Stars in My Eyes

Stars in My Eyes is a revealing and entertaining collection of celebrity portraits, rendered both in acute drawings and in finely observed prose. In the 1970s and 1980s, internationally known artist Don Bachardy made portraits from life, depicting the actors, writers, artists, composers, directors, and Hollywood elite that he and his partner Christopher Isherwood knew. He then made detailed notes about these portrait sittings in the journal he has kept for more than forty years. The result is a unique document: we enter the mind of the artist as he records the images and behavior of his celebrity subjects—from Ruby Keeler and Barbara Stanwyck to Jack Nicholson and Linda Ronstadt—during their often intense collaboration with him.
Finalist, Lambda Literary Foundation Book Award

Arts & Photography

Bachardy, Don

History & Criticism

University of Wisconsin Press

Stars in My Eyes is a revealing and entertaining collection of celebrity portraits, rendered both in acute drawings and in finely observed prose. In the 1970s and 1980s, internationally known artist Don Bachardy made portraits from life, depicting the actors, writers, artists, composers, directors, and Hollywood elite that he and his partner Christopher Isherwood knew. He then made detailed notes about these portrait sittings in the journal he has kept for more than forty years. The result is a unique document: we enter the mind of the artist as he records the images and behavior of his celebrity subjects—from Ruby Keeler and Barbara Stanwyck to Jack Nicholson and Linda Ronstadt—during their often intense collaboration with him.
Finalist, Lambda Book Award

Drawing

The love story between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy―in their own words The English novelist and screenwriter Christopher Isherwood was already famous as the author of Goodbye to Berlin when he met Don Bachardy, a California teenager, on the beach in Santa Monica in 1952. Within a year, they began to live together as an openly gay couple, defying convention in the closeted world of Hollywood. Isherwood was forty-eight; Bachardy was eighteen. The Animals is the testimony in letters to their extraordinary partnership, which lasted until Isherwood's death in 1986―despite the thirty year age gap, affairs and jealousy (on both sides), the pressures of increasing celebrity, and the disdain of twentieth-century America for love between two men. 
 The letters reveal the private world of the Animals: Isherwood was "Dobbin," a stubborn old workhorse; Bachardy was the rash, playful "Kitty." Isherwood had a gift for creating a safe and separate domestic milieu, necessary for a gay man in mid-twentieth-century America. He drew Bachardy into his semi-secret realm, nourished Bachardy's talent as a painter, and launched him into the artistic career that was first to threaten and eventually to secure their life together.
 The letters also tell of public achievements―the critical acclaim for A Single Man, the commercial success of Cabaret―and the bohemian whirl of friendships in Los Angeles, London, and New York with such stars as Truman Capote, Julie Harris, David Hockney, Vanessa Redgrave, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams. Bold, transgressive, and playful, The Animals articulates the devotion, in tenderness and in storms, between two uniquely original spirits.

The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy

ISHERWOOD, Christopher

Humor & Entertainment

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Beautiful pen/pencil drawings - these are all male nudes, artistic mild erotica subject matter, mostly solo posing, lounging, sitting, standing, no "active" posing.

Drawings of the Male Nude

Twelvetrees Pr

Don Bachardy is famous not only as a lifelong companion to the late English novelist Christopher Isherwood, but also as a fine art painter and portraitist. Having lived in Hollywood all his life, he has had the opportunity to know and paint many of the city's luminaries. Hollywood is Bachardy's magnum opus, a five-decade retrospective of the artist's portrait drawings and paintings. A stunning compendium of Hollywood's influential actors, directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, costumers, choreographers, composers, columnists, producers, and agents. Includes portraits of: Charlotte Rampling, Henry Fonda, Mia Farrow, Jack Nicholson, Angela Lansbury, Katherine Hepburn, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Lemmon, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Matthew Modine, Tim Robbins, Julianne Moore, Andie McDowell, Tom Waits, Madeleine Stowe, Simon Callow, Patrick Swayze, Brooke Shields, Melanie Griffith, Joan Rivers, Stockard Channing, Jon Voight, Jane Fonda, Joan Collins, Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, Barbara Streisand, Natalie Wood, Marlene Dietrich, John Gielgud, Gore Vidal, John Huston, Ian McKellen, and many, many more.

Hollywood

Garson Kanin

Glitterati Incorporated

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bachardy, Don. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bachardy, Don

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bachardy, Don. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Stars in My Eyes

Stars in My Eyes

The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy

Drawings of the Male Nude

Hollywood