Sally Bowles

Sally Bowles
Julie Harris as Sally Bowles.jpg
Julie Harris as Sally Bowles
in the 1951 play I Am a Camera
First appearanceSally Bowles (1937 novella)
Created byChristopher Isherwood
Based onJean Ross[1]
In-universe information
GenderFemale
OccupationCabaret singer
NationalityBritish

Sally Bowles (/boʊlz/) is a fictional character created by English-American novelist Christopher Isherwood and based upon 19-year-old cabaret singer Jean Ross.[1] The character debuted in Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles published by Hogarth Press,[2] and commentators have described the novella as "one of Isherwood's most accomplished pieces of writing."[2] The work was republished in the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin and in the 1945 anthology The Berlin Stories.

In the 1937 novella, Sally is a British flapper who moonlights as a cabaret singer in Weimar-era Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age. She is depicted by Isherwood as a "self-indulgent upper-middle-class British tourist who could escape Berlin whenever she chose."[3] By day, she is an aspiring film actress hoping to work for the UFA GmbH, the German film production company.[4] By night, she is a mediocre chanteuse at an underground club called The Lady Windermere located near the Tauentzienstraße.[5] She aspires to be a serious actress or, as an alternative, to ensnare a wealthy man to keep her as his mistress.[6] Unsuccessful at both, Sally departs Berlin on the eve of Adolf Hitler's ascension as Chancellor of Germany and is last heard from in the form of a postcard sent from Rome, Italy, with no return address.[7]

Following the tremendous popularity of the Sally Bowles character in subsequent decades, Jean Ross was hounded by reporters seeking information about her colourful past in Weimar-era Berlin.[8] She believed her popular association with the naïve character of Bowles occluded her lifelong work as a political writer and social activist.[9] According to her daughter Sarah Caudwell, Ross never "felt any sense of identity with the character of Sally Bowles, which in many respects she thought more closely modeled on" Isherwood's gay friends,[10] many of whom "fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the storm troopers looked in their uniforms".[11]

Sally Bowles is a central character in the 1951 John Van Druten stage play I Am a Camera, the 1955 film of the same name, the 1966 musical stage adaptation Cabaret and the 1972 film adaptation of the musical. The character of Sally Bowles inspired Truman Capote's Holly Golightly in his novella Breakfast at Tiffany's,[12][13] and the character also has appeared in novels by other authors.[14] In June 1979, critic Howard Moss of The New Yorker commented upon the peculiar resiliency of the character: "It is almost fifty years since Sally Bowles shared the recipe for a Prairie oyster with Herr Issyvoo [sic] in a vain attempt to cure a hangover" and yet the character in subsequent permutations lives on "from story to play to movie to musical to movie-musical."[15]

  1. ^ a b Isherwood 1976, pp. 60–64; Parker 2004, p. 179.
  2. ^ a b Parker 2004, p. 313.
  3. ^ Isherwood 1976, pp. 244–245.
  4. ^ Isherwood 2012, p. 29.
  5. ^ Isherwood 2012, pp. 27, 38; Garebian 2011, p. 5.
  6. ^ Isherwood 2012, pp. 44–45.
  7. ^ Isherwood 2012, pp. 75–76.
  8. ^ Caudwell 1986, pp. 28–29; Friedrich 1995, p. 307; Fryer 1977, p. 164.
  9. ^ Firchow 2008, p. 120; Caudwell 1986, pp. 28–29.
  10. ^ Caudwell 1986, pp. 28–29.
  11. ^ Isherwood 1976, pp. 124–125; Doyle 2013.
  12. ^ Cite error: The named reference Izzo 2005 p. 144 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  13. ^ Norton 2010; Clarke 1988, Chapter 19
  14. ^ Bailey 2012.
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference Moss 1979 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).