Ventura, Clyde (1936–1990). American actor and stage director, born in New Orleans. He was in the 1963 Broadway cast of Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, and he was Artistic Director of Theater West in Los Angeles, where he directed a number of Williams plays. He was also an acting coach at Actors Studio on the West Coast, and he had a few small movie roles. He appears in D.2.
Vera. See Stravinsky, Vera.
Vernon. See Old, Vernon.
Vidal, Gore (b. 1925). American writer. He introduced himself to Isherwood in a café in Paris in early 1948, having previously sent him the manuscript of his third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948). Vidal’s father taught at West Point, and Vidal was in the army as a young man. Afterwards, he wrote essays on politics and culture, short stories, and many novels, including Williwaw (1946), Myra Breckinridge (1968, dedicated to Isherwood), its sequel, Myron (1975), Two Sisters: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1970), Kalki (1978), Duluth (1983), The Judgement of Paris (1984), Live from Golgotha (1992), The Smithsonian Institute (1998), ancient and medieval historical fiction such as A Search for the King (1950), Messiah (1955), Julian (1964), Creation (1981), and the multi-volume American chronicle comprised of Burr (1974), Lincoln (1984), 1876, (1976), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1989), and Washington, D.C. (1967). He also published detective novels under a pseudonym, Edgar Box. During the 1950s, Vidal wrote a series of television plays for CBS, then screenplays at Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM (including part of Ben Hur), and two Broadway plays, Visit to a Small Planet (1957) and The Best Man (1960). His adaptation of Friedrich Duerrenmatt’s Romulus the Great, about Romulus Augustulus, ran on Broadway from January to March 1962. In 1960 Vidal ran for Congress, and in 1982 for the Senate, both times unsuccessfully. He bought Edgewater, a Greek Revival mansion on the Hudson River north of New York, and lived there off and on with Howard Austen, from 1950 until he sold it in 1968; later he settled in Rapallo, Italy, and finally in Los Angeles. Over the years, Vidal campaigned to become a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; with pushing from Isherwood, he was finally elected in 1976 but turned it down. He describes his friendship with Isherwood in his memoir, Palimpsest (1995) and in Point to Point Navigation (2006). There are many passages about him in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Vidor, King (1894–1982). American film director, screenwriter, producer; born and raised in Texas. He began directing in the silent era with The Turn in the Road for Universal in 1919, then formed his own studio, and afterwards worked for MGM. His movies include The Big Parade (1925), The Crowd (1928), Show People (1928), Billy the Kid (1930), The Champ (1931), Northwest Passage (1940), Duel in the Sun (1947), and The Fountainhead (1949). In D.1, Isherwood describes meeting him in Italy in 1955 on the set of War and Peace (1956), which Vidor was directing with the assistance of Mario Soldati. Vidor retired when his next film, Solomon and Sheba (1959), failed. During the 1960s he taught at UCLA film school, and in 1979 he received a special Academy Award as a creator and innovator in film. His first wife was silent screen star, Florence Vidor, who came to Hollywood with him in 1915 as a newlywed; they divorced in 1924. He was married to Eleanor Boardman, also a film star, for a few years in the mid-1920s. His third wife was a writer, Elizabeth Hill. He appears in D.2.
Vidya, also Vidyatmananda, Swami, previously John Yale. See Prema Chaitanya.
Viertel, Peter (1920–2007). German-born American screenwriter and novelist; second son of Berthold and Salka Viertel. He attended UCLA and Dartmouth and became a freelance writer, then served in the U.S. Marines during World War II and was decorated four times. He wrote the award-winning screenplay for Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as well as other Hemingway adaptations. His own novels are in the Hemingway vein, with subjects such as soldiering (Line of Departure, 1947), big game hunting (White Hunter, Black Heart, 1954), and bull-fighting (Love Lies Bleeding, 1964). His first novel, The Canyon (published in 1941, but completed when he was just nineteen), gives a compelling adolescent view of Santa Monica as it was around the time when Isherwood first arrived there. His first marriage was to Virginia Schulberg, and in 1960 he married the actress Deborah Kerr. Like his mother and father he eventually resettled in Europe. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years and is mentioned in D.2.
Viertel, Salka (1889–1978). Polish actress and screenplay writer; first wife of Berthold Viertel with whom she had three sons, Hans, Peter, and Thomas. Sara Salomé Steuermann Viertel had a successful stage career in Vienna (including acting for Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater) before moving to Hollywood where she became the friend and confidante of Greta Garbo; they appeared together in the German-language version of Anna Christie and afterwards Salka collaborated on Garbo’s screenplays for MGM in the 1930s and 1940s (Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, Conquest, and others). Isherwood met her soon after arriving in Los Angeles and was often at her house socially or to work with Berthold Viertel. In the 1930s and 1940s, the house was frequented by European refugees, and Salka was able to help many of them find work—some as domestic servants, others with the studios. Her guests included the most celebrated writers and movie stars of the time. In 1946, Isherwood moved into her garage apartment, at 165 Mabery Road, with Bill Caskey. By then Salka was living alone and had little money. Her husband had left; her lover Gottfried Reinhardt had married; Garbo’s career was over; and later, in the 1950s, Salka was persecuted by the McCarthyites and blacklisted by MGM for her presumed communism. In January 1947, she moved into the garage apartment herself and let out her house; in the early 1950s, she sold the property and moved to an apartment off Wilshire Boulevard. Eventually, she returned modestly to writing for the movies, but finally moved back to Europe, although she had been a U.S. citizen since 1939. She published a memoir, The Kindness of Strangers, in 1969. She appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Virgil. See Thomson, Virgil.
Vishwananda, Swami. Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order. Isherwood met him in 1943 when Vishwananda visited the Hollywood Vedanta Society and other centers on the West Coast. Vishwananda was head of the Vedanta Center in Chicago. He appears in D.1 and D.2.
Vivekananda, Swami (1863–1902). Narendranath Datta (known as Naren or Narendra and later as Swamiji) took the monastic name Vivekananda in 1893. He was Ramakrishna’s chief disciple. He came from a wealthy and cultured background and was attending university in Calcutta when Ramakrishna recognized him as an incarnation of one of his “eternal companions,” a free, perfect soul born into maya with the avatar and possessing some of the avatar’s characteristics. Vivekananda was trained by Ramakrishna to carry his message, and he led the disciples after Ramakrishna’s death, though he left them for long periods, first to wander through India as a monastic, practising spiritual disciplines, then to travel twice to America and Europe, where his lectures and classes spawned the first western Vedanta centers. In India he devoted much time to founding and administering the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. His followers hired a British stenographer, J.J. Goodwin, to transcribe his lectures; these transcriptions, which Goodwin probably edited into complete sentences and paragraphs, along with Vivekananda’s letters to friends and to his own and Ramakrishna’s disciples, were published as The Complete Works of Vivekananda. Isherwood wrote the introduction to one volume, What Religion Is: In the Words of Swami Vivekananda (1960), selected by Prema Chaitanya.
Vividishananda, Swami (d. 1980). Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order. Head of the Vedanta Center in Seattle. In D.1, Isherwood tells about meeting him in Portland in October 1943 and afterwards spending a few days at his center in Seattle. In 1974, Vividishananda had the first of a series of strokes which, by 1977, left him in a semi-coma; when he was not in the hospital, the monks cared for him at the Seattle center until his death. He was the author of A Man of God, about Swami Shivananda (also known as Mahapurush Maharak, or Tarak), a direct disciple of Ramakrishna. Isherwood contributed a Foreword to the paperback edition, which appeared with a new title, Saga of a Great Soul: Swami Shivananda
(1986).
Voeller, Bruce (1934–1994). American biologist. He left his associate professor-ship at Rockefeller University for gay activism in the early 1970s and helped found the National Gay Task Force (later the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force). In 1980, he created the Mariposa Foundation, based in Topanga, California, to study human sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases. He published a book and numerous studies about AIDS, and he originated the name Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome as an improvement over the stigmatizing Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome. At Mariposa, he also began collecting materials related to the history of the gay and lesbian movement, an archive he donated in 1988 to create the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University. Voeller commissioned Bachardy to do portraits of twelve gay and lesbian leaders: Charles Bryden, James Foster, Barbara Gittings, David Goodstein, Franklin Kameny, Morris Kight, Phyllis Lyon, Jean O’Leary, Del Martin, Elaine Noble, Troy Perry, and Voeller himself. These went on a national tour in 1981 and were donated to Cornell in 1995 by Voeller’s partner Richard Lucik. Voeller died of AIDS.
Voight, Jon (b. 1938). American stage and movie actor, born in Yonkers, educated at Catholic University and the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. His father was a golf pro of Czech background. Voight was in the Broadway production of The Sound of Music and worked in television Westerns during the 1960s before becoming a star as the hustler in Midnight Cowboy (1969), a role for which he received an Academy Award nomination and the New York Film Critics Best Actor Award. He opposed the Vietnam war and worked with Jane Fonda’s Entertainment People for Peace and Justice, then appeared with her in Coming Home (1978), for which he won an Academy Award as the paraplegic Vietnam veteran. Among his many other films are Catch-22 (1970), Deliverance (1972), The Odessa File (1974), The Champ (1979), Runaway Train (1985, Academy Award nomination), Ali (2001, Academy Award nomination), and National Treasure (2004). He married actress Lauri Peters in 1962 and Marcheline Bertrand in 1971 and divorced both times.
Wallwork, Leslie. Wealthy American queen; he lived alone, hired hustlers for sex, and liked to give dinner parties, especially for John Ashbery when Ashbery was in Los Angeles. He died in middle age, evidently of cancer. He was gossipy, funny, and ambitious of social power.
Wan, Barney. Chinese graphic designer and illustrator, born in Hong Kong; he studied in San Francisco during the 1950s. In 1959, he went to Paris and freelanced for Elle, French Vogue, and Marie-Claire. He joined British Vogue in 1967 and was Art Director there until 1979, living between London and Paris for many years. From 1970, he also began to design books, for Cecil Beaton, Lord Snowden, and later for various other photographers from London and from Kenya; among his titles is the prizewinning African Ceremonies (1990). He also designed film titles for If . . . (1968), Isadora (1968), and Sebastiane (1976).
Ward, Simon (b. 1941). British actor, educated at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, where he joined the National Youth Theatre before training at RADA. He became known on the London stage for his role in Joe Orton’s Loot in 1967. His films include Young Winston (1972), The Three Musketeers (1973), Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), All Creatures Great and Small (1974), and The Four Feathers (1977).
Warshaw, Howard (1920–1977). American artist, born in New York City, educated at Pratt Institute, the National Academy of Design Art School, and the Art Students League. He moved to California in 1942 and worked in the animation studios of Walt Disney and later Warner Brothers, then taught briefly at the Jepson Art Institute where he was influenced by a colleague, Rico Lebrun. In 1951, he began teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he remained for over twenty years. He painted murals in the Dining Commons at UCSB and at the Santa Barbara Public Library. At UCLA he painted the neurological mural, and he also did murals for U.C. San Diego and U.C. Riverside. He was blind in one eye. His wife Frances had money of her own. She had been married previously to Mel Ferrer with whom she had a daughter called Pepa and a son. Isherwood and Warshaw became friendly when Isherwood began teaching at UCSB, and Isherwood usually slept at their house when he stayed overnight in Santa Barbara. In 1954, Isherwood encouraged Bachardy to attend drawing classes with Warshaw in Los Angeles, but Bachardy found the class too theoretical and left. Years later, as Isherwood records, Warshaw sat for Bachardy. He appears in D.2.
Wasserman, Lew (1913–2002). Cleveland-born studio executive; he joined MCA as an agent in 1936, was president by 1946, merged it with Universal in 1962, and, as chairman and CEO, built the company into a global entertainment giant.
Watergate. In his entry for May 10, 1973, Isherwood mentions the indictments of John Mitchell and Maurice Stans, both close to President Nixon. Mitchell (1906–1988) was Attorney General until 1972 when he resigned to run the Committee to Re-elect the President; Stans (1908–1998) was Secretary of Commerce during Nixon’s first administration and then became Finance Chairman for the Committee to Re-elect the President. They were indicted with financier Robert Vesco for concealing a $200,000 cash contribution received from Vesco in April 1972 in exchange for influencing a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against him. Vesco was accused of looting over $200 million from foreign mutual funds. After Mitchell helped obtain Vesco’s release from a Swiss jail, Vesco fled to the Bahamas and then disappeared. Mitchell and Stans were acquitted in 1974, but Mitchell was convicted in 1975 on other charges and served eighteen months in prison before being paroled. On May 24, Isherwood also mentions James McCord (b. 1924), the former CIA and FBI officer who was security advisor for the Committee to Re-elect the President and who led the Watergate burglary. McCord had already been convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping, on January 20; on March 19, he wrote to Judge John Sirica saying that he and his cohorts had pleaded guilty under pressure and that lies had been told. This led to further investigations.
Waterston, Sam (b. 1940). American actor, educated at Groton and Yale; his many films include The Great Gatsby (1974), Heaven’s Gate (1980), and The Killing Fields (1984, Academy Award nomination). He won a Drama Desk Award as Benedick in Joseph Papp’s 1973 production, which Isherwood mentions, of Much Ado About Nothing. He is a longtime regular on the T.V. series “Law & Order.”
Weidenfeld, George (b. 1919). Viennese-born British publisher; trained as a lawyer and diplomat. He emigrated in 1938 and worked for the BBC during World War II, mostly commentating on European Affairs; he also wrote a foreign affairs column for The News Chronicle. After the war, he began publishing a magazine, Contact, and then founded Weidenfeld & Nicolson with Nigel Nicolson. Their first books appeared in 1949, focusing initially on history and biography. In the 1950s, they turned to fiction as well; Nabokov’s Lolita (1959) was their first best-seller. Weidenfeld & Nicolson also became known for its books by world political leaders and for diaries, letters, and memoirs of public figures. In 1949, Weidenfeld spent a year in Israel as a political adviser and Chief of Cabinet to President Chaim Weizmann, and afterwards he maintained close ties there. He wrote The Goebbels Experiment (1943) and an autobiography; for a time he had a column in Die Welt. He married four times and had one daughter with his first wife; his second wife, Barbara Skelton, had previously been married to Cyril Connolly. He appears in D.2.
Weissberger, L. Arnold (1907–1981). Top show-business and arts lawyer, for instance to Stravinsky, to ballerinas Alexandra Danilova and Alicia Markova, to Orson Welles, and many others. He was also a devoted amateur photographer and published Famous Faces: A Photographic Album of Personal Reminiscences (1973) containing nearly 1,500 pictures of his celebrity friends and acquaintances. He lived in New York with theatrical agent Milton Goldman.
Wescott, Glenway (1901–1987). American writer, born in Wisconsin. He attended the University of Chicago, lived in France in the 1920s, partly in Paris, and travelled in Europe and England. Afterwards he lived in New York. Early in his career he wrote poetry and reviews, later turning to fiction. His best-known works are The Pilgrim Hawk (1940) and Apartment in Athens (1945). Wescott was pr
esident of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 1957 to 1961. His long-term companion was Monroe Wheeler, although each had other lovers. In 1949, Wescott went to Los Angeles expressly to read Isherwood’s 1939–1945 diaries. While he was there, Isherwood introduced Wescott to Jim Charlton with whom Wescott had an affair. Wescott appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Wheeler, Hugh (1912–1987). English writer. He published mystery thrillers under the name Patrick Quentin. Later he wrote plays—Big Fish, Little Fish (1961); Look, We’ve Come Through (1961)— the books for the Sondheim musicals A Little Night Music (1973) and Sweeney Todd (1979), and screenplays (Something for Everyone, 1970). According to rumor, he wrote much of the screenplay for Cabaret though he was credited only as a technical advisor because of Writers Guild rules. He lived on a farm in Massachusetts with his black lover, John Grubbs. Wheeler was a good friend of Chris Wood, and possibly it was Wood who introduced Wheeler and Isherwood, probably in the 1940s. He appears in D.1.
Wheeler, Paul. British musician. When Isherwood met him in 1970, Wheeler was an undergraduate reading English at Cambridge. He played in London clubs and in a Cambridge band called Wild Oats. Later, he lived with his wife on the estate of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, worked as a civil servant and as a management trainer, and continued to sing and write songs on the side. He also performed with another band, Ghosts.
Whitcomb, Ian (b. 1941). British pianist, singer, ukulele player, record producer; educated at Bryanston and at Trinity College, Dublin. He moved to Los Angeles in 1965 when his song “You Turn Me On” reached number eight in the American Top Ten, and he performed there with the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, and The Kinks, among others. Later, he hosted a Los Angeles radio show and published books about the history of popular music, including After the Ball: Pop Music from Rag to Rock (1972), Tin Pan Alley: A Pictorial History (1919–1939), and Rock Odyssey: A Chronicle of the Sixties (1983). He appears in D.2.
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