The Sixties

by Christopher Isherwood

  Aufderheide, Charles. American technician, from the Midwest. He moved to Los Angeles with Ruby Bell and the From twins in the 1940s and worked on cameras at the Technicolor laboratories for about thirty years. He was an amateur poet, read widely, liked to entertain, and was a crucial unifying personality in the Benton Way group. In the early 1970s, he moved to San Francisco. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Austen, Howard (Tinker) (1928–2003). Companion to Gore Vidal from 1950. He worked in advertising in New York and studied singing, then devoted most of his time to Vidal, managing his business and social life. He appears in D.1.

  Ayer, A.J. (Alfred, Freddie) (1910–1989). British philosopher, educated at Eton and Oxford. He married four times and had many affairs. His second (and fourth) wife was American journalist Dee Wells, née Chapman (b. 1925), author of the best-selling novel Jane (1973). They married in 1960 and again in 1989. Ayer’s third wife was Vanessa Lawson, formerly wife of Nigel Lawson; she and Ayer married in 1982 but were involved with each other from 1968; she died of cancer in 1985. Another long affair, in the early 1950s, was with Jocelyn Rickards, who remained a friend. Ayer was also a close friend of Tony Bower, whom he met in New York during World War II, and with whose half-sister, Jean Gordon-Duff, he was briefly involved around the same time.

  Bachardy, Don (b. 1934). American painter; Isherwood’s companion from 1953. Bachardy accompanied his elder brother Ted to the beach in Santa Monica from the late 1940s, and Isherwood occasionally saw him there. Ted first introduced them in November 1952. They met again in early February 1953 and, on February 14, began an affair which quickly became serious. Don was then an eighteen-year-old college student living at home with his brother and his mother. He had studied languages for one semester at UCLA, then transferred at the start of 1953 to Los Angeles City College in Hollywood, near his mother’s apartment. He studied French and Spanish but dropped French for German as a result of Isherwood’s influence. He had worked as a grocery boy at a local market, and, like Isherwood in youth, spent most of his free time at the movies. In February 1955, Bachardy went back to UCLA to begin his junior year and almost immediately changed his major to theater arts. In July 1956, he enrolled at the Chouinard Art School, supplementing his instruction by taking classes with Vernon Old, and within a few years got work as a professional artist, drawing fashion illustrations for a local department store and then for newspapers and magazines. During this period he also began to do portraits of Isherwood, close friends, and favorite film stars, and to sell his work. He drew a set of Hollywood personalities to accompany an article in the Paris Review in 1960, but his first major portrait commission, from Tony Richardson, was to draw the cast of the 1960 stage production of A Taste of Honey. During 1959 and 1960, Bachardy worked a few days a week in a West Hollywood studio loaned to him by Paul Millard. In 1961 he attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London, supported partly by his patron Russell McKinnon and partly by Women’s Wear Daily which, since he had no work permit, paid him generously in cash to be their London fashion illustrator. His work at the Slade led to his first solo shows, in London in 1961 and in New York in 1962. Since then, he has done countless portraits, both of the famous and the little known, and exhibited in many cities. His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. and the National Portrait Gallery in London, and he has published his drawings in several books, including October (1981) with Isherwood, Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood (1990), and Stars in My Eyes (2000). Together, Isherwood and Bachardy wrote several stage and film scripts, including their award-winning screenplay for the T.V. film “Frankenstein: The True Story” (1973). He figures centrally in D.1.

  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 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 th
e 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 seventeen. 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, beginning 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, Brit
ish 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).