by Joel Grey
The bristles hurt when they hit my arms and legs, but that was nothing compared with the beating I knew I would receive if I surrendered.
“Get out from under there!”
I never understood what we could have done to make her so angry. I was always so careful. Always. But it had to be something. Maybe we didn’t clean up the dishes when we were supposed to, or we didn’t wash them well enough. Or maybe we spilled something on the sofa. Whatever it was, I knew I deserved it—just as my father deserved her ridicule for being who he was.
After a time, the broom would retreat and so would Mother. Still, I would wait before coming out from under the bed to make sure that it was safe. When it was and my mother’s mood had passed, I would return to my role of the perfect son.
My first leading role, as a young pilgrim climbing a very tall watchtower, was a true test of my mettle as an actor. I was petrified climbing the flimsy ten-foot set piece, but the audience didn’t know, because I climbed as if I weren’t afraid.
CHAPTER TWO
The school bus dropped me off at 105th Street, from where I surveyed all the trees, grass, and ponds of Rockefeller Park below. A ten-minute walk and I was home. As soon as I entered the large and stately lobby of the Sovereign Hotel, I was boiling. Even though it was a 50-degree Cleveland spring day, Mother, worried I would catch a cold, had overdressed me as always. I took off my hat and plaid, cold-weather jacket, put them down next to my lunch box on a big burgundy leather chair, and went over to the reception desk.
We had moved to the large residential hotel two years earlier, when I was eight years old. It was still only ten minutes by streetcar from Grandma Fanny’s house, but according to Mom we were stepping up in the world. There were maids that would come to clean our apartment every day, ballrooms where they held wedding parties on the weekend, and a concierge desk manned by Larry.
Standing in front of a wall of hanging keys and messages in little cubbies, the old man wearing a mustache, glasses, and Sovereign uniform was easily annoyed by my questions.
“Hello, Larry, are my parents upstairs?”
“No, your mom and dad are out.”
When Dad wasn’t out at or traveling for a job, he was sleeping late after one. I usually saw him only when I got to tag along to the RKO or on outings to Uncle Abie’s nearby drugstore, where I loved standing among the tight, tall aisles packed with bottles, jams, jellies, and tubes of mysterious purpose. Mom, too, was often out, either off playing mah-jongg with her girlfriends or shopping for unusual ingredients to make a new recipe.
“Where’s my brother? Is my brother up there?”
“The babysitter is up there.”
Uh-huh. Effie and Ronnie. I’d rather be alone. No matter how old my little brother grew, to me he was just a baby.
I asked Larry if Susie Kovach, one of the few children in the hotel, was home. She and I went to different elementary schools, and I had assumed that was because she was an immigrant. She and her mother had moved to Cleveland from Prague not long before we moved into the hotel.
When Larry replied that he didn’t know, I said, “Could you call up please and ask Mrs. Kovach if Susie is there?”
Annoyed, he picked up the house phone.
“Mr. Joel Katz from 10B is downstairs and wants to know if he can come up … You can go right up.”
Mrs. Kovach, a nice lady with a thick accent, opened the door. With her somber clothing and worried expression, she was so different from my own mother. But sometimes she gave Susie and me finger paints with a funny smell that I loved to use. She showed me into the living room, where Susie was already doing her homework. After Mrs. Kovach left to get us a snack, Susie leveled her serious blue eyes at me. Under her straight blonde bangs, they made quite an impression.
“Mama can’t get in touch with Teta Ingrid,” she whispered. “She’s very upset since we probably shan’t see her again because of what is happening to the Jews.”
This wasn’t the first time Susie had brought up this subject. She often talked about how she and her mother, who had escaped Prague, were afraid for the family they had left back there.
In this way, Susie filled in some of the information my parents had tried to shield Ronnie and me from. Although they tried to whisper or speak in Yiddish (Dad was fluent), I knew 1942 was a time of terrible things for the Jews in Europe. I overheard stuff such as Dad’s phone call with Uncle Abie about the Jewish passengers of the transatlantic liner St. Louis. They had been forced to return to Europe, and their story was all over the news.
“President Roosevelt is letting those boats go back?” my father said in a tone that was both concerned and questioning. “How can that be? He’s been so much on the side of the Jews … Do you think the papers are right? I read they sailed so close to Florida they could see Miami’s lights … It’s a shanda. Women, children. Jews. All those people are going to be killed.”
Killed?
Why would anyone want to kill Jews? I was Jewish—why would they want to kill me? Was there something wrong with us?
Roosevelt was a god and a great president—so Dad said—but if he couldn’t protect the Jews, who could? My father’s phone call left an indelible mark as did so much else about being Jewish at that time. There was a deep-seated anxiety about the goyim. Being Jewish was dangerous—in Europe at the moment but anywhere eventually. Even collecting money to plant trees in Israel, a perennial Hebrew school project, made me uneasy. I wondered as donations dropped into those little blue boxes whether one day we would have to leave the Sovereign and move there.
After finishing my homework and the snack with which Mrs. Kovach had returned, I looked up at the clock on the wall and saw that it was nearly 4:00 P.M. Jerry would soon be starting his shift. I quickly gathered my things, said goodbye to Susie, thanked Mrs. Kovach, and headed to the elevator.
Elevators in buildings were still rare, and the fact that we had one where we lived made the place seem exciting and luxurious. The decor of the Sovereign’s elevator—dark wood paneled with shiny brass, a hand-operated lever, and soft overhead lighting—confirmed its importance. But the real thrill for me was Jerry, the pale-skinned, sixteen-year-old bellboy who ran the elevator every day after he finished school.
Sometimes he let me work the elevator, which I loved to do, but the best part of being with Jerry was that he treated me like an equal. Even though we were six years apart, he took an interest in me and shared things about himself: from a big, Irish family who lived in the poor west side of town, he hoped to go to college on a baseball scholarship. When he described the Cleveland Indians games he went to, I pretended I was interested (if someone tossed a baseball to me underhanded I would find a way to injure myself catching it). I loved talking to Jerry no matter what the subject—sports, homework, even the girls who walked through the hotel lobby.
“She’s pretty, isn’t she?” he said after a cute blonde girl visiting one of the guests went by.
“Did you see that one?” he said about a sexy redhead. “Now, she’s gorgeous.”
“Yeah. She really is something. Do you go out with her?” I might ask.
That’s how it began between us, with girls, with how men are supposed to talk until one day the talk about the sexiness of girls shifted into something else.
“You know something, that’s making me horny,” Jerry said while discussing a buxom, older woman who lived on the fifth floor. “I’m getting hard.”
Silence.
“So am I.”
He stopped the elevator between floors and slipped his arm around my shoulder. I thought to myself, What are you doing? I didn’t speak. I smelled dry-cleaning fluid on his uniform.
When the buzzing for service became frantic, he returned his hand to the lever, put the elevator back in motion to pick someone up. I went along for the ride, hands folded in front of me, like any ordinary passenger.
From the moment Jerry dropped me off at my floor—the elevator doors closing on his smiling face—unti
l his next shift, I couldn’t wait to see him again. To ride up and down in the elevator, talking about homework and the hotel. To feel the thrill in my stomach at his touch.
Jerry’s affections solidified feelings and impulses within myself that I had trouble naming before we began fooling around. When we first met, I was immediately attracted to him, even though I didn’t understand it as such. Months before our first encounter, I couldn’t take my eyes off him and would find any reason to take a ride in the elevator. Afterward, the whole thing seemed so obvious. He was handsome and strong, and we liked each other. Yet when I was off the elevator, I was keenly aware we weren’t supposed to be doing what we were doing.
I explained away the unnerving early stirrings of my sexuality with a member of the same sex by using the closeness—acceptable within the confines of the playfulness of boys—that I shared with my cousin Burton. The only child of my mother’s oldest sister, the dour Aunt Helen, and her harried husband, Irving, Burton was born a month before me and was roughly the same height. But that’s where the similarities ended. From the small apartment where he lived above his parents’ candy store on the west side, Burton did all the normal things a ten-year-old boy was supposed to do—at least according to the Epsteins. He played sports and wore regular clothes, unlike me. My best sport was jumping rope with the girls (I wasn’t allowed to play anything too rough for fear that I might get hurt).
We adored each other because of our differences, not in spite of them. I admired him for his conventional clothes, strength, and position as Grandma Fanny’s favorite, the only child of her firstborn. In turn, he thought that I was something glamorous with my artistic family and flair. We cared for each other a lot, so alone in the quiet of Burton’s bedroom, cuddling under the covers, we felt comfortable to explore normal urges that for us started at about nine years old. The erotic aspect of our closeness was innocent and exploratory—the normal stuff of kids. But we also sensed that if our family found out what we were up to in his bedroom, they would not be happy. Outside of the cocoon of Burton’s bedroom and Jerry’s elevator, boys weren’t supposed to be like that with boys. It felt right to me, but I knew it would get me into big trouble.
I was taunted by the neighborhood bullies for much less. When my mother dressed me in a green bow tie for picture day at school, she said, “You look wonderful!” But on the way to the school bus the boys on the corner shouted, “Look at the sissy!” It was ironic my mother chose outfits that made the kids call me queer, since she was no fan of the faygelehs (the Yiddish word that meant little birds was derogatory slang for the flittery-fluttery outcasts with lisps and limp wrists). When my parents would have friends over for cocktails and start to get a little loose, I would overhear them making fun of any musicians who seemed a little too swishy.
Although I felt safe in Burton and Jerry’s embrace, out in the world, the disgust in the voices of my parents, their friends, and the kids on the block alerted me to a very real danger. Their insults posed a threat against which I had to be constantly vigilant. I had to protect myself from queer or faygeleh being leveled at me. I had to conceal the closeness and comfort I had with certain boys.
It sometimes felt as if danger lurked around every corner of my childhood—my mother’s erratic, angry moods; the murderous hatred of the Jews that Susie Kovach described; my feelings for boys that would make everyone else hate me. There was even a period of worry in the house about my being so small, as if I were freakish. Mother looked into pituitary shots, but that didn’t go anywhere, and I remained forever in the front row for my class pictures. The result of all this anxiety was a permanent state of hyperalertness for being born who I was (small, sissy, Jewish). I always kept my antennae up for signs of trouble. A boy looking at me a beat too long or a group of more than four of them congregating on the corner was reason to turn and go the other way.
There was, however, one place where it seemed as though nothing bad could happen, a safe haven where I was free to let go of my caution.
From the moment I first walked into the Cleveland Play House, when I was nine years old, a feeling of pure joy washed over me. Mother brought me on a special date (Ronnie had to stay home with Effie the babysitter) to a Saturday-matinee performance by the Curtain Pullers, the children’s program, and I was enchanted as we walked into the Drury Theatre, the bigger of the two that made up the Play House’s complex on Euclid Avenue. I had never been to the theater, and as soon as I got there I knew I was someplace.
The refined stone and masonry work gave way to the 560-seat apron-stage theater, which had been converted from a church. As I nestled into the seat beside my mother, I thought about how the theater’s beauty was so different from the calculated glamour of the RKO Palace Theatre, where my father played in the orchestra. The Play House didn’t dazzle; it impressed. Its patrons, too, were different; they looked as if they were in a real church (or what I imagined people looked like in church). The adults holding playbills, the boys in gray flannel pants and blue blazers, and the girls in smocked dresses were all refined and serious. A respectful hush filled the theater.
Then the lights went down and the performance began. I didn’t know what the play was or who the Curtain Pullers were—but as I watched the children up there in their colorful costumes telling us a magical story, I pointed to the stage and whispered to my mother, “I want to do that.”
Mother enrolled me as soon as the performance ended, and the following Saturday I joined the dozen or so other Curtain Pullers in the drama class taught by the very severe Esther Mullin, who made it clear from the onset that one had to measure up no matter how insignificant the exercise. She didn’t have a lot of humor, and she told it like it was. The way she nailed people for bad acting was scary, but I could also see what she meant when she talked. Recognizing the art Miss Mullin was instilling in us, I not only feared but respected her.
Even when it was my turn to be criticized, I didn’t mind so much, because I was learning something new and important.
“Is that supposed to be walking through a door?” she said to me one day in class. “You’re just showing something; you’re not really doing it. Make me see the door. Now, go again.”
Miss Mullin was right, and I worked on doing it the proper way, walking through that door so everyone could see it!
I loved class and being in front of an audience that had paid 25 cents a seat to watch my fellow miniature thespians and me in our weekly plays. My first leading role, as a young pilgrim climbing a watchtower to warn the populace of a dreadful storm in Hurricane Island, was a true test of my mettle as an actor. It wasn’t my lines or the complexity of the character’s emotional state that proved challenging, but rather the daunting task of climbing a very tall ladder to reach the platform where I was supposed to wave frantically to the other pilgrims (offstage). I was petrified climbing the flimsy ten-foot set piece, but the audience didn’t know that, because I climbed as if I weren’t afraid. As if nothing bothered me. As if I were brave and strong. That was the job, so that’s what I did.
Hurricane Island, a real confidence booster, was an early, very crucial lesson in performance—not just onstage but also in real life. Learning to do things “as if” was a discovery that turned out to be an invaluable tool as an actor and as a person with secrets. I adopted a confident stride, different from my own, so that no one on the street would finger me as a sissy. That walk became so ingrained that I no longer remembered what my own true way of walking was.
I acted in a wide variety of children’s plays and parts from the title role in Jack of Tarts, to the wicked wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, to Little Black Sambo in a musicalized version of the classic children’s story in which a “Topsy” wig transformed my blond curls into cornrows tied up with little colored ribbons and makeup turned my white face black (not the Curtain Pullers’ finest moment). Through the much-needed framework of the Play House, I began to gain an identity—and a reputation.
After the artistic director
of the Play House, K. Elmo Lowe, saw me in one of the Curtain Puller rehearsals, he asked Miss Mullin if she thought I could handle a part on the main stage. She said yes, and soon I was auditioning for the part of eight-year-old Pud in the Play House’s production of Paul Osborn’s Broadway smash hit On Borrowed Time.
For my audition, Mother dressed me up in high-top boots, a plaid mackinaw jacket, and the Daniel Boone coonskin hat that was all the rage with the under-twelve set. When I arrived for my meeting with Mr. Lowe looking as if I had got lost hunting rabbits, it was all he could do to stifle his laughter. Calling to his wife in the greenroom upstairs, he said, “Miss Paxton, you’ve got to see this.”
Walking behind Mr. Lowe into the room where the actors hung out between rehearsals and performances, I was keenly aware of the photographs of previous Play House productions that covered the walls. Serious young men and dreamy women stared out at me as I readied myself for a chance at a place in one of those pictures on the wall.
“Mrs. Katz, would you mind waiting downstairs,” Mr. Lowe said, breaking me out of my reverie. I looked at my mother, who, having followed Mr. Lowe and me into the greenroom, appeared just as startled as I was.
“Thank you very much,” he added, and Mother left the room.
It wasn’t hard to understand how he had been a matinee idol back in the 1920s (legend had it that in his early years at the Play House, the theater couldn’t hang his picture in the lobby because it kept getting stolen by love-struck women). With his thick crop of pushed-back black hair, natty tweed jacket, and six-foot-four frame, K. Lowe was the epitome of highbrow glamour.