Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood’s Santa Monica

Don Bachardy: now
                                                            photo by Lisa Stefanson

Christopher Isherwood: then
                                            photo courtesy of Don Bachardy

Carolyn See
Special to the Mirror
  
   Sometimes I get strange literary mail. One letter from a woman a few years ago, chronicled the hell of living with a self-important, blatantly unfaithful English professor at UCLA back in the sixties. She had children; she felt trapped, and developed a searing hatred of men-as-monsters. But at the same time, she admitted, her five-year-old daughter made friends with the guys who lived just above them in Santa Monica Canyon. Saturday nights and Sunday mornings the sad wife would go outside in the fragrant California air and listen to those guys and their friends laugh, and treat each other civilly. She said that just the thought of those men saved her from utter despair.
   Their neighbors were Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood, whose Berlin Stories all of Santa Monica is reading – or should be reading – this month. Wonderful men who lived a “gay life style” half a century before it was fashionable, wonderful men who met each other from literally worlds apart and stayed together until death literally did part them.
   Christopher Isherwood had grown up in a gloomy manor house in Northern England after World War I. He was gay (at an inconvenient time and place) and his friend, poet W.H. Auden urged him to go to Germany which was where the beautiful boys were. What Isherwood found besides boys was pre World War II Germany. Genius broke out in him like a bad case of hives: he wrote two amazing novels about a down-and-out country descending into unspeakable evil: “I am a camera with its shutter open,” he wrote famously, “quite passive, not thinking.”
   His tolerance and intelligence have given us perhaps the finest work on how ordinary people slip into fascism, not because they choose to but because they have to. All the subsequent glitter of the musical “Cabaret” can’t change the perverse enchantment of drab bathrobes and aging prostitutes and TB and boarding houses – everything in The Berlin Stories that was Germany before Hitler.
   “But Isherwood was sick of Germany!” Don Bachardy says now. “I’ve never even been to Berlin.”
   When I ask Bachardy about the old literary canard that Isherwood came to Santa Monica because it was the only place on earth as decadent as Berlin, he huffs. “England was decadent! Where you had to pretend not to be queer when you were!”
   When World War II started (the story goes), Auden and Isherwood decided they would have none of it. They decamped to America, Isherwood landing in Los Angeles in 1939 to be near to Salka Viertel whose husband he had worked with earlier in London. Soon, Isherwood migrated even further west to Santa Monica canyon and found Paradise. As we know, his first neighbors there were the artist Lee Mullican and his superlative wife Luchita, who lived the good life as though it were a religion. The beach was only blocks away. He frequented State beach where the “queers” went, and at the same time became interested in the spiritual practice of Vedanta, nourishing both body and soul. He’d found his home.
   Off across the city in Atwater Village a darling young boy was growing up. On the weekends he’d take the red car across town to the beach with his older brother and they’d hike up to State beach, where the beautiful gay men were. Bachardy was only 16 when he first met Isherwood, who was 30 years his senior. Their romance began two years later, Bachardy says, at a dinner party where they kissed, lost their balance and broke a window pane. Bachardy was mortified in the short run, but in the long run his life utterly, totally changed. He would become one half of an artistic, literary legend.
   They had a difficult time of it at first. As if being the same gender wasn’t trying enough, the age difference was daunting. Isherwood’s friends said they would never last: “Two guys without a prayer of staying together,” Bachardy mimics them now: “That kid’ll be out of there in jig time.” Even Isherwood insisted that he, the older man, was nothing but a “way station,” in the young artist’s life, but, Bachardy says, “I told him I wasn’t going anywhere, and I didn’t. Our relationship lasted because there were so many facets to it: He was my father, my guru, my guide, teacher, lover…”
   Isherwood sent Bachardy first to art school in LA, then to London to the Slade School of Art. The young man’s portraits were sublime, sometimes scarily honest. The men perfectly complemented each other while they lived together as a couple. They accomplished something privately that society is still crabbily arguing about today. They made a beautiful home; they stayed together, they got along, they became pillars – no, legends – of their community. And they were openly gay.
   Isherwood, who had memorialized beleaguered Berlin, wrote of peaceful Santa Monica, and larger LA. I remember, he wrote of palm trees like torn shredded lace in an issue of an obscure little magazine I used to own; he wrote about the city in either Harpers or Vogue in the 1940s; he wrote of West LA in The World in the Evening and of Santa Monica Canyon most movingly in A Single Man, a novel so evocative that even now it’s hard to drive down Santa Monica Canyon without thinking of it. And in 1983, they worked together on a “coffee table book,” October, when for 31 days – as he did each day anyway – Bachardy painted a portrait, and Isherwood contributed a diary entry. Then, finally, their most poignant collaboration came in 1985 - 86, The Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood, in which Bachardy painted his mentor, friend, lover, every day up to his death, through his death, after his death.
   It’s not an exaggeration to say that to sit in the Bachardy/Isherwood house is to be in, if only for minutes, part of the literary, artistic history of the twentieth and twenty-first century history. When Bachardy talks about his first one-man-show in London, 1961, he says: “Oh! What a night! Maugham was there, Forster was there, Gielgud was there…”
   When Isherwood wrote of reading Peter Viertel’s novel “White Hunter, Black Heart,” terrified that he wouldn’t like it and then crashing down through the shrubbery of Santa Monica Canyon in the middle of the night, shouting, “It’s good, Peter! It’s really, really good!” – all that connects back (through time, friendship, love, art) to the lost city of Berlin before the war; the Kit Kat Club with Bobby, its seedy bartender, and Sally Bowles, the lost little girl looking for sin in all the conventional, lower case ways, while an increasingly wicked government was planning capital SINS in ways we still have trouble imagining – all that, all that, connects to this beach side community that traffics in dreams and weapons alike, and still shelters the shy boy from Atwater Village who came to the beach to find some fun, then fell in love with the literary legend whose work Santa Monicans are reading this month.
   Ed. note: See is one of America’s leading novelists. Her 1987 novel, Golden Days, should be the 2005 CitywideReads selection. P.C.