The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  Nugent was surely overstating his case in that instance. But there was unquestionably an atmosphere of liberation in Harlem at night that outstripped most of the city’s other neighborhoods. Van Vechten was a regular and enthusiastic guest at A’Leila Walker’s extravagant parties, infamous for their same-sex and interracial exhibitionism, and he befriended Walker’s circle of rent boys and pimps. In one of his first turns as tour guide of Harlem for white outsiders, Van Vechten took the English writer Somerset Maugham to a Harlem institution at the other end of the social spectrum, a buffet flat. There were dozens of these venues in Harlem, modest apartments in which various rooms were rented out for gambling, sex shows, and orgies. In small, dimly lit rooms heaving with bodies, soft cushions, and throws scattered on the floor, this was where the fantasies of white tourists like Van Vechten came vividly to life. Any combination of people—black, white, male, female—enjoyed anonymous sexual encounters as the sound of hot jazz tunes rippled out from a phonograph or an upright piano. “All around the den”—Claude McKay described the atmosphere in one Harlem establishment—“luxuriating under little colored lights, the dark dandies were loving up their pansies. Feet tickling feet under tables, tantalizing liquor-rich giggling, hands busy above.” In a Harlem buffet flat, there was no curb on the sexual possibilities. The former Vanity Fair editor Helen Lawrenson described in her memoirs one notorious place that reputedly listed Cole Porter among its return clientele and featured a “young black entertainer named Joey, who played piano and sang but whose specialité was to remove his clothes and extinguish a lighted candle by sitting on it until it disappeared.”

  The ethical dimensions of sex tourism never entered Van Vechten’s mind. He was too enamored by the atmosphere of transgression and fantasy to be bothered about the fact that buffet flats and rent parties existed mainly as imaginative—or desperate—ways for people to pay their bills. However, it was not the use and abuse of his wealth and status that Van Vechten found arousing. Harlem was sexually attractive to him mainly because it was a point of fusion among his homosexuality, his fascination with blackness, and his natural voyeurism. Neither was Harlem, in any of its guises, the exclusive focus of Van Vechten’s sexual interests. He was part of the select crowd at Bob Chanler’s House of Fantasy, where heterosexual porn movies were projected, and he badgered Arthur Davison Ficke to obtain Japanese pornographic art on his behalf. One night at his friend Ralph Barton’s midtown apartment in September 1925 Van Vechten watched Barton and his wife “give a remarkable performance. Ralph goes down on Carlotta. She masturbates and expires in ecstasy. They do 69, etc.” “Performance” here is the operative word. In moments of sexual encounter more often than not Van Vechten reverted to type: the sharp-sighted critic reveling in the spectacle.

  * * *

  At home sexual exhibitionism was substituted for something less scandalous yet still with the power to shock, as Van Vechten brought Harlem down into the fashionable circles south of Central Park. From the first weeks of 1925 he and Marinoff routinely invited black people into their home—not as servants or novelty entertainers but as guests, a practice almost unheard of in white New York.

  The entire block knew when it was the night of a Van Vechten party. Taxicabs and chauffeur-driven limousines lined up along West Fifty-fifth Street, decanting illustrious passengers into the lobby of 150, the doorman escorting them to the elevator. They were millionaire bankers dressed in jet-black tuxedos and stiff white collars and Hollywood movie stars in mink coats and strings of iridescent pearls, Harlem jazz musicians, and chorus girls rushing from Broadway shows, the smell of greasepaint still faintly detectable beneath their perfume. Van Vechten welcomed each guest at the apartment door like an old and cherished friend, no matter how recently they had become acquainted. Within seconds they had a drink in their hand, a cocktail made from Jack Harper’s premium bootleg liquor mixed by Van Vechten himself. Entertainment was usually provided by some combination of the remarkable talents on the guest list: a recital by Marguerite d’Alvarez in her clipped, powerful contralto; a reading by James Weldon Johnson, his voice deep and sonorous. George Gershwin was virtually the resident pianist. “He was extraordinary. It was impossible to get him off of [sic] the piano stool after he settled there,” Van Vechten recalled. “He used to play all night without ever repeating anything.”

  Inside 7D Van Vechten replicated all he had learned from Mabel’s Evenings with one key twist. At his salon the byzantine rules of racial division that existed beyond his front door were suspended. Here white society magnates and struggling black artists drank and laughed and danced the Charleston together, as equals. He knew the damage that could be done to racial prejudice through the simple act of socializing because he had experienced it firsthand. One night he came home from Harlem and told Fania “in great glee” that he had just met a black person he had not taken to. “I’d found one I hated,” he recollected to an interviewer. “And I felt that was my complete emancipation, because now I could select my friends and not have to know them all.” He continued, “Up to that time, I had considered them all as one.” There is something perverse about that statement; usually one would expect to have one’s racial prejudices challenged by making friends with those from other ethnic communities. However, this was not Van Vechten indulging in a Wildean inversion of conventional logic; he meant what he said. Since his college days he had idealized black people and inadvertently reduced them to generic character types rather than real people. This moment of epiphany reinforced his conviction that to humanize one race in the eyes of the other, there was no better method, he felt, than shutting them in a room, plying them with drink, and letting nature take its course.

  Tales about what went on at the Van Vechten’s interracial parties became part of Manhattan lore in the 1920s and 1930s. Most repeated was the story of the night that Bessie Smith came to perform in December 1928. The account that Smith herself was fond of telling has it that upon her arrival Van Vechten flounced up to her and offered “a lovely, lovely dry Martini.” Smith, who was already drunk, apparently screwed her face up and said she had never had a martini, dry, wet, or any other kind, and wanted nothing but straight-up whiskey. Recoiling from Van Vechten’s fussing, she downed the first whiskey shot, then a second, and a third. Fortified by liquor, she launched into a short but mesmerizing set of blues standards in the style that Van Vechten described as “full of shouting and moaning and praying and suffering, a wild, rough, Ethiopian voice, harsh and volcanic, but seductive and sensuous too.” When it came time for Smith to leave, Marinoff, full of her usual theatricality, flung her arms around the singer and attempted to give her a kiss goodbye. Smith apparently threw Marinoff to the floor, yelling, “Get the fuck away from me!… I ain’t never heard such shit,” and stormed out, leaving Van Vechten to scoop his wife up from the hallway rug while horrified guests stared on.

  Across the years the story has been told and retold, used either to convey Smith’s uncompromising character or to ridicule Van Vechten’s obsession with African-American culture, mocking him as a wealthy white aesthete trying to insinuate himself with the black working class. It is worth noting that the anecdote is based entirely on Smith’s recollection, which, considering how intoxicated she was, may not have been 100 percent clear. Van Vechten does not appear to have written any account of the incident to friends, and his daybook records only that Smith arrived drunk and sang three numbers. Nevertheless, at a time when intimate social interaction between blacks and whites was conspicuously unusual the anecdote soon did the rounds because it sounded plausible: to those who spread the story, discord and confrontation seemed the inevitable outcome when white high society mixed with black blues singers late at night, everybody soused.

  The night of Smith’s appearance might have produced the most gossip, but Van Vechten’s most important party occurred on January 17, 1925, when he welcomed Paul Robeson and his wife, Eslanda—Essie to friends—into his home for the first time. A few days earlier Van Vec
hten had heard Paul singing spirituals at Walter White’s home and was keen to have him repeat the performance at 150. In front of some of the most influential figures in New York, including Alfred and Blanche Knopf and the investment banker and chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Opera House, Otto Kahn, Robeson performed arrangements by his musical partner Lawrence Brown. Though he had taken up acting only within the last two years, Robeson was an emerging celebrity, having earned excellent reviews in 1924 for his performances in the Eugene O’Neill plays The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings. Even so, he and Essie realized that performing at a Van Vechten party in the presence of so many opinion formers and wealthy patrons was an opportunity to showcase his singing talent and accelerate his career. Robeson’s short set caused a sensation among Van Vechten’s guests. Van Vechten wrote his friend Scott Cunningham to tell him how marvelous the party had been, thanks to Gershwin’s piano playing and Adele Astaire’s dancing. But the highlight, he said, had been the “really thrilling experience” of hearing Paul Robeson sing spirituals in a way only he could.

  Van Vechten believed spirituals to be the purest expression of African-American experience and that “the unpretentious sincerity that inspires them makes them the peer of any folk music the world has yet known.” He was sure that Robeson—handsome, charismatic, and gifted with an incomparably beautiful voice—was the man to convince white audiences that spirituals were an American cultural treasure. In collaboration with Walter White and Essie Robeson, Van Vechten set about organizing and publicizing Robeson’s first solo concert at the Greenwich Village Theatre on April 19, even managing to persuade his friend Heywood Broun, an influential critic and journalist, to dedicate his column on the day before the concert to Robeson. The event was a resounding success: the house sold out, and hundreds had to be turned away at the door; Robeson performed sixteen encores to rapturous ovations from the almost exclusively white audience. Reviews in the newspapers were equally effusive, heralding Robeson as “the new American Caruso.” To Gertrude Stein, Van Vechten likened Robeson to Fyodor Chaliapin, which, considering his hero-worship of the Russian singer, was high praise indeed.

  * * *

  In public Van Vechten embodied the carefree spirit of excess and experimentation that defined Manhattan’s Jazz Age adventure. In private the frenetic lifestyle was taking its toll. Every wild night brought hangovers, exhaustion, and physical discomfort, a grim confluence that he often attempted to break with yet more cocktails. The fractures previously apparent in his marriage were forced open. More than once, drunk and angry, he was “rough” with Marinoff, in the euphemism of his own diary, forcing her to stay the night with friends while he calmed down and sobered up. On occasion she removed herself from New York entirely with trips to Atlantic City and farther afield. Their periods of separation frequently caused them more upset and annoyance than the fraught time they spent together. When Marinoff set off for a trip to London in April 1925, Van Vechten, pained at the prospect of their temporary separation, accompanied her to the docks. During her trip each wrote to the other of how unhappy they felt at being apart. Van Vechten’s letters were particularly lachrymose. Life was pathetic and worthless without her, he wailed, and he grumbled that her declarations of love were less frequent and heartfelt than his. Yet he made no effort to curb the behavior that was causing Marinoff such upset. The evening after she left New York he joined Angus and friends for a rip-roaring night out at a gay-friendly speakeasy named Philadelphia Jimmie’s and other Harlem nightspots, returning as the sun came up at dawn. It was a sign of his essential immaturity. Composing grand romantic gestures for a loved one far out of reach had become something of a specialty of his; changing his selfish behavior to demonstrate the undying love he professed was something he had not mastered. Anna Snyder had spotted the tendency twenty years earlier, when she accused him of caring more for “symbols than reality” in the love letters they shared. Two decades on, little had changed. Responsibility still bored him; it was a loathsome distraction from the festival of self-indulgence that he wanted life to be.

  Paul Robeson, c. 1933, photograph by Carl Van Vechten

  Marinoff would have been approximately two-thirds of her way across the Atlantic that spring when Van Vechten accompanied the Harlem writer Eric Walrond and the white actress Rita Romilly to the inaugural awards dinner of the monthly black publication Opportunity, the journal of the civil rights organization the National Urban League. Opportunity’s subtitle, “A Journal of Negro Life,” gives a good indication of its purpose: to exhibit the full continuum of African-American experience and opinion. Its editor, the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, belonged to a different era from that of W.E.B. DuBois, who used his editorship of the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis as propaganda for the political cause of racial uplift, committed to always presenting black people in their proverbial Sunday best. Johnson wanted Opportunity to be a debating chamber rather than a propaganda sheet and opened its pages to a lively mix of up-to-the-minute social research and the brightest talents of an emerging generation of black writers who explored and exposed black life in the round, street gambling, buffet flats, and nightclubs included.

  The most exciting and important of those talents was Langston Hughes, an unknown twenty-three-year-old college student from Washington, D.C, who was creating a lot of excitement with his sonorous blues poetry. At the awards that night Hughes won first prize and read aloud some of his work to the assembled guests in their finery.

  Droning a drowsy syncopated tune

  Rockin back and forth to a mellow croon

  As Hughes recited those opening lines to “The Weary Blues,” his poem about a Harlemite “who sang the blues all night and then went to bed and slept like a rock,” Van Vechten sat listening, bewitched. Hughes’s poetry was intelligent, stylish, and modern but also fun-loving and steeped in his racial identity, what he himself described as a “heritage of rhythm and warmth.” The blues was a natural source for his work because it contained not only the historical experience of black America but also everyday life as lived by “the low-down folks” who “hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations.” If DuBois and his followers always wanted to present African-Americans to the outside world scrubbed and groomed, Langston Hughes was happy to have the white folks take them as they found them, as “people who have their hip of gin on Saturday nights” and are happy “to watch the lazy world go by.” It was an entirely new type of poetry to Van Vechten: colloquial and sensual in a way that captured the raw emotion of the blues. To his ears it was both unmistakably black and distinctively American.

  At some point that evening Van Vechten asked Hughes if he might be permitted to show the Knopfs some of his poems. Hughes said yes without hesitation. For a young, penniless black poet unknown outside literary Harlem, the prospect of having his work placed with the most fashionable publishing house in New York was the stuff of dreams. At five o’clock the following afternoon Hughes arrived at Van Vechten’s front door with his manuscript. Van Vechten had been out drinking until 7:30 a.m., had barely slept and was not in an ideal state to study poetry. Still, he was eager to read Hughes’s work and promised to do so right away. When Hughes dropped in again the following day, on his way back home to Washington, Van Vechten gave him a list of instructions about which poems should be excised and which edited in order to turn his mass of unfettered creativity into a commercially viable edition of poetry. Van Vechten had a title for this revised manuscript too: The Weary Blues, the title of Hughes’s prizewinning poem. With everything in place he handed the manuscript over to the Knopfs, urging Alfred and Blanche not to let some other publishing house snap the boy up. Two weeks later Hughes received a letter from Van Vechten to say that all was arranged: Alfred A. Knopf was to publish the book. “I shall write the introduction and the cover design will be by [Miguel] Covarrubias,” he announced, referring to the Mexican artist. Hughes was astonished. “You’re my good angel,” he gushed. “I’ll have
to walk sideways to keep from flying!”

  Hughes’s obvious delight was qualified by a nagging doubt about how his association with Van Vechten might look to other black people. He worried that being plucked from obscurity by an attention-seeking dandy from downtown would only give further fuel to those older, more established literary figures in Harlem who thought his poems pandered to white stereotypes of black life, focusing too much on jazz, whiskey, and sex. His fears were prescient. Over the years—and especially after the publication of Van Vechten’s hugely controversial novel Nigger Heaven in 1926—the impression that Van Vechten somehow exploited or led Hughes astray has persisted. In reality, Van Vechten’s input into The Weary Blues was little more than it had been with Firbank’s Prancing Nigger a year earlier. He haughtily assumed control of the project by shaping it into a publishable book and made sure that everyone knew of his connection to Hughes by writing the book’s introduction, but the themes, subjects, and style of Hughes’s work were never significantly affected by Van Vechten. Despite their differences in age and social status, they were friends, not patron and client or even mentor and protégé. And contrary to the rumors that have floated down the decades, neither were they lovers. Whether or not Hughes was sexually attracted to men is difficult to discern. The same cannot be said of Van Vechten, whose flirtatious correspondence with the men he had affairs with was full of homosexual coding and innuendo. His letters to Hughes feature none of that and disclose nothing but warm, jovial friendship and honest exchanges of opinions.

  “The influence, if one exists,” Van Vechten said of their relationship, “flows from the other side.” In his very first letter to Hughes, written while arranging a publishing deal for The Weary Blues with Knopf, it was Van Vechten who was seeking instruction, asking for information about raunchy southern ballads and recommendations for books about Haiti. Soon after, he also elicited Hughes’s help in writing an article about the blues for Vanity Fair and quoted him at length in doing so. Van Vechten was in awe of Hughes’s talent. It had taken him until his mid-thirties to find his writing voice; Hughes had discovered his while still in college, and crafting his lyrical jewels seemed to come as naturally to him as breathing. Even if Van Vechten had wanted to, Hughes was far too talented and self-confident to allow Van Vechten to manipulate or control him. Around the same time he met Van Vechten at the Opportunity awards, Hughes encountered the successful poet Vachel Lindsay, who gave him a marvelous piece of advice: “Do not let any lionizers stampede you.” Hughes never did. When he declined Van Vechten’s words of advice or ignored lengthy criticisms of some latest work, Van Vechten’s bottom lip might jut out a little, but their friendship was never seriously affected. Hughes’s innate emotional intelligence enabled him to intuitively realize what many others failed to: that despite his proprietorial tendencies, Van Vechten could reconcile himself with not being in control of a particular situation, so long as he was made to feel brilliant, unique, and admired. As Richard Bruce Nugent remarked, all Van Vechten really wanted was to have his head patted and to be told he was “a nice boy.”