Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  Shortly before she and Allan finally separated, Diane went to see her school friend Shirley Fingerhood. Fingerhood, a lawyer and later to be a judge, had been divorced and was raising a baby son by herself. “How do you do it alone?” Diane asked. “What demands do you make?”

  Fingerhood says, “I just told her it was going to be rough and that she had to be prepared for it.”

  Around them a generation of marriages seemed to be cracking at the seams. Couples like Rick and Tina Fredericks and the Forsts had already broken up, and couples like Robert and Mary Frank and Cheech and her husband were in high states of emotional agitation.

  Sidney Simon, the sculptor, recalls that “last angry summer of 1960 when a few of us were trying to stick together and the effort was becoming almost unbearable.” Simon knew Allan because the Arbus kids all went to the Little Red School House. During the summer Simon organized a car trip to Maine with Diane, “and Allan and Susan and her husband, the actor Michael Wager, were the other passengers driving up to see their children, who were attending Blueberry Cove Camp in Tenants Harbor. We were in the last stages—the last dying gasps—of our respective marriages, so the atmosphere was awfully tense. We’d booked rooms in the same motel for a night. The following morning Diane knocked on our door and announced, Allan and I have separated and he’s gone back to New York.’ She seemed totally composed, although she looked as if she hadn’t slept a wink.”

  She didn’t go into the whys, and nobody asked any questions. At breakfast the Wagers and the Simons tried to talk of other things. Diane insisted that everybody go to a traveling fair in Bar Harbor. It was at least sixty miles from where they were, but nobody was in the mood to argue, so after visiting their children they piled into the car and headed for the fair.

  When they arrived, they wandered around aimlessly, eating too much sticky popcorn, trying to win at target practice. Meanwhile Diane disappeared. Hours went by. The sun was going down. Simon says, “We hunted high and low and couldn’t find her and it was getting late and we were dying to get back to New York. Finally, at what seemed like the eleventh hour, we found her photographing a transvestite in a tent.”

  During the fall of 1960 Diane followed William Mack (also known as the Sage of the Wilderness). Mack, eighty-two, a retired seaman with flowing beard and bright black eyes, was a scavenger who lived in the Bowery, and Diane went with him on his daily ritual (which began at five a.m. in the freezing dawn), picking empty bottle caps out of the garbage and depositing them in his baby carriage, which he would eventually wheel over to a bottle-collector. She photographed Mack reclining in his tiny room stuffed with personal rubbish, his favorite items a squashed coffee pot and a pair of nurse’s white shoes.

  Also in 1960 she spent a great deal of time photographing Prince Robert de Rohan Courtney (whom Mitchell had written about). The prince was claimant to the throne of the Byzantine Roman Empire and lived in a “bejeweled 6 by 9 foot room on 48 Street called the Jade Tower,” Diane wrote. “In his bureau drawer he keeps the ingredients for breakfast of 3 raw eggs and a pat of butter in hot coffee.” Diane pored over his poems (nine thousand of them), scrawled in a kind of pig Latin, a fragment of which she unscrambled to read, “he who searches for trash so surely finds only trash.” She eventually accompanied the prince (who’d been born in Oklahoma) when he went to the Bowery to distribute cigarettes and money to delighted derelicts, and several times she joined him for supper at the 57th Street Automat.

  Diane was so excited by her photographs of eccentrics (the prince, the scavenger) that she wrote Harold Hayes asking for an assignment to photograph other eccentrics for a picture story, and she listed people she hoped to include, such as “a hermit and a very cheerful man with half a beard who collects woodpecker holes…these are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups.”

  Hayes turned down the idea with the excuse that “you can’t take a picture of someone with the express purpose of showing him or her as an eccentric.” They spoke no more about it, but Diane continued to photograph regularly for Esquire, and she and Hayes sent each other brief missives about her work. She often kidded him about his brusque manner in rejecting one of her projects. Once she commented, “Your last letter was a bit lacking in human warmth. It would have been an excellent one to send to the phone company.”

  By this time she was assured of another outlet for her work because in early 1961 Marvin Israel replaced Henry Wolf as art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Immediately, Israel invited her to complete her essay on eccentrics. He also encouraged her to write about them (she had shown him the long captions she’d written for her Esquire pictures) and promised he would publish both text and pictures in Bazaar.

  Diane went to Washington, D.C., by train to attend the Kennedy Inauguration with one of her favorite eccentrics, a tiny, gray-bearded, eighty-year-old man, Max Maxwell Landars, who called himself “Uncle Sam.” Clad in a red, white, and blue Uncle Sam uniform (he’d originally worn the uniform when he was advertising an exterminator service), Uncle Sam talked compulsively about himself. “I am what I call a Personality,” he told her. “I’ve got the greatest laugh in the country… I am writing my life story which will be similar to Mission to Moscow which Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote… I have the voice of a man, woman and child… I am a Phenomenon… M…E…Me!” During the train ride Diane photographed Uncle Sam as he trudged up the aisles proclaiming to the passengers how he planned to be THE FIRST MAN TO SHAKE THE HAND OF DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER WHEN HE WAS NO LONGER PRESIDENT.

  She planned to photograph that moment too, but when they reached the capital, Uncle Sam panicked; they missed the Inauguration and Diane spent an entire night in Union Station calming him down. Periodically he would do Shirley Temple imitations and he repeated his name, “Uncle Sam,” to anyone who would listen. Near dawn he was promising to “bring the Liberty Bell” back to New York. For a while they slept fitfully on benches in the waiting room, and sometime the following morning Diane photographed Uncle Sam climbing imperiously up the 898 steps of the Washington Monument during a raging blizzard.

  Ultimately, she added Uncle Sam to her collection of eccentrics, along with the prince, the Marked Man, the junk collector, Polly/Cora, and Stormé, “the lady who appears to be a gentleman.” She wrote a succinct little portrait to go with each picture after entitling the essay “The Full Circle—‘who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (Shakespeare).” Pictures and text were accompanied by an eloquent introduction also written by Diane: “These are five singular people who appear further out than we do; beckoned, not driven; invented by belief; each the author and hero of a real dream by which our own courage and cunning are tested and tried; so that we may wonder all over again what is veritable and inevitable and possible and what it is to become whoever we may be.”

  Nancy White, Bazaar’s editor-in-chief, resisted publishing “The Full Circle.” The pictures were not only marred by too much graininess and contrast, she said, but what Bazaar reader could possibly be interested in staring at the face of a recluse who believed himself to be the Emperor of Byzantium?—or a junk collector whose prize possessions were a squashed coffee pot and pair of battered nurse’s shoes? Mrs. White resisted publishing certain things. She supposedly pulled Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s after it was already in galleys because she thought the character was too kooky and amoral. The real reason, however, was she was afraid it might offend Tiffany and Company, who advertised in the magazine. “Nancy did publish a lot of great stuff,” says Bazaar’s former articles editor, Ilya Stanger, in her defense. “She published Flannery O’Connor and Natalie Sarraute…but she had a funny manner. She was never enthusiastic about anything that came across her desk. Dick Avedon often felt like tearing out his hair after an editorial meeting with Nancy.”

  So it was with the Diane Arbus pictures of eccentrics. Mrs. White says, “I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I’d worked with Diane when I was at Good Housekeeping, when she’d done lovely things on childr
en’s fashions, and then these odd images came in and Marvin and his assistants, Bea and Ruth, treated them like the Holy Grail!”

  It was not the first instance (nor would it be the last) when Diane’s work polarized viewers into two camps. Mrs. White maintains she was turned off by Diane’s preoccupation with grotesques and deviates. Marvin Israel presumably argued that the Arbus images were like no one else’s in their force and originality, and hadn’t Bazaar published Brassai, Bill Brandt, and Lisette Model? After much discussion Mrs. White finally allowed Diane’s pictures to be published in the November 1961 issue of Bazaar, but she pulled the portrait of “The Lady Who Appears to Be a Gentleman” as being too disconcerting for Bazaar readers.

  Not long after that, Diane visited Emile de Antonio in his new Japanese-modern apartment on East 91st Street to complain. “We sat around and Diane smoked a little pot and I drank some whiskey and she was very angry about the Stormé portrait being pulled and she didn’t like the look of the final layout, although she didn’t tell Marvin at the time. She thought the pictures were too small.”

  (Diane held on to the rights, and the following year she resold both pictures and text to Infinity magazine—Stormé included—and retitled the essay “The Eccentric as Nature’s Aristocrats—rare and precious people as seen from the inside as they would have themselves be seen.”

  (An Infinity art director comments, “We got a couple of cancellations after the Arbus pictures were published—some people couldn’t take that kind of confrontation with life. At times the confrontation seemed so direct as to seem hostile.”)

  One of the first copies of Bazaar’s November issue went to Joseph Mitchell at The New Yorker with a note from Diane written in tiny script on the cover: “Dear Mr. Mitchell, thanks for your kindness on the phone last fall when I was looking for people. Here are some I found (pp. 133-137) Diane Arbus.”

  She also sent copies to her sister, Renée, her brother, Howard, and her parents in Palm Beach. She received little response. Later her mother would comment that she didn’t know why Diane took photographs of “such people.”

  A good deal of Diane’s secret concern for respectability sprang from her family’s attitudes. She knew her parents were embarrassed by her bare, unshaven legs, her smudged eye make-up. Since her separation from Allan, her habit of wandering the streets photographing night people and outcasts really upset them, particularly since Renée appeared to have created such a traditional life for herself with Roy, her adopted daughter, and their dogs in a house on a lake in Michigan. And Howard’s marriage to Peggy seemed solid, too—they now had two sons, and Howard’s academic career was festooned with awards and grants; he was currently Visiting Professor of Literature at the University of Minnesota.

  “Howard was expected to be the somebody in the family. Diane was not expected to be anything other than a wife and mother,” her cousin Dorothy Evslin says.

  Howard’s New and Selected Poems had just been published to superlative reviews. Thom Gunn had stated in the Yale Review: “Howard Nemerov is one of the best poets writing in English,” and James Dickey had commented on his “poetic intelligence, his wit.”

  Howard was finally making money as well, having sold his novel The Homecoming Game to the movies. (Jane Fonda and Tony Perkins appeared in the film version, entitled Tall Story.) He told Diane kiddingly that his shoulder ached from carrying so many checks to the bank, and reminded his friend John Pauker that “Daddy never praised me until I made money in Hollywood,” bitterly concluding, “It was the first time Daddy accepted me as a man.” (“Oh, the pathology of the American obsession with success!” Pauker replied.)

  By now the Nemerovs were living in a penthouse on top of the Palm Beach Towers in Florida and Mr. Nemerov was continuing to turn out flower paintings which sold briskly. He was also wheeling and dealing with the money he’d made from his sale of Russeks stock, investing practically all of it in a real-estate venture that went “totally bust” near the end of 1961, Renée says. “Daddy was absolutely devastated—he’d thought he was going to make a huge killing and instead he lost almost everything. It broke his spirit.”

  She and Roy flew to Florida. They stayed on at the Palm Beach Towers for almost six weeks, keeping the Nemerovs company, trying to cheer them up. And they worked on their plastic sculptures and Roy’s illuminated “stained glass” plastic. Both were eventually exhibited at the Palm Beach Art Institute.

  As usual, Diane showed no interest whatsoever in her sister’s latest artistic endeavor. When she came to Palm Beach she always chose to come when Renée wasn’t there. At that point the polarization between the two sisters was acute. “I really did love Diane,” Renée says. “And I wanted her to love me.”

  In retrospect it probably went back to their childhood when the Nemerovs began labeling Renée as “the normal one” and Howard and Diane as different. Renée was supposed to be her parents’ salvation—she would vindicate them by growing up conventional. So Diane and Renée grew up in psychological opposition to each other, and although they both married men their parents disapproved of and both became artists, these similarities did not draw them close; instead they believed that deep within themselves something vital was missing. Diane spent most of her adult life revealing to no one that she had a sister. Renée, on the other hand, bragged constantly about Diane. When they were together, there was always unspoken tension between them.

  There were other family tensions, too. By now the Nemerovs realized that Diane and Allan’s trial separation was a permanent one—the marriage, for all intents and purposes, was over. This disappointed them deeply, so Diane had to cope with that, too. Even so, when her depressions over Allan became too extreme, she would fly to Palm Beach and Gertrude would try to minister to her; Diane always expected her mother to come to the rescue and relieve her of her terrible feelings of helplessness. But this rarely happened. They might talk haltingly—“at” each other; might talk as they wandered around Gertrude’s beautifully appointed bedroom and out onto the sun-drenched balcony which overlooked the blue Atlantic Ocean. They might talk about money worries, family illnesses, Doon and Amy. (Motherhood was the only subject on which they could relate to each other easily.) But as often as not their conversations would grind to a halt and there would be long, uncomfortable silences until Gertrude split open a fresh pack of cigarettes and then Diane might escape to the beach and plunge into the surf, swimming far out beyond the waves.

  Most of the time Diane didn’t mention her mother to friends; if she did, it was with some irony. Because, after all, Gertrude had shared an intense love with her mother, the wisecracking, chain-smoking Rose. And Diane and Doon were intensely, symbiotically connected. But with Diane and her mother, warmth and tenderness and love had always been repressed. There would probably never be a mutual confirmation between the two of them, although they obviously hungered for it.

  * Diane left thousands of negatives. Over a decade after her death some of them are still being catalogued. However, Israel and Doon have chosen a select number of Arbus’ published magazine work as part of a traveling exhibit and book.

  24

  LIKE MOST OF HER contemporaries, Diane had been using a Leica for years, but in 1962 she changed to a Rolleiflex. She once explained the shift by saying that the Leica’s flattening perspective added to the air of unreality in her images; she’d grown impatient with the grainy quality of her prints and wanted to be able to decipher the texture of things. Her teacher Lisette Model stressed, “The most mysterious thing is a fact clearly stated.”

  The Rollei with its 2-1/4-inch-square, less grainy negative gave Diane the clarity she wanted and contributed to the refinement of a deceptively simple classical style that has since been recognized as one of the distinctive features of her work. At first, however, she was intimidated by the vividness provided by her new equipment and frustrated by what she called “the rigidity of the new square frame.”

  She wrote to the Meserveys in Boston: “I am very glo
omy and scared. Maybe I have discovered that I have to use the 2-1/4 instead of the 35mm, but the only tangible result so far is that I can’t photograph at all.”

  She was still getting used to her new life as a woman alone, trying to oversee her two daughters, rustle up magazine jobs, tend to her latest projects. She could often be seen peddling furiously around New York on her bicycle, in search of a different face, a new situation. However, unless she had a specific assignment, her days tended to be disorganized and chaotic and structured mainly by her daughters’ schedules when they were both living with her and attending school in the city. “Diane always put her responsibility as a mother first,” Tom Morgan says, “even when she was the most successful and in demand. Being a mother came first for her. She was a loving, thoughtful parent and concerned about her kids in the extreme.”

  When the Nemerovs visited from Palm Beach, Diane would dutifully invite them down to the Charles Street house to see their grandchildren. On these occasions she always hoped she’d get along better with her father, but they invariably disagreed about something trivial and Diane would try to stand up to him and then David Nemerov would do what he’d always done—make up some crazy statistic to defend his point of view. “Like he’d say five million Chinese are doing such and such,” Diane commented, “and he didn’t know any more than I do whether that was true, but he would speak with such authority I’d be stopped in my tracks.”

  When her parents finally left, Diane would rush off to photograph someone, or she might drop in at Richard Avedon’s studio on East 58th Street. She had been introduced to the great photographer in the early 1950s and was getting to know him better through Marvin Israel, who worked with him regularly at Bazaar.