Liberation (132 page)

Loud, Lance (1951–2001).
Flash celebrity. He became famous in 1973 in a twelve-part public T.V. documentary “An American Family,” a precursor of reality T.V. It showed seven months in the life of his upper-middle-class Santa Barbara family and included Loud's revelation, in a shabby New York hotel, that he was gay. He later started and played in a rock band called The Mumps and then worked as a journalist. He became addicted to crystal meth and died of AIDS.

Loy, Myrna (1905–1993).
Hollywood star; born in Montana, raised there and in Los Angeles, where she became a chorus girl at eighteen. She was an exotic screen vamp in over sixty films until the mid-1930s, when she began to appear as Nora Charles in movies based on Dashiell Hammett's
The Thin Man
, and became Hollywood's number-one woman star. Her later films include
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946),
The Red Pony
(1949), and
Midnight Lace
(1960). During World War II, she worked for the Red Cross and, later, for UNESCO. She was also active in the Democratic party. She appears in
D.2
.

Luce, Henry R. (1898–1967) and Clare Boothe (1903–1987).
He was born in China and educated at Hotchkiss, Yale, and Oxford. He worked as a journalist before he co-founded
Time Magazine
in 1923. In the 1930s, he launched
Fortune
and
Life
, and then
House and Home
and
Sports Illustrated
in the 1950s. She was the illegitimate, peripatetically educated daughter of a dancer mother and a violinist father who deserted them. She worked as an actress briefly, was editor of
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
, a successful Broadway playwright—
Abide with Me
(1935),
The Women
(1936),
Kiss the Boys Goodbye
(1938)—a Republican congresswoman and U.S. Ambassador to Italy (1953–1957). Each was married once before. She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1946 after her daughter, an only child by her first husband, was killed in a car accident. The Luces were both vehement anticommunists.

Luckenbill, Dan (b. 1945).
American writer and librarian. From 1970, he worked at the UCLA library in the manuscripts division. Later he curated exhibitions and wrote catalogues on gay and lesbian studies. He published short stories from the 1970s onwards.

Luckinbill, Laurence (b. 1934).
American actor, writer and director. His film appearances include
The Boys in the Band
(1970) and
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
(1989); on T.V., he had roles in “Law and Order” and “Murder, She Wrote” among others. He also wrote and performed one-man stage shows about American “heroes,” such as Hemingway, Teddy Roosevelt, Clarence Darrow and LBJ. He was married to Robin Strasser until 1976 and had two children with her; later he married Lucie Arnaz, with whom he had three more children.

Ludington, Wright (1900–1992).
Art collector and philanthropist; raised in Pennsylvania, educated at the Thacher School in Ojai, at Yale, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and at the Art Students League in New York. In 1927, he inherited a fortune from his father, a lawyer and investment banker who worked with the Curtis Publishing Company. He also inherited an estate in Montecito—Val Verde—and spent decades improving it with the help of a school friend, the landscape architect Lockwood de Forest. Val Verde included an art gallery for Ludington's collection of modern paintings and outdoor settings for his ancient sculpture. In 1955, he sold Val Verde and built a new house off Bella Vista Drive—Hesperides—which was designed by Lutah Maria Riggs especially to display his art collection. De Forest's widow landscaped Hesperides. Ludington was a founder and board member of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and gave the museum many pieces from his collection. He appears in
D.2.

M.
Isherwood's mother. He called her “Mummy” and began letters to her with “My Darling Mummy,” and later, “Dearest Mummy,” but he invariably wrote “M.” in his diaries. See Isherwood, Kathleen.

Isherwood sometimes uses “M.” for Mahendranath Gupta, the schoolmaster who became Ramakrishna's disciple and recorded Ramakrishna's conversations and sayings in his diaries, later compiling them in
Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita or The Gospel of Ramakrishna.

MacDonald, Madge.
Nurse. She worked at UCLA hospital and lived in Isherwood's neighborhood. She appears in
D.1
and
D.2
.

Macht, Stephen (b. 1942).
American actor. He appeared in suspense, disaster and horror films, many for T.V.; he also appeared on “Knots Landing” in the early 1980s.

Macy, Gertrude (190[4]–1983).
New York stage manager and producer; secretary and biographer of actress Katherine Cornell. She co-produced the 1951 stage version of
I Am a Camera
with Walter Starcke and thereby had a substantial financial stake in
Cabaret
, which reduced Isherwood's earnings and which he several times refers to in his diaries. When the film of
Cabaret
came out in 1972, she made a new claim based on her original involvement as co-producer of van Druten's play. She is mentioned in
D.1
and
D.2.

Madigan, Leo (Larry).
Roman Catholic writer and teacher, born and educated in New Zealand. As Isherwood tells in his entry for April 6, 1970, he was a merchant seaman and first shipped out as a teenager. He also tried acting and psychiatric work. His early writing appeared in a magazine called
The Seafarer
, published by the Marine Society in London, and which he edited for a time; he also contributed to
Blackwood's Magazine
. His first novel,
Jackarandy
(1973), is about the professional gay sex scene in London. Later, he settled in Fatima, Portugal, and published religious books,
The Devil Is a Jackass
(1995),
The Catholic Quiz Book
(1995),
Fatima: Highway of Hope
(2000),
What Happened at Fatima
(2000), and an English-language guide to the shrine. He has also written Catholic novels for children.

Maharaj.
See Brahmananda, Swami.

mahasamadhi.
Great samadhi, usually referring to the moment of death, when the illuminated soul leaves the body and is absorbed into the divine. See samadhi.

Mailer, Norman (1923–2007).
American writer, raised in Brooklyn and educated at Harvard. He fought in the Pacific during World War II and 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. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize: for
The Armies of the Night
(1968) and
The Executioner's Song
(1979). Other novels and works blending fiction with non-fiction and personal commentary include
The Deer Park
(1955),
An American Dream
(1965),
Why Are We in Vietnam?
(1967),
Of a Fire on the Moon
(1970),
The Prisoner of Sex
(1971),
Ancient Evenings
(1983),
Tough Guys Don't Dance
(1984),
Harlot's Ghost
(1991),
Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery
(1995),
The Gospel According to the Son
(1997), and
The Castle in the Forest
(2007). He also wrote screenplays and directed films. He co-founded
The Village Voice
in 1955, and in 1969 he ran for mayor of New York. He married six times. In
Lost Years
, Isherwood tells of his first meeting with Mailer in 1950, and Mailer also appears in
D.2.

Mallory, Margaret (b. 1911).
Art collector and philanthropist. She lived with Alice Story, known as Ala, and they travelled and collected together. Mallory was a benefactor of UCSB, endowing fellowships in music and art history and donating parts of her collection. She appears in
D.2.

Mangeot, André (1883–1970) and Olive (1885–1969).
Belgian violinist and his English wife; parents of Sylvain and Fowke Mangeot. Isherwood met them in 1925 and worked for a year as part-time secretary to André Mangeot's string quartet which was organized from the family home in Chelsea. He brought friends to meet Olive when he was in London. She is the original for “Madame Cheuret” in
Lions and Shadows
, and Isherwood drew on aspects of her personality for “Margaret Lanwin” and “Mary Scriven” in
The Memorial
. Olive had an affair with Edward Upward and through his influence became a communist. Later, she separated from her husband and for a time shared a house with Jean Ross and Jean's daughter in Cheltenham. Hilda Hauser, the Mangeots' housekeeper and cook, also moved with Olive to Cheltenham, where, together, they raised Hilda's granddaughter, Amber. As Isherwood tells in
D.1
and in
Lost Years
, Hilda's daughter Phyllis was raped by a black G.I. during World War II and Amber resulted. The Mangeots also appear in
D.2.

Mangeot, Sylvain (1913–1978).
Younger son of Olive and André Mangeot. Isherwood's friend Eric Falk initially introduced Isherwood to the Mangeot family because Sylvain, at age eleven, had a bicycle accident which confined him to a wheelchair for a time, and Isherwood had a car in which he could take Sylvain for outings. They grew to know each other well during the time that Isherwood worked for Sylvain's father, and together they made a little book,
People One Ought to Know
, for which Isherwood wrote nonsense verses to accompany Sylvain's animal paintings (it was eventually published in 1982, but one pair of verses appeared earlier as “The Common Cormorant” in Auden's 1938 anthology
The Poet's Tongue
). Sylvain is portrayed as “Edouard” in
Lions and Shadows
. Later he joined the Foreign Office and then became a journalist, working as a diplomatic correspondent, an editor, and an overseas radio commentator for the BBC. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Manionis, Anthony (Tony).
Aspiring actor. He understudied and was an assist ant stage manager for the Phoenix Theater Broadway production of
School for Wives
in 1971 and had a part in the first New York production
A Meeting by the River.

Mann, Erika (1905–1969).
German actress and author, eldest daughter of Thomas Mann. Isherwood met her in the spring of 1935 in Amsterdam through her brother Klaus; she had fled Germany in March 1933. Her touring satirical revue, “The Peppermill” (for which she wrote most of the anti-Nazi material), earned her the status of official enemy of the Reich and she asked Isherwood to marry her and provide her with a British passport. He felt he could not, but contacted Auden who instantly agreed. The two met and married in England on June 15, 1935, the very day Goebbels revoked Mann's German citizenship. In September 1936, Erika emigrated to America with Klaus and unsuccessfully tried to reopen “The Peppermill” in New York. As the war approached, she lectured widely in the U.S. and wrote anti-Nazi books, two with Klaus, trying to revive sympathy for the non-Nazi Germany silenced by Hitler. She worked as a journalist in London during the war, for the BBC German Service and as a correspondent for the New York
Nation
. Later, she grew closer to her father, travelling with her parents and helping Mann with his work. She appears in
D.1
and
Lost Years.

Mann, Heinrich Klaus (1906–1949).
German novelist and editor, eldest son of Thomas Mann. Isherwood became friendly with him in Berlin in the summer of 1931. By then Klaus had written and acted with his sister, Erika, in the plays which launched her acting career, and he had published several novels in German (a few appeared in English translations) and worked as a drama critic. He travelled extensively and lived in various European cities before he left Germany for good in 1933; he emigrated to America in 1936 when his family settled in Princeton. He lived in New York, continued to travel to Europe as a journalist, and eventually settled for a time in Santa Monica. He founded two magazines,
Die Sammlung
(The Collection) in Amsterdam in 1933, and
Decision
, which appeared in New York in December 1940 but lasted only a year because of the war. He became a U.S. citizen and served in the U.S. army during the war. He wrote his second volume of autobiography,
The Turning Point
(1942), in English. He attempted suicide several times, finally succeeding in Cannes. Isherwood wrote a reminiscence for a memorial volume published in Amsterdam in 1950,
Klaus Mann—zum Gedaechtnis
(reprinted in
Exhumations
), and he describes their friendship in
D.1
and
Lost Years
.

mantram or mantra.
A Sanskrit word or words which the guru tells his disciple when initiating him into the spiritual life and which is the essence of the guru's teaching for that particular disciple. The mantram is a name for God and includes the word
Om
; the disciple must keep the mantram secret and meditate for the rest of his life on the aspect of God which it represents. Repeating the mantram (making japam) purifies the mind and leads to the realization of God. With the mantram, the guru often gives a rosary—as Swami Prabhavananda gave Isherwood—on which the disciple may count the number of times he repeats his mantram.

Marguerite, previously Marguerite Brown, also Marguerite Harrity.
See Lamkin, Marguerite.