The Sixties Read online

  I have made some very minor alterations silently, such as standardizing passages which Isherwood quotes from his own published books, from other published authors, and from letters. I have standardized punctuation for most dialogue and quotations, for obvious typos (which are rare), and very occasionally to ease the reader’s progress. I have usually retained Isherwood’s characteristic use of the semi-colon followed by an incomplete clause. I have spelled out many abbreviations, including names, for which Isherwood sometimes used only initials, because I believe he himself would have spelled these out for publication. Also, I have corrected the spellings of many names because he typically checked and corrected them himself. Square brackets mark emendations of any substance or interest and these are often explained in a footnote. Square brackets also mark information I have added to the text for clarity, such as surnames or parts of titles shortened by Isherwood. And square brackets indicate where I have removed or altered material in order to protect the privacy of individuals still living.

  This book includes some footnotes written by Isherwood himself, in particular in the diary he kept in London from April to October 1961. Had Isherwood himself prepared the diary for publication, he would almost certainly have incorporated such material into the text, rewriting as necessary. I have not attempted to do this on his behalf. I have occasionally added, in square brackets, to his notes.

  Readers will find supplemental information provided in several ways. Footnotes explain passing historical references, identify people who appear only once, offer translations of foreign passages, gloss slang, explain allusions to Isherwood’s or other people’s works in progress, give references to books of clear significance to Isherwood, sometimes provide information essential for making sense of jokes or witticisms, and so forth. For people, events, terms, organizations, and other things which appear more than once or which were of long-term importance to Isherwood, and for explanations too long to fit conveniently into a footnote, I have provided a glossary at the end of the volume. The glossary gives general biographical information about many of Isherwood’s friends and acquaintances and offers details of particular relevance to Isherwood and to what he recorded in his diaries. A few very famous people—for instance, Katharine Hepburn or Mick Jagger—do not appear in the glossary because although Isherwood may have met them more than once, he knew them or at least wrote about them essentially in their capacity as celebrities. Others who were intimate friends—Igor Stravinsky or Aldous Huxley—are included even though their main achievements will be familiar to many readers. This kind of information is now easily available on the internet, but a reader of this diary should be able to find what he or she immediately wishes to know and to get a feel for what Isherwood himself or his contemporaries may have known, without putting the book down and turning to a computer. Isherwood has audiences of widely varied ages and cultural backgrounds, and I have aimed to make his diaries accessible to all of them. Where he himself fully introduces someone, I have avoided duplicating his work, and readers may need to use the index to refer back to figures introduced early in the text who sometimes appear much later. Hindu terminology is also explained in the glossary in accordance, generally, with the way the terms are used in Vedanta.

  In any book of this size, there are many details which do not fit systematically into even the most flexible of structures, but I hope that my arrangement of the supplemental materials will be consistent enough that readers can find what help they want.

  The Sixties 1960–1969

  August 27, 1960–December 31, 1969fn1

  August 27. My birthday evening at Hope Lange’s was cozy and quite pleasant. Just Hope, Glenn Ford, David Lange and a friend of his, Don [Bachardy] and me. Glenn seems to be around all the time now, but, we think, merely in loco parentis. He makes a big show of devotion to Hope—saying for instance that he has to learn polo for his part in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and that he’s sure to get hurt, especially if Hope is watching the shooting of the polo scenes, thus causing him to show off and get too daring. Somehow, though, one doesn’t believe in this. Again, Glenn hugged me when we said goodnight—and this, too, didn’t altogether convince. You felt it wasn’t him. Is it how he thinks Hope’s bohemian friends should behave? Is he trying to get himself elected an honorary queer?

  (It’s strange, typing this diary. It seems much less intimate than handwriting, and already in that first paragraph I notice a primness. I suppose typing makes me instinctively try harder. But I’ll get used to it.)fn2

  Mr. Gardner and his brother arrived this morning to begin painting the house on the outside. But now we find that the existing coat of paint on the house is calcimine, and that if we had painted it with the paint Don bought yesterday it would all have started to peel off in a few days. So poor Don has to go clear down to Western Avenue to change the paint.

  Yesterday and again today I have been sketching an opening passage to serve as a frame for the four episodes of my novel.fn3 I feel that I must start with myself, and at the present time—otherwise there will be no perspective—but just how to relate myself to my characters, I don’t know. Because, after all, it is my characters who matter most in the stories, not me. As long as the characters come to life, I have achieved my purpose; in a book of this sort, philosophy doesn’t greatly matter. I do see that it would be fatal to be too pat—to base the four narratives, for instance, on four reflections in a mirror, or some such crap. That would cheapen the whole effect. Nor, I think, must I suggest that I’m deliberately setting out on a Proustian time-safari; that’d give me a tiresome air of self-consciousness.

  No—I see something different, even as I write this. Something much simpler. Some kind of a brief introduction and description of myself today—showing somehow, as it were, geological-psychological strata which correspond to the periods of my four episodes and which reveal the influence on me of the characters in them. Here’s something really difficult but fascinating to work out, perhaps calling for a new technique of behavior description.

  August 29. The day before yesterday, I ran into Michael Hall and Scott Schubach on the beach. So I asked them up to the house for drinks. (We had plenty!) They told a marvellous story about Scott. He has always been a bit ashamed of his Jewish background and especially his childhood, which was spent in a slum neighborhood of New York. He even had a block against remembering any of it. So, when he went through analysis (including lysergic acid) he decided he must face up to all of this. And so he and Michael paid a visit to the apartment house where he and his mother used to live. They found the apartment was now inhabited by a family of Puerto Ricans; when Michael explained to them in Spanish why Scott wanted to look around their place they were deeply touched and most hospitable. So Scott and Michael came inside, and at once Scott was violently moved: he remembered everything; it all came back to him—how the rooms had looked when he was little and the view from the window, and how his mother’s voice had sounded, calling down to him in the street, and even how the grain of the woodwork had felt to his hands as a child. He wept. This was one of the greatest experiences of his life. The Puerto Ricans wept, too.… And then Scott and Michael went to visit Scott’s mother in her present home, and told her where they had been—and she questioned them, and found that they’d been in the wrong apartment!

  Yesterday I had lunch up at Malibu Colonyfn4 with Doris and Len Kaufman. Doris was in a very strange mood. She kept saying, about Len, “He sassed me this morning—he hasn’t got long to live, and he knows it.” At first, the rest of us laughed at this. But Doris wasn’t quite joking. You saw in her a feminine tyrannical determination not to let the male get away with anything, because, if the female once does, she’s sunk.

  September 1. Spent yesterday and this morning reading “The Beach of Falesá,” the screenplay on it by Dylan Thomas, and the revised screenplay by Jan Read. There’s certainly a great deal there already, but I think I can improve it.fn5 Above all, it is a chance to air one of my favorite theories,
that the truly evil man is the one who only pretends to believe in evil.

  Incidentally, I’d always thought the [Robert Louis] Stevenson story was called “The Beach at Falesá.” Somehow, I like at much better than of. Why? Partly, I suppose, because at dissociates the beach from Falesá itself—thereby suggesting that there is something peculiarly significant and sinister about the beach. But that’s not the whole of the reason why I like at. At somehow goes very deep into my subconscious fantasy.

  Talking of beaches, I’ve been going to the beach at Santa Monica Canyon quite regularly, lately, and swimming. Not because I terribly want to—I always have to do it alone, or almost always. But I want a tan, and I want to catch a little of what’s left of the summer, which I’ve spent mostly indoors, writing this novel.

  On the retaining wall below the road at Inspiration Point, somebody has painted in huge red letters, UNI IS PIMP, with an arrow coming in from the right to call extra attention to the inscription. Most mysterious. Who or what is UNI? Why IS PIMP rather than IS A PIMP? (This suggests a foreigner—a Mexican, maybe.) And what a strange accusation for nowadays, surely? It sounds so old-fashioned.

  Don in very low spirits and inclined to vent them on me—because he has had to draw these “bad” drawings to be used on the stage in A Taste of Honey…fn6 I’m afraid I got irritated with him, because he moaned about it so much. I do hate that. Except of course when I’m sad—then I demand sympathy and am furious when I don’t get it.

  September 8. Maybe as a reaction from finishing the novel, maybe because of a change in the weather, I am having a wretched attack of arthritis, gout, or whatever—my thumbs both sore, the left hand very, and pain all up the left arm into the shoulder, so that last night I had to take a painkiller pill. I’m still dazed now, but I had a good sleep.

  Yesterday evening, we gave a dinner party; Dorothy [Miller] spent the night here and cooked for us. We had Iris Tree, Ivan Moffat, Gavin Lambert, Wolfgang Reinhardt, Lesley Blanch and a Mademoiselle Yvonne Petranant who is the French Consul here and who has somehow so intimidated Lesley that she begged us to let her bring her. Romain Gary has already gone to France, and Lesley is most unwillingly preparing to follow him; she has now become one of southern California’s most passionate lovers. She’s really a most hysterical woman.

  The party started quite well. Wolfgang told us about the experiments which are being made in Russia and elsewhere in producing prolonged sleep—a sort of hibernation which may last weeks or months and from which you get up quite refreshed and renewed. “Sleep is only in its infancy!” said Iris with her chuckle. And then they—chiefly Ivan—started an elaborate fantasy about future times in which people will have themselves put to sleep for five hundred or a thousand years at a stretch. And how one’ll avoid waking up at the same time as some terrible bore. And how one’ll try to figure out the best way of spacing out one’s eighty years—etc. etc. It went on so persistently that it became boring. And then Wolfgang, who really is diseased, I suspect, and cannot bear to listen to any talk which isn’t thoroughly negative and alarmist, began talking about dreams and how they’ve discovered that there are dreams that can kill you if you have a weak heart; they give you such a shock that you wake up and die. (This really horrified Iris.) And he said that probably our dream experiences are far more terrible than anything in our waking life and that maybe patients who have been given sedation suffer more horribly than those who endure the physical pain.

  And from this he went on to talk about the RAND Corporation;fn7 how the experts say it doesn’t matter if there is an atomic war because about eighty million will survive, which is quite sufficient. Of course, the people who survive will be the ones with money, because to survive you have to build a shelter and stay in it for three weeks. And when you get your shelter built, you should go to at least three different contractors, so nobody will know what it is you’re building; because if the word gets around that you have a shelter, you’ll be mobbed at the first emergency. For the same reason, you ought to have a submachine gun to kill people who try to force their way in.

  This led to talk about the different nations and their policies. Wolfgang is violently anti-USA and pro-Russia. According to him, the Americans are the real warmongers; this he deduces because of the RAND Corporation. But then when Mlle. Petranant began speaking up for France, he said that French people were so scared of their own police that he had been asked by French friends to mail letters for them outside the country. At this, Petranant, who is a most unappetizing blonde lesbian type, threw back her head and laughed savagely. But Wolfgang stuck to his accusation, and said that the letters were about the Algerian situation. “Oh well—” said Petranant, “Algeria—that’s different. That’s an internal problem.”fn8

  Why does one entertain people one doesn’t like? The only really relaxed part of the evening was right at the end, when we had Gavin alone. He is leaving shortly for New York, to work on the movie of Vanity Fair; then going on to Rome for the shooting of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. We talked about the performance of Taste of Honey, all agreeing that it’s really a nothing play.

  Don finished reading “Paul”fn9 yesterday. He seems very excited by it; and thinks it’s so shocking that maybe it even won’t be published. He is such a tremendous moral and emotional support to me, now, and so I’m correspondingly upset when he turns on me and is vicious and ugly. And yet—all that is on the surface. And again and again I have to remind myself that the whole art of life is to lean on people, to involve oneself with them quite fearlessly and yet—when the props are kicked away—remain leaning, as it were, on empty air. Like levitation.

  All kinds of boringly sensational tales about the split-up of Marguerite and Rory [Harrity]. […] Rory has now gone home to his mother, like an old-fashioned bride.

  After the opening of Taste of Honey the night before last, we had drinks with Glenn Ford and Hope in two grand, depressingly empty night spots, The Traders and Le Petit Jean. This was to say goodbye to Glenn, who’s leaving for Europe. He asked “if he might” write to me, and said, “I want us to be friends—for reasons you don’t even know about.” His behavior is truly a mystery—I wish it were a more thrilling one. But there is something very nice about him.

  September 10. I’m suffering from acute nervous laziness—the kind which is caused by having too much to do. Also, the weather is tropically steamy. The ocean yesterday was so strange, shining silver and quite smooth and streamy, like a vast river. Went down on the beach today; horrible, dirty, crowded and the water full of rocks.

  Here are some of the things I have to do:

  Think seriously about my opening lecture at Santa Barbara.fn10 Get my earnings and expenses properly listed for the income tax. (I have taken on this new accountant of Jo and Ben [Masselink]’s, Ken Hogan, who is handsome and seems nice but is still going to charge “a minimum” of $150, which Jo says is a hundred dollars more than he charges them!) Finish chapter 10 of the Ramakrishna book,fn11 (plus a promotion letter for the magazine which Prema wants me to write.fn12) Get started on the revision of my novel.

  Nothing from Laughton, and my God I certainly do not want to get all involved with him yet.fn13 As for the “Beach of Falesá” project, I think it will bog down in a financial deadlock; [Jim] Geller wants to ask for $10,000 down, which Hugh French will never in his life pay.fn14

  I long for the fall and its beautiful sane weather and its empty beaches.

  Last night we saw The Prodigal, this play by Jack Richardson, at UCLA.fn15 It is arty and more than somewhat Frenchified, with the usual wa-wa talk—I parodied it to Don as, “No, Prince—it is not the birds who fear the sea; it is the sea which fears the birds.” Just the same, it is entertaining and has a good idea.

  Another inscription, in the evil-smelling tunnel under the coast highway, reveals that it is not just UNI but UNIHI that is a pimp—also shit. I suppose this means University High School. But the word “pimp” is still mysterious.

  September 17. W
ell, I have finished off chapter 10 of the Ramakrishna book, and an open letter Prema wanted me to write, appealing to the readers to renew their subscriptions to the magazine, in order to read (his) “Student’s Notebook.” Oh, the ghastly coyness of the draft of the letter which Prema made to guide me! This kind of a chore is more difficult for me than any other sort of writing.

  Also, I have brought our income tax accounts up to date. And I have to admit grudgingly that, once you have things listed in the way Mr. Hogan suggested, it is far simpler to keep track.

  Laughton came down, three days ago. It was the first time he’d visited 147 Adelaidefn16 since his operation. Poor thing, he still seems terribly shaky, and so old. Like a punch-drunk old fighter groggily declaring that he’ll make a comeback, but not quite believing it himself. It was curious, how impressed he was when Geller told him that Hurokfn17 believes the Socrates project is really box office, and will back it. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. I can’t help expecting that Laughton should be ready, at his time of life and with his fortune, to try something he wants to do, regardless of the money. Laughton brought a pair of young men with him; the one who chauffeurs him and a masseur. Their shameless grins and ever-so-slightly cautious familiarity. Courtiers. The masseur started right in with jokes. “Have you heard the latest? They’ve sent a rocket to the moon with a colored man in it. The headline’s in the paper: THE JIG’S UP.” We cackled away, and old Charles watched us, his head sunk into his shoulders. There was a faint smile on his face, as though he were being tickled. After a while, he said in his deep hoarse voice, “You’re bloody funny, aren’t you?” (He uses “bloody” on principle, you feel; it is part of his public performance of being British.)