The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Campbell, Dean. American musical comedy actor, singer, dancer, singing coach; he appears in D.1.

  Campbell, Douglas (b. 1922). Scottish actor and director, mostly of classic stage plays, including Shakespeare; later, he appeared in small T.V. roles and made a few movies. He spent much of his career in Canada, where he performed at the Stratford Festival from 1955 onward and founded The Canadian Players, of which he was artistic director. He played Bernard Shaw in Isherwood’s version of The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God.

  Capote, Truman (1924–1984). American novelist, born in New Orleans; his real name was Truman Persons. In Lost Years, Isherwood describes meeting Capote in the Random House offices in May 1947 shortly before the publication of Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. They quickly became friends, and Capote also appears in D.1. Capote wrote for The New Yorker, where he worked in the early 1940s, and for other magazines. His books include The Grass Harp (1951), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), and the non-fiction novel In Cold Blood (1966). He never finished his last novel, Answered Prayers, though a chapter, “La Côte Basque, 1965,” was published in Esquire magazine in 1975, forever alienating rich and powerful friends who were portrayed in it. The rest of what he had written of the novel was published posthumously. Capote’s companion for many years was Newton Arvin, a college professor; afterwards, he lived and travelled with Jack Dunphy, and then later picked up new boyfriends with increasing frequency, including John O’Shea. Drink and drugs hastened his death.

  Caron, Leslie (b. 1931). French dancer and actress. Her father was a chemist, her American-born mother a dancer. Caron studied ballet from childhood, performed in Paris as a teenager, and was discovered by Gene Kelly, who made her a star in An American in Paris (1951). Isherwood first met her during the 1950s, when she was appearing in Hollywood musicals such as The Glass Slipper (1955) and Gigi (1958). She received British Film Academy Awards and was nominated for Academy Awards for Lili (1953) and The L-Shaped Room (1962). Later, she appeared in Damage (1992), Jean Renoir (1993), The Reef (1997), Chocolat (2000), and Le Divorce (2003). She also worked on the stage in New York, London, and Paris. She was married briefly to George Hormel in the early 1950s, then for ten years to British director Peter Hall, with whom she had two children. Her third husband, from 1969 to 1980, was American producer Michael Laughlin. She is mentioned in D.1.

  Carroll, Nellie (d. 2005). American artist, born Jean Dobrin; she designed and drew greeting cards. She was a close friend of Jim Bridges and Jack Larson. Bachardy drew and painted her many times after they met in 1963. She married once and had a daughter, Amy, who died of cancer in the early 1990s. For the last forty or so years of her life, she lived with a Mexican man about fifteen years her junior, who also had a wife and son.

  Carter. See Lodge, Carter.

  Caskey, William (Bill) (1921–1981). American photographer, born and raised in Kentucky; a lapsed Catholic of Irish background, part Cherokee Indian. Isherwood met him in 1945 when Caskey arrived in Santa Monica Canyon with a friend, Hayden Lewis, and joined the circle surrounding Denny Fouts and Jay de Laval. They became lovers in June that year and by August had begun a serious affair. Caskey was briefly in the navy during World War II and was discharged neither honorably nor dishonorably (a “blue discharge”) following a homosexual scandal in which Hayden Lewis was also implicated. Caskey’s father bred horses, and Caskey had ridden since childhood; he had worked in photo-finish at a Kentucky racecourse, and in about 1945 he took up photography seriously. He took portraits of his and Isherwood’s friends, and he took the photographs for The Condor and the Cows, which Isherwood dedicated to Caskey’s mother, Catherine. Caskey’s parents were divorced, and he was on poor terms with his father and two sisters. He and Isherwood split in 1951 after intermittent separations and domestic troubles. Later, he lived in Athens and travelled frequently to Egypt. As well as taking photographs, he made art objects out of junk, and for a time had a business beading sweaters. There are many passages about him in D.1, and he is a central figure in Lost Years.

  chaddar. A length of cloth worn on the upper body, often draped on the shoulders as a shawl, by monks and nuns of the Ramakrishna Order and by many other Hindus. Some Western Vedantists meditate in it, to keep warm, and to conceal their rosary.

  Chamberlain, Richard (b. 1935). American actor and singer; born in Beverly Hills and educated at Pomona College before serving in Korea for a year and a half. He became famous in the series “Dr. Kildare,” in which he starred from 1961 to 1966, and he never shook off the role, despite ambitious appearances on the London stage (for instance as Hamlet) and in a number of films, including The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), Julius Caesar (1970), The Three Musketeers (1974), and The Four Musketeers (1975). He returned to T.V. successfully in the mini-series “Shogun” (1980) and “The Thorn Birds” (1985).

  Chapman, Hester (1895–1976). Novelist and biographer of royal figures such as Anne Boleyn, Caroline Matilda of Denmark, and the Duke of Buckingham. She was a cousin of Dadie Rylands, a habitué of Bloomsbury, and a longtime friend of Rosamond Lehmann. With her first husband, she ran a boys’ prep school in Devon. Her second husband, Ronnie Griffin, a banker, died in 1955.

  Chapman, Kent (b. 1935). A student acquaintance of Isherwood, first mentioned in D.1 in July 1957. He was an aspiring writer, followed artistic developments among the California poets and painters in West Venice where he lived during the late 1950s, and told Isherwood about the scene there, including his own first attempt to smoke pot. Isherwood also met a girlfriend, Nancy Dvorak. In 1958, Chapman was drafted into the army and served briefly and unhappily in Korea. The night before he received his induction letter, he ran across Los Angeles to Venice from a friend’s house in Hollywood and was stopped by a policeman in Beverly Hills. He no longer recalls whether the policeman drove him the rest of the way home, but Isherwood perhaps drew on the episode for A Single Man. After Korea, Chapman threw away a novella he had completed and which Isherwood admired, about Vivekananda. In 1963, he moved to San Francisco where he developed a serious drug problem. Five years later, he gave up drugs, got married, and became a Roman Catholic. Eventually, he divorced, moved to France in 1979, and, in 1982, entered a Benedictine monastery, the Abbey of En Calcat, in southern France where, as Frère Laurent, he continued to write and where he also took up painting. He was also a close friend, in France, of Swami Vidyatmananda.

  Charles. See Laughton, Charles.

  Charlton, Jim (1919–1998). American architect, from Reading, Pennsylvania. He studied at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in Arizona and also at Wright’s first center, Taliesin, in Wisconsin. He joined the air force during the war and flew twenty-six missions over Germany, including a July 1943 daylight raid. Isherwood was introduced to him by Ben and Jo Masselink in August 1948 (Ben Masselink had also studied at Taliesin West), and they established a friendly– romantic attachment that lasted many years. Towards the end of the 1950s, Charlton married a wealthy Swiss woman called Hilde, a mother of three; he had a son with her in September 1958. The marriage ended in divorce. Afterwards he lived briefly in Japan and then, until the late 1980s, in Hawaii, where he wrote an autobiographical novel, St. Mick. Charlton was a model for Bob Wood in The World in the Evening. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Cherry, Budd. Creative assistant on The Loved One for Tony Richardson. He sat for Bachardy around this time and signed his portrait using a double “d” for his first name. He had an apartment in New York, on East 68th Street, which he once loaned to Bachardy. He was also a dialogue director on Faces (1968). Chester. See Kallman, Chester.

  Christian. See Neddermeyer, Christian.

  Claxton, Bill and Peggy Moffitt. He was a photographer known for his work with musicians and actors. His wife, Peggy Moffitt, was a model and actress. She was muse to fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, modelling his topless bathing suit in the mid-1960s, and she had a small role in Antonioni’s Blow-up (1965). In 1991, they published The Rudi Gernre
ich Book, full of Claxton’s photographs of Gernreich’s designs worn mostly by Moffitt in her signature white pancake makeup with heavily blacked eyes. One shot shows Bachardy drawing her portrait while Gernreich looks on. Isherwood met Bill Claxton through Jim Charlton, and he appears in D.1.

  Clay, Camilla (d. 2000). American stage director. She assisted Ellis Rabb at the APA Repertory Company in 1966 and occasionally later. In 1967, she assisted José Quintero when he directed O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions with Ingrid Bergman and Colleen Dewhurst at the Ahmanson before bringing it to New York. From 1967 to 1972 she rented a house in Malibu with writer Linda Crawford and before that, briefly, they lived at the Chateau Marmont. In 1972, the pair moved back east where Clay directed Cabaret at a community theater on the North Fork of Long Island in 1974 and Stuck by Sandra Scoppettone in 1976. She lived in Los Angeles again for a few years from 1979 onward before finally settling in New York, where she died of cancer. Isherwood met her through Gavin Lambert.

  Clift, Montgomery (1920–1966). American actor, born in Nebraska. He began his career on Broadway at fourteen and appeared in Moss Hart and Cole Porter’s musical comedy Jubilee (1935), Robert Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning There Shall Be No Night (1940), Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), Lillian Hellman’s The Searching Wind (1944), and Tennessee Williams and Donald Windham’s romantic comedy You Touched Me (1945). He was an early member of Actors Studio in the late 1940s before becoming a Hollywood star in Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948). His other films included A Place in the Sun (1951), From Here to Eternity (1953), Raintree County (1957), The Young Lions (1958), Suddenly Last Summer (1959), The Misfits (1961), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and Freud (1962). Isherwood met him at the end of the 1940s through Fred Zinnemann. As Isherwood records in D.1 and Lost Years, Clift had a drinking problem and was insecure about his looks. He had a car crash in 1957 which badly affected his face, and while he was making Freud, in which he appeared as the young doctor, he had cataracts removed from both eyes. He died of a heart attack when he was only forty-five.

  Clint. See Kimbrough, Clint.

  C.O. Conscientious objector.

  Cockburn, Jean. See Ross, Jean.

  Cohen, Andee (b. circa 1946). American photographer. She began taking pictures of her friends—actors, artists, and rock-and-roll musicians in London and Los Angeles—when her boyfriend, James Fox, gave her a camera in 1966. Her work appeared on album covers for Frank Zappa, Joe Cocker, Tom Petty, and others. Later she married Rick Nathanson, a film producer.

  Coldstream, William (Bill) (1908–1987). English painter and teacher; educated at the Slade School of Fine Art. He exhibited with the New English Art Club and the London Group in the late 1920s and became a member of the London Group in 1934. During the mid-1930s, he worked for John Grierson’s General Post Office film unit with Auden, already an acquaintance, and Benjamin Britten; Coldstream and his first wife, the painter Nancy Sharp, took in Auden as a lodger. (Nancy later married Stephen Spender’s older brother Michael Spender.)

  Coldstream painted mostly portraits, including of Isherwood, Auden, Auden’s mother, and some landcapes. In 1937, he founded the Euston Road School of Draw ing and Painting with Victor Pasmore. During the war, he joined the Royal Artillery and in 1943 was made an Official War Artist. Afterwards he taught at Camberwell School of Art and became a professor at the Slade, where he remained until 1975. He chaired the National Advisory Council on Art Education from 1959, producing the Coldstream Report in 1960, which called for art students to study art history as a requirement and led eventually to degree status being awarded to recognized art courses.

  Colloredo-Mansfeld, Countess Mabel (Nishta) (1912–1965). American secretary of the Ramakrishna-Vedanta Center in New York, on the Upper East Side, from 1956. She first visited the center in 1951. She was born Mabel Bayard Bradley in Boston and educated at Foxcroft School, Virginia. In 1933 she married Franz Colloredo-Mansfeld, an Austrian count raised partly in New York and educated at Harvard. They had two sons and a daughter before he was killed flying for the Royal Air Force during World War II.

  Connolly, Cyril (1903–1974). British journalist and critic; educated at Eton and Oxford. He was a regular and prolific contributor to English newspapers and magazines, including The New Statesman, The Observer (where he was literary editor in the early 1940s), and The Sunday Times. He wrote one novel, The Rock Pool (1936), followed by collections of criticism, autobiography, aphorisms, and essays—Enemies of Promise (1938), The Unquiet Grave (1944), The Condemned Playground (1945), Previous Convictions (1963), and The Evening Colonnade (1973). In 1939, he founded Horizon with Stephen Spender and edited it throughout its publication until 1950. He was perhaps the nearest “friend” of Isherwood and Auden who publicly criticized their decision to remain in America during World War II. He blamed them for abandoning a literary-political movement that he was convinced they had begun and were responsible for. Connolly married three times: first to Jean Bakewell, who divorced him in 1945, then to Barbara Skelton from 1950 to 1956, and finally, in 1959, to Deirdre Craig with whom he had a son, Matthew, and a daughter, Cressida. From 1940 to 1950 he lived with Lys Lubbock, who worked with him at Horizon; they never married, but she changed her name to Connolly by deed poll. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Connolly, John. Secretary to Bill Inge. They met at a party given by Glenway Wescott in 1952; in 1957 Connolly left a job assisting Carson McCullers with a play script and began working for Inge—filing, typing, paying bills, answering letters, organizing travel and domestic arrangements. He understood and coped well with Inge’s depressive mood swings. According to Connolly, they were never lovers; he maintained his own apartment and social life. He advised against Inge’s move to California in 1964, remained behind in New York, and was replaced by Mark Minton. Connolly was friendly with George Platt Lynes and took a particular interest in Don Bachardy after meeting Isherwood and Bachardy at Lynes’s New York apartment on New Year’s Eve 1953.

  Coombs, Don. Instructor of English at UCLA during the 1940s and, as Isherwood tells, a librarian there from 1967. He was a sex friend of Isherwood’s beginning in 1949. He appears in Lost Years.

  Cooper, Gladys (1888–1971). British stage and film star; she was a teenage chorus girl, World War I pin-up, and silent film actress before establishing her reputation on the London stage. As Isherwood tells in D.1, he first met her in Los Angeles in 1940 when she was past fifty and had made few films. She had a supporting role in Rebecca that year and afterwards appeared in The Song of Bernadette (1943), Green Dolphin Street (1947), The Secret Garden (1949), Madame Bovary (1949), The Man Who Loved Redheads (1955), Separate Tables (1958), and My Fair Lady (1964), among many others.

  Cooper, Wyatt (1927–1978). Actor, screenwriter, editor, from Mississippi; educated at Berkeley and UCLA. He appeared on stage and T.V., had a small role in Sanctuary (1961), and wrote the screenplay for The Chapman Report (1962). In D.1, Isherwood describes meeting Cooper when he was involved with Tony Richardson. He became the fourth husband of Gloria Vanderbilt (b. 1924), the only granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt and in girlhood the subject of a headline-making custody battle between her widowed, reportedly lesbian mother and her forceful, richer aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who raised her in lonely splendor on Long Island. At seventeen, Gloria married Pasquale “Pat” DiCicco, a Hollywood agent; at twenty-one she inherited four million dollars. Her two other husbands were conductor Leopold Stokowski and film director Sidney Lumet. She again made her name a household word with her designer jeans in the 1980s. She had two sons with Cooper, the younger one, Carter, committed suicide in 1988; the older one is CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. Cooper also wrote Families: A Memoir and a Celebration (1978).

  Cordes, Ted. A companion of Ted Bachardy, and the last steady partner he had. He was a few years younger than Bachardy and worked in advertising or pub licity. They lived together for several years in the late 1960s, and Cordes weathered at leas
t one of Bachardy’s breakdowns. Eventually the relationship collapsed over Bachardy’s mental health, and Cordes asked Bachardy to move out of the apartment which they shared. Don Bachardy did several portraits of Cordes. Coricidin. A brand-name cold remedy. Some versions contain a cough suppressant (dextromethorphan) attractive to recreational drug users and dangerous in combination with the antihistamine ingredient (chlorphenamine maleate). When Isherwood used it, Coricidin contained a decongestant (pseudoephedrine) and not an antihistamine. Some versions also contain an analgesic (acetaminophen), for fever and pain.

  Cotten, Joseph (1905–1994). American actor. He worked on Broadway from the early 1930s and played the lead opposite Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story in 1939 and 1940. He was also a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater from 1937 to 1939, and Welles brought him to Hollywood to appear in Citizen Kane (1941). He went on to star in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Journey Into Fear (1943) for Welles and then, for Hitchcock, in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). His many other films include Portrait of Jennie (1948), The Third Man (1949), and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). He appears in D.1 with his first wife, Lenore Kipp; she was wealthy in her own right and a friend to Isherwood and Bachardy until her death from leukemia in 1960. The year Lenore died, Cotten married British actress Patricia Medina (b. 1920), who was in The Three Musketeers (1948) and Welles’s Mr. Arkadin (1955) and starred with Cotten on Broadway.