Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

  On July 2, Christopher went up to Wyberslegh again, for a short farewell visit. The day-to-day diary doesn’t say that Caskey came along, and probably he stayed in London. On July 5, Christopher returned. He and Caskey spent their last few days in England staying at John Lehmann’s house with Alexis Rassine. John was in Paris but came back before they left.

  On July 6, Christopher and Caskey travelled down to Trottiscliffe(?)[12] to see Graham Sutherland; Caskey wanted to photograph him. I don’t remember who gave them an introduction to him; I’m pretty certain they hadn’t met before. He was dark and handsome and friendly and his wife was charming. (I remember hearing, maybe much later, that their otherwise happy marriage was saddened by the fact that she was unable to have children and they therefore as strict Catholics felt bound to refrain from sex. This was probably sheer fiction.) While Sutherland was showing them his studio, they noticed a watercolor landscape lying, along with other discarded work, on the floor. They offered to buy it. Sutherland told them they could take it, saying, “If I ever come to the States and run short of money, you can give me a hundred dollars.” (This never happened.)

  That evening, back in town, they had supper with Morgan and Bob Buckingham. It was perhaps on this occasion that Forster took Christopher aside and asked him gently not to drink so much. “You always seem a bit dazed, nowadays,” he said.

  On July 7, Christopher had lunch with Berthold Viertel. This was the fifth time Christopher had met Viertel in London; and they had met about the same number of times in New York—sometimes with Elisabeth Neumann, whom Viertel married in 1949. There has been nothing to say about him here, for he was no longer an important figure in Christopher’s world. As Christopher became increasingly detached from his own German-refugee persona (which belonged to the post-Berlin years of travel around Europe with Heinz) Viertel had lost his power to make Christopher feel guilty and responsible for him. On Christopher’s side, strong affection remained. But Viertel’s huge old-fashioned ego, his demand to be respected as a German Poet and Thinker, his masochistic Jewishness—“I wanted only to keep the wound open,” he had declared in one of his poems—had made it hard for Christopher to go on being intimate with him; it was just too much trouble.13

  This was to be their last meeting. Though Viertel didn’t suspect it yet, he was about to begin enjoying the five most successful years of his life—directing plays in Zürich, Berlin and Vienna, among which were translations made by himself of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Rose Tattoo. During that period, Christopher came back to Europe only once, and then their paths didn’t cross. Viertel died on September 24, 1953.

  On July 9, Christopher and Caskey sailed on the Queen Elizabeth for New York. They landed on July 14. Caskey had decided to stay in the East for a while before returning to California. He was going to visit his mother in Kentucky. Christopher left next day for Chicago on the Twentieth Century.

  The eight hours you had to spend in Chicago between trains were always a challenge to adventure. This time, Christopher determined not to waste them wandering around the Art Institute. So he looked up steam baths in the phone book, chose one whose name, printed in extra black letters, suggested that it would be big and busy, and called a cab to take him there. The cab driver, a fatherly type, asked him if he wasn’t a stranger in town. Christopher said yes, he was. The driver said that was what he’d guessed—because the bath Christopher had mentioned wasn’t the kind of place he’d care for; all manner of bad characters hung out there. “I’ll take you to a nice quiet place,” he added, “where you’ll be comfortable.”

  To Christopher, the driver’s meaning seemed obvious; the bath Christopher had picked was queer. So he hadn’t the courage to insist on going there. Cursing his luck, he let himself be taken to the nice respectable quiet place the driver recommended. It was called The Lincoln Baths and was in the midst of a residential district. When Christopher entered, he was a little surprised to find a very obvious (black) queen who took his money, grinned archly and told him to “have a good time.” But far bigger surprises followed. The “bath” could hardly be described as a bath at all—for there was no steam in the steam room. It was just a shabby dirty warren of cubicles, nearly pitch dark and quite crowded; everybody was cruising. Christopher didn’t have much of a good time because the clients were mostly his own age. But this, at least, was an adventure—and an utterly mysterious one. What had been in the taxi driver’s mind?

  At six that evening (July 16) Christopher left on the Super Chief, after having seen and fallen for Montgomery Clift in The Search. On July 18 he arrived back in Los Angeles. I think Hayden Lewis and/or Rod Owens must have met him at the depot downtown. They were now living in the Santa Monica–Ocean Park area, which was probably why Christopher decided to take a room at a tiny hotel called the El Kanan, on Ocean Avenue, quite near them.14 Relations between Hayden and Christopher were much better now that Caskey was absent. But Hayden couldn’t resist making put-down personal remarks. “You’re fat as a pig!” he exclaimed, on first seeing Christopher. A couple of weeks later, when Christopher was feeling proud of having lost weight, Hayden told him, “My dear, you look like a scarecrow!” Rod Owens was always friendly.

  Christopher’s room at the El Kanan was dark and small—all the smaller because Christopher had to keep his bicycle in it; there was no other safe storage place. He used it only for going to bed in.

  Christopher reported to MGM for work the morning after his arrival; it happened to be a Monday. It was delightful to have Gottfried Reinhardt as his producer again. (Looking back, I can still say that Gottfried has been my favorite boss—leaving Tony Richardson out of the running, because the relation between a writer and his director is different.)

  The Great Sinner15 is listed in its credits as having been based on an original story by Ladislas Fodor and René Fueloep-Miller. I’m pretty sure that Christopher never saw this story, if indeed it ever existed in writing. What he was required to start working on was an already-completed first-draft script which had been put together by Reinhardt and Fodor. (René Fueloep-Miller never appeared—for all I know, he was in Europe or dead.)

  The story idea was basically nothing more than an adaptation of The Gambler—putting Dostoevsky himself in place of the story’s narrator.16 Thus it is Dostoevsky who falls in love with Polina and becomes a gambling addict through her influence. Finally, after descending to the lowest depths of addiction and even (this was Gottfried’s addition) planning—though not actually committing—the murder of the old woman pawnbroker out of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky cures himself by writing a story about his experiences, which is presumably The Gambler.

  It’s possible that Christopher wouldn’t have accepted this assignment so lightly if he had had time to find out more about it and think it over. But the glamor of a job offer by long distance phone was powerful in itself And then there was the salary, and the free transportation home—and the immense satisfaction of having been remembered and wanted and asked for.

  The reunion with Gottfried was like being welcomed back into a cozy Jewish-Viennese club; Christopher felt absolutely at his ease. Ladislas Fodor also belonged to the club, he was a Hungarian Jew who had spent much of his youth in Vienna. But Gottfried and Fodor were very different. Gottfried was intelligent, sad-humorous, idealistic, basically honest and capable of frankness. Fodor was full of smiles and schmaltz, smoothly witty, crafty and capable of ruthlessness. Sometimes, with his slanting, almost oriental eyes and heavy sleek mustache, he looked like a comic Stalin. Christopher didn’t trust him for one instant, but that was unimportant. They skated gaily together on the thick ice of professional politeness.

  Christopher was given to understand by Gottfried that he was free to rewrite the dialogue of the first-draft script and to reconstruct its story line in any way he wanted. Gottfried also told Christopher that Fodor wouldn’t interfere with him, and indeed Christopher was left alone when he was working in his office. But Fodor was me
anwhile in conference with Gottfried, unpicking Christopher’s work of the previous day and restoring the script more or less to its original form. Fodor even fought to preserve his creaky foreign-sounding dialogue; Christopher was merely allowed to polish it. All this was done tactfully and smilingly and with charm; there were never any quarrels. Christopher argued sometimes, but he usually had to agree that this rewriting of his rewrite was necessary, under the circumstances. They were short of time—the picture was due to start shooting early in October—and the first-draft script was at least shootable; it was corny and slick but it made cinematic sense.17

  If Christopher had had several months and complete freedom to handle this story idea in his own way, he would have tried to create a more lifelike Dostoevsky character—a role for a character actor, not a romantic lead—eccentric, ugly, violent, shameless, farcical. He would have tried to make the love affair with Polina an enslavement, a bizarre addiction, instead of a cool-blooded pretty Viennese romance. He would have thrown out the neat little Fodor–Reinhardt triangle with the casino director, who ends up behaving like an English gentleman. But, alas, he knew already that the Dostoevsky character was to be played by Gregory Peck!

  Christopher had always been a model employee. He despised amateurs like Brecht who, when they condescended to work at a film studio, whined and sneered and called themselves whores or slaves. Christopher prided himself on his adaptability. Writing a movie was a game, and each game had a different set of rules. Having learned the rules, Christopher could play along with enjoyment—especially if he had a fellow player like Gottfried Reinhardt who was enjoying himself too. Once Christopher had accepted the fact that this game was to be played according to the Viennese code, he became almost as Viennese as Gottfried and Fodor. I have no doubt that some of the script’s most Viennese touches were contributed by him, though I can’t remember which they were.[18]

  Christopher’s first four weeks on The Great Sinner were busy but uneventful. He worked all day at the studio, Mondays through Fridays, and sometimes stayed on there with Gottfried and Fodor till nearly midnight. Gottfried would get food sent up from the commissary and they would drink and talk in his office or watch films in the projection room. (One evening, they ran two costume pictures, because both were set more or less in the same period as The Great Sinner. During the Vivien Leigh version of Anna Karenina, Christopher closed his eyes for what seemed like a couple of seconds. When he opened them again, he was shocked to discover what liberties the director had taken with Tolstoy’s story; there seemed to be several unfamiliar characters. . . . He had slept right through into the middle of Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman!)

  In the evenings, Christopher had supper with Hayden and Rod more often than with any of his other friends. They were his nearest neighbors, their company was relaxing and their interest in studio gossip was unfailing. (Like most people who are in the midst of a project, Christopher found it easier to talk about The Great Sinner than about anything else; all other topics required extra concentration.)

  Christopher also saw Peggy and Bill Kiskadden, Salka Viertel, Lesser Samuels, Vernon Old, Klaus Mann, Chris Wood, van Druten, Tito Renaldo,19 Carlos McClendon, Jay de Laval and a few others. Peggy—like Berthold Viertel—already belonged to Christopher’s past, but she didn’t realize this yet, and neither did Christopher, altogether. So she still had a certain power over him. Even while Christopher was entertaining Peggy with anecdotes about his South American trip, he felt himself becoming involuntarily apologetic. He hated this but he couldn’t help it. What was he apologizing for? His defection from the Vedanta Center, and his life with Caskey. He wasn’t really apologizing to Peggy, though. He knew very well that she disapproved of Caskey and of all his other boyfriends, past and to come. But that was neither here nor there, for she also disapproved of the Vedanta Center—and for the same reason. Christopher’s sexual and religious associates embarrassed her equally; both groups, from her point of view, were shoddy, second-rate, not to be mentioned in nice society. . . . Christopher rejected Peggy’s moral judgements in advance, yet he perversely went on seeing her and telling her about himself. Because his life made him feel guilty, he needed disapproval of it by a dogmatically stupid woman, a woman whose disapproval would reassure him. Poor Peggy! Christopher had given her an ungrateful role to play—a role which was very bad for her own character, for it brought out all her self-righteousness. When Christopher got cured of his guilt, several years later, he stopped seeing her altogether. She was well rid of him, and he of her. They were both of them remarkable and even admirable people, but their relationship had been founded on falseness from the start; they could only have acted sincerely as declared enemies. I must blame Christopher far more than Peggy. For years, he had been using her for his convenience and involving her in his neuroses; if he had had an elder sister, he would have used her in much the same manner. Well—enough of that.

  Thomas Mann, in a letter to Dr. Theodor Adorno (reprinted in Mann’s Letters), writes on July 12, 1948, that Klaus is “physically restored” after an attempt at suicide20 and is staying at Bruno Walter’s house along with his sister Erika, “who is giving him spiritual care.” Thomas continues:

  I am somewhat angry with him for having tried to do that to his mother. She is understanding about everything—and so am I. That has spoiled him.

  The situation remains dangerous. My two sisters committed suicide, and Klaus has much of the elder sister in him. The impulse is present in him and is favored by all the surrounding circumstances—except that he has a parental home he can always rely on, although naturally he does not want to be dependent on it.

  It is a good sign that he curses the publicity that followed the incident on the grounds that “this makes it so hard to start over again.”

  I don’t know just what Thomas Mann meant by “all the surrounding circumstances” which “favored” Klaus’s impulse to suicide. Did these include Klaus’s homosexuality in general and his boyfriend Harold Fairbanks in particular?

  I don’t think Klaus had known Harold Fairbanks very long before Christopher met Harold; the three of them had supper together for the first time on July 27. Harold was a merchant seaman. He was well built (though in danger of fat) and quite good-looking. He drank a lot. He could be very amusing or sullen or aggressive or sentimental, switching his moods suddenly and often. When he was drunk and encountered one or more sexy young studs in a bar, his favorite challenge was, “Fuck or fight!”—he didn’t seem to mind being beaten up, at all. He was definitely homosexual [. . . ].

  If Klaus talked to Christopher about his suicide attempt, I don’t remember what he said. Obviously, Klaus must have found the subject embarrassing. I imagine that one could only talk freely about one’s own attempted suicide to someone who had tried it himself. Christopher, on the other hand, was a confirmed self-preserver.

  On the surface, as always, Klaus was bright, witty and seemingly interested in what was going on in the world around him. He had a lot of courage and he tended to keep the melancholic side of his nature hidden. I don’t think that he got much moral support from any of his love affairs. Certainly not from Harold Fairbanks, who was fond of him no doubt but much too unstable to be able to take a lasting interest in other people’s problems.

  How seriously did Klaus feel himself involved with Harold? I don’t know. But I’m sure that Klaus’s realistic pessimism convinced him there was no future in their relationship. He did however make a scene of jealousy when he found Harold sitting drinking with Christopher in Christopher’s room, late at night. (Harold also had a room at the El Kanan and Klaus used to come and sleep with him there sometimes.) Christopher and Harold weren’t, in fact, doing anything sexual, but Christopher rather wanted to go to bed with him and Harold realized this and would probably have said yes if Klaus hadn’t shown up. He and Christopher weren’t really attracted to each other, merely compatible; they got along well together from the start. Between them, they calmed Klaus do
wn—it was easy to convince him that his suspicions had been false, especially since he had been drunk at the time. Next morning, he and Christopher were friends again.

  Harold Fairbanks used to spend a lot of time on the beach. Christopher often joined Harold there when he could get away from the studio, which was of course only on weekends. I think it must have been on Saturday, August 14, that Christopher first met Jim Charlton. They met on the beach, I’m fairly sure, but it wasn’t a pickup. Maybe Jim already knew Harold.21 Anyhow, they got talking and that evening they had supper together.

  When Christopher met him, Jim Charlton must have been about twenty-seven years old.22 But he still seemed boyish. He was larger than Christopher but not above medium American size. He had a white smooth-skinned body, strong though not heavily muscled, with little hair on it. Big shoulders, sturdy arms and legs, very small buttocks. He couldn’t have been described as handsome but he was funny looking and cute. He had a long, oddly turned-up nose, big teeth, a ready grin, blue-grey eyes with a mistrustful look in them, and a deep growly voice. He wore his brown hair short but not cropped or crew-cut. His clothes were of the army surplus type, cords, a blue work shirt, a leather jacket, sneakers. He always seemed very clean. At the same time, he had an unusually strong, musky body odor, which Christopher was soon to find delicious and intensely sexy.