Liberation (144 page)

Vanessa.
See Redgrave, Vanessa.

Van Horn, Mike.
American artist and fashion illustrator, especially for Lord & Taylor. A close friend of Bachardy. In the early 1970s, he left Los Angeles for New York State where he renovates country properties. He appears in
D.2.

Van Petten, William (Bill) (d. mid-1980s).
Local reporter, for
The Los Angeles Times
and elsewhere. He grew up in La Jolla and in 1965 introduced Tom Wolfe to the beach scene there, which Wolfe wrote about in
The Pump House Gang
. He was also an early source of stories, later corroborated, that Richard Nixon was a belligerent drunk and beat his wife. He lived at the bottom of Santa Monica Canyon in an apartment once inhabited by Jim Charlton. He had a small independent income and often travelled abroad, especially to the Middle East. He had radiation treatment for cancer during the 1960s, and the treatment damaged his face and eyes. He appears in
D.2.

Van Sant, Tom (b. 1931).
Californian sculptor, painter, conceptual artist, and kite maker; he produced the first satellite map of earth, the Geosphere Image, and founded the Geosphere Project to model issues of earth resource management. He appears in
D.2.

Vaughan, Keith (1912–1977).
English painter, illustrator, and diarist. He worked in advertising during the 1930s and was a conscientious objector in the war; later he taught at the Camberwell School of Art, the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and the Slade, as well as briefly in America. Isherwood met him in 1947 at John Lehmann's and bought one of his pictures,
Two Bathers
, a small oil painting, still in his collection. Vaughan's diaries, with his own illustrations, were published in 1966. He appears in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
.

Vedanta Place.
The Vedanta Society of Southern California was able to adopt the address Vedanta Place when, in 1952, the Hollywood Freeway cut off the tail end of Ivar Avenue where the society was located, leaving it in a cul-de-sac. The property, previously 1946 Ivar Avenue, had been the home of Carrie Mead Wyckoff, later known as Sister Lalita. As Isherwood tells in
D.1
, he lived at the Hollywood society as a novice monk during World War II.

Ventura, Clyde (1936–1990).
American actor and stage director, born in New Orleans. He was in the 1963 Broadway cast of Tennessee Williams's
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
, and he was Artistic Director of Theater West in Los Angeles, where he directed a number of Williams plays. He was also an acting coach at Actors Studio on the West Coast, and he had a few small movie roles. He appears in
D.2.

Vera.
See Stravinsky, Vera.

Vernon.
See Old, Vernon.

Vidal, Gore (b. 1925).
American writer. He introduced himself to Isherwood in a café in Paris in early 1948, having previously sent him the manuscript of his third novel,
The City and the Pillar
(1948). Vidal's father taught at West Point, and Vidal was in the army as a young man. Afterwards, he wrote essays on politics and culture, short stories, and many novels, including
Williwaw
(1946),
Myra Breckinridge
(1968, dedicated to Isherwood), its sequel,
Myron
(1975),
Two Sisters: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel
(1970),
Kalki
(1978),
Duluth
(1983),
The Judgement of Paris
(1984),
Live from Golgotha
(1992),
The Smithsonian Institute
(1998), ancient and medieval historical fiction such as
A Search for the King
(1950),
Messiah
(1955),
Julian
(1964),
Creation
(1981), and the multi-volume American chronicle comprised of
Burr
(1974),
Lincoln
(1984),
1876
, (1976),
Empire
(1987),
Hollywood
(1989), and
Washington, D.C.
(1967). He also published detective novels under a pseudonym, Edgar Box. During the 1950s, Vidal wrote a series of television plays for CBS, then screenplays at Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM (including part of
Ben Hur
), and two Broadway plays,
Visit to a Small Planet
(1957) and
The Best Man
(1960). His adaptation of Friedrich Duerrenmatt's
Romulus the Great
, about Romulus Augustulus, ran on Broadway from January to March 1962. In 1960 Vidal ran for Congress, and in 1982 for the Senate, both times unsuccessfully. He bought Edgewater, a Greek Revival mansion on the Hudson River north of New York, and lived there off and on with Howard Austen, from 1950 until he sold it in 1968; later he settled in Rapallo, Italy, and finally in Los Angeles. Over the years, Vidal campaigned to become a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; with pushing from Isherwood, he was finally elected in 1976 but turned it down. He describes his friendship with Isherwood in his memoir,
Palimpsest
(1995) and in
Point to Point Navigation
(2006). There are many passages about him in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
.

Vidor, King (1894–1982).
American film director, screenwriter, producer; born and raised in Texas. He began directing in the silent era with
The Turn in the Road
for Universal in 1919, then formed his own studio, and afterwards worked for MGM. His movies include
The Big Parade
(1925),
The Crowd
(1928),
Show People
(1928),
Billy the Kid
(1930),
The Champ
(1931),
Northwest Passage
(1940),
Duel in the Sun
(1947), and
The Fountainhead
(1949). In
D.1
, Isherwood describes meeting him in Italy in 1955 on the set of
War and Peace
(1956), which Vidor was directing with the assistance of Mario Soldati. Vidor retired when his next film,
Solomon and Sheba
(1959), failed. During the 1960s he taught at UCLA film school, and in 1979 he received a special Academy Award as a creator and innovator in film. His first wife was silent screen star, Florence Vidor, who came to Hollywood with him in 1915 as a newlywed; they divorced in 1924. He was married to Eleanor Boardman, also a film star, for a few years in the mid-1920s. His third wife was a writer, Elizabeth Hill. He appears in
D.2.

Vidya, also Vidyatmananda, Swami, previously John Yale.
See Prema Chaitanya.

Viertel, Peter (1920–2007).
German-born American screenwriter and novelist; second son of Berthold and Salka Viertel. He attended UCLA and Dartmouth and became a freelance writer, then served in the U.S. Marines during World War II and was decorated four times. He wrote the award-winning screenplay for Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea
as well as other Hemingway adaptations. His own novels are in the Hemingway vein, with subjects such as soldiering (
Line of Departure
, 1947), big game hunting (
White Hunter, Black Heart
, 1954), and bull-fighting (
Love Lies Bleeding
, 1964). His first novel,
The Canyon
(published in 1941, but completed when he was just nineteen), gives a compelling adolescent view of Santa Monica as it was around the time when Isherwood first arrived there. His first marriage was to Virginia Schulberg, and in 1960 he married the actress Deborah Kerr. Like his mother and father he eventually resettled in Europe. He appears in
D.1
and
Lost Years
and is mentioned in
D.2.

Viertel, Salka (1889–1978).
Polish actress and screenplay writer; first wife of Berthold Viertel with whom she had three sons, Hans, Peter, and Thomas. Sara Salomé Steuermann Viertel had a successful stage career in Vienna (including acting for Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater) before moving to Hollywood where she became the friend and confidante of Greta Garbo; they appeared together in the German-language version of
Anna Christie
and afterwards Salka collaborated on Garbo's screenplays for MGM in the 1930s and 1940s (
Queen Christina
,
Anna Karenina
,
Conquest
, and others). Isherwood met her soon after arriving in Los Angeles and was often at her house socially or to work with Berthold Viertel. In the 1930s and 1940s, the house was frequented by European refugees, and Salka was able to help many of them find work—some as domestic servants, others with the studios. Her guests included the most celebrated writers and movie stars of the time. In 1946, Isherwood moved into her garage apartment, at 165 Mabery Road, with Bill Caskey. By then Salka was living alone and had little money. Her husband had left; her lover Gottfried Reinhardt had married; Garbo's career was over; and later, in the 1950s, Salka was persecuted by the McCarthyites and blacklisted by MGM for her presumed communism. In January 1947, she moved into the garage apartment herself and let out her house; in the early 1950s, she sold the property and moved to an apartment off Wilshire Boulevard. Eventually, she returned modestly to writing for the movies, but finally moved back to Europe, although she had been a U.S. citizen since 1939. She published a memoir,
The Kindness of Strangers
, in 1969. She appears in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
.

Virgil.
See Thomson, Virgil.

Vishwananda, Swami.
Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order. Isherwood met him in 1943 when Vishwananda visited the Hollywood Vedanta Society and other centers on the West Coast. Vishwananda was head of the Vedanta Center in Chicago. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2
.

Vivekananda, Swami (1863–1902).
Narendranath Datta (known as Naren or Narendra and later as Swamiji) took the monastic name Vivekananda in 1893. He was Ramakrishna's chief disciple. He came from a wealthy and cultured background and was attending university in Calcutta when Ramakrishna recognized him as an incarnation of one of his “eternal companions,” a free, perfect soul born into maya with the avatar and possessing some of the avatar's characteristics. Vivekananda was trained by Ramakrishna to carry his message, and he led the disciples after Ramakrishna's death, though he left them for long periods, first to wander through India as a monastic, practising spiritual disciplines, then to travel twice to America and Europe, where his lectures and classes spawned the first western Vedanta centers. In India he devoted much time to founding and administering the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. His followers hired a British stenographer, J.J. Goodwin, to transcribe his lectures; these transcriptions, which Goodwin probably edited into complete sentences and paragraphs, along with Vivekananda's letters to friends and to his own and Ramakrishna's disciples, were published as
The Complete Works of Vivekananda
. Isherwood wrote the introduction to one volume,
What Religion Is: In the Words of Swami Vivekananda
(1960), selected by Prema Chaitanya.

Vividishananda, Swami (d. 1980).
Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order. Head of the Vedanta Center in Seattle. In
D.1
, Isherwood tells about meeting him in Portland in October 1943 and afterwards spending a few days at his center in Seattle. In 1974, Vividishananda had the first of a series of strokes which, by 1977, left him in a semi-coma; when he was not in the hospital, the monks cared for him at the Seattle center until his death. He was the author of
A Man of God
, about Swami Shivananda (also known as Mahapurush Maharak, or Tarak), a direct disciple of Ramakrishna. Isherwood contributed a Foreword to the paperback edition, which appeared with a new title,
Saga of a Great Soul: Swami Shivananda
(1986).

Voeller, Bruce (1934–1994).
American biologist. He left his associate professor-ship at Rockefeller University for gay activism in the early 1970s and helped found the National Gay Task Force (later the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force). In 1980, he created the Mariposa Foundation, based in Topanga, California, to study human sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases. He published a book and numerous studies about AIDS, and he originated the name Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome as an improvement over the stigmatizing Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome. At Mariposa, he also began collecting materials related to the history of the gay and lesbian movement, an archive he donated in 1988 to create the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University. Voeller commissioned Bachardy to do portraits of twelve gay and lesbian leaders: Charles Bryden, James Foster, Barbara Gittings, David Goodstein, Franklin Kameny, Morris Kight, Phyllis Lyon, Jean O'Leary, Del Martin, Elaine Noble, Troy Perry, and Voeller himself. These went on a national tour in 1981 and were donated to Cornell in 1995 by Voeller's partner Richard Lucik. Voeller died of AIDS.

Voight, Jon (b. 1938).
American stage and movie actor, born in Yonkers, educated at Catholic University and the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. His father was a golf pro of Czech background. Voight was in the Broadway production of
The Sound of Music
and worked in television Westerns during the 1960s before becoming a star as the hustler in
Midnight Cowboy
(1969), a role for which he received an Academy Award nomination and the New York Film Critics Best Actor Award. He opposed the Vietnam war and worked with Jane Fonda's Entertainment People for Peace and Justice, then appeared with her in
Coming Home
(1978), for which he won an Academy Award as the paraplegic Vietnam veteran. Among his many other films are
Catch-22
(1970),
Deliverance
(1972),
The Odessa File
(1974),
The Champ
(1979),
Runaway Train
(1985, Academy Award nomination),
Ali
(2001, Academy Award nomination), and
National Treasure
(2004). He married actress Lauri Peters in 1962 and Marcheline Bertrand in 1971 and divorced both times.