Houseman, John (1902–1988)
. American movie producer and actor.
Houseman began as a stage producer and founded the Mercury Theater with Orson Welles in 1937. He produced Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and then worked for David Selznick in Hollywood. After the war he worked in theater, film, and, eventually, television. He produced a long string of successful, widely admired films before taking the first of many acting roles in Seven Days in May (1964), and he won an Academy Award for his supporting role in The Paper Chase (1973).
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Glossary
Howard, Brian (1905–1958) . English poet and aesthete of American parentage; an outspoken antifascist. Howard was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he became friends with W. H. Auden. He was exceedingly dissolute, a heavy drinker and a drug user, and he never lived up to his promise as a writer. Evelyn Waugh’s character Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags is modelled on Howard, and Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited is also partly inspired by him. Howard lived a vagrant’s life, moving from place to place in Europe, and was often in Paris. Isherwood met him in Amsterdam in 1936, during the period when each of them was trying to find a country where he could live with his German boyfriend––Howard’s boyfriend throughout the 1930s was a Bavarian known as Toni. At the start of the war, Toni was interned in the south of France; Howard worked for his release evidently in vain, but after the fall of France, Toni escaped to New York via Tangier. He found work loading trucks at night, and soon married a wealthy American woman. Howard worked briefly for British intelligence and then joined the RAF as a clerk and later a public relations writer. After the war he again travelled to and from Europe, with his new companion Sam Langford, struggling with alcoholism and eventually with tuberculosis which propelled him ever faster into drug addiction. When Langford died in their new home in the south of France, Howard committed suicide with a drug overdose.
Hoyt, Karl. A close friend of Chris Wood during the early 1940s. He was drafted into the army during World War II and afterwards settled in Bel Air, the Los Angeles suburb.
Huston, John (1906–1987) . Film director, screenwriter, and actor. Huston wrote scripts for a number of successful films during the 1930s and early 1940s before making his directing debut with The Maltese Falcon (1941); he directed many more movies during the following fifty years––including The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1947), The African Queen (1952), Beat the Devil (1954), The Misfits (1960), Fat City (1971), and Prizzi’s Honor (1985). The Red Badge of Courage (1951) was adapted from Stephen Crane’s novel about the Civil War. Huston also continued intermittently as a writer and occasionally acted.
Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963) . English novelist and utopian. Not long after he arrived in Los Angeles, Isherwood was introduced to Huxley by Gerald Heard. Huxley was then writing screenplays for MGM for a large weekly salary, and he and Isherwood later collaborated on several film projects. Like Heard, Huxley was a disciple of Prabhavananda, but subsequently he became close to Krishnamurti, the one-time Messiah of the theosophical movement.
Huxley was educated at Eton and Oxford, a grandson of Thomas Huxley and brother of Julian Huxley, both prominent scientists. In youth he published poetry, short stories, and satirical novels such as Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923), drawing on life in London’s literary bohemia and at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor, where Huxley worked as a conscientious objector during World War I. He lived abroad in Italy and France during the 1920s and 1930s, part of the time with D. H. Lawrence––who appears in his Point Counter Point (1928)––and Lawrence’s wife, Frieda. In 1932 Huxley published Brave New World, for which he is most famous.
An ardent pacifist, Huxley joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1935, but Glossary
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became disillusioned as Europe moved towards war. His Ends and Means (1937) was regarded as a basic book for pacifists. In April 1937 he sailed for America with his first wife, Maria, and their adolescent son, accompanied by Gerald Heard and by Heard’s friend Chris Wood. Huxley’s plans to return to Europe fell through when he tried and failed to sell a film scenario in Hollywood, became ill there, and convalesced for nearly a year. California benefitted his health and eyesight––he had been nearly blind since an adolescent illness––but he was denied U.S. citizenship on grounds of his extreme pacifism. After Many a Summer (1939) is set in Los Angeles, and Huxley wrote many other books during the period that Isherwood knew him best, including Grey Eminence (1941), Time Must Have a Stop (1944), The Devils of Loudun (1952), The Genius and the Goddess (1956).
Huxley’s study of Vedanta was part of a larger interest in mysticism and parapsychology, and beginning in the early 1950s he experimented with mescaline, LSD, and psilocybin, experiences which he wrote about in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956). In addition to Below the Equator (later called Below the Horizon) Huxley and Isherwood also worked together on two other screenplay ideas during the 1940s: Jacob’s Hands, about a healer, and a film version of The Miracle, Max Reinhardt’s celebrated 1920s stage production. Isherwood often writes about Huxley in D 1.
In 1960 Huxley found a malignant tumor on his tongue but refused surgery in favor of less radical treatment; he died of cancer on the same day John F.
Kennedy was shot.
Huxley, Maria Nys (1898–1955) . Belgian first wife of Aldous Huxley.
Isherwood met her in the summer of 1939 soon after he arrived in Los Angeles and mentions her frequently in D 1. Maria Nys was the eldest daughter of a prosperous textile merchant ruined in World War I. Her mother’s family included artists and intellectuals, and her childhood was pampered, multi-lingual, and devoutly Catholic. She met Huxley at Garsington Manor where she lived as a refugee during World War I; they married in Belgium in 1919
and their only child, Matthew, was born in 1920. Before her marriage, Maria showed promise as a dancer and trained briefly with Nijinsky, but her health was too frail for a professional career. She had little formal education and devoted herself to Huxley and to his work. Her premature death resulted from cancer. According to Huxley, she was a natural mystic and had “pre-mystical”
experiences in the desert in California in the 1940s.
Huxley, Matthew (b. 1920) . British-born son of Aldous and Maria Huxley.
Matthew Huxley was brought to America in adolescence and Isherwood met him in Santa Monica in 1939. He attended the University of Colorado with the intention of becoming a doctor, served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II, and was invalided out of the army in 1943. Much of this is recorded in D 1. Huxley became a U.S. citizen in 1945. In 1947 he took a degree from Berkeley and later studied public health at Harvard. This became his career, and for many years he worked at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C. He also published a book about Peru, Farewell to Eden (1965). He married three times, and had two children with his first wife.
Hyndman, Tony. Secretary and companion to Stephen Spender in the early 322