PART THREE
FOR A WHILE DIANE and Allan continued to live together; they didn’t want to break up the family unit and they wanted to be civilized about everything. There would always be a residual affection and respect between them. “They were gently estranged,” Robert Meservey commented.
In time they moved from the triplex down to Greenwich Village and opened a new photography studio in the mammoth parlor floor of a reconverted townhouse at 71 Washington Place. Ali MacGraw lived on the second floor; the New Yorker cartoonist Opi and his wife were on the third; and Off-Broadway director Jess Kummel, who committed suicide shortly after the Arbuses moved into the building, had the penthouse. (Kummel had been directing workshops at the Theatre de Lys when he found out he was going deaf and became unrelievedly despondent. Shortly before he killed himself, he pasted a Variety headline above his kitchen door: “LAST YEAR IT WAS GREAT.”
Diane never felt settled at Washington Place. Tina Fredericks came to lunch there once and the two women sat on the floor and ate from picnic baskets. “It wasn’t very homy,” Tina says. Allan had his Vespa parked in a corner.
Eventually Allan sublet the mezzanine of the studio to Arthur Unger, who ran his Young World Press from that space for the next eight years. “Allan said he didn’t need so much room; I think he also needed the extra rent. He didn’t seem to be doing much fashion business.” Unger remembers a succession of very attractive women going in and out of the Arbus studio who seemed particularly at home there. Diane, on the contrary, did not.
Unger often ran into her early in the morning when he was coming back from the newsstand with the Times. Diane would be leaving the studio, usually dressed in her ratty fur coat. “She looked to me like an average college student. And she always seemed acutely embarrassed at being discovered coming out of the Arbus studio, even though as Allan’s wife she presumably belonged there.”
Subsequently, Diane and her daughters moved again, to a little converted stable at 121 ½ Charles Street, in back of the 6th Precinct police station. Diane gave the girls the upstairs bedrooms; she slept in the living room, putting up a screen next to her couch to give her some privacy, although it kept toppling over. (In time she covered the screen with some favorite images: her latest contact prints, postcards, a portrait of a woman with elephantiasis.) Allan helped with the move, even scraping and painting the floor, but he stayed more and more at Washington Place. In the evenings he let his acting teacher, Mira Rostova, use his studio for her classes—he was getting more involved with Off-Broadway theater and with mime, and began appearing in plays at the Café Cino. “He dreamed of being a movie star,” Emile de Antonio says.
Ted Schwartz recalls seeing Diane backstage after one of Allan’s performances—“I think she was wearing a tuxedo”—and she took photographs of Allan in a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. (“He was really good,” says another member of the cast.)
Diane and Allan still entertained together sporadically, but there was a distance between them; their marriage was crumbling. Emile de Antonio remembers one party at which Diane was surrounded by Esta Leslie (now Mrs. Hilton Kramer), Tina Fredericks, Cheech, and Maya Deren. The women all treated her with fierce maternal tenderness as if they could sense what she was going through.
She appeared ambivalent about her situation with Allan. By now she knew they would have to separate eventually, but she couldn’t face that inevitability. They agreed to remain partners in photography (the Diane and Allan Arbus studio didn’t close until 1969). Throughout their difficulties they remained as close as brother and sister—as twins. And in some ways they still resembled twins—they had the same mournful, watchful expression in their round, dark eyes. They had lived like twins for so long; it had been their way of surviving.
Now their attitude toward each other and toward their lost love was one of nostalgia, of looking back into their teens when they’d met and been so passionate. And they still shared their collaboration, their perceptions, as they had for over twenty years of struggle to achieve something artistic and original. But only one twin was the real artist, as Allan was the first to admit. “Diane is the more talented,” he would repeat over and over. Obviously he meant it; he was proud of her talent and encouraged and nurtured it. And Diane knew how necessary Allan’s sympathetic, intelligent presence had been to her all those years. She wanted to go on sharing and discovering with him, and she went on trying to until she died.
Diane did not tell her parents, so her mother had no idea the marriage was in trouble. “I thought Diane and Allan would always be together,” Gertrude Nemerov says. “They seemed to care about each other so much.” Meanwhile the Nemerovs had made some major readjustments of their own. In 1957 David Nemerov retired as president of Russeks* and sold some of his stock. After auctioning off most of their antiques, he and Gertrude moved to Florida and the penthouse of the Palm Beach Towers, where David began painting fulltime—mostly vivid flower studies, but also paintings of Central Park, the Manhattan skyline, Radio City. In November 1958 he had his first major exhibit of fifty paintings at Gallery 72 in Manhattan and he sold forty-two of his canvases at prices ranging from $350 to $1250. “A lot of his Seventh Avenue cronies bought his stuff,” Nate Cummings says. Cummings himself bought two Nemerovs for the lobby of his Sara Lee cheesecake factory in Chicago.
Alex Eliot flew in from Europe to review the exhibit for Time magazine. “Nemerov’s paintings are crude and luminous and intensely colorful,” Alex wrote. “He’s obviously been inspired by the French impressionists.” When he asked Nemerov to explain why his paintings sold so rapidly, Nemerov answered, “People who bought them were mainly people of means who prefer a colorful painting. But when a stranger walks in and pays for a painting of yours, life becomes wonderful. You see, I couldn’t bear to be a failure. Not only in my eyes but in the eyes of the world.”
Howard came to the exhibit and kidded his father about being reviewed in Time magazine before his son was. And Nemerov retorted, “You see? An artist can be successful at making money.”
“It was a bitter pill to swallow,” John Pauker says. “Howard had been struggling for years to write fine poetry and he had a wonderful reputation and received a great deal of praise, but he’d made very little money. Now in a matter of months his father was earning up to a thousand dollars for one lousy oil. It wasn’t fair.”
Not long after the Arbuses became estranged, Sudie Trazoff, a former student of Howard’s from Bennington who lived across the street from Diane, offered to serve as baby-sitter and general factotum. She was the first of several young women who worked devotedly for Diane over the years and who became “like family.” Amy Arbus remembered in a radio interview, “As we got poorer and poorer and after my sister, Doon, went away to college, we had boarders—people who would take care of me and clean up the house a little even though it wasn’t their job.” This enabled Diane to go around peddling her photographs. She was desperate to make some money on her own.
Allan was, of course, supporting Diane and their two daughters, working as a fashion photographer—and acting whenever he could. It was an exhausting schedule, but he was determined to do both because he was suddenly happier than he’d been in years. And Diane was happy for him although she herself was miserable.
She had lunch with Tina Fredericks at the Museum of Modern Art and told her how Allan had left her for “this actress.” She seemed in despair. She felt as if she had failed in some basic way. Was part of it that she had never been self-supporting? Never been financially independent? Maybe if she had contributed more money to the running of the household…
“She was upset about everything,” Tina Fredericks says. “Nothing I said made her feel any better.” They eventually began talking about her photographs. She told Tina she had to sell her photographs but didn’t know how to market them. For the past couple of years she had been working in isolation, apart from Allan’s encouragement and Lisette Model’s teaching. She had been taking pictures haphazardly—village kids in the streets, Central Park. Lately she’d sneaked back into the Ukrainian Baths and managed to take some shots, hiding her camera under a towel, until she was thrown out again by the irate management.
Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue were the only places where art photography was ever seriously considered editorially; otherwise as television became the all powerful medium, magazine outlets for photographers began shrinking. Colliers folded. The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies Home Journal, Look, and Life kept asking for upbeat photo essays but that was something Diane had no interest in supplying.
Even so she tried to get an assignment from Life, since the single-page rate for a black-and-white photograph averaged between $500 and $800, but her portfolio was judged too idiosyncratic, as was Robert Frank’s—he did get assignments, but his work was always rejected as being “too harsh.”
Eventually Frank Zachary, the art director of Holiday magazine, gave her one job. “She photographed the gossip columnist Leonard Lyons on his nightclub rounds,” Zachary says. “But she couldn’t get Lyons to pay any attention to her, to relate to her, so finally she cornered him in Times Square, then she backed out into oncoming traffic and snapped the astonished expression on his face.” She was paid $75 for the portrait.
Tina Fredericks was working in a building near Holiday; she had left Glamour and was now picture editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Her marriage had broken up and she was seeing a great deal of Emile de Antonio, or De, as his friends called him. “De knows everybody in the art world,” Tina told Diane. “De can help you sell your work.” A large, unkempt man with a rich, hearty laugh, De invariably wore different-colored socks and soiled sweatshirts. He was from Philadelphia and independently wealthy, but as an undergraduate he had organized rubber-plant workers and worked as a barge captain. He had been a classmate of John F. Kennedy’s at Harvard. After Harvard he taught philosophy at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Eventually he moved to a house in Pound Ridge, New York, near the avant-garde composer John Cage—and the two men became close friends. (In 1957 De organized Cage’s twenty-fifth-anniversary concert at Town Hall, which turned out to be musically as wildly dissonant an event as Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring.)
Through Cage, De got to know the painters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who were then penniless; once he got them a job designing window displays at Tiffany. “De connected artists with everything from neighborhood movie houses to huge corporations,” wrote Andy Warhol, who maintained that De had defined his stark black-and-white painting of a Coca-Cola bottle as “remarkable art—a reflection of our society”; it was De who in 1960 convinced the Stable Gallery to hang the first major exhibit of Warhol’s work. Recently De had been so inspired by the syncopated sound track and images in Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy that he became distributor of the film, and he himself was about to make a film on Senator Joseph McCarthy—“a collage-type film inspired by my friends Bob Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns” which he eventually called Point of Order when it was released.
Tina thought De could promote Diane and her photographs as he’d promoted Warhol’s soup cans and later Frank Stella’s black paintings. “But I was never anyone’s manager—I never took a commission,” De says. “I guess what you’d call me is a catalyst. I helped artists get galleries by putting dealers and artists together. For some reason Tina thought I was very ‘together,’ which was a crock. What does a displaced intellectual do who’s never found an art? I’d originally wanted to be a writer. I used to drink myself into oblivion. I got married six times, but I gave the appearance of knowing what I was about.”
Diane began visiting De in his grimy office in what he called “the Brute Force building” at Sixth Avenue and 53rd Street. “I called it that because the Mark Hellinger ad for his movie Brute Force was still plastered on one of the building’s walls. Anyhow, Diane would drop by, always loaded down with cameras—and we’d talk.” But not about her career or how she could sell her pictures. “And it wasn’t that she wasn’t ambitious—nobody could work as hard as she did and not be ambitious—and it wasn’t that she didn’t care about money or fame; it was just that she made no effort to go after it; she refused to indulge in any ploys or subterfuges.”
Instead she and De talked about monsters—mythic monsters like the Cretan minotaur and the dog-headed boy. Diane knew all about such literary monstres as Count Dracula, who turned into a vampire, and Poe’s “Hop Frog,” about a crippled dwarf who is also a Fool.
De took Diane to see Tod Browning’s 1932 movie Freaks, which Dan Talbot was reviving at his New Yorker Theatre on the Upper West Side. She was enthralled because the freaks in the film were not imaginary monsters, but real—midgets, pinheads, dwarfs had always excited, challenged, and terrified her because they defied so many conventions. Sometimes she thought her terror was linked to something deep in her subconscious. Gazing at the human skeleton or the bearded lady, she was reminded of a dark, unnatural, hidden self. As a little girl she’d been forbidden to look at anything “abnormal”: the albino with his flat pink eyes, the harelipped baby, the woman swollen with fat from some mysterious glandular disease. Forbidden to look, Diane had stared all the more and developed an intense sympathy for any human oddity. Those creatures had had normal mothers, but they’d popped out of the womb altered by some strange force she couldn’t understand.
Diane returned to see Freaks again and again, sometimes with a woman friend, sometimes with De. Often they would go in the afternoon and sit in the dark, cavernous, almost empty theater smoking pot while in front of them beribboned, feeble-minded pinheads cavorted across the screen.
At this point Diane was photographing Miss Stormé De Larverie backstage at the Apollo Theatre on West 42nd Street; Stormé was the single and sole male impersonator in a female-impersonator show called 25 Men and a Girl. She was black and she dressed as a man in impeccably cut suits she’d had made in London. Diane spent hours photographing and talking to Stormé as well as writing about “the delicate art of her transformation from woman to man. [Stormé] has consciously experimented [with] her appearance as a man without ever tampering with her nature as a woman,” Diane wrote, “or trying to be what she is not.” She quoted Stormé as saying, “If you have any respect for the human race, you know that nature’s not a joke.”
At some point, De says, Diane timidly showed him a few of her photographs of Stormé. “They were grainy and quite wrinkled. Apparently Diane was ironing her prints on her ironing board. But it didn’t matter, she’d been able to capture a combination of anxiety and pleasure in her subject’s face. Stormé seemed pleased to have her picture taken, but worried that too much was being revealed in her collaboration with the photographer.” De continues: “You know, I jotted down some notes about Diane. So many people have used these words I hate to use them again, but they meant so much to me when I read them as a teen-ager. It’s what James Joyce suggested were prerequisites for an artist’s survival in the modern world—[that the artist must practice] ‘silence, cunning, and exile.’ I always felt these were emblems of Diane’s work. She was making herself an exile in New York, her home, the place she’d grown up in and lived her entire life. When I knew her, she was starting to move about the city unknown—quiet as a mouse. She seemed so small! I don’t know whether she actually was that small, but she gave an impression of fragility, or smallness—she’d creep into a room or onto the street with her cameras and you almost couldn’t see her. You forgot she was there. She blended into the scenery.”
She had begun to prowl the city at all hours, striking up a conversation with any outcast she happened to encounter. It was hard at first, she was so shy with people, but she wasn’t afraid of New York at two a.m. Her life was beginning to take on a night-blooming quality, De thought. She seemed to be more alive in the dark as she traveled by herself on the subway, laden down with her cameras. The trains pounded in and out of the dark tunnels, headlights shining like eyes. The stations were deep, empty, odoriferous—“like the pits of hell,” she said. She saw hunchbacks, paraplegics, exhausted whores, boys with harelips, pimply teen-age girls. She was sure the ladies in ratty fur coats were cashiers.
She considered photographing the men who lived in the bowels of Grand Central Station—bums who wrapped their feet in old newspapers to keep warm. She befriended a bag lady—a woman who for a long time was a fixture in the long corridor connecting the Lexington Avenue subway to the Times Square shuttle. The bag lady would lie in a corner day and night, without moving. The rumble of the trains in the distance was like the sound of the sea in her ear; gradually it was going to rise up and envelop her completely.
Then there was the blind, bearded giant swathed in Army-surplus blankets who called himself Moondog. An imposing, hostile figure, he stood outside De’s office on the corner of West 54th Street and Sixth Avenue for eight hours at a stretch; he tolerated the people who gave him pennies. Like a biblical prophet, Moondog carried a staff, and he wore a Viking’s helmet decorated with tusks. “People keep asking me why do you dress the way you do?” he would say. “I tell them it’s my way of saying no.”
Diane got to know him. Sometimes she would sit with him while he ate his supper at a cafeteria near Carnegie Hall. Often she would take her daughter Amy along. Amy recalls, “He had an awful smile.”
Diane discovered that Moondog considered himself a serious musician, had made several recordings, and had appeared on TV and in nightclubs. But he subsisted mainly by begging. “It’s not degrading,” he would say. “Homer begged and so did Jesus Christ. It was only the Calvinists who ordained that no man shall eat who does not work.”
Moondog was the son of an Episcopal minister. He came to New York in 1942, immediately adopting his nickname out of devotion to a former pet who had bayed at the moon, and quickly established himself in Times Square, where he stood for several years on a traffic island playing the “oo” and the “uni,” percussion instruments of his own design.
When around 1955 he decided to stop his street performances because of the crowds he drew, he moved to West 54th Street, where he remained still as a statue as the trucks and cars whizzed past. Sometimes he would sell copies of his verse written in rhymed heptameter—couplets such as “Christianity’s uncompromising war on error or evil would appear to me to be an evil error.”
Diane wanted to photograph him and he agreed on one condition—that she spend the night with him at his fleabag hotel on West 44th Street. “Presumably Diane did spend the night with Moondog,” De says, “and presumably all they did was talk. I don’t know what happened for certain—she said she took pictures of him, but she never showed them to me. Apparently Moondog had a wife and a small baby, but he and his wife didn’t get along.”
Diane talked about his tiny, cockroach-infested room, which he loved because there were pigeons flapping and cooing outside his window—“a little bit of nature.” Although he couldn’t see, he knew where all his possessions were in that room. Behind the door was his treasured trimba, two triangular drums with a cymbal attached. On the trimba Moondog would beat out what one newspaper critic called his “delicate Coplandesque modern rhythms.”
It was weird photographing the blind, “because they can’t fake their expressions,” Diane said. “They don’t know what their expressions are, so there is no mask.”
Moondog had no idea what he was doing when she photographed him, she said, no idea that his huge, hairy face was so relaxed and goofy it seemed as if he were either drunk or floating through the great beyond.
Diane talked to De a lot about Moondog, and De would think, “Jesus! these stories of hers—why can’t she combine them with her pictures?” and then he realized that she was interested in freezing an image—not elaborating on it.
In past summers Diane and Allan had taken their daughters on vacation, but after they became estranged in the summer of 1959 Doon visited Howard and Peggy on Cape Cod and Amy was enrolled in a camp. Diane stayed by herself in the Charles Street house, concentrating on photographing “mud shows”—second-rate little circuses that played backwater towns throughout New Jersey and New England. At dawn she would hop a Greyhound bus to catch one—maybe outside Flemington, or in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She would hang around all day, observing and photographing the fortune teller’s tent, the contortionist shaving. One of her earliest circus pictures, taken in 1959, is of a midget clown convulsed with giggles.
Charlie Reynolds, a magician and circus buff (“I’ve been photographing circuses all over the country for thirty years”), used to bump into Diane at Hunt’s Vaudeville, “the oldest traveling circus in America,” when Hunt’s was camped in the Pennsylvania hills. Through Reynolds (who lived near her in the Village) Diane met the Amazing Randi, the escape artist who is considered today’s successor to Houdini. (One of Randi’s recent tricks: writhing in a straitjacket while dangling upside down supported by a crane over Niagara Falls.) In the 1970s Randi gained celebrity for debunking the Israeli psychic Uri Geller.
Diane took hundreds of pictures of Randi, who in turn brought her together with Presto the Fire Eater. Presto, a great natural magician, did his act on Village streetcorners, draped in feathers, buckles, cameras, tape recorders, flashbulbs. Randi also brought her to Gangler’s, a little truck circus which was playing in a loft on St. Mark’s Place; he was performing there along with a pony and a llama, a bear and a dog. He introduced Diane to Yves, a French juggler with pale, waxen skin, “a really weird, far-out fellow who believed juggling was a mystic act, and he convinced Diane it was mystic, too.” She took pictures of him and of another juggler named Adrian. Adrian was bugged that he couldn’t juggle fulltime; to support himself, he simonized cars on York Avenue.
“Diane was fascinated by weirdos,” Randi says. “Not just by their weirdness but by their commitment to weirdness. As far as she was concerned, I didn’t count because I’d do my levitation act—very convincingly, I might add—and then I’d step offstage and drive to my house in New Jersey. I merely served as liaison for Diane into the worlds of magic and illusion. I introduced her to a lot of people I knew in the business—some of whom she photographed, like Presto and Jack Dracula, the tattooed man. She could weave a spell around people like Presto and Jack so they’d reveal themselves the way they were and the way they presented themselves to the world. It was a magic double thing she caught.”
Back in New York, Diane haunted the Coney Island sideshows and the sideshows in the basement of Madison Square Garden when Ringling Brothers’ circus came to town. She often took her daughter Amy with her—once she was back from camp—and introduced her to “these very strange people.”
Of sideshows Diane said later: “There’s some thrill going to a sideshow—I felt a mixture of shame and awe. I mean, there’s a sword box where they don’t cut the girl in half, they stick a lot of swords in and none of them really go through her and besides they’re not sharp and…it’s fun because the girl is almost looney.”
Diane’s portraits of twin fetuses hobbling in a bottle of formaldehyde as well as of the “headless man” clad in a business suit were some of her earliest sideshow shots.
That same summer De was introducing Diane to the garish strip on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, where shabby peep-shows and hot-dog stands never closed and third-run movie houses opened at seven a.m. “Even then robbings and stabbings were a common occurrence,” De says. “Forty-second Street was dangerous. We’d pass a sea of empty beer cans, broken bottles, druggies, pimps, and then we’d go to Grant’s for clams and french fries. Grant’s was a tough place full of hard gays. There were lots of knife fights, but Diane didn’t blink an eye. ‘Places are the only things you can trust,’ she would say.”
After a meal at Grant’s they would walk over to Hubert’s Freak Museum, which had been operating for more than twenty-five years at Broadway and 42nd Street. They always visited with Professor Leroy Heckler, whose father had been a strongman; Heckler ran the flea-circus concession at Hubert’s. Often Diane would sit with him while he fed his fleas. He’d roll up his sleeves and, using tweezers, pick up the fleas out of their mother-of-pearl boxes, drop them on his forearm, and let them eat their lunch while he read the Daily News.
There was seldom any talking, even when Alberto Alberta, the half-man, half-woman, dropped by, or Sealo the Seal Boy, who had hands growing out of his shoulders. Everyone did his or her act on the average of two shows an hour from eleven a.m. to eleven p.m., but they were never “on display” on their curtained platforms for more than five minutes at a time, speaking very briefly about their origins and their malformations in a bored, perfunctory manner to the handful of the curious who milled before them.
Diane was one of the most avid spectators, as attracted to the freaks as she was repelled by them, and some of them really frightened her. This was part of her motivation for coming to Hubert’s—she wanted to get so scared that her heart would pound and sweat would pop out on her brow, and then she would conquer her fear and stay for hours, scrutinizing the fat lady’s smelly waddle, the armless man’s dexterity as he lit a cigarette from the match he held between his toes.
When she first approached the freaks offstage with her cameras, they stared at her blankly; they seemed haughty, taciturn; they didn’t feel comfortable with a “normal” in their midst. She was gentle and patient with them, coming in every day, talking with them until they got used to her and “she became almost one of the gang,” says Presto, who was performing his fire-eating act at Hubert’s then. Once she felt the freaks trusted her, she asked them to pose.
Hubert’s became one of Diane’s principal hangouts in New York. Over and over again she photographed the midgets, the three-legged man, the lady with a serpent, attempting to penetrate their mystery and their fascination for her. Often she brought friends along—the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, the poet Marvin Cohen, and mostly her daughter Amy, who couldn’t understand why her mother wanted to take pictures of freaks. “They were like foreign bodies to me.” The pictures embarrassed her until her first year in high school, “when we were all taking photography class and [my classmates] were really impressed with Mom’s work; they kept saying how amazing it was.” Then Amy began to study Diane’s work with a different eye and discovered the beauty and strangeness of it. (Today Amy is a photographer herself, documenting the Punk Rock scene for the Village Voice.)
Diane used to show the Amazing Randi her latest Hubert’s Museum contact sheets. “I thought they were great. She photographed all the acts—the pinhead, the skeleton, the little people—and she seemed to capture the gothic fantasy—the supernatural qualities…and the phoniness.” Randi thinks Congo the Jungle Creep was Diane’s particular favorite. “Because he was so extreme. She knew that his act was a hoax—essentially failed magic—but that was precisely his appeal to her. He believed so totally in his fakery, he was positively arrogant about it.” She photographed Congo for years and never got tired of watching him stamping on saw blades, performing his sand act—he’d mix sand in a bucket of muddy water, shout “Ugga mugga,” and then scoop up a wad of dry sand and flourish it at the audience. He’d also light a cigarette, swallow it, drink a glass of water, blow smoke out of his mouth and nostrils, grimace, scream, then cough up the cigarette. Congo was a natural magician, Randi says. “Everything he did came from his soul.” In fright wig, T-shirt, loincloth worn over his trousers, he’d thump on a drum, have dialogues with evil spirits, mix potions, cast spells, threaten the audience. “Diane would go ape shit over his act,” says Randi. “And the way he used his hands—they were huge, oversized, with savagely long fingernails—they’d claw the air as he performed his mumbo-jumbo. Congo’s real name was Hezekiah Trambles—he was from Haiti, and Diane used to describe him as a pseudo jungle voodoo-type character.”
Congo made a lot of money from his act. During breaks from Hubert’s, Diane and Randi would sometimes see him strolling down Times Square. “He’d be wearing a natty suit, no fright wig, and lots of diamonds on his huge hands. ‘Hi, Congo,’ we’d say. But he would studiously ignore us.”
As the months went by, Diane wandered the Times Square area at all hours of the day and night. She talked with the habitués—the derelicts, the insomniacs lining up to get into the ten-cent movie houses. She found out that the deaf and dumb liked going to the Apollo Theatre; she discovered that a great many bag ladies used the Howard Johnson’s ladies’ room near the Automat.
Bag ladies seemed particularly solitary and tragic. They weren’t crazy, she decided; they were wives and mothers like herself; some even had held jobs before tumbling out on the street, not by choice but because they had no money. She would watch silently as they clung to their bulging shopping bags—their only possessions. This was completely understandable to Diane, who until recently had usually carried a paper sack jammed with her favorite things.
She was still very shy and frightened as she approached each new situation, but the fear was thrilling. Photographing the blind Moondog had helped, and photographing the Amazing Randi and Presto the Fire Eater and Congo the Jungle Creep, and trying to calm the Russian midget Gregory Ratoucheff when she photographed him in his roominghouse at one a.m. He’d been so nervous he posed in his hat and coat; to get him relaxed, Diane talked to him a long time. (He’d been one of the stars of the movie Freaks.Married five times to normal-sized women, he did a terrific imitation of Marilyn Monroe singing “My Funny Valentine.”)
It was getting easier to ask people to pose, and one of the reasons was that she had a new champion, a new mentor, who would be close to her for the rest of her life; someone who believed in her special talent, who goaded and pressured her to accept greater challenges, tougher assignments, more personal projects. “You can photograph everyone in the world,” he said.
His name was Marvin Israel. Pale, bespectacled, a painter of grim visions (sinister rooms full of dangling electrical cords), Israel lived with his painter wife, Margie, in a basement studio on West 14th Street which visitors described as a “veritable menagerie of flapping birds and barking dogs.” The Israels were a detached, remote couple who could go for weeks at a time without seeing anybody while they labored over various projects.
For a few years in the mid-fifties Israel had been art director of Seventeen and Diane had known him slightly then when she and Allan were doing fashion work for the magazine. Sometime in 1959 she ran into him at a party and he directed a fierce monologue at her that seemed to last half the night. Afterward Diane told Cheech she had never met such a riveting man. Depending on his mood, he could be expansive and charming or smug and downright insulting. (Many of his students at the Parsons School of Design, where he taught, recall breaking under his abusive comments about their work.)
His mind teemed with ideas and opinions on every subject from Proust to James Bond. He loved riddles, he loved magic, and he seemed to see the potential in photography, the parallels between experience and irrationality. Céline was said to be one of his idols, Céline the half-crazed Paris original who thought human beings should be categorized as either voyeurs or exhibitionists. His Death on the Installment Plan suggested that life’s final reward was death, and his exaggeration of reality, his preoccupation with the grotesque and the dangerous appealed to Diane, too. Her rebellion against the conventional, the reassuring, had begun when she was a teen-ager.
“Marvin and I are similar,” Diane confided to Tina Fredericks. “Rich, Jewish, protected,” They’d both been raised on Central Park West and Israel’s family had run a string of ladies’ specialty shops around Manhattan called David’s. But he did not talk about that much nor did he talk much about his brother or sister. “He was a very private fellow” says Bazaar editor Nancy White. However all of his friends knew he’d gone to the Yale art school, where he’d studied with Joseph Albers and then become one of Alexey Brodovitch’s protégés.
He’d apparently been greatly influenced by these men—master teachers who acted as guides, counselors, protectors, to a generation of artists and photographers. Their methods were harsh, dictatorial, and as Israel’s reputation grew in the 1960s as a painter/art director/teacher of graphics, he would behave rather like a Brodovitch with the small band of up-and-coming artists who gathered around him. “Marvin would always get turned on by a new talent,” one of his students says, “but then he’d grab hold of it—try to mold it and control it. He had to believe he controlled you as a talent. If you let him, he would art-direct your life.”
He saw Diane as an original talent who needed to be pushed. For the next eleven years he advised, cajoled, and promoted her. When she started telling Israel about the places she’d gone—the carnivals, Moondog’s filthy room—when she showed him contact prints of the freaks and eccentrics, he praised her courage. He later described her in a magazine article as the “first great private eye,” adding that she “loved being naughty…much of what she did came from that kind of delight. It made an explorer out of her.”
“Marvin thinks an artist’s obsessions are what make an artist interesting,” the novelist Larry Shainberg says. During the 1960s there was an almost convulsive move against fixed traditions in art, and in New York, off-Broadway actors, painters, musicians, dancers were experimenting wildly. Drugs were a source of pleasure, sex a source of power, and there seemed to be an increasing interest in characters who were living on the edge. Israel encouraged Diane to go deeper into the dark seedy worlds with her camera. “He believed she could push her obsessions to the limit,” Shainberg adds.
Some friends thought that Israel’s surrealist leanings, his lack of sentiment as reflected in his own stark paintings, not only influenced Diane’s photography but narrowed her vision as well. (Certainly modernist artists were deadly serious about their subject matter and their goals.) But the late photographer Chris von Wangenheim, who followed Diane’s progress closely, believed that “Marvin was like a creative sounding board to Diane—he galvanized her into having faith in her own vision—but he had little to do with the ambiguities suggested in her pictures. And he had no control over what made the best of them so perplexing—so alienating.”
According to Cheech, “Diane changed after she met Marvin. Her life got more fragmented—more secretive. She would never make plans. Everything was always last-minute. When I finally met Marvin, I told Diane I couldn’t get along with him and it was the beginning of the end of our friendship. She would not tolerate criticism of Marvin—she absolutely worshipped him. She saw fewer of her old friends with Marvin, since nobody could get along with him.” “He was very contemptuous of me whenever I visited Diane,” Shirley Fingerhood says. “It soon became impossible to visit her.”
The photographer Ben Fernandez remembers trying to speak to Diane on the street, only to have Marvin yank her away, exclaiming, “ ‘Come on! Come on!’ He seemed to want her all to himself.”
“Diane was always saying ‘Marvin this’ and ‘Marvin that,’ ” Cheech goes on. “Marvin Israel began obsessing her. But she never saw him that often; sometimes he’d drive her someplace very fast in his car and then go on to another appointment. Marvin goosed her creatively,” Cheech says. “Allan got upset hearing Marvin’s name mentioned so much. After all, Allan had nurtured and encouraged Diane all these years—he wanted some of the credit for developing her.”
During the first year of their friendship Israel was art director of Atlantic Records and so wasn’t in a position to place any of Diane’s pictures, but he talked about her to everyone in magazines. Then in the late summer of 1959 she took her portfolio up to Esquire.
* In 1958 Russeks Fifth Avenue folded; one of the reasons given was “changing customer patterns.” Other Russeks stores in Chicago and Brooklyn stayed open for the next few years. The chain, including the Savoy-Plaza shop, finally expired in the mid-sixties.