MEANWHILE DIANE’S SISTER. RENEE, was living with her husband, Roy Sparkia, in an apartment at Park Avenue and 96th Street that they could barely afford. Roy was grinding out magazine articles and short stories while Renée struggled to achieve some recognition as a sculptor. She worked tirelessly with her clay, shaping forms of skinny ballet dancers. (Some of her work is now in collections at the Palm Beach Institute and Lord Beaverbrook’s museum in New Brunswick.)
David Nemerov was pleased by her efforts. “It was the start of me being close to Daddy,” she says. “He ended up telling me I was his favorite.”
At the time Diane showed no interest in what her sister was doing creatively. “We’d talk about my marriage but she always ignored my work,” Renée says. “I was very hurt.”
She remembers Diane as being “down in the dumps and awfully blue” during this period. Bill Ober, then a pathologist at Knickerbocker Hospital, says that Allan would visit his office periodically to talk about Diane’s recurrent depressions, which he was finding harder and harder to take. There seemed to be no solution.
These episodes, which took the form of extreme lassitude—she couldn’t seem to respond to anything—came and went throughout their marriage, but never sprang from any particular incident. On the surface Diane appeared to be leading a rich, active life, sharing not only a successful career with her husband but two bright, healthy children as well. Even so, at the core something was false and empty for her and she remained restless and depressed much of the time.
Whether or not her depressions were genetic and caused by some deficient enzyme unrelated to anything that was happening to her day to day cannot be established, since there is no scientific proof as to whether depression is genetic or physiological. As a family the Nemerovs had shared in a mutual ongoing depression for years. “Mommy, Daddy, Howard, and I were all periodically very depressed,” Renée says. “But Diane’s depressions were somehow more dramatic—more extreme. And they seemed to last longer.”
Often Diane barely had enough energy to attend the Friday-night dinners, but she would force herself to, and Renée and Roy continued coming to them “out of a sense of duty more than anything else,” since there was increasing strain between the sisters. “I wanted D to acknowledge me as an artist—something she seemed unwilling to do. I was still the baby—I hadn’t accomplished as much as my brother and sister. Well, I was working very hard and making progress and I wanted D to say something!”
Recently there had been a rather ugly outburst in the garden of the Nemerovs’ Westchester summer home. The argument had started ostensibly over the “bad manners” of Roy’s two Afghan dogs* —Gertrude Nemerov had a dislike of all animals.
Somehow the subject veered to Renée’s sculpture, and, as Roy wrote in his journal: “I finally could stand it no longer and told Gertrude off—said the entire family had been treating Ren like a second-rate pet all her life—no wonder she felt so insecure. That Diane more than Howard was the pampered one—the one who could do no wrong.” (He adds that Diane’s remote, dazed manner intimidated her parents. They kept getting different signals from her. She could be totally unresponsive one day and gentle and loving the next. They never knew where they were with her, and this baffled them.)
“Anyhow [the journal goes on] I let Gertrude Nemerov have it. I was bold for once. I’d got so tired of Ren being the scapegoat, the butt of family jokes when she was just as talented as her brother and sister. Gertrude began to cry and allowed as to how maybe she had favored Diane over Howard and Ren but she loved Ren dearly she assured us. Diane meanwhile sat quiet as a mouse—not saying a word—not defending Ren or anything—the afternoon ended with Allan in a rage telling us he’d never feel the same towards us again. He was angry for months after—wouldn’t allow us in the studio—when we dropped by once he was cold as ice. Diane acted as if nothing had happened.”
In 1954 Renée and Roy left New York and moved to Roy’s home state, Michigan. They settled in Frankfort on Lake Michigan and adopted a child. Roy began a successful career as “a paperback writer”—he has written thirty books, among them Vanishing Vixen and Creole Surgeon. Renée began experimenting with plastic sculptures, even inventing a synthetic bronze (mixing bronze powder with polyester). The resulting substances looked and felt like bronze and eliminated the process of casting. “But it was far too toxic for many artists to use,” she admits.Together, she and Roy collaborated on the design of plastic-topped tables embedded with shells, pebbles, and stones they collected from their daily walks on Michigan beaches. They briefly ran the RenRoy studios in Beulah, Michigan, and soon expanded to five decorative outlets across the country. Six of their tables exhibited at the International Housing Show in Chicago won an award from the American Institute of Decorators.
The more Renée did with her life, the more she realized that her rivalry with Diane was intrinsic to shaping her identity. “I would dream about Diane—dream about what she was doing—and then I’d wake up and realize I was doing a lot on my own.”
Periodically Renée would phone Diane in New York and “we’d talk a long time and try to catch up—I’d always say, ‘Please come out and visit’ and D would always say she wanted to but just didn’t have the time.” She and Allan had more assignments from Glamour and Seventeen than they could handle. They were making money, but expenses were high, so Allan didn’t hire a secretary; instead he himself kept the books and made the phone calls—and cajoled the clients—and Diane was by his side, giving advice and suggestions, shaping and styling the shots. She would still record the sessions with her Leica for her own amusement; it was the only way she could tolerate remaining inside the studio all day.
By 1956 Diane was telling Cheech she didn’t know how much longer she could stand it. She hated the artifice of fashion—the fact that the clothes didn’t belong to the models. “When clothes belong to a person, they take on a person’s character,” she said, “and they are wonderful and fit on the body a different way.”
Mostly she hated the grinding monotony of the fashion sittings, the deadly “sameness” of the days—so much so that she would “grasp at straws” to create the slightest break in their routine.
This had begun recently when she and Allan had driven “a very tall ugly dumb but hypnotic model” Diane was especially fond of to La Guardia Airport to photograph her in spring clothes. As they approached the field, the model suddenly asked in a musing way, “Wouldn’t it be terrific if a plane crashed?” Diane repeated that story to students over the years as an example of “spontaneous honesty.” Everyone is secretly fascinated by disaster and death, but few people are willing to admit it.
When Grandma Rose died, Diane had taken photographs of her lying in her coffin. She was growing increasingly attracted to “off-limit experiences,” she told Cheech; attracted and afraid. By this time Cheech had moved to a five-flight walk-up in Spanish Harlem. She had painted the walls blood red, the ceilings blue, and had filled the rooms with her potted violets, and glued photographs of her favorite artist (Jean Cocteau) and her favorite movie star (Katharine Hepburn) above her bed. Nearby, the bathtub was filled alternately with green or blue-tinted water in case she wanted to dye material very quickly (she was now designing costumes for Off-Broadway shows). There was also a junk room in the back, in darkness save for a big TV set always playing, but with the sound off. Diane took many pictures of the wavering images on that set.
She also took some lovely still-lifes of Cheech’s rocking chair and dressmaker’s mannequin. The light seemed to fall from nowhere, glancing off the rocking chair, before forming strange columns and then disappearing into the aqua-painted floor.
At Cheech’s apartment on Orchard Street the space had been so dim and mysterious, Diane had had difficulty taking pictures. On Orchard Street, Cheech had hung out with a band of gypsies—had, in fact, seen many of them through illness, even death. She always hungered for knowledge of every culture in the world, and felt she could learn only through friendship or love. So far she’d married a black man and a Chinese, but “it was a beginning,” she’d say. She seemed relaxed about the situation; she had plenty of time, since she was going to lead many lives after this one. She believed staunchly in reincarnation.
Recently she had convinced Diane that Elvis Presley had been a god in another life (“He was a Greek god—look at his curly mouth”). Together Cheech and Diane played Presley’s current hits “Hound Dog” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” singing along with the frenzied crooning and the thrumming electric guitar—bouncing up and down (much to Allan’s annoyance), then collapsing into giggles on the floor.
It was this capacity for silly, childlike pleasure that drew the two women close. “We’d been best friends for ten years now,” Cheech says. “We planned to live together in our old age. Two dotty old ladies tending our plants.”
Once, when she was visiting Cheech in Spanish Harlem, Diane confided that she thought she might go crazy if she didn’t stop styling soon. Every time she returned to their fashion studio to work, she felt dragged down, confined, and her depressions increased in intensity, although she tried to hide them from Allan because he was working so hard and she loved him dearly and depended on him completely. At the studio she would address him teasingly as “swami” or “boy” (he still called her “girl”). But living and working with him in the same space—practically twenty-four hours a day—was getting to be a strain; there was so little time to dream.
And, as with everything she did, Diane was intensely concentrated as a stylist/photographer; depressed or not, she worked strenuously, throwing herself into each new assignment with fervor. She would spend hours choosing the right accessory; she might scour New York for days searching for the perfect prop, whether it was a hundred red balloons or a particular breed of kitten. As a result, her collaboration with Allan on every sitting made them more and more successful as a team (they were now Seventeenmagazine’s favorite cover photographers). But their work schedule was frenetic and suffocating; they started early and finished late, and neither of them was fulfilled by fashion photography. They viewed it simply as a way of making money.
How Diane longed to—just once—cut around or beneath a fashion image to get at the story behind that image, the fiction of it. As with the ravishingly beautiful model, married four times, whom she and Allan booked frequently even though the girl usually staggered into the studio black and blue from a lover’s beating. Diane would minister with coffee and ice packs on her arms and thighs, especially if they were shooting a bathing-suit spread. Between shots the model—who later, briefly, became a movie star—would sit in the dressing room moaning and studying her exquisite reflection in the brightly lit mirror.
Sometime in 1957 Diane inexplicably burst into tears at a dinner party when a friend asked her to describe her routine as a stylist at the studio. She, who rarely cried, who hated crying, began to sob as she ticked off her duties: fix model’s hair and makeup, accessorize her outfit with belt, necklace, earrings, hat, arrange the props just so. Since she hadn’t had much practice crying, the sobs seemed to have trouble coming from her throat. They were ugly, constricted cries. She would never again “style” the shots for a Diane and Allan Arbus fashion layout.
Soon afterward Allan phoned Alex Eliot and insisted that he and Jane come over “right away. We have something very important to tell you.” He sounded so urgent that the Eliots canceled their plans for the evening and rushed to the Arbus Studio. The minute Allan opened the door, he announced that Diane had made a dessert for everybody and that she had never made a dessert before; he seemed almost childishly pleased, since he had a sweet tooth that Diane had never catered to. “She had no real interest in food.”
The couples ate whatever it was, and then Allan explained why he’d summoned the Eliots. He and Diane had decided to break up their business partnership, he said, and they were going to start doing things independently of each other. He would continue to run the Diane and Allan Arbus studio (and the name would remain, since it was so well established), but he would also take a mime class from Etienne Decroux, which he’d always dreamed of doing. And Diane would have nothing more to do with styling or fashion photography. Instead, she would now be free to wander around photographing whatever she liked. Although he didn’t say so, it was obvious he hoped this change would alleviate her recurring depressions.
The Eliots responded enthusiastically to the plan, particularly Alex, who had always maintained that Diane was potentially “a great artist—she can do anything she sets her mind to” and, although she kept denying it, the image of herself as an adventurer, a risk-taker, a “great sad artist” had been rolling around in her fantasies about herself since she was a kid. However, when Alex repeated, “You can do anything” that night, she looked a little frightened by the prospect of going out on her own and she said nothing because it was more than that—she had absolutely no idea how she was going to go about photographing anything and everything she wanted since she didn’t know precisely what she wanted to photograph.
Weeks passed and Diane wasn’t styling anymore—wasn’t doing much of anything. Jane dropped by and urged her to take her camera and go out on the street. “You owe it to yourself,” she said. Again Diane said nothing; she disliked talking personally—it wasn’t part of her nature. She couldn’t admit to Jane that she sometimes felt peculiar, not normal somehow, because her need to love and be cared for seemed to conflict directly with her need to photograph. What about her daughters? Would they get enough attention if she was out in the city with her camera? And Allan? What about her duties as his wife?
“Ma had always thought all her life was about helping Pa do his thing,” Amy Arbus said years later in a radio interview. “It took her a long time to adjust.”
For a while Diane went out every day and tried photographing strangers on the street. Her initial efforts were hampered by such extreme shyness that she enrolled in Alexey Brodovitch’s workshop at the New School to see if he could help her overcome her timidity. She knew that as an art director Brodovitch had made a special place for documentary photographers such as Brassai, Bill Brandt, and Lisette Model in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, photographers she felt a special kinship for although she wasn’t quite sure why. Perhaps it was because they were all portraitists who explored people’s roles. She knew as well that Brodovitch had encouraged fashion photographers like Penn and Avedon to be “serious.” (“I learned from his impatience, his dissatisfaction, his revolutionary eye,” Avedon has said.) However, once in the workshop, Diane discovered that Brodovitch—old, ailing, and suffering from extreme melancholia since all his possessions had been destroyed by a fire—had no interest in whether or not photographers were insecure. “He didn’t care if we were broke or had stomachaches,” Art Kane says. “His dictum was, ‘If you see something you’ve seen before, don’t click the shutter.’ ” It was something Diane never forgot.
At the workshop the photographers would huddle around while Brodovitch went over different portfolios. He would hold up a picture and talk about its “shock impact,” its “showmanship,” its “surprise.” He could be vicious in his criticism; he rarely praised. Occasionally he would suggest that they all cut out a rectangular section from a piece of cardboard and use the framed space to take mental pictures of things until their ordinary way of seeing turned into a photographic way of seeing. “It was a remarkable discipline aimed at ending the division between formal and informal vision—a way of turning camera-users into cameras,” Owen Edwards wrote.
“Set yourself a problem—don’t shoot haphazardly!” Brodovitch would cry before giving out assignments. “Shoot the United Nations, traffic jams, graffiti, Dixie Cups—give the subject your personal interpretation.” For months the fledgling photographer Hiro photographed a shoe over and over again in a wild, imaginative variety of styles; finally Brodovitch told him he was ready to photograph for a magazine.
Eventually Diane stopped attending Brodovitch’s workshop. She told Yamashiro, who’d accompanied her, that she simply didn’t like the man, didn’t like the forbidding atmosphere he created around himself, didn’t like the abuse he heaped on his students, thought his approach was too monotonous, too narrow. He stressed visual coherence; she was interested in suggesting the mystery of existence, however unbearable, and in the deep, secret, interior lives of people. Brodovitch never mentioned secrets. But she left the workshop disturbed by one comment he made: “The life of a commercial photographer is like the life of a butterfly. Very seldom can a photographer be productive for more than eight years.”
Now that she was freer, Diane began a study of photography back to the world’s first photograph: by Joseph Niepce, a view from the window of his blurred French garden circa 1826. (She used to tell John Putnam that she liked Balzac’s theory regarding the invention of the daguerreotype: that every human being in his natural state is made up of a series of superimposed images which the camera peels away.)
In time Diane would become familiar with the dreamy nineteenth-century portraiture of Julia Cameron, with Mathew Brady’s documentation of Civil War battlefields. She would read about Paul Strand’s switch from pictorialism to Cubist-inspired photographs in the 1920s; she would study Lewis Hine’s powerful pictures of children working in coal mines. Hine’s bleak images would impress her more than Stieglitz’ gorgeous cloud formations. Stieglitz believed that photographs could be metaphorical equivalents of deep feelings. He also believed that the fine print, the excellently made photograph, was the criterion of a good photograph. Diane did not believe that. Which is why she responded to the work of her contemporaries Louis Faurer and Robert Frank, who were experimenting with outrageous cropping and out-of-focus imagery. But Diane was even more impressed by Lisette Model’s studies of grotesques, especially the grotesques of poverty and old age which she documented with almost clinical detachment.
* “When we were breeding our dogs, Diane took pictures of the animals copulating. I was embarrassed,” Renée says. “Diane and Allan laughed at me.”