The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project DEBORAH A. BOLTON Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: January 21, 2010 Copyright 2015 ADST Q: Today is the 21st of January 2010. This is an interview with Deborah A. What does the A stand for? BOLTON: Anne. Q: Bolton. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy. Do you go by Deborah? Debbie? BOLTON: Debbie is fine. Q: Debbie. Let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? BOLTON: I was born on December 22, 1952 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with a twin brother, and raised and educated in Philadelphia. Q: All right. Let’s take on your father’s side? Where did your family come from your father’s side? BOLTON: My father’s side is Irish, my mother’s side is German. As I say, my German gets me out of bed in the morning, and my Irish gets me through the day. My father’s grandparents were born in County Mayo, and my mother’s grandparents, one was born in Germany in Dresden, and my grandmother was born in Warsaw but of German family. Brandt was her surname. Q: County Mayo. And they headed right for Philadelphia? BOLTON: They took the boat right to Philadelphia as far as I know. Q: Do you know much about them? BOLTON: I barely remember them. They died when I was quite young as my parents married later in life. I think my grandfather was a pipe fitter and had a lot of personality. I think my grandmother initially was, as they say, “in service” in Philadelphia, but I don’t really remember much more. My father used to take me down to see them on Saturday morning when I was little, so I got to know some interesting parts of Philadelphia. 1 Q: On your mothers side. Where did the German side come in? BOLTON: Well, the story is as I understand it, my grandmother who was born in Warsaw but of German stock, she had emigrated to the States with her husband very young. He had died in the first year of tuberculosis, and they had had a daughter, so she went back to Poland. They were very middle class. They were full of artists and fresco painters and musicians, and they even had a car. My great grandmother had passed away and then within six months my great grandfather remarried, and that apparently inflamed my grandmother who got back on the boat after a year and took her daughter back to Philadelphia. She met my grandfather who was a steward on the boat, my German grandfather from Dresden and they settled in Philadelphia. Q: Do you recall much about them? BOLTON: Yes, because they lived nearby and plus my grandfather actually lived with us for a few years when I was in high school after my grandmother died, so we saw them frequently, and I still have memories of them, but they seemed always to have been elderly and very European. They both spoke English, but would sometimes use German between them. Q: What did your father do? Did he go to school? How far up? BOLTON: My father was a bricklayer. He left school when he was 13, went into World War II, Signal Corps as a Tech Sergeant, in the South Pacific. I think he was a bricklayer before the war then went back to being a bricklayer. Like any Irish person he read poetry to me. I could read before I went to school. He also read history to me because like anyone who could get through World War II in one piece, if you didn’t get killed, you had a great time. That was a very fixating moment, so he was always reading histories of World War II and of course, we Irish descendants would have to hear about all the wrong Ireland endured as well as the poetry and the language. Q: On your mother’s side, what was she up to? BOLTON: Oh, Mother was an interesting person, too. She was an acrobatic dancer. She was the first American performer in the Soviet Union after recognition, around 1933 as part of about a five-year "gig" in Europe. She grew up in Philadelphia, where she took ballet, tap, and gymnastics. Apparently to the point where it was the decision whether she trains for the Olympics or whether goes professional. The Depression took care of that decision, so she went professional because making $100 a week was pretty good money in the Depression when you were 16 years old. There were four girls, four acrobatic dancers and a manager of the "Hazel Mangean Four". She spent five years in Europe having to come back only because of the war. They saw the war coming and thought they better get out on one of the last boats but performed in the U.K., France, and all over Germany, and she had run-ins with the Nazis because of her wearing her stage makeup on the street after rehearsal. She was blond and German 2 looking, given her parents. She spoke German. Some brown shirts were berating her because she had too much makeup for a good German girl and my mother gave them the "How dare you. I'm an American citizen." speech which perhaps counted for something in those days. They were the first performers in the Soviet Union after recognition. Unfortunately, they signed an extended contract but for rubles, not hard currency (valuta). Once they figured out that they could not take their salary out of the Soviet Union and one could only take on so many sables and eat so much ice cream, they needed the embassy's help to break the contract. She recalled that Ambassador Bullitt was the chief of mission and talked of playing cards with "the boys" from the embassy who turned out to be our most renowned, future Sovietologists. Even though they were not dancing classical ballet, as dancers they still used a ballet base and had ballet items with them. Mother told me they gave their toe shoes to the "boys" in the embassy for their "girlfriends" in the Bolshoi. Eventually, they did get out of their contract, and the experience was written up in Variety as a cautionary tale for those taking bookings in Moscow. She has wonderful pictures from May Day which she spent at the British Embassy. They had bookings all over Europe. When she visited me in Budapest in 1984 we went to one of the clubs she performed in (reportedly the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were in her audience). I took her to a reception and left her with all the older German-speaking Hungarian diplomats who remembered all those pre-World War II haunts and they had a wonderful trip down memory lane. We took the train to Vienna and sat at the tea room in the Ambassador Hotel (where she had been in the 1930s) for hours while she told me about their adventures such as one of the girls getting caught smuggling watches in her girdle from Switzerland to England on the boat train. One having too much liking for German beer and having to diet because of the costumes and the fact they were acrobats who had to support and balance each other. They never went to Spain because as my mother put it, "They were always in revolution", otherwise known as the Spanish Civil War. Q: Civil war and all. BOLTON: Exactly! She didn't follow the politics that closely. Then they came back to the States. They performed a lot in the U.S., too, and in Canada, and I think she was doing some modeling -- at least I have clippings from newspapers with her posing in a fur beside cars for sale, but then when the war came, she did war work. By that time she was not a spring chicken anymore; I mean, for that kind of tumbling and dancing. The act broke up although the manager stayed in New York and still continued in show business as an agent and manager. My mother never went back to show business, but she did work as a costumer for Van Horn’s which was a big costumer in Philadelphia that moved to New York and was actually the costumer for Saturday Night Live when that show started. Obviously I always grew up listening to old stories of travel, and my mother’s experiences in Europe. Again, for someone who left Philadelphia when she was 16, she knew Europe like the back of her hand and had a trunk that to me, was full of magic and siren songs. 3 I grew up with a historical interest from my father in foreign affairs and looking at his pictures from the war. From my mother the message was that living overseas can be a whole lot of fun. It was never like a conscious decision. I just always knew that I would travel. My twin brother’s idea of traveling is to go down the shore, and that’s it. He had no interest whatsoever, but I always, always knew that I would do something like this. When I started to talk about the foreign service, my mother told me sternly that "There are no women in the foreign service! I knew all those men overseas in the embassies. They’re all men!” which they were in the ‘30s, and beyond.