Buddha Chaitanya (Buddha). An American disciple of Swami Prabhavananda; born Philip Griggs. He lived as a monk both at the Hollywood Vedanta Society and at Trabuco during the 1950s and took brahmacharya vows with John Yale in August 1955, becoming Buddha Chaitanya. In 1959 he left Vedanta for a time, but eventually took sannyas and became Swami Yogeshananda. Later he led a Vedanta group in Georgia. He appears in D.1.
Bürgi, Maria. Swiss academic and Vedanta devotee. She taught about Hinduism at the University of Lausanne and as Maria Bürgi-Kyriazi published several books, including one about Ramana Maharshi.
Burton, Richard (1925–1984). British actor, born Richard Jenkins in a Welsh coal-mining village; he took the surname of his English master and guardian, Philip Burton. He made his professional stage debut in the early 1940s, then served in the air force and briefly studied English at Oxford, where he acted in Shakespeare. He starred in Hamlet in London and New York in 1953 and 1954, followed by other Shakespearian roles and, later, the musical Camelot (1960) on Broadway and Equus (1976). His films include My Cousin Rachel (1952), The Robe (1953), Alexander the Great (1956), Look Back in Anger (1959), Becket (1964), The Night of the Iguana (1964), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Where Eagles Dare (1969), Equus (1977), and California Suite (1978). He was nominated seven times for an Academy Award. His first wife was a Welsh actress, Sybil Williams, with whom Isherwood met him in the late 1950s, and with whom he appears in D.1. He began a tempestuous public romance with Elizabeth Taylor when he played opposite her in Cleopatra (1963); they married twice, in 1964 and 1975, and divorced both times. His third wife, whom he married in 1976, was an English model, Susan Hunt, and he met his fourth wife, Sally Hay, when she worked as an administrator on his television film “Wagner”; they married in 1983. His legendary drinking hastened his death. In September 1960, Isherwood began to work for Burton on a screenplay of “The Beach of Falesá” by Robert Louis Stevenson; Burton had bought the rights to the story and wanted to produce it himself. Nothing came of the screenplay drafts by various authors although the project limped on for a few years. Around the same time, the Burtons loaned their Hampstead house to Don Bachardy when he studied at the Slade, and Isherwood lived there with Bachardy during 1961. Richard Burton’s brother, Ivor Jenkins, lived adjacent with his wife, Gwen, and looked after the property; the Jenkinses also appear in D.1.
Calley, John (b. 1930). American film producer and studio executive, born in New Jersey. He began his career in T.V. in the 1950s, worked in advertising, and then became an executive at Filmways, Inc. From 1968 to 1981, he was a senior executive at Warner Brothers and president for a time. During the 1980s, he was an independent producer, working closely with Mike Nichols, and then he ran United Artists and Sony Pictures. Isherwood worked for him when Calley was co-producer with Haskell Wexler of The Loved One (Neil Hartley was associate producer). Calley’s other films include Ice Station Zebra (1968), Catch-22 (1970), Postcards from the Edge (1990), The Remains of the Day (1993), Goldeneye (1995), Closer (2004), and The Da Vinci Code (2006).
Campbell, Alan (1904–1963). Actor and screenwriter, second husband of Dorothy Parker. They first married in 1933, divorced after the war, and later remarried, eventually settling on Norma Place, West Hollywood, the heart of Boys Town, as it was known among the gay community (Campbell was rumored to be homosexual). They worked on more than a dozen screenplays together, including, with Robert Carson, A Star Is Born (1937) and Lillian Hellman’s film adaptation of her play Little Foxes (1941). Campbell was involved with the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and other leftist causes; he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s.
Campbell, Dean. American musical comedy actor, singer, dancer, singing coach; he appears in D.1.
Campbell, Douglas (b. 1922). Scottish actor and director, mostly of classic stage plays, including Shakespeare; later, he appeared in small T.V. roles and made a few movies. He spent much of his career in Canada, where he performed at the Stratford Festival from 1955 onward and founded The Canadian Players, of which he was artistic director. He played Bernard Shaw in Isherwood’s version of The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God.
Capote, Truman (1924–1984). American novelist, born in New Orleans; his real name was Truman Persons. In Lost Years, Isherwood describes meeting Capote in the Random House offices in May 1947 shortly before the publication of Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. They quickly became friends, and Capote also appears in D.1. Capote wrote for The New Yorker, where he worked in the early 1940s, and for other magazines. His books include The Grass Harp (1951), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), and the non-fiction novel In Cold Blood (1966). He never finished his last novel, Answered Prayers, though a chapter, “La Côte Basque, 1965,” was published in Esquire magazine in 1975, forever alienating rich and powerful friends who were portrayed in it. The rest of what he had written of the novel was published posthumously. Capote’s companion for many years was Newton Arvin, a college professor; afterwards, he lived and travelled with Jack Dunphy, and then later picked up new boyfriends with increasing frequency, including John O’Shea. Drink and drugs hastened his death.
Caron, Leslie (b. 1931). French dancer and actress. Her father was a chemist, her American-born mother a dancer. Caron studied ballet from childhood, performed in Paris as a teenager, and was discovered by Gene Kelly, who made her a star in An American in Paris (1951). Isherwood first met her during the 1950s, when she was appearing in Hollywood musicals such as The Glass Slipper (1955) and Gigi (1958). She received British Film Academy Awards and was nominated for Academy Awards for Lili (1953) and The L-Shaped Room (1962). Later, she appeared in Damage (1992), Jean Renoir (1993), The Reef (1997), Chocolat (2000), and Le Divorce (2003). She also worked on the stage in New York, London, and Paris. She was married briefly to George Hormel in the early 1950s, then for ten years to British director Peter Hall, with whom she had two children. Her third husband, from 1969 to 1980, was American producer Michael Laughlin. She is mentioned in D.1.
Carroll, Nellie (d. 2005). American artist, born Jean Dobrin; she designed and drew greeting cards. She was a close friend of Jim Bridges and Jack Larson. Bachardy drew and painted her many times after they met in 1963. She married once and had a daughter, Amy, who died of cancer in the early 1990s. For the last forty or so years of her life, she lived with a Mexican man about fifteen years her junior, who also had a wife and son.
Carter. See Lodge, Carter.
Caskey, William (Bill) (1921–1981). American photographer, born and raised in Kentucky; a lapsed Catholic of Irish background, part Cherokee Indian. Isherwood met him in 1945 when Caskey arrived in Santa Monica Canyon with a friend, Hayden Lewis, and joined the circle surrounding Denny Fouts and Jay de Laval. They became lovers in June that year and by August had begun a serious affair. Caskey was briefly in the navy during World War II and was discharged neither honorably nor dishonorably (a “blue discharge”) following a homosexual scandal in which Hayden Lewis was also implicated. Caskey’s father bred horses, and Caskey had ridden since childhood; he had worked in photo-finish at a Kentucky racecourse, and in about 1945 he took up photography seriously. He took portraits of his and Isherwood’s friends, and he took the photographs for The Condor and the Cows, which Isherwood dedicated to Caskey’s mother, Catherine. Caskey’s parents were divorced, and he was on poor terms with his father and two sisters. He and Isherwood split in 1951 after intermittent separations and domestic troubles. Later, he lived in Athens and travelled frequently to Egypt. As well as taking photographs, he made art objects out of junk, and for a time had a business beading sweaters. There are many passages about him in D.1, and he is a central figure in Lost Years.
chaddar. A length of cloth worn on the upper body, often draped on the shoulders as a shawl, by monks and nuns of the Ramakrishna Order and by many other Hindus. Some Western Vedantists meditate in it, to keep warm
, and to conceal their rosary.
Chamberlain, Richard (b. 1935). American actor and singer; born in Beverly Hills and educated at Pomona College before serving in Korea for a year and a half. He became famous in the series “Dr. Kildare,” in which he starred from 1961 to 1966, and he never shook off the role, despite ambitious appearances on the London stage (for instance as Hamlet) and in a number of films, including The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), Julius Caesar (1970), The Three Musketeers (1974), and The Four Musketeers (1975). He returned to T.V. successfully in the mini-series “Shogun” (1980) and “The Thorn Birds” (1985).
Chapman, Hester (1895–1976). Novelist and biographer of royal figures such as Anne Boleyn, Caroline Matilda of Denmark, and the Duke of Buckingham. She was a cousin of Dadie Rylands, a habitué of Bloomsbury, and a longtime friend of Rosamond Lehmann. With her first husband, she ran a boys’ prep school in Devon. Her second husband, Ronnie Griffin, a banker, died in 1955.
Chapman, Kent (b. 1935). A student acquaintance of Isherwood, first mentioned in D.1 in July 1957. He was an aspiring writer, followed artistic developments among the California poets and painters in West Venice where he lived during the late 1950s, and told Isherwood about the scene there, including his own first attempt to smoke pot. Isherwood also met a girlfriend, Nancy Dvorak. In 1958, Chapman was drafted into the army and served briefly and unhappily in Korea. The night before he received his induction letter, he ran across Los Angeles to Venice from a friend’s house in Hollywood and was stopped by a policeman in Beverly Hills. He no longer recalls whether the policeman drove him the rest of the way home, but Isherwood perhaps drew on the episode for A Single Man. After Korea, Chapman threw away a novella he had completed and which Isherwood admired, about Vivekananda. In 1963, he moved to San Francisco where he developed a serious drug problem. Five years later, he gave up drugs, got married, and became a Roman Catholic. Eventually, he divorced, moved to France in 1979, and, in 1982, entered a Benedictine monastery, the Abbey of En Calcat, in southern France where, as Frère Laurent, he continued to write and where he also took up painting. He was also a close friend, in France, of Swami Vidyatmananda.
Charles. See Laughton, Charles.
Charlton, Jim (1919–1998). American architect, from Reading, Pennsylvania. He studied at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in Arizona and also at Wright’s first center, Taliesin, in Wisconsin. He joined the air force during the war and flew twenty-six missions over Germany, including a July 1943 daylight raid. Isherwood was introduced to him by Ben and Jo Masselink in August 1948 (Ben Masselink had also studied at Taliesin West), and they established a friendly–romantic attachment that lasted many years. Towards the end of the 1950s, Charlton married a wealthy Swiss woman called Hilde, a mother of three; he had a son with her in September 1958. The marriage ended in divorce. Afterwards he lived briefly in Japan and then, until the late 1980s, in Hawaii, where he wrote an autobiographical novel, St. Mick. Charlton was a model for Bob Wood in The World in the Evening. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.
Cherry, Budd. Creative assistant on The Loved One for Tony Richardson. He sat for Bachardy around this time and signed his portrait using a double “d” for his first name. He had an apartment in New York, on East 68th Street, which he once loaned to Bachardy. He was also a dialogue director on Faces (1968).
Chester. See Kallman, Chester.
Christian. See Neddermeyer, Christian.
Claxton, Bill and Peggy Moffitt. He was a photographer known for his work with musicians and actors. His wife, Peggy Moffitt, was a model and actress. She was muse to fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, modelling his topless bathing suit in the mid-1960s, and she had a small role in Antonioni’s Blow-up (1965). In 1991, they published The Rudi Gernreich Book, full of Claxton’s photographs of Gernreich’s designs worn mostly by Moffitt in her signature white pancake makeup with heavily blacked eyes. One shot shows Bachardy drawing her portrait while Gernreich looks on. Isherwood met Bill Claxton through Jim Charlton, and he appears in D.1.
Clay, Camilla (d. 2000). American stage director. She assisted Ellis Rabb at the APA Repertory Company in 1966 and occasionally later. In 1967, she assisted José Quintero when he directed O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions with Ingrid Bergman and Colleen Dewhurst at the Ahmanson before bringing it to New York. From 1967 to 1972 she rented a house in Malibu with writer Linda Crawford and before that, briefly, they lived at the Chateau Marmont. In 1972, the pair moved back east where Clay directed Cabaret at a community theater on the North Fork of Long Island in 1974 and Stuck by Sandra Scoppettone in 1976. She lived in Los Angeles again for a few years from 1979 onward before finally settling in New York, where she died of cancer. Isherwood met her through Gavin Lambert.
Clift, Montgomery (1920–1966). American actor, born in Nebraska. He began his career on Broadway at fourteen and appeared in Moss Hart and Cole Porter’s musical comedy Jubilee (1935), Robert Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning There Shall Be No Night (1940), Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), Lillian Hellman’s The Searching Wind (1944), and Tennessee Williams and Donald Windham’s romantic comedy You Touched Me (1945). He was an early member of Actors Studio in the late 1940s before becoming a Hollywood star in Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948). His other films included A Place in the Sun (1951), From Here to Eternity (1953), Raintree County (1957), The Young Lions (1958), Suddenly Last Summer (1959), The Misfits (1961), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and Freud (1962). Isherwood met him at the end of the 1940s through Fred Zinnemann. As Isherwood records in D.1 and Lost Years, Clift had a drinking problem and was insecure about his looks. He had a car crash in 1957 which badly affected his face, and while he was making Freud, in which he appeared as the young doctor, he had cataracts removed from both eyes. He died of a heart attack when he was only forty-five.
Clint. See Kimbrough, Clint.
C.O. Conscientious objector.
Cockburn, Jean. See Ross, Jean.
Cohen, Andee (b. circa 1946). American photographer. She began taking pictures of her friends—actors, artists, and rock-and-roll musicians in London and Los Angeles—when her boyfriend, James Fox, gave her a camera in 1966. Her work appeared on album covers for Frank Zappa, Joe Cocker, Tom Petty, and others. Later she married Rick Nathanson, a film producer.
Coldstream, William (Bill) (1908–1987). English painter and teacher; educated at the Slade School of Fine Art. He exhibited with the New English Art Club and the London Group in the late 1920s and became a member of the London Group in 1934. During the mid-1930s, he worked for John Grierson’s General Post Office film unit with Auden, already an acquaintance, and Benjamin Britten; Coldstream and his first wife, the painter Nancy Sharp, took in Auden as a lodger. (Nancy later married Stephen Spender’s older brother Michael Spender.) Coldstream painted mostly portraits, including of Isherwood, Auden, Auden’s mother, and some landcapes. In 1937, he founded the Euston Road School of Drawing and Painting with Victor Pasmore. During the war, he joined the Royal Artillery and in 1943 was made an Official War Artist. Afterwards he taught at Camberwell School of Art and became a professor at the Slade, where he remained until 1975. He chaired the National Advisory Council on Art Education from 1959, producing the Coldstream Report in 1960, which called for art students to study art history as a requirement and led eventually to degree status being awarded to recognized art courses.
Colloredo-Mansfeld, Countess Mabel (Nishta) (1912–1965). American secretary of the Ramakrishna-Vedanta Center in New York, on the Upper East Side, from 1956. She first visited the center in 1951. She was born Mabel Bayard Bradley in Boston and educated at Foxcroft School, Virginia. In 1933 she married Franz Colloredo-Mansfeld, an Austrian count raised partly in New York and educated at Harvard. They had two sons and a daughter before he was killed flying for the Royal Air Force during World War II.
Connolly, Cyril (1903–1974). British journalist and critic; educated at Eton and Oxford. He was a regular and prolific contributor to English news
papers and magazines, including The New Statesman, The Observer (where he was literary editor in the early 1940s), and The Sunday Times. He wrote one novel, The Rock Pool (1936), followed by collections of criticism, autobiography, aphorisms, and essays—Enemies of Promise (1938), The Unquiet Grave (1944), The Condemned Playground (1945), Previous Convictions (1963), and The Evening Colonnade (1973). In 1939, he founded Horizon with Stephen Spender and edited it throughout its publication until 1950. He was perhaps the nearest “friend” of Isherwood and Auden who publicly criticized their decision to remain in America during World War II. He blamed them for abandoning a literary-political movement that he was convinced they had begun and were responsible for. Connolly married three times: first to Jean Bakewell, who divorced him in 1945, then to Barbara Skelton from 1950 to 1956, and finally, in 1959, to Deirdre Craig with whom he had a son, Matthew, and a daughter, Cressida. From 1940 to 1950 he lived with Lys Lubbock, who worked with him at Horizon; they never married, but she changed her name to Connolly by deed poll. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.
Connolly, John. Secretary to Bill Inge. They met at a party given by Glenway Wescott in 1952; in 1957 Connolly left a job assisting Carson McCullers with a play script and began working for Inge—filing, typing, paying bills, answering letters, organizing travel and domestic arrangements. He understood and coped well with Inge’s depressive mood swings. According to Connolly, they were never lovers; he maintained his own apartment and social life. He advised against Inge’s move to California in 1964, remained behind in New York, and was replaced by Mark Minton. Connolly was friendly with George Platt Lynes and took a particular interest in Don Bachardy after meeting Isherwood and Bachardy at Lynes’s New York apartment on New Year’s Eve 1953.
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