onwards; a cousin of Webster Milam, who, as a high school student, lived at the Vedanta Center with Isherwood and others during the war. Isherwood often mentions Milam in his diaries of the period; see D 1. Webster did not become a monk, but Knight did. After he took his first vows his name became Asima Chaitanya.
Kolisch, Joseph. Viennese physician. Kolisch was a follower of Swami Prabhavananda. Aldous and Maria Huxley, Gerald Heard, several of the nuns Glossary
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and monks at the Vedanta Center, and perhaps even Greta Garbo, followed his advice and were on his vegetarian diets during the 1940s. At the suggestion of Gerald Heard, Isherwood first saw Kolisch in January 1940 for what he thought was a recurrence of gonorrhea. In D 1 Isherwood describes how then and on other occasions, Kolisch tended to attribute his symptoms to Isherwood’s psychological makeup.
Lamarr, Hedy (1913–2000) . Austrian-born film actress. She appeared nude in a 1933 Czech film, Extase, and a few years later Louis B. Mayer brought her to Hollywood where she played various seductress roles. She appeared in Algiers (1938), Comrade X (1940), Boom Town (1940), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), H. M.
Pulham Esq. (1941), Tortilla Flat (1942), White Cargo (1942), and others. Her career faltered after the war (she turned down Ingrid Bergmann’s role in Casablanca), though she is still remembered for Samson and Delilah (1949).
Lamarr married six times.
Lamkin, Speed. American novelist; born and raised in Monroe, Louisiana.
Lamkin studied at Harvard and lived in London and in New York before going to Los Angeles to research his second novel, The Easter Egg Hunt (1954)––about movie stars, in particular Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst––and he dedicated the novel to Isherwood who appears in it as the character
“Sebastian Saunders.” Lamkin was on the board at the Huntington Hartford Foundation. In the mid-1950s he wrote a play Out by the Country Club which was never produced, although Joshua Logan was briefly interested in it, and in 1956, he scripted a TV film about Perle Mesta, the political hostess. During 1957, he wrote another play, Comes a Day, which had a short run on Broadway. Eventually, when this play failed, Lamkin returned home to live in Louisiana. He appears often in D 1.
Langford, Sam (d. 1958) . Irish-born companion to Brian Howard, from 1943 onwards. Langford liked to sail and commanded an Air-Sea Rescue Launch in the British navy during the war. He was invalided out of the navy with a foot problem and briefly worked for the BBC before travelling and living abroad with Howard. Like Howard, Langford became addicted to drugs.
He died in his bath when he was gassed by a faulty water heater at the house he shared with Howard and Howard’s mother in the south of France. Howard killed himself a few days later.
LaPan, Dick. A boxer; evidently Isherwood first met him at the Viertels’ in July 1943. During the 1950s LaPan moved to Mexico and taught English.
Lathwood, Jo. See Masselink, Jo.
Laughton, Charles (1899–1962) . British actor. Laughton played many roles on the London stage from the 1920s onward, and began making films during the 1930s––The Private Life of Henry VIII (1934), for which he won an Academy Award; Les Misérables (1935); Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), in which he played Captain Bligh; The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); and many others. He also acted in New York and Paris, and gave dramatic readings throughout the U.S.
from Shakespeare, the Bible, and other classic literature. He became an American citizen in 1950. Isherwood met Laughton in the late 1950s through 328
Glossary
Laughton’s wife, the actress Elsa Lanchester, and later the two became neighbors and close friends, as Isherwood records in D 1; they worked on various projects together, including a play about Socrates.
Lawrence, Frieda (1879–1956). German-born wife of the English writer D. H. Lawrence. She was the daughter of a Prussian army officer, Baron Friedrich von Richthofen, and grew up in Metz; at twenty she married Ernest Weekley, a professor at Nottingham University, and moved with him to Nottingham. There in 1912, aged thirty-two, she met Lawrence, a former student of her husband, and eloped with him back to Germany. They married in 1914 after her divorce, lived in London and Cornwall, and then, persecuted over Lawrence’s work and suspected as German spies, left for Italy in 1919. In the early 1920s, they travelled further afield, to Ceylon, Australia, and America, settling intermittently just outside Taos, New Mexico, where Lawrence for a time hoped to found Rananim, his utopian community. They stayed in various properties belonging to Mabel Dodge Luhan, and in 1924 Mrs. Luhan gave Frieda a ranch with 160 acres of land on Lobo mountain. Lawrence named the ranch “Kiowa.” In 1925, while travelling in Mexico, Lawrence was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and the pair returned to Taos and then to Europe, persisting in their nomadic life, he writing and painting all the time. He died in France in 1930. Later, Frieda returned to New Mexico with her lover, Angelo Ravagli, an Italian military officer from whom she and Lawrence had rented a villa in Spotorno in 1925. In 1933, Ravagli built a modern house for them at the Del Monte Ranch, where Dorothy Brett lived and where the Lawrences had also lived, about two miles below the Kiowa cabins. Ravagli also built the little chapel where Lawrence’s ashes were deposited. Frieda married Ravagli in 1950.
Ledebur, Count Friedrich (b. 1908) . Austrian actor; second husband of Iris Tree. The marriage ended in 1955. His films include Moby Dick (1956), The Blue Max (1966), and Slaughterhouse Five (1972).
Lehmann, Beatrix (1903–1979) . English actress; the youngest of John Lehmann’s three elder sisters. She met Isherwood when she was visiting Berlin in 1932, and they became close friends.
Lehmann, John (1907–1988)
. English author, publisher, editor, auto-
biographer; educated at Cambridge. Isherwood met Lehmann in 1932 at the Hogarth Press, where Lehmann was assistant (later partner) to Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Lehmann persuaded the Woolfs to publish The Memorial after it had been rejected by Jonathan Cape, publisher of Isherwood’s first novel, All the Conspirators. Isherwood helped Lehmann with his plans to found New Writing, discussing the manifesto and obtaining early contributions from friends such as W. H. Auden. He tells about this in Christopher and His Kind, and also writes about Lehmann in D 1. When he left the Hogarth Press, Lehmann founded his own publishing firm and later edited The London Magazine.
He wrote three revealing volumes of autobiography, beginning with The Whispering Gallery (1955).
Lehmann, Rosamond (1901–1990) . English novelist; an elder sister of Isherwood’s longtime friend John Lehmann. She made a reputation with the frankness of her first novel, Dusty Answer (1927), and her later works––
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including Invitation to the Waltz (1932), The Weather in the Streets (1936), The Echoing Grove (1953)––also shocked with their candid handling of sexual and emotional themes. From 1928 to 1944 she was married to the painter Wogan Philipps with whom she had a son and a daughter.
Lerman, Leo. American magazine editor. Lerman was an actor and then a writer, and he held various editorial positions at Condé Nast, eventually becoming one of its most senior managers. During the 1940s he was well-known in New York for his Sunday night parties which attracted writers, actors, and dancers, and for a time, he wrote a gossip column for Vogue. He also introduced various new writers into Vogue’s pages. He was close friends with his Manhattan neighbor, Truman Capote, from the day of their first meeting in 1945 and attended Yaddo with Capote in 1946. The house Lerman rented on Nantucket, Hagedorn House, which Isherwood mentions, was evidently a converted coastguard station in Quidnet and may have belonged to the poet and biographer, Herman Hagedorn.