Gates, Jim (1950–circa 1990). American non-conformist, violinist, monk of the Ramakrishna Order; born in Washington State and raised in Claremont, California; his father taught Latin and English. He moved out of his parents’ house before the end of his sophomore year in high school and after high school went with Peter Schneider to Los Angeles, where they shared various living arrangements in Venice, San Marino and Hollywood, and where he eventually revealed to Schneider that he was gay. He was obsessed with Isherwood and hoped to run into him on the beach; Schneider looked up Isherwood’s telephone number in the phone book and called him to explain this, and Isherwood invited them to Adelaide Drive. Gates attended Santa Monica College briefly and worked as a bus boy, library clerk, and live-in assistant to the husband of Marlene Dietrich. He also joined the Hollywood Vedanta monastery for a time. He died of AIDS. He appears in D.2.
Gavin. See Lambert, Gavin.
Gaynor, Janet (1906–1984). American film star. She appeared in her first movie in the 1920s and by 1934 was the biggest box office attraction in the U.S. Her films include The Johnstown Flood (1926), Sunrise (1927), Seventh Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1928), State Fair (1933), A Star is Born (1937), The Young in Heart (1938), and Bernadine (1957). For many years, she used the name of her second husband, fashion designer Gilbert Adrian (known as “Adrian,” d. 1959), with whom she appears in D.1. In 1964, she married producer Paul Gregory. Gaynor was also an accomplished painter and showed her still lifes in New York in 1976. She appears with Gregory in D.2.
Geldzahler, Henry (1934–1994). American art historian and curator; son of a Belgian diamond dealer; educated at Yale and Harvard. He zealously promoted contemporary artists and supervised the creation of the Department of Twentieth Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he organized the major exhibition, “New York Painting: 1940–1970.” He also served as the first director of the Visual Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he was responsible for grants to young artists. Later he became Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for New York City. Hockney drew and painted him a number of times.
Gerald. See Heard, Henry FitzGerald.
gerua. Hindi for ocher, the color of the cloth worn by monks and nuns who have taken their sannyas vows and symbolizing their renunciation.
Gielgud, John (1904–2000). British actor and director; born and educated in London, trained briefly at RADA. He achieved fame in the 1920s acting Shakespeare, Wilde, and Chekhov, and as a director he had his own London company from 1937. From the 1950s onward, he also worked with contemporary British playwrights, including Peter Shaffer, Alan Bennett and David Storey. He won three Tonys for his work on the New York stage. His movies, in which he often majestically played supporting and character roles, include: Hamlet (1939), Julius Caesar (1953), Richard III (1955), Becket (1964), Hamlet (1964), The Loved One (1965), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), Lost Horizon (1973), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Joseph Andrews (1977), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1979), The Elephant Man (1979), Arthur (1981, Academy Award), Chariots of Fire (1981), Gandhi (1982), The Shooting Party (1985), Plenty (1985), Prospero’s Books (1991), Hamlet (1996), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Shine (1996), Elizabeth (1998). During the 1970s and 1980s, he also worked in television, notably as Charles Ryder’s father in the series “Brideshead Revisited.” His companion in the 1950s was Paul Anstee, an interior decorator. In 1960, he met Martin Hensler at an exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London; Hensler, Hungarian by background, moved in with him about six years later, and they remained together for the last thirty years of Gielgud’s life. Isherwood tells in D.1 that he first met Gielgud in New York in 1947 and didn’t like him; they met again in London in 1948 and became friends. Gielgud also appears in Lost Years and D.2.
Gilliatt, Penelope (1932–1993). English critic, novelist, screen writer; born Penelope Connor in London and briefly educated at Bennington College in Vermont. She was a staff writer for British Vogue and later for Queen, and by 1961 she was film critic for The Observer. Later she became widely known in America as film critic for The New Yorker. Her first husband, Roger Gilliatt, was a London neurologist and best man at the wedding of Princess Margaret to Antony Armstrong-Jones. In 1963, she married John Osborne and had a daughter with him; the marriage broke down by 1966, and Gilliatt settled in New York in 1967, where she had a relationship with the stage and film director Mike Nichols which lasted until 1969, followed by a brief affair with Edmund Wilson. She became an alcoholic, and her career at The New Yorker ended when she fabricated an interview with Graham Greene for the magazine. She wrote the prize-winning original screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), more than ten volumes of fiction including short stories, and several volumes of film history and criticism.
Ginsberg, Allen (1926–1997). American poet, born in New Jersey; educated at Columbia University; a member of the Beat scene in New York, San Francisco, and Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, and a central figure in 1960s counterculture. He was a Zen Buddhist and campaigned against the Vienam War and in favor of drugs, communism, and homosexuality. He invented the phrase “flower power” and claimed he was the first to chant Hare Krishna in North America, through his friendship with Swami Prabhupada who launched the movement in the West. He was a poetic disciple of William Blake and of Walt Whitman and is best known for his early works Howl and Other Poems (1956) and Kaddish and Other Poems (1961). He published numerous volumes of poetry and also lectures, letters, and journals telling about his friendships with William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and with his longterm lover, American poet Peter Orlovsky (b. 1933), whom he first met in San Francisco in 1954. Orlovsky had dropped out of high school and served as a U.S. Army medic before becoming Ginsberg’s secretary; he published several volumes of his own poetry. Ginsberg and Orlovsky appear in D.2.
Glade. See Bachardy, Glade.
Glaesner, Ole. Danish tailor and costume designer, from Copenhagen; son of a sailor. He was trained by Yves St. Laurent and rented a room near Patrick Procktor in Manchester Street, where he ran a business making trousers known for their immaculate fit. He was evidently Procktor’s lover for a time.
Glenway. See Wescott, Glenway.
Goddard, Paulette (1911–1990). American film star, once a model and a Ziegfeld Girl. She was Charlie Chaplin’s third wife, from 1933 to 1942, and became famous in his Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940). She was reportedly cleverer than other Hollywood stars and was admired by intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley and H.G. Wells. Her third marriage was to Burgess Meredith during the late 1940s, and she virtually retired after her fourth marriage in 1958 to German novelist and screenwriter Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western Front). Isherwood met her soon after coming to Hollywood. She appears in D.1.
Goldin, Marilyn. American screenwriter. She co-wrote Souvenirs d’en France (1974) and Barocco (1976) with director André Téchiné in French with English subtitles, Camille Claudel (1988) with Bruno Nuytten in French, and The Triumph of Love (2001), based on Marivaux’s play, with Clare Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci. She also had a small role in The Conformist (1970).
Goode, Joseph ( Joe) (b. 1937). American artist; born in Oklahoma and trained at the Chouinard Art Institute. He had his first solo show at a San Fransicso gallery in 1962 and was part of the early pop art exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, “New Painting of Common Objects,” which included work by Lichtenstein, Warhol, and others. He has won a number of grants and awards, and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York, the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian, among others.
Goodstein, David (1932–1985). American lawyer, activist, publisher; educated at Cornell and at Columbia Law School. He made a fortune on Wall Street managing investment portfolios and used his money
to promote gay rights. He hired James Foster to set up and run the Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation, and he organized the Committee for Sexual Law Reform, which campaigned, through Assembly Bill 489, towards the 1975 repeal of California’s sodomy law. Also, in 1974, he bought The Advocate, which he built into the national gay news magazine.
Goodwill. Nonprofit provider of education and training for the poor, homeless, ill-educated, and physically and mentally disadvantaged in the U.S. It was founded in Boston in 1902 by a Methodist minister, Edgar J. Helms, who trained the poor to mend and resell used household goods and clothing.
Gordon, Bob. American writer, settled in San Francisco. He was a friend of Jack Larson and Jim Bridges, who introduced him to Isherwood.
Gore. See Vidal, Gore.
Gowland, Peter (b. 1916) and Alice. Photographer and camera maker and his wife, director of his photo shoots. He is known for his photographs of celebrities and his nudes, many of which have appeared as Playboy centerfolds. His Gowlandflex camera, designed in 1957, is still on the market and is widely used by professionals. The Gowlands were among the Masselinks’ closest friends, and Isherwood met them through the Masselinks in the early 1950s. They have two daughters, Ann Gowland and Marylee Gowland. The Gowlands appear in D.1 and D.2.
Granny Emmy. See Smith, Emily Machell.
Gregory, Paul (b. 1920). American film, T.V., and theater producer; born and raised in Iowa, and, briefly, in London. He acted in two films, then turned to booking and management. In 1950, he persuaded Charles Laughton to be his client and arranged tours for him, then T.V. appearances and stage and film productions for which Laughton acted, directed, and sometimes wrote material. Gregory’s Broadway shows include John Brown’s Body (1953) and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1954); his movies, The Night of the Hunter (1955) and The Naked and the Dead (1958). He was the third husband of Janet Gaynor. He appears in D.2.
Griggs, Phil. See Buddha Chaitanya.
Grose, Peter. Isherwood’s penultimate agent at Curtis Brown in London. He went on to found Curtis Brown Australia, then became a publisher at Secker & Warburg, and later a non-fiction author.
Grosser, Maurice (1903–1986). American painter and writer; raised in Tennessee and educated at Harvard. He wrote about art for The Nation and published a number of books including The Painter’s Eye (1956), Painting in Our Time (1964), and Painter’s Progress (1971). He was the longtime companion of Virgil Thomson; both were close friends of Paul and Jane Bowles, and Grosser lived partly in Tangier. He had a Manhattan apartment which he often loaned to Bachardy, on 14th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. He appears in D.2.
Guerriero, Henry. American painter and sculptor; from Monroe, Louisiana, where he had known Marguerite and Speed Lamkin and Tom Wright, who were roughly his contemporaries in age. In Los Angeles, he moved in different circles with his companion Michael Leopold. Isherwood met him in the early 1950s, and he is mentioned in D.1 and D.2. He changed his name to Roman A. Clef in 1978.
Guinness, Alec (1914–2000). English actor, born in London; his mother’s name was de Cuffe; he never knew who his father was. He trained at the Fay Compton School of Dramatic Art and began his career on the London stage in the mid-1930s, appearing in Shakespeare, Shaw, and Chekhov at the Old Vic. During World War II, he served in the navy, and afterwards began making films, generally in comic or character roles. These include Great Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949, in which he played eight parts), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951; Academy Award nomination), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, Academy Award), The Horse’s Mouth (1958, for which he wrote the screenplay, nominated for an Academy Award), Our Man in Havana (1959), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Comedians (1967), Scrooge (1970), Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973), Hitler, the Last Ten Days (1973), Murder by Death (1976), Star Wars (1977, Academy Award nomination), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return of the Jedi (1983), A Passage to India (1984), and Little Dorrit (1987, Academy Award nomination). He also played the lead in the television miniseries of John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. He was knighted in 1959, and he was awarded an honorary, career Academy Award in 1980. His wife—Lady Guinness, once he was knighted—was Merula Salaman, an actress and later a painter and children’s author. He appears in D.2.
guna. Any of three qualities—sattva, rajas, tamas—which together constitute Pakriti, or nature. When the gunas are perfectly balanced, there is no creation or manifestation; when they are disturbed, creation occurs. Sattva is the essence of form to be realized; tamas, the obstacle to its realization; rajas, the power by which the obstacle may be removed. In nature and in all created beings, sattva is purity, calm, wisdom; rajas is activity, restlessness, passion; and tamas is laziness, resistance, inertia, stupidity. Since the gunas exist in the material universe, the spiritual aspirant must transcend them all in order to realize oneness with Brahman.
Gunn, Thom (1929–2004). English poet. Thomson Gunn was educated at University College School, Bedales, and Cambridge. His father edited the London Evening Standard; his mother, also a journalist, committed suicide when he was fifteen. He contacted Isherwood in 1955 on his way from a creative writing fellowship at Stanford to a brief teaching stint in Texas; Isherwood invited him to lunch at MGM and they immediately became friends. Gunn later taught at Berkeley off and on from 1958 until 1999. His numerous collections of poetry include Fighting Terms (1954), My Sad Captains (1961), Moly (1971), Jack Straw’s Castle (1976), The Man with Night Sweats (1992), and Boss Cupid (2000). He appears in D.1 and D.2.
Guttchen, Otto. German refugee. Isherwood met him in Hollywood during World War II and writes about him in D.1 and D.2. Guttchen’s kidneys were badly damaged in a Nazi concentration camp, and he was also tortured. He left his wife and child in Switzerland. He struggled to find employment in Hollywood, was often too poor to eat, and became suicidal late in 1939. Isherwood found it difficult to help him adequately and felt intensely guilty about it. In the mid-1950s, they met again and Guttchen appeared to have regained his hold on life.
Hall, Michael. American actor and, later, antique dealer; he appeared in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). In Lost Years, Isherwood describes how he met Hall at a party in the winter of 1945–1946 and began a friendship which lasted for twenty years and included occasional sex. Eventually, Hall left the West Coast and settled in New York. He also appears in D.2.
Hamilton, Gerald (1890–1970). Isherwood’s Berlin friend who was the original for Mr. Norris in Mr. Norris Changes Trains. His mother died soon after his birth in Shanghai, and he was raised by relatives in England and educated at Rugby (though he did not finish his schooling). His father sent him back to China to work in business, and while there Hamilton took to wearing Chinese dress and converted to Roman Catholicism, for which his father, an Irish Protestant, never forgave him. He was cut off with a small allowance and eventually, because of his unsettled life, with nothing at all. So began the persistent need for money that motivated his subsequent dubious behavior. Hamilton was obsessed to the point of high camp with his family’s aristocratic connections and with social etiquette, and lovingly recorded in his memoirs all his meetings with royalty, as well as those with crooks and with theatrical and literary celebrities. He was imprisoned from 1915 to 1918 for sympathizing with Germany and associating with the enemy during World War I, and he was imprisoned in France and Italy for a jewelry swindle in the 1920s. Afterwards, he took a job selling the London Times in Germany and became interested there in penal reform. Throughout his life he travelled on diverse private and public errands in China, Russia, Europe, and North Africa. He returned to London during World War II, where he was again imprisoned, this time for attempting to promote peace on terms favorable to the enemy; he was released after six months. After the war he posed for the body of Churchill’s Guildhall Statue and later became a regular contributor to The Spectator. He appears in Lost Years and D.1, where Isherwood tells that at the start o
f the war, he sent Hamilton a letter which was quoted in William Hickey’s gossip column in the Daily Express, November 27, 1939, without permission. In the letter, Isherwood mocked the behavior of German refugees in the U.S. His remarks, frivolously expressed for Hamilton’s private amusement but fundamentally serious, seemed to Isherwood to have triggered the public criticism which continued into 1940 in the press and in Parliament, of both his own and Auden’s absence from England. Hamilton also appears in D.2.
Hamilton, Richard (1922–2011). British painter and printmaker, one of the earliest and most influential pop artists. The subject of the seven paintings and two prints titled “Swingeing London 67”—which Isherwood mentions in his diary entry for March 17, 1970—is the Rolling Stones drug bust at Redlands. The judge pronounced jail terms for Jagger, Keith Richards, and Robert Fraser, who was Richard Hamilton’s art dealer, telling them that “a swingeing sentence can act as a deterrent.” Swingeing, pronounced with a soft g, means huge or daunting. (The prison sentences were overturned on appeal.)
Hansen, Erwin. German Communist, former army gymnastics instructor. Isherwood first met him at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute, where Hansen did odd jobs until Francis Turville-Petre hired him as cook and housekeeper for the house he rented at Mohrin, outside Berlin, and where Isherwood went to live with them in 1932. Hansen hired Heinz Neddermeyer to assist him and thus introduced Heinz to Isherwood. And he travelled with them in 1933 when they fled Berlin for Turville-Petre’s island in Greece. Isherwood thought Hansen died in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.
Harford, Betty. See Andrews, Oliver and Betty Harford.
Hargrove, Marion (1919–2003) and Robin. Novelist and screenwriter, Marion Hargrove, and his second wife; born in North Carolina where he became a journalist while he was still in high school. He was drafted into the army during World War II and wrote the best-selling books See Here, Private Hargrove! (1942) and What Next, Corporal Hargrove? (1944), which became popular movies. Afterwards, he settled in Hollywood where he wrote the script for the film of The Music Man (1962) and episodes of “Maverick,” “I Spy,” and “The Waltons.” The Hargroves lived on Adelaide Drive with their three children; he also had three other children from a previous marriage.