The Tastemaker Page 4
Indeed, all of Van Vechten’s key memories of the exposition were linked to the illicit thrill of seeing naked flesh, usually forbidden but sanctioned here in many forms. Outside the refinement of the White City, the exposition resembled a fantastical county fair. In true Chicago style, this was the first world’s fair to dedicate an entire precinct to entertainments without high-minded objectives, just thrills and empty escapism, set in an area dubbed the Midway Plaisance. The Midway featured an array of amusements from the crudity of greased poles and coconut shies to the extravagance of the world’s first Ferris wheel. There was no space for indigenous American music in the White City—only Europe’s classical traditions were permitted there—but it was everywhere on the Midway. Sousa’s marching bands were a huge hit, and many visitors got their first exposure to ragtime. This was the folk culture of the American city: democratic, uncomplicated pleasure seeking, packaged in glitz and sold for five cents per ride. Along with twenty-seven million other visitors, Van Vechten was seduced and spent hours there wandering through the spectacles. The attractions that burrowed their way deepest into his memory were the exotic dancers who thrust and swiveled their hips, twisting shawls provocatively around their exposed shoulders and naked midriffs in a way “novel to most Americans of the period,” he recalled, “and absolutely enthralling to me. The lady who could make an apple bound and bounce about by the movements of her abdomen especially delighted me.” He was far from alone. The dancers, supposedly from places such as Java, Turkey, and Egypt, and whose risqué performances were justified on the pretext of providing an education in anthropology, were the talk of the fair. One journalist, unable to conceal his excitement, advised potential visitors that “you will see the female abdomen execute such feats as never before entered your wildest and most unrestrained imaginations to conceive.” For Van Vechten, it was a second moment, shortly after Herbie Newell’s skirt dance, in which sex and dance were fused, although this time there was nothing coded or elliptical in the performance; this was a blatant expression of carnality.
The significance of those first exposures to Chicago in 1892 and 1893 poke through in an unfinished autobiographical novel that Van Vechten wrote in his early twenties, a piece of juvenilia of negligible literary merit, in which he first set down the events of his life through the mythological lens that he employed thereafter. Although much of it cannot be unquestioningly accepted as a factual record of his early years, it seems emotionally authentic, capturing his idea of himself in relation to the world around him. In the first chapter of his tale he describes himself as an extravagantly gifted child who was drawn by fate to leave his midwestern home for the rowdy charms of Chicago, the mecca in which he would fulfill his urban destiny. It was self-absorbed hyperbole, of course, yet the rhetoric does suggest that his discovery of Chicago was a turning point, firing his imagination and giving him a tangible focus for his daydreams of life beyond Cedar Rapids. New York sounded magical from all he had read about it, but he had never stepped foot on Broadway like his idols who dashed in and out of town on the railway, or on Fifth Avenue, like Carnegie, Rockefeller, or the other names that littered his father’s copies of The Atlantic Monthly. He had, however, experienced Chicago, seen its filth-encrusted streets, heard the screeches of its streetcars, and witnessed the warp and weft of urban culture weaving one between the other, the unthinking pleasures of the Midway and the highbrow ambition of the White City, each as fascinating as the other.
Stalking his teenage years, the vision of Chicago deepened his withdrawal into a world created from his imagination and the scraps of insight that books afforded. Out went the distant childhood fantasies of The Swiss Family Robinson and Arabian Nights; in came contemporary adventures, animating an urban universe of conflict, speed, and excitement. Confessions of a Young Man, George Moore’s scabrous account of city life, and the witty provocations of George Bernard Shaw’s Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant dropped into his world like incendiaries fizzing from the sky, setting his mind alight with the possibilities of an existence that spurned Victorian probity for art, self-expression, and the freedoms of the city.
A life like that could not have been pursued in Cedar Rapids—not openly at least. The older he got, the more Van Vechten came to believe that the town was not governed by gentility, honor, and respectability, as it wanted to believe, but by shame and hypocrisy. It was not, he thought, that the people in Cedar Rapids were any less lustful, crude, or imperfect than the people he had read about in books, merely that they chose to hide their true selves behind a facade. Increasingly, he became aware of extramarital affairs glossed over and vices indulged under the cover of darkness. His own brother, Ralph, had once been involved in what Van Vechten described years later as the town’s “fast life,” caught up in a passionate affair with Mahala Dutton, a vivacious epicurean who refused to behave like a demure lady of narrow interests and tepid emotions. After Ralph’s death, in 1927, Dutton told Van Vechten that his brother had lived “a frightfully stupid life,” chasing career success and money rather than the emotional honesty that had always been her guiding principle.
Van Vechten adored Dutton for her attitude toward life, and she was the closest thing he had to a role model during his teens, the first in a long line of flamboyant women to capture his imagination and shape his unconventional personality. His parents may have been remarkably freethinking in certain ways, but the significance they attached to maintaining an impeccable public reputation through the accumulation of wealth and status within Cedar Rapids made them frightfully conservative in his eyes. Dutton, one of the few prominent women in town of whom his mother did not approve, who was not “quite respectable enough,” in his words, to be admitted into the clubs that Ada established, conducted herself in a very different manner. Respectability was never Dutton’s concern: she was decadent, glamorous, and theatrical; she believed that attending to one’s needs and desires was the primary business of life, and she never seemed to care when her affairs or her modish fashion sense set tongues wagging.
Aside from Dutton, female companionship was a constant part of Van Vechten’s teenage years. His closest friend was Anna Snyder, a highly intelligent Gibson Girl of glacial temperament who shared his love of music and literature as well as his dissatisfaction with the emotional narrowness of life in Cedar Rapids, and though there was something faintly romantic about their connection, during this period it was entirely chaste. That his adolescent relationship with Anna, or any other girl, never blossomed into anything more than friendship intensified his feeling that he was somehow different from those around him. He felt only the weakest sense of physical attraction to girls. Even thinking of females as belonging to a different sex seemed strange, but he was unsure of why that might be. Neither at school nor at home were any of the facts of life explained to him, and he had not learned about sex in the tentatively hands-on way that many boys did, the way Ralph had done: finding a “high-spirited” girl with whom one could “twitch a garter, and probably go further,” as the writer Henry Seidel Canby remembered the convention of the day.
Twitching garters was about as familiar to Van Vechten as rustling cattle. He began to exhibit on the outside the jumbled feelings of difference, superiority, and rebellion gestating on the inside, acquiring a wardrobe of tight-fitting clothes, growing his fingernails long, and cultivating a demeanor of aloofness that consciously marked him out as a misfit. The rakish appearance of the disaffected youth at the center of The Tattooed Countess was based on his own trademark outfit: “a brown derby hat, a chocolate-shaded coat with padded shoulders, very tight tan trousers, a very high, stiff collar with an Ascot tie, and pointed, patent-leather boots,” and with long fingernails protruding from his starched cuffs. Dressed in his finest attire, he found being in front of the camera as enjoyable as being behind it and he developed the pose that he re-created hundreds of times over the decades, the one he used to communicate the mythology he wove around him: his mouth gripped shut, teeth hidden from view;
his anvil of a jawbone jutting out defiantly; his stare fixed and predatory, like a tiger waiting to pounce. Plenty of teenagers acquire a shell of physical vanity and narcissism; Van Vechten never shook loose of his. In the 1950s he told one friend that he suspected that he had first dallied with cameras because he so adored being photographed, and fancied the idea of spending his time taking pictures of himself.
To most of his classmates he must have seemed deeply odd. In his unpublished autobiographical sketches he wrote that a group of girls at his high school gossiped about him, through giggles and sideways glances. He refrained from stating explicitly what about him they found so amusing, but the implication was that his effeminate strangeness identified him as a “sissy”—nothing like his brawny elder brother—and therefore an object of ridicule. The Van Vechten of later years was strident and unapologetic in his camp eccentricities and paraded his unconventionality. At this vulnerable stage in life that was much harder to do. More than anything he craved escape to Chicago, the city of his waking dreams, where he figured he would find other people like him. Eventually, he got his wish when he secured a place to study at the University of Chicago in 1899.
* * *
Coming to Chicago as a single young man, rather than as an adolescent under the guidance of his parents, Van Vechten discovered a city of even more distant extremes than the Columbian Exposition had revealed. At the end of the nineteenth century nowhere better represented the hopes and fears for the American future than Chicago. Around the world it had become famous for its love of business and its bluster and drive, and infamous for the endemic corruption that infused every aspect of its existence. To the journalists and novelists who tried to capture its excesses, here was a city that made Dickensian London look quaint. Fears about rampant prostitution, buccaneer capitalists, white slavery, black street gangs, and the collapse of public morals—what the Chicago novelist Theodore Dreiser famously called “the cosmopolitan standard of virtue”—gripped the city. Both social scientists and evangelical preachers urged Chicago to tackle its dissipations: the former through reform; the latter through salvation. “In no other city of the world,” Van Vechten noted some years later, “is such anxiety manifested for the welfare of the soul,” although it was not a topic he devoted much thought to. In the seven eventful years he lived there, he saw all possible sides of Chicago life but never showed the faintest interest in the great moral debates that dominated public discourse.
Perhaps his own religious education partly explains his lack of interest. The Universalist belief that all humans will be eventually reconciled with God irrespective of their conduct on earth seemed to translate itself in Van Vechten’s mind into a form of moral complacency, a laissez-faire attitude to life and its problems that was subsequently amplified by the cynical detachment of the decadent authors he read in his early twenties, Oscar Wilde most notably. To his parents, of course, Universalism provided a profound optimism about man’s potential for doing good in the world, but they instructed their children to view the fervor of the Third Awakening—the name given to the evangelical revival that swept American cities during Van Vechten’s youth—with hostility and suspicion. When Van Vechten was taken to Chicago for the first time in 1892, he wrote his mother about an incident on a train when his father fell into conversation with a fellow passenger. The topic of religion was somehow raised, and the man mentioned that he happened to be a Baptist. Van Vechten assumed that this revelation would be enough for his father to bring the conversation to an end and was surprised when Charles did not do so. In public Charles was able to tactfully mask his opinions for the sake of social concord, a skill his youngest son never mastered, but in the privacy of his home he taught his children to deride religious zealotry.
Van Vechten may not have been interested in the struggle for Chicago’s soul, but by enrolling in the University of Chicago he became an unwitting participant in it. The influential reformer Jane Addams believed that Chicago’s greatest failing was its inability to channel the spirit of adventure of its huge single male population into high art and away from the city’s profusion of commercialized leisure and popular entertainment, “all that is gaudy and sensual … the flippant street music, the highly colored theater posters, the trashy love stories, the feathered hats, the cheap heroics of the revolvers displayed in the pawn-shop windows.”
The university was one of a number of formidable cultural institutions opened in the 1890s designed to edify young minds just as Addams urged. In his opening semester Van Vechten could have been a poster child for the movement. Within weeks of his arrival he saw his first opera, Charles Gounod’s Faust, starring Nellie Melba at the Auditorium, the zenith of Chicago’s cultural establishment and, for the rest of his college days, the chief venue of his education in classical music. The Auditorium was the home of both the Chicago Opera as well as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Metropolitan Opera brought one production there each season, starring some of the finest international talents. To be surrounded by music of this type and quality was Van Vechten’s dream come true. Barely a week passed throughout his four years of college when he did not attend several recitals, concerts, or opera performances. In particular the vivid, all-encompassing spectacle of the opera burrowed its way into his heart, though the high cost of frequent attendance meant he occasionally took to the stage as a supernumerary, standing silently at the back of a scene as a Roman soldier or a toiling peasant. This was not exactly a regular way of hearing the opera, but the Auditorium’s ambitious attempts to rival the reputation of New York’s Metropolitan Opera meant there was often a need for supernumeraries to fill the stage in its lavish productions. It was a great compromise for Van Vechten too. He found more pleasure in watching others perform than in performing himself, but being close to the first-rate talents who appeared at the Auditorium thrilled him, as if the pages of one of his scrapbooks had come to life around him.
The kinetic force driving Chicago’s thriving music scene was the German-born conductor Theodore Thomas. An unapologetic elitist of the highest order, Thomas sacralized European high culture and believed that great art must by definition be difficult art. In the Auditorium, his audiences would get what they needed, not what they wanted. Chicago’s taste-shaping magazine The Dial approved. “If you do not like it now,” it said in reference to Thomas’s insistence on playing the unpopular Wagner, “pray that you may learn to like it, for the defect is yours.” Dictatorial snob though he may have been, it was thanks to Thomas that Van Vechten was introduced to a host of innovative modern composers, including Wagner, Dvořák, and Richard Strauss, obscure names to most Americans of the day, but very familiar to Van Vechten when barely into his twenties. The advanced state of his musical knowledge, as well as Thomas’s notion that classical music was an exceptional art that required hard work and self-sacrifice in order to be properly appreciated, fitted perfectly with Van Vechten’s sense of his specialness, a feeling that was gradually swallowing his entire sense of self. In a creative writing assignment, English being the one class he made any effort in during his undistinguished college career, Van Vechten wrote a short story titled “Unfinished Symphony,” in which a sweet, uncomplicated young woman called Marian Ormesby pretends to like classical music in order to win the heart of the cultured and urbane Harvey Jerman, a thinly veiled self-portrait of Van Vechten. For a time Harvey is enchanted with Marian, delighted to have found a female companion capable of sharing his passions and his understanding of the emotional complexities of great art. But when Marian decides she can continue the charade no longer and reveals that her love of music has been a ruse, the spell is broken, their bond immediately dissolved; it was the allure of Marian’s apparent cultivation that ensnared Harvey rather than the girl’s looks or personality. It was how Van Vechten saw his place in the world: not one of the regular people but a member of a special breed whose lives are inextricably bound to art.
Though the adolescent feelings of differentness and superiority
calcified, the environment of a big city college helped Van Vechten shed some of the awkward aloofness of his teenage years. Surrounded by people with similar interests, he made friends quickly and even felt some excitement at the prospect of joining the Omega chapter of Psi Upsilon, one of the most prestigious fraternities at the university. Its members “came from the leading families around Chicago,” according to the fraternity’s official annals, but also had a reputation for creating a public nuisance. In 1899 the famed Chicago satirist George Ade published “The Fable of the Copper and the Jovial Undergrads” in the Chicago Record, depicting Chicago fraternity men as “drunken ruffians” in the guise of “well-bred young men,” prone to smashing windows, starting fights in the street, and insulting policemen. This was not Van Vechten’s world at all, but he felt the need to join Psi Upsilon to please his father, who was keen that he should become a well-connected, clubbable man of the world, as the other Van Vechten men were. Rather predictably, by the start of his senior year Van Vechten’s commitment to the fraternity had waned decisively. He enjoyed the impressive banquets shared with chapters from other colleges, but when one of the boys put ice cubes in his bed or played some other jape, his enthusiasm dissipated, the practical jokes feeling uncomfortably like bullying.
However, close contact with young men did hold certain attractions for a sexually curious boy away from home for the first time. In the fraternity house, he became especially close to Edwin Boehmer, a slender, slightly fragile-looking boy with soft, feminine features and wavy blond hair that peaked in an unruly quiff. He and Van Vechten spent many evenings together, sharing jugs of foaming pilsner in the Little Vienna district and sitting up late by the fire in the fraternity house to talk about sex. Being the more experienced of the two, Boehmer did most of the talking, Van Vechten providing an eager audience for his tales of petting and fornication. Things may have progressed further than gossip and dirty stories too. In his perfunctory diary entries Van Vechten notes the numerous occasions on which Boehmer stayed the night in his room, a device used later in his life as shorthand for a sexual assignation. Whether they were lovers is unclear, but the intimacy they established strongly suggests this was more than plain friendship. Boehmer was not the only boy who caught Van Vechten’s eye either. He confessed to his diary that he was in love with a fellow student by the name of Wid Norton, though the crush was apparently never acted upon.