BY 1950, ALEX SAYS, “Diane was pulling away from me.” She was committed to Allan, and the affair was incidental to her life, an experiment, and she didn’t bother to examine the relationship except in those terms; such things didn’t interest her. It was enough that when they were alone together her trancelike spirit might be suffused with a trembling vitality, an uncanny strength, and these occasions belonged to another plane—a friendly, enjoyable-enough plane that lay between their oh-so-different marriages.
Then they stopped being lovers. There was never any discussion, it was simply understood. Was she bored? Exhausted? Anxious in some way? Alex never knew, but he remembers their last time together and he insists he was not hallucinating. “It was late afternoon. We were on a high floor, so the blinds were drawn; the light was eerie. I was gazing down at her when suddenly her face became a death’s head. The flesh decayed and fell away from her cheeks and I distinctly saw the shape of her skull. And the eye sockets—black hollows behind those glorious green eyes. I was terrified and lay there not moving. Diane didn’t move either. I think she must have known what was happening. After a few moments the flesh swam back and covered her skull, forehead, and nose. My heart pounded very loudly on the pillow as I watched her hair—I used to call it smoky hair—burst out thickly and cover her bald head.”
From then on Alex threw himself into his job at Time; he interviewed Picasso and Matisse in the south of France—he ground out cover stories, among them “Photography, the Number One Hobby in America.” Subsequently he and his wife decided to separate and divorce, but “Diane had nothing to do with our break-up.” Anne had been frail and ill for years; now her drinking and depressions had increased and she was spending more and more time in hospitals.*
After her mother and father separated, nine-year-old May Eliot boarded with various family friends—among them the Arbuses, with whom she lived for six months during 1950. She remembers very little about the period except that she was “fat and clumsy” and Diane and Allan were exceedingly gentle with her. She noticed they no longer sprawled on the mattress in the living room with her parents; now the two couples no longer saw each other and separately they often wore frowns on their faces, and Diane in particular seemed eerily detached. But she took being May’s godmother very seriously. “She was always there for me, a nurturing, magical force.” May grew up maintaining a closeness to both her father and her mother, but she always loved Diane in a special way. “We never referred to her affair with my dad, but it was like an unspoken connection between us. And I couldn’t hold it against her, because I knew she could never do anything intrinsically wrong. She was a wonderfully free spirit who had her own code of morality—she would never consciously hurt anybody. My mother stayed bitter, though, because she and Diane had been really good friends. She had liked Diane, so she was very hurt.”
May was “unhappy” at the Arbuses’. She felt uprooted, lost, cut off from her family, her home. Every so often she tried to express some of the anger and confusion that bubbled inside her to Diane. “Afterwards she would always say something soothing. I invariably felt better after talking to her,” May says.
Diane and Allan were listening to Alex a lot, too. After only a short hiatus he’d started dropping by their apartment again.
He could not stop seeing Diane and Allan—not completely. As far as he was concerned, the affair had been a “minor aspect” of their friendship, although “inevitable” from his point of view. But “we were creative souls in the making,” he would write some thirty years later—“we merged together now and then…and loved each other truly, not just with an itch.” Still, meetings proved uncomfortable for a while because “Allan seemed angry and he hadn’t seemed angry while the affair was going on.” Usually when he was with them Alex would lie on the couch talking about his latest Time assignments or the future of his daughter, May. Every so often he would start to laugh. “That was my way in those days—I tried not to let anything get to me—I laughed because I was so miserable and confused.” For diversion Diane and Allan would take photographs of him looking very hung over. Alex used one rather sinister close-up, blurry with cigarette smoke, on his first book jacket. “That’s the way Diane and Allen saw me then—as a boozer and a carouser, which I guess I was.”
The following year he met Jane Winslow, and she convinced him to stop drinking and smoking. “Actually, she changed my life.” Jane was a striking, dark-haired, self-contained, twenty-one-year-old researcher at Time who’d lived all over Europe. “She came into my office to translate something from the Spanish and I fell—literally—head over heels in love with her. By that I mean I fell smack in front of her onto the floor, I was so hung over and smitten when we met.”
However, Alex didn’t ask Jane out until his separation from Anne was legal. Then he invited her to dinner and they talked all night. The following morning, after breakfast at Reuben’s, Alex called Diane excitedly from a pay phone. “I’ve found another woman I can love!” he shouted. Diane’s reaction sounded a bit subdued, but she urged him to bring Jane over immediately—she wanted to meet her. Nevertheless, Jane made Alex put the meeting off for a while. “All Alex had talked about that first night was Diane and Allan Arbus, Diane and Allan Arbus, and that he’d been in love with Diane, and that Allan was still in love with Diane, and that they shared this marvelous friendship. I knew I’d be coming into a very complicated situation and I wasn’t sure I could handle it.”
When they finally did meet, Jane’s initial impression of Diane was “disorganized—ambiguous—undefined. She was twenty-seven then, but she spoke and dressed like a little girl. I don’t think she was really close to anyone. But she was inordinately sexy.”
After they became friends, Diane confided that she had been momentarily shaken when Alex said he’d found another woman he could love. “It was so nice having two men in love with me,” she told Jane. She was rather sorry it had to stop.
(It isn’t surprising that in the 1960s one of Diane’s favorite movies turned out to be Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, since Jules and Jim are in love with the same woman, Catherine—a mesmerizing creature played by Jeanne Moreau. Catherine is an untamed spirit, determined to live and love freely, but using every female wile to gain advantage, to increase her power position. Catherine suffers and feels ambivalent about being “free.” Only the love relationships she establishes and dominates are correct. She can leave men she loves who love her, but if they leave her, she feels abandoned and destroyed.)
In the beginning, whenever Jane went with Alex to the Arbuses’, they would take pictures of her, compliment her on her beauty, and urge her to become a fashion model, “which I had no interest in being.” She knew they were trying to make her feel at ease, and she liked them—“they were so bright and attractive”—but she grew uncomfortable whenever they referred to their past with Alex, or repeated stories about “Diane and Alex” or “Diane and Allan and Alex and Anne.” “That part of Alex’s life was over,” Jane says. “I wanted to forget it and get on with our life. We were madly in love. I kept telling Alex, ‘Forget the past and live in the now!’ Eventually we did, but the Arbuses—at first—seemed more interested in reliving the Sturm una Drang of their shared experiences with Alex than in our new happiness. I think they resented me for a while because now I possessed Alex and they didn’t.”
Jane adds that, try as she would, she could never fit into the old friendship, “mainly because I refused to be slotted in as Anne had—as the fourth leg of that table. Diane and Allan and even Alex wanted to keep sharing in the friendship—have everything out in the open. They wanted to repeat the extended-family bit with me—well, I didn’t. I didn’t want to share everything.”
Eventually Diane and Allan accepted Jane’s position, but they never stopped asking personal questions. Diane in particular was exceedingly curious and nothing seemed to shock her—she was always interested in “How do you feel?” about everything. She and Allan appeared to share their thoughts, but they actually revealed very little about themselves as a couple. Only once Diane commented that during their quarrels Allan could become “cold, unshakable, tight-lipped, whereas I get hysterical and fierce like I’ll try anything to get my way.” But intimacy is mysterious and no one can prejudge a marriage, and the Arbus marriage was based on secrecy, as everybody’s private life is. At that point they seemed anxious to preserve their privacy, and to some extent they did.
Occasionally the couples played a game: what kind of an animal are you? And Diane said she’d be a cat, and when it came to Jane, she declared she’d be all the animals—because we have all animals in us: we are greedy as pigs, passionate as lions; we’re foxy, we’re mousy; we can be swift as gazelles. That silenced everybody, and for a while they stopped playing the animal game.
With Jane in the picture, the intimacy between Diane and Allan and Alex shifted. Diane moved closer to Allan again, and Jane and Alex became very much a couple, and a new friendship was created which existed on a new level. It was warier. Since they didn’t “share everything,” the emotional investment was not so enormous.
* Anne Eliot died in 1981 after a long illness.