For nearly seven decades, painter Don Bachardy has lured Hollywood luminaries — from Marlene Dietrich to Mark Ruffalo — to sit for portraits, most frequently inside his second-floor studio perched atop a converted garage at his cliffside bungalow overlooking Santa Monica Canyon. There are now 17,000 Bachardy portraits in existence, some of which have landed at the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Portrait Gallery of London. More than 100 — from his early, tightly constructed black-and-white watercolors to his more expressionistic latter-day portraits, including decades of self-portraits and paintings of his partner of three decades, the novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood — will go on display April 12 (through August) as part of "Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits" at the Huntington Library, which will soon be the recipient of the artist's vast archive, perhaps the most definitive fine art rendition of Tinseltown in history.
"Don and his brother would go crash Hollywood premieres and take photos of themselves with all these stars when they were teenagers. That's a helpful way to think about Don as an artist," says Huntington curator Karla Nielsen, who organized the survey with her colleague Dennis Carr and independent curator Gregory Evans, who was an ex-lover of David Hockney and longtime friend of Bachardy. In addition to the paintings, the trio included many early photos of Bachardy with family, with friends, with Bogey, Bacall, and Lucille Ball. Adds Nielesen, "He just wanted to be near this world and was really interested in capturing it."
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Capturing "it" really started with Bachadry's mother, who hid money from his father to take her boys to early morning movies when they were just kids. Jezebel struck an early chord for Don at the tender age of four. "It was the 'sausage curls' on Bette Davis. And the gown she wore to the ball that shocked everybody, because it was red. And in a black-and-white film, it was black, but it still looked pretty impressive. And that was a very early but indelible impression for Ted and me," Bachardy told Evans in an interview for the exhibition catalogue. He would go on to paint Davis several times in the early Seventies. If the film fascination came from his mother, making portraits was a gift from his older brother.
"Ted drew every one, usually portraits of actors from movie magazines and I followed his example," Bachardy, who speaks and walks a little slower at 90 but still has a sparkle in the eyes poking out from behind his wire frame spectacles. He tells me over one of several morning meetings exploring the art-filled rooms of Adelaide last summer that his older brother not only introduced him to painting, but also to the man who would teach him how to be a serious artist.
It was on Valentine's Day 1952 (the same year he met Marilyn Monroe at a premiere) that Bachardy, then buzz-cut and 18, first encountered the 48-year-old Isherwood, whose pair of Weimar era-set novels The Berlin Stories would inspire Cabaret.
"I'd never met someone so charming, but he was older than my father," recalls Bachardy.
Don Bachardy, Self-portrait, 2004
Don, meanwhile, was painting famous faces from magazine pages. That is, until Isherwood offered to sit for him, and he learned the pleasure of capturing all the contours and moods of his sitter's faces sans makeup or editorial retouching. "That became the only way I wanted to work," says Bachardy, who went to study at Chouinard Institute of Arts, now CalArts, on Isherwood's urging (and dime). "Once I was with Chris I started meeting real movie actors and it was thrilling for me."
They lived together at the bottom of Santa Monica Canyon for a few years, until a realtor friend saved the house on Adelaide for them when it became available.
"It was very bare and dirty looking and there were about eight teenagers living here," says Bachardy in his nasally Anglicized accent, relaxing in a rattan chair in front of the shuttered living room window overlooking the canyon. He's seated in the same place
where David Hockney captured the couple for the now iconic portrait, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968. Adelaide, which will ultimately be preserved as a museum by the Christopher Isherwood Foundation and the city of Los Angeles, became a hotbed of artistic production for both Bachardy and Isherwood, who captured the queer scene of the beach below them in his 1964 opus, A Single Man, which Tom Ford adapted for his first feature film.
"Chris got the idea for that book when he and I were having a domestic crisis," Bachardy once said of the novel. "He killed off my character, Jim, in the book and imagined what his life would be like without me." Despite occasional hardships, they endured as one of the first openly queer Hollywood couples until Isherwood's death in 1986.
Bachardy made thousands of portraits of Isherwood over the decades—he made over 800 paintings of Isherwood during his last six months as he succumbed to prostate cancer—and collaborated with him on a book of Gawker-worthy love letters (The Animals), an illustrated memoir Isherwood wrote during the fall of 1959 (October), and an NBC movie version of Frankenstein. Three decades after Isherwood's passing their live-work romance was the subject of Tina Mascara's endearing 2007 documentary, Chris & Don: A Love Story. Bachardy is the rare portrait painter who's been the subject of three documentaries, including The Eyes of Don Bachardy and Face to Face: Don Bachardy, a forthcoming feature by Mascara.
"Chris never wanted to be in the hospital and Don devoted himself to painting him every day when he was pronounced terminal," says Mascara. "He painted him asleep, while he was in pain. They just went through the whole process. It was something they could do together. There was just no question whether he wanted to be left alone or sit for Don."
Alexander Payne, Feb. 13, 2000
Jack Nicholson, Nov. 16, 1982
Today, Bachardy's studio is brimming with portraits — Frances McDormand, Theresa Russell, Jerry Brown, Isherwood in all states of dress and undress. Though we'd made plans over the years to do a sitting, Bachardy and I had never gotten together for one. Now, at his age, he needs all the elements to be just right. Posing for Bachardy is not some glamorous gossip session. He asks for total stillness and silence, and if you're a wiggle worm, it will be mercilessly reflected in the resulting portrait. Though most sitters ride a cushion in the oak swivel chair he offers, there's also a bed beneath the corner window, where he's painted many male (and female) nudes in repose. Sitting on his custom painting bench, he stares intently at me until the phone rings.
"I'm with someone now, but can I take your name? Yes, go ahead: S-I-G-O-U-R-N-E-Y. W-E-A-V-E-R." He writes the name of the Oscar-nominated actress and her number on a stray piece of paper and agrees to call her back.
Frances McDormand, Aug. 5, 1992
Bachardy paints only from life and each portrait is done in one session. The approach allows him to cut straight to the subject's essence. "Apparently Bette Davis said upon seeing the final portrait of herself 'Yup, that's the old bag,'" says Nielsen. "It wasn't like, 'Oh here is some idealized version of myself.' It was something beyond the face you give to the camera, but it still captures some star power. I feel like sometimes there's a sense that something has to become ugly to become truthful, but that's not true of Don's portraits."
"When I was pregnant, I called and asked Don to paint me," recalls Angelina Jolie. "I'd never sat for an artist before. Every moment … that I sat for him is etched into my mind — where I was laying, the light in the room, the sound of his brush, his intense eyes. His portraits are soulful; each stroke is intentional, and his use of color is poetry. There's a magic to his work. Somehow, he captures the spirit and soul of the person he's painting. His portraits of my time pregnant are the truest capture of me, and I treasure them."
In January, thousands of portraits still at Adelaide were breathtakingly close to the Palisades Fire, which burned nearly all the homes on the other side of the canyon.
Tilda Swinton, Oct. 25, 2014
"I got Don to evacuate, but he immediately went back home the next day," says Pietro Alexander, the art dealer son of the late Light and Space star Peter Alexander, another beloved Bachardy subject.
And who can blame Bachardy for potentially going down with this made-for-Hollywood ship?
"You can imagine that in living here all these years, I'm a steady worker," said Bachardy, in his whispery rasp, just before I left his studio for the first time last summer. "My work is a history of my lifetime, about all the people I've known … all the ones who sat for me."
Jennifer West, 1963
James Baldwin, 01-23-64, 1964
David Hockney, 1969
William Burroughs, 1976
Bette Davis, 1973
This story appeared in the April 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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