Rebels in Paradise

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Photograph courtesy of Don Bachardy

  Despite the fact that he barely passed his courses in art history, he earned a gold medal from the Royal College of Art in 1962. The following year, British art dealer John Kasmin opened a gallery and gave Hockney a contract for £600 a year to paint. He had his first solo show at the age of twenty-six.

  His experiences in New York led him to execute twenty-four etchings on the theme of lost innocence called A Rake’s Progress, after William Hogarth’s work. In 1963, the Royal College of Art published the series as a book, and the etchings were purchased for £5,000 by Paul Cornwall-Jones to be published as an edition of fifty, each set to be sold for £250. “I didn’t dare tell people the price because it was so outrageous, I was ashamed of it.”8 The income allowed him to move to Los Angeles in 1963.

  Los Angeles lived up to his expectations. “I think my notions were quite accurate in the sense that L.A. is a city where you can go and find whatever in a sense you want.” Months before he arrived in the city, Hockney painted Domestic Scene, Los Angeles, showing a man wearing an apron and scrubbing the back of another man in the shower. It was based on photographs in the Los Angeles body-building magazine Physique Pictorial.

  John Rechy’s startling, homoerotic novel City of Night inspired Hockney to paint Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles based on Rechy’s description of the downtown area: “Remember Pershing Square and the apathetic palm trees.” He had never driven a car and, in all innocence, bought a bicycle to ride downtown from his quarters in Santa Monica, a short straight distance on the map that turned out to be sixteen miles. The next day, a friend volunteered driving lessons and in just one week, he had got his license and bought a Ford Falcon for $1,000. He managed to get on the Santa Monica Freeway but, not knowing how to get off, wound up driving all the way to Las Vegas, where he won some money at a casino and then drove home the same night. The next day, he drove to Venice, where he rented an apartment with a view of the ocean. This was the easy, affordable America that had captured his imagination back in London. “I thought, it’s just how I imagined it would be.”9

  In the winter of 1964, Kasmin came to Los Angeles to see Hockney and took him around to visit a few art collectors. “I’d never seen houses like that,” Hockney recalled. “And the way they liked to show them off! They were mostly women—the husbands were out earning the money. They would show you the pictures, the garden, the house.”10 His feelings were made clear in California Art Collector, his painting of a woman in her garden where a sculpture by the English artist William Turnbull competed for attention with the swimming pool.

  In a seedy area downtown, he tracked down the Physique Pictorial offices and met the owner, who paid young toughs just out of jail to be photographed in the buff. “I was quite thrilled by the place,” Hockney recalled. “I bought a lot of still photographs from him.”11 These inspired yet more paintings of men taking showers. Hockney was obsessed by American showers. “They all seemed to me to have elements of luxury: pink fluffy carpets to step out on, close to the bedrooms (very un-English that!).12

  “A lot of sex is fantasy,” Hockney said. “The only time I was promiscuous was when I first went to live in Los Angeles. I’ve never been promiscuous since. But I used to go to the bars in Los Angeles and pick up somebody. Half the time they didn’t turn you on, or you didn’t turn them on, or something like that. And the way people in Los Angeles went on about numbers! If you actually have some good sex with somebody, you can always go back for a bit more, that’s the truth. I know a lot of people in Los Angeles who simply live for sex in that they want somebody new all the time, which means that it’s a full-time job actually finding them; you can’t do any other work, even in Los Angeles where it’s easy.… It doesn’t dominate my life, sex, at all.… At times I’m very indifferent to it.”13

  After showers and cars, Hockney embraced yet another innovation. He switched from slow-drying oil paint to a quick-drying acrylic invented in the 1950s. The water-based Liquitex changed the appearance of Hockney’s painting by facilitating smooth surfaces and intensifying colors. He also bought a new Polaroid instant camera, which, he said, “coincided with an interest in making pictures that were depicting a place and people in … California.”14 These instant snapshots, with a shallow depth of field and artificial color, contributed to the flattened perspective of his pictures of boxy buildings with carpets of green lawn or turquoise pools.

  Once he had settled in, Hockney decided to visit the galleries and meet other artists during the Monday night art walk. Daunted by the “Fagots Stay Out” [sic] sign at Barney’s, Hockney felt the macho atmosphere of the Ferus group was not welcoming. He met art dealer Nicholas Wilder, who had just moved to the city from San Francisco. His closest friends became English author Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy, who invited him regularly to their home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica Canyon. After spending the summer teaching at the University of Iowa, Hockney drove through the southwest with designer Ossie Clark, visiting from London. They got back to Los Angeles just in time to see the Beatles perform at the Hollywood Bowl. In late 1964, Hockney attended the opening of his exhibition at the Alan Gallery in New York, where his paintings sold out at $1,000 apiece. After this exciting year, he found himself back in cold, gray London painting pictures of swimming pools as though revisiting Los Angeles.

  Six months later, after teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1965 he moved back to Los Angeles and shared a small house with his art school friend Patrick Proctor. During his short time back, Hockney concentrated on a series of lithographs, A Hollywood Collection, for the just-launched publisher Gemini GEL. His renderings of palm trees and other city icons were surrounded by his elaborately depicted frames.

  Hockney’s restless creativity led him to Beirut to do drawings for a set of etchings relating to the poems of C. P. Cavafy and then to London to design sets for the Alfred Jarry play Ubu Roi at the Royal Court Theatre. In the summer of 1966, Hockney moved back to Los Angeles and stayed for four months in the Larrabee Street apartment of Nicholas Wilder, who had opened his eponymous gallery on North La Cienega Boulevard. Hockney recalled, “I liked Nick because he, like me, was a slob, untidy some people said, but I would tell them our excuse was a higher sense of order, and I mean that.”15

  Meaning that Wilder was devoted to his artists and showed both Hockney and Bachardy. “Everything was a lot more bohemian than it is now. I admired Nick’s intelligent eye. I don’t think he ever made much money, and possibly never expected to,” Hockney added. “He was a very sensitive person, and the time I am talking about, his gallery was the centre of L.A. to me.”16

  Teaching at UCLA, Hockney anticipated a class full of lithe surfer boys, but there was only one: a full-lipped, shaggy-haired teenager named Peter Schlesinger. Together, they moved into a run-down house on Pico Boulevard near Crenshaw. Instead of installing a telephone, they made do with the corner pay phone. Hockney painted during the day, while Schlesinger attended school. It was the first time that Hockney had lived with a lover. Their neighbor was the geometric abstract painter Ron Davis, who also showed at Nicholas Wilder’s gallery. Hockney and Davis played chess together. Hockney relished the memory: “I think the very first game of chess we played he won, and he said, ‘That’s what comes of playing with geometric artists.’ The second game I won, and I said, ‘That’s what comes of playing with figurative artists who know what to do with a queen.’”17

  Schlesinger was only nineteen so they couldn’t go to the bars. It was a quiet and productive time during which Hockney produced some of his greatest paintings. “It was certainly the happiest year I spent in California, and it was the worst place we lived in,” he reflected later.18

  Hockney painted a number of large canvases that barely fit into the room he used as a studio. The first was a portrait of the elegant blond art collector Betty Freeman, who had seen his first show at the Kasmin Gallery in London and bought the one remaini
ng drawing for $150. When Hockney moved to Los Angeles, actor and writer Jack Larson took Freeman to meet him at the run-down house. “David asked if he could paint my pool,” she remembered. “He came over and took little Polaroids. Then Felix Landau called and asked if I wanted to see the finished painting.”19 The first two times that he offered it to her, she refused. It was about to be shipped to a New York dealer when Freeman finally bought it. In the painting, she wears a floor-length pink caftan (that she kept for the rest of her life) and stands near her zebra-striped chaise and a mounted antelope head on the wall, a trophy of her engineer husband Stanley Freeman, who was a big-game hunter. After seeing it, she informed Hockney, “There is only one thing you can call this painting: Beverly Hills Housewife. So he did.”20

  The twelve-foot-long double canvas hung in her dining area facing the glass doors opening to the patio. It joined an art collection that included sculptures by Oldenburg and Flavin, and paintings by Francis, Lichtenstein, and Warhol. The Freemans underwrote musical performances at the Pasadena Art Museum and at the L.A. County Museum of Art (LACMA), and their traditional brick house on Hillcrest Drive in Beverly Hills was later the scene of concerts by advanced contemporary composers Philip Glass, John Adams, and Harry Partch.

  These encounters with collectors, so unlike anything that he had experienced in England, felt liberating to Hockney. “In Los Angeles, I actually started to paint the city round me, as I’d never … done in London. To me, moving into more naturalism was a freedom.… A lot of painters can’t do that—their concept is completely different. It’s too narrow; a lot of them, like Frank Stella, who told me so, can’t draw at all.”21 This pursuit of “naturalism” led Hockney to concentrate intently on the effects of light and shadow that embellish even the humblest views around Los Angeles.

  After six months in Europe, Hockney and Schlesinger moved back to Santa Monica in 1968 and rented a small penthouse facing the ocean. Hockney rented a room in a wooden bungalow across the street where he embarked on his large double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy. He took many Polaroids of them seated in their living room before a coffee table arranged with two stacks of large books, a bowl of fruit, and a rather suggestive dried corn cob. Bachardy went to London for two months before the portrait was finished while Isherwood visited Hockney’s studio frequently to pose in person, so the rendering of the author is more detailed. Isherwood was distraught and spent a great deal of time worrying that he had become too possessive of his young lover. In the painting, he is turned toward Bachardy while Bachardy faces straight ahead. Isherwood’s concern and affection for Bachardy is palpable. Hockney was facing similar difficulties with Schlesinger, who was restless and ready to move on.

  Hearing of Hockney’s portraits, collector Marcia Weisman asked him to paint her husband, Frederick. Since attending Walter Hopps and Henry Hopkins’s art-collecting classes in their living room just a few years before, the Weismans had become discerning and voracious collectors of Kline, Rothko, Johns, and many of the Los Angeles artists. Hockney didn’t accept commissioned portraits but offered to paint them together. American Collectors portrayed them standing in the garden at the rear of their modern glass and white stucco home. Frederick is formally attired in a gray suit and tie and facing Marcia, who is wearing a pink caftan. On an aggregate concrete patio, they are separated by modern sculptures by Turnbull and Henry Moore. The totem pole standing to one side is incongruous, as Hockney knew, and he used it to capture Marcia’s outspoken nature and its effect on her husband, who often was so tense from her constant criticism that he clenched his fists. “There’s a totem pole in the picture that looks rather like Marcia. It really had a similar look: the face, the mouth and things. I couldn’t resist putting that in,” he said. “So it’s a slightly different kind of portrait in that the objects around the figures are part of them. I left the drip on Fred Weisman’s hand because it seemed to make his stance more intense, as though he were squeezing so hard that his paint was coming off.”22

  Two years later, Weisman was dining with a business associate in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Frank Sinatra was hosting a dinner party for Dean Martin at a nearby table. Weisman complained that Sinatra’s party was making too much noise and making anti-Semitic remarks. Sinatra said, “Listen, buddy, you’re out of line.” Sinatra started arguing with Weisman. Accounts differ about what happened next. Marcia, who was not there, said that her husband was hit with a blackjack by Sinatra’s bodyguard. An eyewitness claimed that Sinatra threw one of the telephones kept in the Polo lounge booths at Weisman’s head. Weisman was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital with a fractured skull and remained in a coma for months.23 The LAPD wanted to make an arrest but Marcia received anonymous threatening phone calls warning her not to press charges. As they had three children, she decided not to pursue the case officially, but she spoke freely of the incident in order to spread the word of Sinatra’s behavior.

  While in a coma, Frederick had no recollection of family or friends until Marcia brought a small Pollock drawing into his room. The swirling patterns triggered his memory, and soon he was lecturing his doctors on the meaning and pleasure of contemporary art. This extraordinary occurrence prompted Frederick, who was a hospital board member, to suggest hanging contemporary art throughout the new hospital building then being built on Beverly Boulevard. Other board members said, “Well, that’s fine. But we haven’t the money for it. How do we do it?” Frederick replied, “I know how you’ll do it. I’ll give you Marcia.”24 Frederick provided the seed money and Marcia got busy selecting works from their collection and soliciting gifts and funds from friends. When the hospital opened, the stark white corridors were brightened by framed examples of original contemporary art, including prints by Hockney.

  Initially, Hockney spent only five years in Los Angeles, returning periodically to England, yet it was the place where his unique sensibilities coalesced. Apart from Ruscha, no other artist was so completely identified with the city. The quintessential elements of Los Angeles—swimming pools, lawns with sprinklers, squat stucco buildings, and skinny palm trees—became the imagery associated most popularly with his work. The freedom of opportunity there allowed Hockney to pursue his convictions as a painter without worrying about history or critics. As English art critic Richard Dorment later put it, “The day he stepped off the plane in Los Angeles, everything changed. In a moment I would seriously compare to Vincent Van Gogh’s arrival at Arles, it is as though the heat, light and colour of California entered Hockney’s bloodstream. Overnight, a talented British artist became a major international star.”25 Captivated by the particular beauty of Los Angeles, Hockney bought a house off of Mulholland Drive and made it his primary residence in 1978.

  He said, “In London, I think I was put off by the ghost of [Walter] Sickert, and I couldn’t see it properly. In Los Angeles, there were no ghosts; there were no paintings of Los Angeles. People then didn’t even know what it looked like. And when I was there, they were still finishing some of the big freeways. I remember seeing, within the first week, a ramp of freeway going into the air, and I suddenly thought: ‘My God, this place needs its Piranesi; Los Angeles could have a Piranesi, so here I am!’”26

  Hockney may have been tantalized by what he saw as a permissive lifestyle, but homosexuality was far from accepted in Southern California. The Friendship, the ship-shaped bar with porthole windows in Santa Monica Canyon, was packed nightly but many of Dorothy’s friends were content to remain closeted. The Mattachine Society, created in Los Angeles in 1950 in the home of Communist activist Harry Hay, focused on assimilation and respectability for homosexuals. (Soon after, several women in San Francisco formed the Daughters of Bilitis, or DOB, for lesbians with similar goals.) Rudi Gernreich was a founding Mattachine member but never admitted his homosexuality publicly. His life partner of thirty-one years, Oreste Pucciani, recalled that not only was it still illegal, but Gernreich had joked, “It’s bad for business.”27 (The Gernreich and Pucciani estate
s provided a trust for litigation and education in the area of gay and lesbian rights.) A small uprising of gays against police harassment took place in Los Angeles in 1959; an automobile parade was organized to fight exclusion of homosexuals from the military in 1966, but it was not until the Stonewall riot of 1969 in Greenwich Village that the gay rights movement gained real momentum.

  Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood in front of the double portrait of them painted by David Hockney

  Photograph courtesy of Don Bachardy

  Isherwood’s sexual inclinations could be gleaned from his books, especially Goodbye to Berlin, about his experiences during the Weimar Republic. It was later transformed into the musical and film Cabaret. Having rejected the upper-class upbringing of his parents by dropping out of Cambridge University, he moved to Los Angeles in 1939 with W. H. Auden, where he achieved his greatest success as a novelist and screenwriter. With friends Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Bertrand Russell, all prominent authors, he fell under the sway of Swami Prabhavananda. All wrote numerous articles about Vedanta but Isherwood wrote books on the subject, worked as the managing editor of the official publication of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, and later served on its editorial board with Huxley and Heard.

  Isherwood was forty-eight when he met the sixteen-year-old Don Bachardy on Valentine’s Day, 1953. He had been infatuated with Bachardy’s older brother, Ted, but after Ted suffered a nervous breakdown, Isherwood was placed in the position of consoling Don. Their relationship continued until Isherwood’s death in 1986.

  Isherwood took his young partner as his date to all of the Hollywood parties, a brazen gesture for the times. Bachardy recalled the wonder of being warmly welcomed as “the only queer couple” in the home of producer David O. Selznick and his actress wife Jennifer Jones, while confronting veiled hostility from actors Joseph Cotten and Henry Fonda.