Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (5 page)

The shadow of her mother’s failed marriage hung heavily over Mildred and she was determined not to make the same mistakes. In June 1922 she broke off her engagement to Kelly Elliott. Her stepsister Edna Mae reflected that although Mildred was capable of love, she was afraid of marriage: “Seeing the many heartaches Mother experienced with her marriages, with none of them due to Mother’s fault, I believe gave Mildred a shocking picture of marriage. Sort of the idea Love wouldn’t last after the altar.”
⁵⁵

It was only after Newcomb convinced his star student to pursue a life in the theater that she broke up with Kelly—a decision that Edna Mae attributed to the fact that her “stage ambitions were stronger than becoming a wife.”
⁵⁶
The end of her engagement coincided with the crisis in her mother’s marriage and the increasing influence of Professor Newcomb. Witnessing her mother’s pain had a decisive influence on her decision not to marry. Her relationship with Mae grew even stronger, and Edna Mae recalled that the two were so close that they were often taken for sisters.
⁵⁷

Calvin (Kelly) Gladding Elliott, who spent his college career devoted to a woman who ultimately abandoned him, never graduated from Ohio Wesleyan. He withdrew from OWU the same year as Mildred and moved to New York City. He wandered Greenwich Village in the hope of becoming an artist. After a succession of jobs in New York, he became an interior decorator and married a woman who closely resembled his former fiancé. Never fully recovered from the failed romance of his college days, Kelly turned to drinking and reportedly committed suicide before the age of forty.
⁵⁸

In Cleveland, Halle assigned Mildred to the costume jewelry counter where she proved to be a successful saleswoman. During the Christmas season of 1922, she earned a large $89 commission check, and the owner offered to promote her to buyer. Mildred refused:

“I finally received something like $89, only in commissions, and Mr. Halle was speechless. He said it never happened before and he sent for me, and asked me to report to his office, which was a very unusual procedure, and told me that in the whole history of his store that a beginner had ever received such a gigantic commission check. He said he was very pleased with my work and hoped in a short time that I would become a buyer, or at least, an assistant buyer. I informed him that with the $89 I intended to leave his store after Christmas because I wanted to devote my entire time to studies at Chronicle House.
⁵⁹

Before going to work at Halle’s store, Mildred worked by day and rehearsed at night. The windfall of that Christmas led her to impetuously quit her job so that she could devote all her time to acting, but it was not long before she was again in dire need of funds. When she needed to economize, Mildred cut back on food. One night, she passed out from hunger in the middle of a rehearsal:

“I fainted one night during the rehearsal. Afterwards, when I regained consciousness, everyone asked how that happened, and for the first time I explained the great sacrifice this has been for me, and so Mrs. Brown [the director of Chronicle House] reduced my tuition from $10 to five.”
⁶⁰

As Mildred approached the end of her year at Chronicle House, she planned to move to New York City. Broadway was the place for young actors to make their mark and she could hardly wait to complete her studies and leave Cleveland. She needed a job to save up enough money for her move to New York. Mildred noticed that some of the female students were coming and going at very strange hours for young, unmarried women of that era. She approached Mrs. Brown and asked if these girls had some kind of employment. Mrs. Brown told her that she could not divulge the girls’ secret, so Mildred asked them.

The young actresses were working as waitresses at diners and restaurants around the Cleveland area. She applied for a job at a restaurant on the outskirts of the city where she thought she would not be recognized. The other girls advised Mildred to tell prospective employers that she had prior experience as a waitress, but it became apparent on her first night on the job that she had exaggerated her qualifications when she dropped and shattered an armful of plates. Fortunately, the owner kept the hardworking student on the payroll and she was able to complete her studies.

With her year at Chronicle House at an end, Mildred bade farewell to Cleveland and to Charles Newcomb. Armed with a series of bit roles on her resume and having worked with acting notables like Julia Marlowe, her expectations were high as she boarded a train east in the autumn of 1923 to conquer the Great White Way.

On the Circuit

The Broadway of 1923 was a thrilling, bustling place for a young actor or actress in love with the footlights. Although Mildred longed to perform the works of Shakespeare and Ibsen on the New York stage, she arrived that summer to find a theater scene dominated by musical comedies with plot lines ranging from fantasy to farce. The most popular shows of the year were lighthearted fare such as George M. Cohan’s
Adrienne, Little Jessie James
and
Little Miss Bluebeard.
By 1927, a record 264 shows and musicals were being presented on New York stages, an increase that led to an explosion of theater construction. Over the next ten years, twenty new houses were built in the area between West 40th and West 50th Streets alone.
⁶¹

In addition to “legitimate” theater, approximately half the New York houses were filled with the popular entertainment known as vaudeville. Singers, dancers, actors, musicians, magicians, ventriloquists, wirewalkers and showgirls all faced keen competition for places in the two to three shows per day variety revues. The
Ziegfeld Follies, Music Box Revue, Artists and Models
and
Earl Carroll’s Vanities
lit up the stage with beautiful showgirls revealing just the right (i.e. legal) amount of skin. Tightly controlled by owner/impresarios such as Marcus Loew, E.F. Albee, B.F. Keith, and the Shubert Brothers, performers honed their skills on the “circuit” where they traveled to second- and third-tier cities such as Yonkers, Jersey City, Norfolk and Toronto. These touring road shows were often painful experiences for performers who were greeted by primitive living conditions and little pay. A performing artist rarely rose to Broadway’s first-class venues without first experiencing the travails of the road.

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.”
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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:

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.’”
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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.