Big Role

Stage-struck Mildred Gillars had yearned to become an actress, and had been rejected. But last week, at 48, she made the best of a dingier dramatic opportunity--her trial for treason as "Axis Sally." Her silver-grey hair hung in a shoulder-length bob as she entered the Washington courtroom. She wore her unfashionably short dress with an ingenue air. There was a peacock blue scarf at her throat, her long, horseface was dazzlingly tan, her mouth and nails crimson.

Her first stagy gesture came almost as soon as she was seated--she tugged at her attorney's sleeve and whispered importantly, her head held to one side with a stiff and stilted coquettishness. Watching her, many a spectator felt that her affected posturing explained the things that had happened to Mildred Gillars almost as well as the testimony.

She was born in Portland, Me., in November 1900, grew up yearning for footlights. She took public-speaking at Ohio Wesleyan University, and then headed for Greenwich Village--and failure.

Hello, Gang. For a while, in the '20s, she haunted New York theatrical agencies. In 1927 she was arrested for pretending to attempt suicide on a Philadelphia bridge-- apublicity hoax to advertise a sleazy movie about unwed mothers. She was an artist's model in Paris in 1928, a dressmaker's assistant in Algiers in 1933. When the war broke out she was teaching English in Berlin; she was soon broadcasting in English on the German radio.

After Pearl Harbor she fell in with a Foreign Office radio official named Max Otto Koischwitz. Koischwitz, who had once been a professor at New York's Hunter College, was a man of influence. That, plus Mildred Gillars' soft and insinuating American voice, brought her a highly paid job-opportunity to show her talent. Soon she was doing her best to undermine the morale of U.S. troops, was famed from Africa to Italy as Axis Sally.

Last week, as judge, jurors, lawyers and reporters sat listening through earphones, some of her recorded broadcasts were played back in the courtroom. "I love America," said her voice, between recordings of U.S. jazz, "but I do not love Roosevelt and all his kike boy friends . . ."

The voice often began, "Hello, gang . . ." It reminded "all you kids" of the girls back home. "I just wonder if she isn't sort of running around with . . . 4-Fs . . ." It suggested ". . . throw down those little old guns and toddle off home . . . there's no getting the Germans down . . ." "What," it asked, "will [wounded men] think in later years when there are no jobs for cripples? . . ."

Were You Jealous? Neither this nor the prosecution's methodical progress wilted Mildred Gillars' theatrical attitude--at first. After Inge Doman, one of three German witnesses, had told of seeing her make broadcasts in Berlin, Mildred Gillars tugged at her lawyer's sleeve. She whispered; after a moment he asked the witness if she wasn't "a little jealous of Miss Gillars?"

When Mildred Gillars took the stand herself, as the defense tried to keep the recorded broadcasts from being admitted as evidence, she shook her long bob, pressed her fingers to her forehead, smiled archly at the judge. But her perky dramatics seemed more & more artificial as the trial went on. Mildred Gillars also wept; her tears and terror did not seem to be playacting.

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