Free Diane Arbus by Patricia Bosworth

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…”
    * 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.”

6
    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.
    So did Howard, who also worked in the stockroom during Easter vacations. By this time he and his father were having arguments about Howard ultimately taking over the store. He knew that if he didn’t make a career at the store, it would seem as if he was deserting his family, and he wasn’t yet sure he could redeem himself by success elsewhere. “And I would cry,” Howard says. “I was terrified of Daddy and I wanted him tolove me, but I knew I would never be interested in running Russeks and I would never change my mind.”
    Russeks meanwhile was flourishing. Nemerov kept tabs on the increasing popularity of mink coats (mink represented eighty percent of Russeks sales—there were an estimated 250,000 mink coats and jackets in American closets). He noted each new fur trend—now women wore fox-fur jackets over their bathing suits in Palm Beach, unflattering to short figures and mature silhouettes; he predicted the demise of the fox-fur jacket and he was right.
    He had created a series of boutiques within the store proper—among them a college shop and a bridal boutique, innovative merchandising touches in 1938. He also organized weekly fashion shows at Russeks—very popular with the customers—and they helped boost sales. “David did everything,” the fashion illustrator George Radkai says. “He chose the clothes, he accessorized the models, he was a magician when it came to putting the right scarf with the right earrings and shoes.” As added promotion for the store, Nemerov was also supplying Russeks outfits for Broadway shows. “He’d dress bit players free and then get Russeks credited in Playbill,” Radkai says. “David loved being involved with show business.”
    By June of 1938 Diane’s romance with Allan had grown even more intense. “A lot of yearning and