American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (53 page)

Astoundingly, Macdonald initially wrote the article, in a shorter form, for
The Saturday Evening Post
. The magazine killed the piece over an editorial disagreement.
12
The problem was that editor Ben Hibbs felt it was unfair for Macdonald to criticize
The Atlantic Monthly
and
Harper’s Magazine
in his article as examples of middlebrow magazines without mentioning
The New Yorker
, where Macdonald was a staff writer and maintained an office. Asked to consider including
The New Yorker
, Macdonald declined.
13

Once he realized his article would be killed, Macdonald asked to be paid for it in full—$2,500. But he received only the kill fee, $1,000. On November 9 he composed several drafts of a long, grieved letter to Ben Hibbs: “I’ve waited a week to write this letter, not wanting to trust the heat of the moment. But I still feel ill-used.”
14
Claiming he was capable of assessing
The New Yorker
despite his status as a staff writer, he charged that “the Post and not I is at fault and the Post owes me $1,500.”

Journalists, as everyone knows, are supposed to avoid conflicts of interest, as well as the appearance of conflict. A critic who goes to great lengths to demolish the star illustrator at a magazine that killed his story and declined to issue a check for $1,500 he thought he was owed—this is a critic who has a conflict.

But even if one were to give Macdonald the benefit of the doubt and assume that his opinions of Rockwell’s work were based on nothing besides the pure force of his taste and reasoning, his article is tainted by outlandish snobbishness. His pronouncements are sour and unkind. He is too much concerned with classification and categorization, and not enough with the pleasures of looking.

*   *   *

In the summer of 1960, almost a year after Mary’s death, Rockwell began dating Peggy Worthington Best, an artist herself and an old family friend. An attractive and charismatic divorcée in her late fifties, with dark hair and large glasses, she owned the Peggy Best Studio and Gallery. It occupied the ground floor of a light-blue clapboard house on Pine Street and its commodious front room served as the site of both art classes and exhibitions of contemporary art. The gallery also had a little alcove where visitors could sit and browse through exhibition catalogs and oversize art books and it was the closest thing Stockbridge had to an art school.

Peggy Best had initially moved to Stockbridge with her two children in 1949, after separating from her husband, the editor Marshall Best. She was hired by Austen Riggs to start an art program. A warm, well-read woman whose searching ways led her to convert to Catholicism,
15
she quickly befriended Mary Rockwell, among other patients. In May 1957, when Peggy opened her own studio-gallery and offered her first sketch class—which was not a class so much as a casual gathering where everyone drew from a (clothed) model seated in the center of the room—both Mary and Rockwell attended.
16
“I go to Peggy Best’s class on Wednesday afternoon,” Rockwell had announced to the entire nation when he appeared on Edward R. Murrow’s
Person to Person
in 1959. The statement brought her so much attention she had to hang curtains and close them when Rockwell was on the premises.

Once he became a widower, Rockwell’s relationship with Peggy Best changed. As most everyone in Stockbridge was aware, he was “the most eligible bachelor in town,” and Peggy was his most persistent female admirer. She frequently had him to dinner, and she enlisted his participation in various art projects around town. That summer, in addition to the show at her gallery—an impressive array of works by David Park, Joan Brown, and other Bay Area figurative painters—she organized an exhibition of local artists for the upstairs lobby of the Berkshire Playhouse. Rockwell gladly lent her a painting.

Peggy’s two children found Rockwell to be a “very, very sweet man with a twinkle in his eye.”
17
Once, he took Peggy and her sixteen-year-old son, Jonathan, out for a fancy lunch at the Morgan House in Lenox. “It was the first time I ever ate a whole lobster,” Jonathan Best recalled, “bib and all, and he very patiently showed me how to go about it.”
18

Rockwell still attended her sketching class, favoring a morning class that met on Thursdays.
19
At this point one might reasonably wonder why a gifted illustrator with decades of work behind him would attend an amateur sketch class. Rockwell’s explanation was that he wanted to try working without photographs. He wanted to draw in a freer style, to sacrifice his tightly bound, detail-stuffed surfaces to a looser, hairier, scribbly way with the pencil. Erikson, at Rockwell’s recommendation, attended a few of the classes as well. Once, as a joke, Rockwell dashed off a painting entitled
Nymph
, in which Erikson, squeezed into the space behind a young woman’s shoulder, grins maniacally and appears quite deranged.
20

*   *   *

The summer of 1960 arrived and he had more work than usual. On the morning of June 11, a month before the Democratic National Convention anointed Senator John F. Kennedy as its nominee, Rockwell arrived at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, on the opposite side of Massachusetts. In recounting the visit, Rockwell always mentioned that Kennedy was ambling around upstairs in his pajamas when he arrived. The senator called down to Rockwell and his photographer to make themselves comfortable. At the time, political observers were concerned that Kennedy, at forty-three, was too young to seek the office of the presidency. He implored Rockwell, in his portrait for the cover of the
Post
, to make him look “at least” his age.
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Between sittings, Rockwell and the senator strolled to the dock to see Kennedy’s boat. It was a memorable two hours and Rockwell was charmed by the senator, believing there was already a golden aura about him.

Rockwell had met with the Republican nominee, Vice President Richard Nixon, the previous February 25, arranging to see him in the then-new Senate Office Building in Washington. As much as he admired President Eisenhower, Rockwell did not care for his vice president, who, despite his self-professed centrism, was immoderate in his political tactics and had already been dubbed Tricky Dick. It bothered Rockwell that the ever-conservative editorial board of
The Saturday Evening Post
planned to endorse Nixon for president and it is telling that the
Post
photographer who accompanied Rockwell on the photo shoot that day—Ollie Atkins—would wind up, a decade later, as the official White House photographer during the Nixon administration.

In those days, Rockwell, much like any journalist, was obliged to strive for impartiality in his portraits of politicians. In his studio, he worked on the portraits of Senator Kennedy and Vice President Nixon side by side, scrupulously avoiding any hint of his political preferences by making collars, coats, ties, and backgrounds almost identical. He made sure that neither candidate flashed a millimeter more of a smile than the other. And he endowed both men with a wide, determined jaw. It was tedious work, not least because Nixon’s face posed unique challenges. As Peter Rockwell recalled, “My father said the problem with doing Nixon is that if you make him look nice, he doesn’t look like Nixon anymore.”
22
Rockwell declined to tell his sons whom he planned to vote for. But he did disclose his choice after he officially left the
Post
. In 1963 he described himself to a reporter from
Pageant
magazine as a “moderate Republican who voted for Kennedy.”

*   *   *

He wanted to do something large, something lit with social significance. Something in keeping with the spirit of the New Frontier that Kennedy had laid out in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in July. On August 19, 1960, after finishing the two presidential candidates’ portraits and having them driven down to Philadelphia, Rockwell began work on
The Golden Rule
, which would occupy him for five months. It is, in many ways, a turning-point picture, the moment when he became intent on making art that carried an overt liberal message.

The painting might be seen as a tribute to Erikson, who himself was an intermittent scholar of comparative religion and had already published his
Young Man Luther
. Moreover, Erikson was a neighbor and friend of the celebrated theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of his patients. For Erikson, who was more socially minded than most psychoanalysts, the quest for identity was not limited to the pursuit of your individual goals. It also required that you acknowledge the rest of the human race. In his essays, he championed the Golden Rule—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—as if it represented not just a biblical injunction but a revolutionary new concept. He felt “the rule,” as he called it, was under-appreciated, that “students of ethics often indicate a certain disdain for this all-too-primitive ancestor of more logical principles.”
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Yet he believed it was as useful as any social doctrine in trying to defuse tensions between nations and foster “a more inclusive human identity.”
24

This is the implicit theme of Rockwell’s
The Golden Rule
, a paean to multiculturalism, or what was called circa 1960, with similar vagueness, humanitarianism. The painting is a love-thy-neighbor manifesto in paint. (Many people know it through the mosaic copy displayed at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
25
) It consists of a tightly packed field of twenty-eight overlapping faces and torsos belonging to people of different religions and nations. A Chinese laborer in a bamboo hat, an Egyptian mother sheathed in white cotton, a Catholic schoolgirl with shiny red bangs who is clutching a cross and rosary beads to her pale chin—the people of the world have been brought together to share a moment of prayer.

The Golden Rule
, 1961
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

In the upper right corner, Mary Rockwell makes a cameo appearance. She is shown holding a cherubic infant: Geoffrey, her first grandson, born a few months after her death.

Rockwell’s best paintings draw you in with their minute particulars and storytelling force, but
The Golden Rule
is not a story. It’s a painted slogan. Still, it is easy to feel sympathetic when you see what the artist was trying to accomplish. He wanted to imbue his work with a sense of social importance. In explaining the origins of
The Golden Rule
, Rockwell once said, “I’d been reading up on comparative religion. The thing is that all major religions have the Golden Rule in common.”

In assembling models for his painting, Rockwell enlisted his nonethnic neighbors in Stockbridge to pose as ethnic types. Note, for instance, the lean, elderly rabbi who comes complete with a snowy beard, black yarmulke, white tallis draped over his head, and lively brown eyes gazing from bony sockets. In real life, he was not a rabbi but the retired postmaster of Stockbridge: William Lawless, a Catholic who did not have a beard.

The rabbi, interestingly, is depicted as the senior figure in the painting. He is decades older than the people around him, and Rockwell has positioned him at the apex of a pyramid. Perhaps the rabbi was a stand-in for Erikson, who had been raised in a Jewish home and whose most noticeable feature was his corona of thick white hair. Erikson was the closest Rockwell, a nonbeliever, ever came to having a spiritual leader.

*   *   *

The Golden Rule may not sound very daring as far as personal philosophies go. But when it was published on the cover of the
Post
,
The Golden Rule
jarred many readers. In 1961 it was still controversial for a mainstream magazine to have blacks and whites mingling as social equals on a cover, not to mention in the traditionally all-white precincts of a Norman Rockwell painting. Of the twenty-eight figures in
The Golden Rule
, three are black. A sweet African-American schoolgirl in a white blouse and plaid jumper, who appears to be about six years old and who glances up at the viewer from the lower left of the canvas, evokes the bitter battles over school desegregation. The theme would become central to Rockwell’s work in coming years.

The inclusion of the little African-American girl would barely be noticed today, but it was received as pure provocation when the painting first appeared on the cover of the
Post
, on Easter Sunday, 1961. Letters fell into two opposing camps. “It should heal many sick segregationists,” wrote Edward F. Kryter of Indianapolis. But nearly as many letters came from readers in the Deep South who felt rankled by what they saw as Rockwell’s intrusive moralizing.

*   *   *

By now Erikson felt marooned in Stockbridge and eager to leave. His mother, Karla Abrahamsen, died in Israel in January 1960, an “overshadowing” event that drastically diminished his chance of learning his father’s identity.
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On some basic level, Erikson did not know who he was. He was thrown back into the thicket of questions that come from being an orphan, or at least a paternal orphan, and realized, in short order, that he wanted to rejoin an academic community. His professor friends at Harvard, led by the sociologist David Riesman, took up his cause but met with opposition. Some faculty members grumbled that Erikson was an intellectual celebrity unqualified to join their scholarly ranks. It was pointed out derisively that he had been too busy “wandering” Europe to go to college or get a PhD, and his most recent book,
Young Man Luther
, was not a volume of psychoanalytic theory but a speculative biography that reflected his penchant for hopscotching among disciplines. McGeorge Bundy, then dean of the Harvard faculty, worked out a clever compromise. He offered Erikson, whom he referred to as “a pleasant oddball,”
27
a special professorship outside of any academic department.