American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (52 page)

If he was unable to articulate a sense of loss, he did make a charitable gesture in his wife’s memory. Before the year was out, he donated one thousand dollars to the Stockbridge Public Library for the purchase of children’s books.

He drew a lovely pencil-and-ink sketch of Mary and arranged for it to run as the dedication page of his soon-to-be-published autobiography. The drawing shows her in profile, a graceful woman in a buttoned white blouse, her hair pinned up. She turns her back toward the viewer, as if turning away from the demands of the world and into a cocoon of solitude. She appears to be around forty, a slender and youthful version of her later self. He based the drawing on a set of photographs that had been taken of her in 1948, when she posed for
The Gossips
.

By mid-September he had submitted the drawing to Doubleday, just as the book was going to press. It would appear on an otherwise blank page, framed in a rectangle of powder blue, above a line of appreciative prose: “To Mary, whose loving help has meant so much to me.”

The dedication is a bit misleading. It does not acknowledge the fact of Mary’s death; it does not say “in memory of.” In coming months, the thousands of readers who picked up Rockwell’s brand-new autobiography—a substantial work running more than four hundred pages—would have no reason to doubt that Mary was anywhere but at home in her kitchen in Stockbridge, chuckling at her husband’s droll anecdotes and offering her “loving help,” as always.

TWENTY-FOUR

WIDOWHOOD, OR
THE GOLDEN RULE

(1960)

In the autumn of 1959 Rockwell settled into the life of a widower. But
settled
is not the right word.
Unsettled
is closer. For all his misgivings about family life, he was reluctant to be alone in his drafty Colonial house in Stockbridge and asked people to stay with him. His son, Tom, and Tom’s wife, Gail, remained until the end of October, sleeping in the guest bedroom, across the hall from his. Tom was helping him make the final corrections on the proofs of his soon-to-be published autobiography.

In the process, Rockwell grew closer to his son and shared confidences that sometimes seemed overly personal. He liked to report on what had transpired in his therapy sessions, as if his conversations with Erikson were of universal interest and his children were expected to receive them attentively. Tom was surprised when his father complained that Erikson confiscated a pistol he had purchased in the interest of keeping Rockwell from visiting harm upon himself. “I’m so mad at Erik,” he used to say. “He took my gun and won’t give it back.” Tom couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

Once, during one of Rockwell’s therapy sessions at Austen Riggs, Erikson glanced out the window and commented neutrally that someone they knew was walking by. That, too, became fodder for a joke. “When I talk to Erik,” Rockwell would lament, “he is always looking out the window.”

Rockwell very much liked his daughter-in-law, the former Gail Sudler, a distinctly beautiful artist with green eyes, porcelain skin, and light brown hair cut in a pageboy style. During this period, she took over the job of running the household and helped Rockwell in the studio as well. He painted a portrait of her that ran in the
Post
, to illustrate a sexy short story called “Another Man’s Wife.”
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She wondered if Rockwell had a crush on her, a perverse desire to steal her away from his son. Once, when he spotted her silk slippers in the hallway, lined up neatly outside the bathroom, he mentioned “how cute”
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they looked. Soon after, he asked her to marry him and she considered it for at least ten minutes before declining.

Anxious about Tom and Gail’s departure, Rockwell imagined having a family board with him. In short order, he converted a space on the second floor of his house into a two-bedroom apartment. It required that he empty out Mary’s former studio, the large room over the garage, which became the central room of the unfurnished apartment. A small kitchen was built and outdoor stairs were constructed to provide an entrance from the yard.

Rockwell asked Dr. Knight to offer the apartment to one of the young doctors at Austen Riggs. A family moved in almost immediately. “I’ve fixed up the rear of the house as an apartment and a Dr. and Mrs. Philip are occupying it,” Rockwell wrote to Clyde Forsythe.
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“I’m just no good at living alone in this big house.”

His new boarder was Anthony F. Philip, who had moved to Stockbridge to continue his training at Riggs. A soft-spoken man of thirty-two, he was, officially, a postdoctoral fellow in clinical psychology. (He later became the director of counseling services at Columbia University.) He and his wife and two young daughters would stay in Rockwell’s house for three years. Although the artist had them sign a lease (rent: sixty-five dollars a month), what he sought from the arrangement was hardly financial. He desired to have an emissary from the field of psychology sleeping in the bedroom down the hall from his, available should he find himself, in the middle of the night, in need of rescue. Rescue from what, exactly? An accidental fire, a heart attack, his own agitated thoughts—it hardly mattered. “He didn’t want to be alone,” Dr. Philip recalled. “He felt shaky and it made him feel better to have someone from Riggs around. It was somehow reassuring for him.”
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Dr. Philip came to see Rockwell as an extremely sympathetic and complicated man. In the beginning, Rockwell would sometimes come upstairs to have tea with him and his family. Dr. Philip had heard on the grapevine that his wife had been a handful, had shuffled along Main Street reeking of whiskey and cigarettes. He imagined what he must have endured and did not hold Rockwell accountable. “I was at Riggs and I heard about Mary Rockwell,” he later recalled. “I don’t think it was a direct suicide, but she was depressed, and sometimes people just want to die.”

Despite his genial exterior, Rockwell, the doctor could see, was a panicky man who demanded a lot of himself not only as an artist but even in his relatively unimportant obligations as a landlord. Once when Dr. Philip mentioned that the stairs to his apartment were slippery, Rockwell arranged for them to be covered in outdoor carpeting by the end of the day. Another time, a new clothing dryer arrived with similarly confounding speed. “He was a very compulsive guy, very organized. Everything had to be in its place. He had an obsessive-compulsive character style.”

Asked if Rockwell was obsessive-compulsive in medical terms, the doctor replied, “As a style, I don’t mean as a disorder. They key thing is control. People who are obsessive want to be in control of themselves and their impulses.”

In later years, when Dr. Philip thought of Rockwell, the same picture always came to mind. He thought of him on the phone in his studio arranging to have someone come help him with one thing or another. “He paid people well to do things,” Dr. Philip recalled. “He wanted someone he could depend on.”

He certainly had a good deal of help. In addition to his twice-a-week sessions with Erikson, he had Mrs. Bracknell to cook his meals. Chris Schafer still drove down from Vermont on Tuesdays to sift through Rockwell’s bills and get his books in order. Louie Lamone came in on weekends to stretch canvases and build sets and move stuff around. Bill Scovill, the clinically depressed photographer, had been joined by Clemens Kalischer, a German-Jewish émigré and accomplished photojournalist. While Scovill was a quiet man who lived alone, collected camera equipment and claimed to be afraid of taking trips, Kalischer had worked all over the world. He, too, became accustomed to answering his home phone and hearing a male voice inquire, “Are you free? Can you come over?”

Kalischer later recalled Rockwell as “a limited man” who seemed terrified of touching pencil to paper without having a black-and-white photograph to consult. “He had very good art books,” Kalischer recalled. “Once, he took out a book of Flemish paintings and said to me, ‘Can you make a photograph of one foot?’”
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Kalischer was puzzled by Rockwell’s request, his desire to draw a foot only from the greatest possible remove.

*   *   *

In February 1960 Rockwell’s autobiography,
Norman Rockwell: My Adventures as an Illustrator
, was published in hardcover by Doubleday—price, $4.95. It was a new decade, and the senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, had just announced his bid for the presidency, but in many ways the fifties remained intact. For starters, Eisenhower was still in the White House and he sent Rockwell a personal note the day he received
My Adventures as an Illustrator
. “While I have not yet had an opportunity to more than glance at the book,” the president wittily wrote, “I understand, with some regret, that I have been indirectly at least responsible for several of your memorable experiences with pills of one sort or another.”
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He was referring to the now-famous incident when Rockwell’s last Dexamyl disappeared down the hotel-sink drain.

My Adventures as an Illustrator
struck a modest tone, starting with its title, which made it clear that Rockwell did not think of himself as an artist with a capital
A
or even an artist with a lowercase
a
. No, he was an illustrator, preferring to link himself in his book and in his insecure mind with a history of American illustrators that went back to Howard Pyle and his swashbuckling pirates.

The reviews of the book were mixed, at best, and reflected probably less on Rockwell than on an era in which abstract art was still believed to be more emotionally authentic than realism. Phoebe-Lou Adams of
The Atlantic Monthly
found the book “good-humored” and “clever,” but was disappointed that Rockwell did not expose more of himself and his creative agonies.
7
The harshest review was by Benjamin DeMott, who, writing in
The Nation
, branded Rockwell an apologist for capitalism. Forcing Rockwell’s career into a Marxist frame, DeMott charged that the artist’s subjects—working-class people in plain, thrifty-looking settings—were designed expressly to distract Americans from the reality of their growing affluence and provide “a device to quiet their guilt.”
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Under instructions from editor Ben Hibbs,
The Saturday Evening Post
gave the book a generous launch by serializing it in eight installments that kept it on the minds of readers through the spring. The first excerpt, on February 13, 1960, came with a wonderful cover illustration:
Triple Self-Portrait
(see frontispiece), a triumph of self-burlesque in which Rockwell portrays himself in the midst of painting his self-portrait and taking liberties with the truth.

Although the artist is shown from the back, at his easel, his anxiety is conveyed with full frontal force. His black socks are falling down. A glass of Coke tips precariously on an open art book whose bookmark-studded pages attest to the hours spent searching other artists’ work for ideas. Postcard reproductions of four master self-portraits—a Dürer, a Rembrandt, a van Gogh, a Picasso—are tacked in a vertical row along the right edge of his canvas, contrasting the lofty accomplishments of the European past to his limited American self, an identity indicated by the gilded bald eagle crowning his reflection in the mirror. (In reality, the mirror in Rockwell’s studio was eagle-less.)

The joke lies in the comical perfection of the self-portrait resting on his easel. The artist has cast himself, in the easel self-portrait, as a self-possessed prince of the studio. His glasses are gone, and his expression is one of manly self-control and suaveness. He projects an absence of fear. Even his pipe seems more assured, rising from its once-dangling position into an erect horizontal.
Triple Self-Portrait
deserves to be seen as the artist’s manifesto. His “realism,” he is saying, has nothing to do with the reflection in the mirror. Art is not a mirrored version of reality. It is an invention, an idealization, a willful falsification. What makes
Triple Self-Portrait
so winning is that Rockwell outs himself as a maker of illusions, allowing the viewer to feel superior by seeing through his act of deceit.

Tellingly, the lenses of the artist’s glasses are opaque—he can’t see out. In his visually incapacitated state, he debunks his own supposed powers of vision; he declines to embrace the popular myth of artists as heroic seers.

*   *   *

What was perhaps the most disturbing attack on Rockwell appeared in April 1960, just as the
Post
was about to run the last of the eight parts of his autobiography. Dwight Macdonald’s now-famous essay, “Masscult and Midcult,” was published in two parts in
Partisan Review
, the influential literary magazine. The essay, as the critic Louis Menand notes, “was not Macdonald at his most coherent or persuasive,”
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but it tends to be reissued and anthologized at regular intervals, perhaps out of nostalgia for an era when intellectuals were public figures who could afford to live in Manhattan.

Briefly: Macdonald’s takedown of Rockwell came in the context of a sweeping denunciation of mass culture, which he believed contaminated the air around it. He refused to consider the possibility that a painting made for a wide audience might reflect artistic impulses. Moreover, he was the type of critic who would burn most anything to fuel an argument and he uses even Rockwell’s artistic sincerity against him. “There seem to be two main conditions for the successful production of
Kitsch
,” he writes. “One is that the producer must believe in what he is doing. A good example is Norman Rockwell.”
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As many critics have since pointed out, Macdonald’s article is reminiscent of Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” which had appeared in
Partisan Review
a generation earlier and similarly argued that culture is an elite affair reserved for the happy few. While Greenberg divides culture into opposing halves (high and low) and emphasizes the unbridgeable distance between them, Macdonald focuses more on the spongy, everyone-onto-the-bus center—that is, middlebrow culture, or midcult as he called it, which he believes is wrecking cultural values.
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