LIKE MOST OF HER contemporaries, Diane had been using a Leica for years, but in 1962 she changed to a Rolleiflex. She once explained the shift by saying that the Leica’s flattening perspective added to the air of unreality in her images; she’d grown impatient with the grainy quality of her prints and wanted to be able to decipher the texture of things. Her teacher Lisette Model stressed, “The most mysterious thing is a fact clearly stated.”
The Rollei with its 2-1/4-inch-square, less grainy negative gave Diane the clarity she wanted and contributed to the refinement of a deceptively simple classical style that has since been recognized as one of the distinctive features of her work. At first, however, she was intimidated by the vividness provided by her new equipment and frustrated by what she called “the rigidity of the new square frame.”
She wrote to the Meserveys in Boston: “I am very gloomy and scared. Maybe I have discovered that I have to use the 2-1/4 instead of the 35mm, but the only tangible result so far is that I can’t photograph at all.”
She was still getting used to her new life as a woman alone, trying to oversee her two daughters, rustle up magazine jobs, tend to her latest projects. She could often be seen peddling furiously around New York on her bicycle, in search of a different face, a new situation. However, unless she had a specific assignment, her days tended to be disorganized and chaotic and structured mainly by her daughters’ schedules when they were both living with her and attending school in the city. “Diane always put her responsibility as a mother first,” Tom Morgan says, “even when she was the most successful and in demand. Being a mother came first for her. She was a loving, thoughtful parent and concerned about her kids in the extreme.”
When the Nemerovs visited from Palm Beach, Diane would dutifully invite them down to the Charles Street house to see their grandchildren. On these occasions she always hoped she’d get along better with her father, but they invariably disagreed about something trivial and Diane would try to stand up to him and then David Nemerov would do what he’d always done—make up some crazy statistic to defend his point of view. “Like he’d say five million Chinese are doing such and such,” Diane commented, “and he didn’t know any more than I do whether that was true, but he would speak with such authority I’d be stopped in my tracks.”
When her parents finally left, Diane would rush off to photograph someone, or she might drop in at Richard Avedon’s studio on East 58th Street. She had been introduced to the great photographer in the early 1950s and was getting to know him better through Marvin Israel, who worked with him regularly at Bazaar.
Avedon was sharing his studio with Hiro then, so the place literally pulsated with activity; both photographers were doing a great deal of fashion work for Bazaar. The ambiance surrounding them was theatrical—blazing lights and music, ever-ringing phones, clouds of hairspray, preening half-nude models like the six-foot-two-inch Veruscha and later the ninety-pound nymphet Twiggy, who became the quintessential model of the period because she could fit so perfectly into fashion’s baby styles—the tunics, the boxy little coats. It was the start of the sixties—“the wildest looniest time in New York since the 1920s,” Tom Wolfe wrote. And Avedon (whom Cocteau called “that wonderful, terrible mirror”) was tuned into everything from rock music to fashion to civil rights.
Diane admired Avedon’s manic energy, his dazzling inventiveness—he could photograph eerie Roman catacombs or madhouses with equal intensity. He was currently doing fashion-in-motion studies where clothes, hairstyles, makeup blurred gorgeously. “Dick keeps setting photographic problems for himself and then solving them,” Diane remarked. A major challenge for him had always been celebrity portraits because, he explained, “Celebrities have the faces of men and women familiar with extreme situations…they are defined by their accomplishments.” As far back as 1948 (when he’d started serving as associate editor on Theatre Arts magazine because he couldn’t stand being known simply as a “fashion photographer”) he’d taken soft, almost worshipful pictures of stars like Mary Martin in South Pacific, Henry Fonda in Mister Roberts, a debonair Tennessee Williams posed next to his agent, Audrey Wood. By 1958 the portraits had shifted from show business to the arts in general, and Avedon grew bolder, capturing the hairy poet Ezra Pound as he shrieked into his lens, pouncing on wizened Isak Dinesen until her stare became transfixed. These were followed by a series of savage images, among them Dorothy Parker and Somerset Maugham looking so nasty and exhausted their expressions resembled police mug shots.
Diane was bothered by some of Avedon’s methods. She didn’t think they were always fair. The retouching—the softening or coarsening of prints—distorted and warped some of his celebrities on film. And while she was painstakingly slow when taking a portrait, Avedon relied on his brand of rapid “unearned intimacy” with a subject. “Ten minutes” and it’s a deep one-on-one situation with two strangers who share a moment. “Then, it’s over, and thank you very much and how to get out the door.” When asked what it felt like to photograph Ezra Pound or Marilyn Monroe, Avedon responded, “I forget. I’m so split the moment I photograph, I don’t remember what they’ve said or what I’ve said.” Diane couldn’t believe he was unable to remember, since she remembered everything, but everyone was different. She had already formulated a belief (shared by Steichen) that photography was “born perfect.” That an image at its truest should be both literal and transcendent. Diane didn’t want the quality of her portraits to be sentimentalized or manipulated; what she hoped for was to dramatize a particular life.
Diane would occasionally voice her ambivalent feelings about some of Avedon’s work to others—but never to him. Mostly she seemed to be his biggest fan, just as he seemed to be hers. He stood in awe of her curious talent and she remained impressed by his staying power in a business where there were so many burnouts; his ideas were limitless—and he could always solve the photographer’s perennial problem, what to photograph next.
They became dear friends, perhaps because they possessed the same roots. Both were descended from immigrants; their fathers were driven, inarticulate men who had run Fifth Avenue stores at the same time. “Diane and I were so close we used to tell each other our dreams,” Avedon once confided.
As a little boy, when he’d done poorly in school, he’d forged his parent’s signature on report cards. He failed to graduate from DeWitt Clinton High, which disappointed his family greatly—they’d wanted him to get a good education because they believed education was essential for survival. “But I had a visual intelligence,” Avedon would say. As a teen-ager he could not concentrate on math—instead he papered his bedroom walls with Munkacsi’s exuberant fashion photographs from Bazaar and he collected autographs by writing letters to Toscanini, Einstein, Katharine Cornell. Once he found out that Salvador Dali was staying at the Hotel St. Moritz and went to his suite carrying his autograph book. The eccentric painter greeted him at the door wearing a snake wrapped around his waist. In the background his wife, Gala, stood nude, waiting to be sketched.
After he became a famous photographer, Avedon would try to convince various women friends to pose for him with snakes. In recent years one of his most publicized celebrity portraits was of the beautiful German movie star Nastassia Kinski, totally naked, her body entwined by a huge python.
Diane never saw that picture, but she did see Avedon’s huge portrait of Eisenhower looking exceedingly absent-minded. She loved it “because Ike’s expression is like he came out of the womb too soon.” (It bore a slight resemblance to the ID shots Avedon took by the hundreds when he was in the Merchant Marine during World War II. That was part of his training as a photographer.)
Later Diane would say, “Dick does everything with grace.” He had originally fantasized becoming a tap dancer (he was thrilled when Fred Astaire played him in the movie musical Funny Face). He effortlessly moved around his studio; his wiry body appearing even more slender because he often dressed in black suits. Terrified of gaining weight, he existed sometimes on a spoonful of peanut butter a day. Oh, he was gallant, Diane thought—she called him glamorous too, and mercurial and charming with everything—but he had a reserve, he held back. His family life with his wife, Evelyn, and his son, John, was scrupulously private and he had few close friendships apart from Diane—one was with Laura Kanelos, his devoted photo rep. When she died of cancer in the 1970s, he shut himself away from everybody for days. Ultimately he would move into his studio and live in one room, but during the sixties he kept an apartment on Park Avenue. Even so, he spent most of his time photographing in his studio, where everything seemed synchronized down to the last minute.
His studio with his many assistants was a miracle of organization and efficiency as far as she was concerned, she who was so inefficient! And the way he made so much money—$100,000 for one Revlon account, another $100,000 for CBS Records—he could complete shooting the accounts in a month or two and then be free to concentrate on personal work. Avedon showed “grace under pressure,” Diane believed, including the time when one of his secretaries dropped dead in the studio and he’d got everybody involved. “It was a shocking occurrence,” a friend said. “Happened right in the middle of a fashion shooting. Dick had never seen anyone dead close up before. He made everybody from Bazaar come to her funeral, and afterwards at the magazine’s advertising conference, where he was supposed to talk about upcoming styles, he spoke instead very movingly of the girl’s untimely death. Diane thought that was a terrific thing to do.”
For his part Avedon thought Diane was a genius—a photographer with a rare and special gift. Marvin Israel called her an artist. “Avedon for all his phenomenal success was very insecure about his talent,” Lee Witkin, the gallery owner, says. He wanted his pictures to be considered—noticed; more than anything, he wanted not to be thought of as “merely a fashion photographer.”
In time he would be able to see that his fashion work was truly remarkable—unique. He would accept the fact, and he would also be influenced by Diane—by her patience, her endurance, by her collaborative, confrontational portraiture organized around a single focus: the face.
But an Avedon would still be—distinctively—an Avedon, more isolated and energized than an Arbus and always immaculately, superbly printed on gleaming white semigloss or matte simulacrum to make the subjects stand out with a kind of hallucinatory sharpness.
Like Diane, Avedon used a Rollei, but eventually he switched to the old-fashioned 8x10 Deardorf camera “because I no longer wanted to hide behind the camera. I wanted to meet my subjects man to man. I wanted nothing to help the photograph except what I could draw out of the sitter.”
He was now insisting on alternating his fashion pages in Bazaar with faces that interested him. He’d become obsessed with documenting the similarity between faces, matching up unlikely combinations: the baby doctor—the murderer (can you tell who’s who?). He made Nancy White give him extra pages in which to publish his portraits of marriages in City Hall, or his portraits of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
He was given total support by Marvin Israel, who was making the magazine’s design concept as distinctive as its editorial content. He sent Robert Frank to Poland and Russia to photograph fashions against grim totalitarian backdrops; he hired Stan Vanderbeck to create imaginative collages; he applauded Avedon’s idea of taking pictures of Countess Christina Paolozzi baring her breasts, and of photographing the Paris collections with the beautiful model China Machado surrounded by mottled, wrinkled, aging members of the French press.
Israel would talk of his future plans for Bazaar: yes, it would reflect trendy clothes and images, but also life as seen by Fellini. Dale McConathy, its former features editor, says, “Marvin loved La Dolce Vita. He wanted to capture the feel of that movie with its suggestions of tabloid sensationalism—upper-class apathy and corrupted sensuality; he wanted to capture that in the pages of Bazaar, in between the ads for perfume and jewelry and the editorials on lingerie and furs…and Marvin and Avedon had 1950s cultural heroes they longed to immortalize—cultural heroes like Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Oscar Levant, who were starting to be physical wrecks.”
Needless to say, Diane’s severe vision—her fascination with freaks and eccentrics—seemed to be an asset, a weapon if you will, to wield against Nancy White, Bazaar’s stylish but rather conventional editor-in-chief.
Diane was dropping in at Richard Avedon’s studio with increasing regularity and he always encouraged her and gave her technical advice. Occasionally they would exchange stories about how they had achieved a particular photographic result, but that was rare—Avedon ordinarily didn’t reveal his tricks. Nor did he praise other photographers except for Diane, though he admired Irving Penn. “What’s Irving up to these days?” he’d ask.
Once he did confide how he got the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to appear so surprised in his ravaged portrait of them for his book Nothing Personal. He reportedly arrived at their Waldorf Towers apartment and began setting up his cameras as the royal couple carefully arranged themselves. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he murmured, “but the most terrible thing happened—my cab ran over a dog.”
The Windsors (both dog-lovers) gasped. “Acch!”
Click! went the shutter.
Diane liked that story and another he used to tell about the time Charlie Chaplin hid out for a day in his studio, hoping to avoid the immigration authorities. During that day Avedon snapped dozens of increasingly frenzied portraits of the great clown making faces at him through the lens.
Diane thought her own anecdotes about getting pictures weren’t as “classy.” Her stories were about how she’d finally been able to track down a hermit only to find he was “uh—a man more than a hermit.” Then there had been the weird meal she’d shared with two transvestites in a diner…after she’d photographed them at a drag-queen ball.
At first she didn’t have much to say when she visited Avedon to show him her latest prints. He and Israel were the only ones she trusted enough to let them see her rough, private work in progress. Usually the three of them would huddle over her latest set of contacts with magnifying glass and grease pencil. In these sessions Israel would demonstrate what museum people like T. Hartwell called “genius” because he would invariably help Diane choose from her contacts the shots which best revealed her personal style. He knew what made visual sense. He would often tell her to go back and shoot some more, or he might suggest cropping a photograph in a particular way that would result in a more powerful result. Neither he nor Avedon would ever tamper with her unique approach; all they could really do was encourage her, nurture her. The three of them developed a more or less free-floating system of equals. “They respected each other so much,” the photographer Neil Selkirk says. What bound them together in that studio more than anything was a kind of shared energy. “And nosiness,” he adds. As a, trio they were insatiably curious, wandering the city together, until Diane went off to photograph in her “forbidden places” alone, returning with pictures and stories that often left the men howling. “These shreds of life stories are what she found from the people she photographed,” Doon Arbus writes, “and when she told of these encounters, …she would become like someone possessed—possessed by phrases, accents, and peculiarities of speech, and bursts of laughter over her own performance.”
“A photograph for Diane was an event,” Marvin Israel said in a television interview. “It could be argued that for Diane the most valuable thing wasn’t the photograph (the result), it was the experience—the event. She was absolutely moved by every single event, and she would narrate them in detail. She wouldn’t just say, ‘I took a photograph of so and so in their home.’ It was the going there—being there, the dialogue that came back and forth, the moments of just waiting—no talk. It was an incredibly personal thing and once [she] became an adventurer—because Diane really was an adventurer—she went places no one else [no photographer] had ever gone to. [Those] places were scary… But once [she] became an adventurer [she was] geared to adventure and she sought out adventure and [her] life [was] based on that…the photograph was like her trophy—it was what she received as an award for her adventure.”
After she had shown her latest photographs to Avedon and Israel and told them her latest adventure, she might take off with Alen McWeeney, the young Irish photographer who was then Avedon’s assistant. They would settle in at Grand Central Station and photograph the people hanging around the waiting room late at night, and then they might go back to the Charles Street house and talk about photography. “But she showed me few of her photographs,” McWeeney says, “even though I knew she was working on a lot of new stuff.”
She was starting to photograph more mythological types—dwarfs and a giant. She never explained why she was so drawn to these fabled creatures, but then Diane never gave specific reasons for anything she did artistically. It was simply that the best pictures she took reflected her attraction to the subject. Like Morales, the Mexican dwarf, whom she photographed over and over again for years, getting to know his habits, his thoughts. Eventually she posed him squatting bare-chested on his bed with his hat on. By that time the rapport between them was palpable, almost erotic, and you can feel it emanating from the image. “Taking a portrait is like seducing someone,” Diane told John Gossage.
The same thing happened when she began photographing the 495-pound, eight-foot-tall “Jewish Giant,” Eddie Carmel. Diane kept shooting him for almost a decade, not printing the negatives until 1970 because “the others were just—pictures.” She first photographed him in the insurance office on 42nd Street where he worked selling mutual funds. Next she photographed him wandering around Times Square in the penny arcades, looming above the traffic. In a good mood he would make up poetry for her—“a kind of calypso,” Diane said. “You would give Eddie a word or two and then he’d compose a poem.”
She felt in awe of his enormous height—particularly when she photographed him alone in a room. She said later to a class, “He’s really very moving, when he lies down, because he looks in a way like Alice. I mean there’s something extraordinary about the way he fills a couch. I don’t know—like a mountain range.”
Throughout the years Diane and the giant developed a friendship of sorts. He confided in her that he still dreamed of being a great actor, but the only parts he could get on TV were monster roles. (He had played the son of Frankenstein’s monster in a film called The Head That Would Not Die. In it he had chomped off a man’s arm and tossed a half-nude girl across a table.) He bragged to Diane that he had auditioned for the lead in a Broadway show—that of a tall basketball player in Tall Story. He hadn’t got it because he was too tall. Diane remarked that her brother had written the original version of Tall Story, the novel The Homecoming Game, but Carmel didn’t seem impressed.
Eventually he invited Diane to photograph him at his home in the Bronx, where he lived with his normal-sized parents. Even though he was slowly dying of bone disease, he kept talking about joining a carnival. He had played the Tallest Cowboy in the World for Ringling Brothers’ circus at Madison Square Garden.
From 1962 to 1970 Diane kept returning to the Carmels’ cramped apartment until she finally captured the image she wanted—certainly one of her most memorable—in which giant and parents confront one another.
At one point she excitedly phoned Joseph Mitchell at the New Yorker. “You know how every mother has nightmares when she’s pregnant that her baby will be born a monster? I think I got that in the mother’s face as she glares up at Eddie, thinking, ‘OH MY GOD, NO!’ ”
Gradually toward the end of 1962 Diane’s freakish subject matter—the dwarf, the giant, the changing cast of characters at Hubert’s Museum—was joined by another major project: nudists. She was to spend the next five years photographing nudists in camps around New Jersey and Pennsylvania. She hoped these portraits of dense, impenetrable “naked people,” as she called them, would result in a book, with lengthy captions to be written by herself. Once she laid out all her pictures for John Gossage sequentially to show him how these images could tell a kind of story—the family of overweight nudists lying in the meadow; the leathery retired nudists who posed with nude pictures of themselves lolling in easy chairs; the slightly potbellied nudist lovers who reminded one of Adam and Eve; the nudist kids.
Many of them looked like statues to her—indeed, most of the nude figures she photographed fill the picture frame with weighty masses—you can almost feel the bulk and earthiness of their existence.
But Diane’s book of “naked people” was never published because she couldn’t get releases; nevertheless, photographing at the nudist camps was a singularly provocative experience for her because she collaborated so completely with her subjects; in order to get permission to photograph them, she had to agree to be naked too, which challenged her subjects as well as herself. “You feel silly for ten minutes and then it’s okay,” she said. “Nudist camps was a terrific subject for me.” She polished her stories about photographing nudists by repeating them over and over again to Marvin Israel, her daughters, and friends. She would say that her first impression “was a bit like walking into a hallucination and not being sure whose it was. I was really flabbergasted at the time… I had never seen that many men naked all at once. The first man I saw was mowing his lawn.”
She developed many theories about nudist camps. “They run the whole social gamut,” she would say, “from people in tents (a lot of people are nudists because it’s cheap) to people in trailers and homes—mansions almost…and you have a whole microcosmic society where everybody is supposedly equal… New Jersey is riddled with nudist camps because they’re not allowed in New York State.”
She might talk about another phenomenon—urban nudists, called Jaybirds. These were people who never went to nudist camps—they lived in the city in apartments, and when they got home they took off all their clothes.
She would recount a time when she met a prison warden at a camp: a warden from Sing Sing who spent hours watching the nudists trail down to a beach. And he would try to guess what kind of jobs they had from the accessories they wore. They were all stark naked, but the men smoked pipes and wore shoes and socks and others stuck cigarette packs into their socks…the women sport hats, earrings, necklaces, and high-heeled slippers or moccasins. “It was really loathsome,” Diane said.
She told of a nudist camp where there were two grounds for expulsion: a man could get expelled for having an erection, and either sex could get expelled for something called staring. “I mean you were allowed to look if you didn’t make a big deal out of it.”
She recalled playing volleyball nude. “You’re always jumping, and it’s most uncomfortable without clothes…you’re sort of jiggling and you can’t just quietly miss the ball and let someone else take the blame. It’s like a big production.”
After a while Diane said that she “began to wonder about nudist camps…there’d be an empty pop bottle or rusty bobby pin—the lake bottom oozes in a particularly nasty way and the outhouse smells, the woods look mangy—it gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the fall Adam and Eve begged the Lord to forgive them…and in his boundless exasperation he’d said all right then, stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up. And they did.”
This particular period—1962-4—was one of the most productive and energizing periods of Diane’s life.
She had finally adjusted to the Rollei, and one of her first set of prints made with it and completed in 1962 was of kids playing grown-ups—kids posed like Rogers and Astaire for a dance contest; there was also the now famous shot of the grimacing boy with a toy hand grenade, taken in Central Park.
Now she was not only deeply involved with her own work, she had magazine assignments, including several from Show, although Show’s art director, Henry Wolf, wasn’t entirely pleased by her crude, abrasive work. “I couldn’t use the pictures she shot for Gloria Steinem’s story on movie theaters in Ohio—they weren’t that good—and I refused to publish her portrait of the human pincushion, even though she kept urging me to.” Wolf, a cultivated gentleman who later headed a successful advertising agency with Jane Trahey before becoming a photographer, confesses, “Diane always made me feel guilty for enjoying myself. Once I ran into her on a beautiful Saturday morning all decked out in her cameras. ‘What are you doing on such a gorgeous day?’ I asked. ‘Trying to find some unhappy people,’ she answered. Well, I couldn’t relate to that!”
Alan Levy, who worked with Diane on another story for Show in 1962, has a very different memory, and he wrote about it in Art News: “she introduced herself to me over the phone with a giggle as [Diane Arbus] your photographer…when I met her, small and trim in black sweater and brown leather skirt, she looked like a teen-ager.” Together they documented the making of a TV commercial for National Shoes. “I have never had more fun being paid to work than I did with Deeyan, as everyone pronounced her name. Our trail led us to a host of talented people with fascinating names and titles. The ad agency chief was named Mogul, the account supervisor, Gutteplan… The National Shoes official in charge was the low heel buyer… Deeyan, her eyes widening like camera apertures, watched several of our subjects wining me and dining us (Deeyan didn’t drink). She was, she said, a person to whom funny things happened. She also confessed to having a radar that verged on the embarrassing. ‘I can walk into a room and tell who’s sleeping with whom. Sometimes I can even tell this before it’s happened. I mean, later they’ll make contact and eventually end up in bed.’ ”
Levy found that she was a voracious reader—she quoted Kafka and Rilke and urged him to read Borges. One weekend morning she took him on the subway to Coney Island and made him peer into the face of every horse on the merry-go-round. “Deeyan taught me to look closely at things we look through. She was right about every horse being different from all the others.”
They had only one fight, Levy writes. When they finished the Show story, he was pleased with the result, but she wasn’t. She didn’t want her byline under the pictures (tiny ones laid out rather like a comic strip). “On the other hand, I wanted to share a byline with her as badly as I wanted anything in 1962,” Levy finishes, “so I bullied her, writing at least one impassioned letter complaining that she was hurting me. At 3 o’clock on the last afternoon before the issue was to be locked up she phoned and said alright.”
Not long after that she went to California for Show to photograph the aging camp symbol Mae West, who’d agreed to pose in the white-and-gold bedroom of her Hollywood apartment. (Whenever she had visitors, sleek, mute muscle men stood at attendance; nobody ever commented on the monkey turds imbedded in the pale fur rug.)
Diane arrived in the early afternoon. The shades were drawn, the lamps lit, and West appeared to wade through the shadows with her ludicrous walk and gutsy insolence. While the camera clicked, she spoke of her dependence on health foods, enemas, therapeutic sex, all in an effort to stay young. “Stay outa the sun!” she warned Diane gruffly. “The sun wrinkles!” She added she hadn’t left her apartment during the day for years “because I HATE THE SUN.” Diane answered that she didn’t much like the sun either—the light was too bright, too jarring; it gave her the jitters—made her squint. The two women agreed that they much preferred darkness.
After the session West handed Diane a $100 bill and said, “Thanks, honey” before sashaying off into another room. Diane guessed this might have been a habit—during the 1930s she’d tipped still photographers who snapped her on the movie set. Diane returned the money with a note, saying how thrilled she’d been to meet her. When the harsh black-and-white layout appeared in Show magazine, however, West was furious and had her lawyers write a threatening letter to the publisher, Huntington Hartford, claiming that the pictures were “unflattering, cruel, not at all glamorous.” Diane was upset. “She was genuinely surprised when subjects disliked what she found in them,” Charlie Reynolds says. Yet there was something beyond Diane’s surface images that invariably disturbed. In this case West—despite her flauntingly curvaceous body—did not come across as a creditable woman. And her bedroom setting mirrored an imitation of reality only Hollywood could devise.
After Diane returned from California, Hiro would occasionally stop at the Charles Street house for an early breakfast before going on to Avedon’s studio. “Diane would cook me an egg and she’d show me her Hollywood contacts,” he says. She had done stills when she was out there, too, of Disneyland’s fake rocks on wheels and a house on a hill, which was shot from an angle to reveal the supporting scaffolding behind the false front. The illusion seemed very personal and possibly a metaphor of the emptiness and pretension she’d hated about her past.
“But it was her portraits that got to me,” Hiro says. “That subject matter! I remember Irving Penn saying to me once, ‘How does she do it? She puts a camera between her bare breasts and photographs those nudists.’ He couldn’t get over it and neither could I.”
Although he would soon become a virtuoso with cameras (alternating between instant strobe and Polaroid and slow-speed large format), Hiro thought portrait-making was the most difficult process of all. “It’s almost trancelike—and the photographer has to give up some control.” Hiro, of course, made classic portraits of Maya Plisetskaya, the Rolling Stones, Mifune, but Diane especially loved the picture he took of his tiny sons wearing grotesque masks. He gave her a print and in exchange she gave him her family of fat nudists lolling in the tall grass. Throughout her career Hiro would always be there for Diane—cool, analytical, seemingly dispassionate, offering darkroom advice, lending her cameras.
He was one of the few photographers she knew who not only thrived on the diversity of his fashion and commercial work (he photographed everything from emeralds and paper shoes to the launch of the Apollo 11), but believed such variety essential since it vitalized his more personal projects. He also enjoyed making a great deal of money, and gave credit to Avedon for teaching him how to market his special talents.
Diane, on the other hand, felt ambivalent about being paid for what she was doing. She was always ashamed of making money. “When I make money from a photograph, I immediately assume it’s not as good a photograph,” she once said. But this attitude didn’t keep her from accepting more assignments; she was getting a great many from Robert Benton at Esquire now, “practically one a month,” Benton says. She photographed stripper Blaze Starr dancing with her little dog across a violently patterned rug; she photographed Jayne Mansfield and her daughter, and city planner Jane Jacobs and her son, and Ozzie and Harriet Nelson looking faintly disagreeable.
“Diane would come up to the art department with her latest contact sheets and she always managed to surprise me,” Benton goes on. “Or rather she would reverse my expectations.” Blaze Starr with her sequined nipples, Ozzie and Harriet, the middle-class ideal, and dumpy, proud mother Jayne Mansfield were photographed with the same intensity as her New York freaks. After a while Benton came to see that “we” (meaning the viewer) looked no different from “them” (meaning the subjects). “It was Diane’s idiosyncratic style—her deceptively simple, singular approach that leveled all her subjects, regardless of who they were, and made both freak and normal appear in some aspects the same. The term ‘freak’ or ‘normal’ in her context became meaningless. Because Diane had made no distinctions—no concessions either.”
David Newman (Benton’s sometime partner) adds, “Diane made no concessions when she photographed Benton’s wedding to Sally. And they are absolutely sensational pictures which Benton has in his living room to this day. Diane documented every single detail of that supposedly conventional ritual—rituals were what Diane was obsessed with, right? She photographed everything in sequence and she became part of the celebration. I remember her clicking away as Sally struggled into her wedding dress with her mother trying to help her—I remember her right after the ceremony crouching on the floor of the limousine, clicking away like mad.”
In May of 1962 Tom Morgan went off to write about a peace march for Esquire and Diane covered it with him. The two of them joined thirteen pacifists who were somewhere in Maryland protesting the arms race. (They had begun the seven-hundred-mile march in Hanover, New Hampshire, and planned to end it at the Washington Monument.)
Twenty-one-year-old Paul Salstrom, the tall, sober leader of the march, was a conscientious objector from Illinois. He remembers Diane as “strong—athletic, muscular legs. She walked along with us for two days straight without tiring at all and she photographed everybody”—everybody like Marcie Bush, the sixty-year-old blind man who sold vending machines in Philadelphia, and Joel Kerr, who raised trees in Vermont, and Penny Young, the most experienced protester, who had been in demonstrations against the Atomic Energy Commission and spent five days in jail.
Salstrom says, “Diane spent time talking with all of us.” He thought she was “totally apolitical but a humanist.” He was impressed by her “because she seemed serious without being heavy about it.” Diane ended up taking an individual portrait of every member of the march, but when she gave her rolls of film to Esquire, Robert Benton blew up the long shot of the thirteen pacifists trudging along a highway, flags and posters flapping in the wind, and he bled it across a two-page spread. It is a very striking image that reminds the viewer of a medieval children’s crusade—a crusade that is doomed, without hope of progress or relief.
Benton says Diane was “producing like crazy for us all during 1962, ‘63, ‘64.” He was very pleased with what she was doing; her haunted, eerie images seemed to complement the jazzy, edgy journalism Clay Felker and Harold Hayes were conjuring up. Sometimes, after going over a layout with Benton, Diane would go out to the corner Schrafft’s with him and David Newman to “share bacon sandwiches and talk.” Benton believes she was almost happy then, “because she was part of a family again.”
The family in question was journalist Thomas B. Morgan’s. Morgan hailed from Springfield, Ohio, and he regularly wrote profiles for Look and Esquire. He and his wife, Joan, and their children lived across from Diane’s converted stable in a lovely Federal house they’d just bought; the two families shared a common court.
“Actually, it was just a compound,” Morgan says. “Our two houses were surrounded by a wall which backed the Sixth Precinct. Years ago the police kept their horses in the reconverted stable Diane now lived in.”
Diane got into the habit of visiting the Morgans at least once a day. “Sometimes she’d whip up a batch of chili and we’d all share it,” Morgan says. “Diane and I had chili-making contests because I thought I was the best chili-maker in the world until I tasted hers.” When she wasn’t photographing, Diane would spend hours in the Morgan kitchen listening to Tom and Joan talk. Usually Pati Greenfield would be there too—Joan’s “best pal.” And Diane became close to them both. “They were all married to restless, ambitious men who were away from home a lot—myself included,” Morgan admits. “They were into making nests, so their friendship was very much a female-bonding kind of thing. I’d come back from an assignment and they’d seem to be communicating together in the kitchen in a language I didn’t understand.” Pati was tall, big-breasted, hugely energetic, raising five kids in a house on West 22nd Street. Diane admired her because she seemed the perfect maternal figure—available, responsible, uncomplaining. She was able to juggle everything simultaneously—hold a child in one arm while stirring a stew with the other. The three women would take turns baby-sitting for each other; they’d shop together in the markets and cheese stores around Greenwich Village, and on Saturdays Amy Arbus might go out to Wading River, where the Morgans and the Greenfields had weekend homes.
(In 1967 Pati Greenfield was the victim of a strange accident. Deeply depressed and on too many tranquilizers, she either jumped or fell from the second-story window of her house, pitched onto the sidewalk, and cracked open her skull. In 1971 Diane committed suicide, and Joan Morgan found herself surrogate mother to the Arbus and Greenfield kids. She would never discuss either of her dead friends. “The whole thing is too personal, too painful,” she cried.)
During the 1960s the atmosphere between the Arbus and Morgan families was harmonious and loving. “There was only one unsettling incident,” Tom Morgan says. “Unsettling because Diane and I so violently disagreed.”
It started when a close friend of Morgan’s, the artist Paul Von Ringleheim (known for his huge environmental sculptures that embellish shopping centers), stopped at the Arbus/Morgan compound one afternoon and on the spur of the moment proceeded to decorate an entire interior wall of the courtyard with a mural. “It was twenty yards long and fifteen feet high,” Von Ringleheim says. “I wanted to show how you could control space with color. The Arbus and the Morgan kids got into the act, with me splashing paint around. While I was doing swirls and squares on one wall, they did a mural on the opposite wall which had a more primitive, less abstract cast—jungles, birds, that kind of thing.”
Everybody seemed enthusiastic about murals, but a week later Diane strode into the Morgan kitchen and told Tom, “I hate Paul’s mural. Really hate it. It gets on my nerves, and I’m forced to look at it every time I walk outside. I want it painted out.” Morgan says, “This caused some consternation since Paul was—is—one of my best friends and, I think, a fine artist. I didn’t know what to do. But Diane wouldn’t rest until something was done. We finally had a two-family conclave and Diane gave an impassioned plea and I gave my opinion. It was voted that Paul’s mural be painted out, and only then did Diane calm down. She could be very determined when she wanted to be, but her determination always surprised me because she was usually so reticent.”
Every so often, without any explanation, Diane would break into tears at the Morgans’ and stumble back across the courtyard to her own little house. Once her sister phoned her from Michigan—“I always phoned D, she never phoned me”—and suddenly Diane was sobbing into the receiver about not getting over the break-up of her marriage. She didn’t blame Allan, she kept saying, because they’d grown away from each other, they’d found they weren’t what they’d thought they were—that they wanted different things—but why couldn’t they still be married? It had never occurred to her that their marriage might be anything but permanent. Why, you could be on the other side of the world—you could have lovers—and still be married. It was like having a sibling. Even if you had nothing in common with that sibling, you could never lose a brother or a sister or a husband except in death. But she had been wrong, and now she was disillusioned because she’d once believed so completely in the loony fantasies she’d had as a teen-ager about love and marriage lasting forever. These fantasies were now being replaced by the sexual battling between herself and the various men she was going out with.
She tried to keep from most people the torment she continued to experience over the end of her marriage. Eventually she began telling friends she no longer believed in love, and when Pati Hill wrote a short novel entitled One Thing I Know about the death of an adolescent passion, she dedicated it “to Diane Arbus.” Diane scribbled ironic comments in the margins of the galleys Pati sent her from Paris, and yet when her goddaughter, May Eliot, told her that she was determined to marry a man she was crazy about, “Diane was delighted. She thought it was wonderful when people married the first person they fell in love with.” She told May that she and Allan were really good friends and that their separation was relaxed and civilized. They were too polite for it to be otherwise.
May Eliot remembers going to breakfast at Charles Street and Allan dropping in, as he often did, and Doon and Amy were crowded around the table along with Sudie, the baby-sitter, and “there were big wine goblets filled with orange juice and the coffee mugs were brightly colored enamel with white insides and everybody giggled and joked about all sorts of things personal and cosmic.”
But there was strain. De Antonio remembers visiting Charles Street and “Diane was trying to play the mother who took care of everything, and she laughed and smiled a lot, but the obligation to her children was an overwhelming burden for her.” She was obviously under great pressure and weighed down by the responsibilities of raising two daughters mostly by herself. But she never complained; she went from grocery-shopping to helping Amy with her homework to advising Doon about one of her writing assignments before dashing off to photograph someone for Esquire. “I always saw Diane hurrying somewhere,” Robert Benton says. “Getting in and out of cabs, lugging those cameras—she was frequently late. Or the cab hadn’t got to the right address. It was always a drama.” And Allan was helping her print. She could spend hours working on a negative under his guidance. Once a fashion editor who’d worked with them for over a decade found them huddling over a tray of hypo. “Allan was whispering something in Diane’s ear—she had a sly little smile on her face. It was just like the old days at Glamour magazine. They still seemed very close.”
And they were. Allan would often introduce Diane to the women he was seeing—she would tell him about Marvin Israel’s plans for her career. However, she told Tina Fredericks that she never could see Marvin as much as she wanted to. Oh, they might meet at a party or run into each other at an art gallery; but ideally she wished he could be available for comfort and advice twenty-four hours a day. Allan was still like that, and—when he was in New York—Alex Eliot, and sometimes her brother, Howard.
Meanwhile, Marvin Israel remained devoted to his wife. A shy, prodigiously gifted woman who rarely left their 14th Street studio, Margie Israel, née Ponce (she’d been born in Cuba), was totally consumed by her art. A master craftsman—she could sculpt, paint, sketch, build, and she invented various mixed-media combinations: plaster, ceramic, and papier-mâché sculpture, blackboard drawings, fabric constructions involving feathers and stained glass. Israel frequently mentioned his wife’s impressive achievements to Diane; he was proud of her and took loving care of her. She was often in delicate health, but he never allowed her to go to a hospital; instead he nursed her himself.
Now that he was busy with his job at Harper’s Bazaar, he had less time for Diane, so she would periodically wander over to the Bazaar offices at 56th and Madison Avenue, ostensibly to rustle up another assignment but actually to be near him for a while. She might wait in the fiction editor’s cubicle, giggling over Alice Morris’ gossip about the latest books. At some point Israel would pass by—she could count on that. Listening for the soft pad-pad of his tennis shoes, she could always sense his approach. He would saunter into view. She wouldn’t even look up at him. They wouldn’t exchange a word, and he would walk on.
Marvin Israel had a slight, muscular build, very trim. He exercised ferociously. Geri Trotta, Bazaar’s features editor, remembers he wore expensive but frayed clothes and had his hair cut by his pretty English secretary. Trotta once observed this being done in the art department. “Marvin perched on a stool scowling as the scissors clip-clipped.” Nearby his two assistant art directors, Bea Feitler and Ruth Ansel, pasted up the layouts.
Bea and Ruth had been Israel’s most brilliant students at Parsons. They were both twenty-three and precocious, original designers. (Later Ruth became art director of the New York Times Magazine and Bea would design Ms. Magazine, Rolling Stone, and, just before her premature death in 1982, the new Vanity Fair.) Back in the 1960s they were already copying Israel’s cold, abrupt manner with editors and photographers, but they were unusually tender and solicitous to Diane, gave her many assignments, and allowed her free run of the art department. She came and went, and long after Marvin Israel was gone, the Bazaar office was one of Diane’s chief places for hanging out.
Eventually the three women became friends. Bea, in particular—husky-voiced, imperious Bea—would invite Diane up to the stylish little apartment she kept on West 56th Street. She gave many parties there, mixing French fashion models with Italian movie stars and the trendiest American designers and painters. The parties lasted late and there was, a guest said, “a bacchanal feel to them.” “Plenty of wine and drugs and thumping disco music,” recalled the late Chris von Wangenheim. “A lot of the guests were what you’d call polymorphous-perverse.”
Bea came from a wealthy Brazilian family, and that, too, helped bring her and Diane together; they shared an understanding of the problems and pleasures of being born rich. Eventually Diane gave Bea some of her private unpublished photographs and she may have spoken to her about her increasing obsession with Marvin Israel. Bea was very close to Israel. She cared about him and she cared about Diane, too; as the years slipped by, she went on hoping that nobody would get hurt.
Sometimes, after leaving Bazaar, Diane would wander the streets before going home. And if Amy was being taken care of by Doon or a baby-sitter, she could stay out as late as she wanted—prowling about Grand Central Station, 42nd Street, and the bus terminal. She met the Village Voice drama critic, Arthur Sainer, in the Sheridan Square subway station on New Year’s Eve, on her way to covering a big party. She dropped a lens from her camera bag and it rolled across the platform; Sainer ran to bring it back to her and they started talking. It was the only way to meet people, she thought. Spontaneously. No formal introductions, no planning.
She’d met the novelist John A. Williams (author of The Man Who Cried I Am) casually, at a party celebrating the publication of Tom Morgan’s first book. Williams recalls: “Diane looked straight at me, then looked away, giggling, because Tom was trying to get her to go out with another one of his friends and she refused. Instead we went out to dinner—to some Spanish restaurant with Dave and Heije Garth. Diane told me she’d known we’d be together from the moment she laid eyes on me.
“Diane’s friendship was nice,” he continues. “No demands. We saw each other on and off for eight months and then I got married. Diane knew my plans.” He would phone her in the evening and she’d usually stop off at his place, which wasn’t far from hers in the Village. They would be together for a while and then he’d put her into a cab and she’d go home. She never asked him about his life. (At the time Williams’ writing grant from the American Academy in Rome had just been withdrawn, with no reasons given. He believes it was because he was black and about to be married to a white woman.)
“Diane did ask a lot of questions about my family,” he says. He told her that his mother had been a domestic and his father a day laborer, and that one of his mentors in Syracuse, where he grew up, was a redcap at the railway station who was also a numbers runner.
In turn, Diane described her childhood to Williams. “She connected her identity to Russeks department store and with money, but she seemed ambivalent—almost angry about it.”
She never talked about her photography except to say that she was trying to photograph some Hell’s Angels gang. Williams asked her if she was frightened. She said she was always frightened, no matter what she did—she lived with fear and overcoming fear every day of her life.
“Sometimes,” Williams says, “I got the feeling that Diane wanted me to treat her badly. But I wasn’t into chains and punching in the mouth. I thought she was probably bisexual. Why I suspected it I don’t know, except that she was inordinately sexy. There is something challenging and triumphant for a man if he can please this kind of mysterious creature, and I think I did.”
Diane, in fact, would say that she went to bed with women but “liked men better.” Apparently she did have occasional intimacies with women, but these liaisons were always discreet; Diane didn’t talk about them. Emile de Antonio used to accompany her and two of her women friends to the movies and he always felt acutely uncomfortable, even though no one said or did anything out of the ordinary. It was just that “Diane could create a very pervasive sexual atmosphere around her and she had an especially tender, insinuating way with the women she was attracted to.” It was as if she could not only sense the person’s deepest needs and most passionate demands, but seemed to suggest that she was willing to comply with any of them.
“Diane was many things to many people,” Marvin Israel has noted.
A New York hostess tells of a Halloween party she and her husband gave in the early sixties, “where many people seemed wired—on speed. Most of the art world came—Warhol, Frank Stella, de Antonio, Jasper Johns. Diane was there, hopping around with her cameras. I was costumed as Theda Bara. Bea Feitler wore a mask. We were both very drunk and Diane photographed us falling all over each other. Then she asked us to pose nude. We both refused. There was a lot of tension between Diane and Bea because Bea loved Diane—and she wanted Diane all to herself. She’d act possessive, but Diane would have none of it—she’d turn remote and detached, which drove Bea crazy. Come to think of it, everyone who ever cared about Diane became very possessive about her.
If at this point in her life Diane needed to have men and women fighting for her attention, there must be a connection to the unhappy truth that since Allan’s departure she had often experienced an aching sense of worthlessness so profound that she couldn’t leave the Charles Street house. She had begun having an increasing amount of casual sex, which blotted out—at least temporarily—her feeling of abandonment; in the dark she could touch a stranger and be momentarily comforted.
During this period if you were with her for any length of time and she was in a talkative mood, the conversation might shift to sex and she would question you avidly about your sex life, or suddenly confide a detail about hers—that one of her lovers was a distinguished musician old enough to be her father; that the greatest thing about a pick-up or a one-night stand was the terrific sex—because neither one of you wants something from the situation and it isn’t exploitative yet, so all you have to do is respond, and sometimes it can be ecstatic.
“I’ve never heard anyone talk as frankly about sex as Diane Arbus did,” Frederick Eberstadt says. “She told me she’d never turned down any man who asked her to bed. She’d say things like that as calmly as if she were reciting a recipe for biscuits.”
According to the late John Putnam, “Diane told me she wanted to have sex with as many different kinds of people as possible because she was searching for an authenticity of experience—physical, emotional, psychological—and the quickest, purest way to break through a person’s façade was through fucking. She referred to such experiences as ‘adventures’—as ‘events.’ Actually, everything she did was an ‘adventure.’ To talk about her life that way seemed to heighten and justify existence for her.”
Morality was not involved. As far as she was concerned, men and women should be free to have as many, and as varied, sexual relationships as they wanted. Whether or not she got emotional fulfillment from any of her regular lovers is another matter. She could discuss technicalities of sex—the fact that she used amyl nitrate (a drug said to prolong orgasm), or that one of her lovers made her feel as if she’d climbed to the top of Mount Everest when he brought her to climax. But whether she was able to sustain or wanted another lasting love relationship—a true commitment with someone—she would never say. Increasingly, Diane maintained that she no longer believed in love and certainly not in sentiment.
It pleased her that in many cases she was now the seducer. The more successful she became with her camera, the more aggressive she became sexually; the camera was her protector, her shield, and it gave her access to forbidden places and she took advantage of that.
Some of the women Diane talked to thought she was merely experiencing “cheap thrills.” “It was a turn-off whenever she’d tell me about the men she’d had,” one woman says, adding, “It depressed me to hear that her ‘adventures’ were so limited—it was such a literal submission.” But others admired her for her daring; they believed she was “fucking for liberation” (women affirming the need for sexual pleasure is political); they felt she was breaking a taboo by not only frankly acknowledging her sexual needs but acting on them. (Her attitude about breaking taboos was well known to her intimates. Among her friends she had been the first to speak openly about masturbating, about her pride in her menstrual flow. She spoke about her attraction for blacks; she revealed her obsession with a married man.) Kathy Aisen, a young artist who posed nude for her, says, “Women of my generation considered Diane Arbus a heroine. But I wished she’d done her screwing around before she became a mother. I wonder how her daughters felt.”
Diane never thought of herself as a revolutionary, let alone a feminist. And with her male lovers she continued to play the role of helpless female while bragging to them of her sexual conquests. “She had a dual persona,” says one man. “She was sexual victim/lusty lady rolled into one. She told me she would have been devastated if I hadn’t wanted her.”
During this period she went on seeing Marvin Israel (who, it is said, alternately scolded and applauded her for the way she was leading her life). She might accompany him to Robert Frank’s new apartment on West 86th Street, where the two men would hold earnest conversations that would often erupt into arguments while Diane sat in silence on the couch. Sometimes Israel’s outbursts were excused or ignored because he was a diabetic; sometimes his rages would break out if he went too long without his insulin shot. For whatever reasons, Diane seemed to enjoy his disturbing theatrics—his hostility in public. “Because underneath Diane was hostile, too,” de Antonio says. “Marvin expressed hostility for her.”