Diane Arbus (27 page)

Howard came to the exhibit and kidded his father about being reviewed in
Time
magazine before his son was. And Nemerov retorted, “You see? An artist can be successful at making money.”

“It was a bitter pill to swallow,” John Pauker says. “Howard had been struggling for years to write fine poetry and he had a wonderful reputation and received a great deal of praise, but he’d made very little money. Now in a matter of months his father was earning up to a thousand dollars for one lousy oil. It wasn’t fair.”

Not long after the Arbuses became estranged, Sudie Trazoff, a former student of Howard’s from Bennington who lived across the street from Diane, offered to serve as baby-sitter and general factotum. She was the first of several young women who worked devotedly for Diane over the years and who became “like family.” Amy Arbus remembered in a radio interview, “As we got poorer and poorer and after my sister, Doon, went away to college, we had boarders—people who would take care of me and
clean up the house a little even though it wasn’t their job.” This enabled Diane to go around peddling her photographs. She was desperate to make some money on her own.

Allan was, of course, supporting Diane and their two daughters, working as a fashion photographer—and acting whenever he could. It was an exhausting schedule, but he was determined to do both because he was suddenly happier than he’d been in years. And Diane was happy for him although she herself was miserable.

She had lunch with Tina Fredericks at the Museum of Modern Art and told her how Allan had left her for “this actress.” She seemed in despair. She felt as if she had failed in some basic way. Was part of it that she had never been self-supporting? Never been financially independent? Maybe if she had contributed more money to the running of the household…

“She was upset about everything,” Tina Fredericks says. “Nothing I said made her feel any better.” They eventually began talking about her photographs. She told Tina she had to sell her photographs but didn’t know how to market them. For the past couple of years she had been working in isolation, apart from Allan’s encouragement and Lisette Model’s teaching. She had been taking pictures haphazardly—village kids in the streets, Central Park. Lately she’d sneaked back into the Ukrainian Baths and managed to take some shots, hiding her camera under a towel, until she was thrown out again by the irate management.

Harper’s Bazaar
and
Vogue
were the only places where art photography was ever seriously considered editorially; otherwise as television became the all powerful medium, magazine outlets for photographers began shrinking.
Colliers
folded.
The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies Home Journal, Look,
and
Life
kept asking for upbeat photo essays but that was something Diane had no interest in supplying.

Even so she tried to get an assignment from
Life,
since the single-page rate for a black-and-white photograph averaged between $500 and $800, but her portfolio was judged too idiosyncratic, as was Robert Frank’s—he did get assignments, but his work was always rejected as being “too harsh.”

Eventually Frank Zachary, the art director of
Holiday
magazine, gave her one job. “She photographed the gossip columnist Leonard Lyons on his nightclub rounds,” Zachary says. “But she couldn’t get Lyons to pay any attention to her, to relate to her, so finally she cornered him in Times Square, then she backed out into oncoming traffic and snapped the astonished expression on his face.” She was paid $75 for the portrait.

Tina Fredericks was working in a building near
Holiday;
she had left
Glamour
and was now picture editor of the
Ladies’ Home Journal.
Her
marriage had broken up and she was seeing a great deal of Emile de Antonio, or De, as his friends called him. “De knows everybody in the art world,” Tina told Diane. “De can help you sell your work.” A large, unkempt man with a rich, hearty laugh, De invariably wore different-colored socks and soiled sweatshirts. He was from Philadelphia and independently wealthy, but as an undergraduate he had organized rubber-plant workers and worked as a barge captain. He had been a classmate of John F. Kennedy’s at Harvard. After Harvard he taught philosophy at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Eventually he moved to a house in Pound Ridge, New York, near the avant-garde composer John Cage—and the two men became close friends. (In 1957 De organized Cage’s twenty-fifth-anniversary concert at Town Hall, which turned out to be musically as wildly dissonant an event as Nijinsky’s
Rite of Spring.)

Through Cage, De got to know the painters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who were then penniless; once he got them a job designing window displays at Tiffany. “De connected artists with everything from neighborhood movie houses to huge corporations,” wrote Andy Warhol, who maintained that De had defined his stark black-and-white painting of a Coca-Cola bottle as “remarkable art—a reflection of our society”; it was De who in 1960 convinced the Stable Gallery to hang the first major exhibit of Warhol’s work. Recently De had been so inspired by the syncopated sound track and images in Robert Frank’s
Pull My Daisy
that he became distributor of the film, and he himself was about to make a film on Senator Joseph McCarthy—“a collage-type film inspired by my friends Bob Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns” which he eventually called
Point of Order
when it was released.

Tina thought De could promote Diane and her photographs as he’d promoted Warhol’s soup cans and later Frank Stella’s black paintings. “But I was never anyone’s manager—I never took a commission,” De says. “I guess what you’d call me is a catalyst. I helped artists get galleries by putting dealers and artists together. For some reason Tina thought I was very ‘together,’ which was a crock. What does a displaced intellectual do who’s never found an art? I’d originally wanted to be a writer. I used to drink myself into oblivion. I got married six times, but I gave the appearance of knowing what I was about.”

Diane began visiting De in his grimy office in what he called “the Brute Force building” at Sixth Avenue and 53rd Street. “I called it that because the Mark Hellinger ad for his movie
Brute Force
was still plastered on one of the building’s walls. Anyhow, Diane would drop by, always loaded down with cameras—and we’d talk.” But not about her career or how she could sell her pictures. “And it wasn’t that she wasn’t ambitious—nobody
could work as hard as she did and not be ambitious—and it wasn’t that she didn’t care about money or fame; it was just that she made no effort to go after it; she refused to indulge in any ploys or subterfuges.”

Instead she and De talked about monsters—mythic monsters like the Cretan minotaur and the dog-headed boy. Diane knew all about such literary
monstres
as Count Dracula, who turned into a vampire, and Poe’s “Hop Frog,” about a crippled dwarf who is also a Fool.

De took Diane to see Tod Browning’s 1932 movie
Freaks,
which Dan Talbot was reviving at his New Yorker Theatre on the Upper West Side. She was enthralled because the freaks in the film were not imaginary monsters, but
real
—midgets, pinheads, dwarfs had always excited, challenged, and terrified her because they defied so many conventions. Sometimes she thought her terror was linked to something deep in her subconscious. Gazing at the human skeleton or the bearded lady, she was reminded of a dark, unnatural, hidden self. As a little girl she’d been forbidden to look at anything “abnormal”: the albino with his flat pink eyes, the harelipped baby, the woman swollen with fat from some mysterious glandular disease. Forbidden to look, Diane had stared all the more and developed an intense sympathy for any human oddity. Those creatures had had normal mothers, but they’d popped out of the womb altered by some strange force she couldn’t understand.

Diane returned to see
Freaks
again and again, sometimes with a woman friend, sometimes with De. Often they would go in the afternoon and sit in the dark, cavernous, almost empty theater smoking pot while in front of them beribboned, feeble-minded pinheads cavorted across the screen.

At this point Diane was photographing Miss Stormé De Larverie backstage at the Apollo Theatre on West 42nd Street; Stormé was the single and sole male impersonator in a female-impersonator show called
25 Men and a Girl.
She was black and she dressed as a man in impeccably cut suits she’d had made in London. Diane spent hours photographing and talking to Stormé as well as writing about “the delicate art of her transformation from woman to man. [Stormé] has consciously experimented [with] her appearance as a man without ever tampering with her nature as a woman,” Diane wrote, “or trying to be what she is not.” She quoted Stormé as saying, “If you have any respect for the human race, you know that nature’s not a joke.”

At some point, De says, Diane timidly showed him a few of her photographs of Stormé. “They were grainy and quite wrinkled. Apparently Diane was ironing her prints on her ironing board. But it didn’t matter, she’d been able to capture a combination of anxiety and pleasure in her
subject’s face. Stormé seemed pleased to have her picture taken, but worried that too much was being revealed in her collaboration with the photographer.” De continues: “You know, I jotted down some notes about Diane. So many people have used these words I hate to use them again, but they meant so much to me when I read them as a teen-ager. It’s what James Joyce suggested were prerequisites for an artist’s survival in the modern world—[that the artist must practice] ‘silence, cunning, and exile.’ I always felt these were emblems of Diane’s work. She was making herself an exile in New York, her home, the place she’d grown up in and lived her entire life. When I knew her, she was starting to move about the city unknown—quiet as a mouse. She seemed so small! I don’t know whether she actually
was
that small, but she gave an impression of fragility, or smallness—she’d creep into a room or onto the street with her cameras and you almost couldn’t see her. You forgot she was there. She blended into the scenery.”

She had begun to prowl the city at all hours, striking up a conversation with any outcast she happened to encounter. It was hard at first, she was so shy with people, but she wasn’t afraid of New York at two a.m. Her life was beginning to take on a night-blooming quality, De thought. She seemed to be more alive in the dark as she traveled by herself on the subway, laden down with her cameras. The trains pounded in and out of the dark tunnels, headlights shining like eyes. The stations were deep, empty, odoriferous—“like the pits of hell,” she said. She saw hunchbacks, paraplegics, exhausted whores, boys with harelips, pimply teen-age girls. She was sure the ladies in ratty fur coats were cashiers.

She considered photographing the men who lived in the bowels of Grand Central Station—bums who wrapped their feet in old newspapers to keep warm. She befriended a bag lady—a woman who for a long time was a fixture in the long corridor connecting the Lexington Avenue subway to the Times Square shuttle. The bag lady would lie in a corner day and night, without moving. The rumble of the trains in the distance was like the sound of the sea in her ear; gradually it was going to rise up and envelop her completely.

Then there was the blind, bearded giant swathed in Army-surplus blankets who called himself Moondog. An imposing, hostile figure, he stood outside De’s office on the corner of West 54th Street and Sixth Avenue for eight hours at a stretch; he tolerated the people who gave him pennies. Like a biblical prophet, Moondog carried a staff, and he wore a Viking’s helmet decorated with tusks. “People keep asking me why do you dress the way you do?” he would say. “I tell them it’s my way of saying no.”

Diane got to know him. Sometimes she would sit with him while he ate his supper at a cafeteria near Carnegie Hall. Often she would take her daughter Amy along. Amy recalls, “He had an awful smile.”

Diane discovered that Moondog considered himself a serious musician, had made several recordings, and had appeared on TV and in nightclubs. But he subsisted mainly by begging. “It’s not degrading,” he would say. “Homer begged and so did Jesus Christ. It was only the Calvinists who ordained that no man shall eat who does not work.”

Moondog was the son of an Episcopal minister. He came to New York in 1942, immediately adopting his nickname out of devotion to a former pet who had bayed at the moon, and quickly established himself in Times Square, where he stood for several years on a traffic island playing the “oo” and the “uni,” percussion instruments of his own design.

When around 1955 he decided to stop his street performances because of the crowds he drew, he moved to West 54th Street, where he remained still as a statue as the trucks and cars whizzed past. Sometimes he would sell copies of his verse written in rhymed heptameter—couplets such as “Christianity’s uncompromising war on error or evil would appear to me to be an evil error.”

Diane wanted to photograph him and he agreed on one condition—that she spend the night with him at his fleabag hotel on West 44th Street. “Presumably Diane did spend the night with Moondog,” De says, “and presumably all they did was talk. I don’t know what happened for certain—she said she took pictures of him, but she never showed them to me. Apparently Moondog had a wife and a small baby, but he and his wife didn’t get along.”

Diane talked about his tiny, cockroach-infested room, which he loved because there were pigeons flapping and cooing outside his window—“a little bit of nature.” Although he couldn’t see, he knew where all his possessions were in that room. Behind the door was his treasured trimba, two triangular drums with a cymbal attached. On the trimba Moondog would beat out what one newspaper critic called his “delicate Coplandesque modern rhythms.”

It was weird photographing the blind, “because they can’t fake their expressions,” Diane said. “They don’t know what their expressions are, so there is no mask.”

Moondog had no idea what he was doing when she photographed him, she said, no idea that his huge, hairy face was so relaxed and goofy it seemed as if he were either drunk or floating through the great beyond.