Neil. See Hartley, Neil.
Nelson, Allyn L. A girlfriend of Jim Gates and Peter Schneider. She lived in Oxnard, California, and attended Claremont College, where she met Gates and Schneider. Schneider later recalled she may have been studying nursing. She appears in D.2.
Newman, Bob. Friend, assistant, and travelling companion to Tony Richardson during the mid-1970s; he settled in Richardson’s Los Angeles pool house, looked after the gardens at Richardson’s various properties, and eventually started his own gardening business. Bachardy hired him to garden at 145 Adelaide Drive from the mid-1980s onward.
Newman, Paul (1925–2008) and Joanne Woodward (b. 1930). American actor, director, producer, born in Ohio, educated at Kenyon College, Yale School of Drama and Actors’ Studio and his second wife, actress, film and T.V. producer, born in Georgia and educated at Louisiana State University and New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse. He debuted on Broadway in Picnic (1953) and received many awards and nominations for his Hollywood films, which include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), The Verdict (1982), The Color of Money (1986, Academy Award), and Road to Perdition (2002). They met when Woodward was an understudy for Picnic and married in 1958. By then, she had won an Academy Award for The Three Faces of Eve (1957). Her other films include Rachel, Rachel (1968) and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972) both directed by Newman, The Sound and the Fury (1959), Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1991), and two Emmy Award-winning T.V. films in 1978. They were liberal Democratic activists, and his Newman’s Own food products generated hundreds of millions of dollars for charity. Gore Vidal introduced Isherwood and Bachardy to the Newmans in the mid-1950s, and they appear in D.1 and D.2. Both stars sat for Bachardy in the early 1960s.
Nichols, Mike (b. 1931). American actor, director, producer; born in Berlin. He emigrated to New York at seven and was educated at the University of Chicago. His real name was Michael Igor Peschkowsky. He studied acting with Lee Strasberg and became famous with Elaine May in a comedy duo which they took to Broadway as An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May (1960). He directed many Broadway hits, including Barefoot in the Park (1964), The Odd Couple (1965), The Little Foxes (1967), Plaza Suite (1968), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971), The Real Thing (1984), Death and the Maiden (1992), and Spamalot (2005). His Hollywood successes were just as numerous, among them: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (1966), The Graduate (1967), Carnal Knowledge (1971), The Day of the Dolphin (1973), Silkwood (1983), Working Girl (1988), Postcards from the Edge (1990), Primary Colors (1998), Closer (2004), and Charlie Wilson’s War (2007). When Isherwood knew him, his wife was Pat Scot. His fourth wife, since 1988, is newscaster Diane Sawyer. He appears in D.2.
Niem, Jan (d. 1973). Chauffeur to Tony Richardson, for twenty years. He was born in Poland and sent to a camp in Siberia by the Russians during World War II. He came to the U.K. after the war, on a training scheme Churchill offered Stalin, and was made a British citizen so that he did not have to return to the USSR. He married an English woman with whom he ran a car service for the film industry. According to rumor, Tony Richardson “won” him in a poker game with Cubby Broccoli. He died on top of a prostitute while on location in the South of France.
Nikhilananda, Swami. Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order; a longtime head of the Ramakrishna-Vedanta Center in New York, on the Upper East Side; author of numerous books on Vedanta and translator of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna from Bengali into English with the help of Joseph Campbell, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, and John Moffitt who put Nikhilananda’s translations of the songs into poetic form. He appears in D.1 and D.2.
Nin, Anaïs (1903–1977) and Rupert Pole (1919–2006). American writer and her second husband, an actor, forest ranger, and teacher. She was born in Paris, raised in New York after the outbreak of World War I, and spent the 1920s and 1930s back in Paris seeking out the company of writers, intellectuals, and bohemians. She became a psychoanalyst as well as writing novels, short stories, and literary criticism. Her six-volume Diary began to appear in 1966, and tells, among other things, about her friendship with Henry Miller. Her other books include Children of the Albatross (1947)—which Isherwood read and admired before he met her—The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), and A Spy in the House of Love (1954). Some of her work, like Miller’s, was published in Paris years before it appeared in the U.S. She had many love affairs, and her 1955 marriage to Pole was bigamous, since she never divorced her first husband, New York banker Hugh Guiler, and kept her continuing relationship with Guiler a secret from Pole until 1966. Pole, much younger than she, was a stepgrandson of Frank Lloyd Wright. He had a Harvard music degree, played the viola and the guitar, and acted professionally in New York in the late 1940s before going to California to study forestry at UCLA and Berkeley. As Isherwood tells in Lost Years, Nin lived with Pole at his forest station in the San Gabriel mountains among all the other rangers in defiance of the rules. By the 1970s, the pair settled in the Silver Lake District of Los Angeles in a house designed by Wright’s grandson, Eric Lloyd Wright, and Pole became a science teacher. They appear in D.2.
Nixon and the students. Student opposition to the Vietnam War grew in response to the introduction of the draft lottery in December 1969 and erupted after Nixon, on April 30, 1970, announced the Cambodian invasion. On May 4, four student demonstrators were shot and killed and nine others wounded by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State in Ohio. On May 8, 100,000 students marched on Washington. Nixon left the White House before dawn on May 9 to speak with a few informally at the Lincoln Memorial. On May 15, two more students were shot dead and twelve wounded at Jackson State in Mississippi. Over 400 campuses across the U.S. were closed by protests.
Oberon, Merle (1911–1979). British film star, raised in India and discovered in London by her first husband, Alexander Korda, who made her internationally famous during the 1930s. Her films include The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1935), Wuthering Heights (1939), Forever and a Day (1943), Stage Door Canteen (1943), and A Song to Remember (1945). She divorced Korda in 1945 and married cinematographer Lucien Ballard, whom she divorced in 1949. In 1957 she married again, to Bruno Pagliai, an Italian industrial tycoon with vast holdings in Latin America and especially Mexico, where they went to live until she divorced him in 1973. Her fourth marriage was to actor Robert Wolders, her co-star in her last film, Interval (1973), which she produced herself. She appears in D.2.
O’Hilderbrandt, Mrs. Isherwood’s neighbor. As Mary Miles Minter, she was a teenage star of silent films. Her career ended in scandal before she was twenty when her director, and, by rumor, her lover, William Desmond Taylor, was murdered, possibly by her mother. The crime was never solved, and she once offered to tell Isherwood what had happened if he would write a book about it on her behalf. As he mentions in his diary on August 18, 1972, she sued Rod Serling for portraying her as a murderer on his CBS show “Wonderful World of Crime,” broadcast February 15, 1970. She appears in D.2.
“Old, Vernon” (not his real name). American painter. During Isherwood’s first visit to New York in 1938, George Davis introduced him to Vernon Old at an establishment called Matty’s Cell House. Blond, beautiful, and intelligent, Vernon matched the description Isherwood had given Davis of the American boy he’d like to meet, and Vernon featured in Isherwood’s decision to return to New York in 1939. They lived together in New York and Los Angeles until February 17, 1941, when they split by mutual agreement. Vernon then lived unsteadily on his own, painting, drinking, and being sexually promiscuous, until a suicide attempt later that year. During World War II, he tried to become a monk, first in a Catholic monastery in the Hudson Valley and later at the Hollywood Vedanta Society and at Ananda Bhavan in Montecito. Eventually, he turned to heterosexuality, married “Patty O’Neill” (nor her real name) in November 1948, and had a son before divorcing. His painting career was increasingly successful, and in the late 1950s
he tutored Don Bachardy. He appears in Christopher and His Kind and in My Guru and His Disciple (as “Vernon,” without a surname) and throughout D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Olivier, Laurence (1907–1989). British actor, director, producer; celebrated as the greatest Shakespearian actor of his time. He became a Hollywood star by the start of World War II in Wuthering Heights (1939), Rebecca (1940), Pride and Prejudice (1940), and That Hamilton Woman (1941), and was appointed co-director of the Old Vic with Ralph Richardson near the end of the war. In 1963, he became director of the National Theatre in Britain. He directed and produced himself in a number of movies, beginning with Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948), which together won him several Academy Awards for acting and directing, and he appeared in more than fifty other films and over a hundred stage roles in London, New York, and elsewhere. He was married three times, to actress Jill Esmond from 1930 to 1940, to Vivien Leigh until 1960, and then to Joan Plowright until his death. Isherwood became friendly with him during 1959 when Olivier was in Los Angeles filming Spartacus (1960). He appears in D.1 and D.2.
One, Incorporated. Homosexual advocacy and support group founded in 1952; publisher of One magazine. One was the subject of a legal struggle with the U.S. Post Office during the 1950s; in 1958 the Supreme Court ruled that gay publications were not a priori obscene and could be sent and sold by mail. The business manager at One, Inc., and its driving force for over a decade, was Bill Legg. He had several names: Dorr Legg, William Lambert, and Marvin Culter.
O’Reilly, Anna. Personal assistant to Tony Richardson from 1964 until 1971, and to Vanessa Redgrave during the Richardson-Redgrave marriage. She arranged airplane tickets, bank drafts, presents, bought and rented real estate, and acted as hostess for dinner parties when Richardson needed an atmosphere of conventional respectability. She also assisted Richardson on his films and worked her way up to Associate Producer before she left to marry Graham Cottle. In 1976, she returned to help Richardson with Joseph Andrews and with his first T.V. production. Then she became an inhouse production assistant at Warner Brothers T.V. and went on to produce T.V. shows as Anna Cottle. She settled in Los Angeles and later worked in the film and literary management business, selling book rights for movies and T.V. Among her book-to-film projects are Capote and Get Happy.
Orphanos, Stathis (b. 1940). American photographer, born in North Carolina; his parents were Greek. His photographs of writers, artists, actors, and male nudes have appeared on book jackets and in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Antaeus. With his longterm companion Ralph Sylvester (b. 1934), he publishes fine limited-edition books under the imprint Sylvester and Orphanos.
Osborne, John (1929–1994). English playwright, born in Fulham, West London. He worked as a journalist briefly and then acted in provincial repertory until his third play, Look Back in Anger (1956), established him as the center of a generation of working-class realist playwrights called “the angry young men.” During the 1950s, his work was mostly produced by George Devine and Tony Richardson’s English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Other plays include The Entertainer (1957), starring Laurence Olivier, Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964), A Patriot for Me (1965), West of Suez (1971), A Sense of Detachment (1972), Watch It Come Down (1976), and Déjàvu (1991), a later sequel to Look Back in Anger. Several of his plays were filmed. Osborne also wrote the screenplays for Richardson’s Tom Jones and The Charge of the Light Brigade. Their collaborations ended with the latter because Osborne was sued for plagiarizing Mrs. Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why. The rights to her novel belonged to Laurence Harvey, who agreed to sell them and abandon the suit if he could be in the film. So Richardson gave Harvey a small role previously promised to Osborne. Osborne and Richardson quarrelled and never worked together again. In D.1, Isherwood records that he met Osborne in Hollywood in 1960, when Osborne came to join Mary Ure (his second wife) and Richardson, both working there. In September 1961, as Isherwood tells in D.2, he and Bachardy were guests at La Beaumette, the house which Osborne rented from Lord Glenconner during August and September in Valbonne in the South of France. Osborne married five times; first to Pamela Lane, an actress, then to Ure, then to Penelope Gilliatt. His fourth wife, from 1969 to 1978, was Jill Bennett (1931–1990), the British actress, who starred in several of his plays and died a suicide. Finally, he married Helen Dawson (d. 2004), drama critic and arts editor at The Observer during the 1960s, and remained with her until his death. He wrote three volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981), Almost a Gentleman (1991), and Damn You, England (1994).
O’Shea, John. Truman Capote’s lover from July 1973. When they met, O’Shea was a bank vice-president living in a suburb outside Manhattan, married, Roman Catholic, and a father of three. He gave up his job to become Capote’s business manager.
Owens, Rodney (Rod). California-born ceramics manufacturer and, later, fashion retailer. In 1946, he began a long relationship with Hayden Lewis, Bill Caskey’s navy friend; he and Lewis appear often in D.1 and in Lost Years. Together they built up a business making dinnerware and ashtrays. Eventually they split, and Owens moved to New York where he sold clothing for the designer Helen Rose.
Page, Anthony (Tony) (b. 1935). Oxford-educated British actor and director, born in India. He was Artistic Director at the Royal Court from 1964 to 1973 and directed five plays there by John Osborne, three during 1968, when Bachardy contributed drawings to the programs. In 1966, he planned to adapt Wedekind’s Lulu plays, Erdgeist (Earthsprite, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1904), but the project wasn’t completed. He also directed productions of Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, Albee and others in the West End and at the National Theatre and in New York. He made a few movies, including I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977) and later became known for his television documentaries, biographies, and miniseries. He appears in D.2.
Paget’s Disease. A chronic condition which weakens bones and can enlarge or deform them, causing bone pain and sometimes leading to arthritis or fractures. It is typically localized, rather than affecting all the bones in the body. Sufferers can be asymptomatic for years or may confuse the condition with arthritis.
Pagett, Nicola (b. 1945). British actress, trained at RADA. She played Princess Mary in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and became well known as Elizabeth Bellamy in the T.V. series “Upstairs Downstairs” in the early 1970s. Her many later T.V. roles included leads in the miniseries “Anna Karenina” (1977), “Scoop” (1987), and “A Bit of a Do” (1989). She played Elizabeth Fanshawe in “Frankenstein: The True Story.”
Paley, William (Bill) (1901–1990). American media mogul; son of a Ukrainian cigar manufacturer; he was educated at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. He bought CBS in 1928 when it was a small radio network and developed it into the radio and T.V. giant which he ran for over fifty years. During World War II, he was deputy chief of psychological warfare for the Allies. He was a figure in American cultural and intellectual life, devoting time to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to hospitals, universities, and think tanks. His second wife, Barbara (Babe) Cushing Mortimer (1915–1978), a Boston-born society beauty, was one of Truman Capote’s closest friends from 1955 until 1975. She epitomized the glamor of the rich women Capote called his Swans, but she ended their friendship when she discovered that Capote was using her private life as material for his fiction.
Parker, Dorothy (1893–1967). American poet, short-story writer, journalist, and literary critic; born in New Jersey. Celebrated for her wit and associated with the Algonquin Hotel in New York where for years she lunched with writer friends. Her first brief marriage was to a New York stockbroker, Edwin Parker. She contributed to The New Yorker from its debut and to many other American magazines. Her 1929 short story “The Big Blonde” won the O. Henry Prize. She wrote plays—Close Harmony (1929) with Elmer Rice and Ladies of the Corridor (1953) with Arnaud d’Usseau—and screenplays—notably A Star is Born (1937) and Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942) with her se
cond husband, Alan Campbell. She protested the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, covered the Spanish Civil War for The New Masses, and was involved in the founding of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and other Hollywood committees opposing fascism; she also supported the Civil Rights movement and willed her estate to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was blacklisted at the end of the 1940s and later testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee where, in contrast to many of her colleagues, she cited the First Amendment (freedom of speech) instead of the Fifth (the right not to serve witness against oneself ). She took over Isherwood’s teaching position at L.A. State College when he left, during the 1960s. Bachardy drew her portrait a number of times during the same period. She appears in D.2.
Parone, Ed. American stage director. He assisted Gordon Davidson with the professional Theater Group at UCLA, where he directed Oh! What a Lovely War. In 1967, he moved with Davidson to the Mark Taper Forum and ran New Theater for Now to develop new plays, including A Meeting by the River in 1972, directed by Jim Bridges. He stayed at the Mark Taper Forum for about twelve years, and was a director in residence and eventually associate artistic director, turning his hand to producing, writing, and editing. He was also assistant to the producer on The Misfits and directed for T.V. He appears in D.2.
Pavitrananda, Swami. Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order; head of the Vedanta Society in New York, on the Upper West Side, and a trustee of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. He spent many years in the order’s editorial center, Advaita Ashrama, at Mayavati in the Himalayas. He often paid a month-long visit to Swami Prabhavananda during the summers. Other than Prabhavananda, he was Isherwood’s favorite swami. He appears in D.2.
Payne, Maurice. English master printer; he met Hockney in London in 1965 and worked with him on the books Hockney did for the Petersburg Press, including the Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (1969). For a while, he worked full time as Hockney’s assistant before setting up a studio in New York where he collaborated with other artists.
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