Ure, Mary (1933–1975). British stage actress who appeared in a few Hollywood films, including Sons and Lovers (1960), for which she received an Academy Award nomination. She grew up in the suburbs of Glasgow, the daughter of a prosperous engineer. She played the female lead in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court in London in 1956, then in New York, and afterwards in the film, and she became Osborne’s second wife. In D.1, Isherwood tells of meeting her with Tony Richardson in 1960 when she was appearing (as Clare Bloom’s replacement) in the touring stage production of Jean Giraudoux’s Duel of Angels with Vivien Leigh. She divorced Osborne and, in 1963, married Robert Shaw (1927–1978), the English actor and writer, with whom she appeared in Tony Richardson’s production of The Changeling (1961) and several other plays and films, and with whom she had four children. Their first child was born while Ure was still married to Osborne. Her other films include Storm Over the Nile (1955) and Where Eagles Dare (1969). She died from a combination of barbiturates and alcohol.
Usha. A nun at the Vedanta Society and later at the convent in Santa Barbara; originally called Ursula Bond and, after sannyas, Pravrajika Anandaprana. She was a German Jew, educated in England, and came to the U.S. as a young refugee during the war. Until the war ended, she worked for the U.S. government as a censor. She had been married before taking up Vedanta, and she had a daughter, Caroline Bond; she left three-year-old Caroline with the child’s father, but Caroline later joined the Hollywood convent where she was known as Sumitra, took brahmacharya vows, and remained for about ten years before leaving to join an ashram, which emphasized Sanskrit and scriptural study. Later, Sumitra did graduate work in Sanskrit and became a freelance editor. Usha appears in D.1.
Vadim, Roger (1928–2000). French actor of stage and screen, journalist, screen-writer, director; he dropped his Ukrainian surname, Plemiannikov. Vadim helped launch the New Wave in movies when he directed his wife, Brigitte Bardot, in Et Dieu créa la femme/And God Created Woman (1956), the first of many erotically charged films, mostly in French. Later work included Les Liaisons dangereuses (1959), Et mourir de plaisir/Blood and Roses (1960), La Ronde/Circle of Love (1964), Barbarella (1968), Don Juan 1973 ou si Don Juan était une femme/Ms. Don Juan (1973), La Jeune fille assassinée/Charlotte (1974), Une Femme fidèle (1976), and three U.S. films, Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), a remake of And God Created Woman (1988), and The Mad Lover (1991). He collaborated on many of his screenplays and continued to appear as an actor, for instance in The Testament of Orpheus (1959), Rich and Famous (1981), and Into the Night (1985). His second wife was Danish actress Annette Stroyberg, with whom he had his first child; he had another child with Catherine Deneuve before marrying Jane Fonda in 1965. He and Fonda also had a child, then divorced in 1973. He later married twice more, to Catherine Schneider, with whom he had a fourth child, then to Marie-Christine Barrault.
Vandanananda, Swami (1915–2007). Hindu monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He arrived at the Hollywood Vedanta Society from India in the summer of 1955 and eventually became chief assistant, replacing Swami Asheshananda. In 1969 he returned to India, was head of the Delhi Center, and later, at Belur Math, became Assistant Secretary of the order, and then General Secretary. He appears in D.1.
Vanderbilt, Gloria. See Cooper, Wyatt.
van Druten, John (1901–1957). English playwright and novelist. Isherwood met him in New York in 1939, and they became friends because they were both pacifists. Van Druten’s family was Dutch, but he 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, then emigrated in 1938 and became a U.S. citizen in 1944. His strength was light comedy; among his numerous plays and adaptations, many of which were later filmed, 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. Van Druten acquired a sixty percent share in material which he used in I Am a Camera from Goodbye to Berlin; Isherwood retained a forty percent share. Anyone acquiring rights after van Druten needed his agreement or, after his death, the agreement of his estate. In 1951, van Druten directed The King and I on Broadway. He also wrote a few novels and two volumes of autobiography, including The Widening Circle (1957). He 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 him with a permanently crippled arm; partly as a result of this, he became attracted to Vedanta and other religions (he was a renegade Christian Scientist), and in his second autobiography he describes a minor mystical experience which he had in a drug store in Beverly Hills. He was a contributor to Isherwood’s Vedanta for the Western World, and there are numerous accounts of him in D.1 and Lost Years.
Vanessa. See Redgrave, Vanessa.
Van Horn, Mike. American artist and top fashion illustrator, especially for Lord & Taylor. A close friend of Bachardy. In the early 1970s, he left Los Angeles to continue his career in New York State where he now renovates country properties, paints, and sculpts.
Van Petten, Bill (d. mid-1980s). An Ivy Leaguer who divided his time between La Jolla and Santa Monica, where he lived at the bottom of the Canyon in an apartment once inhabited by Jim Charlton. He contributed to the Los Angeles Times and was an early friend of Tom Wolfe. He had a small independent income and often travelled abroad, especially to the Middle East. During the 1960s he had radiation treatment for cancer, and the treatment damaged his face and eyes. Van Sant, Tom (b. 1931). Californian sculptor, painter, conceptual artist, and kite maker; he produced the first satellite map of Earth, the Geosphere Image, and founded the Geosphere Project to model issues of earth resource management.
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 Art, the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and the Slade where he was Bachardy’s tutor in 1961. He also taught 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. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.
Vedanta. One of six orthodox systems of Hindu philosophy, Vedanta is based on the Upanishads, the later portion of the ancient Hindu scriptures known as the Vedas. More generally, Vedanta is the whole body of literature which explains and comments on these texts. Probably first formulated by the philosopher Badarayana (second or first century bc), Vedanta teaches that the object of existence is not release but realization—that we should learn to know ourselves for what we really are. This realization is not obtained through logic, but through the direct experience of the inspired sages recorded in the Upanishads. Vedanta is uncompromisingly non-dualistic. Everything exists through Brahman; Brahman is consciousness, joy, bliss absolute. He is the Ultimate Principle and the Final Reality and the Indivisible One. Brahman within the individual is the divine self or Atman; Atman is eternal, unchanging, and one with Brahman. The phenomenal world of nature and man has merely a temporary, changing existence; it is the result of maya, illusion. Ignorance of this leads to a belief that things exist apart from the absolute. Ignorance is responsible for samsara, the continuous cycle of death and rebirth and death which lasts as long as the individual remains in the toils of maya. The search for Reality is a mystical search, pursued by introspective means such as meditation and spiritual discipline. Vedanta honors all the great spiritual teachers and impersonal or personal aspects of Godhead worshipped by different religions, considering them as manifestions of one Reality. Vedanta had a broadreaching revival in the nineteenth century under the leadership of the Indian holy man Ramakrishna, and it spread to the West through his disciples, especially Vivekananda, and the disciples of his disciples. Isherwood began his
study of Vedanta in July 1939 under the guidance of Swami Prabhavananda, a second-generation disciple.
Vedanta Place. The Vedanta Society of Southern California was able to adopt the address Vedanta Place when, in 1952, the Hollywood Freeway cut off the tail end of Ivar Avenue where the society was located, leaving it in a cul-de-sac. The property, previously number 1946 Ivar Avenue, had been the home of Carrie Mead Wyckoff, later known as Sister Lalita. As Isherwood tells in D.1, he lived at the Hollywood society as a novice monk during World War II.
Ventura, Clyde (1936–1990). American actor and stage director, born in New Orleans. He was in the 1963 Broadway cast of Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, and he was Artistic Director of Theater West in Los Angeles, where he directed a number of Williams plays. He was also an acting coach at Actors Studio on the West Coast, and he had a few small movie roles.
Vera. See Stravinsky, Vera.
Vidal, Gore (b. 1925). American writer. He introduced himself to Isherwood in a café in Paris in early 1948, having previously sent him the manuscript of his third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948). Vidal’s father taught at West Point, and Vidal was in the army as a young man. Afterwards, he wrote essays on politics and culture, short stories, and many novels, including Williwaw (1946), Myra Breckinridge (1968, dedicated to Isherwood), its sequel, Myron (1975), Two Sisters: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1970), Kalki (1978), Duluth (1983), The Judgement of Paris (1984), Live from Golgotha (1992), The Smithsonian Institute (1998), ancient and medieval historical fiction such as A Search for the King (1950), Messiah (1955), Julian (1964), Creation (1981), and the multi-volume American chronicle comprised of Burr (1974), Lincoln (1984), 1876 (1976), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1989), and Washington, D.C. (1967). He also published detective novels under a pseudonym, Edgar Box. 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). His adaptation of Friedrich Duerrenmatt’s Romulus the Great, about Romulus Augustulus, ran on Broadway from January to March 1962. In 1960 Vidal ran for Congress, and in 1982 for the Senate, both times unsuccessfully. He bought Edgewater, a Greek Revival mansion on the Hudson River north of New York, and lived there off and on with Howard Austen, from 1950 until he sold it in 1968; later he settled in Rapallo, Italy, and finally in Los Angeles. Over the years, Vidal campaigned to become a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; with pushing from Isherwood, he was finally elected in 1976 and turned it down. He describes his friendship with Isherwood in his memoir, Palimpsest (1995) and in Point to Point Navigation (2006). There are many passages about him in D.1 and Lost Years.
Vidor, King (1894–1982). American film director, screenwriter, producer; born and raised in Texas. He began directing in the silent era with The Turn in the Road for Universal in 1919, then formed his own studio, and afterwards worked for MGM. His movies include The Big Parade (1925), The Crowd (1928), Show People (1928), Billy the Kid (1930), The Champ (1931), Northwest Passage (1940), Duel in the Sun (1947), and The Fountainhead (1949). In D.1, Isherwood describes meeting him in Italy in 1955 on the set of War and Peace (1956), which Vidor was directing with the assistance of Mario Soldati. Vidor retired when his next film, Solomon and Sheba (1959), failed. During the 1960s he taught at UCLA film school, and in 1979 he received a special Academy Award as a creator and innovator in film. His first wife was silent screen star Florence Vidor, who came to Hollywood with him in 1915 as a newlywed; they divorced in 1924. He was married to Eleanor Boardman, also a film star, for a few years in the mid-1920s. His third wife was a writer, Elizabeth Hill.
Vidya, also Vidyatmananda, Swami, previously John Yale. See Prema Chaitanya.
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. Her guests included the most celebrated writers and movie stars of the time. In 1946, Isherwood moved into her garage apartment, at 165 Mabery Road, with Bill Caskey. By then Salka was living alone and had little money. Her husband had left; 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 herself and let out her house; 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. She published a memoir, The Kindness of Strangers, in 1969. She appears in D.1 and Lost Years.
Vince. See Davis, Vince.
Vishwananda, Swami. Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order. Isherwood met him in 1943 when Vishwananda visited the Hollywood Vedanta Society and other centers on the West Coast. Vishwananda was head of the Vedanta Center in Chicago. He appears in D.1.
Vivekananda, Swami (1863–1902). Narendranath Datta (known as Naren or Narendra and later as Swamiji) took the monastic name Vivekananda in 1893. He was Ramakrishna’s chief disciple. He came from a wealthy and cultured background and was attending university in Calcutta when Ramakrishna recognized him as an incarnation of one of his “eternal companions,” a free, perfect soul born into maya with the avatar and possessing some of the avatar’s characteristics. Vivekananda was trained by Ramakrishna to carry his message, and he led the disciples after Ramakrishna’s death, though he left them for long periods, first to wander through India as a monastic, practising spiritual disciplines, then to travel twice to America and Europe, where his lectures and classes spawned the first western Vedanta centers. In India he devoted much time to founding and administering the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. His followers hired a British stenographer, J.J. Goodwin, to transcribe his lectures; these transcriptions, which Goodwin probably edited into complete sentences and paragraphs, along with Vivekananda’s letters to friends and to his own and Ramakrishna’s disciples, were published as The Complete Works of Vivekananda. Isherwood wrote the introduction to one volume, What Religion Is: In the Words of Swami Vivekananda (1960), selected by Prema Chaitanya.
Wald, Jerry (1911–1962) and Connie. American screenwriter and producer, born in New York and educated at New York University, and his wife. He worked as a journalist, produced film shorts for Warner Brothers in the early 1930s, and then became a screenwriter before starting to produce his own features. In 1950, he formed a production company with Norman Krasna and afterwards joined Columbia Pictures as a vice-president and executive producer. Then in 1956, he formed Jerry Wald Productions, releasing his films through Twentieth Century-Fox where he had a high reputation and a great deal of power. As a producer, his name is associated with a long list of films from the 1940s and 1950s, including All Through the Night (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945), Key Largo (1948), Johnny Belinda (1948), Adventures of Don Juan (1948), The Glass Menagerie (1950), all at Warner Brothers, and Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), Peyton Place (1957), The Long Hot Summer (1958), Sons and Lovers (1960), and Let’s Make Love (1960). He also did screenwriting work at Warner Brothers on In Caliente (1935), Brother Rat (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), Torrid Zone (1940), They Drive by Night (1940), and others. He was rumored to be a model for Budd Schulberg’s What Make
s Sammy Run? Isherwood was hired by Wald in 1956 to work on Jean-Christophe (never made), and Gore Vidal and Gavin Lambert also worked for Wald. He appears in D.1. Only months after his death, on July 13, 1962, his wife, Connie, married a successful Beverly Hills doctor called Myron Prinzmetal. Prinzmetal was a drug addict, and the marriage did not last. She went back to calling herself Connie Wald and continued in her role of Hollywood hostess.
Warshaw, Howard (1920–1977). American artist, born in New York City, educated at Pratt Institute, the National Academy of Design Art School, and the Art Students League. He moved to California in 1942 and worked in the animation studios of Walt Disney and later Warner Brothers, then taught briefly at the Jepson Art Institute where he was influenced by a colleague, Rico Lebrun. In 1951, he began teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he remained for over twenty years. He painted murals in the Dining Commons at UCSB and at the Santa Barbara Public Library. At UCLA he painted the neurological mural, and he also did murals for U.C. San Diego and U.C. Riverside. He was blind in one eye. His wife Frances had money of her own. She had been married previously to Mel Ferrer with whom she had a daughter called Pepa and a son. Isherwood and Warshaw became friendly when Isherwood began teaching at UCSB, and Isherwood usually slept at their house when he stayed overnight in Santa Barbara. In 1954, Isherwood encouraged Bachardy to attend drawing classes with Warshaw in Los Angeles, but Bachardy found the class too theoretical and left. Years later, Warshaw sat for Bachardy.
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