Liberation (121 page)

Crawford, Joan (1904–1977).
American movie star, born in Texas and discovered by MGM in a Broadway chorus line. Isherwood first met her when he worked on the script for
A Woman's Face
in 1940–1941, and she appears in
D.1
. Her many films include
Possessed
(1931 and 1947),
Grand Hotel
(1932),
Rain
(1932),
Mildred Pierce
(1945, Academy Award),
Sudden Fear
(1952), and
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
(1962). She married four times, finally to Pepsi chairman Alfred Steele in 1956, and when he died, she joined the board of Pepsi. She is the subject of
Mommie Dearest
(1978), by her adopted daughter Christina Crawford, made into a 1981 film starring Faye Dunaway.

Crawford, Linda (b. 1938).
New York writer. She shared a house in Malibu with Camilla Clay from 1967 to 1972, then returned to New York and began to publish novels in the mid-1970s; they include
In a Class by Herself
(1976),
Something to Make Us Happy
(1978),
Vanishing Acts
(1983), and
Ghost of a Chance
(1985). She appears in
D.2.

Cribb, Don.
American photographer, born in North Carolina; he got a film degree from USC in 1969. Later, he restored antiques. He founded the Santa Ana Council of Arts and Culture, an arts advocacy group behind the creation of the Grand Central Arts Center and Santa Ana Arts Village and behind the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art. He posed for Hockney during the 1970s and again in the late 1990s, and he sat often for Bachardy in the mid-1970s.

Cukor, George (1899–1983).
American film director. Cukor began his career on Broadway in the 1920s and came to Hollywood as a dialogue director on
All Quiet on the Western Front
(1930). In the thirties he directed at Paramount, RKO, and then MGM, moving from studio to studio with his friend and producer David Selznick. He directed Garbo in
Camille
(1936) and Hepburn in her debut,
A Bill of Divorcement
(1932), as well as in
Philadelphia Story
(1940); other well-known work includes
Dinner at Eight
(1933),
David Copperfield
(1934),
A Star is Born
(1954), and
My Fair Lady
(1964). Isherwood tells in
D.1
that he met Cukor at a party at the Huxleys' in December 1939. Later they became friends and worked together. Cukor also appears in
Lost Years
and in
D.2.

Cullen, John (1909–1977).
British publisher, educated at Cambridge. He worked as a schoolmaster before going into the educational side of Methuen in the 1930s. He returned as General Editor after serving in World War II, developed Methuen's list of British, Irish, and European literature, and launched the paperback originals series, Methuen Modern Plays, beginning with Shelagh Delaney's
A Taste of Honey
. He was Isherwood's editor after Alan White retired, until he himself retired in 1976.

Curtis Brown.
Isherwood's first literary agency in London and in New York, from the mid-1930s. In September 1935, Curtis Brown's London office oversaw the contract between Isherwood and Methuen committing Isherwood to deliver his next three full-length novels to Methuen; 1935 is also the year Isherwood first appears on the books of Curtis Brown in New York. (At the time, Isherwood was still being published by the Hogarth Press, also represented by Curtis Brown, but Methuen began publishing him with
Prater Violet
after the war.) Isherwood evidently formed a relationship with Curtis Brown's play department for
The Ascent of F6
in the mid-1930s, and Curtis Brown also represented Auden from about this time. In the New York office, Alan Collins was Isherwood's agent until 1959 when Perry Knowlton took over and continued as Isherwood's American agent until 1973. In the mid-1970s, Isherwood left Curtis Brown, New York, for Candida Donadio. But he stayed with Curtis Brown in London, where he was represented by John Barber, James McGibbon, Richard Simon, Peter Grose, and Anthea Moreton-Saner.

Cuthbertson, Tom (194[5]-2005).
American writer. He studied German at U.C. Santa Cruz and got a masters in English at San Francisco State University. He was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. Isherwood read several of his stories as a favor to Peter Schlesinger, praised them, and later met Cuthbertson and his first wife, Pat Zylius. In 1972, Cuthbertson, a cyclist, published a best-selling book on bicycles,
Anybody's Bike Book
, which gave him financial independence.

Dambacher, David.
American artist. Once a year, he created a tableau honoring Marilyn Monroe, either on her birthday or on the anniversary of her death. He became a professional trucker with his friend Gene Martin, who was about fifteen years older than he. They were sex addicts and told stories of elaborate seductions on the road. Both died of AIDS.

Dare, Diana.
Secretary to Oscar Lewenstein at Woodfall Productions. Later, she was the second wife of British fashion photographer Terence Donovan.

darshan
. In Hinduism, a blessing or sense of purification which is achieved by paying a ceremonial visit to a holy person or place; also, the ceremonial visit itself.

David.
See Hockney, David.

Davidson, Gordon (b. 1933).
Theater director, raised in Brooklyn. He worked as stage manager and director at the American Shakespeare Festival, where he met John Houseman who invited him to UCLA to work with the Theater Group in 1964. In 1967, the Theater Group moved into the new Mark Taper Forum, and Davidson became artistic director. He continued in the job for thirty-eight years, opening the new Ahmanson Theater in 1989 and the Kirk Douglas Theater in 2004. By the time he retired, he had won eighteen Tony Awards, three Pulitzer Prizes, and sent thirty-five productions to Broadway. He also won a Margo Jones Award for his contribution to the development of American regional theater.

Davis, Ronald (Ron) (b. 1937).
American painter and lithographer, born in Santa Monica and raised in Wyoming, where he studied at the University of Wyoming before attending the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1960s. He was influenced there by Abstract Expressionism. His first show was at Nicholas Wilder's gallery in 1965. In 1966, he taught at the University of California at Irvine and had a solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, followed in 1968 by a show at Leo Castelli. His optical geometric works soon began to be acquired by major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Day-Lewis, Cecil (1904–1972).
Irish-born poet, novelist, translator, editor; educated at Sherborne School and Oxford, where he became friends with Auden and, through him, met Isherwood. He was a schoolmaster during the 1930s, wrote for leftist publications and joined the Communist party in 1936. His poetry from the period reflects his political involvement, but he later returned to personal themes and abandoned his radical opinions during World War II. He wrote roughly twenty detective novels under a pseudonym, Nicholas Blake, as well as three autobiographical novels, and he published verse translations of Virgil and of Paul Valéry. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1951 to 1956 (just before Auden) and became poet laureate of Britain in 1968. He married twice, the second time to actress Jill Balcon (b. 1925), with whom he had three children (one is the actor Daniel Day-Lewis); he had two children with his first wife. He also had a long affair with Rosamond Lehmann during his first marriage. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Deepti.
See High, Beth.

Dehn, Paul (1912–1976).
British film critic, playwright, lyricist, librettist, and screenwriter; raised in Disley, Greater Manchester, and educated at Oxford. He won an Oscar for his first film story,
Seven Days to Noon
(1951), co-authored with his live-in partner, film composer James Bernard (1925–2001), and he won a British Film Academy Award for
Orders to Kill
(1958). He later worked on
Goldfinger
(1964),
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
(1965),
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
(1970), and the many
Planet of the Apes
sequels. His lyrics for musicals and films include the song for the film version of
I Am a Camera
.

“de Laval, Jay” (probably an assumed name).
American chef; he adopted the role of the Baron de Laval. In the mid-1940s he opened a small French restaurant on the corner of Channel Road and Chautauqua in Santa Monica, Café Jay, frequented by movie stars seeking privacy. In 1949, he opened a second restaurant in the Virgin Islands, and in 1950 he was briefly in charge of the Mocambo in Los Angeles before opening a grand restaurant in Mexico City. There, he also planned interiors with Mexican designer Arturo Pani and created a menu for Mexicana Air Lines and crockery for Air France. Isherwood met de Laval through Denny Fouts. He was a lover of Bill Caskey before Isherwood and a friend of Ben and Jo Masselink. He appears in
D.1
and
Lost Years
and is mentioned in
D.2
.

de Velasco, Adolfo.
Spanish-born antique dealer and socialite, friendly with the Moroccan royal family. He ran two shops, one in Tangier and one in the Hotel La Mamounia in Marrakech, and he also had two palaces, one in the Casbah in Tangier and the other in Marrakech. The palaces were lavishly decorated with oriental antiques, and he threw stupendous parties in them. He died in the 1990s.

Dexamyl.
Dextroamphetamine, an antidepressant or upper, combined with amobarbitol, a barbiturate to offset its effect. Isherwood was introduced to it by Bachardy, and they both used it when tackling big swathes of work; for many years they shared Bachardy's prescription since neither of them relied on it habitually. Bachardy was first given it at eighteen by a friend, Alex Quiroga. (Dexedrine, which Isherwood also mentions, is a brand name for a preparation of dextroamphetamine without the barbiturate.)

dharma.
Vocation, duty, including religious duty, station or role in life; also morality, righteousness.

Dharmadas.
Jon Monday, an American devotee of Prabhavananda. His wife, Anna Monday, was known as Urbashi, and they were both members of the Venice Group. They had a daughter, Rachel. He built a recording studio at Takoma Records from which he ran MondayMedia, and where, with Charlie Mitchell, he recorded the 1979 L.P.
The Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God, Selections Read by Christopher Isherwood
. Isherwood read from the translation he made with Swami Prabhavananda. Indian flutist Harprasad Chaurasias contributed musical interludes, accompanied by Rijram Desad and Sultan Khan. The L.P. was later remastered as a C.D.

di Capua, Michael.
Isherwood's editor at Farrar, Straus Giroux, where di Capua worked from 1966 until 1991. Afterwards, he moved with Isherwood's work to HarperCollins until 1999. Di Capua also published children's books by prize winning authors and illustrators such as Jules Feiffer, Randall Jarrell, Maurice Sendak, and William Steig. He took his imprint, Michael di Capua Books, to Hyperion in 1999 and then to Scholastic in 2005, but Isherwood remained at HarperCollins.

Didion, Joan (b. 1934).
American writer, raised in the Sacramento Valley and educated at Berkeley. Her career began as a
Vogue
staff writer and film critic. She is known for her essays on American cultural decline collected in
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
(1968),
The White Album
(1979), and
After Henry
(1992), and for the journalism and critical pieces she still contributes to
The New Yorker
and
The New York Review of Books
. Her best-selling novels include
Run River
(1963),
Play It as It Lays
(1970), and
The Book of Common Prayer
(1977). She wrote film scripts with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. After his death, she published a memoir of her grief,
The Year of Magical Thinking
(2005), staged as a play starring Vanessa Redgrave. Five weeks before the memoir came out, their only child, a daughter called Quintana Roo, died after being critically ill off and on for some years; Didion incorporated Quintana Roo's death into the play.

Diebenkorn, Richard (1922–1993).
American painter, born in Portland, educated at Stanford, at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and at the University of New Mexico. He travelled and studied widely, absorbing influences from Edward Hopper, Rothko and Clyfford Still (with whom he taught in the 1950s), Arshile Gorky, de Kooning and, later, Matisse, among others. His style evolved in alternating phases of figurative and non-figurative interest so that he helped to launch a West Coast movement in Abstract Expressionism and later was at the center of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. He taught at the California School of Fine Arts, the University of Illinois, Stanford, and in 1966 moved to Santa Monica to take a job at UCLA. His studio in Ocean Park became the focus of his last development as an abstract painter with the Ocean Park series, which he continued to work on into the late 1980s.

Diehl, Digby.
American book critic, mostly for
The Los Angeles Times
where he was the founding editor of
The Los Angeles Times Book Review
. He has written and co-written over three dozen books, including the autobiographies
Million Dollar Mermaid
(1999), about Esther Williams, and
Angel on My Shoulder
(2000), about Natalie Cole, and the novel
Soapsuds
(2005) with actress Finola Hughes. He is also a broadcast commentator on media and entertainment.