Master of Ceremonies

by Joel Grey

  Dad threw himself into the project. To record “Haim Afen Range,” he gathered the very best from the world of Jewish musicians, including his friend and composer Al Sack. Al, a fellow Clevelander and the musical director for Dinah Shore’s radio show, wrote the song’s musical arrangement. The elite musicians, who typically played the scores for the biggest movie studios of the day, performed “Haim Afen Range” as if their souls had been yearning for it. They were thrilled to play the music of their forefathers instead of the theme to Ben-Hur. When Dad heard the final product, he realized some kind of magic had been created and quickly wrote “Yiddish Square Dance” for the flip side of the record.

  His instincts turned out to be right on the money. In the fall of 1947, RCA released 10,000 copies in New York City, and the 78 rpm recording sold out in three days—with orders for 25,000 more! The record eventually hit upward of 200,000 copies. Mickey Katz had a smash! On the heels of its meteoric sales, Colony Records played my dad’s first solo record from loudspeakers that blared onto Broadway.

  Oy geb mir a haim

  (oh, give me a home)

  Mit a viabele shain

  (with a pretty wife)

  Vu de sheps und die tziggelach lafen

  (where the sheep and lambs run)

  Oy geb mir a hois

  (oh, give me a house)

  Mit gesundte cowboys

  (with healthy cowboys)

  Und a por hundred cattle tzu far kafen

  (and a couple of hundred cattle to sell)

  Hundreds of people of every ethnicity walking down Broadway stopped to listen to the virtuosic freilach and Dad’s outrageous delivery. Jew, Irish, Italian, black—it sounded funny to everyone even if they, like the original RCA execs who commissioned the album, didn’t totally understand it.

  Dad was thrilled, and so was Mom, who found validation in all the attention and opportunity that song brought. This one hit made it clear that Mickey was going places, which is what she always thought about him, even when he was just a sixteen-year-old horn-blower in Cleveland. Dad’s newfound success couldn’t have come at a better time for my mother. True to my word, I kept my distance from her after the cantor affair. It had been months after the Paul and Linda drama before I could even be in the same room with her. In the space left by my emotional absence came this big new presence: fame. She was getting what she needed, and she did need it.

  On the heels of “Haim Afen Range,” RCA Victor offered my father a recording contract. “Tico, Tico”—the song recorded and made famous by Carmen Miranda after she performed it in the film Copacabana—became “Tickle, Tickle.” The Spike Jones hit “Chloe” was Yiddishized into “Chloya.”

  “Barber of Schlemiel,” “That Pickle in the Window,” and “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Katzkills” were more than just entertaining. In light of the larger geopolitical events raging around him—World War II and the Holocaust—Dad’s zany little songs were actually an act of bravery. There was a tremendous amount of fear in being Jewish, even in the US, which was far from immune to anti-Semitism. Many American Jews, particularly those who had found success, wanted to assimilate, not highlight their background. This was a time when there were still Gentile-only country clubs, law firms, and hospitals. We were here but not entirely welcome.

  Yiddish for some Jews was death. My father breathed life back into it, and for that he was considered by many to be a hero. But my father didn’t record his parodies just because he thought it would be good for the Jews. Though he loved the idea of giving people a sense of their heritage, because he was so proud of it himself, his sense of humor drove his music. Yet by parodying the hit songs of the day—such as “Shrimp Boats” (it became “Herring Boats”) and “Kiss of Fire” (“Kiss of Meyer”)—which everyone, both Jew and Gentile, knew, he was inviting the larger American society into the beauty and hilarity of Jewish culture. He was inserting Jews into pop culture, so that we belonged, too.

  From the moment “Haim Afen Range” hit, his life turned around. Mickey Katz became a bona fide recording star. So in 1948, when he and Hal worked on the idea for Borscht Capades, Dad was of course the draw, the headliner. Hal, who became one of the first big promoters of rock in the fifties, later represented and promoted everyone from Frank Zappa to Lenny Bruce to Ray Charles. In this period, he was devoted to my dad even though they were complete opposites. Hal, who towered over my small, slight father, was a tough guy, while there was no bigger softy than my father. Hal was the muscle, the businessman, and liked taking care of Dad.

  Up until this point, Dad never had to carry a show. Other than the occasional bit he did while part of the Palace orchestra in Cleveland, such as the one where he played Jean Harlow’s cuckolded lover, Dad was at heart a musician—not an actor, personality, or emcee. But this was the time of The Ed Sullivan Show, when people expected a host to guide them through an evening’s entertainment. That meant he had to entertain not only by playing his hits but also by introducing the acts. He had to become a master of ceremonies.

  Funny and sweet, he proved to be a great emcee—even if he didn’t love the part. He would have preferred simply to play with his band, because that was his passion. Yet his desire and his temperament, self-deprecating without acting the fool, made him a natural.

  Borscht Capades became the talk of LA, from Beverly Hills to Boyle Heights—it was that good. The revue offered something that couldn’t be found anywhere else. For all those people who had no place to hear klezmer music, Yiddish humor, and freilachs, the Wilshire Ebell was it.

  The show had something for everyone: Women swooned over a handsome tenor singing “Ich hob dir tzu fil leibt” (“I love you much too much”); men laughed at the ventriloquist Rickie Layne and his Yiddish-speaking dummy, Velvel; and everyone stood solemnly when Dad and his six-piece band ended the show with Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah.” Tickets became a hot commodity with scalpers selling them for top dollar. Meanwhile, my father, whose home number was listed in the phone book, took reservations from the public from our living room.

  “Hello, I’d like to speak to Mickey about tickets,” a woman said when I answered the phone. Everyone called him Mickey, as if they knew him. I passed the receiver to my dad.

  “Mrs. Goldberg, I have four seats in the fifth row,” he said.

  “This seat is going to be fine,” he continued.

  I didn’t need to hear Mrs. Goldberg’s side of the conversation to know what she was saying; everyone wanted to be in the first four rows. And they all had an excuse—a bad foot, bad hearing, a very important person from “the community.” But who could fit all these people into the first four rows?

  Our family always sat in the first four rows. Mother, all dressed up and gorgeous, was there every night in a different outfit, of course. She wouldn’t miss an opportunity to take bows after the show as admirers came up to congratulate the lovely Mrs. Mickey Katz. And it wasn’t just Mother; my aunts, uncles, and grandparents, all having followed our family out to LA, had to be at the show as well.

  The Epsteins made the exodus to Hollywood at about the same time as my father’s success with Borscht Capades. They had to make sure that Mother didn’t have anything that they didn’t have, too. Hearing about Grace’s wonderful life was just too much for them to take—when they received the photos Mother had sent of herself in a bathing suit, posed like a screen siren in our backyard in February, they immediately sold everything in Cleveland and came out to California. The Sisters—who were all married by that time, even Beverly the baby—arrived on the West Coast within weeks of one another.

  With husbands and kids in tow, they invaded the Westside, where we lived. There was Fritzi and her husband, Eddie Volk, and their two kids, Jackie and Robin (who later changed his name to Bobby). Helen and Irv, Burton’s parents, started up a hamburger joint near the Farmers Market.

  Grandpa Morris wasn’t feeling well when he made the move, and not long afterward he was diagnosed with cancer from which he soon
died. Fanny didn’t waste any time grieving. A year later, she married Harry Brody, whom she schlepped along wherever she wanted, and took his name.

  Dad’s family, who came out after the Epsteins, also lived on the Westside. (Between the Katzes and Epsteins, about forty citizens left Cleveland for good.) Abe, now Al, continued to work as a pharmacist, and Aunt Jeannie married Morris Schneider, whose religion and profession were both a little cloudy. Although it was a constant topic of family conversation, we never knew what Uncle Morris did for a living or if he was really Jewish. Esther and her husband Eddie opened Katz’s Finer Foods, on Pico.

  With the Westside colonized by my entire extended family, life in California shared a lot of similarities to what I knew back East. There was, however, one major exception: I no longer had a theater to act in.

  Before we left Cleveland, K. Lowe recommended that my mom bring me to the Pasadena Playhouse, a historically important theater that mounted productions of Shakespeare as well as the Southern California premieres of works by Eugene O’Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Noël Coward, and Tennessee Williams.

  Located in a low 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival building around a gracious arcaded courtyard, the “talent factory,” as it was known in LA, was certainly professional. I auditioned and landed a part in Dear Octopus, an English drawing-room comedy by the playwright and novelist Dodie Smith about three generations of a family, hoping that I might re-create my experience back in Cleveland. But the Play House was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that turned out to be impossible to replicate. With K., Miss Paxton, and the rest, I was not only inspired creatively but also nurtured emotionally. At the Pasadena Playhouse I was just in a play. After Dear Octopus finished its run, I didn’t return.

  I auditioned for some radio jobs. Radio was big, big, big back then. The one job I got was on Red Ryder, a radio show based on a popular Western comic strip. I was the understudy for Little Beaver, whose big line was “You betchum, Red Ryder.” Otherwise, acting in school plays and working with Mrs. Montague composed the sum total of my acting experience in LA.

  Sitting in the audience of the Wilshire Ebell and watching all the people around me cheer and laugh during Borscht Capades made me want to be onstage again. It would be great to join my dad’s show, but I had never sung or danced onstage before, and I didn’t know if I could do it.

  I turned to my godmother, Aunt Jeannie, for help in finding a suitable number that might work for the revue. Whatever I did had to appeal to the Yiddishkeit-loving audience of Borscht Capades but also capitalize on my seventeen-year-old energy. Jeannie had just the thing. In her living room, she took out “Rumania, Rumania,” a very popular song sung by Aaron Lebedoff, the Yiddish theater’s answer to Danny Kaye, and placed the needle on the record:

  Ay! Rumania, Rumania, Rumania …

  Geven amol a land a zise, a sheyne.

  Ay! Rumania, Rumania, Rumania …

  Geven amol a land a zisseh, a fineh.

  The fast-patter song exploded with a million Yiddish words. With dizzying speed, Lebedoff sang of a Romania from before the war, “a land, sweet and lovely” where “what your heart desires you can get; a mamalige, a pastrami, a karnatzl, and a glass of wine, aha!”

  I had never spoken a word of Yiddish, so Aunt Jeannie translated the lyrics, which I wrote down in longhand. I also wrote down the phonetic sounds of the Yiddish words, which my aunt helped me decipher, and memorized them. It was very difficult and very fast. The song was a real Yiddish tongue twister, but I sensed it would make a great, great piece of material.

  In quick succession, Dad figured out an orchestration for the number, I rehearsed it with the band, and that very same night, I was on. My one request was that he not say I was his son when he introduced me; I didn’t want the audience to think I got the job because I was the boss’s kid. So instead, my father announced, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Joel Kaye!”

  I came out, and the audience smiled at me as they would for any other nice Jewish boy. What happened next was a blur. I improvised all my dance moves while trying to remember the torrent of foreign words. I pulled from Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, and Mickey Rooney. I crossed my eyes and puffed out my cheeks. No body part was left unused. I jumped; I growled. You couldn’t exactly call it singing, but whatever it was, the audience loved it.

  Clapping and singing along with the lyrics, they knew the song well. Its nostalgia for the vanished pleasures of the Old Country resonated with them. To have these Yiddish words usher from the mouth of a young person was the ultimate symbol of hope. Perhaps all that they once were was not lost. It was a showstopper.

  When I was done, my heart pounding in my chest and sweat dripping down my forehead, the reaction from the crowd sounded like a helicopter’s landing. They shouted and shrieked, “More! More!” What I got from the audience was a rush, like a drug. This was not On Borrowed Time.

  With my one song over, my father took the stage and came over to me. Borrowing from the famous curtain speech coined by George M. Cohan—the legendary Broadway performer and founder of American musical comedy—Dad said, “Joel’s mother thanks you. His brother thanks you. His Aunt Jean thanks you. And I’m his father. And I thank you, too.” The audience went crazy.

  From that moment on I was a bona fide member of Borscht Capades. Dad always introduced me the same way, respecting my initial wish to be identified as his son only after I finished my act. He did make one small modification. “Now, ladies and gentleman,” he would say, “please welcome the Juvenile Star of Borscht Capades!” (To this day, my brother still kids me about it whenever he calls, asking, “Is the Juvenile Star of Borscht Capades home?)

  I was an instant hit, but I needed another number. Dad, the writer, came to the rescue with “Yossel Yossel,” a parody based on the Andrews Sisters’ hit “Joseph! Joseph!”

  When I was eight days old, they named me Yossel

  Oh, what a simcha; such a celebration!

  All my mishpuchah drank a toast l’chaim

  while I was suffering a minor operation.

  And later on, I went to kindergarten.

  I said, “Teacher, Yossel is my name.”

  She said, “The name of Yossel, it sounds like a schlomossel.”

  From Yossel, my name became Joel Kaye.

  “Yossel Yossel,” “Rumania,” and one more song Dad wrote for me about how much I loved the Jewish holidays became my act, fifteen sock-’em minutes of pure kvelling from the audience. I was everyone’s darling—including Mother’s.

  “He’s never sung or danced before. Can you imagine?” she’d say. “Oh, no, he doesn’t speak a word of Yiddish. I don’t know where he gets it from.”

  This was from the woman who had been so disgusted by and angry with me after she found out about my affair with the cantor that she wanted to send me to military school (an ironic choice, considering my crime). Now that I was getting a little bit of my own fame, all seemed to be forgiven. At least on her part. She could praise me to others as much as she wanted. No matter how much she tried to show affection toward me directly, I always kept a stiff arm. Mother was able to move on because, according to her, what had happened between Paul and me was relegated to the past. Right after the incident, instead of military school, she and my father had decided to send me to therapy.

  It wasn’t my first time in treatment. I had gone to see a psychologist at thirteen, not long after moving to LA, because I was having trouble with a bully and didn’t want to go to school. Gertrude, the therapist, was civilized, intelligent, and compassionate, and I enjoyed talking to her in the little room in the garden in back of her house. I was able to discuss my feelings in a calm way I couldn’t at home.

  Freud believed that all human beings started out bisexual, eventually turning homosexual or heterosexual depending on their early family dynamic. Beginning in the 1940s, however, psychoanalytic theory for the most part considered homosexuality a pathology. Horrific treatments, including electroshock therapy, chem
ical castration, hormone injections, and even lobotomies, were widely used in an attempt to cure homosexuals of their mental illness.

  I was incredibly lucky with Gertrude (as well as with the other few psychologists I would have in my lifelong relationship with therapy). When I talked frankly about the same-sex desires I was wrestling with, she didn’t panic. I wasn’t a bad person for the thoughts I had or even the things I had done. On the contrary, she told me I was smart, capable, sensible, and funny. My struggles were never black and white. Still, Gertrude framed my interest in men as developmental, something I would eventually get over with work and understanding. That’s what I wanted, too.

  I never discussed the sessions with my mom and dad. The girls I took out on dates after Paul had been run out of town were proof enough for my parents that I was “cured.” My homosexual experiences could be chalked up to adolescent experimentation—at least as far as Mother was concerned, so why would I let her know otherwise. In fact, I didn’t let her know anything.

  Something fundamental had been broken between my mother and me. I saw her clearly for who she was, a painful experience but one out of which some good did come. From my earliest memories, my mother had led me to believe that my father was weak so that she could have me all to herself. (“Look at you. You’re just like me; you’re your mother’s son.”) After she shunned me, any distance that might have existed between my father and me closed. Although I always loved him, I realized he was in fact a man of substance, someone I could rely upon no matter what.

  So when my father decided to go on the road with Borscht Capades, there was no question that I wanted to go with him. The tour went to every city that had a decent-sized Jewish community. As we traveled to Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Boston, Phoenix, Toronto, Montreal, and elsewhere, I learned on the road that there were Jewish communities in places where I had never imagined they existed—I became fascinated with the American Indian Baskets, beaded vests, and silver buckles I found in trading posts … often owned by Jews.