Liberation (134 page)

Merchant, Ismail (1936–2005).
Indian film producer and director. He got an MBA at New York University and provided the financial expertise in his long-running partnership with American director James Ivory, who was also his companion. They became virtually a brand in the 1980s and 1990s with their adaptations of Henry James and E.M. Forster, generally working closely with German-born screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Indian by marriage. Merchant directed two shorts,
The Creation of a Woman
(1960, Academy Award nomination) and
Mahatma and the Mad Boy
(1973), a T.V. documentary called “The Courtesans of Bombay” (1973), and, later, feature films including
In Custody
(1973),
The Proprietor
(1996),
Cotton Mary
(1999), and
The Mystic Masseur
(2002).

Meredith, Burgess (1907–1997).
American actor and director. He distinguished himself in the theater in the early 1930s, moved to film in 1936 with his stage role in
Winterset
, and appeared in many subsequent films, including
Of Mice and Men
(1939),
The Story of G.I. Joe
(1945),
Advise and Consent
(1961), and
Rocky
(1976). He also played the Penguin in the Batman T.V. series. His third of four wives was actress Paulette Goddard, from 1944 to 1949. Meredith was blacklisted in 1949, and disappeared from movies for nearly a decade. In
D.1
, Isherwood tells how his plan to play Ransom in
The Ascent of F6
was interrupted by the war; in
D.2
, Isherwood records Meredith's interest in directing
The Dog Beneath the Skin
.

Merlo, Frank (1921–1963).
Italian-American companion of Tennessee Williams; raised in New Jersey by his Sicilian immigrant parents. He met Williams in 1947. He had served in the navy and for a time continued to work as a truck driver. He was handsome and capable, kept house, cooked, and made travel, social and business arrangements for Williams. Isherwood first met him in Los Angeles when Merlo accompanied Williams on a visit there in 1949, and Merlo appears in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
. The relationship grew less stable during the late 1950s, and the pair were often apart during Merlo's fatal illness with lung cancer; but it was the most lasting romance of Williams's life, and Williams was at his bedside when Merlo died.

Methuen.
Isherwood's English publisher from the mid-1940s. Isherwood's cousin, Graham Greene, recommended
Mr. Norris Changes Trains
to E.V. Rieu, a managing director at the firm, but Isherwood's first book published by Methuen was
Prater Violet
in the spring of 1946 (well after the U.S. publication because of the war). In September 1935, Isherwood had signed a contract for his “Next three full-length available novels” and accepted half of a £300 advance on the first (styled in the contract
Prata Violet
); he had already promised his next novel to his current publisher, The Hogarth Press, and at Leonard Woolf 's insistence,
Sally Bowles
,
Goodbye to Berlin
and
Lions and Shadows
were published by Hogarth. After the war, the contract with Methuen was honored, the second novel being
The World in the Evening
and the third,
Down There on a Visit
, which he delivered to Alan White in 1961. White joined Methuen in 1924, became a director in 1933, and retired as Chairman in 1966. When White retired, John Cullen became Isherwood's editor, and after Cullen, Geoffrey Strachan. Methuen remained Isherwood's U.K. publisher for the rest of his life and posthumously until 1997, when Random House took over the imprint which by then belonged to a larger group, Reed Books. Methuen achieved independence through a management buy-out, but agreed in the negotiations to let Isherwood go to Chatto & Windus at Random House. Random House was then already publishing Isherwood's
Diaries
in a Vintage paperback edition, and, by chance, Chatto had in any case been the home since 1946 of Isherwood's much earlier publisher, The Hogarth Press.

Meyer, David and Tony.
Twin brothers, both actors. When Isherwood met them in London in 1970, David, the younger twin, was Mark Lancaster's boyfriend. The twins appeared together that year in Peter Brook's production of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
at The Roundhouse. Later they were in movies,
The Draughtsman's Contract
(1982) and
Octopussy
(1985), and David appeared in Derek Jarman's films, including
The Tempest
(1979). He also worked on the stage with Lindsay Kemp and later taught and acted at the Globe. Tony, who was straight, married and became a painter.

Michael.
See Barrie, Michael.

Millard, Paul.
American actor. He lived with Speed Lamkin in West Hollywood for a few years during the 1950s. He briefly called himself Paul Marlin, then later changed to Millard; his real name was Fink. He was good-looking and relatively successful on the New York stage and on T.V., but eventually joined his mother's real estate business and invested in property. During 1959 and 1960, he loaned Bachardy a little house in West Hollywood to use as a studio, and around this time, the two had an affair which Isherwood apparently did not know about. Millard appears in
D.1
and
D.2
; he died in the 1970s.

Miller, Dorothy (d. 1974).
Cook and cleaner to Isherwood and Bachardy from 1958 until the early 1970s. On their recommendation she later kept house for the Laughtons as well, both in Hollywood and in Charles Laughton's house next door to Isherwood and Bachardy in Adelaide Drive.

Milow, Keith (b. 1945).
British painter, printmaker, and sculptor. He studied at the Camberwell School of Art and the Royal College of Art, and later worked in New York and Amsterdam.

Mishima, Yukio (1925–1970).
Japanese author, of novels, short stories, poems, plays and essays; educated at Tokyo University. His real name was Kimitake Hiraoka. He was already famous in Japan when Alfred Knopf published
The Sound of Waves
in English translation in 1956 and invited Mishima to the U.S. the following year. Isherwood first met him during that visit, which he tells about in
D.1
, and they met again in November 1960, as he tells in
D.2
, when Mishima returned to the U.S. for the staging in New York of three of his Noh plays. By then Mishima had married Yoko Sugiyama, a student of English literature and daughter of the painter Yagushi Sugiyama, and the couple had had the first of their two children. More of Mishima's work had been translated into English:
Five Modern Noh Plays
appeared in English in 1957, then
Twilight Sunflower
(also a volume of plays) and
Confessions of a Mask
(1949) in 1958, followed by
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
(1959) and many others.
Confessions of a Mask
addressed Mishima's discovery of his homosexuality. His masterwork,
Sea of Fertility
, conceived in 1962 and completed in 1970, is a tetralogy about Japan in the twentieth century. Mishima was obsessed by the warrior traditions of Imperial Japan and was expert in martial arts. In 1968, he founded a military group, the Shield Society, to revive the Samurai code of honor. Disillusioned when the young did not answer his call for a return to nationalist ideals, he committed Seppuku; in his diary entry for November 25, 1970, Isherwood transcribed an account of the ritual suicide from the
Los Angeles Times
. Mishima was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize.

Mitchell, Charlie.
Vedanta devotee; educated at UCLA, where he studied English and, later, law. Around 1971, he attracted followers to what he called the First Liberty Church (his own offshoot of the Universal Life Church), founded on meditation and, evidently, pot smoking, but he soon advised his devotees to follow Swami Prabhavananda; they were the core of what Isherwood refers to as the Venice Group. Mitchell ran a small recording company and oversaw its sale to Chrysalis. Afterwards, he practised law, became the lawyer for the Vedanta Society of Southern California and also served as the society's vice-president. His Sanskrit name is Krishnadas. His wife was called Mary, later Apple, and finally Sita. Their son, Christopher, known as Lal Chand because of his red hair, got a Ph.D. in physics. Christopher became a monk at Trabuco, Asesha Chaitanya.

Mitchell, J.J.
A friend and lover of Joe LeSueur and afterwards of Frank O'Hara; his relationship with O'Hara drove LeSueur out of the loft LeSueur and O'Hara had shared for many years. In May 1971, Isherwood mentions a new companion of Mitchell's, Ron Holland. Holland was rich from personal success in publicity and advertising. Mitchell died of AIDS in his mid-forties.

Moffat, Ivan (1918–2002).
British-American screenwriter, educated at Dartmouth; son of Iris Tree and her American husband Curtis Moffat. He worked on government-sponsored documentaries for Strand Films in London, served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps Special Coverage Unit under the American film director George Stevens during World War II, and returned to Los Angeles in 1946 as Stevens's assistant. He worked with Stevens on
A Place in the Sun
(1951), was Stevens's associate producer for
Shane
(1953), and co-wrote
Giant
(1956), before going on to work for David Selznick on
Tender Is the Night
(1962). Other screenplays include
Bhowani Junction
(1956),
Boy on a Dolphin
(1957), and
Justine
(1969). Moffat's first wife was Natasha Sorokin, a Russian, once part of a ménage à trois with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Their marriage broke up at the start of the 1950s, leaving a daughter, Lorna. Moffat then had a number of beautiful and talented girlfriends, including the writer Caroline Blackwood with whom he fathered a daughter, Ivana, born in 1966 during Caroline's second marriage to the composer and music critic Israel Citkowitz; Ivana's paternity was kept secret until Caroline Blackwood's death in 1996. In 1961, Moffat married Katharine Smith, known as Kate, a well-connected English heiress. As Isherwood records, the marriage ended in 1972. Moffat appears often in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
. Although Moffat was heterosexual, Isherwood identified with him, as an expatriate and as a romantic adventurer, and based both the main character in the first draft of
Down There on a Visit
and “Patrick” in
A Meeting by the River
partly on him.

Moffat, Kate.
See Smith, Katharine.

Monday, Jon.
See Dharmadas.

Monkhouse, Patrick (Paddy), John ( Johnny), Rachel.
Childhood friends of Isherwood, raised near Marple in Disley, where they lived in a house called Meadow Bank with another, younger, sister, Elizabeth (Mitty), whom Isherwood got to know in 1947 when he visited Wyberslegh. Their father, Allan (1858–1956) was a journalist, theater critic, and playwright. The oldest brother, Patrick, also a journalist, was Isherwood's close friend in adolescence. Patrick attended Oxford a year or two ahead of Auden and edited
The Oxford Outlook
. Later, he achieved a senior position at the
Manchester Guardian
and married. The Monkhouses appear in
D.1
and
Lost Years
.

Montel, Michael.
American stage director, once an actor. He was managing director of the New Phoenix Repertory Company which produced eight revivals on Broadway between 1973 and 1975. T. Edward Hambleton, a co-founder of the first Phoenix Theater, was also a managing director; the artistic directors were Hal Prince and Stephen Porter. John Houseman was a producing director of the first Phoenix Theater, and continued to be associated with the New Phoenix. Montel directed a few other Broadway plays and musicals, and also operas, including Bernstein's
Trouble in Tahiti
and Copland's
The Tender Land
.

Moody, Robert L. (1910–1973).
British psychotherapist; raised in Surbiton and educated at Bromsgrove School. He began the Bachelor of Medicine course alongside Isherwood at King's College Medical School, London, in October 1928 but left in 1930 without taking any exams. Later, he became one of the first directors of the Jungian organization, the Society of Analytical Psychology, when it was formally registered under that name in 1945. He was also an editor of the
Journal of Analytical Psychology
and wrote various articles. He married three times, last to Louise Diamond. He appears as “Platt” in
Lions and Shadows
and is mentioned in
D.2.

Moreau, Jeanne (b. 1928).
French stage and screen star and singer; daughter of an English chorus girl. She was educated at the Paris Conservatory of Dramatic Art and became a leading actress for the Comédie Française and the Théâtre National Populaire before coming to international prominence in Louis Malle's
Frantic, (Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud
, 1957, in France; released as
Lift to the Scaffold
in the U.K. and later retitled
Elevator to the Gallows
in the U.S.) and
The Lovers
(1958). Her many film roles after that, for a range of celebrated directors, include
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
(1959),
Moderato Cantabile
(1960),
La Notte
(1961),
Jules and Jim
(1961),
Eva
(1962),
The Trial
(1963),
Diary of a Chambermaid
(1964),
Chimes at Midnight
(1966),
The Bride Wore Black
(1968), and
Going Places
(1974). She was married twice, briefly both times, and had many love affairs, including a complicated one with Tony Richardson while she was working with him on
Mademoiselle
(1966) and
The Sailor from Gibraltar
(1967).