Diane Arbus (49 page)

She marveled that so many photographs had been taken—so many millions of images. Would the ultimate be less easy to capture? Had the visible been over-exposed?

Obviously, Avedon didn’t think so. Whenever Diane and Nancy Grossman visited him, he was busier than ever, photographing every pop hero of the 1960s from the Beatles to Cher to Andy Warhol’s Factory groupies. (He’d already photographed Warhol after his near-murder—photographed his pale blond torso crisscrossed with ugly scars and bullet holes.) Rock music throbbed all day long in Avedon’s studio while models like Penelope Tree and Donyale Luna traipsed through along with Revlon account executives and
Vogue
fashion editors. And Doon was taping everybody Avedon photographed (like Janis Joplin, frizzy-haired, clad in sleazo-freak clothes). Avedon planned to use taped voices as a backdrop for part of his mammoth upcoming show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The voices of the sixties would complement the strident-angry, laid-back, mammoth blow-ups of Tom Hayden and Abby Hoffman and Julie Christie…

Everybody who entered Avedon’s studio was some kind of star. And there was a sense of excitement, of titillation in that huge, white, lighted space full of expensive cameras and equipment and gigantic rolls of pale backdrop paper—such an overwhelming sense of prosperity, of abundance. The people Avedon was photographing could afford to indulge themselves in any kind of rebellious, experimental behavior and it would be accepted, because the past had dissolved for most of them—the future only seemed conceivable as a continuation of the bizarre experimental present that was defined only by its novelty.

Visiting Avedon’s studio excited Diane, disturbed her; the energy level
was always so high, the personality combinations were so fascinating, so unstable. Her spirits would rise momentarily, then sink again. She was being forced to lecture frequently for money, although she hated to. Irene Fay remembers hearing her speak at the Photography Club of America; suddenly in the middle of her talk she pulled her sweater up over her head and went on speaking through the material.

Friends who saw her during that period say she was depressed “almost all the time.” She complained of being dragged down, of having no drive, no energy. She blamed this new depression on her two bouts with hepatitis. She’d never been ill in her life before then—she’d prided herself on being very strong, very healthy. This new dark feeling of weakness, of lassitude, reminded her of her mortality, and it terrified her. She needed to be strong to photograph—she had always been very strong.

In the past she’d been accustomed to depression; she’d lived with depression always—melancholia had pervaded the atmosphere of the Nemerov home. At times as a child she’d even enjoyed her depressions—the feeling of bleakness, of
angst,
protected her, isolated her. But this new depression was not like that—it was bone-crushing; it exhausted her.

The doctors she consulted prescribed tranquilizers—Librium, Placidyl. But she refused to take any anti-depressant pills after her bad reaction to Vivactil. She simply went on trying to live with her depression, although she told people it was choking her.

Toward the spring of 1969, with her depression no better, friends kept urging Diane to go into therapy again—it would surely bring some relief. She finally agreed after Marvin Israel insisted, although privately she didn’t think it would do much good. She made appointments with several therapists who’d been recommended to her, settling on one a close friend insisted would be “perfect.” Soon she began talking of how much she liked her new therapist—a young woman M.D., a Neo-Freudian who had incorporated the teachings of Karen Horney into her method of treatment.

As time passed Diane began referring to her therapist as “cute.” But she remained depressed. At home she would stay on the phone for hours with friends (sometimes taping the conversations and playing them back to herself) and she would ramble on about Marvin Israel and Allan. Why couldn’t she
depend
on them? she asked. Why weren’t they there when she needed them? She seemed both angry and confused. It didn’t bother her that these two most important men in her life were married to other women—she wasn’t jealous, she
liked
both women; she just wanted Marvin and Allan to be available when she needed them. Was this too much to ask?

After a long, dreamy pause she would speak again—rapidly—her ideas twisting and turning, interrupted by further long pauses. (These pauses
had been characteristic of her speech since she was a teen-ager and Allan used to scold, “Finish your sentence, girl!”)

She would go on to say—vehemently—to friends like John A. Williams or her former assistant Tod Yamashiro that she didn’t enjoy earning money for money’s sake. Richard Avedon could do both she said—earn a great deal of money and create art—but she said she couldn’t, although in typical contradictory fashion she was doing both, perfecting her flat exacting style while completing a variety of magazine assignments. Her magazine assignments were one of the few constants in her life and she clung to them even as she complained.

For
Harper’s Bazaar,
she photographed her idol, the great blind Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in Central Park; she photographed the French novelist Natalie Sarraute, and afterward she and Dale McConathy took Mme. Sarraute to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Harlem, and in the midst of some magnificent pasta Sarraute expressed her fears that the Mafia would burst out of the men’s room and start shooting.

McConathy recalls, “After Sarraute got so nervous, Diane tried to make her feel at ease. Eventually she discovered that all Natalie really wanted to do while she was in New York was to buy her daughter a fur coat, so the next day Diane took her to Kaplan’s where she personally chose a coat for her. I went along, too. ‘You don’t want chinchilla—that’s a dowager fur,’ Diane told Natalie. ‘You don’t want Persian lamb or Russian sable.’ Then she went into a long rap about furs and Russeks and her family, and she talked about every fur imaginable—why broadtail is so terrific (I think she chose broadtail for Sarraute) and how seal has long, dense fur and leopard sheds, so you don’t want that, and how tipping is a way of dying long hairs with a brush to make inferior pelts look rare!”

Between assignments Diane was spending a great deal of time in Central Park. Although it was no longer safe or clean as it had been in her youth, it could still enfold her in greenery or snow, depending on the season. She knew every inch of the park by heart and never tired of returning to the bandstand or the skating rink or the bird sanctuary or the Children’s Zoo. The carousel looked shabbier now, but the music sounded the same as it had in her childhood; the jaunty tunes reminded her of her French nanny.

Frequently she would arrive at the West 59th Street entrance of the park at around five a.m., and sometimes the photographer Barbara Brown, who describes herself as “a street pal of Diane’s,” would talk with her before they separated to begin shooting. “Diane almost always went off alone,” Barbara says. “She rarely wanted company.”

She might trudge along the two-mile walk up to Harlem Meers at 110th Street. The park was silent and brooding at that hour, its landscape
desolate. As dawn broke across Manhattan, mist would start rising from the reservoir and floating across the once rich green meadows.

By seven a.m. she might have come across some strange tableau which she might photograph or not—a fat lady in a Santa Claus outfit somersaulting heavily down a grassy hill; a solitary young man, totally nude, raising his arms to the sky.

It would still be very quiet, although some cars and taxis were beginning to traverse the park roads. As morning progressed, bums could be seen emerging from the bushes onto paths littered with newspapers and dog turds. And runaways and hippies would start to gather in Sheep Meadow. Diane would often disappear for a while into the Ramble, a small wood near the Shakespeare Festival Theatre. The Ramble was a homosexual trysting place—by noon on a Saturday dozens of men were moving furtively behind the trees Diane had played around as a child, some dressed in leather, others bare-chested, lounging against the boulders.

In April of 1969 Diane flew to London on assignment for
Nova
magazine. Peter Crookston (who’d just become
Nova’s
editor) met her at the airport and was shocked at the change in her face. “I hardly recognized her. She was gray and lined and her eyes seemed to burn in much deeper sockets.” When he told her they couldn’t spend the evening together because he had another commitment, she burst into tears. She cried frequently while she was in London, Crookston notes—in between wandering around Piccadilly Circus at night and shooting mod rockers in Brighton and photographing Lulu, the British pop star, backstage. Sometimes when she was alone with Crookston her eyes would suddenly brim over and tears would course down her cheeks, but she offered no explanation, although she did say she was homesick for New York. She assured Crookston later that “all my tears made it better…you sustained me.” She kept repeating how much she loved the tacky hotel in Knightsbridge, where she was staying, loved the lumpy bed, the faded flowered wallpaper, the tattered but clean towel hanging next to the marble basin by the window.

She kept very busy photographing for
Nova
—photographing ordinary people who thought they looked like famous people—Elizabeth Taylor or Sophia Loren or the Queen of England. Diane got these women to pose like the celebrities they fantasized being, and she struggled to help them maintain their singularity or, rather, their
illusion
of singularity.

She also got some more London
Sunday Times
assignments, spending the day with the writer Francis Wyndham at a sanatorium “for terminally ill patients who were supposedly being cured by some kind of faith
healing.” It was depressing rather than macabre, Wyndham notes, and Diane was disappointed with the pictures she took—the feature they worked on together never ran.

Going back to London on the train, Diane kept pummeling Wyndham with questions about the Kray brothers—London gangsters who were about to go on trial. She told Wyndham she was spending her free time at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum and was very upset because she couldn’t get permission to photograph the figures. She confided gaily that her ambition was “to spend the night making love there.”

As the trip neared its end, Diane’s spirits seemed to rise.

A few days before she left London, she visited Alex and Jane Eliot, who were living outside the city in a place called Forest Row. Alex and May drove to the train station to pick Diane up. They were late—the sun had just set and they couldn’t find her “until we saw what we thought was a boy in knickers, leaning against the platform,” May says. “It turned out to be Diane. She was observing the passengers getting on and off the train and she seemed perfectly content and said she could have stayed there forever watching.

“The three of us drove back to our village,” May goes on. “I remember being very happy that Diane was in the car.” Later they talked for hours, trying to catch up on all the news. May told Diane about attending graduate school in London and writing more poetry, and the Eliots described their years in Greece and in Rome, where they’d made a documentary about Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel, and about their last twelve months in Japan studying Zen, “which had been very rough.” Diane listened, but made few comments. “If she was depressed, she didn’t reveal it,” May says. “But then she never acted depressed around me.”

They didn’t finish dinner until midnight and then they took a walk up a long green slope to the village cricket field. It was a beautiful night. The sky was moonlit, the air very fresh, and all the trees seemed soft and still, although a breeze flowed around them. May wondered about coming back to New York. Could she be happy and adjust to that noisy, dangerous, crowded city after experiencing so much beauty? Diane insisted she loved every encounter she’d ever had in Manhattan—loved every contradiction, every test, every risk.

The following morning a thick mist hung over the cricket field. The Eliots rose early because Diane had to catch a six-thirty a.m. train back to London. As they were drinking their coffee, Jane noticed that Diane had on an ornate gold ring, shaped like a bee. Ordinarily she never wore jewelry except for gold studs in her pierced ears. When Jane commented, “What a lovely ring,” Diane took it off and gave it to her. “I want you to have it,” she said gravely, and Jane recalls that “a chill went through me
because the bee is a symbol of death, of reincarnation. I wanted to cry out, ‘Diane! Do you know what you’re doing?’ I felt it was a warning of some kind. After she’d left, I told Alex and he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ ” But Jane never saw Diane again, and she wore the bee ring only a few times before it broke apart.

The London trip had exhausted her. Once back in New York, Diane stayed in her apartment and fell into a depression. She tried to sleep, but she could not, except for brief spells. She would awake at dawn unrefreshed and start wandering around her living room, fussing with her plants, which appeared to be dying. She didn’t want to look out the windows because when she did, all she saw were “bloodied people” in the streets. Her phone kept ringing with obscene calls until she took the receiver from the hook and bolted out into the day with her cameras festooned around her neck for protection.

One of the first people she ran into was John Putnam, and she rambled on about her trip, suddenly declaring, “There were no more freaks in England. Where are the freaks?” He tried to answer, to make some connection, but “she was on a different wave length. She wasn’t listening.” The same thing happened when she visited Lisette Model and over and over again she described her disappointment at being unable to photograph inside Madame Tussaud’s. How she loved those waxy, ghostlike figures! Why hadn’t
THEY
allowed her to photograph them? And she started rubbing Model’s table in anxiety and her voice became the voice of a five-year-old girl. Model was used to these dramatic personality shifts. She believed Diane was schizophrenic—“as
all
artists are schizophrenic,” she added firmly. Diane suffered from a kind of madness caused by “obsessive demands that cannot be satisfied,” she said. “Diane could be inordinately demanding. Like all schizophrenics, she could take and take if you let her. I told Diane she must learn more about cooperation. That it was Nature’s Law: the elephants make a circle to protect the small. If you see a piece of glass in the street, you pick it up, so that no one else will fall and hurt himself. She thanked me, she was grateful to me for saying these things. And Diane could learn—she was the greatest learner who ever lived.”