Liberation (141 page)

Schubach, Scott.
A wealthy doctor who lived with Michael Hall for some years in West Hollywood.

Schuman, Howard (b. 1942).
American television writer and presenter; born in Brooklyn, educated at Brandeis University and the University of California at Berkeley. He settled permanently in London in 1969 to live with Robert Chetwyn. His television work includes “Rock Follies”—which he devised and wrote, including the lyrics, and which won the BAFTA Award for best serial in 1976—and “Selling Hitler” (1991). He has been a BBC T.V. presenter and writes articles and reviews. Isherwood conjectures in this diary that Schuman is partly black, but as far back as he can trace his ancestry, Schuman knows of no black forebears.

Schwed, Peter (1911–2003).
Isherwood's editor at Simon & Schuster; raised on Long Island and educated at Princeton. Eventually he became editorial chairman of the firm. He wrote several books himself, mostly about golf and tennis, and published a volume of his editorial correspondence with P.G. Wodehouse. Isherwood never genuinely felt that Schwed liked or understood his writing although they worked together for about fifteen years. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2
.

Scobie, W.I. (William, Bill) (b. 1932).
British journalist, born in Scotland, educated at Perth Academy and the University of London. He reported freelance for
Time Magazine
and
The Observer
in the Middle East, Cyprus, and Italy, then in 1969 moved to Los Angeles, where he continued as a stringer for
The Observer
. He met Tony Sarver that October and spent the next ten years with him—until Sarver's death—in two wooden shacks which backed onto each other on Venice Beach. In 1974, Scobie proposed to interview Isherwood for
The Paris Review
, launching a friendship with him and with Bachardy; they saw movies together every couple of weeks and ate supper at El Coyote. The interview appeared in 1975. Scobie was a regular contributor to
The Advocate
, and he published poems in
Encounter
,
The London Magazine
, and
The Paris Review
. Later, he settled in France.

Scott Gilbert, Clement.
British would-be theatrical producer, he was wealthy and eventually became the owner of the Pembroke Theatre in Croydon Surrey. With Ernest Vadja, he created the characters for “Presenting Charles Boyer,” an NBC radio show which ran a handful of times in 1950. He backed two 1961 productions staged in Croydon:
Mother
, with David McCallum in the cast, and
Compulsion
. And he backed the proposed London production of
A Meeting by the River
in London in 1970. He appears in
D.2.

Searle, Alan (1905–1985).
Secretary and companion to Somerset Maugham from 1938; he was the son of a Bermondsey tailor and had a cockney accent. Lytton Strachey was a former lover. When he first met Maugham in London in 1928, Searle was working with convicts—visiting them in prison and helping them to resettle in the community on release—but he told Maugham he wanted to travel. Maugham invited him on the spot to do so, but for a decade they met again only when Maugham was in London. Eventually, Searle devoted his life to Maugham and became his heir. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Selznick, David O. (1902–1965).
American movie producer, most famous for
Gone with the Wind
(1939). He also brought Alfred Hitchcock to Hollywood to direct
Rebecca
(1940). Among Selznick's many other movies are
King Kong
(1933),
David Copperfield
(1934),
Reckless
(1935),
Anna Karenina
(1935),
A Tale of Two Cities
(1935),
A Star Is Born
(1937),
The Prisoner of Zenda
(1937),
Intermezzo
(1939),
Spellbound
(1945),
Duel in the Sun
(1946),
Portrait of Jennie
(1948), and
The Third Man
(1949). He worked for his father's movie company until Lewis Selznick went bankrupt in 1923; in 1926, his father's former partner, Louis B. Mayer, hired him as an assistant story editor in MGM. Selznick soon moved to Paramount, then RKO, then back to MGM until 1935 when he formed Selznick International Pictures with John Hay Whitney. Selznick's aspirations were monumental, and he tried to control every detail of his pictures. Despite his box-office success, he went into debt, and by the end of the 1940s he had to close his companies. He married Louis B. Mayer's daughter Irene in 1931, and they had two sons, Jeffrey and Daniel, before separating in 1945. When their divorce was finalized in 1949, he married Jennifer Jones. During the 1950s, he took Jones to Europe to work, and her career absorbed him at the end of his life. He traded his rights in
A Star is Born
to get Jones the lead in
A Farewell to Arms
(1957); the film failed, and it proved to be his last. Isherwood worked for Selznick in 1958, developing a script for a proposed film,
Mary Magdalene
, and they became friends, as Isherwood records in
D.1
and
D.2
.

Selznick, Jennifer.
See Jones, Jennifer.

Seymour, Jane (b. 1951).
British actress, educated in Hertfordshire. She played Winston Churchill's mistress in
Young Winston
(1972) directed by Richard Attenborough, then appeared as Prima in “Frankenstein: The True Story” and as the Bond Girl Solitaire in
Live and Let Die
(1973). Later she had numerous T.V. roles. The first of her four husbands was Richard Attenborough's son, Michael Attenborough, from 1971 to 1973.

Shadduck, Tom.
Isherwood and Bachardy's gardener for several years in the mid-1970s. He was the younger brother of Jim Shadduck, whom they knew from the gym.

Shaw, Irwin (1913–1984).
American novelist, playwright, screenwriter; raised in Brooklyn and educated at Brooklyn College, where he was a football star. He began his career writing for radio during the Depression, served with George Stevens's filmmaking unit during World War II, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and lived largely in Europe after 1951. His plays include
Bury the Dead
(1937) and
Gentle People
(1939). His best-selling novels, many of which were adapted for film and T.V., include
The Young Lions
(1948),
Lucy Crown
(1956),
Rich Man, Poor Man
(1970),
Evening in Byzantium
(1973), and
Acceptable Losses
(1982). He appears in
D.1.
His wife, Marian Edwards, an actress and chorus girl from Los Angeles, was a friend of Peter Viertel's first wife, Jigee, and Shaw remained close to Peter Viertel all his life. The Shaws married in 1939, divorced in 1969, and remarried in 1982. Their only child, Adam (b. 1950), was a journalist and aspiring novelist in youth and later became a commercial pilot. According to Larry Collins, a friend skiing with the group on the afternoon of the fatal avalanche Isherwood tells about in his diary account for February 12, 1973, Peter Viertel himself proposed the dangerous route, whereupon Irwin Shaw and Collins dropped out of the party; Collins's version appears in Michael Shnayerson's
Irwin Shaw: A Biography
.

Sheinberg, Sidney (Sid) (b. 1935).
Studio executive; born in Texas, educated at Columbia College, the University of Texas Law School and Columbia Law School. He joined a T.V. division of Universal Studios in 1959 as a lawyer and soon moved into production as an executive. When he was just thirty-eight years old, in 1973, he became President and Chief Operating Officer of MCA, the parent company of Universal. While he was head, Universal Pictures released three of the top-grossing films of all time,
Jaws
(1975),
E.T.
(1982), and
Jurassic Park
(1993), all directed by Steven Spielberg, whom Sheinberg originally hired to work in T.V. Sheinberg later started his own production company, The Bubble Factory.

Shiva.
The final aspect of the Hindu triad: Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva, the Dissolver. Shiva is the father aspect, balancing the creative mother aspect of the godhead personified as Shakti Parvati, Kali, Durga, and other female gods. When worshipped as the chosen ideal, Shiva represents Brahman, the transcendent Absolute. Shiva also has other names and is represented in many different ways. Shiva is the lord of renunciation and of compassion. Shiva Ratri, or Shiva Night, in the early spring about four days before Ramakrishna's birthday, is observed by worship, meditation and fasting, all day and through four pujas, from 6 p.m. until the early hours, when there is a meal.

Shone, Richard (b. 1949).
British art historian, curator, author; editor of
The Burlington Magazine
since 2003. His books and monographs include
Toulouse-Lautrec
(1974),
The Century of Change: British Painting Since 1900
(1977),
Manet
(1978),
The Charleston Artists
(1984),
The Art of Rodrigo Moynihan
(1988),
Walter Sickert
(1988),
Bloomsbury Portraits
(1994),
Sisley
(1999), and
The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant
(1999).

Shroyer, Frederick B. (Fred) (191[7]–1983).
Professor in the English department at Los Angeles State College, where he was responsible for Isherwood being hired to teach in 1959. He wrote novels—
Wall Against the Night
(1957),
Wayland 33
(1962),
There None Embrace
(1966)—and he produced a number of college English books and anthologies—
College Treasury: Prose Fiction, Drama
(1956) edited with Paul Jorgensen,
Informal Essay
(1961),
Art of Prose
(1965) both with Paul Jorgensen,
Short Story: A Thematic Anthology
(1965) edited with Dorothy Parker,
Types of Drama
(1970) with Louis Gardemal, and
Muse of Fire: Approaches to Poetry
(1971) compiled with H. Edward Richardson. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2
.

Simon & Schuster.
Isherwood's U.S. publisher from the late 1950s until the mid-1970s; founded in 1924 by M. Lincoln (Max) Schuster (1897–1970) and Richard L. Simon (1899–1960). Isherwood moved from Random House to Simon & Schuster in 1957 in order to work with John Goodman. When Goodman unexpectedly died, Isherwood's new editor was Peter Schwed. After several changes of heart, Isherwood remained at Simon & Schuster anyway, and the firm published
Down There on a Visit
,
A Single Man
,
A Meeting by the River
,
Kathleen and Frank
, and
Exhumations
. He then moved to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the publication of
Christopher and His Kind
.

Simon, Norton (1907–1993).
American industrialist, art collector, philanthropist; born in Portland, Oregon. He dropped out of Berkeley to go into the sheet metal business, and at twenty-two, at the start of the Depression, bought an orange juice bottling plant which he developed with enormous success and merged with Hunt Foods in the early 1940s. Norton Simon Inc., eventually diversified to control other household brands, including McCall's Publishing, Canada Dry, Max Factor Cosmetics, and Avis car rentals. In 1969, Simon's son Robert committed suicide. He withdrew from his corporate roles, and the following year, he divorced his first wife. In 1971, he married Jennifer Jones. He began collecting Impressionist paintings in the 1950s, and over the following thirty years amassed one of the finest ever private art collections, including Old Masters and modern work, Indian and South Asian. During the 1960s, he loaned widely from his collection, especially to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which he helped to found; then in 1974, he agreed to give his name and financial resources to the former Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, transforming it into the Norton Simon Museum. In 1970 he ran for the Senate as a Republican.

Simon, Richard (b. 1932).
One of Isherwood's literary agents, at Curtis Brown in London. In 1971–1972, he set up his own firm, Richard Scott Simon Ltd., and Isherwood briefly considered leaving Curtis Brown to go with him. Like Isherwood, Simon suffers from Depuytren's Contracture.

Sister Lalita (Sister) (d. 1949).
Carrie Mead Wyckoff was an American widow who met Vivekananda on one of his trips to America and became a disciple of Swami Turiyananda (a direct disciple of Ramakrishna). Turiyananda gave her the name Sister Lalita. She met Swami Prabhavananda when he opened the Vedanta center in Portland, Oregon, and in 1929 invited him to live in her house in Hollywood. By 1938, they had gathered a congregation around them, and they built the Hollywood temple in her garden. She appears in
D.1.

Sleep, Wayne (b. 1948).
British ballet dancer; educated at the Royal Ballet School; in 1966, he joined the Royal Ballet Company, where he became a Principal with numerous roles choreographed on him. He also appeared as a guest dancer with other ballet companies and starred in West End musicals, including
Cats
(1981). He is a choreographer and teacher and created his own review of dance,
Dash
, in which he toured world wide. He appears in
D.2.

Smight, Jack (1925–2003).
American director, mostly for T.V., beginning in the 1940s; he directed episodes of many regular shows including “The Twilight Zone,” “Route 66,” and “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.” He also made films—for instance,
Harper
(1966),
No Way to Treat a Lady
(1968),
Rabbit, Run
(1970), and
Midway
(1976)—and a number of made-for-T.V. movies.