Liberation
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Bachardy, Glade De Land (1906–198[8]). Don Bachardy’s mother, from Ohio. Childhood polio left her with a limp, resulting in extreme shyness. Her father was the captain of a cargo boat on the Great Lakes, and she met her husband, Jess Bachardy, on board during a summer cruise with her sister in the 1920s. They married in 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio, and travelled to Los Angeles on their honeymoon, settling there permanently. The Bachardys divorced in 1952, but later reconciled; once Don and his brother Ted Bachardy had moved out of their mother’s apartment, their father moved back in, early in 1955. An ardent movie-goer, Glade took Don and Ted to the movies from their early childhood because she could not afford babysitters, thus nurturing an obsession which developed differently in each of them. According to Don, Glade did not know what homosexuality was until her elder son Ted had his first breakdown in 1945. She appears in D.1 and D.2.
Bachardy, Jess (1905–1977). Don Bachardy’s father, born in New Jersey, the youngest of several brothers and sisters in an immigrant German-Hungarian family. Jess’s mother, who never learned to speak English, was pregnant with him when she arrived in the U.S.; his father drowned accidentally shortly before. Jess was an automobile enthusiast and a natural mechanic and took several jobs as a uniformed chauffeur when he was young. Afterwards, he worked on board a cargo boat on the Great Lakes, where he met his future wife. They moved to California, and he turned his mechanical skills to the aviation industry, working mostly with Lockheed Aircraft for the next thirty years. His progress was limited by the fact that he never finished high school, but he worked his way up to the position of tool planner before he retired in the 1960s. He never allowed his sons to learn Hungarian, and they barely knew their Bachardy grandmother or any of her family. For fifteen years, he refused to meet Isherwood, but he finally relented and came to like him. He was a lifelong smoker and died of lung cancer. He appears in D.1 and D.2.
Bachardy, Ted (1930–2007). Don Bachardy’s older brother. Isherwood spotted him on the beach in Santa Monica, probably in the autumn of 1948 or spring of 1949, and invited him to a party in November 1949 (Ted’s name first appears in Isherwood’s diary that month). Isherwood was attracted to Ted, but did not pursue him seriously because Ted was involved with someone else, Ed Cornell. Around the same time, Ted experienced a mental breakdown—about the third or fourth he had suffered since 1945, when he was fifteen. Eventually he was diagnosed as a manic-depressive schizophrenic. He was subject to recurring periods of manic, self-destructive behavior followed by nervous breakdowns and long stays in mental hospitals. Isherwood continued to see Ted intermittently during the early weeks of his affair with Don, but a turning point came in February 1953 with Ted’s fourth or fifth breakdown, when Isherwood sympathized with Don and intervened to try to prevent Ted from becoming violent and having to be hospitalized; nevertheless, Ted was committed on February 26. When well, Ted took odd jobs: as a tour guide and in the mail room at Warner Brothers, as a sales clerk in a department store, and as an office worker in insurance companies and advertising agencies. Isherwood writes about him in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Bacon, Francis (1909–1992). English painter, born in Dublin. He worked as an interior decorator in London during the late 1920s and lived in Berlin in 1930, around the time that he taught himself to paint. He showed some of his work in London during the 1930s, but came to prominence only after the war, when his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion made him suddenly famous in 1945. He appears in D.1, where Isherwood records some of his remarks on art, and in Lost Years and D.2. The story Bacon told Isherwood in 1972, about his friendship with the Kray twins, is told in Bacon’s own words in Michael Peppiatt’s biography, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. Bacon was especially interested in Ronnie Kray, a homosexual and the more sadistic of the two notoriously brutal, murderous brothers. Bacon had kept some paintings in his studio because he considered them poor work; these were the paintings stolen, as Isherwood mentions. The theft was discovered when the Krays tried to sell them, and Bacon eventually bought them back and destroyed them because he didn’t want them shown publicly.
Baddeley, Hermione (1906–1986). British actress, dancer, comedienne; she first appeared on Broadway as a replacement for Angela Lansbury in A Taste of Honey (1960–1961). Among her films are Brighton Rock (1947), which she previously played on stage, Room at the Top (1958), and Mary Poppins (1964). She was married twice and lived for a time with actor Laurence Harvey.
Bailey, Jeffrey ( Jeff ). American writer, of short stories for little magazines. He interviewed Paul Bowles, James Leo Herlihy, Isherwood, Gavin Lambert, Anaïs Nin, John Rechy, Muriel Spark, Gore Vidal, and Edmund White, some for The Paris Review. As Isherwood records, Bailey visited in 1972 with another aspiring writer, Michael McDonagh, after he and McDonagh spent their junior year abroad at the Loyola University Center in Rome in 1971–1972. Later, he lived in Morocco, working for the Peace Corps there, and in Europe. McDonagh settled in San Francisco where he became an arts journalist, mostly for the Bay Area Reporter, and published some of his poems.
Bailey, Paul (b. 1937). British novelist; educated at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He worked as an actor and wrote a radio play before publishing his first novel, At the Jerusalem, in 1967. Isherwood was on the panel which awarded Bailey the first E.M. Forster Prize given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974. Bailey’s other novels include Peter Smart’s Confessions (1977), Old Soldiers (1980), Gabriel’s Lament (1986), Kitty and Virgil (1998), Uncle Rudolf (2002), and A Dog’s Life (2003). There are varied works of biography and autobiography. He has won numerous prizes and twice been on the Booker Prize shortlist. He was authorized to write a life of Henry Green for Chatto & Windus, as he mentioned to Isherwood in 1978, but after some preliminary research, abandoned it for other projects. Later, he supplied an introduction to a paperback reprint of Henry Green’s novel Living.
Balanchine, George (1904–1983). Russian-born choreographer, son of a composer. He studied ballet at the Maryinsky and piano at the St. Petersburg music conservatory. In 1924, he emigrated via Berlin and spent a decade working in Europe, mostly for Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe. In 1933, Lincoln Kirstein persuaded him to emigrate again, to New York, and together they founded the American School of Ballet, struggling off and on for another decade to finance and house the company which would eventually become the New York City Ballet. Balanchine made over four hundred ballets and is known for his Modernist approach—abstract, technically demanding, and based on a committed understanding of music. He was to twentieth-century ballet what Picasso was to painting and Stravinsky to music, and he collaborated with Stravinsky a number of times. He married five times.
Bangladesh. In the Pakistani elections in 1970, the Awami League, led by Mujibur Rahman, won almost all the seats in East Pakistan (formerly East Bengal, and sharing a long border with West Bengal, in India). Despite winning no seats in West Pakistan, the league had a clear constitutional majority; nonetheless, it was prevented by the government in power from forming a national government with Rahman as Prime Minister. On March 1, 1971, the president of Pakistan, Yahya Khan, indefinitely postponed the next session of the national assembly, provoking a General Strike in East Pakistan and sympathetic protests in India. The Awami League was banned, Mujibar Rahman was arrested, and his close supporters fled to India where they formed a provisional government. In East Pakistan, the Pakistani army initiated bloody reprisals against supporters of Bengali independence. As Isherwood mentions, Indira Gandhi was elected Prime Minister of India on March 10, in a landslide victory for her Congress Party. On March 26, the Awami League declared independence for Bangladesh, and India joined with Bangladesh in the ensuing war of liberation from Pakistan.
Barada. A senior nun at the Santa Barbara convent, born Doris Ludwig; after sannyas she was called Pravrajika Baradaprana. Barada was interested in music and composed Vedantic hymns. Isherwood first met her at the Hollywood monastery in 1943; she appears in D.1.
Barrie, Jay Michael (1912–2001). A one-time singer with financial and administrative talents; friend and secretary to Gerald Heard from the late 1940s onward. He met Heard through Swami Prabhavananda and lived at Trabuco as a monk until about 1955. He was friendly with Isherwood and Bachardy throughout the 1950s, and they rented Barrie’s house, at 322 East Rustic Road, for roughly two months in 1956. Barrie nursed Heard through his five-year-long final illness until Heard’s death in 1971. He appears in D.1 and D.2.
Baxter, Anne (1923–1985). American actress, a granddaughter of Frank Lloyd Wright; educated in New York private schools. She studied acting with Maria Ouspenskaya, debuted on Broadway at thirteen, and had made her first movie by seventeen. Her films include The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Razor’s Edge (1946), for which she received an Academy Award as best supporting actress, Yellow Sky (1949), All about Eve (1950), for which she received an Academy Award nomination, The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1952), The Blue Gardenia (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Cimarron (1960), and Walk on the Wild Side (1962). From 1971, as Isherwood records, she returned to Broadway, replacing Lauren Bacall in Applause. She also acted on T.V., including, from 1983 to 1985, “Hotel.” Her first husband was the actor John Hodiak, with whom she had a daughter; the second, from 1960 to 1968, was Randolph Galt, an outdoorsman and adventurer with whom she had two daughters; the third was David Klee, an investment banker. With Galt, Baxter went to live in the Australian outback on a cattle station; after the marriage failed, she published a book about her experience there, Intermission: A True Story (1976). She was a client and friend of Jo Masselink, and she appears in D.1 and D.2.
Baxter, Keith (b. 1933). Welsh actor, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). His first film role was in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957), and he later worked in T.V. His theater roles include Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1960), and, on Broadway, A Man for All Seasons (1961) and Sleuth (1970).
Beaton, Cecil (1904–1980). English photographer, theater designer, author, and dandy. He photographed the most celebrated and fashionable people of his era, beginning in the 1920s with the Sitwells and going on to the British royal family, actors, actresses, writers, and others. From 1939 to 1945 he worked successfully as a war photographer. Isherwood and Beaton were contemporaries at Cambridge but became friendly only in the late 1940s when Beaton visited Hollywood with a production of Lady Windermere’s Fan and was helpful to Bill Caskey, then trying to establish himself as a photographer. Returning later to Hollywood, Beaton designed costumes and productions for Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964) and both times won the Academy Award for costumes. He collected many of his photo graphs into books and travel albums, often with commentary, and he published five volumes of diaries. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Bedford, Brian (b. 1935). British stage actor and, later, director; an American citizen from 1959. He trained at RADA and starred in the West End and on Broadway in Shakespeare and other classic dramas as well as new plays by Stoppard, Shaffer, and others. During 1969, he was in revivals of The Cocktail Party and The Misanthrope for Ellis Rabb’s APA-Phoenix Theater repertory program on Broadway. In 1971, he won a Tony Award for his role in The School for Wives. He acts regularly at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, and on T.V. and in films. He appears in D.2.
Beesley, Alec (1903–1987) and Dodie Smith Beesley (1896–1990). She was the English playwright, novelist and former actress, Dodie Smith. He managed her career. They spent a decade in Hollywood because he was a pacifist and a conscientious objector during World War II. She wrote scripts there for Paramount and her first novel, I Capture the Castle (1949). Isherwood met them in 1942 through Dodie’s close friend John van Druten, once a Christian Scientist like both the Beesleys. When Isherwood left the Vedanta Society in August 1945, his first home was the Beesleys’ chauffeur’s apartment. Dodie encouraged his writing, and he discussed The World in the Evening with her extensively. It was Dodie Beesley who challenged John van Druten to make a play from Sally Bowles, leading to I Am a Camera. In the summer of 1943, the Beesleys mated their dalmatians, Folly and Buzzle, and Folly produced fifteen puppies—inspiring Dodie’s most famous book, The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), later filmed by Walt Disney. Her plays include Autumn Crocus (1931) and Dear Octopus (1938). The Beesleys returned to England in the early 1950s and settled in their cottage, The Barretts, at Finchingfield, Essex. They appear in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Behrman, S.N. (1893–1973). American playwright, producer, screenwriter, short story writer, journalist. His successes on Broadway include The Second Man (1927), End of Summer (1936), No Time for Comedy (1939), the book (with Joshua Logan) for Fanny (1954), and Lord Pengo (1962). He also adapted work by others, including Serena Blandish and Maugham’s short story “Jane.” He worked for the Hollywood studios off and on from 1930, specializing in dialogue, and was known for his contributions to Garbo’s films Queen Cristina, Conquest, and Two-Faced Woman. He also wrote for The New York Times and published a number of long profiles in The New Yorker, including the excerpts that Isherwood writes about from his memoir, People in a Diary (1972). He is mentioned in D.1 and D.2.
Bell, Larry (b. 1939). American painter and sculptor, born in Chicago, raised in California and trained at the Chouinard Art Institute. In 1958 and 1959, he worked in a picture framing shop in Burbank, where he grew intrigued by the reflective and refractive qualities of glass; during the 1960s, he became known for his glass cubes, in various sizes, made from clear and treated glass. His first solo show was at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962, and he began showing at the Pace Gallery in New York a few years later, followed by countless solo and group exhibitions and installations in many cities. His work is held by major museums including the Albright-Knox, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn in Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis. In the 1970s, he settled with his wife in Taos, New Mexico, where he sometimes taught at the Taos Institute of Arts. Later, he also continued to work in Los Angeles.
Ben. See Masselink, Ben.
Bengston, Billy Al (b. 1934). American artist, born in Kansas, educated at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, at Los Angeles City College, and at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis Art Institute). He had his first one-man show at the Ferus Gallery in 1958, followed, from the 1960s onward, by shows and public and private commissions throughout the United States, Canada, Germany, and Japan. His work includes painting, sculpture, textiles, lithography, and architectural design. He has been a guest artist and a professor at the Chouinard Art Institute, UCLA, and elsewhere, and has held numerous fellowships and grants, including a Guggenheim. Based for years in Venice, California, he moved in 2004 to Victoria, British Columbia, with Wendy Al, his Japanese-American wife of many years, but they returned in 2007. Isherwood met him through Bachardy who was commissioned to do Bengston’s portrait, along with other prominent Los Angelinos, for Harper’s Bazaar in 1967. He appears in D.2.
Bergman, Ingrid (1915–1982). Swedish star of stage and screen. David Selznick brought her to Hollywood in 1939 to remake Gustav Molander’s Intermezzo (1936) for American audiences. She debuted on Broadway a year later in Liliom and went on to star in Casablanca (1942), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Gaslight (1944; Academy Award), Spellbound (1945), The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), Notorious (1946), and Joan of Arc (1948), adapted from another Broadway role. In 1949, she fell in love with Italian director Roberto Rossellini while the
y were filming Stromboli and had his son although she was still married to Swedish dentist Petter Lindstrom. As a result, she was attacked by American women’s groups, religious groups, and even in the Senate, lost custody of her daughter, Pia Lindstrom, and disappeared from Hollywood films. She married Rossellini in 1950 and had twin daughters, one of whom is the actress, Isabella Rossellini (b. 1952). In 1956, Bergman was welcomed back to Hollywood with an Academy Award for Anastasia. She split with Rosselini in 1958 and married a Swedish stage producer, Lars Schmidt, whom she divorced in 1975. She died of breast cancer after seven years of illness during which she continued to act. Later films include Elena et les Hommes / Paris Does Strange Things (1956), The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), Murder on the Orient Express (1974, Academy Award), and Autumn Sonata (1978); she had numerous other stage roles and also appeared on T.V. As he tells in D.1, Isherwood first met her in 1940 on the set of Rage in Heaven.