Diane Arbus (32 page)

Diane was bothered by some of Avedon’s methods. She didn’t think they were always fair. The retouching—the softening or coarsening of prints—distorted and warped some of his celebrities on film. And while
she was painstakingly slow when taking a portrait, Avedon relied on his brand of rapid “unearned intimacy” with a subject. “Ten minutes” and it’s a deep one-on-one situation with two strangers who share a moment. “Then, it’s over, and thank you very much and how to get out the door.” When asked what it felt like to photograph Ezra Pound or Marilyn Monroe, Avedon responded, “I forget. I’m so split the moment I photograph, I don’t remember what they’ve said or what I’ve said.” Diane couldn’t believe he was unable to remember, since she remembered
everything,
but everyone was different. She had already formulated a belief (shared by Steichen) that photography was “born perfect.” That an image at its truest should be both literal and transcendent. Diane didn’t want the quality of her portraits to be sentimentalized or manipulated; what she hoped for was to dramatize a particular life.

Diane would occasionally voice her ambivalent feelings about some of Avedon’s work to others—but never to him. Mostly she seemed to be his biggest fan, just as he seemed to be hers. He stood in awe of her curious talent and she remained impressed by his staying power in a business where there were so many burnouts; his ideas were limitless—and he could always solve the photographer’s perennial problem, what to photograph next.

They became dear friends, perhaps because they possessed the same roots. Both were descended from immigrants; their fathers were driven, inarticulate men who had run Fifth Avenue stores at the same time. “Diane and I were so close we used to tell each other our dreams,” Avedon once confided.

As a little boy, when he’d done poorly in school, he’d forged his parent’s signature on report cards. He failed to graduate from DeWitt Clinton High, which disappointed his family greatly—they’d wanted him to get a good education because they believed education was essential for survival. “But I had a visual intelligence,” Avedon would say. As a teen-ager he could not concentrate on math—instead he papered his bedroom walls with Munkacsi’s exuberant fashion photographs from
Bazaar
and he collected autographs by writing letters to Toscanini, Einstein, Katharine Cornell. Once he found out that Salvador Dali was staying at the Hotel St. Moritz and went to his suite carrying his autograph book. The eccentric painter greeted him at the door wearing a snake wrapped around his waist. In the background his wife, Gala, stood nude, waiting to be sketched.

After he became a famous photographer, Avedon would try to convince various women friends to pose for him with snakes. In recent years one of his most publicized celebrity portraits was of the beautiful German movie star Nastassia Kinski, totally naked, her body entwined by a huge python.

Diane never saw that picture, but she did see Avedon’s huge portrait of Eisenhower looking exceedingly absent-minded. She loved it “because Ike’s expression is like he came out of the womb too soon.” (It bore a slight resemblance to the ID shots Avedon took by the hundreds when he was in the Merchant Marine during World War II. That was part of his training as a photographer.)

Later Diane would say, “Dick does everything with grace.” He had originally fantasized becoming a tap dancer (he was thrilled when Fred Astaire played him in the movie musical
Funny Face).
He effortlessly moved around his studio; his wiry body appearing even more slender because he often dressed in black suits. Terrified of gaining weight, he existed sometimes on a spoonful of peanut butter a day. Oh, he was gallant, Diane thought—she called him glamorous too, and mercurial and charming with everything—but he had a reserve, he held back. His family life with his wife, Evelyn, and his son, John, was scrupulously private and he had few close friendships apart from Diane—one was with Laura Kanelos, his devoted photo rep. When she died of cancer in the 1970s, he shut himself away from everybody for days. Ultimately he would move into his studio and live in one room, but during the sixties he kept an apartment on Park Avenue. Even so, he spent most of his time photographing in his studio, where everything seemed synchronized down to the last minute.

His studio with his many assistants was a miracle of organization and efficiency as far as she was concerned, she who was so inefficient! And the way he made so much money—$100,000 for one Revlon account, another $100,000 for CBS Records—he could complete shooting the accounts in a month or two and then be free to concentrate on personal work. Avedon showed “grace under pressure,” Diane believed, including the time when one of his secretaries dropped dead in the studio and he’d got everybody involved. “It was a shocking occurrence,” a friend said. “Happened right in the middle of a fashion shooting. Dick had never seen anyone dead close up before. He made everybody from
Bazaar
come to her funeral, and afterwards at the magazine’s advertising conference, where he was supposed to talk about upcoming styles, he spoke instead very movingly of the girl’s untimely death. Diane thought that was a terrific thing to do.”

For his part Avedon thought Diane was a genius—a photographer with a rare and special gift. Marvin Israel called her an artist. “Avedon for all his phenomenal success was very insecure about his talent,” Lee Witkin, the gallery owner, says. He wanted his pictures to be considered—noticed; more than anything, he wanted not to be thought of as “merely a fashion photographer.”

In time he would be able to see that his fashion work was truly remarkable—unique. He would accept the fact, and he would also be influenced
by Diane—by her patience, her endurance, by her collaborative, confrontational portraiture organized around a single focus: the face.

But an Avedon would still be—distinctively—an Avedon, more isolated and energized than an Arbus and always immaculately, superbly printed on gleaming white semigloss or matte simulacrum to make the subjects stand out with a kind of hallucinatory sharpness.

Like Diane, Avedon used a Rollei, but eventually he switched to the old-fashioned 8x10 Deardorf camera “because I no longer wanted to hide behind the camera. I wanted to meet my subjects man to man. I wanted nothing to help the photograph except what I could draw out of the sitter.”

He was now insisting on alternating his fashion pages in
Bazaar
with faces that interested him. He’d become obsessed with documenting the similarity between faces, matching up unlikely combinations: the baby doctor—the murderer (can you tell who’s who?). He made Nancy White give him extra pages in which to publish his portraits of marriages in City Hall, or his portraits of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

He was given total support by Marvin Israel, who was making the magazine’s design concept as distinctive as its editorial content. He sent Robert Frank to Poland and Russia to photograph fashions against grim totalitarian backdrops; he hired Stan Vanderbeck to create imaginative collages; he applauded Avedon’s idea of taking pictures of Countess Christina Paolozzi baring her breasts, and of photographing the Paris collections with the beautiful model China Machado surrounded by mottled, wrinkled, aging members of the French press.

Israel would talk of his future plans for
Bazaar:
yes, it would reflect trendy clothes and images, but also life as seen by Fellini. Dale McConathy, its former features editor, says, “Marvin loved
La Dolce Vita.
He wanted to capture the feel of that movie with its suggestions of tabloid sensationalism—upper-class apathy and corrupted sensuality; he wanted to capture that in the pages of
Bazaar,
in between the ads for perfume and jewelry and the editorials on lingerie and furs…and Marvin and Avedon had 1950s cultural heroes they longed to immortalize—cultural heroes like Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Oscar Levant, who were starting to be physical
wrecks.”

Needless to say, Diane’s severe vision—her fascination with freaks and eccentrics—seemed to be an asset, a weapon if you will, to wield against Nancy White,
Bazaar’s
stylish but rather conventional editor-in-chief.

Diane was dropping in at Richard Avedon’s studio with increasing regularity and he always encouraged her and gave her technical advice. Occasionally they would exchange stories about how they had achieved a particular photographic result, but that was rare—Avedon ordinarily didn’t reveal his tricks. Nor did he praise other photographers except for
Diane, though he admired Irving Penn. “What’s Irving up to these days?” he’d ask.

Once he did confide how he got the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to appear so surprised in his ravaged portrait of them for his book
Nothing Personal.
He reportedly arrived at their Waldorf Towers apartment and began setting up his cameras as the royal couple carefully arranged themselves. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he murmured, “but the most terrible thing happened—my cab ran over a dog.”

The Windsors (both dog-lovers) gasped. “Acch!”

Click! went the shutter.

Diane liked that story and another he used to tell about the time Charlie Chaplin hid out for a day in his studio, hoping to avoid the immigration authorities. During that day Avedon snapped dozens of increasingly frenzied portraits of the great clown making faces at him through the lens.

Diane thought her own anecdotes about getting pictures weren’t as “classy.” Her stories were about how she’d finally been able to track down a hermit only to find he was “uh—a man more than a hermit.” Then there had been the weird meal she’d shared with two transvestites in a diner…after she’d photographed them at a drag-queen ball.

At first she didn’t have much to say when she visited Avedon to show him her latest prints. He and Israel were the only ones she trusted enough to let them see her rough, private work in progress. Usually the three of them would huddle over her latest set of contacts with magnifying glass and grease pencil. In these sessions Israel would demonstrate what museum people like T. Hartwell called “genius” because he would invariably help Diane choose from her contacts the shots which best revealed her personal style. He knew what made visual sense. He would often tell her to go back and shoot some more, or he might suggest cropping a photograph in a particular way that would result in a more powerful result. Neither he nor Avedon would ever tamper with her unique approach; all they could really do was encourage her, nurture her. The three of them developed a more or less free-floating system of equals. “They respected each other so much,” the photographer Neil Selkirk says. What bound them together in that studio more than anything was a kind of shared energy. “And nosiness,” he adds. As a, trio they were insatiably curious, wandering the city together, until Diane went off to photograph in her “forbidden places” alone, returning with pictures and stories that often left the men howling. “These shreds of life stories are what she found from the people she photographed,” Doon Arbus writes, “and when she told of these encounters, …she would become like someone possessed—possessed by phrases, accents, and peculiarities of speech, and bursts of laughter over her own performance.”

“A photograph for Diane was an event,” Marvin Israel said in a television interview. “It could be argued that for Diane the most valuable thing wasn’t the photograph (the result), it was the experience—the event. She was absolutely moved by every single event, and she would narrate them in detail. She wouldn’t just say, ‘I took a photograph of so and so in their home.’ It was the going there—being there, the dialogue that came back and forth, the moments of just waiting—no talk. It was an incredibly personal thing and once [she] became an adventurer—because Diane really was an adventurer—she went places no one else [no photographer] had ever gone to. [Those] places were scary… But once [she] became an adventurer [she was] geared to adventure and she sought out adventure and [her] life [was] based on that…the photograph was like her trophy—it was what she received as an award for her adventure.”

After she had shown her latest photographs to Avedon and Israel and told them her latest adventure, she might take off with Alen McWeeney, the young Irish photographer who was then Avedon’s assistant. They would settle in at Grand Central Station and photograph the people hanging around the waiting room late at night, and then they might go back to the Charles Street house and talk about photography. “But she showed me few of her photographs,” McWeeney says, “even though I knew she was working on a lot of new stuff.”

She was starting to photograph more mythological types—dwarfs and a giant. She never explained why she was so drawn to these fabled creatures, but then Diane never gave specific reasons for anything she did artistically. It was simply that the best pictures she took reflected her attraction to the subject. Like Morales, the Mexican dwarf, whom she photographed over and over again for years, getting to know his habits, his thoughts. Eventually she posed him squatting bare-chested on his bed with his hat on. By that time the rapport between them was palpable, almost erotic, and you can feel it emanating from the image. “Taking a portrait is like seducing someone,” Diane told John Gossage.

The same thing happened when she began photographing the 495-pound, eight-foot-tall “Jewish Giant,” Eddie Carmel. Diane kept shooting him for almost a decade, not printing the negatives until 1970 because “the others were just—pictures.” She first photographed him in the insurance office on 42nd Street where he worked selling mutual funds. Next she photographed him wandering around Times Square in the penny arcades, looming above the traffic. In a good mood he would make up poetry for her—“a kind of calypso,” Diane said. “You would give Eddie a word or two and then he’d compose a poem.”

She felt in awe of his enormous height—particularly when she photographed him alone in a room. She said later to a class, “He’s really very
moving, when he lies down, because he looks in a way like Alice. I mean there’s something extraordinary about the way he fills a couch. I don’t know—like a mountain range.”