by Joel Grey
He had joined the Play House in 1921 when Frederic McConnell—his classmate from the Carnegie Institute of Technology Drama School, in Pittsburgh—became its managing director. Together they brought national recognition to the amateur company, and it was now the nation’s oldest resident professional theater. Although Mr. Lowe continued to act as a member of the company, he had also become a renowned director who had influenced the careers of many successful Play House alumni.
I took off my coonskin cap and my jacket and began my audition. The material from On Borrowed Time, a dark comedy about Death in the form of a man named Mr. Brink who comes for my character’s parents in the very first scene, was heady stuff for a nine-year-old. By the second scene Mr. Brink has come for Granny. Then it’s Pud’s grandfather’s turn, but Gramps tricks Death by trapping him in a tree so that Mr. Brink can’t take him away from Pud, who has lost everyone. The only problem is that as long as Gramps doesn’t die, no one else in the world can, either.
When I finished with the line “Don’t want my whole life ahead of me. I want to go with you. I love you, Gramps,” Mr. Lowe looked at me like I had just said something he had never heard before. He paused for a beat and then asked gently, “What would you do if your grandfather said, ‘I can’t be with you anymore. I have to go with Mr. Brink’? How would you feel if he would abandon you like that?”
“I would feel very sad and mad, too, mad that he would leave me. You don’t love me anymore.”
“And what would that mean, ‘You don’t love me anymore’?”
“Who is going to keep care of me? I would be sad and angry.”
“That’s right. Let’s do the scene again.”
After I had done it, he said, “That was very good, and you’re a very good actor, Mr. Katz.”
As I tried to do what he asked, I felt something new coming out of me, something he had drawn out of me, that I hadn’t known I’d had. I put old feelings and experiences of my own short life into the scene. I thought about the deepest fear a kid can have—losing your mother. It made me angry and sad and scared all at once. And with that, the part was mine, and I stepped into the magical world of the Play House.
The weeks leading up to opening night of the play changed my life. First of all, I was allowed to go to school late, so that I could spend the mornings rehearsing. How I loved those mornings! Unlike the chaos and noise of school and home, there was such dignity and structure to the theater. At the Play House there were clear rules for behavior, and I was enthralled by the exceptional actors’ manners. In accordance with British tradition, all the actors were referred to by their last names and the appropriate titles before them. That included me. “Mr. Katz, come to the stage, please.”
The formality signaled to me that this was a serious art, of which I had the privilege to take part. No one in his wildest dreams would randomly change the playwright’s words. There were no excuses for not having learned one’s lines. Pride in craft was simply too high for that kind of amateur-hour stuff.
Although I was only nine years old and the Play House was the premier regional repertory theater, drawing tremendous talent from all over the country, I was treated as an equal. In the dressing room, veterans such as Johnny Rowe, who played Gramps, taught me the art of putting on makeup. I sat in front of the mirrors and bright lights, breathing in the spirit gum as the highly regarded actor turned into a painter, applying shading and lines to his face.
Showing up at the theater on time, learning my lines quickly, and remaining quiet when other actors were working, I was admired for my discipline and my naturalness. Even Esther Mullin, who was also in the production, respected me. (Esther played the villain of the piece, the terrible Aunt Demetria Riffle, who pretended she wanted to take care of Pud but just wanted the money—a real bitch and a great part.)
By the time I made my stage debut on opening night of On Borrowed Time, I fully understood the necessity of serious preparation, and the need for very hard work to create a successful theatrical production. As a result, I was prepared. I knew my lines and blocking. But I was not prepared for the weeping in the first and second rows! The 150-seat Brooks Theatre was filled to capacity. I heard audience members sobbing and blowing their noses during the last scene of the play—as Pud, having fallen from the tree and broken his back, lies helpless and in pain in Gramps’s arms. “Take him, Mr. Brink. Take him now. Take us both,” Gramps said. I stood up, smiling beatifically after all that pain, because my character had been carried to heaven and reborn—and so was I.
During the curtain call, holding hands with the seven other actors, a family, and having won the affection of the audience because I did a good job, I thought, I want my life to always be like this.
After the show, people clambered around me to say how my performance moved them. “It was so powerful.” “How did you know how to do that?” “How could a kid so young understand all those deep feelings?”
Praise for my performance extended to the local press. “As for Joel Katz’ playing of ‘Pud,’ I only can say that the boy is phenomenal,” read the review of On Borrowed Time in the highly regarded Cleveland Press. “He is as completely at home on the stage without being the slightest degree precocious as any child I have ever seen.” My first review was better than I could have ever hoped for! (Who knew that it wouldn’t always be the case?)
But perhaps my biggest fan of all was Mother. She just loved the recognition I was receiving for my work onstage. If she used her husband’s success as a musician to boost her self-esteem and standing in the community, imagine what it would mean if her son became a star. I was her flesh and blood, so if I were admired, it was in large part thanks to her. The dream that had burned too brightly in her youthful imagination had been magically rekindled. I was to be famous in her place.
My mother’s pride in me had real perks. I relished her attention during the run of On Borrowed Time, particularly our late-night suppers at Wong’s after the show. I felt so grown-up rolling into the Chinese restaurant at ten o’clock with my mother as if we were on a date. She ordered all my favorites: shrimp chow mein, sweet and sour pork, egg foo young. The food, even those disgusting cardboard fortune cookies, was a prize for giving a good performance.
I was in On Borrowed Time for months, then another play immediately afterward. I continued to get part after part, never wearying of the performance or rehearsal schedule. I didn’t perform with the Curtain Pullers any longer, but I didn’t miss it. Nowhere was I more content than at the Play House. I found every nook and cranny of the theater fascinating. While I was in a production of Family Portrait, being performed in the Drury Theatre, Invitation to Murder was being performed in the other small theater, the Brooks (where On Borrowed Time had been). When I wasn’t onstage, I would go underneath the theater and wait below the other stage for the actress to lift the arm of her chair, causing a trapdoor to open. Night after night, she would drop straight down a hole in the stage, and I would be waiting below. It never got old.
One night, my father and mother each thought the other one was picking me up after a performance—so no one came to get me. Locked in the theater alone, I wasn’t the least bit frightened. It was a dream come true! Onstage, illuminated only by a single ghost light, I recited to an imaginary, yet deeply enthralled audience the Queen Mab monologue from Romeo and Juliet, which Mr. Lowe had encouraged me to learn.
O then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
I wandered up and down the steps of the four-story building, in heaven, trying on all sorts of costumes in the wardrobe department and practicing my entrance onto the stage. I would have been totally thrilled to sleep there, but, alas, my father finally arrived to retrieve me. Almost in tears, he had absolutely no idea how happy I’d been.
There was a lot that my parents didn’t understand about the Play House. The Epsteins and the Katzes frequented Cleveland�
��s thriving Yiddish theater. They often went to the Duchess and Globe theaters, owned by a furrier who produced Yiddish plays during the warmer months, when fur sales were slow. Many famous Jewish performers appeared there, such as Molly Picon and a young Paul Muni (born Frederich Meier Weisenfreund). But the legitimate theater was not the world of my family—certainly not my grandparents, who lived an almost entirely Jewish existence.
My grandfather Max, a passionate opera-lover, always listened to the broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera on the radio, even while he helped me prepare for my bar mitzvah. Sitting next to him in his tailor shop at 74th Street and Cedar in the middle of winter—the windows fogged up from the steam-presser, an egg salad sandwich my mother had made for us to share resting on the display case—I was practicing my maftir when he stopped me. I hadn’t made a mistake in the recitation of my Torah portion. Rather, a recording of the late Enrico Caruso, one of my grandfather’s favorite singers, was playing on the radio.
“You know,” Grandpa Max said to me with his customary seriousness, “Caruzeh vas a Jew.”
In Mendel the Tailor’s worldview, everybody worthy of respect was Jewish—even the great Italian tenor. And who was going to deny it?
I, however, knew the difference between Gentiles and Jews—and there were definitely no Jews at the Play House. Except for one: Benny Letter, the head of construction and a fan of my father’s, kept an eye out for me, occasionally inviting me to share coffee cake during his break.
“How do you like it?” Benny asked about the Play House.
“I love everything about it.”
“That’s good … And I’m here, too.”
It was a reminder that Benny and I were indeed a little different from everyone else in the company. But I wasn’t afraid of that difference. The fact that I was appreciated, even admired, at the Play House relieved some of my Jewish wariness of the Gentiles. How could I be afraid in such an inviting and pleasant place?
Mr. Lowe and his wife, Dorothy, were certainly as different from Grace and Mickey Katz as one could imagine, and in my mind for the better. I loved visiting the tall, handsome, and urbane Mr. Lowe and the fine actress and Southern beauty Miss Paxton in their special dressing room for two. The storied duo were the Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne of Cleveland, often appearing together onstage, sometimes even as husband and wife.
They shared a professional life as well as a personal one, but that was not what distinguished them most from my parents. Mr. Lowe and Miss Paxton were educated, having both graduated from Carnegie’s drama department, where they met. They were polite and soft-spoken, not just with others but also—astonishingly—with each other. I didn’t know that kind of respect and gentleness existed between married people.
Because I came from a house where expressions of love were coupled with hostility, discovering a man and woman who respected each other in love and work, who were careful with each other, was a revelation. The relationship between Mr. Lowe and Miss Paxton couldn’t have been that perfect, but to me, it was.
Hoping one day to have a marriage like theirs, I turned Mr. Lowe and Miss Paxton into role models and surrogate parents. In her honeyed Southern accent, Miss Paxton would invite me to join them for dinner along with their two daughters, P.K. and Stanja. She listened to my stories about home and school, accompanying my tales with her hiccup of a laugh, and met all of my odd little quirks—such as the green bow tie I continued to wear or my becoming overly dramatic when retelling my day at school—with motherly affection. Miss Paxton, a real Southern belle, didn’t have moods, only maternal protectiveness.
Mr. Lowe also showed concern for my well-being—often by keeping Mother on a short leash. While watching me grow as an actor, he intuited that her motives behind her extreme desire for my success had more to do with her than with me. Elegantly, he protected me, asking her not to direct me in my lines or telling her I would be fine at the theater for the day and that she could go. He was able to succeed at what few had before him: putting Mother in her place. To her credit, she accepted it from Mr. Lowe.
Still, I had an uneasy feeling of guilt that by loving Mr. Lowe and Miss Paxton as much as I did, I was somehow dishonoring my parents. Caught in a confusion of allegiance, I was torn between wanting to be safe and heard and wanting to please my mother and make her proud of me. While I knew my dad’s love was a constant, something I didn’t have to work at and could take for granted, my mother’s affection seemed entirely conditional.
Above all else, I loved being with my mother, particularly when I could have her all to myself. So when she told me we were going to New York City, just the two of us, the prospect was over-the-top exciting. The purpose was to audition for the role of one of the sons in Life With Father. Based on a beloved book series, the heartwarming Broadway hit concerned a nineteenth-century Wall Street broker and his attempts to keep order at home with four lively sons.
Word had gone around the Play House that the Broadway hit production was looking to replace one of the sons, and Mom thought we should go for it. The plan was haphazard. Details on where this audition was to take place, or who had set it up in the first place, were sort of vague. But the biggest question I had was how I could play one of the boys, since they were all redheads. “Please!” she said. “If you get the part, they can dye your hair.”
Mother took me out of school, just as she had for rehearsal at the Play House, and we arrived at Cleveland’s Terminal Station all dressed up for our train to the Big City.
The train trip, while exciting and romantic, was nothing compared with arriving in the city that was the epicenter of the American theater. In the cab from Penn Station to our hotel, we sped through block after block of theaters, the marquees rising, blinking, and calling out:
BY JUPITER STARRING RAY BOLGER
GERTRUDE LAWRENCE IN MOSS HART’S LADY IN THE DARK
GEORGE GERSHWIN’S PORGY AND BESS
CANADA LEE IN NATIVE SON
I had never seen so many people on one street! There were crowds of people, smiling, talking, smoking, pushing. There were policemen on horses and guys selling hot dogs and pretzels. Street musicians competed with honking car horns.
Having arrived at 47th Street, we made our way into the Edison Hotel, the biggest, fanciest hotel I could ever imagine. The Sovereign, where we still lived, was grand, but the Edison was truly glamorous. The Art Deco lobby was just as chaotic as the street outside. Bellhops dashed in between men in suits and women in cinched cocktail dresses with lots of jewelry. New York was everything I had imagined—larger than life, full of possibilities, and fast. It was also overwhelming.
At some point, I turned and suddenly realized that my mother was gone. I looked frantically around the lobby. Where was she? Barely a moment had passed since she had been right next to me. Then I spotted her, just a few yards away, talking to some strange man. She was smiling, her mascaraed eyes glowing so that even I knew she was flirting.
A few minutes passed before Mother called me over and introduced me to the handsome, older man. I was confused, but Mother quickly moved us along. “Joel, dear,” she said. “I have the key. Let’s go to the room.” She said goodbye to the man, and we left.
Up in the room, the two of us changed for an early dinner in one of the hotel’s exotic restaurants. As if in a romantic scene from the movies, I ate my strawberry flambé and listened to this beautiful woman across the table telling me what a good actor I was and how my talent would take me far. By the time the check arrived, I was ready to go back to the room to rest up for my audition and a day in the city.
Back in our room, I couldn’t get over the sea of lights that shone below the window where I sat. I was so enchanted that I almost didn’t notice that my mother was changing her outfit again, this time into a tight-fitting dress.
“Why are you changing clothes?” I asked. No answer. She continued to apply her lipstick and to fool with her hair.
“Where are you going? It’s late.”
; “I’m going dancing,” she finally replied. “There’s a famous place around the corner called the Havana Madrid. It’s a hot spot for Latin dancing.”
“Am I coming with you?”
“Children are not allowed.”
“You can’t…” I started to protest.
“Sweetheart, you know your mother loves to dance.”
“Are you going with that man in the lobby?”
“Yes, dear. But I promise you: One dance, and I will be back.”
“Mommy. You can’t go.”
“It is late, but you can stay up for a little while. I love you, dear.”
And then she was gone.
I was alone in a hotel room in New York City. I got so cold, I began to shiver. Then came the tears. Although I was considered mature for my age and spent a lot of time back home around adults or by myself, I was still just a kid. Left alone in a big and strange city such as New York was the scariest thing in the world. I looked out the window; I looked at the clock; I turned the radio on and off and on; I put more lights on around the room. Nothing helped. A series of terrible what-ifs raced through my mind. What if he was a bad man? What if he hurt her? What if she never came back? It was two o’clock in the morning when she returned. She came over to embrace me and I smelled alcohol on her breath.
“Why are you crying?” she said. “Mother’s here.”
“I hate you.”
There never was an audition during that trip. We were supposed to call somebody, or somebody was supposed to give somebody else a letter, but “somebody” never panned out. I don’t know what happened, and frankly I didn’t care. Mother tried to explain, but I was not interested. The only lasting impression of the trip was Mother’s volatility. Even if she said I was the greatest, “the sun, the moon, and the stars,” that couldn’t guard me from her unpredictability.
So it became clear: The only truly safe place for me was the theater. Over the next two years the Play House provided a harbor from the chaos of my mother, a place where I never found myself knocked between being wonderful one minute and bad the next, as I did during the Epsteins’ Sunday brunches. In the acting company, I found a family of an entirely different sort. Here, you could say and feel whatever was inside you. Problems were solved and decisions were made by listening to different points of view. There was an exchange of ideas, because no one way would satisfy.