Don Bachardy

Los Angeles, at the fulcrum of popular culture, has had an uneasy relationship with high art. Serious artists have often had an uncomfortable time in the movie capital. And colleagues on the East Coast and in Europe usually looked askance at cultural figures who settled in Southern California, even such well-established members of the intelligentsia as Igor Stravinsky and Aldous Huxley, who remained because they loved the setting, if not the movie industry.

One British intellectual who sought out the sunny clime and stayed was Christopher Isherwood, the writer whose “The Berlin Stories” first metamorphosed into the play “I Am a Camera,” then the musical “Cabaret.” As evident in his diaries, the first volume of which was published several months ago, Isherwood reveled in the mix of high and low culture that was his daily life in Los Angeles. He sits down to lunch with Huxley and Greta Garbo, or has a well-lubricated dinner with Dylan Thomas and Shelley Winters, and records it all with the same steady dispassionate hand.

At his side, from 1953 on, was Don Bachardy. They met when Bachardy was 18 and Isherwood was 48 and, though the age difference should have been overwhelming, remained together until the writer’s death from cancer, in 1986. Bachardy became a portrait painter of note who drew studies from life of many of the cultural and intellectual figures their lives intersected--everyone from Charles Laughton to Tennessee Williams, Montgomery Clift to James Baldwin, Rita Hayworth to E.M. Forster, Marlene Dietrich to John Ashbury. The National Portrait Gallery in London recently presented a show of his work--Bachardy says he has “always had much more attention as an artist in England than in L.A. or New York”--and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington then called him about mounting a similar show.

In a way, these portraits are a visual counterpart of his companion’s meticulous diaries, drawn with a similar discerning eye. “All of my pictures are done in one sitting and they’re all done on a specific day,” the trim, natty artist explains. “They are all signed and dated by the sitters. So it really is a visual equivalent of a diary. I can tell you who I was spending the day with, on any specific date, going back 40 years.”

Bachardy, now 63, still lives in the same Santa Monica house he and Isherwood moved into in 1959. From this hillside perch, the shy artist has seen the Southern California art world develop and flourish. He has also witnessed, close-up, Hollywood’s continuing fascination with and rejection of the world of serious art. There is a chasm, Bachardy says, between the visual world of the movie maker and the visual world of the artist. They should “assume they were coming from different planets,” Bachardy asserted in his clipped, mid-Atlantic accent, during a conversation in his art-filled living room earlier this week. After more than 40 years, he is still not sure how film and art fit together as pieces of the same cultural puzzle.

Question: Was there much contact between the intellectuals of Los Angeles, the writers and artists, and the Hollywood community?

Answer: The groups were pretty much closed off. Hollywood people, writers, actors, people in the business, more or less kept to themselves. And artists kept to themselves, and also the musicians. Chris and I--we had access to each of these worlds. But they weren’t mixed. It was the exception when people from the different worlds met each other.

Q: Why do you think that is?

A: It’s the nature of Los Angeles life. There doesn’t seem to be that kind of community spirit or the people who organize it. Because an awful lot of people who’ve lived here don’t feel a kind of identity with the place. They feel culture exists somewhere else--culture is in New York or London or Paris . . . .

I think it’s expressed by the destruction, again and again, of all kinds of architecture that would create a sense of place and history--the Chaplin studios, the destruction of MGM and the back lot. There seems to be no real appreciation of this place as any kind of historical site. It become so identified as the movie capital of the world that other artists who lived here seem to have gone underground.

Q: Is there something about how people in Los Angeles, those involved in Hollywood, think about art that overshadows serious artists?

A: Well, collectors here, even when they buy the works of Southern California artists--and they often don’t--they don’t buy the work here, necessarily. They go to New York to buy it. Even if there’s a show here, in a quite reputable gallery, somehow or other the serious pictures are going to be sold in New York.

. . . It seems self-deprecating of where one lives--to think that you go elsewhere for the serious art; for the serious consideration . . . . As though people felt guilty for living here. As if it’s a kind of pleasure spa and, for anything serious, one has to look elsewhere.

Q: But artists are more accepted when they leave town.

A: Oh, yes, it was so usual in the ‘60s and ‘70s for my young artist friends to feel that, when they achieved a little attention here, the next obvious career move was to go to New York and to establish residence there. That was the inevitable process of becoming a known artist: that you had to be taken seriously in New York. That Los Angeles was, at best, a preliminary.

. . . . It’s true, Ed Ruscha really has managed to be accepted on both sides of the country, and Diebenkorn . . . . But, for instance, Ed Moses had a period where he thought he ought to move to New York. It just turned out he hated it and came back here. That’s happened to a lot of L.A. artists.

Q: Are people in Los Angeles uncomfortable with serious art?

A: Well, for a long time, they had very little access to it. I remember in the ‘50s, it wasn’t easy to see good painting here. There wasn’t any kind of public collection in L.A. that was of very much interest, and there weren’t many visiting shows of good painting from any era. These days of crowded museums, where you have to wait on lines to get in, that’s all in the last 15 years. In the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, museums were empty here. Art as a tourist attraction is very, very recent.

Q: But you had people like the Arensbergs, important collectors of major art. And they couldn’t give their art away here.

A: They were major figures in L.A., but when it came time to unload that collection, it didn’t go to a Los Angeles museum. And I think he was very upset that whoever was bidding for the collection just really didn’t show enough interest. So finally it went elsewhere.

Q: They tried to give it to UCLA and they couldn’t get a building.

A: Yes. It seems more of that kind of attitude you were asking about earlier. Just a kind of indifference from the very people who live here . . . . I think Los Angeles people believe . . . this is a crazy place to live. That you can’t do serious work in a temperate climate. That you have to suffer for art. I mean, well, the naivete of it is too banal almost to speak of! Yes, I do think people have been programmed, psychologically programmed. And it still hangs on--even though this place is getting so big and busy, there is, deep down, still this sense of inadequacy in the people who live here. That, somehow, the big scene has to be taking place elsewhere.

Q: Yet, many cultural figures are here. Many important writers, including Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, have lived here and written for the movies.

A: Ah, yes. But so many of them have wailed about prostituting themselves. Chris had utter contempt for writers who put on that voice, saying, “Oh, I’m prostituting myself, I’m selling myself.” Whenever he had a movie job, he knocked himself out. He worked very hard and he always felt he learned a great deal about his own writing as a novelist from his experience as a movie writer. He claimed that he learned about construction from movie writing: how to construct a story, what is the progression of scenes, which is a very important aspect of screenwriting.

Q: But aren’t those comments part of what you were saying about a disdain for the place and a lack of sense of place?

A: Oh, yes, if you aren’t taken seriously in the place that you live, if there isn’t a community art scene in which the artists who live in the place are encouraged, then they begin to think, maybe they aren’t any good . . . . Even now, I don’t think there is a great deal of interest in the various museums in town in art that is done in this place. It seems far more shows of New York or European artists get featured. When an L.A. artist gets some kind of show, it’s grudgingly given.

Q: And in the film and art show at MoCA, there was an almost European attitude--

A: A totally European attitude. So flimsy. Really about very little. And so intensely European in its focus. Rather than get somebody who lives in the place, who knows about the interaction of movies and art, they bring in all this irrelevant art . . . . The premise is a little bit faulty: I don’t think there really has been all that much direct influence of the movies on artists. I’m not sure that they really go together. Dragging in the sets that [Salvador] Dali did for that Hitchcock film [“Spellbound”] that seemed to be really stretching it.

Q: Why don’t art and film go together?

A: They’re both essentially visual, but their approach has to be different . . . . If you’re an artist influenced by movies, by the time you’ve translated the movie influence in your work, it may not be discernible . . . .

I don’t think there really is that much direct interaction between the two. I’m probably more influenced as an artist by my moviegoing experience than most, because I was an avid moviegoer when I was a kid, and I think that’s where I developed all my interest in people, in faces--looking at those huge close-ups.

So I was profoundly influenced by movies. But that doesn’t mean the works I do as an artist necessarily divulge that.

Even when they’re of movie people--because I’ve repeatedly had the experience of having sittings with the people whom I’d been so impressed by in movies. It was fascinating. And, of course, it was very difficult. Because it was maybe 20, 25, 30 years later. So the people I’d loved as a child were already in middle age--or older. For instance, a portrait of Fred Astaire at 70 was difficult--because he didn’t look like Fred Astaire of the ‘30s, and I couldn’t pretend that he did. I had to draw him as I saw him. And he was helpless, too, because he couldn’t help expecting to see the Fred Astaire image instead of a 70-year-old man.

That’s tough. I often feel badly that I’m hurting the very people I adored, by being frank about how they look. But there’s no way around it. I can’t invent anything: Working from life means a devotion to what I see in life. I can’t fake it.

You see, Fred Astaire, when you think of him, you think of him with a big grin. Well, you can’t sit for an artist for an hour and grin at him. Some people have tried it--Ginger Rogers tried it. Of course, as soon as you force any kind of smile, it’s not a smile anymore. But she did smile for me--hour after hour after hour. I drew what I saw. But you look at the pictures, and you see it’s not really a smile, it’s almost a grimace of pain. And when you think of holding a smile for an hour or more, it is painful! That came out in the picture. So that upset her.

Q: So do you think movie people misunderstand the role of the artist?

A: So many of the collaborations between movie-maker and artists haven’t worked. For instance, an artist I admire enormously, Peter Alexander, he was hired to do artwork for “The Day of the Locust,” the [John] Schlesinger film. And I think that was very uncomfortable for both of them. They found, in the end, that they were at cross purposes. What Schlesinger imagined he wanted from Peter was something that Peter just saw quite differently . . . . It’s this thing I was saying earlier: of both being visual artists but approaching their visual concerns from totally different points of view.

Q: Yet, movie makers are people dealing with artists, making decisions about art. Should movie-making be looked upon as just another big business?

A: Yes. You know, maybe the expectation that two arts are or should be closely aligned is one of the difficulties. Maybe if an artist and movie makers, when they collaborated, assumed that they were coming from different planets, they might get on better. They might have more success in collaborating.

In fact, that was true between Peter and John Schlesinger. I think they both expected that, somehow, they would hit it off and understand each other right away--because they were both visual artists. But I think they had totally different concepts of what would be right for the film.

And movies about artists, for instance, has there ever been a good one? . . . Usually in a movie, just an incidental character is a painter. Then that awful moment arrives when we’re shown the painting he does! In that Hitchcock film, “Vertigo,” which is so much loved--when it gets down to that scene in the museum where we see the painting of Carlotta. My god, it’s awful! It’s a visual offense! Why is it that somebody as sophisticated as Hitchcock couldn’t get a better imitation of a painting that might seriously be hung in a museum? It looked like the cheapest kind of illustration.

But then, Chris felt the same way about writers in movies. Oh, the number of times I remember him laughing out loud at some actor sitting at a table, with his tie loose, surrounded by wadded paper on the floor. The cliche that always amused him was when a writer finally, after all kinds of difficulty, sits down at a typewriter, puts in a piece of paper and types the title of what he’s going to write. That always made us howl!