The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  December 15. It is very cold. Snow is even said to be possible later today. But inside, all is snug. Am so happy with Don.

  Have been working on “A Christmas Carol” since I got back. Now the draft of a treatment is finished and submitted. So let’s hope we get a director and go ahead.

  It seems that the Shaw estate have given permission for our script of Black Girl to be performed; but Lamont Johnson won’t be back until after Christmas. So I can get on with my book.

  December 22. A resolution at the winter solstice: to keep this record more regularly and to be chatty.

  Hunt Stromberg Jr. seriously believes he can induce Queen Elizabeth to appear as a sponsor on our television movie of “A Christmas Carol”! This he plans to arrange through Douglas Fairbanks Jr.!773

  Jim Charlton, home for Christmas from Hawaii, is now delighted with his new life and says he has lots of work and is making money. He also says that Jo can have a far better business there, if she wants to, than she ever had in California.

  A revival of Dodie’s Dear Octopus is a big hit in London.

  Olive Mangeot writes that she had a heart attack, but is all right now.

  The Shaw estate has apparently okayed Black Girl.

  Jack Larson and Jim Bridges have moved into their Frank Lloyd Wright house on Skyewiay (sic) and it is a very sacred shrine of art—at least to Jack. Jim is prepared to work in the cellar, at least for now. Later there may be a crisis about opening up another window, and thus vandalizing the shrine. (Which reminds me that the newspapers say the Christmas tableaux on Ocean Avenue have also been vandalized. Drove by them this afternoon but couldn’t see anything wrong.)

  On the 17th I at last finished working through the year 1901 in M.’s diaries and Frank’s letters. If all the years take me this long, I won’t get the book itself even started for about three and a half years!

  December 25. All is peace on earth in this household, and the sun has just set after a beautiful mild gold-hazy winter beach day. Don has done two very striking paintings from photographs of women. Now he is with his parents. (He was obliged to take his father a terribly sickly Christmas card, the only one he could find, about how his dad had always been the best of dads, right from the beginning!) We’re to meet up at a party given by Charles Aufderheide. Then see The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Happiness!

  Yesterday I began the teleplay of “Christmas Carol.”

  David Sachs, whom we saw yesterday evening, says that when Paul Goodman’s son was killed the son’s girlfriend put a cucumber in his coffin because it reminded her of his erection.

  1968

  January 1. Working hard on “A Christmas Carol.” Hunt Stromberg is beginning to say he wants a draft of the teleplay this month. Rex Harrison is supposed to be interested. Hunt talks about bringing me to England to be on hand throughout the shooting of the film. This will fit in all right, unless the Mark Taper Forum people want to do Black Girl this spring, which I doubt.

  Anyhow it’s very good to have so much work. As for Don, he’s equally hard at work painting.

  No New Year’s resolutions, except to make the bed every morning and try to avoid mooning about.

  We spent midnight last night with Jack and Jim in their beautiful home. Looking into the living room from the deck, it was exactly like a stage set—in the sort of play in which the lights go up slowly to reveal an empty stage. I said this, and Don commented with his typical ambiguity, “It’d be the sort of play which ends exactly as it begins.”

  The first things I read this year, some of Ezra Pound’s translations from Cavalcanti. How marvellous they are! The lines I woke up saying to myself, this New Year’s morning:

  Language has not the power to speak what love indites:

  The Soul lies buried in the ink that writes.774

  Don is listening a good deal now to the tapes I made for him of various poems. He likes Swinburne, Poe, Herbert. I asked him which New Year’s Eve seemed most memorable to him. He said, “1961; I was sulking.”

  January 19. Swami has just telephoned this afternoon to say that Dick Thom is dead, apparently of a heart attack. Swami sounded very sad, and I suppose it was partly because he thinks of Richard as being a monk gone to waste—like me. I haven’t seen Richard in such ages that I can’t feel a great shock, and yet he’s very vivid as he was up at the monastery in the old days.

  I heard from Chris Wood last time I saw him that Peggy Kiskadden has had one of her breasts removed because of cancer. That did jolt me because it seems such a shockingly apt stroke of karma; I can never forget how Peggy gloated over Bill’s brutal frankness to her mother, when her breast had to be removed.

  Have been working intensively on “Christmas Carol.” I finished the teleplay on the 15th and Hunt Stromberg loves it, but Rex Harrison hasn’t read it yet. Now I’m redoing some parts of Black Girl, trying to redistribute the material contained in Shaw’s epilogue over the rest of the play.

  The last three days have been beautiful, though the nights are cold. The day before yesterday I parked my car up on Ocean Avenue and went for a walk—I always find it hard to do this; I have to make myself. And yet there is so much to be seen when you’re on foot; it’s like a psychic world which exists, just over the threshold, invisible to the daily world of our auto-borne lives.

  Up in the park, for example, there was a young man sitting under a palm; apparently he was a truck driver who’d got out of his truck, as one might get out to take a leak, in order to play a guitar! I went down the steps from the park and across the footbridge over the coast highway; it is fenced in now (I don’t think it used to be) perhaps to stop people throwing things, or themselves, onto the road below. Some graffiti were: Pam please be my wife, Surfers rule, Veil, Silence is complicity, End war, Kill all pags (this must have originally been fags, and probably altered by a fag).

  The old solarium is a parking lot now, but the bungalow court next door still exists, where one occasionally retired to repeat and prolong some hasty outdoor act. This section of the boardwalk is very nostalgic, it is the surviving remnant of a quiet little beach town. Sandy Bay House, where Jim Charlton used to live and where I so often spent the night and ran out early next morning to dip in the waves, far off across the wide stretch of sand. The Chalet, truly old world, with beach furniture on its tiny front lawn and a beach umbrella and a sleepy cat. Another building which looks quite empty, except for several bicycles and two mobiles made of sun spectacles. And the Synanon building, for sale now. And the miniature court of shacks covered with tar paper printed to resemble brick, where the old man used to take out his false teeth to give blowjobs. There is still some sort of clairvoyant doing business on the pier, in or near the place where I went with Vernon and Chaplin and the Huxleys to have our handwriting read.775 I stood a long while watching a young long-haired surfer who seemed purely a native islander, quite unconnected with any of us ashore. And I remembered how I watched other boys on other boards here in this bay, twenty-nine years ago!

  February 18. Back to this diary at last, now that I have more or less finished with Black Girl for the time being and have nothing more to do on “Christmas Carol” until something happens about casting, getting a director and deciding when to go to England.

  All this time I have managed to creep ahead with the copying of diaries and letters for my book. Today I reached Kathleen’s wedding day, March 12, 1903.

  Will write a few things about the past month, but not today. Joe LeSueur is coming to supper, along with Jack Larson, Jim Bridges, Gavin and Basil Wright, whom we finally got around to inviting.776 My relations with Jim are steadily becoming more and more strained, although he may not know this yet. I am getting irritated by his failure to restart work on the play of Meeting by the River; everything else seems to come first. I know very well from my own experience that, however busy you are, you can always sneak in some little extra effort on the side. Now I have talked to Robin French about it again, and he must surely have said something to Jim;
but Jim never mentions it to me. Don says that this is because he is such a coward. Don also thinks that Jim is utterly under the thumb of Jack and that Jack maybe doesn’t want him to do this job. We shall soon find out, I suppose.

  Horst Buchholz wants me to work on a musical version of Felix Krull. He came to see me about this the day before yesterday. He thinks he can still play Felix, natch—on the stage, that is.777

  February 21. Talked to Jo this morning. Her prospects for working as a designer in Honolulu are now the best; she has practically closed a deal with one of the biggest firms. But she is still very doleful. She hates to leave her apartment here (“it’s my only security”) and yet it makes her miserable most of the time by reminding her of the days with Ben. Ben finally told his father about their split-up, and about Dee. The father wrote back to Jo, “There used to be just the three of us, and now there’s four.” This sent Jo right up the wall, and no wonder. She has agonies of jealousy whenever she thinks of Dee being taken by Ben to any of their former friends, and received as Ben’s wife. In our case she knows this won’t happen, because we dislike Dee. But if Ben’s father receives her as his “daughter” that will be worse than anything. This line about “now there’s four” certainly sounds like an absolutely stunning bit of tactlessness. But I suppose the father, in the selfishness of his senility, merely thinks of Dee as one more person to look after him and be counted as “family.” Except for the fact that he isn’t in the least bit selfish or senile, according to Jo, and has never made any emotional demands on either of them.

  The television cable trucks are making a maddening noise this morning. Everybody in the Canyon is getting the cable put in, as otherwise our reception is so poor. I have been trying to record more poetry for Don, and the mike keeps picking up their broadcast. Doing Pope, Cowper and Clare.

  Richard Thom’s funeral was on January 23, at Santa Barbara. I went up there for it; so did Webster Milam—and this seemed to please Mr. and Mrs. Thom very much. They were quite wonderful about the whole thing, appearing at the funeral in colors, no mourning. But Swami says that Mr. Thom was still reproaching himself because—when Richard didn’t show up at his job and they went down to his apartment to find out the reason—Mr. Thom had said to Mrs. Thom, on the way there: “I hope he hasn’t started drinking again—I’d rather see him dead.” And then they found his dead body.

  Swami says he is convinced that Richard died in spiritual ecstasy. Since he gave up drinking he had seemed very much changed, and full of love. And death came so easily, as he lay in bed; his hair was still tidily brushed and parted.

  Talking of love—such a long period, lately, of happiness with Don. I always hate superstitiously to write about this, so I won’t say more. But our visit to Truman Capote in Palm Springs (February 8–10) really made the best kind of fifteenth anniversary celebration. It was so pleasant being bossed auntishly by Truman, told when to come and see him, when to go off by ourselves, where to eat and how we were to take whirlpool mineral baths, steam and massage at the Spa Hotel.

  February 24. A cliff slide this morning held up traffic in the Canyon. One car was buried but the driver not seriously hurt. A beautiful day. Have been working on Kathleen’s diary, as usual. I am getting pretty bored with these uncommunicative entries and with Frank’s letters about servants; but there is nothing to do but plod on. One unimaginable day, quite quite suddenly, it will all be finished—and then the real problem arises, what the hell does it all add up to, what does it mean? I simply have to have faith that the whole job is worthwhile, and I do, because even if a book doesn’t hatch out of it I shall still have learnt such a lot about Kathleen and Frank.

  We saw Emlyn and Molly Williams the night before last, at Marti Stevens’s house. Judith Anderson was there too, and Emlyn teased her quite fiendishly. He looked the picture of fiendish spark ling good health, with his ruddy complexion and silk-white hair, and he was still bursting with energy although he had just given one of his Dylan Thomas performances at Royce Hall. For some rather mysterious reason, both he and Molly made a great fuss over us. Don thinks they have guilty consciences.

  We left early but Gavin who was there too told me about the talk during supper. Molly got rather drunk and declared that she’d had “thirty-three years of perfect marriage,” Emlyn pronounced that John Gielgud had spoilt his career by being too queer. He had liked The Valley of the Dolls778 for its frankness(!) He was surprised and hurt because, at the home of some close friends of Frank Sinatra, his joke about Sinatra had been very coldly received. This was the joke: Emlyn was making fun of Gielgud’s famous brick-droppings. He said, “If John were introducing the Sinatras, he’d say ‘This is Frank Sinatra the crooner, and this is his daughter, Mafia Farrow.’”779

  Judith looks marvellously young for seventy, but she sadly complains that no one wants her, she’s too old. We suspect her of still harboring her corny old ideas about how women should be treated, etc.; she is as bad as Jo, or worse.

  February 29 [Thursday]. A nice expression I just learnt: as queer as a treeful of ducks. (Good titles for a trilogy: A Treeful of Ducks, Dick’s Hatband, The Three-Dollar Bill.)

  Monday morning was foggy. I woke and immediately knew that, for some extraordinary reason, I wanted to reread The Prisoner of Zenda. So I did, right through, and most of Rupert of Hentzau too.780 They are a very good demonstration of the supreme importance of narrative viewpoint. Zenda is far superior to Hentzau chiefly because Rassendyll is so much more fun to be with than von Tarlenheim.

  As regards plans, fog still predominates. I don’t even know for absolute certain if it is Screen Gems781 who owns “A Christmas Carol” now, or Aubrey-Stromberg. If it is Screen Gems, and I think it is, then I may not be sent to England after all. But Don will go, definitely; and I most probably shall, sooner or later.

  Cabaret opened in London yesterday and Robin French has heard from Hugh that the notices are very good. The Daily Mail tracked down Jean [Ross] as the original of Sally Bowles and she has been interviewed and is being brought to the theater to meet Judi Dench.782

  The day before yesterday, Jim Bridges spoke of Meeting by the River for the first time in weeks. He assured me that he will go to work on it again as soon as this screenplay he is doing now is finished.

  Last night we watched Kubrick’s Paths of Glory again, on T.V. It is a truly great picture. Aside from all the virtues of its direction, writing and acting, two things particularly struck me. The stylized sounds of firing, made (I suppose) by drums and strangely melodious, and thereby all the more sinister. And that marvellous last scene. For the first time in the whole picture we are shown a representative of “The Enemy,” the pretty frightened German girl who sings “Es war einmal . . .”783 If the picture had ended just before this it would still have had a terrific impact but it would have been less than it now is; it would have been just another bitter brilliant exposure of The Way Wars are Run. But, after all this bitterness, Kubrick shows us a final scene which is like a shrug of his shoulders over the whole ghastly mess. No use staying furious. This is what human beings are. And, in the end, you have to forget your fury and weep or laugh (either is equally appropriate) and give them your reluctant blessing.

  March 16. It looks as if we really are going to buy two duplex buildings from Paul Millard, as a tax write-off. I had violent fears of this, because I imagined all the fuss and expenses they might cause, but Don wants to do it, and I am feeling a lot less opposed after talking to Arnold Maltin784 this morning.

  Swami has been quite seriously sick, but is being moved out of the intensive care ward at Mt. Sinai Hospital either today or tomorrow.

  Still no definite word about “A Christmas Carol.” Don is anyhow leaving for England via New York around March 28. I suppose I shall stay on here and keep grinding away at Kathleen’s diaries. Reached 1905 today.

  Don remarked yesterday that the people he finds it fun to be with are Truman, Gore (who’s coming here soon), Tony Richardson, Hunt Stromberg and his fr
iend Dick Shasta785 (with whom we had dinner the other evening and whom rather to our surprise we got along with very well). Also, says Don, it used to be fun with Doris Dowling—sad that this has come to an end because of Leonard’s Jewish behavior. Of course, fun-to-be-with people are almost by definition not those one knows well. I said Igor and Vera are almost the only people I feel really snobbish about knowing; they are my royalty. I doubt if I could quite feel this about any writer, past or present.

  March 22. A recent synchronicity: On the evening of the 16th, I went over to 147 to listen to a new song for Dogskin which Ray Henderson had composed. Elsa was there too. For some reason we got talking about quotations and how one sometimes can’t hunt down their origins for years. Elsa gave as an example, “things that go bump in the night,” which is a phrase from a Scottish prayer. That same evening, Don and I went to have supper with Jack [Larson] and Jim [Bridges], and one of the other guests was Terence McNally, who wrote a (very unsuccessful) play called [And T ]hings that Go Bump in the Night!786

  It now seems that the deal with Paul Millard will go through almost at once. Still no word from Screen Gems. Robin French thinks they will make “Christmas Carol” in England anyway, so I may well go there even if Stromberg and Aubrey are definitely out of the production.

  Yesterday we went to see the Bracketts. Muff was just the same as ever. Charlie is now an invalid. His mouth is open most of the time, in a down-curving shark-grimace. However he seems to understand everything you tell him. They seemed delighted to see us, and the pathos of this was the only embarrassing feature of an otherwise really quite pleasant visit. Having to make an effort to entertain is actually much more amusing than not having to make any effort. Besides, Muff knew exactly what they wanted to hear; it was chiefly about Marguerite, her house and her life in London. They seemed much less interested in the doings of Dodie and Alec. Perhaps because Marguerite represents vitality, and that’s what invalids need. They fed us caviar and iced white wine.