American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (60 page)

Hurd countered derisively, “I wish I could copy a photograph like that.” The president insisted the portrait was not a copy of a photograph, that he had in fact posed for it. He added that Rockwell had managed to produce it after only one, inordinately efficient twenty-minute audience with him, which is perhaps what the president liked best about the portrait.

Lady Bird, in the meantime, took it upon herself to provide Hurd with what she believed were well-founded criticisms of the painting. She recalled in her diaries “a gruesomely uncomfortable half hour”
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in which she proposed several major changes. For one thing, the painting stood four feet high—too big in Lady Bird’s estimation. She found the sunset garish and was particularly bothered by the portrayal of the president’s hands, which she felt were not the “gnarled, hardworking”
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presidential hands she knew and loved but a bland simulacrum. Hurd, she noted, “was the first to admit that the body, and especially the hands, were not good, because he had not had enough sittings.”
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Her verdict was that Hurd should go back to his studio and make a smaller portrait in order to omit the president’s hands altogether. Then the Johnsons would look at it again.

After seeing Peter Hurd’s portrait of him, LBJ denounced it and decided retroactively that he liked Rockwell’s earlier portrait of him.

For all his stated affection for Rockwell’s portrait of him, President Johnson was willing to part with it for political gain. He used it as a chit to please a supporter. Unknown to Rockwell, Johnson regifted the painting in 1966 to a friend in Texas. “Norman Rockwell sent me a portrait I thought you might like to have,”
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he wrote that April to Robert Kleberg, Jr., who owned the King Ranch and had just embarked on a dubious plan to establish a wildlife refuge stocked with deer and nilgai antelopes on the site of the president’s own birthplace. “I am sending it to you, suitably inscribed, for your home.”

Peter Hurd, in the meantime, eventually lost interest in undertaking a second portrait of the president. He decided instead to put the original one on public view, seeking the small satisfactions of revenge. The story broke on January 5, 1967, in a women’s page feature in
The Washington Post
,
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and was quickly picked up by newspapers and magazines all over the country. Speaking to reporters by telephone from his ranch in New Mexico, Hurd cheerfully denounced the president’s behavior (“very damn rude”
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). It turned out that a majority of Americans sympathized with Hurd and agreed that the president had treated him shabbily. The story of the callously rejected portrait seemed to confirm LBJ’s reputation as a man who was insulated from the public and had no patience for opinions other than this own, not least when the opinions came from his various advisers who thought the country should get out of Vietnam.

Hurd was happy to expound on his art and his technique for his new following. He explained in interviews that he favored the quaintly ancient technique of egg tempera. Consequently, his portrait of President Johnson had taken him a total of “400 hours,” the implication being that the quality of a painting, not unlike homework, is directly related to the amount of labor expended on it.

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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,”
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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.”
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*   *   *

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.”
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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 emotion.

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.”
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Although Crosby sent him a nudging letter in October (“I do hope I hear from you soon with some favorable news”
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), 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,”
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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.
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