As for Christopher, he felt much sympathy, even love for Tito, despite Tito’s tiresome moodiness, which sometimes expressed itself in attacks of asthma. During August and September, Christopher twice stayed the night at Tito’s apartment; the two of them wanted to make love to each other because of their mutual affection. The memory of it is pleasant though the sex acts themselves weren’t satisfactory.
Tito was an actor. About that time or a little later, he played the part of Jennifer Jones’s young brother in John Huston’s We Were Strangers. In the movie, Tito gets shot and dies in Jennifer’s arms. I have a memory of another evening (I think, in 1949) which Christopher spent with Tito, while Tito was suffering from asthma. Christopher pretended to be Jennifer Jones. Embracing Tito, he murmured in a would-be Cuban accent: “Manolo, Manolo––don’t die!” which made Tito laugh in the midst of his choking.
The strongest bond between Tito and Christopher was that Tito was religious. He became a follower of Vedanta and a disciple of Swami. More about this later.
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for his convenience and involving her in his neuroses; if he had had an elder sister, he would have used her in much the same manner.
Well––enough of that.
Thomas Mann, in a letter to Dr. Theodor Adorno (reprinted in
Mann’s Letters), writes on July 12, 1948, that Klaus is “physically restored” after an attempt at suicide1 and is staying at Bruno Walter’s house along with his sister Erika, “who is giving him spiritual care.”
Thomas continues:
I am somewhat angry with him for having tried to do that to his mother. She is understanding about everything––and so am I.
That has spoiled him.
The situation remains dangerous. My two sisters committed
suicide, and Klaus has much of the elder sister in him. The impulse is present in him and is favored by all the surrounding circumstances––except that he has a parental home he can always rely on, although naturally he does not want to be dependent on it.
It is a good sign that he curses the publicity that followed the incident on the grounds that “this makes it so hard to start over again.”
I don’t know just what Thomas Mann meant by “all the surrounding circumstances” which “favored” Klaus’s impulse to suicide. Did these include Klaus’s homosexuality in general and his boyfriend Harold Fairbanks in particular?
I don’t think Klaus had known Harold Fairbanks very long before Christopher met Harold; the three of them had supper together for the first time on July 27. Harold was a merchant seaman. He was well built (though in danger of fat) and quite good-looking. He drank a lot. He could be very amusing or sullen or aggressive or sentimental, switching his moods suddenly and often. When he was drunk and encountered one or more sexy young studs in a bar, his favorite challenge was, “Fuck or fight!”––he didn’t seem to mind being beaten up, at all. He was definitely homosexual [. . .].
If Klaus talked to Christopher about his suicide attempt, I don’t remember what he said. Obviously, Klaus must have found the
subject embarrassing. I imagine that one could only talk freely about one’s own attempted suicide to someone who had tried it himself.
Christopher, on the other hand, was a confirmed self-preserver.
On the surface, as always, Klaus was bright, witty and seemingly interested in what was going on in the world around him. He had a lot of courage and he tended to keep the melancholic side of his 1 Klaus had slashed his wrists but his condition wasn’t serious.
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nature hidden. I don’t think that he got much moral support from any of his love affairs. Certainly not from Harold Fairbanks, who was fond of him no doubt but much too unstable to be able to take a lasting interest in other people’s problems.
How seriously did Klaus feel himself involved with Harold? I
don’t know. But I’m sure that Klaus’s realistic pessimism convinced him there was no future in their relationship. He did however make a scene of jealousy when he found Harold sitting drinking with Christopher in Christopher’s room, late at night. (Harold also had a room at the El Kanan and Klaus used to come and sleep with him there sometimes.) Christopher and Harold weren’t, in fact, doing anything sexual, but Christopher rather wanted to go to bed with him and Harold realized this and would probably have said yes if Klaus hadn’t shown up. He and Christopher weren’t really attracted to each other, merely compatible; they got along well together from the start. Between them, they calmed Klaus down––it was easy to convince him that his suspicions had been false, especially since he had been drunk at the time. Next morning, he and Christopher were friends again.
Harold Fairbanks used to spend a lot of time on the beach.
Christopher often joined Harold there when he could get away from the studio, which was of course only on weekends. I think it must have been on Saturday, August 14, that Christopher first met Jim Charlton. They met on the beach, I’m fairly sure, but it wasn’t a pickup. Maybe Jim already knew Harold.1 Anyhow, they got talking and that evening they had supper together.
When Christopher met him, Jim Charlton must have been about
twenty-seven years old.2 But he still seemed boyish. He was larger than Christopher but not above medium American size. He had a white smooth-skinned body, strong though not heavily muscled, with little hair on it. Big shoulders, sturdy arms and legs, very small buttocks. He couldn’t have been described as handsome but he was funny looking and cute. He had a long, oddly turned-up nose, big teeth, a ready grin, blue-grey eyes with a mistrustful look in them, and 1 No, says Jim ( July 3, 1973), he was with Jo and Ben Masselink, not Harold, when he first met Christopher. Ben Masselink and Jim had been fellow students at Taliesin West; and Jim had had an unrequited crush on Ben.
2 Twenty-seven was my own guess. Since I wrote it, Bill van Petten has told me he once saw Jim’s passport and it stated that he was born in 1917, meaning that he was already thirty-one in August 1948 (his birthday was on April 8).
Later ( July 1973), Jim himself told me he was born in 1919. Which of them was telling the truth? A passport is impressive, but Bill is perhaps unreliable.
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a deep growly voice. He wore his brown hair short but not cropped or crew-cut. His clothes were of the army surplus type, cords, a blue work shirt, a leather jacket, sneakers. He always seemed very clean. At the same time, he had an unusually strong, musky body odor, which Christopher was soon to find delicious and intensely sexy.
I suppose that Christopher must have discovered, on the day of their meeting, the following basic facts about Jim––that he was an architect1 and at present employed on a fairly large job, the building of about a dozen houses in the Brentwood area; that he had been trained as an architect at Frank Lloyd Wright’s two centers, Taliesin North in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona; that he had joined the air force during the war and had been sent to England but not until the fighting was nearly over; that he was the only child of a widow and was unmarried and homosexual.
Jim knew about Christopher’s writing and had read some of it, I think; I forget which book or books. He wasn’t an ardent Isherwood fan, however, and Christopher had the impression (later confirmed) that their immediate rapport was a here-and-now affair; it had nothing to do with previous literary admiration, as far as Jim was concerned. This pleased Christopher, of course. And, as that evening progressed with the discovery of more and more topics and tastes in common, Christopher was finally moved to a drunkenly frank statement, “You know, I really like you!” Jim grinned and gave Christopher a mistrustful but pleased look, then turning his head aside, he growled, “You’ll find I’m a lousy lay.” Christopher was amused but taken aback. He hadn’t meant this as a pass. (If he had wanted to get Jim in the hay, he would have led up to it much more gradually; indeed he almost never made a direct pass until he was certain of success, because it embarrassed him to be turned down.) He had had no reason to think that Jim would agree to go to bed with him––Jim had been talking romantically about a long-ago love for a teenage boy––and Christopher had felt no particular desire to go to bed with Jim. However, now that the whole situation had changed within a couple of seconds, Christopher found himself intrigued, curious and quite prepared to follow through. For some reason, Jim couldn’t come back with Christopher to the El Kanan then and there; they agreed to meet again the next night.