Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Old Drub got messily drunk, spilling wine over his pants and having to be helped to leave the premises by Darling, with everybody watching. “I played the scene very well,” Darling told me, “but I know they were all thinking, ‘How awful it must be for Don.’” So Drub swore to reform.

  Old Jo reports that two black boys tried to mug a young man and a girl right on Channel Road, a few days ago, but the young man shouted and they ran away. The same pair tried to hold up The Golden Bull, but one of the employees went for them with a knife, and again they ran away.

  November 4. Thick coastal fog tonight, suitable for election day—although it seems clear already that Reagan will win. Last night at supper Gavin Lambert declared that this would be better than Carter—partly because it will force us gays to make a stand and show the forces of reaction that we won’t be bullied—partly because Reagan is a realist, he will always modify his political attitudes and retreat from them altogether if he sees it’s necessary. I wish I could accept Gavin’s optimistic view that the gays are now firmly established and can’t be pushed around. A pessimistic voice whispers in my ear, “It’s all very easy for him to talk like that—he doesn’t live in this country.”

  Also at dinner were Joan Didion and John Dunne, about to leave on an Asian tour paid for by lecturing. I really quite like them both, though Joan’s look of misery gets me down. Don Carr was again a social success; he had brought one of Joan’s books for her to sign, and he was charming to Marsh Ahunt27 and Marilyn Goldin. And Darling was so beautiful, and in such control of the situation. Don’s eyes kept fastening on him admiringly, as well they might.

  As for Drub, he was in the dry doldrums. Resolved not to drink, he nevertheless had a bellyache and was so bored he could have neighed with anguish. He simply isn’t meant for parties, only intimate encounters. And, perhaps because of his general condition, the meat and vegetables seemed quite tasteless. It was scary—a sort of blindness of the palate.

  Today is the first day in about a week that I haven’t dictated a rough draft of scenes for our “Paul” screenplay to the tape recorder. I mustn’t falter.

  When you are getting senile like Dobbin, any assertion of the will seems valuable and cheering. For example, I felt sure that I would never be able to follow the instructions for using a waterpik, but now I use it, though I still spray water all over the bathroom.

  Then, yesterday, I realized that I’d lost the most recent bank statement, together with my cancelled checks. At the bank they agreed to send me a copy of the statement but added that the checks, couldn’t, of course, be duplicated. I had a nagging feeling that I might have thrown out the statement in its envelope unopened. Today is trash-collection day, so I had to hunt all through the garbage yesterday afternoon—and I found the statement. This was a real triumph of the will. It raised my morale absurdly high.

  November 10. Morale low again—Reagan’s victory, sad sea-fog, something the matter with my right (better-seeing) eye, and the horrible murder of poor pretty foolish Mark Bernolak, who seems to have gotten himself in wrong with the dope-dealing underworld and was tortured before being killed; neighbors heard his screams. ( Jim Bridges told me about this a couple of days ago.)28 And yesterday was a downer—two huge parties, one given by the Michael Yorks, the other by Barney Wan for Michael Childers, up at the Schlesingers’ house. During the first party, Don discovered that Pat had put his two drawings away off in an uttermost corner, where the damp is getting to them. I am utterly utterly bored by myself as a party celebrity. I don’t want to hear what I am about to say—and neither do most of the people I’m about to say it to. Also, I spilled some bright red syrup on my suit—only a silly pretentious cunt like Pat would have served such an unmanageable dessert at a buffet lunch. I don’t know which I hate more—getting drunk in order to endure such a party or having to endure it anyhow, sober. Yesterday I was sober. The only good thing that happened—David gave me one of his blue-faced comic watches—it has a comic-strip character* on it—also some little smears of Hockney paint on its wrist strap, which make it into a relic. He is one of the people I get fonder and fonder of. There aren’t many.

  Darling is outside all of this. I just want to be with him always, every minute. (Though I don’t fret when I’m alone). Yesterday he got us out of the second party in record time—about five minutes. We slipped out by the back way, leaving our glasses on the terrace, but having already been photographed, so we could prove we had been there—like an alibi in a murder mystery.

  November 28. Yesterday morning, Ted Bachardy called and said, in his characteristic tone of gloomy satisfaction: “They’re dropping like flies”—this referred to the recent deaths of Mae West and George Raft29—“Now it’s Rachel Roberts.” Very soon afterwards, Gavin called, bubbling with details: how Rachel had been to see Rex Harrison and had then announced to Darren Ramirez that she would like to move back into their house and kill herself there. She followed this by telling Darren that she was leaving for New York, where she’d been offered a play. Then she packed a bag (to make this seem convincing, I suppose) and went into hiding up the hill behind the house. There she took a big dose of drugs. Having done this, she got scared, it seems, and hurried back to the house hoping to get help of some sort. But she collapsed, falling through a plate-glass window, cutting herself, and died sometime later. The coroner was able to avoid saying that this was suicide; officially the cause of death has been called a cardiac arrest.

  I’ve probably got some of these details wrong, but the sum of them is that this poor miserable woman seems, consciously or unconsciously, to have attempted to deal Rex Harrison’s morale a death-blow on the eve of his opening in My Fair Lady tonight.30 Good old Rex, the nicest man’s man you could hope to meet, has probably always been a selfish bastard with women; but Darren, who brought Rachel so much Latin charm and devotion in her early middle age, didn’t deserve this final whack.

  I never saw this side of Rachel very much—my clearest memory is of a long ago dinner party at which I was forced to sit next to her fearing for my best suit because she seemed about to throw a plate of soup at Rex. Most of my meetings with her were lively—she could be very funny.

  A beautiful milky blue calm ocean this morning, with fishing boats dotted about on it in what you can imagine as being significant relations to each other, like chessmen.

  Old-age pains, a girdle around my loins on waking. But oh, the wonder of the depths of Kitty’s fur!

  December 6. Two days ago, Don and I had one of our sudden emotional openings-out to each other, prompted by a couple of light scotches. Don was saying how happy he feels in his work—which also means, in our life together. He spoke with intense, slightly incoherent excitement about the ways he glimpses of developing his drawing and painting: “forcing the same old tools to be versatile” was how he put it. Oh the pride of feeling that Kitty is airborne! He doesn’t need Dobbin any longer. He can fly. (That reminds me how, back in the early 1960s, he used to say to me, “I wish I loved you more and needed you less[.]”)

  On December 3, we went with Tom Siporin, my ex-pupil from UCLA,31 and Marilyn Goldin, to see Muktananda,32 at the ashram which his followers have set up for him in Santa Monica. As far as I was concerned, I suppose the visit was foredoomed to be a flop. I was in a bad mood, I now realize, arising out of mixed ego-attitudes. I didn’t like the crowd, although it was very well behaved. I didn’t want to bow down to Muktananda or stand in line to do so, and yet I would have been equally unwilling to meet him in a private one-to-one interview. So I behaved rather rudely to poor Tom, who is bubbling over with a new convert’s enthusiasm, and insisted on leaving before Muktananda spoke. (Admittedly, this could have been no big deal, since he only does so through an interpreter.) Was I afraid of Muktananda? Perhaps a little. They all stress his extraordinary power, and speak of shocks and visions transmitted by his hand-touch. I don’t want any of that from anyone outside the Ramakrishna Order. It would be a sort of disloyalty to Swami, who was alway
s inclined to be jealous of his disciples’ contacts with other gurus, even Ramakrishna monks.

  I suppose, to be quite candid, I also have a prejudice against Muktananda merely because his ministry is so hugely successful. I equate any kind of large-scale success with falsity of some sort—at any rate, in the West.

  Yesterday, Joan Quinn, I think it was, told me that a new version of my adventure with the Mexican boys on October 18 is going around town. Instead of my saying, “O mi corazon!” I am being quoted as having said, “O mi parasol!” which is supposed to mean that I was pretending to be crazy. . . . Don felt that this was giving the story an anti-gay twist—the silly old fag resorts to camping, even when in danger.

  Yesterday night, at a party given by Kiki Kiser for the pianists Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Kiki confessed that she is terrified of her house (157 Kingman Avenue).33 So I told her that we have always felt it had a bad atmosphere and might well be haunted. Luckily, she has already managed to sell it to a family who simply love it!

  I must record that I have been having a slight lapse into face making—of both kinds—these past few days. I must be on my guard against this.

  December 12. Tony Sarver died on the night of December 7. His funeral was yesterday, at the chapel in the veterans’ cemetery. Tony had been a very devout Catholic while he was in the navy, and a Catholic priest had visited him at the hospital—the terminal ward section known as the hospice—although, by then, Tony had lost much of his faith and didn’t care to receive the last sacrament.

  This priest spoke at the funeral. He had funny wavy hair which looked as if it had been curled with curling irons—but which Don, the expert, said was natural—and rather campy overemphatic gestures. We were both curiously impressed by him, because he talked about death so naturally, as a consummation of life rather than an embarrassing medical accident, a doctor defeat.

  The get-together afterwards at Bill Scobie’s house made Bill’s predicament painfully evident, because so many of the mourners were black and one got the impression that they were Tony’s friends rather than his. What will he do with himself now? Will he stay here or go far far away? Is there anyone around who might be prepared to make him want to stay?

  Last time Tom Shadduck was here, he asked me what does the word karma really mean. (I find that he, too, has had a Catholic upbringing; and lately he has been seeing a psychiatrist who is Catholic and, I believe, a priest.) So, to illustrate my answer, I told him—maybe not quite accurately—the story of the two men who went into the forest; one of them picks up a coin of the lowest value; the other treads on a thorn and hurts his foot. Later, the first of these men is told (by a holy man?) that his karma is very bad—otherwise, he would have discovered a gold mine; and the second man is told that his karma is very good—otherwise he would have been bitten by a cobra.

  A few minutes after I’d told Tom this story, he picked up a penny, while watering the plants down at the back of the house. He at once came up to the carport, where I was, exclaiming: “I’ve got bad karma!” He said this jokingly yet with a certain note of superstitious dismay. As he spoke, I looked down and saw, lying at my feet, another penny. What made this all the odder was that this penny, judging from its appearance, had been lying there for a long time; it was rusted. I must have walked very close to it over and over again.

  December 25. A model Californian Christmas Day—quite warm, the sunshine lighting up the external scene. But not the internal. Despite the uplift of a Dexedrine tablet, I’m down. And so is Darling—in one of his states of acute frustration: “What’s in all this for me?” To which the answer is always “nothing” or “something,” according to mood. What we’re both suffering from, right now, is pressure. This “Paul” screenplay, which we don’t really want to write and yet feel we should. And the abiding nuisance-presence of poor old gaga Glade—and of me too, as far as Darling’s concerned. I am, I suppose, “wonderful for my age,” but nevertheless still an old crabby killjoy drag, and often a bore.

  Well, as usual, let’s just repeat it, the only possible watchword is courage. Let’s get on with the show.

  Perhaps one cause of my downed spirits is that, despite pretty regular sits, night and morning, I feel a dryness, even a lack of faith. Am I getting anywhere with my religious life? Where’s the joy in it? To this, the answer is: Don’t ask, simply keep at it. And, when I say that to myself, I find that my faith consists in keeping at it. I have no other source of strength. So I echo Jung’s, “I do not need to believe—I know.”34

  1981

  January 1. I woke up heavily depressed, this morning—and yet I don’t quite know why—unlike so many New Year’s Eves, this one had been pleasant. We were with Rick, whom I’m fonder of than I am of almost any of our friends. It was Rick’s birthday, so we also invited one of Rick’s close buddies, Jeff Capp. Jeff’s maybe a bit dull but adequately intelligent and (for my taste) more than adequately sexy—blond, feminine, but muscular. I’m turned on by his arms, which he usually exposes by wearing only T-shirts without a jacket. The film we saw was adequately interesting though Frog-cute, Mon Oncle d’Amérique, and then we ate at El Adobe which I always like, and then we went to a quite small party of young men, many of them attractive and all friendly.

  So why my complaints?

  January 3. I do know why I was depressed; it was because these hernia pains are lowering. Also I guess I am worried about the cyst in my mouth. It hasn’t grown larger but it hasn’t grown smaller either; and, now that we’re past the holidays, Elsie will want a specialist to look at it.

  Anyhow, this is the time for a pulling of myself together. This morning is beautiful and my mood is up—admittedly this may be partly because I just took a Dexedrine tablet which seems to be doing its job.

  A big flap right after breakfast because I got confused and gave David Hockney the wrong message—that it was all right for him to bring his two friends from Bradford to dinner tomorrow night, when Virgil Thomson (at his own suggestion) is to cook at our house. Darling, who has been in pain from one of his muscular spasms in the shoulder, exploded in fury against his/our life, with all the work load that it puts on him. This time, he did something he has never done before—picked up a bunch of papers in my room and flung them around over the floor. His recurring complaint on such occasions is that I’ve upstaged him, grabbed the role of dear old saintly celebrity who always emerges from every crisis “smelling like a rose,” and leaving him to play the nasty little vixen. This is true. It’s also true that I, deep down, feel put upon, groan and picture myself as a martyr to our entertaining—a heavily burdened social secretary. The truth is that we are both highly talented charming amusing attractive (yes, Dobbin too) individuals and selfish as such creatures nearly always are. Why should we stay together? Only if we love each other—which I sincerely believe we do. And that doesn’t alter the fact that my death—I sincerely believe—would set Darling free. He wouldn’t collapse. He would spread his wings and fly higher.

  Well, courage, Dobbin. Pray to Swami for love and devotion and acceptance of dying. And get on with your work and don’t sulk, and watch that face making. As I noted last month, it has been recurring.

  January 4. The weather of the household is sunshiny again—thanks to those two sweet boys, Bob Drennon and Billy Faught. We met Bob about the middle of December through Mark Valen; he’s a curly-headed, funny-faced, well-built, bespectacled joli laid, with a cast in one eye—intelligent and very sexy. Billy we met at the New Year’s Eve party—in fact, I think both Bob and Billy were among the hosts of it. After a while, Billy got drunk and slept, which enabled us to admire his beauty—he is Texan, American-Indian Irish, with goldish-red hair. His eyes are blue. Darling wasn’t charmed when Bob showed up to be drawn bringing Billy with him, unannounced. But the two of them had soon endeared themselves to both of us. They are very married. At least, Billy is very married to Bob, though we gather that the marriage isn’t sexually exclusive. Billy told me, “Sex isn’t so impor
tant—what matters is to love and know you’re loved.” Looking through our October book with Bob and seeing the double portrait of David Dambacher and Gene [Martin], he said, “That’s us, twenty years from now.” So far, they have only been together a couple of weeks; and I wouldn’t be too sure of Bob’s devotion. But they make a quite adorable pair. They returned later to have dinner with us at Casa Mia and then drink some more at The Friendship.

  January 9. Yesterday, I went to see Dr. Alfred Katz, whom Elsie Giorgi recommended, and showed the cyst in my mouth. He said that it is almost certainly nonmalignant but should be taken out. He guaranteed that the entire operation—driving to the Cedars-Sinai hospital and having the surgery—would take less time than a trip to the airport and back! I was impressed by him, although he works very hard at keeping up a line of facetious chatter.

  The year is opening grimly with confident forecasts of economic disaster—inflation, a fall in real estate values, unemployment, increase in crime. Not to mention the prospect of nuclear-war scares plus nuclear accidents.

  Against all this I have whatever I can muster of my religious faith, plus Don’s love. Yesterday, for example, his love seemed extraordinary, as good as new, no, far better. It’s almost incredible to realize its strength. And to realize that there must be other people who enjoy such love. (They’d better!)

  Am plugging along with an outline of the rest of the “Paul” screenplay, dictating it to the tape recorder. This is a very stiff push, but I must have something to show our producers.

  January 13. A perfect day. Ran down to the beach, where I saw— for the first time, almost, that I can remember—someone reading a book of mine (Guru)!