Reminiscences of a boy in blue

As I wrote last week, one of the more gratifying aspects of blogging - and, believe me, there are many - is the way that people over the last two years have been generous with sources, suggestions, reminiscences and even images of my subjects. And so it was with with this photograph of Marguerite Littman, but what excited me, and here I don't wish to be ungentlemanly, was what was on the wall behind Mrs Littman - a double portrait of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Seeing that painting again was one of those moments when, wordless and blind, I traipsed through memories long buried.

 

I need to tell you, and this will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me well, is that I did not enjoy Cabaret. Piteous, I know, and it's an admission deplorable enough to require my gay card to be rescinded or, at least, be withheld until I've been re-gayed. Whilst I'm being a confessin' queen I might as well just get it all out and admit I couldn't stand listening to Judy Garland or her daughter. I know, I know!

What you might think, has that got to do with Marguerite Littman? Well, actually, not a lot. But what is germane is that Christopher Isherwood wrote I Am a Camera, the book on which Cabaret was based - a book that, together Jean Genet's Querelle of Brest, Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, James Baldwin's Another Country, John Rechy's City of Night, and the nude drawings and blue swimming pools of David Hockney, was a seminal influence in my youth. You could say, if you'll pardon the pun, they all made a bigger splash, and were emblematic of youth yearning to be misspent.

I say above the connection with Marguerite Littman is tenous - a background to a photograph and nothing more - but if truth be told, she was one of the first people to organize a response to the spread of AIDS, and continues to be involved, a fact that should be again noted here. The connection, then, is with the younger me and my admiration of David Hockney. In his autobiography he talks about meeting Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, how they took him up and introduced him to his new life - much as happened to me in a different circle all those years ago.

"By this time I had met Christopher Isherwood and we instantly got on. He was the first author I'd met that I really admired. I got to know him and Don Bachardy, whom he lives with, very well; they woud invite me out, take me around to dinner; we had marvellous evenings together. Christopher was always interesting to talk to about anything and I loved it, really loved it. I don't know how it was that we hit it off, but we did. It wasn't only that we were English, but we were both from Northern England. I remember Christopher later said Oh David, we've so much in common; we love California, we love American boys, and we're from the north of England. Of course, Christopher's from the opposite side of the north of England: his family was quite rich, mine is working class."

A scant five years before I first read of a new and rapidly aging, aggressively wasting, ultimately fatal disease affecting gay men, I'd bought Hockney's autobiography - a book I still own and in which the light of California still glances off the glittering pools, the hissing lawns and the bronzed bodies. It had been an all too brief time of recognition, liberaton and great fun - certainly not a time of innocence as the past tends to be - and without, as is always the way, any hint of the catastrophe to come.

I'll let David Hockney himself finish this post with a paragraph that has such savour of those years:

"I went to visit the place where Physique Pictorial was published in a very seedy area of downtown Los Angeles. It's run by a wonderful complete madman and he has this tacky swimming pool surrounded by Hollywood Greek plaster statues. It was marvellous! To me it had the air of Cafavy in the tackiness of things. Even Los Angeles reminded me of Cafavy; the hot climate's near enough to Alexandria, sensual; and this downtown area was sleazy, a bitt dusty, very masculine - men always; women are just not part of that kind of life. I love downtown Los Angeles - marvellous gay bars full of mad Mexican queens, all tacky and everything. The Physical Pictorial people get men, boys, when they've just come out of the city gaol: Do you want to earn ten dollars? Take your clothes off, jump in the pool, that sort of thing. They're all a bit rough-looking, but the bodies are quite good. The faces are terrible, not pretty boys, really. I must admit, I have a weakness for pretty boys: I prefer them to the big butch scabby ones. I was quite thrilled by the place, and I told the guy. I bought a lot of still photographs from him, which I still have."

Whilst I'm, or Hockney is, on the subject of Physique Pictorial: if you've ever seen the painting When Did You Last See Your Father you know exactly how I felt when my grandmother demanded of me, then aged fourteen or so, an explanation of why I had a stash of the magazines in my nightstand! Like the young man in the painting, it took me a long time to find my voice in these matters.

Odd how pictures can have so many consequences and memories.

Image of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968, from David Hockney by David Hockney, edited by Nick Stangos, Thames and Hudson, London 1976.

A sneak peek

I’ve mentioned before that people write to me about connections they have made or feel I should make, and these past few weeks have been no different in that. Last week I read about the irritation one correspondent feels when he reads or hears the phrase “pop of color” and I knew exactly what he meant.

My particular bête noir is “sneak peek.” I’d like to say it’s the only piece of decorator-speak that irritates me but “wow factor” comes pretty close, as does “a fresh take on …” and “... with a twist” as in “timeless yet modern twist on traditional style" - whatever that might mean! I fully appreciate we all have set phrases, patterns of speech, jargon – lord knows, I recognize mine each time I put fingers to keyboard - but there are times when the sloppiness and vacousness of it all gets up my nose exasperates me. It seems to me that the more inconsequential interiors have become in recent years, the more consequential, referential and reverential the descriptions have needed to be.

Last Thursday I said I intended to move away from Roderick Cameron and his friends for a while and look in other directions - my own fresh take, or a twist on tradition, if you will - and in this post I am doing so, but not moving too far. To be honest, I cannot say I had made the connection between Marguerite Littman and the men I've been writing about, but now it has been pointed out to me, I realize it's a connection I could have made for in the 1960s Littman and her husband were clients of David Hicks. Marguerite Littman, though not a decorator, fits into my theme of circles within circles because she is connected to a number of the men I have written about.

Mentioned by Edmund White in the latest chapter of his autobiography and, indeed, written about by him for Vanity Fair, friend to Princess Diana, Rock Hudson, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams and - well, the list is endless.  In the main, I've stayed clear of the characters of those I've written about, preferring in my own way to stress positive rather than the opposite - not in any way striving towards hagiography but simply being clear  that it is the work rather than the character that counts. Not that I want to sound naive - I'm very aware of the utter vacuousness and frequent viciousness that characterized the lives of the many style icons. It has never been my intention to be an apologist for the likes of ... but that is for another post and I want to stress just in case I have not expressed myself clearly, none of the above applies in my mind to Marguerite Littman.

For, if by their deeds ye shall know them is the standard by which we can judge then Mrs Littman comes, amongst these Blue Remembered Hills, pretty close to sainthood. In the mid-1980s when conservative and fundamentalist politicians on both sides of the Atlantic were ignoring or, on occasion, celebrating  the growth of an epidemic she founded the AIDS Crisis Trust in the United Kingdom. If you are a gay man, or just a human being, of a certain age, you will remember how while a thin red line was being drawn through history anorexic socialites and their walkers danced till dawn with the unheeding leaders of Western society in the White House and other bastions of the establishment.

It is that thin red line, the Maginot Line of our times, that the likes of Mrs Littman, a woman to whom I shall return, recognized and walked across. It is the consequences of that red line drawn through late 20th-century history that underlies my fascination with the circles within circles and those who orbited within them.

Photographs of Mr and Mrs Mark Littman's house from David Hicks: A Life of Design, Ashley Hicks, Rizzoli 2009