Girl at the Mirror
March 6, 1954

Mary’s pose seems “apprehensive, as if she understands that womanhood is upon her and fears that she is not quite ready,” writes art expert Karal Ann Marling in her 1997 book, Norman Rockwell. However, young Mary didn’t have a clue.

“I was only in fifth or in sixth grade, and I wasn’t a kid who was at all interested in growing up. I was just having a good time,” Mary says.

Discarded doll

Rockwell knew that Mary wasn’t grasping the idea, so he tried again, “Now, Mary, don’t you ever stand in front of a mirror and wonder what a beautiful woman you’re going to be? I can remember standing in front of a mirror, combing my hair, wondering how handsome I was going to be.”

Brush and lipstick

Mary tells us Rockwell felt he had made a mistake including the magazine featuring sexy movie star Jane Russell. “He regretted it deeply. Norman got a lot of criticism—remember this was in the ’50s—that said, ‘Is that all a little girl can dream about is becoming a movie star?’”

“I should not have added the photograph of the movie star,” Rockwell later said in Marling’s book, “the little girl is not wondering if she looks like the star but just trying to estimate her own charms.”

Magazine

Mary, who describes this painting as “very different than most of Rockwell’s covers,” compares the subtle use of color and lighting with another of Rockwell’s finest works. “In The Marriage License,” she explains, “you think you’re going to concentrate on the couple getting their license, but really what you find yourself looking at and being drawn into is the sweet, dear man [the elderly clerk]. Because that’s where the light is, on his face.”

Girl at the Mirror
March 6, 1954

Mary never knew why Rockwell called her his favorite model, but he had quickly become one of her favorite people. “I kept in touch with him until he died. He always sent me a little note at Christmas time and told me he missed me.”

See Mary today as she talks about the artist in this video, courtesy of the Norman Rockwell Museum.

Rockwell’s Favorite Model, Part III The Saturday Evening Post

See the covers Mary modeled for in “Rockwell’s Favorite Model.”

A special thank you to the Norman Rockwell Museum for sharing the video of Mary Whalen Leonard.

Interview with Rockwell Model Mary Whalen Leonard The Saturday Evening Post

Day in the Life of a Girl
Norman Rockwell
August 30, 1952

Rockwell said he enjoyed working with 9-year-old Mary Whalen, who “could look sad one minute, jolly the next, and raise her eyebrows until they almost jumped over her head.”

“He was very inclusive; he wasn’t authoritarian, telling me what to do,” Mary says. “It was, ‘OK, this is what we’re going to do today.’ He would act it out for me.

“I was reserved and he would just sort of pull [the expressions] out of me by laughing or clapping or stomping his feet or jumping up and down and making me laugh, that kind of thing. And I just felt such a part of what was happening. As a kid, I liked to be a part of something. He knew what he wanted and he knew how to get that out of you. And then when he got [the right expression], he would just shout, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful! That’s wonderful!’”

For the 1952 cover, A Day in the Life of a Girl, Mary gave Rockwell over 20 wonderful expressions.

“It took a week,” Mary tells us, to shoot all the scenes for the 1952 cover. Beginning with getting out of bed, A Day in the Life of a Girl is done sequentially, like a movie reel. Photographer Gene Pelham took dozens of shots, as the artist posed his models.

“When I posed for A Day in the Life of a Girl,” Mary tells us, “I got up early, my mother combed my hair, did my braids, and off we went [to Rockwell’s studio].” The first thing Rockwell said to them was, “We’re going to mess up Mary’s hair,” and with that he tousled her tidy braids.

The first six scenes were completed that first day. For this flying out the door on her way to go swimming look, her mother had to hold her pigtails back, while someone else pulled back her swimming cap. When the angles were just right, “Rockwell would yell, ‘Get it!’” Mary says, and Pelham would snap away.

The scene below depicts the old story: Boy meets girl, boy tries to drown girl, spunky girl bawls him out, and then gives him a taste of his own medicine. Ah, young love!

The boy in the love story is Chuck Marsh, another model with a wonderfully expressive face. He was in the earlier Rockwell cover, A Day in the Life of a Boy.

In real life, Mary tells us, she and Chuck never posed in a pool—it was all done in the studio. And when we asked about the dripping wet hair, Mary gave us a glimpse into the glamorous world of modeling: “They poured a bowl of water on me.”

The kids never pushed each other’s heads down either. “We used a bronze bust to lean on … to get the elbow right,” Mary reveals, then adds, “I went to the Rockwell Museum three or four years ago, and they still had that bust in his studio!”

[You can tour the artist’s studio at The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, or take the online tour here.]

Gradually, boy and girl become friends, go for a bike ride and a movie, and then we find them at a birthday party. In this scene, Mary is wearing a party dress Rockwell bought for her. But what sounds like an act of kindness was most likely the artist’s insistence on just the right details. As an example, he shopped several furniture stores for the exact chair he wanted for his delightful Easter Morning cover from 1959.

The party scene involved more models, including Mary’s twin brother, Peter; and Chuck Marsh’s little brother, Donnie, whose mission was simply to devour the cake and ice cream. Donnie’s single-mindedness about the treats made for a difficult day’s shoot, Mary recalls.

Ten-year-old Chuck Marsh noted that this scene was the “toughest time” he ever had posing. He liked Mary very much, but no how, no way was he going to kiss a girl. “Mr. Rockwell finally gave up trying to get me to kiss her,” he said, and the artist posed the two separately. Getting the smooch just right involved Chuck leaning toward—you guessed it—that bronze bust. Who knew the head of a Classical figure could be so utilitarian?

At the end of this long day, Mary is dressed for bed and writing in her diary, no doubt about that moonlit kiss. And the painting is almost complete.

But there was a problem when Rockwell reached his final scene. With the deadline almost upon him, he remembered the many complaints he had received about one aspect of A Day in the Life of a Boy—before retiring for the night, the boy did not say his prayers. So Rockwell called the Whalens and said, “You’ve got to get Mary down here!”

Because the prayer scene was added, another scene was taken out, Mary tells us. Deleted was a charming scene of Mary and Chuck smiling and thanking their hostess (the birthday girl in the pink hat in the party scene above). But the day is done, bedtime prayers said, and Mary drifts off to sleep with a smile on her face and a party favor beside her.

Next Week: The third and final installment of Rockwell’s Favorite Model, featuring a coming-of-age cover many feel is one of the artist’s finest works.

Rockwell’s Favorite Model, Part II The Saturday Evening Post

Plymouth Ad
Norman Rockwell
December 22, 1951

Young Mary was thirsty. Seeing neighbors at a local basketball game carrying soft drinks, she asked her father for one. He was trying to explain that refreshments were only served at halftime, and that the concession stand was now closed, when a man seated behind them “came very gallantly to my rescue and said, ‘You can have my Coke.’” She “had no clue” who the man was, but gratefully accepted the drink. The gallant man was Norman Rockwell, who “was just sitting behind us, cheering. His son was on the team.”

Talking after the game with Mary’s father (who was Rockwell’s lawyer), the artist asked Mary if she would like to pose for him some day. “I said, ‘Sure!’ although I didn’t know what that meant,” she tells the Post.

She soon found out, when she (in the polka-dotted bathrobe at left), along with her mother, brother, and a young cousin posed for this 1951 Christmas ad for Plymouth. “There was something about the connection with Norman. Maybe it just came at the right time in my life. I was just kind of intrigued by him as a kid. I think it’s because he disarmed me when I went to the studio for the first time, and he said, ‘Call me Norman. My name is Norman.’ I really trusted him. [At that time] you would never call an adult by his first name!”

For the ad “I had to borrow a bathrobe,” Mary says, “because I didn’t have one.” (She’s still not a bathrobe person.)

It is significant that the Plymouth ad has no image of the product or even details about the car’s features: The excited faces of the family say it all. In addition to Post covers, Rockwell did a great deal of illustration for advertising.

Outside the Principal’s Office
Norman Rockwell
May 23, 1953

When Rockwell decided to use Mary as the model for a cover about a girl with a black eye, he called for her at the local school. Unfortunately, this had the effect of scaring the child. Having never been summoned to the principal’s office, she jumped to the conclusion she was in trouble. “That was really frightening,” Mary tells us today, “I cried! But my sweet brother—he’s my twin brother, so we were in the same class—held my hand, and we walked together.” She was greatly relieved to discover Rockwell there and find out the reason for the command appearance.

Although the scene depicts the principal’s office, her part was done in the artist’s studio. And Mary says she never saw the principal and the secretary in the preliminary sketches. That’s because Rockwell added them later. According to Susan E. Meyer’s book, Norman Rockwell’s People, the artist “wavered back and forth” about including the adults. “He took them out and put them back in. [Fellow cover artist] George Hughes is convinced they were retained because he advised Rockwell to remove them.” (There was a long-running joke that Rockwell would solicit Hughes’ advice, and inevitably do the opposite.)

But Rockwell’s biggest challenge was getting the black eye right. He tried a charcoal mix on his young model, then makeup, but neither looked realistic. He finally advertised for a real black eye in the paper.

He not only got that tricky shiner right, his choice of Mary proved a great one. As a triumphant victor, the model manages the perfect devilish grin, even as the principal and school secretary confer on how to handle the situation.

Part II: Mary gives behind-the-scenes details on how certain poses were done as we review the Rockwell cover A Day in the Life of a Girl.

Rockwell’s Favorite Model The Saturday Evening Post

First Flower

First Flower
Norman Rockwell
March 22, 1947

On a blustery March day a man excitedly spies that first crocus peeking through. The man is Gene Pelham, who as a youth had met Rockwell and occasionally modeled for him while living in New Rochelle, New York.

But in 1938, Marcy Kennedy Knight writes in the March/April 2013 issue of the Post, Pelham moved from New York, filled with visions of a country life. When settled, he dreamed of doing some farming in Arlington, Vermont. But a funny thing happened on the way to his dream. Knight writes that Pelham was in his yard one day when a man seeking directions pulled into his driveway and rolled down his window. Pelham looked up and “was amazed to see none other than Rockwell behind the wheel. ‘Norman? What are you doing here?’ he asked.”

What the artist was doing was moving to Arlington too. “Rockwell was delighted to find Pelham living in Arlington when he and his family arrived, and soon hired him as his studio assistant,” Ron Schick writes in Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. Pelham “built props, prepared canvases, wrangled models, and was himself a versatile and expressive model,” continues Schick. “The relationship was mutually beneficial: Pelham grew as an illustrator as he learned from his mentor, and Rockwell gained from Pelham’s considerable range of talents.”

Plumbers

Plumbers
Norman Rockwell
June 21, 1951

Plumbers was one of Rockwell’s most entertaining covers. Pelham (right) and Rockwell’s apprentice Don Winslow are typecast as Laurel and Hardy like characters cutting up in a fancy boudoir, much to the confusion of the Pekingese to the right. Rockwell’s passion for detail works a wonderful contrast between the room with it’s floral wallpaper and frilly vanity and the laborer with their dirty hands and well-used tools. There’s a good chance that Pelham was the one who located the tools. He was key to acquiring props for the artist.

“Dad never threw anything away,” Pelham’s daughter Melinda said in a recent Post interview. “Norman would get these things and say, ‘Here, Gene, take this. I don’t want it.’ I think that’s why he liked my dad so much because my dad could always come up with whatever it was he needed.”

Melinda has had fun over the years, looking at Rockwell’s paintings and recognizing various items. “A lot of the props he would drag from our house. Sometimes I see things in Post covers that are either things I had or someone in my family had.” For example, in Rockwell’s 1943 April Fool cover Melinda recognized the table (“it was my grandmother’s”), the chairs, and the clock that she still owns today.

A more famous prop was Rockwell’s chair, depicted in the cover Blank Canvas. After many years of use, the artist threw the chair out, but Pelham retrieved it and took it home. “Dad used it when he did his own painting,” from then on Melinda told us. And who wouldn’t? After all, America’s favorite illustrator created many iconic images while sitting in that old seat.

New Chair

New Chair
Gene Pelham
April 25, 1942

“My father was a landscape painter mostly,” Melinda says. “My mother used to say ‘You should paint more,’ but he didn’t.” Although he did a “few covers for the Post and Collier’s,” it was difficult to make a living at commercial illustration. The competition was great for magazine and advertisement art, and there was certainly no competing with Rockwell, who was at the pinnacle in these venues. Besides, Melinda says, “Norman kept him busy.”

By the time Pelham created this colorful 1942 cover, it was apparent that his move to Vermont’s countryside was the beginning of a trend. That February, the Post noted another of their illustrators, Mead Schaeffer, had “joined Norman Rockwell and Gene Pelham at Arlington, Vermont, in what promises to become a Post art colony.” They were prophetic words, for the tiny town would soon boast fellow cover artists John Atherton and George Hughes. These renowned illustrators socialized and consulted each other on their projects. We can see the influence of Hughes’ humorous everyday situations and Rockwell’s sense of fun in Pelham’s beleaguered moving man.

Classic Art: Rockwell’s Right-hand Man The Saturday Evening Post

The Babysitter

The Babysitter
Norman Rockwell
November 8, 1947

We would like to say that no babies were harmed in the making of this classic Rockwell cover, but the baby may disagree. During Melinda’s first modeling job, as the crying infant in The Babysitter, the artist and photographer couldn’t get her to cry, so someone stuck her foot with a pin. “My mother told me she always felt terrible about that, but it was what it was.”

“Obviously I was too small to remember anything,” she says. “But somewhere I have a photograph of me that Dad took … and I can see my mother’s image. She’s standing and I’m looking at her, and I am sort of looking sad like, ‘Oh, help me!’” Like many illustrators of the period, Rockwell began by painting live models. But around the mid 1930s, he used photography to capture the scene he would sketch out for a painting, calling the model back if necessary.

The Babysitter shows Rockwell’s ability to capture a dizzying array of details, making it one of those paintings where viewers may pick up something new each time they look at it. And still Melinda brought a fresh detail to our attention: “There’s a pin, an actual pin in the painting. The pin is in the diaper that’s hanging over the chair. He put it right through the canvas, he didn’t paint that in there.” It’s a delightful bit of Rockwell whimsy we were unaware of. Melinda has another viewpoint: “When I found out that I was stuck by a pin and I look at that painting, I wonder if that was the pin that did the deed and then he put it in the picture,” she says, laughing.

Despite the prickly offense, Melinda has a good sense of humor about the situation. In fact, she says she (along with the model baby sitter, Lucille Towne Holton) got involved in keeping the painting where the artist wanted it to be. Rockwell gave the original to the sixth graders of Taft Elementary in Burlington, Vermont, in memory of a student who died of leukemia. The school closed in 1978, and the painting was stored in a local bank. In 1995 appraisers determined it would be worth about $300,000. This was welcome news to the cash-strapped school system, which considered an auction. Former classmates protested and were offered an alternative: raise $300,000 and the painting would remain in town. Many townspeople got involved, and Melinda reports, “We raised the funds and it stays forevermore! It’s at the Fleming Museum; and every time my granddaughter goes there, she says, ‘That’s my grandmother!’ She gets a kick out of it.”

Rockwell Ads

Du Mont TV Ad
Norman Rockwell
December 9, 1950

We first saw Melinda on a recent episode of Antiques Roadshow, where she was having Rockwell artifacts appraised, including a print of this 1950 Du Mont TV ad featuring her at about age 5. The print was accompanied by a note addressed to her father: “…to reimburse your daughter for the long session of posing. Give her my thanks for helping me out. Sincerely, Norman.” We called to ask her about her memories of the artist.

“I do remember him! I remember very well,” Melinda says, although she was only about 5 or 6 when he moved away from her small town in Vermont. “My sister always says to me, ‘I don’t know how you remember all that, I don’t remember these things.’ Maybe I just paid more attention or maybe I just have a different brain. And my sister didn’t pose for him that often.”

What she remembers was a kind man with a fondness for Cokes. This was a treat because soft drinks were limited to “special occasions” at home. But Rockwell had a Coke machine and the models could help themselves on breaks.

Melinda also recalls that Rockwell was particular about the pose he wanted for this ad. “He was very detailed in the way he wanted you to sit,” she says. And sit she did, for 15 hours. The time “would be broken up,” Melinda says, “so he might be working with the boy or the dog, and they didn’t need me” for a while. She remembers the artist’s wife Mary Rockwell who “would take me into the house so I wasn’t just sitting in the studio all that time. She was great about leaping into the breach. I can remember getting a dish of ice cream.”

“It was a long day,” Melinda says, “but Mary took me on a walk. I remember we walked down the back road, and it was a dirt road that ran along the river. And I remember picking ferns with her and then we went back to her garden and got some zinnias.” Melinda’s mother was laid up with an injury at this time, “and I brought her home this bouquet of flowers that Mary had ‘helped’ me put together. She did it all herself, I was very small, but I remember picking the ferns. She was really very sweet. She was a lovely lady. I have very fond memories of being there as a child.”

Blank Canvas

Blank Canvas
Norman Rockwell
October 8, 1938

Painting and drawing appraiser Alasdair Nichol was a bit surprised when Melinda also brought a chair to his table at the Antiques Roadshow, suspecting she had been sent to the wrong area. But when Melinda explained that the chair had belonged to Norman Rockwell and had been depicted in the iconic 1938 cover we see here, he understood. Rockwell’s photographer, Gene Pelham (Melinda’s dad), took the chair after the artist threw it out.

“Dad never threw anything away,” Melinda says. He would salvage discards or “Norman would get these things and say, ‘Here, Gene, take this. I don’t want it.’ Norman was not a hoarder or collector, I don’t think, unless it was something he felt he would need in the long run for paintings—costumes and things.”

But the salvaged chair was special. “To think of the amazing paintings that he did when he was sitting in this chair,” appraiser Nichol said. To see how the cast away chair was evaluated, we have a link to the appraisal, courtesy of the Antiques Roadshow.

Thank you to the Antiques Roadshow for the link to the episode featuring Melinda and to the Norman Rockwell Museum for their assistance in contacting her.

Classic Art: Growing Up with Rockwell The Saturday Evening Post

Courtesy of the Norman Rockwell Museum.

A Day in the Life of Norman Rockwell Model Chuck Marsh The Saturday Evening Post