Diane Arbus (5 page)

Still later she would go with Ben Fernandez to photograph the American Nazi Party in Yorkville. Loaded down with her cameras, she would listen while the leader of the party made vicious anti-Semitic remarks. She did not react; she just listened intensely—watching, watching. And she arranged to photograph the Nazis. And they were charmed by her.

“To Diane the real world was always a fantasy,” said a friend.

*
Howard admits that some of his earliest poetry, which has a despairing, almost rabbinical quality, was probably inspired by his grandfather Meyer, whom he calls “one of the wisest men I’ve ever known.” Meyer Nemerov, the Biblical scholar who often wept when he read the Old Testament, instilled in Howard a love of and dedication to words.

B
Y THE AGE OF
thirteen Howard was on his way to being a first-rate athlete—an excellent swimmer and tennis player and on the second-string football team. He was pursuing proper names—through bird books, flower books, tree books, star books—“to make some mind of what was only sense,” he recalled later. He was also discovering Freud by reading the entire Basic Writings in the Modern Library edition, “even though a friend of my mother’s told me ‘reading Freud will make you sick.’ ”

He and Diane still took walks together and went to museums, but they no longer roller-skated since he’d been robbed by a group of toughs right across the street from the San Remo with Diane as terrified witness. Afterward Howard had tried to fight with the boys, which was difficult since he was on roller skates and Diane was, too, but she attempted to stop him “
à la
Lillian Gish in some silent movie.” For several minutes they wheeled around on the sidewalk “like nutty performers.” Diane would repeat this anecdote over and over again to friends, and she was to have a nightmare about the experience; in fantasy it became a much more violent confrontation.

Now Howard spent most of his free time with his schoolmate John Pauker, whose father, Edmond Pauker, was Ferenc Molnár’s agent. The Pauker home in Riverdale became Howard’s home away from home. Pauker, Sr., was deeply involved in show business. “He got every Hungarian artist a job in Hollywood,” John Pauker says, “including, I believe, Ernst Lubitsch.”

Howard was intrigued by the energy and ebullience that radiated from the Pauker household, and John Pauker had it, too. Red-haired, pixie-faced, highly theatrical, he wore a green cape when he and Howard took their walks through Central Park singing, arguing, vowing to become “heroes.”

For a while Howard toyed with the idea of becoming an opera tenor, but as his voice changed he realized he’d have to be “a basso if anything.” Then he thought that perhaps he’d be a psychoanalyst, until “Mommy
ridiculed me, saying, ‘How could you ever be an analyst when you’re incapable of talking with people!’ ”

In 1934 Howard caught typhoid fever. He remembers he had “a nurse who taught me dirty songs… I am said to have been some time in delirium.” While he was convalescing, he broke out in red spots, which “the doctor circled in blue ink.”

Their brother’s fever was so contagious that Diane and Renée were moved to the Hotel Bolivar, on Central Park West at 84th Street, where they lived with their nanny for three months. Every so often they would be trotted back to Stand opposite the San Remo and wave up to their mother, who stood at their apartment window waving back.

During that period, Renée recalls, “Diane and I were as intimate as we’d ever be, I suppose.” She remembers coming back to the hotel and Diane helping the nanny bathe her and Diane coloring in her coloring book or drawing pictures for her and reading to her from
Jane Eyre
or
Wuthering Heights.
Diane enjoyed Gothic novels in which fantasy predominates over reality; the strange overshadows the commonplace, the supernatural prevails over the natural. “I had the feeling Diane likened herself to Jane Eyre, who was a talented, superior girl deeply romantic and full of dreams,” Renée says.

At school she was a font of creativity—particularly in art class, where she sketched, painted in oils, sculpted, and made collages. “Obviously Diane possessed a gift which gave her a sense of separateness, from the very beginning,” her art teacher, Victor D’Amico, says. “She wasn’t
aware
of her talent then, but her talent—her imagination—compelled her to live in a state of internal crisis, of excitement, which must have been disturbing to her. I remember how impatient she was with easy solutions.”

He recalls, “Once I gave her class an assignment to design a dream house. Everyone else drew up very traditional plans, mainly mock Tudor three-story jobs with fireplaces and balconies. Diane’s house was completely round with windows on different levels so she could study the stars in the sky as well as watch the grass grow. There was little furniture in her fantasy house, just the essentials—bed, table, chair—because she wanted to be free to walk around in the dark without bumping into things. In spite of her fears about so many things, Diane felt safer, more comfortable in the dark.”

However, in school, invariably surrounded by a group of children who looked to her for leadership, she was beginning to show signs of independence. After class she would organize treks and games in Central Park with her friends. Whenever there was something a little daring or dangerous to do, like jumping over a wide crevice between rocks or playing a trick on a teacher or teasing one of the younger girls, Diane would be the
leader, “the first one to do it.” As a result she was considered one of the boldest students at Ethical Culture, but privately she was sure “I was more afraid than the others.” She forced herself to be brave, “even though I hated to and was all hot and frightened.”

She became very popular and was able to move in and out of cliques, which she defined as being “based on exclusion and feeding on the misery of non-members.” She fluctuated between wanting to desert one clique and be close to another. She was never sure which clique she liked best.

Even at the age of eleven she was aware of the duplicity in herself and her classmates, and she would write about it angrily in her autobiography—labeling both herself and her friends as “mean” and “stupid” because they all pretended they knew everything when they knew nothing. She realized she was supposed to act excited and silly about boys and clothes and dances, too, but often she found she could not react. She felt still and empty inside and then she would go off by herself to the Metropolitan and stare at the El Grecos. A classmate remembers how “Diane would float away from a group of us—suddenly—no explanation. Later we’d see her sitting by herself reading a book of poetry in Central Park. She did that a lot.”

She was always being disappointed in people. They were not what they appeared. The grown-ups were falsely sophisticated and hypocritical—they played roles, projecting different images in order to compete and be loved. And the kids imitated them. For a while she was best friends with a rich European—a striking, arrogant girl who seemed to have invented herself. At parties they would amuse each other with half-smiles and whispered sarcastic remarks. They found they both liked watching people in peculiar situations, people under stress—a Schrafft’s waitress with hiccups, a deaf-mute child making bird sounds to attract his parents’ attention. But Diane had a falling out with the rich European girl and would no longer speak to her and would tell no one why and the stillness inside her got bigger and bigger.

In 1934 Diane’s grandparents Meyer and Fanny Nemerov were given a party at the Hotel Tower in Brooklyn to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The party was attended by the entire Nemerov clan. Diane and Renée went, but Howard was still at home recovering from typhoid. When they posed for the family portrait, Diane held a photograph of her brother in her lap.

Diane never forgot her grandparents’ genuine attachment to each other. “They were married lovers,” she told a friend. Every morning Meyer went to the synagogue and Fanny would sit in the window of their
apartment all day waiting for him to come back. There was a mysterious closeness about these grandparents that fascinated Diane, perhaps because her own parents seemed so inscrutable.

Later Diane composed an entire series of photographs on people and their love objects, including a woman holding a pet monkey in her arms (the monkey is dressed in a baby’s snowsuit). And she wrote: “Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.”

“But, darling, what is it—being married?” David Nemerov once asked a relative. And then he answered, “Being married is just lying in bed back to back.”

Howard remembers listening to his parents “quarreling” behind closed doors and being terribly shocked. Their behavior seemed “secret, invisible.” Once, impulsively, he peeked into their bedroom, was caught and scolded for it. Ever after, he says, he has connected “seeing with the sexual act and guilt; with the forbidden and punishable and photography as the antithesis (guilt) of writing (innocent).”

When they were growing up, Diane and Howard had little chance to know their mother and father, who at home spent much of their time playing cards. “That’s my most vivid memory of the Nemerovs—smoking and playing bridge for hours,” John Pauker says. “But Diane and Howard always treated them with the most exquisite respect. They would always kiss them very dutifully on the cheek before they went out, even if it was just for a chocolate malted.”

Their mother seemed the more impenetrable—Gertrude, the beautiful chain-smoker who ran the elaborate apartment, directed the servants, sat at the long dining table in the evenings. “Gertrude was deep down very shy, a woman of few words,” explains her old friend Lillian Weinstein. “Her life revolved around her husband—she was crazy about him. But she was concerned about Howard, Diane and Renée—like any good mother, she wanted them only to do the ‘right thing,’ the ‘correct thing,’ and to have all the advantages.”

As for David Nemerov, one presumes he wanted the best for his family, too, but neither Gertrude nor the children saw much of him. He was at his office up to fourteen hours a day—helping keep the various Russeks afloat (aside from the Fifth Avenue store, there were now branches in Brooklyn and Chicago). Away from the store, he devoted his energies to the Home and Hospital of the Daughters of Jacob and later to United Jewish Appeal. And he gave advice. “He was fantastic at giving advice,” Diane said. Relatives, most of whom worked at Russeks at one time or another, and
friends and children of friends would drift in and out of the apartment at the San Remo and Nemerov would listen to their problems—emotional, sexual, philosophical—and he would dispense (occasionally lofty) solutions.

Sometimes he betrayed confidences. A Nemerov cousin who wishes to remain anonymous says, “I idolized David—thought he was a god. When I was sixteen, I fell in love with a boy and we eventually had sex—a terrible thing to do in the 1930s when you’re not married. My parents disapproved of him. Anyway, I ran to David for advice. I told him how crazy I was about this boy, how much in love and so forth. David was so gentle and sympathetic—near the end of our talk he whispered, ‘I won’t tell anyone, I promise, but have you gone to bed with this boy?’ I nodded. That night David informed my parents I was no longer a virgin; it was a humiliating and awful time for me. I never spoke to David again.”

In the evenings Nemerov would go either to the theater or to nightclubs with friends like Nate Cummings, the Canadian industrialist who later became a billionaire art-collector and head of Consolidated Foods (Fuller Brushes, Sara Lee frozen baked goods, Chicken Delight). Nemerov admired Cummings almost slavishly for his ability to make money. “A businessman must be ruthless, otherwise he’s not a good businessman,” Cummings was quoted as saying. “Too many people are afraid of making decisions—I know how to make decisions.”

Every so often Nemerov and Cummings would take a train to Florida and hole up in a hotel suite with their cronies. “We’d play cards in our underwear for twenty-four hours straight,” Cummings recalls. “We had one hell of a time.”

Throughout the 1930s a family rumor circulated but was never proved that Nemerov was under particular pressure because he was attempting to pay off an enormous debt his father-in-law had incurred. A compulsive gambler, Frank Russek had supposedly “lost the entire chain of Russek stores in a wild game of roulette at Monte Carlo.” Nemerov had been with him and it was only due to his fast talking that the Russeks empire remained in family hands. (Years later Walter Weinstein, Max’s son, disputed the story vehemently. “Frank loved to gamble, but he couldn’t have gambled the stores away without our knowledge—our family owned fifty percent of the stock.”)

Be that as it may, at home Nemerov often talked anxiously about the future of Russeks. Howard, acutely aware of what his father expected of him, kept out of the discussions. As the only Nemerov son, it was assumed that he would take over the store as merchandising director, but he had no interest in retail or making money for money’s sake, “so I kept quiet.”

Diane said nothing either, but she sensed her father’s concern and imagined a terrible fate for him. In her autobiography she wrote, “I was ashamed… I thought my family must do things wrong… I was afraid that my father’s business was really being run badly and that one day everyone would find out and he would be put in jail.”

Although their relationship continued to be a formal one (“We were a family of silences,” Renée says), Diane felt an ambivalent attachment to her stern, handsome daddy “because he was there if I really needed him.”

Judy Freed, who knew the Nemerovs when she was a child, recalls attending Howard’s eleventh-birthday party at the San Remo. “Mr. Nemerov dropped in and he and Diane flirted outrageously with each other. They were obviously taken with one another.”

As she grew older, Diane fantasized about committing incest with her father; she thought he preferred her to her mother. She alternated between loving her father and feeling contempt for him because “he was always putting on an act.” He bought expensive French art books, which he displayed prominently in the living room, pages uncut. He often greeted guests in a smoking jacket. He smiled continuously in public. Phyllis Carton, one of Diane’s closest friends in school, says, “Diane didn’t seem to belong to him, and yet the power and talent in herself she may have inherited from him.”