Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (6 page)

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” actors 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:

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.
^*

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 philosophical 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

This approach became known as the
Fourth Way
—in which each man or woman achieves the balance of his or her intellectual, physical and spiritual faculties. Dances and rituals originating from the pre-Islamic cult of Sufism were combined with mental exercises appropriated from Buddhist monasteries to enhance the modern life of Western man—a life deemed “mechanical” and unthinking. “The Work,” as it was known, was aimed at overthrowing the unsatisfying and dreamlike mechanical life and replacing it with self-observation, self-awareness and self-consciousness.

In Moscow, Gurdjieff began to teach the sacred exercises to a growing coterie of followers, but the violence and unrest of the Bolshevik Revolution pushed him westward. Eventually, Gurdjieff and his followers settled in France where he established the “Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man” (known as “Le Prieuré”) in 1922. Located 70 kilometers south of Paris at Fontainebleau, Le Prieuré drew a stream of eager and curious followers from Europe and America, including notables such as the artist Man Ray (Eugene Radnitzsky), novelist Thornton Wilder, and the poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Ezra Pound.
⁸³
Gurdjieff sought to expand his following through traveling exhibitions featuring the costumed dances learned at Fontainebleau.

In 1923, a dancing troupe traveled to Paris and London; and on January 13, 1924, the charismatic, hypnotic mystic with balding head and piercing eyes arrived in New York. Young Bernard Metz and a group of twenty dancers traveled with their “master” to demonstrate the Fourth Way in action. The strange display of rituals and dances captured the attention of New York’s “smart set.”
The New York Tribune
announced the arrival of a “New Cult Hero Here to Water Acid Emotions” and the
Syracuse Herald
declared that the mysterious European had come “To Teach America to Dance Its Troubles Away,” promising “Novel Methods by Which a Modern Mystic Expects to Make All Our Difficulties over Taxes, Prohibition and the High Cost of Living Quickly Vanish.”
⁸⁴

After his wildly successful visit to America, Gurdjieff returned to France. A novice driver, he was nearly killed when he drove his car into a tree. During his convalescence at the Prieuré, Bernard Metz tended to his temporarily crippled master and carried his chair. During the next two years (1925–26), Metz became a notable figure in the movement, not only serving as one of Gurdjieff’s personal secretaries but also helping to translate his first book,
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
, into the English language.