Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  Once in a while she would do portraits for Glamour’s editorial page “if we really pressed her,” Tina Fredericks says; “she was so shy.” Frances Gill remembers attending a college-issue promotion luncheon and “Diane was darting around the tables taking pictures of the students and her finger was going ‘click! click! click!’ on the shutter of her camera—’click! click! click!’ ”

  She did things like this in her spare time; usually she was too busy assisting Allan. But she liked “hanging around” the Condé Nast offices because by now she knew most of the editors there, as well as everybody else from secretaries to art directors.

  “It was a protective, sheltered world at Condé Nast,” Kate Lloyd recalls. Lloyd was features editor of Glamour then and she says, “We were insulated the way most monthly magazines were—a world within a world; everything ahead of time—Christmas-in-July kind of thing—and the perks that went with the media: free theater tickets, free bottles of scotch. None of us was aware of issues—controversial stuff like the electrocution of the Rosenbergs or the Alger Hiss trial were ignored. Most everything we dealt with was fluff.”

  At the office the women—whether they were art directors or fashion editors—called themselves “girls,” and they were patronized by the men, and everybody did a lot of flirting. “That was the way to get the job done. When in doubt, we acted giggly instead of authoritative,” Kate continues. “Most of us dressed in our mothers’ cast-off Hattie Carnegie suits, and we always wore white gloves, and Diane fitted perfectly into the white-glove syndrome. I was astonished when she surfaced with all those freak pictures. She was as bland and colorless as we all were back then.”

  Still, there were undercurrents, because Diane and Kate and Tina Fredericks were all working wives in the era of the “housewife heroine.” So they felt constantly torn. “It was the subtext of our lives,” Tina says. “At the office we’d be making decisions, taking creative responsibility for things. At home we were susceptible and passive and dependent on our men. It was confusing.”

  But they never talked about this to each other. Life was more private then, less examined. Isolated by their loyalties to their marriages, these women never confided that they were secretly a little embarrassed about having careers; secretly scared that they might lose their femininity. “So we worked doubly hard at home to compensate,” Kate Lloyd says.

  It didn’t help that their independent, adventuresome movie heroines—Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn—were fast disappearing from the screen to be replaced by the kittenish Doris Day. It didn’t help that magazines such as McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal were publishing articles and short stories showing women in the act of renouncing their careers because they’d discovered that all they really wanted to be was “Mrs. So-and-So.” It was such a disquieting theory that in 1951 Tina Fredericks devised an article featuring working wives in Glamour entitled “I Love You Because… eight happy couples define the special quality that makes this one the one.” Tina, Diane, Kate Lloyd, fashion editor Winnie Campbell and their husbands were interviewed. Paradoxically, all the couples—except for Kate—got divorced within the next decade.

  When she photographed them, Frances Gill remembers, Diane and Allan seemed self-contained and quite happy. “I captured them at a moment when they were very close.” Next to their portrait—an arresting one in which they resemble clones—are the following quotes:

  ALLAN: [I love you because] you have humility and dignity and are above competition.

  DIANE: [I love you because] your actions are more precise and simpler and happier than other people’s.

  And under the quotes this statement: “Diane was thirteen when she and Allan met and she was impressed with his sophistication. ‘He talked over the phone with no hands.’ Allan noticed she was the boss’s daughter… they work together as photographers…. The Arbuses have been married nine years and have a seven-year-old daughter Doon.”

  Diane was determined that Doon would receive all the encouragement and nurturing she had never had as a child. She treated Doon like a sister, an equal; there were few rules in the Arbus household, and Doon was allowed to run free.

  When she was small, Diane took her almost every afternoon to Central Park, where they often would play games. Doon later wrote: “She would say to me, ‘I dare you to crawl between the legs of that man sitting on the bench, stand up and ask him where Central Park is.’ And I would go off and do it… And then I would challenge her. ‘I dare you to go up to that governess in the white uniform and ask her to lift you onto the swing.’ And we would roar with laughter over what we had made them think of us.”

  For a while Doon decided she hated her name* and insisted on being called Billy. She would correct anyone who addressed her as Doon, and she would ask her mother over and over again, “Was I born a boy, Ma? Was I? Was I?” And Diane would be gentle and very loving with her.

  At times she seemed almost intimidated by Doon’s radiant beauty and funny, energetic turn of mind. She rarely denied her anything; she gave her a tiny chair, desk, and easel for her bedroom. Doon had music and dance lessons. When she demanded a horse, Diane seriously considered it, even approaching her father for the money, but Mr. Nemerov said no. In school Doon was showing a marked writing talent and Diane bragged about that—and Allan was proud of her ability to clown and mimic.

  May Eliot recalls “being scared of Doon, although she was younger than I was.” She remembers Doon saying in a threatening voice, “Stick ’em up!” “And I had no idea what she meant or why she was so angry at me.”

  Allan used Doon as often as possible in their fashion settings—Doon in her Hopalong Cassidy costume can be seen galloping over the pages of Glamour circa 1947-9; and Doon riding with Santa Claus in a horse-and-buggy through Central Park. And then there was the time Diane appeared with Doon in a “Pretty Mothers” feature. Diane in profile, utterly serious, wearing a navy-blue dress, is posed opposite Doon in flowered pajamas perched on a tiny chair. She seems to be nibbling on her mother’s fingers.

  In his off hours Allan took dozens of portraits of Diane and Doon together; mother and daughter possessed almost identical haunted moon-faces. A private subliminal knowledge seemed to flow between them in the photographs; each was the other’s mirror image—the other’s twin.

  Abruptly, in the winter of 1951, Allan decided to leave New York and take Diane and Doon to Europe for a year. To anyone who asked why they were going so suddenly, he would reply that he and Diane were exhausted from the pressures of fashion photography and needed a break.

  Meanwhile Alex Eliot remained ever present in their lives. He would drop by most evenings with Jane Winslow, whom he was planning to marry as soon as his divorce became final. The Arbuses seemed very pleased and the two couples joked and laughed about their futures; they appeared extremely compatible, even though occasionally Diane and Alex would still shut everybody else out while they carried on an intense conversation between themselves. Out of habit Diane had to get Alex’s reaction to her ideas and impressions. She didn’t see anything wrong in that and she never got a sense that anyone was uncomfortable when, say, she told Alex about her urge to photograph a tattooed lady in the Bronx and Alex encouraged her as he always encouraged her and Allan mixed cocktails very efficiently in the background.

  Sometimes when the couples had dinner together, Allan would go over his carefully prepared plans for their trip to Italy, Spain, and France. Suddenly Alex had a “brainstorm.” They should photograph El Greco’s Toledo from that same hill—from the spot where El Greco painted it, stormclouds and all. And they could do it for Time because he could get them the assignment. The idea thrilled Diane—even more so when Alex came up with another possible assignment, also for Time. They should photograph the Matisse chapel in Vence, France, and he would convince his boss to send him and Jane along so they could research the captions. Allan did not seem very enthusiastic. He had planned their European year very carefully and this was not part
of the plan. Diane was devastated.

  Rick and Tina Fredericks knew none of this little drama when they gave the Arbuses a going-away party along with Leslie and Frances Gill, who were taking a vacation in Europe, too. “It was jolly,” Rick Fredericks says. “Lots of fashion editors milling around, like Geri Stutz, and my reporter friends from the Times.”

  Alex and Jane didn’t appear, but nobody noticed because the crowd was too busy drinking and gossiping about the couples’ travel plans. Allan kept repeating their itinerary, adding they’d got a Vogue assignment from Alex Liberman to do in Paris—this would help pay for the trip. Diane stood silently beside him. “She had dark circles under her eyes and I was sure she was very ill,” Bob Meservey says. “She never said a word.” When anyone tried to find out how she was, Allan would answer all questions for her, explaining she was very, very tired. They were still arguing about whether or not to take the Time assignment, since Alex had gone ahead and suggested it to his bosses anyway.

  The morning after the Fredericks’ party, in spite of the unspoken tension between them, Alex saw the Arbuses off on the boat. “They seemed in good spirits,” he says. Other friends who saw them off remember they seemed relieved to be getting away. It was Alex’s birthday, and as he left the cabin Diane slipped him a tiny gift—a box with a string hanging from it. “I think she made it herself,” he says. Clutching it to his breast, he ran down the gangplank and onto the dock so he could wave goodbye as the ship pulled up anchor. He started waving frantically to Diane and she kept gesturing from the railing to hold the box to his ear and pull the string. “Finally I did and a muppet-type voice piped, ‘Happy Birthday, Alex!’ I looked at Diane and I could tell she was giggling.”

  The year abroad was a revelation to Diane because she learned so much about looking. All her impressions were sensory—noises, colors, textures, shapes, expressions, whirled around in her head. In Venice and Florence she took Doon with her while she wandered the streets, longing to explore every crumbling palace with her camera. The time spent in Spain was very rich for her, too, although she and Allan were unable to photograph Toledo—it just didn’t work. Instead they watched an unending series of El Greco faces pass beneath their hotel window in Barcelona.

  In New York, Alex was trying to arrange for the Time assignment in Venice. Allan remained adamant; he would not accept it. Letters flew back and forth between the two couples—lively affectionate letters because they cared for each other in spite of the confusion and pain. And Allan held firm and by the time they reached France in August Diane had come to the conclusion that Allan had been right: they shouldn’t accept the Time assignment and it was better for them to be by themselves for a while. And they stopped arguing and grew close again.

  And then Alex’s letter came saying that Time had turned down his idea for a picture story on Vence and the whole thing seemed pretty anticlimactic. They were relieved and traveled to Vence anyway and tried to photograph the Matisse chapel for themselves. Diane referred to it as looking like “God’s bathroom.”

  She stayed in the chapel for hours, watching the nuns move silently up and down the aisles. Their rosaries clinked. Light filtered through the enormous stained-glass windows and onto the floor. Diane was struck by the difficulties of photographing empty space.

  Years afterward, still fascinated by empty, silent spaces, she remembered her experience in Vence when a friend from Fieldston, Stewart Stern, took her to Tyrone Power’s grave and to the top of the Hollywood Hills. They ended up at a movie studio soundstage just before the sun went down. “Diane set her camera up and walked away from it,” Stewart Stern writes, “explaining that ‘a funny alchemy happens.’ The camera in its goofy way would see what she couldn’t. If she set it right and printed it right, it would make for her the picture of a mystery.”

  Returning to Paris in August, Diane and Allan stayed with Doon in an apartment on the Boulevard Victor Hugo. They completed their fashion assignment for Vogue and dined at the Ritz with the Nemerovs, who were in town for the collections. Allan’s cousin Arthur Weinstein, who was living in Europe, joined them. He remembers David Nemerov being worried about the future of Russeks; the Philadelphia store was doing badly. He talked about it compulsively.

  The Arbuses’ last stop was Rome in December of 1951. They rented a huge old villa on the Appian Way, “full of halls and a vineyard and an olive orchard and a housekeeper who has a voice so deep she sounds like the first creature blessed with human speech.” Diane got sore feet from walking around Rome, so in the evenings she would soak for hours in a hot tub. “I feel on the brink of such marvelous things,” she wrote.

  When her feet healed, she went back into Rome proper and began photographing a lot—in the piazzas and along the Tiber—blurred pictures of child prostitutes and street urchins. Afterward she showed them to a few of her friends. “In them you can see Diane right there looking on very hard,” Alex says, “trying to know and understand her subjects.”

  The Arbuses returned from Italy on the Ile de France in the late spring of 1952 and Bob Meservey met them at the boat because the Eliots were on their honeymoon in Mexico. “Diane still looked sick to me with dark circles under her eyes,” Meservey says. “But she said nothing about the way she felt.”

  The following year she became pregnant, and carrying another baby seemed to please her. (She mentioned to Jane that she wanted “at least four children” but that Allan didn’t.) She seemed more relaxed, complacent. Years afterward she confided how much she loved the physical changes in her body—she didn’t even mind vomiting or headaches or getting bruised; physical sensations made her feel alive.

  All the strange movements that take place in a woman’s body—the fact that a woman gives birth—seemed the most incredible and mysterious miracle to Diane. She found singular physical pleasure in being a woman, in touch with earthy, natural things like the cycles of the moon. “Maybe that’s why she loved the ocean so much,” Tina Fredericks says. She particularly enjoyed menstruating—when her womb cramped up, when warm, wet blood coursed between her thighs. (Later when she became well known, if she was on assignment photographing a news event at that time of month, she might suddenly declare with great pride, “I’ve got my period!” to the other—mostly male—photographers who were near her, clicking away or changing film. After a while her colleagues got used to such announcements, but she was disconcerting at first.)

  Big with child, Diane felt close and loving toward her mother, Gertrude, who approved of the pregnancy and wanted her to have a larger family—at last they had something to talk about. Diane felt closer as well to Cheech and Pati Hill and Tina and a new friend, Bunny Sellers.

  At some point she announced she was going to have natural childbirth; she wanted the experience, she said, and when her time came on April 16, 1954, she went through it gladly, saying afterward that bearing her second daughter, Amy, without anesthetic—wide awake—was the most grotesque and transcendental experience of her life. Amy was a round-faced, steady little baby, very different from the more mercurial Doon. “Amy is like Allan—not like me, thank God,” Diane told Tina Fredericks. “I’ll never have to worry about her.”

  With another baby, the Arbuses needed a bigger place to live. David Nemerov was friendly with almost every judge, congressman, and bookie in New York, as well as Mayor Impelliteri; he not only helped find a triplex at 319 East 72nd Street which had originally belonged to the sculptor Paul Manship, he arranged with someone at City Hall to have the zoning in the building changed, which enabled “the kids” to both live and work there.

  “The studio was magnificent,” May Eliot remembers. A living room two stories high with white walls, not much furniture—large cushions to sit on and a huge potted tree which gave one the feeling of being in an interior garden. At one end—the dining area—was a pink marble table and chairs. The other end of the room was always a jumble of photographic equipment—rolls of white paper for backdrops, lots of cameras. On the second floor was the
darkroom and halfway between the second and third floors were bedrooms—Doon’s and Amy’s and Diane and Allan’s bedroom with that same low mattress bed covered with a white spread on a pale purple floor. “The purple was startling and unfloorlike,” May says. “It seemed to me the bed was floating—either on clouds or water.”

  Impulsively Diane and Allan urged Jane and Alex to share the studio with them. There was enough space, they argued—they could save on rent and it would be “fun.” But Jane convinced Alex they should continue to develop a life of their own—no more groups. It was the start of a new period for both couples. The Arbuses became more successful as a photography team; Alex made great strides at Time as a cover-story writer. He and Jane had two children, and their days and evenings were full of activities and new friends. They continued to see Diane and Allan and even went on shared vacations, and a harmonious, relaxed feeling flowed between them. Allan got the Eliots one of their first apartments, a large, elegant room with a wraparound terrace on East 79th Street. He did this by accompanying Jane to a real-estate agency, where he behaved in such a disdainful manner the agent thought he was the Eliots’ lawyer and agreed to a very low rent.

  Not long before Amy’s birth, Diane and Allan hired Tod Yamashiro, an eighteen-year-old Japanese photographer, to be their assistant.

  Yamashiro, who is now a photography teacher, worked closely with them for the next six years, but he never spent time with them socially and so knew nothing of their private life. “They were extremely kind, cultivated people. And I learned a lot from Allan in the darkroom.”

  The only thing that ever “bugged” Yamashiro was Allan’s clarinet-playing, which would go on between sessions. “Sometimes I’d yell at him, ‘Stop the music and get another assignment!’ ”