Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  During this period Diane was constantly visiting the Eliots in their new apartment at Lexington and 73rd. Anne had just had a daughter, May, who’d been a “blue baby” and was now suffering from a heart defect; she would eventually have an operation. Diane was godmother, so she felt very responsible and spent as much time as she could caring for her little godchild. And she tried to comfort Anne, who’d become increasingly despondent; she was very upset about her baby’s condition, and New York made her uneasy—other than the Arbuses, she had no friends. She decided to take May for a visit to the Dicks’ shambling estate, Appleton Farms, in Ipswich, Massachusetts. She said the visit would be temporary, but it stretched into weeks and months while Alex remained in New York most of the time. It was quiet and peaceful at Appleton Farms; the other Dick sisters were back and forth from Boston, herded about by their indomitable mother.

  Diane’s own daughter, Doon, was born on April 3, 1945. Afterward Diane told Naomi Rosenbloom that she had forbidden her mother and sister to accompany her to the hospital. She hadn’t wanted anyone close to her to witness her personal drama of “dread, guilt, and expectation.” Diane was terrified of being alone, but she believed she had to be alone to really experience something. Only then would it count.

  As soon as she got back to the Nemerov apartment, she bustled about, trying to act very grown-up, very much the little woman. “She became a wonderful mother,” Renée says. “Tender, gentle, loving—she absolutely adored Doon and felt magically connected to her.” When the baby was only a month old, Diane entwined her bassinet with fresh flowers and pasted postcards on the walls—prints of Roman ruins, Greek statues, English landscapes—“things for the baby to see and absorb when she wakes up.”

  She loved showing her tiny daughter off. Ben Lichtenstein dropped by the Nemerov apartment and Diane woke Doon up and put her on the floor, ordering, “Now crawl for your Uncle Ben, Doonie.” And Doon wriggled across the carpet and Diane beamed. She was very proud.

  By this time, Lichtenstein says, “The Nemerovs’ place was overflowing with women.” Aside from Diane and Renée, there was a European refugee girl (the daughter of a friend of David’s), there was Gertrude and her mother, Rose, and Peggy Russell Nemerov, Howard’s nineteen-year-old English bride, who’d arrived on a troopship from London in May 1945.

  Peggy, a pretty brunette, was, in her own words, “gauche, timid, and hideously dressed.” She was also extremely self-conscious, knowing that the Nemerovs disapproved of her because she wasn’t Jewish. (David Nemerov had, in fact, written Howard a twelve-page letter denouncing his choice of a Gentile wife, and Howard had fired back an eloquent defense which had been gone over and over at the dinner table. It was “like a family conference,” Diane reported to her brother in a note. She ended with, “Don’t worry, there is nothing our parents can do. It is your life. D.”)

  And, of course, the Nemerovs did nothing—they tried to be welcoming, but “they never ever accepted me,” Peggy says. She was unprepared for their wealth—their power. Howard hadn’t told her that his family owned department stores. “Why didn’t you tell me your parents had money?” she demanded months later, and he replied grouchily, “I didn’t think it had anything to do with me.”

  (“We never felt rich,” Diane said. “Oh, we had the most expensive clothes and the finest educations, but the benefits redounded to the family’s credit—the money would never pleasure [Howard, me, or Ren] personally in any way.”)

  After the austerity of wartime London, Peggy was staggered by the waste in the Nemerov home “of everything—food, clothes, liquor.” She couldn’t get used to so many servants underfoot. There was a cook, a maid, a chauffeur, a laundress, a seamstress, and “someone who came in just to do Mr. Nemerov’s Sulka shirts.” She remembers “trembling with fear” during Passover and Chanukah. “I didn’t know what was going on.”

  A month or so after Peggy arrived, her mother, Hilda Russell, appeared at the Nemerovs’ apartment. Hilda was fragile, seemingly timid, and very pretty (“I wanted to be an actress when I was a girl”). She had recently been divorced in London and decided to come to America, “where the money was.” After meeting her, David Nemerov gave her a job at Russeks selling the more expensive dresses. “He loved my English accent. He said it helped sales.”

  Hilda stayed with the store for more than a decade and waited on people like Doris Duke and Vivien Leigh and Mrs. Bob Hope. Occasionally when a really big customer like Eleanor Roosevelt came in, Nemerov would ask Hilda to “get some hot tea across the street at Schrafft’s and then I’d serve it to the celebrity in a silver pot on a silver tray.” Hilda recalls Mrs. Roosevelt wanting a “very cheap fur-lined coat and I sold her one for sixty-five dollars.”

  Sometimes, Hilda says, Diane would wander into Russeks. “She was so dear, so sweet—so kind to me—but I always thought she behaved as if her head were in the clouds. She was never quite ‘there,’ if you know what I mean. She would always squeeze my hand when she saw me and whisper, ‘Oh, Hilda, I love you!’ Diane was a great comfort to me.”

  Peggy says, “Diane tried to be so nice to me, too, although we had nothing in common—it was hard for us to have an extended conversation. But she was going through her own personal hell at home, so maybe that’s why she reached out.”

  Gertrude Nemerov had decided to take over the care and feeding of her granddaughter, Doon, and without consulting Diane she had hired a German nurse and insisted that Doon be bottle-fed, even though Diane had been breast-feeding her baby. Arguments ensued. Diane held her ground. Finally a compromise was reached: before every feeding the nurse would put Doon on the scales to be weighed and then Diane would attempt to breast-feed her, after which Doon would be weighed again to see if she had gained any nourishment.

  Peggy says, “I felt so sorry for Diane. She was under such scrutiny that often the milk wouldn’t flow. She was trembling with nerves—with the German nurse and Gertrude hovering over her.” Peggy remembers that once after the feeding-and-weighing procedure Diane suddenly burst into the hall and ran up and down crying triumphantly, “Doon gained five and a half ounces!”

  When Howard came back from England trimly handsome and charged with the rank of second lieutenant, the Nemerovs gave him a lavish party. Diane and Alex and Anne Eliot were there, and all the Russek and Nemerov relatives—aunts, uncles, cousins, the people from the store. “I was not at my best,” Howard says. “Everyone around me was complaining about gas rationing and not getting enough steak to eat. I’d seen blood and crushed bones—death. I clammed up and refused to talk. Mommy was furious.”

  Not long after coming home, Howard told his parents he’d decided to become a writer, something he’d already confided to Peggy and Diane in many letters from London. David Nemerov listened to his son’s plans in silence; there was no question now that Howard would ever take over Russeks, so he didn’t bring up the subject, but he was bitterly disappointed. Supposedly he confided his disappointment to his close friend I. Miller, whose son Jerry had followed his father into their shoe empire. Jerry recalls, “If you didn’t make a career out of the family business, it was like deserting the Armed Forces or something. You could redeem yourself by being very successful in another field—but to be a writer, to be a poet, well, it was considered a terrible failure, particularly if you were the only son.”

  Nemerov said none of this to Howard; he only begged him not to use the word “artist” when describing what he was going to do with his life. “What about ‘man of letters,’ Daddy?” Nemerov liked that phrase and used it often when telling his colleagues of his son’s choice of occupation.

  Howard realized that in order to survive he must remove himself from his family’s apartment, so he and Peggy immediately rented a tiny flat on 25th Street which the Nemerovs rarely visited. “What made the whole thing incomprehensible to me,” Peggy says, “was David Nemerov’s un-awareness of the suffering he’d inflicted on Howard. Howard wanted to write all the rich fantasies crowding his head�
��he wanted to push his intellect to the furthest reaches possible, because he believed that to use the mind passionately and well was the true test of aristocracy in the modern world. David Nemerov seemed indifferent to Howard’s dreams. Nor did he have any notion of his power—the power a father has to irrevocably hurt his son.”

  Every so often Diane would escape from the vast Nemerov apartment and take Doon to Central Park. She would meet Jill Kornblee, who now owns an art gallery on 57th Street, and the two women would wheel their baby carriages down to the sailboat lake at 72nd Street. “The park was almost Edwardian then,” Jill says, “sweet-smelling—clean—no litter—no violence. Even the sunlight on the grass seemed pure, almost distilled.

  “We felt suspended in time. We’d read our husbands’ letters or just sit and talk. Doon was breathtakingly beautiful. She’d be tugging on my son John’s rattle. Diane and I complained about being back with our parents. We were both women of the world. Wives. Mothers. We were twenty years old.”

  Jill remembers “Diane’s bony bare feet thrust into Capezio ballet slippers—nobody in those days wore ballet slippers on the street. When she walked, she sort of plodded flat-footed—like an Indian surveying the land. And she would have on some little nothing smocklike dress—no jewelry, no powder or lipstick, and leg makeup. She looked terrific. She had this great, thick hair. Oh, and funny teeth. When she smiled wide, she looked faintly wolfish.”

  Sometime in 1946, Hilda Belle Rosenfield ran into Diane on Fifth Avenue. The two old school friends stood on the corner and talked. “Diane told me that her husband, Allan, had come back from the wars and that they were going to become fashion photographers. ‘We’re going to be a team,’ she said.”

  Hilda Belle was about to be married, “so I didn’t care about Diane’s career—I wanted to know how it felt to be a wife and mother. Was it as she anticipated? Was it fulfilling and marvelous?

  “Diane listened to my questions without answering, scrutinizing me with her huge green eyes. Suddenly she interrupted me almost violently. ‘When I look at my baby, I get a funny feeling!’ she cried. The tone of her voice sent shivers up and down my spine. I had the sense that although she’d tried to do all the right things, the traditional things a woman is expected to do—get married, have a child—she still felt separate and alone. She said nothing more, just mumbled goodbye and plodded off. I never saw her again.”

  PART TWO

  THE FASHION YEARS

  9

  IN 1946 BEN LICHTENSTEIN gave Diane his Speed Graphic and she tried experimenting with it. But it was heavy to carry and the flashgun attachment scared her; the images produced were chaotic and came too fast. She stopped using it. Later she would say she found the camera “recalcitrant—it’s determined to do one thing and you want it to do something else.” A photograph suggested alternatives—choices. The act of photography was ambiguous and contradictory, like herself.

  For a short while she studied with Berenice Abbott, who photographed New York and James Joyce and collected Atget. Abbott thought photography was the ultimate art form of the twentieth century because it demands speed and science, and she was fond of quoting Goethe: “Few people have the imagination for reality.”

  Some of Diane’s first pictures taken after her classes with Abbott were candids of Howard and Peggy in their cold-water flat on Third Avenue. “We never saw them, but Diane seemed to have fun taking them,” Peggy says.

  Diane would develop the pictures in the darkroom set up in her parents’ Park Avenue apartment. She liked escaping into the little cubbyhole lit only by a red bulb. There were trays holding strange-smelling chemical solutions, and she would place a negative with a sheet of photographic paper under a piece of glass and expose it to white light for a few seconds, then place the paper in a tray of dark solution, and slowly the image would swim into view in the ruby glow of the lightbulb.

  There was a magic in the process that never failed to amaze her, and the chemical smells, the continual sound of running water soothed her.

  She developed more pictures, one of Anne Eliot clad in a white slip and seated on the floor of the Eliots’ Lexington Avenue apartment. She looked very sad.

  “I thought it was the most revealing portrait Diane had ever taken,” Alex says, “but then Diane did a funny thing. She backed Anne’s portrait with a nude portrait of herself that Allan had taken. She tried to scratch out much of her image with pencil, but you could still see the outlines of her body.”

  Meanwhile Allan had been discharged from the Army, and he and Diane moved into a railroad flat on 70th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue. Their landlady had rented out all the floors of her converted brownstone at exorbitant rates—$225 a month in 1946 was a lot to pay for a one-bedroom apartment, but there were thousands of ex-GIs in the city saddled with new families and no place to live.

  “Our building was never well tended,” says Dell Hughes, a neighbor. “There were mice and cockroaches and hardly any heat in the winter.” Hughes tried fighting the landlady in court about the heat and about rent reductions. “Although we talked about it, the Arbuses didn’t involve themselves in these disputes,” he goes on. “They were a shy, retiring couple, especially Diane.” Allan, as he remembers, worked in a frame shop on Sixth Avenue; Hughes would hear the sound of a clarinet drifting out from the Arbus apartment most evenings. Allan was practicing his music while scheming and dreaming about becoming an actor—that’s all he wanted to be.

  He and Diane had long talks about whether or not it was too risky, since he almost certainly couldn’t support a wife and child on what he might make in the theater. They discussed it with their parents and with Howard and with Anne and Alex Eliot, too, although they frequently got sidetracked with them and would wonder instead over the adjustments they were having to make—the adjustments of living together again as a married couple after two years apart. They’d both tasted independence—they were no longer used to compromise. They seemed to feel better after they voiced their discomfort to the Eliots. After a while they forgot they’d ever been separated and grew very close again. By that time Allan had decided to give up—at least temporarily—his dream of being an actor. Trained as an Army photographer, he finally decided to go back into that work—into fashion photography—with Diane as his partner. They had dabbled in it briefly in 1941 and had been rather successful, although neither of them had any interest in fashion; it seemed too frivolous, too ephemeral.

  Once again David Nemerov helped them out. He agreed to pay for all their new camera equipment, but at the last minute reneged on his promise and paid for only a fraction of it. However, he did give them their first regular account—photographing Russeks fashion and furs for newspaper ads.

  Postwar fashion photography was almost painterly in tone and line, influenced by the elegant studio work of Steichen, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and John Rawlings as well as the bold German émigrés Erwin Blumenfeld and Horst P. Horst, all of whom believed that color combinations carry emotional weight.

  These particular photographers came to the fore in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar with the resurgence of Paris styles and the explosion of original American designs such as the wraparound dresses of Claire McCardell.

  Then in contrast there was Munkacsi, the Romanian sports photographer, who revolutionized fashion photography with his exuberant “snapshot realism.” Munkacsi was the first photographer to photograph clothes as they were worn—in action—and outside on location.

  As far back as 1934, Munkacsi had been photographing models for Bazaar, swimming, running, playing golf—in other words, women enjoying themselves. This innovative way of shooting fashion has since been reinterpreted by countless photographers, the most famous being Richard Avedon, who papered his bedroom walls with Munkacsi images when he was a little boy.

  At the beginning of their career Diane and Allan Arbus worked only inside the Russeks studio, sharing it with Harold Halma. “They were very particular,” Ben Lichtenstein says. “They wouldn�
�t let the Russeks stylist or the art director interfere. Diane would model the clothes first. They were usually miles too big, but she’d pose barefoot in, say, a Nettie Rosenstein black dress, looking like a kid fooling around in her mother’s wardrobe.”

  Allan meanwhile would be fiddling with the lights, setting them up, and then together he and Diane would try to figure out what the picture should look like before booking the models through Eileen Ford, a former stylist who was operating out of her father’s law office, taking calls for four top models (among them Dorian Leigh) at $75 a month.

  Recalls Carole McCarlson, a Ford model who worked frequently for the Arbuses up to the 1950s: “As soon as I’d come out of the dressing room, maybe in one of those satin suits and awful pointy slippers, Diane and Allan would duck under the focusing cloth of their heavy eight-by-ten view camera and start whispering together conspiratorially. It got to be a big joke in the business—Diane and Allan huddling under the focusing cloth—because, no matter how many people you get under that cloth, only one person can click the shutter. I had the feeling they were playing a game—waiting for me to do something surprising. They’d egg me on—I’d strike various poses. Sometimes I’d feel like a dancing dog. Then Allan would shout, ‘Hold it!’ and I’d remain motionless for what seemed like hours—I’d often have to count to a hundred and twenty before they clicked. Then they’d pop up from the cloth and Allan would always say to Diane, ‘Well, what do you think, girl?’ and then they’d go off and confer in a corner.”

  Sometimes he’d shoot half a session and she’d shoot the other half, and when the models were gone, they’d take photographs of each other. The models often gossiped about their behavior. No other husband-and-wife photography team worked the way they did—so tenderly, so closely, in complete collaboration. Not Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel (and Lillian Bassman had married Paul Himmel when she was very young); not Leslie and Frances Gill, nor the Radkais.