Disparate Sides of America and Americana

Charles Kuralt may cross your mind during the course of a rewarding new PBS biography of Norman Rockwell. And no wonder.

Each was a beloved cultural icon. Each spent a career mostly celebrating the kinds of ordinary Americans who rarely qualify for a nightly newscast or even a small newspaper headline. Each created waves of feelgood warmth that began at your toes and climbed your body like mercury does a thermometer. Each also communicated through pictures, although Rockwell’s buoyancy flowed entirely from his brush, while Kuralt was essentially a writer-reporter whose “On the Road” pieces for CBS News were prose/camera partnerships.

The “portraiture of America and Americans without cynicism” that Steven Spielberg tonight attributes to the subject of “Norman Rockwell: Painting America” applies equally to Kuralt. The blacksmiths, auctioneers, country doctors, eccentrics and unsung heroes whom Kuralt introduced year after year were as Rockwellian as any Saturday Evening Post cover painted by the famed illustrator.

Freeze-frame Kuralt’s 87 people from 24 countries who spent one Fourth of July becoming U.S. citizens, and you have yourself one Yankee Doodle Dandy of a magazine cover. Freeze-frame the nine Chandler kids--highly successful college graduates reuniting in rural Mississippi on Thanksgiving for the 50th anniversary of their sharecropper parents who made it all possible--and your tear ducts will never be the same.

In a more fundamental way, though, Kuralt’s and Rockwell’s back roads never crossed.

The sweet, poignant euphoria that attracted Kuralt was real in the flesh. A sentimental populist, he just located and reported stories that others ignored. Rockwell, on the other hand, sold America as Madison Avenue sells shampoo, making it just the way we’d like it to be. He created his own ever-comfortable universe, giving faux lasting life to the unattainable and awakening in us a nostalgia for things that never were or existed only as fleeting moments in time.

Kuralt’s subjects were a rainbow of races, whereas Rockwell’s, until late in his career, were as white as the picket fence he painted around America.

Writer Richard Reeves says tonight that Rockwell excluded African Americans from his Saturday Evening Post covers on orders from the magazine. Yet ironically, some he did paint, from 1960 on when working for such magazines as Life and Look, were among the most memorable of his career. They exhibited a strong social awareness of a burgeoning civil rights movement, as in his rendering of a little black girl being escorted to a white school in New Orleans by security personnel past a wall smeared with the juices of a thrown tomato. In this, one of his most famous illustrations, a single Rockwell painting equaled an entire chapter in a history book.

Three Norman Rockwells emerge in this Elena Mannes film for the “American Masters” series.

One is the real Rockwell. More than just a tweedy beanpole with a bow tie who could have stepped right out of one of his illustrations, he was a New York native with dark corners in his life and a fervent admiration for Picasso and some of the Dutch masters.

Another is Rockwell the artist, whose present resurgence in retrospectives across the nation is prompting a critical second look at his oft-demeaned work.

And, finally, there is Rockwell the star of mass culture whose illustrations became, in the public mind, a metaphor for America, even though few could recall living life, or seeing it lived, quite as he pictured it. A metaphor so cozily in harmony with your most idyllic dreams that you wanted to step inside and merge with his painted stories.

“He just sort of got trapped as a Hallmark card somewhere along the line,” says art historian Karal Ann Marling.

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As interpreters of America, how would Rockwell have painted and Kuralt have reported the Bowlings, a sprawling eastern Kentucky family living in a 9-mile-wide valley that is one of the poorest, most isolated regions of Appalachia?

Matriarch Iree Bowling and her brood--she and her husband have 13 children, 30 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren--are the subjects of the profoundly fascinating HBO documentary “American Hollow.”

Ironically, the filmmaker who lived among the Bowlings to make this documentary is Rory Kennedy, who, as one of those Kennedys, is from another enormous clan, one as fabulously rich as these Kentuckians are poor. It was to her wedding that her cousin John F. Kennedy Jr. was flying last July when his plane crashed into the sea off Martha’s Vineyard, killing him, his wife and sister-in-law.

In a sense, the Bowlings are a Rockwell or Kuralt moment waiting to happen. They’re deeply religious. They’re fiercely loyal as a family. Their hard lives are etched into their faces. They’re hillbillies, and proud of it. They’re as anomalous--TVs and VCRs appearing in shanties without running water--as Rockwell’s painting of a television antenna being attached to a Victorian roof.

And they have a moving story to tell.

Unlike Kuralt’s Chandlers of Mississippi, though, this cycle of poverty and hopelessness isn’t being broken, which may never change. Life here is no Hallmark card, for all of the Bowlings are on government assistance, and only one of 68-year-old Iree’s children now lives outside the valley. For generations, the Bowlings have followed a script: They marry early, stay put and stay poor.

Fresh out of high school, Iree’s jobless grandson Clint wants to marry his 17-year-old sweetheart, but has to borrow $34.50 for the marriage license. When she backs out, he’s angry and distraught. “Is this the end?” he sobs as his mother tries to console him in a moment of tenderness. “Listen to Mommy,” she says. “Mommy loves you, OK?”

Yet life is rarely tender in these “hollers” of Appalachia where, those TVs and VCRs aside, time seems almost to have stood still. Maybe Clint will hang around. Or he might try his luck with his uncle, an ex-con who repairs cars in Cincinnati. He wants to break out, but doesn’t know how, in this real-life story where no Rockwell or Kuralt happy ending is in sight.

Even if Clint does leave, then what? “We’ve all left, and come back,” his father says.

* “Norman Rockwell: Painting America” will be shown tonight at 8 on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV.

* “American Hollow” will be shown Monday at 8 p.m. on HBO.