Master of Ceremonies

by Joel Grey

  I moved into a sublet, a third-floor walk-up on West 11th Street where I immediately got sick with a terrible flu, as if everything, even my immune system, had given up. I felt abandoned, rudderless, and totally without value. My whole life was coming undone. I had done everything in my power not to be homosexual, no matter the cost, and now the whole construct was falling apart around me. The destruction had such far-reaching effects, just as I had feared. Although they were already young adults who had moved out of the house, Jennifer and James distanced themselves from me. I never had a direct conversation with either of them about my sexuality, but I knew that Jo had to have told them everything.

  I didn’t know if the kids were angry with me. So many people we knew, including parents of Jennifer’s and James’s friends, were divorced. Jo and I had created such a strong picture together; we were the couple that had made it. None of our friends could believe it when we split. Hell, I couldn’t believe it.

  I wept all the time. I lost my taste for food and forgot to sleep. I watched television every night in some kind of trance, waiting patiently for snow to appear on the screen. I recorded an insane message for my answering machine in Yiddish. I had too much time on my hands. A good friend decided I needed a cat. I didn’t think she was right—look how much good a puppy did Jo and me in the end. But my friend was right. The cat’s name was Betty, and she was a godsend who ended up traveling with me when I went on tour for months.

  The end of my marriage was like any other loss in that acceptance didn’t come all at once but in slow and painful stages: Jo’s moving out; Jo’s not coming back; and then a divorce process that further depressed me in its expense and ugliness. By the time we were officially divorced, in 1982, I was utterly worn out and mistrustful not only of others but also of my own instincts.

  The fact that I was free to see who I wanted to see was for me never a cause for celebration. I had never wanted to be free. Ever since I was a little boy I wanted to be part of a loving family of my own creation, and I grew up in a time when recognized unions and children were unthinkable for gay men—unless, of course, they were married to women. But if the idea of being openly gay seemed difficult then, at this particular time, when an unnamed and terrifying disease was killing gay men everywhere, it seemed unimaginable.

  The first person I knew to get sick with this mystery illness was Kris, a trainer at my gym. I asked some other member what happened to him when I hadn’t seen him for weeks.

  “I heard he’s very sick,” the gym member said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. He’s got it.”

  He didn’t have to say more. “It” was enough to know I would probably never see Kris again—and to question the contact I had with him in the past. Had I used equipment after him? Did we hug each other goodbye? Stupid things felt scary.

  And no gay man was safe. The bombshell that Rock Hudson had contracted the virus was tragic proof of that point. Having lived his life in the closet, the classic matinee idol’s story had a heartbreaking end. When he became the first public figure to announce that he had AIDS, just ten weeks before his death, at the age of fifty-nine, in 1985, Rock was no longer the handsome leading man from Giant or McMillan & Wife. He was gaunt and suffered from Kaposi’s sarcoma, the lesions that afflicted many with AIDS. As if the disease itself weren’t cruel enough, homophobia added to the pain. Full of venom and judgment, loud voices said that Rock, a truly nice guy, deserved not only to suffer but also to die because of his sexual practices.

  It was heartbreaking for me to reconcile the vibrant star—with whom I had spent some delightful time in Italy while shooting Come September—with the wasted man further ripped apart in the tabloids. It seemed as if overnight AIDS was attacking so many people who were important to me.

  Ted, my early publicist, boyfriend, and friend, had in the intervening years become very powerful in Hollywood. When I heard he was sick, we hadn’t been in touch. Still I knew that he never did get married, have a family, or come out. He remained one of those industry bachelors who people said never settled down because they were so busy with their careers.

  My longtime stage manager, Rick, lost his young partner, David, while we were on tour together. In between shows at the Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, Rick found me in my dressing room and said, “David died about an hour ago.” He was only in his twenties.

  The hardest of all for me, however, was Larry Kert, my great longtime friend. After West Side Story, Larry became the go-to guy, someone who could do anything in the theater. He and his longtime partner, Ron Pullen, had made a terrific life together, and Larry never lost his humor, even when I visited him late in his illness at their apartment on Horatio Street.

  Ron opened the door, we hugged, and he took me to his lifetime lover, who, always so robust, was now emaciated. Still, Larry was trying to be his sweet self. “Hi, brother,” I managed to say while bending down to embrace his disappearing body. We told each other we loved each other, and in his presence I wasn’t afraid of all the rumors about this awful illness. I hugged and kissed him, not knowing how much longer I would have to do those things. After I left, though, I fell apart. I sat down on that stoop on Horatio Street and bawled. I was in LA when Larry died but flew back to be a part of the memorial service. Ron asked if I wanted to perform, and I did. I sang “Danny Boy,” the song that played that time at the Belvedere Hotel. “Why ‘Danny Boy’?” I imagined people asking. Nobody knew why, but I did.

  I wanted to reenter life but wasn’t sure what that meant. I never imagined that would mean living as a gay man. Having spent so many years pushing those feelings down, I didn’t know how to “be gay.” I needed practice, but AIDS served only to reinforce my caution.

  My first job after the divorce, acting in and directing a summer-stock revival of George M!, turned out to be just the tonic I needed. I was always a happy man working on a play or musical, and this was no exception. I knew the show well, enjoyed playing George Cohan, and loved directing it with an assist from my longtime friend Charlie Repole.

  I’ve always felt that the intimacy of the theater, and trust necessary between actors, made for flirting, fantasizing about sex, and actually clicking with someone. Well that’s exactly what happened. Paul was handsome, talented, and married. For me, it was just good to feel affection and passion. It seemed like forever since I had been pursued. After the show closed, a friend offered me his house on Nantucket, and for three days we enjoyed uninterrupted pleasure. We took walks on the beach, made dinner, made love, went to sleep, woke up, and made love again. I had never had that continuity of sleeping with a man and waking up with him in the morning. It was like being a whole human being.

  For a few days, there were just the two of us in this world we created within the confines of a beautiful, old, beat-up beach house. We never left it. Neither of us thought it was wise to be seen in public together, so the closeness we felt for each other still had the element of hiding that had always been a part of my relationships with other men.

  The idea that love and sex with a man was bound with humiliation and even the threat of death created a brutal contradiction that guys like me had to learn to live with. But as I sat in the audience of the Public Theater in July of 1985, watching Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, all the outrage and sadness and shame that I had kept as confined as my sexuality came to the surface.

  The play, which was already the talk of New York even though it was only in previews, was an unrelenting and unapologetic discussion of AIDS, a frightening subject most people did not want to deal with. From the moment I walked into the theater, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. The set, designed by Eugene Lee and Keith Raywood, had stark white walls covered with the names of people who had died from the disease. Too many names. I froze at the sight of names of friends I didn’t know had succumbed.

  Even though AIDS had been declared an epidemic by the Centers for Disease Control in 1981, because it was
thought to be only a gay man’s disease, little to nothing was being done to combat it. The Normal Heart blew the story open. Within moments of the start of the play, a patient walks out of a doctor’s office and says, “I’m her twenty-eighth case, and sixteen of them are dead.”

  No one was talking like this at the time, and that was just the first of many shocking moments in the play. There were shocking lines, such as that of a doctor who calls AIDS “the most insidious killer I’ve ever seen or studied or heard about” and “Who cares if a faggot dies?” And there were OMG moments such as when the central character, Ned Weeks, Larry Kramer’s autobiographical writer and gay activist, is kissed fully on the mouth by Felix, a reporter from the New York Times, who also is gay. Nothing quite like that had been seen in the theater.

  The Normal Heart was devastating, frightening, and inspiring. I didn’t know people who were activists in the way that Larry, or Ned, was. I didn’t come from a world where gay men were out and loud and proud. My model had been the quietly refined bachelor such as Charlie Baker or the married man who snuck around, like me. Larry and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), an AIDS service organization that he had helped found, were a relatively new phenomenon that inspired and frightened me. I had an immediate gut reaction. During intermission, I saw Larry and blurted out: “If there is ever a time for me to be in this play, know that I’ll do anything to make that happen.” It was chutzpah, but I needed to do this play, as an actor and probably as something else, too.

  A few weeks later I got a call from Joe Papp, the Public Theater’s founder and director. He wanted to know if I could take over the role of Ned Weeks. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. But it came with other disturbing information. Brad Davis, the actor who originated the role, had been diagnosed with AIDS. Davis, who rose to fame playing a drug smuggler imprisoned in Turkey in the film Midnight Express and kept his illness a secret for many years, had contracted the virus from intravenous drug use.

  When I told a friend familiar with the play that I was taking over the part, he thought it might be smart for me to find out whether kissing someone with AIDS was dangerous, since playing Ned would mean kissing the man who played Felix. I didn’t know anything about the actor or have any reason to believe he was ill. But this was the height of AIDS paranoia, when people wondered about contracting the virus through the air or by shaking someone’s hand.

  It was recommended that I contact Dr. Michael Gottlieb at UCLA, a leading AIDS researcher who also treated Rock Hudson. I asked him whether he thought there was any threat kissing a man about whom I had no previous knowledge. After a rather long silence, Dr. Gottlieb said, “Let me ask you something. Do you have to kiss him?”

  “Yes, it’s crucial to the play.”

  “Then I wouldn’t do the play.”

  It was a tough conversation during a tough time, but it turned out to be nothing more than an academic exercise, because not even a leading researcher in the field was going to deter me from taking this role. I had spent so much of my life being ashamed of who I was that I somehow knew it would be freeing and therapeutic to inhabit a character completely unabashed about being gay. Maybe Ned could teach me something about self-acceptance.

  My small act of disobedience brought me close to Ned, a role that turned out to be as transformative to play as I imagined. The character was just as powerful and outspoken as the man who created him. In the strength of his beliefs, Larry Kramer was a killer. While I had spent so much of my existence afraid of anyone finding out about certain feelings inside of me, Larry and Ned were the complete opposite. A real fighter, this character was out there shouting to the world that something had to be done because people were dying.

  Ned has a long aria toward the end of the play that struck me to my core from the first time I heard it, and every night that I spoke it:

  “I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E. M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjöld,” Ned says. “These are not invisible men.”

  “The only way we’ll have real pride,” he says, “is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn’t just sexual. It’s all there, all through history we’ve been there, but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what’s in our minds and hearts, and all our creative contributions to this Earth, and until we do that, until we organize ourselves by block, by neighborhood, by city, by state, into a united and visible community that fights back, we’re doomed. That’s how I want to be defined, as one of the men who fought the war.”

  Ned forced me to look at the parts of myself I had tried to hide for so long. Although no one knew it except me, saying those words to the audience was like revealing and standing up for myself in front of the world. Eight times a week, I got to be a gay man, a remarkable gay man, and every night that felt as full, as true, as passionate, and as authentic as I ever felt in my life.

  My experience in The Normal Heart was just the beginning of a journey of self-discovery. But it was meaningful to me that the first moment I truly recognized a part of myself as homosexual didn’t happen on an analyst’s couch, during affairs with men, or after my divorce. It happened onstage.

  The audience felt the transformative power of the play, too. During the last scene, in which Ned and Felix get married in the hospital just before Felix dies, we heard sobbing most every performance. So many were overcome with emotion. A minority, however, didn’t care for the play, or more specifically, were offended by it. I learned early into the show’s run that some fans of my earlier, more mainstream and popular shows weren’t quite ready to see me as an out, gay activist. One night, when I stripped to my shorts in a hospital examination scene, I became aware of a rustling in the third row, and then a little muffled talking, like an argument. This was a small theater in which three-quarters of the audience was really close. So when a man and woman stood up, maneuvered down their row, and left, I could see them as clearly as they saw me. It didn’t bother me, though, when it happened that night or on the many nights it happened thereafter. Instead I sensed a kind of triumph that I was a part of a story told so well that it brought on such strong reaction.

  My children came from LA to see me in the play. Although I was apprehensive, it meant a great deal to me for Jennifer and James to hear me saying Ned’s words as if they were mine. If regular audience members felt the power of watching me kiss a man passionately onstage, how much more powerful was it for my daughter and son, who knew that this was a part of their dad? I had carried around such guilt after Jo and I split. It was all my fault that my family and my children’s hearts were broken. Yes, it was Jo who left. But I was the father and husband who had been attracted to other men. There was no more shameful position than that. So when after the play Jennifer and James greeted me with tears in their eyes and loving, long hugs, I was relieved that they had accepted what was nothing short of a declaration onstage.

  Jennifer was able to relate to my work not just as my daughter but also as an actress in her own right. Ever since I could remember, even before she spent her Saturdays watching me from the wings in Cabaret, Jennifer wanted to act. Although clearly the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree, when Jennifer didn’t want to go to college because she wanted to be an actor, I worried. Knowing how hard it is to deal with this business, I was very protective—and negative about her acting full-time right away.

  She had already appeared in the films Red Dawn and The Cotton Club, but it wasn’t until I saw Jennifer in American Flyers, starring Kevin Costner, that I fully supported her decision to be an actor. The movie had opened right around the time I was in The Normal Heart. I took myself to an afternoon showing at the Sutton Theater, on East 57th. In the empty theater, watching my daughter’s one wonderful scene, in which she
becomes hysterical on a blind date gone wrong, I thought, She can do this. This was right before the major success she would have with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and then, of course, her iconic role in Dirty Dancing, but I knew there was no stopping her. She was too good—and I loved that.

  I know that my father would have felt the same way if he could have seen me in The Normal Heart. Dad passed away several months before I took the role. He had been on dialysis for several years before ultimately dying of renal failure, at the age of seventy-five, on April 30, 1985.

  Throughout my life my father also never stopped being my dad. After we first moved to Los Angeles, he went to Canter’s deli every Sunday morning while we were still asleep to pick up blintzes, lox, bagels, cream cheese, pickled herring, whitefish, and more. His weekly shopping sprees earned him the nickname “the Goodie Man.” Years later, in fact, on my fiftieth birthday, the doorbell of my New York apartment rang and I found a gigantic basket all wrapped with ribbons. Inside were blintzes, lox, bagels, cream cheese, pickled herring, whitefish, and more; the note was signed, “The Goodie Man is everywhere.”

  I believe that if he had been alive, my father would have come to see me in The Normal Heart and that he would have gotten it and would have been proud. My mother, on the other hand, never came. I never expected her to. Through the play I was moving closer to a new place of acceptance and ease within myself. The fear and shame that had been such a big part of me was slowly falling away, and in its place came an empowering sense of solidarity and, yes, pride. What people thought about me became less and less important.

  Alas, my mother never, ever got it. Over dinner at her favorite restaurant in LA, knowing better but wanting to give her and us one more chance, I said, “You know, Mom, now that I’m divorced, the next important person in my life might be a man.”