Chris & Don: A Love Story
Directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara
Seitgeist Films
IT HAPPENED on a typical day in sun-drenched Southern California in the early 1950’s. Two men met on the “queer” side of Will Rogers Beach in Santa Monica. It was, despite the setup, all rather innocent. Within two months, they would begin a fearless, challenging, and devoted romance that would last for the next 33 years. On that afternoon, in that moment, all could have been lost to history save for the fact that one of the men was 49-year-old Christopher Isherwood, already an accomplished author, and the other a captivating and spirited eighteen-year old, Don Bachardy, whose portraits of the celebrated and powerful would one day enchant the world.
Over a decade ago, Jim Berg and I began studying the Anglo-American writer Isherwood. It became immediately clear to us that to do justice to the American Isherwood, we would have to focus on both Isherwood and his longtime partner, Don Bachardy. In the introduction to our first book, The Isherwood Century, we included a section called “Chris and Don Alive,” in which we wrote that we hoped to provide readers with a “sense of Isherwood and Bachardy actively constructing their lives and work together.” There’s another part in the book called “Artist and Companion” that’s dedicated to both men and their collaborations. To introduce that aspect of the story, we wrote: “With few models to emulate, Isherwood and Bachardy developed their relationship as lovers, partners, friends, and collaborators. In spite of the notoriously homophobic environment in the Hollywood of the 1950’s, they insisted on defying the prevailing culture and lived their lives in the open.”
Jim and I are both thrilled to be included in the new documentary, Chris & Don: A Love Story, directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara.
One of the most favorably reviewed films of 2008, Chris & Don uses home movies from the 1950’s, interviews with Bachardy, commentary from friends and scholars, and even charming animation sequences to provide fresh views of these men, dubbed by Armistead Maupin as “the first couple.” Like most independent films, this one is a labor of love. Santi, who has known Bachardy for a long time, began contemplating a film on Isherwood and Bachardy years ago. For various reasons, it never got off the ground, until almost five years ago, when Santi teamed with Tina Mascara, a young filmmaker who also happened to be his romantic partner. Already an interesting dynamic emerges: a relatively new straight couple making a film about a great, long-term gay relationship. Part of the genius of the film is that it isn’t polemical. The filmmakers worked tirelessly, conducted many interviews, and raised some money. Who knew that they would finish the film, find the perfect distributor in Zeitgeist Films, and have it released just as the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage? The film’s essence is revealed in its subtitle: “A Love Story.” As reviewer Ernest Hardy noted in LA Weekly, “as confetti and champagne toasts greet the news, it might be a good thing for gays and straights to glean some lessons from Isherwood and Bachardy’s example: Make your own rules, set your own terms for connection, and be willing to let them evolve as you and your partner hopefully do.” The evolution of Chris and Don’s relationship is revealed in the ninety-minute film as we see fifty years pass before us. Because he liked Santi and Mascara—and because he was never quite convinced that a film would finally get made—Bachardy tried to be candid: “We were friends. I liked pleasing them. They got some great material from me.” He also gave them reels and reels of those amazing 16-millimeter home movies, which were in remarkably good condition. Having seen the film a dozen or more times, Bachardy has been moved each time, usually connecting to all that footage of the young couple in love: “Seeing what Chris saw of me through the camera lens is very moving to me.” He also loves “seeing Chris looking so beautiful, as he did when we first knew each other. That’s lovely.” Suffice it to say that there’s something here for everyone: a portrait of a longtime partnership that could never have been easy but turns out to have been worth it; a view of a kind of life that one can no longer really live; and all that astonishing footage of cultural luminaries from Igor Stravinsky and E.M. Forster and W.H. Auden (dancing around like kids with Isherwood) to 101 Dalmatians author Dodie Smith, complete with a dalmatian. A better film could scarcely have been fashioned out of this material. If there weren’t this kind of footage and millions of words of diaries to substantiate it, no one would quite believe the scope of the life Chris and Don shared. The filmmakers recreate the horror story of visiting Paul Bowles in Tangiers—when Bowles got the two men stoned on hashish and tried to come between them. One of the most amazing parts of the movie takes viewers to Key West with Tennessee Williams, Burt Lancaster, and Anna Magnani on location for The Rose Tattoo. That experience helped aspiring star Bachardy get over his hope of being in the movies: “like all extras, we were treated like cattle,” he laments. What Bachardy needed in the late 1950’s, as he was more than five years into this relationship with the much older and highly accomplished Isherwood, was a vocation. He found it in drawing and painting, and he began going to art school. Isherwood was the subject of much of Bachardy’s work and, most importantly, he was Bachardy’s biggest booster. In the film, Bachardy says that his father never wanted Isherwood to visit the family home, only half an hour away from Santa Monica in nearby Glendale. Furthermore, the elder Bachardy actively discouraged his son from pursuing a career in art, hating his son’s queerness. Add to that the close relationship Don had with his older brother Ted, through whom he met Isherwood, and the family complications for the young man are clear. Ted suffered from manic depression and schizophrenia, and young Don feared that he was like Ted. Isherwood’s diaries reflect that anxiety. A scene in which Don visits Ted (who has died since that scene was filmed) and takes him to see Capote is heartbreaking. At Bachardy’s first solo exhibit, which was in early 1960’s London, Chris felt a great pride. As the voice of Michael York reads from Isherwood’s diaries, we see some of the keys to this relationship: the older man acknowledges his role as mentor and father, and he owns up to the “egotism” of taking credit for the younger man’s success. What’s clear is the mutual recognition of the opportunity, the encouragement, and the love between them as the men began to work together more comfortably and more productively, notably during the last twenty years of their lives together. That period began just after the most difficult time—the infamous seven-year itch didn’t skip over Chris and Don. It was during that time that Don began to emerge as an artist in his own right—and began to see other men. It was also when Isherwood wrote his masterpiece, A Single Man (1964), his most overtly gay novel, in which protagonist George is approaching sixty and living in a cozy home in Santa Monica Canyon while grieving for his younger partner Jim, who recently died in a car crash. Isherwood allowed himself to use fiction to imagine life without Don. It wasn’t pretty, or particularly happy. However, as he noted in an interview with Carola Kaplan, he wasn’t George, exactly: “Being alone has not been my life experience, I’m happy to say. Therefore, perhaps I was loading the dice a bit, but I didn’t feel up to juggling a domestic homosexual relationship on top of all the other factors in the book. Just to sort of clear the decks a bit, I wanted to have George by himself.” The picture of George alone allowed Isherwood to contemplate losing Don, a possibility that broke his heart. As he’s quoted as saying early in the film, “Don may someday leave me, but I’d never leave him, unless he ceased to need me.” In an otherwise favorable review of the film in The New Republic, Stanley Kaufmann wrote that “though the picture offers a colorful, attractive portrait of Chris the man, it insufficiently celebrates his distinction as a writer.” To a point, of course, that’s true, but given the limits of time and space and the fact that this isn’t supposed to be about Isherwood the writer, the film does offer an overview of Isherwood’s career with well-chosen comments and examples. Perhaps most significant is the quotation from Isherwood’s diary from the spring of 1953, in which his burgeoning love for Don is coupled with his creeping dissatisfaction with fiction and his imaginative move toward nonfiction: “The lack of inclination to cope with a constructed, invented plot—the feeling, why not write what one experiences from day to day? And then … this sinking-sick feeling of love for Don … and the reality of that—so far more than all this tiresome fiction. Why invent—when Life is so prodigious?” The capitalization of Life in the diaries suggests the awe that Isherwood was experiencing that first, magical spring with his young lover. Isherwood went on to write his most important nonfiction book, Christopher and His Kind, in the mid-1970’s. The memoir is a retelling of the 1930’s, the years he immortalized in The Berlin Stories, but this time the tales are told without the guise of fiction. That book’s success—as Kate Bucknell says in the film, it was Isherwood’s best seller and readers lined up around the block to get his autograph—catapulted him and Bachardy into the forefront of the gay rights movement and made them celebrities after a fashion. Bachardy says, “We were made into speakers for the cause. We were professional personalities. We went public that way, but personally we were very much private and withdrawn—but we were always out as a couple. The community cheered us on and we felt obligated. It meant a great deal to our tribe and to the two of us. Chris was a wonderful public speaker—he gloried in declaring victory for our cause.” This partnership continued to grow and to help move forward the gay liberation movement. Isherwood and Bachardy always made clear in interviews that they were not a monogamous couple. They didn’t want to be seen as emulating a straight, conventional marriage. Relationships, as we all know, are complicated. Isherwood himself had an interesting view of how they work, which he described to Winston Leyland in 1973. Asked if his deep relationships have been “satisfactory and fulfilling,” Isherwood responded, The two men related to each other, throughout their relationship, with pet identities: “Dubbin” for the old horse, Isherwood; “Kitty” for the sometimes restless, feline Bachardy. The film’s animation sequences showing the two characters risk cuteness but achieve a sweetness and provide an interesting message about communication. During the couple’s tough times, especially when Bachardy spent time pursuing other men, Isherwood would ask him, “How was the mousing tonight?” That teasing softened the hard realities and allowed the men to talk to each other, getting through some of the deepest pain and insecurity of their enduring partnership. Bachardy sums up their lives together thus: References Berg, James J. and Chris Freeman. The Isherwood Century: Essays on the Life and Work of Christopher Isherwood. University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Berg, James J. and Chris Freeman, eds. Conversations with Christopher Isherwood. University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Hardy, Ernest. “Chris & Don: Opposites Attract.” LA Weekly, July 2, 2008. Isherwood, Christopher. Diaries, Volume One: 1939-1960. HarperCollins, 1997. Kauffmann, Stanley. “Matters of Fact.” The New Republic, July 9, 2008. Chris Freeman has co-edited (with James Berg): The Isherwood Century; Conversations with Christopher Isherwood, and Love, West Hollywood: Reflections Of Los Angeles. A contributor to this journal for over a dozen years, he teaches at the University of Southern California.
Fulfilling, yes. I’m a bit shy of the word “satisfactory.” It suggests that something has been delivered as ordered, according to specifications. … With love there ought to be a need to worry, every moment. Love isn’t an insurance policy. Love is tension. What I value in a relationship is constant tension, in the sense of never being under the illusion that one understands the other person. … You suddenly see a human being in all his magic ordinariness. And you know that you can never understand him, never take him for granted. He’s eternally unpredictable—and so are you to him, if he loves you. And that’s the tension. That’s what you hope will never end.
With Bachardy and Isherwood, certainly, it never ended. Even as Isherwood was dying, as shown in the film’s most poignant scene, Bachardy and he collaborated constantly for the last six months. Bachardy drew the ailing Isherwood every single day, sometimes nine or ten times. Then, on the day Isherwood died, Bachardy kept working, drawing the corpse of the man he’d spent his entire adult life with. As Don says, haltingly, in the film, “Chris would have been proud of me. He’d have said ‘that’s what an artist would do.’ And that’s what an artist did.”
I don’t take any credit for what’s happened to me in my life. It all seems fate—my destiny and Chris’s destiny. We were actually exactly what the other wanted and needed, whether we knew it or not. Well, Chris knew it. I didn’t for a long time. … I know that Chris would agree that the last ten years or so were our best—not the early years when we were younger and beautiful, but the later years when we really just enjoyed each other’s company and worked together in a variety of ways. It all just enhanced our basic unity—unity with each other, our harmony.
It is in witnessing this kind of relationship evolve that those of us who haven’t been in such long-term partnerships can imagine how two people might be able to make it work. Chris & Don: A Love Story shows us that even vast disparities in class, age, and life experience can melt away when two kindred spirits find each other.
