Osborne, John (1929–1994). English playwright. Osborne worked briefly as a journalist and as an actor in provincial repertory before his third play, Look Back in Anger (1956), established him at the center of a new trend in British drama toward working-class realism and also popularized the epithet frequently applied to his generation, “the angry young men.” During the 1950s Osborne’s work was largely produced at The Royal Court by the English Stage Company, where Osborne became friends with Tony Richardson and Laurence Olivier among others. Later plays include The Entertainer (1957) starring Olivier, Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964), and A Patriot for Me (1965); several were filmed. Osborne also wrote the screenplay for Richardson’s Tom Jones. Isherwood met Osborne in Hollywood in 1960 when Osborne came to join Mary Ure, then his wife, and his close friend Tony Richardson, both working there. Osborne married four other times.
Osmond, Humphry. English psychiatrist. Osmond pioneered the use of mescaline in treating alcoholics. In May 1953, Aldous Huxley volunteered as a subject in Osmond’s research and took four tenths of a gram of mescaline. The next year Huxley published The Doors of Perception, describing his experiences with the drug. Osmond also supplied mescaline to Gerald Heard and others. In a 1956 letter to Huxley, Osmond first suggested the term “psychedelic” for mescaline and the other drugs they were experimenting with; he later glossed the word as “mind-manifesting,” saying it included the concepts of “enriching the mind and enlarging the vision.”
Owens, Rod. Hayden Lewis’s companion and business partner from 1946 onward.
Pasternak, Boris (1890–1960). Russian poet, novelist, translator and autobiographer. His work most famous in the West, Dr. Zhivago—an account of the Russian intelligentsia’s experience of the revolution—was never published in the USSR and Pasternak’s position in his own country was precarious. Dr. Zhivago appeared in Italy in 1957. In 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature but was virtually forced by the Soviets to refuse it, and his companion, Olga Ivinskaya, was imprisoned. The letter from him which Stephen Spender read aloud at a London cocktail party in 1959 was evidently intended for Pasternak’s western supporters. Spender tried to meet Pasternak the following February, 1960, when he visited Moscow, but was told by the British Embassy that it would be unsafe for Pasternak. Afterwards, Pasternak wrote to Spender again, saying that he would have liked to have had the meeting. Pasternak died that May.
Paul. See Millard, Paul.
Pavan, Marisa (b. 1932). Italian actress. Marisa Pavan’s career began in the early 1950s. Isherwood first met her in 1954 when she was given the role of Catherine de Medici in Diane, and both he and Bachardy were friendly with her during the filming in Key West and Los Angeles of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo (1955), for which Pavan received an Academy Award nomination. She starred in a few other Hollywood films during the fifties and acted in Hollywood again in the seventies and eighties. Her real name is Marisa Pierangeli, and her twin sister was the actress Pier Angeli. Pavan was the second wife of the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont.
Pavitrananda, Swami. Hindu monk; head of the Vedanta Society in New York and a trustee of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. In India, Pavitrananda spent many years in the order’s editorial center, Advaita Ashrama, at Mayavati in the Himalayas. He often paid a month-long visit to Swami Prabhavananda during the summers. Other than Prabhavananda, he was Isherwood’s favorite swami.
Pears, Peter. English tenor; longtime companion and musical partner to Benjamin Britten. The youngest of seven children, Pears went to boarding school at six and rarely saw his family. He was sent down from Keble College, Oxford after failing his first year music exams, became a prep school master, studied briefly at the Royal College of Music and then joined the BBC singers in 1934. Pears and Britten became close friends in 1937, shared a flat from early 1938, and began performing together in 1939. They travelled to America, via Canada, in 1939 and lived outside New York at Elizabeth Mayer’s house in Amityville; they also lived for a time in Brooklyn at George Davis’s house in Middagh Street and made a trip to California. Pears studied singing further in New York, and his voice developed and gained in strength there. Britten and Pears returned to England in March 1942. They were pacifists during the war. Although at first they both had other relationships, their lives became increasingly fused, with Britten writing a great deal of music for Pears, and Pears singing it expressly for Britten.
Peggy, also Peggy Bok, later Peggy Rodakiewicz. See Kiskadden, Peggy.
Pendleton, James (Jimmy) and Mary Frances (Dodo). He trained as a dancer and had a stage career before starting a highly successful interior design and antiques business, first in New York and later in Los Angeles where he and Dodo moved during World War II. His Los Angeles shop was on Sunset Strip. Dodo was wealthy in her own right. The marriage was a formality as he was homosexual. She died in 1963; Jimmy died in 1995, aged ninety.
Pete. See Martinez, José.
Peter. See Viertel, Peter.
Phil, also Philip, also Philip Griggs. See Buddha Chaitanya.
Phipps, Bill. American actor. Phipps appeared in several Hollywood films in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was a friend of Charles Laughton, who introduced him to Isherwood and Bachardy.
Plomer, William (1903–1973). British poet and novelist born and raised in South Africa. He met Isherwood in 1932 through Stephen Spender who had already shown Isherwood Plomer’s poems and stories about South Africa and Japan. Plomer was a friend of E. M. Forster and soon took Isherwood to meet him. In South Africa, Plomer and Roy Campbell had founded Voorslag (Whiplash), a literary magazine for which they wrote most of the satirical material (Laurens van der Post also became an editor). Plomer taught for two years in Japan, then settled in Bloomsbury in 1929 where he was befriended by the Woolfs. They had published his first novel in 1926 at the Hogarth Press. In 1937 Plomer became principal reader for Jonathan Cape. In addition to his poems and novels, Plomer wrote several libretti for Benjamin Britten, notably Gloriana. Plomer lived with his friend, Charles Erdmann, who was born in London of a German father and Polish mother, raised in Germany from about age five, and then returned to England in 1939 where he worked as a waiter and pastry-cook among other things. Isherwood included Plomer’s “The Child of Queen Victoria” (from Plomer’s 1953 volume of short stories with the same title) in Great English Short Stories (1960).
Poland, Scott. A friend of Tom Wright during the late 1950s. His real name was Jim Hambleton. In 1956 he had an operation on his penis, and when Isherwood and Bachardy visited him in the UCLA hospital he showed them the stitches, which revealed that it had been sliced in half lengthwise and sewn up again. Isherwood and Bachardy lost touch with him after Poland moved away from Los Angeles in 1958.
Prabha. Originally Phoebe Nixon, she was the daughter of Alice Nixon (“Tarini”), and after sannyas Prabha became Pravrajika Prabhaprana. The Nixons were wealthy Southerners. Isherwood first met Prabha in the early 1940s in the Hollywood Center, where she handled much of the administrative and secretarial work, and he grew to love her genuinely. By the mid-1950s, Prabha was head nun at the Sarada Convent in Santa Barbara.
Prabhavananda, Swami (1893–1976). Hindu monk of the Ramakrishna Order, founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California based in Hollywood. Gerald Heard introduced Isherwood to Swami Prabhavananda in July 1939. On their second meeting, August 4, Prabhavananda began to instruct Isherwood in meditation; on November 8, 1940 he initiated Isherwood, giving him a mantram and a rosary. From February 1943 until August 1945 Isherwood lived monastically at the Vedanta Center, but decided he could not become a monk as Swami wished. (Isherwood invariably pronounced it Shwami, as he had been taught phonetically by Prabhavananda.) Isherwood continued to be closely involved with the Vedanta Society, travelled twice to its monastery in India, and remained Prabhavananda’s disciple and close friend for life. Their relationship is described in My Guru and His Disciple.
Prabhavananda was born in a Bengali vil
lage northwest of Calcutta and was originally named Abanindra Nath Ghosh. As a teenager he read about Ramakrishna and his disciples Vivekananda and Brahmananda and felt mysteriously attracted to their names. By chance he experienced an affecting meeting with Ramakrishna’s widow, Sarada Devi. At eighteen he visited the Belur Math, the chief monastery of the Ramakrishna order beside the Ganges outside Calcutta. There he had another important encounter, this time with Brahmananda, and abandoned his studies for a month to follow him. When Abanindra returned to Calcutta, he became involved in militant opposition to British rule, and joined a revolutionary organization for which he wrote and distributed propaganda. At one time he took charge of some stolen weapons and some of his friends who engaged in terrorist activities met with violent ends. Because he was studying philosophy, Abanindra attended Belur Math regularly for instruction in the teachings of Shankara, but he regarded the monastic life as escapist and set his political duties first, until he had another compelling experience with Brahmananda and suddenly decided to give up his political activities and become a monk. He took his final vows in 1921, when his name was changed to Prabhavananda.
In 1923 Prabhavananda was sent to the United States to assist the swami at the Vedanta Society in San Francisco; later he opened a new center in Portland, Oregon. He was joined there by Sister Lalita and later, in 1929, founded the Vedanta Society of Southern California in her house in Hollywood, 1946 Ivar Avenue. Several other women joined them. By the mid-1930s the society began to expand and money was donated for a temple which was built in the garden and dedicated in July 1938. Prabhavananda remained the head of the Hollywood Center until he died; he frequently visited Trabuco and the Sarada Convent in Santa Barbara and also stayed in the home of a devotee in Laguna Beach. Isherwood and Prabhavananda worked on a number of books together, notably translations of the Bhagavad Gita (1947) and of the yoga aphorisms of Patanjali (1953). Prabhavananda contributed to two collections on Vedanta edited by Isherwood, and Isherwood also worked on Prabhavananda’s translation of Shankara’s Crest Jewel of Discrimination. Prabhavananda persuaded Isherwood to write a biography of Ramakrishna, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1964); this became an official project of the Ramakrishna Order and was subject to chapter-by-chapter review by a high authority at the Belur Math.
prasad. Food or any other gift that has been consecrated in a Hindu ceremony of worship by being offered to God or to a saintly person; the food is usually eaten as part of the meal following the ritual, or the gift given to the devotees.
Prema Chaitanya (Prema). Originally John Yale, a successful Chicago publisher, Prema joined the Vedanta Center in Hollywood in 1950 after his religious faith was renewed by reading Isherwood and Prabhavananda’s translation of the Gita during the 1940s. In August 1955, he took his brahmachari vows at Trabuco and was renamed Prema Chaitanya (he continued to live in Hollywood, and briefly in Santa Barbara, but never at Trabuco). Prema developed the Vedanta Center’s bookshop, building a successful mail-order business, and he helped to edit the Vedanta Society magazine, Vedanta and the West, collaborating extensively with Isherwood on the magazine’s chapter-by-chapter publication of Isherwood’s biography of Ramakrishna. Prema’s own 1961 book, A Yankee and the Swamis, described his journey in 1952–1953 to numerous holy places and to the Ramakrishna monastery in India. He also edited two books: a selection from Vivekananda, What Religion Is: In the Words of Swami Vivekananda, for which Isherwood wrote the introduction, and What Vedanta Means to Me (1960), a collection of sixteen “testimonies” by Westerners (including Isherwood) which mostly appeared first in the Hollywood magazine. In January 1964, Prema took sannyas at Belur Math and became Swami Vidyatmananda; Isherwood, who was in India with Prema from December 1963 until the sannyas ceremony took place, drew on Prema’s experiences during this ritual for A Meeting by the River, which he once intended to dedicate to his friend. Swami Vidyatmananda left California in 1966 to assist Swami Ritajananda at the Vedanta Society in Gretz, France, east of Paris.
Premananda, Swami (1861–1918). A direct monastic disciple of Ramakrishna, from a pious Bengali family; he was originally called Baburam Ghosh. As a young man, Baburam Ghosh was first taken to meet Ramakrishna at Dakshineswar by his Calcutta classmate, Rakhal Chandra Ghosh (Brahmananda). Premananda’s sister was married to one of Ramakrishna’s most prominent devotees, Balaram Bose, and his mother also came to Dakshineswar as a devotee. Ramakrishna regarded him as especially pure and sweet-natured and recognized him as an Ishvarakoti (a perfect, free soul born for mankind’s benefit) like Brahmananda and Vivekananda. During the last decades of his life Premananda ran the Belur Math and was vice-president of the Ramakrishna Order.
Preston, Jonathan. A young Englishman introduced to Isherwood by Phil Burns and whom Isherwood found attractive; they became friends around Christmas 1958. Preston had recently arrived in Los Angeles from England with a Canadian companion, John Durst; later he returned to England where he became a publicist, and Isherwood occasionally met him there.
Prokosch, Frederic (“Fritz”) (1906–1989). American novelist and poet. His first novel, The Asiatics (1930), was his most successful, though he wrote numerous others and also published several volumes of poetry during the 1930s and early 1940s. His poetry was heavily influenced by W. H. Auden. Prokosch was educated at Haverford College before going on to Yale, and was friendly with Teddy le Boutilliere, the Bryn Mawr bookshop proprietor who introduced himself to Isherwood when Isherwood lived in Haverford, Pennsylvania, in the early 1940s. Prokosch had introduced himself to Auden and to Stephen Spender by letter during the 1930s, but met Auden only in 1939 in New York. He evidently met Isherwood around the same time.
puja. Hindu ceremony of worship; usually offerings—flowers, incense, food—are made to the object of devotion, and other ritual, symbolic acts are also carried out depending upon the occasion.
Quiroga, Alex. Mexican television cameraman working in Hollywood for ABC. Bachardy and Isherwood both thought him very attractive. In 1953, during the first weeks of his life with Isherwood, Bachardy was still having a sexual relationship with Quiroga; he confided the details to Isherwood, and Isherwood briefly encouraged him in the affair.
quota visa. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, known as the Quota Act, dictated that the number of immigrants admitted annually from any one country could not exceed two percent of the existing U.S. population deriving from that same national origin (as determined by the 1890 census), although a minimum quota of 100 immigrants was permitted to all countries. As the vast majority of Americans at that time traced their ancestry to Great Britain, British nationals could immigrate with ease. Of all the countries in the world, only Ireland, Germany and Britain were permitted more than 10,000 immigrants a year during the twenties and thirties; most European countries were permitted between a few hundred and a few thousand, while other countries throughout the world were generally limited to 100. Quotas published in 1940 show the dramatic range, for example: Egypt, 100; Ethiopia, 100; France, 3,086; Italy, 5,802; Ireland, 17,853; Germany, 27,370; Britain and Northern Ireland, 65,721. (The figures were adjusted annually by the Department of Labor, until 1939 when the Department of Justice took control of immigration.) After the rise of Hitler, Germany’s quota was increasingly oversubscribed and soon that of surrounding European countries as well, but Britain’s quota was far from full (nationality was determined by country of birth, regardless of the last time visited there, so it was not possible for non-British to immigrate via Britain). Visas were given out by the consul in the country of origin, and once a visa was obtained, the immigrant had to enter the U.S. at a designated point of entry and be inspected. (According to the Immigration Act of 1917, immigrants could be excluded on a wide range of grounds, including alcoholism, TB, anarchist or revolutionary beliefs, criminal convictions, prostitution, vagrancy, immorality, illiteracy, physical or mental handicaps, etc.) Isherwood first entered the U.S. on a nonimmigrant visa, and had to leave and re-enter once he obtained his quota visa. To app
ly for citizenship, five years’ continuous residence in the U.S. was required, the last six months in one county.
Rabwin, Marcus (Mark) (b. 1901). Surgeon. Rabwin studied in Minnesota and Vienna and had a private practice in Los Angeles from 1930 onward. Eventually he also became Chief of Staff at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. In 1934 he married David Selznick’s secretary, Marcella Bennett.
Radebaugh, Roy. See Cromwell, Richard.
raja yoga. Royal yoga; one of the four main yogas. A meditation technique which concentrates the mind solely upon the Ultimate Reality until samadhi is achieved.
rajas. Activity, restlessness. See guna.
Ramakrishna (1836–1886). The Hindu holy man whose life inspired the modern renaissance of Vedanta. He is widely regarded as an incarnation of God. Ramakrishna, originally named Gadadhar Chattopadhyaya, was born in a Bengali village sixty miles from Calcutta. He was a devout Hindu from boyhood, practiced spiritual disciplines such as meditation, and served as a priest. A mystic and teacher, in 1861 he was declared an avatar: a divine incarnation sent to reestablish the truths of religion and to show by his example how to ascend towards Brahman. Also, Ramakrishna was initiated into Islam, and he had a vision of Christ. His behavior was sometimes highly unconventional, in keeping with his beliefs. For instance, he sometimes dressed in women’s clothing and worshipped God in the attitude of a female lover, believing the distinction between the sexes to be an illusion. He several times danced with drunkards because their reeling reminded him of his own when he was in religious ecstasy. His followers gathered around him at Dakshineswar and later at Kashipur. His closest disciples, trained by him, later formed the nucleus of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, now the largest monastic order in India. Ramakrishna was worshipped as God in his lifetime; he was conscious of his mission, and he was able to transmit divine knowledge by a touch, look, or wish. Isherwood wrote a biography, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1964), an official project of the Ramakrishna Order.
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