AROUND 1947, CHEECH MCKENSIE* met Diane. “I was a John Robert Powers model, but not a very good one. I was walking down West 70th Street one day on a photographer’s go-see, and there on the other side of the street was this young woman with the most extraordinary presence about her—she seemed haunted. She had wild, startling eyes and she was carrying a paper bag instead of a purse and she filled the space around herself with an almost palpable mood. Anyhow, we both stopped and looked long and hard at each other and then we walked on. And I thought, ‘I’ve got to meet her!’ And then I came to this beat-up brownstone—I climbed the stairs and rang the bell and a man answered. He was wearing a freshly pressed, very white shirt and slacks—turned out to be Allan Arbus, the photographer. I gave him my portfolio…he barely looked at it, he said, ‘You have a funny expression on your face.’ And I started telling him about this extraordinary woman I’d passed on the street—didn’t know who she was, but she had this look—and then suddenly the door opens and Diane appears and I think excitedly, ‘That’s her!’ and Allan says rather irritatedly, ‘I thought you were going out,’ and Diane stares at me and says, ‘I just decided to come back.’ We became friends instantly. It was as if we had always known one another. We saw each other almost every day for the next eleven years. Our friendship was metaphysical, rapturous. We were all things to each other. We were mothers to each other, we were daughters—sometimes we were little girls giggling in the attic, other times we were wise old women talking about our men, our kids. ‘You’re my best friend,’ she’d say solemnly. We addressed each other as ‘Grace.’ ‘How you doin’, Grace?’ we’d say, and then we’d laugh uncontrollably. Diane drew the story of my life out of me and we exchanged secrets, ideas, memories. She was never judgmental about me or anybody or anything.”
A native from the farmlands of Ohio, Cheech was twenty-eight, a brilliant, perverse, slender woman with a dazzling smile and a fiercely determined manner. Cheech painted, designed costumes, composed operas; she didn’t shave her legs or under her arms (neither did Diane) and wore cast-off clothes (quilted jackets, long, patched skirts). Often she and Diane would spend hours discussing what they’d read—everything from The Little Prince to The Brothers Karamazov.
Cheech lived a hand-to-mouth existence in an abandoned house on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village; she painted the staircase banisters every color of the rainbow. Nobody knew how she supported herself, but even when she was in desperate financial straits she refused to write home for money. When she couldn’t support herself modeling; she found odd jobs. “It was nobody’s business how I paid the rent, I just did,” she says. “And the I Ching, the Taoist Book of Changes, helped me.”
Cheech wanted to be an artist. She wanted to live fully and freely and rapturously, slowly savoring each moment. But if she missed something, okay, she’d get around to it in the “next life.” She always did what she wanted to, not what was expected of her. She knew almost at once that the people close to Diane, like Allan and Alex, might think she was immature or selfish or even a little crazy, but that didn’t matter. It never occurred to her to change her behavior, her way of dress, her life style in order to win approval. And Diane loved these qualities.
Among the other regulars at the Arbus apartment in the mid-forties was Robert Meservey, his then-wife, Pati Hill, a fragile but outspoken blonde from Kentucky who was briefly a model. When Pati and Diane weren’t together, they’d chatter on the phone for hours; they were both keeping voluminous journals for “self-exploration.” Diane envied Pati, who was exactly her age (twenty-six), because she seemed so free; she had no responsibilities and did exactly as she wished. She and Meservey soon divorced (amicably) and Pati went on to write a highly praised novel, The Ninth Circle, about her Southern gothic childhood.
Cheech did not get along with Pati even though she had known her long before Diane; she thought Pati was “affected in her cut-off blue jeans.” Cheech even disapproved sometimes of Allan, “so trim and logical and niggly-piggly about everything including Karen Homey, and he never stopped playing his damn clarinet!”
As for Alex Eliot, Cheech found him “fat, sloppy, pompous—a buffoon.” He was full of ideas about the latest American artists—he bragged he’d written about Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock before any other art critic. “He tried to upstage Allan at every turn to attract Diane’s attention.” Cheech didn’t like the way “he’d mention to me that Diane didn’t wear any underpants—you could see that if she stood in a certain light. What difference did that make to anything?”
Nobody measured up to Diane, as far as Cheech was concerned. “She never asked for anything for herself or expected anything from anybody. Diane was exemplary—a saint. She was the most intensely curious person I’ve ever met—only interested in the essential nature of reality. Her curiosity drove her into unknown areas. And the more developed her curiosity became, the more acute, the more complicated and suggestive the world became to her.
“She had a funny attitude about herself—she was very much the loner. I related to that. One of the few times she cried was when she told me how in summer camp all her friends had been bitten by leeches and she wasn’t. ‘Not even leeches bite me,’ she cried. She still felt immune to life—overly protected and insulated from it by Allan. Ultimately, of course, she was bitten by many leeches…”
Cheech eventually became something of an irritant in the Arbus household: “Maybe, because I could see that everything was not always sweetness and light.” She grew so possessive in her friendship with Diane and so argumentative with everyone that Allan periodically banished her from the apartment and forbade Diane to see her. But the two women would speak surreptitiously over the phone and then meet secretly in Central Park. “We would take her daughter roller-skating.” Eventually Allan would ask Cheech back to the apartment for supper and tell her he really liked her and that from then on things were going to be okay, “and they would be for a while, and then we’d get into some violent disagreement and the whole thing would begin all over again.”
One time in the park Diane told Cheech she was thinking of going to bed with Alex Eliot and asked for her opinion. “I told her not to. Later she would complain about Alex. ‘What does he want from me?’ she would ask. As if she didn’t know.”
Sometimes Cheech and Diane sneaked off to swim at Coney Island. “We were fearless—we’d swim far out, breast-stroking toward the horizon,” Cheech says. “The ocean embraced us—never menaced us. We could feel the electricity in the water coursing around our bodies.” Afterward they’d sit on the beach and they’d watch the crowds. “I don’t know whether I introduced Diane to the idea that Coney Island was like some huge living room. Everybody in stages of undress. Gypsies, Chinese eating pizza, Jewish matrons playing cards. Couples forgot their masks—you could really see their faces as they greased themselves under the glare of the sun. Tattered umbrellas draped with bedspreads—bathing suits held together with safety pins… And the wind would whip the bedspreads and the towels and orange rinds and dogs ran and barked in the waves and radios played noisily…
“There was this woman Diane and I always noticed—a big black lady who wandered around the beach calling herself God. She wore a tattered Army uniform—one of her breasts was exposed. And she would rant and orate and talk to the sky.”
Diane never got tired of watching her. She always had her camera with her and sometimes she’d focus it on the God woman…but mostly she stared at the water. According to Cheech, for all Diane’s shyness and gentleness, she had a deep sense of personal ambition; a feeling that there was something very special inside her that had to get out.
* “Cheech McKensie” is a pseudonym.