Stars in My Eyes, Signed Presentation to Jack Fontan and Ray Unger
[Signed Presentation] Bachardy, Don. Stars in My Eyes. First Edition. 2001. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. This copy is ex libris Jack Fontan and Ray Unger, who were close friends of Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood. It is warmly inscribed, “To dearest Jack and Ray, with my love always, your devoted Don, 25 May 2001.”
A young and sublimely attractive Jack Fontan set hearts aflutter when he danced on Broadway in shortest of shorts and nothing else in the hit musical South Pacific. By the time, Don Bachardy knew him, he was living in Laguna Beach, then a small gay enclave, with his longtime partner, Ray Unger. He was also practicing astrology and gave Don a reading of which Isherwood very much approved and wrote about extensively in his diaries (See: Liberation Diaries: 1970-1983). One of the predictions was that Bachardy would be taken seriously as an artist, which came to pass. This book is a monograph of Bachardy’s portraits of Hollywood personalities, including the great movie queens—Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, Olivia de Havilland, et al., of whom Bachardy had been starstruck since boyhood. In addition to the drawings, the book includes Bachardy’s perceptive impressions of the various sitters, with fascinating detail about how the sitter behaved as during the sketching process.
“[Bette] Davis believes that loneliness is the price of her talent and fame … and she also, I suspect, equates a sad appearance with wisdom and greatness. She seemed proud of her sad look.”
--Don Bachardy