Diane Arbus (25 page)

(After
Pull My Daisy
was completed, Frank made eight more movies, including
OK
with Susan Graham before she married Charlie Mingus;
Me and My Brother
about Peter Orlovsky’s catatonic sibling; and the infamous, raunchy
Cocksucker Blues
about a Rolling Stones tour across America, which tells much about the side effects of power, boredom, and isolation on rock-and-roll superstars.)

By 1958 Frank found himself positioned near the frantic intersection of the art world and the counter-culture. Around him his friends were discovering Hinduism, experimenting with mind-expanding drugs like LSD and mescaline; everybody suffered from violent hangovers. “It was an insane time,” Frank said. New York painters had suddenly achieved a liberating self-awareness by moving away from the suffocating Paris-based aesthetics. Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, were becoming big names. Frank knew these artists, and others just starting out—like George Segal, who was painting Impressionistic abstractions, and Myron Stout, who composed hard-edged canvases in black and white—and Richard Bellamy gave them shows at the Hansa, now located in a walk-up gallery facing Central Park.

“It was insane,” Frank repeated. “Insane.” De Kooning spent an entire year on a single canvas, painting it over and over again because he didn’t think it was working. Kline sketched drawings across the pages of
telephone books, and Elaine de Kooning tore sports photographs from newspapers in order to study their “abstract compositions.”

“I learned a lot from these people,” Frank said. “They had a lot to do with my development.” (In
The Americans
he demonstrated how he could snap images in the energetic, responsive spirit of the Abstract Expressionists, but without any painterly effects.)

With Frank and his friends, the subject of money was avoided. (To pay the rent, everybody took odd jobs—at the post office, in restaurants, at department stores.) Publicity among artists was never an issue—in the 1950s the press was indifferent to the art world anyway; Jackson Pollock’s spread in
Life
magazine had been a fluke. As yet, the galleries hadn’t turned exploitative or commercial. “We were a scruffy, excitable lot,” says painter Buffie Johnson, who “floated through the group” from 1950 on. “It was us against the world.”

Even though the Franks never had any money, there was always food on their long artist’s table—quiche, fresh raspberries, pickled watermelon with ginger. And sometimes Mary Frank and Barbara Forst would give joint parties at the loft, to which Diane and Allan might come, spectacular parties for which they would cover the walls with rolls of white photographic paper and then paint jungles of huge flowering trees and beasts and birds and exploding stars. An entire world would be created, and then the neighbors—like de Kooning and Milt Resnick—and other painters and photographers would crowd into the loft to dance and drink and smoke till dawn.

Theirs was a frantic, tortured community bursting with vitality and gossip and sexual experimentation. “Everybody was in everybody else’s pocket,” the dancer Sondra Lee says. “There was rivalry, yes—egos were gargantuan and there was a lot of competition—but the struggle was private and not corrupted by media.”

In those days, the graphics designer Loring Eutemay says, “It didn’t matter if you were a good Abstract Expressionist—what really mattered was, could you play the bongos well? Could you dance all night? We danced constantly in those days—incessantly. God, it was fun.”

The painter Marvin Israel would hire a van and everybody would pile in and go up to the Hotel Diplomat in Harlem—“everybody” meaning Marvin and Margie Israel, Anita and Jordan Steckel, Diane and Allan Arbus, Robert and Mary Frank, Miriam and Tomi Ungerer, and lawyer Jay Gold. “Mary was the greatest dancer of all,” Eutemay goes on. “She’d studied with Martha Graham, and she had a magnificent body, and she could dance and dance and dance, sometimes all by herself.”

Often Robert Frank stood on the sidelines with Diane and they both observed the action on the dance floor. Diane yearned to dance, too, but believed she could not.

As she became more committed to photography, Diane moved deeper into downtown bohemia. But nobody ever thought of her as a particularly visible or articulate member. “She began appearing at places; eventually she was just
there,
a presence,” says Rosalyn Drexler, who remembers her as a gentle, passive creature who could be open and friendly one minute and remotely mysterious the next.

Sometimes when Allan was at mime class in the evening, Bob Brown might take Diane to the Cedar Bar on University Place, where they might sit with the sculptor Sidney Simon or the watercolorist Paul Resika. “Diane never drank, but she had a way of listening which drew people to her like flies to honey,” Resika says.

Diane also belonged to another group—of spectacularly talented women who were still for the most part “underground.” Among them: Mary Frank, Anita Steckel, Rosalyn Drexler (who wrote hilarious, far-out plays and novels, who painted and was also a wrestler). Then there were film-maker Shirley Clarke and the novelist Pati Hill (who was usually in Paris, but remained very close to Diane). None of them had come into her own yet, but you assumed they would, they were so restless and ambitious.

In another league entirely was the chain-smoking Maya Deren. Deren—voluptuous, hyperenergetic, always broke—is today recognized as a major figure in American avant-garde film. Even in the fifties she was regarded as someone special. She taught, lectured, and wrote, directed, and produced a series of films, among them the classic surrealistic
Meshes in the Afternoon
and
Rituals in Transfigured Time,
which shows the passage of woman from bride to widow. In both Deren herself played the protagonist. Cheech had begun to work with Deren and worshipped her as she worshipped Diane.

In the summer of 1958 the Franks and the Arbuses rented houses near each other in Truro on Cape Cod, and Mary began drawing prodigiously: the curve of the beach, the line of the ocean. The light on the Cape was clear, shimmering, pierced with deep shadows. Diane photographed a lot that summer—most memorably her younger daughter. Amy, in a flannel nightie just before taking her afternoon nap. That eloquent photograph was later published in
Harper’s Bazaar
and then in the Time-Life book on
Children in Photography,
which commented: “Amy stands tiny, indomitable, against a background of storm-tossed clouds. She appears to have all the charged emotion of a 19th Century romantic.”

Near the end of the summer Mary Frank sketched some of her dreams. (Later a critic likened her sculptures to “pieces of dreams—part memory, part desire.”) She and Diane had become good friends; among other things they shared was a strong belief in dream images.

Back in New York that fall, the Forsts, the Arbuses, the Franks, and several other couples continued to see one another: in the Village, at screenings of underground movies, at Happenings—the rage of the late fifties. Between the couples, except for Diane and Allan, the unspoken competition was “ferocious,” Barbara Forst says. “The men in our group sensed that the women were as talented as they were—in some cases maybe more so. Certainly we were different, and they were threatened by that and by our productivity, and they demeaned us and made us feel insecure. We were like handmaidens to our men—mothering, accommodating, putting off and in some cases putting down our own work—sometimes hiding or destroying it.”

Whenever the women met for coffee, five or six of them, they would tell anecdotes about the men in their lives—their husbands, lovers, casual pick-ups, old boyfriends. None of the women was a feminist—certainly Diane wasn’t; they never used that word. “We were just female, so basically we mistrusted each other,” Barbara Forst continues, and they tried to woo and keep their men in the old ways, and tried to ignore their incompatible longings, their lacerating fights. Anger rather than tenderness seemed to be the chief means of communication between each couple—again with the exception of Diane and Allan, who didn’t seem angry at each other so much as “cut off from each other and traveling on different wavelengths.” “Everybody was screwing everybody else compulsively,” Forst recalls. “We all thought, Diane included, that sex was very important; that our bodies were a source of power—maybe our
only
source of power.” So the women talked of yearning to be “turned inside out—to feel naked, exposed, crushed, destroyed, and yet still remain alive.” None of them believed that all this infidelity would break up their marriages (although indeed most of their marriages broke up).

Most of these marriages were in chaos because of drugs or drink or some terrible disappointment. Most of the women still believed that being wives and mothers would be their salvation, their ultimate destiny, “so we were not sustained by our work. We were shy about talking about our work to each other,” Barbara Forst says. “We did not think our work was that important.”

Diane certainly believed hers wasn’t. She constantly vacillated about
her photography—how could she ever make a living as a street photographer? Who would want her pictures of a tattooed lady? How could she pitch a story about a female bum to one of her chic editor friends on Madison Avenue? Nevertheless, she was bursting with ideas. She once walked from Eighth Street to the Upper East Side with Paul Resika, telling him of her dream to photograph “the great losers of the world—Adlai Stevenson, Robert Oppenheimer, Khrushchev,” and then she murmured, “If only Hitler were alive, I’d photograph him—he was the greatest loser of them all.”

I
F
D
IANE LOVED ANYONE
unreservedly, it was her daughter Doon. She spoiled her, catered to her, marveled at her beauty, her quirky turn of mind, her disconcerting behavior. (Once while the apartment was being painted Doon wrote succinct directions across her bedroom walls, explaining to the painters the exact colors she wanted used.) So when at the age of twelve Doon got a crush on Tony Perkins, Diane did nothing to discourage her.

Subsequently Doon discovered where Tony Perkins lived in New York and every day after school she would go to his house on West 55th Street and stand outside, looking up into his windows, hoping to see him. She returned to West 55th Street day after day, month after month. Helen Merrill, a friend of Perkins’ who lived in his house, began noticing “this exquisite golden-haired creature” staring up at her from the street. “Tony had a number of fans who camped outside his door—but never for this long, this doggedly, and this girl was so particular in her intensity and her beauty that I really wondered about her,” Mrs. Merrill goes on. Finally, Perkins went out on the street himself to ask her name, but Doon wouldn’t tell him. He persisted until she blurted out, “Both my parents are photographers.”

Perkins gave her money for a cab and told her gently to go home, which she did. Meanwhile Mrs. Merrill, who had been a photographer herself, put two and two together and phoned Diane and Allan Arbus. “Do you know where your daughter goes every day after school?” she demanded, and Diane replied, “Oh, yes, of course we know, and we think it’s fine—we trust her completely.”

Diane remembered how as a girl she’d wandered the streets with her friend Phyllis Carton, but they’d never been as adventurous as Doon. “Doon is far braver than I was as a teen-ager,” Diane said.

So Doon was allowed to continue standing outside Tony Perkins’ building until finally Mrs. Merrill and Perkins came up with a solution: if Doon would stop standing outside every day, she would be invited for brunch
on Sunday morning. Doon agreed, and soon she began drifting by most Sundays for brunch, and on other days as well. “She was so bright and funny and lovely—she was impossible not to like. Tony and I adored her,” Mrs. Merrill says.

Perkins was then starring in
Look Homeward, Angel
on Broadway, and it was an exciting and busy time for him. Doon got caught up in it. Through Perkins she met Michael Smith, an Off-Broadway playwright, and later she worked on two of Smith’s productions at Café Cino. Throughout most of her adolescence Doon spent much of her free time at the Perkins house, and Diane and Allan allowed her to do so although they were undoubtedly aware that there was something unsettling in their own lives that she was wishing to avoid.

Allan had begun to get concerned before every fashion shooting, his assistant Richard Marx remembers. He was a perfectionist and he was sure his photographic perceptions were failing since he no longer had any interest in what he was doing. Shooting a
Seventeen
magazine cover, for instance, had become sheer hell for him. And there was no place to hide. A painter has a million ways of putting one color next to another; he can hide behind the richness of the painting process. But not the photographer. And in fashion photography there were so many elements to worry about: the lights might go; the film might not have been put in the camera correctly; the clothes might look lousy; the models could turn temperamental. Nor was Diane around anymore to smooth things out; to pull a sitting together. And when she did observe, she was often critical. As her own work grew more harshly realistic, she often found Allan’s images too one-dimensional and idealized. Her criticism (although asked for) could be devastating. “By the end of a session he would be snapping at me,” Marx recalls, and he would remain snappish through dinner, telling Diane and his daughters that he was in despair and could feel and express nothing. After dinner he would escape to his room, and the clarinet-playing grew so excessive that little Amy would shut the door to her room and refuse to come out. Scales and scales for hours, Diane told Cheech; she said she didn’t know how much longer she could stand it.

Everything seemed to be going wrong. Their apartment, so beautiful and serene on the surface, wasn’t working. They couldn’t utilize the space—it didn’t look lived in. Diane would murmur wistfully, “If only we had more furniture…” They still tried to entertain, but “the dinners fizzled—there was no spark,” Alex Eliot says. They now knew a great many people, but they had few close friends. They still saw a great deal of the Eliots, but usually alone. “It didn’t seem to work when we invited other people.”