No word from Caskey; but Don saw him at Julian Morton’s.
Tonight, I’m going to meet the new Swami—Vandanananda.
A charming evening with the Stravinskys last night. Igor is really one of the most uninhibitedly sweet people I know. He threw his arms around me and told me how fond he was of me. A conversation with slimy Lukas Voss202 under the impression that he was Michael Mann.203 Luckily I only asked: “How’s your father?”
August 3. Swami Vandanananda turns out to be youngish, hook nosed, bright eyed, shock haired—rather like a comic kind of bird. He talked very little while I was there, which wasn’t surprising—as our meeting was the usual jam session with half a dozen girls, and Krishna taking notes on the floor in the corner.
John Yale and Phil [Griggs] are taking their brahmachari vows today.
Yesterday I stayed home from the studio, partly because I wanted to see Johnny Goodwin, partly because my office was being painted. John and I went on the beach. He’s very little changed—the thin pinch-faced, handsome yet shrivelled boy, whose life, as he says, is, “A Greek tragedy produced by Mack Sennett.”204 Quite objectively and with a straight face and no apologies, he related the extraordinary details of his European trip with a protégé—an Italian-American boy who had been a boxer and reform school inmate and knew all the correct scientific words, because he’d gone through analysis. “The trouble with me is, I’m looking for security”—that might be the slogan of the 1950s.
They went to Barcelona together, where the boy—for the sake of “security”—decided to marry a whore. Unfortunately, she was already married to an older man, who didn’t want to give her up because he made money by pimping with her. So the boy had the brilliant notion of giving a valuable ring (a present from Johnny) to her sister, on condition that the sisters should exchange identity papers. When Johnny pointed out that this would prevent the sister from ever marrying—since she’d then be officially married to the pimp—the boy replied: “Aw, them foreigners will do anything for money! She won’t care.” However, he later abandoned the scheme and decided instead to go to a priest. But the pimp (or maybe it was some other pimp) persuaded him to go to “a saint” instead. “A saint’s better than a priest, ain’t he, John?” John agreed that this was indeed true, if you could find a saint. But, unfortunately, by this time it was Easter and the saint’s stigmata had started to bleed. So there was nothing to be done—he couldn’t be visited. So the boy left Barcelona with John for northern Europe—where they later parted.
John has taken mescaline several times, with various friends. He says it’s extraordinary how much basic agreement there is about the nature of the perceptions and intuitions you get from it. He didn’t have any “mystical” experiences (but this may be a purely semantic distinction) but he agreed with Gerald in saying how horribly people walked. He found the falseness, avarice, self-will, etc. in people’s faces so embarrassing that he didn’t want to see it. He said, however, that he had no sense of moral judgment in experiencing this. In general, he felt that man has lost touch with nature. That almost everything man-made was evil and horrible.
He got the mescaline by simply going into a drugstore and asking for it.
Today there was a luncheon in the executive dining room for the people who sell the studio’s pictures. Stills from the newest, including Diane, were exhibited round the walls. But the whole thing was fantastically mismanaged, because though the producers and writers were invited they weren’t seated next to the salesmen—so we couldn’t “sell the product,” and our presence was quite useless. Actually I sat with Lennie Spigelgass, Walter Reilly and Adolph Green205 and spent lunch talking to Adolph about mescaline!
Gore Vidal brought in his father,206 who’s assistant to the Defense Department and has a whole staff of military aides. Gore says they’re all appalled by the capacities of the new nuclear weapons. They don’t think the Russians have nearly as many.
August 5. One of the suggested titles (in the usual studio contest) for our film: The King and Di.
Last night, the Bracketts showed The Virgin Queen at Fox, and then gave a party at Romanoff’s. Don was very penitent because—having been put between a boy and a college-age girl (considered by Muff as suitable company for him)—and having had them talk across him for a long time, he got up in a rage and changed places. Mistook Edna Ferber for Cobina Wright.207 She didn’t remember me, anyway.
Lunch yesterday with Gore and Paddy Chayevsky.208 Liked him. He described how he is haunted by a feeling of horror and unreality which he can only reduce by constantly smoking, and by eating chocolate layer cake. He was amusing about American “virility.” He thinks the U.S. is a nation of repressed and terrified homosexuals. Women hunters who loathe women. Men who can only lay girls if their best buddy is watching.
August 6. Glorious weather. We’re just back from the beach with John Goodwin.
Yesterday afternoon I saw Jessie Marmorston, returned from Europe. Told her to get some mescaline for us to take.
Then went around to Harry’s. Speed and Paul have just moved in there. Speed has brightened the place with more pictures and there is nonstop record playing and nonstop rhumba dancing by Speed. A young man was engaged in putting a lock on Speed and Paul’s bedroom door—just in case Harry gets wild. Harry himself, sweaty and sloppy-drunk on beer but quite amiable, was flirting with Henrietta Ledebur, also drunk. When she’d gone, Harry announced that he could lay her anytime he wanted. Later Joan Elan arrived, and they all started to fix lamb chops, no one quite knowing how.
Don spent the night at home, because he had to see his mother off to Cleveland early today on a bus. I had supper at Salka’s, with Virginia and a nice couple—the Fred Greens—who are friends of Montgomery Clift—now reportedly drinking himself out of his career in the elderly arms of Libby Holman.209 Salka greatly shocked me by telling me that Maria Huxley said they had decided never to let me have mescaline, as it would undoubtedly prove fatally habit-forming—since I’m so weak willed! The puritanism back of this decision is what’s so shocking—quite aside from its injustice. And of course Gerald is mixed up in it too. So I’m determined to get mescaline elsewhere and tell him nothing till I’ve tried it.
August 8. My weight’s up to 150, which is almost unheard of. So I’m starting a campaign, to practice the posture exercises which are given in Davan’s Exercise without Exercises. I can’t remember exactly when I did them before, but I know I got good results.
Don and I went to Tony Duquette’s last night, and Tony held forth at great length about his plans. He wants to establish a workshop-school—a kind of team which will produce artwork of whatever kind his employers require. He wants me to get in on this team, and of course I’m prepared to do so, up to a certain point, as long as it helps Don.
We also talked more about the proposed trip to Europe. I must say, I’m really rather worried about that—not at all sure what the Duquettes will be like to travel with.
And yesterday we talked to the Lights, and looked over their house again. We both now feel very doubtful if this is the right place for us: it’s so tacky and the rooms really are too small.
In the night, quite often now, I wake—not with the horrors, but calmly and lucidly. Then I know certain things clearly—it’s almost as if they belonged to another order of reality: that I shall die one day—that much of my life has been wasted—that the life of the spirit is the only valid occupation—that I really care for Don and that I have, as it were, adopted him, much as I adopted Heinz, but more completely. In the daytime, these facts are obscured, by studio noise and as-if behavior, and insane resentments and mental and physical slumping. Also I know that all occupations, even Art, are symbolic, and all are valid, so long as they represent right-livelihood.
Tony’s amazing treasures—Venetian paintings, marvellous photos. And the fat old lady, Alice Toulmin, with one whole leg in the tomb, nevertheless can’t bear to give him a lacquer box she has, because she “clings to it.” Claire Mi
chell—her attractive yet somehow faintly sinister British niece, who has been a waitress at Lyons’ Corner House210 and sails on the Norfolk Broads.
The Duquettes served their usual stodgy Mexican dinner. The night-blooming cereus bloomed on their patio. They gave Don the blossom.
August 10. Johnny Goodwin came to supper with us last night. He has taken a violent dislike to Speed, whom he met the day before yesterday. He even thinks that Speed has encouraged the divorce—and he was shocked by Harry’s condition.
Yesterday, Don went to a fortune-teller with Joan Elan. She told Don that a relative put $5,000 aside for him on his twenty-first birthday. He’ll inherit it in a few years. She said Don will get work in connection with the theater when he’s twenty-seven, but not acting. He’ll go abroad in September and visit two countries principally—France only for a short time—and in one of them he’ll make many friends.
August 11. John Goodwin, after inviting us to a party tonight, has suddenly decided to leave town. A typical caprice of his. He hasn’t changed.
A charming letter from Stephen, inviting us to stay with him in England.
Don is beginning to talk of a showdown with the Duquettes: either they treat him like a proper apprentice and teach him things, or he doesn’t want to stay with them. I’m careful not to interfere in this.
Gore, at lunch today, told me I was cold. We were discussing George Cukor and why he doesn’t invite me to his house.
August 14. Thomas Mann died last Friday—tidily, as he did everything. There was a greatness in his dry neatness, and I must say—in spite of the gap in time since I saw him and the slightness of our friendship—I think of him with real love. He was somehow very supporting—not because of his great gestures, his “open letters” to world leaders, his public self-questionings. No, he was lovable in a tiny, cozy way—he was kind, he was genuinely interested in other people, he kept cheerful, he was gossipy, he was quite brave—he had the virtues of a truly admirable nursery governess.
Thinking of him, and communing with him as I dipped into Disorder and Early Sorrow,211 I said to myself: “At least I’ll write two more books—the Inferno novel, and the 1939–44 autobiography, based on my diary.” I feel real eagerness, an appetite for these projects.
Incidentally, I heard a few days ago that Billy Caskey has had another drunk-driving ticket and has skipped bail and left the state with a boy who builds cyclone cellars in Oklahoma and came out West, only to find that we don’t have cyclones!
August 15. For hours I’ve been wading through the tournament scenes of The Wayfarer, as if through thick tropical swamp. What a weary bore! I lie down, pace the floor, pick my nose, belch, go to the men’s room, glance through books and magazines—and all the while Betsy Cox sits there, like a watermelon, waiting for the next sentence to be dictated. Has she no temperament at all? Is she a saint? Or does she smolder inwardly, curse me and my British accent and affectations, and imagine herself—to while away the hours of her imprisonment with me—naked in the arms of her lover? I suppose she has one.
Lunch with Gore. I guess he’s still wondering what I think of Messiah, his novel. Well, I don’t. I’m bored and stuck fast. He asks quite often about my journal and talks apprehensively about the famous one Anaïs Nin is keeping—seventy volumes already!—in which he believes he figures most unfavorably. I believe he really thinks about “posterity” and its “verdict”—just like a nineteenth-century writer! And I don’t know whether to admire this, or feel touched by it, or just regard him as a conceited idiot.
Tinker212 has arrived and told him he must work out because he’s getting fat. So Gore is looking for a gym. Actually, he says, it’s natural for him to be fat. All the family are—except his father, who exercises frantically.
Yesterday we had lunch with the Bracketts—a very quiet and unglamorous affair, for the benefit of Charlie’s other daughter,213 her husband and her kids. Charlie, pulling a long face, took me out into the garden to confide that The Virgin Queen is a flop at the box office, and Zanuck is beginning to say: No more costume pictures for the present. I can’t really see why Charlie is so upset—he has so many irons in the fire. I urged him to write his autobiography and he insinuated that he couldn’t because he had to earn money—which seems a ludicrous excuse. He also told me that he’s very worried about Muff, because she looks so tired (which she does). All the while he kept gobbling caviar canapés like an addict.
One of the reasons Muff looks tired may be Xan.214 She was stiff drunk even before lunch, and Don says James Larmore slapped her for it as they left the table. Later, she and Muff disappeared.
Marguerite and Harry were there too—she unostentatiously avoiding him as usual, and he ostentatiously being avoided. And there was Ivan with his Chessy-cat smile, recommending life in a beach house at Malibu. (I think we’ll store the furniture in September and take a place on the beach until it’s time for us to go to Europe.) And Speed—who for some reason is concerned about the fate of the Inez Johnson215 painting belonging to Caskey. And Peter Hartshorne, who manages to give the most unpleasant impression of corrupt double-facedness while saying only the most harmless things. He reminds me of what Caesar said about thin people.216
We had supper with Dick Foote, out at a motel up the coast called Malibu Lodge. Carter wasn’t there, because he had to attend a business meeting: he may become head of a company making glass swimming pools: a new process—much cheaper, and this kind of glass comes in different colors, is very light, and as hard as iron. Dick talked a lot about Carter’s financial genius—how much money he has made for himself and John—and how we ought to let him advise us—which Don wants me to do. Also, of course, Dick held forth against Starcke, saying how […] mercenary [he is] and what bad business judgement he has, and how he makes a show of his religion. But Dick himself quite naively revealed his own fortune-hunting exploits—affairs with older women who had “millions”—and one old flame that nearly got relighted the other day, if Carter hadn’t objected. He has had his nose put straight by plastic surgery, so he can play heavies. Over it all was the weird empty fata morgana shine of the “as-if” life—in which all the values are really advertisements which interrupt the “life” itself like commercials interrupting the action of a TV drama. Even views, sunsets, ocean breezes have price tags on them. This weekend at Malibu was costing them $45.50.
I hope Don gets through the next month without unnecessary friction with the Duquettes—but I doubt it. He’s mad at them right now because they went away for a long weekend leaving him and Jimmy Daugherty, the colored boy, to paint screens and fix abalone shells on to them—a loathsomely chichi effect. He wants to take tomorrow off but he can’t if they don’t come back. He thinks (and so do I) that they ought to teach him more things as long as they’re paying him so little—actually, they’re teaching him almost nothing. He doesn’t want to go with them to Europe—and neither do I, really. I’d much rather see Venice alone with Don. Well, time will tell. Our plans are straightening out, and I don’t think this move will be too difficult, after all.
The new hurricane, “Dianne,” ought to be used, I think, to advertise our picture. “She raised the roof when she blew into court to shoot the breeze with the King.” “When she hit Paris at 120 miles an hour, the pressure was plenty low.”
August 16. When I look back on this period, how will it seem to me, I wonder? Quite possibly idyllic. The circumstances of le bonheur are all present—money, occupation, domesticity, pleasant surroundings etc.—yet most of the time I’m strained and worried. Don came back yesterday evening depressed again, and uncertain whether to talk to Tony himself or to get me to talk to him. The difficulty is really this: if I talk to Tony and explain to him how he unconsciously neglects Don, treats him as a mere odd-job boy, fails to teach him anything or show him any techniques—if, in a word, I make Tony see what a monstrously selfish creature he is—then, ten to one, he’ll repent (temporarily) being anyhow in a “repenting” mood and wanting to see
Gerald Heard—and we shall be “better friends than ever” and it will be inevitable that we go to Europe together. Now the truth is, I feel nothing special toward Tony. As soon as I imagine myself moving toward intimacy with him, I’m blocked by embarrassment at his marriage—[…]. Not that I believe he and Beegle aren’t fond of each other, but, no—I don’t know exactly what it is—she’s somehow a slave, a Trilby,217 a zombie—I sense something quite uncanny there. And I sense, in Tony, the uncanny cold-blooded cruelty of the fish. He’s a fish person, with his big round eyes and round quick-snapping acquisitive mouth.
Well, anyhow, we keep running into patches of Don’s melancholy and discussing it and getting nowhere, because all I can say is: it will pass. I would find all of this very tiresome if Don weren’t so sincerely disgusted with it himself. He never sulks, like Vernon. Also, I remember that I acted just the same at his age, only worse. Also, as I keep reminding myself, it’s much preferable to have someone with problems to worry over, than to have no one at all.
A strange pair we make! I’m getting to be such a crazy old thing—frittering away the last of my life—uneasily dozing, or drunk, or going around in a daze. I seem to myself much more like an old-fashioned, creaky machine than a sentient human being. I make a great show of functioning. I know many people regard me as well able to be allowed out by myself. Yet I’m actually next door to madness, with my frantic resentments, my fears, my refusal to believe I shall die. I have the cunning of a miser when I think of the time remaining to me. Instead of laying it out prudently and deciding how to spend it, I just clutch it like a bag of coins—in which there’s a hole I can’t mend. Oh shit! This talk is all insincere. I’m just playing around the subject—it’s the madman himself who’s writing this. But one day I’ll catch him off guard, maybe, and get some message through.
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 78
