Gerald Heard

Gerald Heard Official Website

ENGLISH AUTHORS IN LOS ANGELES

Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, Julian Huxley, and Aldous Huxley

Although Waugh referred to Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney as “the two artists” of Hollywood, Waugh wasn’t the first, nor the greatest English talent to come to Los Angeles.High Lane-born Christopher Isherwoodmoved to the US earlier and was, along with WH Auden, caricatured by Waugh in his novel Put Out More Flags as Parsnip and Pimpernel — two poets who fled to California to avoid fighting in World War II. Isherwood became an American citizen in 1945 and pithily dismissed Los Angeles haters, stating “Either they understand it’s the only place or they don’t.”

Godalming-born Aldous Huxley was a close friend and occasional collaborator with Isherwood (and fellow Englishman/LSD experimenter, Gerald Heard). He moved to Los Angeles even earlier, in 1937, and initially found little to his liking. In 1940 he moved from the city proper to the Llano, in the Antelope Valley, very near Job Harriman’s utopian socialist Llano del Rio commune. In 1954, Huxley published The Doors of Perception about his experiments with mescaline which would prove influential to the psychedelic music scene (and inspire the name of Los Angeles rock bandThe Doors).