Stars in My Eyes

by Bachardy, Don

• ISBN13: 9780299167301
• ISBN10: 0299167305
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

Stars in My Eyesis a revealing and entertaining collection of celebrity portraits, rendered both in acute drawings and in finely observed prose. In the 1970s and 1980s, internationally known artist Don Bachardy made portraits from life, depicting the actors, writers, artists, composers, directors, and Hollywood elite that he and his partner Christopher Isherwood knew. He then made detailed notes about these portrait sittings in the journal he has kept for more than forty years. The result is a unique document: we enter the mind of the artist as he records the images and behavior of his celebrity subjects-from Ruby Keeler and Barbara Stanwyck to Jack Nicholson and Linda Ronstadt-during their often intense collaboration with him. Finalist, Lambda Literary Foundation Book Award

Author Biography

Don Bachardy lives in Santa Monica, California. His drawings and paintings are in the collections of many major art museums, including the Metropolitan in New York, the de Young in San Francisco, the Fogg in Cambridge, the Smithsonian in Washington, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. He has published six other books of his drawings, including Christopher Isherwood: Last Drawings and Drawings of the Male Nude, and he is coeditor of Where Joy Resides: A Christopher Isherwood Reader.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	ix
Introduction	3	(12)
Bette Davis	15	(12)
Myrna Loy	27	(6)
Paulette Goddard	33	(4)
Alice Faye	37	(12)
Ruby Keeler	49	(8)
Ginger Rogers	57	(22)
Aaron Copland	79	(6)
Joan Blondell	85	(8)
Ingrid Bergman	93	(6)
Alec Guinness	99	(6)
Peter Pears	105	(4)
Charlotte Rampling	109	(6)
Joan Fontaine	115	(8)
Maggie Smith	123	(4)
Louise Brooks	127	(10)
James Merrill	137	(4)
Barbara Stanwyck	141	(10)
Olivia de Havilland	151	(6)
Mia Farrow	157	(6)
Linda Ronstadt	163	(8)
Irwin Shaw	171	(6)
Iris Murdoch	177	(8)
Henry Fonda	185	(6)
William Wyler	191	(4)
Vincente Minnelli	195	(6)
Laurence Olivier	201	(6)
Julian Schnabel	207	(6)
Ellsworth Kelly	213	(6)
Jill St. John	219	(6)
Allen Ginsberg	225	(8)
Jack Nicholson	233	(8)
Helmut Newton	241	(4)
Jerry Brown	245

Excerpts

Chapter One

Bette Davis

13 November 1973, New York

On the first day of November, I spent nearly eight hours alone with Bette Davis in her house in Connecticut. Ten days earlier (21 October), she, Chris, and I had been guests at a dinner party at Roddy McDowall's house, where, after asking her to sit for me, I showed her a catalogue of a recent exhibition of my work. She turned the pages without comment until she paused to inspect a drawing of Margaret Leighton. Though I had seen her and Leighton in the original 1962 production of The Night of the Iguana , I had forgotten that they had worked together. "You've drawn Maggie," she said. I sensed from the tone of her remark that her professional rivalry with Leighton still flourished. I knew then that I'd hooked her.

    Since both Davis and I were going east the following week, she gave me her telephone number in Connecticut. I called her when I got to New York. We agreed on a date for a sitting and a noon train from Grand Central Station, which would get me to Weston shortly after one. The train was on time, but at the station I was told that it might be fifteen minutes before a cab was available. "You're very considerate to let me know," Davis said, as though my telephoning about the delay was an uncommon courtesy. She surprised me further by adding that she was fixing lunch for me. "Yankee corn chowder or a broiled steak?" (Bette Davis anxious to serve the right meal to me!) I guessed that she had put the chowder first because it was her choice, and her tagging it with "Yankee" might be a test of my American mettle, so I chose the chowder.

    As I was paying the cab driver in front of her house, she came out onto the porch to greet me. She was wearing a cornflower-blue wool turtleneck, blue and yellow plaid trousers, and blue socks on her shoeless feet, and she looked little and brightly painted in the gray, overcast daylight. Perhaps because of her shortness, or because of her thinning hair, I noticed the firm shape of her skull.

    Once we were inside the house, she offered me a drink and I declined. Then she immediately sat me at a table by a window and told me to start on the salad she placed before me. After the salad came the corn chowder, more for me than for her, and, though she was still standing up preparing things, she insisted that I start before it got cold. She seemed pleased when I praised the chowder, but not until she had delivered a cloth-covered basket of toast to the table did she finally sit down. I wondered if she would notice that both of the placemats were wrong side up, with the tags showing. (She didn't.)

    I wasn't hungry, and the thick soup was made from canned corn, but I agreed to a second helping despite my concern about getting the sitting started. I also worried that I was too tired (from a late Halloween party the night before) to do my best work.

    To establish a transition from meal to work, I pretended to be curious about a small painting on a nearby wall and got up from the table to inspect it. Perhaps because it was crammed with furniture, her small, neat house felt miniature when I stood up, and the ceiling seemed too low. The amateurish, overrendered painting--sent to her by a fan, she told me--was done from a photograph of her in All About Eve . "The best portrait ever done of me," Davis asserted, unaware, I think, of the challenge she was posing.

    We were still uncomfortably respectful of each other, and we both seemed to dread our imminent confrontation, but I was determined to get started. I chose for my drawing bench two of the chairs from the table we'd just left and put them seat-to-seat in the middle of her living room. Then I chose a wooden chair with arms for her, and placed it before a large window, which looked out onto a narrow river near the back of the house. As soon as she sat down, I began to work. My head-on view of her face was satisfactory except for her eyes, which looked away from mine and instantly became fixed and glassy. I didn't dare to ask her to look directly at me because, when I began to peer into her face, I saw her intense shyness and uncertainty. She hides her vulnerability with an outward show of strength and independence, but I suspect that if anyone made the mistake of cowering before her, she would be merciless, like a true bully. A few days later, a friend asked me if she was as implacable as he had heard, and I answered: "No, but she'd like to be. She imagines implacability and character are the same thing."

    The first fifteen minutes of the sitting were tense for us both. Mysteriously, she managed to be restless and rigid. Catching the stiffness of her body, my drawing hand sweated onto the glossy-smooth surface of my paper. The tension was relieved when she asked if she could smoke, and--much more emphatically than I'd intended--I greeted her request with a startling "YES!"

    As my drawing progressed, I worried that it might be unflattering. So I was glad, once I'd finished, that Davis tactfully waited to be invited to look at it. But I didn't invite her; instead, I asked if I could do a second drawing. She answered, "Why not?" She then complained that the chair I'd put her in was uncomfortable and proposed an enormous chaise, which, she informed me, had been custom-made for her. The chaise was far from any window or the already-scant afternoon light, and it was too big to move. It was so deep and long that it dwarfed the two chairs I was using as a drawing bench. Now the only available light came from a stationary lamp, lighting Davis from behind and casting over my drawing, as I worked, a dark shadow from my hand. To compensate for the difficult working conditions, I asked Davis to look at me while I drew her eyes.

    Once I had begun the second drawing, we became more relaxed with each other. I was feeling the full effect of several cups of coffee and marveled at my circumstances: I was alone with Bette Davis in her house in Connecticut! And not only were my eyes fixed on her battered face, but those baleful eyes of hers were fixed on me ! In spite of the bad light and her fidgeting, which steadily increased as she grew more relaxed, I gloried in every detail of her.

    When I'd completed the drawing, she stood up and, without waiting to be invited, moved behind me to look at it over my shoulder. "That's me all right," she declared with only a faint note of reserve in her praise. She then gasped in mock exhaustion when I proposed another drawing, but I knew she was going to agree before I asked. She liked my fanatical appetite for her, my whole attention devoted to her, a veritable trance of looking and recording. "But only," she insisted, "if I can have a drink."

    Returning to the giant chaise with her scotch, she spilled some of it precisely where she'd been sitting. "I'm glad you saw me do that," she said, gesturing at the wet stain, "otherwise you might think I'd been incontinent." We both laughed at the idea of Bette Davis peeing while sitting for her portrait.

    Now we were easy with each other, but the drink destroyed what was left of her concentration. She talked more, and her head moved continually. My confident determination turned to frenzy, and I found myself uncharacteristically erasing and re-drawing. I knew then that my concentration was shot, too.

    As I gradually lost control of my drawing, it became a sad, almost mournful version of her. "Now you've done it," she declared, when I finally stopped working and she got up to inspect what I'd done. "That's the best." Davis believes that loneliness is the price of her talent and fame (her autobiography is called The Lonely Life ), and she also, I suspect, equates a sad appearance with wisdom and greatness. She seemed proud of her sad look.

    She assumed that her generous praise for my third drawing gave her license to attack the second. She now called it "cruel" and refused to sign it. But she signed the third and even the tentative first drawing. I guessed that her accusation of cruelty resulted from my accurate treatment of her jawline, which could have been even more explicit.

    "If I let you do another," Davis had stipulated before I started the third drawing, "I can't let you get back onto the train without your supper. But because of the short notice, the meal will be humble--chicken pot pies from the freezer." She then cried, "Thank God for Mr. Stouffer!" I couldn't help wondering about the broiled steak I was offered for my lunch, but I kept silent.

    After she put two frozen pies into the oven, Davis opened a can of beets, which she emptied into a saucepan. Putting the saucepan over a high flame, she boiled its contents for a good half hour. Again, I kept silent.

    "Now you must have a drink," she announced. I needed one, too. I hadn't tasted hard liquor in many months, but I asked for straight vodka on the rocks. It tasted good. She refreshed her drink several times, and, though its effect on her was discernible, she could hold her liquor. Drink eased her shyness, and it also brought out her susceptibility to self-pity. She complained of loneliness but cited her own perversity as the cause. She was often too impatient to endure having other people around her, and she sent them away, only to find that she was lonely again. Narrowing her eyes and fixing them on a slim white cat sleeping on a kitchen chair, she exclaimed: "I never thought I'd wind up with a cat!"

    "Aries must be first," she repeated, having asserted it several times during the afternoon. "We're hell to live with because we have to be on top! Taurus is strong, too," she allowed, graciously including me, "we're both strong." She was smoking nonstop now, and, as in so many of her movies, she imparted to the smoke seeping out of her mouth a peculiar sensuousness. Then, fastening her eyes onto mine, she launched into a series of tales about Gary Merrill's manic-depressive fits.

    More drink brought out the little old lady in Davis. Her balance became precarious, and she seemed to lag behind her own driving energy. With her feet more firmly planted on the floor, her gestures became looser and her efforts in the kitchen less precise. Soaking up her increasingly intimate disclosures, I was still, after more than five hours with her, astonished to have her all to myself. Despite her advancing age, she's still Bette Davis--overwhelmingly so. I'd imagined that in her movies she exaggerated herself for the camera. Now I realized she was keeping herself down!

3 December 1973, Santa Monica

Bette Davis arrived in Los Angeles last Thursday around four in the afternoon. I telephoned her at six to invite her to dinner at our house, as I had promised her that I would, and also to set up a second sitting, which she had promised me. I expected the same friendliness she had shown me when I telephoned her in Connecticut to thank her for our previous drawing session and the two meals she had cooked for me, but I got a surprise. `I can't have dinner with you and your friend. I'm only here for a few days. I go to Phoenix on Wednesday." After a slight pause she continued: "You know, I was very good to you. Too good. I sat for three drawings. That's very hard work. I was exhausted, and I had a stiff neck for days. I think I spoiled you. You get one hour this time. That's all. One hour , and I mean it!"

    I guessed that she'd had several drinks during her plane flight and maybe more afterward, but I also wondered if I had offended her by the note, addressed to "Dear Bette," which I'd sent with a copy of Quentin Bell's biography of Virginia Woolf because we had spoken about Woolf during our sitting. Davis didn't even mention the book. However, we made a date for Tuesday afternoon at two. "One hour," she repeated, "and that's all ."

    I'd just come from the Chateau Marmont, where I'd had a drawing session with Myrna Loy five hours long! Not a word from Myrna about exhaustion or spoiling me. And we had had a three-and-a-half-hour session the week before.

[The day after this journal entry I did have a second sitting with Davis. She was staying with a friend in his house on North Orlando Avenue in West Hollywood. I arrived promptly at two o'clock and found her alone, ready and waiting for me. The living room where we worked was flooded with north light from a large overhead window, a welcome contrast to Davis's dark Connecticut house. I only regretted that there wasn't time to paint her in full color. The vivid pinks and blues in the plaid of her wool suit were outdone only by the blue eyeshadow on her eyelids and the vivid magenta crimson of her painted lips.

    Instead of the grumpy disciplinarian that I was expecting and dreading, Davis was again the unalarming, compliant version of herself I had known in Connecticut. But I wasn't tempted to challenge her decree. I fully intended to keep my drawing time to an hour and started work a few minutes after my arrival.

    I knew that this was my last chance with her. Because of the time pressure, I kept my drawing simple and was determined not to worry about a flattering likeness. But the uncompromising face that gradually formed on the paper scared me. I foresaw myself rebuked by a furious Davis and sent away with an unsigned drawing.

    By the time the hour was up, I had finished her head and could have left the drawing at that. Davis, however, had noticed that I was working feverishly, and, when we were within a few minutes of the time limit, she suddenly spoke, "I'm not going to throw you out if you aren't finished on time." I thanked her for her lenience and continued working.

    When I announced a few minutes later that I was finished, Davis rose from her chair and stood behind me to see what I'd done. Dread of her fury made me afraid to turn around. During the agonizing pause that followed, I half-expected a wallop on the back of my head accompanied by accusations of treachery.

    "Yup," she finally said, "that's the old bag."

    I already knew that this was the best of my four drawings of Davis. My admiration for her unflinching approval of it was almost as great as my relief that the sitting had gone well.

    We never met again. I sent her a photograph of the drawing and called her in Connecticut a few weeks later to ask her permission to reproduce the drawing as a poster for an upcoming exhibition of my work at the New York Cultural Center. "I'd be honored" were her last words to me.]