Roy Sparkia, who accompanied Renée to the debut of this newest edition of Russeks, recalls from his journal: “Feb. 1949—the latest Russeks is a disaster. Crimson carpeting, pink walls, chandeliers and fluorescent lighting so everyone who walks into the place looks sick and drained…there was piped music and champagne and models showing off the latest fashions…” Diors with big, rustling skirts containing up to fifty yards of fabric—dark crêpe dresses, white tulle, lots of gray jersey, taffeta scarves, navy-blue coats with gold buttons.
Buyers and friends of the family were everywhere. Nemerov cousins, Russek uncles and aunts and children, and finally, Roy writes, “We wander up to the executive offices and sit around pretending we own the place…Diane is prowling around…I remember Allan reciting Shakespeare into the intercom—he sounded like John Barrymore—God, he had a beautiful voice.”
They returned to the main floor of the new Russeks just in time to see poor shoe tycoon Meurice Miller fall on his face over a fashion mannequin’s pointed slipper while the Nemerovs stood by in shock. “Nobody knew what the hell to say,” Roy says. “We all knew it was a fiasco. The store stayed open until 1956, but the Russek family lost millions.”
Driving back to New York, “Allan suddenly began talking about the negative and positive aspects of sexual freedom between married couples,” Roy goes on. “Renée and I were very possessive about each other and Allan kidded us about that. I got indignant because he said something like ‘You two behave like newlyweds—you’d have to get permission from each other before you were unfaithful.’ It all stemmed from the fact that Renée had wanted to have a drink with an old boyfriend and I’d told Allan I wouldn’t let her.”
Then the two couples started talking about what happens to a marriage after ten years, when some of the emotional adventure is gone. What do you do? Play around? And if so, do you hide your affair or reveal it? “You’ve got to remember this was 1949—” Ray goes on. “Everybody was very uptight about sex—nobody talked openly about adultery, let alone illicit sexual pleasure. Diane had always been influenced by Allan in everything. His interest in sex got her interested in sex. We talked about sex—marital and otherwise—all the way home.”
Months afterward Diane reminded her sister of their conversation in the car and confessed that she’d slept with Alex Eliot a couple of times and Allan had known about it. It wasn’t meant to be serious, she said; it was for pleasure and to try and transcend possessiveness, and while she was deeply fond of Alex as a friend, she never felt so much as a twinge of the yearning anguish she associated with love.
She and Allan really loved each other, she said—would never stop loving each other. Theirs was romantic love. She believed implicitly in romantic love—in passion and a quickening of the blood. But she couldn’t reconcile the perpetual conflict in herself between love and lust, between need and fear.
Sex was very important to her. She bragged that she and Allan “made love all the time.” She had a growing curiosity about what other married people did in bed, and she had begun to ask friends intimate questions about their sex lives.
But the photographer Frederick Eberstadt, who used to run into the Arbuses in Central Park, thinks her interest was never prurient; rather, it was clinical. “Diane was just as fascinated by sexual duality and sexual conflict and ambiguity—sexual role-playing—as she was in sexual intercourse.” And she was reading lots of books on the subject. She told Cheech that she believed “masculine” and “feminine” were transcendent realities; sex differences were mysterious, unfathomable to her.
On another level, however, Diane’s sexual fantasies were dark and perverse. She once confided that she envied a girlfriend who’d been raped. She wanted to have that punishing, degrading experience, too. She could almost imagine it was like a murder—the murder of a woman’s nature and body—though the woman lived to tell the tale.
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BY 1950, ALEX SAYS, “Diane was pulling away from me.” She was committed to Allan, and the affair was incidental to her life, an experiment, and she didn’t bother to examine the relationship except in those terms; such things didn’t interest her. It was enough that when they were alone together her trancelike spirit might be suffused with a trembling vitality, an uncanny strength, and these occasions belonged to another plane—a friendly, enjoyable-enough plane that lay between their oh-so-different marriages.
Then they stopped being lovers. There was never any discussion, it was simply understood. Was she bored? Exhausted? Anxious in some way? Alex never knew, but he remembers their last time together and he insists he was not hallucinating. “It was late afternoon. We were on a high floor, so the blinds were drawn; the light was eerie. I was gazing down at her when suddenly her face became a death’s head. The flesh decayed and fell away from her cheeks and I distinctly saw the shape of her skull. And the eye sockets—black hollows behind those glorious green eyes. I was terrified and lay there not moving. Diane didn’t move either. I think she must have known what was happening. After a few moments the flesh swam back and covered her skull, forehead, and nose. My heart pounded very loudly on the pillow as I watched her hair—I used to call it smoky hair—burst out thickly and cover her bald head.”
From then on Alex threw himself into his job at Time; he interviewed Picasso and Matisse in the south of France—he ground out cover stories, among them “Photography, the Number One Hobby in America.” Subsequently he and his wife decided to separate and divorce, but “Diane had nothing to do with our break-up.” Anne had been frail and ill for years; now her drinking and depressions had increased and she was spending more and more time in hospitals.*
After her mother and father separated, nine-year-old May Eliot boarded with various family friends—among them the Arbuses, with whom she lived for six months during 1950. She remembers very little about the period except that she was “fat and clumsy” and Diane and Allan were exceedingly gentle with her. She noticed they no longer sprawled on the mattress in the living room with her parents; now the two couples no longer saw each other and separately they often wore frowns on their faces, and Diane in particular seemed eerily detached. But she took being May’s godmother very seriously. “She was always there for me, a nurturing, magical force.” May grew up maintaining a closeness to both her father and her mother, but she always loved Diane in a special way. “We never referred to her affair with my dad, but it was like an unspoken connection between us. And I couldn’t hold it against her, because I knew she could never do anything intrinsically wrong. She was a wonderfully free spirit who had her own code of morality—she would never consciously hurt anybody. My mother stayed bitter, though, because she and Diane had been really good friends. She had liked Diane, so she was very hurt.”
May was “unhappy” at the Arbuses’. She felt uprooted, lost, cut off from her family, her home. Every so often she tried to express some of the anger and confusion that bubbled inside her to Diane. “Afterwards she would always say something soothing. I invariably felt better after talking to her,” May says.
Diane and Allan were listening to Alex a lot, too. After only a short hiatus he’d started dropping by their apartment again.
He could not stop seeing Diane and Allan—not completely. As far as he was concerned, the affair had been a “minor aspect” of their friendship, although “inevitable” from his point of view. But “we were creative souls in the making,” he would write some thirty years later—“we merged together now and then…and loved each other truly, not just with an itch.” Still, meetings proved uncomfortable for a while because “Allan seemed angry and he hadn’t seemed angry while the affair was going on.” Usually when he was with them Alex would lie on the couch talking about his latest Time assignments or the future of his daughter, May. Every so often he would start to laugh. “That was my way in those days—I tried not to let anything get to me—I laughed because I was so miserable and confused.” For diversion Diane and Allan would take photographs of him looking very hung ov
er. Alex used one rather sinister close-up, blurry with cigarette smoke, on his first book jacket. “That’s the way Diane and Allen saw me then—as a boozer and a carouser, which I guess I was.”
The following year he met Jane Winslow, and she convinced him to stop drinking and smoking. “Actually, she changed my life.” Jane was a striking, dark-haired, self-contained, twenty-one-year-old researcher at Time who’d lived all over Europe. “She came into my office to translate something from the Spanish and I fell—literally—head over heels in love with her. By that I mean I fell smack in front of her onto the floor, I was so hung over and smitten when we met.”
However, Alex didn’t ask Jane out until his separation from Anne was legal. Then he invited her to dinner and they talked all night. The following morning, after breakfast at Reuben’s, Alex called Diane excitedly from a pay phone. “I’ve found another woman I can love!” he shouted. Diane’s reaction sounded a bit subdued, but she urged him to bring Jane over immediately—she wanted to meet her. Nevertheless, Jane made Alex put the meeting off for a while. “All Alex had talked about that first night was Diane and Allan Arbus, Diane and Allan Arbus, and that he’d been in love with Diane, and that Allan was still in love with Diane, and that they shared this marvelous friendship. I knew I’d be coming into a very complicated situation and I wasn’t sure I could handle it.”
When they finally did meet, Jane’s initial impression of Diane was “disorganized—ambiguous—undefined. She was twenty-seven then, but she spoke and dressed like a little girl. I don’t think she was really close to anyone. But she was inordinately sexy.”
After they became friends, Diane confided that she had been momentarily shaken when Alex said he’d found another woman he could love. “It was so nice having two men in love with me,” she told Jane. She was rather sorry it had to stop.
(It isn’t surprising that in the 1960s one of Diane’s favorite movies turned out to be Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, since Jules and Jim are in love with the same woman, Catherine—a mesmerizing creature played by Jeanne Moreau. Catherine is an untamed spirit, determined to live and love freely, but using every female wile to gain advantage, to increase her power position. Catherine suffers and feels ambivalent about being “free.” Only the love relationships she establishes and dominates are correct. She can leave men she loves who love her, but if they leave her, she feels abandoned and destroyed.)
In the beginning, whenever Jane went with Alex to the Arbuses’, they would take pictures of her, compliment her on her beauty, and urge her to become a fashion model, “which I had no interest in being.” She knew they were trying to make her feel at ease, and she liked them—“they were so bright and attractive”—but she grew uncomfortable whenever they referred to their past with Alex, or repeated stories about “Diane and Alex” or “Diane and Allan and Alex and Anne.” “That part of Alex’s life was over,” Jane says. “I wanted to forget it and get on with our life. We were madly in love. I kept telling Alex, ‘Forget the past and live in the now!’ Eventually we did, but the Arbuses—at first—seemed more interested in reliving the Sturm una Drang of their shared experiences with Alex than in our new happiness. I think they resented me for a while because now I possessed Alex and they didn’t.”
Jane adds that, try as she would, she could never fit into the old friendship, “mainly because I refused to be slotted in as Anne had—as the fourth leg of that table. Diane and Allan and even Alex wanted to keep sharing in the friendship—have everything out in the open. They wanted to repeat the extended-family bit with me—well, I didn’t. I didn’t want to share everything.”
Eventually Diane and Allan accepted Jane’s position, but they never stopped asking personal questions. Diane in particular was exceedingly curious and nothing seemed to shock her—she was always interested in “How do you feel?” about everything. She and Allan appeared to share their thoughts, but they actually revealed very little about themselves as a couple. Only once Diane commented that during their quarrels Allan could become “cold, unshakable, tight-lipped, whereas I get hysterical and fierce like I’ll try anything to get my way.” But intimacy is mysterious and no one can prejudge a marriage, and the Arbus marriage was based on secrecy, as everybody’s private life is. At that point they seemed anxious to preserve their privacy, and to some extent they did.
Occasionally the couples played a game: what kind of an animal are you? And Diane said she’d be a cat, and when it came to Jane, she declared she’d be all the animals—because we have all animals in us: we are greedy as pigs, passionate as lions; we’re foxy, we’re mousy; we can be swift as gazelles. That silenced everybody, and for a while they stopped playing the animal game.
With Jane in the picture, the intimacy between Diane and Allan and Alex shifted. Diane moved closer to Allan again, and Jane and Alex became very much a couple, and a new friendship was created which existed on a new level. It was warier. Since they didn’t “share everything,” the emotional investment was not so enormous.
* Anne Eliot died in 1981 after a long illness.
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IN 1950 THE TWO couples and Tina and Rick Fredericks spent the month of June together in the Adirondacks. Allan wanted to go to Lake George because his idol, Stieglitz, had summered there with Georgia O’Keeffe for years.
“There was a lot of traveling from island to island,” Rick Fredericks says. “We paddled around in canoes—slept in sleeping bags on bunches of rocks. My back was killing me.”
Alex remembers somebody losing their car keys and Jane diving into the lake over and over again in an unsuccessful effort to retrieve them. And Diane, fighting a depression, made a great effort to get close to Jane. She wore a strapless bathing suit identical to Jane’s and they went swimming together and afterward they might lie on the sand next to Alex and try to talk. Much later she wrote about Jane’s jealousy and her own and how well she understood it because in the past she’d always counted on Alex to cheer her up when she was low, but now that he was in love with Jane she couldn’t count on him, and at times like that she wished she were Jane.
She was relieved when Cheech arrived so she could tell her that Alex was far more desirable now that he was unattainable—she had never thought she cared that much, but ever since he’d fallen in love with somebody else she suddenly cared terribly! Cheech told her, in effect, “This too shall pass…” She’d come up with a copy of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, which she urged everybody to read. She talked endlessly about the myth of the goddess, “the muse, the mother of all living, the female spider, whose embrace is death.” “I thought Diane was a goddess,” Cheech says.
Later that summer Bob Meservey visited with a new girl, followed by Richard Bellamy, a soft-cheeked, scruffy young man of twenty who was later called a “visionary” by his friends when he founded the Green Gallery and dedicated it to Pop Art. Bellamy’s passion was art—he was then sweeping floors in museums just so he could be around painting and sculpture. In the evenings he would go to the Cedar Bar and listen to de Kooning and Harold Rosenberg argue, and he haunted the Hansa then on East 12th Street so he could absorb the disparate styles of Jane Wilson, a water-colorist, and Richard Stankowitz, who created junk sculpture. Diane went to many of these shows with Bellamy, and to others at the Myers, which was showing Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers, both of whom were doing figurative paintings in a loosely Abstract Expressionist manner. Painting had a residual effect on Diane’s photography; she would ultimately experiment with painterly effects like Impressionism’s soft focus, Cubism’s linear composition, and corny symbolism (which she and Allan used in some of their fashion work).
She studied portrait painting—especially the canvases of Goya. She liked his looming giants, his hunchbacked dwarfs and demons. Everything she studied or thought about either fell away or sank into her austere, self-effacing style. She would always arrange her subjects like a painter and make them hold a pose for hours. Because of this, her contact prints showed relatively little vari
ety.
In August, Alex gave Diane and Allan another chapter of his novel to read. “Yes, it was the novel I’d been working on since 1947 about a brother and sister’s incestuous desires.”
Allan read it, but said the book made him uncomfortable particularly in the chapter where the sister masturbates.
Diane murmured that she disagreed; she thought it was an extremely accurate description of masturbation and she didn’t feel uncomfortable with it at all.
In the fall, life continued as usual. Diane and Allan photographed fashions in Madison Square Garden; they photographed college clothes in Central Park and bathing suits in the Caribbean. On Saturday nights she and Allan would join in two-room charade games at an actor friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village. Diane would often bring along Stanley Kubrick, then twenty-one years old and a fledgling still-photographer for Look magazine. Broadway producer Mort Gottlieb, who participated in the charade game, says “the evenings were long and very lively—devoted to acting out the titles of hit shows like Kiss Me, Kate—Edward, My Son—Death of a Salesman.”
Occasionally Diane went on assignment by herself with Glamour features writer Marguerite Lamkin. Once they planned to do a feature on couples’ bathrooms; they eventually abandoned the project, but while they were on it, Diane “nosed around” people’s Johns, noting the details she might photograph—the flowering gardens that grew in some showers, the libraries of old magazines stacked by certain toilets, and the soaps, creams, nail polish, sleeping pills, vitamins, bubble bath, suppositories, diaphragms, rubbers, cologne, and witch hazel crowded onto cabinet shelves. “The contents of somebody’s bathroom is like reading their biography,” Diane said.
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