Liberation (125 page)

Gregory, Paul (b. 1920).
American film, T.V., and theater producer; born and raised in Iowa, and, briefly, in London. He acted in two films, then turned to booking and management. In 1950, he persuaded Charles Laughton to be his client and arranged tours for him, then T.V. appearances and stage and film productions for which Laughton acted, directed, and sometimes wrote material. Gregory's Broadway shows include
John Brown's Body
(1953) and
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
(1954); his movies,
The Night of the Hunter
(1955) and
The Naked and the Dead
(1958). He was the third husband of Janet Gaynor. He appears in
D.2.

Griggs, Phil.
See Buddha Chaitanya.

Grose, Peter.
Isherwood's penultimate agent at Curtis Brown in London. He went on to found Curtis Brown Australia, then became a publisher at Secker & Warburg, and later a non-fiction author.

Grosser, Maurice (1903–1986).
American painter and writer; raised in Tennessee and educated at Harvard. He wrote about art for
The Nation
and published a number of books including
The Painter's Eye
(1956),
Painting in Our Time
(1964), and
Painter's Progress
(1971). He was the longtime companion of Virgil Thomson; both were close friends of Paul and Jane Bowles, and Grosser lived partly in Tangier. He had a Manhattan apartment which he often loaned to Bachardy, on 14th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. He appears in
D.2.

Guerriero, Henry
. American painter and sculptor; from Monroe, Louisiana, where he had known Marguerite and Speed Lamkin and Tom Wright, who were roughly his contemporaries in age. In Los Angeles, he moved in different circles with his companion Michael Leopold. Isherwood met him in the early 1950s, and he is mentioned in
D.1
and
D.2.
He changed his name to Roman A. Clef in 1978.

Guinness, Alec (1914–2000).
English actor, born in London; his mother's name was de Cuffe; he never knew who his father was. He trained at the Fay Compton School of Dramatic Art and began his career on the London stage in the mid-1930s, appearing in Shakespeare, Shaw, and Chekhov at the Old Vic. During World War II, he served in the navy, and afterwards began making films, generally in comic or character roles. These include
Great Expectations
(1946),
Oliver Twist
(1948),
Kind Hearts and Coronets
(1949, in which he played eight parts),
The Lavender Hill Mob
(1951; Academy Award nomination),
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957, Academy Award),
The Horse's Mouth
(1958, for which he wrote the screenplay, nominated for an Academy Award),
Our Man in Havana
(1959),
Lawrence of Arabia
(1962),
Doctor Zhivago
(1965),
The Comedians
(1967),
Scrooge
(1970),
Brother Sun, Sister Moon
(1973),
Hitler, the Last Ten Days
(1973),
Murder by Death
(1976),
Star Wars
(1977, Academy Award nomination),
The Empire Strikes Back
(1980),
Return of the Jedi
(1983),
A Passage to India
(1984), and
Little Dorrit
(1987, Academy Award nomination). He also played the lead in the television miniseries of John Le Carré's
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
and
Smiley's People
. He was knighted in 1959, and he was awarded an honorary, career Academy Award in 1980. His wife—Lady Guinness, once he was knighted—was Merula Salaman, an actress and later a painter and children's author. He appears in
D.2.

guna.
Any of three qualities—sattva, rajas, tamas—which together constitute Pakriti, or nature. When the gunas are perfectly balanced, there is no creation or manifestation; when they are disturbed, creation occurs. Sattva is the essence of form to be realized; tamas, the obstacle to its realization; rajas, the power by which the obstacle may be removed. In nature and in all created beings, sattva is purity, calm, wisdom; rajas is activity, restlessness, passion; and tamas is laziness, resistance, inertia, stupidity. Since the gunas exist in the material universe, the spiritual aspirant must transcend them all in order to realize oneness with Brahman.

Gunn, Thom (1929–2004).
English poet. Thomson Gunn was educated at University College School, Bedales, and Cambridge. His father edited the London
Evening Standard
; his mother, also a journalist, committed suicide when he was fifteen. He contacted Isherwood in 1955 on his way from a creative writing fellowship at Stanford to a brief teaching stint in Texas; Isherwood invited him to lunch at MGM and they immediately became friends. Gunn later taught at Berkeley off and on from 1958 until 1999. His numerous collections of poetry include
Fighting Terms
(1954),
My Sad Captains
(1961),
Moly
(1971),
Jack Straw's Castle
(1976),
The Man with Night Sweats
(1992), and
Boss Cupid
(2000). He appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Guttchen, Otto.
German refugee. Isherwood met him in Hollywood during World War II and writes about him in
D.1
and
D.2.
Guttchen's kidneys were badly damaged in a Nazi concentration camp, and he was also tortured. He left his wife and child in Switzerland. He struggled to find employment in Hollywood, was often too poor to eat, and became suicidal late in 1939. Isherwood found it difficult to help him adequately and felt intensely guilty about it. In the mid-1950s, they met again and Guttchen appeared to have regained his hold on life.

Hall, Michael.
American actor and, later, antique dealer; he appeared in
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946). In
Lost Years
, Isherwood describes how he met Hall at a party in the winter of 1945–1946 and began a friendship which lasted for twenty years and included occasional sex. Eventually, Hall left the West Coast and settled in New York. He also appears in
D.2.

Hamilton, Gerald (1890–1970).
Isherwood's Berlin friend who was the original for Mr. Norris in
Mr. Norris Changes Trains
. His mother died soon after his birth in Shanghai, and he was raised by relatives in England and educated at Rugby (though he did not finish his schooling). His father sent him back to China to work in business, and while there Hamilton took to wearing Chinese dress and converted to Roman Catholicism, for which his father, an Irish Protestant, never forgave him. He was cut off with a small allowance and eventually, because of his unsettled life, with nothing at all. So began the persistent need for money that motivated his subsequent dubious behavior. Hamilton was obsessed to the point of high camp with his family's aristocratic connections and with social etiquette, and lovingly recorded in his memoirs all his meetings with royalty, as well as those with crooks and with theatrical and literary celebrities. He was imprisoned from 1915 to 1918 for sympathizing with Germany and associating with the enemy during World War I, and he was imprisoned in France and Italy for a jewelry swindle in the 1920s. Afterwards, he took a job selling the London
Times
in Germany and became interested there in penal reform. Throughout his life he travelled on diverse private and public errands in China, Russia, Europe, and North Africa. He returned to London during World War II, where he was again imprisoned, this time for attempting to promote peace on terms favorable to the enemy; he was released after six months. After the war he posed for the body of Churchill's Guildhall Statue and later became a regular contributor to
The Spectator
. He appears in
Lost Years
and
D.1
, where Isherwood tells that at the start of the war, he sent Hamilton a letter which was quoted in William Hickey's gossip column in the
Daily Express
, November 27, 1939, without permission. In the letter, Isherwood mocked the behavior of German refugees in the U.S. His remarks, frivolously expressed for Hamilton's private amusement but fundamentally serious, seemed to Isherwood to have triggered the public criticism which continued into 1940 in the press and in Parliament, of both his own and Auden's absence from England. Hamilton also appears in
D.2.

Hamilton, Richard (1922–2011).
British painter and printmaker, one of the earliest and most influential pop artists. The subject of the seven paintings and two prints titled “Swingeing London 67”—which Isherwood mentions in his diary entry for March 17, 1970—is the Rolling Stones drug bust at Redlands. The judge pronounced jail terms for Jagger, Keith Richards, and Robert Fraser, who was Richard Hamilton's art dealer, telling them that “a swingeing sentence can act as a deterrent.” Swingeing, pronounced with a soft g, means huge or daunting. (The prison sentences were overturned on appeal.)

Hansen, Erwin.
German Communist, former army gymnastics instructor. Isherwood first met him at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute, where Hansen did odd jobs until Francis Turville-Petre hired him as cook and housekeeper for the house he rented at Mohrin, outside Berlin, and where Isherwood went to live with them in 1932. Hansen hired Heinz Neddermeyer to assist him and thus introduced Heinz to Isherwood. And he travelled with them in 1933 when they fled Berlin for Turville-Petre's island in Greece. Isherwood thought Hansen died in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

Harford, Betty.
See Andrews, Oliver and Betty Harford.

Hargrove, Marion (1919–2003) and Robin.
Novelist and screenwriter, Marion Hargrove, and his second wife; born in North Carolina where he became a journalist while he was still in high school. He was drafted into the army during World War II and wrote the best-selling books
See Here, Private Hargrove!
(1942) and
What Next, Corporal Hargrove?
(1944), which became popular movies. Afterwards, he settled in Hollywood where he wrote the script for the film of
The Music Man
(1962) and episodes of “Maverick,” “I Spy,” and “The Waltons.” The Hargroves lived on Adelaide Drive with their three children; he also had three other children from a previous marriage.

Haridas.
American monk of the Ramakrishna Order, originally called Bill Stevens. During the 1990s, he went to the Chicago Vedanta Center and then to India where he took his sannyas and became Swami Hariharananda. Afterwards he lectured in Chicago and settled in Sacramento.

Harris, Bill (d. 1992).
American artist, raised partly in the USSR and Austria. Harris painted in the 1940s and later made art-objects and retouched photographs. Isherwood met him through Denny Fouts in 1943, while still living as a celibate at the Hollywood Vedanta Society; early in 1944 they began an affair which helped weaken Isherwood's determination to become a monk. Harris was a beautiful blond with a magnificent physique, and Isherwood found him erotically irresistible; the relationship soon turned to friendship, and Harris later moved to New York. Isherwood refers to Harris as “X.” in his 1939–1945 diaries (see
D.1
), and he calls him “Alfred” in
My Guru and His Disciple
. Harris also appears in
Lost Years
and
D.2.

Harris, Julie (b. 1925).
American stage and film actress, born in Grosse Pointe, Michigan; educated at finishing school, Yale Drama School, and the Actors Studio. She became a star in the stage adaptation of Carson McCullers's
The Member of the Wedding
(1950), a status she confirmed when she originated the role of Sally Bowles in
I Am a Camera
(1951). She received a Tony Award for
Forty Carats
(1969) and for
The Last of Mrs. Lincoln
(1972), and toured with a one-woman show on Emily Dickinson,
The Belle of Amherst
(1976). Altogether, she has won five Tony Awards, more than any other actor, and she has been nominated ten times. She moved to the screen with early stage roles, receiving an Academy Award nomination for her film debut in
The Member of the Wedding
(1952); later Hollywood movies include
East of Eden
(1955),
Requiem for a Heavyweight
(1962),
The Haunting
(1963),
Harper
(1966),
Reflections in a Golden Eye
(1967),
The Bell Jar
(1976), and
Gorillas in the Mist
(1988). She has also been nominated for nine Emmy Awards, and won twice. During the 1980s, she appeared in the television series “Knots Landing.” Isherwood first met her in 1951 after she was cast as Sally Bowles, and their close friendship is recorded in
D.1
and
D.2
. She was married to Jay Julien, a theatrical producer, and then to Manning Gurian, a stage manager and producer, with whom she had a son, Peter Gurian. She divorced Gurian in 1967 during a long affair with actor James ( Jim) Murdock. In 1977 she married the writer William Carroll.

Harrison, Rex (1908–1990).
English stage and film star, educated at Liverpool College. He made his stage debut in Liverpool at sixteen and was successful in the West End, on Broadway, and in films by the mid-1930s, especially in black-tie comedies. He married six times: to Marjorie Colette Thomas (1934–1942), to actresses Lilli Palmer (1943–1957), Kay Kendall (1957–1959), and Rachel Roberts, whom Isherwood mentions both as Rachel Harrison and as Rachel Roberts (1962–1971), to Elizabeth Harris, ex-wife of actor Richard Harris (1971–1975), and to Mercia Tinker (1978 until his death). His affair with another actress, Carole Landis, was presumed to have contributed to her suicide. He won a Tony Award as Henry Higgins in
My Fair Lady
(1956) on Broadway, and the 1964 film brought him an Academy Award. His other films, many of which also reprised stage roles, include
Blithe Spirit
(1945),
The Rake's Progress
(1945),
Anna and the King of Siam
(1946),
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
(1947),
Cleopatra
(as Julius Caesar, 1963),
The Agony and the Ecstasy
(as Pope Julius, 1965), and
Doctor Dolittle
(1967). He appears in
D.2.