Cuthbertson, Tom (194[5]-2005). American writer. He studied German at U.C. Santa Cruz and got a masters in English at San Francisco State University. He was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. Isherwood read several of his stories as a favor to Peter Schlesinger, praised them, and later met Cuthbertson and his first wife, Pat Zylius. In 1972, Cuthbertson, a cyclist, published a best-selling book on bicycles, Anybody’s Bike Book, which gave him financial independence.
Dambacher, David. American artist. Once a year, he created a tableau honoring Marilyn Monroe, either on her birthday or on the anniversary of her death. He became a professional trucker with his friend Gene Martin, who was about fifteen years older than he. They were sex addicts and told stories of elaborate seductions on the road. Both died of AIDS.
Dare, Diana. Secretary to Oscar Lewenstein at Woodfall Productions. Later, she was the second wife of British fashion photographer Terence Donovan.
darshan. In Hinduism, a blessing or sense of purification which is achieved by paying a ceremonial visit to a holy person or place; also, the ceremonial visit itself.
David. See Hockney, David.
Davidson, Gordon (b. 1933). Theater director, raised in Brooklyn. He worked as stage manager and director at the American Shakespeare Festival, where he met John Houseman who invited him to UCLA to work with the Theater Group in 1964. In 1967, the Theater Group moved into the new Mark Taper Forum, and Davidson became artistic director. He continued in the job for thirty-eight years, opening the new Ahmanson Theater in 1989 and the Kirk Douglas Theater in 2004. By the time he retired, he had won eighteen Tony Awards, three Pulitzer Prizes, and sent thirty-five productions to Broadway. He also won a Margo Jones Award for his contribution to the development of American regional theater.
Davis, Ronald (Ron) (b. 1937). American painter and lithographer, born in Santa Monica and raised in Wyoming, where he studied at the University of Wyoming before attending the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1960s. He was influenced there by Abstract Expressionism. His first show was at Nicholas Wilder’s gallery in 1965. In 1966, he taught at the University of California at Irvine and had a solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, followed in 1968 by a show at Leo Castelli. His optical geometric works soon began to be acquired by major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Day-Lewis, Cecil (1904–1972). Irish-born poet, novelist, translator, editor; educated at Sherborne School and Oxford, where he became friends with Auden and, through him, met Isherwood. He was a schoolmaster during the 1930s, wrote for leftist publications and joined the Communist party in 1936. His poetry from the period reflects his political involvement, but he later returned to personal themes and abandoned his radical opinions during World War II. He wrote roughly twenty detective novels under a pseudonym, Nicholas Blake, as well as three autobiographical novels, and he published verse translations of Virgil and of Paul Valéry. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1951 to 1956 (just before Auden) and became poet laureate of Britain in 1968. He married twice, the second time to actress Jill Balcon (b. 1925), with whom he had three children (one is the actor Daniel Day-Lewis); he had two children with his first wife. He also had a long affair with Rosamond Lehmann during his first marriage. He appears in D.1 and D.2.
Deepti. See High, Beth.
Dehn, Paul (1912–1976). British film critic, playwright, lyricist, librettist, and screenwriter; raised in Disley, Greater Manchester, and educated at Oxford. He won an Oscar for his first film story, Seven Days to Noon (1951), co-authored with his live-in partner, film composer James Bernard (1925–2001), and he won a British Film Academy Award for Orders to Kill (1958). He later worked on Goldfinger (1964), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), and the many Planet of the Apes sequels. His lyrics for musicals and films include the song for the film version of I Am a Camera.
“de Laval, Jay” (probably an assumed name). American chef; he adopted the role of the Baron de Laval. In the mid-1940s he opened a small French restaurant on the corner of Channel Road and Chautauqua in Santa Monica, Café Jay, frequented by movie stars seeking privacy. In 1949, he opened a second restaurant in the Virgin Islands, and in 1950 he was briefly in charge of the Mocambo in Los Angeles before opening a grand restaurant in Mexico City. There, he also planned interiors with Mexican designer Arturo Pani and created a menu for Mexicana Air Lines and crockery for Air France. Isherwood met de Laval through Denny Fouts. He was a lover of Bill Caskey before Isherwood and a friend of Ben and Jo Masselink. He appears in D.1 and Lost Years and is mentioned in D.2.
de Velasco, Adolfo. Spanish-born antique dealer and socialite, friendly with the Moroccan royal family. He ran two shops, one in Tangier and one in the Hotel La Mamounia in Marrakech, and he also had two palaces, one in the Casbah in Tangier and the other in Marrakech. The palaces were lavishly decorated with oriental antiques, and he threw stupendous parties in them. He died in the 1990s.
Dexamyl. Dextroamphetamine, an antidepressant or upper, combined with amobarbitol, a barbiturate to offset its effect. Isherwood was introduced to it by Bachardy, and they both used it when tackling big swathes of work; for many years they shared Bachardy’s prescription since neither of them relied on it habitually. Bachardy was first given it at eighteen by a friend, Alex Quiroga. (Dexedrine, which Isherwood also mentions, is a brand name for a preparation of dextroamphetamine without the barbiturate.)
dharma. Vocation, duty, including religious duty, station or role in life; also morality, righteousness.
Dharmadas. Jon Monday, an American devotee of Prabhavananda. His wife, Anna Monday, was known as Urbashi, and they were both members of the Venice Group. They had a daughter, Rachel. He built a recording studio at Takoma Records from which he ran MondayMedia, and where, with Charlie Mitchell, he recorded the 1979 L.P. The Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God, Selections Read by Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood read from the translation he made with Swami Prabhavananda. Indian flutist Harprasad Chaurasias contributed musical interludes, accompanied by Rijram Desad and Sultan Khan. The L.P. was later remastered as a C.D.
di Capua, Michael. Isherwood’s editor at Farrar, Straus Giroux, where di Capua worked from 1966 until 1991. Afterwards, he moved with Isherwood’s work to HarperCollins until 1999. Di Capua also published children’s books by prize winning authors and illustrators such as Jules Feiffer, Randall Jarrell, Maurice Sendak, and William Steig. He took his imprint, Michael di Capua Books, to Hyperion in 1999 and then to Scholastic in 2005, but Isherwood remained at HarperCollins.
Didion, Joan (b. 1934). American writer, raised in the Sacramento Valley and educated at Berkeley. Her career began as a Vogue staff writer and film critic. She is known for her essays on American cultural decline collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), and After Henry (1992), and for the journalism and critical pieces she still contributes to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Her best-selling novels include Run River (1963), Play It as It Lays (1970), and The Book of Common Prayer (1977). She wrote film scripts with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. After his death, she published a memoir of her grief, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), staged as a play starring Vanessa Redgrave. Five weeks before the memoir came out, their only child, a daughter called Quintana Roo, died after being critically ill off and on for some years; Didion incorporated Quintana Roo’s death into the play.
Diebenkorn, Richard (1922–1993). American painter, born in Portland, educated at Stanford, at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and at the University of New Mexico. He travelled and studied widely, absorbing influences from Edward Hopper, Rothko and Clyfford Still (with whom he taught in the 1950s), Arshile Gorky, de Kooning and, later, Matisse, among others. His style evolved in alternating phases of figurative and non-figurative interest so that he helped to launch a West Coast movement in Abstract Expressionism and later was at the cen
ter of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. He taught at the California School of Fine Arts, the University of Illinois, Stanford, and in 1966 moved to Santa Monica to take a job at UCLA. His studio in Ocean Park became the focus of his last development as an abstract painter with the Ocean Park series, which he continued to work on into the late 1980s.
Diehl, Digby. American book critic, mostly for The Los Angeles Times where he was the founding editor of The Los Angeles Times Book Review. He has written and co-written over three dozen books, including the autobiographies Million Dollar Mermaid (1999), about Esther Williams, and Angel on My Shoulder (2000), about Natalie Cole, and the novel Soapsuds (2005) with actress Finola Hughes. He is also a broadcast commentator on media and entertainment.
Dill, Guy (b. 1946). American sculptor, educated at the Chouinard Art Institute. By the 1970s, he was having several one-man shows each year, and he has won major fellowships and prizes. He taught sculpture at UCLA, where he was head of the department from 1978 to 1982. His work is in the Los Angeles County Museum, the Norton Simon Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Smithsonian, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and many smaller public and private collections. He is the younger brother of Laddie John Dill.
Dill, Laddie John (b. 1943). American painter and sculptor; older brother of Guy Dill. Born in Long Beach, California; trained at the Chouinard Art Institute. He ran a framing company with Chuck Arnoldi while he was still at Chouinard, and afterwards became an apprentice printer at Gemini in West Hollywood, where he assisted Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. He lived with Johns in New York for a few months during the 1970s. His father was a scientist who designed lenses, and Dill refers to that as an inspiration for his interest in technical experimentation and in unconventional materials such as neon and argon tubing, sand, cement, and plate glass. He has had countless one-man shows, and his work is held by many major museums.
Divine (1945–1988). Transvestite singer and actor; his real name was Harris Glenn Milstead. He appeared in John Waters’s underground films, including Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), Polyester (1981), and the mainstream hit Hairspray (1988).
DMSO. Dimethyl sulfoxide, a by-product of wood pulp manufacture, used as a solvent and, experimentally from about 1963, as a topical pain-killer.
Dobbin. A pet name for Isherwood, known in his lifetime only to himself and Bachardy. Other names included Dubbin, Dub, Drubbin, and Drub, all associated with his private identity as a reliable, stubborn old workhorse.
Dobyns, Dick. A friend of Paul Millard who lived in and helped to manage the apartment building Millard owned. He appeared in D.1.
Dodie. See Beesley, Alec and Dodie Smith Beesley.
Don. See Bachardy, Don.
Donadio, Candida (1929–1971). Isherwood’s New York literary agent, from the mid-1970s when she opened her own agency. Later, she formed a partnership with Eric Ashworth and finally with Neil Olson. Her other clients included Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, for whom she sold Catch-22, and Philip Roth, for whom she sold Goodbye, Columbus. The first book she handled for Isherwood was Christopher and His Kind, which she sold away from Simon & Schuster to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. After her death from cancer, Neil Olson ran the Donadio and Olson Literary Agency on his own and continued to represent Isherwood. He also became a novelist with Icon (2005).
Donoghue, Mary Agnes (b. 194[6]). American screenwriter and director; born in Queens. She first moved to Los Angeles to become Assistant Director of Publicity at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and later scripted The Buddy System (1984), Beaches (1988), Paradise (1991), which she also directed, White Oleander (2002), and Veronica Guerin (2003), among others. She lived with artist Joe Goode for several years and then married British writer Chris Robbins in 1976.
Doone, Rupert (1903–1966). English dancer, choreographer and theatrical producer; founder of The Group Theatre, for which Isherwood and Auden wrote plays in the 1930s. His real name was Reginald Woodfield. The son of a factory worker, he ran away to London to become a dancer, and then went on to Paris where he was friendly with Cocteau, met Diaghilev, and turned down an opportunity to dance in the corps de ballet of the Ballets Russes. He was working in variety and revues in London during 1925 when he met Robert Medley, his longterm companion. He died of multiple sclerosis after years of increasing illness. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Downer, The. See Franklin, Bill.
Druks, Renate (1921–2007). Austrian-American painter, actress, film director, scenic designer; born in Vienna, where she studied at the Vienna Art Academy for Women. Later, she studied at the Art Students League in New York. She settled in Malibu in 1950. Her paintings were mostly allegorical portraits of women friends—Anaïs Nin, Joan Houseman, Doris Dowling—in naive, magic-surrealist style. Druks had a role in Kenneth Anger’s experimental film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and in other underground films. She often sat for Don Bachardy. She appears in D.2.
Dub, Dub-Dub, Dubbin. Isherwood; see under Dobbin.
Dunne, John Gregory (1932–2003). American writer, raised in Connecticut and educated at Princeton. Younger brother of novelist and journalist Dominick Dunne. He worked at Time Magazine until 1964, when he married Joan Didion and moved with her to Los Angeles to write screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park (1971), Play It as It Lays (1972), adapted from one of Didion’s novels, A Star is Born (1976), and True Confessions (1981), adapted from one of his own novels. Dunne wrote two non-fiction books about Hollywood, The Studio (1969) and Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (1997), as well as an autobiography, Vegas (1974), and political and cultural essays.
Dunphy, Jack (1914–1992). American dancer and novelist; born and raised in Philadelphia. He danced for George Balanchine and was a cowboy in the original production of Oklahoma! He was married to the Broadway musical-comedy star Joan McCracken, and from 1948 he became Truman Capote’s companion, although in Capote’s later years they were increasingly apart. He published John Fury (1946) and Nightmovers (1967). He appears in Lost Years and is mentioned in D.2.
Dupuytren’s Contracture. A disease of the hand in which the connective tissue underneath the skin of the palm and fingers develop fibrous bumps or cords. The cords gradually shorten, contracting the fingers into a bent position so they cannot be straightened. It usually affects only the third and fourth fingers. Cortisone injections can alleviate the condition and wearing a splint at night can slow its progress, but eventually, the bumps and cords have to be removed surgically, in particular to prevent the middle joint of the fingers from becoming fixed in a bent position and in severe cases, where nerve and blood supplies are cut off, to prevent the fingers from requiring amputation. The cords can grow back after surgery and are more difficult to remove the second time. The disease is more frequent in men than in women, and more common in middle age.
Duquette, Tony (191[4]–1999) and Elizabeth (“Beegle”) (d. 1994). Los Angeles interior designers. Bachardy worked for them in 1955. They appear in D.1.
Durga. A name for the divine mother, consort of Shiva. She is shown with ten arms, riding a lion, and sometimes with her four children. Durga puja, the biggest of the Hindu festivals in Bengal, is celebrated in September or October over a ten-day period. On the first day of the puja, the goddess leaves the Himalayas to visit her parents below. Clay idols of the goddess are newly made each year and stood on pandals; on the last day of the festival, the idols are immersed in the ocean or a river to symbolize Durga’s return to her celestial abode. Vedanta Society devotees in southern California worship a photograph of Durga; the photo is not immersed, but stored for the following year.
Eckstein, Tony. See Abedha.
Edward. See Upward, Edward.
Elan, Joan (1929–1981). British actress. She settled in Hollywood after making her first film, The Girls of Pleasure Island (1953), but subsequent appearances in film and T.V. were undistinguished, apart from a small role
in the Broadway production of Jean Anouilh’s The Lark. She was a friend of Marguerite Lamkin, and in the mid-1950s she had a love affair with Ivan Moffat. She frequently sat as a model for Don Bachardy in the 1950s and early 1960s. Later she married an advertising executive, Harry Nye, and lived with him in New York until she died young, of a heart attack. She appears in D.1.
Elsa. See Lanchester, Elsa.
Emily, or Emmy. See Smith, Emily Machell.
Energy Crisis. Energy prices rose two hundred percent during the autumn of 1973 after Arab oil-exporting countries imposed an embargo in retaliation for U.S. support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Long lines at gas stations became ubiquitous, and stringent energy-saving measures were implemented throughout the cold winter of 1973–1974. But on the very day that Isherwood mentions the fuel shortage, January 6, 1974, The New York Times reported that large quantities of crude oil could be seen flowing from tankers into U.S. refineries in New Jersey and that the major U.S. oil companies were refusing to tell government officials or anyone else how much refined oil they were producing and how much they already had stored. This contributed to widespread suspicion that the oil companies were contriving the shortage to keep prices high for their own benefit.
Ennis, Bob. Black actor and dancer, his professional name was Exotica. He was tall, glamorous, and feminine looking. He had a part in Jim Bridges’s The Babymaker, and he also worked as an extra cameraman and miscellaneous crew on other films.