Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  We saw Frederick Brisson yesterday, because he’s considering becoming our producer for the play. Don thinks he’s maybe queer. We both think he may turn out to be dictatorial and clash with Marre. For the first time, we heard from him of a possible alternative to New York or London for our opening—to go on a tour in this country, of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, etc. and not come into New York until the fall of 1979.

  Have just finished John Lehmann’s Thrown to the Woolfs. All you can say in its favor is that it’s a necessary document for the record. But does John really have to write so boringly? I don’t say this merely as a put-down. He makes me ask myself, am I perhaps being more boring than I realize, in my Swami book? The writer of any kind of autobiographical book is in deadly danger whenever he is trying to get from point A to point B in a hurry—when, that’s to say, he isn’t interested in what he’s immediately writing. Somehow or other, one must make such bridge passages interesting. There are many of them in my narrative, and that is really what’s worrying me.

  September 25. This heat is really something! We neither of us felt up to running down to the beach today; there’s quite a bit of smog in the air, even down here. The temperature at the edge of the ocean is said to have been 87 yesterday.

  Last night, in deep heat, we saw poor old Vincent Price do his Oscar Wilde show down on the USC campus. We both felt he was wrong for it, despite his technical know-how. He certainly did not make you feel that Wilde was a very good man, really compassionate, although he had the lines to speak of this, and he didn’t show Wilde’s strength. Sometimes, his vanity was wrong too, it seemed the vanity of a man unsure of himself and therefore aggressive, more like Paul Sorel’s.

  September 26. Don has gone out to see Marie Antoinette, but I can’t face Norma Shearer, and this foul heat which continues. Have just been to dear old Dr. Maxwell Wolff, who pulled a little growth out of my nose, not serious but something, and Don was worried about it. It was surprisingly hard and long. Now, in an odd, somehow rather reckless mood, I am drinking a bottle of Superior (Mexican [beer]) before watching a segment of Jim’s T.V. “Paper Chase.”

  Last night, a truly dreadful party at Leslie Wallwork’s—I can never imagine where he finds his guests, all middle-aged closet queens; maybe they’re business associates. Really I do loathe nearly all parties. I don’t think Don realizes quite how much I loathe them. It’s because I am always being fed to someone or other and I am charming to him, her, them, and I bore myself being charming. The only exceptions are beautiful young men, and even with them I feel subtly humiliated by the energy of my performance. I am perfectly happy by myself, much as I love my darling and his furry nearness, and I nearly never want to go out on these social evenings. If only I could spend the last bit of my life alone with Don or alone.

  September 27. Perhaps a shade cooler. But we have to go to Pasadena tonight. Keith Baxter has arrived, we see him and his hostess, Brenda Vacaro(?)61 tomorrow. And now Keith Addis has come up with another of his improbable jobs—to make a T.V. spectacular out of a sci-fi bestseller called Dune, Doone(?).62 And I am still being plagued by the editor of the revised Gay Liberation Book to somehow fix up the miserable mess of an interview produced by that lazy sloppy boy, Len Richmond.63 I think I shall refuse to let him print it—even if I did improve it, it would still be dull and weak in comparison with the quite good one I did for the Gay Sunshine collection.

  September 28. A really bad hangover after that long hot evening in Pasadena. First a party at Harry Montgomery’s,64 the kind in two acts—act 1 squares with an academic flavor, act 2 screaming fags in the pool; the difficulty is getting the curtain down and up again between acts. We only took in part of act 1. At a very very dull party like that, a newly arrived friend seems far larger than life, so exciting, so delightful, so utterly welcome. Then on to Cal. Tech., to see Laddie Dill’s pictures, including the one they borrowed from us. I do like most of them very much and am rather proud of being able to like them so sincerely, as I have my blind spots in this kind of art. Then to have supper with Don Sorenson,65 with Nick Wilder [and] Jack Woody and his lover Tom Long. Nick has done his first (and hopefully last) stint in jail, two days. We deserved all of that for getting so drunk and driving home. Don, like Jim Charlton, is almost totally trustworthy drunk, partly because his head is very strong; but he felt bad about it afterwards. Incidentally, this morning, Kitty was very very sweet to old Drub. So sweet that Drub is wondering—?

  September 29. Another hangover—this is getting to be dreary. And there was no need for it, we only had two people to dinner, Keith Baxter and Brenda Vaccaro. And Keith I think I really like. Anyhow, as Don says, he is perfect for the part of Patrick. He has hot dark sexy eyes and looks immensely strong. He is very polite—remembering, for instance, to address both of us when talking about the script. This morning he came again and Don drew him and he was full of praise. His suggestions for script changes were woolly, however; both of us thought so. A very pretty, tall boy named Mark came to pick him up.

  Don liked Vaccaro too. I wasn’t so sure. A funny misunderstanding when she came in, and exclaimed, “What a warm house!” I thought she meant it was stuffy and said something defensive about the weather being so hot. She had meant that it had a warm feeling—i.e. hospitable, cozy, etc.

  September 30. Sore tongue, tiredness from the heat, although it seems to be letting up. Last night, we had supper with Paul Sorel, who was to leave for England today. Again he brought up all this stuff about believing in his luck; somehow or other, he would get some more money. I suggested that he should call Mirandi Levy, whom he knows well and who is very practical and worldly-wise, and tell her the exact facts of his financial situation [and] ask her what she advises him to do. Don thought this a good idea too. Paul did call her, but she was out—he told me this on the phone last night. Now, presumably, he has left.

  Some worry that Ted may be going mad again. He seemed very odd to me on the phone a couple of days ago, when he talked of the Pope’s death and said, “Now we’ll have to play pick-a-pope again!”66 with a wild uncharacteristic laugh. Don has noticed something too. But we saw him on the beach today and he seemed fairly normal.

  Awful grinding at my book. I get into moods when I simply don’t feel the slightest interest in what I am writing; it all seems mere word splicing.

  October 1. It has been foggy all day down here by the beach, but there is still a feeling of heat behind it. A long talk with Kurt Yount. I always feel how much I wish he lived around here, then I know I would be over at his place a lot, reading aloud to him, for one thing. It is tragic, the authors he hasn’t been able to read because, really, so little is published in braille or recorded. In his cheerful unsentimental way, he tells how he gets “bored” and therefore drinks himself drunk all by himself.

  Don is again worried about Ted—especially as he is about to take a vacation, which is always a dangerous period. If Ted flips, how shall we manage about Glade? She keeps referring to “the person who lives with me.” I said to Don, wouldn’t it be funny if he looked in one day without warning and found Glade sitting up with a real old-fashioned guardian angel wearing huge white wings?

  October 2. Bad news. Oliver Andrews got a heart attack while diving and died of it or drowned, we haven’t heard which. Worse news—let’s hope it’s not true—Ingrid Bergman said to be dying of cancer. That really shocked us both.

  It’s cooler today, but I feel very tired and am slipping behind with my work.

  Alan Bates is really one of the best actors alive; his Mayor of Casterbridge is magnificent.67 He could play Lear in a new way, I feel.

  Woke up in the middle of last night. Foggy, dead silent, rather too warm. As so often, lately, I thought there was going to be an earthquake—felt everything waiting for it.

  October 3. A girl named Nancy Monk68 came here with a girlfriend this morning. She is blonde and boyishly good-looking; probably they are lovers. The sculpture, about the size of a small book, is called
Send Me Some Sand for My Shoes. Part of it is grey blue, most of it is white. I didn’t know what to say about it and so covered my embarrassment with facile chatter about the slide situation of the cliffs. Nancy had written me a very nice letter of admiration for my work. Was it worth seeing me? No—under the circumstances—but they will never admit that, or not until I am dead and they are old.

  A fun rumor from Rome—that the late Pope may have been murdered. There was apparently no autopsy; it was just announced that he died of a heart attack.

  October 4. At present I’m living an exceptionally compulsionistic life. It is certainly better than my usual laziness, but it is compulsionistic, like square hopping. I have to do my various specimen tasks each day—my midday beads, my isometric stretchings, my bit of the Swami book, and this diary. Perhaps it is the only way I can function now. Well, at least I’m functioning. It’s around eight in the evening, Darling has gone out mousing and I’m alone for the night, quite snug, sipping a glass of Superior Light Mexican beer. Later I shall watch Network, which we both hated when we saw it as a feature film, and probably enjoy it, because all values on T.V. are scaled down, especially when you’re eating a T.V. supper—Mexican, tonight.

  A 5.6 earthquake in Owens Valley. And mysterious earthslides in Laguna Beach. We’re getting a bit worried about Jack Fontan and Ray Unger, having called them both at home and at their gym and gotten no answer.

  Last night I dreamt that Don had painted a portrait of somebody sitting in a garden. I was rather excited, feeling that the introduction of the garden was some sort of a breakthrough for him. Actually, he is painting very well indeed just now, without showing the need of any such adjuncts.

  October 5. Hated Network as much as ever, it’s such desperately strained satire. Earlier in the evening, Ray Unger called and said he and Jack are all right; the slides took place in another canyon altogether.

  Today, we await a visit from Armistead Maupin (pronounced More-pin), the author of Tales of the City, and his friend Ken Maley. Am curious, at least to see what they’ll be like.

  Kitty and his mouse smoked till the mouse fell asleep, so there was no gobbling; and then, this morning, the mouse’s mousefriend appeared without warning and so Kitty had to pitpat away pronto. The mouse has proposed a return gobble this evening.

  This morning I did something odd, read nearly all of Byron’s “The Corsair,” for the story. Which is how it was originally read, I suppose, and why it was so popular. I’d never read it before.

  October 6. The evil breath of the Briggs Proposition 6 begins to be smelt terribly strong. The polls say it will win. And it’s certain to be followed by worse. Nevertheless, feeling miserable about this and feeling rage against Briggs and the other swine is a deadly temptation. A. One has to do something about it. B. One has to get on with one’s own work. Otherwise, this despair and indignation evaporates in mere tamas.

  Armistead Maupin was unexpectedly attractive and youthful. Not all that much so, but I realize I was expecting something terribly closet-elegant. His friend and promoter was also young and pleasant. They might become friends, don’t know yet. They’ve gone back to San Francisco today.

  The return gobble of the mouse took place and was a success.

  October 7. A somewhat reassuring talk to Bill Scobie today—I mean, reassuring about Briggs. He is still ahead but only a point or two—although there are many undecided, and, as Don says, undecided are usually conservatives.

  This afternoon, out of the blue air, David Hockney called. He is right here in town despite Tony Richardson’s news that he would remain in New York for a long while. And he’s in the house he has rented, although he was said to have given it up. David is the Rommel of the art world, with his bold surprise moves and sudden appearances on one’s flank. . . . Just the same, we’re both happy that he’s here.

  October 8. Yesterday evening wasn’t a success. David was tired and not his usual cheerful self. Also he’d brought with him dreary Maurice Payne. And we had to have dreary Bill Franklin. Mark Lipscomb, admittedly undreary but uninvited, came too. Sometime during the evening, Mark whispered a pass at me, rain-checkwise, he wanted us to do it sometime—“Before you die” was unspoken. He hinted at this once before. I was pretty drunk and now can’t remember what I answered.

  October 9. Oh, the sadness of going out with Glade yesterday! Don and I gave her her dinner, we just drank wine and watched her. All she could talk of was the weather, she was afraid it would be bad next day. And her poor ankle, turning over like rubber and nearly making her fall down the steps. It seems touching that she always knows who I am when I come to see her, she even knows my name.

  A glorious beach day, with refreshing waves. But we both have mysteriously upset stomachs. And a party looms grim on the evening horizon. David Hockney, the Tynans, Cukor, Dagny Corcoran, Tony Richardson and a woman he asked to bring, Tamara Asseye[v],69 Leslie Wallwork, and The Downer.70

  October 10. I will perhaps write about the deeper significance of the party some other time, when I see it at more of a distance. Superficially it was a “success.” Ken Tynan carried on about Louise Brooks, thereby oddly annoying George Cukor, who seems to disapprove of her chiefly because she left the movies before they ceased to want her, finding the life of sound pictures boring because you had to learn your lines in advance of time and there fore couldn’t stay up all night at parties, as you could during the silent picture days. Ken says he had a four-hour sex talk with Louise, during which she told him that women can ejaculate just as men do; she herself had been masturbating recently and had shot a spurt of liquid right across the room. He also told me that she is anti-queer and that this is characteristic of women whose lives are centered on sex—they have no use for men who don’t desire them.

  October 11. I think the sun has now definitely set beyond the headland, into the sea, but can’t be certain because of low-lying clouds. I creep on with the Swami book. My old head is so thick and stupid it’s brutal. I fight my way on, sentence by sentence, and always a cold scornful remnant of reason waits for the next morning, when it looks through the latest page and says, idiot, can’t you see that that sentence ought to be the other way around, and that that adjective is utterly wrong? Are you really so senile? And it’s right—I do see it.

  Chat with Cukor, who, like ourselves, is invited to have dinner with the Tynans to meet Princess Margaret on Friday. We’ve been told to call her “Ma’am,” and George is working himself up into a nervous cramp, like a young actor with only one line to say; he feels sure he’ll get it wrong and call her Mum or Mom or something.

  An attorney put his hand into his mailbox—I think it was in the Pacific Palisades—and was bitten by a diamondback rattlesnake. It is thought that the rattler was planted there, as a revenge. I shouldn’t like to have the job of putting a rattler into a mailbox. Oddly enough, I was objecting to an almost similar situation in [Agatha Christie’s] Death on the Nile, where a large cobra is planted in Poirot’s cabin. I pictured the practical difficulties of doing this. Also, this morning, before hearing about the mailbox rattler, I had been thinking of The Speckled Band, which ends with Sherlock Holmes putting the swamp adder into the safe and locking the door—and imagining how Dodie Smith would have exclaimed, “What a horrible story!” meaning simply that the snake gets shut in without enough air—and grinning to myself.

  October 12. Gavin Lambert called unexpectedly to say he is back in town. We had supper with him yesterday evening. He says that Tangier is becoming more scandalous than ever. The American Consul, who is, admittedly, just about to retire anyhow, has started an affair with a thirteen-year-old boy, while his wife has gone off to live with a seventy-five-year-old lesbian artist (whom we met while we were there). Gavin also described how the customs examiner—who is required to search outgoing travellers—actually groped him and kissed him.

  A nightmare, last night, that the manuscript of my Swami book had been destroyed—by fire, I think.

  October 13.
The German translation of Christopher and His Kind just reached me. Now I have to compose a long letter in German to Heinz, to go with the manuscript, and, although I don’t really expect any trouble—at least, not from him personally—and although I don’t really care even if he says it mustn’t be published in Germany at all—I feel a bit tense about the whole thing, as I always do before a showdown of any kind.

  No time for more now. The Tynan dinner impends and I still haven’t done my stint on the Swami book. How characteristic of me—thinking of Princess Margaret, I remember Browning: “next moment, I dance at the King’s!”71

  October 15. Missed a day because I fell and sprained my right wrist and one of my fingers. It is better today but still much swollen. I also missed out on my isometric exercises. But not my midday beads.

  Meeting Princess Margaret was hardly a dance. We only got her in very short hops, and although Ken Tynan honored me by putting me at her table, I hardly got to tell her more than that I had been at a school which produced three archbishops of Canterbury in a row—that was all the royalty talk I knew; and Neil Simon’s wit,72 as he sat opposite me, was altogether silenced. She seemed quite a common little thing, fairly good-humored but no doubt capable of rapping your knuckles.

  Yesterday, James White came from Texas on a pilgrimage to ask The Old One if it was okay to write detective stories on the side if you want to be a “serious” novelist. The Old One told him to use another name. He is rather a sweet little randy rabbit, cruising the hedges and ditches for male mating-partners, but thrilled that he and his wife are about to have a baby after many years of marriage. He talks a poor mouth but one smells lots of money. We went to a Gays Against Proposition 6 auction at the Carriage Trade Restaurant. Prospects are better, the polls show a swing toward us, but the situation is still very dangerous. One great coup, the Catholic archbishop is on our side.73