THREE
That Shudder of Fascination
Considering that Van Vechten eventually became famous for his frivolity and elegance, it is jarring that it was the newspaper trade of Chicago that provided his introduction to American public life when he graduated from college in the summer of 1903. In the Progressive Era of the early 1900s Chicago had a reputation for producing the most ruthless muckrakers in the United States. Eugene Field, Finley Peter Dunne, Theodore Dreiser, and George Ade headed a sparkling generation of polemicists, satirists, and investigative reporters who were untiring in their chase of a story. In a dingy backroom of Koster’s saloon on a narrow street known as Newsboy’s Alley, a group of those mavericks set up the Whitechapel Club, an impudent reference to the stalking ground of Jack the Ripper that captured the spirit of their profession. A coffin-shaped table dominated the clubroom with souvenirs of their greatest scoops lying around: the skull of a murdered prostitute; photographs of decapitated Chinese pirates; a blood-soaked Indian blanket salvaged from a gunfight out west.
Van Vechten would have appreciated the luridness of the Whitechapel Club, but he was no muckraker; he had no desire to speak truth to power or to save souls via the printing press. In his early twenties, the closest thing he had to a vocation was creative writing. “I cannot remember the time when I was not trying to write,” he reflected in 1932. At college he had been delighted to be tutored by Robert Herrick, a writer of precise, tightly structured fiction and a prominent figure of the Chicago school of “realist” novelists, whom Van Vechten described as “the first novelist I ever met and a hero to me for many years on that account.” His own efforts at writing fiction were anemic imitations of his heroes—namely, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and George Moore, whose work he devoured as a student. Literary greatness would have to be worked at.
Van Vechten’s first exposure to journalism came at the end of his sophomore year in the summer of 1901, when he got a temporary job as a reporter for the City News, a wire service established by a number of newspapers to cover the bread and butter of daily news and a de facto training stable for up-and-coming reporters. He was employed to gather stories rather than write them up, and in this job a college education was less valued than a fellow’s ability to keep his wits about him as he chased down whatever tales of intrigue came his way. For Van Vechten, a typical day’s work might require reporting on assaults, petty crime, or the two great deadly hazards of inner-city Chicago, house fires and streetcar accidents. An entry from his diary of July 1901 mentions a legal case he was reporting on for which he arrived at a dilapidated house to discover a woman teetering at the top of the stairs with a cut to her head, blood coursing down her face. The green boy who had arrived from Iowa in 1899 would have been well out of his depth in those circumstances, but now he discovered that he had a flair for handling the unusual and the unexpected.
The job did nothing to improve his writing, but every day provided the chance to encounter a different set of characters and to gain an education in the workings of the real world. The work was exciting, dangerous, and unpredictable, a paid extension of the nighttime adventures he went on in the Levee; Eddie Boehmer even joined him on a couple of assignments. He enjoyed the job so much that he set his mind on quitting his final year of college to enter journalism full-time. Only his father’s stern interjections deterred him from doing so. Charles favored as a career choice for Carl the family concerns of banking and insurance, where money and a steady future were plainly available. Carl’s brother, Ralph, had also dabbled in newspaper reporting before he took to a lucrative career in finance. Charles hoped the same would happen with his younger son.
Van Vechten’s first full-time job came immediately after graduation in the summer of 1903, as a rookie reporter on the best-known newspaper in the city, the Chicago American owned by the real Citizen Kane himself, William Randolph Hearst. Depending on whom you asked, the American represented either the apex of Chicago journalism or its nadir. Hearst established the paper in 1900 with the objective of crushing the pro-Republican Chicago Tribune and bolstering his chances of landing the Democratic nomination for the 1904 presidential election. Consequently, the American was run in accordance with the principles of yellow journalism, a mixture of lurid sensationalism and aggressive political agendas that had dominated the circulation war between Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in recent years. On Hearst’s watch, news was not something to be reported but something to be made. As he declared, “the modern editor of the popular journal does not care for facts.” A good story was always valued over veracious journalism, and any employee who failed to appreciate that was swiftly replaced. Shortly before Van Vechten arrived, the journalist William Salisbury began work on the American, believing its mission was not just to report events but to shape the future of a fast-changing nation, “to enlighten and uplift humanity” and “to reform Chicago as it was reforming New York and San Francisco.” How wrong he was. Not long into the new job, Salisbury was suspended, unpaid, for a week for failing to include in his report of a house fire the extraordinary details that a rival newspaper had related about the same incident. When he protested that the other newspaper had clearly fabricated its account of a great human ladder used to evacuate the victims of a fire that had actually taken place in a one-story building, he was told the facts of the story were irrelevant: “never allow any of the old conservative newspapers to outdo the American in ‘features.’” From the moment he arrived Van Vechten knew that if one wanted to get ahead at the American, it was advisable to leave journalistic principles at the hatstand.
Like many of his colleagues, Van Vechten found his abiding memory of the American was the thunderous noise that enveloped its offices, the Madhouse, as those who worked there habitually called it. Located in a rickety old building at the former premises of the Steuben Wine Company at 216 West Madison Street, the entire operation existed on a single floor. It was “the most terrific din you ever heard,” Van Vechten said, remembering how the staccato clacking of mechanical typewriters, the brassy ring of candlestick telephones, and the yells of journalists racing toward the next deadline strained above the constant grind of the printing presses that churned out multiple editions each day. The usual workforce comprised around twenty reporters, but staff turnover was prodigiously high, and the pressure to deliver compelling stories even higher. As William Salisbury remembered it, most of the eager young newshounds who came through the Madhouse were dismissed before their colleagues were even aware of their existence. It says much for Van Vechten’s talents for the dark arts of yellow journalism that he survived for more than two years.
Chief among his early assignments was securing photographs to accompany human interest stories—not shooting photographs of his own but rooting out preexisting ones and encouraging their owners to part with them. This practice was common at the time, especially on Hearst titles where vivid pictorial content was considered vital. “I was so successful at this I was kept at it interminably,” Van Vechten later grumbled, but it was in performing this duty that he first discovered his remarkable powers of persuasion, using “guile” to get photographs from grieving relatives and irate victims of crime without the slightest trace of guilt or awkwardness. “I suppose sometimes I even lied to get photographs,” he later admitted. It was a risky business. One time he found himself at the family home of a girl who had “either been killed or ravished”—Van Vechten, telling the story years later, could not remember which—attempting to procure a photograph from the victim’s parents. Photograph in hand he was about to leave when the girl’s brother rushed into the room and drew a gun on him, held it to his head, and demanded the picture be returned. Fortunately, the family priest was also on hand and convinced the man to lower his pistol. Van Vechten made his escape unscathed.
In an attempt to stay ahead of his rivals on the juiciest stories, Hearst split into two parts the job of the crime reporter, which in Chicago had been the most prized journalistic position during the 1890s. Instead of having one intrepid figure to investigate a story and spin a gripping article from his findings, on the American, nimble young reporters were dispatched to unravel a lead and straightaway send the details back to the office for skilled rewriters to turn into copy. For a time Van Vechten’s brief was to cover events at the Harrison Street police station in the Loop, a notorious holding pen for violent criminals, pimps, prostitutes, drunks, and the mentally ill. He spent a bleak Thanksgiving of 1903 trawling through the misery contained within its cells in search of a subject to tug at the readers’ heartstrings, eventually settling on a man in acute distress, sweating and shaking uncontrollably with alcohol withdrawal. A few weeks later came an even more depressing assignment when, on the afternoon of December 30, he was sent to report on a fire that had engulfed the Iroquois Theatre on West Randolph Street. The scene was hideous: at least six hundred people had been killed, many burned to death, others suffocated by the smoke or trampled in the mass panic. Reporters from all the city’s newspapers scrambled to the nearest telephones to contact their editors and rewriters with the latest information only to find the lines had gone dead. It turned out that the first man on the scene, a ruthless young journalist named Walter Howey, working for Van Vechten’s old employer the City News wire service, had sabotaged the local public telephones in an attempt to protect his exclusive. When Van Vechten eventually left the site of the tragedy later that night, the flames still licking the walls of the theater, he went home and wept. When he was an old man, his memories of the American were patchy and confused, but he never forgot the things he saw that night, how “on the sidewalk corpses were piled up like cordwood, with legs or arms burned off, or just simply smothered.” The first weeks of 1904 were spent wading further into the pain and grief of others as he staked out the overcrowded makeshift morgues to find the most heart-wrenching stories of the unfortunates who had perished. The stark horror of the whole episode shook him and revealed something about the job that he would much rather have left concealed: that beneath the excitement and danger of the stories he covered were other people’s lives, full of all their messy, complicating emotions, their sorrow, anger, and despair. The bubble of self-absorption in which he had spent much of the first twenty-three years of his life was pricked. Never before had he been forced to confront the interior lives of other people on such a scale. It was not an agreeable experience and one he hoped he would not have to repeat too often.
* * *
Van Vechten’s crime reporting brief gifted him with a sense of the wild diversity that industrialization had brought to the United States and an insight into how the whole organism of a city functioned, the connections between its synapses and its sinews. It also sharpened his facility for flitting between different cultural and social groups, a common theme of his later endeavors. In the course of his duties on the American he encountered brothel madams and society ladies, police chiefs and violent criminals. Van Vechten’s esteemed colleague Jack Lait once explained that as a journalist on the American he collated a “chorus of opinion,” a bookful of contacts from all walks of life who could furnish an instant opinion on any conceivable issue. It was, he said, “a staff equal to any symposium in any emergency,” and when he was promoted to a more senior editorial job, he passed it to “my next typewriter neighbor, Carl Van Vechten.”
By the time he received Lait’s contacts, Van Vechten had been given the task of writing some stories of his own. He handled the new responsibilities well, embellishing the formula of yellow journalism with a hint of his own mordant wit. Full of shocking facts—many of which, one suspects, were not really facts at all—and contrived outrage, his articles succeeded in conjuring something fantastical out of the mundane. He wrote about a young woman who sued an ex-fiancé for calling off their engagement when he discovered she had a glass eye and about a well-to-do young lady who ditched her millionaire suitor in favor of a Texan miner; a more serious piece exposed the fraudulent leader of a religious cult whose followers fasted themselves to the point of death. His editor also gave him the responsibility of writing the society gossip column, for which he invented a preposterous imaginary sidekick named Angel Child through whom he was able to voice catty observations about Chicago’s upper crust. With puckish delight and a homosexual innuendo presumably lost on most of his readers, he once reviewed the performance of a brawny baseball-loving University of Chicago student who so convinced in a female role in a recent operatic production that young men rushed to the stage and threw violets at his feet. In a Christmastime edition, he filed the story of little Louis Simmons, a six-year-old boy who died after opening his presents on Christmas morning, under the headline XMAS TOYS BOY’S DEATH MESSENGER. Van Vechten quoted the child’s mother, who said, “I have never seen him so happy before, and I think that it was joy that killed him.” On the surface readers were entreated to wring their hands in sympathy. But there is a certain relish in the way Van Vechten reported the lament of this grieving mother: death in the attainment of pure pleasure seemed a gloriously decadent way to go.
Tabloid rag though it may have been, the American was an important stage in Van Vechten’s development as a writer. The stories he wrote contain traces of the mischievous absurdity and gossipy satire that were to characterize his best novels of the 1920s. Just as significant, it was while working on the American that Van Vechten received a thorough training in how to put facts in the service of a story, an approach that he drew on extensively in his work as a music, dance, and drama critic in the 1910s. His best writing in that latter period succeeded because it thoroughly described his experience of the event rather than just the qualities of those performing. When reviewing a play, he would evoke the entire sensory environment inside the theater, sometimes down to the body odor of the people sitting next to him and the taste of the apple pie he had eaten in the restaurant across the street a half hour earlier. Most of his readers took these details as they were presented: intelligently observed and factual accounts of specific events. But Van Vechten never felt any obligation to facts. In a valedictory message in his final book of critical essays in 1925, he conceded that his work had always been “creative rather than critical,” his objective being to evoke a sensation or an atmosphere rather than write a report of factual accuracy. With no ethical qualms he would embellish anecdotes, fabricate dates, invent conversations, and alter facts if it suited him to do so. The time he spent working on the American at the beginning of his career encouraged him to view objectivity and the truth as obstructions to good writing.
Van Vechten would have been reluctant to admit that a direct relationship might have existed between his elegant essays on music and dance and the tittle-tattle he wrote for tabloid newspapers. He was never embarrassed by his years in Chicago, exactly. Rather, this chapter of his life inserted a messy complication into his grand personal narrative, a kink in what could otherwise be written as an archetypal modern tale of the midwestern ingenue who comes to New York and discovers his creative identity amid opera, ballet, Greenwich Village bohemia, and modern art.
When he spoke to Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office in 1960, he admitted that his experiences on the American had given him a marvelous education in the ways of the world. “That was some life,” he recalled; “what I didn’t know before then, I learned there.” Yet in virtually the same breath, he spoke of how he outgrew the city: “I learned to dislike [it] heartily,” he said, explaining that “there are lots of ways of amusing yourself [in Chicago] until you get tired of them. I got tired of them eventually.” There was more to Van Vechten’s sudden displeasure with Chicago than his capricious nature, tossing the city away once the novelty had worn off as he had with his pets and birds’ eggs. The start of his dissatisfaction with the place actually coincided with the most traumatic event of his life so far. In November 1905 his mother died, and he felt the suffocating weight of grief for the first time. More than half a century later he recalled it as being a defining moment in his life, though even at the age of eighty he still sounded surprised that the passing of another person could have had such a profound effect on him. “I didn’t get over it for weeks or months,” he said. Only very rarely did the deaths of those in his life have any lasting emotional impact on him, evidence of his essentially egocentric character. The elderly Van Vechten claimed that he used his response to a person’s death as a yardstick for measuring his feelings for him or her. “It’s one way I can tell when I’m really fond of people,” he said. “I think that’s rather interesting and probably not the experience of most people, because some people at least make themselves believe they care a great deal when a friend died. I usually didn’t.” His mother’s death was clearly an exception.
Ada’s passing forced him to take stock of his own life. In a peculiar way the experience challenged his belief in his uniqueness; it made him feel “human or normal, whatever you want to call it,” he confessed. He was twenty-five now, more than two years out of college, and saw no route for progress at the American. Writing the society column was fun as far as it went, and his reporting duties allowed him access to some fascinating aspects of life, but what he really wanted was to immerse himself in his passion for music and the stage; that alone would provide an environment in which his specialness would thrive.
Once he would have thought Chicago the perfect place for that type of escape. When Theodore Thomas passed away in January 1905, there was a tangible sense that Chicago’s golden age of orchestral concerts and opera had died with him. New York, on the other hand, was just about to enter a phenomenally exciting period as Oscar Hammerstein announced his plans to open an enormous new opera house to rival the Metropolitan. All his life Van Vechten claimed that he had been sacked for “lowering the tone of the Hearst papers” when he insulted the wife of one of the paper’s senior figures through his society column. That story was another exaggeration: he had been reprimanded for causing embarrassment but not dismissed. How much better for his rebellious self-image, though, to give the impression that an act of daring had cast him out into the cold. Neither William Randolph Hearst nor the great city of Chicago, the anecdote implied, could handle a personality as large and audacious as his. New York alone was capable of that.
* * *
“New York, my dear, you would love, with its thousand and one queer places and restaurants.” In January 1907, Van Vechten wrote these words to a childhood friend, Leah Maynard, about all the wonderful things that could be found only in this incredible city, his new home. New York was alive with possibilities for artists and innovators of all stripes. Between shifts as a singing waiter at the Pelham Café a young Irving Berlin was writing his first Tin Pan Alley songs, while Alfred Stieglitz proselytized photography as the great visual art of the new century, finding mesmeric shapes and patterns in the city’s huddled masses. On the Lower East Side the “nickel madness” reigned, working-class immigrants filling their days and nights with the impossibly futuristic technology of moving pictures, the flickering, fast-cut images mimicking the mad pace of the modern world. Mack Sennett was still a year away from breaking into the movies, but he was a regular face on New York’s vaudeville stage along with Chinese conjurers, Armenian belly dancers, blackface minstrels, and Hungarian escapologists. On the tiny island of Manhattan, every conceivable sensation could be found.
The cultural event that gripped Van Vechten that year was a scandalous new opera from Europe. Salome, adapted by Richard Strauss from Oscar Wilde’s controversial play of the same name, tells a tale of lust, incest, and murder, in which King Herod’s niece and stepdaughter unleashes her powers of seduction to win John the Baptist’s head on a plate in revenge for his refusal of her sexual advances. The publication of Wilde’s play had been a crucial feature of Europe’s art nouveau movement of the 1890s, especially the editions augmented by Aubrey Beardsley’s vivid illustrations, his “whiplash line” in sensuous concert with the violent carnality of Wilde’s text. By the time of its debut performance in Paris in 1896 Wilde was serving a sentence of hard labor for the crime of homosexuality, transforming a play that had previously been considered indecorous into something that was regarded as a work of genuine subversion. Upon its premiere in Dresden in 1905, Salome, the opera, generated even greater excitement, partly because of Wilde’s narrative, partly because of Strauss’s unconventional music—Strauss’s own father described listening to it as having “one’s trousers full of maybugs”—and partly because of its infamous nine-minute-long dance of the seven veils, a provocative striptease performed by Salome at the request of her stepfather, that many considered the depth of depravity. The archbishop of Vienna excoriated Strauss for having put his name to such inestimable filth and lobbied to have the whole thing banned. So when the news broke that New York’s proudly conservative Metropolitan Opera was to make Salome the focal point of its 1907 season, there was widespread disbelief. American producers were known for eschewing operas considered controversial, challenging, or unconventional. For the Metropolitan and its audience, this was uncharted territory.
Like almost everyone else in the United States, Van Vechten had never heard a bar of Salome before its premiere, but the very idea of it thrilled him. Thanks to Theodore Thomas’s ambitious orchestral programs, he had been exposed to Strauss in Chicago, an experience denied most New Yorkers at that point. He had also read Wilde’s play and had enviously received a detailed account of the opera from Anna Snyder after she attended a performance in Germany during a trip to Europe. In New York with no particular plans or prospects, Van Vechten hustled the way a Hearst journalist should and used this secondhand knowledge to convince the new editor of Broadway Magazine, his fellow Chicagoan Theodore Dreiser, that he was the man to introduce New Yorkers to the most incredible theatrical event of their times. In a 1950 essay on his memories of Dreiser, Van Vechten claimed that the afternoon he arrived at Dreiser’s office to pitch his services was their first meeting and that it had come about through the involvement of a mutual acquaintance, though he could not remember whom. Given Van Vechten’s and Dreiser’s links to Chicago, that person may well have been one of Van Vechten’s well-connected fraternity brothers. There is the outside possibility that their paths may have crossed at the Everleigh Club too, as Dreiser was one of its most committed patrons. In any event, Dreiser commissioned Van Vechten to write an article entitled “Salome: The Most Sensational Opera of the Age.” It lacked the insight and flair of his later work, but it was the first phase of his reinvention from tabloid hack to an insider of the star-studded world of New York opera.
The second phase began soon after when he was hired as a staff reporter by The New York Times in November 1906 and swiftly promoted to assistant music critic in early 1907. To Van Vechten’s glee, the new position afforded him access to the city’s great artistic events, including Salome. He wrote Leah Maynard that being present at Salome’s New York debut was a life-changing event; he feared that no future theatrical event could ever match it. That first night, on January 22, was like no other he, or any other American theatergoer, had ever experienced. His boss, the Times’s lead music critic, Richard Aldrich, captured the strange ambivalence of the audience, “tense with a sort of foreboding as well as with evident and insistent interest.” He reported “a stifling and heavily erotic atmosphere” in the auditorium, “repulsive yet strangely fascinating.”
The eroticism that Aldrich described was the thing that defined Van Vechten’s memory of the night. Nine years later he wrote an essay on Olive Fremstad, the soprano who played the title role of Salome, in which he evoked the excitement he felt in watching her from the dark of the auditorium. She did not merely perform the role; she seemed to live it. So committed was she to inhabiting the character of Salome that she even spent time at a morgue, to familiarize herself with the experience of holding a dead man’s head in her hands. Her performance enthralled Van Vechten. “Her entrance was that of a splendid leopard,” he wrote, “standing poised on velvet paws on the terrace, and then creeping slowly down the staircase.” Frequently he evoked sexual activity through the stalking behavior of cats: slow-moving elegance followed by a sudden pounce, both beautiful and savage. He extended the metaphor in his description of the final scene in which Fremstad took the Baptist’s severed head in her hands and kissed it passionately on the lips. Van Vechten took a perverse pleasure in the breaching of a carnal taboo:
I cannot yet recall her as she crept from side to side of the well in which Jochanaan was confined, waiting for the slave to ascend with the severed head, without that shudder of fascination caused by the glimmering eyes of a monster serpent, or the sleek terribleness of a Bengal tiger. And at the end she suggested, as perhaps it has never before been suggested on the stage, the dregs of love, the refuse of gorged passion.
He had never seen the pains and ecstasies of human experience explored like this before, in such a vivid and unambiguous way. The fact that so many in the audience were outraged by what he found electrifying only added to his enjoyment. When the time came for the dance of the seven veils, performed by the prima ballerina Bianca Froelich, it was more than many could stand. Dozens of ladies apparently averted their gaze for the whole of the dance, and similar numbers of men avoided embarrassment by removing themselves from the auditorium altogether, at least until Froelich was through with her writhing. In his essay on Fremstad, Van Vechten deliberately underlined his divergence from the Diamond Horseshoe, the group of wealthy, conservative patrons who dominated the Metropolitan, by suggesting that the dance actually dulled the erotic intensity of the opera as a whole. Froelich’s dancing on the first night, he said, was tame compared with the wild manner in which she had torn off her layers in the dress rehearsal. And in any case, Fremstad should have been allowed to do the dance herself; what she lacked in technique she would have made up for in sexual passion.
Olive Fremstad as Salome at the Metropolitan Opera House, January 1907
Several highly influential patrons of the Metropolitan were so disgusted by the production that they issued an ultimatum: cancel the production or lose their patronage. Van Vechten was sent to interview Olive Fremstad in her suite at the Wyoming Hotel, probably his first one-to-one interview with an opera star. With every ounce of her “overpowering and dominating temperament,” as Van Vechten once described the singer, Fremstad defended the opera to the hilt, praising Strauss’s innovative brilliance. Significantly, she could find no kind words for Oscar Wilde, whose association with the opera was a chief cause of complaint, the stench of his homosexuality trial still clinging to his name. “Salome is the worst sort of degenerate,” Fremstad argued, “but Strauss makes something more of her at the last, where she gets her idea of what love means … Strauss tells me this. Wilde tells me nothing.” Van Vechten thought that an absurd claim. He knew that an attempt to separate Strauss’s depiction of Salome from Wilde’s was senseless; the one flowed directly from the other. Eight days after its one and only performance, the directors of the Metropolitan Opera House announced that Salome was canceled with immediate effect. In the piece he wrote about the decision in the Times, Van Vechten suppressed his dismay and quoted the board in also laying the blame for the whole episode on the late Oscar Wilde. “We take issue with the statement that Strauss’s music is of the same character and tendency as Wilde’s text,” it said, as if Wilde’s play were an afterthought of Strauss’s, rather than his sole inspiration. Clearly, to defend Strauss’s inventive music could be seen as dedication to one’s art; to defend the product of a deviant mind such as Oscar Wilde’s was sure to provoke disgust.
The entire controversy was Van Vechten’s first experience of art’s capacity to polarize with such power, forcing one to take a side either for or against an artwork not simply for the quality of its content but for its underlying philosophy. Salome shocked so thoroughly not only because its stripteases and severed heads offended moral sensibilities but also because it emphatically challenged a long-standing assumption that the purpose of art should be to venerate goodness. As with many artists of the art nouveau era, which bridged the romantic and the modern, moral instruction was never a goal for Wilde or Strauss, who were far more interested in using art to explore the reality of the human condition, no matter how unpalatable. Van Vechten was in complete agreement. In time, he would take up his pen “in defence [sic] of bad taste”—that is, in support of individual expression free from moral censure. For now he had neither the critical skills nor the seniority at the Times to do so. Still, there was no doubt whose side Van Vechten was on: Wilde’s and Strauss’s instinct that there was beauty to be found in ugliness appeared self-evident. The great cities of the United States had already taught him that much.
* * *
Opera in New York was not usually such a combustible environment as it was in those opening weeks of 1907. For the majority of his career at the Times, Van Vechten’s role was less music critic and more celebrity-watching gossip columnist as he covered the comings and goings of European opera singers, usually portrayed in the press as a species separate from drab, businesslike Americans. He fueled speculation about the love life of Geraldine Farrar, gasped at the fashion trends set by Mary Garden, gave dramatic insights into rivalries between chest-thumping tenors, and reported with astonishment the vast riches that these stars were raking in year after year thanks to the New York public’s fixation with the opera. Making the most of his yellow journalism training, he quickly became accomplished at turning the most trivial episodes into news stories. CARUSO’S MUSTACHE OFF declaimed the headline above his report of the momentous occasion when Enrico Caruso shaved off his mustache: “Can he sing without it?” Other earth-shattering scoops included Nellie Melba’s decision to charge a dollar per autograph and the profligacy of Henry Clay Frick, the steel magnate, who paid one hundred thousand dollars for a box at the Metropolitan, before splashing out thousands more to have it redecorated.
Van Vechten enjoyed the froth and found the showy self-importance of the opera celebrities he met highly entertaining. At a time when journalists were given the kind of access to performers and rehearsals that is unheard of in the early twenty-first century, Van Vechten’s working week was inhabited by the world-famous, and he assiduously cataloged his association with them in his scrapbooks. Some he even photographed, including Luisa Tetrazzini—the Italian soprano and prima donna in every sense—as she left The New York Times building in her customary silk turban and chinchilla fur coat. The photographs were an extension of the theatrical pictures he had taken in his youth and a precursor to the celebrity portraits he spent the last thirty years of his life obsessively shooting. It was less the person he was capturing, more the fame attached to him or her, another handful of glitter for his collections. Even so, the fact that these high-powered celebrities posed for him, no matter how informally, shows that he felt comfortable in their company, and they in his. The tartness of his usual personality was sugarcoated in their presence: more deferential, less abrasive. The hustler from Chicago was turning into a silver-tongued Manhattan schmoozer.
Luisa Tetrazzini took to Van Vechten so warmly that she allowed him to ghostwrite an article for her in Cosmopolitan magazine, detailing her life and her rise to fame. Van Vechten also clicked with Fyodor Chaliapin, a Russian bass whom he described as “exuberant,” “like a great big boy, a sophomore in college, who played football.” Chaliapin possessed only rudimentary English when Van Vechten first interviewed him in the dining room of the Savoy Hotel one dreary Sunday morning. But the barrier of language was swiftly overcome by their shared love of drinking and eating. “I spik English,” Van Vechten recalled as his interviewee’s first words. “How do you do? et puis good-by, et puis I drrrink, you drrink, he drrrrinks, et puis I love you!” The interview started shortly before midday and continued until late into the evening, though not much in the way of newsworthy comment was gathered. At one point, back in his room at the Brevoort Hotel after a whole day of drinking and eating, Chaliapin supposedly performed his party trick of singing along with a record of “La Marseillaise,” managing to drown out the sound of the phonograph altogether, so powerful was his voice. “The effect in this moderately small hotel room can only be faintly conceived,” said Van Vechten afterward, his ears ringing with the memory.
The nodal point of this sparkling pageant was not an exotic foreigner but Oscar Hammerstein, the millionaire cigar manufacturer turned theater impresario, who opened the Manhattan Opera House with the aim of breaking the monopoly of the Metropolitan and smashing the elitism and conservatism that its wealthy patrons exerted over opera in New York. For four years between 1906 and 1910 Hammerstein produced remarkable performances and elevated New York to one of the great opera capitals of the world. As a reporter from the Times Van Vechten was one of a select group who got to see Hammerstein up close during the four years of his reign. Helped immeasurably by the fact that a friend of his from Chicago, Anna Pollock, was Hammerstein’s press agent, Van Vechten was a frequent guest at the rooms above the Victoria Theatre on Broadway where Hammerstein lived, “gilded, but shabby, dusty and dingy, and always crowded” with antique furniture, papers, and various detritus strewn around him. The only thing that seemed clean in those disheveled quarters was Hammerstein himself, always immaculately turned out in the finest tailoring. Through Pollock, Van Vechten filed a number of puff pieces about Hammerstein, such as the unlikely sounding one about a couple from Winnipeg, Manitoba, who came all the way from Canada to hear Rigoletto at the Manhattan with their eighteen-month-old baby, whom they deposited at the cloakroom for the evening. Van Vechten quoted Hammerstein as saying that the Manhattan could not “check all children who come with their mothers. However, it can be arranged occasionally if the baby is as good as this one.”
Frequently, and his recollections of both Hammerstein and Chaliapin are cases in point, one wonders whether Van Vechten’s anecdotes about the New York opera at this period capture the personalities of the real people he knew or merely the caricatures of their public images, the one-dimensional “stars” about whom he wrote in the Times and felt so proud to know. To an extent, this reflects a hazard of Van Vechten’s testimony on just about anything in his past. An engaging and vivid storyteller though he may have been, he was certainly no infallible witness, and his years of writing gossip for newspapers undoubtedly exacerbated a natural tendency to embroider the truth for the sake of a good yarn. In this case, the profound influence his early years in New York had on him distorted Van Vechten’s memories of the era, encouraging him to depict its personalities as larger and more magnetic than almost any he encountered at any stage of his life. He admitted as much in an interview in 1960: “some of the artists of that period, like Fremstad and Mary Garden, were so much better than anything we’ve had since, that it’s very hard for me to get interested in opera any more.” In the late 1910s Van Vechten wrote brilliant dissections of the craft of performance in various arts; no other critic in the United States came close to producing the same enthusiasm and depth of insight about such a breadth of music and dance, from the blues to Schoenberg. Yet when he turned his attention to the personalities of the performers in question, he frequently resorted to caricatures, gossipy dinner party anecdotes wheeled out by an inveterate name-dropper. There was always a part of Van Vechten that remained the stage door autograph hunter, the little boy from Iowa dazzled by the fame of the big stars, rapt by the spectacle of the show.