Diane Arbus (4 page)

As time went by, Diane would accompany Renée and their nanny across Central Park, identifying trees and statues along the way. “Diane was my idol,” Renée says, “my point of reference for everything.”

When Renée got older, Diane read her
Grimms’ Fairy Tales, A Child’s History of the World, Gulliver’s Travels, Peter Pan,
the Oz books, and especially
Alice in Wonderland.
Diane marveled over Alice as giant, Alice as midget, Alice fat and Alice thin, and she would often run to the bathroom and stare at her reflection in the glass. Am I really big…am I really small…am I in any way imperfect…am I just right? Like most children, Diane was fascinated by her mirror image.

Meanwhile, Howard had taken up the piano and at home he practiced diligently. Diane (who’d refused to go on studying music after her brother started) would sometimes plop down next to him on the piano bench and correct him. “No, no, it shouldn’t be played
that
way but
this
way,” and she’d demonstrate, her fingers flying over the keys. Then she’d run off to fuss over Renée.

Howard invariably dismissed Renée as “the baby,” but he seemed
briefly annoyed that Diane was no longer focusing her attention on him alone. For her part, Diane possessed a certain command over both her brother and her sister, making them do what she wanted, says a Nemerov cousin who used to observe them playing together.

Since there was such an age difference, the siblings rarely went anywhere together except to the dentist. “There was this dentist—a friend—who’d come to Daddy with a hard-luck story,” Renée says, “a hard-luck story that his business was going bankrupt and he was so in debt he was going to kill himself. Daddy lent him money (as he often did with friends) and got him patients. He used to send Diane, Howard, and me to him constantly, almost every month for years. We were constantly being X-rayed, drilled, worked over, chiseled at… When we grew up, we all had terrible trouble with our teeth.”

Howard writes: “It frequently crossed my mind that [the dentist] wanted my teeth to outlast me, that I was his monument, those fillings would still be there when the last Pyramid had been worn down to the desert… Ideas of death and eternity in connection with teeth appear thus early in my life, and it comes to me now that behind
‘lux aeterna’
is the dentist’s overhead light which I described in a short story (about a man who tried to kill himself)… (‘Looking down your throat’ is an expression of triumphant aggression and hostility, chiefly in poker games).”

In 1930, when she was seven, Diane began attending Ethical Culture School on Central Park West. Most of the couples the Nemerovs knew were sending their children to this school, which was part of the Ethical Cultural system, based on the religious humanistic philosophy, also called Ethical Culture, which had been developed by Felix Adler in New York around 1867. Adler, who’d been trained as a rabbi, maintained it didn’t matter whether you believed in God; in life what mattered was “deed, not creed.” At Ethical Culture emphasis was placed on “a love of learning,” one of its finest English teachers, Elbert Lenrow, says. Lenrow, who was also Howard’s first mentor, adds, “The artistic development of each student was stressed and particular value was placed on the creative arts as both an intellectual discipline and a means of nourishment.”

Other teachers at Ethical Culture remember Diane as subject to occasional tantrums but otherwise well behaved and “powerfully bright.” “Diane Nemerov demonstrates a large vocabulary, the ability to read and concentrate better than her peers and she has a marked talent for drawing,” stated one third-grade report.

David Nemerov had already recognized his daughter’s mental agility, her specialness. He was proud, but he was fearful, too. After reading the school report he remarked to his sister Bessie Shapiro that maybe Diane was too bright for a little girl. What should they do? He subsequently
contacted Ethical Culture by letter and asked that Diane be given extra homework. They did so and she rapidly completed it.

Now she was growing tall and slender, and her thick brown hair hung down her back in tangled curls. Mamselle had left the Nemerovs the previous summer and Diane “loathed” her new nanny (and all subsequent ones). In rebellion she became a “grubby kid” for a while. “I refused to keep clean,” she said. Her father was furious “because I was the apple of his eye and he wanted me to be the most possibly beautiful that I could possibly be.”

Excruciatingly shy, she lived in a state of constant fear. For years cruel and wily kidnappers pursued her in her fantasies—panting, haunting her steps. From an early age she was beset by shadows of herself as persecuted victim and courageous heroine—products of her rage and longing to be noticed. But, like most imaginative children, she told no one of her secret terrors—nor would she admit for the longest time that she preferred darkness to light—loved, in fact, to stay in a pitch-black room where she could wait for monsters to come and tickle her to death. Her sister, Renée, insisted that a lamp be kept burning in her bedroom all night. Once the lampshade caught on fire and Mr. Nemerov had to run and beat out the flames. It was around four in the morning. Diane stayed curled up among her pillows in the purple darkness, listening to the scuffling and the cries.

In her autobiography she confided, “The teachers always used to think I was smart and it would torment me because I knew that I was really terribly dumb.”

At around this period of her life the family moved from the apartment on 90th Street to another at Park Avenue and 93rd. Then during the Depression they moved again, settling at 146 Central Park West in an apartment house called the San Remo, where Diane was to live until shortly before she got married.

The San Remo apartment was huge—fourteen rooms with wood-paneled walls and decorated with French and English antiques. “It was essentially dreary,” Diane said. The only detail Howard remembers about the San Remo apartment was “Rodin’s ‘Le Baiser’ reproduced in bronze on the edge of a jade ashtray in the living room.”

Diane’s bedroom overlooked Central Park and it was cluttered with books. She didn’t enjoy collecting toys, as Howard did; his closet was crammed with toy soldiers and expensive sports equipment from Abercrombie and Fitch. Diane treasured a strange speckled rock she had discovered on a path near Sheep Meadow in the park. For a while she kept goldfish in a bowl, but when they died, she flushed them down the toilet and said, “Please, no more.”

On weekends when she was seven and eight years old, Diane and her
cousin Dorothy Evslin would play together. They’d throw bags of water from Diane’s bedroom window onto pedestrians walking up Central Park West. Or they’d take turns talking into Howard’s “phone”—two Dixie Cups connected by a piece of string. Every so often they’d wander around the apartment, which to Dorothy (who lived in Brooklyn) seemed “gigantic and somber.” Once Diane showed her Gertrude Nemerov’s dressing room. “I ohhed and ahhed over Aunt Gertrude’s collections of cut-glass perfume bottles. ‘Most of them are filled with tea,’ Diane told me.”

During the early years of the Depression, things got so bad that Gertrude Nemerov sold some of her jewels and for a while her parents moved into the San Remo and the living room filled up with Frank Russek’s cronies from the track. Diane recalled: “I remember vaguely family conferences which took place behind closed doors…like loans negotiated and things like that…but the front had to be maintained…in business, if people smelled failure in you, you’d had it.”

At Russeks, David Nemerov worked longer hours, exhorting his buyers to order less merchandise but “don’t lower the quality.” To save money, he didn’t cover the Paris collections; anyhow, he knew from the fashion grapevine that Schiaparelli was experimenting with synthetic fabrics that disintegrated when cleaned; that Chanel’s entire line was a study in cotton and piqué.

Every week, in an effort to attract business, Nemerov changed Russeks’ windows. Sometimes he would work all night with his assistant, Miss Christ, a beautiful little woman whose energy and imagination were similar to his. Together they displayed the styles of the period (flowing lounging pajamas, “tea gowns” with horse-halter necks) against all manner of exaggerated backgrounds: driftwood, whitened tree branches, Chinese lanterns, white-on-white paper decorated with fishnets. “Once they displayed Russian cossack costumes against what looked like snowdrifts,” says George Radkai, who was a Russeks illustrator. “Another time they hung tapestries and placed dozens of mannequins in front of them dressed in the most opulent furs and jewels. It was a daring thing to do at the height of the Depression. None of the other Fifth Avenue stores were doing anything in their windows—they looked dead—and here was Russeks exploding with rococo glitter and surrealistic fashion excitement. David’s windows were like stage sets—like George Piatt Lynes or Hoyningen-Huene photographs—specially lit so you could see the sheen of fur against the bloom of a little flowered hat. The Russeks windows drew crowds.”

Even so, the store was losing a great deal of money because Nemerov refused to do what Saks and Best’s were doing—turning their main floors
into a mass of accessories bars with cosmetics, jewelry, handbags, scarves. The fur department was still what you saw the instant you entered Russeks. “It was quiet as a morgue,” Dorothy Evslin says. Nevertheless the Nemerovs “kept up the front” (Diane’s phrase), entertaining a great deal in the San Remo. At least once a week an extra maid would be hired to help serve a dinner party of twelve which invariably included the Millers, who were still the Nemerovs’ closest friends (when you asked Miller how his shoe business compared with other shoe businesses, he’d always answer, “We’re predominantly dominant”). There were also cigar makers and theater owners, and dress manufacturers like Ben Zuckerman, who often came to the Nemerovs. “It was like being part of a closed corporation,” says a childhood friend of Diane’s, whose real-estate tycoon father was part of the group that dined there regularly.

These men, mostly immigrant Jews from Poland or Russia whose parents had fled the pogroms and worked their way up from the Lower East Side slums to the “gilded ghettoes of Central Park West,” displayed the same kind of snobbism as the uptown German Jews—bankers like Selig-man, Warburg, Schiff. The Seligmans and the Schiffs would never entertain the Russeks or the Nemerovs; it was a question of class. And, carrying snobbery a step further, the Russeks would never entertain David Nemerov’s parents, who lived in Brooklyn—David Nemerov rarely if ever invited his father and mother to the San Remo. In that mammoth apartment any suggestion of superstition or poverty had been blotted out.

Diane and most of her friends were brought up to have all the accomplishments of the well-bred eighteenth-century English lady—painting, piano, languages, manners, a thorough familiarity with art. “Our upbringing was a cultural phenomenon,” a classmate of Diane’s says. “It never would have happened if our parents hadn’t made a great deal of money very quickly and hadn’t known how to deal with it. The kind of money our families had magnified their feelings of inadequacy, of personal failure. We grew up in an emotional desert of shame—never affirmation—and those of us who were taught to be assimilated were filled with self-loathing.”

Another childhood friend remembers that in spite of the Depression she and Diane and Renée and others like them were raised as “Jewish princesses.” They had the “kvelling mamas” who almost daily told them they were special—they had the lessons at Viola Wolff’s dancing class, the orthodontia, and, for several of them, later the nose job. “We were isolated, we were pampered, we were spoiled, we knew nothing else but that world on Central Park West, so we took it for granted.”

She then recalls Diane’s reaction when the two of them were taken as teen-agers to Arthur Loew’s vast estate at Oyster Bay. They swam in the
outdoor swimming pool and later watched a screening of
The Little Colonel.
“We compared notes on the afternoon and suddenly Diane looked at me and said, ‘I’m Jewish!’ As if she’d forgotten.”

“I never knew I was Jewish when I was growing up,” she said. “I didn’t know it was an unfortunate thing to be! Because I grew up in a Jewish city in a Jewish family and my father was a rich Jew and I went to a Jewish school, I was confirmed in a sense of unreality. All I could feel was my sense of unreality.” (In 1967, after her first major exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Diane commented to
Newsweek:
“It’s irrational to be born in a certain place and time and of a certain sex. It’s irrational how much you can change circumstances and how much you can’t. The whole idea of me being born rich and Jewish is part of that irrationality. But if you’re born one thing, you can dare—venture—to be ten thousand other things.”)

While “Jewishness” was never central to her life or Howard’s (they attended Temple Emanu-El only on Holy Days and they went to Sunday school grudgingly), their “Jewishness” was still a fact. And always dramatized when, every other year, they celebrated Passover at Meyer and Fanny Nemerov’s apartment in Brooklyn. It was practically the only time they ever saw their paternal grandparents, and they found the experience strangely consoling. Surrounded by immigrants and the sons and daughters of immigrants who all shared a common past, the awareness that they were Jewish had residual significance.

Later, at Harvard, Howard toyed with the idea of converting to Catholicism (for “silly aesthetic reasons”). But he didn’t, and in his poetry
*
he frequently reaffirms his Jewishness. Perhaps his clearest statement is in the poem “Debate with the Rabbi,” part of which goes:

Stubborn and stiff-necked man! the Rabbi cried.

The pain you give me, said I.

Instead of bowing down, said he,

You go on in your obstinacy.

We Jews are that way, I replied.

Later Diane would take dozens of photographs of Jewish matrons in which she explored not only their collective memories but the relationship between role-playing and cultural identity. And she was to find an affinity with the famous fashion photographer Richard Avedon because his Russian immigrant father had also owned a Fifth Avenue dress shop; she
would laugh when she heard Garry Winogrand shout, “The best photographers are Jewish!”