Face to Face With Don Bachardy : In His Studio, One Can Learn a Lot by Sitting for Hours, Perfectly Still

It’s an April morning, damp with pearly, luminescent fog that’s bound to wear off by 10 o’clock. You’re going to get your portrait painted today by Don Bachardy, the man who painted Gov. Jerry Brown’s official picture, the one that scandalized the Legislature. It got stuck off somewhere above an obscure staircase in the Statehouse. Don Bachardy, who lived with British writer Christopher Isherwood for more than 30 years (they were the first same-sex pair ever covered in the “Couples” section of People magazine). Isherwood, who dined with Virginia Woolf and learned from E. M. Forster and palled around with Stephen Spender and collaborated with W. H. Auden. Bachardy, who’s painted Forster and John Gielgud and Marlene Dietrich and Jon Voight and Dorothy Parker and Ginger Rogers and Teri Garr and Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne and every other living being worth painting and this morning--in the first of three sittings--is painting you. Actually, me.

It doesn’t have to be written that on this day my hair looks like Elsa Lanchester’s (whom he also painted, of course), that strange puffy circles seem to be occurring not just under my eyes but all over my face, that my wrists and ankles seem to be swelling with some strange toxemia--the body gone berserk, the body out of control. What else should be happening? I wear a plain blue linen top and a locket from my grandmother (and, stupidly, a skirt with a pattern).

I drive down the coast, the Pacific a sullen deep blue. Turn into Santa Monica Canyon. Get lost. Get lost again. Get on the right street, get lost again . And, with trepidation, go down a driveway, find a white-painted wooden gate, ring a bell.

There’s a scrambling on the stairway, and the door opens. Bachardy grins; his hair catches in the breeze. He speaks, with a slight and very elegant stammer. (Isherwood 50 years before wrote of a Cambridge don who stammered very slightly, just because he liked the sound of it.) “M-may I get you something? Juice, or some tea?” We’re still on the stairs. He points me into his studio, a two-level, verandaed building on the left; then he clatters down more stairs to the right and into the house for tea.

The studio! It hugs a slippery canyon wall. One side is all glass windows, with a perfect view down the gorge to the toy cars on the highway and then to the sea. Below us, a dinky patio is smothered by ivy, nasturtiums, succulents, some of those purple flowers that grew in everybody’s backyard 40 years ago--and the smell of ocean, gasoline, wet stucco, grass, fog burning off: all Southern California in one sniff. As you look to the ocean there are dozens of eyes, Christopher Isherwood’s eyes, burning--cornflower blue--into your back. After Isherwood’s death in January, Twelvetrees Press asked Bachardy to prepare a retrospective of all the paintings he’s done of his friend. From three walls, Isherwood stares at you or away from you: Here he’s in pen-and-ink, looking away; here he reclines on a pale, watercolored sofa pillow; here he has stars for eyes; here he stares from a turquoise background and pale orange aura; here, in a dazzling combination of love and truth, he snores like an old guy, his mouth gaping. (The last time I saw Isherwood he was standing at a Bachardy exhibit, dressed in a natty tropical suit, rosy with health and good humor, posing just underneath that “sleep” portrait. “I’m still here!” was his silent message then. “Don’t believe everything you see!”)

Bachardy is back, holding a glass cup of tea with the bag still in it. “I’m sitting you here, Carolyn,” he says, and sticks me in a chair with a pillow on it, facing the ocean. Then he fiddles with a gadget that looks like a rocking horse without the horse, a bicycle without the wheels. It holds an easel and a seat, and Bachardy sits on it, poking about in his paints, sighing, breeze whiffling through his hair. “Just, uh, get comfortable,” he says.

And I don’t remember him saying anything else. How does one know that one is supposed to sit still, still, still , and look into Bachardy’s eyes? One knows , that’s all. Why waste this man’s time? Everything, the air here, speaks of work getting done.

So you look out at the ocean. The fog is rising. The dew evaporating. The air thickens and sparkles. Your feet go immediately to sleep. You made a terrible mistake arranging your left hand the way you did. Your neck stiffens. The blood leaves your head. You notice yourself breathing and try to breathe shallowly, or wait until he looks at your skirt to breathe. All your skin itches. Bachardy looks over his bifocals at you and dips his fine brush in ink--actually, this first sitting is for a black-and-white drawing--addresses it to the pad, fixes you with his eyes again. You begin to get that scrabbly feeling in your chest. The edges to everything in the room, and the glowing, sun-drenched world outside, begin to blur and glitter. The morning’s happening behind Bachardy! Still, you’re locked into his eyes, and vice versa. It’s like the ‘60s, when you’d play those eye games with mirrors; the mirror showing you your own face, the slot in the mirror revealing the eyes of the person beside you; the point of the game being that we’re all one human, we’re all one soul; the rest of the stuff is just decoration. And this sitting still, this election to stay motionless, like a lizard on a rock, while the world begins to thrum about you, the scrabbly feeling in your chest, the sound of your brain going nuts, the feeling of being connected, not just to Bachardy in the present but--through Isherwood looking over your shoulder and Forster looking over his shoulder and Samuel Butler looking over his shoulder and maybe John Donne--to the past, and also the future--well, it’s too much. Your eyes well up with tears, which trickle down into your nose and the back of your throat. You can’t swallow, and you can’t sniff, and you can’t move your arms to get a Kleenex, so for God’s sake, Carolyn, get a grip! You wait like a snake until Bachardy dips his brush into the ink and moves to dab it on the paper. You sneak a glance at your watch. Twelve minutes have passed. Three hours and 48 minutes to go. At least.

One thinks about where one is. Isherwood wrote that the minute he saw Los Angeles he knew it was home. That when he saw Santa Monica Canyon he knew he was home. That when he and Bachardy slept, their souls mingled. (Well, love makes even the most meticulous stylist a little bit corny.) Why, though, if you’re a British novelist with a fine European reputation, pick Los Angeles to live in, even though you’re trying to avoid World War II? It’s easy to postulate that Isherwood’s artist’s eye, in the beginning of the ‘50s, saw this sleeping city as a place where things were going to happen.

Take, for instance, the public high school, John Marshall, which had as a recent alumnus Caryl Chessman, who would be executed for, among other things, sexual excesses performed in the old neighborhood, though afterward, it is said, he asked the girl to “go steady.” And, standing remote and oversized on a bench in the Glee Club picture, Odetta Felius, who would soon become plain (famous) Odetta, and Jackie Joseph, who would be the charming Audrey Plant in the very first “Little Shop of Horrors,” and Julie Newmeyer, who would become Julie Newmar, the sexy celebrity-dancer, and Paul Sanchez, who would become actor Paul Sand, and , standing tiny and cherubic in Ms. Weintraub’s homeroom picture, Don Bachardy, raised in Atwater, but who would live in a larger world.

Bachardy lived in a “small frame house where this beautiful tree in the front yard really gave the place its character.” He grew up in a life where--even more than for most of us--reality was one thing, and fantasy another. In real life, his mother was shy, beautiful and lame; his dad worked the swing shift at Lockheed. On those nights, Glade Bachardy would take her two sons, Ted and Don, out to the movies--to the Alex in Glendale, or to Hollywood. “My life really was the movies,” Bachardy says. “I was a moviegoer in every sense; I was quite advanced, sophisticated even. I loved grown-up pleasures. And the city was quite free then. I could go down by myself at night, see a first-run movie and come home. There was no danger then.”

Then, one night in October, 1952, Ted, “who was quite a man of the world--he prided himself on that,” took his younger brother along to the tag end of a dinner party where the 48-year-old Isherwood was a guest. “Chris had been drinking through the evening, and I certainly didn’t know how to drink--I remember that somehow we broke a pane of glass. I was, well, I got out of there as soon as I could, and I thought I’d never see him again. In a few months my brother took me”--and the outsider wistfully wonders how those boys made that fateful Atwater jump--”over to Chris’ house for breakfast. He’d made scrambled eggs with mushrooms. Canned mushrooms. You know how teen-agers are. I couldn’t eat them! I made a pile of them at the side of my plate! But then we went to the beach, right here, where we are now, at the mouth of the canyon. And, well, we had a wonderful day, and we said, ‘Let’s do this next Saturday!’ That was Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 1953, and we were together from then on.”

It wasn’t easy. Don, though he was 18, looked 12. To be together the way they were was a felony: “People have told me since then that when they met me for the first time, they thought I was really a child .” Friends helped them be together, but it was difficult. Mrs. Bachardy was supportive, but Isherwood and Don’s father would not meet for 15 years.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1956--”I was 22 then, and realized that I had to be something more than Chris’ pretty young friend”--that Bachardy began to “be” an artist. The young man who had begun his career at age 4 painting pictures of Alice Faye from 8x10 glossies was sent by Isherwood to study at the Slade School in London. It was in that city that he had his first show. “It was a very good gallery, but I was young and only had the downstairs room. At the opening, Forster came, and Maugham, and Gielgud, and they went straight downstairs through the main show to see my work. The other artist was very displeased.”

From the beginning there were strict boundaries to Bachardy’s work. He painted only people: “The more I do, the more appetite I have for it. I’ve invented myself as an artist--I can look at people now in a way I never dreamed, and I’m sure all that . . . appetite came from the movies.” And from the beginning, Bachardy painted celebrities: “In 1960, Tony Richardson needed some crude drawings for ‘A Taste of Honey.’ I ended up doing the drawings, and then the entire cast. In 1962, I did a series of studies of Dorothy Parker. I thought, it had to be the celebrities, because I didn’t deserve the attention. It wasn’t until 1969 that I began to be taken seriously in the art world. I was still doing people, when Abstract Expressionism was it , you know. But I began to trade works with people like Billy Al Bengston and Ed Ruscha. Chris, every step of the way, cared passionately.”

THE FIRST DRAWING IS FINISHED. I LOOK like a nice tank with a head on top. “I’m not terribly satisfied with this,” Bachardy says, “but we’ll do more.” I take the time to stretch and breathe as deeply as I can. We go into the house where, a year before, I’d come to talk to Isherwood about a scholarly paper. “I don’t know what to say--I’m scared,” I’d said. Isherwood, his hands clamped on his knees, his ankles swathed in bright red socks, had said, “We’ll sit here until you decide what to say,” and looked into the middle distance. That day Bachardy broke a bottle of champagne on the kitchen floor. To put the desperate interviewer at ease? I’ll never know.

By now the sun is somewhere near 1 o’clock. Bachardy brings out acrylics. “If you want to move after I’ve finished your eyes, it’s really all right.” But it’s not, and he knows it and I know it. “The people I paint are really going through an ordeal, and it’s the ordeal I’m painting as much as anything else.” As the light turns a bright, after-school yellow, Bachardy tells a few tales out of school. “Only two people that I’ve ever painted felt it necessary to keep smiling for all those minutes, those hours--Janet Gaynor and Ginger Rogers. That tells more about willpower than spontaneity, or smiling. And Marlene Dietrich resisted me. She knew how to disappear. It was a slight sort of a shimmer, and then she was gone. Just as I . . . she had this uncanny instinct. She was resisting me. And Jerry Brown--he coped with it all by removing himself, so that at times I felt I was painting his bodily remains. He simply put himself right out of the room.”

Which is the time to say that the next picture I see of myself is of a vulgar Irish waitress, offensively perky. May I take your order please? is the message of that portrait. How could my maternal grandmother, of good Protestant family, have run off with that indigent Irishman? But there it is, in the portrait. “Could you,” I venture, “uh, I’m a writer, uh. . . .” Many people, Bachardy says, love his work until he paints them .

On a third day of sitting, a photographer comes to record this process. “I’m putting you on the bed today, Carolyn,” Bachardy says. When Bachardy paints in acrylics, he paints standing up, and after the first half hour or so it turns into a kind of dance. He looks, he dabs, he puts the paint on the surface, he stands back, he looks, he does an almost-dance step, cocks his head, makes a face, then looks again, goes through the same procedure. My feet fall asleep instantly this time, and I have to think consciously of Isherwood to keep my shoulders from tensing. Think how many times he sat for this man. Did he bitch about it? Of course not.

The trick is to get “yourself” to come up and live in your eyes so that he can grab what he sees and get it, and put it on paper so that we can all go home and take a nap. I know by now there’s no point in “looking” a certain way, because he’ll just paint that and I’ll be far more embarrassed than if I’d come clean in the first place.If you put up defenses or any one of your many “acts,” he gives you a chance to look at those. When someone takes the time to look at you, he or she can see everything--at least if you’re sitting still.

On the day of the photographer, then, I concentrate as hard as I can. I try to remember--without moving to take notes--that during the other days I thought that Bachardy danced like a mongoose as he moved. That there’s something in the sitter that does not want to be disturbed. That more than anything else it reminded me of octopuses off the coast of Mazatlan that did not want to be pried off their rocks and eaten for dinner; that they tried everything: looking furious, looking invisible, changing color, holding on for dear life, but no matter what they tried, once the skin diver had made his choice, they ended up in the soup pot. All this as the blood ebbs and explodes around my body and the photographer clicks clicks clicks clicks, drops a roll of film, stumbles, clicks clicks, Bachardy sticks his brush into a cup of tea and swears, the phone rings and is not answered. For the second painting the photographer watches with a bemused smile and hardly clicks at all. “I want to say,” she tells Bachardy later, “that you’ve taught me a lot about vulnerability today. There’s no point in not being vulnerable, because you miss so much.”

The two red portraits from that third day weren’t the ones I ended up buying. One looked furious (and a little too much like my mother for comfort), and the other looked goofy. Both had what my ex-husband called “that glaring eye.” If you want to look beautiful you don’t go to Bachardy for a portrait. There are those who say that he treats his men-as-subjects more kindly than his women, but Bachardy denies it: “I think that making women prettier than they are is a kind of reverse discrimination,” he says. “I think it’s a form of unkindness.” And looking through his stacks of portraits you see men enough with flabby stomachs and purple jowls and eyes full of anguish and defeat.

So I ended up picking another one altogether. My hair’s not combed in it, but that’s the breaks. The “glaring eye” is there, but I had done the best I could that day to keep thinking about my novels, and I delude myself that this one looks “visionary,” while in the others I’m plain crazed. At least the lady in this one doesn’t ask if you want cream in your coffee and butter on your baked potato.

Not everybody is crazy about it. A man I used to go out with said, “He took your birthmark and smeared it around all over your face.” I took that to be sour grapes. A younger couple stood in front of the picture and chanted things like “What a scam!” “How can the guy charge money for that?” “Do you know he tosses those things off in a couple of sittings? He even took in the governor!” “Well, that’s California for you!” I wanted to say, “Look . If it’s good enough for John Gielgud and Marlene Dietrich, it’s good enough for me.” I wanted to say, “I’d pay the money just for the privilege of sitting in those white rooms, by the ocean, watching dew evaporate, hearing time thunder by.” What I guess I did say was, “Would you like coffee with your dessert? Decaffeinated?” The considerate waitress to the end.

“Love is unconditional.” So said Don Bachardy, talking about that picture of Isherwood as an old man--thousands of miles and decades of time away from the young artist who wrote “The Berlin Stories,” but still “himself,” sound asleep. “If you love someone, you must love all of him. If not, you’re in for some unpleasant surprises.”

BACHARDY IS 51 NOW, THREE YEARS OLDER than Isherwood was when they met. There were, Bachardy says, a few rocky times. “I tested him in every way I could. But he was determined that we should stay together. He passed every test.” Fifteen years into the relationship, Bachardy says, it dawned on him that this was, in a sense, it . Neither of them was going anywhere. Isherwood died at home. In the last weeks, Bachardy painted only him.

Now he spends days reading the voluminous journals Isherwood left, but reading backward, into the past. Today Bachardy has gotten to Caryl Chessman’s execution: “Chris and Phyllis Kirk went up to San Francisco to see Gov. Brown, to see if they couldn’t change his mind. Capital punishment for a sexual crime is a horror. The governor wouldn’t see them.” That would be Jerry Brown’s father, of course, and Bachardy just a lad.

If this is about art and immortality, it’s also about history, about time passing. Bachardy’s hair is silver. And--just asking--what about all those portraits that don’t get bought? The artist sends, as a courtesy, an 8x10 glossy of the first ink drawing to everyone who sits for him. Some of the paintings he donates to charity auctions. Thus, you may end up looking pained, crazy, purple or goofy in someone else’s living room. Or, more ignominiously, you may find yourself part of a Bachardy pentimento, a being clamoring under someone else’s acrylic rendering, trying to get out.

What about Don Bachardy, now that he’s living alone for the first time? Is he hopeful? Does he have plans? Up in the studio with the sun streaming in and the birds singing furiously with a lot of good work going on, he seemed fierce, insouciant, incapable of defeat. Here in this small, clean, California kitchen, he seems more like the “real” Don; his father’s son, his mother’s son. He drinks tea, looks straight at me. “I’m OK, Carolyn. It doesn’t seem to me I have an alternative. I’ve said all along I was going to be all right, and I am.”