The Eternal Sally Bowles

Scarlett O’Hara apart, can one think of another heroine of fiction of the 1930s who has lived on as notably, as memorably, as triumphantly as Sally Bowles? Hers, indeed, is a peculiar case. The usual thing is for a novel and its characters to exist in an inescapable relationship, fading into obscurity or oblivion together (the general fate), or else (the exceptional fate) aging together into “classic” status. But for Sally Bowles her literary beginning proved to be only a kind of launching pad. from which she was to take off into stellar space, far beyond the mere trappings of fiction. Adding to the peculiarity, moreover, is the fact that the work of fiction from which she sprang (or sprang away from) has itself not been forgotten. Admired, and acquiring generations of new readers, it has sturdily endured, albeit on a less glamorous and international scale than its heroine, until it is now accepted as one of the secure literary achievements of the 1930s in England.

Sally, as a character, made her first appearance in 1937 in a very long short story or a very short novel by Christopher Isherwood. The book was Sally Bowles; the publisher. The Hogarth Press. (There was no separate American publication.) Two years later Isherwood included Sally Bowles along with five other pieces in Goodbye to Berlin, something more than a collection of stories and something not quite a novel, that was published both in England and America—here by Random House. In a brief, characteristically diffident prefatory note he explained that “the six pieces contained in this volume form a roughly continuous narrative. They are the only existing fragments of what was originally planned as a huge episodic novel of pre-Hitler Berlin [where Isherwood had lived almost continuously from 1929 to 1933, and where he had met the English original of Sally Bowles]. I had intended to call it The Lost. My old title has been changed, however; it is too grandiose for this short loosely-connected sequence of diaries and sketches.”

That was in 1939—not, all things considered, an ideal time to publish a low-keyed, ironic, rueful, sometimes frivolous-seeming fictional account of life on the fringes of Berlin just as the Nazis were coming to power.

Goodbye to Berlin was praised by reviewers, and won for itself a small circle of loyal admirers; then, like many another worthy novel of the period, it was swallowed up in the wake of the war, and that seemed to be that. Isherwood settled in Los Angeles, where he became a student of Vedanta; his next novel, PraterViolet, would not appear until 1945. For Sally Bowles there began what we now recognize as a long “latency" period. There she was—with her green fingernails and her prairie oysters, her indiscriminate “dar; lings,” her grand passions that turned out to be (as she was the first to admit) rather shabby little affairs, her silliness, her outrageousness. her pathos and her courage, her sheer marvelous indestructibility—waiting for her next incarnation.

The man who eventually brought that about—and, of course, Sally being Sally, it would have to be a man. darling—was the dramatist John Van Druten, who decided to make a play out of Isherwood’s Berlin material, with Sally Bowles at its center. The year was 1951. and the play was I Am a Camera. Van Druten performed his task skillfully, but the stroke of genius in the proceedings was the decision to cast Julie Harris in the role of Sally Bowles. Isherwood has described their first meeting:

When I arrived in NewYork to sit in on rehearsals, I had first to go to a studio and be photographed. for publicity, with our leading lady, Julie Harris. I had never met Miss Harris before. I hadn’t even seen her famous performance in The Member of the Wedding.

Now. out of the dressing-room, came a slim, sparkling-eyed girl in an absurdly tart-like black satin dress, with a little cap stuck jauntily on her pale flame-colored hair, and a silly naughty giggle. This was Sally Bowles in person. Miss Harris was more essentially Sally Bowles than the Sally of my book, and was much more like Sally than the real girl who long ago gave me the idea for my character.

Thanks to Julie Harris and Sally Bowles—for the two were really indistinguishable, as anyone (not only the dazzled author) who has read the book and had the good fortune to see that unforgettable performance will testify—I Am a Camera was a triumph for them both; and since then, decade by decade, Sally has never had to look back. In the mid-fifties came, inevitably, the movie of the play (again with Miss Harris); and then, in the mid-sixties, the musical Cabaret, drawing upon Isherwood’s material once more, set to a clever pastiche of a score that shuttled between Berlin and Broadway; and then, in the early seventies, the movie of the musical, with Liza Minnelli as Sally. Arriving at that most recent and most spectacular thus far of her incarnations, Sally had undergone certain superficial metamorphoses: for one thing, she had become an American; for another, she was shown to us (and how else could we have seen her with Liza in the part?) as a rivetingly professional entertainer. Miss Minnelli belting out “Life is a cabaret, old chum” is light-years distant from Sally Bowles at the Lady Windermere, in Isherwood’s text, singing “Exactly Like You” “badly, without any expression . . . her arms hanging carelessly limp, and a take-it-or-leave-it grin on her face.”

And yet, for all the changes, from one incarnation to the next, fundamentally she remains Sally Bowles; and one wonders, ventures to speculate, at her continuing appeal, decade by decade, and at the ease with which she modulates, fits in. It is not, I think, as a historical figure that Sally chiefly captivates us. There is something remarkably contemporary about her, so that one feels she would be as much at ease this year at Maxwell’s Plum in New York or Perry’s in San Francisco as she was in 1930 at the Lady Windermere off the Tauentzienstrasse. (Let us pass over the easy, questionable parallels that might be drawn between Berlin in its decadence and present-day America.)

As a character perhaps because Isherwood’s method is not to give us too much, only a succession of partial portraits or snapshots, what the camera photographed at a chosen moment Sally lends herself easily and accommodatingly to a multitude of polymorphic fantasies, For heterosexual men she is the girl one takes to bed with a minimum of fuss, and says good-bye to (or forgets to say good-bye to) with a minimum of guilt: a good lay and a better memory. For homosexual men she is the understanding girl who makes no demands and poses no threat. And for women she is but here I must move with some caution. Do women identify with Sally, or pity her, envy her or patronize her? That they feel something about her. I am certain, and I would suspect that now (as perhaps was not the case in the 1950s) they find her admirable in her courage the courage to be herself; to he, for all her apparent dependence on men, independent of them; to go her own way, acknowledging her silliness, which in the long run is a kind of shrewdness, a way of surviving.

Survive, certainly, she does; and will continue to do so. I am confident that Sally has not yet been shown to us in her final and grandest incarnation. It looms ahead, however. Surely the logical conclusion for Ms. Bowles is the opera that has yet to be written. What it will be like, apart from being a huge, predictable success, is the secret of her composer, whoever he may turn out to be. Meanwhile, it is beguiling to think of the Puccinian version in which she might have figured: Sally, a latter-day Mimi, so gay, so doomed, made to pay for her folly but rewarded with so touching a death scene. Or, better still, the Straussian version: Sally as the Marschailin, a woman of a certain age and a certain experience, ensconced in her suite at the Plaza, dismissing her current young man. and remembering the past with so much tenderness and nostalgia. It seems only a matter of time, of waiting for the right moment, and the marvelous thing will happen, as her history already amply proves. After all, it was only forty or so years ago that she met this absolutely fascinating man, Christopher Isherwood, darling, at Fritz Wendel’s flat in Berlin, and darling, he absolutely adored me . . .