If you’re a fan of musicals, you probably remember Liza Minelli’s Oscar-winning performance as Sally Bowles in Cabaret.

Liza Minelli's

Cabaret’s screenplay is based on Christopher Isherwood’s novella Sally Bowles, now usually published with other Isherwood stories in Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood was one of several young writers who fled the stodgy, conservative atmosphere of post-World War I Britain to seek adventures in Weimar Republic Germany. Others included W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and an American, Paul Bowles.

The Sally Bowles character is supposed to be one of these British expats. But there was a real Sally Bowles. Her name was Jean Ross, and she was nothing like the Sally Bowles in Cabaret.

Jean Ross

In Isherwood’s 1937 novella, Sally is a flapper who moonlights as a singer in a Berlin cabaret during the twilight of the Weimar Republic, which was also the waning years of the Jazz Age.

As Isherwood portrays her, she’s ditzy, promiscuous, and looking for a sugar daddy to support her. Although Nazis prowl through Isherwood’s storyline, Sally remains apolitical, scarcely aware that the high times of the permissive Weimar Republic are coming to an end.

Christopher Isherwood

After a series of failed romances, Sally becomes pregnant, has a botched abortion, and then flees Berlin, only to disappear for good in Rome.

Jean Ross, on the other hand, was an intellectual – a journalist, film critic, and committed communist.

During a youthful sojourn in the Weimar Republic, Ross did work as a cabaret singer in Berlin, just like Sally. In 1931, she briefly shared a flat with Isherwood, but the two did not get along. Isherwood subsequently elaborated on some of the incidents of Ross’s life in Berlin to create the Sally Bowles character.

Although Isherwood never publicly claimed that Ross inspired Sally Bowles until after her death, Ross’s former partner Claud Cockburn – who previously abandoned Ross and their daughter, Sarah Caudwell – leaked to the press that she had inspired the character.

Consequently, when the Broadway production of Cabaret won critical acclaim in the 1960s, journalists hounded Ross with intrusive questions.

Ross came to resent the Sally Bowles character – and Christopher Isherwood as well – because she believed the public association of herself with that naïve and apolitical character cheapened her lifelong work as a professional writer and political activist.

And Ross had a distinguished career. As a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Ross 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 allegedly as a press agent for the Comintern.

Throughout her lifetime, Ross wrote political criticism, anti-fascist polemics, and socialist manifestos for various progressive cultural organizations like the British Workers' Film and Photo League.

As her daughter, Sarah Caudwell, wrote in a 1986 article “Reply to Berlin,” “[Ross] may well, at 19, have been less informed about politics than Isherwood, five or six years older; but, when the Spanish war came and the fascists were bombing Madrid, it was she, not Isherwood, who was there to report on it.”

In fact, Caudwell says, Ross believed that Sally's political indifference more closely resembled Isherwood and some of his gay friends, who "fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the storm troopers looked in their uniforms.”

Even the poet W. H. Auden, who was a friend and occasional boyfriend of Isherwood, confessed that the young Isherwood "held no opinions whatever about anything.”

According to Caudwell, "in the transformations of the novel for stage and cinema, the characterization of Sally has become progressively cruder and less subtle and the stories about 'the original' correspondingly more high-colored.”

What was most galling to Ross was some antisemitic remarks Isherwood wrote for his Sally character. According to Caudwell, racial bigotry "would have been as alien to my mother's vocabulary as a sentence in Swahili; she had no more deeply rooted passion than a loathing of racialism and so, from the outset, of fascism."

As a committed anti-fascist, Ross was incensed Isherwood had depicted her as thoughtlessly allied in her beliefs "with the attitudes which led to Dachau and Auschwitz".

To the end of her life in 1961, Ross refused to discuss her sexual adventures in Berlin with reporters.

"They asked if I was a feminist. Well, of course I am, darling. But they don't think feminism is about sex, do they? It's about economics," she said.