Frederick Gerald Haxton (1892 – November 7, 1944), a native of San Francisco, was the long term secretary and lover of novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham.
[1] He and Maugham met at the outbreak of World War I when they both began serving as part of a Red Cross ambulance unit in French Flanders.
[1] However, in November 1915, Haxton and another man, John Lindsell, were arrested in a Covent Garden hotel in London and charged with gross indecency.
They lived in Villa La Mauresque at Cap Ferrat almost exclusively until they were forced to flee the advancing Germans at the commencement of World War II.
It is thought that Haxton's flamboyant nature, said to be portrayed in the character Rowley Flint in Up at the Villa, was the key to Maugham's popularity with members of society wherever the pair traveled.