The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Bachardy, Glade De Land (1906–198[8]). Don Bachardy’s mother, from Ohio. Childhood polio left her with a limp, resulting in extreme shyness. Her father was the captain of a cargo boat on the Great Lakes, and she met her husband, Jess Bachardy, on board during a summer cruise with her sister in the 1920s. They married in 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio, and travelled to Los Angeles on their honeymoon, settling there permanently. The Bachardys divorced in 1952, but later reconciled; once Don and his brother Ted Bachardy had moved out of their mother’s apartment, their father moved back, in the late 1950s. An ardent movie-goer, Glade took Don and Ted to the movies from their early childhood because she could not afford babysitters, thus nurturing an obsession which developed differently in each of them. According to Don, Glade did not know what homosexuality was until her elder son Ted had his first breakdown in 1945. She appears in D.1.

  Bachardy, Jess (1905–1977). Don Bachardy’s father, born in New Jersey, the youngest of several brothers and sisters in an immigrant German-Hungarian family. Jess’s mother, who never learned to speak English, was pregnant with him when she arrived in the U.S.; his father drowned accidentally shortly before. Jess was an automobile enthusiast and a natural mechanic and took several jobs as a uniformed chauffeur when he was young. Afterwards, he worked on board a cargo boat on the Great Lakes, where he met his future wife. They moved to California, and he turned his mechanical skills to the aviation industry, working mostly with Lockheed Aircraft for the next thirty years. His progress was limited by the fact that he never finished high school, but he advanced to the position of tool planner before he retired in the 1960s. He never allowed his sons to learn Hungarian, and they barely knew their Bachardy grandmother or any of her family. For fifteen years, he refused to meet Isherwood, but he finally relented and came to like him. He was a lifelong smoker and died of lung cancer in 1977. He appears in D.1.

  Bachardy, Ted (1930–2007). Don Bachardy’s older brother. Isherwood spotted him on the beach in Santa Monica, probably in the autumn of 1948 or spring of 1949, and invited him to a party in November 1949 (Ted’s name first appears in Isherwood’s diary that month). Isherwood was attracted to Ted, but did not pursue him seriously because Ted was involved with someone else, Ed Cornell. Around the same time, Ted experienced a mental breakdown—about the third or fourth he had suffered since 1945, when he was fifteen. Eventually he was diagnosed as a manic-depressive schizophrenic. He was subject to recurring periods of manic, self-destructive behavior followed by nervous breakdowns and long stays in mental hospitals. Isherwood continued to see Ted intermittently during the early weeks of his affair with Don, but a turning point came in February 1953 with Ted’s fourth or fifth breakdown. Isherwood sympathized with Don and intervened to try to prevent Ted from becoming violent and having to be hospitalized; nevertheless, Ted was committed on February 26. He had another breakdown, in March 1955, and was again committed to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital for a number of weeks, until April 7. When well, Ted took odd jobs: as a tour guide and in the mail room at Warner Brothers, as a sales clerk in a department store, and as an office worker in insurance companies and advertising agencies. Isherwood writes about him in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Bacon, Francis (1909–1992). Irish-born English painter. He worked as an interior decorator in London during the late 1920s and lived in Berlin in 1930, around the time that he taught himself to paint. He showed some of his work in London during the 1930s, but came to prominence only after the war, when his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion made him suddenly famous in 1945. His paintings present anguished, distressed figures in vague, nightmare spaces, often with deliberately smudged paintwork and blurred outlines; he urged that art should expose emotions, rather than simply represent, and expressed his intention to leave evidence of his human presence and experience on his work. Isherwood records some of his remarks on art in D.1. He also appears in Lost Years.

  Balanchine, George (1904–1983). Russian-born choreographer, son of a composer. He studied ballet at the Maryinsky and piano at the St. Petersburg music conservatory. In 1924, he emigrated via Berlin and spent a decade working in Europe, mostly for Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe. In 1933, Lincoln Kirstein persuaded him to emigrate again, to New York, and together they founded the American School of Ballet, struggling off and on for another decade to finance and house the company that would eventually become the New York City Ballet. Balanchine made over four hundred ballets and is known for his modernist approach—abstract, technically demanding, and based on a committed understanding of music. He was to twentieth-century ballet what Picasso was to painting and Stravinsky to music, and he collaborated with Stravinsky a number of times. He married five times.

  Barbette (1899–1972). American tightrope walker, born Van der Clyde Broodway, in Texas. As a young member of Ringling Brothers’ Circus, he filled in for a woman tightrope walker who fell ill, and he afterwards began to perform as a woman, though he concluded his act by removing his wig to reveal his gender. He became well-known in Paris, where he was photographed by Man Ray in 1926 and appeared in Cocteau’s first film, Le Sang d’un poète (1930). At the start of World War II, he returned to the U.S. but a fall from the high wire in 1942 ended his performing career. He continued as a circus producer and choreographer; in Hollywood, he choreographed The Big Circus (1959). In old age, he was twisted and painfully stiff as a result of his injuries. He sat for Bachardy twice.

  Barnett, Jimmy. American monk of the Ramakrishna Order, also known as Sat and as Swami Buddhananda. He lived at Trabuco during the 1960s and later at the Hollywood Vedanta Society. Eventually, he left the order and settled in Sedona, Arizona, where he became a Native American chieftan and worked as an artist, counsellor, and medicine man. Isherwood mentions him in Lost Years.

  Barrie, Michael. A one-time singer with financial and administrative talents; friend and secretary to Gerald Heard from the late 1940s onward. He met Heard through Swami Prabhavananda and lived at Trabuco as a monk until about 1955. He was friendly with Isherwood and Bachardy throughout the 1950s, and they rented Barrie’s house, at 322 East Rustic Road, for roughly two months in 1956. Barrie nursed Heard through his five-year-long final illness until Heard’s death in 1971. He appears in D.1.

  Batson, Susan (b. 1944). American actress, teacher, director, producer. She was in the original off-Broadway cast of Hair (1967), appeared in T.V. serials, and was later acting coach to Tom Cruise, Spike Lee, Jennifer Lopez, Nicole Kidman, and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. She won the 1969 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Best Performance Award for her Black Girl in Isherwood’s adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God.

  Baxter, Anne (1923–1985). American actress, a granddaughter of Frank Lloyd Wright; educated in New York private schools. She studied acting with Maria Ouspenskaya, debuted on Broadway at thirteen, and made her first movie by seven teen. Her films include The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Razor’s Edge (1946) for which she received an Academy Award as best supporting actress, Yellow Sky (1949), All about Eve (1950) for which she received an Academy Award nomination, The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1952), The Blue Gardenia (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Cimarron (1960), and Walk on the Wild Side (1962). From 1971, as Isherwood records, she returned to Broadway, replacing Lauren Bacall in Applause. She also acted on T.V., including, from 1983 to 1985, “Hotel.” Her first husband was the actor John Hodiak, with whom she had a daughter; the second, from 1960 to 1968, was Randolph Galt, an outdoorsman and adventurer with whom she had two daughters; the third was David Klee, an investment banker. With Galt, Baxter went to live in the Australian outback on a cattle station; after the marriage failed, she published a book about her experience there, Intermission: A True Story (1976). She was a client and friend of Jo Masselink, and she appears in D.1.

  Beaton, Cecil (1904–1980). English photographer, theater designer, author, and dandy. He photographed the most celebrated and fashionable people of his era, beginn
ing in the 1920s with the Sitwells and going on to the British royal family, actors, actresses, writers, and others. From 1939 to 1945 he worked successfully as a war photographer. Isherwood and Beaton were contemporaries at Cambridge but became friendly only in the late 1940s when Beaton visited Hollywood with a production of Lady Windermere’s Fan and was helpful to Bill Caskey, then trying to establish himself as a photographer. Returning later to Hollywood, Beaton designed costumes and productions for Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964) and both times won the Academy Award for costumes. He collected many of his photographs into books and travel albums, often with commentary, and he published five volumes of diaries. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Beckman, Mathilde von Kaulbach (Quappi) (1904–1986). German Vedanta devotee at the Ramakrishna-Vedanta Center in New York on the Upper East Side. She trained as a violinist and studied voice and acting in Vienna. In 1925, she became the second wife of German painter Max Beckman (1884–1950) and she was a subject of some of his paintings. They fled to Amsterdam in 1937, and after the war they settled in St. Louis and later in New York.

  Bedford, Brian (b. 1935). British stage actor and, later, director; an American citizen from 1959. He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and starred in the West End and on Broadway in Shakespeare and other classic dramas as well as new plays by Stoppard, Shaffer, and others. During 1969, he appeared in revivals of The Cocktail Party and The Misanthrope in Ellis Rabb’s APA-Phoenix Theater repertory program on Broadway. In 1971, he won a Tony Award for his role in The School for Wives. He appears regularly at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, and on T.V. and in films.

  Beesley, Alec (1903–1987) and Dodie Smith Beesley (1896–1990). She was the English playwright, novelist and former actress, Dodie Smith. He managed her career. They spent a decade in Hollywood because he was a pacifist and a conscientious objector during World War II. She wrote scripts there for Paramount and her first novel, I Capture the Castle (1949). Isherwood met them in 1942 through Dodie’s close friend John van Druten, and when Isherwood left the Vedanta Society in August 1945, his first home was the Beesleys’ chauffeur’s apartment. Dodie encouraged his writing, and he discussed The World in the Evening with her extensively. It was Dodie Beesley who challenged John van Druten to make a play from Sally Bowles, leading to I Am a Camera. In the summer of 1943, the Beesleys mated their Dalmatians, Folly and Buzzle, and Folly produced fifteen puppies—inspiring Dodie’s most famous book, The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), later filmed by Walt Disney. Her plays include Autumn Crocus (1931) and Dear Octopus (1938). In California, the Beesleys lived on Tower Road in Beverly Hills from the autumn of 1943, then on the Pacific Coast Highway in Las Tunas from the spring of 1945; in November 1945, they moved further out on the old Malibu Road, beyond the Malibu Colony. They returned to England in the early 1950s and settled again in their cottage, The Barretts, at Finchingfield, Essex. They appear in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Behrman, S.N. (1893–1973). American playwright, producer, screenwriter, short story writer, journalist. His successes on Broadway include The Second Man (1927), End of Summer (1936), No Time for Comedy (1939), the book (with Joshua Logan) for Fanny (1954), and Lord Pengo (1962). He also adapted work by others, including Serena Blandish and Maugham’s short story “Jane.” He worked for the Hollywood studios off and on from 1930, specializing in dialogue, and was known for his contributions to Garbo’s films Queen Cristina, Conquest, and Two-Faced Woman. He also wrote for The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is mentioned in D.1.

  Ben. See Masselink, Ben.

  Bengston, Billy Al (b. 1934). American artist, born in Kansas, educated at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, at Los Angeles City College, and at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis Art Institute). He had his first one-man show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1958, followed, from the 1960s onward, by shows and public and private commissions throughout the United States, Canada, Germany and Japan. His work includes painting, sculpture, textiles, lithography, and architectural design. He has been a guest artist and a professor at the Chouinard Art Institute, UCLA, and elsewhere, and has held numerous fellowships and grants, including a Guggenheim. Based for years in Venice, California, he moved in 2004 to Victoria, British Columbia, with Wendy, his Japanese-American wife of many years, but they returned in 2007. Isherwood met him through Bachardy who was commissioned to do Bengston’s portrait, along with other prominent Los Angelinos, for Harper’s Bazaar in 1967. Bennett, Alan (b. 1934). English actor and playwright, born in Yorkshire, educated at Oxford, where for a time he pursued a graduate degree in medieval history. He has written for stage, film, T.V., radio, and print, revolutionizing the possibilities of comic satire and winning many awards. His works for one medium have frequently been presented later in at least one other; they include Beyond the Fringe (1960, with Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore), Forty Years On (1968), An Englishman Abroad (1982), Talking Heads (1987), A Question of Attribution (1988), The Madness of George III (1991), Writing Home (1994), The History Boys (2004), and The Uncommon Reader (2007).

  Berlin crisis. At the Vienna talks in early June 1961, Khrushchev advised Kennedy that he would soon transfer Soviet authority in Berlin to East Germany, thereby ending agreements made among the four victors at the end of World War II which guaranteed Britain, France, and the U.S. access to Berlin across the East German territory surrounding it. The Western Allies would be forced to renegotiate with the new communist East German state, a state they did not formally recognize, in order to get food, supplies, and military personnel and equipment into Berlin, 110 miles from the western border. Kennedy replied to Khrushchev that the Allies would not give up the right of access won in the war and that the West had a moral duty to the 2,000,000 people in West Berlin.

  On June 8, the USSR protested the meeting of the Upper House of the Bonn Parliament planned for June 16 in West Berlin. The Parliament had been meeting in Berlin for years, and the USSR had been protesting since 1959; nevertheless, the renewed protest was seen as the first move in Khrushchev’s attempt to force the Western Allies out of West Berlin. Isherwood first mentions the crisis two days later, on June 10, and he mentions it again on June 16, the day after Khrushchev recapped the Vienna talks on Soviet T.V. and set the end of 1961 as a deadline for a German peace agreement. On T.V., Khrushchev reiterated his plans for a peace conference, warning that if the West did not attend, other countries would sign a treaty with East Germany without them. He also warned that any fighting over access to West Berlin could bring nuclear holocaust.

  By June 26, when Isherwood mentions the crisis a third time, some British papers were suggesting that the West should recognize communist East Germany in exchange for a guarantee of self-determination for West Berlin, but in England the crisis was heavily shadowed by the disaster of appeasement in September 1938. By mid-July, the West was preparing military resources, including building up troops. Macmillan, de Gaulle, Adenauer, and former U.S. President Eisenhower, as well as President Kennedy, were publicly advocating a tough position against Russian plans.

  Meanwhile, more and more East Germans were fleeing to West Berlin, and they were increasingly students and young professionals needed in the work force. Whereas at the end of the 1950s, over 100,000 refugees a year had been crossing to West Berlin, during the crisis, the numbers doubled and, in bursts, tripled. The East Germans closed the border between East and West Berlin on August 13 and began to build the Berlin Wall. The British and the Americans responded by sending in more troops, and Vice President Johnson visited, promising West Berlin would not be forgotten, but these moves were widely seen as symbolic. By September 23–24, when Isherwood records signs that the West would sell West Germany down the river, the U.S. was advising West Germany to accept the reality of two German states, even while proclaiming U.S. policy was unchanged. Kennedy reassured Khrushchev that the U.S. would not pursue reunification of Germany, and on October 17, Khrushchev rescinded
his December 31 deadline for a peace settlement.