Dub, Dub-Dub, Dubbin. Isherwood; see under Dobbin.
Dundy, Elaine (1921–2008). American actress and writer; born in New York, educated at Mills College in California, at Sweet Briar, and at Jarvis Theater School. Her real name was Elaine Rita Brimberg. She acted intermittently, mostly for T.V., then published a best-selling novel The Dud Avocado (1958) and wrote a play, My Place, which was staged successfully in 1962. She was the first wife of theater critic Ken Tynan, whom she married in 1951 and with whom she had a daughter, Tracy. The marriage became unstable and increasingly belligerent, and they divorced in 1964. Afterwards she lived largely in New York. Her later books include two more novels, a biography of Peter Finch, a book about Elvis Presley and his mother, and her memoir Life Itself! (2001). She appears in D.1.
Dunphy, Jack (1914–1992). American dancer and novelist; born and raised in Philadelphia. He danced for George Balanchine and was a cowboy in the original production of Oklahoma! He was married to the Broadway musical-comedy star Joan McCracken, and from 1948 he became Truman Capote’s companion, although in Capote’s later years they were increasingly apart. He published John Fury (1946) and Nightmovers (1967). He appears in Lost Years.
Dupuytren’s Contracture. A disease of the hand in which the connective tissue underneath the skin of the palm and fingers develops fibrous bumps or cords. The cords gradually shorten, contracting the fingers into a bent position so they cannot be straightened. It usually affects only the third and fourth fingers. Cortisone injections can alleviate the condition and wearing a splint at night can slow its progress, but eventually, the bumps and cords may have to be removed surgically, in particular to prevent the middle joint of the fingers from becoming fixed in a bent position and in severe cases, where nerve and blood supplies are cut off, to prevent the fingers from requiring amputation. The cords can grow back after surgery and are more difficult to remove the second time. The disease is more frequent in men than in women, and more common in middle age.
Easton, Harvey and June. He ran probably the first gym in the Los Angeles area, on Beverly Boulevard in Hollywood. He aspired to be a lyricist and had some talent, but died in his early forties of cancer. June ran a dress shop. Diane Easton, their daughter, was at art school with Bachardy briefly during the 1950s, then acted for T.V. Harvey and June appear in D.1.
Eckstein, Tony. See Abedha.
Edward. See Upward, Edward.
Elsa. See Lanchester, Elsa.
Emily, or Emmy. See Smith, Emily Machell.
Evans, Rex (1903–1969). British music hall comedian; he moved to Broadway, then became a Hollywood character actor, playing small film roles from the late 1930s through the 1950s. He ran an art gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. He appears in D.1.
Fairfax, James (b. 1933). Australian art collector and philanthropist, educated at Oxford. He was the last family chairman, from 1957 to 1987, of the Fairfax newspaper empire.
Faithfull, Marianne (b. 1946). English singer, songwriter, actress. Her recording of “As Tears Go By,” by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, was a Top Ten U.K. hit in 1964, and she became Jagger’s girlfriend in 1966. She was to play Ned Kelly’s girlfriend in Tony Richardson’s film, but as she was arriving in Sydney, she tried to kill herself by swallowing 150 Tuinals (a barbiturate), and went into a coma for six days. Isherwood mentions that she was accompanied on location in Australia by her mother, Eva, Baroness Apollonia and Erisso, a half-Jewish Viennese dancer, actress, and, after she emigrated to England, teacher, who was divorced from Major Glynn Faithfull, a British intelligence officer during World War II.
Falk, Eric (1905–1984). English barrister, raised in London. Falk, who was Jewish, was a school friend from Repton, where he was in the same house as Isherwood, The Hall, and in the History Sixth. He helped Isherwood edit The Reptonian during Isherwood’s last term, and they saw one another during the school holidays and often went to films together. Falk introduced Isherwood to the Mangeots, whom he had met on holiday in Brittany. Later, he lived in The Temple, a group of mostly late seventeenth-century, college-like buildings in which barristers have offices and also keep residential apartments on the Thames Embankment at the western edge of the City of London. He appears in Lions and Shadows, D.1, and Lost Years.
Faye, Alice (1915–1998). American actress, singer, comedienne; born and raised in New York, where she went on the stage at fourteen. She starred in Hollywood musicals from 1934 to 1945—including Every Night at Eight (1935), Poor Little Rich Girl (1936), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938), The Gang’s All Here (1943)—but quit movies over conflicts with Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox and focused back on radio and stage. She made only a few further films. In 1972 and 1973, she revived the musical Good News on Broadway, then toured in it for a year, including to Los Angeles. She was a childhood favorite of Bachardy.
Finney, Albert (b. 1936). English actor, trained at RADA; son of a bookie. He acted in Shakespeare from the mid-1950s for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and came to prominence on the London stage in Billy Liar (1960). Afterwards, he appeared in several John Osborne plays directed by Tony Richardson, receiving great praise for Luther in 1961, and taking the role to Broadway in 1963. In 1965, he joined the National Theatre Company and appeared in Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy (1965) and Peter Nichols’s A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967); then, after a hiatus, he returned to the company to star in Hamlet, Tamburlaine, Macbeth, and others. His film career was launched with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), and he became an international star in Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963). His other films include: The Entertainer (1960), Night Must Fall (1964), Scrooge (1970), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Dresser (1983), Under the Volcano (1984), The Browning Version (1994), Erin Brokovich (2000), and Traffic (2000).
Foch, Nina (1924–2008). American actress, born in Holland and raised in Manhattan. Her films include The Return of the Vampire (1944), Johnny Allegro (1949), An American in Paris (1951), Scaramouche (1952), Executive Suite (1954), The Ten Commandments (1956), Spartacus (1960), and Mahogany (1975). She had roles on Broadway, was a member of the American Shakespeare Festival, and appeared regularly on T.V. in John Houseman’s “Playhouse 90,” “The Outer Limits,” and others. She also directed and, from the 1960s, taught acting at USC and at the American Film Institute. Her third husband, from 1967 to 1993, was stage producer Michael Dewell (b. 1931).
Fonda, Jane (b. 1937). American actress, born in New York, raised in Hollywood and Greenwich, Connecticut, educated at Vassar; daughter of actor Henry Fonda and his socialite second wife, Frances Seymour Brokaw, who committed suicide in 1950. She worked as a model before studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. There she met Andreas Voutsinas, a Greek would-be actor and director born and raised in Africa and educated in London; he directed her in a disastrous Broadway comedy and coached her in films at the start of the 1960s. Attracted to the vanguard of cultural trends, she opposed the Vietnam War during the 1960s, toured American G.I. camps with Donald Sutherland and other actors as the Anti-War Troop and, in 1972, travelled through North Vietnam followed by press and making radio broadcasts. In 1988, she apologized publicly for supporting the enemy and allowing herself to be photographed at the controls of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. Her films include Walk on the Wild Side (1962), Period of Adjustment (1962), The Chapman Report (1962), Cat Ballou (1965), Barefoot in the Park (1967), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), Klute (1971, Academy Award and New York Film Critics Award), Julia (1977), Coming Home (1978, Academy Award), California Suite (1978), 9 to 5 (1980), and On Golden Pond (1981). She married three times: in 1965 to Roger Vadim, who directed her in La Ronde/Circle of Love (1964) and Barbarella (1968), then from 1973 to 1990 to political activist Tom Hayden, and from 1991 to 2001 to CNN tycoon Ted Turner. She had one child with Vadim and another with Hayden.
Foote, Dick. American actor and singer. A longtime lover of Carter Lodge. Isherwood and Bill Caskey first met him in early 1949, and saw him regularly over the y
ears with Lodge and van Druten, sometimes at the AJC Ranch. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.
Forbes, Bryan (b. 1926). English actor, director, producer, screenwriter, novelist; born in London and educated at RADA. He worked on the stage from seventeen, had film roles during the 1950s, and appeared in The Guns of Navarone (1961) and A Shot in the Dark (1964). From the 1960s, he turned mostly to directing—including The L-Shaped Room (1962), King Rat (1965), The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), and The Stepford Wives (1975)—and contributed some of his own screenwriting and producing. His second wife is the English actress Nanette Newman (b. 1934), with whom he has two daughters, Emma, an actress, and Sarah, a fashion journalist.
Ford, Glenn (1916–2006). Canadian-born actor raised in Santa Monica. He was already making movies by 1939, served in the marines during World War II, and afterwards became a star opposite Rita Hayworth in Gilda and opposite Bette Davis in A Stolen Life, both in 1946. Among his many other films are The Big Heat (1953), The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Cimarron (1961), The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963), and Midway (1976). He also acted in T.V. films and in the series “Cade’s County” (1971) and “The Family Holvak” (1975). When Isherwood met him with Hope Lange in July 1960, he was working on The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962), Vincente Minnelli’s remake of the 1921 silent film about a family fighting on opposite sides in World War I; Minnelli’s film was set during World War II. From 1943 to 1959 Ford was married to the American tap dancer, Eleanor Powell (1910–1982); they had a son, Peter. Later, Ford was married to actress Kathryn Hays, from 1966 to 1968, and then to actress Cynthia Hayward from 1977 to 1984 and to Jeanne Baus from 1993 to 1994.
Forster, E.M. (Morgan) (1879–1970). English novelist, essayist and biographer; best known for Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). He was an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, and one of the Cambridge Apostles; afterwards he became associated with Bloomsbury and later returned to King’s as a Fellow until the end of his life. He was a literary hero for Isherwood, Upward, and Auden from the 1920s onward, and Isherwood regarded Forster as his master. They were introduced by William Plomer in 1932. Forster was a supporter when Isherwood was publicly criticized for remaining in American during World War II. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years. He left his papers and copyright to King’s College with a life interest to his literary executor, the psychologist and translator of Freud, Professor W.J.H. “Sebastian” Sprott (1897–1971). Isherwood was also named in his will, as the heir to the American rights of Forster’s unpublished homosexual novel Maurice, written 1913–1914 and heavily revised 1959–1960; it was published posthumously in 1971 under Isherwood’s supervision. Forster and Isherwood shared an understanding that any proceeds would be used to help English friends in need of funds for U.S. travel; Isherwood assigned the proceeds to the National Institute of Arts and Letters where an E.M. Forster Award was created to support English writers on extended visits in the U.S.
Forthman, William H. (Will). American professor of Philosophy of Religion. Isherwood met him at the start of the 1940s, when Will and his brother Bob were teenage parishioners of Allan Hunter, the Congregational minister who participated in the La Verne Seminar in 1941 and involved himself with Gerald Heard’s spiritual pursuits. Bob Forthman attended one of Heard’s Trabuco seminars in 1942, and Will Forthman continued for many years to attend events sponsored by Heard or by the Vedanta Society. In the 1950s, Will lived on Spoleto Drive in the house of Margaret Gage, Heard’s patroness. He became an instructor at California State University, North Ridge in 1958 while still working on his Ph.D.; later, he was a full professor and taught there for many years. He appears in D.1.
Fouts, Denham (Denny) (circa 1914–1948). Son of a Florida baker; he worked for his father as a teenager then left home to travel as companion to various wealthy people of both sexes. Among his conquests was Peter Watson, who financed Horizon magazine, and Fouts helped solicit some of the magazine’s earliest pieces. During World War II, Watson sent Fouts to the U.S. with Jean Connolly, and she and Tony Bower introduced Fouts to Isherwood in mid-August 1940 in Hollywood. Fouts determined to begin a new life as a devotee of Swami Prabhavananda, but Swami would not accept him as a disciple, so, after a spell in the East, Fouts moved in with Isherwood in the early summer of 1941, and they led a spartan life of meditation and quiet domesticity. Isherwood describes this in Down There on a Visit where Fouts appears as “Paul,” and there are many passages about Fouts in D.1 and Lost Years. In August 1941, Fouts was drafted into Civilian Public Service camp as a conscientious objector; on his release in 1943, he lived with a friend from the camp while studying for his high-school diploma; afterwards he studied medicine at UCLA. In 1945 and 1946, Isherwood and Bill Caskey lived in Fouts’s apartment at 147 Entrada Drive while Fouts was mostly away; eventually, when Fouts returned, Caskey quarrelled with him, ruining Isherwood’s friendship. Soon afterwards, Fouts left Los Angeles for good. He became an opium addict in Paris, and Isherwood saw him there for the last time in 1948 before Fouts died in Rome.
Fox, James (Willie) (b. 1939). British actor, from childhood; his real name is William; he is a younger brother of actor Edward Fox. Tony Richardson gave him a small role in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and he later starred in The Servant (1963), The Chase (1966), Isadora (1968), Performance (1970), A Passage to India (1984), Absolute Beginners (1986), The Remains of the Day (1993), and other films. He left acting for Christian evangelism for a time during the 1970s.
Fox, Lyle. He ran the gym in Pacific Palisades attended by Isherwood, Bachardy, and the Masselinks from the start of the 1960s. He was blond and muscular. In 1967, he married an attractive younger woman called Rez. Eventually he became personal trainer and masseur for Gregory Peck and travelled with Peck on location all over the world.
Frandson, Phillip (Phil) (1925–1981). American educator, from the Midwest. He studied geography, geology, and economics in Paris and Mexico and earned a doctorate in adult education from UCLA. He worked for the Adult Education Association in Washington and Chicago, and from 1956 onwards, for UCLA Extension, where he became Associate Dean in 1970 and Dean in 1973 and developed the Extension into probably the largest continuing education program in the U.S. He was a consultant to the U.S. Office of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities and travelled in the U.S. and abroad to advise other continuing education administrators. He also collected and lectured about American antiques and received an Emmy Award for producing and hosting a nationally televised T.V. series on American folk art. He also helped plan the Los Angeles Zoo and was a member of its Board of Trustees.
Frank. See Isherwood, Frank Bradshaw.
Franklin. See Knight, Franklin.
French, Hugh (1910–1976). Hollywood agent and former actor. He first approached Isherwood with project ideas in the late 1950s after opening his own agency, Chartwell Artists, with his son, Robin, in about 1956. The Frenches took over from Jim Geller as Isherwood’s film agents in 1963. At the start of the 1970s, Hugh French left Chartwell Artists to produce films. He appears in D.1.
French, Robin (b. 1936). Hollywood agent and, later, producer and T.V. syndicator; educated at boarding school in England and briefly at college in California. He worked with his father, Hugh, and increasingly represented Isherwood in the film business, taking over entirely in about 1970. He presided over the “incredible rights mess” of the play I Am a Camera and the musical and film Cabaret, securing Isherwood a substantial income for many years. By 1974, he had left the agency business to become head of domestic production at Paramount Pictures. He later produced a few films, but worked primarily as a T.V. syndicator; eventually he operated and part-owned several T.V. stations before retiring in the late 1990s. French is mentioned in D.1.
From, Isador (Eddie, Isad). American film technician and, later, psychotherapist. Isherwood first met him in 1944, though he became closer to Eddie’s identical twin, Sam, who was among the first to answer one of Evelyn Hooker’s
questionnaires. (The Froms did not look alike because Sam had his nose bobbed.) Sam became wealthy as a businessman, but was a frequent drunk driver and died in a car crash in the mid-1950s. The Froms were at the center of The Benton Way Group which began when Ruby Bell, a librarian from the Midwest, inherited some money and encouraged a group of friends, mostly homosexuals and including the Froms and Charles Aufderheide, to move with her to Los Angeles where she bought a house for them downtown on Benton Way. Later, the group moved to a bigger house, above the Sunset Strip behind the Chateau Marmont; the new house looked like an Italian villa and became known as The Palazzo. It was the scene of many parties and also of serious discussions about homosexual love. Their third home was a large apartment above some shops in a two-story building on Melrose Place. According to Alvin Novak, Eddie was once picked up by the police for an offense relating to his homosexuality, and Isherwood made a great impression on him by coming to his aid. The Froms appear in D.1 and Lost Years.
Frost, Ron (Ronny). American musician, writer, teacher, and registered nurse. He was accepted as a private piano student by Elizabeth O’Neil De Avirett, director of the Los Angeles Conservatory, when he was still a teenager, but he abandoned his studies and became a surgical technician in the army. Afterwards, he settled in Hollywood and worked at Mount Sinai Hospital, but had difficulties adjusting to civilian life. He heard Swami Prabhavananda lecture at the Hollywood temple in 1957, and the following year he became a monk. By the start of the 1960s, he felt able to devote himself to his music again, and he also studied for a master’s degree in English. Eventually he returned to Texas, where he taught English Composition at the Community College in El Paso, gave private music lessons, and was the organist at Unity Church.
Gage, Margaret. A rich, elderly patroness of Gerald Heard; she loaned him her garden house on Spoleto Drive in Pacific Palisades, close to Santa Monica, from the late 1940s until the early 1960s. She also provided Will Forthman with a room in her house during the same period. She appears in D.1.
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