IN 1950 THE TWO couples and Tina and Rick Fredericks spent the month of June together in the Adirondacks. Allan wanted to go to Lake George because his idol, Stieglitz, had summered there with Georgia O’Keeffe for years.
“There was a lot of traveling from island to island,” Rick Fredericks says. “We paddled around in canoes—slept in sleeping bags on bunches of rocks. My back was killing me.”
Alex remembers somebody losing their car keys and Jane diving into the lake over and over again in an unsuccessful effort to retrieve them. And Diane, fighting a depression, made a great effort to get close to Jane. She wore a strapless bathing suit identical to Jane’s and they went swimming together and afterward they might lie on the sand next to Alex and try to talk. Much later she wrote about Jane’s jealousy and her own and how well she understood it because in the past she’d always counted on Alex to cheer her up when she was low, but now that he was in love with Jane she couldn’t count on him, and at times like that she wished she were Jane.
She was relieved when Cheech arrived so she could tell her that Alex was far more desirable now that he was unattainable—she had never thought she cared that much, but ever since he’d fallen in love with somebody else she suddenly cared terribly! Cheech told her, in effect, “This too shall pass…” She’d come up with a copy of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, which she urged everybody to read. She talked endlessly about the myth of the goddess, “the muse, the mother of all living, the female spider, whose embrace is death.” “I thought Diane was a goddess,” Cheech says.
Later that summer Bob Meservey visited with a new girl, followed by Richard Bellamy, a soft-cheeked, scruffy young man of twenty who was later called a “visionary” by his friends when he founded the Green Gallery and dedicated it to Pop Art. Bellamy’s passion was art—he was then sweeping floors in museums just so he could be around painting and sculpture. In the evenings he would go to the Cedar Bar and listen to de Kooning and Harold Rosenberg argue, and he haunted the Hansa then on East 12th Street so he could absorb the disparate styles of Jane Wilson, a water-colorist, and Richard Stankowitz, who created junk sculpture. Diane went to many of these shows with Bellamy, and to others at the Myers, which was showing Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers, both of whom were doing figurative paintings in a loosely Abstract Expressionist manner. Painting had a residual effect on Diane’s photography; she would ultimately experiment with painterly effects like Impressionism’s soft focus, Cubism’s linear composition, and corny symbolism (which she and Allan used in some of their fashion work).
She studied portrait painting—especially the canvases of Goya. She liked his looming giants, his hunchbacked dwarfs and demons. Everything she studied or thought about either fell away or sank into her austere, self-effacing style. She would always arrange her subjects like a painter and make them hold a pose for hours. Because of this, her contact prints showed relatively little variety.
In August, Alex gave Diane and Allan another chapter of his novel to read. “Yes, it was the novel I’d been working on since 1947 about a brother and sister’s incestuous desires.”
Allan read it, but said the book made him uncomfortable particularly in the chapter where the sister masturbates.
Diane murmured that she disagreed; she thought it was an extremely accurate description of masturbation and she didn’t feel uncomfortable with it at all.
In the fall, life continued as usual. Diane and Allan photographed fashions in Madison Square Garden; they photographed college clothes in Central Park and bathing suits in the Caribbean. On Saturday nights she and Allan would join in two-room charade games at an actor friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village. Diane would often bring along Stanley Kubrick, then twenty-one years old and a fledgling still-photographer for Look magazine. Broadway producer Mort Gottlieb, who participated in the charade game, says “the evenings were long and very lively—devoted to acting out the titles of hit shows like Kiss Me, Kate—Edward, My Son—Death of a Salesman.”
Occasionally Diane went on assignment by herself with Glamour features writer Marguerite Lamkin. Once they planned to do a feature on couples’ bathrooms; they eventually abandoned the project, but while they were on it, Diane “nosed around” people’s Johns, noting the details she might photograph—the flowering gardens that grew in some showers, the libraries of old magazines stacked by certain toilets, and the soaps, creams, nail polish, sleeping pills, vitamins, bubble bath, suppositories, diaphragms, rubbers, cologne, and witch hazel crowded onto cabinet shelves. “The contents of somebody’s bathroom is like reading their biography,” Diane said.
Once in a while she would do portraits for Glamour’s editorial page “if we really pressed her,” Tina Fredericks says; “she was so shy.” Frances Gill remembers attending a college-issue promotion luncheon and “Diane was darting around the tables taking pictures of the students and her finger was going ‘click! click! click!’ on the shutter of her camera—’click! click! click!’ ”
She did things like this in her spare time; usually she was too busy assisting Allan. But she liked “hanging around” the Condé Nast offices because by now she knew most of the editors there, as well as everybody else from secretaries to art directors.
“It was a protective, sheltered world at Condé Nast,” Kate Lloyd recalls. Lloyd was features editor of Glamour then and she says, “We were insulated the way most monthly magazines were—a world within a world; everything ahead of time—Christmas-in-July kind of thing—and the perks that went with the media: free theater tickets, free bottles of scotch. None of us was aware of issues—controversial stuff like the electrocution of the Rosenbergs or the Alger Hiss trial were ignored. Most everything we dealt with was fluff.”
At the office the women—whether they were art directors or fashion editors—called themselves “girls,” and they were patronized by the men, and everybody did a lot of flirting. “That was the way to get the job done. When in doubt, we acted giggly instead of authoritative,” Kate continues. “Most of us dressed in our mothers’ cast-off Hattie Carnegie suits, and we always wore white gloves, and Diane fitted perfectly into the white-glove syndrome. I was astonished when she surfaced with all those freak pictures. She was as bland and colorless as we all were back then.”
Still, there were undercurrents, because Diane and Kate and Tina Fredericks were all working wives in the era of the “housewife heroine.” So they felt constantly torn. “It was the subtext of our lives,” Tina says. “At the office we’d be making decisions, taking creative responsibility for things. At home we were susceptible and passive and dependent on our men. It was confusing.”
But they never talked about this to each other. Life was more private then, less examined. Isolated by their loyalties to their marriages, these women never confided that they were secretly a little embarrassed about having careers; secretly scared that they might lose their femininity. “So we worked doubly hard at home to compensate,” Kate Lloyd says.
It didn’t help that their independent, adventuresome movie heroines—Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn—were fast disappearing from the screen to be replaced by the kittenish Doris Day. It didn’t help that magazines such as McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal were publishing articles and short stories showing women in the act of renouncing their careers because they’d discovered that all they really wanted to be was “Mrs. So-and-So.” It was such a disquieting theory that in 1951 Tina Fredericks devised an article featuring working wives in Glamour entitled “I Love You Because… eight happy couples define the special quality that makes this one the one.” Tina, Diane, Kate Lloyd, fashion editor Winnie Campbell and their husbands were interviewed. Paradoxically, all the couples—except for Kate—got divorced within the next decade.
When she photographed them, Frances Gill remembers, Diane and Allan seemed self-contained and quite happy. “I captured them at a moment when they were very close.” Next to their portrait—an arresting one in which they resemble clones—are the following quotes:
ALLAN: [I love you because] you have humility and dignity and are above competition.
DIANE: [I love you because] your actions are more precise and simpler and happier than other people’s.
And under the quotes this statement: “Diane was thirteen when she and Allan met and she was impressed with his sophistication. ‘He talked over the phone with no hands.’ Allan noticed she was the boss’s daughter… they work together as photographers…. The Arbuses have been married nine years and have a seven-year-old daughter Doon.”
Diane was determined that Doon would receive all the encouragement and nurturing she had never had as a child. She treated Doon like a sister, an equal; there were few rules in the Arbus household, and Doon was allowed to run free.
When she was small, Diane took her almost every afternoon to Central Park, where they often would play games. Doon later wrote: “She would say to me, ‘I dare you to crawl between the legs of that man sitting on the bench, stand up and ask him where Central Park is.’ And I would go off and do it… And then I would challenge her. ‘I dare you to go up to that governess in the white uniform and ask her to lift you onto the swing.’ And we would roar with laughter over what we had made them think of us.”
For a while Doon decided she hated her name* and insisted on being called Billy. She would correct anyone who addressed her as Doon, and she would ask her mother over and over again, “Was I born a boy, Ma? Was I? Was I?” And Diane would be gentle and very loving with her.
At times she seemed almost intimidated by Doon’s radiant beauty and funny, energetic turn of mind. She rarely denied her anything; she gave her a tiny chair, desk, and easel for her bedroom. Doon had music and dance lessons. When she demanded a horse, Diane seriously considered it, even approaching her father for the money, but Mr. Nemerov said no. In school Doon was showing a marked writing talent and Diane bragged about that—and Allan was proud of her ability to clown and mimic.
May Eliot recalls “being scared of Doon, although she was younger than I was.” She remembers Doon saying in a threatening voice, “Stick ’em up!” “And I had no idea what she meant or why she was so angry at me.”
Allan used Doon as often as possible in their fashion settings—Doon in her Hopalong Cassidy costume can be seen galloping over the pages of Glamour circa 1947-9; and Doon riding with Santa Claus in a horse-and-buggy through Central Park. And then there was the time Diane appeared with Doon in a “Pretty Mothers” feature. Diane in profile, utterly serious, wearing a navy-blue dress, is posed opposite Doon in flowered pajamas perched on a tiny chair. She seems to be nibbling on her mother’s fingers.
In his off hours Allan took dozens of portraits of Diane and Doon together; mother and daughter possessed almost identical haunted moon-faces. A private subliminal knowledge seemed to flow between them in the photographs; each was the other’s mirror image—the other’s twin.
Abruptly, in the winter of 1951, Allan decided to leave New York and take Diane and Doon to Europe for a year. To anyone who asked why they were going so suddenly, he would reply that he and Diane were exhausted from the pressures of fashion photography and needed a break.
Meanwhile Alex Eliot remained ever present in their lives. He would drop by most evenings with Jane Winslow, whom he was planning to marry as soon as his divorce became final. The Arbuses seemed very pleased and the two couples joked and laughed about their futures; they appeared extremely compatible, even though occasionally Diane and Alex would still shut everybody else out while they carried on an intense conversation between themselves. Out of habit Diane had to get Alex’s reaction to her ideas and impressions. She didn’t see anything wrong in that and she never got a sense that anyone was uncomfortable when, say, she told Alex about her urge to photograph a tattooed lady in the Bronx and Alex encouraged her as he always encouraged her and Allan mixed cocktails very efficiently in the background.
Sometimes when the couples had dinner together, Allan would go over his carefully prepared plans for their trip to Italy, Spain, and France. Suddenly Alex had a “brainstorm.” They should photograph El Greco’s Toledo from that same hill—from the spot where El Greco painted it, stormclouds and all. And they could do it for Time because he could get them the assignment. The idea thrilled Diane—even more so when Alex came up with another possible assignment, also for Time. They should photograph the Matisse chapel in Vence, France, and he would convince his boss to send him and Jane along so they could research the captions. Allan did not seem very enthusiastic. He had planned their European year very carefully and this was not part of the plan. Diane was devastated.
Rick and Tina Fredericks knew none of this little drama when they gave the Arbuses a going-away party along with Leslie and Frances Gill, who were taking a vacation in Europe, too. “It was jolly,” Rick Fredericks says. “Lots of fashion editors milling around, like Geri Stutz, and my reporter friends from the Times.”
Alex and Jane didn’t appear, but nobody noticed because the crowd was too busy drinking and gossiping about the couples’ travel plans. Allan kept repeating their itinerary, adding they’d got a Vogue assignment from Alex Liberman to do in Paris—this would help pay for the trip. Diane stood silently beside him. “She had dark circles under her eyes and I was sure she was very ill,” Bob Meservey says. “She never said a word.” When anyone tried to find out how she was, Allan would answer all questions for her, explaining she was very, very tired. They were still arguing about whether or not to take the Time assignment, since Alex had gone ahead and suggested it to his bosses anyway.
The morning after the Fredericks’ party, in spite of the unspoken tension between them, Alex saw the Arbuses off on the boat. “They seemed in good spirits,” he says. Other friends who saw them off remember they seemed relieved to be getting away. It was Alex’s birthday, and as he left the cabin Diane slipped him a tiny gift—a box with a string hanging from it. “I think she made it herself,” he says. Clutching it to his breast, he ran down the gangplank and onto the dock so he could wave goodbye as the ship pulled up anchor. He started waving frantically to Diane and she kept gesturing from the railing to hold the box to his ear and pull the string. “Finally I did and a muppet-type voice piped, ‘Happy Birthday, Alex!’ I looked at Diane and I could tell she was giggling.”
The year abroad was a revelation to Diane because she learned so much about looking. All her impressions were sensory—noises, colors, textures, shapes, expressions, whirled around in her head. In Venice and Florence she took Doon with her while she wandered the streets, longing to explore every crumbling palace with her camera. The time spent in Spain was very rich for her, too, although she and Allan were unable to photograph Toledo—it just didn’t work. Instead they watched an unending series of El Greco faces pass beneath their hotel window in Barcelona.
In New York, Alex was trying to arrange for the Time assignment in Venice. Allan remained adamant; he would not accept it. Letters flew back and forth between the two couples—lively affectionate letters because they cared for each other in spite of the confusion and pain. And Allan held firm and by the time they reached France in August Diane had come to the conclusion that Allan had been right: they shouldn’t accept the Time assignment and it was better for them to be by themselves for a while. And they stopped arguing and grew close again.
And then Alex’s letter came saying that Time had turned down his idea for a picture story on Vence and the whole thing seemed pretty anticlimactic. They were relieved and traveled to Vence anyway and tried to photograph the Matisse chapel for themselves. Diane referred to it as looking like “God’s bathroom.”
She stayed in the chapel for hours, watching the nuns move silently up and down the aisles. Their rosaries clinked. Light filtered through the enormous stained-glass windows and onto the floor. Diane was struck by the difficulties of photographing empty space.
Years afterward, still fascinated by empty, silent spaces, she remembered her experience in Vence when a friend from Fieldston, Stewart Stern, took her to Tyrone Power’s grave and to the top of the Hollywood Hills. They ended up at a movie studio soundstage just before the sun went down. “Diane set her camera up and walked away from it,” Stewart Stern writes, “explaining that ‘a funny alchemy happens.’ The camera in its goofy way would see what she couldn’t. If she set it right and printed it right, it would make for her the picture of a mystery.”
Returning to Paris in August, Diane and Allan stayed with Doon in an apartment on the Boulevard Victor Hugo. They completed their fashion assignment for Vogue and dined at the Ritz with the Nemerovs, who were in town for the collections. Allan’s cousin Arthur Weinstein, who was living in Europe, joined them. He remembers David Nemerov being worried about the future of Russeks; the Philadelphia store was doing badly. He talked about it compulsively.
The Arbuses’ last stop was Rome in December of 1951. They rented a huge old villa on the Appian Way, “full of halls and a vineyard and an olive orchard and a housekeeper who has a voice so deep she sounds like the first creature blessed with human speech.” Diane got sore feet from walking around Rome, so in the evenings she would soak for hours in a hot tub. “I feel on the brink of such marvelous things,” she wrote.
When her feet healed, she went back into Rome proper and began photographing a lot—in the piazzas and along the Tiber—blurred pictures of child prostitutes and street urchins. Afterward she showed them to a few of her friends. “In them you can see Diane right there looking on very hard,” Alex says, “trying to know and understand her subjects.”
The Arbuses returned from Italy on the Ile de France in the late spring of 1952 and Bob Meservey met them at the boat because the Eliots were on their honeymoon in Mexico. “Diane still looked sick to me with dark circles under her eyes,” Meservey says. “But she said nothing about the way she felt.”
The following year she became pregnant, and carrying another baby seemed to please her. (She mentioned to Jane that she wanted “at least four children” but that Allan didn’t.) She seemed more relaxed, complacent. Years afterward she confided how much she loved the physical changes in her body—she didn’t even mind vomiting or headaches or getting bruised; physical sensations made her feel alive.
All the strange movements that take place in a woman’s body—the fact that a woman gives birth—seemed the most incredible and mysterious miracle to Diane. She found singular physical pleasure in being a woman, in touch with earthy, natural things like the cycles of the moon. “Maybe that’s why she loved the ocean so much,” Tina Fredericks says. She particularly enjoyed menstruating—when her womb cramped up, when warm, wet blood coursed between her thighs. (Later when she became well known, if she was on assignment photographing a news event at that time of month, she might suddenly declare with great pride, “I’ve got my period!” to the other—mostly male—photographers who were near her, clicking away or changing film. After a while her colleagues got used to such announcements, but she was disconcerting at first.)
Big with child, Diane felt close and loving toward her mother, Gertrude, who approved of the pregnancy and wanted her to have a larger family—at last they had something to talk about. Diane felt closer as well to Cheech and Pati Hill and Tina and a new friend, Bunny Sellers.
At some point she announced she was going to have natural childbirth; she wanted the experience, she said, and when her time came on April 16, 1954, she went through it gladly, saying afterward that bearing her second daughter, Amy, without anesthetic—wide awake—was the most grotesque and transcendental experience of her life. Amy was a round-faced, steady little baby, very different from the more mercurial Doon. “Amy is like Allan—not like me, thank God,” Diane told Tina Fredericks. “I’ll never have to worry about her.”
With another baby, the Arbuses needed a bigger place to live. David Nemerov was friendly with almost every judge, congressman, and bookie in New York, as well as Mayor Impelliteri; he not only helped find a triplex at 319 East 72nd Street which had originally belonged to the sculptor Paul Manship, he arranged with someone at City Hall to have the zoning in the building changed, which enabled “the kids” to both live and work there.
“The studio was magnificent,” May Eliot remembers. A living room two stories high with white walls, not much furniture—large cushions to sit on and a huge potted tree which gave one the feeling of being in an interior garden. At one end—the dining area—was a pink marble table and chairs. The other end of the room was always a jumble of photographic equipment—rolls of white paper for backdrops, lots of cameras. On the second floor was the darkroom and halfway between the second and third floors were bedrooms—Doon’s and Amy’s and Diane and Allan’s bedroom with that same low mattress bed covered with a white spread on a pale purple floor. “The purple was startling and unfloorlike,” May says. “It seemed to me the bed was floating—either on clouds or water.”
Impulsively Diane and Allan urged Jane and Alex to share the studio with them. There was enough space, they argued—they could save on rent and it would be “fun.” But Jane convinced Alex they should continue to develop a life of their own—no more groups. It was the start of a new period for both couples. The Arbuses became more successful as a photography team; Alex made great strides at Time as a cover-story writer. He and Jane had two children, and their days and evenings were full of activities and new friends. They continued to see Diane and Allan and even went on shared vacations, and a harmonious, relaxed feeling flowed between them. Allan got the Eliots one of their first apartments, a large, elegant room with a wraparound terrace on East 79th Street. He did this by accompanying Jane to a real-estate agency, where he behaved in such a disdainful manner the agent thought he was the Eliots’ lawyer and agreed to a very low rent.
Not long before Amy’s birth, Diane and Allan hired Tod Yamashiro, an eighteen-year-old Japanese photographer, to be their assistant.
Yamashiro, who is now a photography teacher, worked closely with them for the next six years, but he never spent time with them socially and so knew nothing of their private life. “They were extremely kind, cultivated people. And I learned a lot from Allan in the darkroom.”
The only thing that ever “bugged” Yamashiro was Allan’s clarinet-playing, which would go on between sessions. “Sometimes I’d yell at him, ‘Stop the music and get another assignment!’ ”
By now Allan was taking virtually all the fashion photographs because Diane hated the big 8 x 10 camera; she preferred the Leica. “But her collaboration on every sitting was absolute,” Yamashiro says. “She was in on every picture conference. We’d sit around the pink marble table and talk about the ‘problem’ and Diane would always have a solution.” She had the stylist’s eye. As a stylist, she created “the look” of the Diane and Allan Arbus fashion photographs. She knew how to put it all together—makeup, hair, clothes, accessories, backdrop; she could even chart the mood. (Winnie Campbell, a Glamour fashion editor who worked with them on many assignments, remembers a spread called “The Love Letter Dress” where all the accessories were pink—pink writing paper, pink quill pen, pink flowers, pink birdcage with pink doves cooing away.)
“I can still see Diane padding around the studio in her filthy bare feet,” Yamashiro says. “She wore the same dress over and over. She’d choose the props, brush the model’s hair, then once the sitting got started she’d stand on the sidelines and record the event with her Leica. She couldn’t seem to stop taking photographs. It was like a compulsion with her.”
Soon after Yamashiro began working for the Arbuses, the Nemerovs started dropping by the studio for Friday-night dinner, and then Diane and Allan, Renée and Roy, and occasionally Howard and Peggy might sit around the pink marble table and try to talk. But the subject on everyone’s mind would never be mentioned—“the scandal,” meaning the exposure of the Jelke call-girl ring. Stories about the $100-a-night prostitutes servicing wealthy executives and masterminded by Mickey Jelke, a twenty-three-year-old oleomargarine millionaire, had been all over the tabloids. There was a highly publicized trial and then another one in March of 1955, and during that trial it was revealed that David Nemerov’s name was listed along with other well-known “Johns” in Madame Pat Ward’s scented red-leather telephone book.
There were actual references to Nemerov in Theo Wilson’s account in the Daily News (March 17, 1955). Headlined “PAT NAMES 20 MEN IN HER LOVE $PARADE,” the story went on to say: “Men’s names popped in the Mickey Jelke vice trial yesterday like popcorn over a hot fire as Pat Ward went through a box score of ‘customers’ she met while she was peddling pleasure with a price tag.”
Before her testimony ended, “she had totaled 20 who had ‘relations’ with her and paid for it anywhere from $50 to $200 apiece and one other who dated her and gave her $500 but had never been intimate.”
A double date with a Barbara Scott was described. Pat Ward went with Miss Scott to the Statler Hotel. Asked why, she said to receive money from somebody. For doing what? she was asked.
“For having relations with men.”
There were lots of people at the Statler, Pat said, in what was the Governor’s Suite. She went to a bedroom in the suite with a Mr. Nemerov, after having dinner there with men and women. Nemerov gave her $100 then and $50 before she left him. She explained, “They were playing dice at the party and this man [Nemerov] seemed to be winning.”
Howard writes that at the time he wanted “to express sympathy and affection in my father’s trouble, but I never did… I may have been scared…what if it had been a different man with the same name?” (Indeed, the Herald Tribune reported a “Dave Nemeroff” listed in Pat Ward’s book.)
Howard never did mention it, nor did any members of his family. His friends showed their loyalty by saying that of course they assumed it was a different man.
Gertrude Nemerov appeared oblivious to the situation. “She was probably numbed by it,” Anita Weinstein says. “Everyone felt so sorry for her—she had been going through this kind of humiliation for so long.”
“The scandal turned out to be the start of the decline of David’s career,” a garment-district colleague states. “David had been caught with his pants down—literally and figuratively. Because of his connections, his name was kept out of the papers after a while, but the damage had been done both to the store and to him as a businessman.” It was particularly embarrassing to Walter Weinstein, Max’s son, who was vice president of Russeks and a scrupulously moral person. Weinstein confessed he found it difficult to walk down the street with Nemerov after his involvement with the call-girl ring was splashed across the front page of every newspaper in the country.
David Nemerov, meanwhile, behaved as if nothing had changed. His manner was as confident and charming as ever—but something had changed; his life was never quite so flamboyant or filled with as many women after the scandal.
He continued to work as hard as ever at Russeks, and Russeks remained “a flashy shop,” according to one of Nemerov’s friends. “David kept on believing Russeks should cater to the kept woman, the woman who loved wrapping herself in furs.” But business sagged. Already the fur market had been squeezed out of Sixth Avenue and replaced by zipper, sportswear, and textile manufacturers.
I. J. Fox, Russeks’ archcompetitor across the street, had closed up shop in 1953. The fur business was in drastic decline as housewives and their families moved to the suburbs. There they demanded casual dressing—no mink coats, at least not for a while. And the very nature of Fifth Avenue was changing, as were shopping patterns; as were customers. The quality specialty stores adjacent to Russeks—Bonwit, Mark Cross—had long since moved uptown, leaving Russeks to compete with Lord and Taylor, B. Altman, and Macy’s.
“David longed to move to Fifth-seventh Street,” Andrew Goodman says. “But he was losing his touch. He still thought customers wanted lavishness, elegance, beauty—but now they wanted useful, wearable clothes.”
After the Philadelphia Russeks lost millions and closed, Nemerov couldn’t afford to move Russeks Fifth Avenue anywhere. “The Philadelphia store had been a disaster,” Walter Weinstein says. “It was the major factor; the Russeks empire started crumbling.” That was one of the reasons he sold the controlling interest in Russeks stock to the Pritzcy brothers from Chicago. They were millionaire chocolate manufacturers who’d always wanted to get into fashion.
Sometime in 1955 the Nemerovs sold their big apartment on Park Avenue and moved into a much smaller one at 60 Sutton Place South. They got rid of a lot of their heavy antique furniture, replacing it with “classic modern.” Their decorator, Jerry Manashaw, says, “They wanted the floors all white—the colors were beige and cream and yellow.” They had designed built-in cabinets and bookshelves and Mr. Nemerov started painting at home. There was a view of the East River he liked—he would sit by the window sketching and watching the boats move by.
The apartment took about six months to decorate. It was Manashaw’s first big job and he found the Nemerovs “really nice to work for,” but he noticed that they kept to themselves mostly. He remembers meeting Diane. “She came in and out of the apartment a lot with her two little girls. Her mother said she was involved with photography.”
* According to a possibly apocryphal story, she was named Doon because she’d been conceived on the sand dunes of East Hampton.