Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  The last thing Putnam recalls Diane saying is that she was going on a story with Gail Sheehy to Queens; Sheehy was writing a piece for New York magazine on “The Important Order of Red Men,” a branch of the American Legion which consisted of former plumbers and druggists and bank clerks, all of whom dressed up in Indian feathers and brandished sequined tomahawks. The two women spent most of the day with the group, and Diane took a forceful portrait of a grinning man in a huge Indian headdress which was later part of her posthumous show at the Museum of Modern Art.

  Afterward Diane and Sheehy had coffee and discussed their daughters and how emotionally insecure a mother alone could be. Sheehy had recently separated from her husband; Diane wanted to know how she coped with loneliness.

  Diane’s life had grown increasingly lonely. Both Doon and Amy were busy and often away from the apartment, and since her most recent bout with hepatitis she didn’t always have the strength to see people, so she kept in touch by phone. She could talk on the phone for hours with Pati Hill or Richard Avedon or Mariclare Costello, Allan’s girl. Sometimes she would see the Hollywood producer John Calley when he passed through New York. Calley was a brooding, handsome man nicknamed “the Dark Angel” by his colleagues. He had worked his way up from gas-station attendant to powerful studio executive (he ultimately headed Warners during the 1970s). Diane would visit him in the apartment in the East Seventies which he’d sublet and afterward they might have dinner with the screenwriter Buck Henry. Diane once brought along a portfolio of strange photographs of genitalia for the men to look at while they ate. It was the same batch of photographs she’d shown Bill Jay.

  Occasionally she would photograph group sex parties. That was how she’d met poet/painter Stanley Fisher (now deceased), who’d participated in the “Doom, No!” and “Shit” shows at the Gertrude Stein gallery. (These garish art exhibits ridiculing a “plastic America” featured “the ultimate bowel movement” sculpture, as well as Fisher’s shocking collages, photographs of concentration-camp victims superimposed on Betty Grable’s nipples.)

  Fisher’s main preoccupation was sex. He was at the time “master” to three young female “slaves” in a shabby but immaculate apartment on King Street. Diane went there to take pictures of Fisher, a former Brooklyn schoolteacher, handsome, blue-eyed, perpetually angry, sitting regally in a shabby old armchair railing against sexual repression in America. He had been in Reichian therapy, and believed that sex was the driving force in life; he would lecture obsessively about the need for frequent orgasms in order to stay healthy, and his female “slaves” (or “tribe,” as he called them) would hang on his every word—they never interrupted him except to go into the kitchen, where they would peel potatoes for dinner. If Fisher left the apartment (usually to make another “sexual conquest”), his “slaves” would follow him down the street, trotting behind him—out of deference, in homage.

  Eventually Diane tried photographing Fisher orchestrating a group sex party and she was fascinated by his attempts to include everybody in such a mysterious act. She said later to a class, “The situation is both real and unreal and you have to deal with both…it’s all different kinds of theater… I mean the spanking…there’s a whole race of spanking people who are absolutely dotty about it.”

  However, Diane did not think enough of her group-sex photographs to develop many of the negatives. Neil Selkirk, who has printed virtually all her work since her death, maintains that there are “no erotic pictures in her files” except for a set of contacts which include one image that Harold Hayes describes as “remarkable.” He saw it tacked on the wall in Diane’s Charles Street house, and he says, “It was of a couple fucking, and I’ll never forget it because it was such a total expression of stasis, of detachment. The sexual act was all one saw, divorced from everything else.” (This particular image is listed in the Arbus catalogue and may still be available from the Arbus estate’s dealer, Harry Lunn, in Washington, D.C.)

  Selkirk believes that this and one other picture (taken in a bondage house) are the only such Arbus pictures in existence. He believes that “a great many incorrect stories have circulated about Diane’s so-called pornographic pictures because she did photograph at some orgies. But obviously she didn’t think that the results were impressive enough to keep.” Selkirk goes on, “Diane would never limit herself to just the aberrant or sexual; she was interested in photographing a wide range of people and events.”

  She would eventually tell fashion editor Carol Troy that she hoped to station herself inside Henri Bendel and “photograph a host of shoppers when things are ‘on sale.’ ” She wrote to Peter Crookston of her plan to photograph fat ladies and capture the psychological panic brought on by overeating; and possibly women who’d had plastic surgery, “if they’ll admit it.” And she wanted to photograph the Kronhausens—sex therapists who at the time had an open marriage; they ran a museum in San Francisco that featured their collection of erotic art. (The Kronhausens had given Diane the pictures of genitalia which she continued to show to everyone.) In late 1968 she was about to undertake a search for a couple who shared a “folie à deux.” She looked for this phenomenon in twins, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, and a couple in a mental institution. For a while she considered the possibility of photographing schizophrenic patients under treatment by the controversial analyst R. D. Laing, whose existential theories were very popular during the sixties; he believed that no one can begin to think or feel or act except out of his alienation. Laing viewed schizophrenia as a valid experience—simply a negation of the negative experience of an alienated culture.

  At Christmas, Diane flew to St. Croix with Pat Peterson to shoot another entire issue of children’s fashions for The New York Times Magazine. Once more her pictures of kids are blunt and unsentimental, and in some of them she seems, astonishingly, to reveal the shape of their faces as adults.

  When she got back from St. Croix, she ran into Studs Terkel at a party. Terkel recalls: “I knew her brother Howard already—had interviewed him for my radio show in Chicago. I was starting to do a book on the 1930s Depression—Hard Times, it was later called—and I guess I told Diane about it, and then she mentioned that her father had been a colorful character during the Depression—running Russeks, staying afloat during and after the Crash. And how she and Howard had grown up as rich kids isolated on Central Park West, and at the time she hadn’t been aware at all of the poverty, the bread lines. Which had bugged her in retrospect. So I decided I’d interview her for my book. She was called ‘Daisy Singer’ (most of the people I interviewed were given pseudonyms). But first we had lunch to get better acquainted.

  “We went to a restaurant in the Village. Up close Diane looked like a little girl to me. Dressed in a leather miniskirt, I think. I remember indelibly—there was a sense of out of time about her, she wasn’t quite there. Even though she was warm and friendly and terribly vulnerable, she was never quite there. And she had so little self-esteem—I remember that about her, too. So many self-doubts. And she talked about men using her. Some Hollywood type. And a writer or a critic…”

  Afterward they went to the Arbus studio on Washington Place and Terkel taped her for a couple of hours. He kept trying to get her to talk about the Depression, “but she kept getting sidetracked, recalling anecdotes about her family—her father and mother—and she talked about art and money and courage, not necessarily in that order. I asked few questions; it just kept pouring out.”

  “My father was a kind of self-made man,” Diane told Terkel. “After he died I found in his drawer—along with his condoms—a credo of ten things he wanted to achieve. One was to make a million dollars. My brother pointed out that for a man who had his heart set on being rich, what he achieved was totally inadequate. My brother pointed out also that while we were rich, my father was a gambler and something of a phony. That he could always appear richer than he was. His friends were richer than he was, but he was the most flamboyant of them and in a sense he made what he mad
e go a long way. It was a front. My father was a frontal person. A front had to be maintained…in business if people smell failure, you’ve had it. I’ve learned to lie as a photographer, Studs. There are times when I come to work in certain guises, pretend to be poorer than I am—acting, looking poor.”

  She continued: “I always had governesses. I had one I really loved until I was seven and then I had a succession of ones I really loathed. I remember going with this governess that I loved—liked—to the park to the site of the reservoir which had been drained; it was just a cavity and there was this shanty town there. For years I couldn’t get anyone to remember this, but finally someone at the Museum of the City of New York said yes, there was this shanty town. This image wasn’t concrete, but for me it was a potent memory. Seeing the other side of the tracks holding the hand of one’s governess. For years I felt exempt. I grew up exempt and immune from circumstance. That idea that I couldn’t wander down…and that there is such a gulf. I keep learning this over and over again…the difference between rich people and poor people. I’m fascinated with how people begin because it influences their attitudes about money and everything else…

  “[My brother and I] never went far afield…the outside world was so far. Not evil, but the doors were simply shut. You were never expected to encounter it. For so long I lived as if there was contagion. I guess you would call it innocence, but I wouldn’t call it pretty at all…

  “I grew up thinking all my minimal conjecture was true. I thought I’d been born knowledgeable; that what I knew came from beyond the grave. I mean before birth. I didn’t want to give up that wisdom for the ordinary knowledge of experience, which is the way I confirmed the way my parents brought me up, which is the less you experience, the better. You know what I mean? I’m accusative…what I mean is my mother never taught me courage and I don’t mean to accuse her—parents only teach by default. What I learned was, if you were weak—if you didn’t know something—all you had to do was confess it and then it would be all right—that’s what femininity constituted in that time, and you found a man to take care of you in exchange for being taken care of. You see, I never suffered from adversity… I was confirmed in a sense of unreality.

  “I’ve always been ashamed of making money, and when I do make money from a photograph, I immediately assume it’s not as good a photograph.

  “I can’t believe that money is any proper reward for art. Art seems to me something you do because it makes you feel good to do it; it excites you or you learn something from it; it’s like your play, your education…but I’ve never felt in a funny way…I don’t even feel [what I do] is terribly useful. It might be historical. It’s embarrassing. I can’t defend this position, but I think I take photographs because there are things that nobody would see unless I photographed them. When I was gloomy I thought other people could take the photographs I wanted to take. You know, I could call up some good photographer and say, ‘Why don’t you photograph this and this?’ I really think my photographs aren’t very useful except to me. I think I have a slight corner on something about the quality of things…

  “It’s very subtle and I don’t know that it’s world-shaking, but I’ve always had this terrific conceit. I used to think I was the perfect thermometer for the times. If I liked a movie, it would be a popular movie… You grow up split between these two things—thinking you’re utterly average and inclusive or that every human emotion has its echo in you. Well, I do feel that in a certain way.”

  Finally, Terkel asked her, “How did the public experience of the Depression affect you?” and Diane answered, “I was aware of it partly because it didn’t affect me. That sense of being immune—ludicrous as it sounds—was painful.

  “[Now] I seek danger and excitement. It may be frivolous of me, [but] I’ve come to believe you can only really learn by being touched by something.”

  During the interview Diane kept referring to the horrific poverty she’d seen in South Carolina. A month earlier Esquire had sent her down to photograph Donald E. Gatch, a young white doctor who was trying to combat starvation and maggots in an impoverished black community called Beaufort. He had reported the shocking conditions to the local health authorities, but nobody would listen to him, so he was caring for the poor alone, with little federal funding.

  Diane told Terkel: “I had never seen poverty like that.” She had gone with Gatch to a home with sixteen children. “One child had only one eye, another was hydrocephalic.” Another was scarred at birth; some showed symptoms of worms caused by filthy outhouses.

  She and Gatch drove all over the countryside—to factories where women shucked oysters at $15 a season. He told her “incredible stories,” she recalled to Terkel. About examining a dead woman whose body was infested with maggots. And another woman “with an illegitimate, mentally defective boy who couldn’t get welfare, so she had to go to work and leave the boy chained to the bed.”

  And Diane had photographed Gatch standing outside a falling-down shack and inside stinking cabins fetid with the smell of old urine and up on the hills where some poor whites lived so inbred the children had one blue eye, one brown.

  She took roll after roll of film which recorded the inbreeding, malnutrition, and pathological depression of deep Southern poverty (“as well as Walker Evans,” Gene Thornton wrote in the Times when many of these pictures were finally exhibited at the Robert Miller Gallery in 1980. “What a picture of deformity and imbecility”).

  And Terkel said, “You saw what Walker Evans saw.” And Diane replied, “Somewhat similar. Yeah. But now I’m seeing with double vision. With what I learned as a kid and what I’ve since learned. It seems to me the only pleasure about getting old is if you come through with more understanding than you had in the first place.”

  31

  IN 1969 ALLAN DIVORCED Diane and married Mariclare Costello, a young actress who had been one of the original members of the Lincoln Center Repertory Company. Diane gave a small reception for them, writing to Peter Crookston later that she felt “sad happy” about the occasion. She said that Mariclare was a “good friend” of hers, and that the two of them hung out on the phone a lot.

  Not long after the wedding party Allan closed the fashion studio on Washington Place and he and his new wife moved to Hollywood so that he could pursue his acting career in earnest. For more than twenty years he’d been dreaming of being an actor fulltime, and Diane outwardly applauded the move. But she was frightened.

  Frightened because Allan would no longer be close by. They had been absorbed in each other’s lives since she was fourteen; he was one of the few people who understood her. Now she would no longer be able to visit him, to get extra money when she needed it or to ask advice; she wouldn’t be able to phone him daily—he would be three thousand miles away.

  She ran into Garry Winogrand on the street. “She seemed to be in a tizzy,” Winogrand recalls. “She said her husband had remarried and gone to California and she was going to be without a darkroom and what should she do? She also mentioned that she’d just recovered from hepatitis, that at first they’d misdiagnosed her case—but she hadn’t just had hepatitis, she’d also been allergic to birth-control pills and tranquilizers, which made her feel rotten, and did I know that the combination could have an adverse effect on a woman?”

  She told Shirley Fingerhood that she felt “funny” about Allan going away. She didn’t resent it, she kept saying; she wasn’t angry—she just felt that a part of her was going to California, too.

  Although Allan continued to send as much money as he could from California, Diane needed to earn more now to make ends meet. But it was still emotionally painful for her to see magazine art directors; despite her success, she had little self-confidence.

  Avedon recommended her for a lucrative advertising job to photograph a new camera in her own particular way.

  She was also discussing the possibility of becoming unit photographer on the film Catch-22, which Mike Nichols was about to direct in Mexico an
d Rome; John Calley was the producer and the pay would be astronomical, Diane told someone. But in the end she said no to Calley. She didn’t think she could do it.

  Instead, she flew to Boston for the London Sunday Times and photographed the lawyer F. Lee Bailey in his office and piloting his plane. Next she went to Chicago to make a portrait of Tokyo Rose and interview her for Esquire. This account, along with the picture, was published in the May 1969 issue of Esquire. Diane then flew to California and photographed novelist Jacqueline Susann with her husband, Irving Mansfield, for Harper’s magazine.

  Susann was currently promoting her novel The Love Machine, which was high on the best-seller list, and between interviews (some six a day) she was ensconced in a Beverly Hills hotel suite overlooking banks of geraniums and a smoggy sky. When Diane arrived, Susann began patting her jet-black Korean hair fall and adjusting her bubble glasses until Diane asked her to take them off.

  “This Diane Arbus character was bossy,” Irving Mansfield remembers. “She made us move all over the place. Then she wanted us to pose in our bathing suits next to the TV set. I didn’t get it, so I said no to the idea, but Jackie, who was always cooperative with the press, said of course. And when we were in our suits and Arbus asked Jackie to plunk down in my lap, Jackie said yes to that, too. Particularly after Arbus assured us this shot would be for her portfolio—not for publication.* Her exact words. We held the pose for what seemed like hours—until my kneecaps went numb. The flashbulbs kept blinding us, she kept assuring us we looked terrific. Arbus looked tense. She told us as soon as she finished shooting she was taking the next plane back to New York; she’d flown out specifically to photograph us and she seemed a little angry about it.”

  Diane was angry. Privately, secretly, very angry. Because ever since Allan had left New York, Marvin Israel seemed to be paying less attention to her. He simply couldn’t always be there when she wanted him to be, and she couldn’t understand that. With Allan gone, Marvin Israel had become the principal source of energy she could draw on; it wasn’t that she didn’t have plenty of ideas of her own, it was that she needed him to confirm them to her and to confirm herself. Often it seemed she resisted taking full responsibility for her life.