Liberation (136 page)

O'Hilderbrandt, Mrs.
Isherwood's neighbor. As Mary Miles Minter, she was a teenage star of silent films. Her career ended in scandal before she was twenty when her director, and, by rumor, her lover, William Desmond Taylor, was murdered, possibly by her mother. The crime was never solved, and she once offered to tell Isherwood what had happened if he would write a book about it on her behalf. As he mentions in his diary on August 18, 1972, she sued Rod Serling for portraying her as a murderer on his CBS show “Wonderful World of Crime,” broadcast February 15, 1970. She appears in
D.2.

“Old, Vernon” (not his real name).
American painter. During Isherwood's first visit to New York in 1938, George Davis introduced him to Vernon Old at an establishment called Matty's Cell House. Blond, beautiful, and intelligent, Vernon matched the description Isherwood had given Davis of the American boy he'd like to meet, and Vernon featured in Isherwood's decision to return to New York in 1939. They lived together in New York and Los Angeles until February 17, 1941, when they split by mutual agreement. Vernon then lived unsteadily on his own, painting, drinking, and being sexually promiscuous, until a suicide attempt later that year. During World War II, he tried to become a monk, first in a Catholic monastery in the Hudson Valley and later at the Hollywood Vedanta Society and at Ananda Bhavan in Montecito. Eventually, he turned to heterosexuality, married “Patty O'Neill” (nor her real name) in November 1948, and had a son before divorcing. His painting career was increasingly successful, and in the late 1950s he tutored Don Bachardy. He appears in
Christopher and His Kind
and in
My Guru and His Disciple
(as “Vernon,” without a surname) and throughout
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
.

Olivier, Laurence (1907–1989).
British actor, director, producer; celebrated as the greatest Shakespearian actor of his time. He became a Hollywood star by the start of World War II in
Wuthering Heights
(1939),
Rebecca
(1940),
Pride and Prejudice
(1940), and
That Hamilton Woman
(1941), and was appointed co-director of the Old Vic with Ralph Richardson near the end of the war. In 1963, he became director of the National Theatre in Britain. He directed and produced himself in a number of movies, beginning with
Henry V
(1944) and
Hamlet
(1948), which together won him several Academy Awards for acting and directing, and he appeared in more than fifty other films and over a hundred stage roles in London, New York, and elsewhere. He was married three times, to actress Jill Esmond from 1930 to 1940, to Vivien Leigh until 1960, and then to Joan Plowright until his death. Isherwood became friendly with him during 1959 when Olivier was in Los Angeles filming
Spartacus
(1960). He appears in
D.1
and
D.2
.

One, Incorporated.
Homosexual advocacy and support group founded in 1952; publisher of
One
magazine.
One
was the subject of a legal struggle with the U.S. Post Office during the 1950s; in 1958 the Supreme Court ruled that gay publications were not
a priori
obscene and could be sent and sold by mail. The business manager at One, Inc., and its driving force for over a decade, was Bill Legg. He had several names: Dorr Legg, William Lambert, and Marvin Culter.

O'Reilly, Anna.
Personal assistant to Tony Richardson from 1964 until 1971, and to Vanessa Redgrave during the Richardson-Redgrave marriage. She arranged airplane tickets, bank drafts, presents, bought and rented real estate, and acted as hostess for dinner parties when Richardson needed an atmosphere of conventional respectability. She also assisted Richardson on his films and worked her way up to Associate Producer before she left to marry Graham Cottle. In 1976, she returned to help Richardson with
Joseph Andrews
and with his first T.V. production. Then she became an inhouse production assistant at Warner Brothers T.V. and went on to produce T.V. shows as Anna Cottle. She settled in Los Angeles and later worked in the film and literary management business, selling book rights for movies and T.V. Among her book-to-film projects are
Capote
and
Get Happy
.

Orphanos, Stathis (b. 1940).
American photographer, born in North Carolina; his parents were Greek. His photographs of writers, artists, actors, and male nudes have appeared on book jackets and in
Vogue
,
Harper's Bazaar
, and
Antaeus
. With his longterm companion Ralph Sylvester (b. 1934), he publishes fine limited-edition books under the imprint Sylvester and Orphanos.

Osborne, John (1929–1994).
English playwright, born in Fulham, West London. He worked as a journalist briefly and then acted in provincial repertory until his third play,
Look Back in Anger
(1956), established him as the center of a generation of working-class realist playwrights called “the angry young men.” During the 1950s, his work was mostly produced by George Devine and Tony Richardson's English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Other plays include
The Entertainer
(1957), starring Laurence Olivier,
Luther
(1961),
Inadmissible Evidence
(1964),
A Patriot for Me
(1965),
West of Suez
(1971),
A Sense of Detachment
(1972),
Watch It Come Down
(1976), and
Déjàvu
(1991), a later sequel to
Look Back in Anger
. Several of his plays were filmed. Osborne also wrote the screenplays for Richardson's
Tom Jones
and
The Charge of the Light Brigade
. Their collaborations ended with the latter because Osborne was sued for plagiarizing Mrs. Cecil Woodham-Smith's
The Reason Why
. The rights to her novel belonged to Laurence Harvey, who agreed to sell them and abandon the suit if he could be in the film. So Richardson gave Harvey a small role previously promised to Osborne. Osborne and Richardson quarrelled and never worked together again. In
D.1
, Isherwood records that he met Osborne in Hollywood in 1960, when Osborne came to join Mary Ure (his second wife) and Richardson, both working there. In September 1961, as Isherwood tells in
D.
2, he and Bachardy were guests at La Beaumette, the house which Osborne rented from Lord Glenconner during August and September in Valbonne in the South of France. Osborne married five times; first to Pamela Lane, an actress, then to Ure, then to Penelope Gilliatt. His fourth wife, from 1969 to 1978, was Jill Bennett (1931–1990), the British actress, who starred in several of his plays and died a suicide. Finally, he married Helen Dawson (d. 2004), drama critic and arts editor at
The Observer
during the 1960s, and remained with her until his death. He wrote three volumes of autobiography,
A Better Class of Person
(1981),
Almost a Gentleman
(1991), and
Damn You, England
(1994).

O'Shea, John.
Truman Capote's lover from July 1973. When they met, O'Shea was a bank vice-president living in a suburb outside Manhattan, married, Roman Catholic, and a father of three. He gave up his job to become Capote's business manager.

Owens, Rodney (Rod).
California-born ceramics manufacturer and, later, fashion retailer. In 1946, he began a long relationship with Hayden Lewis, Bill Caskey's navy friend; he and Lewis appear often in
D.1
and in
Lost Years
. Together they built up a business making dinnerware and ashtrays. Eventually they split, and Owens moved to New York where he sold clothing for the designer Helen Rose.

Page, Anthony (Tony) (b. 1935).
Oxford-educated British actor and director, born in India. He was Artistic Director at the Royal Court from 1964 to 1973 and directed five plays there by John Osborne, three during 1968, when Bachardy contributed drawings to the programs. In 1966, he planned to adapt Wedekind's Lulu plays,
Erdgeist
(
Earthsprite
, 1895) and
Die Büchse der Pandora
(
Pandora's Box
, 1904), but the project wasn't completed. He also directed productions of Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, Albee and others in the West End and at the National Theatre and in New York. He made a few movies, including
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
(1977) and later became known for his television documentaries, biographies, and miniseries. He appears in
D.2.

Paget's Disease.
A chronic condition which weakens bones and can enlarge or deform them, causing bone pain and sometimes leading to arthritis or fractures. It is typically localized, rather than affecting all the bones in the body. Sufferers can be asymptomatic for years or may confuse the condition with arthritis.

Pagett, Nicola (b. 1945).
British actress, trained at RADA. She played Princess Mary in
Anne of the Thousand Days
(1969) and became well known as Elizabeth Bellamy in the T.V. series “Upstairs Downstairs” in the early 1970s. Her many later T.V. roles included leads in the miniseries “Anna Karenina” (1977), “Scoop” (1987), and “A Bit of a Do” (1989). She played Elizabeth Fanshawe in “Frankenstein: The True Story.”

Paley, William (Bill) (1901–1990).
American media mogul; son of a Ukrainian cigar manufacturer; he was educated at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. He bought CBS in 1928 when it was a small radio network and developed it into the radio and T.V. giant which he ran for over fifty years. During World War II, he was deputy chief of psychological warfare for the Allies. He was a figure in American cultural and intellectual life, devoting time to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to hospitals, universities, and think tanks. His second wife, Barbara (Babe) Cushing Mortimer (1915–1978), a Boston-born society beauty, was one of Truman Capote's closest friends from 1955 until 1975. She epitomized the glamor of the rich women Capote called his Swans, but she ended their friendship when she discovered that Capote was using her private life as material for his fiction.

Parker, Dorothy (1893–1967).
American poet, short-story writer, journalist, and literary critic; born in New Jersey. Celebrated for her wit and associated with the Algonquin Hotel in New York where for years she lunched with writer friends. Her first brief marriage was to a New York stockbroker, Edwin Parker. She contributed to
The New Yorker
from its debut and to many other American magazines. Her 1929 short story “The Big Blonde” won the O. Henry Prize. She wrote plays—
Close Harmony
(1929) with Elmer Rice and
Ladies of the Corridor
(1953) with Arnaud d'Usseau—and screenplays—notably
A Star is Born
(1937) and Hitchcock's
Saboteur
(1942) with her second husband, Alan Campbell. She protested the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, covered the Spanish Civil War for
The New Masses
, and was involved in the founding of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and other Hollywood committees opposing fascism; she also supported the Civil Rights movement and willed her estate to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was blacklisted at the end of the 1940s and later testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee where, in contrast to many of her colleagues, she cited the First Amendment (freedom of speech) instead of the Fifth (the right not to serve witness against oneself ). She took over Isherwood's teaching position at L.A. State College when he left, during the 1960s. Bachardy drew her portrait a number of times during the same period. She appears in
D.2.

Parone, Ed.
American stage director. He assisted Gordon Davidson with the professional Theater Group at UCLA, where he directed
Oh! What a Lovely War
. In 1967, he moved with Davidson to the Mark Taper Forum and ran New Theater for Now to develop new plays, including
A Meeting by the River
in 1972, directed by Jim Bridges. He stayed at the Mark Taper Forum for about twelve years, and was a director in residence and eventually associate artistic director, turning his hand to producing, writing, and editing. He was also assistant to the producer on
The Misfits
and directed for T.V. He appears in
D.2.

Pavitrananda, Swami.
Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order; head of the Vedanta Society in New York, on the Upper West Side, and a trustee of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. He spent many years in the order's editorial center, Advaita Ashrama, at Mayavati in the Himalayas. He often paid a month-long visit to Swami Prabhavananda during the summers. Other than Prabhavananda, he was Isherwood's favorite swami. He appears in
D.2.

Payne, Maurice.
English master printer; he met Hockney in London in 1965 and worked with him on the books Hockney did for the Petersburg Press, including the
Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm
(1969). For a while, he worked full time as Hockney's assistant before setting up a studio in New York where he collaborated with other artists.

Pears, Peter (1910–1986).
English tenor; longtime companion and musical partner to Benjamin Britten. He was sent down from Oxford, after failing his first-year music exams, became a prep school master, studied briefly at the Royal College of Music and then joined the BBC Singers in 1934. He shared a flat with Britten from early 1938, and they began performing together in 1939. The same year, they went to America and lived outside New York at Elizabeth Mayer's house in Amityville and then in Brooklyn at George Davis's house in Middagh Street. They also made a trip to California. Pears studied singing further in New York, where his voice developed and gained in strength. He returned to England with Britten in March 1942, and thereafter their lives became increasingly fused, with Britten writing a great deal of music for Pears, and Pears singing it expressly for Britten. He appears in
D.1.