Diane Arbus (36 page)

“Walker called Diane a huntress. He admired her daring, but couldn’t understand how she was able to go so fearlessly into the underworld of New York… He’d always been attracted to and repelled by lowlife, but he had ‘Victorian barnacles’ on him, he said; couldn’t shake them off. How did she do it? Diane admitted to being exhilarated by danger. Her obsessive search for adventures, for strangeness, was a way of escaping both boredom and depression; she suffered a lot from depression, she said.”

She continued to fight periods of helplessness and hopelessness, and would succumb to crying spells. When she gave in to her despairing moods, there was no reaching her; she would withdraw behind a wall of dazed silence which could last for hours. These periods came and went; they were more severe than the depressions she’d suffered in the past. To alleviate them, a male colleague supplied her with an anti-depressant, an “upper,” which he would first break open, then shake onto his palm; she would lick the powder off. She was extremely sensitive to any stimulant—she could drink neither coffee nor tea nor liquor—so she tried to be very careful about drugs, never relying on them, let alone experimenting with them.

She did smoke pot and she’d tried LSD once, but with disastrous results—she’d had a horrific hallucination that whirled her head around for days. She disliked watching what was happening to people around her on pills—photographers like Dick Hyman and Mark Shaw ultimately died from too many “Dr. Feel Good” shots. And she was a friend of Tiger Morse, the skinny designer who ran the Teeny Weeny boutique on 73rd Street. Tiger created psychedelic fashions: paper dresses, silver boots and motorcycle suits, vinyl skirts with “
HATE
” on one side, “
LOVE
” on the other. Tiger ate amphetamines like candy—“I’m living proof speed does not kill,” she used to say.

Since Diane’s relationship with Walker Evans was essentially a formal one, neither of them discussed their depressions or the drugs they took (“although Walker tried everything to combat his despair,” his wife says). To forget, he would tell Diane how he admired Flaubert—how he often read passages from
Madame Bovary
before going off on an assignment. Literature influenced Diane, too, but in “an oblique way,” she’d say. Some stories were actual photographs to her, like Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog.” She called it “a terrific story written by the dog—it’s the real dog life of a dog.”

One evening Walker Evans talked to Diane about being a voyeur—a fantasizer. He even had a special trunk to keep his pornography collection in. It wasn’t much—“feelthy” photographs he’d bought in Paris; a film of a woman taking a shower which he thought was quite arousing. He liked 1920s pornography—he liked the Bellocq pictures of prostitutes Lee Friedlander had discovered in New Orleans. Modern porn was too clinical—modern porn wasn’t naughty or perverse or playful enough—modern porn turned him off.

He had never been able to photograph anyone nude, he said. Diane told him about photographing an orgy in a New Jersey motel “where everybody sat around eating peanut butter on crackers before they fucked.” She’d found out about the orgy from a swingers’ newspaper. It was a
pretty boring experience, she said. But taking the voyeuristic masculine role was peculiarly satisfying to her, and the camera protected her, distanced her, and permitted her to go into forbidden territory and have access to all kinds of relationships—she could witness primal scenes with husbands and wives switching partners or straight and gay intermingling; couples up to six on a mattress writhing around. On one level it became mythic to her. But on another level it was uncomfortable and “tacky,” and once it got near-violent when a woman in the room wanted another woman and the pride of the man involved got hurt.

Evans confided that he’d been approached to go to an orgy by “a black who was shining my shoes” outside the Plaza Hotel. He couldn’t bring himself even to take down the address. He was afraid, afraid of so much. He was afraid to go to Robert Frank’s because there was so much smoking, and he wouldn’t attend any of Norman Mailer’s parties after Mailer stabbed his wife in November of 1960. Diane told Evans she’d photographed Mailer shadow-boxing with his own reflection in a mirror, and Evans loved that. But he kept saying he was so afraid—afraid of most things, and particularly death. Was Diane afraid of death? She wouldn’t answer that question.

Her own father was dying; she knew that, although the doctors and the family kept saying he was going to be all right. The Nemerovs had only recently come back from an around-the-world buying trip, fashion-consulting for Lord and Taylor. David Nemerov thought at first he’d caught bronchitis; he’d started to cough convulsively. Oh, he’d been a heavy smoker for over forty years—“butts all over the place,” Renée says. But he couldn’t stop smoking; he loved to smoke. So did Gertrude—so did most of the Russeks and Nemerovs. “Even Grandma Rose smoked while we were growing up—we just thought it was smelly, not unhealthy,” says Helen Quat. But not long after he returned from Europe Nemerov was not only coughing but complaining of an excruciating backache. There were tests. Soon he was ensconced in a room at Mount Sinai Hospital—the diagnosis was lung cancer, but he hadn’t been told. So Gertrude continued to smoke as she waited in the hospital lounge with Howard, who’d come up from Washington, D.C., where he’d just begun his year as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. Howard chain-smoked, too, and caught a heavy cold. He was terrified of not crying, because his relatives would ask him why he didn’t cry. He had an answer all ready: “My father brought me up not to cry, he told me men don’t cry.”

Aunts, uncles, cousins, moved in and out of David Nemerov’s hospital room, conferring with Gertrude in the hall afterward, trying to be cheerful. “David had been the big gun, the big cheese, in the family,” Helen Quat says. “He’d given everybody jobs and advice, loaned them money,
and now he was dying and everybody was very upset.” At one point Diane urged Doon to “go in and ask your grandfather for your college tuition.” Which she did, and he arranged to pay for it, and Doon attended Reed College for a year before dropping out.

Diane visited her father often. To help him keep his mind off the pain, she talked to him about finally winning a Guggenheim. It was the third time she’d applied; the first time she’d sent in 150 pictures and been turned down; the second time 75 pictures and been turned down. This time she’d sent in 12. Walker Evans had been one of her sponsors. And now that she’d won, she would explore “American rites and customs, contests, festivals… These are our symptoms and our monuments,” she wrote in the original application, which she read aloud to her father. “I want to gather them like somebody’s grandmother putting up preserves because they will have been so beautiful. I want to save these things, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.”

And her father was very proud and he cried.

Near the end Renée flew in from Michigan and stayed at Diane’s Charles Street house. It was spring of 1963 and New York glittered in the sunlight. But Renée stayed inside with Diane, pacing trancelike about the dark living room, and the two sisters forgot their differences, their hostility, and talked throughout the afternoon and into the evening, “mostly about Daddy,” Renée says.

“I didn’t really adore him,” Diane said later. But she had been baffled by him her entire life; haunted by his seeming indifference, his veiled eroticism. She looked for these qualities over and over again in men. She felt held in hostage.

Her father had been the first person to acknowledge her talent, the first person to suggest to her an outside, energizing world. Hating him, loving him, she knew she had not always pleased him; she wanted his approval, but she’d had to rebel. Once long ago she’d demanded a sewing machine so she could make her own clothes rather than accept what he could give her. She remembered his cold displeasure when she told him she was going to marry Allan Arbus.

As a woman she did not believe she was allowed to make mistakes, so when her marriage failed she did not tell her father right away.

At Mount Sinai the two sisters entered their father’s hospital room together and David Nemerov, perhaps aware that his cancer was incurable, began weakly reviewing his life. Ill as he was, he managed to tell his daughters that he’d been so busy while they were growing up he hadn’t given them much love or attention. He regretted that now and hoped he’d
made it up to them a little. They assured him he had. But he soon lapsed into a half-waking state. He would rage and whimper and sweat and seem to speak in tongues—as if he had been flung out of time and space. He’d hallucinate “businessman fantasies,” Diane said. “He’d take imaginary papers out of imaginary pockets and briefcases…and then he’d think he was a painter again and wave an imaginary brush through the air.” He wrote garbled poetry to Gertrude, addressing her as “my angel, my saint.” And Gertrude sat by his side, never moving, beautifully dressed, smoking her endless cigarettes.

Every so often one of the relatives would spell her, all except Howard, who didn’t want his father to catch his heavy cold. Nor would he kiss his father, as he always dutifully had in the past. Later he wrote: “The cold was my revenge on my father, whom I punished by not kissing him. For in childhood, whenever my father was seriously angry at me the first symptom of it would be his saying…when he came to breakfast, ‘Don’t kiss me, I have a cold.’ On such occasions I would then have to wait the whole day, until he came home, under the threat of his powerful, unforgiving will.”

And finally when Howard did visit him briefly in his last days and watched him dying, he wrote: “[My father] was a man of immense powers and many powers he may have had and kept to himself, a deep cynicism about life and about his life in particular and who may have asked himself many times perhaps in relation to his children if the results had been worth living for,” and Howard experienced a “terrible personal anguish at never having known my father and at never having tried.”

After David became unconscious, Diane sat with him. “He looks like Everyman,” she told Howard later, moved by the gaunt, spiritual quality in her father’s face. He was becoming transfigured, ennobled in his terrible suffering. She was with him when he fell into the last coma and feebly began to masturbate as she watched. She described this later to Harold Hayes. “She was very upset,” he remembered, “and
I
was upset because she’d told me this intimate thing, and I wondered why she had told me.”

Diane was the only one to know about Uncle Willy’s vision—Uncle Willy, one of David Nemerov’s “black sheep” brothers, who had lived in his shadow but adored him. “Suddenly he woke up at five a.m. and knew [Daddy] was about to die—he rushed to the hospital and was with him at the end.”

Diane felt “really awful when my father died. I mean I stood in a corner of his room like a creep. I was absolutely fascinated… I was spellbound by the whole process of his gradual diminishment. He became shrunken and he’d got to look like nobody…and I photographed him then, which
was tremendously cold of me, I suppose, although I resent that implication.”

Following his death, Diane noticed “how [Daddy’s] energy seemed reapportioned to others [in the family] and the women got incredibly strong… I remember hating that and thinking they should have told him he was going to die; it was an insult to him that he didn’t know.” The photographer Ben Fernandez recalls Diane sneaking into Richard Avedon’s studio during a seminar not long afterward and announcing “in a whispery little voice that she’d just come from taking a series of photographs of her father dead. It was such an extreme statement, fraught with emotion…nobody reacted at all.” She did not show the pictures, but Fernandez surmises that this is what may have inspired Avedon to take the agonizing series of portraits of his own father after he’d been struck by cancer.

A month after David Nemerov’s death, in June 1963, Roy Sparkia’s plastic “stained-glass”
*
artworks depicting the Seven Wonders of the World were unveiled on the south wall of the lobby of the Empire State Building (where they remain to this day). The panels, five by seven feet in dimension, depict the Great Pyramids, the hanging gardens of Babylon, the statue of Zeus, the temple of Diana, the tomb of King Mausolus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the lighthouse of Pharos. The eighth panel depicts the Empire State Building itself.

At the ceremony Paul Screvane, president of the City Council, threw a light switch illuminating the panels in all their brilliant translucent colors. In his speech he noted that thirty-five thousand people visit the Empire State Building every day—more visitors in a single year than the combined total of all who visited the original Seven Wonders of the World throughout recorded history.

Renée says, “Mommy came, but Diane and Howard didn’t.” As far as she knows, they never saw the Seven Wonders of the World—“although they always had a good excuse.” But she was hurt.

*
Years later Susan Sontag commented that for many photographers “class is the deepest mystery—the exhaustible glamour of the rich and powerful, the opaque degradation of the poor and outcast—social misery has inspired the comfortably off with the urge to take pictures…in order to document a hidden reality that is a reality hidden from them.”

*
Plastic “stained glass” is a technique Sparkia invented which exploits optical methods using a combination of new plastics that have varying refractive indexes that are lighted from behind and achieve a true third-dimension impression.

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1963 Diane floated around New York, sometimes accompanied by Arthur Sainer, the
Village Voice
drama critic she’d met in the subway. Once they were kicked out of a dress rehearsal of the Living Theatre because the producers, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, didn’t like the idea of a woman crouched in the aisle with a camera pressed against her eye.

Sainer considers himself a friend of Diane’s, “not an intimate, although originally I hoped I’d be.” But at the start of their relationship she’d told him gently that she cared about somebody else—she wouldn’t say who. Sainer accepted this “because I wanted to see her on any terms. She fascinated me as she fascinated most people, I guess, with her compelling, irresistible quality.” For a while he thought he could fall in love with her.