AFTER COMPLETING THE ESQUIRE assignment, Diane finished reading Joseph Mitchell’s epic profiles of outcasts, gypsies, freaks, and buffoons which appeared in the book McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. Possibly best known for his study of Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village eccentric, Mitchell had come to New York from Robinson, South Carolina, in 1929. He briefly wrote short stories before becoming a reporter, covering major news events like the Lindbergh kidnapping trial and Huey Long’s assassination for the World-Telegram and Herald Tribune. He became a New Yorker staff writer in 1937 and, according to Stanley Edgar Hyman, “in a few years he reshaped the magazine’s traditional reportorial forms ‘the Profile’ and ‘Reporter at Large’ into supple resourceful instruments for his own special purposes by blending the symbolic and poetic elements of his early fiction with the objectivity and detail of newspaper reporting.”
Painfully shy and secretive, with a gray cast to his face and a low, hesitant voice, Mitchell spent much of his free time with his close friends A. J. Liebling and S. J. Perelman at Costello’s Bar; otherwise he could be found hunched over his typewriter, struggling with profiles such as “Joe Gould, Greenwich Village Bohemian.”
Few people were allowed access to his austere twentieth-floor New Yorker office, part of a warren of offices called “Sleepy Hollow.” Surrounded only by desk, file cabinet, and, later, a poster of the ill-fated Broadway musical Bajour (based on his story of a slum gypsy king), Mitchell would labor for months, sometimes years, on projects like the eloquent “Bottom of the Harbor” series, studies of New York river life.
One afternoon, says Mitchell, he was “typing away in my cell when the phone rang and a tiny voice introduced herself as ‘Diane Arbus—I’m a photographer.’ For some reason—habit, I guess—I jotted her name down and the date of her call on my yellow pad, November 1960. We started talking and didn’t stop for two hours—she had the kind of voice—light, friendly—that made you trust her immediately. I had no idea how old she was—she sounded like a little girl. But her thoughts—many of them were extremely cultivated, erudite—if you’ll excuse the expression, it was freakish.
“She told me she wanted to take pictures of some of the people I’d written about like Lady Olga, the bearded lady, and Mazie, who rah a movie house in the Bowery. She said she imagined they were a link to a strange, dark world—to an underworld. I said I supposed they were, but hadn’t Brassai done photographs like that of the Parisian underworld in the 1920s and wasn’t Weegee doing it right now for the Daily News? Diane allowed as I was right but she was going to go about it in a different way—pursuing what couldn’t be defined, pursuing what was missing in an image. I said Okay.
“Then she asked me how I found the kind of people I wrote about and I told her by being persistent—by hanging around. Around cafeterias, park benches, subway trains, public libraries, by interviewing ambulance drivers, scrubwomen, morgue workers. I told her about Professor Heckler at the flea circus, who was a good friend of mine. Did she know him? I asked. Indeed she did—she had been spending a lot of time at the flea circus for her essay in Esquire. We laughed when we found out we’d both spent hours watching him feed his damn fleas.”
In another conversation Diane and Mitchell talked about freaks and Diane referred to Mitchell’s definition of “class distinctions among freaks” which had appeared in his masterful portrait of Lady Olga, the bearded lady. “Born freaks are the aristocracy of the sideshow world,” Mitchell wrote. “Bearded ladies, Siamese twins, pinheads, fat girls, dwarfs, midgets, giants, living skeletons, men with skulls on which rocks can be broken.
“Made freaks include tattooed people who obtain sideshow engagements, reformed criminals, old movie stars, retired athletes like Jack Johnson.”
Again and again in their conversations Diane returned to Mitchell’s distinctions among freaks, and one assumes that her own celebrated comments about freaks were inspired by him. She said: “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
Mitchell says, “I urged Diane not to romanticize freaks. I told her that freaks can be boring and ordinary as so-called ‘normal’ people. I told her what I found interesting about Olga, the bearded lady, was that she yearned to be a stenographer and kept geraniums on her windowsill, and that the 450-pound wrestler I once interviewed cried piteously from homesickness for his native Ukraine.”
Mitchell says Diane phoned him frequently in subsequent weeks. They would always talk for at least an hour, and Mitchell jotted down some of the topics they covered: Kafka, James Joyce, Walker Evans, Grimms’ Fairy Tales. She had been reading Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics and told him of Sitwell’s theory that contemplating eccentrics was a cure for melancholy—a way of distinguishing Man from Beast. She would giggle when Mitchell said something funny, and sometimes when he didn’t she would giggle anyway. “She said she had looked for the people I’d written about, and Lady Olga was dead and Mazie down in the Bowery didn’t want to be photographed. But she was making progress finding eccentrics, she said.” And she talked about discovering “people who were anomalies, who were quixotic, who believed in the impossible, who make their mark on themselves.” Mainly, she said, she was “nosing around.”
Her idea of “nosing around” was to prowl the city from dawn to dusk, alighting at any number of her favorite haunts—Central Park, the 42nd Street Automat, Washington Square. When somebody caught her fancy, she would go over and strike up a conversation. Joel Meyerowitz, who sometimes accompanied her in her wanderings, says, “She could hypnotize people, I swear. She would start talking to them and they would be as fascinated with her as she was with them. She had a magnetic quality—a Peter Pan quality. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
She didn’t like being interrupted. Once when her former assistant, Richard Marx, saw her huddled outside the 56th Street Doubleday bookstore, camera poised, he spoke to her. “Shh,” she hissed, “I’m working!” She was more polite with Dale McConathy, who ran into her during lunch hour on West 47th Street by the Gotham Book Mart. “I asked her to please take my picture, but she refused—with a smile. ‘It would take five hundred exposures before I’d get you without your mask,’ she told me.”
She might wait for days or weeks until a face in the crowd intrigued her and then she would grab it with her camera. Her friend Marvin Israel wrote after her death that these contacts, which are different from her other work, are breathtaking. “There are hundreds of sheets where the same face never appears more than once, all very close-up.” Thousands of exposures “like some strange catalogue,* and then there would be a contact sheet from several years later with one of those same faces in which you can trace Diane’s progress from the street to their home to their living room to their bedroom. These are like a narrative, a slow process leading up to some strange intimacy.”
She told Ann Ray of Newsweek, “1 love to go to people’s houses—exploring—doing daring things I’ve not done before—things I’d fantasized about as a child. I love going into people’s houses—that’s part of the thrill of seduction for a woman—to see how he [the subject] lives—the pictures on the wall—the wife’s slippers in the bathroom. But I’m not vicarious—I really am involved. And all the time I’m photographing I’m having a terrific time.” (Sometimes such encounters could end disastrously, although Diane was never specific about the trouble she may have got into or the danger she may have faced in welfare hotels or carnivals. Jack Smith, the creator of the underground movie Flaming Creatures, said he kicked her out of his apartment when she persisted in taking his picture and pictures of his various costumes. And she was periodically ousted from transvestite bars. “She could be extremely aggressive as a photographer,” Frederick Eberstadt says.)
“What came to really excite her was anything out of place,” Israel wrote. He felt that Diane was quite proud that she was able to tell, just by seeing someone for a moment, that they had something secret or mysterious about them and that in their homes “they would be extraordinary.” She’d approach these people and ask, “Can I come home with you?”
So it was with the various eccentrics she discovered in the next years. Some she went home with, some she didn’t; some she photographed, others she just talked to, but everyone impressed her. Like the irate lady who appeared to Diane one night pulling a kiddy’s red express wagon trimmed with bells and filled with cats in fancy hats and dresses. Like the man in Brooklyn called the Mystic Barber who teleported himself to Mars and said he was dead and wore a copper band around his forehead with antennae on it to receive instructions from the Martians. Or the lady in the Bronx who trained herself to eat and sleep underwater, or the black who carried a rose and a noose around with him at all times, or the person who invented a noiseless soup spoon, or the man from New Jersey who’d collected string for twenty years, winding it into a ball that was now five feet in diameter, sitting monstrous and splendid in his living room.
Sometimes friends suggested subjects. Abby Fink, who’d grown up with Diane, phoned to tell her about Polly Boshung, an attractive blonde who, because she was almost completely deaf and acutely embarrassed about it (“I’d wanted to be an actress, but realized I wouldn’t hear my cues”), had created an entirely different identity for herself to hide behind whenever she appeared in public. At dinners, on cruises, the usually sedate Polly transformed herself into “Cora Pratt,” an outrageous loudmouth who sported a wig, huge false buck teeth, and a shower cap. Once “Cora” pretended to be the maid at a party in Bucks County: sipped guests’ drinks, blew ashes from ashtrays, and talked nonstop about the joys of Five Day Deodorant Pads before collapsing on the sofa dead asleep. She’d been so expert in her disguise that none of her friends recognized Polly as “Cora.”
Diane took the Greyhound bus up to Peabody, Massachusetts, where Polly lived with her mother. Today Polly (now a saleslady in a Nantucket dress shop) remembers that “Diane Arbus was awful nice to me. Sweet. She spent all day photographing me in the garden and then she packed up her cameras and went down to catch the bus. But before she left she asked me a couple of times was I really sincere about having those two people inside myself? I kept telling her I was sincere, but I guess she didn’t believe me because I didn’t end up at her show in the Museum of Modern Art. Actually, I didn’t mind, because I don’t see how you could label me a freak.”
Shortly before she and Allan finally separated, Diane went to see her school friend Shirley Fingerhood. Fingerhood, a lawyer and later to be a judge, had been divorced and was raising a baby son by herself. “How do you do it alone?” Diane asked. “What demands do you make?”
Fingerhood says, “I just told her it was going to be rough and that she had to be prepared for it.”
Around them a generation of marriages seemed to be cracking at the seams. Couples like Rick and Tina Fredericks and the Forsts had already broken up, and couples like Robert and Mary Frank and Cheech and her husband were in high states of emotional agitation.
Sidney Simon, the sculptor, recalls that “last angry summer of 1960 when a few of us were trying to stick together and the effort was becoming almost unbearable.” Simon knew Allan because the Arbus kids all went to the Little Red School House. During the summer Simon organized a car trip to Maine with Diane, “and Allan and Susan and her husband, the actor Michael Wager, were the other passengers driving up to see their children, who were attending Blueberry Cove Camp in Tenants Harbor. We were in the last stages—the last dying gasps—of our respective marriages, so the atmosphere was awfully tense. We’d booked rooms in the same motel for a night. The following morning Diane knocked on our door and announced, Allan and I have separated and he’s gone back to New York.’ She seemed totally composed, although she looked as if she hadn’t slept a wink.”
She didn’t go into the whys, and nobody asked any questions. At breakfast the Wagers and the Simons tried to talk of other things. Diane insisted that everybody go to a traveling fair in Bar Harbor. It was at least sixty miles from where they were, but nobody was in the mood to argue, so after visiting their children they piled into the car and headed for the fair.
When they arrived, they wandered around aimlessly, eating too much sticky popcorn, trying to win at target practice. Meanwhile Diane disappeared. Hours went by. The sun was going down. Simon says, “We hunted high and low and couldn’t find her and it was getting late and we were dying to get back to New York. Finally, at what seemed like the eleventh hour, we found her photographing a transvestite in a tent.”
During the fall of 1960 Diane followed William Mack (also known as the Sage of the Wilderness). Mack, eighty-two, a retired seaman with flowing beard and bright black eyes, was a scavenger who lived in the Bowery, and Diane went with him on his daily ritual (which began at five a.m. in the freezing dawn), picking empty bottle caps out of the garbage and depositing them in his baby carriage, which he would eventually wheel over to a bottle-collector. She photographed Mack reclining in his tiny room stuffed with personal rubbish, his favorite items a squashed coffee pot and a pair of nurse’s white shoes.
Also in 1960 she spent a great deal of time photographing Prince Robert de Rohan Courtney (whom Mitchell had written about). The prince was claimant to the throne of the Byzantine Roman Empire and lived in a “bejeweled 6 by 9 foot room on 48 Street called the Jade Tower,” Diane wrote. “In his bureau drawer he keeps the ingredients for breakfast of 3 raw eggs and a pat of butter in hot coffee.” Diane pored over his poems (nine thousand of them), scrawled in a kind of pig Latin, a fragment of which she unscrambled to read, “he who searches for trash so surely finds only trash.” She eventually accompanied the prince (who’d been born in Oklahoma) when he went to the Bowery to distribute cigarettes and money to delighted derelicts, and several times she joined him for supper at the 57th Street Automat.
Diane was so excited by her photographs of eccentrics (the prince, the scavenger) that she wrote Harold Hayes asking for an assignment to photograph other eccentrics for a picture story, and she listed people she hoped to include, such as “a hermit and a very cheerful man with half a beard who collects woodpecker holes…these are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups.”
Hayes turned down the idea with the excuse that “you can’t take a picture of someone with the express purpose of showing him or her as an eccentric.” They spoke no more about it, but Diane continued to photograph regularly for Esquire, and she and Hayes sent each other brief missives about her work. She often kidded him about his brusque manner in rejecting one of her projects. Once she commented, “Your last letter was a bit lacking in human warmth. It would have been an excellent one to send to the phone company.”
By this time she was assured of another outlet for her work because in early 1961 Marvin Israel replaced Henry Wolf as art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Immediately, Israel invited her to complete her essay on eccentrics. He also encouraged her to write about them (she had shown him the long captions she’d written for her Esquire pictures) and promised he would publish both text and pictures in Bazaar.
Diane went to Washington, D.C., by train to attend the Kennedy Inauguration with one of her favorite eccentrics, a tiny, gray-bearded, eighty-year-old man, Max Maxwell Landars, who called himself “Uncle Sam.” Clad in a red, white, and blue Uncle Sam uniform (he’d originally worn the uniform when he was advertising an exterminator service), Uncle Sam talked compulsively about himself. “I am what I call a Personality,” he told her. “I’ve got the greatest laugh in the country… I am writing my life story which will be similar to Mission to Moscow which Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote… I have the voice of a man, woman and child… I am a Phenomenon… M…E…Me!” During the train ride Diane photographed Uncle Sam as he trudged up the aisles proclaiming to the passengers how he planned to be THE FIRST MAN TO SHAKE THE HAND OF DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER WHEN HE WAS NO LONGER PRESIDENT.
She planned to photograph that moment too, but when they reached the capital, Uncle Sam panicked; they missed the Inauguration and Diane spent an entire night in Union Station calming him down. Periodically he would do Shirley Temple imitations and he repeated his name, “Uncle Sam,” to anyone who would listen. Near dawn he was promising to “bring the Liberty Bell” back to New York. For a while they slept fitfully on benches in the waiting room, and sometime the following morning Diane photographed Uncle Sam climbing imperiously up the 898 steps of the Washington Monument during a raging blizzard.
Ultimately, she added Uncle Sam to her collection of eccentrics, along with the prince, the Marked Man, the junk collector, Polly/Cora, and Stormé, “the lady who appears to be a gentleman.” She wrote a succinct little portrait to go with each picture after entitling the essay “The Full Circle—‘who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (Shakespeare).” Pictures and text were accompanied by an eloquent introduction also written by Diane: “These are five singular people who appear further out than we do; beckoned, not driven; invented by belief; each the author and hero of a real dream by which our own courage and cunning are tested and tried; so that we may wonder all over again what is veritable and inevitable and possible and what it is to become whoever we may be.”
Nancy White, Bazaar’s editor-in-chief, resisted publishing “The Full Circle.” The pictures were not only marred by too much graininess and contrast, she said, but what Bazaar reader could possibly be interested in staring at the face of a recluse who believed himself to be the Emperor of Byzantium?—or a junk collector whose prize possessions were a squashed coffee pot and pair of battered nurse’s shoes? Mrs. White resisted publishing certain things. She supposedly pulled Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’safter it was already in galleys because she thought the character was too kooky and amoral. The real reason, however, was she was afraid it might offend Tiffany and Company, who advertised in the magazine. “Nancy did publish a lot of great stuff,” says Bazaar’s former articles editor, Ilya Stanger, in her defense. “She published Flannery O’Connor and Natalie Sarraute…but she had a funny manner. She was never enthusiastic about anything that came across her desk. Dick Avedon often felt like tearing out his hair after an editorial meeting with Nancy.”
So it was with the Diane Arbus pictures of eccentrics. Mrs. White says, “I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I’d worked with Diane when I was at Good Housekeeping, when she’d done lovely things on children’s fashions, and then these odd images came in and Marvin and his assistants, Bea and Ruth, treated them like the Holy Grail!”
It was not the first instance (nor would it be the last) when Diane’s work polarized viewers into two camps. Mrs. White maintains she was turned off by Diane’s preoccupation with grotesques and deviates. Marvin Israel presumably argued that the Arbus images were like no one else’s in their force and originality, and hadn’t Bazaar published Brassai, Bill Brandt, and Lisette Model? After much discussion Mrs. White finally allowed Diane’s pictures to be published in the November 1961 issue of Bazaar, but she pulled the portrait of “The Lady Who Appears to Be a Gentleman” as being too disconcerting for Bazaar readers.
Not long after that, Diane visited Emile de Antonio in his new Japanese-modern apartment on East 91st Street to complain. “We sat around and Diane smoked a little pot and I drank some whiskey and she was very angry about the Stormé portrait being pulled and she didn’t like the look of the final layout, although she didn’t tell Marvin at the time. She thought the pictures were too small.”
(Diane held on to the rights, and the following year she resold both pictures and text to Infinity magazine—Stormé included—and retitled the essay “The Eccentric as Nature’s Aristocrats—rare and precious people as seen from the inside as they would have themselves be seen.”
(An Infinity art director comments, “We got a couple of cancellations after the Arbus pictures were published—some people couldn’t take that kind of confrontation with life. At times the confrontation seemed so direct as to seem hostile.”)
One of the first copies of Bazaar’s November issue went to Joseph Mitchell at The New Yorker with a note from Diane written in tiny script on the cover: “Dear Mr. Mitchell, thanks for your kindness on the phone last fall when I was looking for people. Here are some I found (pp. 133-137) Diane Arbus.”
She also sent copies to her sister, Renée, her brother, Howard, and her parents in Palm Beach. She received little response. Later her mother would comment that she didn’t know why Diane took photographs of “such people.”
A good deal of Diane’s secret concern for respectability sprang from her family’s attitudes. She knew her parents were embarrassed by her bare, unshaven legs, her smudged eye make-up. Since her separation from Allan, her habit of wandering the streets photographing night people and outcasts really upset them, particularly since Renée appeared to have created such a traditional life for herself with Roy, her adopted daughter, and their dogs in a house on a lake in Michigan. And Howard’s marriage to Peggy seemed solid, too—they now had two sons, and Howard’s academic career was festooned with awards and grants; he was currently Visiting Professor of Literature at the University of Minnesota.
“Howard was expected to be the somebody in the family. Diane was not expected to be anything other than a wife and mother,” her cousin Dorothy Evslin says.
Howard’s New and Selected Poems had just been published to superlative reviews. Thom Gunn had stated in the Yale Review: “Howard Nemerov is one of the best poets writing in English,” and James Dickey had commented on his “poetic intelligence, his wit.”
Howard was finally making money as well, having sold his novel The Homecoming Game to the movies. (Jane Fonda and Tony Perkins appeared in the film version, entitled Tall Story.) He told Diane kiddingly that his shoulder ached from carrying so many checks to the bank, and reminded his friend John Pauker that “Daddy never praised me until I made money in Hollywood,” bitterly concluding, “It was the first time Daddy accepted me as a man.” (“Oh, the pathology of the American obsession with success!” Pauker replied.)
By now the Nemerovs were living in a penthouse on top of the Palm Beach Towers in Florida and Mr. Nemerov was continuing to turn out flower paintings which sold briskly. He was also wheeling and dealing with the money he’d made from his sale of Russeks stock, investing practically all of it in a real-estate venture that went “totally bust” near the end of 1961, Renée says. “Daddy was absolutely devastated—he’d thought he was going to make a huge killing and instead he lost almost everything. It broke his spirit.”
She and Roy flew to Florida. They stayed on at the Palm Beach Towers for almost six weeks, keeping the Nemerovs company, trying to cheer them up. And they worked on their plastic sculptures and Roy’s illuminated “stained glass” plastic. Both were eventually exhibited at the Palm Beach Art Institute.
As usual, Diane showed no interest whatsoever in her sister’s latest artistic endeavor. When she came to Palm Beach she always chose to come when Renée wasn’t there. At that point the polarization between the two sisters was acute. “I really did love Diane,” Renée says. “And I wanted her to love me.”
In retrospect it probably went back to their childhood when the Nemerovs began labeling Renée as “the normal one” and Howard and Diane as different. Renée was supposed to be her parents’ salvation—she would vindicate them by growing up conventional. So Diane and Renée grew up in psychological opposition to each other, and although they both married men their parents disapproved of and both became artists, these similarities did not draw them close; instead they believed that deep within themselves something vital was missing. Diane spent most of her adult life revealing to no one that she had a sister. Renée, on the other hand, bragged constantly about Diane. When they were together, there was always unspoken tension between them.
There were other family tensions, too. By now the Nemerovs realized that Diane and Allan’s trial separation was a permanent one—the marriage, for all intents and purposes, was over. This disappointed them deeply, so Diane had to cope with that, too. Even so, when her depressions over Allan became too extreme, she would fly to Palm Beach and Gertrude would try to minister to her; Diane always expected her mother to come to the rescue and relieve her of her terrible feelings of helplessness. But this rarely happened. They might talk haltingly—“at” each other; might talk as they wandered around Gertrude’s beautifully appointed bedroom and out onto the sun-drenched balcony which overlooked the blue Atlantic Ocean. They might talk about money worries, family illnesses, Doon and Amy. (Motherhood was the only subject on which they could relate to each other easily.) But as often as not their conversations would grind to a halt and there would be long, uncomfortable silences until Gertrude split open a fresh pack of cigarettes and then Diane might escape to the beach and plunge into the surf, swimming far out beyond the waves.
Most of the time Diane didn’t mention her mother to friends; if she did, it was with some irony. Because, after all, Gertrude had shared an intense love with her mother, the wisecracking, chain-smoking Rose. And Diane and Doon were intensely, symbiotically connected. But with Diane and her mother, warmth and tenderness and love had always been repressed. There would probably never be a mutual confirmation between the two of them, although they obviously hungered for it.
* Diane left thousands of negatives. Over a decade after her death some of them are still being catalogued. However, Israel and Doon have chosen a select number of Arbus’ published magazine work as part of a traveling exhibit and book.