TWO
The Cosmopolitan Standard of Virtue
Eighteen ninety-three was a year of panic and exhilaration. In February an unprecedented credit crunch triggered the most devastating economic crisis in the nation’s history, closing five hundred banks and destroying the livelihoods of millions. Weeks later Chicago, the great financial success story of the late 1800s, defied the gloom by opening the World’s Columbian Exposition, an electrified jamboree of American power and potential to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing. The fair entertained millions but ended in horror and tragedy, doubling as the site of the assassination of Mayor Carter Harrison, Sr., and the grisly deeds of H. H. Holmes, the United States’ first documented serial killer. By fall any Gilded Age illusions that Americans could stroll blithely into the modern world shielded by a parasol of genteel manners and Christian values were blown away.
The summer before the exposition Van Vechten, aged twelve, visited Chicago for the first time with his father. He had never encountered a great industrial city, and his first impressions were mixed. He was repulsed by its crowded, dirty streets, unlike anything he was used to in Cedar Rapids or Grand Rapids, the largest towns he had experienced before then. When his father took him away from the city’s beating heart and out onto the cleaner, calmer waters of Lake Michigan, he saw the outline of the exposition buildings in mid-construction and thought them among the most wonderful things he had ever seen. He wrote his mother about them and also about the great traffic of tall steamships transporting lumber along the Chicago River. It was, he gasped, a truly beautiful sight. What he discovered in that trip was the hustle, dynamism, and spring-heeled ambition for which Chicago had become world renowned. In a grandiloquent echo of Van Vechten’s own observations, the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens captured the atmosphere best when he declared Chicago “First in violence, deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the ‘tough’ among cities, a spectacle for the nation—I give Chicago no quarter and Chicago asks for none.”
Van Vechten’s fascination with Chicago intensified a year after his first visit, when his parents took him back to experience the exposition, the event that sealed Chicago’s reputation as a place of dizzying excess. The exposition had a huge impact on Americans of the time, hailed by many as the greatest spectacle ever seen on American soil. For visitors, like Van Vechten, from smaller towns in the Midwest, the delights of the exposition offered an opportunity to feel part of the nation’s growing international eminence, in an event that would command attention around the globe. Most felt themselves lucky to be able to attend at all, but Van Vechten was allowed to luxuriate in all the wonders of the exposition over several days, another treat provided by his parents’ deep pockets.
Certainly there were enough attractions to make repeat visits worthwhile. At a cost of ten million dollars, the exposition swallowed over six hundred acres, turning swaths of barren marshland into an oasis of wonderment, an American Eden, not in the lush tranquillity of a garden but on the crude outskirts of a metropolis. Without doubt, its crowning glory was the White City, a custom-built district of sumptuous boulevards lined with white stucco buildings, the very ones that Van Vechten had gazed at from his boat on Lake Michigan, each of which housed a different array of mesmerizing exhibits. The Electricity Building demonstrated a zeal for technocratic solutions to the world’s problems; the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building evinced high-minded but practical sophistication; the Woman’s Building reflected an earnest commitment to moral purity. There was no trace here of Burnham and Root’s audacious skyscrapers that were Chicago’s signature architectural style: all of the White City’s buildings were reverent Romanesque constructions, a bold physical statement that Chicago belonged to an ancient tradition of progress, achievement, and beauty.
Naturally enough, the family was keen to introduce Van Vechten to the White City, that beacon of pure-minded sophistication. In the Palace of Fine Arts he was marched around the galleries to look at canvas after canvas of Greek and Roman mythological scenes and idyllic landscapes of pastoral calm and order. This was meant to be where Americans received a definitive lesson in what constituted good art and good taste; usually something European and godly were the fundamentals. The painting Van Vechten best remembered fitted into that category: Invading Cupid’s Realm, a scene of a half-naked young woman being attacked by a group of cupids, some firing arrows toward her chest, while others pull on the flowing skirt that hangs loosely from her hips. The painting was by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, an academic French artist then revered by the artistic establishment and reviled by the impressionists. It has been suggested that Bouguereau intended the work to be an allegory for the metaphorical violence being wrought upon him and his peers by an impudent younger generation of French artists, led by his onetime pupil Henri Matisse. It would not have pleased the custodians of good taste to know that the pubescent Van Vechten’s eye was caught not by the painting’s classical representation of beauty but because “until then I had seen comparatively few pictures of naked women.” Not for the first or last time, a sexual frisson had defined his moment of artistic revelation.
Indeed, all of Van Vechten’s key memories of the exposition were linked to the illicit thrill of seeing naked flesh, usually forbidden but sanctioned here in many forms. Outside the refinement of the White City, the exposition resembled a fantastical county fair. In true Chicago style, this was the first world’s fair to dedicate an entire precinct to entertainments without high-minded objectives, just thrills and empty escapism, set in an area dubbed the Midway Plaisance. The Midway featured an array of amusements from the crudity of greased poles and coconut shies to the extravagance of the world’s first Ferris wheel. There was no space for indigenous American music in the White City—only Europe’s classical traditions were permitted there—but it was everywhere on the Midway. Sousa’s marching bands were a huge hit, and many visitors got their first exposure to ragtime. This was the folk culture of the American city: democratic, uncomplicated pleasure seeking, packaged in glitz and sold for five cents per ride. Along with twenty-seven million other visitors, Van Vechten was seduced and spent hours there wandering through the spectacles. The attractions that burrowed their way deepest into his memory were the exotic dancers who thrust and swiveled their hips, twisting shawls provocatively around their exposed shoulders and naked midriffs in a way “novel to most Americans of the period,” he recalled, “and absolutely enthralling to me. The lady who could make an apple bound and bounce about by the movements of her abdomen especially delighted me.” He was far from alone. The dancers, supposedly from places such as Java, Turkey, and Egypt, and whose risqué performances were justified on the pretext of providing an education in anthropology, were the talk of the fair. One journalist, unable to conceal his excitement, advised potential visitors that “you will see the female abdomen execute such feats as never before entered your wildest and most unrestrained imaginations to conceive.” For Van Vechten, it was a second moment, shortly after Herbie Newell’s skirt dance, in which sex and dance were fused, although this time there was nothing coded or elliptical in the performance; this was a blatant expression of carnality.
The significance of those first exposures to Chicago in 1892 and 1893 poke through in an unfinished autobiographical novel that Van Vechten wrote in his early twenties, a piece of juvenilia of negligible literary merit, in which he first set down the events of his life through the mythological lens that he employed thereafter. Although much of it cannot be unquestioningly accepted as a factual record of his early years, it seems emotionally authentic, capturing his idea of himself in relation to the world around him. In the first chapter of his tale he describes himself as an extravagantly gifted child who was drawn by fate to leave his midwestern home for the rowdy charms of Chicago, the mecca in which he would fulfill his urban destiny. It was self-absorbed hyperbole, of course, yet the rhetoric does suggest that his discovery of Chicago was a turning point, firing his imagination and giving him a tangible focus for his daydreams of life beyond Cedar Rapids. New York sounded magical from all he had read about it, but he had never stepped foot on Broadway like his idols who dashed in and out of town on the railway, or on Fifth Avenue, like Carnegie, Rockefeller, or the other names that littered his father’s copies of The Atlantic Monthly. He had, however, experienced Chicago, seen its filth-encrusted streets, heard the screeches of its streetcars, and witnessed the warp and weft of urban culture weaving one between the other, the unthinking pleasures of the Midway and the highbrow ambition of the White City, each as fascinating as the other.
Stalking his teenage years, the vision of Chicago deepened his withdrawal into a world created from his imagination and the scraps of insight that books afforded. Out went the distant childhood fantasies of The Swiss Family Robinson and Arabian Nights; in came contemporary adventures, animating an urban universe of conflict, speed, and excitement. Confessions of a Young Man, George Moore’s scabrous account of city life, and the witty provocations of George Bernard Shaw’s Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant dropped into his world like incendiaries fizzing from the sky, setting his mind alight with the possibilities of an existence that spurned Victorian probity for art, self-expression, and the freedoms of the city.
A life like that could not have been pursued in Cedar Rapids—not openly at least. The older he got, the more Van Vechten came to believe that the town was not governed by gentility, honor, and respectability, as it wanted to believe, but by shame and hypocrisy. It was not, he thought, that the people in Cedar Rapids were any less lustful, crude, or imperfect than the people he had read about in books, merely that they chose to hide their true selves behind a facade. Increasingly, he became aware of extramarital affairs glossed over and vices indulged under the cover of darkness. His own brother, Ralph, had once been involved in what Van Vechten described years later as the town’s “fast life,” caught up in a passionate affair with Mahala Dutton, a vivacious epicurean who refused to behave like a demure lady of narrow interests and tepid emotions. After Ralph’s death, in 1927, Dutton told Van Vechten that his brother had lived “a frightfully stupid life,” chasing career success and money rather than the emotional honesty that had always been her guiding principle.
Van Vechten adored Dutton for her attitude toward life, and she was the closest thing he had to a role model during his teens, the first in a long line of flamboyant women to capture his imagination and shape his unconventional personality. His parents may have been remarkably freethinking in certain ways, but the significance they attached to maintaining an impeccable public reputation through the accumulation of wealth and status within Cedar Rapids made them frightfully conservative in his eyes. Dutton, one of the few prominent women in town of whom his mother did not approve, who was not “quite respectable enough,” in his words, to be admitted into the clubs that Ada established, conducted herself in a very different manner. Respectability was never Dutton’s concern: she was decadent, glamorous, and theatrical; she believed that attending to one’s needs and desires was the primary business of life, and she never seemed to care when her affairs or her modish fashion sense set tongues wagging.
Aside from Dutton, female companionship was a constant part of Van Vechten’s teenage years. His closest friend was Anna Snyder, a highly intelligent Gibson Girl of glacial temperament who shared his love of music and literature as well as his dissatisfaction with the emotional narrowness of life in Cedar Rapids, and though there was something faintly romantic about their connection, during this period it was entirely chaste. That his adolescent relationship with Anna, or any other girl, never blossomed into anything more than friendship intensified his feeling that he was somehow different from those around him. He felt only the weakest sense of physical attraction to girls. Even thinking of females as belonging to a different sex seemed strange, but he was unsure of why that might be. Neither at school nor at home were any of the facts of life explained to him, and he had not learned about sex in the tentatively hands-on way that many boys did, the way Ralph had done: finding a “high-spirited” girl with whom one could “twitch a garter, and probably go further,” as the writer Henry Seidel Canby remembered the convention of the day.
Twitching garters was about as familiar to Van Vechten as rustling cattle. He began to exhibit on the outside the jumbled feelings of difference, superiority, and rebellion gestating on the inside, acquiring a wardrobe of tight-fitting clothes, growing his fingernails long, and cultivating a demeanor of aloofness that consciously marked him out as a misfit. The rakish appearance of the disaffected youth at the center of The Tattooed Countess was based on his own trademark outfit: “a brown derby hat, a chocolate-shaded coat with padded shoulders, very tight tan trousers, a very high, stiff collar with an Ascot tie, and pointed, patent-leather boots,” and with long fingernails protruding from his starched cuffs. Dressed in his finest attire, he found being in front of the camera as enjoyable as being behind it and he developed the pose that he re-created hundreds of times over the decades, the one he used to communicate the mythology he wove around him: his mouth gripped shut, teeth hidden from view; his anvil of a jawbone jutting out defiantly; his stare fixed and predatory, like a tiger waiting to pounce. Plenty of teenagers acquire a shell of physical vanity and narcissism; Van Vechten never shook loose of his. In the 1950s he told one friend that he suspected that he had first dallied with cameras because he so adored being photographed, and fancied the idea of spending his time taking pictures of himself.
To most of his classmates he must have seemed deeply odd. In his unpublished autobiographical sketches he wrote that a group of girls at his high school gossiped about him, through giggles and sideways glances. He refrained from stating explicitly what about him they found so amusing, but the implication was that his effeminate strangeness identified him as a “sissy”—nothing like his brawny elder brother—and therefore an object of ridicule. The Van Vechten of later years was strident and unapologetic in his camp eccentricities and paraded his unconventionality. At this vulnerable stage in life that was much harder to do. More than anything he craved escape to Chicago, the city of his waking dreams, where he figured he would find other people like him. Eventually, he got his wish when he secured a place to study at the University of Chicago in 1899.
* * *
Coming to Chicago as a single young man, rather than as an adolescent under the guidance of his parents, Van Vechten discovered a city of even more distant extremes than the Columbian Exposition had revealed. At the end of the nineteenth century nowhere better represented the hopes and fears for the American future than Chicago. Around the world it had become famous for its love of business and its bluster and drive, and infamous for the endemic corruption that infused every aspect of its existence. To the journalists and novelists who tried to capture its excesses, here was a city that made Dickensian London look quaint. Fears about rampant prostitution, buccaneer capitalists, white slavery, black street gangs, and the collapse of public morals—what the Chicago novelist Theodore Dreiser famously called “the cosmopolitan standard of virtue”—gripped the city. Both social scientists and evangelical preachers urged Chicago to tackle its dissipations: the former through reform; the latter through salvation. “In no other city of the world,” Van Vechten noted some years later, “is such anxiety manifested for the welfare of the soul,” although it was not a topic he devoted much thought to. In the seven eventful years he lived there, he saw all possible sides of Chicago life but never showed the faintest interest in the great moral debates that dominated public discourse.
Perhaps his own religious education partly explains his lack of interest. The Universalist belief that all humans will be eventually reconciled with God irrespective of their conduct on earth seemed to translate itself in Van Vechten’s mind into a form of moral complacency, a laissez-faire attitude to life and its problems that was subsequently amplified by the cynical detachment of the decadent authors he read in his early twenties, Oscar Wilde most notably. To his parents, of course, Universalism provided a profound optimism about man’s potential for doing good in the world, but they instructed their children to view the fervor of the Third Awakening—the name given to the evangelical revival that swept American cities during Van Vechten’s youth—with hostility and suspicion. When Van Vechten was taken to Chicago for the first time in 1892, he wrote his mother about an incident on a train when his father fell into conversation with a fellow passenger. The topic of religion was somehow raised, and the man mentioned that he happened to be a Baptist. Van Vechten assumed that this revelation would be enough for his father to bring the conversation to an end and was surprised when Charles did not do so. In public Charles was able to tactfully mask his opinions for the sake of social concord, a skill his youngest son never mastered, but in the privacy of his home he taught his children to deride religious zealotry.
Van Vechten may not have been interested in the struggle for Chicago’s soul, but by enrolling in the University of Chicago he became an unwitting participant in it. The influential reformer Jane Addams believed that Chicago’s greatest failing was its inability to channel the spirit of adventure of its huge single male population into high art and away from the city’s profusion of commercialized leisure and popular entertainment, “all that is gaudy and sensual … the flippant street music, the highly colored theater posters, the trashy love stories, the feathered hats, the cheap heroics of the revolvers displayed in the pawn-shop windows.”
The university was one of a number of formidable cultural institutions opened in the 1890s designed to edify young minds just as Addams urged. In his opening semester Van Vechten could have been a poster child for the movement. Within weeks of his arrival he saw his first opera, Charles Gounod’s Faust, starring Nellie Melba at the Auditorium, the zenith of Chicago’s cultural establishment and, for the rest of his college days, the chief venue of his education in classical music. The Auditorium was the home of both the Chicago Opera as well as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Metropolitan Opera brought one production there each season, starring some of the finest international talents. To be surrounded by music of this type and quality was Van Vechten’s dream come true. Barely a week passed throughout his four years of college when he did not attend several recitals, concerts, or opera performances. In particular the vivid, all-encompassing spectacle of the opera burrowed its way into his heart, though the high cost of frequent attendance meant he occasionally took to the stage as a supernumerary, standing silently at the back of a scene as a Roman soldier or a toiling peasant. This was not exactly a regular way of hearing the opera, but the Auditorium’s ambitious attempts to rival the reputation of New York’s Metropolitan Opera meant there was often a need for supernumeraries to fill the stage in its lavish productions. It was a great compromise for Van Vechten too. He found more pleasure in watching others perform than in performing himself, but being close to the first-rate talents who appeared at the Auditorium thrilled him, as if the pages of one of his scrapbooks had come to life around him.
The kinetic force driving Chicago’s thriving music scene was the German-born conductor Theodore Thomas. An unapologetic elitist of the highest order, Thomas sacralized European high culture and believed that great art must by definition be difficult art. In the Auditorium, his audiences would get what they needed, not what they wanted. Chicago’s taste-shaping magazine The Dial approved. “If you do not like it now,” it said in reference to Thomas’s insistence on playing the unpopular Wagner, “pray that you may learn to like it, for the defect is yours.” Dictatorial snob though he may have been, it was thanks to Thomas that Van Vechten was introduced to a host of innovative modern composers, including Wagner, Dvořák, and Richard Strauss, obscure names to most Americans of the day, but very familiar to Van Vechten when barely into his twenties. The advanced state of his musical knowledge, as well as Thomas’s notion that classical music was an exceptional art that required hard work and self-sacrifice in order to be properly appreciated, fitted perfectly with Van Vechten’s sense of his specialness, a feeling that was gradually swallowing his entire sense of self. In a creative writing assignment, English being the one class he made any effort in during his undistinguished college career, Van Vechten wrote a short story titled “Unfinished Symphony,” in which a sweet, uncomplicated young woman called Marian Ormesby pretends to like classical music in order to win the heart of the cultured and urbane Harvey Jerman, a thinly veiled self-portrait of Van Vechten. For a time Harvey is enchanted with Marian, delighted to have found a female companion capable of sharing his passions and his understanding of the emotional complexities of great art. But when Marian decides she can continue the charade no longer and reveals that her love of music has been a ruse, the spell is broken, their bond immediately dissolved; it was the allure of Marian’s apparent cultivation that ensnared Harvey rather than the girl’s looks or personality. It was how Van Vechten saw his place in the world: not one of the regular people but a member of a special breed whose lives are inextricably bound to art.
Though the adolescent feelings of differentness and superiority calcified, the environment of a big city college helped Van Vechten shed some of the awkward aloofness of his teenage years. Surrounded by people with similar interests, he made friends quickly and even felt some excitement at the prospect of joining the Omega chapter of Psi Upsilon, one of the most prestigious fraternities at the university. Its members “came from the leading families around Chicago,” according to the fraternity’s official annals, but also had a reputation for creating a public nuisance. In 1899 the famed Chicago satirist George Ade published “The Fable of the Copper and the Jovial Undergrads” in the Chicago Record, depicting Chicago fraternity men as “drunken ruffians” in the guise of “well-bred young men,” prone to smashing windows, starting fights in the street, and insulting policemen. This was not Van Vechten’s world at all, but he felt the need to join Psi Upsilon to please his father, who was keen that he should become a well-connected, clubbable man of the world, as the other Van Vechten men were. Rather predictably, by the start of his senior year Van Vechten’s commitment to the fraternity had waned decisively. He enjoyed the impressive banquets shared with chapters from other colleges, but when one of the boys put ice cubes in his bed or played some other jape, his enthusiasm dissipated, the practical jokes feeling uncomfortably like bullying.
However, close contact with young men did hold certain attractions for a sexually curious boy away from home for the first time. In the fraternity house, he became especially close to Edwin Boehmer, a slender, slightly fragile-looking boy with soft, feminine features and wavy blond hair that peaked in an unruly quiff. He and Van Vechten spent many evenings together, sharing jugs of foaming pilsner in the Little Vienna district and sitting up late by the fire in the fraternity house to talk about sex. Being the more experienced of the two, Boehmer did most of the talking, Van Vechten providing an eager audience for his tales of petting and fornication. Things may have progressed further than gossip and dirty stories too. In his perfunctory diary entries Van Vechten notes the numerous occasions on which Boehmer stayed the night in his room, a device used later in his life as shorthand for a sexual assignation. Whether they were lovers is unclear, but the intimacy they established strongly suggests this was more than plain friendship. Boehmer was not the only boy who caught Van Vechten’s eye either. He confessed to his diary that he was in love with a fellow student by the name of Wid Norton, though the crush was apparently never acted upon.
It was a sexual awakening, but not one limited to his homosexual urges. At exactly the same time that he explored his interest in men for the first time, he embarked upon a number of embryonic romances with women. Most of it was chaste and sweetly innocent. He accompanied young ladies in voluminous evening gowns to formals, the dances organized by the university as a means of regulating social contact between the sexes, and enjoyed going on picnics and walks with coed classmates in Jackson Park. At this point he was too young, inexperienced, and sheltered to know exactly how his sexual identity was configured, and neither does it appear to have been something that bothered him very much. To judge from the scraps afforded by his diaries, letters, and unpublished creative writing, Van Vechten spent little time wrestling with his feelings but simply followed wherever the path of self-exploration led him, supremely confident in the rightness of his instincts.
Since leaving Cedar Rapids, he had kept in close contact with his old friend Anna Snyder, who had left town to study at Wellesley before returning after graduation to become a teacher. When they reunited during vacations, their old bond seemed stronger than ever before, charged now with a sexual dimension. Two weeks after his twenty-first birthday Van Vechten poured his heart out to his diary, saying that it caused him pain to depart from her and that there was nothing in the world he would not give her, she need only ask. Staying with his parents over Christmas that year, he found himself embroiled in a strange love triangle with Snyder and her Wellesley classmate Elsie Stern. In some quiet corner, they held a séance during which Van Vechten appears to have had sex with Snyder as Stern watched. On other nights Van Vechten made out with Stern, but it was Snyder, he said, who had his heart.
Rapidly the carapace of innocence that Cedar Rapids had constructed around him was breaking up. Leaving home, he had been not just a virgin but remarkably ignorant about sex. He claimed that at the age of nineteen, the only woman he had ever kissed was his mother. When he found himself immersed in the freedoms and temptations of an industrialized city, that all changed: “I picked it up fast,” he admitted. Little wonder, when some of his earliest sex education lessons appear to have come from the Levee, Chicago’s red-light district, which had the undesirable reputation of being the most depraved locale of any city in the United States.
Just south of Chicago’s Loop district and bordering the large African-American neighborhoods known as the Black Belt, the Levee was the center of Chicago’s notoriously illicit nightlife, with street after street of gambling dens, cabaret clubs, gin palaces, and saloons, many lit up with new electric lighting, their enticing glow beckoning young men and women inside for some disreputable fun. In the Levee, fifty cents could buy access to just about any sexual adventure imaginable. Prostitutes of both sexes and various ethnicities walked the streets, posed topless in brothel windows to rustle up business, and offered their services at such places as the Bucket of Blood and the Why Not? The mind boggles on what exactly went on behind those closed doors. Prostitution was so rife there that the madams who ran its most profitable brothels were fixtures of newspaper gossip columns, and the stretch of State Street between Van Buren and Twenty-second Streets, was given the name Satan’s Mile, such were the number and variety of bordellos on its path. Over the course of the six years he lived in Chicago, Van Vechten came to know the sins of the Levee better than most. If his diaries can be believed—and often they provide Van Vechten at his most factual and dispassionate—the boy who left home a sexual ignoramus was, by his second year in the big city, intimately acquainted with the world’s oldest profession. In a diary entry from December 1901 he mentions going to Twenty-second Street, the southern tip of the Levee, where he encountered a young woman by the name of Violette, returning home at two in the morning. He gives no further details, but in 1901 young men who went to Twenty-second Street to meet women late at night generally did so for only one reason. A number of subsequent entries mention further trips to the Levee with male friends, including one futile attempt with his fraternity brother Denis Campau to rediscover Violette. In all likelihood the inexperienced Van Vechten was guided by Campau, whom, like Edwin Boehmer, Van Vechten admired for his worldliness. To Anna Snyder, Van Vechten confessed that he and Campau shared a “philandering spirit,” and it was Campau who provided lyrics for “Love Songs of a Philanderer,” one of Van Vechten’s undergraduate attempts at musical composition.
Whether or not Campau coaxed Van Vechten into Chicago’s red-light district, Van Vechten claimed to have played a notable part in an extraordinary chapter of the Levee’s unpalatable story when he worked as a pianist at the Everleigh Club, the most sumptuous and exclusive brothel in town. Run by Ada and Minna Everleigh, two sisters originally from Omaha, the Everleigh Club combined degeneracy, elegance, and extravagance in a most Chicagoan way. Situated at South Dearborn and Twenty-second Streets, the Everleigh Club operated less like a whorehouse and more like an ultraexclusive private members’ establishment, admitting only respectable, sober men prepared to pay a minimum of fifty dollars for an evening’s entertainment. The staff, whose duty it was to see that the gentlemen got value for their money, was a cohort of young ladies with steady temperaments and unfailing good manners, fitted out in the latest expensive designs from Paris. The club’s interior was suitably lavish. Leading off from its sweeping mahogany staircases were dozens of ornately decorated rooms, including a library, a ballroom, and a banqueting hall, all furnished with cut-glass chandeliers, plush carpets, and silk sheets. Everyone from John Barrymore to the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson to Prince Henry of Prussia passed through on trips to the city, and Chicago’s literary leading men, including Edgar Lee Masters and Theodore Dreiser, were regulars too.
The centerpiece of the whole establishment was the Gold Room, in which stood a gold piano custom made for the Everleigh sisters at the eye-watering cost of fifteen thousand dollars. The resident piano professor was the improbably named Vanderpool Vanderpool, resplendent in finely cut evening wear and a lustrous head of tousled white hair. If Van Vechten’s stories were true, it would have been from him that he assumed piano-playing duties when Vanderpool went for meal breaks. However, there is very little to corroborate his testimony. In the writer Charles Washburn’s detailed account of the Everleigh Club, originally published in 1934, he made no mention of a piano player who would have fitted Van Vechten’s description, and more recent histories of the club account only Scott Joplin as an occasional substitute for Vanderpool. When asked as an old man for details by one inquisitive friend, Van Vechten could not remember the name of the Everleigh Club and gave its address, incorrectly, as Custom House Place, evidence, perhaps, of a failing memory or that the story had been a fabrication to begin with. It is very possible that he had stitched together stories of various experiences to form a tale that perfectly fitted the image of himself that he wanted to project, a tactic he employed time and again over the years. He certainly played the odd piano recital at college; he frequented the racier parts of town too and in the coming years became acquainted with the Everleigh Club in his capacity as a journalist. These elements may well have fused themselves into a story that Van Vechten could use in order to associate himself with the great emblem of Chicago’s cosmopolitan wonders, the place where sex, music, wealth, beauty, flamboyance, and notoriety all met.
In his lifelong exploration of the illicit and forbidden, there were two great taboo subjects that obsessed him. Sex was one; race was the other. Chicago offered endless opportunities to traverse the early-twentieth-century lines of racial division. The city’s black vaudeville scene was, like its classical music, arguably the most dazzling in the country and a vital precursor to its legendary blues and jazz movements that gained international acclaim decades later. Van Vechten had glimpsed African-American entertainment at Greene’s Opera House when Sissieretta Jones or some other polite black vaudeville act came to town. What went down in the nightclubs and theaters of the Black Belt was an altogether different experience: not sanitized for middle-class white spectators but expressed with verve for working-class blacks. With Denis Campau in tow—two eager young white faces conspicuous among the majority black audiences—Van Vechten got to know venues such as the Dreamland Café and Lincoln Gardens, where he saw many of the most influential African-American musicians and stage performers: the pianists James “Slap Rags” White and Millard Thomas, the vaudeville legends Williams and Walker, and the daring, cross-dressing Whitman Sisters. When he saw George Walker and his wife, Aida Overton Walker, perform the cakewalk at one South Side venue, it stayed with him forever as an iconic image of American art. Their cakewalk was “one of the great memories of the theatre,” he wrote years later, praising its physical and technical brilliance as if recalling a prima ballerina at the Bolshoi. “The line, the grace, the assured ecstasy of these dancers who bent over backward until their heads almost touched the floor, a feat demanding an incredible amount of strength, their enthusiastic prancing, almost in slow motion, have never been equaled in this particular revel, let alone surpassed.”
Slumming was a popular pastime for many bourgeois thrill seekers by 1900 in both Chicago and New York, a pseudoeducational entertainment that mirrored the new journalistic fad of poking a lens into the ghetto to see “how the other half lives.” Adventure of this sort was almost certainly part of Van Vechten’s motivation for investigating the Black Belt. Tests of physical courage were of little interest to him, but social danger—the buzz of breaking a taboo by keeping unusual company or straying into places convention dictated he should not go—was irresistible. But ultimately he went because he was fascinated by the shows, which displayed an extravagance and energy that he could not find in even the best white vaudeville acts. According to his own reminiscences, after one show he befriended one of his heroines, the singer and dancer Carrie Washington, who went by the stage name of Carita Day. She was the wife of Ernest Hogan, one of the great black pioneers of the American entertainment industry, whose legacy is often obscured by his song “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” an enormous hit that sealed his reputation as a first-rate songwriter but whose title and lyrics, both of which he composed, later made him wince. When Hogan’s revue The Georgia Minstrels opened in Chicago, Van Vechten was dazzled by Day, who shone in the lead role. Managing to meet her after the show, he made her acquaintance and even convinced Day and Hogan to perform at a fraternity house party.
As it happened, it was the fraternity that had first led him into the social world of the Black Belt. Shortly after joining the Omega chapter of Psi Upsilon, he struck up an unlikely friendship with its housekeeper, a middle-aged black woman named Mrs. Desdemona Sublett. She was a hefty, good-looking woman who fixed her hair tightly with curlers, and the boys of the fraternity found her forceful personality tremendously entertaining. To Van Vechten she was more than a mere amusement; she was mesmerizing. A devout Christian and member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Mrs. Sublett could often be heard praying in the loud, uninhibited tones of her evangelical faith. Van Vechten had been raised to associate Christian worship with a quiet, sober dignity that tended to sublimate raw emotion rather than draw it to the surface, as seemed to happen when Mrs. Sublett spoke to God. The religious faith at the center of her prayers was irrelevant; for all Van Vechten cared, Mrs. Sublett could have been invoking the devil or reciting entries from the telephone directory. It was her performance that excited him: the passion she summoned to enliven the mundane events of her everyday life. No white person he knew ever did this. Having grown up in an environment committed to racial equality, Van Vechten was able to communicate with her in a way the other socially privileged boys of the fraternity could not, and the two formed a close bond. Before long Van Vechten was missing fraternity parties to accompany her to the heart of black Chicago for church socials, wedding anniversary parties, and other “colohed affahs,” in his words, where he was the only white person in attendance.
At some of these parties he took to the piano, though his repertoire of classical masterpieces made little impression and usually could not be heard over the noise of laughter and conversation. His pride was stung when he played Moszkowski’s Waltz Opus 34 and discovered that only one small girl had been paying any attention. Despite this, he loved the crowded, convivial rooms Mrs. Sublett led him through and the warmth of the people he encountered within them, “uncultured and uneducated,” he noted with unintended condescension, but “intensely good hearted, humorous, interesting and even clever.” The things he most liked about them were attributes he believed belonged almost exclusively to black people: emotional expressiveness and a warm sensuality that he saw reflected in the pleasing tones of their skin and the contours of their bodies, particularly the “dusky matrons with ample bosoms.” He said that these women rekindled his childhood longing for a nurturing southern mammy, and he claimed that when he told them this, they responded with delight and pride, as if he had made some special connection with them thanks to his instinctive understanding of true blackness.
Desdemona Sublett, c. 1922
After several months of this socializing Van Vechten believed that he was able to project blackness, as if he had possessed some kind of magic cape that he could slip on in order to vault the social chasm that stood between blacks and whites. Although as pale-skinned as his Dutch name suggests, he claimed that when with Mrs. Sublett he was “invariably taken for a coon” by black people. It is the kind of rhetorical flourish that makes one suspect a good deal of his accounts were the product of either a febrile imagination or an inflated ego. Yet as is so often the case with Van Vechten, the literal truth is incidental; the important point is that for the first time he had experienced the power of social contact as a way of hurdling the seemingly insuperable barriers that existed between different groups of Americans. In his own mind at least, by simply attending the right parties at the right time, he had found it possible to erase centuries of rancorous history and become an honorary Negro. Touching, even inspirational, as that conviction was, it was also incredibly naive.
As he left college, Van Vechten reflected on his time in Chicago and concluded that the city had allowed him to live the lives of any number of people: a Buddhist, a Catholic; a pillar of virtue, and a pitiful thief; on some days a high-minded sophisticate, on others a good ol’ boy who lived for corn bread and liquor. He was never actually any of those things, of course. It was a poetic way of expressing that Chicago allowed him to be the person he wanted to be, to escape the restraints of convention and unite disparate strands of American identity within one body. In the ferment of the twentieth-century city, he had found a place to belong.