Master of Ceremonies

by Joel Grey

  Without missing a beat, she looked right at me with a smile and said, “Oh, no, dear, that’s not you.” Then she finished her glass of champagne and we never spoke about it again.

  In my mid-sixties, I had come to a point in my life where I realized that passion of any kind is gold.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I met someone, a guy, in, of all places, the 1987 revival of Cabaret.

  It happened at the meet-and-greet on the first day of rehearsal for the show, which was set to embark on a seven-month national tour before opening on Broadway at the Imperial. All of the usual suspects were there: the producers, the creative team, the cast, production people, and the concessions department, which sold souvenirs, programs, and CDs—and was headed by Eddie, who gave me the look. A big guy in his late thirties with curly, prematurely gray hair, he was handsome.

  As if the freedom and excitement of the road weren’t erotic enough, Eddie was aggressively romantic with me as we began an intense but secret relationship. I was flattered by the little love notes—one more creative than the next—that this beautiful, talented man wrote me all of the time.

  The unexpected affair added a layer of upheaval to the already tumultuous experience of reviving this much-loved show, which over the past two decades had taken on mythic proportions. In the original, I was far from the top of the marquee, but now I had star billing. I was the draw, and I was also twenty years older!

  In this production, Harold Prince took up his original role as director as did Ron Fields with the choreography. Joe Masteroff adapted the script to make Cliff bisexual, as he was in the movie version, which most people now thought of as the official version. Alyson Reed played Sally; Gregg Edelman had the role of Cliff; the opera singer Regina Resnik was Fräulein Schneider; and Werner Klemperer played Herr Schultz. As the only member of the original cast, I had to live up to the reputation I had built for the character long ago. With the challenge of my age and the fact that the character was no longer a surprise, I needed my storied Emcee to be as daring and dark onstage as he’d been in the film seen by so many.

  I drove myself, as usual, crazy trying to achieve that goal as we performed to sold-out shows night after night, week after week, city after city. There was a lot of anticipation, since this was the first time I reprised the role of the Emcee after the film. This was a theater event, and I was at the center of it.

  Facing three sold-out shows in Hartford, Connecticut, I felt the beginnings of a cold. I should have taken a few days off, but I have always feared disappointing an audience. Well, by the third performance, my throat was in so much pain I could hardly bare it. We were scheduled to open in Philadelphia in two days, the last out-of-town engagement before New York, and something felt really, really wrong. This was not just a sore throat.

  I was rushed upon my arrival in Philly to Dr. Robert Sataloff, a top throat specialist, who delivered the news that I had burst a blood vessel on my left vocal cord, and would need to spend two, maybe three weeks on vocal rest, not speaking a word to anyone. And the opening in Philadelphia was in two days. Just a little more pressure: Our Broadway run was set to begin in only three weeks.

  Before going on the road, I had become fascinated with the I Ching, introduced to me by a close Buddhist friend. The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is a 3,000-year-old Chinese text used for telling the future—like astrology or palm reading (only more philosophical and spiritual). Forbidden to speak, I sat in my hotel room in Philly, looking to the I Ching to answer questions about my very uncertain future. It was at least something I could do while keeping my mouth shut. Maybe there was something to that old Confucian magic, because while I was flipping through the pages my mind flashed to a news brief I had read in Time magazine about an opera singer, who, after losing his voice, still went on by miming it while someone else sang for him from the wings.

  The next day, I discussed it with Hal. (I had a pad and pencil in hand at all times, since I could only communicate by writing.) The plan was that while my understudy sang from the box above stage left, I would lip-synch and act the role. Hal OK’d the plan, but it remained to be seen whether the audience would accept it. We never lied to the theatergoers; the program clearly stated what was happening. At the end of the show, I brought my understudy onstage, and we took a bow together. The audience loved it and gave us a standing ovation.

  For the next three weeks my understudy and I were two halves of an Emcee, and not one person asked for his money back. I was grateful to be there and to have found a way to play the part and keep the audience in their seats. But it was also one of the hardest times of my life. I didn’t know if my voice was ever going to come back, and what condition it would be in if it did. The actor’s voice is his everything.

  One week after seeing Dr. Sataloff, I went for a follow-up visit. The cord showed only slight improvement, and he was doubtful that I would be well enough to make the Broadway opening. I went into New York to meet with Galli, my singing teacher, who gave me some gentle exercises while I waited to get the OK from the good doctor. The cast and crew worried, some for their jobs, some for me, some for both. Lip-synching could never be a solution on Broadway. Then came our last performance in Philadelphia, a Sunday matinee. I got the go-ahead from Sataloff to sing and did the whole show without my understudy. The voice was there and ready—maybe—to open in New York.

  That was the backdrop to my already anxious state of mind when at 8:20 P.M. on October 22, 1987, opening night of the show at the Imperial, the set jammed. In the original production, back in ’66, stagehands would move the scenery behind closed curtains on stage wagons, using long push poles or just their hands. Technological advances over the passing decades meant that in the revival all the sets now moved mechanically. It was supposed to make the production smoother, more problem-free. With most of the audience members already seated, I didn’t know what to do other than take my place for the opening. I stood there waiting for the go-ahead. That’s when I heard one of the stagehands loudly whisper in the dark, “Does anybody have a hanger?”

  I looked in the wings, and there I found Eddie. My beautiful, sweet Eddie. He was staring right back at me like he always did, his eyes smiling and kind; he thought I could do no wrong.

  Ultimately, Eddie and I lasted longer than Cabaret on Broadway. The revival wasn’t an unmitigated success. It did run for 261 performances, but the critics complained it didn’t compare with the original. Life inevitably changes things. It had certainly changed me. The last time I played the Emcee, I was a married man with two children. Now I was in a full-on romance with a man.

  As our relationship progressed, I introduced Eddie to many of my friends, who were supportive. But no matter how much time he spent with them, they always perceived Eddie as at best enigmatic and at worst standoffish. Whether he thought he was more interesting that way or was simply hiding something, he didn’t reveal a lot of himself to others.

  I didn’t care what anyone else had to say. I was over the moon. In private, Eddie continued to be the same devoted, adoring man that I saw from the wings opening night of Cabaret on Broadway. To mark my birthday one year, he hand-bound an accordion book no bigger than an inch high and a half-inch wide. I was moved beyond words as I opened the muted, Japanese-print cover to find, in the tiny, perfect handwriting done by this six-footer, “Rare is true love; true friendship is still rarer.” The Jean de La Fontaine quote was followed by contributions from Lord Bryon, Alexander Pope, Heinrich Heine, and others—all on the subject of love and friendship. The theme was apt. Ours was a terrific friendship with the added dimension of a powerful physical connection. With him so romantic and me so ready, our relationship seemed like something I had been moving toward for a long, long time.

  Still, I recognized some truth in what my friends had said about him. Even with me, he never totally let his guard down. After we had been together for a few years, he still insisted on maintaining a private life separate from ours.

  Ironically, Eddie was t
he one uncomfortable with the idea that someone might think he was gay. It was as if God had played a joke on me. Here was the closest I had ever come to a real commitment to another man, and the man I chose to be with had trouble accepting his own truth.

  But the heart wants what it wants, and I was in his thrall. Like anyone else in love, I was willing to settle for the conditions that had been imposed upon it. Eddie might not have wanted to let the world know I was his lover, but I did—and the first step toward that was introducing him to my family.

  While I was in LA for an extended period in 1992 during pilot season, still chasing after that same bluebird of happiness, I sent Eddie a ticket so we could spend time together on the West Coast. I missed him, but I also wanted Ron and his wife, Maddie, to meet him.

  My brother and Maddie had built a wonderful life for themselves in California. Ronnie, now Ron, a business genius, provided an Ozzie and Harriet–style existence for their two boys, Randy and Todd. They went to private schools and played tennis every day on their private court before heading off to UCLA. And still they were wonderful kids. Maddie was the most consistent and loving mother and person I ever encountered. When Jo and I were splitting up, and I no longer had a place in LA, I stayed with them, and Maddie accompanied me way downtown to court every day for the divorce proceedings. She made me laugh about Jo’s über-fierce lawyer, who acted in court like she wanted me dead. A first-rate cook and true balabusta, Maddie made me all of my favorite comfort foods.

  It was a tribute to my nurturing sister-in-law and my brother that I told them about Eddie. “I think I’m ready to commit, whatever that entails,” I shared with Maddie. This was a time when things were beginning to change. Forty years earlier, I would have risked arrest with such an admission. Marc Blitzstein, who wrote The Threepenny Opera, was murdered in 1964 in the West Indies for being gay. America was slowly starting to come out of a period when being gay was considered a death sentence. Revealing to a family member that I was in love with a man was nothing short of a miracle. My brother and his wife, always knowing who I was and very much wanting to meet Eddie, invited us out to Malibu for brunch.

  With Eddie sitting next to me at their breakfast table, I was contented. Ronnie and Maddie liked Eddie very much. He charmed both of them, and they were thrilled with my happiness. That emotion, however, turned out to be extremely short-lived. On the way back to the house I had rented on Clinton Street in West Hollywood, he became very quiet. I asked him what was going on, and he said he needed some air. “What do you mean?” I asked, but I didn’t get an answer. When we got back to the house, he said, “I’m sorry. I’m really not ready for this. I need to marry a woman.” And he ran as fast as he could. And that was that.

  While I was deeply wounded by Eddie’s response to my attempts to draw him into my family, after time had passed and I was able to look at that relationship with some distance, I saw my part in the puzzle of what had happened. I had spent a lifetime of making up stories and giving people messages that weren’t exactly true, so that my life wouldn’t be ruined. He was another version of me, twenty years ago. Eddie’s resistance was much too familiar. You can’t just turn that off because now society says it’s OK—or because you are in love. I had come up in a time when being gay was so far from being OK that the sensibility never completely left me. Choosing someone like Eddie was another defense against understanding who I was. The fact that he didn’t want to be out and open fed into my own damaged psyche, which had just begun to take baby steps toward acceptance.

  What I didn’t understand after my breakup with Eddie, and not until four years later, when I took on the role of Amos Hart in the 1996 revival of Chicago, was that while being closeted felt so necessary for survival that it was hard to let go, its side effects were equally damaging. To not be seen, that terrible way of living, is at the core of Amos’s character’s psychology. “’Cause you can look right through me, walk right by me,” he sings in his big musical number “Mr. Cellophane,” “and never know I’m there.”

  I almost didn’t take the part. I had attended opening night of the original 1975 production, because I was interested, for obvious reasons, in Bob Fosse’s choreography and direction of the musical (in addition, Kander and Ebb wrote the music and lyrics for it after Cabaret). I didn’t connect with the cynical and dark piece—and I hardly remembered anything about the small part of Amos, a cuckolded auto mechanic played by the fine actor Barney Martin, except to note that I found the character to be sorry for himself. I didn’t like Chicago, and I couldn’t stand Amos.

  A few days after I told my agent to pass on the revival of Chicago for the City Center Encores! series, Charlie Repole—the friend who I had worked with a lot over the years including on the summer tour of George M!—called. “Someone in the office was talking about you and how you turned down Chicago,” he said. “You’re wrong! You could score with Amos. The part’s a classic.” He was adamant that I reread the script, listen to the song again, and think about how I might approach the role in a fresh way.

  That’s when it struck me that Amos had a peculiar dignity that I was drawn to. Ideally, a role reflects some part of an actor’s psyche. It is a positive way of expressing and possibly exorcising those demons for the actor and audience. Throughout Chicago, Amos is mocked by the rest of the characters—particularly his wife, Roxy, who spends the play cheating on him and calls him that “scummy, crummy dummy hubby of mine.” And yet he’s the one guy whose actions are generous and genuine. He’s the only one who seems to know what love really means.

  I wouldn’t play Amos as a loser. A man with the courage to love fully, no matter what people think of him, is a hero. At least to someone like me who had spent so much of my life fearing what loving unconditionally in my way would mean to others. With that in mind, I said yes and flew to New York two days later.

  Our revival of Chicago, stripped of all the excess and cynicism of the original, turned out to be a huge hit. Ann Reinking—who had started out her career in the chorus of a Bob Fosse show before becoming a star and his love—played Amos’s wife, Roxie Hart (a part she had taken over for Fosse’s wife, Gwen Verdon, in the original) and choreographed the show “in the style of Bob Fosse.” Bebe Neuwirth was brilliantly cast as Velma Kelly, the nightclub singer charged with murder, and James Naughton as her lawyer, Billy Flynn. The result was a great year in a show that would become the second-longest-running show in Broadway history, with more than 7,300 performances.

  I felt deeply gratified by the show’s success, as if it were a reward for having believed in and given all of oneself over in the way that Amos does. It was ironic, but I felt more open now than I ever had been as a young man. The experience that only comes with age made some of the old fears not disappear completely but at least recede. I was ready for adventure, which is exactly what I got when I received a call out of the blue.

  “Joel Grey?” said someone in a tiny and strange but lilting voice.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Björk.”

  I didn’t know exactly what to say.

  “Oh, hello. How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” said the Icelandic pop star. “I’m calling because I’m wanting to tell you that I want very much for you to be in a movie I’m making with Lars von Trier. We are shooting in Sweden right now. And we will try to send you the music for the number. But we are very happy if you are coming.”

  Then she hung up.

  It was like getting a casting call from a woodland elf. But to work with Lars von Trier I would have accepted the job from one of the seven dwarfs. I thought his movie Breaking the Waves was one of the greatest films ever made and gladly accepted the role in his musical, Dancer in the Dark, of a former musical-comedy star from Czechoslovakia. No script necessary.

  So in 1998, I flew to Stockholm, where someone from the studio picked me up to drive me to the hamlet where everybody was working on the film. I was put up in what I imagined was the only hotel in town. It was a little i
nn where the other cast members, such as David Morse, stayed, as well as tourists who had come to enjoy rural Sweden. I went out to dinner with Catherine Deneuve, one of the film’s stars, and Lars von Trier. That alone was worth making the movie.

  I still had little idea what I was doing in the movie. Although filmed in Scandinavia, it is set in 1960s Washington State, where Björk’s character, Selma, a poor Czech immigrant, struggles to survive as she raises a son and slowly goes blind. Her rich fantasy life expresses itself in musical numbers filmed using more than a hundred small digital video cameras. That’s where my character—Oldrich Novy, a former Czech movie-musical comedy star whom Björk’s character worships and believes is her father—appears.

  I remained in the small country village inn waiting to be called to set, but no call came. A day passed, then two, then three. Just when I was starting to really be nervous I received a call in my room from Lars: “We’re recording your number.”

  Excuse me? Pardon me?

  I was confused. I took for granted that we would record the music in a professional recording studio later in Stockholm—just as we had done for Cabaret. “We’re recording,” Lars said. “In room 176.” That was not exactly the truth. We actually recorded our number “In the Musicals” in the room’s eight-by-ten-foot bathroom. As if the song, with its Björkian off-kilter beats and chords, weren’t strange enough. With one foot in the shower stall to improve the sound quality, I sang, “I don’t mind it at all / If you’re having a ball / This is your musical / I’ll always be there to catch you.” Björk, also performing, stood right in front of me holding on to the shower door to steady herself while she sang, “You were always there to catch me when I’d fall.” Lars was lying on the bed, listening.