the arrival of a son (Jarvis), whose back is turned toward the viewer. He receives a joyous hug from his mother (Mary Rockwell) as a roomful of relatives and friends look on with visible delight. Although you can’t see the boy’s face, you imagine he is a college student who packed his bags in a hurry (note the pajama string hanging out of his bulging suitcase). Rockwell tells the story by capturing the reactions of the onlookers; he switches the spotlight from the actor to the audience. The picture plane is a sea of smiling, bobbing heads, and the expressions are oddly undifferentiated. For once he is painting people he knows and cares about, but somehow he fails to individuate them. A sense of one-mood-fits-all warmth prevails, compromising the painting.