The Nasty Prose Behind the Pose

Everyone knows he can draw, but who knew Don Bachardy had such a wicked way with words? The portrait artist has spent his life sketching legends of our time--film stars, authors, artists, politicians. It turns out that what he wrote about them in his diaries is as intriguing as the drawings.

Ginger Rogers’ hair was a “wig of thatch,” her false lashes like little “rows of spiders’ legs.” Henry Fonda’s home decor was like a “a fancy Mexican restaurant.” And Mia Farrow, with “one of her endless array of children” in tow, was “obsessed with the image of herself as Mother,” Bachardy confided to his journal.

And poor ailing, reclusive Louise Brooks, who reluctantly welcomed the artist into her digs. Her thanks is Bachardy’s written record of what he saw and heard when she excused herself and forgot to close the bathroom door.

Of course, Farrow, Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Maggie Smith, Nancy Reagan and the hundreds of others who sat for him for two hours at a tilt--and got nothing but a thank you in return--had not the slightest clue that sitting for Bachardy meant they were also sitting ducks. They had no idea that after each session, he rushed to his diary to disgorge uncensored thoughts on how each behaved and looked.

“My goodness, it all sounds very mean,” Bachardy, 65, says in a conversation at his Santa Monica house, sounding almost as if he hadn’t written all those nasty words himself. Relaxing, cross-legged on a well-worn sofa, he is a slight, unimposing, middle-aged man with a kindly, almost elfin presence. It is his voice that defines him: an unusual simulated British stammer, delivered in an oddly resonant tenor.

“You must understand,” he says “that those words were lifted . . . ahh . . . directly from my . . . ahh . . . diaries. And when writing a diary . . . ahh . . . one allows oneself brutal frankness. One tries to be completely observant, to leave nothing out.” Besides, he says, “it never occurred to me that I would ever consider publishing them.”

Well, now he has. Bachardy’s new book, “Stars in My Eyes,” (University of Wisconsin Press) features portraits of mostly Hollywood types, along with the diary jottings made after he drew them. An exhibition of his work opened Thursday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills.

The book and show represent only the tiniest sliver of the artist’s extraordinary life--a life in which diaries have played a crucial role.

Bachardy’s journals, the house in which he lives, in fact the author-artist himself, have all become a part of the cultural history of Los Angeles. He will always be remembered as one-half of a socially pioneering pair--as the companion of author Christopher Isherwood, who loved and lived with Bachardy for more than three decades.

Isherwood had kept diaries for years before they met. The importance of doing so was one of the first things the author taught Bachardy when the two met, fell in love and moved in together in 1953. Bachardy was 18, Isherwood 48.

It was an unlikely match in ways other than age. Isherwood was a distinguished English author who had come to L.A. to write screenplays. Most famous for his Berlin stories (which formed the basis for the stage and film versions of “Cabaret,”), his closest chums were other great English writers such as W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, whom he had known since Cambridge University days, and European writers who had settled here, such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Aldous Huxley.

Hollywood moguls were eager to mingle with a literary light like Isherwood, and they invited him everywhere. And Bachardy, a handsome Southern California beach kid, tagged along.

In those years, the word gay meant happy. The word “homosexual” was whispered as if it were profane. So when the revered Isherwood began turning up with the baby-faced Bachardy in tow, pillars of the community were not amused.

“Many who revered Christopher as a distinguished author didn’t want to face the fact that he was homosexual. So they tried to put responsibility for his queerness onto me. Of course, neither of us really cared.”

With Isherwood’s encouragement (and his funds), Bachardy, who had been drawing since he was 4, went to art school and began to do portraits of their large and growing group of famous friends.

The couple partied at the homes of George Cukor and Jennifer and David Selznick, where “often it seemed like every major star in Hollywood was there. Of course I was goggle-eyed most of the time.”

Slowly, Bachardy’s work became respected in the art community. His drawings (in pencil, ink or acrylic wash) are now in permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

The house they shared--a small, comfortable place nestled into the hillside overlooking Santa Monica canyon and the Pacific beyond--became a happy haven for guests of all ages and artistic stripes. Artist David Hockney, a close friend, immortalized the couple’s well-worn, twin wicker chairs in his portraits of the pair. They became the first gay partners to appear in the “Couples” section of People magazine. Not a literary coup, but a pop culture signal, unintentionally achieved after years spent advancing their cause merely by being unashamedly and devotedly together. They cut a swath through Los Angeles life that wove together the city’s literary, cinematic, and social strands.

Author Armistead Maupin, a friend of both, said by phone this week “they amused each other intensely and amused the rest of us. Because of their tremendous love, they became the great inspiration of my generation. Their lives were the greatest ad for gay liberation anyone could imagine. They had such a good time.”

The romance lasted 33 years, with both writing in their diaries daily, until Isherwood was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 1986, at 81, with Bachardy at his bedside doing hundreds of deathbed drawings “in order to stay sane.”

Isherwood’s diaries helped Bachardy through his grief. “It seems remarkable, thinking back, that all the years we lived in this house, I always knew where his diaries were, and it never occurred to me to sneak a look. We had decided we mustn’t give each other access to our diaries because that would make us self-conscious about what we wrote about each other,” Bachardy says.

“I started reading the night he died, at first very slowly. It took me months, and it was the most amazing experience, because it was the perfect antidote to the state I was in emotionally. Imagine how I felt when I came across passages addressed to me. ‘Don, I know you are going to be reading this after I’m dead.’ It was like real communication with him. After I finished his diaries, I thought it was time to read my own. I’d never done that before, just wrote them and put them away. And of course I came to all kinds of passages that discussed events he had discussed in his diaries. It occurred to me only then that he would never get to read my diaries, and that made me very sad, because I know they would have made him laugh, and made him happy.”

On Feb. 14, 1960, Isherwood wrote in his diary: “What shall I write about Don after seven years. Only this . . . he has mattered, and does matter more than any of the others. Because he imposes himself more, demands more, cares more--about everything he does and encounters. He is so desperately alive.”

Diaries--both his own and Isherwood’s--have continued to absorb the artist. As executor of Isherwood’s estate, Bachardy first set about finding a suitable editor for the author’s copious volumes of journals, eagerly anticipated by scholars. He was determined to ensure that none of the entries would be changed to protect those who are living, or shortened to make publishers happy.

The first volume of Isherwood’s diaries was published in 1986, to rave reviews. The second of three projected volumes has just hit bookstores, to less favorable response.

After a lengthy bidding war, Bachardy selected the Huntington Library in San Marino as the repository for Isherwood’s archive, which included the diaries, and “mounds of very valuable papers, including original manuscripts given to him by Auden and others.” Bachardy’s papers will go there, too, he says. Bachardy hasn’t stopped traveling, drawing, entertaining friends and writing about them in his diary. He does it all with gusto, he says, yet still thinking about his departed partner. He hopes to start an Isherwood Foundation, which would secure their house “as a place for young writers and perhaps artists to come and live and work on their projects.”

And now doesn’t he worry that some people mentioned in his new book might take offense? “Absolutely not,” he counters in an impish tone. “If anyone dislikes what I wrote, he or she is perfectly free to run right home and write all the nasty things they can think of about me.”