A Literary Lion and a Famous Flier

Among the European literary lions who once stalked the canyons and hillsides of Southern California--Aldous Huxley and Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann--the one who lasted the longest was the novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood. As late as 1986, the year of his death, the aging but still boyishly handsome Isherwood was still holding court in his lair, a Hockney-esque hillside house overlooking Santa Monica Canyon.

Isherwood is best remembered, when he is remembered at all, as the author of “Goodbye to Berlin,” the book that inspired the musical “Cabaret.” But the two dozen contributors to “The Isherwood Century: Essays on the Life and Work of Christopher Isherwood,” edited by James J. Berg and Chris Freeman (University of Wisconsin Press, $34.95, 296 pages), are seeking to restore Isherwood to what they regard as his rightful place in the literary pantheon.

“In contrast to such tormented and self-destructive American gay writers as Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams,” writes David Berman, “Isherwood provided a calm, sane and productive counter-example whose work was imaginatively rich, stylistically challenging, and politically and spiritually engaged.”

Significantly, Isherwood is celebrated in “The Isherwood Century” as much for his efforts to come to terms with his sexual orientation as for his work as a writer--he is praised as “a gay pioneer,” and the years he spent with the artist Don Bachardy are held up as “a model of a long-term gay relationship.” Indeed, at moments, the book presents itself as a series of belated eulogies by the artists and writers whom Isherwood had befriended and inspired.

“Our work now lies in what we can re-create of his life and influence,” writes Dan Luckenbill, one of Isherwood’s proteges, “or what he sparked us to do through his example of steady work and his bravery in coming out and living openly gay with Don.”

But “The Isherwood Century” also allows us to see his long and colorful life is an expression of the freedom to reinvent oneself that is the single greatest allure of Southern California. Isherwood came to Los Angeles at the outbreak of World War II as a pacifist in search of a safe haven and a writer in search of a studio job. He was drawn to the Hindu spiritual tradition known as Vedanta, attending talks by Swami Prabhavananda at his headquarters near Hollywood and Vine and going into retreat at the Ramakrishna Monastery in Trabuco Canyon. He worked as a scriptwriter at MGM and a lecturer at Los Angeles State College (now Cal State Los Angeles), where his students were treated to classroom visits by his famous friends--W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester.

“I am a camera with its shutter open,” goes a famous line from “Goodbye to Berlin”--Isherwood himself, as we learn here, referred to the same line as “that infamous sentence.” As the expatriate years lengthened into a lifetime, Isherwood turned from writing novels and plays to keeping diaries, and his later books--”Christopher and His Kind,” for example, and “My Guru and His Disciple”--are masterpieces of the literary and spiritual memoir.

The most successful of the essays in “The Isherwood Century” share the same sense of intimacy and immediacy. “Write it down, or it’s lost,” Isherwood once told James White, another of the contributors. That was his credo as a writer, and that’s exactly what has inspired those who knew Isherwood in life to recall him with such ardor so long after his death.

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If Christopher Isherwood is a gay icon, then Florence (better known as “Pancho”) Barnes is a purely heterosexual one. She was briefly but memorably depicted in “The Right Stuff” as the proprietor of the desert saloon where Air Force pilots hung out between record-setting test flights. But, as we discover in “The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes” by Lauren Kessler (Random House, $24.95, 305 pages), her real life as a flier was far richer and far more raucous than her 15 minutes of fame might suggest.

“Flying,” Pancho once exulted in a characteristic turn of phrase, “makes me feel like a sex maniac in a whorehouse.”

Born into a wealthy Pasadena family at the turn of the century, she succeeded in scandalizing polite society by, among other things, riding naked at midnight around the grounds of a horse show in Sacramento, running away from her convent school and heading south to Tijuana, and partying at her San Marino mansion and her Laguna Beach beach house with Hollywood celebrities--the parties were “more bacchanals than opportunities for industry networking,” as biographer Lauren Kessler puts it.

What set Pancho Barnes free and earned her a place in history, however, was her passion for flying at a time when anyone who took the controls of an airplane was something of a daredevil. As a barnstormer in the ‘20s, she billed herself as “the Pancho Barnes Flying Mystery Circus of the Air,” and she went on to work as both a stunt pilot and a test pilot. “More than anything,” Kessler writes, “Pancho loved to fly fast.”

When she fell on hard times in Hollywood, Pancho went into a kind of self-exile on a remote ranch in the Mojave Desert, where she supported herself by selling milk and meat to the sleepy little air base in nearby Muroc. But her history caught up with her when the base was turned into a combat training center during World War II, and her ranch turned into a watering-spot for fighter and bomber pilots. No longer young, and never really beautiful, Pancho Barnes became the object of adulation for the young women who drank her liquor, swam in her pool, and rode her horses out into the desert.

“She loved men, and she especially loved fliers,” explains Kessler. “They could tell her a dirty joke, and she would answer with an even filthier one.”

By the time the war ended and the space race began in earnest, Pancho--”the heiress who dressed like a ranch hand and cursed like a sailor,” as Kessler writes, “the woman who had flown open-cockpit airplanes in the old days when guts, not instruments, kept you in the air”--was already a living legend, and her ranch, dubbed “the Happy Bottom Riding Club,” was a California landmark.

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West Words looks at books related to California and the West. It runs every other Wednesday.