Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany

by Richard Lucas

  Freshly arrived from Cleveland, Mildred visited the offices of Broadway’s leading talent agents every morning. These men directed aspiring actors and actresses to “cattle call” auditions and recommended performers for upcoming productions. Turned away by agents and their secretaries, she doggedly attempted to get auditions. The rejection was frustrating for a young woman accustomed to the support and encouragement of teachers and friends. Mildred had lost contact with Charles Newcomb, the man who set her on her path. Although she would run into her former mentor on Broadway “quite by chance” (as she described it), she floundered without a strong or influential man to illuminate her way. Cut off from her mother and stepfather’s financial help, she soon found herself without friends, funds or a job.

  With little more than youth and a thin Midwestern resume, Mildred sat in the waiting room of casting agents day after day only to hear the same disappointing refrain. After one particularly fruitless day of audition seeking, she saw a familiar face. Walking through the office of the prominent casting agent Max Hart, Florence Pendleton was one of the professional actresses whose work Mildred had seen in Cleveland. Seeing an opportunity, she greeted the successful character actress as though she were a gift from heaven: “I felt that that was just fate finally giving me a break, and I approached her and told her I liked her work at home in Cleveland.”62 Pouring out her troubles to the older woman, Florence was persuaded to take Mildred under her wing. It was an exceptionally busy and successful year for Pendleton. She was starring on Broadway in the show Tweedles and was able to offer the struggling 23-year-old an empty room in her Greenwich Village apartment. Mildred accepted and moved into the tiny bedroom while she looked for work. Florence would also offer guidance, contacts and advice in the coming years.

  Florence Pendleton was an old hand in the world of stage and film. In 1916, she appeared in the silent film The Lurking Peril—the thirteenth installment of a cliffhanger serial. A year later, she debuted on Broadway in The Pipes of Pan, a comedy well received by critics, including the New York Times.63 For more than a decade, Florence performed in a string of successful plays and musical comedies on Broadway including Her Honor, The Mayor (1918), The Goose Hangs High (1924), Magda (1926), The Pearl of Great Price (1926), Veils (1928), Penal Law 2010 (1930), and Grand Hotel (1931).64

  With the help and advice of her more experienced roommate, Mildred won her first role in 1924. She was cast in a Canadian road show of the play Little Lord Fauntleroy. Fauntleroy, first produced in 1888, did not have an especially illustrious history on the stage. It was briefly revived in 1903 and lasted for only twelve performances. In the winter of 1923 it found an audience again when Mary Pickford starred in a wildly successful silent 1922 film version of the story.65 Mildred joined a small theater group presenting the play in small towns throughout Ontario and Quebec. Receiving fifty dollars a week, she moved from town to town on one-night stands in the brutal Canadian winter.

  By the tour’s end in the spring of 1925, Mildred returned to New York where she played bit parts in a stock theater company. Dorothy Long, her classmate at Ohio Wesleyan, recalled an unverified story about that time:

  In 1926 or 1927 a former classmate from Cleveland… told me of seeing Mildred a short while before that and hearing about her troubles. Mildred told her that she had joined a stock company playing through the Canadian provinces; she had married the director manager, and later divorced him on the grounds of mental cruelty because he gave the feminine leads to a blonde in the company and she got only minor parts.66

  This story reveals the beginning of a pattern that Mildred Gillars repeated throughout her adult life. She habitually conducted romantic relationships with and sought marriage to powerful men who could further her career aspirations. In this instance, she “married” the director of the stock company production but left him when her career did not benefit from being his wife. When the director favored a blonde and possibly more attractive or talented actress, she left him. She demanded star turns but was relegated to frustratingly small roles as a stock player.

  After returning to New York, she quickly won a role in a tour of My Girl, the hit musical comedy running at the now-defunct Vanderbilt Theater. The show was a major success that ran for 291 performances until August 1925. Written by Harlan Thompson, the author and lyricist of the hit Little Jessie James, My Girl played to full houses as it passed through the small and medium cities of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Mildred was featured in “The Wonder Chorus,” described by the show’s press as “a bevy of chorus beauties.”67 Opening in Akron in the fall of 1925, the cast played a string of dates throughout her home state and the Midwest. Despite the success of the tour, Mildred was impatient and dissatisfied with the role:

  “I was getting nowhere playing this sort of innocuous musical comedy, and I went to the manager and said I felt very unhappy. I didn’t feel my career was being helped by playing this sort of part month in and month out. And he said ‘You are too young in the theater and you don’t realize it is a great mistake, but I can’t keep you, if you insist on going.’”68

  She gave the show’s manager two weeks’ notice and left the production. Her fellow cast members were dumbfounded by her decision to leave a successful tour to return to joblessness in New York. Following the same pattern that she exhibited after her financial success at Halle’s department store, Mildred took the money she had saved from the tour and returned to New York in search of more serious dramatic opportunities. Such roles were few and far between in a Broadway built on light entertainment. Before long, her savings from My Girl were gone. Once again, she was penniless and hungry. She paid her rent by giving pieces from her wardrobe to her landlady:

  “Finally with no more money left,” she remembered, “I had been giving a dress a week to my landlady, and I had moved from uptown to save car fare, to save every cent I could and so I moved in on 48th or 49th Street, to one of those awful theatrical boarding houses.”69 At that time, single-sex boarding houses for young actresses were common in the theater district. For many artistic aspirants these houses were the only affordable living arrangements while they sought work.

  Poverty began to take its toll—she was starting to look haggard and worn from malnourishment and exhaustion. Casting agents looking for fresh, young faces rejected her out of hand. Mildred had barely eaten for eight days when she walked into the Old Heidelberg restaurant on 49th Street and asked for work. She offered to do any thing in return for lunch. The owner took pity on the hungry young lady and hired her to type menus. He also allowed her to eat dinner on credit. It was Christmas week and Mildred was touched by the kindness of the German owners: “I remember sitting in the restaurant, how sweet everyone was to me, and the waiter taking out a little package of cigarettes on Christmas Day and saying ‘Merry Christmas’ to me…”70 The memory of the owner’s warmth and hospitality when she was hungry and cold would affect her regard for the German people for the rest of her life.

  On December 30, 1925, Mildred received another Yuletide surprise. A wire arrived from her colleagues in the My Girl troupe. The cast and crew were extremely unhappy with her replacement and asked if she would consider returning to the show. The musical was to open at the Tulane Theater in New Orleans on January 1. She accepted and the tour manager wired the funds for her ticket to Louisiana. Thrilled and relieved, Mildred was grateful for the opportunity to return to My Girl. The play was given rave reviews by both the New Orleans Item and the Times-Picayune.71 She remained with the tour as it traveled through the South, moving from Louisiana to Texas, Mississippi, Missouri, Maryland and finally New York. At the end of her first week of employment, she kept her promise to the owners of the Old Heidelberg and sent a money order to New York to reimburse them for her dinners.

  The My Girl tour ended in the spring of 1927 and a chastened Mildred Gillars was again looking for a job. The bitter days of hunger taught her a lesson that she would not forget: never to walk away from a paycheck again. “Serious” a
ctors tended to look down on vaudeville, but despite its lowbrow nature, it paid the bills. Before long, Mildred had joined the ranks of those performers who worked two and three shows a day to earn their daily bread. One of these immensely popular musical revues was George White’s Scandals, which was the first major challenge to the type of revue originated by the legendary Florenz Ziegfeld, and was later joined by other imitators. His Follies featured long-legged showgirls showing just the right amount of leg without intruding into the realm of burlesque.

  George White was not an impresario but a dancer who had once worked for Flo Ziegfeld, and he employed the likes of George Gershwin to compose music for his shows. By the time Mildred had joined the cast to perform in sketches, the Scandals were touring the Loews circuit—a series of theaters owned and operated by Marcus Loew in several states. The revue opened at the Loews State in New York City and moved on to Brooklyn, Newark, Yonkers, Philadelphia and other cities. Despite the high quality of the production and venues, Mildred nonetheless was frustrated with the sketches that she was reduced to performing for an uncultured audience. “I felt that there was no future at that time… I was always torn between the need for funds and the desire to do something worthwhile in the American theater.”72

  The introverted, friendless little girl who kept to her room had evolved into an attention-seeking chorus girl with a taste for the fast life. She dyed her black hair platinum blonde and was relentless in her quest for a good time. The syndicated columnist Inez Robb recalled a party in Ohio with Mildred in attendance. Bored with the festivities, the chorus girl took it upon herself to get things moving. Robb remembered:

  Her idea of livening up a party was to go downstairs and throw a heavy garbage can thru [sic] the plate glass window of a little grocery store about four doors down the street. No one knew what she’d done until the cops began banging on the door of [the host’s] apartment. It seems they were in the next block when Mildred heaved the can… and when Mildred saw the cops; she dived into the bedroom and under the bed.73

  The police followed the trail of the fleeing vandal to the host’s apartment. He vehemently denied that any of his upstanding guests could have broken the shop window. The policemen were then invited in for a drink of illegal “bathtub gin.” At the height of Prohibition, inexpensive alcohol and water was combined with fruit juice or the oil of juniper berries to cover the dreadful taste. The officers “lapped up enough gin and canned grapefruit juice… to soothe a cage of lions. They never did get around to searching the apartment but Mildred had to stay under the bed for two or three hours because the cops liked the party and decided to stay.”74

  Mildred’s recklessness would bring her into far greater trouble with the law a few years later when she went to an audition at the Hotel Empire in New York City. The producers of a new film depicting the plight of fatherless children were searching for an actress to portray a pregnant woman abandoned by the father of her unborn child. Mildred had not worked for several weeks and needed the $75 plus expenses that the producers promised. She agreed to place an advertisement in a New Jersey newspaper, threaten suicide and then dramatically “attempt” to end her life. John Ramsey, her classmate and friend from Ohio Wesleyan, would play the cad who would reunite with the woman he abandoned. The hoax would thrust the issues presented in the film’s plot onto the front page and win the film Unwelcome Children welcome publicity.

  The next day, Mildred Gillars boarded a bus for Camden, New Jersey to play the most notable role of her disappointing acting career—Barbara Elliott, the deserted bride.*

  CHAPTER 3

  Expatriate

  MAY 1929–AUGUST 1939

  Although the fame of “Barbara Elliot” reached far and wide, the career of Mildred Gillars fared less well. She returned from Camden to New York without a dime. Throughout the 1920s, Mildred took occasional jobs as an artist’s model. By 1929, she was posing regularly for the sculptor Mario Korbel. The endless cycle of audition and rejection overwhelmed the ambitious 28-year-old and she began to look for hope abroad. Mildred asked her employer if she could borrow money for a ticket to France so she could find work as a model or dancer.75 Korbel agreed, and although she later insisted that the money was merely a loan which she subsequently repaid, the two rendezvoused in Paris. The French capital was a haven for American expatriate artists and writers—the locus of activity in the world of arts and letters. The magnetic pull of Paris for young, bright Americans was given a name—the “French Disease.” Parisian cafés and salons were filled with the leading writers and philosophers of a generation: Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, e.e. cummings, James Joyce and, ironically, the poet who would later be indicted for treason against the United States—Ezra Pound.

  By the time Mildred arrived in Paris in 1929, the American colony in France numbered over 60,000. One of the reasons for the city’s popularity among the artistic set was the strength of the American dollar against the post-World War I French franc. Hemingway famously described the city as “anything you want… and cheap.”76 The inexpensive cost of living allowed American artists and intellectuals to pursue their craft while maintaining part-time or modestly salaried employment. It was a scene tailor-made for Mildred Gillars. Café society, so reminiscent of her days at Ohio Wesleyan reading poetry with Kelly Elliott over nickel cokes, was a welcome respite from hand-tomouth survival in New York.

  After six months savoring the exciting life of a single woman on the Left Bank, Mildred returned to New York on the SS Majestic on October 22, 1929.77 Ready to return to the stage, her arrival was met by the disaster of the stock market crash and the ensuing economic downturn. She was only able to scrape together a bare existence performing small roles in a stock company.

  After almost two more years of bitter struggle and financial hardship, Mildred was ready to abandon her hopes of Broadway fame. Acutely aware of her fading chances of stardom, she was now 31 and no longer an ingénue. Even those unsatisfying parts that characterized her theatrical career to date were difficult to come by. America was in the depths of the Great Depression, and approximately one in four Americans was out of work.78 Vaudeville was facing a slow but certain death. The economic crisis, the rising popularity of radio, and the advent of the sound motion picture led to falling attendance at live shows. Vaudevillians such as Fred Allen, George Burns, Gracie Allen and Eddie Cantor successfully made the transition to radio, but many more performers were left to struggle for roles at fewer and fewer venues. Mildred had no inclination to forge a career in the new medium. Despite her failure to be cast in dramatic roles, she still held out some hope that she might work in “serious” dramatic theater.

  The seeds of anti-Semitism and resentment toward the upper class might well have been planted during those bitter, hungry days in New York. In a July 1943 broadcast, she told listeners that “in a weathered shanty you will never find a Jew. No sir, the Jews are all in the marble palaces along Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue, New York City.”79

  Despairing of success in America and fondly remembering her days in Paris, she looked again to Europe. It was at about this time that she came into contact with a British-born secretary of a wellknown philosopher, and developed a friendship with the young man that would lead her fatefully away from the country of her birth. Once again, a man would motivate her to sacrifice a frustrating present to pursue an uncertain and questionable future.

  A thin, professorial man with tousled, curly brown hair, Bernard Metz was an unlikely match for the former showgirl with an Irishbred dislike for all things British. In London, he was a student of the Russian mathematician and novelist Peter D. Ouspensky (1878– 1947). Paul Beekman Taylor who, as a child, knew Metz, called him “a small, slim man with a furtive look, someone intense and curious, even nervous about everything going on about him.”80 Taylor’s mother, Edith, described Metz as “a slight, smiling perky Jew.”81 Metz’s teacher and mentor Ouspensky had, for several years, sought to find a phi
losophical bridge between Western Rationalism and Eastern Mysticism. After a trip to India that had left him unfulfilled and searching, Ouspensky journeyed back to Russia in 1915 where he encountered the Greek-Armenian philosopher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866–1949).

  Gurdjieff and his fellow “seekers of truth” traveled across Central Asia, Persia, India, Tibet and Mongolia where they observed the ancient rituals, dances and behavior-modification techniques of Eastern religious traditions and cults. Gurdjieff put this collected knowledge to use in a philosophy and discipline of his own. After witnessing the habits of monks and shamans, he sought to achieve a perfect balance between man’s physical, mental and spiritual centers. As the “fakirs” of India and early Christians had mastered their physical bodies through asceticism, as the monks of Tibet espoused monasticism to gain control over their emotional or fantasy life, and as the Yogis of India demonstrated control over the mind—Gurdjieff maintained that all three could be achieved through harmony and balance.82