The Tastemaker Page 6
The job did nothing to improve his writing, but every day provided the chance to encounter a different set of characters and to gain an education in the workings of the real world. The work was exciting, dangerous, and unpredictable, a paid extension of the nighttime adventures he went on in the Levee; Eddie Boehmer even joined him on a couple of assignments. He enjoyed the job so much that he set his mind on quitting his final year of college to enter journalism full-time. Only his father’s stern interjections deterred him from doing so. Charles favored as a career choice for Carl the family concerns of banking and insurance, where money and a steady future were plainly available. Carl’s brother, Ralph, had also dabbled in newspaper reporting before he took to a lucrative career in finance. Charles hoped the same would happen with his younger son.
Van Vechten’s first full-time job came immediately after graduation in the summer of 1903, as a rookie reporter on the best-known newspaper in the city, the Chicago American owned by the real Citizen Kane himself, William Randolph Hearst. Depending on whom you asked, the American represented either the apex of Chicago journalism or its nadir. Hearst established the paper in 1900 with the objective of crushing the pro-Republican Chicago Tribune and bolstering his chances of landing the Democratic nomination for the 1904 presidential election. Consequently, the American was run in accordance with the principles of yellow journalism, a mixture of lurid sensationalism and aggressive political agendas that had dominated the circulation war between Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in recent years. On Hearst’s watch, news was not something to be reported but something to be made. As he declared, “the modern editor of the popular journal does not care for facts.” A good story was always valued over veracious journalism, and any employee who failed to appreciate that was swiftly replaced. Shortly before Van Vechten arrived, the journalist William Salisbury began work on the American, believing its mission was not just to report events but to shape the future of a fast-changing nation, “to enlighten and uplift humanity” and “to reform Chicago as it was reforming New York and San Francisco.” How wrong he was. Not long into the new job, Salisbury was suspended, unpaid, for a week for failing to include in his report of a house fire the extraordinary details that a rival newspaper had related about the same incident. When he protested that the other newspaper had clearly fabricated its account of a great human ladder used to evacuate the victims of a fire that had actually taken place in a one-story building, he was told the facts of the story were irrelevant: “never allow any of the old conservative newspapers to outdo the American in ‘features.’” From the moment he arrived Van Vechten knew that if one wanted to get ahead at the American, it was advisable to leave journalistic principles at the hatstand.
Like many of his colleagues, Van Vechten found his abiding memory of the American was the thunderous noise that enveloped its offices, the Madhouse, as those who worked there habitually called it. Located in a rickety old building at the former premises of the Steuben Wine Company at 216 West Madison Street, the entire operation existed on a single floor. It was “the most terrific din you ever heard,” Van Vechten said, remembering how the staccato clacking of mechanical typewriters, the brassy ring of candlestick telephones, and the yells of journalists racing toward the next deadline strained above the constant grind of the printing presses that churned out multiple editions each day. The usual workforce comprised around twenty reporters, but staff turnover was prodigiously high, and the pressure to deliver compelling stories even higher. As William Salisbury remembered it, most of the eager young newshounds who came through the Madhouse were dismissed before their colleagues were even aware of their existence. It says much for Van Vechten’s talents for the dark arts of yellow journalism that he survived for more than two years.
Chief among his early assignments was securing photographs to accompany human interest stories—not shooting photographs of his own but rooting out preexisting ones and encouraging their owners to part with them. This practice was common at the time, especially on Hearst titles where vivid pictorial content was considered vital. “I was so successful at this I was kept at it interminably,” Van Vechten later grumbled, but it was in performing this duty that he first discovered his remarkable powers of persuasion, using “guile” to get photographs from grieving relatives and irate victims of crime without the slightest trace of guilt or awkwardness. “I suppose sometimes I even lied to get photographs,” he later admitted. It was a risky business. One time he found himself at the family home of a girl who had “either been killed or ravished”—Van Vechten, telling the story years later, could not remember which—attempting to procure a photograph from the victim’s parents. Photograph in hand he was about to leave when the girl’s brother rushed into the room and drew a gun on him, held it to his head, and demanded the picture be returned. Fortunately, the family priest was also on hand and convinced the man to lower his pistol. Van Vechten made his escape unscathed.
In an attempt to stay ahead of his rivals on the juiciest stories, Hearst split into two parts the job of the crime reporter, which in Chicago had been the most prized journalistic position during the 1890s. Instead of having one intrepid figure to investigate a story and spin a gripping article from his findings, on the American, nimble young reporters were dispatched to unravel a lead and straightaway send the details back to the office for skilled rewriters to turn into copy. For a time Van Vechten’s brief was to cover events at the Harrison Street police station in the Loop, a notorious holding pen for violent criminals, pimps, prostitutes, drunks, and the mentally ill. He spent a bleak Thanksgiving of 1903 trawling through the misery contained within its cells in search of a subject to tug at the readers’ heartstrings, eventually settling on a man in acute distress, sweating and shaking uncontrollably with alcohol withdrawal. A few weeks later came an even more depressing assignment when, on the afternoon of December 30, he was sent to report on a fire that had engulfed the Iroquois Theatre on West Randolph Street. The scene was hideous: at least six hundred people had been killed, many burned to death, others suffocated by the smoke or trampled in the mass panic. Reporters from all the city’s newspapers scrambled to the nearest telephones to contact their editors and rewriters with the latest information only to find the lines had gone dead. It turned out that the first man on the scene, a ruthless young journalist named Walter Howey, working for Van Vechten’s old employer the City News wire service, had sabotaged the local public telephones in an attempt to protect his exclusive. When Van Vechten eventually left the site of the tragedy later that night, the flames still licking the walls of the theater, he went home and wept. When he was an old man, his memories of the American were patchy and confused, but he never forgot the things he saw that night, how “on the sidewalk corpses were piled up like cordwood, with legs or arms burned off, or just simply smothered.” The first weeks of 1904 were spent wading further into the pain and grief of others as he staked out the overcrowded makeshift morgues to find the most heart-wrenching stories of the unfortunates who had perished. The stark horror of the whole episode shook him and revealed something about the job that he would much rather have left concealed: that beneath the excitement and danger of the stories he covered were other people’s lives, full of all their messy, complicating emotions, their sorrow, anger, and despair. The bubble of self-absorption in which he had spent much of the first twenty-three years of his life was pricked. Never before had he been forced to confront the interior lives of other people on such a scale. It was not an agreeable experience and one he hoped he would not have to repeat too often.
* * *
Van Vechten’s crime reporting brief gifted him with a sense of the wild diversity that industrialization had brought to the United States and an insight into how the whole organism of a city functioned, the connections between its synapses and its sinews. It also sharpened his facility for flitting between different cultural and social groups, a common theme of his later endeavors. In the course of his
duties on the American he encountered brothel madams and society ladies, police chiefs and violent criminals. Van Vechten’s esteemed colleague Jack Lait once explained that as a journalist on the American he collated a “chorus of opinion,” a bookful of contacts from all walks of life who could furnish an instant opinion on any conceivable issue. It was, he said, “a staff equal to any symposium in any emergency,” and when he was promoted to a more senior editorial job, he passed it to “my next typewriter neighbor, Carl Van Vechten.”
By the time he received Lait’s contacts, Van Vechten had been given the task of writing some stories of his own. He handled the new responsibilities well, embellishing the formula of yellow journalism with a hint of his own mordant wit. Full of shocking facts—many of which, one suspects, were not really facts at all—and contrived outrage, his articles succeeded in conjuring something fantastical out of the mundane. He wrote about a young woman who sued an ex-fiancé for calling off their engagement when he discovered she had a glass eye and about a well-to-do young lady who ditched her millionaire suitor in favor of a Texan miner; a more serious piece exposed the fraudulent leader of a religious cult whose followers fasted themselves to the point of death. His editor also gave him the responsibility of writing the society gossip column, for which he invented a preposterous imaginary sidekick named Angel Child through whom he was able to voice catty observations about Chicago’s upper crust. With puckish delight and a homosexual innuendo presumably lost on most of his readers, he once reviewed the performance of a brawny baseball-loving University of Chicago student who so convinced in a female role in a recent operatic production that young men rushed to the stage and threw violets at his feet. In a Christmastime edition, he filed the story of little Louis Simmons, a six-year-old boy who died after opening his presents on Christmas morning, under the headline XMAS TOYS BOY’S DEATH MESSENGER. Van Vechten quoted the child’s mother, who said, “I have never seen him so happy before, and I think that it was joy that killed him.” On the surface readers were entreated to wring their hands in sympathy. But there is a certain relish in the way Van Vechten reported the lament of this grieving mother: death in the attainment of pure pleasure seemed a gloriously decadent way to go.
Tabloid rag though it may have been, the American was an important stage in Van Vechten’s development as a writer. The stories he wrote contain traces of the mischievous absurdity and gossipy satire that were to characterize his best novels of the 1920s. Just as significant, it was while working on the American that Van Vechten received a thorough training in how to put facts in the service of a story, an approach that he drew on extensively in his work as a music, dance, and drama critic in the 1910s. His best writing in that latter period succeeded because it thoroughly described his experience of the event rather than just the qualities of those performing. When reviewing a play, he would evoke the entire sensory environment inside the theater, sometimes down to the body odor of the people sitting next to him and the taste of the apple pie he had eaten in the restaurant across the street a half hour earlier. Most of his readers took these details as they were presented: intelligently observed and factual accounts of specific events. But Van Vechten never felt any obligation to facts. In a valedictory message in his final book of critical essays in 1925, he conceded that his work had always been “creative rather than critical,” his objective being to evoke a sensation or an atmosphere rather than write a report of factual accuracy. With no ethical qualms he would embellish anecdotes, fabricate dates, invent conversations, and alter facts if it suited him to do so. The time he spent working on the American at the beginning of his career encouraged him to view objectivity and the truth as obstructions to good writing.
Van Vechten would have been reluctant to admit that a direct relationship might have existed between his elegant essays on music and dance and the tittle-tattle he wrote for tabloid newspapers. He was never embarrassed by his years in Chicago, exactly. Rather, this chapter of his life inserted a messy complication into his grand personal narrative, a kink in what could otherwise be written as an archetypal modern tale of the midwestern ingenue who comes to New York and discovers his creative identity amid opera, ballet, Greenwich Village bohemia, and modern art.
When he spoke to Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office in 1960, he admitted that his experiences on the American had given him a marvelous education in the ways of the world. “That was some life,” he recalled; “what I didn’t know before then, I learned there.” Yet in virtually the same breath, he spoke of how he outgrew the city: “I learned to dislike [it] heartily,” he said, explaining that “there are lots of ways of amusing yourself [in Chicago] until you get tired of them. I got tired of them eventually.” There was more to Van Vechten’s sudden displeasure with Chicago than his capricious nature, tossing the city away once the novelty had worn off as he had with his pets and birds’ eggs. The start of his dissatisfaction with the place actually coincided with the most traumatic event of his life so far. In November 1905 his mother died, and he felt the suffocating weight of grief for the first time. More than half a century later he recalled it as being a defining moment in his life, though even at the age of eighty he still sounded surprised that the passing of another person could have had such a profound effect on him. “I didn’t get over it for weeks or months,” he said. Only very rarely did the deaths of those in his life have any lasting emotional impact on him, evidence of his essentially egocentric character. The elderly Van Vechten claimed that he used his response to a person’s death as a yardstick for measuring his feelings for him or her. “It’s one way I can tell when I’m really fond of people,” he said. “I think that’s rather interesting and probably not the experience of most people, because some people at least make themselves believe they care a great deal when a friend died. I usually didn’t.” His mother’s death was clearly an exception.
Ada’s passing forced him to take stock of his own life. In a peculiar way the experience challenged his belief in his uniqueness; it made him feel “human or normal, whatever you want to call it,” he confessed. He was twenty-five now, more than two years out of college, and saw no route for progress at the American. Writing the society column was fun as far as it went, and his reporting duties allowed him access to some fascinating aspects of life, but what he really wanted was to immerse himself in his passion for music and the stage; that alone would provide an environment in which his specialness would thrive.
Once he would have thought Chicago the perfect place for that type of escape. When Theodore Thomas passed away in January 1905, there was a tangible sense that Chicago’s golden age of orchestral concerts and opera had died with him. New York, on the other hand, was just about to enter a phenomenally exciting period as Oscar Hammerstein announced his plans to open an enormous new opera house to rival the Metropolitan. All his life Van Vechten claimed that he had been sacked for “lowering the tone of the Hearst papers” when he insulted the wife of one of the paper’s senior figures through his society column. That story was another exaggeration: he had been reprimanded for causing embarrassment but not dismissed. How much better for his rebellious self-image, though, to give the impression that an act of daring had cast him out into the cold. Neither William Randolph Hearst nor the great city of Chicago, the anecdote implied, could handle a personality as large and audacious as his. New York alone was capable of that.
* * *
“New York, my dear, you would love, with its thousand and one queer places and restaurants.” In January 1907, Van Vechten wrote these words to a childhood friend, Leah Maynard, about all the wonderful things that could be found only in this incredible city, his new home. New York was alive with possibilities for artists and innovators of all stripes. Between shifts as a singing waiter at the Pelham Café a young Irving Berlin was writing his first Tin Pan Alley songs, while Alfred Stieglitz proselytized photography as the great visual art of the new century, finding mesmeric shapes and patterns in the city’s huddled masses.
On the Lower East Side the “nickel madness” reigned, working-class immigrants filling their days and nights with the impossibly futuristic technology of moving pictures, the flickering, fast-cut images mimicking the mad pace of the modern world. Mack Sennett was still a year away from breaking into the movies, but he was a regular face on New York’s vaudeville stage along with Chinese conjurers, Armenian belly dancers, blackface minstrels, and Hungarian escapologists. On the tiny island of Manhattan, every conceivable sensation could be found.
The cultural event that gripped Van Vechten that year was a scandalous new opera from Europe. Salome, adapted by Richard Strauss from Oscar Wilde’s controversial play of the same name, tells a tale of lust, incest, and murder, in which King Herod’s niece and stepdaughter unleashes her powers of seduction to win John the Baptist’s head on a plate in revenge for his refusal of her sexual advances. The publication of Wilde’s play had been a crucial feature of Europe’s art nouveau movement of the 1890s, especially the editions augmented by Aubrey Beardsley’s vivid illustrations, his “whiplash line” in sensuous concert with the violent carnality of Wilde’s text. By the time of its debut performance in Paris in 1896 Wilde was serving a sentence of hard labor for the crime of homosexuality, transforming a play that had previously been considered indecorous into something that was regarded as a work of genuine subversion. Upon its premiere in Dresden in 1905, Salome, the opera, generated even greater excitement, partly because of Wilde’s narrative, partly because of Strauss’s unconventional music—Strauss’s own father described listening to it as having “one’s trousers full of maybugs”—and partly because of its infamous nine-minute-long dance of the seven veils, a provocative striptease performed by Salome at the request of her stepfather, that many considered the depth of depravity. The archbishop of Vienna excoriated Strauss for having put his name to such inestimable filth and lobbied to have the whole thing banned. So when the news broke that New York’s proudly conservative Metropolitan Opera was to make Salome the focal point of its 1907 season, there was widespread disbelief. American producers were known for eschewing operas considered controversial, challenging, or unconventional. For the Metropolitan and its audience, this was uncharted territory.