Arty Farty Friday ~ Christopher Isherwood & Don Bachardy

 Isherwood & Bachardy in front of David Hockney's portrait of them

Artist Don Bachardy met British ex-pat author Christopher Isherwood on a Santa Monica beach in 1952. Bachardy was 18; Isherwood was 49. Given their age difference and Hollywood's then-repressive attitude toward homosexuality, their relationship came as a shock to many. Few expected their romance to last for years, let alone decades. (See NPR website HERE)

The relationship lasted, in fact, for 30 years, until Isherwood's death in 1986. Don Bachardy still lives in the house they shared in Adelaide Drive, Los Angeles.

Christopher Isherwood is best remembered for The Berlin Stories (1935-39), two semi-autobiographical novellas inspired by Isherwood's time in Weimar Republic Germany. These enhanced his postwar reputation when they were adapted first into the play I Am a Camera (1951), then the 1955 film of the same name, I Am a Camera (film); much later (1966) into the bravura stage musical Cabaret (musical) which was acclaimed on Broadway, its unsparing stance being substantially sweetened for the film Cabaret (1972). His novel A Single Man was published in 1964. (Wikipedia)

Don Bachardy became a popular portrait painter among "celebrities" of California's film and entertainment world; Joan Rivers, Fred Astaire, Tennessee Williams, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Jacqueline Bisset and Nancy Reagan have numbered among his subjects. His artistic talent was, for sure, encouraged and mentored by Christopher Isherwood. (See HERE)



There are many interesting articles online about the pair's lives and relationship.

Christopher Isherwood was born on 26 August 1904, at 11.45 PM, in Disley, Cheshire, England.
Don Bachardy was born on 18 May, 1934, at 4.11 AM, in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Natal charts are available HERE and HERE at Astrodatabank.

Astrologically the pair were "fated" to be, at the very least, friends; their Earthy Suns (Virgo for Isherwood and Taurus for Bachardy), combined with Watery Moons (Pisces for Isherwood (+ Cancer rising), and Cancer Moon for Bachardy would have ensured they'd gravitate towards each other if moving in the same social circles. I'd guess, though, that Bachardy's steadfast Taurean Sun and ascendant were a major factor in maintaining longevity in this loving relationship.

TV Maturing Well ?

When we started watching Grace and Frankie, Netflix's own new series, without having read any reviews I was expecting a comedy - mainly due to Lily Tomlin's inclusion in the cast. Husband did laugh out loud a few times during the first couple of episodes - I didn't. I really disliked the show's pilot and second episode. Maybe it's due to my non-American background. Maybe due to ....oh, I don't know...my aversion to certain sitcoms about a certain "class" of Americans. They always live in big houses with pools and a view of the ocean, they are lawyers, surgeons, always wealthy, clever, successful etc. etc. Such situations might have been just the thing to attract an audience a few decades back. TV viewers in the USA, then, might have been anticipating their own rise to such opulence. Now - not so much!

Basic storyline of Grace and Frankie is that "Grace" and "Frankie" (Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, respectively) women in their 70s, have been long married to lawyers who are business partners, Robert (Martin Sheen) and Sol (Sam Waterston). The husbands announce to their wives, over a communal dinner, that they've been in love with each other for 20 years, and intend leaving their wives to set up home together and marry. The guys hope to live out the rest of their lives in tune with their natural instincts. Both couples have grown-up families, bringing in four more regular cast members.

Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin are probably the only two actresses, of the right age group, who could have carried off the parts of Grace and Frankie. They're a classic "odd couple" thrown together by circumstance. There are other, lesser known TV faces who could have played the parts of the husbands to much better effect though. Martin Sheen remains Jed Bartlett (West Wing) to me for all time. Sam Waterston's Law and Order character loomed large for me over his characterisation of an ultra-sensitive, soft and gentle gay guy.

The show did grow on me some during the 13 episodes of its first season. It still isn't, for me, what it ought to be, and could be. Maybe Season 2 will improve it still further. In any case, it is good to see another show with its focus on characters of an older generation, and not portraying them like doddering old fools. In tandem with its more mature characters the show approaches what had been "a sensitive subject": being married to a heterosexual partner while gay. For those factors alone I should give Grace and Frankie a gold star!

Another show we saw early on in our Roku-owning time, was Amazon's Transparent, starring Jeffrey Tambor as a guy who dared to came out as transgender in later life. I much preferred the general tenor of that series to that of Grace and Frankie. The humour was less forced, more natural; the characters warmer, and far more believable.







An excellent British TV drama series we found, I think also on Amazon Prime during our free month's trial a while back: Last Tango in Halifax. It's another drama mixing love stories of an elderly couple (played by Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi), with an interwoven theme of a lesbian relationship of one of their daughters (played by Sarah Lancashire). Characters in this series were totally believable; there was humour and pain mixed with delicate deftness, skilled writing and acting. Maybe I'm a wee bit prejudiced because the action took place in my native county of Yorkshire!




Thank goodness some writers and producers are at last cottoning on to the fact that there is an audience out here made up of more than teens, twenties, thirties and forty-somethings! We have time to watch too, and we have been starved of decent drama and comedy to which we can easily relate. I don't want to watch nothing but "oldie" stories, I enjoy films and shows featuring younger people, as long as their themes are interesting, funny, witty, clever or science-fiction related - so few of them are though. Writers of such shows will often throw in a token "oldie" to keep things, as Fox News puts it "fair and balanced", but those token characters are usually portrayed in such a way that is anything but fair and balanced - just like Fox News!

1) Gays' Hurrays.....2) Zodiac Types in Fiction

#1....Good news arrived for the LGBT front this week:

In a pair of major victories for the gay rights movement, the Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that married same-sex couples were entitled to federal benefits and, by declining to decide a case from California, effectively allowed same-sex marriages there................(SEE HERE)

Lots of articles and commentary have flooded the net on this topic already, so I'm limiting my own contribution to links to previous postings touching on the Gay rights issue (most have some comments attached):

From March this year:
GAY MARRIAGE

from June 2011:
Homosexuality, Astrology, Prejudice

From June 2009:

Stonewall, Prejudice, Astrology.

#2..ZODIAC TYPES in FICTION (Gone With the Wind, Little Women, Ally McBeal.)

I wonder how often authors of novels, or screen writers for film and television consider astrology, or more likely, simplified Sun Sign astrology, when describing characteristics of the individuals who bring to life their books and dramas? I've thought about this several times in the past - there are posts on this very topic relating to Gone With the Wind (HERE) and Little Women (HERE) with suggestions in the posts and in several comments beneath them as to astrological matches to characters in the novels.

Another instance of what I'll call ZIF (Zodiac in Fiction) came up for me recently. We're years late catching up with what used to be a hugely popular TV series in the USA from 1997 to 2002: Ally McBeal.

My husband, out on some errand by himself spotted a garage sale in the neighbourhood and came home clutching a big white box, still cellophane wrapped. It was the entire 5-season series of Ally McBeal on DVD, and he paid only $3 for it plus another, single DVD (can't even recall the film). Such sets cost a lot more than $3 on the net. We suspect this set might have been produced for the Chinese market, a clue: choice of subtitles = Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin - and English. We're almost to the end of Season 2 now, and greatly enjoying the series.

Ally McBeal was created and mostly written by David E. Kelley whose series are always A-grade (LA Law, Boston Legal, The Practice, Picket Fences, Harry's Law to name the best known).
More on Kelley, and his natal chart in an archived post HERE.

The Ally McBeal series had a super cast, good musical interludes with vocalist Vonda Shepard, well-written characters, humour, romance, whimsy, fantasy and frequently interesting courtroom dramas.

Ally McBeal, played by Calista Flockhart, and one of the senior partners of the law firm for which she works, John Cage, played by Peter MacNicol, share a birthday we were told in the course of Season 2. This revelation immediately had me surmising on a Sun sign for them. It had already become obvious the two had similar characteristics: a definite quirkiness, romantic awkwardness, mild eccentricity and frequent dips into whimsy, while both remained talented in their professional life as courtroom lawyers. A quick Google search sent me to a site where commenters were betting on Scorpio as Ally's likely Sun sign - mainly because it's Calista Flockhart's, who plays Ally. That could not possibly be correct, here's why.

Each season devotes an episode to Thanksgiving and an episode to Christmas, presumably to be screened during November and December. Characters are always muffled in scarves, gloves and hats for outdoor scenes, it's often snowing in Boston,where the series was set, in these episodes. In season 2, in an episode following fairly quickly after the Christmas one, there was a combined birthday celebration for Ally and John - so it could not possibly have taken place in Scorpio time. More likely, and I had already suspected, Ally and John, and their shared whimsy, fantasy, and eccentricities alongside otherwise very astute legal minds, must surely have Neptune/Pisces and/or Aquarius/Neptune/Pisces prominent, with likely some Capricorn in there too, strong link to the law.

It's all just fiction, of course. I doubt that David E. Kelley gives two hoots about astrology, though perhaps one of his assistants might have offered hints.

If any passing reader has an instance of ZIF, a pet fictional character or situation, from well-known novels, TV or films, with likely matching Sun Sign - do let me know !

Homosexuality, Astrology, Prejudice.

The issue of identifying homosexuality in a natal chart, and the issue of homosexuality in general were mentioned, in passing, in comments here a few days ago. For any curious passing reader relevant comments are HERE.

My view is that gender cannot be identified in a natal chart, and neither can sexual preferences. To check myself - I could be wrong - I looked around the net for information and views.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: there's a mountain of rubbish out there the size of Everest!

I did come across a sensible and very detailed investigation of the topic at Astro-Revelations: Gay Astrology ?

The author's conclusion echoes my own. This is how the piece concludes after having examined written work by such luminaries as Liz Greene, Stephen Arroyo, Francis Sakoian & Louis S Acker, and several other professional astrologers ~~

In conclusion I would suggest that searching for a homosexual signature in the natal chart is a complete waste of time and quite irrelevant. This search in itself seems implicitly homophobic. There is absolutely no consensus of opinion amongst astrologers about it. The multitude of astrological signatures that have been suggested are just hearsay and are not backed up by any serious empirical evidence.

There is no evidence or authentic tradition that the hard aspects (square, opposition and sometimes conjunction ) between Mars/Venus and the outer planets are more likely to be linked to homosexuality than heterosexuality.

The fact that astrologers have suggested this link in the past speaks volumes about the prevalent ill-informed prejudices against gay and lesbian people.

Moreover, the search for an astrological signature for homosexuality presupposes that it is abnormal in some way. The fact that this search has been spectacularly unsuccessful speaks for itself. Sexual orientation like race, religion and gender cannot be detected in the chart; the chart does not judge whether a person is normal or abnormal and neither should we.

The same dynamics exist in homosexual relationships as well as heterosexual ones. The planetary energies are ultimately beyond gender and belong to us all.

Hear hear!!

What might well be identifiable in a natal chart is a predisposition to prejudices of one sort or another - prejudice against gays included. Look for narrow-mindedness, a judgmental nature, strictness, structure, regimentation = astrological Saturn and the way it relates to other personal planets.

Stonewall, Prejudice, Astrology......

We watched a DVD of the movie "Milk" a while back and ever since, I've been juggling with ideas for writing something about gay issues, or about Harvey Milk, probably the most famous figure in the struggle against gay prejudice in the USA. Or, I wondered, how about the astrology of the Stonewall Riots - which occurred just 40 years ago, 28 June 1969. As so often though, I find that the pros have "been there, done that". Why wouldn't they?


An article by astrologer Eric Meyers, Lactose Tolerance: Harvey Milk & Gay Acceptance, covers Harvey Milk's natal chart.

Madam Lichtenstein, at The Starry Eye has written about the astrology of the Stonewall Riots (here).

During my searches I also found a very interesting piece, based on a lecture given last year by astrologer Lee Lehman:
Lee Lehman Draws Parallels Between Astrologers and Gays.

This is a thought I'd never considered before. I'm not a professional astrologer, so maybe it doesn't affect me - yet really it does. I could dare to adjust the premise to be "parallels between prejudice against astrology and prejudice against homosexuality". I don't accept that the relative seriousness of the two areas of prejudice are anywhere near comparable. Prejudice against astrology is a minor problem compared with gay prejudice, which is capable of spoiling the lives of others - something I'd say is evil. Yep, evil!

I have, on occasion, felt sheepish about mentioning astrology in conversation. I don't feel ashamed of my interest, I mainly want to avoid ridicule of my pet subject. I'm not normally afraid of voicing my views on tricky topics: politics or religion, but when it comes to astrology, I have to feel I'm on very friendly ground before I'll even say the word. So, in a very minor way, this is the kind of feeling many gays must have, I guess.

I gather, from some of the comments which follow the article quoting Lee Lehman's lecture, that there's a certain amount of elitism (my pet hate) going on in astrological circles, especially in the attitude displayed towards Sun sign astrologers. Astro guys ought to stick together. There are all kinds of roads into astrology, none is better than another.

From here on I shall remember this article, remember the struggles of our gay friends, which are ongoing, and stop being such a wimp about mentioning astrology. If young Adam Lambert can stand in front of TV cameras, and a Rolling Stone interviewer and say "I am what I am....I am gay and proud" - I can stand before anybody and say, "Astrology works, I enjoy using it, prejudice against it is unfounded and unfair."