PART TWO
IN 1946 BEN LICHTENSTEIN gave Diane his Speed Graphic and she tried experimenting with it. But it was heavy to carry and the flashgun attachment scared her; the images produced were chaotic and came too fast. She stopped using it. Later she would say she found the camera “recalcitrant—it’s determined to do one thing and you want it to do something else.” A photograph suggested alternatives—choices. The act of photography was ambiguous and contradictory, like herself.
For a short while she studied with Berenice Abbott, who photographed New York and James Joyce and collected Atget. Abbott thought photography was the ultimate art form of the twentieth century because it demands speed and science, and she was fond of quoting Goethe: “Few people have the imagination for reality.”
Some of Diane’s first pictures taken after her classes with Abbott were candids of Howard and Peggy in their cold-water flat on Third Avenue. “We never saw them, but Diane seemed to have fun taking them,” Peggy says.
Diane would develop the pictures in the darkroom set up in her parents’ Park Avenue apartment. She liked escaping into the little cubbyhole lit only by a red bulb. There were trays holding strange-smelling chemical solutions, and she would place a negative with a sheet of photographic paper under a piece of glass and expose it to white light for a few seconds, then place the paper in a tray of dark solution, and slowly the image would swim into view in the ruby glow of the lightbulb.
There was a magic in the process that never failed to amaze her, and the chemical smells, the continual sound of running water soothed her.
She developed more pictures, one of Anne Eliot clad in a white slip and seated on the floor of the Eliots’ Lexington Avenue apartment. She looked very sad.
“I thought it was the most revealing portrait Diane had ever taken,” Alex says, “but then Diane did a funny thing. She backed Anne’s portrait with a nude portrait of herself that Allan had taken. She tried to scratch out much of her image with pencil, but you could still see the outlines of her body.”
Meanwhile Allan had been discharged from the Army, and he and Diane moved into a railroad flat on 70th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue. Their landlady had rented out all the floors of her converted brownstone at exorbitant rates—$225 a month in 1946 was a lot to pay for a one-bedroom apartment, but there were thousands of ex-GIs in the city saddled with new families and no place to live.
“Our building was never well tended,” says Dell Hughes, a neighbor. “There were mice and cockroaches and hardly any heat in the winter.” Hughes tried fighting the landlady in court about the heat and about rent reductions. “Although we talked about it, the Arbuses didn’t involve themselves in these disputes,” he goes on. “They were a shy, retiring couple, especially Diane.” Allan, as he remembers, worked in a frame shop on Sixth Avenue; Hughes would hear the sound of a clarinet drifting out from the Arbus apartment most evenings. Allan was practicing his music while scheming and dreaming about becoming an actor—that’s all he wanted to be.
He and Diane had long talks about whether or not it was too risky, since he almost certainly couldn’t support a wife and child on what he might make in the theater. They discussed it with their parents and with Howard and with Anne and Alex Eliot, too, although they frequently got sidetracked with them and would wonder instead over the adjustments they were having to make—the adjustments of living together again as a married couple after two years apart. They’d both tasted independence—they were no longer used to compromise. They seemed to feel better after they voiced their discomfort to the Eliots. After a while they forgot they’d ever been separated and grew very close again. By that time Allan had decided to give up—at least temporarily—his dream of being an actor. Trained as an Army photographer, he finally decided to go back into that work—into fashion photography—with Diane as his partner. They had dabbled in it briefly in 1941 and had been rather successful, although neither of them had any interest in fashion; it seemed too frivolous, too ephemeral.
Once again David Nemerov helped them out. He agreed to pay for all their new camera equipment, but at the last minute reneged on his promise and paid for only a fraction of it. However, he did give them their first regular account—photographing Russeks fashion and furs for newspaper ads.
Postwar fashion photography was almost painterly in tone and line, influenced by the elegant studio work of Steichen, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and John Rawlings as well as the bold German émigrés Erwin Blumenfeld and Horst P. Horst, all of whom believed that color combinations carry emotional weight.
These particular photographers came to the fore in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar with the resurgence of Paris styles and the explosion of original American designs such as the wraparound dresses of Claire McCardell.
Then in contrast there was Munkacsi, the Romanian sports photographer, who revolutionized fashion photography with his exuberant “snapshot realism.” Munkacsi was the first photographer to photograph clothes as they were worn—in action—and outside on location.
As far back as 1934, Munkacsi had been photographing models for Bazaar, swimming, running, playing golf—in other words, women enjoying themselves. This innovative way of shooting fashion has since been reinterpreted by countless photographers, the most famous being Richard Avedon, who papered his bedroom walls with Munkacsi images when he was a little boy.
At the beginning of their career Diane and Allan Arbus worked only inside the Russeks studio, sharing it with Harold Halma. “They were very particular,” Ben Lichtenstein says. “They wouldn’t let the Russeks stylist or the art director interfere. Diane would model the clothes first. They were usually miles too big, but she’d pose barefoot in, say, a Nettie Rosenstein black dress, looking like a kid fooling around in her mother’s wardrobe.”
Allan meanwhile would be fiddling with the lights, setting them up, and then together he and Diane would try to figure out what the picture should look like before booking the models through Eileen Ford, a former stylist who was operating out of her father’s law office, taking calls for four top models (among them Dorian Leigh) at $75 a month.
Recalls Carole McCarlson, a Ford model who worked frequently for the Arbuses up to the 1950s: “As soon as I’d come out of the dressing room, maybe in one of those satin suits and awful pointy slippers, Diane and Allan would duck under the focusing cloth of their heavy eight-by-ten view camera and start whispering together conspiratorially. It got to be a big joke in the business—Diane and Allan huddling under the focusing cloth—because, no matter how many people you get under that cloth, only one person can click the shutter. I had the feeling they were playing a game—waiting for me to do something surprising. They’d egg me on—I’d strike various poses. Sometimes I’d feel like a dancing dog. Then Allan would shout, ‘Hold it!’ and I’d remain motionless for what seemed like hours—I’d often have to count to a hundred and twenty before they clicked. Then they’d pop up from the cloth and Allan would always say to Diane, ‘Well, what do you think, girl?’ and then they’d go off and confer in a corner.”
Sometimes he’d shoot half a session and she’d shoot the other half, and when the models were gone, they’d take photographs of each other. The models often gossiped about their behavior. No other husband-and-wife photography team worked the way they did—so tenderly, so closely, in complete collaboration. Not Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel (and Lillian Bassman had married Paul Himmel when she was very young); not Leslie and Frances Gill, nor the Radkais.
Paul Radkai was a top fashion photographer, but his wife, Karen, was just beginning, and she often annoyed the models by insisting they pose free for her after they’d done a sitting for her husband. “She was building up her portfolio for Vogue and she wanted to use top professionals,” Dorian Leigh says.
While Diane and Allan knew the Radkais and Lillian Bassman (who saw their portfolio when she was art director of Junior Bazaar), they did not spend time with them or with any photographers, for that matter.
“We weren’t a very friendly bunch,” reports Francesco Scavullo, who had just begun to photograph for the fashion magazines in 1947. He recalls, “Diane had the most terrible teeth—funny-looking little brown teeth—odd for someone so young and otherwise attractive. She and Allan always kept to themselves.” Scavullo adds, “Fashion photographers have always been unfriendly to each other because we’re all basically after the same job.”
He recalls that the only photographer in the forties who gave parties for other photographers was the highly original George Piatt Lynes. Celebrated for his portraits of Gertrude Stein and Somerset Maugham (gazing longingly at a male nude), Lynes also did surrealistic, almost hallucinatory fashion shots, experimenting with bizarre poses, offbeat props, shadowy lighting. Lynes destroyed most of his fashion work before his death in 1955 because he secretly despised fashion. He believed that those in it were interested only in the immediate effect of creating something that would reflect the present—the now.
Diane and Allan felt that way about fashion, too, but they didn’t voice their dissatisfaction. Instead, along with the Russeks account, they began shooting a series of one-column ads for Bonwit Teller. (Robert Frank and Louis Faurer were shooting Bonwit ads then, too.) Barbara Lamb, who was assistant ad director for Bonwit, recalls: “Diane always wore beige on beige and spoke in a whisper. Allan was so considerate—he’d run out and get me a container of chocolate-chip ice cream in the mornings. For some reason, chocolate-chip ice cream cured my hangovers.”
According to Betty Dorso, a model turned boutique owner, “Everybody in fashion drank.” After a shooting, the models and photographers would go into P. J. Clarke’s and down lethal martinis and there’d be a lot of dashing to the bathroom while cigarettes smoked in the ashtrays, and then around midnight everyone would go on to jam sessions where musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Lester Young were playing. And on Friday nights there would be wild car rides out to the Hamptons. “It took hours—no freeways then,” Dorso says, “so along the way we’d stop at some roadside bar and get plastered. It was a miracle we never got into any accidents—we were always drunk, always laughing. Postwar New York was golden and exciting and affluent…”
The Arbuses did not join in the merrymaking at P.J.’s or the Hamptons. They didn’t drink or smoke—they were considered by everyone who knew them a shy young couple who seemed almost symbiotically close. In fact, strangers frequently mistook them for brother and sister, since they did bear a striking physical resemblance—they were roughly the same height and had thick, wavy hair and identical watchful expressions. For a while a rumor persisted in the fashion business that Diane and Allan Arbus were blood relations—first cousins who’d fallen passionately in love and married in spite of family opposition. That story got started because Russeks president Max Weinstein’s wife’s maiden name was Bertha Arbus (her brother was Allan’s father). It was also incorrectly assumed that Weinstein was a member of the Russeks clan because he headed the store and was therefore Diane and Allan’s grandfather. In truth, he was Allan’s, not Diane’s, uncle, but no blood relative at all. Another incorrect assumption was that Diane was so rich she and Allan didn’t have to work. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She and Allan never received any financial help from her father, and throughout their marriage—particularly in the early years—they were always worried about money.
Neither the Russeks nor the Bonwit account was very lucrative (Bonwit paid only $50 a column), so Diane and Allan would periodically take turns going from advertising agency to fashion magazine with their portfolio of photographs in the hope of getting more assignments. (Art Kane, then an art director, says, “They reminded me of two little mice scurrying around and acting furtive.”) Afterward Diane might describe her adventures on Madison Avenue to one of their new friends, a lanky young photographer named Bob Meservey from New Hampshire. He was earning $21 a week as Ferdinand Fonssagrives’ assistant. Meservey says that, despite her shyness, Diane was starting to be quite an anecdotist. “Actually, Allan would act out the stories and Diane would narrate them,” he says. “She sounded like the explorer Stanley describing his adventures in Africa. Diane could make a documentary out of going to the corner deli for a quart of milk.”
Finally in January 1947 the Arbuses got an appointment to see twenty-six-year-old Tina Fredericks, the youngest art director ever at Condé Nast. (Tina was to become one of Diane’s closest friends.) “Diane and Allan came into my office at Glamour and there was hardly any fashion in their portfolio,” she says. The only photograph she can remember was “of a cracked ceiling with a lightbulb hanging from it.” Nevertheless, after talking with them, she decided that they both had a sense of style and taste, and she passed on their book to her boss, Alexander Liberman, now a legend in fashion journalism (as Condé Nast’s supreme editorial director, he oversees Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, House and Garden, Self, and the new Vanity Fair).
As Liberman remembers it, the Arbus portfolio was full of rigid images, moody double exposures, a kind of affected artiness that was characteristic of the late forties, but he felt that a few of the photographs showed “a flair—a talent for observation.” He told Mrs. Fredericks to give them some work.
Their first assignment for Glamour, published in May of 1947, was entitled “The New Sweater Is a Long Story.” For it they shot sweaters—striped cardigans, chenille pullovers, bouclé turtlenecks—in close-ups of the neck, arm, and so forth. “It was difficult to lay out, but it was effective,” Mrs. Fredericks says.
Their next assignment was less successful because they photographed a dozen shirtwaist dresses in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, but from such a distance that the models looked like stick figures and you couldn’t see the clothes. Fredericks had them reshoot it and it was better.
From then on Diane and Allan worked steadily for Glamour magazine, and the cramped Condé Nast offices in the Graybar Building on Lexington Avenue became like a second home. Before they got their own place, they would shoot assignments in the Voguestudios—pages and pages of accessories: scarves, dark glasses, purses, gloves. They photographed ruffled lingerie and extraordinary sequined hats. Once they photographed rainbow-bright bathing suits against a backdrop of painted clouds. Afterward they might drop by the art department to show off their contact prints. “They were so well liked, those two,” says Miki Denhoff, another art director there. “They were so in love, so interdependent.”
Eventually they shot covers for Glamour and beauty features on location in the Caribbean and the Hamptons. They became adept at arranging groups of models—models on bleachers, models draped around phone booths. They liked everybody “in action”—models in bouffant Jonathan Logan dresses playing Ping-Pong or powdering their noses in the spacious, mirrored ladies’ lounge of the Plaza Hotel.
The Condé Nast booking department complained about how expensive the Arbus sittings were because Diane and Allan worked so slowly and carefully that the sessions took hours, sometimes days, and the model fees ran way up. “But the results were worth it,” Tina Fredericks says, “even though we fought a lot. We would disagree over the concept of a layout and then would behave as if they were doing me a favor if they ended up shooting it my way.” But she enjoyed working with them “because they were so creative and such perfectionists—slaving over the smallest detail to get it right.”
At home their collaboration was just as intense—it was almost a way of surviving. They were like twins, sharing secrets, forbidden pleasures, little indulgences. And they did everything together—even cooked meals together. Rick Fredericks, Tina’s husband, who was a reporter on the New York Times, thought they were “like kids acting out a storybook marriage. The whole thing didn’t seem quite for real. They would hold hands constantly and then Diane would bat her eyes—at Allan and then at me. She was a great one for batting her eyes at men and she could be very seductive—whispering to you almost conspiratorially in her little-girl voice. I found her quite manipulative.” There were other occasions when she refused to speak at all. When Allan was out of the room and Rick would try to talk with her, she would stare him down, leaving him feeling exceedingly uncomfortable.
Their central fact was the marriage itself. “It seemed—in 1947-48—unshakable,” Betty Dorso says. Diane and Allan complemented each other, backed each other up. Diane would tell people what a great fashion photographer Allan was turning into, and Allan would talk about Diane’s mystical way of seeing. He was always encouraging her to take photographs on her own—long before anyone else. Diane gave him credit for that. “He was my first teacher,” she would say.
He cared for her, watched over her, seemed to dominate and almost guard her. “Sometimes he seemed more at ease when he was away from her,” Rick Fredericks says, “although it was obvious he doted on her.” For a long time their collaboration was on one level a matter of survival.
As with many couples, it seemed a marriage of opposites: each needed what the other had. Diane was a shadowy creature—slow-moving, receptive, given to protracted fits of daydreaming. Allan, on the contrary, was brisk, rational, organized, anxious. The life they envisioned for themselves would ideally be full of exotic new experiences which they would somehow collaborate to bring into being. Already they had created a visually pleasing setting in their little home; the West 70th Street railroad flat was immaculate and painted all white—walls, floors, furniture. “Your eyes opened up when you entered the Arbus apartment,” May Eliot says. And Diane’s artistic clutter stood out—the Henry James novel she might be reading; the wrinkled brown paper bags she insisted on using instead of purses because she loved the color, shape, and texture of paper bags. You could stuff so much into a paper bag—copper pennies found on the sidewalk, shells from the beach, an old green bottle, weirdly formed rocks. So many objects to finger and stroke and dream over…
But sometimes it must have been exasperating, not her clutter but her lethargy, her inexplicable melancholia. When they weren’t photographing, she might withdraw into a depression and sit dazedly in the apartment for hours. Her black moods came and went, but she fought them, rarely giving in to despair in front of her daughter, Doon, or her goddaughter, May. In fact, she usually hid her depressions from most people; only with Allan would she let down her guard, and then after a while he would gently tell her to take their portfolio up to Condé Nast or that it was time to buy groceries—anything to focus her concentration elsewhere. “Allan would get very upset by Diane’s depressions,” her sister, Renée, says. “He was pulled down by them and he didn’t want to be.”
To raise his spirits, when he relaxed with their friends he would often do imitations of David Nemerov walking ducklike around Russeks, or he’d tell stories about his war experiences in China and Burma in his deep, mellifluous voice and describe the strange types he’d met, from English officers to spies, and then he’d create entirely new characters. “He could be very, very funny,” Rick Fredericks says.
But he had his dark moods, too, which caused him to go off and play the clarinet compulsively—for hours; and then the music he made, whether it was classical or jazz, sounded like an appeal. He yearned to act—to be in the movies; he talked about this to everybody. As time went on, he felt increasingly frustrated because he was certain he’d never fulfill his dreams.
As for Diane, dreaming remained her best defense against awareness. Part of her existence was spent rearranging her expectations—adjusting what she saw to what she hoped to see and feel. Her inner reality was her most valuable possession—it constantly challenged the assumptions of the world outside. On her own she led an exceptionally rich life of the mind. She read widely—Jung, Willa Cather, Kafka, Emily Dickinson. She saw movies, theater, attended concerts, went to galleries—asked a thousand questions, few of them ordinary. But mostly, Alex Eliot says, “she spent her time digging people—digging her friends. She really looked and responded deeply to everybody and everything around her.” Alex’s daughter, May, adds, “I have never met anyone who relished life the way Diane did.” Often she would wander through museums and not look at the art; instead, she would scrutinize the spectators. Or if she did look at a painting or a photograph, she would sometimes think (as she said later), “That’s not the way it is…this is fantastic, but there’s something wrong. I guess it’s my own sense of what a fact is. Something will come up in me very strongly of No, a terrific No. It’s a totally private feeling I get of how different it really is.”
But in those days she had little confidence in herself and she would rarely voice her own thoughts; instead, she might parrot Allan’s opinions and he would order her to “Speak up, girl!”
Still, to her goddaughter, May Eliot, “Diane was like a new breath.” Her parents’ fights were “growing oppressive, so whenever Diane and Allan came over for dinner, I was joyful.” She might share a meal with the four adults and then, before she fell asleep, “Diane would sit on my bed and talk in a husky whisper as she carefully and gently ran her forefinger along each eyebrow, from the center of my forehead out, and then down my nose and along my lips, from one end to the other. Then she would quietly leave the room. I can still remember the feeling of her hand some thirty years later.”
The Eliots and the Arbuses were inseparable. They saw each other constantly, spending most weekends together, occasionally having dinner in Greenwich Village with Robert Lowell and Jean Stafford. Or they might drive up to Garrison, and picnic at Dick’s Folly, a strange shell of a medieval castle which Anne Eliot’s grandfather had started building for his wife in the 1920s but left unfinished. The crumbling edifice hung over a bluff overlooking the Hudson River and the Palisades. “We spent many lovely afternoons there,” Alex recalls, “advising each other, teasing each other, criticizing life and art.” They were positive that they said things in a way they had never been said before. And their marriages seemed tied together—bound up in their friendship, which they kept likening to a table with four legs. “And if one leg is removed, the friendship is destroyed.” May Eliot remembers tiptoeing into the Arbus living room in the evenings and “there was this large double bed—a mattress, actually—on the floor, and my parents and Diane and Allan would be sprawled on it, talking happily and peacefully.”
To Alex their “four-way friendship was extremely complex, rough-edged, but on the whole profoundly satisfying…in spite of the subsequent pain.” And for a while the friendship must have had the radiant quality he attributed to it—he almost singlehandedly held them together with his booming energy and charm; he served as a catalyst, drawing them out—applauding Diane’s ideas, Allan’s need “to know everything about everything.” He saw only the best in them and only the best in his wife, “the golden Anne,” although she was increasingly driven and angry over her frustrated writing ambitions. She would drink and fall into despair and he could do little to comfort her. Often she would take their daughter, May, and escape to her grandmother’s farm in Massachusetts until the depression passed. But her pain was such she had little interest in Alex’s career. In 1947, when he replaced Walker Evans as art editor of Time, it was Diane rather than Anne whom he first showed around the office, introducing her to his new friends James Agee and Bob Lax. And Allan would drive him out of town on some of his first assignments. Gradually Anne began complaining to Diane that she felt neglected; that Alex was getting so caught up in his job—interviewing the likes of Salvador Dali—that he wasn’t paying enough attention to her. She felt “left out” and she wasn’t at ease with most of the journalists he knew. So she clung to the Arbuses and depended on them, and they kept her entertained and occupied and were always very gentle with her. And Alex was so grateful he told everybody about the wonderful friendship they shared—he couldn’t get over it. He would usually add that he and Diane were like “brother and sister”; when they were together in a room, they would always go off by themselves and have an intense conversation. Every so often she would absentmindedly stroke his wrist.
In all the years they’d known each other, they’d never totally consummated their fierce attraction—even while Allan was away in the Army during 1944 and Diane posed nude for Alex as he completed a great many sketches and paintings because “God, she was beautiful! Beautiful breasts, shoulders so beautifully shaped…but we were too inhibited. And besides, we were both married to people we cared about.”
Over the Christmas holidays in 1947 the Eliots and the Arbuses traveled through the snowy New England countryside, stopping at an inn somewhere in Massachusetts. Before they retired for the night, Diane, clad in long red underwear, performed a little dance for her husband and friends. “Which part of my body do you like best?” she demanded. “Allan likes my legs best.”
“I was still madly in love with her,” Alex says.