The Tastemaker

by Edward White

  At the same time he was helping Yale amass its vast record of black culture, Van Vechten arranged for Fisk University, a small, historically African-American liberal arts college, to begin a collection detailing the history of American music, named the George Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music and Musical Literature, in honor of another recently departed veteran of the glory days, Gershwin having passed away in 1937. Again, the core collection was provided by Van Vechten himself from the piles of material that he had hoarded over the decades, all of which crowded the large, high-ceilinged rooms of his apartment. Having already donated the African-American materials to an Ivy League college in New England, he carefully calculated the choice of a black college in Tennessee at a time when Jim Crow laws were still very much in force. While the Gershwin collection “was all white people’s music for a Negro college,” he recalled some years after both collections had been established, “if you want to study the Negro since 1900, you have to go to Yale … I thought this would interest people of the other race to go and look up things in their respective places.” To his friend Arna Bontemps he admitted that the means were as important as the ends: “I am mad over the idea of breaking down segregation” by drawing white researchers into the archives of black universities.

  Sitting on committees for grand civic projects and establishing formidable educational resources to strike a blow for racial equality, Van Vechten looked as though he had turned into his father. Certainly there were striking similarities, principally that both devoted themselves to projects that stressed the importance of individual self-improvement. But Carl’s ambitions had an aesthetic dimension that Charles’s never had. Creating beautiful surroundings was a passion of his that flowed irresistibly through his works as well as his private life. With the collections at Fisk and Yale he wanted to furnish environments of the mind through which scholars could have their imaginations stimulated and their prejudices challenged. Van Vechten once copied into a notebook a passage from the 1935 novel The Last Puritan, by George Santayana, that perfectly articulates his approach to his role of wealthy patron: “The use of riches isn’t to disperse riches, but to cultivate the art of living, to produce beautiful homes, beautiful manners, beautiful speech, beautiful charities. You individually can’t raise the lowest level of human life, but you can raise the highest level.”

  Noblesse oblige, one might call it, an aristocratic individualism conducive with his love of material splendor and his desire to be seen as an exceptional man of foresight and influence. In the catalog he wrote for the James Weldon Johnson Collection, he left no doubt about which beneficent benefactor had laid the foundations. The catalog, an exhaustive document of 658 pages that provides information about every item and major personality appearing in Van Vechten’s gift, is a thing of mesmeric scope, reflecting the depth and breadth of his passion for African-American culture. Obscure abolitionist novels are explained alongside even more obscure eugenicist tracts; Josephine Baker and Claude McKay rub shoulders with Booker T. Washington and Charles Chesnutt. But on every page is Van Vechten. The story of his life is found scattered in fragments, conspicuously written in the third person, among the larger, more complex stories of black America postemancipation. In the entry for a biography of Paul Robeson, Van Vechten notes that one chapter includes rich descriptions of his cocktail parties at 150 West Fifty-fifth Street; on detailing a book about the history of American boxing, he draws attention to his interest in the sport and to the black fighters he has photographed; when he comes to his copy of Half-Caste, Cedric Dover’s evisceration of the pseudoscientific basis of white supremacy, he thinks it vital to note that there is a passing, unflattering reference to him on page 14. After reading a document in which Van Vechten parachutes himself into the black history of the United States at every possible moment, one might easily interpret his immense generosity in establishing the collection as lordly largess. The same often applied to his personal life. Once he had taken up photography full-time as a man of great private wealth who never need work again, certain friends felt uncomfortably beholden to his benevolence. He spent hours taking and developing photographs for them but refused to accept money or favors in return. Inevitably, this could cause frustration and resentment. After receiving some prints in the mail, Mahala Dutton—or Mahala Dutton Benedict Douglas, as she was now known—asked Van Vechten why he insisted on making people feel “so much in your debt” by refusing to accept payments for his photographs, and only ever issuing them as gifts. “I never seem able to do anything for you,” she said in a letter that balanced gratitude and exasperation.

  Imperiousness was a characteristic too deeply embedded to be changed now, however. And neither should it render his objectives unworthy. His egocentrism aside, the collections at Fisk and Yale reflect Van Vechten’s glee at the vitality of American culture, a vitality created by its founding commitment to the genius of the individual. Coinciding with the outbreak of the Second World War, the act of establishing these archives of American brilliance might just have been the first and last overtly political act of his life. During the same period his revulsion for communism deepened, at a time when lots of his closest friends thought the Soviet Union Europe’s greatest hope of defeating fascism. Many of his cohorts had enthusiastically supported communism’s role in the Spanish Civil War and were attracted by its creed of class solidarity, which appeared to cut across the racial dividing lines that held the United States’ culture of segregation in place. Van Vechten had no truck with any of this. “With great pleasure,” he wrote his left-wing friend Dorothy Peterson in December 1939 a few days after the outbreak of the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland, “I spit on Russia and all the Russian sympathizers.” Beyond the ruthless imperialism of the Red Army there was a bigger issue: he believed that leftist ideologies promoted the idea that sameness could be a virtue, and his individualist instincts could not tolerate that notion. His disdain even made its way into the James Weldon Johnson Collection catalog when he noted that C.L.R. James’s adherence to Trotskyism fatally damaged his abilities as a writer.

  When the United States entered the war with the Soviet Union as an ally, Van Vechten took the opportunity to express his fealty to his nation’s individualistic ethic by spending Monday and Tuesday nights running the Stage Door Canteen, a venue where servicemen in New York could eat, drink, dance, and socialize while being waited on by celebrities from the entertainment world. It proved such a hit that it provided the basis of the 1943 propaganda film Stage Door Canteen starring, among many other Hollywood A-listers, Katharine Hepburn. Marinoff was actually first to volunteer her services at the canteen, but when Van Vechten decided to get involved, he swiftly bundled her aside and turned the venture to his own purposes. As well as being a site of respite for servicemen away from home in the Big Apple, the canteen became another venue for Van Vechten to challenge the authority of the color line. He wrote with pride to many friends about the racial mixing he was facilitating, as black soldiers danced with white girls and got to know white fellow servicemen in a way they would never have done elsewhere. It reaffirmed his belief that political campaigns, committees, and state-run projects were no match for the transforming power of direct social contact—especially when he was in charge. He told Dorothy Peterson that the success of the canteen was “proof” of his belief that if blacks only had “nerve enough” to enter white establishments, then racism, outside the South, “could be broken down in a week.”

  The naivety of that statement is breathtaking. Considering how often black friends of his had been turned away from restaurants, theaters, and nightclubs that he himself patronized, it seems bizarre that he believed the social timidity of the black community to be the biggest obstacle in defeating racism. It was the type of observation he made all the time. When the African-American academic Norman Holmes Pearson asked him to sign a petition in support of the Civil Rights Congress in 1948, Van Vechten declined the invitation, telling Pearson that he made it a rule never to add
his name to petitions, before ostentatiously claiming that he had followed his own methods for opposing racial discrimination for half a century, “sometimes almost single-handed,” and with tremendous effect. He added that he had been particularly successful in challenging the behavior of the many African-Americans who attempt to “Jim Crow other Negroes.” Beyond the supercilious, self-regarding waffle, Van Vechten’s response reveals that his fixation with individual transformation blinded him to the structural nature of racism, the deep-rooted social and political issues that kept black and white America divided. When a new, more organized and politicized phase of the civil rights struggle began after the Second World War, Van Vechten could not take to its petitions, marches, demonstrations, and rallies, which, to him, emphasized collective rights over individual experiences. The unwieldy complexities of politics had no place in his scheme to “cultivate the art of living,” as George Santayana had put it in The Last Puritan. He clung to the idea that racism would be destroyed if whites and blacks were encouraged to lindy hop together on a Saturday night and that the world could be revolutionized one elegant cocktail party at a time. It was a fanciful, quixotic indulgence that could be enjoyed only by a rich white man to whom racial discrimination was an abstract problem rather than a vicious reality that blighted his daily life.

  Still, there is something inspiring about Van Vechten’s inexhaustible faith in the capacity of the individual to effect change, and before his eyes at the canteen he saw young lives set on a path of self-discovery. The unusually named George George, sensitive, awkward, and barely twenty, was drawn in almost immediately when he spent an evening at the canteen, shyly watching the other soldiers spin the pretty girls around the dance floor. Van Vechten could spot the truth about boys like George a mile off. He had, after all, been just like them once, a confused outsider dreaming of escape. The currents of longing and frustration that George thought were buried deep within him surged to the surface under Van Vechten’s gaze. To George, Van Vechten was an exemplar of the life he dreamed of living. Though too self-conscious to speak at any length to him on the night, George struck up an extraordinary correspondence with Van Vechten, writing vivid and intense letters from Miami, Brazil, and all the other places he was stationed. In return Van Vechten sent him anecdotes of memorable times past and present and copies of his novels. George immediately identified with Gareth Johns, the frustrated youth at the center of The Tattooed Countess. Like Johns, George said, “I am understood by no one; liked by fewer.” He apologized for the melodrama, blaming it on his feelings of vulnerability and confusion. George came to idealize Van Vechten and described him as one of the greats of the twentieth century, an artist of beauty, poise, style, and authenticity, for whom no exaltation was too grand. The canteen was a magnet for lonely and bored young servicemen far from home—just like George—and it provided Van Vechten the opportunity to swell the numbers of the jeunes gens assortis. As he entered his old age, this seemed more important than ever; inculcating these youngsters with his values, interests, and way of living was the surest means by which his influence would live on after his death.

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  In the last twenty years of his life securing a legacy became the focus of Van Vechten’s work. As the forties bled into the fifties, his days were split among three principal activities: letter writing, photography, and boxing up material to be stored for posterity. He was helped in the latter two of these by Saul Mauriber, another much younger man who became the main object of Van Vechten’s sexual and romantic attentions after his relationship with Mark Lutz had settled into warm friendship in the early forties. The materials they were arranging were not just for the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale or the archive in memory of Gershwin at Fisk. Van Vechten was donating reams of his correspondence and personal photographs to the New York Public Library and Yale’s Collection of American Literature. Those grand institutions were only too glad to receive them. His relationships with H. L. Mencken, Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, and hundreds more are preserved in their letters to him and in their submission before his camera, providing a twisting paper trail of Van Vechten’s life and his nation’s cultural transformation.

  These are the archives of a kind of cultural alchemy that took place in the United States from the start of the twentieth century, the curious tale of how the unseemly forces of modernism conquered the conventions of the past—but with a vignette depicting Van Vechten’s involvement on every page. Among the thousands of photographs he donated, by far his most common subject is himself, either shots taken by others or the hundreds of vainglorious self-portraits. He bequeathed piles of receipts, tax returns, report cards, student essays, scraps of fabric, and even a box of dried flowers that belonged to him. In the margins of letters and on their envelopes he scribbled explanatory notes about the identities of his correspondents and the people, events, and places they discuss. He was talking to the future generations he imagined poring over his belongings, narrating for them the story of the times through which he had lived. By the mid-1940s Van Vechten’s literary fame was a distant memory. His impish novels, so firmly fixed to the era in which they were written, aged poorly, and his essays on dance, music, and the theater faded almost entirely from view. In the meantime, many of his great causes had outstripped him: Stein, Hughes, Gershwin, and Robeson, for example, all were world-famous, and in 1949 Ethel Waters became only the second black woman in history to receive an Oscar nomination. Fabulously wealthy and well connected though he was, Van Vechten was frustrated by his slide from public prominence. He viewed these archives as his best chance of immortalizing himself, of leaving definitive proof of his uniqueness and the role he had played in helping the United States realize its artistic potential.

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  In the mountains of papers and objects he cataloged and sent away, Van Vechten exhibited his inner life in minute detail. When researchers looked through these materials in the years immediately before and after his death in 1964, they were overwhelmed by the volume of evidence that attested to those private relationships of his that hurdled the barriers of race and class. Signs of his varied sexual interests, however, were far less prominent—visible, certainly, but often obscured by codes, innuendos, and meanings that nestled between the lines. It was as if Van Vechten had excised that important part of his life from history. For myriad reasons such self-censorship would have been entirely understandable. Leading an openly homosexual life had of course never been an option for Van Vechten, but in the years during and immediately after the Second World War, the sexually playful atmosphere of the twenties, in which he had written about homosexuality with relative candor, seemed remarkably distant. J. Edgar Hoover began his grotesque campaign against homosexuality as early as 1937, ordering FBI agents to compile thousands of reports on homosexuals within the military, government, politics, and various other fields of public life. By 1947 Hoover was warning Congress that homosexuality was a key threat to national security, second only to communism, and urging President Truman to flush it out wherever it existed. His invective proved greatly persuasive. By the early fifties Senator Joseph McCarthy and numerous other prominent federal and state officials were joining in the witch-hunts, and between 1947 and 1955 twenty-one states and the District of Columbia introduced sexual psychopath laws that specifically targeted homosexuals. Life for many American gay men and lesbians was now more fearful and secretive than ever before.

  In a direct sense, Van Vechten was relatively unaffected by these developments. He turned seventy in 1950, and his years of cruising in gay bars were behind him. All the same, the demonization of homosexuality enraged him, and he refused to be victimized. On his death he left instructions that certain documents, sealed in boxes, should be handed to Yale and the New York Public Library, only to be opened many years after his passing. His daybooks from the 1920s were sent to the New York Public Library, the perfect place for his shorthand chronicle of Manhattan’s coming of age. To Yale he left very different materia
ls: boxes of homoerotic photographs and eighteen scrapbooks recording an adult life of homosexual desire. The books are a jumble of newspaper clippings, erotic and pornographic photographs, sketches, and scraps of personal correspondence, the majority of which comes from the 1940s and the 1950s, though one newspaper story included came from as early as 1917. The article in question concerned the notorious playboy Harry K. Thaw, who was jailed for kidnapping and whipping a teenage boy named Frederick Gump in a violent sexual assault. There are many clippings like that dotted throughout the scrapbooks; stories of gay bashings, of persecution, and of men, fearful that some dark secret would emerge to destroy them, who had taken their own lives. These of course were the tragic realities for all too many Americans in a pre-Stonewall society—and, to a lesser extent, continue to blight the lives of some gay people today—yet without his inclusion of them here, it would be tempting to believe that such darkness did not encroach on Van Vechten’s horizon. His treatment of homosexuality in his published writing in the 1920s was rarely anything other than exuberantly camp, some of his male characters conforming to the pansy stereotype of the day: effete, flamboyant, superficial, and unashamed of their sexual interests. His private correspondence, even with other gay men, gives little indication that he found anything troubling about his sexuality. When writing friends, often he signed off his letters with extravagant farewells that lavished imaginary gifts upon his correspondent, wonders such as exotic multicolored birds of prey, priceless jewelry, and a thousand tender kisses. When addressed to his closest gay male friends, these read like positive affirmations of a shared identity, especially when they mentioned flowers—pansies, lilies, violets, and carnations being particular favorites—as they frequently did. The tales of misery and torment in the scrapbooks show a different man, not one tortured by his sexual self but one clearly touched by the pain of those who were and angry at an intolerant world insensitive to their suffering.