How Weimar Berlin Inspired Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles

“She was dressed in black silk, with a small cape over her shoulders and a little cap like a page-boy’s stuck jauntily on one side of her head,” Isherwood wrote in Sally Bowles.

I noticed that her finger-nails were painted emerald green, a colour unfortunately chosen for it called attention to her hands, which were much stained by cigarette-smoking and as dirty as a little girl’s. […] Her face was long and thin, powdered dead white. She had very large brown eyes which should have been darker, to match her hair and the pencil she used for her eyebrows.

The eccentric clothing, the unsteady hat, the childish dirtiness, the homely, appealing visage might once again have been refashioned from Dickens, offering Sally, the child-woman, as a new kind of Artful Dodger to Isherwood’s Oliver Twist. The narrator and his friend Fritz Wendell watch Sally coo down the telephone in German as if she were playing “a performance at the theatre.” Then:

She hung up the telephone and turned to us triumphantly.

“That’s the man I slept with last night,” she announced. “He makes love marvellously. He’s an absolute genius at business and he’s terribly rich—”

Sally is depicted as a more lively actress in her personal life than on stage in her nightclub act, all the better to defy expectation and shock observers in both audiences: “She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides—yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse what people thought of her.”

Her boyish, devil-may-care determination to get on with the show hides any inward uncertainty, but Sally is only an amateur, barely getting by. Her nightclub job will last another week; the hoped-for movie offer never comes through. She is immersed in the underworld of a dangerous city, vulnerable, resilient, an instinctive performer; her trade is not picking pockets but picking up men. She is easy prey to the stereotyped, Dickensian, money-fingered Jew, telling the narrator: “there’s an awful old Jew who takes me out sometimes. He’s always offering to get me a contract; but he only wants to sleep with me, the old swine.”

Isherwood endows her with an unstainable purity linked to her childish inability to gauge exactly what impression she makes with her performances. One costume, her black silk dress with the addition of white collar and cuffs, “produced a kind of theatrically chaste effect, like a nun in grand opera. ‘What are you laughing at, Chris?’ ” she demands. Neither of them knows.

As with Isherwood’s childhood friend Mirabel Cobbold, the pair in the story fall out over the narrator’s wounded vanity. Sally asks Chris to ghostwrite a magazine article for her on the English Girl, then rejects it. In revenge, he plays a nasty trick, bringing the police down on her. But nothing dampens her spirits for long. “The whole idea of the study is to show that even the greatest disasters leave a person like Sally essentially unchanged,” Isherwood was to tell Lehmann.

Jean Ross, the real-life original of Sally Bowles, was seven years younger than Isherwood, born in Alexandria, where her father worked for the Bank of Egypt classifying cotton. She was sent to boarding school in England, was thrown out for pretending to be pregnant, was sent to a Swiss finishing school, and then studied acting at RADA for a year on a trust fund allowance. She worked as a model, actress, and singer, and aspired to film. Later she became a journalist.

Ross was nineteen when Isherwood met her, probably in October 1930, at the apartment of a Hungarian baron, Franz von Ullman, portrayed in Goodbye to Berlin as Fritz Wendell. According to Spender, von Ullman was Jewish, worked in publishing and perhaps only pretended to be a baron. Ross was then singing at a nightclub intermittently. She was an extra in Max Reinhardt’s spectacular production of Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffmann in Berlin in November 1931, and Kathleen and Richard later saw her in a small experimental production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in London.

With Isherwood’s encouragement, Ross moved into Fräulein Thurau’s flat early in 1931 and lived there for five or six months until her love life became too exciting even for Fräulein Thurau: “Jean and Kantorowicz made such a mess of their bedclothes that Thurau has forbidden him the house,” Isherwood told Spender, evidently referring to the German-Jewish communist journalist Alfred Kantorowicz, who was later a contributor to New Writing. So Ross moved elsewhere with a friend, Erika Glück, rumoured to be a heroin addict. Meanwhile, she had become pregnant by Götz von Eick, a German-Jewish musician, and Isherwood helped her get an abortion in the early summer of 1931. This was illegal at the time; it was done sloppily and nearly killed her.

The abortion was the chief reason that Isherwood took great care to get Ross’s permission before publishing Sally Bowles, in which he incorporated it. She said yes when he showed her the story in the autumn of 1936, and Lehmann planned to run it in New Writing. Then she changed her mind, so Isherwood gave Lehmann “A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930)” instead. In February 1937, Ross agreed after all, and Sally Bowles appeared as an individual novella from the Hogarth Press.

Isherwood portrayed von Eick as Sally’s piano accompanist Klaus Linke, who abandons her by letter from London. In real life, von Eick indeed moved on to London and then New York, earning his living as a pianist and assistant stage director until he resurfaced in Hollywood as the actor Peter Van Eyck, specializing in Nazi villain roles. Tennessee Williams found Van Eyck “excruciatingly beautiful” and told a friend that the atmosphere between Van Eyck and his then wife, the actress Ruth Ford, “was charged with an almost hysterical sexuality and torment of jealousy and suspicion although there was much exchange of darlings and kisses all around.” The marriage with Ford did not last much longer than the affair with Ross.

In August 1932, Isherwood dictated the first version of the story to his brother Richard, who wrote it out longhand; it included material later separated into “The Nowaks.” Isherwood was freshly returned to London from Germany and so was Ross. He visited her four times in six days. They had dinner, lunch, and tea at her digs in Pembridge Square, Notting Hill, dined with her family and with the actor and director Nigel Playfair. Then Isherwood went home to Pembroke Gardens and shared the friendship aloud with Richard as he had once shared The History of My Friends with his mother.

The dictation was the culmination of Isherwood’s renewed effort to bring Richard into his life. They worked together for three weeks, from August 13 until September 8, then Isherwood typed up the draft himself. Thus, Sally Bowles began as a performance acted out far from Berlin. Isherwood later described the dictation as “a supreme act of intimacy. It is immeasurably more embarrassing for a writer to invent crudely in someone else’s presence than to confide to him the most shameful personal revelations.” Energy spread through Pembroke Gardens, as with Christopher’s childhood Shakespeare seasons, now intensified by secrecy. “Their collaboration brought a feeling of subdued excitement into the household. Something—no matter exactly what—was going on upstairs, behind Christopher’s closed door.”

In Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood said that he borrowed the American composer and writer Paul Bowles’s surname for his character, Sally Bowles. Paul Bowles, aged twenty, was in Berlin studying composing with Aaron Copland, and Isherwood sometimes had lunch with him at the Café des Westen. But Bowles was also a family name. Kathleen recorded in her “History of Marple and Wyberslegh Halls and the Bradshaw Isherwoods” that the current owner of Bradshaw Hall in Derbyshire was a Mr. C.E. Bradshaw Bowles, a direct descendant of the original Bradshaw owners. She had taken Isherwood to Bradshaw Hall in 1916, and they had toured the property with a servant. C.E. Bradshaw Bowles was also the author of a history of North Derbyshire which Kathleen had cut out and pasted into her history. Thus, Isherwood was tagging Sally as a runaway heir, like himself, and a kind of distant cousin. Sally’s fictional full name, like his real name, is an embarrassing double-barreled one, Jackson-Bowles, which she has jettisoned for her stage career.

Her first name, Sally, was perhaps borrowed from another Berlin friend, Sally Coole, a journalist who appears in Mr. Norris Changes Trains as Helen Pratt. More likely, Sally was named for the eponymous heroine of Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton’s musical comedy Sally, which Isherwood saw in London in 1921. The orphan dishwasher and would-be singer meets her prince in disguise and fulfills her dream of stardom as a Ziegfeld Follies dancer. In a characteristic twisting of the storyline, Isherwood’s Sally never gets to marry her prince, but she lives by the spirit of two of the show’s most popular tunes, “Look for the Silver Lining” and “You Can’t Keep a Good Girl Down.”

His Sally Bowles character has lasting vitality because Isherwood conjured her as an ideal type from many different forerunners—from stage, film, books, real life, and personal fantasies. Though she is depicted with the surface particulars of a real woman in the Berlin of the early 1930s, she is not a straightforward portrait of Jean Ross, nor of any single person. There was the tomboy Mirabel Cobbold, with whom Isherwood played and quarreled in Limerick and whom he saw acting the part of a sailor boy on the eve of his departure for boarding school. There was Katherine Mansfield, his literary idol, with her bob and her bohemian lovelife, on the run from her middle-class background in New Zealand. There was the American actress Louise Brooks as Lulu and the Lost Girl in Pabst’s films. There was, as Isherwood mentioned in a letter to Lehmann, the faux-naif London society flirt Miss Dolly Foster of The Dolly Dialogues, Anthony Hope’s comic satire that ran in the Westminster Gazette in the 1890s before being collected as a book. There were the various scheming courtesans and grisettes in Balzac’s La comédie humaine. In the same letter to Lehmann, Isherwood described Sally Bowles as “an attempt to satirize the romance-of-prostitution racket” and announced in a further paragraph, “I am reading Balzac.” Balzac’s interconnected stories about nineteenth-century Paris certainly offered a more general inspiration for The Lost.

Then there was Isherwood himself. For Sally Bowles was Isherwood’s own boy-girl alter ego, his female double, enthusiastically sleeping her way to nowhere. Casting his alter ego as a girl had the advantage of neutralizing his own sexual transgressions since any bad girl was, in the 1930s, far more shocking than any bad boy. As a woman, Sally is far more “lost” than the Isherwood character, and the Isherwood character can even masquerade as her protector.

Isherwood’s childhood fantasy of sailing away to the ends of the earth, first acted out with his Limerick playmates, became in Sally Bowles part of a more sophisticated narrative in which Herr Issyvoo and Sally Bowles will be whisked away by Sally’s rich, alcoholic, American lover, Clive: “The Orient Express would take us to Athens. Thence, we should fly to Egypt. From Egypt to Marseille. From Marseille, by boat to South America. Then Tahiti. Singapore. Japan.” Clive was based on the rich and generous John Blomshield, who passed through their lives with lavish speed.

In the story, Isherwood tellingly juxtaposed this fantasy of escape with the funeral cortège of Hermann Müller, the former chancellor of Germany, whose Social Democrats were trounced by Hitler in the elections of March 1930. The cortège—“Ranks of pale steadfast clerks, government officials, trade union secretaries”—trudges past Clive’s window, symbolizing the death of Prussian social democracy; Clive, Sally, and Herr Issyvoo ignore it. “We had nothing to do with those Germans down there,” the narrator persuades himself, thus making a pact with the devil as in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus or Marjorie Bowen’s Black Magic:

In a few days, I thought, we shall have forfeited all kinship with ninety-nine per cent. of the population of the world, with the men and women who earn their living, who insure their lives, who are anxious about the future of their children. Perhaps in the Middle Ages people felt like this, when they believed themselves to have sold their souls to the Devil. It was a curious, exhilarating, not unpleasant sensation: but, at the same time, I felt slightly scared. Yes, I said to myself, I’ve done it, now. I am lost.

The coming blindside of Hitler was to repeat and amplify the disaster of World War I that Isherwood had experienced in the destruction of his happy childhood life. It was the unprepared, the gullible, the dreamers, the fantasists, the young who moved him. For all her knowing talk of sex, Sally Bowles is one of them, easily tricked. “‘You know, Sally,’ I said, ‘what I really like about you is that you’re awfully easy to take in. People who never get taken in are awfully dreary.’” But Isherwood himself was on the alert, bearing witness to the unfolding disaster. He was not taken in, nor did he run away as the realities began to mount up. Instead, in his work, he focused more and more on the power of illusion in all arenas of Berlin life and on the hard line between real and imagined—in love as well as in politics. He was to last in Berlin until May 1933.

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Excerpted from Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out by Katherine Bucknell. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by Katherine Bucknell. All rights reserved.