“The Saint” was published in Maugham’s Points of View (1958).
Mauriber, Saul. Assistant to the photographer and writer Carl Van Vechten.
He was still a student when he met Van Vechten and worked with him for twenty years. Later, Mauriber also became a designer.
McClendon, Carlos (b. 1923)
. American designer and shop owner.
McClendon was born in California and worked as an apprentice set designer at MGM and as a dancer before opening his shop, Chequer, in New York in 1954. He sold clothes of his own design for men and women, furniture, and art objects, and he travelled widely to acquire raw materials and finished goods, including ethnic textiles and folk art from Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and elsewhere. He spent time living in Haiti and in Mexico as well as in New York, and he eventually opened Chequer West in West Hollywood, frequented like his New York shop by theater, movie and entertainment people, and designers and costumiers. Isherwood met McClendon through Denny Fouts and John Goodwin in the 1940s when McClendon often visited the beach in Santa Monica. The friendship continued long after McClendon left Los Angeles in the early 1950s. Eventually McClendon settled in New Mexico.
McDowall, Roddy (1928–1998) . British actor and photographer. McDowall began his education at a Catholic school in a south London suburb and made his first movie when he was eight years old. When the Blitz began, he was evacuated to the USA and became a Hollywood star as a teenager after appearing as the crippled boy in How Green Was My Valley (1941) and, with Elizabeth Taylor, in Lassie Come Home (1943). During the 1950s he took stage and television roles in New York, where he won a Tony Award for his supporting role in The Fighting Cock in 1960. He returned to Hollywood in the 1960s and starred in Planet of the Apes (1968), most of the sequels, and the television series. Other films include My Friend Flicka (1943), Thunderhead, Son of Flicka (1945), Orson Welles’s Macbeth (1948), The Subterraneans (1960), The Longest Day (1962), Cleopatra (1963), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Funny Lady (1975), and Fright Night (1985). He published several books of his photographs, mostly of celebrities.
Medley, Robert (1905–1995) . English painter. Robert Medley attended Gresham’s School, Holt, with W. H. Auden, and the two remained close Glossary
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friends after Medley left for art school at the Slade. In London, Medley became the longtime companion of the dancer Rupert Doone, and was involved with him in 1932 in forming The Group Theatre, which produced The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F 6, and On the Frontier. Medley also worked as a theater designer and teacher, founding the Theatre Design section at the Slade in the 1950s before becoming Head of Painting and Sculpture at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1958.
Menotti, Gian Carlo (b. 1911) . Italian-born composer, librettist, and conductor. Menotti emigrated to the USA, where he studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and began to establish an international reputation with his operas from the late 1930s. He won Pulitzer Prizes for The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954), and his widely known opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), was the first to be written expressly for American television.
MGM. The preeminent Hollywood studio from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s; Isherwood began writing for MGM at the start of 1940, his second Hollywood job. Formed by a three-way merger between Loewe’s Incorporated (owner of the Metro Pictures Corporation), the Goldwyn Studios, and the Louis B. Mayer Pictures Corporation, the studio was run by Mayer with Irving Thalberg and Harry Rapf. Stars included Garbo, Norma Shearer, Gable, Joan Crawford, the Barrymores, Elizabeth Taylor, Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and Greer Garson; among the directors and producers were George Cukor, Clarence Brown, Victor Fleming, Mervyn Leroy, Vincente Minnelli, Busby Berkeley, David Selznick and Arthur Freed.
MGM reached its apogee between 1935 and 1945, then management conflicts gradually developed and enforcement of the Sherman antitrust laws eroded its power. Financial losses and further management upheavals plagued the studio throughout the 1960s, and MGM stopped making films in 1974.
Minton, John (1917–1957)
. English painter and theater designer. His
paintings were admired by Wyndham Lewis, and he taught at several London art schools. He took his life with a drug overdose.
Moffat, Ivan (b. 1918) . British-American screenwriter; son of Iris Tree and Curtis Moffat. He was educated at Dartmouth and served in the U.S. military during World War II. Afterwards he assisted the director George Stevens on A Place in the Sun (1951), was Stevens’s associate producer for Shane (1953), and co-wrote Giant (1956) before going on to work for Selznick on Tender Is the Night (1962). He met his first wife, Natasha Sorokine, in Paris at the end of the war; the marriage broke up at the start of the 1950s, leaving a daughter, Lorna.
Moffat then had a series of beautiful and talented girlfriends until marrying Kate Smith, an Englishwoman, whose family fortune derived from the book and stationery chain, W. H. Smith. He often appears in D 1.
Monkhouse, Allan (1858–1936) . English journalist and theater critic; father of Isherwood’s boyhood friend, Patrick Monkhouse. Allan Monkhouse also wrote plays and fiction, including a novel, My Daughter Helen (1922), in which one of the main characters, Marmaduke, is partly modelled on the adolescent Isherwood.
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Glossary
Monkhouse, Patrick. English journalist. Patrick Monkhouse was raised in Disley, near Marple, and became Isherwood’s close friend by the time they were adolescents. He was at Oxford a year or two ahead of W. H. Auden, and edited The Oxford Outlook.
Moraturi, Pancho. Wealthy Argentine. Longtime lover, companion, and supporter of Bill Harris. In his April 1949 preface to The Condor and the Cows (“To the Reader”) Isherwood names Moraturi and Harris among those whom he wishes to thank for helping him and Caskey during their visit to Buenos Aires.
Morris, Phyllis. British actress. She was a student with Dodie Smith (later Beesley) at the Academy of Dramatic Art (precursor to RADA) in London during World War I, and they remained close friends for life. Morris came from a wealthy family. She was a stage actress, but played minor roles in a few Hollywood films after the war––for instance, That Forsyte Woman (1949). She also wrote children’s books and plays.
Mortimer, Raymond (1895–1980) . English literary and art critic; he worked for numerous magazines and newspapers as both writer and editor and wrote books on painting and the decorative arts as well as a novel. Mortimer was at Balliol College, Oxford, with Aldous Huxley and later became a close friend of Gerald Heard, introducing Heard to Huxley in 1929. He was also intimate with various Bloomsbury figures and an outspoken advocate of their work.
From 1948 onward Mortimer worked for The Sunday Times and spent the last nearly thirty years of his life as their chief reviewer.
Nadeau, Nicky. American dancer. Isherwood had a sexual relationship with him in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Possibly he met Nadeau through Chris Wood’s wealthy Bel Air friend Karl Hoyt; Nadeau had an affair with Hoyt and later, towards the end of the 1950s, with Chris Wood. He is mentioned in D 1.
Nanny. See Avis, Annie.
Neddermeyer, Heinz. German boyfriend of Isherwood; Heinz was about seventeen when they met in Berlin, March 13, 1932. Their love affair, the most serious of Isherwood’s life until then, lasted about five years. Hitler’s rise forced them to leave Berlin in May 1933 and afterwards they lived and travelled in Europe and North Africa. In a traumatic confrontation with immigration officials at Harwich, Heinz was refused entry on his second visit to England in January 1934, so Isherwood went abroad more and more to be with him. In 1936 Heinz was summoned for conscription in Germany, and Isherwood scrambled to obtain or extend permits for him to remain in the ever-diminishing number of European countries which would receive him. A shady lawyer failed to obtain him a new nationality, and finally Heinz was expelled from Luxembourg on May 12, 1937, and returned to Germany. There he was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced––for “reciprocal onanism” and draft evasion––to a three-and-a-half-year term: six months’ imprisonment, then one year of labour, and two years of military service. Nonetheless, he married in 1938, and with his wife, Gerda, had a son, Christian, in 1940. Isherwood did not see Heinz again until 1952 in Berlin, though he corresponded with him Glossary