Diane Arbus (11 page)

He went on to win his wings and serve fifty missions with the RAF; later, with the United States Eighth Army air force, he flew fifty-seven bombing missions over the North Sea. “I was finally on my own,” he says. “I was still frightened, but I was frightened in a different way.”

Allan joined the Signal Corps in September of 1943. He stayed briefly at the induction center of Fort Dix, New Jersey, before being shipped out to Camp Crowder, Neosho, Missouri, for basic training. According to Hope Eisenman, whose husband, Alvin, was there, too, “Allan was miserable.” By November Allan was shipped back to New Jersey, to the photography school near Fort Monmouth. Diane moved to Red Bank and lived in one room. She set up a darkroom in the bathroom and every night Allan would come back from photography school and teach her what he’d learned. Often in the afternoons she would baby-sit for Hope Eisenman (Alvin was stationed at the Publications Center, working on army manuals). “Diane loved our baby daughter, Suzy. She would push her around the camp in a doll’s carriage. It’s all we could afford.”

Hope says Diane was snapping pictures all the time. “She carried her cameras in a black sack. I would ask her, ‘What did you photograph today?’ She once told me she’d been trying to photograph the bare lightbulb hanging from their ceiling.” When a dead whale was washed up on the Jersey shore, Diane took a bus to the beach and spent hours
photographing the whale from every angle. She returned to Red Bank that evening with rolls of film and a piece of the whale’s carcass for Allan.

Every so often the Eisenmans and the Arbuses would have supper together. “But they almost resented being around other people—you got the sense they preferred being by themselves, they were so close! And Diane never stopped talking about Allan when she was away from him.”

In May 1944 Allan was transferred from Fort Monmouth to Astoria, Queens, for more photographic training. Diane told Hope she was excited because they would be moving to her “favorite spot in New York—Lexington and 54th Street.” They rented an apartment there and spent their evenings printing and framing their best pictures. Diane eventually sent Hope a portrait she’d taken of her in which, Hope says, “I look quite cross.” Diane had written on the back of the print: “not complicated enough.”

In late 1944 Allan was shipped off to Burma with a photographers’ unit. Diane discovered she was pregnant not long after he left. She subsequently took a nude self-portrait which she showed to Alex before sending it to Allan. And she took another self-portrait a little later—clothed—in the mirror of her parents’ bathroom. This haunting image (which Alex still has) reflects the dreamy, faraway quality she would later capture in almost all of her subjects’ expressions.

With Allan away at war, the Nemerovs were insisting that Diane move into their new apartment at 888 Park. A nice, freshly decorated room awaited her; everything would be taken care of—meals, maids, her bills. And she could talk on the phone as much as she wanted. “Diane had telephonitis,” a friend said. So she returned, a bit sullen, and within a few days she and her mother were arguing. She told Naomi Rosenbloom, “Mommy keeps telling me to wear my galoshes in the rain and I don’t want to anymore.”

For Renée, Diane’s return home was a godsend. At Fieldston, where she was now a sophomore, she was constantly being compared to Diane scholastically. Known as “Diane Nemerov’s ‘little sister,’ I was miserable. Mommy and Daddy kept saying I was the normal one—they seemed to be pinning their hopes on me; that, unlike Diane and Howard, I would turn into a conventional person. I wanted to please them because I wanted them to love me, but I wanted to please Diane, too. I felt under huge pressures.”

It was Diane who supported her when Renée decided to switch to the Dalton School in her junior year “so I could find my own identity.” At Dalton nobody asked her about being Diane Nemerov’s sister, and at Dalton she was the first student to graduate with a “distinction in sculpture.”
She went on to study with Rufino Tamayo and the Swiss impressionist Hansegger.

Renée was fascinated by the changes in Diane since her marriage to Allan. “She seemed more sure of herself. She still looked like a little girl, but she walked like a woman—I remember how her hips undulated under her skirts. She was sexually very aware. I was still innocent, so I was jealous of her sophistication. We talked a lot about life.”

During this period Diane was constantly visiting the Eliots in their new apartment at Lexington and 73rd. Anne had just had a daughter, May, who’d been a “blue baby” and was now suffering from a heart defect; she would eventually have an operation. Diane was godmother, so she felt very responsible and spent as much time as she could caring for her little godchild. And she tried to comfort Anne, who’d become increasingly despondent; she was very upset about her baby’s condition, and New York made her uneasy—other than the Arbuses, she had no friends. She decided to take May for a visit to the Dicks’ shambling estate, Appleton Farms, in Ipswich, Massachusetts. She said the visit would be temporary, but it stretched into weeks and months while Alex remained in New York most of the time. It was quiet and peaceful at Appleton Farms; the other Dick sisters were back and forth from Boston, herded about by their indomitable mother.

Diane’s own daughter, Doon, was born on April 3, 1945. Afterward Diane told Naomi Rosenbloom that she had forbidden her mother and sister to accompany her to the hospital. She hadn’t wanted anyone close to her to witness her personal drama of “dread, guilt, and expectation.” Diane was terrified of being alone, but she believed she had to be alone to really experience something.
Only then would it count.

As soon as she got back to the Nemerov apartment, she bustled about, trying to act very grown-up, very much the little woman. “She became a wonderful mother,” Renée says. “Tender, gentle, loving—she absolutely adored Doon and felt magically connected to her.” When the baby was only a month old, Diane entwined her bassinet with fresh flowers and pasted postcards on the walls—prints of Roman ruins, Greek statues, English landscapes—“things for the baby to see and absorb when she wakes up.”

She loved showing her tiny daughter off. Ben Lichtenstein dropped by the Nemerov apartment and Diane woke Doon up and put her on the floor, ordering, “Now crawl for your Uncle Ben, Doonie.” And Doon wriggled across the carpet and Diane beamed. She was very proud.

By this time, Lichtenstein says, “The Nemerovs’ place was overflowing with women.” Aside from Diane and Renée, there was a European refugee
girl (the daughter of a friend of David’s), there was Gertrude and her mother, Rose, and Peggy Russell Nemerov, Howard’s nineteen-year-old English bride, who’d arrived on a troopship from London in May 1945.

Peggy, a pretty brunette, was, in her own words, “gauche, timid, and hideously dressed.” She was also extremely self-conscious, knowing that the Nemerovs disapproved of her because she wasn’t Jewish. (David Nemerov had, in fact, written Howard a twelve-page letter denouncing his choice of a Gentile wife, and Howard had fired back an eloquent defense which had been gone over and over at the dinner table. It was “like a family conference,” Diane reported to her brother in a note. She ended with, “Don’t worry, there is nothing our parents can do. It is your life. D.”)

And, of course, the Nemerovs did nothing—they tried to be welcoming, but “they never ever accepted me,” Peggy says. She was unprepared for their wealth—their power. Howard hadn’t told her that his family owned department stores. “Why didn’t you tell me your parents had money?” she demanded months later, and he replied grouchily, “I didn’t think it had anything to do with me.”

(“We never
felt
rich,” Diane said. “Oh, we had the most expensive clothes and the finest educations, but the benefits redounded to the family’s credit—the money would never pleasure [Howard, me, or Ren] personally in any way.”)

After the austerity of wartime London, Peggy was staggered by the waste in the Nemerov home “of everything—food, clothes, liquor.” She couldn’t get used to so many servants underfoot. There was a cook, a maid, a chauffeur, a laundress, a seamstress, and “someone who came in just to do Mr. Nemerov’s Sulka shirts.” She remembers “trembling with fear” during Passover and Chanukah. “I didn’t know what was going on.”

A month or so after Peggy arrived, her mother, Hilda Russell, appeared at the Nemerovs’ apartment. Hilda was fragile, seemingly timid, and very pretty (“I wanted to be an actress when I was a girl”). She had recently been divorced in London and decided to come to America, “where the money was.” After meeting her, David Nemerov gave her a job at Russeks selling the more expensive dresses. “He loved my English accent. He said it helped sales.”

Hilda stayed with the store for more than a decade and waited on people like Doris Duke and Vivien Leigh and Mrs. Bob Hope. Occasionally when a really big customer like Eleanor Roosevelt came in, Nemerov would ask Hilda to “get some hot tea across the street at Schrafft’s and then I’d serve it to the celebrity in a silver pot on a silver tray.” Hilda
recalls Mrs. Roosevelt wanting a “very cheap fur-lined coat and I sold her one for sixty-five dollars.”

Sometimes, Hilda says, Diane would wander into Russeks. “She was so dear, so sweet—so kind to me—but I always thought she behaved as if her head were in the clouds. She was never quite ‘there,’ if you know what I mean. She would always squeeze my hand when she saw me and whisper, ‘Oh, Hilda, I love you!’ Diane was a great comfort to me.”

Peggy says, “Diane tried to be so nice to me, too, although we had nothing in common—it was hard for us to have an extended conversation. But she was going through her own personal hell at home, so maybe that’s why she reached out.”

Gertrude Nemerov had decided to take over the care and feeding of her granddaughter, Doon, and without consulting Diane she had hired a German nurse and insisted that Doon be bottle-fed, even though Diane had been breast-feeding her baby. Arguments ensued. Diane held her ground. Finally a compromise was reached: before every feeding the nurse would put Doon on the scales to be weighed and then Diane would attempt to breast-feed her, after which Doon would be weighed again to see if she had gained any nourishment.

Peggy says, “I felt so sorry for Diane. She was under such scrutiny that often the milk wouldn’t flow. She was trembling with nerves—with the German nurse and Gertrude hovering over her.” Peggy remembers that once after the feeding-and-weighing procedure Diane suddenly burst into the hall and ran up and down crying triumphantly, “Doon gained five and a half ounces!”

When Howard came back from England trimly handsome and charged with the rank of second lieutenant, the Nemerovs gave him a lavish party. Diane and Alex and Anne Eliot were there, and all the Russek and Nemerov relatives—aunts, uncles, cousins, the people from the store. “I was not at my best,” Howard says. “Everyone around me was complaining about gas rationing and not getting enough steak to eat. I’d seen blood and crushed bones—death. I clammed up and refused to talk. Mommy was furious.”

Not long after coming home, Howard told his parents he’d decided to become a writer, something he’d already confided to Peggy and Diane in many letters from London. David Nemerov listened to his son’s plans in silence; there was no question now that Howard would ever take over Russeks, so he didn’t bring up the subject, but he was bitterly disappointed. Supposedly he confided his disappointment to his close friend I. Miller, whose son Jerry had followed his father into their shoe empire. Jerry recalls, “If you didn’t make a career out of the family business, it
was like deserting the Armed Forces or something. You could redeem yourself by being very successful in another field—but to be a writer, to be a poet, well, it was considered a terrible failure, particularly if you were the only son.”

Nemerov said none of this to Howard; he only begged him not to use the word “artist” when describing what he was going to do with his life. “What about ‘man of letters,’ Daddy?” Nemerov liked that phrase and used it often when telling his colleagues of his son’s choice of occupation.

Howard realized that in order to survive he must remove himself from his family’s apartment, so he and Peggy immediately rented a tiny flat on 25th Street which the Nemerovs rarely visited. “What made the whole thing incomprehensible to me,” Peggy says, “was David Nemerov’s un-awareness of the suffering he’d inflicted on Howard. Howard wanted to write all the rich fantasies crowding his head—he wanted to push his intellect to the furthest reaches possible, because he believed that to use the mind passionately and well was the true test of aristocracy in the modern world. David Nemerov seemed indifferent to Howard’s dreams. Nor did he have any notion of his power—the power a father has to irrevocably hurt his son.”

Every so often Diane would escape from the vast Nemerov apartment and take Doon to Central Park. She would meet Jill Kornblee, who now owns an art gallery on 57th Street, and the two women would wheel their baby carriages down to the sailboat lake at 72nd Street. “The park was almost Edwardian then,” Jill says, “sweet-smelling—clean—no litter—no violence. Even the sunlight on the grass seemed pure, almost distilled.

“We felt suspended in time. We’d read our husbands’ letters or just sit and talk. Doon was breathtakingly beautiful. She’d be tugging on my son John’s rattle. Diane and I complained about being back with our parents. We were both women of the world. Wives. Mothers. We were twenty years old.”

Jill remembers “Diane’s bony bare feet thrust into Capezio ballet slippers—nobody in those days wore ballet slippers on the street. When she walked, she sort of plodded flat-footed—like an Indian surveying the land. And she would have on some little nothing smocklike dress—no jewelry, no powder or lipstick, and leg makeup. She looked terrific. She had this great, thick hair. Oh, and funny teeth. When she smiled wide, she looked faintly wolfish.”

Sometime in 1946, Hilda Belle Rosenfield ran into Diane on Fifth Avenue. The two old school friends stood on the corner and talked. “Diane told me that her husband, Allan, had come back from the wars and that
they were going to become fashion photographers. ‘We’re going to be a team,’ she said.”