The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Stravinsky, Igor (1882–1971). Russian-born composer; he went to Paris with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1920 and brought about a rhythmic revolution in Western music with The Rite of Spring (1911–1913), the most sensational of his many works commissioned for the company. He composed in a wide range of musical forms and styles; many of his early works evoke Russian folk music, and he was influenced by jazz. Around 1923 he began a long neo-classical period responding to the compositions of his great European predecessors. During the 1950s, with the encouragement of Robert Craft, he took up the twelve-note serial methods invented by Schoenberg and extended by Webern—he was already past seventy. After the Russian revolution, Stravinsky remained in Europe, making his home first in Switzerland and then in Paris, and he 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, 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 for English words was his opera, The Rake’s Progress (1951), for which Auden and Kallman wrote the libretto. Isherwood first met Stravinsky in August 1949 at lunch in the Farmer’s Market in Hollywood with Aldous and Maria Huxley. He was soon invited to the Stravinskys’ house for supper where he fell asleep listening to a Stravinsky recording; Stravinsky later told Robert Craft that this was the start of his great affection for Isherwood. He appears throughout D.1 and Lost Years.

  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, she 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. Isherwood met her with Stravinsky in August 1949. She painted in an abstract-primitive style influenced by Paul Klee, childlike and decorative. She appears throughout D.1 and in Lost Years.

  the Strip, also Sunset Strip. A once-glamorous section of Sunset Boulevard between Laurel Canyon Boulevard in the east and Doheny Drive in the west. Home to nightclubs like Ciro’s, Trocadero, Mocambo, Crescendo and expensive restaurants including La Rue and The Players.

  Stromberg, Hunt, Jr. (1923–1985). American T.V. executive; son of Hunt Stromberg (1894–1968), who was one of MGM’s most profitable and powerful film producers from the mid-1920s until he retired in 1951. Stromberg Jr. began his career as a theater producer and moved to T.V. early in the 1950s. He worked with James Aubrey at CBS on the original idea for the series “Have Gun, Will Travel” (1956) and during the 1960s, he supervised “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Green Acres,” and “Lost in Space.” He was fired from CBS at the time of Aubrey’s downfall in 1965 and for a time ran a production partnership with Aubrey until Aubrey took over MGM Studios in 1969. Later, Stromberg worked at Universal Studios. He produced “Frankenstein: The True Story” (1973), written by Isherwood and Bachardy, and “The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb” (1980), adapted by Herb Meadow from Barry Wynne’s book.

  Stuurman, Douwe (1910–1991). American classicist and professor of literature, raised in Washington state, where his Dutch immigrant parents were farmers. Of seven children, he alone completed his formal education, at Calvin College in Michigan, at the University of Oregon, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and studied philosophy, literature, and Greek. He taught at Reed College and Santa Barbara College before serving in U.S. military intelligence during World War II. At the end of the war, as part of a Library of Congress military team, he retrieved over 100,000 Nazi books, pamphlets, and files of unpublished chancellory correspondence, transporting them in army trucks and storing them in an army warehouse for later historical analysis. He taught in the English department at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1949 to 1975, arranged for Huxley to lecture there in 1959, and was responsible for Isherwood’s appointment in 1961. He married twice, first to a blind poet, later, briefly, to Phyllis Plous, director of the UCSB art museum. He appears in D.1.

  Sudhira. A nurse of Irish descent, born Helen Kennedy; she was a probationer nun at the Hollywood Vedanta Society when Isherwood arrived to live there in 1943. In youth, she had been widowed on the third day of her marriage. Afterwards, she worked in hospitals and for Dr. Kolisch and first came to the Vedanta Society professionally to nurse a devotee. In D.1, Isherwood tells how he relished being ill under her care; she also appears in Lost Years. She enlisted in the navy in January 1945 and later married for a second time and returned to nursing.

  Sujji Maharaj. See Nirvanananda, Swami.

  Surmelian, Leon (1905–1995). Armenian-American writer, popular historian, teacher. His books include I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen (1945), a memoir about his orphaned childhood in Turkey during the Armenian genocide. He was a professor at Los Angeles State College, later called California State University. He appears in D.1.

  Sutro, John (1903–1985). Oxford-educated British film producer and screen-writer. He was a friend of Evelyn Waugh and worked as a rubber merchant at the family firm in London before starting a production company, Ortus Films. He produced 49th Parallel (1941), The Way Ahead (1944) directed by Carol Reed, and Men of Two Worlds (1946), among others; later, he translated scripts for Roman Polanksi’s Cul-de-Sac (1966) and The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). Another close friend was Graham Greene, and, in 1960, Isherwood mentions Sutro’s proposed film of England Made Me, but it was produced only in 1973 by five others: C. Robert Allen, David Anderson, Jerome Z. Cline, Jack Levin, and Zika Vojcic. Sutro’s wife was Gillian Hammond, a fashion journalist.

  Swahananda, Swami. Monk of the Ramakrishna Order, from India; born near Habiganj, now in Bangladesh, and educated at Murari Chand College, Sylhet, and at the University of Calcutta where he got an M.A. in English. He was initiated in 1937 by Swami Vijnananda, a direct disciple of Ramakrishna, joined the order in 1947 and took his final vows in 1956. He was head of the Delhi Ramakrishna Mission, and then in 1968 was sent to the San Francisco center as assistant to Swami Ashokananda. Later, he became head of the Berkeley center, and in 1976 he was moved to Hollywood to replace the late Swami Prabhavananda. As a young monk, he edited Vedanta Kesari, a scholarly publication of the Ramakrishna Order, and he went on to publish numerous articles and books of his own.

  Swami. Used as a title to mean “Lord” or “Master.” A Hindu monk who has taken sannyas, the final vows of renunciation in the Hindu tradition. Isherwood used it in particular to refer to his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, and he pronounced it Shwami; see Prabhavananda.

  Swamiji. An especially respectful form of “Swami,” but also a particular name for Vivekananda towards the end of his life.

  tamas. See guna.

  Tate, Sharon (1943–1969). Texas-born model and starlet; she appeared in The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) directed by her husband, Roman Polanski, and in The Valley of the Dolls (1967). On August 9, 1969, Tate, eight months pregnant, was murdered with four friends by Charles Manson and his followers in the Polanskis’ rented house in Bel Air, Benedict Canyon. The next day, August 10, the Manson gang murdered Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in the Los Feliz/Silver Lake area. On August 12, Chet Young, a deranged fan of the singing Lennon Sisters, shot their father, William Lennon, in the parking lot of a golf course in Marina del Rey where Lennon was an instructor.

  Ted. See Bachardy, Ted.

  Teller, Edward (1908–2003). Hungarian-born nuclear physicist. He worked on the atom bomb at Los Alamos under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), then left to start the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory at Berkeley, where, with Stanislav Ulam, he developed the hydrogen bomb, first tested in 1952. He had a reputation for disdaining the mo
ral implications of his appetite for research, and colleagues found him difficult. In 1954, he failed to support Oppen heimer in public testimony after Oppenheimer’s security clearance was revoked over youthful links to the Communist party. Oppenheimer had opposed fast-paced development of the H-bomb, and he worked for international control of nuclear arms. The rivalry between the two scientists may lie behind Isherwood’s resentment dream about Teller, recorded in his diary April 19, 1962, at a time when Isherwood felt that he, like Oppenheimer, was being professionally persecuted, or at least misunderstood, by colleagues, partly for his liberal convictions. And Isherwood shared not only Oppenheimer’s liberalism but also his religious inclinations. Oppenheimer studied Sanskrit and Hinduism and publicly quoted the Baghavad Gita to express his awe when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atom bombs. In his entry for December 28, 1963, Isherwood observes that in a photograph taken in India, he resembles Oppenheimer.

  Tennant, Stephen (1906–1987). British poet, aesthete, eccentric; youngest son of Lord Glenconner, a Scottish peer, and Pamela Wyndham, a cousin of Oscar Wilde’s paramour, Lord Alfred Douglas. He studied painting at the Slade and worked for decades on a novel which he never completed. He was known for his extravagantly camp dress and manners, his interior decorating, and spending the last seventeen years of his life mostly in bed. He was an intimate friend of Cecil Beaton and was photographed by him several times, and he had a long affair with Siegfried Sassoon. He is said to be a model for Sebastian Flyte in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and for Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate.

  Tennessee. See Williams, Tennessee.

  Terry. See Jenkins, Terry.

  Thom, Richard (Dick) (d. 1968). American disciple of Swami Prabhavananda. His parents were among Swami’s devotees in Portland, Oregon in the 1920s, and Thom began preparing to be a monk while still in high school. He was also Northwest weightlifting champion in adolescence. He lived at the Vedanta Society in Hollywood with Isherwood and the other probationer monks briefly in 1943, until he got into trouble and was expelled from school. He took various jobs, then joined the marines, later returning to the monastery intermittently until the mid-1960s. He had trouble with alcoholism, was a loner, and never settled into the monastic life, although he remained close to the nuns in Santa Barbara through his parents who were gatekeepers at the temple. He appears in D.1. His cousin, Tommy Thom, was also at the Hollywood center for a time.

  Thompson, Nicholas. American theatrical agent, based in London. He was introduced to Isherwood and Bachardy by Robin French and became the London agent for A Meeting by the River. Isherwood records in March 1969 that Thompson planned to return to Los Angeles eventually and work with French at Chartwell Artists, but French does not recall offering him a job.

  Thomson, Virgil (1896–1989). American composer, music critic, author; born in Kansas and educated at Harvard. During the 1920s, he lived off and on in Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger and met the young French composers, including Poulenc and Auric who were known as “Les Six” and who were, like him, influenced by Satie. He became friendly with Gertrude Stein, who supplied libretti for his operas Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947). In 1940, he returned permanently to New York. He was the music critic for the Herald Tribune for a decade and a half, published eight books on music, including American Music Since 1910 (1971), and composed prolifically. His third and last opera, Lord Byron, on a libretto by Jack Larson, was planned for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but instead premiered at the Juilliard Opera Center in April 1972. His film scores include The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938), both directed by Pare Lorentz, and Louisiana Story (1948), directed by Robert Flaherty. His companion for many years was Maurice Grosser.

  Tony. See Richardson, Tony.

  Trabuco. Monastic community sixty miles south of Los Angeles and about twenty miles inland; founded by Gerald Heard in 1942. Heard anonymously provided $100,000 for the project (his life savings), and he consulted at length with various friends and colleagues as well as with members of the Quaker Society of Friends about how to organize the community. In 1940, he planned only a small retreat called “Focus,” then he renamed the community after buying the ranch at Trabuco. Isherwood’s cousin on his mother’s side, Felix Greene, oversaw the purchase of the property and the construction of the building which could house fifty. By 1949 Heard found leading and administering the group too much of a strain, and he persuaded the Trustees to give Trabuco to the Vedanta Society. It opened as a Vedanta monastery in September 1949.

  Tree, Iris (1896–1968). English actress and writer; third daughter of actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree. She published three volumes of poetry (two before 1930, a third in 1966) and wrote poems and articles for magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as Botteghe Oscura, 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, an 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 the Huxleys introduced her to Isherwood in California during the war. With Allan Harkness, she brought a troupe of actors to Ojai to start a repertory theater, The High Valley Theater, and she adapted, wrote and acted in plays for the group including her own Cock-a-doodle-doo. Many of the actors were pacifists like herself. 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 she appears in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Tutin, Dorothy (1931–2001). English actress; she played Sally Bowles in the original London stage production of I Am a Camera in 1954. As he records in D.1, Isherwood became friendly with her in London and visited her several times on her houseboat. The Hollow Crown, with which she toured in 1963 in the U.S., was a “Royal Revue,” devised by John Barton for the Royal Shakespeare Company, about the kings and queens of England from William the Conqueror to Victoria. Afterwards, she appeared in another RSC production, John Gay’s 1728 play The Beggar’s Opera. Her films include The Beggar’s Opera (1953) opposite Olivier and A Tale of Two Cities (1958) opposite Dirk Bogarde.

  Tynan, Elaine. See Dundy, Elaine.

  Tynan, Kenneth (Ken) (1927–1980). English theater critic, educated at Oxford. During the 1950s and 1960s, he wrote regularly for the London Evening Standard, then for The Observer, The New Yorker, and other publications. He was literary adviser to the National Theater from its inception in 1963, but his anti-establishment views brought about his departure before the end of the decade. His support for realistic working-class drama—by new playwrights such as Osborne, Delaney and Wesker—as well as for the works of Brecht and Beckett, was widely influential. Many of his essays and reviews are collected as books. At the end of stage censorship in 1968, he devised and produced the sex revue Oh! Calcutta! which opened in New York in 1969 and in London in 1970. His first wife, from 1951, was the actress and writer Elaine Dundy, with whom he had a daughter, Tracy Tynan, later a costume designer for films. In 1963, he began an affair with the newly married Kathleen Halton Gates (1937–1995), a Canadian journalist and, later, novelist and screenwriter, raised in England; they married in 1967 and settled for a time in the U.S. with their children, Roxana and Matthew. Isherwood first met Ken and Elaine Tynan in London in 1956, and they are mentioned in D.1.

  UCLA. University of California at Los Angeles.

  UCSB. University of California at Santa Barbara, where Isherwood taught during the autumn of 1960.

  Upward, Edward (1903–2009). English novelist and schoolmaster.
Isherwood first met him in 1921 at their public school, Repton, and followed him (Upward was a year older) to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Their close friendship was inspired by their shared attitude of rebellion toward family and school authority and by their literary obsessions. 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 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 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 left it, but Upward never abandoned his Marxist-Leninist convictions. Towards the end of the 1950s, he overcame writer’s block and a nervous breakdown to produce 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 in Sandown, on the Isle of Wight, where Upward retired in 1962. They were followed by four collections of short stories. Upward remained a challenging and trusted critic of Isherwood’s work throughout Isherwood’s life, and a loyal friend. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.