Jean Ross
Jean Iris Ross Cockburn was a British journalist, political activist, and film critic. A devout Stalinist, she became a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and she worked as a film critic for the Daily Worker. During the Spanish Civil War, she served as a war correspondent for the Daily Express and as an alleged press agent for Joseph Stalin's Comintern. Throughout her lifetime, Ross wrote political criticism, anti-fascist polemics, and socialist manifestos for various organisations such as the British Workers' Film and Photo League.
During a youthful sojourn in the Weimar Republic, Ross worked as a cabaret singer in Berlin while aspiring to become a famous actress. In 1931, she briefly shared lodgings with writer Christopher Isherwood, and her escapades inspired the heroine and plot of his 1937 novella Sally Bowles, later collected in Goodbye to Berlin. In the 1937 novella, a British flapper named Sally Bowles moonlights as a chanteuse during the twilight of the Jazz Age. After a series of failed romances, she becomes pregnant and has an abortion facilitated by the narrator. Isherwood based many details on actual events in Ross' personal life, including her abortion. Fearing a libel suit, Isherwood delayed publication of the work until given Ross' explicit permission. Goodbye to Berlin was later adapted into the stage musical Cabaret.
Although Isherwood never revealed that Ross inspired Sally Bowles until after her death, her former partner Claud Cockburn—who previously abandoned Ross and their daughter—leaked to the press that she had inspired the character. After Cabaret garnered acclaim in the 1960s, journalists hounded Ross with intrusive questions. For the remainder of her life, Ross believed the public association of herself with the naïve and apolitical character of Sally Bowles occluded her lifelong work as a professional writer and political activist. Her daughter Sarah Caudwell wrote a newspaper article in an attempt to correct the historical record and to dispel misconceptions about Ross. According to Caudwell, "in the transformations of the novel for stage and cinema the characterisation of Sally has become progressively cruder and less subtle and the stories about 'the original' correspondingly more high-coloured".
In addition to inspiring the character Sally Bowles, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and other sources credit Ross as the muse for lyricist Eric Maschwitz's jazz standard "These Foolish Things ", one of the 20th century's most enduring love songs. Although Maschwitz's estranged wife Hermione Gingold claimed the song was written for herself, Maschwitz contradicted these claims. Instead, Maschwitz cited memories of a "young love", and most scholars and biographers posit Maschwitz's youthful affair with Ross inspired the song.
Early life and education
Jean Ross was raised in luxury at Maison Ballassiano in the British protectorate of Alexandria, Egypt. She was the eldest daughter of Charles Ross, a Scottish cotton classifier for the Bank of Egypt and brought up with her four siblings in a staunchly liberal, anti-Tory household.Ross was educated in England at Leatherhead Court, Surrey. As an unusually intelligent pupil who had completed the sixth form curricula by the age of 16, she was bored and loathed school. She became openly rebellious when informed she must remain at school for another year to repeat her already completed coursework. To gain her freedom, she feigned a teenage pregnancy and was summoned to appear before the school's headmistress:
She falsely insisted to the headmistress that she was pregnant and the Leatherhead Court schoolmasters sequestered the teenager in a nearby insane asylum until a relative arrived and retrieved her. When they discovered the pregnancy was feigned, Ross was formally expelled. Exasperated by her defiant behaviour, her parents sent her abroad to Pensionnat Mistral, an elite Swiss finishing school in Neuchâtel. Ross, however, was either expelled or fled the school.
Using a trust stipend provided by her grandfather Charles Caudwell, who was an affluent industrialist and landowner, the teenage Ross returned to England and enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London. After diligently applying herself in her first year, she won a coveted acting prize that gave her the opportunity to play the lead role in any production of her choice. When she selected the difficult role of Phaedra, she was informed her youth precluded such a tragic role because she lacked the requisite life experience. Hurt by this refusal, Ross left the academy after one year to pursue a film career.
In 1930, at nineteen years of age, Ross and fellow Egyptian-born Hungarian actor Marika Rökk obtained cinematic roles portraying a harem houri in director Monty Banks' Why Sailors Leave Home, an early sound comedy that was filmed in London. Ross's dark complexion and partial fluency in Arabic were deemed suitable for the role. Disappointed with their small roles, she and Rökk heard rumours about ample job opportunities for aspiring actors in the Weimar Republic of Germany and set off with great expectations for Berlin.
Weimar Berlin
Ross's excursion to Weimar Germany proved less successful than she had hoped. Unable to find acting work, she worked as a nightclub singer in Berlin's lesbian bars and second-rate cabarets. When not singing or modelling, she visited the offices of the UFA GmbH, a German motion picture production company, in the hopes of gaining small film roles. By late 1931, she obtained a job as a dancer in theatre director Max Reinhardt's production of Offenbach's opéra fantastique ''Tales of Hoffmann and played Anitra in Reinhardt's production of Peer Gynt.Reinhardt's much-anticipated production of Tales of Hoffmann'' premiered on 28 November 1931. The production was reputedly one of the last great triumphs of the Berlin theatre scene prior to the Nazi Party's gradual ascent. Ross and a male dancer appeared together as an amorous couple in the stage background, and were visible only in silhouette during the Venetian palace sequence of the second act. Later, Ross said she and the male performer had capitalised on this opportunity for sexual intimacy in full view of the unsuspecting audience.
Meeting Isherwood
By late 1931, Ross had moved to Schöneberg, Berlin, where she shared modest lodgings in Fräulein Meta Thurau's flat at Nollendorfstraße 17 with English writer Christopher Isherwood, whom she had met in October 1930 or early 1931. Isherwood, who was an apprentice novelist, was politically ambivalent about the rise of fascism and had moved to Berlin in order to avail himself of boy prostitutes and to enjoy the city's orgiastic Jazz Age cabarets. At their first meeting, Ross monopolised the conversation and recounted her latest sexual conquests. At one point, she reached into her handbag and produced a diaphragm, which she waved in the face of a startled Isherwood. The two soon became intimate friends.Although Ross' relations with Isherwood were not always amicable, she soon joined Isherwood's social circle alongside more politically-aware poets W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. Subsequently, Ross was the only woman in this circle of gay male writers, who mythologised her in their respective memoirs. Among Isherwood's acquaintances, Ross was regarded as a sexual libertine who was devoid of inhibitions and had no qualms about entertaining visitors to their flat while nude or about discussing her sexual relations. A contemporary portrait of the 19-year-old Ross appears in Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin when the narrator first encounters the "divinely decadent" Sally Bowles:
File:Bundesarchiv B 145 Bild-P049500, Berlin, Aufmarsch der SA in Spandau.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.4|A parade of Nazi brownshirts in Weimar Berlin in 1932. By the time Ross and Isherwood fled Berlin, these parades had become a regular occurrence.
Isherwood further described the youthful Ross as having a physical resemblance to Merle Oberon but said her face naturally had a sardonic humour akin to that of comedian Beatrice Lillie. Their ramshackle flat at Nollendorfstraße 17 was in a working-class district near the centre of Weimar Berlin's radical enclaves, subversive activity, and gay nightlife.
By day, Ross was a fashion model for popular magazines, and by night, she was a bohemian chanteuse singing in the nearby cabarets located along the Kurfürstendamm avenue, an entertainment-vice district that was selected for future destruction by Nazi politician Joseph Goebbels in his 1928 journal. When the Nazi Party later seized power in early 1933, Brownshirts forcibly closed these venues. Isherwood visited these nightclubs to hear Ross sing, and he described her voice as poor but nonetheless effective:
Due to her acquaintance with Isherwood, Ross later became immortalised as "a bittersweet English hoyden" named Sally Bowles in Isherwood's 1937 eponymous novella and his 1939 book Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood introduced Ross to the visiting Paul Bowles, a bisexual American writer who would later gain acclaim for his post-colonial novel The Sheltering Sky. This meeting between Ross and Paul Bowles made an impression upon Isherwood, who later used Bowles' surname for the character Sally Bowles, whom he based upon Ross. Isherwood said Ross was "more essentially British than Sally; she grumbled like a true Englishwoman, with her 'grin-and-bear-it' grin. And she was tougher".
Botched abortion
While Isherwood sometimes had sex with women, Ross—unlike the fictional character Sally—never tried to seduce Isherwood, although they did share a bed whenever their flat became overcrowded with visiting revelers. Instead, a 27-year-old Isherwood settled into a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old German boy named Heinz Neddermeyer.Meanwhile, Ross entered into a variety of heterosexual liaisons, including one with musician Götz von Eick, who later became an actor under the stage name Peter van Eyck and starred in Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear. Although some biographers identified van Eyck as Jewish, others posit van Eyck was the wealthy scion of Prussian landowners in Pomerania. As an aristocrat, his family expected him to embark upon a military career but he became interested in jazz and pursued musical studies in Berlin.
When the 19-year-old van Eyck met Ross, he often moonlighted as a jazz pianist in Berlin cabarets. Either during their brief relationship or soon after their separation, Ross realised she was pregnant. As a personal favour to Ross, Isherwood pretended to be her heterosexual impregnator in order to facilitate an abortion, of the consequences of which Ross nearly died due to the doctor's incompetence. Visiting the ailing Ross in a Berlin hospital, Isherwood felt the resentment by the hospital staff for, as they assumed, forcing Ross to undergo an abortion. These events later inspired Isherwood to write his 1937 novella Sally Bowles and serves as its narrative climax.