Maharaj. See Brahmananda, Swami.
mahasamadhi. Great samadhi, usually referring to the moment of death, when the illuminated soul leaves the body and is absorbed into the divine. See samadhi.
Mailer, Norman (1923–2007). American writer, raised in Brooklyn and educated at Harvard. He fought in the Pacific during World War II and became famous with the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), about an American infantry platoon invading a Japanese-held island. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize: for The Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner’s Song (1979). Other novels and works blending fiction with non-fiction and personal commentary include The Deer Park (1955), An American Dream (1965), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), Of a Fire on the Moon (1970), The Prisoner of Sex (1971), Ancient Evenings (1983), Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984), Harlot’s Ghost (1991), Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995), The Gospel According to the Son (1997), and The Castle in the Forest (2007). He also wrote screenplays and directed films. He co-founded The Village Voice in 1955, and in 1969 he ran for mayor of New York. He married six times. In Lost Years, Isherwood tells of his first meeting with Mailer in 1950, and Mailer also appears in D.2.
Mallory, Margaret (b. 1911). Art collector and philanthropist. She lived with Alice Story, known as Ala, and they travelled and collected together. Mallory was a benefactor of UCSB, endowing fellowships in music and art history and donating parts of her collection. She appears in D.2.
Mangeot, André (1883–1970) and Olive (1885–1969). Belgian violinist and his English wife; parents of Sylvain and Fowke Mangeot. Isherwood met them in 1925 and worked for a year as part-time secretary to André Mangeot’s string quartet which was organized from the family home in Chelsea. He brought friends to meet Olive when he was in London. She is the original for “Madame Cheuret” in Lions and Shadows, and Isherwood drew on aspects of her personality for “Margaret Lanwin” and “Mary Scriven” in The Memorial. Olive had an affair with Edward Upward and through his influence became a communist. Later, she separated from her husband and for a time shared a house with Jean Ross and Jean’s daughter in Cheltenham. Hilda Hauser, the Mangeots’ housekeeper and cook, also moved with Olive to Cheltenham, where, together, they raised Hilda’s granddaughter, Amber. As Isherwood tells in D.1 and in Lost Years, Hilda’s daughter Phyllis was raped by a black G.I. during World War II and Amber resulted. The Mangeots also appear in D.2.
Mangeot, Sylvain (1913–1978). Younger son of Olive and André Mangeot. Isherwood’s friend Eric Falk initially introduced Isherwood to the Mangeot family because Sylvain, at age eleven, had a bicycle accident which confined him to a wheelchair for a time, and Isherwood had a car in which he could take Sylvain for outings. They grew to know each other well during the time that Isherwood worked for Sylvain’s father, and together they made a little book, People One Ought to Know, for which Isherwood wrote nonsense verses to accompany Sylvain’s animal paintings (it was eventually published in 1982, but one pair of verses appeared earlier as “The Common Cormorant” in Auden’s 1938 anthology The Poet’s Tongue). Sylvain is portrayed as “Edouard” in Lions and Shadows. Later he joined the Foreign Office and then became a journalist, working as a diplomatic correspondent, an editor, and an overseas radio commentator for the BBC. He appears in D.1 and D.2.
Manionis, Anthony (Tony). Aspiring actor. He understudied and was an assist ant stage manager for the Phoenix Theater Broadway production of School for Wives in 1971 and had a part in the first New York production A Meeting by the River.
Mann, Erika (1905–1969). German actress and author, eldest daughter of Thomas Mann. Isherwood met her in the spring of 1935 in Amsterdam through her brother Klaus; she had fled Germany in March 1933. Her touring satirical revue, “The Peppermill” (for which she wrote most of the anti-Nazi material), earned her the status of official enemy of the Reich and she asked Isherwood to marry her and provide her with a British passport. He felt he could not, but contacted Auden who instantly agreed. The two met and married in England on June 15, 1935, the very day Goebbels revoked Mann’s German citizenship. In September 1936, Erika emigrated to America with Klaus and unsuccessfully tried to reopen “The Peppermill” in New York. As the war approached, she lectured widely in the U.S. and wrote anti-Nazi books, two with Klaus, trying to revive sympathy for the non-Nazi Germany silenced by Hitler. She worked as a journalist in London during the war, for the BBC German Service and as a correspondent for the New York Nation. Later, she grew closer to her father, travelling with her parents and helping Mann with his work. She appears in D.1 and Lost Years.
Mann, Heinrich Klaus (1906–1949). German novelist and editor, eldest son of Thomas Mann. Isherwood became friendly with him in Berlin in the summer of 1931. By then Klaus had written and acted with his sister, Erika, in the plays which launched her acting career, and he had published several novels in German (a few appeared in English translations) and worked as a drama critic. He travelled extensively and lived in various European cities before he left Germany for good in 1933; he emigrated to America in 1936 when his family settled in Princeton. He lived in New York, continued to travel to Europe as a journalist, and eventually settled for a time in Santa Monica. He founded two magazines, Die Sammlung (The Collection) in Amsterdam in 1933, and Decision, which appeared in New York in December 1940 but lasted only a year because of the war. He became a U.S. citizen and served in the U.S. army during the war. He wrote his second volume of autobiography, The Turning Point (1942), in English. He attempted suicide several times, finally succeeding in Cannes. Isherwood wrote a reminiscence for a memorial volume published in Amsterdam in 1950, Klaus Mann—zum Gedaechtnis (reprinted in Exhumations), and he describes their friendship in D.1 and Lost Years.
mantram or mantra. A Sanskrit word or words which the guru tells his disciple when initiating him into the spiritual life and which is the essence of the guru’s teaching for that particular disciple. The mantram is a name for God and includes the word Om; the disciple must keep the mantram secret and meditate for the rest of his life on the aspect of God which it represents. Repeating the mantram (making japam) purifies the mind and leads to the realization of God. With the mantram, the guru often gives a rosary—as Swami Prabhavananda gave Isherwood—on which the disciple may count the number of times he repeats his mantram.
Marguerite, previously Marguerite Brown, also Marguerite Harrity. See Lamkin, Marguerite.
Markovich, John (Mark) (193[2]–2008). American painter and monk of the Ramakrishna Order, born in Detroit. He was known as Mark, and later as Brahamachari Nirmal and then Swami Tadatmananda. He became the official abbot of Trabuco. He appears in D.2.
Marple Hall. The Bradshaw Isherwood family seat; see entries for Frank Bradshaw Isherwood and Richard Bradshaw Isherwood.
Marre, Albert (b. 1925). American theater director, writer and producer; born in New York. He acted on Broadway, moved to directing classical theater, including Van Brugh and Shaw, and had a hit in 1953 with the musical Kismet. He cast singer and actress Joan Diener (1930–2006) in one of the leads and she became his wife in 1956. He was nominated for a Tony Award for The Chalk Garden in 1956 and had another major hit with The Man of La Mancha in 1965 for which he won a Tony and which he frequently revived. Joan Diener again played the lead, Aldonza / Dulcinea, her most successful role.
Mason, James (1909–1984). British actor, educated at Marlborough and Cambridge. He was a conscientious objector during World War II. He joined the Old Vic Theatre Company in the 1930s, soon began making films, and became a star in The Seventh Veil (1945), before moving on to Hollywood where he often played villains. Later films include Julius Caesar (1953), The Desert Rats (1953), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), North by Northwest (1959), Lolita (1962), Lord Jim (1965), Georgy Girl (1966), and The Verdict (1982). On T.V. he played Franz Gruber in Isherwood and Danny Mann’s “The Legend of Silent Night” and Polidori in “Frankenstein: The True Story.” He was married to actress Pamela Kellino from 1941 to 1965 and,
from 1971, to Clarissa Kaye. He appears in D.2.
Masselink, Ben (1919–2000). American writer. Probably Isherwood and Bill Caskey met Ben Masselink with his longtime companion Jo Lathwood in the Friendship Bar in Santa Monica around 1949; they appear often in D.1 and Lost Years. During the war, Masselink was in the marines; one night on leave, he got drunk in the Friendship and Jo Lathwood took him home and looked after him. When the war was over he returned and stayed for twenty years. Isherwood alludes to this meeting in his description of The Starboard Side in A Single Man. Masselink had studied architecture, and Isherwood helped him with his writing career during the 1950s. His first book of stories, Partly Submerged, was published in 1957. He then published several novels: two about his war experience—The Crackerjack Marines (1959) and The Deadliest Weapon (1965), the second of which Isherwood greatly admired—and The Danger Islands (1964), for teenage boys. He also wrote for television throughout the 1950s and in 1960 worked at Warner Brothers on the script for a film of The Crackerjack Marines. As Isherwood tells in D.2, Masselink left Jo in 1967 for a younger woman, Dee Hawes, the wife of their friend, Bill Hawes. Dee had an adopted daughter, Heather, from her first marriage.
Masselink, Jo (circa 1900–1988). Women’s sportswear and bathing suit designer, from Northville, South Dakota; among her clientele were movie stars such as Janet Gaynor and Anne Baxter. In youth, she worked as a dancer and was briefly married to a man called Jack Lathwood whose name she kept professionally. Also, she had a daughter, Betty (see Arizu), and a son with a North Dakotan, Ferdinand Hinchberger. From 1938 onwards, Jo lived in an apartment on West Channel Road, a few doors from the Friendship, and by the late 1940s she knew many of Isherwood’s friends who frequented the bar—including Bill Caskey, Jay de Laval, and Jim Charlton. She never married Ben Masselink, though she used his surname while they lived together. She and Masselink figure through much of D.1, D.2, and Lost Years as Isherwood’s closest heterosexual friends.
Maugham, William Somerset (Willie) (1874–1965). British playwright and novelist. He had a daughter, Liza Wellcome (1915–1998) with Syrie Wellcome, whom he married in 1917 but never lived with. In the 1960s, he tried to disinherit Liza, saying she was the daughter of Henry Wellcome, Syrie’s husband at the time of Liza’s birth, but the court decided Maugham was the biological father. During Maugham’s marriage, his companion was Gerald Haxton, eighteen years younger; he met Haxton in 1914 when they both worked in an ambulance unit in Flanders. They travelled and entertained on Cap Ferrat at the Villa Mauresque which Maugham bought in 1926. Haxton died in 1944, and Maugham’s subsequent companion and chosen heir was Alan Searle. Isherwood met Maugham in London in the late 1930s and saw him whenever Maugham visited Hollywood, where many of Maugham’s works were filmed; with Bachardy, Isherwood later made several visits to the Villa Mauresque. In 1945, Isherwood worked for Wolfgang Reinhardt on a screenplay for Maugham’s 1941 novel Up at the Villa (never made), and he enlisted Swami Prabhavananda to advise Maugham on the screenplay for The Razor’s Edge (1944). Although Maugham did not follow their advice, Isherwood and Swami again helped him in 1956 with an essay, “The Saint,” about Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950), the Indian holy man Maugham had met in 1936 and on whom he had modelled Shri Ganesha, the fictional holy man in The Razor’s Edge. Maugham appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Maupin, Armistead (b. 1944). American writer; born in Washington, D.C., raised in North Carolina, and educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served in the navy and worked as a newspaper journalist in Charleston and in San Francisco, where he settled in 1971. His best-selling Tales of the City (1978), set in San Francisco, and the many sequels, were begun as a newspaper serial and led to a T.V. miniseries based on the first three of the novels. Other books are Maybe the Moon (1992) and The Night Listener (2001), which was also made into a film.
maya. In Vedanta, maya is the cosmic illusion, the manifold universe which the individual perceives instead of perceiving the one reality of Brahman; in this sense, maya veils Brahman. But maya is inseparable from Brahman and can also be understood as the manifestation of Brahman’s power, god with attributes. Maya has a double aspect encompassing opposite tendencies, toward ignorance (avidya) and toward knowledge (vidya). Avidya-maya involves the individual in worldly passion; vidya-maya leads to spiritual illumination.
McCallum, David (b. 1933). Scottish actor. He co-starred in The Great Escape (1963) and became known for his role as Illya Kuryakin in the T.V. series “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” (1964–1968) before appearing as Clerval in “Frankenstein: The True Story.”
McCallum, Rick (b. 1952). T.V. and movie producer; son of Pat York; educated at Columbia University. He was a crew member on two Merchant-Ivory productions and assisted John Frankenheimer on three films in the 1970s. Later, he worked with British T.V. and film writer Dennis Potter on “Pennies from Heaven” and “The Singing Detective” among others, and at the BBC. In the 1990s, he became widely known for producing the T.V. series “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” and for the Star Wars prequels, all for George Lucas.
McCarthy, Frank (1912–1986). American film producer. He rose to brigadier general in the army during W.W.II and worked as a reporter before producing Decision Before Dawn (1951), Patton (1970; three Academy Awards), and MacArthur (1977). He also headed public relations for Twentieth-Century Fox.
McCarty-Cooper, Billy (193[7]–1991). American interior designer, raised in Florida; originally called Billy McCarty. He studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, worked for David Hicks in London and then opened his own firm. In 1972, he was adopted by Douglas Cooper, and changed his name accordingly. When Cooper died in 1984, McCarty-Cooper inherited his fortune and Château de Castille with its Picassos and other art works, many of which he sold. With the proceeds, he became a collector in his own right and entertained lavishly. He died of AIDS.
McCoy, Ann (b. 1946). American painter, born in Boulder, Colorado, educated there and at UCLA. When Isherwood first mentions her in 1976, she was teaching aesthetics at Claremont Graduate School. She later taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Barnard, and elsewhere. She has written numerous articles and contributions to catalogues, exhibited widely, and won many awards. Her work is in the Los Angeles County Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney in New York; the Hirshhorn; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Dallas Art Museum; and other major collections.
McDermott, Mo (d. 1988). British fabric designer and artist, educated at Salford College of Art. He began modelling for David Hockney during Hockney’s last year at the Royal College of Art and became a close friend. He went on to work as Hockney’s studio assistant and continued to pose frequently for him. Later, he married and moved to California, where he settled in Echo Park.
McDowall, Roddy (1928–1998). British actor and photographer; he made his first film aged eight. During the Blitz, he was evacuated to the U.S. and became a teenage Hollywood star as the crippled boy in How Green Was My Valley (1941) and with Elizabeth Taylor in Lassie Come Home (1943). In the 1950s, he took stage and television roles in New York and won a Tony Award for his supporting role in The Fighting Cock (1960), then returned to Hollywood in the 1960s and starred in Planet of the Apes (1968), most of the sequels, and the T.V. series. His other films include My Friend Flicka (1943), Orson Welles’s Macbeth (1948), The Subterraneans (1960), The Longest Day (1962), Cleopatra (1963), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Funny Lady (1975), and Fright Night (1985). He published several books of his photographs, mostly of celebrities. He appears in Lost Years.
McGuire, Dorothy (1916–2001). American stage and movie actress, born in Nebraska. She appeared on Broadway from 1938 and was brought to Hollywood by Selznick to reprise a stage role in Claudia (1943). Other films include A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The Spiral Staircase (1946), Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), Old Yeller (1957), and Swiss Family Robinson (1960). In 1976, she returned to Broadway i
n The Night of the Iguana, and she often appeared on T.V. She married photographer John Swope (1908–1973) in 1943. Swope came to Hollywood in 1936 as a production assistant and publicity photographer for Leland Hayward then worked as a U.S. Navy photographer during World War II, and afterwards for Life magazine. He published his first book of photographs, Camera over Hollywood, in 1939.
McWhinnie, Donald (1920–1987). British T.V. producer and director, from Yorkshire. He was a BBC script editor, then a producer, and continued to work in T.V. throughout his career. During the 1960s, he directed several plays on Broadway. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his 1962 production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, and he directed Gladys Cooper in A Passage to India the same year.
Medley, Robert (1905–1994). English painter. He attended Gresham’s School, Holt, with Auden, and they remained close friends after Medley left for art school at the Slade. In London, he became the longtime companion of the dancer Rupert Doone and was involved with him in 1932 in founding The Group Theatre, which produced The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F6, and On the Frontier. He also worked as a theater designer and teacher and founded the Theatre Design section at the Slade in the 1950s before becoming Head of Painting and Sculpture at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1958. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Mendelson, Edward (b. 1946). American scholar and writer, educated at the University of Rochester and Johns Hopkins; he has been a professor of English literature at Yale, Harvard, and Columbia Universities. Auden appointed him literary executor in 1972. When Mendelson visited Isherwood in 1974, he was preparing The English Auden, first of many posthumous editions by Auden, and he was looking for poems which Auden enclosed in his letters to Isherwood; no volume of Auden’s letters has been published, although a few letters have appeared in scholarly publications. Also in about 1974, Mendelson and Stephen Spender proposed a jointly written biography to Random House, and Spender asked Isherwood for his help, as Isherwood records early in 1975. But they abandoned the idea after a year because they were concerned about the privacy of those still living and they each had too many other projects. Mendelson eventually wrote two literary-critical biographies, Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999).
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