American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  In public, Rockwell recycled the confusions for their full comic potential. Shortly after returning from Moscow, he went down to Washington, to speak at a luncheon hosted by the National Press Club, and he mentioned in his opening remarks that he was neither George Lincoln Rockwell nor Rockwell Kent. This got a big laugh. Such was his nomenclatural fate: he had to share his surname with a demented white supremacist on the one hand and a Communist-smitten painter on the other.

  * * *

  His own politics continue to be defined by the New Left and his main cause was civil rights. In his youth, he had thought of America as a “we,” one nation indivisible or at least basically in sync; everyone had wanted the same things, it seemed. But the civil rights movement, and especially the battle to desegregate public schools, had forced Americans to confront the existence of two Americas and the inequality between them. As Rockwell once said, “I was born a white Protestant with some prejudices which I am continuously trying to eradicate. I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people or in myself.”

  His third major civil rights painting, New Kids in the Neighborhood, appeared in Look in May 1967, accompanying an article on white flight.22 Spread over two pages, the painting is set on a scrubbed-looking suburban street and shows an African-American brother and sister, whose family is still unloading the van, encountering a few white kids. They survey each other with a mixture of wariness and shy curiosity, and you assume they will soon find common ground. Racial lines have already been blurred by the integration of a fluffy white cat that belongs to the black kids and the black dog that belongs to the white kids.

  That summer—1967—Rockwell befriended Dr. Robert Coles, the prominent child psychiatrist and Harvard professor. They were introduced by Erik Erikson, who suggested to Dr. Coles, his former student and protégé, that he ask Rockwell to illustrate a children’s book he was writing. Dead End School, as it was titled, is the story of a sensitive black boy who is bused to a white school; it grew out of Dr. Coles’s experience working in the Deep South with black children caught in the throes of desegregation.

  Later, asked what he thought of Rockwell’s portrayal of children, Dr. Coles said: “I think he gets a lot into them. I like that he takes reality and gives it a subjective boost, a kind of connecting what’s visible with what’s inside the head.”23

  Rockwell first met Dr. Coles on June 28, when the psychiatrist, visiting Stockbridge to lecture at Austen Riggs, dropped by the studio to discuss the illustrations for his manuscript in progress.24 Rockwell cautioned Dr. Coles that his process would involve models. “I cannot do a picture without seeing someone,” Rockwell insisted. “We’re going to have to find some children who fit in with what this story is about.”25

  Dr. Coles could not imagine why Rockwell needed to look at yet another model. God knows he had drawn thousands of figures by now. But Rockwell was adamant on this point. He wanted to draw the characters in the book “from life,” or at least from their imagined counterparts in life. It was a kind of humility, perhaps, this need to subordinate his gaze to the visual actuality of all he drew.

  “The next thing I knew,” Dr. Coles recalled, “I was driving him to Springfield, Massachusetts, because he couldn’t find anyone in Stockbridge.” Meaning, he could not find the right models and needed a larger pool. About two months later, Rockwell sent Dr. Coles a pack of photographs of people posing as the characters in the book. “I think the poses turned out very well and I will enjoy making the drawings,”26 Rockwell noted, asking Dr. Coles what he thought. Dr. Coles, who felt baffled by the intricacy of Rockwell’s process, didn’t think anything, except that it was all fine and good if it worked for Rockwell.

  The finished book includes seven illustrations, vivid ink drawings of Jimmy and the other characters. Grandma recites “one of her long, preachy prayers” with her hands up in the air, and Ma stands on a protest line, a slender woman dressed neatly in a skirt and a raincoat, holding a sign that says, “This is our school.”27

  Dr. Coles was personally acquainted with Ruby Bridges. He had been down in New Orleans, providing Ruby and her parents with free counseling in the early sixties, while studying the toll that integration was taking on black families. “He was enormously interested in Ruby,” Dr. Coles recalled of Rockwell. “He wanted to know more about Ruby’s family than almost anything else.”28

  Once when they were talking about Ruby, Rockwell appeared to be crying and took a handkerchief out of his pocket. He dabbed his eyes, then commented: “This handkerchief is torn and I need a new one.”29 Dr. Coles chuckled and wondered if Rockwell was capable of being overwhelmed by emotion or whether his obsession with cleanliness always intervened somehow.

  THIRTY

  ALICE’S RESTAURANT

  (1967)

  The Back Room occupied a tiny space in an alleyway off of Main Street, and was fragrant at lunchtime with the scent of homemade wheat berry bread. Its proprietor, chef, sous-chef, and waitress happened to be one person: Alice May Brock, a Sarah Lawrence dropout in her midtwenties who strode around town in long dresses and love beads and boots. The menu at the restaurant changed every few days and was composed mostly of thick soups and casseroles—chicken divan, lasagna, moussaka—that could be spooned out or sliced up to accommodate any number of people and that helped popularize the thrift-is-beautiful school of cooking. “Any chance you get, take wooden ice cream spoons from the market,” Alice urged in her cookbook. “They’re free.”1

  She and her husband, Ray Brock, an architect, had moved to the Berkshires in 1962, to work at the Stockbridge School, which had been founded by a practicing socialist on property overlooking a lake. Ray taught the shop class and Alice was the school librarian. There she met Arlo Guthrie, one of the students. In April 1966, by which time Arlo was a high school graduate and Alice had quit teaching, she opened her café on Main Street. Arlo decided to promote it by writing a song about it, which is not to say that his reputation as a musician extended beyond his school friends.

  “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” made its radio debut in February 1967, when Guthrie performed it live on WBAI-FM, a noncommercial, listener-supported station in New York City that itself was a symbol of the counterculture. The song was an instant sensation, despite its daunting length—it takes more than eighteen minutes to sing in its rambling, tangent-upon-tangent entirety. Only nominally about Alice or a restaurant, “Alice’s Restaurant” (as it is called, from the title of Guthrie’s album) is mainly an account of Guthrie’s picaresque clashes with government authorities and remains one of the great protest songs of the sixties. It lavished enduring fame on Alice Brock, as well as on the Stockbridge chief of police, William J. Obanhein, who is better known as Officer Obie and who, on Thanksgiving Day 1965, had arrested the eighteen-year-old Guthrie for illegally disposing of a load of garbage left over from the turkey dinner that Alice had prepared. (He and a friend had offered to take the garbage out, only to realize that the town dump was closed for the holiday.) In a tale of spiraling absurdity, the song relates how Guthrie received notice from the Selective Service Administration to report for induction. At the draft board, asked if he had ever been convicted of a crime, he mentioned his littering offense and, to his immense disbelief, was reclassified as unfit for service in the Vietnam War.

  On the surface, Rockwell and Guthrie might seem to have stood at opposite poles from each other. In 1967 Rockwell turned seventy-three and, despite his late-life embrace of liberal politics—his despair over segregation, the civil rights paintings he did for Look—he continued to appeal to an older generation that believed in the essential greatness of America. Guthrie represented freedom from that, freedom from the phoniness he perceived in American life. He was easy to spot on the streets of Stockbridge, a stick-thin man of twenty in billowing paisley shirts and jeans, a brown felt hat atop his shoulder-length curls.

  He and Rockwell met at least a few times. Guthrie said the introduction was made by his physician, Dr. Campbell, the Dr. Campbel
l, a longtime friend (and onetime model) of Rockwell. “All of the people Norman used as models were friends of mine,” Guthrie remarked years later.2

  It has been reported that the Officer Obie who arrested Arlo on Thanksgiving Day is the same well-intentioned, broad-backed cop seated at the lunch counter in Rockwell’s Runaway. This is incorrect; a state trooper had posed for The Runaway. But Chief Obanhein did pose for several other Rockwell works from the fifties, including The Jury and Policeman with Boys, the latter a pencil drawing that appeared in advertisements for a life insurance company. Surely Chief Obanhein’s best-known role was playing himself in the film version of Alice’s Restaurant, which came out in 1969. “In the end, if someone was going to make a fool out of me, it had better be me,” he explained at the time, and wound up winning critical acclaim for his performance as a gruff comic villain.

  Alice Brock claims that Rockwell never ate at her restaurant, which is not surprising. A fussy eater who did not experiment and avoided vegetables, especially asparagus, Molly’s specialty, he preferred nothing for dinner so much as a plate of “good thick roast beef” and roast potatoes, with either an oatmeal cookie or a scoop of Breyer’s vanilla ice cream for dessert. Which left him in no great hurry to sample Alice’s spicy casseroles or famous “Hot Meat and Cabbage Borscht.”3

  Even if they weren’t among her customers, Alice was well aware of Rockwell and Molly, in part because her father, Joe Pelkey, had taken Molly’s poetry class at Lenox Library and thought it was first-rate. (“My father loved Molly,” Alice later recalled.) Alice kept what she considered a necessary distance from people of her parents’ generation. “Most Berkshire people over the age of thirty didn’t like me,” she later recalled. “It was the sixties; kids were dropping out of college and becoming rebels. I was a symbol of all that.”4 She didn’t think much of Rockwell’s work, nor did she think much about it, believing it had as much relevance for her generation as Sinatra songs or victory gardens.

  Guthrie, by contrast, was more sympathetic to Rockwell’s work. He could see that it captured something true about America, an ideal of fellowship. “I’ll tell you something that’s honestly true,” Guthrie recalled years later. “I was over in Sweden or Norway a while ago. I was by myself; I was lonely; I had done a few shows but I didn’t know a soul. I walk in to just get a beer and a sandwich somewhere and I’m sitting there and I look up on the wall and there was that picture of Dr. Campbell and the kid and a couple of other Rockwell paintings. I suddenly looked around and I thought, ‘You know what, I know all of these people’ and it made it so freaking nice.”5

  * * *

  Rockwell and Guthrie had more in common than either man might have cared to acknowledge. They were both native New Yorkers who left the big city for countrified Stockbridge as if to tap into some truer, less urbanized state of being. Both were raconteurs, humorous storytellers who favored rambling narratives and who, coincidentally or not, got an astonishing amount of creative mileage out of the theme of Thanksgiving dinner. Both were folk artists of a sort, unrepentant populists who took their material from everyday life in America. In Rockwell’s world, ordinary people encounter small frustrations but are saved from despair by the goodness of their fellow citizens; in Arlo’s worldview, the entrenched ridiculousness of institutions wins out over reason every time. The cop locks you up overnight for littering, instead of escorting you to a diner and talking sense into you at a counter bedecked with homemade cherry pies.

  It was perhaps his desire to claim Stockbridge as his own that led Rockwell to create one of his best-known paintings, Stockbridge—Main Street at Christmas, which offers no hint of the town’s burgeoning hippie population or the VW Beetles parked along its curbs. Instead, we tour an old-fashioned New England street on a dead-cold winter afternoon, when darkness starts descending too early and overhead lights are turned on in the shops; windows shine out with a golden-yellow brightness. We glimpse all this from across the street, from an elevated vantage point that suggests we are looking down from a second-floor room. Main Street is an extra-wide road encrusted with days-old, flattened snow, less of a thoroughfare than a frozen swath separating the viewer from the shops beckoning on the east side of the street.

  Rockwell had begun the painting and abandoned it a decade earlier, in 1956, when his studio was still located in a second-floor space on Main Street. In 1960, asked to participate in a group show of local scenes held at the Stockbridge library, he sent along a “very rough sketch for a projected painting of our main street.”6 Now it was 1967, and when a reporter visited Rockwell that September in his studio-barn adjacent to his house, he found “a huge, elongated canvas” resting on his easel, waiting to be finished. The eight-foot-long painting was scheduled to be featured in a three-page foldout section in the December issue of McCall’s magazine, for which he furnished an occasional illustration.

  The painting is the only one of Rockwell’s to overtly identify Stockbridge as its setting. His other major paintings are consistently set in unnamed cities and supposed to represent Anywhere, USA. But when he submitted Stockbridge—Main Street at Christmas, he asked his editors to identify the location in their text. Another first, or almost first: the painting is a landscape, one of very few he ever completed. In the top half of the canvas, mountains are silhouetted against a vast sky streaked with pastel pinks and blues. This is not to suggest that Rockwell suddenly awoke to the pleasures of plein-air painting. He continued to have as little interest in rendering mountains as any artist who ever lived. To compose the scenery, he used photographs taken in the Berkshires as well as in Vermont and the Swiss Alps; he consulted prints of Siberian winter scenes to help him portray the snowy street that lay just outside his window.7

  Rockwell painted Stockbridge—Main Street at Christmas in 1967, after Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” made its radio debut on WBAI-FM. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

  He seems to identify more with the buildings than with the landscape around them. Here he renders the buildings along Main Street, each a different style and size, in razor-sharp detail, as if his goal was a plank-by-plank reassembly of them. You can make out the outline of every red brick on the crenellated facade of the old town hall, every fish-scale shingle on the white-painted Queen Anne building that is second from the left, every wooden window frame at the Red Lion Inn, which was closed for the winter, its long porch empty.

  Perhaps he was thinking of Edward Hopper, the cantankerous realist who had died that May, at age eighty-four. Hopper knew how to bring intense emotion to portrayals of architecture, and Rockwell’s Stockbridge—Main Street can put you in mind of Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, of 1930. Both paintings offer a bluntly frontal view of a row of stores and small businesses; both exploit an elevated vantage point. Some of the windows in the Rockwell painting—such as the grid of darkened rectangles fronting the Red Lion Inn—feel like Hopper windows, meaning you stare at them but cannot see through them; they appear almost to stare back.

  But the elegiac quality of Stockbridge—Main Street was probably Rockwell’s own entirely. He was seventy-three, his knees ached, he was having trouble hearing. (He had recently obtained an Audiovox hearing aid, at the Pittsfield Hearing Center.8) He renders Stockbridge in the days before Christmas not as the twinkling haunt of Santa and his artisanal, toy-designing elves, but as a place where daylight is fading and the street is emptying out, where one is made to feel the intense quiet of Rockwell’s own landscape. Here, in the center of the composition, is the upstairs space on Main Street that had once served as his studio. Here on the far right is his white-painted Colonial house, lights ablaze in the windows. Here is the block he had trod a thousand times, prodigious walker that he was. The painting is “an autobiography written in architectural landmarks,” as the art historian Karal Ann Marling puts it.9

  * * *

  One establishment, by the way, remains curiously absent from Rockwell’s painting of the town: the Back Room,
better known as Alice’s Restaurant. Nowhere in the painting can one discern the wooden sign that hung discreetly on Main Street, directing passersby into the alley where the restaurant was tucked away. Rockwell, however, cannot be blamed for the omission. Alice’s Restaurant proved to be short-lived, lasting from one April to the next. In a case of bad timing or rather bohemian timing, it closed just months before Alice’s Restaurant was released as an album. By then, Alice had divorced her husband and moved out of their artfully renovated church; she was living with her mother in Boston. “I felt that instead of owning it, it owned me,” she said later of the restaurant, explaining why she gave it up.10

  * * *

  In a way, Stockbridge—Main Street at Christmas is as much a symbol of the sixties as Alice’s Restaurant, if only because it captures an America on the brink of vanishing. It was painted at a time when mom-and-pop shops were being annihilated by the advent of malls, which were pulling stores away from Main Street and into the uninhabited, unzoned areas on the outskirts of towns. But it wasn’t just downtowns that had broken apart. It was also the great narrative that had allowed the nation to believe that old-school democratic values had created a country where every person, young and old, black and white, had a voice, a place, a sense of belonging, that Americans shared a common identity.

  That dream was replaced in the sixties by another dream of togetherness, at least for a younger generation. Instead of community, the talk was of communes, of love-ins, be-ins, and utopian experiments of all kinds. The communal order envisaged by the counterculture was supposed to be based on tolerance and free love, but unkindly excluded everyone over thirty. When the high wore off, housemates bickered over who contributed more for the groceries or washed the most dinner dishes.