APRIL 15, 1967. EASTER SUNDAY “Be-In” in Central Park. A pungent smell of incense rose from the grass on the Sheep Meadow, mingled with the smoke of burning draft cards. Thousands of hippie kids in beads and body paint were tripping, stumbling, playing guitars, throwing balloons into the air, yanking off their clothes and rolling into the lake by Bethesda Fountain. Diane came to photograph the spectacle with Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah and Garry Winogrand, both of whom snapped shots of her looking guarded and chewing on a daffodil. “She hated having her picture taken,” Winogrand says.
Later that day she ran into John Putnam and complained that she wasn’t getting enough work. She’d expected “New Documents” to generate some really lucrative assignments, but not much had happened. A lot of phone calls, queries—a lot of talk from Life,but no definite offers—and when she went to Look to ask if they’d like her to photograph Death Row (something she’d always wanted to do), she was told it was too difficult to get permission. She hated peddling her pictures, her ideas, to magazines; it seemed degrading. She was now more afraid of going to Condé Nast than to a leather bar or a brothel.
She was still working regularly for Esquire and Bazaar, but the pay rate was terrible—$150 for a single black-and-white picture, $200 for a spread.
To dispel the growing myth that she only took pictures of freaks, she made up a list of elegant people she wanted to photograph. She told someone she wanted to photograph beautiful people because “beauty is itself an aberration—a burden, a mystery…like babies. They can take the most remorseless scrutiny…”
As if to prove her point, she took a remarkable portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt’s sleeping baby son, Anderson Hays Cooper, for a Harper’s Bazaar Valentine issue. In this truly astonishing picture the infant resembles a flat white death’s head—eyes sealed shut, mouth pursed and moist with saliva. When Gloria Vanderbilt saw the photograph, she forbade Bazaar to publish it, but eventually she changed her mind and this stunning image opened Diane’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.
She was still phoning Joseph Mitchell. One of the last times they spoke, he says, “I suggested she photograph the Basque shepherds who come to New York once a year for a few days before going on their way to Wyoming to herd sheep. Most of their time was spent at the Jai Lai, a marvelous Basque restaurant that used to be on Bank Street. Diane wanted to photograph men out of their culture—here was an opportunity. Don’t know whether she did.”
Mitchell says that after seven years of phone conversations “we still hadn’t met. She once said, ‘You know, we should meet.’ And then I admitted I’d caught a glimpse of her recently in the East Village at the Dom—she’d been photographing and she’d been so involved I didn’t want to interrupt her…
“And there was a pause and she confided she’d seen me. At Costello’s Bar—I’d been sitting with Sid Perelman and she’d looked very hard at me but decided not to come over. So we never met. And if memory serves, May of 1967 was the last time I ever heard from her.”
As the weather grew warmer, there were more marches for and against the Vietnam war. Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael spoke to crowds in Sheep Meadow, and Diane, along with dozens of other photographers, would move through the masses of humanity with her flash. Afterward she might wander over to 57th Street and Fifth Avenue near Doubleday’s and position herself by the store until the sun set, photographing. And in the evenings she might go to Richard Avedon’s seminars, where Debbie Turbeville was showing her first monochromatic shots of slouching women trapped in ominous settings and Garry Winogrand talked about how he was planning to use his Guggenheim. From there she might head for the Dom, the biggest disco on the Lower East Side, which was always filled with the sound of rock music and strobe lights and movies projected against the walls; she would stay there documenting the couples dancing, preening, clowning for her cameras. These people were an essential part of what came to be known as the sixties subculture—druggies, transvestites, groupies, socialites, rich kids, all gathered together, performing for Diane’s cameras. Everybody at the Dom acted hungry for approval, for recognition, but it was all surface—immediate, noisy, tedious, scanned. The girls wore outrageous styles—like the “plural love/peace dress” which three could squeeze into at once (moving about the dance floor, they resembled a freaky six-legged animal). Then there were the boys in tight jeans and Sergeant Pepper jackets, little caps and granny glasses covering drugged, droopy eyes. Diane would quickly tire of such trivial self-revelation and end up at Max’s Kansas City to meet Marvin Israel and tell him about her day.
Often they might be joined by Mary and Robert Frank, Bea Feitler, and Larry Shainberg. The other poets and painters who frequented the bar seemed to hold the bleak, despairing Frank and the shadowy Diane in awe. By 1967 the art world had lost its idealism, its sense of outsideness, and was turning art into big business, but Diane and Robert Frank seemed exceptions—pursuing harsh, subversive work without any thought of financial gain or self-publicizing. At the moment Frank, unshaven and tattered as always, was completing a documentary called Me and My Brother about a catatonic man, and he was about to start another movie in Nova Scotia with novelist Rudi Wurlitzer (already a cult figure for his book Nog, which is dominated by a fantasy of self as a “dark wet hole”). As for Diane, she would usually be “electric with anxiety,” but eager to describe whatever had been happening to her.
Her latest story concerned releases. Her show was still up at the Museum of Modern Art, but she still hadn’t been able to get releases from most of her subjects and this was worrying since it touched on a photographer’s moral responsibility, the legal issue of invasion of privacy, as well as permission to reproduce the image. (Diane maintained that she always asked permission to photograph a person, and if he said no, she respected that.) In any event, she had recently hopped a cab, laden down as usual with her cameras, and the driver had asked laconically, “You a photographer?” “Yes, yes,” Diane answered, looking not at him but at her appointment book because she was late for an assignment. “Funny thing,” the driver droned on as he steered through traffic, “I went to the Museum of Modern Art the other day to catch à show and there I am big as life hanging on the wall. Picture of me! What a thrill! Wish I knew who the photographer was. Like to thank him.” Diane stared at his profile and burst out laughing. “I’m the photographer!” she exclaimed, recognizing the driver as the earnest young man in straw hat and a BOMB HANOI button in his lapel whom she’d photographed at a pro-Vietnam demonstration. “Listen,” she said, “I need a release* from you, all right?” With that he stopped the cab and scrawled an okay on a matchbook cover, obviously delighted.
Other subjects weren’t. When her portrait of identical twins appeared in the “New Documents” exhibit, the twins’ parents protested that the image was a distortion and tried to stop the picture from being reproduced elsewhere because they thought their daughters would be exploited. (Eventually “The Twins” became Diane’s most famous photograph—her trademark, reproduced on posters, on her book cover, inspiring Stanley Kubrick in his horror film The Shining.)
The twins’ family’s reaction upset Diane, but she was equally upset about being copied. (“Imitation was not for her the sincerest form of flattery but an absolute horror,” her daughter Doon has written. One wonders how she’d feel today when so many photographers use her square format with flash.) Peter Hujar recalls that once when he joined her for dinner with Avedon and Marvin Israel, “She refused to speak to me. Later I found out she’d thought I’d ripped her off—copied her way of photographing transvestites—with a black border around the picture.” (One of Hujar’s most famous shots is of the dying transvestite Candy Darling.) “When I first saw Diane’s black-bordered portrait of the Gish sisters in Bazaar, I thought she’d copied me.”
She frequently talked to Garry Winogrand and John Szarkowski about being imitated, and as a result she kept changing cameras in order to change her imagery. She would go to Marty Forscher’s camera shop on West 46th Street a couple of times a week to look at the latest models. “In 1967 she was trying out a Fujica,” Winogrand says. “It resembled a pregnant Leica—clumsy, clunky—but Diane believed that the more difficult the camera, the better. She didn’t believe a picture that was easy to get could be good.”
In the early summer of 1967, Peter Crookston, deputy editor of the London Sunday Times magazine, arrived in New York from England. He was a polite, rosy-cheeked young man on the lookout for “the hottest American reporters and photographers,” so he’d already arranged to meet Harold Hayes of Esquire, that quintessential magazine of the 1960s. Hayes put him in touch with New Journalists like Gay Talese and photographers like Carl Fischer, but Crookston phoned Diane directly because the Sunday Times art director, Michael Rand, had seen her eccentric portraits in Infinity and wanted to give her some assignments.
Crookston says he was “instantly attracted” to the tousle-haired woman in miniskirt and workshirt who invited him into her little Greenwich Village house. She was soft and shy and giggled with pleasure at some of the comments he made about her pictures. They sat in her cool, dark living room, which was so dim he found it hard to see the blow-ups she kept handing him—strange, angry, despairing faces, many of them. She had prints hung everywhere, tacked up on mats. There was one he liked in particular—a strong man flexing his muscles. “He looked like some mythic Hercules. I told Diane it was very good and she promptly gave it to me. It’s framed now in my apartment in London.”
They were interrupted periodically by Doon, who kept running up and down the stairs, shouting things at her mother. Diane would call back in reply, sometimes making a face of mock exasperation. Crookston noted that they seemed to have a very close, very warm relationship and that Doon was astonishingly beautiful. “You have a lovely daughter,” he murmured finally, and Diane answered, “Yes. We’re rivals.” She did not elaborate, and then the phone rang and she proceeded to hold a monosyllabic conversation. “Hmmm. Yeah. Yes? No…not tonight…well, maybe another time.” And she hung up and came back to sit down beside Crookston. “Have you ever been to an orgy?” she asked, and he replied, “No, have you?” “Yes,” she answered, she went to orgies and she photographed them. “Would you like to go to one tonight? We could go, but it would probably be very boring. They usually are. Although sometimes they’re fun.” And Crookston answered quickly, “I’d rather take you to supper.” Eventually they left the Charles Street house and went to a chili place nearby to eat. During the meal they talked mostly about their backgrounds, telling each other about their families. Then, after supper, they walked back to her car—“a beat-up Renault”—and she drove him to his hotel and they spent the night together.
At dawn, Crookston says, “I was awakened by Diane sitting bolt upright on the pillows and crying out, ‘What are you doing with me? I go to bed with old men, young boys…’ and then her voice trailed off and she giggled. ‘I couldn’t possibly have known that, now could I?’ I answered. With that she murmured that she’d gone wild after Allan left—wild—and had started having sex with as many people as possible, partially to ‘test’ herself, partially to see what it was like.”
She was always frightened, she said, but that meant conquering her fear each time; developing courage was extremely important to her, as important and “thrilling” as the “adventures” or “the events” (as she called them) themselves. Because the only way to understand something was to confront it, she said, and when you had sex, restraints were broken, inhibitions disappeared. Sex was the quickest, most primitive way to begin connecting with another human being, and the raunchier and grosser the person or environment, the more intense the experience, and this enlarged her life.
She then described in a peculiarly detached way how one night she’d had sex with a sailor in the back of a Greyhound bus. (“If you sit on the inside back seat of a Greyhound bus, it means you’re sexually available.”) No introductions were made, not a word was spoken, and after this swift, mute encounter in the dark, she got off at the next stop and waited on the highway for an hour or so until another bus came along which would bring her back to New York. When the bus arrived, she got on and collapsed on a seat (“not the back seat”). It was close to five a.m. and suddenly she was hurtling through space, through tunnels, whirling, drifting, rootless. Gas fumes and air-conditioning enveloped her, and across the aisle other passengers snored or gurgled in their sleep…
Suddenly she launched into another kind of story, complete with gestures and accents, about a recent photo assignment. The subject had been a celebrated Washington lawyer. She’d arrived at his office and found a British journalist already there, interviewing him—a very pretty, very ambitious journalist who, Diane sensed, wanted to seduce him “because this lawyer was rather sexy and powerful, too.” Diane decided “for kicks” to seduce him first—and for the next hour she exerted her fey charm on the man while blinding him with her flash. He got sweatier and more excited and finally the British journalist left, and Diane said she’d felt sorry for her because “she didn’t have the patience I had. I hung in there.”
It was almost as if she was determined to explore with her body and her mind every nightmare, every fantasy, she might have repressed deep in her subconscious. Crookston listened as she told him of picking up a Puerto Rican boy on Third Avenue “because he was so beautiful.” She described other encounters with strangers and after a while they began sounding almost mythical, since identities were blotted out, leaving only the throbbing sexual reality.
At this point Crookston interrupted to ask if she hadn’t ever faced actual danger as a result of such recklessness. Yes, she answered, but she’d always been “thrilled” to take risks to “test” herself—and, besides, nothing bad had ever happened to her and for some strange reason she was positive it never would. And she didn’t drink or take drugs, and when her camera was with her she always felt in control. Crookston got the sense that if she was ever disgusted by much of what she’d seen and done, she’d faced the disgust fiercely and with dignity, which is why she seemed neither coarsened nor debased by anything that had happened to her. And in manner she remained gentle, ironic, almost passive.
Around five a.m. Diane got up, dressed, and left the hotel. Then later Crookston flew to California. But when he returned a few days later, they spent two more evenings together. And she told him more adventures, more stories. “And, yes, I believed Diane. I believed her implicitly,” Crookston says. However, Marvin Israel, who presumably heard many of these same anecdotes, has written that her stories always had a “curious improbability.” He goes on to say they seemed “exaggerated and very funny…only the barest account of what must have occurred.”
As soon as he got back to England, Crookston began phoning Diane regularly and he gave her many assignments to do for the London Sunday Times magazine, starting with the “diaper derby” in New Jersey (out of which came the controversial portrait of a crying, snotty baby). They also began an intense correspondence in which they poured out their thoughts and concerns. Diane’s letters—often written in almost indecipherable scrawl—form a record of her work (“nearly everything delights me!” she wrote in late 1967). She would phone Crookston her ideas for possible photo essays: “runaways, criminals, sex clubs, wives of famous men, rich people, vigilantes.”
In most letters Diane is full of questions and concern for Crookston, for whom she had developed some affection. Referring to their first time together in an early note: “You were so gentle and generous and so very game…” And in another letter: “You looked at me as hard as I looked at you, as if we were England and America at the signing of the treaty…it is so mysterious. I am suggestible even to myself.”
To which Crookston comments: “There was a part of Diane that needed to be valued, listened to, comforted… I had the feeling she didn’t always get enough of the latter…” He adds, “There was never any talk of being in love [between us]. Actually, she told me she no longer believed in it, although I’m not sure that was totally true. I was not infatuated with her, but I was fascinated. She was a marvelous woman—wise, poetic. I was proud to be her friend. And she was witty, too. We’d been instantly attracted to each other because we always gave each other a good laugh. But it needn’t have been a relationship that got into bed, although that was, as Diane might have put it, “A GOOD THING.”
In almost every letter Diane mentions money; it had become a gnawing worry to her. Allan had always taken care of their income, depositing any sum they earned in a joint account, balancing their checkbook. Diane herself rarely entered a bank; many of the checks she received for jobs lay uncashed about her apartment. Her way of dealing with money was rather like her father’s—she carried wads of it with her.
In July Diane flew out to San Francisco to photograph for her second Guggenheim project. She had arranged to stay with Paul Salstrom, who was running a house for AWOLs and deserters in the Haight-Ashbury. Salstrom took her, almost at once, to the Living Theatre’s production of Paradise Now and afterward they went backstage to visit the Becks, who ran the Living Theatre. They were pacifists—Salstrom had been in prison with them. They began to talk together, so Diane sneaked off by herself and started prowling through the dressing rooms, hoping to catch a glimpse of the babies who’d supposedly been conceived by members of the Living Theatre company while on LSD. The babies were said to resemble mutants, with huge, pale protruding eyes, silvery skin, and spaced-out expressions. Diane was unable to find any such babies.
She spent the next few days wandering all over the Haight trying to find faces to photograph, but all she saw were stoned “flower children” wearing thrift-shop clothes. Some were begging. Most were runaways or high-school dropouts having a hard time surviving on junk food and bad dope. Drugs were everywhere—mescaline, cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines. Many of the kids were physically ill; those who weren’t acted extremely aggressive, “like most speed freaks did,” Salstrom says. The media were there in full force—TV cameras, Life and Look photographers, all documenting the “Love Generation” as it flocked into the Avalon Ballroom to hear psychedelic rock. “Diane thought the whole scene was degrading—commercialized. She wanted nothing to do with it,” Salstrom adds. She made only a few photographs. When Newsweek phoned to ask her to do a big spread on hippies, she refused and instead went out to North Beach and took pictures of a topless dancer.
By the end of the week she was ready to leave San Francisco. The city and its population were too hidden, she said—hidden behind the fog and the shuttered windows of the houses and the rolling hills. She and Salstrom drove down the coast to Los Angeles. “We had no plans,” Salstrom says, “Diane hated making plans.” He remembers that often when they stopped at a diner or a gas station she would see something she wanted to photograph and would turn mute and unapproachable as she focused on the person or object. She never seemed satisfied with anything she shot. By noon she would have taken a hundred shots—by sunset another hundred.
When they reached the outskirts of Los Angeles, they both called friends from a pay phone, but were unable to connect with anybody, so they drove on to visit Salstrom’s aunt and uncle, who lived in a tiny town near the California desert. Salstrom says that his aunt was “a heavy-set woman—a compulsive eater—deeply neurotic—obsessed with movie stars. Her husband, my uncle, had been a gambler in his youth but an unsuccessful one, so now they were very poor and my aunt cleaned rooms in a motel and my uncle drove a pick-up truck back and forth across an apricot orchard. In the evenings they were together, but they hardly ever exchanged a word.
“Diane spent most of the time photographing my aunt draped against her refrigerator—her prize possession. I saw a blow-up later in New York. It was very severe, in that square format she always used along with the flash. The effect was overpowering—like an X-ray of my aunt’s emotions. All you can see is that she’s been immobilized by her fantasies. Like it’s obvious from her expression that she’s resorted to total self-absorption or otherwise she’d fall apart. We stayed with my relatives overnight, but Diane refused to take photographs of my uncle the next day because he was too defenseless, she said. She couldn’t bear to look at the eczema that flamed across his face and neck and made him both embarrassed and miserable.”
They drove through the desert into New Mexico. Salstrom thought they should stop at the Hog Farm Commune, but Diane wasn’t interested, so they drove on to Texas. “One night we slept together out under the stars.” By now Diane was so anxious to get home that when they reached Dallas she went directly to the airport, paid for the car, and took the next flight back to New York. Salstrom hitchhiked the rest of the way.
In the fall of 1967 Diane was invited to attend “idea meetings” at New York magazine, which was about to start publication. She joined contributing editors Gloria Steinem, Tom Wolfe, and Barbara Goldsmith in editor Clay Felker’s noisy, cluttered little office.
Felker was setting out to revolutionize the city-weekly format with a mélange of stylish graphics and articles about sex, money, and power (his favorite subjects). “Classy trash,” Richard Reeves called it all. Diane knew about Felker’s single-minded editorial methods, having worked with him when New York was part of the Sunday Herald Tribune and also at Esquire. Felker was on the prowl night and day for “hot” stories. He hung on the phone, not only badgering his writers to come up with the latest “trends,” the latest “winners,” but often encouraging them to cannibalize or humiliate the subject in question simply because when the story got into print it would be more “talked about.” Diane understood his tactics. “He has a photographer’s mentality,” she once commented. “He’ll stop at nothing to get the image—he’ll pay any price.”
They had already had a little run-in—almost forgotten now, but not quite—when Diane photographed him and his then wife, movie star Pamela Tiffin, for Bazaar. Felker had agreed to pose, since he liked publicity, too—but when he found out that Diane Arbus was the photographer, he panicked. He recalls: “She kept gushing that she wanted to capture the moony looks on our faces because we were so ‘in love.’ She’d never seen such a perfect couple, she told us—so romantic. But I wasn’t fooled. I knew she wanted me to relax my guard—take off my mask, reveal my neuroses. I wasn’t about to. I clenched my teeth and gave her back nothing.” Diane photographed them for hours, but the results were so poor that no picture was ever published, much to Felker’s relief. He and Diane remained on amicable terms and he wanted very much to use her on New York, particularly after the attention her museum show had received. She was a “star,” he told people—someone both talented and talked about.
At one New York editorial meeting there was a great deal of discussion as to whether or not the magazine should run an article on Andy Warhol, who seemed to be setting the tone of the sixties with his avid pursuit of publicity, his perpetual voyeurism, his wild parties at his silver-walled studio loft called the Factory, where sex, liquor, and drugs were available in unlimited quantities, and fading movie stars like Judy Garland and socialites like Marian Javits crowded in to watch Warhol film drag queens, transvestites, would-be poets doing “outrageous things” on camera.
Recently Warhol had been promoting an exceptionally beautiful actress named Viva. In his latest movie, Lonesome Cowboy, she could be observed nude and talking nonstop while participating in an orgy and a masturbation scene. Felker decided that Diane should photograph Viva and Barbara Goldsmith write about her. The two women went down to the Factory sometime in December 1967.
The moment they arrived, they were almost blinded by a gigantic mirrored strobe light suspended from the ceiling. Silver engulfed them; silver foil covered the walls, the water pipes, and even the little back room where homosexual acts took place. And propped against the chairs and tables were chunks of broken mirror and great slabs of silvery cracked glass.
Silver turned speed freaks on (“Silver was spacy, silver was the past—silver was narcissism,” Andy Warhol wrote). And since almost everyone at the Factory was on speed—amphetamine—they would “sing until they choked, dance until they dropped, brush their hair until they sprained their wrists,” and all their convulsions would invariably be reflected in the glaring, silvery mirrors.
That first evening, Beatles music seemed amplified to ear-splitting loudness. Diane snapped portraits of Warhol, his chalky face impassive behind dark glasses. He had his tape recorder on to document the murmurings of his druggie entourage—pimply transvestites, young, sleek hustlers, emaciated A-heads. Some of them camped for Diane, strutting in their costumes.
She was more interested in studying Warhol’s death-image paintings—Marilyn Monroe’s still smile on dozens of silk screens. But Viva was the assignment, so Diane eventually began photographing her preening in a black velvet Edwardian coat and slacks, and talking a mile a minute. In person, Viva had a physical presence almost as commanding as Garbo’s. Tall and very slender with huge green eyes, pale hollow cheeks, curly blonde hair, she had lips as prim as an Irish Catholic nun’s.
Diana Vreeland planned to have Viva model an entire issue of upcoming fashions for Vogue; Avedon was to photograph. But Viva seemed unimpressed by that; she was intent on describing her horrible Christ-religion-sex obsession. How as a little girl she’d been afraid to go to Mass…how she’d had her first nervous breakdown in France. Nudity in Warhol movies had given her a certain celebrity, she said, but when she went on the Tonight Show or Merv Griffin, she was treated like a freak “because I hadn’t been ashamed to display my naked body on film.” She spoke for what seemed like hours with an edge of hysteria in her voice, as if an interruption might release some fearful depression.
The following afternoon Diane and Goldsmith visited Viva in her East 83rd Street apartment. The place was filthy. Dirty clothes were everywhere, and the remains of some pancakes rotted on tinfoil plates. Goldsmith began interviewing and Diane snapped pictures at a frantic pace while Viva wandered aimlessly around the room, telling stories about herself.
Her real name wasn’t Viva but Mary Hoffman, she said. She’d come from a family of nine kids—birthplace, the St. Lawrence Seaway area in upper New York State, “Thousand Islands country.” Her father was a criminal lawyer who had a collection of seventy-four violins. Her mother was a “Joe McCarthy supporter” whose two expressions were “Shut up” and “Cross your legs.” Enemas were a routine of her childhood, Viva said. She rambled on about that and other bodily functions as she perched naked on the toilet. Diane photographed her there and in her cluttered bedroom, trying to push the stuffing back into a chair pillow.
She went on talking. Her first lover, the photographer Louis Faurer, had painted elaborate makeup on her face every night, very tenderly. Masturbation was a better solution than going to bed with someone you don’t like. She compared Andy Warhol to Satan. “He just gets you and you can’t get away. Now I can’t make the simplest decision or go anywhere without asking Andy,” Viva said. “Andy has such a hold on us all.”
She babbled on until Goldsmith ran out of tapes and Diane had no more film. If her talk seemed self-exploitative, it was also self-generating—in talking she could perpetuate herself, assert herself, create herself. “I’m not as mixed up as I sound.”
On one freezing holiday evening Goldsmith and Diane accompanied Viva to Max’s Kansas City, where they were joined by Warhol, Ingrid Superstar, and Brigid Polk, whose father was Richard Berlin, president of the Hearst Corporation. Viva sniffed meth from a spoon because, she said, she was suffering from menstrual cramps. Another time Diane went with Viva to an off-Broadway actor’s apartment on Perry Street. That night, according to Viva, “we all got stoned on hash, Diane too, and we were all very comfortable and friendly together.” That same night Diane took more photographs of Viva—having sex with the actor and his wife (who was mysteriously murdered later that year by an intruder).
The following morning Diane went back to the apartment very early to take a last batch of photographs. Viva’s memory is a bitter one: “Diane rang the doorbell. I’d been asleep on the couch. I was naked, so I wrapped a sheet around me and let Diane in and then I started putting mascara on. I was about to get into some clothes when Diane told me, ‘Don’t bother—you seem more relaxed that way—anyway, I’m just going to do a head shot.’ Asshole that I was, I believed her. She had me lie on the couch naked and roll my eyes up to the ceiling, which I did. Those photographs were totally faked. I looked stoned, but I wasn’t stoned, I was cold sober. There was nothing natural about those pictures, nothing spontaneous. They were planned and manipulated. Diane Arbus lied, cheated, and victimized me. She said she was just going to take head shots. I trusted her because she acted like a martyr, a little saint, about the whole thing. Jesus! Underneath she was just as ambitious as we all were to make it—to get ahead. I remember right afterwards I phoned Dick Avedon because he’d just done some gorgeous shots of me for Vogue. I told him, ‘Diane Arbus has taken pictures of me for New York magazine,’ and he groaned, ‘Oh, my God, no! You shouldn’t have let her.’ And Andy told me the same thing. After the fact. I’d never seen her work. I didn’t know an Arbus from a Philippe Halsman.”
The photographs of Viva which illustrated Barbara Goldsmith’s compelling interview in New York, April 1968, were absolutely merciless. Out of the hundreds of contacts Felker and Milton Glaser, the art director, chose two. In a jarring, grainy close-up Viva appears dazed and drugged, eyes rolled back in her sockets. There is no suggestion here that life is still paradoxical and complicated; it is merely brutal. The picture seems cropped in such a way as to emphasize Viva’s hairy armpit, her small breasts. In the other portrait Viva can be seen naked and roaring with laughter on a sheet-draped couch. There is a raunchy casualness about the pose; she appears pleased with herself right down to the soles of her dirty feet. The qualities that are distressing and alienating in some of Diane’s work—the severity, the seeming disregard for the subject—are very apparent here.
When Diana Vreeland saw the pictures, she reportedly screamed and canceled the rest of Viva’s bookings for Vogue; the Viva pictures created such a furor along Madison Avenue that New York magazine seemed about to lose all its advertisers.
Today Clay Felker winces when he recalls the Viva portraits. “I made a terrible mistake publishing them,” he says. “They were too strong—they offended too many people.”
Diane told Crookston over the phone, “It is a cause célèbre.” Much mail. Canceled subscriptions, pro and con phone calls, and even a threatened lawsuit (from Viva, which was ultimately dropped).
Tom Morgan thinks the Viva portraits were “watershed pictures. They broke down barriers between public and private lives. They were painful photographs—that’s what made them significant. You’re repelled by Viva’s campy self-image, but you’re drawn to it, too.” By 1983 a culture glutted by media would be tolerating brilliant color candids of the Jonestown massacre and art portraits of a woman baring her stitched-up torso after a mastectomy. And by 1983 there would be an even deeper examination of photographic paradoxes as seen in the stark minimalist work of Eve Sonnemann or in Jerry Ulesmann’s transfixing dreamlike moments or Cindy Sherman’s chameleon disguises as she explored in kitschy self-portraits—woman’s image as defined by media.
While the Viva controversy was at its height, some of Diane’s friends wondered why after her prestigious show at the Museum of Modern Art, she would take such tawdry, exploitative pictures. Her sister, Renée, spoke to her about it. “Diane told me she knew the Viva photographs were sensationalistic. She said she’d taken them that way deliberately. She was determined to make more money so Allan wouldn’t have to give her so much—she thought notorious pictures were one way of getting more assignments.”
But at the same time in her own projects she was moving very consciously away from freak pictures. She didn’t want to fall into the trap of repeating herself; she would never just turn out a product. And so she began choosing less theatrical subjects, ones less capable of imitation.
She was spending weeks in Central Park. She was still hanging around East 57th Street and Fifth—near Tiffany and Bonwits and the big Doubleday—watching the shoppers and musicians and the old people moving up the avenue. It was her favorite corner, where she always ran into friends—classmates from Fieldston, models, editors, other photographers. She was photographing mostly “normal” people now—housewives, matrons, widowers, kids; usually she’d photograph them confrontationally with the flash, and often, without their knowing it, their gestures, their expressions (sometimes startled, sometimes blank) suggested strange yearnings, strange dramas.
It would be that way when she photographed the Westchester couple. She loved that disorienting image. Bathed in sunlight, a husband and his beautiful blonde wife can be observed dozing side by side in lounge chairs set out on a great lawn. Behind them a baby plays weirdly by himself against what looks like a forest of black trees.” The parents seem to be dreaming the child and the child seems to be inventing them,” Diane wrote Crookston as an explanation for the picture before sending it to him for an article he was editing on “The Family.”
1968 was not the best of years. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, and the American public saw devastating images of dying Vietnamese on the television news. Avedon began talking about going to Vietnam to document the atrocities, and Diane demonstrated against the war. She, who had never voiced a political opinion, wrapped a white band about her head and joined a huge crowd, also in white headbands, who were marching silently across Manhattan to protest the escalation of bombing. Basha Poindexter, a Polish art student, trudged next to Diane “for what seemed like hours. We ended up milling around Central Park—thousands of us. Nobody knew whether the march had done any good. Diane and I talked some about that, and we exchanged phone numbers. But we never saw each other again. She seemed very, very depressed.”
On March 14 Diane celebrated her forty-fifth birthday. The thought of getting old terrified her. After years of looking like a young girl, she had started to age and was now wearing thick Pan-Cake makeup to mask her lines. Sam Antupit remembers how the wrinkles—deep ones—“would shoot up around her cheeks and chin when she spoke, but then as soon as she got involved with telling you a story, they would momentarily disappear and she looked like a teen-ager again.”
For a while she took dance classes in order to tighten her thighs. Shirley Fingerhood joined her, and while they were changing in the dressing room Diane confided her fears about growing old. She had visited her mother recently in Palm Beach and Gertrude was still fine—still so beautiful and “with it,” smoking, shopping, playing cards—but the other people she’d seen were not. Frail old couples moved slowly along the blazing streets—some on walkers, others using canes. Eyes stared vacantly into space, and there was frequent talk about heart transplants, and what was the best hearing aid, and So-and-so has suddenly got arteriosclerosis or cancer of the liver…
She was depressed by the sight of so many old people. She never wanted to get old! she said. She hated the idea that as the body ages, the imagination doesn’t; she felt hers was sharper, more acute, than ever. And then, studying her friend’s finely etched reflection in the glass, she blurted out, “I’m jealous of you, Shirley,” jealous because although there wasn’t much difference between them in age, Shirley Fingerhood had taut, smooth, unlined skin. Later, as they walked out of the dance studio and onto the street, she spoke of her envy again.
* According to Neil Selkirk, who has printed her work since her death: “Diane obtained few releases.” Had she lived, it would have been much more difficult to exhibit her photographs so widely since many of her subjects objected strongly to the way she depicted them. But, as Selkirk says, “Since she’s dead, they figure there’s not much they can do about it.”