Diane Arbus (14 page)

A native from the farmlands of Ohio, Cheech was twenty-eight, a brilliant, perverse, slender woman with a dazzling smile and a fiercely
determined manner. Cheech painted, designed costumes, composed operas; she didn’t shave her legs or under her arms (neither did Diane) and wore cast-off clothes (quilted jackets, long, patched skirts). Often she and Diane would spend hours discussing what they’d read—everything from
The Little Prince
to
The Brothers Karamazov.

Cheech lived a hand-to-mouth existence in an abandoned house on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village; she painted the staircase banisters every color of the rainbow. Nobody knew how she supported herself, but even when she was in desperate financial straits she refused to write home for money. When she couldn’t support herself modeling; she found odd jobs. “It was nobody’s business how I paid the rent, I just did,” she says. “And the
I Ching,
the Taoist Book of Changes, helped me.”

Cheech wanted to be an artist. She wanted to live fully and freely and rapturously, slowly savoring each moment. But if she missed something, okay, she’d get around to it in the “next life.” She always did what she wanted to, not what was expected of her. She knew almost at once that the people close to Diane, like Allan and Alex, might think she was immature or selfish or even a little crazy, but that didn’t matter. It never occurred to her to change her behavior, her way of dress, her life style in order to win approval. And Diane loved these qualities.

Among the other regulars at the Arbus apartment in the mid-forties was Robert Meservey, his then-wife, Pati Hill, a fragile but outspoken blonde from Kentucky who was briefly a model. When Pati and Diane weren’t together, they’d chatter on the phone for hours; they were both keeping voluminous journals for “self-exploration.” Diane envied Pati, who was exactly her age (twenty-six), because she seemed so free; she had no responsibilities and did exactly as she wished. She and Meservey soon divorced (amicably) and Pati went on to write a highly praised novel,
The Ninth Circle,
about her Southern gothic childhood.

Cheech did not get along with Pati even though she had known her long before Diane; she thought Pati was “affected in her cut-off blue jeans.” Cheech even disapproved sometimes of Allan, “so trim and logical and niggly-piggly about everything including Karen Homey, and he never stopped playing his damn clarinet!”

As for Alex Eliot, Cheech found him “fat, sloppy, pompous—a buffoon.” He was full of ideas about the latest American artists—he bragged he’d written about Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock before any other art critic. “He tried to upstage Allan at every turn to attract Diane’s attention.” Cheech didn’t like the way “he’d mention to me that Diane didn’t wear any underpants—you could
see
that if she stood in a certain light. What difference did that make to anything?”

Nobody measured up to Diane, as far as Cheech was concerned. “She
never asked for anything for herself or expected anything from anybody. Diane was exemplary—a saint. She was the most intensely curious person I’ve ever met—only interested in the essential nature of reality. Her curiosity drove her into unknown areas. And the more developed her curiosity became, the more acute, the more complicated and suggestive the world became to her.

“She had a funny attitude about herself—she was very much the loner. I related to that. One of the few times she cried was when she told me how in summer camp all her friends had been bitten by leeches and she wasn’t. ‘Not even leeches bite me,’ she cried. She still felt immune to life—overly protected and insulated from it by Allan. Ultimately, of course, she was bitten by many leeches…”

Cheech eventually became something of an irritant in the Arbus household: “Maybe, because I could see that everything was not always sweetness and light.” She grew so possessive in her friendship with Diane and so argumentative with everyone that Allan periodically banished her from the apartment and forbade Diane to see her. But the two women would speak surreptitiously over the phone and then meet secretly in Central Park. “We would take her daughter roller-skating.” Eventually Allan would ask Cheech back to the apartment for supper and tell her he really liked her and that from then on things were going to be okay, “and they would be for a while, and then we’d get into some violent disagreement and the whole thing would begin all over again.”

One time in the park Diane told Cheech she was thinking of going to bed with Alex Eliot and asked for her opinion. “I told her not to. Later she would complain about Alex. ‘What does he want from me?’ she would ask. As if she didn’t know.”

Sometimes Cheech and Diane sneaked off to swim at Coney Island. “We were fearless—we’d swim far out, breast-stroking toward the horizon,” Cheech says. “The ocean embraced us—never menaced us. We could feel the electricity in the water coursing around our bodies.” Afterward they’d sit on the beach and they’d watch the crowds. “I don’t know whether I introduced Diane to the idea that Coney Island was like some huge living room. Everybody in stages of undress. Gypsies, Chinese eating pizza, Jewish matrons playing cards. Couples forgot their masks—you could really
see
their faces as they greased themselves under the glare of the sun. Tattered umbrellas draped with bedspreads—bathing suits held together with safety pins… And the wind would whip the bedspreads and the towels and orange rinds and dogs ran and barked in the waves and radios played noisily…

“There was this woman Diane and I always noticed—a big black lady who wandered around the beach calling herself God. She wore a tattered
Army uniform—one of her breasts was exposed. And she would rant and orate and talk to the sky.”

Diane never got tired of watching her. She always had her camera with her and sometimes she’d focus it on the God woman…but mostly she stared at the water. According to Cheech, for all Diane’s shyness and gentleness, she had a deep sense of personal ambition; a feeling that there was something very special inside her that had to get out.

*
“Cheech McKensie” is a pseudonym.

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1948 when the Arbuses went up to Martha’s Vineyard, the Eliots joined them at the Victorian cottage they’d rented on the lagoon in Vineyard Haven. The two couples swam naked in the cove and collected seashells to decorate the house, and Allan would obsessively practice flying his kite across the dunes. He taught Diane to drive, and she “loved the feel of the steering wheel and the gearshift. It’s like getting to know universal gestures I’ve always been aware of.”

On weekends Doon and May would dance in the living room while Alex sang South African songs and Diane would lean back and smile. The vitality and the energy that burned in him like a furnace excited her, and his big, shaggy presence was comforting. He reminded her, she once said, of “a pillow against disaster.”

By now most of Alex’s colleagues at
Time
magazine knew of his obsession with Diane. “He seemed increasingly bewitched by her,” Bob Wernick says. Whenever he returned from a weekend at the Vineyard, he’d talk about what an incredible thing it was to be in love with two women—Diane and his wife, Anne—and also share a close friendship with Diane’s husband. It was perfect, he said. Of course nobody at
Time
believed it could be that perfect; there had to be some flaw, some sour note.

But for most of that summer it was fairly perfect, May Eliot recalls. Her mother and Diane were genuinely close on their own—“They really enjoyed each other’s company.” And Allan took photographs of everybody on the beach and they would all play a game in the cottage driveway—“We would tie each other up with ropes in all kinds of knots and then you had to work yourself free. Allan was reading about Houdini.”

Diane was photographing that summer, too, but photographing simply because she loved to photograph, not for any other reason. (Years later she explained to
Newsweek
why she didn’t start photographing seriously until she was thirty-eight years old: “Because a woman spends the first block of her life looking for a husband and learning to be a wife and mother, just
trying to get these roles down pat; you don’t have time to play another role.”)

That summer on Martha’s Vineyard, Diane concentrated on homemaking: sweeping out the cottage with a huge broom; cooking leg of lamb, roast duck, stuffed cabbage—delicious recipes, because Allan loved “gourmet food.” And she spent hours teaching Doon to swim. “My parenthood is such a joy,” she wrote Tina Fredericks. “It’s the one thing that makes me feel big.”

Everyone else was busy trying to achieve “an artistic breakthrough.” Alex finished first, completing two paintings nobody liked very much. Undaunted, he decided to show part of a novel he was writing about a brother and sister’s incestuous desires in which the sister is roughly patterned after Diane. “I kept telling myself if I could paint a single good painting or write one decent book, I could leave
Time
magazine,” he says. He read a chapter to the assembled trio one evening after dinner and when he finished there was a deathly silence followed by Anne Eliot’s cry of “Disgusting! Terrible! Why did I ever marry you? You are totally untalented and I am the writer and I should be writing!” (Unbeknownst to anyone, she’d had a short story accepted by
Harper’s Bazaar.
But, afraid it was too revealing to be published, she’d asked for the manuscript back.) In a moment she stormed out of the room, and later that night she left the island.

Alex says he was devastated by his wife’s outburst. The following morning he dove into the ocean and “swam and swam.” He wasn’t considering suicide, he was just “extremely depressed and down about myself.” He didn’t realize he’d swum too far out until the tide began tugging at him and in a panic he realized he was so exhausted he might not be able to swim back. In the distance he could see Diane and Allan seated on the beach and he waved frantically at them, shouting “Help! Help!” and they waved back; they obviously hadn’t heard him. He managed to rest by floating on his back “for what seemed like hours” and then finally he “clawed through the heavy surf” until he reached land and crawled on his hands, knees, and elbows up the steep beach, collapsing on the dunes.

Diane and Allan rushed to see what had happened. As soon as he caught his breath, he told them—how he’d been in such despair over their negative reactions to his work that he’d jumped into the sea and swum too far out. He’d been sure he was going to drown, a failure.

The three of them talked all afternoon. Just before the sun set, Diane sent Allan back to the house and suddenly, Alex says, “I found myself alone with her and she became even more tender and maternal and we fell, slow motion, into each other’s arms—it was almost like a continuation of our
conversation. That evening Diane told Allan that she and I had made love on the beach. She was always honest with him, as she was with everyone.” The following day Alex drove back to New York and
Time
magazine.

A week or so later Anne Eliot returned to the Vineyard, followed by her cousin Frank Parker and his wife. The Parkers had never met the Arbuses before. They thought Allan acted “polite and subdued” and Diane seemed “so timid you wanted to take care of her—assure her that everything was going to be all right,” until they went swimming nude in the cove, and as soon as she “hit the water she became a mermaid—a creature from another world—undulating—gliding—exactly like a fish…and her face turned dangerously alive and very, very seductive.”

On the weekend Alex came up from New York and “tension crackled through the house,” Parker continues. “We didn’t know what was going on. There was very little conversation between anyone—much fussing over the two little girls, May and Doon, who were demanding attention. I remember how tender Allan was with the children. And Diane puttered in the kitchen with Anne and my wife.”

Finally—quite late—after much wine had been drunk, the adults sat down to eat. Suddenly Alex declared that he and Diane had been in love since they were teen-agers and had finally admitted it to each other a few days before on the beach and it had been beautiful. He didn’t elaborate further, but it was obvious that he now possessed her. “He sounded positively triumphant,” Parker says. With that, Anne Eliot snapped that she didn’t think it was beautiful at all; it was a betrayal of trust, of friendship, and what about those goddamn table legs? What would happen to their table now?

And everybody turned to Diane, waiting for her response. But she just sat there, inscrutable. And again Frank Parker was reminded of the mermaid image, “because everything was swirling around this creature and she seemed oblivious to the havoc she was causing, until Anne rushed from the table and out into the night.” Later she confronted Diane and demanded an apology, an explanation of sorts. “Aren’t you sorry about what happened?” she cried. And Diane answered, “No.” She didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. She believed in trying to practice freedom and un-possessiveness in their marriage. As far as Anne Eliot was concerned, such an attitude tore the heart out of intimacy.

Although the Eliots remained together for another year, “Anne never forgave Diane and Allan,” says her sister Liberty Dick; as far as she knows, Anne never saw the Arbuses again.

When they returned to New York in the fall, Diane and Alex found opportunities to be by themselves, but there were no regular meetings or
trysts. “I never knew when we’d be together, so I would sometimes walk the streets half the night. I wanted to phone her, but I couldn’t. I never felt like her lover. I felt like a guilty husband, which I was.”

To make matters more complicated, Alex continued to see the Arbuses together. He would find himself talking to Allan about Anne, who was in a hospital, suffering from manic depression, and Allan, who “continued to be a wonderfully forbearing friend,” would listen and try to comfort him. “And here I was in love with his wife,” Alex says. “It was lunatic!” There were never any scenes between the two men. Allan, in fact, never discussed Alex’s ongoing affair with Diane. “When the three of us were together, it was almost as if it didn’t exist—as if it hadn’t happened. We acted as if everything was the same.” But of course it wasn’t.