Rebels in Paradise by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

Author:Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood in front of the double portrait of them painted by David Hockney

Photograph courtesy of Don Bachardy

Isherwood’s sexual inclinations could be gleaned from his books, especially Goodbye to Berlin, about his experiences during the Weimar Republic. It was later transformed into the musical and film Cabaret. Having rejected the upper-class upbringing of his parents by dropping out of Cambridge University, he moved to Los Angeles in 1939 with W. H. Auden, where he achieved his greatest success as a novelist and screenwriter. With friends Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Bertrand Russell, all prominent authors, he fell under the sway of Swami Prabhavananda. All wrote numerous articles about Vedanta but Isherwood wrote books on the subject, worked as the managing editor of the official publication of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, and later served on its editorial board with Huxley and Heard.

Isherwood was forty-eight when he met the sixteen-year-old Don Bachardy on Valentine’s Day, 1953. He had been infatuated with Bachardy’s older brother, Ted, but after Ted suffered a nervous breakdown, Isherwood was placed in the position of consoling Don. Their relationship continued until Isherwood’s death in 1986.

Isherwood took his young partner as his date to all of the Hollywood parties, a brazen gesture for the times. Bachardy recalled the wonder of being warmly welcomed as “the only queer couple” in the home of producer David O. Selznick and his actress wife Jennifer Jones, while confronting veiled hostility from actors Joseph Cotten and Henry Fonda.

Bachardy had been drawing portraits of movie stars from photographs kept in a scrapbook since childhood, probably inspired by weekly movie matinees with his mother. Raised in the suburb of Atwater, California, he was stunned to be dropped into the world of actual celebrities on one of his first dates. “I remember being in a restaurant in Hollywood called Naples with Chris. It was close to Columbia [Pictures] where they were making From Here to Eternity. After we’d been there a few minutes, the door opened and I saw Montgomery Clift come in. I said, ‘Chris, Montgomery Clift just came in.’ He turned around and we both watched Montgomery Clift come straight up to the table and say, ‘Hi Chris!’ I was absolutely awestruck. Chris introduced us and we talked for a few minutes and it was my first meeting with a movie star. Of course, I was thrilled to pieces.”28

By 1956, it was clear that Bachardy had the makings of a talented portraitist—he later shared models with Hockney—and Isherwood underwrote his education at Chouinard Art Institute. (In 1962, when he had an exhibition at the gallery of character actor Rex Evans, a critic wrote that Bachardy managed to “freeze personalities like Stravinsky and Dorothy Parker in off-guard moments in such a manner as to arouse uncommon interest.”)29

Bachardy was classmates with Ruscha, Goode, and Bell. “I was very shy and kept a low profile,” he recalled. “They were artists of their time doing abstract pictures. Ed Ruscha was already doing words. And here I was doing nothing but pictures of people.

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