Bachardy, Glade. Don Bachardy’s mother; from Ohio. Childhood polio left her with a limp resulting in extreme shyness. An ardent movie-goer, she took Don Bachardy and his brother, Ted, to the movies from early childhood, thus nurturing Don’s obsession. She married in 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio and travelled to Los Angeles on her honeymoon—she never left. Her father was the captain of a cargo boat on the Great Lakes, and she met her husband, Jess Bachardy, a member of the crew, on board during a summer cruise in the 1920s. They were divorced in 1952, but later reconciled; once Ted and Don had moved out of their mother’s apartment their father moved back in, early in 1955.
Bachardy, Ted. Don Bachardy’s older brother; Isherwood noticed Ted Bachardy 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 the same month). Isherwood was attracted to Ted, but did not pursue him seriously because Ted was becoming involved with someone else, Ed Cornell, during 1949. Around the same time, Ted also experienced a mental breakdown—the second or third one since 1945 when he was fifteen. Eventually he was diagnosed as a manic-depressive schizophrenic. He suffers recurring periods of manic, self-destructive behavior followed by nervous breakdowns and long stays in mental hospitals. Isherwood continued to see Ted Bachardy intermittently during the early weeks of his affair with Don Bachardy, but a turning point came in February 1953 with Ted’s third or fourth breakdown when Isherwood sympathized with Don and intervened to try to help prevent Ted from becoming excessively violent and having to be hospitalized; nevertheless, Ted was committed on February 26. He had another breakdown, in March 1955, and was again committed to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital for a number of weeks, until April 7. When well, Ted took odd jobs: he was employed 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.
Bacon, Francis (1909–1992). English painter, born in Dublin. Bacon 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 controversial Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion made him suddenly famous in 1945. His paintings present anguished, distorted figures in vague nightmare spaces, often with deliberately smudged paintwork and blurred outlines; he urged that art should expose emotions rather than simply represent, and expressed his intention to leave an evident trace of his human presence and experience upon his work. He is widely held to be one of the great painters of this century. Isherwood recorded some of Bacon’s remarks on art in his diary, and evidently set store by them; he first mentions Bacon when in London in 1956, although he met Bacon earlier, probably in 1948, otherwise in 1952 and perhaps through Stephen Spender.
Barada. A senior nun at the Santa Barbara convent; after sannyas she was called Pravrajika Baradaprana. Her original name was Doris Ludwig. Barada was interested in music and composed Vedantic hymns. She still lives at the Sarada Convent.
Bardo Thodol. A set of instructions for the dead and dying in Mahayana or Northern Buddhism. The Lama whispers the instructions into the ear of the corpse, guiding the dead man during the Bardo existence which intervenes between death and rebirth. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, an Oxford scholar and a disciple of the Tibetan sage Lama Kazi Dawa-Sandup, first compiled the text in English and named it The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Evans-Wentz translated the words Bardo Thodol as “Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane.”
Barnes, Jimmy. A monk from 1955 to 1958, living most of the time at Trabuco; his wife, possibly called Ailleen, was a nun at Santa Barbara during roughly the same period. Barnes played the saxophone and was evidently a good cook.
Barrie, Michael. A former 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 when he left on bad terms. He was friendly with Isherwood and Bachardy throughout the 1950s, and they rented his 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.
bastrika. A bellows used in a furnace; in hatha yoga, bastrika is a fast vigorous intake of breath followed by a fast vigorous exhalation, making a sound like air rushing through a bellows. See also hatha yoga.
Beaton, Cecil (1904–1980). English photographer, theater designer, and author. Beaton 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 many other public figures. He was himself a dandy and a creature of style. From 1939 to 1945 he worked successfully as a war photographer (his photograph of a child in hospital after a bombing raid made the cover of Life). His numerous costume and set designs for stage and screen were widely admired; in Hollywood his most celebrated achievements were Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964), for which he won two Oscars. 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 which he had designed and in which he was acting) and was helpful to Bill Caskey who was then trying to establish himself as a photographer.
Beesley, Alec and Dodie Smith Beesley. She was an English playwright, novelist and former actress, known professionally as Dodie Smith. He was a conscientious objector and an unofficial legal advisor to C.O.s in Los Angeles during the war; he also managed her career. The Beesleys spent a decade in Hollywood for the sake of Alec’s pacifist convictions, and Dodie wrote scripts there for Paramount and her first novel, I Capture the Castle. They returned to England in the early 1950s. Isherwood met the Beesleys in November 1942, through Dodie’s close friend and confidant John van Druten, and often lunched with them on Sundays. In contrast to many of his friends during that period, he felt he could speak comfortably to them about all aspects of his life. When Isherwood moved out of the Vedanta Society in August 1945, his first home was the chauffeur’s apartment at the Beesleys’. Dodie Beesley in particular encouraged him to keep on with his writing, and he discussed The World in the Evening with her extensively. He derived some of the details of the marriage between Stephen Monk and the writer Elizabeth Rydal in The World in the Evening from the Beesleys’ professional and domestic arrangements, and Elizabeth’s correspondence with her friend Cecilia de Limbour resembles the voluminous letters continually exchanged between Dodie and John van Druten. Isherwood dedicated the novel to the Beesleys. It was Dodie Beesley who challenged John van Druten to make a play from Sally Bowles, ultimately 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 One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), later filmed by Walt Disney. Her play writing career was less successful after the war; for example, These People, Those Books, which Isherwood mentions, had a pre-London run but was never produced in the West End.
Belfrage, Cedric (1904–1990). British journalist and novelist. Belfrage attended Isherwood’s Cambridge college, Corpus Christi, where they knew one another. He worked alternately in Hollywood and London as a newspaper correspondent and a theater and film critic; for a time he was Samuel Goldwyn’s public relations man in London. During the war he served in British intelligence, then co-founded the leftist National Guardian in 1948. He was deported back to England in 1955 after being hounded by the McCarthyites, and reported from abroad for various left-wing journals, eventually settling in Mexico in 1963. His books include two which Isherwood mentions, a 1940 novel about the South, Let My People Go, and, in 1948, Abide With Me, about the undertaking business.
Ben, also Benjamin. See Bok, Benjamin.
Ben. See Masselink, Ben.
Benoit, Hubert.
French surgeon; his career was ended by wounds sustained during World War II, and he became a psychotherapist and a student of Vedanta and Zen Buddhism. He published several works on metaphysics, psychology and Zen, and his article “Notes in Regard to a Technique of Timeless Realization” appeared in the March–April 1950 issue of Vedanta and the West (translated by Huxley and later reprinted in Vedanta for Modern Man). According to Benoit’s technique, the subject could disconnect the imagination by sitting or lying relaxed in a comfortable place, alone, and watching whatever mental images the imagination produced. Benoit argued that if the imagination was left free to produce what it liked, and the subject consciously watched, the imagination would in fact produce no images at all, and the subject would then be in a state of pure, voluntary attention.
Berlin crisis. In November 1958, the German Democratic Republic in Soviet-occupied East Germany sought official recognition abroad. Khrushchev announced his intention to transfer Soviet authority in Berlin to the East German regime, aiming to force the other three powers responsible for the city—England, France, and the U.S.—to recognize the GDR. The White House declared that it would maintain the integrity of West Berlin. In December, Khrushchev demanded that troops be withdrawn and Berlin established as a free city, putting a six-month deadline on his ultimatum for the transfer of Soviet rule in Berlin to the GDR. Feared Soviet land and air blockades and possible escalation never came about, but the crisis dominated East-West diplomacy throughout the first half of 1959. Talks were finally agreed, and the ultimatum effectively withdrawn when Khrushchev visited the U.S. in September 1959.
Berthold. See Viertel, Berthold.
Besant, Annie (1847–1933). English social reformer and a leader of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical movement. Mrs. Besant was a Fabian and a trade union organizer before going to India where she founded what was to become the Hindu University of India, was involved in the beginning of the All India Home Rule League in 1916, and served as a President of the Indian National Congress. A prolific author on Theosophy, she had a strong personal stake in Krishnamurti’s role as the new “World Teacher” since, in 1911, she herself proclaimed him the “vehicle” in which the Theosophical master might reincarnate himself, and she closely supervised Krishnamurti’s upbringing and education.
Bill, also Billy. See Caskey, William.
Blanch, Lesley. English journalist and author. Blanch was an editor at Vogue during the 1940s. Her books include The Wilder Shores of Love, The Sabres of Paradise, The Nine-Tiger Man, biography, travel essays, and an autobiography, Journey Into the Mind’s Eye. She met the French novelist Romain Gary in England during the war, and they were married for a number of years before divorcing. She now lives in France. Blanch was a close friend of Gavin Lambert who introduced her and Romain Gary to Isherwood and Bachardy during the 1950s.
Bob. See Craft, Robert.
Bobo, Wallace (Bobo). Neighbour of Denny Fouts at 137 Entrada Drive, where Bobo lived with his friend Howard Kelley. Bobo and Kelley attended all Fouts’s parties in the late 1940s and were often in his apartment. Bobo worked as a gardener.
Bok, Ben. Eldest son of Peggy Kiskadden and Curtis Bok. He married in 1948 and later raised wolves near Llano, California.
Bok, W. Curtis (1897–1962). American lawyer, judge, author; first husband of Peggy Kiskadden and father of Tis, Ben, and Derek Bok. Curtis Bok was the elder son of Dutch-born Edward Bok (1863–1930), editor, author, philanthropist, and pacifist, who began his career as a Western Union office boy and retired as the wealthy and powerful editor of Ladies Home Journal, a success story he chronicled in his 1921 Pulitzer-Prize-winning autobiography, The Americanization of Edward Bok. Curtis Bok’s mother, Mary Louise Curtis (1876–1970), was a great Philadelphia philanthropist in her own right and the daughter of the one-time owner of Ladies Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. Curtis Bok attended Williams College and studied law at the University of Virginia Law School. He practiced law in Philadelphia and became a distinguished judge and public official, serving on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for twenty-one years. He was also the author of four books including three novels. Although he served in both World Wars, Bok was a Quaker and, like his father, a peace advocate. He first met Aldous Huxley at Dartington Hall, Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst’s school in Devonshire where Huxley’s son, Matthew, was at school from 1932 until 1935. After his 1933 divorce, Bok married again and had two more daughters.
Bok, Derek (Dek) (b. 1930). Second son of Peggy Kiskadden and Curtis Bok. He became a professor of law, Dean of the Harvard Law School, and later President of Harvard University. He is the author of several books on law and on higher education. His wife is the Swedish-born philosopher and writer, Sissela Myrdal Bok.
Bok, Margaret Welmoet (Tis). Daughter of Peggy Kiskadden and Curtis Bok. She married Reynout Roland Holst.
Bok, Peggy. See Kiskadden, Peggy.
Bower, Tony. American friend of Jean and Cyril Connolly; Isherwood met him in Paris in 1937. Bower was present at lunch in Hollywood the day Isherwood met Denny Fouts, and he appears as “Ronny” in Down There on a Visit. He was drafted into the army twice during the war, and trained on Long Island and later in San Diego; he also wrote about film for a New York paper. The January 1944 Horizon carried an article by Bower (using the pseudonym Anthony Bourne) which, relatively humorously, described W. H. Auden’s ménage at Middagh Street in Brooklyn and “the metaphysical development of your friends Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard” in Hollywood. He called Huxley, Heard and Isherwood “the mystic Axis” and regretted the disappearance from England of so talented a novelist as Isherwood (“Where Shall John Go?” III–USA, Antony Bourne, Horizon, January 1944, 9.49, pp. 13–23).
Bowles, Paul (b. 1910). American composer and, later, writer. Probably best known for his novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), filmed by Bertolucci. In addition to fiction, he wrote poetry and travel books and made translations. Isherwood first met Bowles fleetingly in Berlin in 1931 and used his name for the character “Sally Bowles” without realizing that he would later meet Bowles again and that Bowles would become famous in his own right. Bowles and his wife, the writer Jane Bowles (1917–1973), lived in George Davis’s house in Brooklyn with W. H. Auden and others during the 1940s. They later moved to Tangier where they lived separately from one another, but remained close friends. She became an invalid. In 1955 Isherwood and Bachardy visited the Bowleses, who were the object of many other literary pilgrimages as well. Later Isherwood and Bachardy met Bowles again on his visits to America.
Brackett, Charles (1892–1969). American screenwriter and producer. Charlie Brackett was from a wealthy East Coast family; he began as a novelist, then became a screenwriter, and later a producer. He often worked with the Viennese writer-director Billy Wilder. He was one of the writers who worked on the script for Garbo’s Ninotchka (1939); he won an Academy Award as writer-producer of The Long Weekend (1945); and he produced The King and I (1956), as well as working on numerous other films. When Isherwood knew him best during the 1950s, Brackett worked for Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox where he remained for about a decade until the early 1960s. His second wife, Lillian, was called Muff; she had been the spinster sister of Brackett’s first wife, who died, and was already in her sixties when Brackett married her. Brackett also had two grown daughters, and one, Alexandra (Xan), was married to James Larmore, Brackett’s assistant.
brahmachari or brahmacharini. In Vedanta, a spiritual aspirant who has taken the first monastic vows. In the Ramakrishna Order, the brahmacharya vows may be taken only after five or more years as a probationer monk or nun.
Brahmananda, Swami (1863–1922). Rakhal Chandra Ghosh, the son of a wealthy landowner, was a boyhood friend of Vivekananda with whom, ultimately, he was to lead the Ramakrishna Order. Later he was also called Maharaj. Married off by his father at sixteen, he became a disciple of Ramakrishna soon afterwards. Like Vivekananda, Brahmananda, was an Ishvarakoti, an eternally free and perfect soul
born into the world for mankind’s benefit and possessing some characteristics of the avatar. He was an eternal companion of Sri Krishna, and his companionship took the especially intimate form of a parent/son relationship (thus reenacting a previously existing and eternal relationship between their two souls). After the death of Ramakrishna, Brahmananda ran the Baranagore monastery (two miles north of Calcutta), made pilgrimages to northern India, and in 1897 became President of the Belur Math and, in 1900, of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, founding and visiting Vedanta centers in and near India.
Breese, Eleanor and Vance. She was a novelist and secretary; he was a pilot. They were divorced but remained close and made an attempt to renew their marriage in 1956. She worked for Isherwood at Twentieth Century-Fox starting in September 1956. Her novel The Valley of Power appeared in 1945 under her pen name, Eleanor Buckles, but a second novel, about her marriage to Vance, was evidently never published. Later she co-wrote a memoir for Wynne O’Mara, Gangway for the Lady Surgeon: An Account of W. O’Mara’s Experiences as a Ship’s Surgeon (1958). Vance Breese also became a friend of Isherwood and Bachardy. In addition, Eleanor had a boyfriend, Charles Taylor (nicknamed Spud), who was a doctor; he examined Isherwood in May 1957 during a period of continuous ill health.
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