Diane Arbus (28 page)

Diane talked to De a lot about Moondog, and De would think, “Jesus!
these stories of hers—why can’t she combine them with her pictures?” and then he realized that she was interested in freezing an image—not elaborating on it.

In past summers Diane and Allan had taken their daughters on vacation, but after they became estranged in the summer of 1959 Doon visited Howard and Peggy on Cape Cod and Amy was enrolled in a camp. Diane stayed by herself in the Charles Street house, concentrating on photographing “mud shows”—second-rate little circuses that played backwater towns throughout New Jersey and New England. At dawn she would hop a Greyhound bus to catch one—maybe outside Flemington, or in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She would hang around all day, observing and photographing the fortune teller’s tent, the contortionist shaving. One of her earliest circus pictures, taken in 1959, is of a midget clown convulsed with giggles.

Charlie Reynolds, a magician and circus buff (“I’ve been photographing circuses all over the country for thirty years”), used to bump into Diane at Hunt’s Vaudeville, “the oldest traveling circus in America,” when Hunt’s was camped in the Pennsylvania hills. Through Reynolds (who lived near her in the Village) Diane met the Amazing Randi, the escape artist who is considered today’s successor to Houdini. (One of Randi’s recent tricks: writhing in a straitjacket while dangling upside down supported by a crane over Niagara Falls.) In the 1970s Randi gained celebrity for debunking the Israeli psychic Uri Geller.

Diane took hundreds of pictures of Randi, who in turn brought her together with Presto the Fire Eater. Presto, a great natural magician, did his act on Village streetcorners, draped in feathers, buckles, cameras, tape recorders, flashbulbs. Randi also brought her to Gangler’s, a little truck circus which was playing in a loft on St. Mark’s Place; he was performing there along with a pony and a llama, a bear and a dog. He introduced Diane to Yves, a French juggler with pale, waxen skin, “a really weird, far-out fellow who believed juggling was a mystic act, and he convinced Diane it was mystic, too.” She took pictures of him and of another juggler named Adrian. Adrian was bugged that he couldn’t juggle fulltime; to support himself, he simonized cars on York Avenue.

“Diane was fascinated by weirdos,” Randi says. “Not just by their weirdness but by their
commitment
to weirdness. As far as she was concerned, I didn’t count because I’d do my levitation act—very convincingly, I might add—and then I’d step offstage and drive to my house in New Jersey. I merely served as liaison for Diane into the worlds of magic and illusion. I introduced her to a lot of people I knew in the business—some
of whom she photographed, like Presto and Jack Dracula, the tattooed man. She could weave a spell around people like Presto and Jack so they’d reveal themselves the way they were and the way they presented themselves to the world. It was a magic double thing she caught.”

Back in New York, Diane haunted the Coney Island sideshows and the sideshows in the basement of Madison Square Garden when Ringling Brothers’ circus came to town. She often took her daughter Amy with her—once she was back from camp—and introduced her to “these very strange people.”

Of sideshows Diane said later: “There’s some thrill going to a sideshow—I felt a mixture of shame and awe. I mean, there’s a sword box where they don’t cut the girl in half, they stick a lot of swords in and none of them really go through her and besides they’re not sharp and…it’s fun because the girl is almost looney.”

Diane’s portraits of twin fetuses hobbling in a bottle of formaldehyde as well as of the “headless man” clad in a business suit were some of her earliest sideshow shots.

That same summer De was introducing Diane to the garish strip on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, where shabby peep-shows and hot-dog stands never closed and third-run movie houses opened at seven a.m. “Even then robbings and stabbings were a common occurrence,” De says. “Forty-second Street was dangerous. We’d pass a sea of empty beer cans, broken bottles, druggies, pimps, and then we’d go to Grant’s for clams and french fries. Grant’s was a tough place full of hard gays. There were lots of knife fights, but Diane didn’t blink an eye. ‘Places are the only things you can trust,’ she would say.”

After a meal at Grant’s they would walk over to Hubert’s Freak Museum, which had been operating for more than twenty-five years at Broadway and 42nd Street. They always visited with Professor Leroy Heckler, whose father had been a strongman; Heckler ran the flea-circus concession at Hubert’s. Often Diane would sit with him while he fed his fleas. He’d roll up his sleeves and, using tweezers, pick up the fleas out of their mother-of-pearl boxes, drop them on his forearm, and let them eat their lunch while he read the
Daily News.

There was seldom any talking, even when Alberto Alberta, the half-man, half-woman, dropped by, or Sealo the Seal Boy, who had hands growing out of his shoulders. Everyone did his or her act on the average of two shows an hour from eleven a.m. to eleven p.m., but they were never “on display” on their curtained platforms for more than five minutes at a time, speaking very briefly about their origins and their malformations in a bored, perfunctory manner to the handful of the curious who milled before them.

Diane was one of the most avid spectators, as attracted to the freaks as she was repelled by them, and some of them really frightened her. This was part of her motivation for coming to Hubert’s—she
wanted
to get so scared that her heart would pound and sweat would pop out on her brow, and then she would conquer her fear and stay for hours, scrutinizing the fat lady’s smelly waddle, the armless man’s dexterity as he lit a cigarette from the match he held between his toes.

When she first approached the freaks offstage with her cameras, they stared at her blankly; they seemed haughty, taciturn; they didn’t feel comfortable with a “normal” in their midst. She was gentle and patient with them, coming in every day, talking with them until they got used to her and “she became almost one of the gang,” says Presto, who was performing his fire-eating act at Hubert’s then. Once she felt the freaks trusted her, she asked them to pose.

Hubert’s became one of Diane’s principal hangouts in New York. Over and over again she photographed the midgets, the three-legged man, the lady with a serpent, attempting to penetrate their mystery and their fascination for her. Often she brought friends along—the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, the poet Marvin Cohen, and mostly her daughter Amy, who couldn’t understand why her mother wanted to take pictures of freaks. “They were like foreign bodies to me.” The pictures embarrassed her until her first year in high school, “when we were all taking photography class and [my classmates] were really impressed with Mom’s work; they kept saying how amazing it was.” Then Amy began to study Diane’s work with a different eye and discovered the beauty and strangeness of it. (Today Amy is a photographer herself, documenting the Punk Rock scene for the
Village Voice.)

Diane used to show the Amazing Randi her latest Hubert’s Museum contact sheets. “I thought they were great. She photographed all the acts—the pinhead, the skeleton, the little people—and she seemed to capture the gothic fantasy—the supernatural qualities…and the phoniness.” Randi thinks Congo the Jungle Creep was Diane’s particular favorite. “Because he was so extreme. She knew that his act was a hoax—essentially failed magic—but that was precisely his appeal to her. He believed so totally in his fakery, he was positively arrogant about it.” She photographed Congo for years and never got tired of watching him stamping on saw blades, performing his sand act—he’d mix sand in a bucket of muddy water, shout “Ugga mugga,” and then scoop up a wad of
dry
sand and flourish it at the audience. He’d also light a cigarette, swallow it, drink a glass of water, blow smoke out of his mouth and nostrils, grimace, scream, then cough up the cigarette. Congo was a natural magician, Randi says. “Everything he did came from his soul.” In fright wig, T-shirt, loincloth
worn over his trousers, he’d thump on a drum, have dialogues with evil spirits, mix potions, cast spells, threaten the audience. “Diane would go ape shit over his act,” says Randi. “And the way he used his hands—they were huge, oversized, with savagely long fingernails—they’d claw the air as he performed his mumbo-jumbo. Congo’s real name was Hezekiah Trambles—he was from Haiti, and Diane used to describe him as a pseudo jungle voodoo-type character.”

Congo made a lot of money from his act. During breaks from Hubert’s, Diane and Randi would sometimes see him strolling down Times Square. “He’d be wearing a natty suit, no fright wig, and lots of diamonds on his huge hands. ‘Hi, Congo,’ we’d say. But he would studiously ignore us.”

As the months went by, Diane wandered the Times Square area at all hours of the day and night. She talked with the habitués—the derelicts, the insomniacs lining up to get into the ten-cent movie houses. She found out that the deaf and dumb liked going to the Apollo Theatre; she discovered that a great many bag ladies used the Howard Johnson’s ladies’ room near the Automat.

Bag ladies seemed particularly solitary and tragic. They weren’t crazy, she decided; they were wives and mothers like herself; some even had held jobs before tumbling out on the street, not by choice but because they had no money. She would watch silently as they clung to their bulging shopping bags—their only possessions. This was completely understandable to Diane, who until recently had usually carried a paper sack jammed with her favorite things.

She was still very shy and frightened as she approached each new situation, but the fear was thrilling. Photographing the blind Moondog had helped, and photographing the Amazing Randi and Presto the Fire Eater and Congo the Jungle Creep, and trying to calm the Russian midget Gregory Ratoucheff when she photographed him in his roominghouse at one a.m. He’d been so nervous he posed in his hat and coat; to get him relaxed, Diane talked to him a long time. (He’d been one of the stars of the movie
Freaks.
Married five times to normal-sized women, he did a terrific imitation of Marilyn Monroe singing “My Funny Valentine.”)

It was getting easier to ask people to pose, and one of the reasons was that she had a new champion, a new mentor, who would be close to her for the rest of her life; someone who believed in her special talent, who goaded and pressured her to accept greater challenges, tougher assignments, more personal projects. “You can photograph everyone in the world,” he said.

His name was Marvin Israel. Pale, bespectacled, a painter of grim visions (sinister rooms full of dangling electrical cords), Israel lived with his painter wife, Margie, in a basement studio on West 14th Street which visitors described as a “veritable menagerie of flapping birds and barking dogs.” The Israels were a detached, remote couple who could go for weeks at a time without seeing anybody while they labored over various projects.

For a few years in the mid-fifties Israel had been art director of
Seventeen
and Diane had known him slightly then when she and Allan were doing fashion work for the magazine. Sometime in 1959 she ran into him at a party and he directed a fierce monologue at her that seemed to last half the night. Afterward Diane told Cheech she had never met such a riveting man. Depending on his mood, he could be expansive and charming or smug and downright insulting. (Many of his students at the Parsons School of Design, where he taught, recall breaking under his abusive comments about their work.)

His mind teemed with ideas and opinions on every subject from Proust to James Bond. He loved riddles, he loved magic, and he seemed to see the potential in photography, the parallels between experience and irrationality. Céline was said to be one of his idols, Céline the half-crazed Paris original who thought human beings should be categorized as either voyeurs or exhibitionists. His
Death on the Installment Plan
suggested that life’s final reward was death, and his exaggeration of reality, his preoccupation with the grotesque and the dangerous appealed to Diane, too. Her rebellion against the conventional, the reassuring, had begun when she was a teen-ager.

“Marvin and I are similar,” Diane confided to Tina Fredericks. “Rich, Jewish, protected,” They’d both been raised on Central Park West and Israel’s family had run a string of ladies’ specialty shops around Manhattan called David’s. But he did not talk about that much nor did he talk much about his brother or sister. “He was a very private fellow” says
Bazaar
editor Nancy White. However all of his friends knew he’d gone to the Yale art school, where he’d studied with Joseph Albers and then become one of Alexey Brodovitch’s protégés.

He’d apparently been greatly influenced by these men—master teachers who acted as guides, counselors, protectors, to a generation of artists and photographers. Their methods were harsh, dictatorial, and as Israel’s reputation grew in the 1960s as a painter/art director/teacher of graphics, he would behave rather like a Brodovitch with the small band of up-and-coming artists who gathered around him. “Marvin would always get turned on by a new talent,” one of his students says, “but then he’d grab hold of it—try to mold it and control it. He had to believe he controlled you as a talent. If you let him, he would art-direct your life.”

He saw Diane as an original talent who needed to be pushed. For the next eleven years he advised, cajoled, and promoted her. When she started telling Israel about the places she’d gone—the carnivals, Moondog’s filthy room—when she showed him contact prints of the freaks and eccentrics, he praised her courage. He later described her in a magazine article as the “first great private eye,” adding that she “loved being naughty…much of what she did came from that kind of delight. It made an explorer out of her.”

“Marvin thinks an artist’s obsessions are what make an artist interesting,” the novelist Larry Shainberg says. During the 1960s there was an almost convulsive move against fixed traditions in art, and in New York, off-Broadway actors, painters, musicians, dancers were experimenting wildly. Drugs were a source of pleasure, sex a source of power, and there seemed to be an increasing interest in characters who were living on the edge. Israel encouraged Diane to go deeper into the dark seedy worlds with her camera. “He believed she could push her obsessions to the limit,” Shainberg adds.