Lost Years (76 page)

van Leyden, Ernst and Karen.
Dutch painters and decorative artists. They specialized in painting on glass, and they were responsible for a mural painted on glass in Jay de Laval's restaurant Café Jay. Karen van Leyden also painted screens and panels. The van Leydens had been friendly with Brian Howard in Portugal in 1933 when Howard travelled there with Cyril and Jean Connolly and Howard's boyfriend Toni. During the 1940s and early 1950s they lived on Barrington Avenue in Brentwood, which was then still rustic with open fields, and they converted the large barn on the property into their studio.

Van Meegeren, Han (1889–1947).
Dutch painter and perhaps the greatest forger ever; he painted a number of Vermeers and De Hooghs which were
accepted as authentic and which hung in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until 1945 when Van Meegeren was arrested as a collaborator because he was associated with the sale of a Dutch master painting to Goebbels. To clear himself of the charge of collaborating, Van Meegeren confessed that the Goebbels painting and certain others were his own work. A two-year scientific study confirmed his claim, uncovering his immensely complex process and also his remarkable talent. He was sentenced to a year in prison and died there of a heart attack.

van Petten, Bill (1922–1989).
American film administrator. Van Petten came from a wealthy oil family, read widely, especially in Sufi literature, and eventually converted to Islam. For two years he was assistant to the Saudi Arabian Minister of Information and helped to establish an Imax theater at the royal palace. He also supervised the filming of documentary footage there. He lived in Santa Monica, for many years in the same building with Jim Charlton.

Van Vechten, Carl (1880–1964).
American novelist and poet, critic of music and dance, and, late in life, photographer. He was a prolific writer and a figure of New York's bohemia, frequenting Harlem clubs and greatly contributing to popular recognition of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance. He was also an early editor of Gertrude Stein. Among his seven novels are
The Tattooed Countess
(1924) and
Nigger Heaven
(1926). He was married to Fania Marinoff.

Vaughan, Keith (1912–1977).
English painter, illustrator, and diarist. He worked in advertising during the 1930s and was a conscientious objector in the war; later he taught at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and the Slade, as well as briefly in America. Isherwood met him in 1947 at John Lehmann's and bought one of his pictures, “Two Bathers,” a small oil painting still in his collection. Vaughan's diaries, with his own illustrations, were published in 1966.

Vidal, Gore (b. 1925).
American writer. Vidal introduced himself to Isherwood in a café in Paris in early 1948, having previously written to him and sent the manuscript of his novel
The City and the Pillar.
They became lasting friends. Later, Isherwood also met Howard Austen (Tinker), Vidal's companion from 1950 onward. Vidal was in the army as a young man; afterwards he wrote essays on politics and culture as well as many novels, including
Williwaw
(1946),
Myra Breckenridge
(1968, dedicated to Isherwood), and the multi-volume American chronicle comprised of
Burr
(1974),
Lincoln
(1984),
1876
(1976),
Empire
(1987),
Hollywood
(1989), and
Washington, D.C.
(1967). During the 1950s Vidal wrote a series of television plays for CBS, then screenplays at Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM (including part of
Ben Hur
), and two Broadway plays,
Visit to a Small Planet
(1957) and
The Best Man
(1960). In 1960 he ran for Congress, and in 1982 for the Senate, both times unsuccessfully. He described his friendship with Isherwood in his memoir,
Palimpsest
(1995), and there are many passages about him in
D1
.

Viertel, Berthold (1885–1953).
Viennese poet, playwright, and film and theater director. Isherwood worked for Viertel in London as a screenplay writer and, later, dialogue director on Viertel's film
Little Friend
made by Gaumont-British. This was Isherwood's first experience in the film business,
and he made it the subject of
Prater Violet
, in which Viertel appears as “Friedrich Bergmann.” Viertel also appears throughout
D1
. Viertel had settled his first wife and children in Santa Monica in 1928 and returned alone to Europe for long periods to work. His description of the life in California was a glamorous lure to Isherwood; they renewed their friendship soon after Isherwood arrived there in 1939, beginning work on a film vaguely inspired by
Mr. Norris Changes Trains
. At the Viertels' house in Santa Monica Canyon Isherwood met a number of the celebrated European emigres then in Hollywood, and the friendship with Viertel led to his second Hollywood job (the first of any substance) with Gottfried Reinhardt at MGM. Viertel began his career as an actor and stage director and turned to films in the 1920s. He first made films in Germany, began directing in Hollywood from the late 1920s, and in England from 1933. Towards the end of his life he lived partly in New York and eventually, with his second wife—the German character actress Elisabeth Neumann—he returned to Europe as a theatrical director, staging, among other works, German-language productions of Tennessee Williams.

Viertel, Peter (b. 1920).
German-born second son of Berthold and Salka Viertel; screenplay writer and novelist. Peter Viertel attended UCLA and Dartmouth and became a freelance writer. He served in the U.S. Marines during World War II and was decorated four times. He wrote the award-winning screenplay for Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea
as well as other Hemingway adaptations, and his own novels are in the Hemingway vein, with subjects such as soldiering (
Line of Departure
, 1947), big game hunting (
White Hunter, Black Heart
, 1954), and bullfighting (
Love Lies Bleeding
, 1964). His first novel,
The Canyon
(published in 1941, but completed when he was just nineteen), gives a compelling adolescent view of Santa Monica as it was around the time when Isherwood first arrived there, and Isherwood mentions it in
D1
. Viertel's first marriage was to Virginia Schulberg, known as Jigee, and in 1960 he married the actress Deborah Kerr. Like his mother and father he eventually resettled in Europe.

Viertel, Salka (1889–1978).
Polish actress and screenplay writer; first wife of Berthold Viertel with whom she had three sons, Hans, Peter, and Thomas. Sara Salomé Steuermann Viertel had a successful stage career in Vienna (including acting for Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater) before moving to Hollywood where she became the friend and confidante of Greta Garbo; they appeared together in the German-language version of
Anna Christie
and afterwards Salka collaborated on Garbo's screenplays for MGM in the 1930s and 1940s (
Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, Conquest
, and others). Isherwood met her soon after arriving in Los Angeles and was often at her house socially or to work with Berthold Viertel. In the 1930s and 1940s the house was frequented by European refugees and Salka was able to help many of them find work—some as domestic servants, others with the studios. Among her guests were some of the most celebrated writers and movie stars of the time. By the mid-1940s, her husband had left her; her lover Gottfried Reinhardt had married; Garbo's career was over; and later, in the 1950s, Salka was persecuted by the McCarthyites and blacklisted by MGM for her presumed communism. In January 1947, she moved into the garage apartment Isherwood and Caskey had
let from her and rented out her house; then in the early 1950s she sold the property and moved to an apartment off Wilshire Boulevard. Eventually she returned modestly to writing for the movies, but finally moved back to Europe, although she had been a U.S. citizen since 1939. Isherwood tells about her in detail in
D1
.

Viertel, Tommy.
Youngest son of Berthold and Salka Viertel. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in February 1944. After the war he lived in Los Angeles where he worked for Los Angeles County. He married twice.

Viertel, Virginia (Jigee).
Peter Viertel's first wife, from 1944 to 1959. Born Virginia Ray to working-class Americans ruined by the Depression, Jigee was a dancer in the Paramount chorus and then married the writer Budd Schulberg with whom she shared strong leftist political convictions. She and Schulberg divorced after having a daughter, Vicky Schulberg. Jigee's second daughter, Christine Viertel, was born in Paris in 1952, and Jigee and Peter separated immediately afterwards. Salka Viertel partly raised both Vicky and Christine. After the ruin of her second marriage, Jigee drank increasingly heavily; then in January 1960 she fell asleep with a lit cigarette and died of burns in the hospital. She appears in
D1
.

Vivekananda, Swami (1863–1902).
Narendranath Datta (also known as Naren, Narendra and later as Swamiji) was Ramakrishna's chief direct disciple. Ramakrishna recognized him as an “eternal companion,” a perfect soul born into the world along with the avatar and possessing some of the avatar's characteristics. Vivekananda led the disciples after Ramakrishna's death and founded the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. He also spent time wandering through India practicing spiritual disciplines and travelling to America and Europe, where his lectures and classes spawned the first Vedanta centers in the West. His teachings and sayings were published in various volumes, and Isherwood wrote the introduction to a 1960 selection from these.

Vividishananda, Swami.
Hindu monk, from India. Vividishananda ran the Seattle Vedanta Center; Isherwood met him at the dedication of the new Portland temple in 1943 and afterwards briefly visited his Seattle center. Swami Vividishananda's biography of Shivananda,
A Man of God: Glimpses into the Life and Work of Swami Shivananda, a Great Disciple of Sri Ramakrishna
—for which Isherwood wrote the foreword in 1949—was eventually published in 1957 by the Ramakrishna Math.

Waley, Arthur (1889–1966).
English poet and scholar of Chinese and Japanese; educated at Rugby and King's College, Cambridge. Waley lived in Bloomsbury and associated with figures in the Bloomsbury group. He is best known for his translations of Chinese and Japanese literature which he began to publish during World War I. His renderings from the Chinese influenced Ezra Pound and the Imagists, among others, and his major prose translations (
The Tale of Genji, Monkey
) along with his scholarly writings on Japanese and Chinese art and culture contributed in England from the 1920s onward to a growing general interest in oriental literature.

Walter, Bruno.
German conductor. Walter was a neighbor of Thomas Mann
in Munich from before the start of World War I, and they became lifelong friends. Their children were acquainted with one another from childhood. When the Manns first arrived to spend the summer in Brentwood in 1940, the Walters were already settled nearby. Walter also lived in New York.

Warner Brothers.
One of the major Hollywood studios, founded in 1923 by the four sons of a Polish shoemaker. Warner Brothers pioneered talking pictures and later became known for realistic, often black-and-white, films. As well as gangster movies and musicals, there were numerous relatively highbrow historical and political films, and the studio was especially successful from the 1930s to the 1950s. It was increasingly run by the youngest brother. Jack Warner, although Darryl F. Zanuck and, after him, Hal Wallis, contributed to Jack Warner's success. Warner Brothers was sold to Seven Arts in 1967 and later taken over by a conglomerate, eventually merging with Time Inc. in 1989.

Warren, Robert Penn (1905–1989).
American poet, novelist, critic, and teacher; born in Kentucky and educated at Vanderbilt, Berkeley, Yale, and Oxford. Warren won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1946 novel
All the King's Men
, also his best known, and he wrote numerous other novels and works of non-fiction, mostly preoccupied with the concerns of his native South. He helped to found
The Southern Review
and co-edited it with Cleanth Brooks from 1935 until 1942; with Brooks he also later compiled two volumes of criticism and literary writing which spread the so-called New Criticism into many college classrooms:
Understanding Poetry
(1938) and
Understanding Criticism
(1943). Warren's first volume of poetry appeared in 1935, and he won two more Pulitzer prizes for later volumes of poetry,
Promises
(1957) and
Now and Then
(1978). He also won several other major literary awards and was made America's first poet laureate in 1986. He held university teaching posts throughout his career. For a time he was on the board of the Huntington Hartford Foundation with Isherwood, giving away three-month fellowships for young writers.

Watson, Peter.
The financier behind
Horizon
, of which he was art editor and co-founder. Watson was heir to a margarine fortune, intelligent, and idealistically devoted to art. He collected art and befriended many artists. He was close to Denny Fouts in the 1930s and was the officially named owner of Denny Fouts's Picasso when it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Later, he lived with Norman Fowler, whom he met in New York in 1949. The pair lived together in London until the apparently healthy and sober Watson mysteriously drowned in his bath in 1956.

Watson-Gandy, Anthony Blethwyn (Tony) (1919–1952).
British RAF flying officer and scholar; educated at Westminster, King's College, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. His parents were minor gentry, and his father a soldier like Isherwood's. Watson-Gandy translated from French
The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire
(1952) by René Grousset.