The Tastemaker Page 8

  Similar experiences were to be had in Greenwich Village, just then beginning to acquire a reputation for dissidence and bohemian living. By night in the Village, the winding streets and poor working-class Italian communities living cheek by jowl with the recent influx of artists and political radicals made the neighborhood feel very different from any other that Van Vechten had previously encountered, vaguely resembling the tales that he had heard about the Left Bank. In the ramshackle basement bars and dingy restaurants, the environment was different from the Tenderloin—more discussion of the sexual theories of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis than dancing to ragtime tunes—but the same opportunities existed for taboo encounters. Given his sexual interest in men and his past experiences in the Levee, Van Vechten would have almost certainly been familiar with the fleshpots of the Bowery too. At the Bowery’s “fairy” clubs, like Paresis Hall, male prostitutes worked the room in search of clients, while customers were entertained by effeminate men onstage performing acts of female impersonation. Some clubs even dared flout the laws against transvestism—masquerading as a woman could be punishable by several weeks’ incarceration—and allowed male entertainers to do full drag shows. Van Vechten’s fascination with cross-dressing that started with Herbie Newell’s skirt dance led him to numerous drag balls in Harlem in the 1920s—he even judged one once—and he would have enjoyed a Bowery show too.

  The popular stereotypes of homosexuality of the time revolved around caricatures of limp-wristed inverts, half-male creatures mincing their way up and down Broadway. In reality, of course, gay men expressed their sexuality in many more subtle ways that often went entirely unnoticed by the straight majority. As Van Vechten discovered, New York had a thriving gay social world, but almost none of it was out in the open. Outside the clubs and brothels of the Bowery, homosexuality crept in the shadows and scrambled itself into secret codes. In most places, if Van Vechten wanted to signal his interest in another man, he would likely have followed the sort of discreet tactics that many gay men of the time employed. A fleeting moment of eye contact held just a fraction longer and steadier than normal might start it off, perhaps followed by an inquiry about the time or a request for a match to light a cigarette. If the other fellow responded to his attentions with a smile and a line of conversation, then he knew that things might be taken further. Like many others, Van Vechten also gave little clues to his sexual interest in men through his physical appearance. His silk shirts and ties, his immaculately groomed hair, the occasional flower worn in his buttonhole, and a discreet bracelet gave him the merest hint of the “fairy” caricature, colorful and a little showy, just enough to communicate his difference without attracting censure or antagonism. The biggest but also subtlest clue was the intaglio ring depicting the classical scene of Leda being raped by a swan he wore on the little finger of his left hand. The myth of Leda acquired something of a cult among many writers and artists of the fin de siècle era, a symbol of forbidden desire and taboo practices that some homosexual dandies displayed as a sign that they existed outside the sexual mainstream.

  Van Vechten enjoyed the secretive culture of New York’s clandestine gay world. The thrill of being a select member of a closed community getting up to things that would enrage public decency was one of his central pleasures. Throughout his adult life it seemed that the more forbidden an assignation, the more exciting it was, whether it be with tough-looking sailors, effeminate teenagers, or black call boys. Not just on his person but throughout his creative work as essayist, novelist, and photographer he played with codes endlessly, leaving clues and references that those in the know would instantly pick up on. It was an obsession that hovered somewhere between risqué humor and an act of defiance, a refusal to bury his identity beneath conventional morality. In one of his novels, Firecrackers, written in 1925, a character named Paul Moody, who bears many superficial similarities to Van Vechten, buys two red neckties, sartorial shorthand for homosexuality. When he gives them to a helpful messenger boy as a gift, the boy accepts them “but not without grumbling that he wouldn’t be caught drowneded [sic] in a red tie.” Years after that, when Van Vechten’s days and nights were taken up with photography, he had dozens of homosexual men—friends or artists he admired—come to his studio to have their pictures taken. In the poses of the subjects, their outfits, the props they held, or the floral backdrops placed behind them, Van Vechten left a sign to make the viewer aware that they were looking at another cherished face in his vast gallery of gay men, giving visibility to a hidden minority as well as to his own sexuality.

  Though he was an avid cruiser for most of his adult life, his most lasting homosexual relationships came through introductions made by other homosexual friends. In 1906 the lesbian writer and activist Edna Kenton, an old friend from Chicago, freshly arrived in New York, introduced Van Vechten to Avery Hopwood, a promising young playwright whose innocent, baby-faced appearance was comically out of step with his hedonistic personality and incorrigibly irreverent sense of humor. Gertrude Stein said she detected in Hopwood “the air of a sheep with the possibility of being a wolf.” Soon after meeting, he and Van Vechten forged an intense bond expressed through private jokes, gossip, and sexual innuendo that resulted in crescendos of shrieking laughter and often had the effect of making those outside their circle of two feel alienated and uneasy, wondering whether the joke was at their expense. Alice Toklas once described their combined presence as “gay, irresponsible and brilliant.” The double meaning of “gay” may well have been deliberate, for it was an open secret in their circle that Van Vechten and Hopwood’s early friendship periodically strayed into a romantic and sexual intimacy, or “dead sweet affectionateness,” as their mutual friend Mabel Dodge euphemistically describes it in her memoirs. Wherever they went, they were the self-appointed life and soul, playfully competing to see who could be the wittiest, most daring bon viveur. Twenty years before it became a defining characteristic of New York life, a spirit of irreverent levity enveloped them as they glided across the city at night. Their drinking habits preempted the atmosphere of the 1920s too. Frequently they got so drunk together that one or the other would subject nearby innocents to a tirade of insults, a habit that lost both of them numerous friends over the years.

  Portrait of Avery Hopwood by Florine Stettheimer, c. 1915–18

  Hopwood lived the life of a homosexual man as openly as was possible amid the considerable constraints of the time and only pursued relationships with other men. Van Vechten, however, continued to be romantically involved with the opposite sex. He was able to feel physically attracted to certain women, but his sincere need for female companionship was much more emotional than physical. “Women, seemingly, have had more influence on me than men,” he observed in his final years, thinking of how bold, charismatic women, such as Mrs. Sublett; Mahala Dutton, the glamorous older woman from Cedar Rapids; and, later, Gertrude Stein, had captivated his attention and steered his life in new directions. It surely started with his mother, another headstrong woman, whose adoration of her precious baby boy inculcated in him the belief that he was somehow set apart from others. As an adult he rarely felt attracted to females in the same powerfully magnetic way that he was drawn to other males, but he hungered for their love, adulation, and physical affection just as urgently.

  In the years he spent chasing stories at the American, his relationship with Anna Snyder had evolved from occasional adolescent fumbling into a steady and heatedly passionate long-distance romance. “I am determined to be a villain,” Snyder telegrammed Van Vechten in advance of a visit to Chicago in 1904; “in other words—Stratford Hotel—six o’clock—Friday. And may the gods forgive me!” At the end of what had clearly been an eventful stay she sent another telegram, assuring him, “I do care and that it has been the best week ever.” From a vacation in Europe, Snyder wrote to outline her vision of their life together in a union that would joyously overturn the conventions of the society in which they were raised. Comparing the “pure passion”
of their relationship with La Bohème, which she had just heard for the first time, she painted a picture of “a bohemian domesticity,” governed only by love and mutual adoration. Intimacy, honesty, and art would be the basis of their relationship, a new sort of marriage.

  “Bohemian domesticity.” The phrase is strikingly evocative of their relationship yet also intriguingly vague, an attempt, perhaps, to reconcile Snyder’s need for a conventional marriage with Van Vechten’s unconventional sexual identity. That she must have known about Van Vechten’s strong sexual interest in men seems a virtual certainty and not only because his outward appearance semaphored it. Long before their wedding their letters to each other contained cryptic references to Van Vechten’s “nature,” something he said he could neither ignore nor conceal. Considering how they danced around the issue on paper, it is difficult to know whether Snyder realized the full implications of this, though at times it obviously played on her mind. “Do you remember once saying to me that you were much like your friend Campau in regard to his ‘philandering spirit’?,” she asked with forced casualness in one letter. “If I really thought so I think I should prefer never to see you again.” In the months leading up to their wedding, she teased him that “all the men you seem most to fancy personally and admire, are of slender years.” It is a delicate turn of phrase, but one that reverberates with the defense used by Oscar Wilde in his obscenity trial of 1895, in which he described his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas as a manifestation of a Hellenic ideal, “a great affection of an elder for a younger man” of the sort that laced itself through the great art of Western history. Van Vechten was one of the many young men of the early twentieth century whose understanding of their homosexual desires was partially achieved through Wilde’s argument, his physical attraction to men emboldened and validated by an artistic and intellectual lineage that stretched back to Michelangelo and Plato. As a middle-aged man, Van Vechten’s attachment to this classical model of homosexual love was manifested in his predilection for taking lovers young enough to be his sons and capturing the physical beauty of youth in many of his photography sessions. Snyder noticed that even at the age of twenty-six Van Vechten liked to put himself in the role of the older man, the one with wisdom to impart and control to exert. His experience of being the ingenue “with all the joy, glamour and hope of life before him,” as Wilde put it, came in his connections not to men but to older women. His relationships with Mahala Dutton and Mrs. Sublett, for example, lacked an overt sexual dimension, allowing him to exhibit his vulnerabilities and submit himself to their tutelage. With other men, however, he displayed a desire for status and dominance, an expression of the traditional masculinity of the powerfully built, high-achieving males in the Van Vechten family.

  If Snyder’s bohemian domesticity encompassed a reluctant accommodation of her fiancé’s roving eye, an arrangement of that sort would not have been out of place in the fashionable neighborhoods of downtown Manhattan where Van Vechten was mixing. The writers Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood, who became close friends of Van Vechten’s around 1912, were intellectually committed to having an open marriage in which the autonomy of either partner would not be restricted by sexual jealousy or dependency of any kind. In one of Boyce’s unpublished short stories a Village artist called Eugene encapsulated the ideal perfectly, in an echo of the imprecise aspirations that Snyder voiced in her letters to Van Vechten. “This wouldn’t be an ordinary marriage,” says Eugene. “Neither of us wants that—domestic atmosphere and all that … We can go on independently of one another.”

  Whatever the exact arrangement, Van Vechten agreed with Snyder that theirs would be a blissful wedded life of a sort that folks in Cedar Rapids could not possibly conceive. He was not madly in love with Snyder, but he was swept up in the story of their romance, their shared narrative of being freethinking rebels struggling against provincialism. Moreover, he basked in the strength of Snyder’s feelings for him. Her letters professed him the sole focus of her erotic and romantic fantasies, her soul mate and her reason for living. The attention was exquisite. Accustomed as a child to having his every whim tolerated and indulged, as a man he needed desperately to be fussed over and worshipped by his lovers, his flaws instantly forgiven and his indiscretions just as swiftly forgotten. If his specialness went unrecognized, he could offer nothing in return. “I could never be in love with anybody who wasn’t in love with me,” he once admitted. When he felt Snyder had not expressed her adoration in sufficiently effusive terms, he sulked and lashed out in rebuke. After one particularly petulant episode Snyder asked, “I am not writing you love letters—is that your complaint? Do you care more for symbols than realities?” Frequently that was just so. Their correspondence often reads like the love letters of precocious teenagers rather than those entering their late twenties. For all his supposed sophistication, there remained at Van Vechten’s core an emotional immaturity, both childlike and childish.

  Playing at rebellious star-crossed lovers, Van Vechten and Snyder hatched a plan to marry in London in the summer of 1907, without their families present. Displaying less bohemianism and more bourgeois pragmatism than she would have liked to admit, Snyder briefly wobbled over the plan, fearing the reaction of her parents as well as the cost and the practicalities of life immediately after the wedding. Her fiancé, however, was immovable. He was already jealous enough of her European travels and desperately wanted to see the opera in Munich and Paris as well as the music halls of London, the next stage in his cosmopolitan education. He insisted that the wedding must go ahead; Snyder eventually relented. Of course Van Vechten had nowhere near enough money to fund his grand tour out of his wages from the Times, a little more than fifty dollars per week, all of which was spent as soon as it was made. To cover the cost, he cashed in the small bequests left him by his grandmothers. Carl’s spending and accumulation of debt were a constant source of concern for his father, but Charles was delighted about the wedding, despite some sadness that he would not be permitted to attend. “It shall be a day of joy,” he wrote in congratulation, adding that Van Vechten’s mother would have been more pleased than anyone: “you must never forget how much she loved you.”

  Having married in Christ Church in Woburn Square, the newlyweds took in the highlights of the theatrical season in England, France, and Germany as part of a lengthy honeymoon. Paris was the undoubted climax. In Van Vechten’s imagination the city was an almost mythical place akin to Babylon and Atlantis, and he was overwhelmed by his first encounter with it. “It would be difficult to exaggerate my emotion,” he related several years later in his novel Peter Whiffle, as though describing a scene from a belle epoque painting rather than Paris itself: “the white wine, the bearded students, the exquisite women, all young and smiling and gay, all organdie and lace and sweet-peas, went to my head.” Though he returned to the city many times, he maintained “the first night was the best and every other night more or less a pale reflection of that, always, indeed, coloured a little by the memory of it.”

  Back in New York the new Mr. and Mrs. Van Vechten moved into a suitably bohemian home when they took a room at the Maison Favre boardinghouse on West Fortieth Street, which backed onto the Metropolitan Opera House. The accommodation was not remotely luxurious, but it was a discernible improvement on the dingy room Van Vechten had been renting at a similar establishment on West Thirty-ninth Street for the last year. Edna Kenton was a frequent guest at many of the parties the Van Vechtens threw at their new home and thought it one of the best social spots in New York. Reminiscing about those times, she told Van Vechten how she loved “your indecent and unforgettable tales, with your wonderful blush coming swiftly after, and Ann’s great big eyes brimming with laughter with you, and at the world.” Van Vechten had equally fond memories. “It wasn’t formal and it wasn’t rich, but it was delightful.”

  * * *

  Roughly a year into his marriage, in May 1908, Van Vechten’s career received a huge boost when the Times awarded him the cove
ted position of Paris correspondent. Living on the fashionable rue Jacob, he and Snyder ensconced themselves in Left Bank society, befriending an array of prominent figures, including Polaire, the Algerian-born star of Parisian theater, as famous for her corseted thirteen-inch waist as for her acting talent; the American opera singer Bessie Abott; and James Hazen Hyde, the multimillionaire spendthrift, who had recently moved to France in the wake of a corporate scandal in which he was centrally implicated. The lifestyle was pleasing, but Van Vechten was unsuited to the job and often felt out of his depth. While interviewing the English author Elinor Glyn at the Ritz, he asked Glyn who should play the leading man in the forthcoming stage adaptation of her novel Three Weeks. The great lady said she did not know, but whoever it was must have class and must be a European. “No American, with his vulgar padded shoulders,” she insisted. As Van Vechten reached self-consciously for the shoulder pads beneath his suit jacket, Glyn said, “I didn’t mean you, dear boy. It isn’t your fault that you haven’t centuries of breeding behind you.” It was a silly remark, the sort of throwaway witticism that Glyn was famous for. The fact that Van Vechten remembered it decades later and that it was one of the very few anecdotes he told about what should have been an immensely exciting time in his young life indicates the general sense of unease he felt in the job. With little knowledge of politics, and even less interest, he was unable to file the breadth of stories required of a foreign correspondent. His stories showed Paris not as one of the world’s great political and financial capitals but as a playground for exceptional creatures and their exuberant lifestyles. The European jaunts of prominent Americans appeared frequently in his features, with details of the luxury and splendor the Vanderbilts and the Barrymores treated themselves to during their months abroad. The few stories about diplomatic rows and developments in the business world, when they did come, were clearly not enough to convince Van Vechten’s employers that he should be kept on in such a wide brief, and he was recalled after a year in the post. “I don’t think I was exactly what they wanted,” he admitted, dryly. It was a chastening experience, one of the few that knocked his usually formidable self-confidence. He returned to New York in the summer of 1909 to continue his duties under Richard Aldrich: filing routine copy on the opera and mopping up the review work that Aldrich thought unworthy of his own attentions.