Diane Arbus (50 page)

After returning from London, Diane appeared to talk even more compulsively about her sexual adventures. Not just to friends but to casual acquaintances, even strangers she might meet at a party. She told how she had followed a dumpy middle-aged couple to their staid East Side apartment. She had sex with both of them, she said. There was never any
shame or embarrassment in her voice. She always reported this kind of experience as exactly as she could, going out of her way to state the facts clearly. It was as if she were bearing witness to her own life, observing, reporting on the explorations of other people’s nightmares, other people’s fantasies not her own. This was the public part of her, the adventuring somebody outside herself. Actually she was an exceptionally concealed person with an intense inner life nobody would ever know about. The perversities, the obsessions, the distinctiveness that were a part of Diane—her genius eye—where did they come from? “Nothing about her life, her photographs or her death was accidental or ordinary,” Richard Avedon has said. “They were mysterious and decisive and unimaginable except to her. Which is the way it is with genius.”

So that when she maintained she’d had sex with a dwarf or a couple of nudists her friends would listen—some in awe that she had the courage to go so totally with her obsessions. Others were shocked and disturbed as the stories grew more urgent. It seemed as if merging with her subjects, both “straights” and “freaks,” was a way of giving herself to them after they revealed themselves to her camera. Such violent self-definition seemed part of her nature as an artist. To take extreme risks fed her art and energized her life. The purest experience for her was a body experience. The body’s life was a matter of power to her. And if and when the sex act was perfect then the combination of intense physical pleasure and ecstasy along with the total psychic connection made the experience transcendental. But usually the quick impersonal sex Diane had was only “very very boring.” The sex act could also be filled with dread and awe and death-awareness for her. (She once was talking to Gail Sheehy, “and without any prompting, Diane told me about the group sex she was into—photographing it and joining in it. It seemed to tempt and revolt her at the same time. ‘All sensation and no emotion,’ she said. The couples, most of them, were unattractive physically and there was no desire—no reconciliation of body and spirit. She described the experience as an attempt to lose herself, to give herself up to sex. Because no human emotion was involved. Not lust or fantasy and certainly no fulfillment. It was a denial of nature and our flesh. An out-of-body experience almost like death, she said.” Sheehy said she thought Diane was unprepared for this kind of deadly exploration and it was damaging to her. But to others like John Putnam, to whom she told the same story, she seemed heroic for opening herself up to such extreme experiences.)

She seemed heroic to some of the students she lectured to at Cooper Union, Parsons and lastly at the Rhode Island School of Design. One student, Stephen Frank, recalls, “She blew everybody’s mind. She was very
wound up talking about photography—nothing was sacred to her—there were no taboos and she was so sexy! She drew us out about ourselves. We all wanted to make love to her.”

Another student, a girl, developed a huge crush on her. She was very young and highly keyed, malleable. She started dressing like Diane—in the same black leather outfit and short cropped hair that seemed to obscure gender and ethnicity. Eventually she tried to take pictures the way Diane did, in a harsh bleak way, and she would tell people Diane was a visionary because she saw the world as a frightening alienating place where everybody defined their own reality and she “saw” the world like that too—and identified with Diane’s freaks and oddities—freaks were the metaphors of the sixties. There was a tension in this girl whenever she spoke about Diane and sometimes she trembled when she spoke.

For a while Diane allowed the girl to be her assistant and “go-fer.” She babysat for Amy and in late afternoons or evenings she might listen to Diane talk about the extortionist she’d met and the pickpocket she’d tried to photograph after waiting for hours for him in a police station.

“It was Blow-Up time,” said the late Chris von Wangenheim. “Photographers like Avedon—like Diane—were being lionized, romanticized. It was weird because photographers were starting to cannibalize—those of us who’d just come from Berlin or Paris were getting into images of cruelty and the forbidden. Fashion photography would soon turn pornographic. It was the time of the Manson killings too—Diane talked a lot about that and about witchcraft in Beverly Hills and strange rites practiced on a beach. She was dying to photograph Manson and his gang and this girl assistant wanted to go with her.”

But instead Diane flew out to California alone. Since she couldn’t get an assignment photographing Manson, she worked on one of her own projects, photographing a man who said he was Joan Crawford. He had made up a new identity, she would tell Francis Wyndym later, a new identity in order to survive in the world.

When she returned to New York, Diane was depressed. She went back into therapy but it didn’t seem to give her much relief. “I think Diane saw her shrink just so she could talk,” the late John Putnam said. “But Diane could seduce anybody with her talk. She could talk rings around you which is what I think she did with the analyst—you could never find out what was bothering her.”

She did say over and over again that now that she was getting better known people
expected
things of her and she didn’t want anyone to expect things from her since she didn’t know what to expect from herself and never would. Photography consumed her. But her success and
achievements held little interest for her. She continually denied her ability. It was almost like a reflex, something she’d been taught.

Howard was the same way. He’d often comment that he wasn’t too bright. Diane referred to him in conversation as “my brother the poet.” She never referred to him by name. But they seemed to have a very intense emotional relationship; it may have been the most sustaining relationship in her life, in spite of their protracted separations and silences. She would talk about Howard’s visits to New York to see her.

By October Diane was telling people that therapy wasn’t helping much, but she seemed less depressed when Garry Winogrand photographed her, flirty in black satin and decorated with her flash attachments, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were both covering Henry Geldzahler’s big party there celebrating the “New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940-1970” exhibit. A thousand people were invited and at least two thousand more crashed through what amounted to dazzling single-room retrospectives of Stella, Rauschenberg, de Kooning, Gorky, and Johns. “What no one realized at the time,” Calvin Tompkins wrote later, “was the whole gaudy event—the paintings, the sculptures, the behavior, the baroque costumes, the din, the excitement arising from the brilliant work…would come to be regarded as the last exotic rites of an era that was ending.”

Diane must have sensed this. She photographed “like a vulture” that evening, someone said—“hopping—swooping—blinding the mobs around the six bars and the orchestra blasting rock and the museum trustees, some of whom were grinding their hips against party-crashers dressed like Indians.”

Late in 1969 Mary Frank and Diane discussed moving into Westbeth, the new artists’ community that had just opened near the Hudson River docks. To outsiders the massive gray stone buildings might resemble “a Swedish prison,” but Mary thought Diane would be less lonely there.

Mary herself later had a handsome studio in the huge thirteen-story reconverted Bell Telephone Lab, which overlooked both West and Bethune streets.

Apart from containing 383 moderately priced apartments and lofts (highest rent $209 a month), Westbeth had plans for a theater as well as galleries, a foundry, and a day-care center. The qualifications for admittance: you had to be judged a “serious artist” by a group of your peers, and your income could not exceed $12,700 a year. “Well, I certainly
qualify in that respect,” Diane reportedly murmured. When she applied, she was accepted and was given a choice duplex on the ninth floor in the rear, so that she could have a view of the river.

She moved into Westbeth in January of 1970 along with the dancer Merce Cunningham, the poet Muriel Rukeyser, and the documentary photographer Cosmos, who hadn’t shaved his beard since John F. Kennedy was assassinated. (Cosmos saved everything he’d ever received in the mail, calling it a “novel in progress.” He loved “the rejected objects” of the world, and soon after moving to Westbeth he began carefully collecting Diane’s destroyed prints and contact sheets, which he retrieved from the trash can outside her door.)

Once in Westbeth, Diane felt happy. She wrote to Peter Crookston how pleased she was with her apartment, and she’d been on a buying spree: “An ant farm so I can watch them working when I’m not…marvelous toys I’ve always wanted…fake worms, lady-shaped ice cubes, a transparent plastic lady with all her organs and bones.”

For a time Diane seemed less lonely, less cut off. Living in Westbeth was like living in a big, turbulent stew. “Every artist was going through some kind of crisis—either with work or money or love,” says one tenant. For a while the atmosphere was charged—energizing—and there was a real sense of community.”

It was the end of the sixties. Westbeth residents left their doors ajar. There were endless parties, consciousness-raising sessions, group sex, and rock music floating through mile-long halls. “Everybody was into primal experience and learning about the subconscious,” says David Gillison, a photographer.

Diane would have dinner at Westbeth with Alice Morris, the former literary editor of
Bazaar,
who now taught writing at the New School. (Renata Adler and Marvin Israel might be guests there, too.) And she visited other Westbeth apartments as well—like Tobias Schneebaum’s, whose one room was leafy with plants, and where shrunken heads and primitive artifacts hung on the walls. An anthropologist and painter, Schneebaum spent part of every year in New Guinea studying the life styles of cannibals.

Thalia Seltz, a writer, lived across the hall from Diane and they became friends. “We’d discuss work and life.” The two women also attended tenants’ meetings—“something about noise abatement.” Westbeth’s block-long halls teemed with kids riding their bikes, roller-skating, fighting. Some of the artists complained they couldn’t work, and a few resented Diane and said so. She had one of the best duplexes in Westbeth—it was
supposedly meant for a family of four and she was living in it alone (Amy was in boarding school; Doon had her own apartment). Diane was self-conscious about the special treatment she was getting, but Mary Frank got special treatment, too—she was allowed to move from apartment to apartment; she always needed more space, she was working so prodigiously. Her sculptures were fanciful, dreamlike: angels with leaf wings, faces turning into plants, deer into men; everything seemed in a process of metamorphosis, of transformation. Diane enjoyed being with her because Mary understood her need, her craving for the basic and mythic in her life, and Mary always had music playing in her studio. Mary loved to dance.

Not long after Diane moved to Westbeth, Al Squilaco, who ran as well as art-directed the Ridgeway Press, came to see her. He was extremely enthusiastic about her pictures and knew that no book
*
of her work existed, so they talked of the possibility of one. “Diane was gentle and kind,” Squilaco recalls. “She showed me many photographs I’d never seen before. When I said, ‘Would you like to do a book with me?’ she answered, ‘I’ll have to ask my mentors—Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel. And of course Marvin would design any book I do.’ And I said, ‘But
I’m
the art director of Ridgeway, so that’s out of the question.’ She just smiled and shrugged.”

In March 1970 the London
Sunday Times
asked Diane to photograph some of America’s leading feminist theoreticians, among them Betty Friedan and Kate Millett. Diane knew little about the movement’s troubled factions. All she knew was that at Westbeth consciousness-raising groups were popular with her artist friends—wives and mothers had invited her to join them in long evenings of intense talk and self-discovery. But Diane was skeptical. She wasn’t sure that women uniting in a common cause (human rights) would behave any differently from men; she doubted they would be any less ambitious or competitive. Even so, she was intrigued by the feminist leaders she planned to photograph—especially Ti Grace Atkinson, considered by some to be the most extreme and charismatic.

Ti Grace Atkinson was tall and sardonic with an elegant feline face half hidden by blue-tinted glasses. The daughter of a wealthy Louisiana family, she was getting her Ph.D. in political philosophy at Columbia. Ti Grace
had resigned as president of the New York chapter of NOW to form the more radical Feminists, only to leave that group after being unable to create individual leaders among its members. Ti Grace believed in total separatism between the sexes. Lately she had been challenging not only marriage and children as the supreme fulfillment for women but love and sex as well.

Such theories were considered harmful to the movement’s image by more moderate feminists like Friedan, who believed women should understand they had alternatives, while other feminists begrudged Ti Grace the publicity she was getting, and accused her of manipulating media for her own personal gain. She could be outrageous—as when she grappled with Eunice Shriver on the podium at Catholic University, disputing Shriver’s belief that the Virgin Mary’s conception of Jesus was immaculate.

Ti Grace was the only feminist who liked the photograph Diane took of her for the
Sunday Times,
declaring that it was “art.” When
Newsweek
decided to run a major story on Women’s Liberation with Ti Grace as one of its focal points (“I was going to be on the cover,” she says), she insisted that Diane Arbus take the cover photograph and also insisted that Diane be paid whether the photograph was used or not.