In the Oscar-winning 1972 film Cabaret, Liza Minnelli, framed by black fishnet stockings and extravagant false eyelashes, is unmistakably Judy Garland’s daughter as she plays the brazen flapper Sally Bowles. The film follows a world of wine, song and sex as Germany falls under the poisonous influence of the Nazis.
Bob Fosse’s movie is also celebrated for Joel Grey’s electrifying performance as the Emcee. It was adapted from the Harold Prince Broadway and West End musical, which had previously showcased Judi Dench in 1968 and established Sally’s distinctive, gravelly voice.
The material had already reached the screen in a non-musical form with I Am A Camera in 1955, starring Anton Diffring, Shelley Winters and Julie Harris as Sally. The studios had wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role, a choice that could have been inspired. The film received an X certificate, reportedly because of the line: ‘What shall we do first, have a drink or go to bed?’
Every adaptation drew on Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye To Berlin (1939), later collected as The Berlin Stories (1945). The books have appeared in countless paperback editions, including a Folio version illustrated by Beryl Cook with her characteristically exuberant images of big-busted women in suspenders brandishing whips.
Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey in Cabaret (1972)
In 1929, Isherwood, the son of Cheshire gentry, was drawn to the decadence of Weimar Germany, its atonal music, Expressionist art and male brothels. Berlin was, in his description, ‘a city with no virgins’, where men wore kimonos and burned incense. In smoky cellar bars, showgirls would tear off their wigs, ‘exposing them as men’. This was certainly not Cheadle.
Known as Herr Ishyvoo, Isherwood shared a rented flat with the 19-year-old woman who would soon inspire Sally Bowles: ‘an apathetic gold-digger and dupe’ whose desire to become a cabaret star far exceeded her ability. As Isherwood observed, ‘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 of what people thought of her.’
The real Sally was Jean Ross, a woman with a ‘long and thin’ face covered in dead-white powder. She would make declarations such as, ‘I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I’ve got a marvellous new lover.’ It was said that she had more than 200 lovers during her time in Berlin. Poet Stephen Spender, later the father-in-law of Barry Humphries, offered the ironic but admiring verdict: ‘I think she’s absolutely repulsive.’
Born in Egypt in 1911 and educated in Switzerland, Jean arrived in Germany hoping to find work as a film-industry translator. She had little musical ability and could not carry a tune; nor would she make her own bed, stop talking or put down her cigarettes. Yet this dark-eyed beauty fascinated everyone around her.
Author Christopher Isherwood
After her Berlin years, which ended with a botched abortion, Jean returned to London and began a relationship with Eric Maschwitz. He wrote These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You) with her in mind and had earned £1.2 million in royalties by 1957. Jean later had an affair with journalist Claud Cockburn, became a communist, reported from the Spanish Civil War and met Ernest Hemingway.
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She then vanished from public view, until this newspaper tracked her down after the success of the Cabaret musical. When asked, ‘Are you the real Sally Bowles?’, Jean replied: ‘Yes, and now go away.’ She died from cervical cancer in 1973.
Isherwood’s other major inspiration was Gerald Hamilton, the model for Arthur Norris, who changed trains. In the novel, Norris is a confidence trickster and adventurer, a comic character sporting an ill-fitting toupée. According to Brian Fairbanks, the real Hamilton was every bit as extraordinary.
Hamilton worked, for reasons that remain unclear, in a Chinese bank, converted to Catholicism, squandered a family inheritance, experimented with black magic and wore a turban decorated with a red bicycle reflector. He was fond of dancing and bridge. Isherwood described him as an ‘icy cynic’ who ‘took it for granted everybody would grab and cheat if they dared’.
Hamilton sold rifles to Indian rebels, cheated at roulette and attempted to learn Dutch. During the Second World War, he spied on the British for the Germans and on the Germans for the British. He conducted an affair with a Black nightclub singer who was killed when a bomb struck London’s Café de Paris. Later, disguised as a nun, he escaped to Ireland and met Vatican emissaries at the German embassy in Dublin. Imprisoned as a traitor, he shared a cell with Oswald Mosley, who regarded him as both a joke and a bore.
After the war, Hamilton became friendly with the elderly Lord Alfred Douglas and had some kind of association with Guy Burgess, the Soviet defector. Obese and stooped, he claimed that sculptors had used his body as a model when creating likenesses of Winston Churchill. Hamilton died bankrupt in 1970, although he may have faked his death ‘to evade creditors’.
Life is a Cabaret is available now
The television biopic Christopher And His Kind (2011) was filmed in Belfast rather than Berlin, but it remains well worth revisiting. Toby Jones plays Hamilton, Imogen Poots portrays Jean Ross and Matt Smith takes the role of Isherwood.
The story is entertaining and often farcical. Yet Isherwood’s famous claim that ‘I am a camera with the shutter open’ does not entirely withstand scrutiny. His work was heavily edited, and its blind spots are striking. The Berlin novels offer little sense of the economic crisis, anti-Semitism or the growing reach of the police state.
Fairbanks rightly supplies the missing historical context: the failing democracy, the street violence inflicted by the rising Nazis and the persecution of Jews. Their businesses and shops were confiscated, they were dismissed from their jobs, excluded from the civil service, barred from driving motor cars and prevented from attending concerts. Deprived of citizenship, Jews were soon rounded up for torture, slave labour in rock quarries and murder.
By the early 1930s, while Isherwood was enjoying Berlin’s nightlife, Hitler’s conviction that rebuilding the army would restore Germany’s strength had already led to the suspension of freedom of speech and the press, alongside the abandonment of due process in criminal cases.
Fairbanks is excellent when explaining the wider historical reality behind Cabaret’s high jinks, but his prose is far less impressive. Words such as ‘debaucherous’, ‘frenemies’, ‘gaydar’, ‘wannabe’, ‘strategize’ and ‘guilted’ appear alongside numerous other awkward turns of phrase.
