While Isherwood Was Off Writing…
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            Schreiber’s book interweaves three “portraits” of Bachardy: lifelong fan of the movies, legendary partner of Isherwood, and renowned portrait artist. We learn that the movies were a huge part of Bachardy’s childhood. Accompanied by his mother and his older brother—the “Three Musketeers”—young Bachardy became “enraptured” by the silver screen and its stars. He crashed Hollywood premieres, kept piles of clippings, and started making portraits of movie personalities from magazine photos. “The movies trained me to look,” he tells Schreiber, “but because I looked at so many movies, I wanted something even more startling than what the movies could give me, and that is life.”

            “Life” came knocking early. Bachardy knew he was queer by the time he was eleven and later went to after-hours gay bars with his brother. By the time he met Isherwood on the beach in Santa Monica (he was eighteen, Isherwood 48), Bachardy had already had “a couple of awkward sexual encounters.” Soon Isherwood became “everything” for him—“mentor, influence, partner supreme.” Isherwood saw to it that Bachardy got an “education that mattered … to be a decent human being instead of a sneaky little movie-crazy fan. I was being taught by Chris to take real responsibility for myself as an adult.”

            Schreiber displays an adroit knack for bringing out Bachardy, who responds with candid, compelling, gossipy, and witty stories. “I don’t ever remember speaking as frankly as I’ve spoken to you about my work and my attitude, or talking so frankly about my famous sitters,” he declares at one point. Schreiber often prods him to say more, and Bachardy genially complies. When Anne Baxter sat for her portrait, she was “just so actressy that it was all so phony.” Charles Boyer was “nasty to me,” Joan Crawford “all teary and graciousness.” As for Katharine Hepburn: “You wouldn’t think an actress would be so eager to look like a drama queen!” The names that fill these interviews constitute a who’s who in the world of film, art, dance, and literature. Without exaggeration, merely listing every well-known name that Bachardy mentions would take up all the space allotted for this review.

            Apart from the talk about these celebrities, Bachardy has many interesting things to say about making art. He says he feels a responsibility to be interested in everyone who sits for him. “I’ll take on anybody as a subject, but on the basis that I don’t know at the start what I’m going to do. … The surprise of looking at somebody in the way that I look at him or her is what I build the whole experience on.” Calling himself an “artist of personality,” he says it’s “humankind” that interests him. “What artist could ask for a more interesting subject than another human being?”

            Early in his career, Bachardy learned not to place too many conditions on the people who posed for him, “because that’s the way of losing sitters.” He holds himself to the principle that he will “never blame a bad drawing on my sitter.” At the same time, he’s out to “tell the truth about them in life, because that’s what life is.” He tells Schreiber that he’s always after a good picture, if not a flattering likeness. “If it’s a case of doing my best work and maybe hurting the feelings of the sitter, or don’t do my best work and fake it a little bit so that it’s not as stark as it looks, I’ve always chosen the starkness.”

            Bachardy’s opting for starkness over flattery hasn’t always sat well with his celebrity subjects. Ginger Rogers “just criticized me right down to the tiniest detail.” But other actresses were more gracious. After he finished a portrait of Bette Davis, she got up and took a long look before she said: “Yup! That’s the old bag.” To that end, he affirms that “Hollywood loveliness is a lie, and the truth is far more exciting—and far more tragic even than your most tragic Hollywood film.”

            While he says that he had to learn “to get the same enjoyment out of drawing men as I did women,” Bachardy has drawn and painted many men, including male nudes—“not just young beauties, a great variety.” He says that back in art school there was a double standard: drawing nudes of men was considered distasteful, while drawing naked women was okay. “But oh, that just fired me up: if I couldn’t get them at school, I was determined to get them on my own.” He prides himself on his skill at drawing penises. “They have every bit as much personality as the face!”

            He’s also candid about his sexual and emotional entanglements with other men during his thirty-plus years with Isherwood, who allowed him to “wander.” “I just wanted the freedom to sample! My attitude was, and I said to Chris: ‘You had all that experience when you were my age, and are you going to deny it to me?’ But I told him: ‘I can handle it without breaking up with you,’ and we didn’t break up.”

            This is a fiercely queer-positive book. Bachardy, who will turn 92 in May, says that it meant “a great deal” to Isherwood for LGBT people “to be who they are and live their lives the way they want.” He taught Bachardy to “be what you are, and make it something to be glad about.” Summing up his extraordinary life, he tells Schreiber: “Being queer has brought me everything of value, of real value, in my life. Without that, I don’t think I could have enjoyed anything nearly so much, and I don’t think I would have been courageous enough without [Chris] to feel that way.”