Diane Arbus (12 page)

Hilda Belle was about to be married, “so I didn’t care about Diane’s career—I wanted to know how it felt to be a wife and mother. Was it as she anticipated? Was it fulfilling and marvelous?

“Diane listened to my questions without answering, scrutinizing me with her huge green eyes. Suddenly she interrupted me almost violently. ‘When I look at my baby, I get a funny feeling!’ she cried. The tone of her voice sent shivers up and down my spine. I had the sense that although she’d tried to do all the right things, the traditional things a woman is expected to do—get married, have a child—she still felt separate and alone. She said nothing more, just mumbled goodbye and plodded off. I never saw her again.”

I
N 1946
B
EN
L
ICHTENSTEIN
gave Diane his Speed Graphic and she tried experimenting with it. But it was heavy to carry and the flashgun attachment scared her; the images produced were chaotic and came too fast. She stopped using it. Later she would say she found the camera “recalcitrant—it’s determined to do one thing and you want it to do something else.” A photograph suggested alternatives—choices. The act of photography was ambiguous and contradictory, like herself.

For a short while she studied with Berenice Abbott, who photographed New York and James Joyce and collected Atget. Abbott thought photography was the ultimate art form of the twentieth century because it demands speed and science, and she was fond of quoting Goethe: “Few people have the imagination for reality.”

Some of Diane’s first pictures taken after her classes with Abbott were candids of Howard and Peggy in their cold-water flat on Third Avenue. “We never saw them, but Diane seemed to have fun taking them,” Peggy says.

Diane would develop the pictures in the darkroom set up in her parents’ Park Avenue apartment. She liked escaping into the little cubbyhole lit only by a red bulb. There were trays holding strange-smelling chemical solutions, and she would place a negative with a sheet of photographic paper under a piece of glass and expose it to white light for a few seconds, then place the paper in a tray of dark solution, and slowly the image would swim into view in the ruby glow of the lightbulb.

There was a magic in the process that never failed to amaze her, and the chemical smells, the continual sound of running water soothed her.

She developed more pictures, one of Anne Eliot clad in a white slip and seated on the floor of the Eliots’ Lexington Avenue apartment. She looked very sad.

“I thought it was the most revealing portrait Diane had ever taken,” Alex says, “but then Diane did a funny thing. She backed Anne’s portrait with a nude portrait of herself that Allan had taken. She tried to scratch
out much of her image with pencil, but you could still see the outlines of her body.”

Meanwhile Allan had been discharged from the Army, and he and Diane moved into a railroad flat on 70th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue. Their landlady had rented out all the floors of her converted brownstone at exorbitant rates—$225 a month in 1946 was a lot to pay for a one-bedroom apartment, but there were thousands of ex-GIs in the city saddled with new families and no place to live.

“Our building was never well tended,” says Dell Hughes, a neighbor. “There were mice and cockroaches and hardly any heat in the winter.” Hughes tried fighting the landlady in court about the heat and about rent reductions. “Although we talked about it, the Arbuses didn’t involve themselves in these disputes,” he goes on. “They were a shy, retiring couple, especially Diane.” Allan, as he remembers, worked in a frame shop on Sixth Avenue; Hughes would hear the sound of a clarinet drifting out from the Arbus apartment most evenings. Allan was practicing his music while scheming and dreaming about becoming an actor—that’s all he wanted to be.

He and Diane had long talks about whether or not it was too risky, since he almost certainly couldn’t support a wife and child on what he might make in the theater. They discussed it with their parents and with Howard and with Anne and Alex Eliot, too, although they frequently got sidetracked with them and would wonder instead over the adjustments they were having to make—the adjustments of living together again as a married couple after two years apart. They’d both tasted independence—they were no longer used to compromise. They seemed to feel better after they voiced their discomfort to the Eliots. After a while they forgot they’d ever been separated and grew very close again. By that time Allan had decided to give up—at least temporarily—his dream of being an actor. Trained as an Army photographer, he finally decided to go back into that work—into fashion photography—with Diane as his partner. They had dabbled in it briefly in 1941 and had been rather successful, although neither of them had any interest in fashion; it seemed too frivolous, too ephemeral.

Once again David Nemerov helped them out. He agreed to pay for all their new camera equipment, but at the last minute reneged on his promise and paid for only a fraction of it. However, he did give them their first regular account—photographing Russeks fashion and furs for newspaper ads.

Postwar fashion photography was almost painterly in tone and line, influenced by the elegant studio work of Steichen, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and John Rawlings as well as the bold German émigrés Erwin Blumenfeld and
Horst P. Horst, all of whom believed that color combinations carry emotional weight.

These particular photographers came to the fore in
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
with the resurgence of Paris styles and the explosion of original American designs such as the wraparound dresses of Claire McCardell.

Then in contrast there was Munkacsi, the Romanian sports photographer, who revolutionized fashion photography with his exuberant “snapshot realism.” Munkacsi was the first photographer to photograph clothes as they were worn—in action—and outside on location.

As far back as 1934, Munkacsi had been photographing models for
Bazaar,
swimming, running, playing golf—in other words, women enjoying themselves. This innovative way of shooting fashion has since been reinterpreted by countless photographers, the most famous being Richard Avedon, who papered his bedroom walls with Munkacsi images when he was a little boy.

At the beginning of their career Diane and Allan Arbus worked only inside the Russeks studio, sharing it with Harold Halma. “They were very particular,” Ben Lichtenstein says. “They wouldn’t let the Russeks stylist or the art director interfere. Diane would model the clothes first. They were usually miles too big, but she’d pose barefoot in, say, a Nettie Rosenstein black dress, looking like a kid fooling around in her mother’s wardrobe.”

Allan meanwhile would be fiddling with the lights, setting them up, and then together he and Diane would try to figure out what the picture should look like before booking the models through Eileen Ford, a former stylist who was operating out of her father’s law office, taking calls for four top models (among them Dorian Leigh) at $75 a month.

Recalls Carole McCarlson, a Ford model who worked frequently for the Arbuses up to the 1950s: “As soon as I’d come out of the dressing room, maybe in one of those satin suits and awful pointy slippers, Diane and Allan would duck under the focusing cloth of their heavy eight-by-ten view camera and start whispering together conspiratorially. It got to be a big joke in the business—Diane and Allan huddling under the focusing cloth—because, no matter how many people you get under that cloth, only one person can click the shutter. I had the feeling they were playing a game—waiting for me to do something surprising. They’d egg me on—I’d strike various poses. Sometimes I’d feel like a dancing dog. Then Allan would shout, ‘Hold it!’ and I’d remain motionless for what seemed like hours—I’d often have to count to a hundred and twenty before they clicked. Then they’d pop up from the cloth and Allan would always say to Diane, ‘Well, what do you think, girl?’ and then they’d go off and confer in a corner.”

Sometimes he’d shoot half a session and she’d shoot the other half, and
when the models were gone, they’d take photographs of each other. The models often gossiped about their behavior. No other husband-and-wife photography team worked the way they did—so tenderly, so closely, in complete collaboration. Not Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel (and Lillian Bassman had married Paul Himmel when she was very young); not Leslie and Frances Gill, nor the Radkais.

Paul Radkai was a top fashion photographer, but his wife, Karen, was just beginning, and she often annoyed the models by insisting they pose free for her after they’d done a sitting for her husband. “She was building up her portfolio for
Vogue
and she wanted to use top professionals,” Dorian Leigh says.

While Diane and Allan knew the Radkais and Lillian Bassman (who saw their portfolio when she was art director of
Junior Bazaar),
they did not spend time with them or with any photographers, for that matter.

“We weren’t a very friendly bunch,” reports Francesco Scavullo, who had just begun to photograph for the fashion magazines in 1947. He recalls, “Diane had the most terrible teeth—funny-looking little brown teeth—odd for someone so young and otherwise attractive. She and Allan
always
kept to themselves.” Scavullo adds, “Fashion photographers have always been unfriendly to each other because we’re all basically after the same job.”

He recalls that the only photographer in the forties who gave parties for other photographers was the highly original George Piatt Lynes. Celebrated for his portraits of Gertrude Stein and Somerset Maugham (gazing longingly at a male nude), Lynes also did surrealistic, almost hallucinatory fashion shots, experimenting with bizarre poses, offbeat props, shadowy lighting. Lynes destroyed most of his fashion work before his death in 1955 because he secretly despised fashion. He believed that those in it were interested only in the immediate effect of creating something that would reflect the present—the now.

Diane and Allan felt that way about fashion, too, but they didn’t voice their dissatisfaction. Instead, along with the Russeks account, they began shooting a series of one-column ads for Bonwit Teller. (Robert Frank and Louis Faurer were shooting Bonwit ads then, too.) Barbara Lamb, who was assistant ad director for Bonwit, recalls: “Diane always wore beige on beige and spoke in a whisper. Allan was so considerate—he’d run out and get me a container of chocolate-chip ice cream in the mornings. For some reason, chocolate-chip ice cream cured my hangovers.”

According to Betty Dorso, a model turned boutique owner, “Everybody in fashion drank.” After a shooting, the models and photographers would go into P. J. Clarke’s and down lethal martinis and there’d be a lot of dashing to the bathroom while cigarettes smoked in the ashtrays, and then
around midnight everyone would go on to jam sessions where musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Lester Young were playing. And on Friday nights there would be wild car rides out to the Hamptons. “It took hours—no freeways then,” Dorso says, “so along the way we’d stop at some roadside bar and get plastered. It was a miracle we never got into any accidents—we were always drunk, always laughing. Postwar New York was golden and exciting and affluent…”

The Arbuses did not join in the merrymaking at P.J.’s or the Hamptons. They didn’t drink or smoke—they were considered by everyone who knew them a shy young couple who seemed almost symbiotically close. In fact, strangers frequently mistook them for brother and sister, since they did bear a striking physical resemblance—they were roughly the same height and had thick, wavy hair and identical watchful expressions. For a while a rumor persisted in the fashion business that Diane and Allan Arbus were blood relations—first cousins who’d fallen passionately in love and married in spite of family opposition. That story got started because Russeks president Max Weinstein’s wife’s maiden name was Bertha Arbus (her brother was Allan’s father). It was also incorrectly assumed that Weinstein was a member of the Russeks clan because he headed the store and was therefore Diane and Allan’s grandfather. In truth, he was Allan’s, not Diane’s, uncle, but no blood relative at all. Another incorrect assumption was that Diane was so rich she and Allan didn’t have to work. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She and Allan never received any financial help from her father, and throughout their marriage—particularly in the early years—they were always worried about money.

Neither the Russeks nor the Bonwit account was very lucrative (Bonwit paid only $50 a column), so Diane and Allan would periodically take turns going from advertising agency to fashion magazine with their portfolio of photographs in the hope of getting more assignments. (Art Kane, then an art director, says, “They reminded me of two little mice scurrying around and acting furtive.”) Afterward Diane might describe her adventures on Madison Avenue to one of their new friends, a lanky young photographer named Bob Meservey from New Hampshire. He was earning $21 a week as Ferdinand Fonssagrives’ assistant. Meservey says that, despite her shyness, Diane was starting to be quite an anecdotist. “Actually, Allan would act out the stories and Diane would narrate them,” he says. “She sounded like the explorer Stanley describing his adventures in Africa. Diane could make a documentary out of going to the corner deli for a quart of milk.”

Finally in January 1947 the Arbuses got an appointment to see twenty-six-year-old Tina Fredericks, the youngest art director ever at Condé Nast. (Tina was to become one of Diane’s closest friends.) “Diane and Allan
came into my office at
Glamour
and there was hardly any fashion in their portfolio,” she says. The only photograph she can remember was “of a cracked ceiling with a lightbulb hanging from it.” Nevertheless, after talking with them, she decided that they both had a sense of style and taste, and she passed on their book to her boss, Alexander Liberman, now a legend in fashion journalism (as Condé Nast’s supreme editorial director, he oversees
Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, House and Garden, Self,
and the new
Vanity Fair).