Diane Arbus (30 page)

“Then she asked me
how
I found the kind of people I wrote about and I told her by being persistent—by hanging around. Around cafeterias, park benches, subway trains, public libraries, by interviewing ambulance drivers, scrubwomen, morgue workers. I told her about Professor Heckler at the flea circus, who was a good friend of mine. Did she know him? I asked. Indeed she did—she had been spending a lot of time at the flea circus for her essay in
Esquire.
We laughed when we found out we’d both spent hours watching him feed his damn fleas.”

In another conversation Diane and Mitchell talked about freaks and Diane referred to Mitchell’s definition of “class distinctions among freaks” which had appeared in his masterful portrait of Lady Olga, the bearded lady. “Born freaks are the aristocracy of the sideshow world,” Mitchell wrote. “Bearded ladies, Siamese twins, pinheads, fat girls, dwarfs, midgets, giants, living skeletons, men with skulls on which rocks can be broken.

“Made freaks include tattooed people who obtain sideshow engagements, reformed criminals, old movie stars, retired athletes like Jack Johnson.”

Again and again in their conversations Diane returned to Mitchell’s distinctions among freaks, and one assumes that her own celebrated comments about freaks were inspired by him. She said: “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

Mitchell says, “I urged Diane not to romanticize freaks. I told her that freaks can be boring and ordinary as so-called ‘normal’ people. I told her what I found interesting about Olga, the bearded lady, was that she yearned to be a stenographer and kept geraniums on her windowsill, and that the 450-pound wrestler I once interviewed cried piteously from homesickness for his native Ukraine.”

Mitchell says Diane phoned him frequently in subsequent weeks. They would always talk for at least an hour, and Mitchell jotted down some of
the topics they covered: Kafka, James Joyce, Walker Evans, Grimms’ Fairy Tales. She had been reading Edith Sitwell’s
English Eccentrics
and told him of Sitwell’s theory that contemplating eccentrics was a cure for melancholy—a way of distinguishing Man from Beast. She would giggle when Mitchell said something funny, and sometimes when he didn’t she would giggle anyway. “She said she had looked for the people I’d written about, and Lady Olga was dead and Mazie down in the Bowery didn’t want to be photographed. But she was making progress finding eccentrics, she said.” And she talked about discovering “people who were anomalies, who were quixotic, who believed in the impossible, who make their mark on themselves.” Mainly, she said, she was “nosing around.”

Her idea of “nosing around” was to prowl the city from dawn to dusk, alighting at any number of her favorite haunts—Central Park, the 42nd Street Automat, Washington Square. When somebody caught her fancy, she would go over and strike up a conversation. Joel Meyerowitz, who sometimes accompanied her in her wanderings, says, “She could hypnotize people, I swear. She would start talking to them and they would be as fascinated with her as she was with them. She had a magnetic quality—a Peter Pan quality. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

She didn’t like being interrupted. Once when her former assistant, Richard Marx, saw her huddled outside the 56th Street Doubleday bookstore, camera poised, he spoke to her. “Shh,” she hissed, “I’m working!” She was more polite with Dale McConathy, who ran into her during lunch hour on West 47th Street by the Gotham Book Mart. “I asked her to please take my picture, but she refused—with a smile. ‘It would take five hundred exposures before I’d get you without your mask,’ she told me.”

She might wait for days or weeks until a face in the crowd intrigued her and then she would grab it with her camera. Her friend Marvin Israel wrote after her death that these contacts, which are different from her other work, are breathtaking. “There are hundreds of sheets where the same face never appears more than once, all very close-up.” Thousands of exposures “like some strange catalogue,
*
and then there would be a contact sheet from several years later with one of those same faces in which you can trace Diane’s progress from the street to their home to their living room to their bedroom. These are like a narrative, a slow process leading up to some strange intimacy.”

She told Ann Ray of
Newsweek, “1
love to go to people’s houses—exploring—doing daring things I’ve not done before—things I’d fantasized about as a child. I love going into people’s houses—that’s part of the thrill
of seduction for a woman—to see how he [the subject] lives—the pictures on the wall—the wife’s slippers in the bathroom. But I’m not vicarious—I really am involved. And all the time I’m photographing I’m having a terrific time.” (Sometimes such encounters could end disastrously, although Diane was never specific about the trouble she may have got into or the danger she may have faced in welfare hotels or carnivals. Jack Smith, the creator of the underground movie
Flaming Creatures,
said he kicked her out of his apartment when she persisted in taking his picture and pictures of his various costumes. And she was periodically ousted from transvestite bars. “She could be extremely aggressive as a photographer,” Frederick Eberstadt says.)

“What came to really excite her was anything out of place,” Israel wrote. He felt that Diane was quite proud that she was able to tell, just by seeing someone for a moment, that they had something secret or mysterious about them and that in their homes “they would be extraordinary.” She’d approach these people and ask, “Can I come home with you?”

So it was with the various eccentrics she discovered in the next years. Some she went home with, some she didn’t; some she photographed, others she just talked to, but everyone impressed her. Like the irate lady who appeared to Diane one night pulling a kiddy’s red express wagon trimmed with bells and filled with cats in fancy hats and dresses. Like the man in Brooklyn called the Mystic Barber who teleported himself to Mars and said he was dead and wore a copper band around his forehead with antennae on it to receive instructions from the Martians. Or the lady in the Bronx who trained herself to eat and sleep underwater, or the black who carried a rose and a noose around with him at all times, or the person who invented a noiseless soup spoon, or the man from New Jersey who’d collected string for twenty years, winding it into a ball that was now five feet in diameter, sitting monstrous and splendid in his living room.

Sometimes friends suggested subjects. Abby Fink, who’d grown up with Diane, phoned to tell her about Polly Boshung, an attractive blonde who, because she was almost completely deaf and acutely embarrassed about it (“I’d wanted to be an actress, but realized I wouldn’t hear my cues”), had created an entirely different identity for herself to hide behind whenever she appeared in public. At dinners, on cruises, the usually sedate Polly transformed herself into “Cora Pratt,” an outrageous loudmouth who sported a wig, huge false buck teeth, and a shower cap. Once “Cora” pretended to be the maid at a party in Bucks County: sipped guests’ drinks, blew ashes from ashtrays, and talked nonstop about the joys of Five Day Deodorant Pads before collapsing on the sofa dead asleep. She’d been so expert in her disguise that none of her friends recognized Polly as “Cora.”

Diane took the Greyhound bus up to Peabody, Massachusetts, where Polly lived with her mother. Today Polly (now a saleslady in a Nantucket dress shop) remembers that “Diane Arbus was awful nice to me. Sweet. She spent all day photographing me in the garden and then she packed up her cameras and went down to catch the bus. But before she left she asked me a couple of times was I really sincere about having those two people inside myself? I kept telling her I was sincere, but I guess she didn’t believe me because I didn’t end up at her show in the Museum of Modern Art. Actually, I didn’t mind, because I don’t see how you could label me a freak.”

Shortly before she and Allan finally separated, Diane went to see her school friend Shirley Fingerhood. Fingerhood, a lawyer and later to be a judge, had been divorced and was raising a baby son by herself. “How do you do it alone?” Diane asked. “What demands do you make?”

Fingerhood says, “I just told her it was going to be rough and that she had to be prepared for it.”

Around them a generation of marriages seemed to be cracking at the seams. Couples like Rick and Tina Fredericks and the Forsts had already broken up, and couples like Robert and Mary Frank and Cheech and her husband were in high states of emotional agitation.

Sidney Simon, the sculptor, recalls that “last angry summer of 1960 when a few of us were trying to stick together and the effort was becoming almost unbearable.” Simon knew Allan because the Arbus kids all went to the Little Red School House. During the summer Simon organized a car trip to Maine with Diane, “and Allan and Susan and her husband, the actor Michael Wager, were the other passengers driving up to see their children, who were attending Blueberry Cove Camp in Tenants Harbor. We were in the last stages—the last dying gasps—of our respective marriages, so the atmosphere was awfully tense. We’d booked rooms in the same motel for a night. The following morning Diane knocked on our door and announced, Allan and I have separated and he’s gone back to New York.’ She seemed totally composed, although she looked as if she hadn’t slept a wink.”

She didn’t go into the whys, and nobody asked any questions. At breakfast the Wagers and the Simons tried to talk of other things. Diane insisted that everybody go to a traveling fair in Bar Harbor. It was at least sixty miles from where they were, but nobody was in the mood to argue, so after visiting their children they piled into the car and headed for the fair.

When they arrived, they wandered around aimlessly, eating too much sticky popcorn, trying to win at target practice. Meanwhile Diane
disappeared. Hours went by. The sun was going down. Simon says, “We hunted high and low and couldn’t find her and it was getting late and we were dying to get back to New York. Finally, at what seemed like the eleventh hour, we found her photographing a transvestite in a tent.”

During the fall of 1960 Diane followed William Mack (also known as the Sage of the Wilderness). Mack, eighty-two, a retired seaman with flowing beard and bright black eyes, was a scavenger who lived in the Bowery, and Diane went with him on his daily ritual (which began at five a.m. in the freezing dawn), picking empty bottle caps out of the garbage and depositing them in his baby carriage, which he would eventually wheel over to a bottle-collector. She photographed Mack reclining in his tiny room stuffed with personal rubbish, his favorite items a squashed coffee pot and a pair of nurse’s white shoes.

Also in 1960 she spent a great deal of time photographing Prince Robert de Rohan Courtney (whom Mitchell had written about). The prince was claimant to the throne of the Byzantine Roman Empire and lived in a “bejeweled 6 by 9 foot room on 48 Street called the Jade Tower,” Diane wrote. “In his bureau drawer he keeps the ingredients for breakfast of 3 raw eggs and a pat of butter in hot coffee.” Diane pored over his poems (nine thousand of them), scrawled in a kind of pig Latin, a fragment of which she unscrambled to read, “he who searches for trash so surely finds only trash.” She eventually accompanied the prince (who’d been born in Oklahoma) when he went to the Bowery to distribute cigarettes and money to delighted derelicts, and several times she joined him for supper at the 57th Street Automat.

Diane was so excited by her photographs of eccentrics (the prince, the scavenger) that she wrote Harold Hayes asking for an assignment to photograph other eccentrics for a picture story, and she listed people she hoped to include, such as “a hermit and a very cheerful man with half a beard who collects woodpecker holes…these are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups.”

Hayes turned down the idea with the excuse that “you can’t take a picture of someone with the express purpose of showing him or her as an eccentric.” They spoke no more about it, but Diane continued to photograph regularly for
Esquire,
and she and Hayes sent each other brief missives about her work. She often kidded him about his brusque manner in rejecting one of her projects. Once she commented, “Your last letter was
a bit lacking in human warmth. It would have been an excellent one to send to the phone company.”

By this time she was assured of another outlet for her work because in early 1961 Marvin Israel replaced Henry Wolf as art director of
Harper’s Bazaar.
Immediately, Israel invited her to complete her essay on eccentrics. He also encouraged her to write about them (she had shown him the long captions she’d written for her
Esquire
pictures) and promised he would publish both text and pictures in
Bazaar.

Diane went to Washington, D.C., by train to attend the Kennedy Inauguration with one of her favorite eccentrics, a tiny, gray-bearded, eighty-year-old man, Max Maxwell Landars, who called himself “Uncle Sam.” Clad in a red, white, and blue Uncle Sam uniform (he’d originally worn the uniform when he was advertising an exterminator service), Uncle Sam talked compulsively about himself. “I am what I call a Personality,” he told her. “I’ve got the greatest laugh in the country… I am writing my life story which will be similar to
Mission to Moscow
which Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote… I have the voice of a man, woman and child… I am a Phenomenon… M…E…Me!” During the train ride Diane photographed Uncle Sam as he trudged up the aisles proclaiming to the passengers how he planned to be
THE FIRST MAN TO SHAKE THE HAND OF DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER WHEN HE WAS NO LONGER PRESIDENT
.

She planned to photograph that moment too, but when they reached the capital, Uncle Sam panicked; they missed the Inauguration and Diane spent an entire night in Union Station calming him down. Periodically he would do Shirley Temple imitations and he repeated his name, “Uncle Sam,” to anyone who would listen. Near dawn he was promising to “bring the Liberty Bell” back to New York. For a while they slept fitfully on benches in the waiting room, and sometime the following morning Diane photographed Uncle Sam climbing imperiously up the 898 steps of the Washington Monument during a raging blizzard.