by Joel Grey
Naturally, I was happy to be noticed in the Times, but generally the rule I’ve experienced through my career is that when a movie bombs, you might as well not be good in it. My cameo in About Face led to a few television parts, but I still couldn’t seem to get hired in the theater, the only place I really wanted to be.
I spent a lot of time in the office of my splendid agent, Charlie Baker, head of the theater department at William Morris, being upset about parts I didn’t get. And he always tried to cheer me up and on.
“There’s no reason to beat yourself up,” he said sympathetically. “They simply went a whole other way. C’mon, let’s go to the Oak Room. I need a martini.”
Charlie, whose clients included Angela Lansbury, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, and Barbara Cook, was a true gentleman in an often sleazy business. The Harvard-educated World War II Navy lieutenant, well versed in the history of the theater, was elegant and effete to the point of being aristocratic. With his perfect martinis, clothes from J. Press, and country home in Sneden’s Landing, Charlie was known for his taste. He also became a passionate advocate of mine. It was a coup and an honor having him believe in me. However, he seemed to be the only one certain I’d succeed.
My disappointments were many. I had desperately wanted to be in No Time for Sergeants, a play about a rube from the sticks and his misadventures as he’s drafted into the Army during World War II. But they wouldn’t see me. I went up for the part of Rolf, the young Nazi who is in love with Liesl in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. My rendition of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” didn’t make Mr. Rodgers’s ears perk up any. Even when John Kander—a talented composer and close friend who was at the beginning of his career, accompanied me on the piano for my audition for a show called Irma la Douce—I still didn’t get the part.
I had a couple of strikes against me when it came to getting work in the theater. First there was my nightclub act. Having a variety performer in your legitimate show could easily be perceived as déclassé. The other issue was anti-Semitism.
Charlie took me to a party, a seated dinner held at a swell address on the Upper East Side, where blue-blooded theater types engaged in intellectual exchanges about the latest shows. So I was stunned to hear “kike,” the clipped sound of that ugly word, coming forcefully from the mouth of our prominent host. Even more surprising was my response: nothing. I said nothing. After I left the dinner and long after that, I continued beating myself up for not having said something.
Hiding or at least not announcing being Jewish was evidence of a deep conflict within me (although I was the son of the most Jewish performer in the business, theater people had no idea who Mickey Katz was). Denying yet another part of myself activated those feelings from childhood that there was something inherently wrong with me. It also finally persuaded me to listen to my agents’ conviction that plastic surgery on my nose would lead to a broader variety of parts. I had fought the idea for a long time. It felt crummy that I had to change such a fundamental part of myself in order to be acceptable. Why was a turned-up Aryan nose better? The answer was a difficult one to face; the pressure to change my nose was about anti-Semitism, and I rightfully hated that idea. Yet I so wanted and needed to work that I went ahead with the surgery.
Of course, Mother was all for it, particularly since she had already had her nose done. In Los Angeles, where plastic surgery was beginning to flourish right along with the palm trees, Mother was one of the first to do it. (Just like with fashion or food, she was always one of the first.) Aunt Jeannie followed by a month, then Aunt Helen, Aunt Fritzi, Aunt Esther, and oh, yes, the baby, Beverly—all of them except Estelle. (Hmm, what did she know?!) They all had plastic surgery for the same reason they had followed us out to California—they didn’t want Grace to have anything that they didn’t. The whole family even went to the same surgeon!
So when I eventually gave in, Mother herself took me to her wonderful Dr. Jessie Fuchs. My entire face was swollen and bandaged after the operation, but Dr. Fuchs assured me that I would be pleased with his work when the swelling went down. It took a good six months for my nose to reveal an ordinary and perfectly generic shape, but in the end I did think it looked fine. More important, I hoped that my new, less ethnic nose could help my career.
Thinking back, I’m certain without the surgery I never would have got the plum part of Jack in NBC’s 1956 telecast of an original musical version of Jack and the Beanstalk. With my hair bleached so blond that it was nearly white and my slightly swollen pug nose, I looked like the perfect non-ethnic fairy-tale character. Written by Helen Deutsch, hot after the success of the film Lili, starring Leslie Caron, Jack and the Beanstalk was an expensive, high-quality production.
The tension on the set right before we went live was high, and all the pressure fell on my shoulders. I was in every scene, singing and dancing. It didn’t help that my understudy had clearly watched All About Eve one too many times. All during rehearsals, he kept looking for me to break my leg. I saw out of the corner of my eye, moments before going on air, his face with an incredulous expression that read, How could you do this to me?
No matter: All went off without a hitch, and it was a giant step. I got good notices. The William Morris crew thought Jack and the Beanstalk was going to jettison me into the big time. It didn’t. It brought more television opportunities. The following year, I had a three-episode arc in December Bride as the fresh-faced, showbiz-crazy nephew of the sitcom’s star Spring Byington, who was like an older Lucille Ball. Also in 1957, I played a teenage killer who beats up a woman and is on the verge of killing her child in a realistic and violent episode of Bell Telephone’s Telephone Time drama series. With my face covered in mud and blood, it was exciting to work against type and play an aggressor, and I got to recover some of my acting chops. Much less enthusiastically, I took a role in the low-budget movie musical Calypso Heat Wave, in which I recycled dance steps I had made up for About Face. The only memorable thing about the movie was a cameo by Maya Angelou, then a little-known singer who had released a calypso album.
The fight to become an actor wasn’t the only persistent battle in my life. Throughout my twenties, I continued to wage a sexual war with myself. No matter how many women I was sleeping with, my conflict with men was never not there. I told myself I was bisexual, because I was attracted to women and men. But if I really looked at it, I would have to admit that was because being gay was simply not an option.
Trying so hard to be what society, including my parents, insisted I should be was exhausting. Particularly because when I did have relationships with men I had to be extremely careful not to be discovered. During the year that Ted, a publicist, and I spent together in the mid-fifties, he often brought me home to his parents’ house for Shabbos, and no one ever suspected we were anything more than business associates and friends. Over a delicious dinner at their gracious apartment at 80th Street and Riverside Drive, his lovely family didn’t have a clue as to the true nature of our relationship. To them I was simply their son’s client, a nice young Jewish boy living in New York away from his family. They took me in and made me feel like a part of theirs.
Ted wasn’t my first hidden adult relationship with a man. Before him, there was Robby, whom I met while shopping at Bloomingdale’s. I was looking for linens for the very first apartment I lived in alone—a one-bedroom at 400 East 57th Street with a sunken living room and cork floors that was all very Paul McCobb. While I was feeling the thread count of the sheets, Robby, an up-and-coming interior designer, offered me some advice. I knew instantly that he couldn’t care less about linens. When secrecy is part of your life, you develop a heightened awareness to the look.
The look, a certain minuscule brightening, widening of the eyes, can’t ever be denied or reversed. It can be nonsexual—a perfectly friendly hey-I-get-it acknowledgment. Or it can be angry, as in the defiant look, which says, How dare you know a secret about me that I’ll spend a lifetime denying. But the best is
the healthy admiring look and a smile that says, Hey! We’re from the same shtetl.
Connecting with someone was a relief; I could be unguarded and myself. But because the connection was forbidden, it was also electric. Robby, an erstwhile Orthodox Jewish boy from Brooklyn, had gone on to marry a Boston Brahman, joining a group of well-known figures in the design field who had put aside their sexuality (either permanently or intermittently) for the sake of wives and children.
I liked Ted and Robby a lot, but I knew deep down that neither would figure in my future. (I parted undramatically with both and remained good friends.) I never allowed myself even to imagine such a life. My agent, Charlie Baker, was gay, but no one at the office or the high society in which he moved seemed to acknowledge that discreet aspect of him. I stayed many times in his place in Sneden’s Landing, where some of the great theater people at the time had homes, but if he had lovers, I never met them.
And this was complicated by the fact that I wanted a family. I always knew this, from the time I was a little boy wandering around the Sovereign Hotel in Cleveland. Whenever there was an infant in the hotel, I had to stop and stare. The Davises, a couple who lived on our floor, couldn’t help noticing my interest in their baby and asked if I would like to hold her. Oh, yes, I would! I turned out to be very good at it, and Mrs. Davis let me give her six-month-old a bottle while she watched. I wound up babysitting little Nicole while her mother did other things; I loved holding, burping, and even diapering her. I knew right then that one day I’d be a dad.
Robert Anderson’s 1953 Broadway hit Tea and Sympathy, about a man who resolves his conflicted sexuality with a compassionate woman, had a profound impact on me. Directed by Elia Kazan and starring Deborah Kerr, making a remarkable Broadway debut, and a young John Kerr (no relation), the play centered on a seventeen-year-old, Tom, who is bullied by his prep school classmates because they assume his lack of ability with sports and girls means he’s a queer. Tom is drawn to the beautiful and sympathetic headmaster’s wife, played by Ms. Kerr, who in an act of unselfish generosity ends up validating him by taking him to her bed. In the quiet after making love, she says to Tom, “When you talk of this in years to come, and you will, be kind.” Broadway was shocked by this scene and the ideas the play dealt with so frankly, but I was inspired. I identified wholeheartedly with Tom during this confusing time. No matter how I conducted my personal life, becoming a husband and dad was my biggest desire, just as important as making it in the theater or becoming famous.
The only problem was that I was twenty-six years old and still single. That might not have seemed that old, even at that time, but I felt that it was. Many of my straight friends wed by twenty-one or twenty-two and were already on their second child. My primary example, my parents, married when they were seventeen and nineteen. Even Ronnie, my little brother, whom I had always dismissed as a baby, had a wonderful wife.
Ron took the path I hadn’t chosen: He went to UCLA, where he was Zeta Beta Tau and met Maddie, a nice Jewish girl from the sister sorority. They were immediate soul mates. Ronnie and I never had a lot in common and didn’t have a close relationship. Mother didn’t help by always showing her strong bond with me, the one who might make her famous. Growing up, the poor kid had to sit in the theater night after night watching everyone fall all over me during my performances in Borscht Capades. Meanwhile, I saw him as someone who was interested only in business.
Once he got married, however, everything changed. I instantly loved Maddie, who was so giving and easy and optimistic and gentle. She and I became like brother and sister (we always called each other that), and in turn Ronnie and I grew much closer. Maddie, the complete opposite of our mother, helped ease whatever competition our mother had stoked between us so that we could just enjoy each other. (Mother, not quite as big a fan of Maddie’s as the rest of us, took every opportunity to give her daughter-in-law helpful suggestions, such as “You shouldn’t wear that dress, dear. It makes your legs look even shorter than they are.”) Mother might not have loved her, but I was happy in their LA home and even more so when soon after their wedding they told me that Maddie was expecting.
With my younger brother doing everything I was unable to do, I started to feel old and self-conscious. Yet I couldn’t seem to stay on the straight and narrow.
There were nights when I went out of my way to pass the infamous Everard Baths, wondering what was happening behind the nineteenth-century limestone walls of the building on West 28th Street. What was I missing? Hidden from sight, I watched who went into the gay bathhouse (nicknamed “Ever-hard”). I desperately wanted to go in, but I was also deeply afraid.
This was the fifties, and a vehement crackdown on men having sex with men was well under way. President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an executive order, formalizing policy that had begun during Truman’s administration, which denied federal government security clearances to people because of their sexual orientation. The FBI conducted surveillance of gays and harassed them; the police continued to raid gay bars, hauling off well-dressed businessmen in handcuffs for photographers to capture, their families to see, and their lives to be ruined.
Even though I knew all of this, the arched entryway of the Everard proved too exciting to ignore. One night, feeling that I have to do this, I walked in just like a regular and paid my entrance fee. With an equal mix of fear and anticipation I took my key and towel from the clerk.
I was still in the locker room, totally naked, my towel over my shoulder and with no idea what awaited me, when I felt a poke on my shoulder and then heard someone say, a little too loudly, “Joel Grey. What are you doing here?”
I can’t remember what happened after that. The next thing I knew I was hailing a cab on Lexington and begging the driver to step on it. It takes a lot for me to cry, but it was all I could do when I got home that night. Beating myself up for wanting something that had the capacity to destroy me, I cried and cried. At some point I stopped, washed my face, got into bed, and tried to forget the whole thing.
This woman is a beauty, I thought.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I moved through the fine mid-century modern furniture, just looking, not looking to buy—I didn’t need anything. A viewing for an estate sale at an auction house on the corner of Wilshire and La Cienega was always amusing. And, of course, you never know.
“Joel!”
I was looking up from an Arne Jacobsen chair I was trying out; it was Dan, one of my William Morris agents, and on his arm was a striking girl with dark brown hair tied up in a knot.
“Jo, you gotta meet this kid,” Dan said to his date, who turned her dark almond eyes on me. “He sings; he dances! The office is really high on him.”
At twenty-nine, I was hardly a kid, but I was more interested in this woman than in correcting him. There was something unusual about her beauty—high cheekbones and sexy buckteeth like Gene Tierney’s—that made me think I had seen her before.
After Dan gave me the trademark William Morris agent hug (performed while scanning the room to see who else was there), he introduced her to me: “Jo, I’d like you to meet Joel Grey. The office thinks he is going to do big things. Joel, this is Jo Wilder, an actress we just signed from New York.”
Jo Wilder? Something was familiar.
“Been in LA long?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “I’ve just come out.”
“Oh? Where in the city do you live?”
“On Lafayette, across from the Public.”
Then it hit me.
“You’re June Ericson’s roommate! We’ve met!”
The singer June Ericson was the girlfriend of Peter Matz (a successful composer for film, theater, and TV—and my good friend from Hami High). She was also one of three women who had shared a cool loft—before lofts were lofts—in the Colonnade, a landmark building on Lafayette right across the street from the Public Theater. (The third roommate was Charlotte Foley, who went on to originate the role of Electra, the stripper, in the Eth
el Merman production of Gypsy.) About a year earlier, I had gone there one night with Peter to pick up June and met Jo quickly. The introduction clearly hadn’t made an impression on either of us.
Now, in the auction house, something was going on between us. She looked different to me. This woman is a beauty, I thought. An odd mix of feisty, vulnerable, and sexy, she had a presence. Even though she appeared to be Dan’s date, there was no doubt that something was sparking. While Dan was busy, she wrote her number on a Du-par’s matchbook and handed it to me. I guess she wasn’t Dan’s girl after all.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her that night—or for the next few days. I was living in LA for TV pilot season. “You gotta be here,” my agent said, because the bluebird of happiness (aka big money and security) was a TV series. Although I made several pilots throughout my career that didn’t sell, I never stopped pursuing that bird. So I always maintained a presence in the form of an apartment on the West Coast and would go back and forth between New York and LA.
Finally I pulled out the Du-par’s matchbook and called Jo. Why was I so nervous? After a couple of minutes of small talk I said, “I’m invited to a party at the top of Laurel Canyon tonight. There’ll be people from the business. It’s a great house, and they’re great pals.” She didn’t wait a second to say, “Yes, I’d love to.” I was shocked by how excited her answer made me.
Just as we had planned on the phone, I arrived late that afternoon at the apartment she shared with three girls, walked up the steps, and rang the bell. The door opened, and there was some other girl.