Stars in My Eyes

Stars in My Eyes is a revealing and entertaining collection of celebrity portraits, rendered both in acute drawings and in finely observed prose. In the 1970s and 1980s, internationally known artist Don Bachardy made portraits from life, depicting the actors, writers, artists, composers, directors, and Hollywood elite that he and his partner Christopher Isherwood knew. He then made detailed notes about these portrait sittings in the journal he has kept for more than forty years. The result is a unique document: we enter the mind of the artist as he records the images and behavior of his celebrity subjects--from Ruby Keeler and Barbara Stanwyck to Jack Nicholson and Linda Ronstadt--during their often intense collaboration with him.

Finalist, Lambda Book Award

Don Bachardy lives in Santa Monica, California. His drawings and paintings are in the collections of many major art museums, including the Metropolitan in New York, the de Young in San Francisco, the Fogg in Cambridge, the Smithsonian in Washington, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. He has published six other books of his drawings, including Christopher Isherwood: Last Drawings and Drawings of the Male Nude, and he is coeditor of Where Joy Resides: A Christopher Isherwood Reader.