Diane Arbus (55 page)

On July 26 the Apollo 15 astronauts were launched to the moon. Shirley Clarke was setting up her cameras to film a documentary on the roof of Westbeth. She could hear the news of the blast-off on a thousand TVs and radios. “Suddenly, for no reason at all, an image of Diane flew into my mind. I thought I should call her—I must call—she’s right here in this building.”

That morning Diane had slipped a print of Kandinsky’s death mask under Andra Samuelson’s door. Andra had asked her for it, but Diane didn’t wait to see if she was there.

Later she had lunch at the Russian Tea Room with Bea Feitler. She had accepted an assignment from Bud Owett to do some advertising photography for the
New York Times,
and Owett says he came over to her table to talk to her briefly about it.

Afterwards the photographer Walter Silver ran into her on the street. “She was carrying a flag. She said she was catching a cold. She also said she was thinking of moving out of New York. I told her, ‘Don’t be silly.’ ”

On July 27 the telephone kept ringing in Diane’s apartment. Peter Schlesinger called and called, trying to confirm the fact that she would be conducting a symposium on photography that he had organized for later in the week. Marvin Israel called several times too and he got no answer. On July 28 he went over to Westbeth.

He found Diane dead, with her wrists slit, lying on her side in the empty bathtub. She was dressed in pants and shirt—her body was already “in a state of decomposition.” On her desk her journal was open to July 26, and across it was scrawled “The last supper.”

No other message was found, although Lisette Model claimed to have received a note but refused to divulge its contents. There is also a rumor that Diane had set up her camera and tripod and taken pictures of herself as she lay dying. However, when the police and coroner arrived, there was no evidence of camera or film.

At the morgue her uncle, Harold Russek, identified the body. He said his niece had always been subject to depressions. After the autopsy, her death was diagnosed by Dr. Michael Baden, the New York medical examiner, as “acute barbiturate poisoning.”

In Palm Beach, Gertrude Nemerov was informed of Diane’s suicide and made arrangements to come to New York at once. It was she who phoned Howard and Renée.

As soon as Richard Avedon heard the news, he dropped everything he was doing and took the next flight to Paris so that he himself could tell Doon about her mother’s death.

Back at Westbeth the tenants started discussing Diane’s suicide. Then
a squabble began between several artists as to who would get her apartment. “It was one of the biggest in the building,” a playwright says. “It had such a great view.”

Diane’s funeral at Frank Campbell’s at 80th Street and Madison Avenue was sparsely attended. Many of her friends were away for the summer; others weren’t informed. There was only a death notice August 1 in the
Times.
Obits didn’t appear in the newspapers or in
Time
or
Newsweek
or the
Village Voice
until August 5.

Allan Arbus flew in from California with his wife, Mariclare, and Bea Feitler and Ruth Ansel were there, as were Doon, Amy, Gertrude Nemerov, Renée and Howard, and Richard Avedon. (At one point during the service Avedon murmured, “Oh, I wish I could be an artist like Diane!” And Frederick Eberstadt says he whispered back, “Oh, no you don’t.”)

Howard gave the eulogy; it was short.

Later he wrote a poem for Diane which has since been reprinted many times.

To D—Dead by Her Own Hand

My dear, I wonder if before the end

You ever thought about a children’s game—

I’m sure you must have played it too—in which

You ran along a narrow garden wall

Pretending it to be a mountain ledge

So steep a snowy darkness fell away

On either side to deeps invisible;

And when you felt your balance being lost

You jumped because you feared to fall, and thought

For only an instant: That was when I died.

That was a life ago.

And now you’ve gone,

Who would no longer play the grown-ups’ game

Where, balanced on the ledge above the dark,

You go on running and you don’t look down,

Nor ever jump because you fear to fall.

I
AM STANDING MESMERIZED
in front of a huge black-and-white photograph by Diane Arbus labeled “Identical Twins, Roselle New Jersey.” The picture was taken in 1967; Diane considered it her self-defining icon. The twins—Cathleen and Colleen—are posed against a neutral alley wall staring gravely into the camera; they’re clearly responding to Diane as she clicks the shutter. At first glance this portrait seems to resemble nothing more than a snapshot since the little girls are placed together so simply in the frame. But the psychological reverberations run deep.

The seemingly casual treatment of the two little girls belies the fact that as identical twins they are quite extraordinary. This is characteristic of Diane’s radical vision: portraying the extraordinary as ordinary and acceptable. And there is as well a mix of extreme concentration, eerie detachment, and belief in the photograph. Diane’s spirit is mysteriously present too, looking steadily on.

“Identical Twins” was one of 200 prints of people and events in a remarkable exhibition entitled “Diane Arbus Revelations” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the Spring of 2004. It was the first major retrospective of Diane since the landmark one at MOMA in 1972. The exhibition began in San Francisco, where the show caused a flurry of high praise and invective. But that wasn’t surprising. Diane always polarizes. According to Michael Kimmelman of the
New York Times,
she’s looked upon as either “a compassionate renegade” or “an exploitative narcissist of decadent elegance.” After the show left Los Angeles it traveled to Houston and then in 2005 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before moving on to Essen, Germany; London; and Minneapolis.

Suffice it to say that, since my biography was published in 1984, Diane’s reputation as a master has grown and flourished. Her portraits of drag queens, celebrities, nudists, suburban couples, and angry kids have
been acknowledged by scholars and critics as classics in the field; these images are fundamental to our understanding of twentieth-century photography—although in some quarters they are still thought to be controversial.

Diane’s work remains a major force, along with Walker Evans’s and Robert Frank’s in the transition documentary photography made as it shifted its focus from the social concerns of the 1930s (rural poverty, the Depression in the big cities) to the personal and psychological obsessions that overtook society from the 1950s on. At the same time, Diane’s suicide turned her into an instant legend like Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe. She gained fame and was romanticized as “the tormented genius” more celebrated for living on the edge than for the artistry she brought to her emotional struggles. Novels were written based on apocryphal stories about her. There were poems and screenplays. A radio show on NPR documented the trials and tribulations of “the Jewish Giant” and his family, another one of Diane’s most famous portraits. Stanley Kubrick (also a still photographer) was inspired by the “Identical Twins” when he directed an adaptation of Stephen King’s
The Shining
with Jack Nicholson. The ghost twins in that movie were replicas of Diane’s signature image.

Not surprisingly there were plays as well. One,
Silence, Cunning and Exile
by Stuart Greenman, was drawn in part from a chapter I’d written in my biography about a peculiarly intense summer Diane and Allan Arbus spent with another couple on the island of Nantucket in 1948. The drama was produced at Harvard University and then at the Public Theater in New York in 1995.

In 2003 another play,
Third Floor Second Door to the Right
by Doon Arbus, was produced by the Cherry Lane Theater as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. Allan Arbus, now white-haired and eighty-five, played the central role: an old man living alone who is interviewed by a young reporter about the old man’s best friend, “a famous figure” who’s just committed suicide. The reporter attempts to examine the impact of that bloody death on their complicated relationship. Arin Arbus (Doon Arbus’s half sister), who directed the play, maintains that the drama “is not autobiographical.”

Perhaps because of such notoriety and because her work is so singular, Diane’s photographs remain in constant demand. The Arbus estate has brought new images out slowly and carefully so that the market has never been flooded. Each new work has been heralded as an event; the result: the value of an Arbus keeps going up. Consider that one of Diane’s rare prints of “Identical Twins” recently sold at auction for $270,000 and a wistful self-portrait she took in 1945 looking into her parents’ bathroom
mirror went for $101,000 in 2001. Even so, for the past thirty years there have been few exhibits of her work and relatively little written about her. That’s because the Arbus estate has kept a tight rein on all Arbus papers and restricted reproductions. Scholars and critics who wanted to write about her work had to hand over their texts for estate approval in order to use illustrations. Some refused to do so.

Why such strict control?

Executrix Doon Arbus’s reasoning is “to safeguard [the pictures] from the onslaught of theory and interpretation.” Initially Doon Arbus thought the images should be as widely available as possible, but after the hugely publicized success of the MOMA retrospective in 1972 she decided that her mother was turning into “a phenomenon and that phenomenon…endangered the pictures.” For the next three decades the pictures were guarded assiduously. However, in the past year the archive was opened up in order to contain the present retrospective as well as an accompanying book, also entitled
Diane Arbus Revelations.
Although Doon Arbus maintains that this new exhibit and the book “do not signal a change of heart but rather one of strategy,” the fact remains that the public will at last be able to gaze into Diane’s life and career on all sorts of new levels.

Beyond the 200 prints (many not seen before) there are work prints, contact sheets, notebooks, correspondence, Diane’s collages, and her cameras under glass—as well as a fascinating and detailed chronology of her day-to-day life which ends with the coroner’s terse report: “final cause of death (9/14/71) incised wounds of wrists with external hemorrhage. Acute barbiturate poisoning. Suicidal.”

I think I must have stayed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for hours that day in February of 2004. I wanted to absorb all I could of Diane’s process. I stopped for the longest time at some of her earliest pictures and some of her most mysterious, such as the crumbling movie palaces along 42nd Street and Times Square taken in the late 1950s. Diane went to the movies a lot, often in the afternoons, and she would photograph the theaters and their patrons. What’s remarkable about these photographs is how they prefigure many of her later concerns. She would climb up into the balcony of the theater and juxtapose screen images with people—often to ironic effect. In one photograph I see the silhouette of a couple about to kiss; they’re framed against a filmed shot on the screen of a menacing burning cross. A few essentially romantic images show a glowing angle of light spilling from the projector and through the smoky air over the audience spotted up and down the aisles.
I imagine I can make out a couple of street kids slouched together on a velvet seat; there’s an old man asleep in his raincoat. I spy a bag lady. The overall tone is one reminiscent of her later work in which a fascination with grubbiness, loneliness, and sex is mingled with bleak irony and despair.

Diane loved photographing in the dark. Darkness interested her much more than light. As a matter of fact, the last time I ever saw her was on the dimly lit roof of a tenement building in the East Village. It was a very hot evening during the summer of 1970. My husband and I had gone to a fundraiser for “the Chicago Seven,” the political radicals put on trial for their violent demonstrations during the Democratic National Convention of 1968, who were out on bail. The rooms were so crowded and noisy with antiwar activists that we climbed up on the roof to get some air.

Others from the party had fled there too. I could make out a few couples smoking. Someone had brought a guitar. Below in the distance a police siren wailed. An orange moon hung over the chimneys. That’s when I recognized Diane rising out of the gloom. She was in a miniskirt and safari jacket, cameras slung about her neck, and she was taking pictures of Abby Hoffman, one of the most outrageous members of “the Chicago Seven.”

Wild-haired, manic Abby Hoffman was a founder of the Yippies who’d once been a straight young man from upstate New York. In the mid-1960s he started working for peace before turning to drugs and street theater. He helped organize the explosive demonstrations against the war at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Hoffman was arrested for painting “fuck” on his forehead. In 1989 he too committed suicide.

But the night I saw him with Diane he was joking about his seven months on the stand as a “conspirator inciting the crowds to riot.” He described how at one point he’d leaped over the velvet rope in the courtroom and how after he’d been sentenced and was being led off to jail in manacles he called out to his wife, “Water the plant.” Meanwhile Diane was totally focused on capturing Hoffman’s many animated expressions; she positively quivered every time another emotion flickered across his pockmarked face.

Eventually he stopped performing for her and his shoulders sagged. He was sweating under his flowered headband as he began to observe her. Their eyes locked. He listened to her soft questions, responding to her gap-toothed smile.

Diane was always connected to her subjects by some magnetic bond and that bond was the source of her formidable power. It’s evident in all
her pictures and it’s why no other photographer can imitate her no matter how hard they try.

By midnight she’d taken hundreds of shots, then she ran out of film.