GAY ICONS 7: BERLIN IS BOYS!

[PeterRS]

"Good authors too who once knew better words

Now only use four-letter words

Writing prose.

Anything goes."

These lyrics from the opening of Cole Porter's gorgeous 1934 musical "Anything Goes" could well have been written with the writer and novelist Christopher Isherwood in mind. Although Porter and Isherwood may never have met, both were gay. While Porter married in part to mask his sexuality (the fact that his wife was rich no doubt also helped!) the English-born Isherwood was one of the 20th century's most openly gay men. 

 

1950s photo of Christopher by William Caskey with whom he had a tempestuous 5-year affair

Deprived of his father killed during the First World War and thereafter of life with the remainder of his family when, as was customary for those of the upper middle class, the young Christopher was packed off to boarding school, he quickly made friends. Equally quickly he discovered his homosexuality. Boys' boarding schools in those days were notorious havens of homosexuality, an activity that was often more innocent than romantically serious and usually discarded when young men advanced to university.

One school friend who followed him to University was the young poet W. H. Auden. The two became best friends and frequently shared a bed, even though Christoppher was at Cambridge and Auden not far away at Oxford. Unlike Auden, though, university for Christopher was not to be taken seriously. At the end of his second year in 1925, he was sent down, the polite phrase for being expelled, after he wrote joke answers on his end-of-year exam papers. This caused great annoyance to his mother who had expected her son to become a Cambridge don. 

Christopher did not care. He took a variety of part-time jobs – as a private tutor, as secretary to a music group, as an attempted writer of novels and attended medical school. Like many Cambridge students of the day, he had dabbled in Communism, believing like so many others in the Russian propaganda which painted a picture of a superior egalitarian society than the very unequal society then in Britain. Perhaps fortunately he was some years older than all but one of the infamous Cambridge ‘five’, the British spies Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, all recruited from university who went on to betray many of their country’s secrets to the Russians, the first three defecting to the post-war Soviet Union after their discovery in the 1950s and 60s.

The austere face of Sir Anthony Blunt, exposed as a dangerous spy for the Soviet Union in 1964 as “the fourth man”, but permitted to retain his position as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures provided he confessed what he knew. He was finally unmasked and disgraced in parliament in 1979. 

Christopher was far more interested in what was happening in poverty-stricken Germany. When Auden moved to Berlin for a few months in 1928, he wrote to his friend extolling the availability of gay men in the Weimar Republic. Isherwood followed a few months later. Berlin had earned a thoroughly deserved reputation for sexual freedom and debauchery. The words of Cole Porter were never more true: sexually, in Berlin “anything goes”! As his lover of many decades, Don Bachardy, later made clear, "To Christopher, Berlin was boys!" (Isherwood did not meet Bachardy until 1953 on a beach in California when he was 49 and Bachardy 18 - they remained together until his death in 1986).

Whereas Auden had left to teach in England, Christopher stayed on and positively revelled in Berlin's thriving gay scene. He was later to say he had had sex with at least 400 boys. In staid old England and indeed the United States to which he would emigrate in 1939, 400 must have seemed an outrageous number.

The compendium of the three novels based on Christopher's Berlin days

Then in 1932 he met his first real love, a handsome 17-year old German named Heinz Neddermayer. But storm clouds in the form of the Nazi Party were on the horizon. In 1933 the pair escaped to England, but Neddermeyer could not obtain a long-term visa. After a second short visit in 1934, they gave up trying and started four-years of wandering around Europe. The relationship had to end when the Gestapo finally caught up with Heinz in 1937 and enrolled him in the German Army. Neddermeyer survived a short period of forced labour and military service. In 1938 he married and had a son named Christian in 1940. Heinz met Christopher only one more time, in 1952 when Christopher was researching what was to become one of his most famous books of his time in Berlin.

 In 1938 while getting over the split with Heinz, ever the wanderer Christopher had joined his old pal Auden on a trip to the Paris of the Orient, the very permissive Shanghai. They had a commission to write a book on the Sino-Japanese war, but it was Shanghai that fascinated Christopher far more. He wrote –

 “The tired or lustful businessman will find here everything to gratify his desires . . . if you want girls, or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bath houses and the brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray like afternoon tea.”

Just before war broke out in Europe, Auden and Christopher moved to the United States, the former to New York and Christopher to California. In addition to writing and working on various movie scripts, he became a disciple of the Ramakrishna monk, Swami Prabhavananda and remained a Hindu for the rest of his life. Soon after arriving in California he became one of the celebrated European émigré set, mixing regularly with the likes of Thomas Mann, Igor Stravinsky, Charlie Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht and Greta Garbo. 

As he left for the USA he had written a novel based partly on his experiences, "Goodbye to Berlin". In 1951 one of his friends persuaded the playwright John Van Druten to adapt the novel into a Broadway play, "I am a Camera". Eventually it was fashioned into a movie of the same name, Later this was refashioned to become the Broadway musical "Cabaret". With its haunting music, provocative story and lyrics, all set against the backdrop of emerging Nazi Germany, "Cabaret" became a huge Broadway hit. Soon the new movie version was to make it into an even bigger worldwide sensation. Liza Minnelli instantly became one of the world's top stars (and a gay icon in her own right) and the first person ever to appear on the cover of TIME and Newsweek magazines in the same week. 

 

Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles - YouTube Allied Artists

In one scene, Sally Bowles is confronted by her erstwhile English lover about another man she has been seeing -

 Brian: "Oh! Fuck Maximilian!"

Sally: "I already did!"

Brian (sheepishly): "So did I!"

Even for 1972 that was close to pushing the limits of public acceptability! Isherwood continued to write and Bachardy became a noted painter. Their partnership had its ups and downs, especially when Bachardy started a series of affairs. Yet the relationship survived. Indeed, it became a model for many gay men of the time undertaking long-term relationships in the new openness of the gay liberation movement. 

 

The cover of a DVD about Christopher and Don’s relationship

A frequent visitor to their home was the gay artist David Hockney and the couple feature in several of Hockney’s paintings.

 

 Christopher and Don at home painted by their good friend David Hockney

Christopher died in 1986 aged 81. In recent years 90-year old Bachardy has overseen the publication of Christopher's voluminous diaries and the republication of his novels. Even if only his Berlin stories and "Cabaret" are to survive into the future, they must surely be a fitting tribute to Christopher Isherwood, one of the celebrated gay icons of the last century.