Master of Ceremonies

by Joel Grey

  My feet didn’t forget, and the opening was gangbusters. Practicing a half hour before curtain under the stage with the ghost light became my ritual for every single show during the entire run. The opening night party, which happened to be on my birthday, was held at the Plaza Hotel. One of our producers, Konrad Matthaei and his wife, Gay, hosted the red-white-and-blue-themed event attended by theater, business, and society elites Gloria Vanderbilt and her fourth husband, Wyatt Cooper; Henri Bendel president Gerry Stutz; and Liza Minnelli and Peter Allen. Men in black tie and women, who had been asked to wear red, white, and blue, danced to music provided by the renowned bandleader Peter Duchin and his orchestra. To me, no one there looked more beautiful than Jo Wilder Grey in a heavy ridged white cotton dress made for her by designer Gus Tassell. The dress was so simple and devoid of decoration (even the buttons were hidden under a fly front) that it reminded me of the gown she wore on our wedding day.

  There was much cause for celebration—George M! felt like a big hit. But as it turned out, there was a general perception of the show as jingoistic. In 1968, an antiwar time, many people dismissed our show’s message as naive patriotism and not the dark cautionary tale about a brilliant but deeply flawed artist that it was.

  The burgeoning politically radical era was only part of the problem. Despite all the revisions, the reviews were still not great. In the New York Times on April 11 (my birthday), Clive Barnes called the show “ill-prepared” and “mediocrely written.” However, he did praise my performance: “[Joel Grey] sang lightly and beltingly, he danced, with frenetic passion and a God-given sense of timing, and when all else failed, he even acted the script that they had been inconsiderate enough to give him.”

  Not everyone, however, liked my performance. I was devastated when ten days after Barnes’s review, Walter Kerr skewered me in a big Sunday piece in the Times. In the article, humiliatingly titled YANKEE DOODLE’S OUT OF BREATH, Kerr went on for paragraphs and paragraphs. “Mr. Grey does not ask for a rest, though we do,” wrote the very same man who in Cabaret said I was the sun, moon, and stars.

  I didn’t know what to do. I remembered what my father used to always say about critics; if they don’t like your show, audiences won’t either—because the show will no longer be running. Certainly having Walter Kerr lay into me in the Sunday Times could close a show. Jo, who saw me in a panic after I read the review, tried to lighten the situation with a more realistic and levelheaded perspective.

  “This is just one man’s opinion,” she said. “You are wonderful and the audience loves it.”

  “But it’s the whole page of the Sunday Times.”

  “How about what Clive Barnes said? He raved about your performance.”

  “Walter Kerr is more respected.”

  There was nothing Jo could say that was going to make me feel better. I picked up the phone and called my great good friend Beverly Sills, the great soprano. She was not only smart but had a lot of experience dealing with the ups and downs of the press during her long, high-profile career. (A few years later, she landed the cover of Time with the cover line AMERICA’S QUEEN OF OPERA.)

  “Is this the end of my career?” I asked Beverly.

  “There will be a million of those articles,” she said. “Just forget it. It’s part of being on top. They want to pull you down.”

  Of course she knew of what she spoke, but I was never able to stop reading reviews. I’m ashamed to admit that over the years I came to fret irrationally about the press. There was something masochistic, even counterproductive to my worrying: It served only to erode my self-confidence and not improve the work in any way. There are so many people who never read reviews, and I applaud them. However, whenever I didn’t read them my imagination would run wild, conjuring up fantasy reviews that were far worse than anything anyone had written.

  I was thankful that people in my life such as Beverly were there during tough times. I was in one of those down-on-myself states when, while exiting the stage door after a performance, I ran into the husband-and-wife theater legends and longtime collaborators Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, who had just been to the matinee. They were standing on the corner of 47th and Broadway, going on about how much they loved my work. But feeling tired and low, which was pretty much how I felt daily, I said, “I don’t know. I think whatever I had, maybe it’s gone.”

  Ruth, who had recently won an Academy Award for her unforgettable role in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, looked me in the face and said with steely conviction, “Once you are an artist, you’re always an artist.” I have returned to those words often over the years for support.

  In the end it wasn’t reviews that closed George M! but rather President Richard Nixon. He had brought Pat and their daughters, Tricia and Julie, to see the show, and he of course came backstage to congratulate the cast on a job well done. I didn’t want to have my picture taken with him, but I had no choice—and that photo of the two of us, along with Nixon’s personal approval of the show, was wildly publicized. He was as unpleasant-looking in real life as he was on TV and even his compliments made one feel uneasy. Normally when the president of the United States comes to see a Broadway show, the excitement extends the run. Not with Nixon. As if selling Broadway on a musical filled with patriotic tunes during the late sixties weren’t hard enough, Nixon had to stick his unpopular face in my very own dressing room.

  New Yorkers might have felt that they were too hip for the Cohan music, but the rest of the country could hardly wait to hear that great American songbook. I followed in the footsteps of some of Broadway’s greatest stars—such as Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, and Alfred Drake—who typically toured with their shows after the run in New York was done. While Cabaret continued to run, the six-month national tour of George M! was one of the biggest grossers on the road at that time. In places such as Cleveland, Houston, and Denver, we were constantly sold out and cheered. We even played to mostly sold-out audiences at the Music Center in Los Angeles for ten weeks over the summer.

  I was grateful that Jo and the children came out to join me in LA, where we rented a swell house on Beverly Drive. In an interview with the Oakland Tribune from June 21, 1969, Jo described the idyllic mixture of work and family life that allowed us to all have dinner together at 5:30 P.M. before I showered, shaved, rested, and left for the theater. Jo explained how she had started to turn down roles when my career took off.

  “I don’t know how husbands and wives can be in the same profession, pushing in opposite directions,” Jo told the reporter. “They are rare people who can do this without becoming estranged from each other. Joel was never really happy when I was working, so I just quit, and I’m much happier now.”

  I loved seeing that those were her words. I had made good on those very early promises to take care of her and make her proud and safe. We had come a long way from the days when we had fought about her having a career, and I felt that my success had finally become our success.

  Don’t let anybody tell you this isn’t a big thrill.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I rarely read the trades anymore, but while in the waiting room of my dentist’s office, I picked up Variety, where I saw the latest news: Ruth Gordon had met with Bob Fosse regarding playing the Emcee in the upcoming Allied Artists film Cabaret.

  What?

  After five years of deliberation, a movie version of Cabaret had finally been green-lighted, which set off a flurry of rumors that had been flying for weeks. Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin, famous for their Broadway blockbusters, such as Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, were producing for Marty Baum’s company under the aegis of Manny Wolf and ABC Pictures.

  A lot of changes were being made for the film version. Fosse, the director, wanted to stay as far away from the stage musical as possible in order to put his personal stamp on Cabaret.

  Major structural changes to the story were being made by Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler, who were writing the script. All the songs th
at were sung as part of the more conventional Broadway musical were cut; in the film, characters would never speak and then sing to one another as stage and film musicals had always been done. That old-fashioned style had fallen out of favor. It was also decided that the numbers in the Kit Kat Klub (including some new songs by the original team John Kander and Fred Ebb, such as “Money, Money” and “Mein Herr”) should exist in real time and in a real club for a realistic musical film dealing with drastic world consequences.

  No one from the original play was set to appear in the film. Liza Minnelli was a great choice for Sally Bowles, and Michael York was set to play Brian, a stand-in for Christopher Isherwood, her gay lover (as opposed to the stage version, in which the character was decidedly heterosexual). That was appropriate, since the original character in the short story “Welcome to Berlin,” by the openly gay Christopher Isherwood, was autobiographical. Marisa Berenson, the exquisite model and actress, was to play a new character, Natalia Landauer, the Jewish department-store heiress. That character filled the place that was left after Lotte Lenya’s character, Fräulein Schneider, had been cut. And to round it out, a young suitor, Fritz, supposedly Gentile, falls in love with Natalia, and their story line is intertwined with the rise of the Nazis and anti-Semitism in Berlin.

  Just as he recast all the other original roles, Bob adamantly wanted someone new to play the Emcee. So I wasn’t surprised to read in Variety that he was looking at other actors for the part—but Ruth Gordon? She would certainly bring a totally different slant to the part. Another top contender was Anthony Newley, whose agent, Sue Mengers, was pitching very hard for the role.

  I couldn’t imagine someone else inhabiting the Emcee on the big screen, a character that would remain in the popular imagination long after the memory of a theater performance had faded.

  Sam Cohn, Bob’s agent and mine, was in a very awkward spot.

  “You know how it goes,” Sam said, trying to keep it light. “At first, they always try to reinvent the wheel. There’s always the period where they go through the ‘Is Clint Eastwood available?’ or ‘What if we offer it to Kirk Douglas?’”

  But I knew it was (and still is) a director’s medium. They usually have the power, and even though his previous film, Sweet Charity, had gone over budget and hadn’t done well at the box office, he was still the great multiple-Tony-winning Bob Fosse.

  But six weeks before preproduction was set to begin in Munich, they still hadn’t settled on an Emcee!

  A summit was arranged in Marty Baum’s office at Allied with the entire producing team. As I was told by Marty many years later at a dinner party, the meeting had been called because he and the other producers wanted me for the part. But Bob, playing hardball, wouldn’t relent. He thought that if push came to shove, they wouldn’t get rid of the director for the sake of an actor.

  Bob entered the meeting and announced, “I guess this is the moment of truth. It’s either Joel Grey or me!”

  Without hesitation, Marty said, “Then it’s Joel Grey.”

  The part was mine, but what a start to my working relationship with the director! The first time I saw Bob in our new roles was right before we left for Germany. We met at a rehearsal studio to go over some ideas for the numbers. Bob was a lot older than when I had first met him in 1950, performing a nightclub act, Fosse and Niles, with his then wife, Mary Ann Niles. But today he seemed just as remote as ever. Two assistants flanked him. Despite the chilly reception, I was a professional and put my most charming self forward. The only thing that came out of his mouth was smoke from the cigarette always hanging out of it.

  So we skipped the pleasantries and went to work.

  I was three bars into the song when he stopped me.

  “Hold it,” he said to the pianist. “Let’s start again.”

  I started again, and just as quickly was stopped.

  “Why are you moving the rest of your body?” he asked. “I want to see hands.”

  As the director and choreographer, Bob had the right to ask anything, but his direction had an edge to it. He demonstrated a couple of bars so that I could see what he meant. Bob’s style was very specific and recognizable. He was a huge fan of jazz hands. Very often every word had a move assigned to it. He never expected improvisation and wanted every muscle choreographed to counts. But I wasn’t sure about some of his ideas for these numbers. The highly stylized moves didn’t feel right.

  I kept on starting, and he kept on stopping me. I tried to do what he asked even if I thought it was dead wrong. We found ourselves at an impasse. Bob stood there, arms crossed and smoking, closed off and combative. Meanwhile, I continued to ignore anything I thought was ridiculous and do the part the way I knew to do it. I was getting more than a taste of what was ahead. There were things he could teach me, but I didn’t think these things.

  Our first session was really uncomfortable. Both of us came to it full of bad feelings and ready for battle—Bob furious that he hadn’t got his way, and I was pissed that even after having proven myself, that meant nothing to him. A bad situation, and one that didn’t seem likely to improve. We both left the rehearsal just as we had started it, if not worse. This was going to be some party.

  The next time Bob and I saw each other was in Germany, on the first day of rehearsal at Bavaria Studios, twenty minutes outside Munich, where we shot all the Kit Kat Klub scenes. Despite the change in surroundings, things were still chilly between us.

  When I arrived, Bob was already trying out some ideas with his choreographic assistants, Kathryn Doby and John Sharpe. Barely acknowledging me, Bob told Fred Werner, the rehearsal pianist, to play a specific section of “Two Ladies.” Watching Bob go through some of the steps with the two German dancers, I couldn’t help noticing the pleasure he took in performing. He was very good. Bob had gone to Hollywood to be a star. Despite his ambitions and smooth charm, it wasn’t to be. After several movies, he transitioned to choreography and directing. I always wondered if, even unconsciously, he would have liked to play the part of the Emcee himself. Could his line “It’s either Joel Grey or me” be taken that way? Performers don’t ever stop thinking about performing somewhere in the back of their mind, especially if they are good, and Bob was really good. Plus he was a control freak, and the ultimate control over a part is to play it oneself.

  I’ll admit that I arrived in Germany with a chip on my shoulder; I was suspicious of anyone who wanted to change a hair of Cabaret. I had a lot riding on this. Since George M!, which had taken up a few years between its Broadway run and the national tour, I had done a couple of guest appearances on television. But this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to re-create what I had done on Broadway in a major movie. It felt like I was the keeper of the flame from Cabaret’s original team. I couldn’t let Bob “Fosse” it up.

  As in our rehearsal back in New York, Bob created moves that were extremely mannered (“Five, six, seven, eight! No spontaneity please!”). I didn’t think that suited the Kit Kat Klub. My Kit Kat Klub.

  As we struggled with the undercurrent, the rehearsal turned into a kind of dare between Bob and me. He dug in harder with his specificity, while I continued to resist him, until it escalated into Bob’s most unreasonable idea.

  “Can you do a backflip?” he asked me.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied.

  “There’s nothing to it. Let me show you. John, come over here,” he said to his assistant. “I’ll show you how this works. John, spot me.”

  We all watched as Bob threw himself up backward into the air, but he didn’t make it. Instead, he came crashing to the ground and landed on his face. For several horrifyingly long seconds he lay there without moving. All of us around him were frozen with shock. Had he broken his neck? After a stunned moment, we all went to his aid. Bob stood up slowly, and with an arm around each assistant, he was taken to the studio infirmary.

  When Bob came to the studio the next day, he had the usual cigarette hanging out of his mouth, but the whole left
side of his face was black and blue. No one mentioned his injuries—or the backflip—again.

  Even though the rehearsals were exceptionally long and exacting, they were exciting, too. Bob and I watched each other like hawks, but we definitely influenced each other’s plans and ideas. We quietly rose to the challenge of realizing that this thing was not going to succeed without the combination of both strong opinions living in the space we had reluctantly come to share.

  For rehearsal, Bob often required temporary set pieces so he could see how the numbers were going to look. The decor and lighting for the Kit Kat Klub were directly inspired by the work of George Grosz and Otto Dix, two artists who painted pessimistically realistic images of Weimar society and war. The club set, on its own soundstage, was always thick with smoke, which gave the scenes a great look but also made people sick. There was lots of coughing, and no one coughed more than Bob, who, having recovered from his fall, immediately proceeded to come down with a bad cold that led to a respiratory infection, which dogged him the whole time we were filming. Still, I don’t recall having ever seen him without that dangling cigarette.

  More than once we rehearsed a single routine for days only to have Bob throw it out, unsatisfied, and once more begin, “Five, six, seven, eight!” The “Money” number was probably the most complicated. He staged it two or three ways before he was satisfied.

  “Hands, feet.”

  “Look at Liza.”

  “Look straight ahead.”

  “Look to the right, exactly after Liza.”

  “Remember, hands!”

  For rehearsal, he wanted us in costume—not the real ones, which were being built, but a temporary long dress for Liza and a tailcoat, pants, top hat, and cane for me. This tailcoat came from “stock” costumes that were used for extras through the years. The pieces were cleaned after each actor used them, but the warmth of my body seemed to activate the old sweat. Let’s say it was an olfactory explosion.