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(when you asked Miller how his shoe business compared with other shoe businesses, he’d always answer, “We’re predominantly dominant”). There were also cigar makers and theater owners, and dress manufacturers like Ben Zuckerman, who often came to the Nemerovs. “It was like being part of a closed corporation,” says a childhood friend of Diane’s, whose real-estate tycoon father was part of the group that dined there regularly.
    These men, mostly immigrant Jews from Poland or Russia whose parents had fled the pogroms and worked their way up from the Lower East Side slums to the “gilded ghettoes of Central Park West,” displayed the same kind of snobbism as the uptown German Jews—bankers like Selig-man, Warburg, Schiff. The Seligmans and the Schiffs would never entertain the Russeks or the Nemerovs; it was a question of class. And, carrying snobbery a step further, the Russeks would never entertain David Nemerov’s parents, who lived in Brooklyn—David Nemerov rarely if ever invited his father and mother to the San Remo. In that mammoth apartment any suggestion of superstition or poverty had been blotted out.
    Diane and most of her friends were brought up to have all the accomplishments of the well-bred eighteenth-century English lady—painting, piano, languages, manners, a thorough familiarity with art. “Our upbringing was a cultural phenomenon,” a classmate of Diane’s says. “It never would have happened if our parents hadn’t made a great deal of money very quickly and hadn’t known how to deal with it. The kind of money our families had magnified their feelings of inadequacy, of personal failure. We grew up in an emotional desert of shame—never affirmation—and those of us who were taught to be assimilated were filled with self-loathing.”
    Another childhood friend remembers that in spite of the Depression she and Diane and Renée and others like them were raised as “Jewish princesses.” They had the “kvelling mamas” who almost daily told them they were special—they had the lessons at Viola Wolff’s dancing class, the orthodontia, and, for several of them, later the nose job. “We were isolated, we were pampered, we were spoiled, we knew nothing else but that world on Central Park West, so we took it for granted.”
    She then recalls Diane’s reaction when the two of them were taken as teen-agers to Arthur Loew’s vast estate at Oyster Bay. They swam in theoutdoor swimming pool and later watched a screening of The Little Colonel. “We compared notes on the afternoon and suddenly Diane looked at me and said, ‘I’m Jewish!’ As if she’d forgotten.”
    “I never knew I was Jewish when I was growing up,” she said. “I didn’t know it was an unfortunate thing to be! Because I grew up in a Jewish city in a Jewish family and my father was a rich Jew and I went to a Jewish school, I was confirmed in a sense of unreality. All I could feel was my sense of unreality.” (In 1967, after her first major exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Diane commented to Newsweek: “It’s irrational to be born in a certain place and time and of a certain sex. It’s irrational how much you can change circumstances and how much you can’t. The whole idea of me being born rich and Jewish is part of that irrationality. But if you’re born one thing, you can dare—venture—to be ten thousand other things.”)
    While “Jewishness” was never central to her life or Howard’s (they attended Temple Emanu-El only on Holy Days and they went to Sunday school grudgingly), their “Jewishness” was still a fact. And always dramatized when, every other year, they celebrated Passover at Meyer and Fanny Nemerov’s apartment in Brooklyn. It was practically the only time they ever saw their paternal grandparents, and they found the experience strangely consoling. Surrounded by immigrants and the sons and daughters of immigrants who all shared a common past, the awareness that they were Jewish had