The Sixties

by Christopher Isherwood

  kirtan. Hindu devotional singing or chanting.

  Kiskadden, Peggy. Thrice-married American socialite from Ardmore, Pennsylvania; born Margaret Adams Plummer, she was exceptionally pretty and had an attractive singing voice. From 1924 until 1933, she was married to a lawyer and (later) judge, Curtis Bok, the eldest son of one of Philadelphia’s most prominent families. In the early 1930s, she accompanied Bok, a Quaker, to Dartington, England, where she met Gerald Heard and Aldous and Maria Huxley. Her second marriage, to Henwar Rodakiewicz, a documentary filmmaker, ended in 1942, and she married Bill Kiskadden in July 1943. She had four children, Margaret Bok (called Tis), Benjamin Bok, Derek Bok (later president of Harvard University), and William Kiskadden, Jr. (nicknamed “Bull”). Isherwood was introduced to her by Gerald Heard soon after arriving in Los Angeles; they became intimate friends but drew apart at the end of the 1940s and finally split irrevocably in the 1950s over Isherwood’s relationship with Don Bachardy. By the mid-1960s, he had forgotten how to spell her name, sometimes typing Kiscadden. She died in the 1990s. There are numerous passages about her and her family in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Kiskadden, William Sherrill (Bill) (1894–1969). American plastic surgeon; third husband of Peggy Kiskadden. He was born in Denver, Colorado, the son of a businessman, studied medicine at the University of California and in London and Vienna in the late 1920s, and eventually established his practice in Los Angeles. He was the first clinical professor of plastic surgery at UCLA and founded the plastic surgical service at UCLA County Medical Center in the early 1930s as well as holding distinguished positions at hospitals in Los Angeles—teaching, administering, practicing—and writing articles on particular procedures and problems. He became interested in the population problem and with Julian and Aldous Huxley and others founded Population Limited in the early 1950s. He served in both world wars, the second time in the Army Medical Corps. In February 1958, he nearly died after a cardiac operation. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Kitty. Bachardy’s pet name, once known only to himself and Isherwood, and denoting his identity as an exotic, temperamental feline creature in the private myth world they shared.

  Knight, Franklin (Frank) (circa 1924–2005). American monk of the Ramakrishna Order; he was given the name Asima Chaitanya when he took his brahmacharya vows, probably in 1965 or 1966, and came to be known as Asim. He first joined the Trabuco monastery in about 1955 and settled there permanently, but Swami Prabhavananda never allowed him to take sannyas because of an episode—referred to by Isherwood in his diary entry for December 16, 1963—in which he behaved inappropriately towards a woman. Knight was a cousin of Webster Milam, and is mentioned in D.1.

  Knox, Ronnie (1935–1992). American football player and aspiring writer, born in Illinois. His real name was Raoul Landry. He was a football All American for Santa Monica High School, a star freshman quarterback for the University of California, and widely considered to be the most talented college football player in the country when in 1953 he suddenly transferred to UCLA, sacrificing a year of eligibility and generating a scandal. He was also written up as a glamor boy because of his physical beauty. As a professional, he joined the Canadian Football League and played for Montreal. Later he wrote fiction, and published at least one of his stories. He lived with Renate Druks from 1960 to 1964 and afterwards had a French girlfriend called Véronique. All three sat for Bachardy several times. Knox died virtually homeless in San Francisco.

  Kolisch, Dr. Joseph. Viennese physician practicing in Hollywood; a follower of Prabhavananda. Aldous and Maria Huxley, Gerald Heard, several monks and nuns at the Vedanta society and even Greta Garbo followed his advice and were on his vegetarian diets during the 1940s. On Heard’s recommendation, Isherwood first saw Kolisch in January 1940 for what appeared to be a recurrence of gonorrhea, but as Isherwood tells in D.1, Kolisch attributed Isherwood’s symptoms to his psychological makeup. Kolisch also appears in Lost Years.

  Krishna. One of the most widely worshipped Hindu gods, a hero of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavatam. Krishna was also the Sanskrit name given to George Fitts, an American monk of the Ramakrishna Order, from New England. He joined the Vedanta Society in Hollywood in 1940 and was living there as a probationer monk in 1943 when Isherwood moved in. He was then about forty years old, had some private wealth, and spent his time obsessively tape recording and transcribing Swami Prabhavananda’s lectures and classes. He took his brahmacharya vows in 1947, and early in 1958, he took sannyas and became Swami Krishnananda. He lived in Hollywood, but usually accompanied Swami on trips to Santa Barbara, Trabuco, and elsewhere. He appears in D.1.

  Krishnamurti (1895–1986). Hindu spiritual teacher. As an impoverished boy in India, he was taken up by the leaders of the Theosophical movement as the “vehicle” in which their Master Maitreya would reincarnate himself. He was adopted and educated in England, then in 1919 sent to an orange ranch in Ojai, California for his health. In 1929, he renounced his messianic role and rejected the guru–disciple relationship along with the devotional and ritual aspects of Hinduism. Although he broke with the Theosophists, he went on speaking to devotees, sometimes in huge numbers, for the rest of his life all around the world. He was extremely handsome and charismatic and had many secret sexual liaisons which introduced tension among his followers and led to a series of lawsuits with a colleague and rival, Desikacharya Rajagopalacharya, whom he cuckolded. Mary Zimbalist, widow of Hollywood producer Sam Zimbalist (1904–1958), eventually became one of his closest companions, hosting him at her house in Malibu, travelling with him, and helping him with his lectures and books. She was a founder, trustee, and vice-chairman of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America, set up in 1969 to wrest control of assets from Rajagopal. Isherwood first met Krishnamurti in 1939 through Aldous and Maria Huxley and later went to hear him speak in Ojai. He appears in D.1.

  Lambert, Gavin (1924–2005). British novelist, biographer and screenwriter; educated at Cheltenham College and for one year at Magdalen College, Oxford. He edited the British film magazine Sight and Sound before going to Hollywood in 1956. He was working for Jerry Wald at Twentieth Century-Fox on Sons and Lovers (1960) when Ivan Moffat introduced him to Isherwood; he appears often in D.1. His novel The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life (1959), which Isherwood read in manuscript in 1957, was influenced by Isherwood’s Berlin stories. He and Isherwood worked on a television comedy project “Emily Ermingarde” for Hermione Gingold and later for Elsa Lanchester, but the series was never produced. Lambert also helped Isherwood revise the film script of The Vacant Room. During the 1950s and early 1960s, he planned a musical version, never produced, of Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair. He wrote and directed an independent film, Another Sky (1956), wrote the screenplay for his own 1963 novel Inside Daisy Clover (1965), and scripted Bitter Victory (1957), The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977), and others. His books include On Cukor (1972); The Dangerous Edge (1975), a study of nine thrillers; The Goodbye People (1977); Running Time (1983); Norma Shearer: A Life (1990); Nazimova: A Biography (1997); Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000); and Natalie Wood: A Life (2004). During the 1970s, he settled in Tangier for a time, returning to Los Angeles in the early 1980s.

  Lamkin, Hillyer Speed (b. 1928). American novelist; born and raised in Monroe, Lousiana. Isherwood met him in April 1950 when Speed was twenty-two and about to publish his first novel, Tiger in the Garden. He had studied at Harvard and lived in London and New York before going to Los Angeles to research his second novel, The Easter Egg Hunt (1954), about Hollywood, in particular Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst; he dedicated the novel to Isherwood who appears in it as “Sebastian Saunders.” Lamkin was on the board, with Isherwood, at the Huntington Hartford Foundation. With a screenwriter, Gus Field, he tried to adapt Sally Bowles for the stage in 1950–1951, but Dodie Beesley criticized the project and encouraged John van Druten to try instead. In the mid-1950s, Lamkin wrote a play Out by the Country Club which was neve
r produced, and in 1956, he scripted a T.V. film about Perle Mesta, the political hostess who was Truman’s ambassador to Luxembourg. During 1957, he wrote another play, Comes a Day, which had a short run on Broadway, starring Judith Anderson and introducing George C. Scott. Eventually, when the second play failed, Lamkin returned home to Louisiana. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Lamkin, Marguerite (b. circa 1934). A southern beauty, born and raised in Monroe, Louisiana, and briefly educated at a Manhattan finishing school. She followed her brother Speed to Hollywood, and married the screenwriter Harry Brown in 1952, but the marriage broke up melodramatically in 1955 as Isherwood records in D.1, where Marguerite is frequently mentioned. Bachardy had a room in the Browns’ apartment during the early months of his involvement with Isherwood, and Marguerite was an especially close friend to him. In later years she also became close to Isherwood. She assisted Tennessee Williams as a dialogue coach during the original production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and afterwards she worked on other films and theatrical productions on the East and West coasts and in England when southern accents were required. She was married to Rory Harrity from 1959 to 1963, and later settled in London, where she had a successful third marriage, became a society hostess, and raised large sums of money for AIDS and HIV research and care.

  Lanchester, Elsa (1902–1986). British actress; she danced with Isadora Duncan’s troop as a child, then began acting in a children’s theater in London at sixteen. In 1929, she married Charles Laughton and went with him to Hollywood in 1934, settling there for good in 1940 and becoming an American citizen. Lanchester began making films before Laughton and they acted in several together—for instance The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957) for which she received an Academy Award nomination. Her most famous film was The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), but she was in many more, including The Constant Nymph (1928), David Copperfield (1935), Lassie Come Home (1943), The Razor’s Edge (1946), The Secret Garden (1949), Come to the Stable (1949, Academy Award nomination), Les Misérables (1952), Bell, Book and Candle (1958), Mary Poppins (1964), and Murder by Death (1976). She also worked in television and for many years she sang at a Los Angeles theater, The Turnabout, on La Cienega Boulevard. She toured with her own stage show, Elsa Lanchester—Herself, during 1960 and opened at the 41st Street Theater in New York on February 4, 1961 for seventy-five performances. She met Isherwood socially in the late 1950s, was greatly attracted to him and introduced him to Laughton, afterwards vying with Laughton and Bachardy for Isherwood’s attention. She appears in D.1.

  Lane, Homer (1875–1925). American psychologist, healer, and juvenile reformer. Lane established a rural community in England called The Little Commonwealth where he nurtured young delinquents with love, farm work, and the responsibility of self-government. For Lane, the fundamental instinct of mankind “is the titanic craving for spiritual perfection,” and he conceived of individual growth as a process of spiritual evolution in which the full satisfaction of the instinctive desires of one stage bring an end to that stage and lay the ground for the next, higher stage; he believed that instinctive desires must be satisfied rather than repressed if the individual is to achieve psychological health and fulfillment. In practice, Lane identified himself with the patient’s neurosis in order to allow it to emerge from the unconscious; personally loving the sinner and the sin, he freed the patient from his sense of guilt. Auden discovered the teachings of Homer Lane through his Berlin friend, John Layard, a former patient and disciple of Lane’s, and in late 1928 and early 1929, became obsessed with Lane, preaching his theories to his friends and in his poems.

  Lange, David (d. 2006). American film producer; brother of Hope Lange. He was educated at Principia and Harvard, acted a little, and produced several films, including, with Alan Pakula, Klute (1971). He later taught screenwriting. He appears in D.1.

  Lange, Hope (1931–2003). American actress, born and raised in Connecticut; she was twelve years old when she debuted on Broadway in The Patriots (1943). As a teenager, she waitressed in her mother’s Greenwich Village restaurant, modelled, and continued as a stage actress and in live T.V. drama until she was brought to Hollywood with her first husband Don Murray to appear in Bus Stop (1956). Afterwards she played in numerous other films including Peyton Place (1957), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award, The Young Lions (1958), The Best of Everything (1959), Deathwish (1974), Blue Velvet (1986), and Clear and Present Danger (1994). During her love affair with Glenn Ford, she co-starred with him in Pocketful of Miracles (1961) and Love Is a Ball (1963). She made a number of T.V. films and won two Emmy Awards for her role in the television comedy series “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (1968–1970); she also appeared on “The New Dick Van Dyke Show” (1971–1974). In 1977, she returned to Broadway in Same Time Next Year opposite Don Murray. Lange had two children with Murray, but the marriage ended in 1960. In 1963, she married the director and producer Alan Pakula; they divorced in 1969. In 1986, she married Charles Hollerith, a theatrical producer. Isherwood first met Lange with Murray in the late 1950s; she appears in D.1.

  Lansbury, Angela (b. 1925). British star of stage and film; granddaughter of pacifist labor politician George Lansbury and daughter of actress Moyna Macgill, who brought her with her twin brothers Edgar and Bruce to Hollywood to escape the Blitz. Lansbury was making feature films before the end of the war and went on to appear in National Velvet (1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), The Three Musketeers (1948), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Something for Everyone (1970), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), Death on the Nile (1978), and Nanny McPhee (2006) among others. Isherwood first mentions her at the time she made a hit in Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey on Broadway in 1960; other Broadway successes include Mame (1966), Sweeney Todd (1979), and Deuce (2007). She has also had a T.V. career, especially in “Murder, She Wrote” (1984–1996). She has won eleven Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, and been nominated repeatedly for Academy Awards. She married twice, the second time, in 1949, to Peter Shaw with whom she had two children.

  Lansbury, Bruce (b. 1930). British-born T.V. writer and producer; brother of Angela Lansbury and twin brother of stage and film producer Edgar Lansbury. Bruce Lansbury produced “The Wild Wild West,” “Mission Impossible,” and many other shows in a long career at the Hollywood studios and for the major networks there and in New York. Bachardy drew Bruce and Edgar Lansbury as well as Angela and also Bruce Lansbury’s two daughters.

  Laos crisis. Power struggles among communist-dominated Pathet Lao, neutralists, and right-wing militarists brought down government after government in Laos following independence from France in 1953. Isherwood first mentions a crisis on December 31, 1960, when a newly installed pro-Western, right-wing government came under threat internally from communist-led rebels. On December 30, this new government asked for U.N. help to counter a reported invasion across its northern border by 2,000 North Vietnamese troops; they hinted the Chinese were also involved. Hanoi denied any such invasion and also denied supporting the rebels, as did the Soviet Union. But over the next few weeks the North Vietnamese, the Soviets and the U.S. all supplied arms, men, or transport to the localized conflict, and Laos—poor, undeveloped, but strategically positioned as a corridor to the rest of Southeast Asia—became the focus of possible generalized war between the West and the Communist bloc.

  Larmore, James and Alexandra (Xan). He was assistant to the film producer Charlie Brackett, her father. They were married during World War II, when he was a soldier. Previously he had been a chorus boy, and, according to rumor, Brackett’s lover. Xan became an alcoholic, and their relationship was turbulent. They appear in D.1.

  Larson, Jack (b. circa 1933). American actor, playwright and librettist; born in Los Angeles and raised in Pasadena. His father drove a milk truck, and his mother was a clerk for Western Union; they divorced. At fourteen, Larson was California bowling champion for his age group. He attended Pasadena Jun
ior College, where he was discovered acting in a college play and offered his first film role by Warner Brothers in Fighter Squadron (1948) (also Rock Hudson’s first film.) He is best known for playing Jimmy Olsen in “The Adventures of Superman,” the original T.V. series aired during the 1950s. He lived for over thirty-five years with the director James Bridges and co-produced some of Bridges’s most successful films, The Paper Chase (1973), Urban Cowboy (1980), and Bright Lights, Big City (1988). He wrote the libretto for Virgil Thomson’s opera Lord Byron. Larson and Bridges were close friends of Isherwood and Bachardy from the 1950s onward and appear in D.1.

  Laughlin, Leslie. See Caron, Leslie.

  Laughlin, Michael. American film producer, and later, director and screenwriter; educated at Principia College in Illinois and at UCLA, where he studied law. He produced Two Lane Blacktop (1971) among others. He was the third husband of French actress Leslie Caron from 1969 to 1980.

  Laughton, Charles (1899–1962). British actor. He played many roles on the London stage from the 1920s onward and made his first film, Piccadilly, in 1929; other films include The Private Life of Henry VIII (1934, Academy Award), Les Misérables (1935), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). His last film was Advise and Consent (1962), which Isherwood mentions. Laughton also acted in New York and Paris and gave dramatic readings throughout the U.S. from Shakespeare, the Bible, and other classic literature. He became an American citizen in 1950. Isherwood met him in Hollywood in 1959 through Laughton’s wife, Elsa Lanchester, and Laughton proposed various projects; in particular, he asked Isherwood to help him write a play about Socrates. Isherwood first mentions the project in March 1960, and in D.1 he describes their sessions reading through Plato together and devising the script. He also tells how, that summer, Laughton bought 147 Adelaide Drive, next door to Isherwood, so that he could spend time with male friends away from his wife in their house on Curson Avenue.