Davies, Marion (c. 1898–1961) . The Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl taken up by William Randolph Hearst, who financed her movies and tried to make her into a romantic star. Some of her films were successful, though Charlie Chaplin, with whom she also had an affair, noticed that Davies’ real talent was for comedy. Her relationship with Hearst is the basis for the story in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), although Welles’s heroine is not a close portrait.
She lived with Hearst at San Simeon and at houses in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica until he died in 1951. Ten weeks after Hearst’s death, she married Captain Horace Brown, whom she had known for many years.
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“de Laval, Jay” (probably an assumed name). Chef; he adopted the role of the Baron de Laval. In the mid-1940s he opened a small French restaurant, Café Jay, on the corner of Channel Road and Chautauqua in Santa Monica.
As Isherwood tells in D 1, another restaurant was established in the Virgin Islands, and in 1950 he was briefly in charge of the Mocambo in Los Angeles.
Eventually he left California, settled in Mexico, and opened a grand restaurant in Mexico City in the early 1950s. There he also planned interiors with the Mexican designer Arturo Pani, and advised airlines on food, creating a menu for Mexico Air Lines and crockery for Air France. He divided his time between Mexico City and a condominium in Acapulco. De Laval was a friend of Bill Caskey before Isherwood met Caskey, and also of Ben and Jo Masselink.
D 1. Christopher Isherwood, Diaries Volume One 1939– 1960, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London: Methuen, 1996; New York: HarperCollins, 1997). In Lost Years, Isherwood usually calls these diaries his journal, as distinct from his day-to-day diaries.
Doone, Rupert (1903–1966) . English dancer, choreographer, and theatrical producer. Founder of The Group Theatre, the cooperative venture for which Isherwood and W. H. Auden wrote plays in the 1930s. The son of a factory worker and originally called Reginald Woodfield, Doone ran away to London to become a dancer, then went on to Paris where he was friendly with Cocteau and met Diaghilev, turning down an opportunity to dance in the corps de ballet of the Ballets Russes. He was working in variety and revues in London during 1925 when he met Robert Medley, who became his permanent companion. Doone died of multiple sclerosis after many years of increasing illness.
Dunphy, Jack (1914–1992) . American dancer and novelist; born and raised in Philadelphia. Dunphy danced for George Balanchine and was a cowboy in the original production of Oklahoma! For a time he was married to the Broadway musical-comedy star Joan McCracken. From 1948 he was Truman Capote’s companion, although in Capote’s later years they were often apart.
He published John Fury and The Nightmovers.
Durant, Tim. American tennis player and actor. Durant was a tennis star during the 1930s and afterwards worked as an agent for United Artists. He played the part of the general in The Red Badge of Courage (1951). He was good looking, wealthy, and bisexual, and he married and became a father. His athletic prowess never deserted him; he rode race horses well past middle age, and finished the gruelling Grand National when he was in his early seventies.
Edens, Roger (1905–1970) . American film producer, born in Texas. During the 1950s, Eden supervised musicals at MGM, sometimes working with Arthur Freed. He won numerous Academy Awards––including for Annie Get Your Gun (1950)––and later produced Funny Face (1956), Hello Dolly (1969), and others.
Erdmann, Charles (b. 1909) . Longtime companion of William Plomer.
Erdmann was born in London of a German father and Polish mother. At the outbreak of World War I, the family went to Germany where Erdmann was Glossary
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raised from about age five. He returned to England as a refugee in 1939, and worked as a waiter and a pastry-cook (for which he was trained in Germany) and at other things. He met Plomer in 1944 while working as a cloakroom attendant in a Soho restaurant and lived with him for the next twenty-nine years, until Plomer’s death.
Evans, Rex (1903–1969) . British actor working in Hollywood from 1930
onwards. He also ran an art gallery.
Falk, Eric (1905–1984) . English barrister. Falk, who was Jewish, met Isherwood at Repton, where they were in the same house together, The Hall, and in the History Sixth. He helped Isherwood to edit The Reptonian during Isherwood’s last term. Falk grew up in London, and often went to films with Isherwood during school holidays. He introduced Isherwood to the Mangeots, whom he had met on holiday in Brittany. He appears in Lions and Shadows and in D 1.
Falkenburg, Eugenia ( Jinx) (b. 1919) . Spanish-born actress, raised in Chile.
She began her U.S. career working as a model and then made comedies and musicals in Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s before becoming a radio personality and hosting her own radio show.
Firbank, Ronald (1886–1926) . English novelist; educated for a time at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His grandfather’s railroad contracting fortune enabled Firbank to travel and pay for the publication of his own novels and stories. He was a Roman Catholic and a dandy and his writings are witty, fantastic, and somewhat artificial. Among his best-known novels are Vainglory (1915), The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926).
Fontan, Jack (b. 1927) . American actor and painter; educated at New York University. After his appearance in the original New York production of South Pacific, he settled in Laguna Beach where he made collages with his longtime companion Ray Unger. The pair worked as professional astrologers during the 1970s and afterwards owned and managed a gym. In 1994 their house was destroyed by the widespread fire which devastated the area, and they resettled in Palm Springs.
Forster, E. M. (Morgan) (1878–1970) . English novelist, essayist, and biographer; best known for Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924).
His homosexual novel, Maurice, was published posthumously in 1971 under Isherwood’s supervision. Forster had been an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, and one of the Cambridge Apostles; afterwards he became associated with the Bloomsbury group and later returned to King’s as a Fellow until the end of his life. He was a literary hero for Isherwood, Edward Upward, and W. H. Auden from the 1920s onward. He remained supportive when Isherwood was publicly criticized for remaining in America after the outbreak of war in 1939. He is mentioned often in D 1.
Fouts, Denham (Denny). Son of a Florida baker, Fouts left home as a teenager and travelled as companion to a series of wealthy people of both sexes.
Among his conquests was Peter Watson, who financed Horizon magazine.
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Glossary
Fouts helped Watson solicit some of the earliest contributions to Horizon, and Watson gave Fouts a large Picasso painting, Girl Reading (1934). The painting was loaned to the Museum of Modern Art under Watson’s name for the exhibition Picasso––Forty Years of His Art, November 1939–January 7, 1940, and Fouts later sold the painting in New York (evidently to the Florence May Schoenborn and Samuel Marx Collection, whence it became a gift to MOMA).
During the war, Watson sent Fouts to the USA for safety. Isherwood met Fouts in Hollywood in August 1940 and, although Swami Prabhavananda would not accept Fouts as a disciple, Fouts moved in with Isherwood in the early summer of 1941 in order to lead a life of meditation. Isherwood describes this domestic experiment in Down There on a Visit, where Fouts appears as