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.21 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.”23 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 Rockwe
ll 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.26 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.
And so, in September 1960, Erikson arrived in Cambridge, a tall, distinguished figure padding around campus in his blue shirt, check-patterned jacket, and white moccasins. That first semester, the course he taught on the eight-stage life cycle, “Social Science 139,” was swamped with more than a hundred undergraduates, many of whom assumed that his writings on adolescence and “the identity crisis” constituted an invitation to confide their own crises in him during his office hours. He felt harassed when students walked up to him in Harvard Yard in hopes of discussing their childhood traumas and latest strange dreams and expected him to be receptive, to furnish them with on-the-spot Freudian insight. He sought to be a major thinker, not an insight machine.
When Erikson moved to Cambridge, a two-hour drive from Stockbridge on the opposite side of Massachusetts, he no longer was able to treat Rockwell. Although they would see each occasionally in coming years, their seven-year therapeutic relationship was, in effect, over. Rockwell was bereft. “He was very dependent on Erikson as a therapist,” recalled Dr. Philip. “When Erikson left for Harvard, that was a big loss for him.”
Before leaving, Erikson arranged for Rockwell to be treated by Dr. Edgerton Howard, the associate medical director of Riggs. He had treated Rockwell before, in 1957, filling in when Erikson was in Mexico writing Young Man Luther. Since then, Rockwell had relied on Dr. Howard for casual counsel. Once, when Rockwell was out bicycling and took a spill, he asked the police to summon Dr. Howard to his home. The police weren’t sure why he wanted to see a psychiatrist as opposed to an orthopedic surgeon, but Dr. Howard was happy to oblige.28
When Dr. Howard first started seeing Rockwell, he asked Dr. Philip, the psychologist who rented the apartment in Rockwell’s house, to provide additional therapy. “Ed is the one who asked me to do this, to see him at home at night,” Dr. Philip recalled.29 “Norman saw Ed during the day and this was something that was added to it because he was particularly upset. I was asked to see him on a supportive basis during this difficult period.” Dr. Philip met with Rockwell in his house, after dinner, two or three times a week. “We would sit in there, in front of the fire, talking and it was good. It helped him.”
What did they talk about? “In my conversations with him, he would talk about the day, his work, what was going on. I don’t remember that women or children were presented as a problem.” He recalled that Rockwell brooded about the difficulty he had finishing The Golden Rule and displayed hypochondriacal tendencies. “At one point he was seeing a doctor for some medical thing up in Pittsfield, Dr. Paddock, and he was talking about that. He was quite concerned about his health. His health was generally very good in reality, but he worried about it.”
In November 1960 Rockwell was elected to the board of trustees of the Austen Riggs Center,30 joining an unlikely group of heiresses and mental-health professionals. Although hardly in a position to donate large sums of money to Riggs, he was eager to show his appreciation and offered a wonderful gift: a suite of six charcoal portraits of the senior staff, to be hung permanently in the lobby of Riggs. This required little effort or input on the part of the six psychoanalysts, only that they drop by Rockwell’s studio at their leisure to pose for photographs and some quick sketches.31 Before beginning work on Erikson’s portrait, Rockwell mailed him a copy of the photograph he wanted to use, seeking his approval. Erikson wrote back: “The picture you sent for the Riggs Gallery of Senile Cases was as good as could be expected.” However, he and his wife, Joan, both lamented that the photograph was taken on a day when his left eye was inflamed and wondered whether Rockwell could work around it.
Rockwell naturally obliged. The finished portrait shows Erikson in all his Nordic glamour, a handsome man with thick white hair combed off his high forehead. And flawless eyes.
TWENTY-FIVE
MEET MOLLY
(1961)
A heavy snow had fallen on Washington the night before, making the city look fresh and squinty-bright as the new president appeared on the steps of the Capitol to take the oath of office. He was the image of political vigor, a man of forty-three who declined to wear an overcoat that day, his breath visible in the frigid air as he spoke about the change that was coming to America.
It was the first presidential inauguration to be broadcast on color television, but Rockwell, who had visited John F. Kennedy in Hyannis Port the previous June and painted a portrait of him for the Post, was not much of a television watcher. Instead, he listened to the inaugural address on the old Philco radio in his studio. However thrilling it was to be personally connected to an event of such epic significance, he could hardly expect the new administration to alter his day-to-day life. He was sixty-six years old, a widower living in a drafty house with his dog, Pitter, a beagle mix named for the city in which he was found, Pittsfield.
He kept to his usual routines that winter. Every morning around eight, he took two bottles of Coca-Cola from the refrigerator and crunched his way through his snowy yard to his studio. He broke for a sandwich at lunch and his daily oatmeal cookie. When he finished up his work day, it was earlier than usual, because daylight seemed to vanish in midafternoon, forcing him to stop. By the time he washed his brushes and his palette and swept the floor, he was surrounded by deep winter darkness.
On some days that January he felt like he saw no one but therapists. Dr. Anthony F. Philip, the clinical psychologist who had arrived a year earlier, was still renting the apartment in his house. He continued to visit Rockwell at least one evening a week for a therapy session in front of the fireplace. And Erik Erikson had returned to Stockbridge for the holidays. He scheduled a few visits to Rockwell’s studio, which must have counted as therapy sessions, if only because Rockwell paid him for his time; checkbook stubs indicate that Erikson’s fee had risen from thirty-five to fifty dollars an hour.
A recurring theme of their conversation was Rockwell’s displeasure with the Post. On January 8, after five months of near-continuous work on the crowded field of figures that comprise The Golden Rule, he had the painting driven to Philadelphia. But the Post let it languish for months, for reasons that remain unk
nown. Rockwell had nothing in the magazine in January or February or March, which made him feel invisible. The Golden Rule finally ran in the April 1 issue, supposedly in connection with Easter Sunday, but since the painting was intended as a call for religious and racial tolerance, the timing made no sense to him, except that by coincidence it was also April Fool’s Day. Rockwell felt like the joke was on him.
He continued to see Peggy Best over that winter and into the spring, but the scene at her Studio Gallery on Pine Street had begun to grate on him. In addition to her daytime sketching sessions, she also hosted evening “slide parties,” at which she projected images of museum masterpieces—Chinese bronzes, Rembrandts, Cézannes—onto the walls of her darkened gallery. The slide parties were by invitation only and tended to draw a crowd of local artists, most of whom worshiped Pollock and de Kooning and large-scale abstract painting, making Rockwell feel marginal.
Moreover, as he lingered in the gallery and watched Peggy smoking her Winstons and consorting with other artists, he saw how animated she became at parties and how large a role alcohol played in her life. Rockwell himself never had more than one drink at a time. A photograph from this period shows him milling about the gallery, listening politely to a middle-aged woman who appears to have cornered him. He is sipping a cup of hot tea.
People close to them became aware that Peggy Best seemed to depend on Rockwell more than he depended on her. “Unfortunately for my mother she began treating Norman as her strong right arm or rock in a storm,” her son, Jonathan, later recalled. “I read a packet of notes they exchanged over this period. She was drinking a lot and not very stable and I am sure he did not want a repeat of the problems he had had with Mary.”1
At the same time, he was developing feelings for Molly Punderson, a retired English teacher. He had signed up for her class, “Discovering Modern Poetry,” after Erikson insisted he join a group and get out of the house. The poetry class had started the previous October and met on Monday nights at the Lenox Library.
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 37