Diane Arbus (33 page)

Throughout the years Diane and the giant developed a friendship of sorts. He confided in her that he still dreamed of being a great actor, but the only parts he could get on TV were monster roles. (He had played the son of Frankenstein’s monster in a film called
The Head That Would Not Die.
In it he had chomped off a man’s arm and tossed a half-nude girl across a table.) He bragged to Diane that he had auditioned for the lead in a Broadway show—that of a tall basketball player in
Tall Story.
He hadn’t got it because he was
too
tall. Diane remarked that her brother had written the original version of
Tall Story,
the novel
The Homecoming Game,
but Carmel didn’t seem impressed.

Eventually he invited Diane to photograph him at his home in the Bronx, where he lived with his normal-sized parents. Even though he was slowly dying of bone disease, he kept talking about joining a carnival. He had played the Tallest Cowboy in the World for Ringling Brothers’ circus at Madison Square Garden.

From 1962 to 1970 Diane kept returning to the Carmels’ cramped apartment until she finally captured the image she wanted—certainly one of her most memorable—in which giant and parents confront one another.

At one point she excitedly phoned Joseph Mitchell at the New Yorker. “You know how every mother has nightmares when she’s pregnant that her baby will be born a monster? I think I got that in the mother’s face as she glares up at Eddie, thinking, ‘
OH MY GOD, NO
!’ ”

Gradually toward the end of 1962 Diane’s freakish subject matter—the dwarf, the giant, the changing cast of characters at Hubert’s Museum—was joined by another major project: nudists. She was to spend the next five years photographing nudists in camps around New Jersey and Pennsylvania. She hoped these portraits of dense, impenetrable “naked people,” as she called them, would result in a book, with lengthy captions to be written by herself. Once she laid out all her pictures for John Gossage sequentially to show him how these images could tell a kind of story—the family of overweight nudists lying in the meadow; the leathery retired nudists who posed with nude pictures of themselves lolling in easy chairs; the slightly potbellied nudist lovers who reminded one of Adam and Eve; the nudist kids.

Many of them looked like statues to her—indeed, most of the nude figures she photographed fill the picture frame with weighty masses—you can almost feel the bulk and earthiness of their existence.

But Diane’s book of “naked people” was never published because she couldn’t get releases; nevertheless, photographing at the nudist camps was a singularly provocative experience for her because she collaborated so completely with her subjects; in order to get permission to photograph them, she had to agree to be naked too, which challenged her subjects as well as herself. “You feel silly for ten minutes and then it’s okay,” she said. “Nudist camps was a terrific subject for me.” She polished her stories about photographing nudists by repeating them over and over again to Marvin Israel, her daughters, and friends. She would say that her first impression “was a bit like walking into a hallucination and not being sure whose it was. I was really flabbergasted at the time… I had never seen that many men naked all at once. The first man I saw was mowing his lawn.”

She developed many theories about nudist camps. “They run the whole social gamut,” she would say, “from people in tents (a lot of people are nudists because it’s cheap) to people in trailers and homes—mansions almost…and you have a whole microcosmic society where everybody is supposedly equal… New Jersey is riddled with nudist camps because they’re not allowed in New York State.”

She might talk about another phenomenon—urban nudists, called Jaybirds. These were people who never went to nudist camps—they lived in the city in apartments, and when they got home they took off all their clothes.

She would recount a time when she met a prison warden at a camp: a warden from Sing Sing who spent hours watching the nudists trail down to a beach. And he would try to guess what kind of jobs they had from the accessories they wore. They were all stark naked, but the men smoked pipes and wore shoes and socks and others stuck cigarette packs into their socks…the women sport hats, earrings, necklaces, and high-heeled slippers or moccasins. “It was really loathsome,” Diane said.

She told of a nudist camp where there were two grounds for expulsion: a man could get expelled for having an erection, and either sex could get expelled for something called staring. “I mean you were allowed to look if you didn’t make a big deal out of it.”

She recalled playing volleyball nude. “You’re always jumping, and it’s most uncomfortable without clothes…you’re sort of jiggling and you can’t just quietly miss the ball and let someone else take the blame. It’s like a big production.”

After a while Diane said that she “began to wonder about nudist camps…there’d be an empty pop bottle or rusty bobby pin—the lake bottom oozes in a particularly nasty way and the outhouse smells, the woods look mangy—it gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the fall
Adam and Eve begged the Lord to forgive them…and in his boundless exasperation he’d said all right then, stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up. And they did.”

This particular period—1962-4—was one of the most productive and energizing periods of Diane’s life.

She had finally adjusted to the Rollei, and one of her first set of prints made with it and completed in 1962 was of kids playing grown-ups—kids posed like Rogers and Astaire for a dance contest; there was also the now famous shot of the grimacing boy with a toy hand grenade, taken in Central Park.

Now she was not only deeply involved with her own work, she had magazine assignments, including several from
Show,
although Show’s art director, Henry Wolf, wasn’t entirely pleased by her crude, abrasive work. “I couldn’t use the pictures she shot for Gloria Steinem’s story on movie theaters in Ohio—they weren’t that good—and I refused to publish her portrait of the human pincushion, even though she kept urging me to.” Wolf, a cultivated gentleman who later headed a successful advertising agency with Jane Trahey before becoming a photographer, confesses, “Diane always made me feel guilty for enjoying myself. Once I ran into her on a beautiful Saturday morning all decked out in her cameras. ‘What are you doing on such a gorgeous day?’ I asked. ‘Trying to find some unhappy people,’ she answered. Well, I couldn’t relate to
that
!”

Alan Levy, who worked with Diane on another story for
Show
in 1962, has a very different memory, and he wrote about it in
Art News:
“she introduced herself to me over the phone with a giggle as [Diane Arbus] your photographer…when I met her, small and trim in black sweater and brown leather skirt, she looked like a teen-ager.” Together they documented the making of a TV commercial for National Shoes. “I have never had more fun being paid to work than I did with Deeyan, as everyone pronounced her name. Our trail led us to a host of talented people with fascinating names and titles. The ad agency chief was named Mogul, the account supervisor, Gutteplan… The National Shoes official in charge was the low heel buyer… Deeyan, her eyes widening like camera apertures, watched several of our subjects wining me and dining us (Deeyan didn’t drink). She was, she said, a person to whom funny things happened. She also confessed to having a radar that verged on the embarrassing. ‘I can walk into a room and tell who’s sleeping with whom. Sometimes I can even tell this before it’s happened. I mean, later they’ll make contact and eventually end up in bed.’ ”

Levy found that she was a voracious reader—she quoted Kafka and
Rilke and urged him to read Borges. One weekend morning she took him on the subway to Coney Island and made him peer into the face of every horse on the merry-go-round. “Deeyan taught me to look closely at things we look through. She was right about every horse being different from all the others.”

They had only one fight, Levy writes. When they finished the
Show
story, he was pleased with the result, but she wasn’t. She didn’t want her byline under the pictures (tiny ones laid out rather like a comic strip). “On the other hand, I wanted to share a byline with her as badly as I wanted anything in 1962,” Levy finishes, “so I bullied her, writing at least one impassioned letter complaining that she was hurting me. At 3 o’clock on the last afternoon before the issue was to be locked up she phoned and said alright.”

Not long after that she went to California for
Show
to photograph the aging camp symbol Mae West, who’d agreed to pose in the white-and-gold bedroom of her Hollywood apartment. (Whenever she had visitors, sleek, mute muscle men stood at attendance; nobody ever commented on the monkey turds imbedded in the pale fur rug.)

Diane arrived in the early afternoon. The shades were drawn, the lamps lit, and West appeared to wade through the shadows with her ludicrous walk and gutsy insolence. While the camera clicked, she spoke of her dependence on health foods, enemas, therapeutic sex, all in an effort to stay young. “Stay outa the sun!” she warned Diane gruffly. “The sun wrinkles!” She added she hadn’t left her apartment during the day for years “because
I HATE THE SUN
.”
Diane answered that she didn’t much like the sun either—the light was too bright, too jarring; it gave her the jitters—made her squint. The two women agreed that they much preferred darkness.

After the session West handed Diane a $100 bill and said, “Thanks, honey” before sashaying off into another room. Diane guessed this might have been a habit—during the 1930s she’d tipped still photographers who snapped her on the movie set. Diane returned the money with a note, saying how thrilled she’d been to meet her. When the harsh black-and-white layout appeared in
Show
magazine, however, West was furious and had her lawyers write a threatening letter to the publisher, Huntington Hartford, claiming that the pictures were “unflattering, cruel, not at all glamorous.” Diane was upset. “She was genuinely surprised when subjects disliked what she found in them,” Charlie Reynolds says. Yet there was something beyond Diane’s surface images that invariably disturbed. In this case West—despite her flauntingly curvaceous body—did not come across as a creditable woman. And her bedroom setting mirrored an imitation of reality only Hollywood could devise.

After Diane returned from California, Hiro would occasionally stop at the Charles Street house for an early breakfast before going on to Avedon’s studio. “Diane would cook me an egg and she’d show me her Hollywood contacts,” he says. She had done stills when she was out there, too, of Disneyland’s fake rocks on wheels and a house on a hill, which was shot from an angle to reveal the supporting scaffolding behind the false front. The illusion seemed very personal and possibly a metaphor of the emptiness and pretension she’d hated about her past.

“But it was her portraits that got to me,” Hiro says. “That subject matter! I remember Irving Penn saying to me once, ‘How does she do it? She puts a camera between her bare breasts and photographs those nudists.’ He couldn’t get over it and neither could I.”

Although he would soon become a virtuoso with cameras (alternating between instant strobe and Polaroid and slow-speed large format), Hiro thought portrait-making was the most difficult process of all. “It’s almost trancelike—and the photographer has to give up some control.” Hiro, of course, made classic portraits of Maya Plisetskaya, the Rolling Stones, Mifune, but Diane especially loved the picture he took of his tiny sons wearing grotesque masks. He gave her a print and in exchange she gave him her family of fat nudists lolling in the tall grass. Throughout her career Hiro would always be there for Diane—cool, analytical, seemingly dispassionate, offering darkroom advice, lending her cameras.

He was one of the few photographers she knew who not only thrived on the diversity of his fashion and commercial work (he photographed everything from emeralds and paper shoes to the launch of the Apollo 11), but believed such variety essential since it vitalized his more personal projects. He also enjoyed making a great deal of money, and gave credit to Avedon for teaching him how to market his special talents.

Diane, on the other hand, felt ambivalent about being paid for what she was doing. She was always ashamed of making money. “When I make money from a photograph, I immediately assume it’s not as good a photograph,” she once said. But this attitude didn’t keep her from accepting more assignments; she was getting a great many from Robert Benton at
Esquire
now, “practically one a month,” Benton says. She photographed stripper Blaze Starr dancing with her little dog across a violently patterned rug; she photographed Jayne Mansfield and her daughter, and city planner Jane Jacobs and her son, and Ozzie and Harriet Nelson looking faintly disagreeable.

“Diane would come up to the art department with her latest contact sheets and she always managed to surprise me,” Benton goes on. “Or
rather she would reverse my expectations.” Blaze Starr with her sequined nipples, Ozzie and Harriet, the middle-class ideal, and dumpy, proud mother Jayne Mansfield were photographed with the same intensity as her New York freaks. After a while Benton came to see that “we” (meaning the viewer) looked no different from “them” (meaning the subjects). “It was Diane’s idiosyncratic style—her deceptively simple, singular approach that leveled all her subjects, regardless of who they were, and made both freak and normal appear in some aspects the same. The term ‘freak’ or ‘normal’ in her context became meaningless. Because Diane had made no distinctions—no concessions either.”

David Newman (Benton’s sometime partner) adds, “Diane made no concessions when she photographed Benton’s wedding to Sally. And they are absolutely sensational pictures which Benton has in his living room to this day. Diane documented every single detail of that supposedly conventional ritual—rituals were what Diane was obsessed with, right? She photographed everything in sequence and she became part of the celebration. I remember her clicking away as Sally struggled into her wedding dress with her mother trying to help her—I remember her right after the ceremony crouching on the floor of the limousine, clicking away like mad.”