Diane Arbus (48 page)

“I’ve always been ashamed of making money, and when I do make money from a photograph, I immediately assume it’s not as good a photograph.

“I can’t believe that money is any proper reward for art. Art seems to me something you do because it makes you feel good to do it; it excites you or you learn something from it; it’s like your play, your education…but I’ve never felt in a funny way…I don’t even feel [what I do] is terribly useful. It might be historical. It’s embarrassing. I can’t defend this position, but I think I take photographs because there are things that nobody would see unless I photographed them. When I was gloomy I thought other people could take the photographs I wanted to take. You know, I could call up some good photographer and say, ‘Why don’t you photograph this and this?’ I really think my photographs aren’t very useful except to me. I think I have a slight corner on something about the quality of things…

“It’s very subtle and I don’t know that it’s world-shaking, but I’ve always had this terrific conceit. I used to think I was the perfect thermometer for the times. If I liked a movie, it would be a popular movie… You
grow up split between these two things—thinking you’re utterly average and inclusive or that every human emotion has its echo in you. Well, I do feel that in a certain way.”

Finally, Terkel asked her, “How did the public experience of the Depression affect you?” and Diane answered, “I was aware of it partly because it
didn’t
affect me. That sense of being immune—ludicrous as it sounds—was painful.

“[Now] I seek danger and excitement. It may be frivolous of me, [but] I’ve come to believe you can only really learn by being touched by something.”

During the interview Diane kept referring to the horrific poverty she’d seen in South Carolina. A month earlier
Esquire
had sent her down to photograph Donald E. Gatch, a young white doctor who was trying to combat starvation and maggots in an impoverished black community called Beaufort. He had reported the shocking conditions to the local health authorities, but nobody would listen to him, so he was caring for the poor alone, with little federal funding.

Diane told Terkel: “I had never seen poverty like that.” She had gone with Gatch to a home with sixteen children. “One child had only one eye, another was hydrocephalic.” Another was scarred at birth; some showed symptoms of worms caused by filthy outhouses.

She and Gatch drove all over the countryside—to factories where women shucked oysters at $15 a season. He told her “incredible stories,” she recalled to Terkel. About examining a dead woman whose body was infested with maggots. And another woman “with an illegitimate, mentally defective boy who couldn’t get welfare, so she had to go to work and leave the boy chained to the bed.”

And Diane had photographed Gatch standing outside a falling-down shack and inside stinking cabins fetid with the smell of old urine and up on the hills where some poor whites lived so inbred the children had one blue eye, one brown.

She took roll after roll of film which recorded the inbreeding, malnutrition, and pathological depression of deep Southern poverty (“as well as Walker Evans,” Gene Thornton wrote in the
Times
when many of these pictures were finally exhibited at the Robert Miller Gallery in 1980. “What a picture of deformity and imbecility”).

And Terkel said, “You saw what Walker Evans saw.” And Diane replied, “Somewhat similar. Yeah. But now I’m seeing with double vision. With what I learned as a kid and what I’ve since learned. It seems to me the only pleasure about getting old is if you come through with more understanding than you had in the first place.”

I
N 1969
A
LLAN DIVORCED
Diane and married Mariclare Costello, a young actress who had been one of the original members of the Lincoln Center Repertory Company. Diane gave a small reception for them, writing to Peter Crookston later that she felt “sad happy” about the occasion. She said that Mariclare was a “good friend” of hers, and that the two of them hung out on the phone a lot.

Not long after the wedding party Allan closed the fashion studio on Washington Place and he and his new wife moved to Hollywood so that he could pursue his acting career in earnest. For more than twenty years he’d been dreaming of being an actor fulltime, and Diane outwardly applauded the move. But she was frightened.

Frightened because Allan would no longer be close by. They had been absorbed in each other’s lives since she was fourteen; he was one of the few people who understood her. Now she would no longer be able to visit him, to get extra money when she needed it or to ask advice; she wouldn’t be able to phone him daily—he would be three thousand miles away.

She ran into Garry Winogrand on the street. “She seemed to be in a tizzy,” Winogrand recalls. “She said her husband had remarried and gone to California and she was going to be without a darkroom and what should she do? She also mentioned that she’d just recovered from hepatitis, that at first they’d misdiagnosed her case—but she hadn’t
just
had hepatitis, she’d also been allergic to birth-control pills and tranquilizers, which made her feel rotten, and did I know that the combination could have an adverse effect on a woman?”

She told Shirley Fingerhood that she felt “funny” about Allan going away. She didn’t resent it, she kept saying; she wasn’t angry—she just felt that a part of her was going to California, too.

Although Allan continued to send as much money as he could from California, Diane needed to earn more now to make ends meet. But it was still
emotionally painful for her to see magazine art directors; despite her success, she had little self-confidence.

Avedon recommended her for a lucrative advertising job to photograph a new camera in her own particular way.

She was also discussing the possibility of becoming unit photographer on the film
Catch-22,
which Mike Nichols was about to direct in Mexico and Rome; John Calley was the producer and the pay would be astronomical, Diane told someone. But in the end she said no to Calley. She didn’t think she could do it.

Instead, she flew to Boston for the London
Sunday Times
and photographed the lawyer F. Lee Bailey in his office and piloting his plane. Next she went to Chicago to make a portrait of Tokyo Rose and interview her for
Esquire.
This account, along with the picture, was published in the May 1969 issue of
Esquire.
Diane then flew to California and photographed novelist Jacqueline Susann with her husband, Irving Mansfield, for
Harper’s
magazine.

Susann was currently promoting her novel
The Love Machine,
which was high on the best-seller list, and between interviews (some six a day) she was ensconced in a Beverly Hills hotel suite overlooking banks of geraniums and a smoggy sky. When Diane arrived, Susann began patting her jet-black Korean hair fall and adjusting her bubble glasses until Diane asked her to take them off.

“This Diane Arbus character was bossy,” Irving Mansfield remembers. “She made us move all over the place. Then she wanted us to pose in our bathing suits next to the TV set. I didn’t get it, so I said no to the idea, but Jackie, who was always cooperative with the press, said of course. And when we were in our suits and Arbus asked Jackie to plunk down in my lap, Jackie said yes to that, too. Particularly after Arbus assured us this shot would be for her portfolio—
not for publication.
*
Her exact words. We held the pose for what seemed like hours—until my kneecaps went numb. The flashbulbs kept blinding us, she kept assuring us we looked terrific. Arbus looked tense. She told us as soon as she finished shooting she was taking the next plane back to New York; she’d flown out specifically to photograph us and she seemed a little angry about it.”

Diane
was
angry. Privately, secretly, very angry. Because ever since Allan had left New York, Marvin Israel seemed to be paying less attention
to her. He simply couldn’t always be there when she wanted him to be, and she couldn’t understand that. With Allan gone, Marvin Israel had become the principal source of energy she could draw on; it wasn’t that she didn’t have plenty of ideas of her own, it was that she needed him to confirm them to her and to confirm herself. Often it seemed she resisted taking full responsibility for her life.

But she didn’t express her anger, telling very few people how she felt; instead she brooded and sulked, and eventually her anger imploded and turned into depression. Shirley Fingerhood, who saw Diane often during this period, says, “Diane expected a great deal from her friends. She would actually refuse to do certain things for herself—like getting a new lock for her door, or reading a new lease (which I did for her). Diane was like a little girl in that respect. She expected others to do for her constantly, and when they didn’t, her irritation was profound.” She would get on the phone and make demands and then collapse and apologize saying she was terribly sorry she’d bothered anybody. Before the hepatitis she’d relished her independence, her solitude, but lately she’d felt an overwhelming need to be taken care of.

Often now—in fact, whenever possible—Diane would go flying with gallery owner Margo Feiden from a little airfield in Deerfield, Long Island. They flew at every conceivable time—at dawn, at dusk, in the afternoon—swooping over the island of Manhattan, past the Statue of Liberty and the Wall Street skyscrapers. “We always flew over Diane’s place on East 10th Street,” Feiden says. “Diane never spoke during these flights. She seemed mesmerized by the experience and relieved to be off the ground. I got the feeling she imagined
she
was piloting the plane. The cold wind was on our faces; we could see the clouds very close. She would have flown every day with me if I’d let her, but I usually wanted to go alone. I think she mentioned that her brother, Howard Nemerov, had been in the Air Force during the war; anyway, we flew steadily together for the next two years; Diane once told me she loved flying more than anything in the world. She loved flying so much Allan gave her a pair of wings—actually a pin shaped like wings. She was pleased about that and always spoke with admiration and affection for Allan. He had been her teacher of photography, she said. He had taught her how to develop and print her work. She seemed very grateful to him.”

On the train trips back from the airfield Diane would invariably mention Marvin Israel. Suddenly, she said, she was starting to envy the attention Marvin Israel lavished on his wife. She had never really envied anyone before, she said, but now she not only envied Margie Israel, she hated Marvin for being so loyal, so responsible. Then she would add hastily that she admired him for it, too. She had also begun to wonder what it
would be like to
be
Margie Israel—Margie Israel, who was such a powerful font of unending creativity, who could tirelessly sculpt, paint, sketch, make collages, twenty-four hours a day. Who never needed to see people or go out into the world. During the 1950s many men had been drawn to the beautiful, black-browed Margie Ponce from Cuba—drawn to her Latin temperament, her vivid sense of fantasy. She had danced through the night at parties with many men and “then she chose Marvin,” Diane would say in hushed tones, as if Margie had received a benediction. Sometimes she would fantasize about Marvin and Margie’s life together—because certainly she had no clues. Her curiosity always got the better of her. (As it had years before when Allan had fallen in love with the young actress. After the initial hurt, Diane had made it her business to become acquainted with the actress—she had seen her act in several plays, even going backstage to visit. She had to know what this woman’s appeal was, and she ended up liking her a lot—as she liked Allan’s new wife, Mariclare.)

Although they shared mutual friends and sometimes attended the same parties, Diane did not really know Margie Israel, she could only imagine what she was like—she could only imagine how their studio looked. (She had heard it was a “fairyland” filled with dogs, the smell of cats and birds, and paintings, and a Christmas tree made of carrots hanging upside down from the ceiling.)

Sometimes the longing to observe the Israel’s became so great she would sneak over to 14th Street and stand in the shadows of a building across from their studio, where she would wait for either of them to come out. She could wait for hours until Marvin finally emerged to pedal off on his bicycle, presumably to the other studio on lower Fifth Avenue, where he did most of his painting and book-designing. He never saw Diane. And finally—long after Diane had gone home—at around four a.m. Margie Israel might surface with her six dogs and walk the streets until the sun came up. If it was summer, Margie might go to the outdoor swimming pool on Carmine Street, scale the fence with her dogs, and then they would all plunge into the water. Diane never knew that Margie Israel liked to swim as much as she did. Lately when Diane stopped in at Marvin Israel’s Fifth Avenue studio, which was crammed with his paintings, his plants, his dogs and cats, and even a black crow, she would complain that she could no longer swim at Coney Island because the water there was so polluted. Larry Shainberg was often at the Israel studio, and the sculptor Nancy Grossman, whose show of leather-sculpted zippered heads resembling knights, tribal fighters, motorcyclists had recently opened at the Cordier-and-Ekstrom gallery to controversy and acclaim. “Marvin Israel introduced us—arranged a meeting,” Grossman says. “He loved bringing
different kinds of artists together. I remember Diane running into the studio the first afternoon I was there. She circled me like I was an object.”

Grossman says that Diane’s moods would shift wildly—“Some days, when she was up, she looked and acted like a very young girl. Other days, when she was depressed, her face would resemble an old, old woman.”

Diane soon took to visiting Grossman in the loft near Chinatown that she shared with the painter Anita Seigal. Diane would wander past their walls of books, the gurgling fish tanks, and into a series of huge, dusty rooms crowded with paintings and sculptures. She would go over Grossman’s collection of newspaper photographs that were stuffed into drawers and files—all sorts of elliptical, fragmentary images: Nixon holding hands with Governor Rockefeller, Churchill’s birthday cake, plane crashes, fires, the face of a drunken driver, flood waters, terrified children after a misplaced napalm strike, an injured dock worker’s expression after a boat explosion, women overcome by heat in a subway…