Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Yesterday evening, we had supper with David and Celia Clark at the Malibu beach house. Joel Grey62 and his wife Joey63 were there—don’t like them much—and Nick Wilder and his friend Gregory Evans—am getting to like them both increasingly. Ossie Clark is supposed to be coming out here almost at once. Don has drawn and talked to Celia. It seems clear that she and David haven’t had sex together; she told Don that David is like a little boy. She doesn’t altogether want Ossie around and yet she misses him.

  Rain most of today. Hunt rang up very drunk to tell me that the cast had just read through the script and that David McCallum is sensational as Henry Clerval and that James Mason had said that Leonard Whiting is so great that he’ll steal the show and that every time Michael Sarrazin (as the Creature) had said “Victor” he (Hunt) had felt tears come into his eyes, etc. etc. They have got an incredibly beautiful girl named Jane Seymour to play Prima and the part of the foreign lady at the opera is to be offered to Simone Signoret64—wow! Hunt had the gall to suggest that we should write an extra scene for Mason, in which Polidori denounces Henry. I told him we aren’t about to strikebreak—there are too many spies around.

  March 15. Hunt called today to tell me that they have just finished their first day’s shooting—Nicola [Pagett] and Leonard Whiting and David McCallum in the scene of Elizabeth’s visit to the lodgings and her hostility toward Henry Clerval. Everybody had been terrific, and McCallum terrific-terrific. (Hunt was drunk again; it’s very tiresome that he calls at eight in the evening, their time.) However, he let slip some ominous hints. They have altered the period of the costumes quite a bit, because Hunt thinks the Regency clothes look unattractive on women. They have also altered “a few words” in the script. Also, on this first day, they were ahead of schedule by midday—which sounds like quickie filming.

  Am getting worried because of the utter silence of the Writers Guild strike committee. No one has called to tell me when I’m to picket. I can’t help wondering if maybe I am supposed to contact them, and if I shall be fined for not having done so. According to some bossy woman who called Jack Larson about Jim Bridges (who can’t picket because he is rehearsing Streetcar) the fine is one hundred dollars a day for picket dodging!

  Ananda and the other girls are back from India. We saw them last night for the first time. Ananda can’t stop talking about their experiences. Perhaps their greatest scoop was seeing a very old lady who had met Ramakrishna. She was in her high nineties, and she has since died! But Ananda said, “Just the same, it makes you realize, we have everything right here.” I repeated this remark to Swami. He said, agreeing, “How many places are there where you can live all the time with your guru?” This was one of his utterly impersonal uncoy remarks which never fail to startle me.

  Ananda brought us back a leaf from the mango tree which Ramakrishna planted at Kamarpukur.

  March 19. This morning I’m going for the first time to picket, at MGM: noon to three o’clock. Tomorrow we are going down to Palm Springs to see Truman Capote. I got excused from picketing that day but forgot to get let off the next day too, which means that I am supposed to picket from six to nine in the morning! The only hope is that the strike may possibly be ending, or at any rate reaching a settlement with some of the independent companies, thus reducing the number of pickets needed. It is all a dreary nuisance, but I’m playing it very cooperative until I see a way of wriggling out of the whole thing.

  On the 16th, we went to see one of the previews of Jim’s production of Streetcar. Faye Dunaway was excellent, about as good a Blanche as you could expect. But Jon Voight is all fucked up by his own methods. He got tapes of dialect from New Orleans and very carefully tries to imitate them, thereby inhibiting himself from playing Stanley! It is infuriating, the way these actors tie themselves in knots—when all they have to do is speak up; many of Tennessee’s best lines were lost because Voight was trying to speak with his mouth full of spittle, or some such idiocy. Jack Larson said later, “All that generation of actors, they’re done for, there’s nothing, no way of saving them.” Jim has fits of despair. But no doubt they will all perk up on the press night—tonight, in fact. Tennessee himself is coming, which is regrettable; one never knows how he will act up, nowadays. We haven’t seen him yet.

  March 25. This morning, Swami rang up to tell me that Mokshada (Meta Evans)65 died at midnight last night. She was in her nineties. Abhaya (I can never spell that name, but she’s the hospital nurse devotee who looks after Swami66) was with Mokshada and so was Krishna. At about 11:30 p.m. Mokshada told them that she had seen Brahmananda. She asked them to prop her up in bed, so she could be in a posture of meditation with her beads. Then she cried out, “Raja! Raja!”67 She didn’t want anybody to sit with her; she said she wanted to be alone with Maharaj. Swami was obviously enormously impressed by this story. I had unworthy doubts, remembering what a playactress Mokshada used to be and what a conniving old Jewess, full of schmaltz and bitchery. But then Don said, “Does one playact when one’s dying?” I thought maybe yes, but on second thoughts had to admit that it was at least remarkable not to want to have people with you at the end. Swami said, “And that will happen to every devotee.”

  The local notices of Streetcar in the papers, including the Free Press and the two trades, were very bad. That is, they took it for granted that the play is a masterpiece and that Jim’s direction had ruined it, and they disliked Voight. But they praised Dunaway greatly. (And Tennessee even said she was the best Blanche ever.) Tennessee also told Jim that he loved the direction and wanted to work with him again. Jim was shattered at first, stayed in bed the day after, but has perked up since the play and his work were praised on T.V. Voight is said to be very upset. We haven’t seen him since the preview. Meanwhile, you can’t get a seat for love or money. It’s the biggest hit they’ve had. And, often, there are standing ovations at the end of a performance!

  Tennessee has arranged to leave for the Orient—Hong Kong and then Thailand—on a cruise ship from Honolulu, with a fierce-looking blue-eyed blond young man named Robert Carroll.68 But today we hear that they may split up, because of some awful quarrel. In fact, Ten is very much himself. He has recently given a deplorable interview to Playboy with indiscreet personal stuff about Frank Merlo’s sex life and death.

  Also, on the 20th, we drove down to Palm Springs and saw Truman. He seems very sick, says he vomits constantly. He’s swollen up enormously and looks very old, rather like Churchill.

  My picketing on the 19th was rather fun, except that I wore myself out talking to my colleagues. Since then, I haven’t done it. I got excused by the picket captain, in order to go to see Truman, and then, on the 23rd, because I’d lost my voice. It has more or less come back now. But we only picket alternate weeks, so this coming week we’ll be free.

  A heaventime with Don. But Kitty caught Drub out yesterday, he had eaten a whole bag of dried dates. So the sentence of the cat court was No Supper. The sentence was revoked at the last moment, and they had eggplant, lots of it. With the result that Drub weighed 153 and ¼ this morning (up a pound and ¼) and Kitty weighed 144.

  March 29. Triumph of Cabaret over The Godfather. They got only three awards, we got eight.69 Excitement over Brando’s refusal to accept the award, a silly show-biz stunt which was probably nevertheless of some value because it made people remember the Indians. We minorities are like a lot of tiresome (to the majority) children jumping about yelling, “Look at me!” But Brando should have appeared personally.70

  This is a jittery period, as far as I’m concerned. What with the prospect of the writers’ strike dragging on maybe for months and the fuss of having to make several public appearances after all this long while, and the feeling that we’re not getting on with our Meeting by the River screenplay and Don’s continuing uncertainty about having his show and about his future as an artist altogether and my wonderings about what to write next. Well, jitters are better than inertia.

  Tennessee finally did go off with Robert Carroll to
the Orient.

  A very interesting interview with Truman Capote by Andy Warhol in Rolling Stone ( Jim Charlton gave Don a subscription to it as a present). He says that, once he has finished Answered Prayers, he won’t do any ambitious writing again. He says:

  I can’t count . . . five people [. . .] of real importance in the media who aren’t Jewish. [. . .] If those people could have done me in, they would have done me in like nobody’s ever been done in. But they couldn’t do me in. They would have done me in because not only wasn’t I Jewish and wasn’t in the Jewish clique, but I talked about not being part of it.

  He says that he gets lots of poison-pen letters from a man who signs himself “U.” They are becoming increasingly threatening. The writer keeps changing the style and color of his envelopes, so Truman won’t recognize his letters and simply throw them away. He thinks Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip is one of the greatest books ever written by anybody in the world. He says: “I know everything there is to know about success, so how can success change your life? I know everything there is to know about failure, too, so nothing can affect me on that score. I mean professionally . . . from the beginning I always attracted a lot of attention, because—well, really—there really isn’t anybody else like me.” He says: “For me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery. . . . There’s a technical mystery to be mastered, and there’s a mystery of human nature. Art is a mystery.”71

  Truman impresses me enormously and I feel that he has a great deal of worldly wisdom. I feel a mature weariness in him; to me, he seems much older than I am. And yet at the same time I’m aware that this stance of his is partly a pose and that, probably, when he seems most assured he is whistling in the dark.

  This morning a postcard arrived from Tom Wright; I can’t read the postmark but it’s somewhere in Colombia. “I had a splendid adventure in Brazil, in the wilds above Manaus. A (name illegible) guide, an American youth and I took a skiff along a deserted and densely forested river tributary of the Rio Negro. After a grueling fourteen-day trip we got to the Waimiri Indians (eluding the Indian Protection service), a tribe who massacred thirteen missionaries four years ago, and who killed three road builders just last month. There was no danger at all. I found them charming and hated to go back to Manaus!” Dear Tom! I feel such a warmth of love, thinking of him, that plump white porky-pig, sticking his inquisitive nose into darkest Amazonia. I love his genuine but somehow ridiculous daring. This news brightened up the day for me.

  March 30. My day was further brightened up when someone from the Screen Writers Guild called during the afternoon to say that the whole picket schedule has been revised. My group doesn’t have to picket again until April 9, and then the picketing will be from 12 to 3 every day for five days, after which there will be a two-week interval before the next stint begins!

  David Hockney came around to talk about Peter. He has decided to write him a letter saying that they mustn’t meet again for a long time. It seems that Peter has been dropping into the Powis Terrace flat and using it like a club while David has been away— making Mo furiously indignant. Meanwhile, David has been flirting with Gregory Evans, Nick Wilder’s friend. Gregory has a crush on David and would like to go back with him to England. David is really very tough, but he keeps saying how much Peter has “hurt” him.

  April 6. We have just heard that Virginia Pfeiffer died on February 24 of cancer, after a very painful illness. I talked yesterday to Laura, who is still quite shattered.

  When I saw Swami last Saturday, the 31st of March, Abhaya told me quite firmly, in his presence, that Mokshada did not claim to have seen Maharaj, though she did cry out, “Raja! Raja!” Anandaprana (not in Swami’s presence) told me that he had been talking about dying, a few days before. Ananda had said, “I’m sorry, Swami, but I don’t believe your time has come yet.”

  Early in the morning of the 3rd, I had the following very vivid dream. With the greatest of ease, Don picked up a large full-size oak tree. (I think this happened in Coldwater Canyon.) In the branches of the tree, an old Chinese woman was sitting. I was terribly afraid that she’d fall and that he would therefore get into trouble. Later, the oak tree became tiny and was inside a leather bag, like the camera bag he uses to carry his paints and brushes in. I guarded it, afraid that it would be found.

  Was this a dream about big worries that become small and absurd ones?

  Yesterday, Faride Mantilla (who has decided she won’t come to us any more because she’s got a better job) sent us a Texan Mexican named Vangie or Angie Bravo. This seems worthy to be called a synchronicity because, a few days ago, Don wanted me to suggest a name for the chihuahua he has just bought for Glade and I suggested “Olé”!

  Angie’s enormous advantage to us is that she speaks fluent English. But she is also a good cleaner and very agreeable. She calls us Don and Chris, not out of what Kathleen would have called “familiarity” but because those names are easiest to say. She has a very big ass.

  When she saw our Shirley Temple doll, she picked it up with an extraordinarily moving expression of tenderness. (She has two children of her own.) She looked at it for a moment, then became self-conscious, murmured, “A grownup playing with dolls!,” put the doll down again and straightened herself, letting go a loud fart.

  April 9. This in haste, because I have to picket today, from 12 to 3. The new schedule only requires you to picket one week out of three and the dreaded 6 to 9 a.m. shift has been eliminated— because, apparently, the people who go to work at the studios that early are not worthwhile picket-victims.

  In my last entry I neglected to say that on April 4 I made two public appearances in aid of the Kathleen and Frank paperback; one downtown at the Alexandria Hotel, talking to the Los Angeles County Public Library breakfast; one in Berkeley that same evening, at which I didn’t have to talk, merely mingle with two hundred and some booksellers from northern California. The one truly memorable moment of that day was when I was about to leave for the plane and Don reminded me to take my beads with me—I hadn’t even thought of doing so. But I’ve noticed, whenever we’re on a plane together at take-off, that Don tells his beads. (I merely make japam.) Don’s reminder moved me very much. It seemed to express what is essential in our relationship, what makes it different from and dearer than any other I have ever had in my life.

  When I saw Swami on April 6, I asked him, did he fear death. He said no, not at all, but he then repeated a story he has told me before, how, when he was going to have a double hernia operation and had to fill in a form relieving the surgeon of responsibility in the event of his death, he had felt afraid and had prayed to Maharaj for release from his fear and had been instantly reassured.

  On April 7, Swami initiated Peter Schneider—at last! I have been trying to get in touch with Peter ever since, to hear his impressions, but without success.

  This reminds me that Allyn Nelson told Don that Jim Gates has told her he mustn’t see her any more, because he’s a monk. This seems to Don and me a piece of almost incredible hypocrisy. Don thinks that Jim made Swami forbid him to see Allyn by asking innocently, “Swami—ought I to have a friendship with my old girlfriend, now I’m a monk?” Swami could only answer this question with a “No.” It’s the same thing as programming a computer to get the answer you want. The only mystery is, why did Jim want an excuse to stop seeing Allyn?

  Oh yes—and on March 30 Dr. Maxwell Wolff removed a little growth from the tip of my nose. This seems to be all right, now. I don’t think he was seriously concerned about it.

  April 22. Easter Sunday and a truly glorious day—lately we’ve been having too much wind for beachgoing. This afternoon, we’re driving down to Laguna Beach to see Jack Fontan and Ray Unger.

  Yesterday, I finished a weary chore: twenty pages of reconstructed diary about our trip to England. I forced myself to go on writing it, but I know most of it is mere typewriting. Now I can go on with the reconstruction of my 1949 diary. That’s an effort, too, but I know it’s worthwhile. I would
love to push right through to the end of 1952, as soon as possible. Then I want to sit down and read the whole bunch of my diaries. I have a feeling something will come out of this. I keep playing with the idea of a version of Specimen Days—nothing like Whitman’s, but that’s its “secret” title. Kind of prose poems, each one quite short, following certain trials or scents through the jungles of memory and fantasy and dream.

  On April 18, when last I saw Swami, I asked him, “If Gerald Heard had stayed with you, would you have arranged for him to take sannyas?” Swami said yes and then added, “And you too, Chris—even now—why don’t you come back to us?” I said, “I’m not fit to,” and he answered, “Only the Lord can judge who is fit.” We looked at each other and he giggled. He giggled again at supper when he told the girls, “Chris is going to become a monk!” I laughed and the girls laughed too, rather uneasily, watching my face to see if this was a joke. It was very odd and disturbing. Doesn’t Swami accept my present way of life, after all? I had begun to believe that he did. Oddly enough, during that same conversation, Swami had said that it had been all right for Amiya to leave the convent because she had only taken brahmacharya, which was only a resolve, not an absolute vow. Sarada’s case was different, because she had taken sannyas.

  Talking to Mrs. Norman Lloyd, the actor’s wife,72 in the market the other day, we got onto the subject of Don, who recently drew her. She said, “While he’s drawing, you feel that pure spirit—the marvellous grace with which he handles your immortal soul!”