Reinhardt, Gottfried (1911–c.1993). Austrian-born film producer. Reinhardt emigrated to the United States with his father, the theatrical producer Max Reinhardt, and became assistant to Walter Wanger. Afterwards he worked as a producer for MGM from 1940 to 1954 and later directed his own films in the United States and Europe. His name is attached to many well-known movies, including Garbo’s Two Faced Woman, which he produced in 1941, and The Red Badge of Courage, which he produced in 1951. He was Salka Viertel’s lover for nearly a decade before his marriage to his wife, Silvia, in 1944. Through Salka and Berthold Viertel, Reinhardt gave Isherwood his second Hollywood film job in 1940, and Isherwood worked for him a number of times after that. There are numerous passages about him in D 1. Reinhardt and his wife eventually returned to Europe and settled near Salzburg.
Reinhardt, Wolfgang. Film producer and writer; son of Max Reinhardt, brother of Gottfried. He produced My Love Come Back (1940), The Male Animal (1942), Three Strangers (1946), Caught (1948), and Freud (1962), for which he won an Academy Award as co-writer. As Isherwood records in D 1, Reinhardt and Isherwood tried to work together several times. With Aldous Huxley they discussed making The Miracle, a film version of the play produced by Max Reinhardt in the 1920s, but nothing came of it. Reinhardt hired Isherwood to work on Maugham’s 1941 novel Up at the Villa, but the film was never made.
Much later, in 1960, Reinhardt approached Isherwood to write a screenplay based on Felix Dahn’s four-volume 1876 novel, Ein Kampf um Rom (A Struggle for Rome), about the decline and fall of the Ostrogoth empire in Italy in the sixth century, but Isherwood turned the project down. Wolfgang’s wife was called Lally.
Renaldo, Tito. Mexican actor. He played the first son in Anna and the King of Siam (1946). He was known as an exceptional cook at the Vedanta Center, which he joined and left five times. During the late 1950s and 1960s, he worked for a time in Carlos McClendon’s shop in West Hollywood.
Afterwards, in the 1970s, Renaldo returned in frail health to his family in northern Mexico and fell out of touch with his Los Angeles friends. He is often mentioned in D 1.
Repton. Isherwood’s public school, near Derby.
Richardson, Tony (1928–1991) . British stage and film director. Richardson is most admired for his work in the theater, especially at the Royal Court in London during the 1950s, and he made movies from many of his productions there. His films include Look Back in Anger (1958), The Entertainer (1960), Sanctuary (1961), A Taste of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and Tom Jones (1963), for which he won an Academy Award.
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He was married for a time to Vanessa Redgrave, with whom he had two daughters during the 1960s. Isherwood became friends with Richardson in Hollywood in 1960, and in 1964 Richardson hired him to adapt Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One for film; Richardson then gave Isherwood’s script to Terry Southern who wrote most of the dialogue. Later projects with Richardson included a script for Reflections in a Golden Eye (which John Huston did not use when he took over the film), The Sailor from Gibraltar (based on Marguerite Duras’ novel), and adaptations with Don Bachardy of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius, the God which were never made because Richardson fell out with his proposed Caligula, Mick Jagger. Richardson appears in D 1.
Robson-Scott, William (1901–1980) . English teacher and scholar of German; educated at Rugby School, University College, Oxford, and in Berlin and Vienna. Robson-Scott was lecturing in English at Berlin University in 1932 when Isherwood first met him. He summered at Rügen Island that year with Isherwood, Heinz Neddermeyer, Stephen Spender, and others, and remained a close friend through the 1930s. When he returned to London, Robson-Scott became a lecturer in German, and later in German language and literature, at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he continued to teach until 1968. He married in 1947 and, with his wife, made a translation of Freud’s letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé, published in 1972.
Rod. See Owens, Rodney.
Rodd, Marcel. English bookseller and publisher living in Hollywood. Rodd published Prabhavananda and Isherwood’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita and Vedanta for the Western World as well as the magazine, The Voice of India (later Vedanta and the West).
Roder, Hellmut. German emigré; Peggy Kiskadden helped Roder and his friend Fritz Mosel escape from Germany via France and Spain, then onward to Mexico and Los Angeles. Later, the pair moved to New York where they designed jewelry, especially for opera costumes. They also dealt in metal and feathers. Eventually Fritz Mosel committed suicide, and after a time, Hellmut Roder apparently did the same.
Rodman, Selden (b. 1909) . American writer and editor; educated at Yale.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, Rodman published narrative poems––one about T. E. Lawrence, another about airmen. During the same period, he was co-founder and editor of a review called Common Sense and later co-founder of another magazine, Our House. He also became a director of the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, worked to promote Haitian art, and eventually wrote a number of books about Haiti and about Haitian art, as well as a verse play about the 1791 liberation of Haiti. In later years, Rodman wrote travel and guide books about Central and South America, and he produced various volumes of autobiography and commentary on modern art and poetry.
Roerick, Bill. American actor. Isherwood met him in 1943 when John van Druten brought Roerick to a lecture at the Vedanta Center. His companion for many years was Tom Coley.
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Glossary
Ross, Alan (b. 1922) . English poet and journalist; editor of John Lehmann’s The London Magazine from 1961 onwards. Isherwood probably met him when he returned to London for the first time after the war.
Ross, Jean (d. 1973) . The original of Isherwood’s character Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood met Jean Ross in Berlin, possibly in October 1930, but certainly by the start of 1931. She was then occasionally singing in a nightclub, and they shared lodgings for a time in Fräulein Thurau’s flat. Ross’s father was a Scottish cotton merchant, and she had been raised in Egypt in lavish circumstances. After Berlin, she returned to England where she became close friends with Olive Mangeot. She joined the communist party and had a daughter, Sarah (later a crime novelist under the name Sarah Caudwell), with Claud Cockburn, though she and Cockburn never married.
Roth, Sanford (Sandy). American photographer; known for his pictures of actors and actresses, and especially of James Dean. Isherwood first met Roth in 1951 when Roth photographed Isherwood with Julie Harris costumed as Sally Bowles.
Sachs, David (1921–1992) . American philosopher, born in Chicago; educated at UCLA and Princeton, where he obtained his doctorate in 1953. He taught philosophy at Cornell, Brandeis, Iowa State, Rutgers and Johns Hopkins––he was on the faculty there for many years––and he held visiting posts at many other universities in the USA and in Europe. Sachs lectured widely and published numerous philosophical essays on ethics, ancient philosophy, and philosophy of the mind; his subjects included literature and psychoanalysis, and his work appeared in journals such as The Philosophical Review (of which he was editor), Mind, Philosophical Studies, and Dissent. In 1951 he reviewed Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche for Eileen Garrett’s Tomorrow.
He also published poems in Poetry, Epoch, Voices, The New York Times, and elsewhere.
Salka. See Viertel, Salka.
Samuels, Lesser. American screenwriter. In 1940 Isherwood was hired to polish dialogue on Samuels’s script for a remake of A Woman’s Face; not long after, Samuels asked Isherwood to help him on Maugham’s The Hour Before Dawn. Like Isherwood, Samuels had worked for Gaumont-British during the 1930s. In subsequent years they often worked together, sometimes on their own ideas, including Judgement Day in Pittsburgh (for which they were paid $50,000), The Easiest Thing in the World, and The Vacant Room. Samuels was married and had a daughter. There are a number of passages about him in D 1.