Diane Arbus (7 page)

In the spring of 1935 Diane’s father arranged for her to come down to the store after school and take sketching lessons from Dorothy Thompson, who was Russeks’ illustrator.

“Dorothy was probably the first beatnik type Diane had ever met,” Ben Lichtenstein says. “She was an independent lady who didn’t wear makeup, had studied painting with George Grosz, lived in a rustic place upstate with a guy who made carved gun handles. Anyway, Dorothy gave Diane sketching lessons in anatomy twice a week. And she’d take Diane to museums like the Met and talk to her about art.”

Dorothy Thompson introduced her to Grosz’s watercolors—harsh, unforgiving images which depicted the world as an evil, phantasmagorical place. Grosz became one of Diane’s favorite artists (and a future inspiration for her photographs). She was particularly fascinated by the subjects he explored: lechery, drunkenness, and overeating.

Lichtenstein notes that at fourteen Diane was still “painfully shy, withdrawn—proud of her lustrous hair, which she liked to brush.” The impression of fragility which she always gave was in her manner, her fluttery gestures, her voice. She spoke softly and in rapid, convulsive bursts. When she was at ease, she would punctuate her conversation with giggles.

Also in the Russeks art department, working with Ben Lichtenstein as a copy boy, was Allan Arbus, a slender, handsome, curly-haired nineteen-year-old who was going to City College at night.

Allan had got the job through his uncle Max Weinstein, who was still very much president of Russeks. Weinstein’s second wife was Bertha Arbus. Her youngest brother, Harry Arbus, was Allan’s father. Harry had helped run the family business, I. Arbus & Sons (which featured ladies’ coats), before he began selling mutual funds.

The Arbuses were originally from Warsaw, Poland. “As a clan they were musical, secretive, emotionally cold,” says a cousin, Lureen Arbus. “Allan was bright and strong-willed,” says another cousin, Arthur Weinstein. “He was interested in everything to do with the arts.” His mother, Rose Goldberg, was a schoolteacher (her most famous pupil was Harold Clurman). Rose’s brother was an actor. Her sister Jenny Goldberg was a classical pianist and married to Philip Horowitz, Enrico Caruso’s doctor.

“Allan wanted to be an actor. We’d go to all the Broadway shows together,” Weinstein continues. “He could mimic anybody.” A classmate at Bronx High School of Science, Seymour Peck, remembers him as “the
best actor in the school and president of the Drama Club.” He’d already won several prizes on Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour. Apart from acting, his main obsession was playing the clarinet. His idol was Benny Goodman.

Diane took one look at Allan and he took one look at her and, according to Ben Lichtenstein, “they fell madly in love.” Later Diane would say Allan was “the most beautiful man she had ever seen” and their romance had been “like Romeo and Juliet.”

Not long after they met, Diane told her parents she wanted to marry Allan Arbus right away—immediately—at fourteen. The Nemerovs were flabbergasted by this turn of events. As far as they knew, Diane had never shown much interest—let alone excitement—about anybody or anything. They said no, absolutely not, and they did everything they could to discourage the young couple.

Arthur Weinstein, then eighteen, remembers being ordered by his parents to “take Diane Nemerov out—which I did and I was completely captivated by her. We became close friends.” She immediately told him she was in love with Allan and he ended up being “like a beard.” “I’d pick Diane up at the San Remo and we’d appear to be off to a movie, but instead I’d take her straight to Allan. They were very stubborn and determined to see each other as often as they could.” For the next four years they carried on a courtship fraught with clandestine meetings, secret phone calls, rendezvous in Central Park, letters delivered by hand.

“Allan became the most important person in Diane’s life, the crucial relationship,” Renée says. “She had never been that close to anyone before except to Howard—and at fourteen she was restless, impatient. She longed to experience things, and Allan brought beauty and passion into her life. He became her guide, her mentor, her reason for being.”

He called her “girl”—she called him “swami.” They tried to see each other every day, although that was difficult with Diane at Fieldston and Allan working at Russeks and then attending college at night. Still, they managed. Diane told only a few of her clique at Fieldston about her involvement with Allan. Naomi Rosenbloom recalls that she did say she was “crazy about him” and that he made her feel “shivery,” but she never introduced him to any of her friends.

“And then the oddest thing,” Naomi goes on. “Months went by—Diane turned fifteen and one day she advised me not to wear a bra or panty girdle and that I should do breast and stomach exercises instead. Allan had taught her to do this,” Naomi says. “He made her very aware of her body. Her body didn’t scare her and she wasn’t ashamed like most of us—she carried herself proudly.” Diane told another friend that she had started to masturbate. After everyone was asleep in the apartment, she would go into the bathroom, lock the door, turn on the light, and undress
slowly in full view of the neighbors. She would caress herself, aware that men in other apartments were watching her. She
wanted
them to watch her, she said. She did this night after night, and with abandon, for several years, she told her friend. Her parents never caught her. Howard meanwhile regarded masturbation “with a religious guilt and seriousness.” His secret word for it was “worship.” “My father once caught me at it and said he would kill me if it ever happened again.”

During this period (1938-9) Diane and Hilda Belle Rosenfield would go to one of the lounges between classes at Fieldston and practice foxtrotting. Diane’s mother, a beautiful ballroom dancer, was always taking lessons to master the latest variations in the rhumba and the samba; she once even took a special course at some resort in the Catskills. Diane envied her grace and suppleness.

Diane invited Hilda Belle to dinner with her parents off and on through 1938. “I thought it was a proud, odd household,” Hilda Belle says. “The Russeks and the Nemerovs were such a powerful combination when they were together in one room. Not much communication—but reverberations. And a great many servants. Lots of antiques. I remember someone exclaiming over a tabletop of inlaid wood. Howard was made much of—he had just begun at Harvard and he spoke about it in a slow, thoughtful way. Mrs. Nemerov never stopped looking at herself in the mirror.”

After one of these dinners Diane confided to Hilda Belle that she’d seen her mother sitting on her father’s lap and crying—something about how she could no longer run the country house they’d rented in Westchester along with their New York apartment. Diane wondered if her mother wasn’t really crying about the perilous state of her marriage.

Just as David Nemerov’s style and presence pervaded the apartment in the San Remo, so, too, did stories of his constant philandering. Diane first heard these stories from Paris, the new chauffeur, who confided to her that he frequently drove the “boss” to various assignations. At one point during the 1930s Nemerov was rumored to be involved with Joan Crawford
*
; he used to visit her at her suite in the Beekman Tower Hotel. And Ben Lichtenstein recalls taking flowers to a girl who ran a bike rental place on 59th Street. “It was David’s way of telling the girl he didn’t want to see her anymore.”

Gertrude meanwhile held her suffering deep inside. Most afternoons she stayed in the apartment, chain-smoking and doing exquisite embroidery or playing bridge. She seemed to accept what was happening in the profoundly passive way so many women accept life and their men. “Diane and I learned how to be submissive from Mommy,” Renée says.
If Gertrude confided in anyone, it was in her mother, Rose, a heavy-set, good-natured woman who spoke in stentorian tones (a habit both Gertrude and Howard imitated). “Gertrude was closer to her mother than anyone else in the world,” Bessie Shapiro said. “They saw each other most every day, especially after the Russeks moved to the Hotel Lombardy. When they were together, they behaved like schoolgirls.”

Sometimes Diane would observe her grandmother and mother whispering together and she would imagine her family being close like that—“united.” She knew about her father and his women and was confused. Diane in particular hated seeing her mother in pain although she didn’t understand
why
she was in pain. “I could tell Diane was very sensitive to my moods, although she never said anything,” Gertrude Nemerov recalls.

By 1938 Gertrude Nemerov’s feelings of inadequacy and melancholia had increased and a deep depression set in which she couldn’t shake.

Forty years later she said: “All I know is I had everything in life that a woman wants and I was miserable. I didn’t know why. I simply could not communicate with my family. I felt my husband and children didn’t love me and I couldn’t love them. I stopped functioning. I was like a zombie. My friend May Miller had to take me shopping and help me try on clothes. I wasn’t able to take them off the hangers I felt so weak.”

She would sit in silence at the dinner table night after night, until finally her husband asked Kitty, the maid, to help get the children off for camp in the summer. “Mrs. Nemerov is sick.”

Eventually she consulted psychiatrists, gynecologists, nerve specialists, “but nobody could diagnose what was the matter with me. My depressions continued. Finally one doctor told me I wasn’t neurotic—I wasn’t crazy—I should just live my life as planned and go off to Europe with Daddy as we did every year to the south of France and then to Paris to see the collections.”

So they did. As always, they went by ocean liner. The first night on board, “Daddy wanted me to go to dinner, but I couldn’t, I was in such a state of depression, of anxiety, so he went up by himself and I had supper in our cabin. Later when he came back he said he’d met a famous analyst from Chicago—I can’t remember his name—at the captain’s table and he’d told him about me and the doctor said, ‘Look—I’m on vacation, but as a favor I’ll treat your wife. Have her meet me on deck tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock.’ ”

For the next couple of mornings Mrs. Nemerov had sessions with the analyst on deck while couples played shuffleboard or drank coffee from trays and the sea pitched and rolled around them. Mrs. Nemerov said the analyst made her uncomfortable. “He was oily—and he had hot, piercing
black eyes and I didn’t see the purpose of his questions.” The sessions did no good. “I felt exactly the same—no lifting of the depression.”

After the third or fourth session the analyst arranged “to treat me in our cabin—but I was alone. I remember I was wearing very short shorts. He asked me to lie down on the bunk and then he began asking me all sorts of intimate, probing questions about my sex life. I was embarrassed and I refused to answer them. He did not react, he just kept staring at me with his hot, piercing black eyes. I was so unnerved I decided I wouldn’t see him after that, and I told my husband that I didn’t need to see the analyst anymore—that I was much better—even though I still felt terrible, almost crippled with anxiety. That night I remember putting on my prettiest evening gown and we went up to the dining room. I forced myself to laugh and act as if I was having a marvelous time—inside I was absolutely choked. Panicked.
Because I could not define my depression.
All the while I could see the analyst lounging at the bar, watching me with his hot, piercing black eyes. I was terrified of him. I never wanted to see or talk to him again!

“He got off at Naples—we were going on to Cannes. Before he left, he presented Daddy with a bill for a thousand dollars. But I felt no better and remained depressed the entire summer and into the fall. Then slowly, very slowly, I came out of it. I don’t quite know how. A year went by and I was all right again. I was exhausted. I felt as if I’d recovered from a hideous disease and had finally healed.

“I tell you this because Diane, I think, was concerned for me; she observed me during those painful months. We never talked about what was troubling me, of course, but years later when she contracted hepatitis and had to go into the hospital, she fell into a ghastly, unending depression that went on for three years—until her death. Periodically she would call me on the phone in Florida and cry, ‘Mommy—Mommy—tell me the story of your depression and how you got over it.’ And although I had no real answer—no solution—I would repeat my story and it seemed to reassure her. That if I had gotten well, so could she…”

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He encouraged the design of a mink coat with the “Joan Crawford look”—full, swinging collar and cuffed with an overabundance of fur “in which every pelt suggested a dollar sign.”

D
IANE’S ROMANCE WITH
A
LLAN
Arbus went on unabated during her sophomore and junior years at Fieldston. Her friends were beginning to know of Allan’s existence, but she never brought him to the campus. Secrecy was always important to her—as it was to Allan. They were a scrupulously private couple who revealed themselves to few people.

Gertrude kept saying that in time Diane would change her mind about Allan and marry a man with money and social position. Allan was bright and attractive but poor in comparison to the Russeks and the Nemerovs. “It never occurred to Aunt Gertrude that she, too, had fallen in love with a bright, attractive, but impoverished man and married him against her parents’ wishes,” Dorothy Evslin said.

To placate her mother, Diane went out with a few boys at Fieldston, among them Adam Yarmolinsky. “There were a lot of boys in love with her,” another classmate, Eda LeShan, recalls. “She was irresistible,” Stewart Stern says. “I used to stand outside her apartment looking up at her window, hoping I’d catch a glimpse of her. When you were with her, she made you feel like you were the only person in the world.” But she wanted to be with Allan—only with Allan. When she went to Russeks to try on clothes, the salesladies said, she would be wearing Allan’s underpants “as a sign of love.”

Periodically Diane also worked at Russeks in the stockroom. A cousin, Helen Quat, who worked with her, says, “I’ve never seen anyone hate a job as much as Diane hated the stockroom.” Later Diane said: “I absolutely hated furs; I found the family fortune humiliating.” But as a teen-ager she suffered in silence.