BONUS NUMBER 5: THE HAPPIEST GAY COUPLE IN AMERICA

(Did You Sleep With the Models?)

When I think of happy couples — gay or straight, married or cohabiting — these come to mind: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh, Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Of these, I can claim a very slight acquaintance with the latter couple. It came about like this.

Not long after becoming editor-in-chief of Mandate, Honcho, and Playguy early in 1982, I received in the mail a handsome new book from Twelvetrees Press. The title: October, with text by Christopher Isherwood and drawings by Don Bachardy. The 85-page book reproduced a diary that Isherwood kept during the month of October 1979, with drawings by Bachardy. Immediately I wanted to run an excerpt in Mandate. Many readers, I knew, would not learn about the book otherwise. And it would be a coup for me to land such a prestigious team in one of my early issues.

Half expecting a refusal, I telephoned Twelvetrees Press and spoke with Jack Woody, who gave his enthusiastic permission along with the telephone number of Isherwood and Bachardy. “I’m sure it will be okay with them,” he said, “just tell them I sent you.” I did, and it was.

I knew the work of both men. Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), the author of many books and screenplays, is best remembered today for The Berlin Stories and for Bob Fosse’s film Cabaret (1972), based on the stories in that book. Bachardy’s drawings are included in many museum collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the de Young in San Francisco, and the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Both men, on the phone from their home in southern California, were as down to earth as next door neighbors. They were aware of Mandate, and asked questions about my new agenda for the magazine. Arrangements for the excerpt were so informal that no document was sent for signing, not even a letter of agreement. Already, in 1982, the couple had been together for twenty-nine years. Not every day was blissful, of course, but their de facto marriage lasted until Christopher’s death.

Don Bachardy (b. 1934), as busy as ever, is represented by the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica (craigkrullgallery.com). I spoke to him again recently for permission to reproduce the Mandate excerpt. As before, it was given cheerfully and without question. Later I joked to friends, “Oh yes, Don and I speak at least once every forty years.”

Role models — a phrase that has gone slightly out of fashion — surely applies to Bachardy and Isherwood. Men like them make one happy to be gay.

When Christopher Isherwood died I sent a condolence note to Don Bachardy. Here is his reply.

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Please disregard the outdated ordering information in the first paragraph below of October: Excerpts from a Diary. Inquiries about this book, and the many other handsome volumes published by Jack Woody, should be sent to twinpalms.com, which incorporates Twelvetrees Press. In a recent email, Jack wrote, “Though I haven’t seen a copy of October in some years, they must be deep in the warehouse.”

A further note about Jack Woody: he is the grandson of actress Helen Twelvetrees (1908-1958). In my book on A Streetcar Named Desire I wrote that “this faintly remembered star of the 1930s headed to Hollywood in 1928 along with many other New York stage actors to replace silent stars who could not, or would not, make the transition to talking pictures. In 1929, she made her screen debut in The Ghost Talks. Helen Twelvetrees played Blanche DuBois at the Sea Cliff Summer Theatre on Long Island in August 1951, more than a decade after the end of her movie career. Her final screen appearance was in Unmarried (1939).”

Christopher Isherwood in 1979

And now I find I can’t end without a few more paragraphs on Don Bachardy. I have known his drawings for as long as I can remember, but only recently did I learn that he is also as good a writer as Christopher Isherwood — but very, very different. A friend sent me a copy of Bachardy’s Stars in My Eyes, published in 2000 by the University of Wisconsin Press. The title is highly ironic, like every page of text in the book. From 1973 to 1984 Bachardy drew thirty-three stars, including Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, and Laurence Olivier. These and others were from studio-era Hollywood, and faded or fading when they met up with the artist.

His eclectic definition of “star,” however, stretches to include youngsters such as Charlotte Rampling (thirty when he drew her in 1976), Jill St. John (forty-two when she sat for Bachardy in 1982), and seniors (composer Aaron Copland, seventy-five when he settled in front of Bachardy’s drawing board in 1975) and director Vincente Minnelli, seventy-seven in 1980.

Bachardy surely knew what most of his subjects apparently did not: that sitting for a portrait is a highly charged, intimate experience. It verges on the sexual, though everyone who posed was fully clothed. And no one came out really happy, least of all Bachardy. He went home from every session and wrote about the experience with a pen dipped lightly in arsenic, although, like a fine wine, the poison is tempered with hints of benevolence to keep the acidity in check. Again, like an oenophile, his prose is bracing and his basic good humor prevents over-ripening or too savage a coup de grâce.

Gentlemanly savage he is, however, and I laughed uncontrollably while reading his pages. Ginger Rogers, for instance, bossed him throughout their sessions as though she were still at RKO in the 1930s and he were a cameraman instructed to grant her every wish. Sitting for the first time in front of Bachardy, she interrupts his work, jumps up and runs to get the false eyelashes she forgot to put on. “A few minutes later,” he writes, “Rogers returned to the living room with her eyelashes in place. Jutting out in all directions from around her bright little eyes, the primitive black prongs, like rows of spiders’ legs, were both protective and threatening.”

Joan Fontaine was in a foul mood when he arrived at her New York apartment. He could do nothing right: he sat in the wrong chair; he wanted too much of her time; he asked the wrong questions about her films. When he finished the drawing — gave up, really, rather than completing it — he grasped the totality of the fiasco. “It’s not right,” she stated. A moment later, “moving away after a pause, she then said, almost casually but with a deadly edge, “In fact, I loathe it.”

As he quickly packed his materials to leave, she added “in a final, toneless voice, ‘I wish you would destroy it.’ ” She hustled him to the elevator in her most imperious manner, and her parting words, uttered with murderous finality, were, “Don’t leave anything of yours behind.”