American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (50 page)

Before the Shot
remains the only Rockwell cover in which a boy exposes his unclad rear. Locke recalls posing for the picture in Dr. Campbell’s actual office on an afternoon when the doctor was gone. Rockwell asked the boy to drop his pants and had his new photographer, Clemens Kalischer, take the pictures. “He instructed me to pose how he wanted it,” Locke recalled. “It was a little uncomfortable, but you just did it, that’s all.”

One night, Rockwell surprised the boy’s family by stopping by their house unannounced. He was carrying the finished painting and apparently needed to do a bit more research. “He asked for the pants,” Locke recalled years later. “This is what my parents told me. He asked for the pants to see if he had gotten the color right. They’re kind of a grey-green.”
11
It’s an unsettling anecdote. Once again we are made to wonder whether Rockwell’s complicated interest in the depiction of preadolescent boys was shadowed by pedophilic impulses. But an impulse is not a crime. There is no evidence that he acted on his impulses or behaved in a way that was inappropriate for its time.

At one point, he bought Louie Lamone a Polaroid camera and asked him to go around town taking pictures of potential models, children whom he might want to contact after seeing their photograph. Lamone found the process unnerving. “It was risky,” he recalled, “going around taking pictures of little boys and little girls and I almost got killed. People think you are a pervert or something.”
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*   *   *

A few months after Eddie Locke posed for
Before the Shot
, he posed for a second
Post
cover,
The Runaway
(September 20, 1958), one of Rockwell’s most beloved paintings. The theme is one he had first tackled in 1922, in an earlier
Runaway
, a mud-colored painting in which a boy who had hoped to join the circus sits crying as a sensitive clown dabs away his tears. The later
Runaway
is more austere. It takes us into an old-fashioned diner, where a boy of perhaps seven or eight is sitting at the counter with a beefy policeman. The boy’s possessions are on the floor, wrapped in a red bandana that is attached to a hobo-style “bindlestick” hinting at his cross-country fantasies.

The Runaway
, 1958
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

At the time,
On the Road
had just been published. Unlike Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise, who takes a wild road trip across America, Rockwell’s runaway got no farther than the town limits before he was apprehended by a caring cop. Curiously, in an age when grown-ups and kids still went about their lives as if separated by a language difference, the cop decided against returning the boy to his inevitably scolding mother and sat down to talk things over with him at the diner.

The boy and the officer are shown from the back, on adjacent stools covered in green vinyl. The officer gazes intently into the boy’s eyes and tilts his upper body toward him, as if to emphasize the bond of understanding and even tenderness that can form between a grown man and a little boy. To undercut the hint of homoeroticism, Rockwell includes the usual gimlet-eyed onlooker—in this case, a lanky counterman who leans forward with a lopsided grin, his thinning hair slicked against his skull, a ribbon of smoke rising from the cigarette stub pressed between his lips.
13
In its time, the cover was received by readers of the
Post
as a touching tribute to American values. The officer represents the warm arm of the law, authority at its paternal best; he’s the quintessential Officer Friendly. On closer reading, however, the cop can also be seen as a figure of tantalizing masculinity, a muscle man in a skintight uniform and boots. There is something sensual about the expanse of his massive back, the sharp creases in his shirt formed where the fabric pulls. His tapered waistline is highlighted by the sheen of his wide leather belt and, all in all, the picture is infused with a sneaking admiration for uniforms and regalia.

The model was Dick Clemens, then a thirty-one-year-old state trooper who lived down the road from Rockwell. After Rockwell called him at home one day, they arranged to meet at the Howard Johnson’s in Pittsfield. Clemens recalled that he posed for the photographs—in his own uniform, with his own .38 Smith & Wesson revolver—after his fellow model, little Eddie, went outside to play in the patrol car. “You could see the 28 flavors in the background, until Rockwell painted them out,” Clemens recalled later.
14
Indeed, charcoal sketches for the picture offer a glimpse of the HoJo list, although Rockwell also had a few other restaurant interiors photographed for reference.

For years, it was reported that the picture is set at Joe’s Diner, in the blue-collar town of Lee, a myth fostered in no small degree by Joe Sorrentino, who claimed his tiny eatery as the inspiration for the painting. You could always find a reproduction of
The Runaway
tacked to the wall. But that is true of many diners across the country, where
The Runaway
is displayed over the counter, usually in a cheap frame, reminding us that the American desire for on-the-road freedom has always been accompanied by an opposing desire for security and safety, a desire to find refuge at a welcoming counter where cherry pies gleam in a glass case.

*   *   *

In December 1957 Rockwell decided against sitting out the holiday in Stockbridge. Although he had moved into the house on South Street only six months earlier, all it took was an invitation to judge the Rose Parade to rouse his barely suppressed wanderlust and get him on a train bound for California. Not much is known about the trip, but details gleaned from news clippings provide some sense of his movements. On January 1, 1958, he was in Pasadena, selecting the best floats in the Sixty-Ninth Tournament of Roses Parade, whose theme that year was “Daydreams in Flowers.”

A few days later, accompanied by a Hollywood photographer, Pete Todd, he visited the Santa Ana Park. There, he “made his first racing bet” and arranged for Eddie Arcaro, a celebrated jockey, to pose for sketches and photographs.
Weighing In
, which would run the following June 25, is one in a long line of Rockwell covers pairing physically opposite male figures. It depicts the jockey as a tiny, doll-like figure in a pink-and-white diamond-pattern jacket, standing on a scale as a beefy steward hovers over him, checking his weight.

From there Rockwell continued north to San Francisco, where he spoke at the Art Directors’ Club and visited with his oldest son. Jarvis was then twenty-six, a shaggy-haired art student who was renting an apartment on Fillmore Street, the headquarters of beatnik culture. He had settled in San Francisco two years earlier at the suggestion of Erikson, who felt that Jarvis needed to put a protective distance between himself and his parents and enter therapy with someone unconnected to the family, or at least sort of unconnected.

Peter, the youngest of the Rockwell boys, by then had become serious about art as well. He waited more than a year before disclosing his ambitions to his father. Finally he could not wait any longer. He had found his calling and it was sculpture. “That’s nonsense,” Rockwell told his son, without the least hint of irony. “Jarvis is a painter, Tom is a poet, and the only thing I can think of that is commercially worse than painting and poetry is sculpture. There aren’t more than three sculptors in the continental U.S. making a living from sculpture.”

By now Erikson was back from his sabbatical in Mexico and Peter suggested that his father talk it out with his therapist. He was confident that Erikson, who had been an artist in his youth, would support him. “If Erik thinks it’s all right, will you relax?” Soon afterward, Peter himself became a regular visitor to Erikson’s office at Riggs, hoping to make his desires understood both to himself and his doubting father.

A bill that survives among Rockwell’s papers indicates that in December 1958 he and two of his sons had separate therapy sessions with Erikson. “You know, I think your family has logged more hours of psychiatric care than any other family in America,” Erikson joked to Rockwell.
15

In Rockwell’s mind, no one needed a special reason to go into psychotherapy. His children went to their therapy appointments the way other children went to the dentist. There was something admirable about his openness to therapy, with its implicit quest for emotional clarity. On the other hand, therapy, too, at times seemed like a form of emotional avoidance, a way for Rockwell to outsource responsibility for the mental well-being of his wife and sons. “He wanted someone else to take care of it,” his son Tom recalled years later.

TWENTY-THREE

ROCKWELL TELLS HIS LIFE STORY

(1959)

By now Rockwell was working on his autobiography, at the suggestion of Ken McCormick, the editor in chief of Doubleday. The project had begun haltingly. In May 1957 McCormick invited Rockwell to lunch in New York. Although Rockwell had never cared for writing, McCormick, who described him as an “old sweetie,” suggested that he do a book that would require no writing. He could tape-record his large store of anecdotes and someone else could assemble them into book form.

A few days later, the editor had a Dictaphone shipped to Stockbridge, a bit too optimistically. Rockwell ignored the deadline for his book much as he ignored any deadline that did not pertain to his
Post
covers. In a letter to Rockwell in November, McCormick nudged: “How does it go with the patent word machine? I visualize you with a brush in one hand and a microphone in the other—I do hope the sound inscriber hasn’t turned into a sound torture machine.”
1
Six months later, Rockwell still had not turned on the Dictaphone. His editor thought a ghostwriter was needed and signed on Hawthorne Daniel, who had written some old-style biographies of explorers and seafarers, and who spent the first two weeks of July 1958 interviewing Rockwell at his home in Stockbridge. But Rockwell found it discomfiting to confide his life story to a relative stranger, and Daniel was ditched in short order. “Thank you for being a gentleman and understanding our position,” McCormick wrote to the dismissed biographer.
2

Instead, Tom Rockwell, the writer in the family, was brought in to cowrite his father’s book. Tom was then twenty-five and working as an editorial assistant at
Flower Grower
magazine. He was glad to have a job at least nominally related to writing. He and his wife, Gail, lived in a renovated barn in Poughkeepsie, New York, about an hour and a half from Stockbridge. They would drive up on weekends so that Tom could interview his father, whom he found entertaining if not quite credible as he sat at the kitchen table, recounting a lifetime’s worth of anecdotes. As Tom put it, “His memory was the Norman Rockwell version of his life.”
3

In place of introspection, Rockwell narrated his adventures with a folksiness that was perhaps meant to recall Mark Twain or one of the fiction writers at the
Post
, like Ring Lardner. He wanted his book to be a pageant of Americana, with childhood gangs, boardinghouses, and Model T’s. He takes us through Prohibition, the two world wars, McKinley and all the other presidents.

Rockwell was loath to reminiscence about the more personal aspects of his past. “He said hardly anything about his relationship with his parents,” Tom recalled later. “It was sort of startling. I had to push to get even what is in there.” Indeed, his loyal son, who spent countless hours listening to his anecdotes, chuckling at his jokes and writing it all up without delay, was about as much family as he could take.

*   *   *

On Friday night, February 6, 1959, Rockwell was interviewed on Edward R. Murrow’s
Person to Person
, a hit television talk show that invited viewers into the well-appointed living rooms of the famous, nearly all of whom chose to appear on their upholstered chintz sofas, in front of floor-length floral drapes.
Person to Person
was criticized in its time as too lightweight for a newsman of Murrow’s depth and his interview with Rockwell was indeed fluffy.
4

The excitement began the day before the telecast, when CBS sent a twenty-five-man crew up to Stockbridge along with truckloads of equipment. A large van containing five cameras was parked in Rockwell’s yard and would serve as a makeshift control booth during the show. Murrow, as always, remained in his Manhattan studio—his custom was to appear on camera sinking into a comfy armchair, leisurely “visiting” his guests by chatting them up long-distance, starting at 10:30 p.m. He smoked throughout the show, favoring Kent, “with its full filter action,” as the commercials boasted.

The first guest that evening was Fidel Castro, who along with his rebels had overthrown the Batista government only a month earlier. Dressed in his pajamas, with a straggly beard, Castro stared cockily at the camera. Then came the feature on Rockwell, which lasted for eleven minutes and implicitly reassured viewers that no one was about to topple the machinery of American democracy, not least because the streets were quiet and devoid of Communists. The black-and-white segment opened with a long shot of Main Street in Stockbridge, which looked poetically deserted, the bare tree branches casting shadows on the empty sidewalks. The road was encrusted with snow, and the rows of windows at the Red Lion Inn, which had closed for the winter, were dark.