Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (30 page)

The young man never looks back. Finally, he turns left, leaving Cavafy standing on a street corner, completely alone. In the next image, though, where we had just seen the boy exit, a hand appears. The young man has known all along that he was being followed. It is just an erotic game, and then they kiss. The kiss wasn’t in Duane’s original plan. The young man and I were just supposed to give each other a meaningful look. But I impulsively kissed him, on a public street not far from where I live and am known in the West Village, and the moment ended up in Duane’s masterly book, because it perfectly encapsulated the unplanned yet inevitable.

The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy
, published in 2007, was another step in my revealing myself to the world—an artful coming out much the way
The Normal Heart
had been. At the opening at Pace/MacGill, the top New York gallery for photography, the prints were hung beautifully. Even though I faced images in which I would have never allowed myself to appear in the past—a large photograph of me pouring oil for a massage onto my hands just above a naked man’s butt—I felt comfortable as I milled about, as I would have at any other opening. I found Duane’s art very special and was proud of our collaboration. Looking at the black-and-white prints, I came to understand my commonality with this aspect of Cavafy.

The gallery filled up quickly, and although the event was just beginning the place was already packed. Standing near the entrance, I spotted in the crowd a New York socialite I had known personally for years. She walked toward the elevator and pushed the button to call it. Having seen this longtime friend of mine arrive only a few moments earlier, I assumed her quick exit meant that perhaps she didn’t feel well (when you get older, any out-of-the-ordinary behavior is a cause for concern about someone’s health). I went over to the elevator and said, “Sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to you. Why are you leaving so early?”

She looked at me coolly and said, “I can’t for the life of me understand why you would do such a thing.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that in this day and age, in a city known for its sophistication, in an art gallery, among friends, someone would criticize me simply for who I was. It was another variation of the same old thing I had heard my whole life, the thing my mother had put so succinctly by saying, “Oh, no, dear,
that’s
not you.”

I don’t blame the woman at the gallery, or my mother, for having trouble accepting my story; it’s taken me a lifetime to understand and accept my own particular set of contradictions.

For sure, a great deal of them lie within the realm of my sexual history. Even though my true powerful pull to intimacy is with men, the love of my life was unquestionably Jo Wilder.

That’s quite something, since after our yearlong divorce proceedings, during which we communicated only primarily unpleasant things through our lawyers, we didn’t speak to each other for a very long time. There were such hard feelings all over the place. Jo remained in LA, which she has made her permanent home, and I stayed in New York, which is mine. We lived completely separate lives with the kids as our only point of connection. Over time, our intermittent conversations about James and Jennifer turned into something of a friendship, albeit a distant one.

Despite the way things ended up between us, I can say unequivocally that the years I shared with Jo—loving, making a family, taking care of each other and our children—were my happiest. It was the realization of a lifelong dream. In the section of my junior high school yearbook where graduating eighth graders write their future aspirations, usually pro football player or astronaut, I wrote, “to be happily married.”

When I eventually recovered from the divorce, I assumed I would find a similar connection with a man. But that hasn’t happened. I turned out to be a much better family man than a gay man. I didn’t know, and I still haven’t figured out how to be that.

For the majority of my life I did everything I could not to feel that “shameful” thing, and when I left the straight world I still possessed the same instincts I had cultivated all those years before. I had powerfully pushed the idea down for so long that when I eventually tried to live in that world, I wasn’t very good at it. I could never seem to let go of that feeling of shame or stop looking over my shoulder, even if I knew no one was coming to get me. That is simply the result of the time I came up in.

So it was no small achievement when, only recently, I actually said, to myself, those five little incredibly complicated words:
I am a gay man
. It happened during an ordinary dialogue with myself, an un-momentous moment. I had left the gym and was walking down West 23rd Street. The day was beautiful, blue skies sharp against the red brick of Chelsea’s historic townhouses. Hyperaware of everything around me, I thought,
The world today is not the world I was born into.
It was no longer criminal for men to love men, as it was for me at fifteen. Now gay men and lesbians could even get married. Rick—my longtime stage manager, one of the first people to make no bones to me about being gay, the one who had lost his lover, David, to AIDS while we were on tour—had recently married his boyfriend in Hawaii. Who in the fifties would have imagined it possible?

I didn’t say it to anyone else but me.
This is who I am—I belong to a culture. I want to include myself in this world, whether I am in a relationship or not.
For the first time I was no longer judging the core of who I am, which is gay. I had not honored it before because what was so innately me was spoiled by my early life experience. Now I was ready to honor who I was and all those who suffered so that people like us could have a sense of freedom, love, and acceptance.

If you don’t tell the whole truth about yourself, life is a ridiculous exercise. It’s been a long struggle for me to internalize something that I have been working on since the Cleveland Play House, that the fundamental job of the actor is to tell about the human condition, to be a voice for the truest ideas and deepest emotions. Sometimes they are big ones, such as the nature of death in
On Borrowed Time
, the powerful material that informed the rest of my life. Or they are painful, such as in
The Normal Heart,
where I first talked to the world as a gay man. They are also lighthearted, such as
Wicked
, the 2003 musical in which I originated the role of the Wizard, and just plain hilarious, such as the stage madness in the 2011 revival of Cole Porter’s
Anything Goes
.

No matter the subject matter, it is through the creative process that I am able to reinvent and make sense of the world around me. And often times I am the one who is changed. That is the power of a great work of theater—to help people find their way and to create new types of normal.

When
Cabaret
first appeared on Broadway, its themes of fluid sexuality, soulless survival, and easy violence were shocking and strange. But as Sally Bowles and the Emcee seeped into the public consciousness they changed the zeitgeist and the norms of what is appropriate. The stylized decadence of the Kit Kat Klub set trends and gave permission to those who wished to explore. The genius of
Cabaret
is that the audience can participate in the prurient appeal of Weimar Germany without getting their hands dirty. So what began as over-the-top and scandalous—Sally’s fishnets and green “divine decadence” nail polish and the Emcee’s crimson lips, rouged cheeks, and fake eyelashes—became cultural touchstones.

Having played all over the world,
Cabaret
is now an international touchstone. I remember traveling to Amsterdam in the ’70s for the opening of the Dutch production, and with a free morning I was walking along the canals when I heard a tapping sound on a window. Through the glass, I could see a woman waving for me to come closer and I just assumed it was one of the city’s many prostitutes.
Thank you but no thank you!
I continued walking, but the tapping grew louder until finally the woman threw open her window and yelled, “Joel Grey!” Turning around and walking back toward her in resignation, I geared up for the encounter since she was obviously not to be denied.

When I got in front of the canal house, the woman was no longer in the window. Before I knew it, she was coming out the front door. Only then, when she extended a large hand with green nail polish did I realize she wasn’t in fact a woman at all. “I’m Sally Bowles,” she introduced herself. Smiling to myself, I thought,
Of course you are.

“How are you liking Amsterdam?” she asked.

“Very, very nice, thank you. Lovely to meet you.”

What about finding Sally as a transvestite in the middle of the Netherlands? That is simply the miracle of performance and of discovery. I was truly glad to meet her, and that she was free to be who she was. As Cavafy wrote in his poem “I’ve Brought to Art”:

Let me submit to Art:

Art knows how to shape forms of Beauty,

almost imperceptibly completing life,

blending impressions, blending day with day.

My confidence in the search continues to grow, as does the authenticity of my existence now that the old attitudes and intolerance don’t hold the same power to sting or stop the search. I am heartened by the irrepressible nature of desire, and that the fear of aloneness is greatly diminished by the inner quest that is now my companion. I know firsthand the power of transformation, that things can, and things do change. A doting mother turns into an antagonist; a wife becomes a stranger; children grow into adults; a husband of a woman finds he loves men; and the horror of a crass vaudevillian becomes the beautiful part of a lifetime.

Through it all the pursuit of art has always been a great friend, a place I could go when real life was too brutal or confining. Mastery can be pleasurable. But I think my Grandma Fanny summed it up best years ago when she was interviewed for a television special (along with my entire family, even The Sisters) right after
Cabaret
became a hit. “What is Joel Grey really like?” the host asked my grandmother, the last family member to be interviewed. Sitting under the bright lights with her makeup and hair done, this woman who never really learned how to read or speak English, all of a sudden became a TV star.

“You vanna know about Joel?” she said. “Joel vas de best!”

Although I was standing right there, it was as if she were eulogizing me.

“He used to come to my houz every Sunday for brawnch. I vood hev lox and bagels and crim cheez and pot cheez and barley soup and udder goodeez. And I vood say to everybody, ‘Today iz Joel Grey’s day. He should sing and dance and do anyting his heart desires.’”

Well, I’m still singing (in the same key), still dancing (but slower), and, finally, getting a lot of my heart’s desire.

The Epsteins: Morris and Fanny; “The Sisters” Helen, Grace, Esther, and Frida (Fritzi). Baby Beverly was born later.

The Katz family: Max, Abe, Mama Johanna, Jeanne, Estelle, and Myron (Mickey).

Photo booth shot of the folks (circa 1930s).