Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  May 1. Rather a flurried First. So much to be done. So much I ought to record here but can’t now because other chores are more urgent.

  Poor old awful tiresome John Lehmann is coming on Friday for the night. Also Ed Mendelson, to start looking through the Auden letters.156 He’ll be on our necks for several days. We have to see Jon Voight this afternoon with Ivory and Merchant, although we’re now convinced that he would be fatal for Meeting, even if he wanted to do the film and even if they like him. Lazar has gone off to Europe just when needed; we shall have to get rid of him. A producer at Paramount, Emmett Lavery Jr., wants us to do a T.V. film of [Poe’s] “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”; and a very good director, Daryl Duke, who made Pay Day, wants to make a film out of Prater Violet. And I have got a polished version of the first chapter of my new book ready. I showed it to Don yesterday and he likes it.

  Feeling rather senile, and I really must go to the Japanese doctor (Roy Ozawa) about my foot. He told Don that he doesn’t have cancer in his, and Don says he is adorable.

  Swami called me the other day, again worried lest I should have fallen and hurt myself when crossing the rough ground where the building site is, at Vedanta Place. He also told me Peter Schneider is to become a monk within a few months. Peter himself wasn’t aware of his, but seemed delighted when I told him!

  May 19. Don marked his birthday yesterday by having most of his hair cut off and by shaving off his moustache. He looks much more handsome, interesting, formidable and aggressive without the hair. Also younger. The truth is that the long hair, beautiful as it was, seemed a bit absurd and unworthy of Don as a person. That elaborate coiffure would have been quite suitable for someone of Don’s age or far younger, provided that that someone was no one in particular, just a plain face that needed an amusing frame. Don’s doesn’t.

  Today he’s depressed. Perhaps just a little bit because the hair is gone—it takes him a long time to grow it that long—but chiefly because Nick Wilder said to him at dinner last night that he wanted to come down and see some more of Don’s paintings. And Don says there aren’t any more that are any good. He is rattled and talks of putting off the show.

  The birthday dinner, at Chianti, was with Nick and his new friend Raymond and Mike Van Horn. The food was inferior and they kept us waiting a long time for a table.

  Last time I saw Swami, on the 8th, I asked him if he had had any experiences and he said no. “If I have another one, it will be the end of me.” He said this quite casually, with a certain amusement. “I couldn’t stand it,” he added.

  On the 12th, Elsa Laughton and I were part of a Tribute to Auden at USC. We both read some of Wystan’s poems. That is to say, I read; Elsa wriggled, camped, half sang, rolled her eyes and was generally embarrassing. We both got very good notices in the press. Don says I really was good and I felt it went well. I read “O What Is That Sound,” “A shilling life,” “Danse Macabre,” “The Ship,” part of “St. Cecilia,”157 part of the Yeats poem,158 “At Dirty Dick’s,”159 “Song of the Devil” and “Since.”

  Now I’m making resolutions to work harder and be more recollected during the three months between our two birthdays. Enough for now.

  May 24. First, some afterthoughts and additions:

  On May 17, there were the following misguided attempts to pre-celebrate Kitty’s birthday: the FBI’s massacre of the six Symbionese Liberation Army members in South Los Angeles, the bombings in Dublin, the Israeli raids on Lebanon, the earthquake in Peru.160

  On the 12th, at the Tribute to Auden at USC, Mae West was present, sitting like an idol, dumpy, expressionless, with her creamy hair piled up on her head and great sausage-curls hanging down over her shoulder. When I read “Danse Macabre,” I had made up my mind to look straight at West as I said the line, “He would steal you and cut off your beautiful hair”—but the bright lights made the audience almost invisible and I can’t be sure that I beamed it to her or that she was even aware of it. We didn’t meet afterwards.

  Speaking of hair, Don has received almost one hundred percent of compliments on his haircut. Only one person, I forget who it was, failed to say that the cut made Don look younger; this one said it made him look older—but handsomer.

  The day before yesterday, I went to Vedanta Place to read. Don came by at the same time, just to see Swami. We both got the impression that he was in a mood to tell things—particularly to tell them to me, so I should record them.

  He spoke of the time he had had the vision of Holy Mother. This was while he was still in his room in the old house. He had gotten out of bed (I think this was all part of his dream) and sat down to meditate and Mother had appeared to him. First his hair stood on end and then his surroundings disappeared. “And I went into samadhi.” Swami’s using that word about himself gave me quite a shock, I’d never heard him do it before. He added, “There is samadhi in sleep also—there are many kinds of perfection.”

  He also told how he had seen The Big Four161 in the shrine, and added to the story—I think I’ve heard this before, but I’m not sure—that he had been terribly upset at the time because Ashokananda had taken exception to what I wrote about Swamiji in my introduction to Vedanta for the Western World, and how he had said to himself, “If I have offended Swamiji I shall kill myself.” So this vision was, so to speak, an assurance that he hadn’t offended Swamiji—and that I hadn’t, either. I have to admit, it bothered me when Swami said that about killing himself. It seemed hysterical and unlike him. I want to ask him more about this.

  He also talked about Ramakrishna and Girish Ghosh162—how they had had a competition to find who knew the most risqué words—risqué was the word Swami used. At the end, Girish bowed down and said, “You are my guru in this, also.”

  There is a great deal of flurry about a book of selections from Swamiji on the subject of meditation which Chetanananda is preparing.163 Anandaprana, who seems to get bossier and bossier, is trying to influence me to insist on certain changes. She is patronizing in her attitude toward Chetanananda; she keeps cooing, “He’s such a good little man.” Then, when I was up at the monastery, Chetanananda himself talked to me, evidently wanting to get me on his side. It is a ludicrous situation. I must be very tactful.

  Well, and then Bob Adjemian rather secretively called me upstairs into his room, shut the door and made me sit down on his bed while he showed me a printed pamphlet which contains a very outspoken appeal by Swamiji to young people to renounce everything and become monks and nuns. Obviously this is something Bob identifies with strongly. He wants to get it into the book, and I guess Anandaprana has already said it isn’t suitable because this book is primarily for householders. (I think I might sneak it into the preface I’ve promised to write.) Anyhow—while Bob and I are sitting there on the bed, so compromisingly close together, Jim Gates throws open the door without knocking and says Chetanananda says it’s time for me to go to the reading. He obviously did it just out of nosiness.

  As I was driving back home, I saw Jim going down to the market at the corner of Franklin and Cahuenga. I stopped the car and he got in and we talked. He said that he is getting along all right but there is a lot of hate in the monastery and he doesn’t have any real friend. He doesn’t know if Peter Schneider will be able to stand it. He told me that Beth [High] (D[ee]pti) nearly left the other day, to go back to her husband Gib [Peters]. She told Swami she planned to and he said all right and he told the girls not to argue with her about it. But, on the very day she was to go off with Gib, she decided she couldn’t. Somehow, I keep getting the impression that Jim is becoming more and more of a conniver and getting less and less spiritual. He leaves me with a bad taste in the mouth.

  This morning we are to drive over to Riverside to see Ivory shooting The Wild Party. Poor old Jo just rang up in tears to say that the doctor told her she has Paget’s Disease and that she must keep her foot off the ground. She is terribly worried and doesn’t know what will happen to her.

  May 27. Memorial Day, the last
of the most dreadful weekend in the year—with the menace of the crowded summer beyond it. Yesterday we had thick fog and the beach was swarming. Today it’s beautiful but the road below us still has very few cars parked on it.

  I am getting slowly ahead with chapter 2 of my book. I keep feeling that it’s all too abstract—all about my feelings and attitudes, with hardly any description of my surroundings. The trouble is, the descriptions are written already, in my Berlin books.

  Don is drawing in the living room, with Mike Van Horn and Paul Wonner. They have a girl for a model because the groovy guy who’d promised to come didn’t show.

  Old Jo seems a bit better. She came out to dinner with us, the day before yesterday. And now she’s discovering that “everybody” has got Paget’s Disease!

  Paul Wonner is leaving this week to join Bill Brown in San Francisco. They’re going to live up there for a while.

  Swami called me yesterday to say that I should come and see him earlier next Wednesday because he has something to tell me, “something I never told before,” which I’m to take notes of.

  Our visit to Riverside was unpleasant because of the smog but otherwise quite fascinating. I have never before explored the Mission Inn which is quite as mad in its own way as anything Ludwig of Bavaria can have built—the top half Germanic, the lower half Spanish, a bar with a huge Buddha behind it, a chapel like one of the golden churches in Quito,164 a sort of bierkeller, and some magnificent twent[ies]ish apartments with period furniture. It’s in some of these that Ivory is shooting the film. There are very few exteriors, some of them to be shot in the patio at night. Other than that, there’s a beach scene, I think, and one scene in Los Angeles.

  Michael Childers and his bitchy little friend Bruce Weintraub165 are both working on the picture. It was surely a mistake to have hired them. They both put on the airs of professionals who are forced to consort with amateurs and keep referring to the professional way things were done during the shooting of The Day of the Locust. Weintraub bitched Ivory and Merchant continually and kept adding, “I know they’re your friends,” until I nearly said, “Yes they are and you sure as hell aren’t.”

  Obviously, there is a lot of confusion. This situation is entirely different from shooting in a proper studio. Big crowds of extras have to be brought out from Los Angeles and dressed and made up. The day we were there, their wigs had just been stolen! Also Ismail seems confused, because that is his Asian way; probably in fact he has things quite well under control, considering the fact that he is being the producer, stage manager, costume master etc. etc. all at once. He has immense energy and good humor. But he scurries, instead of strolling with the dignity befitting his position, and that makes underlings like Childers and Weintraub despise him.

  Their chief problem is the bitchery of Raquel Welch. (The other leads, James Coco and Perry King, are very professional and charming too.) But Welch nearly walked out on them once already, and tried to get Ivory fired. Now she has brought her own dramatic coach with her and consults him about every take—a good deal to his embarrassment. This is of course an outrageous insult to Ivory. We both thought his self-control was impressive and, altogether, his behavior on the set confirmed our belief that he would be a splendid director for Meeting. He has a first-rate cameraman on the picture, Walter Lassally, who has worked a lot with Tony Richardson. Lassally has lived a long time in England but he’s still full of German arrogance166 and it seems much more likely that he might tell Welch to go fuck herself than that Ivory would.

  We pray that the picture will be a success, despite all of these problems. Then Ismail and James will be able to get the money for Meeting.

  We’ve heard nothing more from Jim Bridges.

  June 16. On May 28, Hunt Stromberg called from Texas, wanting us to do another script for him, A Tale of Two Cities. This would be T.V. It is really unthinkable that we should work with Hunt again. We can’t trust him and the only way we could more or less protect ourselves would be to demand director approval, which Universal would never grant. However, our talk was quite friendly. No use getting nasty. It’s too late for that.

  On May 29, we saw Swami and he recorded some memories of Maharaj, but there really wasn’t anything new—except for a couple of details: Swami said how, when Premananda had bathed in the Ganges, he, Swami, had taken the mud from his footprints and smeared it on his own chest. Also how, on one occasion, he massaged one of Maharaj’s legs and a very beautiful girl massaged the other; because of Maharaj’s purity, Swami, who wasn’t a monk then, hadn’t felt the least desire for the girl.

  On June 3, Don flew to New York, to work with Bryan Forbes on his film, The Stepford Wives. Don had to do some drawing on camera. His hand was supposed to be the hand of William Prince, who is playing an artist in the film.167 Don returned on June 7. Bryan had been very nice, he said, but the whole job was a bore and a waste of time and he was sure the film would be awful.

  On June 8, I went to a banquet at the Century Plaza Hotel, given by the Institute for the Study of Human Resources. I had to introduce Evelyn Hooker, who was the guest of honor. And whom should I meet there but Bud Mong, who has settled down with a friend and become quite prosperous in business!168 He was still flirty. The friend is a psychiatrist; that was why they were at the dinner.

  On June 10, I got around to telling Irving Lazar that we don’t want him as our agent any more. He was very pleasant about this; I didn’t feel he wanted us either. But now the search is on for another agent, or rather, two, since we need a literary agent in New York.

  On June 11, I finished the second chapter of Wanderings. Fairly pleased with it.

  On June 12, Don got his hair cut even shorter, by Mike Van Horn. Mike is an excellent barber but he works like a snail. It took him two whole hours, in the middle of the night! Alas, Mike is going away to New York to try to get himself a job there. This saddens Don who says Mike is his only real friend and that he really loves him. And I more or less love Mike myself. What a sweet passive inhibited creature!

  Yesterday, we went to Vedanta Place for the Father’s Day celebration (one day early). This year there was no lunch, only a kind of darshan with fruit punch and cookies in the puja hall. Swami told several of his favorite stories about Maharaj. He seemed very very old and rather like a tiny black man in his West Indian-style straw hat.

  This morning, Swami called me and came as near as he has ever done to giving me a bawling out. He said he had been “shocked” by two questions I had asked him while he was speaking in the puja hall yesterday. “You were not yourself,” he said, rather as if he were accusing me of having been drunk or high on something. The worse of my two offences was that, when Swami told how Maharaj had jokingly asked someone at a gathering of women, “Which one do you like?” I had asked him: “Did Maharaj say that to you, Swami?” My question shocked Swami because it was a suggestion that Maharaj could possibly say such a thing, even in joke, to a boy who was already a monk and his disciple. Actually, he had been speaking to Ramakrishna’s nephew, Ramlal, who was a married man. Swami says he made this clear and I’m sure he did. But the heat was stupefying inside the puja hall and I guess I wasn’t attending. Also, I frankly couldn’t see anything very terrible in the idea that Maharaj could make a joke of this kind, even to a young monk. Surely, purity such as his gives one a great deal of license? My other offence was that, when Swami told how Maharaj was able to inhibit his sense of smell completely, I asked, “Do you mean he did it permanently?” This was sheer silliness on my part, admittedly. Well, I asked him to forgive me and of course he ended by laughing and saying, “How should I not forgive you? You are my disciple and my child.” “A very silly child,” I said. “Oh, no, Chris, you are the most intelligent of all my disciples.” After this conversation, I felt that his scolding had really been a true blessing. But now I can’t resist a little resentment—not toward him—because I suspect one of the nuns of having mentioned my mistake to him and thus put the idea of scolding me into his head.
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  Fred Shroyer, on the phone this morning: “I’m a boy who could never get away from under the Christmas tree.” He was talking about the presents he had been given for Father’s Day, including a print of the original Phantom of the Opera,169 and how he loves to read romantic horror stories. Le Fanu is one of his favorites.

  Don is drawing Michael Moriarty. We had supper with him last night and gave him the Meeting play to read. We are hoping to lure him into the film.

  June 22. Today, Michael Moriarty told me on the phone that he wants to play Oliver in Meeting. But that he wants to get the play put on and do that before he does the film. He wants to do the play either in New York or London; he mentioned London first. Says he feels that he can only prepare himself for the film by acting in the play. He is a bit grand about it all but he does seem genuinely enthusiastic about the whole project. I have already told Ismail and Jim Ivory about this. I think Ismail is chiefly worried lest he and Jim get pushed out of the play-and-film deal by middlemen. They have finished their work on The Wild Party and are now off on vacation. They were both very pleased and excited about Moriarty. So am I.

  Don doesn’t know yet, because he went back to Connecticut the day before yesterday. Bryan Forbes wanted him to draw more portraits and also to do some more drawing on camera. When he called me after arrival he was very disgusted because they had put him in a motel, miles from anywhere. His only amusement: reading the first volume of Dodie Smith’s autobiography.

  There are lots more little details but maybe I’ll put them in in a day or two, because right now I should gradually get ready for a dinner party at which Tony Richardson, Neil Hartley and Hugh Wheeler will be present.

  June 25. The only “little detail” I can remember now is that shortly before midnight on June 20 there was an apparent earthquake shock; not a big one, but the house gave quite a shudder. Later, Cal. Tech. stated that this shock had not registered on the seismograph. So the papers called it a mystery shock. There were two others I didn’t feel.