The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  Trying to sort people who lived a century ago into neat little piles of straight, gay, and bisexual by transposing their relationships to a post-Stonewall world is a difficult, and perhaps futile, exercise. This is almost certainly true with Van Vechten. That, from an early age, he had strong sexual attractions to men that outweighed any similar feelings he may have had for women is undeniable. But it does not follow that his intimate relationships with women were therefore fraudulent. These were not loveless shams of respectability to cover the dark and painful secret of the love that dare not speak its name. Beneath the bohemian exterior Van Vechten had some thoroughly conventional needs and yearned for the domestic stability that his parents had enjoyed. Until his death he kept a sequence of his parents’ heartfelt love letters, written shortly before their wedding. “I must have kisses for breakfast, kisses for dinner and kisses for supper,” Charles wrote Ada, whose love, he said, had “a spring like influence over me.” Their nurturing relationship as husband and wife was one Van Vechten idealized and craved for himself. He could not feel fulfilled without a steady female companion in his life, a wife to adore him, to love him and reassure him, and at times he enjoyed the physical intimacy that came with these more conventional relationships.

  To borrow a cliché from our own time, Van Vechten wanted it all: companionship and worship from an adoring wife who desired him, but also the freedom to follow his sexual urges wherever they led him. He was still on some level the greedy boy who found compromise impossible and would not be satisfied until he had taken every egg from the bird’s nest. Anna Snyder had been swamped by his demands and felt ignored and taken for granted. Marinoff, whose whole life was deeply unorthodox and filled with atypical relationships, seemed better suited to a romance that deviated from societal norms. She was also an independent woman with a thriving career who would not wilt in the shadow of Van Vechten’s enormous personality. Around a year after their first meeting Van Vechten told Marinoff that she was everything he had always dreamed of, “the only one I have ever found who completely satisfies me.” It was the kind of disingenuous hyperbole he was to lavish upon her repeatedly over the fifty-two years that they were together. He loved her, and in the moment of uttering such fierce devotion he probably believed every word of it. But clearly she did not “completely satisfy” him in every way, and Marinoff knew it. From their earliest days together she was aware of Van Vechten’s homosexual desires and probably accepted that he would sometimes have sexual encounters with men. Maybe her willingness to share him with others stemmed from a belief in free love, the “New Woman,” and other radical ideas about gender roles that were fashionable in the circles in which she and Van Vechten mixed. Many couples of their acquaintance, believing that traditional marriage curbed the freedoms of the individual to an intolerable extent, tried similar companionate arrangements. The fact that Marinoff herself appears to have remained monogamous during the long course of their relationship suggests hers was a compromise she knew she had to make in order to remain beside the man she so passionately loved.

  Van Vechten was overjoyed to have Marinoff in his life, taking care of his emotional needs and some of Tom-Tom’s physical ones. She was not, however, the right person to aid his “progress,” his next step on the road to true sophistication. In a crude assessment of her capabilities he once waspishly declared that “Fania’s native intelligence is great; her opinions are frequently worthless.” Enlightenment would come instead from a dazzling new source.

  FIVE

  How to Read Gertrude Stein

  In March 1913 Van Vechten interviewed John C. Freund, the editor of Musical America and one of the nation’s leading authorities on classical music, about how the United States might create art as great as that produced by its cousins in Europe. The key, according to Freund, was women. Just as reformers such as Frances Willard and Jane Addams sought to improve society by imbuing it with civilizing values, by opening salons in their own front rooms, the nation’s ladies could foster exciting new arts scenes, full of domestic virtue. “Any one or two dozens of great women in New York … could establish the first one,” Freund assured his interviewer. It must have amused Van Vechten that Freund appeared unaware that at that very moment a great New York woman was doing just as he suggested, though the things her salon promoted were a long way from the idyll of feminine purity that Freund had in mind.

  The woman in question was Van Vechten’s remarkable new friend Mabel Dodge. After years of living in picturesque luxury in Italy and France, Mabel had begrudgingly moved to New York with her husband, the acclaimed architect Edwin Dodge and their son, John, in the summer of 1912, finding the United States’ most sophisticated city monolithic, gray, and lifeless. In the spacious rooms of her Fifth Avenue apartment, the second floor of an imposing brownstone, she passed her time daydreaming of the Renaissance splendor of Florence and the art nouveau glamour of Paris. “We have left everything worthwhile behind us,” she raged. “America is all machinery and money-making and factories—it is ugly, ugly, ugly!” She decided it was her duty and destiny to release this city into a new plain of experience.

  The change began beneath her very feet. First, she ordered every inch of her apartment be painted and papered a brilliant white. Gleaming white marble mantelpieces and long white curtains were brought in too, along with yard upon flowing yard of white Chinese silk, “a repudiation of grimy New York.” While Edwin and John were attending football games, she crisscrossed the city in a chauffeur-driven limousine, peering out at the passing shopwindows, dashing out of the car only when a divine chandelier, chaise longue, or work of colored glass came into view, spending no more time on the mean, functional streets of New York than was absolutely necessary. On the second floor of 23 Fifth Avenue, Mabel created a pristine haven of sophistication. Now all she needed were some heavenly beings to share it with.

  According to Dodge, she and Van Vechten first met at a dinner party hosted by a mutual friend. Sitting opposite him at dinner, Mabel was instantly captivated by Van Vechten, who struck her as a large “porcine” man dressed fussily in a frilly white shirt with “finely textured red skin,” the teeth of a “wild boar,” and “brown eyes, full of twinkling, good-natured malice.” Van Vechten was equally intrigued by the exotic but taciturn Mabel. After dinner he sought her out and made her laugh by discreetly making “affectionate fun” of their hosts. “He seemed amused at everything; there wasn’t a hint of boredom in him,” Mabel recalled. At the end of the evening she offered him a lift in her limousine. Instead of wanting to go home to bed, Van Vechten asked to be taken to the Metropolitan Opera House. “I have to meet some fellows in the lobby at the last act and see what we’re going to say about it tomorrow,” he explained, trying to suppress a smile. “After all, one takes one’s job seriously, I hope.”

  Van Vechten became a constant presence at the Dodge household, often arriving in the morning to take Mabel to watch rehearsals at the Metropolitan or the Manhattan. Unperturbed by his “warm friendships for other men,” for a time Mabel explored the possibility of taking Van Vechten as her lover. It was only when the intensity of Van Vechten’s attachment to Marinoff became apparent that Mabel settled for a close, if peculiar, friendship. “He was the first person who animated my lifeless rooms,” Mabel said, though he was far from the last.

  From the early months of 1913 Mabel opened up her home to New York’s most influential people. On any given night a hundred or more extraordinary characters ascended the polished wooden staircase of 23 Fifth Avenue to enter Mabel’s immaculate chamber of white. Poets from Greenwich Village in scuffed shoes and frayed cuffs were followed by suave, well-fed art dealers, feminist radicals, free love evangelists, college professors, and Marxist agitators. In they filed like rare, exotic beasts stepping onto a bohemian Ark, each of them different from the last, all of them vital to the same outlandish project. They were there for one of Mabel’s Evenings, a chance for New York’s fractured array of radicals and dissidents to argue, debat
e, and create. Each Evening was themed by some vital current issue. There were Evenings on “sex antagonism,” cubism, “dangerous characters,” birth control, female suffrage, “art and unrest,” revolutionary socialism, and Freudian psychoanalysis. At Mabel’s salon the unthinkable was commonplace; the unsayable, routinely said.

  Van Vechten adored the Evenings. He had no interest in the radical political ideas or the unsettling philosophical positions that were posited, but he loved the beautiful surroundings and the spirit of transgression that prevailed. He drank in the atmosphere as greedily as he did the champagne that sparkled and fizzed in Mabel’s thin-stemmed crystal flutes. The tiniest sensual details buried themselves into his memory: “Curtis Cigarettes, poured by the hundreds from their neat pine boxes into white bowls, trays of Virginia ham and white Gorgonzola sandwiches, pale Italian boys in aprons, and a Knabe piano.” The adornments that pleased him most were the clusters of exceptional people who spun like luminous tops across Mabel’s luxurious Angora rugs. “The groups separated, came together, separated came together,” Van Vechten wrote in re-creating the scene for a novel in 1922. “I talked with one and then another, smoking constantly and drinking a great deal of Scotch whisky.” At Mabel’s salon suffragists learned about mother complexes and penis envy; anarchists were introduced to spiritualism; bohemian artists discovered the mind-expanding power of peyote. In one corner Emma Goldman could be found in heated conversation with “Big” Bill Haywood, the irascible leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, while a Broadway celebrity like Avery Hopwood shared fine wine and cigars with Alfred Stieglitz in another. All the time Mabel floated on the periphery, sphinxlike, watching.

  Mabel Dodge, c. 1910

  This was Mabel’s genius, Van Vechten said: her ability to create a charged environment from thin air; her trick of bringing together incongruous groups of people and watching silently from the sidelines as they argued, joked, and got drunk together. It appealed to his sense of mischief as well as to his decadent instincts. The fact that the salon became an object of notoriety throughout the city, the physical embodiment of Greenwich Village degeneracy, added an extra edge. Newspaper reporters made their way into the apartment one evening and recounted the most heinous sights, of “women in low-necked gowns” smoking cigarettes and consorting with “men with long, black, flowing locks,” all of which was shorthand for sedition and sexual perversion.

  Despite the salon’s reputation for radical politics and the mingling of unlikely groups, the attendees were still capable of being shocked, as Van Vechten proved when Mabel once allowed him to organize the program of entertainment. Inspired by his visits to the cabaret clubs in the Tenderloin, he arranged for a duo of black vaudeville entertainers to put on a little show at the salon, which for all its radicalism was a solidly white environment. Mabel and her bohemians were apparently horrified at what they witnessed. “The man strummed a banjo, sang an embarrassing song and she cavorted,” Mabel said. “They both leered and rolled their suggestive eyes and made me feel first hot and then cold, for I had never been so near this kind of thing before, but Carl rocked with laughter and little shrieks escaped him as he clapped his little hands.”

  Van Vechten had expected and hoped for that response. The fact that many high-minded whites found African-American entertainment vulgar was one of the reasons he loved it. As far as he was concerned, an appreciation of black culture was a revolt against mainstream tastes and a means of confounding societal expectations. He was far from the first white bohemian to see blackness in this way, and he would certainly not be the last. In the early nineteenth century minstrel performers such as Stephen Foster, Dan Emmett, and Frank Brower ran away from home and toured the country with their blackface acts as a means of repudiating the values and norms of the communities in which they had been raised. Van Vechten’s situation was very different, of course, but still, his connection to black people and their culture provided him innumerable ways of rejecting the conventions of society or rebelling against his upbringing, an adolescent urge that persisted in him until late middle age. Even his habit of using the word “nigger” to refer to black people was an immature act of defiance against his parents. Of course such language was not uncommon among white people of the time, but Van Vechten should have known better. After all, he had grown up in a household where racial equality was passionately supported and where racial epithets were strictly taboo; Charles Van Vechten despised the word “nigger” and would not allow it to be spoken in his house. Consequently, when Van Vechten used the word, he did so deliberately and precisely—not because he ever wanted to cause hurt or offense to black people but because the word for him held the allure of the forbidden, a quality he associated with much African-American culture.

  Still, the revulsion that the appearance of black entertainers provoked among Mabel’s salon of self-proclaimed radicals demonstrates how strongly his ideas about American art and culture differed from many of those around him. Mabel, for instance, had started her salon to shake New York out of what she perceived to be a very American slumber of anodyne mass culture and commercialized frippery. Her tastes were radical but not remotely demotic, and she sometimes despaired of Van Vechten’s crudity, his resistance to drawing distinctions between low and high culture. She dismissed as cheap, vacuous, and soulless many of the things he loved best: backstreet entertainments, popular song and dance shows, and the hedonism of uncomplicated pleasures. For her the objective of all art was intellectual and spiritual enrichment. Van Vechten, on the other hand, had grown to love the arts for their capacity to stimulate the senses, to excite, to arouse with novelty and sensation.

  Despite their very different sensibilities, Van Vechten credited Mabel with setting his life on a new course. “I think I owe more to her, on the whole, than I do to any other one person,” he once reflected. Given the combustibility of their friendship over the years, that was a remarkable admission. They periodically fell out over slights and indiscretions, real and imagined, causing silent feuds that dragged on for years before lines of communication were opened once again as if nothing had happened. During the détentes theirs was an extraordinary friendship sustained through an engrossing exchange of letters in which they joked, gossiped, and bickered. From the 1920s onward their correspondence also became an arena in which they jostled for primacy, each attempting to persuade the other of the superiority of his or her taste. But in that first year and a half of their acquaintance there was no debate about who was the senior figure. Mabel was the latest of Van Vechten’s female mentors to instruct him in the art of living. It was she who proved to him definitively that Americans were equal to Europeans in terms of their creative genius. Trivial though it might sound, she also taught him techniques for being the perfect host, managing to appear both withdrawn and omnipresent at the same time, a skill that was crucial to Van Vechten’s public reputation as an important figure on the New York arts scene in the decade following the First World War.

  Perhaps, though, the greatest lesson Mabel taught him was how to bolster one’s profile by championing the work of others. That particular lesson started the day she handed him a book, slim and elegantly bound in ornate Florentine wallpaper, containing the text of Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia by Gertrude Stein, at that point a noted member of the Parisian avant-garde and friend to Picasso, Renoir, and Matisse, yet virtually anonymous in the United States. Written by Stein in the summer of 1912 at Mabel’s home in Italy, Van Vechten’s copy was one of a small number that Mabel had privately printed and dispersed to her flourishing crowd of New York acolytes. Beginning with one of Stein’s most famous lines—“The days are wonderful and the nights are wonderful and the life is pleasant”—Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia is a typical example of Stein’s playful, disorientating prose in which words dance and jut from the page, their objective being to create a mood through sound and rhythm. In promoting the book, Mabel introduced Stein to numerous influential Americans, but she was mo
tivated to do so as much by the prospect of enhancing her own reputation as a modernist trendsetter as by her love of Stein’s work. Stein, who was herself an immensely ambitious woman who carefully constructed her public reputation, suspected as much, and jealousy, distrust, and rivalry enshrouded their subsequent relationship.

  When Van Vechten took up Stein’s cause, his reasons were a mixture of sincere admiration for Stein’s writing and a desire to attach himself to the stirrings of an exciting new moment in American arts. Immediately he was drawn to the euphony of her writing, and with his keen musical ear and his critical background he frequently described his interest in Stein through musical metaphors, stressing the rhythmical and phonological dimensions of her work. Beyond the words on the page, he was fascinated by Stein, the person, the writer who had the requisite chutzpah to break all the rules, to dump convention and dedicate herself to crafting something so resolutely unusual. To discover that the most radical voice in English literature was a middle-aged Jewish American lesbian in self-exile in France, whose home was decorated with canvases painted by the mercurial imaginations of Europe’s experimental visionaries, was too perfect for words. As with his attachment to African-American culture, the exoticism of Stein’s writing remained a strong attraction his entire life. In the 1920s, when he began to write bestselling novels, he incorporated a number of Stein’s devices and affectations in homage to the great lady in whose shadow he felt his generation of American writers toiled. Most notably, he refused to include speech marks in his writing, to the enduring irritation of his critics, who thought it a ridiculous affectation, an unsubtle shorthand to let readers know that they were in the presence of a genuine sophisticate.