The Tastemaker Page 7
Like almost everyone else in the United States, Van Vechten had never heard a bar of Salome before its premiere, but the very idea of it thrilled him. Thanks to Theodore Thomas’s ambitious orchestral programs, he had been exposed to Strauss in Chicago, an experience denied most New Yorkers at that point. He had also read Wilde’s play and had enviously received a detailed account of the opera from Anna Snyder after she attended a performance in Germany during a trip to Europe. In New York with no particular plans or prospects, Van Vechten hustled the way a Hearst journalist should and used this secondhand knowledge to convince the new editor of Broadway Magazine, his fellow Chicagoan Theodore Dreiser, that he was the man to introduce New Yorkers to the most incredible theatrical event of their times. In a 1950 essay on his memories of Dreiser, Van Vechten claimed that the afternoon he arrived at Dreiser’s office to pitch his services was their first meeting and that it had come about through the involvement of a mutual acquaintance, though he could not remember whom. Given Van Vechten’s and Dreiser’s links to Chicago, that person may well have been one of Van Vechten’s well-connected fraternity brothers. There is the outside possibility that their paths may have crossed at the Everleigh Club too, as Dreiser was one of its most committed patrons. In any event, Dreiser commissioned Van Vechten to write an article entitled “Salome: The Most Sensational Opera of the Age.” It lacked the insight and flair of his later work, but it was the first phase of his reinvention from tabloid hack to an insider of the star-studded world of New York opera.
The second phase began soon after when he was hired as a staff reporter by The New York Times in November 1906 and swiftly promoted to assistant music critic in early 1907. To Van Vechten’s glee, the new position afforded him access to the city’s great artistic events, including Salome. He wrote Leah Maynard that being present at Salome’s New York debut was a life-changing event; he feared that no future theatrical event could ever match it. That first night, on January 22, was like no other he, or any other American theatergoer, had ever experienced. His boss, the Times’s lead music critic, Richard Aldrich, captured the strange ambivalence of the audience, “tense with a sort of foreboding as well as with evident and insistent interest.” He reported “a stifling and heavily erotic atmosphere” in the auditorium, “repulsive yet strangely fascinating.”
The eroticism that Aldrich described was the thing that defined Van Vechten’s memory of the night. Nine years later he wrote an essay on Olive Fremstad, the soprano who played the title role of Salome, in which he evoked the excitement he felt in watching her from the dark of the auditorium. She did not merely perform the role; she seemed to live it. So committed was she to inhabiting the character of Salome that she even spent time at a morgue, to familiarize herself with the experience of holding a dead man’s head in her hands. Her performance enthralled Van Vechten. “Her entrance was that of a splendid leopard,” he wrote, “standing poised on velvet paws on the terrace, and then creeping slowly down the staircase.” Frequently he evoked sexual activity through the stalking behavior of cats: slow-moving elegance followed by a sudden pounce, both beautiful and savage. He extended the metaphor in his description of the final scene in which Fremstad took the Baptist’s severed head in her hands and kissed it passionately on the lips. Van Vechten took a perverse pleasure in the breaching of a carnal taboo:
I cannot yet recall her as she crept from side to side of the well in which Jochanaan was confined, waiting for the slave to ascend with the severed head, without that shudder of fascination caused by the glimmering eyes of a monster serpent, or the sleek terribleness of a Bengal tiger. And at the end she suggested, as perhaps it has never before been suggested on the stage, the dregs of love, the refuse of gorged passion.
He had never seen the pains and ecstasies of human experience explored like this before, in such a vivid and unambiguous way. The fact that so many in the audience were outraged by what he found electrifying only added to his enjoyment. When the time came for the dance of the seven veils, performed by the prima ballerina Bianca Froelich, it was more than many could stand. Dozens of ladies apparently averted their gaze for the whole of the dance, and similar numbers of men avoided embarrassment by removing themselves from the auditorium altogether, at least until Froelich was through with her writhing. In his essay on Fremstad, Van Vechten deliberately underlined his divergence from the Diamond Horseshoe, the group of wealthy, conservative patrons who dominated the Metropolitan, by suggesting that the dance actually dulled the erotic intensity of the opera as a whole. Froelich’s dancing on the first night, he said, was tame compared with the wild manner in which she had torn off her layers in the dress rehearsal. And in any case, Fremstad should have been allowed to do the dance herself; what she lacked in technique she would have made up for in sexual passion.
Olive Fremstad as Salome at the Metropolitan Opera House, January 1907
Several highly influential patrons of the Metropolitan were so disgusted by the production that they issued an ultimatum: cancel the production or lose their patronage. Van Vechten was sent to interview Olive Fremstad in her suite at the Wyoming Hotel, probably his first one-to-one interview with an opera star. With every ounce of her “overpowering and dominating temperament,” as Van Vechten once described the singer, Fremstad defended the opera to the hilt, praising Strauss’s innovative brilliance. Significantly, she could find no kind words for Oscar Wilde, whose association with the opera was a chief cause of complaint, the stench of his homosexuality trial still clinging to his name. “Salome is the worst sort of degenerate,” Fremstad argued, “but Strauss makes something more of her at the last, where she gets her idea of what love means … Strauss tells me this. Wilde tells me nothing.” Van Vechten thought that an absurd claim. He knew that an attempt to separate Strauss’s depiction of Salome from Wilde’s was senseless; the one flowed directly from the other. Eight days after its one and only performance, the directors of the Metropolitan Opera House announced that Salome was canceled with immediate effect. In the piece he wrote about the decision in the Times, Van Vechten suppressed his dismay and quoted the board in also laying the blame for the whole episode on the late Oscar Wilde. “We take issue with the statement that Strauss’s music is of the same character and tendency as Wilde’s text,” it said, as if Wilde’s play were an afterthought of Strauss’s, rather than his sole inspiration. Clearly, to defend Strauss’s inventive music could be seen as dedication to one’s art; to defend the product of a deviant mind such as Oscar Wilde’s was sure to provoke disgust.
The entire controversy was Van Vechten’s first experience of art’s capacity to polarize with such power, forcing one to take a side either for or against an artwork not simply for the quality of its content but for its underlying philosophy. Salome shocked so thoroughly not only because its stripteases and severed heads offended moral sensibilities but also because it emphatically challenged a long-standing assumption that the purpose of art should be to venerate goodness. As with many artists of the art nouveau era, which bridged the romantic and the modern, moral instruction was never a goal for Wilde or Strauss, who were far more interested in using art to explore the reality of the human condition, no matter how unpalatable. Van Vechten was in complete agreement. In time, he would take up his pen “in defence [sic] of bad taste”—that is, in support of individual expression free from moral censure. For now he had neither the critical skills nor the seniority at the Times to do so. Still, there was no doubt whose side Van Vechten was on: Wilde’s and Strauss’s instinct that there was beauty to be found in ugliness appeared self-evident. The great cities of the United States had already taught him that much.
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Opera in New York was not usually such a combustible environment as it was in those opening weeks of 1907. For the majority of his career at the Times, Van Vechten’s role was less music critic and more celebrity-watching gossip columnist as he covered the comings and goings of European opera singers, usually portrayed in the press as a species sep
arate from drab, businesslike Americans. He fueled speculation about the love life of Geraldine Farrar, gasped at the fashion trends set by Mary Garden, gave dramatic insights into rivalries between chest-thumping tenors, and reported with astonishment the vast riches that these stars were raking in year after year thanks to the New York public’s fixation with the opera. Making the most of his yellow journalism training, he quickly became accomplished at turning the most trivial episodes into news stories. CARUSO’S MUSTACHE OFF declaimed the headline above his report of the momentous occasion when Enrico Caruso shaved off his mustache: “Can he sing without it?” Other earth-shattering scoops included Nellie Melba’s decision to charge a dollar per autograph and the profligacy of Henry Clay Frick, the steel magnate, who paid one hundred thousand dollars for a box at the Metropolitan, before splashing out thousands more to have it redecorated.
Van Vechten enjoyed the froth and found the showy self-importance of the opera celebrities he met highly entertaining. At a time when journalists were given the kind of access to performers and rehearsals that is unheard of in the early twenty-first century, Van Vechten’s working week was inhabited by the world-famous, and he assiduously cataloged his association with them in his scrapbooks. Some he even photographed, including Luisa Tetrazzini—the Italian soprano and prima donna in every sense—as she left The New York Times building in her customary silk turban and chinchilla fur coat. The photographs were an extension of the theatrical pictures he had taken in his youth and a precursor to the celebrity portraits he spent the last thirty years of his life obsessively shooting. It was less the person he was capturing, more the fame attached to him or her, another handful of glitter for his collections. Even so, the fact that these high-powered celebrities posed for him, no matter how informally, shows that he felt comfortable in their company, and they in his. The tartness of his usual personality was sugarcoated in their presence: more deferential, less abrasive. The hustler from Chicago was turning into a silver-tongued Manhattan schmoozer.
Luisa Tetrazzini took to Van Vechten so warmly that she allowed him to ghostwrite an article for her in Cosmopolitan magazine, detailing her life and her rise to fame. Van Vechten also clicked with Fyodor Chaliapin, a Russian bass whom he described as “exuberant,” “like a great big boy, a sophomore in college, who played football.” Chaliapin possessed only rudimentary English when Van Vechten first interviewed him in the dining room of the Savoy Hotel one dreary Sunday morning. But the barrier of language was swiftly overcome by their shared love of drinking and eating. “I spik English,” Van Vechten recalled as his interviewee’s first words. “How do you do? et puis good-by, et puis I drrrink, you drrink, he drrrrinks, et puis I love you!” The interview started shortly before midday and continued until late into the evening, though not much in the way of newsworthy comment was gathered. At one point, back in his room at the Brevoort Hotel after a whole day of drinking and eating, Chaliapin supposedly performed his party trick of singing along with a record of “La Marseillaise,” managing to drown out the sound of the phonograph altogether, so powerful was his voice. “The effect in this moderately small hotel room can only be faintly conceived,” said Van Vechten afterward, his ears ringing with the memory.
The nodal point of this sparkling pageant was not an exotic foreigner but Oscar Hammerstein, the millionaire cigar manufacturer turned theater impresario, who opened the Manhattan Opera House with the aim of breaking the monopoly of the Metropolitan and smashing the elitism and conservatism that its wealthy patrons exerted over opera in New York. For four years between 1906 and 1910 Hammerstein produced remarkable performances and elevated New York to one of the great opera capitals of the world. As a reporter from the Times Van Vechten was one of a select group who got to see Hammerstein up close during the four years of his reign. Helped immeasurably by the fact that a friend of his from Chicago, Anna Pollock, was Hammerstein’s press agent, Van Vechten was a frequent guest at the rooms above the Victoria Theatre on Broadway where Hammerstein lived, “gilded, but shabby, dusty and dingy, and always crowded” with antique furniture, papers, and various detritus strewn around him. The only thing that seemed clean in those disheveled quarters was Hammerstein himself, always immaculately turned out in the finest tailoring. Through Pollock, Van Vechten filed a number of puff pieces about Hammerstein, such as the unlikely sounding one about a couple from Winnipeg, Manitoba, who came all the way from Canada to hear Rigoletto at the Manhattan with their eighteen-month-old baby, whom they deposited at the cloakroom for the evening. Van Vechten quoted Hammerstein as saying that the Manhattan could not “check all children who come with their mothers. However, it can be arranged occasionally if the baby is as good as this one.”
Frequently, and his recollections of both Hammerstein and Chaliapin are cases in point, one wonders whether Van Vechten’s anecdotes about the New York opera at this period capture the personalities of the real people he knew or merely the caricatures of their public images, the one-dimensional “stars” about whom he wrote in the Times and felt so proud to know. To an extent, this reflects a hazard of Van Vechten’s testimony on just about anything in his past. An engaging and vivid storyteller though he may have been, he was certainly no infallible witness, and his years of writing gossip for newspapers undoubtedly exacerbated a natural tendency to embroider the truth for the sake of a good yarn. In this case, the profound influence his early years in New York had on him distorted Van Vechten’s memories of the era, encouraging him to depict its personalities as larger and more magnetic than almost any he encountered at any stage of his life. He admitted as much in an interview in 1960: “some of the artists of that period, like Fremstad and Mary Garden, were so much better than anything we’ve had since, that it’s very hard for me to get interested in opera any more.” In the late 1910s Van Vechten wrote brilliant dissections of the craft of performance in various arts; no other critic in the United States came close to producing the same enthusiasm and depth of insight about such a breadth of music and dance, from the blues to Schoenberg. Yet when he turned his attention to the personalities of the performers in question, he frequently resorted to caricatures, gossipy dinner party anecdotes wheeled out by an inveterate name-dropper. There was always a part of Van Vechten that remained the stage door autograph hunter, the little boy from Iowa dazzled by the fame of the big stars, rapt by the spectacle of the show.
FOUR
A Certain Sensuous Charm
Within a year of arriving in New York Van Vechten had fully embraced the decadent notion that life itself was a work of art. Spending well beyond his means, he set about beautifying himself with suits and silk shirts from Fifth Avenue and eye-catching jewelry. Salome had affected him profoundly, and something of its dissolute, daring atmosphere enveloped him; the Wildean notion of sophistication, a knowing worldliness combined with a quixotic love of physical beauty, became the central value of Van Vechten’s existence. However, as an elderly man Van Vechten concluded: “You don’t pick up sophistication by wanting to”; it was not something that could be simply bought and slipped on like a fur coat. It could be acquired only through the loss of innocence and the steady accretion of experience of every sort—mind and body.
While the Metropolitan Opera and the Manhattan took care of his mind, his body was attended to in less respectable establishments, usually under the cover of darkness. The historian Lewis Erenberg credits the explosion of nighttime pleasure districts in American cities at the start of the twentieth century as the key cultural break with the nineteenth century because they provided perfect arenas in which young adults could “burst out of domestic controls and get closer to real desires.” This was definitely true for Van Vechten, whose yearning for sexual adventure, interracial company, and rebellion against good taste all were catered to in New York’s most debauched nocturnal playgrounds.
Portrait of Carl Van Vechten by Martha Baker, 1906
When Van Vechten arrived in New York, the hub of entertainment was Manhattan’s Tenderloi
n district, at the southern end of which was a large African-American community known as Black Bohemia that gave Van Vechten the chance to expand on his adventures in the Black Belt of Chicago. At clubs like the Haymarket and Café Wilkins, he was able to hear the city’s hottest ragtime musicians—both Scott Joplin and Eubie Blake were regulars—and as a very old man Van Vechten insisted that he once dined in the Tenderloin with one of his all-time heroes, Bert Williams, of the legendary Williams and Walker double act. The appeal of these places, though, was much more than good music and celebrities. Like most of Chicago’s Black Belt, Black Bohemia existed only in the peripheral vision of the city’s moral guardians, meaning that in its most popular nightspots blacks and whites could carouse together in ways they never could on the street in the light of day. Shrouded from the stern, judgmental gaze of the authorities, venues in this part of town also afforded nonheterosexual men and women, like Van Vechten, the chance to socialize, flirt, and even make pickups in relative safety.