Aldous Huxley was here for an endowed chair when this
was taken. The powers that be on campus were very worried about his
health, because he just wasn't eating. His beautiful hands are just skin
and bones, and his clothes could hold another person. He had slipped
into an intellectual trance and was fading away. He wasn't even
bothering with his laundry. So the University paid a student to live
with him and take care of him. I was ecstatic about having the
opportunity to do his portrait. During the sitting he began talking
about a book he had just finished, the 180 degrees counterpart of Brave
New World. We spent a wonderful afternoon talking about what an utopian culture would really be like, and he said that the only thing he
had left to do was to choose a title for the book. The tragedy is that
his house in Westwood later burned, and the only copies of his completed
manuscript were destroyed. He had to be physically restrained from
trying to rescue them.
GPB
