Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Adjemian, Bob (b. 1947). American monk of the Ramakrishna Order, also called Nirvana after he took his brahmacharya vows. He has a B.A. in communications and oversees the Vedanta Press and the retail mail order department for the Vedanta Catalogue. Isherwood first met him in 1969 or 1970, when Adjemian came to Adelaide Drive to talk about living in a monastery. As Isherwood mentions, he is a committed runner; he has completed nine 100-mile mountain trail races.

  Albee, Edward (b. 1928). American playwright, educated at Lawrenceville, Choate, and Trinity College in Connecticut. He had his first success with The Zoo Story off-Broadway in 1958, won Pulitzer Prizes for A Delicate Balance (1966), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994), and is best known for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962).

  Albert, Eddie (1906–2005). American actor, on Broadway from the mid-1930s. his films include Carrie (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), Oklahoma (1955), and The Heartbreak Kid (1972), and he played Oliver in the T.V. series “Green Acres,” which first aired in 1965. He appears in D.2. His wife of forty years, the actress and dancer Margo (1917–1985), was born in Mexico City as Maria Marguerita Guadalupe Teresa Estel Bolado Castilla y O’Donell. She had a brief first marriage. Her films include Winterset (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), and Viva Zapata! (1952). She sat for Bachardy in 1973.

  Albert, Edward (1951–2006). Actor; son of Eddie and Margo Albert. He appeared in his first film when he was fourteen. Later he went to UCLA and Oxford. He starred in Butterflies Are Free (1972), as Isherwood records, and eventually became a photographer. He sat for Bachardy in 1973. He appears in D.2.

  Aldous. See Huxley, Aldous.

  Alec. See Beesley, Alec and Dodie Smith Beesley.

  Alexander, Clytie (b. 1940). American artist, from Kansas, educated in Quebec and Dhaka, Bangladesh. She was an architect’s apprentice and studied art and engineering at Antioch College in Ohio and at San José State College in California before focusing on fine arts at UCLA. Much of her work—abstract, minimalist, linked to colorfield—evokes the light and landscapes of southern California. Since the 1970s, she has exhibited in countless solo and group exhibitions on the West and East Coasts, Europe and Japan; her work is held in many public and corporate collections, and she has received numerous grants and awards. She was married to Peter Alexander for more than fifteen years, until the mid-1980s, and had two daughters with him: Hope, later an architect and designer, and Julia. For a number of years she was Bachardy’s closest woman friend. She divides her time between New York and Los Angeles.

  Alexander, Peter (b. 1939). American artist; born in Los Angeles, educated at the University of Pennsylvania, the Architectural Association in London, at Berkeley, at the University of Southern California, and at UCLA. His murals, posters, and sculptures—mostly landscapes and figurative work—are in many public venues in California, including Disney Hall, and he has exhibited all over the United States. Collections holding his work include the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; the Getty Museum, Malibu; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena; the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. His first wife was the painter Clytie Alexander, and he later married Claudia Parducci, a painter and musician. He first sat for Bachardy in 1969, and Isherwood met him around that time.

  Allen, Alan Warren. Isherwood’s general practitioner from April 1961 until the mid-1970s; he was about forty when they met, tall, handsome, soft-spoken, easygoing, and married. As Isherwood tells in D.2, his first wife committed suicide.

  Allen, Edwin (Ed). American librarian, at Wesleyan College; once a salesman for Oxford University Press. He met the Stravinskys in 1962, when he was about thirty, and catalogued Igor Stravinsky’s library. He also helped with errands and domestic tasks in California and New York, becoming a weekend fixture in the Stravinskys’ Fifth Avenue apartment when they moved permanently to New York. He appears in D.2.

  Altman, Dennis (b. 1943). Australian academic, author, gay activist. He did graduate work at Cornell in the mid-1960s and published one of the first accounts of the gay liberation movement in the U.S., Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971), followed by many books on sexuality and political culture. Later, he became a politics professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne and President of the AIDS Society of Asia and the Pacific. He appears in D.2.

  Amaya, Mario (1933–1986). Canadian curator and art critic. He founded the London magazine Art and Artists and is credited with bringing Yoko Ono’s work to London. He was a member of Andy Warhol’s circle, was with Warhol the day Warhol was shot in 1968, and was himself also shot. In 1972, he became Director of the New York Cultural Center where he staged a show of Bachardy’s drawings, February 15–April 7, 1974.

  Amendt, Rudolf (Rudi) (1895–1987). German actor, in Hollywood from the 1930s, at first sometimes using the name Robert O. Davis. He played small parts in thrillers, dramas, war and horror movies—often as a Nazi—before moving into T.V. in the 1950s and 1960s.

  Amiya (1902–1986). English Vedanta devotee, born Ella Sully, one of ten daughters of a handsome Somerset farm laborer whose well-born wife chose scandal and poverty in order to marry him. Amiya travelled to California in the early 1930s with an older sister, Joy, who married an American artist called Palmerton. She was hired by Swami Prabhavananda and Sister Lalita as housekeeper at Ivar Avenue. By the time Isherwood met her at the end of the decade, she had received her Sanskrit name from Swami and become a nun. She became a particular friend of Isherwood’s when he lived at the Vedanta Society during the 1940s. Amiya had married in the late 1920s, becoming Ella Corbin, but the marriage failed; in the early 1950s she met George Montagu, Earl of Sandwich (then in his sixties), when he visited the Vedanta Society. A few weeks later Swami gave them permission to marry, and Amiya returned to England, divorced Corbin, and became Countess of Sandwich. She grew close to Isherwood’s mother and his brother Richard. She was also close throughout her life to her younger sister, Sally Hardie (1906–1990). Bachardy drew Amiya twice. She appears in D.1 and D.2.

  Amohananda. American monk of the Ramakrishna Order. Until he took sannyas in 1971, he was called Paul Hamilton.

  Anamananda. See Arup Chaitanya.

  ananda. Sanskrit for bliss or joy; an aspect of Brahman. It is used as the last part of a monk’s sannyas name in the Shankara Order, for example, Vivekananda, “whose bliss is in discrimination.”

  Anandaprana (Ananda). See Usha.

  Anderson, Judith (1898–1992). Australian-born actress; she made her first appearance on the New York stage in 1918 and played major roles throughout the 1930s and 1940s, including the lead in Mourning Becomes Electra (1932), Gertrude to Gielgud’s Hamlet in 1936, Lady Macbeth twice, and Medea twice. She also had many movie roles, including Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and other often chilling parts. She took the lead in the brief Broadway run of Speed Lamkin’s play Comes a Day at the end of the 1950s and toured with Bill Roerick in 1961, performing snippets from her most famous shows. She appears in D.1 and D.2.

  Anderson, Lindsay (1923–1994). British director; born in India and educated at Cheltenham College and Oxford. After World War II, he founded the British film magazine Sequence with Karel Reisz and Gavin Lambert, a friend since school; he wrote film criticism for it, for Sound and Sight, and for The New Statesman. He made documentaries as well as features and was at the heart of the British Free Cinema Movement, which gave rise to the new realism in British films in the early 1960s. Many of his stage productions were at The Royal Court where he was an artistic director from 1969 to 1975. His films include Thursday’s Child (1954), This Sporting Life (1963), If. . . (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973), Britannia Hospital (1982), and The Whales of August (1987).

  Anderson, Paul. American would-be actor and singer; as Isherwood records, he was a boyfriend of Roddy McDowall, who supported his efforts to establish himself professionally, bringing celebrity
friends to Anderson’s nightclub performances. As well as singing at The Little Club and appearing in a production of Pinter’s The Homecoming, he had a few tiny movie parts as Adam Anderson. But his career never took off.

  Andrews, Oliver and Betty Harford. California sculptor, on the art faculty at UCLA; American actress, his wife until the 1970s. Andrews knew Alan Watts well and travelled with Watts to Japan. Harford was a close friend of Iris Tree and acted at Tree’s High Valley Theater in the Upper Ojai Valley. She also worked for John Houseman in numerous stage productions, appeared in a few movies, including Inside Daisy Clover (1965), and had numerous T.V. roles from the 1950s onward, including Professor Kingsfield’s secretary, Mrs. Nottingham, in “The Paper Chase” (1978–1986) and the cook, Hilda Gunnerson, in “Dynasty” (1981–1989). They had a son, Christopher, born in the 1950s and named after Isherwood. They are mentioned as a couple in D.1 and Lost Years, where Isherwood called her Betty Andrews, and separately in D.2. After they split, she lived with Hungarian actor Alex de Naszody until he died in the early 1980s. As Isherwood tells, Andrews died suddenly of a heart attack in 1978, while still in his forties.

  Anhalt, Edward (Eddie) (b. 1914). American screenwriter. He wrote war, crime, and spy thrillers but also adapted Beckett (1964), The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), and many others. He began writing with his first wife, Edna Anhalt, during the 1950s and later worked successfully by himself. His second wife, whom he married later in the 1950s, was called Jackie George. In 1958, Selznick hired Anhalt to work on Mary Magdalene, replacing Isherwood, but the film was never made. He appears in D.1.

  the Animals. Isherwood and Bachardy. Also, homosexuals in general, as against human beings or heterosexuals. Isherwood and Bachardy called their Adelaide Drive house La Casa de los Animales (The House of the Animals). See also Dobbin for Isherwood in his identity as a horse and Kitty for Bachardy.

  Apollo 13. The third lunar landing attempt was launched April 11, 1970; on April 13, 200,000 miles from earth, an oxygen tank blew up, causing the other to fail; the three astronauts had to evacuate from the command module into the lunar module, and travel back to earth in near-freezing temperatures with little food and only six ounces of water a day. They splashed down safely near Samoa on April 17.

  Arizu, Betty. The daughter Jo Masselink had with Ferdinand Hinchberger. She appears as a grown woman in D.2. and in this diary, married to Fran Arizu, a Mexican, with whom she had two children.

  Arnoldi, Charles (Chuck) (b. 1946). American sculptor, painter, and graphic artist; born in Ohio, educated briefly at the Art Center in Los Angeles and at the Chouinard Art Institute. He became recognized in the early 1970s for his wall reliefs and objects made of sticks, rope, and bamboo. His works are in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the National Gallery of Australia, among others.

  Arup Chaitanya. A disciple of Swami Prabhavananda, born Kenneth (Kenny) Critchfield. He arrived at the Vedanta Society towards the end of the 1940s and lived there and at Trabuco. He took his brahmacharya vows in 1954, becoming Arup Chaitanya; then in 1963, on taking sannyas, he became Swami Anamananda. He worked for many years in the Vedanta Society Hollywood bookstore and spent his last days at Trabuco, where he died in the early 1990s. He appears in D.1 and D.2.

  Asaktananda, Swami (1931–2009). Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He was groomed by Swami Prabhavananda to take over the Hollywood Vedanta Society, until Prabhavananda unexpectedly decided that Asaktananda had the wrong personality for the role and sent him back to the Belur Math in India against Asaktananda’s wishes and amid much controversy. Asaktananda later headed the Narendrapur Center, an enormous educational establishment of the Ramakrishna order outside Calcutta. He appears in D.2.

  asanas. Yoga postures, or the mat on which they are performed.

  Assembly Bill 489 (A.B. 489). California state legislation decriminalizing adultery, oral sex, and sodomy between consenting adults. It was introduced in Sacramento every year for about a decade by liberal black assemblyman Willie Brown until it was approved in March 1975 by the state assembly and on May 2 by the more conservative state senate. Mervyn Dymally, newly elected, also black, rushed back from out of state to break the tie while the state senators were kept locked in the building to ensure a quorum. Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill, and it took effect on January 1, 1976.

  Atman. The divine nature within man; Brahman within the human being; the self or soul; the deepest core of man’s identity.

  Auden, W. H. (Wystan) (1907–1973). English poet, playwright, librettist; perhaps the greatest English poet of his century and one of the most influential. He and Isherwood met as schoolboys towards the end of Isherwood’s time at St. Edmund’s School, Hindhead, Surrey, where Auden, two and a half years younger, arrived in the autumn of 1915. They wrote three plays together—The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), On the Frontier (1938)—and a travel book about their trip to China during the Sino-Japanese war—Journey to a War (1939). A fourth play—The Enemies of a Bishop (1929)—was published posthumously. They also wrote a film scenario, “The Life of an American,” probably in 1939. As well as several stints of schoolmastering, Auden worked for John Grierson’s Film Unit, funded by the General Post Office, for about six months in 1935, mostly writing poetry to be used for sound tracks. He and Isherwood went abroad separately and together during the 1930s, famously to Berlin (Auden arrived first, in 1928), and finally emigrated together to the United States in 1939. After only a few months, their lives diverged; Auden settled in New York with his companion and, later, collaborator, Chester Kallman, but he remained close friends with Isherwood. Auden’s libretti include Paul Bunyan (1941) for Benjamin Britten, The Rake’s Progress (1948) with Kallman for Stravinsky, and Elegy for Young Lovers with Kallman for Hans Werner Henze. Auden is caricatured as “Hugh Weston” in Lions and Shadows and figures centrally in Christopher and His Kind. There are many passages about him in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Austen, Howard (Tinker) (1928–2003). Companion to Gore Vidal from 1950. He worked in advertising in New York and studied singing, then devoted most of his time to Vidal, managing Vidal’s business and social life. He appears in D.1 and D.2.

  Avis, Annie (1869–1948). Isherwood’s nanny, from near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk. She was hired by Isherwood’s mother when he was two months old and Avis herself was about thirty; she remained with the family for the rest of her life and never married. In childhood, Isherwood and his younger brother Richard spent more time with Nanny than they did with their mother. In Kathleen and Frank, Isherwood writes that he had loved Nanny dearly; he bullied her in adolescence, but she never criticized him, and he shared intimate secrets with her.

  Ayer, A.J. (Alfred, Freddie) (1910–1989). British philosopher, educated at Eton and Oxford. He married four times and had many affairs. His second wife was also his fourth, American journalist Dee Wells, née Chapman (b. 1925), author of the best-selling novel Jane (1973). They met in 1956, married in 1960, divorced in the early 1980s, and married again in 1989. Ayer’s third wife was Vanessa Lawson, formerly wife of Nigel Lawson; she and Ayer married in 1982 but were involved with one another from 1968 onward; she died of cancer in 1985. Another long affair, in the early 1950s, was with Jocelyn Rickards, who remained a friend. Ayer was also a close friend of Tony Bower, whom he met in New York during World War II, and with whose half-sister, Jean Gordon-Duff, he was briefly involved around the same time. He appears in D.2.

  Bacall, Lauren (b. 1924). American stage and screen star, born in the Bronx and trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She appeared on Broadway before making her first film To Have and Have Not (1944) with Humphrey Bogart, whom she married in 1945. Her other films with him are The Big Sleep (1945), Dark Passage (1
947), and Key Largo (1948), and she also appeared in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Sex and the Single Girl (1965), and The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), among others. She returned to Broadway in Cactus Flower (1965), Applause (1970), for which she won a Tony Award, and Woman of the Year (1981). Bogart died in 1957, and in 1961 Bacall married Jason Robards, Jr., but they later divorced. Isherwood first mentions her in D.1 in 1954 when Peter Viertel was friendly with her, and they met again several times with the Viertels and at the Selznicks’ during the 1950s.

  Bachardy, Don (b. 1934). American painter; Isherwood’s companion from 1953 onwards. Bachardy accompanied his elder brother, Ted Bachardy, to the beach in Santa Monica from the late 1940s, and Isherwood occasionally saw him there. Ted Bachardy, with other friends, first introduced them in November 1952. They met again in early February 1953 and, on February 14, began an affair which quickly became serious. Bachardy was then an eighteen-year-old college student living at home with his brother and his mother. His parents were divorced. He had studied languages for one semester at UCLA, then transferred at the start of 1953 to Los Angeles City College in Hollywood, near his mother’s apartment. At first he studied French and Spanish but dropped French for German as a result of Isherwood’s influence. He had worked as a grocery boy at a local market, and, like Isherwood in youth, spent most of his free time at the movies. In February 1955, Bachardy went back to UCLA to begin his junior year and almost immediately changed his major from languages to theater arts. In July 1956, he enrolled at the Chouinard Art School, supplemented his instruction there by taking classes with Vernon Old, and within a few years got work as a professional artist, drawing fashion illustrations for a local department store and then for newspapers and magazines. During this period he began to do portraits of Isherwood, close friends, and favorite film stars, and to sell his work. His first major portrait commission, from Tony Richardson, was to draw the cast of the 1960 stage production of A Taste of Honey. In 1961 he attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London, supported partly by his patron Russell McKinnon and partly by Women’s Wear Daily as their London fashion illustrator. His work at the Slade led to his first individual shows, in London in 1961 and in New York in 1962. Since then, he has done countless portraits, both of the famous and the little-known, and exhibited in many cities. His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. and the National Portrait Gallery in London, and he has published his drawings in several books, including October (1981) with Isherwood, Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood (1990), and Stars in My Eyes (2000). Together, Isherwood and Bachardy wrote several stage and film scripts, including their award-winning screenplay for the T.V. film “Frankenstein: The True Story” (1973). He figures centrally in D.1 and D.2.