Don Bachardy’s Hollywood Portraits on Display at Huntington Library

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.

If Bachardy’s film fascination came from his mother, making portraits was a gift from his older brother. “Ted drew everyone, usually portraits of actors from movie magazines, and I followed his example,” says Bachardy, who speaks and walks a little slower at 90 but still has a sparkle in those hazel eyes poking out from behind his wire-frame spectacles.

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.

He had continued to find his portrait subjects in magazine pages until Isherwood offered to sit for him. After that, the artist learned the pleasure of capturing all the contours and moods of his sitters’ 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.”

Their Adelaide Drive home 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 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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

This story appeared in the April 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.