The Tastemaker

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  For Mum and Dad

  Americans are inclined to look everywhere but under their noses for art.

  —Carl Van Vechten

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Yesterday

  2. The Cosmopolitan Standard of Virtue

  3. That Shudder of Fascination

  4. A Certain Sensuous Charm

  5. How to Read Gertrude Stein

  6. In Defense of Bad Taste

  7. What One Is Forced by Nature to Do

  8. An Entirely New Kind of Negro

  9. Exotic Material

  10. Cruel Sophistication

  11. A Quite Gay, but Empty, Bubble That Dazzles One in Bursting

  12. Papa Woojums

  13. Yale May Not Think So, but It’ll Be Just Jolly

  Epilogue: The Attention That I Used to Get

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Concealed within rural Connecticut’s verdant undergrowth, two young men—one white, the other black—stripped naked in the heat of a July afternoon in 1940. They had done this before; they knew the routine. Standing face-to-face, each reached out to place his hands on the other as the sunlight, breaking through the foliage above them, dappled their skin. Soon they settled into a pose and held it, frozen in place, until the click of a camera shutter pierced the quiet.

  Ten feet away stood the photographer, Carl Van Vechten, a slightly stooped white man just turned sixty with thinning, slicked-back, snowy hair, high-waisted pants, and a stare as direct as the lens he held in his manicured hands. He had long been looking forward to today’s shoot, which was taking place on the grounds of a friend’s country estate. It was an opportunity to take a moment’s respite from the relentless flow of happenings in his beloved New York City, the metropolis that had been his muse for the last thirty-four years of a prolifically creative life. More to the point, the two men posing for him that day were his favorite models, and it was a rare treat to have them both together like this. As he peered at them through his viewfinder, his greatest obsessions snapped into focus: the splendor of male bodies; the wonders of racial difference; the preciousness of a life lived in the service of beauty, art, and pleasure. Despite the serious expression that gripped his features whenever he stepped behind the camera, this shoot, like the hundreds of others he was to do over the next two decades, was not a professional engagement; the photographs would not be bought or exhibited. It was just for fun. In Van Vechten’s life, almost everything was.

  * * *

  Today, nearly a half century since his death, Carl Van Vechten’s name means nothing to most Americans. New Yorkers may have seen it engraved on a pillar in the Great Hall at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street, in acknowledgment of his status as a major benefactor. Eighty or so blocks uptown, he might just garner the odd flicker of recognition as a bullhorn for the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or perhaps as the author of Nigger Heaven, a salacious novel of 1926 that unveiled the intimate lives of black Americans to their incredulous white compatriots and stoked a passion for Harlem nightlife that became a definitive part of Jazz Age New York. The book’s title was as startling then as it is now, and the furor it caused has frequently overshadowed everything else Van Vechten achieved.

  A list of those achievements makes extraordinary reading. Carl Van Vechten was a polymath unparalleled in the history of American arts. From the 1910s onward, he was, at various times, the nation’s most incisive and far-seeing arts critic, who promoted names as diverse as Gertrude Stein and Bessie Smith long before it was popular to do so; a notorious socialite who held legendary parties; a controversial novelist who captured the dizzying panorama of Prohibition Era New York and topped the bestseller lists in the process; a celebrated photographer who took thousands of portraits of underappreciated artists as well as many of the world’s most famous people; a de facto publicist for great forgotten names, including Herman Melville; and one of the most important champions of African-American literature, vital in progressing the careers of Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Chester Himes.

  Like many legendary New Yorkers, Van Vechten was an interloper. He grew up roughly one thousand miles from Manhattan, in the prosperous, provincial town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He was an odd-looking boy, willowy and sallow with entrancing chestnut-colored eyes, the prominent front teeth of a donkey, and the dress sense of a romantic poet. In Cedar Rapids, the Van Vechten men, all workaholics who made their fortunes from respectable business concerns, embodied the masculine ideals of the era, ran their homes with firm-handed benevolence, and joined clubs, lodges, and committees to shape their community. Young Carl bucked the trend. If it had not been for the unmistakable forehead and jawline—two solid curves of bone as smooth and thick as sculpted marble—it would have been difficult to know that he was a Van Vechten at all. He was lazy in school, had no interest in politics or sports or the other manly pursuits of the day, and sublimated his unspoken homosexual desires into a fantasy world of music, literature, and theater. His one burning desire was to ditch the life of a bourgeois midwesterner for the glamour and grime of the big cities. When asked what he was going to do when he grew up, he did not name a sensible profession or an earnest vocation like the other boys at school. He knew the art of living was to be his calling. “I’m going to live in Chicago; I’m going to live in New York; I’m going to live in London; I’m going to live in Paris,” he declared. He wanted to see the world and have the world see him.

  When Van Vechten began his urban adventures at the start of the twentieth century, the United States was convinced of its manifest destiny as a political and economic powerhouse, yet culturally it languished in the shadow of the European civilization it aimed to usurp. With the patronage of industrial magnates, museums, opera houses, and symphony halls were built in towns and cities across the country, often in eager imitation of places seen on pilgrimages to Paris, London, Florence, Venice, and Rome. Many Americans became anxious that cultural life in the nation’s cities was drab and derivative, a pale imitation of European traditions. Others feared that the urban way of life was simply inimical to the American project. In his hugely popular book of 1885, Our Country, the Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong expressed the fears of many socially conservative Americans when he identified the city as “a serious menace to our civilization” because of its multiethnic populations of young, single people led astray by godless entertainments and fleshly pleasures. When the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan campaigned in the presidential election of 1896, he too tapped into the generic fears about an American republic run from the cities. Cedar Rapids was one of the many stops on his mammoth nationwide campaign circuit during which he railed against the avarice of Wall Street, the corruption of Washington, the un-American values of East Coast cultural elites, and all the other cancers that, in his view, were destroying traditional ideals of thrift, industry, and piety.

  In the first forty years of the twentieth century Van Vechten played a vital role in helping the United States accept its cities as the fount of a new and distinctively American culture that would be envied and
imitated the world over. As a critic, novelist, photographer, and promoter he valorized modern art and the cultural life of the city in the industrial age, in particular New York, a place he depicted as a modernist phantasmagoria in which any experience was possible. Van Vechten was always on the scene, connecting himself to Greenwich Village poets and Broadway legends, setting trends and starting crazes. “For him Manhattan never loses its Arabian Nights glamour,” said Van Vechten’s friend the writer and editor Emily Clark in 1931. “It is the eighth, and most wonderful, wonder of the world.” For more than half a century he prowled its various neighborhoods in flashy silk shirts, rings, and bracelets, in search of sexual adventure, exotic entertainment, and the company of brilliant individuals from assorted backgrounds. His stated ambitions in life were to avoid responsibility and stay one step ahead of boredom. Whether it was an evening at the opera or a gin-fueled night at a gay speakeasy in Hell’s Kitchen, he did just that, immersing himself in spectacle and sensation.

  At the height of his fame and cultural influence in the 1920s, his diaries sometimes read like a guide to the attractions of the city. An evening in a Chinese restaurant and a Yiddish theater would be closely followed by lunch at the Algonquin Hotel with H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis and an eight-hour tour of Harlem cabaret clubs. Open the diaries at any page, and the record of a remarkable day is waiting to be found. On February 16, 1927, for example, Van Vechten went with Langston Hughes to the lavish home of A’Lelia Walker, the queen of Harlem high society, for one of her legendary parties attended by black poets, NAACP activists, jazz singers, socialites, and sexual adventurers, before hopping in a cab to the downtown apartment of the Vanity Fair cartoonist Ralph Barton. Charlie Chaplin happened to be there that evening, and over the finest bootleg liquor that money could buy, they gossiped for hours about the movie business, Van Vechten having recently returned from a monthlong sojourn in Hollywood. At five in the morning, Chaplin drove Van Vechten home; after a couple of hours’ sleep another hectic day began. Nights like this, ones that would glow forever in the memory for most people, were part of Van Vechten’s weekly routine of pleasure seeking. As he never tired of telling people, his own parties were the best in town, and he prided himself on being the consummate host, concocting guest lists and entertainments of exotic and jarringly disparate elements in exactly the same way that he mixed his delicious, powerful cocktails. Van Vechten was dazzled by the wealthy, seduced by the beautiful, and thrilled by the talented; his soirees featured equal parts of each, of all ethnicities and sexual orientations. As millionaire entrepreneurs befriended showgirls, Paul Robeson might sing, or George Gershwin play the piano. Now and then passions soared and guests stripped naked as they danced or spat insults over their martini glasses. No matter the character of a particular evening, Van Vechten delighted in the sight of his creation, the diverse components of urban America in beautiful collision right there in his front room.

  Nothing gave him such joy as breaking taboos and transgressing established notions of good taste; he treated it as evidence that he was being true to himself, living the life of a liberated individual and not buckling under the will of others. Steadfastly obeying one’s inborn instincts, no matter how peculiar, was the thing that bound his wide-ranging artistic interests together. He was captivated by Gertrude Stein because of the sheer unusualness of her writing and the strength of her unconventional personality. His adoration of African-American culture similarly stemmed from his fascination with what he thought was an inner, irreducible blackness, a quality he claimed to have spotted in Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and Ethel Waters, all of whom he publicly feted. His creed of following one’s inherent nature meant he refused to be ashamed of his complex sexuality, though it was also a symptom of his immense self-absorption. He held as an article of faith that the feelings and opinions of other people should supersede his desires only in truly exceptional circumstances, a fact that caused years of pain and discomfort for his wife, Fania Marinoff, a woman he claimed to love with all his heart but whom he repeatedly treated as an addendum to his life rather than the center of it, neglecting her in favor of his many friends and lovers. His high self-regard meant that he held others to standards of conduct that he never adhered to himself, and he was quick to lash out or sulk ostentatiously when he felt slighted. “If people have no sense of obligation and no sense of values I let them drift or stew in their own juice,” he once confessed about his attitude toward friends who had lost his favor. “I can cut him [sic] off without a shilling. It’s very easy for me.”

  Through his life of indulgence and excess, and in promoting his bespoke pantheon of celebrities, Van Vechten was one of the leading figures of a brash, iconoclastic generation of writers, artists, and thinkers that helped Americans to see that art and beauty existed amid the hum and buzz of their own cities and not just in the galleries and theaters of ancient European capitals. To an extent, his life and legacy have been overlooked simply because the extraordinary range of his interests and the idiosyncrasies of his character are too unwieldy to handle. A white champion of the African-American cause who used the n-word; a devoted husband who kept a retinue of young male lovers; a disciple of European modernism who hated to leave Manhattan; an aesthete with aristocratic leanings who loved the cheap thrills of Coney Island: the man is simply too contradictory to slot snugly into the established narrative of the American Century. Yet that is precisely why he is so important; his life was simultaneously atypical and emblematic. To his detractors—and there have been plenty of them—he was a flippant, egotistical, name-dropping drunkard, a fantasist and mythmaker who perpetuated grotesque racial stereotypes and wallowed in the immoral grime of city life. At times he was all these things. But he was also a modernist pioneer who lived a fast-paced cosmopolitan existence in its fullest aspect and a prophet of a new cultural sensibility that promoted the primacy of the individual, sexual freedom, and racial tolerance and dared put the blues on a par with Beethoven. Across those decades when the United States began to push itself from its nineteenth-century moorings into a chaotic but exciting new era, Van Vechten’s hyperindividualism and radically eclectic tastes were perfectly suited to flourish.

  ONE

  The Gilded Age: A Tale of Yesterday

  From the beginning of their adventure in America, the Van Vechtens did things their way—with force, panache, and little regard for what others might think. The trend started with Teunis Dircksz Van Vechten, a twenty-eight-year-old farmer, who sailed with his wife and infant son from the Netherlands to the shores of the New World in the summer of 1638. Along with a dozen other farmers and merchants, the family set out from the tiny Dutch island of Texel aboard the Arms of Norway on May 12 and arrived in New Amsterdam nearly three months later on August 4 ready to transform the fecund, open land before them into their fortune.

  After two years working as a laborer for another colonist, Teunis acquired the tenancy of a farm on the Rensselaerswijck patroonship, a vast manorial estate given by the West India Company to Kiliaen van Rensselaer, a diamond merchant from Amsterdam. Teunis was soon making a fine living for himself and his family, amassing enough money to buy a 50 percent stake in a nearby brewery. Like many Dutch pioneers of the time, the Van Vechtens were pulled toward America rather than pushed from Europe. It was the promise of prosperity and the prospect of adventure, not the need for sanctuary from religious persecution or crushing tyranny, that tempted them across the ocean. For that very reason, some found life on Rensselaerswijck hugely frustrating, as the impositions of the colony’s rulers often seemed more exacting than those of the royal government back home. Yet few of the colonists made such a fuss as Teunis, who bridled at any attempt to impinge on his liberty.

  If the patroonship records can be believed, Teunis was a hothead, an old-fashioned brawler, who liked to settle disagreements with his sharp tongue and sizable fists. But he was also a man of strong principle, whose lack of deference frequently enraged authorities. In 1651 he was prosecuted for
publicly humiliating one official—the director of the patroonship no less—calling him “an old grey thief and a rascal.” More serious, he threatened to stab the Reverend Johannes Megapolensis with a knife; punishment, he said, for being “an informer.” Perhaps it had been Megapolensis who let slip that Teunis was selling produce at a price not sanctioned by the patroonship, a crime for which he received a further prosecution. There were other moments when the disdain for Old World bondage was less about taking a stand and more about indulging a wicked sense of humor. In September 1648, Teunis ordered a young employee at his brewery to fire a musket four times during the middle of the night, seemingly for the amusement of watching Jean Labatie, the self-important Frenchman in charge of the nearby Fort Orange, panicked into action.

  These acts of rebellion were coupled with plenty of arduous endeavor. The Van Vechtens thrived in the New World, and by 1685 their coffers had grown sufficiently for Teunis’s grandson Michael to buy a plot of around nine hundred acres in the vicinity of the Raritan River in New Jersey, where he built a large family home. Nearly a century later, the house played a crucial role in the Revolutionary War, when it was willingly loaned by its owner, Derrick Van Vechten, to Quartermaster Nathanael Greene during the Middlebrook campaign against the British in the winter of 1778–79. Derrick Van Vechten had a reputation for throwing first-rate entertainments, and those he gave for Greene did not disappoint. At one soiree a high-spirited George Washington took a shine to the quartermaster’s famously beautiful wife. “His Excellency and Mrs. Greene danced upwards of three hours without once sitting down,” reported Greene, “a pretty little frisk.” A lively, star-studded party in support of a revolutionary cause; Van Vechtens past and future would have been proud.

  * * *

  In the eight decades that elapsed after the Revolutionary War, the scope of American civilization drifted decisively westward, and at least one branch of the Van Vechten family drifted with it. By the time Carl Van Vechten was born in 1880, the family name was fast becoming one of the most important in the burgeoning state of Iowa.