by Edward White
When not enjoying himself with the local misfits, Van Vechten experienced the Pueblo culture up close, the main reason that Mabel had been so keen for him to visit. One evening he and Tony were preparing to leave for a wedding feast when, unannounced, a group of young men and boys arrived on horseback to entertain him with a dance. After two hours of preparation—they stripped naked and daubed themselves in intricate painted designs before dressing again in feathers, beads, and colored cloth—the men danced energetically to the accompaniment of Tony’s drumming and singing. Van Vechten found the whole performance enchanting, in particular the men’s careful attention to decorating their bodies. He even wrote Marinoff asking if she might be able to fetch a batch of large feathers from Bloomingdale’s to be distributed among the dancers by way of thanks. It was very rare that he could find nothing of interest in a dance performance, no matter from which culture it originated, and Mabel noted his appreciation in “Twelfth Night.” “Not even Louis could find anything louche in the dances,” she wrote of Van Vechten’s fictional incarnation. “It was like a respite from evil thinking.”
Even so, the real Van Vechten could not help comparing the Pueblo culture, unfavorably, with the singing and dancing of African-Americans. As decorative as the Pueblo rites were, suffused with what to him appeared a beguiling innocence and authenticity, he found them nowhere near as thrilling as black folk culture. The “Indians” of Taos, he told Marinoff, lacked the vivaciousness of Harlem’s Negroes, who lived their lives with a relentless emotional honesty—joy, despair, sexual ecstasy, and religious fervor always at the surface. After only five days in Taos Van Vechten told Marinoff how pleased he had been to have met the only black person in town, a woman named Lulu Williams, who worked as a cook at the local inn. Her warmth lifted his mood and made a very welcome change from what he considered the emotional coldness of the Pueblo natives. Despite all the negativity surrounding Nigger Heaven, Van Vechten still found the company of black people life-affirming.
A little more than two weeks into his stay, Van Vechten decided it was time to move on, not least because of the increasing fractiousness between him and Mabel. After so many years of being badgered to visit he was confused and deeply irritated that she should subject him to one of her prolonged bouts of silent hostility. A couple of days before moving on he wrote in his daybook: “Mabel sends for me to tell me that she is going through a change of life. Possibly this is true, but it sounds like a Tenth Day explanation of her moodiness.” He was right. She was livid that he had corrupted her tranquil paradise with New York dissipation and felt the bite of public humiliation when Van Vechten gave his opinion on Native American culture to a local newspaper. In a piece about his visit a reporter noted that “Mr. Van Vechten was disappointed in the Taos deer dance, given the sixth of January, not finding in it the emotional excitement which he feels is so great a force in the dances of Harlem.” For Mabel, a self-appointed authority and guardian of Pueblo culture, this was intolerable impudence; she cut the article out and attached it to the end of her “Twelfth Night” story. Once, as Van Vechten’s mentor, she had held the upper hand in their friendship, teaching him the true meaning of sophistication. Now the balance of power had shifted. Her former protégé was lauded, by other whites at least, as the nation’s unrivaled expert on the Negro, the man who had unveiled to the world the remarkable truth about the United States’ hidden artistic genius. But Mabel had fully expected her guest, invited to her home in the artistic colony over which she presided, to bend his knee and fawn over her own collection of primitive marvels. Instead he had the temerity to insult her prized possession, which also happened to be her husband’s native culture, though that, to Mabel, was a secondary issue. Furthermore, he magnified the insult by taking the opportunity to advertise his own cause yet again. Vast and sparsely populated though it was, the state of New Mexico was clearly only big enough for one proprietorial champion of ethnic Americans. When Van Vechten left, Mabel felt the whole of Taos had been disinfected. Her story “Twelfth Night” ends: “The air was all clear again and likely enough that night she would hear the stars singing.”
After such a disastrous visit, aghast at the prospect that Van Vechten might write a book about the “Indians,” she wrote him a letter suggesting he steer clear of the subject altogether because he had failed to find the true spiritual worth of the Pueblo culture during his stay. She need not have worried; Van Vechten had never seriously considered writing about Native Americans at any length. The trip to Taos had been a welcome break and an introduction to a fascinating community. But it was only ever intended as a stop on the way to observe the tribes of a much more exciting destination: Hollywood.
* * *
Like Harlem, Hollywood in 1927 was still a relatively new presence in the American imagination. Originally, and ironically, founded by socially conservative Christians seeking a haven from the overcrowded and licentious cities farther east, by the early 1920s the town of Hollywood had become the focus of the nation’s film industry and synonymous with all that entailed. It was the soft-focus image of the American dream, a symbol of the United States’ mania for fame and spectacle where those with talent and a work ethic could find their fortune. In Hollywood, a confident new culture forged by technology, capitalism, and youthful liberation found its boldest form. But the celluloid glamour of Hollywood also possessed a dark photonegative. In 1921 Fatty Arbuckle had stood trial for allegedly raping and murdering a young actress in a hotel suite. A stream of lurid tales about the deviancy, corruption, and exploitation that governed Hollywood swiftly followed. The Hollywood sign, erected as a real estate advertisement in 1923 and only just becoming recognized as a national landmark, was seen as a warning and an invitation, a siren beckoning impressionable dreamers onto the rocks of a place that was materially rich but morally bankrupt.
Van Vechten’s limited experience of the movie industry convinced him that Hollywood was neither as dangerous nor as exciting as Manhattan, but probably an awful lot sillier. His novel The Tattooed Countess had been adapted and retitled A Woman of the World for a 1925 movie starring Pola Negri. At the time Negri was one of the most celebrated stars in the business, but she is probably best known today as Rudolph Valentino’s lover, the young woman who repeatedly fainted at his funeral in 1926. Van Vechten liked Negri very much but hated the film, saw it only once, and suggested to his friend Max Ewing that it was, in its own peculiar way, a sort of masterpiece—so bad it was almost good. He echoed the sentiments of the critic who wondered aloud why the studio responsible had bothered to buy the rights to the novel when the plot bore so little resemblance to Van Vechten’s original story and even the title had been completely changed. Despite that episode, which he considered the nadir of his artistic life, he had heard all sorts of outlandish tales of Hollywood’s excesses and was keen to give the place a closer look.
Upon his arrival in Los Angeles Van Vechten was astonished by its sheer size. Manhattan was just beginning its ascent into the skies; plans for the Chrysler Building were being sketched at that very moment. In Los Angeles it was the horizontal scale rather than the vertical that dominated. For a man who usually crossed the Hudson only under extreme duress, these wandering Californian miles were extraordinary. Nothing better reflected the hubris and rapacity of the modern United States than the vast expanse of this playground of the rich, famous, and nakedly ambitious. Some weeks later, in a short series of articles about his trip that he produced for Vanity Fair, Van Vechten said that the geographical expanse of Hollywood was a metaphor for all of its other excesses. Hollywood, he said, possessed “more money, more sunlight … more work, more poverty and bad luck, more automobiles, more flowers … more beautiful gals … and more dissatisfaction” than any place he had ever been, New York included.
In the land of excessive consumption there was plenty to sate Van Vechten’s ravenous appetites. Even his hotel, the Ambassador, was of immense proportions. Set far back from Wilshire Boulevard, the Ambassador’s
grounds were swathed in palm and bamboo trees, and a huge verdant lawn separated the hotel’s reception from a community of well-appointed bungalows, where its wealthy guests stayed. The Ambassador was famed not only for its A-list clientele but also for its nightclub, the Cocoanut Grove, Hollywood’s most fashionable and exclusive hangout, where California’s best jazz bands performed. Van Vechten worried that he might need a tour guide to navigate his way around the hotel, never mind the city. Much to his delight, within minutes of his checking in, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald appeared at his door. Scott had come to Hollywood to write a screenplay for Lipstick, Constance Talmadge’s next movie, and as chance would have it, they had taken the next-door bungalow. The caliber of neighbors was very much to Van Vechten’s approval. Aside from the Fitzgeralds, Pola Negri and the actress Carmel Myers were nearby, and John Barrymore was staying in the suite directly above. Van Vechten unpacked, dressed, and joined the Fitzgeralds for a drink. Any hopes any of them had of a quiet, abstemious stay were in that moment definitively dashed. Although Scott was under pressure to finish his script and did his best to avoid temptation, Van Vechten admitted that he was frequently guilty of interrupting Scott’s labors by knocking on his door, “often late in the afternoon, often late at night.”
It was not unusual that these two East Coast novelists should find themselves neighbors in Hollywood. Recently several of Van Vechten’s peers, including Theodore Dreiser and Joseph Hergesheimer, had come west to write scenarios for the big studios. It was a sign that Hollywood was in a moment of transition, making great efforts to infuse the movie business with a degree of class, turning mass entertainment into art. Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, was at this instant attempting to confirm the transformation by establishing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Movies were beginning to capture and create the zeitgeist. The big titles of 1927 were The Jazz Singer—Al Jolson’s groundbreaking talkie that dealt with themes of race, class, and religion—and It, in which Clara Bow delivered one of the definitive models of the flapper. This was the reason that Van Vechten was intrigued by Hollywood. He wanted to mix in the circles of wealthy, talented, and influential people who were turning this town into such a gigantic cultural force. Movies were actually something of a blind spot of his. It was not until the sound era of the 1930s that he developed a passion for the medium that approached his love of live performance. He was being honest when he assured journalists upon his arrival that he was in Hollywood only to satisfy his sense of curiosity. “Say that I am one author who came to Los Angeles not to make money,” he instructed an interviewer, “or to write for the movies, or to get color for a story. Say that I just came out, to look around.”
Within a matter of days that all changed. On his second night in town Van Vechten experienced a Hollywood premiere for the first time, the debut screening of An American Tragedy, adapted from a Theodore Dreiser novel. The movie itself was forgettable. It was the spectacle of the occasion that left him gasping: “an astonishing sight,” he said, “Kleig lights & megaphones, announcing the arrivals and taking their pictures. I see a great many people I know & meet [the silent movie stars] Pauline Starke & Patsy Miller.” Afterward he was invited to a party at the home of the writer Edwin Justus Mayer, a villa with glorious panoramic views, high up in the hills. The very next morning the actor—and future Academy Award winner—Joseph Schildkraut drove him out to the set of his new movie, the biblical epic The King of Kings, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, where Van Vechten watched in awe the filming of the earthquake at the end of the movie, great mounds of rock and soil shaking and churning at the director’s command. The excesses of the movie world had Van Vechten rapt. Before the week was out, he was seized by the idea of writing a definitive Hollywood novel. He warned Marinoff that such a venture would necessitate “as much intensive study as Harlem,” at least two months of total immersion. “There is nothing else like it on Earth,” he told her.
His mention of Harlem was apt. Although the two places were starkly different, they were united in Van Vechten’s mind as exotic locations of extremes and complexities that few outsiders were capable of penetrating and understanding. A key motivation for writing Nigger Heaven was that no other writer had already successfully written about Harlem, and he believed the same was true about Hollywood. Here he could cement his status as “a chronicler of our times,” as Mabel had once described him, the writer who captured the twin pillars of the new American culture—New York and Hollywood—at their most exhilarating moments.
For the time being only he and Marinoff knew that his vacation had turned into a research trip; he wanted to see Hollywood as it really was, not preening to be put in its best light. Over the next four weeks Van Vechten trawled the party circuit and the studio lots, seemingly meeting every significant person in Hollywood, from the starlets Lillian Gish and Joan Crawford to B. P. Schulberg, the legendary producer at Paramount Pictures, to the Hollywood power couple Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. The latter Van Vechten particularly approved of because he was an enthusiastic practitioner of goosing, an art that Van Vechten had worked hard to master.
Fairbanks and Pickford also gave Van Vechten a taste of genuine superstardom when they took him as their guest to the premiere of Old Ironsides, a maritime epic directed by James Cruze, at Sid Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre. For Vanity Fair Van Vechten described his excitement at being sat with Fairbanks and Pickford in the back of their car as they drove slowly toward the venue. A good two miles from the theater crowds filled the street; countless men, women, and children craned their necks or ran up to the car windows in hope of catching a glimpse of their idols. “Mary Pickford was cheered,” he noted with astonishment and delight, “not faintly, not half-heartedly, but lustily, even hysterically. Having made it out the car in front of the theater, Van Vechten was bowled over by the spectacle that confronted him: “Searchlights streamed in all directions. A battalion of policemen vainly attempted to push back the seething hordes of gaping humanity.” They were now forty-five minutes late, and Van Vechten was astonished to find that the screening of the movie, in which neither Pickford nor Fairbanks had the slightest involvement, had been delayed just so the reigning royal couple of Hollywood could see it in its entirety. As the three of them entered the auditorium, Van Vechten recalled, the entire audience sprang to its feet and gave them a rousing ovation. The approbation was obviously for the two pinups by his side, not for Van Vechten, but the vicarious thrill he got from it is tangible in that breathless description. Only in his days of reporting on the New York opera had he felt so energized and excited by being in the presence of celebrity.
Carl Van Vechten at the Famous Players-Lasky studio, Los Angeles, January 30, 1927. From left to right: Frank Case, Van Vechten, Flora Zabelle, Emil Jannings, Bertha Case, Jesse Lasky
In his observation, Fairbanks and Pickford possessed almost superhuman powers. These deities of the flesh, he pointed out, not only received more adulation than any royal figure he could think of, but they possessed an uncommon and invaluable gift: “the power of satisfying wishes.” That sense of autonomy and influence was immensely attractive to Van Vechten; the ability to transform one’s environment at will was an abiding fascination of his. For a successful and imaginative Hollywood star every possible fancy was apparently indulged. If the whim should take them, Hollywood stars could probably arrange to have exotic animals paraded up and down their street, Van Vechten joked, “accompanied by nude Nubians with torches.” The movie stars he met, half of whom he had never seen in any film, absorbed him so fully because their extravagant lives represented the sort of existence that he had tried so hard for so long to make reality but could never entirely achieve, one created and controlled according to his lusts and whims and in which he bore no responsibility to anyone else. The fundamental business of Hollywood, the motion pictures, was of virtually no interest to him. In his daybooks, his letters to Fania, and his four Vanity Fair articles his sole focus was the power of celebrity. “I am swimmin
g among movie stars,” he boasted to Marinoff in one of his daily missives home. Like a tourist rushing through a sightseeing itinerary with guidebook in hand, he admitted that he carried around a list of the town’s most famous people; each time he encountered a new celebrity he checked their name off the roll call. He was less interested in the people he met than the fame attached to them, the surface glamour rather than the substance—or lack of it—beneath.
Yet his seduction was never entirely complete. As a man who lived under the shelter of his own towering fantasies, he understood intuitively that Hollywood was make-believe. The entire town was a movie set, its inhabitants continually acting. “Never before,” he believed, “have I heard virtues and talents, domestic and professional, extolled as whole-heartedly as they are at Hollywood.” He knew this was simply part of the Hollywood hustle. Unlike in New York, where scabrous insults flew from the mouths of writers and artists with nonchalant ease, in Hollywood terrified that some careless insult could cost him or her the next role, everyone claimed to think that everyone else was a marvel. At one party four sparkling young stars—Constance Talmadge, Louella Parsons, Betty Compson, and Bebe Daniels—collected around him and, according to Van Vechten, spent an hour talking exclusively about his books. It was, he said, an experience “which may have been something of a strain for them, but which was extremely agreeable as far as I was concerned.” After the critical scolding he had received at the end of the previous year, even disingenuous praise was welcome.