Berlant, Anthony (Tony) (b. 1941). American artist, born in New York, raised and educated in Los Angeles where he got B.A., M.A., and M.F.A. degrees at UCLA. He is known for his large collages made from painted sheets of metal. His first solo show, in 1963, was at the David Stuart Gallery in Los Angeles; his work is held by the Hirshhorn, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney, and he has executed public commissions for the Fox Network Center in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Airport, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Mayo Clinic, and the Target Corporation in Minneapolis. Much of his work reflects his preoccupation with the desert, and he is also a collector and dealer in Navajo blankets, Mimbres pottery, and early human artifacts.
Bertrand, Marcheline (1950–2007). American actress and model, part French-Canadian, part Iroquois Indian. She studied with Lee Strasberg and had bit roles in Lookin’ to Get Out (1982) and the Blake Edwards remake of The Man Who Loved Women (1983). In 1971, as Isherwood records, she married Jon Voight, with whom she had two children, James Haven and Angelina Jolie, before divorcing in 1978. She was later married for five years to Tom Bessamra.
Bhadhrananda. See Worton, Len.
Bhavyananda. Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order; head, when Isherwood visited there in 1970, of the London Ramakrishna-Vedanta Centre. As a jnani, his discipline was to identify with God rather than to worship God dualistically. Also, he was a medical doctor, trained at the Karachi Ramakrishna Mission under Swami Ranganathananda, who emphasized lecturing and social service above devotional activities. Many jnanis perform pujas, but Bhavyananda had relatively recently arrived from India, where heads of centers rarely perform pujas.
Birtwell, Celia. See Clark, Celia.
Blanch, Lesley (1904–2007). English journalist and author. She studied painting at the Slade, designed book jackets, and from 1937 to 1944 was an editor at Vogue. Her books include The Wilder Shores of Love (1954), The Sabres of Paradise (1960), The Nine-Tiger Man (1965), Pavilions of the Heart (1974), biography, travel essays, cook books, and an autobiography titled Journey Into the Mind’s Eye (1968). She married twice, the second time to the Russian-born French novelist, diplomat, and film director, Romain Gary (1914–1980), whom she met in England during World War II. She was posted with him to Bulgaria and Switzerland, and she travelled widely elsewhere before they divorced in 1962 in Los Angeles, where he was the French consul. Blanch was a close friend of Gavin Lambert who introduced her and Romain Gary to Isherwood and Bachardy during the 1950s; Isherwood also tells about their friendship in D.1 and she appears in D.2. Later she settled in France.
Blum, Irving (b. 1930). American art dealer. As a salesman for Hans Knoll, purveyor of modernist furniture, he helped Knoll’s Cranbrook-trained wife, Florence, carry out corporate decorating assignments, which often included paintings, and he frequented the Manhattan art scene before joining the Ferus Gallery on La Cienaga Boulevard in 1957. His efforts to create a clientele included organizing classes with co-owner Walter Hopps to educate West Coast collectors. In 1967, he opened his own gallery, where he continued to show contemporary Californian artists including Ed Moses, Billy Al Bengston, and Don Bachardy, and more widely known talents like Diebenkorn, Stella, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Johns. Later he opened a New York gallery with Mark Helman. He appears in D.2.
Blum, Shirley Neilsen (b. 1932). American scholar of Renaissance painting, educated at Stockton College, the University of Chicago, and the University of California; she was a professor of art history at U.C. Riverside for eleven years, and afterwards on the East Coast. Irving Blum was her first husband; when she remarried, she took the name Resnek.
Bobo, Wallace (Bobo). Neighbor of Denny Fouts at 137 Entrada Drive, where he lived with his friend Howard Kelley. He worked as a gardener. Bobo and Kelley attended all Fouts’s parties in the late 1940s and were often in his apartment. Bobo later became an alcoholic. He appears in D.1 and in Lost Years.
Bogdanovich, Peter (b. 1939). American director, producer, screenwriter. He studied acting with Stella Adler, appeared in Shakespeare, directed off-Broadway, wrote features and profiles for Esquire and monographs and books on Fritz Lang, John Ford, Orson Welles, and others before starting to work in film himself. The Last Picture Show (1971) made him famous, and he had a few other successes, including What’s Up Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973).
Boorman, John (b. 1933). British film director; educated at Salesian College, Chertsey, Surrey. He was a film critic and a T.V. news editor before achieving recognition for his BBC documentaries. His first feature was Catch Us If You Can / Having a Wild Weekend (1965) about the British rock group The Dave Clark Five, and he went to Hollywood to make Point Blank (1967) and Hell in the Pacific (1968), both starring his friend Lee Marvin. He won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for Leo the Last (1970) and became famous with Deliverance (1972), which he directed and produced and for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He then wrote, directed and produced Zardoz (1974), a science-fiction film starring Sean Connery as a barbarian warrior who worships a stone head representing the god, Zardoz, and which had no success. His later films include Excalibur (1981), The Emerald Forest (1985, nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Producer and Best Screenplay), Hope and Glory (1987, New York Film Critics Circle Best Director and Best Screenplay, Academy Award nomination), and The General (1998, Best Director award at Cannes). In the late 1950s, he married Christel Kruse, costume designer on several of his films, and they had a son and three daughters, all of whom have been involved in his films.
Bopp, Bill (b. 1932). A friend of Bachardy; he worked in administration for Burroughs Corporation, the data processing company, and lived in an apartment in Hollywood.
Bowen, Karl (d. 1992). American would-be actor and painter, a patient of Patrick Woodcock. He was a member of the Kellogg cereal family and received income from a trust fund. He lived in an impressive flat in London above the Shaftesbury Theater, where Hair was playing from 1968 to 1973. For a time, Wayne Sleep had a room there. Later, Bowen lived in New York. He appeared in Derek Jarman’s film In the Shadow of the Sun (1980). He lived with AIDS for over a decade before deciding to commit suicide.
Bower, Tony (1911–1972). American editor and art dealer; educated in England at Marlborough College and Oxford. His mother became Lady Gordon-Duff through a second marriage, and his accent and manners gave the impression he was English. He is said to have made a living by playing bridge for money, and he was a spectacular gossip. He worked briefly for Horizon, was drafted into the U.S. Army twice during World War II, and trained on Long Island and later in San Diego. After the war he worked at New Directions, and in 1948 he became an editor at the New York magazine Art in America. Eventually, he became an art dealer. Isherwood met Bower in Paris in 1937 through Jean and Cyril Connolly. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years, and, as Isherwood tells, was the model for “Ronny” in Down There on a Visit.
Bowie, David (b. 1947). British rock star. He lived in Los Angeles when he was filming The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), and Isherwood met him the year the film came out. Bowie then lived in Berlin, where he collaborated with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti on Low (1977) and Heroes (1977), the first two albums in his Berlin triptych, completed with Lodgers (1979). His next U.S. tour, starting March 1978, featured the music from the first two Berlin albums and resulted in the live album Stage (1978). Bachardy recalls that Bowie proposed working together on a film, possibly Just a Gigolo (1979), about a Prussian World War I veteran; it is set in Berlin and also stars Marlene Dietrich in her final role, a cameo. This may be the project Isherwood refers to in his entry for April 16, 1978. Bowie’s first wife, Angela (Angie) Barnett (b. 1949), to whom he was married from 1970 to 1980, was an American model born in Cyprus; her father was English and her mother of Greek Cypriot descent.
Bowles, Paul (1910–1999). American composer and writer, best known for his novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), filmed by Bertolucci. In addition to fictio
n, 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 Auden and others during the 1940s. They later moved to Tangier, where they lived separately from one another but remained close friends. As Isherwood tells in D.1, he and Bachardy visited them there in 1955. Bowles also appears in D.2.
Brackett, Charles (1892–1969) and Muff. American screenwriter and producer and his wife. He was from a wealthy East Coast family, began as a novelist, then became a screenwriter and, later, a producer. He often worked with the Austro-Hungarian writer-director Billy Wilder. He was one of five 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 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 Muff 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. The Bracketts appear in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Bradbury, Ray (b. 1920). American novelist, poet, playwright, and screenwriter; he finished high school in Los Angeles and never went to college. He is best known for his science-fiction classics The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Other works include Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and, among his collections of stories, I Sing the Body Electric! (1969). From the mid-1980s, he adapted his short stories for his T.V. series, “The Ray Bradbury Theater.” He married and had four daughters. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Bradley, Dan and Evelyn. English laborer and his wife; they cared for Richard Isherwood. He was the younger brother of Alan Bradley, who worked at Wybersley Farm and befriended Richard there after World War II. Alan Bradley and his wife looked after Richard when Kathleen Isherwood died; they passed the role to Dan after an accident at work made Dan otherwise unemployable. Richard called these Bradleys “the Dans” and his previous carers “the Alans.” After Marple Hall was torn down, the Dans lived next door to Richard in one of the new houses built on the estate. Richard left much of his property and money to the two Bradley families in his will. They appear in D.2.
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.
Brahman. The transcendental reality of Vedanta; the impersonal absolute existence; infinite consciousness, infinite being, infinite bliss.
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 intimate form of a parent/son relationship (thus reenacting a previously existing and eternal relationship between their two souls). After the death of Rama krishna, 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.
Brainard, Joe (1942–1994). Arkansas-born artist. He worked in New York City from the early 1960s and in Vermont.
Brando, Marlon (1924–2004). American actor; raised in Nebraska. He was kicked out of military school in Minnesota, studied acting for a year in New York, debuted on Broadway in I Remember Mama in 1944, and became a star as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947. He continued to explore Method Acting as a professional and joined the Actors Studio in the late 1940s. Once he arrived in Hollywood, his stardom became phenomenal; his blend of defiance and charisma gave him the stature of Garbo and few others, and the violent eccentricities of his private life (including three failed marriages and murderous and suicidal off-spring) did not diminish his fame. His films include: The Men (1950; Academy Award nomination), Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953, Academy Award nomination), The Wild One (1953), On the Waterfront (1954, Academy Award), Guys and Dolls (1955), The Young Lions (1958), Mutiny on the Bounty (1952), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), The Godfather (1972), Last Tango in Paris (1972), Apocalypse Now (1979). Isherwood first met Brando when Tennessee Williams came to Hollywood to polish the film script for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which Brando received an Academy Award nomination; he tells about this in Lost Years, and he also mentions Brando in D.1 and D.2. Sacheen Littlefeather, an Apache actress, refused on Brando’s behalf his 1973 Academy Award for Best Actor for The Godfather in order to highlight the mistreatment of American Indians in the movie and T.V. industries and also to draw attention to the ongoing armed siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Members of the American Indian Movement had occupied Wounded Knee on February 27, 1973 to protest federal government policies towards the Indians, high unemployment, police brutality, and corruption among tribal leaders. The siege lasted seventy-one days and resulted in two deaths and 1,200 arrests.
Brandt, Stuart. American painter. He lived at the Vedanta Society in Santa Barbara for a time and remained a devotee afterwards, settling in a nearby house which he rented from the society. His Sanskrit name is Sadhak. He later ran a business specializing in faux finishes, trompe-l’oeil, and hand-painted furniture and moved away from the society though he keeps a studio in Santa Barbara.
Brevard, Lee (1949–1994). American painter and jewelry designer; born outside Pittsburgh, educated at Arizona State and Cooper Union. He worked as a water-colorist in Paris, where he met David Hockney, then relocated to Los Angeles around 1977 and began designing jewelry. Elizabeth Taylor was one of his first and best clients; his pieces were sought out by other stars, too, and appeared in a number of films. The business was called The House of Brevard; his studio was in Venice.
Bridges, James ( Jimmy, Jim) (1936–1993). American actor, screenwriter and director; raised in Arkansas and educated at Arkansas Teachers College and USC. He was frequently on T.V. in the 1950s and appeared in a number of movies, including Johnny Trouble (1957), Joy Ride (1958), and Faces (1968). He lived with the actor Jack Larson from the mid 1950s onward, and through Larson became close friends with Isherwood and Bachardy. In the early 1960s, he was stage manager for the UCLA Professional Theater Group when John Houseman recommended him as a writer for a Hitchcock suspense series on T.V. He turned out plays constantly, some of which were shown only to Larson, and many of which were never staged. Bridges came to prominence in the 1970s when he directed and co-wrote screenplays for The Babymaker (1970), The Paper Chase (1973), The China Syndrome (1979), Urban Cowboy (1980), and, later, Mike’s Murder (1984), Perfect (1985), and Bright Lights, Big City (1988). He directed the first production of Isherwood and Bachardy’s play A Meeting by the River for New Theater for Now at the Mark Taper Forum in 1972, and he directed the twenty-fifth-anniversary production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Ahmanson in 1973. He appears in D.1 and D.2.
Brisson, Frederick (1912–1984). Danish-born Broadway producer, husband of Rosalind Russell. He produced The Pajama Game (1955) and Damn Yankees (1956), both winners of Best Musical Tony Awards, Alfie! (1964), Jumpers (1974), and others.
Britten, Benjamin (1913–1976). British composer. Auden worked wit
h him briefly from September 1935 at John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit in Soho Square and introduced him to the Group Theatre; at Auden’s instigation, he composed the music for The Ascent of F6, and Isherwood perhaps first met him at rehearsals in February 1937. By March 1937, the two were friendly enough to spend the night together at the Jermyn Street Turkish Baths, though they never had a sexual relationship. Britten also wrote the music for the next Auden–Isherwood play, On the Frontier. In the summer of 1939, he went with Peter Pears to America, where he collaborated with Auden on their first opera, Paul Bunyan (1941); then, Britten and Pears returned to England halfway through the war, registering as conscientious objectors. Britten composed songs, song cycles, orchestral music, works for chorus and orchestra such as his War Requiem (1961), and nine operas including Peter Grimes (1945), Albert Herring (1948), Billy Budd (1951), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (1973). He appears in D.1 and in Lost Years. After Paul Bunyan, he set Auden’s “Three Songs for St. Cecilia’s Day,” their last collaboration; Britten resented Auden’s affectionate but bossy advice not to settle for the comfortable fame available in England. Once the friendship with Auden ended, Britten also gradually withdrew his friendship from Isherwood and from the Spenders because they were close to Auden. But a reunion with Isherwood was brought about by Pears at Aldeburgh in 1976. Britten, already frail, wept when he saw Isherwood.
Brookes, Jacqueline (b. 1930). American actress, trained at RADA. She was acclaimed on the New York stage in the mid-1950s, worked steadily in daytime T.V., and made a few films, including Without a Trace (1983).
Brown, Andrew (1938–1994). T.V. producer, from New Zealand; he worked in the U.K. in the 1960s and 1970s, for the BBC and then for Thames T.V., and afterwards co-produced from New Zealand. Among his shows are “Rock Follies” (1976) and “Selling Hitler” (1991), both by Howard Schuman, “Edward and Mrs. Simpson” (1978), “Prick Up Your Ears” (1986) by Alan Bennett, and “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” (1992) adapted from Angus Wilson’s novel. He was a member of Peter Adair’s Mariposa Film Group, which created the gay and lesbian film The Word Is Out (1977).