‘Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!” Laughter explodes down the line from California. “It was a very long time ago!” says the painter Don Bachardy. His voice is high and rasping. Listening to him, you could be forgiven for thinking that the late Truman Capote was still with us. As for what happened “a very long time ago”, Bachardy is referring to the parties he threw with his partner, the British novelist Christopher Isherwood. Their home in Adelaide Drive, Santa Monica, was a salon thronged by movie stars and writers as well as Bachardy’s fellow artists.
“Yes, we had a good time back then, but you can’t expect me to remember exactly who was here!” he says. It’s a fair point. Isherwood has been dead for almost 40 years and Bachardy, who is 91, suffers from some of the conditions that typically afflict people of his age. But the famous names they entertained in the 60s and 70s read like a wishlist for the guest bookers on the Johnny Carson show: Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier, Rock Hudson, Igor Stravinsky, Elton John, Tennessee Williams and Capote, too.
Those heady recollections have been prompted by the forthcoming auction of David Hockney’s celebrated “double portrait” of Isherwood and Bachardy. It’s a monumental work, measuring more than six feet by nine feet, and it could fetch up to £45m. Bachardy has no difficulty in remembering that, he says. “How could one forget it? It’s a beautiful picture.”
Hockney depicted the couple in their living room, sitting in matching chairs. Isherwood, whose writing inspired Cabaret and the Oscar-winning A Single Man, is seen on the right of frame, looking over at Bachardy. The foreground is filled by a large, low table set with stacks of books and a fruit bowl. The pieces of fruit are almost luminous in the west coast sunshine that infuses the room despite the closed shutters behind the two men. My call to the Los Angeles-born Bachardy finds him anticipating another scintillating day. “It’s a sunny morning here, the ocean is calm,” he confirms. He is speaking from the house on Adelaide Drive. Next year, Bachardy will have lived there for 70 years.
Painted in 1968, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is like a storyboard for an interiors magazine or a sober, even bourgeois, portrait of a marriage, one that could almost have come from the studio of a Gainsborough or Joshua Reynolds. You might never know that “homosexual acts” were criminalised in the California of the 60s and that out gay men and women were beyond the pale of mainstream America. Needless to say, Isherwood and Bachardy weren’t married. They spent their first night together on Valentine’s Day 1953 when the artist was 18 and the writer 48. They lived with each other, not always frictionlessly, until Isherwood died in 1986.
Hockney’s study of a gay couple living a settled middle-class life – their improving books, their healthy snacks – is a landmark in queer art, according to critics. “It’s perfectly understandable that’s what it’s become,” agrees the surviving sitter. It’s also a significant work in Hockney’s own oeuvre, the first of only seven “double portraits” by the artist, which also include the much-loved Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, now in Tate Britain in London.
Despite its title, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is really about three people: the third, unseen presence is the artist himself, who was a neighbour of Bachardy’s at the time and remains a friend. What does Bachardy remember about the making of the work? “David was relaxed, confident. He’s very talented, his results were always impressive. He wasn’t in any hurry. You don’t get a beautiful picture in half an hour.”
Hockney took photographs of his subjects and drew them in pencil before making the finished work in acrylic paint. At first, he intended that the pair would appear the other way round in the picture, but then he noticed that the writer often glanced over to his lover while they sat for him and so he swapped them over.
Were they good models? “I sat still!” Bachardy said. “David and I are both painters. We know exactly how to do it and we’ve done it for years.” What about Isherwood? “He had lots of experience of sitting for artists and he was lucky to have such talented artists painting him.” Was Bachardy happy when he saw the finished product? “I expected the best and I got it. I had no reservations about it at all.”
But some people are surprised or even shocked to see what an artist has made of them, even one as accomplished as Hockney. “The amateurs have amateur reactions,” says Bachardy with a note of asperity. “People who are doing this for a living are very experienced.” He is a considerable artist in his own right, with many gallery shows in the US to his credit. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Portrait Gallery in London. For a time, he was court artist to Hollywood royalty. He painted Bette Davis at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Contemplating Bachardy’s likeness of her, the formidable star muttered: “Yes, that’s the old bag.”
As well as sitting for Hockney, Bachardy returned the favour. He says: “I don’t think somebody in his position could be happy sitting for another painter but we sat for each other several times. I think this was really the start for him of doing portraits outside members of his family. We had friends who wanted to sit for us. We used to say to each other, ‘Hey, this is a pretty good business to get into!’” Their friendship survived Hockney moving back to Europe and they still speak on the phone from time to time, says Bachardy.
The double portrait was a highlight of Hockney’s acclaimed exhibition in Paris this summer, David Hockney 25. It’s of its time and yet oddly contemporary: we could be looking at the green room of a literary festival somewhere warm, or the waiting room of an exclusive and open-minded adoption agency. It’s been in private hands for the past four decades and Bachardy is surprised to learn that it’s up for sale. Its eye-popping asking price elicits another rasping laugh. “Oh really? Well let’s see. I’ll believe it when I see it!”
Do you think it’s a lot of money for a painting of you and Christopher, I ask. “It’s a lot of money for anything!” he says, with that voice like an emery board from Tiffany’s.
Bachardy painted Isherwood many times over. Was that difficult? “It’s always difficult to do something that’s worth doing, whether it was Christopher or a hundred other people. If you live with a painter, it’s hard to go on being painted by him, but he was a good sport.”
Isherwood died at Adelaide Drive. He was 81. Some of Bachardy’s most penetrating and affecting images of him were made as he was dying and immediately postmortem. Though the artist has not wanted for company in the past 40 years or so, Isherwood was a great loss, he says. “He was irreplaceable, one of a kind. I never met anyone who could hold a candle to him. I probably miss him more than ever because it’s been such a long time since he went another way.”
Why has Bachardy chosen to stay in the house after so many years? Doesn’t he get itchy feet? “Oh, I think my feet are as itchy as any other person’s! But this is a precious, wonderful house. I love it and would hate to leave it. Isn’t that what most people feel about their home?”
Bachardy tells me that he continues to paint. “Yes, I am painting because that’s what I do. The same things I’ve always done: paintings of people, portraits. It can be difficult but not enough to stymie me,” he says. You’ve been lucky with your eyesight, I suggest. “I think I’ve been lucky in quite a few departments,” he shoots back.
I wonder what’s become of the furniture which is such a feature of Hockney’s painting. Bachardy thinks that he still has the chairs. His friend, a younger man called Tim, takes the phone. He says: “The chairs are rattan. They were deteriorating so they’re in storage.”
Somebody would probably pay a lot of money for them, I suggest. “That’s why they’re in storage,” Tim replies. He says the chairs may be restored to the property at a future date. Could the house become a museum? “It belongs to a trust. It might become a residence,” thinks Tim, perhaps a base for writers and painters as it was in its 60s pomp.
At the beginning of the year, the house was threatened by the wildfires that raced through the neighbouring district of Pacific Palisades. “We were only moderately endangered,” says Bachardy. “The fire wasn’t really close.” Did he evacuate? “No, I stayed. I thought, ‘If the house burns down, I prefer to stay in it.’”
