Kenneth Anger, born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer in 1927, is an American avant-garde filmmaker whose work has gained underground notoriety over the past several decades, beginning with the homoerotic Fireworks (1947), for which he was charged with, but later acquitted of, obscenity.
Louis and Bebe Barron (1920-1989 and 1925-2008 respectively) are best known for their innovations in early electronic music. Early on, in order to make a living, they began “Sound Portraits,” recordings of authors reading their work, among them Anaïs Nin, whom they met in 1949. The book Cybernetics inspired Louis to build electronic devices capable of producing sounds never heard before, which he and Bebe were able to incorporate into musical scores for experimental and, eventually, Hollywood films.
Inge Bogner (1910-1987) was a New York psychiatrist whom Hugh Guiler began seeing in 1946, followed by Nin in the early 1950s.
Rosa Culmell de Nin (1871-1954), a classically trained singer born in Cuba and of Danish and French descent, married pianist/composer Joaquín Nin y Castellanos in 1902 and gave birth to three children: Anaïs (1903), Thorvald (1905), and Joaquín (1908). After her husband abandoned the family in France in 1913, she and her children first went to Barcelona to live with her husband’s parents, and the following year they came to New York where she took in boarders and did mail-orders for her wealthy Cuban relatives in order to make a living. She lived with Anaïs and her husband Hugh Guiler in France for a time and then came to America once again with her son, Joaquín, living with him in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, and then in Oakland, California.
Kay Dart, a failed actress and bonne vivante, was a neighbor and friend of Rupert Pole in Sierra Madre.
René de Chochor, who worked for James Brown Associates, was Anaïs Nin’s literary agent from 1952 until 1955, when he left New York for France. Under his care, Nin was able to get A Spy in the House of Love published.
Maya Deren (1917-1961) was an avant-garde filmmaker who befriended Anaïs Nin in 1945. Nin and several of her friends, including Gore Vidal, acted in one of Deren’s most acclaimed films, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946). Deren gained the respect of many young filmmakers, including Kenneth Anger, who cites her as one of his inspirations.
Ruth Witt Diamant was a professor at San Francisco State University and played the role of hostess to prominent writers such as Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, James Broughton, and Stephen Spender. She invited Anaïs Nin to read at San Francisco State in 1948, and they became friends. Diamant allowed Nin to store several of her original diary volumes at her home.
Renate Druks (1921-2007) was born in Vienna and studied at the Vienna Art Academy for Women. She eventually came to New York, then Mexico, and finally to Malibu, California, where she built a house and studio overlooking the ocean. She lived there with her son Peter (from a previous marriage) and was a prolific painter, all the while supporting herself by working day jobs. Her home became a salon of sorts, attracting the likes of Colleen Dewhurst, John Houseman, and Christopher Isherwood.
Millicent Fredericks, Anaïs Nin’s faithful maid, was born in Antigua to African and Portuguese parents. When she came to America with hopes of teaching, she could not get a job and settled into housekeeping. She played a key role in keeping Nin’s love affair with Rupert Pole a secret.
Maxwell Geismar (1909-1979) was an American critic, author, and editor who wrote the introduction to Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. He and his wife Anne befriended Anaïs Nin and her husband Hugh Guiler in 1951, and he was one of Nin’s few ardent supporters during that period.
Edward Graeffe (Chinchilito) was a Viennese tenor who met Anaïs Nin in Provincetown in 1941. The two had a sporadic but long and fiery physical relationship, and Nin felt he was the first man with whom she could have whimsical sexual encounters. Graeffe was the longtime companion of millionaire Alice Tully until his death in 1969.
Hugh Guiler (Hugo) (1898-1985) married Anaïs Nin, a Catholic, in 1923, which estranged him from his wealthy Protestant family. Having studied both literature and economics at Columbia University, he became employed at National City Bank in New York City. He took a position at the Paris branch of the bank and moved there with his wife, her mother, and two brothers in late 1924. After the crash of 1929, they moved to the Paris suburb of Louveciennes. It was through an associate of his that he met the rogue American writer Henry Miller and introduced him to his wife, setting the stage for one of literature’s most famous love affairs. When war broke out in 1939, he and Nin fled to New York, where he undertook another bank position. During this time he became interested in engraving and produced artworks that adorn Nin’s self-published novels—preferring to keep his artist life separate from the bank life, he used the nom d’artiste Ian Hugo. Much of this era is recorded in Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939-1947.
Carter Harman (1918-2007), a composer, met Anaïs Nin and Hugh Guiler in New York in 1947. Almost immediately he began to collaborate with Nin on an opera inspired by House of Incest, which never came to fruition.
James Leo Herlihy (1927-1993), born in Detroit to a working-class family, was a novelist, playwright, and actor who would achieve fame with his novel Midnight Cowboy, which would be filmed and win a Best Picture Oscar. Herlihy was introduced to Anaïs Nin when she came to visit Black Mountain College in 1947, and the two of them struck up a close friendship, each supporting the other’s work.
Helba Huara (1900-1986) was a Peruvian dancer who married at the age of fourteen and bore a daughter. She met Gonzalo Moré in Lima, where he had come to interview her after a performance. The two fell in love and fled to Paris, where she was known as “the dancing Inca,” performing sensuous and savage dances in native attire. Failing health ended her dancing career, and she became a near-invalid totally dependent on Moré, who had become Anaïs Nin’s lover in 1936. While the Nin-Moré relationship lasted for ten years, Huara’s jealous rages slowly helped destroy it.
Max Jacobson (1900-1979) was a German-born physician who was aided in fleeing Europe at the beginning of World War II by Hugh Guiler and Anaïs Nin. As a way of thanking them, Jacobson treated Nin gratuitously, and they had a brief sexual affair in the early 1940s. In 1942, Nin recorded in her diary Mirages that “Jacobson discovered a new mixture—the most potent vitamin—which rid me of anemia in three weeks and transformed me physically.” It was later determined that some of his “vitamin” shots were actually a mixture of amphetamines, painkillers, steroids, and many other ingredients. He gained a reputation and was visited by celebrities, athletes, and politicians, including John F. Kennedy in later years. He was dubbed “Dr. Feelgood” and “Miracle Max.” An FDA investigation would lead to the loss of his license to practice medicine.
Paul Mathieson was a painter and the bisexual lover of Renate Druks, whom he introduced to Anaïs Nin.
Lawrence Maxwell was a bookshop owner who befriended Anaïs Nin in New York in the late 1940s and invited her to make public appearances at his store. He would become an integral part of Nin’s “underground force” that kept her husband Hugh Guiler from discovering her relationship with Rupert Pole in California.
Henry Miller (1891-1980), American author of Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, among many other titles, met Anaïs Nin in Louveciennes, France, in 1931. He and Nin shared a passion for literature and for each other—their love affair would last a decade. After both Nin and Miller returned to New York at the onset of war, they began to drift apart and eventually broke from each other in 1942.
Gonzalo Moré (1897-1966) was born in Punto, Peru, of Indian, Scottish, and Spanish blood. He fell in love with the young dancer, Helba Huara, who was married at the time, and fled with her to Paris. He joined the Peruvian Communist Party and associated with the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo. He met Anaïs Nin in Paris in 1936 and the two were wildly attracted to each other, carrying on a torrid, emotional love affair for a decade. It soon became apparent, however, that Moré had little practical ambition and was dominated by Huara’s increasingly frequent maladies, some of which were imaginary. When war came to Europe, Nin arranged for Moré and Huara to come to New York shortly after her own arrival, where the affair resumed. During the 1940s, Nin and Moré worked together to print her books on an old hand-press and called their enterprise “Gemor Press.” When Huara’s chronic illnesses and jealousy began to wear on the relationship, Moré became increasingly destructive and violent, which eventually caused Nin to reject him completely.
Joaquín Nin y Castellanos (1879-1949), born in Cuba and of Spanish descent, married Rosa Culmell in Cuba in 1902 and fathered three children: Anaïs (1903), Thorvald (1905), and Joaquín (1908). He rose to prominence in Europe as a composer and pianist, and he had an eye for “la jolie,” the pretty woman. He fell in love with his underaged student, Maria Luisa Rodriguez, known as “Maruca,” and abandoned his family in 1913. He eventually got a divorce and married Maruca. After having been estranged from her father for many years, Anaïs received him at her home in Louveciennes, France, in 1933, and he began to aggressively court her. In the summer of the same year, he and his then thirty-year-old daughter embarked on an incestuous relationship that would last several months. In 1939, he moved in with relatives in Cuba and never saw his daughter again.
Joaquín Nin-Culmell (1908-2004) was the younger of Anaïs Nin’s two brothers. Born in Berlin to Joaquín Nin y Castellanos, a renowned pianist and composer, Nin-Culmell studied piano at the Schola Cantorum and the Paris Conservatory with prominent instructors, most notably Manuel de Falla. He gave his first recital in New York in 1936 and later became a member of the music departments at Williams College in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, and, later, the University of California in Berkeley.
William Pinckard (1927-1989) met Anaïs Nin in New York at the age of seventeen and became her lover for more than a year. When he joined the army in 1946, it was his intention to be stationed in Asia, where he had grown up. After his tour, he graduated from the University of California and became interested in Buddhism. He returned to Japan, where he attempted an 88-temple pilgrimage and became ill, spending weeks in a rural clinic. While there, he learned of “go,” a game, and became enamored with it, even writing about it. He married a Japanese woman and had two children.
Reginald Pole, born in England, was a heralded Shakespearian actor, director, writer, and playwright, working with John Barrymore and Boris Karloff and garnering rave reviews in the early part of the 20th century. After moving to California, he married Helen Taggart, and the union produced a son, Rupert, in 1919. The couple divorced in 1923, and Pole became artist Beatrice Wood’s lover for a time. His behavior became increasingly erratic, and he eventually plunged into severe hypochondria, consuming numerous prescribed drugs and living a vagabond life, going from one dreary hotel room to the next.
Rupert Pole (1919-2006), Anaïs Nin’s “west coast husband,” was born in Los Angeles to Reginald Pole and Helen Taggart. His mother divorced Reginald and married Lloyd Wright when Rupert was a young boy. In the early 1940s, Rupert began a short and unsuccessful stage career, appearing in a few plays and on the radio. He was drafted into the army in 1943, refused to bear arms, got very ill in boot camp, and was medically discharged. He was briefly married to Janie Lloyd Jones, a cousin of his stepfather. Pole met Anaïs Nin at a party in February 1947 and became her lover. He invited her to drive from New York to California with him, and she accepted.
Lila Rosenblum (1925-2000) was a friend of Anaïs Nin who acted as her personal typist in New York. Her reminiscences of Nin can be found in Recollections of Anaïs Nin by Her Contemporaries (1996).
Clement Staff was a New York psychologist who treated Anaïs Nin between 1945 and the early 1950s.
Jean Varda (1893-1971) was a Greek/French friend of Henry Miller and an artist best known for his collages. After discovering Anaïs Nin’s work through Miller, he sent her a collage entitled “Women Reconstructing the World” in 1944, sparking a friendship between them that would last for the rest of his life. Varda lived a bohemian lifestyle on an old ferryboat, called the Vallejo, which was moored in Sausalito. It became a gathering place where guests would come for wine, good food, storytelling, and rides on Varda’s homemade sailboat.
Gore Vidal (1925-2012), a renowned American novelist, essayist, and playwright, was twenty years old when he met Anaïs Nin. Although homosexual, he developed a close relationship with Nin and proposed that they get married and have outside lovers, a notion Nin considered, but ultimately rejected. As an editor at E. P. Dutton, he was able to convince Dutton to publish some of Nin’s fiction, beginning with Ladders to Fire in 1947. Vidal dedicated his second novel, A Yellow Wood, to Nin.
Helen Wright (née Taggart; 1892-1977) was married to actor Reginald Pole when their son, Rupert, was born. Taggart divorced Pole in 1923 and married architect Lloyd Wright a short time later. With Wright, she bore a son, Eric Lloyd Wright, who became an architect as well.
Lloyd Wright (1890-1978) was an architect and the son of Frank Lloyd Wright and his first wife, Catherine Lee “Kitty” Tobin. He moved from the family home in Oak Park, Illinois, to California in 1911. In 1922 Wright married actress and artist Elaine Hyman (known as Kyra Markham), and they divorced in 1925. Shortly thereafter he married Helen Taggart, and her son Rupert Pole became his stepson. Wright’s first important work was the Taggart House, built for Helen’s mother. He went on to design and build many structures in the Los Angeles area, and perhaps his most-known work is the Wayfarer’s Chapel on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which is made of steel and glass and surrounded by redwood trees.