Diane Arbus (44 page)

She then described in a peculiarly detached way how one night she’d had sex with a sailor in the back of a Greyhound bus. (“If you sit on the inside back seat of a Greyhound bus, it means you’re sexually available.”) No introductions were made, not a word was spoken, and after this swift, mute encounter in the dark, she got off at the next stop and waited on the highway for an hour or so until another bus came along which would bring her back to New York. When the bus arrived, she got on and collapsed on a seat (“not the back seat”). It was close to five a.m. and suddenly she was hurtling through space, through tunnels, whirling, drifting, rootless. Gas fumes and air-conditioning enveloped her, and across the aisle other passengers snored or gurgled in their sleep…

Suddenly she launched into another kind of story, complete with gestures and accents, about a recent photo assignment. The subject had been a celebrated Washington lawyer. She’d arrived at his office and found a British journalist already there, interviewing him—a very pretty, very ambitious journalist who, Diane sensed, wanted to seduce him “because this lawyer was rather sexy and powerful, too.” Diane decided “for kicks” to seduce him first—and for the next hour she exerted her fey charm on the man while blinding him with her flash. He got sweatier and more excited and finally the British journalist left, and Diane said she’d felt sorry for her because “she didn’t have the patience I had. I hung in there.”

It was almost as if she was determined to explore with her body and her mind every nightmare, every fantasy, she might have repressed deep in her subconscious. Crookston listened as she told him of picking up a Puerto Rican boy on Third Avenue “because he was so beautiful.” She described other encounters with strangers and after a while they began sounding almost mythical, since identities were blotted out, leaving only the throbbing sexual reality.

At this point Crookston interrupted to ask if she hadn’t ever faced actual danger as a result of such recklessness. Yes, she answered, but she’d always been “thrilled” to take risks to “test” herself—and, besides, nothing bad had ever happened to her and for some strange reason she was positive it never would. And she didn’t drink or take drugs, and when her camera was with her she always felt in control. Crookston got the sense that if she was ever disgusted by much of what she’d seen and done, she’d faced the disgust fiercely and with dignity, which is why she seemed neither coarsened nor debased by anything that had happened to her. And in manner she remained gentle, ironic, almost passive.

Around five a.m. Diane got up, dressed, and left the hotel. Then later Crookston flew to California. But when he returned a few days later, they spent two more evenings together. And she told him more adventures, more stories. “And, yes, I believed Diane. I believed her implicitly,”
Crookston says. However, Marvin Israel, who presumably heard many of these same anecdotes, has written that her stories always had a “curious improbability.” He goes on to say they seemed “exaggerated and very funny…only the barest account of what must have occurred.”

As soon as he got back to England, Crookston began phoning Diane regularly and he gave her many assignments to do for the London
Sunday Times
magazine, starting with the “diaper derby” in New Jersey (out of which came the controversial portrait of a crying, snotty baby). They also began an intense correspondence in which they poured out their thoughts and concerns. Diane’s letters—often written in almost indecipherable scrawl—form a record of her work (“nearly everything delights me!” she wrote in late 1967). She would phone Crookston her ideas for possible photo essays: “runaways, criminals, sex clubs, wives of famous men, rich people, vigilantes.”

In most letters Diane is full of questions and concern for Crookston, for whom she had developed some affection. Referring to their first time together in an early note: “You were so gentle and generous and so very game…” And in another letter: “You looked at me as hard as I looked at you, as if we were England and America at the signing of the treaty…it is so mysterious. I am suggestible even to myself.”

To which Crookston comments: “There was a part of Diane that needed to be valued, listened to, comforted… I had the feeling she didn’t always get enough of the latter…” He adds, “There was never any talk of being in love [between us]. Actually, she told me she no longer believed in it, although I’m not sure that was totally true. I was not infatuated with her, but I was fascinated. She was a marvelous woman—wise, poetic. I was proud to be her friend. And she was witty, too. We’d been instantly attracted to each other because we always gave each other a good laugh. But it needn’t have been a relationship that got into bed, although that was, as Diane might have put it, “
A GOOD THING
.”

In almost every letter Diane mentions money; it had become a gnawing worry to her. Allan had always taken care of their income, depositing any sum they earned in a joint account, balancing their checkbook. Diane herself rarely entered a bank; many of the checks she received for jobs lay uncashed about her apartment. Her way of dealing with money was rather like her father’s—she carried wads of it with her.

In July Diane flew out to San Francisco to photograph for her second Guggenheim project. She had arranged to stay with Paul Salstrom, who was running a house for AWOLs and deserters in the Haight-Ashbury. Salstrom took her, almost at once, to the Living Theatre’s production of
Paradise Now
and afterward they went backstage to visit the Becks, who ran the Living Theatre. They were pacifists—Salstrom had been in prison with them. They began to talk together, so Diane sneaked off by herself and started prowling through the dressing rooms, hoping to catch a glimpse of the babies who’d supposedly been conceived by members of the Living Theatre company while on LSD. The babies were said to resemble mutants, with huge, pale protruding eyes, silvery skin, and spaced-out expressions. Diane was unable to find any such babies.

She spent the next few days wandering all over the Haight trying to find faces to photograph, but all she saw were stoned “flower children” wearing thrift-shop clothes. Some were begging. Most were runaways or high-school dropouts having a hard time surviving on junk food and bad dope. Drugs were everywhere—mescaline, cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines. Many of the kids were physically ill; those who weren’t acted extremely aggressive, “like most speed freaks did,” Salstrom says. The media were there in full force—TV cameras,
Life
and
Look
photographers, all documenting the “Love Generation” as it flocked into the Avalon Ballroom to hear psychedelic rock. “Diane thought the whole scene was degrading—commercialized. She wanted nothing to do with it,” Salstrom adds. She made only a few photographs. When
Newsweek
phoned to ask her to do a big spread on hippies, she refused and instead went out to North Beach and took pictures of a topless dancer.

By the end of the week she was ready to leave San Francisco. The city and its population were too hidden, she said—hidden behind the fog and the shuttered windows of the houses and the rolling hills. She and Salstrom drove down the coast to Los Angeles. “We had no plans,” Salstrom says, “Diane
hated
making plans.” He remembers that often when they stopped at a diner or a gas station she would see something she wanted to photograph and would turn mute and unapproachable as she focused on the person or object. She never seemed satisfied with anything she shot. By noon she would have taken a hundred shots—by sunset another hundred.

When they reached the outskirts of Los Angeles, they both called friends from a pay phone, but were unable to connect with anybody, so they drove on to visit Salstrom’s aunt and uncle, who lived in a tiny town near the California desert. Salstrom says that his aunt was “a heavy-set woman—a compulsive eater—deeply neurotic—obsessed with movie stars. Her husband, my uncle, had been a gambler in his youth but an unsuccessful one, so now they were very poor and my aunt cleaned rooms in a motel and my uncle drove a pick-up truck back and forth across an apricot orchard. In the evenings they were together, but they hardly ever exchanged a word.

“Diane spent most of the time photographing my aunt draped against her refrigerator—her prize possession. I saw a blow-up later in New York. It was very severe, in that square format she always used along with the flash. The effect was overpowering—like an X-ray of my aunt’s emotions. All you can see is that she’s been immobilized by her fantasies. Like it’s obvious from her expression that she’s resorted to total self-absorption or otherwise she’d fall apart. We stayed with my relatives overnight, but Diane refused to take photographs of my uncle the next day because he was too defenseless, she said. She couldn’t bear to look at the eczema that flamed across his face and neck and made him both embarrassed and miserable.”

They drove through the desert into New Mexico. Salstrom thought they should stop at the Hog Farm Commune, but Diane wasn’t interested, so they drove on to Texas. “One night we slept together out under the stars.” By now Diane was so anxious to get home that when they reached Dallas she went directly to the airport, paid for the car, and took the next flight back to New York. Salstrom hitchhiked the rest of the way.

In the fall of 1967 Diane was invited to attend “idea meetings” at
New York
magazine, which was about to start publication. She joined contributing editors Gloria Steinem, Tom Wolfe, and Barbara Goldsmith in editor Clay Felker’s noisy, cluttered little office.

Felker was setting out to revolutionize the city-weekly format with a mélange of stylish graphics and articles about sex, money, and power (his favorite subjects). “Classy trash,” Richard Reeves called it all. Diane knew about Felker’s single-minded editorial methods, having worked with him when
New York
was part of the Sunday
Herald Tribune
and also at
Esquire.
Felker was on the prowl night and day for “hot” stories. He hung on the phone, not only badgering his writers to come up with the latest “trends,” the latest “winners,” but often encouraging them to cannibalize or humiliate the subject in question simply because when the story got into print it would be more “talked about.” Diane understood his tactics. “He has a photographer’s mentality,” she once commented. “He’ll stop at nothing to get the image—he’ll pay any price.”

They had already had a little run-in—almost forgotten now, but not quite—when Diane photographed him and his then wife, movie star Pamela Tiffin, for
Bazaar.
Felker had agreed to pose, since he liked publicity, too—but when he found out that Diane Arbus was the photographer, he panicked. He recalls: “She kept gushing that she wanted to capture the moony looks on our faces because we were so ‘in love.’ She’d never seen such a perfect couple, she told us—so romantic. But I wasn’t fooled. I
knew she wanted me to relax my guard—take off my mask, reveal my neuroses. I wasn’t about to. I clenched my teeth and gave her back nothing.” Diane photographed them for hours, but the results were so poor that no picture was ever published, much to Felker’s relief. He and Diane remained on amicable terms and he wanted very much to use her on
New York,
particularly after the attention her museum show had received. She was a “star,” he told people—someone both talented and talked about.

At one
New York
editorial meeting there was a great deal of discussion as to whether or not the magazine should run an article on Andy Warhol, who seemed to be setting the tone of the sixties with his avid pursuit of publicity, his perpetual voyeurism, his wild parties at his silver-walled studio loft called the Factory, where sex, liquor, and drugs were available in unlimited quantities, and fading movie stars like Judy Garland and socialites like Marian Javits crowded in to watch Warhol film drag queens, transvestites, would-be poets doing “outrageous things” on camera.

Recently Warhol had been promoting an exceptionally beautiful actress named Viva. In his latest movie,
Lonesome Cowboy,
she could be observed nude and talking nonstop while participating in an orgy and a masturbation scene. Felker decided that Diane should photograph Viva and Barbara Goldsmith write about her. The two women went down to the Factory sometime in December 1967.

The moment they arrived, they were almost blinded by a gigantic mirrored strobe light suspended from the ceiling. Silver engulfed them; silver foil covered the walls, the water pipes, and even the little back room where homosexual acts took place. And propped against the chairs and tables were chunks of broken mirror and great slabs of silvery cracked glass.

Silver turned speed freaks on (“Silver was spacy, silver was the past—silver was narcissism,” Andy Warhol wrote). And since almost everyone at the Factory was on speed—amphetamine—they would “sing until they choked, dance until they dropped, brush their hair until they sprained their wrists,” and all their convulsions would invariably be reflected in the glaring, silvery mirrors.

That first evening, Beatles music seemed amplified to ear-splitting loudness. Diane snapped portraits of Warhol, his chalky face impassive behind dark glasses. He had his tape recorder on to document the murmurings of his druggie entourage—pimply transvestites, young, sleek hustlers, emaciated A-heads. Some of them camped for Diane, strutting in their costumes.

She was more interested in studying Warhol’s death-image paintings—Marilyn Monroe’s still smile on dozens of silk screens. But Viva was the assignment, so Diane eventually began photographing her preening in a black velvet Edwardian coat and slacks, and talking a mile a minute. In
person, Viva had a physical presence almost as commanding as Garbo’s. Tall and very slender with huge green eyes, pale hollow cheeks, curly blonde hair, she had lips as prim as an Irish Catholic nun’s.

Diana Vreeland planned to have Viva model an entire issue of upcoming fashions for
Vogue;
Avedon was to photograph. But Viva seemed unimpressed by that; she was intent on describing her horrible Christ-religion-sex obsession. How as a little girl she’d been afraid to go to Mass…how she’d had her first nervous breakdown in France. Nudity in Warhol movies had given her a certain celebrity, she said, but when she went on the
Tonight Show
or Merv Griffin, she was treated like a freak “because I hadn’t been ashamed to display my naked body on film.” She spoke for what seemed like hours with an edge of hysteria in her voice, as if an interruption might release some fearful depression.