The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  June 21. An absolute chain reaction of synchronicities at the gym today: A short while ago, I told Lyle Fox the story about Jesus and the Blessed Virgin playing golf (see October 29 of last year; page 130) and Lyle has been retelling it ever since. This afternoon he told it to one of the men who work out there, and this man remarked, “Now I must go see King of Kings,” (which happens to be playing now in Pacific Palisades) and, just as he said it, in walked Jeffrey Hunter!402 Neither Lyle nor the other man told him the story, feeling that he had probably become allergic to Jesus jokes. . . . In due course, Hunter went into the steam room with a copy of Esquire. After he had left, I went into the steam room and the magazine was lying there. I picked it up, opened it at random, and there was an ad with the caption “The Inferior Golfer”!

  A minor synchronicity this morning: I met both Frank Wiley and Jim Charlton in the magazine shop near the library. (I was there because I had time to kill waiting for the eye drops to take effect so Dr. Bierman could examine my eyes and prescribe some new glasses for me.) Frank Wiley has become a naval officer and is about to go off to the Orient and serve on an aircraft carrier. Jim is very vague and grand and treats everybody and everything here as so much non-Japanese trash.

  Last Monday, George Huene and Barbette and Gavin came to supper. It was tragic to see Barbette, who is now crippled as the result of some form of paralysis, tottering as he made his way over the debris of our future carport, and saying to George, “I can’t balance as well as you can.”403

  Talked to Paul Kennedy on the phone. He is so delighted because he is getting out of hospital, probably, at the end of the week. And yet he is losing weight still and can’t sleep at night and still can’t eat properly. His hope for life is heartbreaking.

  Saw Doctor Allen yesterday. He couldn’t explain the soreness of my tongue, but took blood for tests. It might be due to anemia, he said, or syphilis, which is very prevalent just now. I asked him why, and he answered, “Because society is so disorganized.” When he was pricking the tip of my finger to get the blood, I apologized for wincing, and he said that lots of people are sensitive about their fingers. A colored woman had come into his surgery with her hand wrapped in a cloth. The cop who came with her—there had been some accident—handed Dr. Allen a package, remarking, “These are her fingers.” When the woman saw them she fainted dead away. Dr. Allen told me this as if it were an amusing example of hypersensitivity. And yet he isn’t at all the brutal type of doctor.

  June 23. Talked to Dr. Allen this morning. He says the blood tests show nothing alarming, so that is that. The burning in my tongue continues, but I just won’t think about it. I really wasn’t in the least worried about the syphilis, although I know, theoretically, that almost anyone can get it and it is a nuisance to cure. I don’t even worry about heart attacks, sclerosis, T.B. or strokes, although strokes run in our family and I shall very probably end up with some, and they can be unspeakably terrible. No—all my fears are centered on cancer. I thought I might have cancer of the tongue; just as I thought I might have cancer of the jaw. That is my obsession. And yet cancer i[n] our family is very rare, almost unknown. Only Aunt Esther [Isherwood] had it, very late in life.

  Don was miserable yesterday because he tried to do this job for Cassini—draw a fashion model in a copy of a dress belonging to the Princess Radziwill and fake in her face from photographs out of Life Magazine—and he couldn’t. He has sent them a telegram saying so, and offering to pay for the model. Personally, I believe that this refusal will raise his prestige in the long run; but naturally he can’t see this.

  I felt great satisfaction yesterday because I went in a truck with Mr. Haslam looking for filler dirt for the floor of our new carport, and when we found some, on the slope of Chautauqua, I was able to keep working right along with him, shovelling it into the truck. I couldn’t have done this if I hadn’t been going to the gym. It impressed him, I think. He says work is part of the Mormon religion, which is why the boys who work for him are so lively and active.

  The Seven Arts404 have offered me this job adapting The Night of the Iguana for the screen. I don’t want to do it. So I have asked for more money—fifteen thousand instead of ten. Geller doesn’t think they will accept. Yet we do need the money, because we have the most ambitious schemes for fixing up the house, with the help of this nice but dull tall girl, Margot Smith. Last night we took her to Lolita, which has been made into a fascinating film by Kubrick, brilliantly acted and, like the book, all about nothing.

  Work on the novel again yesterday, after a long interruption. I got a good gimmick-idea, about voyeurism. But I must keep at it every day. Also I started another chapter, the fifteenth, of the Ramakrishna book.

  June 25. Yesterday, after what seemed like a whole age of fog, the sun shone. Don and I lay on the deck, which still has no railing and seems as insecure as a flying carpet, with the wind blowing up between the floorboards and the whole Canyon floating in the air around you. Today, the building is going full blast. A plumber is putting in Don’s studio john and cement is being laid down in the carport and the man has come to arrange the railing for the deck. And the sun is glittering on the ocean.

  Bruce Zortman told me on the phone that Charles definitely does have cancer and it can be only a matter of time. I talked to Paul, who is out of the hospital and staying with the Morrows. He can’t sleep well and he only weighs 118 pounds.

  Don just got a call from New York and now they want him to go there and draw Cassini himself. So his rejection of the Radziwill fake-portrait seems to have worked for him, as I suspected it would. He may leave at the end of the week.

  Nothing from the Seven Arts people about Night of the Iguana. Not that I care. I just want to go right on doing what I’m doing. Got in a very good spell of work yesterday on the novel and the new chapter on Vivekananda.

  Don is being an angel. My tongue burns and my jaw aches, and I would be perfectly happy if—if I wasn’t me.

  June 27. This glorious sparkling weather continues. The workmen have now put up the trellis over the deck, casting a barred shadow. Don is in raptures. The framing of the view gives him exquisite pleasure and now he keeps saying how happy he is here and how happy he is with me. And so, of course, I am happy too.

  We are still waiting for a word from New York. Now it is possible that Cassini will come out here and Don can draw him here. Don is praying that this will happen; he dreads going to New York, and indeed this would be a most awkward time for him to go away, when so many details about his studio have to be decided.

  Talked to Al Spar405 yesterday about the Camera musical deal and some kind of rather mysterious merger of Don’s and my finances which Al is planning, to save us income tax. Al is so funny, the way he talks. After explaining something to me, he wanted to say, “Let me recapitulate.” What he actually said was, “Let me recapture myself.”

  Yesterday afternoon, for the first time since his illness, I saw Laughton. I had prepared myself for a ghastly shock, but actually he didn’t look so bad; thinner, and very serious, with a walrus moustache, but his color was quite fresh and rosy. He walked round the pool several times with his male nurse. (Who, I hear this morning over the phone from Bruce Zortman, got drunk after I left yesterday on vodka, fell out of bed, peed all over the floor, and was packed off by plane to New York.) Charles said at once, in his typical abrupt tragic voice, “You know what’s the matter with me, don’t you?” So we talked quite frankly about death, God, etc. Charles told me, however, that cancer hasn’t been definitely diagnosed; this may or not be so. He said he was appalled how unprepared he was to die. The only thing that had helped him was thinking about some of the Japanese temple gardens he had seen on his trip. I got the impression very strongly that Elsa is fatal for him, and so is all this medical solicitude. What Charles needs is to play “his last great role.” He should actually appear in a film, even if he had to be wheeled on to the set and given shots of adrenalin. At best, it would cure him; at worst, it would be a
mercy killing. To lie in bed, moping, not even being able to make up his mind to read, is simply crawling toward death. I see all this vividly, and yet, would I act any differently? I think I did help him a bit, however, even if only just by being outspoken.

  Charles said, “It’s a ghastly irony, isn’t it, that I watched Albert Brush406 die, and now I have to go through the same thing? The last two weeks, Albert was like an animal.”

  June 29. Sloth. It is twelve-fifteen and I still haven’t done anything this morning except read. Nearly all my activities are compulsive—making japam, going to the gym, keeping this diary, working on the Ramakrishna book and the novel (which has crawled as far as page 33). Not compulsive is lying flat on my back on the couch in my workroom and reading Ian Fleming; have just finished Moonraker. And why do I like Fleming? He’s not all that good but he has atmosphere. It’s a world. You can enter it and have fun.

  Why do I do all these other things, then? Because, if I don’t, I start feeling awful. Life is such a drag. Charles and Paul dying. Don out for the night, and soon, it seems, going to New York on the Cassini job. Supper to be marketed for and prepared for tonight, because Doris Dowling and Gavin are coming and we are all going to a film I don’t particularly want to see, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Mr. Haslam has now stopped work on the house and this may drag on, I suppose, for weeks. And I don’t really care about any of that, either. Only if it pleases Don. What do I want? To idle, rest, lie in the sun—I never do—have a couple of sex adventures maybe—I never do—sleep, sleep, sleep forever. . . . Sloth. It means nothing.

  Talk with Gerald, the day before yesterday. He says he feels the Buddhistic position is unsatisfactory. It’s not enough just to want to end sorrow. And now, he says, we know that the universe is going somewhere; it’s not just meaningless. I urged him to write his memoirs, maybe in the dialogue form of the Stravinsky-Craft books. (“I am the vessel through which Le sacre passed.”)

  Today I have to pick up my new spectacles. And that reminds me of something which oddly enough I never recorded here. Sometime in May I got a fan letter from a man named Ronald Flora,407 from Boston, who said he was coming out to the Coast and would I see him. He did come and I met him at the Georgian Hotel where he was staying. He knew Maugham and seemed a fairly intelligent rather pissy-assed languid queen. That was on June 3. Then, out of the blue, on June 14, I got a phone call to come over at once to an apartment on a street very near here, Palisades Avenue. So I went and there was a detective and a man from the Georgian Hotel, and they were bullying Flora, whom they called Smith (that turned out to be his full name) and they forced him to confess to me how he had run out of the hotel in the middle of the night without paying. He was shaking all over and the detective was really sadistic. Well, it ended up with my having to pay forty dollars, rather than see him taken off [to] prison on the spot, and this I did with a very bad grace. He promised to call me, but he never did. And then I found I’d left my spectacles at the apartment and when I went around there I was told that he has left for the East. Temporarily losing these spectacles goosed me into getting some new ones prescribed, and now I shall have these as spares, which is all to the good. I remember that the detective acted very matey to me, and remarked that the H-bomb tests had undoubtedly ruined the weather! Why did I never record any of this? Because it is the sort of thing which bores me. Such a dreary little tale.

  July 2. Just talked to Barbara Morrow on the phone. Paul has had a relapse. He is in bad pain and terribly upset and keeps crying. The doctor wants to have him back in hospital and give him drugs. He says he won’t go. Barbara still doesn’t know what will be decided.

  Last night, Elsa came down to 147 [Adelaide Drive], with Ray Henderson. She is very bitter against Terry, who is here now. Says he won’t sit with Charles and thinks only of gadding about. Says Charles called all the doctors together, when he was in hospital in New York, and made a great confession about his sex life. She thinks he is obsessed with guilt. At the same time, he tells her he loves her, and kisses her on the mouth. She says he was treated by Ernest Jones,408 many years ago, because of a scandal in the park; and then left Jones. And a short while ago, when there was a notice in the paper that Jones had died, Elsa told Charles and Charles said, “Who was he? Never heard of him.”

  Oh, it was so ugly and horrible to listen to her. It hardly mattered if she was lying or not. It was horrible in either case.

  Beautiful weather. Margot Smith came yesterday and we planned all kinds of things for the house. As usual, my puritanical nature made me feel an almost superstitious dread of spending all this money for such a purpose. I can only do it by firmly reminding myself that it is entirely for Don’s pleasure, reassurance and morale. He has got to feel that this is his home, created by himself. I would really feel much better if I put the house in his name.

  It now seems fairly definite that he’ll leave on the 11th for New York. I am keeping on with my tasks, the Ramakrishna book and the novel. I feel as if the darkness has crept in very close, and yet I am well, functioning and my life with Don is happy. So cling to japam and watch and pray, especially for Paul and Charles.

  July 6. This morning I was practically woken up by some journalist on the phone telling me that William Faulkner died today and asking what were my reactions. “He was a very great writer,” I said, in a voice like a tape-recorded answering service. “I am proud to have known him but I only knew him very slightly.”

  On the evening of July 4, Don and I went to supper with Gladys Cooper. Robert Morley409 was there, and Cathleen Nesbitt.410 Morley is amusing but pompous. At first, the pomposity seems part of an act; then you begin to suspect that it’s a double bluff. He is a pompous man pretending to be pompous in a slightly different way in order to cover his pomposity. He made some good remarks, though. One of them was, “It’s never difficult to play a part, it’s only difficult to get it.” After supper and drinks, I surprised him and myself by a violent outburst against Russia. The outburst was no good, because I didn’t explain what I really loathe about communist morality; its betrayal of Marx in its interference with the private life. But I do like Gladys—she is such a wonderfully good-humored woman and so full of energy. It seems strange to see her now, running around cooking and joking and fixing drinks, and then look at those marvellous theatrical photographs of the twenties which show an infinitely languid creature in an elegant sack, being fervently kissed on the cheek by her leading man while she gazes at the camera with an expression of frigid, rather absentminded purity.

  This afternoon, Jerry Lawrence and I drove to the hospital to see Paul Kennedy. He is terribly thin and his stomach is distended, because o[f] the tumor on the liver. But he was quite lively and got out of bed and came with us into the visitors’ anteroom. When Jerry Lawrence offered to help him pay the hospital bills, he began to cry.

  July 10. Don left late last night for New York. We went to the airport in lots of time, for once, to catch his eleven o’clock plane, and then got so engrossed talking in the bar (where there is no public address system) that we missed it! So then we had to wait an hour and forty minutes for another one, which stops at Chicago, and Don proposed we should go up into the new Sky Room (or whatever it’s called) for drinks. They wouldn’t let us in because I hadn’t got a tie on. So we bought one at the gift shop; it was expensive but really very pretty. And then we talked about the mantram Swami gave Don. Don says that it has made a tremendous difference to him already, repeating it, and that the words of popular songs, which used to run in his head all the time, now fill him with a kind of horror. He also said that he is afraid that this whole thing may take over, that he may find himself getting in too deep and thinking about nothing but finding God. I said well that was something which would happen if it was going to happen.

  What with God and everything, I really don’t know exactly where I stand with Don right now, but it seems that, in some way or other, we are happy together as almost never before; never, at any rate, since the
earliest time, and that was in such a different way. He made such a strange declaration of love, that night we went up to Margot Smith’s romantic little house, perched up on the hill above the Golden State Freeway intersection and confronting the mountains. And the next day, when I asked him if he had meant it, all he would say was, “I’m a man of my word.” Last night, he said he was very happy with the life we are leading now, and asked if I was, too. At the same time, he said he wished we could speak frankly about everything that we did. I said this wasn’t desirable. He said, “But I get to know almost everything you do, anyway.”

  The other evening—Sunday—we had Evelyn Hooker to supper. She was very optimistic about the liberalization of the sex laws. She made us laugh describing a doctor (in St. Louis?) who is researching the orgasm. He makes people masturbate and even have sex with a partner right in front of him and his female secretary, and he wants Evelyn to sit in on this. She is terribly embarrassed at the mere thought of it! He has also constructed a dummy penis with a camera inside it!411

  July 19. Much to be told. To begin with, Don is still in New York but may return tomorrow unless there are more people he has to draw. On the 15th, Gene, Ben Masselink’s brother, died of a heart attack at Taliesin East.412 So Jo and Ben have gone over there for the funeral. The remodelling of the house continues steadily. Today they have started plastering and the new kitchen floor is being put in. We also now have the lath house413 up outside the front door, complete with gate. It is certainly private—in fact, it seems doubtful if anyone will ever again find his way into the house. This morning, at 7:00 a.m., I was roused out of bed by strange sounds and discovered that the plasterer, unable to get in any other way, had climbed the ladder onto the deck! He seemed to believe quite seriously that this was the way we go in and out of the house! On the 16th, I finished the fifteenth chapter of the Ramakrishna book but have failed to do any work at all on the novel. Hope to restart this today. On the 13th, Jerry Wald died of a heart attack at forty-nine, the same age as Ben Masselink; another pair of events.