Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983
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38 Ed Moses, Larry Bell, Joe Goode, Tony Berlant, Ron Davis, Ed Ruscha, Ken Price, Peter Alexander; see Glossary for more about these artists whose works are widely exhibited.
39 Dusty and Sweets McGee (1971).
40 Poet, biographer, literary critic (b. 1915), from New Orleans, a longtime friend of Williams. He wrote about Carson McCullers, Anaïs Nin, and E.M. Forster, and worked as an English professor at several American universities.
41 Kilhefner; see Glossary.
42 Interior designer and photographer, a close friend of Tony Duquette, who introduced him to Isherwood, and of Irving Blum.
43 American political journalist (1918–1998); the screen adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Washington politics, Advise and Consent (1959), was Laughton’s last movie.
44 California-born Morris Fry catalogued the New Writing papers which Lehmann sold to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin; they met in 1969 and began an on-off affair.
45 A John Bradshaw emigrated to the U.S. in the seventeenth century and pretended to be Judge John Bradshaw (1602–1659), Isherwood’s ancestor born at Wyberslegh, who sentenced Charles I to death. As he tells in chapter 13 of Kathleen and Frank, Isherwood was unable to find out more.
46 I.e., the formal recognition of these services by the Queen in making him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
47 I.e., “The Other Boat,” mentioned above.
48 A joint exhibition with Ed Ruscha, opening December 1 at the Hansen-Fuller Gallery.
49 Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1970, A4.
50 This reconstructed diary appeared posthumously as Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951 (2000).
51 Adapted from Shakespeare’s play, with John Gielgud as Caesar, Charlton Heston as Mark Antony and Jason Robards as Brutus.
52 The Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a Christian charity.
53 Isherwood’s New York agent; see Glossary under Curtis Brown.
54 A secondhand book dealer.
55 Teenage film star (1923–2005) in Stage Door Canteen (1943), The Story of Sea Biscuit (1949), and others; he retired at thirty and began investing in real estate.
56 I.e. John Markovich.
57 The clock was given to Isherwood by Fräulein Thürau and is described in Goodbye to Berlin, p. 15. Finkelstein, a neighbor, cleaned and repaired it on at least one other occasion, in 1968.
58 Robert Walker Jr. (b. 1940) trained at Actors’ Studio in the early 1960s and appeared on stage, in a few films, and often on T.V.
59 Hendrik Van Keppel (b. 1914) and Taylor Green (b. 1914) ran a shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills selling furniture of their own design along with housewares, lighting and jewelry by others.
60 Chptr. 15.
61 Cf., “The inner life had paid,” Forster, Howards End, chptr. 37.
62 Elisabeth Luce Bradshaw Isherwood (1836–1921), his father’s mother.
63 The cliff on Oahu, over a thousand feet high.
64 A Universal executive.
65 The Daily Telegraph, August 7, 1970.
66 Grinnich, an actor who occasionally spent weekends with her.
67 Her agent; he represented actors, writers, and directors in Hollywood and New York and later became a casting director for T.V. and films.
68 Inflammation of a small sac or sacs formed on the outside of the colon.
69 Mark 5.9, when Jesus casts out the demons.
70 Tall, good-looking, and wealthy; once a companion of Speed Lamkin. He is mentioned in D.2.
71 Marietta Donegal in Two Sisters is modelled on Nin.
72 Apollo 14 made the third moon landing on February 5.
73 T.V. producer and director, for instance of “The Jack Benny Show” in the 1950s.
74 A Japanese papier-mâché horse which Bachardy gave Isherwood for his birthday August 26, 1962 (see D.2). It was about six inches high, seven inches from head to tail, and had one foreleg daintily raised.
75 Some apartments they had bought as an investment, on Hilldale Avenue in Santa Monica, financed partly with a loan.
76 A Hindu truism.
77 His wife had just died.
78 Four two-story deco buildings with duplex apartments, mostly hidden by shrubs, on the corner formed by Adelaide Drive, Ocean Avenue and San Vicente Boulevard.
79 London bookseller (1906–1986); The Schoolmistress and Other Stories was the volume Isherwood didn’t have when he resolved for the New Year to read his Constance Garnett translation.
80 From a non-portrait series inspired by still pictures of movie stars.
81 Charles Manson and his gang were convicted on January 25 of murdering seven adults and Sharon Tate’s unborn child; in early February, the court reconvened for a jury trial to decide punishment.
82 Anthony Shaffer (1926–2001), twin brother of playwright Peter Shaffer, studied law at Cambridge and worked in advertising and T.V. production; he adapted his Tony-Award-winning play Sleuth for the screen. Other screenplays include Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972).
83 Miller (1919–1986), journalist, screen and T.V. writer, novelist, and biographer of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson, published “What It Means to Be a Homosexual” in The New York Times Magazine on January 17, 1971.
84 Jeane Dixon (1918–1997), astrologer and Washington socialite, famous for her prediction that Kennedy would die in office.
85 I.e., August 1952 to September 1953, when he lived in her garden house.
86 Chptr. 20.
87 Clay (b. 1942), known as Muhammad Ali since joining the Nation of Islam in 1964, lost the World Heavyweight Championship to Joe Frazier on March 8.
88 The Bengali independence movement was reaching crisis point in Pakistan; see Glossary under Bangladesh.
89 “The Platonic Blow,” written in 1948 and circulated in typescript; it was first printed, without Auden’s permission, in 1965.
90 Once a publicist for the Santa Fe Opera; she was retrained by the Stravinskys in 1959 to manage some concerts in New York and became an unofficial press liaison. Isherwood typed Lilian Litman.
91 An invented character based on Byron’s real-life doctor, John Polidori, who appears in the film’s historical prologue and epilogue. In later versions, both the invented and the real characters are called Polidori.
92 U.S. Lieutenant William Calley received a life sentence on March 31 for murdering hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in March 1968 at the village of My Lai in South Vietnam.
93 Second annual Gay Pride parade commemorating the June 29, 1969 riots outside the Stonewall bar on Christopher Street in New York City.
94 Longtime studio executive in T.V. production at Universal.
95 “The Confessions of Marian Evans” (1969), directed by Don Taylor for the BBC arts program “Omnibus.”
96 Chptr. 16.
97 Chptr. 26.
98 Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906).
99 A retrospective, “Andy Warhol,” May 1–June 20, Whitney Museum of American Art.
100 By Paul Zindel; Rae Allen won a Tony for Best Featured Actress, and Estelle Parsons was nominated for Best Actress.
101 Yukoku (1966), based on his 1960 novella; the English title is Patriotism or, sometimes, The Rite of Love and Death.
102 He danced for Balanchine from age seventeen and later became a choreographer and the first artistic director of the Carolina Ballet.
103 Halpern (b. 1945), a poet, co-founded Antaeus with Paul Bowles. He also co-founded Ecco Press, acquired in 1999 by HarperCollins, which made him publisher of one volume of Isherwood’s diaries.
104 I.e., of Pirandello’s play.
105 Stephen Sondheim’s musical, playing on Broadway since April 4.
106 American painter, teacher, writer, and lecturer on art (1920–1989), married to the Dutch-born artist Willem de Kooning since 1943.
107 Bloom (b. 1931, London) won a 1971 Drama Desk award for the role.
108 Probably the often-reproduced
shot taken beside the Paleys’ pool in Jamaica soon after Capote was introduced to them by the Selznicks in 1955.
109 The Happy Years (1972), volume 3 of his diaries, tells about the love affair which began in 1947; further passages about Garbo appear in volume 4, The Strenuous Years (1973). The sex is only implied, not explicitly described.
110 A historical romance about Catherine Howard originally published as a trilogy: The Fifth Queen and How She Came to Court (1906), Privy Seal (1907), The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908).
111 They were Vedanta devotees; see Glossary under Mitchell.
112 Siegel (1902–1978), Latvian-born American poet, philosopher, critic, and essayist based his personal philosophy on three principles: living honestly, the danger of contempt for the world, and uniting opposites.
113 I.e., self-haters, suffering from shame and disappointment.
114 American (b. 1945), he later starred in the 1980s T.V. series “Dempsey and Makepeace” and in the 2003 stage musical Jerry Springer–The Opera.
115 German stage and film star (1905–1986), famous at seventeen in Max Reinhardt’s The Speaking Ape; she married a co-star, Oscar Homolka, and, later, an American railroad tycoon Howard Gould, then returned to Germany where she appeared in modern American plays.
116 I.e., Sodom et Gomorrhe.
117 The Beat Generation (1971), one of Cook’s (1923–2003) more than twenty fiction and non-fiction books; he also worked at Newsweek and USA Today.
118 It appeared in 1964 from the Vedanta Press and from Allen and Unwin in London.
119 Evidently Sidney Sheinberg; see below and Glossary.
120 Out Cry.
121 I.e., Ben Masselink.
122 Oxyphencyclimine, an antocholinergic used for treating peptic ulcers.
123 La Casa de los Animales, i.e., 145 Adelaide Drive.
124 Not his real name.
125 Not his real name.
126 Hall (b. 1928)—poet, playwright, autobiographer, essayist, educated at Harvard and Oxford and appointed fourteenth poet laureate of the U.S. in 2006—had already published books on Henry Moore and Marianne Moore. He drafted half a million words and roughed out one hundred pages of the biography, but Lanchester didn’t like it, and Hall destroyed the manuscript and his notes.
127 A screenplay Lambert was working on; never filmed.
128 Byrd (b. 1947) got an MFA from the University of California at Irvine, went on to paint in abstract geometric style, and illustrated a text book for Macmillan.
129 Dan Crane; he later left and married.
130 Wall Street lawyer turned broadcasting executive; he became president of NBC in 1974 and later a media and entertainment analyst.
131 Who directed it; see Glossary.
132 Chartwell Artists produced the 1971 faked documentary in which war protesters must choose between prison sentences or a three-day desert crossing pursued by National Guardsmen authorized to shoot and kill them. “Culloden” (1964) was made for BBC T.V.
133 Rumens (b. 1949) attended Magdalen College; later he made environmental films and was a Green Party activist. The literary society was The Oxford Critical Society.
134 Directed by Nicolas Roeg.
135 Wood’s best friend, who died in England in 1943, as Isherwood records in D.1.
136 Joanne Carson; see Glossary.
137 Nirmalananda (1863–1938), or Tulsi Maharaj, is sometimes considered one of seventeen direct disciples of Ramakrishna, but in Ramakrishna and His Disciples Isherwood includes only sixteen. He appears in some photographs as Ramakrishna’s disciple, but also described himself as a disciple of Vivekananda. His uncertain status evidently symbolizes Prabhavananda’s own conflicting feelings of longing and humility as his death approached and he prepared to “join” the circle of disciples.
138 Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), architect of Henry VIII’s Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury, was burned at the stake by Henry’s Roman Catholic daughter Mary Tudor when she became queen. He pushed his right hand into the flames first for its offence in signing a recantation, forced from him, of his Protestant beliefs.
139 Isherwood wrote “John,” perhaps transposing with the first name, mentioned in the same sentence, of his editor at Methuen.
140 Wood (1905–1985) represented many celebrated playwrights, including, until 1971, Tennessee Williams. The agency she once ran with her husband, William Liebling, was bought by MCA in 1954.
141 Stoker (1932–1988), who ran away from home at seventeen, was well read, intelligent, a drinker, and never successfully employed. He was Lehmann’s sexual partner, cleaner, and travelling companion from the late 1950s until an angry split not long before Stoker’s sudden death in 1988.
142 Eric Boman, then an illustrator and fabric designer, later a well-known fashion photographer, became Schlesinger’s long-term companion.
143 The book never appeared; see Glossary under Hoopes.
144 British star (1938–1999) then at the height of his career after Oliver! (1968), Women in Love (1969), and The Devils (1971).
145 American Modernist painter (1883–1935), trained in Philadelphia and Paris; he exhibited with Alfred Steiglitz’s group at the American Place Gallery.
146 Bhakti yoga, the path of love, is the most natural path to God; Jnana, the path of knowledge, relies on the intellectual power of the mind to discriminate between the real and the unreal.
147 I.e., someone who supports one party, then another.
148 Richardson directed Mortimer’s stage adaptation of I, Claudius, but there was no film. The girlfriend was Grizelda Grimond (b. 1942). See Glossary.
149 Not his real name.
150 American actor and lawyer (b. 1931), educated at Exeter and Harvard; he came from an acting family and appeared on Broadway and in films before studying law at UCLA. He still worked occasionally in T.V.
151 Joy Palmerton survived to old age and enjoyed a second marriage to “Mitch” Mitchell, with whom she settled in Monterey.
152 I.e., Ramakrishna.
153 In Lost Years, Isherwood urges that he did not pee on Chaplin’s sofa and that Chaplin may have had some other reason for ending the friendship, around April 1950.
154 Deliverance.
155 They followed Paramananda’s charismatic niece, Gayatri Devi, thereby ending their official relationship with Belur Math; and after her death, they followed a longtime American nun, Sudha Ma. Prabhavananda and, later, Swami Swahananda tried—so far without success—to help them rejoin the Vedanta Society.
156 In Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” the dead valet who haunts Bly.
157 “An interview with Christopher Isherwood,” The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 2, Sept. 1972, pp. 143–158, published at Eastern Michigan University where Geherin became a professor of twentieth-century British and American fiction; he got his Ph.D. from Purdue in 1970.