Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, page 78
Into the midst of his brooding on Van Druten and the possibility of knowledge from beyond the grave came a cable from Richard Bradshaw Isherwood, on April 30: “Deeply regret to tell you Mum seriously ill following stroke writing fondest love.” Richard expected Kathleen to die. Isherwood had last seen her en route from India, just after Christmas at Wyberslegh. The news made him feel wretched, but he decided not to tell anyone except Bachardy because he couldn’t bear the effort and the distress of grief.
Already the next day, another cable reported his mother was better, but he went on feeling sad and dull. His mother’s mortality felt like his own. He revived a phrase from his nursery childhood to express his feeling that he was still in the middle of playing, and that he was not ready to stop simply because Kathleen might be ready to stop: “I think how I might die right now, leaving everything ‘out on the floor.’ And yet—is there any way to tidy it up—and—far more important—is tidying up really desirable?”
On May 9, he was acutely ill and “spent the night vomiting.”326 Perhaps it was food poisoning. Perhaps it was a symptomatic recollection of the fact that on May 9, 1915, his father, alone and far away, was flattened under a barrage of German artillery fire.
There were a great many strands in Isherwood’s life just now; “tidying up” certainly did not feel either desirable or possible. Film writing had captured his attention again—the financially rewarding game that kept him from writing his novels and which would have kept him from his mother’s deathbed. The current film job was especially glamorous. “Today I suddenly got the call to see Selznick next Monday—on Mary Magdalene,” he had written in his diary on March 13.
Isherwood had built a reputation for being able to script religious stories. He was at David Selznick’s command until mid-June for $1,250 a week. At first, Selznick wanted Mary Magdalene to be “rather like Brett in The Sun Also Rises.” Then they agreed on “a Shavian comedy with a background of violence.” By the time they were on the eighth draft for the treatment, Isherwood was restless to get back to the Ramakrishna biography and to his novel, and by September, he had turned against Selznick’s Mary Magdalene: “Loved him, hated her,” he quipped to Dodie Smith.327
He tried not to mind when Selznick returned to the project in October with a different writer, for he and the Selznicks had become good friends, and Isherwood’s extraordinary capacity for intimacy once again sidelined the matter of making movies. Jennifer Jones became a disciple of Prabhavananda, and some years later, in June 1965 when Selznick died after a series of heart attacks, she was to ask Isherwood to be a pallbearer. On the day of the funeral, as he received George Cukor’s instructions alongside the likes of Sam Goldwyn and CBS chief executive Bill Paley, Goldwyn—with whom Isherwood had parted ways on such uneasy terms in 1939—was so friendly as to seem positively sentimental. Isherwood recorded in his diary: “He said to me, referring to David, “He was very fond of you,” and then added, “We’re all very fond of you.” So I had to forgive him. If I’m not careful, I soon won’t have any mortal enemies left—”328
Isherwood’s likableness also made him a popular guest on a Hollywood talk show hosted by the composer Oscar Levant during the late 1950s and early 1960s. On a typical evening, as Gavin Lambert recalled about The Oscar Levant Show: “Levant cracked a joke or two about his neuroses and medications, played a piece or two by Gershwin or Ravel on the piano, then cued Christopher to recite poetry, tell stories about Auden, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Berlin, and Hollywood.”
Isherwood appeared on the show about a dozen times from 1958 to 1961. Soon he began to be recognized in public, and he had a fight with Levant on the air, for which he blamed his ambivalence: “I didn’t want to go on the Levant show any more—so I worked myself into a rage in order to quarrel with him in order not to go on.” But Isherwood had cause; the fight was really about his position on World War II.
According to his diary, he had told Levant that he admired Winston Churchill as a man but did not like Churchill’s far-right politics. Levant prodded Isherwood to say whether he admired Churchill as a writer, pointing out that Churchill had won a Nobel Prize for his writing and his speeches. Isherwood finally retorted, “Yes, and I think it was disgraceful. They only gave it to him because he’s such a celebrity.”
On a subsequent show, when Isherwood was not there to defend himself, Levant said, “In 1941, when Churchill was making his great speech, Isherwood was in Hollywood writing I Am a Camera.” Churchill’s famous speech was presumably his “Now we are masters of our fate” address to the Joint Session of the U.S. Congress on December 26, 1941, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. In fact, Isherwood was then living in Haverford teaching English to German refugees, and of course he didn’t write I Am a Camera. Levant’s public innuendo that Isherwood had shirked his war duty stung painfully, and Isherwood demanded and received an apology from Levant before agreeing to appear again on air.
Levant triggered the show-off that Isherwood disapproved of in himself. After one appearance, Isherwood observed, “I was good, I guess; but I have to stop this ingenue-oldboyish act which is inseparable from appearances with Levant.”329 Neverthless, he found it hard to resist going on the show, just as he found it hard to resist working with Selznick. According to Bachardy, he didn’t want to hurt Levant’s feelings, and of course, with Selznick, he wanted the money he could earn. But also, his tortured compulsion toward the limelight tapped his vestigial defiance of his mother. He had his toys out on the floor, and he was determined to play with them.
* * *
BACHARDY WAS STILL attending Chouinard, and from February to October 1958, he also took painting lessons from Isherwood’s first American boyfriend, Harvey Young. He was often away all day, and once or twice a week he stayed away overnight. In his day-to-day diaries, Isherwood recorded that Bachardy was staying at his parents’, but by May 1958, he abandoned this pretense. For himself, he recorded evenings spent with other young male friends, sometimes including sex.
Isherwood thought continually about finding someone who could replace Bachardy, but no single individual ever materialized to fill the role. He imagined romances and sentimental friendships with various boys, imaginings which were to develop and coalesce in the fictional character he named Kenny Potter in A Single Man—a boy who attracts, who suggests a possibility, but with whom there is little or no sexual involvement and no disappointment. One of the models for Kenny was Kent Chapman, a student who stopped by with a girlfriend and, as Isherwood wrote, “talked a lot about the Beat Generation and Venice West.”330 Chapman was a pacifist and an aspiring writer, and Isherwood liked his work.331 The character Kenny is a “crazy” boy, in the 1950s sense of crazy—curious, a free spirit, a more Whitmanesque type than Bachardy. In the evolving slang of the mid-twentieth century, he might have been called a hobo, later a beatnik, and later still, a hippie.
Occasionally, Isherwood ate alone at home; more often, he ate at Vedanta Place, where on Wednesday evenings he often stayed to perform the reading. He missed Bachardy’s company, but he believed in the new modus vivendi. “It really is better, I guess, since his ‘freedom’ has been officially recognized. Anyhow I know it’s the right thing and I’m in favour of it unshakably—in principle.” He called it “our design for living” after Noël Coward’s 1933 play about a long-lasting three-way love affair.
He found it hard, though, when Bachardy went away for more than one night at a time. In September, Bachardy made a six-day trip with a friend to a party in Yosemite. Isherwood fell into a “[b]lack depression” the day before the departure, and when Bachardy returned, he made a scene. “My possessiveness hates to face the fact that he can have important experiences with other people. Well, I have got to face it. The trick is to stop minding without ceasing to care for him.” He especially minded that Bachardy kept him off balance: “He decides at the last minute so I shan’t be able to make any plans. Is he aware of this?”332
Bachardy had learned in childhood to occupy the central position on his father’s lap, where Jess made a nightly favorite of him over Ted. Now, Bachardy was strategic about protecting his claim on Isherwood even as he established his new freedom. Toward the end of September, Bachardy proposed giving up his art studies to “be my secretary and collaborator,” as Isherwood recorded. “He said, ‘Am I intelligent enough?’ ‘Do you like me as well as love me?’”333
Two weeks later, Bachardy left again with a friend, to spend a long weekend in Ensenada, where he and Isherwood had shared one of their first and most intimate romantic trips in 1953. The friend was Paul Millard, a good-looking actor, who had lived with Speed Lamkin for a few years. Isherwood distracted himself with his sex friend Phil Burns. “We had such a wonderful time together,” he wrote in his diary:
Yet he couldn’t make me feel better about Don’s going to Ensenada. I mind that. It burns deep. I sort of hate him for it.
Yes, and I know one should mind. It is inhuman to be reasonable about these things. And yet, in the last resort, one must be fair, must show understanding, must admit that being twenty-four and fifty-four are two worlds.334
Bachardy pressed the idea of working together, and they decided to write a play based on The World in the Evening, using their recent Far East trip for settings. They called it The Monsters, Bachardy’s title for his play about his family. A second draft was finished in mid-January 1959, and they mailed it to the Beesleys. Then Bachardy spent a day reading through Isherwood’s old reviews, perhaps imagining the reception their play might receive. In February, they gave a copy of The Monsters to Cecil Beaton. “Cecil Beaton doesn’t like our play at all,” Isherwood groaned to his diary. “He couldn’t find one good word to say about it.” Neither could the Beesleys. “Whatever possessed us to write this crap?”335 Isherwood wondered when he reread The Monsters. But while they were working on it, they were as happy as they had been in the early days of their relationship, when Bachardy sat typing Isherwood’s novel in the garden house.
Next to Bachardy, “the reallest person” in Isherwood’s life, he noted in his diary, was Swami Prabhavananda, and Isherwood realized toward the end of the 1950s that he needed to spend more time with his guru. “I would like to be with him often—quietly, without speaking, like a dog.” A few months later, he again described himself as a dog, “Tonight I went up to Vedanta Place. Suddenly I was so glad to be sitting on the floor beside Swami—without a word, like his dog.” At the beginning of 1959, Prabhavananda urged Isherwood “to come and live in one of the apartments of the new apartment house they are going to build.” Isherwood considered it “quite out of the question at present because of Don, and anyhow I do not want to become part of the ‘congregation.’” He decided not to mention the offer to Bachardy “because I know it would upset him and make him feel insecure.”
The offer also upset Isherwood: “I fear it means the start of another come-back-to-Vedanta offensive, such as Swami waged while I was with Caskey.”336 Prabhavananda was just as strategic as Bachardy, and he sensed that the dog beneath Isherwood’s skin was longing to devote himself simply and abjectly to a master.
* * *
ISHERWOOD NEEDED TO make money. Script jobs were too brief, and schemes to sell material written on spec weren’t panning out. “Very low finances,” he had written in his diary on March 11, 1959. “And now we have to pay huge assigned-risk insurance as punishment for our accidents.”337 These were car accidents, and some were not their fault, but neither he nor Bachardy were reliable drivers. The worst crash was just before Thanksgiving 1958, when Isherwood fell asleep driving home from dinner and slammed into a parked vehicle, breaking his nose, bruising his eyes, cutting his left knee, and, most painful of all, tearing his pleura. Bachardy had received five traffic tickets, the most recent for running a red light.
Bachardy was just beginning to earn money for his artwork. He completed the semester at Chouinard in triumph, with eleven drawings in the year-end show in the spring of 1959, and he got a part-time job drawing for a department store, the May Company, along with freelance fashion advertising jobs.
Meanwhile, an altogether new source of income presented itself. Isherwood was invited to teach at Los Angeles State College. He described the campus to the Beesleys as “brand new and built, so its faculty members say, in ‘late supermarket.’ All brick and glass. Wonderfully clean. Perfectly equipped.” He signed on in March 1959. “It seems strange, after running away from Cambridge to avoid becoming a don, that now I am a real professor!” he wrote after classes began in the autumn.338 Even without a university degree, Isherwood was seen as a desirable teacher, and indeed, he had plenty of experience as a private tutor and language teacher.
Another major change was in the offing: Isherwood and Bachardy decided to move away from Sycamore Road. “I do not love the Hine boys,” Isherwood wrote in May 1959 about the family across the street. From his window during the last three years, he had often watched the Hine and Stickel children playing in the street and on a vacant lot opposite. The noise shattered his concentration, and he found himself “roaring like a cross old bear.”339 He was to take it all away with him, as with his observations about his neighbors in Berlin, and use it in A Single Man. He knew exactly what time the fathers brought the daughters back from swimming; he saw how the mothers dressed to put out their garbage; he watched them mow their lawns; he overheard their conversations. He was to fictionalize himself as a monster in his lair, whom the neighbors feared for his sexual nature.
He and Bachardy looked at a beach house for sale and then 145 Adelaide Drive. What they wanted most of all was privacy and quiet. The Adelaide Drive house was tucked beneath the lip of the canyon at the end of Ocean Avenue. It had nearly a third of an acre, secluded by vegetation. The rear walls were overhung and protected by the cliff behind it. In front, it had panoramic views of the canyon floor, the beach, the ocean to the west and the mountains to the north. They made an offer in early June and sold Sycamore Road by the end of July, planning to move in the autumn.
Meanwhile, Bachardy arranged an entirely separate option for himself, like an escape clause, borrowing a guesthouse in West Hollywood to use as a studio. It belonged to Paul Millard, the actor with whom he had been conducting an affair. Isherwood visited the guesthouse in mid-July and returned to pose for Bachardy in mid-August, but he did not know how involved Bachardy was with Millard. In any case, Isherwood had renewed his own friendship with Jim Charlton. One night, when Bachardy was staying in town, Isherwood and Charlton got drunk together, “and we more or less got back to our old relationship, which was very nice.”340
Before the move, Isherwood and Bachardy took a summer vacation to New York and Europe, and Bachardy accompanied Isherwood to Wyberslegh, where they arrived the day before Isherwood’s fifty-fifth birthday. Kathleen had “recovered largely from the stroke,” though she had lost sight in one eye and movement in one arm. Richard, though, had “a wild look of dismayed despair which I have never seen before,” wrote Isherwood. The house was in a worse state than ever, and Richard cooked them a sickening meal. He showed no sign of being able to cope alone.
Isherwood and Bachardy took Kathleen out to supper, and the next day, they went for a drive that Isherwood had made countless times—in his childhood with his grandfather in the horse-drawn coach emblazoned with the Bradshaw Isherwood coat of arms; in the 1920s with family friends who had large open cars; in taxis; on bicycles. The two great loves of his life were in the car with him that day, Kathleen Isherwood and Don Bachardy. One had seen him in and the other would see him out.
He experienced the drive, as he experienced so many of the most satisfying moments of his life, as partly real and partly imaginary, enhanced by the power of a favorite book: “—Glossop, the Snake [Pass], Castleton, Miller’s Dale, Buxton; and the weather was perfect. It was like that sinister summer passage in Wuthering Heights, when they go up to Penistone Crag and it is so lovely, but the shadow of the oncoming winter and death is over everything.”341 This was the last birthday he spent with Kathleen, who had cared so much to celebrate birthdays with him throughout his childhood.
145 ADELAIDE DRIVE, SANTA MONICA, 1959
“The day before yesterday we moved here—to 145 Adelaide Drive,” Isherwood wrote on October 2, 1959. “We can see the hills from our bed. Don is so delighted, it warms my heart. But this is a real house, a long in-and-out place of many rooms and half-rooms, passageways and alcoves.” Nearly half a century earlier, Kathleen had described Isherwood’s childhood home in Limerick—Roden House—in similar phrases, “all surprises—little passages and endless doors running in and out.”342 The Adelaide Drive house was a kind of burrow for the Animals, hidden below the level of the street above. It was built “in Californiano style, stucco and a heavy tiled roof,” as Isherwood told the Beesleys. “The living-room is paved with the most attractive old tiles; the other floors are hardwood. We have a fireplace, but oh how it smokes! This is to be investigated.”343 Of course, the houses were completely different, yet at Roden House, too, the floors had been stained wood, and the chimneys had smoked so badly that some rooms were uninhabitable in winter.
Isherwood was “home.” This was the house where he was to live with Bachardy for the rest of his life. He was to inhabit the physical space so completely that it became part of his interior psyche, gradually suffused with the lightness and magic of his devotion to the immaterial.
Bachardy was repainting the rooms as Isherwood sat describing it all to the Beesleys by letter, and Isherwood soon agreed to expensive remodeling. Workmen removed beams from the roof, replastered walls and mended the floor. Shutters were added to the living-room windows, and Bachardy painted them sky blue. Thus, he created the background for David Hockney’s double portrait, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, conceived eight years later in the living room at Adelaide Drive.
