Liberation (166 page)

 

⁸⁶
Chptr. 20.

 

⁸⁷
Clay (b. 1942), known as Muhammad Ali since joining the Nation of Islam in 1964, lost the World Heavyweight Championship to Joe Frazier on March 8.

 

⁸⁸
The Bengali independence movement was reaching crisis point in Pakistan; see Glossary under Bangladesh.

 

⁸⁹
“The Platonic Blow,” written in 1948 and circulated in typescript; it was first printed, without Auden's permission, in 1965.

 

⁹⁰
Once a publicist for the Santa Fe Opera; she was retrained by the Stravinskys in 1959 to manage some concerts in New York and became an unofficial press liaison. Isherwood typed Lilian Litman.

 

⁹¹
An invented character based on Byron's real-life doctor, John Polidori, who appears in the film's historical prologue and epilogue. In later versions, both the invented and the real characters are called Polidori.

 

⁹²
U.S. Lieutenant William Calley received a life sentence on March 31 for murdering hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in March 1968 at the village of My Lai in South Vietnam.

 

⁹³
Second annual Gay Pride parade commemorating the June 29, 1969 riots outside the Stonewall bar on Christopher Street in New York City.

 

⁹⁴
Longtime studio executive in T.V. production at Universal.

 

⁹⁵
“The Confessions of Marian Evans” (1969), directed by Don Taylor for the BBC arts program “Omnibus.”

 

⁹⁶
Chptr. 16.

 

⁹⁷
Chptr. 26.

 

⁹⁸
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
(1906).

 

⁹⁹
A retrospective, “Andy Warhol,” May 1–June 20, Whitney Museum of American Art.

 

¹⁰⁰
By Paul Zindel; Rae Allen won a Tony for Best Featured Actress, and Estelle Parsons was nominated for Best Actress.

 

¹⁰¹
Yukoku
(1966), based on his 1960 novella; the English title is
Patriotism
or, sometimes,
The Rite of Love and Death.

 

¹⁰²
He danced for Balanchine from age seventeen and later became a choreographer and the first artistic director of the Carolina Ballet.

 

¹⁰³
Halpern (b. 1945), a poet, co-founded
Antaeus
with Paul Bowles. He also co-founded Ecco Press, acquired in 1999 by HarperCollins, which made him publisher of one volume of Isherwood's diaries.

 

¹⁰⁴
I.e., of Pirandello's play.

 

¹⁰⁵
Stephen Sondheim's musical, playing on Broadway since April 4.

 

¹⁰⁶
American painter, teacher, writer, and lecturer on art (1920–1989), married to the Dutch-born artist Willem de Kooning since 1943.

 

¹⁰⁷
Bloom (b. 1931, London) won a 1971 Drama Desk award for the role.

 

¹⁰⁸
Probably the often-reproduced shot taken beside the Paleys' pool in Jamaica soon after Capote was introduced to them by the Selznicks in 1955.

 

¹⁰⁹
The Happy Years
(1972), volume 3 of his diaries, tells about the love affair which began in 1947; further passages about Garbo appear in volume 4,
The Strenuous Years
(1973). The sex is only implied, not explicitly described.

 

¹¹⁰
A historical romance about Catherine Howard originally published as a trilogy:
The Fifth Queen and How She Came to Court
(1906),
Privy Seal
(1907),
The Fifth Queen Crowned
(1908).

 

¹¹¹
They were Vedanta devotees; see Glossary under Mitchell.

 

¹¹²
Siegel (1902–1978), Latvian-born American poet, philosopher, critic, and essayist based his personal philosophy on three principles: living honestly, the danger of contempt for the world, and uniting opposites.

 

¹¹³
I.e., self-haters, suffering from shame and disappointment.

 

¹¹⁴
American (b. 1945), he later starred in the 1980s T.V. series “Dempsey and Makepeace” and in the 2003 stage musical
Jerry Springer–The Opera.

 

¹¹⁵
German stage and film star (1905–1986), famous at seventeen in Max Reinhardt's
The Speaking Ape
; she married a co-star, Oscar Homolka, and, later, an American railroad tycoon Howard Gould, then returned to Germany where she appeared in modern American plays.

 

¹¹⁶
I.e.,
Sodom et Gomorrhe
.

 

¹¹⁷
The Beat Generation
(1971), one of Cook's (1923–2003) more than twenty fiction and non-fiction books; he also worked at
Newsweek
and
USA Today
.

 

¹¹⁸
It appeared in 1964 from the Vedanta Press and from Allen and Unwin in London.

 

¹¹⁹
Evidently Sidney Sheinberg; see below and Glossary.

 

¹²⁰
Out Cry
.

 

¹²¹
I.e., Ben Masselink.

 

¹²²
Oxyphencyclimine, an antocholinergic used for treating peptic ulcers.

 

¹²³
La Casa de los Animales, i.e., 145 Adelaide Drive.

 

¹²⁴
Not his real name.

 

¹²⁵
Not his real name.

 

¹²⁶
Hall (b. 1928)—poet, playwright, autobiographer, essayist, educated at Harvard and Oxford and appointed fourteenth poet laureate of the U.S. in 2006—had already published books on Henry Moore and Marianne Moore. He drafted half a million words and roughed out one hundred pages of the biography, but Lanchester didn't like it, and Hall destroyed the manuscript and his notes.

 

¹²⁷
A screenplay Lambert was working on; never filmed.

 

¹²⁸
Byrd (b. 1947) got an MFA from the University of California at Irvine, went on to paint in abstract geometric style, and illustrated a text book for Macmillan.

 

¹²⁹
Dan Crane; he later left and married.

 

¹³⁰
Wall Street lawyer turned broadcasting executive; he became president of NBC in 1974 and later a media and entertainment analyst.

 

¹³¹
Who directed it; see Glossary.

 

¹³²
Chartwell Artists produced the 1971 faked documentary in which war protesters must choose between prison sentences or a three-day desert crossing pursued by National Guardsmen authorized to shoot and kill them. “Culloden” (1964) was made for BBC T.V.

 

¹³³
Rumens (b. 1949) attended Magdalen College; later he made environmental films and was a Green Party activist. The literary society was The Oxford Critical Society.

 

¹³⁴
Directed by Nicolas Roeg.

 

¹³⁵
Wood's best friend, who died in England in 1943, as Isherwood records in
D.1
.

 

¹³⁶
Joanne Carson; see Glossary.

 

¹³⁷
Nirmalananda (1863–1938), or Tulsi Maharaj, is sometimes considered one of seventeen direct disciples of Ramakrishna, but in
Ramakrishna and His Disciples
Isherwood includes only sixteen. He appears in some photographs as Ramakrishna's disciple, but also described himself as a disciple of Vivekananda. His uncertain status evidently symbolizes Prabhavananda's own conflicting feelings of longing and humility as his death approached and he prepared to “join” the circle of disciples.

 

¹³⁸
Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), architect of Henry VIII's Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury, was burned at the stake by Henry's Roman Catholic daughter Mary Tudor when she became queen. He pushed his right hand into the flames first for its offence in signing a recantation, forced from him, of his Protestant beliefs.

 

¹³⁹
Isherwood wrote “John,” perhaps transposing with the first name, mentioned in the same sentence, of his editor at Methuen.

 

¹⁴⁰
Wood (1905–1985) represented many celebrated playwrights, including, until 1971, Tennessee Williams. The agency she once ran with her husband, William Liebling, was bought by MCA in 1954.

 

¹⁴¹
Stoker (1932–1988), who ran away from home at seventeen, was well read, intelligent, a drinker, and never successfully employed. He was Lehmann's sexual partner, cleaner, and travelling companion from the late 1950s until an angry split not long before Stoker's sudden death in 1988.

 

¹⁴²
Eric Boman, then an illustrator and fabric designer, later a well-known fashion photographer, became Schlesinger's long-term companion.

 

¹⁴³
The book never appeared; see Glossary under Hoopes.

 

¹⁴⁴
British star (1938–1999) then at the height of his career after
Oliver!
(1968),
Women in Love
(1969), and
The Devils
(1971).

 

¹⁴⁵
American Modernist painter (1883–1935), trained in Philadelphia and Paris; he exhibited with Alfred Steiglitz's group at the American Place Gallery.

 

¹⁴⁶
Bhakti yoga, the path of love, is the most natural path to God; Jnana, the path of knowledge, relies on the intellectual power of the mind to discriminate between the real and the unreal.

 

¹⁴⁷
I.e., someone who supports one party, then another.

 

¹⁴⁸
Richardson directed Mortimer's stage adaptation of
I, Claudius
, but there was no film. The girlfriend was Grizelda Grimond (b. 1942). See Glossary.

 

¹⁴⁹
Not his real name.

 

¹⁵⁰
American actor and lawyer (b. 1931), educated at Exeter and Harvard; he came from an acting family and appeared on Broadway and in films before studying law at UCLA. He still worked occasionally in T.V.

 

¹⁵¹
Joy Palmerton survived to old age and enjoyed a second marriage to “Mitch” Mitchell, with whom she settled in Monterey.

 

¹⁵²
I.e., Ramakrishna.

 

¹⁵³
In
Lost Years
, Isherwood urges that he did not pee on Chaplin's sofa and that Chaplin may have had some other reason for ending the friendship, around April 1950.

 

¹⁵⁴
Deliverance
.

 

¹⁵⁵
They followed Paramananda's charismatic niece, Gayatri Devi, thereby ending their official relationship with Belur Math; and after her death, they followed a longtime American nun, Sudha Ma. Prabhavananda and, later, Swami Swahananda tried—so far without success—to help them rejoin the Vedanta Society.

 

¹⁵⁶
In Henry James's “The Turn of the Screw,” the dead valet who haunts Bly.

 

¹⁵⁷
“An interview with Christopher Isherwood,”
The Journal of Narrative Technique
, vol. 2, Sept. 1972, pp. 143–158, published at Eastern Michigan University where Geherin became a professor of twentieth-century British and American fiction; he got his Ph.D. from Purdue in 1970.

 

¹⁵⁸
Probably
Zardoz
; see Glossary.

 

¹⁵⁹
Since then, winner of four Emmy Awards for production designs, and production designer for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

 

¹⁶⁰
American character actor (1921–2000), mostly on T.V.

 

¹⁶¹
T.V. star (1948–2003), later, in the 1980s series “Three's Company”; he had numerous subsequent stage and film roles before his early death.

 

¹⁶²
Actor and, later, T.V. director.

 

¹⁶³
Which he had revised and retitled as
Out Cry
; see Glossary.

 

¹⁶⁴
Hughes, a writer and film director who had served in the military, was speaking at the Rotary Club; Isherwood recorded this in
D.1.

 

¹⁶⁵
George McGovern (b. 1922), Senator for South Dakota, then campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.

 

¹⁶⁶
Los Angeles dance critic who regularly reviewed ballet, musicals, and films.

 

¹⁶⁷
Isherwood typed 1957.

 

¹⁶⁸
Foster (1934–1990), founded the lesbian and gay political group called the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club and was being paid to organize what was eventually called the Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation.

 

¹⁶⁹
Goodstein hired Foster to run the foundation; see Glossary under Goodstein.

 

¹⁷⁰
Fourth part of
Down There on a Visit.