fn797 Their own bed.
fn798 Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, for service to the nation.
fn799 At UCLA on March 16.
fn800 Sabato Rodia, a local workman, spent more than twenty-five years building the junk towers; see Glossary.
fn801 Beckerman had a production company and worked with various studios; his best-known film was Marathon Man (1976) at Paramount.
fn802 I.e., that Carter Lodge, as van Druten’s heir, had rights in the material; see Glossary.
fn803 Evans’s companion, also his silent partner in the gallery.
fn804 Maugham (1916–1981)—barrister, soldier, author of fiction, plays, and screenplays, and a nephew of Somerset Maugham—published the novel in 1968.
fn805 The most sacred mantra of the Hindu tradition.
fn806 Isherwood also loved this ballad, from the end of Billy Budd, which contains the line, “Heaven knows who will have the running of me up!” “Up,” meaning heaven, was a special habitat of Bachardy’s Kitty persona.
fn807 Made by Lawrence from a twisted branch fixed to a hand-cut, oval, wooden base possibly from the same tree; given to Isherwood by Frieda Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, or Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos in 1950. During the same visit, Georgia O’Keeffe gave him a cedar root she found at the Lawrence ranch; he mentions the root in D.1.
fn808 Not his real name.
fn809 “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.”
fn810 Winston Churchill’s war correspondence—London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900) and Ian Hamilton’s March, Together with Extracts from the Diary of Lieut. H. Frankland, a Prisoner of War at Pretoria (1900)—appeared in a one-volume edition in 1962.
fn811 Goodbye Dolly Grey: The Story of the Boer War (1959).
fn812 A.H.C. Kearsey, War Record of the York and Lancaster Regiment 1900–1902 (1903).
fn813 On May 24, 1969 in London for possession of cannabis. The trial was delayed until September 29 so he could make Ned Kelly. He was previously arrested on May 10, 1967 at Redlands, the home of Rolling Stone Keith Richards, and convicted of possessing amphetamines.
fn814 Ryan (d. 1991), an electronics engineer, helped design Mattel’s Barbie and Chattie Cathy talking dolls; he was later a husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor. The party was a UCLA alumni fundraiser.
fn815 American talent agent, movie producer, and studio executive at CBS and Twentieth Century-Fox (b. 1935).
fn816 When Gautama renounces the world to wander alone.
fn817 Gable (1940–1998), a star at the Royal Ballet, played Eric Fenby, the composer’s amanuensis, in Ken Russell’s Delius: Song of Summer (1968); later he founded the Central School of Ballet and was artistic director of Northern Ballet Theatre.
fn818 Anamananda, previously Arup Chaitanya and before that, Kenny.
fn819 Choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan, 1965.
fn820 Robert Hoffman (1921–1997), twice-married monk who also lived at the Hollywood Vedanta Society. He founded the Hoffman Institute to promote his 1967 insight that unconditional love is a universal birthright and published Getting Divorced from Mother and Dad (1976).
fn821 See Aug. 12, 1961.
fn822 Apollo 11 was launched July 16; Nixon declared July 20 a national holiday so that Americans could watch Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin walk on the moon.
fn823 Isherwood and Bachardy eventually received satisfactory payment.
fn824 I.e., Union de Transports Aériens, a French airline.
fn825 Richard Dreyfuss; see Glossary.
fn826 Rudolph Graf Strachwitz von Gross-Zauche und Camminetz helped plan the assassination attempt against Hitler in 1944; see Glossary.
fn827 The murders in Benedict Canyon and Silver Lake were committed by the Manson gang; the third incident was unrelated. See Glossary.
fn828 A bar.
fn829 Cf. Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXX, l. 75.
fn830 Samoan houses.
fn831 Agnes Genevieve Grey (1897–1988), of British-Samoan descent, ran a bar, once called the Cosmopolitan Club, which flourished when the U.S. military arrived in Samoa in 1942; she is rumored to have been a model for “Bloody Mary” in James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (1948).
fn832 Traditional Samoan feast with music and dancing.
fn833 Medavoy (b. 1941) became a powerful studio executive at United Artists, was a founder of Orion Pictures in 1978, and later chairman of Tri-Star Pictures. Isherwood typed Midavoy.
fn834 Stevenson’s house.
fn835 The last two lines of “Requiem” appear on the tomb; Isherwood first read Stevenson in childhood with Frank.
fn836 Published as Narada’s Way of Divine Love (1971), translated and with a commentary by Prabhavananda, introduced by Isherwood.
fn837 72 Drawings: Chosen by the Artist (1971); Isherwood’s introduction was not used.
fn838 His first wife.
fn839 Anne Heywood, Miss Britain 1949 (b. Violet Pretty, 1932), appeared in the film of another D.H. Lawrence story, The Fox (1968), and was being promoted by her producer husband, Stross (1916–1988). Their other films include A Terrible Beauty (1960), Midas Run (1969), and Good Luck Miss Wyckoff (1979), but they did not make the two Isherwood mentions.
fn840 An Australian studio.
fn841 In The Boy in the Bush (1924), chptr. 4, “Wandoo.”
fn842 Passages about the visit appear in D.1.
fn843 British production director and costume designer (1917–2003) for Ned Kelly; production designer for the English Stage Company since painting scenery for its first season at the Royal Court. She lived with company co-founder George Devine and worked on other Richardson films.
fn844 Christopher Jagger, musician, songwriter, bandleader.
fn845 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (b. 1917), who devised and promoted Transcendental Meditation. He initiated the Beatles in 1967, and they went on a retreat at his Himalayan ashram; Jagger and Faithfull were also there.
fn846 Australian journalist (1910–1983), celebrated for his coverage of W.W.II; his books include the prize-winning Gallipoli (1956).
fn847 The bungalow where Lawrence and Frieda lived in 1922 when he was writing Kangaroo, in which he used it.
fn848 Isherwood’s ancestor Judge John Bradshaw (1602–1659) sentenced Charles I to death. Thomas Fairfax (1612–1671) led the Parliamentary forces to victory against the king but stayed away from the trial and tried to get the execution postponed.
fn849 I.e., cliff; it is well over a thousand feet high.
fn850 The raid on the Variety, December 1, 1949, mentioned in D.1 in Isherwood’s “Outline” and in his entry for December 6, 1949.
fn851 Schenck was a studio executive; see Glossary.
fn852 The San Pedro Channel, between the Los Angeles coastline and Santa Catalina Island.
fn853 Manhattan lawyer (1927–1986); he helped prosecute Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs for the New York District Attorney and then became chief council to Joseph McCarthy.
fn854 Richard J. Daley (1902–1976), mayor of Chicago from 1955 to his death and president of the corrupt Cook County Democratic Central Committee; he issued a shoot-to-kill order against rioters following Martin Luther King’s assassination and appeared to encourage police violence against demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic convention.
fn855 Lewis Blaine Hershey (1893–1977), director of the Selective Service System (the U.S. draft) 1940-1970.
fn856 Pro-segregation, four-time governor of Alabama (1919–1998); he ran for president four times.
fn857 Of figurative art over abstract.
fn858 I.e., St. John’s College.
fn859 I.e., George Lazenby instead of Sean Connery.
fn860 Isherwood devised the pseudonym as a comment on the T.V. show. “Bergmann” is the character in Prater Violet whose wife tells him, “Go and write your poems. When I have cooked the dinner, I will invent this idiotic story for you. After all, prostitution is a woman’s business.” “Magda” is indeed
a woman’s name, borrowed from one of the Gabor sisters, at Bachardy’s suggestion.
fn861 Isherwood wrote David Selznick, but almost certainly meant Daniel (b. 1936), Harvard-educated writer and producer who was the younger son of David with his first wife Irene Mayer Selznick (1907–1990). She became a theatrical producer when they separated—of Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and van Druten’s Bell, Book, and Candle (1950) among others.
fn862 The Babymaker.
Glossary
Abedha. American disciple of Swami Prabhavananda, born Tony Eckstein. He spent many years at Trabuco and at the Hollywood Vedanta Society, but never took sannyas and eventually left to work for Parker Pens.
Acebo, Eddie (b. 1940). American Vedanta devotee, born in Los Angeles of Mexican parents. When he was just fifteen, he saw Gerald Heard moderate a television program called “Focus on Sanity”; later he read essays by Heard, Huxley, and Isherwood, which guided him to Vedanta, and he spent six years living as a monk at the Hollywood Vedanta Society and at Trabuco studying Indian philosophy. In 1968, he moved to Mexico and settled there for many years, but eventually he returned to Trabuco.
Ackerley, J. R. (Joe) (1896–1967). English author and editor. He wrote drama, poetry, fiction, and autobiography, and is well known for his intimate relationship with his Alsatian, described in My Dog Tulip (1956) and We Think the World of You (1960). Other books include Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal (1932) and My Father and Myself (1968). He was literary editor of The Listener from 1935 to 1959 and published work by some of the best and most important writers of his period; Isherwood contributed numerous reviews during the 1930s. Their friendship was sustained in later years partly by their shared intimacy with E.M. Forster. Ackerley was also close to his sister, Nancy West, who was a great beauty and a drunk, as Isherwood records. Ackerley appears in D.1 and is mentioned in Lost Years.
ACLU. American Civil Liberties Union, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization founded in 1920 to protect and preserve individual liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and its amendments.
Alan. See Campbell, Alan.
Albert, Eddie (1906–2005). American actor, on Broadway from the mid-1930s. his films include Carrie (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), Oklahoma (1955), and The Heartbreak Kid (1972), and he played Oliver in the T.V. series “Green Acres,” which first aired in 1965. His wife of forty years, the actress and dancer Margo (1917–1985) was born in Mexico City as Maria Marguerita Guadalupe Teresa Estel Bolado Castilla y O’Donell. She had a brief first marriage. Her films include Winterset (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), and Viva Zapata! (1952). She sat for Bachardy in 1973.
Albert, Edward (1951–2006). American actor; son of Eddie and Margo Albert. He appeared in his first film when he was fourteen. Later he went to UCLA and Oxford. He starred in Butterflies Are Free (1972) and eventually became a photographer. He sat for Bachardy in 1973.
Aldous. See Huxley, Aldous.
Alec. See Beesley, Alec and Dodie Smith Beesley.
Allen, Alan Warren. Isherwood’s general practitioner from April 1961; he was then about forty, tall, handsome, soft-spoken, easygoing, and married. As Isherwood tells in this diary, his first wife committed suicide and Allen later remarried.
Allen, Edwin (Ed). American librarian, at Wesleyan College; once a salesman for Oxford University Press. He met the Stravinskys in 1962, when he was about thirty, and cataloged Igor Stravinsky’s library. He also helped with errands and domestic tasks in California and New York, becoming a weekend fixture in the Stravinskys’ Fifth Avenue apartment when they moved permanently to New York.
Altman, Dennis (b. 1943). Australian academic, author, gay activist. He did graduate work at Cornell in the mid-1960s and published one of the first accounts of the gay liberation movement in the U.S., Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971), followed by many books on sexuality and political culture. Later, he became a politics professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne and President of the AIDS Society of Asia and the Pacific.
Amiya (1902–1986). English Vedanta devotee, born Ella Sully, one of ten daughters of a handsome Somerset farm laborer whose upper-class wife chose scandal and poverty in order to marry him. Amiya travelled to California in the early 1930s with an older sister, Joy, who married an American artist named Palmerton. She was hired by Swami Prabhavananda and Sister Lalita as housekeeper at Ivar Avenue. By the time Isherwood met her at the end of the decade, she had received her Sanskrit name from Swami and become a nun. She became a particular friend of Isherwood’s when he lived at the Vedanta Society during the 1940s. She had married in the late 1920s, becoming Ella Corbin, but the marriage failed; in 1952 she met George Montagu, 9th Earl of Sandwich (1874–1962), when he visited the Vedanta Society. A few weeks later Swami gave them permission to marry, and Amiya returned to England, divorced Corbin, and became Countess of Sandwich. She grew close to Isherwood’s mother and brother. She was also close to her own younger sister, Sally Hardie (1906–1990), over whom she tried to hold sway with her social position, with lavish gifts, and by financing her company, Sphinx Films, which, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, made several travel films about Italy. Bachardy drew Amiya twice. She appears in D.1.
Amohananda. American monk of the Ramakrishna Order. Until he took sannyas in 1971, he was called Paul Hamilton.
Anamananda. See Arup Chaitanya.
ananda. Sanskrit for bliss or joy; an aspect of Brahman. It is used as the last part of a monk’s sannyas name in the Ramakrishna Order, for example, Vivekananda, “whose bliss is in discrimination.”
Anandaprana or Ananda. See Usha.
Anderson, Judith (1898–1992). Australian-born actress; she made her first appearance on the New York stage in 1918 and played major roles throughout the 1930s and 1940s, including the lead in Mourning Becomes Electra (1932), Gertrude to Gielgud’s Hamlet in 1936, Lady Macbeth twice, and Medea twice. She also had many movie roles, including Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and other often chilling parts. She took the lead in the brief Broadway run of Speed Lamkin’s play Comes a Day at the end of the 1950s. In 1961, Isherwood records that he saw the “snippets” from her most famous shows, which she performed with Bill Roerick on a U.S. tour that included Los Angeles. She appears in D.1.
Anderson, Phil. A big, dark, good-looking American whom Isherwood and Bachardy sometimes ran into on the beach in Santa Monica in the early 1960s. Isherwood often told Bachardy he found Anderson attractive. He had particularly nice legs.
Andrews, Oliver and Betty Harford. California sculptor, on the art faculty at UCLA; American actress, his wife until the 1970s. They are mentioned as a couple in D.1 and in Lost Years. Oliver knew Alan Watts well and travelled with him to Japan. Betty acted for John Houseman in numerous stage productions and appeared in a few movies, including Inside Daisy Clover (1965). Also, she was a close friend of Iris Tree and acted at Tree’s High Valley Theater in the Upper Ojai Valley. They had a son, Christopher, born in the 1950s and named after Isherwood. After they separated, she lived with Hungarian actor Alex de Naszody until he died in the early 1980s. Oliver died suddenly of a heart attack in 1978, while still in his forties.
Angus. See Wilson, Angus.
Animals, The. Isherwood and Bachardy. Also, homosexuals in general, as against human beings or heterosexuals. Isherwood and Bachardy called their Adelaide Drive house La Casa de los Animales. See also Dobbin for Isherwood in his identity as a horse and Kitty for Bachardy.
Arizu, Betty. The daughter Jo Masselink had with Ferdinand Hinchberger. She married Fran Arizu, a Mexican, with whom she had two children.
Arup Chaitanya. American disciple of Swami Prabhavananda, born Kenneth (Kenny) Critchfield. He arrived at the Vedanta Society towards the end of the 1940s and lived there and at Trabuco. He took his brahmacharya vows in 1954, becoming Arup Chaitanya; then in 1963, on taking sannyas, he became Swami Anamananda. He worked for many years in the Vedanta Society Hollywood bookstore, and he died at Trabuco in the early 1990s. He appears in
D.1.
Asaktananda, Swami (1931–2009). Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He was groomed by Swami Prabhavananda to take over the Hollywood Vedanta Society, until Prabhavananda unexpectedly decided that Asaktananda had the wrong personality for the role and sent him back to the Belur Math in India against his wishes and amid much controversy. Asaktananda later headed the Narendrapur Center, an enormous educational establishment of the Ramakrishna Order outside Calcutta.
asanas. Yoga postures, or the mat on which they are performed.
Ashokananda, Swami. Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order. Head of the Vedanta Center in San Francisco, where Isherwood first met him in 1943. He appears in D.1.
Ashton, Frederick (Freddy) (1904–1988). British choreographer and dancer; born in Ecuador, raised in Peru, and educated in England from 1919. He studied with Léonide Massine and Marie Rambert; Rambert was the first to commission a ballet from him, in 1926. In the late 1920s, he worked briefly as a choreographer in Paris; then, in 1926, he joined the Vic-Wells (later Sadler’s Wells) Ballet, where he spent the rest of his career. The company gradually evolved into the Royal Ballet, and, in 1963, Ashton succeeded Ninette de Valois as director. He appears in Lost Years.
atman. The divine nature within man; Brahman within the human being; the self or soul; the deepest core of man’s identity.
Aubrey, James (1918–1994). Film and T.V. executive; born in Illinois, educated at Princeton. He was a fantastically successful president of CBS television, dominating ratings and doubling profits, until he was fired in 1965. In 1969, he took over MGM Studios, but meanwhile, he briefly headed Aubrey Productions, joined by Hunt Stromberg, who had worked closely with him at CBS. Isherwood refers to their producing partnership as Aubrey-Stromberg. Aubrey was said to be the model for the ruthless Robert Stone in Jacqueline Susann’s 1969 novel The Love Machine.
Auden, W.H. (Wystan) (1907–1973). English poet, playwright, librettist; perhaps the greatest English poet of his century and one of the most influential. He and Isherwood met as schoolboys towards the end of Isherwood’s time at St. Edmund’s School, Hindhead, Surrey, where Auden, two and a half years younger, arrived in the autumn of 1915. They wrote three plays together—The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), On the Frontier (1938)—and a travel book about their trip to China during the Sino-Japanese war—-Journey to a War (1939). A fourth play—The Enemies of a Bishop (1929)—was published posthumously. They also wrote a film scenario “The Life of an American,” probably in 1939. As well as several stints of schoolmastering, Auden worked for John Grierson’s Film Unit, funded by the General Post Office, for about six months in 1935, mostly writing poetry to be used for sound tracks. He and Isherwood went abroad separately and together during the 1930s, famously to Berlin (Auden arrived first, in 1928), and finally emigrated together to the U.S. in 1939. After only a few months, their lives diverged, but they remained close friends; Auden settled in New York with his companion and, later, collaborator, Chester Kallman. Auden’s librettos include Paul Bunyan (1941), for Benjamin Britten, The Rake’s Progress (1948) with Kallman for Stravinsky, and Elegy for Young Lovers with Kallman for Hans Werner Henze. As this diary records, Isherwood and Bachardy attended the premiere of Elegy for Young Lovers at Glyndeborne in July 1961. Auden is caricatured as “Hugh Weston” in Lions and Shadows and figures centrally in Christopher and His Kind. There are many passages about him in D.1 and in Lost Years.
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