The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

693 Here Isherwood added by hand the names of Y. and Z., close friends.

  694 Blow-up (1966).

  695 I.e., Blow-up.

  696 Both quotes are from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”

  697 As the Russians advanced on Berlin in early 1945, Walther Wenck (1900-1982), the youngest German general, initiated the counterattack, February 15–16, then was ordered to Berlin to update Hitler. Returning to the fighting at dawn, he fell asleep and had a spectacular crash. The attack was called off.

  698 Emlyn Williams’s 1936 play about a violent rural killer; it was twice adapted as a film.

  699 Hemmings, the British actor (1941–2003), was appearing in Joshua Logan’s film musical Camelot (1967) with Redgrave and Franco Nero, the Italian actor (b. 1941) who became her lover. Hemmings had just appeared in Blowup with Redgrave.

  700 Norman’s Letter (1966).

  701 Religion in Practice (1968).

  702 American character actor (1905–1991), W.W.II veteran and former teacher; he appeared in Julius Caesar (1953), The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955), Spartacus (1960), and others.

  703 Black Baptist preacher (circa 1880–1965), founder of a non-sectarian Christian movement, Peace Mission, which aimed to establish an interracial paradise on earth and attracted large sums of money. He claimed he was God.

  704 Leary (1920–1996), former Harvard psychology professor, was sentenced to thirty years when he took responsibility for his daughter possessing marijuana in 1965. He appealed, on grounds of self-incrimination, and won in 1969, but meanwhile was arrested again for possession in 1968.

  705 American hairdresser; longtime companion of John Goodwin.

  706 Auden was writing about The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) for an Erdman series, “Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective.” He destroyed the 1966 pamphlet, possibly already completed, because Tolkien angrily objected to it after Auden criticized the appearance of Tolkien’s house.

  707 The pornographic poem, beginning “It was a Spring day, a day for a lay. . .,” appeared in Ed Sanders’s arts magazine Fuck You, March 1965; it was untitled but headed “A gobble poem snatched from the notebooks of W.H. Auden.”

  708 A Los Angeles acquaintance, about Bachardy’s age, who sat for him several times, once with his identical twin brother.

  709 Towns in Yorkshire, Surrey, and Ireland, where Isherwood lived in childhood while following his father’s regiment before W.W.I.

  710 I.e., youngest daughter (1901–1918) of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, rumored to have escaped execution with her family at Ekaterinburg. Ingrid Bergman had starred in the 1956 film, Anastasia.

  711 I.e., the back sides of the seven Cambridge colleges along the River Cam, with rear lawns running down to the water’s edge and up the opposite banks.

  712 Isherwood’s college, also attended by Marlowe.

  713 Mood.

  714 Henry Heckford’s book was never published.

  715 Patrick Leigh Fermor (b. 1915), British travel writer.

  716 Two waist-high columnar stone markers on the Gritstone Trail, probably the shafts of a pair of Anglo-Saxon crosses destroyed during the Reformation.

  717 From “The Child’s Grave” by Edmund Blunden.

  718 French painter (1865–1938), model and friend of Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and others. Salka Viertel had asked Isherwood to work on a Valadon film with her in 1958; see D.1.

  719 The Charge of the Light Brigade was filmed in Turkey, where Neil Hartley was assisting Richardson.

  720 For years, leftist friends warned Spender that the CIA secretly funded Encounter. He resigned as co-editor May 7, 1967, telling The New York Times he had been unable to confirm the allegations until a month before. Patrick Woodcock’s dinner party was May 8. See Glossary.

  721 Trilling (1905–1975), prolific literary critic and professor of literature at Columbia, wrote E.M. Forster (1943), which Isherwood read in November 1959. See D.1.

  722 Diana Trilling (1905–1996), also a literary critic. She reviewed Prater Violet with enthusiasm, as Isherwood tells in Lost Years.

  723 This Timeless Moment.

  724 Nava, born in Los Angeles in 1927 to Mexican immigrant parents, became a history professor and was later ambassador to Mexico.

  725 A nationwide movement started by Martin Luther King and Benjamin Spock in April 1967.

  726 John Hay Whitney (1904–1982)—sportsman, financier, film producer, phil-an thropist, publisher, one of the richest men in America, from an old New England family—married twice but had only romantic liaisons with movie stars.

  727 Arlen (1895–1956), British-educated, Bulgarian-Armenian novelist, playwright, and screenwriter of cosmopolitan, debauched bohemia, wrote the 1924 bestseller The Green Hat; Bankhead starred in the stage adaptation.

  728 A police raid on a black after-hours club, July 23, triggered five days of violence and looting; 2,700 businesses were sacked, 1,300 buildings burned, 5,000 people left homeless; and there were 41 dead, 347 wounded, and 3,000 arrested.

  729 For a sex offense; see Glossary.

  730 “Posko Piati knows everything”; the sequence of ten letters—each appears twice—is a system for laying out twenty cards. The viewer chooses one, the cards are collected and laid out again, and the sharp can identify the card.

  731 John Lee Thompson (1914–2002), British actor, playwright, screenwriter; he directed The Guns of Navarone (1961) and two Planet of the Apes sequels.

  732 James Fox.

  733 Ronald Reagan was eight months into his first term as governor of California; Bachardy had been commissioned to do portraits of twelve Los Angeles celebrities.

  734 A comedy by Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode (1898–1962).

  735 The carpenter and contractor Isherwood and Bachardy hired to improve their first house, 434 Sycamore Road; son of silent film star Wallace Reid (1891–1923); mentioned in D.1.

  736 By George Moore.

  737 By William Plomer.

  738 “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.”

  739 A Haight-Ashbury movement providing free food and shelter. See Glossary.

  740 I.e., Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), Canadian-born professor of English literature and communication, author of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) and other bestsellers. San Francisco hosted the first McLuhan Festival in 1965.

  741 Trott (b. circa 1944) had rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosis spondylolisthesis, suffered chronic degenerative joint disease, and eventually required repeated hip replacements and other surgery. He later settled in San Antonio, Texas, where he founded the first Gay and Lesbian Community Center.

  742 I.e., Robert McNamara (1916–2009), secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson, 1961–1968, during the Vietnam build-up.

  743 Literally male-male, evidently a pidgin-English formation from the Tahitian word tane for male.

  744 Possibly formed from the Polynesian karu, referring to part of the eye, with na, of or by.

  745 Fouts; see Glossary.

  746 Undergraduates at UCLA; Loskota was later an anesthesiologist at USC School of Medicine, where he joined the faculty.

  747 They had bought a house in the hills above Malibu, on Rambla Orienta.

  748 Hunt Stromberg Jr. (1923–1986) was producing a T.V. adaptation of Charles Dickens’s novel. Isherwood worked on it until Stromberg found he could not assemble the cast he wanted.

  749 A late-night T.V. talk show on ABC.

  750 A direct disciple (1863–1922) of Ramakrishna; he visited America with Vivekananda in 1899 and founded Shanti Ashrama in the San Antonio Valley near San Francisco before returning to India in 1902.

  751 English industrialist and philanthropist (1924–2005), from the Quaker chocolate-making family; he invented an oil pipeline valve and amassed a fortune which he used for other projects. He was disqualified as best man at the wedding of Princess Margaret to Antony Armstrong-Jones over a homosexual offense. He married, had four children, and divorced in 1967.


  752 The Hotel in Amsterdam, in which the producer “K.L.” is based on Richardson. See Glossary under Osborne for their quarrel.

  753 Nunnally Johnson’s 1954 East-West Berlin thriller starring Gregory Peck.

  754 Franklin Murphy, an undergraduate friend of Inge’s at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, became chancellor there and encouraged Inge to return as a writer in residence, but the idea made Inge anxious.

  755 Ewing (1903–1967), Professor of English at UCLA from 1930 and head of the department 1948–1955, married a wealthy southern Californian, Carmelite Rosencrantz, whose money allowed him to endow a lecture series in his name, collect books, found the Friends of the UCLA Library, and entertain the influential. Isherwood describes the Dylan Thomas episode in D.1, in the entry for Dec. 8, 1953.

  756 Amboen.

  757 Bean received autographed letters, poems, books, and photographs from James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Malcolm Cowley, Mary Hemingway, Randall Jarrell, and Stephen Spender, which can now be found in the collections of libraries and booksellers. He was alive to correspond with Cowley as late as 1971.

  758 Pacific Southwest Airways.

  759 Not his real name; New York painter, about ten years older than Bachardy, with whom Bachardy had a brief sexual relationship.

  760 Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, in Westwood. Bachardy attended about six sessions before realizing that he read only for pleasure and preferred to read slowly.

  761 By Chris Davidson, 1967.

  762 Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal: A Physiological Romance of Today (1893), sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde.

  763 By Carl Corley, 1967.

  764 Created under the 1964 Equal Opportunities Act. Chinatown was one of San Francisco’s five Anti-Poverty Target Areas in President Johnson’s War on Poverty.

  765 American architect and engineer (1895–1983); he invented the geodesic dome.

  766 From Chicago, owner of The Old Spaghetti Factory, a restaurant in North Beach.

  767 I.e., University of California at Santa Cruz.

  768 Kenneth Thimann (1904–1997), English botanist.

  769 The first college at UCSC, Cowell, was founded in 1965, followed by Adlai Stevenson in 1966, Crown in 1967, and Merril (College Four) in 1968. There are now ten colleges.

  770 Divorçons (1881) by Victorien Sardou and Emile de Najac; there was a new English version by Angela and Robert Goldsby in 1967.

  771 F.M. Glenn Willson, professor of politics, and social sciences; he had degrees from the University of Manchester and from Oxford and had taught in Rhodesia.

  772 Charles Page Smith (1917–1995), American historian, prize-winning biographer and columnist, author of A People’s History of the United States in eight volumes, previously at UCLA.

  773 American actor (1909–2000), intimate with the royal family since the 1930s, decorated by them for special service in W.W.II, knighted in 1949.

  774 “Fragment” by John Clare (1793–1864), first published 1950 in Selected Poems, edited and introduced by Geoffrey Grigson.

  775 Probably in early 1941; see D.1, pp. 144–145.

  776 Cambridge-educated British documentary director and producer (1907– 1987); he began teaching at the University of California in 1960. Isherwood had met him during the 1930s, around the time when Wright co-directed Night Mail (1936) for the GPO Film Unit.

  777 The 1957 German-made film of Thomas Mann’s last novel, The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954), was among his greatest roles—more than a decade before.

  778 Jacqueline Susann’s novel was published in 1966; the film was released in 1967.

  779 Sinatra (1915–1998) was thirty years older than actress Mia Farrow (b. 1945), his third wife, 1966–1968. In 1963, he lost his Las Vegas casino license for entertaining Sam Giancana in a casino in Lake Tahoe; his friendships with other Mafia bosses were monitored by the FBI.

  780 Anthony Hope’s 1894 novel and its sequel, subtitled From the Memoirs of Fritz von Tarlenheim (1898), possibly sources for the film plot in Prater Violet.

  781 Then the T.V. Division of Columbia Pictures.

  782 Starring as Bowles in the London premiere.

  783 “Once there was . . .” from “The Faithful Hussar,” sung by Kubrick’s third wife Christiane Harlan (under the stage name Susanne Christian); the 1957 film, from Humphrey Cobb’s best-selling 1935 novel, is about W.W.I.

  784 Not his real name, an accountant.

  785 Not his real name.

  786 McNally, American playwright (b. 1939), later wrote Love! Valor! Compassion! (1994), Master Class (1995), Corpus Christi (1998), and the books for the musicals Kiss of the Spider Woman (1992) and Ragtime (1997).

  787 Evidently at the Esalen Institute.

  788 A fashionable psychiatrist then treating her.

  789 On March 31, President Johnson announced he would not run again because he could not spare the time when the country was so divided and Americans were fighting overseas. He halted bombing in North Vietnam and renewed calls for peace talks.

  790 I.e., Robert Hutchins, who founded the center in 1959; see Glossary.

  791 German political scientist (1918–2002), fifth child of Thomas Mann; executive secretary to Hutchins’s Board of Editors at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, subsequently a Senior Fellow at the center and an expert in peaceful management of the world ocean. Later nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

  792 In reaction to King’s assassination.

  793 Spender, his daughter.

  794 Leftist intellectual, novelist, theater critic, political journalist (1912–1989), author of The Group (1963).

  795 De Maria (b. 1935), educated at Berkeley, once a drummer for Lou Reed and John Cale, made Mile Long Drawing that year, two parallel chalk lines twelve feet apart running for two miles through the Mojave Desert. He also installed his first Earth Room, a room filled with dirt, in a Munich gallery.

  796 Broadway stage manager and producer, in partnership briefly with Edgar Bronfman Jr., whose father was one of his backers.

  797 Eugene McCarthy (b. 1916), Democratic senator from Minnesota since 1959, ran for president in 1968 calling for a negotiated peace in Vietnam.

  798 By Chris Davidson (1967).

  799 In a note, Isherwood corrected this to “Barclift.” Edgar Nelson Barclift (circa 1917–1993), dancer and choreographer, was lead dancer in Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army (1942) and afterwards worked in T.V. and films. He was a companion of Cole Porter, like Renaldo, and reportedly the subject of “Night and Day.”

  800 See The Complete Works of Vivekananda, vol. 7, pp. 498–499.

  801 American director and producer (1920–1997), on Broadway and in movies, but mostly for T.V., notably “Hallmark Hall of Fame.”

  802 Auden was to be awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry by the National Institute of Arts and Letters on May 28, 1968.

  803 Never published; see Glossary under Hoopes.

  804 Bob Hulter, Laughton’s road man; he managed travel, hotel, and other arrangements on tour.