The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969
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354 A U.S. military veterans’ organization.
355 Published respectively by the homosexual advocacy groups, One, Inc. and the Mattachine Society.
356 A neighborhood acquaintance who did some remodelling work at 145 Adelaide Drive in 1959; he appears in D.1.
357 Paxton worked at the gallery, but didn’t own it; he sometimes lived in Los Angeles.
358 Director of Judgment at Nuremberg.
359 I.e., the European Economic Community (EEC), functioning from January 1958.
360 Nineteenth-century Hindu reformer and the non-sectarian religious and social movement which he transformed.
361 The 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.
362 He set “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets as Anthem.
363 Isherwood evidently identified with Teller’s colleague, Robert Oppenheimer, whose professional judgement was questioned by Teller at public security hearings in 1954. See Glossary.
364 The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, translated by Prabhavananda and Isherwood.
365 Suspected communists were questioned in Los Angeles, April 24–28. Possibly, Isherwood meant to type, “antidesegregation crowd.” See Glossary under House Un-American Activities Committee.
366 U.S. Steel announced a six-dollar-a-ton price increase after pushing through a non-inflationary wage agreement with the union. On April 11, Kennedy publicly attacked the executives for their greed; privately, he threatened an IRS audit.
367 Welsh-born actor and, later, director (1907–1986); he won an Academy Award for The Lost Weekend (1945) and had his own T.V. show in the 1950s.
368 Pen and ink drawings of American fashion designer Oleg Cassini (b. 1913 in Paris, known for dressing Mrs. Kennedy as First Lady) and of Merle Oberon in a Cassini evening gown, for full-page ads in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
369 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).
370 Les Noyers de l’Altenburg (1948) by André Malraux, translated by A.W. Fielding in 1952.
371 Percy Pinkerton’s 1953 translation of Zola’s novel, which includes an introduction by Angus Wilson.
372 Stuart Gilbert’s 1946 translation of Camus’ L’Étranger (1942).
373 American actor (1918–1971), educated at Columbia, on Broadway from the early 1940s. His films include The Corn Is Green (1946), Rope (1948), Gun Crazy (1950), and Spartacus (1960). He lived across the street from Parker and Campbell with his lover Clem Brace.
374 Happiness.
375 American singer and actor (b. 1928); he starred on his own radio and T.V. show until 1959 when he divorced Debbie Reynolds to marry Elizabeth Taylor.
376 American actor (b. 1925); he had recently starred in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Some Like It Hot (1959), and Spartacus (1960), but his marriage to actress Janet Leigh was ending.
377 Blond, blue-eyed star (1936–2001) of teen T.V. series “Surfside Six” (1960– 1962) and “Hawaiian Eye” (1962–1963) and of similar films with Sandra Dee and Suzanne Pleshette.
378 British actor (b. 1936), Romeo opposite Judi Dench in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1960 stage production. In Hollywood, he had character parts. He sometimes returned to the London stage and later developed a T.V. career.
379 Hudson (1925–1985) was nominated for an Academy Award for Giant (1956) and had more recently appeared in Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1957), and Pillow Talk (1959).
380 Probably Solomon Sturges IV (b. 1941), known as “Mon,” son of the playwright, screenwriter, director (1898–1959) and his third wife, Louise Tevis.
381 A lecture included in Jnana Yoga and later in Vedanta: Voice of Freedom (1986) with a foreword by Isherwood.
382 A minimum-security correctional facility where inmates worked in the laundry, kitchen, and garden; probably the Los Angeles County Honor Farm.
383 According to Huxley’s biographer, Sybille Bedford, Max Cutler pronounced Maria Huxley’s cancer hopeless in 1954.
384 Carl Jung coined the term and lectured and wrote about it several times, including a long essay, “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” (1952).
385 American actor (1914–1965), on stage in England and on Broadway; he became a movie star with The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and The Southerner (1945).
386 American movie producer, son of Sol Lesser (1890–1980) who produced Tarzan and Dick Tracy movies and Westerns.
387 Hearn (1850–1904), born in Greece and educated in England, was a journalist in America, then, in 1890, settled in Japan with a Japanese wife and taught English literature at the Imperial University, Tokyo.
388 Marlene Laurence (d. circa 1980), an eccentric Hollywood devotee with an unpredictable temper; she worked at Kodak.
389 Novelist and literary critic; she published work in English and in SerboCroat.
390 American poet, novelist, critic (b. 1919); her books include Paul Valéry: The Mind in the Mirror (1952) and Signs and Cities (1968) with a Bachardy drawing of her on the cover.
391 A professor of English at L.A. State from 1960 to 1984.
392 American stage actor (191[4]–1989), Roerick’s longtime companion; he appears in D.1.
393 Harvard-educated American actor (b. 1931); he starred in Tea and Sympathy on Broadway (1953) and in Hollywood (1956), played a T.V. lawyer in “Arrest and Trial” (1963) and “Peyton Place” (1965–1966), then became a real-life lawyer.
394 Tree was married to Brad Fuller, and they had a child, but Fuller was companion to American poet and translator Hugh Chisolm; Fuller and Chisolm appear in D.1.
395 Stanwyck played a lesbian bordello mistress in the film.
396 Bachardy drew her half a dozen times on two different occasions and later drew her son and daughter, but she never bought a portrait from him, so the check was for something else.
397 Andreas Voutsinas; see Glossary under Fonda.
398 Claudine à l’école (1900) and Claudine à Paris (1901).
399 Chauffeur and helper.
400 Caroline Bouvier (b. 1933), socialite sister of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy; then married to her second husband, Prince Stanislaus Radziwill (1914–1976).
401 I.e., Cheltenham literary festival.
402 “Jesus” in Nicholas Ray’s 1961 remake of the Cecil B. DeMille silent movie about Christ.
403 He had been a tightrope walker; see Glossary.
404 Independent production company.
405 Lawyer-accountant for Carter Lodge, who recommended him to Isherwood.
406 A friend of the Laughtons and of Jay de Laval; Isherwood met him in 1945. He is mentioned in D.1 and Lost Years.
407 Not his real name.
408 Welsh-born psychoanalyst (1878–1958), biographer of Freud, author and broadcaster. President for many years of the British and the International Psychoanalytical Societies.
409 English character actor and playwright (1908–1992); he was married to Cooper’s daughter, Joan Buckmaster.
410 English stage star (1888–1982), also in character roles; she appeared in a few movies and in “Upstairs Downstairs” on T.V.
411 Evidently William Masters and his research assistant, later wife, Virginia Johnson. They worked together from 1957 and founded the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis in 1964. Their bestsellers include Human Sexual Response (1966) and Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970).
412 Ben’s older brother, Eugene, an artist and architect, helped Frank Lloyd Wright run Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin (which Isherwood calls Taliesin East) and Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. He appears in D.1.
413 Made of thin wood strips spaced to let in light and air.
414 He was married himself at the time. See Glossary.
415 Luis Miguel Dominguín (1926–1995), Spanish bullfighter; in D.1 Isherwood mentions his deadly rivalry with Antonio Ordóñes.
416 Arthur Michael Ramsey (1904–1988), Bishop of Durham (1952–1956), Archbishop of York (1956–1961), Archbishop of Canterbury (1961–1974), and afterwards life pe
er. The Rev. James B. Simpson’s book was The Hundredth Archbishop of Canterbury (1962). The Mitre and the Hall are boarding houses at Isherwoods’ public school, Repton.
417 Carl T. Jackson, later a specialist in U.S. intellectual history and a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, was writing his UCLA Ph.D. thesis, “The Swami in America: A History of the Ramakrishna Movement in the United States, 1893–1960,” published as Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United States (1994).
418 The Ascent of F6, Auden and Isherwood’s 1936 play, for broadcast on local radio on November 7.
419 Cf., Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well (II.iii), “A dark house and a detested wife.”
420 For Bachardy-Isherwood Enterprises.
421 Upward’s In the Thirties.
422 August 3, at the radio station KPFK.
423 On Camel Point Drive, the oceanfront house of a devotee, Ruth Conrad; Swami often stayed there in the summer.
424 Bill Bergfeldt became a monk, Atma, at the Vedanta Society of Southern California and later settled at the Hollywood Vedanta Society. Previously he was a devotee at the Kansas City Center. He does not recall serving Satprakashananda.
425 On August 5. Isherwood describes his several meetings with her, at parties, in D.1.
426 Mae West (1892–1980)—film star, playwright, sex bomb, wit—was about to have her seventieth birthday, on August 17; Monroe was thirty-six.
427 North American Aviation, Inc. built the Apollo spacecraft for NASA and the Saturn V rockets which launched them.
428 See Glossary under Rembrandt.
429 French stage actor (1897–1978), a Hollywood leading man in the 1930s and, during the 1950s and 1960s, a regular on a T.V. drama series he co-produced. The play was Lord Pengo by S.N. Behrman; Bachardy’s drawing was for a poster to promote the Broadway opening.
430 Poet, author, anarchist (1921–2000), imprisoned as a C.O. during W.W.II; he co-edited with Holley Cantine a collection by imprisoned C.O.s, Prison Etiquette, The Convict’s Compendium of Useful Information (1950), with a preface by Isherwood.
431 Gregory was producing Lord Pengo; Janet Gaynor, widow of Gilbert Adrian, recommended Bachardy to him. See Glossary.
432 German photographer, introduced by Herbert List in Munich during Isherwood and Bachardy’s 1955 European trip. He appears in D.1.
433 Aircraft carrier USS Princeton, then training with marines in Okinawan waters.
434 Reinhardt and Charles Kaufman wrote the screenplay Freud; Huston directed.
435 The day he delivered “A Personal Statement” as part of a lecture series “The Writer at Mid-Century: The Moral Crisis,” sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley Extension.
436 Anthony Cave Brown (1929–2006), British journalist for The Daily Mail, The Times, and the Manchester Guardian; he later published popular books on military intelligence and espionage.
437 A blond beauty celebrated in Santa Monica Canyon during the 1940s, briefly a boyfriend of Jay de Laval; Isherwood tells of his own relationship with Cowan in Lost Years.
438 See Glossary under Cuban Missile Crisis.
439 Leonora Gershwin (d. 1991), wife of Ira Gershwin (1895–1983), the lyricist brother of composer George Gershwin.
440 Columnist from 1951 to 1966 for The Hollywood Reporter.
441 American radio and T.V. journalist (b. 1932), for CBS and, later, NBC, where he became John Chancellor’s understudy on “NBC Nightly News” in the 1970s and 1980s.
442 Gregory (b. 1932) became famous in 1961 for his Chicago Playboy Club skits satirizing racism; later he was a civil rights activist, anti-war protestor, anti-drug campaigner, and author.
443 It was Isherwood, September 30 on KNXT.
444 Bachardy thought the plays banal and could never bear watching professionally accomplished friends humiliated by amateur productions.
445 Irish stage actress (1895–1975), mother of Angela, Edgar and Bruce Lansbury. She played small character parts in Hollywood films and appeared on T.V. Bachardy drew her portrait several times.
446 Wright (1915–1989) was British; he guest-starred on American T.V. from the late 1950s through the 1970s.
447 He ran the Vedanta centers in both cities for many years.
448 Shraddha, a former ballerina, and her husband Bob Louis, had lived in India, where they became close to Swami Sarvagatananda. Sarvagatananda became head of the Boston and Providence centers for the next forty years. The Louises remained devotees in Santa Barbara until their deaths in the 1990s.
449 Later changed to George.
450 Possibly Soules (1935–1991), born in Canada, raised in Detroit; he was a circus star for nearly four decades. After a bad fall in 1964, he developed a dog act, “Poodles de Paree.” He was murdered in a Las Vegas hotel.
451 The California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena.
452 A Santa Monica realtor.
453 Anne Marshall’s Hunting the Guru in India was published by Gollancz in 1963; it contains no passages about Ramakrishna and homosexuality.
454 He continued the new volume for four years and labelled it “October 1962–September 1966.”
455 I.e., the University of California at Irvine.
456 In order to turn back Soviet ships carrying more weapons; see Glossary under Cuban Missile Crisis.
457 American bass Jerome Hines (1921–2003) sang the lead in Boris Godunov, October 23, and Khrushchev even visited his dressing room.
458 The Cuban representative, Mario García Incháustegui, characterized the Soviet weapons as defensive, asserted Cuba’s right to defend itself, and denounced the blockade as an “act of war.”
459 Longtime resident of Santa Monica Canyon.
460 China invaded on October 20; see Glossary under Sino-Indian War.
461 Leucocristine, or vincristine, extracted from periwinkles (vinca), used in chemotherapy.
462 On November 7, Nixon lost the California governor’s race. In what he called his “last press conference,” he announced, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more.”
463 Frank Laughton (1907–1964), youngest of the three Laughton brothers; he ran his parents’ Pavilion Hotel in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, where the boys had spent their childhood.
464 Twenty-two portrait drawings at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, January 29 to February 17, 1963.
465 Jerry Wald had been dead for only four months. Stephen Sondheim’s musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, opened May 8, 1962 on Broadway.
466 “Thou art that,” one of the Hindu “great sayings” stating the oneness of the soul with Brahman.
467 Not his real name. He was a trained engineer, considered brilliant.
468 The missiles were already being shipped back to Russia, but Soviet IL-28 bombers remained in Cuba; Castro agreed, on November 19, to their removal.
469 I.e., Pacific Coast Highway.