American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (61 page)

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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.)
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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,”
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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 waiting 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.”

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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.”
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Rockwell, in turn, was “more than a little disturbed” about the publicity Kent received for his ten thousand dollar cash gift to the Vietcong.
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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.

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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,”
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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.”
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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.”
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