Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (29 page)

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 inn 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.

I had just taped a musical number for a major motion picture in the bathroom. Who would have ever thought? Maybe the younger me would have been put off by the lack of decorum, that this wasn’t the right way to do things and so shouldn’t be done at all. When you have to work so hard to keep a secret, you can’t help but close off more parts of yourself than intended. No matter what anyone thought of
Dancer in the Dark
, I was just happy to be part of a project that was brave and independent. In my mid-sixties, I had come to a point in my life where I realized that passion of any kind is gold.

That is the power of a great work of theater—to help people find their way and to create new types of normal.

CODA

It was my brother who called on August 9, 2004, to tell me that Mother was gone. Her girlfriends had been expecting her for their weekly mah-jongg game that afternoon, but when she didn’t show up, they were sufficiently alarmed that they called Ron. She was, after all, ninety-two years old. The police accompanied him to her apartment, where they found her, dressed to the nines per usual, lying on her bed, hands neatly folded, looking perfectly at peace. It was as if, feeling faint, she had decided to lie down for a minute, and that was that.

Ron—who had so much trouble forgiving our mother for always making him feel less than, especially less than me—told me that he planned to get rid of everything in her apartment. Right away. Tomorrow. Being a take-charge kind of guy, he was ready to dispose of her clothes, her photos, and even her artwork. (Mom had made something of a name for herself in LA as an artist, opening her own gallery called, what else, Grace. She made charming stylized paintings of children, but her most popular works were wooden, painted sculptures of children in the shape of chairs, which she called “chair people.”)

In recent years, Ron and Mother didn’t have a lot of contact, even though they lived around the corner from each other in LA. I told him that I was flying out tomorrow and that we would figure out what to do with the stuff that remained of her life. I couldn’t let go as easily. As complicated a woman as she was and as complicated as our relationship had been, she was my mother, the woman who instilled in me my sense of beauty and creativity—in addition to the shame I felt for who I was. Up until the day she died, Mother never accepted that I was gay.

After Ron and I went through Mom’s things and gave them to the grandchildren and friends, and I had returned home to New York, he called me to say he had found a diary she kept and asked if I wanted it. Of course I did. I always wanted to know more of her, in the hope of understanding what was behind her anger toward me. So Ron sent it to me in New York, and I opened it to the first page. I could quickly see her full venom across the page. After closing it fast, I handed the diary to my analyst at my next session where I asked her, “Do you think I should read it? Is there something for me to learn?” A week later, she advised me to throw it away, which I did without reading another word. I, who could never keep myself from reading reviews of my performances by strangers no matter how much they upset me, threw out my own mother’s review. Who says we can’t change?

It was a lot easier for me to be open about my sexuality: My mother and father were gone, Jo and I were divorced, my children were accepting of my truth, I had a group of loving, supportive friends, and the world was a much more open place in which to live. Still, when I agreed to play out various homoerotic themes in front of Duane Michals’s camera for a book he was doing on the famous homosexual poet C. P. Cavafy, I worried I would be too anxious or inhibited to play the infamous poet.

I had met Duane—a remarkable photographer who has applied his cinematic, narrative style to many themes, including those involving gay culture—when he shot me as the Emcee for
Glamour
magazine in 1966. Over the years, he photographed me for various other magazines and became a valued friend. He was one of the few people I could talk to about gay stuff. He got it completely and was always a safe place to go.

He was definitely the only one who could have gotten me to play C. P. Cavafy in a large monograph that paid homage to the greatest Greek poet of the twentieth century. Duane imagined and staged elaborate scenarios, with various models and me as the poet (Duane always said I looked like him), that illustrated poems and essays that were overtly homosexual—like Cavafy himself.

After his shower he dried himself very carefully. And although he would never admit it, it had all been for my benefit.

The shoots, in tousled beds and outdoor cafés, were exciting for me, because the project was all about a desire that I hadn’t been allowed to explore in my real life.

But here, at seventy-five years old, in front of Duane’s elegant lens, I had a chance to act out those different vignettes that had played so many times in my own head. In one series, a young man sits at a café on the corner of Bleecker and Christopher streets where I, as Cavafy, spot him through the window. Emboldened by the young man’s beauty, I follow him when he exits the café and as he walks down Christopher Street. The exhilaration of the moment was compounded by the fact that I hadn’t met the model before the shoot, so it truly unfolded like an encounter between strangers.