by Edward White
In addition to the old favorites London and Paris, there was a new stop on the itinerary: Berlin. Although in the early 1930s Berlin existed as a complex tessellation of extraordinary issues, Van Vechten’s interest was not caught by the rise of nazism or the films of Fritz Lang. To paraphrase Christopher Isherwood, who had discovered the city for himself the previous year, for Carlo, Berlin meant boys. On August 22 he visited its renowned gay bars for the first time, as a new acquaintance chaperoned him to four different venues, all of them at the mainstream end of the spectrum catering to those in search of champagne and jazz as much as the company of gay men or lesbians. The Eldorado was one of those four: a luxurious establishment famed for its transvestite clientele and drag competitions where the man judged to be wearing the most beautiful outfit was customarily awarded a live monkey, while the runner-up received a parrot. Also on the schedule that night was the Silhouette, a favorite nightspot of Berlin’s artists and performers, including Marlene Dietrich, who was wont to turn up dressed in her trademark suits and ties. For the rest of the week the pattern was fixed, much as it had been when Van Vechten went cruising in the rue de Lappe the previous year: after dinner and a couple of drinks he kissed Marinoff goodnight as she retired to her hotel room, leaving him to explore until the early hours of the morning. Sometimes his destination was a ritzy venue with a top-class cabaret and a sophisticated crowd; other times he slummed it in rough trade joints, cruising for working-class locals. He enjoyed both equally. When the time came to leave Berlin, he did so reluctantly. “I am very sad,” he confessed to himself. “I adore the place.”
Back in New York, with no project to occupy him, he toyed with the idea of writing a novel about Reno after gambling was legalized there in March 1931. Quickie divorces, casinos, drink, and drugs in a city of bright lights adrift in the desert: the setting was so perfect for a Van Vechten novel that the book would have almost written itself. That was the problem. Parties had given the twenties’ culture of frivolity and excess such an almighty kick in the guts that Van Vechten could not fathom what else he could say about it. Even if a new angle could be found, he feared he would no longer have an audience to share it with. The tone of American cultural life had changed so radically since the crash that the public Van Vechten and the rest of the Exquisites had once merrily indulged no longer seemed to exist. Hergesheimer and Cabell, who had been remarkably successful ever since the late teens, saw their careers implode in the early thirties, their novels without appeal to a nation that had swapped Warren Harding for FDR and looked to John Steinbeck and Nathanael West for literary evocations of its times. Now that he was financially secure it seemed crazy to go through the struggle of writing a book that stood a good chance of being ignored, a fate Van Vechten could not bear to contemplate. On May 18 he told Marinoff that he had scrapped plans to go to Reno for research. He would have to think this one out again.
Two days later his friend Eddie Wasserman rang with some dreadful news. Ralph Barton, insane with jealousy over his ex-wife Carlotta Monterrey’s marriage to Eugene O’Neill, had killed himself with a single bullet shot straight through his temple. Barton had clearly been in a highly disturbed state for some time, his private life and mental health torn to shreds by his alcoholism. One might presume that Van Vechten, of all people, could sympathize with that. Instead his reaction to the news of Barton’s suicide was brutally unfeeling. The next day he wrote Marinoff complaining about Barton’s “rotten act,” a display of craven selfishness, he thought. According to Van Vechten, Barton had taken his own life because he was jealous and angry that his ex-wife had married O’Neill, a man whose celebrity far outstripped his own. Firing a bullet through his skull was simply Barton’s way of kicking up a fuss, so Van Vechten reasoned, making an old friend’s suicide sound like the naughty outburst of a stroppy child. Two days later Van Vechten read Barton’s obituary in the Times and coldly noted that Barton was “already forgotten: nobody called to see him; there were no flowers.”
Van Vechten’s pitiless response to Barton’s passing was indicative of his chilling ability to remove people from his life without emotional residue. But it also had a deeper symbolism. Barton had been instrumental in both creating and satirizing 1920s celebrity culture, his caricatures of the rich and famous being a staple of Vanity Fair’s coverage of the goings-on in New York and Hollywood. His short film Camille assembled a huge number of those celebrities in its cast, featuring bona fide movie stars such as Lois Moran, Charlie Chaplin, Dorothy Gish, and Paul Robeson, alongside Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, Alfred Knopf, and three dozen other seminal names. Louis Mayer himself could not have compiled such a line-up; even the sultan of Morocco was given a role. When Barton died, it delivered a final, brutal blow to Van Vechten’s “splendid drunken twenties”; by discarding Barton’s memory so ruthlessly, Van Vechten was distancing himself from that milieu. Bob Chanler had died a few months earlier, and later that summer the party hostess A’Lelia Walker succumbed to a brain hemorrhage, a moment many cite as the symbolic end of the Harlem Renaissance. Van Vechten’s link to the atmosphere of the previous decade was decisively severed, and with it his career as a novelist.
TWELVE
Papa Woojums
For more than a decade alcohol and parties had been Van Vechten’s means of escape from the mundane realities of life. It seemed to him, surrounded by youth and gaiety, and with a belly full of booze, as if he need never grow up or grow old but forever remain the wide-eyed adventurer he had been when he arrived in New York in 1906. With the convergence of illness, bereavement, economic crisis, and the passing of his literary career, the pretense became impossible to maintain. To stay fresh, young, and vital, he would have to reinvent himself as he had done so many times before.
The initial phase of his latest transformation took place in the seat of an airplane in the fall of 1931. Van Vechten had long harbored an ambition to fly. Air travel was bound to be of interest to him: a cutting-edge adventure accessible to only a special few. He gasped at the exploits of the great early aviators, especially Charles Lindbergh, whose bravery as much as his celebrity fascinated him. Van Vechten took his first plane trip in October of 1931, when he flew to Richmond, Virginia, and found the experience exhilarating. In flight he was able to perform feats he had previously managed only in a metaphorical sense: racing at remarkable speed high above the humdrum lives of the earthbound; risking life and limb in search of a new thrill. The moment he landed he telegrammed Marinoff about it and wrote excitedly to friends to tell them that he had now joined the ranks of the airborne. In an interview she gave to a New York newspaper a few months later, Marinoff confirmed that her husband “tinkers with planes, flies in them to everywhere, and all the time,” adding that this new passion of his was infinitely preferable to his last. “I have tasted all the drinks in all the speakeasies … and I am tired of them. I have memories of hundreds of parties in apartments, in nightclubs, in Harlem, in the Village. It was a phase in the life of this generation. It was very hollow. I never liked it,” she said, the last utterance perhaps a trifle disingenuous.
Aside from experiencing the thrill of his maiden flight, there had been another motivation for traveling to Richmond that fall. In July his friend Hunter Stagg had put him in touch with Mark Lutz, an idealistic thirty-year-old journalist on The Richmond News Leader who added a refreshing, youthful presence to the town’s aging literary scene. Lutz had been on vacation in New York that summer and was hopeful of meeting Van Vechten, a man he had heard much about yet never encountered in the flesh. Van Vechten too was intent on getting acquainted, for Lutz was one of the young men about whom Stagg wrote gossipy letters during long, hot Virginian afternoons when he should have been working. As early as 1926 Stagg mentioned Lutz in response to Van Vechten’s teasing that Richmond lacked any attractive young men. “Taylor Crump is good-looking,” Stagg protested, “and Berkley Williams, and in a way, Mark Lutz. So there.” When they first spoke, Van Vechten suggested Lutz
come to a gathering he was hosting at his apartment. Already having plans for the evening, Lutz attempted to politely decline the invitation, but Van Vechten was insistent: whatever other engagements he had could be arranged for another time; a party at the Van Vechtens’ was not something anybody in Manhattan could afford to miss. Lutz had no choice but to relent, his diffident southern manners no match for Van Vechten’s Manhattan high-handedness.
Just as Donald Angus had been, Lutz was attracted to Van Vechten for his worldliness, his self-confidence, and his sophistication. Van Vechten was never interested in anyone who played hard to get, and in some measure he surely took to Lutz because the young man was fascinated by him. Yet Lutz was not the frolicsome gadfly that Angus had been when they met, and he was certainly no debauchee. He was a more sedate companion for a less frenzied period of Van Vechten’s life. In one of his notebooks Van Vechten pondered the things that made Lutz interesting. Most unlike his own profligate ways, Lutz was cautious, parsimonious even, and a nonsmoking teetotaler. He was also highly superstitious, believed himself to have psychic powers, and followed peculiar rules, such as never swatting flies in airplanes, an act that seemed to him a tiny perversion of the laws of nature. What they did have in common was an interest in the plight of African-Americans and their culture. As a liberal-minded journalist from Virginia, Lutz was always seeking out examples of the brutalities of segregation and worked to expose them in his work if and when he could. At the time of their first meeting, in July 1931, the infamous Scottsboro Boys trial, in which eight young black men were sentenced to death for the alleged rapes of two white women in Alabama, had just concluded, and Lutz fiercely backed the campaign to get the convictions overturned. Pressure groups and organized campaigns were not Van Vechten’s thing, but he did put Lutz in touch with Langston Hughes, who was heavily involved in the matter and had spoken out publicly about the injustice of the trial.
By the start of 1932 Van Vechten and Lutz were engaged in a love affair of the deepest intimacy. When they were not together as, because of the great distances that often separated them, was frequently, they sent each other letters, postcards, and clippings from newspapers and magazines almost every day for the next three decades. In his will Lutz requested that Van Vechten’s letters to him, perhaps as many as ten thousand, be destroyed after his death, but Van Vechten seemingly kept every piece of mail he had received from Lutz. In them all subjects are raised: from family bereavements, to international diplomacy, to rows with work colleagues, to race relations, reflecting the extent to which each was involved in the other’s life. “It was disappointing to have NO word from you in the mail of yesterday,” Lutz wrote on one of the rare occasions he found his mailbox empty one morning. More than a decade into their relationship he spelled out exactly how important Van Vechten had been to him from their first meeting in 1931. Before then, he said, he had played the field, but meeting Van Vechten had changed him: “I settled down to ONE … and would not change it for a MILLUN.”
At almost exactly the same moment that he found a new lover Van Vechten discovered the artistic calling he had been seeking. His friend Miguel Covarrubias had recently returned from Europe with a marvelous gadget, a new Leica camera that was lightweight and portable, yet capable of taking exceptionally crisp pictures. Photography was not new to Van Vechten. His relationship with the art laced its way through his life, usually in close concert with his valorization of the famous. As a child he lived among his stage idols through their cigarette card photographs and placed friends in dramatic poses before the family’s box camera. At the Times he recorded his association with opera stars through photographs. Being photographed himself by Nickolas Muray, one of New York’s most fashionable photographers during the 1920s, was an important moment to him, confirmation of his celebrity status. Photography to Van Vechten was a quintessential modern art, combining technology, spectacle, and glamour, though the cost of equipment and the time commitment involved in perfecting a technique had never permitted him to be anything other than an occasional practitioner. As Covarrubias demonstrated, the Leica allowed the amateur a freedom and a degree of precision previously unimagined. Always an early adopter of technology, and eager to test himself in a new element, Van Vechten soon bought one for himself. He turned unused space in the apartment into a makeshift darkroom and studio, and by January 1932 the new hobby was becoming a full-time obsession. Van Vechten roped in Mark Lutz to help him in his early shoots. Lutz set up lights and posed in front of the lens, allowing Van Vechten to experiment and learn from his mistakes. When Lutz was unavailable, other members of the jeunes gens assortis were employed to lend a hand, notably Donald Angus, and the artist Prentiss Taylor, who on “bright winter Saturdays” accompanied him on shoots in Harlem as well as a trip to Copenhagen in upstate New York to photograph the gravestones of Van Vechten antecedents long since dead.
Despite the amateur setup, Van Vechten was convinced from the start that the gift of taking a good photograph, and in particular a good portrait, was his. “Great photographers are born, not educated,” he believed, and if not great quite yet, he suspected it was only a matter of time. As early as February 1932 he boasted to Gertrude Stein that Stieglitz had pledged to hold an exhibition of his work and told Max Ewing that he was struggling to decide whether his first show would be photographs of Harlem or portraits of the great and good. Stieglitz never hosted a Van Vechten exhibition and almost certainly would not have offered one to such a novice. Probably Van Vechten’s bulletproof ego decided that he deserved an exhibition mounted by the godfather of American photography, and that was what counted. The facts, again, were irrelevant to his sense of truth. By June he was even comparing his capabilities, favorably, to those of Stieglitz’s when he sent Mabel Dodge some examples of his work, including a self-portrait. These, he declared, were just a taste of his considerable talent.
Carl Van Vechten, self-portrait, c. 1934
In truth, the photographs he took in the early 1930s were of wildly varying quality. Many were enchanting, but many others poorly lit, peculiarly composed, or spoiled by fussy backgrounds that seem more a reflection of the photographer’s taste than the sitter’s personality. It is the number and range of his sitters that are extraordinary. “My first subject was Anna May Wong,” he often claimed, “and my second was Eugene O’Neill.” Though that was not strictly so, it was a trademark Van Vechten embellishment in that it articulates a general truth, in this case the volume of celebrated people who sat in front of his camera. In addition to Wong and O’Neill, Bill Robinson, Langston Hughes, Bennett Cerf, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, Gladys Bentley, George Gershwin, Lois Moran, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Demuth, to name but a few, all were shot within roughly the first year of his photographic career. Scattered among the artists and impresarios were various interesting people outside the public eye. Over the years Marinoff posed endless times, of course, and usually in some extravagant costume: a belle epoque society lady; a flamenco dancer; resplendent in an Indian sari. Numerous other relatives were captured, as were favored domestic servants, window cleaners, doormen, and Sarah Victor, the pastry chef at the Algonquin Hotel. Even Harry Glyn, a bootlegger and pimp whose services Van Vechten had used on occasion over the years, was summoned for a shoot.
Anna May Wong, c. 1932, photograph by Carl Van Vechten
The discipline of portrait photography was tailor-made for Van Vechten. It indulged not only his voyeurism but also his fascination with exceptional people and the immense pleasure he took in being in their company. It was no coincidence, either, that photography seized him at a point in his life when change was taking place all around him and outside his control: the deaths of friends and loved ones, the economic situation that transformed New York’s social world, and the end of his writing career. With photography the holder of the camera had complete power; moments in time could be frozen forever. Van Vechten discovered that he was able to dictate the entire process of producing a photograph from beginn
ing to end. The one variable was the attitude of his subjects, but he soon found that he was able to rely on his ebullient charm to get from them exactly what he wanted.
At Apartment 7D his shooting space was small and quickly became hot under the studio lights. In coming years he moved to larger premises, but in all his studios there was a closeness, an atmosphere of emotional intimacy. All around lay the clutter of Van Vechten’s props and backdrops—crumpled sheets of colored cellophane, posters, rugs, African sculptures, floral wallpaper. To the sitters who arrived this was clearly neither an artist’s workroom nor the studio of a commercial artist but the den of an obsessive hobbyist. Observing him at work at close quarters for many years, Mark Lutz believed Van Vechten’s greatest attribute as a photographer had nothing to do with technical expertise or artistic flair but rather with his ability to put people at their ease, that silky charisma he had first used to get stories and photographs as a Chicago journalist. An arm placed lightly across the shoulder and some rich encomiums would do the trick for most. Even when a high-profile movie star came for a session, Van Vechten was unfazed: “a few glasses of champagne and he or she would pose contently and without self-consciousness,” Lutz recalled. Once things felt suitably loose, Van Vechten would position his subject and photograph quickly “in about a twentieth of a second” before self-consciousness arrived to spoil the moment. Occasionally, it would take considerably more effort. When Billie Holiday came for a shoot in 1949, Van Vechten struggled for two hours to break through her contrary, sullen exterior. It was only when he retrieved some shots he had taken of Bessie Smith, Holiday’s great heroine, that she let her guard down. “She began to cry, and I took photographs of her crying, which nobody else had done,” he remembered; “later I took pictures of her laughing.” Holiday ended up staying until five in the morning, telling Van Vechten and Marinoff her life story, and Van Vechten thought it one of his finest moments, a devastating combination of his charm and artistic skill used to capture an American icon. “There are no good photographs of Holiday except the ones I took of her,” he said a year after her death.