The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  He was once again working behind the scenes to secure success, as he had for Robeson, Hughes, Firbank, and so many others. And as always, he ensured that his name was tightly bound to the artist he was promoting. Before he escorted Stein and Toklas on their flight to Chicago, he alerted the press to the photo opportunity and posed proudly in the frame next to the couple as they climbed aboard. He also distributed one of the photographs that he had taken of Stein in France to promote her lectures. The scholar Tirza True Latimer perceptively notes that the picture he chose was a close re-creation of the George Platt Lynes photograph that Time had put on its cover—Stein’s profile as she gazed across rural France—his way of blotting out the presence of a rival.

  Naturally, Van Vechten photographed Stein obsessively, taking her portrait whenever he had the chance. In Virginia he photographed her before monuments and grand architectural forms, including the Jefferson Rotunda. Some of them could be mistaken for the sorts of holiday snaps habitually taken in front of the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben, but it seems there was an agreed plan between Stein and Van Vechten to use these photographs as a means of rooting her in American history, making her epic and durable. On receiving the Virginia photographs, Stein composed a letter of fulsome thanks in which she suggested they collaborate on a “pictorial history” of the United States. Stein would write the text, Van Vechten would supply the photographs, and “we will all be so happy.”

  Gertrude Stein, January 4, 1935, photograph by Carl Van Vechten

  Stein in fact was already happy. Not since Oscar Wilde’s triumphant tour of 1882 had a writer generated such excitement by traveling the nation; no American literary figure other than Mark Twain had delivered so many enthusiastically received lectures. To recognize Van Vechten’s prominent role in her triumphant return, Stein allowed their relationship to take on a new aspect, reflecting her gratitude for all the work he had done on her behalf. Among them, Van Vechten, Stein, and Toklas created a fictitious family unit called the Woojumses, the name adapted from a cocktail that Van Vechten had invented for Parties. Van Vechten became the organizing patriarch, Papa Woojums; Toklas, the nurturing Mama Woojums; Stein was Baby Woojums, the brilliant but vulnerable child who must be indulged, protected, and controlled in equal parts. He relished being Stein’s paternal guardian and gatekeeper. A matter of weeks into the tour Van Vechten wrote to Mabel Dodge to warn her that the chances of Stein’s being able to visit Taos were slim to none, so great were the demands on Gertrude’s time. Mabel was cut to the quick by the snub; Van Vechten, more than a little gratified to have got one over on his former mentor. When Stein slipped out of his grasp and went to stay with a lesser acolyte, Thornton Wilder, in Chicago, Van Vechten wrote her a letter of mock protest. “Thornton Wilder has got me down with jealousy. Don’t go and like him BETTER, PLEASE!” The tone was jokey, but the feelings of jealousy were entirely real.

  Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein aboard the SS Champlain as Stein waves farewell to the United States, May 4, 1935

  Shortly before she left, Stein returned to Van Vechten’s apartment for a final photo session. From the studio wall Van Vechten hung a crumpled Stars and Stripes, looking at first glance as if billowing in a strong wind. In front of the flag he posed Stein and took what is perhaps the definitive image of her. With her thick, solid frame statuesque and her gaze strong and steady, she looks like a female addition to Mount Rushmore. The symbolism was not remotely accidental. Gertrude Stein was no longer a figure of ridicule but a national treasure, and the cultural forces she represented were now recognized as integral to the American experience as were the Model T and the Marx Brothers’ movies. Stein liked the photograph so much that she chose it as the front cover of her book Lectures in America. “I always wanted to be historical, almost from a baby on,” Stein admitted shortly before her death. Thanks to Van Vechten’s portrait that ambition and sense of mission were immortalized, the image intricately bound up with the public perception of Stein as an American great, a unique genius who set the United States on a new path. It was exactly how Van Vechten thought of her. He may not have been as technically slick as Lynes, Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, or the other giants of photography who took Stein’s portrait, but he had an instinctive understanding of the medium’s power to exploit symbolism and communicate myth, the mightiest weapons in the modernist arsenal. Stein was the first American artist whose reputation he affected in this way, but there would be many more to follow, from Scott Fitzgerald to Ella Fitzgerald. When he died, he ensured that his photographs would continue to embed themselves within public consciousness, bequeathing thousands of prints to institutions across the United States. On almost all of them the words PHOTOGRAPH BY CARL VAN VECHTEN are clearly embossed on the bottom of the image, his name indivisible from the artist in shot.

  * * *

  On May 4, 1935, Van Vechten accompanied Stein and Toklas aboard the SS Champlain. Their tour at its end, the couple returned to France with heavy hearts, nervous that yet another hideous conflict was brewing in Europe and sad to leave behind a country that felt more like home than when they had lived there. On the gangplank, journalists bombarded Stein with questions about her final thoughts on America. “It is violent and gentle,” she said. Despite all the casual brutality of the modern world, Americans had managed to preserve the kernel of innocence that had defined them in the days of her youth before skyscrapers and airplanes and nightclubs arrived. That “their gentleness has persisted while they have been becoming sophisticated,” she declared, “shows that it is genuine.” The front-page picture that accompanied Stein’s farewell messages showed the lady smiling joyously, waving her famous cap in the air with her left hand. Standing next to her is Papa Woojums, his teeth deliberately hidden from the cameras with a tight-lipped half smile, while the little finger on his left hand hooked gently into Baby’s coat pocket. It was a sign to those watching of his importance to the woman by his side, who was now a pillar of the establishment, but the gesture also displayed his enormous affection for a friend, a cause, and a fellow iconoclast. Moments later he said his goodbyes and disembarked, heading back into the embrace of the New York night, satisfied that no matter the distance between them, he and Stein would be forever entwined in their mutual legacies.

  THIRTEEN

  Yale May Not Think So, but It’ll Be Just Jolly

  Aged fifty-five and into a fifth career, Van Vechten was as excited as a schoolboy when his first photographic exhibition opened to the public in New York in November 1935. “Im [sic] in a big show at Radio City,” he informed Langston Hughes, “and here is my first notice!” He had enclosed for Hughes’s attention a short review of the exhibition by Henry McBride, whose kind words about Van Vechten’s work may not have been entirely unbiased; he and Van Vechten had been friends for twenty years, and both were apostles of Gertrude Stein. Still, Van Vechten regarded public praise from McBride as confirmation of his inestimable talent. The exhibition displayed an eclectic mix of Van Vechten’s most celebrated subjects, hinting at the outline of his experience of the century so far, from Theodore Dreiser, to Fania Marinoff, to Ethel Waters and Bricktop, the African-American woman who ran the most fashionable nightclub in Paris during the 1920s. McBride’s verdict was brief but unequivocal: “literature’s loss is photography’s gain.”

  Over the following years Van Vechten’s stature as a portrait photographer grew enormously, as did his skill. He gained the respect and admiration of many fellow photographers, including Man Ray, who was so pleased with shots that Van Vechten took of him and Salvador Dalí that he asked for permission to use them to promote his work. The praise that most pleased Van Vechten came from Alfred Stieglitz, who, along with his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, sat for him on numerous occasions over seven years. “They are damn swell, a joy,” Stieglitz told him about one set of prints. “You are certainly a photographer. There are but few.” More and more great names ascended to Apartment 7D at 150 West Fifty-fifth Street and, from the fall of 1936, to the Van Vechtens’ tw
o subsequent homes on Central Park West, to have their pictures taken. In February 1936, a year before her death, Bessie Smith returned to the scene of her infamous outburst eight years earlier to pose, this time on her best behavior, “cold sober and in a quiet reflective mood.” “I got nearer her real personality than I ever had before, and the photographs, perhaps, are the only adequate record of her true appearance and manner that exist.” Given that this was the only time that Van Vechten had met her while both were sober, quite how he would have known who the true Bessie Smith was is up for debate. However, his immodesty does nothing to alter that the portraits he took were among his best, and they immortalized in photographic form the same woman generations have discovered in Smith’s recordings: an artist who is alive, bright, and playful in some; reflective, pained, and soulful in others.

  Bessie Smith, 1936, photograph by Carl Van Vechten

  Not long after, he photographed Scott Fitzgerald, though not at his studio. “I hadn’t planned to meet Scott,” he told a biographer of Zelda’s when relaying how the two had accidentally met at the Algonquin one afternoon. Fitzgerald was at a table with the literary critic Edmund Wilson, but at first Van Vechten did not recognize Fitzgerald and stood waiting to be introduced. “It was a terrible moment; Scott was completely changed. He looked pale and haggard. I was awfully embarrassed.” After lunch Van Vechten shepherded Fitzgerald outside to take his photo. “He posed for two or three,” he explained, “and that was the last time I saw him.” Those impromptu shots are among the definitive images of Fitzgerald. Had things turned out differently, had Fitzgerald flourished after the twenties, perhaps Van Vechten’s photographs would not be known at all. As it is, Fitzgerald looks strangely uncomfortable before the lens, smiling but ever so slightly stooped and squinting in the sunlight and perfectly reflecting the faded glamour that he has come to symbolize.

  Those close to him saw something different in the photographs. Some years later the Fitzgeralds’ daughter, Scottie, wrote to thank Van Vechten for sending her a print of one of the photographs, the best ever taken of her father, she thought, which captures “a nice sober, serious look … his hard-working side,” which she remembered much more clearly than his hedonistic tendencies. Scottie would have dearly loved for Van Vechten to have captured her mother in that same way, but he never heard from Zelda again save for a couple of odd, rambling missives she sent after her mental health problems had overwhelmed her. Just eight days after Scott’s death, in December 1940, she scribbled Carl a letter in pencil, betraying a fragile and distressed woman who bore no resemblance to the exuberant flapper Van Vechten had known in New York and Hollywood. She thanked Van Vechten for some kind words that he had written about Scott, and reflected on their shared experiences of the 1920s, “the glamour, and tragedy, of those courageous and dramatic lives so many years ago.”

  It was the sort of maudlin reflection with which he had become all too familiar. In June 1938 James Weldon Johnson was killed in a car accident. Van Vechten was heartbroken at the news, one of the rare occasions when the death of somebody he knew caused him genuine distress. During the fourteen years they had known each other, they had fostered not just a close friendship but an intellectual kinship that for both of them symbolized the hope of a new era in which black and white Americans would eliminate the divisions of racial difference through social contact, the two races uniting over a shared love of art and entertainment, socializing together in apartments and nightclubs, forging friendships over drinks and love affairs on the dance floor. The two men celebrated their shared birthday together every year along with Alfred Knopf, Jr., who had also been born on June 17. Langston Hughes remembered the last birthday party they had, in 1937, at Van Vechten’s apartment. Presented to the three guests of honor were three cakes, “one red, one white, and one blue,” as Hughes recalled, “the colors of our flag. They honored a Gentile, a Negro, and a Jew—friends and fellow Americans.”

  Sadly, Van Vechten realized that he and his great friend were never able to stand as equals in the eyes of wider society and that Johnson’s talents had been smothered by racial prejudice. “I always said, if he had been white he would have been ambassador to St. James in London,” Van Vechten stated. “He was a very tactful, diplomatic, extraordinary man, very delightful company, very amusing.” When he tried to express his feelings for Johnson as a man and a totem for the African-American cause, the only fitting way he could do it was to compare him with Charles Van Vechten, his own father. Both men had gifts that Van Vechten admired immensely: kindness, generosity, and conviviality, but most especially an ability to be both “tolerant of unorthodox behavior in others” and “patriarchal in offering good advice.” The comparison reveals that beneath his carefully managed image of the sophisticated iconoclast Van Vechten’s moral exemplars were his parents, whose bold stand on race relations kick-started his interest in African-American culture. Of course his parents, like his brother, Ralph, and his dear friend Avery Hopwood were long dead. When Johnson joined them, Van Vechten felt the presence of his own mortality and decided that now was the time to shape a concrete legacy for himself and to honor Johnson’s memory.

  The first step Van Vechten took was to convene the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Committee. Featuring, among others, Walter White, W.E.B. DuBois, and Eleanor Roosevelt, for three years the committee attempted to create a public monument in tribute to Johnson: a bronze statue of a black man by the black sculptor Richmond Barthé placed at the entrance to Central Park on West 110th Street and Seventh Avenue. Barthé’s design, enthusiastically supported by the committee, had the man, who was a representative figure, rather than a depiction of Johnson himself, naked and shackled to celebrate the efforts of African-American artists whose work projects the beauty and humanity of their race in the face of discrimination and oppression. The project never materialized, partly because of the timidity of the city authorities, who feared the proposed design could be incendiary, and partly because of Van Vechten’s impatience with the politics of the situation and his refusal to sanitize the memorial by unshackling the statue or putting it in a pair of pants, as was requested. Van Vechten was frustrated with the processes of compromise and amelioration that committee work involved and equally vexed that there were those who seemed not to recognize that Johnson was a unique man who deserved a unique tribute. He guarded Johnson’s memory with jealous fervor, as if it were his own possession. One of the reasons his opinion of Walter White soured so much in later life may have been that White had replaced Johnson as the national secretary of the NAACP in 1931 and ran the organization with tremendous success for twenty-four years, his presence in the national consciousness outstripping Johnson’s, a fact Van Vechten seemed to resent. “Walter was never, in my mind, anything like as big a man as James Weldon Johnson was,” he said in an interview after both men had died.

  With the plan for the statue dead and buried by 1941, Van Vechten moved on to something less striking but equally radical. For nearly the past twenty years, the collecting passion that was first fired in his childhood had been focused primarily on African-American materials. In boxes, drawers, chests, and cabinets and crammed onto the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that wrapped around his apartment he compiled a huge depository of books, records, music scores, and manuscripts by and about African-Americans as well as thousands of items of correspondence with black artists, writers, performers, educators, and public figures. This stockpile of materials was so large he fancied it would make an excellent founding contribution to an archival collection dedicated entirely to the culture of black Americans. Yale University accepted his proposal to house the collection and so became the first Ivy League institution to hold any resource of that kind. It was named the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters, founded by Carl Van Vechten. Besides this being a fitting tribute to his friend, the name locked Johnson’s memory to his for time immemorial. Van Vechten also openly admitted that the use of Johnson’s name first and his second wa
s “to induce others to make valuable additions to the collection.” He knew that the words “Carl Van Vechten” still caused icy chills in some parts of black America, and he suspected that eliciting first editions, letters, and other precious materials from prominent black figures would be vastly easier if it were done in the name of an African-American pioneer rather than the white author of Nigger Heaven.

  Van Vechten’s plan for the collection was for it to be a vivid, living record of black culture. Throughout the 1940s, and for the rest of his life, he sought out valuable material wherever he could, entreating authors to gift draft manuscripts and inscribed first editions, along with letters that would shine a light on the intimate connections among and within black American communities. Langston Hughes joked that now he was to be absorbed into the august archives of an Ivy League college Van Vechten should expect his letters to acquire a new tone “and no doubt verge toward the grandiloquent.” “Don’t be selfconscious about Yale,” Van Vechten replied. “Henry Miller puts more shits and fucks and cunts in than ever when I assure him his letters are destined for college halls.” Beyond the joke there was a serious message. This was not to be an airbrushed record of the Negro edited by the white establishment; it was to be the unexpurgated story of a people in the words, sounds, and images of their highest achievers. To ensure that the great swath of African-American talent was represented, Van Vechten made it his mission to photograph every interesting and prominent black person he could entice to his studio and sent the results to Yale. As the years passed, the old guard of the Harlem Renaissance was joined on the rolls of Van Vechten’s film by a younger generation, including the likes of Eartha Kitt, Harry Belafonte, and James Earl Jones. And though Sidney Poitier and a few others declined invitations to pose—probably the lingering association of Nigger Heaven’s putting them off—the opportunity to be immortalized in the James Weldon Johnson Collection was irresistible to most. Even W.E.B. DuBois agreed to put past hostilities to one side and submit to Van Vechten’s lens, smiling warmly as he did so.