The Tastemaker Read online

  * * *

  It was a vital lesson too because as he grew, Van Vechten felt his differentness from those around him with increasing acuity. Physically he stood out from the crowd by his early teens. The plump softness of infancy had been stretched into a tall, ungainly frame, and his pinched, downturned mouth now gave his face a look of severity. And then there were the front teeth that became a trademark in his years of fame and infamy: huge, angular, misshapen, and apparently resistant to dental intervention of any sort. But the oddness was much more than skin deep. While other boys spent their playtime as cowboys and Indians, or reenacting Yankee victories in the Civil War, Van Vechten’s obsessiveness was turned inward, constructing a cavernous interior world of music and literature.

  As an adult he claimed that before puberty he had made his way through Tristram Shandy and the complete works of Shakespeare and Ibsen, had adored Beethoven, and could play Mozart concertos on the piano. He proudly told friends that because Cedar Rapids was such an uncultured place his musical education was autodidactic. Nobody else in town even knew what a concerto was, while he was mastering concertos through sheet music, he snorted priggishly. Even his brother, Ralph, who played the violin well, was not “sophisticated enough to know that string quartets existed.”

  Carl Van Vechten, aged three, with his parents, Ada and Charles (seated), his brother, Ralph, and his sister, Emma, November 7, 1883

  These were shameless exaggerations. It was true that he had obvious musical talent, a fact that helped him greatly in his later career as a music critic, and was also a voracious reader, but he was no child prodigy. As often with Van Vechten’s tall stories, there is an important, greater truth tucked beneath the tissue of embellishments. Being a sophisticate among the hayseeds was a crucial part of the story that Van Vechten told about himself over the years, the central pillar upon which his adult personality was constructed. In an unpublished autobiographical sketch written in his early twenties, he claimed that by the age of ten his love for music and literature was so intense and all-consuming that it made him acutely aware that he was fundamentally unlike the other children in Cedar Rapids—especially the boys. The essential differentness he felt because of his artistic passions was a metaphor for another awakening he experienced around the same time but that as a child he neither understood nor would have been permitted to talk about: that of his nascent attraction to other males.

  In the environment of the 1880s and 1890s it is easy to see how the two could become linked in his mind. The arts were often considered feminine concerns, while healthy American boys were expected to have the backwoodsman at their core; Tom Sawyer was closer to the model of precocious male youth than Mozart. Van Vechten wrote in The Tattooed Countess that Gilded Age society did not understand “boys with imagination and the creative impulse; they are looked upon with vague disgust and suspicion.” Even Uncle Charlie, who shared his appreciation of literature, teased him a little about his artistic temperament, warning him in a Christmas letter not to waste too much of his time on poetry. Far better, he ragged, to channel his creative energies into the great new American art form of advertising slogans. “They have some practical common sense in them,” Charlie said. “Everybody reads them. And they pay. What line of Shakespeare do you think ever had such wealth creating possibilities within its compass as the immortal, ‘Good morning. Have you used Pears’ Soap?’” Business was a manly pursuit, but the arts needed to be treated with caution, on the whole best left to girls, sissies, and foreigners.

  At the age of eleven or twelve Van Vechten witnessed in the crypt of the Grace Episcopal Church in Cedar Rapids a local sixteen-year-old boy called Herbie Newell perform the skirt dance, a variation on the cancan first made famous by English music-hall star Lottie Collins. In his recollection of the performance the specter of sexual awakening hangs in the ether. He had never seen anything like it: Newell, dressed as a woman, “excelled in female impersonation,” gracefully kicking up the “thirty or forty yards of soft material” that swirled around his waist. Throughout his personal and professional lives, performances of dance and female impersonation were two of the key ways in which Van Vechten explored his sexual attraction to men. Both created brash and unapologetic visions of maleness transported beyond the gender norms of the early 1900s, and dance had the bonus of providing a socially acceptable means of publicly admiring the male body. Newell’s dance was expressive and unconventional, a strange contortion of masculinity. It was the moment when Van Vechten’s appetite for creative expression, his inchoate sexual feelings, and his sense of being unusual soldered together as a single, inseparable entity. Like him, Newell was clearly different from most other boys and did not belong in Cedar Rapids; he was “headed for the Broadway stage and stardom.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, Herbie Newell never made it to New York. In fact, the closest thing that Cedar Rapids had to Broadway stars for Van Vechten to dote on were the Cherry Sisters, five chaste, teetotal, tone-deaf siblings whose bizarrely awful musical act elevated them to the status of national celebrities for a brief moment at the end of the nineteenth century. The sisters moved to Cedar Rapids as adults, having grown up in neighboring Marion and spent twenty years touring their execrable self-written material, apparently oblivious that the huge audiences they drew came mainly to laugh at their ineptitude and po-faced self-delusion. In the big cities of the East they became a novelty hit because audiences saw in them all the worst stereotypes of the Midwest: pious, parochial rubes, uncultured and living in the past. It was those stereotypes that Van Vechten perpetuated in later life, casting the Midwest as a cultural desert, diametrically opposed to the vibrant and fertile cities in which he made his name as a cosmopolitan trailblazer.

  The scene of the sisters’ most infamous performance was on home turf, in Cedar Rapids’s Greene’s Opera House, run by the father of Louise Henderson, one of Van Vechten’s childhood friends. The next day’s Cedar Rapids Gazette featured a devastating review. “Imagine two hundred leading citizens jumping to their feet, waving hats, umbrellas, brooms and handkerchiefs, reaching toward the stage and shouting themselves hoarse in mockery of approval at the appearance before them of the greenest, gawkiest females that ever faced the footlights, and doing nothing but tramping out on the stage with a basket of flowers and with less grace than an elephant would eat soup.” Clearly the patrons of Greene’s Opera House were accustomed to far more accomplished acts. In fact, when the Cherry Sisters made their bows there, the place was an Iowan cultural institution, an eighteen-hundred-seat theater built in 1880 as a boosterish statement of Cedar Rapids’s growing wealth and an attempt to connect the town to the cultural current of the rest of the nation. No full-length opera was ever performed there, of course; the name was a misnomer popular of theaters of the time, and the ornate decor similarly attempted to emit an air of cultivation that bore little relation to the bills of pantomime and polite variety that were its stock-in-trade. Regardless of its clumsy pretensions, this was Van Vechten’s favorite place in the whole of Cedar Rapids, a refuge of fantasy and magic in which exciting new worlds animated before his eyes and were crucial in developing his artistic sensibilities.

  Greene’s had opened at a propitious moment. For much of the nineteenth century, theater in the United States had been regarded as either a snobbish interest of a tiny elite in the East or a low, immoral distraction for single men, not far removed from the brothel and the saloon. In the 1880s vaudeville emerged: variety theater as professionally run as any of the great industries and designed to make the theater “as ‘homelike’ as it was possible to make it,” in the words of the impresario B. F. Keith, so that it “would directly appeal to the support of ladies and children.” Cedar Rapids’s location as a railroad hub meant that it instantly became one of the key stops on the new theater circuit, though not always one that the performers relished playing. Cedar Rapids’s audiences had a reputation for giving instant and bracingly honest critiques. When the Marx Brothers
performed a skit based on The Spirit of ’76 at another Cedar Rapids venue, the Majestic Theatre, there were boos and catcalls from swaths of the audience, incensed by what they considered an insult to the flag. The young Van Vechten was nowhere near as discriminating. During his formative years a litany of theatrical talent whizzed through the town for one-night-only performances, sprinkling a film of stardust over Cedar Rapids as it went. From his favored vantage point of the balcony at Greene’s, Van Vechten saw many of vaudeville’s biggest stars, as well as celebrated names from outside the variety tradition. Richard Mansfield appeared as the caddish dandy Beau Brummell, Lillian Russell in American Beauty, and Otis Skinner in Romeo and Juliet; all three were celebrated names who packed theaters in New York and Chicago with ease. Van Vechten devoured everything the producers served up, from Shakespeare to minstrelsy; from Stephen Foster and John Philip Sousa to the productions of the American Extravaganza Company, which put on spectacular Arabian Nights–style pantomimes with evocative titles such as Fantasia and Superba.

  Beyond the pure escapism, Greene’s offered a glimpse of another America far away from the cornfields and church socials of Iowa, one brightly illustrated by a collage of multiethnic cultures and propelled by the brutal dynamism of urban life that was swiftly enveloping the nation. Young Carl saw a production of A Trip to Chinatown, a hit musical that revolved around fast-living members of the Bohemian Club, wealthy San Francisco bachelors who patronized fancy restaurants and dallied with young single ladies. Despite being set in California, the show featured a popular song, entitled “The Bowery,” that helped establish the infamy of New York’s vice districts in the late 1800s. Sissieretta Jones, an African-American singer otherwise known as Black Patti after the Italian soprano Adelina Patti, appeared with the Black Patti Troubadours, a revue company of dozens of black singers and dancers and acrobats, one of whom was a then unknown Bert Williams. There was even a demonstration of Edison’s revolutionary Vitascope motion picture technology at which Van Vechten and a thousand other astonished patrons watched a Native American tribal ceremony, a round from Jim Corbett’s victorious bout against Charley Mitchell in Florida, water cascading down New Jersey’s Paterson Great Falls, and Loie Fuller dancing on the Parisian stage, the wonders of modern machinery summoning them all to appear under the same roof.

  Van Vechten documented his passions in scrapbooks—another collecting obsession that stayed with him for life—spending hours filling their pages with magazine cuttings, theater programs, newspaper reviews, and a vast collection of cigarette card photographs of the biggest stars of the day. Actresses rather than actors, enchanting in their bustles and gowns, their hair pinned elaborately and their cheeks dusted with rouge, held his fascination. The charismatic comedian Della Fox was a particular favorite, but there were also less conventional heroines (or heroes), such as Richard Harlow, a hulking two-hundred-pound female impersonator, further testament to Van Vechten’s interest in men who refused to be men. The scrapbooks were his attempt to possess beauty in much the same way that a lepidopterist pins butterflies to a board. Held in stasis between the covers of his books, the luminaries of the theater who swept into town never really left: they and the glamour they exuded were with Carl, always.

  As a teenager he photographed his own moments of theatrical fantasy, getting friends to re-create poses from magazines or shows he had seen. He had Louise Henderson stand on a chair on his back porch, pretending to be an opera singer, while another female friend lay among flowers like Shakespeare’s Juliet laid to rest. These were the adolescent prototypes of the famous Van Vechten studio portraits, studied and deliberate encapsulations of beauty and talent. As child and adult Van Vechten used his camera lens to eschew the banal and ugly, focusing on perfect little moments of make-believe to be captured for posterity.

  In those sepia images, and in the dark of Greene’s auditorium, an intangible presence reverberated like a new elemental force; through the taffeta drapery of the Gilded Age, the bright lights of a new world flickered before Van Vechten’s eyes. Very soon the drapes would be torn down and the illumination would be total.

  TWO

  The Cosmopolitan Standard of Virtue

  Eighteen ninety-three was a year of panic and exhilaration. In February an unprecedented credit crunch triggered the most devastating economic crisis in the nation’s history, closing five hundred banks and destroying the livelihoods of millions. Weeks later Chicago, the great financial success story of the late 1800s, defied the gloom by opening the World’s Columbian Exposition, an electrified jamboree of American power and potential to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing. The fair entertained millions but ended in horror and tragedy, doubling as the site of the assassination of Mayor Carter Harrison, Sr., and the grisly deeds of H. H. Holmes, the United States’ first documented serial killer. By fall any Gilded Age illusions that Americans could stroll blithely into the modern world shielded by a parasol of genteel manners and Christian values were blown away.

  The summer before the exposition Van Vechten, aged twelve, visited Chicago for the first time with his father. He had never encountered a great industrial city, and his first impressions were mixed. He was repulsed by its crowded, dirty streets, unlike anything he was used to in Cedar Rapids or Grand Rapids, the largest towns he had experienced before then. When his father took him away from the city’s beating heart and out onto the cleaner, calmer waters of Lake Michigan, he saw the outline of the exposition buildings in mid-construction and thought them among the most wonderful things he had ever seen. He wrote his mother about them and also about the great traffic of tall steamships transporting lumber along the Chicago River. It was, he gasped, a truly beautiful sight. What he discovered in that trip was the hustle, dynamism, and spring-heeled ambition for which Chicago had become world renowned. In a grandiloquent echo of Van Vechten’s own observations, the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens captured the atmosphere best when he declared Chicago “First in violence, deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the ‘tough’ among cities, a spectacle for the nation—I give Chicago no quarter and Chicago asks for none.”

  Van Vechten’s fascination with Chicago intensified a year after his first visit, when his parents took him back to experience the exposition, the event that sealed Chicago’s reputation as a place of dizzying excess. The exposition had a huge impact on Americans of the time, hailed by many as the greatest spectacle ever seen on American soil. For visitors, like Van Vechten, from smaller towns in the Midwest, the delights of the exposition offered an opportunity to feel part of the nation’s growing international eminence, in an event that would command attention around the globe. Most felt themselves lucky to be able to attend at all, but Van Vechten was allowed to luxuriate in all the wonders of the exposition over several days, another treat provided by his parents’ deep pockets.

  Certainly there were enough attractions to make repeat visits worthwhile. At a cost of ten million dollars, the exposition swallowed over six hundred acres, turning swaths of barren marshland into an oasis of wonderment, an American Eden, not in the lush tranquillity of a garden but on the crude outskirts of a metropolis. Without doubt, its crowning glory was the White City, a custom-built district of sumptuous boulevards lined with white stucco buildings, the very ones that Van Vechten had gazed at from his boat on Lake Michigan, each of which housed a different array of mesmerizing exhibits. The Electricity Building demonstrated a zeal for technocratic solutions to the world’s problems; the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building evinced high-minded but practical sophistication; the Woman’s Building reflected an earnest commitment to moral purity. There was no trace here of Burnham and Root’s audacious skyscrapers that were Chicago’s signature architectural style: all of the White City’s buildings were reverent Romanesque constructions, a bold physical statement that Chicago belonged to an ancient tradition of progress, achievement, and beauty.

 
; Naturally enough, the family was keen to introduce Van Vechten to the White City, that beacon of pure-minded sophistication. In the Palace of Fine Arts he was marched around the galleries to look at canvas after canvas of Greek and Roman mythological scenes and idyllic landscapes of pastoral calm and order. This was meant to be where Americans received a definitive lesson in what constituted good art and good taste; usually something European and godly were the fundamentals. The painting Van Vechten best remembered fitted into that category: Invading Cupid’s Realm, a scene of a half-naked young woman being attacked by a group of cupids, some firing arrows toward her chest, while others pull on the flowing skirt that hangs loosely from her hips. The painting was by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, an academic French artist then revered by the artistic establishment and reviled by the impressionists. It has been suggested that Bouguereau intended the work to be an allegory for the metaphorical violence being wrought upon him and his peers by an impudent younger generation of French artists, led by his onetime pupil Henri Matisse. It would not have pleased the custodians of good taste to know that the pubescent Van Vechten’s eye was caught not by the painting’s classical representation of beauty but because “until then I had seen comparatively few pictures of naked women.” Not for the first or last time, a sexual frisson had defined his moment of artistic revelation.