Liberation (131 page)

Langan, Peter (1914–1988).
Irish restaurateur; son of a Shell Oil Company director. He ran Odin's Restaurant in Devonshire Street with Kirsten Andersen, a Dane, who started the restaurant with her first husband, James Benson. (Benson died in a car crash in 1966.) Regular customers at Odin's included Hockney, Peter Schlesinger, Ossie Clark, Wayne Sleep, George Lawson and Patrick Procktor. Procktor became Kirsten Andersen's second husband in 1973. Hockney and Procktor sometimes paid for their meals with art works; Lawson paid in secondhand books; the pictures and books were used as décor in the restaurant. Langan later bought the Coq d'Or in Mayfair and reopened it as Langan's Brasserie, in partnership with Richard Shepherd and actor Michael Caine. He was an alcoholic and died of burns when he set fire to his house following a drunken argument with his wife, Susan, who escaped.

Lange, Hope (1931–2003).
American actress, born and raised in Connecticut; she was twelve years old when she debuted on Broadway in
The Patriots
(1943). As a teenager, she waitressed in her mother's Greenwich Village restaurant, modelled, and continued as a stage actress and in live T.V. drama until she was brought to Hollywood with her first husband Don Murray to appear in
Bus Stop
(1956). Afterwards she appeared in numerous other films including
Peyton Place
(1957), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award,
The Young Lions
(1958),
The Best of Everything
(1959),
Deathwish
(1974),
Blue Velvet
(1986), and
Clear and Present Danger
(1994). During her love affair with Glenn Ford, she co-starred with him in
Pocketful of Miracles
(1961) and
Love Is a Ball
(1963). She made a number of T.V. films and won two Emmy Awards for her role in the television comedy series “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (1968–1970); she also appeared on “The New Dick Van Dyke Show” (1971–1974). In 1977, she returned to Broadway in
Same Time Next Year
opposite Don Murray. Lange had two children with Murray, but the marriage ended in 1960. In 1963, she married the director and producer Alan Pakula; they divorced in 1969. In 1986, she married Charles Hollerith, a theatrical producer. Isherwood first met Lange with Murray in the late 1950s; she appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Lansbury, Angela (b. 1925).
British star of stage and film; granddaughter of pacifist Labour politician George Lansbury and daughter of actress Moyna Macgill, who brought her with her twin brothers Edgar and Bruce to Hollywood to escape the Blitz. Lansbury was making feature films before the end of the war and went on to appear in
National Velvet
(1944),
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1945),
The Three Musketeers
(1948),
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
(1960),
The Manchurian Candidate
(1962),
Something for Everyone
(1970),
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
(1971),
Death on the Nile
(1978),
Nanny McPhee
(2006), and
Mr. Popper's Penguins
(2011) among others. Isherwood first mentions her at the time she made a hit in Tony Richardson's
A Taste of Honey
on Broadway in 1960; other Broadway successes include
Mame
(1966),
Sweeney Todd
(1979), and
Deuce
(2007). She has also had a T.V. career, especially in “Murder, She Wrote” (1984–1996). She has won eleven Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, and been nominated repeatedly for Academy Awards. She married twice, the second time, in 1949, to Peter Shaw with whom she had two children.

Lansbury, Edgar (b. 1930).
Stage and film producer and, earlier, scenic designer; brother of Angela Lansbury and twin brother of stage and film producer Bruce Lansbury. Among his successful shows are
The Subject Was Roses
(1964) and
Godspell
(1976)—of which he also produced the films—and
American Buffalo
(1977). Bachardy drew Edgar, Bruce, and Angela Lansbury.

Larson, Jack (b. 1933).
American actor, playwright and librettist; born in Los Angeles and raised in Pasadena. His father drove a milk truck, and his mother was a clerk for Western Union; they divorced. At fourteen, Larson was California bowling champion for his age group. He attended Pasadena Junior College, where he was discovered acting in a college play and offered his first film role by Warner Brothers in
Fighter Squadron
(1948) (also Rock Hudson's first film). He is best known for playing Jimmy Olsen in “The Adventures of Superman,” the original T.V. series aired during the 1950s. He lived for over thirty-five years with the director James Bridges and co-produced some of Bridges's most successful films,
The Paper Chase
(1973),
Urban Cowboy
(1980), and
Bright Lights, Big City
(1988). As Isherwood mentions, he wrote the libretto for Virgil Thomson's opera
Lord Byron
. Larson and Bridges were close friends of Isherwood and Bachardy from the 1950s onward and appear in
D.1
and
D.2
.

Lathwood, Jo.
See Masselink, Jo.

Laughlin, Leslie.
See Caron, Leslie.

Laughlin, Michael.
American film producer, and later, director and screen-writer; educated at Principia College in Illinois and at UCLA, where he studied law. He produced
Two Lane Blacktop
(1971) among others. He was the third husband of French actress Leslie Caron from 1969 to 1980. The thriller he was producing in 1973,
Nicole
—starring Caron with Catherine Bach, Ramon Bieri and others, and directed by István Ventilla—never reached the movie theaters, but it was released on video in 2005 as an erotic thriller,
Crazed
. (It also had another title,
Widow's Revenge
.) Isherwood and Bachardy saw it in a screening room at Goldwyn Studios. Laughlin lived with the costume and production designer Susanna Moore (b. 1945) from around the time in 1978 when she divorced her husband, production designer Richard Sylbert, but they never married. She became a successful novelist with
My Old Sweetheart
(1982),
The Whiteness of Bones
(1989),
In the Cut
(1995), and others.

Laura.
See Huxley, Laura Archera.

Lawrence, Jerome ( Jerry) (1915–2004).
American playwright; born in Ohio, educated at Ohio State University and UCLA. He was a reporter and editor for small daily newspapers in Ohio then a continuity editor for a Beverly Hills radio station. By the time he joined the U.S. Army during World War II, he was a senior staff writer for CBS radio. In the army, he worked as a consultant to the Secretary of War then as a correspondent from North Africa and Italy, and he co-founded Armed Forces Radio with Robert Lee. They continued their partnership as playwrights after the war. Among their best-known plays are
Look, Ma, I'm Dancin'!
(1948), the prize-winning
Inherit the Wind
(1955) about the Scopes monkey trial, the stage adaptation of
Auntie Mame
(1956), and
The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail
(1971). Lawrence and Lee also wrote the book and the lyrics for the musical
Mame
(1966), adapted James Hilton's novel
Lost Horizon
as the book and lyrics for
Shangri-La
(1956), and were involved in adapting much of their work for film. Lawrence taught playwriting at several universities and was an adjunct professor at USC. Isherwood often went to parties at his house, especially to meet good-looking young men, mostly actors, whom Lawrence knew through his theater connections. Lawrence often claimed that he had introduced Isherwood and Bachardy to each other because Bachardy and his brother Ted attended a party at Lawrence's house on February 14, the date Isherwood and Bachardy marked as the start of their romance, but, in fact, Isherwood and Bachardy met earlier. Lawrence appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Lawson, George.
Scottish antiquarian book dealer, a longtime director of Bertram Rota. He is a friend of David Hockney and a subject of several Hockney paintings. For many years he was Wayne Sleep's companion and remains, in his own phrase, Sleep's accomplice.

Layard, John (1891–1975).
English anthropologist and Jungian psychoanalyst. He read Medieval and Modern Languages at Cambridge and did field work in the New Hebrides with the anthropologist and psychologist W.H.R. Rivers. In the early 1920s, he had a nervous breakdown and was partially cured by the American psychologist Homer Lane. Lane died during the treatment, leaving Layard depressed and seeking further treatment, first unsuccessfully with Wilhelm Stekel and eventually more productively with Jung. Auden met Layard in Berlin late in 1928 and introduced him to Isherwood the following spring; for a time all three were obsessed with Lane's theories recounted by Layard. During this period, Layard had a brief and tortured triangular affair with Auden and a German sailor, Gerhart Meyer, whereupon he tried to kill himself. Isherwood used the suicide attempt in
The Memorial
, and Layard appears as “Barnard” in
Lions and Shadows
. Layard eventually recovered his psychological health so that he was able to work and write again, and he married and had a son. Like Auden, he also returned to the Anglican faith of his childhood.

Lazar, Irving (Swifty) (1907–1993).
Agent and deal-maker for movie stars and authors such as Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Truman Capote, Noël Coward, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, Cole Porter, Diana Ross, Irwin Shaw, and Tennessee Williams. He practiced bankruptcy law in New York during the Depression, then relocated to Hollywood in 1936. His wife was called Mary.

Leavitt, Natalie.
Isherwood and Bachardy's Romanian-born cleaning lady and cook from about 1976; she was a widow after nursing her husband, an American, through a long illness. She was first employed at Adelaide Drive around 1960, but irritated Isherwood by asking Stravinsky for an autograph while he was at the dinner table. She eventually returned as twice-monthly cleaner, then server and dishwasher, and finally chef and shopper for dinner parties about twice a week until her retirement around 2000. Her daughter, Thaïs Leavitt, trained with the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden and was a principal dancer with the Düsseldorf Ballet until she retired with a knee injury. Thaïs later taught at Ballet Petit Performing Arts Center, the Los Angeles County Council for the Arts, and elsewhere, settled with her mother in the family home near 145 Adelaide Drive, and occasionally helped with the work there.

Lehmann, Beatrix (Peggy) (1903–1979).
English actress; youngest of John Lehmann's three elder sisters. She met Isherwood in Berlin in 1932, and they remained close friends. She had a London triumph in O'Neill's
Mourning Becomes Electra
in 1938 when Isherwood was in China, and he returned in time to see her in the Group Theatre's performance of Cocteau's
La Voix Humaine
in July. During 1938 she had an affair with Berthold Viertel. She appears in
D.2.

Lehmann, John (1907–1987).
English author, publisher, editor, autobiographer; educated at Cambridge. Youngest child and only son of a close family; his mother was an American from New England; his father trained as a barrister and wrote for
Punch
. Isherwood met him 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 the magazine
New Writing
and obtained early contributions from friends like Auden. He writes about this in
Christopher and His Kind
and also about Lehmann in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
. When Lehmann left the Hogarth Press, he founded his own publishing firm and later edited
The London Magazine
. He wrote three volumes of autobiography,
The Whispering Galley
(1955),
I Am My Brother
(1960), and
The Ample Proposition
(1966). For many years he shared his house with the dancer Alexis Rassine.

Lehmann, Rosamond (1901–1990).
English novelist, educated at Cambridge, second-eldest sister of John Lehmann. She made a reputation with the sexual and emotional frankness of her first novel,
Dusty Answer
(1927), and her later works—including
Invitation to the Waltz
(1932),
The Weather in the Streets
(1936),
The Echoing Grove
(1953)—also shocked. Her first marriage, in 1923, was to Leslie Runciman, son of a Liberal Member of Parliament, and from 1928 to 1944, she was the first wife of the painter Wogan Philipps, with whom she had a son and a daughter. Afterwards, she had a nine-year affair with Cecil Day-Lewis. Her daughter with Philipps, Sally, died suddenly of polio in 1958 when she was twenty-four; Rosamond described her continuing spiritual relationship with Sally in
The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life
(1967). She appears in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
.

Leighton, Margaret (Maggie) (1922–1976).
English actress. She made her London debut as a teenager and established her reputation in the Old Vic Company in the late 1940s. From the mid-1950s until the late 1960s, she also played on Broadway, where she won Tony Awards for
Separate Tables
(1956) and
The Night of the Iguana
(1962). Her films include
The Winslow Boy
(1948),
The Sound and the Fury
(1959),
The Loved One
(1965), and
The Go-Between
(1971). Her second marriage was to Laurence Harvey, from 1957 to 1961, and her third, in 1964, to actor Michael Wilding. She had a small role in Bachardy and Isherwood's “Frankenstein: The True Story.”

Len.
See Worton, Len.

Leopold, Michael.
Aspiring writer, from Texas; he was about eighteen when Isherwood met him at the apartment of a friend, Doug Ebersole, in December 1949. They began a minor affair soon afterwards. Leopold was interested in literature, admired Isherwood's work, and later wrote some stories of his own. During the 1960s, he lived with Henry Guerriero in Venice, California. He appears in
D.1
,
D.2
, and
Lost Years
.

Le Page, Richard W.F. (b. 1940).
British medical microbiologist, Life Fellow, Caius College, Cambridge. Author and co-author of numerous research papers in many areas, including vaccine delivery.

LeSueur, Joe (192[4]–2001).
Aspiring playwright, screenwriter, and critic, originally from California. He was the companion, from 1955, of American poet and art critic Frank O'Hara (1926–1966), who died in a sand buggy accident on Fire Island.

Levant, Oscar (1906–1972).
American composer, pianist, and actor. He was a close friend of George Gershwin and became famous as an interpreter of his music. His film appearances include
Kiss the Boys Goodbye
(1941),
Rhapsody in Blue
(1945),
Humoresque
(1946),
You Were Meant for Me
(1948), and
An American in Paris
(1951). Levant wrote the music for several popular musicals and had a live talk show in Hollywood, “The Oscar Levant Show,” broadcast out of a shed on a minor network. His show was shut down by the sponsors in the early 1960s despite its popularity, because he insulted their products for laughs and encouraged his guests to do the same. Isherwood appeared on the show in the mid-1950s, sometimes reading poetry; this led to his occasionally being recognized in the street. In 1958, he argued with Levant about Churchill and then refused to return to the show for a time because Levant attacked him for remaining in Hollywood during the war. He appears in
D.1
and
D.2.

Levy, Miranda Speranza (Mirandi).
Sister-in-law of the Italian-American jewelry designer, Frank Patania (d. 1964) whose Native American-influenced work in silver, turquoise, and coral was bought by Mabel Dodge Luhan and Georgia O'Keeffe and can be seen in museums. She ran Patania's Thunderbird shop in Santa Fe and married Ralph Levy, a Hollywood film director. She appears in
D.1
under her maiden name, Mirandi Masocco, and in
D.2
.

Lipscomb, Mark.
American painter working in Los Angeles. He had a show at the Long Beach Museum of Art in the 1970s, but afterwards exhibited his work only at home in the various houses he shared with his longterm companion John Ladner. In addition to sitting for Bachardy, he was also drawn and painted by David Hockney.

List, Herbert.
German photographer. Probably introduced to Isherwood by Stephen Spender who, in 1929, became friends with List in Hamburg, where List was working as a coffee merchant in his family's firm. List appears as “Joachim” in Spender's
World Within World
and as “Joachim Lenz” in Spender's
The Temple
. Isherwood writes about him in
D.1
and
D.2
.

Little, Penny.
Sales representative for a fabric house and later for a large interior design firm. She was the girlfriend of painter Billy Al Bengston for about twenty years. Afterwards she was briefly married to Kevin Hearst, and then to Gregg Hawks, son of film director Howard Hawks. She sat for Bachardy several times.

Littman, Robert (Bobby) (1938–2001).
Hollywood agent, from England. He began representing Isherwood and Bachardy in 1976. He was previously a head of MGM in the U.K. His wife's name was Doris.

Locke, Charles O. (1896–1977).
American journalist, novelist, screenwriter. He wrote for his family's newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, while still in college then had a career in New York working for several major papers and in advertising and publicity. He wrote poetry and song lyrics as well as five novels. In 1957, he wrote the screenplay from his most famous novel
The Hell-Bent Kid
in the office next door to Isherwood's at Twentieth Century-Fox. Isherwood describes their friendship in
D.1
, where Locke's wife and his daughter, Mary Schmidt, are also mentioned. He also appears in
D.2.

loka.
In Hindu traditions, world or plane of existence.

Loos, Anita (1888–1981).
American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. Isherwood met her through Aldous and Maria Huxley soon after arriving in Hollywood and sometimes attended the Sunday lunches at which she entertained her circle of emigré friends. Loos created the art of silent film captions, and later she wrote over two hundred screenplays for sound movies. Her novel
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(1925)—written to amuse H.L. Mencken—became a play, then a movie, then a musical comedy for stage, and finally a film of the musical comedy. She launched Huxley in studio writing and also introduced him socially. She wrote several volumes of autobiography in which Isherwood is occasionally mentioned. She appears in
D.1.