Often they might be joined by Mary and Robert Frank, Bea Feitler, and Larry Shainberg. The other poets and painters who frequented the bar seemed to hold the bleak, despairing Frank and the shadowy Diane in awe. By 1967 the art world had lost its idealism, its sense of outsideness, and was turning art into big business, but Diane and Robert Frank seemed exceptions—pursuing harsh, subversive work without any thought of financial gain or self-publicizing. At the moment Frank, unshaven and tattered as always, was completing a documentary called Me and My Brother about a catatonic man, and he was about to start another movie in Nova Scotia with novelist Rudi Wurlitzer (already a cult figure for his book Nog, which is dominated by a fantasy of self as a “dark wet hole”). As for Diane, she would usually be “electric with anxiety,” but eager to describe whatever had been happening to her.
Her latest story concerned releases. Her show was still up at the Museum of Modern Art, but she still hadn’t been able to get releases from most of her subjects and this was worrying since it touched on a photographer’s moral responsibility, the legal issue of invasion of privacy, as well as permission to reproduce the image. (Diane maintained that she always asked permission to photograph a person, and if he said no, she respected that.) In any event, she had recently hopped a cab, laden down as usual with her cameras, and the driver had asked laconically, “You a photographer?” “Yes, yes,” Diane answered, looking not at him but at her appointment book because she was late for an assignment. “Funny thing,” the driver droned on as he steered through traffic, “I went to the Museum of Modern Art the other day to catch à show and there I am big as life hanging on the wall. Picture of me! What a thrill! Wish I knew who the photographer was. Like to thank him.” Diane stared at his profile and burst out laughing. “I’m the photographer!” she exclaimed, recognizing the driver as the earnest young man in straw hat and a BOMB HANOI button in his lapel whom she’d photographed at a pro-Vietnam demonstration. “Listen,” she said, “I need a release* from you, all right?” With that he stopped the cab and scrawled an okay on a matchbook cover, obviously delighted.
Other subjects weren’t. When her portrait of identical twins appeared in the “New Documents” exhibit, the twins’ parents protested that the image was a distortion and tried to stop the picture from being reproduced elsewhere because they thought their daughters would be exploited. (Eventually “The Twins” became Diane’s most famous photograph—her trademark, reproduced on posters, on her book cover, inspiring Stanley Kubrick in his horror film The Shining.)
The twins’ family’s reaction upset Diane, but she was equally upset about being copied. (“Imitation was not for her the sincerest form of flattery but an absolute horror,” her daughter Doon has written. One wonders how she’d feel today when so many photographers use her square format with flash.) Peter Hujar recalls that once when he joined her for dinner with Avedon and Marvin Israel, “She refused to speak to me. Later I found out she’d thought I’d ripped her off—copied her way of photographing transvestites—with a black border around the picture.” (One of Hujar’s most famous shots is of the dying transvestite Candy Darling.) “When I first saw Diane’s black-bordered portrait of the Gish sisters in Bazaar, I thought she’d copied me.”
She frequently talked to Garry Winogrand and John Szarkowski about being imitated, and as a result she kept changing cameras in order to change her imagery. She would go to Marty Forscher’s camera shop on West 46th Street a couple of times a week to look at the latest models. “In 1967 she was trying out a Fujica,” Winogrand says. “It resembled a pregnant Leica—clumsy, clunky—but Diane believed that the more difficult the camera, the better. She didn’t believe a picture that was easy to get could be good.”
In the early summer of 1967, Peter Crookston, deputy editor of the London Sunday Times magazine, arrived in New York from England. He was a polite, rosy-cheeked young man on the lookout for “the hottest American reporters and photographers,” so he’d already arranged to meet Harold Hayes of Esquire, that quintessential magazine of the 1960s. Hayes put him in touch with New Journalists like Gay Talese and photographers like Carl Fischer, but Crookston phoned Diane directly because the Sunday Times art director, Michael Rand, had seen her eccentric portraits in Infinity and wanted to give her some assignments.
Crookston says he was “instantly attracted” to the tousle-haired woman in miniskirt and workshirt who invited him into her little Greenwich Village house. She was soft and shy and giggled with pleasure at some of the comments he made about her pictures. They sat in her cool, dark living room, which was so dim he found it hard to see the blow-ups she kept handing him—strange, angry, despairing faces, many of them. She had prints hung everywhere, tacked up on mats. There was one he liked in particular—a strong man flexing his muscles. “He looked like some mythic Hercules. I told Diane it was very good and she promptly gave it to me. It’s framed now in my apartment in London.”
They were interrupted periodically by Doon, who kept running up and down the stairs, shouting things at her mother. Diane would call back in reply, sometimes making a face of mock exasperation. Crookston noted that they seemed to have a very close, very warm relationship and that Doon was astonishingly beautiful. “You have a lovely daughter,” he murmured finally, and Diane answered, “Yes. We’re rivals.” She did not elaborate, and then the phone rang and she proceeded to hold a monosyllabic conversation. “Hmmm. Yeah. Yes? No…not tonight…well, maybe another time.” And she hung up and came back to sit down beside Crookston. “Have you ever been to an orgy?” she asked, and he replied, “No, have you?” “Yes,” she answered, she went to orgies and she photographed them. “Would you like to go to one tonight? We could go, but it would probably be very boring. They usually are. Although sometimes they’re fun.” And Crookston answered quickly, “I’d rather take you to supper.” Eventually they left the Charles Street house and went to a chili place nearby to eat. During the meal they talked mostly about their backgrounds, telling each other about their families. Then, after supper, they walked back to her car—“a beat-up Renault”—and she drove him to his hotel and they spent the night together.
At dawn, Crookston says, “I was awakened by Diane sitting bolt upright on the pillows and crying out, ‘What are you doing with me? I go to bed with old men, young boys…’ and then her voice trailed off and she giggled. ‘I couldn’t possibly have known that, now could I?’ I answered. With that she murmured that she’d gone wild after Allan left—wild—and had started having sex with as many people as possible, partially to ‘test’ herself, partially to see what it was like.”
She was always frightened, she said, but that meant conquering her fear each time; developing courage was extremely important to her, as important and “thrilling” as the “adventures” or “the events” (as she called them) themselves. Because the only way to understand something was to confront it, she said, and when you had sex, restraints were broken, inhibitions disappeared. Sex was the quickest, most primitive way to begin connecting with another human being, and the raunchier and grosser the person or environment, the more intense the experience, and this enlarged her life.
She then described in a peculiarly detached way how one night she’d had sex with a sailor in the back of a Greyhound bus. (“If you sit on the inside back seat of a Greyhound bus, it means you’re sexually available.”) No introductions were made, not a word was spoken, and after this swift, mute encounter in the dark, she got off at the next stop and waited on the highway for an hour or so until another bus came along which would bring her back to New York. When the bus arrived, she got on and collapsed on a seat (“not the back seat”). It was close to five a.m. and suddenly she was hurtling through space, through tunnels, whirling, drifting, rootless. Gas fumes and air-conditioning enveloped her, and across the aisle other passengers snored or gurgled in their sleep…
Suddenly she launched into another kind of story, complete with gestures and accents, about a recent photo assignment. The subject
had been a celebrated Washington lawyer. She’d arrived at his office and found a British journalist already there, interviewing him—a very pretty, very ambitious journalist who, Diane sensed, wanted to seduce him “because this lawyer was rather sexy and powerful, too.” Diane decided “for kicks” to seduce him first—and for the next hour she exerted her fey charm on the man while blinding him with her flash. He got sweatier and more excited and finally the British journalist left, and Diane said she’d felt sorry for her because “she didn’t have the patience I had. I hung in there.”
It was almost as if she was determined to explore with her body and her mind every nightmare, every fantasy, she might have repressed deep in her subconscious. Crookston listened as she told him of picking up a Puerto Rican boy on Third Avenue “because he was so beautiful.” She described other encounters with strangers and after a while they began sounding almost mythical, since identities were blotted out, leaving only the throbbing sexual reality.
At this point Crookston interrupted to ask if she hadn’t ever faced actual danger as a result of such recklessness. Yes, she answered, but she’d always been “thrilled” to take risks to “test” herself—and, besides, nothing bad had ever happened to her and for some strange reason she was positive it never would. And she didn’t drink or take drugs, and when her camera was with her she always felt in control. Crookston got the sense that if she was ever disgusted by much of what she’d seen and done, she’d faced the disgust fiercely and with dignity, which is why she seemed neither coarsened nor debased by anything that had happened to her. And in manner she remained gentle, ironic, almost passive.
Around five a.m. Diane got up, dressed, and left the hotel. Then later Crookston flew to California. But when he returned a few days later, they spent two more evenings together. And she told him more adventures, more stories. “And, yes, I believed Diane. I believed her implicitly,” Crookston says. However, Marvin Israel, who presumably heard many of these same anecdotes, has written that her stories always had a “curious improbability.” He goes on to say they seemed “exaggerated and very funny…only the barest account of what must have occurred.”
As soon as he got back to England, Crookston began phoning Diane regularly and he gave her many assignments to do for the London Sunday Times magazine, starting with the “diaper derby” in New Jersey (out of which came the controversial portrait of a crying, snotty baby). They also began an intense correspondence in which they poured out their thoughts and concerns. Diane’s letters—often written in almost indecipherable scrawl—form a record of her work (“nearly everything delights me!” she wrote in late 1967). She would phone Crookston her ideas for possible photo essays: “runaways, criminals, sex clubs, wives of famous men, rich people, vigilantes.”
In most letters Diane is full of questions and concern for Crookston, for whom she had developed some affection. Referring to their first time together in an early note: “You were so gentle and generous and so very game…” And in another letter: “You looked at me as hard as I looked at you, as if we were England and America at the signing of the treaty…it is so mysterious. I am suggestible even to myself.”
To which Crookston comments: “There was a part of Diane that needed to be valued, listened to, comforted… I had the feeling she didn’t always get enough of the latter…” He adds, “There was never any talk of being in love [between us]. Actually, she told me she no longer believed in it, although I’m not sure that was totally true. I was not infatuated with her, but I was fascinated. She was a marvelous woman—wise, poetic. I was proud to be her friend. And she was witty, too. We’d been instantly attracted to each other because we always gave each other a good laugh. But it needn’t have been a relationship that got into bed, although that was, as Diane might have put it, “A GOOD THING.”
In almost every letter Diane mentions money; it had become a gnawing worry to her. Allan had always taken care of their income, depositing any sum they earned in a joint account, balancing their checkbook. Diane herself rarely entered a bank; many of the checks she received for jobs lay uncashed about her apartment. Her way of dealing with money was rather like her father’s—she carried wads of it with her.
In July Diane flew out to San Francisco to photograph for her second Guggenheim project. She had arranged to stay with Paul Salstrom, who was running a house for AWOLs and deserters in the Haight-Ashbury. Salstrom took her, almost at once, to the Living Theatre’s production of Paradise Now and afterward they went backstage to visit the Becks, who ran the Living Theatre. They were pacifists—Salstrom had been in prison with them. They began to talk together, so Diane sneaked off by herself and started prowling through the dressing rooms, hoping to catch a glimpse of the babies who’d supposedly been conceived by members of the Living Theatre company while on LSD. The babies were said to resemble mutants, with huge, pale protruding eyes, silvery skin, and spaced-out expressions. Diane was unable to find any such babies.
She spent the next few days wandering all over the Haight trying to find faces to photograph, but all she saw were stoned “flower children” wearing thrift-shop clothes. Some were begging. Most were runaways or high-school dropouts having a hard time surviving on junk food and bad dope. Drugs were everywhere—mescaline, cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines. Many of the kids were physically ill; those who weren’t acted extremely aggressive, “like most speed freaks did,” Salstrom says. The media were there in full force—TV cameras, Life and Look photographers, all documenting the “Love Generation” as it flocked into the Avalon Ballroom to hear psychedelic rock. “Diane thought the whole scene was degrading—commercialized. She wanted nothing to do with it,” Salstrom adds. She made only a few photographs. When Newsweek phoned to ask her to do a big spread on hippies, she refused and instead went out to North Beach and took pictures of a topless dancer.
By the end of the week she was ready to leave San Francisco. The city and its population were too hidden, she said—hidden behind the fog and the shuttered windows of the houses and the rolling hills. She and Salstrom drove down the coast to Los Angeles. “We had no plans,” Salstrom says, “Diane hated making plans.” He remembers that often when they stopped at a diner or a gas station she would see something she wanted to photograph and would turn mute and unapproachable as she focused on the person or object. She never seemed satisfied with anything she shot. By noon she would have taken a hundred shots—by sunset another hundred.
When they reached the outskirts of Los Angeles, they both called friends from a pay phone, but were unable to connect with anybody, so they drove on to visit Salstrom’s aunt and uncle, who lived in a tiny town near the California desert. Salstrom says that his aunt was “a heavy-set woman—a compulsive eater—deeply neurotic—obsessed with movie stars. Her husband, my uncle, had been a gambler in his youth but an unsuccessful one, so now they were very poor and my aunt cleaned rooms in a motel and my uncle drove a pick-up truck back and forth across an apricot orchard. In the evenings they were together, but they hardly ever exchanged a word.
“Diane spent most of the time photographing my aunt draped against her refrigerator—her prize possession. I saw a blow-up later in New York. It was very severe, in that square format she always used along with the flash. The effect was overpowering—like an X-ray of my aunt’s emotions. All you can see is that she’s been immobilized by her fantasies. Like it’s obvious from her expression that she’s resorted to total self-absorption or otherwise she’d fall apart. We stayed with my relatives overnight, but Diane refused to take photographs of my uncle the next day because he was too defenseless, she said. She couldn’t bear to look at the eczema that flamed across his face and neck and made him both embarrassed and miserable.”
They drove through the desert into New Mexico. Salstrom thought they should stop at the Hog Farm Commune, but Diane wasn’t interested, so they drove on to Texas. “One night we slept together out under the stars.” By now Diane was so anxious to get home that when they reached Dallas she w
ent directly to the airport, paid for the car, and took the next flight back to New York. Salstrom hitchhiked the rest of the way.
In the fall of 1967 Diane was invited to attend “idea meetings” at New York magazine, which was about to start publication. She joined contributing editors Gloria Steinem, Tom Wolfe, and Barbara Goldsmith in editor Clay Felker’s noisy, cluttered little office.
Felker was setting out to revolutionize the city-weekly format with a mélange of stylish graphics and articles about sex, money, and power (his favorite subjects). “Classy trash,” Richard Reeves called it all. Diane knew about Felker’s single-minded editorial methods, having worked with him when New York was part of the Sunday Herald Tribune and also at Esquire. Felker was on the prowl night and day for “hot” stories. He hung on the phone, not only badgering his writers to come up with the latest “trends,” the latest “winners,” but often encouraging them to cannibalize or humiliate the subject in question simply because when the story got into print it would be more “talked about.” Diane understood his tactics. “He has a photographer’s mentality,” she once commented. “He’ll stop at nothing to get the image—he’ll pay any price.”
Diane Arbus Page 34