Diane Arbus (15 page)

Sometimes the atmosphere would grow strained and Alex remembers Allan’s glaring at them and muttering, “Oh, go away!” At one point Pati Hill urged them to run off together. She thought Diane could have a “bigger artistic breakthrough” with Alex than with Allan. But Diane ignored the suggestion. The affair, with its ingredients of sex, love, pain, and hate, was just one of hundreds of experiences she was determined to have in her life—she was ruthless in this regard. She felt no guilt—the issue was emotional, not moral (“She wanted to try everything, that woman!” Alex says). Years later she confided that she was sorry they’d slept together because she’d hurt Anne and Allan and hadn’t intended to.

Alex, for his part, was sure that his sense of rationality, of fairness, had been momentarily consumed by this gigantic passion. He was overwhelmed with guilt and suffered terribly because he couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d done to Anne and he didn’t know how to right it. On top of everything else, he still felt like Diane’s brother, which both titillated and bewildered him. “But I feel like her brother!” he’d say to friends. (Later other men would say the same thing—“Diane treats me like a brother, not a lover.” There was a conspiratorial, incestuous quality in many of her close relationships with men.)

Once, when Alex was flying to Paris on assignment, he stared out the window at the clouds and the sea below and prayed that the plane would crash so that he could be put out of his misery. He said as much to Allan, who interrupted with “Oh, Alex, what you really want is an adventure. But it would be different if you were married to Diane.” And Alex cried, “Oh, no, no, it wouldn’t!” and then he adds, “In retrospect I suppose he was right.”

Sometimes other couples would join Alex at the Arbus apartment and they would dance—fox-trot carefully around the big mattress bed lying on the living-room floor. It was terribly cramped in those two rooms, but jaunty music floated through the air. And then a glass might shatter and
Diane would silently sweep it up and everybody would start dancing again.

“Allan danced beautifully,” Alex recalls. “Once he stopped dancing and came over to me and sang in a husky Louis Armstrong-type voice, ‘Took you for mah friend—thought you were mah pal—then I found out you tried to jive mah gal…’ ”

A
T THE END OF
each week Diane and Allan would try to finish photographing early in order to get to the Nemerovs’ on time. Rain or shine, there was a family dinner at the Park Avenue apartment every Friday night and they were obliged to turn up. It was almost a relief for Diane to escape her complicated private life and return, if only for a little while, to “Mommy and Daddy.” She always complained about the dinners, but she could be briefly comforted by the familiar sight of the smoky, opulent rooms—that is, until her father began criticizing her appearance (she wore the same shirtwaist dress over and over and no lipstick “because Allan says it makes my eyes bigger”). “Why don’t you go to Russeks and get some decent clothes, for God’s sake?” David Nemerov would plead, and then Gertrude would change the subject by joking in her husky voice, “Sometimes I think you children just come here for a free meal.”

It was partially true. Although Diane and Allan always pretended everything was going well in their work, they were still not earning much from fashion photography—they often earned barely enough to pay for rent and groceries, and, given the cost of film and paper, the extra music classes for Doon…

The Nemerovs were undoubtedly aware that Diane and Allan were struggling, but they made no move to help. They would just beam proudly and say, “What wonderful kids” and fuss over them, insisting (much to Renée’s annoyance) that they describe to the group for the umpteenth time their latest fashion assignments.

Mr. Nemerov bragged to all his friends on Seventh Avenue about “the kids’ ” assignments from
Glamour
and later from
Seventeen.
He was particularly proud when they got their first
Vogue
sitting (in 1949 they photographed a young woman seated in a limousine wearing a polka-dot dress). Nemerov never knew how much Diane and Allan hated the fashion business. Renée says, “They never told Daddy, because fashion was so much a part of his life.” Also he was having problems. During the late 1940s, Russeks, like most big department stores (Saks, Altman, Lord and
Taylor), was battling the unions in their fight to organize the retail salespeople.

Over the years Diane would always bring her camera to the Nemerov apartment. She told Tina Fredericks she wanted to capture the solemn ritual of the Friday-night dinner. Her sister recalls how she would wander into the dining room with her camera around her neck and wear it throughout the meal. “She would take a couple of bites of potato and then focus on all of us. The camera was almost like a shield. She seemed to be hiding behind it. I think she imagined that if she was invisible, everybody would forget she was there.”

Often there wasn’t any film in the camera, but she would click away—click! click! After she read Cartier-Bresson’s famous essay on photography, she began talking to Renée about “the decisive moment” when everything falls miraculously into place—she talked about training her
mind’s eye
(which is why she kept her camera with her at all times); how the mind’s eye cannot see everything—that nobody can see everything in an image until the negative has been printed and hung up to dry.

At the Nemerov dinner table she would focus her camera on the familiar figures of her childhood—on Grandma Rose bent over her lace work (she loved to watch the gnarled hands work the colors), and on Howard’s mother-in-law, Hilda, flirting delicately with David Nemerov.

Sometimes other relatives dropped by—like Harold Russek, Gertrude’s handsome brother, and Aunt Ruth, who collected erotic art and was Howard’s favorite because she had a terrific sense of humor. And there were also David’s two “black sheep” brothers who were always borrowing money, and a crazy cousin who talked too loud and smeared lipstick all over her face and used to make scenes when she came to Russeks to shop.

On occasion there was Uncle Joe, the lawyer, who had offices on Broadway and had been a pacifist during the war. Joe died in 1950 and supposedly on his deathbed told his brother David that since he had no children of his own, he’d decided to leave his considerable fortune ($4 million) to Diane, Howard, and Ren. Always competitive with his older brother, David told Joe, “Don’t do that. I’m taking good care of them in
my
will.” Whereupon Uncle Joe agreed and left all his money to other relatives. When Diane, Howard, and Ren heard about this, they were flabbergasted, but there was nothing they could do.

Diane’s family obsessed her. In the 1960s she would plan an autobiography with pictures and text (which she never completed, but which she called “Family Album”). By that time she had abandoned the idea of “the decisive moment”—there was no decisive moment for self-revelation—and gave as much importance to her crazy cousin as to her art-collecting aunt. All her subjects became equivocal. She said she found most families
“creepy—because none of us can ever grasp the scene of our own conception…it is probably the most tempting of all secrets…,” and she added, “Once in the middle of love-making I thought I was forgiving them for conceiving me.”

Diane could never properly document the images floating around the Nemerovs’ candlelit table. “How does one photograph one’s father making funny noises in his throat to signal the maid?” For a while, however, she attempted a series of pictures of Renée, her younger sister—dark, sensuous, willowy Renée, who had just married twenty-three-year-old Roy Sparkia, a tall, handsome man from Owosso, Michigan, who resembled a college fullback.

Roy’s nickname was “Slim.” He could walk on his hands and do acrobatics. In an effort to see America, he had hitchhiked through many states before training as an engineer in Bay City. During the war he worked as a bridge builder and camouflager with the Third Army in Luxembourg and France. After VJ Day he studied playwriting at Shrivenham University in England, then came back to New York, where he paid his way through the Art Students League by sketching caricatures at the Hotel St. Moritz.

He and Renée had met when Renée was studying sculpture at the New School. “My roommate was in her class,” Roy says, “and he arranged to paint a portrait of her in exchange for a bust of his head. I first saw her when she knocked on our door holding a heavy bag of clay in her arms. It was love at first sight. I proposed a week later.”

The Nemerovs disapproved of Roy “because I was Gentile and poor. David Nemerov tried to buy me off—offered me ten thousand dollars if I wouldn’t marry Ren. They took her off with them to Hawaii to think it over—but our love prevailed.” They eventually got married at the Nemerovs’ Park Avenue apartment on October 19, 1947. Diane was matron of honor.

Now the couple were living in a basement apartment on West 16th Street and Roy was studying writing with Saul Bellow at NYU while Renée went on with her classes at the Art Students League. To bring in extra money, she worked part time as a sales clerk at Wannamaker’s department store.

Diane visited them frequently, remarking later that she couldn’t believe Renée rose at three a.m. to cook breakfast with her husband. “That’s one of the reasons they fell in love—because they actually
like
to get up at three in the morning,” she said. After breakfast they would sit together holding their coffee cups on their laps in their darkness…

Renée recalls, “It was always great seeing D. Part of me still hero-worshipped her—lived in her shadow, dressed like her, talked like her, even prayed to look wistful and waifish. When I fell in love with Roy,
Diane was my confidante. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to get married if Diane hadn’t rebelled first and married Allan against our parents’ wishes.”

When they were together, the sisters discussed money. Neither of them had any idea how to earn it, let alone handle it. “We’d grown up rich and spoiled and been given all the advantages, so we never learned thrift—we couldn’t even balance a checkbook. We were often near broke, but, you see, ladies didn’t talk about money. It wasn’t done. Being privileged had influenced us to the extent that we never thought we’d have to go out into the world and earn our living, which we were both now trying to do. We felt woefully inadequate. We always expected somehow to have money. It came as a continual surprise to us when we didn’t.”

Both sisters swallowed their pride and asked their father for small sums, which he always gave them in cash. “He still had power over us. We still wanted to be protected by him—but he never volunteered help—he always had to be asked.”

“We were taught that money was meant to be saved, to be put away in a bank,” Diane said. “Like when my grandfather would give me a ten-dollar gold piece, I wasn’t ever supposed to spend it.”

The two young women envied their brother, Howard, who was managing to be completely independent financially. He’d spent the last two years writing while he and his wife, Peggy, lived on the $7000 he’d saved from his Air Force pay. Howard describes his first attempt at a novel (begun in London) as “Kafkaesque—a fable about a village under a rock. I was lucky nobody published it.”

For a while he wrote poems and sold them to the
Nation
for $10 apiece. He also composed essays that were published in the
Sewanee Review.
Periodically he would show them to Diane, who in turn would show them to close friends like Phyllis Carton. Phyllis remembers one essay in which Howard elaborated on his view that “mankind is at once hopeless and indomitable.” She and Diane discussed this essay at length. “And Diane was so proud of Howard’s intelligence.” She envied his discipline because she fantasized about becoming a writer herself, but thought she was too disorganized.

In 1946 Howard became associate editor of the literary magazine
Furioso,
working with Reed Whittemore and John Pauker. “It was mostly editing by long distance,” Pauker says, “because I was living in Washington, Reed was in Connecticut, Howard in New York.” The three men filled the magazine with their own poetry, and, Whittemore adds, it was their joint inclination at the time to “write about the futility of action.”

Howard was also at work on his latest novel, but he was restless—pacing up and down, running out for fresh bottles of gin—so Peggy
chained him to a chair. “It was my idea,” she says. “He was
forced
to remain at his desk.” It seemed to work until late one afternoon the doorbell rang and Howard bolted to answer it, dragging chair and chain after him. He flung open the door “and the look on the visitor’s face was stunned,” Peggy says.

Every so often, to relax, Howard would break his isolation and he and Peggy would borrow the Nemerov limousine and, together with Diane and Allan, they would careen around Manhattan in the big car. Once they were stopped by the police, who were sure they were riding in a stolen vehicle until Howard (who was driving) solemnly convinced them he was the chauffeur.

When Howard began writing poetry, it was “to write the war out of my system.” He was still having nightmares about the bombing missions (he would have them off and on for years). Like many other modern poets (Jarrell, Ciardi, Dickey—all of whom became his friends), Howard had been romantically attracted to the Air Force, and then the romance had turned to horror at war’s bloody atrocities. In his first book,
The Image and the Law
(published in 1947), poem after poem draws the same conclusion: that death in war is usually casual, accidental, and always horrific.

You watch the night for images of death,

Which sleep in camera prints upon the eye.

Fires go out, and power fails, and breath

Goes coldly out: dawn is a time to die.

Poetry
criticized Howard’s “lack of style” and “conceptual confusion,” and he was angered and upset.

His friend Reed Whittemore thinks that “the legacy of modernism…was part of [our] writing consciousness and it gave us depressingly conflicted instructions about what we should do with our writing lives. It instructed us to cultivate and preserve our isolation (else we would turn into stockbrokers and the Word would not be saved); but it also instructed us with great ambiguity in all the lessons of the thirties…lessons about commitment
and
the dangers of commitment—lessons that tended to cancel each other out, but still lessons… We worked too hard. We were uptight. I remember a dreadful summer when Nemerov was in the living room trying to write a novel and I was in a bedroom trying to write a novel and on weekends there would be other writers, there would be wives and guests and partying, but also the typewriters sat there making their demands. They were vicious, those typewriters.”