Chris & Don

British-born, upper-class Isherwood was already an established novelist, essayist, screenwriter and playwright when he first met Bachardy and his older brother, Ted, on a gay beach in Santa Monica in 1953. Two of Isherwood's best-known books -- the novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains and the story collection Goodbye to Berlin -- had already been turned into the play I Am a Camera, and would eventually serve as the inspiration for the musical and film Cabaret. Bachardy, meanwhile, was a star-struck 18-year-old who felt inextricably drawn to Klieg lights and movie stars, and who, at the time, had little interest in dating a lowly writer. For the next few years Isherwood carried on an intermittent affair with Ted until one drunken night at a Hollywood dinner party when he put the moves on younger brother Don. Isherwood and Bachardy's increasingly close relationship grew even more intimate when Ted suffered a serious nervous breakdown -- he would soon be diagnosed as a manic-depressive schizophrenic -- and Bachardy became distraught. Isherwood's paternal instincts kicked in -- he would later describe his sense of responsibility toward his young lover as "almost fatherly" -- and he and Bachardy became inseparable. At time when that kind of love still dared not speak its name, Isherwood and Bachardy were obviously and apologetically a gay couple; they attended the same Hollywood parties as closeted gay actors -- many of whom they had slept with -- and their poor wives, and homophobic drunks like Joseph Cotten sneered and made cutting remarks. They traveled the world together and Isherwood introduced Bachardy to such famous friends as E.M. Forster, Tennessee Williams and Igor Stravinsky. But not everyone within Isherwood's own enlightened circle approved: Leslie Caron (who is interviewed here) found the way in which Bachardy absorbed Isherwood's personality -- English accent included -- unsettling, and the pioneering pro-gay psychologist Evelyn Hooker was made so uncomfortable by the steep age difference she eventually asked the couple to move out of the cottage they were sharing on her property. Nor was Isherwood and Bachardy's life together all domestic bliss: Bachardy understandably yearned to venture out with boys his own age, and he often felt insecure around his lover's illustrious and much older friends, some of whom no doubt regarded him as little more than an attractive kept boy. Bachardy went on to find his own small degree of celebrity a portraitist of some talent, but it seems he never could quite escape his lover's long shadow: Bachardy's high-profile sitters were mostly Isherwood's famous friends.

On the one hand Mascara and Santi's film shows us an unconventional relationship that, whatever the odds, managed to survive longer than many marriages -- something to keep in mind as the ridiculous debate over gay marriage wears on. But it also raises a number of troubling questions about the downside of such May-December couplings. Would the young and obviously impressionable Bachardy have become more his own person and not Isherwood's "clone" (as director John Boorman here describes him) with a man with his own limited life experience? Would he have developed further as a portraitist if he hadn't felt such pressure to prove himself a legitimate artist in his own right, and not Isherwood's pet? Would Isherwood's own anxieties over age and deterioration -- a theme that drives the fascinating made-for-TV movie FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY which he and Bachardy wrote together -- had been lessened had he grown older with a man his own age? It hard to say exactly what draws people together and it's unfair to judge, but this interesting look at an interesting couple makes such speculation tough to resist. leave a comment --Ken Fox