by Joel Grey
At thirty-four, Cabaret changed my life. In his review of the show for the New York Times, Walter Kerr, who was no fan of the original play I Am a Camera (his review’s headline: ME NO LEICA), raved about Cabaret and my work: “Master of Ceremonies Joel Grey bursts from the darkness like a tracer bullet … cheerful, charming, soulless and conspiratorially wicked.”
Cabaret also experienced, not surprisingly, some controversy. It centered on the lyric “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all,” in the number “If You Could See Her (The Gorilla Song).” During previews, some Jewish groups, totally misunderstanding its true significance, opposed the last line, the punch line in the show. They thought it, in and of itself, was anti-Semitic, instead of it in fact being an ironic comment on anti-Semitism! Their protests became so emphatic that Hal decided rather than endanger the life of the whole show, during previews I was to replace the original line with “She isn’t a meeskite at all.” Meeskite—Yiddish for ugly or funny-looking—was supposed to deliver the same meaning! The change took some of the teeth out of the ugly punchline in the show, but the audience got the point. My job was to make the audience know they had been betrayed. After we opened, there were nights when I spontaneously slipped “look Jewish” back in, prompting the stage manager to scream at me, “What are you doing?” “Shit,” I would say, smiling, “I forgot!”
The set, costumes, staging, and music were so compelling and original that they kept Cabaret running for 1,165 performances.
When the show opened, I started out with fifth-featured billing but was ultimately moved up to fourth—an event that was marked by a party held at the Ground Floor, the cool restaurant done to William Paley’s tasteful specifications at the base of the CBS Building. Every actor on Broadway turned up. The party was a surprise, but so was the success of the Emcee. It wasn’t anyone’s plan for my character to become the focal point of the show. Cabaret’s story centered on Sally Bowles and Cliff Bradshaw. I was just a metaphor, and nobody expected the metaphor to become the centerpiece.
Cabaret made me a celebrity. When Joan Crawford came to the show, she asked to meet me. So while I was still in my makeup, I heard a knock on the door and then in walked one of the greatest screen legends of all time. Heavily made up with large, black, penciled-in eyebrows, her silver hair in a high coif, and many strands of large pearls winding around her neck, she looked like a drag version of Joan Crawford. Very grand, but she couldn’t have been nicer. Her husband, Al Steele, all business in his gray double-breasted suit, accompanied her, the straight man to her star. They arrived without fanfare and exchanged the normal backstage pleasantries (“You were great…”). But having the iconic Joan Crawford come backstage to meet me symbolized the unprecedented success that I was to experience with Cabaret.
It even changed my relationship with Mother. Years ago, whenever I went out shopping with her, or wherever she dragged me when I visited LA, she was always quick to announce to storekeepers, restaurant owners, and the like, “I’m Mrs. Mickey Katz.” After my success in Cabaret, however, I noticed that she changed the line: “I’m Joel Grey’s mother! I’m Grace!”
Jo and I became the new “it kids” and were invited to all of these fancy events. On Monday nights, my night off from the show, we often found ourselves at swanky parties with people I knew more from the press than from real life. One evening was an intimate dinner at Café des Artistes, at which Mayor John Lindsay was seated to my left; another was a big fund-raiser at the Waldorf with celebrity chefs such as Marcella Hazan, from whom I had taken an Italian cooking class. (Twice a week, six of us in her kitchen in her apartment on Lexington Avenue spent all morning cooking her recipes, which we ate for lunch. It was sublime and very serious. I learned her classic tomato sauce, which I still make today.)
Jennifer, who was six years old at the time, also got a taste of glamour when she would come to visit me at the theater during weekend matinee performances. Dressed up special, she would sit in my dressing room watching me intently as I got made up. The chorus girls always made a tremendous fuss over Jennifer, who had good manners and the ability to hold her own with adults. They would make her up like a Kit Kat Girl, much to her delight. But when it came time for the production to start, Jennifer quietly stood in the wings to watch just as I had watched my father at the RKO in Cleveland. The rituals of the theater became a part of Jennifer, who always loved dancing around the apartment dressed up in costumes made from odds and ends I had collected for her from various shows over the years—including the Kit Kat Girl headband with a black velvet cat face.
The press took a new interest in me. Women’s Wear Daily did a style piece and Vogue ran a full-page Milton Greene photo of me surrounded by the Kit Kat Girls. They were also interested in Jo, who as a style setter in designer clothing by Rudi Gernreich, Halston, and Gustave Tassell, was covered by fashion magazines. Jo was thrilled with the attention. My success was hers. Very literally, I owed her a debt of gratitude for having persuaded me to stay the course and take the part of the Emcee when I had my doubts. But even more, Jo was part of the fabric of the play. As a performer, she understood all its nuances, and she had been a dear friend of Lenya’s before I knew either of them. When I wore Jo’s makeup from summer stock, it was like a part of her was up on stage, too.
Even our apartment got press. THE EASY-GOING COSMOS OF A STAR, read the headline of an article about our place in House & Garden. “Behind the Joel Greys’ discreet brass doorplate is an apartment filled with all the gaiety of a triumphant opening night.” The hype! The apartment, into which we had moved at Central Park West and 87th Street, was indeed spacious. The front apartment belonged to the actress Shelley Winters, of course facing the park. Befitting “Broadway’s newest and brightest comedy star,” as House & Garden hilariously dubbed me, the apartment was done by Albert Hadley, who we met through Hal and Judy Prince. He had designed interiors for the biggest names in America from Rockefeller to Kennedy. Sherbet-pink, apple-green, and bright paisley furniture stood in contrast to white walls, zebra rugs, and parquet floors. It was all very uptown—still, Jo and I retained a little Village bohemianism with our quilt-covered brass bed.
The single most meaningful excitement during that period, however, was Cabaret’s being nominated for eleven Tony Awards in 1967—including one for me. The 21st Annual Tony Awards ceremony, held at the Shubert Theatre, opened with “Willkommen.” Not only was I performing for an audience of the greats, my heroes in the theater, but, for the first time in the Tonys’ history, the award show was going to be broadcast live in prime time. When we rehearsed the number on the day of the show, everyone was very, very nervous—including me. On top of the anxiety about the live TV performance, I worried about whether I was going to win. I knew I had a good chance. Still!!
I don’t know how the rest of the country watching the Tonys felt, but inside the Shubert Theatre that night, the Broadway audience wholeheartedly embraced this little musical about Nazis, anti-Semitism, and homosexuals. Cabaret won eight Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Choreography, and, for me, Best Featured Actor in a Musical.
When the famous husband-and-wife dance team Marge and Gower Champion opened the envelope and she said my name, I bounded from the back of the theater toward the stage with all the energy of the eight-year-old Pud at the Cleveland Play House. This is what I had dreamt about, struggled for, worked hard at, and, oh, my God, here it was! After first kissing my beautiful wife, I leapt onto the stage to thank everyone who had helped me get here, ending with “Danke schön. Merci. Thank you. Thank you.”
So I accepted the role of George M. Cohan—yet another song-and-dance man, although one of mythic proportions.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Winning a Tony meant more dinner invitations and press, but most important, it led to my first starring role on Broadway, while still playing the Emcee. Again without requiring an audition, I was offered the title role in the musical George M!, which was based on the life of George M. Cohan. T
he Cabaret producers were less than thrilled about my leaving the show after my yearlong contract was up, and I had my own conflicts about the decision as well.
Playing the Emcee had always been a satisfying experience. It was never less than exciting eight times a week. Not only was the production of such a high caliber, but as a Jew I also believed strongly in the important political message it relayed. Having birthed that character, it became a part of me. So the idea of my understudy taking it over felt strange and sad—kind of like leaving your child for someone else to take care of. But I was ready to take on the next challenge, and Jo supported me in that; she wanted me to continue to succeed and stretch myself. So I accepted the role of Cohan—yet another song-and-dance man, although one of mythic proportions.
Both the script and the concept behind George M! were terrific. The hard-driving performer, who never wore makeup and called everyone kid, was probably the most famous composer in the American songbook, even though he knew only four chords in the key of F-sharp.
The director, Joe Layton, and Michael Stewart, who wrote the book along with Fran Pascal, Mike’s sister, had a fresh approach to the real Cohan story that was challenging and risky. James Cagney had played Cohan wonderfully in Yankee Doodle Dandy, but as was the Hollywood habit, the film avoided the darker aspects of his life such as his anti-union positions and the heavy hand he took with his family. Mike’s version showed the dictatorial and temperamental side of the man who had written more than fifty plays and such beloved songs as “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “Over There.”
Then there was the style of the book. The form was impressionistic, with a unique set that gave suggestions of place instead of being conventionally realistic. Time passed very quickly from episode to episode of Cohan’s life, with only slight changes in costume signaling the transitions. Rather than being dressed fully in period clothing, the actors would start the play in contemporary clothing, and for each song a piece of period attire would be added, maybe an apron, hat, or vest.
I very much liked the complexity of this dark version. The only problem was that I worried I was wrong for the part. First there was the matter of Cohan’s Irish Catholic background. But if I could play an evil Nazi Emcee, I was hoping I could play Irish. More worrying was the idea of singing Cohan’s classics, and the most daunting of all was getting an audience to believe I was a superb tap dancer like Cohan—or for that matter, Cagney, who was also a phenomenal hoofer. All I’d had were a couple of months of lessons when I was a kid back in Cleveland. I thought of my initial worries about the part of the Emcee and how deeply satisfying and transformative an experience playing that character was. But I would never know what I was capable of if I didn’t try.
So after a year on Broadway in the season’s biggest hit, we took a quick vacation at Frenchman’s Cove in Jamaica (where it rained the entire week) and then went straight into rehearsal for George M! Joe Layton was a relentless and brilliant taskmaster, and the choreography was extremely complex, even for experienced tappers. The style of tap dancing Layton wanted wasn’t the Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly variety but a hybrid with Irish clog dancing that made it uniquely off-kilter and fresh. And he was very exacting about its execution.
The biggest challenge in learning to dance like Cohan wasn’t his style of dancing but the fact that he was the best tap dancer of his time. I began a crash course in tap with Bob Audy, the best teacher in New York, with a great assist from Layton’s right-hand man, Wakefield Poole. Every day I would walk over to his studio on Broadway not far from home and go through the basic exercises of tap. I did shuffle flaps, stomp rolls, and every other dance step until I was soaking wet. It took tremendous energy to do the basic steps over and over, but I couldn’t move on to combinations until I had mastered them.
After my work with Bob, who gave me so much confidence, I headed downtown to rehearse the book scenes and musical numbers for hours. This was a show where I was onstage for all but one number. During the endless and exhausting process, there wasn’t a day that went by when I didn’t wonder if they had hired the wrong guy. But there was no quitting. I’d signed my name to the show. They were putting up the marquee, with my name over the title, at the Palace Theatre, where I had seen Judy Garland and Danny Kaye’s names in lights. Opposite the theater, a statue of George M. Cohan himself kept watch as if to say, “Don’t mess this up, kid.” A lot of money was on the line, and a bunch of my wonderful and talented fellow actors were depending on me.
One of those was Bernadette Peters, who immediately nailed the part of Cohan’s younger sister, Josie, the minute she opened her mouth. It was startling when this young, adorably young girl sang; no one had ever heard a sound like that. We all fell in love with her immediately. Where there were about five or six actors being considered for every part, no one could compete with Bernadette; she was Josie.
She was a show-business kid who grew up in Queens in a Sicilian family. Her mother, tough and always around, was a real stage mom (albeit a likable one) who put her talented daughter on TV at the age of three and a half. By the time she was thirteen, Bernadette had become an understudy in a national tour of Gypsy. She and I got along immediately, and I quickly became a safe retreat when her mother was driving her crazy, which was often. I knew from mothers.
Everyone involved loved the show, and we were pretty confident when we headed to Detroit for the out-of-town tryout. All of the investors and producers came in from New York as well. The first upset: A newspaper strike was going on, which meant no reviews and lower ticket sales. And as if that weren’t unlucky enough, a historic snowstorm covered the city. As a result the Fisher Theatre looked like a half-empty school auditorium when the curtain opened.
There were many times I regretted leaving Cabaret; many, many times. But no more so than in that moment: facing an empty theater in the middle of an epic snowstorm in Detroit. It wasn’t lost on me that I could have been the toast of London, since a production of Cabaret opened in England while the original still ran on Broadway.
The situation went from bad to worse as the audience that braved the weather was less than thrilled with George M! Even in the cavernous space of the Fisher Theatre I could feel the tepid response as we knocked ourselves out. The loose style of the show that I had found compelling proved too abstract—arty, even. So there we were, a big, brassy out-of-town musical in trouble.
After the performance, Joe, Mike, my agent and great friend Sam Cohn, and the rest of the creative team and producers had what was reported to be a long meeting at their hotel, the results of which would yield the next step in “fixing the show.” They all agreed that what was missing were fleshed out production numbers of the Cohan biggies, such as “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” So the plan was to rethink and restage most of Act 2 to give the iconic songs their full due. Of course, in order to do this, other material would have to be cut—actors might lose their only big moment. The next day, there were frayed nerves all around. Everyone was exhausted, but we had to push on, rehearsing for most of the day, stopping for a quick bite and a nap, then back to the theater for an eight-thirty curtain.
Of course, narcissist that I was, I thought everything was my fault. For eight performances a week, I rarely left the stage, and for as many hours as the union would allow, we rehearsed a gigantic new twenty-minute production number for Act 2 that had all-new choreography to accomplish these fully realized versions of “Over There,” “Nellie Kelly, I Love You,” “Harrigan,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Expensive new costumes were made and new set pieces built, all of which would hopefully guide the audience more explicitly and conventionally through the great man’s life story. The big question that hung over the show as we came to a close in Detroit was whether the changes, as big and costly and exhausting as they were, would turn it around.
As we got closer to opening night of George M!, I was anxious even though the Detroit audiences seemed to like the show more with the new additions. I had just
come off a big hit that some said had changed the shape of American musicals. This time, with my name above the title, if the show failed, it could put a hard stop to my momentum. It’s not unusual to blame the actor.
Many Broadway musicals, even those created by icons such as Richard Rodgers, Josh Logan, Irving Berlin, and Leonard Bernstein, have struggled out of town, giving their talented all to “fix a show,” only to have it ultimately fail on Broadway. The best of them, Michael Bennett, Hal Prince, Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins, have all had this experience at one time or another. That’s one of the reasons why musical theater is so completely thrilling when it does work.
The substantive changes to the material went very well at the Shubert Theater in Philadelphia, our second out-of-town run before coming to New York. Before the curtain went up, everyone onstage held hands like a family. After prayers and other preshow necessities, the lights went up, and from that instant, the audience plain loved it. They erupted with applause and laughter at every turn. It was pretty clear from the standing ovation we received at the end of the show that the flashy new MGM-style musical numbers had done the trick.
Fifty minutes before the curtain was scheduled to go up at New York’s Palace Theatre, on April 10, 1968, I headed out of my dressing room before putting on my costume. Amid the mayhem of opening night on Broadway, hardly anyone noticed as I made my way along the row of dressing rooms, down the stairs, past the orchestra’s pit, and under the stage, where I found myself alone, in the half light of a ghost light. I put on my tap shoes and ran through the very demanding solo in the show’s first number, “All Aboard for Broadway.”
I was terrified of blowing my first tap solo. The long and complicated sequence would have been challenging for any tap dancer. For a novice like me, it was truly scary. On top of that, I was about to perform it in a theater that contained the likes of Henry Fonda, Albert Finney, and Cohan’s daughter Georgette. I needed to run through my solo one last time before the curtain went up to make sure the steps were still “in my feet.”