Norman Rockwell (57 page)

As he did with all the portraits, most infamously with the number he did, reluctantly, of Richard Nixon, Rockwell emphasized the best physical features of Johnson and modified the unattractive ones. Johnson, predictably, was thrilled with a portrait that he could rightfully believe looked like him, even though the wattles under his chin and the prominence of his ears were invisible. When the artist Peter Hurd was commissioned three years later to create the official portrait of Johnson, a brouhaha erupted when Johnson insisted Hurd’s more somber and less cosmetic painting was “the ugliest thing I ever saw,” and whipped out the Rockwell to press on Hurd as an example of good painting. Hurd was pursued by reporters until he revealed his hurt feelings as well as his pique that Rockwell, who spent only twenty minutes with the president and then painted from the sketch he made and photographs he had taken, was vaunted over Hurd, who had painted from life.

The contretemps was in all the major newspapers, and Peter Hurd, a gentle and generous man by nature, wrote a letter to Rockwell apologizing for the comment he had made in haste and anger, and emphasizing his respect for Rockwell’s work. Rockwell would respond with a similarly gracious note, but the public implications of his inferior status that continued to be part of the culture must have stung. Perhaps his ego was gratified, though the occasion was too grim for true pleasure, when the
Post
reused his earlier portrait of John Kennedy on its commemorative issue after the president’s assassination.

Two weeks into 1964, and two weeks before his seventieth birthday, Rockwell gave dramatic notice of his new willingness to stake his political and philosophical territory more openly than he had in the past.
The Problem We All Live With
appeared in the January 14 issue of
Look
magazine. Inspired by reading about Ruby Bridges’s first day at William Frantz Public School in New Orleans and the violence accompanying school desegregation attempts all over the South, Rockwell had painted a stunning narrative of four seemingly huge United States marshals, their bodies cut off at the shoulders by the top of the canvas, escorting a young, very dark black girl to school. Their massive impersonality, benign but anonymous, contrasts with her smallness. The child walks with a combined stiffness and unnatural strut that belies her fright, and the preternatural whiteness of her dress against the deep glow of her skin not only announces the theme of the painting—it takes on a spiritual symbolism, as if challenging Americans to act any way other than morally righteous. On the wall behind the little parade is the ugly scrawling, “nigger,” with red splashes of color that read at first glance as blood rather than the tomatoes splattered against the wall that they are. The letters “KKK” are carved on the wall in the left part of the picture, and, as if to counterbalance the ugliness of those initials, Rockwell has painted NR + MP in a tiny heart at the bottom, a love note to the wife who has emboldened him. As Susan Meyer has pointed out, the gaping space between the girl and the men behind her represents about two fifths of the entire canvas, “deadly” were it not for Rockwell’s skillful treatment of the tomato-stained concrete wall.

Although
Look
magazine received a small amount of hate mail over the painting, the response was largely positive. Black and white readers wrote to say that the painting said more than they could explain to their children or to themselves with words. And some of them wanted to go on record that this would prove a painting for the ages.

During this same year, Rockwell got up the nerve to tell his old friend at Brown and Bigelow, Claire Briggs, that he needed to stop doing the Four Seasons calendar. Feebly, he blames the decision on his doctor for telling him he needed to take it easy. Molly had ensured that his financial affairs were healthy, and he wanted time and space to continue painting scenes of the contemporary world around him. Now he began to earn good money not for escaping to the past, but for documenting the present.

In late winter of 1964, Rockwell traveled to Cape Kennedy to paint a series commissioned by
Look
on Project Gemini, the series of two-man orbital flights that would include actual space walks for the first time. Rockwell found the creativity that went into producing space suits staggering, and he painted the astronauts suiting up at Cape Kennedy as a kind of modern-day romance, the equivalent of “Sir Galahad girding for battle,” as he worded his inspiration for
Look
readers.

The most exotic record he painted of contemporary life was not, however, of the United States, but of daily existence deep within the Blue Nile region, a native area previously explored by only a few white men. Chris and Mary Schafer’s son John had joined the Peace Corps, and the Rockwells took him up on his invitation to visit. Rockwell turned the trip into visual material for
Look,
using John himself for what would become the June 14, 1966, cover story on the Peace Corps. John Shafer recalls his amazement at the Rockwells’ derring-do: “They flew in on a tiny twin-engine plane, landing on the grass plot near us. I was just shocked; these seventy-year-olds acting like young adventurers.”

All was not fun and games, however. Notes that Rockwell scribbled during sleepless early-morning hours in 1965 attest to his continual struggle over what impulse to trust, and which loyalties to honor:

If only I can hold onto it. To hell with the magazines, my responsibilities. You [Molly] will help, be with me . . . If only I have the steadfastness and get out of the rust [he probably meant to write
ruts
] of fear not a masterpiece and publicity and popularity (cheap) Maybe even no photos Isn’t a Peace corps picture the answer. Youthful dedication. Something bigger than yourself. Maybe not art but my only answer, not some magazine or art editor or publicity but of my own free will Have I the steadfastness????
with you
It isn’t just a glorious hollow gesture. Is it? It’s late I must do it soon Isn’t the Peace Corps the answer. Maybe don’t go to them do it on our own.
You and me.
But I mustn’t be silly. obligations to commitments family Can I keep it up? . . . doubts, weakness, fear . . . Not the Peace Corps one that allen [Hurlburt, the art editor of
Look
] like but the one I like and believe in. . . . Am I dogging life?
No
. . . anyone I respect would respect
this.

Ironically, in a twist that Rockwell would have appreciated had its implications not been so evil, his name became publicly confused at this time with a hatemonger of the first order, American Nazi party leader George Lincoln Rockwell. In the old days, when he and left-wing Rockwell Kent had been mistaken for each other, he was largely amused; Kent was talented and intelligent. Now he was upset; this Nazi Rockwell staged appearances around the country, particularly in New York City, as a storm trooper sent to help white Americans wipe out Jews and blacks, both of which he referred to by vile epithets. Eventually, the illustrator began writing to newspapers that printed the misidentification, threatening legal action if they didn’t rectify their mistake. Although all of them, from
The Huntsville Times
to
The New York Times—
which, on February 24, 1965, would have to clarify that Malcolm X’s earlier reported remark about his opposition to the Ku Klux Klan and the Rockwells did not, after all, refer to Norman Rockwell, but to “the American Nazi leader,” George Lincoln Rockwell—printed retractions, Rockwell never felt such a response to be good enough, though he didn’t know what else to do about it.

By the beginning of 1965, he was struggling more than usual with his work, mostly advertising, and sounding in his calendar notes as if the subjects were too banal to motivate him. January 11 was “a very very rough day” in the studio, dictating that he take a Miltown after lunch in order to calm down for his afternoon painting. On January 19, his spirits received a lift when Twentieth Century–Fox called him to ask if he would do the posters they needed for the movie they planned to film that summer,
Stagecoach.
His calendar records the ambivalent, “Thrilled but ———.” By the end of the month, although he is still “very low,” he becomes “all excited” during the family cocktail hour on January 29, when he and Molly discuss “national problems.” His calendar records a string of words: “pictures, Peace corps, Vista, Race Conflict, etc. to hell with mag. work.” On the other side of the page, he pens, “Heard from Stagecoach.”

But if Hollywood is fun, contemporary issues are meaningful, at least that’s what Rockwell’s notes over the next two months seem to imply. On February 4, he writes “Big Day!!! Wonderful mail! Heard from A. Hurlburt at last—astronauts to be published April 20 or May 4. Peace Corps for fall. Hurrah! All so [
sic
] Vista ok. They are happy with my sketch.” And on February 26, he is pleased with the final oil for the Vista publication, noting in his calendar that “JERRY HELPED a lot.” From March 5, when he mailed the oil sketch of
Southern Justice
(called
Murder in Mississippi
by Rockwell), until March 16, when Allen Hurlburt called with his “ok on ‘massacre,’ ” there are no calendar entries. Clearly Rockwell had been anxiously awaiting Hurlburt’s reaction, and the entry on the 16th begins, “Big Big Day!”

Although Hurlburt admired the preliminary oil sketch so much that he suggested publishing it, Rockwell insisted that the art director let him produce a finished painting as well. By the end of April, after Hurlburt spent a few weeks deciding between the two renditions, he phoned Rockwell with the news that everyone at
Look
preferred the sketch, “quite a change,” the illustrator notes in his calendar. For the first time in his career, both he and an art director agreed that the earlier oil sketch, with its loose brushwork, delivered more impact than the finished oil, and so for the only time in Rockwell’s career, the preliminary study was published while its completed counterpart was not.

Southern Justice,
a dramatic tableau of the Mississippi civil rights workers who were shot during the voting registration drive, appeared in
Look
on June 29, 1965. As he had with
The Problem We All Live With,
Rockwell used the dramatic contrast of light and dark to further the theme of racial strife and potential harmony. The white shirt of the white man holding a dying black man contrasts not only with the slain worker’s skin but with the bright blood splashed on the ground and covering the third participant. Painted in colors reminiscent of the old two-tone process—white, red, and brown—the painting powerfully conveys the beauty of the ideals behind the ugly cost of their achievement. Rockwell “tried making [the] Civil Rights men heroic, influenced by Michel Angelo,” as he had written in his calendar several months earlier.

Reaction among Rockwell’s admirers has been mixed on the painting from its publication. Some believe the painting to be strained because, after all, this wasn’t Rockwell’s kind of thing; others find it masterful, a case of Rockwell finally applying his much-vaunted technique to a historically weighty subject. Even the working photos emphasize the new graphic realism: for most settings, Rockwell preferred to use the natural light from his studio’s large north window. But in both
Southern Justice
and the later
New Kids in the Neighborhood,
another racially themed painting, he now added floodlights to accentuate the contrast of light and dark, the artificial light heightening the sense of drama.

During this year of tackling solemn topics, some levity emerged when the art director of the edgy, intellectual
Ramparts
seriously wrote the seventy-one-year-old illustrator that the magazine would like him to take LSD (not yet outlawed) in order to report his findings while under its influence and help dispute all the incorrectly negative press the hallucinogen had been receiving. Always interested in new experiences, Rockwell might have been at least somewhat tempted, had the art director not made the mistake that Dorothy Canfield Fisher had years earlier: explaining that Rockwell should do no advance planning in terms of “subject matter, composition and the like” before taking the drug, so that the creative effects it has on someone whose work “is a kind of institution in your area” would be discernible, the writer trivializes the very artist he is petitioning. Rockwell answered with a courteous, amused, but taciturn note: “As you expressed the hope that I would be intrigued, I was intrigued, but this is not for me.” Then, in a new paragraph, he concludes with one sentence: “My schedule makes it absolutely impossible.”

The proposal from
Ramparts
may have been inspired by
Esquire
magazine’s early August publication of the “100 Best People in the World.” Although the editors poked fun at their own pretensions in constructing such a list, the choices are revealing about mid-1960s culture. Writers picked include Nabokov, Tolkien, Salinger, and Gregory Corso; film directors John Huston and Stanley Kubrick; politicians Hubert Humphrey and Norman Thomas; and category anomalies such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Alfred Knopf. Five artists were chosen: Saul Steinberg, Alexander Calder, David Levine, Josef Albers, and Norman Rockwell. In response to the question, “What do you mean by best?,” the editors answered: “We mean best by virtue of what they have done or are or both.”

But this was the same era when
Mad
magazine parodied Rockwell by showing his work as a paint-by-number kit, so chances are that he made no more of this honor than he did these days of the ignominy of other media coverage. Most of all, he stayed too busy to care about such things. His break from heavy social issues came from Hollywood, where director Marty Rackin had finally convinced Rockwell to take on the elaborate publicity campaign for
Stagecoach.
He and Molly flew to Denver, where the movie was being shot, to paint a roster of movie stars ranging from Ann-Margret and Stephanie Powers and Bing Crosby, all of whom of whom he liked, to Bob Cummings, whom he deplored for his on-set prima donna behavior. The painter’s obvious enthusiasm for the field of cinema convinced Rackin to give him a tiny part as a cardplayer in the actual movie. Rockwell’s financial records show that almost ten years later, when he no longer had anything to do with the movies, he continued to pay annual fees to sustain his membership in the Screen Actors’ Guild. His cameo seemed to yield almost as much pleasure as did the $35,000 he received for the portraits, a poster of the stagecoach being chased by Indians, and other promotional material. Exhausted at the pace the commission demanded, he and Molly took a late autumn trip to Mexico, traveling to Mexico City, Tepotzlan, Taxco, and Cuernavaca, where they visited with Peggy Best, now their mutual good friend, in her new home.