Diane Arbus Read Online Free PDF Page B

detail Howard remembers about the San Remo apartment was “Rodin’s ‘Le Baiser’ reproduced in bronze on the edge of a jade ashtray in the living room.”
    Diane’s bedroom overlooked Central Park and it was cluttered with books. She didn’t enjoy collecting toys, as Howard did; his closet was crammed with toy soldiers and expensive sports equipment from Abercrombie and Fitch. Diane treasured a strange speckled rock she had discovered on a path near Sheep Meadow in the park. For a while she kept goldfish in a bowl, but when they died, she flushed them down the toilet and said, “Please, no more.”
    On weekends when she was seven and eight years old, Diane and hercousin Dorothy Evslin would play together. They’d throw bags of water from Diane’s bedroom window onto pedestrians walking up Central Park West. Or they’d take turns talking into Howard’s “phone”—two Dixie Cups connected by a piece of string. Every so often they’d wander around the apartment, which to Dorothy (who lived in Brooklyn) seemed “gigantic and somber.” Once Diane showed her Gertrude Nemerov’s dressing room. “I ohhed and ahhed over Aunt Gertrude’s collections of cut-glass perfume bottles. ‘Most of them are filled with tea,’ Diane told me.”
    During the early years of the Depression, things got so bad that Gertrude Nemerov sold some of her jewels and for a while her parents moved into the San Remo and the living room filled up with Frank Russek’s cronies from the track. Diane recalled: “I remember vaguely family conferences which took place behind closed doors…like loans negotiated and things like that…but the front had to be maintained…in business, if people smelled failure in you, you’d had it.”
    At Russeks, David Nemerov worked longer hours, exhorting his buyers to order less merchandise but “don’t lower the quality.” To save money, he didn’t cover the Paris collections; anyhow, he knew from the fashion grapevine that Schiaparelli was experimenting with synthetic fabrics that disintegrated when cleaned; that Chanel’s entire line was a study in cotton and piqué.
    Every week, in an effort to attract business, Nemerov changed Russeks’ windows. Sometimes he would work all night with his assistant, Miss Christ, a beautiful little woman whose energy and imagination were similar to his. Together they displayed the styles of the period (flowing lounging pajamas, “tea gowns” with horse-halter necks) against all manner of exaggerated backgrounds: driftwood, whitened tree branches, Chinese lanterns, white-on-white paper decorated with fishnets. “Once they displayed Russian cossack costumes against what looked like snowdrifts,” says George Radkai, who was a Russeks illustrator. “Another time they hung tapestries and placed dozens of mannequins in front of them dressed in the most opulent furs and jewels. It was a daring thing to do at the height of the Depression. None of the other Fifth Avenue stores were doing anything in their windows—they looked dead—and here was Russeks exploding with rococo glitter and surrealistic fashion excitement. David’s windows were like stage sets—like George Piatt Lynes or Hoyningen-Huene photographs—specially lit so you could see the sheen of fur against the bloom of a little flowered hat. The Russeks windows drew crowds.”
    Even so, the store was losing a great deal of money because Nemerov refused to do what Saks and Best’s were doing—turning their main floorsinto a mass of accessories bars with cosmetics, jewelry, handbags, scarves. The fur department was still what you saw the instant you entered Russeks. “It was quiet as a morgue,” Dorothy Evslin says. Nevertheless the Nemerovs “kept up the front” (Diane’s phrase), entertaining a great deal in the San Remo. At least once a week an extra maid would be hired to help serve a dinner party of twelve which invariably included the Millers, who were still the Nemerovs’ closest friends