Diane Arbus (35 page)

“Diane’s friendship was nice,” he continues. “No demands. We saw each other on and off for eight months and then I got married. Diane knew my plans.” He would phone her in the evening and she’d usually stop off at his place, which wasn’t far from hers in the Village. They would be together for a while and then he’d put her into a cab and she’d go home. She never asked him about his life. (At the time Williams’ writing grant from the American Academy in Rome had just been withdrawn, with no reasons given. He believes it was because he was black and about to be married to a white woman.)

“Diane did ask a lot of questions about my family,” he says. He told her that his mother had been a domestic and his father a day laborer, and
that one of his mentors in Syracuse, where he grew up, was a redcap at the railway station who was also a numbers runner.

In turn, Diane described her childhood to Williams. “She connected her identity to Russeks department store and with money, but she seemed ambivalent—almost angry about it.”

She never talked about her photography except to say that she was trying to photograph some Hell’s Angels gang. Williams asked her if she was frightened. She said she was
always
frightened, no matter what she did—she lived with fear and overcoming fear every day of her life.

“Sometimes,” Williams says, “I got the feeling that Diane wanted me to treat her badly. But I wasn’t into chains and punching in the mouth. I thought she was probably bisexual. Why I suspected it I don’t know, except that she was inordinately sexy. There is something challenging and triumphant for a man if he can please this kind of mysterious creature, and I think I did.”

Diane, in fact, would say that she went to bed with women but “liked men better.” Apparently she did have occasional intimacies with women, but these liaisons were always discreet; Diane didn’t talk about them. Emile de Antonio used to accompany her and two of her women friends to the movies and he always felt acutely uncomfortable, even though no one said or did anything out of the ordinary. It was just that “Diane could create a very pervasive sexual atmosphere around her and she had an especially tender, insinuating way with the women she was attracted to.” It was as if she could not only sense the person’s deepest needs and most passionate demands, but seemed to suggest that she was willing to comply with any of them.

“Diane was many things to many people,” Marvin Israel has noted.

A New York hostess tells of a Halloween party she and her husband gave in the early sixties, “where many people seemed wired—on speed. Most of the art world came—Warhol, Frank Stella, de Antonio, Jasper Johns. Diane was there, hopping around with her cameras. I was costumed as Theda Bara. Bea Feitler wore a mask. We were both very drunk and Diane photographed us falling all over each other. Then she asked us to pose nude. We both refused. There was a lot of tension between Diane and Bea because Bea loved Diane—and she wanted Diane all to herself. She’d act possessive, but Diane would have none of it—she’d turn remote and detached, which drove Bea crazy. Come to think of it, everyone who ever cared about Diane became very possessive about her.

If at this point in her life Diane needed to have men and women fighting for her attention, there must be a connection to the unhappy truth that since Allan’s departure she had often experienced an aching sense of
worthlessness so profound that she couldn’t leave the Charles Street house. She had begun having an increasing amount of casual sex, which blotted out—at least temporarily—her feeling of abandonment; in the dark she could touch a stranger and be momentarily comforted.

During this period if you were with her for any length of time and she was in a talkative mood, the conversation might shift to sex and she would question you avidly about your sex life, or suddenly confide a detail about
hers
—that one of her lovers was a distinguished musician old enough to be her father; that the greatest thing about a pick-up or a one-night stand was the terrific sex—because neither one of you wants something from the situation and it isn’t exploitative yet, so all you have to do is respond, and sometimes it can be ecstatic.

“I’ve never heard anyone talk as frankly about sex as Diane Arbus did,” Frederick Eberstadt says. “She told me she’d never turned down any man who asked her to bed. She’d say things like that as calmly as if she were reciting a recipe for biscuits.”

According to the late John Putnam, “Diane told me she wanted to have sex with as many different kinds of people as possible because she was searching for an
authenticity
of experience—physical, emotional, psychological—and the quickest, purest way to break through a person’s façade was through fucking. She referred to such experiences as ‘adventures’—as ‘events.’ Actually, everything she did was an ‘adventure.’ To talk about her life that way seemed to heighten and justify existence for her.”

Morality was not involved. As far as she was concerned, men and women should be free to have as many, and as varied, sexual relationships as they wanted. Whether or not she got emotional fulfillment from any of her regular lovers is another matter. She could discuss technicalities of sex—the fact that she used amyl nitrate (a drug said to prolong orgasm), or that one of her lovers made her feel as if she’d climbed to the top of Mount Everest when he brought her to climax. But whether she was able to sustain or wanted another lasting love relationship—a true commitment with someone—she would never say. Increasingly, Diane maintained that she no longer believed in love and certainly not in sentiment.

It pleased her that in many cases she was now the seducer. The more successful she became with her camera, the more aggressive she became sexually; the camera was her protector, her shield, and it gave her access to forbidden places and she took advantage of that.

Some of the women Diane talked to thought she was merely experiencing “cheap thrills.” “It was a turn-off whenever she’d tell me about the men she’d had,” one woman says, adding, “It depressed me to hear that her ‘adventures’ were so limited—it was such a literal submission.” But others admired her for her daring; they believed she was “fucking for
liberation” (women affirming the need for sexual pleasure
is
political); they felt she was breaking a taboo by not only frankly acknowledging her sexual needs but acting on them. (Her attitude about breaking taboos was well known to her intimates. Among her friends she had been the first to speak openly about masturbating, about her pride in her menstrual flow. She spoke about her attraction for blacks; she revealed her obsession with a married man.) Kathy Aisen, a young artist who posed nude for her, says, “Women of my generation considered Diane Arbus a heroine. But I wished she’d done her screwing around
before
she became a mother. I wonder how her daughters felt.”

Diane never thought of herself as a revolutionary, let alone a feminist. And with her male lovers she continued to play the role of helpless female while bragging to them of her sexual conquests. “She had a dual persona,” says one man. “She was sexual victim/lusty lady rolled into one. She told me she would have been devastated if I hadn’t wanted her.”

During this period she went on seeing Marvin Israel (who, it is said, alternately scolded and applauded her for the way she was leading her life). She might accompany him to Robert Frank’s new apartment on West 86th Street, where the two men would hold earnest conversations that would often erupt into arguments while Diane sat in silence on the couch. Sometimes Israel’s outbursts were excused or ignored because he was a diabetic; sometimes his rages would break out if he went too long without his insulin shot. For whatever reasons, Diane seemed to enjoy his disturbing theatrics—his hostility in public. “Because underneath Diane was hostile, too,” de Antonio says. “Marvin expressed hostility for her.”

A
LTHOUGH THERE WERE A
great many fine women photographers working during the sixties (Margaret Bourke-White, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Eve Arnold, Toni Frissell, Ruth Orkin, Inge Morath, to name only a few), Diane did not associate herself with them. With the exception of Lisette Model, she never sought out women photographers for either advice or friendship. But she did bring her photographs for Tina Fredericks to comment on; she continued to do so even after Tina had left magazines and gone into real estate on Long Island.

Diane would also show her contacts to Walter Silver, a documentary photographer who lived near her in the West Village. Diane liked his work and he liked hers. “We’d compare prints,” Silver says, and then sometimes Diane would have coffee with him at the Limelight, where many photographers still hung out—photographers like Weegee, Robert Frank, and Louis Faurer. “We’d all sit together at a big table and Diane would sit with us,” Silver adds. “She’d never say a word—she’d just listen and then suddenly you’d look up and she’d be gone. She was the only woman who ever was in our little group.”

Which was her choice, of course, but some people got the feeling that Diane thought of photography as a man’s profession. “I remember, though, that once I mentioned that women might be better photographers than men because women can inspire greater confidence,” John Putnam noted, “and Diane said, ‘Look, I’m a
photographer,
not a woman photographer.’ ”

As for making a great photograph, Diane believed men and women were equal, but she also knew that for many of her magazine assignments she was being paid half what a man would be paid and this bothered her. Still, photographing for magazines was the only way to survive; all the photographers she respected did magazine work. Walker Evans, for example, had subsisted for years on the money he earned from
Fortune.
He was contracted to do one tycoon a month for the magazine.

Marvin Israel wanted Diane to meet Evans, who had encountered
Helen Levitt and Robert Frank at crucial times in their careers. Diane was at a turning point in hers, but she was afraid to meet Evans, so she kept putting it off. She was still struggling to find her themes and master a style. She was afraid he wouldn’t like her work, wouldn’t like
her.
She revered Evans—revered his clear, straightforward portraits of Hart Crane and Lincoln Kirstein, his secret candids of subway passengers, his photographs of empty rooms and clapboard auto shops and peeling billboards and, of course, the moving documents of impoverished sharecropper families he’d taken during the Depression for the Farm Security Administration in collaboration with James Agee’s text for
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

To Evans, the artist was an image-collector—“He collects things with his eye.” He once said: “The secret of photography is that the camera takes on the character and the personality of the handler. The mind works on the machine.”

When Diane finally met him, Evans was fifty-nine and living on the top floor of a brownstone on East 94th Street with his new wife, Isabelle, a shiny-cheeked young woman from Switzerland who was thirty years younger than he. He had just undergone a serious ulcer operation and was frail, spending most of the day reclining on a couch. He taught photography at Yale and was still under contract to
Fortune,
but since he’d turned down its art directorship, the Time Inc. management had put him in a closet-sized office, where he was called an editor but had little to do. His wife, Isabelle, says, “He’d juggle three sets of friends—because the Robert Penn Warrens and the Lincoln Kirsteins didn’t associate with Robert Frank or Berenice Abbott—or the Cass Canfields, for that matter. Walker loved going to the dinner dances at the Canfields’. He’d put on a tux and we’d waltz the light fantastic; he was a very graceful man.”

Much of the time he was in despair because he felt he had “dried up creatively.” He was a legend in photography, but he no longer had any ideas as to what he wanted to photograph. When Diane knew him, he was fighting alcoholism and taking amphetamines and occasionally escaping to the little tenement apartment he still kept on York Avenue—he’d had it since the 1930s. It was filled with letters and old negatives, and sometimes he’d just hole up there for a while.

Isabelle Evans says, “Marvin would phone Walker constantly, asking him to do things for
Bazaar.
He knew Walker was in a down mood. He would bring him fine bottles of Châteauneuf du Pape because he knew Walker couldn’t drink hard liquor, and we’d sit around a roaring fire and talk.”

One afternoon Israel came bounding up the stairs carrying a sheaf of Arbus photographs, “some of the eccentric photographs. Walker couldn’t
get over them. He’d taken a lot of unposed portraits, so he could tell that Diane’s subjects had collaborated with her; they’d had dialogues. He was as impressed as he’d been when he first saw Bob Frank’s work.

“Marvin told him, ‘Diane Arbus is outside in a cab—can I bring her up?’ Walker urged him to, and Marvin tried; he went downstairs, but came back a few minutes later, saying, ‘Diane won’t. She’s too shy…she can’t.’ But she did come soon afterward. It was tough going at first.” She quotes a note Walker Evans wrote her when she was off on a short trip: “March 3, 1963. Cooked dinner for Marvin Israel and little photo girl, Diane Arbus. Not good evening. She was so inarticulate. He was in a poor mood.” Eventually, Isabelle Evans says, Diane and Walker became friends and then “Walker had a falling out with Marvin after he left
Harper’s Bazaar,
so Diane began coming alone. We often had dinner together.”

Isabelle always noticed what Diane wore. “Maybe it was because Walker was so dapper—he adored his beautifully cut English suits, his thirty pairs of highly polished Peel shoes. Diane looked positively elegant whenever she visited us—she might be in a Courrêges jacket and pants, her hair cut chicly like a boy’s. She said David did it at Bendel’s.” (Diane’s personal appearance fluctuated as wildly as her moods. Some people remember her as “fashionable and immaculate,” others insist she was “usually disheveled and not always clean.” How she looked depended on how she felt. If she was depressed or working very hard, she didn’t care how she looked.)

Once she visited the Evanses having just been taken in a jeep to the opening of Mainbocher’s collection at the Brooklyn Museum. Earlier she’d told them that she’d been camping out at some transvestite hotel, photographing its occupants. “She seemed turned on by the fact that she could coexist in both worlds,” Isabelle says. “But maybe there’s a connection—a similarity—between the fashion world and the underworld; entry into each is difficult; each has a code and language of its own, and Diane seemed to know both instinctively.
*