The Tastemaker Page 5

  It was a sexual awakening, but not one limited to his homosexual urges. At exactly the same time that he explored his interest in men for the first time, he embarked upon a number of embryonic romances with women. Most of it was chaste and sweetly innocent. He accompanied young ladies in voluminous evening gowns to formals, the dances organized by the university as a means of regulating social contact between the sexes, and enjoyed going on picnics and walks with coed classmates in Jackson Park. At this point he was too young, inexperienced, and sheltered to know exactly how his sexual identity was configured, and neither does it appear to have been something that bothered him very much. To judge from the scraps afforded by his diaries, letters, and unpublished creative writing, Van Vechten spent little time wrestling with his feelings but simply followed wherever the path of self-exploration led him, supremely confident in the rightness of his instincts.

  Since leaving Cedar Rapids, he had kept in close contact with his old friend Anna Snyder, who had left town to study at Wellesley before returning after graduation to become a teacher. When they reunited during vacations, their old bond seemed stronger than ever before, charged now with a sexual dimension. Two weeks after his twenty-first birthday Van Vechten poured his heart out to his diary, saying that it caused him pain to depart from her and that there was nothing in the world he would not give her, she need only ask. Staying with his parents over Christmas that year, he found himself embroiled in a strange love triangle with Snyder and her Wellesley classmate Elsie Stern. In some quiet corner, they held a séance during which Van Vechten appears to have had sex with Snyder as Stern watched. On other nights Van Vechten made out with Stern, but it was Snyder, he said, who had his heart.

  Rapidly the carapace of innocence that Cedar Rapids had constructed around him was breaking up. Leaving home, he had been not just a virgin but remarkably ignorant about sex. He claimed that at the age of nineteen, the only woman he had ever kissed was his mother. When he found himself immersed in the freedoms and temptations of an industrialized city, that all changed: “I picked it up fast,” he admitted. Little wonder, when some of his earliest sex education lessons appear to have come from the Levee, Chicago’s red-light district, which had the undesirable reputation of being the most depraved locale of any city in the United States.

  Just south of Chicago’s Loop district and bordering the large African-American neighborhoods known as the Black Belt, the Levee was the center of Chicago’s notoriously illicit nightlife, with street after street of gambling dens, cabaret clubs, gin palaces, and saloons, many lit up with new electric lighting, their enticing glow beckoning young men and women inside for some disreputable fun. In the Levee, fifty cents could buy access to just about any sexual adventure imaginable. Prostitutes of both sexes and various ethnicities walked the streets, posed topless in brothel windows to rustle up business, and offered their services at such places as the Bucket of Blood and the Why Not? The mind boggles on what exactly went on behind those closed doors. Prostitution was so rife there that the madams who ran its most profitable brothels were fixtures of newspaper gossip columns, and the stretch of State Street between Van Buren and Twenty-second Streets, was given the name Satan’s Mile, such were the number and variety of bordellos on its path. Over the course of the six years he lived in Chicago, Van Vechten came to know the sins of the Levee better than most. If his diaries can be believed—and often they provide Van Vechten at his most factual and dispassionate—the boy who left home a sexual ignoramus was, by his second year in the big city, intimately acquainted with the world’s oldest profession. In a diary entry from December 1901 he mentions going to Twenty-second Street, the southern tip of the Levee, where he encountered a young woman by the name of Violette, returning home at two in the morning. He gives no further details, but in 1901 young men who went to Twenty-second Street to meet women late at night generally did so for only one reason. A number of subsequent entries mention further trips to the Levee with male friends, including one futile attempt with his fraternity brother Denis Campau to rediscover Violette. In all likelihood the inexperienced Van Vechten was guided by Campau, whom, like Edwin Boehmer, Van Vechten admired for his worldliness. To Anna Snyder, Van Vechten confessed that he and Campau shared a “philandering spirit,” and it was Campau who provided lyrics for “Love Songs of a Philanderer,” one of Van Vechten’s undergraduate attempts at musical composition.

  Whether or not Campau coaxed Van Vechten into Chicago’s red-light district, Van Vechten claimed to have played a notable part in an extraordinary chapter of the Levee’s unpalatable story when he worked as a pianist at the Everleigh Club, the most sumptuous and exclusive brothel in town. Run by Ada and Minna Everleigh, two sisters originally from Omaha, the Everleigh Club combined degeneracy, elegance, and extravagance in a most Chicagoan way. Situated at South Dearborn and Twenty-second Streets, the Everleigh Club operated less like a whorehouse and more like an ultraexclusive private members’ establishment, admitting only respectable, sober men prepared to pay a minimum of fifty dollars for an evening’s entertainment. The staff, whose duty it was to see that the gentlemen got value for their money, was a cohort of young ladies with steady temperaments and unfailing good manners, fitted out in the latest expensive designs from Paris. The club’s interior was suitably lavish. Leading off from its sweeping mahogany staircases were dozens of ornately decorated rooms, including a library, a ballroom, and a banqueting hall, all furnished with cut-glass chandeliers, plush carpets, and silk sheets. Everyone from John Barrymore to the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson to Prince Henry of Prussia passed through on trips to the city, and Chicago’s literary leading men, including Edgar Lee Masters and Theodore Dreiser, were regulars too.

  The centerpiece of the whole establishment was the Gold Room, in which stood a gold piano custom made for the Everleigh sisters at the eye-watering cost of fifteen thousand dollars. The resident piano professor was the improbably named Vanderpool Vanderpool, resplendent in finely cut evening wear and a lustrous head of tousled white hair. If Van Vechten’s stories were true, it would have been from him that he assumed piano-playing duties when Vanderpool went for meal breaks. However, there is very little to corroborate his testimony. In the writer Charles Washburn’s detailed account of the Everleigh Club, originally published in 1934, he made no mention of a piano player who would have fitted Van Vechten’s description, and more recent histories of the club account only Scott Joplin as an occasional substitute for Vanderpool. When asked as an old man for details by one inquisitive friend, Van Vechten could not remember the name of the Everleigh Club and gave its address, incorrectly, as Custom House Place, evidence, perhaps, of a failing memory or that the story had been a fabrication to begin with. It is very possible that he had stitched together stories of various experiences to form a tale that perfectly fitted the image of himself that he wanted to project, a tactic he employed time and again over the years. He certainly played the odd piano recital at college; he frequented the racier parts of town too and in the coming years became acquainted with the Everleigh Club in his capacity as a journalist. These elements may well have fused themselves into a story that Van Vechten could use in order to associate himself with the great emblem of Chicago’s cosmopolitan wonders, the place where sex, music, wealth, beauty, flamboyance, and notoriety all met.

  In his lifelong exploration of the illicit and forbidden, there were two great taboo subjects that obsessed him. Sex was one; race was the other. Chicago offered endless opportunities to traverse the early-twentieth-century lines of racial division. The city’s black vaudeville scene was, like its classical music, arguably the most dazzling in the country and a vital precursor to its legendary blues and jazz movements that gained international acclaim decades later. Van Vechten had glimpsed African-American entertainment at Greene’s Opera House when Sissieretta Jones or some other polite black vaudeville act came to town. What went down in the nightclubs and theaters of the Black Belt was an altogether different experience: not sani
tized for middle-class white spectators but expressed with verve for working-class blacks. With Denis Campau in tow—two eager young white faces conspicuous among the majority black audiences—Van Vechten got to know venues such as the Dreamland Café and Lincoln Gardens, where he saw many of the most influential African-American musicians and stage performers: the pianists James “Slap Rags” White and Millard Thomas, the vaudeville legends Williams and Walker, and the daring, cross-dressing Whitman Sisters. When he saw George Walker and his wife, Aida Overton Walker, perform the cakewalk at one South Side venue, it stayed with him forever as an iconic image of American art. Their cakewalk was “one of the great memories of the theatre,” he wrote years later, praising its physical and technical brilliance as if recalling a prima ballerina at the Bolshoi. “The line, the grace, the assured ecstasy of these dancers who bent over backward until their heads almost touched the floor, a feat demanding an incredible amount of strength, their enthusiastic prancing, almost in slow motion, have never been equaled in this particular revel, let alone surpassed.”

  Slumming was a popular pastime for many bourgeois thrill seekers by 1900 in both Chicago and New York, a pseudoeducational entertainment that mirrored the new journalistic fad of poking a lens into the ghetto to see “how the other half lives.” Adventure of this sort was almost certainly part of Van Vechten’s motivation for investigating the Black Belt. Tests of physical courage were of little interest to him, but social danger—the buzz of breaking a taboo by keeping unusual company or straying into places convention dictated he should not go—was irresistible. But ultimately he went because he was fascinated by the shows, which displayed an extravagance and energy that he could not find in even the best white vaudeville acts. According to his own reminiscences, after one show he befriended one of his heroines, the singer and dancer Carrie Washington, who went by the stage name of Carita Day. She was the wife of Ernest Hogan, one of the great black pioneers of the American entertainment industry, whose legacy is often obscured by his song “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” an enormous hit that sealed his reputation as a first-rate songwriter but whose title and lyrics, both of which he composed, later made him wince. When Hogan’s revue The Georgia Minstrels opened in Chicago, Van Vechten was dazzled by Day, who shone in the lead role. Managing to meet her after the show, he made her acquaintance and even convinced Day and Hogan to perform at a fraternity house party.

  As it happened, it was the fraternity that had first led him into the social world of the Black Belt. Shortly after joining the Omega chapter of Psi Upsilon, he struck up an unlikely friendship with its housekeeper, a middle-aged black woman named Mrs. Desdemona Sublett. She was a hefty, good-looking woman who fixed her hair tightly with curlers, and the boys of the fraternity found her forceful personality tremendously entertaining. To Van Vechten she was more than a mere amusement; she was mesmerizing. A devout Christian and member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Mrs. Sublett could often be heard praying in the loud, uninhibited tones of her evangelical faith. Van Vechten had been raised to associate Christian worship with a quiet, sober dignity that tended to sublimate raw emotion rather than draw it to the surface, as seemed to happen when Mrs. Sublett spoke to God. The religious faith at the center of her prayers was irrelevant; for all Van Vechten cared, Mrs. Sublett could have been invoking the devil or reciting entries from the telephone directory. It was her performance that excited him: the passion she summoned to enliven the mundane events of her everyday life. No white person he knew ever did this. Having grown up in an environment committed to racial equality, Van Vechten was able to communicate with her in a way the other socially privileged boys of the fraternity could not, and the two formed a close bond. Before long Van Vechten was missing fraternity parties to accompany her to the heart of black Chicago for church socials, wedding anniversary parties, and other “colohed affahs,” in his words, where he was the only white person in attendance.

  At some of these parties he took to the piano, though his repertoire of classical masterpieces made little impression and usually could not be heard over the noise of laughter and conversation. His pride was stung when he played Moszkowski’s Waltz Opus 34 and discovered that only one small girl had been paying any attention. Despite this, he loved the crowded, convivial rooms Mrs. Sublett led him through and the warmth of the people he encountered within them, “uncultured and uneducated,” he noted with unintended condescension, but “intensely good hearted, humorous, interesting and even clever.” The things he most liked about them were attributes he believed belonged almost exclusively to black people: emotional expressiveness and a warm sensuality that he saw reflected in the pleasing tones of their skin and the contours of their bodies, particularly the “dusky matrons with ample bosoms.” He said that these women rekindled his childhood longing for a nurturing southern mammy, and he claimed that when he told them this, they responded with delight and pride, as if he had made some special connection with them thanks to his instinctive understanding of true blackness.

  Desdemona Sublett, c. 1922

  After several months of this socializing Van Vechten believed that he was able to project blackness, as if he had possessed some kind of magic cape that he could slip on in order to vault the social chasm that stood between blacks and whites. Although as pale-skinned as his Dutch name suggests, he claimed that when with Mrs. Sublett he was “invariably taken for a coon” by black people. It is the kind of rhetorical flourish that makes one suspect a good deal of his accounts were the product of either a febrile imagination or an inflated ego. Yet as is so often the case with Van Vechten, the literal truth is incidental; the important point is that for the first time he had experienced the power of social contact as a way of hurdling the seemingly insuperable barriers that existed between different groups of Americans. In his own mind at least, by simply attending the right parties at the right time, he had found it possible to erase centuries of rancorous history and become an honorary Negro. Touching, even inspirational, as that conviction was, it was also incredibly naive.

  As he left college, Van Vechten reflected on his time in Chicago and concluded that the city had allowed him to live the lives of any number of people: a Buddhist, a Catholic; a pillar of virtue, and a pitiful thief; on some days a high-minded sophisticate, on others a good ol’ boy who lived for corn bread and liquor. He was never actually any of those things, of course. It was a poetic way of expressing that Chicago allowed him to be the person he wanted to be, to escape the restraints of convention and unite disparate strands of American identity within one body. In the ferment of the twentieth-century city, he had found a place to belong.

  THREE

  That Shudder of Fascination

  Considering that Van Vechten eventually became famous for his frivolity and elegance, it is jarring that it was the newspaper trade of Chicago that provided his introduction to American public life when he graduated from college in the summer of 1903. In the Progressive Era of the early 1900s Chicago had a reputation for producing the most ruthless muckrakers in the United States. Eugene Field, Finley Peter Dunne, Theodore Dreiser, and George Ade headed a sparkling generation of polemicists, satirists, and investigative reporters who were untiring in their chase of a story. In a dingy backroom of Koster’s saloon on a narrow street known as Newsboy’s Alley, a group of those mavericks set up the Whitechapel Club, an impudent reference to the stalking ground of Jack the Ripper that captured the spirit of their profession. A coffin-shaped table dominated the clubroom with souvenirs of their greatest scoops lying around: the skull of a murdered prostitute; photographs of decapitated Chinese pirates; a blood-soaked Indian blanket salvaged from a gunfight out west.

  Van Vechten would have appreciated the luridness of the Whitechapel Club, but he was no muckraker; he had no desire to speak truth to power or to save souls via the printing press. In his early twenties, the closest thing he had to a vocation was creative writing. “I cannot remember the time when I was not trying to write,” he reflect
ed in 1932. At college he had been delighted to be tutored by Robert Herrick, a writer of precise, tightly structured fiction and a prominent figure of the Chicago school of “realist” novelists, whom Van Vechten described as “the first novelist I ever met and a hero to me for many years on that account.” His own efforts at writing fiction were anemic imitations of his heroes—namely, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and George Moore, whose work he devoured as a student. Literary greatness would have to be worked at.

  Van Vechten’s first exposure to journalism came at the end of his sophomore year in the summer of 1901, when he got a temporary job as a reporter for the City News, a wire service established by a number of newspapers to cover the bread and butter of daily news and a de facto training stable for up-and-coming reporters. He was employed to gather stories rather than write them up, and in this job a college education was less valued than a fellow’s ability to keep his wits about him as he chased down whatever tales of intrigue came his way. For Van Vechten, a typical day’s work might require reporting on assaults, petty crime, or the two great deadly hazards of inner-city Chicago, house fires and streetcar accidents. An entry from his diary of July 1901 mentions a legal case he was reporting on for which he arrived at a dilapidated house to discover a woman teetering at the top of the stairs with a cut to her head, blood coursing down her face. The green boy who had arrived from Iowa in 1899 would have been well out of his depth in those circumstances, but now he discovered that he had a flair for handling the unusual and the unexpected.