The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Ivan. See Moffat, Ivan.

  japa or japam. 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 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 japa. Japam is a Tamil form which came into use among Bengali swamis of the Ramakrishna Order—including Prabhavananda, Ashokananda, Akhilananda—because they spent varying periods of time in the Madras Math.

  Jason, Peter (b. 1944). American actor. He played small roles in T.V., films, and commercials.

  Jenkins, Ivor (1906–1972). An older brother of Richard Burton. He helped run the family home in Wales after Burton’s mother died in her early forties, and he worked in a local coal mine. When Burton became successful in acting, Ivor and his wife, Gwen, often travelled with him, and Burton bought them a house adjacent to his own in Squire’s Mount, Hampstead. In the late 1960s, Ivor broke his neck in a fall; he spent the last four years of his life in a wheelchair.

  Jenkins, Terry. British model and aspiring actor. Isherwood met him when Charles Laughton brought Jenkins to Hollywood in 1960. Jenkins was then in his twenties. Laughton was in love with him, coached him and got him a screen test, but Jenkins had no real talent for acting. He was heterosexual, but admired Laughton and entered into a sexual relationship with him in an untroubled manner. When Laughton was dying, Jenkins looked after him with great care and sensitivity. Later Jenkins married a nurse of Laughton’s. He is mentioned in D.1.

  Jennifer. Also Jennifer Selznick and, later, Jennifer Simon; see Jones, Jennifer.

  Jim. See Charlton, Jim.

  Jo. See Masselink, Jo.

  Joe. See Ackerley, J.R.

  The John Birch Society. Founded in 1958 by millionaire candy-manufacturer Robert Welch to promote personal freedom, limited government, and traditional Christian values. It was a bastion of anti-communism in the 1960s.

  Johnson, Lamont (Monty) (b. 1922). American actor and, especially, director; born in Stockton, California, educated at UCLA and the Neighborhood Playhouse. He worked in radio as a teenager to pay his way through college, then moved to New York where he continued in radio soaps and directed an off-Broadway production of Gertrude Stein’s Yes Is for a Very Young Man. In 1959, he was a founder of the UCLA Theater Group, and during the 1960s and 1970s he won numerous Emmys and Screen Directors Guild Awards for his T.V. mini-series and made-for-T.V. movies. He also directed episodes of popular shows like “Have Gun Will Travel,” “The Rifleman,” and “The Twilight Zone,” and a few feature films, including The Last American Hero (1973) and Lipstick (1976). He acted on T.V. and in a number of movies. “Losers Weepers,” broadcast February 19, 1967 as the premiere to NBC’s series “Experiments in Television,” was about the desperation of a poor black family in Watts; “Deadlock,” a made-for-T.V. movie broadcast February 22, 1969 as a pilot for NBC’s “The Protectors” (1969–1970), explored the tensions between a white police officer and a black district attorney during ghetto violence triggered by the police killing of a black youth. The first was a play written in the Watts Writers Workshop; it was filmed in Watts and framed by clips from the workshop and comments by the cast and by Budd Schulberg, who founded the workshop, and his brother Stuart Schulberg, who produced the segment.

  Jonathan. See Preston, Jonathan.

  Jones, Jack. American painter; a disciple and, later, close friend of Gerald Heard. Some of his best work was of Margaret Gage’s garden on Spoleto Drive, where Heard lived until 1962, and he shared Heard’s interest in clothing and costume. Jones was about the same age as Don Bachardy and lived nearby in Santa Monica Canyon, so they sometimes sat for each other.

  Jones, Jennifer (Phylis Isley) (1919–2009). American actress, born in Tulsa, Oklahoma; in childhood, she travelled with her parents’ stock stage company and spent hours in her father’s movie theaters. After a brief stint at Northwestern University, she attended the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, left for a radio job in Tulsa, and began her Hollywood career in B-movies in 1939. She was discovered in 1941 by David Selznick, who changed her name and took control of her career with spectacular results. She won an Academy Award for The Song of Bernadette in 1943, followed by Since You Went Away (1944, Academy Award nomination), Love Letters (1945, Academy Award nomination), Duel in the Sun (1946, Academy Award nomination), Portrait of Jennie (1948), Madame Bovary (1949), Carrie (1951), Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955, Academy Award nomination), A Farewell to Arms (1957), Tender is the Night (1962), The Towering Inferno (1974), and others. Her 1939 marriage to the actor Robert Walker, with whom she had two sons, ended in divorce in 1945, and Selznick left his wife, Irene Mayer, for Jones; they married in 1949. His obsession with Jones combined with her own emotional instability (including suicide attempts) made a melodrama of their careers and their private lives. In 1965, Selznick died, leaving huge debts. In 1971, Jones married a third time, to Hunt Foods billionaire and art collector Norton Simon. Later that decade, her only child with Selznick, Mary Jennifer, committed suicide; partly as a result, Jones created the Jennifer Jones Foundation for Mental Health and Education and trained as a lay therapist and volunteer counsellor. Isherwood first met her when he worked with Selznick on Mary Magdalene in 1959, and he took her to meet Swami Prabhavananda in June that year. He writes about the friendship in D.1.

  Julie. See Harris, Julie.

  Kali. Hindu goddess; the Divine Mother and the Destroyer, usually depicted dancing or standing on the breast of a prostrate Shiva, her spouse, and wearing a girdle of severed arms and a necklace of skulls. Kali has four arms: the bleeding head of a demon is in her lower left hand, the upper left holds a sword; the upper right hand gestures “be without fear,” the lower right confers blessings and boons on her devotees. Kali symbolizes the dynamic aspect of the godhead, the power of Brahman: she creates and destroys, gives life and death, well-being and adversity. She has other names: Shakti, Parvati, Durga. Kali was Ramakrishna’s Chosen Ideal, and for a number of years, he devoted himself to worshipping her image in her temple at Dakshineswar. Kali puja is usually celebrated in November.

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

  Kaper, Bronislau (1902–1983). Polish-born composer, trained at Warsaw Conservatory; he wrote music for German films in Berlin, then, fleeing Hitler, emigrated to Paris and Hollywood where he continued his career at MGM. His film scores include the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (1935); Green Dolphin Street (1947), from which the theme became a jazz favorite; The Great Sinner (1949), for which Isherwood wrote the script; Invitation (1952) directed by Gottfried Reinhardt; and Lili (1953), for which Kaper won an Academy Award.

  Kaplan, Abbot (1912–1980). University administrator and professor, born in New York, educated at Columbia and at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He worked as a high school principal, served in the navy during World War II, and in 1946 began lecturing in labor economics at UCLA’s Institute of Industrial Relations. He became a professor of adult education and director of the continuing education program, UCLA Extension, for which he hired Isherwood to lecture in 1961. He was also a founder, with William Melnitz, of UCLA’s Professional Theater Group, which became the resident company at the Mark Taper Forum. Later, he was a
dean and a professor in the College of Fine Arts. He left UCLA in 1967 to be founding president of the State University of New York at Purchase, but after retirement returned to the Graduate School of Management where he taught Arts Management in the 1970s.

  Kaplan, Abraham (1918–1993). American philosopher, born in Odessa, son of a rabbi. He was raised in Minnesota and educated there and at the University of Chicago and UCLA, where he later taught. He asked Isherwood to be a public signatory, with Aldous Huxley and others, to a telegram in the Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1961, protesting Soviet treatment of Jews. Three leaders of the Leningrad Jewish community had been given prison sentences ranging from four to twelve years for passing information about the USSR to a foreign embassy, possibly the Israeli Embassy. Their trial, from October 9 to 13, was made public only in mid-November. In addition, three leaders of the main synagogue in Moscow were said to have been tried and convicted in early October, and, reportedly, synagogues and schools were being closed down. Tass denied antiSemitic persecution and said Western criticism insulted the hundreds of thousands of Jews working in all parts of Soviet life.

  Kaplan, Al. American doctor. He was wealthy, interested in theater, and backed at least one West End show, Keep Your Hair On, by John Cranko. He lived in West London and died fairly young.

  Karapiet, Rashid. Anglo-Indian actor; he played small roles on the British stage and in T.V. and films, including Bombay Dreams, “Miss Marple,” and A Passage to India. Isherwood met him through his lover, John Lehmann’s friend Jeremy Kingston, and as Isherwood mentions, Karapiet typed some of Down There on a Visit.

  Kathleen. See Isherwood, Kathleen Bradshaw.

  Kaufmann, Leonard (Len). Beverly Hills agent and publicist, third husband of actress Doris Dowling.

  Kennedy, Paul. A young man with whom Isherwood had an occasional sexual relationship towards the end of the 1950s. As Isherwood tells in this volume, Kennedy developed cancer suddenly and died in August 1962. Isherwood drew on his visits to Kennedy in the hospital for the episode of A Single Man in which George visits Doris in similar circumstances. Kennedy is mentioned in D.1.

  K.H.3. An anti-aging preparation developed by a Romanian doctor, Ana Aslan, and promoted in the 1960s and 1970s; the active ingredient is procaine, the local anaesthetic widely used by dentists and typically known by its brand name, Novocaine. K.H.3 possibly has a mild antidepressant effect, but it never persuaded the medical establishment and is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S.

  Kidd, Kap. American actor. Isherwood met him towards the end of the 1950s through Bill Jones, a writer with whom Kidd shared an apartment for many years. He appears in D.1.

  Kimbrough, Clinton (1933–1996). American actor and director, sometimes credited as Kimbro. He appeared at the American National Theater and Academy at Washington Square in New York during the first half of the 1960s; he also had small roles in a few films and narrowly missed being cast as one of the killers in the film of Capote’s In Cold Blood. He had affairs with both sexes. Bachardy did many drawings and paintings of him and of his wife, Frances Doel. She was a script girl on low-budget films, then began to work on her own screenplays and original stories, including Big Bad Mama (1974) and Crazy Mama (1975), in which her husband had a small part. Later she became a producer and a script development consultant.

  Kingston, Jeremy (b. 1931). British writer. He was trying to establish himself as a playwright when he met John Lehmann in 1956 and began an affair with him that cooled after some months into a lifelong friendship. Lehmann hired him as an editorial assistant at The London Magazine, and Kingston also typed some of Lehmann’s books. In the late 1950s, Kingston had some success with a radio drama and a play, No Concern of Mine, staged in 1958 and with another play, Signs of the Times. But his novel, The Prisoner I Keep, mentioned by Isherwood, was never published. He was theater critic for Punch for eleven years. Later he became a drama critic for The Times.

  Kirstein, Lincoln (1907–1996). American dance impresario, author, editor, and philanthropist, raised in Boston, 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 he helped found 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 founding the Museum of Modern Art. His taste and critical judgement combined with his entrée into wealthy society enabled him to recognize and promote some of the greatest artistic talent of the twentieth century. In 1941, he married Fidelma (Fido) Cadmus, sister of the painter Paul Cadmus. He served in the army from 1943 to 1946. Isherwood’s first meeting with Kirstein in New York in 1939 was suggested by Stephen Spender, who had met Kirstein in London, and Kirstein appears in D.1 and Lost Years. He is a model for Charles in The World in the Evening. His poetry was admired by Auden, and Isherwood mentions reviewing his Rhymes of a PFC (1964) when Kirstein reissued it as Rhymes and More Rhymes of a PFC (1966). But their friendship ended that year, when Kirstein commissioned Bachardy to do portraits of the New York City Ballet stars without consulting Balanchine. Kirstein, who suffered from depression and paranoia, could not bring himself to ask Balanchine’s permission to sell the drawings as a ballet souvenir, even though he had already had them printed, because he became irrationally afraid that Balanchine and others associated with the company would assume Bachardy was a boyfriend he was trying to promote. Balanchine’s red pencil markings on a copy of the portfolio returned to Bachardy by Kirstein reflect Balanchine’s personal attitudes to some of the dancers—he wrote, for instance, “I hate her,” on one portrait, and “He can’t dance,” on another—but there are no criticisms of Bachardy’s work. Bachardy was disappointed when the project was scrapped, and he later blamed himself for the fact that Kirstein thereafter refused to see Isherwood even though Auden tried to reconcile them.

  kirtan. Hindu devotional singing or chanting.

  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 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 Bok (called Tis), Benjamin Bok, Derek Bok (later president of Harvard University), and William 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. By the mid-1960s, he had forgotten how to spell her name, sometimes typing Kiscadden. She died in the 1990s. There are numerous passages about her and her family in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Kiskadden, William Sherrill (Bill) (1894–1969). American plastic surgeon; third husband of Peggy Kiskadden. He was born in Denver, Colorado, the son of a businessman, 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, practicing—and writing articles on particular procedures and problems. He 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. In February 1958, he nearly died after a cardiac operation. He appears in D.1 a
nd Lost Years.

  Kitty. Bachardy’s pet name, once known only to himself and Isherwood, and denoting his identity as an exotic, temperamental feline creature in the private myth world they shared.

  Knight, Franklin (Frank) (circa 1924–2005). American monk of the Rama-krishna Order; he was given the name Asima Chaitanya when he took his brahmacharya vows, probably in 1965 or 1966, and came to be known as Asim. He first joined the Trabuco monastery in about 1955 and settled there permanently, but Swami Prabhavananda never allowed him to take sannyas because of an episode— referred to by Isherwood in his diary entry for December 16, 1963—in which he behaved inappropriately towards a woman. Knight was a cousin of Webster Milam, and is mentioned in D.1.

  Knox, Ronnie (1935–1992). American football player and aspiring writer, born in Illinois. His real name was Raoul Landry. He was a football All American for Santa Monica High School, a star freshman quarterback for the University of California, and widely considered to be the most talented college football player in the country when in 1953 he suddenly transferred to UCLA, sacrificing a year of eligibility and generating a scandal. He was also written up as a glamor boy because of his physical beauty. As a professional, he joined the Canadian Football League and played for Montreal. Later he wrote fiction, and published at least one of his stories. He lived with Renate Druks from 1960 to 1964 and afterwards had a French girlfriend called Véronique. All three sat for Bachardy several times. Knox died virtually homeless in San Francisco.