Master of Ceremonies

January 25, 2016
Joel Grey's iconic Cabaret Emcee leers throughout his chronicle of a life hiding his homosexuality. He "had worked for years to rise above the cheap tricks of the vaudevillianâ¦the fag impersonations of a sleazy nightclub comedian," but found his greatest triumphs there (Tony, Oscar, and Golden Globe wins). Early success, touring with his father's Borscht Capades) was through his Jewishness, which was also something better hidden in the shadow of the Holocaust. Eventually he had a nose job to counter anti-Semitism. There are heterosexual interludes including a 24-year-marriage to the "love of his life," Jo Wilder. His first homosexual experience is at 10, and his entire memoir filters his life and career through the ambivalence about his sexual identity. After a threesome with a cantor and the cantor's wife, Grey begins a "lifelong relationship with therapy." The reader is pulled along, knowing that this 5'5" song-and-dance entertainer, with over seven decades on stage, in film, and on TV, will forever be prized by anyone who has seen him perform (most notably in Cabaret, Chicago, George M). Emotion kicks in when his first child dies, when his wife leaves, when he loses his friend Larry Kert to AIDS, and when he realizes that his mother will never accept him for who he is. The reader cheers when Grey finds playing in The Normal Heart, the AIDS cri de coeur, transformative.

February 15, 2016
The diminutive, unforgettable creator of the emcee in Cabaret both on stage and on screen writes frankly of his diverse career, exacting mother, and public embrace of his homosexuality. Although Joel Grey, born Joel Katz in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932, hated the role of master of ceremonies that he seemed to command from an early age, he unlocked the character in 1966 after 15 years of struggling to fulfill his dream of creating his own role on Broadway. His portrayal of the emcee in Hal Prince's Broadway production of Cabaret emerged as brilliantly "mercenary, lascivious, and menacing" and made his career, earning him Tony and Academy awards. The first son to Grace Epstein and musician Mickey Katz, who eventually played with Spike Jones in Los Angeles, where the family moved in 1945, Grey caught the acting bug early on in Cleveland theaters, where, as a short, pixie-ish kid, he felt accepted and loved. However, his ambivalent sexuality meant that he had both girlfriends and secret boyfriends, and when he had to reveal a seduction by a male friend, his mother turned away from him emotionally. The theater, then, became his haven, and instead of pursuing his dream of college at UCLA, he dove into the nightclub circuit, represented by big-time agents. As Grey writes, "achieving some level of fame could protect me from the kind of rejection I had experienced from my own mother after she discovered I had had an affair with another man." Marriage to a fellow actress brought out his intense yearning for fatherhood and domesticity, and although the couple had two children and many years of happiness, Grey's inability to sanction his wife's own career and his latent homosexuality doomed the marriage. In the last few chapters, the author elucidates his stunning Cabaret success and "coming out" in the role of Ned Weeks in Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart in the mid-1980s. An honest, eloquent, memorable autobiography.

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