Diane Arbus (17 page)

The following year he met Jane Winslow, and she convinced him to stop drinking and smoking. “Actually, she changed my life.” Jane was a
striking, dark-haired, self-contained, twenty-one-year-old researcher at
Time
who’d lived all over Europe. “She came into my office to translate something from the Spanish and I fell—literally—head over heels in love with her. By that I mean I fell smack in front of her onto the floor, I was so hung over and smitten when we met.”

However, Alex didn’t ask Jane out until his separation from Anne was legal. Then he invited her to dinner and they talked all night. The following morning, after breakfast at Reuben’s, Alex called Diane excitedly from a pay phone. “I’ve found another woman I can love!” he shouted. Diane’s reaction sounded a bit subdued, but she urged him to bring Jane over immediately—she wanted to meet her. Nevertheless, Jane made Alex put the meeting off for a while. “All Alex had talked about that first night was Diane and Allan Arbus, Diane and Allan Arbus, and that he’d been in love with Diane, and that Allan was
still
in love with Diane, and that they shared this marvelous friendship. I knew I’d be coming into a very complicated situation and I wasn’t sure I could handle it.”

When they finally did meet, Jane’s initial impression of Diane was “disorganized—ambiguous—undefined. She was twenty-seven then, but she spoke and dressed like a little girl. I don’t think she was really close to anyone. But she was inordinately sexy.”

After they became friends, Diane confided that she had been momentarily shaken when Alex said he’d found another woman he could love. “It was so nice having two men in love with me,” she told Jane. She was rather sorry it had to stop.

(It isn’t surprising that in the 1960s one of Diane’s favorite movies turned out to be Truffaut’s
Jules et Jim,
since Jules and Jim are in love with the same woman, Catherine—a mesmerizing creature played by Jeanne Moreau. Catherine is an untamed spirit, determined to live and love freely, but using every female wile to gain advantage, to increase her power position. Catherine suffers and feels ambivalent about being “free.” Only the love relationships
she
establishes and dominates are correct. She can leave men she loves who love her, but if they leave her, she feels abandoned and destroyed.)

In the beginning, whenever Jane went with Alex to the Arbuses’, they would take pictures of her, compliment her on her beauty, and urge her to become a fashion model, “which I had no interest in being.” She knew they were trying to make her feel at ease, and she liked them—“they were so bright and attractive”—but she grew uncomfortable whenever they referred to their past with Alex, or repeated stories about “Diane and Alex” or “Diane and Allan and Alex and Anne.” “That part of Alex’s life was over,” Jane says. “I wanted to forget it and get on with
our
life. We were madly in love. I kept telling Alex, ‘Forget the past and live in the
now!’ Eventually we did, but the Arbuses—at first—seemed more interested in reliving the
Sturm una Drang
of their shared experiences with Alex than in our new happiness. I think they resented me for a while because now I possessed Alex and they didn’t.”

Jane adds that, try as she would, she could never fit into the old friendship, “mainly because I refused to be slotted in as Anne had—as the fourth leg of that table. Diane and Allan and even Alex wanted to keep sharing in the friendship—have everything out in the open. They wanted to repeat the extended-family bit with me—well, I didn’t. I didn’t want to share everything.”

Eventually Diane and Allan accepted Jane’s position, but they never stopped asking personal questions. Diane in particular was exceedingly curious and nothing seemed to shock her—she was always interested in “How do you feel?” about everything. She and Allan appeared to share their thoughts, but they actually revealed very little about themselves as a couple. Only once Diane commented that during their quarrels Allan could become “cold, unshakable, tight-lipped, whereas I get hysterical and fierce like I’ll try anything to get my way.” But intimacy is mysterious and no one can prejudge a marriage, and the Arbus marriage was based on secrecy, as everybody’s private life is. At that point they seemed anxious to preserve their privacy, and to some extent they did.

Occasionally the couples played a game: what kind of an animal are you? And Diane said she’d be a cat, and when it came to Jane, she declared she’d be all the animals—because we have all animals in us: we are greedy as pigs, passionate as lions; we’re foxy, we’re mousy; we can be swift as gazelles. That silenced everybody, and for a while they stopped playing the animal game.

With Jane in the picture, the intimacy between Diane and Allan and Alex shifted. Diane moved closer to Allan again, and Jane and Alex became very much a couple, and a new friendship was created which existed on a new level. It was warier. Since they didn’t “share everything,” the emotional investment was not so enormous.

*
Anne Eliot died in 1981 after a long illness.

I
N 1950 THE TWO
couples and Tina and Rick Fredericks spent the month of June together in the Adirondacks. Allan wanted to go to Lake George because his idol, Stieglitz, had summered there with Georgia O’Keeffe for years.

“There was a lot of traveling from island to island,” Rick Fredericks says. “We paddled around in canoes—slept in sleeping bags on bunches of rocks. My back was killing me.”

Alex remembers somebody losing their car keys and Jane diving into the lake over and over again in an unsuccessful effort to retrieve them. And Diane, fighting a depression, made a great effort to get close to Jane. She wore a strapless bathing suit identical to Jane’s and they went swimming together and afterward they might lie on the sand next to Alex and try to talk. Much later she wrote about Jane’s jealousy and her own and how well she understood it because in the past she’d always counted on Alex to cheer her up when she was low, but now that he was in love with Jane she couldn’t count on him, and at times like that she wished she were Jane.

She was relieved when Cheech arrived so she could tell her that Alex was far more desirable now that he was unattainable—she had never thought she cared that much, but ever since he’d fallen in love with somebody else she suddenly cared terribly! Cheech told her, in effect, “This too shall pass…” She’d come up with a copy of Robert Graves’
The White Goddess,
which she urged everybody to read. She talked endlessly about the myth of the goddess, “the muse, the mother of all living, the female spider, whose embrace is death.” “I thought Diane was a goddess,” Cheech says.

Later that summer Bob Meservey visited with a new girl, followed by Richard Bellamy, a soft-cheeked, scruffy young man of twenty who was later called a “visionary” by his friends when he founded the Green Gallery and dedicated it to Pop Art. Bellamy’s passion was art—he was then sweeping floors in museums just so he could be around painting and
sculpture. In the evenings he would go to the Cedar Bar and listen to de Kooning and Harold Rosenberg argue, and he haunted the Hansa then on East 12th Street so he could absorb the disparate styles of Jane Wilson, a water-colorist, and Richard Stankowitz, who created junk sculpture. Diane went to many of these shows with Bellamy, and to others at the Myers, which was showing Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers, both of whom were doing figurative paintings in a loosely Abstract Expressionist manner. Painting had a residual effect on Diane’s photography; she would ultimately experiment with painterly effects like Impressionism’s soft focus, Cubism’s linear composition, and corny symbolism (which she and Allan used in some of their fashion work).

She studied portrait painting—especially the canvases of Goya. She liked his looming giants, his hunchbacked dwarfs and demons. Everything she studied or thought about either fell away or sank into her austere, self-effacing style. She would always arrange her subjects like a painter and make them hold a pose for hours. Because of this, her contact prints showed relatively little variety.

In August, Alex gave Diane and Allan another chapter of his novel to read. “Yes, it was the novel I’d been working on since 1947 about a brother and sister’s incestuous desires.”

Allan read it, but said the book made him uncomfortable particularly in the chapter where the sister masturbates.

Diane murmured that she disagreed; she thought it was an extremely accurate description of masturbation and she didn’t feel uncomfortable with it at all.

In the fall, life continued as usual. Diane and Allan photographed fashions in Madison Square Garden; they photographed college clothes in Central Park and bathing suits in the Caribbean. On Saturday nights she and Allan would join in two-room charade games at an actor friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village. Diane would often bring along Stanley Kubrick, then twenty-one years old and a fledgling still-photographer for
Look
magazine. Broadway producer Mort Gottlieb, who participated in the charade game, says “the evenings were long and very lively—devoted to acting out the titles of hit shows like
Kiss Me, Kate
—
Edward, My Son
—
Death of a Salesman.
”

Occasionally Diane went on assignment by herself with
Glamour
features writer Marguerite Lamkin. Once they planned to do a feature on couples’ bathrooms; they eventually abandoned the project, but while they were
on it, Diane “nosed around” people’s Johns, noting the details she might photograph—the flowering gardens that grew in some showers, the libraries of old magazines stacked by certain toilets, and the soaps, creams, nail polish, sleeping pills, vitamins, bubble bath, suppositories, diaphragms, rubbers, cologne, and witch hazel crowded onto cabinet shelves. “The contents of somebody’s bathroom is like reading their biography,” Diane said.

Once in a while she would do portraits for
Glamour’s
editorial page “if we really pressed her,” Tina Fredericks says; “she was so shy.” Frances Gill remembers attending a college-issue promotion luncheon and “Diane was darting around the tables taking pictures of the students and her finger was going ‘click! click! click!’ on the shutter of her camera—’click! click! click!’ ”

She did things like this in her spare time; usually she was too busy assisting Allan. But she liked “hanging around” the Condé Nast offices because by now she knew most of the editors there, as well as everybody else from secretaries to art directors.

“It was a protective, sheltered world at Condé Nast,” Kate Lloyd recalls. Lloyd was features editor of
Glamour
then and she says, “We were insulated the way most monthly magazines were—a world within a world; everything ahead of time—Christmas-in-July kind of thing—and the perks that went with the media: free theater tickets, free bottles of scotch. None of us was aware of issues—controversial stuff like the electrocution of the Rosenbergs or the Alger Hiss trial were ignored. Most everything we dealt with was fluff.”

At the office the women—whether they were art directors or fashion editors—called themselves “girls,” and they were patronized by the men, and everybody did a lot of flirting. “That was the way to get the job done. When in doubt, we acted giggly instead of authoritative,” Kate continues. “Most of us dressed in our mothers’ cast-off Hattie Carnegie suits, and we always wore white gloves, and Diane fitted perfectly into the white-glove syndrome. I was astonished when she surfaced with all those freak pictures. She was as bland and colorless as we all were back then.”

Still, there were undercurrents, because Diane and Kate and Tina Fredericks were all working wives in the era of the “housewife heroine.” So they felt constantly torn. “It was the subtext of our lives,” Tina says. “At the office we’d be making decisions, taking creative responsibility for things. At home we were susceptible and passive and dependent on our men. It was confusing.”

But they never talked about this to each other. Life was more private then, less examined. Isolated by their loyalties to their marriages, these women never confided that they were secretly a little embarrassed about
having careers; secretly scared that they might lose their femininity. “So we worked doubly hard at home to compensate,” Kate Lloyd says.

It didn’t help that their independent, adventuresome movie heroines—Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn—were fast disappearing from the screen to be replaced by the kittenish Doris Day. It didn’t help that magazines such as
McCall’s
and
Ladies’ Home Journal
were publishing articles and short stories showing women in the act of renouncing their careers because they’d discovered that all they really wanted to be was “Mrs. So-and-So.” It was such a disquieting theory that in 1951 Tina Fredericks devised an article featuring working wives in
Glamour
entitled “I Love You Because… eight happy couples define the special quality that makes this one the one.” Tina, Diane, Kate Lloyd, fashion editor Winnie Campbell and their husbands were interviewed. Paradoxically, all the couples—except for Kate—got divorced within the next decade.

When she photographed them, Frances Gill remembers, Diane and Allan seemed self-contained and quite happy. “I captured them at a moment when they were very close.” Next to their portrait—an arresting one in which they resemble clones—are the following quotes:

ALLAN:
[I love you because] you have humility and dignity and are above competition.

DIANE:
[I love you because] your actions are more precise and simpler and happier than other people’s.

And under the quotes this statement: “Diane was thirteen when she and Allan met and she was impressed with his sophistication. ‘He talked over the phone with no hands.’ Allan noticed she was the boss’s daughter… they work together as photographers…. The Arbuses have been married nine years and have a seven-year-old daughter Doon.”

Diane was determined that Doon would receive all the encouragement and nurturing she had never had as a child. She treated Doon like a sister, an equal; there were few rules in the Arbus household, and Doon was allowed to run free.