Liberation

by Christopher Isherwood

Kitty. Bachardy’s pet name, once known only to himself and Isherwood, and denoting his identity as an exotic, temperamental feline creature in the private myth world they shared.

  Kitty’s birthday pre-celebration. Isherwood notes four violent events on the day before Bachardy’s fortieth birthday in 1974. Los Angeles police and the FBI had a gun battle, shown live on Los Angeles T.V., with presumed members of the Symbionese Liberation Army in a house near Watts; the siege culminated in a fire which destroyed the house and left five unidentifiable bodies. Heiress Patricia Hearst, kidnapped by the SLA on February 4, was not in the house and remained a hostage and an apparent convert to the SLA’s radical anti-Establishment cause. In Dublin, three car bombs exploded during rush hour, killing at least twenty-three and injuring eighty, the worst casualties since fighting over Northern Ireland began in 1968. The bombs were thought to be set by extremist Protestants. In Eastern Lebanon, Israeli planes bombed villages and Palestinian refugee camps in the second day of reprisals for the killing of twenty Israeli students by Palestinian guerrillas in a village near the Lebanese border; more than fifty refugees were killed at Nabatieh camp alone and half the houses reduced to rubble in the first day’s raid; Syrian planes challenged the Israeli flights, and continuing reprisals and counterreprisals were promised on both sides. In Peru, there was a small earthquake, felt in Lima and elsewhere; it proved to be one of a series of tremors building up to a powerful and destructive earthquake October 3.

  Kleiser, Randal (Randy) (b. 1946). American film director, writer, and producer. He made a prize-winning film, Peege, as his master’s thesis at USC. Then he directed episodes of popular T.V. series, followed by T.V. films such as “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” (1976) and “The Gathering” (1977). He became famous with Grease (1978). Other films include The Blue Lagoon (1980) and Honey, I Blew Up the Kids (1992). He teaches at USC and in Europe.

  Knight, Franklin (Frank) (circa 1924–2005). American monk of the Ramakrishna Order; he was given the name Asima Chaitanya when he took his brahmacharya vows, probably in 1965 or 1966, and came to be known as Asim. He first joined the Trabuco monastery in about 1955 and settled there permanently, but Swami Prabhavananda never allowed him to take sannyas because of an episode—referred to by Isherwood in his diary entry for December 16, 1963—in which he behaved inappropriately towards a woman outside the congregation. Knight was a cousin of Webster Milam, and is mentioned in D.1 and appears in D.2.

  Knott, Harley. A son of Francis Bacon’s sister Ianthe; she married a South African farmer, settled with him in southernmost Rhodesia, then moved to the Transvaal after his death.

  Knox, Ronnie (1935–1992). American football player and aspiring writer, born in Illinois. His real name was Raoul Landry. He was a football All-American for Santa Monica High School, a star freshman quarterback for the University of California, and widely considered to be the most talented college football player in the country when in 1953 he suddenly transferred to UCLA, sacrificing a year of eligibility and generating a scandal. He was also written up as a glamor boy because of his physical beauty. As a professional, he joined the Canadian Football League and played for Montreal. Later he wrote fiction, and published at least one of his stories. He lived with Renate Druks from 1960 to 1964, and afterwards had a French girlfriend called Véronique. All three sat for Bachardy several times. Knox died unemployed and virtually homeless in San Francisco. He is the chief model for Kenny in A Single Man. He appears in D.2.

  Korda, Michael (b. 1933). Editor in chief at Isherwood’s American publisher, Simon & Schuster, from 1968 until he retired in 2005. Born in London and educated at Oxford, he settled in New York in his twenties and became Henry Simon’s editorial assistant in 1958. He wrote several books of his own. He is a nephew of film impresario Alexander Korda.

  Kramer, Terry Allen. Broadway producer. She was an heiress to her father’s Manhattan investment bank, Allen and Co., which owned, among other things, a controlling interest in Syntex Chemicals Inc., developer of the oral contraceptive pill. Her second husband, Irwin Kramer, worked in his family’s hotel and then became a partner in her father’s firm. Irwin Kramer adopted her daughter, Toni Phillips (b. 1956), from her first marriage. Among the Broadway shows she produced, many with Harry Rigby, are Knock Knock (1976), I Love My Wife (1979), A Meeting by the River (1979), Sugar Babies (1982), Me and My Girl (1989), Shadowlands (1991), and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (1992).

  Krishna. One of the most widely worshipped Hindu gods, a hero of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavatam. Krishna was also the Sanskrit name given to George Fitts, an American monk of the Ramakrishna Order, from New England. He joined the Vedanta Society in Hollywood in 1940 and was living there as a probationer monk in 1943 when Isherwood moved in. He was then about forty years old, had some private wealth, and spent his time obsessively tape recording and transcribing Swami Prabhavananda’s lectures and classes. He took his brahmacharya vows in 1947, and early in 1958, he took sannyas and became Swami Krishnananda. He lived in Hollywood, but usually accompanied Swami on trips to Santa Barbara, Trabuco, and elsewhere. He appears in D.1 and D.2.

  Krishnamurti (1895–1986). Hindu spiritual teacher. As an impoverished boy in India, he was taken up by the leaders of the Theosophical movement as the “vehicle” in which their Master Maitreya would reincarnate himself. He was adopted and educated in England, then in 1919 sent to an orange ranch in Ojai, California, for his health. In 1929, he renounced his messianic role and rejected the guru–disciple relationship along with the devotional and ritual aspects of Hinduism. Although he broke with the Theosophists, he went on speaking to devotees, sometimes in huge numbers, for the rest of his life all around the world. He was extremely handsome and charismatic and had many secret sexual liaisons which introduced tension among his followers and led to a series of lawsuits with a colleague and rival, Desikacharya Rajagopalacharya, whom he cuckolded. Isherwood first met Krishnamurti in 1939 through Aldous and Maria Huxley and later went to hear him speak in Ojai. He appears in D.1 and D.2

  Krost, Barry. British agent and film and T.V. producer, formerly a child actor. He appeared in a few films in the 1950s. He was John Osborne’s manager for about ten years, then settled in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. He founded the Los Angeles talent agency Barry Krost Management and promotes gay and lesbian rights in the film industry. As a producer, he works with his long-time companion, Douglas Chapin.

  Ladner, John (b. 194[6]). American lawyer, educated at Berkeley and Loyola School of Law, admitted to the California Bar in 1973. He worked in Washington, D.C. and New York for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, was a Public Defender in Los Angeles from 1977 to 1979, and until 1983 ran his own practice specializing in criminal and juvenile defense. He later spent twenty years as a Municipal and Superior Court Commissioner and presided over California’s criminal child support enforcement court. His longterm companion is Mark Lipscomb.

  Lambert, Gavin (1924–2005). British novelist, biographer and screenwriter; educated at Cheltenham College and for one year at Magdalen College, Oxford. He edited the British film magazine Sight and Sound, before going to Hollywood in 1956. He was working for Jerry Wald at Twentieth Century-Fox on Sons and Lovers (1960) when Ivan Moffat introduced him to Isherwood; he appears often in D.1 and D.2. His novel The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life (1959), which Isherwood read in manuscript in 1957, was influenced by Isherwood’s Berlin stories. He and Isherwood worked on a television comedy project “Emily Ermingarde” for Hermione Gingold and later for Elsa Lanchester, but the series was never produced. Lambert also helped Isherwood revise the film script of The Vacant Room. During the 1950s and early 1960s, he planned a musical version, never produced, of Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair. He wrote and directed an independent film, Another Sky (1956), wrote the screenplay for his own 1963 novel Inside Daisy Clover (1965), and scripted Bitter Victory (1957), The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977), and others. His books include On Cukor (197
2); The Dangerous Edge (1975), a study of nine thrillers; The Goodbye People (1977); Running Time (1983); Norma Shearer: A Life (1990); Nazimova: A Biography (1997); Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000); and Natalie Wood: A Life (2004). During the 1970s, as Isherwood tells, he settled in Tangier for a time, returning to Los Angeles in the early 1980s.

  Lamkin, Hillyer Speed (b. 1928). American novelist; born and raised in Monroe, Lousiana. Isherwood met him in April 1950 when Speed was twenty-two and about to publish his first novel, Tiger in the Garden. He had studied at Harvard and lived in London and New York before going to Los Angeles to research his second novel, The Easter Egg Hunt (1954), about movie stars, in particular Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst; he dedicated the novel to Isherwood who appears in it as “Sebastian Saunders.” Lamkin was on the board, with Isherwood, at the Huntington Hartford Foundation. With a screenwriter, Gus Field, he tried to adapt Sally Bowles for the stage in 1950–1951, but Dodie Beesley criticized the project and encouraged John van Druten to try instead. In the mid-1950s, Lamkin wrote a play, Out by the Country Club, which was never produced, and in 1956, he scripted a T.V. film about Perle Mesta, the political hostess who was Truman’s ambassador to Luxembourg. During 1957, he wrote another play, Comes a Day, which had a short run on Broadway, starring Judith Anderson and introducing George C. Scott. Eventually, when the second play failed, Lamkin returned home to Louisiana. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Lamkin, Marguerite (b. circa 1929). A southern beauty, born and raised in Monroe, Louisiana, like her brother Speed and briefly educated at a Manhattan finishing school. She followed Speed to Hollywood, and married the screenwriter Harry Brown in 1952, but the marriage broke up melodramatically in 1955 as Isherwood records in D.1, where Marguerite is frequently mentioned. Bachardy had a room in the Browns’ apartment during the early months of his involvement with Isherwood, and Marguerite was an especially close friend to him. In later years she also became close to Isherwood. She assisted Tennessee Williams as a dialogue coach during the original production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and afterwards she worked on other films and theatrical productions on the East and West coasts and in England when southern accents were required. She was married to Rory Harrity from 1959 to 1963, and later settled in London, where she had a successful third marriage, became a society hostess and raised large sums of money for AIDS and HIV research and care. She also appears in D.2.

  Lancaster, Mark (b. 1938). British artist, raised in Yorkshire, educated at Newcastle. He travelled to New York and Los Angeles while he was still an under graduate writing a thesis on Alfred Steiglitz, appeared in Andy Warhol’s films Kiss (1963), Batman Dracula (1964), and Couch (1964), helped Warhol with his silkscreens, and hung around The Factory taking photographs. Back in England, he taught at Newcastle and at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, and from 1968 to 1970 he was the first Artist in Residence at King’s College, Cambridge. In 1972, he moved to New York, where he supported his painting by working as secretary and manager to Jasper Johns. He helped Johns to design productions for Merce Cunningham’s dance troupe, took over the lighting, and became Artistic Advisor to the company, designing over twenty dances during the 1970s and 1980s. Isherwood first met him with David Hockney on the beach in Santa Monica in 1966. In 1985, Lancaster moved back to England briefly, then lived in Scotland, Miami, and Rhode Island.

  Lanchester, Elsa (1902–1986). British actress; she danced with Isadora Duncan’s troop as a child then began acting in a children’s theater in London at sixteen. In 1929, she married Charles Laughton and went with him to Hollywood in 1934, settling there for good in 1940 and becoming an American citizen. Lanchester began making films before Laughton did and they acted in several together—for instance The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957), for which she received an Academy Award nomination. Her most famous film was The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), but she was in many more, including The Constant Nymph (1928), David Copperfield (1935), Lassie Come Home (1943), The Razor’s Edge (1946), The Secret Garden (1949), Come to the Stable (1949, Academy Award nomination), Les Misérables (1952), Bell, Book and Candle (1958), Mary Poppins (1964), and Murder by Death (1976). She also worked in television and for many years she sang at a Los Angeles theater, The Turnabout, on La Cienega Boulevard. She toured with her own stage show, Elsa Lanchester—Herself, during 1960 and opened at the 41st Street Theater in New York on February 4, 1961 for seventy-five performances. She met Isherwood socially in the late 1950s, was greatly attracted to him and introduced him to Laughton, afterwards vying with Laughton and Bachardy for Isherwood’s attention. In the summer of 1960 Laughton bought 147 Adelaide Drive, next door to Isherwood, so that he could spend time with male friends away from his wife in their house on Curson Avenue; after Laughton died, Lanchester often spent weekends at 147. She appears in D.1 and D.2.

  Lane, Homer (1875–1925). American psychologist, healer, and juvenile reformer. Lane established a rural community in England called The Little Common wealth, where he nurtured young delinquents with love, farm work, and the responsibility of self-government. For Lane, the fundamental instinct of mankind “is the titanic craving for spiritual perfection,” and he conceived of individual growth as a process of spiritual evolution in which the full satisfaction of the instinctive desires of one stage bring an end to that stage and lay the ground for the next, higher stage; he believed that instinctive desires must be satisfied rather than repressed if the individual is to achieve psychological health and fulfillment. In practice, Lane identified himself with the patient’s neurosis in order to allow it to emerge from the unconscious; personally loving the sinner and the sin, he freed the patient from his sense of guilt. Auden discovered the teachings of Homer Lane through his Berlin friend, John Layard, a former patient and disciple of Lane’s, and in late 1928 and early 1929, became obsessed with Lane, preaching his theories to his friends and in his poems.

  Langan, Peter (1914–1988). Irish restaurateur; son of a Shell Oil Company director. He ran Odin’s Restaurant in Devonshire Street with Kirsten Andersen, a Dane, who started the restaurant with her first husband, James Benson. (Benson died in a car crash in 1966.) Regular customers at Odin’s included Hockney, Peter Schlesinger, Ossie Clark, Wayne Sleep, George Lawson and Patrick Procktor. Procktor became Kirsten Andersen’s second husband in 1973. Hockney and Procktor sometimes paid for their meals with art works; Lawson paid in secondhand books; the pictures and books were used as décor in the restaurant. Langan later bought the Coq d’Or in Mayfair and reopened it as Langan’s Brasserie, in partnership with Richard Shepherd and actor Michael Caine. He was an alcoholic and died of burns when he set fire to his house following a drunken argument with his wife, Susan, who escaped.

  Lange, Hope (1931–2003). American actress, born and raised in Connecticut; she was twelve years old when she debuted on Broadway in The Patriots (1943). As a teenager, she waitressed in her mother’s Greenwich Village restaurant, modelled, and continued as a stage actress and in live T.V. drama until she was brought to Hollywood with her first husband Don Murray to appear in Bus Stop (1956). Afterwards she appeared in numerous other films including Peyton Place (1957), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award, The Young Lions (1958), The Best of Everything (1959), Deathwish (1974), Blue Velvet (1986), and Clear and Present Danger (1994). During her love affair with Glenn Ford, she co-starred with him in Pocketful of Miracles (1961) and Love Is a Ball (1963). She made a number of T.V. films and won two Emmy Awards for her role in the television comedy series “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (1968–1970); she also appeared on “The New Dick Van Dyke Show” (1971–1974). In 1977, she returned to Broadway in Same Time Next Year opposite Don Murray. Lange had two children with Murray, but the marriage ended in 1960. In 1963, she married the director and producer Alan Pakula; they divorced in 1969. In 1986, she married Charles Hollerith, a theatrical producer. Isherwood first met Lange with Murray in the late 1950s; she appears in D.1 and D.2.

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sp; Lansbury, Angela (b. 1925). British star of stage and film; granddaughter of pacifist Labour politician George Lansbury and daughter of actress Moyna Macgill, who brought her with her twin brothers Edgar and Bruce to Hollywood to escape the Blitz. Lansbury was making feature films before the end of the war and went on to appear in National Velvet (1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), The Three Musketeers (1948), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Something for Everyone (1970), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), Death on the Nile (1978), Nanny McPhee (2006), and Mr. Popper’s Penguins (2011) among others. Isherwood first mentions her at the time she made a hit in Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey on Broadway in 1960; other Broadway successes include Mame (1966), Sweeney Todd (1979), and Deuce (2007). She has also had a T.V. career, especially in “Murder, She Wrote” (1984–1996). She has won eleven Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, and been nominated repeatedly for Academy Awards. She married twice, the second time, in 1949, to Peter Shaw with whom she had two children.

  Lansbury, Edgar (b. 1930). Stage and film producer and, earlier, scenic designer; brother of Angela Lansbury and twin brother of stage and film producer Bruce Lansbury. Among his successful shows are The Subject Was Roses (1964) and Godspell (1976)—of which he also produced the films—and American Buffalo (1977). Bachardy drew Edgar, Bruce, and Angela Lansbury.

  Larson, Jack (b. 1933). American actor, playwright and librettist; born in Los Angeles and raised in Pasadena. His father drove a milk truck, and his mother was a clerk for Western Union; they divorced. At fourteen, Larson was California bowling champion for his age group. He attended Pasadena Junior College, where he was discovered acting in a college play and offered his first film role by Warner Brothers in Fighter Squadron (1948) (also Rock Hudson’s first film). He is best known for playing Jimmy Olsen in “The Adventures of Superman,” the original T.V. series aired during the 1950s. He lived for over thirty-five years with the director James Bridges and co-produced some of Bridges’s most successful films, The Paper Chase (1973), Urban Cowboy (1980), and Bright Lights, Big City (1988). As Isherwood mentions, he wrote the libretto for Virgil Thomson’s opera Lord Byron. Larson and Bridges were close friends of Isherwood and Bachardy from the 1950s onward and appear in D.1 and D.2.