He was a contributor to Isherwood’s Vedanta for the Western World, and there are numerous accounts of him in D 1.
van Leyden, Ernst and Karen. Dutch painters and decorative artists. They specialized in painting on glass, and they were responsible for a mural painted on glass in Jay de Laval’s restaurant Café Jay. Karen van Leyden also painted screens and panels. The van Leydens had been friendly with Brian Howard in Portugal in 1933 when Howard travelled there with Cyril and Jean Connolly and Howard’s boyfriend Toni. During the 1940s and early 1950s they lived on Barrington Avenue in Brentwood, which was then still rustic with open fields, and they converted the large barn on the property into their studio.
Van Meegeren, Han (1889–1947) . Dutch painter and perhaps the greatest forger ever; he painted a number of Vermeers and De Hooghs which were Glossary
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accepted as authentic and which hung in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until 1945 when Van Meegeren was arrested as a collaborator because he was associated with the sale of a Dutch master painting to Goebbels. To clear himself of the charge of collaborating, Van Meegeren confessed that the Goebbels painting and certain others were his own work. A two-year scientific study confirmed his claim, uncovering his immensely complex process and also his remarkable talent. He was sentenced to a year in prison and died there of a heart attack.
van Petten, Bill (1922–1989) . American film administrator. Van Petten came from a wealthy oil family, read widely, especially in Sufi literature, and eventually converted to Islam. For two years he was assistant to the Saudi Arabian Minister of Information and helped to establish an Imax theater at the royal palace. He also supervised the filming of documentary footage there. He lived in Santa Monica, for many years in the same building with Jim Charlton.
Van Vechten, Carl (1880–1964) . American novelist and poet, critic of music and dance, and, late in life, photographer. He was a prolific writer and a figure of New York’s bohemia, frequenting Harlem clubs and greatly contributing to popular recognition of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance. He was also an early editor of Gertrude Stein. Among his seven novels are The Tattooed Countess (1924) and Nigger Heaven (1926). He was married to Fania Marinoff.
Vaughan, Keith (1912–1977) . English painter, illustrator, and diarist. He worked in advertising during the 1930s and was a conscientious objector in the war; later he taught at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and the Slade, as well as briefly in America.
Isherwood met him in 1947 at John Lehmann’s and bought one of his pictures,
“Two Bathers,” a small oil painting still in his collection. Vaughan’s diaries, with his own illustrations, were published in 1966.
Vidal, Gore (b. 1925) . American writer. Vidal introduced himself to Isherwood in a café in Paris in early 1948, having previously written to him and sent the manuscript of his novel The City and the Pillar. They became lasting friends. Later, Isherwood also met Howard Austen (Tinker), Vidal’s companion from 1950 onward. Vidal was in the army as a young man; afterwards he wrote essays on politics and culture as well as many novels, including Williwaw (1946), Myra Breckenridge (1968, dedicated to Isherwood), and the multi-volume American chronicle comprised of Burr (1974), Lincoln (1984), 1876 (1976), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1989), and Washington, D.C. (1967).
During the 1950s Vidal wrote a series of television plays for CBS, then screenplays at Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM (including part of Ben Hur), and two Broadway plays, Visit to a Small Planet (1957) and The Best Man (1960). In 1960 he ran for Congress, and in 1982 for the Senate, both times unsuccessfully.
He described his friendship with Isherwood in his memoir, Palimpsest (1995), and there are many passages about him in D 1.
Viertel, Berthold (1885–1953) . Viennese poet, playwright, and film and theater director. Isherwood worked for Viertel in London as a screenplay writer and, later, dialogue director on Viertel’s film Little Friend made by Gaumont-British. This was Isherwood’s first experience in the film business, 358
Glossary
and he made it the subject of Prater Violet, in which Viertel appears as
“Friedrich Bergmann.” Viertel also appears throughout D 1. Viertel had settled his first wife and children in Santa Monica in 1928 and returned alone to Europe for long periods to work. His description of the life in California was a glamorous lure to Isherwood; they renewed their friendship soon after Isherwood arrived there in 1939, beginning work on a film vaguely inspired by Mr. Norris Changes Trains. At the Viertels’ house in Santa Monica Canyon Isherwood met a number of the celebrated European emigrés then in Hollywood, and the friendship with Viertel led to his second Hollywood job (the first of any substance) with Gottfried Reinhardt at MGM. Viertel began his career as an actor and stage director and turned to films in the 1920s. He first made films in Germany, began directing in Hollywood from the late 1920s, and in England from 1933. Towards the end of his life he lived partly in New York and eventually, with his second wife––the German character actress Elisabeth Neumann––he returned to Europe as a theatrical director, staging, among other works, German-language productions of Tennessee Williams.
Viertel, Peter (b. 1920) . German-born second son of Berthold and Salka Viertel; screenplay writer and novelist. Peter Viertel attended UCLA and Dartmouth and became a freelance writer. He served in the U.S. Marines during World War II and was decorated four times. He wrote the award-winning screenplay for Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as well as other Hemingway adaptations, and his own novels are in the Hemingway vein, with subjects such as soldiering (Line of Departure, 1947), big game hunting (White Hunter, Black Heart, 1954), and bullfighting (Love Lies Bleeding, 1964). His first novel, The Canyon (published in 1941, but completed when he was just nineteen), gives a compelling adolescent view of Santa Monica as it was around the time when Isherwood first arrived there, and Isherwood mentions it in D 1.
Viertel’s first marriage was to Virginia Schulberg, known as Jigee, and in 1960
he married the actress Deborah Kerr. Like his mother and father he eventually resettled in Europe.
Viertel, Salka (1889–1978) . Polish actress and screenplay writer; first wife of Berthold Viertel with whom she had three sons, Hans, Peter, and Thomas. Sara Salomé Steuermann Viertel had a successful stage career in Vienna (including acting for Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater) before moving to Hollywood where she became the friend and confidante of Greta Garbo; they appeared together in the German-language version of Anna Christie and afterwards Salka collaborated on Garbo’s screenplays for MGM in the 1930s and 1940s (Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, Conquest, and others). Isherwood met her soon after arriving in Los Angeles and was often at her house socially or to work with Berthold Viertel. In the 1930s and 1940s the house was frequented by European refugees and Salka was able to help many of them find work––some as domestic servants, others with the studios. Among her guests were some of the most celebrated writers and movie stars of the time. By the mid-1940s, her husband had left her; her lover Gottfried Reinhardt had married; Garbo’s career was over; and later, in the 1950s, Salka was persecuted by the McCarthyites and blacklisted by MGM for her presumed communism. In January 1947, she moved into the garage apartment Isherwood and Caskey had Glossary