Liberation

by Christopher Isherwood

  Lathwood, Jo. See Masselink, Jo.

  Laughlin, Leslie. See Caron, Leslie.

  Laughlin, Michael. American film producer, and later, director and screen-writer; educated at Principia College in Illinois and at UCLA, where he studied law. He produced Two Lane Blacktop (1971) among others. He was the third husband of French actress Leslie Caron from 1969 to 1980. The thriller he was producing in 1973, Nicole—starring Caron with Catherine Bach, Ramon Bieri and others, and directed by István Ventilla—never reached the movie theaters, but it was released on video in 2005 as an erotic thriller, Crazed. (It also had another title, Widow’s Revenge.) Isherwood and Bachardy saw it in a screening room at Goldwyn Studios. Laughlin lived with the costume and production designer Susanna Moore (b. 1945) from around the time in 1978 when she divorced her husband, production designer Richard Sylbert, but they never married. She became a successful novelist with My Old Sweetheart (1982), The Whiteness of Bones (1989), In the Cut (1995), and others.

  Laura. See Huxley, Laura Archera.

  Lawrence, Jerome ( Jerry) (1915–2004). American playwright; born in Ohio, educated at Ohio State University and UCLA. He was a reporter and editor for small daily newspapers in Ohio then a continuity editor for a Beverly Hills radio station. By the time he joined the U.S. Army during World War II, he was a senior staff writer for CBS radio. In the army, he worked as a consultant to the Secretary of War then as a correspondent from North Africa and Italy, and he co-founded Armed Forces Radio with Robert Lee. They continued their partnership as playwrights after the war. Among their best-known plays are Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’! (1948), the prize-winning Inherit the Wind (1955) about the Scopes monkey trial, the stage adaptation of Auntie Mame (1956), and The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail (1971). Lawrence and Lee also wrote the book and the lyrics for the musical Mame (1966), adapted James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon as the book and lyrics for Shangri-La (1956), and were involved in adapting much of their work for film. Lawrence taught playwriting at several universities and was an adjunct professor at USC. Isherwood often went to parties at his house, especially to meet good-looking young men, mostly actors, whom Lawrence knew through his theater connections. Lawrence often claimed that he had introduced Isherwood and Bachardy to each other because Bachardy and his brother Ted attended a party at Lawrence’s house on February 14, the date Isherwood and Bachardy marked as the start of their romance, but, in fact, Isherwood and Bachardy met earlier. Lawrence appears in D.1 and D.2.

  Lawson, George. Scottish antiquarian book dealer, a longtime director of Bertram Rota. He is a friend of David Hockney and a subject of several Hockney paintings. For many years he was Wayne Sleep’s companion and remains, in his own phrase, Sleep’s accomplice.

  Layard, John (1891–1975). English anthropologist and Jungian psychoanalyst. He read Medieval and Modern Languages at Cambridge and did field work in the New Hebrides with the anthropologist and psychologist W.H.R. Rivers. In the early 1920s, he had a nervous breakdown and was partially cured by the American psychologist Homer Lane. Lane died during the treatment, leaving Layard depressed and seeking further treatment, first unsuccessfully with Wilhelm Stekel and eventually more productively with Jung. Auden met Layard in Berlin late in 1928 and introduced him to Isherwood the following spring; for a time all three were obsessed with Lane’s theories recounted by Layard. During this period, Layard had a brief and tortured triangular affair with Auden and a German sailor, Gerhart Meyer, whereupon he tried to kill himself. Isherwood used the suicide attempt in The Memorial, and Layard appears as “Barnard” in Lions and Shadows. Layard eventually recovered his psychological health so that he was able to work and write again, and he married and had a son. Like Auden, he also returned to the Anglican faith of his childhood.

  Lazar, Irving (Swifty) (1907–1993). Agent and deal-maker for movie stars and authors such as Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Truman Capote, Noël Coward, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, Cole Porter, Diana Ross, Irwin Shaw, and Tennessee Williams. He practiced bankruptcy law in New York during the Depression, then relocated to Hollywood in 1936. His wife was called Mary.

  Leavitt, Natalie. Isherwood and Bachardy’s Romanian-born cleaning lady and cook from about 1976; she was a widow after nursing her husband, an American, through a long illness. She was first employed at Adelaide Drive around 1960, but irritated Isherwood by asking Stravinsky for an autograph while he was at the dinner table. She eventually returned as twice-monthly cleaner, then server and dishwasher, and finally chef and shopper for dinner parties about twice a week until her retirement around 2000. Her daughter, Thaïs Leavitt, trained with the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden and was a principal dancer with the Düsseldorf Ballet until she retired with a knee injury. Thaïs later taught at Ballet Petit Performing Arts Center, the Los Angeles County Council for the Arts, and elsewhere, settled with her mother in the family home near 145 Adelaide Drive, and occasionally helped with the work there.

  Lehmann, Beatrix (Peggy) (1903–1979). English actress; youngest of John Lehmann’s three elder sisters. She met Isherwood in Berlin in 1932, and they remained close friends. She had a London triumph in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra in 1938 when Isherwood was in China, and he returned in time to see her in the Group Theatre’s performance of Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine in July. During 1938 she had an affair with Berthold Viertel. She appears in D.2.

  Lehmann, John (1907–1987). English author, publisher, editor, autobiographer; educated at Cambridge. Youngest child and only son of a close family; his mother was an American from New England; his father trained as a barrister and wrote for Punch. Isherwood met him in 1932 at the Hogarth Press where Lehmann was assistant (later partner) to Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Lehmann persuaded the Woolfs to publish The Memorial after it had been rejected by Jonathan Cape, publisher of Isherwood’s first novel All the Conspirators. Isherwood helped Lehmann with his plans to found the magazine New Writing and obtained early contributions from friends like Auden. He writes about this in Christopher and His Kind and also about Lehmann in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years. When Lehmann left the Hogarth Press, he founded his own publishing firm and later edited The London Magazine. He wrote three volumes of autobiography, The Whispering Galley (1955), I Am My Brother (1960), and The Ample Proposition (1966). For many years he shared his house with the dancer Alexis Rassine.

  Lehmann, Rosamond (1901–1990). English novelist, educated at Cambridge, second-eldest sister of John Lehmann. She made a reputation with the sexual and emotional frankness of her first novel, Dusty Answer (1927), and her later works—including Invitation to the Waltz (1932), The Weather in the Streets (1936), The Echoing Grove (1953)—also shocked. Her first marriage, in 1923, was to Leslie Runciman, son of a Liberal Member of Parliament, and from 1928 to 1944, she was the first wife of the painter Wogan Philipps, with whom she had a son and a daughter. Afterwards, she had a nine-year affair with Cecil Day-Lewis. Her daughter with Philipps, Sally, died suddenly of polio in 1958 when she was twenty-four; Rosamond described her continuing spiritual relationship with Sally in The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life (1967). She appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Leighton, Margaret (Maggie) (1922–1976). English actress. She made her London debut as a teenager and established her reputation in the Old Vic Company in the late 1940s. From the mid-1950s until the late 1960s, she also played on Broadway, where she won Tony Awards for Separate Tables (1956) and The Night of the Iguana (1962). Her films include The Winslow Boy (1948), The Sound and the Fury (1959), The Loved One (1965), and The Go-Between (1971). Her second marriage was to Laurence Harvey, from 1957 to 1961, and her third, in 1964, to actor Michael Wilding. She had a small role in Bachardy and Isherwood’s “Frankenstein: The True Story.”

  Len. See Worton, Len.

  Leopold, Michael. Aspiring writer, from Texas; he was about eighteen when Isherwood met him at the apartment of a friend, Doug Ebersole, in December 1949. They began a minor affair soon afterwards. Leopold was interested in lit
erature, admired Isherwood’s work, and later wrote some stories of his own. During the 1960s, he lived with Henry Guerriero in Venice, California. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Le Page, Richard W.F. (b. 1940). British medical microbiologist, Life Fellow, Caius College, Cambridge. Author and co-author of numerous research papers in many areas, including vaccine delivery.

  LeSueur, Joe (192[4]–2001). Aspiring playwright, screenwriter, and critic, originally from California. He was the companion, from 1955, of American poet and art critic Frank O’Hara (1926–1966), who died in a sand buggy accident on Fire Island.

  Levant, Oscar (1906–1972). American composer, pianist, and actor. He was a close friend of George Gershwin and became famous as an interpreter of his music. His film appearances include Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1941), Rhapsody in Blue (1945), Humoresque (1946), You Were Meant for Me (1948), and An American in Paris (1951). Levant wrote the music for several popular musicals and had a live talk show in Hollywood, “The Oscar Levant Show,” broadcast out of a shed on a minor network. His show was shut down by the sponsors in the early 1960s despite its popularity, because he insulted their products for laughs and encouraged his guests to do the same. Isherwood appeared on the show in the mid-1950s, sometimes reading poetry; this led to his occasionally being recognized in the street. In 1958, he argued with Levant about Churchill and then refused to return to the show for a time because Levant attacked him for remaining in Hollywood during the war. He appears in D.1 and D.2.

  Levy, Miranda Speranza (Mirandi). Sister-in-law of the Italian-American jewelry designer, Frank Patania (d. 1964) whose Native American-influenced work in silver, turquoise, and coral was bought by Mabel Dodge Luhan and Georgia O’Keeffe and can be seen in museums. She ran Patania’s Thunderbird shop in Santa Fe and married Ralph Levy, a Hollywood film director. She appears in D.1 under her maiden name, Mirandi Masocco, and in D.2.

  Lipscomb, Mark. American painter working in Los Angeles. He had a show at the Long Beach Museum of Art in the 1970s, but afterwards exhibited his work only at home in the various houses he shared with his longterm companion John Ladner. In addition to sitting for Bachardy, he was also drawn and painted by David Hockney.

  List, Herbert. German photographer. Probably introduced to Isherwood by Stephen Spender who, in 1929, became friends with List in Hamburg, where List was working as a coffee merchant in his family’s firm. List appears as “Joachim” in Spender’s World Within World and as “Joachim Lenz” in Spender’s The Temple. Isherwood writes about him in D.1 and D.2.

  Little, Penny. Sales representative for a fabric house and later for a large interior design firm. She was the girlfriend of painter Billy Al Bengston for about twenty years. Afterwards she was briefly married to Kevin Hearst, and then to Gregg Hawks, son of film director Howard Hawks. She sat for Bachardy several times.

  Littman, Robert (Bobby) (1938–2001). Hollywood agent, from England. He began representing Isherwood and Bachardy in 1976. He was previously a head of MGM in the U.K. His wife’s name was Doris.

  Locke, Charles O. (1896–1977). American journalist, novelist, screenwriter. He wrote for his family’s newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, while still in college then had a career in New York working for several major papers and in advertising and publicity. He wrote poetry and song lyrics as well as five novels. In 1957, he wrote the screenplay from his most famous novel The Hell-Bent Kid in the office next door to Isherwood’s at Twentieth Century-Fox. Isherwood describes their friendship in D.1, where Locke’s wife and his daughter, Mary Schmidt, are also mentioned. He also appears in D.2.

  loka. In Hindu traditions, world or plane of existence.

  Loos, Anita (1888–1981). American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. Isherwood met her through Aldous and Maria Huxley soon after arriving in Hollywood and sometimes attended the Sunday lunches at which she entertained her circle of emigré friends. Loos created the art of silent film captions, and later she wrote over two hundred screenplays for sound movies. Her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925)—written to amuse H.L. Mencken—became a play, then a movie, then a musical comedy for stage, and finally a film of the musical comedy. She launched Huxley in studio writing and also introduced him socially. She wrote several volumes of autobiography in which Isherwood is occasionally mentioned. She appears in D.1.

  Loud, Lance (1951–2001). Flash celebrity. He became famous in 1973 in a twelve-part public T.V. documentary “An American Family,” a precursor of reality T.V. It showed seven months in the life of his upper-middle-class Santa Barbara family and included Loud’s revelation, in a shabby New York hotel, that he was gay. He later started and played in a rock band called The Mumps and then worked as a journalist. He became addicted to crystal meth and died of AIDS.

  Loy, Myrna (1905–1993). Hollywood star; born in Montana, raised there and in Los Angeles, where she became a chorus girl at eighteen. She was an exotic screen vamp in over sixty films until the mid-1930s, when she began to appear as Nora Charles in movies based on Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, and became Hollywood’s number-one woman star. Her later films include The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), The Red Pony (1949), and Midnight Lace (1960). During World War II, she worked for the Red Cross and, later, for UNESCO. She was also active in the Democratic party. She appears in D.2.

  Luce, Henry R. (1898–1967) and Clare Boothe (1903–1987). He was born in China and educated at Hotchkiss, Yale, and Oxford. He worked as a journalist before he co-founded Time Magazine in 1923. In the 1930s, he launched Fortune and Life, and then House and Home and Sports Illustrated in the 1950s. She was the illegitimate, peripatetically educated daughter of a dancer mother and a violinist father who deserted them. She worked as an actress briefly, was editor of Vogue and Vanity Fair, a successful Broadway playwright—Abide with Me (1935), The Women (1936), Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938)—a Republican congresswoman and U.S. Ambassador to Italy (1953–1957). Each was married once before. She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1946 after her daughter, an only child by her first husband, was killed in a car accident. The Luces were both vehement anticommunists.

  Luckenbill, Dan (b. 1945). American writer and librarian. From 1970, he worked at the UCLA library in the manuscripts division. Later he curated exhibitions and wrote catalogues on gay and lesbian studies. He published short stories from the 1970s onwards.

  Luckinbill, Laurence (b. 1934). American actor, writer and director. His film appearances include The Boys in the Band (1970) and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989); on T.V., he had roles in “Law and Order” and “Murder, She Wrote” among others. He also wrote and performed one-man stage shows about American “heroes,” such as Hemingway, Teddy Roosevelt, Clarence Darrow and LBJ. He was married to Robin Strasser until 1976 and had two children with her; later he married Lucie Arnaz, with whom he had three more children.

  Ludington, Wright (1900–1992). Art collector and philanthropist; raised in Pennsylvania, educated at the Thacher School in Ojai, at Yale, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and at the Art Students League in New York. In 1927, he inherited a fortune from his father, a lawyer and investment banker who worked with the Curtis Publishing Company. He also inherited an estate in Montecito—Val Verde—and spent decades improving it with the help of a school friend, the landscape architect Lockwood de Forest. Val Verde included an art gallery for Ludington’s collection of modern paintings and outdoor settings for his ancient sculpture. In 1955, he sold Val Verde and built a new house off Bella Vista Drive—Hesperides—which was designed by Lutah Maria Riggs especially to display his art collection. De Forest’s widow landscaped Hesperides. Ludington was a founder and board member of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and gave the museum many pieces from his collection. He appears in D.2.

  M. Isherwood’s mother. He called her “Mummy” and began letters to her with “My Darling Mummy,” and later, “Dearest Mummy,” but he invariably wrote “M.” in his diaries. See Isherwood, Kathleen.

  Isherwood sometimes uses “M
.” for Mahendranath Gupta, the schoolmaster who became Ramakrishna’s disciple and recorded Ramakrishna’s conversations and sayings in his diaries, later compiling them in Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita or The Gospel of Ramakrishna.

  MacDonald, Madge. Nurse. She worked at UCLA hospital and lived in Isherwood’s neighborhood. She appears in D.1 and D.2.

  Macht, Stephen (b. 1942). American actor. He appeared in suspense, disaster and horror films, many for T.V.; he also appeared on “Knots Landing” in the early 1980s.

  Macy, Gertrude (190[4]–1983). New York stage manager and producer; secretary and biographer of actress Katherine Cornell. She co-produced the 1951 stage version of I Am a Camera with Walter Starcke and thereby had a substantial financial stake in Cabaret, which reduced Isherwood’s earnings and which he several times refers to in his diaries. When the film of Cabaret came out in 1972, she made a new claim based on her original involvement as co-producer of van Druten’s play. She is mentioned in D.1 and D.2.

  Madigan, Leo (Larry). Roman Catholic writer and teacher, born and educated in New Zealand. As Isherwood tells in his entry for April 6, 1970, he was a merchant seaman and first shipped out as a teenager. He also tried acting and psychiatric work. His early writing appeared in a magazine called The Seafarer, published by the Marine Society in London, and which he edited for a time; he also contributed to Blackwood’s Magazine. His first novel, Jackarandy (1973), is about the professional gay sex scene in London. Later, he settled in Fatima, Portugal, and published religious books, The Devil Is a Jackass (1995), The Catholic Quiz Book (1995), Fatima: Highway of Hope (2000), What Happened at Fatima (2000), and an English-language guide to the shrine. He has also written Catholic novels for children.