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 funeral 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.”
It was not the first time that Van Vechten had been awestruck in the presence of religious preachers. The Holy Jumpers service he witnessed in the Bahamas and the evangelical churches that he visited in Harlem had excited him because he viewed them as performances of undiluted blackness, a little like seeing Bert Williams or Nora Holt onstage. McPherson, however, was white, and the extreme reaction that Van Vechten had to her sermons is a sign of a tiny chink in his emotional armor presenting itself to the outside world. Usually he expressed feelings of self-doubt or weakness only to those closest to him—Marinoff, Avery Hopwood, or Donald Angus. Of course there is no chance that Van Vechten considered joining McPherson’s congregation, but after the bereavements, his illnesses, the rickety state of his marriage, and his dissatisfaction with his writing, McPherson’s offer of spiritual nourishment fell on receptive ears.
Those stirrings of vulnerability evident in the spring consumed him just a few months later. On July 1, after an evening of cocktails and absinthe with some of the jeunes gens assortis, a reporter from The New York Times called Van Vechten at home to get his reaction to some terrible news: Avery Hopwood was dead. The story at first was that Hopwood had got into difficulties while swimming in the Mediterranean and drowned. Within three weeks Somerset Maugham wrote to say that in fact, a heart attack had been the culprit, the culmination of an epic binge. Maugham explained that Hopwood had arrived in Juan les Pins one evening after four days of heavy drinking in Nice. Already drunk, he helped himself to several more drinks before sitting down to dinner. “Immediately after dinner he insisted on going in to the water,” Maugham said, implying the outcome was inevitable. Hopwood’s death hit Van Vechten as hard as any of the recent family deaths, perhaps more so. Van Vechten’s experience of New York had been entwined with his relationship with Hopwood, who was one of the few close friends during the last two decades with whom he had never fallen out, as well as having been his lover, albeit briefly. Marinoff, away on another of her restorative breaks, wrote him a tender letter of sympathy but also implored him to learn from Hopwood’s demise. The issue was no longer merely the survival of their marriage, she said, but their very lives. “You just can’t beat that sort of game darling,” She said, referring to the recklessness with which Hopwood had faced life. “It gets everyone sooner or later.” She was terrified that Van Vechten’s turn was next.
For the first time in their marriage Van Vechten paid serious attention to Marinoff’s supplications. On September 5 he boarded the SS Mauretania to join her in Europe, his first trip abroad since 1915. Perhaps there was a little of his essential selfishness in that decision. After all, he was reaching out to Marinoff at a moment when he most needed her support, after years of making little effort to atone for his atrocious behavior. Even so, the time they spent in each other’s company traveling through England, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Italy was physically and emotionally the closest they had been for many years, perhaps a full decade since Van Vechten had begun his affair with Donald Angus and certainly since his immersion in Harlem. The central problems of their marriage—Van Vechten’s chronic self-obsession and his alcohol dependency—were not obviated by the trip, but Van Vechten’s decision to leave New York and devote himself to Marinoff for a few weeks was a sign to her that he thought their relationship worth saving. Until now that had seemed very far from obvious.
* * *
The vacation afforded Van Vechten a vital moment of respite. Several thousand miles away from Manhattan he had the opportunity to break the rhythms of his usual existence, dedicate more attention to his relationship with Marinoff, and take stock of his life and career. That he was attempting to view the world from a fresh perspective that fall is evident from the journal he kept, in which he observed his European surroundings with a reflective, analytical calmness, a tone that he had not been using much of late.
On his first visit to Europe, in 1907, Van Vechten had been among the many Americans who scampered there in search of enlightenment. When he had returned, in 1913 and 1914, his motivation was essentially the same, and his direct exposure to European modernism had set his life on a new course. Fourteen years later he found the United States’ relationship with Europe drastically changed. His nation was a genuine cultural force in the Old World; its newness and brashness, once reviled, were now widely envied. As he and Marinoff journeyed through Western and Central Europe, Van Vechten scribbled in his notebook his surprise at how thoroughly Europe had been seduced by the fashions of New York and Hollywood. He thought the new urban Germany of the Weimar Republic at night could almost be Manhattan: jazz bands played in New York–style cabaret venues, and assertive young women walked the streets in their modern finery, no doubt influenced by the emancipated flappers they had seen in American movies. In shops in Prague, American names jumped out from the shelves in translations of novels about urban America, such as Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos, and any number of books by Upton Sinclair. The streets may have been lined with bicycles rather than motorcars, and Czech women had not caught the smoking habit yet, but American shadows were cast at every turn.
He noted all this with a combination of patriotic pride and a little amusement, a gentle disbelief that the cultural interests of the United States should have snaked their way not only across the Atlantic but down the full length of the Danube. It was with genuine excitement that he discovered the extent to which black America had made the journey too. Aside from the blare of jazz filling the streets, Van Vechten discovered photographs of Josephine Baker and other black American entertainers gazing out from magazine stands in numerous cities. The point of this trip was to cut the cord to Manhattan and heal the wounds he had inflicted upon his marriage. But try as he might, Van Vechten could not dislodge Harlem from his mind, and he pined for the company of the black people who inhabited his life in New York. A few days after spotting a black man in the center of Prague, Van Vechten was still rebuking himself for not having engaged him in conversation, as this man turned out to be the only person of color he saw in his whole time in Czechoslovakia. He was a snappily dressed fellow too, Van Vechten thought, who would have surely been wonderful company.
In noting Europe’s pockets of blackness, Van Vechten was also measuring his success as the publicist in chief of the New Negro. Nigger Heaven was proving a great success in Europe, selling well in Britain and France and translated into several European languages; when he met Greta Garbo in Hollywood earlier that year, he cabled Marinoff to send Garbo one of the Swedish versions immediately. Even before the book was published, he was acting as tour guide to Harlem for inquisitive outsiders, many of whom were visiting European artists, writers, and journalists, such as Paul Morand, Beverley Nichols, Rebecca West, and Somerset Maugham, who returned home with tales of black New York that fascinated their compatriots. Van Vechten was a crucial influence in spreading knowledge of African-American culture among not just white Americans but white Europeans, an achievement of which he was immensely proud. “That was almost my fate for ten years at least: taking people to Harlem,” he recalled. “You’ll find little Harlems everywhere you go,” Langston Hughes wrote him regarding his travel plans; “you were a mighty big part starting it all.”
When Van Vechten and Marinoff arrived in Paris in the fall of 1928, they encountered what the French called le tumulte noir, a craze for African-American art that swept all social classes right across the city. Van Vechten had played a small but significant role in this through his contribution as creative consultant to the producer Caroline Dudley on her La Revue Nègre show at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Marinoff’s desire to insulate Van Vechten from the hedonistic patterns of his life in New York was frustrated in Paris, where Carl’s old drinking pals, including Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Barton, turned up everywhere. However, his nights out on the town were curbed by illness, exhaustion, and another flare-up of the phlebitis in his leg, a sure sign to Marinoff that Van Vechten’s lifestyle during these last few years threatened to drag him into dark territory from which he would never return.
After a tour of the European mainland they decamped in November to London, where their social diary was full but less frenetic than in New York. Their arrival coincided with Paul Robeson’s highly praised reprisal of his role in Show Boat at the Drury Lane Theatre. Of all of Van Vechten’s causes Robeson was at this stage the most conspicuously successful, and when he wrote friends back home about how Robeson was stunning the English critics, he did so in the satisfied tones of someone who believed a good share of the credit was his. Showing off to Gertrude Stein, Van Vechten told her all about a party that the Robesons’ threw in his honor at their upscale house in Swiss Cottage. “It was their first party & a great success,” he began before providing a detailed breakdown of the guest list. “All the distinguished Negroes in London were there,” he said, along with many others, including Hugh Walpole, the politician and newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook, the singer Alberta Hunter, and Fred Astaire. The British establishment mingling with a multiracial group of America’s pop culture icons: this was an eclectic guest list to rival one of Van Vechten’s own and had been an unthinkable proposition when he was last in London fourteen years earlier. Van Vechten took great pride in being the guest of honor at this extraordinary event, a sign that he held some exalted position among this remarkable company, the reason they all had been brought together. Before he left England, Van Vechten purchased a portrait bust of Robeson sculpted by Jacob Epstein to be displayed in the hallway of his apartment. It was a monument in stone of his link to Robeson’s celebrity and a reminder to all who entered his home that it was in this very space that Van Vechten had set the world’s most famous black man on his path to stardom.
Van Vechten and Marinoff returned to New York laden with expensive gifts for themselves and others shortly before Christmas. If Marinoff had hoped the break would act as some sort of purification ritual from which her husband would emerge cleansed and reformed, she would have been disappointed. The anxieties of the last eighteen months had certainly eased, but Van Vechten still had a long way to go to shake off the grip that alcohol had taken on him. Over the next year he made repeated attempts to cut down on his drinking and told various friends that he was getting on the wagon for good. As often as not a declaration like that was quickly followed by a relapse, but he was earnest in his intentions of reining in the excess for fear of going the same way as Hopwood.
In the summer of 1929 Van Vechten accompanied Marinoff back to Europe. Most of their time was spent in Spain and France, where Van Vechten passed several long nights in Paris in the bars of the rue de Lappe, picking up Arab soldiers and rent boys. Even if they did not discuss explicit details, Marinoff must have had a pretty good inkling of the sorts of things that Van Vechten was doing when he chose to stay up late after kissing her goodnight. Here they were on a joint vacation as part of an effort to strengthen their marriage, and Van Vechten was taking the opportunity to engage in sexual adventures without any apparent objections from his wife. Nothing better expresses the Van Vechtens’ peculiar arrangement. Marinoff was apparently content to let Van Vechten satisfy his sexual needs however he saw fit, so long as she did not feel neglected or taken for granted. In New York, where Van Vechten’s coterie of young men was always buzzing around him, she often felt as if she had to wait in line for an audience with her husband. Here she knew that Van Vechten was all hers until the moment she retired for the evening. In any case, his nighttime assignations were only fleeting; soon they would be leaving for some other destination, just the two of them. To Van Vechten the situation was even more straightforward: he was devoted husband by day, sex tourist by night, another bit of pragmatic compartmentalizing that allowed him to avoid compromising any of his varied desires.
They returned to New York at the end of August. In October the stock market crashed. Manhattan’s gaudy carousel screeched to a sudden stop. Even with his unerring ability to disregard the realities of the outside world Van Vechten, who was relatively unaffected by the crash and barely mentioned it in his daybooks or in his letters to others, appreciated that the time had come to survey the devastation and count the bodies.
Written over the early months of 1930, Parties was the final installment of Van Vechten’s Manhattan chronicle, a brutal send-up of the alcohol-induced insanity of the last few years. David and Rilda Westlake, based not too loosely on the Fitzgeralds, take center stage as the fulcrum of a community of dyspeptic party animals, who spend their time fighting, sleeping around, taking drugs, gossiping, dancing, and, most of all, drinking—until the debauchery and sexual jealousy result in a murder. It is in many ways Van Vechten’s most effective novel, a vivid evocation of a remarkable moment in American history, told with humor and insight, but it is also an exhausting read. As frenetically silly as any of his previous efforts, Parties contains a menace and viciousness entirely absent from other Van Vechten novels, a legacy of the bereavements that he had suffered in the last two years. The death of Avery Hopwood, who had treated life with the same reckless abandon that defines many of the characters in the novel, seems to have had a particular impact on Parties’s bitter atmosphere. Knopf’s advertisements announced it as a state-of-the-nation address told through a sly, caustic smile: “Exhausted by wars and peace conferences, worn out by prohibition and other dishonest devices of unscrupulous politicians, the younger generation, born and bred to respect nothing, make a valiant and heart-breaking attempt to enjoy themselves.”
Weaving around the high-octane self-destruction is a valedictory salute to New York City. More sharply than in any of Van Vechten’s other books, the sensory experience of the city appears as a character in its own right. Its unmistakable landmarks, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, are name-checked, as are its smells—“hot asphalt, a distinct smell of chop suey and occasionally even of cooking opium on Broadway and the adjacent streets”—and its sounds, “most of which,” Van Vechten points out as if barely unable to believe it himself, “did not exist twenty years ago.” The novel unambiguously reiterates his long-standing belief that “what is new in New York is always more beautiful than what is old.” This is the strange ambiguity at the heart of Parties: that although New York is a mad, violent, exhausting city, it is the greatest place on earth for precisely those reasons. As detestable as the New Yorkers in the book are Van Vechten can never bring himself to condemn them because they represent much of what he thought best about the United States, a nation now imitated across the world. In publicity interviews he mentioned how his trips abroad had shown him “that interest in America is increasing rapidly in Europe.” Almost every European he encountered, he said, wanted to know about New York and Hollywood. In Parties he expressed this through the character of an elderly German aristocrat, the Gräfin Adele von Pulmernl und Stilzernl, who swaps the stuffy grandeur of her usual existence for the kinetic energy of New York. Among the first English words she learns are “bootlegger, speakeasy, buffet-flat, racketeer, stinko and ginny,” and she is enthralled of course by Harlem. In a scene that signifies a passing of the modernist torch from Europe to the United States, the Gräfin watches men and women dance the lindy hop, a new dance, which Van Vechten describes in detail as the greatest of all African-American dances, the one that “most nearly approaches the sensation of religious ecstasy.” The Gräfin looks on astonished at “the expression of electricity and living movement.” There was nowhere on earth quite like New York. The Gräfin speaks the novel’s telling final lines: “It is so funny, David, so very funny, and I love your country.”
The reviews were mixed. Some admired its ingenuity; others found its satire too cynical and its characters loathsome. “‘Parties’ scared me to death,” wrote Mabel Dodge. “I think it must be well done since it is so upsetting.” A “strange” and “disquieting” work, was Joseph Hergesheimer’s verdict. Marinoff was less diplomatic and told Van Vechten she hated it, probably because it was a little too close to home. A perceptive reviewer noted that the novel was published in the same week as Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, which also deals with the alienation and unhappiness wrought by modernity, and that “they have so much in common that ‘Parties’ might be a case book for Freud.”
It would not have taken a man of Freud’s deductive powers to fathom that Van Vechten had grown weary of the atmosphere that Parties evokes. In time he came to see the novel as his greatest literary achievement, a biting satire that delivered a sharper verdict on the decade’s follies than any other writer of the time achieved. In 1930 he found it difficult to judge its merits; he was just pleased to have finished it. For readers familiar with the hidden messages and in jokes of a Van Vechten novel, there was a transparent admission that the 1920s were over, even for the heartiest partygoer of them all, who had been forced to recognize his mortality by the turbulent events of the last two years. “He was getting on,” Van Vechten wrote of his character Hamish Wilding; “a career of drinking and drifting must stop at some date, he supposed: probably when he was fifty.” In August 1930, when the book was published, Van Vechten had just hit his half century.
* * *
At the moment Parties was published, Van Vechten ensured he was out of New York. As with Spider Boy, the writing process had been a protracted struggle, and once it was finished he was not sure whether he even liked the book, so could muster little enthusiasm for reading the reviews when they came out. For a third year in a row he and Marinoff sailed for a lengthy vacation in Europe.
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.