DON BACHARDY

Life, love, and movies.

Portrait artist Don Bachardy (b. 1934) was the companion of British writer Christopher Isherwood (1904-86) for more than 50 years. “America’s most famous gay couple” in the 1970s, they inhabited a star-studded world, counting among their friends actor Simon Callow and director James Ivory, each of whom contributes an affectionate foreword to Bachardy’s candid oral history. In conversations with Schreiber, Bachardy recounts growing up in Los Angeles, enraptured by movies. He and his older brother snuck into previews, taking photographs of themselves with stars and collecting autographs from warmhearted actors like Marilyn Monroe and Debbie Reynolds. Over the years, many stars—Leslie Caron, who became a dear friend; Jane Powell (a “wounded creature”); and Natalie Wood (“stunningly beautiful”) sat for portraits. Bachardy met Isherwood in 1953, when he was 18 and Isherwood 30 years older. A student at UCLA at the time, Bachardy found in his older lover a father figure and mentor who introduced him to literature, encouraged him to go to art school, and taught him “how to be grown up and responsible and to be somebody with a vocation who could do something in the arts, not just devour them.” Besides studying art in the U.S., he enrolled at the Slade School in London, living with Isherwood in Richard and Sybil Burton’s Hampstead house. It was at Slade, he says, that he began to hone his craft intensively. In their early years together, Bachardy reveals, they were the only openly queer couple at Hollywood parties, shocking some guests. Bachardy’s memoir is replete with vivid, sometimes dishy, reminiscences about the elite of 20th-century culture: E.M. Forster, Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud, Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris, W.H. Auden—and scores more.

A zesty and entertaining self-portrait.