Hi friends!

This week, I’m excited to finally share a piece I’ve been working on for ages: an exploration of the origins and evolution of Cabaret and its divinely decadent star, Sally Bowles! The last little push came courtesy of the release of Liza Minelli’s delightful new memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This. A massive thank you to Samuel for inspiration, advice and editing input — I loved researching it, and hope you enjoy the read.

And speaking of Cabaret super-fans, my brother Neil’s new art exhibition, a lying place, is opening this weekend (20 June) at Solvent Gallery in Annandale. It’s on for about a fortnight — come check it out!

But now, Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome — Im Cabaret, au Cabaret, to Cabaret!

The Lives & Loves of Sally Bowles

We first meet Sally Bowles in the drawing room of Fritz Wendel’s flat, on an afternoon in early October. She’s over half an hour late, but Fritz is sure to let his guest Christopher know that she’s “mar-vellous” and “hot stuff” — “I believe I’m getting crazy about her.”

The woman who swans into the apartment is clad in black silk, with a jaunty cap pinned to the side of her head and fingernails painted emerald-green. Her hands are dirty from cigarettes, her face is powdered dead white, and her hair (and penciled-in eyebrows) is dark. From the first, she’s a whirlwind. Sally immediately calls everyone “darling”, seizes Fritz’s phone to call a “terribly passionate” recent sexual conquest, sinks into the sofa and asks for a coffee (“I’m simply dying of thirst!”), passes judgement on her host’s troubles in love, then races off to meet another “old swine” who wants her as a mistress — but not before borrowing ten marks for the taxi. “I haven’t got a bean!”

Sally’s irresistible debut comes in Christopher Isherwood’s short story ‘Sally Bowles’, first published in 1937 and later collected in Goodbye to Berlin, an episodic bystander’s account of Germany’s descent into fascism. For anyone who already knows Sally — through revivals of the Kander, Ebb & Masteroff Broadway musical, as embodied by Liza Minelli on screen, or endlessly reproduced via merchandise, drag shows and even Schitt’s Creek — it’s remarkable to see her fully formed from her first appearance, already endowed with the affected drawl, aspirations of stardom and love for prairie oysters that will follow her through decades of adaptations.

After the door slams shut behind her, Fritz remarks, “I’m getting crazier about her each time I see her!”

Same Fritz. Same.

Yet this iconic figure of a flighty chanteuse with a dream, belting out ‘Maybe This Time’ in a dingy basement bar has always sat in a strange tension with the story around her. Cabaret in all its guises is a study of Weimar Berlin’s rapid transformation from a hotbed of liberal decadence into the nexus of Nazism. Most iterations are imbued with a sense of urgency, speaking to contemporary upheavals stretching from the onset of WW2 to the US Civil Rights movement to the AIDs epidemic, all the way to our own era of surging populism. But it’s Sally — who only appeared in two of Isherwood’s Berlin stories, and is perhaps least personally touched by the rising tides of antisemitism, homophobia and nationalism — who consistently takes centre stage.

The challenge of every adaptation is to find the sweet spot wherein Sally’s distance from the politics of the moment helps to sharpen the social critique rather than distract from it. To that end, we find that while Sally herself remains recognisable from one Cabaret to the next, everything around her is in a state of flux. Star crossed lovers come and go — sometimes it’s Fritz and Natalia, sometimes it’s Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz — the Lady Windermere becomes the Kit Kat Club, and Clive the obnoxious American transforms into the suave Baron Maximilian (or vanishes entirely). Even the impish Emcee, who today frequently shares the spotlight (and celebrity casting opportunities) with Sally, is only a late addition to the tale.

Nowhere is this strange evolution more apparent than in the ever-shifting identity of the story’s point-of-view character: Sally’s roommate, an aspiring writer who goes by the name of Brian, or Cliff, or Christopher or “the Camera”. Sometimes he’s American, sometimes he’s British, sometimes he’s straight, and sometimes he’s queer. This slipperiness goes all the way back to Isherwood himself, who obscured his own homosexuality via this rather obvious self-insert character to keep his stories palatable for 1930s audiences. Through every transformation, he has remained by Sally’s side.

So let’s travel back through the decades, through the films, musical, stage play and novel, all the way to the real woman who inspired the “mar-vellous” Miss Bowles, to explore how each adaptation grapples with politics, sexuality and Sally.

Inch by inch. Step by step. Mile by mile. Man by man.

Sally & Brian on Screen

If you are anything like me, your first introduction to Sally Bowles probably came with Bob Fosse’s 1972 big-screen musical Cabaret. Once seen, she’s never forgotten: Liza Minelli in a halter vest and short-shorts, draped over a chair with bowler hat askew over her black helmet hair. There have been many remarkable Sallys over the years, but none have held the same stranglehold over our collective vision of the character as ‘Liza with a Z’: delightful, daffy, sexy, vulnerable and oh-so-larger-than-life.

So it’s worth beginning with what sets this Sally apart: on paper, Liza is completely miscast. It’s not the superficial differences — who cares if Sally is British in every other version — but Minelli’s undeniable musical talent. In Isherwood’s stories, Sally Bowles is a mediocre performer; he describes her as singing “badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides”. That’s why she’s working in third-rate bars like the Lady Windermere. She’s dime-a-dozen, not a star.

Well, Liza Minelli is, and the role transformed with her. Fosse didn’t try to tamper down Minelli’s star power to fit the brief, but accentuated it. He added showstoppers that played to her strengths: ‘Mein Herr’ and ‘Money Money’ are movie originals, and Sally’s most famous number, ‘Maybe This Time’, wasn’t even originally written for Cabaret, but was a number from an unproduced Kander & Ebb show that Minelli had already been performing on tour for years. She’d even recorded it for her debut album, and lobbied Fosse hard to include it in the film. Liza was also responsible for a good deal of Sally’s now-familiar iconography: the haircut was suggested by Liza’s father, director Vincent Minelli, inspired by Louise Brookes’ angular flapper cut in Pandora’s Box, and the wardrobe, mixing period and contemporary elements, largely came from Liza op-shopping with Fosse’s wife Gwen Verdon in Munich prior to the shoot. As musical theatre historian Kurt Ganzl puts it, “I don’t suppose Sally Bowles has been played as she was written since, and I don’t suppose she ever will be. That’s what you call taking a role and making it your own.”

Fosse’s brilliant choice to confine all of the film’s musical numbers to the Kit Kat Club, overseen by Joel Grey’s Emcee, creates a further dissonance. Sally’s prowess and incandescent star power within the club comes to feel unreal, in constant tension with the harsh reality of life outside. This bleeds into our understanding of Sally — she never feels entirely a part of the poverty-stricken world of 1931 Berlin. Jay Presson Allen’s screenplay adds the crucial detail that Sally is the daughter of a high-flying American diplomat, making it abundantly clear that she could make a swift exit whenever she wants, a privilege few of the Jews, queers and everyday Germans around her share.

While Sally cosplays the part of the starving artist, Minelli makes it clear that even if her Sally can belt out a tune with the best of them, she’s a lousy actress. Even the most casual observer can sense that this self-styled femme fatale is “as fatale as an after-dinner mint.” Sally’s desperate need for love and security is painfully evident under every display of social and sexual bravado — scar issue of a short lifetime spent as an exploitable commodity, a bauble for men that is momentarily admired then tossed aside — until at last she sings to an empty room:

This time, she pins those hopes on Brian, played by Michael York. Like his literary counterpart, Brian is a young British intellectual, freshly arrived in Berlin and eager to eke out a living giving English lessons. Michael York initially turned down the role, fearing it was just "a pallid screen doppelganger” for Isherwood, “a dull foil to all the brilliant extrovert characters enlivening the story”, but changed his mind when Fosse rewrote the role to give the Brian a greater sense of playfulness, a true partner in divine decadence for Sally. But Fosse’s true stroke of genius was to make Brian’s sexual ambiguity — also inherited from the novel — into the fulcrum point of his relationship with Sally.

Of course, for a first-time viewer, it initially seems like Fosse has pulled a Breakfast at Tiffany’s, transforming a gay besties story into a Hollywood-friendly straight romance. Although Brian initially resists Sally’s advances (“doesn’t my body drive you wild with desire?”), the pair finally fall into bed together. But then the film introduces a character not found in any other Cabaret — Maximilian, a dashing German Baron who sweeps Sally off her feet with his extravagant largesse… yet insists on bringing Brian along for the ride. It soon becomes evident that Brian is also being seduced — with tailored suits, champagne, gold accessories, and some much-missed intellectual jousting. And if Sally’s seduction of Brian lures him towards her wilful ignorance of the political headwinds, Maximilian’s seduction promises that the Nazi threat can be managed, contained and exploited; that money will ultimately trump ideology.

In one of the most indelible exchanges in queer film history, Sally and Brian finally realise they’ve been cheating on each other — with the same man. (“Screw Maximilian!” “I do.” “…So do I.” Absolutely incredible). There were objections to Brian’s bisexuality of course — not only from nervous producers but also Isherwood himself, who felt the reveal treated his sexuality like “an indecent but comic weakness to be snickered at”. I disagree; I think it’s a triumphant moment that treats sexual fluidity as something matter-of-fact, equally at home in the 1930s as the post-Stonewall 70s. Brian (and Maximilian) escape the era’s “limp-wristed fag stereotype” (Fosse’s words), depicting a queer man who’s capable, chiseled and willing to punch a Nazi. Brian’s duality enriches the film in turn; he is not only Sally’s love interest, but her sexual competitor. He is both a member of a persecuted minority and another straight-passing, privileged expat able to hop on the next train out of Berlin when things get tough.

All these dualities and contradictions that Fosse has fostered — straight and gay, performance and reality, the Kit Kat Club and the real Berlin — at last become too weighted, and Sally’s fragile deck of cards begins to collapse. Sally’s pregnancy (father unknown) spurs Brian to propose, but Sally — believing she doesn’t deserve Brian and the straight-laced British life he promises, and perhaps fearing he’ll desert her for a man — gets an abortion. Brian leaves Berlin. Sally lingers on, and the film closes with her boisterous performance of the title song, a triumphant ode to seeking distraction from life’s troubles, to a Kit Kat Club patronised no longer by queers, Jews and outcasts, but Nazi brownshirts. Sally’s art, which once appeared so transgressive, has become yet more fodder for fascists.

Sally & Cliff on Stage

Six years before Liza Minelli’s performance forever defined the character of Sally Bowles on the big screen, the original Kander, Ebb & Masteroff musical Cabaret debuted on Broadway. The role of Sally was performed by Jill Haworth, a relative newcomer with a black wig, white furs and a rather shaky voice. The show certainly wasn’t a guaranteed hit — this was a form-breaking concept musical, quietly revolutionary for 1966, with strange publicity materials that boasted, not about its stars, but the influence of Bertolt Brecht and Weimar-era artists like Otto Dix.

The team had been drawn to Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin for its themes rather than its plot (not that there was much to begin with). The musical retained Sally Bowles, her sexually-ambiguous roommate, the Weimar setting… and not much else. Despite this, Sally was hardly the central figure. For starters, she only had three numbers: her introductory floorshow ‘Don’t Tell Mama’, love song ‘Perfectly Marvellous’, and finale ‘Cabaret’. The spotlight had to be shared with a suite of all-new characters and plotlines, including a sweet-but-doomed romance between landlady Fräulein Schneider and Jewish fruit seller Herr Schultz, the machinations of Nazi smuggler Ernst Ludwig, and, of course, the goings-on at the Kit Kat Club, overseen by Joel Grey’s devilish Emcee (a performance so remarkable that the producers forced Fosse to cast him in the film years later).

Although most of the songs were delivered in standard musical theatre style (i.e. the cast spontaneously bursting into song mid-scene), the Kit Kat Club functioned as an experimental, almost metaphysical performance space, where the Emcee’s musical numbers (‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’, If You Could See Her’) could mirror the decay of German society. The key feature of the Kit Kat set was literally a vast overhead mirror, presenting a distorted, unsettling view of the on-stage cabaret performers, and designed to collapse the distance between paying audiences in 1966 New York with 1930 Berlin. Director Hal Prince always saw the production as urgently political: in rehearsals, he shared reference images with his cast and crew of snarling blonde, white teenagers, faces brimming with hate… before revealing that these were not members of the Hitler Youth, but American students violently resisting desegregation at Little Rock.

Sally was a difficult role to cast; Prince auditioned over two hundred actresses, including a young Liza Minelli. But Liza was deemed "too American, and too strong a singer, to play a mediocre British flapper”, despite her friendship with the composers. Instead, Prince chose Jill Haworth, a British film actress with a loud, unpolished and untrained voice — all the better to match Isherwood’s description. But even when the show became a hit, Haworth’s middling vocals were singled out as one of the its few disappointments. And it wasn’t just Haworth; Judi Dench took over the role on the West End on the basis of her (considerable) acting chops rather than singing prowess, only to receive the worst reviews of her career. “If you can’t get the top note,” Prince advised her, “Act that you can’t get it”.

With Sally’s star dimmed, consensus held that the Schneider & Schultz romance was the dominant plotline — they had more songs after all, including a charming one about a pineapple. This impression was confirmed at the Tony Awards, where Lotte Lenya (the original Fräulein Schneider) was nominated for ‘Best Actress’ instead of Haworth.

Equally challenging was the Isherwood character, now renamed Cliff Bradshaw and transformed into an American; writer Joe Masteroff confessed “I was more comfortable writing an American than an Englishman.” His passivity was a problem, but there was no appetite in 1966 for making the character queer; one of the producers demanded “we gotta put balls on this guy. If he shacks up with the girl, he’s gotta sleep with her.” So the closeted Cliff became Sally’s rather unenthusiastic love interest, rarely participating in the singing and dancing. Their inevitable break-up is the musical’s only clear moment of intersection between Sally and the wider politics of Berlin — Cliff urges her to “wake up” to the dangers and flee the country with him, but Sally chooses to return to the Kit Kat Club and her impossible dreams of stardom.

Or at least, that’s how the show used to go.

Liza’s powerhouse portrayal of Sally in the film forever altered audience expectations for the original musical. Audiences today are paying to see Sally belt out ‘Mein Herr’, ‘Money Money’ and ‘Maybe This Time’ — not to mention a dash of that legendary Fosse choreography. And so, from the 1980s onward, production after production has added songs from the movie, supplementing or outright replacing the original score. As a result, Sally’s role (along with that of the Emcee) has continued to grow, transforming Miss Bowles from just one member of an ensemble into a quintessential diva part that attracts stars like Natasha Richardson, Emma Stone and Jesse Buckley.

Masteroff’s script has also undergone considerable rewrites. Modern productions have opted to drag Cabaret — and Cliff — out of the closet at last. Sam Mendes’ landmark 1993 revival was laden with queer imagery, including the now-iconic skimpy Kit Kat costumes made up largely of straps and garters. Most recently, Rebecca Frecknall’s 2021 production (still going strong on the West End) explicitly outed Cliff as a gay man. His decision to pursue a heteronormative relationship with Sally is thus transfigured into yet another act of delusion and denial in a musical laden with them (although his ‘real talk’ that Sally doesn’t any talent sounds rather less convincing when you’ve heard her belt out ‘Maybe This Time’ before the intermission). Similarly, Sally’s newfound realisation that Cliff doesn’t truly love her gives added impetus to her decision to get an abortion.

Although I suspect these rolling change have been vital to Cabaret’s ongoing success, I also believe they’ve seriously imbalanced a musical that has always struggled to serve its disparate plot-lines. Despite her expanded role, in Frecknell’s production Sally still spends the majority of her scenes just hanging around Cliff’s apartment, siloed from the rest of the cast while more politically cogent plots occur elsewhere. Miss Bowles may have firmly pushed Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz off the marquee, but their old-fashioned musical theatre romance nonetheless eats up nearly half of the running time, and looks increasingly tired alongside the experimental, libertine atmosphere of the rest of the show. Meanwhile, Cliff’s newly-awakened queerness is all talk, and has yet to be convincingly integrated into the plot or songs (unless you count a furtive kiss with an extra).

As a result, today’s directors have to put in a lot of work to pull these ideas together in the climax, and finally integrate Sally into the core theme of rising fascism. Mendes opted for shock value, ending with a prophetic vision of the denizens of the Kit Kat Club relegated to pink triangle-wearing victims of the Nazi concentration camps, drawing an explicit link to the contemporary AIDs crisis. Frecknell’s approach is a little more metaphorical: the final act of the show sees the ensemble being integrated, one-by-one, into the Emcee’s growing mass of Aryan conformity, sporting slicked-back hair and pale suits. It’s in this state that Sally performs the title number — as a soul at war with itself, disintegrating before our very eyes, delivering her last lines as a discordant scream:

The words have been completely robbed of Liza’s deluded delight; her declaration now sounds akin to the final lines of Orwell’s 1984. Sally Bowles has won the victory over herself. She loves a cabaret.

Sally & ‘The Camera’

Now what would Cabaret look like without all those pesky songs or lefty politics? Let me introduce you to the very first adaptations of Isherwood’s Berlin stories. Now largely forgotten, I Am A Camera was a Tony-winning 1951 Broadway play, soon adapted into a relatively successful British film in 1956. They marked Sally Bowles’ first appearance on both stage and screen. It’s a critical link in the chain; here we find the first instance of romantic subplot between Fritz and Natalia Landauer (two Isherwood characters who never meet on the page), an expanded sequence with the rich American businessman Clive (who presages Maximilian), and scenes such as Fritz and Sally crashing Natalia’s english lesson, Sally’s dubious advice to “pounce”, and Fritz’s confession that he’s Jewish, all in their nascent forms.

For all that, I’m sorry to report that I Am A Camera is no a lost gem; the hard-to-find film version is about as inspiring as its online nickname, “straight Cabaret”, would suggest. The curious title comes from the opening paragraphs of Goodbye to Berlin, in which Christopher Isherwood’s self-titled narrator reflects:

I Am A Camera follows suit by naming its hero ‘Christopher Isherwood’, and insisting rather obnoxiously on his role as a chronicler of the age. This is the only version of Cabaret that cares about its male lead’s writing career, treating Sally as both a source of inspiration and a comical nuisance who makes it impossible for poor Chris to get any work done. Whereas every other iteration of the story is at heart a portrait of a liberal society being overtaken by fascism, I Am A Camera is instead largely about the pitfalls of having a wacky roommate.

Nonetheless, this is the moment when Sally Bowles jumped from a little-known character in a pair of short stories to the main attraction. The part was originated by Broadway legend Julie Harris, who won the first of her five Tony awards for the role, and reproduced it for the big screen. While I think she often over-eggs things for the camera, Harris’ charisma is the film’s biggest asset, and she really sells scene after scene of sitcom-grade hijinks. But her Sally never really gets the chance to seduce us — there are no delightful Kit Kat Club performances, her Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl tendencies are dialled up to eleven, and the film displays a dismissive, paternal attitude towards her: “naive as a school-girl, trusting as a child.”

Surprisingly, Camera doesn’t work very hard to straighten Christopher up. Played by an uninspired Lawrence Harvey, he’s introduced as a “confirmed bachelor” (we know what that means), and never treats Sally as a legitimate love interest, only a nuisance — aside from one deeply unpleasant scene (bizarrely played for laughs) where he ‘cracks’ and almost forces himself on Sally. The film excuses his general passivity by awkwardly insisting that he has a “camera-like detachment” and is committed to his “very important work” as a writer, but the result is a dull figure who swings between neurotic, churlish and sulky. Nonetheless, scholar Marjorie Garber in her book Vice Versa argues this charisma void serves a purpose, deliberating displacing “the question of dangerous sexuality onto Sally Bowles, she is permitted to traverse the territory from androgyny to promiscuity.” And indeed, the production was considered groundbreaking at the time for its frank discussion of Sally’s sex life, which had to be significantly cut back to appease cinema censors — Sally’s abortion (pivotal to the climax of every version) is written off as a false pregnancy scare, muddling the film further.

But whereas other Cabarets cleverly deploy Sally to contrast and illuminate attitudes towards the rise of fascism, I Am A Camera is just as detached and aloof as its star. The convulsions of Weimar Berlin are mere window dressing; this story could just as well have been set in any colourful European capital. Even the Nazis are only mentioned in passing, and only visualised when Chris goes on a late-film wander. True, like Cliff and Brian he hits a Nazi (huzzah!) — but the incident only serves to give Chris something to write about, sparking a breakthrough that propels him out of Berlin and towards literary stardom. Fritz and Natalia, the sole Jewish characters, shuffle off-stage with a resolution to move to Switzerland until this all blows over. The film has so little weight that it ends, not with a call to action or intimation of tragedies to come, but a cutesy epilogue set in London in the 1950s, where Chris is re-introduced to Sally — older but no wiser — and she quickly worms her way into being his freeloading roommate yet again. I find the film’s incidental depiction of Nazism betrays an ugly sense of self-satisfaction; suggesting this was all merely a passing phase, already consigned to the dust-bin of history. Instead, that’s where I Am A Camera has remained.

Jean & Christopher in Berlin

Before Cabaret, before I Am A Camera, before Goodbye to Berlin, before Sally… there was Jean Ross.

Jean was the daughter of a rich Scottish cotton merchant, raised in Egypt, and sent to boarding school in England in her teens. She was devilishly smart and easily bored, with a knack for causing trouble. She was kicked out of her boarding school for feigning a pregnancy, sequestered in an insane asylum, and moved across the pond to an elite Swiss finishing school… where she was also expelled. Back in London and eating into her trust fund, she studied at RADA but quit after a year. Then she was on the move, looking for opportunities to act, model and sing — and eventually become a film star. Those dreams brought her to Weimar Berlin in 1930, just nineteen years old, where she found work in dingy cabarets and lesbian bars. It’s also where she first met Christopher Isherwood.

The pair were introduced in the apartment of Isherwood’s friend Franz von Ullman (who was impersonating a Baron at the time, and served as the inspiration for Fritz), recounting her sexual conquests and waving around her diaphragm. The two became fast friends, and a few months later Jean moved into Christopher’s flat. That arrangement lasted for around five months, until Jean’s love life wreaked a little too much havoc on the furniture, and the landlady kicked her out. Later that year, Christopher helped Jean get an abortion; but it was a rushed backyard job, and nearly killed her. Jean left Berlin for London in 1932, months before Isherwood.

There was no question that Jean provided the template for Sally. Everything from her first meeting with Isherwood, to her fashion sense, to her mannerisms in performance were written directly into his short stories. The overlap was so brazen that Isherwood’s publisher refused to print ‘Sally Bowles’ until they obtained Jean’s written consent to head off any libel suit — the abortion sequence was a particular sticking point, as the procedure was illegal in England and carried a potential life sentence. Jean wasn’t happy with the caricatured portrait, and equivocated for months… but Isherwood begged and pleaded, insisting that he desperately needed the money. And so Jean Ross finally gave her approval in early 1937, and a few months later, the mar-vellous Sally Bowles made her debut.

At first, the link between Jean and Sally was only known to a small circle of their old friends from Berlin. Jean had a busy decade; she joined the Communist party, became an anti-fascist activist, and went on to work as a film critic, essayist and war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. She had little cause to think about her literary alter-ego. That was, until adaptations of Goodbye to Berlin began to draw press attention, and a vindictive ex-boyfriend leaked the connection to the press. At first, Jean ignored it; but when the musical Cabaret explored in the late 1960s, journalists pounced. Suddenly, it was as if Jean’s decades of hard-fought activism had been erased — all anyone wanted to know were sordid tales of her hedonistic youth in Berlin as the “real Sally Bowles”.

What truly stung was that, despite their overt similarities, Jean never really identified with Miss Bowles. They may have dressed and sung the same way, but Sally was naive, politically apathetic and (in the original stories), casually antisemitic. Indeed, Sally’s wilful blindness to the mounting horrors, singing as democracy crumbles, is core to her character in every single iteration of Cabaret — it’s what ties Sally to the wider story. It’s more integral than her emerald nails, her motormouth, or her colourful love life.

And it has much more to do with Christopher Isherwood than Jean Ross.

Every adaptation of Cabaret has had to contend with an absence at the centre of the story that goes all the way back to the original text: the curious passivity of our narrator, “the Camera” himself, Christopher. From the very first page, Isherwood leaves his reasons for arriving in Berlin vague; using his status as an impartial eyewitness to the fall of Weimar Germany to add legitimacy and urgency to the work, whilst also insisting that his narrator is “a convenient ventriloquist’s dummy, nothing more.” Adaptations have had to wrestle with Isherwood’s sexuality, to mixed results, because the author himself obscured it. But, as Jean and his circle always knew, and Isherwood himself confessed in his memoir Christopher and his Kind decades later, his homosexuality was always inseparable from his experiences in Berlin.

Weimar Germany was the place to be as a gay man in Europe in the late 1920s and early 30s, with its permissive culture and thriving queer nightlife. Here Isherwood and his circle of gay writer mates, including W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, were free to pick up young men or buy sex for cheap from working class lads, far from the English strictures of class or bourgeois morality. Around the corner from the flat he shared with Jean were numerous gay clubs, where Isherwood took in masked drags shows, and first saw Marlene Dietrich perform. Jean was the only woman in the group, a source of curiosity who was never a romantic prospect to Christopher, but in fact his rival for men they’d meet in the cabarets and “boy bars” (replicating this dynamic is what I suspect makes Fosse’s bisexual Brian the most successful version of ‘Christopher’).

Jean long believed that Sally’s political indifference and shallowness was far more representative of Christopher and his friends; Auden lamented that in those days, young Isherwood “held no [political] opinions whatsoever about anything.” Jean was the first to leave Berlin after the Nazi triumph in the 1932 election. Isherwood remained, shacked up with his 16-year old boyfriend until May 1933. It’s with some nerve that Isherwood later wrote that Jean “wasn't a victim, wasn't proletarian, was a mere self-indulgent upper middle class foreign tourist who could escape from Berlin when she chose” — because how better to describe his own situation? On stage and screen, Brian, Cliff and Chris each slugged a Nazi; the real Isherwood did not. It was only with hindsight, writing in England as the war approached, that Isherwood’s Berlin experiences gained their anti-fascist patina.

In his later years, Isherwood showed some regret for what the association with Sally had done to Jean, and tried to create some distance between his friend and most famous creation. In Christopher and his Kind, he describes Jean as more like Sally’s “reproachful older sister… more essentially British than Sally; she grumbled like a true Englishwoman, with her grin-and-bear-it grin. And she was tougher.” Jean’s daughter, lawyer and murder mystery writer Sarah Caudwell, tried to encapsulate her mother’s relationship to Christopher and his creation in a piece titled ‘Reply to Berlin’:

Jean Ross died in 1973, an activist to the bitter end, protesting the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa. Christopher Isherwood followed her in 1981, having belatedly taken his place as an elder statesman of the gay liberation movement.

Sally Bowles endures. Night after night she’s born anew on stage and screen. She’s slipped beyond the bound of her inspiration and author; even if she began life as an unkind caricature of Jean, or perhaps an unwitting self-portrait of Christopher, she has become so much more. Her co-stars come and go — the sets and scenery changes — she finds new songs to sing and dances to delight in — yet Sally remains instantly recognisable. Not just for the bowler hat, the emerald nails or her “darling” way with words, but as a symbol of both divine decadence and dangerous detachment. She remains a vital portrait of desperation and privilege, love and egotism, and above all, that urge to retreat from the troubles of the world, to close our eyes and hearts. We know we must act, we know that time is running out — but please, not just yet. One more song.

Maybe this time, we’ll learn.

To write this piece, I drew on a number of excellent books, including ‘The Making of Cabaret’ by Keith Garebian, ‘Kids, Wait til You Hear This!’ by Liza Minelli and ‘Christopher and his Kind’ by Christopher Isherwood. And of course I’ll take any excuse to rewatch Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, quite possibly my favourite film. Rebecca Frecknall’s production, known as Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club is still tearing up the West East, while Sam Mendes’ revival has a stellar recording, originally for TV and featuring Jane Horrocks as Sally and Alan Cumming as the Emcee, you can watch online.

Odds & Ends

• Vale to David Hockney, one of the great modern painters, co-author of some excellent books on art (including A History of Pictures, with Martin Gayford), and a damn fine set designer. I’m particularly fond of his swimming pool paintings from the 1960s and early 70s, especially the gorgeous Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). If only it hadn’t recently been bought by a billionaire for an astronomical sum. I hope it returns to a public gallery soon.

• For Spielberg fans, Vulture has put together an epic oral history of his career, with input from dozens of collaborators.

• Sure, Jon Greenway’s piece on the Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon is rather harsh. But it’s also true.

And that’s all for this week — thanks for reading!