Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  Sometimes Diane would observe her grandmother and mother whispering together and she would imagine her family being close like that—“united.” She knew about her father and his women and was confused. Diane in particular hated seeing her mother in pain although she didn’t understand why she was in pain. “I could tell Diane was very sensitive to my moods, although she never said anything,” Gertrude Nemerov recalls.

  By 1938 Gertrude Nemerov’s feelings of inadequacy and melancholia had increased and a deep depression set in which she couldn’t shake.

  Forty years later she said: “All I know is I had everything in life that a woman wants and I was miserable. I didn’t know why. I simply could not communicate with my family. I felt my husband and children didn’t love me and I couldn’t love them. I stopped functioning. I was like a zombie. My friend May Miller had to take me shopping and help me try on clothes. I wasn’t able to take them off the hangers I felt so weak.”

  She would sit in silence at the dinner table night after night, until finally her husband asked Kitty, the maid, to help get the children off for camp in the summer. “Mrs. Nemerov is sick.”

  Eventually she consulted psychiatrists, gynecologists, nerve specialists, “but nobody could diagnose what was the matter with me. My depressions continued. Finally one doctor told me I wasn’t neurotic—I wasn’t crazy—I should just live my life as planned and go off to Europe with Daddy as we did every year to the south of France and then to Paris to see the collections.”

  So they did. As always, they went by ocean liner. The first night on board, “Daddy wanted me to go to dinner, but I couldn’t, I was in such a state of depression, of anxiety, so he went up by himself and I had supper in our cabin. Later when he came back he said he’d met a famous analyst from Chicago—I can’t remember his name—at the captain’s table and he’d told him about me and the doctor said, ‘Look—I’m on vacation, but as a favor I’ll treat your wife. Have her meet me on deck tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock.’ ”

  For the next couple of mornings Mrs. Nemerov had sessions with the analyst on deck while couples played shuffleboard or drank coffee from trays and the sea pitched and rolled around them. Mrs. Nemerov said the analyst made her uncomfortable. “He was oily—and he had hot, piercing black eyes and I didn’t see the purpose of his questions.” The sessions did no good. “I felt exactly the same—no lifting of the depression.”

  After the third or fourth session the analyst arranged “to treat me in our cabin—but I was alone. I remember I was wearing very short shorts. He asked me to lie down on the bunk and then he began asking me all sorts of intimate, probing questions about my sex life. I was embarrassed and I refused to answer them. He did not react, he just kept staring at me with his hot, piercing black eyes. I was so unnerved I decided I wouldn’t see him after that, and I told my husband that I didn’t need to see the analyst anymore—that I was much better—even though I still felt terrible, almost crippled with anxiety. That night I remember putting on my prettiest evening gown and we went up to the dining room. I forced myself to laugh and act as if I was having a marvelous time—inside I was absolutely choked. Panicked. Because I could not define my depression. All the while I could see the analyst lounging at the bar, watching me with his hot, piercing black eyes. I was terrified of him. I never wanted to see or talk to him again!

  “He got off at Naples—we were going on to Cannes. Before he left, he presented Daddy with a bill for a thousand dollars. But I felt no better and remained depressed the entire summer and into the fall. Then slowly, very slowly, I came out of it. I don’t quite know how. A year went by and I was all right again. I was exhausted. I felt as if I’d recovered from a hideous disease and had finally healed.

  “I tell you this because Diane, I think, was concerned for me; she observed me during those painful months. We never talked about what was troubling me, of course, but years later when she contracted hepatitis and had to go into the hospital, she fell into a ghastly, unending depression that went on for three years—until her death. Periodically she would call me on the phone in Florida and cry, ‘Mommy—Mommy—tell me the story of your depression and how you got over it.’ And although I had no real answer—no solution—I would repeat my story and it seemed to reassure her. That if I had gotten well, so could she…”

  * He encouraged the design of a mink coat with the “Joan Crawford look”—full, swinging collar and cuffed with an overabundance of fur “in which every pelt suggested a dollar sign.”

  6

  DIANE’S ROMANCE WITH ALLAN Arbus went on unabated during her sophomore and junior years at Fieldston. Her friends were beginning to know of Allan’s existence, but she never brought him to the campus. Secrecy was always important to her—as it was to Allan. They were a scrupulously private couple who revealed themselves to few people.

  Gertrude kept saying that in time Diane would change her mind about Allan and marry a man with money and social position. Allan was bright and attractive but poor in comparison to the Russeks and the Nemerovs. “It never occurred to Aunt Gertrude that she, too, had fallen in love with a bright, attractive, but impoverished man and married him against her parents’ wishes,” Dorothy Evslin said.

  To placate her mother, Diane went out with a few boys at Fieldston, among them Adam Yarmolinsky. “There were a lot of boys in love with her,” another classmate, Eda LeShan, recalls. “She was irresistible,” Stewart Stern says. “I used to stand outside her apartment looking up at her window, hoping I’d catch a glimpse of her. When you were with her, she made you feel like you were the only person in the world.” But she wanted to be with Allan—only with Allan. When she went to Russeks to try on clothes, the salesladies said, she would be wearing Allan’s underpants “as a sign of love.”

  Periodically Diane also worked at Russeks in the stockroom. A cousin, Helen Quat, who worked with her, says, “I’ve never seen anyone hate a job as much as Diane hated the stockroom.” Later Diane said: “I absolutely hated furs; I found the family fortune humiliating.” But as a teen-ager she suffered in silence.

  So did Howard, who also worked in the stockroom during Easter vacations. By this time he and his father were having arguments about Howard ultimately taking over the store. He knew that if he didn’t make a career at the store, it would seem as if he was deserting his family, and he wasn’t yet sure he could redeem himself by success elsewhere. “And I would cry,” Howard says. “I was terrified of Daddy and I wanted him to love me, but I knew I would never be interested in running Russeks and I would never change my mind.”

  Russeks meanwhile was flourishing. Nemerov kept tabs on the increasing popularity of mink coats (mink represented eighty percent of Russeks sales—there were an estimated 250,000 mink coats and jackets in American closets). He noted each new fur trend—now women wore fox-fur jackets over their bathing suits in Palm Beach, unflattering to short figures and mature silhouettes; he predicted the demise of the fox-fur jacket and he was right.

  He had created a series of boutiques within the store proper—among them a college shop and a bridal boutique, innovative merchandising touches in 1938. He also organized weekly fashion shows at Russeks—very popular with the customers—and they helped boost sales. “David did everything,” the fashion illustrator George Radkai says. “He chose the clothes, he accessorized the models, he was a magician when it came to putting the right scarf with the right earrings and shoes.” As added promotion for the store, Nemerov was also supplying Russeks outfits for Broadway shows. “He’d dress bit players free and then get Russeks credited in Playbill,” Radkai says. “David loved being involved with show business.”

  By June of 1938 Diane’s romance with Allan had grown even more intense. “A lot of yearning and frustration,” her sister Renée says. She remembers going into the kitchen late at night for a glass of ice water “and there they’d be—Diane and Allan—kissing passionately in the dark.” When Allan wasn’t around, Diane hung on the phone with him, and in conversati
on with others she referred to him constantly. “ ‘Allan says this’—’Allan believes that’—Allan’s word was gospel,” says Hilda Belle Rosenfield.

  Under Allan’s influence Diane began creating her own style—her own look. She often refused to put on the elaborate dresses her mother chose for her at Russeks—nor did she wear silk stockings and her legs were bare and unshaved. When she visited her brother at Harvard, his friend Clara Park recalls: “Diane’s thick brown hair hung almost to her waist. She wore a blouse of heavy ivory silk, tweed skirt, no makeup, no jewelry, and white ankle socks and sandals—you know the kind one bought at Best’s for children? Howard kept repeating how exquisite his sister looked, but to me she was making a statement—and it was an utter rejection of the way she’d been raised.”*

  That summer Allan took a photograph of Diane lying in the grass in Central Park. “It was the most rapturous portrait of young love I’ve ever seen,” Dorothy Evslin says. “Diane seemed thrilled with it and showed it to everybody in the family.” David Nemerov refused comment. While he never told Diane to stop seeing Allan, he disapproved of their involvement and he expressed his disapproval by being “as cold as ice,” Renée says. “Diane retaliated by ignoring Daddy, which frustrated him terribly. He was used to people wilting under his disapproval, but Diane wouldn’t budge. And to make matters worse, she wouldn’t accept the fur coat he’d given her—all our friends were wearing little fur coats that year, but Diane wouldn’t even try hers on. It was the final blow as far as Daddy was concerned.”

  Eventually Nemerov phoned Victor D’Amico at Fieldston and pleaded with him, “Make Diane stop seeing this Arbus fellow. I’ll pay you any amount of money if you can persuade her. She respects you more than anybody in the world. Please do something.”

  D’Amico refused. Subsequently he and Diane talked briefly about Allan, “but I never met him. Diane said she was determined to go through with the marriage in spite of her parents’ opposition. ‘I’m going to wait until I’m of age,’ she told me, ‘and then I can go off by myself.’ I got the impression that, while she may have cared for Arbus, he was principally the way for her to leave home and be independent.”

  During their talk D’Amico suggested to Diane—and later to Mr. Nemerov—that she go to the Cummington School of the Arts for the summer. Cummington, set on 170 acres in the hills above Northampton, Massachusetts, was considered a “very progressive” school. The students (aspiring poets, writers, painters, dancers) baked their own bread, made their own shoes, literally tilled the fields on the school property, “in order to get close to nature and themselves.” At one time or another the faculty members included Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, and Allen Tate.

  These names meant nothing to David Nemerov, but when D’Amico told him about the school, he thought that a protracted separation from Allan might break up Diane’s romance, so he packed his daughter off to the school in July of 1938.

  It was very hot in Cummington. The grass on the hills was golden and brittle. Diane worked sporadically in class on an oil painting she called “The Angel Gabriel” (it was really Allan Arbus), and together with the other students she sang songs while washing the supper dishes. But she spent most of her time with nineteen-year-old Alexander Eliot, the great-grandson of Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard. Alex, a genial six-footer, was to become the art editor of Time magazine, but at the time Diane first met him, he was, according to a friend, “a beaming wunderkind—messy, red-haired, always smoking, always talking.”

  Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and raised in Northampton, where his father, Sam, Jr., taught drama at Smith College, Alex was nurtured by his mother, Ethel Cook, a plump, gentle woman and a writer of children’s books, among them Wind Boy, which was a best-seller in the 1930s. Ethel encouraged Alex to be an artist rather than an educator. “She thought everything I did was great,” he says. As a boy Alex scribbled short stories, painted “all kinds of painting—from realism to complete abstraction.” He attended Loomis prep school, but refused to go to Harvard and instead went to Black Mountain College for two years, and then to the Boston Museum school of painting. He had opinions about everybody and everything, from philosophy to art. One of the first things he told Diane was a quote from Goethe which she never forgot: “Every form correctly seen is beautiful.”

  Alex says he fell in love with Diane the moment he saw her. “Her physical presence was so extraordinary, she startled me—took my breath away. It was like coming upon a deer in a forest.” “There was this meeting opening night of Cummington,” he goes on. “Katherine Frazier, the founder of the school and quite a remarkable woman—a musician, an aesthetician—was giving us students an inspiring talk as to how we could develop into a real artistic community.

  “Meanwhile I noticed Diane moving in the background—weaving in and out among the other students. She was dressed all in black. Her thick, lustrous, fragrant hair was hanging down about her shoulders. She was quite voluptuous—beautifully shaped arms, exquisitely formed legs… She kept moving back and forth very deliberately as if she was dancing out what Miss Frazier was saying, with beautiful, thoughtful motions. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I fell in love. She was the first great love of my life.”

  The following day Alex asked Diane to take a walk with him and she said, “Sure.” “I told her, ‘I noticed you last night,’ and she said, ‘I know you did.’ ‘I loved the way you moved,’ I said, and she said, ‘I know you did—it was all very much for you.’ She was completely aware. It was her nature. She had that instantaneous intuition coupled with a cherishing slowness of response. She always knew what was up, but she took her time about reacting.”

  Diane and Alex went off on many walks alone that summer. “Walking with her took on special significance because she would stop and notice everything along the way. All artists collect images and Diane was no exception. She noticed everything—the changing colors of the sky, the way the clouds formed on the horizon, the peeling paint on a barn, the textures, wrinkles, feel of the peeling paint… Once, I remember, we were sitting in a meadow and a fly alighted on her arm and she watched it move across the hairs…with the utmost concentration.” Years later when Alex was studying Zen in Kyoto, he was in the temple meditating “and there were flies in the temple and they buzzed around me and one burrowed into my cheek as I knelt there. I remained very still on my knees, remembering Diane’s large, dreaming eyes on that fly, her almost trancelike concentration.”

  When he met her, Alex was attempting to be a painter. He showed Diane his painting of the burning of Boston. She showed him her portrait of Allan/Gabriel. “The minute I saw it, I knew she was going to be a great artist. The painting of Allan [which Alex now has in his home in Northampton] was an extraordinary work for someone so young.” (In the painting Allan is stripped to the waist, arms clenched. He resembles a soul locked in despair. His head is bald, although in person he has a headful of thick, curly hair. His eyes are sad and bulging, the color of his skin is pale—almost dead-looking. There is an eerie, ghostly quality about the painting—a primitive quality.)

  “The emotion, the colors, the textures—the proportion—it was all there. I thought it was museum quality,” Alex goes on. “I got very excited about it and told Diane how I felt, but the fact that she was talented couldn’t have mattered less to her. She was bewildered by people who made much of her talent. It was simply a part of her like her fingernails and so what?

  “It’s something that’s commonly understood now, what we’ve learned from the East is that product is not the point. That it isn’t a question of doing art, it’s a question of making art of what you do… This attitude didn’t hold in the 1930s. It was a severe and hungry time for artists, musicians, poets—you were supposed to produce, do something that would startle and amaze the world… Diane was far ahead of her time…she’d already in her heart made the leap—that it was not the end result that mattered, it was the doing, and if the doing was too easy—as in painting—she�
�d try something else, something more difficult…”

  That summer Diane and Alex cut most of their art classes and spent hours wandering together through the hills. They had a favorite place—the town graveyard of Cummington, which, oddly enough, was in the center of the school grounds and high on a hill. “It was a tiny, eerie place full of strange vibes,” the poet Louise Bernikow recalls. “Very spiritual but ominous, too—one could imagine having an out-of-body experience in this graveyard; one could imagine miracles happening, snakes appearing; one could imagine men turning into bears, vampires, or mountain gnomes.” Diane and Alex went often to that graveyard, usually lingering until dusk—sometimes they would try to decipher the ancient tombstones, sometimes they would just talk.

  “It was a sweaty Sunday afternoon,” Alex writes. “Diane and I were giving each other back rubs in the long grass behind the cemetery. I first sensed with my fingertips the snake of light, the delicious serpent hidden within her spinal cord.” Several times that summer she laughed and cried in Alex’s arms. Nobody understood her except Allan Arbus, she confided. Her mother phoned her every day, wanting to know her every thought, her every move. She said her mother wanted her to have an operation. “Diane had a funny breastbone. It stuck out and was very obvious whenever she wore a bathing suit or a dress with a round neck. Mrs. Nemerov wanted her to have corrective surgery to repair it—she found it ugly, disfiguring. I told Diane, ‘Don’t do it! That breastbone is your antenna!’ ”

  To the other students at Cummington “Diane was wondrously strange,” Alex says. “She was beloved by everyone.” This was proven when she lost the inscribed silver slave bracelet Allan had given her. “We had gone to the meadow one afternoon and Diane had taken it off and left it behind in the tall grass,” Alex says. “When she realized she’d lost it, she was beside herself. The entire student body searched the meadow until the bracelet was found. There was great rejoicing,” Alex says, “and then Diane and I were summoned to the principal’s office—we’d cut so many classes we were sure we were going to be expelled. But instead Miss Frazier said that although most of the teachers thought we should be kicked out, she had decided to let us stay. She then added something like ‘There is more than one way to learn about life and art.’ She even told us to keep on cutting classes if we wanted to.”