Issue Number 1009 | Don Bachardy | Advocate.com Don Bachardy  |  | Advocate.com

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Don Bachardy
With two recent gallery shows and a new film about his life with Christopher Isherwood, the artist enjoys the rewards of a gay life well lived.
From The Advocate  June 17, 2008
Don Bachardy

Don Bachardy, one of America’s most respected portraitists, has captured the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, Natalie Wood, and Bette Davis on paper and canvas. Yet Bachardy’s most persistent identification remains his partnership of over 33 years with legendary British novelist Christopher Isherwood, who died in January 1986. Bachardy’s considerable talent and his enduring bond with Isherwood each get pride of place in a powerful new documentary, Chris and Don: A Love Story, from filmmakers Guido Santi and Tina Mascara, which premieres June 13 in New York City. What’s more, Bachardy just enjoyed exhibitions of his male nudes, portraits, and abstracts at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, Calif., and New York City’s White Columns gallery.

Pride month is a fitting time to catch up with the artist at his home -- a bungalow tucked into the rugged hillside of a Santa Monica canyon, with a pristine view of the Pacific on one side and the Santa Monica Mountains on the other. At 74, Bachardy appears not just fit but indefatigable, like a silver-haired bantamweight fighter. He knows time has been kind to him. “I believe that good luck can become habit-forming,” he observes. “It seems I’ve had a great deal of luck, and hopefully it will see me through to my end.”

Watching Bachardy now, it’s easy to imagine the beautiful young man whose life, in 1952, became forever and irrevocably intertwined with Isherwood’s. Bachardy was still in his teens, a grocery-store bag boy from workaday Glendale, Calif., when he met the then-48-year-old upper-crust British writer and intellectual on Will Rogers State Beach.

As he serves me coffee, Bachardy recalls that clandestine first meeting. “I used to accompany my older brother, Ted, to the beach, sort of just tagging along,” he says. “Ted was exceptionally beautiful, and there was always a coterie of men gathered around him. Chris was among the many. Ted had pointed him out to me, and on occasion he’d wave to us from his nearby spot.” In the documentary, Bachardy makes a casual reference to the fact that Ted had “gone to bed with Chris…once or twice.” Despite all that, Bachardy and Isherwood became sexually involved. Several months later they moved in together.

The Berlin Stories -- Isherwood’s semiautobiographical tales of early 1930s Weimar Berlin, with its unprecedented sexual freedom and simultaneous totalitarian leanings -- inspired the classic Broadway and film musical Cabaret. Throughout his long life, which he recorded in his voluminous diaries, Isherwood continued to expound on many of the themes found in his Berlin work, including sexual exploration and spiritual seeking.

From the start, Bachardy and Isherwood lived openly as a couple, a brave and hazardous choice in the homophobic 1950s. The enmity of the age may have drawn them closer, although the disparity in their ages sometimes chafed. Bachardy remembers that as an 18-year-old who looked 16, he was dismissed by Chris’s friends as a “sort of male prostitute.” A July 1955 entry from Isherwood’s diary reveals his sense of responsibility toward his partner: “I’ve taken on this project, and I obviously have to do my best. And I do want to do my best. I’m not being noble about that. It is a genuine vocation. Don is by far the most interesting person I’ve ever lived with. Why? Because he minds the most about things.”  

Reader Comments

These comments are reproduced as written by visitors to this Web site. They have not been edited for content, grammar, or spelling. The viewpoints appearing here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or views of advocate.com, The Advocate, or its affiliates.

  • Name: alif rahman
    Date posted: 2008-05-31 7:47 AM
    Hometown: jakarta

    Comment:

    my name is alif, i live in south east asia, honestly i never heard of don and chris, but i just read it, they lived togather for 33 years, for me that is HUGE, congrat don u have found ur soulmate, i just wish i found mine.


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