Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  When the girl left two weeks early, Diane cried, but in her teen-age autobiography she confided she “almost hated her because she was too much like me. We both wanted to tell and neither one of us wanted to hear…”

  5

  IN THE FALL DIANE returned to Fieldston School, which she attended from the seventh through twelfth grades and which to some extent shaped her life. (Fieldston is located in the wooded Riverdale section of the Bronx, just off the Henry Hudson Parkway; it is the continuation of the two Ethical Culture elementary schools: the midtown school on Central Park West, which Diane had attended, and the Fieldston lower school.)

  At the time, in the mid-1930s, ethical orientation was a big part of the curriculum, and Fieldston had inspired teachers like Algernon Black, a fierce, handsome man who believed that humanity was at once civilized and primitive. To illustrate philosophical points that had ethical consequences, he would recount symbolic anecdotes from Dante, Homer, the Greek myths, and Shakespeare to his students. He was a dynamic storyteller and Diane developed a crush on him.

  From Black she learned that myths are not invented but inspired; that they come from the same source as dreams, below the level of consciousness. A dream is personal, Black said; a myth is a dream of society and concerns the mysteries of life. You can’t interpret images concretely—if you try, you’ve lost their significance. Certain myths concerning heroes and quests belong to nearly all societies.

  For the rest of her life, Diane savored words like “quest,” “aristocracy,” “rituals,” “legends,” “kingdom,” and she began to view the world in mythic terms. Later she would see the ritual, the myth, in visual spectacles such as parades, contests, circuses, dances, and weddings, and such backgrounds would be a source for her photography. And as she pursued her dwarfs and giants, her eccentrics and extremes, she would explore the winding paths of self-dramatization, contradiction, and ambivalence in her subjects—between what men and women are and what they wish they could be.

  Sometimes on a school field trip to a museum or a zoo she identified with Alice in Wonderland (a favorite book about growing up which she would read and reread as an adult, having memorized the riddles, the endless kingdoms of freaks). Like Alice, Diane constantly wondered what was normal? What was not? What was animal and what was human? What was real or make-believe? She was never quite sure.

  She couldn’t understand why when she and her class visited the Ethical Culture settlement house (an immaculate building set amid decaying slums) they weren’t allowed to speak to the outcasts and derelicts who lounged in the doorways while mangy cats skittered across garbage-strewn sidewalks. Diane longed to talk to these strange people—find out their thoughts. She sensed that the cultural gap between them and herself was enormous, but still she identified with these strange, sad people’s isolation—their aloneness. They were the same in some basic way—exactly the same.

  Years afterward she confided, “One of the things I suffered from as a kid was I never felt adversity. I felt confirmed in a sense of unreality which I could feel as unreality, and the sense of being immune was, ludicrous as it seems, a painful one.”

  The secret pain of being kept immune stayed with Diane until she began photographing experimentally by herself in New York during the 1950s. Throughout her adolescence her immediate frustrations centered on the fact, as far as she was concerned, “the world seemed to belong to the world. I could learn things, but they never seemed to be my own experience.”

  To counteract this, she and Phyllis Carton would periodically create little adventures for themselves. They would ride all over the subway system, observing the strange passengers—the albino messenger boy, the little girl with the purple birthmark. These were visual, sensual experiences for Diane, and they frightened and pleased her just as later on photographing freaks and extremes frightened and pleased her, too.

  Often she and Phyllis would get off the subway “impulsively—in the Bronx or Brooklyn or the Lower East Side—we never planned anything,” and would simply follow a person who interested them. It could be someone like an old lady, barefoot but otherwise dressed in bedraggled finery, and they would trail her for blocks, watching terrified and fascinated as she rummaged through garbage cans, babbling to herself, before she disappeared into a tenement building’s dark hall. Diane would have noted that the old lady’s ankles were swollen and red but that she had a tiny diamond in her ear—she was undoubtedly a countess in disguise. But what was it like inside her tenement building? Diane would wonder. She was dying to explore the old lady’s room.

  Finally, just as it was growing dark, she and Phyllis would drag themselves back to the subway and home to their luxurious, gloomy apartments on Central Park West. Later they might phone each other to go over again what they had seen and experienced that day. “Because everything in life was extraordinary to Diane,” says Phyllis, “even the most ordinary details. She would use the word ‘extraordinary’ to describe the old lady,” but she would use the same word to describe the way her mother played cards. Most afternoons the shuffling sound of cards echoed through the ornate living room. “I got the feeling that Diane was as terrified of reentering the bourgeois world of her parents as she was of exploring the world of freaks and eccentrics. Both worlds fascinated her because they seemed one and the same to her.”

  Diane’s clique lived near one another on Central Park West, so they took the bus, and then the subway up to Fieldston School in Riverdale in those early mornings. “We’d crowd into the Eighth Avenue express sharing chewing gum and secrets,” Hilda Belle Rosenfield says. “Stewart and Phyllis and I talked a lot more to Diane than she did to us—often she seemed far away.” “And so beautiful!” Stewart Stern adds. “I was madly in love with her, but she never knew.”

  (Unbeknownst to her clique, Diane was forcing herself to observe the men on the subway who exposed themselves. Some sat quietly, newspapers covering their genitals. Others stood between the swaying cars opening and closing their coats quickly, convulsively, and Diane would catch a glimpse of pinkish-brown swollen flesh and she would force herself to stare very hard. Terror aroused her. Later she said, “I must have counted thirteen exhibitionists on the subway during high school.”)

  Once on Fieldston’s grassy campus, the quartet of friends attended fire drills in the rain, they raced to history class or the library, and, along with the rest of the student body, they voted to discredit cheaters. And they went on field trips: to the coal mines of Pennsylvania, to the Taystee Bread factory near Newark. There was talk of inviting a few of the factory workers’ children to lunch at Fieldston, but Diane argued against it as “grotesque” and the plan was abandoned.

  Later she auditioned for a school production of Shaw’s Saint Joan. Everyone said she had the perfect spiritual quality and she was sure she would get the part of the peasant girl—she saw herself leading armies, hearing voices. But the teacher gave the role to someone else—an earthy, voluptuous type. Diane was devastated—both angry and upset. If she had had any dreams about going on the stage, she now abandoned them.

  She started devoting more time to art class. Friends remember her bold paintings, the confrontational way she sketched the naked models relaxing, smoking in life-study class. She also made bizarre little pencil sketches—caricatures of people she saw on the street. She helped Stewart Stern complete a huge mural in the school dining room. Her advisor and art teacher, Victor D’Amico, encouraged her to think seriously about becoming a painter after she graduated.

  “She had a talent and I think she was responding to it negatively and positively,” D’Amico says. “She found it both a burden and a blessing, but she was what she was. She was special. I remember her hands—she had powerful, capable hands with great manual dexterity—she could put puzzles together, build models, concoct objets trouvés. She particularly enjoyed working with clay because she could control the material—she would knead and push and change the shape and she could feel herself doing this. She liked working in
creative situations where her hands controlled the result. Maybe that’s why she ultimately shifted to the camera. She could capture the unguarded naked moment quicker on film than with a brush.”

  D’Amico recalls how often she would come to his little office at Fieldston to discuss something. “Maybe about Käthe Kollwitz, who was a favorite of hers—or Paul Klee. ‘May I talk to you, please?’ I can still hear her hushed little voice. She was always bursting with ideas. She had such a superior intellect it was sometimes hard to follow what she was saying, she thought so quickly—so imaginatively. I remember her participation on a student panel at the Museum of Modern Art along with Phyllis Carton and Stewart Stern where she talked about what it would be like if Goya painted in the Impressionist style—afterwards Alfred Barr said, ‘That girl’s mind is terrifying.’ ”

  She would wince every time D’Amico called her talented. Phyllis Carton recalls, “We felt like phonies. We told each other we couldn’t be as talented as D’Amico said.”

  Frequently in class Diane appeared catatonic. “Not for long periods. We all got used to it,” D’Amico said. “Diane would be talking about something and then pfft! she’d go off into a kind of trance. It was when an idea or image seized her—it was as if she’d stepped out of the room to glance into a book for research—then she was back with us, talking away as if nothing had happened. I never in all my seven years of teaching her found her melancholy. She was endlessly curious, funny, decent, good.”

  Diane kept on showing her paintings to her father; he was impressed. Although he had mixed feelings about any of his children becoming an artist (“How can you make a living at it?” he would ask Howard, who was then thinking of a career as a tenor), he was still pleased that Diane and her brother were so “creative.” When Gertrude complained that the children were growing even more distant with her—that she simply could not talk to them and whose children were they anyway?—David would laugh and say, “They’re my children, Buddy. They take after me.” After all, the Nemerovs were artistically inclined. His mother, Fanny, had done water-colors—and didn’t he have a fabulous sense of design and color? “I could be a painter,” he would murmur.

  In the spring of 1935 Diane’s father arranged for her to come down to the store after school and take sketching lessons from Dorothy Thompson, who was Russeks’ illustrator.

  “Dorothy was probably the first beatnik type Diane had ever met,” Ben Lichtenstein says. “She was an independent lady who didn’t wear makeup, had studied painting with George Grosz, lived in a rustic place upstate with a guy who made carved gun handles. Anyway, Dorothy gave Diane sketching lessons in anatomy twice a week. And she’d take Diane to museums like the Met and talk to her about art.”

  Dorothy Thompson introduced her to Grosz’s watercolors—harsh, unforgiving images which depicted the world as an evil, phantasmagorical place. Grosz became one of Diane’s favorite artists (and a future inspiration for her photographs). She was particularly fascinated by the subjects he explored: lechery, drunkenness, and overeating.

  Lichtenstein notes that at fourteen Diane was still “painfully shy, withdrawn—proud of her lustrous hair, which she liked to brush.” The impression of fragility which she always gave was in her manner, her fluttery gestures, her voice. She spoke softly and in rapid, convulsive bursts. When she was at ease, she would punctuate her conversation with giggles.

  Also in the Russeks art department, working with Ben Lichtenstein as a copy boy, was Allan Arbus, a slender, handsome, curly-haired nineteen-year-old who was going to City College at night.

  Allan had got the job through his uncle Max Weinstein, who was still very much president of Russeks. Weinstein’s second wife was Bertha Arbus. Her youngest brother, Harry Arbus, was Allan’s father. Harry had helped run the family business, I. Arbus & Sons (which featured ladies’ coats), before he began selling mutual funds.

  The Arbuses were originally from Warsaw, Poland. “As a clan they were musical, secretive, emotionally cold,” says a cousin, Lureen Arbus. “Allan was bright and strong-willed,” says another cousin, Arthur Weinstein. “He was interested in everything to do with the arts.” His mother, Rose Goldberg, was a schoolteacher (her most famous pupil was Harold Clurman). Rose’s brother was an actor. Her sister Jenny Goldberg was a classical pianist and married to Philip Horowitz, Enrico Caruso’s doctor.

  “Allan wanted to be an actor. We’d go to all the Broadway shows together,” Weinstein continues. “He could mimic anybody.” A classmate at Bronx High School of Science, Seymour Peck, remembers him as “the best actor in the school and president of the Drama Club.” He’d already won several prizes on Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour. Apart from acting, his main obsession was playing the clarinet. His idol was Benny Goodman.

  Diane took one look at Allan and he took one look at her and, according to Ben Lichtenstein, “they fell madly in love.” Later Diane would say Allan was “the most beautiful man she had ever seen” and their romance had been “like Romeo and Juliet.”

  Not long after they met, Diane told her parents she wanted to marry Allan Arbus right away—immediately—at fourteen. The Nemerovs were flabbergasted by this turn of events. As far as they knew, Diane had never shown much interest—let alone excitement—about anybody or anything. They said no, absolutely not, and they did everything they could to discourage the young couple.

  Arthur Weinstein, then eighteen, remembers being ordered by his parents to “take Diane Nemerov out—which I did and I was completely captivated by her. We became close friends.” She immediately told him she was in love with Allan and he ended up being “like a beard.” “I’d pick Diane up at the San Remo and we’d appear to be off to a movie, but instead I’d take her straight to Allan. They were very stubborn and determined to see each other as often as they could.” For the next four years they carried on a courtship fraught with clandestine meetings, secret phone calls, rendezvous in Central Park, letters delivered by hand.

  “Allan became the most important person in Diane’s life, the crucial relationship,” Renée says. “She had never been that close to anyone before except to Howard—and at fourteen she was restless, impatient. She longed to experience things, and Allan brought beauty and passion into her life. He became her guide, her mentor, her reason for being.”

  He called her “girl”—she called him “swami.” They tried to see each other every day, although that was difficult with Diane at Fieldston and Allan working at Russeks and then attending college at night. Still, they managed. Diane told only a few of her clique at Fieldston about her involvement with Allan. Naomi Rosenbloom recalls that she did say she was “crazy about him” and that he made her feel “shivery,” but she never introduced him to any of her friends.

  “And then the oddest thing,” Naomi goes on. “Months went by—Diane turned fifteen and one day she advised me not to wear a bra or panty girdle and that I should do breast and stomach exercises instead. Allan had taught her to do this,” Naomi says. “He made her very aware of her body. Her body didn’t scare her and she wasn’t ashamed like most of us—she carried herself proudly.” Diane told another friend that she had started to masturbate. After everyone was asleep in the apartment, she would go into the bathroom, lock the door, turn on the light, and undress slowly in full view of the neighbors. She would caress herself, aware that men in other apartments were watching her. She wanted them to watch her, she said. She did this night after night, and with abandon, for several years, she told her friend. Her parents never caught her. Howard meanwhile regarded masturbation “with a religious guilt and seriousness.” His secret word for it was “worship.” “My father once caught me at it and said he would kill me if it ever happened again.”

  During this period (1938-9) Diane and Hilda Belle Rosenfield would go to one of the lounges between classes at Fieldston and practice foxtrotting. Diane’s mother, a beautiful ballroom dancer, was always taking lessons to master the latest variations in the rhumba and the samba; she once even took a speci
al course at some resort in the Catskills. Diane envied her grace and suppleness.

  Diane invited Hilda Belle to dinner with her parents off and on through 1938. “I thought it was a proud, odd household,” Hilda Belle says. “The Russeks and the Nemerovs were such a powerful combination when they were together in one room. Not much communication—but reverberations. And a great many servants. Lots of antiques. I remember someone exclaiming over a tabletop of inlaid wood. Howard was made much of—he had just begun at Harvard and he spoke about it in a slow, thoughtful way. Mrs. Nemerov never stopped looking at herself in the mirror.”

  After one of these dinners Diane confided to Hilda Belle that she’d seen her mother sitting on her father’s lap and crying—something about how she could no longer run the country house they’d rented in Westchester along with their New York apartment. Diane wondered if her mother wasn’t really crying about the perilous state of her marriage.

  Just as David Nemerov’s style and presence pervaded the apartment in the San Remo, so, too, did stories of his constant philandering. Diane first heard these stories from Paris, the new chauffeur, who confided to her that he frequently drove the “boss” to various assignations. At one point during the 1930s Nemerov was rumored to be involved with Joan Crawford*; he used to visit her at her suite in the Beekman Tower Hotel. And Ben Lichtenstein recalls taking flowers to a girl who ran a bike rental place on 59th Street. “It was David’s way of telling the girl he didn’t want to see her anymore.”

  Gertrude meanwhile held her suffering deep inside. Most afternoons she stayed in the apartment, chain-smoking and doing exquisite embroidery or playing bridge. She seemed to accept what was happening in the profoundly passive way so many women accept life and their men. “Diane and I learned how to be submissive from Mommy,” Renée says.If Gertrude confided in anyone, it was in her mother, Rose, a heavy-set, good-natured woman who spoke in stentorian tones (a habit both Gertrude and Howard imitated). “Gertrude was closer to her mother than anyone else in the world,” Bessie Shapiro said. “They saw each other most every day, especially after the Russeks moved to the Hotel Lombardy. When they were together, they behaved like schoolgirls.”