Liberation (124 page)

Friebus, Florida (1909–1988).
American actress and writer. She debuted on Broadway in an Ibsen revival in 1929 and appeared, among other things, in
Alice in Wonderland
, which she adapted for the stage with her longtime companion Eva Le Gallienne. She also had numerous T.V. roles, notably in “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” and “The Bob Newhart Show.”

Fry, Basil.
A bachelor cousin of Kathleen Isherwood, sixteen years younger than her; educated at Oxford. In 1928, Isherwood made his first trip to Germany to stay with Fry in Bremen, where Fry was British vice-consul. This visit was the basis for “Mr. Lancaster” in
Down There on a Visit
, and Fry was the model for Lancaster.

Furbank, P.N. (Nicholas, Nick) (b. 1920).
English scholar, critic, editor, author. He was a longstanding friend of E.M. Forster and was asked by Forster to write his biography, which appeared in 1978. Furbank went on to edit, with Mary Largo, two volumes of Forster's letters. His other books include a prizewinning biography of Diderot and, with W.R. Owen, a biography of Defoe. He is a regular contributor to
The New York Review of Books
and other publications.

Gage, Margaret.
A rich, elderly patroness of Gerald Heard; she loaned him her garden house on Spoleto Drive in Pacific Palisades, close to Santa Monica, from the late 1940s until the early 1960s. She also provided Will Forthman with a room in her house during the same period. She appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Gain, Richard (Dick).
American ballet dancer. He danced in the original Broadway chorus of
Camelot
(1960) and in Martha Graham's company and later worked as a choreographer and teacher. He became friendly with Richard and Sybil Burton during
Camelot
and shared their Hampstead home with Isherwood and Bachardy in 1961, when he toured with Jerome Robbins's “Ballets: USA.” Gain's friend, Richard (Dick) Kuch, also danced in
Camelot
. Eventually the pair moved to East Bend, North Carolina, to teach dance at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where Kuch became an assistant dean. They resigned in 1995. They appear in
D.2
.

Gambhirananda, Swami (1899–1988).
Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order; philosopher, scholar, translator. A powerful General Secretary of the Ramakrishna Order for many years, in charge of its practical daily operation. Then, from 1985 to 1988, he was the eleventh president of the order, the spiritual leader, with no role in temporal matters. He appears in
D.2.

Garrett, Stephen and Jean.
A British couple, a few years younger than Don Bachardy. He had an administrative job in Los Angeles. After she died of cancer, he moved back to England with their two daughters, and Isherwood and Bachardy lost touch with them.

Gates, Jim (1950–
circa
1990).
American non-conformist, violinist, monk of the Ramakrishna Order; born in Washington State and raised in Claremont, California; his father taught Latin and English. He moved out of his parents' house before the end of his sophomore year in high school and after high school went with Peter Schneider to Los Angeles, where they shared various living arrangements in Venice, San Marino and Hollywood, and where he eventually revealed to Schneider that he was gay. He was obsessed with Isherwood and hoped to run into him on the beach; Schneider looked up Isherwood's telephone number in the phone book and called him to explain this, and Isherwood invited them to Adelaide Drive. Gates attended Santa Monica College briefly and worked as a bus boy, library clerk, and live-in assistant to the husband of Marlene Dietrich. He also joined the Hollywood Vedanta monastery for a time. He died of AIDS. He appears in
D.2.

Gavin.
See Lambert, Gavin.

Gaynor, Janet (1906–1984).
American film star. She appeared in her first movie in the 1920s and by 1934 was the biggest box office attraction in the U.S. Her films include
The Johnstown Flood
(1926),
Sunrise
(1927),
Seventh Heaven
(1927),
Street Angel
(1928),
State Fair
(1933),
A Star is Born
(1937),
The Young in Heart
(1938), and
Bernadine
(1957). For many years, she used the name of her second husband, fashion designer Gilbert Adrian (known as “Adrian,” d. 1959), with whom she appears in
D.1.
In 1964, she married producer Paul Gregory. Gaynor was also an accomplished painter and showed her still lifes in New York in 1976. She appears with Gregory in
D.2.

Geldzahler, Henry (1934–1994).
American art historian and curator; son of a Belgian diamond dealer; educated at Yale and Harvard. He zealously promoted contemporary artists and supervised the creation of the Department of Twentieth Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he organized the major exhibition, “New York Painting: 1940–1970.” He also served as the first director of the Visual Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he was responsible for grants to young artists. Later he became Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for New York City. Hockney drew and painted him a number of times.

Gerald.
See Heard, Henry FitzGerald.

gerua.
Hindi for ocher, the color of the cloth worn by monks and nuns who have taken their sannyas vows and symbolizing their renunciation.

Gielgud, John (1904–2000).
British actor and director; born and educated in London, trained briefly at RADA. He achieved fame in the 1920s acting Shakespeare, Wilde, and Chekhov, and as a director he had his own London company from 1937. From the 1950s onward, he also worked with contemporary British playwrights, including Peter Shaffer, Alan Bennett and David Storey. He won three Tonys for his work on the New York stage. His movies, in which he often majestically played supporting and character roles, include:
Hamlet
(1939),
Julius Caesar
(1953),
Richard III
(1955),
Becket
(1964),
Hamlet
(1964),
The Loved One
(1965),
The Charge of the Light Brigade
(1968),
Oh! What a Lovely War
(1969),
Lost Horizon
(1973),
Murder on the Orient Express
(1974),
Joseph Andrews
(1977),
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1979),
The Elephant Man
(1979),
Arthur
(1981, Academy Award),
Chariots of Fire
(1981),
Gandhi
(1982),
The Shooting Party
(1985),
Plenty
(1985),
Prospero's Books
(1991),
Hamlet
(1996),
The Portrait of a Lady
(1996),
Shine
(1996),
Elizabeth
(1998). During the 1970s and 1980s, he also worked in television, notably as Charles Ryder's father in the series “Brideshead Revisited.” His companion in the 1950s was Paul Anstee, an interior decorator. In 1960, he met Martin Hensler at an exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London; Hensler, Hungarian by background, moved in with him about six years later, and they remained together for the last thirty years of Gielgud's life. Isherwood tells in
D.1
that he first met Gielgud in New York in 1947 and didn't like him; they met again in London in 1948 and became friends. Gielgud also appears in
Lost Years
and
D.2.

Gilliatt, Penelope (1932–1993).
English critic, novelist, screen writer; born Penelope Connor in London and briefly educated at Bennington College in Vermont. She was a staff writer for British
Vogue
and later for
Queen
, and by 1961 she was film critic for
The Observer
. Later she became widely known in America as film critic for
The New Yorker
. Her first husband, Roger Gilliatt, was a London neurologist and best man at the wedding of Princess Margaret to Antony Armstrong-Jones. In 1963, she married John Osborne and had a daughter with him; the marriage broke down by 1966, and Gilliatt settled in New York in 1967, where she had a relationship with the stage and film director Mike Nichols which lasted until 1969, followed by a brief affair with Edmund Wilson. She became an alcoholic, and her career at
The New Yorker
ended when she fabricated an interview with Graham Greene for the magazine. She wrote the prize-winning original screenplay for
Sunday Bloody Sunday
(1971), more than ten volumes of fiction including short stories, and several volumes of film history and criticism.

Ginsberg, Allen (1926–1997).
American poet, born in New Jersey; educated at Columbia University; a member of the Beat scene in New York, San Francisco, and Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, and a central figure in 1960s counterculture. He was a Zen Buddhist and campaigned against the Vienam War and in favor of drugs, communism, and homosexuality. He invented the phrase “flower power” and claimed he was the first to chant Hare Krishna in North America, through his friendship with Swami Prabhupada who launched the movement in the West. He was a poetic disciple of William Blake and of Walt Whitman and is best known for his early works
Howl and Other Poems
(1956) and
Kaddish and Other Poems
(1961). He published numerous volumes of poetry and also lectures, letters, and journals telling about his friendships with William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and with his longterm lover, American poet Peter Orlovsky (b. 1933), whom he first met in San Francisco in 1954. Orlovsky had dropped out of high school and served as a U.S. Army medic before becoming Ginsberg's secretary; he published several volumes of his own poetry. Ginsberg and Orlovsky appear in
D.2
.

Glade.
See Bachardy, Glade.

Glaesner, Ole.
Danish tailor and costume designer, from Copenhagen; son of a sailor. He was trained by Yves St. Laurent and rented a room near Patrick Procktor in Manchester Street, where he ran a business making trousers known for their immaculate fit. He was evidently Procktor's lover for a time.

Glenway.
See Wescott, Glenway.

Goddard, Paulette (1911–1990).
American film star, once a model and a Ziegfeld Girl. She was Charlie Chaplin's third wife, from 1933 to 1942, and became famous in his
Modern Times
(1936) and
The Great Dictator
(1940). She was reportedly cleverer than other Hollywood stars and was admired by intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley and H.G. Wells. Her third marriage was to Burgess Meredith during the late 1940s, and she virtually retired after her fourth marriage in 1958 to German novelist and screenwriter Erich Maria Remarque (author of
All Quiet on the Western Front
). Isherwood met her soon after coming to Hollywood. She appears in
D.1.

Goldin, Marilyn.
American screenwriter. She co-wrote
Souvenirs d'en France
(1974) and
Barocco
(1976) with director André Téchiné in French with English subtitles,
Camille Claudel
(1988) with Bruno Nuytten in French, and
The Triumph of Love
(2001), based on Marivaux's play, with Clare Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci. She also had a small role in
The Conformist
(1970).

Goode, Joseph ( Joe) (b. 1937).
American artist; born in Oklahoma and trained at the Chouinard Art Institute. He had his first solo show at a San Fransicso gallery in 1962 and was part of the early pop art exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, “New Painting of Common Objects,” which included work by Lichtenstein, Warhol, and others. He has won a number of grants and awards, and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York, the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian, among others.

Goodstein, David (1932–1985).
American lawyer, activist, publisher; educated at Cornell and at Columbia Law School. He made a fortune on Wall Street managing investment portfolios and used his money to promote gay rights. He hired James Foster to set up and run the Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation, and he organized the Committee for Sexual Law Reform, which campaigned, through Assembly Bill 489, towards the 1975 repeal of California's sodomy law. Also, in 1974, he bought
The Advocate
, which he built into the national gay news magazine.

Goodwill.
Nonprofit provider of education and training for the poor, homeless, ill-educated, and physically and mentally disadvantaged in the U.S. It was founded in Boston in 1902 by a Methodist minister, Edgar J. Helms, who trained the poor to mend and resell used household goods and clothing.

Gordon, Bob.
American writer, settled in San Francisco. He was a friend of Jack Larson and Jim Bridges, who introduced him to Isherwood.

Gore.
See Vidal, Gore.

Gowland, Peter (b. 1916) and Alice.
Photographer and camera maker and his wife, director of his photo shoots. He is known for his photographs of celebrities and his nudes, many of which have appeared as
Playboy
centerfolds. His Gowlandflex camera, designed in 1957, is still on the market and is widely used by professionals. The Gowlands were among the Masselinks' closest friends, and Isherwood met them through the Masselinks in the early 1950s. They have two daughters, Ann Gowland and Marylee Gowland. The Gowlands appear in
D.1
and
D.2
.

Granny Emmy.
See Smith, Emily Machell.