Lost Years (62 page)

As has been recorded, neither of them liked the Speed Lamkin–Gus Field play based on
Sally Bowles
. Now, while they were driving together to visit John van Druten at his ranch in the Coachella Valley, Alec got the idea that John should be persuaded to take on the project. Dodie writes (August 25, 1975): “I have such a vivid memory of Alec (by arrangement) putting his head out of John's swimming pool and saying, ‘Why not make a play out of Sally Bowles'—and then diving down again, leaving me to get John going.”

(Dodie's letter was written to correct my misremembered or, rather, invented version of the facts in my introduction to
The Berlin of Sally Bowles
,
^[
5
]
published in 1975.)

Once John's inventiveness had been challenged, the rest was predictable. John quickly produced a first draft. And now the news
was told to Christopher. On May 28, John, Starcke and Christopher had supper together and John read his play aloud. It was then still called
Sally Bowles
.

I have no memory whatsoever of the impression made on Christopher by that first reading. I think he disliked the character of Christopher Isherwood from the beginning and never changed his opinion. I think he also objected to most of the speeches about the persecution of the Jews which John had written in, and to several of John's jokes. But what mattered to him chiefly was that this play would almost certainly be performed and would probably make money. And, already, he saw the glitter of footlights ahead of him and felt the thrill of escaping into the New York theatrical world.

Christopher was obviously the person who had to tell Speed Lamkin and Gus Field—since it was he, after all, who had to accept the responsibility of deciding to authorize John van Druten's play and reject theirs. Speed could not have behaved better. He assured Christopher that he quite understood the situation. In Christopher's place, he would jump at this chance. He was happy for Christopher and knew that the play would be a terrific hit. As for Gus, he would explain everything to him. It would be easier, Speed said, for him to do it himself than for Christopher to do it.

So Christopher felt more warmly toward Speed than ever—as did the Beesleys, partly perhaps because they were suffering from slight guilt. They invited Speed to their house, several times, with Christopher. And Speed charmed them; he had nice southern manners which he could use when he wished. Also, he continued to create a most peculiar relationship with Alec Beesley. Declaring to Christopher, in private, that Alec was one of the handsomest men he'd ever set eyes on and that he'd bet Alec wasn't that hard to get, he began flirting quite openly but inoffensively with Alec in Dodie's presence. Neither Alec nor Dodie could object to this because Speed was such an avowed faggot that his behavior seemed no more than natural. But it amused Christopher to realize that Alec was not only slightly embarrassed by it but also coyly pleased. Alec even tried to learn Speed's language—that is to say, he tried to get Speed to explain to him what “camp” is. But Speed's teasingly misleading definitions left him nowhere. Alec ended by deciding that camp is any kind of irresponsible unmotivated behavior. Therefore, one morning when Speed and Christopher had been invited to lunch, they found that Alec had prepared for their arrival by throwing all the garden chairs into the pool, where they were floating. “It's a camp!” Alec explained, obviously pleased with himself, like a proud pupil expecting praise.

As for Gus Field, he took the news well, too. Which was more admirable, since he got very little gratitude from Christopher or anybody else for doing so. If he was invited to the Beesleys', it was only once or twice. Speed dropped him. Christopher only saw him occasionally. He was treated as a bore and an outsider—and that, from Christopher's point of view, was what he was.

[
¹
Not his real name.]

²
In connection with this, I have a memory which is very vivid but which I suspect slightly, simply because I can't find any reference to it in the day-to-day diary. Jim Charlton came to spend the night at Monterey Street, not long after Christopher's fuck with Lennie. In the morning Jim walked into Christopher's and Caskey's bedroom, naked, with a hard-on. Caskey was asleep. Jim grinned at Christopher, lifted him naked out of bed and carried him out of the room and into the guest bedroom. This was a typical specimen of Jim's he-man camp; Christopher found it funny but also sexually exciting. He wanted Jim to fuck him, and, when Jim started to, Christopher began flexing and unflexing his sphincter muscle in imitation of Lennie Newman. It was an amateur performance but it impressed Jim. “Where did you learn that whore trick, for Christ's sake?” he growled. The fuck was a huge success.

[
³
“Hear you this Triton of the minnows?” with which Coriolanus scoffs at the people's tribune, Sicinius.]

⁴
Referring to an earlier party (April 27–28) Christopher writes [on May 6]: “All sorts of people came down for the weekend, and I was cheerful and it ‘went' very well. But afterwards I felt—well, sort of disturbed in my inmost nest. It was hard to settle down on the eggs again. (The eggs, this week, were a rather stupid review I did of a book on Katherine Mansfield.)” [Sylvia Berkman,
Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study
for
Tomorrow
, reprinted in
Exhumations
.]

[
⁵
Mr. Norris Changes Trains
and
Goodbye to Berlin
reissued in one volume by the Hogarth Press.]

This glossary does not include entries for people adequately introduced by Isherwood himself in his text, nor does it incorporate information from the text. Readers should use the index to locate Isherwood's own descriptions.

Ackerley, J. R. (1896–1967).
English author and editor. Ackerley wrote drama, poetry, and autobiography, and is known for his intimate relationship with his dog, described in two of his autobiographical books. He was literary editor of
The Listener
from 1935 to 1959, and published work by some of the best and most important writers of his period; Isherwood contributed numerous reviews during the thirties. Their friendship was sustained in later years partly by their shared acquaintance with E. M. Forster.

Adorno, Theodor (1903–1969).
German philosopher. In 1933, he emigrated to Oxford and then to the U.S. where he became friends with Thomas Mann; later, he returned to his academic career in Frankfurt. Adorno was a critic of phenomenology, existentialism, and neo-positivism. He also wrote about music, language, and literature.

Agee, James (1909–1955).
American poet, novelist, journalist, and screenwriter; born in Tennessee and educated at Harvard. Agee's first book was a 1934 volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He became famous for his collaboration with the photographer Walker Percy on
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(1941), about Alabama sharecroppers during the Depression (an assignment rejected by
Fortune
magazine). Later he wrote two semi-autobiographical novels,
The Morning Watch
(1951) and
A Death in the Family
(1957), the second of which was published posthumously and won a Pulitzer Prize (it won another Pulitzer when adapted for the stage as
All the Way Home
). Agee was on the staff of
Time
as well as
Fortune,
and he became widely known as a film critic. His screenplays included
The African Queen
(1951, with John Huston) and an adaptation of Stephen Crane's
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
(1953).

AJC Ranch.
Carter Lodge, John van Druten, and the British actress and director Auriol Lee (who had directed several of van Druten's plays) bought the ranch in the early 1940s. They named it “AJC” for Auriol, John, Carter. Lee died in a car accident not long afterwards. Van Druten also owned a forest cabin nearby, in the mountains above Idyllwild.

Allgood, Sara (1883–1950).
Irish actress. At the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Allgood created the part of “Juno Boyle” in
Juno and the Paycock
by Sean O'Casey. Isherwood evidently saw the first London run of
Juno and the Paycock
between November 1925 and May 1926. Allgood repeated the role of “Juno” for Hitchcock's 1930 film, and later settled in Hollywood where she made numerous films.

Almond, Paul (b. 1931).
Canadian director, producer, screenwriter; educated at McGill University and at Oxford, where he was president of the poetry society and edited the undergraduate literary magazine
Isis
. On leaving Oxford, Almond joined a British repertory company before returning to Canada in the early 1950s to work as a TV director and later in film. He made
Isabel
(1967),
Act of the Heart
(1970), and
Journey
(1972) starring his first wife, Geneviève Bujold. His second wife, Joan, is a photographer. With a life-long literary friend, Michael Ballantyne, Almond published a memoir,
High Hopes: Coming of Age at the Mid-Century
(1999).

Andrews, Oliver.
California sculptor, on the art faculty at UCLA. He died suddenly of a heart attack during the 1970s, while still in his forties.

Angermayer, Ken (Kenneth Anger) (b. 1929).
American filmmaker and author. His films include
Fireworks
(1947),
Eaux d'Artifice
(1953), and
Scorpio Rising
(1964). Angermayer grew up in Hollywood. His sensationalist book,
Hollywood Babylon
(1975), exposes the habitual excesses of many stars and the ruthless way in which some stars were exploited.

Arvin, Newton (1900–1963).
American literary critic and professor of literature; born in Indiana and educated at Harvard. Arvin taught at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and published biographies of Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whitman, and Melville. The Melville biography (which he was working on in Nantucket when Isherwood visited in the summer of 1947) won the National Book Award in 1951. He also contributed to scholarly journals and to
The Nation, The New Republic
, and, later,
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
. He was unsuccessfully married for eight years, from 1932 to 1940, to a former student, Mary Garrison. Arvin met Truman Capote at Yaddo in June 1946, and they began an intense love affair which lasted several years. In 1960, Arvin was arrested when his large collection of erotic photographs and stories was discovered by the police; he informed on a number of colleagues and close friends, then had a nervous breakdown and lost his job at Smith. Not long afterwards, he discovered he had terminal cancer.

Ashton, Frederick (Freddy) (1906–1988).
British choreographer and dancer, born in Ecuador, raised in Peru, and educated in England from 1919. Ashton studied with Léonide Massine and Marie Rambert. She was the first to commission a ballet from him, in 1926. In the late 1920s, he worked briefly as a dancer and choreographer in Paris. Then in 1935, he joined the Vic-Wells (later Sadler's Wells) Ballet where he spent the rest of his career. The company gradually evolved into the Royal Ballet, and in 1963 he succeeded Ninette de Valois as its director. Sadler's Wells had its first New York season and U.S. tour in the autumn of 1949, with
The Sleeping Beauty
as its centerpiece, and they toured again the following autumn.

Auden, W. H.
(Wystan) (1907–1973).
English poet, playwright, librettist, critic. Perhaps the greatest English poet of his century and one of the most influential. He and Isherwood met as schoolboys at St. Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey, where Auden, two and a half years younger than Isherwood, arrived in the autumn of 1915. They wrote three plays together—
The Dog Beneath the Skin
(1935),
The Ascent of F6
(1936),
On the Frontier
(1938)—and a travel book about their trip to China during the Sino-Japanese war—
Journey to a War
(1939). A fourth play—
The Enemies of a Bishop
(1929)—was published posthumously. As well as doing several stints of schoolmastering, Auden worked for John Grierson's Film Unit, funded by the General Post Office, for about six months during 1935, mostly writing poetry to be used as sound track. He and Isherwood went abroad separately and together during the 1930s, famously to Berlin, and finally emigrated together to the United States in 1939. After only a few months, their lives and interests diverged (Auden settled in New York while Isherwood went on to California). but they remained close friends until Auden's death. Auden is caricatured as “Hugh Weston” in
Lions and Shadows
and figures centrally in
Christopher and His Kind
. There are many passages about him in
D1
.

Aufderheide, Charles.
American technician, from the Midwest. Aufderheide came to Los Angeles with Ruby Bell and the From twins. He began working on cameras at Technicolor soon after he arrived, and he continued there for about thirty years. According to a friend, Alvin Novak, Aufderheide's personal qualities were largely responsible for the longterm harmony of The Benton Way Group: he had quick insight into the needs and motives of his circle of acquaintances and friends, liked to entertain, and was able to talk practically on a wide range of sophisticated subjects. The Benton Way Group became a special haven for certain intellectuals who belonged neither to the Hollywood film world, nor to the continental high culture of the refugee community. The Benton Way Group were almost exclusively Americans, apart from the Egyptian-born scholar and intellectual Edouard Roditi (who was evidently attracted to them precisely because they were unlike himself). Aufderheide also wrote poetry, and after he died his friends collected some of his verses in a book.