Rebels in Paradise (21 page)

The twelve-foot-long double canvas hung in her dining area facing the glass doors opening to the patio. It joined an art collection that included sculptures by Oldenburg and Flavin, and paintings by Francis, Lichtenstein, and Warhol. The Freemans underwrote musical performances at the Pasadena Art Museum and at the L.A. County Museum of Art (LACMA), and their traditional brick house on Hillcrest Drive in Beverly Hills was later the scene of concerts by advanced contemporary composers Philip Glass, John Adams, and Harry Partch.

These encounters with collectors, so unlike anything that he had experienced in England, felt liberating to Hockney. “In Los Angeles, I actually started to paint the city round me, as I'd never … done in London. To me, moving into more naturalism was a freedom.… A lot of painters can't do that—their concept is completely different. It's too narrow; a lot of them, like Frank Stella, who told me so, can't draw at all.”
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This pursuit of “naturalism” led Hockney to concentrate intently on the effects of light and shadow that embellish even the humblest views around Los Angeles.

After six months in Europe, Hockney and Schlesinger moved back to Santa Monica in 1968 and rented a small penthouse facing the ocean. Hockney rented a room in a wooden bungalow across the street where he embarked on his large double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy. He took many Polaroids of them seated in their living room before a coffee table arranged with two stacks of large books, a bowl of fruit, and a rather suggestive dried corn cob. Bachardy went to London for two months before the portrait was finished while Isherwood visited Hockney's studio frequently to pose in person, so the rendering of the author is more detailed. Isherwood was distraught and spent a great deal of time worrying that he had become too possessive of his young lover. In the painting, he is turned toward Bachardy while Bachardy faces straight ahead. Isherwood's concern and affection for Bachardy is palpable. Hockney was facing similar difficulties with Schlesinger, who was restless and ready to move on.

Hearing of Hockney's portraits, collector Marcia Weisman asked him to paint her husband, Frederick. Since attending Walter Hopps and Henry Hopkins's art-collecting classes in their living room just a few years before, the Weismans had become discerning and voracious collectors of Kline, Rothko, Johns, and many of the Los Angeles artists. Hockney didn't accept commissioned portraits but offered to paint them together.
American Collectors
portrayed them standing in the garden at the rear of their modern glass and white stucco home. Frederick is formally attired in a gray suit and tie and facing Marcia, who is wearing a pink caftan. On an aggregate concrete patio, they are separated by modern sculptures by Turnbull and Henry Moore. The totem pole standing to one side is incongruous, as Hockney knew, and he used it to capture Marcia's outspoken nature and its effect on her husband, who often was so tense from her constant criticism that he clenched his fists. “There's a totem pole in the picture that looks rather like Marcia. It really had a similar look: the face, the mouth and things. I couldn't resist putting that in,” he said. “So it's a slightly different kind of portrait in that the objects around the figures are part of them. I left the drip on Fred Weisman's hand because it seemed to make his stance more intense, as though he were squeezing so hard that his paint was coming off.”
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Two years later, Weisman was dining with a business associate in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Frank Sinatra was hosting a dinner party for Dean Martin at a nearby table. Weisman complained that Sinatra's party was making too much noise and making anti-Semitic remarks. Sinatra said, “Listen, buddy, you're out of line.” Sinatra started arguing with Weisman. Accounts differ about what happened next. Marcia, who was not there, said that her husband was hit with a blackjack by Sinatra's bodyguard. An eyewitness claimed that Sinatra threw one of the telephones kept in the Polo lounge booths at Weisman's head. Weisman was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital with a fractured skull and remained in a coma for months.
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The LAPD wanted to make an arrest but Marcia received anonymous threatening phone calls warning her not to press charges. As they had three children, she decided not to pursue the case officially, but she spoke freely of the incident in order to spread the word of Sinatra's behavior.

While in a coma, Frederick had no recollection of family or friends until Marcia brought a small Pollock drawing into his room. The swirling patterns triggered his memory, and soon he was lecturing his doctors on the meaning and pleasure of contemporary art. This extraordinary occurrence prompted Frederick, who was a hospital board member, to suggest hanging contemporary art throughout the new hospital building then being built on Beverly Boulevard. Other board members said, “Well, that's fine. But we haven't the money for it. How do we do it?” Frederick replied, “I know how you'll do it. I'll give you Marcia.”
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Frederick provided the seed money and Marcia got busy selecting works from their collection and soliciting gifts and funds from friends. When the hospital opened, the stark white corridors were brightened by framed examples of original contemporary art, including prints by Hockney.

Initially, Hockney spent only five years in Los Angeles, returning periodically to England, yet it was the place where his unique sensibilities coalesced. Apart from Ruscha, no other artist was so completely identified with the city. The quintessential elements of Los Angeles—swimming pools, lawns with sprinklers, squat stucco buildings, and skinny palm trees—became the imagery associated most popularly with his work. The freedom of opportunity there allowed Hockney to pursue his convictions as a painter without worrying about history or critics. As English art critic Richard Dorment later put it, “The day he stepped off the plane in Los Angeles, everything changed. In a moment I would seriously compare to Vincent Van Gogh's arrival at Arles, it is as though the heat, light and colour of California entered Hockney's bloodstream. Overnight, a talented British artist became a major international star.”
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Captivated by the particular beauty of Los Angeles, Hockney bought a house off of Mulholland Drive and made it his primary residence in 1978.

He said, “In London, I think I was put off by the ghost of [Walter] Sickert, and I couldn't see it properly. In Los Angeles, there were no ghosts; there were no paintings of Los Angeles. People then didn't even know what it looked like. And when I was there, they were still finishing some of the big freeways. I remember seeing, within the first week, a ramp of freeway going into the air, and I suddenly thought: ‘My God, this place needs its Piranesi; Los Angeles could have a Piranesi, so here I am!'”
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Hockney may have been tantalized by what he saw as a permissive lifestyle, but homosexuality was far from accepted in Southern California. The Friendship, the ship-shaped bar with porthole windows in Santa Monica Canyon, was packed nightly but many of Dorothy's friends were content to remain closeted. The Mattachine Society, created in Los Angeles in 1950 in the home of Communist activist Harry Hay, focused on assimilation and respectability for homosexuals. (Soon after, several women in San Francisco formed the Daughters of Bilitis, or DOB, for lesbians with similar goals.) Rudi Gernreich was a founding Mattachine member but never admitted his homosexuality publicly. His life partner of thirty-one years, Oreste Pucciani, recalled that not only was it still illegal, but Gernreich had joked, “It's bad for business.”
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(The Gernreich and Pucciani estates provided a trust for litigation and education in the area of gay and lesbian rights.) A small uprising of gays against police harassment took place in Los Angeles in 1959; an automobile parade was organized to fight exclusion of homosexuals from the military in 1966, but it was not until the Stonewall riot of 1969 in Greenwich Village that the gay rights movement gained real momentum.

Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood in front of the double portrait of them painted by David Hockney

Photograph courtesy of Don Bachardy

Isherwood's sexual inclinations could be gleaned from his books, especially
Goodbye to Berlin
, about his experiences during the Weimar Republic. It was later transformed into the musical and film
Cabaret
. Having rejected the upper-class upbringing of his parents by dropping out of Cambridge University, he moved to Los Angeles in 1939 with W. H. Auden, where he achieved his greatest success as a novelist and screenwriter. With friends Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Bertrand Russell, all prominent authors, he fell under the sway of Swami Prabhavananda. All wrote numerous articles about Vedanta but Isherwood wrote books on the subject, worked as the managing editor of the official publication of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, and later served on its editorial board with Huxley and Heard.

Isherwood was forty-eight when he met the sixteen-year-old Don Bachardy on Valentine's Day, 1953. He had been infatuated with Bachardy's older brother, Ted, but after Ted suffered a nervous breakdown, Isherwood was placed in the position of consoling Don. Their relationship continued until Isherwood's death in 1986.

Isherwood took his young partner as his date to all of the Hollywood parties, a brazen gesture for the times. Bachardy recalled the wonder of being warmly welcomed as “the only queer couple” in the home of producer David O. Selznick and his actress wife Jennifer Jones, while confronting veiled hostility from actors Joseph Cotten and Henry Fonda.

Bachardy had been drawing portraits of movie stars from photographs kept in a scrapbook since childhood, probably inspired by weekly movie matinees with his mother. Raised in the suburb of Atwater, California, he was stunned to be dropped into the world of actual celebrities on one of his first dates. “I remember being in a restaurant in Hollywood called Naples with Chris. It was close to Columbia [Pictures] where they were making
From Here to Eternity
. After we'd been there a few minutes, the door opened and I saw Montgomery Clift come in. I said, ‘Chris, Montgomery Clift just came in.' He turned around and we both watched Montgomery Clift come straight up to the table and say, ‘Hi Chris!' I was absolutely awestruck. Chris introduced us and we talked for a few minutes and it was my first meeting with a movie star. Of course, I was thrilled to pieces.”
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By 1956, it was clear that Bachardy had the makings of a talented portraitist—he later shared models with Hockney—and Isherwood underwrote his education at Chouinard Art Institute. (In 1962, when he had an exhibition at the gallery of character actor Rex Evans, a critic wrote that Bachardy managed to “freeze personalities like Stravinsky and Dorothy Parker in off-guard moments in such a manner as to arouse uncommon interest.”)
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Bachardy was classmates with Ruscha, Goode, and Bell. “I was very shy and kept a low profile,” he recalled. “They were artists of their time doing abstract pictures. Ed Ruscha was already doing words. And here I was doing nothing but pictures of people. I couldn't have felt more old-fashioned but it was all I wanted to do. Billy Al was my first artist sitter because I had a commission from
Harper's Bazaar
to do about fifteen ‘in' people of Los Angeles, including Nancy Reagan, Betsy Bloomingdale, and Fred Astaire. Billy Al Bengston was the only artist on the list. Of course, I knew his work and had seen him at parties. I didn't know any artists yet.
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“I was scared,” he continued. “I had already heard of his reputation for being very outspoken. I thought he might make quick work of me. But he sat very still, which is very uncharacteristic of him. It was a big moment for me. And we did a trade. A bona fide established artist and little Donny did a trade! Artist to artist. That was very exciting for me, and through him I met all the others. Ed Ruscha eventually had me do sittings with all the members of his family. His mother, his sister, his brother, his wife, his son, and he sat for me many times. That is how I got so many Ruschas.”
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Bengston, the most macho of all the Ferus artists, became Bachardy's friend and mentor. “It was very touchy then because in the sixties, these were all straight artists,” Bachardy recalled. “Homophobia was the flavor of the month for years on end. It was a quite touchy situation getting to know Billy. I remember after that first sitting with him for
Harper's Bazaar
, he was invited to dinner to meet Chris. Just the three of us. We cooked dinner for him and that was our kind of audition. If he passed us, we had a chance. But just as an independent fag, I would never have gotten into the Venice art scene. I realized from the beginning, I was only on approval. It was a concession. Others were not encouraged to apply. It was largely because I was guaranteed by Chris, who was charming, witty, modest, unpretentious. Of course, if he made up his mind to charm whoever, he always succeeded. Billy liked him immediately, and so did all the others. Otherwise, I probably would never have gotten into the art world here.”
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