240 The 2nd Earl of Avon (1930–1985), educated at Eton, served in the Queen’s Royal Rifles, later an ADC to the Queen and a Tory politician; he bred no sons and died of AIDS. His father, Anthony Eden—educated at Eton and Oxford, a W.W.I hero and Conservative M.P.—resigned as Prime Minister in 1957 after his use of military force to secure the Suez Canal against Egyptian nationalization provoked international condemnation.
241 When Isherwood first conceived of the novel in Mexico in December 1954, south of the border was to be the Inferno, where a visitor would interview the main character.
242 Robert Boothby (1900–1986), former Conservative M.P. and star political commentator on radio and T.V., was a life peer and a longtime advocate of homosexual law reform. In the early 1960s, he was implicated in a homosexual scandal with one of the gangster Kray twins, but won a libel action clearing his name. He professed himself heterosexual, married twice, had many affairs with women, and, reportedly, also with men.
243 English poet, biographer, editor, critic (1887–1964); eccentric, upper-class hero of the avant-garde in Isherwood’s youth.
244 Nigel Kneale’s six-part science-fiction T.V. play, first broadcast in 1955, and published by Penguin in 1960.
245 Soviet cosmonaut German Titov completed a twenty-five-hour flight, August 6 and 7, aboard Vostok 2.
246 Preparing for press interest in his show at the Redfern.
247 For “Tonight.”
248 Georges Duthuit (1891–1973), a Byzantinist married to Matisse’s daughter Marguerite; he helped Ackerley find pieces for The Listener and was a former lover of Ackerley’s sister, Nancy West.
249 “A Life,” referring to Maupassant’s novel Une Vie (1883) about the trivial sorrows of an unhappily married woman.
250 English film and photography critic, travel writer, novelist, poet (1907– 1985); his real name was Henry Joseph Hasslacher. He was once a camera boy at Gaumont British, where he possibly first met Isherwood.
251 Osborne’s “A Letter to My Fellow Countrymen” appeared in the Tribune, August 18; on August 20, The Sunday Times ran a page of commentary on it. See Glossary under Osborne.
252 The Daily Express, without permission, quoted a letter from Isherwood to Gerald Hamilton at the start of W.W.II; this sparked public criticism of Isherwood and Auden for remaining in the U.S. See Glossary under Hamilton.
253 I.e., grinning fixedly, like the proverbial Cheshire cat.
254 Peter Stern, one of two younger brothers, acted with the St. Pancras People’s Theatre in Camden Town, north London, during the 1930s.
255 International Galerie D’Art Contemporain in the Rue Saint-Honoré.
256 Dr. C.B.M. McBurney of Cambridge University, author of The Stone Age of Northern Africa (1960).
257 The USSR, U.S., and U.K. had observed a moratorium on nuclear tests since late 1958; following their August 31 announcement, the Soviets carried out the first of ten explosions on September 1.
258 I.e., the Munich crisis, August–September 1938; see August 31 in “Waldemar,” Down There on a Visit.
259 Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington was sold to an American millionaire by the Duke of Leeds in mid-June, but a public outcry elicited a £100,000 donation from Isaac Wolfson to buy it back for the nation; when it went on display at the National Gallery in August, it was stolen.
260 Ure’s son was born August 31; she was still married to Osborne, but he was living with Rickards and beginning an affair with Penelope Gilliatt at the Venice Film Festival. See Glossary.
261 English novelist and short story writer (1905–1974), author of The Darling Buds of May (1958).
262 An Italian motor scooter.
263 Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film which tells about a rape and murder from four different points of view.
264 In 1946, during an operation to remove a median bar from his urethra, Isherwood’s sperm tubes were tied, making him sterile. See D.1.
265 Ivar Krueger (1880–1932), Swedish engineer and match tycoon; he was involved in European financial reconstruction after W.W.I—borrowing in New York and relending to Germany and France; he shot himself in 1932, and huge irregularities were exposed in his companies.
266 I.e., “As Long as He Needs Me” from Oliver (1960) and “I Enjoy Being a Girl” from Flower Drum Song (1959).
267 “Carla,” September 11, 1961, one of the worst to hit Texas in modern times.
268 Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100 was planning a mass sit-down in Trafalgar square on September 17. Some had been summonsed and sentenced in advance. See Glossary under Russell.
269 “Madame cried.”
270 I.e., The Odeon, Leicester Square, the movie theater showing A Taste of Honey.
271 Philip Burton.
272 Whistle Down the Wind (1961).
273 Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the U.N. since 1953 and a friend through Lincoln Kirstein, died in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia on the night of September 17–18; rumors suggested he was assassinated by Soviet or international mining interests for trying to restore order to the wealthy mining province of Katanga which had seceded from the new Republic of Congo.
274 British actor and, later, stage director (1931–1994); he starred in Osborne’s Epitaph for George Dillon at the Royal Court in 1958 and appeared in the film A Taste of Honey. First husband (1967–1975) of actress Maggie Smith.
275 Fashion photographer, once a boyfriend of Rickards.
276 Left-wing, Oxford-educated British philosopher (1923–2003), then teaching at University College, London. His published work reflects his interest in psychoanalysis and aesthetics.
277 Née Dawson, model, waitress, and bohemian (b. 193[7]); her second, brief marriage was to Johnnie Moynihan and her third, in 1963, to jazz musician and screenwriter George Melly.
278 Isherwood’s regular Los Angeles dentist.
279 Isherwood miswrote “Robert.”
280 With Heinz Neddermeyer, 1934–1935.
281 Directed by David Thomson with Edward de Souza, John Woodvine, and Zena Walker.
282 English painter and lithographer (1919–1983).
283 Novelist (1915–1994), friend of E.M. Forster; he wrote Look Down in Mercy (1951) and The Image and the Search (1953).
284 “Georgiadis, Cliffe, Bachardy,” Oct. 7-21, p. 16.
285 London fashion designer; from the mid-1940s she also created movie costumes.
286 Dirk Bogarde plays a lawyer pursuing blackmailers who caused the death of a young man with whom he is in love.
287 I.e., chemin de fer.
288 From Newbolt’s poem “Vitaï Lampada” in Admirals All (1897).
289 Franco Zeffirelli (b. 1923) designed and directed the production.
290 I.e., devil’s advocate.
291 “‘Bonne Fête’ Monsieur Picasso from Southern California Collectors”; two hundred works loaned by fifty Californians, opened on his eightieth birthday, October 25.
292 A four-car pileup in July 1960 with Michael Barrie; in D.1, Isherwood says Heard was “quite badly hurt.”
293 The same fire that destroyed the Huxleys’ house in May; see Glossary under Pfeiffer.
294 Laughton was playing the southern senator Seab Cooley in Otto Preminger’s film.
295 Evidently one of the buildings Le Corbusier (1887–1965) designed for the new capital of Punjab, Chandigarh.
296 Stalin’s body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum on October 31 and buried under the Kremlin wall after thousands of murders during his purges were exposed October 28 by the publication in the USSR of Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech to the Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress.
297 Davison, tall, good-looking, and wealthy.
298 Larmore, his daughter.
299 Columnist and actress (1905–1978).
300 Richard Chamberlain; see Glossary.
301 Not his real name.
302 Charlie Brackett’s friend had spied on and then attacked a woman playwright who was a tenant in Pa
ul Millard’s building; the friend was arrested and eventually sent to a mental institution, the Menninger Clinic, where he recovered and married. Later he became a painter.
303 Evidently, Knight was still preparing to take his brahmacharya vows; see Glossary.
304 Others recall he was an ex-soldier; see Glossary.
305 Julius (1909–2000) and Philip (1909–1952) Epstein wrote screenplays together, including Casablanca (1943), with a third writer, Howard Koch. Philip died of cancer, and Julius subsequently worked alone. Richard was Philip’s son, raised thereafter by his uncle.
306 American reporter, newspaper editor, novelist, radio, T.V. and movie writer (1908–1976) of war and adventure films, including Tarzan Goes to India (1962).
307 Indira Gandhi (1917–1984), who first became India’s Prime Minister in 1966, two years after Nehru’s death.
308 Ariel Durant (1898–1981), co-author with historian and philosopher Will Durant (1885–1981) of the last four volumes of his eleven-volume The Story of Civilization. (They won a 1968 Pulitzer Prize for volume ten.)
309 Stone (1903–1989) wrote biographical novels; Lust for Life (1934) about Van Gogh and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961) about Michaelangelo were made into films. His wife, Jean, was an editor.
310 American singer, comedian, Broadway and Hollywood star (1913–1987); he hosted a T.V. variety show from 1963 to 1967.
311 Indian spiritual leader and reformer (1896–1982), a disciple of Gandhi; he walked 40,000 miles during the 1950s asking landlords to give their land to poor farmers and villages.
312 I.e., her notes and questionnaires on homosexuals.
313 American movie actor (1921–1977), briefly a leading man in the 1950s.
314 Patrick Ryan O’Neal (b. 1941), stuntman and amateur boxer, later a star as Ryan O’Neal in “Peyton Place” on T.V. (1964–1969) and in Love Story (1970) and other movies.
315 Kevin O’Neal (b. 1945), his brother, also a T.V. and movie actor.
316 I.e., classed by the draft board as deferred from U.S. military service.
317 By Robinson Jeffers, who also made the adaptation of Euripides’s Medea.
318 Zortman, Laughton’s secretary and a disciple.
319 Los Angeles State College.
320 He settled in San Francisco, where he ran his practice and where, for a few years, Isherwood and Bachardy continued to see him whenever they were in town. Stanley Miron is not his real name.
321 See Glossary under Abraham Kaplan.
322 In Marcel Achard’s A Shot in the Dark.
323 Manhattan stockbroker (19[20]–1989), educated at Yale, decorated twice during W.W.II. Later, he was associate producer for two Hollywood films, wrote quiz books, and married a Palm Beach divorcée.
324 Protetch was diabetic, careless about treating himself, and a hard drug user; he died of pituitary cancer, evidently a consequence, in 1969 aged forty-six.
325 Adapted by William Morris from his best-selling 1961 novel; Emlyn Williams was in the cast.
326 John William Vinson (191[6]–1979), professor of microbiology at Harvard, was an authority on tropical and venereal diseases and also a poet. He was a friend of Kallman.
327 Jean Sorel (b. 1934), star of the film, is French-Canadian, but the film was Italian and dubbed into English.
328 English actress (b. 1917, in Karachi), mostly on the London stage and in British films; from the 1950s she worked in Australia where she appeared in Shine (1996).
329 Mary Lee Epling Hartford (191[1]–1988), former wife of A&P heir Huntington Hartford, and second wife of actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (1909–2000).
330 Daughter of wealthy New York socialite and beauty, Mrs. William Rhinelander Stewart, Jr; Isherwood wrote “Selena.”
331 Presumably the young man giving away the cream tarts, who must eat any refused by the strangers he accosts.
332 Beerbohm Tree: His Life and Laughter (1956) and Alfred Duggan’s Family Favorites (1960).
333 Carl Ohm.
334 American actress (b. 1934), she became a Broadway star in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, which opened in November 1960 and was still running.
335 “The people I respect must behave as if they were immortal and as if society were eternal.” In “What I believe,” The Nation, July 16, 1938.
336 The thirteenth-century musical drama was edited by Noah Greenburg for the New York Pro Musica, of which he was director. Auden’s verse narration was spoken between episodes. This version was first performed in 1958.
337 Based on Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina (1934), for which Harris won an Emmy; kinescope was a pre-videotape method of recording from television.
338 German-born actress, aristocrat, beauty (b. 1935).
339 Artist and illustrator, born in Boston, then in her mid-twenties; she trained in Boston and Paris, worked for Show Magazine, and became Mrs. Gordon Douglas when she married in the late 1960s.
340 Isherwood had been a member since 1949; see Glossary under National Institute of Arts and Letters.
341 Eton and Oxford-educated Welsh novelist and literary journalist (1908– 1987), editor of The Times Literary Supplement 1948–1958.
342 Paul Henri Spaak (1899–1972), then Minister of Foreign Affairs for Belgium; previously Prime Minister (1938–1939, 1947–1949), top U.N. and NATO officer, and chair of signatories of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, establishing the European Economic Community.
343 Anne Charteris (1913–1981), also widow of 3rd Lord O’Neill and former wife of Esmond, 2nd Viscount Rothermere.
344 Warhol (1929–1987), worked as a commercial artist during the 1950s and drew shoe advertisements for fashion magazines; his early portraits often show only hands or feet. His pop art career took off in 1964 when he exhibited his Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery in New York.
345 Especially sacred consecrated food; see prasad in Glossary.
346 In Puri, Orissa, eastern India, a traditional place of pilgrimage. It houses an image identified with Krishna and his brother and sister.
347 California town on the Colorado River at the borders with Nevada and Arizona.
348 I.e., a national holiday, honoring Abraham Lincoln.
349 Bradley Smith, who ran a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, was the first to be prosecuted in Los Angeles for selling the 1961 Grove Press edition; academic colleagues and acquaintances of Isherwood testified for the defense along with the literary editor of the Los Angeles Times, Robert Kirsch. See Glossary.
350 Spender served in the Auxiliary Fire Service in London during the war; “visiting fireman” in American idiom is any important visitor requiring attention.
351 Bachardy no longer recalls what this was.
352 Bruce Lansbury; see Glossary.
353 A board member of the San Pedro Public Library and, later, librarian of the Urban School in San Francisco (1968–1976); he collected and published moon legends from Malaysia, Indonesia, and New Guinea (d. 1999).