American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (58 page)

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One of the odd facts surrounding the painting is that Rockwell painted it three years after the event it chronicles. Why did he turn to the subject so belatedly? Perhaps it was brought to his attention by John Steinbeck’s engaging memoir,
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
, published in the summer of 1962. Driving across the country with his elderly French poodle, Steinbeck happened to arrive in New Orleans in time to witness the events of November 14, 1960, the scene outside the school, the shouting segregationists, “the littlest Negro girl you ever saw, dressed in starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round.”
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The Problem We All Live With
, which appeared as a two-page spread in
Look
magazine on January 14, 1964, remains the single most famous painting of the civil rights movement.
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

But probably Rockwell was more influenced by an account provided by the child psychiatrist Dr. Robert Coles. He and Rockwell would become friends a few years later, through their mutual friend Erik Erikson, but at the time Dr. Coles was a graduate student doing research in the Deep South. Dr. Coles, too, had witnessed the scene outside the school. In November 1960 he was driving to “a shrink conference,”
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as he says, in New Orleans when he came upon the crowd of people screaming invectives at a black girl. In the next two years, Dr. Coles provided regular counseling to Ruby Bridges and a handful of other African-American children trying to endure the strains of desegregation.

Rockwell’s
The Problem We All Live With
echoes a news photograph of Ruby Bridges being escorted from school by U.S. deputy marshals.
(Courtesy of AP)

He published his findings in the October 1963 issue of
The American Journal of Psychiatry
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and Rockwell, who was still a trustee at Austen Riggs, almost surely saw his article. It focused attention on, among other things, the ordeal of black school children forced to confront “the explosion of words of hate and deeds of violence by certain white persons.”
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When Rockwell needed to find a model who was African-American, he did not have to look far. There were only two black families in Stockbridge. One was presided over by David Gunn, Sr., who lived right on East Street and worked as a head coach at various private high schools. He was also a social activist and at the time served as the executive chairman of the Berkshire County chapter of the NAACP. Part of his job was to recruit new members and Rockwell signed on as a “life member,” the highest membership category, for five hundred dollars. Attending a meeting of the NAACP on the last Monday in October 1963, “Mr. Rockwell was presented a life membership pin in the NAACP by David Gunn,” as the local paper reported on page one. Rockwell was only the fifth person in the Berkshires to become a life member, and his name was promptly added to a bronze plaque in the New York offices of the NAACP.

Rockwell liked to visit Gunn at his house, where they would smoke their pipes on the porch. Their meetings were at least partly about business, if painting is a business. Usually Rockwell would bring a few pencil sketches for paintings he was thinking about doing. Gunn would look at the sketches and focus on the figures. He had a large extended family and could usually furnish the name of a possible model from among his own relatives. He and his son, David Jr., had already posed for
The Golden Rule
.

For the Ruby Bridges painting, Gunn referred Rockwell to two of his granddaughters, Lynda Gunn and Anita Gunn, who were first cousins. They were both eight years old and thrilled at the prospect of posing for Rockwell. The artist warned both girls up front, “You might not be the chosen one,” but they were still happy to pose.

First he visited Anita Gunn, who lived in Great Barrington. Her dad worked for the State of Massachusetts, in the maintenance department. One day she came home from school and Rockwell was milling in the living room, talking to her mother, Elaine. “He was a very warm and gentle man, especially with the children,” Mrs. Gunn recalled years later. “He would just get down when he talked to them. He got on their level.”
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Noticing that Anita had returned home from school that day carrying a violin case, he asked her if she would like to earn some money to pay for her violin lessons. Mrs. Gunn thought that was a charming way of asking her daughter to pose.

He mentioned to Mrs. Gunn that he liked the dress Anita was wearing—a blue cotton dress with a Peter Pan collar and puff sleeves. It tied in the back, plain as could be. Mrs. Gunn was surprised when the artist asked her: “Could you have two made like that in white for me?” One for Anita, one for Lynda. He said he would reimburse her, and she said yes on the spot even as it occurred to her that she had never had a dress made. “I knew that the Methodist minister’s wife was a dressmaker,” she recalled, “so I asked Aunt Sinclara to ask Mrs. Durant to make the dresses.”

Anita modeled for Rockwell on a Sunday morning in October, arriving at the studio with her parents and siblings in tow. “He had had chairs set up for all of us,” Mrs. Gunn recalled. “Anita was dressed in the white dress. He asked everybody if they would like a Coca-Cola. He kept a case of Coca-Cola under the stairs in his studio. He went back there and got a bottle of Coke for each of us.” They were touched by the gesture, and watched with barely concealed pride as Rockwell directed Anita to look this way and that as his photographer snapped away.

In the end, he went with her cousin Lynda, perhaps, it was surmised, because she was a little thinner. That’s what the family said anyhow. To spare feelings, Rockwell insisted the girl in the painting was actually a composite, but no one believed him.

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The Problem We All Live With
, which was the official name of the Ruby Bridges painting, marked a sharp break from the representation of race in popular culture. Rockwell recalled having been directed by the
Post
to remove a black person from a group picture because the magazine’s policy dictated showing black people only in service-industry jobs. (And the magazine was by no means alone in perpetuating racial caricature. Advertisements in newspapers and magazines were regular offenders. There was Aunt Jemima and her maple syrup; Uncle Ben and his long-grain rice; Rastus in his floppy chef’s hat on the Cream of Wheat box, each of them smiling, teeth flashing against dark skin, as if nothing in their experience was more rewarding than cooking up hearty, starch-laden dishes for white folks.)

When radio and then television came along, the stereotype of the servile black was adopted for shows like
Amos ’n’ Andy
or
Beulah
, a now-forgotten sitcom starring a bosomy, apron-clad maid. It was not until 1968 that the show
Julia
, in which Diahann Carroll played a widowed nurse who barely seems aware of her race, made history by being the first sitcom to have a nonsubservient black character in a title role.

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In some ways, it might seem unlikely that Rockwell’s painting of Ruby Bridges owes its existence to
Look
, a slick biweekly whose pages were filled with jumbo-sized photographs and short-verging-on-nonexistent articles. It had been founded in 1937, a year after Henry Luce founded
Life
. Three decades later, when Rockwell started publishing his work in
Look
, it was still part of the conservative Cowles Communications empire, still a picture magazine competing with
Life
. The articles in
Look
could be fairly puffy: hagiographic profiles of actors (“Dick Van Dyke, Family Man”), dispatches on nonburning social issues (“Will Fraternities Survive?”), endless fashion forecasts and football forecasts and recipes for fettucini. “They wasted a lot of money sending photographers over to Paris to photograph an artichoke,” the journalist Christopher S. Wren recalled years later.
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But it also managed to run some excellent pieces of social and political reportage. In 1956 editor Dan Mich had assigned the first major magazine article on Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old schoolboy whose death became a heart-rending symbol of racial injustice in the South.
Look
’s story about his assassins’ trial, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” remains a landmark of civil rights reportage.

Look
’s New York office was located in midtown, at 488 Madison Avenue, at Fifty-first Street, up on the eleventh floor, with windows facing the back of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Rockwell would drop by the office when he was in the city, and his main ally there was Allen Hurlburt, the magazine’s talented art director, a thin, stylish guy in horn-rimmed glasses who was then in his midfifties. It was Hurlburt who sanctioned Rockwell to create a series of illustrations chronicling the civil rights movement, a brilliant gambit.

By the time his painting of Ruby Bridges being escorted to school by federal marshals appeared in
Look
, Rockwell had been out of the country for three weeks. “I went to Russia and they had it in the newspaper that the guards were taking her to prison,” he recalled, referring to a story that
Pravda
ran about the painting.

A few days before Christmas 1963, he had flown to Moscow to take part in a cultural exchange program sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency. It was run by Edward R. Murrow, the CBS newsman who had been a hero of the liberal establishment at least since the climactic on-air moment when he dispensed with his usual journalistic impartiality and expressed his outrage over Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunts. Sadly, his stay in the Johnson administration was short. A chain smoker, Murrow would soon be diagnosed with lung cancer and it was in his last few months on the job that he tapped Rockwell as a “specialist.” His assignment was to travel to Moscow along with Graphic Arts USA, a giant road show made up of some two thousand works that included fine-art prints, magazine illustrations, cartoons, preposterous advertisements—basically anything that had been created in the United States through the process of printing.

At this point in the Cold War, Premier Nikita Khrushchev had already sent missiles to Cuba and made headlines by taking off his shoe at the United Nations and banging it on a table. But unlike Stalin, who closed off contact with the United States, Khrushchev welcomed cultural exchange, which led to a quaint chapter in U.S. history when exhibitions of art and other objects were curated by the government and sent abroad.

The Soviets dawdled in granting Rockwell permission to visit. He submitted his application on November 20, just two days before the Kennedy assassination. On December 11, he was in Washington, “awaiting Soviet visa,” according to State Department records. He would have to wait in Washington another week. The Soviet Union was hardly enamored of American art and was still spooked by an incident in 1959, when Pollock’s drip paintings had arrived in Russia as part of the massive American National Exhibition. To quell fears about the possibility of more subversive “drip paintings” arriving on Soviet soil, an officer at the State Department emphasized in a telegram to his aides in Moscow: “Embassy may find it helpful to remind ROMCOM that failure to issue visa to Rockwell would result in keeping out of USSR an American exponent of representational rather than abstractionist art.”

Rockwell, accompanied by Molly, arrived in Moscow on December 20, 1963, on a flight from London. They stayed for a month, at the Budapest Hotel, an old, slightly tattered place not far from Red Square and the Kremlin. Every morning at eight, instead of the punctual walk to his studio in Stockbridge, Rockwell walked briskly through subzero weather to the building at the Soviet fairgrounds where Graphic Arts USA was installed. Then he worked all day, much as he always did. A wire story filed from Moscow on Christmas Day describes him sitting in the middle of the exhibition, sketching a portrait of a Russian girl. “He plans in the next three weeks to sketch about four Russians a day—some in black and white, some in color,” the article reported.