Chris & Don: A Love Story

The night of the day he died,

without any preliminary decision,

almost, uh, unconsciously,

I went straight to his diary.

That spring I realized that I had fallen deeply in love...

with a boy whom I'd known for only a short while--

Don Bachardy.

The 30-year difference in our ages shocked some of those who knew us.

I, myself, didn't feel guilty about this,

but I did feel awed by the emotional intensity of our relationship...

right from the beginning.

The strange sense of a fated, mutual discovery.

I knew that this time I had really committed myself.

Don might leave me, but I couldn't possibly leave him...

unless he ceased to need me.

This sense of responsibility, which was almost fatherly,

made me anxious but full of joy.

And Chris knew exactly what to do with me. Yes.

His role could be described...

as that of the arch villain.

He took this young boy, and he warped him to his mold.

He taught him all kinds of wicked things.

It was exactly what the boy wanted,

and, um, he flourished.

Well, I mean, the idea of this middle-aged man,

um, deflowering this young boy.

And also what Chris was doing to his own reputation.

I don't even think that a lot of queers...

would have considered me ripe enough yet.

Chris told me I was very sophisticated for my age.

And, of course, that just enchanted me.

Chris was against having an animal, a pet.

And his reason was...

that he felt that when two people live together...

who had an animal,

an awful lot of affection would be siphoned off by that animal,

which otherwise would go between the two people.

And, of course, he was absolutely right.

The, uh, result was that we became each other's animals.

I became the cat, and Chris was an old horse,

an old dobbin.

On birthday cards,

he would always do a little drawing of a dobbin...

in some act of homage to Kitty.

Kitty often rode the old dobbin.

We devised stories about Kitty and Dobbin.

And they had all kinds of adventures,

which, uh, were just--

full of symbolic meaning.

This is Chris's workroom,

where I've been sleeping for,

oh, eight or nine months now.

And, uh, I moved his day bed into the corner...

under the windows.

At night I can lie down and look up at the stars in the sky,

and also I see the full moon coming through the other window...

around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning.

The Hockney print,

which is a variation on the painting he did of the two of us.

In the painting, Chris is on the right in profile.

Here he is full-faced in the chair that I'm sitting in in the painting.

And that was a piece of Indian corn...

that Elsa Lanchester gave Chris.

They're no longer there, because we once had a rat living in the house.

To force him out, we locked up all the food cupboards,

and he was so desperate one night, he ate the kernels.

He cleaned almost entirely both cobs.

And this is ancient corn.

It had to be something like 50 years old.

Imagine being so hungry.

And finally we drove him out.

We didn't want to catch him in a trap, but we did drive him out.

There was nothing left to eat.

And these are watercolors...

by Chris's father.

This one down here too.

This was by a professional painter of houses in England.

And this is of the house that Chris was born in--

Wyberslegh Hall.

Chris was born in Cheshire, England...

to an upper-class family in 1904..

His mother, Kathleen, was a dominant figure in his life.

And he often spoke more fondly of his nanny than he did of her.

He and Kathleen were adversaries.

They couldn't help but be, because Kathleen had very clear ideas...

what she wanted, what she expected of Chris.

She wanted him to be a don-- a teacher-- and, uh--

and that wasn't his intention at all.

His father, Frank, was an officer in the British army.

And he was killed in the First World War...

when Chris was just a young boy.

He later received a scholarship to study history at Cambridge.

But Chris was rebellious...

and felt manipulated by the way history was being taught at Cambridge.

He did fine in his first year exams,

and then in the second year,

he deliberately wrote joke answers.

Wrote about the decoration of the examining rooms, mocked the examiners.

And shortly after wards, he was called back to school from London,

where he'd gone for the summer holidays.

And got expelled, because he wanted to be,

and I think because he wanted to disappoint Kathleen...

and make it perfectly clear...

that he wasn't going to do her bidding.

Isherwood was searching for a place where he could live...

and explore, I think, among other things, his sexuality.

He was beginning to realize that he was gay.

England was a place of confinement and strictures...

that made it hard fora gay man to pursue that life,

if not openly, at least in a satisfying and complete kind of way.

Also his very good friend, W. H. Auden,

one of the foremost poets of the 20th century, had gone to Berlin.

He was writing letters back to Isherwood, urging him to come to Berlin.

I was looking for a sort of homeland,

for somewhere where I could function in a way where I would feel freer...

than I felt in England at that particular time...

under the particular circumstances I was living in.

I think it was partly a class thing,

but, of course, it was inextricably mixed up with my homosexuality,

because, um,

what I in fact started to encounter...

was the German working class.

To Christopher, Berlin meant boys.

At school, Christopher had fallen in love with many boys...

and been yearningly romantic about them.

At college, he had at last managed to get into bed with one of them.

Others experiences followed,

all of them enjoyable, but none entirely satisfying.

This was because Christopher was suffering from an inhibition...

then not unusual among upper-class homosexuals.

He couldn't relax sexually with a member of his own class or nation.

He needed a working-class foreigner.

Isherwood just happened to be at one of the most important spots to be in...

in the 20th century.

And that was in Germany in the late 1920s, the early 1930s.

This was the place in which Nazism was developing,

emerging as an important force.

This was where Hitler's Germany was on the rise.

Chris was observing everything that was going on there...

and formulating ideas...

that would later go into his two books about Berlin--

one a novel and the other a collection of stories--

that really put him on the map as an author.

The success ofthose two books led to a play, I Am a Camera,

and a movie of the play and eventually Cabaret,

which was quite a success on Broadway,

and then, of course, the movie version with Liza Minnelli.

Ladies und Gents, fraulein Sally Bowles!

Isherwood did not love the way the movie was done.

He thought Liza Minnelli was too good.

He made a funny comment in interviews about, if--

if she opens her mouth and she's every bit Judy Garland's daughter...

and that there's no way a club in Berlin could have housed such a talent.

Five minutes after Liza Minnelli had been on screen,

Chris leaned towards me and said, "She's no good. "

That's him.

He liked Michael York very much. He thought he was just right for it.

But how could he like Liza Minnelli?

Because, um--

with her personality and talent,

she destroyed the character of Sally Bowles.

Because if Sally Bowles isn't an amateur, she isn't Sally Bowles.

I think Christopher Isherwood enjoyed the film. I think he would say,

"Well, that's not what it was like."

But it was a point of view.

And when you write a piece, you have to be prepared for all kinds of points of view.

And, um, he liked that people liked it so much.

Cabaret put him on the map for the world at large,

for the general public.

People who didn't read much or may not have known about Isherwood as an author--

Cabaret was really the ticket to fame.

Isherwood had to leave Berlin in 1933, as so many people did.

And throughout the 1930s, he'd wandered in Europe,

looking for a country where he could settle...

with his German boyfriend, Heinz Neddermeyer.

There were problems about passports, papers, visas.

Heinz eventually was arrested by the Gestapo...

and first served a prison sentence and then went into the army.

This was very distressing. This was a boy to whom, at the time, he felt very committed.

I think for both Isherwood and Auden,

they could see that there was a war on the horizon in Europe, without any doubt at all.

And they recognized that they had no part in that, because they were pacifists.

So he and Auden turned their backs on Europe.

They decided to emigrate to the United States.

And they arrived in New York City in January, 1939.

Chris didn't like the cold. He didn't like the grime of New York.

He didn't like the bustle, and he longed for the West.

He had a romantic vision of the West,

which he got from John Ford movies.

So he headed out across country...

and ended up in Southern California.

Los Angeles offered a tremendously varied cultural atmosphere...

for someone like Isherwood to drop into the center.

There were the expatriates,

the artists, the musicians, the actors, the directors--

a great boiling pot...

for all sorts of cultural and artistic life and creativity.

He fit in beautifully.

Because he had something to offer, they had something to offer him.

He's one of the few writers who will admit...