Upward, Edward (b. 1903). English novelist and schoolmaster. Isherwood met Upward in 1921 at their public school, Repton, and followed him to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. They were closely united by their rebellious attitude toward family and school authority and by shared literary interests. In the 1920s they created the fantasy world, Mortmere, about which they wrote surreal, macabre, and pornographic stories and poems for each other; their excited schoolboy humor is described in Lions and Shadows where Upward appears as “Allen Chalmers.” Upward made his reputation in the 1930s with his short fiction, especially Journey to the Border (1938), the intense, almost mystical, and largely autobiographical account of a young upper-middle-class tutor’s conversion to communism. Shortly afterwards he gave up his writing to devote himself to schoolmastering (he needed the money) and to Communist Party work. From 1931 to 1961 he taught at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich where he became Head of English and a housemaster; he lived nearby with his wife, Hilda, and their two children, Kathy and Christopher. In 1962, following his retirement, he moved to the Isle of Wight. After World War II, Upward had become disillusioned by the British Communist Party and left it, though he never abandoned his Marxist-Leninist convictions. In the face of psychological difficulties of some magnitude, he returned to his writing towards the end of the 1950s, and eventually produced a massive autobiographical trilogy, The Spiral Ascent (1977)—comprised of In the Thirties (1962), The Rotten Elements (1969), and No Home but the Struggle. But he had almost as much difficulty in getting the work published as he had had in writing it; Leonard Woolf rejected In The Thirties with the suggestion that Upward should cut out most of the material about communism and alter the ending so that the main character could be clearly seen to reject communism. Roughly eight more publishers, including Faber and Faber, also rejected this first volume before James Michie of Heinemann finally accepted it. Upward remained a challenging and trusted critic of Isherwood’s work throughout Isherwood’s life, and a loyal friend.
Ure, Mary (1933–1975). British stage actress who acted in a few Hollywood films, including Sons and Lovers (1960). She was married to John Osborne, the playwright, and afterwards to Robert Shaw, the actor. Isherwood met her with Tony Richardson in 1960 when she was appearing with Vivien Leigh in the touring stage production of Jean Giraudoux’s Duel of Angels; the play went on from Los Angeles to San Francisco and eventually to a New York opening.
USC. University of Southern California.
Usha. A nun at the Vedanta Center and later at the convent in Santa Barbara; originally called Ursula Bond and later, after sannyas, Pravrajika Anandaprana. She was a German Jew, educated in England, and came to the U.S. as a young refugee during the war. Until the war ended, she worked for the U.S. government as a censor. She had been married before taking up Vedanta.
Valadon, Suzanne (1865–1938). French painter. Injured by a fall from a circus trapeze, Valadon became a model for Puvis de Chavannes and afterwards for Renoir, and was evidently mistress to both. She also modelled for Toulouse-Lautrec who introduced her to Degas. Degas took her work seriously and encouraged her. Valadon was also the mother of the painter Maurice Utrillo (1883–1935). A biography, The Valadon Story: The Life of Suzanne Valadon, by John Storm, appeared in 1958, possibly sparking Salka Viertel’s idea for a film.
Vandanananda, Swami. Hindu monk. He arrived at the Hollywood Vendanta Center from India in the summer of 1955 and eventually became the chief assistant there, replacing Swami Aseshananda.
van Druten, John (1901–1957). English playwright and novelist. Isherwood met van Druten in New York in 1939, and they formed a friendship on the basis of their shared pacifism. Of Dutch parentage, van Druten was born and educated in London and took a degree in Law at the University of London. He achieved his first success as a playwright in New York during the 1920s, then emigrated for good in 1938 and became a U.S. citizen in 1944. His strength was light comedy; among his numerous plays and adaptations were Voice of the Turtle (1943), I Remember Mama (1944), Bell, Book and Candle (1950), and I Am a Camera (1951) based on Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Many of these were later filmed. Some works were less successful, for example Leave Her to Heaven (1940), his play about the Crippen murder. In 1951, van Druten directed The King and I on Broadway. He also wrote a few novels and two volumes of autobiography, including The Widening Circle (1957). His mature habit was to spend half the year in New York and half near Los Angeles on the AJC Ranch which he owned with Carter Lodge and—before her death—the British actress and theater director Auriol Lee. Van Druten also owned a mountain cabin above Idyllwild which Isherwood sometimes used. A fall from a horse in Mexico in 1936 left van Druten with a permanently crippled arm despite numerous operations; partly as a result of this, he became attracted to Vedanta and other religions (he was a renegade Christian Scientist), and in his second autobiography he describes a minor mystical experience which he had in a drug store in Beverly Hills. He was a contributor to Isherwood’s Vedanta for the Western World.
Van Meegeren, Han (1889–1947). Perhaps the greatest forger ever; he painted a number of Vermeers and De Hooghs which were accepted as authentic and which hung in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until 1945 when Van Meegeren was arrested as a collaborator because he was associated with the sale of a Dutch master painting to Goebbels. To clear himself of the charge of collaborating, Van Meegeren confessed that the Goebbels painting and certain others were his own work. A two year scientific study confirmed his claim, uncovering his immensely complex process and also his remarkable talent. He was sentenced to a year in prison and died there of a heart attack. Van Meegeren’s Faked Vermeers and De Hooghs by Dr. P. B. Coremans (one of the experts who confirmed the forgeries) was published in 1949 with many photographs of Van Meegeren’s work, and Isherwood may have seen it.
Van Vechten, Carl (1880–1964). American novelist and poet, critic of music and dance, and, late in life, photographer. He was a prolific writer and a figure of New York’s bohemia, frequenting the Harlem clubs and greatly contributing to popular recognition of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance. He was also an early editor of Gertrude Stein. Among his seven novels are The Tattooed Countess (1924) and Nigger Heaven (1926). He was married to Fania Marinoff. Saul Mauriber, still a student when they met, assisted Van Vechten for twenty years; Mauriber also became a designer.
Varner, Van. A friend of Frank Taylor at the start of the 1950s. He was slim and pale with reddish-blond hair and worked in an office job in Los Angeles.
Vaughan, Keith (1912–1977). English painter, illustrator and diarist. He worked in advertising during the 1930s and was a conscientious objector in the war; later he taught at the Camberwell School of Art, the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and the Slade, as well as briefly in America. Isherwood met him in 1947 at John Lehmann’s and bought one of his pictures, “Two Bathers,” a small oil painting still in his collection. Vaughan’s diaries, with his own illustrations, were published in 1966.
Vedanta. “Acme of the Vedas”; one of six orthodox systems of Hindu philosophy, Vedanta is based on the Upanishads, the later portion of the ancient Hindu scriptures known as the Vedas. More generally, Vedanta is the whole body of literature which explains and comments upon these teachings. Probably first formulated by the philosopher Badarayana (second or first century B.C.), Vedanta teaches that the object of existence is not release but realization—that we should learn to know ourselves for what we really are. This realization is not obtained through logic, but through the direct intuition of the inspired sages recorded in the Upanishads. Vedanta is uncompromisingly non-dualistic. Only Brahman has existence; Brahman is existence; Brahman is consciousness. He is the Ultimate Principle and the Final Reality and the Indivisible One. References in the sacred writings to more than one principle are regarded as merely allegorical and descriptive. The phenomenal world of nature and man has merely a phantom existence, it is the result of maya, illusion. Ignorance of this leads to a belief that things exist apart from the Absolu
te. Ignorance is responsible for samsara, the continuous cycle of death and rebirth and death which lasts as long as an individual remains in the toils of maya. The search for Reality is a mystical search, pursued by introspective means such as meditation and spiritual discipline. Vedanta honors all the great spiritual teachers and impersonal or personal aspects of Godhead worshipped by different religions, considering them as manifestations of one Reality. The unillumined mind is incapable of imagining Brahman, so it adores the godlike in man—in Christ, in Buddha, in Kali—the highest it can conceive, yet in Vedanta the Truth is singular.
Vera. See Stravinsky, Vera.
Vernon. See Old, Vernon.
Vidal, Gore (b. 1925). American writer. Vidal introduced himself to Isherwood in a café in Paris in early 1948, having previously written to him and sent the manuscript of his novel The City and the Pillar. They became lasting friends. Later, Isherwood also met Howard Austen (Tinker), Vidal’s companion from 1950 onward. Vidal was in the army as a young man; afterwards he wrote essays on politics and culture as well as many novels, including Williwaw (1946), Myra Breckinridge (1968, dedicated to Isherwood), and the multi-volume American chronicle now stretching from Burr (1974), Lincoln (1984), 1876 (1976), Empire (1987), and Hollywood (1989) to Washington, D. C. (1967). During the 1950s Vidal wrote a series of television plays for CBS, then screenplays at Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM (including part of Ben Hur), and two Broadway plays, Visit to a Small Planet (1957) and The Best Man (1960). Another less successful play, On the March to the Sea, about the Civil War, was staged at the Hyde Park Playhouse near Vidal’s Hudson Valley estate and published in Three Plays (1962). During 1957, when Isherwood was working at Fox, Vidal also worked for Jerry Wald on a film version of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In 1960 Vidal ran for Congress, and in 1982 for the Senate, both times unsuccessfully. He describes his friendship with Isherwood in his memoir, Palimpsest (1995).
Viertel, Berthold (1885–1953). Viennese poet, playwright and film and theater director. Isherwood met Viertel in London in 1933 when Jean Ross suggested to Viertel that Isherwood could replace Margaret Kennedy as a screenplay writer on Viertel’s film Little Friend. Viertel liked the scene describing “Edward’s” suicide in The Memorial and Gaumont-British hired Isherwood as writer and, later, dialogue director. Isherwood made this first experience in the film industry the subject of Prater Violet, in which Viertel appears as “Friedrich Bergmann.” Viertel had settled his family in Santa Monica in 1928 and returned alone to Europe for long periods to work. His description of the life in California was a glamorous lure to Isherwood; they renewed their friendship soon after Isherwood arrived in 1939, beginning work on a film vaguely inspired by Mr. Norris Changes Trains. At the Viertels’ house in Santa Monica Canyon Isherwood met a number of the celebrated European emigrés then in Hollywood, and the friendship with Viertel led to his second job (the first of any substance) with Gottfried Reinhardt at MGM. Viertel began his career as an actor and stage director and turned to films in the 1920s. He first made films in Germany, began directing in Hollywood from the late 1920s, and in England from 1933. Viertel’s second marriage to Elizabeth Neumann took place in 1949. At the end of his life, he returned successfully to directing plays in Europe, including his own German translations of Tennessee Williams.
Viertel, Hans. Eldest son of Berthold Viertel and Salka Steuermann Viertel; born in Germany. Hans studied at the Reinhardt Workshop for Stage, Screen, and Radio, was assistant and dramaturge to Max Reinhardt in 1939, and later worked in films for William Dieterle. Eventually he became a linguistics professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and a children’s author.
Viertel, Peter (b. 1920). German-born second son of Berthold and Salka Viertel; screenplay writer and novelist. Peter Viertel attended UCLA and Dartmouth and became a free-lance writer. He served in the U.S. Marines during World War II and was decorated four times. He wrote the award-winning screenplay for Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as well as other Hemingway adaptations, and his own novels are in the Hemingway vein, with subjects such as soldiering (Line of Departure, 1947), big game hunting (White Hunter, Black Heart, 1954), and bullfighting (Love Lies Bleeding, 1964). His first novel The Canyon (published in 1941, but completed when he was just nineteen) gives a compelling adolescent view of Santa Monica Canyon as it was around the time when Isherwood first arrived there. Viertel’s first marriage was to Virginia Schulberg, and in 1960 he married the actress Deborah Kerr. Like his mother and father he eventually returned to Europe, settling in Klosters and Marbella.
Viertel, Salka (1889–1978). Polish actress and screenplay writer; first wife of Berthold Viertel with whom she had three sons, Hans, Peter, and Thomas. Sara Salomé Steuermann Viertel had a successful stage career in Vienna (including acting for Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater) before moving to Hollywood where she became the friend and confidante of Greta Garbo; they appeared together in the German language version of Anna Christie, and afterwards Salka collaborated on Garbo’s screenplays for MGM in the 1930s and 1940s (Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, Conquest, and others). Isherwood met Salka Viertel soon after arriving in Los Angeles and was often at her house socially or to work with Berthold. In the 1930s and 1940s the house was frequented by European refugees, and Salka was able to help many of them find work—some as domestic servants, others with the studios. Among her guests were some of the most celebrated writers and movie stars of the time. In 1946 Isherwood moved into her garage apartment, at 165 Mabery Road, with Bill Caskey. By then Salka was living alone and had little money, and Isherwood became a close friend. Her husband had left her; her lover Gottfried Reinhardt had married; Garbo’s career was over; and later, in the 1950s, Salka was persecuted by the McCarthyites and blacklisted by MGM for her presumed communism. In January 1947, Salka herself moved into the garage apartment and let out her house; later she sold the property and moved to an apartment off Wilshire Boulevard in the early 1950s. Eventually she returned modestly to writing for the movies, but finally moved back to Europe, although she had been a U.S. citizen since 1939. She published a memoir, The Kindness of Strangers, in 1969.
Viertel, Tommy. Youngest son of Berthold and Salka Viertel; he had a bad stutter. Tommy Viertel was drafted into the U.S. Army on February 5, 1944. After the war he lived in Los Angeles where he worked for Los Angeles County. He married twice.
Viertel, Virginia (Jigee). Peter Viertel’s first wife, from 1944 to 1959. Born Virginia Ray to working class Americans ruined by the depression, Jigee was a dancer in the Paramount chorus and then married the writer Budd Schulberg with whom she shared strong leftist political convictions. (Schulberg’s father, Ben Schulberg, was a Paramount executive.) She and Budd Schulberg divorced after having a daughter, Vicky Schulberg. Jigee’s second daughter, Christine Viertel, was born in Paris in 1952, and Jigee and Peter separated immediately afterwards. Jigee’s mother, Henny Ray, died of a stroke while caring for Vicky so that Salka Viertel partly raised both Vicky and Christine. After the ruin of her second marriage, Jigee drank increasingly heavily; then in January 1960 she fell asleep with a lit cigarette and died of burns in the hospital.
Vishwananda, Swami. Hindu monk, from India. Isherwood met him in 1943 when Vishwananda visited the Hollywood Vedanta Center and other centers on the West Coast. Vishwananda ran the Vedanta Center in Chicago.
Vivekananda, Swami (1863–1902). Narendranath Datta (known as Naren or Narendra and later as Swamiji) took the monastic name Vivekananda for himself only in 1893. He was Ramakrishna’s chief direct disciple. He came from a wealthy and cultured background; and was attending university in Calcutta when Ramakrishna recognized him as an incarnation of one of his “eternal companions,” a free, perfect soul born into maya with the avatar and possessing some of the avatar’s characteristics. Vivekananda was trained by Ramakrishna to carry his message and led the disciples after Ramakrishna’s death, though he left them for long periods, first to wander through India as a monastic practicing spiritu
al disciplines, then to travel twice to America and Europe where his lectures and classes spawned the first western Vedanta centers. In India he devoted much of his time to founding and administering the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. He also published his teachings and sayings in various volumes; Isherwood wrote the introduction to a 1960 selection from these by John Yale (Prema).
Vividishananda, Swami. Hindu monk, from India. Vividishananda ran the Seattle Vedanta Center; Isherwood met him at the dedication of the new Portland temple in 1943 and afterwards briefly visited his Seattle center.
von Alvensleben, Werner. Austrian artist, from a Junker family, and a cousin of Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein. He arrived in Berlin, where Isherwood met him, in the 1920s or 1930s, was involved in anti-Nazi politics and later went to Paris where he mixed with the Surrealists and became a sculptor. Around 1939 he emigrated to England, adopted the name Michael Werner, worked as a journalist and translator, and also used the pseudonym Peter Purbright. He died in 1989. Von Alvensleben was possibly a model for the art student, “Werner”—met in a communist café and later wounded by the police in street fighting—in the section of Goodbye to Berlin titled “A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932–3).” Like so many others with anti-Nazi sentiments, he may have been conscripted and helped to build the Siegfried line (the fortification along Germany’s western frontier, facing France’s Maginot line), though if this is so, he apparently found a way to leave Germany for good soon afterwards.
Wald, Jerry (1911–1962). American screenwriter and producer. Wald worked as a journalist and in radio before starting as a writer for Warner Brothers in the early 1930s; he was producing by 1942 and moved on to RKO in 1950 then afterwards to Columbia Pictures as a vice-president and executive producer. In the mid-1950s he went to Twentieth Century-Fox with a high reputation and a great deal of power. As a producer, Wald was extremely prolific: his name is associated with a long list of well-known films from the 1940s and 1950s and he was rumored to be a model for Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? Isherwood was hired by him in 1956 to work on Jean-Christophe (never made), and several of Isherwood’s friends, such as Gore Vidal and Gavin Lambert, also worked for Wald during the 1950s.
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