A bohemian and his kind

He abandoned a sexually decadent Berlin and an unsettled Britain to come to a bright city full of churchgoers, orange groves and beach boys. But those extremes were on the point of convergence. During the nearly 50 years that Christopher Isherwood was to spend here, Europe embraced Southern California styles transmitted by Hollywood, and Los Angeles grew closer to Europe both culturally and intellectually.

Most readers still know Isherwood as the man who wrote the stories that became “Cabaret.” To many observers, however, he also presided over the transformation of his adopted hometown from a sleepy burg with Westside lima bean fields and a folksy, Midwestern tone to a cosmopolitan metropolis with powerful ambitions.

“Christopher Isherwood was the strongest voice among those European emigres who forever changed the culture of Los Angeles, took it into the world, made it the least provincial of American cities,” Joan Didion said when the Huntington Library acquired his literary archives five years ago.

Isherwood’s place as a gay pioneer and an early convert to the New Age movement remains better known than his role in the city where he arrived in 1939 and died in 1986. But this summer, an exhibit at the Huntington marking his 100th birthday with the first public display of items from his 4,500-piece archive is casting a new light on that role. An accompanying music festival, beginning Saturday, will feature works by some composers he knew and others he admired. And a huge new biography, a dozen years in the making, will shortly be published in the U.S. Together, they help illuminate a charming, prickly writer who acted as a magnet for European exiles and a nucleus of L.A.’s mid-century bohemia.

COMING TO AMERICA

Isherwood and poet W.H. Auden met as schoolboys and became lifelong friends and literary collaborators. In January 1939, fleeing a Europe on the verge of war and pursuing their own curiosity, they sailed across the Atlantic to New York City. Both faced accusations, which persisted for decades, that they’d betrayed their homeland.

Isherwood was already famous for the short fiction that would later be collected as “The Berlin Stories.” They told of the shadowy, effete Mr. Norris and the desperately high-spirited Sally Bowles with an understated, detached style rich in metaphor and controlled wit.

But as Auden settled into New York and began major work there, Isherwood stalled. “There is much that is majestic but nothing that is gracious about this city,” he wrote.

So that May, Isherwood boarded a Greyhound bus and headed for L.A., interested in writing for the movies and visiting his friends Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, writers involved in Eastern religion at the Vedanta Center on Ivar in Hollywood.

Isherwood’s first view of L.A. was not encouraging. He landed in downtown L.A., which he called “the ugliest city on earth. It was a Saturday night, and the streets were swarming with drunks. We saw three sailors carrying a girl into a house, as though they were going to eat her alive.”

Isherwood was more comfortable with the stuccoed bungalows of Hollywood, a flowering city where “the architecture is dominated by the vegetation.”

“The whole place is like a world’s fair, quite new and already in ruins.... On the hill, giant letters spell ‘Hollywoodland,’ but this is only another advertisement ... for a city which doesn’t exist.” He rented an apartment on Franklin.

“He’d been wandering for much of the ‘30s,” says Huntington curator Sue Hodson, “looking for himself and a place to perch. He was most productive when he was an outsider. It put him a little bit on edge. If he felt too much at home, he couldn’t write.”

Isherwood had loved the movies since boyhood. “He came here hoping to meet three people: Chaplin, Garbo and Mickey Rooney,” recalls Don Bachardy, Isherwood’s partner for more than 30 years, who still lives in the Santa Monica Canyon house where they moved in 1959.

Soon after he arrived in Los Angeles, Isherwood did meet Chaplin and Garbo, and he went on to form close friendships with them. He didn’t meet Rooney until both were old men, but he did spend many afternoons standing outside the actor’s MGM’s sets, hoping for a glimpse.

“He thought [Rooney] was wildly sexy,” recalls Bachardy, 70, a draftsman and painter whose home is filled with David Hockney canvases. “Chris loved his energy.”

Isherwood, in short, didn’t scorn Hollywood, unlike many literary authors who fell into its grip. “He always laughed at New York writers who’d come here to write scripts and say, ‘I’m whoring myself,’ ” Bachardy says. “He always thought that was amateur and unprofessional. He said [screenwriting] gave him lots of help with his novel writing.”

During the ‘40s and ‘50s, Isherwood worked at MGM on contract and as a freelancer. (His few produced credits include “Rage in Heaven,” with Robert Montgomery and Ingrid Bergman, and “Diane,” with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner.) He returned to London and his native county, Cheshire, from time to time to visit friends and family, but he demonstrated almost no homesickness.

“He simply couldn’t understand other British friends who’d come here to escape the war and longed for the old country,” the painter says. “He thought it was absolutely unintelligible.”

ASPECTS OF A LIFE

The Huntington show, though fairly small, covers most aspects of Isherwood’s life in Los Angeles with a selection of letters, photographs, drawings, even a complete draft of the novel “A Single Man,” which many critics regard as his best.

The letters, drawn from the 2,500 in the archive, are especially revealing. They include a note of praise from Truman Capote after he read “A Single Man,” one from Tennessee Williams describing a New York gay bar, an oddly tart message from J.D. Salinger about Hinduism and meditation (and a hope they “could have a talk somewhere near Hollywood -- like New York, for example”), and a letter from E.M. Forster about publication of Forster’s novel “Maurice.”

There’s also a letter from Auden, who complains of being “very dashed” that Isherwood didn’t like his book “The Sea and the Mirror,” now considered one of his triumphs.

Amid all this correspondence, Isherwood was becoming a key member of the European exile community that thrived on the Westside during the war years and after. Many of its members were spiritual or cultural seekers from Britain and Germany.

A number of these exiles refused to accommodate themselves to Southern California. Bertolt Brecht, for instance, who lived in Santa Monica during the 1940s, “embodied the outer limits of alienation” and dressed “as if he were living in a workers’ commune,” Kevin Starr writes in “The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s.”

But because Isherwood stayed the longest and embodied so many attributes that would become central to Southern California’s identity -- gay culture, Eastern religion and meditation, aesthetic modernism, the region’s Anglophilia, the glamour of the movies, the reinvention of self -- he generated a powerful homegrown cult that other exiles didn’t. It remains far easier to meet an Angeleno passionate about him than one fiercely loyal to, say, Thomas Mann.

In some ways, Isherwood remained intensely British -- he seems to have passed his accent and style of hospitality to Bachardy, who grew up in Florida -- but after a few years, English spellings began to disappear from his writing, and Bachardy mentions Isherwood’s fondness for American slang.

He also ventured outside the world of letters, as is demonstrated by the programming of the 2004 Southwest Chamber Music Summer Festival, eight concerts beginning Saturday and concluding Aug. 29. They will offer pieces by Isherwood friends Igor Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten as well as a nod to Isherwood’s Berlin years with a performance of Kurt Weill songs from “The Threepenny Opera.” There will also be music by Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Holst.

One of the author’s most intense L.A. friendships was with Stravinsky, who came here with his wife, Vera, after many years in Russia and France.

Isherwood and the composer were introduced by Huxley over lunch at the Fairfax Farmers Market. When they got together on a later occasion, Isherwood fell asleep while listening to one of Stravinsky’s pieces -- something that, oddly, endeared him to the composer.

“Going to their house for dinner was something we loved more than going anywhere else,” Bachardy remembers. “We were the only relatively nonmusical people there: We were almost the only people who Stravinsky saw who didn’t call him ‘maestro.’ That was a relief to him. He felt all the more relaxed that he didn’t have to talk music to us.”

The composer and novelist enjoyed Scotch and champagne, and when Stravinsky visited Santa Monica Canyon, he was entranced by watching Isherwood cook over an open flame.

“He was a very affectionate, very sweet and witty man,” Bachardy says. “We often heard stories about his aloof behavior in formal situations, how he frightened people with his grandeur. But with us he was very snug. And the food in that house was the best.”

Despite this friendship with Stravinsky, though, and one with Britten (who approached him about writing the libretto for “Peter Grimes”) -- along with some interest in Beethoven and Mozart -- Bachardy says Isherwood went to movies and theater far more often than to concerts. “There wasn’t a great deal of music played in the house,” he recalls, “because Chris felt words were music.”

Indeed, the appeal of a visit to the Huxley home -- first in the Palisades, then in a Neutra house on Kings Road and later on Mulholland Drive -- was talk. Isherwood “was so amazed by his erudition,” Bachardy says, remembering how the two of them would watch Huxley and Heard discuss politics and world events for hours at a time.

In his diaries, Isherwood describes the Huxley home in Pacific Palisades: “The walls are hung with semierotic, fetishistic pictures of ‘cruel’ ladies in boots, and with romantic photographs or nudes. The lighting is dim and sexually inviting -- like an old-fashioned Berlin night spot.”

Huxley himself, the author wrote, was “modest, gentle and kind” and swam across the room “like a great, blind deep-sea fish.”

Many of the exiles attended the legendary Sunday afternoon gatherings of screenwriter Salka Viertel, among them Thomas Mann. Isherwood described the “Death in Venice” author as looking “wonderfully young for his age -- perhaps because, as a boy, he was elderly and staid.... He would be magnificent at his own trial.”

The mix was so rich in Los Angeles in those years that Isherwood sometimes showed up at parties attended by both Garbo and philosopher Bertrand Russell. (Walking with Garbo was like “going around with someone who is wanted for murder,” the writer noted in his diary.)

Bachardy enjoys telling stories about being asked to pick up “a young actress in Westwood named Audrey Hepburn” on their way to a party at the Huxleys’ Kings Road house, or of the ghostly Auden, who hated the sun, frowning on a Santa Monica beach in bright “swim trunks.”

Isherwood also became a famous host, entertaining visitors like Capote, who told Bachardy he’d be happy to fill in if the young artist fell out of favor; Britten; and of course Auden, who once wrote that heaven must have an English climate and who could never quite accommodate himself to California.

A DISCONNECT

UnLIKE the Huntington show, the new biography challenges the memories of many who knew Isherwood here.

Published last month in Britain and due in November in the States, Peter Parker’s 914-page “Isherwood: A Life” captures the novelist from many angles. Most British reviewers have praised the book -- the Spectator’s Philip Hensher called the author’s long life “the story of the 20th century” -- though some have assailed its length.

But there is a disconnect. Angelenos acquainted with Isherwood unfailingly talk about his charm and warmth. Carolyn See, the Westside novelist and critic, recalls bringing a UCLA student to interview the author for the Daily Bruin. “He almost changed sexual preference before my eyes,” she says of the young man. “He just fell under his spell. Isherwood was so seductive and charming.”

Similarly, James P. White, a writer and former USC professor who moved to Los Angeles to be near Isherwood and calls him a mentor, says every conversation he had with the writer was “witty and bright and interesting. Whenever he was at a dinner party or something, it sparkled.

“It wasn’t casual, meeting Chris,” says White, now executive director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, which offers grants to writers and will launch a journal this fall. “If you knew him, he affected you.”

But the biography shows an egotistical man who could be kind but also mocked his friends behind their backs. (Parker notes, for instance, that the author knocked acolyte White for his “incessant chattering.”)

“Prickly, solitary, self-sufficient, hard to handle and difficult to love,” John Sutherland concluded in the London Review of Books, referring to poet Stephen Spender’s description of the writer as “a cactus.”

Bachardy, who authorized the book and Parker’s access to Isherwood’s papers, has received a copy but doesn’t want to talk about it. White says the biographer “has strangled Chris.”

Parker, who first read “Mr. Norris Changes Trains” as an impressionable gay teenager, says he came into the project a longtime fan and aimed to render the truth as he found it.

“There’s some dismay over how Isherwood, who seemed charming and sunny in person, made a lot of vicious, even brutal, remarks in private,” he says from London. He judged the man “genuinely charming, but also strategically charming” and “a professional seducer.”

Still, those thrown by the biography can find vanity, bigotry and bitterness in Isherwood’s diaries or in “A Single Man,” a thinly veiled memoir with wonderful but eviscerating passages of comic cruelty. “His diaries were partly therapeutic,” Parker points out. “He was such good fun at parties because he got the bile out of his system in writing.

“I do think that among the Isherwood cultists, there are some who want to canonize him. He had a lot of good qualities, but he wasn’t a saint. And not everything he wrote was equally strong. If you’re a gay writer and you say that about a gay writer, there’s a sense that you’re letting down your side.”

A SOCIAL CIRCLE

Although Isherwood began several collaborations with local residents -- he and Charles Laughton started an adaptation of Plato’s Dialogues -- his relationship with the artists and intellectuals in L.A. was mostly social.

Nor did the writer and his exile crowd mix extensively within the larger Southern California outside the emigre circle. Their parties included few of the Midwest-born “folks” described by historian Louis Adamic.

Yet despite at least one period of what he termed “lost years” of obsessive drug use and sex, Isherwood wrote almost every day and produced not only novels and screenplays (another, with Terry Southern, was the 1965 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s bent and hilarious “The Loved One”) but also some well-received memoirs, including “My Guru and His Disciple.”

Even those who were hardest on him could not gainsay his limpid style. “Isherwood’s writing has the music of the old English fineness in it,” Alfred Kazin wrote. “It never presses or stammers; its correctness is implicit in its wit and it is always headed for the comic; he is a man who touches his language with affectionate brush strokes in exile.”

And even as Los Angeles’ flourishing bohemia headed underground in the ‘50s, when much of California drifted right and many exiles returned to Europe, slowly, under the surface, the city’s tone was changing.

Isherwood, according to Bachardy, rarely evangelized for Los Angeles to his out-of-town visitors, despite their predictable scorn. “For years, that kind of snoot from visitors -- New Yorkers, Londoners -- was fairly predictable,” he says. “Nowadays, I don’t hear it so much.”

It may be that Isherwood showed these skeptics, and the world, another side of the city.

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‘Christopher Isherwood:A Writer and His World’

Where: Huntington Library, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino

When: 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays

Ends: Oct. 3

Price: $6 to $15; under 5, free

Contact: (626) 405-2100

Also

What: Southwest Chamber Music Summer Festival at the Huntington

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday and next Sunday; July 31-Aug. 1; Aug. 14-15; Aug. 28-29

Price: $25 and $35

Contact: (800) 726-7147