Diane Arbus (26 page)

Alex had just completed a huge work for Time-Life Books,
Three
Hundred Years of American Painting,
which received an excellent review in the
Times
(“remarkable—contagiously enthusiastic about art and artists”) and sold very well. Alex was pleased, but he was now considering leaving Time Inc. “I’d been there fifteen years; I was safe and secure and earning good money, and so what?” He took a leave of absence for a year in 1957, and he and Jane lived in Spain. Then he came back to
Time,
but only briefly. “By now our offices were in a new skyscraper on Sixth Avenue with sealed-shut windows. We began breathing stale air and feeling lousy. One editor got so bugged he kicked open his window, and within seconds someone from maintenance had sealed it up with a new pane of glass.”

Finally, on assignment in Delphi, Alex had a dream “which clinched it for me.” In his dream a voice cried out, “Alex, what will you do when there are no more museums?” And he woke up realizing that for years he’d been reporting on art, absorbed with art, but not living much of a life; he’d been waiting for significance, waiting for epiphanies. “I wanted to live life more deeply before I died.” He applied for a Guggenheim to study the sacred places of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Far East, and when he received the grant he and Jane and their two children set out to explore Greece and Italy and ultimately Japan.

One evening, just before the Eliots left for Greece, Alex arranged for Benny Goodman to come to the Arbus studio for a midnight drink. Allan was overjoyed, since Goodman was his idol; he’d been trying to emulate his musical style for over twenty years. Coffee and brandy were served; there was some conversation and then Goodman borrowed Allan’s clarinet and began to play. He was only going to play a few numbers, but he ended up “blowing until the early hours—gorgeous, marvelous stuff,” while Allan sat there very still.

Diane was starting to develop and print some of her most recent pictures in John Stewart’s East Side darkroom. (Stewart, an English cosmopolite and memorable
Vogue
still-life photographer, lent Diane his studio whenever he traveled.) It was another small step toward independence, moving through a strange borrowed space—turning on lights, coming upon an unrecognizable chair, pillow, or dish. And then she would labor over her contacts in the darkroom, trying to decipher which were the most dramatic stances, the most peculiar evocative expressions, expressions that were at once familiar and strange.

Allan meanwhile had enrolled in Mira Rostova’s acting class and he started doing scenes from Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya.
At first, he seemed constricted with emotion as he stood on the stage, and he would hide behind his rich, mellifluous voice. He was ten to fifteen years older than most of
the other students, so he was self-conscious and refused to go out with them afterward. But in time he did, and then everybody treated him with great deference because he was a well-known photographer. He kept insisting that he hated photography and wasn’t much good at it; his wife, Diane, was much better, he said.

Gradually Allan got more caught up with acting; the classes with Rostova were stimulating, and he made friends with a few of the students and listened to them talk about auditions, rehearsals, the electric performances of the moment—Colleen Dewhurst and George C. Scott in
Children of Darkness.
Such talk only dramatized the fact that he loved show business, make-believe, the theater, more than anything else. He had to be an actor! he kept repeating.

He and Diane would go over and over again the pros and cons of his quitting fashion photography once and for all. But it was the same old problem: how could he support the family? Most of the actors he knew lived on unemployment insurance. He was afraid to take that chance—he couldn’t bear to be without money—and Diane could do nothing to help since she was earning almost no money at all. Whenever she took her portfolio to a magazine, she would be dismissed. No art director warmed to her images of sideshows or “headless” men. Her close-ups of children—usually giggling hysterically, their bodies distorted by a kind of curious foreshortening—were like El Greco paintings. It upset her that she couldn’t contribute to household expenses and she felt even more helpless when she confided to Lisette Model that on top of everything else she and Allan seemed to be growing apart. It was happening to several of her friends—working women like herself who had also been “child brides,” had had babies in their teens, and now some twenty years later suddenly found they had very little in common with their husbands.

And yet in spite of this Diane was determined to stay married. Allan was decent, good, supportive, and he had helped to create a comfortable, well-run little nest for their family.

But nothing seemed right anymore. The days and evenings seemed bleak. They were starting to have little to say to each other, and Allan became, as time went on, increasingly unreachable.

He continued to seem miserable until he started rehearsing a scene for class with a young actress. They worked so well together he couldn’t stop talking about the experience, and Diane grew uneasy, but she didn’t show it; she behaved very politely even when the young actress visited their studio.

Weeks went by. Allan seemed happier. He had always worn his hair
slicked back, but now he began to wear it wild and curly around his head. The young actress had told him how terrific it looked.

This upset Diane. She confided to a friend she thought Allan might be falling in love. Days passed. Allan said or did nothing out of the ordinary—he just seemed happy now and Diane felt increasingly betrayed. Her identity seemed to evaporate. A possible sexual involvement didn’t bother her—at issue were her emotions. She couldn’t believe he would fall in love with someone else—that it was possible for him to fall in love with somebody new. Eventually she phoned Cheech terribly distraught and asked to see her right away.

Cheech says, “I told her to meet me at the Baths on Monroe Street. The walls were blistered from decades of steam, the place was dank—water dripping everywhere; the boards were rotting from so much water. I remember that the carpet was soaking wet and the flowered patterns had faded from so much extreme moisture. We sat fully clothed in the steam on the stairs and there were elderly Jewish women surrounding us—wrinkled old crones with hanging boobs and stringy hair wrapped in sheets, murmuring to each other while Diane poured her heart out to me, rocking back and forth.”

She cried with great moans and sighs, tears streaming down her face. She had believed in their love, she cried, in their deep attachment—she believed that love between a man and a woman was the significant and all-encompassing experience and should be treasured. She had loved Allan since she was fourteen—loved him, revered him, trusted him, depended on him. Her own infidelities were unimportant—she had never loved these men or said she loved them! But she was sure Allan had fallen in love with another woman, head over heels, and she could not accept it. He was withdrawing his love from her, and that withdrawal was so powerful it was crushing the potential in her for feeling. “I am going to be numbed!” she cried. Finally she said, “I can’t talk about it anymore!” And then, idiotically, “I’m going to take pictures!” With that, she took out her camera and began snapping away at the women lolling around in their sheets in the cloudy steam.

Cheech told her not to—it wasn’t proper, it wasn’t the time—but she kept on photographing—click! click! click!—as if her life depended on it. The women seated on the steps told her to stop, but she wouldn’t. Instead, she crept around and squatted close as if she were trying to kill them with her camera. And suddenly en masse these old women rose up in their sheets screaming and began to attack her. They tore her camera away from her and tossed it into a bucket of water and “We were thrown out on the street by the management,” Cheech says.

“Suddenly it was insanely funny. We came out into the day and collapsed into a cab, and although Diane’s face was ugly and strained—her skin ashen—we laughed hysterically, uncontrollably, all the way back to East 68th Street. When we reached the studio, we were still laughing and Allan greeted us at the door and we kept laughing at him and he kept asking, ‘What is going on between you two? What in God’s name is so funny?’ ”

F
OR A WHILE
D
IANE
and Allan continued to live together; they didn’t want to break up the family unit and they wanted to be civilized about everything. There would always be a residual affection and respect between them. “They were gently estranged,” Robert Meservey commented.

In time they moved from the triplex down to Greenwich Village and opened a new photography studio in the mammoth parlor floor of a reconverted townhouse at 71 Washington Place. Ali MacGraw lived on the second floor; the
New Yorker
cartoonist Opi and his wife were on the third; and Off-Broadway director Jess Kummel, who committed suicide shortly after the Arbuses moved into the building, had the penthouse. (Kummel had been directing workshops at the Theatre de Lys when he found out he was going deaf and became unrelievedly despondent. Shortly before he killed himself, he pasted a
Variety
headline above his kitchen door: “
LAST YEAR IT WAS GREAT
.”

Diane never felt settled at Washington Place. Tina Fredericks came to lunch there once and the two women sat on the floor and ate from picnic baskets. “It wasn’t very homy,” Tina says. Allan had his Vespa parked in a corner.

Eventually Allan sublet the mezzanine of the studio to Arthur Unger, who ran his Young World Press from that space for the next eight years. “Allan said he didn’t need so much room; I think he also needed the extra rent. He didn’t seem to be doing much fashion business.” Unger remembers a succession of very attractive women going in and out of the Arbus studio who seemed particularly at home there. Diane, on the contrary, did not.

Unger often ran into her early in the morning when he was coming back from the newsstand with the
Times.
Diane would be leaving the studio, usually dressed in her ratty fur coat. “She looked to me like an average college student. And she always seemed acutely embarrassed at being discovered coming out of the Arbus studio, even though as Allan’s wife she presumably belonged there.”

Subsequently, Diane and her daughters moved again, to a little converted stable at 121 ½ Charles Street, in back of the 6th Precinct police station. Diane gave the girls the upstairs bedrooms; she slept in the living room, putting up a screen next to her couch to give her some privacy, although it kept toppling over. (In time she covered the screen with some favorite images: her latest contact prints, postcards, a portrait of a woman with elephantiasis.) Allan helped with the move, even scraping and painting the floor, but he stayed more and more at Washington Place. In the evenings he let his acting teacher, Mira Rostova, use his studio for her classes—he was getting more involved with Off-Broadway theater and with mime, and began appearing in plays at the Café Cino. “He dreamed of being a movie star,” Emile de Antonio says.

Ted Schwartz recalls seeing Diane backstage after one of Allan’s performances—“I think she was wearing a tuxedo”—and she took photographs of Allan in a production of Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard.
(“He was really good,” says another member of the cast.)

Diane and Allan still entertained together sporadically, but there was a distance between them; their marriage was crumbling. Emile de Antonio remembers one party at which Diane was surrounded by Esta Leslie (now Mrs. Hilton Kramer), Tina Fredericks, Cheech, and Maya Deren. The women all treated her with fierce maternal tenderness as if they could sense what she was going through.

She appeared ambivalent about her situation with Allan. By now she knew they would have to separate eventually, but she couldn’t face that inevitability. They agreed to remain partners in photography (the Diane and Allan Arbus studio didn’t close until 1969). Throughout their difficulties they remained as close as brother and sister—as twins. And in some ways they still resembled twins—they had the same mournful, watchful expression in their round, dark eyes. They had lived like twins for so long; it had been their way of surviving.

Now their attitude toward each other and toward their lost love was one of nostalgia, of looking back into their teens when they’d met and been so passionate. And they still shared their collaboration, their perceptions, as they had for over twenty years of struggle to achieve something artistic and original. But only one twin was the real artist, as Allan was the first to admit. “Diane is the more talented,” he would repeat over and over. Obviously he meant it; he was proud of her talent and encouraged and nurtured it. And Diane knew how necessary Allan’s sympathetic, intelligent presence had been to her all those years. She wanted to go on sharing and discovering with him, and she went on trying to until she died.

Diane did not tell her parents, so her mother had no idea the marriage was in trouble. “I thought Diane and Allan would always be together,” Gertrude Nemerov says. “They seemed to care about each other so much.” Meanwhile the Nemerovs had made some major readjustments of their own. In 1957 David Nemerov retired as president of Russeks
*
and sold some of his stock. After auctioning off most of their antiques, he and Gertrude moved to Florida and the penthouse of the Palm Beach Towers, where David began painting fulltime—mostly vivid flower studies, but also paintings of Central Park, the Manhattan skyline, Radio City. In November 1958 he had his first major exhibit of fifty paintings at Gallery 72 in Manhattan and he sold forty-two of his canvases at prices ranging from $350 to $1250. “A lot of his Seventh Avenue cronies bought his stuff,” Nate Cummings says. Cummings himself bought two Nemerovs for the lobby of his Sara Lee cheesecake factory in Chicago.

Alex Eliot flew in from Europe to review the exhibit for
Time
magazine. “Nemerov’s paintings are crude and luminous and intensely colorful,” Alex wrote. “He’s obviously been inspired by the French impressionists.” When he asked Nemerov to explain why his paintings sold so rapidly, Nemerov answered, “People who bought them were mainly people of means who prefer a colorful painting. But when a stranger walks in and pays for a painting of yours, life becomes wonderful. You see, I couldn’t bear to be a failure. Not only in my eyes but in the eyes of the world.”