Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  Paul Radkai was a top fashion photographer, but his wife, Karen, was just beginning, and she often annoyed the models by insisting they pose free for her after they’d done a sitting for her husband. “She was building up her portfolio for Vogue and she wanted to use top professionals,” Dorian Leigh says.

  While Diane and Allan knew the Radkais and Lillian Bassman (who saw their portfolio when she was art director of Junior Bazaar), they did not spend time with them or with any photographers, for that matter.

  “We weren’t a very friendly bunch,” reports Francesco Scavullo, who had just begun to photograph for the fashion magazines in 1947. He recalls, “Diane had the most terrible teeth—funny-looking little brown teeth—odd for someone so young and otherwise attractive. She and Allan always kept to themselves.” Scavullo adds, “Fashion photographers have always been unfriendly to each other because we’re all basically after the same job.”

  He recalls that the only photographer in the forties who gave parties for other photographers was the highly original George Piatt Lynes. Celebrated for his portraits of Gertrude Stein and Somerset Maugham (gazing longingly at a male nude), Lynes also did surrealistic, almost hallucinatory fashion shots, experimenting with bizarre poses, offbeat props, shadowy lighting. Lynes destroyed most of his fashion work before his death in 1955 because he secretly despised fashion. He believed that those in it were interested only in the immediate effect of creating something that would reflect the present—the now.

  Diane and Allan felt that way about fashion, too, but they didn’t voice their dissatisfaction. Instead, along with the Russeks account, they began shooting a series of one-column ads for Bonwit Teller. (Robert Frank and Louis Faurer were shooting Bonwit ads then, too.) Barbara Lamb, who was assistant ad director for Bonwit, recalls: “Diane always wore beige on beige and spoke in a whisper. Allan was so considerate—he’d run out and get me a container of chocolate-chip ice cream in the mornings. For some reason, chocolate-chip ice cream cured my hangovers.”

  According to Betty Dorso, a model turned boutique owner, “Everybody in fashion drank.” After a shooting, the models and photographers would go into P. J. Clarke’s and down lethal martinis and there’d be a lot of dashing to the bathroom while cigarettes smoked in the ashtrays, and then around midnight everyone would go on to jam sessions where musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Lester Young were playing. And on Friday nights there would be wild car rides out to the Hamptons. “It took hours—no freeways then,” Dorso says, “so along the way we’d stop at some roadside bar and get plastered. It was a miracle we never got into any accidents—we were always drunk, always laughing. Postwar New York was golden and exciting and affluent…”

  The Arbuses did not join in the merrymaking at P.J.’s or the Hamptons. They didn’t drink or smoke—they were considered by everyone who knew them a shy young couple who seemed almost symbiotically close. In fact, strangers frequently mistook them for brother and sister, since they did bear a striking physical resemblance—they were roughly the same height and had thick, wavy hair and identical watchful expressions. For a while a rumor persisted in the fashion business that Diane and Allan Arbus were blood relations—first cousins who’d fallen passionately in love and married in spite of family opposition. That story got started because Russeks president Max Weinstein’s wife’s maiden name was Bertha Arbus (her brother was Allan’s father). It was also incorrectly assumed that Weinstein was a member of the Russeks clan because he headed the store and was therefore Diane and Allan’s grandfather. In truth, he was Allan’s, not Diane’s, uncle, but no blood relative at all. Another incorrect assumption was that Diane was so rich she and Allan didn’t have to work. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She and Allan never received any financial help from her father, and throughout their marriage—particularly in the early years—they were always worried about money.

  Neither the Russeks nor the Bonwit account was very lucrative (Bonwit paid only $50 a column), so Diane and Allan would periodically take turns going from advertising agency to fashion magazine with their portfolio of photographs in the hope of getting more assignments. (Art Kane, then an art director, says, “They reminded me of two little mice scurrying around and acting furtive.”) Afterward Diane might describe her adventures on Madison Avenue to one of their new friends, a lanky young photographer named Bob Meservey from New Hampshire. He was earning $21 a week as Ferdinand Fonssagrives’ assistant. Meservey says that, despite her shyness, Diane was starting to be quite an anecdotist. “Actually, Allan would act out the stories and Diane would narrate them,” he says. “She sounded like the explorer Stanley describing his adventures in Africa. Diane could make a documentary out of going to the corner deli for a quart of milk.”

  Finally in January 1947 the Arbuses got an appointment to see twenty-six-year-old Tina Fredericks, the youngest art director ever at Condé Nast. (Tina was to become one of Diane’s closest friends.) “Diane and Allan came into my office at Glamour and there was hardly any fashion in their portfolio,” she says. The only photograph she can remember was “of a cracked ceiling with a lightbulb hanging from it.” Nevertheless, after talking with them, she decided that they both had a sense of style and taste, and she passed on their book to her boss, Alexander Liberman, now a legend in fashion journalism (as Condé Nast’s supreme editorial director, he oversees Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, House and Garden, Self, and the new Vanity Fair).

  As Liberman remembers it, the Arbus portfolio was full of rigid images, moody double exposures, a kind of affected artiness that was characteristic of the late forties, but he felt that a few of the photographs showed “a flair—a talent for observation.” He told Mrs. Fredericks to give them some work.

  Their first assignment for Glamour, published in May of 1947, was entitled “The New Sweater Is a Long Story.” For it they shot sweaters—striped cardigans, chenille pullovers, bouclé turtlenecks—in close-ups of the neck, arm, and so forth. “It was difficult to lay out, but it was effective,” Mrs. Fredericks says.

  Their next assignment was less successful because they photographed a dozen shirtwaist dresses in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, but from such a distance that the models looked like stick figures and you couldn’t see the clothes. Fredericks had them reshoot it and it was better.

  From then on Diane and Allan worked steadily for Glamour magazine, and the cramped Condé Nast offices in the Graybar Building on Lexington Avenue became like a second home. Before they got their own place, they would shoot assignments in the Vogue studios—pages and pages of accessories: scarves, dark glasses, purses, gloves. They photographed ruffled lingerie and extraordinary sequined hats. Once they photographed rainbow-bright bathing suits against a backdrop of painted clouds. Afterward they might drop by the art department to show off their contact prints. “They were so well liked, those two,” says Miki Denhoff, another art director there. “They were so in love, so interdependent.”

  Eventually they shot covers for Glamour and beauty features on location in the Caribbean and the Hamptons. They became adept at arranging groups of models—models on bleachers, models draped around phone booths. They liked everybody “in action”—models in bouffant Jonathan Logan dresses playing Ping-Pong or powdering their noses in the spacious, mirrored ladies’ lounge of the Plaza Hotel.

  The Condé Nast booking department complained about how expensive the Arbus sittings were because Diane and Allan worked so slowly and carefully that the sessions took hours, sometimes days, and the model fees ran way up. “But the results were worth it,” Tina Fredericks says, “even though we fought a lot. We would disagree over the concept of a layout and then would behave as if they were doing me a favor if they ended up shooting it my way.” But she enjoyed working with them “because they were so creative and such perfectionists—slaving over the smallest detail to get it right.”

  At home their collaboration was just as intense—it was almost a way of surviving. They were like twins, sharing secrets, forbidde
n pleasures, little indulgences. And they did everything together—even cooked meals together. Rick Fredericks, Tina’s husband, who was a reporter on the New York Times, thought they were “like kids acting out a storybook marriage. The whole thing didn’t seem quite for real. They would hold hands constantly and then Diane would bat her eyes—at Allan and then at me. She was a great one for batting her eyes at men and she could be very seductive—whispering to you almost conspiratorially in her little-girl voice. I found her quite manipulative.” There were other occasions when she refused to speak at all. When Allan was out of the room and Rick would try to talk with her, she would stare him down, leaving him feeling exceedingly uncomfortable.

  Their central fact was the marriage itself. “It seemed—in 1947-48—unshakable,” Betty Dorso says. Diane and Allan complemented each other, backed each other up. Diane would tell people what a great fashion photographer Allan was turning into, and Allan would talk about Diane’s mystical way of seeing. He was always encouraging her to take photographs on her own—long before anyone else. Diane gave him credit for that. “He was my first teacher,” she would say.

  He cared for her, watched over her, seemed to dominate and almost guard her. “Sometimes he seemed more at ease when he was away from her,” Rick Fredericks says, “although it was obvious he doted on her.” For a long time their collaboration was on one level a matter of survival.

  As with many couples, it seemed a marriage of opposites: each needed what the other had. Diane was a shadowy creature—slow-moving, receptive, given to protracted fits of daydreaming. Allan, on the contrary, was brisk, rational, organized, anxious. The life they envisioned for themselves would ideally be full of exotic new experiences which they would somehow collaborate to bring into being. Already they had created a visually pleasing setting in their little home; the West 70th Street railroad flat was immaculate and painted all white—walls, floors, furniture. “Your eyes opened up when you entered the Arbus apartment,” May Eliot says. And Diane’s artistic clutter stood out—the Henry James novel she might be reading; the wrinkled brown paper bags she insisted on using instead of purses because she loved the color, shape, and texture of paper bags. You could stuff so much into a paper bag—copper pennies found on the sidewalk, shells from the beach, an old green bottle, weirdly formed rocks. So many objects to finger and stroke and dream over…

  But sometimes it must have been exasperating, not her clutter but her lethargy, her inexplicable melancholia. When they weren’t photographing, she might withdraw into a depression and sit dazedly in the apartment for hours. Her black moods came and went, but she fought them, rarely giving in to despair in front of her daughter, Doon, or her goddaughter, May. In fact, she usually hid her depressions from most people; only with Allan would she let down her guard, and then after a while he would gently tell her to take their portfolio up to Condé Nast or that it was time to buy groceries—anything to focus her concentration elsewhere. “Allan would get very upset by Diane’s depressions,” her sister, Renée, says. “He was pulled down by them and he didn’t want to be.”

  To raise his spirits, when he relaxed with their friends he would often do imitations of David Nemerov walking ducklike around Russeks, or he’d tell stories about his war experiences in China and Burma in his deep, mellifluous voice and describe the strange types he’d met, from English officers to spies, and then he’d create entirely new characters. “He could be very, very funny,” Rick Fredericks says.

  But he had his dark moods, too, which caused him to go off and play the clarinet compulsively—for hours; and then the music he made, whether it was classical or jazz, sounded like an appeal. He yearned to act—to be in the movies; he talked about this to everybody. As time went on, he felt increasingly frustrated because he was certain he’d never fulfill his dreams.

  As for Diane, dreaming remained her best defense against awareness. Part of her existence was spent rearranging her expectations—adjusting what she saw to what she hoped to see and feel. Her inner reality was her most valuable possession—it constantly challenged the assumptions of the world outside. On her own she led an exceptionally rich life of the mind. She read widely—Jung, Willa Cather, Kafka, Emily Dickinson. She saw movies, theater, attended concerts, went to galleries—asked a thousand questions, few of them ordinary. But mostly, Alex Eliot says, “she spent her time digging people—digging her friends. She really looked and responded deeply to everybody and everything around her.” Alex’s daughter, May, adds, “I have never met anyone who relished life the way Diane did.” Often she would wander through museums and not look at the art; instead, she would scrutinize the spectators. Or if she did look at a painting or a photograph, she would sometimes think (as she said later), “That’s not the way it is…this is fantastic, but there’s something wrong. I guess it’s my own sense of what a fact is. Something will come up in me very strongly of No, a terrific No. It’s a totally private feeling I get of how different it really is.”

  But in those days she had little confidence in herself and she would rarely voice her own thoughts; instead, she might parrot Allan’s opinions and he would order her to “Speak up, girl!”

  Still, to her goddaughter, May Eliot, “Diane was like a new breath.” Her parents’ fights were “growing oppressive, so whenever Diane and Allan came over for dinner, I was joyful.” She might share a meal with the four adults and then, before she fell asleep, “Diane would sit on my bed and talk in a husky whisper as she carefully and gently ran her forefinger along each eyebrow, from the center of my forehead out, and then down my nose and along my lips, from one end to the other. Then she would quietly leave the room. I can still remember the feeling of her hand some thirty years later.”

  The Eliots and the Arbuses were inseparable. They saw each other constantly, spending most weekends together, occasionally having dinner in Greenwich Village with Robert Lowell and Jean Stafford. Or they might drive up to Garrison, and picnic at Dick’s Folly, a strange shell of a medieval castle which Anne Eliot’s grandfather had started building for his wife in the 1920s but left unfinished. The crumbling edifice hung over a bluff overlooking the Hudson River and the Palisades. “We spent many lovely afternoons there,” Alex recalls, “advising each other, teasing each other, criticizing life and art.” They were positive that they said things in a way they had never been said before. And their marriages seemed tied together—bound up in their friendship, which they kept likening to a table with four legs. “And if one leg is removed, the friendship is destroyed.” May Eliot remembers tiptoeing into the Arbus living room in the evenings and “there was this large double bed—a mattress, actually—on the floor, and my parents and Diane and Allan would be sprawled on it, talking happily and peacefully.”

  To Alex their “four-way friendship was extremely complex, rough-edged, but on the whole profoundly satisfying…in spite of the subsequent pain.” And for a while the friendship must have had the radiant quality he attributed to it—he almost singlehandedly held them together with his booming energy and charm; he served as a catalyst, drawing them out—applauding Diane’s ideas, Allan’s need “to know everything about everything.” He saw only the best in them and only the best in his wife, “the golden Anne,” although she was increasingly driven and angry over her frustrated writing ambitions. She would drink and fall into despair and he could do little to comfort her. Often she would take their daughter, May, and escape to her grandmother’s farm in Massachusetts until the depression passed. But her pain was such she had little interest in Alex’s career. In 1947, when he replaced Walker Evans as art editor of Time, it was Diane rather than Anne whom he first showed around the office, introducing her to his new friends James Agee and Bob Lax. And Allan would drive him out of town on some of his first assignments. Gradually Anne began complaining to Diane that she felt neglected; that Alex was getting so caught up in his job—interviewing the likes of Salvador Dali—that he wasn’t paying enough attention to her. She felt “left out” and she wasn�
��t at ease with most of the journalists he knew. So she clung to the Arbuses and depended on them, and they kept her entertained and occupied and were always very gentle with her. And Alex was so grateful he told everybody about the wonderful friendship they shared—he couldn’t get over it. He would usually add that he and Diane were like “brother and sister”; when they were together in a room, they would always go off by themselves and have an intense conversation. Every so often she would absentmindedly stroke his wrist.

  In all the years they’d known each other, they’d never totally consummated their fierce attraction—even while Allan was away in the Army during 1944 and Diane posed nude for Alex as he completed a great many sketches and paintings because “God, she was beautiful! Beautiful breasts, shoulders so beautifully shaped…but we were too inhibited. And besides, we were both married to people we cared about.”

  Over the Christmas holidays in 1947 the Eliots and the Arbuses traveled through the snowy New England countryside, stopping at an inn somewhere in Massachusetts. Before they retired for the night, Diane, clad in long red underwear, performed a little dance for her husband and friends. “Which part of my body do you like best?” she demanded. “Allan likes my legs best.”

  “I was still madly in love with her,” Alex says.

  10

  AROUND 1947, CHEECH MCKENSIE* met Diane. “I was a John Robert Powers model, but not a very good one. I was walking down West 70th Street one day on a photographer’s go-see, and there on the other side of the street was this young woman with the most extraordinary presence about her—she seemed haunted. She had wild, startling eyes and she was carrying a paper bag instead of a purse and she filled the space around herself with an almost palpable mood. Anyhow, we both stopped and looked long and hard at each other and then we walked on. And I thought, ‘I’ve got to meet her!’ And then I came to this beat-up brownstone—I climbed the stairs and rang the bell and a man answered. He was wearing a freshly pressed, very white shirt and slacks—turned out to be Allan Arbus, the photographer. I gave him my portfolio…he barely looked at it, he said, ‘You have a funny expression on your face.’ And I started telling him about this extraordinary woman I’d passed on the street—didn’t know who she was, but she had this look—and then suddenly the door opens and Diane appears and I think excitedly, ‘That’s her!’ and Allan says rather irritatedly, ‘I thought you were going out,’ and Diane stares at me and says, ‘I just decided to come back.’ We became friends instantly. It was as if we had always known one another. We saw each other almost every day for the next eleven years. Our friendship was metaphysical, rapturous. We were all things to each other. We were mothers to each other, we were daughters—sometimes we were little girls giggling in the attic, other times we were wise old women talking about our men, our kids. ‘You’re my best friend,’ she’d say solemnly. We addressed each other as ‘Grace.’ ‘How you doin’, Grace?’ we’d say, and then we’d laugh uncontrollably. Diane drew the story of my life out of me and we exchanged secrets, ideas, memories. She was never judgmental about me or anybody or anything.”