American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (57 page)

However compromising his relationship with the
Post
had become, the idea of leaving, of “cutting the knot,” induced in Rockwell something verging on terror. His acquiescence in the
Post
’s stratagems frustrated him, but he wasn’t sure he was capable of making a break. On May 19, unable to sleep, he got out of bed at 3:00 a.m. and took “2 more pills.” Feeling frazzled, he jotted six pages of notes in which he tried make sense of his situation. For a moment it all seemed clear: he longed to leave the
Post
, whose new editorial regime had treated him shabbily, and take up meaningful work—he was thinking, in particular, of doing a painting to honor the Peace Corps, which had been founded a few years earlier to send volunteers to third world countries.

“All of this debasement, depression, unsatisfaction. Isn’t this the answer—If necessary, die doing something worthwhile. A worthy end … not humiliating fear and groveling. Have I got the sustaining courage to cut it though? Cut the knot myself not die groveling.”
5

His notes mention Harris Wofford, the future U.S. senator who oversaw the Peace Corps in Ethiopia and Africa and who had encouraged Rockwell to consider doing a painting in tribute to the organization. As Rockwell noted: “Isn’t a Peace Corps picture the answer? Youthful dedication. Something bigger than yourself. Maybe not art but my only answer.”

Molly’s belief in his work emboldened him, and he addressed her in his mind as his stream of notes continued: “You will help, be with me, admire me, I have the courage with you … Above and beyond all I have faith in you. Your steadfastness and courage. Have I the steadfastness?
With you.
”

Three weeks later, feeling more certain about the required course of action, Rockwell wrote to Sherrod and asked to be excused from future
Post
assignments. He cited health reasons. He told his editor that he had returned from Egypt “completely exhausted,” and was still recovering.
6
“I write this letter only after a lot of thought and consultation with my doctor, Frank Paddock, and my friend Dr. Howard, who is a psychiatrist on the senior staff of the Riggs Foundation.”

In September, when the
Post
’s new art editor, Asger Jerrild, contacted him about illustrating an article on the Bible, Rockwell declined without hesitation. “I have come to the conviction,” he wrote, “that the work I now want to do no longer fits into the
Post
scheme.”
7
It was the closest thing he wrote to a letter of resignation.

He had published 323 paintings on the cover of the
Post
, whose editors did not bother to announce or even acknowledge his departure. Neither did he. He was sixty-nine years old and, in interviews, he declined to cast stones at the
Post.
He had never felt comfortable expressing anger; in this case, it certainly would have been justified. He could have pointed out, had he been a combative person or even a nominally confident one, that the
Post
’s readers were still 7 million strong, and they consisted mostly of older readers who loved his work. He could have argued that, of all the contributors to the
Post
, he was the only one whose reputation had broadened into what marketing people call a brand. He was, in short, the only enduring creation of
The Saturday Evening Post
. When he left, he didn’t get a cent.

*   *   *

On the morning of November 19 Rockwell appeared again on the
Today
show. The segment was designed to showcase portraits of the Kennedys as well as their creators. Rockwell was joined by Philippe Halsman, the French photojournalist, and Milt Caniff, whose comic strip
Steve Canyon
included a character (Lt. Peter Pipper) fashioned after the president.

No footage of the show survives, but it is easy enough to imagine Rockwell on the set. You can bet money that he wore a bow tie and one of his tweedy jackets. A pipe—as integral to his body as his right hand—would have been present. Over a period of maybe fifteen minutes, there would have been some questions about President Kennedy and Jackie, some comments, general laughter, the sound of accomplished men chuckling at each other’s piquant observations. Maybe even chuckling a little too loudly in acknowledgment of the gratitude they felt at that moment, when they were on national television reminiscing about their personal encounters with the U.S. president and feeling unexpectedly connected to something larger than their anxious and itchy creative selves.

Three days later, the convivial banter on American television stopped abruptly. And television screens filled up with the never-to-be-forgotten images of the open-top limousine proceeding slowly through the streets of Dallas. The president and his wife were in the backseat, smiling gamely at the crowds, when the car delivered them into the crosshairs of a waiting assassin.

*   *   *

On December 14, 1963,
The Saturday Evening Post
put out a memorial issue to honor a slain president. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., his trusted adviser, wrote a moving eulogy and there was also an interview with the new president, Lyndon Johnson, to whom Americans were trying to reconcile themselves. Unlike competing magazines, which ran grisly photographs of the assassination, the
Post
went with an illustration—it reprinted the Rockwell portrait of JFK that had run in 1960, before he was elected president. There he was again, with his blue eyes and thick hair and boyish Kennedy grin that seemed to promise that all would be well in America.

Rockwell sent a charcoal study to Jacqueline Kennedy as a gift. “Dear Mr. Rockwell,” she responded, “I was deeply touched to receive your beautiful charcoal drawing of The President. It is an excellent likeness and a portrait that I shall especially treasure.”
8

TWENTY-SEVEN

RUBY BRIDGES

(1964)

In the end, it was liberating for him to leave
The Saturday Evening Post
. At the age of sixty-nine, he could have retreated into retirement, or taken up golf, or made a fortune accepting commissions from the likes of Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope, whose portraits he had recently completed. Instead, he entered a new phase of his career. Call it his “late period.” Starting in January 1964, when his first illustration appeared in
Look
magazine, Rockwell began treating his work as a vehicle for progressive causes. Kennedy had been buried in Arlington National Cemetery and President Johnson had taken up the cause of civil rights as if it had been his mission all along. Rockwell, too, would help drive the Kennedy agenda forward. You might say he became its premier if unofficial illustrator.

It was quite astounding. He went from doing gently humorous paintings about everyday moments to unsettling images of the world and its woes. In coming years, he did paintings about school desegregation and the violence against civil rights workers in the American South. He did paintings of Peace Corps volunteers in African villages, ministering to the poor. He did a painting of a defiantly raised fist, in observance of LBJ’s declaration of a war on poverty.

What lay behind his newfound assertion of social idealism? His detractors accuse him of opportunism. They say he was acting out of expediency, trying to salvage a wrecked career. His original editors were dead, much of his original audience was dead, and the
Post
had dropped him. He was well aware that no magazine was eager to commission paintings of Santa Claus or solicitous policemen at a time when a new generation was turning on the radio and hearing Bob Dylan admonish in a vaguely pissed-off voice that the times they are a-changing. And so Rockwell took up social realism—belatedly, perhaps. It had been more than a generation since Ben Shahn had turned social realism into a reputable chapter in American art.

Yet Rockwell’s lateness should not be held against him. With his new work, he pushed his art in surprising directions and risked alienating a public that had long turned to him for humor and diversion. Now he had to cultivate a new audience in a new venue. Unlike his paintings for
The Saturday Evening Post
, Rockwell’s paintings for
Look
ran inside the magazine, not on the screaming cover, and they did not have the same visibility at corner newsstands, in doctors’ waiting rooms, or in the culture at large.

The truth is that in the sixties he became a political being, a man whose views put him squarely in the group known as the New Left. He was influenced to some degree by his liberal acquaintances in western Massachusetts, including his wife Molly and Erik Erikson.

But he also came to the discovery and formulation of his own liberal sentiments through the nuclear disarmament movement. The founding of the antiwar movement is sometimes traced to 1957, when the escalating arms race led Norman Cousins to organize the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, the group known as SANE. The goal: a reduction in nuclear weapons. Rockwell agreed to become a “sponsor” of the organization in January 1962. His name was listed on SANE’s letterhead, along with those of such prominent peace activists as Benjamin Spock, Jules Feiffer, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
1

Rockwell and Molly sent off pointed telegrams to the White House, calling for a ban on the testing of nuclear weapons. Moreover, Rockwell volunteered to design the group’s poster. It was to be a collaboration with his intellectually distinguished neighbors, the playwright William Gibson and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. But nothing is simple when geniuses get together. “Reinhold wouldn’t sign it,” Gibson recalled. “He didn’t think humanity could save itself, so the whole thing was scratched because Reinhold couldn’t be upbeat enough.”
2

Once Rockwell had been a symbol of the establishment, a man who had helped define the optimistic mid-twentieth century. Now he wondered what was wrong with The Establishment, which acquired upper-case emphasis in the antiestablishmentarian sixties. He wondered what could lead a country to build nuclear weapons, risk the possibility of annihilation. He wondered what kind of country could be complicit for so long in the systematic wickedness of racial segregation.

*   *   *

On January 14, 1964, Rockwell published his first illustration in
Look
.
The Problem We All Live With
was spread over two pages inside the magazine. It had a wonderful directness to it, in part because it appeared without a caption or a chunk of explanatory text. True, it was introduced by a tan-colored page with minimal type: “Painted for
Look
by Norman Rockwell.”
3
As readers turned to page 21 and came upon the painting, they must have wondered, “What is this?” There she was, an African-American girl—a six-year-old in a chaste white dress, a matching bow in her hair—walking to school. She is escorted by four uniformed officers in lockstep.

The background of the painting conveys the background of the story. A defaced, dinged stucco wall is inscribed with a slur (“nigger”) and, in the upper left, the initials KKK, the creepiest monogram in American history. The girl, we can see, is a person of exemplary dignity. She stares ahead as she walks, declining to acknowledge the graffiti or the still-dripping mess in the center of the wall, a tomato that was tossed by a demonstrator and which thankfully missed the girl’s head.

Ruby Bridges was the first African-American to attend the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, as a result of court-ordered desegregation. And Rockwell’s painting chronicled that famous day. On the morning of November 14, 1960, shortly before 9:00 a.m., federal marshals dispatched by the U.S. Justice Department drove Ruby and her mother to her new school, which was only five blocks from their house. It was her first day of first grade and, according to news accounts, she had to walk by a crowd of crazy hecklers outside the school, most of them housewives and teenagers. She did this every day for weeks, and then the weeks became months. In retaliation, white Louisiana parents withdrew their kids from school and only one teacher was willing to help Ruby, the sainted Barbara Henry of Boston. So Ruby sat alone with Mrs. Henry in an empty classroom and learned how to read and how to add numbers.

It is interesting to compare Rockwell’s painting with the wire-service photographs on which it was loosely based. Even when he was depicting an event out of the headlines, he was not transcribing a scene but inventing one—he added the tomato and the defaced wall and changed various details. In the news photographs, for instance, which were taken a few days after she started school, Ruby is carrying a plaid book bag that resembles a small briefcase. In Rockwell’s painting, she carries instead a small stack of school supplies—a red pencil, a blue pencil, a notebook with a blue, star-spangled cover, and a wooden ruler—that echo the design of the American flag.

In news photographs of the scene, Ruby and the federal marshals enter or exit the school through a glass door and a short flight of steps. But Rockwell dispenses with the entranceway and frames the figures against a stucco wall that stretches horizontally across the canvas, an abstract painting within the painting. The writer Zora Neale Hurston once observed, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,”
4
and Rockwell’s background, if not exactly white, is sufficiently light-toned to make Ruby’s color the unmistakable theme of the work.

More important, Rockwell has achieved an intensification of meaning through the process of cropping, with all that implies about close-up views and sliced-off heads. Although the original news photographs show the U.S. marshals from head to toe, some of them wearing hats, Rockwell has cut them off at the shoulders. We see their polished shoes, the legs of their pants, their jackets—that’s it. Only Ruby has a face, and this detail is essential. She is spared the indignities heaped on Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
, who is invisible, of course, not because he is a ghost but because no one bothers to look at his black face. By granting us the chance to see her face, Rockwell has depicted Ruby as a heroic representative from the ranks of a black America that was prepared to face—and even to outface—the bullies out there.