Jean Ross
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 cabaret singer in Berlin while aspiring to become a famous actress. In 1931, she briefly shared lodgings with writer Christopher Isherwood, and her escapades inspired the heroine and plot of his 1937 novella Sally Bowles, later collected in Goodbye to Berlin. 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. 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 musical Cabaret.
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 had inspired the character. After Cabaret garnered acclaim in the 1960s, journalists 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. Her daughter Sarah Caudwell wrote a newspaper article in an attempt to correct the historical record and to dispel misconceptions about Ross. According to Caudwell, "in the transformations of the novel for stage and cinema the characterisation of Sally has become progressively cruder and less subtle and the stories about 'the original' correspondingly more high-coloured".
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)", one of the 20th century's most enduring love songs. Although Maschwitz's estranged wife Hermione Gingold claimed the song was written for herself, Maschwitz contradicted these claims. Instead, Maschwitz cited memories of a "young love", and most scholars and biographers posit Maschwitz's youthful affair with Ross inspired the song.
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