Diane Arbus (43 page)

Like most imaginative photographers, Diane found the medium limited—so that her images were meaningless unless she had stories and secrets attached to them.

Her friend, the painter Richard Lindner, would confirm this. Lindner would say that creative people must deal in secrets—if your secrets disappear, you are nothing.

Both he and Diane were intrigued by the sexual role-changes that were occurring in the sixties. He thought men were the victims as well as the victimizers of women, that women were more imaginative than men because “they have secrets we don’t even know about,” and richer, more complicated interior lives. Diane appreciated that, given her intense involvement with self, her ability to live so freely with her restless body and caressing hands.

She and Lindner often discussed pornography. She had, in fact, begun to collect porn (both novels and photographs), and was mesmerized by the boring repetitiveness of it—the literalness, the minimal style. Whenever
she went to the 42nd Street “live sex” shows, she was struck by how, although the expectation was for sensation, there was finally no sensation at all, no eroticism, no mystery up on the rickety stage. Strangely enough, erotic images seemed to hold little interest for Diane; their complicated, self-defining qualities were almost lost on her.

*
Pat Peterson says that when the special fashion issue was published in May 1967, it was “quite controversial. We got a lot of negative mail because Diane’s images were so strong.”

Diane credited this first issue to the Arbus studio. But her next two issues of children’s fashion, done in 1969 and 1970, she credited to herself. (All three have since become collectors’ items.)

*
Kelly (who later played the Fonz’s girl on TV) used to dress up in outrageous costumes and wigs and take kitschy self-portraits in an effort to “find” her true image. In 1968 Diane took a series of portraits of Kelly posing à la Marilyn Monroe. And Kelly took pictures of Diane staring out the window of the 42nd Street automat. She is holding onto her camera and flash. “(She looked as if she was on a cloud and about to take off,” Kelly said. “She took off alright [after that] I never saw her again.”)

A
PRIL 15, 1967.
E
ASTER
S
UNDAY
“Be-In” in Central Park. A pungent smell of incense rose from the grass on the Sheep Meadow, mingled with the smoke of burning draft cards. Thousands of hippie kids in beads and body paint were tripping, stumbling, playing guitars, throwing balloons into the air, yanking off their clothes and rolling into the lake by Bethesda Fountain. Diane came to photograph the spectacle with
Village Voice
photographer Fred McDarrah and Garry Winogrand, both of whom snapped shots of her looking guarded and chewing on a daffodil. “She hated having her picture taken,” Winogrand says.

Later that day she ran into John Putnam and complained that she wasn’t getting enough work. She’d expected “New Documents” to generate some really lucrative assignments, but not much had happened. A lot of phone calls, queries—a lot of talk from
Life,
but no definite offers—and when she went to
Look
to ask if they’d like her to photograph Death Row (something she’d always wanted to do), she was told it was too difficult to get permission. She hated peddling her pictures, her ideas, to magazines; it seemed degrading. She was now more afraid of going to Condé Nast than to a leather bar or a brothel.

She was still working regularly for
Esquire
and
Bazaar,
but the pay rate was terrible—$150 for a single black-and-white picture, $200 for a spread.

To dispel the growing myth that she only took pictures of freaks, she made up a list of elegant people she wanted to photograph. She told someone she wanted to photograph beautiful people because “beauty is itself an aberration—a burden, a mystery…like babies. They can take the most remorseless scrutiny…”

As if to prove her point, she took a remarkable portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt’s sleeping baby son, Anderson Hays Cooper, for a
Harper’s Bazaar
Valentine issue. In this truly astonishing picture the infant resembles a flat white death’s head—eyes sealed shut, mouth pursed and moist with saliva. When Gloria Vanderbilt saw the photograph, she forbade
Bazaar
to publish it, but eventually she changed her mind and this stunning image opened Diane’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.

She was still phoning Joseph Mitchell. One of the last times they spoke, he says, “I suggested she photograph the Basque shepherds who come to New York once a year for a few days before going on their way to Wyoming to herd sheep. Most of their time was spent at the Jai Lai, a marvelous Basque restaurant that used to be on Bank Street. Diane wanted to photograph men out of their culture—here was an opportunity. Don’t know whether she did.”

Mitchell says that after seven years of phone conversations “we still hadn’t met. She once said, ‘You know, we
should
meet.’ And then I admitted I’d caught a glimpse of her recently in the East Village at the Dom—she’d been photographing and she’d been so involved I didn’t want to interrupt her…

“And there was a pause and she confided she’d seen
me.
At Costello’s Bar—I’d been sitting with Sid Perelman and she’d looked very hard at me but decided not to come over. So we never met. And if memory serves, May of 1967 was the last time I ever heard from her.”

As the weather grew warmer, there were more marches for and against the Vietnam war. Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael spoke to crowds in Sheep Meadow, and Diane, along with dozens of other photographers, would move through the masses of humanity with her flash. Afterward she might wander over to 57th Street and Fifth Avenue near Doubleday’s and position herself by the store until the sun set, photographing. And in the evenings she might go to Richard Avedon’s seminars, where Debbie Turbeville was showing her first monochromatic shots of slouching women trapped in ominous settings and Garry Winogrand talked about how he was planning to use his Guggenheim. From there she might head for the Dom, the biggest disco on the Lower East Side, which was always filled with the sound of rock music and strobe lights and movies projected against the walls; she would stay there documenting the couples dancing, preening, clowning for her cameras. These people were an essential part of what came to be known as the sixties subculture—druggies, transvestites, groupies, socialites, rich kids, all gathered together, performing for Diane’s cameras. Everybody at the Dom acted hungry for approval, for recognition, but it was all surface—immediate, noisy, tedious, scanned. The girls wore outrageous styles—like the “plural love/
peace dress” which three could squeeze into at once (moving about the dance floor, they resembled a freaky six-legged animal). Then there were the boys in tight jeans and Sergeant Pepper jackets, little caps and granny glasses covering drugged, droopy eyes. Diane would quickly tire of such trivial self-revelation and end up at Max’s Kansas City to meet Marvin Israel and tell him about her day.

Often they might be joined by Mary and Robert Frank, Bea Feitler, and Larry Shainberg. The other poets and painters who frequented the bar seemed to hold the bleak, despairing Frank and the shadowy Diane in awe. By 1967 the art world had lost its idealism, its sense of outsideness, and was turning art into big business, but Diane and Robert Frank seemed exceptions—pursuing harsh, subversive work without any thought of financial gain or self-publicizing. At the moment Frank, unshaven and tattered as always, was completing a documentary called
Me and My Brother
about a catatonic man, and he was about to start another movie in Nova Scotia with novelist Rudi Wurlitzer (already a cult figure for his book
Nog,
which is dominated by a fantasy of self as a “dark wet hole”). As for Diane, she would usually be “electric with anxiety,” but eager to describe whatever had been happening to her.

Her latest story concerned releases. Her show was still up at the Museum of Modern Art, but she still hadn’t been able to get releases from most of her subjects and this was worrying since it touched on a photographer’s moral responsibility, the legal issue of invasion of privacy, as well as permission to reproduce the image. (Diane maintained that she always asked permission to photograph a person, and if he said no, she respected that.) In any event, she had recently hopped a cab, laden down as usual with her cameras, and the driver had asked laconically, “You a photographer?” “Yes, yes,” Diane answered, looking not at him but at her appointment book because she was late for an assignment. “Funny thing,” the driver droned on as he steered through traffic, “I went to the Museum of Modern Art the other day to catch à show and there
I
am big as life hanging on the wall. Picture of me! What a thrill! Wish I knew who the photographer was. Like to thank him.” Diane stared at his profile and burst out laughing.
“I’m
the photographer!” she exclaimed, recognizing the driver as the earnest young man in straw hat and a
BOMB HANOI
button in his lapel whom she’d photographed at a pro-Vietnam demonstration. “Listen,” she said, “I need a release
*
from you, all right?” With that he
stopped the cab and scrawled an okay on a matchbook cover, obviously delighted.

Other subjects weren’t. When her portrait of identical twins appeared in the “New Documents” exhibit, the twins’ parents protested that the image was a distortion and tried to stop the picture from being reproduced elsewhere because they thought their daughters would be exploited. (Eventually “The Twins” became Diane’s most famous photograph—her trademark, reproduced on posters, on her book cover, inspiring Stanley Kubrick in his horror film
The Shining
.)

The twins’ family’s reaction upset Diane, but she was equally upset about being copied. (“Imitation was not for her the sincerest form of flattery but an absolute horror,” her daughter Doon has written. One wonders how she’d feel today when so many photographers use her square format with flash.) Peter Hujar recalls that once when he joined her for dinner with Avedon and Marvin Israel, “She refused to speak to me. Later I found out she’d thought I’d ripped her off—copied her way of photographing transvestites—with a black border around the picture.” (One of Hujar’s most famous shots is of the dying transvestite Candy Darling.) “When I first saw Diane’s black-bordered portrait of the Gish sisters in
Bazaar,
I thought she’d copied
me
.”

She frequently talked to Garry Winogrand and John Szarkowski about being imitated, and as a result she kept changing cameras in order to change her imagery. She would go to Marty Forscher’s camera shop on West 46th Street a couple of times a week to look at the latest models. “In 1967 she was trying out a Fujica,” Winogrand says. “It resembled a pregnant Leica—clumsy, clunky—but Diane believed that the more difficult the camera, the better. She didn’t believe a picture that was easy to get could be good.”

In the early summer of 1967, Peter Crookston, deputy editor of the London
Sunday Times
magazine, arrived in New York from England. He was a polite, rosy-cheeked young man on the lookout for “the hottest American reporters and photographers,” so he’d already arranged to meet Harold Hayes of
Esquire,
that quintessential magazine of the 1960s. Hayes put him in touch with New Journalists like Gay Talese and photographers like Carl Fischer, but Crookston phoned Diane directly because the
Sunday Times
art director, Michael Rand, had seen her eccentric portraits in
Infinity
and wanted to give her some assignments.

Crookston says he was “instantly attracted” to the tousle-haired woman in miniskirt and workshirt who invited him into her little Greenwich Village house. She was soft and shy and giggled with pleasure at
some of the comments he made about her pictures. They sat in her cool, dark living room, which was so dim he found it hard to see the blow-ups she kept handing him—strange, angry, despairing faces, many of them. She had prints hung everywhere, tacked up on mats. There was one he liked in particular—a strong man flexing his muscles. “He looked like some mythic Hercules. I told Diane it was very good and she promptly gave it to me. It’s framed now in my apartment in London.”

They were interrupted periodically by Doon, who kept running up and down the stairs, shouting things at her mother. Diane would call back in reply, sometimes making a face of mock exasperation. Crookston noted that they seemed to have a very close, very warm relationship and that Doon was astonishingly beautiful. “You have a lovely daughter,” he murmured finally, and Diane answered, “Yes. We’re rivals.” She did not elaborate, and then the phone rang and she proceeded to hold a monosyllabic conversation. “Hmmm. Yeah. Yes? No…not tonight…well, maybe another time.” And she hung up and came back to sit down beside Crookston. “Have you ever been to an orgy?” she asked, and he replied, “No, have you?” “Yes,” she answered, she went to orgies and she photographed them. “Would you like to go to one tonight? We could go, but it would probably be very boring. They usually are. Although sometimes they’re fun.” And Crookston answered quickly, “I’d rather take you to supper.” Eventually they left the Charles Street house and went to a chili place nearby to eat. During the meal they talked mostly about their backgrounds, telling each other about their families. Then, after supper, they walked back to her car—“a beat-up Renault”—and she drove him to his hotel and they spent the night together.

At dawn, Crookston says, “I was awakened by Diane sitting bolt upright on the pillows and crying out, ‘What are you doing with me? I go to bed with old men, young boys…’ and then her voice trailed off and she giggled. ‘I couldn’t possibly have known that, now could I?’ I answered. With that she murmured that she’d gone wild after Allan left—wild—and had started having sex with as many people as possible, partially to ‘test’ herself, partially
to see what it was like
.”

She was always frightened, she said, but that meant conquering her fear each time; developing courage was extremely important to her, as important and “thrilling” as the “adventures” or “the events” (as she called them) themselves. Because the only way to understand something was to confront it, she said, and when you had sex, restraints were broken, inhibitions disappeared. Sex was the quickest, most primitive way to begin connecting with another human being, and the raunchier and grosser the person or environment, the more intense the experience, and this enlarged her life.