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Glossary

Harford, Betty. Irish-born actress; she acted for John Houseman in numerous stage productions and made a few movies, including Inside Daisy Clover. Harford was a close friend of Iris Tree. Her son with Oliver Andrews

––Christopher, born in the 1950s––was named after Isherwood.

Harkness, Alan. Australian-born actor; director of The High Valley Theatre in the Ojai Valley, where he specialized in teaching and directing the plays of Chekhov. A few members of the group first met in the late 1930s at the theater school at Dartington founded by Michael Chekhov (nephew of the playwright) and followed Chekhov to Connecticut. When Chekhov’s school broke up during the war, they went on to southern California, continuing to study and act together while also doing obligatory war work (they were mostly pacifists). Eventually the group was able to purchase a schoolhouse in the Upper Ojai Valley and converted it themselves into a theater. The High Valley Theatre aimed to be a school as well as an acting company. Harkness continued to follow Michael Chekhov’s approach to acting, which was derived from the teachings of Rudolf Steiner and the methods of the Moscow Art Theater. He emphasized creating a character from the imagination and from observation and giving autonomous life to this character on stage rather than impersonating. The group frequently worked by improvisation. Harkness was killed in Carpinteria when his car was hit by a train at a railroad crossing.

Harrington, Curtis (b. 1928) . American director; he made underground films and then moved on to features and television. At a party in 1954, Isherwood punched Harrington in the face after a friend of Harrington also at the party made advances to Don Bachardy; Harrington sued Isherwood and they eventually settled out of court.

Harris, Bill (d. 1992) . American artist. Isherwood met him in the summer of 1943, and they began a love affair the following spring. The relationship lasted only as a casual friendship. Harris later moved to New York where he became successful as a commercial art retoucher. Isherwood refers to Harris as “X.” in his 1939–1945 diaries (see D 1), and he calls him “Alfred” in My Guru and His Disciple.

Hartford, Huntington. Grandson and heir of the A&P grocery stores multi-millionaire, Huntington Hartford, for whom he was named. He produced films and took an active interest in the arts. He was ultra-conservative, anti-communist, and homophobic. He set up the Huntington Hartford Foundation in 1949 to nurture artists, writers, and musicians. Frank Taylor assembled the board of directors, which included Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Speed Lamkin, Michael Gaszynski, and Robert Penn Warren, among others. Isherwood records more about the foundation in D 1. The job of board members was to give away fellowships bringing young artists to live and work at the foundation for three months. By 1951 there were 150 people living there ––a western Yaddo. The board members resigned one by one as Hartford’s views gradually emerged in intolerable forms (for instance, he wanted each of them to submit to a graphology test which he believed would reveal their respective sexual inclinations). Hartford disliked avant-garde art; he also founded a museum of contemporary art in New York to foster his theories, and the building later Glossary

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became his New York headquarters. Isherwood never respected Hartford and found the management of the foundation inefficient and too easily swayed by gossip and favoritism; he resigned in 1952 when a resident writer was ousted from his fellowship for having an unauthorized overnight guest. Eventually the foundation became an arts and crafts colony.

Hatfield, Hurd (1918‒c .1998) . American actor; from New York City, educated at Columbia. He made his debut on the London stage and later appeared on Broadway. Hatfield began working in films in 1944 and played the lead in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), but stardom eluded him, and he is mostly admired for his stage roles. Later films include Joan of Arc (1948), El Cid (1961), and Crimes of the Heart (1986), among others.

Hauser, Hilda. Housekeeper and cook to Olive and André Mangeot, and to Olive after the Mangeots divorced. Isherwood first met her when he began working for André Mangeot in 1925.

Hayden. See Lewis, Hayden.

Hayward, John (1905–1965) . British editor and scholar. Hayward was crippled by muscular dystrophy and was confined to a wheelchair. He shared a flat in Chelsea with T. S. Eliot from 1946 until 1957, when Eliot remarried.

Heard, Henry FitzGerald (Gerald) (c.1885–1971) . Irish writer, broadcaster, philosopher, and religious teacher. W. H. Auden took Isherwood to meet Heard in London in 1932 when Heard was already well-known as a science commentator for the BBC and author of several books on the evolution of human consciousness and on religion. A charismatic talker, Heard associated with some of the most celebrated intellectuals of the time. One of his closest friends was Aldous Huxley, whom he met in 1929 and with whom he joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1935 and then emigrated to Los Angeles in 1937 accompanied by Heard’s friend Chris Wood and Huxley’s wife and son. Both Heard and Huxley became disciples of Swami Prabhavananda.

Isherwood followed Heard to Los Angeles and through him met

Prabhavananda.

Heard broke with the Swami early in 1941, and set up his own monastic community, Trabuco College, the same year. By 1949 Trabuco had failed, and he gave it to the Vedanta Society of Southern California to use as a monastery.

During the early 1950s, Heard shared Huxley’s experiments with mescaline and LSD. He contributed to Vedanta for the Western World (1945) edited by Isherwood, and throughout most of his life he turned out prolix and eccentric books at an impressive pace; these included The Ascent of Humanity (1929), The Social Substance of Religion (1932), The Third Morality (1937), Pain, Sex, and Time (1939), Man the Master (1942), A Taste for Honey (1942, adapted as a play by John van Druten), The Gospel According to Gamaliel (1944), Is God Evident?

(1948), and Is Another World Watching? (1950, published in England as The Riddle of the Flying Saucers; see also UFOs). There were many more books.

Heard is the original of “Augustus Parr” in Down There on a Visit and of

“Propter” in Huxley’s After Many a Summer (1939). He also appears in My Guru and His Disciple and throughout D 1.

318

Glossary

Heinz. See Neddermeyer, Heinz.

Hersey, John (1914–1993) . American writer; born in China, educated at Yale. He was Time magazine’s Far East correspondent from 1937 to 1946, and during the same period he published his Pulitzer Prize-winning documentary novel, A Bell for Adano (1944; filmed the following year). Hersey wrote various other semi-fictionalized books about World War II, and a pamphlet-length, first-hand account of the effects of nuclear explosion, Hiroshima (1946). There were many further novels, short stories and works of nonfiction, several of which were dramatized.

Hewit, Jack (1917–1998). English dancer, spy, and civil servant; son of a metal worker. He won a scholarship to ballet school, but his father forbade him to accept it, so he ran away from home and began dancing in revues. He met Guy Burgess while dancing in the chorus of No, No, Nanette and became Burgess’s lover; Burgess involved him in counterespionage work for MI5.

Through Burgess, Hewit also met Anthony Blunt, and became Blunt’s lover as well. Burgess and Blunt ran Hewit’s spy career for him, passing on his intelligence to the KGB as well as to MI5. Isherwood met Hewit towards the end of 1938 through Burgess and mentions him in D 1. During the war, Hewit joined the Royal Artillery, but was transferred back to MI5; afterwards, he joined UNESCO. He lived with Burgess at different periods, including the three years leading up to Burgess’s defection to the Soviet Union in May 1951. The connections with Burgess and Blunt bedeviled Hewit in later life, though he was able to join the Civil Service as a clerk in 1956 and left as a Higher Executive Officer in 1977. He published one short story, “Tales of Cedric” (1991).

Hirschfeld, Magnus (1868–1935) . German sex researcher; founder of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, where he studied sexual deviancy.

Hirschfeld wrote books on sexual-psychological themes and dispensed psychological counselling and medical treatment (primarily for sexually transmitted diseases). He was homosexual and campaigned for reform of the German criminal code in order to legalize homosexuality between men. His work was jeopardized by the Nazis and he was beaten up several times; he left Germany in 1930 and died in France at around the same time that the Nazis raided his institute and publicly burned a bust of him along with his published works.

Isherwood took a room next door to the Institute in 1930 and first met Hirschfeld then, through Francis Turville-Petre.

Holmes, John (1910–1988) . Canadian diplomat, author, and teacher. Holmes was born in Ontario and educated at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Toronto, and the University of London. He held many diplomatic and academic posts in Canada and abroad. When Isherwood met him in 1947, Holmes was completing a three-year post as First Secretary at Canada House in London and preparing to spend a year as the Chargé d’affaires at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow. Later he represented Canada at the U.N.

and served as the Assistant Under Secretary of State for External Affairs (1953–1960). When he retired from public service, he became the Director General of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and was a Professor of International Relations at the University of Toronto. His books include a Glossary

319

two-volume work The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order, 1943– 1957 (1979 and 1982) and Life with Uncle: The Canadian-American Relationship (1982).

Hooker, Evelyn Caldwell (1907–1996). American psychologist and psychotherapist, trained at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins; professor of psychology at UCLA where for a time she shared an office with the Rorschach expert, Bruno Klopfer, who was impressed by her work and assisted and encouraged her. Hooker was among the first to view homosexuality as a normal psychological condition. Encouraged by her involvement with The Benton Way Group and, according to Alvin Novak, inspired in particular by her close friendship with Sam From––to whom, Novak recalls, she was especially drawn, and who was equally drawn to her––she worked with and studied homosexuals in the Los Angeles area for many years. At Klopfer’s urging, she first presented her research publicly at a 1956 conference in Chicago, demonstrating that as high a percentage of homosexuals as heterosexuals were psychologically well-adjusted. The paper, entitled “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual,” was later published in a Burbank periodical, Projective Techniques (this was the journal of the Society for Projective Techniques and the Rorschach Institute; it later changed its title to Journal of Projective Techniques and Personality Assessment). Born Evelyn Gentry, she took the name Caldwell from a brief first marriage, then changed to Hooker when she married Edward Hooker, a professor of English at UCLA and a Dryden scholar, at the start of the 1950s. Isherwood lived in the Hookers’ garden house on Saltair Avenue in Brentwood for a time in 1952‒1953. He describes the friendship in D 1.

Hopper, Hedda (1890–1966) . American actress and Hollywood columnist.

She began in silent movies and went on to act in many sound films, but she was best known for her influential columns. She also wrote several volumes of autobiography.

Horst (1906–1999) . German-born fashion photographer. Horst B. Horst (also known as Horst Bohrmann) was a shopkeeper’s son, from a small German town; he studied art history in Hamburg, then persuaded Le Corbusier to take him on as an architectural assistant in Paris in the early 1930s. In Paris he became a protégé of the Russian-born, half-American photographer George Hoyningen-Huene with whom he worked for many years. Like Hoyningen-Huene, Horst photographed Parisian and Russian emigré society, and took countless pictures for Vogue and other fashion magazines. Another mentor was the American fashion photographer George Platt Lynes. Horst eventually made New York his home, but frequently travelled and worked in Europe.

Houseman, John (1902–1988)

. American movie producer and actor.

Houseman began as a stage producer and founded the Mercury Theater with Orson Welles in 1937. He produced Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and then worked for David Selznick in Hollywood. After the war he worked in theater, film, and, eventually, television. He produced a long string of successful, widely admired films before taking the first of many acting roles in Seven Days in May (1964), and he won an Academy Award for his supporting role in The Paper Chase (1973).

320

Glossary

Howard, Brian (1905–1958) . English poet and aesthete of American parentage; an outspoken antifascist. Howard was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he became friends with W. H. Auden. He was exceedingly dissolute, a heavy drinker and a drug user, and he never lived up to his promise as a writer. Evelyn Waugh’s character Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags is modelled on Howard, and Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited is also partly inspired by him. Howard lived a vagrant’s life, moving from place to place in Europe, and was often in Paris. Isherwood met him in Amsterdam in 1936, during the period when each of them was trying to find a country where he could live with his German boyfriend––Howard’s boyfriend throughout the 1930s was a Bavarian known as Toni. At the start of the war, Toni was interned in the south of France; Howard worked for his release evidently in vain, but after the fall of France, Toni escaped to New York via Tangier. He found work loading trucks at night, and soon married a wealthy American woman. Howard worked briefly for British intelligence and then joined the RAF as a clerk and later a public relations writer. After the war he again travelled to and from Europe, with his new companion Sam Langford, struggling with alcoholism and eventually with tuberculosis which propelled him ever faster into drug addiction. When Langford died in their new home in the south of France, Howard committed suicide with a drug overdose.

Hoyt, Karl. A close friend of Chris Wood during the early 1940s. He was drafted into the army during World War II and afterwards settled in Bel Air, the Los Angeles suburb.

Huston, John (1906–1987) . Film director, screenwriter, and actor. Huston wrote scripts for a number of successful films during the 1930s and early 1940s before making his directing debut with The Maltese Falcon (1941); he directed many more movies during the following fifty years––including The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1947), The African Queen (1952), Beat the Devil (1954), The Misfits (1960), Fat City (1971), and Prizzi’s Honor (1985). The Red Badge of Courage (1951) was adapted from Stephen Crane’s novel about the Civil War. Huston also continued intermittently as a writer and occasionally acted.

Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963) . English novelist and utopian. Not long after he arrived in Los Angeles, Isherwood was introduced to Huxley by Gerald Heard. Huxley was then writing screenplays for MGM for a large weekly salary, and he and Isherwood later collaborated on several film projects. Like Heard, Huxley was a disciple of Prabhavananda, but subsequently he became close to Krishnamurti, the one-time Messiah of the theosophical movement.

Huxley was educated at Eton and Oxford, a grandson of Thomas Huxley and brother of Julian Huxley, both prominent scientists. In youth he published poetry, short stories, and satirical novels such as Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923), drawing on life in London’s literary bohemia and at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor, where Huxley worked as a conscientious objector during World War I. He lived abroad in Italy and France during the 1920s and 1930s, part of the time with D. H. Lawrence––who appears in his Point Counter Point (1928)––and Lawrence’s wife, Frieda. In 1932 Huxley published Brave New World, for which he is most famous.

An ardent pacifist, Huxley joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1935, but Glossary

321

became disillusioned as Europe moved towards war. His Ends and Means (1937) was regarded as a basic book for pacifists. In April 1937 he sailed for America with his first wife, Maria, and their adolescent son, accompanied by Gerald Heard and by Heard’s friend Chris Wood. Huxley’s plans to return to Europe fell through when he tried and failed to sell a film scenario in Hollywood, became ill there, and convalesced for nearly a year. California benefitted his health and eyesight––he had been nearly blind since an adolescent illness––but he was denied U.S. citizenship on grounds of his extreme pacifism. After Many a Summer (1939) is set in Los Angeles, and Huxley wrote many other books during the period that Isherwood knew him best, including Grey Eminence (1941), Time Must Have a Stop (1944), The Devils of Loudun (1952), The Genius and the Goddess (1956).

Huxley’s study of Vedanta was part of a larger interest in mysticism and parapsychology, and beginning in the early 1950s he experimented with mescaline, LSD, and psilocybin, experiences which he wrote about in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956). In addition to Below the Equator (later called Below the Horizon) Huxley and Isherwood also worked together on two other screenplay ideas during the 1940s: Jacob’s Hands, about a healer, and a film version of The Miracle, Max Reinhardt’s celebrated 1920s stage production. Isherwood often writes about Huxley in D 1.

In 1960 Huxley found a malignant tumor on his tongue but refused surgery in favor of less radical treatment; he died of cancer on the same day John F.

Kennedy was shot.

Huxley, Maria Nys (1898–1955) . Belgian first wife of Aldous Huxley.

Isherwood met her in the summer of 1939 soon after he arrived in Los Angeles and mentions her frequently in D 1. Maria Nys was the eldest daughter of a prosperous textile merchant ruined in World War I. Her mother’s family included artists and intellectuals, and her childhood was pampered, multi-lingual, and devoutly Catholic. She met Huxley at Garsington Manor where she lived as a refugee during World War I; they married in Belgium in 1919

and their only child, Matthew, was born in 1920. Before her marriage, Maria showed promise as a dancer and trained briefly with Nijinsky, but her health was too frail for a professional career. She had little formal education and devoted herself to Huxley and to his work. Her premature death resulted from cancer. According to Huxley, she was a natural mystic and had “pre-mystical”

experiences in the desert in California in the 1940s.

Huxley, Matthew (b. 1920) . British-born son of Aldous and Maria Huxley.

Matthew Huxley was brought to America in adolescence and Isherwood met him in Santa Monica in 1939. He attended the University of Colorado with the intention of becoming a doctor, served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II, and was invalided out of the army in 1943. Much of this is recorded in D 1. Huxley became a U.S. citizen in 1945. In 1947 he took a degree from Berkeley and later studied public health at Harvard. This became his career, and for many years he worked at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C. He also published a book about Peru, Farewell to Eden (1965). He married three times, and had two children with his first wife.

Hyndman, Tony. Secretary and companion to Stephen Spender in the early 322

Glossary

1930s. Hyndman ran away from his working-class home in Wales at eighteen and spent three years in the army before becoming unemployed and meeting Spender. He split with Spender in the autumn of 1936, became a communist, joined the International Brigade, and went to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

In Spain, he was greatly disillusioned and became a pacifist. He deserted and was imprisoned, but eventually Spender, who had followed him to Spain, obtained his release. Hyndman appears as “Jimmy Younger” in Spender’s World Within World and in Christopher and His Kind.

Ince, Thomas (1882–1924) . American film director and producer. Ince moved from stage and vaudeville to become an important figure in the early film industry. The studios he built at Culver City in 1916 evolved into MGM and the company, Triangle, which he formed with two other partners, D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett, eventually became United Artists. His later films were released through Adolph Zukor. Ince became mortally ill while on board William Randolph Hearst’s yacht Oneida; his death two days later was attributed to heart failure resulting from severe indigestion, but rumor suggested that Hearst shot Ince, either because he suspected Ince of having an affair with Marion Davies or because Hearst suspected Charlie Chaplin, also on board the yacht, of having an affair with Davies and shot Ince when he mistook him for Chaplin.

Isherwood, Henry Bradshaw. Isherwood’s uncle (his father’s elder brother).

In 1924 Uncle Henry inherited Marple Hall and the family estates on the death of Isherwood’s grandfather, John Bradshaw Isherwood. Though he married late in life (changing his name to Bradshaw-Isherwood-Bagshawe in honor of his wife), Uncle Henry had no children; thus, Isherwood was his heir, and for a time after Isherwood’s twenty-first birthday he received a quarterly allowance from his uncle. The two had an honest if self-interested friendship, occasionally dining together and sharing intimate details of their personal lives. When Henry Isherwood died in 1940, Isherwood at once passed on the entire inheritance to his own younger brother, Richard Isherwood.

Isherwood, Kathleen Bradshaw (1868–1960) . Isherwood’s mother. The only child of Frederick Machell Smith, a successful wine merchant, and Emily Greene, Kathleen was born and lived until sixteen in Bury St. Edmunds, then moved with her parents to London. She travelled abroad, mostly with her mother, and helped her mother to write a guidebook for walkers, Our Rambles in Old London (1895). She married Frank Isherwood in 1903 when she was thirty-five years old. They had two sons, Isherwood, and his much younger brother, Richard. After the second battle of Ypres in May 1915, Kathleen was told her husband (by then a colonel in the York and Lancasters) was missing, but it was many months before his death was officially confirmed, and she never obtained definite information about how he died. Isherwood’s portrait of her in Kathleen and Frank is partly based on her own letters and diaries (he regarded the latter as her masterpiece), but heavily shaped by his attitude towards her. She was also the original for the fictional character “Lily” in The Memorial. Isherwood mentions her throughout D 1.

Like many mothers of her class and era, Kathleen consigned her sons to the care of their nanny from infancy and later sent Isherwood to boarding school.

Glossary

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Her husband’s death affected her profoundly, which Isherwood sensed and resented from an early age. Their relationship was intimate and mutually tender in Isherwood’s boyhood, increasingly fraught and formal as he grew older. Like her husband, Kathleen was a talented amateur painter. She was intelligent, forceful, handsome, dignified, and capable of great charm. Isherwood felt she was obsessed by class distinctions and propriety. As the surviving figure of authority in his family, she epitomized everything against which he wished to rebel. Her intellectual aspirations were narrow and traditional, despite her intelligence, and she seemed to him increasingly backward looking. Nonetheless, she was utterly loyal to both of her notably unconventional sons and, as Isherwood himself recognized, she shared many qualities with him.

Isherwood, Richard Graham Bradshaw (1911–1979) . Christopher Isherwood’s brother and his only sibling. Younger by seven years, Richard Isherwood was also backward in life. He was reluctant to be educated, and never held a job in adulthood, although he did wartime national service as a farmworker at Wyberslegh and at another farm nearby, Dan Bank. In childhood Richard saw little of his elder brother who was sent to boarding school by the time Richard was three. The two brothers became closer during Richard’s adolescence, when Isherwood was sometimes at home in London and took his brother’s side against their mother’s efforts to advance Richard’s education and settle him in a career. During this period Richard met some of Isherwood’s friends and even helped Isherwood with his work by taking dictation. Richard was homosexual, but he seems to have had little opportunity to develop any longterm relationships, hampered as he was by his mother’s scrutiny and his own shyness.

In 1941, Richard returned permanently with his mother and nanny to Wyberslegh––signed over to him by Isherwood with the Marple estate––

where he lived, more and more, as an eccentric semi-recluse. There are further passages about him in D 1. After Kathleen Isherwood’s death in 1960, Richard depended upon a local family, the Bradleys. He had become friends with Alan Bradley after the war when Bradley was working at Wyberslegh Farm, and Bradley and his wife, Edna, cared for Richard when Kathleen died. Later, Bradley’s brother, Dan Bradley, took over the role with his wife, Evelyn (Richard referred to them as the Dans). Richard was by then a heavy drinker.

Marple Hall fell into ruin and became dangerous, and Richard was forced to hand it over to the local council which demolished it in 1959, building houses and a school on the grounds. He lived in one of several new houses built beside Wyberslegh, with the Dans in a similar house next door to him, and when Richard died he left most of the contents of his house to the Dans and the house itself to their daughter and son-in-law. Richard’s will also provided for money bequests to the Dans, Alan Bradley, and other local friends. Family property and other money was left to Isherwood and to a cousin, Thomas Isherwood, but Isherwood refused the property and passed his share of money to the Dans.

j a p a m . A method for achieving spiritual focus in Vedanta by repeating one of the names for God, usually the name that is one’s own mantra; sometimes the repetitions are counted on a rosary. The rosary of the Ramakrishna Order has 324

Glossary

108 beads plus an extra bead, representing the guru, which hangs down with a tassel on it; at the tassel bead, the devotee reverses the rosary and begins counting again. For each rosary, the devotee counts one hundred repetitions towards his own spiritual progress and eight for mankind. Isherwood always used a rosary when making japam.

Jay. See de Laval, Jay.

John, Augustus (1878–1961) . English painter, trained at the Slade during the 1890s. His most admired work was produced during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and he is remembered above all for his portraits, especially of literary figures including Hardy, Yeats, Shaw, Dylan Thomas, T. E. Lawrence, Joyce, and Joyce’s friend Oliver Gogarty. John knew many other writers, and led a flamboyantly bohemian life involving numerous affairs and children out of wedlock. He is said to be the model for characters in various novels of his period.

Johnson, Celia (1908–1982) . British actress, primarily on the stage. She made her film debut in Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942) and is best known for her role in his Brief Encounter (1945). She also appeared in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968) and continued to act on stage and television until near the end of her life.

journal. In Lost Years, Isherwood often uses the term “journal” for his earlier diaries which have been published in Christopher Isherwood, Diaries Volume One 1939– 1960, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London: Methuen, 1996; New York: HarperCollins, 1997). Editorial notes refer to this published volume of diaries by the abbreviation D 1.

Kallman, Chester (1921–1975) . American poet and librettist; companion and collaborator to W. H. Auden. He also appears in D 1. Auden met Kallman in New York in May 1939, and they lived together intermittently in New York, Ischia, and Kirchstetten for the rest of Auden’s life, though Kallman spent a great deal of his time with other friends, often in Athens as he grew older. Kallman published three volumes of poetry and with Auden wrote and translated a number of opera libretti, notably The Rake’s Progress (for Stravinsky), Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bassarids (both for Hans Werner Henze).

Kazan, Elia (b. 1909) . American stage and film director, born in Con-stantinople to Greek parents. He studied at Yale and began his career as an actor on Broadway and in Hollywood. Among the plays he directed are Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942); Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949); and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). Kazan brought his production of A Streetcar Named Desire to the screen, and he made a number of other celebrated films, including Gentleman’s Agreement (1947, Academy Award), East of Eden (1954), and On the Waterfront (1954, Academy Award). He was a founder in 1947 of The Actors Studio, famous for Method acting. In 1962 he moved from The Actors Studio to The Lincoln Center Repertory Company, then turned to writing fiction and eventually his own autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life (1988). He also appears in D 1.

Glossary

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Keate, Richard (Dick) (b. 1922) . American pilot and furniture designer.

Keate flew B-17s for the air force during World War II and afterwards became a flying instructor in northern California. From there he often visited Santa Monica Canyon and sometimes took trips with Isherwood and Carlos McClendon to Johnny Goodwin’s ranch and to the bullfights in Tijuana. In the late 1940s he was a pilot for Air Services of India (now Air India) and lived in India. When he returned to California, he attended the American School of Dance on the GI Bill and worked as a dancer. In 1956 he moved to New York, planning to take up acting, but instead studied Flamenco guitar; his studies took him to Spain where he became interested in furniture, and he began to import Spanish furniture to New York and then to design and manufacture his own furniture. He opened a shop, Casa Castellana, in Greenwich Village in 1964

and was successful for many years.

Kelley. Howard Kelley; see Index and see also D 1.

Kennedy, Bill. American editor, magazine publisher, and radio host.

Kennedy lived in New York, but Isherwood first met him in January 1949 at Salka Viertel’s house. During the 1940s, Kennedy helped the medium Eileen Garrett to relaunch her psychic magazine Tomorrow as a literary publication, and he later persuaded Isherwood to write regular reviews for it. He also cohosted a radio show, “The World in Books,” with a friend Vernon Brooks; both Isherwood and W. H. Auden were guests on the show.

Kennedy, Ludovic (b. 1919)

. Scottish-born writer and broadcaster;

educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. He served in the British navy during World War II and worked as a librarian and a lecturer before joining the BBC, where he presented television news and public affairs programs. He was a newscaster for ITN in the mid-1950s. His later television shows also focused on criminal and legal topics, especially miscarriages of justice, and he published books on similar matters. In the late 1950s he ran for Parliament. As Isherwood mentions, he is married to Moira Shearer.

Kennington, Eric (1888–1960) . English painter and, later, sculptor.

Kennington was born in London, studied at the Lambeth School of Art, and was an official war artist during both world wars. He is best known for his illustrations of T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). The illustration Isherwood saw at Forster’s flat, of Mahmas, a camel driver, appears in book 7, chapter 87.

Kirstein, Lincoln (1907–1996) . American dance impresario, author, editor, and philanthropist. Isherwood’s first meeting with Kirstein in New York in 1939 was suggested by Stephen Spender who had already befriended Kirstein in London. Kirstein was raised in Boston, the son of a wealthy self-made businessman. He was educated at Berkshire, Exeter, and Harvard where he was founding editor of Hound and Horn, the quarterly magazine on dance, art, and literature. He also painted and helped establish the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. In 1933 Kirstein persuaded the Russian choreographer George Balanchine to come to New York, and together they founded the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. Kirstein was also involved in starting the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in other 326

Glossary

similar projects. His taste and critical judgement combined with his entrée into wealthy society enabled him to promote some of the great artistic talent of the twentieth century. In 1941 he married Fidelma Cadmus (Fido), sister of the painter Paul Cadmus. He served in the army from 1943 to 1946. Isherwood often tells about Kirstein in D 1. Don Bachardy blames himself as well as Kirstein for the end of this friendship. Trouble arose between Kirstein and Bachardy in 1966 when Kirstein, without consulting Balanchine, commissioned Bachardy to do portraits of the New York City Ballet stars; Balanchine did not approve of some of the portraits, and the whole project was withdrawn. Kirstein thereafter refused to see Isherwood again, even though W. H. Auden tried to bring about a reconciliation.

Kiskadden, Peggy. Thrice-married American socialite from Ardmore, Pennsylvania; born Margaret Adams Plummer, she was exceptionally pretty and had an attractive singing voice. From 1924 until 1933, she was married to a lawyer and (later) judge, Curtis Bok, the eldest son of one of Philadelphia’s most prominent families. In the early 1930s she accompanied Bok, a Quaker, to Dartington, England, where she first met Gerald Heard and Aldous and Maria Huxley. Her second marriage, to Henwar Rodakiewicz, a documentary filmmaker, ended in 1942, and she married Bill Kiskadden in July 1943. She had four children, Margaret Welmoet Bok (called Tis), Benjamin Plummer Bok, Derek Curtis Bok (later President of Harvard University), and William Elliott Kiskadden, Jr. (nicknamed “Bull”). Isherwood was introduced to her by Gerald Heard soon after arriving in Los Angeles; they became intimate friends but drew apart at the end of the 1940s and finally split irrevocably in the 1950s over Isherwood’s relationship with Don Bachardy. There are numerous passages about her and her family in D 1.

Kiskadden, William Sherrill (Bill) (1894–1969) . American plastic surgeon; third husband of Peggy Kiskadden. Kiskadden was born in Denver, Colorado, the son of a businessman. He studied medicine at the University of California and in London and Vienna in the late 1920s and eventually established his practice in Los Angeles. He was the first clinical professor of plastic surgery at UCLA and founded the plastic surgical service at UCLA County Medical Center in the early 1930s, as well as holding distinguished positions at hospitals in Los Angeles––teaching, administering, and practicing––and writing articles on particular procedures and problems. Kiskadden became interested in the population problem and with Julian and Aldous Huxley and others founded Population Limited in the early 1950s. He served in both world wars, the second time in the Army Medical Corps.

Knight, Franklin. Vedanta monk living at Trabuco monastery from 1955

onwards; a cousin of Webster Milam, who, as a high school student, lived at the Vedanta Center with Isherwood and others during the war. Isherwood often mentions Milam in his diaries of the period; see D 1. Webster did not become a monk, but Knight did. After he took his first vows his name became Asima Chaitanya.

Kolisch, Joseph. Viennese physician. Kolisch was a follower of Swami Prabhavananda. Aldous and Maria Huxley, Gerald Heard, several of the nuns Glossary

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and monks at the Vedanta Center, and perhaps even Greta Garbo, followed his advice and were on his vegetarian diets during the 1940s. At the suggestion of Gerald Heard, Isherwood first saw Kolisch in January 1940 for what he thought was a recurrence of gonorrhea. In D 1 Isherwood describes how then and on other occasions, Kolisch tended to attribute his symptoms to Isherwood’s psychological makeup.

Lamarr, Hedy (1913–2000) . Austrian-born film actress. She appeared nude in a 1933 Czech film, Extase, and a few years later Louis B. Mayer brought her to Hollywood where she played various seductress roles. She appeared in Algiers (1938), Comrade X (1940), Boom Town (1940), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), H. M.

Pulham Esq. (1941), Tortilla Flat (1942), White Cargo (1942), and others. Her career faltered after the war (she turned down Ingrid Bergmann’s role in Casablanca), though she is still remembered for Samson and Delilah (1949).

Lamarr married six times.

Lamkin, Speed. American novelist; born and raised in Monroe, Louisiana.

Lamkin studied at Harvard and lived in London and in New York before going to Los Angeles to research his second novel, The Easter Egg Hunt (1954)––about movie stars, in particular Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst––and he dedicated the novel to Isherwood who appears in it as the character

“Sebastian Saunders.” Lamkin was on the board at the Huntington Hartford Foundation. In the mid-1950s he wrote a play Out by the Country Club which was never produced, although Joshua Logan was briefly interested in it, and in 1956, he scripted a TV film about Perle Mesta, the political hostess. During 1957, he wrote another play, Comes a Day, which had a short run on Broadway. Eventually, when this play failed, Lamkin returned home to live in Louisiana. He appears often in D 1.

Langford, Sam (d. 1958) . Irish-born companion to Brian Howard, from 1943 onwards. Langford liked to sail and commanded an Air-Sea Rescue Launch in the British navy during the war. He was invalided out of the navy with a foot problem and briefly worked for the BBC before travelling and living abroad with Howard. Like Howard, Langford became addicted to drugs.

He died in his bath when he was gassed by a faulty water heater at the house he shared with Howard and Howard’s mother in the south of France. Howard killed himself a few days later.

LaPan, Dick. A boxer; evidently Isherwood first met him at the Viertels’ in July 1943. During the 1950s LaPan moved to Mexico and taught English.

Lathwood, Jo. See Masselink, Jo.

Laughton, Charles (1899–1962) . British actor. Laughton played many roles on the London stage from the 1920s onward, and began making films during the 1930s––The Private Life of Henry VIII (1934), for which he won an Academy Award; Les Misérables (1935); Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), in which he played Captain Bligh; The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); and many others. He also acted in New York and Paris, and gave dramatic readings throughout the U.S.

from Shakespeare, the Bible, and other classic literature. He became an American citizen in 1950. Isherwood met Laughton in the late 1950s through 328

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Laughton’s wife, the actress Elsa Lanchester, and later the two became neighbors and close friends, as Isherwood records in D 1; they worked on various projects together, including a play about Socrates.

Lawrence, Frieda (1879–1956). German-born wife of the English writer D. H. Lawrence. She was the daughter of a Prussian army officer, Baron Friedrich von Richthofen, and grew up in Metz; at twenty she married Ernest Weekley, a professor at Nottingham University, and moved with him to Nottingham. There in 1912, aged thirty-two, she met Lawrence, a former student of her husband, and eloped with him back to Germany. They married in 1914 after her divorce, lived in London and Cornwall, and then, persecuted over Lawrence’s work and suspected as German spies, left for Italy in 1919. In the early 1920s, they travelled further afield, to Ceylon, Australia, and America, settling intermittently just outside Taos, New Mexico, where Lawrence for a time hoped to found Rananim, his utopian community. They stayed in various properties belonging to Mabel Dodge Luhan, and in 1924 Mrs. Luhan gave Frieda a ranch with 160 acres of land on Lobo mountain. Lawrence named the ranch “Kiowa.” In 1925, while travelling in Mexico, Lawrence was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and the pair returned to Taos and then to Europe, persisting in their nomadic life, he writing and painting all the time. He died in France in 1930. Later, Frieda returned to New Mexico with her lover, Angelo Ravagli, an Italian military officer from whom she and Lawrence had rented a villa in Spotorno in 1925. In 1933, Ravagli built a modern house for them at the Del Monte Ranch, where Dorothy Brett lived and where the Lawrences had also lived, about two miles below the Kiowa cabins. Ravagli also built the little chapel where Lawrence’s ashes were deposited. Frieda married Ravagli in 1950.

Ledebur, Count Friedrich (b. 1908) . Austrian actor; second husband of Iris Tree. The marriage ended in 1955. His films include Moby Dick (1956), The Blue Max (1966), and Slaughterhouse Five (1972).

Lehmann, Beatrix (1903–1979) . English actress; the youngest of John Lehmann’s three elder sisters. She met Isherwood when she was visiting Berlin in 1932, and they became close friends.

Lehmann, John (1907–1988)

. English author, publisher, editor, auto-

biographer; educated at Cambridge. Isherwood met Lehmann in 1932 at the Hogarth Press, where Lehmann was assistant (later partner) to Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Lehmann persuaded the Woolfs to publish The Memorial after it had been rejected by Jonathan Cape, publisher of Isherwood’s first novel, All the Conspirators. Isherwood helped Lehmann with his plans to found New Writing, discussing the manifesto and obtaining early contributions from friends such as W. H. Auden. He tells about this in Christopher and His Kind, and also writes about Lehmann in D 1. When he left the Hogarth Press, Lehmann founded his own publishing firm and later edited The London Magazine.

He wrote three revealing volumes of autobiography, beginning with The Whispering Gallery (1955).

Lehmann, Rosamond (1901–1990) . English novelist; an elder sister of Isherwood’s longtime friend John Lehmann. She made a reputation with the frankness of her first novel, Dusty Answer (1927), and her later works––

Glossary

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including Invitation to the Waltz (1932), The Weather in the Streets (1936), The Echoing Grove (1953)––also shocked with their candid handling of sexual and emotional themes. From 1928 to 1944 she was married to the painter Wogan Philipps with whom she had a son and a daughter.

Lerman, Leo. American magazine editor. Lerman was an actor and then a writer, and he held various editorial positions at Condé Nast, eventually becoming one of its most senior managers. During the 1940s he was well-known in New York for his Sunday night parties which attracted writers, actors, and dancers, and for a time, he wrote a gossip column for Vogue. He also introduced various new writers into Vogue’s pages. He was close friends with his Manhattan neighbor, Truman Capote, from the day of their first meeting in 1945 and attended Yaddo with Capote in 1946. The house Lerman rented on Nantucket, Hagedorn House, which Isherwood mentions, was evidently a converted coastguard station in Quidnet and may have belonged to the poet and biographer, Herman Hagedorn.

Lewis, Hayden (1919–c.1994) . Lewis was born in Alabama; his family came from Caledonia, a rural community near a tiny town called Pineapple, and they later moved to Fairhope, not far away, where Lewis eventually retired. As a young man he worked in Chicago, and attended the University of Chicago with a younger brother. Then, during the war, he went to Florida and worked for the navy in a civilian capacity until he and Caskey moved on together to California. After spending several decades building up his successful ceramics business with Rodney Owens, Lewis returned to Alabama where he married a Florida native, Mildred MacKinnon, whom he met at the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education. He appears frequently in D 1.

Litvak, Anatole (1902–1974) . Russian-born film director. He made his first film in Russia, then worked in Germany, France, and England from the late 1920s before going on to Hollywood in 1937. His films in English include Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), All This and Heaven Too (1940), Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), The Snake Pit (1948), Decision Before Dawn (1952), and Anastasia (1956). During the war, Litvak co-directed propaganda films with Frank Capra.

Lodge, Carter (d. 1995) . American friend of John van Druten. Lodge was van Druten’s lover in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He lived mostly in the Coachella Valley at the AJC Ranch, which he and van Druten purchased in the early 1940s with Auriol Lee, the British actress and director. Lodge managed the ranch, where they grew corn and tomatoes, and handled his own and van Druten’s financial affairs very successfully. Isherwood also writes about him in D 1.

Logan, Joshua (1908–1988) . American stage and film director, producer, and playwright; educated at Princeton. In the 1930s he went to see Stanislavsky in Moscow before beginning his career as a producer in London. Usually working with others, Logan wrote, directed, or produced some of the most successful ever Broadway musicals and plays, including Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and South Pacific (1949). In Hollywood he made musicals into films, and directed Bus Stop (1956), Picnic (1956), and Sayonara (1957), among others.

330

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Luhan, Mabel Dodge (1879–1962) . American writer, patron, salon hostess; married four times. Her four volumes of memoirs, begun in 1924 and published during the 1930s, were admired by D. H. Lawrence, who was both attracted and repelled by her. Born in Buffalo, New York, to great wealth, she was sent to Europe in 1901 to recover from a nervous breakdown; there she lived in a Medici villa in Florence, wore Renaissance dress, had lovers, befriended Gertrude Stein, and entertained lavishly. In 1912 she returned to New York where she set up her salon at 23 Fifth Avenue and had an affair with the radical journalist John Reed. Next she moved to Taos, New Mexico, where she met Tony Luhan, a Pueblo Indian whom she married in 1923. The Indian way of life became her religion, and she believed that she and her husband were messiahs by whose leadership white civilization would be redeemed. She brought others to Taos to celebrate her new life, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Leopold Stokowski, John Collier, and Lawrence. During the 1920s and 1930s she worked for land reform, self-determination, and medical benefits for the Indians.

Lynes, George Platt (1907–1955) . American photographer; educated at The Berkshire School, where he met Lincoln Kirstein, and, briefly, at Yale. Lynes first photographed Isherwood and W. H. Auden during their brief visit to New York in 1938. In the 1940s, he encouraged Bill Caskey in his efforts to become a professional photographer, and later, in 1953, Lynes befriended and photographed Don Bachardy. He appears in D 1. Lynes made his living from advertising and fashion photography as well as portraits (his work appeared in Town and Country, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue), but he is also known for his photographs of the ballet, male nudes, and surrealistic still lifes; he did many portraits of film stars and writers.

Macaulay, Rose (1881–1958) . British novelist, essayist, and travel writer; educated at Somerville College, Oxford. She was the daughter of a Cambridge don and published her first novel in 1906. In all she wrote twenty-three novels; the last and perhaps best, The Towers of Trebizond (1956), became a bestseller in the U.S. Macaulay also produced various works of nonfiction, including a biography of Milton and a book about the writings of E. M. Forster, and she wrote numerous articles for periodicals.

Mace, John. Los Angeles lawyer. He and Isherwood had a number of mutual friends and sometimes attended the same parties in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1954, Isherwood asked Mace to represent him when Curtis Harrington sued Isherwood for punching Harrington in the face at a party given by Iris Tree.

The case was settled out of court and Isherwood paid Harrington $350.

MacNeice, Louis (1907–1963) . Poet, born in Belfast. MacNeice was an undergraduate at Oxford with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, and he collaborated with Auden on Letters from Iceland (1937). He worked as a university lecturer in classics and later for the BBC as a writer and producer, while publishing numerous volumes of verse, verse translation, autobiography, and plays for radio and stage.

Madge, Charles (1912–1996) . South African-born sociologist and poet; educated at Winchester and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He became a Glossary

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communist in the early 1930s, worked as a journalist and was a founder in 1937

of Mass Observation. His first marriage, to the poet Kathleen Raine, ended in 1939, and he then began an affair with Stephen Spender’s first wife, Inez Pearn, whom he later married. He published only two volumes of poetry, but continued his social and economic research through the war and, in 1950, became a professor of sociology at Birmingham University.

Maher, Fern (b. 1917) . American social worker. Educated at UCLA where she became close friends with David Sachs. She lived for some years in the Benton Way house. In 1948 she married Ken O’Brien, a photographer who was an occasional resident at Benton Way, and after some time abroad in North Africa, they eventually settled in Venice, California.

Mailer, Norman (b. 1923) . American novelist; born and raised in New Jersey and Brooklyn and educated at Harvard. Mailer was in the army and fought in the Pacific during World War II; he became famous with the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), about an American infantry platoon invading a Japanese-held island. Subsequent books include The Deer Park (1955) about Hollywood, An American Dream (1965), Why are We in Vietnam? (1967), Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) about the lunar landings, The Executioner’s Song (1979) about the execution of a convicted murderer, two books about Marilyn Monroe, and Oswald’s Tale (1995) about Lee Harvey Oswald. He won a Pulitzer Prize for The Armies of the Night (1968), describing the first peace march on the Pentagon––in which he was a participant––during the Vietnam era.

Mangeot, André, Olive, Sylvain and Fowke. Belgian violinist and his English wife and two sons. Isherwood met the Mangeots in 1925 and worked for a year as part-time secretary to André Mangeot’s string quartet which was organized from the family home in Chelsea. The Mangeots’ warm and chaotic household offered an irresistible contrast to the cool formality of Isherwood’s own, and Olive, energetic but easygoing, was an attractive rival to Kathleen in the role of mother. Isherwood brought all his friends to meet Olive when he was in London. She is the original of “Madame Cheuret” in Lions and Shadows and Isherwood drew on different parts of her personality for the characters

“Margaret Lanwin” and “Mary Scriven” in The Memorial. She had an affair with Edward Upward and through his influence became a communist. Later she separated from her husband and for a time lived in Cheltenham with Jean Ross and her daughter.

Mann, Erika (1905–1969) . German actress and author; eldest daughter of Thomas Mann. Isherwood first met Erika Mann through her brother Klaus in the spring of 1935 in Amsterdam; she had fled Germany in March 1933. Her touring revue, The Peppermill (for which she wrote most of the satirical, anti-Nazi material), earned her the status of official enemy of the Reich, and she asked Isherwood to marry her and provide her with a British passport. He felt he could not, but contacted W. H. Auden who agreed, and the two met and married in England in June 1935. In September 1936 Erika emigrated to America with Klaus and unsuccessfully tried to reopen The Peppermill in New York. As the war approached, she lectured widely in the USA and wrote anti-332

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Nazi books, two with Klaus, trying to revive sympathy for the non-Nazi Germany silenced by Hitler. She worked as a journalist in London during the war, for the BBC German Service and as a correspondent for the New York Nation. Later, she became increasingly close to her father, travelling with her parents and helping Thomas Mann with his work. She also appears in D 1.

Mann, Klaus (1906–1949) . German novelist and editor. Heinrich Klaus Mann was the eldest son of Thomas Mann; Isherwood became friendly with him in Berlin in the summer of 1931. By then Klaus had written and acted with his sister, Erika, in the plays which launched her acting career, and he had published several novels in German (a few appeared in English translations) and worked as a drama critic. He travelled extensively and lived in various European cities even before he left Germany for good in 1933; in 1936, when his family settled in Princeton, he emigrated to America and lived in New York, continuing to travel to Europe as a journalist, and later settling for a time in Santa Monica. He founded two magazines: Die Sammlung (The Collection) in Amsterdam in 1933, and Decision, which appeared in New York in December 1940 but lasted only a year because of the war. Klaus became a U.S. citizen and served in the U.S. Army during the war. He wrote his second volume of autobiography, The Turning Point (1942), in English. Isherwood wrote a reminiscence about Klaus for a memorial volume published in Amsterdam in 1950, Klaus Mann––zum Gedaechtnis, and describes their friendship in D 1.

Mann, Thomas (1875–1955) . German novelist and essayist; awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929. Mann was patriarch of a large and talented literary family; he and his wife Katia Pringsheim Mann (whose father was a mathematics professor and Wagner scholar) had six children. Mann’s novels and stories are among the greatest German literature of this century. They include Buddenbrooks (1901), Tonio Kröger (1903), Death in Venice (1912), The Magic Mountain (1924), Doktor Faustus (1947), and The Confessions of the Confidence Trickster Felix Krull (1954). Mann lectured in support of the Weimar Republic both in Germany and abroad during the 1920s, and he publicly dissociated himself from the Nazi regime in 1936, taking Czech citizenship (though he had remained in Switzerland since a 1933 holiday). Isherwood first met him in Princeton where Mann was a visiting professor after his flight from the Nazis.

Then in 1941, Mann moved with his family to Pacific Palisades and became part of the circle of German emigrés and artists with which Isherwood was intimate; he is sometimes mentioned in D 1. Later the Manns returned to Switzerland.

Markova, Alicia (b. 1910) . English prima ballerina; her real name was Lilian Alicia Marks. She danced for the Ballets Russes in 1924 and afterwards for various companies in England where she was partnered for many years by the British dancer Anton Dolin (also a former member of the Ballets Russes). In 1935, Markova and Dolin founded their own ballet company and toured internationally. Later she became a professor of dance at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.

Martinez, José (Pete) (c. 1913–1997) . Mexican-born ballet dancer; also known as Pete Stefan. Isherwood met him through Lincoln Kirstein in 1939.

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Martinez was among the first students at the American School of Ballet (founded by Kirstein and Balanchine), and during the 1940s he danced with the American Ballet Caravan and the Ballet Society, forerunners of the New York City Ballet. He created the scenario for Pastorela (1941) and toured in it to Latin America. In 1942, Martinez worked with Isherwood at the refugee hostel in Haverford, Pennsylvania, while waiting to be drafted into the army. Isherwood records their life together in D 1. Martinez’s family then moved from Texas to Long Beach, and Isherwood saw him in Long Beach in 1943 before Martinez left to fight in northern France from 1943 to 1945. Afterwards they met occasionally in New York and California. When the war was over, Martinez danced for two more years: he was in the original cast of Balanchine’s Four Temptations (1946), and he created the role of the minister in William Dollar’s Highland Fling (1947). A knee injury forced him to retire in 1947, and he became a teacher, opening his own studios in Virginia, Ohio and, finally, California where he worked until the mid-1960s and then remained for the rest of his life.

Masselink, Ben (1919–2000) . American writer. Masselink was in the marines during the war; one night on leave, he got drunk in The Friendship, the bar in Santa Monica Canyon, and Jo Lathwood took him to her apartment nearby and looked after him. When the war was over he went back to her and stayed for over twenty years. Masselink had studied architecture, and Isherwood helped him with his writing career during the 1950s. His first book of stories, Partly Submerged, was published in 1957, followed by two novels about his war experience––The Crackerjack Marines (1959) and The Deadliest Weapon (1965), the second of which Isherwood admired––and a story for teenage boys, The Danger Islands (1964). Masselink also wrote for television throughout the 1950s and in 1960 worked at Warner Brothers on the script for a film of The Crackerjack Marines. In 1967, when Lathwood was in her late sixties, Masselink, still in his forties, left her for a younger woman. There are numerous passages about the Masselinks in D 1.

Masselink, Jo (c. 1900–1988) . Women’s sportswear and bathing suit designer from Northville, South Dakota; among her clientele were movie stars such as Janet Gaynor and Anne Baxter. She had worked as a dancer and was briefly married to a man called Jack Lathwood (whose name she kept professionally); also, she had a son and a daughter with a North Dakotan, Ferdinand Hinchberger. From 1938 onwards she lived on West Channel Road, a few doors from The Friendship, and by the late 1940s she knew many of Isherwood’s friends who frequented the bar––including Bill Caskey, Jay de Laval, and Jim Charlton. She never married Ben Masselink, though she lived with him and used his surname. She appears often in D 1.

Matta Echaurren, Roberto Sebastián (b. 1911) . Chilean-born surrealist painter. Matta trained as an architect with Le Corbusier and began painting in Paris towards the end of the 1930s. During World War II, he worked in New York with other European surrealists who had emigrated there, such as André Breton, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy.

Maugham, William Somerset (Willie) (1874–1965) . British playwright 334

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and novelist. Maugham was married and had a daughter, but for a long time his usual companion was Gerald Haxton, eighteen years younger, whom he met in 1914 working in an ambulance unit in Flanders. Maugham and Haxton travelled, and they entertained on Cap Ferrat at the Villa Mauresque which Maugham bought in 1926. After Haxton’s early death, Maugham’s subsequent companion and heir was Alan Searle. Isherwood met Maugham in London in the late 1930s and saw him whenever Maugham visited Hollywood, where many of Maugham’s works were filmed; later Isherwood also made several visits to Maugham’s house in France. Their friendship is described in D 1. Shri Ganesha (the character about whom Maugham consulted Swami for the film of The Razor’s Edge) was based on Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950), an Indian holy man Maugham met in 1936. Later, in 1956, Swami and Isherwood both advised Maugham again on his essay “The Saint,” about Ramana Maharshi.

“The Saint” was published in Maugham’s Points of View (1958).

Mauriber, Saul. Assistant to the photographer and writer Carl Van Vechten.

He was still a student when he met Van Vechten and worked with him for twenty years. Later, Mauriber also became a designer.

McClendon, Carlos (b. 1923)

. American designer and shop owner.

McClendon was born in California and worked as an apprentice set designer at MGM and as a dancer before opening his shop, Chequer, in New York in 1954. He sold clothes of his own design for men and women, furniture, and art objects, and he travelled widely to acquire raw materials and finished goods, including ethnic textiles and folk art from Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and elsewhere. He spent time living in Haiti and in Mexico as well as in New York, and he eventually opened Chequer West in West Hollywood, frequented like his New York shop by theater, movie and entertainment people, and designers and costumiers. Isherwood met McClendon through Denny Fouts and John Goodwin in the 1940s when McClendon often visited the beach in Santa Monica. The friendship continued long after McClendon left Los Angeles in the early 1950s. Eventually McClendon settled in New Mexico.

McDowall, Roddy (1928–1998) . British actor and photographer. McDowall began his education at a Catholic school in a south London suburb and made his first movie when he was eight years old. When the Blitz began, he was evacuated to the USA and became a Hollywood star as a teenager after appearing as the crippled boy in How Green Was My Valley (1941) and, with Elizabeth Taylor, in Lassie Come Home (1943). During the 1950s he took stage and television roles in New York, where he won a Tony Award for his supporting role in The Fighting Cock in 1960. He returned to Hollywood in the 1960s and starred in Planet of the Apes (1968), most of the sequels, and the television series. Other films include My Friend Flicka (1943), Thunderhead, Son of Flicka (1945), Orson Welles’s Macbeth (1948), The Subterraneans (1960), The Longest Day (1962), Cleopatra (1963), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Funny Lady (1975), and Fright Night (1985). He published several books of his photographs, mostly of celebrities.

Medley, Robert (1905–1995) . English painter. Robert Medley attended Gresham’s School, Holt, with W. H. Auden, and the two remained close Glossary

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friends after Medley left for art school at the Slade. In London, Medley became the longtime companion of the dancer Rupert Doone, and was involved with him in 1932 in forming The Group Theatre, which produced The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F 6, and On the Frontier. Medley also worked as a theater designer and teacher, founding the Theatre Design section at the Slade in the 1950s before becoming Head of Painting and Sculpture at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1958.

Menotti, Gian Carlo (b. 1911) . Italian-born composer, librettist, and conductor. Menotti emigrated to the USA, where he studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and began to establish an international reputation with his operas from the late 1930s. He won Pulitzer Prizes for The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954), and his widely known opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), was the first to be written expressly for American television.

MGM. The preeminent Hollywood studio from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s; Isherwood began writing for MGM at the start of 1940, his second Hollywood job. Formed by a three-way merger between Loewe’s Incorporated (owner of the Metro Pictures Corporation), the Goldwyn Studios, and the Louis B. Mayer Pictures Corporation, the studio was run by Mayer with Irving Thalberg and Harry Rapf. Stars included Garbo, Norma Shearer, Gable, Joan Crawford, the Barrymores, Elizabeth Taylor, Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and Greer Garson; among the directors and producers were George Cukor, Clarence Brown, Victor Fleming, Mervyn Leroy, Vincente Minnelli, Busby Berkeley, David Selznick and Arthur Freed.

MGM reached its apogee between 1935 and 1945, then management conflicts gradually developed and enforcement of the Sherman antitrust laws eroded its power. Financial losses and further management upheavals plagued the studio throughout the 1960s, and MGM stopped making films in 1974.

Minton, John (1917–1957)

. English painter and theater designer. His

paintings were admired by Wyndham Lewis, and he taught at several London art schools. He took his life with a drug overdose.

Moffat, Ivan (b. 1918) . British-American screenwriter; son of Iris Tree and Curtis Moffat. He was educated at Dartmouth and served in the U.S. military during World War II. Afterwards he assisted the director George Stevens on A Place in the Sun (1951), was Stevens’s associate producer for Shane (1953), and co-wrote Giant (1956) before going on to work for Selznick on Tender Is the Night (1962). He met his first wife, Natasha Sorokine, in Paris at the end of the war; the marriage broke up at the start of the 1950s, leaving a daughter, Lorna.

Moffat then had a series of beautiful and talented girlfriends until marrying Kate Smith, an Englishwoman, whose family fortune derived from the book and stationery chain, W. H. Smith. He often appears in D 1.

Monkhouse, Allan (1858–1936) . English journalist and theater critic; father of Isherwood’s boyhood friend, Patrick Monkhouse. Allan Monkhouse also wrote plays and fiction, including a novel, My Daughter Helen (1922), in which one of the main characters, Marmaduke, is partly modelled on the adolescent Isherwood.

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Glossary

Monkhouse, Patrick. English journalist. Patrick Monkhouse was raised in Disley, near Marple, and became Isherwood’s close friend by the time they were adolescents. He was at Oxford a year or two ahead of W. H. Auden, and edited The Oxford Outlook.

Moraturi, Pancho. Wealthy Argentine. Longtime lover, companion, and supporter of Bill Harris. In his April 1949 preface to The Condor and the Cows (“To the Reader”) Isherwood names Moraturi and Harris among those whom he wishes to thank for helping him and Caskey during their visit to Buenos Aires.

Morris, Phyllis. British actress. She was a student with Dodie Smith (later Beesley) at the Academy of Dramatic Art (precursor to RADA) in London during World War I, and they remained close friends for life. Morris came from a wealthy family. She was a stage actress, but played minor roles in a few Hollywood films after the war––for instance, That Forsyte Woman (1949). She also wrote children’s books and plays.

Mortimer, Raymond (1895–1980) . English literary and art critic; he worked for numerous magazines and newspapers as both writer and editor and wrote books on painting and the decorative arts as well as a novel. Mortimer was at Balliol College, Oxford, with Aldous Huxley and later became a close friend of Gerald Heard, introducing Heard to Huxley in 1929. He was also intimate with various Bloomsbury figures and an outspoken advocate of their work.

From 1948 onward Mortimer worked for The Sunday Times and spent the last nearly thirty years of his life as their chief reviewer.

Nadeau, Nicky. American dancer. Isherwood had a sexual relationship with him in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Possibly he met Nadeau through Chris Wood’s wealthy Bel Air friend Karl Hoyt; Nadeau had an affair with Hoyt and later, towards the end of the 1950s, with Chris Wood. He is mentioned in D 1.

Nanny. See Avis, Annie.

Neddermeyer, Heinz. German boyfriend of Isherwood; Heinz was about seventeen when they met in Berlin, March 13, 1932. Their love affair, the most serious of Isherwood’s life until then, lasted about five years. Hitler’s rise forced them to leave Berlin in May 1933 and afterwards they lived and travelled in Europe and North Africa. In a traumatic confrontation with immigration officials at Harwich, Heinz was refused entry on his second visit to England in January 1934, so Isherwood went abroad more and more to be with him. In 1936 Heinz was summoned for conscription in Germany, and Isherwood scrambled to obtain or extend permits for him to remain in the ever-diminishing number of European countries which would receive him. A shady lawyer failed to obtain him a new nationality, and finally Heinz was expelled from Luxembourg on May 12, 1937, and returned to Germany. There he was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced––for “reciprocal onanism” and draft evasion––to a three-and-a-half-year term: six months’ imprisonment, then one year of labour, and two years of military service. Nonetheless, he married in 1938, and with his wife, Gerda, had a son, Christian, in 1940. Isherwood did not see Heinz again until 1952 in Berlin, though he corresponded with him Glossary

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both before and after this visit. Heinz’s conscription first turned Isherwood towards pacifism. Their shared wanderings are described in Christopher and His Kind and their friendship also serves as one basis for the “Waldemar” section of Down There on a Visit. He is sometimes mentioned in D 1.

Nin, Anaïs (1903–1977) . American writer. Nin was born just outside Paris, raised in New York from age eleven, and spent most of the 1920s and 1930s back in Paris seeking out the company of writers, intellectuals, and bohemians.

She was a model, a dancer, and a teacher, and later became a psychoanalyst, as well as writing novels, short stories, and literary criticism. She is now best known for her six-volume Diary which began to appear in the 1960s and which tells, among other things, about her Parisian friendship with Henry Miller. She had many love affairs and was married twice. Her second husband, Rupert Pole, is a stepgrandson of Frank Lloyd Wright. By the 1970s the pair had settled in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles in a house designed by Wright’s grandson, Eric Lloyd Wright.

Norment, Caroline. American Quaker relief worker and administrator.

Norment was director of the American Friends Service Committee’s Cooperative College Workshop, the refugee hostel in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where Isherwood worked as a volunteer during the war. She was in her fifties when Isherwood first met her in late summer 1941. She had previously done relief work in Russia and Germany, and she had also served as Dean of Women at Antioch College in Ohio. As he mentions in Lost Years, Isherwood wondered whether Norment somehow attracted or unconsciously caused fires.

In his wartime diaries he had recorded for April 30, 1942 that there was a bad fire at the hostel, Norment’s fifth. In two earlier fires she had lost most of her possessions; later, there were two more near fires also at the hostel (D 1, pp.

212–14). Norment is the original of Sarah Pennington in The World in the Evening; Isherwood took the character’s first name from the actress Sara Allgood, whom Norment resembled.

Novak, Alvin (b. 1928) . American pianist, born in Chicago. He moved to Los Angeles as a teenager with his family, and his father died shortly afterwards.

Novak put himself through college at UCLA, where he studied philosophy and met other members of The Benton Way Group with whom he became closely involved. At twenty-six, when he graduated, he began a new life in New York, developing his gift for the piano into a professional career as a teacher and performer. Later he lived increasingly on Long Island, organizing concerts in the Hamptons as well as teaching and performing there.

Obin, Philomé (1891–1986) . Haitian painter. Obin was an important figure in the Haitian art movement and one of the first to apply to the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince in the early 1940s. He was a devout Protestant, and reportedly prayed and sang hymns while he painted; among his important works were a Crucifixion and a Last Supper for the Saint-Trinité Episcopal Cathedral in Port-au-Prince.

Ocampo, Victoria. Argentine writer, critic, editor, and publisher. She owned and edited Sur (South), the international literary magazine for which Isherwood had agreed, a few years before he met her, to assemble the work of 338

Glossary

some modern writers to be translated into Spanish. She also ran her own small publishing house––Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf were among the contemporary writers she introduced to her Argentine audience.

Her background was privileged and traditional, and she was celebrated as a beauty in her youth, but she was bohemian and an outspoken feminist who preferred to write in French rather than Spanish. During the 1950s she was imprisoned by the Perón regime. She was a close friend of Maria Rosa Oliver, who helped her with Sur, and of Tota Cuevas de Vera. In early 1948, Isherwood and Caskey visited the three of them in Buenos Aires and in the nearby seaside resort, Mar del Plata.

O’Hara, John (1905–1970) . American journalist, short story writer, and novelist, from Pennsylvania. Many of his books were later reworked as movies, including Butterfield 8 (published 1935, filmed 1960), A Rage to Live (1949, filmed 1965), and Ten North Frederick (1955, filmed 1958). Pal Joey (1940) was adapted for the stage as a musical comedy by O’Hara himself with Rodgers and Hart, who wrote songs for it which are still well-known, such as “My Funny Valentine” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” It was filmed in 1957.

O’Keeffe, Georgia (1887–1986) . American painter. Raised on a farm in Wisconsin, she studied art in Chicago and New York early in the century and was a pioneer of American modernism. Her early work was abstract; later she became more figurative, painting townscapes and landscapes as well as the flower and plant forms for which she is most widely known. O’Keeffe married the photographer Alfred Stieglitz in 1924. He had promoted the work of European artists such as Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Brancusi and later of American artists, including O’Keeffe, in a series of New York galleries from just after the turn of the century. Camera Work, which Isherwood mentions, was published from his first gallery and eventually included not only photography, but all the visual arts, as well as criticism, reviews, and new American writing. O’Keeffe wintered in New Mexico from the 1930s and settled there in 1946 after Stieglitz died, although from the 1950s she began to travel widely.

Old, Vernon (not his real name). American painter; raised in New York City and New England and educated partly at Catholic boarding school.

Isherwood met Vernon Old in 1938 when first visiting New York, and Vernon featured in Isherwood’s decision to return to New York in 1939. They moved to Los Angeles together that spring, but split up by mutual agreement in February 1941. Vernon then lived unsteadily on his own, working on his painting. He could not return to his family as his parents were divorced and he did not like his mother’s second husband. During the war, he tried to become a monk, first in a Catholic monastery in the Hudson Valley and later at the Hollywood Vedanta Center and at Ananda Bhavan, another center which became the Sarada Convent, in Montecito. Later, he married and had a son before divorcing. His painting career was increasingly successful, and in the late 1950s he tutored Don Bachardy. He appears in Christopher and His Kind and in My Guru and His Disciple (as “Vernon,” without a surname) and in D 1.

Oliver, Maria Rosa. Argentine intellectual. Isherwood first met her during Glossary

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the war when she visited Hollywood in August 1944 with an introduction from Lincoln Kirstein. She asked Isherwood to find contemporary writers whose work could be translated into Spanish for her friend Victoria Ocampo’s literary magazine, Sur. When Isherwood and Caskey saw her in Argentina early in 1948, Caskey photographed her for The Condor and the Cows. Oliver’s legs were partly paralyzed, and she was confined to a wheelchair.

Ouspenskaya’s school. The School of Dramatic Arts founded by Maria Ouspenskaya (1876–1949), a Russian actress who first arrived in Hollywood with the Stanislavsky troupe in 1923.

Owens, Rodney (Rod). Hayden Lewis’s companion and business partner for many years from 1946; a California native. He is often mentioned in D 1. After he split with Lewis, Owens became a sales person for the clothing designer Helen Rose and settled in New York.

Patanjali. The obscure Indian compiler of the yoga sutras, the series of spare, aphoristic statements formulating the philosophy and practice of yoga. Patanjali was a follower of Sankhya philosophy, not Vedanta, and did his work sometime between the fourth century BC and the fourth century AD. In ancient times, the sutras could not be recorded in books and so were repeated from memory and elaborated and explained by a teacher. This is partly why they are so short and, on their own, seemingly difficult. In 1948, Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda began making a translation of the sutras in which they expanded and paraphrased them for modern, English-speaking devotees and also added a commentary drawing on various earlier teachers. This was published by the Vedanta Society in 1953 as How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali.

Pears, Peter (1910–1986) . English tenor. The youngest of seven children, Pears went to boarding school at six and rarely saw his family. He was sent down from Keble College, Oxford, after failing his first-year music exams, became a prep school master, studied briefly at the Royal College of Music and then joined the BBC Singers in 1934. Pears became close friends with Benjamin Britten in 1937; they shared a flat from early 1938, and began performing together in 1939. That same year, the two travelled together to New York where Pears studied singing further, and they went on to California before returning to England in 1942. Although at first they both had other relationships, their lives became increasingly fused, with Britten writing a great deal of his music for Pears, and Pears singing it expressly for Britten.

Pembroke Gardens. The address of Isherwood’s family home in London before the war. Kathleen Isherwood lived at 19 Pembroke Gardens, Kensington, from June 1928 until mid-July 1941, when she and Richard and Nanny (Annie Avis) returned to Wyberslegh.

Perkins, Lynn. American screenwriter. He approached Isherwood for help with a film outline for a ghost story. Evidently he was a writer for a series of action–science fiction films called The Purple Shadow Strikes (also The Purple Monster Strikes) produced in 1945 by Ronald Davidson for Republic Pictures.

Perlin, Bernard (Bernie). American painter; associated through his work 340

Glossary

with Paul Cadmus, Jared French and George Tooker. Bill Caskey met Perlin in Miami in 1944 when they were both still in the navy. Perlin had recently survived a German attack in Greece and encouraged Caskey not to fear persecution by the admiral who was conducting a homosexual witch-hunt at their naval air base; the scandal shortly resulted in Caskey’s blue discharge.

After the war, Perlin lived in Italy from the late 1940s until the mid-1950s, and later he settled in Connecticut.

Philipps, Wogan (1902–1993) . English painter and, later, politician; educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. Philipps was a communist and drove an ambulance for the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. When Isherwood saw him in 1947, he was serving as a communist councillor on the Cirencester Rural District Council. He succeeded his father as second Baron Milford in 1962 and became the first communist peer in the House of Lords. He was married three times: first, to Rosamond Lehmann; then to an Italian, Cristina, who was the ex-wife of the Earl of Huntingdon and a daughter of the Marchese Casati; and, after Cristina died in 1953, to Tamara Rust, widow of William Rust, the editor of the Daily Worker.

Pilates, Joseph (1880–1967) . German-born exercise guru, of Greek ancestry.

Pilates was frail in childhood and began bodybuilding in adolescence to overcome fears of tuberculosis; he was also a gymnast, boxer, skier, and diver.

He and a brother performed a Greek statue act in a circus which was touring England at the outbreak of World War I. Pilates was interned and passed the time teaching self-defense, bodybuilding, and wrestling to his fellow internees while beginning more systematically to develop his exercise method. By one account he also became a nurse and designed his unusual exercise apparatus by attaching springs to hospital beds for patients who could not move. He returned to Germany for a time after the war and trained police in Hamburg.

There, during the early 1920s, he also met members of the dance world who incorporated some of his techniques into their own practices, and who began to teach them to other dancers. Pilates helped train the heavyweight boxer, Max Schmelling, and Schmelling persuaded him to emigrate to the U.S., where Pilates established a studio in New York in 1926. The studio was frequented by dancers from George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, and Pilates’ followers included many other prominent dancers and choreographers, as well as numerous actors and musicians. His method (he called it “Con-trology”) is used increasingly widely today.

Plomer, William (1903–1973) . British poet and novelist; born and raised in South Africa. He met Isherwood in 1932 through Stephen Spender. In South Africa, Plomer and Roy Campbell had founded Voorslag (Whiplash), a literary magazine for which they wrote most of the satirical material themselves (Laurens van der Post also became an editor). Plomer taught for several years in Japan, then in 1929 settled in Bloomsbury where he was befriended by the Woolfs; they had already published his first novel, Turbott Wolfe, in 1926 at the Hogarth Press. In 1937 Plomer became principal reader for Jonathan Cape where, among other things, he brought out Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.

During the war he worked in naval intelligence. In addition to his own poems and novels, Plomer also wrote several libretti for Benjamin Britten, notably Glossary

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Gloriana (1953). A 1943 arrest for soliciting a sailor in Paddington station was hushed up, but led Plomer to destroy early correspondence with homosexual friends and to practice extreme circumspection in his private life.

Pollock, Peter (b. 1921) . English steel heir; the family fortune left him with small private means. Pollock was still a public school boy when Guy Burgess met him in Cannes in 1938, and they were lovers for about a decade. Burgess recruited Pollock to help MI5 spy on foreigners in England. In 1955 Pollock and his later longterm companion, Paul Danquah, a lawyer and actor, began sharing their Battersea flat with Francis Bacon, who lived with them until 1961

and became an intimate friend. Pollock and Danquah afterwards settled in Tangier, where, for a time, Pollock ran a beach bar, The Pergola.

Porter, Cole (1891–1964) . American composer and lyricist, educated at Yale University, Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Music, and also in Paris.

His Broadway hits include Anything Goes (1934) and Kiss Me, Kate (1948), and many of his individual lyrics, such as “Let’s Do It,” “You’re the Top,” and “I Get a Kick Out of You,” are permanently lodged in the popular imagination.

Isherwood was fond of Cole Porter and, according to Don Bachardy, believed that a third party had made mischief between them, possibly by repeating (perhaps inaccurately) a remark made by Bill Caskey. The friendship ended just a year or two before Porter’s death, preventing any reconciliation.

Porter, Katherine Anne (1890–1980) . American novelist and short story writer, born in Texas; best known for Ship of Fools (1962). She was a good friend of Glenway Wescott who may have suggested she meet Isherwood and Caskey.

Prabha. Originally Phoebe Nixon, she was the daughter of Alice Nixon (“Tarini”), and after taking her final monastic vows, Prabha became Pravrajika Prabhaprana. The Nixons were wealthy Southerners. Isherwood first met Prabha in the early 1940s in the Hollywood Vedanta Center, where she handled much of the administrative and secretarial work, and he grew to love her genuinely. By the mid-1950s, Prabha was head nun at the Sarada Convent in Santa Barbara.

Prabhavananda, Swami (1893–1976) . Hindu monk of the Ramakrishna Order. Gerald Heard introduced Isherwood to Swami Prabhavananda in July 1939. On their second meeting Prabhavananda began to instruct Isherwood in meditation, and in November he initiated Isherwood, giving him a mantram and a rosary. From February 1943 until August 1945 Isherwood lived monastically at the Hollywood Vedanta Center, but decided he could not become a monk as Swami wished. (Isherwood invariably pronounced it Shwami, as he had been taught phonetically by Prabhavananda.) He remained Prabhavananda’s disciple and close friend for life. Their relationship is described in My Guru and His Disciple, which is based on the many passages about Prabhavananda in Isherwood’s diaries.

Prabhavananda was born in a Bengali village northwest of Calcutta and was originally named Abanindra Nath Ghosh. As a teenager he read about Ramakrishna and about his disciples Vivekananda and Brahmananda, and he met Ramakrishna’s widow, Sarada Devi. At eighteen, he visited the Belur 342

Glossary

Math––the chief monastery of the Ramakrishna Order beside the Ganges outside Calcutta––where he met Brahmananda and was so affected that he briefly abandoned his studies in Calcutta to follow him. Because he was studying philosophy, Abanindra returned to Belur Math regularly for instruction in the teachings of Shankara, but he still placed greater importance on his political beliefs and became involved in militant opposition to British rule, mostly as a propagandist. After a second peculiarly compelling experience with Brahmananda, he suddenly decided to give up his political activities and become a monk. He took his final vows in 1921, when his name was changed to Prabhavananda.

In 1923 Prabhavananda was sent to the United States to assist the swami at the Vedanta Society in San Francisco; later he opened a new center in Portland, Oregon. He was joined in Portland by Sister Lalita and, in 1929, founded the Vedanta Society of Southern California in her house in Hollywood, 1946 Ivar Avenue. Several other women joined them. By the mid-1930s the society began to expand and money was donated to build a temple, which was dedicated in July 1938. Prabhavananda remained the head of the Hollywood Center until he died.

Isherwood and Prabhavananda worked on a number of books together, including a translation of the Bhagavad Gita (1944), and Prabhavananda contributed to two collections on Vedanta edited by Isherwood. Also, Prabhavananda persuaded Isherwood to write a biography of Ramakrishna, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1964).

pranam. A salutation of respect made by folding the palms, or by touching the saluted one’s feet and then touching one’s own forehead (i.e., taking the dust of the saluted one’s feet), or by prostrating.

prasad. Food or any other gift that has been consecrated by being offered to God or to a saintly person in a Hindu ceremony of worship; the food is usually eaten as part of the meal following the ritual, or the gift given to the devotees.

Pritchett, V. S. (1900–1997) . British literary critic, short story writer, and novelist; raised mostly in various suburbs of London. He worked abroad as a photographer and journalist before publishing his first novel in 1929. His short stories began to appear in London magazines such as The Cornhill and The New Statesman during the 1920s and were later collected in diverse volumes; he also contributed criticism to The New Statesman for several decades, and was its literary editor just after World War II, when Isherwood saw him in London.

Pritchett’s literary-critical books include The Living Novel (1946) and studies of Balzac, Turgenev, and George Meredith. He also published two volumes of autobiography.

puja. Hindu ceremony of worship; usually offerings––flowers, incense, food

––are made to the object of devotion, and other ritual, symbolic acts are also carried out depending upon the occasion.

quota visa. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, known as the Quota Act, dictated that the number of immigrants admitted annually from any one country could not exceed two per cent of the existing U.S. population deriving from that same national origin (as determined by the 1890 census), although a Glossary

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minimum quota of 100 immigrants was permitted to all countries. As the vast majority of Americans at that time traced their ancestry to Great Britain, British nationals could immigrate with ease.

Rainey, Ford (b. 1908) . American actor, born in Idaho. Rainey made his professional stage debut in 1932 and had acted on Broadway by 1939, but his roles were small. During the 1950s and early 1960s he appeared in a few Hollywood films, including Westerns, and went on to act for television shows such as Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and Perry Mason. He divorced his first wife in 1950, then married again in 1954.

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) . The Hindu holy man whose life inspired the modern renaissance of Vedanta. He is widely regarded as an incarnation of God. Ramakrishna, originally named Gadadhar Chattopadhyaya, was born in a Bengali village sixty miles from Calcutta. He was a devout Hindu from boyhood, practiced spiritual disciplines such as meditation, and served as a priest. A mystic and teacher, in 1861 he was declared an avatar: a divine incarnation sent to reestablish the truths of religion and to show by his example how to ascend towards Brahman. Ramakrishna was initiated into Islam, and he had a vision of Christ. His followers gathered around him at Dakshineswar and later at Kashipur. His closest disciples, trained by him, later formed the nucleus of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, now the largest monastic order in India. Ramakrishna was worshipped as God in his lifetime; he was conscious of his mission, and he was able to transmit divine knowledge by a touch, look, or wish. Isherwood wrote a biography, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1964), an official project of the Ramakrishna Order.

Ram Nam. A sung service of ancient Hindu prayers which invoke the divinities Rama, his wife Sita, and the leader of Rama’s army, Hanuman. In Ramakrishna practice, Ram Nam is sung on Ekadashi, the eleventh day after the new or the full moon, a day generally observed by devout Hindus with worship, meditation, and fasting.

Rapper, Irving (1898–1999) . Hollywood film director, born in London.

Rapper directed for the stage before becoming an assistant director at Warner Brothers in the 1930s. His films include Now Voyager (1942), The Corn is Green (1945), Rhapsody in Blue (1945), Deception (1946), The Voice of the Turtle (1947), The Glass Menagerie (1950), The Brave One (1956), and Marjorie Morningstar (1958).

Rassine, Alexis (1919–1992). Ballet dancer; his real name was Alec Raysman.

He was born in Lithuania of Russian parents and, from about ten years old, was brought up in South Africa. He studied ballet there and in Paris, joined the Ballet Rambert in 1938, and danced with several other companies before joining the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1942, where he became a principal and a star.

Reed, John (1887–1920) . American journalist. Born in Portland, Oregon, and educated at Harvard. Reed was a radical leftist and began his career covering American textile and mining strikes and reporting on Pancho Villa’s role in the Mexican Revolution. He was a war correspondent in Europe during World War I and became involved with the Bolshevik leadership in 344

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Russia. In 1917 he reported on the Bolshevik coup and then returned home for a time to try to establish a communist party in the U.S. He died in Russia and was buried in the Kremlin. Much of his reporting was published or republished in book form: Insurgent Mexico (1914), The War in Eastern Europe (1916), Red Russia (1919), and the work on the Bolshevik take-over for which he is most widely known, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). He is the subject of Warren Beatty’s film Reds (1981).

Reinhardt, Gottfried (1911–c.1993). Austrian-born film producer. Reinhardt emigrated to the United States with his father, the theatrical producer Max Reinhardt, and became assistant to Walter Wanger. Afterwards he worked as a producer for MGM from 1940 to 1954 and later directed his own films in the United States and Europe. His name is attached to many well-known movies, including Garbo’s Two Faced Woman, which he produced in 1941, and The Red Badge of Courage, which he produced in 1951. He was Salka Viertel’s lover for nearly a decade before his marriage to his wife, Silvia, in 1944. Through Salka and Berthold Viertel, Reinhardt gave Isherwood his second Hollywood film job in 1940, and Isherwood worked for him a number of times after that. There are numerous passages about him in D 1. Reinhardt and his wife eventually returned to Europe and settled near Salzburg.

Reinhardt, Wolfgang. Film producer and writer; son of Max Reinhardt, brother of Gottfried. He produced My Love Come Back (1940), The Male Animal (1942), Three Strangers (1946), Caught (1948), and Freud (1962), for which he won an Academy Award as co-writer. As Isherwood records in D 1, Reinhardt and Isherwood tried to work together several times. With Aldous Huxley they discussed making The Miracle, a film version of the play produced by Max Reinhardt in the 1920s, but nothing came of it. Reinhardt hired Isherwood to work on Maugham’s 1941 novel Up at the Villa, but the film was never made.

Much later, in 1960, Reinhardt approached Isherwood to write a screenplay based on Felix Dahn’s four-volume 1876 novel, Ein Kampf um Rom (A Struggle for Rome), about the decline and fall of the Ostrogoth empire in Italy in the sixth century, but Isherwood turned the project down. Wolfgang’s wife was called Lally.

Renaldo, Tito. Mexican actor. He played the first son in Anna and the King of Siam (1946). He was known as an exceptional cook at the Vedanta Center, which he joined and left five times. During the late 1950s and 1960s, he worked for a time in Carlos McClendon’s shop in West Hollywood.

Afterwards, in the 1970s, Renaldo returned in frail health to his family in northern Mexico and fell out of touch with his Los Angeles friends. He is often mentioned in D 1.

Repton. Isherwood’s public school, near Derby.

Richardson, Tony (1928–1991) . British stage and film director. Richardson is most admired for his work in the theater, especially at the Royal Court in London during the 1950s, and he made movies from many of his productions there. His films include Look Back in Anger (1958), The Entertainer (1960), Sanctuary (1961), A Taste of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and Tom Jones (1963), for which he won an Academy Award.

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He was married for a time to Vanessa Redgrave, with whom he had two daughters during the 1960s. Isherwood became friends with Richardson in Hollywood in 1960, and in 1964 Richardson hired him to adapt Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One for film; Richardson then gave Isherwood’s script to Terry Southern who wrote most of the dialogue. Later projects with Richardson included a script for Reflections in a Golden Eye (which John Huston did not use when he took over the film), The Sailor from Gibraltar (based on Marguerite Duras’ novel), and adaptations with Don Bachardy of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius, the God which were never made because Richardson fell out with his proposed Caligula, Mick Jagger. Richardson appears in D 1.

Robson-Scott, William (1901–1980) . English teacher and scholar of German; educated at Rugby School, University College, Oxford, and in Berlin and Vienna. Robson-Scott was lecturing in English at Berlin University in 1932 when Isherwood first met him. He summered at Rügen Island that year with Isherwood, Heinz Neddermeyer, Stephen Spender, and others, and remained a close friend through the 1930s. When he returned to London, Robson-Scott became a lecturer in German, and later in German language and literature, at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he continued to teach until 1968. He married in 1947 and, with his wife, made a translation of Freud’s letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé, published in 1972.

Rod. See Owens, Rodney.

Rodd, Marcel. English bookseller and publisher living in Hollywood. Rodd published Prabhavananda and Isherwood’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita and Vedanta for the Western World as well as the magazine, The Voice of India (later Vedanta and the West).

Roder, Hellmut. German emigré; Peggy Kiskadden helped Roder and his friend Fritz Mosel escape from Germany via France and Spain, then onward to Mexico and Los Angeles. Later, the pair moved to New York where they designed jewelry, especially for opera costumes. They also dealt in metal and feathers. Eventually Fritz Mosel committed suicide, and after a time, Hellmut Roder apparently did the same.

Rodman, Selden (b. 1909) . American writer and editor; educated at Yale.

In the 1930s and early 1940s, Rodman published narrative poems––one about T. E. Lawrence, another about airmen. During the same period, he was co-founder and editor of a review called Common Sense and later co-founder of another magazine, Our House. He also became a director of the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, worked to promote Haitian art, and eventually wrote a number of books about Haiti and about Haitian art, as well as a verse play about the 1791 liberation of Haiti. In later years, Rodman wrote travel and guide books about Central and South America, and he produced various volumes of autobiography and commentary on modern art and poetry.

Roerick, Bill. American actor. Isherwood met him in 1943 when John van Druten brought Roerick to a lecture at the Vedanta Center. His companion for many years was Tom Coley.

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Glossary

Ross, Alan (b. 1922) . English poet and journalist; editor of John Lehmann’s The London Magazine from 1961 onwards. Isherwood probably met him when he returned to London for the first time after the war.

Ross, Jean (d. 1973) . The original of Isherwood’s character Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood met Jean Ross in Berlin, possibly in October 1930, but certainly by the start of 1931. She was then occasionally singing in a nightclub, and they shared lodgings for a time in Fräulein Thurau’s flat. Ross’s father was a Scottish cotton merchant, and she had been raised in Egypt in lavish circumstances. After Berlin, she returned to England where she became close friends with Olive Mangeot. She joined the communist party and had a daughter, Sarah (later a crime novelist under the name Sarah Caudwell), with Claud Cockburn, though she and Cockburn never married.

Roth, Sanford (Sandy). American photographer; known for his pictures of actors and actresses, and especially of James Dean. Isherwood first met Roth in 1951 when Roth photographed Isherwood with Julie Harris costumed as Sally Bowles.

Sachs, David (1921–1992) . American philosopher, born in Chicago; educated at UCLA and Princeton, where he obtained his doctorate in 1953. He taught philosophy at Cornell, Brandeis, Iowa State, Rutgers and Johns Hopkins––he was on the faculty there for many years––and he held visiting posts at many other universities in the USA and in Europe. Sachs lectured widely and published numerous philosophical essays on ethics, ancient philosophy, and philosophy of the mind; his subjects included literature and psychoanalysis, and his work appeared in journals such as The Philosophical Review (of which he was editor), Mind, Philosophical Studies, and Dissent. In 1951 he reviewed Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche for Eileen Garrett’s Tomorrow.

He also published poems in Poetry, Epoch, Voices, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

Salka. See Viertel, Salka.

Samuels, Lesser. American screenwriter. In 1940 Isherwood was hired to polish dialogue on Samuels’s script for a remake of A Woman’s Face; not long after, Samuels asked Isherwood to help him on Maugham’s The Hour Before Dawn. Like Isherwood, Samuels had worked for Gaumont-British during the 1930s. In subsequent years they often worked together, sometimes on their own ideas, including Judgement Day in Pittsburgh (for which they were paid $50,000), The Easiest Thing in the World, and The Vacant Room. Samuels was married and had a daughter. There are a number of passages about him in D 1.

Sansom, William (1912–1976) . British writer, born in London. Sansom travelled in Europe during the 1930s and wrote stories about the Blitz when he was in the London Fire Service during the war; these were published in 1944

as Fireman Flower. Afterwards he published many further volumes of stories, and he also wrote travel books and novels, including The Body (1949) and The Cautious Heart (1958).

Sarada. “Sarada” Folling was a young nun at the Vedanta Center when Isherwood arrived in Hollywood in 1939. She was of Norwegian descent, had Glossary

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studied music and dance, and while at the center learned Sanskrit. Her father lived in New Mexico. Sarada later moved to the convent at Santa Barbara where Isherwood occasionally saw her. She was a favorite of Prabhavananda, who gave her the Sanskrit name Sarada, but eventually left the Vedanta Society rather suddenly after becoming interested in men. Thereafter, Prabhavananda forbade her name to be mentioned to him. Isherwood tells about her in D 1.

Saroyan, William (1908–1981) . American writer of Armenian parentage, born in Fresno, California. Saroyan turned down a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life (1939). Other plays include My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939), Love’s Old Sweet Song (1941), The Beautiful People (1941), Get Away Old Man (1944), and The Cave Dwellers (1957). He also published many volumes of short fiction, and his novels include The Human Comedy (1943), The Adventures of Wesley Jackson (1946), Rock Wagram (1951), Mama, I Love You (1956), Papa, You’re Crazy (1957), Boys and Girls Together (1963), and One Day in the Afternoon of the World (1964). Some of his novels and plays were made into films: The Human Comedy (1943) won an Academy Award. From the 1950s onward, Saroyan turned increasingly to autobiography and memoirs.

Schindler, Mr. and Mrs. German actor and his wife. He had worked with Max Reinhardt in Europe. Isherwood met them when they arrived at the Haverford refugee hostel, via an Italian concentration camp, in March 1942; he records in D 1 that they left Haverford by the end of June.

Schlee, George. New York financier of Russian background. Schlee met Greta Garbo towards the end of the 1930s at his wife Valentina’s New York dress shop, and the three became involved in a long-running ménage à trois.

In the late 1940s, Garbo bought an apartment in the Schlees’ building on East 52nd Street, and when Schlee died in his sleep in 1964, he was in a suite adjoining Garbo’s at the Hotel Crillon in Paris.

Scott-Kilvert, Ian. British cultural administrator. He matriculated at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, in 1936 as a classicist but changed to English and took his B.A. in 1940. Afterwards he became Head of the Recorded Sound Department at the British Council. He appears as “Graham” in Lions and Shadows.

Searle, Ronald (b. 1920) . English artist and cartoonist. He created the St.

Trinian’s schoolgirls and achieved more serious recognition for the drawings he made while held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese during World War II.

He was for many years a theatrical illustrator for Punch, contributed to The New Yorker and The New York Times among other publications, and had numerous one-man gallery shows. Later he also designed animated films and film sequences.

Shankara. Hindu religious philosopher and saint (of between the sixth and eighth centuries AD), widely recognized as an emanation of Shiva. Shankara wrote commentaries on the Brahma Sutras, the principal Upanishads, and other religious texts, as well as philosophy, poems, hymns, and prayers. Much of his work is not attributed with authority. He probably organized the Hindu mendicant orders.

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Shearer, Moira (b. 1926) . Scottish-born ballet dancer and, later, actress. She also became a writer, publishing biographies of Balanchine and of Ellen Terry as well as reviewing books. See also Ludovic Kennedy, her husband.

Shivananda, Swami (d. 1934). Hindu monk; a direct disciple of Ramakrishna.

Shivananda was originally named Tarak Nath Ghoshal, and his father was legal advisor to a rani. He met Ramakrishna in 1880, when he was about twenty-six, and though he afterwards married, he remained celibate and eventually renounced the world to live as a monk. After Ramakrishna’s death, there followed a period of wandering; then Shivananda founded a Ramakrishna monastery at Benares, and in 1922 he became President of the Ramakrishna Order.

Sister Lalita (Sister) (d. 1949) . Carrie Mead Wykoff, an American widow, met Vivekananda on one of his U.S. lecture tours and became a disciple of Swami Turiyananda (another direct disciple of Ramakrishna). Turiyananda gave her the name Sister Lalita. In 1929 she invited Swami Prabhavananda to live in her house in Hollywood and within a decade they had gathered a congregation and built the Hollywood temple in her garden. She appears in D 1.

Smedley, Agnes (1892–1950) . American journalist and author; a radical advocate of feminist, communist and nationalist causes. She was involved in Margaret Sanger’s birth control movement and was jailed for her role in trying to organize an overseas Indian independence movement. During the 1920s she lived in and wrote about Weimar Germany. Smedley was helpful to Isherwood and W. H. Auden when they met her in Hankow in March 1938. She spent nearly a decade there organizing medical supplies for Mao’s Eighth Route Army, writing a book about the army, and writing for German and American newspapers about the antifascist struggle in China. She had many Chinese contacts and she was also a willing go-between for the U.S. government; she was frequently at the U.S. Embassy and was friendly with American officials.

Smedley died under the accusation of being a Soviet spy.

Snow, Edgar (1905–1972) . American author; born and educated in Missouri.

Snow began his career as a reporter. He went to China in 1928 and became correspondent there for several U.S. and British papers. In 1936 he was the first correspondent to interview Mao Tse-tung. During World War II he covered Asia and later Europe, and he was the first correspondent to enter liberated Vienna. Afterwards he travelled widely as a special correspondent for various newspapers and magazines. Snow wrote a number of books about Chinese and Soviet communism; among the best known is Red Star Over China (1937). He also made a documentary film about China at the end of the 1960s. Isherwood and W. H. Auden mention Snow in their foreword to Journey to a War because he helped them with information and introductions for their China trip.

Sorel, Paul (b. 1918) . American painter, of midwestern background; his real name is Karl Dibble. Sorel was a close friend of Chris Wood, and lived with him in Laguna in the early 1940s. He moved out in 1943 after disagreements about money and in 1944 went to New York for a time, then intermittently returned. Chris Wood continued to support Sorel for the rest of Wood’s life, Glossary

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though they did not live together at all after 1953. Sorel is also described in D 1.

Sorokine, Natasha. White Russian intellectual, raised in France where she and her parents were officially stateless. At her lycée, she was taught by Simone de Beauvoir, befriended her and became part of de Beauvoir and Sartre’s intimate circle during the war. De Beauvoir described their friendship in her memoirs La Force de l’âge (1960) and Tout compte fait (1972), thinly disguising Natasha as “Lise Oblanoff.” (In fact, de Beauvoir and Sartre called her Nathalie and, according to Ivan Moffat, also addressed her as Sarbakhane––after a West African trumpet of great length and exotic design.) According to de Beauvoir, Sorokine’s interest in philosophy led her to pursue a degree at the Sorbonne during the war. During the same period, she became romantically involved with a student of Sartre’s, a young Spanish Jew who was arrested and killed by the Nazis near the end of the war, leaving her devastated. Not long afterwards, she met and married Ivan Moffat, joining him in California. They had a daughter, Lorna Moffat, but the marriage did not succeed, and Sorokine struggled to make a living. She wrote, taught French, worked in a kinder-garten, waitressed, and studied law. Her fiction was never published. She married a second time, to a physicist Sidney Benson, with whom she had a son and adopted a daughter, but she was plagued by ill health and mental instability.

She died in the late 1960s.

Speaight, Robert (1904–1976) . British actor and writer; educated at Lincoln College, Oxford. He established a stage reputation by the start of the 1930s and began publishing novels around the same time. Among his many stage roles was Becket in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in 1935. During the later part of his career he published scholarly books on Shakespeare and a number of biographies.

Spender, Humphrey (b. 1910) . English photographer and designer; brother of Stephen Spender. He was educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, Norfolk; at the University of Freiburg, Breisgau, Germany; and at the Architectural Association School, London. During the 1930s he worked as a portrait and commercial photographer from his own studio in London, was a staff photographer for the Daily Mirror newspaper, and became the official photographer for Mass Observation. Before the war he moved to Picture Post magazine. He trained in the Royal Army Service Corps (Tanks) in 1941, worked for the Ministry of Information, and became a War Office Official Photographer and afterwards a Photo Interpreter for Theatre Intelligence Service. When the war ended, he returned to Picture Post, but gradually gave up photography to paint and to design textiles. He had many individual shows in these media during the 1940s and 1950s, and also taught design at the Royal College of Art and at several other schools in London until the mid-1970s.

From the late 1970s, a revival of interest in his photographs led to numerous exhibitions of his 1930s work. Spender married twice (his first wife died of Hodgkin’s disease) and had one son with each of his wives.

Spender, Natasha Litvin. English concert pianist; she married Stephen Spender in 1941 and had two children with him, Matthew and Lizzie.

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Spender, Stephen (1909–1995) . English poet, critic, autobiographer, editor.

W. H. Auden introduced Isherwood to Spender in 1928; Spender was then an undergraduate at University College, Oxford, and Isherwood became a mentor. Afterwards Spender lived in Hamburg and near Isherwood in Berlin, and the two briefly shared a house in Sintra with Heinz Neddermeyer and Tony Hyndman. Spender was the youngest of the writers who came to prominence with Auden and Isherwood in the 1930s; after they emigrated, he cultivated the public and social roles they abjured in England. He worked as a propagandist for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War and was a member of the National Fire Service during the Blitz. He was co-editor with Cyril Connolly of Horizon and later of Encounter. He moved away from his early enthusiasm for communism, but remained liberal in politics. In 1968, at the request of Russian dissident Pavel Litvinov and with the combined support of various celebrated intellectuals (mostly personal friends) and of Amnesty International, Spender helped to found Index on Censorship to report on and publicize the circumstances of persecuted writers and artists throughout the world. His 1936 marriage to Inez Pearn was over by 1939, and in 1941 he married Natasha Litvin with whom he had two children. Spender appears as

“Stephen Savage” in Lions and Shadows and is further described in Christopher and His Kind and in D 1. He published an autobiography, World Within World, in 1951, and his Journals 1939– 1983 appeared in 1985.

Stafford, Jean (1915–1979) . American novelist and short-story writer. Her much-praised first novel, Boston Adventure, appeared in 1944 and her second, The Mountain Lion, in 1947, followed by other novels and numerous short stories. She worked on The Southern Review and occasionally taught college. In 1966 she published an interview with Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, A Mother in History. Her Collected Stories (1969) won the Pulitzer Prize. When Isherwood met Stafford in 1947 she was married to the poet Robert Lowell, but this first marriage (for both) ended in 1948; later she was married again for a time.

Stern, James (1904–1993) and Tania Kurella Stern (1906–1995) . Irish writer and translator and his wife, daughter of a German psychiatrist. He was educated at Eton and, briefly, Sandhurst. In youth, he worked as a farmer in Southern Rhodesia and as a banker in the family bank in England and Europe, then travelled until settling for a time in Paris in the 1930s, where he met Tania Kurella. They married in 1935. She was a physical therapist and exercise teacher, exponent of her own technique, the Kurella method. She fled Germany in 1933 to escape persecution for the left-wing political activities of her two brothers, already refugees. Isherwood met the Sterns in Sintra, Portugal in 1936 through William Robson-Scott and introduced them to W. H. Auden with whom they became close friends, later, in America. James Stern’s books include The Heartless Land (1932), Something Wrong (1938)––both story collections––and The Hidden Damage (1945), about his trip with Auden to survey bomb damage in postwar Germany for the U.S. Army. Tania Stern collaborated on some of his translations. Eventually they returned to England and settled near Salisbury.

Stern, Josef Luitpold (1886–1966) . Viennese poet, journalist, and editor; identified throughout his career with the cause of the workers. Stern reformed Glossary

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the workers’ library in Vienna and was a high-ranking administrator in workers’ education both before and after the war. He arrived as a refugee at the Quaker hostel in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where Isherwood volunteered during the war, and Isherwood records in D 1 that they met there in the autumn of 1941. Stern returned to Vienna after the war. He published nearly twenty volumes, including Klassenkampf und Massenschulung (1925), Zehn Jahre Republik (1928), Lyrik und Prosa aus vier Jahrzehnten (1948), and Das Sternbild, Gedicht eines Lebens, a collected works in two volumes (1964–1966).

Steuermann, Eduard. Polish-born concert pianist; Salka Viertel’s brother and briefly a member of her extended household during the war. He reestablished his career in the USA, achieving wide recognition as an interpreter in particular of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Among his students was Alfred Brendel. Steuermann married twice, and had three daughters. His second marriage was to his student, Clara Silvers, thirty years his junior.

Steve, also Stevie. Steve Conway; see index and see also D 1.

Stevens, George (1904–1975) . American film director. Early in his career, Stevens directed Laurel and Hardy. He made a number of successful films in the 1930s and early 1940s, and had a special touch for comedy. His prewar films include Alice Adams (1935), Swing Time (1936), Gunga Din (1939), Woman of the Year (1941)––in which he introduced Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn––and Talk of the Town (1942). During the war, Stevens headed the Sigma Corps Special Motion Picture Unit in Europe, where, among other disturbing scenes, he filmed Dachau soon after it was liberated. Although he made some of his best-known films after his return, his work became heavier and, eventually, less successful. Later films include I Remember Mama (1947), A Place in the Sun (1951, Academy Award), Shane (1953), and Giant (1956, Academy Award).

Stokowski, Leopold (1882–1977) . English-born conductor. He studied at Oxford University and at the Royal College of Music. Stokowski began as a church organist in London and then in New York and settled in the USA, becoming a citizen in 1915. He conducted many celebrated orchestras in his long career, in particular the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1912 to 1938, for which he established a superlative international reputation and where he introduced important European works to U.S. audiences––such as Mahler’s 8th Symphony, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and works by Schoenberg, Berg, and Rachmaninoff––as well as performing new American music. He conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra for Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and was also involved in several other movies. Afterwards, he conducted leading orchestras all over the world, including the New York Philharmonic and the Houston Symphony, finally returning to London in 1972 where he often appeared with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Strasberg, Lee (1901–1982) and Paula. Lee Strasberg was an American theater director and acting teacher; he derived his approach from Stanislavsky.

In 1931, he helped to found the Group Theater (in New York), and in 1950

he became a director of The Actors Studio, where he made his reputation as a leading proponent of Method acting. Paula Strasberg, his wife (Isherwood’s 352

Glossary

landlady on East Rustic Road), became Marilyn Monroe’s acting coach.

Stravinsky, Igor (1882–1971) . Russian-born composer; he went to Paris with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1910 and brought about a rhythmic revolution in Western music with his The Rite of Spring (1911–1913), the most sensational of his many works commissioned for the company. In youth he was greatly influenced by his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, but Stravinsky’s originality as a composer derived partly from his ability to borrow and rework an enormously wide range of musical forms and styles. He remained continuously open to new ideas, even into old age. Many of his early works evoke Russian folk music, and he was influenced by jazz. Around 1923 he began a long neoclassical period during which he drew on and responded to the compositions of his great European predecessors. After the Russian revolution, Stravinsky remained in Europe, making his home first in Switzerland and then in Paris, and turned to performing and conducting to support his family. In 1926 he rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church, and religious music became an increasing preoccupation during the later part of his career. At the outbreak of World War II, he emigrated to America where he settled in Los Angeles and eventually became a citizen in 1945. Although he was asked to, he never composed for films. His first and most important work to English words was his opera, The Rake’s Progress (1951), for which W. H.

Auden and Chester Kallman wrote the libretto. During the 1950s, with the encouragement of Robert Craft, Stravinsky began to compose according to the twelve-note serial methods invented by Schoenberg and extended by Webern

––he was already past seventy. There are many passages about Stravinsky in D 1.

Stravinsky, Vera (1888–1982) . Russian-born actress and painter. Second wife of Igor Stravinsky; she was previously married three times, the third time to the painter and Ballets Russes stage designer Sergei Sudeikin. In 1917, Vera Arturovna Sudeikin fled St. Petersburg and the bohemian artistic milieu in which she was both patroness and muse, travelling in the south of Russia with Sudeikin before going on to Paris where she met Stravinsky in the early 1920s; they fell in love but did not marry until 1940 after the death of Stravinsky’s first wife. Vera Stravinsky’s paintings were in an abstract-primitive style influenced by Paul Klee, childlike and decorative. She appears often in D 1.

Sudhira. A nurse of Irish descent; she was a probationer nun at the Hollywood Vedanta Center when Isherwood arrived to live there in 1943. Her real name was Helen Kennedy. She had been widowed in youth, and first came to the Vedanta Center professionally to nurse a devotee. After the war she married for a second time and returned to nursing. Isherwood tells about her in detail in D 1.

Sutherland, Graham (1903–1980) . English artist. Sutherland began his career as an etcher and engraver and took up oil painting by the mid-1930s, producing semi-abstract pictures inspired by the landscape of Pembrokeshire.

He was an official war artist during World War II, employed to depict bomb damage. After the war he began painting religious subjects, and in 1949 he painted a portrait of Somerset Maugham, thus embarking on a new phase as a portrait painter. His best-known work is an enormous tapestry, Christ in Glory, Glossary

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which he designed during the 1950s for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. He also worked with ceramics and designed for the stage. From the late 1930s, Sutherland and his wife lived half the year in France and half in Trottiscliffe, Kent.

Swami. Used as a title to mean “Lord” or “Master.” A Hindu monk or religious teacher. Isherwood used it in particular to refer to his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, and he pronounced it “Shwami,” according to the Sanskrit phonetics Prabhavananda taught him; see Prabhavananda.

Swamiji. An especially respectful form of “Swami,” used in particular as a name for Vivekananda in his later years.

Taxman, Barry. American composer; raised in the Midwest and educated at Yale and the University of Chicago. He was associated for a time with the University of California at Berkeley and his music is regularly performed in Berkeley where he settled.

Taylor, Frank (1915–1999) . American publisher and movie producer, born in upstate New York and raised as a Roman Catholic. Taylor was turned down by the draft for health reasons and made a meteoric rise in New York publishing during the war years. He began in advertising at Harper and Brothers, the Saturday Review of Literature, and then Reynal & Hitchcock where he was able to move to the literary side during the war and discovered his first bestsellers, Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith and, later, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. After the war, he visited England and established literary friendships which helped him expand the list of American and international authors he was already publishing, such as Arthur Miller, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Saint-Exupéry, Le Corbusier, and Brecht. He vainly tried to start his own publishing firm, worked briefly at Random House, then in 1948 went to Hollywood to produce movies, first of all at MGM, later at Fox. Despite critical recognition and ubiquitous success on the Hollywood social scene, he was victimized during the McCarthy period for his former associations with the communist party––he was a labor activist throughout his early career in New York––and eventually toward the end of 1951 he returned to New York.

There, in 1952, he became editor-in-chief at Dell, achieving huge success during the paperback revolution. But Hollywood beckoned again, and Taylor produced The Misfits (1960) with his old friend Arthur Miller. As he records in D 1, Isherwood worked with Taylor on film ideas in the 1950s––including The Journeying Boy, a detective story by Michael Innes, and I Am a Camera––and he prepared the 1960 anthology Great English Short Stories for Taylor at Dell.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Taylor ran the trade division at McGraw-Hill where he published Marshall McLuhan, Eldridge Cleaver, Germaine Greer, and Nabokov, among others.

Taylor, Nan (b. 1915) . American radio hostess; born and raised in Minnesota as a Roman Catholic. Her maiden name was Skallon. Taylor trained as an actress at the University of Minnesota and afterwards had a children’s radio show in New York. During the war, she worked with Bennett Cerf, presenting a books program. She gave up her career when she moved to Hollywood with her husband, Frank Taylor, and looked after their four sons, 354

Glossary

Michael, Mark, Curtice, and Adams. When the Taylors returned east, they settled in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she founded the town’s first day-care center and, later, during the 1970s, became head of the Board of Education. She was also president locally of the English Speaking Union. The Taylors divorced in the 1970s and Nan remarried, though she remained close to her first husband.

Thomas, Dylan (1914–1953) . British poet, born and raised in Wales, where his father was the English master at Swansea Grammar School. Thomas began writing poetry in childhood, left school early and published his first book, 18

Poems, in 1934 while working as a journalist. In London he also worked as a scriptwriter and broadcaster for the BBC and wrote stories as well as poems.

His marriage in 1937 to Caitlin Macnamara was famously stormy and drunken, but Thomas’s work nevertheless attracted critical acclaim and a wide audience.

After the pair moved back to Wales together in 1949, he made a series of taxing reading tours through the USA because he needed the money. He died in New York of alcohol poisoning in November 1953. His Collected Poems appeared in 1952, and he completed a version of his radio play Under Milk Wood not long before he died.

Todd, Thelma (1905–1935) . American movie actress. She owned an establishment on the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Monica incorporating a restaurant, a gambling casino and a whorehouse, and she was murdered there. Afterwards the restaurant––named Chez Roland after Gilbert Roland with whom Todd was supposed to be in love––remained in business for many years; Isherwood always referred to it as “Thelma Todd’s.”

Tooker, George. American painter. He became Paul Cadmus’s lover after they met at the Art Students League in New York in 1942, and he was friendly with Cadmus’s circle. During the 1950s he moved to Vermont with another artist, William Christopher, and continued his career there.

Trabuco. Monastic community founded by Gerald Heard in 1942, on a ranch about sixty miles south of Los Angeles and roughly twenty miles inland. An anonymous benefactor provided $100,000 for the project, and Isherwood’s cousin, Felix Greene, administered the practical side, buying the property and constructing the building, which could house fifty. By 1949 Heard found the responsibility of leading the group too much of a strain and Trabuco was given to the Vedanta Society.

Tree, Iris (1896–1968) . English actress, poet, and playwright; third daughter of actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree. She published three volumes of poetry and wrote poems and articles for magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as Botteghe Oscure, Poetry Review, and The London Magazine. In youth she travelled with her father to Hollywood and New York and married an American, Curtis Moffat, with whom she had her first son, Ivan Moffat, born in Havana. Until 1926 she lived mostly in London and in Paris where she acted in Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle; she toured with the play back to America where she met her second husband, the Austrian Count Friedrich Ledebur, with whom she had another son, Christian Dion Ledebur (called Boon) in 1928. Iris Tree had known Aldous and Maria Huxley in London, and they Glossary

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introduced Isherwood to her in California during the war. With Alan Harkness, she brought a troupe of actors to Ojai to start The High Valley Theatre, and she adapted, wrote, and acted in plays for the group, including her own Cock-a-doodle-doo. She moved often––from house to house and country to country––and in July 1954 left California for good, settling in Rome where she worked on but never finished a novel about her youth. Her marriage to Ledebur ended in 1955. Isherwood modelled “Charlotte” in A Single Man partly on Iris Tree and wrote much about her in D 1.

Turville-Petre, Francis. English archaeologist, from an aristocratic Catholic family. Isherwood met the eccentric Turville-Petre through W. H. Auden in Berlin in 1929, and it was at Turville-Petre’s house outside Berlin that Isherwood met Heinz Neddermeyer in 1932. In 1933 when Isherwood and Heinz fled Germany, they spent nearly four months on Turville-Petre’s tiny island, St. Nicholas, in Greece. Turville-Petre is the model for “Ambrose” in Down There on a Visit.

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. One of Hollywood’s five biggest studios. It was formed by a merger between Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox Film Corporation. Darryl F. Zanuck ran it from 1935 to 1952

and again from 1962 with his son Richard Zanuck. Alan Ladd Jr. took over in the 1970s, and Twentieth Century-Fox has since been sold and resold, eventually to Rupert Murdoch. Its many stars have included Shirley Temple and Marilyn Monroe, and Fox produced the first widescreen Cinemascope film, The Robe, in 1953, followed by other big screen spectaculars, including The King and I (1956), Cleopatra (1963), and The Sound of Music (1965).

Isherwood worked at Fox scripting Jean-Christophe in 1956 and 1957, but the film was never made.

UFOs. In June 1947 an Idaho businessman, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing through the window of his private plane, near Mt. Rainier, flying objects which he described to the press as looking like “skipping saucers.” So many more “sightings” followed around the country that the U.S. military officially investigated the possible threat to national security. In his 1950 book Is Another World Watching? (The Riddle of the Flying Saucers in the U.K.), Gerald Heard described many of these early UFO sightings. He believed they were either top secret, ultra-fast experimental aircraft which the government was covering up or, more exciting to him, visitors from Mars. Among the numerous accounts of flying saucers analyzed by the U.S. Air Force between 1947 and the mid-1950s, about ten percent of reported sightings were never accounted for. As the terminology indicates, they remain Unidentified Flying Objects. Official U.S.

investigations were abandoned in 1969.

Upward, Edward (b. 1903) . English novelist and schoolmaster. Isherwood met Upward in 1921 at their public school, Repton, and followed him to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. They were closely united by their rebellious attitude toward family and school authority and by shared literary interests. In the 1920s they created the fantasy world, Mortmere, about which they wrote surreal, macabre, and pornographic stories and poems for each other; their excited schoolboy humor is described in Lions and Shadows where 356

Glossary

Upward appears as “Allen Chalmers.”

Upward made his reputation in the 1930s with his short fiction, especially Journey to the Border (1938), the intense, almost mystical, and largely autobiographical account of a young upper-middle-class tutor’s conversion to communism. Then he published nothing for a long time, writing only fragments while he devoted himself to schoolmastering (he needed the money) and to communist party work. From 1931 to 1961 he taught at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, where he became Head of English and a housemaster; he lived nearby with his wife, Hilda, and their two children, Kathy and Christopher.

After World War II, Upward and his wife became disillusioned by the British communist party, and they left it in 1948; but Upward never abandoned his Marxist-Leninist convictions. In the face of psychological difficulties of some magnitude, he returned to his writing in earnest towards the end of the 1950s, and eventually produced a massive autobiographical trilogy, The Spiral Ascent (1977)––comprised of In the Thirties (1962), The Rotten Elements (1969), and No Home but the Struggle. The last two volumes were written on the Isle of Wight, where Upward retired in 1962, and they have been followed by several collections of short stories. Upward remained a challenging and trusted critic of Isherwood’s work throughout Isherwood’s life, and a loyal friend. He is often mentioned in D 1.

van Druten, John (1901–1957) . English playwright and novelist. Isherwood met van Druten in New York in 1939, and they became friends because they were both pacifists. Of Dutch parentage, van Druten was born and educated in London and took a degree in law at the University of London. He achieved his first success as a playwright in New York during the 1920s, emigrated in 1938 and became a U.S. citizen in 1944. His strength was light comedy; among his numerous plays and adaptations were Voice of the Turtle (1943), I Remember Mama (1944), Bell, Book, and Candle (1950), and I Am a Camera (1951) based on Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Many of these were later filmed. In 1951, van Druten directed The King and I on Broadway. Van Druten usually spent half the year in New York and half near Los Angeles on the AJC Ranch, which he owned with Carter Lodge. He also owned a mountain cabin above Idyllwild which Isherwood sometimes used. A fall from a horse in Mexico in 1936 left van Druten with a crippled arm, and partly as a result of this, he became attracted to Vedanta and other religions (he was a renegade Christian Scientist).

He was a contributor to Isherwood’s Vedanta for the Western World, and there are numerous accounts of him in D 1.

van Leyden, Ernst and Karen. Dutch painters and decorative artists. They specialized in painting on glass, and they were responsible for a mural painted on glass in Jay de Laval’s restaurant Café Jay. Karen van Leyden also painted screens and panels. The van Leydens had been friendly with Brian Howard in Portugal in 1933 when Howard travelled there with Cyril and Jean Connolly and Howard’s boyfriend Toni. During the 1940s and early 1950s they lived on Barrington Avenue in Brentwood, which was then still rustic with open fields, and they converted the large barn on the property into their studio.

Van Meegeren, Han (1889–1947) . Dutch painter and perhaps the greatest forger ever; he painted a number of Vermeers and De Hooghs which were Glossary

357

accepted as authentic and which hung in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until 1945 when Van Meegeren was arrested as a collaborator because he was associated with the sale of a Dutch master painting to Goebbels. To clear himself of the charge of collaborating, Van Meegeren confessed that the Goebbels painting and certain others were his own work. A two-year scientific study confirmed his claim, uncovering his immensely complex process and also his remarkable talent. He was sentenced to a year in prison and died there of a heart attack.

van Petten, Bill (1922–1989) . American film administrator. Van Petten came from a wealthy oil family, read widely, especially in Sufi literature, and eventually converted to Islam. For two years he was assistant to the Saudi Arabian Minister of Information and helped to establish an Imax theater at the royal palace. He also supervised the filming of documentary footage there. He lived in Santa Monica, for many years in the same building with Jim Charlton.

Van Vechten, Carl (1880–1964) . American novelist and poet, critic of music and dance, and, late in life, photographer. He was a prolific writer and a figure of New York’s bohemia, frequenting Harlem clubs and greatly contributing to popular recognition of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance. He was also an early editor of Gertrude Stein. Among his seven novels are The Tattooed Countess (1924) and Nigger Heaven (1926). He was married to Fania Marinoff.

Vaughan, Keith (1912–1977) . English painter, illustrator, and diarist. He worked in advertising during the 1930s and was a conscientious objector in the war; later he taught at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and the Slade, as well as briefly in America.

Isherwood met him in 1947 at John Lehmann’s and bought one of his pictures,

“Two Bathers,” a small oil painting still in his collection. Vaughan’s diaries, with his own illustrations, were published in 1966.

Vidal, Gore (b. 1925) . American writer. Vidal introduced himself to Isherwood in a café in Paris in early 1948, having previously written to him and sent the manuscript of his novel The City and the Pillar. They became lasting friends. Later, Isherwood also met Howard Austen (Tinker), Vidal’s companion from 1950 onward. Vidal was in the army as a young man; afterwards he wrote essays on politics and culture as well as many novels, including Williwaw (1946), Myra Breckenridge (1968, dedicated to Isherwood), and the multi-volume American chronicle comprised of Burr (1974), Lincoln (1984), 1876 (1976), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1989), and Washington, D.C. (1967).

During the 1950s Vidal wrote a series of television plays for CBS, then screenplays at Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM (including part of Ben Hur), and two Broadway plays, Visit to a Small Planet (1957) and The Best Man (1960). In 1960 he ran for Congress, and in 1982 for the Senate, both times unsuccessfully.

He described his friendship with Isherwood in his memoir, Palimpsest (1995), and there are many passages about him in D 1.

Viertel, Berthold (1885–1953) . Viennese poet, playwright, and film and theater director. Isherwood worked for Viertel in London as a screenplay writer and, later, dialogue director on Viertel’s film Little Friend made by Gaumont-British. This was Isherwood’s first experience in the film business, 358

Glossary

and he made it the subject of Prater Violet, in which Viertel appears as

“Friedrich Bergmann.” Viertel also appears throughout D 1. Viertel had settled his first wife and children in Santa Monica in 1928 and returned alone to Europe for long periods to work. His description of the life in California was a glamorous lure to Isherwood; they renewed their friendship soon after Isherwood arrived there in 1939, beginning work on a film vaguely inspired by Mr. Norris Changes Trains. At the Viertels’ house in Santa Monica Canyon Isherwood met a number of the celebrated European emigrés then in Hollywood, and the friendship with Viertel led to his second Hollywood job (the first of any substance) with Gottfried Reinhardt at MGM. Viertel began his career as an actor and stage director and turned to films in the 1920s. He first made films in Germany, began directing in Hollywood from the late 1920s, and in England from 1933. Towards the end of his life he lived partly in New York and eventually, with his second wife––the German character actress Elisabeth Neumann––he returned to Europe as a theatrical director, staging, among other works, German-language productions of Tennessee Williams.

Viertel, Peter (b. 1920) . German-born second son of Berthold and Salka Viertel; screenplay writer and novelist. Peter Viertel attended UCLA and Dartmouth and became a freelance writer. He served in the U.S. Marines during World War II and was decorated four times. He wrote the award-winning screenplay for Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as well as other Hemingway adaptations, and his own novels are in the Hemingway vein, with subjects such as soldiering (Line of Departure, 1947), big game hunting (White Hunter, Black Heart, 1954), and bullfighting (Love Lies Bleeding, 1964). His first novel, The Canyon (published in 1941, but completed when he was just nineteen), gives a compelling adolescent view of Santa Monica as it was around the time when Isherwood first arrived there, and Isherwood mentions it in D 1.

Viertel’s first marriage was to Virginia Schulberg, known as Jigee, and in 1960

he married the actress Deborah Kerr. Like his mother and father he eventually resettled in Europe.

Viertel, Salka (1889–1978) . Polish actress and screenplay writer; first wife of Berthold Viertel with whom she had three sons, Hans, Peter, and Thomas. Sara Salomé Steuermann Viertel had a successful stage career in Vienna (including acting for Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater) before moving to Hollywood where she became the friend and confidante of Greta Garbo; they appeared together in the German-language version of Anna Christie and afterwards Salka collaborated on Garbo’s screenplays for MGM in the 1930s and 1940s (Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, Conquest, and others). Isherwood met her soon after arriving in Los Angeles and was often at her house socially or to work with Berthold Viertel. In the 1930s and 1940s the house was frequented by European refugees and Salka was able to help many of them find work––some as domestic servants, others with the studios. Among her guests were some of the most celebrated writers and movie stars of the time. By the mid-1940s, her husband had left her; her lover Gottfried Reinhardt had married; Garbo’s career was over; and later, in the 1950s, Salka was persecuted by the McCarthyites and blacklisted by MGM for her presumed communism. In January 1947, she moved into the garage apartment Isherwood and Caskey had Glossary

359

let from her and rented out her house; then in the early 1950s she sold the property and moved to an apartment off Wilshire Boulevard. Eventually she returned modestly to writing for the movies, but finally moved back to Europe, although she had been a U.S. citizen since 1939. Isherwood tells about her in detail in D 1.

Viertel, Tommy. Youngest son of Berthold and Salka Viertel. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in February 1944. After the war he lived in Los Angeles where he worked for Los Angeles County. He married twice.

Viertel, Virginia ( Jigee). Peter Viertel’s first wife, from 1944 to 1959. Born Virginia Ray to working-class Americans ruined by the Depression, Jigee was a dancer in the Paramount chorus and then married the writer Budd Schulberg with whom she shared strong leftist political convictions. She and Schulberg divorced after having a daughter, Vicky Schulberg. Jigee’s second daughter, Christine Viertel, was born in Paris in 1952, and Jigee and Peter separated immediately afterwards. Salka Viertel partly raised both Vicky and Christine.

After the ruin of her second marriage, Jigee drank increasingly heavily; then in January 1960 she fell asleep with a lit cigarette and died of burns in the hospital.

She appears in D 1.

Vivekananda, Swami (1863–1902) . Narendranath Datta (also known as Naren, Narendra and later as Swamiji) was Ramakrishna’s chief direct disciple.

Ramakrishna recognized him as an “eternal companion,” a perfect soul born into the world along with the avatar and possessing some of the avatar’s characteristics. Vivekananda led the disciples after Ramakrishna’s death and founded the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. He also spent time wandering through India practicing spiritual disciplines and travelling to America and Europe, where his lectures and classes spawned the first Vedanta centers in the West. His teachings and sayings were published in various volumes, and Isherwood wrote the introduction to a 1960 selection from these.

Vividishananda, Swami. Hindu monk, from India. Vividishananda ran the Seattle Vedanta Center; Isherwood met him at the dedication of the new Portland temple in 1943 and afterwards briefly visited his Seattle center. Swami Vividishananda’s biography of Shivananda, A Man of God: Glimpses into the Life and Work of Swami Shivananda, a Great Disciple of Sri Ramakrishna––for which Isherwood wrote the foreword in 1949––was eventually published in 1957 by the Ramakrishna Math.

Waley, Arthur (1889–1966) . English poet and scholar of Chinese and Japanese; educated at Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge. Waley lived in Bloomsbury and associated with figures in the Bloomsbury group. He is best known for his translations of Chinese and Japanese literature which he began to publish during World War I. His renderings from the Chinese influenced Ezra Pound and the Imagists, among others, and his major prose translations (The Tale of Genji, Monkey) along with his scholarly writings on Japanese and Chinese art and culture contributed in England from the 1920s onward to a growing general interest in oriental literature.

Walter, Bruno. German conductor. Walter was a neighbor of Thomas Mann 360

Glossary

in Munich from before the start of World War I, and they became lifelong friends. Their children were acquainted with one another from childhood.

When the Manns first arrived to spend the summer in Brentwood in 1940, the Walters were already settled nearby. Walter also lived in New York.

Warner Brothers. One of the major Hollywood studios, founded in 1923

by the four sons of a Polish shoemaker. Warner Brothers pioneered talking pictures and later became known for realistic, often black-and-white, films. As well as gangster movies and musicals, there were numerous relatively highbrow historical and political films, and the studio was especially successful from the 1930s to the 1950s. It was increasingly run by the youngest brother, Jack Warner, although Darryl F. Zanuck and, after him, Hal Wallis, contributed to Jack Warner’s success. Warner Brothers was sold to Seven Arts in 1967

and later taken over by a conglomerate, eventually merging with Time Inc. in 1989.

Warren, Robert Penn (1905–1989) . American poet, novelist, critic, and teacher; born in Kentucky and educated at Vanderbilt, Berkeley, Yale, and Oxford. Warren won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1946 novel All the King’s Men, also his best known, and he wrote numerous other novels and works of nonfiction, mostly preoccupied with the concerns of his native South. He helped to found The Southern Review and co-edited it with Cleanth Brooks from 1935

until 1942; with Brooks he also later compiled two volumes of criticism and literary writing which spread the so-called New Criticism into many college classrooms: Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Criticism (1943).

Warren’s first volume of poetry appeared in 1935, and he won two more Pulitzer prizes for later volumes of poetry, Promises (1957) and Now and Then (1978). He also won several other major literary awards and was made America’s first poet laureate in 1986. He held university teaching posts throughout his career. For a time he was on the board of the Huntington Hartford Foundation with Isherwood, giving away three-month fellowships for young writers.

Watson, Peter. The financier behind Horizon, of which he was art editor and co-founder. Watson was heir to a margarine fortune, intelligent, and idealistically devoted to art. He collected art and befriended many artists. He was close to Denny Fouts in the 1930s and was the officially named owner of Denny Fouts’s Picasso when it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Later, he lived with Norman Fowler, whom he met in New York in 1949. The pair lived together in London until the apparently healthy and sober Watson mysteriously drowned in his bath in 1956.

Watson-Gandy, Anthony Blethwyn (Tony) (1919–1952). British RAF flying officer and scholar; educated at Westminster, King’s College, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. His parents were minor gentry, and his father a soldier like Isherwood’s. Watson-Gandy translated from French The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire (1952) by René Grousset.

Watts, Alan (b. 1915) . English mystic, religious philosopher, author, and teacher. Watts became a Buddhist while still a schoolboy at King’s School, Canterbury, Kent, and went on to study all forms of religious thought and Glossary

361

practice. His many books include An Outline of Zen Buddhism (1932), Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion (1947), The Supreme Identity: An Essay on Oriental Metaphysic and the Christian Religion (1950), Nature, Man and Woman: A New Approach to Sexual Experience (1958), and Psychotherapy East and West (1961). He emigrated to America at the start of World War II, eventually settling near San Francisco where he became Dean of the American Academy of Asian Studies. He is known as a Zen Buddhist, but was also ordained as an Anglican priest in 1945. He was a close friend of Aldous Huxley, whom he first met in 1943, and he was impressed by Krishnamurti’s decision to renounce his messianic role. Krishnamurti greatly influenced Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951). Watts felt that Huxley and Gerald Heard were working toward the same synthesis of Christian and oriental mysticism as himself, and like them he experimented with LSD in the 1950s. He opposed the Hindu emphasis on asceticism: he married three times and asserted that sex improved spiritual presence. He was a figure of the San Francisco beat scene and a model for Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.

Wescott, Glenway (1901–1987) . American writer. Wescott was born in Wisconsin, attended the University of Chicago, lived in France in the 1920s, partly in Paris, and travelled in Europe and England. Afterwards he lived in New York. Early in his career he wrote poetry and reviews, later turning to fiction. His best-known works are The Pilgrim Hawk (1940) and Apartment in Athens (1945). He was President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 1957 to 1961. From the late 1930s, Wescott, his longterm companion Monroe Wheeler, and George Platt Lynes shared a country house in New Jersey.

Whale, James (1886–1957) . British actor and stage and film director. Whale’s film career began when he arrived in Hollywood in 1930 to direct Journey’s End, which he had produced for the stage in London and New York. He went on to make other movies, including Frankenstein with Boris Karloff (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein with Karloff and Elsa Lanchester (1935), Showboat (1936), and The Man in the Iron Mask (1939). He retired in 1941 to paint, then in 1949

tried to make another film, but it was never released.

White, J. Alan. British publisher. He joined Methuen in 1924, became a director in 1933 and retired as Chairman in 1969. He brought many new writers to the firm (which had already published Conrad and James), emphasizing the importance of taking risks on new talent. During the war, he was exempted from military service even though he was only thirty-five because his boss, C. W. Chamberlain, said he could not run the firm without him. White moved his family to Kent and commuted to London to struggle with paper and labor shortages and wartime printing regulations; at night he served in the Home Guard. Prater Violet, published in New York in 1945 but delayed in England until the spring of 1946, was Isherwood’s first publication with Methuen. White got the book for his new postwar list simply by offering Isherwood more money than any other English publisher. Methuen remained Isherwood’s U.K. publisher for the rest of Isherwood’s life, and posthumously, until 1998 when Random House attempted to take over the imprint which by then belonged to a larger group, Reed Books. Methuen achieved inde-362

Glossary

pendence through a management buy-out, but permitted Isherwood to go to Chatto & Windus at Random House. (Random House was already publishing Isherwood’s diaries in a Vintage paperback edition; by chance, Chatto had in any case been the home since 1946 of Isherwood’s much earlier publisher, the Hogarth Press.)

Williams, Emlyn (1905–1987) . Welsh playwright and actor. Williams wrote psychological thrillers for the London stage, including Night Must Fall (1935), and is perhaps best known for The Corn Is Green (1935), based on his own background in Wales and in which he played the lead; both of these were later filmed. He acted in many other stage productions, including Shakespeare and contemporary theater. During the 1950s he toured with one-man shows of Charles Dickens and Dylan Thomas (the Dylan Thomas show was titled Growing Up). Isherwood first met Williams in Hollywood in 1950 and saw him and his wife Molly again in London and Hollywood in subsequent years.

Williams, Tennessee (1911–1983) . American playwright; Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Mississippi and raised in St. Louis. His father was a travelling salesman, his mother felt herself to be a glamorous southern belle in reduced circumstances. His essentially autobiographical play, The Glass Menagerie, made him famous in 1945, and soon afterwards he wrote A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Many of his subsequent plays are equally well-known––such as The Rose Tattoo (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1962)––and were made into films.

Williams also wrote a novella, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950). When he first came to Hollywood in 1943 to work for MGM, he bore a letter of introduction to Isherwood from Lincoln Kirstein; this began a long and close friendship, with numerous visits on both coasts, often to attend openings of Williams’s plays. There are many passages about Williams in D 1. Williams’s longtime companion, Frank Merlo, died of cancer in 1963.

Windham, Donald (b. 1920) . Novelist and playwright, from Georgia.

Windham was a friend of Lincoln Kirstein and of Glenway Wescott as well as of Paul Cadmus and George Platt Lynes, and wrote a book, Tanaquil, based on this circle of artists. Isherwood probably met him in New York early in the 1940s, certainly by 1942. Windham worked for Kirstein at Dance Index, and ran the magazine while Kirstein was away in the army during the war. He also collaborated with Tennessee Williams––a close friend––on the play You Touched Me! (1945). Isherwood wrote a blurb for Windham’s 1950 novel The Dog Star.

Winter, Ella. American author and translator. During the 1920s she translated from German The Diary of Otto Braun with Selections from His Letters and Poems and Wolfgang Koehler’s The Mentality of Apes. Her book about the Soviet Union, Red Virtue: Human Relationships in the New Russia (1933), was a bestseller. Winter’s first husband, Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936), was a journalist and author (she edited his letters), and she later married the American playwright and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. The Stewarts were neighbors of Salka Viertel in Santa Monica.

Winter, Keith. British novelist, playwright, and screenwriter; born in Wales, Glossary

363

educated at Berkhamsted and Lincoln College, Oxford. His 1934 play, The Shining Hour, was filmed in 1938 with Joan Crawford and Margaret Sullavan (using a script by Jane Murfin and Ogden Nash), and during the 1940s Winter worked on numerous screenplays at MGM and at Warner Brothers, where Isherwood mentions being friendly with him. One of Winter’s boarding-school novels, The Rats of Norway (1932), was staged successfully in London, but flopped in New York in 1948. Winter also wrote the first movie adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, later scripted by Isherwood and Terry Southern.

Wood, Christopher (Chris) (d. 1976) . Isherwood met Chris Wood in September 1932 when W. H. Auden took him to meet Gerald Heard, then sharing Wood’s London flat. Wood was about ten years younger than Heard, handsome and friendly but shy about his maverick talents. He played the piano well, but never professionally, wrote short stories, but not for publication, had a pilot’s license and rode a bicycle for transport. He was extremely rich (the family business made jams and other canned and bottled goods), sometimes extravagant, and always generous; he secretly funded many of Heard’s projects and loaned or gave money to many other friends (including Isherwood). In 1937 Wood emigrated with Heard to Los Angeles and in 1941 moved with him to Laguna. Their domestic commitment persisted for a time despite Heard’s increasing asceticism and religious activities. Ultimately, the household disbanded as their lives diverged, though they remained friends. From 1939, Wood was involved with Paul Sorel, also a member of the household for about five years. Wood appears throughout D 1.

Worsley, Cuthbert. English writer, theater critic, and schoolmaster. T. C.

Worsley was a friend of Stephen Spender and in 1937 accompanied him to the Spanish Civil War on an assignment for the Daily Worker. Worsley returned to Spain soon afterwards to join an ambulance unit. He later wrote about this period for The Left Review and in Behind the Battle (1939), as well as in a fictionalized memoir published much later, Fellow Travellers (1971). During the 1950s he wrote about theater for the Financial Times.

Wright, Frank Lloyd (1869–1959) . American architect. A preeminent figure in twentieth-century architecture, Wright originated the organic principle that the form of a building should develop naturally from its setting, from its function, and from its materials. He began as a designer in a Chicago firm and eventually opened his own practice, first expressing his genius for spacious, open-plan interiors in his low-standing “prairie” houses. His houses in particular tended to conform to the features of the natural landscape in which they were set, but also, he was trained as a civil engineer, and he was able to apply the principles of engineering to his architectural designs. Thus, he initiated new techniques in offices and other large public buildings––such as concrete blocks reinforced with steel rods, air conditioning, indirect lighting, panel heat, and new uses of glass. In 1910, Wright established Taliesin, near Spring Green, Wisconsin. It was both his home and an architectural school (named after a sixth-century Welsh bard). Later, in 1938, he founded Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he spent the winter months and where apprentice architects also gathered to work with him. His foundation, the 364

Glossary

Taliesin Fellowship, supported both centers.

Wyberslegh Hall. The fifteenth-century manor house where Isherwood was born and where his mother lived with his brother, Richard, after the war; it was part of the Bradshaw Isherwood estate.

Yogi and Yogini. Disciples of Swami Prabhavananda. His real name was Walter Brown, and he was in the army briefly during the war. Isherwood met him in April 1943 when Brown visited the Hollywood Vedanta Center where Mrs. Brown, Yogini, was already a probationer nun. Yogi and Yogini both lived at the center for a time, but eventually Yogi left and Yogini remained there alone as a nun.

Yorke, Henry. See Green, Henry.

Zinnemann, Fred (1907–1997) . Viennese-born director; son of a physician.

He studied at the Technical School of Cinema in Paris in 1927 and 1928, briefly worked as an assistant cameraman in Berlin, and arrived in the autumn of 1929 in Hollywood, where he was employed as an extra in All Quiet on the Western Front and then became Berthold Viertel’s personal assistant. He learned about documentary filmmaking from Robert Flaherty during an otherwise fruitless movie project back in Berlin, then filled in for his friend Henwar Rodakiewicz directing a documentary for the Mexican government, The Wave (1934). Two years later he was hired to direct shorts at MGM and eventually went on to other major studios, still using the semi-realistic style shaped by his documentary experience. By the early 1940s, when Isherwood met him, Zinnemann was living with his English wife, Renée Bartlett, on Mabery Road, near the Viertels, and Isherwood mentions them both in D 1. He directed a great many successful films––High Noon (1952), The Member of the Wedding (1953), From Here to Eternity (1953), Oklahoma (1955), A Hatful of Rain (1957), The Sundowners (1960), A Man for All Seasons (1966), The Day of the Jackal (1973), Julia (1977), and others.

Index

NOTE: Works by Isherwood appear directly under title; works by others appear under authors’ names.

Aarons, Chester, 277

Arvin, Newton, 120, 125

Abiquiu, New Mexico, 249, 252–5

Ashton, (Sir) Frederick, 271–2

Ackerley, Joe Randolph, 83 & n;

Asit (Prabhavananda’s nephew) see

Hindoo Holiday, 175–6n

Ghosh, Asit

Act of the Heart (film), 195

Auden, Wystan Hugh: meets

Adorno, Theodor, 155

Caskey, xvii; homosexual

Agee, James, 268, 270

practices, xx, 58; poetic style,

Ainsworth, William Harrison: The

xxvii; on sex relationships, 20;

Tower of London, 223n

C.I. writes article on, 31;

AJC Ranch, Coachella Valley

sexual relations with C.I., 58;

(California), 21, 196, 214, 220,

arrival in USA, 72, 82; C.I.

271

stays with in New York, 82; in

Aldeburgh festival (1948), 144–5

China with C.I., 82; mocks

Alderson, Nik, 104–5n, 107

Lehmann, 84; approves of Jack

Allen, John Edward, 144

Hewit as C.I.’s lover, 93n; in

Allgood, Sara, 188–9

Brussels with C.I., 93n, 106;

Almond, Paul, 194–5

friendship with Hayward, 98;

“Ambrose” (C.I.; section of Down

departs for USA, 105n;

There on a Visit ), 7

proposed visit to Spain, 105n;

Amsterdam, 134–5n

shocked at Sterns’ rental charge

Anderson, Ted and Mrs., 228

to C.I., 117; in New York,

Andersson, John, 128[n]

119, 123, 129; in Berlin,

Andrews, Oliver, 229

133–4n; in Amsterdam,

Angelo, Waldo, 212n

134–5n; on Fire Island, 138; in

Angermeyer, Ken (Kenneth Anger),

Paris, 142; on Stravinsky’s

212

avariciousness, 202; Agnes

Anna Karenina (film), 153

Smedley meets, 209

Arensberg, Walter, 29–30

Aufderheide, Charles: friendship

Argo, Leif, 195, 212

with From, xviii–xix, 24n; at

Arnold, Kenneth, 263n

Benton Way Group, 197

366

Index

Avery, Stephen Morehouse, 34n

49; and C.I.’s departure for

Avis, Annie (C.I.’s nanny), 87–8

England, 81; Kathleen

Isherwood’s idea of, 89;

Bachardy, Don: C.I. meets, ix,

Gielgud disparages, 135;

xxxii, 213n; C.I.’s relations

recommends Ivy

with, x, xxiv, xxvii; moves

Compton–Burnett, 140n;

into garden house with C.I.,

approves C.I.’s wish to be

xxi; C.I. takes notes on private

waited on, 181; moves to

behavior patterns, xxiii; uses

Cove Way, 191; on Dick

Stravinsky’s first name, 202n

Foote, 196n; and C.I.’s break

Bachardy, Ted (Don’s brother),

with Caskey, 283; and C.I.’s

212n

The World in the Evening, 284;

Bacon, Francis (painter), 116

Lamkin admires, 285

Bacon, Francis (Viscount St. Albans),

Beesley, Dodie Smith: dislikes Field

29–30 & n

and Lamkin’s adaptation of

Bailey, Bill, 123, 170

Goodbye to Berlin, xxxi–xxxii,

Balanchine, George, 50n

277, 284–5; and C.I.’s life at

Balchin, Nigel: The Small Back

Vedanta Center, 7; C.I. visits,

Room, 52n

11–12, 15, 18, 23, 208, 214,

Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, 50n

244, 277, 281; home above

Barada (Doris Ludwig), 209

Tower Road, 12; moves to

Barnett, Jimmie, 7

new house, 18, 23; Steve

Barr, James: Quatrefoil, 275n

Conway not introduced to, 41;

Barrie, Michael, 208, 230, 238, 247,

likes Caskey and Fouts, 45;

263

dalmatian dogs, 49–50; moves

Barrymore, Ethel, 37, 40, 187

to Malibu Road, 49; and C.I.’s

Barrymore, John: house, 11–12

departure for England, 81;

Barton–Brown, Monsignor, 107

Kathleen Isherwood’s idea of,

Baz, Ben, 123–4, 133, 138

89; mocks van Druten’s The

Baz, Emilio, 124, 133, 138

Mermaids Singing, 123n;

Beat the Devil (film), 126n

Gielgud on, 135; recommends

Beaton, Cecil, 65n, 95, 113

Ivy Compton–Burnett, 140n;

Beautiful and Damned, The (C.I.; TV

approves C.I.’s wish to be

script), ix

waited on, 181; moves to

Beauvoir, Simone de, xvi, 67 & n

Cove Way, 191; encourages

Beesley, Alec: dislikes Field and

and advises on C.I.’s writing,

Lamkin’s adaptation of Goodbye

217, 244–5; Caskey visits with

to Berlin, xxxi–xxxii, 284–5;

C.I., 233; and C.I.’s break

and C.I.’s life at Vedanta

with Caskey, 283; and C.I.’s

Center, 7; C.I. visits, 11–12,

The World in the Evening, 284; I

15, 18, 23, 244, 277; moves to

Capture the Castle, 175–6n

new house, 18, 23; C.I.’s

Below the Horizon (earlier Below the

friendship with, 23, 28, 49–50,

Equator ; film), 207n, 229–30,

81, 208, 214, 233, 281; Steve

236 & [n]

Conway not introduced to, 41;

Bemelmans, Ludwig: Dirty Eddie,

C.I. occupies chauffeur’s

140n

apartment, 45; dalmatian dogs,

Bennett, Ronald, 74

49–50; moves to Malibu Road,

Benton Way Group (Los Angeles),

Index

367

xviii–xix, 24n, 197–8

212–15; Albert Herring (opera),

Bergman, Ingrid, 117

144 & [n]

Berkman, Sylvia: Katherine Mansfield,

Brooke, Tim, 81

282n

Brooks, Richard and Mrs., 231–2

Berlin, 133–4n

Brown, Walter see Yogi

Berlin of Sally Bowles, The (C.I.),

Brown, Mrs. Walter see Yogini

284

Brush, Albert, 29

Berns, Walter, 194

Brussels, 93n

Best Years of Our Lives, The (film),

Bry, Doris, 250

67

Buckingham, May, 95n

Bhagavad Gita, 8 & [n], 9, 22

Buckingham, Robert, 83 & n, 86,

Bill see Caskey, William

95n, 148

Bill, George, 24n, 197

Buechner, Frederick: A Long Day’s

Birmingham Hospital, San Fernando

Dying, 225n

Valley, California, 183, 200,

Buenos Aires, 135n, 141

204–5, 219, 230, 236

Bujold, Geneviève, 195

Blanke, Henry, 31 & n, 34

Bunyan, John, xxvii

Bliss, Herbert, 50n

Burczinsky, Hank, 212n

Blunt, Anthony, 93n

Burgess, Guy, 93 & n, 99–100 & n

Bobo, Wallace (Bo), 17–18, 50, 81,

Burns, John Horne: in New York,

227

135, 137; The Gallery, xv & n,

Bogarde, Dirk, 67

137, 140n

Bogart, Humphrey, 126n

Burra, Edward, 124–5

Bok, Ben and Coral: marriage, 173

Busch, Wilhelm: Max und Moritz,

Bonaparte, Miss Dicky, 40

26n

Bors, Dr., 205, 230

Bynner, Witter, 253; Journey with

Bowen, Elizabeth: The Death of the

Genius, 253

Heart, 140n; The Heat of the

Day, 225n

Cadmus, Paul, 119, 123, 127,

Bower, Tony, 115n, 119, 123, 139

128[n], 139

Bowles, Paul: The Sheltering Sky,

Caffery, Jamie, 125

223–4n

Caldwell, Evelyn see Hooker,

Brackett, Charles, 37

Evelyn

Bradbury, Ray: The Martian

“California Story” (C.I.), 210n

Chronicles, 247, 274n

Cambridge: Forster in, 146

Bradshaw, George, 200, 219

Cambridge University: C.I. studies

Brando, Marlon, 205, 206n, 228,

at, xii

267

Cambus, Bertrand (pseud.), 258–61

Brecht, Bertolt, 81

Camera Work (magazine), 251

Brecht, Stefan, 13–14 & n

Camille’s, Laguna Beach (gay bar),

Brett, Dorothy, 253, 254n

277

Brighton (England), 145

Campbell, Sandy, 127

Britain: 1945 election, 25n

Camus, Albert: Caligula, 175–6n;

Britten, Benjamin: hostility to C.I.,

The Plague, 175–6n; The

69; C.I. meets in England, 92,

Stranger, 140n, 176n

95, 145; and Ian Scott–Kilvert,

Capote, Truman: meets Caskey,

106; at first Aldeburgh festival

xvii, 120; C.I. meets and visits,

(1948), 144–5; in California,

119; C.I. visits at Nantucket

368

Index

with Caskey, 125–7; in

with Fouts, 69–70; occupies

London (1948), 144; Vidal’s

Salka Viertel’s garage

rivalry with, 146; Other Voices,

apartment, 70–1, 73–4;

Other Rooms, 119, 140n

promiscuity, 74–5; affair with

Carpenter, Edward, xx

Keohane, 75; trip to Mexico

Carstairs, Keith (pseud.), 258–9

with C.I., 78–9; and C.I.’s

Carter see Lodge, Carter

departure for England (1947),

Cartier–Bresson, Henri, 65n, 135,

81–2; plans to settle in New

137

York with C.I., 82n; C.I. gives

Cartwright, Rob (pseud.), 50–1

Howard’s semi–precious stone

Cary, Joyce: Herself Surprised, 223n,

to, 96; never meets Mitty

225n; The Moonlight, 140n

Monkhouse, 112; meets C.I.

Caskey, Anne (William’s sister), 129

on return from England (1947),

Caskey, Catherine (William’s

117; in New York with C.I.,

mother), 54–5, 135, 139–40,

117–19, 123–5, 128–35, 138–9;

194–5, 199

pessimism and low self–esteem,

Caskey, William (Bill): relationship

118; travels in South America

with and influence on C.I.,

with C.I., 119, 123, 133, 139,

xv–xvii, xxv, xxvii–xxviii, 20,

141; cooks for Forster in New

34–5, 41–9, 52–6, 59–61, 66,

York, 121; visits Truman

69, 73–5, 79, 117–18, 163,

Capote with C.I., 125–7;

166–7, 175, 182, 193–4, 208,

photographed by Jared French,

241, 278; sense of guilt, xxviii,

128; driving, 131; on Fire

182, 193, 199; Lamkin on,

Island, 138–9; Francophobia,

xxx; C.I. travels with, xxxiv;

142; visits France and England

on de Laval’s seducing, 29n;

with C.I., 142–9; quarrels with

birthday party (1945), 34; affair

Vidal, 143, 146; stays on in

with Gerald Haxton, 37;

New York (1948), 149, 150n,

appearance, 42; social manner,

163; friendship with Tito

42; background, 43; and

Renaldo, 153n; drives from

Hayden Lewis, 43, 48; motor

New York to California, 166;

trip with C.I., 47; entertains

meets Charlton, 167; moves

with C.I., 49–51, 277;

into East Rustic Road with

genealogy, 52n; relations with

C.I., 167; falls asleep at Vernon

parents and sisters, 54–5, 199;

Old’s wedding, 171[n];

sexual activities and

home–building, 171; Menotti

inclinations, 54–6, 59; religious

makes advances to, 173; C.I.’s

beliefs, 55; humor, 59 & n;

difficulties with, 179–83, 197,

self–image, 61; and C.I.’s

210, 250n, 278, 282; uses ouija

surgical operation, 62–3;

board, 184; provides

drinking with Sudhira, 62; and

photographs for The Condor and

C.I.’s visits to The Pits, 64;

the Cows, 188; C.I. considers

photography, 64–5, 69, 71, 74,

leaving, 192–3, 199–200; splits

119, 144, 189, 194, 224, 251;

with C.I., 195; visits

and C.I.’s appreciation of songs,

Stravinskys with C.I., 200–1;

66 & n; and Katherine Anne

visits Birmingham Hospital,

Porter, 68; gives blood to

204; arrested and tried, 209;

accident victim, 69; quarrels

leaves for Florida, 210, 220;

Index

369

household management, 211;

birthday party (1949), 190;

returns from Florida, 233; visits

mother’s death from cancer,

Chaplins with C.I., 234–5; at

196; provokes fight, 213–14;

Sophia Williams’s séance,

meets Britten and Pears,

238–9; visits Long Beach

214–15; and Korean War, 241;

Veterans Hospital, 239; and

stays with Kittredges, 248, 255;

Korean War, 241; offends Bill

Brad Saunders’s love for, 259;

Kennedy, 241–2; and Lennie

and C.I.’s break with Caskey,

Newman, 246, 280; travels to

283

Baja California, 248; leaves

Charpentier (chef), 195

mess at home after party,

Cheltenham (England), 107

256–7; jailed for drunk driving,

Cherry Grove, Fire Island (New

257–8, 271; released from

York), 129

prison, 272; moves to Laguna

Chicago, 149

Beach with C.I., 273–5;

“Chip” (pseud.), 11

painted by Sorel, 277; and

Christopher and His Kind (C.I.), xi,

C.I.’s pretending to drown,

xx, xxiv, xxvi, xxx, xxxiii, 7n

278; gardening job, 280;

Churchill, (Sir) Winston S., 25n

declares no longer in love with

Cienega, La, Boulevard (Los

C.I., 281; C.I. breaks with,

Angeles), 15

282–3

Clift, Montgomery, 149, 174

Cerf, Bennet, 119

Clock Symphony, The (ballet), 147n

Chaplin, Charlie: friendship with

Clore, Andrew, 235[n]

C.I., xvi, 81, 195, 199, 234,

Coble, Jack, 123

278; hostility to C.I., 69, 199n; Cockburn, Claud, 108

C.I.’s supposed incontinence

Cockburn, Jean see Ross, Jean

on sofa, 199 & n, 234; Dylan

Cockburn, Sarah (Sarah Caudwell),

Thomas visits, 233; Emlyn

108

Williams interrogates, 233–4;

Cocteau, Jean: praises Fireworks,

hears Yma Sumac perform,

212; Le Livre blanc (attrib.),

242

140n

Chaplin, Oona (née O’Neill), 81,

Collier, John: amused by C.I.’s

199n, 234, 242, 278

gonorrhea, 7; enthusiasm for

Charlton, Hilde, 164n

Proust, 21, 26; works on film

Charlton, Jim: depicted in The World

scripts, 23, 25, 31 & n; at

in the Evening, xv, 122n, 159;

Warner Brothers, 24–5;

C.I.’s relations with, 156–66,

described, 24–5; wins bet on

173–4, 183, 208, 210–11, 214,

1945 British election result,

216, 230, 248, 255, 280n; and

25n; alimony payments, 31 &

architecture, 157, 165–6;

n; witnesses C.I.’s homosexual

character and qualities, 158–62,

activities, 32–3; and plot of Up

211; flying, 160–1; influenced

at the Villa, 36n; describes

by father, 160–1; meets

Caskey, 42; His Monkey Wife,

Caskey, 167, 233; visits C.I.

52n

and Caskey, 167, 171; at

Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone, 25;

Vernon Old’s wedding, 170;

The Woman in White, 23–4

friendship with Caskey, 175;

“Coming to London” (C.I.; earlier

and Glenway Wescott, 187;

“Letter from England”; article),

370

Index

83, 85–6, 88, 89n, 113n

Cowper, William, xxvii

Committee on Un–American

Craft, Robert, 198–200, 201n,

Activities, 191

202–3, 222, 241, 243, 264 &

Compton–Burnett, (Dame) Ivy:

[n]; Dialogues and a Diary (with

Manservant and Maidservant,

Stravinsky), 201n; Retrospectives

140n; Two Worlds and Their

and Conclusions, 198

Ways, 224n

Creixell, Luis, 133

Condor and the Cows, The (C.I.):

Cromwell, Richard see Radebaugh,

writing, xxxiv, 170, 172–3,

Roy

177–8, 183, 187; as

Cuevas de Vera, Tota, 133, 134–5n

autobiography, 3; on Caskey’s

Cukor, George, 37–8, 40

hitting C.I., 52n; on Berthold

Culbrow, Leonard, 277

Szczesny and Tota, 133n; ghost

“Curly” (pseud.), 17, 40

story in, 133n; Victoria

Curry, Phil, 167–8

Ocampo in, 136; and C.I.’s

Curtiss, Mina, 135

visit to South America, 141;

manuscript sent to publishers,

Dahl, Ingolf, 264 & [n]

188; dedications, 194;

Dakar (West Africa), 141

publication, 196; Bob Craft

Danielian, Leon, 50n

praises, 203n

Danilova, Alexandra, 50n

Conklin, Groff (ed.): A Treasury of

Dantine, Helmut, 32

Science Fiction, 175–6n

Darms, Peter (pseud.), 242–3, 246,

Connolly, Cyril: in USA, 81; C.I.

258, 282

meets in London, 96, 143; The

Darnell, Linda, 207n

Rock Pool, 140–1n; The Unquiet

Darrow, John, 14

Grave, 51n, 275n

Davies, Marion, 63–4, 234, 273

Connolly, Lys (formerly Lubbock;

Davis, Bette, 31n, 37

née Dunlap), 96 & [n], 143

Davis, Richard E., 235[n]

Connor, Whitfield, 235[n]

Day–Lewis, Cecil (ed.): The Mind in

Conrad, Joseph: Nostromo, 175n;

Chains: Socialism and the

The Shadow Line, 140n

Cultural Revolution, xiii n

Conway, Steve: C.I.’s relations with,

Deception (film), 31 & n

32–8, 41; arrested and released,

Defoe, Daniel, xxvii

39–40; takes drama classes, 39;

de la Mare, Walter: Memoirs of a

interrupts C.I.’s lovemaking,

Midget, 140n

279; and Jack Garber, 279

de Laval, Jay: friendship with C.I.,

Coombs, Don: on de Laval’s

28–9, 81, 153, 195, 208; and

seducing, 29n; relations with

C.I.’s relations with Caskey,

C.I., 218–19, 221, 230, 258,

34–5, 67, 233; runs restaurant,

260–1

43–5, 171; C.I. entertains, 50;

Cooper, William: Scenes from

encourages Michael Hall to

Provincial Life, 275n

approach C.I., 67; relations

Cornell, Ed, 213n

with Lennie Newman, 67; at

Corvo, Baron see Rolfe, Frederick

Vernon Old’s wedding, 170;

William

affair with Brad Saunders, 172,

Cowan, John, 50–1, 76

177; organizes new restaurant

Cowan, Rita, 51, 191

in Virgin Islands, 177; at

Coward, Noël, 130–1

Caskey trial, 209; introduces

Index

371

C.I. and Coombs, 218; Caskey

Ewing, Majal, 233

travels to Baja California with,

Exhumations (C.I.), 83, 282n

248

Derain, André, 244n

Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr., 223n

Devotion (film), 31 & n

Fairbanks, Harold, 155–6, 192, 263n

Dewey, Thomas, 172

Falk, Eric, 107

Dianetics, 237

Falkenburg, Eugenia (Jinx), 135,

Diehl, Digby, 247

137

D.J. (pseud.), 259

Farrell, James T., 48

Dolin, Anton, 147

Faulkner, William, 140n

Doone, Rupert, 83n, 116

Fechin, Nicolai, 222

Doré, Gustave, 99n

Felton, James, 9

Dostoevsky, Fedor: depicted in film

Ferrer, José, 17

(The Great Sinner ), 146, 150–2,

Field, Fritz, 235[n]

177; Crime and Punishment,

Field, Gus: co–adapts C.I.’s Goodbye

151; The Gambler, 150–1

to Berlin for stage (as Sally

Douglas, Melvyn, 187

Bowles ), xxxi, 265–6, 273, 277;

Down There on a Visit (C.I.), xiii,

C.I. excludes, xxxii–xxxiii,

xxv, 7[n], 46n, 49, 271

285; accepts C.I.’s withdrawal

Dreiser, Theodore: An American

of Sally Bowles adaptation, 285

Tragedy, 84

Fire Island, New York, 129 & [n],

Duchamp, Marcel, 29

138

Dunphy, Jack, 125

Fireworks (film), 212

Durant, Tim, 271

Flint (pseud.), 5

Fodor, Ladislas, 150–3, 168n, 188

Easiest Thing in the World, The

Fontan, Jack, 224–6

(film), 167, 195, 198, 206, 207n

Foote, Dick, 196 & n

East Rustic Road (No.333), Santa

Forbes, Don, 11, 31, 50, 220

Monica, 167, 183–6, 238, 272

Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier,

Eberhardt, Dave (pseud.): C.I.’s

140n; Parade’s End, 250n, 275n

friendship with, 11, 31, 50; at

Foreman, Carl, 205

AJC Ranch, 220

Forster, Edward Morgan: meets and

Edelman, Louis, 23–4, 29, 32

likes Caskey, xvii, 42, 121,

Edens, Roger, 170

143; influence on C.I.,

Edman, Irwin, 235[n]

xxviii–xxx, 201n; and

Ehrenburg, Ilya, 135n

Katherine Anne Porter, 68;

Eliot, T.S., 98; The Cocktail Party,

C.I. visits in England (1947),

275n

83 & n, 92, 94–5; on C.I.’s

Enfants du paradis, Les (film), 95

accent, 86; and Burgess’s

England: C.I. visits (1947), 80–116;

intercession for Jack Hewit,

1947 prices, 89n; C.I. visits

93, 99n; on C.I.’s capacity for

with Caskey (1948), 143–9

friendships, 94; character,

Erdman, Richard, 205

94–5; on C.I.’s extravagance,

Erdmann, Charles, 101–2

99n; visits USA, 99n, 121;

Ernst, Max, 158

lectures at Aldeburgh festival,

Erskine, Eileen, 235[n]

144; Vidal and Tennessee

Ethan Frome (stage adaptation), 229

Williams visit, 146; C.I. and

Evans, Rex, 37

Caskey visit (1948), 148; on

372

Index

T.E. Lawrence, 175n; Maurice,

Friendship, The (Santa Monica bar),

xxviii

43–4 & n

Fouts, Denham (Denny): introduces

From, Eddie (Isadore), xix, 24n

Bill Harris to C.I., 4–6, 19;

From, Sam: C.I. attends party,

C.I. depicts in writing, 7,

xviii–xix; appearance, 24n;

121n; and C.I.’s life at Vedanta

friendship with C.I., 24, 264;

Center, 7; and Marcel Rodd,

at Benton Way Group, 197;

8; and kite incident, 9–10; and

answers Evelyn Hooker’s

C.I.’s travels with Bill Harris,

questionnaire, 198; motor

13; starts composing cycling

accident, 264

song, 13n; friendship with

Fry, Christopher: Venus Observed,

C.I., 17, 28, 31, 34, 45; and

275n

Bobo and Kelley, 18; and

Fueloep–Miller, René, 150

C.I.’s relations with Caskey,

Furtmueller, Carl, 121n

20, 34–5, 52, 69; on Thelma

Todd’s, 29; on Steve Conway,

Gage, Margaret, 238

32; Tompkins’s exhibitionism

Garber, Jack (pseud.), 279–80

at party, 35, 48, 279; death,

Garbo, Greta: in C.I.’s circle, xvii,

40n, 142, 172–3; Maugham

81, 101; seeks company of C.I.

warns C.I. of police watch on,

and Caskey, 71–2; C.I.

40; in Mexico, 41; leaves for

rebukes, 130–1; in New York,

New York, 46; sells Picasso

130; Foote claims to have

picture, 46n; quarrels with

propositioned, 196n

Caskey and leaves Los Angeles,

Gardner, Ava, 168, 187 & n

69–70; C.I.’s friendship ends,

Garrett, Eileen, 241

70; C.I. and Caskey visit in

Gaszynski, Michael, 264

Paris, 142; and

Geller, James, 23–4, 230

Watson–Gandy, 173, 222n;

Germany: C.I.’s fading interest in,

and Ken Anger, 212

xxx–xxxi, 19n; C.I.’s sexual

Fowler, Norman, 179

experiences in, 57–8

Fox, Paul, 13, 242

Ghosh, Asit, 8 & n

Fragment of Speaking (film), 212

Gide, André, xx; Lafcadio’s

France: C.I. visits with Caskey,

Adventures, 52n; Pastoral

141–2

Symphony, 84n

Francis, Anne, 220

Gielgud, (Sir) John, 134–6

Frankenstein (C.I.; TV script, with

Gissing, George, xxvii

Bachardy), ix

Goldsmith, Joel, 247

Fred (pseud.; friend of Coombs),

Goodbye to Berlin (C.I.): stage

260–1

adaptation (as I Am a Camera ),

French, Jared, 127–8

xxxi, 78, 282; Vernon Old

Freud, Lucian, 143

reads, 181; see also Sally

Freud, Sigmund, xx

Bowles

Friends, Society of (Quakers): C.I.

Goodman, Paul: at From party,

works with, 7, 72; in The

xviii–xix; at Benton Way

World in the Evening, 121–2 &

Group, 197; The Breakup of

n, 244n; C.I. attends meeting,

Our Camp, 197; Making Do,

125; and Los Angeles world

197

peace conference (1949), 189

Goodwin, John: at Fouts party, 14;

Index

373

friendship with C.I., 45; C.I.

Hartford, Huntington, 245–6;

entertains, 50; and death of

Foundation, 245–6, 264,

Fouts, 172–3; C.I. visits at

277–8, 281–3

ranch, 457–8

Hatfield, Hurd, 170

Gordon, Cliff, 147

Hauser, Amber, 108

Gordon, Ruth, 229

Hauser, Hilda, 107–8

Gorer, Geoffrey: The American

Hauser, Phyllis, 108

People, 175–6n

Haverford, Pennsylvania, xvii,

Gorfain, Dr. A.D., 61–3, 111

xxix–xxxi, 7, 49, 121; see also

Göring, Hermann, 133

Friends, Society of

Gottfried see Reinhardt, Gottfried

Haxton, Gerald, 37

Goulding, Edmund, 38n

Hayden see Lewis, Hayden

Goyen, William, 194; The House of

Hayward, John, 97–8

Breath, 275n

Heard, Henry FitzGerald (Gerald):

Grant, Alexander, 147n

C.I. visits with Caskey, 47;

Great Sinner, The (film), 146, 150,

Kathleen Isherwood mistrusts,

153, 167–8, 174, 176, 187–8

89; on self–imputation, 132;

Green, Henry see Yorke, Henry

acquaintance with Grace

Greene, Felix, 89

Wiley, 152n; believes

Greene, Graham: The Quiet

Kiskadden a sadist, 179;

American, 265n

comments on C.I.’s life–style,

Groddeck, Georg, xx

181; arranges transfer of

Groix (French ship), 141, 170

Trabuco to Vedanta Society,

188; relations with Stravinsky,

Hagen, Uta, 17

201n; friendship with C.I.,

Hagenbuehler, Hanns, 212n

208, 230, 238, 263; C.I.’s

Hall, Michael, 67

proposed article for, 210n;

Halliburton, Richard, 274

story of film dog (Strongheart),

Halma, Harold, 126–7, 131–2

221n; at Sophia Williams’s

Hamilton, Bernie, 200

séance, 238–9; believes in

Hamilton, Gerald, 96–8, 107–8,

flying saucers, 263n; interest in

115n; Mr. Norris and I, 97

extrasensory phenomena, 264;

Hamlin, John and Mrs., 228

“The Great Fog”, 176n; Is

Hanna, Len, 34, 43, 53

Another World Watching?, 263n

Harford, Betty (later Andrews), 229

Hearst, William Randolph, 234,

Harkness, Alan, 74

273

Harper’s Bazaar (magazine), 74n,

Heinz see Neddermayer, Heinz

78, 83, 210n

Helpmann, (Sir) Robert, 113n

Harrington, Curtis, 212, 229

Hemingway, Ernest, 83n, 137,

Harris, Bill: relations with C.I., 4 &

270–1

n, 5–7, 9–20, 76; painting, 16;

Henreid, Paul, 31n

leaves for New York, 21;

Hepburn, Katharine, 15, 40

admires John Cowan, 50; sees

Hersey, John, 135, 137

figure at East Rustic Road,

Heston, Charlton, 263

184–5; and Jack Fontan,

Hewit, Jack, xxix, 92–4, 98–100,

224–6; stays with C.I., 224,

103, 106, 113

226, 229

Heyerdahl, Thor: The Kon–Tiki

Hartford, Connecticut, 78

Expedition, 275n

374

Index

High Valley Theatre, Ojai

Essence, 175–6n

(California), 74, 229

Huxley, (Sir) Julian, 31n

“High Valley Theatre” (C.I.;

Huxley, Maria (née Nys; Aldous’s

article), 74n

first wife), 50, 81, 198, 208,

Hill, Ramsay, 235[n]

222

Hirschfeld, Magnus, xx–xxi, 56

Huxley, Matthew, 23, 27, 139

Hitler, Adolf, xi, 31

Hyndman, Tony, 113–15 & n, 145

Hollywood Code, xii

Holmes, John, 116–17

Ibsen, Henrik: The Stranger from the

Hooker, Edward, xxi

Sea, 75

Hooker, Evelyn (formerly Caldwell):

Ince, Thomas, 234

at From party, xviii–xix;

Institut f ür Sexualwissenschaft,

conducts studies on

Berlin, xx

homosexual community,

Isherwood, Christopher:

xix–xxii, xxiv, 197–8;

Finances: film earnings, 23n, 91;

friendship with From, 24n, 198

credits accumulate in English

& [n]; at Benton Way Group,

bank account, 84–5

197

Health: inflamed throat, 21, 23;

Hopper, Hedda, 216

contracts gonorrhea (the clap),

Horizon (magazine), 143

35–7; penis trouble, 47, 61;

Horst (i.e., Horst B. Horst, or Horst

urethra operation (for median

Bohrmann), 65n, 123, 125

bar), 61–3, 111; made sterile,

Houseman, John, 242

62–3; operation for piles, 179n;

Howard, Brian, 95–6, 102–3, 105n

nervous strain, 183; rectal

Hoyt, Karl, 216

bleeding, 183; impotence,

Hubbard, Ron, 237 & n

219n; copies friends’ ailments,

Hunt, Bob, 253

272; illness (1950), 272

Huntington Hartford Foundation see

Personal life: homosexuality, ix,

Hartford, Huntington

xi–xvii, xx, xxiv–xxv, 32–3, 90;

Huston, John, 126n, 154n, 229, 242,

political ideas, xiii, 190;

268–70

drinking, xvi, 53, 96, 100, 140,

Huston, Walter, 187

183, 195, 199, 201, 276, 278;

Huxley, Aldous: in C.I.’s circle,

sense of identity, xviii, xxv;

xvii, 81; writes to Anita Loos

slow adaptation to American

on Matthew and Warner

style, xxv; sense of guilt,

Brothers strike, 27n; C.I.

xxviii–xxix, xxxiii, 6–7, 41, 55,

lunches and sups with, 31, 198;

81, 181, 220n; learns German,

C.I. entertains, 50; makes no

xxx; preoccupation with

mention of Salka Viertel in

exclusion, xxxii–xxxiii; casual

letters, 71; comments on C.I.’s

sexual activities, 5, 64, 67,

life–style, 181; relations with

116–17, 131, 147, 218, 242,

Stravinsky, 201n, 222–3; Bob

258–62, 276; visits burlesque

Craft contradicts, 203; works

shows, 14–15; attracted to

on Below the Equator film story

blond men, 19 & n, 20; sexual

with C.I., 207, 229–30;

practices, 20–1, 56–8, 219n; as

friendship with C.I., 208, 277;

supposed model for Larry in

on LeCron, 230n, 235; at

Maugham’s Razor’s Edge, 22n;

Vedanta Center, 277; Ape and

Time magazine article on, 22

Index

375

& n; reading, 23, 51, 140n,

278; moves into Huntington

175n, 223n, 274n; hitchhikes to

Hartford Foundation, 282

work, 24; owns cars, 33, 46,

Professional activities: film script

276; takes out U.S. citizenship

writing, 23–5, 28, 32–5, 46,

papers, 40; sexual snobbishness,

150–3, 167, 176–7, 191, 195,

41–2; entertaining with Caskey,

207 & n, 229; film outline of

49–51; at school in England,

ghost story, 49; works for

57 & n; exhibitionism, 64,

MGM, 73n; works with Lesser

279–80; and songs, 66;

Samuels, 81, 91, 167, 195, 198,

antagonizes Katherine Anne

206, 229; speaks lines for

Porter, 68–9; gives blood to

Christ’s voice in The Great

accident victim, 69; occupies

Sinner, 177–8; membership of

Salka Viertel’s garage

Academy of Motion Picture

apartment, 70–1, 73–4;

Arts and Sciences, 188; as

promiscuity, 74; jealousies, 75,

trustee of Hartford Foundation,

79, 166; granted U.S.

245–6, 264

citizenship, 77–8, 209;

Relationships: with Don

pacifism, 77–8, 100, 189–90;

Bachardy, ix–x, xxi, xxiii,

fear of flying, 80; plans to settle

xxvii, xxxii; with Heinz

in New York on return from

Neddermayer, xi, xxi, xxx;

England (1947), 82n;

with Bill Caskey, xv–xvii, xxv,

homesickness for USA, 84;