Stars in My Eyes
by Don BachardyUniversity of Wisconsin Press, 262 pp., $34.95
“Oh, how I quail and suffer in anticipation of these sittings with the famous,” portraitist Don Bachardy writes in his fascinating “pictorial diary,” Stars in My Eyes. The book features both the ink portraits of these stars (mostly from the Seventies and Eighties), as well as Bachardy’s dishy diary entries about his experiences during these sittings. Bachardy, the young lover of the novelist Christopher Isherwood, found himself in the frequent company of the rich and famous, and thus was able to ask such people to sit for him. The drawings here are acute, frank, and revealing — and even more amazing when you consider he completed almost all of them within a few hours. Refusing to work from photos, Bachardy writes, “Some truth and energy from my sitter pass through me on the way to my paper or canvas. … The confrontation between my sitter and me is the subject of my pictures.” The main pleasure of the book lies in reading about these confrontations with his subjects, who include Ginger Rogers, Laurence Olivier, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Nicholson, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many more. Again and again, what his lucid and entertaining accounts reveal about these “stars” is, in many cases, their vanity, but more than that their insecurity. Stars they are, but Bachardy’s drawings and words bring them down to earth, revealing their sometimes unattractive and very human foibles.
This article appears in December 15 • 2000.