Liberation (127 page)

Holy Mother.
See Sarada Devi.

homa fire.
Prepared in an ancient Vedic ceremony according to scriptural instructions, the fire is a visible manifestation of the deity worshipped. Offerings to the deity are placed in the consecrated fire. The homa ritual aims at inner purification; at the end of the ritual, the devotee mentally offers his words, thoughts, actions, and their fruits to the deity.

Hooker, Evelyn Caldwell (1907–1996).
American psychologist and psychotherapist, trained at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins; professor of psychology at UCLA. She was among the first to view homosexuality as a normal psychological condition. She studied homosexuals in the Los Angeles area for many years, through questionnaires, interviews, and discussion in various social settings, accumulating many file drawers of notes which she referred to as “The Project.” She first presented her research publicly at a 1956 conference in Chicago, demonstrating that as high a percentage of homosexuals were psychologically well adjusted as heterosexuals. (Her paper was titled “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual.” There were many more.) Born Evelyn Gentry, she took the name Caldwell from a brief first marriage then changed to Hooker at the start of the 1950s when she married Edward Hooker, a Dryden scholar and professor of English at UCLA, who died of a heart attack in 1957. Isherwood met her in about 1949, possibly through the Benton Way Group, a circle of writers, artists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, and others, mostly homosexual, then living together or gathering to talk at a house in Benton Way, Los Angeles. In 1952, he rented the Hookers' garden house on Saltair Avenue in Brentwood, refurbished it, and lived there until tension developed over the arrival of Don Bachardy in 1953. After an uneasy period, the friendship resumed, as Isherwood tells in
D.1
and
Lost Years
. Hooker also appears in
D.2.

Hoopes, Ned (1932–1984).
Teacher, children's anthologist, and, during 1962– 1963, host of “The Reading Room,” a CBS T.V. series about children's books. He worked on a biography of Charles Laughton, at first with Elsa Lanchester's approval in 1968 and later without. The book,
A Public Success—a Private Failure: The Unauthorized Biography of Charles Laughton
, was never published.

Hope.
See Lange, Hope.

Hopper, Brooke.
Socialite daughter of film star Margaret Sullavan and agent-producer Leland Hayward; briefly an actress in her teens. She divorced her second husband, Dennis Hopper, in 1969, just before he appeared in
Easy Rider
with her step-brother Peter Fonda. Later she married band-leader Peter Duchin.

Houseman, John (1902–1988) and Joan.
Romanian-born writer, director, producer, and actor; his real name was Jacques Haussmann. His mother was British and he was educated in England, then travelled to Argentina and the U.S. as an agent for his father's grain business which collapsed during the Depression. He worked as a journalist and translated plays, then in 1934, directed Virgil Thomson's opera of Gertrude Stein's
Four Saints in Three Acts
, a Broadway hit. Afterwards, he collaborated with Orson Welles with whom he founded the Mercury Theater in 1937. He produced Welles's film
Citizen Kane
(1941), but after a disagreement over who developed the story, he went on to work for David Selznick in Hollywood, then as a producer on his own was responsible for a string of widely admired films, including
The Bad and the Beautiful
(1952). He returned often to direct on Broadway, taught at Vassar, was Artistic Director of the American Shakespeare Festival in the late 1950s, and later of the UCLA Professional Theater Group, and he ran the drama division at Juilliard from 1967. He took his first of many movie roles in
Seven Days in May
(1964), and he won an Academy Award for his supporting role in
The Paper Chase
(1973), which he reprised in the T.V. series. He divorced his first wife and, in 1950, married a beautiful and stylish French woman, Joan Courtney, with whom he had two sons. He appears in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
.

Howard.
See Austen, Howard.

Howard, Donald (Don) (1927–1987).
American literary scholar and university professor; he was born in St. Louis, raised in Boston, and educated at Tufts, Rutgers, and the University of Florida, where he wrote his dissertation on fourteenth-century English literature. He published books on Langland, the Gawain poet, and most notably on Chaucer, and he also wrote essays about many other aspects of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He taught at Ohio State and Johns Hopkins before becoming an associate professor at the University of California at Riverside in 1963. Afterwards he taught at UCLA and, from 1974, at Stanford. He died of AIDS.

Hoyningen-Huene, George (1900–1968).
Russian-born photographer, also known as George Huene; son of an American diplomat's daughter and a Baltic baron who had been chief equerry to Tsar Nicholas II. By the end of World War I, he was an exile in Paris, where he studied art and sold drawings to a fashion magazine. Eventually he became a regular photographer for
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
, and, after 1936, for
Harper's Bazaar
. He published books containing his photo graphs of Greece, Egypt, North Africa, and Mexico. After the war, he settled in Hollywood where he taught photography and was color consultant on films for his longtime friend George Cukor. He also made several amateur documentaries. Isherwood met him in the late 1940s or early 1950s, through Gerald Heard and the Huxleys. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Hubrecht, Peggy.
British or American widow of Daniel Hubrecht (1909–1972), a Dutchman born in Cambridge, England. They lived in Indonesia in the 1950s, then settled in Tangier, where they lived at the foot of the old mountain road, below Noël Mostert.

Hundertmark, Gary.
Gay activist. He was one of the first directors of the National Gay Archives when they opened officially on Hudson Street in Hollywood in 1979.

Hunt.
See Stromberg, Hunt, Jr.

Hunter, Allan.
Congregational minister and author with whom Gerald Heard often met and conversed about spiritual matters. Hunter's church was the Christian focal point of Heard's California milieu. As he tells in
D.1
, Isherwood met Hunter at a conference organized by Heard in 1940, and, in 1941, Hunter and his wife, Elizabeth, participated in the La Verne seminar. They had a son and a daughter.

Hussein, Waris (b. 1938).
Anglo-Indian film and stage director, born in Lucknow, educated at Eton and Cambridge. He studied theater design at the Slade School of Art and trained at the BBC, where he directed the first episode of “Dr. Who.” He went on to make successful T.V. plays, literary adaptations, and mini-series in the U.K. and the U.S. He also directed at the National Theatre in London and made a few feature films.

Huston, John (1906–1987).
American film director, screenwriter, actor. Son of actor Walter Huston and father of actress Anjelica. As a young man, he was California lightweight boxing champion, served as an officer in the Mexican cavalry, worked briefly as a reporter in New York, and lived rough in Paris and London. He wrote a number of successful scripts in the 1930s and 1940s before his directing debut with
The Maltese Falcon
(1941). During World War II, he filmed documentaries in battle conditions as a member of the army signal corps and was awarded the Legion of Merit for his bravery. Afterwards, he directed many further celebrated films, including
The Treasure of Sierra Madre
(1947, two Academy Awards: Best Director, Best Screenplay; his father won a third: Best Supporting Actor),
The Asphalt Jungle
(1950),
The Red Badge of Courage
(1951),
The African Queen
(1952),
Beat the Devil
(1954),
The Misfits
(1960),
The Man Who Would Be King
(1975), and
Prizzi's Honor
(1985). In 1952, he moved with his fourth wife, Ricki Soma, and their family to Ireland. In 1972, he moved to Mexico. His fifth wife, from 1972 to 1977, was Celeste Shane, known as Cici. Isherwood was friendly with Huston by 1950, possibly through the Huxleys or through Gottfried Reinhardt who produced
The Red Badge of Courage
. Huston appears in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
.

Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963).
English novelist and utopian; educated at Eton and Oxford; a grandson of Thomas Huxley and brother of Julian Huxley, both prominent scientists. In youth, he published poetry, short stories, and satirical novels such as
Crome Yellow
(1921) and
Antic Hay
(1923) about London's literary bohemia and Lady Ottoline Morrell's Garsington Manor, where he lived and worked during World War I and where he met his first wife. The Huxleys lived abroad in Italy and France during the 1920s and 1930s, partly with D.H. Lawrence—who appears in Huxley's
Point Counter Point
(1928)—and Lawrence's wife, Frieda. In 1932 Huxley published
Brave New World
, for which he is most famous.

An ardent pacifist, Huxley joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1935, and his
Ends and Means
(1937) was a basic book for pacifists. In April 1937, he sailed for America with his wife and son, accompanied by Gerald Heard and Heard's friend Chris Wood. Plans to return to Europe fell through when he failed to sell a film scenario in Hollywood, became ill there, and convalesced for nearly a year. He was denied U.S. citizenship on grounds of his extreme pacifism. California benefitted his health and eyesight—he had been nearly blind since an adolescent illness.
After Many a Summer
(1939) is set in Los Angeles, and Huxley wrote many other books there, including
Grey Eminence
(1941),
Time Must Have a Stop
(1944),
The Devils of Loudun
(1952), and
The Genius and the Goddess
(1956).

Not long after he arrived in Los Angeles, Isherwood was introduced to Huxley by Gerald Heard. Huxley and Isherwood collaborated on three film projects together during the 1940s:
Jacob's Hand
, about a healer,
Below the Equator
(later called
Below the Horizon
), and a film version of
The Miracle
, Max Reinhardt's 1920s stage production. Like Heard, Huxley was a disciple of Prabhavananda, but subsequently he became close to Krishnamurti, the one-time Messiah of the Theosophical movement. Huxley's study of Vedanta was part of his larger interest in mysticism and parapsychology, and beginning in the early 1950s he experimented with mescaline, LSD, and psilocybin, experiences which he wrote about in
The Doors of Perception
(1954) and
Heaven and Hell
(1956).

Huxley died of cancer on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He appears in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
, and Isherwood helped the novelist Sybille Bedford with her
Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Volume 1 1894–1939
(1973) and
Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Volume 2 1939–1963
(1974).

Huxley, Laura Archera (1911–2007).
Italian second wife of Aldous Huxley. Isherwood met her in the spring of 1956 at the Stravinskys' after she and Huxley married secretly in March. She was the daughter of a Turin stockbroker, had been a concert violinist from adolescence, and worked briefly in film. She became a psychotherapist, sometimes using LSD therapy on her patients, and she published two popular books on her psychotherapeutic techniques. Her 1963 bestseller,
You Are Not the Target
, was an early self-help book. She also published a memoir about Huxley,
This Timeless Moment
(1968), and a children's book. She first befriended Aldous and Maria Huxley in 1948 and used her special method of therapy on Huxley to help him recapture lost parts of his childhood. He incorporated some of her psychotherapy results into his utopia novel,
Island
. Before marrying Huxley, Laura lived for many years with Virginia Pfeiffer; after the marriage, she and Huxley settled in a house adjacent to Virginia's. After Huxley's death, she eventually became a children's rights campaigner. She appears in
D.1
and
D.2
.

Huxley, Maria Nys (1898–1955).
First wife of Aldous Huxley; eldest daughter of a prosperous Belgian textile merchant ruined in World War I. Her mother's family included artists and intellectuals, and her childhood was pampered, multi-lingual, and devoutly Catholic. She met Huxley at Garsington Manor where she lived as a refugee during World War I; they married in Belgium in 1919 and their only child was born in 1920. Before her marriage, Maria showed promise as a dancer and trained briefly with Nijinsky, but her health was too frail for a professional career. She had little formal education and devoted herself to Huxley. Her premature death resulted from cancer. Isherwood met her in the summer of 1939 soon after he arrived in Los Angeles. She appears in
D.1
and
Lost Years
, and she is mentioned in
D.2.

Igor.
See Stravinsky, Igor.

Inge, William (Bill) (1913–1973).
American playwright, born and educated in Kansas and at the University of Kansas; he earned a teaching degree in Tennessee and taught high-school and college English, then became the music and drama critic for the St. Louis
Star-Times
. In 1944, he interviewed Tennessee Williams, who befriended him and took him to Chicago to see
The Glass Menagerie
; afterwards, Inge accepted another university teaching job and wrote his first play,
Farther Off from Heaven
, which was produced in 1947 by Margo Jones at the Dallas Civic Theater. His next play,
Come Back, Little Sheba
, opened on Broadway in 1950 to great praise, and he won a Pulitzer Prize and two Drama Critics Awards for
Picnic
(1953).
Bus Stop
(1955) and
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
(1957) were equally acclaimed, but in the 1960s his stage work failed repeatedly. Although his plays were adapted for film mostly by others, he received an Academy Award for
Splendor in the Grass
(1961), which he co-produced; his other screenplays are
All Fall Down
(1962) and
Bus Riley's Back in Town
(1965, under the pseudonym Walter Gage). In 1963, he moved from New York to Los Angeles, and in the late 1960s, he briefly returned to teaching, at the University of California at Irvine. He wrote two novels,
Good Luck Miss Wyckoff
(1970) and
My Son Is a Splendid Driver
(1971). He was depressive and had problems with alcohol. Isherwood and Bachardy first met Inge in New York in 1953 during the original run of
Picnic
. He is mentioned in
D.1
and
D.2
.