The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  When we arrived, about 7 p.m., we were told that we must go instantly to the dining room, if we wanted any dinner; it didn’t serve after 7:30. In the mornings, they try to make you sit at an already partly occupied table although there are plenty of empty ones, and when you refuse they raise their eyes to heaven and sigh in true British grumble-style. About seven, the maid arrives with the tea. We had locked our door, so she battered on it as though this were a police raid until it was opened, and then entered saying indignantly, “You locked your door!” One evening I went to a cafeteria and asked for a meat sandwich. The waitress told me severely, “We never serve meat at night!” At six on Friday evening the shops snap shut like mousetraps until Monday morning. In an Auckland newspaper there was a letter from a New Zealand wife who had been in California, studying at Stanford. She said, quite innocently, that the two things she would miss, back here at home, were that you could shop at night and on Sundays and that in California husbands do everything with their wives, “They even help them decorate the Christmas trees!”

  There is a very cozy homely charm behind all this, however. In a movie theater I sat down on a piece of chewing gum. Without complaining, I pointed it out to the manager, so he would stop others sitting on it. “The swines!” he exclaimed. “That’s why we won’t sell chewing gum in this cinema. We’ll be able to get it out again but the stuff we use burns like buggery, wouldn’t want to risk it on you, not with your trousers on.” The girl at the hotel produced some cleaning fluid which, much to our surprise, got the gum off my pants. When we told her this, she said, “Then nothing’s wounded but your pride.”

  The harbor is naturally beautiful and enormous, a whole water-world of bays and beaches and islets, around which you could sail for days. The city is mostly suburbs of dull little wooden houses; and all around it the bush. If there is no building it comes right up to the road, great tropical tree ferns growing amidst this northern respectability and the vegetation so dense that you could get lost within fifty yards. After seeing this, it no longer seemed strange that the government puts out a booklet on “How to Survive in the Bush, in the Mountains and on the Beach.”

  We saw a film called The Taking Mood, made strictly by New Zealanders for New Zealanders, which was quite revealing. It’s about a race from the North to the South Island and back between two fishermen; they have to catch fish in various specified locations. One is an old-fashioned expert, a Scot, in old clothes, driving an old beat-up car. He is the idol of the South Island. The other is an amateur, a young Auckland lawyer, English rather than Scots, handsome, slick, elegant, a girl chaser, a sort of younger James Bond. Both of them cheat and they end by dividing the prize. You got such an overwhelmingly provincial atmosphere from it; the lawyer, despite his imitative role-playing, was just as provincial as the old fisherman. One sees them down there, much influenced by the outside world and yet pretty satisfied with themselves and really, if the northern hemisphere is wiped out with bombs, quite capable of keeping things going, with their fishing and yachting and rugger. The idea of actually settling there is full of horror yet fascinating; it’s all so marvellously self-contained and self-sufficient. A surprising fact: The southern end of the South Island is only about two hundred miles nearer to the South Pole than to the equator. A conclusion: Being in bookshops in Auckland (and in Sydney too) made me realize what a tremendous and admirable cultural role is played by Penguin Books. They make Culture seem chic, modern and relevant in a way that no U.S. paperbacks seem able to. You feel suddenly—oh well, all right, I can face this place if I must, as long as there’s Penguins.

  September 5. Swami told me the day before yesterday that, despite his touching speech, Vandanananda has quietly made arrangements to meet some of the people who have involved him in this scandal after he has arrived in India; they are going out to join him there! It seems as if he is really very childish in some ways; which makes him endearing, of course, although a security risk. And Swami seems just a little bit amused by it all.

  I lost my turquoise ring again, this time in the restaurant, The Black Whale, where Jim Gates works as a busboy. But the waitress found it. I went there to see Jim (who happened to be away) but also because I had to take Lee Prosser somewhere and try to raise his morale: poor little thing, he is being drafted, and this after having split up with Mary,902 who says they have outgrown each other and she doesn’t want to live with him any more. To my astonishment, I succeeded quite a bit—although it may well have been that Lee was chiefly depressed because he hadn’t had a proper meal in so long plus a chance to talk to somebody. Anyhow, he talked himself out of his angst and wrote me a sweet little note to thank me for it: “In some inexplicable way, you gave me the strength I needed to go on. I’m not afraid now, and thank you. I can’t explain.”

  Gavin told me that not long ago, after walking on the beach at night, he went into the men’s room over the life guard station, say around ten o’clock, and found two men screwing on the floor, a third going down on a fourth and a fifth watching and jerking off. They didn’t seem bothered when he walked in. He said “hi” to reassure them, peed and went out again. As he left, a young man and a girl approached. The girl wanted to use the public phone and the young man went into the john. He came out again with a face of horror and hurried the girl away. The question is, are these people insane? They might almost as well go and do it right in the police station, you’d think. I suggested that maybe it’s like a professional robbery; all based on exact timing between the janitor’s rounds. But I doubt it.

  Yesterday the man who is producing a film Gavin is to write, The Woman Who Rode Away, called me and told me that he and his associates are quite probably buying Cabaret, so his wife, Anne Haywood(?) can play in it. He wanted to see our treatment and guaranteed that anyhow he would see that we get paid for it. He says Manny Woolf, the head of Allied Artists, hasn’t even been shown a copy! Oh yes, this man’s name is Raymond Stross.903 Gavin has been told that he is a “monster.” He seemed a little too friendly, wanted me to call him Raymond right away.

  When we got to Sydney, a man from Ajax Films,904 John Daniel, met us and put us on the plane for Canberra, so we never left the airport. Neil Hartley was waiting for us there. The airline had sent our bags on into Canberra while we were talking, so Neil got furious and said something about fucking incompetence. The airline clerk said severely that they didn’t have to listen to obscene language, and when Neil said he’d fucking well say what he fucking well pleased, he said, “We have laws to deal with that sort of thing”—all of which wasn’t a very reassuring introduction; besides which, Neil kept going on about how he loathed the country and everybody in it. But when we got outside Canberra, which one does very easily, it was all so strange and empty, the hills and the grey woods of gum trees, whole groves of them deliberately killed by ringing the trunks, and the vast stretches of pasture land and the brilliant pure clear light. White and black cockatoos and a kind of magpie which makes liquid noises like a myna bird. And the silence—“the noiseless antipodes” as Lawrence says905—and the feeling of emptiness. It can’t be described in words, only remembered as a feeling. Waking in the night—utter silence, nothing to make a sound. And then the sun rising, very brilliant, though there’s a mist steaming along the ground. The first morning, Don and I got up and ran down the long dirt road from the house which stretched away into the distance. Don shouted, “We’re in Australia!” Some dogs joined us, and we went crashing uphill into the woods, splintering the dead fallen branches, making a terrific noise in the silence.

  But first, that first afternoon, we went out to where they were filming, a stony riverbed. Ned Kelly and the rest of the gang are trading for horses in the rain; a hose is spraying them. Tony Richardson looking like the Duke of Wellington, in a kind of Inverness mackintosh cape; we embraced in front of the whole crew and the actors, including Mick Jagger. It was such an improbable encounter, after these thousands of miles, like Stanley and Livingstone, rather. Mick Jagger, ve
ry pale, quiet, good-tempered, full of fun, ugly-beautiful, a bit like Beatrix Lehmann; he has the air of a castaway, someone saved from a wreck, but not in the least dismayed by it.

  Whenever you meet Tony after a separation it always seems to be the same situation; he tells you with a gleeful conspiratorial air that something absolutely terrible has just happened. (“Just” is the operative word.) What had happened this time was that an army of students from Canberra were celebrating “Bush Week”—they go out into the countryside and get drunk in small town hotels and then often wreck them or set fire to them, either by accident or for fun. “Bush Week” was now coming to an end and three hundred students were said to be heading for Palerang, the house where Tony and Neil and Mick Jagger were staying; they had vowed to kidnap Mick, or, failing him, Tony, and hold him for a thousand dollars’ ransom, to be given to charity.

  So Tony and Neil had called in the police. Our first night, or was it maybe our second, at Palerang there were ten policemen sitting up in the kitchen all night, waiting for the students, who never showed. Incidentally, without knowing it, they were guarding a pot party which was going on in the living room!

  Palerang was a ranch house standing in the midst of a big ranch, with other ranches (they call them “stations”) adjoining it. It belonged to a family named Sykes. The young Mr. Sykes was a daredevil-type skier, rider and auto racer, not really much interested in farming, who had married a rich Jewess who believed herself to have taste as a decorator. His sister Annabelle cooked for us; she was a very nice girl. But the general atmosphere was that the Sykes[es] hadn’t quite vacated the house; they had moved away while Tony was there but they were keeping an eye on it and there would probably be a big bill for breakages when he left. Mrs. Sykes, the Jewess, had overdecorated that place and made it townish, but it still had a certain magic, chiefly because it was so solitary. This being the Australian winter, the nights were cold, with frost on the ground, and we had big fires. Annabelle told us that the summers are very hot and that life is made unpleasant by the many varieties of poisonous snake, the tiger snake chiefly, which you find all around the garden and in outside privies.

  This situation, a somewhat beleaguered household, surrounded by protectors, infiltrated by spies (Mrs. Sykes looked in every day to check up, and there were two villainous cleaning women) is probably a standard situation which Tony sets up for himself whenever he makes a picture. Of course his headquarters is bound to be a focus for gossip and scandal. And having Mick there—not to mention Marianne Faithfull, who emerged from hospital with her dreadful little Austrian baroness of a mother and descended on Palerang just before we left—made this without doubt the most fascinatingly wicked house in Australia. But Tony managed to create a very similar setup when he came to Los Angeles in 1960 with John Osborne and Mary Ure, and took that house which belonged to one of the Gabors and had the colored maid who used to report all our conversations to a gossip columnist.906

  As guests, Don and I were in a very awkward position the moment Tony and Neil had left for work in the mornings. The cleaning women tolerated us because we made our own beds and tried to be helpful; they called us “chappies.” But they were fiercely on the lookout for any attempt to load them with extra work. The more aggressive of the two had emigrated from England and she grumbled like a Londoner. When she thought the soup was unfit to eat she described it as “on the nose.”

  On the Sunday there was a beard-judging get-together at a pub in the nearby town of Braidwood. (All these places seem half deserted.) Tony, Jocelyn Herbert907 and I were the judges and we gave prizes for the best, the most sinister, the most sexy beards. The contestants got parts in the film, if they wanted them. The beards seemed entirely natural here. Although this country seems relatively law abiding, far more so than the States, there is much more of a frontier feeling. These little empty towns with their wooden houses and ironwork balconies and corrugated iron roofs give you the impression of something missing—it’s the body of a man lying shot dead in the middle of the street. Crowds of beer-drinking men. Men everywhere. The women much less in evidence.

  I only got to talk to Mick alone on the last day. He made a great impression on me. On Don too, but Don didn’t see as much of him. Mick seems almost entirely without vanity, for one thing. He hardly ever refers to his career or himself as a famous and successful person and you might be with him for hours and not know what it is he does. Also, he seems equally capable of group fun, clowning, entertaining, getting along with other people, and of entering into a serious one-to-one dialogue with anybody who wants to. He talked seriously but not at all pretentiously about Jung, and about India (he has a brother who has become a monk in the Himalayas908), and about religion in general. He also seems tolerant and not bitchy. He told me with amusement that the real reason why the Beatles left the Maharishi909 was that he made a pass at one of them: “They’re simple north-country lads; they’re terribly uptight about all that.” Am still not sure if I believe this story. And indeed I am still not sure what I think about Mick. I would have to see him again. It can be that I was carried away—I certainly was when I suggested he should come and stay with us when next he comes to Los Angeles; we’d have the press and the police and the public on our backs for six months afterwards!

  We talked to Tony about Claudius and did an outline. Admittedly he was tired and full of Ned Kelly problems, but he seemed so languid and bored and yet dogmatic during these discussions that we were on the point of telling him to forget all about it. Then suddenly he said it was fine and we should go ahead. Now I kind of wish we had got ourselves out of it because I really am unsure if we can deliver anything. We shall see.

  Other memories of our stay at Palerang: The nice suppers in the dining room with all of them, including usually three or four of the young actors and members of the crew, very noisy and sexy. Walks with Don in the woods and along the river shore; this is such a marvellous place to be together in, sometimes you feel you are the only two people in the world. The discomfort of the shared bathroom which could only be reached through the kitchen full of people. The thrill of watching the members of the Kelly Gang come thundering down the creek side on their horses, splash through the river, gallop uphill past the camera; the wild cocky little boy who was Mick’s double, lounging in the saddle as if it were a galloping easy chair. The sheep grazing in the frosty fields in the early morning; the strange sparkling pallor. But I must repeat, this country can’t be described. It is a feeling, it’s your own predicament in being there. The sense of being so far, far. And of nature being alien. The harsh weird cries of the birds—they are so foreign. You feel they are actually using a foreign language. Yes, that’s how I remember the country round Palerang: the endless empty silence, the pistol-sharp crack of grey dead gum-tree wood, the foreign squawking of birds.

  September 7. The first night we spent in Sydney was in a tall glass tower called the Chevron Hotel. The windows came down to the floor and gave me vertigo, but it was a marvellous place for our first view of Sydney Harbor at sunset, the bridge and the scallop shells of the opera house and the dark cliffs of the harbor gateway. It seemed indeed at that moment worthy of being called one of the most beautiful harbors of the world. Later daylight impressions were much less thrilling; the surrounding heights seemed too regular, the atmosphere suburban, the scallop shells merely silly, the bridge just another bridge (“lumpish,” Alan Moorehead910 calls it). No one who has seen the Golden Gate and San Francisco Bay can think much of this. The most attractive places we visited were Manly, which is a real Victorian English beach town with sunshine and sharks added, and the zoo and Thirroul, down the coast south of Sydney, where D.H. Lawrence and Frieda stayed. (I have only just discovered that Wyewurk911 still stands and is preserved as a Lawrence memorial; I so regret that we didn’t visit it.) Altogether, you still get an impression of transplanted English—despite all the other European immigrants—with their dreadful parody cockney accent; English and northern and bred to a small
island, and yet here they are, with all the wastes of wilderness behind them and the wastes of the ocean in front. There’s also a kind of British rigor which is displayed by the wearing of shorts, almost exhibitionistic it seems, by street cleaners and garbage-truck drivers and many others; we noticed this also in Auckland.

  Other memories of our stay in Sydney aren’t particularly pleasant. A boring evening with a rich man named James Fairfax who was descended from the seventeenth-century general; we got into a royalist-republican tiff because I’d told him about Bradshaw and my approval of his political career!912 Dennis Altman who meant well but is so Jewishly thick-skinned that he unintentionally insulted Don. And my resentment when Don decided to go off to North Africa with [his friend], leaving me alone on my birthday. I write this down because it is there in my mind; but it makes no difference to the fact that this was one of the best trips of my whole wandering life. Indeed, there was more to come, for I spent two days in Honolulu with Jim Charlton which were beautiful and happy and brought back so many memories of our past times together.

  Jim, as usual, has made himself a magic little home, full of psychedelic posters and black lights, in a tropical semi-slum above the “bad” Hotel Street, looking out over the lights below and the dark shoulders of forest above. This time, I saw that the monster hotels of Waikiki aren’t really all that important, because Jim took me up into the rain forests below the Pali913 and to a waterfall in the deep woods, where he stripped off his clothes and swam—extraordinary, how boyish his body still is, at, I guess, nearly fifty!