Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  James, Edward (Eddie) (1907–1984). Youngest child and only son of Willie James and Evelyn Forbes; heir to an American railroad fortune. His parents frequently entertained King Edward VII at West Dean Park. Edward James was a godson and rumored to be son of the monarch, although he himself evidently thought he was a grandson, and his mother a beloved illegitimate daughter. He was an early patron of the Surrealists (especially Dali), and was married briefly in the 1930s to Tilly Losch, the Austrian ballerina, launching a ballet company to further her career. His poetry appeared in vanity editions, paid for by himself. Isherwood knew James by the start of the 1950s, probably through the Stravinskys who, with the Baroness D’Erlanger, were among his close friends in Hollywood, and James appears in D.1. He spent much of his time in Mexico where he was friendly with the English painter Leonora Carrington and a young Indian man called Plutarcho Gastelum, and where he had a coffee finca in Xilitla (pronounced he-heet-la), near Tampico. There, he was often accompanied by the mysterious German writer “B. Traven” (Albert Otto Max Feige). In the last decade of his life, James built an uninhabited concrete city in the jungle, a surrealist art work.

  Jan. See Niem, Jan.

  japa or japam. A method for achieving spiritual focus in Vedanta by repeating one of the names for God, usually the name that is one’s own mantra; sometimes the repetitions are counted on a rosary. The rosary of the Ramakrishna Order has 108 beads plus an extra bead, representing the guru, which hangs down with a tassel on it; at the tassel bead, the devotee reverses the rosary and begins counting again. For each rosary, the devotee counts one hundred repetitions towards his own spiritual progress and eight for mankind. Isherwood always used a rosary when making japa. Japam is a Tamil form which came into use among Bengali swamis of the Ramakrishna Order—including Prabhavananda, Ashokananda, Akhilananda—because they spent varying periods of time in the Madras Math.

  Jarre, Maurice (b. 1924). French composer, educated at the Paris Conservatory; he was musical director for the Théâtre National Populaire and began writing music for French movies in the 1950s. He became famous with his scores for Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), both of which won Academy Awards for best music, and went on to write the music for Barbarella (1968), The Damned (1969), Ryan’s Daughter (1970), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), A Passage to India (1984; Academy Award), Witness (1985), Fatal Attraction (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989), and others. Although he told Isherwood in 1973 that he would not compose the music for “Frankenstein” unless it was made as a feature film, he did compose for T.V. occasionally. He is the father of composer Jean-Michel Jarre.

  Jebb, Julian (1934–1984). British journalist, filmmaker, BBC producer; educated at Cambridge. He was an alcoholic and died from an overdose of a sedative prescribed for alcoholics. The December 1973 film he made of Isherwood was used in “Hooray for Hollywood,” an “Arena: Cinema” program which also featured interviews with Neil Simon and David Puttnam. “Hooray for Hollywood” was presented and produced by Gavin Millar and went out October 10, 1978 on BBC 2. Bachardy recalls that Jebb’s film may also have been aired by itself on another, earlier occasion.

  Jennifer. Also Jennifer Selznick and, later, Jennifer Simon; see Jones, Jennifer.

  Jess. See Bachardy, Jess.

  Jo. Also Jo Lathwood. See Masselink, Jo.

  Johnson, Bart (not his real name). American school teacher. An amateur writer with whom Isherwood had a brief sexual relationship at the end of the 1950s. Isherwood tried to help Johnson with his writing, but without success.

  Johnson, Clifford (Cliff ). Professor of English. He joined the Vedanta Society in 1960 and lived at Trabuco until the late 1970s. He became a brahmachari and was managing editor of Vedanta and the West for some years. Swami Prabhavananda gave him the Sanskrit name Bhuma.

  Johnson, Lamont (Monty) (1922–2010). American actor and, especially, director; educated at UCLA and the Neighborhood Playhouse. He worked in radio as a teenager to pay his way through college, then moved to New York where he continued in radio soaps and directed an off-Broadway production of Gertrude Stein’s Yes Is for a Very Young Man. In 1959, he was a founder of the UCLA Theater Group, and during the 1960s and 1970s he won numerous Emmys and Screen Directors Guild awards for his T.V. miniseries and made-for-T.V. movies. He also directed episodes of popular shows like “Have Gun Will Travel,” “The Rifleman,” and “The Twilight Zone,” and a few feature films, including The Last American Hero (1973) and Lipstick (1976). He acted on T.V. and in a number of movies. He appears in D.2.

  Jones, Jack. American painter; a disciple and, later, close friend of Gerald Heard. Some of his best work was of Margaret Gage’s garden on Spoleto Drive, where Heard lived until 1962, and he shared Heard’s interest in clothing and costume. Jones was about the same age as Don Bachardy and lived nearby in Santa Monica Canyon, so they sometimes sat for each other. He appears in D.2.

  Jones, Jennifer (Phylis Isley) (1919–2009). American actress, born in Tulsa, Oklahoma; in childhood she travelled with her parents’ stock stage company and spent hours in her father’s movie theaters. After a brief stint at Northwestern University, she attended the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, left for a radio job in Tulsa, and began her Hollywood career in B-movies in 1939. She was discovered in 1941 by David Selznick, who changed her name and took control of her career with spectacular results. She won an Academy Award for The Song of Bernadette in 1943, followed by Since You Went Away (1944, Academy Award nomination), Love Letters (1945, Academy Award nomination), Duel in the Sun (1946, Academy Award nomination), Portrait of Jennie (1948), Madame Bovary (1949), Carrie (1951), Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955, Academy Award nomination), A Farewell to Arms (1957), Tender is the Night (1962), The Towering Inferno (1974), and others. Her 1939 marriage to the actor Robert Walker, with whom she had two sons, ended in divorce in 1945, and Selznick left his wife, Irene Mayer, for Jones; they married in 1949. His obsession with Jones combined with her own emotional instability (including suicide attempts) made a melodrama of their careers and their private lives. In 1965, Selznick died, leaving huge debts. In 1971, Jones married a third time, to Hunt Foods billionaire and art collector Norton Simon. On May 11, 1976, her only child with Selznick, Mary Jennifer, committed suicide; partly as a result, Jones created the Jennifer Jones Foundation for Mental Health and Education and trained as a lay therapist and volunteer counsellor. Isherwood first met her when he worked with Selznick on Mary Magdalene in 1958, and he took her to meet Swami Prabhavananda in June that year. He writes about the friendship in D.1 and D.2.

  Julie. See Harris, Julie.

  Kali. Hindu goddess; the Divine Mother and the Destroyer, usually depicted dancing or standing on the breast of a prostrate Shiva, her spouse, and wearing a girdle of severed arms and a necklace of skulls. Kali has four arms: the bleeding head of a demon is in her lower left hand, the upper left hand holds a sword; the upper right hand gestures “be without fear,” the lower right confers blessings and boons on her devotees. Kali symbolizes the dynamic aspect of the godhead, the power of Brahman: she creates and destroys, gives life and death, well-being and adversity. She has other names: Shakti, Parvati, Durga. Kali was Ramakrishna’s Chosen Ideal, and for a number of years, he devoted himself to worshipping her image in her temple at Dakshineswar. Kali puja is usually celebrated in November, and in southern California the festivities all take place in Hollywood because the ritual is complex and demanding; each year a large statue of Kali is made for worship; it takes several months to make and is about three and a half feet high. About a week after the puja, the statue is taken out to sea on a hired boat and immersed, with devotees singing and celebrating on the journey. The immersion symbolizes Kali’s return to her celestial abode, where her husband Shiva resides.

  Kallman, Chester (1921–1975). American poet and librettist; Auden’s companion and collaborator. They met in New York in May 1939 and lived together intermittently in New York, Ischia
, and Kirschstetten for the rest of Auden’s life, though Kallman spent time with other friends, often in Athens as he grew older. He published three volumes of poetry and with Auden wrote and translated opera libretti, notably The Rake’s Progress (for Stravinsky), Elegy for Young Lovers, and The Bassarids (both for Hans Werner Henze). He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Kaper, Bronislau (1902–1983). Polish-born composer, trained at Warsaw Conservatory; he wrote music for German films in Berlin, then, fleeing Hitler, emigrated to Paris and Hollywood where he continued his career at MGM. His film scores include the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (1935); Green Dolphin Street (1947), from which the theme became a jazz favorite; The Great Sinner (1949), for which Isherwood wrote the script; Invitation (1952) directed by Gottfried Reinhardt; and Lili (1953), for which Kaper won an Academy Award. He appears in D.2.

  Kaplan, Joseph (1902–1991). Hungarian-born physicist, educated at Johns Hopkins and Princeton. He was a professor at UCLA and, for a time, chairman of the Physics department and director of the Institute of Geophysics. As a long-time chairman of the U.S. Committee of the International Geophysical Year, he encouraged the exploration of outer space with rockets and satellites in the 1950s. He also helped to found the Global Atmospheric Research Program. In 1957, he advised the press of the greenhouse effect, predicting ocean levels would rise by at least forty feet and advocating scientific control of the earth’s weather and temperature. He married twice, the second time in 1977.

  Kasmin, John (b. 1934). British art dealer, known by his surname, Kasmin; educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He opened a gallery in New Bond Street in 1963, backed by the 5th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, a Guinness heir, to show new British and American art. Hockney had his first show with Kasmin that year, followed by many others, and Kasmin quickly became a pre-eminent London dealer. The gallery closed in 1972, but he had three other galleries in the neighborhood over the next twenty years. His son, Paul Kasmin, later opened a gallery in New York and showed Hockney there.

  Kathleen. See Isherwood, Kathleen Bradshaw.

  Katz, James C. ( Jim). Film producer; he worked with Michael Laughlin on an idea for a film called The Nymph and the Lamp. Later, he got into film preservation, restoring 70 mm films, including Spartacus, My Fair Lady, Vertigo, and Rear Window.

  Kelley, Howard. Upstairs neighbor to Denny Fouts at 137 Entrada Drive, where Isherwood and Bill Caskey first met him with his friend, Wallace Bobo, during the late 1940s. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Kerr, Deborah (1921–2007). Scottish-born actress, trained as a ballet dancer at Sadler’s Wells, where she joined the corps de ballet as a teenager; she soon turned to the stage and then made her film debut in Major Barbara (1941). She became a Hollywood star in The Hucksters (1947) and made a sensation playing an adulteress opposite Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity (1953). She was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for this and for five other roles, in Edward My Son (1949), The King and I (1956), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Separate Tables (1958), and The Sundowners (1960). Her other films include The Avengers (1942), Black Narcissus (1947), King Solomon’s Mines (1950), The End of the Affair (1955), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), The Chalk Garden (1964), and The Night of the Iguana (1964). She retired from making movies in 1969, but continued to work on stage, where she appeared in Tea and Sympathy (1953) and Seascape (1975), among others. Her T.V. roles include “Witness for the Prosecution” (1983) and Emma Harte in “A Woman of Substance” (1982). Her first husband, with whom she had two daughters, was fighter pilot Anthony Bartley, a hero of the Battle of Britain and later a T.V. writer and producer in Hollywood. In 1960, she married Peter Viertel. She appears in D.1.

  K.H.3. An anti-aging preparation developed by a Romanian doctor, Ana Aslan, and promoted in the 1960s and 1970s; the active ingredient is procaine, the local anaesthetic widely used by dentists and typically known by its brand name, Novocaine, K.H.3 possibly has a mild antidepressant effect, but it never persuaded the medical establishment and is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S.

  Kight, Morris (1919–2003). Pioneer gay rights activist, born in Texas. He founded the Gay Liberation Front in 1969, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, the Stonewall Democratic Club, and Christopher Street West, which organizes the West Hollywood Gay Pride Parade.

  Kilhefner, Don (b. circa 1940). Jungian therapist, based in West Hollywood. He co-founded with Morris Kight the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center in 1971 and Van Ness Recovery House. In 1979, he founded the pagan-inspired Radical Faeries with Harry Hay and, in 1999, the shamanistic Gay Men’s Medicine Circle.

  Kimbrough, Clinton (1933–1996). American actor and director, sometimes credited as Kimbro. He appeared at the American National Theater and Academy at Washington Square in New York during the first half of the 1960s; he also had small roles in a few films and narrowly missed being cast as one of the killers in the film of Capote’s In Cold Blood. He had affairs with both sexes, including, as Isherwood records in D.2, Gavin Lambert. Bachardy did many drawings and paintings of him and of his wife, Frances Doel. She was a script girl on low-budget films, then began to work on her own screenplays and original stories, including Big Bad Mama (1974) and Crazy Mama (1975), in which her husband had a small part. Later she became a producer and a script development consultant.

  King, Perry (b. 1948). American actor, born in Ohio, educated at Yale and Juilliard. He appeared regularly on T.V. in “Riptide,” “Melrose Place,” “Titans,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” and in numerous made-for-T.V. movies. His feature films include Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), The Lords of Flatbush (1974), The Wild Party (1975), which Isherwood mentions, Mandingo (1975), and Lipstick (1976). His first wife, from 1970 to 1980, was Karen Hryharrow.

  Kirstein, Lincoln (1907–1996). American dance impresario, author, editor, and philanthropist, raised in Boston, son of a wealthy self-made businessman. He was educated at Berkshire, Exeter, and Harvard, where he was founding editor of Hound and Horn, the quarterly magazine on dance, art, and literature. He also painted, and he helped found the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. In 1933, Kirstein persuaded the Russian choreographer George Balanchine to come to New York, and together they founded the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. Kirstein was also involved in founding the Museum of Modern Art. His taste and critical judgement combined with his entrée into wealthy society enabled him to recognize and promote some of the greatest artistic talent of the twentieth century. In 1941, he married Fidelma (Fido) Cadmus, sister of the painter Paul Cadmus. He served in the army from 1943 to 1946. Isherwood’s first meeting with him in New York in 1939 was suggested by Stephen Spender, who had met Kirstein in London, and Kirstein appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years. He is a model for Charles in The World in the Evening. His poetry was admired by Auden, and Isherwood mentions reviewing his Rhymes of a PFC (1964) when Kirstein reissued it as Rhymes and More Rhymes of a PFC (1966). But their friendship ended that year, when Kirstein commissioned Bachardy to do portraits of the New York City Ballet stars without consulting Balanchine. Bachardy was disappointed when the project was scrapped, and he later blamed himself for the fact that Kirstein thereafter refused to see Isherwood even though Auden tried to reconcile them.

  Kiser, Kirsten (Kiki). With her husband, Tony Kiser, she bought and restored 757 Kingman Avenue in Santa Monica, but, as Isherwood records, felt threatened there. The house, modern and minimalist in style and boasting a secret staircase, was built in 1930 by MGM production designer Cedrick Gibbons for his wife, the Mexican actress Dolores del Rio. They divorced in 1941. Gibbons’s brother, screenwriter Eliot Gibbons, married Irene, the MGM costume designer, who killed herself in 1962. Reportedly, Frances Farmer also lived in the house for a time, and Van Johnson owned it before Kiser. Kiser later divorced; eventually she became a licensed architect, launched an architecture website, and mounted a Frank Gehry retrospective in Copenhagen.

  Kiskadden, Peggy. Thric
e-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. She died in the 1990s. There are numerous passages about her and her family in D.1 and Lost Years and some in D.2.

  Kitaj, R.B. (Ronald) (1932–2007). American painter and graphic artist, born in Cleveland, Ohio; he was a merchant seaman and served in the army before studying at Cooper Union in New York, the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford, and the Royal College of Art in London, where he became friendly with his fellow student David Hockney. He had his first one-man show at the Marlborough New London Gallery in 1963. Isherwood describes his April–May 1970 show at Marlborough Fine Art, and Kitaj continued to exhibit there while achieving international recognition. In the early 1960s, he taught at the Camberwell School of Art, and later at the University of California at Berkeley and at Dartmouth College. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1991. His 1994 retrospective at the Tate was harshly criticized by the British press and soon afterwards his second wife, American painter Sandra Fisher, died of a brain hemorrhage at forty-six, driving Kitaj to leave London in 1997 and settle in Los Angeles.