Liberation

by Christopher Isherwood

  Rick. See Sandford, Rick.

  Rigby, Harry (1925–1985). Broadway producer, sometimes of plays, including The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963), but mostly of adapted and revived musicals. In 1968, his Hallelujah, Baby! won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Producer of a Musical. His revival of Irene opened in March 1973, directed by Gower Champion (not by John Gielgud as once planned). Other successes, many with Terry Allen Kramer, include I Love My Wife (1977) and Sugar Babies (1979). His Broadway production of A Meeting by the River in 1979 lasted only one night after ten previews.

  Ritajananda, Swami. Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order; chief assistant to Swami Prabhavananda at the Hollywood Vedanta Society from 1958 to 1961. He then went to France to run the Vedanta Center at Gretz, near Paris, until his death in 1994. As his assistant at Gretz, he later took on Prema, by then called Swami Vidyatmananda. He appears in D.2.

  Roberts, John. British theater producer; he produced two plays on Broadway in the late 1950s and later worked in South Africa. He was to assist Clifford Williams with the proposed London production of A Meeting by the River in 1970.

  Roberts, Rachel (1927–1980). Welsh-born actress, educated at the University of Wales and RADA. She had many stage roles, beginning in 1951. Her films included Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), This Sporting Life (1963, Academy Award nomination), O Lucky Man! (1973), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and When a Stranger Calls (1979). She also appeared regularly on American T.V. in “The Tony Randall Show” from 1976 to 1978. Her second marriage, in 1962, was to Rex Harrison; they divorced in 1971. She appears in D.2.

  Roerick, Bill (1912–1995). American actor. Isherwood met him in 1943 when John van Druten brought Roerick to a lecture at the Vedanta Society. He was in England as a G.I. during World War II and became friends there with E.M. Forster, J.R. Ackerley, and others. His companion for many years was Tom Coley. In 1944, Roerick contributed a short piece to Horizon defending Isherwood’s new way of life in America after Tony Bower had made fun of it in a previous number. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Ronnie. See Knox, Ronnie.

  Ross, Jean (1911–1973). The original of Isherwood’s character Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin. He met her in Berlin, possibly in October 1930, but certainly by the start of 1931. She was then occasionally singing in a nightclub, and they shared lodgings for a time in Fräulein Thurau’s flat. Ross’s father was a Scottish cotton merchant, and she had been raised in Egypt in lavish circumstances. After Berlin, she returned to England where she became friendly with Olive Mangeot, lodging in her house for a time. She joined the Communist party and had a daughter, Sarah (later a crime novelist under the name Sarah Caudwell), with the Communist journalist and author Claud Cockburn (1904–1981), though Ross and Cockburn never married. She was close to her two sisters and shared houses and flats with them over the years, especially with Margaret, known as Peggy (b. 1913), a sculptor and painter trained at the Liverpool School of Art. Ross appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Ruscha, Ed (b. 1937). American pop and conceptual artist; born in Omaha, raised in Oklahoma where he met Joe Goode; trained at the Chouinard Art Institute; working in Los Angeles. In 1958, he was a printer’s apprentice, and in 1960 he worked briefly in advertising as a layout artist. His first of many solo shows was at the Ferus Gallery in 1963, and he began showing with Leo Castelli in New York in 1973. As well as oils, he has painted in Vaseline, axle grease, food—caviar, cherries, carrot juice, chocolate—and he built “Chocolate Room” for the thirty-fifth Venice Biennale in 1970. Other work includes lithography, silkscreen, books and booklike objects, films, and treated photographs. Since the 1980s, he has been the subject of retrospectives at major museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Hirshhorn, and the Hayward Gallery in London. He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2005, he represented the U.S. at the fifty-first Venice Biennale.

  Russell, Bertrand, 3rd Earl Russell (1872–1970). English philosopher, mathematician, social critic, writer; educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge Apostle; afterwards he worked as a diplomat and academic. He published countless books and is one of the most widely read philosophers of the twentieth century. Chief among his awards and honors was the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Throughout his life, Russell expressed his convictions in social and political activism. When he opposed British entry into World War I and joined the No-Conscription Fellowship, he lost his first job at Trinity, and he was fined and imprisoned more than once for his role in public demonstrations as a pacifist. Partly as a result, he became a visiting professor and lecturer in America and returned to Trinity as a Fellow only in 1944. Isherwood first met him through Aldous and Maria Huxley in late 1939 in Hollywood, as he tells in D.1. By December 1939, Russell had renounced pacifism because of the evils of fascism. In 1949, he began to champion nuclear disarmament. In 1958, he helped to found and was elected president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but he resigned in 1960 to launch his more militant Committee of 100 for Civil Disobedience Against Nuclear Warfare, which sponsored several public protests in 1961 and which Isherwood refers to in D.2.

  Sachs, David (1921–1992). American philosopher and poet, born in Chicago, educated at UCLA and Princeton where he obtained his doctorate in 1953. He lectured widely and taught philosophy at a number of American and European universities, longest at Johns Hopkins. His essays on ethics, ancient philosophy, philosophy of the mind, literature, and psychoanalysis were published in many journals, as were his poems, and he edited The Philosophical Review. He appears in Lost Years as a participant in the mainly homosexual intellectual and domestic ménage known as the Benton Way Group and in D.2.

  Sagal, Boris (1917–1981). Ukrainian-born American director, educated at Yale School for Drama. He mostly directed for T.V., including episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” “Colombo,” and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” and he made the cult science-fiction film, The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston.

  Sagui, Carlos. Mexican friend of Mark Lipscomb and John Ladner; he lived in their house for a time in the mid-1970s and sat for Don Bachardy during the same period.

  Sahl, Mort (b. 1927). Canadian-American comedian and political satirist, raised mostly in Los Angeles and educated at UCLA. As he tells in D.1, Isherwood first saw him perform in Los Angeles in July 1960; that year, Sahl was pictured on the cover of Time Magazine as the father of a new kind of comedy. He appeared in films and on T.V. and made many recordings. He is also mentioned in D.2.

  samadhi. The state of superconsciousness, in which an individual can know the highest spiritual experience; absolute oneness with the ultimate reality; transcendental consciousness.

  Sandford, Rick (1951–1995). American actor and writer raised in Tahoe, California. He became a born-again Christian in 1971–1972 and settled in Los Angeles in 1973. He appeared in porn films and as a T.V. stand-in, and he published stories in Men 2 and His 3. His only novel, The Boys Across the Street, appeared posthumously in 2000. He is the subject of a number of portraits by Don Bachardy.

  Sanfaçon, Paul (1940–1989). Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Comparative Religions. He worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and had an apartment on the Upper West Side nearby. He mostly lived on West 14th Street with his much older lover, the painter and art critic Maurice Grosser, and was able to loan his own apartment to Isherwood. He died of AIDS.

  sannyas. The second and final vows of renunciation taken in the Ramakrishna Order, at least four or five years after the brahmacharya vows. The sannyasin undergoes a spiritual rebirth and, as part of the preparation for this, renounces all caste distinctions. In D.1, Isherwood’s entry for March 13, 1958 refers to the way in which Krishna (George Fitts) had first to join the Brahmin caste in order to have a caste to renounce; then Krishna had to imagine himself as dead, and to become a ghost in preparation
for being reborn. At sannyas, the spiritual aspirant becomes a swami and takes a new Sanskrit name, ending with “ananda,” bliss. Thus, the new name implies “he who has the bliss of” whatever the first element in the name specifies, as in Vivekananda, “he who has the bliss of discrimination.” A woman sannyasin becomes a pravrajika (woman ascetic), and her new name ends in “prana,” meaning “whose life is in” whatever is designated by the first element of the name.

  Santoro, Jean and Tony. American actress Jean Howard (1910–2000) and the Italian musician she married in 1973. She was born and raised in Texas, got a contract with MGM in 1930 and became a Ziegfeld girl around the same time. Her first marriage was to Charles Feldman, an agent and producer—including of the film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). After they divorced in 1948, they continued to live together, and Isherwood also refers to her as Jean Feldman. She met Santoro in 1964 in Capri, where he was playing in a band called The Shakers; they lived there and in Rome for nearly a decade before marrying and returning to Hollywood. She photographed Hollywood friends informally and, later, took pictures for Life and Vogue magazines. She published Jean Howard’s Hollywood: A Photo Memoir (1989) and Travels with Cole Porter (1991), illustrating her many trips with him.

  Sarada (d. 2009). American nun of the Ramakrishna Order; of Norwegian descent, born Ruth Folling. She studied music and dance and, while at the Vedanta Society, learned Sanskrit. Her father lived in New Mexico. Isherwood met her when he arrived in Hollywood in 1939; in the mid-1940s, she moved to the convent at Santa Barbara where he occasionally saw her. He writes about her in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years. She was a favorite of Prabhavananda, but she suddenly left the Vedanta Society in October 1965 when she was forty-three years old. She married a few years later and became a painter. Prabhavananda was distressed by her abrupt departure and for a long time afterwards forbade her to be mentioned by her Sanskrit name, insisting she be called Ruth.

  Sarada Convent, Montecito. In 1944, Spencer Kellogg gave his house at Montecito, near Santa Barbara, to the Vedanta Society of Southern California. The house was called “Ananda Bhavan,” Sanskrit for Home of Peace. Kellogg, a devotee, died the same year, and the house became a Vedanta center and eventually a convent housing about a dozen nuns. During the early 1950s, a temple was built adjacent to the grounds.

  Sarada Devi (1855–1920). Bengali wife of Ramakrishna; they married by arrangement when she was five years old. After the marriage, she returned to her family and he to his temple, and their relationship was always chaste although she later spent long periods of time living intimately with him. She became known as a saint in her own right and was worshipped as Holy Mother, the living embodiment of Mahamaya, of the Divine Mother, of the Goddess Sarasvati, and of Kali herself. Isherwood was initiated on Holy Mother’s birthday, November 8, 1940.

  Sarrazin, Michael (b. 1940). Canadian actor; he had a success in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) and afterwards appeared in made-for-T.V. movies, including “Frankenstein: The True Story” as the Creature.

  Sarver, Tony (1931–1980). American actor, stage manager, singer; born in Indianapolis of Afro-Cherokee-Irish parents. He served in the navy before settling in Los Angeles where he appeared in fringe productions and directed Paulene Myers in her one-woman black history production, World of My America, which toured colleges nationwide. He was the longtime partner of Bill Scobie from 1969 until his death, and he met Isherwood and Bachardy through Scobie. Bachardy drew him and Scobie; the portrait of Sarver appeared in October. When Sarver died of colon cancer, Isherwood read Auden’s poem “Since” at his funeral.

  Sat. See Barnett, Jimmy.

  Schlesinger, John (1926–2003). British film director, educated at Oxford. He was in the army during World War II, worked as an actor during the 1950s, and began making documentaries for BBC T.V. in 1957. Throughout his career, he received critical praise and prizes, beginning at the BBC and continuing with his first two feature films, A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963), followed by an Academy Award nomination for Darling (1965). His first Hollywood film, Midnight Cowboy (1969), won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director and made him internationally famous. Other films include Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), The Day of the Locust (1975), Marathon Man (1976), Madame Sousatzka (1988), Pacific Heights (1990), and Cold Comfort Farm (1996). He also directed for the stage, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, and for T.V. throughout his career. He lived with the photographer Michael Childers for more than thirty-six years. Isherwood was introduced to them by Gavin Lambert.

  Schlesinger, Peter (b. 1948). American painter, photographer, and, later, sculptor; born and raised in Los Angeles. In the summer of 1966, Schlesinger studied drawing with David Hockney at UCLA and became Hockney’s lover and model. In 1968, they travelled together to England, where Schlesinger studied at the Slade. He remained in England for the better part of a decade, also travelling in Europe. Some of the photographs which he took during this period later appeared in his book, A Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the 60s and 70s (2003), including many of Eric Boman, the photographer who became his lover and companion in 1971 and with whom he moved to New York in 1978. He appears in D.2.

  Schneider, Peter (1950–2007). American writer, editor, and teacher, raised in Claremont, California, where he became friends with Jim Gates who first introduced him to Vedanta. He and Gates moved to Los Angeles together when they were about eighteen, at first living briefly with Schneider’s father, Dr. Leonard Schneider, a Gestalt therapist and psychology professor at L.A. State, and afterwards in a cabin on the canals in Venice. Around this time, Schneider attended Santa Monica College; he later got a degree in English at UCLA. He introduced himself and Gates to Isherwood over the telephone; Isherwood began driving them to Wednesday night meetings at the Vedanta Society and soon introduced them to Swami Prabhavananda, whereupon Schneider joined the society, toying with the idea of becoming a monk. Instead, he married Sumishta Brahm, a Vedanta devotee; the marriage was short, but he stayed away from the Vedanta Society for some years. Afterwards, he lived with Anya Cronin, also known as Anya Liffey, with whom he had two children in the 1980s. With Cronin, he wrote and produced musicals and other theater events for the Vedanta Society and elsewhere. He contributed to Vedanta publications and served as the society librarian in Hollywood. His Sanskrit name, given to him by Vivekaprana, was Hiranyagarbha. As P. Schneidre and later P. Shneidre, he published poems in The Paris Review, Rolling Stone, Antioch Review, and others. He also founded and ran a literary press, Illuminati, publishing work by James Merrill, Charles Bukowski, Viggo Mortensen, and a book of Don Bachardy’s drawings of artists, 70 x 1. He appears in D.2.

  Schubach, Scott. A wealthy doctor who lived with Michael Hall for some years in West Hollywood.

  Schuman, Howard (b. 1942). American television writer and presenter; born in Brooklyn, educated at Brandeis University and the University of California at Berkeley. He settled permanently in London in 1969 to live with Robert Chetwyn. His television work includes “Rock Follies”—which he devised and wrote, including the lyrics, and which won the BAFTA Award for best serial in 1976—and “Selling Hitler” (1991). He has been a BBC T.V. presenter and writes articles and reviews. Isherwood conjectures in this diary that Schuman is partly black, but as far back as he can trace his ancestry, Schuman knows of no black forebears.

  Schwed, Peter (1911–2003). Isherwood’s editor at Simon & Schuster; raised on Long Island and educated at Princeton. Eventually he became editorial chairman of the firm. He wrote several books himself, mostly about golf and tennis, and published a volume of his editorial correspondence with P.G. Wodehouse. Isherwood never genuinely felt that Schwed liked or understood his writing although they worked together for about fifteen years. He appears in D.1 and D.2.

  Scobie, W.I. (William, Bill) (b. 1932). British journalist, born in Scotland, educated at Perth Academy and the University of London. He reported freelance for Time Magaz
ine and The Observer in the Middle East, Cyprus, and Italy, then in 1969 moved to Los Angeles, where he continued as a stringer for The Observer. He met Tony Sarver that October and spent the next ten years with him—until Sarver’s death—in two wooden shacks which backed onto each other on Venice Beach. In 1974, Scobie proposed to interview Isherwood for The Paris Review, launching a friendship with him and with Bachardy; they saw movies together every couple of weeks and ate supper at El Coyote. The interview appeared in 1975. Scobie was a regular contributor to The Advocate, and he published poems in Encounter, The London Magazine, and The Paris Review. Later, he settled in France.

  Scott Gilbert, Clement. British would-be theatrical producer, he was wealthy and eventually became the owner of the Pembroke Theatre in Croydon Surrey. With Ernest Vadja, he created the characters for “Presenting Charles Boyer,” an NBC radio show which ran a handful of times in 1950. He backed two 1961 productions staged in Croydon: Mother, with David McCallum in the cast, and Compulsion. And he backed the proposed London production of A Meeting by the River in London in 1970. He appears in D.2.

  Searle, Alan (1905–1985). Secretary and companion to Somerset Maugham from 1938; he was the son of a Bermondsey tailor and had a cockney accent. Lytton Strachey was a former lover. When he first met Maugham in London in 1928, Searle was working with convicts—visiting them in prison and helping them to resettle in the community on release—but he told Maugham he wanted to travel. Maugham invited him on the spot to do so, but for a decade they met again only when Maugham was in London. Eventually, Searle devoted his life to Maugham and became his heir. He appears in D.1 and D.2.