Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  Frank and I.H. didn’t particularly want to move or expand; they were content with their thriving business as it was. What they really cared about was playing the horses. But David went on trying to convince them that he could turn Russeks into a specialty shop to end all specialty shops. He would make it a showplace, he promised—a glittering spectacle with the finest possible merchandise. Russeks’ windows would be veritable theater—the various departments, fantasy lands…

  In time the Russek brothers discussed the project with Max Weinstein, a former coat manufacturer who ran a bank in the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on 34th Street. He thought the idea of a specialty store was great—he put up half a million dollars and the Russek brothers put up another half (David still another). Weinstein would be president of Russeks, Frank and I.H. would handle the fur business, and David would be merchandising director.

  In 1923 a very grand Russeks opened at Fifth Avenue and 36th Street. The outside of the seven-story building (formerly Gorham Silversmiths, designed by Stanford White) was imposing; with its balconies and marble columns, it resembled a Venetian palazzo.

  Inside, on David’s orders, purple velvet carpets covered the floor, and salesmen and salesladies behaved obsequiously. Furs remained the foundation of the store’s financial success (furs were displayed on the main floor as well as the second, partly because Nemerov believed that furs, in some mysterious way, were a primitive symbol of strength: “Fur creates a protective image,” he told one of his buyers once), but there were dress departments, too, both moderately priced and expensive; there was a millinery department and a boutique devoted to lingerie; there was a beauty parlor and a bridal salon.

  From the beginning David proved to be a fashion innovator (to this day he is remembered by people like Ben Zuckerman, the dress manufacturer, as one of the most creative retailers in the business). In the 1920s he pulled together Russeks wardrobes for movie stars like Mae Murray and Norma Talmadge; he was the first to design a silver-fox fur, the first to introduce fur cardigans. For ten years he published a Russeks fashion-furs booklet which was bought and followed by more than two hundred fine stores throughout the country. It was his idea to make copies of Paris originals—other stores followed his lead. Rip-offs of Chanel suits and Paquin coats were sold at Russeks. In 1928 you could buy a copy of a Vionnet pleated afternoon dress for $23.50 at Russeks—“not extravagant but smart.”

  Nemerov also spent a fortune in newspaper ads extolling Russeks chic. He ran ads every day, alternating photographs with illustrations (also an innovation—nobody used photographs in newspaper ads), and his copy was, according to Andrew Goodman, president of Bergdorf Goodman, “the snappiest of all of retail.”

  Sometimes, however, Frank Russek would read an ad and then throw it on the floor and stamp on the elegant copy. He believed Russeks’ identification with high style would ultimately kill its mass fashion potential. He and Nemerov never stopped arguing about Russeks’ ambivalent merchandising policies. On the one hand, it was a high-fashion fur and specialty shop, its quality comparable to that of Henri Bendel on West 57th Street. On the other hand, flanked by Lord and Taylor and B. Altman, Russeks was in the heart of the 34th Street market and presumably trying to reach that market. Yet, unlike Lord and Taylor or B. Altman, which were spacious, well-designed stores, Russeks suffered from its physical situation. Soon after they moved into the Gorham Building, the Russeks realized—too late—that the seven floors were overly narrow and that selling space was hampered by the design of the rooms: their old-fashioned columns and bays, although lovely to look at, restricted traffic and display areas. The extreme narrowness of the main floor stifled the potential of a bustling main-floor operation, which Frank Russek believed was the mainspring of retail profitability.

  Ben Lichtenstein, advertising director of Russeks for thirty years, says, “Russeks survived as long as it did mostly due to David’s enthusiasm and drive. He was a fantastic promoter—a showman like Bernie Gimbel and John Wanamaker.” He never created exploitation wars with his arch competitor, I. J. Fox (across the street)—the kind of war Gimbels cultivated with Macy’s. “No—David did classy promotion which made Russeks seem successful all the time, even when we were going through rough periods. He knew fashion was theater, that fashion was ephemeral—it kept changing. Fashion kept David in a state of perpetual excitement, and his excitement was contagious.”

  And he seemed clairvoyant. He knew that one season baguette jewelry and lace fans would be the thing, along with fur-trimmed coats. He always could sense what women wanted; he could tell husbands what to give their mistresses for Christmas—French perfume, gold mules, satin lingerie, bunches of artificial violets—and he’d be right. Eventually Russeks got the reputation of being the store for “kept women” and chorus girls. “There was always something a little bit excessive about Russeks,” Eleanor Lambert, a fashion press agent says. “A little bit vulgar.”

  By 1935 Nemerov had established a bureau (with Ruth Waltz, a fashion economist) equivalent to the couturier laboratory in Paris to determine fashion trends. He found that suits sell in cycles—that invariably a peak suit season followed a peak bright-color dress season. And as a creator of Russeks furs—which were the Russeks trademark; “We were the largest buyers of raw fur pelts in the world,” Ben Lichtenstein says—“David Nemerov had a particular genius.” He knew women would always pursue furs because they were so soft and luxurious. So he labored in the Russeks workroom along with the designers to create the first black-ermine afternoon coat, the first full-length badger coat, shawls of mink and fox. He was the first to try to bleach mink.

  He understood that both the shape of the fur and the shape of the woman must be carefully considered when cutting a fur coat, otherwise both would look ridiculous. And he was famous on Seventh Avenue for his long discussions with dress manufacturers on the pros and cons of a particular fabric such as silk jersey. Occasionally he wore a scarlet jacket in the office to prove that men didn’t have to wear brown or gray or blue.

  According to Lichtenstein, David Nemerov had only one glaring fault: “With money he was hopeless.” Figures bored him. He had no idea how much money Russeks was making or losing—or if he himself had any money. “I don’t think he ever stepped into a bank or wrote out a check,” Lichtenstein says. “He had Russeks’ accountant pay all the household bills for Gertrude, and he’d often borrow little sums of money from me. If he wanted cash right away, he’d just scrawl ‘$50’ on a piece of paper and hand it to the Russeks cashier.”

  Max Weinstein—a man utterly at home with figures (he not only ran Russeks, he was now chairman of the First National Country Bank, which he had built, complete with marble floors and gold tellers’ boxes, at 38th Street and Seventh Avenue, on the very site where he’d sold candy as a penniless immigrant boy)—was bothered by Nemerov’s casual attitude toward money. “My father and David Nemerov did not get along,” Max’s son Walter recalls. “They disagreed about practically everything, but never openly. My father was always very polite with David, and David was always very polite with him.” Meanwhile the Russek brothers and the Weinsteins continued to be close friends. The two families often vacationed together at Colorado Springs, and Frank Russek particularly enjoyed it when Max’s wife, Bertha Arbus, played the piano.

  2

  ON MARCH 14, 1923, the Nemerovs’ second child and first daughter was born. Later Diane would be told that she had been named after the sublimely romantic heroine in the movie Seventh Heaven. Actually, her mother, Gertrude, had seen the Broadway show from which the film was made while she was pregnant, and, sitting in the warm, dark theater, she’d been so impressed by the character of the “virgin woman Diane, so vulnerable and strong at the same time,” she vowed that if she had a daughter she would call her “Dee-ann” (“They pronounced it that way in the play,” Gertrude Nemerov would explain).*

  According to Gertrude, Diane was a large (nine pounds), beautiful baby with thick golden hair, translucent skin, and hu
ge green eyes that held curious powers of observation. “Even as a baby she didn’t just look at you—she considered you.” At first a fierce, unspoken tenderness and mutuality existed between mother and daughter. On her nanny’s day off, Diane seemed to find pleasure and reassurance from literally clinging to Gertrude. “She’d never let go my hand.”

  Diane’s description of early childhood is slightly different. In an autobiography she wrote at Fieldston School when she was sixteen she recalled that she was “cranky—always crying, yelling, screaming. I can always remember the feeling I had. I always felt warm and tired and there was warm sun on me and I didn’t want to wake up…”

  During this time (except for trips to Palm Beach) Diane lived with her parents and brother at 115 West 73rd Street. When she was around four, the family moved to an apartment at Park Avenue and 90th Street. Thick drapes hung across the windows. “It was almost always dark,” Howard recalls.

  There were two maids, a chauffeur named Scott, a cook named Eva, as well as Helvis, the German nanny for Howard, and a French nanny who took care of Diane for the first seven years of her life. “Mamselle,” as she was called, was a cool, undemonstrative young woman who wore her hair in a bun. “She had a hard sad quite lovely face and I adored her,” Diane wrote. “She always looked as if she had a very sad secret.” Whenever Mamselle went on vacation, Diane would cry and cry and try to keep her from leaving. When they were together, the two rarely spoke, but Diane seemed very happy with her. When they did converse, it was in French and Diane enjoyed that, although she “didn’t know” she was “speaking French.”

  One of her most vivid memories was being taken by Mamselle to the dried-up cavity of what had once been a reservoir in Central Park, where they peered down on a Hooverville shanty town made up of tin shacks. “This image wasn’t concrete, but for me it was a potent memory,” Diane told Studs Terkel years later. “Seeing the other side of the tracks, holding the hand of one’s governess.” Diane asked to go down into the cavity to investigate the shacks, but Mamselle wouldn’t let her. “She was very strict,” Diane said.

  Whatever discipline or direction Diane and Howard received came not from their parents but from their various nannies and later from Kitty, the maid, “who had a terrific sense of humor,” Howard says, and who took them to the dentist and to their dancing and music lessons.

  Gertrude Nemerov, an imperious, beautiful woman nicknamed “Buddy,” was proud of her little son and daughter although she sometimes seemed baffled by them. Early on she began apologizing for Diane and Howard’s “strangeness” because, unlike “most kids,” their noses were pressed in books. She once said she had “a hard time figuring out what they were talking about.”

  Most mornings when the children were little, Mrs. Nemerov would lie in bed drinking coffee and smoking. She might phone her best friend, May Miller, the vivacious wife of the shoe tycoon Meurice Miller, who was filled with curiosity about everything; then at around 10:30 she would discuss the dinner menu with the cook, Eva. Although Eva exasperated everybody in the Nemerov family (she was rude and chewed incessantly on a toothpick), Mrs. Nemerov refused to criticize her because she didn’t want to lose her. “But she makes such marvelous pot roast,” she’d exclaim when Diane would cry out that Eva had been nosing through her dresser drawers again.

  At around eleven, Mrs. Nemerov would rise and begin slowly creaming her face in front of a mirror. Sometimes Diane would watch, wondering at the self-absorbed reflection in the glass. Her mother often seemed to her to be cultivating an air of supreme indifference.

  By 11:45 she was dressed and settled in her limousine, telling the chauffeur, Scott, to take her to Russeks.

  Gertrude Nemerov went to the store several times a week for browsing and pricing and trying on the latest styles. She only window-shopped at Saks and Best’s—never bought there. Everybody on both sides of the family was supposed to get her clothes only at Russeks. “You can look at De Pinna and Bonwit’s or Tailored Woman—but just look,” the children were warned.

  As soon as Diane was old enough to walk, she would accompany her mother in her treks through the store. Dressed in a reefer coat, white gloves, and tiny patent-leather slippers, she would toddle solemnly after her mother as Mrs. Nemerov swept through the narrow main floor across the purple velvet carpet and into the fur department.

  Even before she started investigating a new shipment—it could be the latest sealskin coats, some ermine ball-wraps—the fur salesmen were bowing and scraping and “rubbing their hands together like shoe salesmen,” Diane said. “It was like being in some loathsome movie set in an obscure Transylvanian country, and the kingdom was humiliating.” Of this experience Diane said to the photographer Frederick Eberstadt, “I was treated like a crummy princess.” (Years afterward, as a photographer, her precise, unjudgmental eye would confront an entire series of grief-stricken “crummy princesses.”)

  However, on those late mornings long ago, Diane would merely follow her mother into the elevator and up to the dress-and-suit department, or to the millinery salon to try on hats. Mrs. Nemerov greeted all the personnel by name. As the daughter of the founder of Russeks, she knew everybody. Russeks was a home away from home. She loved the store.

  The last stop would always be David Nemerov’s wood-paneled office on the seventh floor. From that office with its ever-ringing phone and the secretaries and buyers hurrying in and out, Nemerov ran the store, okaying all merchandise, all ad copy, all window displays.

  Preoccupied with Russeks, Nemerov showed little warmth or interest in his children, although in public he would always put his arms around them and make a great show of affection. In or out of the office he chainsmoked, and he suffered from a nervous stomach.

  As a young man he’d been in two car accidents, so he never drove himself; instead he went everywhere by limousine. Chauffeurs came and went because he was such a demanding employer. One driver—the very handsome one named Scott, whom Mrs. Nemerov liked—quit in a huff over a mix-up about his day off and then wrote the Nemerovs a letter implying that they were “crude” and listing the abuses he thought he’d been subjected to. Diane never forget the effect of that letter on her—his words “were both insulting and hurtful to me, because I was somehow implicated in the criticism, but I was equally critical [of my parents], which meant I played both sides.” She secretly thought of her father as “something of a phony. A lot of his friends were richer than he was, but he was the most flamboyant.”

  At Russeks he could be charming and ebullient when business was going well, but much of the time his challenging, often brutal manner terrified personnel. “If you got in his way, he’d walk all over you,” a buyer said. At his angriest, either in the store or at home, he would appear infinitely reasonable; his voice would sink to a whisper. This would madden Gertrude and Diane and Howard, because they often couldn’t hear what he was saying but were afraid to tell him so.

  Howard remembers his father as “an overtly powerful, power-using sort of guy. Diane and I were rarely punished, but everything in our house was based on approval, not love. This made us feel rather helpless because we never knew whether Daddy would approve or disapprove of something we did.” He gives as an example: “I once bought my father a postcard from a little trip I’d taken with my nanny to Van Cortlandt Park. Daddy lectured me very sternly on how much it cost, which must have been three cents.”

  Until Howard was enrolled at the Franklin School in 1926, he and Diane were inseparable. It was as if they had passed through some secret experience together, and although it might not interest any of the other Russeks or Nemerovs, it bound them close together.

  If they took a walk together in Central Park, they were accompanied by their nannies. Howard remembers that whenever he and Diane played in the park sandbox, they were forbidden by their nannies to take off their white gloves.

  Once home, they ate their meals together, usually in silence, occasionally bickering. Both possessed powerful, quirky intellects,
both read voluminously, absorbing knowledge and myths with ease, and they created rich fantasies which they shared with each other and no one else.

  Their giftedness made them feel separate and alone. “We were protected and privileged as children,” Howard says, “but we were watched over incessantly. It made us fearful.” Their sense of themselves and their situation was reflected in the gravity with which they sat or stood, not looking at each other, but close as twins. Their eyes rested on their parents, the servants, weighing each situation, each event.

  One July they traveled to Europe with their parents on the ocean liner Aquitania. While the Nemerovs stayed in Paris to view the collections, Howard and Diane were taken by Mamselle to Le Touquet, Proust’s favorite vacation spot in the north of France, where they gorged on wild strawberries and Diane was frightened by a goat.

  Diane and her brother fought a lot. Howard says they once struggled over a china doll that broke in their hands, and he believes Diane got a scar on her face as a result. “In early life, my sister and I used to blame one another, get one another punished quite a lot.” When it rained, they played football in the living room, and “the ball left the marks of its nose and seam on the ceiling so that we got found out,” Howard writes. “One Christmas morning we came into the living room secretly and managed to knock the tree over.” He doesn’t remember whether they put it back on its feet or not.

  For the most part, however, they were obedient, well-behaved little children, with the same watchful, shining eyes, the same intense remoteness.

  “Howard doted on Diane,” says a Nemerov cousin. “He kept a photograph of her in his wallet until she died. He was certainly in awe—because even when she was tiny, she never behaved like a little girl. She had innate sophistication—wisdom about things—and she was gorgeously intuitive. Howard turned into a highly critical, precise intellectual. It was some combination in one family.”