Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  In an essay she wrote on Medea she alluded to her conflict, describing “the deep selfish slowness of woman who closes her eyes to everything,” including the restlessness of woman whose dreams then become a defense against awareness. “Such women were like sleepwalkers.” She questioned female passivity even as she exhorted herself to be passive. “A woman wants to be one thing,” she wrote, and then she is told to be another. If she doesn’t fulfill her destiny, should she hate herself? “I don’t think so.”

  Abruptly she phoned Alex Eliot in Boston and told him she would marry Allan the moment she turned eighteen. When he asked about her painting, she replied sullenly that she had begun to hate painting—hate the squishy sound of paint on paper, the smell, the mess, the time it took. It had been the greatest pretense in the world, she said, to visualize herself as a “great sad artist” when she wasn’t an artist at all. She sounded as if she was trying very hard to convince herself that she didn’t enjoy the act of creating. “Diane was simply scared stiff of her talent,” Phyllis Carton says. “It terrified her because it set her so apart.”

  During the spring of 1940 she began slowly withdrawing from her friends, and she refused to help with the art work on the Fieldglass, the school yearbook, having denounced all her paintings to D’Amico as “no good.” Nor would she pose for a group class portrait, although the photographer did take a picture of her alone which documents her wistful, faraway quality. Under the picture is the prediction: “Diane Nemerov—to shake the tree of life and bring down fruits unheard of.”

  Now when anyone asked her plans she would say she had no intention of pursuing a career or of attending college; all she wanted to become was Mrs. Allan Arbus. As proof, she never took off the silver slave bracelet he’d given her as proof of his love. Nevertheless her depressions grew more pronounced, and everyone in her class noticed. “She dragged herself around in a daze,” Elbert Lenrow says.

  When Howard came to visit Lenrow at Fieldston during Easter vacation, the teacher commented on Diane’s dark moods. “She seems very troubled,” he told her brother. “Don’t you think you should do something?” Howard didn’t answer. He himself was so often depressed that he thought he should go into analysis. The only thing that saved him, he said, apart from his excitement at being at Harvard, was his writing. He’d had his first short story (about a friend’s suicide) published in the Advocate, he’d just got into the exclusive Signet Society, and he was getting to know instructors like Delmore Schwartz and writers like Wallace Stevens and fellow classmates like Norman Mailer. He told Lenrow that he’d decided he was going to be an artist, no matter what his father’s plans were for him to take over Russeks. He hoped to be a very great artist someday, he declared; he would write plays and novels and epic poems, and he would write essays, too, and criticism, and he would contribute to The New Yorker and all the scholarly journals.

  Of Diane’s mood he remembers that at home they would sit around the living room and she would tease him about his tendency to intellectualize everything. “She told me she was very glad she wasn’t going to college, because she didn’t want to be like me.”

  In May the senior class spent a weekend at Ethical Culture’s Hudson Guild farm in Netcong, New Jersey. Diane didn’t join in the walks through the woods or the Ping-Pong games. A teacher, Spencer Brown, remembers seeing her sitting by herself on the porch staring into space “while the kids screamed and played around her. Some of her friends would go over and try to talk to her. Most of them addressed her as ‘Miss Diane.’ She was very beloved.” Another teacher said, “I thought she was peculiar. Peculiar but nice.”

  In the weeks just before graduation Diane stayed late on the Fieldston campus, wandering the grounds. It was as if she didn’t want to go home.

  One afternoon—it was after five—Elbert Lenrow came upon her in his office gazing up at some prints of African masks he’d tacked up on his bulletin board. The masks were tragic images—huge, hulking, almost grotesque—and Diane seemed drawn to them. She looked at each one close-up for five to ten minutes—just staring very hard, as if memorizing them. Then she reached up and stroked them. “I’ve never seen such an intense physical response to anything,” Lenrow says. “Those masks obviously had a powerful emotional effect on her.”

  Diane did not seem to notice that Lenrow was in the office. Neither one of them spoke, and finally she wandered off into the dusk. After Diane graduated from Fieldston, the Nemerovs sent her with her cousin Dorothy to a farm in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, for the summer. They were driven there by Paris in the limousine. Along the way they listened to news of the London blitz on the radio. “We were supposedly going to get lots of fresh air and sunshine and learn about farm animals,” Dorothy said, “but the real reason was to keep Allan and Diane apart.” It didn’t do any good. As soon as Diane arrived at the farm, she telephoned Allan, and a few days later he came down by bus to visit her.

  The Nemerovs spent the following months trying to convince Diane to change her mind about marrying Allan, but Diane was adamant. Nothing could sway her. Exhausted from talking, the Nemerovs agreed to the marriage, and the engagement was announced in the New York Times on March 3,1941 : “A. F. ARBUS TO WED MISS DIANE NEMEROV. Mr. and Mrs. David Nemerov of 888 Park Avenue have announced the engagement of their daughter Miss Diane Nemerov to Allan Frank Arbus, son of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Arbus of 1225 Park Avenue… Mr. Arbus attended the College of the City of New York and is now in the advertising business.”

  The Nemerovs threw an elaborate cocktail party, “everything in aspic,” to celebrate the engagement. Designers like Mollie Parnis and Hannah Troy came and I. Miller and Andrew Goodman. Everybody stood around the elaborate, gloomy apartment while Diane and Allan whispered to each other in a corner.

  Afterward Diane wrote to Alex Eliot describing the party in detail. She had been corresponding with him regularly since his marriage, and over the past year their romantic attachment to one another had intensified, partially because Alex absolutely doted on Diane—idolized her, championed her in his boisterous, emphatic way. Everything she said and did delighted him. And there was a strong sexual attraction between them, too, that had never been consummated. This both excited and worried Diane. She kept asking Alex, “Is it evil that I want both you and Allan?” He would assure her that it wasn’t evil. He was positive that the four of them would remain dear and trusting friends—possibly better friends after she and Allan got married. Certainly nobody would ever get hurt. “At the time, I thought Diane and I were like brother and sister. She confided in me as a sister confides in a brother… I kept telling myself our relationship was harmless.”

  On April 10, 1941, less than a month after her eighteenth birthday, Diane Nemerov and Allan Arbus were married in a rabbi’s chambers; Diane wore a pale blue suit. Only the immediate families were present: Gertrude and David Nemerov, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Arbus, Allan’s sister Edith, grandparents on both sides. Alex Eliot couldn’t be present—his wife didn’t feel well enough to travel.

  As a wedding present Gertrude Nemerov guaranteed Diane a five years’ supply of clothes from Russeks and the services of a lady’s maid for a year.

  Since they had no money for a real honeymoon, they took the train to Boston and spent their wedding night at the Eliots’ apartment on Pinckney Street. “First we walked around the Commons Garden and I showed them all around Beacon Hill.” Alex adds that he kissed Diane chastely on the cheek just before she and Allan retired for bed. The next morning Diane told Alex that Allan had joked, “Now, why do you suppose he didn’t kiss me?”

  The day after the wedding Diane wrote to her best friend, Phyllis Carton, assuring her, “Everything is going to be all right.”

  8

  SHORTLY BEFORE PEARL HARBOR, Alex came to the conclusion that he couldn’t make a living as a painter in Boston, so he got a job assisting Louis de Rochemont on The March of Time and he and Anne moved to New York and rented an apartment across the hall from Diane and Allan’s on West
38th Street. “The building was next to the Lincoln Tunnel, so it was very noisy,” Alex says.

  The two couples saw each other every night and often spent entire weekends together. Alex’s exuberance, his optimism, his insistence on seeing only the good and positive in life seemed to enhance the quality of their friendship, so that for a while it was infinitely pleasurable for everybody.

  Sometimes Allan would entertain the others by playing his clarinet. “He sounded exactly like Benny Goodman.” Sometimes he would do imitations of Maurice Evans. They all laughed a lot. They were determinedly cheerful. Alex called Anne and Diane “Sun and Moon” because when blonde Anne was happy, her face positively shone, whereas the dark Diane seemed to have a mysterious silvery sheen to her cheeks.

  Together they discussed art and literature and sex—“but not much,” Alex says. “We were inhibited talking about sex.” And they discussed their own feelings, their own emotions in regard to one another. Rather, Allan and Anne and Alex did—Diane did not. “Nobody ever knew what Diane felt about anything,” Liberty Dick, Anne’s sister, says.

  In time Alex decided they should become an extended family, and he likened them to the four legs of a table. “If one leg collapses, the entire table collapses.” They would share everything, he declared—food and money—and nothing would ever be hidden between them and there would be no betrayals, no deceptions.

  To make sure of this, Alex announced that he was still in love with Diane. He would repeat this over and over, adding, in the same breath, that he was in love with his wife, too, of course. And they seemed to accept this as a fact of their life together and Allan didn’t seem to mind—he was used to men falling in love with Diane; it flattered rather than irritated him. As for Anne, she suffered from it a little because, much as she enjoyed his company, she wasn’t the least bit in love with Allan. “I frankly don’t know what Anne ever got out of that four-way friendship except a lot of pain,” Marian Wernick, a former Time magazine researcher, says.

  Diane, meanwhile, floated above the situation—detached, remote, never commenting or making judgments. She concentrated on being Mrs. Allan Arbus and she seemed totally committed to the man, to his desires, his dreams. She had been taught to believe that there is no greater destiny for woman than to glory in her femininity, and she was obsessed with doing just that.

  Phyllis Carton recalls watching her “make the marriage bed”—caressing the mattress, tucking in the sheets, pulling the blankets very tight. “It was an act of supreme devotion and I was much moved by it,” Phyllis says.

  Diane was trying hard to play the 1940s housewife to perfection, taking out the laundry and shopping at the grocery store—these were duties she’d never had to perform at home, where servants took care of everything. Liberty Dick, who was then living in Greenwich Village with her husband, remembers how “Diane would follow me around our apartment trying to ‘learn homemaking,’ as she called it. She didn’t know the first thing about planning a meal, let alone cooking it. Whenever she’d visit me, she’d ask endless questions about this and that—she was actually quite a pest.”

  Diane had become a practicing vegetarian; she had little interest in haute cuisine. However, she worked very hard in the kitchen, and eventually cooked well. But she didn’t try out her culinary skills on her parents right away since they rarely visited the Arbus apartment on West 38th street. They were aware that “the kids” were struggling financially (Allan had two jobs—at Russeks and somewhere else as a salesman; he was also trying his hand at fashion photography with Diane acting as his assistant). But the Nemerovs didn’t give them any money.

  “We [Howard and I] never benefited from our parents’ wealth,” Diane said. “There was no sense that you could ever do something glorious with the money.” It was used for the Nemerovs’ lavish life style, “which we inherited as long as we lived with them, but it was temporary.” There was no money or promise of money when Howard and Diane tried to be independent and lead their own lives.

  Russeks was going through a boom period. “It was the era of the fur-trimmed coat and suit and we did a landslide business,” Ben Lichtenstein says. “Something like two million dollars’ worth of sales in 1941.”

  But there were problems. When World War II broke out in Europe, Norway disposed of its fox furs on the American market; many furriers were caught with huge supplies, and millions were lost. Furriers, Russeks included, hated talking about the fox collapse and turned vague when pressed for details as to how many fox pelts were being kept on ice in warehouses, where uncured skins could be stored indefinitely.

  Just before Pearl Harbor, Howard enlisted in the United States Air Force, but he flunked out. Undaunted, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Charles Lindbergh had been a boyhood hero, and he’d always had a romantic urge to be a pilot. Somehow it was a fierce gesture of independence against his father, a way of testing himself.

  In training in Ontario, Canada, he would vomit every time he took a plane up. He wrote long letters to John Pauker “…wishing the war would be over soon I am in another damn depression…am reading an early work of one V. Nabokov Laughter in the Dark…good…went to a dance last night and saw two sargeants dancing with each other. Seems like dear Berlin…flying solo…landed plane badly but anyway I was alone for the first time in nine months so that was a relief…got the highest marks in meteorology class 50 points out of 50 still the good boy of Fieldston ain’t I?…” and finally this telegram to Pauker: “ROLL OUT THE BOTTLE I AM COMING HOME SUPPER SATURDAY WITH OBSERVER RATING SECOND HIGHEST IN CLASS MUST DRINK MORE…”

  He went on to win his wings and serve fifty missions with the RAF; later, with the United States Eighth Army air force, he flew fifty-seven bombing missions over the North Sea. “I was finally on my own,” he says. “I was still frightened, but I was frightened in a different way.”

  Allan joined the Signal Corps in September of 1943. He stayed briefly at the induction center of Fort Dix, New Jersey, before being shipped out to Camp Crowder, Neosho, Missouri, for basic training. According to Hope Eisenman, whose husband, Alvin, was there, too, “Allan was miserable.” By November Allan was shipped back to New Jersey, to the photography school near Fort Monmouth. Diane moved to Red Bank and lived in one room. She set up a darkroom in the bathroom and every night Allan would come back from photography school and teach her what he’d learned. Often in the afternoons she would baby-sit for Hope Eisenman (Alvin was stationed at the Publications Center, working on army manuals). “Diane loved our baby daughter, Suzy. She would push her around the camp in a doll’s carriage. It’s all we could afford.”

  Hope says Diane was snapping pictures all the time. “She carried her cameras in a black sack. I would ask her, ‘What did you photograph today?’ She once told me she’d been trying to photograph the bare lightbulb hanging from their ceiling.” When a dead whale was washed up on the Jersey shore, Diane took a bus to the beach and spent hours photographing the whale from every angle. She returned to Red Bank that evening with rolls of film and a piece of the whale’s carcass for Allan.

  Every so often the Eisenmans and the Arbuses would have supper together. “But they almost resented being around other people—you got the sense they preferred being by themselves, they were so close! And Diane never stopped talking about Allan when she was away from him.”

  In May 1944 Allan was transferred from Fort Monmouth to Astoria, Queens, for more photographic training. Diane told Hope she was excited because they would be moving to her “favorite spot in New York—Lexington and 54th Street.” They rented an apartment there and spent their evenings printing and framing their best pictures. Diane eventually sent Hope a portrait she’d taken of her in which, Hope says, “I look quite cross.” Diane had written on the back of the print: “not complicated enough.”

  In late 1944 Allan was shipped off to Burma with a photographers’ unit. Diane discovered she was pregnant not long after he left. She subsequently took a nude self-portrait which she show
ed to Alex before sending it to Allan. And she took another self-portrait a little later—clothed—in the mirror of her parents’ bathroom. This haunting image (which Alex still has) reflects the dreamy, faraway quality she would later capture in almost all of her subjects’ expressions.

  With Allan away at war, the Nemerovs were insisting that Diane move into their new apartment at 888 Park. A nice, freshly decorated room awaited her; everything would be taken care of—meals, maids, her bills. And she could talk on the phone as much as she wanted. “Diane had telephonitis,” a friend said. So she returned, a bit sullen, and within a few days she and her mother were arguing. She told Naomi Rosenbloom, “Mommy keeps telling me to wear my galoshes in the rain and I don’t want to anymore.”

  For Renée, Diane’s return home was a godsend. At Fieldston, where she was now a sophomore, she was constantly being compared to Diane scholastically. Known as “Diane Nemerov’s ‘little sister,’ I was miserable. Mommy and Daddy kept saying I was the normal one—they seemed to be pinning their hopes on me; that, unlike Diane and Howard, I would turn into a conventional person. I wanted to please them because I wanted them to love me, but I wanted to please Diane, too. I felt under huge pressures.”

  It was Diane who supported her when Renée decided to switch to the Dalton School in her junior year “so I could find my own identity.” At Dalton nobody asked her about being Diane Nemerov’s sister, and at Dalton she was the first student to graduate with a “distinction in sculpture.” She went on to study with Rufino Tamayo and the Swiss impressionist Hansegger.

  Renée was fascinated by the changes in Diane since her marriage to Allan. “She seemed more sure of herself. She still looked like a little girl, but she walked like a woman—I remember how her hips undulated under her skirts. She was sexually very aware. I was still innocent, so I was jealous of her sophistication. We talked a lot about life.”