Diane Arbus (3 page)

Diane’s description of early childhood is slightly different. In an autobiography she wrote at Fieldston School when she was sixteen she recalled that she was “cranky—always crying, yelling, screaming. I can always remember the feeling I had. I always felt warm and tired and there was warm sun on me and I didn’t want to wake up…”

During this time (except for trips to Palm Beach) Diane lived with her parents and brother at 115 West 73rd Street. When she was around four, the family moved to an apartment at Park Avenue and 90th Street. Thick drapes hung across the windows. “It was almost always dark,” Howard recalls.

There were two maids, a chauffeur named Scott, a cook named Eva, as well as Helvis, the German nanny for Howard, and a French nanny who
took care of Diane for the first seven years of her life. “Mamselle,” as she was called, was a cool, undemonstrative young woman who wore her hair in a bun. “She had a hard sad quite lovely face and I adored her,” Diane wrote. “She always looked as if she had a very sad secret.” Whenever Mamselle went on vacation, Diane would cry and cry and try to keep her from leaving. When they were together, the two rarely spoke, but Diane seemed very happy with her. When they did converse, it was in French and Diane enjoyed that, although she “didn’t know” she was “speaking French.”

One of her most vivid memories was being taken by Mamselle to the dried-up cavity of what had once been a reservoir in Central Park, where they peered down on a Hooverville shanty town made up of tin shacks. “This image wasn’t concrete, but for me it was a potent memory,” Diane told Studs Terkel years later. “Seeing the other side of the tracks, holding the hand of one’s governess.” Diane asked to go down into the cavity to investigate the shacks, but Mamselle wouldn’t let her. “She was very strict,” Diane said.

Whatever discipline or direction Diane and Howard received came not from their parents but from their various nannies and later from Kitty, the maid, “who had a terrific sense of humor,” Howard says, and who took them to the dentist and to their dancing and music lessons.

Gertrude Nemerov, an imperious, beautiful woman nicknamed “Buddy,” was proud of her little son and daughter although she sometimes seemed baffled by them. Early on she began apologizing for Diane and Howard’s “strangeness” because, unlike “most kids,” their noses were pressed in books. She once said she had “a hard time figuring out what they were talking about.”

Most mornings when the children were little, Mrs. Nemerov would lie in bed drinking coffee and smoking. She might phone her best friend, May Miller, the vivacious wife of the shoe tycoon Meurice Miller, who was filled with curiosity about everything; then at around 10:30 she would discuss the dinner menu with the cook, Eva. Although Eva exasperated everybody in the Nemerov family (she was rude and chewed incessantly on a toothpick), Mrs. Nemerov refused to criticize her because she didn’t want to lose her. “But she makes such marvelous pot roast,” she’d exclaim when Diane would cry out that Eva had been nosing through her dresser drawers again.

At around eleven, Mrs. Nemerov would rise and begin slowly creaming her face in front of a mirror. Sometimes Diane would watch, wondering at the self-absorbed reflection in the glass. Her mother often seemed to her to be cultivating an air of supreme indifference.

By 11:45 she was dressed and settled in her limousine, telling the chauffeur, Scott, to take her to Russeks.

Gertrude Nemerov went to the store several times a week for browsing and pricing and trying on the latest styles. She only window-shopped at Saks and Best’s—never bought there. Everybody on both sides of the family was supposed to get her clothes only at Russeks. “You can look at De Pinna and Bonwit’s or Tailored Woman—but just
look,”
the children were warned.

As soon as Diane was old enough to walk, she would accompany her mother in her treks through the store. Dressed in a reefer coat, white gloves, and tiny patent-leather slippers, she would toddle solemnly after her mother as Mrs. Nemerov swept through the narrow main floor across the purple velvet carpet and into the fur department.

Even before she started investigating a new shipment—it could be the latest sealskin coats, some ermine ball-wraps—the fur salesmen were bowing and scraping and “rubbing their hands together like shoe salesmen,” Diane said. “It was like being in some loathsome movie set in an obscure Transylvanian country, and the kingdom was humiliating.” Of this experience Diane said to the photographer Frederick Eberstadt, “I was treated like a crummy princess.” (Years afterward, as a photographer, her precise, unjudgmental eye would confront an entire series of grief-stricken “crummy princesses.”)

However, on those late mornings long ago, Diane would merely follow her mother into the elevator and up to the dress-and-suit department, or to the millinery salon to try on hats. Mrs. Nemerov greeted all the personnel by name. As the daughter of the founder of Russeks, she knew everybody. Russeks was a home away from home. She loved the store.

The last stop would always be David Nemerov’s wood-paneled office on the seventh floor. From that office with its ever-ringing phone and the secretaries and buyers hurrying in and out, Nemerov ran the store, okaying all merchandise, all ad copy, all window displays.

Preoccupied with Russeks, Nemerov showed little warmth or interest in his children, although in public he would always put his arms around them and make a great show of affection. In or out of the office he chainsmoked, and he suffered from a nervous stomach.

As a young man he’d been in two car accidents, so he never drove himself; instead he went everywhere by limousine. Chauffeurs came and went because he was such a demanding employer. One driver—the very handsome one named Scott, whom Mrs. Nemerov liked—quit in a huff over a mix-up about his day off and then wrote the Nemerovs a letter implying that they were “crude” and listing the abuses he thought he’d
been subjected to. Diane never forget the effect of that letter on her—his words “were both insulting and hurtful to me, because I was somehow implicated in the criticism, but I was equally critical [of my parents], which meant I played both sides.” She secretly thought of her father as “something of a phony. A lot of his friends were richer than he was, but he was the most flamboyant.”

At Russeks he could be charming and ebullient when business was going well, but much of the time his challenging, often brutal manner terrified personnel. “If you got in his way, he’d walk all over you,” a buyer said. At his angriest, either in the store or at home, he would appear infinitely reasonable; his voice would sink to a whisper. This would madden Gertrude and Diane and Howard, because they often couldn’t hear what he was saying but were afraid to tell him so.

Howard remembers his father as “an overtly powerful, power-using sort of guy. Diane and I were rarely punished, but everything in our house was based on approval, not love. This made us feel rather helpless because we never knew whether Daddy would approve or disapprove of something we did.” He gives as an example: “I once bought my father a postcard from a little trip I’d taken with my nanny to Van Cortlandt Park. Daddy lectured me very sternly on how much it cost, which must have been three cents.”

Until Howard was enrolled at the Franklin School in 1926, he and Diane were inseparable. It was as if they had passed through some secret experience together, and although it might not interest any of the other Russeks or Nemerovs, it bound them close together.

If they took a walk together in Central Park, they were accompanied by their nannies. Howard remembers that whenever he and Diane played in the park sandbox, they were forbidden by their nannies to take off their white gloves.

Once home, they ate their meals together, usually in silence, occasionally bickering. Both possessed powerful, quirky intellects, both read voluminously, absorbing knowledge and myths with ease, and they created rich fantasies which they shared with each other and no one else.

Their giftedness made them feel separate and alone. “We were protected and privileged as children,” Howard says, “but we were watched over incessantly. It made us fearful.” Their sense of themselves and their situation was reflected in the gravity with which they sat or stood, not looking at each other, but close as twins. Their eyes rested on their parents, the servants, weighing each situation, each event.

One July they traveled to Europe with their parents on the ocean liner
Aquitania.
While the Nemerovs stayed in Paris to view the collections, Howard and Diane were taken by Mamselle to Le Touquet, Proust’s
favorite vacation spot in the north of France, where they gorged on wild strawberries and Diane was frightened by a goat.

Diane and her brother fought a lot. Howard says they once struggled over a china doll that broke in their hands, and he believes Diane got a scar on her face as a result. “In early life, my sister and I used to blame one another, get one another punished quite a lot.” When it rained, they played football in the living room, and “the ball left the marks of its nose and seam on the ceiling so that we got found out,” Howard writes. “One Christmas morning we came into the living room secretly and managed to knock the tree over.” He doesn’t remember whether they put it back on its feet or not.

For the most part, however, they were obedient, well-behaved little children, with the same watchful, shining eyes, the same intense remoteness.

“Howard doted on Diane,” says a Nemerov cousin. “He kept a photograph of her in his wallet until she died. He was certainly in awe—because even when she was tiny, she never behaved like a little girl. She had innate sophistication—wisdom about things—and she was gorgeously intuitive. Howard turned into a highly critical, precise intellectual. It was some combination in one family.”

Since they were three years apart, Howard and Diane never attended the same classes, but for one year they were both at Fieldston, a private school in Riverdale. Teachers said they were the most gifted brother and sister who’d ever attended that institution. They hated being compared. Later, when Howard became a poet and Diane a photographer, they never discussed their work with each other. In fact, each rarely told anyone of the other’s existence. “And I for one have no theories as to how or why we became what we became,” Howard says now.

“My motto was already ‘Do what you’re told and they’ll leave you alone,’ ” he continues. “I didn’t like being bothered by people.”

Diane’s motto was “In God We Trust.” She had read it on a nickel and would repeat it every night before going to sleep. She yearned to have something or somebody to be faithful to, to believe in. She believed in Howard. He was strong and quiet and so handsome she liked to just look into his face. And he didn’t pester her as many relatives in the family did—Howard left her alone with her dreams. Except when they fought—pinching and mauling and tickling each other. Then she was briefly and tantalizingly his equal—sharing the pain and pleasure of fighting. And Diane always remained close to her brother in a primitive, non-verbal way. “We didn’t ‘explain’ or ‘reveal’ things to each other—we always respected each other’s privacy,” Howard says. “We were both very private people—even as kids.”

That feeling of privacy, of having an inner life, disturbed the other Nemerovs and Russeks—all the aunts, uncles, cousins who thrived on intrigue and talk. They would comment on Diane’s detachment, her moods, on Howard’s dour silences. Howard says, “My mother used to tell me, ‘You’ll never get on in the world—you’re much too uncommunicative.’ ”

When they were four and seven respectively, Diane and Howard posed for an oil painting. Although the portrait has been lost, Howard recalls that “[we sat] together on [a] red settee, she in a white dress…[my] hair, still blond…and brushed back into a pompadour…[Diane’s] expression [was] an indescribable compound of sullen and shy, [mine was] bolder, perhaps a trifle insolent, perhaps somewhat defensive. No smiles…[and] the artist’s difficulty with perspective made us appear to have shoed stumps instead of feet.”

Many years later Howard alluded to that portrait in a poem entitled “An Old Picture.”

Two children, dressed in court costume,

Go hand in hand through a rich room.

He bears a scepter, she a book;

Their eyes exchange a serious look.

High in a gallery above,

Grave persons frown upon their love;

Yonder behind the silken screen

Whispers the bishop with the queen.

These hold the future tightly reined,

It shall be as they have ordained:

The bridal bed already made,

The crypt also richly arrayed.

“The anecdote of the poem stressed the helplessness of these children under the traditional impositions of scepter and book, their fates already arranged by the parents (in the poem, the bishop, the queen).” Howard adds, “The poem ends with some considerable bitterness toward these grownups.”

*
To certain people Diane insisted she be addressed as
Dee-ann,
but she answered to “Dy-ann” as well. Howard shifted back and forth. In a letter he began “Diane—
DEEANN?”
Usually he called her “D.”

O
N
O
CT. 13, 1928,
when Diane was five and a half, Renée Nemerov, Diane’s younger sister, was born. As she had with her two previous children, Gertrude Nemerov delegated the care of this latest offspring to a nanny. Diane was very excited about Renee’s arrival. She began showering her with the affection she craved but had not found in her mother. At the slightest provocation she would pick her tiny sister up in her arms and rock her back and forth, kissing her over and over.

Diane would always feel a special kinship with small children. She saw herself in them—isolated creatures, secretly raging. Some of her earliest and best photographs are of little boys and girls confronting their energy and despair. One of her most famous, entitled “Exasperated Boy with Toy Hand Grenade,” she took in Central Park in 1961, part of a series she planned on rich children “[since] I was a rich child more or less myself.”