The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy

The love story between writer Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy–in their own words. Christopher Isherwood was a celebrated English writer when he met the Californian teenager Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1952. They spent their first night together on Valentine’s Day 1953. Defying convention, the two men lived openly as a gay couple in an otherwise closeted Hollywood.  Privately, they were the Animals. Isherwood was Dobbin, a stubborn workhorse; Bachardy was a playful white kitten, Kitty. But Bachardy needed to carve out his own identity. Long letters were exchanged during his trips to London and New York to pursue his career and to widen his emotional and sexual horizons.

The Animals provides loving testimony of an extraordinary relationship that lasted until Isherwood’s death in 1986–and survived affairs (on both sides) and a thirty-year age gap. Whatever happens in the outside world, Dobbin and Kitty always return to their “Basket” and to each other.

“Of all the people I came to know in Los Angeles, their marriage was the only one that endured.” John Boorman, film director

The Animals Podcast

Katherine Bucknell presents The Animals in an eleven-episode podcast starring Simon Callow and Alan Cumming with an audio performance of Isherwood and Bachardy’s play A Meeting by the River directed by Anthony Page and starring Dominic West and Kyle Soller. Visit www.TheAnimalsPodcast.com or download wherever you get your podcasts.