He took the portfolio to Robert Benton, who was then Esquire’s art director (long before he went on to win two Oscars for writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer), and Benton agreed. “Diane knew the importance of subject matter. And she had a special ability to seek out peculiar subject matter, and then her way of confronting it with her camera, well, it was like something I’d never seen before. She seemed to be able to suggest how it felt to be a midget or a transvestite. She got close to these people—yet she remained detached.”
But, despite their enthusiasm, neither Benton nor Hayes could think up what to assign Diane, so she suggested Joan Crawford’s closet—having heard that Crawford owned an enormous array of clothes, all labeled “pretty good,” “fair,” “sensational,” and all wrapped in plastic. Hayes gave her the go-ahead, but she was unable to obtain an appointment with Crawford without submitting samples of her photographs, and she was afraid to do that. For a while she considered passing off one of Allan’s celebrity portraits of Tony Perkins as her own, but Allan wouldn’t hear of it, so she abandoned the idea.
Nevertheless she and Hayes met for lunch several times that fall to try to think of something else for her to do. Hayes remembers Diane at that time as “very sexual, very feminine—tentative—charming—fey. She wore marvelously cut linen suits—no other woman I knew wore linen suits.” He remembers her loving references to her daughter Doon. “Diane was so pleased her daughter confided in her, trusted her.”
By October of 1959 Hayes, Benton, and Clay Felker had come up with the idea of devoting an entire issue of Esquire exclusively to New York. Gay Talese, a young reporter from the New York Times, was going to write the lead essay; there would be contributions from John Cheever and Truman Capote, among others. Hayes told Diane he wanted her to do a photographic essay on the night life of the city, contrasting surprising events and people and places—events, people and places nobody knew about.
Diane was intrigued. “Let me waste some film!” she exclaimed to Benton, adding that she planned to photograph River House, drug addicts, Welfare Island, Roseland, and the Bowery News newsroom “for starters.” She went on to tell him that she’d been “peering into Rolls-Royces, skulking around the Plaza Hotel.” She’d also thumbed through the Yellow Pages under “CLUBS,” since Harold Hayes wanted something “respectable” like the Colony Club and the Union League; she’d found ones called “The Rough Club” and “Ourselves Inc.” She reminded Benton that Mathew Brady had once photographed the DAR and that the results had been “formidable.” In a note scribbled to Benton, she asked for “permissions both posh and sordid… I can only get photographs by photographing. I will go anywhere.”
Diane began the Esquire assignment by visiting the morgue at Bellevue, a cavernous building at 29th Street and the East River that was a place of dank tiles and refrigerated corpses. In the autopsy room the air was heavy with the smell of decomposing flesh, of viscera open for examination. Diane got to know some of the forensic doctors and she was allowed to photograph there. She began to collect information about death and dying.
Then there were the unclaimed bodies (one of which she photographed), bodies that landed in potter’s field. Some fourteen thousand adults and more than four thousand babies died anonymously in one year, she discovered. She read the yellowing police records: “William Harrington, sixty-five. Tailor. Had prison record. Found with fractured skull. Five feet six, slender gray moustache. Harmonica in pocket.”
After photographing in the morgue Diane roamed in and out of Manhattan’s flophouses, brothels, and seedy hotels, the little parks in Abingdon Square and Union Square, the parks near the Brooklyn Bridge and Chinatown. Soon her address books bulged with an unbelievable record of names with scribbled identifications next to them: “Detective Wanderer—West Side homicide…subway brakeman, Kass Pollack…Vincent Lopez, band leader…Flora Knapp Dickinson, DAR…” “I own New York!” she exulted to her sister, Renée. Ultimately Diane would say she was “collecting things”; she defined her special interest in photography as a sort of contemporary anthropology.
She placed a blackboard by her bed with a list of places and people she wanted to photograph: “pet crematorium, New York Doll Hospital, Horse Show, opening of the Met, Manhattan Hospital for the insane, condemned hotel, Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker.”
K. T. Morgan, Tom’s daughter, would visit the Arbus house in the evening and sit on Diane’s bed while she pinned up her latest picture still damp and curly from the darkroom. “It would quickly mingle with the other objects and artifacts she kept around her bed—a wooden poster from an old bed, a California job case filled with tiny mementoes, a Bellocq photograph, a European postcard. There was always something new, whether it was something she made or something she collected. What I saw as a child were, as Susan Sontag says, ‘the Halloween Crowd.’ Diane’s photographs showed me people who were unordinary, extraordinary or people I might never see otherwise.” Like muscleman Kenneth Hall (who in his spare time played the bongos and married a dance-contest winner); like female impersonator Mickey Marlowe, age twenty-eight, who specialized in feather fan dances à la Sally Rand; and then there was Jack Dracula, “the Marked Man,” whom she photographed in the tall grasses of Central Park, counting with care his 306 tattoos. “There are 28 stars on his face,” she wrote later, “as well as 4 eagles in varying postures, 6 greenish symbols shaped like donuts, a Maori moustache and a pair of trompe l’oeil goggles…”
In contrast, she photographed Moss Hart’s daughter, Cathy, getting out of a shiny limousine; she photographed a Boy Scout meeting, the Police Academy, elderly people on Welfare Island. She went down into the sewers and she visited a slaughterhouse: the scene reminded her of a drawing by Piranesi; she could hear the animals roaring before they came out to be butchered—the smell and sight of so much blood, steaming rivers of it, almost made her vomit.
Out of anxiety, she shot hundreds of rolls of film on the Esquire assignment. Robert Benton and Harold Hayes were so excited by the raw images she kept bringing in—Roseland Dance Palace, the men’s detention house, a pet funeral, a condemned Broadway hotel’s tenants—that they considered illustrating the entire New York issue with Arbus pictures. “I foolishly decided against it,” Hayes says now. “The pictures were such an indictment.”
He and Benton finally chose six—among them, Flora Knapp Dickinson of the DAR; an unknown person in the morgue at Bellevue; beautiful blonde Mrs. Dagmar Patino at the Grand Ball benefiting Boys’ Town of Italy; and Walter Gregory, whom Diane had developed a particular fondness for. Gregory was an almost legendary Bowery character known as the “Madman from Massachusetts.” She was very upset when he was run over by a bus not long after she had photographed him.
For four months Diane had thrown herself into this assignment for Esquire, living in an almost constant state of euphoria—pedaling about on her bicycle, jumping in and out of cabs, cameras always weighing her down. She invariably wore a raincoat. “I feel like an explorer!” she would say.
Often Robert Benton and his girlfriend, Sally Rendigs, going home from a party, would see Diane coming up out of the subway. “It would be two a.m.,” Benton says, “and she’d be running up from the station, eyes sparkling, not at all tired. I’ve never seen anyone work so hard.”
“I was often frightened by her capacity to be enthralled,” her daughter Doon has written, “by her power to give herself over to something or to someone, to submit. But it was the very thing that made her photographs possible.”
23
AFTER COMPLETING THE ESQUIRE assignment, Diane finished reading Joseph Mitchell’s epic profiles of outcasts, gypsies, freaks, and buffoons which appeared in the book McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. Possibly best known for his study of Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village eccentric, Mitchell had come to New York from Robinson, South Carolina, in 1929. He briefly wrote short stories before becoming a reporter, covering major news events like the Lindbergh kidnapping trial and Huey Long’s assassination for t
he World-Telegram and Herald Tribune. He became a New Yorker staff writer in 1937 and, according to Stanley Edgar Hyman, “in a few years he reshaped the magazine’s traditional reportorial forms ‘the Profile’ and ‘Reporter at Large’ into supple resourceful instruments for his own special purposes by blending the symbolic and poetic elements of his early fiction with the objectivity and detail of newspaper reporting.”
Painfully shy and secretive, with a gray cast to his face and a low, hesitant voice, Mitchell spent much of his free time with his close friends A. J. Liebling and S. J. Perelman at Costello’s Bar; otherwise he could be found hunched over his typewriter, struggling with profiles such as “Joe Gould, Greenwich Village Bohemian.”
Few people were allowed access to his austere twentieth-floor New Yorker office, part of a warren of offices called “Sleepy Hollow.” Surrounded only by desk, file cabinet, and, later, a poster of the ill-fated Broadway musical Bajour (based on his story of a slum gypsy king), Mitchell would labor for months, sometimes years, on projects like the eloquent “Bottom of the Harbor” series, studies of New York river life.
One afternoon, says Mitchell, he was “typing away in my cell when the phone rang and a tiny voice introduced herself as ‘Diane Arbus—I’m a photographer.’ For some reason—habit, I guess—I jotted her name down and the date of her call on my yellow pad, November 1960. We started talking and didn’t stop for two hours—she had the kind of voice—light, friendly—that made you trust her immediately. I had no idea how old she was—she sounded like a little girl. But her thoughts—many of them were extremely cultivated, erudite—if you’ll excuse the expression, it was freakish.
“She told me she wanted to take pictures of some of the people I’d written about like Lady Olga, the bearded lady, and Mazie, who rah a movie house in the Bowery. She said she imagined they were a link to a strange, dark world—to an underworld. I said I supposed they were, but hadn’t Brassai done photographs like that of the Parisian underworld in the 1920s and wasn’t Weegee doing it right now for the Daily News? Diane allowed as I was right but she was going to go about it in a different way—pursuing what couldn’t be defined, pursuing what was missing in an image. I said Okay.
“Then she asked me how I found the kind of people I wrote about and I told her by being persistent—by hanging around. Around cafeterias, park benches, subway trains, public libraries, by interviewing ambulance drivers, scrubwomen, morgue workers. I told her about Professor Heckler at the flea circus, who was a good friend of mine. Did she know him? I asked. Indeed she did—she had been spending a lot of time at the flea circus for her essay in Esquire. We laughed when we found out we’d both spent hours watching him feed his damn fleas.”
In another conversation Diane and Mitchell talked about freaks and Diane referred to Mitchell’s definition of “class distinctions among freaks” which had appeared in his masterful portrait of Lady Olga, the bearded lady. “Born freaks are the aristocracy of the sideshow world,” Mitchell wrote. “Bearded ladies, Siamese twins, pinheads, fat girls, dwarfs, midgets, giants, living skeletons, men with skulls on which rocks can be broken.
“Made freaks include tattooed people who obtain sideshow engagements, reformed criminals, old movie stars, retired athletes like Jack Johnson.”
Again and again in their conversations Diane returned to Mitchell’s distinctions among freaks, and one assumes that her own celebrated comments about freaks were inspired by him. She said: “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
Mitchell says, “I urged Diane not to romanticize freaks. I told her that freaks can be boring and ordinary as so-called ‘normal’ people. I told her what I found interesting about Olga, the bearded lady, was that she yearned to be a stenographer and kept geraniums on her windowsill, and that the 450-pound wrestler I once interviewed cried piteously from homesickness for his native Ukraine.”
Mitchell says Diane phoned him frequently in subsequent weeks. They would always talk for at least an hour, and Mitchell jotted down some of the topics they covered: Kafka, James Joyce, Walker Evans, Grimms’ Fairy Tales. She had been reading Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics and told him of Sitwell’s theory that contemplating eccentrics was a cure for melancholy—a way of distinguishing Man from Beast. She would giggle when Mitchell said something funny, and sometimes when he didn’t she would giggle anyway. “She said she had looked for the people I’d written about, and Lady Olga was dead and Mazie down in the Bowery didn’t want to be photographed. But she was making progress finding eccentrics, she said.” And she talked about discovering “people who were anomalies, who were quixotic, who believed in the impossible, who make their mark on themselves.” Mainly, she said, she was “nosing around.”
Her idea of “nosing around” was to prowl the city from dawn to dusk, alighting at any number of her favorite haunts—Central Park, the 42nd Street Automat, Washington Square. When somebody caught her fancy, she would go over and strike up a conversation. Joel Meyerowitz, who sometimes accompanied her in her wanderings, says, “She could hypnotize people, I swear. She would start talking to them and they would be as fascinated with her as she was with them. She had a magnetic quality—a Peter Pan quality. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
She didn’t like being interrupted. Once when her former assistant, Richard Marx, saw her huddled outside the 56th Street Doubleday bookstore, camera poised, he spoke to her. “Shh,” she hissed, “I’m working!” She was more polite with Dale McConathy, who ran into her during lunch hour on West 47th Street by the Gotham Book Mart. “I asked her to please take my picture, but she refused—with a smile. ‘It would take five hundred exposures before I’d get you without your mask,’ she told me.”
She might wait for days or weeks until a face in the crowd intrigued her and then she would grab it with her camera. Her friend Marvin Israel wrote after her death that these contacts, which are different from her other work, are breathtaking. “There are hundreds of sheets where the same face never appears more than once, all very close-up.” Thousands of exposures “like some strange catalogue,* and then there would be a contact sheet from several years later with one of those same faces in which you can trace Diane’s progress from the street to their home to their living room to their bedroom. These are like a narrative, a slow process leading up to some strange intimacy.”
She told Ann Ray of Newsweek, “1 love to go to people’s houses—exploring—doing daring things I’ve not done before—things I’d fantasized about as a child. I love going into people’s houses—that’s part of the thrill of seduction for a woman—to see how he [the subject] lives—the pictures on the wall—the wife’s slippers in the bathroom. But I’m not vicarious—I really am involved. And all the time I’m photographing I’m having a terrific time.” (Sometimes such encounters could end disastrously, although Diane was never specific about the trouble she may have got into or the danger she may have faced in welfare hotels or carnivals. Jack Smith, the creator of the underground movie Flaming Creatures, said he kicked her out of his apartment when she persisted in taking his picture and pictures of his various costumes. And she was periodically ousted from transvestite bars. “She could be extremely aggressive as a photographer,” Frederick Eberstadt says.)
“What came to really excite her was anything out of place,” Israel wrote. He felt that Diane was quite proud that she was able to tell, just by seeing someone for a moment, that they had something secret or mysterious about them and that in their homes “they would be extraordinary.” She’d approach these people and ask, “Can I come home with you?”
So it was with the various eccentrics she discovered in the next years. Some she went home with, some she didn’t; some she photographed, others she just talked to, but everyone impressed her. Like the irate lady who appeared to Diane one night pulling a kiddy’s red express wagon trimmed with bells and filled with cats
in fancy hats and dresses. Like the man in Brooklyn called the Mystic Barber who teleported himself to Mars and said he was dead and wore a copper band around his forehead with antennae on it to receive instructions from the Martians. Or the lady in the Bronx who trained herself to eat and sleep underwater, or the black who carried a rose and a noose around with him at all times, or the person who invented a noiseless soup spoon, or the man from New Jersey who’d collected string for twenty years, winding it into a ball that was now five feet in diameter, sitting monstrous and splendid in his living room.
Sometimes friends suggested subjects. Abby Fink, who’d grown up with Diane, phoned to tell her about Polly Boshung, an attractive blonde who, because she was almost completely deaf and acutely embarrassed about it (“I’d wanted to be an actress, but realized I wouldn’t hear my cues”), had created an entirely different identity for herself to hide behind whenever she appeared in public. At dinners, on cruises, the usually sedate Polly transformed herself into “Cora Pratt,” an outrageous loudmouth who sported a wig, huge false buck teeth, and a shower cap. Once “Cora” pretended to be the maid at a party in Bucks County: sipped guests’ drinks, blew ashes from ashtrays, and talked nonstop about the joys of Five Day Deodorant Pads before collapsing on the sofa dead asleep. She’d been so expert in her disguise that none of her friends recognized Polly as “Cora.”
Diane took the Greyhound bus up to Peabody, Massachusetts, where Polly lived with her mother. Today Polly (now a saleslady in a Nantucket dress shop) remembers that “Diane Arbus was awful nice to me. Sweet. She spent all day photographing me in the garden and then she packed up her cameras and went down to catch the bus. But before she left she asked me a couple of times was I really sincere about having those two people inside myself? I kept telling her I was sincere, but I guess she didn’t believe me because I didn’t end up at her show in the Museum of Modern Art. Actually, I didn’t mind, because I don’t see how you could label me a freak.”
Diane Arbus Page 23