IN 1969 ALLAN DIVORCED Diane and married Mariclare Costello, a young actress who had been one of the original members of the Lincoln Center Repertory Company. Diane gave a small reception for them, writing to Peter Crookston later that she felt “sad happy” about the occasion. She said that Mariclare was a “good friend” of hers, and that the two of them hung out on the phone a lot.
Not long after the wedding party Allan closed the fashion studio on Washington Place and he and his new wife moved to Hollywood so that he could pursue his acting career in earnest. For more than twenty years he’d been dreaming of being an actor fulltime, and Diane outwardly applauded the move. But she was frightened.
Frightened because Allan would no longer be close by. They had been absorbed in each other’s lives since she was fourteen; he was one of the few people who understood her. Now she would no longer be able to visit him, to get extra money when she needed it or to ask advice; she wouldn’t be able to phone him daily—he would be three thousand miles away.
She ran into Garry Winogrand on the street. “She seemed to be in a tizzy,” Winogrand recalls. “She said her husband had remarried and gone to California and she was going to be without a darkroom and what should she do? She also mentioned that she’d just recovered from hepatitis, that at first they’d misdiagnosed her case—but she hadn’t just had hepatitis, she’d also been allergic to birth-control pills and tranquilizers, which made her feel rotten, and did I know that the combination could have an adverse effect on a woman?”
She told Shirley Fingerhood that she felt “funny” about Allan going away. She didn’t resent it, she kept saying; she wasn’t angry—she just felt that a part of her was going to California, too.
Although Allan continued to send as much money as he could from California, Diane needed to earn more now to make ends meet. But it was still emotionally painful for her to see magazine art directors; despite her success, she had little self-confidence.
Avedon recommended her for a lucrative advertising job to photograph a new camera in her own particular way.
She was also discussing the possibility of becoming unit photographer on the film Catch-22, which Mike Nichols was about to direct in Mexico and Rome; John Calley was the producer and the pay would be astronomical, Diane told someone. But in the end she said no to Calley. She didn’t think she could do it.
Instead, she flew to Boston for the London Sunday Times and photographed the lawyer F. Lee Bailey in his office and piloting his plane. Next she went to Chicago to make a portrait of Tokyo Rose and interview her for Esquire. This account, along with the picture, was published in the May 1969 issue of Esquire. Diane then flew to California and photographed novelist Jacqueline Susann with her husband, Irving Mansfield, for Harper’s magazine.
Susann was currently promoting her novel The Love Machine, which was high on the best-seller list, and between interviews (some six a day) she was ensconced in a Beverly Hills hotel suite overlooking banks of geraniums and a smoggy sky. When Diane arrived, Susann began patting her jet-black Korean hair fall and adjusting her bubble glasses until Diane asked her to take them off.
“This Diane Arbus character was bossy,” Irving Mansfield remembers. “She made us move all over the place. Then she wanted us to pose in our bathing suits next to the TV set. I didn’t get it, so I said no to the idea, but Jackie, who was always cooperative with the press, said of course. And when we were in our suits and Arbus asked Jackie to plunk down in my lap, Jackie said yes to that, too. Particularly after Arbus assured us this shot would be for her portfolio—not for publication.* Her exact words. We held the pose for what seemed like hours—until my kneecaps went numb. The flashbulbs kept blinding us, she kept assuring us we looked terrific. Arbus looked tense. She told us as soon as she finished shooting she was taking the next plane back to New York; she’d flown out specifically to photograph us and she seemed a little angry about it.”
Diane was angry. Privately, secretly, very angry. Because ever since Allan had left New York, Marvin Israel seemed to be paying less attention to her. He simply couldn’t always be there when she wanted him to be, and she couldn’t understand that. With Allan gone, Marvin Israel had become the principal source of energy she could draw on; it wasn’t that she didn’t have plenty of ideas of her own, it was that she needed him to confirm them to her and to confirm herself. Often it seemed she resisted taking full responsibility for her life.
But she didn’t express her anger, telling very few people how she felt; instead she brooded and sulked, and eventually her anger imploded and turned into depression. Shirley Fingerhood, who saw Diane often during this period, says, “Diane expected a great deal from her friends. She would actually refuse to do certain things for herself—like getting a new lock for her door, or reading a new lease (which I did for her). Diane was like a little girl in that respect. She expected others to do for her constantly, and when they didn’t, her irritation was profound.” She would get on the phone and make demands and then collapse and apologize saying she was terribly sorry she’d bothered anybody. Before the hepatitis she’d relished her independence, her solitude, but lately she’d felt an overwhelming need to be taken care of.
Often now—in fact, whenever possible—Diane would go flying with gallery owner Margo Feiden from a little airfield in Deerfield, Long Island. They flew at every conceivable time—at dawn, at dusk, in the afternoon—swooping over the island of Manhattan, past the Statue of Liberty and the Wall Street skyscrapers. “We always flew over Diane’s place on East 10th Street,” Feiden says. “Diane never spoke during these flights. She seemed mesmerized by the experience and relieved to be off the ground. I got the feeling she imagined she was piloting the plane. The cold wind was on our faces; we could see the clouds very close. She would have flown every day with me if I’d let her, but I usually wanted to go alone. I think she mentioned that her brother, Howard Nemerov, had been in the Air Force during the war; anyway, we flew steadily together for the next two years; Diane once told me she loved flying more than anything in the world. She loved flying so much Allan gave her a pair of wings—actually a pin shaped like wings. She was pleased about that and always spoke with admiration and affection for Allan. He had been her teacher of photography, she said. He had taught her how to develop and print her work. She seemed very grateful to him.”
On the train trips back from the airfield Diane would invariably mention Marvin Israel. Suddenly, she said, she was starting to envy the attention Marvin Israel lavished on his wife. She had never really envied anyone before, she said, but now she not only envied Margie Israel, she hated Marvin for being so loyal, so responsible. Then she would add hastily that she admired him for it, too. She had also begun to wonder what it would be like to be Margie Israel—Margie Israel, who was such a powerful font of unending creativity, who could tirelessly sculpt, paint, sketch, make collages, twenty-four hours a day. Who never needed to see people or go out into the world. During the 1950s many men had been drawn to the beautiful, black-browed Margie Ponce from Cuba—drawn to her Latin temperament, her vivid sense of fantasy. She had danced through the night at parties with many men and “then she chose Marvin,” Diane would say in hushed tones, as if Margie had received a benediction. Sometimes she would fantasize about Marvin and Margie’s life together—because certainly she had no clues. Her curiosity always got the better of her. (As it had years before when Allan had fallen in love with the young actress. After the initial hurt, Diane had made it her business to become acquainted with the actress—she had seen her act in several plays, even going backstage to visit. She had to know what this woman’s appeal was, and she ended up liking her a lot—as she liked Allan’s new wife, Mariclare.)
Although they shared mutual friends and sometimes attended the same parties, Diane did not really know Margie Israel, she could only imagine what she was like—she could only imagine how their studio looked. (She had heard it was a “fairyland” filled with dogs, the smell of cats and birds, and paintings, and a Christmas tree made of carrots hanging upside down from the ceiling.)
Sometimes the longing to observe the Israel’s became so great she would sneak over to 14th Street and stand in the shadows of a building across from their studio, where she would wait for either of them to come out. She could wait for hours until Marvin finally emerged to pedal off on his bicycle, presumably to the other studio on lower Fifth Avenue, where he did most of his painting and book-designing. He never saw Diane. And finally—long after Diane had gone home—at around four a.m. Margie Israel might surface with her six dogs and walk the streets until the sun came up. If it was summer, Margie might go to the outdoor swimming pool on Carmine Street, scale the fence with her dogs, and then they would all plunge into the water. Diane never knew that Margie Israel liked to swim as much as she did. Lately when Diane stopped in at Marvin Israel’s Fifth Avenue studio, which was crammed with his paintings, his plants, his dogs and cats, and even a black crow, she would complain that she could no longer swim at Coney Island because the water there was so polluted. Larry Shainberg was often at the Israel studio, and the sculptor Nancy Grossman, whose show of leather-sculpted zippered heads resembling knights, tribal fighters, motorcyclists had recently opened at the Cordier-and-Ekstrom gallery to controversy and acclaim. “Marvin Israel introduced us—arranged a meeting,” Grossman says. “He loved bringing different kinds of artists together. I remember Diane running into the studio the first afternoon I was there. She circled me like I was an object.”
Grossman says that Diane’s moods would shift wildly—“Some days, when she was up, she looked and acted like a very young girl. Other days, when she was depressed, her face would resemble an old, old woman.”
Diane soon took to visiting Grossman in the loft near Chinatown that she shared with the painter Anita Seigal. Diane would wander past their walls of books, the gurgling fish tanks, and into a series of huge, dusty rooms crowded with paintings and sculptures. She would go over Grossman’s collection of newspaper photographs that were stuffed into drawers and files—all sorts of elliptical, fragmentary images: Nixon holding hands with Governor Rockefeller, Churchill’s birthday cake, plane crashes, fires, the face of a drunken driver, flood waters, terrified children after a misplaced napalm strike, an injured dock worker’s expression after a boat explosion, women overcome by heat in a subway…
She marveled that so many photographs had been taken—so many millions of images. Would the ultimate be less easy to capture? Had the visible been over-exposed?
Obviously, Avedon didn’t think so. Whenever Diane and Nancy Grossman visited him, he was busier than ever, photographing every pop hero of the 1960s from the Beatles to Cher to Andy Warhol’s Factory groupies. (He’d already photographed Warhol after his near-murder—photographed his pale blond torso crisscrossed with ugly scars and bullet holes.) Rock music throbbed all day long in Avedon’s studio while models like Penelope Tree and Donyale Luna traipsed through along with Revlon account executives and Vogue fashion editors. And Doon was taping everybody Avedon photographed (like Janis Joplin, frizzy-haired, clad in sleazo-freak clothes). Avedon planned to use taped voices as a backdrop for part of his mammoth upcoming show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The voices of the sixties would complement the strident-angry, laid-back, mammoth blow-ups of Tom Hayden and Abby Hoffman and Julie Christie…
Everybody who entered Avedon’s studio was some kind of star. And there was a sense of excitement, of titillation in that huge, white, lighted space full of expensive cameras and equipment and gigantic rolls of pale backdrop paper—such an overwhelming sense of prosperity, of abundance. The people Avedon was photographing could afford to indulge themselves in any kind of rebellious, experimental behavior and it would be accepted, because the past had dissolved for most of them—the future only seemed conceivable as a continuation of the bizarre experimental present that was defined only by its novelty.
Visiting Avedon’s studio excited Diane, disturbed her; the energy level was always so high, the personality combinations were so fascinating, so unstable. Her spirits would rise momentarily, then sink again. She was being forced to lecture frequently for money, although she hated to. Irene Fay remembers hearing her speak at the Photography Club of America; suddenly in the middle of her talk she pulled her sweater up over her head and went on speaking through the material.
Friends who saw her during that period say she was depressed “almost all the time.” She complained of being dragged down, of having no drive, no energy. She blamed this new depression on her two bouts with hepatitis. She’d never been ill in her life before then—she’d prided herself on being very strong, very healthy. This new dark feeling of weakness, of lassitude, reminded her of her mortality, and it terrified her. She needed to be strong to photograph—she had always been very strong.
In the past she’d been accustomed to depression; she’d lived with depression always—melancholia had pervaded the atmosphere of the Nemerov home. At times as a child she’d even enjoyed her depressions—the feeling of bleakness, of angst, protected her, isolated her. But this new depression was not like that—it was bone-crushing; it exhausted her.
The doctors she consulted prescribed tranquilizers—Librium, Placidyl. But she refused to take any anti-depressant pills after her bad reaction to Vivactil. She simply went on trying to live with her depression, although she told people it was choking her.
Toward the spring of 1969, with her depression no better, friends kept urging Diane to go into therapy again—it would surely bring some relief. She finally agreed after Marvin Israel insisted, although privately she didn’t think it would do much good. She made appointments with several therapists who’d been recommended to her, settling on one a close friend insisted would be “perfect.” Soon she began talking of how much she liked her new therapist—a young woman M.D., a Neo-Freudian who had incorporated the teachings of Karen Horney into her method of treatment.
As time passed Diane began referring to her therapist as “cute.” But she remained depressed. At home she would stay on the phone for hours with friends (sometimes taping the conversations and playing them back to herself) and she would ramble on about Marvin Israel and Allan. Why couldn’t she depend on them? she asked. Why weren’t they there when she needed them? She seemed both angry and confused. It didn’t bother her that these two most important men in her life were married to other women—she wasn’t jealous, she liked both women; she just wanted Marvin and Allan to be available when she needed them. Was this too much to ask?
After a long, dreamy pause she would speak again—rapidly—her ideas twisting and turning, interrupted by further long pauses. (These pauses had been characteristic of her speech since she was a teen-ager and Allan used to scold, “Finish your sentence, girl!”)
She would go on to say—vehemently—to friends like John A. Williams or her former assistant Tod Yamashiro that she didn’t enjoy earning money for money’s sake. Richard Avedon could do both she said—earn a great deal of money and create art—but she said she couldn’t, although in typical contradictory fashion she was doing both, perfecting her flat exacting style while completing a variety of magazine assignments. Her magazine assignments were one of the few constants in her life and she clung to them even as she complained.
For Harper’s Bazaar, she photographed her idol, the great blind Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in Central Park; she photographed the French novelist Natalie Sarraute, and afterward she and Dale McConathy took Mme. Sarraute to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Harlem, and in the midst of some magnificent pasta Sarraute expressed her fears that the Mafia would burst out of the men’s room and start shooting.
McConathy recalls, “After Sarraute got so nervous, Diane tried to make her feel at ease. Eventually she discovered that all Natalie really wanted to do while she was in New York was to buy her daughter a fur coat, so the next day Diane took her to Kaplan’s where she personally chose a coat for her. I went along, too. ‘You don’t want chinchilla—that’s a dowager fur,’ Diane told Natalie. ‘You don’t want Persian lamb or Russian sable.’ Then she went into a long rap about furs and Russeks and her family, and she talked about every fur imaginable—why broadtail is so terrific (I think she chose broadtail for Sarraute) and how seal has long, dense fur and leopard sheds, so you don’t want that, and how tipping is a way of dying long hairs with a brush to make inferior pelts look rare!”
Between assignments Diane was spending a great deal of time in Central Park. Although it was no longer safe or clean as it had been in her youth, it could still enfold her in greenery or snow, depending on the season. She knew every inch of the park by heart and never tired of returning to the bandstand or the skating rink or the bird sanctuary or the Children’s Zoo. The carousel looked shabbier now, but the music sounded the same as it had in her childhood; the jaunty tunes reminded her of her French nanny.
Frequently she would arrive at the West 59th Street entrance of the park at around five a.m., and sometimes the photographer Barbara Brown, who describes herself as “a street pal of Diane’s,” would talk with her before they separated to begin shooting. “Diane almost always went off alone,” Barbara says. “She rarely wanted company.”
She might trudge along the two-mile walk up to Harlem Meers at 110th Street. The park was silent and brooding at that hour, its landscape desolate. As dawn broke across Manhattan, mist would start rising from the reservoir and floating across the once rich green meadows.
By seven a.m. she might have come across some strange tableau which she might photograph or not—a fat lady in a Santa Claus outfit somersaulting heavily down a grassy hill; a solitary young man, totally nude, raising his arms to the sky.
It would still be very quiet, although some cars and taxis were beginning to traverse the park roads. As morning progressed, bums could be seen emerging from the bushes onto paths littered with newspapers and dog turds. And runaways and hippies would start to gather in Sheep Meadow. Diane would often disappear for a while into the Ramble, a small wood near the Shakespeare Festival Theatre. The Ramble was a homosexual trysting place—by noon on a Saturday dozens of men were moving furtively behind the trees Diane had played around as a child, some dressed in leather, others bare-chested, lounging against the boulders.
In April of 1969 Diane flew to London on assignment for Nova magazine. Peter Crookston (who’d just become Nova’s editor) met her at the airport and was shocked at the change in her face. “I hardly recognized her. She was gray and lined and her eyes seemed to burn in much deeper sockets.” When he told her they couldn’t spend the evening together because he had another commitment, she burst into tears. She cried frequently while she was in London, Crookston notes—in between wandering around Piccadilly Circus at night and shooting mod rockers in Brighton and photographing Lulu, the British pop star, backstage. Sometimes when she was alone with Crookston her eyes would suddenly brim over and tears would course down her cheeks, but she offered no explanation, although she did say she was homesick for New York. She assured Crookston later that “all my tears made it better…you sustained me.” She kept repeating how much she loved the tacky hotel in Knightsbridge, where she was staying, loved the lumpy bed, the faded flowered wallpaper, the tattered but clean towel hanging next to the marble basin by the window.
She kept very busy photographing for Nova—photographing ordinary people who thought they looked like famous people—Elizabeth Taylor or Sophia Loren or the Queen of England. Diane got these women to pose like the celebrities they fantasized being, and she struggled to help them maintain their singularity or, rather, their illusion of singularity.
She also got some more London Sunday Times assignments, spending the day with the writer Francis Wyndham at a sanatorium “for terminally ill patients who were supposedly being cured by some kind of faith healing.” It was depressing rather than macabre, Wyndham notes, and Diane was disappointed with the pictures she took—the feature they worked on together never ran.
Going back to London on the train, Diane kept pummeling Wyndham with questions about the Kray brothers—London gangsters who were about to go on trial. She told Wyndham she was spending her free time at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum and was very upset because she couldn’t get permission to photograph the figures. She confided gaily that her ambition was “to spend the night making love there.”
As the trip neared its end, Diane’s spirits seemed to rise.
A few days before she left London, she visited Alex and Jane Eliot, who were living outside the city in a place called Forest Row. Alex and May drove to the train station to pick Diane up. They were late—the sun had just set and they couldn’t find her “until we saw what we thought was a boy in knickers, leaning against the platform,” May says. “It turned out to be Diane. She was observing the passengers getting on and off the train and she seemed perfectly content and said she could have stayed there forever watching.
“The three of us drove back to our village,” May goes on. “I remember being very happy that Diane was in the car.” Later they talked for hours, trying to catch up on all the news. May told Diane about attending graduate school in London and writing more poetry, and the Eliots described their years in Greece and in Rome, where they’d made a documentary about Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel, and about their last twelve months in Japan studying Zen, “which had been very rough.” Diane listened, but made few comments. “If she was depressed, she didn’t reveal it,” May says. “But then she never acted depressed around me.”
They didn’t finish dinner until midnight and then they took a walk up a long green slope to the village cricket field. It was a beautiful night. The sky was moonlit, the air very fresh, and all the trees seemed soft and still, although a breeze flowed around them. May wondered about coming back to New York. Could she be happy and adjust to that noisy, dangerous, crowded city after experiencing so much beauty? Diane insisted she loved every encounter she’d ever had in Manhattan—loved every contradiction, every test, every risk.
The following morning a thick mist hung over the cricket field. The Eliots rose early because Diane had to catch a six-thirty a.m. train back to London. As they were drinking their coffee, Jane noticed that Diane had on an ornate gold ring, shaped like a bee. Ordinarily she never wore jewelry except for gold studs in her pierced ears. When Jane commented, “What a lovely ring,” Diane took it off and gave it to her. “I want you to have it,” she said gravely, and Jane recalls that “a chill went through me because the bee is a symbol of death, of reincarnation. I wanted to cry out, ‘Diane! Do you know what you’re doing?’ I felt it was a warning of some kind. After she’d left, I told Alex and he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ ” But Jane never saw Diane again, and she wore the bee ring only a few times before it broke apart.
The London trip had exhausted her. Once back in New York, Diane stayed in her apartment and fell into a depression. She tried to sleep, but she could not, except for brief spells. She would awake at dawn unrefreshed and start wandering around her living room, fussing with her plants, which appeared to be dying. She didn’t want to look out the windows because when she did, all she saw were “bloodied people” in the streets. Her phone kept ringing with obscene calls until she took the receiver from the hook and bolted out into the day with her cameras festooned around her neck for protection.
One of the first people she ran into was John Putnam, and she rambled on about her trip, suddenly declaring, “There were no more freaks in England. Where are the freaks?” He tried to answer, to make some connection, but “she was on a different wave length. She wasn’t listening.” The same thing happened when she visited Lisette Model and over and over again she described her disappointment at being unable to photograph inside Madame Tussaud’s. How she loved those waxy, ghostlike figures! Why hadn’t THEYallowed her to photograph them? And she started rubbing Model’s table in anxiety and her voice became the voice of a five-year-old girl. Model was used to these dramatic personality shifts. She believed Diane was schizophrenic—“as all artists are schizophrenic,” she added firmly. Diane suffered from a kind of madness caused by “obsessive demands that cannot be satisfied,” she said. “Diane could be inordinately demanding. Like all schizophrenics, she could take and take if you let her. I told Diane she must learn more about cooperation. That it was Nature’s Law: the elephants make a circle to protect the small. If you see a piece of glass in the street, you pick it up, so that no one else will fall and hurt himself. She thanked me, she was grateful to me for saying these things. And Diane could learn—she was the greatest learner who ever lived.”
After returning from London, Diane appeared to talk even more compulsively about her sexual adventures. Not just to friends but to casual acquaintances, even strangers she might meet at a party. She told how she had followed a dumpy middle-aged couple to their staid East Side apartment. She had sex with both of them, she said. There was never any shame or embarrassment in her voice. She always reported this kind of experience as exactly as she could, going out of her way to state the facts clearly. It was as if she were bearing witness to her own life, observing, reporting on the explorations of other people’s nightmares, other people’s fantasies not her own. This was the public part of her, the adventuring somebody outside herself. Actually she was an exceptionally concealed person with an intense inner life nobody would ever know about. The perversities, the obsessions, the distinctiveness that were a part of Diane—her genius eye—where did they come from? “Nothing about her life, her photographs or her death was accidental or ordinary,” Richard Avedon has said. “They were mysterious and decisive and unimaginable except to her. Which is the way it is with genius.”
So that when she maintained she’d had sex with a dwarf or a couple of nudists her friends would listen—some in awe that she had the courage to go so totally with her obsessions. Others were shocked and disturbed as the stories grew more urgent. It seemed as if merging with her subjects, both “straights” and “freaks,” was a way of giving herself to them after they revealed themselves to her camera. Such violent self-definition seemed part of her nature as an artist. To take extreme risks fed her art and energized her life. The purest experience for her was a body experience. The body’s life was a matter of power to her. And if and when the sex act was perfect then the combination of intense physical pleasure and ecstasy along with the total psychic connection made the experience transcendental. But usually the quick impersonal sex Diane had was only “very very boring.” The sex act could also be filled with dread and awe and death-awareness for her. (She once was talking to Gail Sheehy, “and without any prompting, Diane told me about the group sex she was into—photographing it and joining in it. It seemed to tempt and revolt her at the same time. ‘All sensation and no emotion,’ she said. The couples, most of them, were unattractive physically and there was no desire—no reconciliation of body and spirit. She described the experience as an attempt to lose herself, to give herself up to sex. Because no human emotion was involved. Not lust or fantasy and certainly no fulfillment. It was a denial of nature and our flesh. An out-of-body experience almost like death, she said.” Sheehy said she thought Diane was unprepared for this kind of deadly exploration and it was damaging to her. But to others like John Putnam, to whom she told the same story, she seemed heroic for opening herself up to such extreme experiences.)
She seemed heroic to some of the students she lectured to at Cooper Union, Parsons and lastly at the Rhode Island School of Design. One student, Stephen Frank, recalls, “She blew everybody’s mind. She was very wound up talking about photography—nothing was sacred to her—there were no taboos and she was so sexy! She drew us out about ourselves. We all wanted to make love to her.”
Another student, a girl, developed a huge crush on her. She was very young and highly keyed, malleable. She started dressing like Diane—in the same black leather outfit and short cropped hair that seemed to obscure gender and ethnicity. Eventually she tried to take pictures the way Diane did, in a harsh bleak way, and she would tell people Diane was a visionary because she saw the world as a frightening alienating place where everybody defined their own reality and she “saw” the world like that too—and identified with Diane’s freaks and oddities—freaks were the metaphors of the sixties. There was a tension in this girl whenever she spoke about Diane and sometimes she trembled when she spoke.
For a while Diane allowed the girl to be her assistant and “go-fer.” She babysat for Amy and in late afternoons or evenings she might listen to Diane talk about the extortionist she’d met and the pickpocket she’d tried to photograph after waiting for hours for him in a police station.
“It was Blow-Up time,” said the late Chris von Wangenheim. “Photographers like Avedon—like Diane—were being lionized, romanticized. It was weird because photographers were starting to cannibalize—those of us who’d just come from Berlin or Paris were getting into images of cruelty and the forbidden. Fashion photography would soon turn pornographic. It was the time of the Manson killings too—Diane talked a lot about that and about witchcraft in Beverly Hills and strange rites practiced on a beach. She was dying to photograph Manson and his gang and this girl assistant wanted to go with her.”
But instead Diane flew out to California alone. Since she couldn’t get an assignment photographing Manson, she worked on one of her own projects, photographing a man who said he was Joan Crawford. He had made up a new identity, she would tell Francis Wyndym later, a new identity in order to survive in the world.
When she returned to New York, Diane was depressed. She went back into therapy but it didn’t seem to give her much relief. “I think Diane saw her shrink just so she could talk,” the late John Putnam said. “But Diane could seduce anybody with her talk. She could talk rings around you which is what I think she did with the analyst—you could never find out what was bothering her.”
She did say over and over again that now that she was getting better known people expected things of her and she didn’t want anyone to expect things from her since she didn’t know what to expect from herself and never would. Photography consumed her. But her success and achievements held little interest for her. She continually denied her ability. It was almost like a reflex, something she’d been taught.
Howard was the same way. He’d often comment that he wasn’t too bright. Diane referred to him in conversation as “my brother the poet.” She never referred to him by name. But they seemed to have a very intense emotional relationship; it may have been the most sustaining relationship in her life, in spite of their protracted separations and silences. She would talk about Howard’s visits to New York to see her.
By October Diane was telling people that therapy wasn’t helping much, but she seemed less depressed when Garry Winogrand photographed her, flirty in black satin and decorated with her flash attachments, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were both covering Henry Geldzahler’s big party there celebrating the “New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940-1970” exhibit. A thousand people were invited and at least two thousand more crashed through what amounted to dazzling single-room retrospectives of Stella, Rauschenberg, de Kooning, Gorky, and Johns. “What no one realized at the time,” Calvin Tompkins wrote later, “was the whole gaudy event—the paintings, the sculptures, the behavior, the baroque costumes, the din, the excitement arising from the brilliant work…would come to be regarded as the last exotic rites of an era that was ending.”
Diane must have sensed this. She photographed “like a vulture” that evening, someone said—“hopping—swooping—blinding the mobs around the six bars and the orchestra blasting rock and the museum trustees, some of whom were grinding their hips against party-crashers dressed like Indians.”
Late in 1969 Mary Frank and Diane discussed moving into Westbeth, the new artists’ community that had just opened near the Hudson River docks. To outsiders the massive gray stone buildings might resemble “a Swedish prison,” but Mary thought Diane would be less lonely there.
Mary herself later had a handsome studio in the huge thirteen-story reconverted Bell Telephone Lab, which overlooked both West and Bethune streets.
Apart from containing 383 moderately priced apartments and lofts (highest rent $209 a month), Westbeth had plans for a theater as well as galleries, a foundry, and a day-care center. The qualifications for admittance: you had to be judged a “serious artist” by a group of your peers, and your income could not exceed $12,700 a year. “Well, I certainly qualify in that respect,” Diane reportedly murmured. When she applied, she was accepted and was given a choice duplex on the ninth floor in the rear, so that she could have a view of the river.
She moved into Westbeth in January of 1970 along with the dancer Merce Cunningham, the poet Muriel Rukeyser, and the documentary photographer Cosmos, who hadn’t shaved his beard since John F. Kennedy was assassinated. (Cosmos saved everything he’d ever received in the mail, calling it a “novel in progress.” He loved “the rejected objects” of the world, and soon after moving to Westbeth he began carefully collecting Diane’s destroyed prints and contact sheets, which he retrieved from the trash can outside her door.)
Once in Westbeth, Diane felt happy. She wrote to Peter Crookston how pleased she was with her apartment, and she’d been on a buying spree: “An ant farm so I can watch them working when I’m not…marvelous toys I’ve always wanted…fake worms, lady-shaped ice cubes, a transparent plastic lady with all her organs and bones.”
For a time Diane seemed less lonely, less cut off. Living in Westbeth was like living in a big, turbulent stew. “Every artist was going through some kind of crisis—either with work or money or love,” says one tenant. For a while the atmosphere was charged—energizing—and there was a real sense of community.”
It was the end of the sixties. Westbeth residents left their doors ajar. There were endless parties, consciousness-raising sessions, group sex, and rock music floating through mile-long halls. “Everybody was into primal experience and learning about the subconscious,” says David Gillison, a photographer.
Diane would have dinner at Westbeth with Alice Morris, the former literary editor of Bazaar, who now taught writing at the New School. (Renata Adler and Marvin Israel might be guests there, too.) And she visited other Westbeth apartments as well—like Tobias Schneebaum’s, whose one room was leafy with plants, and where shrunken heads and primitive artifacts hung on the walls. An anthropologist and painter, Schneebaum spent part of every year in New Guinea studying the life styles of cannibals.
Thalia Seltz, a writer, lived across the hall from Diane and they became friends. “We’d discuss work and life.” The two women also attended tenants’ meetings—“something about noise abatement.” Westbeth’s block-long halls teemed with kids riding their bikes, roller-skating, fighting. Some of the artists complained they couldn’t work, and a few resented Diane and said so. She had one of the best duplexes in Westbeth—it was supposedly meant for a family of four and she was living in it alone (Amy was in boarding school; Doon had her own apartment). Diane was self-conscious about the special treatment she was getting, but Mary Frank got special treatment, too—she was allowed to move from apartment to apartment; she always needed more space, she was working so prodigiously. Her sculptures were fanciful, dreamlike: angels with leaf wings, faces turning into plants, deer into men; everything seemed in a process of metamorphosis, of transformation. Diane enjoyed being with her because Mary understood her need, her craving for the basic and mythic in her life, and Mary always had music playing in her studio. Mary loved to dance.
Not long after Diane moved to Westbeth, Al Squilaco, who ran as well as art-directed the Ridgeway Press, came to see her. He was extremely enthusiastic about her pictures and knew that no book* of her work existed, so they talked of the possibility of one. “Diane was gentle and kind,” Squilaco recalls. “She showed me many photographs I’d never seen before. When I said, ‘Would you like to do a book with me?’ she answered, ‘I’ll have to ask my mentors—Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel. And of course Marvin would design any book I do.’ And I said, ‘But I’m the art director of Ridgeway, so that’s out of the question.’ She just smiled and shrugged.”
In March 1970 the London Sunday Times asked Diane to photograph some of America’s leading feminist theoreticians, among them Betty Friedan and Kate Millett. Diane knew little about the movement’s troubled factions. All she knew was that at Westbeth consciousness-raising groups were popular with her artist friends—wives and mothers had invited her to join them in long evenings of intense talk and self-discovery. But Diane was skeptical. She wasn’t sure that women uniting in a common cause (human rights) would behave any differently from men; she doubted they would be any less ambitious or competitive. Even so, she was intrigued by the feminist leaders she planned to photograph—especially Ti Grace Atkinson, considered by some to be the most extreme and charismatic.
Ti Grace Atkinson was tall and sardonic with an elegant feline face half hidden by blue-tinted glasses. The daughter of a wealthy Louisiana family, she was getting her Ph.D. in political philosophy at Columbia. Ti Grace had resigned as president of the New York chapter of NOW to form the more radical Feminists, only to leave that group after being unable to create individual leaders among its members. Ti Grace believed in total separatism between the sexes. Lately she had been challenging not only marriage and children as the supreme fulfillment for women but love and sex as well.
Such theories were considered harmful to the movement’s image by more moderate feminists like Friedan, who believed women should understand they had alternatives, while other feminists begrudged Ti Grace the publicity she was getting, and accused her of manipulating media for her own personal gain. She could be outrageous—as when she grappled with Eunice Shriver on the podium at Catholic University, disputing Shriver’s belief that the Virgin Mary’s conception of Jesus was immaculate.
Ti Grace was the only feminist who liked the photograph Diane took of her for the Sunday Times, declaring that it was “art.” When Newsweek decided to run a major story on Women’s Liberation with Ti Grace as one of its focal points (“I was going to be on the cover,” she says), she insisted that Diane Arbus take the cover photograph and also insisted that Diane be paid whether the photograph was used or not.
Diane could not get over how outspoken and aggressive Ti Grace had been in her behalf. Ti Grace remembers that when they met, “Suddenly Diane asked me in a fresh, naive way if the reason I’d asked for her as my photographer was that I wanted her sexually; that was okay with her, she said. I was stunned. Here I was recognizing her for her work and she thought I was recognizing her sexually. It was cockeyed. I repeated that I’d suggested her because I admired her as an artist. The subject of sex never came up again.”
In the middle of March, Ti Grace flew to Providence to speak on radical feminism and Diane went with her. After the lecture they went back to a motel, and some of the audience followed, “to pour out their torments.” For the next few hours Ti Grace listened as wives and widows, mothers and divorcees, spoke of loneliness and depression and lack of identity; spoke of being victimized, of missing opportunities, of too many kids. “The stories were heartbreaking,” Ti Grace says.
Diane took pictures, but mostly sat in a corner, listening, watching. After the women left, Ti Grace was eager for her opinion, but Diane was surprisingly unsympathetic, almost contemptuous. “She said she couldn’t imagine laying out her hard times on anyone. I told her it’s sometimes easier to tell your troubles to a stranger. ‘Those women are weak,’ Diane answered.” What it boiled down to, she went on, for all their harangues about abolishing marriage and motherhood, was getting their men to take on a share of the housework and child-rearing drudgery—and that she could understand.
“I felt Diane was defensive about what she’d heard—that she’d been threatened by what the women said. It hit too close to home. At one point she did admit, ‘I was trying to hold my marriage together. I let ten years go by before I really started working at my own career. But it was my fault. I don’t blame anybody but myself,’ she said.
“I felt Diane was into absolutes,” Ti Grace says. “And she wasn’t particularly introspective. She kept a distance not just from me but from herself. And she didn’t want to get into the conflict between being creative and free and traditional female role-playing. She couldn’t understand my choice of living alone, without a man. To her, to be a woman living without a man was to be something of a failure.”
For the rest of the weekend Diane shot rolls and rolls of color film on Ti Grace Atkinson for the prospective Newsweek cover. “It was absolutely exhausting. We’d photograph for hours, then go out for a snack, then come back and start photographing again. Every so often we’d take a break, lie on the twin beds, and talk—very intensely. Diane complained about constantly scrounging for jobs and having to do fashion stuff, interrupting her own projects, which she hated doing.”
By the end of the weekend Diane was unsatisfied—she felt that none of the hundreds of pictures she’d taken was in any way revealing. “We both wanted a picture of me as Everywoman,” Ti Grace says. “We kept trying to get the right light. I have very pale skin and Diane was afraid I’d look too washed out. I suggested going into the bathroom—the white tiles…water. I thought if I got into a tub, the water would reflect the light…nothing like being naked in a warm bath to get you relaxed. We both got very excited—because it was risky. Diane was click-clicking away. ‘Nothing shows, does it?’ I kept asking. ‘Nothing shows. It’s just a head shot,’ Diane assured me. It was okay, she said. I thought she knew exactly what she was doing.”
When they got back to New York, Diane delivered all her film to Newsweek to be processed. Weeks went by and she heard nothing. Ti Grace knew the Women’s Liberation story was about ready for publication, so she phoned the art department and demanded to know why there had been no reaction to the pictures. Aren’t they going to be used? she asked. There was a silence and then one of the art directors murmured that he wasn’t quite sure what kind of political statement Diane Arbus was trying to make, and no, they weren’t going to use the pictures; an illustration would be used for the cover instead.
Ti Grace asked Newsweek to send the color pictures to her, which was done. Then she phoned Diane to hop a cab to her apartment on Park Avenue. For the next few hours they pored over the pictures—including dozens of beautiful frontal nudes of Ti Grace Atkinson smiling up from the clear, rippling water, and “everything was showing,” Ti Grace says. “And Diane acted flabbergasted—shocked. I guess it would have been pretty revolutionary to use one of those pictures for a cover of Newsweek. But they are absolutely gorgeous pictures.”
Newsweek did pay Diane well for her work, and in the article itself they used her head shot of Ti Grace lecturing to a group of women.
Ti Grace did not see Diane after that; she became intrigued with Joe Columbo, the Mafia boss, and the two of them joined forces—she to support the Italian American Civil Rights League, he to help women (he took to wearing a FREE A FEMINIST button in his lapel). Periodically, though, Ti Grace would have long conversations with Diane on the phone. “She seemed to be drowning. She kept telling me, ‘Here I am recognized as an artist, but I can’t make a living as a photographer.’ ”
Although it was easier now to get work exhibited in galleries (which didn’t pay until the prints were sold), it appeared to Diane that the better she became as a photographer, the more well known, the fewer magazine assignments she got. And there seemed to be no more grants available to her.
It was particularly frustrating because by 1970—liberated by the Pill, feminism, and federal funding—women artists in general were starting to be self-supporting. And, not so coincidentally, their creations—such as Eva Hesse’s rope-and-cloth hangings, Nancy Grossman’s powerful leather heads, and the androgynous sculptures of Mary Frank—were full of self-revelation.
But Diane had chosen a different route. In a era of self-revelation her work was detached and impenetrable; she refused to be lumped together with Frank and Grossman (much as she liked and respected them) as a “woman artist.” “I’m a photographer,” she insisted, although, paradoxically, she was the only woman to achieve status in what had been an all-male photography clique (its members included Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Bruce Davidson). This meant, of course, that she would have to go it alone. Her femaleness just complicated the issue, raised the stakes. She had less room in which to maneuver (and she didn’t know how to play power games anyway) and fewer alternatives to fall back on. And no desire to make films like Frank, or teach like Winogrand, or get into industrial photography, which Bruce Davidson was starting to do and which was the most lucrative of all, apart from advertising.
Eventually John Szarkowski paid Diane a fee to help edit a show of newspaper photographs he was planning to exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called “Iconography of the Daily News.” For the next six months—until July 1970—she went to the Daily News three days a week and worked with Eugene Ferrara, who headed the photo department there. “Diane began with the file of pictures starting with Beverly Aadland and she got through G… She rarely spoke to me—always wore the same outfit: denim skirt, shirt, and jacket. And she always ate at the Automat by herself.”
This study of news photography was an extension of her interest in the snapshot as art—as a revelation, a recapitulation, a paradox. To Peter Crookston she wrote that editing the pictures was “funny to do. Some of the things are glorious. Yesterday I found a picture of a lady looking lathered as if for a shave sitting cloaked in white between a doctor and a nurse. All For Beauty’s Sake, it is called… Harriet Heckman submits to plastic surgery by Dr. Nathan Smilie of Phila. as nurse assists. (5/21/35) Miss Heckman has asked for the perfect face and perfect figure and announces she is perfectly willing to face death to attain them. ‘I want to do something about a body and face that have made me miserable,’ she says.”
By 1970, although she didn’t often speak of it, Diane had decided to go beyond photographing ordinary people trying to project different images to the world (like her portrait of the middle-aged woman dressed like a teen-ager). Now she was concentrating on photographing retardates—middle-aged retardates at a home in Vineland, New Jersey. She was fascinated by their “extreme innocence,” their total lack of self-consciousness. They paid no attention to her when she was photographing them. In front of her cameras they behaved like bizarre, overgrown kids, and their actions were unpredictable—they were either hyperactive or terribly slowed down. They would often make noises—eerie gurglings, yelps, squeals—while they frolicked clumsily on the grass. Their complete absorption in what they were doing—whether it was trying on funny hats or pulling at each other’s hair—delighted and moved her. She went back to photograph them again and again.
She had gone on changing cameras—in order to change her images. As usual, she asked Avedon for advice. Hiro, who was still sharing Avedon’s studio, said he’d started using a Pentax—he loved the way it worked. And he didn’t use a flash. Diane borrowed it from him and used it for a couple of weeks at Vineland. She was so pleased with the results that in gratitude she gave Hiro a rubber tree which he still has in his new studio on Central Park West. “A lot of people got cuttings from my rubber tree when they found out it was from Diane,” Hiro says. “I bet maybe now there are a dozen Diane Arbus rubber trees around New York.”
In July she went to Minneapolis to attend the opening of Avedon’s exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The show—spectacularly designed by Marvin Israel—displayed over 260 photographs, twenty-five years’ worth of the finest examples of Avedon’s exploration of portraiture. With this exhibit Avedon hoped at last to be critically “considered” as a photographer. Unfortunately, the New York Times photo critic, Gene Thornton, spent most of his review writing about the several nude portraits Avedon had taken of Allen Ginsberg and his lover, Peter Orlovsky. “I had to read this review about my life’s work and it was all about one picture,” Avedon told Connie Goldman of National Public Radio. “He had a hang-up about this one picture—it’s as if all the others weren’t even there. I was devastated…really thrown back. No artist is strong enough to stand that.” (Avedon went on to be acclaimed—for the most part—for exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art, the Marlborough Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum, and he would later say to hell with the critics—the artist works from the inside, not the outside, and reviews, no matter how praising, never really enrich his work.)
Diane, who had observed not only the hectic last-minute preparations for the Minneapolis show but had heard the enthusiastic response as well, was very proud of and impressed by Marvin Israel’s creative involvement—his vision had fused with Avedon’s. During the press preview she and T. Hartwell, the photograph curator, went off into a corner to discuss the visual impact of the exhibit and he brought up the possibility of the institute doing a companion show of her work. “I told her I thought Marvin could style and structure a show that could work just as dramatically for her pictures. And she agreed. She seemed very enthusiastic.”
But when she wrote to Peter Crookston, she said nothing about a possible show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Instead, she told him about the hotel she had stayed at in Minneapolis, which had “a glass dome and a swimming pool next to her room.” She sounded so pleased that Marvin had invited her—he’d been so nice. She phoned Tina Fredericks to tell her that, and Chris von Wangenheim, and a great many other people.
Diane still dreamed of getting a Pentax camera of her own. Hiro told her he could obtain one for her for the wholesale price of $1000, but she didn’t have $1000. Impulsively, she decided to teach a master class in photography at Westbeth and charge $50 a student; if she could collect twenty students, she could buy the camera. She asked Neil Selkirk, a young English photographer who was then Hiro’s assistant, what he thought of the idea. He said he’d sign up in a second. So did one of Avedon’s assistants. This gave her the impetus she needed, and after she put an ad in the Times, twenty-eight more students applied. She thought she should keep the class small, but she didn’t have the heart to turn down any of the applicants, although the work of some didn’t particularly interest her.
By this time Diane had become a legend among young photographers. She had just won the Robert Levitt Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers “for outstanding achievement.” In her acceptance speech she told the audience, “I am still collecting things—the ones I recognize and the ones I can’t quite believe.” “She was already a myth,” her friend Susan Brockman said. “A lot of people related to her that way. She was a very literary character, very classical, which was unusual in this time.” Everyone who attended her course (or “the last class,” as it was later called) had seen her work at the Museum of Modern Art. “You couldn’t forget those startling pictures,” one of her students, Mark Haven, says. “There was such intense collaboration between photographer and subject.” And the “freaks” and “normals” were both captured in such an unjudgmental, uniform style—their faces took on a rich strangeness. In almost every shot a ghostly emotion seems to rise from Diane’s images. “Diane’s pictures appealed to the mind, not the eye,” Jerry Ulesmann says, “which is one of the reasons she broke new ground for photographers. Diane explored the psychological.”
As soon as her class was set and scheduled to meet in a vacant Westbeth apartment, Diane grew terrified. What could anybody learn from her? What would she say? She never stopped doubting herself, asking, “What on earth can they get from me?” At the last minute she asked Marvin Israel to sit in on the class, as well as a fashion model she was fond of, and a filmmaker she liked, Susan Brockman. Suddenly she wanted to have friends hanging around—their joint presence would be comforting to her. But once the classes got under way, she seemed to forget her fears. At first there was some resentment because she had accepted too many students. “The room was overcrowded,” Mary Ellen Andrews, a student, recalls. “We thought we wouldn’t get enough individual attention.” (Deborah Turbeville, in fact, demanded her money back, but Diane wouldn’t give it to her.) However, the resentment quickly simmered down. At the first class Diane announced, “Nobody is going to love your pictures like yourself.” “That was terrific for me,” Susan Brockman said. “It was what she wanted you [to feel] in terms of your own work. It hit me like a ton of bricks; really opened me up.” And Anne Tucker says, “The class was not simply about photography. It was about people and relating to people and eliciting a genuine response.”
Suzanne Mantell, another student, remembers how “Arbus asked us to bring in examples of our favorite things and explain why they were our favorites. Someone brought in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. I brought in a spatula—you know, the kind that flips over pancakes? And Diane brought in her collection of favorite cut-outs and rip-outs, images torn from every conceivable magazine and newspaper.” “It was very significant,” Neil Selkirk says. “It seemed to be saying you don’t have to be an artist to produce something that moves people.”
Another assignment was to describe an experience you couldn’t photograph. “Diane wanted us to tell her our stories,” Anne Tucker says. “She would get angry if we weren’t specific. She kept insisting, ‘Tell exactly what happened. Where were you when that happened?’ ”
Ikko Narahara, a young Japanese photographer who taped all of the Arbus classes, described the time he’d been in Holland trying to photograph a crane in flight. When he found a crane perched in a nest on a rooftop, he set up his cameras very carefully and then waited all day for the propitious moment. Finally the crane flapped her wings—and shit on the roof. Diane loved that story.
Anne Tucker described her father’s funeral. “I was walking up the aisle of the church behind my father’s coffin. And suddenly someone in a pew whispered, ‘She doesn’t have any gloves on,’ and I looked down at my hands. It was a totally visual moment. Diane repeated that anecdote several times.”
Another assignment was to photograph something or somebody you’ve never photographed before—or are in awe of, or afraid of. Eva Rubinstein asked Diane if she could photograph her. “Diane was a little taken aback, but she agreed. She insisted, however, that I do it at the ungodly hour of eight a.m. I said okay, although it would be hard for me; I tend to be a late riser. It was pouring rain that morning—the morning I arrived at Westbeth. Diane was ready for me, dressed in those funny, low-slung, black leather pants and black top she often wore. She seemed harried, but then she always seemed harried to me. She said she had an appointment at the dentist, so be quick about it. Her daughter Amy was there, too. She had just washed her hair and she was sitting on the bed with her head wrapped in a bright red towel. She watched us without speaking. Nearby, on the wall, there were strange pictures tacked up—of penises sticking out of belly buttons—kinky, strange stuff. I began setting up my tripod (I used a Rollei 66), and as I did, I noticed Diane sidle over to the mirror and begin to primp—fix her hair. I thought, ‘What a reversal! Diane Arbus trying to make herself look as good as possible before she’s photographed.’ And, of course, she knew how to pose after all those years of shooting fashion models—she struck exactly the right angle, and she was poised and cool. The session didn’t take very long. Coincidentally, that afternoon I photographed Robert Frank—I’d been waiting months to do that. The following week I brought Diane’s portrait in to class, but I could tell she didn’t like it that much.” (Rubinstein excels in austere, elegant still-lifes containing sumptuous light.) “The only other comment she made about my work was about another portrait—one of my best, a portrait of the dying Violet Trefusis [Vita Sackville-West’s lover] which I’d taken in her bedroom in Florence. Diane remarked, ‘The subject is better than the photograph!’ I took that to mean that if she’d taken the picture, it would have been a better picture. Diane’s childlikeness surprised me. She could giggle like a teen-ager one minute, then turn somber and exhausted the next. Once she commented to several of us in class, out of the blue, ‘I was born way up the ladder of middle-class respectability and I’ve been clambering down as fast as I could ever since.’ ”
During class Diane would sit cross-legged on the floor, passing nuts and dried fruits for everybody to munch on. She kept saying, “You’ve got to learn not to be careful.” She talked about how taking a portrait is like seducing someone. She talked about how she used everything she had to obtain a photograph—from “acting dumb” to dropping things, distracting her subjects so they’d feel less threatened. “Most people like having their picture taken,” she said. “They like being paid attention to.”
Somebody asked her, “Do you think your pictures are cruel?” And she answered, “No, these people wanted to have their pictures taken—agreed to have their pictures taken.” She added that she would never take a picture of somebody who didn’t want it, and she said that she had passed up possible photographs because she couldn’t ask the subject to pose without hurting or embarrassing him. There was a man she saw one night, riding on the subway. She said his entire face was covered with warts and she wanted to take his picture, but she couldn’t without making him feel even more self-conscious than he already was.
She always answered the students’ questions very directly, although she hated being pinned down. (When Diana Edkins, Condé Nast photo-researcher, tried to interview her, Diane said, “Okay—let’s do it right now, but I warn you, I may disagree with what I say now tomorrow.”) But she loved to talk, and to these classes she talked and talked and talked. And Suzanne Mantell, Anne Tucker, Mary Ellen Andrews, and others took notes on some of the things she said.
She talked about photographing Bennett Cerf and “mucking it up.” She had come back to his office a second time, even though she didn’t think it would work a second time if it hadn’t worked the first. “And Cerf presented his face to me from behind his newspaper and…it was like his ass because it was so round and blank.” Famous people reminded Diane of “postage stamps. You know their faces but you don’t know them…if you see a movie star on the street, you want to go up and pinch their cheek.”
She said she once went to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s house in Westport and they looked “like they had lightbulbs inside them. Radiant with health—movie stars got this health thing faster than (the rest of us).”
She spoke of photography as “an adventure.” And then in an aside she commented, “Someone once defined horror for me as the relationship between sex and death.
“Choosing a project can be ironic,” she went on. “Everybody’s got irony. You can’t avoid it. It’s in the structure, the detail, the significance… What I mean is, I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.
“[As a photographer] there are two feelings in you. One is you really want to get closer [to the image]. The other thing is that you’ve got some edge…you’re carrying some slight magic which fixes [the subject] in some way.”
She urged the class to “photograph something real…that’s fantasy. Where fantasy comes from is the reality. The fantasy is [total], it really is. It is totally fantastic that we look [the way we do], and sometimes you see that very clearly in a picture. Because it’s so real, it’s fantastic—not that it’s so fantastic that it’s real. Reality is reality, and if you scrutinize reality close enough, you really, really get to it. It’s fantastic. You have to use the term reality to represent what really is in front of the camera. What I’m saying is, let’s call reality reality and let’s call dreams dreams.”
In class she kept stressing the factual, the literal, the specificity inherent in photography. She loved Bill Dane’s postcard photographs of American landscapes. She encouraged Bruce Weber (who became celebrated in the 1980s with his beautiful, stately photographs of Calvin Klein underwear for men). At the same time Diane could not respond to Ralph Gibson’s multiple images and she told him so when he asked her to recommend him for a Guggenheim.
She showed the class a few of her pictures—like the angry little boy holding the hand grenade—but, according to one student, “Diane never actually explained how she got those images or how she convinced so many weird people to pose for her.”
She referred to her most recent experiences photographing at a home for retardates, and she described attending a dance at the home and watching an incredibly heart-stopping handicapped couple dance—he was tall and skinny and his girl was tiny and radiant with “red hair like Maureen O’Hara.” Diane herself had danced with a sixty-year-old handicapped man who was very shy and spoke like a six-year-old boy.
She took many photographs at the retardates’ home, but she insisted, “I’ve never taken a picture I intended. They’re always better or worse.”
She went on to say, “A photograph has to be specific. I remember Lisette Model telling me, ‘The more specific you are, the more general you’ll be.’ ”
She ended one class with the thought: “When you get confused, look [away] from your pictures. Look out the window. Because somehow the reality is the act of making a picture yourself.
“I can tell you a picture. We’re all verbal and visual; it’s all open to us.”
Between classes Diane spent a great deal of time at the Walker Evans exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She’d been so anxious to see it that she, Avedon, Marvin Israel, and Jim Dine had sneaked in while the show was being hung in early January of 1971, and they had wandered around “in great spirits,” stopping to savor particular photographs that inspired them. As usual, Diane was also juggling a variety of assignments: photographing Cliff Gorman as Lenny Bruce for Vogue, photographing Hortense Calisher for her new book (but Calisher hated the portrait and asked that it be destroyed). She also flew to Detroit to photograph the controversial black separatist minister Albert Cleage for Essence magazine, and she caught him with just a touch of a smirk on his mouth. Cleage liked the portrait so much that it now hangs in the meeting hall of his new church in Houston. The rest of Diane’s days were taken up completing a series for Time-Life Books. “It’s about love,” she said.
She photographed a bridal fashion show and girls trying on their gowns for their mothers and fiancés; she photographed a homosexual couple, but the culmination of the project came when she heard about a New Jersey housewife who was particularly devoted to her pet monkey, Sam. Sam was a baby macaque, and the housewife kept him dressed in bonnet and snowsui? so that he resembled a tiny, ancient-faced baby. Diane used an electronic flash placed close to the camera to create harsh shadows, but there is a halo effect above the housewife’s head. She called the resulting portrait “Madonna and Child.”
By simulating amateur-snapshot techniques, she hoped to catch the “total ordinariness” of the backgrounds. Many of her pictures dissatisfied her because “the woman was cooing or eager or nervous,” but the monkey picture she thought was right. It had the effect of looking like a father’s snapshot of his wife and child, emphasized by the housewife, who, according to Diane, “was extremely serious and grave holding her monkey, the same way you’d be grave about the safety of a child.”
Whenever she could find the time, Diane would go to her new darkroom located in a basement on Charles Street. It was totally quiet there and very well organized—all her pictures filed from one to a thousand, and she would print from six a.m. till noon if she could. She was making up a series of prints for a portfolio—a limited edition of fifty portfolios in which twelve of her best portraits (among them the nudist family and the twins) would be signed and annotated by her and displayed “in a nearly invisible glass box designed by Marvin Israel.” She hoped to sell the portfolio’s to museums and private collectors for $1000 apiece.*
She was also developing and printing more retardate pictures from Vineland. She kept going back to the home and staying there as long as she could before returning with fresh rolls of film. The images excited and disturbed her every time they came swimming into the enlarger. By now she had enough pictures for a book, but she felt ambivalent about a book, just as she felt ambivalent about another show, although she didn’t say that to T. Hartwell when he visited her at Westbeth; he sat on the floor of her apartment for an entire afternoon while she showed him a batch of the retardate pictures—like the old woman in the wheelchair wearing a plastic mask and holding a Halloween candy bag in her lap. “Diane was obviously very moved by these pictures. ‘These people are so angelic,’ she kept telling me.” Hartwell says he was moved by the pictures, too, because even in her most anguished probing there was complete artistic control. “As always, Diane took you ‘inside’ and you got a distinct sense of what these characters were about.” Once again Hartwell urged her to consider a one-woman show in Minneapolis—she was ready for it, he said. And she seemed almost to agree, although they set no date.
She could not tell him her true feelings: that if there was a book of her work, or another exhibit, her life would be “over.” That would be it. Somehow, for her work to live—to flourish, to grow—it could not be contained between pages or hung on walls where it would be judged, scrutinized, interpreted by strangers. She preferred to give her work to friends—to Nancy Grossman, Harold Hayes, Robert Benton, Tina Fredericks, Peter Crookston, Bea Feitler, Richard Avedon.
Her friends accepted the powerful instability in her pictures—the disorienting light, the atmosphere of psychological crisis. One of her last portraits is also one of her greatest: an “albino sword-swallower” stands in front of a flapping carnival tent performing her act. Her arms are stretched out like Christ on the cross, but her head is thrown back so triumphantly you can almost feel the sharpness of the blade sliding down her throat. The image is grotesque and defiantly spiritual.
In her last class Diane spoke of the French photographer Brassaï and his shadowy images of whores and late-night cafés in Paris. “Brassaï taught me something about obscurity, because for years I’ve been hipped on clarity,” she said. “Lately it’s been striking me how I really love what I can’t see in a photograph. In Brassaï, in Bill Brandt, there is the element of actual physical darkness and it’s very thrilling to see darkness again.”
After her final lecture Diane invited her students to her duplex for a party. Lisette Model was there, too, and Diane seemed particularly proud to have her teacher present. Everyone wandered around, intrigued by the apartment. The rooms were light, airy, sparsely furnished. Green, leafy plants flowered in one corner and voluminous cheesecloth curtains billowed out from the windows; a strong breeze blowing in from the Hudson River made the material flap and flutter. Someone noticed sharp prickles or mirrored chips embedded in the furs and animal skins draped across a huge bed set up on a platform. Someone else noticed black satin sheets covering the mattress; Avedon’s portrait of Eisenhower stood on a table, and propped against a wall was a blow-up of what appeared to be people with their guts hanging out. Ruth Ansel assumed it might be something from the Daily News files. “What is it?” she demanded. Diane’s only answer was, “I like it. It’s terrific. Don’t you think it’s terrific?”
Toward the end of the party one of the students, Mark Haven, phoned to explain why he wasn’t there—his wife had just had a baby. Diane asked all suits of questions: Did she go through natural childbirth? Did he take pictures while she was in labor? Then she launched into a rambling monologue about the joys of natural childbirth until Haven interrupted to thank her for the photograph she’d sent him from the National Enquirer. It was of a girl holding a doll giving birth to another doll—a really weird image—and although Diane hadn’t enclosed a note, he’d known it was from her. She now admitted it was; she read the National Enquirer avidly—there were always things in it to laugh about: wild UFO stories, grisly murders, strange baby tales, “Gee Whiz” emotion stuff like the “neon cow” that had supposedly been zapped by an eerie substance from the sky. Diane told Haven that she occasionally got ideas from the Enquirer for pictures. Once, in fact, she described her own style of photography as “funk and news.”
* The resulting portrait of the Mansfields appeared in the October 1969 issue of Harper’s and Diane sold the picture to other publications. “It was seen all over the world,” Mansfield claims. “We thought it was undignified.”
It was, however, consistent with many of Diane’s finest portraits: a couple in extremis, if you will; middle-aged, paunchy, oily in bathing suits, presented in sweetly prosaic terms. Diane could not and did not accept all her subjects with grace. If she couldn’t respond, her reaction was often severe.
* Amy Arbus said later, “My mother was frightened by the idea of a book, she rejected it every time. She hated the finality of it. She thought once she [published a book], that would be it, kind of.”
* Only three portfolios were sold: to Richard Avedon, Jasper Johns, and Bea Feitler. Bea received an eleventh picture as a gift. Inscribed “especially for B.F.,” it is from Diane’s series on “love objects” for Time-Life Books—the portrait of the housewife with her pet monkey.