Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Warner Brothers. One of the major Hollywood studios, especially successful from the 1930s to the 1950s. It was founded in 1923 by the four sons of a Polish shoemaker; they pioneered talking pictures in the mid-1920s and established their position by the end of the decade. The studio was known for its realistic, often black-and-white films. As well as gangster movies and musicals, there were numerous relatively highbrow, historical and political films. Increasingly the studio was run by the youngest brother, Jack Warner. The producer Darryl F. Zanuck and, after him, Hal Wallis, contributed to Jack Warner’s success, but rivalry developed, and by 1944 Warner ran it on his own. Warner Brothers was sold to Seven Arts in 1967 and later taken over by a conglomerate, eventually merging with Time Inc. in 1989.

  Warsaw, siege of. For three weeks in April and May 1943, the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto forcibly resisted the Nazis’ final attempt to liquidate them; 7,000 Jewish fighters were killed, 6,000 burned in their hiding places, and 56,000 Jews captured and transported to Treblinka. The Jewish refugee at Denny Fouts’s party, September 23, 1944, was apparently one of the few who escaped. (It seems less likely, though possible, that he was a refugee from the later Warsaw Rising, which led to the destruction of the entire city by the Nazis. The Warsaw Rising began August 1, 1944, and the Poles did not surrender until October 2. The Polish Home Army evacuated the old city on September 2, at which time 1,500 survivors escaped through the sewers. Few if any Jews can have remained among them, but still, with speed and luck, he might have arrived in Santa Monica by September 23.)

  Watson, Peter. The financier behind Horizon, of which he was art editor and cofounder. Watson was heir to a margarine fortune, intelligent, and idealistically devoted to art. He collected art and befriended many artists. He was close to Denny Fouts in the 1930s and was the officially named owner of Denny Fouts’s Picasso when it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Watson’s other companions included a young American, Norman Fowler, whom he met in New York in 1949 and brought to London where they lived together until the apparently healthy and sober Watson mysteriously drowned in his bath in 1956. (See also Fowler, Norman.)

  Watts, Alan (b. 1915). English mystic, religious philosopher, author and teacher. Watts became a Buddhist while still a schoolboy at King’s School, Canterbury, Kent, and went on to study all forms of religious thought and practice. His many books include An Outline of Zen Buddhism (1932), Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion (1947), The Supreme Identity: An Essay on Oriental Metaphysic and the Christian Religion (1950), Nature, Man and Woman: A New Approach to Sexual Experience (1958), and Psychotherapy East and West (1961). Watts emigrated to America at the start of World War II, eventually settling near San Francisco where he became Dean of the American Academy of Asian Studies. He is known as a Zen Buddhist, but was also ordained as an Anglican priest in 1945. He was a close friend of Aldous Huxley, whom he first met in 1943, and he was impressed by Krishnamurti’s decision to renounce his messianic role. Krishnamurti greatly influenced Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), a book which Isherwood records had a profound effect on the young Don Bachardy. Watts felt that Huxley and Gerald Heard were working toward the same synthesis of Christian and oriental mysticism as himself, and like them he experimented with LSD in the 1950s. Huxley introduced him to Swami Prabhavananda in 1950, and Isherwood met Watts on the same occasion, though at first he did not like him. Watts opposed the Hindu emphasis on asceticism: he was married three times and asserted that sex improved spiritual presence. He was a figure of the San Francisco beat scene and a model for Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. In September 1958, Isherwood read with interest Watts’s article “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen” (later revised as a book), which critiques Kerouac’s Zen in Dharma Bums as “beat Zen” rather than true Zen, arguing that Kerouac is still engaged in rebelling against the culture which spawned him and is therefore no more liberated than the practitioner of “square Zen” who makes his Buddhism into a new form of conventionality.

  Web, also Webster. See Milam, Webster.

  Weingarten, Lawrence (Larry). Producer at MGM and husband of Jessie Marmorston, Isherwood’s doctor. Isherwood met the Weingartens through their mutual friend Eddie Knopf.

  Wescott, Glenway (1901–1987). American writer. Born in Wisconsin; attended the University of Chicago; lived in France in the 1920s, partly in Paris, and travelled in Europe and England. Afterwards he lived in New York. Early in his career he wrote poetry and reviews, later turning to fiction. His best known works are The Pilgrim Hawk (1940) and Apartment in Athens (1945). Wescott was President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 1957–1961. His longterm companion, Monroe Wheeler (1899–1988) was on the staff of The Museum of Modern Art from the mid-1930s, developed the museum’s publications, and later became a trustee. Each had other lovers, including for Wheeler, George Platt Lynes. From the late 1930s, Wescott, Wheeler, and Platt Lynes shared a country house in New Jersey. In 1949 Wescott went to Los Angeles expressly to read Isherwood’s 1939–1945 diaries. While he was there, Isherwood introduced Wescott to Jim Charlton with whom Wescott had an affair.

  Wheeler, Hugh. English writer. Wheeler published mystery thrillers under the name Patrick Quentin. Later he wrote plays (Big Fish, Little Fish; Look We’ve Come Through; the books for the Sondheim musicals A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd), and screenplays (Something for Everyone). According to rumor, he wrote much of the screenplay for Cabaret though he was credited only as a technical advisor because of Writers Guild rules. He lived on a farm in Massachusetts with his black lover, John Grubbs. Wheeler was a good friend of Chris Wood, and possibly it was Wood who introduced Wheeler and Isherwood, probably in the 1940s.

  Wildeblood, Peter. Diplomatic correspondent for The Daily Mail in London. He was arrested with Michael Pitt-Rivers (who later married Sonia Orwell) and charged with acts of indecency committed in 1952 with two RAF pilots. They were convicted in 1954 along with Pitt-Rivers’s cousin Lord Montagu of Beaulieu in a trial reflecting the backlash against sensitively placed homosexuals after the Burgess and Maclean defections in 1951. Wildeblood was given eighteen months in jail. He later published a book about his experiences, Against the Law (1955).

  Williams, Emlyn (1905–1987). Welsh playwright and actor. Williams wrote psychological thrillers for the London stage, including Night Must Fall (1935), and is perhaps best known for The Corn Is Green (1935) based on his own background in Wales and in which he played the lead; both of these were later filmed. He acted in his own work and also in many other stage roles, including Shakespeare and contemporary theater. During the 1950s he toured with one-man shows of Charles Dickens and Dylan Thomas (the Dylan Thomas show was titled Growing Up). Isherwood first met Williams in Hollywood in 1950 and saw him and his wife, Molly, again in London and Hollywood in subsequent years.

  Williams, Tennessee (1911–1983). American playwright; Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Mississippi and raised in St. Louis. His father was a travelling salesman, his mother felt herself to be a glamorous southern belle in reduced circumstances. His essentially autobiographical The Glass Menagerie made him famous in 1945, and soon afterwards he wrote A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Many of his subsequent plays are equally well-known—including The Rose Tattoo (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1962)—and were made into films. Williams also wrote a novella, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950). When he first came to Hollywood in 1943 to work for MGM, he bore a letter of introduction to Isherwood from Lincoln Kirstein; this began a long and close friendship, with numerous visits on both coasts, often to attend openings of Williams’s plays. In the autumn of 1954, Isherwood and Bachardy visited Williams and his long-term companion, Frank Merlo, in Key West during the filming of The Rose Tattoo. When Williams returned to Hollywood at the end of November to complete the film, he showed Isherwood a letter to Elia Kazan about his next play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This was part of a troubled correspondenc
e. Williams was determined to have Elia Kazan direct the play, despite the fact the Kazan insisted on the third act being rewritten. Williams complied during the autumn, but the struggle over the play carried on until the next year and into rehearsals, with Kazan continuing to change the script and the characters and increasingly softening and stylizing the production which Williams had intended to be unremitting and realistic. (Isherwood’s diary entry for March 8, 1955 makes clear that he disliked Kazan’s production; like Williams he felt the play should be presented realistically.) Williams was so dismayed by the way Kazan reshaped his original conception of the play that in 1955 he published the early version, without the changes required by Kazan for the Broadway production, and accompanied by a note explaining what he felt had happened. The play was a commercial success.

  Willie. See Maugham, William Somerset.

  Wilson, Colin (b. 1931). English novelist and critic. Wilson has published numerous psychological thrillers and studies of literature and philosophy, criminology, the imagination, the occult and the supernatural. He became well-known with his 1956 book, The Outsider—which Isherwood mentions October 2 and 12 that year—about the figure of the alienated solitary in modern literature. Isherwood met Wilson in London in 1959.

  Windham, Donald (b. 1920). Novelist and playwright, from Georgia. Windham was a friend of Lincoln Kirstein, of Paul Cadmus, and of Glenway Wescott; Isherwood probably met him in New York early in the 1940s, though certainly by 1942. Windham worked for Kirstein at Dance Index, and ran the magazine while Kirstein was away in the army during the war. He also collaborated with Tennessee Williams—a close friend—on the play You Touched Me! (1945). Isherwood wrote a blurb for Windham’s 1950 novel The Dog Star.

  Winters, Shelley (b. 1922). American actress, from St. Louis. She worked on stage in New York and moved to Hollywood in 1943. In her energetic and versatile career she has acted both comic and dramatic roles. She was nominated for an Academy Award for A Place in the Sun (1951), won Academy Awards for her supporting roles in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965), and was nominated again for The Poseidon Adventure (1972). She played Natalia Landauer in the film of I Am a Camera in 1955. From the early 1990s, she played Roseanne’s grandmother in the television comedy series Roseanne. Isherwood met her at the start of the 1950s, and she was a friend for a number of years. She was married to the actor Tony Franciosa from 1957 to 1960.

  Wood, Christopher (Chris) (d. 1976). Isherwood met Chris Wood in September 1932 when W. H. Auden took Isherwood to meet Gerald Heard, then sharing Wood’s luxurious West End flat. Wood was about ten years younger than Heard, handsome and friendly but shy about his maverick talents. He played the piano well, but never professionally, wrote short stories, but not for publication, had a pilot’s license and rode a bicycle for transport. He was extremely rich (the family business made jams and other canned and bottled goods), sometimes extravagant, and always generous; he secretly funded many of Heard’s projects and loaned or gave money to many other friends (including Isherwood). In 1937 Wood emigrated with Heard to Los Angeles and in 1941 moved with him to Laguna. Their domestic commitment persisted for a time despite Heard’s increasing asceticism and religious activities. Ultimately, the household disbanded as their lives diverged, though they remained friends. From 1939, Wood was involved with Paul Sorel, also a member of their household for about five years.

  Woodcock, Patrick. British doctor. Woodcock was doctor to many London theatrical stars—including John Gielgud and Noel Coward—and also to actors based in New York and Hollywood. Isherwood and Bachardy first met him with Gielgud and Hugh Wheeler in London in 1956, and a few days later Woodcock visited Bachardy at the Cavendish Hotel to treat him for stomach cramps. Woodcock prescribed vitamins for Isherwood and became a friend.

  Worsley, Cuthbert. English writer and schoolmaster. T. C. Worsley was a friend of Stephen Spender and in 1937 accompanied him to the Spanish Civil War on an assignment for The Daily Worker. He returned to Spain soon afterwards to join an ambulance unit. He later wrote about this period for The Left Review and in Behind the Battle (1939), as well as in a fictionalized memoir published much later, Fellow Travellers (1971). Isherwood liked Worsley’s public school novel, set in the 1930s, Flannelled Fool (1967).

  Wright, Frank Lloyd (1869–1959). American architect. A preeminent figure in twentieth-century architecture, Wright originated the organic principle that the form of a building should develop naturally from its setting, from its function, and from its materials. He began as a designer in a Chicago firm and eventually opened his own practice, first expressing his genius for spacious, open-plan interiors in his low-standing “prairie” houses. His houses in particular tended to conform to the features of the natural landscape in which they were set, but also, he was trained as a civil engineer, and he was able to apply the principles of engineering to his architectural designs. Thus, he initiated new techniques in offices and other large public buildings—such as concrete blocks reinforced with steel rods, air conditioning, indirect lighting, panel heat, and new uses of glass. In 1910, Wright established Taliesin, near Spring Green, Wisconsin. It was both his home and an architectural school (named after a sixth-century Welsh bard). Later, in 1938, he founded Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he spent the winter months and where apprentice architects also gathered to work with him. His foundation, the Taliesin Fellowship, supported both centers. Isherwood’s friend Jim Charlton had been a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ben Masselink’s brother, Eugene, was a longtime colleague who helped Wright to run the centers. Isherwood and Bachardy spent a weekend at Taliesin West in 1959 not long before Wright died.

  Wright, Tom. American writer, from New Orleans. Isherwood met Thomas E. Wright through Gerrit Lansing while Wright and Isherwood were fellows-in-residence at the Huntington Hartford Foundation in 1951. Wright was then about twenty-four years old and had taught at NYU. They had a casual affair lasting about eight months. Wright was also a childhood friend of Marguerite and Speed Lamkin, and knew Tennessee Williams and Howard Griffin. His other lovers during the 1950s included Sam Costidy and Scott Poland. Wright was in close touch with his parents during this period and they are mentioned by Isherwood; Wright’s mother, Emily Wright, visited Wright in California before she died. Bachardy drew his first of several portraits of Wright in 1960. Wright published novels and travel books. He later moved to Guatemala.

  Wyberslegh Hall. The fifteenth-century manor house where Isherwood was born and where his mother lived with his brother after the war; it was part of the Bradshaw Isherwood estate. See the entries for Frank Bradshaw Isherwood and Richard Bradshaw Isherwood.

  Wystan. See Auden, W. H.

  X., the “X. situation.” See Harris, Bill.

  Yacoubi, Ahmed. Moroccan painter. Paul Bowles met Ahmed Yacoubi in Fez in 1947 when he bought some majoon prepared by Yacoubi’s mother. They lived and travelled together for a number of years until the late 1950s when, having been tried and acquitted on a morals charge with a fifteen-year-old German boy, Yacoubi married and had a child. Francis Bacon took an interest in Yacoubi’s painting and taught him to use oils in 1955; in 1957 Bacon also helped Yacoubi to show his work in the Hanover Gallery in London. Yacoubi was a model for “Amar” in Bowles’s novel The Spider’s House (1955), and, like other Moroccan friends, he told Bowles native stories which Bowles translated and later published. Yacoubi supplied kif and majoon to Isherwood and Bachardy in Tangier in 1955.

  Yale, John. See Prema.

  Yorke, Henry. See Green, Henry.

  Zeininger, Russ. An acquaintance of Bill Caskey; Isherwood met Zeininger through Caskey in August 1949 and they had an intermittent affair through the remainder of that year, making a trip to the AJC Ranch together in December.

  Zinnemann, Fred (1907–1997). Viennese-born director. He arrived in Hollywood very young, in 1929, and worked as Berthold Viertel’s secretary, also as an extra, and as a studio script clerk. He was soon directing shorts at MGM. By
the early 1940s, when Isherwood met him, he was living with his English wife, Renée, on Mabery Road, near the Viertels. Zinnemann directed a great many successful films—High Noon (1952), The Member of the Wedding (1953), From Here to Eternity (1953), Oklahoma (1955), A Man for All Seasons (1966), The Day of the Jackal (1973), Julia (1977), and others. In 1949 he made The Men, written by Carl Foreman and starring Marlon Brando, about paraplegics; shortly afterwards Isherwood began visiting in the Birmingham Hospital the same group of paraplegics involved in the film and talked to them about writing.

  Acknowledgements

  The list of people who have helped me prepare this book is staggeringly long, and the debt I owe to some of them is immense. At the top of the list is Don Bachardy, who asked me to edit the diaries and then helped me with such patience and care that I wondered how and why he had not done the job himself. Obviously his knowledge of Isherwood’s life is unrivalled, but his knowledge of the movies is nearly as complete; I benefitted from both areas of expertise again and again, and have felt it a continual privilege to work with him. Numerous people who appear in the diaries have answered questions about themselves and others for Don Bachardy and for me; I would like to thank Alice and Peter Gowland, Evelyn Hooker, Gavin Lambert, Dan Luckenbill, Ben Masselink, Ivan Moffat, the late Stephen Spender, Edward Upward, Peter Viertel, and especially Swami Vidyatmananda who has generously read and commented on most of the material in this book.