Diane Arbus (53 page)

Toward the end of the party one of the students, Mark Haven, phoned to explain why he wasn’t there—his wife had just had a baby. Diane asked all suits of questions: Did she go through natural childbirth? Did he take pictures while she was in labor? Then she launched into a rambling monologue about the joys of natural childbirth until Haven interrupted to thank her for the photograph she’d sent him from the
National Enquirer.
It was of a girl holding a doll giving birth to another doll—a really weird
image—and although Diane hadn’t enclosed a note, he’d known it was from her. She now admitted it was; she read the
National Enquirer
avidly—there were always things in it to laugh about: wild UFO stories, grisly murders, strange baby tales, “Gee Whiz” emotion stuff like the “neon cow” that had supposedly been zapped by an eerie substance from the sky. Diane told Haven that she occasionally got ideas from the
Enquirer
for pictures. Once, in fact, she described her own style of photography as “funk and news.”

*
The resulting portrait of the Mansfields appeared in the October 1969 issue of
Harper’s
and Diane sold the picture to other publications. “It was seen all over the world,” Mansfield claims. “We thought it was undignified.”

It was, however, consistent with many of Diane’s finest portraits: a couple
in extremis,
if you will; middle-aged, paunchy, oily in bathing suits, presented in sweetly prosaic terms. Diane could not and did not accept all her subjects with grace. If she couldn’t respond, her reaction was often severe.

*
Amy Arbus said later, “My mother was frightened by the idea of a book, she rejected it every time. She hated the finality of it. She thought once she [published a book], that would be it, kind of.”

*
Only three portfolios were sold: to Richard Avedon, Jasper Johns, and Bea Feitler. Bea received an eleventh picture as a gift. Inscribed “especially for B.F.,” it is from Diane’s series on “love objects” for Time-Life Books—the portrait of the housewife with her pet monkey.

I
N THE SPRING OF
1971 there was a rape at Westbeth, followed by two suicides. A woman came off the street, climbed up onto the roof, and jumped. Her body lay uncovered and unclaimed for almost a day in the Westbeth courtyard, and many residents and their children were forced to view the corpse.

Then a photographer, Shelley Broday, jumped from the roof. He’d been drinking a lot and taking pills. Not long after that suicide Thalia Seltz told Diane that she was concerned because her kids were starting to compose songs about people they knew who’d killed themselves—she thought she ought to take them away from Westbeth, and ultimately she did move. Diane replied that she had been surprised about Broday “because Shelley didn’t seem like the suicidal type.” And then she added, “Frankly, honestly, I’ve thought about suicide, too, but then I’ve thought about my work, and my work is what matters—I couldn’t stop my work.” But Seltz says Diane didn’t sound convincing—she seemed very depressed.

Lately she had been going to the movies early in the day. A Fieldston classmate recognized her at the 68th Street Playhouse. “It was two in the afternoon—the lights had just come up because the film was over and there was Diane slumped in her seat across from me. She looked spooked, bedraggled. I had the impulse to go over to her and say, ‘Are you okay?’ but I was very depressed myself, so instead I hurried up the aisle and out onto the street. I don’t think she ever saw me.”

Usually Diane forced herself to keep on the move. She would drop by the
Bazaar
art department to gossip with Bea and Ruth, or she would go over to
Esquire
to sit in Harold Hayes’ office, and Sam Antupit, who was then art-directing the magazine, would give her “easy jobs because she seemed very frail—very vulnerable. Like I sent her to Boston to photograph Mel Lyman, the hippie leader who answered to the name of ‘God.’ ”

She still took great glee in certain assignments, particularly in photographing Tricia Nixon’s wedding at the White House on June 11, 1971, for the London
Sunday Times.
She told Crookston, “The press tent…the size
of an airplane hanger…as for the ceremony itself, guests like movie extras, and a man with a trumpet and 50 of the photographers straining against the ropes and Secret Service and the Pres and the Mrs. and the Cox family incredibly hometown…illuminated sort of unearthly by the TV lights…it was like a midwestern celebration…endearing exaggerated. The President looks like he wears makeup.”

As soon as she got home from an assignment—from anything—she would shut herself in her apartment and pick up the phone. The phone was like an anchor—and she could keep in touch with an amazing range of people that way, from police chiefs and morgue assistants to John Szarkowski or her brother, Howard, now teaching at Washington University. She spent hours on the phone with Richard Avedon. And she kept in touch with Allan, who’d just got a lead in Robert Downey’s
Greaser’s Palace,
his biggest movie break. He would be playing a zoot-suiter Christ figure, first seen descending to earth in a striped helium balloon.

Diane also called Alex Eliot. He and Jane were planning to move back permanently to the States and would be living in Sam Eliot’s old house in Northampton, Massachusetts, right next door to President Grover Cleveland’s summer mansion. And Jane would be planting organic vegetables and baking flat bread and Alex would dress in flowing robes and sandals; his gray hair now touched his shoulders. He was thinking about writing a book which he would eventually call
Zen Edge,
in which his thoughts on Buddhism and meditation would be mixed up with memories of New York in the forties and Europe and Time Inc. His meeting with Diane during the spring of 1971 would ultimately be included in the manuscript—when they talked of their children: of May, who would soon become a teacher; of Doon, who was in Paris, and Amy in a New England boardingschool…

It was about four in the afternoon and gloom seemed to have descended into the duplex. Alex reminded Diane that once long ago, when they were teen-agers at the Cummington graveyard, she had written in the palm of his hand with a fountain pen. “What did I write?” she demanded, and before he could answer, she said, “Bone. I wrote ‘bone’ in your hand. You were talking so much that day it sounded like a crying of bones. I was sad. Our bodies must have been unquiet.” Her face glowed silver and distant in the dusk, Alex writes. He remembered when he had called her “Moon.” Now the face appeared to waver, full of hollows, dimly glittering. Alex adds that suddenly he found himself wondering what in God’s name are we all looking for in life?

Diane murmured back as if he’d posed the question (but he hadn’t), “Not childhood. There’s something else we’re looking for—something we’re not conscious of as yet, although it may be here already.” And then she spoke of her “monumental blues.”

To her friends she was referring more specifically to her “blues,” her depressions. After almost two years in therapy she seemed more communicative on a personal level, and she’d relaxed. She didn’t converse in what some people called brittle cocktail chatter. She didn’t perform—or refer to her adventures as if she was talking about another person. She’d begun alluding to a deep anxiety—a terror over her increasing responsibilities. Walker Evans had asked her to teach photography at Yale—wanted her to start in the fall of ‘71 (she turned him down). And Walter Hopps, the astute young curator of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, had got her to agree to exhibit her work at the Venice Biennale in the summer of 1972. It was unprecedented—no photographer had ever been so honored—but Hopps believed that “Arbus was a central and crucial figure in the Renaissance of still photography—absolutely uncompromising in her vision…her importance stemmed from the fact that in style and approach she was radically purifying the photographic image.”

Whenever she mentioned Yale or Venice, Diane would fall into wild crying. What did people expect of her? she would sob. She had nothing to give. Nothing! she kept repeating. Why were all these things happening to her? She didn’t deserve them, didn’t want them. On top of everything else, the May issue of
Art Forum,
usually devoted to abstract art, had published a portfolio of her pictures and they had created quite a stir in the art world. Suddenly painters and sculptors were noticing her—getting excited by her images—possibly because photographs like the Jewish Giant or the twins had such a metaphorical life apart from being very documentary.

Still, Diane maintained, she couldn’t understand why anyone would be impressed with her work. She kept denying that it had value, except possibly to her. She sensed that the work was being noticed for the wrong reasons (“Her name was rapidly acquiring a semi-mythic status our culture confers on artists who specialize in extreme unfamiliar experiences,” Hilton Kramer has written). She was certain she would always be known as “the photographer of freaks” and she resented that label because she felt that, at their best, her portraits suggested the secret experiences that are within all of us.

It distressed her that a great deal of the attention she was receiving came from “weirdos.” A photographer in Massachusetts kept phoning her because he was sure she was into “morgue photography,” the way he was. He kept calling her and calling her, demanding to see her. She kept putting him off. All she really wanted to do, she kept telling her friends, was to work in peace and solitude without any pressures or expectations.

On her own, she had begun to photograph bondage houses. She’d
shown Nancy Grossman a picture of a woman done up in high boots and not much else debasing a naked man down on all fours. The image was assaulting, Nancy says. It was like looking at a literal description of the act. Diane seemed a little scared and shocked when she handed it to Nancy, but she said nothing. She showed Peter Beard a photograph of “a Wall Street banker type, nude, getting hot wax poured on him.” Beard says he and Diane were planning to “swap pictures—she wanted some of my big-game stuff from Africa—but then her stuff was big game, too. I always thought Diane had such guts. To go into places like bondage houses—really rough. I always wondered how did she do it?”

Later John Gossage recalled a statement Diane had made which might have explained her courage: “Once I dreamed I was on a gorgeous ocean liner. All pale, gilded, encrusted with rococo—like a wedding cake. There was smoke in the air and people were drinking and gambling. I knew the ship was on fire and we were sinking slowly; they knew it, too, but they were very gay and dancing and singing and a little delirious. There was no hope. I was terribly elated. I could photograph anything I wanted.”

And yet finally even that wasn’t enough. In order to perfect her art, she had cut herself off from so many people. She was lonely, she was alone—and she would fall into despair.

Deep in depression, she would seek out Lisette Model. She was closer than ever to her teacher, phoning her or going to her tiny black apartment on Abingdon Square. And Model was worried, because sometime in June Diane had phoned to tell her that she’d reversed her opinion about the retardate pictures—she hated them now, hated them because she couldn’t control them! She had always controlled her pictures before—with the flash and her square format, she had imprisoned her subjects as if in a vise. But the Pentax was different, and of course the retardates were different from any other subjects: they did not collaborate with her in the making of the pictures—they didn’t look her in the eye, they didn’t acknowledge her presence or tell her their stories, nor were they charmed or seduced by her. Lined up in their Halloween costumes on the grass, they were in a trance. A strange illumination—almost an exaltation—rose up from their chunky bodies, their upturned, oversized heads. Their world, made up of noises and stampings and rolling about on the grass, was a world she could never know, could never enter, and this angered and frustrated her, depressed her. Not long after she phoned Model, she wrote her a note which read, “
DEAREST LISETTE
” in big block letters, and at the bottom of the page, in tiny, shaky letters, “diane.”

And yet she could be charming and assured when the situation warranted. She lectured at the about-to-open International Center of Photography and compared taking pictures to “tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies out of the fridge.”

At Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in June of 1971, she impressed Jerry Liebling and his students with her comments about photographing nudists. “There are two kinds of nudist camps—one is sanctimonious, almost prissy, the other is swinging—the Grossinger’s of nudist camps.” At Hampshire, Diane taught an advanced class on portraiture along with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Liebling recalls, “Everything was confrontational because that’s where things were in those days. Everybody did exercises to get in touch with their personal feelings. I have a photograph somewhere of a class where we’re all covering our faces, trying to summon up deep emotion.”

Many of the kids had already seen Diane’s work and they related to her savage yet vulnerable images. Some of them were even more intrigued with her persona. She was aware that they liked her—she seemed open and unthreatening, not at all like a teacher. But there was something unsettling about her, too. One student recalls shaking her hand and finding it freezing cold to the touch, even though the day was exceedingly hot. Her deep-set eyes glared—severe, dead on. And then she’d grin suddenly and you’d see that part of a front tooth seemed to be missing—you couldn’t really tell because she’d hold her hand to her mouth when she smiled. And she’d go right on talking. While she was there, Diane went swimming every day in a pond outside Amherst. A student took a photograph of her posing in the grass in her bathing suit. And Amy, who was staying in a nearby summer camp, came to visit.

When she returned to New York, Diane received a letter from “the little people’s convention” (midgets who were gathering in Florida for an annual meeting), turning down her request to photograph them. “We have our own little person to photograph us,” the letter said. Diane was extremely upset about this and mentioned it to most of her friends.