Campbell, Sandy (d. 1988) . American stage actor; educated, for a time, at Princeton. He appeared with Tallulah Bankhead in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and published a book of letters about the production.
Campbell was also a fact checker at The New Yorker and worked with a number of well-known writers including Truman Capote, who especially requested his assistance in 1964 with In Cold Blood. He was Donald Windham’s lover for many years, and eventually set up a specialist publishing business with Windham in Italy.
Capote, Truman (1924–1984) . American novelist, born in New Orleans.
Capote worked at The New Yorker in the early 1940s and contributed to other magazines. In 1946 he won the O. Henry Prize for his short story, “Miriam,”
and then he began to write longer works, including Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), The Grass Harp (1951), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), and the non-fiction novel In Cold Blood (1966). In later years, Capote travelled extensively and sometimes lived abroad; drink and drugs accelerated the end of his life.
Isherwood also writes about him in D 1.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri (b. 1908) . French photographer. He studied art and literature before starting to take photographs at the beginning of the 1930s, and much later in his career, during the 1970s, he returned to painting and drawing. He also worked in film, as an assistant to the French filmmaker Jean Renoir, towards the end of the 1930s. After the war, around the time Isherwood met him, Cartier-Bresson helped to found Magnum Photos, the independent photographic agency.
Caskey, William (Bill) (1921–1981) . American photographer, born and raised in Kentucky. Isherwood and Caskey met in June 1945 and by August had begun a serious affair. They split for good in 1951 after intermittent separations. Later Caskey lived in Athens and travelled frequently to Egypt. As well as taking photographs, he made art objects out of junk and for a time had a business beading sweaters. There are many passages about him in D 1.
Cerf, Bennett (1898–1971) . American publisher. Cerf was the founder of Random House, Isherwood’s (and W. H. Auden’s) first American publisher.
He had persuaded Faber and Faber jointly to commission Journey to a War, and in early March 1939, when Isherwood was newly arrived in New York, Cerf gave him a $500 advance on his next (unwritten) novel. Cerf founded the Modern Library and held senior posts at Random House until his death. He is popularly known for his books of jokes and humor.
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Glossary
Charlton, Jim (1919–1998) . American architect. During the war, Charlton flew twenty-six missions over Germany including a July 1943 daylight raid on Hamburg. From 1948 he and Isherwood shared a friendly-romantic attachment that lasted through a number of years and a number of other lovers.
Isherwood tells more about Charlton in D 1. Towards the end of the 1950s Charlton married a wealthy Swiss woman called Hilde, a mother of three, and had a son with her in September 1958. The marriage ended in divorce.
Afterwards he lived in Hawaii until the late 1980s before returning to Los Angeles. He wrote an autobiographical novel called St. Mick.
Cockburn, Claud (1904–1981) . British journalist; educated at Berkhamsted and Keble College, Oxford. After a stint as New York correspondent for the London Times, Cockburn joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the early 1930s and began producing a weekly newsletter, The Week, about the political state of Europe. He was also diplomatic correspondent for the Daily Worker. Later, he became a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph and contributed to various English journals. He wrote a novel, Beat the Devil (1953), and published half a dozen volumes of autobiography.
Cockburn, Jean. See Ross, Jean.
Collier, John (1901–1980) . British novelist and screenwriter. Best known for His Monkey Wife (1930), he also wrote other fantastic and satirical tales.
Isherwood admired his short stories. Collier was poetry editor of Time and Tide in the 1920s and early 1930s and came to Hollywood in 1935. In 1951 he moved to Mexico, though he continued to write films, including the script, deplored by Isherwood in D 1, for the film version of I Am a Camera.
Connolly, Cyril (1903–1974) . British journalist and critic; educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Connolly was a regular contributor to English newspapers and magazines. He wrote one novel, The Rock Pool (1936), followed by collections that combined criticism, autobiography, and aphorism: Enemies of Promise (1938) and The Unquiet Grave (1944). Further collections appeared after the war, displaying his gift for parody. In 1939, Connolly founded Horizon with Stephen Spender and edited it throughout its publication until 1950. Connolly was married three times: first to Jean Bakewell, who divorced him in 1945, then to Barbara Skelton from 1950 to 1956, and finally, in 1959, to Deirdre Craig with whom he had a son, Matthew, and a daughter, Cressida. From 1940 to 1950 he lived with Lys Lubbock, who worked with him at Horizon; they never married, but she changed her name to Connolly by deed poll. He also appears in D 1.
Coward, Noël (1899–1973) . English actor, playwright, and composer; he also published verse, short stories, a novel, and two volumes of autobiography.
Coward became famous in his twenties in his own play, The Vortex (1924), and went on to write the witty and sophisticated comedies for which he is known best, including Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1933), Blithe Spirit (1941), and Present Laughter (1942). He put together musicals and revues for which he wrote his own scores and lyrics and sang with stylish nonchalance. One of Coward’s wartime films, In Which We Serve (1942), won an Academy Award, but his reputation declined after the war. He occupied Glossary
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himself with cabaret appearances in London and Las Vegas until a revival of interest in his earlier plays began in the 1960s.
Craft, Robert (Bob). American musician, conductor, critic, and author; colleague and adopted son to Stravinsky during the last twenty-three years of Stravinsky’s life. Craft lived and travelled everywhere with the Stravinskys except when professional commitments forced him to do otherwise.
Increasingly he conducted for Stravinsky in rehearsals and supervised his recording sessions, substituting entirely for the older man as Stravinsky’s health declined. After Stravinsky died, Craft married, had a son, divorced, and later married again. He published excerpts from his diaries as Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 1948– 1971 (1972, expanded and republished in 1994), and he often appears in D 1.
Cuevas de Vera, Tota. Argentine rancher. She was married to a Spanish count with whom she had several children, and she managed an 86,000-acre estancia, El Pelado (The Bald One), near Buenos Aires. Isherwood and Caskey visited her there early in 1948, and in The Condor and the Cows Isherwood describes El Pelado as a business large enough to send an entire trainload of produce from its own railway station to Buenos Aires each week.
Cukor, George (1899–1983) . American film director. Cukor began his career on Broadway in the 1920s and came to Hollywood as a dialogue director for All Quiet on the Western Front. In the thirties he directed at Paramount, RKO, and then MGM, moving from studio to studio with his friend and producer David Selznick. He directed Garbo in Camille (1936) among others, and Hepburn in her debut, A Bill of Divorcement (1932), as well as in Philadelphia Story (1940). Other well-known work includes Dinner at Eight (1933), David Copperfield (1934), A Star Is Born (1954), and My Fair Lady (1964). As described in D 1, Isherwood first met Cukor at a party at the Huxleys’ in December 1939.
Later they became friends and worked together.
Curtiss, Mina. American writer. As a young woman, she lived in London on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group; later she taught French literature at Smith College and published books on French subjects, including a biography of Georges Bizet and a translation of Proust’s letters. She married Harry Curtiss in 1924, and after his death she was the longtime lover of Alexis Saint-Léger (St.-John Perse). Like her brother, Lincoln Kirstein, Curtiss was extremely wealthy. She divided her time between Manhattan and her husband’s farm, Chapelbrook, in Ashfield, Massachusetts.