Lost Years (63 page)

Avis, Annie (d. 1948).
Christopher Isherwood's nanny, from near Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk. She was employed by Isherwood's mother in October 1904, when Isherwood was two months old and Avis herself was about thirty, and she remained with the family for the rest of her life. She never married, though she had once been engaged (her fiancé died). Isherwood and his younger brother, Richard, were close to Nanny and, in childhood, spent more time with her than with their mother. When Richard started school as a day boy at Berkhamsted in 1919, he lodged in the town with Nanny, and his mother visited only at weekends; Isherwood by then was at Repton. Richard later felt that Nanny had made a favorite of Isherwood. Isherwood wrote in
Kathleen and Frank
that he loved Nanny dearly; in adolescence he had bullied her, but he had also shared intimate secrets with her. And he recalled that Nanny never criticized him.

Bachardy, Don (b. 1934).
American painter; Isherwood's companion from
1953 onwards. Bachardy accompanied his brother, Ted Bachardy, on the beach in Santa Monica from the late 1940s, and Isherwood occasionally saw him there. They were introduced in November 1952, met again in February 1953, and began an affair which quickly became serious. Bachardy was then an eighteen-year-old college student. He studied languages and theater arts at UCLA, then attended Chouinard Art School and, later, the Slade School of Art in London. His portraits have been widely shown, and he has published his drawings in several books including
October
(1980) with Isherwood and
Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood
(1990). Bachardy figures prominently in
D1
.

Bachardy, Ted (b. 1930).
Elder brother of Don Bachardy. After a number of breakdowns, Ted Bachardy was diagnosed as a manic-depressive schizophrenic. When well, he worked at various jobs: as a tour guide and in the mail room at Warner Brothers, as a sales clerk in a department store, and as an office worker in insurance companies and advertising agencies.

Bacon, Francis (1909–1992).
British painter, born in Dublin. Bacon worked as an interior decorator in London during the late 1920s and lived in Berlin in 1930, around the time that he taught himself to paint. He showed some of his work in London during the 1930s, but came to prominence only after the war when his controversial
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
made him suddenly famous in 1945.

Barada.
A nun first introduced to the Hollywood Vedanta Center by Sarada Folling in 1943. Her original name was Doris Ludwig; later, after taking final vows in the Ramakrishna Order, she was called Pravrajika Baradaprana. Barada was interested in music and composed Vedantic hymns. Eventually she became a senior nun at the Sarada Convent in Santa Barbara.

Barnett, Jimmie.
American painter and metaphysical teacher. Isherwood knew him when Barnett was a devotee at the Hollywood Vedanta Center; later Barnett settled in the Southwest.

Barrie, Michael.
A one-time singer with financial and administrative talents; friend and secretary to Gerald Heard from the late 1940s onward. Barrie met Heard through Swami Prabhavananda and lived at Trabuco as a monk until about 1955. Later, Barrie nursed Heard through his five-year-long final illness until Heard's death in 1971. Isherwood often mentions him in
D1
.

Barton-Brown, Monsignor.
British papal chamberlain; an acquaintance of Isherwood's friend Gerald Hamilton from just after World War I, when Barton-Brown was attached to the Vatican. Barton-Brown was Hamilton's priestly counterpart in an attempt, at the start of World War II, to avert the conflict by arranging a meeting between Axis and Allied diplomats on neutral ground (the Vatican was proposed). Barton-Brown and Hamilton contacted various highly placed Catholic officials, and when Hamilton was refused an exit permit to travel from England to Dublin—where he hoped to be able to communicate more easily with Rome—Barton-Brown arranged for him to travel in disguise as a member of a party of Irish nuns. But Hamilton was arrested at Euston station before he could depart, and as Isherwood tells, spent six months in Brixton prison.

Beaton, Cecil (1904–1980).
English photographer, theater designer, and author. Beaton photographed the Sitwells in the 1920s and went on to photograph the British royal family, actors, actresses, writers, and many other public figures. From 1939 to 1945 he worked successfully as a war photographer. He was a dandy and a creature of style, and his numerous costume and set designs for stage and screen were widely admired. In Hollywood his most celebrated achievements were
Gigi
(1958) and
My Fair Lady
(1964), for which he won two Academy Awards. Isherwood and Beaton were contemporaries at Cambridge, but became friendly only in the late 1940s when Beaton visited Hollywood (with a production of
Lady Windermere's Fan
which he had designed and in which he was acting).

Beesley, Alec (d. 1987) and Dodie Smith Beesley (1896–1990).
She was an English playwright, novelist, and actress, known professionally as Dodie Smith. He was a conscientious objector and an unofficial legal advisor to other conscientious objectors in Los Angeles during the war; he also managed her career. The Beesleys spent a decade in Hollywood because of Alec's pacifist convictions, and Dodie wrote scripts there for Paramount and her first novel,
I Capture the Castle.
They returned to England in the early 1950s. Isherwood met the Beesleys in November 1942, through Dodie's close friend and confidant John van Druten. Some details for the marriage between Stephen Monk and the writer Ehzabeth Rydal in
The World in the Evening
are taken from the Beesleys' professional and domestic arrangements, and Ehzabeth Rydal's correspondence with her friend Cecilia de Limbour resembles the voluminous letters continually exchanged between Dodie and John van Druten. Isherwood dedicated the novel to the Beesleys. In the summer of 1943, the Beesleys mated their dalmatians, Folly and Buzzle, and Folly produced fifteen puppies—inspiring Dodie's most famous book,
The Hundred and One Dalmatians
(1956), later filmed by Walt Disney. See
D1
for more passages about the Beesleys (and about their dogs).

Bennett, Ronald.
American actor, born in New England. A member of Michael Chekhov's Chekhov Theater Studio. Bennett taught drama at Brown University as well as at The High Valley Theatre.

Berns, Walter.
American academic. He met Bill Goyen in the navy when they served on the same battleship, and after the war they built an adobe house together in Taos, New Mexico, near Dorothy Brett and Frieda Lawrence with whom they became friends. Frieda Lawrence introduced them to Stephen Spender when Spender visited Taos in 1948 with Leonard Bernstein. At the time, Berns hoped to become a writer, but in 1949, he left Taos to study at the London School of Economics and for a few months he and Goyen lived at the Spenders' house. Berns went on to the University of Chicago where he got a doctorate in Political Science; in 1951 he married, and he and his wife had three children. Berns taught at Yale, Cornell, the University of Toronto, and finally, Georgetown University. When he retired from teaching in 1994, he became a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He has published numerous books and articles.

Bill, George.
American engineer; he worked in the aerospace industry in Los Angeles, possibly at Lockheed.

Bill,
also
Billy.
See Caskey, William.

Bo.
Wallace Bobo; see Index and see also
D1.

Bok, Ben.
Eldest son of Peggy Kiskadden and Curtis Bok, a Philadelphia lawyer and judge. Ben became a wolf breeder near Llano, California.

Bower, Tony.
American friend of Jean and Cyril Connolly; Isherwood met him in Paris in 1937. Bower's accent and manners gave the impression he was English; his mother became Lady Gordon-Duff through a second marriage, and his sister, Jean Gordon-Duff, was a great beauty. He wrote about film for a New York paper and was drafted into the U.S. Army twice during the war. During the late 1940s he worked at New Directions and eventually became editor of a New York art magazine. He was murdered in his Park Avenue apartment in 1972, evidently by a young man he picked up in a bar, possibly The Klondike, near Fifth Avenue in the West Forties. Bower was the model for “Ronny” in
Down There on a Visit
and there are passages about him in
D1
.

Brackett, Charles (1892–1969).
American screenwriter and producer; from a wealthy East Coast family. He began as a novelist, then became a screenwriter, and later a producer, often working with the Austro-Hungarian writer-director Billy Wilder. Brackett was one of five writers who worked on the script for Garbo's
Ninotchka
(1939). He won an Academy Award as writer-producer of
The Long Weekend
(1945), and he produced
The King and I
(1956), as well as working on numerous other films. When Isherwood knew him best during the 1950s, Brackett worked for Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox, where he remained for about a decade until the early 1960s. Brackett appears in
D1
.

Brecht, Bertolt (1898–1956).
German writer, poet, and dramatist; he was closely associated with the German communist party from the late 1920s onwards, though he never joined it. Brecht used the theater to promote his socialist beliefs, but only a handful of his plays are explicitly didactic, and he theorized and wrote at length about his radical approach both to theme and treatment. He worked for two years in Berlin in Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater and collaborated with the composer Kurt Weill on
The Threepenny Opera
(1928) and
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
(1929). Among his best known and most widely appealing plays are
Mother Courage and Her Children
(1941),
The Good Woman of Szechwan
(1943),
The Life of Galileo
(1943), and
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
(1948). Forced to flee the Nazis in 1933, he spent part of his exile in California, from 1941 to 1947; in 1949 he returned to East Berlin where he founded the Berliner Ensemble. Isherwood and W. H. Auden were youthful admirers of Brecht, and Isherwood translated the verses for Desmond Vesey's 1937 English version of Brecht's
Dreigroschenroman, A Penny for the Poor
. In
D1
, Isherwood records that in August 1943, Berthold Viertel introduced Isherwood to Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel, and their son, Stefan. When they next met, Brecht harshly criticized Isherwood's spiritual convictions and denounced Aldous Huxley, enraging Isherwood.
They continued a tentative friendship, and in April 1944 Brecht asked Isherwood to translate
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
; Isherwood declined partly because he had come to dislike Brecht for his ruthless and somewhat hypocritical obsession with his own beliefs and ambitions.

Brett, Dorothy.
English painter. A daughter of Viscount Esher and sister of the Ranee of Sarawak, she studied painting at the Slade. Brett became friends with D. H. Lawrence late in 1915 and was the only one of his circle to accompany Lawrence and Frieda to America in 1924 to found his utopia, Rananim. The plan soon fell apart, though Brett remained with the Lawrences in Taos and travelled with them in Mexico until she was banished by Frieda. She then lived on her own in Taos, returned to Europe where she saw Lawrence one last time in Italy, tried in vain to consummate their long restrained love, and finally settled back in New Mexico. As he mentions in his diary of the time (
D1
), Isherwood read her memoir,
Lawrence and Brett
(1933), in 1940.

Britten, Benjamin (1913–1976).
British composer. At W. H. Auden's instigation, Britten composed the music for
The Ascent of F6,
and Isherwood perhaps first met Britten at rehearsals in February 1937. By March 1937, the two were friendly enough to spend the night together at the Jermyn Street Turkish Baths, though they never had a sexual relationship. Britten also wrote the music for the next Auden-Isherwood play,
On the Frontier
. He went to America with Peter Pears in the summer of 1939, but, as Isherwood notes in
D1,
returned to England halfway through the war, registering with Pears as a conscientious objector. A major figure, Britten composed songs, song cycles, orchestral music, works for chorus and orchestra such as his
War Requiem
(1961), and nine operas including
Peter Grimes
(1945),
Albert Herring
(1948),
Billy Budd
(1951),
A Midsummer Night's Dream
(1960), and
Death in Venice
(1973). Don Bachardy recalls that Britten withdrew gradually from his friendship with Isherwood, and Isherwood sensed it was because Britten associated Isherwood closely with Auden, against whom Britten harbored more particular griefs. But there was a reunion between Isherwood and Britten in 1976, in Aldeburgh, not long before Britten died. Pears had visited Isherwood and Bachardy while performing in Los Angeles and was able to bring about the rapprochement. Britten was frail by then and wept when he saw Isherwood.

Brooke, Tim.
British novelist; a contemporary of Isherwood at Cambridge, he later spent time in Los Angeles. His novels, pubhshed under the name Hugh Brooke, include
The Mad Shepherdess
(1930),
Man Made Angry
(1932),
Miss Mitchell
(1934), and
Saturday Island
(1935). He was a close friend of the dancer Nicky Nadeau.

Brooks, Richard (1912–1992).
American novelist, screenwriter, film director and producer. Brooks was a sports writer and radio commentator before he began writing screenplays in the early 1940s; he then went on to direct and produce. His films include
The Blackboard Jungle
(1955),
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1958),
Elmer Gantry
(1960, for which his script won an Academy Award),
Sweet Bird of Youth
(1964),
Lord Jim
(1965),
In Cold Blood
(1967), and
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
(1977). One of his novels,
The Producer
, is about Hollywood.