After that first day on Adelaide Drive, Isherwood wrote in his diary that he and I might become friends, but he was still waiting to see. Who could blame him? When you’re seventy-something and a half years old, young writers who come on strong about your brilliance are not to be trusted. Only middle-aged artists believe in their own genius: the old know better. Listen to how Isherwood described a gay rights benefit he addressed in San Francisco in 1981: “Armistead Maupin introduced me, going much heavy on the praise, exalting me, in fact, to the position of America’s Old Mr. Queer. But he is basically a friend, I feel—not one of those flattering foes.” Knowing this would have disturbed me at the time, but now it makes perfect sense. We old-timers tend to squirm at eulogies delivered before our funerals.
As it happened, Chris had only four years left. If I had been his kind of diarist, or any kind of diarist at all, I could offer a richer array of my limited time with him. What’s left now, I’m afraid, are a few over-honed anecdotes and the sweet afterglow of laughter and fellowship in that house on Adelaide Drive. Whenever I was in Los Angeles, Chris and Don generously folded me into their circle of friends, a variable feast that could mean anyone from David Hockney to roving poets and porn actors. I remember chicken dinners dished out by a poker-faced Romanian housekeeper named Natalie while the men at the table gabbed about movies or gave literal blow-by-blows of a sex club on Fairfax called Basic Plumbing. Natalie must have had an earful in her time. I wasn’t there myself the night John Travolta gave an impromptu performance of a scene from Cruising, but I can’t help wondering if Natalie was. According to Chris, Travolta knew the scene by heart and shoved his jeans below his Jockey shorts for Pacino’s campy, climactic “Hips or lips?” line. If there are better ways to thank your hosts for a nice evening, they don’t immediately come to mind.
Then there was a chilly night when the dinner guests were gathered with drinks around the living room fire. Chris looked almost preppy in jeans and a tweed jacket with elbow patches, bouncing on the heels of his loafers as if to syncopate the conversation. When talk turned to Eddie Murphy, Chris recognized the name and declared: “Oh, yes, Eddie Murphy! Marvelous, funny man!” One of the guests, the actress Rae Dawn Chong, said what some of us were already thinking: “But, Chris, he’s terribly homophobic.” To which Isherwood replied without a moment’s hesitation: “Well, fuck him, then! Just fuck him!”
There was always an imp at play behind Chris’s eyes. More than once I was prompted to offer him a toke off a joint, but he invariably declined, explaining that he and Don had once had nightmarish reactions to a bowl of kif Paul Bowles had given them in Morocco. Then, thoughtfully, he would add: “I don’t mind if you do, though. I love the smell of it around me.” I’m sure there was plenty of it around him the night a group of us piled into a car to see a cabaret singer performing in the San Fernando Valley. Don was driving, so Chris was stretched out across the three men in the backseat. The singer was a female friend of a friend, an unknown commodity, so there was speculation in the car as to whether or not the cabaret would be gay. Chris offered clues along the way by gleefully reading aloud the signs that passed his limited field of vision. “Midas Muffler!” he would crow. “That’s very bad news indeed!” But, finally, as Don came to a stop in a decidedly lackluster mini-mall: “Pioneer Chicken! Thank God! It is a gay place!”
It was not a gay place—at least not until we arrived. The singer was touchingly earnest and untalented. Savoring the irony, I leaned over to Chris and murmured “Sally Bowles” in his ear. By then he’d had a drink or two, so he replied a little too loudly: “Sally was never this dreadful!” He was indulging me, of course. I remember looking around the table and realizing that six different decades of gay men were represented in our group. Isherwood had his arm around Steve Beery, the youngest one. Across the table sat Gavin Lambert, the almost-sixty-something novelist who had given me the endearing tomboy character Daisy Clover even before I met Sally Bowles.
I remember thinking at that moment: This is how it should be. This is how the camaradarie of queers can span generations, offering solace between young and old, bonding us through friendship and sex and art. And not just among the living. Chris was part of a lineage that reached back through Forster and Maugham to Wilde and Whitman and Carpenter and every unknown soldier and working-class roughneck who had ever rolled in the hay with them. I found this genealogy far more appealing than the one I had been taught to revere in North Carolina, that bone-dry roster of long-gone planters and generals with their broodmare wives standing invisibly in the background. Here, at last, was ancestor worship with hot blood in its veins.
QUEERS WHO EMBOLDEN one another to be honest about themselves can feel real exhilaration in that moment, and it can last them a lifetime. Your tribe, as Isherwood called it, becomes a source of great sustenance. A terrible weight that you have borne for years becomes apparent by its sudden absence.
Ian McKellen and I had met in the early eighties through a mutual friend in San Francisco. Ian had just finished playing D. H. Lawrence in the film Priest of Love in New Mexico. I drove him and his then-partner Sean Mathias around town, giving them my usual rap for visitors. “This is where Kim Novak jumped into the bay in Vertigo. That’s the house where Bacall hid out Bogart in Dark Passage. That’s where Dirty Harry had the big showdown with the serial killer.” And so on and so forth until he could finally take no more. When I showed him a pretty view from Russian Hill without elaboration, he gave me a devilish side-eye and said: “What’s the matter? Wasn’t anything filmed here?”
I had hit a nerve, I realized. Ian’s film career had yet to catch fire (he was still many years away from having his Wizardly visage immortalized on a New Zealand postage stamp), and I had managed to remind him of that at, literally, every turn. I knew, of course, that Ian was a titan of the British stage, but I was wary of talking Shakespeare with him. I wanted for us to be friends, and thought that my shaky grasp of the classics might disqualify me.
It didn’t. He didn’t care about that. We bonded through laughter and queer cheekiness, launching a friendship that has prospered for forty years, though we have rarely been in the same city for long. Ian sometimes tells the press he decided to come out after a night of pot-fueled conversation with me and Steve Beery and my partner at the time, Terry Anderson. It began, quite simply, with Ian asking, “Do you think I should come out?” The three of us gave him an earful. Our friends were dying, and we had lost patience with people whose silence perpetuated the notion that there was shame in being queer.
Steve and Terry had both recently tested positive when the four of us drove up the coast together on a road trip. Back then a positive diagnosis was an almost certain death sentence. I remember how Ian kept our hearts light under the weight of that knowledge. He had signed the register at our inn as Tom Courtenay (an actor for whom he was often mistaken), then called the front desk shortly thereafter to inquire graciously about the pubic hair he had found on his pillow. In the sauna, he mooned us when the other patrons weren’t looking. We giggled in the face of the Reaper when Ian was around.
When a fiftieth-anniversary stroll on the Golden Gate Bridge devolved into human gridlock (a quarter of a million San Franciscans had the bridge sagging visibly on that May day in 1987), Ian pressed on, though our merry band had just reached the first stanchion, and the crowd was quite obviously at a standstill. “C’mon, lads,” he called, “We can do it. There’s a big open patch up ahead where there are jolly picnickers and mothers pushing prams.” He was joking, but he meant it, too, in his own way. Ian had survived the Blitz as a child. He remembered sleeping under a steel plate until he was five years old. His mother had died when he was twelve, his father when he was twenty-two; he was more than experienced in the art of pressing on. He was just what we needed, just when we needed it.
There was, in fact, an open patch up ahead—the AIDS drug cocktail that would begin to save lives in the nineties, or at least prolong them dramatically. Steve, as I??
?ve told you, wouldn’t get to the cocktail in time. Terry would. And the prospect of a future made him realize that he didn’t want to spend it with me. One morning in our tenth year together he climbed onto a new motorcycle and drove away. I had braced myself for his death, but not for this. “Cocktail divorce” was what they called it back then. There were more of them than you’d think.
WHEN I INTERVIEWED Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy for the Village Voice in 1985, I didn’t know Chris was already enduring the pain of prostate cancer. I certainly didn’t know it would be his last interview. Looking back now, I realize that he had already pushed off from the solid shores of his diaries and was drifting at sea on a raft with Don. The interview was about the two of them (I had already titled it “The First Couple”). Chris seemed foggy at times, so Don would answer for them both, or gently nudge Chris toward the answers they both knew to be true. When I asked them about the early days of their romance, Don directed his gaze toward Chris. “I’d never met anyone like him. He was so easy to be with. I was delighted. In fact, wasn’t it I who proposed to you?” Chris blinked at him as if this were some sort of trick question and replied: “That’s not the kind of thing you ask a gentleman. You remember.”
The interview went well, but what stays with me now is the humiliating way it began. I had arrived from San Francisco with the only tool of my trade, a fancy Sony microcassette recorder about the size of a Tarot card. I had already used it on jobs for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine for taped encounters with Bette Midler, Dyan Cannon, Joan Rivers, and others, but eventually, even tiny technology overwhelms me. (I had once left the little microbastard behind at Shirley Temple’s house, so she was forced to run down her circular drive, waving it over her head as I drove away. The interview, what’s more, had not gone well. When Shirley reminisced about the “sweet little geckos” she had encountered when she was ambassador to Ghana, I told her I had similar memories of geckos in Vietnam. Since she was chain-smoking by then and we seemed to have bonded through laughter, I figured it was safe to bring up my other favorite lizard. “We had fuck-you lizards, too. Did you have those in Ghana?” Seeing the murderous gleam in her eye, I hastened to explain the lizard’s cry, mimicking it for her. Her eyes shot to the tape recorder, then back at me. “You know,” she said quietly, “when I was a little girl and there was profanity on the set, they would close down the set and there would be no more filming that day.” Ambassador Black was lobbying her former costar Ronald Reagan to “give her another country,” and she was not about to fuck it up on account of a profane lizard.)
That tape recorder set off another kind of consternation the day I interviewed Chris Isherwood on Adelaide Drive. I had forgotten to replace its batteries before leaving for L.A., so it whirred to a stop less than three minutes into the conversation. My mortification was so apparent that Chris made it his job to console me. “Think nothing of it,” he said. “I once had the same thing happen to me.” Sure you did, I thought, you kind old sweetie pie.
Chris assured me we still had plenty of time, so I should take his VW into Santa Monica to look for batteries. I was forty years old that spring, but I felt an almost boyish exhilaration as I drove past the tall, rattling palms of the palisades on my way to a Radio Shack. How could I not be a little giddy in that moment? There was warm ocean air on my face and the scent of some flower we didn’t have up north, and my own best version of a grandfather, Old Mr. Queer himself, had just entrusted me with the keys to his car. As far as I was concerned, all was right with the world.
IT WAS DON, naturally, who saw Chris off. He sat with him every day of the last month of his life, drawing the man he had loved for the past thirty-three years. Chris was a willing participant in this effort, naked and often in pain, yet free of all vanity, giving himself to his Darling in the ultimate act of intimacy, the only one still available to him. And Don kept on drawing for several hours after Chris had died, recording the flight of spirit from his face, the inescapable absence of him, so that Don and the rest of us who loved him could actually believe that he was gone.
It’s still hard to believe even after thirty years, thanks to the time-released revelations of the Isherwood diaries. There are always new angles on that life, ones that are utterly human and flawed and always irresistible. At times, to me, Chris seems to be in the very air of Santa Monica. In that lovingly haunted house on Adelaide Drive, in the portraits of Chris that still vibrate from the walls of Don’s studio, in the tanned, glistening young men who still jog along the median strip of San Vicente where once they had earned the appreciation of a great man of letters.
And there is Don himself, of course, who is not only the keeper of Chris’s flame but the keeper of his voice. The eerie similarity in their diction, which Don has always attributed to his unconscious mimicry, was vexing to me in my youth when I called their house and could not for the life of me tell whether it was Don or Old Mr. Queer who had answered the phone. Now I find great comfort in that quirk, because it offers a precious link to the past, a sort of two-in-one deal.
NOT LONG AGO I arranged for my friend Laura Linney to meet Don at the house on Adelaide Drive. Laura and I have known each other for almost twenty-five years, ever since she created the role of Mary Ann Singleton in the 1993 miniseries of Tales of the City. It has been one of those relationships where you don’t just finish each other’s sentences, you finish each other’s thoughts. A crooked smile shared across a room is pretty much all it takes. I poured a lot of myself into Mary Ann’s outwardly pleasant but guarded personality, and Laura seemed to relate to that as she inhabited the character. Put simply, we understood each other. Our genteel Southern parents had taught us all too well how to look like good children.
When we were both single, Laura had asked me to escort her to the Academy Awards when she was nominated for Best Actress for You Can Count on Me. In her suite at the Four Seasons I helped her pick out a red Valentino gown only to step on its train repeatedly as we made our way down the red carpet, since the train was exactly the color of the carpet. “It’ll be calmer inside,” Laura reassured me. “It’s like a bunch of well-behaved kids at a prom.” We sat in the front row between Julie Walters and Ben Stiller while John Leguizamo, seated behind us with his gay brother, riffed on the hokey props for the Crouching Dragon number and whispered, “Look, it’s Salvador Dalí!” when Bob Dylan’s pencil-thin mustache appeared on a huge screen above us.
I couldn’t imagine any experience more wonderful than that night until Laura and her husband, Marc Schauer, called me from a hospital room, giddy with joy, to tell me that they had named their newborn son Bennett Armistead Schauer. Marc and Laura had met only a month after Chris Turner and I had. Laura and I had read the same love poem at each other’s weddings. It’s been like this for a dozen years. We have mirrored each other’s bliss, a bliss that, believe me, had been a long time coming.
And now here’s little Bennett Armistead, already walking and just released by his mother onto the floor of Isherwood’s office. This is the room where Chris did his writing and where his books still live and where Don now sleeps on a daybed to be closer to his spirit. There is a framed poster leaning against the wall on the other side of the room, the cover of Liberation, the last volume of Isherwood’s diaries. The child, seeing Isherwood’s kindly lined features, makes a beeline for the poster, pressing his hand against the old man’s cheek, then turning to laugh with delight.
Such moments are all the god I’ll ever need.
NINETEEN
MY MOTHER HAD BEEN DEAD FOR five months when I saw my English grandmother for the last time. The Madwoman was living in a red-brick high-rise in Alexandria, Virginia, one of those genteel “assisted-living facilities,” where residents are assisted ever closer to heaven on the elevator. Grannie had yet to reach the top floor, the floor reserved for the dying. “But I should warn you, Teddy,” my aunt had told me downstairs, “she’s not like she used to be. She’s a lot . . . um . . . smaller, and her hair has go
ne quite white.” I had taken that in with a mute nod. Okay. I can deal.
“And she may not recognize you at all.”
That was unimaginable, but I let it go. My aunt let me into the apartment, a dim, Yardley-scented glade where Grannie’s old furniture—a damask chair, a Wedgwood lamp, an heirloom chest—seemed as awkwardly placed as strangers at a wake, already incompatible with the gleam of the invading chrome. I found her sitting upright in a chair, her back to the door, her small frame supported by a cane, her handbag in her lap. (She kept her chocolates there, among other closely guarded secrets.) She looked like someone waiting, very patiently, for a bus.
That, in effect, was what she was doing. From all reports, she was done with what she called “this bally body” and was ready to inhabit the next one.
She was ninety-five.
GRANNIE HAD GROWN up in Derby, in the East Midlands, a town that boasts about being the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Her fey watercolorist mother had been a follower of Madame Blavatsky, the Russian occultist who founded Theosophy, so Grannie had been awash in those early tides of the New Age: séances, numerology, fairies, reincarnation, and, intermittently, before her Englishness prevailed, vegetarianism. In her teens she had studied piano at the Royal Conservatory of Music in London, the youngest girl to graduate at the time. She remained single throughout her twenties and recommended that course of action to everyone. “Just wait, Teddy,” she had told me many times. “You don’t know who you are until you’re thirty. You’re in no position to judge anything.”