Crippen, Hawley Harvey. Dr. Crippen, a self-effacing American in the patent medicine business, poisoned his second wife, a flamboyant, greedy and domineering would-be singer on whom he had vainly lavished training, clothing, and jewelry. He buried parts of her body under their London house and brought his mistress to live there with him, but soon fled with her and was captured on board ship in the Atlantic. After a sensational trial, Crippen was executed in November 1910. John van Druten based his play Leave Her to Heaven on the Crippen story. Crippen’s son, Otto Hawley Crippen, who lived near the AJC Ranch, was the child of Crippen’s previous wife, Charlotte Bell, who had died in California in about 1890.
Critchfield, Kenneth (Kenny). A disciple of Swami Prabhavananda; he arrived at the Vedanta Center towards the end of the 1940s and lived there as well as at Trabuco. In 1954, upon taking his brahmacharya vows, he became Arup Chaitanya. In 1963 he took sannyas and became Swami Anamananda. He died in the early 1990s.
Cromwell, Richard (Dick). American actor. His real name was Roy Radebaugh. Eventually he gave up his movie career and became a sculptor. He died of cancer in 1960.
Crowley, Aleister (1875–1947). English poet and writer on mysticism. Crowley was a Satanist and insisted he was the Beast from the Book of Revelation. He joined W. B. Yeats’s theosophical association, the Order of the Golden Dawn, but caused a controversy that broke up the group. William Somerset Maugham met and intensely disliked Crowley, modelling the main character in The Magician (1908) on him.
Cukor, George (1899–1983). American film director. Cukor began his career on Broadway in the 1920s and came to Hollywood as a dialogue director on All Quiet on the Western Front. In the thirties he directed at Paramount, RKO, and then MGM, moving with his friend and producer David Selznick. He directed Garbo in Camille (1936) among others, and Hepburn in her debut A Bill of Divorcement (1932) as well as in Philadelphia Story (1940); other well-known work includes Dinner at Eight (1933), David Copperfield (1934), A Star is Born (1954), and My Fair Lady (1964). Isherwood met Cukor at a party at the Huxleys’ in December 1939. Much later they became friends and worked together.
Curtiss, Mina. American writer and Lincoln Kirstein’s sister. As a young woman, Curtiss lived in London on the fringes of the Bloomsbury milieu; later she taught French literature at Smith College and published various books on French writers, including a biography of Georges Bizet and a translation of Proust’s letters. In 1924, she married Harry Curtiss, much older than she, and after his death she was for many years the lover of Alexis Saint-Léger (St.-John Perse). Like her brother, she was extremely wealthy, and she inherited her husband’s farm, Chapelbrook, in Ashfield, Massachusetts, near Williamsburg and not far from Smith in Northampton. She lived there most of the time and also in Manhattan. In 1958, at Lincoln Kirstein’s suggestion, Isherwood applied for a “Chapelbrook” grant, but Curtiss did not think him poor enough, partly because he lived in Hollywood. She was, however, a generous backer of other artists, sometimes including those working on stage and in film. For instance, she once gave her close friend John Houseman a large sum of money on a day’s notice for a theater project in crisis.
Darrow, John. American movie actor turned agent. Darrow became powerful in Hollywood. Isherwood and Bachardy were friendly with him from the mid-1950s.
darshan. In Hinduism, a blessing or sense of purification which is achieved by paying a ceremonial visit to a holy person or place; also, the ceremonial visit itself.
Daugherty, Jimmy. Don Bachardy’s co-worker in his first job, for Tony and Beegle Duquette. Daugherty later moved to New York where he became a successful designer of women’s clothes, married and had a family.
Davies, Marion (c. 1898–1961). The Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl taken up by William Randolph Hearst, who tried to make her into a romantic star and financed her in both successful and unsuccessful films. Her relationship with Hearst provides the basis of the story in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), although Welles’s heroine is not a close portrait. Charlie Chaplin, with whom she had an affair, publicly said Davies’ real talent was for comedy. She lived with Hearst at San Simeon and at houses in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica until he died in 1951. In October 1951, ten weeks after Hearst’s death, Davies married Captain Horace Brown, whom she first met during the war and who was previously a suitor of her sister Rose. Speed Lamkin introduced Isherwood to Davies in 1950.
Davis, George. American writer and editor. Isherwood and W. H. Auden met Davis in London in 1937. He sold an article by them about China to Harper’s Bazaar where he was literary editor, and he escorted them around Manhattan during their nine day visit in 1938, introducing them to celebrities of New York’s literary bohemia and to Vernon Old. During the 1920s, Davis had lived in Paris writing his only novel, The Opening of a Door (1931), and he knew Klaus Mann. In New York, he rented the house at 7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn Heights, where Auden lived from October 1940 with Davis, Golo Mann, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Paul and Jane Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee. Later Davis married the actress Lotte Lenya.
Davis, Vince. A close friend of Ted Bachardy with whom Ted lived for about four years at the end of the 1950s (after Ted had lived with Bart Lord). The arrangement broke down over Ted’s mental health problems; later Davis became a born-again Christian and married.
Daya. An Englishwoman who became a nun at the Sarada Convent in Santa Barbara. She was originally called Joan Rayne, and had been involved in theater in Britain. She also lived as a devotee in India for a time. Daya had an alcohol problem; she left the Vedanta Society in the late 1950s and committed suicide.
“de Laval, Jay” (probably an assumed name). Chef; he adopted the role of the Baron de Laval. In the mid 1940s he opened a small French restaurant on the corner of Channel Road and Chautauqua in Santa Monica called Café Jay and frequented by movie stars seeking privacy. In 1949 he opened a second restaurant in the Virgin Islands, and in 1950 he was briefly in charge of the Mocambo in Los Angeles. Eventually he left California, settled in Mexico, and opened a grand restaurant in Mexico City in the early 1950s. Isherwood met de Laval through Denny Fouts. De Laval was a friend of Bill Caskey before Isherwood was, and also a friend of Ben and Jo Masselink.
de Lichtenberg, William (Bill). English painter; a London friend during the late 1920s. Isherwood met de Lichtenberg through Olive and André Mangeot. In Lions and Shadows, where de Lichtenberg appears as “Bill Scott,” Isherwood recalls being often drunk with him and taking exciting, escapist motor trips at short notice. One such trip, to Scotland, where they spent several days and drove as far north as Cape Wrath, became legendary when W. H. Auden referred to it in his 1929 poem beginning “From scars where kestrels hover” (later titled “Missing”). De Lichtenberg was about ten years older than Isherwood. He married a cellist and later went to live in St. Tropez where he died in an accident in his studio in 1935.
Denison, Henry. A novice monk at the Vedanta Society during the late 1940s; he left Ivar Avenue in the early 1950s to get married.
Denny. See Fouts, Denny.
Derek, also Dek. See Bok, Derek.
Devatmananda, Swami. Hindu monk, from India. Devatmananda ran the Vedanta Center in Portland, Oregon and presided over the founding of a new temple there in 1943.
Dispecker, Franz. Prussian banker. Dispecker was Jewish, wealthy, and a Vedanta devotee. He emigrated to California from Switzerland with his wife, bringing with him an impressive collection of old master paintings. He contributed to the Vedanta Society magazine and translated several Vedanta works into German.
Dobbin. A pet name for Isherwood, known only to himself and Bachardy. Other names included Dubbin, Dub, and Drub.
Dobrin, Arnold. American artist. A friend of Isherwood during the early 1950s. Dobrin married and had two sons before divorcing. In 1965 he published an attractively illustrated children’s story about Thailand, Little Monk and the Tiger.
Dodie. See Beesley, Alec and Dodie Smith Beesley.
Don. See B
achardy, Don. See also Murray, Don, a different person. The distinction is made clear where necessary in the text by the addition of a surname in square brackets.
Doone, Rupert (1903–1966). English dancer, choreographer and theatrical producer. Founder of The Group Theatre, the cooperative venture for which Isherwood and W. H. Auden wrote plays in the 1930s. Originally called Reginald Woodfield, Doone, the son of a factory worker, ran away to London to become a dancer, then went on to Paris where he was friendly with Cocteau and met Diaghilev, turning down an opportunity to dance in the corps de ballet of the Ballets Russes. He was working in variety and revues in London during 1925 when he met Robert Medley, who became his long-term companion. Doone died of multiple sclerosis after many years of increasing illness.
Dowling, Doris (b. 1921). American actress; sister of Constance Dowling (1923–1969), also an actress. Doris Dowling’s most successful films were The Lost Weekend (1945), The Blue Dahlia (1946), and an Italian movie, Bitter Rice (1948); she did not make a great many more. Isherwood met her in the early 1950s through Shelley Winters and Ivan Moffat. Her second marriage, to the musician and bandleader Artie Shaw with whom she had a son (his only child), was then breaking up and she later married Len Kaufman. Bachardy drew Constance Dowling in 1960 and Doris on many occasions; they remained longtime friends.
draft board and draft classifications. See Selective Service.
Durga puja. Annual autumn festival of the Divine Mother, the creative aspect of the godhead and consort of Shiva (Durga’s other names include Kali, Shakti, and Parvati).
Easton, Harvey and June. Easton ran what was probably the first gym in the Los Angeles area, on Beverly Boulevard in Hollywood. Easton aspired to be a lyricist and had some talent, but died in his early forties of cancer. His wife, June, ran a dress shop. Diane Easton, their daughter, was at art school with Bachardy briefly during the 1950s, then acted for TV.
Eckhart, “Meister” (c. 1260–1327). German mystic and theologian; Dominican monk; Prior of Erfurt Convent and Vicar of Bohemia. He was criticized in his lifetime for expounding heretical scholastic philosophy in the German vernacular, and after his death many of his teachings, which implied the Church was not indispensable in achieving a spiritual life, were condemned. Their essence survived in German mysticism, and Eckhart was rediscovered by German Romanticism. The Quakers took him up as a precursor of their views.
In his diary entries for April 27, 1950 and for October 16, 1958, Isherwood attributes to Eckhart a quotation that is actually from the fourteenth-century Theologia Germanica, “Nothing burns in Hell but self-will.” (Indeed he slightly misquotes this as “Nothing burns in Hell but the self.”) Isherwood evidently came across the phrase in a footnote to Eckhart’s sermon “The Love of God” in Raymond Bernard Blakney’s one-volume modern translation of Eckhart. Blakney points out that Eckhart was possibly referring to the Theologia Germanica when he said in the sermon, “They ask, what is burned in hell? Authorities usually reply: ‘This is what happens to willfulness.’”
Edens, Roger (1905–1970). American film producer. During the 1950s, Edens supervised musicals at MGM, sometimes working with Arthur Freed. He won numerous Academy Awards—including for Annie Get Your Gun (1950)—and later produced Funny Face (1956), Hello Dolly (1969) and others. Through Edens, Isherwood also met another friend Don Van Trees.
Edward. See Upward, Edward.
Elan, Joan. British actress. She settled in Hollywood after making her first film, The Girls of Pleasure Island (1953), but her career soon languished. She appeared a few times on live TV, had minor parts in undistinguished films, and played a small role in the Broadway production of Jean Anouilh’s The Lark, in which Julie Harris starred. She was a friend of Marguerite Lamkin, and in the mid-1950s she had an affair with Ivan Moffat. She frequently sat as a model for Don Bachardy in the 1950s and early 1960s. Later she married an advertising executive, Harry Nye, and lived with him in New York until she died young, of a heart attack, in the early 1970s.
Elsa. See Lanchester, Elsa.
Ephron, Marshall. A member of the bohemian, artistic set that gathered at Sam and Eddie From’s “Palazzo” for parties. He was short and fat, but highly intelligent and likeable. Ephron introduced himself to Isherwood in 1958 and they conducted much of their friendship on the telephone.
Evelyn, also Evelyn Caldwell. See Hooker, Evelyn.
Exman, Eugene. Head of religious books at Harper Brothers and Gerald Heard’s publisher. He attended the seminar at La Verne in 1941, and, in 1942, arranged for Vernon Old to go to the Holy Cross monastery on the Hudson River in New York State. Exman also published Joel Goldsmith and Alan Watts, among others.
Fairbanks, Harold. American merchant seaman. Fairbanks was Klaus Mann’s lover at the end of Mann’s life, and Isherwood met him through Mann in July 1948. Later that year, Fairbanks was sent to a prison camp for several months for having sex with a teenager. Afterwards, he became a friend of Bill Caskey, and Caskey joined the merchant marine with him at the end of 1951.
Falk, Eric. English barrister. Falk, who was Jewish, was a schoolfriend from Repton, where he was in the same house as Isherwood, The Hall. He grew up in London, and he and Isherwood 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; he appears in Lions and Shadows (with his own name).
Field, Gus. The screenwriter with whom Speed Lamkin tried to adapt Sally Bowles for the stage in 1950–1951. After the project fell through, Field gossiped about Isherwood and his friends, including Isherwood’s relationship with Bachardy, about which Isherwood felt especially sensitive. Field seemed to be unaware of harming anyone with his talk, and he had occasionally done Isherwood small favors, but Isherwood decided Field was untrustworthy and eventually dropped him as an acquaintance. Isherwood worked with Field on a TV story in 1953.
fifth column. A term coined during the Spanish Civil War and used during World War II for enemy forces hidden and waiting among the civilian population. Nazi propaganda heightened widespread fears that fifth columnists were working to undermine the morale of countries the Nazis intended to conquer and that fifth columnists would rise up and fight for Hitler once he arrived. In fact, fifth columnists existed mostly in rumor.
Fitts, George. A probationer monk at the Vedanta Center in Hollywood when Isherwood went to live there in 1943. Originally from New England, Fitts was then about forty years old, had some private wealth, and spent his time obsessively tape recording and transcribing Swami Prabhavananda’s lectures and classes. He took his brahmachari vows in 1947 and was afterwards called “Krishna”; in 1958, he took sannyas and became Swami Krishnananda. He lived in Hollywood, but almost always accompanied Swami on his trips to Santa Barbara and Trabuco and sometimes elsewhere.
Flaherty, Robert J. (1884–1951). American documentary filmmaker. In youth, Bob Flaherty explored the Canadian wilderness with his father and led expeditions into sub-arctic Canada—the background for his first film, Nanook of the North (1922). He made a Nanook of the south seas—Moana (1926)—and in the 1930s Man of Aran, about the Aran Islanders, and Elephant Boy, shot in India. In 1931 he went to England to instruct John Grierson’s Empire Marketing Board Film Unit in natural observation; Grierson’s group later became the GPO Film Unit, for which W. H. Auden worked. Isherwood recalls meeting Flaherty in 1934, before Auden began work for the GPO Film Unit in 1935, so the meeting may have come about through Isherwood’s work with Berthold Viertel at Gaumont-British. Pare Lorentz, head of the U.S. Film Service, invited Flaherty to make The Land (1941), which Isherwood refers to in December 1939. Flaherty also worked with Frank Capra at the War Department Films Division for about a year.
Foiling, Sarada. See Sarada.
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 years with Lodge and van Druten, sometimes at the AJC Ranch.
&n
bsp; Forster, E. M. (Morgan) (1878–1970). English novelist, essayist and biographer; best known for Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). His homosexual novel, Maurice, was published posthumously in 1971 under Isherwood’s supervision. Forster had been 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. Forster was a literary hero for Isherwood, Edward Upward, and W. H. Auden from the 1920s onward; Isherwood regarded him as his master. In Lions and Shadows, he explains that around 1926 “Chalmers” (Edward Upward) coined the phrase “tea-tabling” to describe the new method of understatement which they both admired in Forster’s novels: “The whole of Forster’s technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mother’s meeting gossip… There’s actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones… It is the completely new kind of accentuation. …” (London, 1938, pp. 173–74). When Isherwood met Forster in 1932 through William Plomer, Forster won his devotion by praising The Memorial, and although his reviews of Isherwood’s later work were always candid, he was a supporter when Isherwood was publicly criticized for remaining in America after the outbreak of war in 1939.
Forthman, Bill (Willie). In 1941, Bill Forthman and his brother Bob were teenage members of Allan Hunter’s congregation. Bob Forthman attended one of Gerald Heard’s Trabuco seminars in 1942, and Bill Forthman continued for years to turn up at events associated with Gerald Heard and with the Vedanta Center. In the 1950s he lived at Margaret Gage’s house, alongside Heard who used her garden house.
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