Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Fouts, Denny. Myth surrounds Denham Fouts. According to Truman Capote, he grew up in Florida and worked as a teenager in his father’s bakery until he was swept off his feet by a passing cosmetics tycoon. He supposedly left the tycoon in Capri and was companion to various other wealthy people of both sexes. Certainly he travelled extensively with Peter Watson, and helped solicit some of the earliest contribitions to Horizon. Watson gave him a large Picasso painting, Girl Reading (spring 1934), which had been loaned to the Museum of Modern Art under Watson’s name for the exhibition Picasso—Forty Years of His Art, November 1939—January 7, 1940. Fouts later sold the painting in New York (evidently to the Florence May Schoenborn and Samuel Marx Collection, whence it is promised as a gift to MOMA). During the war, Watson sent Fouts to the USA with Jean Connolly for safety. She and Tony Bower introduced Fouts to Isherwood in mid-August 1940 in Hollywood; by late October Fouts had determined to take up a new way of life as a devotee of Swami Prabhavananda, but Swami turned him away. 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 (described in Down There on a Visit where Fouts appears as “Paul”). In August that year, Fouts was drafted into CPS camp as a C.O.; 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. During this period, many of Fouts’s friends were black, and he claimed he had an affair with Lena Horne. From the autumn of 1945 through the spring of 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, and Isherwood’s friendship with Fouts was badly damaged. Soon afterwards, Fouts left Los Angeles for good, moving East and then to Europe. He became an opium addict in Paris, and Isherwood saw him there for the last time in 1948. Fouts died in Rome, December 16, 1948.

  Fowler, Norman. American boyfriend of Peter Watson from 1949 onward, and heir to most of Watson’s estate. He had been in the navy and possibly was an epileptic (he was subject to unexplained fits or seizures from which he sometimes had to be roused); he was evidently psychologically disturbed. When Watson drowned in his bath in 1956, Fowler was in the flat; the police dismissed foul play, but the death remained somewhat suspicious. After Watson’s death, Fowler bought a hotel, called The Bath Hotel, on Nevis, in the British Virgin Islands, and lived there until he himself drowned in the bath in 1971, within weeks of the fifteenth anniversary of Watson’s death.

  Fox. See Twentieth Century-Fox.

  Frank, Bruno (1887–1945) and Liesl. German poet, playwright, and novelist and his wife. Frank was best known for his historical novel Trenck (1926) about a Prussian staff officer guillotined as a spy during the French Revolution. He emigrated in 1933 and eventually arrived in Los Angeles where he became a friend and neighbor of Thomas Mann and worked as screenwriter. His wife, and later widow, Liesl, was the daughter of the German musical comedy star Fritzi Massary. She worked with refugees, and founded the European Film Fund with Charlotte Dieterle, wife of the film director.

  Frank. See Merlo, Frank.

  French, Hugh. Hollywood agent and former actor. French took over from Jim Geller as Isherwood’s film agent for a few years from the early 1960s until his death. He had first approached Isherwood with project ideas in the late 1950s.

  French, Robin. Agent and later film producer. Robin French worked with his father, Hugh French, and became Isherwood’s Hollywood agent when his father died. He and his wife, Jessie, and their children became long-term friends of Isherwood and Bachardy.

  Freud, Caroline (1931–1996). English writer, later known under her own name, Lady Caroline Blackwood. Born and brought up in Ulster, she was married for a time to the English painter Lucian Freud—who painted her—and in 1972 she became the poet Robert Lowell’s third wife. Isherwood met her after the marriage to Freud broke up, when she was romantically involved with Ivan Moffat during the mid-1950s. Her novels include The Stepdaughter (1976), Great Granny Webster (1977), The Fate of Mary Rose (1981), and Corrigan (1984); she also published journalism and other shorter prose work.

  Fritz-Szold, Bernadine. Socialite and longtime friend of Glenway Wescott, who dedicated an early volume of poetry to her, Natives of Rock (1925). She had lived in Paris and, later, Los Angeles where she attended cultural events and sought out the company of writers and celebrities. She was friendly with Jim Charlton and with Jennifer Jones and took an interest in both Swami Prabhavananda and Gerald Heard. Don Bachardy once drew her portrait.

  From, Eddie and Sam. Identical twin brothers living in Santa Monica during the 1940s and 1950s. Eddie’s real name was Isadore; Isherwood first met him in 1944, though he became closer friends with Sam. (In fact, the Froms did not look alike because Sam had had his nose bobbed.) Sam became wealthy as a businessman, but was a frequent drunk driver and eventually died in a car crash in the mid-1950s. Eddie became a psychiatrist. The Froms shared various Los Angeles houses with two close friends, Albert Grossman and his lover Charles Aufderheide, and sometimes others. Isherwood referred to them as the Benton Way Group when they lived in a big house of Sam’s in Benton Way; the house was called The Palazzo because it looked like an Italian villa, and the name accompanied the household to other settings even after Sam’s death. The Palazzo was the scene of many parties and also of serious discussions about homosexual love. Sam From was among the first to answer one of Evelyn Hooker’s exhaustive questionnaires.

  Fry, Elizabeth (1780–1845). English prison reformer. Fry was a Quaker heroine; she became a preacher in the Society of Friends in 1810 and, after seeing the condition of the women prisoners in Newgate, devoted her life to prison reform. Fry greatly influenced her brother, Joseph John Gurney (1788–1847), a prosperous Oxford-educated Norwich banker. He, too, became a minister in the Society of Friends, and visited prisons with her. He also became a prominent abolitionist, and Isherwood mentions Gurney’s visit to the U.S., when Gurney reviewed the condition of the slaves, met the President and preached in the Senate before returning home to write a book about what he had seen.

  Gage, Margaret. A rich and 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.

  Ganesha. Hindu god of wisdom; believed to remove obstacles and grant spiritual and material success. He is the son of Shiva and Parvati and is represented as an elephant’s head.

  Garrett, Eileen (1893–1970). Irish-born medium. During World War I, Eileen Garrett ran a tearoom in Hampstead which was frequented by D. H. Lawrence and other intellectuals; later she ran a labor hostel in Euston Square, and then a children’s soup kitchen in the south of France. In 1941, with the fall of France, she went to New York, founded a publishing firm, Creative Age Press, and launched Tomorrow, a monthly review of literature, art, and public affairs. Assisted by Bill Kennedy, she was able to commission work from the likes of Robert Graves, Klaus Mann, Aldous Huxley, Lord Dunsany, and Isherwood, among others; she knew many of the emigré intelligentsia, and Isherwood met her in the late 1940s or early 1950s through the Huxleys. Garrett insisted that her psychic abilities were simply a refinement of the psychic abilities that everyone possesses. She was familiar to a number of scientists and participated in scientific studies of her ESP ability. The Faraday Box or Faraday Cage, which she told Isherwood about and which he mentions in his diary, was built by John Hays Hammond Jr., an inventor (and it was evidently named after Michael Faraday who first discovered electro-magnetism in 1831). The cage, made on a wooden frame, was hung with copper screening; once Garrett was inside, the door was sealed with galvanized iron, and electrical pulses transmitted at random. Several scientists tested Garrett’s ESP inside the electrical field, and her scores were higher inside the cage than outside. She could divine abstruse technical detail as well as personal
secrets. Some of her insights were spectacular, and she had a healing power.

  Gary, Lesley. First wife of Romain Gary; see Blanch, Lesley.

  Gary, Romain (Romain Kacew) (1914–1980). French novelist; a Russian Jew raised partly in Poland, Gary became a French citizen in 1935. He won the Prix Goncourt for his 1945 novel Les Racines du ciel (The Roots of Heaven), and later, under a second pseudonym, Emile Ajar (which he used for four novels), won it again for La Vie devant soi (The Life Before Him, 1970). The Roots of Heaven became a Hollywood film, as did Gary’s 1960 autobiographical novel La Promesse de l’aube (Promise at Dawn). Gary also directed some films, notably the widely derided Les Oiseaux vont mourir au Pérou (Birds in Peru, 1968) starring his second wife, Jean Seberg. In 1957, when Isherwood and Bachardy met him, Gary was still married to the journalist and author Lesley Blanch. In addition to his writing and film career he was also the French consul in Los Angeles.

  Gavin. See Lambert, Gavin.

  Geller, Jim. Isherwood’s Hollywood film agent. Geller was a story editor at Warner Brothers during the 1940s and expressed interest then in Isherwood’s work, especially the script written with Aldous Huxley, Jacob’s Hands. Isherwood worked for Geller briefly on The Woman in White in 1945. Later Geller abandoned his studio career, and he had become Isherwood’s agent by the early 1950s. Isherwood moved on to Hugh French about a decade later.

  George, also Krishna. See Fitts, George.

  Gerald. See Heard, Henry FitzGerald. (Occasionally “Gerald” is Gerald Hamilton, but these instances are made clear in the text.)

  Ghosh, Asit. Bengali nephew of Swami Prabhavananda. Ghosh was a student at the University of Southern California and hoped to become a film director. He was in his early twenties when Isherwood met him at the Vedanta Center in about 1940, and later the two lived in next door rooms when Isherwood moved into the center. Ghosh was a devout Hindu, but he was not preparing to become a monk. He found himself inducted into the army in September 1944 even though he was not a U.S. citizen; he was released the following January as a conscientious objector. Soon afterwards he returned to India.

  Gielgud, John (b. 1904). British actor and director. Isherwood first met Gielgud in New York, September 10, 1947 and didn’t like him; they met again in London in 1948 and became friends. Gielgud achieved fame in the 1920s acting Shakespeare’s tragedies; he also performed Wilde and Chekhov before Chekhov was well known to English audiences. During the 1950s, he worked with contemporary British playwrights, but throughout his stage and film career he continuously returned to and extended his Shakespearean repertoire. In 1954, Gielgud was convicted of importuning a plainclothes policeman in a public washroom in London. At the time he was friendly with the royal family, especially the Queen Mother, and had just been knighted the year before. He felt he had disgraced the Queen. Nonetheless, he received a standing ovation when he returned to the London stage. In 1958 he toured widely, including to Los Angeles, with an acclaimed series of readings from Shakespeare, Ages of Man. He was involved for some years during the 1950s with Paul Anstee, an interior decorator. Eventually Martin Hensler became Gielgud’s permanent companion.

  Gingold, Hermione (1897–1987). British actress and comedienne. Gingold starred in theatrical revues and had leading roles in a number of films, including Pickwick Papers (1952), Bell, Book and Candle (1958), Gigi (1958), and The Music Man (1961). In 1957, Isherwood and Gavin Lambert planned a television series, Emily Ermingarde, especially for her, but she dropped the project after several changes of heart.

  Goddard, Paulette (1911–1990). American actress. Goddard married four times; she was Charlie Chaplin’s third wife, from 1933 to 1942, and became famous in his Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940). She had the reputation of being cleverer than other Hollywood stars and was admired by intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley and H. G. Wells. Goddard virtually retired after her 1958 marriage to the German novelist and screenwriter Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western Front). Isherwood met her soon after coming to Hollywood, and they remained in touch for many years.

  Goldsmith, Joel (1892–1964). American spiritual teacher and healer. Goldsmith came from a Jewish background in New York and turned to Christianity as a teenager; he was drawn to Christian Science when his father miraculously recovered from a grave illness. He was a Freemason for most of his life, and during the 1930s he took up meditation and studied Eastern religions. As a marine during World War II, he had a vision that he must pray for the enemy, and he never saw combat. After the war, the family business collapsed and Goldsmith fell ill with tuberculosis, but like his father he made a miraculous recovery—through Christian Science. Then, after failing as a travelling salesman, he committed himself entirely to the Church of Christian Science, in the role of spiritual reader, advisor and healer, sometimes seeing as many as 135 patients a day. He taught Bible classes in California and gathered students and devotees around him, including John van Druten, whom he had met by the mid-1940s, and Walter Starcke. Van Druten wrote the introduction to Goldsmith’s first book, The Infinite Way (1952). Goldsmith published roughly twenty more books about his spiritual convictions and mystical experiences, and he circulated a monthly newsletter to paying subscribers. In the early 1950s he resigned from the Christian Science Church, asserting that healers become so by their own authority. His movement, known as the Infinite Way, was well-funded, partly by the voluntary donations of wealthy followers. Goldsmith urged believers to do nothing to change their material circumstances, but to live by grace alone, arguing from his own experience that success would naturally flow toward those who were spiritually “centered” or “on the path.” He was married three times.

  Goldwyn, Samuel (1882–1974). Polish-American film producer; his real name was Samuel Goldfish. Samuel Goldfish was partner in several early film companies before forming Goldwyn Pictures with the Goldwyn brothers in 1916; from this partnership he took his new name. He was bought out of Goldwyn when it merged in 1924 with the Metro and Mayer production companies to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and by 1925 he was independent, with his own studio and stars. He remained a top Hollywood producer for thirty years, producing many celebrated and award-winning films (Wuthering Heights, 1939; The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946; Guys and Dolls, 1955; Porgy and Bess, 1959), and the Samuel Goldwyn Studios continued in business after he retired. Isherwood’s first Hollywood job was as a writer at the Goldwyn Studios, beginning November 1939 for a few weeks; he found Goldwyn difficult. Goldwyn’s wife was called Frances.

  Goodman, Jack. American editor. In the mid-1950s, Isherwood decided to change publishers from Random House to Simon and Schuster. Goodman arranged an advance for Isherwood’s next novel (Down There on a Visit), but then suddenly died. Simon and Schuster stood by the promise of the advance, but Isherwood decided not to accept the money. After several vacillations, he did, however, stay with Simon and Schuster for many years; they published all his books from Down There on a Visit (1962) to Kathleen and Frank (1971).

  Goodwin, John. American novelist. A wealthy friend of Denny Fouts, Johnny Goodwin is first mentioned by Isherwood in July 1943, although they apparently met earlier. He owned a ranch near Escondido and a house in New York, was talented but undirected. Goodwin published The Idols and the Prey (1953) and A View of Fuji (1963). Isherwood visted Goodwin’s ranch with Bill Caskey several times in 1945 as well as seeing Goodwin in Los Angeles.

  gopi. Cowgirl or milkmaid; see Krishna.

  Gore. See Vidal, Gore.

  Gottfried. See Reinhardt, Gottfried.

  Gowland, Peter and Alice. He is a photographer and camera maker; known for his photographs of celebrities and his nudes, many of which have appeared as Playboy centerfolds. The Gowlands were among the Masselinks’ closest friends, and Isherwood met them through the Masselinks in the early 1950s.

  Goyen, William (1915–1983). American novelist, playwright, and editor. He was a protégé of Stephen Spender who brought him to visit Isherwood in 1949 with Goyen’s
friend, Walter Berns, later an economics professor at the University of Chicago. In 1950, Isherwood wrote a blurb for Goyen’s book The House of Breath. Goyen had an affair with Katherine Anne Porter beginning in 1951.

  Grandville (1803–1847). French artist; a caricaturist and the illustrator of such classic works as Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Aesop’s Fables and others. Isherwood gave Bachardy his two volume work Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux: Vignettes par Grandville: Études de moeurs contemporaines (1842, Scenes from the Private and Public Life of Animals: Vignettes by Grandville: A Study of Contemporary Mores). The work is a political and social satire, with text contributed by various writers including Balzac (whose Scènes de la vie privée is parodied in the title) and George Sand. The etchings depict animals dressed as people (the method of the satire); darkly witty, fantastic, and almost surrealist.

  Green, Henry (1905–73). The pen name of Henry Yorke, the novelist. He came from a privileged background, was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, worked for a time in a factory belonging to his family and made his way up through the firm to become a managing director. His novels draw on his experience of both working class and upper class life, and also on his time in the National Fire Service during World War II (best-known among them are Living, Party Going, and Loving). Isherwood first mentions Green during his 1947 trip to England, and they met again in London in 1948. Yorke’s wife was called Dig.

  Greene, Hal. Greene sold Isherwood and Bachardy their first house, 434 Sycamore Road, in 1956. He then moved to Adelaide Drive, next door to 145 Adelaide Drive where Isherwood and Bachardy lived from 1959. He was a shrewd investor in property, buying houses to live in for a year or two, then selling them at a profit. It was probably Greene who told Isherwood and Bachardy when 145 Adelaide Drive was on the market, although they bought the house through a real estate agent. He was their neighbor for a time, then sold his Adelaide Drive house to Charles Laughton. Greene was a lover of Nicky Nadeau, who introduced him to Isherwood; later he had a young boyfriend called Dick Lee.