Geist, Kenneth (Ken). American writer; educated at Haverford College, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, and Yale School of Drama. He worked as an actor, stage manager, and director in New York, and became assist ant to the director of the Theater Group based at UCLA. During 1965 he worked at CBS T.V. in Los Angeles. Then he turned to writing, first as a film critic in New York, and later as a biographer of Joseph Mankiewicz.
Geller, Jim (d. 1963). Isherwood’s Hollywood film agent. He was a story editor at Warner Brothers during the 1940s and expressed interest in Isherwood’s work, especially the script written with Aldous Huxley, Jacob’s Hands. Isherwood was employed with him briefly on The Woman in White in 1945. Later, Geller abandoned his studio career, and by the early 1950s he had become Isherwood’s agent. Isherwood moved on to Hugh and Robin French when Geller died. His wife, later widow, was Anne Geller. Geller appears in D.1 and Lost Years.
Gerald. See Heard, Henry Fitzgerald.
Gerda. See Neddermeyer, Heinz and Gerda.
gerua. Hindi for ocher, the color of the cloth worn by monks and nuns who have taken their sannyas vows and symbolizing their renunciation.
Gielgud, John (1904–2000). British actor and director; born and educated in London, trained briefly at RADA. He achieved fame in the 1920s acting Shakespeare, Wilde, and Chekhov, and as a director, he had his own London company from 1937. From the 1950s, he also worked with contemporary British playwrights, including Peter Shaffer, Alan Bennett and David Storey. He won three Tonys for his work on the New York stage. His movies, in which he often majestically played supporting and character roles, include: Hamlet (1939), Julius Caesar (1953), Richard III (1955), Becket (1964), Hamlet (1964), The Loved One (1965), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), Lost Horizon (1973), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Joseph Andrews (1977), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1979), The Elephant Man (1979), Arthur (1981, Academy Award), Chariots of Fire (1981), Gandhi (1982), The Shooting Party (1985), Plenty (1985), Prospero’s Books (1991), Hamlet (1996), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Shine (1996), Elizabeth (1998). During the 1970s and 1980s, he also worked in television, notably as Charles Ryder’s father in the series “Brideshead Revisited.” His companion in the 1950s was Paul Anstee, an interior decorator. In 1960, he met Martin Hensler at an exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London; Hensler, Hungarian by background, moved in with him about six years later, and they remained together for the last thirty years of Gielgud’s life. Isherwood tells in D.1 that he first met Gielgud in New York in 1947 and didn’t like him; they met again in London in 1948 and became friends. Gielgud also appears in Lost Years.
Gill, Jim and Antoinette. American painter and his girlfriend, Canadian actress Antoinette Bower. They lived together for a time but never married. He exhibited his primitivist representational work at the Felix Landau Gallery in the 1960s. One day, he staged an exhibition of his entire store of work, sold it off cheaply, gave up being an artist, and went off with a new girlfriend. Antoinette Bower appeared on T.V., for instance in “Star Trek,” and had a small role in the film Mephisto Waltz (1971). They both sat for Bachardy a number of times.
Gilliatt, Penelope (1932–1993). English critic, novelist, screenwriter; born Penelope Connor in London and briefly educated at Bennington College in Vermont. She was a staff writer for British Vogue and later for Queen, and by 1961 she was film critic for The Observer. Later she became widely known in America as film critic for The New Yorker. Her first husband, Roger Gilliatt, was a London neurologist and best man at the wedding of Princess Margaret to Antony Armstrong-Jones. In 1963, she married John Osborne and had a daughter with him; the marriage broke down by 1966, and Gilliatt settled in New York in 1967, where she had a relationship with the stage and film director Mike Nichols which lasted until 1969, followed by a brief affair with Edmund Wilson. She became an alcoholic, and her career at The New Yorker ended when she fabricated an interview with Graham Greene for the magazine. She wrote the prize-winning original screenplay for Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971), more than ten volumes of fiction including short stories, and several volumes of film history and criticism.
Ginsberg, Allen (1926–1997). American poet, born in New Jersey; educated at Columbia University; a member of the Beat scene in New York, San Francisco, and Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, and a central figure in 1960s counterculture. He was a Zen Buddhist and campaigned against the Vienam War and in favor of drugs, communism, and homosexuality. He invented the phrase “flower power” and claimed he was the first to chant Hare Krishna in North America, through his friendship with Swami Prabhupada who launched the movement in the West. He was a poetic disciple of William Blake and of Walt Whitman and is best known for his early works Howl and Other Poems (1956) and Kaddish and Other Poems (1961). He published numerous volumes of poetry and also lectures, letters, and journals telling about his friendships with William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and with his longterm lover, American poet Peter Orlovsky (b. 1933), whom he first met in San Francisco in 1954. Orlovsky dropped out of high school and served as a U.S. Army medic before becoming Ginsberg’s secretary; he published several volumes of his own poetry. With Ginsberg and Orlovsky, Isherwood mentions Stephen Bornstein, another close friend of theirs.
Glade. See Bachardy, Glade.
Goetschius, George (1923–2006). American sociologist, educated at New York University and Columbia. In 1954, he settled in London where he met Tony Richardson and moved into Richardson’s flat in Hammersmith. He worked for the London Council of Social Service and the Ford Foundation and later taught at the London School of Economics; he also contributed his progressive views to the founding of The English Stage Company at the Royal Court, urging Richardson and George Devine to put on John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger which he was among the first to read. His relationship with Richardson ended around 1959; later his partner was the playwright Donald Howarth. In 1966, he published an article about the social importance of The English Stage Company, and he wrote two books, Working with Unattached Youth: Problem, Approach, and Method (1967) and Working with Community Groups (1969). His health was never stable and he suffered a mental and physical breakdown in the 1970s.
Gokulananda, Swami (d. 2007). Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order, once Swami Prabhavananda’s personal attendant in India. He spent some years in the hills of Cherrapunji, and then became head of the Vedanta Center in Delhi.
Goldwyn, Samuel (1882–1974). Polish-American film producer; his real name was Samuel Goldfish. He was partner in several early film companies before forming Goldwyn Pictures with the Selwyn brothers in 1916; from this partnership he took his new name. He was bought out of Goldwyn when it merged in 1924 with the Metro and Mayer production companies to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and by 1925 he had founded his own Samuel Goldwyn Studios. He remained a top Hollywood producer for thirty years, producing many celebrated and award-winning films—Wuthering Heights (1939), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Guys and Dolls (1955), Porgy and Bess (1959)—and Samuel Goldwyn Studios continued in business after he retired. In D.1, Isherwood describes his first Hollywood job as a writer at the Goldwyn Studios beginning November 1939 for a few weeks; he found Goldwyn difficult. Goldwyn’s wife was called Frances.
Goodman, Paul (1911–1972). American novelist, poet and, critic. He wrote works of social commentary on subjects as various as city planning, psychology, political theory, juvenile delinquency, and education. Three early novels—The Grand Piano (1942), The State of Nature (1946), The Dead Spring (1950)—appeared together in 1959 as The Empire City, and he published The Break-up of Our Camp: Stories 1932–1935 as well as many other short stories, but Isherwood was unim-pressed by his work until the publication of Goodman’s autobiographical novel Making Do (1963). Goodman also published literary, film, and T.V. criticism and an autobiography; he was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is mentioned in D.1 and appears in Lost Years as a member of the Benton Way Group.
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Goodwin, John (1912–1994). American novelist. A wealthy friend of Denny Fouts; Isherwood met him probably during the first half of 1943 and often mentions him in D.1 and Lost Years. He owned a ranch near Escondido, a house in New York, and later a modern house in Santa Fe. His intermittent companion was Anthony Russo, a hairdresser of Italian background, much younger than he. Isherwood and Bachardy were invited to spend Christmas 1964 with Goodwin and Russo in Santa Fe, but since Bachardy was then living mostly in New York, they cancelled the trip to be at home together in Santa Monica; this ended the friendship between Isherwood and Goodwin. Goodwin published The Idols and the Prey (1953) and A View of Fuji (1963).
Gore. See Vidal, Gore.
Gowland, Peter (b. 1916) and Alice. Photographer and camera maker and his wife, director of his photo shoots. He is known for his photographs of celebrities and his nudes, many of which have appeared as Playboy centerfolds. His Gowlandflex camera, designed in 1957, is still on the market and is widely used by professionals. The Gowlands were among the Masselinks’ closest friends, and Isherwood met them through the Masselinks in the early 1950s. They have two daughters, Ann and Marylee Gowland. The Gowlands appear in D.1.
Granny Emmy. See Smith, Emily Machell.
Green, Henry. See Yorke, Henry.
Gregg, Julie (b. 1944). American actress; she was nominated for a Tony Award for her role in the Broadway musical The Happy Time (1968), had film parts in The Godfather (1972) and Man of La Mancha (1972), and many T.V. roles.
Gregory, Paul (b. 1920). American film, T.V., and theater producer; born and raised in Iowa, and, briefly, in London. He acted in two films, then turned to booking and management. In 1950, he persuaded Charles Laughton to be his client and arranged tours for him, then T.V. appearances and stage and film productions for which Laughton acted, directed, and sometimes wrote material. Gregory’s Broadway shows include John Brown’s Body (1953) and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1954); his movies, The Night of the Hunter (1955) and The Naked and the Dead (1958). At the suggestion of his girlfriend, Janet Gaynor Adrian, he hired Bachardy to draw Charles Boyer for a poster to promote the Broadway opening of Lord Pengo (based on S.N. Behrman’s The Days of Duveen) in November 1962, but Boyer was difficult and the drawing was never used. Gregory married Gaynor a few years later.
Grigg, Richard (Ricky). Research oceanographer. He grew up in Santa Monica, where he learned to surf in 1950. In 1953, he moved to Hawaii and pioneered big-wave surfing from 1958 onward, first in Waimea Bay and later on the north shore of Oahu. He also free-dived all over the Pacific and later windsurfed. He got a Ph.D. in marine biology at the University of Hawaii and was a professor there until 2004 when he retired.
Griggs, Phil. See Buddha Chaitanya.
Grosser, Maurice (1903–1986). American painter and writer; raised in Tennessee and educated at Harvard. He wrote about art for The Nation, and published a number of books including The Painter’s Eye (1956), Painting in Our Time (1964), and Painter’s Progress (1971). He was the longtime companion of Virgil Thomson; both were close friends of Paul and Jane Bowles, and Grosser lived partly in Tangier. He had a Manhattan apartment which he often loaned to Bachardy, on 14th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.
Guerriero, Henry (b. 1929). American painter and sculptor; from Monroe, Louisiana, where he had known Marguerite and Speed Lamkin and Tom Wright, who were roughly his contemporaries in age. In Los Angeles, he moved in different circles with his companion Michael Leopold. Isherwood met him in the early 1950s, and he is mentioned in D.1. He changed his name to Roman A. Clef in 1978.
Guinness, Alec (1914–2000). English actor, born in London; his mother’s name was de Cuffe; he never knew who his father was. He trained at the Fay Compton School of Dramatic Art and began his career on the London stage in the mid-1930s, appearing in Shakespeare, Shaw, and Chekhov at the Old Vic. During World War II, he served in the navy, and afterwards began making films, generally in comic or character roles. These include Great Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949, in which he played eight parts), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951, Academy Award nomination), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, Academy Award), The Horse’s Mouth (1958, for which he wrote the screenplay, nominated for an Academy Award), Our Man in Havana (1959), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Comedians (1967), Scrooge (1970), Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973), Hitler, The Last Ten Days (1973), Murder by Death (1976), Star Wars (1977, Academy Award nomination), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return of the Jedi (1983), A Passage to India (1984), Little Dorrit (1987, Academy Award nomination). He also played the lead in the television mini-series of John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. He was knighted in 1959, and he was awarded an honorary, career Academy Award in 1980. His wife—Lady Guinness, once he was knighted—was Merula Salaman, an actress and later a painter and children’s author.
guna. Any of three qualities—sattva, rajas, tamas—which together constitute Pakriti, or nature. When the gunas are perfectly balanced, there is no creation or manifestation; when they are disturbed, creation occurs. Sattva is the essence of form to be realized; tamas, the obstacle to its realization; rajas, the power by which the obstacle may be removed. In nature and in all created beings, sattva is purity, calm, wisdom; rajas is activity, restlessness, passion; and tamas is laziness, resistance, inertia, stupidity. Since the gunas exist in the material universe, the spiritual aspirant must transcend them all in order to realize oneness with Brahman.
Gunn, Thom (1929–2004). English poet. Thomson Gunn was educated at University College School, Bedales, and Cambridge. His father edited the London Evening Standard; his mother, also a journalist, committed suicide when he was fifteen. He contacted Isherwood in 1955 on his way from a creative writing fellowship at Stanford to a brief teaching stint in Texas; Isherwood invited him to lunch at MGM and they immediately became friends. Gunn later taught at Berkeley off and on from 1958 until 1999. His numerous collections of poetry include Fighting Terms (1954), My Sad Captains (1961), Moly (1971), Jack Straw’s Castle (1976), The Man with Night Sweats (1992), and Boss Cupid (2000). He appears in D.1.
Gurian, Manning. Stage manager and, later, producer. In the late 1940s, he was the companion and professional partner of Margo Jones (1911–1955), founder of America’s first nonprofit professional theater, the Dallas Civic Theater, which she envisioned as part of a nationwide network of community theaters. She was producer and director of many young American playwrights, notably Tennessee Williams. In 1951, Gurian was company manager for I Am a Camera, and a few years later became the second husband of Julie Harris, the play’s star. He produced Joe Masteroff ’s The Warm Peninsula, in which Harris took a leading role, but it ran for only a few months, from October 1959 until January 1960. He and Harris had one son, Peter Gurian, and divorced in 1967.
Guttchen, Otto. German refugee. Isherwood met him in Hollywood during World War II and writes about him in D.1. Guttchen was tortured in a Nazi concentration camp, and his kidneys were badly damaged. He left his wife and child in Switzerland. He struggled to find employment in Hollywood, was often too poor to eat, and became suicidal late in 1939. Isherwood found it difficult to help him adequately and felt intensely guilty about it. In the mid-1950s, they met again and Guttchen appeared to have regained his hold on life.
Hackett, Albert (1900–1995) and Frances Goodrich (1891–1984). American stage and screen writers. He was the son of actress Florence Hackett and had been a child actor; she was a former actress, educated at Vassar, with two previous husbands. They were married for many years and collaborated on plays and numerous filmscripts, including The Thin Man (1934), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Virginian (1946), Father of the Bride (1950), and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). They won the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for their 1955 Broadway play The Diary of Anne Frank, later adapted as a film. They are mentioned in D.1.
Hall, Michael. American actor and, later, antique deal
er; he appeared in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). In Lost Years, Isherwood describes how he met Hall at a party in the winter of 1945–1946 and began a friendship which lasted for twenty years and included occasional sex. Eventually, Hall left the West Coast and settled in New York.
Halsey, Edwin (Ed) (d. 1964). American professor of religion; educated at Dartmouth and Harvard, where he obtained a Ph.D. A naval officer during World War II, he then became a monk at Trabuco while Gerald Heard was running it. During the 1950s, he taught at the Claremont Colleges, where he met John Zeigel and, in 1956, began an affair with him while Zeigel was still an undergraduate. The relationship brought disapproval from the college and community, so Halsey resigned and travelled to the Caribbean and Mexico in search of somewhere he could settle with Zeigel. The pair spent two years in Ajijic, Mexico, Halsey writing a book. In 1962, Zeigel returned to California to take his Ph.D. qualifying exams and teach part-time. Halsey visited him, then drove back to Mexico in October to await Zeigel’s homecoming at the end of the academic year. On the way to Mexico, he was killed in a crash in Yuma, Arizona. Isherwood, then at work on A Single Man and perhaps struck by parallels between his relationships with Heinz Neddermeyer and Don Bachardy and Halsey’s relationship with Zeigel, used a fatal car crash to establish the situation in the novel, although the younger lover dies in his story rather than the older one.
Hamilton, Gerald (1890–1970). Isherwood’s Berlin friend who was the original for Mr. Norris in Mr. Norris Changes Trains. His mother died soon after his birth in Shanghai, and he was raised by relatives in England and educated at Rugby (though he did not finish his schooling). His father sent him back to China to work in business, and while there Hamilton took to wearing Chinese dress and converted to Roman Catholicism, for which his father, an Irish Protestant, never forgave him. He was cut off with a small allowance and eventually, because of his unsettled life, with nothing at all. So began the persistent need for money that motivated his subsequent dubious behavior. Hamilton was obsessed to the point of high camp with his family’s aristocratic connections and with social etiquette, and lovingly recorded in his memoirs all his meetings with royalty, as well as those with crooks and with theatrical and literary celebrities. He was imprisoned from 1915 to 1918 for sympathizing with Germany and associating with the enemy during World War I, and he was imprisoned in France and Italy for a jewelry swindle in the 1920s. Afterwards, he took a job selling the London Times in Germany and became interested there in penal reform. Throughout his life he travelled on diverse private and public errands in China, Russia, Europe, and North Africa. He returned to London during World War II, where he was again imprisoned, this time for attempting to promote peace on terms favorable to the enemy; he was released after six months. After the war he posed for the body of Churchill’s Guildhall statue and later became a regular contributor to The Spectator. He appears in Lost Years and D.1, where Isherwood tells that at the start of the war, he sent Hamilton a letter which was quoted in William Hickey’s gossip column in the Daily Express, November 27, 1939, without permission. In the letter, Isherwood mocked the behavior of German refugees in the U.S. His remarks, frivolously expressed for Hamilton’s private amusement but fundamentally serious, seemed to Isherwood to have triggered the public criticism which continued into 1940 in the press and in Parliament, of both his own and Auden’s absence from England.
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