Not able to resist any longer, Harold turned the page to Diane Webber on the dune. He looked at her, lying on her stomach, her
head held up into the wind, her eyes closed, the nipple of her left breast erect, her legs spread wide, the late-afternoon sun casting an exaggerated shadow of her curvaceous body along the smooth white sand. Beyond her body was nothing but a sprawling empty desert—she seemed so alone, so approachable and available; Harold had merely to desire her, and she was his.
He pushed the blankets off his body, warm with excitement and anticipation. He reached under his bed for the wooden stand he had made in school, knowing that his manual-arts teacher would be astonished to learn what use would be made of it tonight. He placed the magazine on the stand in front of him, between his widely spread legs. Raising his head, supporting it on two pillows, he reached for the bottle of Italian Balm, poured lotion into his palms and rubbed it between his hands momentarily to warm it. Then, softly, he began to touch his penis and testicles, feeling the quick growth to full erection. With his eyes half closed, he lay back and gazed at his glistening organ towering in front of the picture, casting a shadow across the desert.
Continuing to massage himself up and down, up and down, back and forth across his testicles, he focused sharply on Diane Webber’s arched back, her rising buttocks, her full hips, the warm, moist place between her legs; and he now imagined himself approaching her, bending down to her, and determinedly penetrating her from the rear without a word of protest from her as he thrust upward, faster faster, and upward, faster, and suddenly he could feel her buttocks pounding back against his thighs, her hips moving from side to side, he could hear her sighs of pleasure as he tightened his grip around her hips, faster, and then her loud cries as she came in a series of quick convulsions that he could feel as fully as he now felt her hand reaching back to hold his tight testicles exactly as he liked to have them held, softly, then more firmly as she sensed the throbbing, shuttering start of sperm flowing upward and gushing out in great spurts that he grabbed in both hands as he closed his eyes and felt it squirt through his fingers. He lay very quietly in bed for a few moments, letting his muscles relax and his legs go limp. Then he
opened his eyes and saw her there, as lovely and desirable as ever.
Finally he sat up, wiped himself with two pieces of Kleenex, then two more because his hands were still sticky with sperm and lotion. He rolled the tissue into a ball and tossed it into the wastebasket, not concerned that his mother might recognize it in the morning when she emptied the baskets. His days at home were numbered. In a matter of a few weeks, he would be in the Air Force, and beyond that he had no plans.
He closed the magazine and placed it on the top of the pile in his closet. He put the wooden stand back under the bed. Then he climbed under the covers, feeling tired but calm, and turned out the light. If he was lucky, he thought, the Air Force might send him to a base in Southern California. And then, somehow, he would find her.
I
N 1928
the mother of Diane Webber won a beauty contest in Southern California, sponsored by the manufacturers of the Graham-Paige automobile, and one of the prizes was a small part in a silent film directed by Cecil B. De Mille in which she portrayed the coy and pretty teenaged girl that in real life she was.
She had come to California from Montana to live with her father, who, after the bitter breakup of his marriage, had quit the Billings Electric Company and found work as an electrician in Los Angeles with Warner Bros. studios. She was much closer to her father than her mother, and she also wanted to escape the harshness of the rural Northwest where her parents had so often quarreled, where her grandmother had been married five times, and where her great-grandmother, while swimming in a river one day, was killed by an arrow shot into her back by an Indian. She had arrived in Southern California convinced that it would offer more fulfillment than the limited horizons of the big-sky country.
And it did, in most ways, even though she would never achieve stardom in the several films in which she appeared in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Her satisfaction came rather from a sense of serenity she felt in Los Angeles, a sunny detachment from the grim girlhood she had known in Montana. In Los Angeles she felt free to pursue her whims, to revive her early interest in religion, to walk in the streets without wearing a bra, eventually to marry
a man who was almost thirty years older and then, seven years later, to take a second husband who was five years younger. Southern California’s characteristic disregard of traditional values, its relatively rootless society, its mobility and lack of continuity—the very qualities that had been a burden in her family’s past in Montana—were accepted easily by her in Los Angeles, partly because she was now sharing these newly accepted values with thousands of her own generation, pretty young women like herself who had left their unglamorous hometowns elsewhere in America and had migrated to California in search of some vaguely defined goal. And while very few of these women would succeed as actresses, or models, or dancers—more likely they would spend their best years working as cocktail waitresses, or receptionists, or salesclerks, or as unhappily married women in San Fernando Valley—nearly all of them remained in California, and they had children, children who were reared in the sun during the Depression, who played outdoor sports the year round during the 1940s, who matured in the period of great California prosperity that began with World War II (when American defense investments poured millions into West Coast aircraft plants and technological industries); and by the 1950s there had emerged in California a new generation that was distinguished for its good looks, its casual style in dress, its relaxed view of life with an emphasis on health, a special look that on Madison Avenue, throughout the nation, and overseas was regarded as peculiarly American—the California Look. And among those who possessed this look in the 1950s, though her mother was among the last to recognize it, was Diane Webber.
Diane’s problems with her mother began after her parents were divorced. Diane’s father, twenty-seven years older than her mother, was a writer from Ogden, Utah, named Guy Empey. He was a short, stocky, imperious, adventurous man who had joined the United States Cavalry in 1911, and, because his country was late in becoming involved in World War I, he joined the British Army. He saw frontline action in Europe, earning battle scars that he would proudly wear on his face the rest of his life, and in
1917 he wrote a best-selling book about his experiences called
Over the Top
, which sold more than a million copies. It also became a film, which he directed and in which he played the lead.
Guy Empey wrote other books during the next decade, though none nearly as popular as the first, and by 1930 he was reduced to writing pulp fiction for magazines, often under pseudonyms. It was around this time, at a social gathering in Hollywood, that he met the small, spry, twenty-year-old actress from Montana whose short dark hair, large brown eyes, and infectious smile reminded him of the silent-screen star Clara Bow. He quickly courted her with bouquets of flowers, took her for rides in his Cadillac touring car, and soon he had proposed marriage—and she accepted, although at forty-six he was as old as her father.
Unwisely, he moved his bride into the home he shared with his beloved mother and sister, to whom he had dedicated
Over the Top
. Both were cultured, sophisticated women from New York—his mother’s uncle, Richard Henry Dana, had written
Two Years Before the Mast;
and his widowed sister, who had been married to a top executive with W. & J. Sloane, read
The New Yorker
each week and had filled the Los Angeles house with fine furnishings and a wonderful library that she had brought with her from across the country. These two women, and particularly Guy Empey’s strong-willed mother, were not overly impressed with the little actress from Montana, and he was unable or unwilling to resolve a growing marital conflict that was only briefly interrupted in the summer of 1932 by the birth of their only child, who was named, after a song then very popular, Diane.
When Diane was two, her mother separated from her father; when she was five, after a brief reconciliation, her parents were divorced, and Diane spent the ensuing years dividing her time between two households. During the week she lived with her mother, who in 1939 married a handsome man of twenty-four who had worked as a photographer for the International News Service and had modeled in a cowboy outfit on billboards advertising Chesterfield cigarettes. At the time of the marriage he owned a small restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and Diane’s
twenty-nine-year-old mother suppressed whatever lingering movie ambitions she still had, as she joined her new husband and worked as a waitress.
On weekends Diane would ride the trolley from the Hollywood Hills over to Echo Park, where her grandmother would meet her and escort her to her father’s house; there, with the music of Handel softly playing on the phonograph, she would dwell in the intellectual presence of her aunt and grandmother, who encouraged her to read widely, who took her to proper films, and who were forever using words that sent her searching through the dictionary. As the women took their daily afternoon naps, and as her father worked at his typewriter—with a minimum of success—Diane would sit alone in her room quietly reading everything from
Anthony Adverse
to the plays of Shakespeare, from the
Arabian Nights
to
Gray’s Anatomy
, acquiring gradually a strong if erratic classic background as well as an intense sense of fantasy.
Her fantasies were formed more clearly one afternoon after she had been taken to the ballet
The Nutcracker
. From then on, in her dreams, Diane saw herself as a glamorous girl in tights, twirling alone onstage in a graceful pirouette. She began taking ballet lessons once a week after school, but this was a privilege that her mother granted on the basis of Diane’s personal behavior and how well she performed various chores around the house. Her stepfather, with whom she felt uncomfortable, would often watch her as she practiced at home, would sometimes gently tease her as she held on to the mantel in the living room and pointed a leg high into the air. This sight did not please her mother, who, having already objected to her young husband’s attempt to display Varga pinups in the hallway, certainly was no less amused by the attention he was now giving to her budding twelve-year-old daughter. Late one afternoon, in a moment of petulance that shattered Diane, her mother remarked that it was most unlikely that Diane’s beauty would ever match her own.
The situation at home quickly worsened for Diane later that year when her mother gave birth to a son and, two years later, to
a baby daughter. Although Diane was approaching her teens, was becoming curious about boys and dating, she was expected to return home after school each day to help care for the children. This routine had continued more or less until she graduated from high school, whereupon she left home to live temporarily in the apartment of her mother’s sister, earning money for her keep and dancing lessons by working as a gift wrapper in the Saks department store on Wilshire Boulevard. Months later, not wishing to further intrude upon the privacy of her maternal aunt, who was then dating a married man who worked in the office of the Beverly Hills Hotel, Diane moved into the Hollywood Studio Club, where her mother had once lived, a residence for women in the movie industry. It was there that Diane learned of an audition for chorus dancers willing to work in a nightclub in San Francisco, and while this was a dubious opportunity for an aspiring ballet dancer, she had concluded that she was probably already too old, at eighteen, and far too undertrained, ever to master the delicate physical art that she performed with such perfection in her fantasies. So she appeared at the audition and passed the test. When she approached her mother to ask if she could accept the position, her mother replied, “Don’t ask me. Make your own decision.” Diane left for San Francisco not knowing whether her mother had granted her independence or was expressing indifference.
Diane earned eighty dollars a week for doing three shows a night, six nights a week, dancing in the chorus behind such headline talents as Sophie Tucker. She wore a modest costume that revealed only her bare midriff, but while changing backstage she became exposed for the first time to group nudity, and she could see how her body compared to those of other women. It compared very well, and she was therefore not surprised when a friend in the chorus suggested that Diane might earn extra money as a figure model and gave her the name of an art professor at Berkeley who had paid other dancers twenty dollars for a brief photographic session in the nude.
Timidly, Diane appeared at the professor’s residence, but his
detached, formal manner soon put her at ease. She removed her clothes and stood nude before him. She watched him back away and heard the camera click. She heard it click again and again, and without any instructions from him she began to move like a ballet dancer, her arms slowly reaching, her body turning, twirling on her toes as she heard interior music and the camera click, and she was no longer aware of the professor’s presence. She was aware only of her body as an inspired instrument that she artfully controlled, and with which she could rise beyond her limitations. Though nude, she did not feel naked. She felt internalized as she danced, private, alone, deeply involved with emotions that might be projected externally in her movements or expressions, but she did not know, she did not contemplate, what effect she was having on the professor behind the camera. She could barely perceive his fuzzy gray figure in the distance. Diane had her glasses off, and she was quite myopic.
Returning to Los Angeles after completing the nightclub engagement, Diane took the initiative and telephoned various fashion photographers who were listed in the classified directory, asking for an appointment. She called such men as David Balfour and Keith Bernard, Peter Gowland and Andre de Dienes, William Graham and Ed Lange, among others. Nearly all were attracted to her and were impressed by the fact that a young woman of such wholesome appeal would so willingly pose in the nude—she was at least ten years ahead of her time.
By 1954, when she was twenty-one, her photographs began to be seen in nudist and camera magazines all over the country. And by 1955, after a series of color photographs of her were sent to
Playboy
magazine in Chicago, the young publisher, Hugh Hefner, examined them in his office and he was immediately impressed.