Odd Men Out

Chris & Don chronicles a 30-year romance that bucked convention in more ways than one.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Jul 23, 2008

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MY KID COULD PAINT THAT: Christopher Isherwood poses for his significantly younger romantic partner, Don Bachardy (right). (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

In life as in the credits of a movie, top billing goes to the highest-ranking. So it's not surprising that when people in the documentary Chris & Don refer to the relationship between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Isherwood invariably gets pride of place. Isherwood, after all, was a celebrated man of letters, the author of the stories that eventually inspired Cabaret. Bachardy was, at first, merely his boy toy, 30 years Isherwood's junior. When they first met, in 1952, Bachardy was 18. Over the course of their three decades as romantic partners, Bachardy became a well-respected painter, and his reputation has continued to grow in the two decades since Isherwood's prostate-cancer-related death in 1986. But Bachardy has always remained in Isherwood's shadow, at least if you choose to look at things that way.

Chris & Don, however, is not just Isherwood's story. Guido Santi and Tina Mascara's documentary (there's that pecking order again) is the story of their lives together, a daring, powerful romance that bucked social convention and the disapproval of their friends, gay and straight. But it is also Bachardy's story, the story of a young man struggling to define himself by the side of a famous and accomplished partner, and of an old man, now in his 70s, who still chokes up at the memory of Isherwood's passing, some two decades after the fact. It may be naïve to say that love transcends inequity (one might sooner say it makes inequity bearable), but Chris & Don treats its two main subjects with equal care and attention, not merely using Bachardy as a convenient vantage from which to examine Isherwood's life.

It helps that Bachardy is an irresistible character, almost elfin in his unfailing good nature. A Los Angeles native, Bachardy still keeps up a demanding fitness regimen, and in his early days he was an Adonis. Even well into his 50s, in pictures taken near the time of Isherwood's death, he's strikingly, almost blindingly handsome. His rugged exterior clashes charmingly with his lilting, high-pitched voice, which still bears the English accent he unconsciously adopted from his life partner. The director John Boorman refers to them as "clones."

Isherwood emigrated to the U.S. at the onset of World War II, and soon found his way to Los Angeles, where he worked on screenplays. (Few were ever produced, and only his 1965 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One has any kind of reputation, but then, as now, writing unproduced scripts could be a lucrative vocation.) In 1952, he met Bachardy and his older brother, Ted, on a stretch of Santa Monica beach unofficially reserved for homosexual men. Isherwood was initially drawn to Ted, and slept with him a few times, but Don kept drifting into his life, and they fell madly in love. (Ted's life took a different, tragic turn. After being committed to a mental asylum, he was given shock treatments that permanently altered his personality; today, he looks dull and listless, only semi-conscious. Bachardy says he was diagnosed as manic depressive and schizophrenic, but at the time, shock treatments were commonly employed as a "cure" for homosexuality.)

At Hollywood parties, Bachardy and Isherwood were visibly a couple, which caused consternation because of their gender and difference in age. At the time, public gay relationships were impossibly rare; Armistead Maupin referred to them as "the first couple." At such parties, a friend recalls, they would often see men they'd slept with in the company of their wives.

Chris & Don is circumspect to the point of obfuscation about some parts of Bachardy and Isherwood's relationship, particularly where the sexual politics of their open de facto marriage are concerned. Bachardy discusses one rough patch, about 10 years in, where he considered leaving Isherwood for a man he was having an affair with, but other than that, you have to use your imagination. Personal disagreements, we're told, were sometimes played out through cartoon proxies, with Isherwood casting himself as an old farm horse and Bachardy as a playful kitten. Their hand-drawn caricatures are sweetly loving, but the directors' decision to turn their crude sketches into animations is too cutesy. They come off as saccharine and even slightly patronizing. Santi and Mascara would have been better off if they'd spent less time trying to sell Bachardy and Isherwood's relationship as a timeless love story, and more placing it firmly in its own time.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Chris & Don | Directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara | A Zeitgeist Films release

On Shakey Ground
Repertory Film