Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (3 page)

“Charles” quickly confessed that his real identity was John Ramsey, a New York writer. After some hesitation, “Barbara” admitted that she was a struggling New York actress named Mildred Gillars. Ramsey and Gillars had been college friends, both members of the dramatic arts fraternity Theta Alpha Phi at Ohio Wesleyan University. The now-impoverished pair had been offered $75 each to impersonate an abandoned mother-to-be and her caddish husband by a motion picture producer. The whole incident was a hoax designed to promote a new silent film entitled
Unwelcome Children
.

The phony couple was brought before the court of Judge Bernard Bertman who immediately sentenced them to three months in jail for contempt of court. Dozens of supporters gathered in court to observe the conclusion of the story. Some were “so touched that they had come to court prepared to offer her a home if the judge let her off.”
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With a dramatic flourish, Mildred Gillars tearfully apologized to the judge. The out-of-work actress said she had taken the job in financial desperation and told the court that neither she nor Ramsey had been paid the $75 promised to them by the movie company. Judge Bertram suspended their sentences, placing blame squarely on the film’s producers and pronouncing that “the movie men who are back of this ought to be before me.”
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The relieved 27-year-old rushed to the bench and grabbed the judge exclaiming, “You sweet thing!” Police restrained the defendant from kissing the surprised judge. Ordered by the judge to leave town, Mildred Gillars and John Ramsey did not have even the car fare to get home. Several newspaper reporters pooled their funds to finance their return trip. One of the contributing reporters told the hoaxers, “You did your best to put it over. It was worth $12.75—car fare back to New York.”
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After this close brush with the law, Mildred Gillars could not possibly know that one day, far from America, she would assume a name and perform a role far more infamous than that of the “deserted bride”—it would be a name synonymous with treachery and anti-Semitism: Axis Sally.

As Mildred Gillars sat with the producers of
Unwelcome Children
to plan her portrayal of Mrs. Barbara Elliott, she built its foundation on memories of her own unhappy childhood and her desperate need for acceptance and acclaim. It was that same reckless search for fame and notoriety that led a star-struck Ohio teenager to wander far from home, abandon family and friends, and ultimately cast her lot with a murderous and tyrannical regime.

She was born Mildred Elizabeth Sisk, the daughter of Vincent Sisk, a Canadian, and Mary (Mae) Hewitson, a 23-year-old seamstress from Fredericton, New Brunswick. Born on November 29, 1900 in Portland, Maine, Mildred was raised with the fierce pride of an Irish nationalist and the anti-British prejudice that came with it.

A strikingly lovely girl with porcelain white skin, dark eyes and raven hair, her early childhood was marred by her father’s alcoholism. Vincent and Mae were married on February 21, 1900, slightly more than nine months before their daughter’s birth, so it is likely that Mae’s pregnancy was the deciding factor in the pair’s union.

From the beginning of the marriage Sisk drank heavily, and his recreational pursuits included smoking opium. Mae was a strict Episcopalian from a middle-class Canadian home (her father was a magistrate in Fredericton) and her husband’s drinking and drug abuse were unbearable. Sisk was the tough son of a stonemason from rural Bathurst, New Brunswick—a mining and shipbuilding community on the province’s northeastern coast. The strapping blacksmith could deliver a punishing beating, and his wife was regularly the victim of his drunken rages.

After almost seven years of misery, Mae took six-year-old Mildred away from their Portland home. It would be the last time Mildred would ever see her natural father. Although Mae would return briefly three weeks later, the marriage was doomed and she would file for divorce in April 1907. Accusing Vincent Sisk of “cruel and abusive treatment,” the court awarded full custody of the child to Mae on October 31, 1907.
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While the divorce decree did not mention abuse directed at the child, the terrifying atmosphere in the home must have had a serious effect on the little girl, who was witnessing the effects of alcoholism and drug abuse firsthand in her most formative years. It would also cement a bond between mother and daughter that would be difficult to break.

Throughout Mildred’s childhood, Mae was close-mouthed about her ex-husband. As an adult, Mildred claimed to know “nothing about my father except his name.”
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Mae was likely shamed by her status as a divorced woman with a child, and never discussed the dark stain on her past. That she was willing to endure the gossip and stigma that followed a divorced woman in those days is testament to the severity of the abuse. She instilled that same strength and self-reliance in her daughter. Years later, Mildred’s stepsister Edna Mae marveled that her mother was “successful in keeping her feeling of a marriage failure from both of us, since neither of us knew this man Sisk was alive…”
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In the face of such an embarrassing family secret, Mae went on to raise Mildred as though her biological father never existed.

As her marriage collapsed, Mae became acquainted with a Portland couple named Dr. and Mrs. Twitchell. The Twitchells introduced her to an itinerant dentist from Pottsville, Pennsylvania named Robert Bruce Gillars. Gillars, also divorced, began courting Mae in earnest. Less than ten months after the finalization of her divorce from Vincent Sisk, Mae married Gillars in Woodstock, Ontario on July 8, 1908.
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Dr. Gillars was a markedly improved prospect for the young divorced mother. Educated at the Philadelphia College of Dentistry, he was a hardworking, traveling professional who was in the process of applying for a license to practice in the state of Maine. Three months after the wedding, Mae was pregnant again and on July 21, 1909, Edna Mae Gillars was born.
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Although the dentist never formally adopted Mae’s daughter, Gillars took the seven-year-old as his own. From that point on, she took the name Mildred Gillars.

Despite his boast to state officials that he had “pulled teeth from coast to coast,” Dr. Gillars was denied a license to practice in Maine.
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This reversal forced the dentist to move his family from town to town with breathtaking speed. Mildred attended schools in St. Johns, New Brunswick in 1910, then moved on to Halifax, Nova Scotia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By 1914, she was enrolled in the Bellevue, Ohio school district. Many of Dr. Gillars’ patients were railroad workers and laborers who moved wherever their occupation demanded.

For a short time, Mae and Edna Mae returned to Maine while Mildred, a teenager of growing beauty, was inexplicably sent to a convent. Her stepsister remembered that, “Mildred entered a convent as a child, despite the fact that her mother was not a Catholic. When the family left Maine for their new home in Conneaut, Ohio, she had to leave.”
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By 1916, Gillars had a large ten-room house built at 145 Grant Street in the small town of Conneaut. The town was a central point for Dr. Gillars to attend to his many regular and potential patients. Conneaut sits at the junction of several railroad lines where the Norfolk Southern, Norfolk & Western, Conrail and Bessemer & Lake Erie lines run today.

Dr. Gillars’ stepdaughter was a lonely, withdrawn and solitary youngster. A former neighbor recalled the little girl as “a very quiet, overdressed child who was never allowed to play with other children and who had the most beautiful black curls that I have ever seen on a child.”
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Although her younger stepsister idolized the cultured and pretty girl with porcelain skin, Mildred was emotionally distant. Edna Mae sadly recalled shortly before her death in 2002: “When we were kids, I would be downstairs making a racket and Mildred would be upstairs. Our lives never crossed.”
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The two girls were of completely different temperaments, with Mildred leading an almost separate existence from her stepsister. Edna Mae was a tomboy while Mildred was a delicate “little lady.” The younger girl was in awe of her older, more sophisticated sister, fearing even to interrupt her when she spoke. She also recalled that Mildred was so obedient and submissive that, if told to do so, she would sit in one place day and night.

The rootless nature of her childhood shaped Mildred’s restless and headstrong personality. It also intensified her need to stand out and gain acceptance, especially with the opposite sex. Nicknamed “Ronnie,” she arrived at Conneaut High School on November 28, 1916 and immediately made an impression on her fellow students by wearing brightly colored, stylish outfits that few of her peers could afford. The high school newspaper noted in 1917 that Mildred’s favorite song was “Won’t You Come and Love Me?” a title remarkably similar to the inviting selections she would play for American troops more than twenty years later.
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A mediocre student, she performed best in English and Domestic Science. Although she would later become a fluent German speaker who could read Goethe in his native tongue, she earned a D in German in her last semester. It was in high school that she developed her interest in the theater and perhaps her unhappiness at home propelled her toward the stage. At the end of her senior year, the high school publication
The Tattler
listed the features that each student was most known for. Mildred Gillars was noted not for her great love of theater or literature, but her hair.
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After graduation, Mildred briefly studied to become a dental assistant at Western Reserve University, but her love for the dramatic arts led her to abandon that path. Her mother had been assisting her stepfather in the dental office for years, but Mildred had no interest in the family business. In September 1918, she enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio.

“I chose Ohio Wesleyan because of the excellent dramatic department, and I wished to study under Professor Charles M. Newcomb whose reputation I had already heard of,” she recalled. “I took every course that was possible to take and joined the dramatic club besides, and played the lead in practically every college production that we had.”
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The first of a series of intellectual older men whose influence shaped her fate, Newcomb was a charismatic married professor, who had a reputation as an engaging lecturer and drama coach. He grew to be a mentor, and more, to the young, impressionable girl with an absent father.

The Painless Dentist

While Mildred had no relationship with and little knowledge of her biological father, the activities and influence of her stepfather raise disturbing questions. Mildred’s stepsister Edna Mae described her father to John Bartlow Martin of McCall’s magazine in 1948 as an “exceptionally brilliant man, but he had a weakness.…” Ironically, it was the same weakness that plagued Vincent Sisk—alcoholism.
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Gillars worked extremely long hours, nights and weekends, visiting patients at their homes as was the custom in those days. She described the dentist with an unwieldy moustache and long beard as a doctor “who worked for the working man” and served railroad families of limited means. Charging 50 cents for a tooth extraction, Gillars was financially successful but not necessarily “an ethical man.”
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Although Edna Mae considered him a “wizard” at dentistry with an extensive knowledge of medicine, she told a troubling story about his practices.

A woman came to Dr. Gillars demanding that all of her teeth be extracted, claiming that her medical doctor recommended it. Despite the danger of infection in a time before antibiotics, Gillars obliged. The woman soon fell ill and died.
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By the standards of the early 1900s, Dr. Gillars had a thriving business, averaging, at times, $1,000 per week.
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In 1919, with Mildred at college, the dentist had opened another office in Elyria approximately one hundred miles away from the family home. Upon his arrival in town, he advertised heavily in the local newspaper as: