The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Schreiber, Taft. American entertainment executive. He worked at the Hollywood talent agency MCA, and when Isherwood met him, he represented Charles Laughton, among others. MCA—Music Corporation of America—was founded in 1924 to book bands and actors but eventually expanded into all areas of entertainment. In the early 1960s, MCA bought Universal Pictures and its parent company Decca Records, started Universal Television, and dropped out of the talent business to avoid antitrust violations. Its subsidiaries eventually included publishers, record and video companies, cable T.V., real estate, and many other businesses. Schreiber and fellow MCA executives became extremely powerful (he was close to Ronald Reagan) and wealthy, and he became known, with his wife Rita, as an art collector and philanthropist. He is mentioned in D.1.

  Schubach, Scott. A wealthy doctor who lived with Michael Hall for some years in West Hollywood.

  Schwed, Peter (1911–2003). Isherwood’s editor at Simon & Schuster; raised on Long Island and educated at Princeton. Eventually he became editorial chairman of the firm. He wrote several books himself, mostly about golf and tennis, and published a volume of his editorial correspondence with P.G. Wodehouse. Isherwood never genuinely felt that Schwed liked or understood his work although they worked together for about fifteen years. He appears in D.1.

  Scott Gilbert, Clement. British would-be theatrical producer, he was wealthy and evidently became the owner of at least one theater. With Ernest Vadja, he created the characters for “Presenting Charles Boyer,” an NBC radio show which ran a handful of times in 1950. He backed two 1961 productions staged in Croydon, Surrey: Mother, with David McCallum in the cast, and Compulsion. And he backed the proposed London production of A Meeting by the River in 1970.

  Searle, Alan (1905–1985). Secretary and companion to Somerset Maugham from 1938; he was the son of a Bermondsey tailor and in youth had a cockney accent. Lytton Strachey was a former lover. When he first met Maugham in London in 1928, Searle was working with convicts—visiting them in prison and helping them to resettle in the community on release—but he told Maugham he wanted to travel. Maugham reportedly invited him on the spot to do so, but for a decade they met again only when Maugham was in London. Eventually, Searle devoted his life to Maugham and became his heir. He appears in D.1.

  Sellers, Dr. Alvin. One of Isherwood’s doctors. He had an office in Beverly Hills and was on the staff at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Isherwood first saw him in the mid-1950s, and he appears in D.1, where his name is spelled incorrectly as Sellars. (In 1961, Cedars of Lebanon merged with Mount Sinai Hospital and became Cedars-Mount Sinai Medical Center.)

  Selznick, David O. (1902–1965). American movie producer, most famous for Gone with the Wind (1939). He also brought Alfred Hitchcock to Hollywood to direct Rebecca (1940). Among Selznick’s many other movies are King Kong (1933), David Copperfield (1934), Reckless (1935), Anna Karenina (1935), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), A Star Is Born (1937), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Intermezzo (1939), Spellbound (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946), Portrait of Jennie (1948), and The Third Man (1949). He worked for his father’s movie company until Lewis Selznick went bankrupt in 1923; in 1926, his father’s former partner, Louis B. Mayer, hired him as an assistant story editor at MGM. Selznick soon moved to Paramount, then RKO, then back to MGM until 1935 when he formed Selznick International Pictures with John Hay Whitney. Selznick’s aspirations were monumental, and he tried to control every detail of his pictures. Despite his box-office success, he went into debt, and by the end of the 1940s he had to close his companies. He married Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Irene in 1931, and they had two sons, Jeffrey and Daniel, before separating in 1945. When their divorce was finalized in 1949, he married Jennifer Jones. During the 1950s, he took Jones to Europe to work, and her career absorbed him at the end of his life. He traded his rights in A Star is Born to get Jones the lead in A Farewell to Arms (1957); the film failed, and it proved to be his last. Isherwood worked for Selznick in 1958, developing a script for a proposed film, Mary Magdalene, and they became friends, as Isherwood records in D.1.

  Selznick, Jennifer. See Jones, Jennifer.

  Shawe-Taylor, Desmond (1907–1995). Dublin-born critic and author, educated at Oxford. He was assistant editor for the magazine of The Royal Geographical Society before starting to write book reviews for The Times, New Statesman, and The Spectator. During the war he served with the Royal Artillery and worked in intelligence. When he returned to his career, he concentrated on music, notably opera, and became the chief music critic for The Sunday Times, where he remained until 1983. He published a book about Covent Garden and, with Edward Sackville-West, edited The Record Guide (1951) and The Record Year (1953). He also broadcast for the BBC on music and records. He owned a house in Dorset with Raymond Mortimer and Edward Sackville-West.

  Shroyer, Frederick B. (Fred) (191[7]–1983). Professor in the English department at Los Angeles State College, where he was responsible for Isherwood being hired to teach in 1959. He wrote novels—Wall Against the Night (1957), Wayland 33 (1962), There None Embrace (1966)—and produced a number of college English books and anthologies—College Treasury: Prose Fiction, Drama (1956) edited with Paul Jorgensen, Informal Essay (1961), Art of Prose (1965) both with Paul Jorgensen, Short Story: A Thematic Anthology (1965) edited with Dorothy Parker, Types of Drama (1970) with Louis Gardemal, and Muse of Fire: Approaches to Poetry (1971) compiled with H. Edward Richardson. He appears in D.1.

  Sino-Indian War. China invaded India across a disputed boundary, the McMahon Line, between Tibet and India, and also into Kashmir on October 20, 1962. As Isherwood mentions, Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon (1897–1974), a London-trained barrister and diplomat, Minister of Defense since 1957, lost his post, and after the war the Indian military was widely reformed. Nehru followed a policy of nonalignment throughout his time as Prime Minister of India, but he requested help from the West when this long-simmering border dispute erupted. A ceasefire was declared on November 20, when the Chinese evacuated back across the McMahon Line. But they retained territory in Kashmir.

  Sleep, Wayne (b. 1948). British ballet dancer; educated at the Royal Ballet School; in 1966, he joined the Royal Ballet Company, where he became a Principal with numerous roles choreographed on him. He also appeared as a guest dancer with other ballet companies and starred in West End musicals, including Cats (1981). He is a choreographer and teacher and created his own review of dance, Dash, in which he toured world wide.

  Smith, David. A young admirer of Isherwood’s work; he occasionally paid court at the house in Adelaide Drive and once sat for Bachardy.

  Smith, Dodie. See Beesley, Alec and Dodie Smith Beesley.

  Smith, Emily Machell (Granny Emmy) (1840–1924). Isherwood’s grandmother on his mother’s side. Emily’s husband, Isherwood’s grandfather Frederick Machell Smith, was a wine merchant in Bury St. Edmunds; they married in 1864 and in 1885 moved to London with Kathleen, their only child, due to Emily’s unpredictable health. She was beautiful, passionate about the theater, and liked to travel with Kathleen, who helped her to prepare a book of guided walks, Our Rambles in Old London (1895). Emily’s maiden name was Greene; her brother Walter Greene was a prosperous brewer in Bury St. Edmunds, went into politics, and became a baronet. Walter Greene entertained lavishly at his country house, Nether Hall, and Kathleen enthusiastically attended house parties and dances there as a young woman. Through Emily’s family, Isherwood was related to the novelist Graham Greene.

  Smith, Katharine (Kate) (1933–2000). English second wife of Ivan Moffat, from 1961 until 1972. She was a daughter of the 3rd Viscount Hambleden whose family fortune derived from the book and stationery chain, W.H. Smith, and Lady Patricia Herbert, daughter of the 15th Earl of Pembroke, elder sister of Isherwood’s Tangier friend, David Herbert, and lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Kate Smith was a bridesmaid to Princess Alexandra and a close friend of Princess Margaret. She had two sons with Moffat, Jonathan (b. 1964) and Patrick (b. 1968), a godson of Princes
s Margaret. In 1973, she married thriller-writer Peter Townend, author of Out of Focus (1971), Zoom! (1972), and Fisheye (1974).

  Smith, Margot. An art student at Chouinard with Bachardy; she was about seventeen when they met in 1956, but she dressed in a sophisticated manner and occasionally modelled for a fashion illustration class. She later married a screen-writer and editor, Sam Thomas. Bachardy drew her many times over the years.

  Sorel, Paul (b. 1918). American painter, of Midwestern background; born Karl Dibble. He was a close friend of Chris Wood and lived with him in Laguna in the early 1940s, but moved out in 1943 after disagreements over money, living intermittently in New York. Wood continued to support him, though they never lived together again. Sorel painted portraits of Isherwood and Bill Caskey in 1950; he appears in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Southern, Terry (1924–1995). American writer, born in Texas and educated at Southern Methodist University, Northwestern, and the Sorbonne. He was a satirist with a dark, hip, comic touch. He published journalism, short stories and novels—including the erotic parody Candy (1957) and The Magic Christian (1959)—and co-wrote the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove (1964) with Stanley Kubrick and Peter George. Later films included Barbarella (1968) and Easy Rider (1969).

  Spender, Elizabeth (Lizzie) (b. 1950). British actress and writer; educated at North London Collegiate School; daughter of Stephen and Natasha Spender. She had small parts in Isherwood and Bachardy’s “Frankenstein” and in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), and she worked in publishing. In 1990, she married Australian actor and satirist Barry Humphries—best known for his caricature “Dame Edna.”

  Spender, Matthew (b. 1945). British sculptor and author; educated at Oxford and the Slade; son of Stephen and Natasha Spender. In 1968, he married the painter Maro Gorky, a daughter of the Turkish-Armenian painter Arshile Gorky, and settled with her in Italy. He exhibited from the late 1980s at the Berkeley Square Gallery in London, and his large stone, clay, and wood sculptures appear in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1995 film Stealing Beauty, made at his property in Tuscany. His books include Within Tuscany: Reflections on a Time and Place (1992) and From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky (1999). He appears in D.1.

  Spender, Natasha Litvin (b. 1919). Russian-born concert pianist; she married Stephen Spender in 1941 and had a son and a daughter with him. In his entry for April 7, 1968, Isherwood alludes to the fact that, in 1964, she underwent two operations for breast cancer followed by radiotherapy. She appears in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Spender, Stephen (1909–1995). English poet, critic, autobiographer, editor. Auden introduced him to Isherwood in 1928; Spender was then an under graduate 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, Portugal, 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 Auden and Isherwood emigrated, he cultivated the public 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 moved away from his early enthusiasm for communism but remained liberal in politics. His 1936 marriage to Inez Pearn was over by 1939; in 1941 he married Natasha Litvin, and they had Matthew and Lizzie. He appears as “Stephen Savage” in Lions and Shadows and is further described in Christopher and His Kind, D.1, and Lost Years. He published an autobiography, World Within World, in 1951, and his Journals 1939–1983 appeared in 1985.

  Spender was co-editor with Cyril Connolly of Horizon and later of Encounter, and in 1968, he helped to found Index on Censorship to report on the circumstances of persecuted writers and artists around the world. As Isherwood mentions in his diary entry for June 22, 1967, it was widely presumed that Spender knew for years that Encounter, of which he was co-editor from 1953 to 1967, was funded by the CIA through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. But Spender’s biographer, John Sutherland, argues he did not. Spender made the first of several formal enquiries into the matter in 1963, because the press had grown interested, and he was evidently told reassuring lies by his backers. Nevertheless, in 1964, he found new funding for the magazine (from Cecil King at the Daily Mirror), and he distanced himself from it by spending more time teaching in the U.S. But even the new funding may have been corrupt. Frank Kermode, who resigned as editor with Spender, was also lied to, as he tells in his memoir Not Entitled (1995). And Kermode’s reputation, like Spender’s, was cleverly employed to defend the magazine. On May 20, 1967, The Saturday Evening Post published an article in which Thomas Braden, who was known to have headed the CIA’s division of international organizations in the early 1950s, stated that one editor at Encounter was a CIA agent. Spender told The New York Times, “I can’t imagine anyone believing I was a CIA agent.” He also doubted it was his American co-editor, Irving Kristol, and he said it could not have been Kermode who had been at the magazine only two years. He did not comment on whether it may have been Melvin Lasky, the American co-editor who had succeeded Kristol and who had supposedly pointed the finger at Spender. As the truth emerged (it never fully did), Spender was threatened and attacked by both adversaries and “friends” who were evidently continuing to try to control him. When Melvin Lasky attacked him in The Observer, Spender warned, on June 27 in The New York Times, that he would sue Encounter for libel if the attacks did not stop.

  Starcke, Walter (b. 1922). American actor and theatrical producer, and later, spiritual teacher and author. He altered the spelling of his last name to Starkey, but returned to Starcke, when he gave up acting. Isherwood first met him in January 1947 through John van Druten. Starcke starred in an unsuccessful play of van Druten’s in the late 1940s, then became van Druten’s producer and his longterm boyfriend. Van Druten’s previous lover, Carter Lodge, and Lodge’s new lover, Dick Foote, never liked Starcke, resulting in complicated rivalries among the four of them; van Druten and Starcke finally split up in 1957, the year van Druten died. Isherwood enjoyed Starcke’s company and remained in touch with him; he appears in D.1 and Lost Years. His books include Joel Goldsmith and I: An Inside Story of a Relationship with a Modern Mystic, It’s All God: The Flowers and the Fertilizer, and Homesick for Heaven: You Don’t Have to Wait.

  Steen, Mike (1928–1983). American stuntman, actor, author, born Malcolm H. Steen. He was from Louisiana, where he was friendly with Speed Lamkin, Tom Wright, and Henry Guerriero. Lamkin introduced him to Isherwood in the early 1950s. Gavin Lambert became romantic ally involved with Steen during 1958, and Steen also had relationships, perhaps sexual, with Nicholas Ray, William Inge, and Tennessee Williams. He worked as a stuntman in Ray’s Party Girl and did stunts or played bit parts in other movies in the late 1950s and 1960s, including a tiny part in the 1962 film of Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. He published two books: A Look at Tennessee Williams (1969) and Hollywood Speaks: An Oral History (1974). He appears in D.1.

  Stephen. See Spender, Stephen.

  Stern, James ( Jimmy) (1904–1993) and Tania Kurella (1906–1995). Irish writer and translator and his German wife. He was educated at Eton and, briefly, Sandhurst. In youth, he worked as a farmer in Southern Rhodesia and 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, the daughter of a psychiatrist. 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. The Sterns married in 1935. Isherwood met Jimmy in Sintra, Portugal, in 1936 through William Robson-Scott and introduced him to Auden with whom the Sterns became intimate friends, later, in America. In 1956, they returned to England and settled, eventually, at Hatch Manor in Wiltshire. His books include The Heartless Land (1932) and Something Wrong (1938)—both story collections—and The Hidden Damage (1945), about his trip with Auden to survey bomb damage in postwar G
ermany for the U.S. Army. Tania collaborated on translations of Mann, Kafka, and Freud. The Sterns appear in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Stevens, Marti (b. 1931). American singer and actress; she appeared in a few films, including All Night Long (1961), several times on Broadway, and often on T.V.

  Stewart, Donald Ogden (1890–1980) and Ella Winter. American actor, novelist, playwright, screenwriter and his wife, an author and translator. He was educated at Yale, served in the navy during World War I, and appeared on Broadway during the 1920s. His most famous screenplay was The Philadelphia Story (1940), for which he won an Academy Award. She wrote a bestselling book about the Soviet Union, Red Virtue: Human Relationships in the New Russia (1933), and translated from German The Diary of Otto Braun With Selections from His Letters and Poems and Wolfgang Koehler’s The Mentality of Apes. Her first husband was Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936), the journalist and author, and she edited his letters. The Stewarts were neighbors of Salka Viertel in Santa Monica, and they remained close to her when Salka’s career foundered during the McCarthy period. Stewart was blacklisted for his involvement with the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, and the couple left Hollywood for London in 1951 and settled in a house in Hampstead near the one loaned to Don Bachardy by the Burtons in 1961. Ella is mentioned in D.1.

  Strachwitz von Gross-Zauche und Camminetz, Graf Rudolf (1896–1969) and Barbara Greene (1907–1991). German diplomat and his wife, Isherwood’s cousin. Each of them had close ties to the conspirators in the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Strachwitz’s name was removed from the conspirators’ list for a proposed future German government because he was married to an English woman, officially an enemy. This saved his life and his wife’s when the plot failed and the list was found. After the war, he served as a German ambassador abroad and also made his home in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, where Hitler once had his summer retreat. Barbara Greene’s books include Land Benighted (1938) about her trip through Liberia with another Isherwood cousin, Graham Greene. Isherwood’s 1948 meeting with the Strachwitzes in Buenos Aires, where Strachwitz was then a university professor, is mentioned in his introduction to The Condor and the Cows.