Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

  Chapman, Hester (1895–1976). Novelist and biographer of royal figures such as Anne Boleyn, Caroline Matilda of Denmark, and the Duke of Buckingham. She was a cousin of Dadie Rylands, a habitué of Bloomsbury, and a longtime friend of Rosamond Lehmann. With her first husband, she ran a boys’ prep school in Devon. Her second husband, Ronnie Griffin, a banker, died in 1955. She appears in D.2.

  Charlton, Jim (1919–1998). American architect, from Reading, Pennsylvania. He studied at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in Arizona and also at Wright’s first center, Taliesin, in Wisconsin. He joined the air force during the war and flew twenty-six missions over Germany, including a July 1943 daylight raid. Isherwood was introduced to him by Ben and Jo Masselink in August 1948 (Ben Masselink had also studied at Taliesin West), and they established a friendly– romantic attachment that lasted many years. Towards the end of the 1950s, Charlton married a wealthy Swiss woman called Hilde, a mother of three; he had a son with her in September 1958. The marriage ended in divorce. After wards he lived briefly in Japan and then, until the late 1980s, in Hawaii, where he wrote an autobio graphical novel, St. Mick. Charlton was a model for Bob Wood in The World in the Evening. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Chester. See Kallman, Chester.

  Chetanananda. Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He was sent to Hollywood at the start of the 1970s to be Swami Prabhavananda’s assistant in place of Vandanananda. When Prabhavananda died, Chetanananda was too young and inexperienced to take over; Belur Math appointed Swahananda, with Chetanananda continuing as assistant. The arrangement was not successful, and Chetanananda was eventually appointed head of the St. Louis center. He often travelled back to southern California, spending several months a year at Laguna Beach. Isherwood wrote forewords for two volumes edited by Chetanananda, Meditation and Its Methods (1976), a selection on meditation from the works of Vivekananda, and Vedanta: Voice of Freedom (1986), a selection from Vivekananda’s lectures with a preface by Huston Smith. He also helped Chetanananda with his translation of the Avadhuta Gita of Dattatreya, published in India by Advaita Ashrama.

  Chetwyn, Robert (b. 1933). British director; educated at the Central School of Speech and Drama; he began his career as a repertory actor in the early 1950s. From 1960 onward, he directed for the stage in London and abroad, including works by Shakespeare, Shaw, and Wilde, Terence Frisby’s There’s a Girl in My Soup—which he took from the West End to Broadway in 1967—and, in 1979, Martin Sherman’s Bent at the Royal Court. He also directed and produced for BBC television and for ITV. In 1970, when he worked with Isherwood on the proposed London production of A Meeting by the River, he was also considering directing Lynn Redgrave in Michael Frayn’s series of short plays, The Two of Us, and planning to take his West End production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound to New York, but these deals fell through.

  Childers, Michael (b. 194[4]). American photographer; born in North Carolina, educated at UCLA Film School. He was the longtime companion of film director John Schlesinger, whom he met in 1968. Schlesinger asked him to assist on Midnight Cowboy (1969), and they afterwards collaborated on other productions. Childers was a photographer for Andy Warhol’s magazines Interview and After Dark from their inception and for Dance magazine, and he created the multimedia presentation used in Oh! Calcutta! He was also the photographer for a number of productions at the National Theatre in London during the 1970s. Other work includes hundreds of record album sleeves; film posters and stills for Hollywood productions such as Grease, Marathon Man, The Year of Living Dangerously, Coal Miner’s Daughter, The Terminator, and Torch Song Trilogy; and covers for Life, GQ, Esquire, Vogue, Elle, and Paris Match.

  Clark, Ossie (1942–1996) and Celia (b. 1941). British dress designer and his wife, British fabric designer Celia Birtwell. He studied at the Manchester School of Art, where he met David Hockney in 1961, and later at the Royal College of Art when Hockney was also there. She trained at the Salford School of Art and later taught at the Chelsea College of Art. He used her fabrics in his designs and together they ran Quorum, a popular clothing boutique. Hockney was best man at the Clarks’ wedding in 1969, and Celia posed for him so often that she is sometimes called his muse. During 1970 and 1971, Hockney made a large painting of them with their cat, Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, now in the Tate. The Clarks had two sons before separating. Later, she ran her own fabric shop in London and launched a clothing line.

  Clarke, Gerald (b. 1937). American journalist and biographer; raised in California, educated at Yale, settled in New York. He wrote magazine profiles of artists and celebrities for many years and then published Capote: A Biography (1988) and Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland (2000), both adapted as films.

  Claxton, Bill (1927–2008) and Peggy Moffitt (b. 1939). He was a photo grapher known for his work with musicians and actors. His wife, Peggy Moffitt, was a model and actress. She was muse to fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, modelling his topless bathing suit in the mid-1960s, and she had a small role in Antonioni’s Blow-up (1965). In 1991, they published The Rudi Gernreich Book, full of Claxton’s photographs of Gernreich’s designs worn mostly by Moffitt in her signature white pancake makeup with heavily blacked eyes. One shot shows Bachardy drawing her portrait while Gernreich looks on. Isherwood met Bill Claxton through Jim Charlton, and he appears in D.1. They both appear in D.2.

  Clay, Camilla (d. 2000). American stage director. She assisted Ellis Rabb at the APA Repertory Company in 1966 and occasionally later. In 1967, she assisted José Quintero when he directed O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions with Ingrid Bergman and Colleen Dewhurst at the Ahmanson before bringing it to New York. From 1967 to 1972, she rented a house in Malibu with writer Linda Crawford and before that, briefly, they lived at the Château Marmont. In 1972, the pair moved back east where Clay directed Cabaret at a community theater on the North Fork of Long Island in 1974 and Stuck by Sandra Scoppettone in 1976. She lived in Los Angeles again for a few years from 1979 onward before finally settling in New York, where she died of cancer. Isherwood met her through Gavin Lambert. She appears in D.2.

  Clement. See Scott Gilbert, Clement.

  Clytie. See Alexander, Clytie.

  C.O. Conscientious objector.

  Cockburn, Jean. See Ross, Jean.

  Cohan, Robert (Bob) (b. 1925). American dancer from New York; he was a longtime soloist with the Martha Graham Dance Company. In the late 1950s, he also became a choreographer and teacher, launching his own school and company in Boston, where he joined the faculty of Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center. Then, in 1966–1967, he founded the London Contemporary Dance Theatre and School, bringing Martha Graham’s technique to Europe. Isherwood generally misspelled his surname as Cohen.

  Cohen, Andee (b. circa 1946). American photographer. She began taking pictures of her friends—actors, artists, and rock-and-roll musicians in London and Los Angeles—when her boyfriend, James Fox, gave her a camera in 1966. Her work appeared on album covers for Frank Zappa, Joe Cocker, Tom Petty, and others. Later she married Rick Nathanson, a film producer. She appears in D.2.

  Collier, John (1901–1980). British novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for His Monkey Wife (1930) and also wrote other fantastic and satirical tales. Isherwood admired his short stories. Collier was poetry editor of Time and Tide in the 1920s and early 1930s and came to Hollywood in 1935. Isherwood met him in the 1940s, perhaps at Salka Viertel’s, and they became close friends while working at the same time at Warner Brothers during 1945. In 1951, Collier moved to Mexico, though he continued to write films, including the script, deplored by Isherwood in D.1, for the film version of I Am a Camera. He appears in Lost Years.

  Connolly, Cyril (1903–1974). British journalist and critic; educated at Eton and Oxford. He was a regular and prolific contributor to English newspapers and magazines, including The New Statesman, The Observer (where he was literary editor in the early 1940s) and The Sunday Times. He wrote one novel, The Rock Pool (1936), followed by collections of cr
iticism, autobiography, aphorisms, and essays—Enemies of Promise (1938), The Unquiet Grave (1944), The Condemned Playground (1945), Previous Convictions (1963), and The Evening Colonnade (1973). In 1939, he founded Horizon with Stephen Spender and edited it throughout its publication until 1950. He was perhaps the nearest “friend” of Isherwood and Auden who publicly criticized their decision to remain in America during World War II. He blamed them for abandoning a literary-political movement which he was convinced they had begun and were responsible for. Connolly married three times: first to Jean Bakewell, who divorced him in 1945, then to Barbara Skelton from 1950 to 1956, and finally, in 1959, to Deirdre Craig with whom he had a son, Matthew, and a daughter, Cressida. From 1940 to 1950 he lived with Lys Lubbock, who worked with him at Horizon; they never married, but she changed her name to Connolly by deed poll. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Cooper, Billy. See McCarty-Cooper, Billy.

  Cooper, Douglas (1911–1984). London-born heir to an Australian fortune, which he spent on Modernist art, especially early French Cubism. He was a curator at the Mayor Gallery in London, investigated Nazi art thieves after World War II, and lectured and wrote widely on Léger, Picasso, Juan Gris, and others. Among the works at his Château de Castille, and which Isherwood mentions, was a design commissioned by him from Picasso and sandblasted onto one of the walls. American decorator Billy McCarty was a longtime companion, and Cooper adopted him in 1972.

  Cooper, Gladys (1888–1971). British stage and film star; she was a teenage chorus girl, World War I pin-up, and silent film actress before establishing her reputation on the London stage. As Isherwood tells in D.1, he first met her in Los Angeles in 1940 when she was past fifty and had made few films. She had a supporting role in Rebecca that year and afterwards appeared in The Song of Bernadette (1943), Green Dolphin Street (1947), The Secret Garden (1949), Madame Bovary (1949), The Man Who Loved Redheads (1955), Separate Tables (1958), and My Fair Lady (1964), among many others. She also appears in D.2.

  Cooper, Wyatt (1927–1978). Actor, screenwriter, editor, from Mississippi; educated at Berkeley and UCLA. He appeared on stage and T.V., had a small role in Sanctuary (1961), and wrote the screenplay for The Chapman Report (1962). In D.1, Isherwood describes meeting Cooper when Cooper was involved with Tony Richardson; he also appears in D.2. He became the fourth husband of Gloria Vanderbilt (b. 1924), only granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt and in girlhood the subject of a headline-making custody battle between her widowed, reportedly lesbian mother and her forceful, richer aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who raised her in lonely splendor on Long Island. At seventeen, Gloria married Pasquale “Pat” DiCicco, a Hollywood agent; at twenty-one she inherited four million dollars. Her two other husbands were conductor Leopold Stokowski and film director Sidney Lumet. She again made her name a household word with her designer jeans in the 1980s. She had two sons with Cooper: the younger one, Carter, committed suicide in 1988; the older one is CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. Beginning in 1969, Wyatt Cooper edited a magazine, Status, to which, as Isherwood mentions, Bachardy contributed an interview and, later, some drawings, but the magazine ceased publication before the work appeared. Cooper also wrote Families: A Memoir and a Celebration (1978).

  Copland, Aaron (1900–1990). American composer; born and raised in Brooklyn, trained in New York and Paris. He drew on jazz, folk, and other popular idioms to give his orchestral and choral works an American character. Appalachian Spring (1944), composed for Martha Graham’s dance company, won a Pulitzer Prize. His film score for The Heiress (1949) won an Academy Award, and three of his many later film scores were also nominated. His numerous other works include Our Town (1940), Rodeo (1942), The Tender Land (1954), and Lincoln Portrait (1942).

  Corcoran, James and Dagny. Los Angeles gallery owner and art dealer and his wife. He took over Nicholas Wilder’s gallery in 1979 and for several years represented Bachardy. She is an art collector and founder of the West Hollywood bookstore Art Catalogues which specializes in current and out-of-print exhibition catalogues and books on modern art and photography. She is the daughter of real estate developer and art collector Edwin Janss, Jr. who helped expand Sun Valley and Snowmass ski resorts and whose father and grandfather developed parts of Los Angeles and its suburbs and donated 385 acres to UCLA for its campus.

  Coricidin. A brand-name cold remedy. Some versions contain a cough suppressant (dextromethorphan) attractive to recreational drug users and dangerous in combination with the antihistamine ingredient (chlorphenamine maleate). When Isherwood used it, Coricidin contained a decongestant (pseudoephedrine) and not an antihistamine. Some versions also contain an analgesic (acetaminophen), for fever and pain.

  Cotten, Joseph (1905–1994). American actor. He worked on Broadway from the early 1930s and played the lead opposite Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story in 1939 and 1940. He was also a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater from 1937 to 1939, and Welles brought him to Hollywood to appear in Citizen Kane (1941). He went on to star in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Journey Into Fear (1943) for Welles and then, for Hitchcock, in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). His many other films include Portrait of Jennie (1948), The Third Man (1949), and Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). He appears in D.1 with his first wife, Lenore Kipp; she was wealthy in her own right and a friend to Isherwood and Bachardy until her death from leukemia in 1960. The year Lenore died, Cotten married British actress Patricia Medina (b. 1920), who was in The Three Musketeers (1948) and Welles’s Mr. Arkadin (1955) and starred with Cotten on Broadway. They appear in D.2.

  Courtenay, Tom (b. 1937). British actor, educated at the University of London and RADA; he came to prominence in Richardson’s 1962 film The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. His many other stage and film roles include Pasha in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Dresser, which he took from stage to screen in 1983, and Last Orders (2001).

  Craft, Robert (Bob) (b. 1923). American musician, conductor, critic, and author; colleague and surrogate son to Stravinsky during the last twenty-three years of Stravinsky’s life. Isherwood first met Craft with the Stravinskys in August 1949 when Craft was about twenty-five years old and had been associated with the Stravinskys for about eighteen months. Craft was part of the Stravinsky household, and travelled everywhere with them, except when his own professional commitments prevented him. Increasingly he conducted for Stravinsky in rehearsals and supervised recording sessions, substituting entirely for the elder man as Stravinsky’s health declined. In 1972, a year after Stravinsky’s death, Craft married Stravinsky’s Danish nurse, Alva, who had remained with Stravinsky until the end, and they had a son. Craft published excerpts from his diaries as Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 1948–1971 (1972; expanded and republished 1994), edited three volumes of Selected Correspondence by Stravinsky, which appeared in 1981, 1984, and 1985, and produced other books arising from his relationship with the Stravinskys as well as articles, essays, and reviews on musical, literary, and artistic subjects. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Crawford, Joan (1904–1977). American movie star, born in Texas and discovered by MGM in a Broadway chorus line. Isherwood first met her when he worked on the script for A Woman’s Face in 1940–1941, and she appears in D.1. Her many films include Possessed (1931 and 1947), Grand Hotel (1932), Rain (1932), Mildred Pierce (1945, Academy Award), Sudden Fear (1952), and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). She married four times, finally to Pepsi chairman Alfred Steele in 1956, and when he died, she joined the board of Pepsi. She is the subject of Mommie Dearest (1978), by her adopted daughter Christina Crawford, made into a 1981 film starring Faye Dunaway.

  Crawford, Linda (b. 1938). New York writer. She shared a house in Malibu with Camilla Clay from 1967 to 1972, then returned to New York and began to publish novels in the mid-1970s; they include In a Class by Herself (1976), Something to Make Us Happy (1978), Vanishing Acts (1983), and Ghost of a Chance (1985). She appears in D.2.

  Cribb, Don. A
merican photographer, born in North Carolina; he got a film degree from USC in 1969. Later, he restored antiques. He founded the Santa Ana Council of Arts and Culture, an arts advocacy group behind the creation of the Grand Central Arts Center and Santa Ana Arts Village and behind the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art. He posed for Hockney during the 1970s and again in the late 1990s, and he sat often for Bachardy in the mid-1970s.

  Cukor, George (1899–1983). American film director. Cukor began his career on Broadway in the 1920s and came to Hollywood as a dialogue director on All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). In the thirties he directed at Paramount, RKO, and then MGM, moving from studio to studio with his friend and producer David Selznick. He directed Garbo in Camille (1936) and Hepburn in her debut, A Bill of Divorcement (1932), as well as in Philadelphia Story (1940); other well-known work includes Dinner at Eight (1933), David Copperfield (1934), A Star is Born (1954), and My Fair Lady (1964). Isherwood tells in D.1 that he met Cukor at a party at the Huxleys’ in December 1939. Later they became friends and worked together. Cukor also appears in Lost Years and in D.2.

  Cullen, John (1909–1977). British publisher, educated at Cambridge. He worked as a schoolmaster before going into the educational side of Methuen in the 1930s. He returned as General Editor after serving in World War II, developed Methuen’s list of British, Irish, and European literature, and launched the paperback originals series, Methuen Modern Plays, beginning with Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. He was Isherwood’s editor after Alan White retired, until he himself retired in 1976.

  Curtis Brown. Isherwood’s first literary agency in London and in New York, from the mid-1930s. In September 1935, Curtis Brown’s London office oversaw the contract between Isherwood and Methuen committing Isherwood to deliver his next three full-length novels to Methuen; 1935 is also the year Isherwood first appears on the books of Curtis Brown in New York. (At the time, Isherwood was still being published by the Hogarth Press, also represented by Curtis Brown, but Methuen began publishing him with Prater Violet after the war.) Isherwood evidently formed a relationship with Curtis Brown’s play department for The Ascent of F6 in the mid-1930s, and Curtis Brown also represented Auden from about this time. In the New York office, Alan Collins was Isherwood’s agent until 1959 when Perry Knowlton took over and continued as Isherwood’s American agent until 1973. In the mid-1970s, Isherwood left Curtis Brown, New York, for Candida Donadio. But he stayed with Curtis Brown in London, where he was represented by John Barber, James McGibbon, Richard Simon, Peter Grose, and Anthea Moreton-Saner.