Owens, Rodney (Rod). Hayden Lewis’s companion and business partner for many years from 1946; a California native. He is often mentioned in D 1. After he split with Lewis, Owens became a sales person for the clothing designer Helen Rose and settled in New York.
Patanjali. The obscure Indian compiler of the yoga sutras, the series of spare, aphoristic statements formulating the philosophy and practice of yoga. Patanjali was a follower of Sankhya philosophy, not Vedanta, and did his work sometime between the fourth century BC and the fourth century AD. In ancient times, the sutras could not be recorded in books and so were repeated from memory and elaborated and explained by a teacher. This is partly why they are so short and, on their own, seemingly difficult. In 1948, Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda began making a translation of the sutras in which they expanded and paraphrased them for modern, English-speaking devotees and also added a commentary drawing on various earlier teachers. This was published by the Vedanta Society in 1953 as How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali.
Pears, Peter (1910–1986) . English tenor. The youngest of seven children, Pears went to boarding school at six and rarely saw his family. He was sent down from Keble College, Oxford, after failing his first-year music exams, became a prep school master, studied briefly at the Royal College of Music and then joined the BBC Singers in 1934. Pears became close friends with Benjamin Britten in 1937; they shared a flat from early 1938, and began performing together in 1939. That same year, the two travelled together to New York where Pears studied singing further, and they went on to California before returning to England in 1942. Although at first they both had other relationships, their lives became increasingly fused, with Britten writing a great deal of his music for Pears, and Pears singing it expressly for Britten.
Pembroke Gardens. The address of Isherwood’s family home in London before the war. Kathleen Isherwood lived at 19 Pembroke Gardens, Kensington, from June 1928 until mid-July 1941, when she and Richard and Nanny (Annie Avis) returned to Wyberslegh.
Perkins, Lynn. American screenwriter. He approached Isherwood for help with a film outline for a ghost story. Evidently he was a writer for a series of action–science fiction films called The Purple Shadow Strikes (also The Purple Monster Strikes) produced in 1945 by Ronald Davidson for Republic Pictures.
Perlin, Bernard (Bernie). American painter; associated through his work 340
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with Paul Cadmus, Jared French and George Tooker. Bill Caskey met Perlin in Miami in 1944 when they were both still in the navy. Perlin had recently survived a German attack in Greece and encouraged Caskey not to fear persecution by the admiral who was conducting a homosexual witch-hunt at their naval air base; the scandal shortly resulted in Caskey’s blue discharge.
After the war, Perlin lived in Italy from the late 1940s until the mid-1950s, and later he settled in Connecticut.
Philipps, Wogan (1902–1993) . English painter and, later, politician; educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. Philipps was a communist and drove an ambulance for the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. When Isherwood saw him in 1947, he was serving as a communist councillor on the Cirencester Rural District Council. He succeeded his father as second Baron Milford in 1962 and became the first communist peer in the House of Lords. He was married three times: first, to Rosamond Lehmann; then to an Italian, Cristina, who was the ex-wife of the Earl of Huntingdon and a daughter of the Marchese Casati; and, after Cristina died in 1953, to Tamara Rust, widow of William Rust, the editor of the Daily Worker.
Pilates, Joseph (1880–1967) . German-born exercise guru, of Greek ancestry.
Pilates was frail in childhood and began bodybuilding in adolescence to overcome fears of tuberculosis; he was also a gymnast, boxer, skier, and diver.
He and a brother performed a Greek statue act in a circus which was touring England at the outbreak of World War I. Pilates was interned and passed the time teaching self-defense, bodybuilding, and wrestling to his fellow internees while beginning more systematically to develop his exercise method. By one account he also became a nurse and designed his unusual exercise apparatus by attaching springs to hospital beds for patients who could not move. He returned to Germany for a time after the war and trained police in Hamburg.
There, during the early 1920s, he also met members of the dance world who incorporated some of his techniques into their own practices, and who began to teach them to other dancers. Pilates helped train the heavyweight boxer, Max Schmelling, and Schmelling persuaded him to emigrate to the U.S., where Pilates established a studio in New York in 1926. The studio was frequented by dancers from George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, and Pilates’ followers included many other prominent dancers and choreographers, as well as numerous actors and musicians. His method (he called it “Con-trology”) is used increasingly widely today.
Plomer, William (1903–1973) . British poet and novelist; born and raised in South Africa. He met Isherwood in 1932 through Stephen Spender. In South Africa, Plomer and Roy Campbell had founded Voorslag (Whiplash), a literary magazine for which they wrote most of the satirical material themselves (Laurens van der Post also became an editor). Plomer taught for several years in Japan, then in 1929 settled in Bloomsbury where he was befriended by the Woolfs; they had already published his first novel, Turbott Wolfe, in 1926 at the Hogarth Press. In 1937 Plomer became principal reader for Jonathan Cape where, among other things, he brought out Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.
During the war he worked in naval intelligence. In addition to his own poems and novels, Plomer also wrote several libretti for Benjamin Britten, notably Glossary
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Gloriana (1953). A 1943 arrest for soliciting a sailor in Paddington station was hushed up, but led Plomer to destroy early correspondence with homosexual friends and to practice extreme circumspection in his private life.
Pollock, Peter (b. 1921) . English steel heir; the family fortune left him with small private means. Pollock was still a public school boy when Guy Burgess met him in Cannes in 1938, and they were lovers for about a decade. Burgess recruited Pollock to help MI5 spy on foreigners in England. In 1955 Pollock and his later longterm companion, Paul Danquah, a lawyer and actor, began sharing their Battersea flat with Francis Bacon, who lived with them until 1961
and became an intimate friend. Pollock and Danquah afterwards settled in Tangier, where, for a time, Pollock ran a beach bar, The Pergola.
Porter, Cole (1891–1964) . American composer and lyricist, educated at Yale University, Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Music, and also in Paris.
His Broadway hits include Anything Goes (1934) and Kiss Me, Kate (1948), and many of his individual lyrics, such as “Let’s Do It,” “You’re the Top,” and “I Get a Kick Out of You,” are permanently lodged in the popular imagination.
Isherwood was fond of Cole Porter and, according to Don Bachardy, believed that a third party had made mischief between them, possibly by repeating (perhaps inaccurately) a remark made by Bill Caskey. The friendship ended just a year or two before Porter’s death, preventing any reconciliation.
Porter, Katherine Anne (1890–1980) . American novelist and short story writer, born in Texas; best known for Ship of Fools (1962). She was a good friend of Glenway Wescott who may have suggested she meet Isherwood and Caskey.
Prabha. Originally Phoebe Nixon, she was the daughter of Alice Nixon (“Tarini”), and after taking her final monastic vows, Prabha became Pravrajika Prabhaprana. The Nixons were wealthy Southerners. Isherwood first met Prabha in the early 1940s in the Hollywood Vedanta Center, where she handled much of the administrative and secretarial work, and he grew to love her genuinely. By the mid-1950s, Prabha was head nun at the Sarada Convent in Santa Barbara.