100 Heroes: Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist.

His semi-autobiographical novel, Goodbye to Berlin (published in 1939) was adapted for the stage and screen as the musical Cabaret.

His novel A Single Man (published in 1964) was adapted into a film by Tom Ford.

Early life

Isherwood was born in 1904 in Cheshire, England.

He studied history at Cambridge.

Berlin

Isherwood published his first novel, All the Conspirators, in 1928.

In 1929, Isherwood visited his friend W.H. Auden in Berlin.

In Berlin, Isherwood completed his second novel, The Memorial (1932), about the impact of the First World War on his family and his generation. He also continued his habit of keeping a diary.

In his diary, he gathered raw material for Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) - inspired by his real-life friendship with Gerald Hamilton.

Isherwood's diary was also source material for Goodbye to Berlin (1939) - his portrait of the city in which Hitler was rising to power, enabled by poverty, unemployment, increasing attacks on Jews and Communists, and ignored by the defiant hedonism of night life in the cafés, bars and brothels.

Goodbye to Berlin included stories published in the leftist magazine, New Writing, and it included Isherwood’s 1937 novella Sally Bowles, in which he created his most famous character. The character of Sally Bowles was based on a young Englishwoman, Jean Ross, with whom he briefly shared a flat.

In 1951, Goodbye to Berlin was adapted for the New York stage by John van Druten using the title I Am a Camera, taken from Isherwood’s opening paragraphs. Julie Harris became a star as Sally Bowles, winning the Best Actress Tony Award, and reprising her role in the 1955 film, I Am a Camera.

The play inspired the hit Broadway musical Cabaret (1966), winner of eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Director.

Liza Minnelli starred in the film adaptation of Cabaret in 1972, and became an international superstar. Cabaret won eight Academy Awards including Best Actress and Best Director.

Heinz Neddermeyer

In 1932, Isherwood started a relationship with a young German, Heinz Neddermeyer.

They fled Nazi Germany together in May 1933, traveling initially to Greece.

Neddermeyer was refused entry to England in January 1934. Isherwood and Neddermeyer lived together in the Canary Islands, Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam and Sintra, Portugal, while trying to obtain a new nationality and passport for Neddermeyer.

In May 1937, Neddermeyer was arrested by the Gestapo for draft evasion and reciprocal onanism.

United States

In 1929, Isherwood and his friend W.H. Auden decided to emigrate to the United States.

While living in Hollywood, California, Isherwood befriended Truman Capote, an up-and-coming young writer who would be influenced by Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, most specifically in the traces of the story “Sally Bowles” that surface in Capote’s famed novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Isherwood also befriended Dodie Smith, a British novelist and playwright who had also moved to California, and who became one of the few people to whom Isherwood showed his work in progress.

Isherwood became an American citizen in 1946.

He began living with the photographer, Bill Caskey. In 1947, the two traveled to South America. Isherwood wrote the prose and Caskey took the photographs for a 1949 book about their journey entitled The Condor and the Cows.

On Valentine’s Day 1953, at the age of 48, he met the teenager Don Bachardy among a group of friends on the beach at Santa Monica. Reports of Bachardy’s age at the time vary, but Bachardy later said, “At the time I was probably 16.”

Despite the age difference, this meeting began a relationship that continued until the end of Isherwood’s life.

The 30-year age difference between Isherwood and Bachardy raised eyebrows at the time, with Bachardy, in his own words, “regarded as a sort of child prostitute,” but the two became a well-known and well-established couple in Southern Californian society with many Hollywood friends.

Isherwood and Bachardy lived together in Santa Monica for the rest of Isherwood’s life. Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981, and died of the disease on 4 January 1986 at his Santa Monica home, aged 81.