Christopher did do one small writing job at home, however.
Apparently, it took him only one day––December 28. This was a short film outline. It was based on a ghost story which had been told him by a young man named Lynn Perkins. Christopher had met
Lynn Perkins on March 7 of that year; the day-to-day diary doesn’t say where. I think Perkins had wanted Christopher to write this story for him right from the start of their acquaintanceship; he was not only very persistent but quite pretty (though unqueer), which was no doubt why Christopher agreed to do so. Later, Christopher went with Perkins to at least one studio (maybe two or three) and made a sales pitch for the story. I have the impression that someone very nearly bought it.
The Beesleys had left their house on the Coast Highway on
November 11; Christopher and Caskey helped them move into
another one, on the old Malibu Road, just beyond the Colony.[*]
The Malibu Road had few houses along it in those days and Alec was able to take the dalmatians out unleashed and let them run on the long empty beach. The house itself was comfortable though rather small, built of wood with shingles, Californian-British cottage style.
Christopher and Caskey saw the Beesleys several times during the month of December and ate Christmas dinner with them. They must have also had Dodie and Alec up to the apartment, though the day-
[* The Malibu Colony, a gated beach community.]
50
Lost Years
to-day diary doesn’t mention this; their visits would anyhow have been brief because they would have had to leave the dalmatians in the car and take turns at visiting and dog-sitting––the dogs were seldom allowed in anyone else’s home. (Even when they were
politely urged to bring the dogs in with them, Dodie and Alec would usually decline, saying that, if they did so, the whole place would be wrecked. They said this with a certain pride––indeed, they liked to think of the dalmatians as being even more violent than they actually were.)
During December, Christopher and Caskey did a lot of
entertaining.1 The day-to-day diary mentions the following guests: Johnny Goodwin, Don Forbes, Dave Eberhardt (see page 11), Bo
and Kelley (see pages 17‒18), Helen Kennedy (Sudhira), John van Druten, Carter Lodge, Chris Wood, Aldous and Maria Huxley,
Peggy and Bill Kiskadden, Salka, Peter and Tommy Viertel, Dick LaPan, the actress Ludmilla Pitoëff and her daughter Anita, Vernon Old (who was having an affair with Anita), Natalia Pascal (who was interested in the Lynn Perkins story), Lynn Perkins, John Cowan and Rob Cartwright,[*] Jay.
John Cowan had been Jay’s boyfriend for a short while; then he left Jay because he had fallen in love with Rob Cartwright, and the two of them started living together. But John had been a familiar figure in the Canyon for some time already––a year at least. He was a big blond boy with an extraordinarily beautiful body. Even Bill Harris acknowledged his beauty and jokingly accepted him as a rival, calling him “The Imposter.” This nickname had been shortened to
“Poster.” Christopher called him “the last of The Great Boys.”
John Cowan was admirably narcissistic. On the beach, he would sunbathe with his trunks off, squeezing them into a ball and placing them so that they just covered his cock, but not his bush. He then would fall asleep or pretend to, make some movement and thus
dislodge the trunks, leaving himself stark naked. There was usually a circle of Cowan watchers lying around him on the sand. John got himself watched after dark, as well, for he strolled around all evening 1 They also went to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo three times during its visit to Los Angeles––on November 30 (the opening night) with Hayden Lewis, on December 4 with John Goodwin and Hayden, on December 7 with Bo and Kelley. Among the stars of that season were Leon Danielian (who danced L’Après-midi d’un faune), [Alexandra] Danilova, Maria Tallchief, Nicholas Magallanes, Herbert Bliss. Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial was on the program.
[* Not his real name.]
¾ 1945 ¾
51
in his trunks. If the weather was cold and he was wearing a sweater he would always take it off as soon as he got inside his friends’ homes and sprawl in an armchair with his gorgeous legs wide apart. You couldn’t take your eyes off them.
John had a sister named Rita; she was pretty but loud [. . .]. John and she had terrific fights, they were both as strong as apes and John was often the only person able to remove her when she misbehaved at a party.
Rob Cartwright was dark and fairly nice looking but no one could quite understand what John Cowan saw in him. As a pair, they were known as “Poster and Rattles,” because Rob Cartwright talked a lot.
So, as a matter of fact, did John.
I think I remember that Peggy, when she visited the Entrada Drive apartment, was slightly shocked––for two of the pictures Denny had put up were conversation pieces, to say the least. Both were army posters, warning against the dangers of venereal disease. One of them showed a whore, with a beret over one eye and a cigarette drooping out of a corner of her mouth, standing under a lamppost. This was captioned: “She may be a bag of trouble.” The other was simply a diagram of a penis, with dotted red lines to show the spreading of gonorrheal infection up the urethra and into the bladder.
On New Year’s Eve, Christopher and Caskey gave a party. This
isn’t recorded in the day-to-day diary, and I don’t remember
who was invited––only that, while Caskey made preparations,
Christopher sat compulsively skimming through the last pages of The Past Recaptured because he had vowed to finish Proust before the end of 1945.1
1 Here are [a] few other books read during 1945––from a list in the 1945 day-to-day diary: Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave (a book I have never stopped dipping into, because it contains the essence of Cyril’s enthusiasms and lovable faults––his literary snobbery, his rash generalizations based on misinformation, his confessions of angst and ill health, his Francophilia––it is amazing how readable he is, and in an area where nearly everybody else is intolerable). George Moore’s Evelyn Innes and Sister Theresa. (These appealed enormously to Christopher at that time, with his then vivid memories of the horrors of monastic life. I still find the ending of Sister Theresa tremendous. About the work as a whole, I’m not so sure that it is the masterpiece I once thought it.) Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow (I still find the essay on Dickens very exciting).
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. (At that time, Christopher found something moving in Waugh’s sentimentality and the daringly nauseating phrases he uses, both sexual and religious; they seemed to express a special kind of sincerity. A rereading not long ago rediscovered nothing but the nausea.) Christopher was fascinated by G. N. M. Tyrrell’s Science and Psychical Phenomena (this tied in with his phase of interest in clairvoyants, see page 39). He was 52
Lost Years
1946
Since there isn’t any day-to-day diary for 1946, I shall have to describe the happenings of that year much more vaguely and
impressionistically. But before I get on to that, I’ll write something about the early stages of the Caskey–Christopher relationship.
As has been said already, Christopher got involved with Caskey partly because Denny had dared him to do it. A bit later, when Caskey and Christopher were already going together, Christopher got another kind of dare––from Hayden Lewis. Hayden warned Christopher, in his soft-voiced mocking way, that Caskey was “a bad boy,” implying that he didn’t think Christopher would be able to handle him. As Caskey’s best friend, Hayden could speak with authority; his warning was impressive, even if bitchily intended. Christopher must have known, even in those early days, what Hayden meant by calling Caskey “bad.” But the challenge excited Christopher far more than it deterred him. Caskey’s temperament, with all its unpredictability, offered Christopher a new way of life. Part of the polarity between them was that of Irishman1 and Englishman.