Liberation

by Christopher Isherwood

  For a while, it looked as if we’d get Jon Voight to be in the play. Now he is backing down. Maybe that’s just as well. He’s what Jim calls “a talking actor,” meaning that he has to discuss every move.

  Am feeling hounded, right now. Letters, manuscripts, people who have written theses and want to interview me. (One of them, David Geherin, did a whole tape of conversation with me and then somehow goofed and erased half an hour of it—so I had to redo it over the phone!157) Then Hunt keeps plaguing us with “The Mummy.” The only thing which doesn’t budge is “Frankenstein.” No glimpse of a director and those two farts, Wasserman and Sheinberg, are still in New York. Boorman is in Ireland, writing his own film,158 and that seems to be that.

  March 25. Hunt Stromberg called me yesterday, saying that he will never employ Boorman now because Boorman has lied to him. He has discovered that Boorman’s commitment is and always has been firm, and that he can’t possibly get out of it to do “Frankenstein,” even if asked by Universal. We don’t know whom to believe [. . .]. But [the] fact remains that Boorman is almost certainly out of the picture. Now Hunt talks about Polanski! He also fusses us to get something done on “The Mummy.” He is going back to Texas today. If it weren’t that we need money and would be silly to break with Hunt, I would say that we don’t want to do “The Mummy.” The whole subject bores me.

  We are having a good deal of fun, auditioning people for our play. We now have a really sexy and amusing Tom (Gordon Hoban), two possible mothers, a good Rafferty ( Jason Wingreen), Laurence Luckinbill for Patrick—except that he’s [urging] us to take his wife, Robin Strasser, for Penelope, [though] we think we have a better one, Susan Brown. ( Jim Bridges, who has gone off to Harvard to look over locations for a film he may be directing, will probably be seeing the Luckinbills on his way home.) The big problem is Oliver. Jon Voight mulls and ponders and keeps putting us off, but we’re pretty sure he won’t do it. The two other actors we have seen are wrong and utterly wrong, respectively.

  Amiya left for England yesterday. I had quite a long talk with her, the day before—or rather, I assisted at a tape-recorded interview she was having with herself, recalling her memories of the society in the early days. She is such a blowsy drunken old bag and yet the thing she got from Swami is still apparent, nearly all of the time, and often she makes remarks of great perceptiveness. For example, she said that Swami doesn’t love us, he lets us find the love that is in him, if we need it. (I’ve expressed this badly—can’t remember how Amiya phrased it; but I think it is very true. And it explains why one cannot feel jealous in Swami’s presence. Jealousy arises when a person sends his love out toward other people on a personal level; because, if he does that, he is bound to favor someone. Did Swami do this in the past? Yes, perhaps. I am thinking of Sarada.)

  Jimmy Barnett (now called Sat) is going to help Jim as a technical director, with the music, costumes, etc. I want to keep this a secret from Swami and the others as long as possible, because of all the fuss and excitement there’ll be, as soon as the news about the play leaks out.

  April 2. He is risen, as I wrote to Dodie and Alec today, telling them about the forthcoming production of Meeting. And indeed this Easter does seem unusually cheerful, thanks to my happy life with Don, the nice prospect of rehearsals starting on Tuesday (though we’ll get sick of them very soon, I realize) and the breakthrough, mostly thanks to Don, on “The Mummy.” We can now almost glimpse a complete continuity, to be produced as soon as Universal pays us some money.

  Hunt is in Texas. I greeted his arrival there by reading him another communication from Boorman, over the phone, in which Boorman repeats that he is ready to make himself free and do “Frankenstein” if ever or whenever he is made an offer. This sent Hunt into a flap. He asked me to read the letter to his agents. So I did. I also asked the agents to call Hunt back. I don’t know if they have. We still can’t figure out who is lying—Hunt or the agents or Boorman. Probably all of them, a little.

  Last night, we had supper with Gavin and Mark. Gavin has definitely decided to leave California, probably to settle in Hawaii. His house is already up for sale, $85,000. His reasons: everything is so expensive here, and there are too many people, and he likes the idea of living on an island. If he and Mark get a picture to do, then they can come back and live in a motel. Gavin said approvingly that we were the only people who haven’t been horrified by his decision. Well, we didn’t express our horror, but we are horrified, rather. We both remember the glimpse we got of island loneliness, on our trip through in 1957. And I remember how isolated Jim Charlton seemed. It is very hard for me to imagine Gavin and Mark together there. But Mark has lived there before, for a number of years; and Gavin, as Don says, is very resourceful. He will be able to keep himself occupied.

  April 7. Our four days of rehearsal have gone by quickly and already the play is coming together. I must say, it seems most awfully good. Even Don is greatly impressed by it. Jim Bridges directs in an easygoing but assured way. Sam Waterston has real power as Oliver and Larry Luckinbill is very funny. He shows signs of bitchery however and Don thinks he’ll make trouble before we’re through. Sam is a very nice boy and a really dedicated actor; his only danger is that he’ll work himself too hard, he is playing in Volpone every night! Gordon Hoban is also nice and sexy and sweet, but a bit stupid. He can’t grasp the moments of camp. Florida Friebus is really excellent as the mother—not great as Gladys Cooper would have been. And Susan Brown, though not at all Penelope, gets enough of the part to make everything work, except, I fear, in her final speech to Oliver. All in all, we got a cast far and away beyond what we might have expected, and we feel that the play will get as good a presentation as it could have, anywhere in America. Certain British nuances will be lacking, but there will be an American freedom of emotion which we might not be able to get in England. Only Gordon as Tom has a couple of hangups, he won’t say “darling” at all, and it bothers the hell out of him to say “faggot”! But when he declares his love for Patrick he is true and moving—you feel something old-American, Whitmanesque.

  Am reading right through Thomas Hardy’s poems.

  April 22. Jim Bridges got back from New York yesterday morning and we had a rehearsal on stage in the Mark Taper. There was bad feeling brewing from the beginning, probably because Jim went off to New York and left them, in the midst of rehearsals. Anyhow, no sooner had we started the run through than Jeremy Railton (who is the sloppiest and most inefficient art director)159 came on the gallery at the back of the set with Donald Harris, the light designer, and a carpenter and proceeded to talk and take measurements. Larry Luckinbill objected. Jim ought to have thrown them off the set at once, but he didn’t; so Larry’s mood got nastier. And then he and Sam Waterston were playing their scene up on the gallery and they couldn’t be heard and Jim told them so, and also called on me to confirm it. Whereupon Larry got really nasty and declared that his whole performance was ruined if he had to shout. (Actors!) There was quite a fuss. Jim seemed weak and upset by it, which alarmed us; we had been thinking of him as a tower of strength—but no doubt this was partly due to his exhaustion after the trip. I was careful not to mix in—lest I should get annoyed and tell them What Every Author Knows: that the lines come first and that the most exquisite acting is useless if you can’t hear them.

  Four days before opening, and I do feel that, by and large, we are in good shape. Larry is very good—as right for the part, physically and psychologically, as any American actor could be; Sam ditto. (But Sam is a much nicer and more serious person—which is as it should be.) Gordon Hoban is nearly perfect in every way, and he no longer seems stupid. After Julie had played Sally Bowles, nearly all the other actresses who took the part seemed like whores. In the same way, the actors (if any) who follow Gordon will seem like hustlers. In the scene where he unbuttons his shirt, offering himself to Patrick, he is truly beautiful and noble. (Admittedly, I have a slight crush on him; so does Jim.) Florida Friebus is all right, though irritating
and too strident at moments; Don and I both particularly dislike [the] way she trots across the stage with the photographs of Oliver as a swami. She’s a bit of a bitch too, and she blows up on her lines. Poor Susan Brown is awful; she has a whining voice, and a disgusting middle-class sweetness. We fully expect, however, that the audience will like her. Jason Wingreen is perfect as Rafferty; he never varies, knows all his lines and can speak more clearly than anybody else. Logan Ramsey160 isn’t a swami, but he is a very good actor and is fat and has authority. Sirri Murad isn’t a swami or an actor and you can’t understand a word he says, because he is Turkish; but he looks very distinguished and is charming and courteous and friendly. The two friends of Tom, John Ritter161 and Jack Bender,162 are very sweet boys, and I think they both understand and appreciate the play better than any other member of the cast (with the possible exception of Sam); no doubt they have talent, too, but it isn’t called for in their tiny parts. They were both in Jack Larson’s Cherry, Larry, Sandy, Doris, Jean, Paul, at USC, a few years ago.

  Speaking of Jack Larson, Jim talked to him this morning on the phone in New York and Jack says that the Byron opera got a bad notice in The New York Times, written by an enemy of Virgil. It said that the opera was too bland and that the libretto lacked wit. Jim commented bitterly that they didn’t like it because it isn’t “heavy with German-Jewish angst.” He said he had realized himself that the opera wasn’t a hit. Virgil is said to be philosophical, Jack is upset. Jim thinks the opera has now no longer a chance of being performed at the Met or elsewhere in New York.

  Hunt Stromberg called a few days ago and said that “Frankenstein” is now declared a feature film—after Wasserman finally got around to reading it. We at once cabled Boorman, asking him was he free to direct it. Boorman hasn’t replied yet.

  On the 16th, at Jerry Lawrence’s, there was a reading of Tennessee’s Two-Character Play.163 It was at least an hour too long, and Tennessee was drunk and bawled out Jerry for using the phone and Mark Andrews for yawning during the performance. And then he tried to strangle Oliver Evans and to throw him over the balcony. He came to see our rehearsal of act 1 and went out in the middle to pee and get a soft drink; then to see act 2 on another day and didn’t arrive until it was nearly over. We are both fond of him but oh dear, he is tiresome.

  April 30. The play opened on the 26th and now we have had four of our six public performances; the last two are today. It has gone very well—considering that Larry and Sam lose us a great many laughs and serious lines because of their poor diction, and considering that Hindu religion and homosexuality are still sticky subjects for many of the audience. The Hinduism bores some; the homosexuality makes many uncomfortable, though they are visibly reassured by Gordon Hoban’s healthy appearance and grin and big teeth and masculine army-surplus clothes. (At the dress rehearsal, he played the first of his scenes naked to the waist, in pajama bottoms, but turned out surprisingly to have a bulky, rather unattractive body; so now he’s in a T-shirt and jeans and looks charming.) Sam gets more and more wailing-wall Jewish in his scenes of spiritual anguish; what his soul needs is a stiff upper lip. Larry Luckinbill is marvellously right for Patrick, if only he could speak better. Susan gets better and better and the audiences like her a lot, but her voice is still horrible.

  The theater has been packed every night, because there are so many regular subscribers, and this in itself helps the play a lot; it creates an atmosphere of success.

  Don and I are already at work on rewrites, because we know that if we don’t do them now we never will.

  May 2. Only two days since it ended. It seems strange and sad, not to be going down every day to rehearsals (though it was a drag), not to be able to come in through the stage door, to be greeted by the doorman (who remembered me from the days of Black Girl), to stroll around backstage or sit on the steps during a performance, feeling you almost owned the theater. We had champagne with the cast after the evening show on Sunday. (We’d given each one of them a signed copy of one of my books, with one or two photographs of drawings of me by Don, pasted into them; an egomaniacal sort of present, but the only one we could think of.) The future didn’t look bright for most of them; most were going back onto unemployment pay, for as long as it would last. Only Larry Luckinbill had an aura of prosperity. He was returning to New York with his wife and child and its nurse, with the prospect of various parts and the performance of something he has written. His coming out here had [been a] gesture in the grandest manner, an affirmation of his belief in our play, for it had cost him (he said) $3,500! Gordon Hoban seemed suddenly much older. He is the eldest of a family of eight; the only one of them who is an actor. And what are his chances? He thinks he may go to New York soon and try his luck there. The Clyde Ventura production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has been cancelled, because Albee won’t permit them to perform it with a male actor in the older woman’s part.

  May 5. The reviews in the Hollywood Reporter, the Los Angeles Times and the Herald Examiner are all condescending toward the play, saying that it needs a lot of work. The Examiner says the play “obscures itself in a murky drizzle of verbiage,” but does call it an “otherwise important work.” Larry and Sam and Florida are praised, but poor Gordon is described as “soggily out-of-sorts in the role of Tom.” Dan Sullivan in the Times, after putting the play down for being “just a bit too pale for the theater” and its letter-reading technique for being “static and strained,” adds, “even so this was one of the most civilized evenings New Theater for Now has given us, the sort of play about which one defiantly says: ‘Well, I liked it.’” Jim feels that this won’t ruin the play’s chances of being put on again for a longer run at the Taper; but the worst of it is, we’re in competition with the play which has followed us, In a Fine Castle by Derek Walcott—and that’s so bad that Gordon Davidson is sure to prefer it, especially as it’s being directed by Ed Parone.

  Jim Bridges and Jack Larson are both of them eager to feud with Gavin, because I incautiously told Jim how Mark Andrews had admitted to us, without the least embarrassment, that he had talked to Sullivan, who was sitting next to him during the performance, and made it clear that he didn’t like it. Mark calls this “being honest.” Personally, I feel sure that Sullivan would have given us a lukewarm review under any circumstances.

  Now I have a cold, which is probably my reaction to the strain of rehearsals and hopes. Weight just 150, nude. Don is sleeping out in the studio, so as not to catch cold too. Jim Bridges has one, and Jack has been in bed with one ever since his return from New York. Virgil Thomson arrives here today or tomorrow. Apparently they no longer regard the Byron opera as a flop, but I don’t know what its prospects are.

  Jim Gates moved into the Hollywood monastery and officially started his life as a monk, on the day our play opened!

  The day before yesterday, when we saw Swami, he told us that he had been unable to sleep the other night so he had made japam for a while—and discovered later that he had been doing it for two and a half hours! (He says he never uses his beads now, because he can’t sit up properly with his legs crossed.)

  May 23. Now we’re back on “Frankenstein” again, cutting it so it can be budgeted—after which Hunt Stromberg will condescend to return from Texas, and a director will be found and casting will begin. What we fear is that, with all this time lost, we shall end by losing not only Boorman (who still holds out some dim hopes), Jim Bridges (who may well have to take on another directing job), and Jon Voight (who may well get a part in another picture). And who knows, we may even end up with Boris Sagal!

  No news of any future for our play. A copy has gone to the Royal Shakespeare Company. And Gordon Davidson is supposed to be considering if he’ll do it again here. But at least we do have a rewritten version which we are very pleased with—so much so that we hate to think it wasn’t the one that was performed. We finished the rewritten version on the 18th, Don’s birthday, so that seems a good omen for it. And indeed Don said that he had enjoyed t
his birthday of work much more than most of his birthdays of celebration. In the evening we went to St. Germain for supper, inviting Billy Al Bengston, Penny Little, Joe Goode, Mary Agnes Donoghue and Mike Van Horn. The super-Frog food made a great impression upon all, as the bill did upon us; it was $135. But it seemingly poisoned both Don and Mary Agnes; anyhow they were both vilely sick for several days, vomiting and shitting water. Don, poor darling angel, even shit in the bed several times. Don had had sweetbreads and had given some of his to Mary Agnes to taste. However, I had sweetbreads too and didn’t feel a thing.

  On the 15th, I talked to John Rechy’s class at Occidental College; such a sleepy old-world oasis, I’d never visited it before in all these years, though Aldous and Gerald used to lecture there often. One of the students was a cute English boy from Manchester, so of course I told him that was practically my hometown too; and when the talk was over, he mumbled bashfully to John Rechy, “He made me feel very proud.” (To balance this bouquet, I must record a brickbat, thrown by someone named Richard Toscan, reviewing our play on KPFK; he referred to me as a “has-been novelist,” sneered at me for contributing to New Theater for Now at the age of sixty-eight, and said I ought to write a gay series for T.V., as that was all I was good for.)

  Next evening, the 16th, I was given an award by the Hollywood Authors’ Club, for “A lifetime of distinguished contribution to literature”; it is a cast of a statuette by Henry Lion, called “The Book,” and shows a nude woman apparently overcome with disgust after reading what looks more like a filmscript open in front of her—or maybe it has just sent her to sleep. The award was engineered by faithful little Fred Shroyer, bless him. But it came only at the end of a four-hour evening, spent mostly in celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the club and the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of its founder, Rupert Hughes, that nasty old horror who said that “we send a gangster to the electric chair but we do not treat these pacifists as traitors” ( July 5, 1940).164 He was described as “Christlike” and “almost a saint.” The speakers also bragged about the old days of the Authors’ Club, when only men were admitted and the conversation was “ribald and raunchy.” The one bright spot in the evening was when a cute seventeen-year-old violinist appeared, his name is Endre Balogh. But he only played stunt pieces, very fast, with buzzy noises and saw strokes.