The most irksome part of his experience with the President, Hurd arrogantly told The New York Times, was having to hear his work compared unfavorably to that of Rockwell, whom he dismissed as a “good commercial artist.” It might seem hypocritical that Hurd, who worked in the realistic style of his hero N. C. Wyeth and himself did an occasional portrait for Time, would malign Rockwell as a commercial artist. His comment suggests that the Wyeth clan considered itself artistically superior to Rockwell, who had never denied his status as an illustrator or tried to escape the stigma. There was no Helga in his life, no secret desire to forsake illustration for more reputable kinds of painting.
Moreover, Hurd maintained in the Times that Rockwell copied from photographs, whereas “I’ve never learned to copy photos.”14 The Washington Post carried a similar accusation: “Rockwell’s genius lies partly in being able to to turn out slick, speedy, glossy copies of photographs in record time to meet magazine deadlines, Hurd insisted.”15
Sadly, no one came to Rockwell’s defense, including Norman Rockwell, who had never bothered to answer his detractors over the years. But someone, anyone, might have pointed out that he did not copy photographs. Rather, he used them to lend greater credibility to his fictions.
Rockwell was unable to express whatever resentment he may have felt over the incident. He almost never went on record criticizing another illustrator and he was not about to pick a fight with the brother-in-law of his colleague Andrew Wyeth. In fact, he actually defended Hurd in his one public comment about the incident. In the summer of 1967, speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, he blamed the affair of the rejected portrait on the White House. President Johnson may have considered Rockwell’s portrait of him the epitome of artistic excellence, but, as Rockwell told the audience with his usual self-debunking humor, “President Johnson is a terrible art critic.”16
TWENTY-NINE
THE VIETNAM WAR
(1965 TO 1967)
In the eyes of the townspeople, Molly and Norman seemed touchingly companionable. They were often spotted riding their bicycles through town, even in the winter, whizzing past in the bright noontime sun. Weather permitting, they set out every day at 11:30, immediately before lunch, and might be joined by Rockwell’s studio assistants. In his cycling, as in so much else, Rockwell adhered to an unvarying routine. His preferred bike route took him west on Main Street, away from the little shops; when he reached the town cemetery, he turned right onto Route 102, which wound through open fields. The route, as he noted, was 4.7 miles long and blessedly flat, except for one part near the Berkshire Gardens Center that required him to pedal standing up. He called it Cardiac Hill.1
By now Rockwell had been married to Molly for four years and in some ways he remained fundamentally unchanged. His 1965 calendar shows he was still in therapy with Dr. Howard and relying on antianxiety drugs (“took Miltown after lunch”) to get through the day and to sleep through the night. He still tended toward hypochondria and imagined himself host to every cold, flu, and cough that passed through Stockbridge. Yet compared to the debacle of his two previous marriages, his union with Molly was a ringing triumph. He noted on his calendar one Thursday in May: “Molly gone lonesome,” and then, three days later: “Molly coming home Hurray!”
It helped that Molly continued to view her marriage as a late-life gift. Unlike the first two Mrs. Norman Rockwells, she was able to tolerate the solitude entailed in sharing a life with him. There was so much she genuinely enjoyed, from the red-carpet treatment they received when they traveled to the hours at home devoted to gardening (asparagus was her specialty) and caring for Pitter, their beagle mix. Once when she was asked to name the woman she most admired, she cited the novelist Jane Austen, explaining: “She contented herself with wherever she found herself.”2
Rockwell still disappeared into his studio by eight, closing the door behind him. Molly had an uneasy relationship with his assistant, Louie Lamone, who found her stiff and imperious, no match for Mary Rockwell. Early in her marriage, Molly frequently went out to the studio; she would bring the mail as soon as it arrived, usually at nine in the morning, and went back and forth throughout the day to discuss small matters as they arose. But then Rockwell installed an intercom system and requested that she buzz from the house with her questions. “She very seldom came in after that,” Lamone recalled.3
She did rap on the studio door every day around eleven o’clock, to remind him to break for their bicycle ride. “If I didn’t,” she said, “he’d probably work through dinner.”
She especially cherished their trips out of town, which were numerous and usually undertaken for his work. Once, asked by a reporter to name her favorite material possession, she replied, “My cameras, which provide my entree on Norman’s work trips.” She owned two Leicas and a Rolleiflex, and although he already had a well-equipped darkroom in his studio, he converted an old icehouse on the property into a photography studio for Molly. Moreover, he arranged for her to receive lessons from one of his photographers, Walter H. Scott, a young artist who had recently “emigrated,”4 as he said, to the Berkshires from San Francisco. Her old friends and former teaching colleagues felt surprised and perhaps a little betrayed by the ease with which she had slipped out of her moorings as an English teacher and cottoned to her new VIP life. She seldom had time to visit Milton, Massachusetts, the site of her professional triumphs. In Stockbridge, her priorities rearranged themselves. She no longer taught her Monday night poetry class at the Lenox Library, in part because she was frequently out of town. “Her life took a very different turn,” her friend Helen Rice recalled. “I was very sorry that she didn’t have time after she married to continue with this.”5
* * *
On June 28, 1965, as Stockbridge filled up with summer residents and visitors assumed their positions in the wicker chairs outside the Red Lion Inn, Rockwell and Molly flew west. For a few weeks they were in Los Angeles, where Rockwell had been invited to exhibit a small group of his paintings at the municipal art gallery. He made sure to include his Ruby Bridges painting as well as Murder in Mississippi, a sketch of which had just appeared in Look, memorializing three young civil rights activists—Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Schwerner—killed by a gang of Klansmen. “Times are changing now, and people are getting angry,” Rockwell told a wire-service reporter a few days after his arrival in Los Angeles. “I’m beginning to get angry too.”6
He again sounded like a socially engaged citizen when he taped an interview with archconservative Art Linkletter for his new CBS show, Hollywood Talent Scouts. While he amused Linkletter by recounting how crotchety President Johnson had been during his portrait session, Rockwell mentioned that he voted for him. He could be public about those things now. He could say he voted Democratic.
The main incentive for the trip was a lucrative assignment from the film producer Marty Rackin. He had persuaded Rockwell to put aside his regular work to undertake the movie poster and “lobby cards” for Stagecoach, a not-awful remake of the John Ford Western. Rockwell and Molly spent two weeks that July in Denver and Boulder and on location at Caribou Ranch in the Colorado Rockies, where he went around with his paint box and and she followed with her Leica camera, and together they had the film’s cast members pose for them, in full costume, one by one. Bing Crosby played alcoholic Doc Boone in what would be his last motion-picture role.
To his surprise, Rockwell was cast in a bit part in the film. As he jotted on his calendar, on July 6, “8:15 a.m. I begin my acting career.” In one sense, he had always been something of an actor, with an actor’s ability to create a range of characters and moods. Over the years, to show his models what he wanted from them, he had twisted his facial features into countless grimaces. But this was surely the first time a director asked him to don a cowboy costume and play cards in a barroom during a fight scene. His crowning moment in the film comes when he leans across the table, gazes at a dead body, and straightens up without showing a flicker of emotio
n.
In the fall Rockwell was surprised when Crosby contacted him about acquiring the paintings for Stagecoach for his private collection. “He wanted to buy all of the pictures,” Rockwell recalled. “He wanted to pay me $20,000, but, you know, I’d never have them again.”7 Although Crosby sent him a nudging letter in October (“I do hope I hear from you soon with some favorable news”8), Rockwell, who tended to be months behind schedule on assignments, hadn’t even started his portrait of Bing for the movie poster, figuring there was no hurry since the film wasn’t opening until the following June.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, he finally set to work on an oil-on-canvas portrait of Crosby as the scruffy, unshaven Dr. Boone. “Painted Bing Crosby head and hat and layered in full pict,”9 he noted on his calendar. The next day was Sunday. “Worked on Bing. Put in stethoscope.” In the end, at Molly’s insistence, Rockwell kept the set of Stagecoach paintings for himself. And Crosby, who resolved to display Rockwell’s portrait of him in the den of his Northern California mansion, had to settle for a copy.10
* * *
In the evenings, when the Rockwells turned on the television, they heard reports on the napalming of peasant villages. The bombing of North Vietnam in 1965 touched off a round of peace activities and brought national prominence to the antiwar movement. The first march on Washington was held that spring, and it was followed by sit-ins and be-ins and rallies staged in parks around the country, enormous gatherings of college kids in their uniform of work shirts and jeans, swaying gently to folk music or appearing defiant as they chanted along with raucous, bullhorned voices, Hell no, we won’t go.
Rockwell openly expressed his opposition to the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. It has been reported that he turned down an offer during the war to do a recruiting poster for the Marines. True enough, but his antiwar gestures were more substantial than that. He deplored what he saw as an unnecessary war and he regularly sent telegrams to President Johnson. Please push for negotiations. Please try for peace. Like many people who called themselves doves, Rockwell was in favor of a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam.
In a telegram sent on January 3, 1966, Rockwell and Molly informed the president: “We fully approve your efforts toward negotiation and hope you will continue to press in every possible way for peace.”11 It was sent in response to a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam that began Christmas Day. Rockwell sent another telegram three weeks later and asked that “our country spare no effort or patience in pressing for negotiations.”12
As much as he embraced the political values of the sixties, Rockwell remained curiously impervious to the accompanying sexual revolution. He was not inclined to toss off his old prudishness and suddenly admit frank sexuality into his work. His illustrations often portray people who feel great affection for one another, but sexual love is never overtly part of their bond.
Once when Rockwell was interviewed by Jinx Falkenburg, a Spanish-born actress who wrote a gossip column for the New York Herald Tribune, he remarked: “If I try to do a picture of a girl with a low-cut dress on, full of allure, she just winds up looking the way you’d want your daughter to look—safe. Or if she’s an older woman, she’ll never look like Marlene Dietrich. Every time, she’ll look as though she should be out in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. Sex appeal seems to be something I just can’t catch on a piece of canvas.”13 He made the comment in 1951 and repeated a version of it in his autobiography, making it sound as if he himself was perplexed by the ineradicable wholesomeness of his work.
Only once in his life had he published an image that was considered risqué—an awful, goofy, prefeminist Post cover in which an old lobster fisherman trudges home with his catch of the day: by mistake he trapped a redheaded mermaid, who is flashing a bit of white breast through the wooden slats of a lobster trap. A Fair Catch, as it was titled, appeared in 1955 and created predictable controversy. After a woman from Worcester, Massachusetts, sent an irate letter to the Post about “the obscene picture on the cover,” the magazine polled its readers and triumphantly reported that very few readers agreed with her. “In poor taste”: 11 letters. “Obscene”: 21 letters. “Not obscene”: 245 letters. (“Norman Rockwell couldn’t draw an obscene picture,” wrote Mrs. James L. Gaston, from Fairhope, Alabama, affirming the opinion of the majority.)14
Now it was a decade later, it was 1966, and Arthur Paul, the art director of Playboy, was writing to Rockwell, imploring him to do an illustration for the magazine. Not clear what he thought Rockwell should illustrate. Perhaps the events of the civil rights movement. Certainly not Varga Girls. They were the work of Alberto Vargas, who stripped his name to Varga and made airbrushed paintings of springy and well-endowed women clad in diaphanous lingerie.
Rockwell had no trouble turning down Playboy. “I’m sorry I opened the mail this morning,” Arthur Paul joked in a letter sent to Rockwell that June.15 “But should you reconsider, please let me know.”
He did not reconsider. He remained uncomfortable about overt sexual references. Asked once by Esquire magazine about his worst temptation, Rockwell replied enigmatically, “As I grow older the terrible temptation seems to recede.”16
* * *
Among the art directors pursuing Rockwell were those at Ramparts, a new magazine based in San Francisco that quickly became the house organ of the New Left. The magazine was among the first to oppose the Vietnam War and, in December 1967, ran a now-famous cover that showed four white hands raised in solidarity, each one holding a burning draft card belonging to a Ramparts editor. Their names were legible on the draft cards and one of them was that of Dugald Stermer, the young art director of the magazine.17
One day Stermer telephoned Rockwell to ask whether he might consider doing a portrait of Bertrand Russell for the cover. Rockwell replied: “One old guy portraying another, right?” Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, was then ninety-four years old and enjoying new prominence as an antiwar activist.
Rockwell had always been a connoisseur of the faces of old men and his portrait of Bertrand Russell still astounds with its frankness. There he is, the philosopher, his corona of frizzy white hair gleaming against a loosely brushed, brick-red ground. The Ramparts cover actually consisted of two heads, as if to capture a range of moods. The head on the right shows an old man with snowy eyebrows, the image of quiet intelligence. The head on the left is crazily intense. The philosopher frowns as if in contemplation of some infuriating truth, his eyes watchful and accusing, his chin lifted to expose an unobstructed view of an old man’s neck, possibly the stringiest neck in all of art.
* * *
Look, in the meantime, was planning a special issue to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Rockwell was enlisted to provide an illustration of a typical Russian classroom and he and Molly traveled to Moscow for the second time, staying for two weeks in June. Arriving at the airport, they were met by Christopher S. Wren, an American journalist then covering the Soviet Union for Look. From the first, he found Rockwell “very accommodating and laid back. I was surprised how nice he was.”18
Wren, who was fluent in Russian, used his translator’s skills to help Rockwell gain access to a Moscow school. He later recalled that Rockwell was in the midst of photographing a group of students, “all sitting there in their Pioneer scarves,”19 when Russian officials intervened. They objected when he asked one of the students to look out the window, to pose as a kid who could not sit still, a child as distracted as he had once been.
The school administrators, however, wanted the children depicted as studious little Communists. “Everyone had to be depicted looking straight ahead,” Wren recalled, “and they wondered what kind of anti-Soviet Norman was to have a student looking out the window.”
Both Rockwell and Wren, who were traveling with their wives, were staying at the National Hotel, just off Red Square, and the two couples got along well. One day Wren offered to take Rockwell and Molly to see Lenin’s tomb, where visitors were waitin
g in long lines in the June heat. Inside, the air was frigid, and the atmosphere was reverent as visitors silently filed past the open sarcophagus in which Lenin lay embalmed in a dark suit and red tie. When they stepped outside, Wren asked Rockwell what he thought of the display.
“Wax,” Rockwell deadpanned.
Years later, Wren recalled Rockwell as a man who had little room in his brain for anything but his art. “He didn’t want to do a lot of great sightseeing,” Wren said. “He didn’t want to have a long discussion about politics, although he did have a couple of derogatory snickers about Lenin. What he wanted was that picture. He wanted to get the right picture.”
* * *
During his trip to Russia, Rockwell kept meeting people who mentioned how much they loved seeing his paintings hanging at the Hermitage. He was nettled to be confused yet again, even in remote Russia, with Rockwell Kent, a Communist who had donated hundreds of his works to the people of the Soviet Union. Just that April, Kent had won the 1967 Lenin Peace Prize and, courting controversy, announced that he was donating his prize money to the “suffering women and children of Vietnam’s Liberation Front.”20 Rockwell, in turn, was “more than a little disturbed” about the publicity Kent received for his ten thousand dollar cash gift to the Vietcong.21
Rockwell, of course, also opposed America’s involvement in Vietnam, but he did not provide charity to the enemy, which was illegal, not to mention poorly advised. It was annoying to be mistaken for an artist who was constantly proclaiming his love for Communists and relishing his transgressions against American values.
It hardly helped that Rockwell was also being confused in the sixties with George Lincoln Rockwell, who founded the American Nazi Party and proudly flew a swastika over his headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. When a newspaper in Newport News, Virginia, ran an editorial opposing the gubernatorial campaign of “Fuehrer Norman Rockwell,” the artist immediately sent a letter, requesting a correction.
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 42
