Diane Arbus (19 page)

“I can still see Diane padding around the studio in her filthy bare feet,” Yamashiro says. “She wore the same dress over and over. She’d choose the props, brush the model’s hair, then once the sitting got started she’d stand on the sidelines and record the event with her Leica. She couldn’t seem to stop taking photographs. It was like a compulsion with her.”

Soon after Yamashiro began working for the Arbuses, the Nemerovs started dropping by the studio for Friday-night dinner, and then Diane and Allan, Renée and Roy, and occasionally Howard and Peggy might sit around the pink marble table and try to talk. But the subject on everyone’s mind would never be mentioned—“the scandal,” meaning the exposure of the Jelke call-girl ring. Stories about the $100-a-night prostitutes servicing wealthy executives and masterminded by Mickey Jelke, a twenty-three-year-old oleomargarine millionaire, had been all over the tabloids. There was a highly publicized trial and then another one in March of 1955, and during that trial it was revealed that David Nemerov’s name was listed along with other well-known “Johns” in Madame Pat Ward’s scented red-leather telephone book.

There were actual references to Nemerov in Theo Wilson’s account in the
Daily News
(March 17, 1955). Headlined “
PAT NAMES 20 MEN IN HER LOVE $PARADE
,” the story went on to say: “Men’s names popped in the Mickey Jelke vice trial yesterday like popcorn over a hot fire as Pat Ward went through a box score of ‘customers’ she met while she was peddling pleasure with a price tag.”

Before her testimony ended, “she had totaled 20 who had ‘relations’
with her and paid for it anywhere from $50 to $200 apiece and one other who dated her and gave her $500 but had never been intimate.”

A double date with a Barbara Scott was described. Pat Ward went with Miss Scott to the Statler Hotel. Asked why, she said to receive money from somebody. For doing what? she was asked.

“For having relations with men.”

There were lots of people at the Statler, Pat said, in what was the Governor’s Suite. She went to a bedroom in the suite with a Mr. Nemerov, after having dinner there with men and women. Nemerov gave her $100 then and $50 before she left him. She explained, “They were playing dice at the party and this man [Nemerov] seemed to be winning.”

Howard writes that at the time he wanted “to express sympathy and affection in my father’s trouble, but I never did… I may have been scared…what if it had been a different man with the same name?” (Indeed, the
Herald Tribune
reported a “Dave Nemeroff” listed in Pat Ward’s book.)

Howard never did mention it, nor did any members of his family. His friends showed their loyalty by saying that of course they assumed it was a different man.

Gertrude Nemerov appeared oblivious to the situation. “She was probably numbed by it,” Anita Weinstein says. “Everyone felt so sorry for her—she had been going through this kind of humiliation for so long.”

“The scandal turned out to be the start of the decline of David’s career,” a garment-district colleague states. “David had been caught with his pants down—literally and figuratively. Because of his connections, his name was kept out of the papers after a while, but the damage had been done both to the store and to him as a businessman.” It was particularly embarrassing to Walter Weinstein, Max’s son, who was vice president of Russeks and a scrupulously moral person. Weinstein confessed he found it difficult to walk down the street with Nemerov after his involvement with the call-girl ring was splashed across the front page of every newspaper in the country.

David Nemerov, meanwhile, behaved as if nothing had changed. His manner was as confident and charming as ever—but something
had
changed; his life was never quite so flamboyant or filled with as many women after the scandal.

He continued to work as hard as ever at Russeks, and Russeks remained “a flashy shop,” according to one of Nemerov’s friends. “David kept on believing Russeks should cater to the kept woman, the woman who loved wrapping herself in furs.” But business sagged. Already the fur market had been squeezed out of Sixth Avenue and replaced by zipper, sportswear, and textile manufacturers.

I. J. Fox, Russeks’ archcompetitor across the street, had closed up shop in 1953. The fur business was in drastic decline as housewives and their families moved to the suburbs. There they demanded casual dressing—no mink coats, at least not for a while. And the very nature of Fifth Avenue was changing, as were shopping patterns; as were customers. The quality specialty stores adjacent to Russeks—Bonwit, Mark Cross—had long since moved uptown, leaving Russeks to compete with Lord and Taylor, B. Altman, and Macy’s.

“David longed to move to Fifth-seventh Street,” Andrew Goodman says. “But he was losing his touch. He still thought customers wanted lavishness, elegance, beauty—but now they wanted useful, wearable clothes.”

After the Philadelphia Russeks lost millions and closed, Nemerov couldn’t afford to move Russeks Fifth Avenue anywhere. “The Philadelphia store had been a disaster,” Walter Weinstein says. “It was the major factor; the Russeks empire started crumbling.” That was one of the reasons he sold the controlling interest in Russeks stock to the Pritzcy brothers from Chicago. They were millionaire chocolate manufacturers who’d always wanted to get into fashion.

Sometime in 1955 the Nemerovs sold their big apartment on Park Avenue and moved into a much smaller one at 60 Sutton Place South. They got rid of a lot of their heavy antique furniture, replacing it with “classic modern.” Their decorator, Jerry Manashaw, says, “They wanted the floors all white—the colors were beige and cream and yellow.” They had designed built-in cabinets and bookshelves and Mr. Nemerov started painting at home. There was a view of the East River he liked—he would sit by the window sketching and watching the boats move by.

The apartment took about six months to decorate. It was Manashaw’s first big job and he found the Nemerovs “really nice to work for,” but he noticed that they kept to themselves mostly. He remembers meeting Diane. “She came in and out of the apartment a lot with her two little girls. Her mother said she was involved with photography.”

*
According to a possibly apocryphal story, she was named Doon because she’d been conceived on the sand dunes of East Hampton.

T
HE NEXT FEW YEARS
were busy ones for the Arbuses, Yamashiro recalls. “They were starting to make money in photography. They were doing covers for
Glamour
and
Seventeen
and they did editorial work for
Vogue;
they had begun to get lucrative accounts from advertising agencies like Young and Rubicam and J. Walter Thompson. They did vodka ads and ads for the Greyhound Bus Company and Maxwell House Coffee which appeared full-page in
Life
magazine.”

“Diane and Allen Arbus were real comers,” remembers Fran Healy, who was an account executive for Young and Rubicam. “Diane shot the ‘Modess Because’ ads for me, and she did some terrific documentary stuff for a no-shrink shirt.”

Yamashiro recalls a sitting where there must have been thirty people milling around the Arbus studio, including another stylist, a hairdresser, a copywriter, and a makeup man. At one point General Electric installed an entire kitchen in the studio for a big layout they were shooting, and afterward told Diane and Allan they could keep it.

Such generosity didn’t impress the Arbuses; although they were increasingly active as photographers both in fashion and in advertising during the 1950s, it was impossible to know them and not hear complaints from them about “the business.” They hated “the business”—meaning the fast-paced, trendy world of commercial photography—even though that world, in the middle fifties, was experiencing a veritable golden age. Television was in its infancy; there were no filmed TV commercials, so advertisers were pouring millions of dollars into magazine campaigns, for beer, cigarettes, cars, deodorants.
Life
and
Look
were swollen with ads. Every photographer wanted a piece of the action.

“But to get a piece of that action you had to be precise and clever and calculating twenty-four hours a day,” says Art Kane, “and you had to hustle your ass off.”

Diane and Allan tried to hustle by giving elaborate dinner parties in their new studio, to which they’d invite advertising executives, some
fashion editors, a copywriter or two. Whenever Howard came down from Bennington, he would be included at these dinners, and he always left the studio feeling that “Diane and Allan were leading an unreal but glittering life.”

Unfortunately, the dinners didn’t work in terms of getting more assignments, Alex Eliot says, “because Diane and Allan were incapable of operating. Diane always mixed lousy cocktails, couldn’t make chit-chat; Allan would get nervous and very cold.” They had no idea how to orchestrate the kind of relaxed, noisy gatherings that photographer Milton Greene threw at his penthouse studio on Lexington Avenue. There everybody operated like mad, but avoided discussion of topics like the hydrogen bomb, and models who lived on codeine and raw hamburger to keep their weight down got into vicious fights with their lovers. “The fashion/ad crowd was the meanest, smuggest, drunkest bunch of people you ever saw,” the late designer Charles James said.

Eventually Allan told the Eliots, “No more parties in the studio. It’s like entertaining at the bottom of a swimming pool.” The ceilings were too high, he complained, and the place looked unfurnished, no matter how much stuff they put into it.

Instead he and Diane utilized the studio as a backdrop for their really theatrical assignments. They were probably most successful with big entertainment spreads for the Christmas issue of
Glamour,
which they shot in July. “They asked some of their friends and a few models to participate,” Tina Fredericks says. “We milled around in heavy clothes, ate wonderful food, had a ball. Allan would shoot the spreads in color and they looked marvelous.”

Nancy Berg, a beautiful brunette model, was booked regularly by the Arbuses then. “It was in the days when models were treated like shit,” Berg recalls. “Other fashion photographers wanted to shave my eyebrows off, just to get an effect in the picture—they didn’t care how
I
might feel. I was treated like an object at most studios. But the Arbs (as they were called) were terrific to work with. They treated me like a human being.”

Nancy posed in a great many Judy Bond blouse ads for the Arbuses. “Diane and Allan would alternate with the shooting. Allan was more vocal—more dictatorial than Diane. When she photographed me, she never said much, but I got a sense of psychic strength from her. There was great nonverbal communication between us. And the studio was quiet, almost tranquil—not like the other studios I was booked into.”

As one of the top models of her time, Nancy worked everywhere—at “factories” like the barn-sized Pagano on East 65th Street where Sears, Roebuck had its fashion catalogues done and Macfadden posed the
True Confessions
pictorials. Then there were the photography studios massed in the 480 Lexington building which was connected by a ramp to 247 Park, where the John Robert Powers agency was located. The ramp made it convenient for the Powers models to traipse across to their bookings; the halls of both buildings smelled of developer and greasepaint.

During this transitional decade of the fifties (transitional because at the start stills and movie images dominated the public’s eye; at the decade’s end they’d both been replaced by television) New York was a mecca for a wild variety of photographers and not just in fashion. Rents were low, so photographers could live and work cheaply out of Murray Hill brownstones or lofts on the Bowery. “Everybody knew everybody else in the business and some of us did more than one thing,” says Bob Cato, who, like Art Kane, alternated as art director and photographer. “It was a rich, exciting time,” adds Walter Silver. He’d begun to document painters such as Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers hanging around the Cedar Bar. Meanwhile dozens of other “street photographers” were wandering all over Manhattan snapping their cameras. Ruth Orkin and Jerry Liebling, veterans of the Photo League, immortalized views of Central Park or bleak new housing projects or just faces. Roy De Carava eloquently depicted Harlem.

Many of these photographers were supporting themselves in photojournalism since it was the heyday of the large-format mass-circulation magazine. Photojournalism of the 1950s was a visual medium of immense power and influence, often defining the way people saw the world. Pictures in
Life
magazine by Leonard McCombe, Margaret Bourke-White, Carl Mydans, and others stated attitudes, aroused curiosity, dramatized events, and occasionally even reflected the wacky smugness of the time—like Philippe Halsman’s
Life
cover of thirty chorus girls immersed in a cloud of soap bubbles.

Often
Life
photographers complained that their editors manipulated the photojournalistic process, shaping images to conform to a specific idea or point of view. Eugene Smith, perhaps the quintessential photojournalist of the 1950s, rebelled. He eventually quit
Life
after his editors condensed what he planned to be a thirty-page essay on Albert Schweitzer into twelve pages.

In 1955 Smith agreed to be part of Edward Steichen’s gigantic exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called “The Family of Man.”
*
Most
photographers of the period agreed as well—photographers like Elliott Erwitt, Ken Hey man, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Wayne Miller, to name only a few. It was “perhaps the last and greatest achievement of the group journalism concept of photography in which the personal intentions of the photographer were subservient to the overall concept of the show”—the concept being a benevolent, sentimentalized view of humanity. This was not shared by the younger, more rebellious photographers represented in the exhibit. Photographers such as Louis Faurer and Robert Frank were starting to document the Eisenhower years in their own idiosyncratic way. They were challenging the moral complacency of America with savage, grainy images—despairing couples, dingy Times Square bars. Frank called “The Family of Man” “the tits and tots show” because there were so many pictures of kids and bare-breasted mothers or just contented families (including Diane and Allan’s bland portrait of a young father flopped on a couch reading the Sunday paper to his son).