She tried to keep from most people the torment she continued to experience over the end of her marriage. Eventually she began telling friends she no longer believed in love, and when Pati Hill wrote a short novel entitled One Thing I Know about the death of an adolescent passion, she dedicated it “to Diane Arbus.” Diane scribbled ironic comments in the margins of the galleys Pati sent her from Paris, and yet when her goddaughter, May Eliot, told her that she was determined to marry a man she was crazy about, “Diane was delighted. She thought it was wonderful when people married the first person they fell in love with.” She told May that she and Allan were really good friends and that their separation was relaxed and civilized. They were too polite for it to be otherwise.
May Eliot remembers going to breakfast at Charles Street and Allan dropping in, as he often did, and Doon and Amy were crowded around the table along with Sudie, the baby-sitter, and “there were big wine goblets filled with orange juice and the coffee mugs were brightly colored enamel with white insides and everybody giggled and joked about all sorts of things personal and cosmic.”
But there was strain. De Antonio remembers visiting Charles Street and “Diane was trying to play the mother who took care of everything, and she laughed and smiled a lot, but the obligation to her children was an overwhelming burden for her.” She was obviously under great pressure and weighed down by the responsibilities of raising two daughters mostly by herself. But she never complained; she went from grocery-shopping to helping Amy with her homework to advising Doon about one of her writing assignments before dashing off to photograph someone for Esquire. “I always saw Diane hurrying somewhere,” Robert Benton says. “Getting in and out of cabs, lugging those cameras—she was frequently late. Or the cab hadn’t got to the right address. It was always a drama.” And Allan was helping her print. She could spend hours working on a negative under his guidance. Once a fashion editor who’d worked with them for over a decade found them huddling over a tray of hypo. “Allan was whispering something in Diane’s ear—she had a sly little smile on her face. It was just like the old days at Glamour magazine. They still seemed very close.”
And they were. Allan would often introduce Diane to the women he was seeing—she would tell him about Marvin Israel’s plans for her career. However, she told Tina Fredericks that she never could see Marvin as much as she wanted to. Oh, they might meet at a party or run into each other at an art gallery; but ideally she wished he could be available for comfort and advice twenty-four hours a day. Allan was still like that, and—when he was in New York—Alex Eliot, and sometimes her brother, Howard.
Meanwhile, Marvin Israel remained devoted to his wife. A shy, prodigiously gifted woman who rarely left their 14th Street studio, Margie Israel, née Ponce (she’d been born in Cuba), was totally consumed by her art. A master craftsman—she could sculpt, paint, sketch, build, and she invented various mixed-media combinations: plaster, ceramic, and papier-mâché sculpture, blackboard drawings, fabric constructions involving feathers and stained glass. Israel frequently mentioned his wife’s impressive achievements to Diane; he was proud of her and took loving care of her. She was often in delicate health, but he never allowed her to go to a hospital; instead he nursed her himself.
Now that he was busy with his job at Harper’s Bazaar, he had less time for Diane, so she would periodically wander over to the Bazaar offices at 56th and Madison Avenue, ostensibly to rustle up another assignment but actually to be near him for a while. She might wait in the fiction editor’s cubicle, giggling over Alice Morris’ gossip about the latest books. At some point Israel would pass by—she could count on that. Listening for the soft pad-pad of his tennis shoes, she could always sense his approach. He would saunter into view. She wouldn’t even look up at him. They wouldn’t exchange a word, and he would walk on.
Marvin Israel had a slight, muscular build, very trim. He exercised ferociously. Geri Trotta, Bazaar’s features editor, remembers he wore expensive but frayed clothes and had his hair cut by his pretty English secretary. Trotta once observed this being done in the art department. “Marvin perched on a stool scowling as the scissors clip-clipped.” Nearby his two assistant art directors, Bea Feitler and Ruth Ansel, pasted up the layouts.
Bea and Ruth had been Israel’s most brilliant students at Parsons. They were both twenty-three and precocious, original designers. (Later Ruth became art director of the New York Times Magazine and Bea would design Ms. Magazine, Rolling Stone, and, just before her premature death in 1982, the new Vanity Fair.) Back in the 1960s they were already copying Israel’s cold, abrupt manner with editors and photographers, but they were unusually tender and solicitous to Diane, gave her many assignments, and allowed her free run of the art department. She came and went, and long after Marvin Israel was gone, the Bazaar office was one of Diane’s chief places for hanging out.
Eventually the three women became friends. Bea, in particular—husky-voiced, imperious Bea—would invite Diane up to the stylish little apartment she kept on West 56th Street. She gave many parties there, mixing French fashion models with Italian movie stars and the trendiest American designers and painters. The parties lasted late and there was, a guest said, “a bacchanal feel to them.” “Plenty of wine and drugs and thumping disco music,” recalled the late Chris von Wangenheim. “A lot of the guests were what you’d call polymorphous-perverse.”
Bea came from a wealthy Brazilian family, and that, too, helped bring her and Diane together; they shared an understanding of the problems and pleasures of being born rich. Eventually Diane gave Bea some of her private unpublished photographs and she may have spoken to her about her increasing obsession with Marvin Israel. Bea was very close to Israel. She cared about him and she cared about Diane, too; as the years slipped by, she went on hoping that nobody would get hurt.
Sometimes, after leaving Bazaar, Diane would wander the streets before going home. And if Amy was being taken care of by Doon or a baby-sitter, she could stay out as late as she wanted—prowling about Grand Central Station, 42nd Street, and the bus terminal. She met the Village Voice drama critic, Arthur Sainer, in the Sheridan Square subway station on New Year’s Eve, on her way to covering a big party. She dropped a lens from her camera bag and it rolled across the platform; Sainer ran to bring it back to her and they started talking. It was the only way to meet people, she thought. Spontaneously. No formal introductions, no planning.
She’d met the novelist John A. Williams (author of The Man Who Cried I Am) casually, at a party celebrating the publication of Tom Morgan’s first book. Williams recalls: “Diane looked straight at me, then looked away, giggling, because Tom was trying to get her to go out with another one of his friends and she refused. Instead we went out to dinner—to some Spanish restaurant with Dave and Heije Garth. Diane told me she’d known we’d be together from the moment she laid eyes on me.
“Diane’s friendship was nice,” he continues. “No demands. We saw each other on and off for eight months and then I got married. Diane knew my plans.” He would phone her in the evening and she’d usually stop off at his place, which wasn’t far from hers in the Village. They would be together for a while and then he’d put her into a cab and she’d go home. She never asked him about his life. (At the time Williams’ writing grant from the American Academy in Rome had just been withdrawn, with no reasons given. He believes it was because he was black and about to be married to a white woman.)
“Diane did ask a lot of questions about my family,” he says. He told her that his mother had been a domestic and his father a day laborer, and that one of his mentors in Syracuse, where he grew up, was a redcap at the railway station who was also a numbers runner.
In turn, Diane described her childhood to Williams. “She connected her identity to Russeks department store and with money, but she seemed ambivalent—almost angry about it.”
She never talked about her photography except to say that she was trying to photograph some Hell’s Angels gang. Williams asked her if sh
e was frightened. She said she was always frightened, no matter what she did—she lived with fear and overcoming fear every day of her life.
“Sometimes,” Williams says, “I got the feeling that Diane wanted me to treat her badly. But I wasn’t into chains and punching in the mouth. I thought she was probably bisexual. Why I suspected it I don’t know, except that she was inordinately sexy. There is something challenging and triumphant for a man if he can please this kind of mysterious creature, and I think I did.”
Diane, in fact, would say that she went to bed with women but “liked men better.” Apparently she did have occasional intimacies with women, but these liaisons were always discreet; Diane didn’t talk about them. Emile de Antonio used to accompany her and two of her women friends to the movies and he always felt acutely uncomfortable, even though no one said or did anything out of the ordinary. It was just that “Diane could create a very pervasive sexual atmosphere around her and she had an especially tender, insinuating way with the women she was attracted to.” It was as if she could not only sense the person’s deepest needs and most passionate demands, but seemed to suggest that she was willing to comply with any of them.
“Diane was many things to many people,” Marvin Israel has noted.
A New York hostess tells of a Halloween party she and her husband gave in the early sixties, “where many people seemed wired—on speed. Most of the art world came—Warhol, Frank Stella, de Antonio, Jasper Johns. Diane was there, hopping around with her cameras. I was costumed as Theda Bara. Bea Feitler wore a mask. We were both very drunk and Diane photographed us falling all over each other. Then she asked us to pose nude. We both refused. There was a lot of tension between Diane and Bea because Bea loved Diane—and she wanted Diane all to herself. She’d act possessive, but Diane would have none of it—she’d turn remote and detached, which drove Bea crazy. Come to think of it, everyone who ever cared about Diane became very possessive about her.
If at this point in her life Diane needed to have men and women fighting for her attention, there must be a connection to the unhappy truth that since Allan’s departure she had often experienced an aching sense of worthlessness so profound that she couldn’t leave the Charles Street house. She had begun having an increasing amount of casual sex, which blotted out—at least temporarily—her feeling of abandonment; in the dark she could touch a stranger and be momentarily comforted.
During this period if you were with her for any length of time and she was in a talkative mood, the conversation might shift to sex and she would question you avidly about your sex life, or suddenly confide a detail about hers—that one of her lovers was a distinguished musician old enough to be her father; that the greatest thing about a pick-up or a one-night stand was the terrific sex—because neither one of you wants something from the situation and it isn’t exploitative yet, so all you have to do is respond, and sometimes it can be ecstatic.
“I’ve never heard anyone talk as frankly about sex as Diane Arbus did,” Frederick Eberstadt says. “She told me she’d never turned down any man who asked her to bed. She’d say things like that as calmly as if she were reciting a recipe for biscuits.”
According to the late John Putnam, “Diane told me she wanted to have sex with as many different kinds of people as possible because she was searching for an authenticity of experience—physical, emotional, psychological—and the quickest, purest way to break through a person’s façade was through fucking. She referred to such experiences as ‘adventures’—as ‘events.’ Actually, everything she did was an ‘adventure.’ To talk about her life that way seemed to heighten and justify existence for her.”
Morality was not involved. As far as she was concerned, men and women should be free to have as many, and as varied, sexual relationships as they wanted. Whether or not she got emotional fulfillment from any of her regular lovers is another matter. She could discuss technicalities of sex—the fact that she used amyl nitrate (a drug said to prolong orgasm), or that one of her lovers made her feel as if she’d climbed to the top of Mount Everest when he brought her to climax. But whether she was able to sustain or wanted another lasting love relationship—a true commitment with someone—she would never say. Increasingly, Diane maintained that she no longer believed in love and certainly not in sentiment.
It pleased her that in many cases she was now the seducer. The more successful she became with her camera, the more aggressive she became sexually; the camera was her protector, her shield, and it gave her access to forbidden places and she took advantage of that.
Some of the women Diane talked to thought she was merely experiencing “cheap thrills.” “It was a turn-off whenever she’d tell me about the men she’d had,” one woman says, adding, “It depressed me to hear that her ‘adventures’ were so limited—it was such a literal submission.” But others admired her for her daring; they believed she was “fucking for liberation” (women affirming the need for sexual pleasure is political); they felt she was breaking a taboo by not only frankly acknowledging her sexual needs but acting on them. (Her attitude about breaking taboos was well known to her intimates. Among her friends she had been the first to speak openly about masturbating, about her pride in her menstrual flow. She spoke about her attraction for blacks; she revealed her obsession with a married man.) Kathy Aisen, a young artist who posed nude for her, says, “Women of my generation considered Diane Arbus a heroine. But I wished she’d done her screwing around before she became a mother. I wonder how her daughters felt.”
Diane never thought of herself as a revolutionary, let alone a feminist. And with her male lovers she continued to play the role of helpless female while bragging to them of her sexual conquests. “She had a dual persona,” says one man. “She was sexual victim/lusty lady rolled into one. She told me she would have been devastated if I hadn’t wanted her.”
During this period she went on seeing Marvin Israel (who, it is said, alternately scolded and applauded her for the way she was leading her life). She might accompany him to Robert Frank’s new apartment on West 86th Street, where the two men would hold earnest conversations that would often erupt into arguments while Diane sat in silence on the couch. Sometimes Israel’s outbursts were excused or ignored because he was a diabetic; sometimes his rages would break out if he went too long without his insulin shot. For whatever reasons, Diane seemed to enjoy his disturbing theatrics—his hostility in public. “Because underneath Diane was hostile, too,” de Antonio says. “Marvin expressed hostility for her.”
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ALTHOUGH THERE WERE A great many fine women photographers working during the sixties (Margaret Bourke-White, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Eve Arnold, Toni Frissell, Ruth Orkin, Inge Morath, to name only a few), Diane did not associate herself with them. With the exception of Lisette Model, she never sought out women photographers for either advice or friendship. But she did bring her photographs for Tina Fredericks to comment on; she continued to do so even after Tina had left magazines and gone into real estate on Long Island.
Diane would also show her contacts to Walter Silver, a documentary photographer who lived near her in the West Village. Diane liked his work and he liked hers. “We’d compare prints,” Silver says, and then sometimes Diane would have coffee with him at the Limelight, where many photographers still hung out—photographers like Weegee, Robert Frank, and Louis Faurer. “We’d all sit together at a big table and Diane would sit with us,” Silver adds. “She’d never say a word—she’d just listen and then suddenly you’d look up and she’d be gone. She was the only woman who ever was in our little group.”
Which was her choice, of course, but some people got the feeling that Diane thought of photography as a man’s profession. “I remember, though, that once I mentioned that women might be better photographers than men because women can inspire greater confidence,” John Putnam noted, “and Diane said, ‘Look, I’m a photographer, not a woman photographer.’ ”
As for making a great photograph, Diane believed men and wome
n were equal, but she also knew that for many of her magazine assignments she was being paid half what a man would be paid and this bothered her. Still, photographing for magazines was the only way to survive; all the photographers she respected did magazine work. Walker Evans, for example, had subsisted for years on the money he earned from Fortune. He was contracted to do one tycoon a month for the magazine.
Marvin Israel wanted Diane to meet Evans, who had encountered Helen Levitt and Robert Frank at crucial times in their careers. Diane was at a turning point in hers, but she was afraid to meet Evans, so she kept putting it off. She was still struggling to find her themes and master a style. She was afraid he wouldn’t like her work, wouldn’t like her. She revered Evans—revered his clear, straightforward portraits of Hart Crane and Lincoln Kirstein, his secret candids of subway passengers, his photographs of empty rooms and clapboard auto shops and peeling billboards and, of course, the moving documents of impoverished sharecropper families he’d taken during the Depression for the Farm Security Administration in collaboration with James Agee’s text for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
To Evans, the artist was an image-collector—“He collects things with his eye.” He once said: “The secret of photography is that the camera takes on the character and the personality of the handler. The mind works on the machine.”
Diane Arbus Page 27