Lost Years (75 page)

Stravinsky, Vera (1888–1982).
Russian-born actress and painter. Second wife of Igor Stravinsky; she was previously married three times, the third time to the painter and Ballets Russes stage designer Sergei Sudeikin. In 1917, Vera Arturovna Sudeikin fled St. Petersburg and the bohemian artistic milieu in which she was both patroness and muse, travelling in the south of Russia with Sudeikin before going on to Paris where she met Stravinsky in the early 1920s; they fell in love but did not marry until 1940 after the death of Stravinsky's first wife. Vera Stravinsky's paintings were in an abstract-primitive style influenced by Paul Klee, childlike and decorative. She appears often in
D1
.

Sudhira.
A nurse of Irish descent; she was a probationer nun at the Hollywood Vedanta Center when Isherwood arrived to live there in 1943. Her real name was Helen Kennedy. She had been widowed in youth, and first came to the Vedanta Center professionally to nurse a devotee. After the war she married for a second time and returned to nursing. Isherwood tells about her in detail in
D1
.

Sutherland, Graham (1903–1980).
English artist. Sutherland began his career as an etcher and engraver and took up oil painting by the mid-1930s, producing semi-abstract pictures inspired by the landscape of Pembrokeshire. He was an official war artist during World War II, employed to depict bomb damage. After the war he began painting religious subjects, and in 1949 he painted a portrait of Somerset Maugham, thus embarking on a new phase as a portrait painter. His best-known work is an enormous tapestry,
Christ in Glory
,
which he designed during the 1950s for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. He also worked with ceramics and designed for the stage. From the late 1930s, Sutherland and his wife lived half the year in France and half in Trottiscliffe, Kent.

Swami.
Used as a title to mean “Lord” or “Master.” A Hindu monk or religious teacher. Isherwood used it in particular to refer to his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, and he pronounced it “Shwami,” according to the Sanskrit phonetics Prabhavananda taught him; see Prabhavananda.

Swamiji.
An especially respectful form of “Swami,” used in particular as a name for Vivekananda in his later years.

Taxman, Barry.
American composer; raised in the Midwest and educated at Yale and the University of Chicago. He was associated for a time with the University of California at Berkeley and his music is regularly performed in Berkeley where he settled.

Taylor, Frank (1915–1999).
American publisher and movie producer, born in upstate New York and raised as a Roman Catholic. Taylor was turned down by the draft for health reasons and made a meteoric rise in New York publishing during the war years. He began in advertising at Harper and Brothers, the
Saturday Review of Literature
, and then Reynal & Hitchcock where he was able to move to the literary side during the war and discovered his first bestsellers,
Strange Fruit
by Lillian Smith and, later,
Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry. After the war, he visited England and established literary friendships which helped him expand the list of American and international authors he was already publishing, such as Arthur Miller, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Saint-Exupéry, Le Corbusier, and Brecht. He vainly tried to start his own publishing firm, worked briefly at Random House, then in 1948 went to Hollywood to produce movies, first of all at MGM, later at Fox. Despite critical recognition and ubiquitous success on the Hollywood social scene, he was victimized during the McCarthy period for his former associations with the communist party—he was a labor activist throughout his early career in New York—and eventually toward the end of 1951 he returned to New York. There, in 1952, he became editor-in-chief at Dell, achieving huge success during the paperback revolution. But Hollywood beckoned again, and Taylor produced
The Misfits
(1960) with his old friend Arthur Miller. As he records in
D1
, Isherwood worked with Taylor on film ideas in the 1950s—including
The Journeying Boy
, a detective story by Michael Innes, and
I Am a Camera
—and he prepared the 1960 anthology
Great English Short Stories
for Taylor at Dell. During the 1960s and 1970s, Taylor ran the trade division at McGraw-Hill where he published Marshall McLuhan, Eldridge Cleaver, Germaine Greer, and Nabokov, among others.

Taylor, Nan (b. 1915).
American radio hostess; born and raised in Minnesota as a Roman Catholic. Her maiden name was Skallon. Taylor trained as an actress at the University of Minnesota and afterwards had a children's radio show in New York. During the war, she worked with Bennett Cerf, presenting a books program. She gave up her career when she moved to Hollywood with her husband, Frank Taylor, and looked after their four sons,
Michael, Mark, Curtice, and Adams. When the Taylors returned east, they settled in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she founded the town's first daycare center and, later, during the 1970s, became head of the Board of Education. She was also president locally of the English Speaking Union. The Taylors divorced in the 1970s and Nan remarried, though she remained close to her first husband.

Thomas, Dylan (1914–1953).
British poet, born and raised in Wales, where his father was the English master at Swansea Grammar School. Thomas began writing poetry in childhood, left school early and published his first book,
18 Poems
, in 1934 while working as a journalist. In London he also worked as a scriptwriter and broadcaster for the BBC and wrote stories as well as poems. His marriage in 1937 to Caitlin Macnamara was famously stormy and drunken, but Thomas's work nevertheless attracted critical acclaim and a wide audience. After the pair moved back to Wales together in 1949, he made a series of taxing reading tours through the USA because he needed the money. He died in New York of alcohol poisoning in November 1953. His
Collected Poems
appeared in 1952, and he completed a version of his radio play
Under Milk Wood
not long before he died.

Todd, Thelma (1905–1935).
American movie actress. She owned an establishment on the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Monica incorporating a restaurant, a gambling casino and a whorehouse, and she was murdered there. Afterwards the restaurant—named Chez Roland after Gilbert Roland with whom Todd was supposed to be in love—remained in business for many years; Isherwood always referred to it as “Thelma Todd's.”

Tooker, George.
American painter. He became Paul Cadmus's lover after they met at the Art Students League in New York in 1942, and he was friendly with Cadmus's circle. During the 1950s he moved to Vermont with another artist, William Christopher, and continued his career there.

Trabuco.
Monastic community founded by Gerald Heard in 1942, on a ranch about sixty miles south of Los Angeles and roughly twenty miles inland. An anonymous benefactor provided $100,000 for the project, and Isherwood's cousin, Felix Greene, administered the practical side, buying the property and constructing the building, which could house fifty. By 1949 Heard found the responsibility of leading the group too much of a strain and Trabuco was given to the Vedanta Society.

Tree, Iris (1896–1968).
English actress, poet, and playwright; third daughter of actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree. She published three volumes of poetry and wrote poems and articles for magazines such as
Vogue
and
Harper's Bazaar
, as well as
Botteghe Oscure, Poetry Review,
and
The London Magazine.
In youth she travelled with her father to Hollywood and New York and married an American, Curtis Moffat, with whom she had her first son, Ivan Moffat, born in Havana. Until 1926 she lived mostly in London and in Paris where she acted in Max Reinhardt's
The Miracle;
she toured with the play back to America where she met her second husband, the Austrian Count Friedrich Ledebur, with whom she had another son, Christian Dion Ledebur (called Boon) in 1928. Iris Tree had known Aldous and Maria Huxley in London, and they
introduced Isherwood to her in California during the war. With Alan Harkness, she brought a troupe of actors to Ojai to start The High Valley Theatre, and she adapted, wrote, and acted in plays for the group, including her own
Cock-a-doodle-doo.
She moved often—from house to house and country to country—and in July 1954 left California for good, settling in Rome where she worked on but never finished a novel about her youth. Her marriage to Ledebur ended in 1955. Isherwood modelled “Charlotte” in
A Single Man
partly on Iris Tree and wrote much about her in
D1
.

Turville-Petre, Francis.
English archaeologist, from an aristocratic Catholic family. Isherwood met the eccentric Turville-Petre through W. H. Auden in Berlin in 1929, and it was at Turville-Petre's house outside Berlin that Isherwood met Heinz Neddermeyer in 1932. In 1933 when Isherwood and Heinz fled Germany, they spent nearly four months on Turville-Petre's tiny island, St. Nicholas, in Greece. Turville-Petre is the model for “Ambrose” in
Down There on a Visit
.

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.
One of Hollywood's five biggest studios. It was formed by a merger between Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox Film Corporation. Darryl F. Zanuck ran it from 1935 to 1952 and again from 1962 with his son Richard Zanuck. Alan Ladd Jr. took over in the 1970s, and Twentieth Century-Fox has since been sold and resold, eventually to Rupert Murdoch. Its many stars have included Shirley Temple and Marilyn Monroe, and Fox produced the first widescreen Cinemascope film,
The Robe,
in 1953, followed by other big screen spectaculars, including
The King and I
(1956),
Cleopatra
(1963), and
The Sound of Music
(1965). Isherwood worked at Fox scripting
Jean-Christophe
in 1956 and 1957, but the film was never made.

UFOs.
In June 1947 an Idaho businessman, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing through the window of his private plane, near Mt. Rainier, flying objects which he described to the press as looking like “skipping saucers.” So many more “sightings” followed around the country that the U.S. military officially investigated the possible threat to national security. In his 1950 book
Is Another World Watching?
(
The Riddle of the Flying Saucers
in the U.K.), Gerald Heard described many of these early UFO sightings. He believed they were either top secret, ultra-fast experimental aircraft which the government was covering up or, more exciting to him, visitors from Mars. Among the numerous accounts of flying saucers analyzed by the U.S. Air Force between 1947 and the mid-1950s, about ten percent of reported sightings were never accounted for. As the terminology indicates, they remain Unidentified Flying Objects. Official U.S. investigations were abandoned in 1969.

Upward, Edward (b. 1903).
English novelist and schoolmaster. Isherwood met Upward in 1921 at their public school, Repton, and followed him to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. They were closely united by their rebellious attitude toward family and school authority and by shared literary interests. In the 1920s they created the fantasy world, Mortmere, about which they wrote surreal, macabre, and pornographic stories and poems for each other; their excited schoolboy humor is described in
Lions and Shadows
where
Upward appears as “Allen Chalmers.”

Upward made his reputation in the 1930s with his short fiction, especially
Journey to the Border
(1938), the intense, almost mystical, and largely autobiographical account of a young upper-middle-class tutor's conversion to communism. Then he published nothing for a long time, writing only fragments while he devoted himself to schoolmastering (he needed the money) and to communist party work. From 1931 to 1961 he taught at Alleyn's School, Dulwich, where he became Head of English and a housemaster; he lived nearby with his wife, Hilda, and their two children, Kathy and Christopher.

After World War II, Upward and his wife became disillusioned by the British communist party, and they left it in 1948; but Upward never abandoned his Marxist-Leninist convictions. In the face of psychological difficulties of some magnitude, he returned to his writing in earnest towards the end of the 1950s, and eventually produced a massive autobiographical trilogy,
The Spiral Ascent
(1977)—comprised of
In the Thirties
(1962),
The Rotten Elements
(1969), and
No Home but the Struggle
. The last two volumes were written on the Isle of Wight, where Upward retired in 1962, and they have been followed by several collections of short stories. Upward remained a challenging and trusted critic of Isherwood's work throughout Isherwood's life, and a loyal friend. He is often mentioned in
D1
.

van Druten, John (1901–1957).
English playwright and novelist. Isherwood met van Druten in New York in 1939, and they became friends because they were both pacifists. Of Dutch parentage, van Druten was born and educated in London and took a degree in law at the University of London. He achieved his first success as a playwright in New York during the 1920s, emigrated in 1938 and became a U.S. citizen in 1944. His strength was light comedy; among his numerous plays and adaptations were
Voice of the Turtle
(1943),
I Remember Mama
(1944),
Bell, Book, and Candle
(1950), and
I Am a Camera
(1951) based on Isherwood's
Goodbye to Berlin.
Many of these were later filmed. In 1951, van Druten directed
The King and I
on Broadway. Van Druten usually spent half the year in New York and half near Los Angeles on the AJC Ranch, which he owned with Carter Lodge. He also owned a mountain cabin above Idyllwild which Isherwood sometimes used. A fall from a horse in Mexico in 1936 left van Druten with a crippled arm, and partly as a result of this, he became attracted to Vedanta and other religions (he was a renegade Christian Scientist). He was a contributor to Isherwood's
Vedanta for the Western World,
and there are numerous accounts of him in
D1
.