Diane Arbus (45 page)

The following afternoon Diane and Goldsmith visited Viva in her East 83rd Street apartment. The place was filthy. Dirty clothes were everywhere, and the remains of some pancakes rotted on tinfoil plates. Goldsmith began interviewing and Diane snapped pictures at a frantic pace while Viva wandered aimlessly around the room, telling stories about herself.

Her real name wasn’t Viva but Mary Hoffman, she said. She’d come from a family of nine kids—birthplace, the St. Lawrence Seaway area in upper New York State, “Thousand Islands country.” Her father was a criminal lawyer who had a collection of seventy-four violins. Her mother was a “Joe McCarthy supporter” whose two expressions were “Shut up” and “Cross your legs.” Enemas were a routine of her childhood, Viva said. She rambled on about that and other bodily functions as she perched naked on the toilet. Diane photographed her there and in her cluttered bedroom, trying to push the stuffing back into a chair pillow.

She went on talking. Her first lover, the photographer Louis Faurer, had painted elaborate makeup on her face every night, very tenderly. Masturbation was a better solution than going to bed with someone you don’t like. She compared Andy Warhol to Satan. “He just gets you and you can’t get away. Now I can’t make the simplest decision or go anywhere without asking Andy,” Viva said. “Andy has such a hold on us all.”

She babbled on until Goldsmith ran out of tapes and Diane had no more film. If her talk seemed self-exploitative, it was also self-generating—in talking she could perpetuate herself, assert herself, create herself. “I’m not as mixed up as I sound.”

On one freezing holiday evening Goldsmith and Diane accompanied Viva to Max’s Kansas City, where they were joined by Warhol, Ingrid Superstar, and Brigid Polk, whose father was Richard Berlin, president of
the Hearst Corporation. Viva sniffed meth from a spoon because, she said, she was suffering from menstrual cramps. Another time Diane went with Viva to an off-Broadway actor’s apartment on Perry Street. That night, according to Viva, “we all got stoned on hash, Diane too, and we were all very comfortable and friendly together.” That same night Diane took more photographs of Viva—having sex with the actor and his wife (who was mysteriously murdered later that year by an intruder).

The following morning Diane went back to the apartment very early to take a last batch of photographs. Viva’s memory is a bitter one: “Diane rang the doorbell. I’d been asleep on the couch. I was naked, so I wrapped a sheet around me and let Diane in and then I started putting mascara on. I was about to get into some clothes when Diane told me, ‘Don’t bother—you seem more relaxed that way—anyway, I’m just going to do a head shot.’ Asshole that I was, I believed her. She had me lie on the couch naked and roll my eyes up to the ceiling, which I did. Those photographs were totally faked. I looked stoned, but I
wasn’t
stoned, I was cold sober. There was nothing natural about those pictures, nothing spontaneous. They were planned and manipulated. Diane Arbus lied, cheated, and victimized me. She
said
she was just going to take head shots. I trusted her because she acted like a martyr, a little saint, about the whole thing. Jesus! Underneath she was just as ambitious as we all were to make it—to get ahead. I remember right afterwards I phoned Dick Avedon because he’d just done some gorgeous shots of me for
Vogue.
I told him, ‘Diane Arbus has taken pictures of me for
New York
magazine,’ and he groaned, ‘Oh, my God, no! You shouldn’t have let her.’ And Andy told me the same thing. After the fact. I’d never seen her work. I didn’t know an Arbus from a Philippe Halsman.”

The photographs of Viva which illustrated Barbara Goldsmith’s compelling interview in
New York,
April 1968, were absolutely merciless. Out of the hundreds of contacts Felker and Milton Glaser, the art director, chose two. In a jarring, grainy close-up Viva appears dazed and drugged, eyes rolled back in her sockets. There is no suggestion here that life is still paradoxical and complicated; it is merely brutal. The picture seems cropped in such a way as to emphasize Viva’s hairy armpit, her small breasts. In the other portrait Viva can be seen naked and roaring with laughter on a sheet-draped couch. There is a raunchy casualness about the pose; she appears pleased with herself right down to the soles of her dirty feet. The qualities that are distressing and alienating in some of Diane’s work—the severity, the seeming disregard for the subject—are very apparent here.

When Diana Vreeland saw the pictures, she reportedly screamed and
canceled the rest of Viva’s bookings for
Vogue;
the Viva pictures created such a furor along Madison Avenue that
New York
magazine seemed about to lose all its advertisers.

Today Clay Felker winces when he recalls the Viva portraits. “I made a terrible mistake publishing them,” he says. “They were too strong—they offended too many people.”

Diane told Crookston over the phone, “It is a cause célèbre.” Much mail. Canceled subscriptions, pro and con phone calls, and even a threatened lawsuit (from Viva, which was ultimately dropped).

Tom Morgan thinks the Viva portraits were “watershed pictures. They broke down barriers between public and private lives. They were painful photographs—that’s what made them significant. You’re repelled by Viva’s campy self-image, but you’re drawn to it, too.” By 1983 a culture glutted by media would be tolerating brilliant color candids of the Jonestown massacre and art portraits of a woman baring her stitched-up torso after a mastectomy. And by 1983 there would be an even deeper examination of photographic paradoxes as seen in the stark minimalist work of Eve Sonnemann or in Jerry Ulesmann’s transfixing dreamlike moments or Cindy Sherman’s chameleon disguises as she explored in kitschy self-portraits—woman’s image as defined by media.

While the Viva controversy was at its height, some of Diane’s friends wondered why after her prestigious show at the Museum of Modern Art, she would take such tawdry, exploitative pictures. Her sister, Renée, spoke to her about it. “Diane told me she knew the Viva photographs were sensationalistic. She said she’d taken them that way deliberately. She was determined to make more money so Allan wouldn’t have to give her so much—she thought notorious pictures were one way of getting more assignments.”

But at the same time in her own projects she was moving very consciously away from freak pictures. She didn’t want to fall into the trap of repeating herself; she would never just turn out a product. And so she began choosing less theatrical subjects, ones less capable of imitation.

She was spending weeks in Central Park. She was still hanging around East 57th Street and Fifth—near Tiffany and Bonwits and the big Doubleday—watching the shoppers and musicians and the old people moving up the avenue. It was her favorite corner, where she always ran into friends—classmates from Fieldston, models, editors, other photographers. She was photographing mostly “normal” people now—housewives, matrons, widowers, kids; usually she’d photograph them confrontationally with the flash, and often, without their knowing it, their gestures, their expressions (sometimes startled, sometimes blank) suggested strange yearnings, strange dramas.

It would be that way when she photographed the Westchester couple. She loved that disorienting image. Bathed in sunlight, a husband and his beautiful blonde wife can be observed dozing side by side in lounge chairs set out on a great lawn. Behind them a baby plays weirdly by himself against what looks like a forest of black trees.” The parents seem to be dreaming the child and the child seems to be inventing them,” Diane wrote Crookston as an explanation for the picture before sending it to him for an article he was editing on “The Family.”

1968 was not the best of years. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, and the American public saw devastating images of dying Vietnamese on the television news. Avedon began talking about going to Vietnam to document the atrocities, and Diane demonstrated against the war. She, who had never voiced a political opinion, wrapped a white band about her head and joined a huge crowd, also in white headbands, who were marching silently across Manhattan to protest the escalation of bombing. Basha Poindexter, a Polish art student, trudged next to Diane “for what seemed like hours. We ended up milling around Central Park—thousands of us. Nobody knew whether the march had done any good. Diane and I talked some about that, and we exchanged phone numbers. But we never saw each other again. She seemed very, very depressed.”

On March 14 Diane celebrated her forty-fifth birthday. The thought of getting old terrified her. After years of looking like a young girl, she had started to age and was now wearing thick Pan-Cake makeup to mask her lines. Sam Antupit remembers how the wrinkles—deep ones—“would shoot up around her cheeks and chin when she spoke, but then as soon as she got involved with telling you a story, they would momentarily disappear and she looked like a teen-ager again.”

For a while she took dance classes in order to tighten her thighs. Shirley Fingerhood joined her, and while they were changing in the dressing room Diane confided her fears about growing old. She had visited her mother recently in Palm Beach and Gertrude was still fine—still so beautiful and “with it,” smoking, shopping, playing cards—but the other people she’d seen were not. Frail old couples moved slowly along the blazing streets—some on walkers, others using canes. Eyes stared vacantly into space, and there was frequent talk about heart transplants, and what was the best hearing aid, and So-and-so has suddenly got arteriosclerosis or cancer of the liver…

She was depressed by the sight of so many old people. She never
wanted to get old! she said. She hated the idea that as the body ages, the imagination doesn’t; she felt hers was sharper, more acute, than ever. And then, studying her friend’s finely etched reflection in the glass, she blurted out, “I’m jealous of you, Shirley,” jealous because although there wasn’t much difference between them in age, Shirley Fingerhood had taut, smooth, unlined skin. Later, as they walked out of the dance studio and onto the street, she spoke of her envy again.

*
According to Neil Selkirk, who has printed her work since her death: “Diane obtained few releases.” Had she lived, it would have been much more difficult to exhibit her photographs so widely since many of her subjects objected strongly to the way she depicted them. But, as Selkirk says, “Since she’s dead, they figure there’s not much they can do about it.”

I
N
J
UNE 1968
D
IANE
and her daughters, Doon and Amy, moved from their Charles Street stable house to a duplex at the top of a brownstone at 120 East 10th Street. There was a brick-walled living room with many windows and a skylight, a kitchen, and, below the living room, two bedrooms. The rent was $275 a month.

Diane thought the place would be wonderfully cozy. She put all her plants around, and her X-ray of a human hand (whose is not known), and then she painted the exposed brick wall white and had a Japanese artist friend construct plaster-of-paris banquettes so that the entire apartment looked sculpted—the furniture appeared free-floating or molded into the walls. The place resembled a cave—rather like one of the rooms she’d designed when she was a student at Fieldston.

Not long after she moved in, her landlady, Judith Mortenson, took her to Macy’s. “I wanted to buy her a new fridge. I wanted her to be happy there. Diane chose the biggest one available, and white—I’d hoped she’d choose salmon or pale green. She didn’t seem particularly pleased about it. I got the feeling she was depressed and anxious. I got that feeling every time I saw her.”

Mortenson lived in the building, too, so would often run into Diane in the hall. “She was usually with her two daughters—they were all dressed like hippies. They seemed very private—very close.”

And they were. Diane always encouraged the girls to be independent and free, and never intruded on their lives—she wanted them to “create themselves.” So when Amy had a weight problem, Diane didn’t even comment. And when Doon decided to work for Richard Avedon, Diane offered no opinion either, although she expressed her concern to Pat Peterson, worrying that “Doon might fall in love with Dick because he’s so bright and mercurial and rich and successful and then Doon might get hurt.” (This presumably never happened, since Doon still works for Avedon periodically. Not long ago she wrote the copy for the controversial Calvin
Klein ads—“There’s nothing between me and my Calvins”—which Avedon photographed.)

In 1968 Diane was behaving more like an older sister or friend to both girls, and they in turn were exceedingly protective and maternal. Doon has written in
Ms.
magazine of the many wrestling matches on her bed with her mother and sometimes with her sister, too. Her mother always won. “And when I think of it now I have the feeling she tricked me into losing…I have wondered since whether her subjects ever felt the way I did in those moments, that she had perpetuated some gentle sort of deception that had made me want to lose.”

Diane’s goddaughter, May Eliot, saw her from time to time. May was diffident, frail, unsure of herself, and Diane responded to that. They had dinner in Chinatown when Alex and Jane Eliot flew over from Europe, concerned for May’s well-being—she had just gotten divorced. “Diane interceded for me—she came to my defense.” Later they shared a cab uptown and May didn’t want the ride to end—they’d begun to talk so frankly to each other; when they met again, they exchanged confidences like two women alone in the world and Diane blurted out that she had to be “very gay around Marvin or he couldn’t take it—he couldn’t take her despair.”

While living in the East Village, Diane continued fighting an unrelieved depression. The depression had never completely disappeared after she contracted hepatitis in 1966—it had subsided briefly, but now it was unrelenting. The therapist continued to prescribe anti-depressants, including Vivactil, but nothing seemed to help and by the summer of 1968 she had other symptoms: she began experiencing nausea and weight loss.