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Realizing he could never get from the President the 25 to 30 hours he usually demands of a subject, Hurd decided to work from eight photographs. For verisimilitude, he persuaded a friend, J.O. ("Bud") Payne, who looks like Johnson and has hands like his, to make the 140-mile round trip to the Hurd ranch near San Patricio, N. Mex., in order to pose for him. Hurd spent about 400 hours on the picture, five times longer than his usual total labor. The result was. if anything, flattering. Done in egg tempera and subdued in tone, it shows the President in three-quarter profile gazing soberly into the distance and clutching a book. In the background is the floodlit Capitol dome.
Forgotten Majesty. In April, just before the portrait was finished, Hurd wanted Johnson to have a preview. He and his wife were invited to the ranch, and he shipped the painting ahead by rail express, cautioning that the President should wait to look at it until he could display it in the proper setting and light. "When we arrived, it was plain that the picture had been openly discussed," says Hurd. "It had been taken out of its crate and propped up leaning back under a bank of cold fluorescent lights. It looked like death warmed over. We marched in single file as if we were about to review the remains. There was a deathly silence. I guess his excellency fired the first shot. He said, That's the ugliest thing I ever saw.'
"I sizzled. I guess that for the moment majesty was forgotten." Hurd asked: "Just what do you like, Mr. President?"
"I'll show you what," replied Johnson. Striding over to a desk drawer, he pulled out a portrait of himself by Illustrator Norman Rockwell. Purred Hurd: "I wish I could copy a photograph like that." Johnson insisted it was not a copy, that he had posed 20 to 30 minutes for it. "Nonsense," snorted Hurd. "He couldn't have painted that in one half-hour with 19 more hands."
The atmosphere was frigid. Nobody spoke. Johnson jingled some change in his pocket, staring at Kurd's portrait. Finally the artist snapped to his wife: "Let's get out of here, Henriette." The Hurds flew back to their ranch. A few weeks later, a distraught Mrs. Johnson called them there and confessed that she hoped never to go through such an ordeal again if she "lived to be a thousand." "The only thing that didn't go wrong that day," she lamented, "was that the government of Viet Nam didn't fall." Mrs. Johnson said that the President thought the Capitol background was too bright and asked Hurd to make it a "little more misty." He refused.