The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  But tension rose all over again only a few days later, when East German police at Checkpoint Charlie stopped the American Chief of Mission in West Berlin and asked to see his passport as he was travelling to the theater in East Berlin. His car bore an occupation forces license plate, entitling him to travel throughout the city without being stopped. The Americans sent another diplomat in a similar car to test the police procedure at the border; he, too, was asked for his passport. The Americans sent him again, backed by tanks and infantry. The Russians answered by sending tanks of their own, evidently because they thought the Americans might attempt to break through the new wall. On October 27 and 28, U.S. and Soviet tanks faced each other about 50–100 yards each from the wall, with live ammunition and orders to fire if fired upon and with tactical nuclear weapons in the vicinity, until Kennedy and Khrushchev finally agreed how to back down from the face-off.

  Blanch, Lesley (1904–2007). English journalist and author. She studied painting at the Slade, designed book jackets, and from 1937 to 1944 was an editor at Vogue. Her books include The Wilder Shores of Love (1954), The Sabres of Paradise (1960), The Nine-Tiger Man (1965), Pavilions of the Heart (1974), biography, travel essays, cook books, and an autobiography titled Journey Into the Mind’s Eye (1968). She married twice, the second time to the Russian-born French novelist, diplomat, and film director, Romain Gary (1914–1980), whom she met in England during World War II. She was posted with him to Bulgaria and Switzerland, and she travelled widely elsewhere before they divorced in 1962 in Los Angeles, where he was the French consul. Blanch was a close friend of Gavin Lambert who introduced her and Romain Gary to Isherwood and Bachardy during the 1950s; Isherwood also tells about their friendship in D.1. Later she settled in France.

  Blum, Irving (b. 1930). American art dealer. As a salesman for Hans Knoll, purveyor of modernist furniture, he helped Knoll’s Cranbrook-trained wife, Florence, carry out corporate decorating assignments, which often included paintings, and he frequented the Manhattan art scene before joining the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard in 1957. His efforts to create a clientele included organizing classes with co-owner Walter Hopps to educate West Coast collectors. In 1967, he opened his own gallery, where he continued to show contemporary Californian artists including Ed Moses, Billy Al Bengston, and Don Bachardy, and more widely known talents like Diebenkorn, Stella, Lichtenstein, Warhol and Johns. Later he opened a New York gallery with Mark Helman.

  Bob. See Craft, Robert.

  Bopp, Bill (b. 1932). A friend of Bachardy; he worked in administration for Burroughs Corporation, the data processing company, and lived in an apartment in Hollywood.

  Bower, Tony (1911–1972). American editor and art dealer; educated in England at Marlborough College and University College, Oxford. His real name was Albert Kilmer Bower. His mother became Lady Gordon-Duff through a second marriage, and his accent and manners gave the impression he was English. He is said to have made a living by playing bridge for money and was a spectacular gossip. He worked briefly for Horizon, was drafted into the U.S. Army twice during World War II, and trained on Long Island and later in San Diego. After the war he worked at New Directions, and in 1948 he became an editor at the New York magazine Art in America. Eventually, he became an art dealer. Isherwood met Bower in Paris in 1937 through Jean and Cyril Connolly. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years, and, as Isherwood tells, was the model for “Ronny” in Down There on a Visit.

  Bowles, Paul (b. 1910). American composer and writer, best known for his novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), filmed by Bertolucci. In addition to fiction, he wrote poetry and travel books and made translations. Isherwood first met Bowles fleetingly in Berlin in 1931 and used his name for the character Sally Bowles without realizing that he would later meet Bowles again and that Bowles would become famous in his own right. Bowles and his wife, the writer Jane Bowles (1917–1973), lived in George Davis’s house in Brooklyn with Auden and others during the 1940s. They later moved to Tangier, where they lived separately from one another but remained close friends. As Isherwood tells in D.1, he and Bachardy visited them there in 1955.

  Brackett, Charles (1892–1969) and Muff. American screenwriter and producer and his wife. He was from a wealthy East Coast family, began as a novelist, then became a screenwriter and, later, a producer. He often worked with the Austro-Hungarian writer-director Billy Wilder. He was one of five writers who worked on the script for Garbo’s Ninotchka (1939); he won an Academy Award as writer-producer of The Long Weekend (1945); and he produced The King and I (1956), as well as working on numerous other films. When Isherwood knew him best during the 1950s, Brackett worked for Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox, where he remained for about a decade. His second wife, Lillian, was called Muff; she had been the spinster sister of Brackett’s first wife, who died, and Muff was already in her sixties when Brackett married her. Brackett also had two grown daughters, and one, Alexandra (Xan), was married to James Larmore, Brackett’s assistant. The Bracketts appear in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Bradbury, Ray (b. 1920). American novelist, poet, playwright, and screenwriter; he finished high school in Los Angeles and never went to college. He is best known for his science-fiction classics The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Other works include Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and, among his collections of stories, I Sing the Body Electric (1969). From the mid-1980s, he adapted his short stories for his T.V. series, “The Ray Bradbury Theater.” He married and had four daughters. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Bradley, Alan. English farm laborer. He worked at Wyberslegh Farm in Cheshire and befriended Richard Isherwood there after World War II. He and his wife, Edna, looked after Richard when Kathleen Isherwood died. Richard called the Alan Bradleys “the Alans.”

  Bradley, Dan. Younger brother of Alan Bradley; with his wife, Evelyn, he took over from Alan the care of Richard Isherwood, partly because Dan Bradley was not fully employable after an accident at work. Richard referred to these Bradleys as “the Dans.” After Marple Hall was torn down, the Dans lived next door to Richard in one of the new houses built on the estate. Richard left much of his property and money to the two Bradley families in his will.

  Bradshaw, Booker (1940–2003). American actor. He appeared in “Star Trek” during 1967 and in several films, including The Strawberry Statement (1970) and Skulduggery (1970).

  brahmachari or brahmacharini. In Vedanta, a spiritual aspirant who has taken the first monastic vows. In the Ramakrishna Order, the brahmacharya vows may be taken only after five or more years as a probationer monk or nun.

  Brahman. The transcendental reality of Vedanta; the impersonal absolute existence; infinite consciousness, infinite being, infinite bliss.

  Brahmananda, Swami (1863–1922). Rakhal Chandra Ghosh, the son of a wealthy landowner, was a boyhood friend of Vivekananda with whom, ultimately, he was to lead the Ramakrishna Order. Later he was also called Maharaj. Married off by his father at sixteen, he became a disciple of Ramakrishna soon afterwards. Like Vivekananda, Brahmananda was an Ishvarakoti, an eternally free and perfect soul born into the world for mankind’s benefit and possessing some characteristics of the avatar. He was an eternal companion of Sri Krishna, and his companionship took the intimate form of a parent/son relationship (thus reenacting a previously existing and eternal relationship between their two souls). After the death of Ramakrishna, Brahmananda ran the Baranagore monastery (two miles north of Calcutta), made pilgrimages to northern India, and in 1897 became president of the Belur Math and, in 1900, of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, founding and visiting Vedanta centers in and near India.

  Brando, Marlon (1924–2004). American actor; raised in Nebraska. He was kicked out of a military school in Minnesota, studied acting for a year in New York, debuted on Broadway in I Remember Mama in 1944, and became a star as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947. He continued to explore Method Acting as a professional and joined the Actors Studio in the late 1
940s. Once he arrived in Hollywood, his stardom became phenomenal; his blend of defiance and charisma gave him the stature of Garbo and few others, and the violent eccentricities of his private life (including three failed marriages and murderous and suicidal offspring) did not diminish his fame. His films include: The Men (1950, Academy Award nomination), Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953, Academy Award nomination), The Wild Ones (1953), On the Waterfront (1954, Academy Award), Guys and Dolls (1955), The Young Lions (1958), Mutiny on the Bounty (1952), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), The Godfather (1972), Last Tango in Paris (1972), Apocalypse Now (1979). Isherwood first met Brando when Tennessee Williams came to Hollywood to polish the film script for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which Brando received an Academy Award nomination; he tells about this in Lost Years, and he also mentions Brando in D.1.

  Breese, Eleanor and Vance. She was a novelist and secretary; he was a pilot. They were divorced but remained close and made an attempt to renew their marriage in 1956. She worked for Isherwood at Twentieth Century-Fox starting in September 1956. Her novel The Valley of Power appeared in 1945 under her pen name Eleanor Buckles, but a second novel, about her marriage to Vance, was evidently never published. Later she co-wrote a memoir for Wynne O’Mara, Gangway for the Lady Surgeon: An Account of W. O’Mara’s Experiences as a Ship’s Surgeon (1958). Vance Breese also became a friend of Isherwood and Bachardy. They appear in D.1.

  Bridges, James ( Jimmy, Jim) (1936–1993). American actor, screenwriter and director; raised in Arkansas and educated at Arkansas Teachers College and USC. He was frequently on T.V. in the 1950s and appeared in a number of movies, including Johnny Trouble (1957), Joy Ride (1958), and Faces (1968). He lived with the actor Jack Larson from the mid-1950s onward, and through Larson became close friends with Isherwood and Bachardy. In the early 1960s, he was stage manager for the UCLA Professional Theater Group when John Houseman recommended him as a writer for a Hitchcock suspense series on T.V. He turned out plays constantly, some of which were shown only to Larson, and many of which were never staged, among them The Papyrus Plays mentioned by Isherwood. Bridges came to prominence in the 1970s when he directed and co-wrote screenplays for The Babymaker (1970), The Paper Chase (1973), The China Syndrome (1979), Urban Cowboy (1980), and, later, Mike’s Murder (1984), Perfect (1985), and Bright Lights, Big City (1988). He directed the first production of Isherwood and Bachardy’s play A Meeting by the River for New Theater for Now at the Mark Taper Forum in 1972, and he directed the twenty-fifth anniversary production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Ahmanson in 1973. He appears in D.1.

  Brown, Bill (b. 1919). American painter, educated at Yale and Berkeley. He has used the professional names W.T. Brown, W. Theo. Brown, W. Theophilus Brown, and Theophilus Brown. He was born in Illinois and made his career on the West Coast with his longterm partner, Paul Wonner, also a painter. Brown and Wonner were companions from the late 1950s until the mid-1990s, sharing apartments and houses in Santa Monica, Malibu, New Hampshire, Santa Barbara, and finally San Francisco, where, after twenty years, they settled into separate apartments in the same building. Along with Wonner, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, David Park, Nathan Oliveira and others first perceived as a group in the early 1950s, Brown has been characterized as an American or a Californian Realist, a Bay Area Figurative Artist, a Figurative Abstractionist. Isherwood met Brown and Wonner in August 1962, when they attended Don Bachardy’s first Los Angeles show at the Rex Evans Gallery with Jo and Ben Masselink.

  Brown, Harry (1917–1986). American poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter. He was educated at Harvard and worked for Time Magazine and The New Yorker. His first novel, A Walk in the Sun (1944), was filmed in 1945, and afterwards he worked on numerous Hollywood scripts, especially war movies. He won an Academy Award for co-writing A Place in the Sun (1951), and he also wrote Ocean’s Eleven (1960) among others. In the early 1950s, he worked at Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM, and he was married for a few years to Marguerite Lamkin. Later he married June de Baum. His other novels are The Stars in Their Courses (1968), A Quiet Place to Work (1968), and The Wild Hunt (1973); he published five volumes of poetry. He appears in D.1.

  Buchholz, Horst (1933–2003). German stage and screen actor, son of a shoemaker. He starred in European films in the 1950s, then achieved Hollywood fame as a gunslinger in The Magnificent Seven (1960). His wife, Myriam Bru (b. 1932), was an actress, and, later, a talent agent in Paris.

  Buckingham, Bob and May. British policeman and his wife, a nurse. E.M. Forster met and fell in love with Bob Buckingham in 1930. In 1932 they made a radio broadcast together, for a BBC series “Conversations in the Train,” over-seen by J.R. Ackerley who had introduced them. When Buckingham then met and married May Hockey, it threw his relationship with Forster into turmoil, but the three eventually established a lifelong intimacy. Forster even gave the Buckinghams an allowance as they grew older. In 1951, Buckingham retired from the police force, joined the probation service, and settled with May in a new post in Coventry in 1953. They had one son, Robin, who married and had children of his own, before dying in the early 1960s of Hodgkins Disease.

  Buckle, Christopher Richard Sanford (Dicky) (1916–2001). British ballet critic and exhibition designer; educated at Marlborough and, for one year, Oxford. He was ballet critic for The Observer from 1948 to 1955 and for The Sunday Times from 1959 to 1975. He designed an influential exhibition about Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in 1954, a less successful one about Shakespeare in 1963, and a Cecil Beaton exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1968. He also created the 1976 exhibition “Young British Writers of the Thirties” at which Isherwood spoke at the Portrait Gallery. He published biographies of Nijinsky (1971), Diaghilev (1979), and Balanchine (1988), as well as three volumes of autobiography.

  Buckley, William F. (1925–2008). Right-wing, Roman Catholic columnist and founder of The National Review. Gore Vidal and Buckley were hired by ABC News to cover the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions on T.V., and they argued bitterly on the air about the violence between police and anti-war demonstrators outside the Democratic convention in Chicago. Their host, Howard K. Smith, asked Vidal whether the attempt of some protestors to raise a Vietcong flag was inflammatory, like raising a Nazi flag during World War II. Vidal asserted that some people in the U.S. believed the Vietcong had the right to organize their country in their own way; Buckley asserted that raising the Vietcong flag encouraged the killing of American soldiers and marines, and called Vidal pro-Nazi. Vidal responded, “The only pro-or crypto-Nazi here is yourself,” whereupon Buckley said, “Now listen, you queer, you stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the jaw and you’ll stay plastered.”

  Buddha Chaitanya (Buddha). An American disciple of Swami Prabhavananda; born Philip Griggs. He lived as a monk both at the Hollywood Vedanta Society and at Trabuco during the 1950s and took brahmacharya vows with John Yale in August 1955, becoming Buddha Chaitanya. In 1959 he left Vedanta for a time, but eventually took sannyas and became Swami Yogeshananda. Later he led a Vedanta group in Georgia. He appears in D.1.

  Bürgi, Maria. Swiss academic and Vedanta devotee. She taught about Hinduism at the University of Lausanne and as Maria Bürgi-Kyriazi published several books, including one about Ramana Maharshi.

  Burton, Richard (1925–1984). British actor, born Richard Jenkins in a Welsh coal-mining village; he took the surname of his English master and guardian, Philip Burton. He made his professional stage debut in the early 1940s, then served in the air force and briefly studied English at Oxford, where he acted in Shakespeare. He starred in Hamlet in London and New York in 1953 and 1954, followed by other Shakespearian roles and, later, the musical Camelot (1960) on Broadway and Equus (1976). His films include My Cousin Rachel (1952), The Robe (1953), Alexander the Great (1956), Look Back in Anger (1959), Becket (1964), The Night of the Iguana (1964), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Where Eagl
es Dare (1969), Equus (1977), and California Suite (1978). He was nominated seven times for an Academy Award. His first wife was a Welsh actress, Sybil Williams, with whom Isherwood met him in the late 1950s, and with whom he appears in D.1. He began a tempestuous public romance with Elizabeth Taylor when he played opposite her in Cleopatra (1963); they married twice, in 1963 and 1975, and divorced both times. His third wife, whom he married in 1976, was an English model, Susan Hunt, and he met his fourth wife, Sally Hay, when she worked as an administrator on his television film “Wagner”; they married in 1983. His legendary drinking hastened his death. In September 1960, Isherwood began to work for Burton on a screenplay of “The Beach of Falesá” by Robert Louis Stevenson; Burton had bought the rights to the story and wanted to produce it himself. Nothing came of the screenplay drafts by various authors although the project limped on for a few years. Around the same time, the Burtons loaned their Hampstead house to Don Bachardy when he studied at the Slade, and Isherwood lived there with Bachardy during 1961. Richard Burton’s brother, Ivor Jenkins, lived adjacent with his wife, Gwen, and looked after the property; the Jenkinses also appear in D.1.

  Calley, John (b. 1930). American film producer and studio executive, born in New Jersey. He began his career in T.V. in the 1950s, worked in advertising, and then became an executive at Filmways, Inc. From 1968 to 1981, he was a senior executive at Warner Brothers and president for a time. During the 1980s, he was an independent producer, working closely with Mike Nichols, and then he ran United Artists and Sony Pictures. Isherwood worked for him when Calley was co-producer with Haskell Wexler of The Loved One (Neil Hartley was associate producer). Calley’s other films include Ice Station Zebra (1968), Catch-22 (1970), Postcards from the Edge (1990), The Remains of the Day (1993), Goldeneye (1995), Closer (2004), and The Da Vinci Code (2006).

  Campbell, Alan (1904–1963). Actor and screenwriter, second husband of Dorothy Parker. They first married in 1933, divorced after the war, and later re married, eventually settling on Norma Place, West Hollywood, the heart of Boys Town, as it was known among the gay community (Campbell was rumored to be homosexual). They worked on more than a dozen screenplays together, including, with Robert Carson, A Star Is Born (1937) and Lillian Hellman’s film adaptation of her play Little Foxes (1941). Campbell was involved with the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and other leftist causes; he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s.