Opening Up about Christopher Isherwood

When Jesús announced he’d invited Christopher Isherwood’s longtime lover, Don Bachardy, for Sunday supper, it seemed like my boyfriend was daring me not to know my gay history. Twelve years my senior, Jesús often patronized me.

However, this time I countered, “I totally know who Isherwood is! I played the Emcee in my high school production of Cabaret.”

Unimpressed, mein herr filled me in on some requisite facts concerning our upcoming dinner party: “Wyn, how can you be clueless about Chris and Don’s relationship or that Don’s a recognized portrait artist? Are you even aware Chris passed away?”

(Not, as one would’ve presumed at the time, from something exotic like Kaposi’s sarcoma but the way old gay men used to die, from something prosaic like prostate cancer.)

It was while at his former job as an Auto Club dispatcher that Jesús had come to meet Chris and Don a few years prior. It’d been a rare stormy night in L.A., and AAA was balls deep in calls. After he confirmed that the member on the other end of the line was the Christopher Isherwood, Jesús placed the famed author’s service request at the top of the list, saving the stranded couple several hours of a wet wait. In appreciation, Don invited Jesús to his next art opening. The friendships developed from there.

On the evening of our dinner date, Don arrived late to Jesús’s apartment because he’d gotten into a fender bender on the way over. In my estimation, Don was frazzled beyond all reasonable measure over his little accident. He kept repeating that he absolutely couldn’t function until he had a glass of Absolut in his hand.

But since Jesús’s roommates were both recovering alcoholics, there wasn’t any hootch to be had in the house. So Jesús and Don drove right over to the Mayfair market in Jesús’s pick up to get our little graying guest a great big bottle of Grey Goose.

Don eventually calmed down as he sipped his drink at the dinner table. When I discovered that Chris had passed away a mere forty-eight days before, I realized I was too quick to judge Don’s fragile temperament. Jesús asked Don how he was doing as a single man, and Don let his emotions pour forth. He concluded his lamentations by revealing that this was the first time he’d opened up to anyone about Chris’s death. Maybe that car crash (and cocktail) was just what Don needed to finally express his deep feelings about the end one of the most famous gay love relationships of contemporary times.

Don shared with us that, in order to cope with his overwhelming loneliness and loss, he’d begun reading the volumes of daily diary entries Isherwood had been composing for as long as Don could remember. But Don wasn’t reading Chris’s diaries in chronological order; he was reading them backwards, beginning with the last entry Chris wrote on the morning of the day he passed. Don was also heartened to discover that Chris often wrote directly to him in his private journals, sagely predicting the time would come when the love of his life would need to “hear” his darling’s voice once more.

At twenty-one, I was only six months into this, my first relationship, and I regularly vacillated between feeling inferior and adored. I thought, Jesús best never dare read any of my uncensored nightly diary entries—whether I was living or deceased—especially those parts where my angry, wounded words cursed him directly.

As Jesús battered and deep fried our dinner in the kitchen, Don nostalgically provided me with the backstory Jesús and the gay literati well knew: Don had met Chris on Valentine’s Day of 1952, when he was eighteen and Chris was forty-eight. Despite their thirty-year age difference, these lovers remained together for over thirty years.

Maybe there’s hope for me and Jesús, I mused.

Don partly credited this relationship longevity to Chris’s wisdom. At the beginning of their May-December romance, Chris had insisted on an open relationship. He firmly believed this was the only way two men, especially so far apart in age, could remain together.

Although Don ended up not eating a bite of the tempura feast Jesús had fixed, he confided in me with a tipsy wink, “When I was a tempting chicken like you are, Wynward, I possessed quite a healthy appetite and fully partook of Chris’s liberal offer.”

This middle-aged man I’d just met looked nothing like the gap-toothed doll in early photos I’d later see of him, so I’m sure that, as a lad, Don had no problem finding the boys and the booze. What I found slightly curious was the English accent he spoke with, even though Don was raised in L.A. In significant ways, I guess we all become the lovers we choose to spend our lives with.

Jesús, with me now on his arm, continued to be a guest in the eclectic Isherwood-Bachardy bungalow on Adelaide Dr. in the Pacific Palisades. At Don’s behest, I also posed nude for him in his sunny art studio one lazy August afternoon in 1986, on what would’ve been Christopher Isherwood’s eighty-second birthday. I was honored Don chose to celebrate that day in my company. Matching Chris’s writing regimen, Don painted a portrait each day.

As I struggled to sit still, Don remarked from behind his easel that he liked my legs. “Chris and I were leg men,” he asserted gleefully. When he completed the painting, he had me sign and date it, as he does with all the subjects who sit for his portraits.

I suspected Jesús had arranged that dinner with Don for a reason because soon afterward he suggested we also open up our relationship. As he explained it, his grand gesture would grant me access to the youthful exploits he’d voraciously availed himself of.

“Babes, I told you, I was out in high school and sneaking into gay clubs at sixteen, all during the sexual revolution of the ’70s. Every single day was the summer of love for gay men back then.”

He also pointed out that partaking of my freedom now would hopefully prevent me from straying several years down our relationship road. Flings would only be anonymous safe sex, of course, and we’d remain a committed couple.

Of course, if I were allowed to dally, Jesús casually added, then he could dabble too.

You’d think a tramp like me would’ve pounced upon such an indecent proposal. But Jesús’s self-seeking coda suddenly didn’t sound so decent anymore, especially when he teased, “Maybe you’ll even learn some new tricks that you can try out on me in bed.”

What? Was I already an old dog? 

I still don’t know about the merits of monogamy, but I knew even then that an open relationship isn’t for me. For better or worse, I’m a one-man woman.

Also, Chris and Don’s arrangement wasn’t as blissfully progressive as I was led to believe. Jealousies over each other’s affairs almost destroyed their union, and nearly losing Don was the impetus for Isherwood’s novel about a man named George coping with the death of his lover.

Several years later, Jesús and I did give an open relationship a shot—but out of desperation, not from confidence in a commitment that was obviously falling apart.

During what would be our last six months together, we gave each other permission to visit the Meat Rack sex club on a Friday or Saturday night. If we happened to have no plans together on one of those nights, one partner was allowed to inform the other that he was “going out.” When it was Jesús who did the departing, I could only imagine what he was doing there—and I did so, in great detail.

I’m certain he did the same for me when he’d lie alone in our bed waiting for me to come home at three or four or more in the morning—not because I was busy pulling a train on caboose after caboose, but because I was so determined to find someone decent to fool around with, which I rarely did.

When I’d arrive home to Jesús, under the covers and feigning sleep, I’d get into bed and hold him as I had every night for nearly six years. Before long, we’d wordlessly wrestle ourselves into the most passionate sex we’d ever had, with most of the intensity deriving from the fact that we both knew our relationship was doomed.

I knew it was over when I realized I’d ceased giving him flowers and instead would bring home flowers “for the house.” In the divorce, Jesús got custody of the Bachardy friendship, but I like to think I received Isherwood’s diarist blessings.

***

“Opening Up about Christopher Isherwood” is an excerpt from Wynward H. Oliver’s forthcoming memoir, Homo-Work.

This story was first published on The Gay&Lesbian Review blog in October 2021.

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