Diane Arbus (34 page)

In May of 1962 Tom Morgan went off to write about a peace march for
Esquire
and Diane covered it with him. The two of them joined thirteen pacifists who were somewhere in Maryland protesting the arms race. (They had begun the seven-hundred-mile march in Hanover, New Hampshire, and planned to end it at the Washington Monument.)

Twenty-one-year-old Paul Salstrom, the tall, sober leader of the march, was a conscientious objector from Illinois. He remembers Diane as “strong—athletic, muscular legs. She walked along with us for two days straight without tiring at all and she photographed everybody”—everybody like Marcie Bush, the sixty-year-old blind man who sold vending machines in Philadelphia, and Joel Kerr, who raised trees in Vermont, and Penny Young, the most experienced protester, who had been in demonstrations against the Atomic Energy Commission and spent five days in jail.

Salstrom says, “Diane spent time talking with all of us.” He thought she was “totally apolitical but a humanist.” He was impressed by her “because she seemed serious without being heavy about it.” Diane ended up taking an individual portrait of every member of the march, but when she gave her rolls of film to
Esquire,
Robert Benton blew up the long shot of the thirteen pacifists trudging along a highway, flags and posters flapping in the wind, and he bled it across a two-page spread. It is a very
striking image that reminds the viewer of a medieval children’s crusade—a crusade that is doomed, without hope of progress or relief.

Benton says Diane was “producing like crazy for us all during 1962, ‘63, ‘64.” He was very pleased with what she was doing; her haunted, eerie images seemed to complement the jazzy, edgy journalism Clay Felker and Harold Hayes were conjuring up. Sometimes, after going over a layout with Benton, Diane would go out to the corner Schrafft’s with him and David Newman to “share bacon sandwiches and talk.” Benton believes she was almost happy then, “because she was part of a family again.”

The family in question was journalist Thomas B. Morgan’s. Morgan hailed from Springfield, Ohio, and he regularly wrote profiles for
Look
and
Esquire.
He and his wife, Joan, and their children lived across from Diane’s converted stable in a lovely Federal house they’d just bought; the two families shared a common court.

“Actually, it was just a compound,” Morgan says. “Our two houses were surrounded by a wall which backed the Sixth Precinct. Years ago the police kept their horses in the reconverted stable Diane now lived in.”

Diane got into the habit of visiting the Morgans at least once a day. “Sometimes she’d whip up a batch of chili and we’d all share it,” Morgan says. “Diane and I had chili-making contests because I thought I was the best chili-maker in the world until I tasted hers.” When she wasn’t photographing, Diane would spend hours in the Morgan kitchen listening to Tom and Joan talk. Usually Pati Greenfield would be there too—Joan’s “best pal.” And Diane became close to them both. “They were all married to restless, ambitious men who were away from home a lot—myself included,” Morgan admits. “They were into making nests, so their friendship was very much a female-bonding kind of thing. I’d come back from an assignment and they’d seem to be communicating together in the kitchen in a language I didn’t understand.” Pati was tall, big-breasted, hugely energetic, raising five kids in a house on West 22nd Street. Diane admired her because she seemed the perfect maternal figure—available, responsible, uncomplaining. She was able to juggle everything simultaneously—hold a child in one arm while stirring a stew with the other. The three women would take turns baby-sitting for each other; they’d shop together in the markets and cheese stores around Greenwich Village, and on Saturdays Amy Arbus might go out to Wading River, where the Morgans and the Greenfields had weekend homes.

(In 1967 Pati Greenfield was the victim of a strange accident. Deeply depressed and on too many tranquilizers, she either jumped or fell from the second-story window of her house, pitched onto the sidewalk, and cracked open her skull. In 1971 Diane committed suicide, and Joan Morgan found herself surrogate mother to the Arbus and Greenfield kids. She
would never discuss either of her dead friends. “The whole thing is too personal, too painful,” she cried.)

During the 1960s the atmosphere between the Arbus and Morgan families was harmonious and loving. “There was only one unsettling incident,” Tom Morgan says. “Unsettling because Diane and I so violently disagreed.”

It started when a close friend of Morgan’s, the artist Paul Von Ringleheim (known for his huge environmental sculptures that embellish shopping centers), stopped at the Arbus/Morgan compound one afternoon and on the spur of the moment proceeded to decorate an entire interior wall of the courtyard with a mural. “It was twenty yards long and fifteen feet high,” Von Ringleheim says. “I wanted to show how you could control space with color. The Arbus and the Morgan kids got into the act, with me splashing paint around. While I was doing swirls and squares on one wall, they did a mural on the opposite wall which had a more primitive, less abstract cast—jungles, birds, that kind of thing.”

Everybody seemed enthusiastic about murals, but a week later Diane strode into the Morgan kitchen and told Tom, “I hate Paul’s mural. Really hate it. It gets on my nerves, and I’m forced to look at it every time I walk outside. I want it painted out.” Morgan says, “This caused some consternation since Paul was—is—one of my best friends and, I think, a fine artist. I didn’t know what to do. But Diane wouldn’t rest until something was done. We finally had a two-family conclave and Diane gave an impassioned plea and I gave my opinion. It was voted that Paul’s mural be painted out, and only then did Diane calm down. She could be very determined when she wanted to be, but her determination always surprised me because she was usually so reticent.”

Every so often, without any explanation, Diane would break into tears at the Morgans’ and stumble back across the courtyard to her own little house. Once her sister phoned her from Michigan—“I always phoned D, she never phoned me”—and suddenly Diane was sobbing into the receiver about not getting over the break-up of her marriage. She didn’t blame Allan, she kept saying, because they’d grown away from each other, they’d found they weren’t what they’d thought they were—that they wanted different things—but why couldn’t they still be married? It had never occurred to her that their marriage might be anything but permanent. Why, you could be on the other side of the world—you could have lovers—and
still be married.
It was like having a sibling. Even if you had nothing in common with that sibling, you could never lose a brother or a sister or a husband except in death. But she had been wrong, and now she was
disillusioned because she’d once believed so completely in the loony fantasies she’d had as a teen-ager about love and marriage lasting forever. These fantasies were now being replaced by the sexual battling between herself and the various men she was going out with.

She tried to keep from most people the torment she continued to experience over the end of her marriage. Eventually she began telling friends she no longer believed in love, and when Pati Hill wrote a short novel entitled
One Thing I Know
about the death of an adolescent passion, she dedicated it “to Diane Arbus.” Diane scribbled ironic comments in the margins of the galleys Pati sent her from Paris, and yet when her goddaughter, May Eliot, told her that she was determined to marry a man she was crazy about, “Diane was delighted. She thought it was wonderful when people married the first person they fell in love with.” She told May that she and Allan were really good friends and that their separation was relaxed and civilized. They were too polite for it to be otherwise.

May Eliot remembers going to breakfast at Charles Street and Allan dropping in, as he often did, and Doon and Amy were crowded around the table along with Sudie, the baby-sitter, and “there were big wine goblets filled with orange juice and the coffee mugs were brightly colored enamel with white insides and everybody giggled and joked about all sorts of things personal and cosmic.”

But there was strain. De Antonio remembers visiting Charles Street and “Diane was trying to play the mother who took care of everything, and she laughed and smiled a lot, but the obligation to her children was an overwhelming burden for her.” She was obviously under great pressure and weighed down by the responsibilities of raising two daughters mostly by herself. But she never complained; she went from grocery-shopping to helping Amy with her homework to advising Doon about one of her writing assignments before dashing off to photograph someone for
Esquire.
“I always saw Diane hurrying somewhere,” Robert Benton says. “Getting in and out of cabs, lugging those cameras—she was frequently late. Or the cab hadn’t got to the right address. It was always a drama.” And Allan was helping her print. She could spend hours working on a negative under his guidance. Once a fashion editor who’d worked with them for over a decade found them huddling over a tray of hypo. “Allan was whispering something in Diane’s ear—she had a sly little smile on her face. It was just like the old days at
Glamour
magazine. They still seemed very close.”

And they were. Allan would often introduce Diane to the women he was seeing—she would tell him about Marvin Israel’s plans for her career. However, she told Tina Fredericks that she never could see Marvin as much as she wanted to. Oh, they might meet at a party or run into each other at an art gallery; but ideally she wished he could be available for
comfort and advice twenty-four hours a day. Allan was still like that, and—when he was in New York—Alex Eliot, and sometimes her brother, Howard.

Meanwhile, Marvin Israel remained devoted to his wife. A shy, prodigiously gifted woman who rarely left their 14th Street studio, Margie Israel, née Ponce (she’d been born in Cuba), was totally consumed by her art. A master craftsman—she could sculpt, paint, sketch, build, and she invented various mixed-media combinations: plaster, ceramic, and papier-mâché sculpture, blackboard drawings, fabric constructions involving feathers and stained glass. Israel frequently mentioned his wife’s impressive achievements to Diane; he was proud of her and took loving care of her. She was often in delicate health, but he never allowed her to go to a hospital; instead he nursed her himself.

Now that he was busy with his job at
Harper’s Bazaar,
he had less time for Diane, so she would periodically wander over to the
Bazaar
offices at 56th and Madison Avenue, ostensibly to rustle up another assignment but actually to be near him for a while. She might wait in the fiction editor’s cubicle, giggling over Alice Morris’ gossip about the latest books. At some point Israel would pass by—she could count on that. Listening for the soft pad-pad of his tennis shoes, she could always sense his approach. He would saunter into view. She wouldn’t even look up at him. They wouldn’t exchange a word, and he would walk on.

Marvin Israel had a slight, muscular build, very trim. He exercised ferociously. Geri Trotta,
Bazaar’s
features editor, remembers he wore expensive but frayed clothes and had his hair cut by his pretty English secretary. Trotta once observed this being done in the art department. “Marvin perched on a stool scowling as the scissors clip-clipped.” Nearby his two assistant art directors, Bea Feitler and Ruth Ansel, pasted up the layouts.

Bea and Ruth had been Israel’s most brilliant students at Parsons. They were both twenty-three and precocious, original designers. (Later Ruth became art director of the
New York Times Magazine
and Bea would design
Ms. Magazine, Rolling Stone,
and, just before her premature death in 1982, the new
Vanity Fair.)
Back in the 1960s they were already copying Israel’s cold, abrupt manner with editors and photographers, but they were unusually tender and solicitous to Diane, gave her many assignments, and allowed her free run of the art department. She came and went, and long after Marvin Israel was gone, the
Bazaar
office was one of Diane’s chief places for hanging out.

Eventually the three women became friends. Bea, in particular—husky-voiced, imperious Bea—would invite Diane up to the stylish little apartment she kept on West 56th Street. She gave many parties there,
mixing French fashion models with Italian movie stars and the trendiest American designers and painters. The parties lasted late and there was, a guest said, “a bacchanal feel to them.” “Plenty of wine and drugs and thumping disco music,” recalled the late Chris von Wangenheim. “A lot of the guests were what you’d call polymorphous-perverse.”

Bea came from a wealthy Brazilian family, and that, too, helped bring her and Diane together; they shared an understanding of the problems and pleasures of being born rich. Eventually Diane gave Bea some of her private unpublished photographs and she may have spoken to her about her increasing obsession with Marvin Israel. Bea was very close to Israel. She cared about him and she cared about Diane, too; as the years slipped by, she went on hoping that nobody would get hurt.

Sometimes, after leaving
Bazaar,
Diane would wander the streets before going home. And if Amy was being taken care of by Doon or a baby-sitter, she could stay out as late as she wanted—prowling about Grand Central Station, 42nd Street, and the bus terminal. She met the
Village Voice
drama critic, Arthur Sainer, in the Sheridan Square subway station on New Year’s Eve, on her way to covering a big party. She dropped a lens from her camera bag and it rolled across the platform; Sainer ran to bring it back to her and they started talking. It was the only way to meet people, she thought. Spontaneously. No formal introductions, no planning.

She’d met the novelist John A. Williams (author of
The Man Who Cried I Am)
casually, at a party celebrating the publication of Tom Morgan’s first book. Williams recalls: “Diane looked straight at me, then looked away, giggling, because Tom was trying to get her to go out with another one of his friends and she refused. Instead we went out to dinner—to some Spanish restaurant with Dave and Heije Garth. Diane told me she’d known we’d be together from the moment she laid eyes on me.