Inebriated Imagination: Carl Van Vechten and New York’s 1920s Salon Scene
- New York History Review
- May 6
- 11 min read
By David Rosen
Copyright ©2026. All rights reserved by the author.
One warm night in June 1925, an invited group of celebrated New Yorkers gathered at the fashionable apartment of the socially prominent couple, Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff, at 150 West 55th Street. Van Vechten was a popular figure in the Gotham literary scene, a novelist, former critic at The New York Times and New York Press, and a well-known man-about-town. Marinoff, a Russian immigrant ballerina, was an accomplished actress who appeared in many Broadway plays and early films. Their regular soirées were the gathering place for the cultural elite, redefining America’s artistic sensibility.
This night was special because it featured George Gershwin playing show tunes at the piano, followed by Paul Robeson singing Negro spirituals and ending with James Weldon Johnson
reciting "Go Down, Death," a funeral sermon that reads in part:
And Death heard the summons,
And he leaped on his fastest horse,
Pale as a sheet in the moonlight.
Up the golden street Death galloped,
And the hooves of his horses struck fire from the gold,
But they didn't make no sound.
Up Death rode to the Great White Throne,
And waited for God's command.
At this and most other soirées hosted by Van Vechten, his regular bootlegger, Jack Harper, supplied the illegal alcohol.[1] (This incident is not in Van Vechten’s “Daybook” for June 1925; see Kellner, ed., pp. 87-90.)
During the late 1910s and early ‘20s, bohemian New York began to rival Paris as the center of Western cultural innovation. The Great War devastated Europe but fueled a wave of postwar American optimism, a creative excitement unprecedented in the nation’s history. Many American artists had visited Paris, Berlin, and other European hotspots during the prewar era and continued to do so throughout the ‘20s. They came back emboldened with new forms of creative expression.
In the ‘20s, the new world of postwar America flexed its creative muscle. New voices in all the arts found expression, invigorating literature, music, dance, theatre, and painting. New York was the locus of this creativity; the new technologies of radio, records, and movies reverberated throughout the country and the world. This creativity was facilitated by the festivities at local speakeasies, which were lubricated by illegal alcohol. The speak was New York’s literati’s second home, like that for gangsters, call-girls, upscale slummers, and anyone who wanted to socialize and have a drink.
The New York literary scene during the ‘20s was divided along a variety of distinct, and sometimes overlapping, groupings – including the literati, the smart set, the New Negro, and the theatre arts. The first scene included popular novelists like F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara; the second included the Algonquin Round Table gang and gossip journalists like Walter Winchell; the third group consisted of those who gave voice to the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Wallace Thurman; and the fourth ranged from Eugene O’Neill to Mae West. Van Vechten was at the center of this convergent literary vortex.
In 1914, Van Vechten married Marinoff, his second wife, and they remained together until his death in 1964; she died in 1971. Their marriage can only be called a “modern” accommodation: in their spacious mid-town apartment, each had their own bedroom. He took male lovers, both white and black, often in his Harlem pied-à-terre; she went on extended trips, for both professional and personal reasons. According to the music journalist Chris Albertson, “Carlo,” as many knew him, “had a weakness for [Harlem’s] strapping young men.”
Van Vechten’s Harlem apartment was painted black, with silver stars decorating the ceiling and red lights giving it a distinct pink glow. Jimmy Daniels, a famous African American song stylist who had a long-term affair with the architect Philip Johnson, once visited Van Vechten’s Harlem lair. "It was a seductive place," he fondly recalled, "there were no chairs or tables, just red velvet cushions, and some of them were more like beds — well, I guess they were beds. It was a decorator’s nightmare, and Carlo acted quite differently when he was there. I don’t think Fania even knew about the place."[2] Among his reported male lovers were the playwright Avery Hopwood, the actor and designer Donald Angus, and the literary publicist Mark Lutz, with whom he had a ten-year affair. He once described himself as “unpredictable, undependable, and inefficient, an atheistic opportunist with a hankering for liquor and a variety of odd ideas about sex.”[3]
Tiring of the grind of a newspaper critic, Van Vechten became a freelance writer in the mid-10s. By the mid-20s, he had established himself as a major New York literary and social figure. During the ‘20s, he published Lords of the Housetops (1921), Peter Whiffle: His Life & Works (1922), The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), The Tattooed Countess (1924), Firecrackers, A Realistic Novel (1925), and Nigger Heaven (1926), his most successful – and controversial – work. Sadly, as his literary biographer Edward Lueders points out, “with the publication of Parties [1930], Van Vechten recognized that his vogue was over.”[4]
While in vogue during the ‘20s, Van Vechten played an unprecedented role in the city’s cultural life. He was an indefatigable schmoozer who knew everyone who was in the know, from Salvador Dali to Theodore Dreiser to Helena Rubenstein. He was also an equally indefatigable drinker, making the rounds of wet-zone and uptown speaks (speakeasies) almost every night. In mid-town, he regularly dropped in at Texas Guinan’s clubs as well as Tony’s, popular with the Algonquin Round Table gang. However, it was in Harlem that he found his rhythm. He was a regular at Connie’s Inn, the Cotton Club, the Lennox Avenue Club, Smalls’ Paradise, and the Sugar Cane Club. He also visited less celebrated establishments like the Catagonia Club (aka Pod’s and Jerry’s), the Nest, Chez Florence, Club Ebony, Sheik Club, Leroy’s, the Log Cabin, Lulu Belle’s, Smalls’ New World, and the Clam House, where he enjoyed the performances of the legendary 300-lb transvestite, Gladys Bentley.
Van Vechten was known for being outlandish, openly breaking social conventions. He partied with equal fervor with his bootlegger, Harper, as with the Prince of Wales, George Gershwin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Privately, he engaged in numerous ostensibly secret sexual liaisons with black and white men. Publicly, he maintained deeply personal friendships with leading African American intellectuals, most especially Johnson and Hughes. He became famous hosting mixed-race, mixed-ethnic, and mixed-arts salons that were the talk of the ‘20s. The snide Time magazine reported in 1925, “sullen-mouthed, silky-haired author Van Vechten has been playing with Negroes lately, writing prefaces for their poems, having them around the house, going to Harlem.”[5]
Carl Van Vechten’s famous soirées were inspired by the legendary “Evenings” hosted by Mabel Dodge (her full name was Mabel Ganson Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan; during her stay in New York, she was known as Dodge) at her townhouse at 23 Fifth Avenue, which he had attended a decade earlier. As he fondly reflected, "While I drank whiskey and soda -- I suffered with a bad cold – Mabel [Dodge] walked up and down, smoking a cigarette, and it was much easier for her to advise me to take a Turkish bath than it was for her to talk about Gertrude Stein.”[6] He first met Dodge when visiting her palatial villa in Florence. She moved back to New York in 1912 with her son, leaving her second husband behind, and quickly plunged into the city’s rapidly growing upper-crust bohemian scene.
Dodge was a classic “poor little rich girl,” a spoiled dilettante and libertine who, until she found her calling, attached herself to the latest fad and male celebrity. Through keen instincts and wealth, she became a cultural tastemaker. Born in Buffalo, NY, to prosperous parents, she attended a Manhattan boarding school as a teen and, at 21-years, married her first husband, the heir to a steamship line; he died shortly thereafter in a hunting accident.
The well-healed young widow followed the path of others in society and moved to Europe, where, in Paris, she became friends with Gertrude Stein. Stein later penned, “Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia,” in admiration, but her partner, Alice B. Toklas, apparently jealous of their friendship, kept them at an arms-length distance. In Paris, Dodge was exposed to the grand salons hosted by some of the most controversial women of the fin de siècle era, including expatriates Stein, Natalie Barney (who ran a salon for half a century), and Sylvia Beach (who, with her life-partner, Adrienne Monnier, ran the bookstore, Shakespeare & Company). In 1905, Mabel settled in Florence with her second husband, Edward Dodge, and hosted regular gatherings that welcomed notables such as Henri Matisse, Bernard Berenson, and Isadora Duncan.
Returning to Gotham in 1912, Dodge quickly affiliated with the Association of Artists and Sculptors and helped organize the controversial 1913 International Show of Modern Art, popularly known as the Armory Show, which launched modern art in America. At the same time, she joined John Reed, “Big Bill” Hayward, and Emma Goldman in support of the IWW-backed silk workers strike in Paterson, NJ, playing a leading role in organizing the controversial “Pageant of the Paterson Strike,” held at Madison Square Garden in June 1913. She also wrote critical articles for publications as diverse as the Arts and Decoration and The Masses, edited by Max Eastman, and eventually wrote a nationally syndicated weekly column for the Hearst newspaper chain.[7]
Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking author of The Shame of the Cities, apparently suggested to Dodge that she turn her occasional get-together discussions of new ideas she hosted at her comfortable Village residence into more formal gatherings. As Steven Watson observed, “Dodge’s Evenings were a combination of town meeting, bohemia Chautauqua, and cocktail party.”[8] During 1913 and 1914, Dodge hosted between one and three salons a week, where notables, ranging from Frances Perkins to Alfred Stieglitz, presented cutting-edge theories, and sometimes as many as 100 invited guests attended.
Dodge’s salons were organized along the lines of the traditional discussion-group format known as a General Conversation. An appointed leader, normally a specialist in an artistic, academic, or political subject, offered a brief introductory commentary to focus the discussion and then invited those in attendance to join the discussion. Salon leaders ranged from A. A. Brill on Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to Reed on Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution to Margaret Sanger on birth control and women’s rights.
One night Van Vechten invited two African American entertainers to perform: “A woman in high-button boots and white stockings danced a jig while her male partner sang a popular song and strummed a banjo.”[9] The performance profoundly threatened Dodge:
While an appalling Negress danced before us in white stockings and
buttoned shoes, the man strummed a banjo and sang an embarrassing
song. They both leered and rolled their suggestive eyes and made me
feel first hot and then cold, for I had never been so near this kind of thing
before; but Carl rocked with laughter and little shrieks escaped him as
he clapped his pretty hands.[10]
For better or worse, as Andrea Barnet reminds us, “Dodge’s salon was where black Harlem first met Greenwich Village bohemia and, conversely, where white bohemia got its first taste of a parallel black culture that it would soon not only glorify but actively try to emulate.”[11] Helping create the right mood, Dodge’s attentive butler, Viittorio, who she brought from Florence, graciously offered Pinch Scotch and Gorgonzola cheese and ham sandwiches.
During the ‘10s, New York was home to a number of salons, gatherings facilitated by the wealth, connections, good food, and drink of some of the city’s more adventurous grandees. Dodge’s Evenings were the most celebrated, but the daughters of the prominent Stettheimer banking family, Florine, Carrie, and Ettie, held evening get-togethers at their lavish apartment at 102 West 76th Street. Their salons, which lasted until the mid-30s, catered to a more genteel European artistic set that included Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Charles Demuth. Walter and Louise Arensbergs, heirs to a steel fortune, hosted a much more downtown, bohemian crowd at their duplex at 33 West 67th Street; it welcomed Duchamp, the artists Man Ray and Joseph Stella, as well as the poets William Carlos Williams, Allen Norton, and Mina Loy.[12]
After the Great War and the Palmer Raids, a campaign that targeted the city’s most radical residents like Emma Goldman for deportation, a new generation of sophisticated salons emerged. While the earlier salons were hosted by and welcomed a nearly exclusive white following, those of the Roaring ‘20s were far more radical.* (In his comprehensive history of New York’s pre-WWI bohemian scene, Strange Bedfellows, Steven Watson mentions only one salon in which African Americans participated, the one Van Vechten organized as part of Dodge’s Evenings.) For example, Dorothy Peterson, a black teacher and novelist associated with the “New Negro” movement, hosted regular salons at her father's Brooklyn home.[13] Alexander Gumby, a postal clerk, hosted a salon for African American homosexual artists and their friends in his large studio apartment on Fifth Avenue between 131st and 132nd Streets. According to one source, Gumby “played an early and significant role in preserving and disseminating African-American history.”[14]
A’Lelia Walker hosted the most celebrated African American salon of the Prohibition era at her townhouse on West 136th Street. Langston Hughes vividly recalled Walker’s salon scene, noting “unless you went early, there was no possible way of getting in.” He knew that “her parties were as crowded as the New York subway at rush hour – entrance, lobby, steps, hallway, and apartment a milling crush of guests, with everybody seeming to enjoy the crowding.” As only Hughes could sing, “A’Lelia Walker was the joy-goddess of Harlem’s ‘20s[15]
Many within Harlem’s more established “Black Bourgeoisie” denigrated Walker as the “Mahogany Millionaires.” Van Vechten chronicled Walker’s exploits in Nigger Heaven as the cabaret diva, Adora Boniface. Grace Nail Johnson, the wife of James Weldon Johnson and one of the grand doyens of black society, boasted that she never attended one of Walker’s salons. Nevertheless, encouraged by Hughes and others, in 1927, Walker transformed a floor of her Harlem townhouse into a salon that she christened “the Dark Tower.” While lasting about a year, it was a venue where uptown and downtown artists, writers, and musicians gathered to socialize and exchange ideas. She wrote afterward, “Having no talent or gift, but a love and keen appreciation for art, The Dark Tower was my contribution.”[16]
However, the best of intentions sometimes went awry amid the clash of cultures between downtown white society and uptown black folk. The most revealing took place on the night of April 12, 1928, at a Van Vechten soirée. After many attempts to lure Bessie Smith to his get-togethers, she gave in due to the prompting of one of her band members, Porter Grainger. According to her biographer, Chris Albertson, Smith “exquisitely sang ‘six or seven numbers’ taking a strong drink between each number”; according to Van Vechten, she sang three songs.
Having to quickly leave in order to make a performance uptown at the Lafayette Theater, Smith and her group were making their way out of the apartment when Van Vechten’s wife, Marinoff, put her arms around her neck and declared, "Miss Smith, you're not leaving without kissing me goodbye." Smith, who had no problems with homoerotic encounters and was (in Van Vechten’s word) “soused,” screamed, "Get the fuck away from me.” Pushing past Marinoff and knocking her down in the process, she shouted, "I ain't never heard of such shit!" Attempting to rescue a major social catastrophe, Van Vechten whispered, "It's all right, Miss Smith, you were magnificent tonight." According to biographer Bruce Kellner, “the incident, laced with verbal obscenities, was elaborated on and passed around in Harlem until it took on mythic proportions, thereafter, reported inaccurately.”[17]
About the author: David Rosen has an MA from Rutgers University and is the author of six nonfiction books and numerous articles. I have written for Church & State, CounterPunch, Logos, Monthly Review, New Politics, The Progressive, Salon, Sexuality & Culture, SGP (Sexuality, Gender & Policy), and Truthout, among others.
Check out: www.davidrosenwrites.com
Endnotes
[1] Wilfred D. Samuels, A Gift of Story/Encyclopedia of African-American Literature.
James Weldon Johnson, "Go Down, Death”
[2] Chris Albertson, Bessie (New York: Stein & Day, 1972).
[3] Caroline Marks and Diana Edkins, The Power of Pride: Stylemakers and Rulebreakers of the Harlem Renaissance (Crown, 1999), p. 204
[4] Edward Lueders, Carl Van Vechten and the Twenties (University of New Mexico Press, 1955), p. 120.
[5] Marks, op. cit., q-p. 205.
[6] Kellner, Iowa, op, cit.
[7] Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Guard (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), p. 178; see also Andrea Barnet, All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Book, 2004).
[8] Watson, op. cit., p. 136.
[9] Watson, op. cit., pp. 137-38.
[10] Andrew Hamilton, “The Black (& White) Predicament: Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967),” Counter-Currents, January 27, 2012;
[11] Barnet, op. cit., pp. 143-44.
[12] Watson, op. cit., pp, 252-55, 278-81.
[13] Andrea Geyer, “Constellations”;
[14] “Gumby Book Studio,” NYC LGBTQ Historical Sites;
[15] Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, An Autobiography (New York; Hill & Wang, 1993), pp. 243-44.
[16] Marks, op. cit., pp. 69, 71.
[17] David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 183-84; Chris Albertson, Bessie (New York: Stein & Day, 1972), pp. 143-45; CVV-Kellner, p. 204.
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