Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  May 22. The day before yesterday, I’m happy to say, Marguerite did go off to Louisiana and so this nonsense is coming to an end, let’s hope. But she still hasn’t told Harry, which means we have to lie to him, and Harry still thinks she’s in Tijuana or someplace, and will return. Harry is coming to supper tonight, which I dread; but it was I who invited him because I felt I had to.

  It’s a grey cheerless Sunday. Don has gone to work with Tony and Beegle. Charlie Brackett just called. He is getting into the act tomorrow, as Harry’s producer, in loco parentis.

  My interest in my novel is stirring again; but I’m recording that in the other diary.

  As for Don—all that part of my life couldn’t be happier and more harmonious. I’ve started reading aloud to him before we go to sleep—from The Snow Queen.175

  Speed has become a disciple of Gerald Heard!

  May 23. No special news from the Brown front. Harry spent all of yesterday drinking and whining and threatening suicide. I called Marguerite in Monroe and got her to authorize me to tell Harry where she is. So I did; and he was worse than ever. But it’s better than having him kid himself that she’ll return.

  Lunched with Tony Duquette today. He says he’s eager to talk to Gerald and find some kind of religion for himself.

  I want to get on with the Buddha treatment—finish it before June 1 and then begin the screenplay.

  I’m all right, really—but I get unnecessarily rattled by all this fussing that’s going on around me. And why? the old old reason—failure to perform acts of recollection. They ought to be constant. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be—for, honestly, right now, I don’t feel I’m engaged in any particularly God-alienating activity. My home life and my work life—at least they represent an effort toward something worthwhile. Well, I just have to keep trying.

  May 25. Yesterday was a gloomy day and Don was depressed in the evening. As he himself said, it was a delayed reaction to the birthday party. He had been running around all day trying to buy a kitten for Beegle Duquette’s birthday—today. We ate at the Lobster and walked on the pier. It was wonderful. So cold and empty. Just a few diners, hushed, dispirited, waiting listlessly for bedtime. An exhibition of inexcusably bad abstract art in the merry-go-round building was put to shame by the nobility and beauty of the wooden horses. The fun park pier at Ocean Park was lighted up, nearly empty probably, but going through the motions of fun. And then there was the cold, foaming sea—the other world. No possible pretense, that evening, that there could be any dealings between it and us. The differences are irreconcilable.

  Don showed the snapshots he and Ted used to take with a flash, of stars signing their autograph albums at premieres. Don and Ted took it in turns to pose and snap the pictures. They have come out wonderfully well. But I don’t like looking at them because they show something in Don’s face which is a faint reflection of Ted’s—an awful staring vacuous emptiness, with eyes bright and hard as those of a stuffed bird. I hope that look has disappeared forever now. It’s the brightness of madness.

  It seems that Harry has gone back to work at Fox. Marguerite called him personally and told him that she wasn’t coming back to him. But he still believes she is, and this isn’t so surprising, because Marguerite is returning to Los Angeles in two weeks to take this job at Fox. I still wouldn’t be surprised if they get together.

  May 26. A party at the Weingartens’, last night, in honor of a British doctor and his wife—[George] Pickering—he perfected a treatment of hypertension, using a drug called Serpasol, known in India for centuries.

  They were really very sweet people, especially the wife, and they had both been up at Cambridge at the same time I was. The evening, otherwise, could hardly have been worse. Nothing but doctors—the Knopfs and I were the only “civilians”—unspiced hamburgers, beer, and, after dinner, a showing of The Glass Slipper. Jessie’s almost sadistic expressions of admiration for me continue. I can’t figure out if she just wants to see how much I’ll stand, or how long I can bear being embarrassed in public. Or maybe this is just Russian Jewish behavior. The worst of it is, the daughters are expected to get in the act.

  Came back to find Don terribly gloomy. And he’s just as bad this morning. Says he’s appalled to find how much he depends on me. Also, I see a beginning of turning against the Duquettes. Yesterday he dropped a bed and broke some valuable carving. I asked if Beegle was cross. “No,” said Don bitterly. “She said accidents must happen, but I know she meant they mustn’t happen too often—even with unpaid workers.” Of course, the truth is that Don is on the verge of a whole fugue of accidents, designed to test the Duquettes and find out if they really love him.

  Masochism is always infuriating. It tries, in fact, to provoke one’s sadism. But if I am to understand Don I must write down everything about him here, the good and the bad. I still think I can help him—but it will be very difficult and I’ll have to keep my head.

  Fan note: whenever Lana Turner gets tired, her left eye begins to close. Her tiredness is a weapon with which she keeps everybody under control. And if you try to buck it, she can make herself look startlingly ugly.

  May 27. Don cheered up a lot last night. At supper he was very funny, telling me how much he’d hoped I’d come back from the Marmorstons’ drunk, so he could bawl me out. But I didn’t, and that made him mad.

  Today I finish the rough draft of the treatment of The Wayfarer. And tonight supper with Jo and Ben—and then three days’ holiday, because of Memorial Day. Why not start that novel? Well—why not?

  May 28. Yes, why not?

  This is a solemn moment, because I’m just about to start.

  I went in swimming this morning, as I did yesterday. The water isn’t cold. They have torn down the old beach club—the building immediately south of State Beach—and they’ll probably destroy the wall which makes it possible to undress on the beach without being seen from the houses along the highway.

  Yesterday I went on the set with Don and suddenly realized that Catherine and indeed the whole court ought to be wearing mourning—the day after the dauphin’s death! Nobody had noticed this. Consternation. Then Knopf was telephoned, and he ruled that it didn’t matter.

  Yesterday evening, we went to supper with Jo and Ben. Don and Jo drew sketches later. Don’s were very good—full of life. He really does have a talent. But they make Jo look so old!

  I find it so touching to think of Don’s childhood—being taken downtown on Saturdays by his mother with Ted, to see movies. How they loved Alice Faye! The pathos of that childhood snugness—false security, so soon to be destroyed.

  10:29 a.m. A grey morning with sun behind the fog. No more excuses for delay. Okay, boys—this is a TAKE!

  May 29. Well, I actually did write something—a page of utter nonsense. And I’ve just finished another page today. (Thick fog out. Don clipping pictures from movie magazines for his collection. The Siamese kitten (Kabuki) he gave Beegle Duquette is frisking around the room—it’s spending the weekend with us because the Duquettes have gone to Palm Springs. A kind of wet-day-in-the-nursery atmosphere.)

  Yesterday morning, I talked to Mrs. Hoerner to find out if we can have the house for another year from next September. This isn’t certain, because her husband may be stationed out here instead of at Norfolk. Otherwise, he’ll go to Washington. Mrs. Hoerner seems placidly indifferent. She’s staying here in any case. If he comes, she’ll move up into this house and live with him. She won’t go to Washington.

  She tells me she is looking for a Buddha. She wants to put it in a shrine and light incense sticks in front of it. The Buddha she has now is unsatisfactory, but she burns the incense, just the same; and if she’s out, her son Griff does it—although he squirms if ever she talks about religion. Griff is nearly seventeen, and the other day she found he’d started taking flying lessons without her permission. Eleven dollars a lesson—he makes the money by washing cars.

  A party last night given by Jesse Lasky Jr.176 and Olive Dee
ring. Couldn’t have been more bored. We went because Don hoped Anne Baxter would be there. A director (middle European—Brahm?) got me in a corner and told me Conrad was psychopathic. He feared and hated the sea but forced himself to be a sailor because he was ashamed of not being a Polish revolutionary, like his parents. The director also said that the man in Heart of Darkness is a prophetic portrait of Hitler. (He himself had directed “The Secret Sharer” for Hartford.)177 For some reason, he made me very angry.

  May 31. Last night, we went to Peter and Alice Gowland’s. Their children danced—Mary Lee, six, dressed up in her mother’s black lace slip, winking and leering and gesturing with a cigarette holder: it was frighteningly obscene. Ann, doing rock and roll with her girlfriend Sue, wasn’t frightening but overpowering. Ann is twelve, and already she has a steady—the son of Johnny Weissmuller, who’s six foot at fourteen and carries a spring knife with which he occasionally “nicks” her. Peter and Alice are utterly helpless and childlike as parents. Mary Lee treats them as her victims. She has to be bribed to be quiet with “six presents” (apparently a kind of inflation has set in). She gets out of going to school by saying she’s sick, and sits watching TV all day long.

  The object of our visit—with Jo and Ben—was to see The Petrified Forest on TV.178 A truly poor play—how did it ever get such a reputation? I remember seeing it as a film, in London, with Stephen [Spender]. Even then we disliked it, but Bogart was much better then, I’m sure.

  Wrote some of my book—page four—today. Every voice of reason tells me this is idiotic—without a plan I’ll get nowhere. But the whole point of this method is not to care where I get. It corresponds to making acts of spiritual recollection, with the faith that no act is wasted. No act of artistic recollection is wasted.

  Lunch with Tony Duquette. He wants to open the theater in his studio with a masque, something part play, part ballet. We discussed the possibility of adapting something from the animal books illustrated by Grandville.179 Talked also about all four going abroad together this fall.

  June 1. Today I’m depressed, partly because of a hangover, chiefly because of a letter from Glenway Wescott yesterday, telling that George Platt Lynes has an inoperable tumor on the lung and can’t live more than a few weeks. How glad I am we gave him that lunch at the Pavillon!180

  Last night we had Gerald and the Bracketts to dinner, with Michael [Barrie] helping as cook. The party itself was a huge success—Gerald highly elated by news of a saucer crash in England and the capture of its midget crew. But later Michael came back and talked religion—he still feels guilty, underneath, about having left Trabuco. And this talk caused Don to feel excluded; which was all the more bitter because he’d just been saying how much he liked Michael and Gerald. “As soon as they get drunk,” he said, “they all show how little they care about me or what I think. They all treat me the same way.”

  This new technique of novel writing is fascinating. Because I seem to have put the subconscious on the spot. Now it’s trying to bribe me to stop by offering me suggestions on how to write it properly. I must listen carefully to the suggestions—and go right ahead with this version.

  Latest Brown news: Harry has been drunk for two days—says he refuses to go back to work, will starve Marguerite out by going bankrupt. Charlie Brackett is all set to deliver a severe reprimand. Marguerite is due to return here shortly. Speed is so tired he says he aches all over.

  June 3. Talked to Henry Daniell on the set yesterday. He told me he suspects the communists are “getting at” the younger generation of Americans. Because his daughter, teenaged, said the other day, “The Russians wouldn’t hurt us if we let them alone.”181 He says acting is an impossible career. He wishes he’d gone into the law.

  Am worried about pains in the top of my head, darting like neuralgia and sometimes quite sharp. Can I be starting a brain tumor?

  Marguerite is scheduled to return from Louisiana today. She’ll start divorce proceedings at once.

  June 7. Yesterday we went to a party at the Archers’182—a big affair with a tent and 150 guests. Both Harry and Marguerite came, separately. Harry says he has given up drinking for keeps. They didn’t reconcile, and Harry is still saying she shan’t have any money.

  Afterwards Don and I and some of the others went up to the Duquettes’ house, which is extraordinarily sinister—sort of ghoul-baroque—and did kicks to the ubiquitous glad-rag-doll record.183 It was quite a lot of fun.

  I still have these head pains, and a hangover.

  June 9. Two nights ago, I went to the Knopfs’, and Allen Rivkin184 described in detail how he’d had a brain tumor scare, and how he saw double in one eye, etc. And Eddie told me how [George] Gershwin came to the house only a couple of weeks before he died, and how he kept dropping things. So I feel less worried about my headache, though it persists.

  Yesterday Thom Gunn came to lunch with me, en route for Texas. Liked him so much I asked him to come on with us to Michael [Barrie]’s for supper. He has pockmarks and a vertically lined face like a convict’s, and his nose and chin are both too big—yet he’s quite attractive, with his bright brown eyes. He likes America, especially California. I warm to all Britishers who do that. And he’s intelligent, and warm.

  Loathsome sad grey dreary weather. No news of how Schary likes The Wayfarer. Marguerite is living at the Duquettes’, getting a divorce. Caskey is reported raging drunk. I keep on with my novel. I’m reading The Inferno.

  June 11. The day before yesterday, we went to supper at the Parrishes’. Don got drunk—we all did—and felt he was being neglected and left abruptly, without saying anything to anybody. I came home later and kidded him, and he was so furious he ran out and slept in the Ford downstairs. So yesterday I had a fearful hangover and stayed home. And Don and I had a long talk, which added up to this: that Don undoubtedly is rejected by people some of the time, but that it’s nevertheless neurotic to mind about it so much. On the whole, this blowup reassured me rather than otherwise, because Don managed to be fairly objective about it and didn’t get furious when I said maybe we should try a psychiatrist. Needless to say, I don’t want that any more than he does.

  Sunshine today and beach weather, after days and days of grey cloudiness. I still have this headache—no worse but no better.

  June 13. Back at the studio. A grey day. The Diane company went out to the Adams Boulevard location, but I’m sure they’ll have to give up. It’s hopeless.

  Marguerite saw Harry last night—but no reconciliation, according to Speed. Harry was expecting one, when I talked to him at the Bracketts’ lunch—where Monty Woolley185 retired in a state of collapse, and Dick Cromwell got drunk. Harry looked awful—his face covered with blotches, his eyes dull and dead. He drinks only soda water.

  Speed says Caskey is going to Italy in August—having let his business slide and sold his lot. Hayden and Rod’s business is slipping too. And Jim is “pitiful.” But this is all part of Speed’s view of the “sick people”—the Canyon folk. I don’t take it too seriously.

  June 14. I feel really lousy today—tired and shaky, and this pain in my head steadily continues. I wish I could get over it without going through all the fuss of having it examined. Maybe it is something—but yet I’ve had far more alarming symptoms so often before this.

  June 20. A big gap. Must be careful.

  Well, I went to see Sellars on the 16th and Irvine on the 17th, and both seem agreed that it isn’t anything very serious. Irvine thinks it may be eyes and is giving me some bifocals. Sellars, however, thinks it’s my back and could be adjusted by Dr. Mitchell here. But he doesn’t want me to be treated without X raying because—as he cheerfully tells me—he had another patient who had something wrong with his back—didn’t have X rays—went to a bone setter, and then found he had a tumor of the spine!

  Right now, due to my relief, the pain has nearly disappeared. That began yesterday, although I went into the ocean twice—the first time in weeks and weeks; because at last the weather has imp
roved.

  Today, Knopf tells me he’s terribly upset by night terrors. He wakes in the small hours, trembling, from terrible nightmares—that Leland Hayward186 upset some sauce. He says he can understand, now, about nervous breakdowns. Sellars tells him: Either take phenobarbital or spend $10,000 on an analyst.

  From a shooting schedule: “Outer space. Exterior.”

  I stop and talk to a writer. He’s working for Joe Pasternak.187 “What’s the picture?” “Four Girls.” “What’s it about?” “We don’t know yet. But Joe said to me—You know all those marvellous terrific gals that keep coming over from Italy? Lollobrigida, Mangano—sensational! Well, how’d it be if we took four of them?”

  Madame Grenier, our technical advisor on the Diane set, tells me how, when she had to become a U.S. citizen (because of her husband), Queen Mary said to her consolingly: “The women of my family always have to change their nationality when they marry.” And she took from a drawer a brooch made of diamonds and rubies representing the U.S. flag, and gave it to Madame Grenier, who wears it still.

  How in the world did Queen Mary get such a thing?

  This isn’t correct, but an effort to remember John van Druten’s latest “poor little” verse:

  Poor Mrs. Lodovic Vroom

  Is going to redo her womb,

  For her suitors have all of them started to shout

  That they feel claustrophobic and want to get out.

  Poor Mr. Lodovic Vroom

  Puts up signboards: “This way to the tomb.”

  Now they’re letting in windows, which serves as a clue

  Why the place is described as a womb with a view.

  We saw him and Starcke on the 15th. They’re off to New York for the play.188

  Other news—Diane may be called Cage of Gold after all. Schary has gotten around to the idea.

  Marguerite has settled into an apartment, on Harratt Street below the strip, where I used to live with Vernon in 1940. And she has started work on The View from Pompey’s Head as a technical advisor. And Harry has started drinking again.