I should write something about Frank Taylor (see pages 134–136) at this point. Frank Taylor had now settled in Los Angeles and was working as a producer at MGM. He was tall, skinny, boyish. His hair was very short and he dressed neatly, in Ivy-League-college-kid style, usually wearing a bow tie. He had professionally sincere blue eyes and lots of Madison Avenue charm. He was quite desperately
enthusiastic about everything which he believed to be “in,” at any given moment. A positive thinker, he abounded in money-making schemes so grandiose that one kept expecting him to become a
millionaire. His sexuality was compulsive and rather scary, he pursued his (always male) prey like a spider and seized it with his long, obscenely thin arms and legs. His wife Nan tried desperately to keep up with [. . .] him. She was small and (I guess) cute. [. . .] They had, at that time, three or four small children, all boys. [. . .]
I have tried to say the worst things about Frank Taylor first, so as to get them off my chest. Having said them, I can admit that
Christopher very often enjoyed being with Frank and found him intelligent and amusing; very often agreed with him politically, for he was a model liberal; very often felt his charm. On two occasions, while drunk, he actually had sex with Frank[*]––though it isn’t an experience I care to dwell on.
What really repelled Christopher––and what repels me today––
about Frank was something which was none of Christopher’s
business; his dishonest, tricky bisexual posture. Frank bragged about his homosexual affairs and even sometimes demanded that they
should be respected as serious love dramas. At the same time, he became maudlin over his marriage and his responsibilities as a father.
Stephen Spender is deeply false in the same way, but not nearly as disgusting as Frank, because he is too shrewd to parade his sentimentality in public. They are both utterly untrustworthy––but then, one should know better than to trust them. On the positive side,
[* Frank Taylor stated that they never had sex and that he did not find Isherwood physically attractive.]
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they were useful to Christopher as partial models for one of his worst and one of his best literary characters––Stephen Monk in The World in the Evening and Patrick in A Meeting by the River. I believe Frank Taylor took Stephen Monk personally and was offended. He never spoke of this to Christopher, but, after the book was published, they gradually lost contact. Stephen Spender wouldn’t have been offended––he isn’t petty in that way––though he may well have been hurt. But the bond between Stephen and Christopher was and still is too tough to be broken––whatever they may write and say about each other.
On October 14, Christopher brought Frank Taylor an outline for a movie he had written with Klaus Mann; it was based on the life of Han Van Meegeren, the painter-forger, and his dealings with the Nazis. This project was entirely Klaus’s idea; he had studied Van Meegeren’s career while he was in Holland. Frank wasn’t interested; or, if he was, he failed to interest the front office. On November 12, Thomas Mann (see Letters of Thomas Mann) wrote to Klaus, “The starry-eyed one seems to have failed––anyone who counts on the movies is throwing himself on Satan’s mercies.” (“The starry-eyed one” was evidently a family nickname for Christopher. Whether it just meant that his eyes were bright, or whether it referred to his supposedly excessive optimism, I don’t know.)
On October 18, Christopher says in the day-to-day diary that he worked on The Condor and the Cows. He had already written some of this––the first two chapters were finished on board the Groix, but probably little or nothing since then.1 Christopher didn’t finish chapter three until November 15.
On November 6 and 7, there are two more entries in the
1948–1956 journal––the first since May 29. They refer to a party given by Caskey and Christopher on November 4 and to the
marriage of Vernon Old and Patty O’Neill[*] on November 5, with Peggy Kiskadden and Christopher in attendance. The guests at the party were Jay Laval, Bill Bailey, Hurd Hatfield, Roy Radebaugh (better known as Richard Cromwell the actor), Lennie Newman
(see page 67), Hayden Lewis and Rod Owens, Roger Edens (who
was a high-up in the music department at MGM) with [a friend] Don Van Trees, and Jim Charlton. Jim now came to the house regularly, 1 There were however at least six articles covering different phases of the trip which Christopher had written while he was still in South America. These he quoted from directly or rewrote when he worked on the book itself. The articles appeared in various magazines during 1948 or the early part of 1949.
[* Not her real name.]
¾ 1948 ¾
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often bringing a boyfriend with him and later screwing him in one of the two upstair bedrooms. Sometimes he showed up without
having been invited; freeloading is a characteristic vice of Dog People. At thirty-eight, Radebaugh still had some of the cuteness which had made Richard Cromwell one of the homosexual pinup
boys of the thirties.1 Now he had given up his movie career and taken to sculpting. He was a touching, sweet-natured tragic character who drank too much. He had a violent unrequited crush on Rod
Owens. He was to die of cancer in 1960. Lennie Newman was still cooking for Jay Laval at his restaurant. Lennie had become Caskey’s favorite drinking companion. They spent many evenings out on the town together.
Vernon Old and Patty O’Neill had been living together for some time already. I seem to remember that Christopher actually urged them to get married––or rather, urged Vernon to marry Patty, who needed no urging. If Christopher did indeed do this, his motives must have been largely malicious. He must have been harboring a grudge against Vernon, who picked up lovers and dropped them
again with no regard for anything but his own convenience.
Christopher must have wanted to see Vernon hog-tied, for once, by marriage.[*] And this suggests that Christopher himself was feeling hog-tied and therefore envious and resentful of other people’s freedom.
In the journal entry of November 6, Christopher writes that,
“Caskey is endlessly busy, home building. . . . He never ceases to carpenter, sew, paint, cook.” Christopher adds, “Sometimes I ask myself uneasily, what will happen when the home is built?”
Christopher says nothing against Caskey here but he goes on to express a lot of guilt and self-defensiveness about their way of life:
“I’m being confronted, at last, with the problems of the Householder
––and who ever dares to say they are less than the problems of the Monk? . . . No doubt the life in Santa Monica Canyon is empty, vain, trivial, tragic, indigent of God. But that’s no reason not to live here and try to do the best you can.” The best Christopher could do was to make japam (not very regularly), see Swami now and then, and keep assuring himself that he would restart his novel as soon as 1 I particularly remember a general fluttering of English hearts over him in Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 1935.
[* According to Vernon Old, Isherwood remembers wrongly. Old recalls that Isherwood derided marriage as “an old-fashioned and bourgeois thing to do, and couldn’t imagine why we wanted it. Yet, he arranged a tiresome reception at Salka Viertel’s which everyone dreaded, but went through with to please him. I remember that Caskey fell asleep.”]
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his bread-and-butter chore, The Condor and the Cows, was finished.
Meanwhile he continued to drink too much and his guilt pressure continued to build up.
Christopher also refers in this entry to the surprise victory of Truman over Dewey in the elections––which took place, that year, on November 2. Like Salka, and many many others, Christopher
rejoiced in the discomfiture of the pollsters even more than in the defeat of Dewey.