Today we got to page 30 of the rough screenplay of “Lady from the Land of the Dead.” It’s sort of fun, as long as you do it in a carefree spirit.
Another refusal of our play, by Ronald Bryden for the Royal Shakespeare Company.15 Well at least it was considered “very seriously” by Trevor Nunn16 and David Jones,17 but they decided they couldn’t do it unless they could get Alec McCowen (he’s far too old, we think) to play Oliver. And he turned it down, choosing to do The Misanthrope instead.18
November 23. We are having our Thanksgiving dinner with Joe Goode and Mary Agnes. Much to give thanks for: life with Don, work accomplished and good health. We are through the first part of “Lady from the Land of the Dead” in rough, started the second part today. I have very nearly finished the big thick manuscript volume in which I’m reconstructing journals from 1945 to 1952 and maybe onwards. Am now halfway through 1949. Mike Montel, who has a repertory theater in New York, The New Phoenix Repertory Company, is doing A Meeting by the River for one or two performances at the beginning of his season on December 18, and we have got Larry Luckinbill and Sam Waterston to play in it again.
Not to give thanks for—that Hunt Stromberg has double-crossed us and signed Jack Smight, a C director, behind our backs, and this will almost certainly mean a C grade cast for the picture. They swear they will shoot in England in February.
Maybe to give thanks for—Pancho Kohner19 wants to make a movie out of A Meeting by the River, but he doesn’t want to pay us for developing a screen treatment. There is also a danger that he may want to direct. He’s away right now, so this is in the mulling stage. He’s a nice young man, sensitive, intelligent but no humor.
December 3. This morning Hunt called, from Texas—and lo and behold, we are even more completely double-crossed. He is going direct from there to England, sailing from New York on the 10th, and we are not asked to join him for the shooting of the film (which will be either in February or March). How he puts it is that the studio won’t pay our fares unless we have rewrites to do. Well, of course we shall have rewrites to do—indeed, they already exist. But Hunt doesn’t want us there rocking the boat.
Our only resource now, it seems, is to make friends hurriedly with Jack Smight and try to influence him to insist on our coming over.
I can’t say that I feel a great rage against Hunt. It’s as if a snake bit you. You know that you shouldn’t handle such creatures without precautions.
We have set our trip to New York for the 11th, hoping to have finished the rough draft screenplay of “Lady from the Land of the Dead” by then. I doubt if we shall have quite, but it should be near enough. We have kept up a quite commendable record of five pages a day—and all this in the mornings only, with often a run to the beach or a visit to the gym also fitted in before lunch! We’ve been fairly good about getting up at seven.
Don has been adorable beyond all words, lately. I can honestly say that the passages in our life together which are like the one we’ve just been living through represent my idea of “the earthly paradise.”
Am delighted that he has at last got the official invitation to have a show at the Municipal Art Gallery, from July 10 to August 5. This will be his biggest—and he will have, for the first time, a proper illustrated catalogue!
December 8. We did finish our rough draft of the “Lady” screen-play—on the 5th. It is terribly slapdash, but we won’t look at it until we return from New York. This may be on the 20th—or later, if we decide to spend Christmas there. We definitely don’t want to go to Bill Brown and Paul Wonner in New Hampshire, even if they ask us. (It looks like they aren’t going to, for Bill called Don just now and didn’t mention it. They are in New York at the moment and want to meet us there.)
Pleasant excitement over the prospect of working on the play. Unpleasant travel jitters. However, we have found an apparently trustworthy (and cute) house sitter named Charles Hill. He’s an artist, a friend of Billy Al Bengston. He will stay here with his girlfriend. Michael Montel has called again from New York, friendly and pleased that we are coming. Gordon Hoban has gone over there to play Tom, and Larry Luckinbill’s wife, Robin Strasser, will play Penelope and Jacqueline Brookes the mother. Rafferty = Steve Macht. Swamis = Barton Heyman, Tony Manionis and Charles Turner. They are short of one actor, so Rafferty20 will have to take his own photographs.
On December 5, we met Jack Smight at Universal. We both liked him and doubtless he is competent, but Don feels sure he has no talent. However he is more than ready to be our ally and said at once that of course we must come to England and work with him there on the script. He called Hunt about this, while we were in his office, and Hunt agreed—if Universal would agree. I still suspect he may manage to find some out. He says he’ll let us know definitely by the end of this month, after he gets to England. They still plan to shoot in either February or March. It is definitely to be a T.V. picture and apparently they are going to cut it up into lengths and serve it to the viewers two or three nights in a row!
The day before yesterday we saw Swami. He was in a strange mood—that’s to say, he seemed other than himself. We were talking about the fragmentary poem by Vivekananda, scribbled on a piece of notepaper while in the United States. There is one line about age having “no hold,” and Swami said, “I can tell you this from my own experience—I have seen that there was no difference in ages between Thakur and Holy Mother and Maharaj and Swamiji.” What was strange wasn’t just the absolute authority with which he said this but also the look in his eyes. He was looking at me as he said it, fixing me with his look, and yet I felt he wasn’t seeing me. He looked inseeing, withdrawn, closed. I thought, as I have so many times, that his look was like a rock face; it inspired awe. And then, a few moments later, he was himself again and full of such sweetness. He asked Don why he wasn’t sitting on a cushion and he looked at him really lovingly. And later, when Don was helping him on with his shoes, he placed his hand on Don’s head, obviously blessing him. Don was well aware of all this; he spoke of it later.
I must repeat it again, I have been so happy with Don lately. Even my rides with him in the car, which I used to hate, are snug now. He drives more recklessly than ever—everyone who rides with us notices it and gets nervous—but I lie down on the back seat, with a pillow under my head, wrapped in a blanket, and we have long intimate talks, punctuated only occasionally by a terrific jerk as he stands on the brake, having just avoided a smash! And the wonderful intimacy of sitting with him in the movies and feeling his closeness. And the joy of waking with him in the basket—the painful but joyful tenderness—painful only because I am always so aware that it can’t last forever or even for very long, Kitty and Old Drub will have to say goodbye.
I still try to keep up my midday sits, but wow what resistance! The Opposition is bent on making me forget to do them, and often I do forget, or only remember hours later. What do I think about, moon about, worry about, when I’m not thinking of God? Plenty, apparently.
December 22. We got home the day before yesterday. The plane was crowded and two noisy parent-indulged moppets were sitting near us. However they had their function, as far as we were concerned; they made us so nervous that we started working on “Dr. Frankenstein” to distract ourselves. Don wrote and I dictated dialogue, my voice getting louder to drown out the screaming until I was giving a performance which must have been audible to all our immediate neighbors. (No one complained either of the children or of us; most of them were elderly, so perhaps they were also deaf.) By the end of the flight, we had roughly reconstructed the entire Prima-Elizabeth-Fanshawe sequence, insofar as it needed reconstructing. This was all the more satisfactory because we hadn’t done one lick of work on it all the time we were in New York.
Charles Hill met us at the airport and drove us home. He and his girlfriend Paula Sweet appear to be the ideal house sitters; the place was spotless and they enjoyed their stay, into the bargain. (However, in justice to former house sitters, I must add that they are the only ones w
e have paid for being in the house. When I suggested this to Charles, before we left, he asked for twenty-five dollars.)
Yesterday, Jim Charlton called; he has just arrived from Honolulu on a short visit. I had to go the UCLA library so I took him along. He looks suddenly very much older—or rather, his youthfulness looks far more damaged; he is still incredibly young-looking for a fifty-some-year-old. He was more affectionate than usual; he seemed really glad to see me and anxious to show me that he was. I was happy to see him, as always, but this is a most awkward time for visitors. There’s so much to do.
Jim struck me as being perhaps a bit less lonely than when I last saw him. His work is going well and he has a capable assistant. He still lives alone but there are lots of boys around; he says he falls in love about three times a year and that he usually falls in love with a boy only after the boy has left him and gone off to some other place. He also has a lot of friends. Does he really want anything more than this? I doubt it. He wants to wander. He wants to be the stray boy who finds shelter with a succession of families or individuals but stays nowhere long. He told me he has no intention of visiting Hilde at Christmas time [. . .]. Jim is still stingy. But why shouldn’t he be, as far as [she] is concerned?
I was going to the UCLA library because I wanted to look up an article on Gore Vidal written by a man named Gerald Clarke, who has been told by Esquire to interview me. I want to find out if he’s a bitch or not, before I say yes. I couldn’t discover the article, because I was looking too far back in the files. But Jim found a copy of a book he’s been hunting for for years, an anthology complied by Dashiell Hammett, Creeps by Night, containing a story called “The Red Brain.”21
What about New York? I really cannot go into all that right now. Maybe I’ll keep slipping in memories of it, day by day, if I keep this journal going continuously till the end of the year. Just for openers: It was icy, windy, wet, snowy, warmish by turns but always so miserably dark—coming back here was like a return to paradise; yesterday was so warm that Don went in the ocean. I tore a ligament in my right ankle. More of that another time. The play was very well received by the audience—much more about that, another time. Of the two notices we have seen so far, one was goodish, one poorish. The goodish one is in the New York Post, December 19. It is by Jerry Tallmer, titled “One Saint in Two Acts.” He starts with a little bit of bitchery, noting that the play is by Christopher Isherwood (born 1904) and Don Bachardy (born 1934) and continues: “It is a witty, intelligent, provocative drama, and though not long in minutes it’s still perhaps a trace too long near the end. . . . this sketched version of a full production was as invigorating as the material, with its overtones of E.M. Forster. . . . I think the drama if mounted in full, though modestly, could find an audience here.” Richard F. Shepard in The New York Times, December 20, says: “. . . .the new work deals with Hinduism and homosexuality, and each, although not related, comes out a moral winner. . . . These constantly shifting triangles and relationships make an over-all interesting but wordy evening, one that slumps into troughs of tedium. . . . But it is a play worth more work and refinement.” (Arnold Weissberger, whom I talked to yesterday on the phone, doesn’t think The New York Times notice is really bad from a business point of view. It dashed our spirits a good deal when we read it, because we had begun to feel that we had had a success.)
December 23. This morning I weighed 153, the all-time high since I started recording my weight. This is probably due to supper with Jack Larson and Jim Bridges last night; we drank a lot of wine and ate handfuls of sugar-coated peanuts. Jim was sulking because (as Don discovered today from Jack) they had had a quarrel about Jim’s cameraman on this film. [. . .] Jim wants to make him his partner in a film company. (The cameraman’s name is Gordon Willis.22) Early this morning, Jim left to spend Christmas with his family in Paris, Arkansas.
Don had lunch today with Gary Abrahams and they finally discussed my quarrel with Philip Chamberlain (see November 7) and the friction with Gary and his friend Gary [Essert] which has followed it. Don gave them to understand that I hadn’t really meant what I’d said and would probably have agreed to speak if I’d been asked nicely. So it is all smoothed over. That’s okay, as long I don’t have to apologize to Chamberlain. That I will never do, because I did mean exactly what I said.
I had lunch with Jim Charlton on the pier. I always enjoy listening to him talk—he describes things so well. Today he talked about the weird derelict island which belongs to the millionaire (Paley?)23 whose life Bill van Petten is writing. Then about Japan, to which he would like to return, and Mutsuo(?) the boy he deserted there. Jim said, with a significantly affectionate look at me, “He was the only other really good person I ever went with.” Pretending not to recognize this compliment, I said, “Oh, you mean Mark Cooper?” ( Jim had just told me that he thinks Mark killed several people, while running around with the Hell’s Angels!)
Gerald Clarke came around in the afternoon. I have decided to let him go ahead with the Esquire interview. Not because I’m sure he’s not a bitch; I think he probably is. But what do I care? The interview won’t be for several months, anyhow.
About our New York visit: this was the first time that Don and I have ever meditated together. We decided to do it as long as we were staying at the hotel, because the alternative was for one of us to go into the bathroom while the other meditated, which created a pressure situation. I think it worked very well and even made another bond between us. But we haven’t kept it up since our return.
On the 12th, the day after our arrival, we met Michael Montel and went with him to a rehearsal of our play. It was at the Edison Theater, where Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope was playing in the evenings. (Our single performance there was set for Monday the 18th because the show was dark on Mondays.) We had seen Don’t Bother Me in Los Angeles—it was produced by Ed Padula, who is interested in making The Adventures of the Black Girl into a musical—and had hated it. To us it seemed a very usual sort of “sincere,” “challenging” freedom play, in which the white audience is insulted by the black performers and just loves it.
Michael Montel is nothing much of a director and his only virtue was that he let Larry Luckinbill and Sam Waterston follow the moves worked out by Jim Bridges. Larry was as good as ever and seemingly quite unchanged. Sam was as good as ever, but his success (in Much Ado About Nothing) did seem to have changed him for the better. He had more confidence and he actually looked a lot better, almost handsome. Dear Gordon Hoban was as good as ever, but he seemed definitely less attractive, beginning to fade. Jacqueline Brookes as the mother was utterly wrong; a squashy-faced mushy-mouthed woman, incapable of irony or bitterness. They all say she is a great actress, but she wasn’t in this part. Robin Strasser, Larry’s wife, was wrong too. She didn’t even seem professional. She looked ugly and mean. Don said she was just a spoilt rich girl. She made a tremendous fuss over Larry, holding hands, stroking his sleeve, kissing him; it was embarrassing. I think he was embarrassed, too. Stephen Macht, who played Rafferty, was quite a young man, and sexy. He had a slightly demonic air and a big-toothed, rather devilish smile. You could think of him as a sort of familiar who had fastened onto Patrick, a symptom of Patrick’s deplorable spiritual condition. Maybe, before long, Patrick would start going to bed with him and be controlled by him entirely— unless he could be rescued by his good angel, Tom. . . . The three swamis all learned the Sanskrit chant from us marvellously quickly. The brightest was a black actor, Charles Turner, Anthony Manionis was good too. Barton Heyman, who was a fairly important actor, showed that he thought the part was beneath his dignity. We decided that he might be a troublemaker.
The set (which belonged to Don’t Bother Me) looked like a miniature golf course. Down the middle of it was a short slippery ramp, which outraged Sam; he kept losing his foothold and skidding, in protest. Later he had some kind of stickers put on the soles of his sandals. But the set remained tricky. The actors kept having to cross the ramp on their way to one
or the other of the little putting-green platforms on which they had to play their scenes. And the ritual had to be performed right on the ramp itself. It looked like an uneasy picnic.
December 24. A brilliant day with a strong wind. Don, trying to catch the low-angled sun, lies in a hollow on our pie slice of land, his head lower than his feet, in trunks. I lie beside him with my clothes on. I can now walk, even trot, but my ankle warns me that it would just love to twist over and throw me, preferably down some steep steps. My left thumb still has that little lump on it—growing(?)[.] And there is the hard little inflamed thing on the side of the calf of my right leg which Dr. Maxwell Wolff says he will have to remove, after the holidays. My weight is down half a pound from yesterday.
Stathis Orphanos found out from catalogues that they are selling postcards I write to fans. So I got mean and sent the following to some applicant, a short while before leaving for New York:
Because dealers solicit autographs and then sell them, I have decided that I will only send autographed photographs to strangers if they will first send me:
Ten dollars, which will be given to a charity of my choice, and a stamped and addressed envelope.
I got my note returned by a Mr. B. Berger, with the following rebuke:
Mr. Isherwood, my son Jeffrey is fourteen years old and he has been collecting autographs for going on seven years now. Among his most famous are Harry Truman, President Nixon, Allen Drury, Leon Uris, William Manchester, plus many Nobel prize winners. When he received this, he brought it down and gave it to me to read—we both smiled at each other—you may keep your autograph sir—he will surely not miss it! Have a joyful holiday season—so sorry you’ve been so taken advantage of.