“She was dressed in black silk, with a small cape over her shoulders and a little cap like a page-boy’s stuck jauntily on one side of her head,” Isherwood wrote in . I noticed that her finger-nails were painted emerald green, a colour unfortunately chosen for it called attention to her hands, which were much stained by cigarette-smoking and as dirty as a little girl’s. [.
..] Her face was long and thin, powdered dead white.
She had very large brown eyes which should have been darker, to match her hair and the pencil she used for her eyebrows. The eccentric clothing, the unsteady hat, the childish dirtiness, the homely, appealing visage might once again have been refashioned from Dickens, offering Sally, the child-woman, as a new kind of Artful Dodger to Isherwood’s Oliver Twist. The narrator and his friend Fritz Wendell watch Sally coo down the telephone in German as if she were playing “a performance at the theatre.
” Then: She hung up the telephone and turned to us triumphantly. “That’s the man I slept with last night,” she announced. “He makes love marvellously.
He’s an absolute genius at business and he’s terribly rich—” Sally is depicted as a more lively actress in her personal life than on stage in her nightclub act, all the better to defy expectation and shock observers in both audiences: “She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides—yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startlin.