Lost Years (69 page)

Lamkin, Speed.
American novelist; born and raised in Monroe, Louisiana. Lamkin studied at Harvard and lived in London and in New York before going to Los Angeles to research his second novel,
The Easter Egg Hunt
(1954)—about movie stars, in particular Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst—and he dedicated the novel to Isherwood who appears in it as the character “Sebastian Saunders.” Lamkin was on the board at the Huntington Hartford Foundation. In the mid-1950s he wrote a play
Out by the Country Club
which was never produced, although Joshua Logan was briefly interested in it, and in 1956, he scripted a TV film about Perle Mesta, the political hostess. During 1957, he wrote another play,
Comes a Day
, which had a short run on Broadway. Eventually, when this play failed, Lamkin returned home to live in Louisiana. He appears often in
D1
.

Langford, Sam (d. 1958).
Irish-born companion to Brian Howard, from 1943 onwards. Langford liked to sail and commanded an Air-Sea Rescue Launch in the British navy during the war. He was invalided out of the navy with a foot problem and briefly worked for the BBC before travelling and living abroad with Howard. Like Howard, Langford became addicted to drugs. He died in his bath when he was gassed by a faulty water heater at the house he shared with Howard and Howard's mother in the south of France. Howard killed himself a few days later.

LaPan, Dick.
A boxer; evidently Isherwood first met him at the Viertels' in July 1943. During the 1950s LaPan moved to Mexico and taught English.

Lathwood, Jo.
See Masselink, Jo.

Laughton, Charles (1899–1962).
British actor. Laughton played many roles on the London stage from the 1920s onward, and began making films during the 1930s—
The Private Life of Henry VIII
(1934), for which he won an Academy Award;
Les Misérables
(1935);
Mutiny on the Bounty
(1935), in which he played Captain Bligh;
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1939); and many others. He also acted in New York and Paris, and gave dramatic readings throughout the U.S. from Shakespeare, the Bible, and other classic literature. He became an American citizen in 1950. Isherwood met Laughton in the late 1950s through
Laughton's wife, the actress Elsa Lanchester, and later the two became neighbors and close friends, as Isherwood records in
D1
; they worked on various projects together, including a play about Socrates.

Lawrence, Frieda (1879–1956).
German-born wife of the English writer D. H. Lawrence. She was the daughter of a Prussian army officer, Baron Friedrich von Richthofen, and grew up in Metz; at twenty she married Ernest Weekley, a professor at Nottingham University, and moved with him to Nottingham. There in 1912, aged thirty-two, she met Lawrence, a former student of her husband, and eloped with him back to Germany. They married in 1914 after her divorce, lived in London and Cornwall, and then, persecuted over Lawrence's work and suspected as German spies, left for Italy in 1919. In the early 1920s, they travelled further afield, to Ceylon, Australia, and America, settling intermittently just outside Taos, New Mexico, where Lawrence for a time hoped to found Rananim, his utopian community. They stayed in various properties belonging to Mabel Dodge Luhan, and in 1924 Mrs. Luhan gave Frieda a ranch with 160 acres of land on Lobo mountain. Lawrence named the ranch “Kiowa.” In 1925, while travelling in Mexico, Lawrence was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and the pair returned to Taos and then to Europe, persisting in their nomadic life, he writing and painting all the time. He died in France in 1930. Later, Frieda returned to New Mexico with her lover, Angelo Ravagli, an Italian military officer from whom she and Lawrence had rented a villa in Spotorno in 1925. In 1933, Ravagli built a modern house for them at the Del Monte Ranch, where Dorothy Brett lived and where the Lawrences had also lived, about two miles below the Kiowa cabins. Ravagli also built the little chapel where Lawrence's ashes were deposited. Frieda married Ravagli in 1950.

Ledebur, Count Friedrich (b. 1908).
Austrian actor; second husband of Iris Tree. The marriage ended in 1955. His films include
Moby Dick
(1956),
The Blue Max
(1966), and
Slaughterhouse Five
(1972).

Lehmann, Beatrix (1903–1979).
English actress; the youngest of John Lehmann's three elder sisters. She met Isherwood when she was visiting Berlin in 1932, and they became close friends.

Lehmann, John (1907–1988).
English author, publisher, editor, autobiographer; educated at Cambridge. Isherwood met Lehmann in 1932 at the Hogarth Press, where Lehmann was assistant (later partner) to Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Lehmann persuaded the Woolfs to publish
The Memorial
after it had been rejected by Jonathan Cape, publisher of Isherwood's first novel,
All the Conspirators
. Isherwood helped Lehmann with his plans to found
New Writing
, discussing the manifesto and obtaining early contributions from friends such as W. H. Auden. He tells about this in
Christopher and His Kind
, and also writes about Lehmann in
D1
. When he left the Hogarth Press, Lehmann founded his own publishing firm and later edited
The London Magazine
. He wrote three revealing volumes of autobiography, beginning with
The Whispering Gallery
(1955).

Lehmann, Rosamond (1901–1990).
English novelist; an elder sister of Isherwood's longtime friend John Lehmann. She made a reputation with the frankness of her first novel,
Dusty Answer
(1927), and her later
works—including
Invitation to the Waltz
(1932),
The Weather in the Streets
(1936),
The Echoing Grove
(1953)—also shocked with their candid handling of sexual and emotional themes. From 1928 to 1944 she was married to the painter Wogan Philipps with whom she had a son and a daughter.

Lerman, Leo.
American magazine editor. Lerman was an actor and then a writer, and he held various editorial positions at Condé Nast, eventually becoming one of its most senior managers. During the 1940s he was well-known in New York for his Sunday night parties which attracted writers, actors, and dancers, and for a time, he wrote a gossip column for
Vogue
. He also introduced various new writers into
Vogue
's pages. He was close friends with his Manhattan neighbor, Truman Capote, from the day of their first meeting in 1945 and attended Yaddo with Capote in 1946. The house Lerman rented on Nantucket, Hagedorn House, which Isherwood mentions, was evidently a converted coastguard station in Quidnet and may have belonged to the poet and biographer, Herman Hagedorn.

Lewis, Hayden (1919–c.1994).
Lewis was born in Alabama; his family came from Caledonia, a rural community near a tiny town called Pineapple, and they later moved to Fairhope, not far away, where Lewis eventually retired. As a young man he worked in Chicago, and attended the University of Chicago with a younger brother. Then, during the war, he went to Florida and worked for the navy in a civilian capacity until he and Caskey moved on together to California. After spending several decades building up his successful ceramics business with Rodney Owens, Lewis returned to Alabama where he married a Florida native, Mildred MacKinnon, whom he met at the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education. He appears frequently in
D1
.

Litvak, Anatole (1902–1974).
Russian-born film director. He made his first film in Russia, then worked in Germany, France, and England from the late 1920s before going on to Hollywood in 1937. His films in English include
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
(1939),
All This and Heaven Too
(1940),
Sorry, Wrong Number
(1948),
The Snake Pit
(1948),
Decision Before Dawn
(1952), and
Anastasia
(1956). During the war, Litvak co-directed propaganda films with Frank Capra.

Lodge, Carter (d. 1995).
American friend of John van Druten. Lodge was van Druten's lover in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He lived mostly in the Coachella Valley at the AJC Ranch, which he and van Druten purchased in the early 1940s with Auriol Lee, the British actress and director. Lodge managed the ranch, where they grew corn and tomatoes, and handled his own and van Druten's financial affairs very successfully. Isherwood also writes about him in
D1
.

Logan, Joshua (1908–1988).
American stage and film director, producer, and playwright; educated at Princeton. In the 1930s he went to see Stanislavsky in Moscow before beginning his career as a producer in London. Usually working with others, Logan wrote, directed, or produced some of the most successful ever Broadway musicals and plays, including
Annie Get Your Gun
(1946) and
South Pacific
(1949). In Hollywood he made musicals into films, and directed
Bus Stop
(1956),
Picnic
(1956), and
Sayonara
(1957), among others.

Luhan, Mabel Dodge (1879–1962).
American writer, patron, salon hostess; married four times. Her four volumes of memoirs, begun in 1924 and published during the 1930s, were admired by D. H. Lawrence, who was both attracted and repelled by her. Born in Buffalo, New York, to great wealth, she was sent to Europe in 1901 to recover from a nervous breakdown; there she lived in a Medici villa in Florence, wore Renaissance dress, had lovers, befriended Gertrude Stein, and entertained lavishly. In 1912 she returned to New York where she set up her salon at 23 Fifth Avenue and had an affair with the radical journalist John Reed. Next she moved to Taos, New Mexico, where she met Tony Luhan, a Pueblo Indian whom she married in 1923. The Indian way of life became her religion, and she believed that she and her husband were messiahs by whose leadership white civilization would be redeemed. She brought others to Taos to celebrate her new life, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Leopold Stokowski, John Collier, and Lawrence. During the 1920s and 1930s she worked for land reform, self-determination, and medical benefits for the Indians.

Lynes, George Platt (1907–1955).
American photographer; educated at The Berkshire School, where he met Lincoln Kirstein, and, briefly, at Yale. Lynes first photographed Isherwood and W. H. Auden during their brief visit to New York in 1938. In the 1940s, he encouraged Bill Caskey in his efforts to become a professional photographer, and later, in 1953, Lynes befriended and photographed Don Bachardy. He appears in
D1
. Lynes made his living from advertising and fashion photography as well as portraits (his work appeared in
Town and Country, Harper's Bazaar
, and
Vogue
), but he is also known for his photographs of the ballet, male nudes, and surrealistic still lifes; he did many portraits of film stars and writers.

Macaulay, Rose (1881–1958).
British novelist, essayist, and travel writer; educated at Somerville College, Oxford. She was the daughter of a Cambridge don and published her first novel in 1906. In all she wrote twenty-three novels; the last and perhaps best,
The Towers of Trebizond
(1956), became a bestseller in the U.S. Macaulay also produced various works of nonfiction, including a biography of Milton and a book about the writings of E. M. Forster, and she wrote numerous articles for periodicals.

Mace, John.
Los Angeles lawyer. He and Isherwood had a number of mutual friends and sometimes attended the same parties in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1954, Isherwood asked Mace to represent him when Curtis Harrington sued Isherwood for punching Harrington in the face at a party given by Iris Tree. The case was settled out of court and Isherwood paid Harrington $350.

MacNeice, Louis (1907–1963).
Poet, born in Belfast. MacNeice was an undergraduate at Oxford with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, and he collaborated with Auden on
Letters from Iceland
(1937). He worked as a university lecturer in classics and later for the BBC as a writer and producer, while publishing numerous volumes of verse, verse translation, autobiography, and plays for radio and stage.

Madge, Charles (1912–1996).
South African-born sociologist and poet; educated at Winchester and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He became a
communist in the early 1930s, worked as a journalist and was a founder in 1937 of Mass Observation. His first marriage, to the poet Kathleen Raine, ended in 1939, and he then began an affair with Stephen Spender's first wife, Inez Pearn, whom he later married. He published only two volumes of poetry, but continued his social and economic research through the war and, in 1950, became a professor of sociology at Birmingham University.

Maher, Fern (b. 1917).
American social worker. Educated at UCLA where she became close friends with David Sachs. She lived for some years in the Benton Way house. In 1948 she married Ken O'Brien, a photographer who was an occasional resident at Benton Way, and after some time abroad in North Africa, they eventually settled in Venice, California.

Mailer, Norman (b. 1923).
American novelist; born and raised in New Jersey and Brooklyn and educated at Harvard. Mailer was in the army and fought in the Pacific during World War II; he became famous with the publication of his first novel,
The Naked and the Dead
(1948), about an American infantry platoon invading a Japanese-held island. Subsequent books include
The Deer Park
(1955) about Hollywood,
An American Dream
(1965),
Why are We in Vietnam?
(1967),
Of a Fire on the Moon
(1970) about the lunar landings,
The Executioner's Song
(1979) about the execution of a convicted murderer, two books about Marilyn Monroe, and
Oswald's Tale
(1995) about Lee Harvey Oswald. He won a Pulitzer Prize for
The Annies of the Night
(1968), describing the first peace march on the Pentagon—in which he was a participant—during the Vietnam era.