Diane Arbus (24 page)

As usual, David Nemerov was busy with another new Russeks—this one opened at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in 1955. Nemerov had always wanted to be in this area: “You get the out-of-town tourists and the rich New Yorkers,” he said at one of the Friday-night dinners. He loved the elegance of 57th and Fifth—the presence and competition of Bonwit, Bergdorf, Bendel, and Jay Thorpe. The new Russeks was furnished with French antique furniture, dark blue walls; the outside was tinted concrete.

Russeks Fifth Avenue, the flagship store, was still operating, but at a $120 million deficit. The Russeks empire (stores in Chicago, Brooklyn, Cross Island Shopping Center) had been bought by a group of Chicago investors, among them the Pritzcy brothers, who maintained that they were going to modernize and expand. They owned controlling stock, but Nemerov remained chairman of the board.

Diane frequently dropped by the Fifth Avenue Russeks to visit her father. She often brought her daughters along and the three of them would remain in Nemerov’s office until conversation lagged or he was called away. Then they might ride up and down the elevators, stopping at various floors to try on the latest sweaters or blouses or shoes, but Diane would quickly tire of shopping (it reminded her of the hours she’d spent shopping with her mother when every purchase became a drama), so she would hustle her daughters home and cook supper—usually chili. It was so often chili, in fact, that Allan would groan, “Oh, no! Not chili again!” every time the dish appeared on the table. Diane no longer wanted to spend time in the kitchen, so she usually served her family “poor food” (her term)—Spam, hot dogs, and spaghetti didn’t take long to fix. However, when they had guests, she would broil a chicken or prepare a vegetable stew. “She could be a terrific cook when she felt like it,” Tina Fredericks says. Tina would come to the Sunday-night suppers at the Arbuses’ which had become almost a ritual for special friends in the mid-fifties—friends like the Eliots, like Cheech, like a new friend, the actor Robert Brown, “who was so handsome you’d gasp when you saw him,”
says actress Tammy Grimes, a friend of Brown’s who would occasionally accompany him to the Arbuses’ along with her then husband, Christopher Plummer.

Brown was then going out with an ethereal-looking nineteen-year-old actress named Sybille Pearson (who is now an award-winning playwright). Sybille has never forgotten those suppers. “They seemed glamorous and folksy at the same time.” Beautiful glassware glittered on the pink marble table. A huge green tree stood in one corner of the high-ceilinged room, and photographic equipment—lights, camera—was propped in another. Amy and Doon would be padding around in their bathrobes trying to attract everybody’s attention while Allan put another Benny Goodman record on the phonograph. He didn’t say much, so Bob Brown talked—mainly to Diane—about the Off-Broadway shows he’d been appearing in. They seemed to have great rapport.

Sybille couldn’t stop looking at Diane’s tawny skin, at the thick blonde down on her upper lip. Her buttocks moved back and forth, undulating under the loose folds of her skirt as she walked barefoot across the room to fuss over her two daughters—tenderly smoothing their hair, buttoning their nightgowns.

“She was so sensuous! A mystery mother. I wanted her to be my mother and love me,” Sybille says.

After the children went off to bed, Diane turned her attention to Sybille, directing gentle questions at her until she almost forgot her shyness. “She related to my sullenness—my insecurity. She accepted me as a person with an identity; she treated me like an adult.”

Diane adored the story Bob Brown kept telling about how Sybille had auditioned for Arthur Miller and his play
A View from the Bridge.
She’d gotten the part, but she’d been so terrified, so sure she’d been awful, that she’d run out of the theater as soon as the audition was over without giving the stage manager her name or her phone number, so nobody could find her to tell her she had won the role. The producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, searched for weeks trying to track her down and finally had to cast another ingénue. Diane thought that was a marvelous story.

Sybille says, “I always felt wanted and loved and accepted by the Arbs.” One Sunday she got the flu and phoned to say that she couldn’t make supper. Within hours a present was hand-delivered to her apartment. It was a gift from Diane, beautifully wrapped, with a little note: “I hope you feel better.” Inside a box was a paperback of
The Wanderer
by Alain-Fournier and a packet of mouches. “You know, those little stars and half-moons you stick on your cheek? The gift was so special—so Diane. I was very much moved. I still have those mouches.”

Diane loved giving presents. She gave Cheech a warped green glass
bottle she’d found washed up from the sea (Cheech has it still on her fire escape); she gave Cheech a lovely copper lampshade, a string of fat brown wooden beads. Once she lugged a heart-shaped waffle iron out on the train to East Hampton for Tina Fredericks’ birthday, and Yamashiro recalls receiving a globe of the world with a ticket to Haiti attached when he was about to go out on his own as a photographer. The film-maker Emile de Antonio remembers receiving a book from Diane called
Flatland,
“which was a geometric study of the universe told in the form of a fable. I tried to read the thing and I thought, ‘What the hell does Diane mean by this?’ Because everything Diane did seemed to have meaning.”

A
LTHOUGH THEY ARE INVARIABLY
linked, Diane never admitted to being influenced by the photographer Robert Frank. Indeed, her very formal portraits of eccentrics and extremes, taken with the primitive frontality of an old-fashioned daguerreotype, bear no resemblance to Frank’s abstract, powerful set pieces of Midwestern highways and bleak automobile graveyards. But in the beginning Diane did copy his abrupt framing process before going on to a more elaborate one. And she often referred to Frank’s ironic pictures in his book
The Americans
as a major turning point in documentary photography.

Frank and his sculptor wife, Mary, were part of a loosely knit artistic community that by the late 1950s was flourishing throughout Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. Diane had become acquainted with some of the group through her friendship with the art dealer Richard Bellamy. He knew everybody, it seemed: de Kooning, sculptor Bill Smith, poet Allen Ginsberg, painter Alice Neel, novelist William Burroughs, and the exceedingly handsome young couple Miles and Barbara Forst (both Abstract Expressionists), who gave wild parties where much pot was consumed. (This was still considered quite daring.)

Cheech thinks Diane and Robert Frank had their first extended conversation at a dinner party she gave in Spanish Harlem in the mid-fifties, at which the Forsts and Richard Bellamy were also present. “It was a rather uncomfortable evening because everyone there was shy and withdrawn. Robert had his usual stubble of beard and was his usual cagy, surly, Swiss-German self, and Diane grew even more tongue-tied in his presence as the evening wore on.”

The Franks were often described as a “pagan couple,” madly in love and so poor they frequently existed on a diet of bananas and Coca-Cola. Their children, Pablo and Andrea, ran wild. One of them had recently been hit by a car.

Mary was trying to sculpt massive wooden forms in her badly lit studio on the bottom floor of the Franks’ 10th Street two-story loft. Walker Evans
told his wife he hated to pass through Mary’s section of the loft because he could sense her frustration at being so poor, at being so hampered by her kids. “Mary wasn’t allowed to be an artist in those days,” a friend says.
“Everything
had to focus on Robert. And Robert had a Norman Mailer complex.
Powerful desires.”

When they were first married (Mary had been just sixteen), they had lived in Paris, where Robert photographed in the streets, using a handheld camera like his mentor, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Frank’s early pictures were blurred, grainy, and so full of movement it seemed as if he were rushing to capture everything in his lens: a couple lounging by a jukebox, limousines gliding through the rain. The images scarcely seemed composed at all.

In 1947 the Franks came to New York and Frank began photographing for
Fortune, Life, Harper’s Bazaar.
The pay was terrible ($50 a picture), so for a period he supported his family by creating a long series of award-winning
cinéma vérité
ads extolling the virtues of New York City for the
New York Times.
Louis Faurer, who shared Frank’s darkroom from 1947 to 1951, writes: “Bob kept saying ‘Whatta town! whatta town!’ ” (Faurer was then the quintessential street photographer, chronicling—almost feverishly—raw Manhattan faces and places with complete indifference to traditional composition. Frank was obviously influenced by Faurer’s photojournalistic portraiture. Both men loved to salvage negatives made in hopelessly dim situations and produce eloquent, grainy prints.)

Louis Silverstein, who was Frank’s art director at the
New York Times,
says, “Robert was one of the most innovative photographers I’ve ever worked with. Technically masterful, but everything he did seemed spontaneous. He’d ‘direct’ the ads as if they were little novels. Cast faces and locations like the Staten Island Ferry or the Fifth Avenue double-decker bus. His response to the world was so direct it was very pure. But there was always a suggested tension in his photographs between style and subject, because he never stopped exploring the photographic form. Which made his images more complex.”

Looking at him, it seemed hard to believe that Frank had got his start as a fashion photographer for
Harper s Bazaar.
He and his family lived with nine cats in a grungy loft, and when he came to the
Times
he would be wearing the most tattered jacket imaginable—the lining would be hanging out and he would deliver his pictures in a filthy manila envelope.

“That’s the way Robert was,” Silverstein says. “It was no affectation. He seemed suspicious of any institution and certainly the Establishment of journalism—the Academe. But he was fascinated by America—by its energy and diversity. He was determined to explore America, and he did.”

Accompanied by Jack Kerouac, Frank first went traveling across
America on assignment for
Life.
But his pictures of the country were turned down “because they looked too much like Russia.” Then in 1956 Frank won a Guggenheim and spent the following year driving around the country again with Mary and their kids in a rattletrap car. Using Walker Evans’ Depression portraits as a guide, Frank photographed a series of eccentrically framed chiaroscuro images of desolate highways, cemeteries, parked cars, glaring TV sets, jukeboxes, sullen faces that eschewed Evans’ classicism for something far more fugitive and ephemeral; his pictures reflected both the ironic complacency of the 1950s and their undercurrent of despair.

“I shot and developed rolls of film in about three different places and made contact sheets—fifty contact sheets in New York, fifty in the South, fifty in California,” Robert Frank told Walker Evans during a photography seminar at Yale in 1971. “I looked at them when I printed them, but I didn’t choose any photographs. I just looked at them and saw they were recurring images like the jukebox or the cars or the flag, and so it got bigger and I turned back again and took another trip to Detroit. Then I came back to New York and I enlarged all the pictures I liked, maybe two hundred of them, put them up on the wall and then eliminated the ones I didn’t like. Then I put them together in three sections and I started each section with the American flag and each section with no people and then people.”

Familiar now, Frank’s wild freely framed iconography was so radical in 1956 that he couldn’t get anyone interested in the work (which he called
The Americans)
until he got a friend to publish it in France in 1958. Grove published a U.S. edition in 1959; it slowly became a kind of underground classic. The introduction by Kerouac began: “To Robert Frank. You got eyes.” Indeed Frank’s personal documentary style along with a poetic vision full of narrative soon revolutionized photography.

A 35-mm. camera and wide-angle lens helped him create a complex new candid style that was “both situational and contextual…” one image played against another. Frank influenced scores of younger photographers including Diane, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, and Arthur Freed, and they began in their own ways to explore the strange, threatening, hidden America Frank was discovering. Some of them made similar crosscountry pilgrimages to do so.

Frank always worked out of deep depression and he photographed
The Americans
in a depressive state. When it was done, friends say he was emotionally exhausted. He completed one more essay called “Bus Series” (pictures taken on a bus moving across West 42nd Street) and he would periodically take on assignments for
Bazaar
and later
Show
magazine. But he kept saying he was sick of “stalking, observing, then turning away with
my camera.” He didn’t want to repeat himself. In 1958 he began making documentary films.

When Diane and Allan got to know him, he was in the midst of shooting
Pull My Daisy
in collaboration with the Abstract Expressionist Alfred Leslie and Jack Kerouac. There were constant fights about whose film it was, but everybody agreed the focus would be on the sights and sounds of the Beat Generation. The setting was Frank’s shabby loft on East 10th Street, and it begins with Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg wandering around and ad-libbing about bop, Groucho Marx, and Buddhism. Other characters join them—Larry Rivers and Alice Neel. Richard Bellamy plays a bishop who preaches to the bums on the Bowery; Delphine Seyrig floats through, flapping an American flag; composer David Amram plays himself. Allan Arbus and Mary Frank have bit parts. Nothing much happens. There is a lot of coughing and scatting—Anita Ellis sings “The Crazy Daisy”—and one gets a sense of a group of sweet, funny people who are innocently self-aggrandizing.

Walter Gutman put up $12,000 to finance the project, which is now considered a documentary classic. He also bought Mary Frank a fur coat. Gutman, a Wall Street broker, wrote an offbeat newsletter about the stock market with advice like “Buy a Rothko now.”