by Edward White
Not all the attention was insincere. As a bestselling novelist Van Vechten had genuine currency. Clara Bow and Lois Moran, two of the hottest young actresses of the day, told him how much they would love to star as the snake charmer Zimbule O’Grady in a screen adaptation of his The Blind Bow-Boy, and he had meetings with the two great directors of the decade, Cecil B. DeMille and King Vidor, about the possibility of turning Nigger Heaven into a movie. As he told Marinoff, if he only had a story in his head, he could get a movie into production tomorrow. The talk of parties and movie stars worried Marinoff. The point of this trip had been to ease off the drinking, she reminded him, to get the Harlem nightclubs out of his system and escape a brutal New York winter, so he could return to her sober, fit, and free of nerves. Equally disturbing was the regular appearance of Scott Fitzgerald in his letters. Like a mother chiding a son led astray by an unruly classmate, she told Carl bluntly that Fitzgerald was a bad influence and she did not approve of the two of them spending so much time together. She received reassurances that Hollywood people were so professional and hardworking that the parties were nowhere near as debauched as in New York, and as for Scott his work commitments meant he was practically teetotal.
In fact, it was Zelda who had reason to worry about Van Vechten’s effect on her husband. Not only did Van Vechten distract Scott from his script, but he also introduced the actress Lois Moran into his life. On their first meeting at the Mayfair Ball Van Vechten veritably swooned when the delicate, beautiful Moran asked him to dance. Only seventeen and accompanied by her mother wherever she went, Moran was a prodigy whose uncommon wit and intellect matched her talent in front of the camera. Van Vechten knew she was a rising star and was therefore excited to be in her presence, although he admitted to Marinoff that he had not actually seen any of the girl’s movies. The two quickly became great friends, and along with Mrs. Moran, they spent hours together, frequenting Hollywood’s most fashionable places, including Madame Helene’s tearoom opposite the Famous Players-Lasky lot, often packed with movie stars taking a break from filming. When Van Vechten heard that Moran’s next picture was desperately in need of a leading man, he suggested Scott Fitzgerald. Everyone involved in the movie, Moran most especially, thought it an inspired suggestion. When Van Vechten put it to Fitzgerald, however, the idea was not met with the same enthusiasm, Fitzgerald wary no doubt of tarnishing his reputation as a literary heavyweight. But when he met Moran at Pickfair (the estate belonging to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks), Fitzgerald’s camera shyness seemed to dissipate. From that very first encounter he was smitten and allowed himself to be screen-tested. The movie never materialized, but over the following months and years Fitzgerald’s infatuation intensified. Moran eventually became the model for the movie star Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night, and her appearances at the Fitzgerald home caused serious ruptures in an already unsettled marriage.
Lois Moran, c. 1932, photograph by Carl Van Vechten
After a monthlong stay, Van Vechten returned from Hollywood feeling refreshed and inspired, the events of 1926 seemingly put behind him. He may have been the only man in history to have gone to Hollywood to “get away from it all” and succeeded. Hollywood had revealed itself to have been “incredible, fantastic, colossal,” he enthused in his Vanity Fair articles. He wrote about the parties and the movie lots, the nightclubs and restaurants, the demands of starry actors and the luxury of the Ambassador all with an amused detachment. It was Van Vechten at his best: cheeky and breezy while skillfully managing to guide the reader into a barely believable alien environment. The Hollywood he depicted was the one he experienced, in which oversize appetites were constantly indulged, and outlandish ambitions were just as frequently destroyed. In his last article of the series, he wryly observed that the “walls of the Hollywood houses are constructed of plaster with wire netting between so that it would be quite possible to kick a hole through the average domicile. A good deal of the Hollywood attitude is equally hollow.” The town was simultaneously formidable and flimsy, but who was Carl Van Vechten to complain about that?
Fun though it was, Hollywood was never going to be Van Vechten’s home away from home any more than Taos was. With an earnest sobriety, Mabel’s vision of the United States repudiated the thrills of modernity, while Hollywood’s valorized them to an absurdly dishonest degree. Back in New York, the place with the bravery to steer the honest course in between, Van Vechten set himself the task of encapsulating Hollywood into a book that would do to Los Angeles what his previous novels had done to Manhattan.
ELEVEN
A Quite Gay, but Empty, Bubble That Dazzles One in Bursting
Marinoff was looking forward to having her husband home. For the last two years she had felt Van Vechten slipping away from her, his obsession with Harlem and his heavy drinking pushing them ever farther apart. She took Charleston lessons and read the books by African-American authors that Van Vechten piled around their home as a means of staying close to him, but too often all she got in return was a raised hand and a nasty insult when he had taken too many drinks. Having read his letters over the past month, she honestly believed that the Southwest had cleansed him and that he would come back the man she had first married. Within twenty-four hours of his return her hopes were dashed as he drank and caroused with a renewed intensity, as if making up for lost time. When Marinoff left for England at the end of March in search of work on the London stage, she sent letters home that laid things out plainly. There could be no more broken promises; unless sanity was restored, their marriage was over. The party must come to an end.
In response to Marinoff’s pleas Van Vechten bombarded her with his usual overblown profusions of unique and undying love, while never actually addressing any of the important issues she raised. If anything, the unpleasantness that Marinoff was so sick of appeared to increase during her stay in London, as a new sense of menace enveloped Vechten’s social scene. Self-indulgence gave way to addiction, and formerly high-spirited parties were now turning violent, including on a couple of occasions at Bob Chanler’s, where the host himself grappled and traded blows with a paralytic E. E. Cummings. In the early years of Prohibition Manhattan’s smart set believed the cocktail glass to be the ultimate symbol of rebellion against the antiquated morality of a tired old order. It was learning the hard way that nobody ever drank himself to liberation. Ill, nervous, and hardly ever sober, Van Vechten boozed his way through party after party under the grip of dependency and a grim sense of duty to the myth of carefree Manhattan that he had done as much as anybody to create.
In Fania’s absence, he dashed off his four Hollywood articles for Vanity Fair, but there was no sign of the planned novel, and although the movie producer Arthur Hornblow approached him to write a scenario for Gilda Gray’s next picture, he never did, largely because he was unable to think of a story. In years gone by he had managed to juggle the demands of writing and his hectic social schedule with impressive ease. His ability to compartmentalize the various spheres of his life had enabled him to work through the hangovers, shutting out all distraction to secure a few productive hours of creative endeavor each day. The majority of Nigger Heaven was written in precisely that fashion, in spells of intense concentration on weekday mornings. It was a skill he first honed in his early twenties, rushing to beat deadlines amid the cacophony of the Madhouse at the Chicago American. Now, in his mid-forties with a serious drinking problem and still somewhat bruised from the critical lashing Nigger Heaven had received in the black press, he was simply too addled to write with the discipline and vigor of old. Mabel Dodge had once accused him of “vampiring” New York. It might have been that the reverse was true: the parties and the hedonism that appeared to be the city’s life force had finally drained Van Vechten of his creativity.
In an attempt to get him working, Marinoff appealed to his vanity, reminding him that since the publication of Nigger Heaven the world was eager to see what he would do next. That only made things worse, piling the pressure
of expectation upon an impenetrable creative block. Plenty of those around him were suffering from similar problems, including Scott Fitzgerald, whose time in Hollywood proved to be a washout. According to one biographer, although Fitzgerald had the best intentions when he arrived in Los Angeles, as soon as Van Vechten, John Barrymore, and Lois Moran arrived in town, he “embarked on a party that lasted three months.” The script he produced was deemed so bad that United Artists refused to pay the eighty-five hundred dollars that was promised him on completion. He and Zelda served their retribution by gathering every stick of furniture in their bungalow at the Ambassador, piling it artfully in the center of the living room, and leaving their unpaid bill at its summit.
In May Van Vechten accompanied Lois and Gladys Moran for a weekend at Ellerslie, a mansion the Fitzgeralds were renting in Delaware. On the first night almost all of them drank until they threw up or passed out, the hosts included, Zelda descending into screaming hysterics before doing so. Van Vechten ended his diary entry for the day with an unexpected but apposite comment on events happening in the world outside this tiny bubble of self-destruction. “Charles Lindbergh arrives in Paris today in 33 hours from N.Y. in his aircraft,” he noted, as if conscious that the two events were in a perverse way linked: the light and shadow of American modernity, the Fitzgeralds’ dissolution the inverse of Lindbergh’s straight-backed heroism. The following week he received an extraordinary letter from Zelda, begging forgiveness for her behavior at the party: “From the depths of my polluted soul, I am sorry that the weekend was such a mess. Do forgive my iniquities and my putrid drunkenness.”
With deliberately black irony, Van Vechten responded by sending her a new cocktail shaker in thanks for her hospitality. The gift was gratefully received, though Zelda pointed out that they were well stocked on these now, so in the future “a gas range and a rug for the dining room” would be appreciated. In his dotage Van Vechten attempted to distance himself from the Fitzgeralds’ spiral of excess, characterizing their infamous bad behavior as of an order entirely different from his own habits. To the interviewer William Ingersoll he disingenuously claimed that Scott’s “way of life didn’t appeal to me.” To another writer he said: “they both drank a lot—we all did, but they were excessive.” As Marinoff would have pointed out, by any sane measure Van Vechten’s drinking fitted that description too. It was only embarrassment or self-delusion that prevented him from admitting it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, c. 1937, photograph by Carl Van Vechten
A few friends outside Manhattan’s alcoholic fug recognized that this lifestyle was damaging both his health and his ability to create. Hugh Walpole, perhaps at Marinoff’s urging, invited Van Vechten to recuperate at his home in the English Lake District. “You need a change physically,” Walpole noted, “and everyone in England will be simply delighted to see you.” But it was in Chicago, not England, that he ended up when, a few weeks later, news came that Ralph was fighting for his life. He had been ill for some time, ailing from an aggressive cancer. His condition had now deteriorated to such an extent that his doctors gave him just weeks, if not days, to live. The sight of his dying brother floored Van Vechten. In his prime Ralph was a formidable man, nearly three hundred pounds and six and a half feet tall. He was now gaunt and pitifully weak, though in his mind he was still an indomitable Van Vechten, capable of laughing at his little brother’s recent escapades. Carl spent the next week in Chicago, fretting over Ralph during the day and then going out at night to see Nora Holt perform at the Sunset nightclub and to drink with friends at the Café de Paris until dawn. For a man watching his brother slip away into death it was unusual behavior, callous even. There was something deeply clinical within Van Vechten’s character that allowed him to coldly sort life into neat sections when he needed to, pushing one set of emotions aside in order to access another. And in a strange way, carousing was now something of a necessity, the closest thing he had to a routine to keep him steady in a time of crisis.
Ralph passed away in the late morning on June 28. The funeral was held on the thirtieth, after which Van Vechten returned immediately to New York. Four days later Marinoff arrived back from Europe to discover a husband grieving, exhausted, and worryingly ill, with unpleasant bladder problems resulting from an enlarged prostate and phlebitis in his leg, both conditions likely worsened by his drinking. Her presence was just the tonic Van Vechten needed. “I adore having Marinoff back,” he admitted to his daybook. “She is the only satisfactory person alive.” It was as close as he ever got to committing to paper any sign of remorse for his abysmal treatment of her over recent times.
Work eventually began on the new novel and carried on throughout the rest of the year. Writing the book was a slow-going, uninspired ordeal attended by the pain and sleeplessness of ill health, further exacerbated by a recurrence of his long-standing dental problems. In the small, quiet spaces between parties in Harlem and bedridden agony at home, Ralph’s death gave him cause for reflection about his future, as his mother’s had done twenty-two years earlier. After a few days in the Berkshires at his friend Bill Bullitt’s home, Van Vechten fell in love with a neighboring farm that he was told was up for sale. He wrote Mabel that he and Marinoff were thinking of following her lead and turning their backs on Manhattan to start a new life of bucolic tranquillity. They never bought the farm, of course. More than a few days away from New York City, and they felt bored and trapped in the countryside with only Mother Nature for company and no distractions to diffuse their livid arguments. As the end of the year approached, Van Vechten made a fresh effort to kick some of his bad habits by going cold turkey for a while in Atlantic City, which partially worked: he did not stop drinking, but he never touched a cigarette again. He found it a depressing experience and wondered whether a permanent move to Hollywood was the answer to his problems. That idea was almost as implausible as his and Marinoff’s becoming New England farmers. Their fidgeting whimsicality could be accommodated only in a city as variegated as New York. If they were to work themselves out of their rut, they would have to do so with Manhattan as their backdrop.
In the early weeks of 1928 the next book was finally complete. Spider Boy was the most uncomplicated and conventional of all of Van Vechten’s novels. Returning to his trusted theme of the innocent abroad, the story concerns Ambrose Deacon, a shy and taciturn playwright from the Midwest of meager talents who unintentionally, and against his wishes, becomes the toast of Hollywood. The novel was a lightweight response to the faddishness of the 1920s, with moments of slapstick humor as broad as anything the Keystone Kops ever committed to celluloid. As a follow-up to Nigger Heaven it was anticlimactic and certainly a smaller, safer effort than the definitive satire of the movie industry that he had initially planned. Both the novel and its depiction of Hollywood were neatly summed up by the headline of a review in the Brooklyn Eagle: VAN VECHTEN FOLLYWOOD A QUITE GAY, BUT EMPTY, BUBBLE THAT DAZZLES ONE IN BURSTING. On reading that headline, Van Vechten might have thought that it summed up much of his life at that point too. He had always enjoyed the process of publishing a book much more than the experience of writing it; the excitement of the publicity campaign was what he liked, seeing his name in print, hearing his work discussed by fashionable cliques, feeling part of the cultural moment. When the reviews were good, he noted them in his daybook, clipped them for his scrapbooks, and quoted them at length in letters to friends on both sides of the Atlantic. When they were bad, he fumed and turned to drink. With this book he seemed remarkably uninterested in how it was received. Spider Boy gave him little pleasure of any sort. The writing had been painful, and the end result distinctly mediocre. Being a novelist had never been so underwhelming.
Shortly after the novel was finished, Ralph’s widow, Fannie, died. When Van Vechten went to Chicago for the funeral, it emerged that he was to inherit a sixth of his brother’s multimillion-dollar estate, meaning he and Marinoff now had a large secured income for life. Apparently exhausted by the stress of a third family f
uneral in a little more than two years, he decided to head west for a vacation. Santa Fe was first on the itinerary before moving on to Hollywood, though he could stand it for only a few days. The superficialities that had so amused him a year earlier now struck him as contemptuously shallow. “My revulsion towards the picture world & all it connotes is complete,” he wrote in his daybook. The highlight of the trip was when he met Aimee McPherson, the famous Pentecostal preacher. In an interview with Gilmore Millen of the Los Angeles Herald Van Vechten said he had heard McPherson preach on the radio in his hotel room the previous night and her soulfulness and passion had had the most extraordinary effect on him. “I listened for two hours,” he said, “and I was enchanted. When she finished, I was almost on my knees.” Considering McPherson’s favorite targets for damnation were the heathens of Broadway and Hollywood, that was no slight achievement. Four days later, on March 1, he managed to get himself invited to a dinner with McPherson, or Sister, as she insisted people call her, and a few other Hollywood figures. After dinner they went to hear Sister perform baptisms at the Angelus Temple, a vast space packed with five thousand worshippers that reminded Van Vechten more of Carnegie Hall than any church he knew. The service was spectacular in every sense and prompted a tremendous outpouring of emotion from the congregation. Van Vechten wrote to both Marinoff and H. L. Mencken about how wonderful the experience had been—so wonderful that Mencken wondered whether Van Vechten had managed to behave himself properly: “I only hope that you didn’t attempt her person. Christian women are usually disappointing. It takes a lot of high-pressure work to convince them that God really doesn’t care a damn.”