Jean Iris Ross Cockburn (; 7 May 1911 – 27 April 1973) 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 (1936–39), 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 nightclub singer in Berlin's lesbian bars and second-rate cabarets while aspiring to become a famous actress. In 1931, she shared lodgings with writer Christopher Isherwood until her eviction due to her sexual activities. Her escapades inspired the heroine and plot of Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles, collected in Goodbye to Berlin.: "Isherwood's Sally Bowles was based on Jean Ross, a spunky British woman whom he met during his Berlin days with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender". 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.: "The abortion is a turning point in the narrator's relationship with Sally and also in his relationship to Berlin and to his writing". 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 play I Am a Camera and the musical Cabaret.: The Berlin Stories "form one coherent snapshot of a lost world, the antic, cosmopolitan Berlin of the 1930s, where jolly expatriates dance faster and faster, as if that would save them from the creeping rise of Nazism".
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 inspired the character. After Cabaret gained widespread attention, tabloid reporters 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. Ross contended the character's political indifference toward fascism more closely resembled Isherwood and his gay friends, many of whom "fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the storm troopers looked in their uniforms". In 1986, her daughter Sarah Caudwell wrote a newspaper article in an attempt to correct the historical record and to dispel misconceptions about Ross.
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 (Remind Me of You)". Although Maschwitz's estranged wife Hermione Gingold claimed to have inspired the lyrics, Maschwitz contradicted these claims. Maschwitz instead cited memories of a "young love", and most scholars and biographers credit Maschwitz's youthful affair with Ross as inspiring the song.
Early life and education
Raised in luxury at Maison Ballassiano in the British protectorate of Alexandria, Egypt, Jean Ross was the eldest daughter of Charles Ross (1880–1938), a Scottish cotton classifier for the Bank of Egypt and brought up with her four siblings in a staunchly liberal, anti-Tory household.
Ross received her secondary education in England at Leatherhead Court, Surrey. An unusually intelligent pupil, she completed the sixth-form curriculum by age 16. She soon grew bored and loathed school. When informed she must remain at school for another year to repeat her already completed coursework, she reacted with open rebellion. To gain her freedom, she feigned a teenage pregnancy, prompting the school's headmistress to summon her for questioning:
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 the schoolmasters discovered that Ross feigned the pregnancy, they formally expelled her. 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, an affluent industrialist and landowner, Ross traveled to London and enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Diligently applying herself in her first year, she won a coveted acting prize that gave her the privilege of choosing 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 filmed in London. Ross' dark complexion and partial fluency in Arabic made her 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 hoped. Unable to find acting roles, she found work as a nightclub singer in Berlin's lesbian bars and second-rate cabarets. When not singing or modelling, she visited the casting offices of UFA, a German motion picture production company, in the hopes of obtaining small film roles. By late 1931, she obtained a job as a dancer in theatre director Max Reinhardt's production of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann and played Anitra in Reinhardt's production of Peer Gynt.
Reinhardt's production of Tales of Hoffmann premiered on 28 November 1931. The production became one of the last great triumphs of the Berlin theatre scene prior to the Nazi Party's ascent. Ross and a male dancer appeared together as an amorous couple in the stage background, visible only in silhouette during the second act's Venetian palace sequence. Ross claimed she and the male performer engaged in sexual intimacy in full view of the unsuspecting audience.: Ross "claimed that she and her fellow extra used to fuck every single night on stage during the party at Giulietta's Venetian palace in the second act of Hoffmans Erzählungen".
Isherwood and the Auden Group
In October 1930, while visiting the apartment of a Hungarian baron, Ross met English writer Christopher Isherwood.: "Ross was nineteen when Isherwood met her, probably in October 1930, at the apartment of a Hungarian baron, Franz von Ullman, portrayed in Goodbye to Berlin as Fritz Wendell." Isherwood, still early in his career as a novelist, had moved to Berlin to avail himself of the boy prostitutes found in the city's orgiastic Jazz Age cabarets.: Isherwood frequented "the boy-bars in Berlin in the late years of the Weimar Republic.... [He] discovered a world utterly different from the repressive English one he disliked, and with it, the excitements of sex and new subject matter." At their first meeting, Ross monopolised the conversation and recounted her latest sexual conquests. At one point, she reached into her handbag, retrieved a diaphragm and waved it in the face of a startled Isherwood. The two soon became intimate friends.: "In real life, Jean and Christopher had a relationship which was asexual but more truly intimate than the relationships between Sally and her various partners in the novel, the plays and the films".
By early 1931, Ross and Isherwood shared modest lodgings in Fräulein Meta Thurau's boarding house at Nollendorfstraße 17 in Berlin's Schöneberg quarter.: "Ross moved into Fräulein Thurau's flat early in 1931 and lived there for five or six months until her love life became too exciting even for Fräulein Thurau".: "Jean moved into a room in the Nollendorfstrasse flat after she met Christopher, early in 1931". The ramshackle boarding house lay near the epicentre of Weimar Berlin's radical enclaves, subversive activity, and gay nightlife. As roommates, Ross' relations with Isherwood were not always amicable, and they often quarreled. Isherwood recalled that their landlady, Fräulein Thurau, disliked the untidy Ross who "expected room service" and ordered "people around in an imperious tone, with her English upper-class rudeness".
Ross soon joined Isherwood's social circle in Weimar Berlin, alongside poets W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. As the only woman in this circle of gay male writers, she became mythologised in their respective memoirs. Isherwood and his circle depicted Ross as a libertine who openly boasted of her sexual relations and entertained visitors to the flat while nude.: "I always remember my first meeting with Jean Ross... When I called with my usual punctuality exactly at twelve o'clock, I was told that Miss Ross was in her bath. However a gay voice rang out down the passes — 'Is that you, Gerald? Come and talk to me, darling, while I'm having my bath' ... I felt rather startled at this warm invitation to sit down in the bathroom while a lady I had only met the night before was performing her ablutions. However, I went into the bathroom".
Isherwood recalled the young Ross as resembling actress Merle Oberon, albeit with a face possessing the sardonic humour of comedienne Beatrice Lillie, while Spender recalled Ross' "clothes dishevelled, her eyes large onyxes fringed by eyelashes like enamelled wire, in a face of carved ivory". A contemporary portrait of Ross appears in Isherwood's Berlin stories when the narrator first encounters the "divinely decadent" Sally Bowles:: "Sally seems satisfied to be divinely decadent...": "The Sally character herself is this century's darling of divine decadence, an odd measure of how dear to us is this fiction of the 'shocking' British/American vamp in Weimar Berlin."
While rooming with Isherwood at Nollendorfstraße, Ross continued to work by day as a fashion model for popular magazines and by night as a bohemian chanteuse singing in the nearby cabarets located along the Kurfürstendamm avenue,: "Jean Ross, whom [Isherwood] had met in Berlin as one of his fellow-lodgers in the Nollendorfstrasse for a time, when she was earning her living as a (not very remarkable) singer in a second-rate cabaret". an entertainment-vice district selected for future destruction by Nazi politician Joseph Goebbels in his 1928 journal. When the Nazi Party seized power in early 1933, the Brownshirts forcibly closed these venues. Isherwood visited these seedy nightclubs to hear Ross sing, and he described her singing voice as poor yet nonetheless effective: