‘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.
