Liberation (115 page)

Arup Chaitanya.
A disciple of Swami Prabhavananda, born Kenneth (Kenny) Critchfield. He arrived at the Vedanta Society towards the end of the 1940s and lived there and at Trabuco. He took his brahmacharya vows in 1954, becoming Arup Chaitanya; then in 1963, on taking sannyas, he became Swami Anamananda. He worked for many years in the Vedanta Society Hollywood bookstore and spent his last days at Trabuco, where he died in the early 1990s. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Asaktananda, Swami (1931–2009).
Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He was groomed by Swami Prabhavananda to take over the Hollywood Vedanta Society, until Prabhavananda unexpectedly decided that Asaktananda had the wrong personality for the role and sent him back to the Belur Math in India against Asaktananda's wishes and amid much controversy. Asaktananda later headed the Narendrapur Center, an enormous educational establishment of the Ramakrishna order outside Calcutta. He appears in
D.2.

asanas.
Yoga postures, or the mat on which they are performed.

Assembly Bill 489 (A.B. 489).
California state legislation decriminalizing adultery, oral sex, and sodomy between consenting adults. It was introduced in Sacramento every year for about a decade by liberal black assemblyman Willie Brown until it was approved in March 1975 by the state assembly and on May 2 by the more conservative state senate. Mervyn Dymally, newly elected, also black, rushed back from out of state to break the tie while the state senators were kept locked in the building to ensure a quorum. Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill, and it took effect on January 1, 1976.

Atman.
The divine nature within man; Brahman within the human being; the self or soul; the deepest core of man's identity.

Auden, W. H. (Wystan) (1907–1973).
English poet, playwright, librettist; perhaps the greatest English poet of his century and one of the most influential. He and Isherwood met as schoolboys towards the end of Isherwood's time at St. Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey, where Auden, two and a half years younger, arrived in the autumn of 1915. They wrote three plays together—
The Dog Beneath the Skin
(1935),
The Ascent of F6
(1936),
On the Frontier
(1938)—and a travel book about their trip to China during the Sino-Japanese war—
Journey to a War
(1939). A fourth play—
The Enemies of a Bishop
(1929)—was published posthumously. They also wrote a film scenario, “The Life of an American,” probably in 1939. As well as several stints of schoolmastering, Auden worked for John Grierson's Film Unit, funded by the General Post Office, for about six months in 1935, mostly writing poetry to be used for sound tracks. He and Isherwood went abroad separately and together during the 1930s, famously to Berlin (Auden arrived first, in 1928), and finally emigrated together to the United States in 1939. After only a few months, their lives diverged; Auden settled in New York with his companion and, later, collaborator, Chester Kallman, but he remained close friends with Isherwood. Auden's libretti include
Paul Bunyan
(1941) for Benjamin Britten,
The Rake's Progress
(1948) with Kallman for Stravinsky, and
Elegy for Young Lovers
with Kallman for Hans Werner Henze. Auden is caricatured as “Hugh Weston” in
Lions and Shadows
and figures centrally in
Christopher and His Kind
. There are many passages about him in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years.

Austen, Howard (Tinker) (1928–2003).
Companion to Gore Vidal from 1950. He worked in advertising in New York and studied singing, then devoted most of his time to Vidal, managing Vidal's business and social life. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2
.

Avis, Annie (1869–1948).
Isherwood's nanny, from near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk. She was hired by Isherwood's mother when he was two months old and Avis herself was about thirty; she remained with the family for the rest of her life and never married. In childhood, Isherwood and his younger brother Richard spent more time with Nanny than they did with their mother. In
Kathleen and Frank
, Isherwood writes that he had loved Nanny dearly; he bullied her in adolescence, but she never criticized him, and he shared intimate secrets with her.

Ayer, A.J. (Alfred, Freddie) (1910–1989).
British philosopher, educated at Eton and Oxford. He married four times and had many affairs. His second wife was also his fourth, American journalist Dee Wells, née Chapman (b. 1925), author of the best-selling novel
Jane
(1973). They met in 1956, married in 1960, divorced in the early 1980s, and married again in 1989. Ayer's third wife was Vanessa Lawson, formerly wife of Nigel Lawson; she and Ayer married in 1982 but were involved with one another from 1968 onward; she died of cancer in 1985. Another long affair, in the early 1950s, was with Jocelyn Rickards, who remained a friend. Ayer was also a close friend of Tony Bower, whom he met in New York during World War II, and with whose half-sister, Jean Gordon-Duff, he was briefly involved around the same time. He appears in
D.2.

Bacall, Lauren (b. 1924).
American stage and screen star, born in the Bronx and trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She appeared on Broadway before making her first film
To Have and Have Not
(1944) with Humphrey Bogart, whom she married in 1945. Her other films with him are
The Big Sleep
(1945),
Dark Passage
(1947), and
Key Largo
(1948), and she also appeared in
How to Marry a Millionaire
(1953),
Sex and the Single Girl
(1965), and
The Mirror Has Two Faces
(1996), among others. She returned to Broadway in
Cactus Flower
(1965),
Applause
(1970), for which she won a Tony Award, and
Woman of the Year
(1981). Bogart died in 1957, and in 1961 Bacall married Jason Robards, Jr., but they later divorced. Isherwood first mentions her in
D.1
in 1954 when Peter Viertel was friendly with her, and they met again several times with the Viertels and at the Selznicks' during the 1950s.

Bachardy, Don (b. 1934).
American painter; Isherwood's companion from 1953 onwards. Bachardy accompanied his elder brother, Ted Bachardy, to the beach in Santa Monica from the late 1940s, and Isherwood occasionally saw him there. Ted Bachardy, with other friends, first introduced them in November 1952. They met again in early February 1953 and, on February 14, began an affair which quickly became serious. Bachardy was then an eighteen-year-old college student living at home with his brother and his mother. His parents were divorced. He had studied languages for one semester at UCLA, then transferred at the start of 1953 to Los Angeles City College in Hollywood, near his mother's apartment. At first he studied French and Spanish but dropped French for German as a result of Isherwood's influence. He had worked as a grocery boy at a local market, and, like Isherwood in youth, spent most of his free time at the movies. In February 1955, Bachardy went back to UCLA to begin his junior year and almost immediately changed his major from languages to theater arts. In July 1956, he enrolled at the Chouinard Art School, supplemented his instruction there by taking classes with Vernon Old, and within a few years got work as a professional artist, drawing fashion illustrations for a local department store and then for newspapers and magazines. During this period he began to do portraits of Isherwood, close friends, and favorite film stars, and to sell his work. His first major portrait commission, from Tony Richardson, was to draw the cast of the 1960 stage production of
A Taste of Honey.
In 1961 he attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London, supported partly by his patron Russell McKinnon and partly by
Women's Wear Daily
as their London fashion illustrator. His work at the Slade led to his first individual shows, in London in 1961 and in New York in 1962. Since then, he has done countless portraits, both of the famous and the little-known, and exhibited in many cities. His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. and the National Portrait Gallery in London, and he has published his drawings in several books, including
October
(1981) with Isherwood,
Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood
(1990), and
Stars in My Eyes
(2000). Together, Isherwood and Bachardy wrote several stage and film scripts, including their award-winning screenplay for the T.V. film “Frankenstein: The True Story” (1973). He figures centrally in
D.1
and
D.2.

Bachardy, Glade De Land (1906–198[8]).
Don Bachardy's mother, from Ohio. Childhood polio left her with a limp, resulting in extreme shyness. Her father was the captain of a cargo boat on the Great Lakes, and she met her husband, Jess Bachardy, on board during a summer cruise with her sister in the 1920s. They married in 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio, and travelled to Los Angeles on their honeymoon, settling there permanently. The Bachardys divorced in 1952, but later reconciled; once Don and his brother Ted Bachardy had moved out of their mother's apartment, their father moved back in, early in 1955. An ardent movie-goer, Glade took Don and Ted to the movies from their early childhood because she could not afford babysitters, thus nurturing an obsession which developed differently in each of them. According to Don, Glade did not know what homosexuality was until her elder son Ted had his first breakdown in 1945. She appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Bachardy, Jess (1905–1977).
Don Bachardy's father, born in New Jersey, the youngest of several brothers and sisters in an immigrant German-Hungarian family. Jess's mother, who never learned to speak English, was pregnant with him when she arrived in the U.S.; his father drowned accidentally shortly before. Jess was an automobile enthusiast and a natural mechanic and took several jobs as a uniformed chauffeur when he was young. Afterwards, he worked on board a cargo boat on the Great Lakes, where he met his future wife. They moved to California, and he turned his mechanical skills to the aviation industry, working mostly with Lockheed Aircraft for the next thirty years. His progress was limited by the fact that he never finished high school, but he worked his way up to the position of tool planner before he retired in the 1960s. He never allowed his sons to learn Hungarian, and they barely knew their Bachardy grandmother or any of her family. For fifteen years, he refused to meet Isherwood, but he finally relented and came to like him. He was a lifelong smoker and died of lung cancer. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Bachardy, Ted (1930–2007).
Don Bachardy's older brother. Isherwood spotted him on the beach in Santa Monica, probably in the autumn of 1948 or spring of 1949, and invited him to a party in November 1949 (Ted's name first appears in Isherwood's diary that month). Isherwood was attracted to Ted, but did not pursue him seriously because Ted was involved with someone else, Ed Cornell. Around the same time, Ted experienced a mental breakdown—about the third or fourth he had suffered since 1945, when he was fifteen. Eventually he was diagnosed as a manic-depressive schizophrenic. He was subject to recurring periods of manic, self-destructive behavior followed by nervous breakdowns and long stays in mental hospitals. Isherwood continued to see Ted intermittently during the early weeks of his affair with Don, but a turning point came in February 1953 with Ted's fourth or fifth breakdown, when Isherwood sympathized with Don and intervened to try to prevent Ted from becoming violent and having to be hospitalized; nevertheless, Ted was committed on February 26. When well, Ted took odd 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. Isherwood writes about him in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
.

Bacon, Francis (1909–1992).
English painter, born in Dublin. He 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
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
made him suddenly famous in 1945. He appears in
D.1
, where Isherwood records some of his remarks on art, and in
Lost Years
and
D.2
. The story Bacon told Isherwood in 1972, about his friendship with the Kray twins, is told in Bacon's own words in Michael Peppiatt's biography,
Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma
. Bacon was especially interested in Ronnie Kray, a homosexual and the more sadistic of the two notoriously brutal, murderous brothers. Bacon had kept some paintings in his studio because he considered them poor work; these were the paintings stolen, as Isherwood mentions. The theft was discovered when the Krays tried to sell them, and Bacon eventually bought them back and destroyed them because he didn't want them shown publicly.

Baddeley, Hermione (1906–1986).
British actress, dancer, comedienne; she first appeared on Broadway as a replacement for Angela Lansbury in
A Taste of Honey
(1960–1961). Among her films are
Brighton Rock
(1947), which she previously played on stage,
Room at the Top
(1958), and
Mary Poppins
(1964). She was married twice and lived for a time with actor Laurence Harvey.