Liberation

by Christopher Isherwood

  July 28. What a radiantly happy time I have had, these last months! Such great joy, being with Don. I am certain that he feels it too. We live in unbroken intimacy and love, day after day, from waking till sleeping. This is most certainly one of the happiest periods of my entire life.

  We finished the first draft of our Meeting by the River screenplay on the 26th—the the day that Jim Bridges got back from New York, where he has been showing his picture (now definitely retitled The Paper Chase and purged of its offensive song). Jim has read our script and doesn’t like it much. He feels that most of the tension between the two brothers has been relaxed and that the other characters upstage them. We have no opinion because we haven’t either of us read the script through properly, we were in such a hurry to let Jim have it. We are both ready to do more work on it—if only Jim will continue to believe in the project and not lose faith and ditch us for something else.

  Today is glorious—at least, this afternoon is, after a morning of sea-fog. (This has been one of the foggiest summers I’ve ever known.) I was in the ocean for nearly ten minutes. Meanwhile, Don went off to Laguna Beach with Lance Loud, who is so lively and friendly and looking really sexy; he has a good figure and he has modified the amusing but too drastic henna-red of his hair to a darker, more becoming shade. Lance is to be introduced to Jack Fontan and Ray Unger; he is eager to have his horoscope read.

  August 3. Jack Fontan and Ray Unger said that Lance Loud is inhibited by his Catholic upbringing—hence the frenzy of his camping; he feels he has to go all the way or none of it. But they think he will be successful in life. Lance has a thing about The Day of the Locust, which Don has just read and loathed, so we are planning to introduce him to John Schlesinger, when he returns from England. Meanwhile, Michael Childers has told us that John is already greatly interested in Lance and will certainly give him at least a walk-on part in the picture.

  John Lehmann has already signed a contract (or at any rate a “memorandum of agreement”) with Methuen; Curtis Brown has just sent me the papers. So I’ve had to write to John saying firmly that I will not sign until I’ve seen copies of my letters because I still haven’t made up my mind if I want them to be published at all. Don says John is trying to railroad me, and he’s right, of course.

  On the 31st, I went with [Bronislau K]aper to the Hollywood Bowl, to meet Ernest Fleischmann, its director, and talk about the Max Reinhardt memorial evening on the 30th of this month, at which I’m to speak. It was a lovely though slightly smoggy morning. Alfred Brendel was rehearsing with the orchestra for a concert that evening. To my great joy he was playing Mozart’s D Minor Concerto when we arrived, with that utterly blissful passage for the piano at the beginning of the second movement. Brendel’s gestures are extravagant yet not ridiculous, because they are obviously for himself rather than for the public. He will suddenly rip his right hand off the keyboard, as though the keys had become red-hot and the flesh of his fingers had begun to stick to them. At the end of a solo passage, he will seemingly throw the music at the orchestra, so they can take over. He will hold his left hand high in the air, drooping from the wrist (“like a lily,” as Kaper said). When both hands are free, he will pat them together, the fingers crooked and helpless looking, like a cripple trying to applaud. Then, again, he will “fish” with his right hand inside the open piano, as though he were a cat trying to catch goldfish. We met him later, a charming, slightly stooped man with comic eyes. [. . .] Fleischmann was very smooth and very polite. Kaper says he is terrifically vain. I do like Kaper so much, whenever I see him. He lives all alone with a housekeeper in a big house on Bedford Drive. I have a feeling that he pursues girls like a maniac. We talked about Gottfried, whom we both love. Kaper says that, when he and Gottfried meet, they repeat the punch lines of stories which they both know by heart—“just to reestablish contact.”

  August 6. Yesterday afternoon, I went alone to see Don’s show again. (He naturally finds it embarrassing to hang around the show himself, as if waiting to be recognized and complimented.) Yesterday was the last day.

  I was terrifically moved—far more so than I expected I’d be. The whole thing—it appeared to me, for the first time, not just as something done by a person I love but “in its own right,” existing quite apart from Don. And it is tremendous. All those faces, famous, infamous, unfamous—each one doing his or her “thing,” trying to impress, to charm, to intimidate, or not trying to project anything, just being—all of them were made equal, they were all part of the family that Don’s art has conjured up. I kept thinking of Edward Thomas’s lines: “All of us gone out of the reach of change—/Immortal in [a] picture of an old grange.”97 The tears ran down my cheeks and I felt so marvellously joyful.

  August 14. Am not so joyful today, because yesterday we saw an untitled undubbed print of “Dr. Frankenstein” (the cut they’re going to show on T.V.) and today I had to tell Hunt Stromberg in no uncertain language what we thought of it.

  God knows we went (to the projection room at Universal) with no great expectations, but this was worse than anything I’d expected. Smight has no imagination, no fun, no sense of style, no feeling for atmosphere. Which also means that he can’t direct actors. Even James Mason wasn’t nearly as good as usual; he missed nearly all the campiness of his part. Leonard Whiting is just a fat young man with an expressionless face and no emotion beyond a certain petulance; he could say a line like, “Why the devil can’t the buses run on time?”) but that’s all. Nicola was a disappointment. David McCallum could have been really good if he had had more humor; Smight is probably to be blamed for this. Michael Sarrazin was physically wrong. When he looked in the mirror and said, “Beautiful!” it was terribly embarrassing because he wasn’t. And the makeup they gave him was totally wrong, too mild to begin with, so that you couldn’t believe it could have scared Mrs. Blair into a fit, and later merely disgusting—sores and carbuncles—not frightening. The best of them was Jane Seymour. She would have been very very good in the part if Smight hadn’t fouled up her scenes. He has no sense of timing whatever.

  And then Hunt and he had put in words and made cuts which spoilt much of our dialogue. And they had written a whole scene for Gielgud and made nonsense of the escape to the ship. And ruined the ball scene. And made the drowning of William meaningless and the avalanche ending ditto. No, I don’t want to write any more. I feel really sick to my stomach. This wretched pair have taken months of our work and destroyed it.

  Don was so wonderful last night, while we were having supper. He said (in effect), “Imagine if, twenty years ago, we could have seen ourselves as we are tonight, talking about this disaster—we’d think we must be unhappy.” Meaning that we aren’t. And truly we aren’t—because the life we have together now makes all such disasters unimportant, even funny. . . . Still and all, we are mad at Hunt!

  August 21. On the 19th, Don went up to Carpinteria, where Ken Price has taken a beach house and was giving a party for The Gang—Billy Al, Joe Goode, etc. etc. Before this, he drew Howard Warshaw and found him very hostile. This seems perfectly natural to Don. He reads it as a typical heterosexual reaction; making a heavy out of the junior partner in a homosexual relationship— “Chris was our friend until Don came along and poisoned him against us” etc. But I’m puzzled. It doesn’t seem to me that simple. Nor do I understand the very much more evident dislike which Fran Warshaw now feels for me—has felt, I’m sure, for a long while. No doubt she hates Don too, but she hasn’t had as many opportunities to show this.

  While I was writing the above, Robin French called and told me that George Santoro at Universal told him NBC is delighted with the “Frankenstein” film and is planning to show it on two consecutive nights—November 30 and December 1—instead of on a Saturday and a Monday night, November 17 and 19, as previously planned. I haven’t told Don this yet because he’s out in the studio drawing Randy Kleiser (who has just signed a contract to direct at Universal and is interested in doing our “Mummy” script—if he likes i
t when he’s read it!).

  To get back to Sunday the 19th. Ben Underhill unexpectedly showed up—he was in town staying with an old friend, [. . .]. The two of them came down and took me to lunch. Ben looked incredibly healthy, his eyes so clear and his skin so pink. But he had a stare of switched-on brightness which seemed a trifle uncanny. I had no chance to speak to him alone, so couldn’t find out anything about his life. He seemed very glad to see me. And indeed I felt happy to see him.

  In the afternoon, Rudi Amendt came over to talk to me, at my request, about Max Reinhardt. He is such a weird creature. He worked himself up into a frenzy of gestures, stage whispers, writhings, eye rollings and impersonations. At moments he looked like a reanimated skeleton—his head is skull-like and his eyes become eyeholes. I have no doubt that he can talk exactly like Max himself. From this point of view, our conversation was as good as a séance; Max was conjured up. But I don’t feel that I got all that much material to use in my speech at the Bowl.

  I’ll try to note down what I did get. . . . Reinhardt was shy, he only came to life in the theater. He didn’t understand business. His brother Edmund looked after that, until he died in 1929. Meanwhile, Reinhardt had become accustomed to borrowing large sums of money and expecting people to have confidence that they’d be paid back, sooner or later. That worked all right in Europe, where he was an internationally famous person, but it didn’t work in America when he came there during the late thirties and ran up against the psychology of the Depression. He was in great money difficulties when he died (seventy years old, in 1943). . . . When he was going to direct a play, he made elaborate plans in advance. He imagined himself playing all the parts and he knew exactly how he wanted them played, but this didn’t mean that he imposed his ideas on his actors if they had ideas of their own. If one of them was at a loss, however, Reinhardt didn’t leave him to work it out, he showed him how to do it. When he was moved by good acting he wept, no matter if it was tragic or not. And his laugh was famous. If you could make him laugh, that was the highest honor. He never lost his temper with his colleagues. His attitude to the theater was fundamentally religious; he instinctively presented plays as religious ceremonies. But he never forgot that the public must be entertained. . . . At Salzburg, he learnt style and became an art collector. His sense of style made him pay great attention to detail. Amendt described how, in one play, he installed a specially heavy well-made door, so that it would shut “like the door of a Cadillac” when one of the characters left the house with a lover. . . . There’s lots more, but I forget—

  August 24. More from Amendt, by telephone, yesterday: When Reinhardt was working with his students at his school in Los Angeles, he was “gentle, reserved, polite,” he treated them “with infinite courtesy.” He made the most of whatever talent they had and even overrated them. He gave them “something to stir their imagination”. . . . I asked, was it difficult for him to stage Sister Beatrice in a small room, after having presented it (as The Miracle) in a building like Olympia?98 No, said Amendt, because he never compared what he was doing with what he had done before. He never considered any project as being finished. He couldn’t stop working on a project—which caused him to keep postponing openings, to the despair of his business advisers. Amendt said that, when he read in Ramakrishna and His Disciples that the atmosphere of Ramakrishna’s life could best be described by the one word now, he had thought of Reinhardt. (I was well aware of the characteristic ally Amendt compliment implied by this—slipping in a little flattery of me along with Reinhardt.) Reinhardt’s life, when he was working, was all now. He didn’t have any sense of time. He would work for days on end and his stamina (until shortly before the end of his life) was extraordinary. . . . Reinhardt had a perfect ear for dialogue, and this was demonstrated when he supervised the translation of foreign plays into German. Not only this, he saw how to tighten them up and improve them in detail. (Am a bit dubious about Reinhardt’s talent in this respect, however. I remember the heavy-handedness of his adaptation of Maugham’s Home and Beauty (called Too Many Husbands or Viktoria) and Gusti Adler describes approvingly how Reinhardt had the actress who played the king’s mistress in The Apple Cart (Der Kaiser von Amerika) do gymnastic exercises throughout the second act in order to liven up the dialogue. Adler comments with true kraut smugness that this was “a wittily inserted circus act which fascinated the public—an example of how Reinhardt could help a writer out, when one of his scenes was not very successful dramatically.”99 I wonder what Shaw thought of this bit of wit. Probably he didn’t care too much, since Reinhardt made the play into a hit, after it had more or less flopped in England.). . . . Amendt says that Reinhardt never made comparisons between actors who had played the same role. . . . When Reinhardt was working with you, you felt that you were very close to him. But, to Reinhardt, it was only the work that mattered. If another project came along and you weren’t the right person to help him with it, then he dropped you. And so, as Amendt puts it, “He left frustrated lovers behind him”. . . . His absolute dedication, his singlemindedness, inspired awe in other people. Amendt says, “One couldn’t pee with him”. . . . Reinhardt always attempted too much. He was unable to supervise all his productions and some of them thus slipped out of his control and became second-rate. He was very extravagant and accustomed, in his middle life, to live in luxury. His great house, Leopoldskron, was in itself a kind of theatrical production. But he never became addicted to his possessions as ordinary rich men do. His great attachment was to a dog named Mickey (after Mickey Rooney) and it was a terrible blow to him when Mickey was killed by a rattlesnake in the Hollywood Hills. And on Fire Island in 1943, the excitement and exertion of trying to defend another of his dogs against two others caused him to have his first stroke.

  August 26. Sixty-nine. A very quiet birthday—partly because I wanted it that way, partly because Don has a cold. We had a talk this morning with Jim Bridges about the Meeting by the River film. He now wants to use most of our script—rewrite some sections and then send it around to possible backers. We feel that he is much hotter on the project than he has ever been before, but his enthusiasm is fickle, and he’ll cool off if he gets something else which offers a chance of immediate employment. He is very hard up.

  One of our chief problems; what is Tom’s role in the story? Jim would like to reduce it, because Tom scares off possible buyers. But he wants to keep Tom in the picture because he loves him. We all agree that the relationship between Patrick and Oliver must be strengthened in every possible way.

  Don brilliantly found a present for me which I really needed and yet wasn’t expecting: a briefcase.

  The thickness—it doesn’t seem to be actually a lump—on the ball of my left foot persists and sometimes hurts, especially when I get out of bed in the morning. My feet are altogether quite painful when I run. I notice a slight shortness of breath, nothing serious. The lump in my left thumb persists, neither smaller nor larger. My memory is very bad—am constantly drying up on people’s names. My weight this morning 151 and ½.

  Chris Wood, whom we had supper with last night, has just started cobalt treatment. He feels well, though complains of being tired, and doesn’t seem unduly worried.

  Few birthday greetings: Stathis Orphanos and Ralph Sylvester (who made me some sweetmeats out of dates), Peter Schlesinger, Richard (a cable), Marguerite [Lamkin] (ditto). Have just called Rod Owens to wish him a happy birthday, but got no answer.

  September 3. We gave a goodbye dinner party for Mike Van Horn last night—Penny Little and Billy Al Bengston, Jim Crabe,100 Jack Larson and Jim Bridges came. Mike and Jim Crabe are splitting up, quite amiably, and Mike is going to try his fortune in New York. Mike is worried about this and regards it as a test of himself and his talent and character—though Don has been trying to persuade him not to take such a dramatic all-or-nothing attitude. Don thinks Jim Crabe’s attitude to Mike is still condescending; that Jim treats him as a quaint little boy. Jim is certainly not heart-broken over their sp
lit-up. He wants to live on his own because then he won’t be embarrassed by Mike’s presence when his square studio friends come around. I’m sure he has never really appreciated Mike for what he is and probably can become. Jim’s closet is terribly terribly square.

  Jim Bridges has just been told that he has been awarded the grand prize for The Paper Chase at the Atlanta Film Festival. So he’s going there on Thursday and so is Randy Kleiser, who also has an award for Peege. And Randy, who is signing a contract with Universal, seems quite interested in “The Lady from the Land of the Dead,” if they’ll let him! Not another word from Hunt Stromberg.

  My appearance at the Bowl was a disaster. When I asked Ernest Fleischmann how long my talk about Reinhardt should be, he said, “Just use your judgment.” So on I went. The Bowl was two-thirds empty—that’s to say, the audience count was just over 6,000 out of an available 17,000 seats—but still and all that’s more people than I’ve ever spoken to before, outside of India. When I got to the mike, it was too high, because it had been adjusted to suit a tall British actress, Rohan McCullogh, who was later to speak some passages out of Midsummer Night’s Dream against a background of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music. Also, I found that I couldn’t see anything but a great blazing spotlight shining down at me out of a blackness which was like outer space. It was quite overwhelming for a moment—like having to address God; you knew the blackness was conscious and could hear you. I felt a sinking feeling of dismay but launched out into my speech and wasn’t bad, I think. Very soon, however, there were flurries of clapping out of the darkness and more clapping with increasing murmuring from the orchestra behind me. At first I disregarded this, but finally the murmuring became so loud that I asked, “Am I running overtime?” “Yes,” they said, “twenty minutes.” I asked if I could finish with an anecdote. They said, “No.” The clapping got louder. So I said, “Sorry, goodnight,” and walked straight off the stage. I may have spoken for twenty minutes in all but I doubt it. (The anecdote was to have been about Jean Ross—how she claimed that she and her fellow extra used to fuck every single night on stage during the party at Guilietta’s Venetian palace in the second act of Hoffmanns Erzählungen.101)