The Tastemaker Read online

  In 1877 a fire razed the general store Van Vechten’s parents, Charles and Ada, ran in Minneapolis, so they moved south to Cedar Rapids, where Charles’s brother Giles had recently opened a bank. Known as the Parlor City because of its reputation for being a well-ordered and respectable community, Cedar Rapids was booming. Although founded in the 1840s, its real genesis moment came in 1859, when the arrival of the railroad transformed what had been a small town of just a few hundred people into an important player in the industrialization of Iowa farming. By the 1870s large grain-processing and meatpacking firms, including Quaker Oats in 1873, had set up in Cedar Rapids, transporting produce to Chicago and beyond in enormous quantities. The town boasted around ten thousand inhabitants when Charles and Ada arrived with the children; by the end of the century it was more than double that figure, making it one of the largest settlements in Iowa and one of the fastest-growing communities in the Midwest.

  For industrious men like the Van Vechten brothers, Cedar Rapids held glittering prospects. After working as the cashier in his brother’s bank for seven years, Charles struck out on a lucrative career in the insurance industry, an occupation he maintained well into his eighties. Throughout that time he strived hard to maintain a leading presence in the community. The fabric of civic life in Cedar Rapids was sewn together by voluntary associations of spirited individuals committed to the service of God and country, and Charles was involved in many of them; he sat as chairman of the cabinet at the First Universalist Church of Cedar Rapids and was a Mason, a Rotarian, and a member of the Knights Templar. The journalist William Shirer grew up in the Cedar Rapids of the early twentieth century and described it as “churchy, Republican, wholesome,” a pithy but accurate sketch of the ordered and genteel society that the elder Van Vechtens helped form.

  Carl’s arrival into the world came as something of a surprise to his parents. Born on June 17, 1880, he was by far the youngest of Charles and Ada’s three children. Emma, their daughter, was thirteen when Carl was born; their son Ralph, already a strapping specimen of all-American masculinity, was nearly eighteen. Just entering middle age and assuming their years of child rearing were fast coming to an end, Van Vechten’s parents were, he said, “very surprised to have a visit from the stork,” though the new baby was greeted joyously by the entire family.

  Ada was besotted with her little boy, whom she regarded as a gift from the heavens. At thirty-nine she savored the pleasures of motherhood that she had been too anxious and inexperienced to enjoy with her first children. She set about recording every moment of Carl’s young life as best she could in a journal solely devoted to his first three years. She studied him diligently as his personality developed, noting his burgeoning talents, the flourishing of his soft, cherubic features, and the joy that he brought her. “My little boy’s birthday,” her entry for June 17, 1882, reads. “Two years old, and oh what happy years they have been.” His specialness to Ada peeks through the numerous photographs she had taken of him too. At eighteen months she sat him alone before the camera, posed on a crushed velvet armchair, wearing a black dress with a white lace collar, wisps of his long hair falling over his ears. He was a gorgeous, fat-cheeked baby with brown eyes like little pools of melted chocolate; it is easy to see why Ada found him so adorable. This was one of the first of many photographs that Ada arranged for Carl throughout his childhood, and it was she who introduced him to the camera’s unique ability to extract and preserve beauty.

  Other members of the family joined Ada in her efforts to make Carl feel precious and worthy of singular attention. During her pregnancy Ada’s brother Charlie made a grand sentimental gesture, promising to write a special letter to the new baby every Christmas until he turned twenty-one. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and at first Charlie wrote charming letters about all the marvelous things that Santa might bring and how lucky Carl was to have been born a beautiful baby boy in the United States at a time of peace and plenty. But each year it became harder to find homespun wisdom worth committing to paper. Fearful that Carl might feel hurt or rejected, Ada could not bear the idea that her brother should stop the letters, so Charlie was compelled to continue the tradition. By the boy’s ninth Christmas, Charlie said, the chore was enough to make a man “tear wildly at his hair and roll his eyes upward in a pitiful way.”

  Carl Van Vechten, December 17, 1881

  Among them, Ada, Charles, and the rest of the family spun around Carl a silken cocoon of genteel comfort. The family home, an elegant but restrained example of the Queen Anne architectural style so fashionable among the wealthy middle class in the late nineteenth century, had been gifted to Van Vechten’s parents by Uncle Giles, whose success in banking had helped him build a considerable fortune. Giles’s own house was a grand white-brick building with turrets, tall chimneys, and enormous bay windows “surrounded by great oak trees, their spreading branches shading the well-kept lawn.” In his 1924 novel, The Tattooed Countess, which drew upon his childhood for its setting, Van Vechten evoked Giles’s house as a midwestern temple to an age of prosperity, temperance, and moral certainty. Charles never matched his brother’s tremendous wealth—worth millions in today’s money—but a combination of astute investment and hard work ensured that he and Ada always kept a beautifully furnished home, maintained by a retinue of three or four domestic servants, and Carl of course was treated to the finest of everything.

  The family began each day at 7:30 a.m. sharp with a vast hourlong breakfast, the sort of honest, gargantuan meal that drove back the frontier and furred up the arteries all at once. Bowls of fresh fruit and oatmeal preceded a main course of sausages, bacon, eggs, fried steaks, and potatoes in cream, with pancakes, buckwheat, corn, and doughnuts thrown in for good measure, all augmented by pots of steaming tea and coffee and thick milk delivered each morning fresh from the udders of Uncle Giles’s Jersey cow. The surrounding Iowan countryside offered a rural paradise for curious children. Immediately outside the town center there was a scraggy patchwork of mills, silos, grain elevators, and the other grimy apparatus of Cedar Rapids’s fortune. But beyond that no suburbs, only the Corn Belt: fields and open meadows, lightly pocked by a scattering of small farmsteads among a flourish of brooks, maples, willows, and wildflowers. Van Vechten’s connection to this landscape was forged early and remained his whole life. In its rolling, twisting hectares of green and pale yellows that shimmered and rippled in the summer breeze like an incoming tide he saw a deeply undervalued beauty that was “essentially American” and affected in him “a kind of inspiration associated with great rivers, high mountains, or that mighty monster, Ocean,” that others revered in more overtly dramatic locations. Old family photographs, some taken by Van Vechten himself, capture long summer days at Indian Creek, five or so miles from town, where he spent hours observing the wildlife, swimming in the warm, glistening waters, and camping out with his brother.

  It would be hard to imagine a more indulged child in the state of Iowa. Van Vechten admitted he had probably been spoiled rotten as a boy. As the years passed, the material comforts and Ada’s swaddling adoration fostered a self-centered and importunate nature within Carl. His idea of playing with other children was bossing them around, and delayed gratification was an entirely alien concept to him. “I hated interference, objections of any kind,” Van Vechten recalled of his childhood, though he could have easily been talking about his adult self. He made that observation in 1921 while looking at a deep scar that ran across his palm, a legacy of the time he grabbed a kitchen knife by the blade from his mother’s hand, “in a fury at not compelling her immediate attention.”

  Perhaps the impatience and egotism that caused his livid outbursts and squawking tantrums are not uncommon in children. The obsessiveness that began to exhibit itself around the age of twelve almost certainly is. It was at this time, during vacations at Uncle Charlie’s house in Michigan, that Van Vechten’s cousin Roy introduced him to collecting birds’ eggs. Roy was a studious young man, a bespectacled teenage
oologist whose idea of a fun weekend was shinning up trees to study the nesting patterns of the eastern meadowlark. Taking just one egg from a nest, he maintained, was pointless. Only by taking a clutch—that is, the entire contents of a nest—could one hope to learn anything of value. Back home in Cedar Rapids, Van Vechten followed Roy’s lead, not out of intellectual curiosity but rather to satisfy the acquisitiveness that was a fundamental part of his personality. He recalled that “my mother, picturing the despair of the mother bird, begged me to leave at least one egg in each nest.” He never did. Often the need to own and control the beautiful things in his orbit was so insistent it overruled all appeals to both heart and head, even when it risked hurting those who loved him the most.

  A half century of ardent collecting began with those clutches of eggs. It was, ironically, a birdlike quality, a magpie’s irresistible attraction to objects of ornament and beauty. Long after the ardor for birds had wilted, bangles and rings, objets d’art, precious first editions, rare recordings, silk shirts, and brightly colored neckties in their hundreds all became collecting fixations of his. Anything elaborate and exquisite, anything new or novel he scooped into his embrace, as man and boy. Even when he could not justify the expense, he spent extravagantly on the latest things: a Victrola phonograph; a sharp new suit; a sleek portable typewriter. During one of his trips to Europe just prior to the First World War, he procured an object apparently unfamiliar to Americans at the time, a timepiece that instead of resting in a pocket was attached to a dainty leather bracelet and worn around the wrist. Returning from another overseas vacation some years later, he disembarked his ship surrounded by porters hauling his twenty-five pieces of luggage onto the dockside, the spoils of a frenzied shopping tour of the markets and department stores of Paris and London.

  Guided by the same acquisitiveness, as a child he gathered a peculiar menagerie of pets: pigeons, thrushes, field mice, canaries, pigs, turtles, chameleons, and, so he claimed as an adult, even an alligator all passed through his protection at one point or another. None of them survived long, and when they died, he was never very bothered. In fact, even the deaths of family members troubled him relatively little as a boy. The passing of his grandmothers, both of whom lived in Cedar Rapids, one of them in his home, caused him no great anguish, and the same was seemingly true when his cousin Roy died tragically young and in blackly ironic circumstances, in an elevator accident in a hospital where he was receiving treatment for an illness. It was not until the age of twenty-five when his mother died that Van Vechten endured the common experiences of bereavement. “Death, up to that time, had meant very little to me,” he admitted. “People died, and I didn’t seem to have any feeling about it,” he said before adding that “I’d begun to think I didn’t care whether people died or not.”

  It is a remarkable admission that illuminates Van Vechten’s understanding of his place in the world and his connection to others. He was a solitary little boy with a striking capacity for self-reliance, and as the only child in a large, extended family of doting adults he was made to feel precious and unique. Even his siblings coddled him. Because of the age gap, Ralph and Emma were more like a devoted aunt and uncle than a brother and sister with whom to squabble and compete for their parents’ affection. As a consequence, from an early age he valued those around him, and especially other children, less for their friendship and more for the purpose they might serve in allowing him to pursue his interests. Roy of course was useful for his collecting tips. Others gained favor by patiently sitting through performances of his model theater or posing for photographs he took with the family’s box camera. If children would not act as he wished them to, there was always some new fad to amuse him or some new thing to collect and possess and invariably an older relative on hand to provide it.

  Nevertheless, during his adult years Van Vechten often found cause to recast his indulgent and peaceful upbringing as deathly stifling. In the 1910s and 1920s, such lamentations were a common cry of modernist writers and artists. Theirs was a generation of pioneers, according to their shared mythology; the herald of a new age in binary opposition to the United States of the nineteenth century, which had been a dry and dusty landscape inhabited by creatures fossilized under the weight of bland materialism and puritanical instincts, the word “puritan” often decoupled from its theological definition and used as a shorthand for anything that seemed prudish and old-fashioned. In her 1926 biography of her husband and fellow writer, George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell declared that the Iowa they both experienced in the 1890s “was not civilized. It knew nothing about success in life itself as apart from success in profession or business.” Cook himself, according to Glaspell, identified a “Puritanic distrust of pleasure and beauty” in the young people he encountered in Iowa City around this time.

  Those observations could have been lifted directly from Van Vechten’s description of Cedar Rapids in his novel The Tattooed Countess, in which he ridicules the people he grew up among as either vicious gossips or well-meaning bores stuck in a Victorian cage of brittle and contrived manners. According to the novel’s teenage antihero, a clear facsimile of the young Van Vechten, his fellow townsfolk were hideously repressed, unable “to be themselves, to do what they want to do, to live for love or whatever it is they want to live for.” Undoubtedly a germ of truth existed at the heart of the caricature. “It was the day of the quilting party,” as one who lived through the era described it, “of the Sunday promenade in the cemetery, of buggy-riding, of the ice-cream festival and the spelling bee,” and polite society in places like Cedar Rapids often betrayed an acute suspicion of the pleasures enjoyed in the surging metropolises. The late-nineteenth-century craze for phosphate soda fountains and ice-cream parlors, for example, came about largely as godly alternatives to the saloon, and the extravagant Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill helpfully sanitized the history of the western frontier, reminding town dwellers of the virtuous individuals who had tamed the wilderness so future generations might enjoy its bounty. What was missing from Van Vechten’s sketch of the Midwest that he had known were the subtle but insistent currents of radicalism that washed over him since birth, courtesy of his parents, neither of whom bore any relation to the vapid, small-minded hicks of The Tattooed Countess.

  His mother may have been guilty of mollycoddling her youngest child, but she was in almost all other ways a formidable and inspirational woman. Cedar Rapids got its first public library thanks to her, when she seized on an initiative launched by Andrew Carnegie to partially fund the building of public libraries for communities across the United States. The cultivation of the mind as a means of individual and social progress was a principle very dear to Ada. Before her marriage to Charles, she had studied at Kalamazoo College, where she became a committed supporter of women’s suffrage decades before the cause gained its first flourish of respectable, mainstream prominence. In later life Van Vechten suggested that during her time at Kalamazoo his mother had become friends with Lucy Stone, the pathbreaking suffragist who shocked the United States by refusing to take her husband’s name after marriage. More likely, Ada befriended the similarly named Lucinda Hinsdale Stone, who, along with her husband, James Stone, turned Kalamazoo into one of the country’s first coeducational colleges. Hinsdale Stone acquired the sobriquet “Mother of Clubs” because of her pivotal role in creating institutions such as the Ladies Library Association, an attempt to advance the issue of women’s rights through education. The influence clearly rubbed off on Ada. Along with Giles’s wife, Emma, who at one point served as the president of the Women’s Club of America, she established various groups for local women to join, exposing them to issues beyond the stereotypical female concerns of homemaking and child welfare.

  Also important to Ada were the civil rights of black people, a passion she shared with Charles, and which they both pressed upon their children. Among the Van Vechtens’ small retinue of domestic servants were two African-Americans—a laundry maid and a gardener—whom the children we
re instructed to address as Mrs. Sercey and Mr. Oliphant, rather than by their first names, as would have been customary. This was no slight eccentricity. Even in a community in which support for the party and causes of Lincoln was solid, as was the case in Cedar Rapids, it was a bold statement, which must have seemed willfully perverse to conservative neighbors. In 1909 Charles went much further, teaming up with a young black teacher called Laurence Clifton Jones to found the Piney Woods School for Negro Children in Mississippi, investing thousands of dollars of his own money. Charles believed that he had a moral duty to use his money for philanthropic ends, reforming the world around him by educating minds. He did this in large ways and small. In the 1940s Van Vechten still had a gift his father gave him on his eleventh birthday, a copy of Cudjo’s Cave, an abolitionist novel by J. T. Trowbridge. Van Vechten eventually donated that same book to his own philanthropic mission designed to combat racism, the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale University. His father’s influence was slow-burning, however, and despite Charles’s best efforts, he could not completely insulate his son from the misguided attitudes of the day. To his embarrassment, Van Vechten recalled that as a young child he avoided the touch of anyone with very dark skin, afraid their color might leave a stain on his pale skin, like black ink spilled on a white cotton tablecloth.

  Underpinning all their civic action was Charles and Ada’s Christian Universalist faith, which Van Vechten conceded shaped his family’s life in subtle but profound ways. The core Universalist conviction that all humans, irrespective of their conduct on earth, will ultimately find reconciliation with an ever-forgiving and beneficent God had significant implications on the development of nineteenth-century social and political ideas in the United States, allowing all manner of radical causes to flourish under its wing. In the debate about women’s rights, the Universalist Church blazed a trail by making the suffragist Olympia Brown an ordained minister in 1863. Around the same time, some members of the Universalist Church were also involved in operating the Underground Railroad, which helped slaves escape the South to claim their freedom in the North. Above all, Universalists maintained a strong faith in the essential good within all people and in the individual’s capacity to positively affect the world around him. From his parents’ measured religious philosophy Van Vechten learned early that having the courage to be different was a laudable, if not sacred, quality.