Merchant, Ismail (1936–2005). Indian film producer and director. He got an MBA at New York University and provided the financial expertise in his long-running partnership with American director James Ivory, who was also his companion. They became virtually a brand in the 1980s and 1990s with their adaptations of Henry James and E.M. Forster, generally working closely with German-born screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Indian by marriage. Merchant directed two shorts, The Creation of a Woman (1960, Academy Award nomination) and Mahatma and the Mad Boy (1973), a T.V. documentary called “The Courtesans of Bombay” (1973), and, later, feature films including In Custody (1973), The Proprietor (1996), Cotton Mary (1999), and The Mystic Masseur (2002).
Meredith, Burgess (1907–1997). American actor and director. He distinguished himself in the theater in the early 1930s, moved to film in 1936 with his stage role in Winterset, and appeared in many subsequent films, including Of Mice and Men (1939), The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), Advise and Consent (1961), and Rocky (1976). He also played the Penguin in the Batman T.V. series. His third of four wives was actress Paulette Goddard, from 1944 to 1949. Meredith was blacklisted in 1949, and disappeared from movies for nearly a decade. In D.1, Isherwood tells how his plan to play Ransom in The Ascent of F6 was interrupted by the war; in D.2, Isherwood records Meredith’s interest in directing The Dog Beneath the Skin.
Merlo, Frank (1921–1963). Italian-American companion of Tennessee Williams; raised in New Jersey by his Sicilian immigrant parents. He met Williams in 1947. He had served in the navy and for a time continued to work as a truck driver. He was handsome and capable, kept house, cooked, and made travel, social and business arrangements for Williams. Isherwood first met him in Los Angeles when Merlo accompanied Williams on a visit there in 1949, and Merlo appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years. The relationship grew less stable during the late 1950s, and the pair were often apart during Merlo’s fatal illness with lung cancer; but it was the most lasting romance of Williams’s life, and Williams was at his bedside when Merlo died.
Methuen. Isherwood’s English publisher from the mid-1940s. Isherwood’s cousin, Graham Greene, recommended Mr. Norris Changes Trains to E.V. Rieu, a managing director at the firm, but Isherwood’s first book published by Methuen was Prater Violet in the spring of 1946 (well after the U.S. publication because of the war). In September 1935, Isherwood had signed a contract for his “Next three full-length available novels” and accepted half of a £300 advance on the first (styled in the contract Prata Violet); he had already promised his next novel to his current publisher, The Hogarth Press, and at Leonard Woolf ’s insistence, Sally Bowles, Goodbye to Berlin and Lions and Shadows were published by Hogarth. After the war, the contract with Methuen was honored, the second novel being The World in the Evening and the third, Down There on a Visit, which he delivered to Alan White in 1961. White joined Methuen in 1924, became a director in 1933, and retired as Chairman in 1966. When White retired, John Cullen became Isherwood’s editor, and after Cullen, Geoffrey Strachan. Methuen remained Isherwood’s U.K. publisher for the rest of his life and posthumously until 1997, when Random House took over the imprint which by then belonged to a larger group, Reed Books. Methuen achieved independence through a management buy-out, but agreed in the negotiations to let Isherwood go to Chatto & Windus at Random House. Random House was then already publishing Isherwood’s Diaries in a Vintage paperback edition, and, by chance, Chatto had in any case been the home since 1946 of Isherwood’s much earlier publisher, The Hogarth Press.
Meyer, David and Tony. Twin brothers, both actors. When Isherwood met them in London in 1970, David, the younger twin, was Mark Lancaster’s boyfriend. The twins appeared together that year in Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Roundhouse. Later they were in movies, The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and Octopussy (1985), and David appeared in Derek Jarman’s films, including The Tempest (1979). He also worked on the stage with Lindsay Kemp and later taught and acted at the Globe. Tony, who was straight, married and became a painter.
Michael. See Barrie, Michael.
Millard, Paul. American actor. He lived with Speed Lamkin in West Hollywood for a few years during the 1950s. He briefly called himself Paul Marlin, then later changed to Millard; his real name was Fink. He was good-looking and relatively successful on the New York stage and on T.V., but eventually joined his mother’s real estate business and invested in property. During 1959 and 1960, he loaned Bachardy a little house in West Hollywood to use as a studio, and around this time, the two had an affair which Isherwood apparently did not know about. Millard appears in D.1 and D.2; he died in the 1970s.
Miller, Dorothy (d. 1974). Cook and cleaner to Isherwood and Bachardy from 1958 until the early 1970s. On their recommendation she later kept house for the Laughtons as well, both in Hollywood and in Charles Laughton’s house next door to Isherwood and Bachardy in Adelaide Drive.
Milow, Keith (b. 1945). British painter, printmaker, and sculptor. He studied at the Camberwell School of Art and the Royal College of Art, and later worked in New York and Amsterdam.
Mishima, Yukio (1925–1970). Japanese author, of novels, short stories, poems, plays and essays; educated at Tokyo University. His real name was Kimitake Hiraoka. He was already famous in Japan when Alfred Knopf published The Sound of Waves in English translation in 1956 and invited Mishima to the U.S. the following year. Isherwood first met him during that visit, which he tells about in D.1, and they met again in November 1960, as he tells in D.2, when Mishima returned to the U.S. for the staging in New York of three of his Noh plays. By then Mishima had married Yoko Sugiyama, a student of English literature and daughter of the painter Yagushi Sugiyama, and the couple had had the first of their two children. More of Mishima’s work had been translated into English: Five Modern Noh Plays appeared in English in 1957, then Twilight Sunflower (also a volume of plays) and Confessions of a Mask (1949) in 1958, followed by The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1959) and many others. Confessions of a Mask addressed Mishima’s discovery of his homosexuality. His masterwork, Sea of Fertility, conceived in 1962 and completed in 1970, is a tetralogy about Japan in the twentieth century. Mishima was obsessed by the warrior traditions of Imperial Japan and was expert in martial arts. In 1968, he founded a military group, the Shield Society, to revive the Samurai code of honor. Disillusioned when the young did not answer his call for a return to nationalist ideals, he committed Seppuku; in his diary entry for November 25, 1970, Isherwood transcribed an account of the ritual suicide from the Los Angeles Times. Mishima was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize.
Mitchell, Charlie. Vedanta devotee; educated at UCLA, where he studied English and, later, law. Around 1971, he attracted followers to what he called the First Liberty Church (his own offshoot of the Universal Life Church), founded on meditation and, evidently, pot smoking, but he soon advised his devotees to follow Swami Prabhavananda; they were the core of what Isherwood refers to as the Venice Group. Mitchell ran a small recording company and oversaw its sale to Chrysalis. Afterwards, he practised law, became the lawyer for the Vedanta Society of Southern California and also served as the society’s vice-president. His Sanskrit name is Krishnadas. His wife was called Mary, later Apple, and finally Sita. Their son, Christopher, known as Lal Chand because of his red hair, got a Ph.D. in physics. Christopher became a monk at Trabuco, Asesha Chaitanya.
Mitchell, J.J. A friend and lover of Joe LeSueur and afterwards of Frank O’Hara; his relationship with O’Hara drove LeSueur out of the loft LeSueur and O’Hara had shared for many years. In May 1971, Isherwood mentions a new companion of Mitchell’s, Ron Holland. Holland was rich from personal success in publicity and advertising. Mitchell died of AIDS in his mid-forties.
Moffat, Ivan (1918–2002). British-American screenwriter, educated at Dartmouth; son of Iris Tree and her American husband Curtis Moffat. He worked on government-sponsored documentaries for Strand Films in London, served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps Special Coverage Unit under th
e American film director George Stevens during World War II, and returned to Los Angeles in 1946 as Stevens’s assistant. He worked with Stevens on A Place in the Sun (1951), was Stevens’s associate producer for Shane (1953), and co-wrote Giant (1956), before going on to work for David Selznick on Tender Is the Night (1962). Other screenplays include Bhowani Junction (1956), Boy on a Dolphin (1957), and Justine (1969). Moffat’s first wife was Natasha Sorokin, a Russian, once part of a ménage à trois with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Their marriage broke up at the start of the 1950s, leaving a daughter, Lorna. Moffat then had a number of beautiful and talented girlfriends, including the writer Caroline Blackwood with whom he fathered a daughter, Ivana, born in 1966 during Caroline’s second marriage to the composer and music critic Israel Citkowitz; Ivana’s paternity was kept secret until Caroline Blackwood’s death in 1996. In 1961, Moffat married Katharine Smith, known as Kate, a well-connected English heiress. As Isherwood records, the marriage ended in 1972. Moffat appears often in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years. Although Moffat was heterosexual, Isherwood identified with him, as an expatriate and as a romantic adventurer, and based both the main character in the first draft of Down There on a Visit and “Patrick” in A Meeting by the River partly on him.
Moffat, Kate. See Smith, Katharine.
Monday, Jon. See Dharmadas.
Monkhouse, Patrick (Paddy), John ( Johnny), Rachel. Childhood friends of Isherwood, raised near Marple in Disley, where they lived in a house called Meadow Bank with another, younger, sister, Elizabeth (Mitty), whom Isherwood got to know in 1947 when he visited Wyberslegh. Their father, Allan (1858–1956) was a journalist, theater critic, and playwright. The oldest brother, Patrick, also a journalist, was Isherwood’s close friend in adolescence. Patrick attended Oxford a year or two ahead of Auden and edited The Oxford Outlook. Later, he achieved a senior position at the Manchester Guardian and married. The Monkhouses appear in D.1 and Lost Years.
Montel, Michael. American stage director, once an actor. He was managing director of the New Phoenix Repertory Company which produced eight revivals on Broadway between 1973 and 1975. T. Edward Hambleton, a co-founder of the first Phoenix Theater, was also a managing director; the artistic directors were Hal Prince and Stephen Porter. John Houseman was a producing director of the first Phoenix Theater, and continued to be associated with the New Phoenix. Montel directed a few other Broadway plays and musicals, and also operas, including Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Copland’s The Tender Land.
Moody, Robert L. (1910–1973). British psychotherapist; raised in Surbiton and educated at Bromsgrove School. He began the Bachelor of Medicine course alongside Isherwood at King’s College Medical School, London, in October 1928 but left in 1930 without taking any exams. Later, he became one of the first directors of the Jungian organization, the Society of Analytical Psychology, when it was formally registered under that name in 1945. He was also an editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology and wrote various articles. He married three times, last to Louise Diamond. He appears as “Platt” in Lions and Shadows and is mentioned in D.2.
Moreau, Jeanne (b. 1928). French stage and screen star and singer; daughter of an English chorus girl. She was educated at the Paris Conservatory of Dramatic Art and became a leading actress for the Comédie Française and the Théâtre National Populaire before coming to international prominence in Louis Malle’s Frantic, (Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud, 1957, in France; released as Lift to the Scaffold in the U.K. and later retitled Elevator to the Gallows in the U.S.) and The Lovers (1958). Her many film roles after that, for a range of celebrated directors, include Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959), Moderato Cantabile (1960), La Notte (1961), Jules and Jim (1961), Eva (1962), The Trial (1963), Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), Chimes at Midnight (1966), The Bride Wore Black (1968), and Going Places (1974). She was married twice, briefly both times, and had many love affairs, including a complicated one with Tony Richardson while she was working with him on Mademoiselle (1966) and The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967).
Morgan. See Forster, E.M.
Moriarty, Michael (b. 1941). American actor and jazz pianist; raised in Detroit, educated at Dartmouth and at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. He won a Tony Award for his performance in Find Your Way Home, which Isherwood saw in 1974, and in the same year he won his first Emmy for his supporting role in a T.V. version of The Glass Menagerie with Katharine Hepburn. His films include Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), Pale Rider (1985), and The Hanoi Hilton (1987). In the early 1990s, he became known for his regular T.V. appearances on “Law & Order.” He had four wives; the second was Françoise Martinet, from 1966 to 1978; he divorced her to marry his third, from 1978 to 1997, Anne Hamilton Martin.
Mortimer, John (1923–2009). British barrister, novelist and playwright, educated at Harrow and Oxford. He wrote A Voyage Round My Father (1971) and Rumpole of the Bailey (1975) and its sequels, later a T.V. series. He is credited with adapting Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited for T.V. (1981), and he devised the script for Tea with Mussolini (1999), among many other projects. Tony Richardson directed his play of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius in the West End, opening July 11, 1972, after first proposing that Mortimer adapt it along with Claudius the God as a film. The production was not successful.
Mortimer, Raymond (1895–1980). English literary and art critic; he was writer and editor for numerous magazines and newspapers and wrote books on painting and the decorative arts as well as a novel. He was at Balliol College, Oxford, with Aldous Huxley and later became a close friend of Gerald Heard, introducing Heard to Huxley in 1929; he was also intimate with various Bloomsbury figures and an advocate of their work. From 1948 onward, he worked for The Sunday Times, spending the last nearly thirty years of his life as their chief reviewer. He appears in D.1 and D.2.
Mortmere. An imaginary English village invented by Isherwood and Edward Upward when they were at Cambridge together in the 1920s; the inhabitants were satires of generic English social types and were all slightly mad. As part of their rebellion against public school and university, Upward and Isherwood shared an elaborate fantasy life which was described by Isherwood in Lions and Shadows. The fragmentary stories the two wrote for each other about Mortmere were eventually published as a collection in 1994; Upward’s The Railway Accident appeared on its own in 1949.
Moses, Ed (b. 1926). American artist, born near Long Beach, California, and educated at UCLA. His early work reflects his interest in abstract expressionism, but he has explored many styles. His drawings, paintings and graphic designs are held by major museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, the Norton Simon Museum, and the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. His wife, Avilda, was a Southerner from a wealthy family and was for a time a follower of a Tibetan Buddhist mystic, Dezhung Rinpoche (1906–1987).
Mostert, Noël. Canadian journalist and short story writer, born in Cape Town, settled in Tangier. He was a military correspondent for Canadian forces in Europe and a U.N. correspondent in New York for the Montreal Star. His books include Supership (1974), about oil tankers, and the major work, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (1992).
Murdock, James (1931–1981). American actor; born David Baker. He worked mostly in T.V. Westerns in the late 1950s and 1960s: “Gunsmoke,” “Rawhide” (as Harkness “Mushy” Mushgrove, the cook’s assistant), “Have Gun, Will Travel,” and “Cheyenne.” Isherwood tended to misspell his name as Murdoch. He appears in D.2.
namaskar. Salutation; see pranam.
Nanny. See Avis, Annie.
Narendra, also Naren. See Vivekananda, Swami.
Natalie. See Leavitt, Natalie.
Natasha. See Spender, Natasha Litvin.
National Institute of Arts and Letters. The National Institute of Arts and Letters had 250 members chosen in recognition of their individual achievements in art, literature, and music. It amalgamat
ed in 1976 with the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was called the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, then later simplified its name to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Members are chosen for life, and they confer several awards of their own, including the E.M. Forster Award. The organization maintains a library and museum in Manhattan. Isherwood was elected in 1949.
National Portrait Gallery, London. After acquiring Bachardy’s 1967 portrait of Auden in 1969, Roy Strong left the NPG to become director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1974 and went on to a career as a writer and broadcaster. He was succeeded at the NPG by the art historian John Hayes, who was director from 1974 to 1993. Hayes was an expert in the paintings of Thomas Gainsborough. It was not until 1996, when Charles Saumarez Smith was director, that the NPG acquired Bachardy’s portraits of Ackerley (1961), Forster (1961), John Osborne (1968), and Thom Gunn (1996) and commissioned portraits of James Ivory, Ismail Merchant, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In 1998, the NPG purchased a ninth portrait, of Dodie Smith (1961).
Neal, Warren. Black psychiatric nurse. He was Jim Gates’s first real love after Gates left the monastery. Neal commuted to work at an institution northeast of Los Angeles, past Pomona, possibly in Bakersfield. He died of AIDS some time before Gates did, and a number of years after they broke up.