American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (54 page)

And so, in September 1960, Erikson arrived in Cambridge, a tall, distinguished figure padding around campus in his blue shirt, check-patterned jacket, and white moccasins. That first semester, the course he taught on the eight-stage life cycle, “Social Science 139,” was swamped with more than a hundred undergraduates, many of whom assumed that his writings on adolescence and “the identity crisis” constituted an invitation to confide their own crises in him during his office hours. He felt harassed when students walked up to him in Harvard Yard in hopes of discussing their childhood traumas and latest strange dreams and expected him to be receptive, to furnish them with on-the-spot Freudian insight. He sought to be a major thinker, not an insight machine.

When Erikson moved to Cambridge, a two-hour drive from Stockbridge on the opposite side of Massachusetts, he no longer was able to treat Rockwell. Although they would see each occasionally in coming years, their seven-year therapeutic relationship was, in effect, over. Rockwell was bereft. “He was very dependent on Erikson as a therapist,” recalled Dr. Philip. “When Erikson left for Harvard, that was a big loss for him.”

Before leaving, Erikson arranged for Rockwell to be treated by Dr. Edgerton Howard, the associate medical director of Riggs. He had treated Rockwell before, in 1957, filling in when Erikson was in Mexico writing
Young Man Luther
. Since then, Rockwell had relied on Dr. Howard for casual counsel. Once, when Rockwell was out bicycling and took a spill, he asked the police to summon Dr. Howard to his home. The police weren’t sure why he wanted to see a psychiatrist as opposed to an orthopedic surgeon, but Dr. Howard was happy to oblige.
28

When Dr. Howard first started seeing Rockwell, he asked Dr. Philip, the psychologist who rented the apartment in Rockwell’s house, to provide additional therapy. “Ed is the one who asked me to do this, to see him at home at night,” Dr. Philip recalled.
29
“Norman saw Ed during the day and this was something that was added to it because he was particularly upset. I was asked to see him on a supportive basis during this difficult period.” Dr. Philip met with Rockwell in his house, after dinner, two or three times a week. “We would sit in there, in front of the fire, talking and it was good. It helped him.”

What did they talk about? “In my conversations with him, he would talk about the day, his work, what was going on. I don’t remember that women or children were presented as a problem.” He recalled that Rockwell brooded about the difficulty he had finishing
The Golden Rule
and displayed hypochondriacal tendencies. “At one point he was seeing a doctor for some medical thing up in Pittsfield, Dr. Paddock, and he was talking about that. He was quite concerned about his health. His health was generally very good in reality, but he worried about it.”

In November 1960 Rockwell was elected to the board of trustees of the Austen Riggs Center,
30
joining an unlikely group of heiresses and mental-health professionals. Although hardly in a position to donate large sums of money to Riggs, he was eager to show his appreciation and offered a wonderful gift: a suite of six charcoal portraits of the senior staff, to be hung permanently in the lobby of Riggs. This required little effort or input on the part of the six psychoanalysts, only that they drop by Rockwell’s studio at their leisure to pose for photographs and some quick sketches.
31
Before beginning work on Erikson’s portrait, Rockwell mailed him a copy of the photograph he wanted to use, seeking his approval. Erikson wrote back: “The picture you sent for the Riggs Gallery of Senile Cases was as good as could be expected.” However, he and his wife, Joan, both lamented that the photograph was taken on a day when his left eye was inflamed and wondered whether Rockwell could work around it.

Rockwell naturally obliged. The finished portrait shows Erikson in all his Nordic glamour, a handsome man with thick white hair combed off his high forehead. And flawless eyes.

TWENTY-FIVE

MEET MOLLY

(1961)

A heavy snow had fallen on Washington the night before, making the city look fresh and squinty-bright as the new president appeared on the steps of the Capitol to take the oath of office. He was the image of political vigor, a man of forty-three who declined to wear an overcoat that day, his breath visible in the frigid air as he spoke about the change that was coming to America.

It was the first presidential inauguration to be broadcast on color television, but Rockwell, who had visited John F. Kennedy in Hyannis Port the previous June and painted a portrait of him for the
Post
, was not much of a television watcher. Instead, he listened to the inaugural address on the old Philco radio in his studio. However thrilling it was to be personally connected to an event of such epic significance, he could hardly expect the new administration to alter his day-to-day life. He was sixty-six years old, a widower living in a drafty house with his dog, Pitter, a beagle mix named for the city in which he was found, Pittsfield.

He kept to his usual routines that winter. Every morning around eight, he took two bottles of Coca-Cola from the refrigerator and crunched his way through his snowy yard to his studio. He broke for a sandwich at lunch and his daily oatmeal cookie. When he finished up his work day, it was earlier than usual, because daylight seemed to vanish in midafternoon, forcing him to stop. By the time he washed his brushes and his palette and swept the floor, he was surrounded by deep winter darkness.

On some days that January he felt like he saw no one but therapists. Dr. Anthony F. Philip, the clinical psychologist who had arrived a year earlier, was still renting the apartment in his house. He continued to visit Rockwell at least one evening a week for a therapy session in front of the fireplace. And Erik Erikson had returned to Stockbridge for the holidays. He scheduled a few visits to Rockwell’s studio, which must have counted as therapy sessions, if only because Rockwell paid him for his time; checkbook stubs indicate that Erikson’s fee had risen from thirty-five to fifty dollars an hour.

A recurring theme of their conversation was Rockwell’s displeasure with the
Post
. On January 8, after five months of near-continuous work on the crowded field of figures that comprise
The Golden Rule
, he had the painting driven to Philadelphia. But the
Post
let it languish for months, for reasons that remain unknown. Rockwell had nothing in the magazine in January or February or March, which made him feel invisible.
The Golden Rule
finally ran in the April 1 issue, supposedly in connection with Easter Sunday, but since the painting was intended as a call for religious and racial tolerance, the timing made no sense to him, except that by coincidence it was also April Fool’s Day. Rockwell felt like the joke was on him.

He continued to see Peggy Best over that winter and into the spring, but the scene at her Studio Gallery on Pine Street had begun to grate on him. In addition to her daytime sketching sessions, she also hosted evening “slide parties,” at which she projected images of museum masterpieces—Chinese bronzes, Rembrandts, Cézannes—onto the walls of her darkened gallery. The slide parties were by invitation only and tended to draw a crowd of local artists, most of whom worshiped Pollock and de Kooning and large-scale abstract painting, making Rockwell feel marginal.

Moreover, as he lingered in the gallery and watched Peggy smoking her Winstons and consorting with other artists, he saw how animated she became at parties and how large a role alcohol played in her life. Rockwell himself never had more than one drink at a time. A photograph from this period shows him milling about the gallery, listening politely to a middle-aged woman who appears to have cornered him. He is sipping a cup of hot tea.

People close to them became aware that Peggy Best seemed to depend on Rockwell more than he depended on her. “Unfortunately for my mother she began treating Norman as her strong right arm or rock in a storm,” her son, Jonathan, later recalled. “I read a packet of notes they exchanged over this period. She was drinking a lot and not very stable and I am sure he did not want a repeat of the problems he had had with Mary.”
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At the same time, he was developing feelings for Molly Punderson, a retired English teacher. He had signed up for her class, “Discovering Modern Poetry,” after Erikson insisted he join a group and get out of the house. The poetry class had started the previous October and met on Monday nights at the Lenox Library.

The spring term started on March 6, 1961. Molly Punderson was then sixty-four, a year younger than Rockwell. Although she had inherited what her relatives termed derisively “the Punderson nose,” she had clear blue eyes and a gaze that seemed exceptionally alert. She wore her white hair pinned up in a bun, with a stiffly lacquered curl on each side of her face. In June 1959, after thirty-nine years of teaching at the Girls’ School of Milton Academy, she had retired and moved back to Stockbridge.

Molly knew a class clown when she saw one. “He was no great student,” she recalled of Rockwell. “He skipped classes, made amusing remarks, and livened up the sessions.”
2

She was surprised that someone as famous as he was could be so free of self-importance. She could not have known that his mood, his way with people, could turn stone cold in a matter of seconds. For a widower, he struck her as uncommonly genial, buoyant even, with his barely repressed playfulness and ceaseless pipe smoking, which continued in her poetry class. As she stood in the front of the room posing earnest questions about T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” she tried not to be distracted by his fussing with the pipe.

From the beginning, he found her appealing, this older school teacher, wife of no one, mother of no one, disciplined memorizer of thousands of poems. He had always admired English teachers, admired their learning, their familiarity with novels he wished he had read. He admired women who could recite passages from Shakespeare from memory, as if in compensation for his own lack of reading or scholastic accomplishment. Molly Punderson was no doubt one of the best-read individuals in Stockbridge. She had majored in English at Radcliffe (class of 1919) and spent her junior year in England, which she considered life-changing.

Molly, obviously, had a good deal in common with Rockwell’s deceased wife. Like Mary Rockwell, she harbored a passion for literature and occasionally wrote a poem herself, in daring free verse. But unlike Mary, Molly was sturdy and self-contained, flinty in the classic New England manner. She was the sort of woman who was always deploring things with visible conviction, one whose ancestors had delivered fiery sermons in black Puritan garb. Her righteousness made her both likable and unlikable, depending on whom you asked. She was said to be popular at Milton Academy, where successive generations of Milton girls from established families who had first encountered the
Canterbury Tales
and
Hamlet
under her demanding tutelage spoke kindly of Miss Pundy, as everyone called her. She was well-versed in the modernists, too. Her favorite poet was T. S. Eliot and she felt honored to be teaching at the very prep school that young Tom had attended years earlier.

But within her own family, Molly commanded less admiration. She clashed frequently with her older brother and only sibling, Frank Punderson, a good-natured businessman who ran a coal and wood company in Springfield, Massachusetts. Molly disapproved of his (Republican) politics and the books he read. He and his wife, Beulah, had three children, and one Christmas when Aunt Molly made a rare appearance at their home, the children realized with crushing disappointment that she had arrived from the fashionable, shop-lined streets of Boston without a single gift—except for a bag of dusty, brown pine cones that she had collected on country walks. As she distributed the booty between her niece and two nephews, she cheerfully decried “the ugly display of commercialism under the Christmas tree.”
3

True, she made efforts toward her niece, Nancy Punderson. In the summer, when Molly was back in Stockbridge, she would invite Nancy to visit for a few days at a stretch. Even as a teenager, Nancy knew that Aunt Molly was not like other aunts. Here was a woman who, as if in defiance of the rules of auntdom, declined to bubble with affection and encouragement. “She was an Anglophile with a British accent, and she said I had such ordinary intelligence,” Nancy recalled years later.

When it was time for Nancy to apply to college, Molly personally administered the SATs to her. “She gave me a 300 on the test,” she recalled. Molly was qualified to grade the test because she had served for many years on the Committee of the College Entrance Examination Board,
4
which required her to attend meetings in Princeton, and come up with questions on grammar and vocabulary.

For their first date, Rockwell invited Molly to a play that had just opened in Pittsfield. This occurred one evening in June, on the cusp of summer, after Molly’s poetry-discussion group had ended for the season and Peggy Best had flown to Paris with her two teenage children. It had been arranged that Rockwell’s son Peter would run Peggy’s gallery in her absence. She planned to remain abroad all summer, leaving Rockwell free to court Molly without feeling like a traitor.

By October, he would be married again.

*   *   *

Molly is not known to have had any male suitors before she met Rockwell. Rather, her closest relationships were with two single women: Dorothy Kendall, who taught history at Milton; and Helen Rice, an accomplished violinist from Stockbridge. Her sense of being on her own, of being a woman without a man, had come early. “I was too shy or solemn or something to be socially any kind of light,” she recalled of her childhood in Stockbridge. “I loved Sunday school, even. I am ashamed to admit it.”
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