Liberation (118 page)

Brandt, Stuart.
American painter. He lived at the Vedanta Society in Santa Barbara for a time and remained a devotee afterwards, settling in a nearby house which he rented from the society. His Sanskrit name is Sadhak. He later ran a business specializing in faux finishes, trompe-l'oeil, and hand-painted furniture and moved away from the society though he keeps a studio in Santa Barbara.

Brevard, Lee (1949–1994).
American painter and jewelry designer; born outside Pittsburgh, educated at Arizona State and Cooper Union. He worked as a water-colorist in Paris, where he met David Hockney, then relocated to Los Angeles around 1977 and began designing jewelry. Elizabeth Taylor was one of his first and best clients; his pieces were sought out by other stars, too, and appeared in a number of films. The business was called The House of Brevard; his studio was in Venice.

Bridges, James ( Jimmy, Jim) (1936–1993).
American actor, screenwriter and director; raised in Arkansas and educated at Arkansas Teachers College and USC. He was frequently on T.V. in the 1950s and appeared in a number of movies, including
Johnny Trouble
(1957),
Joy Ride
(1958), and
Faces
(1968). He lived with the actor Jack Larson from the mid 1950s onward, and through Larson became close friends with Isherwood and Bachardy. In the early 1960s, he was stage manager for the UCLA Professional Theater Group when John Houseman recommended him as a writer for a Hitchcock suspense series on T.V. He turned out plays constantly, some of which were shown only to Larson, and many of which were never staged. Bridges came to prominence in the 1970s when he directed and co-wrote screenplays for
The Babymaker
(1970),
The Paper Chase
(1973),
The China Syndrome
(1979),
Urban Cowboy
(1980), and, later,
Mike's Murder
(1984),
Perfect
(1985), and
Bright Lights, Big City
(1988). He directed the first production of Isherwood and Bachardy's play
A Meeting by the River
for New Theater for Now at the Mark Taper Forum in 1972, and he directed the twenty-fifth-anniversary production of
A Streetcar Named Desire
at the Ahmanson in 1973. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Brisson, Frederick (1912–1984).
Danish-born Broadway producer, husband of Rosalind Russell. He produced
The Pajama Game
(1955) and
Damn Yankees
(1956), both winners of Best Musical Tony Awards,
Alfie!
(1964),
Jumpers
(1974), and others.

Britten, Benjamin (1913–1976).
British composer. Auden worked with him briefly from September 1935 at John Grierson's GPO Film Unit in Soho Square and introduced him to the Group Theatre; at Auden's instigation, he composed the music for
The Ascent of F6
, and Isherwood perhaps first met him 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
. In the summer of 1939, he went with Peter Pears to America, where he collaborated with Auden on their first opera,
Paul Bunyan
(1941); then, Britten and Pears returned to England halfway through the war, registering as conscientious objectors. 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). He appears in
D.1
and in
Lost Years
. After
Paul Bunyan
, he set Auden's “Three Songs for St. Cecilia's Day,” their last collaboration; Britten resented Auden's affectionate but bossy advice not to settle for the comfortable fame available in England. Once the friendship with Auden ended, Britten also gradually withdrew his friendship from Isherwood and from the Spenders because they were close to Auden. But a reunion with Isherwood was brought about by Pears at Aldeburgh in 1976. Britten, already frail, wept when he saw Isherwood.

Brookes, Jacqueline (b. 1930).
American actress, trained at RADA. She was acclaimed on the New York stage in the mid-1950s, worked steadily in daytime T.V., and made a few films, including
Without a Trace
(1983).

Brown, Andrew (1938–1994).
T.V. producer, from New Zealand; he worked in the U.K. in the 1960s and 1970s, for the BBC and then for Thames T.V., and afterwards co-produced from New Zealand. Among his shows are “Rock Follies” (1976) and “Selling Hitler” (1991), both by Howard Schuman, “Edward and Mrs. Simpson” (1978), “Prick Up Your Ears” (1986) by Alan Bennett, and “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” (1992) adapted from Angus Wilson's novel. He was a member of Peter Adair's Mariposa Film Group, which created the gay and lesbian film
The Word Is Out
(1977).

Brown, Bill (1919–2012).
American painter. He has used the professional names W.T. Brown, W. Theo. Brown, W. Theophilus Brown, and Theophilus Brown. He was born in Illinois and made his career on the West Coast with his longterm partner, Paul Wonner, also a painter. Brown and Wonner were companions from the late 1950s until the mid-1990s, sharing apartments and houses in Santa Monica, Malibu, New Hampshire, Santa Barbara, and finally San Francisco, where, after twenty years, they settled into separate apartments in the same building. Along with Wonner, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, David Park, Nathan Oliveira and others first perceived as a group in the early 1950s, Brown has been characterized as an American or a Californian Realist, a Bay Area Figurative Artist, a Figurative Abstractionist. Isherwood met Brown and Wonner in August 1962, when they attended Don Bachardy's first Los Angeles show at the Rex Evans Gallery with Jo and Ben Masselink. He appears in
D.2.

Brown, Harry (1917–1986).
American poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter. He was educated at Harvard and worked for
Time Magazine
and
The New Yorker
. His first novel,
A Walk in the Sun
(1944), was filmed in 1945, and afterwards he worked on numerous Hollywood scripts, especially war movies. He won an Academy Award for co-writing
A Place in the Sun
(1951), and he also wrote
Ocean's Eleven
(1960), among others. In the early 1950s, he worked at Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM, and he was married for a few years to Marguerite Lamkin. Later he married June de Baum. His other novels are
The Stars in Their Courses
(1968),
A Quiet Place to Work
(1968), and
The Wild Hunt
(1973); he published five volumes of poetry. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Brown, Jerry (b. 1938).
Governor of California from 1975 to 1983, and again from 2011, and the only son of the previous Governor Brown. When Isherwood met him in November 1979, he was running for president against Jimmy Carter, Brown's second of three unsuccessful attempts to secure the Democratic nomination. He went to a Roman Catholic high school, St. Ignatius, run by Jesuits, and to a Jesuit college, Santa Clara University. He then joined a Jesuit seminary, Sacred Heart Novitiate, in 1958 with the intention of becoming a priest. But he left the seminary to study classics at Berkeley, and later got a degree in law from Yale.

Brown, Rick.
Aspiring actor, born and raised in rural West Virginia. He left high school to join the navy, married and had a son before divorcing. In 1971, he had an affair with Truman Capote after they met in a bar on the West Side of Manhattan where Brown then worked. Capote introduced him to Isherwood.

Brown, Susan (b. 1946).
English actress. She had a few stage and film roles and appeared on British T.V. in “Making Out,” “Prime Suspect,” “Casualty,” “East Enders” and “The Ruth Rendell Mysteries.”

Browne, Coral.
See Price, Vincent and Coral Browne.

Buchholz, Horst (1933–2003).
German stage and screen actor, son of a shoemaker. He starred in European films in the 1950s, then achieved Hollywood fame as a gunslinger in
The Magnificent Seven
(1960). His wife, Myriam Bru (b. 1932), was an actress, and, later, a talent agent in Paris.

Buckingham, Bob (1904–1975) and May (1908–1997).
British policeman and his wife, a nurse. E.M. Forster met and fell in love with Bob Buckingham in 1930. In 1932 they made a radio broadcast together, for a BBC series “Conversations in the Train,” overseen by J.R. Ackerley who had introduced them. When Buckingham then met and married May Hockey, it caused turmoil in his relations with Forster, but the three eventually established a lifelong intimacy. Forster even gave the Buckinghams an allowance as they grew older. In 1951, Buckingham retired from the police force, joined the probation service, and settled with May in a new post in Coventry in 1953. They had one son, Robin, who married and had children of his own, before dying in the early 1960s of Hodgkins Disease. The Buckinghams appear in
D.2.

Buckle, Christopher Richard Sanford (Dicky) (1916–2001).
British ballet critic and exhibition designer; educated at Marlborough and, for one year, Oxford. He was ballet critic for
The Observer
from 1948 to 1955 and for
The Sunday Times
from 1959 to 1975. He designed an influential exhibition about Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in 1954, a less successful one about Shakespeare in 1963, and a Cecil Beaton exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1968. He also created the 1976 exhibition “Young British Writers of the Thirties,” at which Isherwood spoke at the Portrait Gallery. He published biographies of Nijinsky (1971), Diaghilev (1979), and Balanchine (1988), as well as three volumes of autobiography. He appears in
D.2.

Buddha Chaitanya (Buddha).
An American disciple of Swami Prabhavananda; born Philip Griggs. He lived as a monk both at the Hollywood Vedanta Society and at Trabuco during the 1950s and took brahmacharya vows with John Yale in August 1955, becoming Buddha Chaitanya. In 1959 he left Vedanta for a time, but eventually took sannyas and became Swami Yogeshananda. Later he led a Vedanta group in Georgia. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Burroughs, William (1914–1997).
American writer and painter, born in St. Louis, educated at Harvard; he lived with Jack Kerouac in Greenwich Village and for many years abroad in Paris, Mexico City, Tangier and elsewhere. He was also close to Allen Ginsberg and Byron Gysin. His extreme and destructive bohemianism, obsessed by heroin and sadistic sex, is charted in his novels,
Junkie
(1953),
The Naked Lunch
(1959),
The Wild Boys
(1971), and
Queer
(1985, written in 1953), among others.
A Report from the Bunker
(1981) was about his life in New York in the 1970s.

Burton, Richard (1925–1984).
British actor, born Richard Jenkins in a Welsh coal-mining village; he took the surname of his English master and guardian, Philip Burton. He made his professional stage debut in the early 1940s then served in the air force and briefly studied English at Oxford, where he acted in Shakespeare. He starred in
Hamlet
in London and New York in 1953 and 1954, followed by other Shakespearian roles and, later, the Broadway musical
Camelot
(1960) and
Equus
(1976). His films include
My Cousin Rachel
(1952),
The Robe
(1953),
Alexander the Great
(1956),
Look Back in Anger
(1959),
Becket
(1964),
The Night of the Iguana
(1964),
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
(1965),
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
(1966),
The Taming of the Shrew
(1967),
Where Eagles Dare
(1969),
Equus
(1977), and
California Suite
(1978). He was nominated seven times for an Academy Award. His first wife was a Welsh actress, Sybil Williams, with whom Isherwood met him in the late 1950s, and with whom he appears in
D.1.
He began a tempestuous public romance with Elizabeth Taylor when he played opposite her in
Cleopatra
(1963); they married twice, in 1963 and 1975, and divorced both times. His third wife, whom he married in 1976, was an English model, Susan Hunt, and he met his fourth wife, Sally Hay, when she worked as an administrator on his television film “Wagner”; they married in 1983. His legendary drinking hastened his death. As Isherwood records in
D.
2, he worked for Burton on a screenplay of “The Beach of Falesá” by Robert Louis Stevenson, but nothing came of the project. Around the same time, the Burtons loaned their Hampstead house to Don Bachardy when he studied at the Slade, and Isherwood lived there with Bachardy during 1961.

Butazolidin.
Brand name for phenylbutazone, a nonsteroidal, anti-inflammatory and analgesic drug.

Byrne, John (b. 1945).
English bibliophile and scholar, educated at Marlborough and Cambridge, where he abandoned his classics scholarship after two years. He worked on manuscripts and archives for Bertram Rota from 1967 until 1995, and occasionally contributed reviews to
The Book Collector
and the
Times Literary Supplement
. He edited
James Stern: Some Letters for His Seventieth Birthday
(1974), prepared and introduced an edition of Lord Berners's roman à clef,
The Girls of Radcliff Hall
(2000), and wrote
Aiding & Abetting: An Alphabet for AIDS.