Diane Arbus (54 page)

At about this time Marvin Israel was working on a miniature sculpture of a person of no specific sex lying on a bed. The person’s wrists were obviously slashed. Diane helped him complete it.

By now, in late June, a humid heat had descended on New York. Diane hated and feared the summer. It reminded her of her childhood long
ago when her nanny—her beloved Mamselle—had abruptly left. From then on, every summer had brought back to her the pain of that loss. Her parents had always been away in the summer, too, traveling around Europe. After camp, Diane and Howard and Renée would return to the big apartment on Central Park West and be looked after by bored servants—they weren’t often permitted to go out, and remained for hours in the airless rooms, Diane counting the silver and feeling that life was unlived and unlivable.

Now New York’s million air-conditioners hummed and traffic snarled in the streets and many of Diane’s friends escaped to the beach or the mountains, and the old hurtful feeling—the almost physical grip of anxiety at abandonment—returned to haunt her.

She still didn’t have enough assignments, so would sometimes take pictures of media events and sell them later. That’s why she attended a press conference for Germaine Greer held at Sardi’s.

Greer—formidably intelligent and imposing, over six feet tall and clad in buckskin skirt and clogs—had just come back from England to continue promoting her best-seller
The Female Eunuch
around the United States. She had already created a sensation at Town Hall, debating Norman Mailer on female sexuality. She’d been on the cover of
Life
and she was in New York for the express purpose of emceeing the Dick Cavett show.

Today Greer says her first impression of Diane was of “a rosepetal-soft, delicate little girl. I couldn’t guess how old she was, but she charmed me in her safari jacket and short-cropped hair. She was carrying such an enormous bag of camera equipment I almost offered to carry it for her—she could barely lug it around. She hopped around photographing me, and when she said she’d like to have a proper photographic session alone with me, I agreed. I recognized her name and thought, ‘Why not?’

“It was a hot, muggy day,” Greer goes on. “I was staying at the Chelsea Hotel in a seedy room. Diane arrived and immediately asked me to lie down on my bed. I was tired, God knows I was tired—I’d been flogging my book like mad—so I did what she told me. Then all of a sudden she knelt on the bed and hung over me with this wide-angle lens staring me in the face and began click-clicking away.

“It developed into sort of a duel between us, because I
resisted
being photographed like that—close-up with all my pores and lines showing! She kept asking me all sorts of personal questions, and I became aware that she would only shoot when my face was showing tension or concern or boredom or annoyance (and there was plenty of
that,
let me tell you), but because she was a woman I didn’t tell her to fuck off. If she’d been a man, I’d have kicked her in the balls.

“It was tyranny. Really tyranny. Diane Arbus ended up straddling me
—this frail little person kneeling, keening over my face. I felt completely terrorized by the blasted lens. It was a helluva struggle. Finally I decided, ‘Damn it, you’re not going to do this to me, lady. I’m not going to be photographed like one of your grotesque freaks!’ So I stiffened my face like a mask. Diane went right on merrily photographing—clickclickclick-click—cajoling me, teasing me, flattering me. This frail rosepetal creature kept at me like a laser beam, clickclickclick. She’d jump off the bed periodically to reload the camera. Just as I was breathing a sigh of relief, she’d be on top of me again! It was a battle between us. Who won? It was a draw. After that afternoon I never saw her again. I never saw the photographs either.”

The first weekend in July, Diane went out to East Hampton to visit Tina Fredericks, who was getting to be one of the biggest real-estate agents on Long Island—she owned land and two houses and her phone never stopped ringing. But to Diane, Tina remained simply one of her oldest friends—an ebullient, auburn-haired woman who had been one of the first people to encourage her in photography. Diane loved coming to Tina’s—it was like another home, and she would eat her delicious food and swim and walk on the beach for hours.

Tina says she knew Diane was very depressed and kept trying to cheer her up. “I said I would buy one of her portfolios—I’d buy two or three if she wanted me to. She didn’t seem to hear me.”

Instead, that weekend Diane took pictures of Tina’s lovely twenty-one-year-old daughter, Devon. “She made me put on a leotard top and she took tons of photographs and when she sent us the contacts a week later, I thought, ‘But I don’t look like that at all.’ I was unrecognizable. Now, ten years later, I’ve grown into the face Diane Arbus saw in me then.”

Before she took the train back to New York, Larry Shainberg drove over from Amagansett to see her. She repeated what she’d told him over and over again in the last months—that she didn’t know how much longer she could go on. Shainberg says, “I didn’t believe her. I tried to kid her out of it. I don’t think anybody believed she would actually…” Other friends also ignored her allusions to suicide. “We had our own lives to lead,” says a poet from Westbeth. “And we didn’t know how to deal with it—she was getting so tough to handle—really heavy. It was excruciatingly depressing to be with her. She would drag you down—she would bore you. But in retrospect a lot of us feel guilty about not being there when she needed us.”

There were other friends who noticed that she was “tying things up.”
She wrote to Pati Hill in Paris saying she had gathered up all her letters of twenty-five years and would Pati like them back? She phoned Tina Fredericks to say happily that Doon and Amy were both settled—Doon at work, Amy in school—and Allan was at last getting his big break in a movie. Years later Amy told friends that she thought her mother had done what she wanted to do in this life—there was simply nothing more she wanted to accomplish.

Cornell Capa had been trying to bring Diane together with Marge Neikrug, who had just opened a little photography gallery in her brownstone on East 68th Street. Marge wanted to learn how to print—“I’d fallen in love with the darkroom”—and Capa suggested that Diane Arbus might help her. The two women had a series of long conversations over a period of several weeks. “But I couldn’t pin Diane down as to when we’d get together. Then about a week before she died she suddenly appeared at my gallery with her portfolio and we started talking… I’d played tennis with Harold Russek and that got her started on her family, whom she seemed obsessed with, and then we went from there to her portfolio and we made a list of the museums we hoped would buy them. I loved her work and told her I’d give her a show. She seemed agreeable. I asked if I could keep her portfolio overnight to study it, but she was possessive about it and wouldn’t let me borrow it. She was very charming, but seemed tormented in some way—I couldn’t figure out why. Something profound was bothering her. She talked about the future and photography and politics. She talked very fast, all in a rush, as if she was
thinking
too fast, and sometimes after she’d say something she’d contradict herself totally, but it was still a marvelous conversation that lasted five hours and then suddenly in the middle of a sentence Diane got up with her portfolio and bolted out of my gallery.”

She began phoning compulsively. She phoned her mother in Florida, begging her to tell her how she’d coped with her depression back in the 1930s. She kept asking, “Mommy, Mommy, what happened? How did you get over it?” Gertrude Nemerov says she didn’t have an answer. “ ‘I don’t know, darling,’ I said, and then I asked her if the therapist was helping and she told me, ‘No, no,’ and then she talked about her pictures not selling and how she wasn’t getting enough assignments.”

Later she phoned John Gossage, who was now living in Washington, D.C., to ask him, “Can’t you find anyone to buy one of my portfolios?” She phoned her old art teacher from Fieldston, Victor D’Amico, and said she had to see him and talk about her work. D’Amico told her he was busy but
would try to see her soon. She phoned Lee Witkin. “The beautiful glass box Marvin Israel had designed for her portfolios was constantly breaking,” Witkin says. “Diane was in tears about that.”

Her brother, Howard, visited her at Westbeth. He had been moving around in the past few years—from Bennington to Brandeis and now he was settled at Washington University in St. Louis, where he held a prestigious chair in literature. He and Peggy lived in a spacious house with their three sons and he was part of a lively circle of writers that included Stanley Elkin and William Gass. He should have been content, but he remained edgy and easily bored. He was depressed by his continuing self-doubt in spite of genuine achievements.

All these years while he’d been sustained by his drive for perfection, for language in its purest, most concentrated, ordered, and expressive form, he’d made a supreme effort to conceal himself. He distanced his life, keeping it remote and formal except to a chosen few. Some of his closest friends, like Stanley Edgar Hyman and the painter Paul Feeley, had died, and although he wrote a great many letters, there were only a few people he felt close to; the constants after Diane were Kenneth Burke and his old English teacher Elbert Lenrow from Fieldston, who’d kept up with him regularly for forty years. To them he didn’t have to reveal his private upsets, his disappointments. “In poetry the art itself has got to be its own reward,” he once said dryly. He knew he would never get rich writing poetry, and only a few ever got famous, so there was little left to do except gossip, display, and jostle for position, and Howard (like Diane) enjoyed doing none of these things.

Still, he’d applied himself—he’d worked very hard and finally honors would pile up: membership in the exclusive Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim. Eventually he would win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in one year for his collected poetry. By 1971 he was a poets’ poet—admired by his peers for his intricate use of language, his deep erudition; criticized by others because he had never cut loose or “gone confessional” as had Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. Nor would he capture the imagination of the American public as Robert Frost had, or William Carlos Williams.

Only once could anyone remember him openly showing his frustration at being ignored. It happened at Bernard Malamud’s house in Cambridge when Malamud was teaching at Harvard. The other dinner guests were John Updike, Philip Rahv, and Robert Lowell. It was at the height of the Vietnam war. Lowell had been very involved in the anti-war
demonstrations, and throughout dinner all attention focused on him as he spoke passionately and manically about his involvement. Although Howard and the others attempted to be heard, nobody else could so much as finish a sentence. Finally, as coffee was being served, Lowell pulled out a poem he’d written about Vietnam and read it aloud. When he finished, Howard got up abruptly and walked out the door. Later Lowell remarked, “Howard Nemerov is a minor poet, isn’t he?” And Bernard Malamud replied very quietly, “Who isn’t minor, Cal?” The subject was immediately dropped.

When Howard and Diane met that evening in July, they didn’t discuss their careers; they never did. At the restaurant in the West Village where they had dinner, they reverted to the private language they’d always used as brother and sister—bantering, teasing, whispering conspiratorially, or just eating in silence as they had long ago on Central Park West with only their nannies for company.

That night they spoke of their children and of their mother, who’d briefly remarried. (Diane said of her stepfather, “Mommy told me his mouth doesn’t water. My mouth waters at the thought.”)

Howard says, “Diane seemed in a very good mood that evening. We had a marvelous time. Laughed quite a bit.” Just before they left the restaurant, she suddenly announced, “You know, I’m going to be remembered for being Howard Nemerov’s sister.” (“How ironic and untrue,” Howard says today.)

He brought her back to Westbeth feeling that, despite her cheerfulness and jokes, “she was terribly alone.” The elevator they rode up in smelled of urine. The endless black hall which led to her apartment appeared shadowy and sinister. Howard was glad to leave.

During the weekend of July 10, Diane visited Nancy Grossman and Anita Siegel’s loft. “She arrived Sunday afternoon, extremely distraught,” Grossman says. “She said, ‘We’re on the street.’ I thought she meant Marvin and she were on the street, but Marvin wasn’t with her. She stayed with Anita and me until after it got dark.

“She had been close with Marvin twelve years, she said. He kept going off and she felt depressed and outside his life. The summers were always the worst for Diane and this summer was bad as usual; she felt general rage and depression about being kept out of his life.

“She spoke about Marvin in a torrent of words and tears and then about her work, which, she cried, was giving her
nothing back.
‘My work doesn’t do it for me anymore,’ she said. She had spent months
photographing these mental retardates and she was exhausted, drained from the experience, and the pictures were no good—out of control. She could not confront these subjects as she had in the past—it was a new thing for her. She didn’t know what it meant. She had just developed the contacts, but hadn’t printed them. Suddenly it didn’t matter. ‘My work doesn’t do it for me anymore,’ she repeated. And, listening to her, I thought this must be the most devastating thing to happen to an artist—to lose one’s need to discover. What does it mean when suddenly, inexplicably, we’re no longer nourished by our work and it gives us nothing back? I tried to make her feel better by showing her the most recent pictures I’d been collecting from newspapers, but they didn’t interest her. Instead she climbed into Anita’s lap and Anita tried to comfort her, but Diane just went on crying. ‘I love you two,’ she said. ‘I wish I could go to bed with both of you.’ It was an extraordinary statement to make in that time—very controversial—and I was threatened by it. Anita and I were not lovers, had never been lovers; nor were we involved with Diane sexually—or with any woman for that matter. We had been Diane’s friends for over three years. Had been together often, and we felt very, very close but there had never been anything sexual between us. In retrospect I guess what Diane wanted was comfort then. She wanted a nest. I was roasting a chicken, and when it was done we fed Diane. She ate ravenously, as if she hadn’t eaten for days, and then again she told us how depressed she was and how during her last class at Hampshire College she’d tried explaining what being a photographer was like—about how a photographer can capture the soul of a person, which is why photography is so sinister and mysterious! And suddenly, remembering another experience at the New School, she said, in the midst of a class she’d been conducting there, she got her period and blood started flowing down her leg and she thought, ‘How terrific’ She loved getting her period! She welcomed it, welcomed the cramps, welcomed the blood—she was feeling something, she was no longer numbed. She told us she had tried everything as an adolescent—Kotex, Modess, tampons—to staunch her flow. She said she’d even used some kind of gadget she’d bought at Rexall’s Drug—something in the shape of a tiny cup that caught the blood and held it. As she told the story, she seemed to enjoy the memory of what it was like to have her period—what pleasure and pride she felt at being a woman, at being grown-up. Later when she was feeling more relaxed she made a hand rubbing on a piece of my drawing paper (I have it still). I helped her with it—she pressed her fingers down hard on the paper, hoping to see an imprint of flesh. Finally she left, looking wan and tired, but she assured us she was less depressed. We never saw her again.”