Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (11 page)

By the time I had come to his attention, through the owners of Grossinger’s, the legendary Jewish resort in the Catskills, where I had performed a number of times, Mr. Cantor had already transitioned from the dying world of vaudeville. Radio was the beginning of the demise of vaudeville, which was the most popular entertainment in America during the turn of the century. Like many big vaudevillians such as Burns and Allen, Bob Hope, and Will Rogers, Mr. Cantor had gone where the work was—first to radio, then the movies, and now, the new medium of television. He was in Florida as part of a nationwide hunt for fresh talent to appear on his new TV show.

Keenly aware that he was in the audience at the Roosevelt that night, I gave
Rumania, Rumania
my all. If I got on TV, I was told, people would know my name, and I would become a commodity. That would help pave the way for more jobs as an actor—ideally in the theater. That muggy Miami night, I was auditioning for the most important job of my life.

After the show, Mr. Cantor came backstage to say he’d like to introduce me on his upcoming television show,
The Colgate Comedy Hour
.

My family was thrilled. Dad said this was my “big chance,” even though Hal was opposed to it.
The Colgate Comedy Hour
meant I had to leave
Borscht Capades
to work on new material in LA for the TV show. Losing me could be bad for business, but Dad insisted he was “for it all the way.” He always wanted the best for me. I knew my mother was thrilled even though she didn’t say anything at all on the topic. Staying quiet wasn’t like Mom. But I understood that she didn’t want to be effusive about the opportunity, since it was a loss for Dad’s show. However, if she hadn’t liked the idea, Mother definitely would have spoken up. Grace was nothing if not a realist.
Borscht Capades
was limited in its appeal because it was for a Jewish audience. TV’s audience was unlimited.

I finished out the last two weeks of our run at the Roosevelt, left for California, and then, on April 1, 1951, found myself back East to perform live on national TV.
The Colgate Comedy Hour
, which we did in Philadelphia, was a storm of technology and terror—at least for me. Heaps of wire coiled around like snakes, and enormous cameras pointed like strange laser-beam guns of the future. I was queasy when I heard Mr. Cantor announce me, but I burst through the red velour as if this were the best moment of my life.

I caught a glimpse of myself on the monitor and saw someone else. Mr. Cantor and the other producers thought I was a comedian-singer-dancer-impressionist. And I was none of those.

“Who has more fun than a boy?” I sang. “I mean fun that is the real McCoy like football and baseball and swimming a lot.”

Through sheer force of will, I made people believe that I was a song-and-dance man. I stole a little bit from a lot of my heroes, such as Jerry Lewis, Ray Bolger, and Danny Kaye. Flinging myself around the soundstage in Philadelphia was not too different from performing in our Cleveland living room for the relatives. “Joel, do something!” one of them would yell, and I would oblige, impersonating Aunt Estelle’s ballet moves while Aunt Jean played the piano. I was not proficient as a singer, dancer, or comedian, but I was a very good faker and got away with it. Compared with pretending that I had feelings only for women and never, ever thought about men, this was a breeze.

After my whirling-dervish impression on his show, Mr. Cantor called me the “new Danny Kaye!” The televised reward for my performance was a phony spot in the cast of some future Broadway show—the real prize was an entrée, smoothed by Mr. Cantor, into the high-powered universe that was the William Morris Agency.

On my way to my first meeting at WMA’s offices, I decided to walk up Broadway for inspiration. The marquees that glowed with the names of the day’s biggest stars in theater—Lillian Hellman, Henry Fonda, Helen Hayes, Mary Martin—reminded me of what all the nerves and worries were for. I passed Lindy’s, where Milton Berle (also a WMA client) apparently ate almost every night. And although I couldn’t have eaten a bite of cheesecake at that very moment—my stomach was so tied in knots—I imagined myself in one of the booths when I was rich and famous.

My interior pep talk fizzled out as soon as I arrived at the imposing skyscraper at 1740 Broadway, where WMA had its big, fancy offices. From the moment I stepped into the building’s lobby with its dizzyingly high ceilings, I was overwhelmed. Businessmen clutching their briefcases and hats, secretary types in high heels, and delivery boys rapidly crisscrossed. I felt like I was the only one who didn’t know where he was going.

I was ushered into a large conference room, where a parade of men from many departments came in to meet me and see what I was about. Everyone was dressed in a similar uniform of dark suits, white shirts, black ties, and black shoes, and I couldn’t distinguish among them. In the conference room filled with suits, the Morris Men began their calculations.

“So you think you’d like to be on the stage, huh?” one said.

“What about movies?” another said.

“I say, we put him in nightclubs.”

“He’ll need an act.”

“Somebody’ll need to talk to the writing department.”

“We can break in at a midnight audition at the Copa.”

“I’ll make a call.”

Having decided my fate, the group quickly disbanded while I was still catching up. I had never considered becoming a nightclub performer. I had hardly been to any nightclubs in my eighteen years. But who was I to say no? The fact that WMA heavyweights were interested in me for anything was
big
. This was the agency that repped Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Danny Kaye, and Laurence Olivier! I was lucky that they had even let me walk into the office.

I practically sailed back to my hotel room with the feeling, “My God! I was on my way.” As for nightclubs, the Copacabana was it. There was nothing bigger. Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin had debuted their comedy act at the famed hot spot on East 60th Street, which was owned partly by the notorious mob boss Frank Costello. When the time came for me to have my audition, failure was not an option, but it seemed the only one I had. I was about to go on the midnight show, unbilled, in the top nightclub in the world, and I had no idea what I was doing.

In my dressing room, I put on my tuxedo with shaky hands. After I fixed my bow tie, I reluctantly made my way to the club’s kitchen, through which all the entertainers passed on their way to the small stage. Amid the steam rising up from the dishwasher’s sink and the orders barked by line cooks, the Copa Girls entered in matching fruited turbans. Having just performed their number, they flashed by me, all flesh, fishnet stockings, perfume, and feathers.

“You’re cute,” one of them said to me.

“How old are you, anyway?” another laughed.

“Aw, leave the kid alone,” a third said.

In a trail of giggles, they left me petrified. If the Copa Girls thought I was just some kid, what were the patrons, who had paid a lot of money to be there, going to think? I had got away with a lot in my short life, but I didn’t know how I was going to manage this one.

I walked out into the dark near the dance floor, which doubled as a stage, where the Copa Girls had left an empty spotlight for me to die in. (There’s nothing like being a short Jewish kid following a bouncy number by girls in sequined bustiers and mink panties.) I felt faintly claustrophobic in the tight space. There was a large, fake palm tree above, an orchestra behind, and squeezed all around the stage were tables of people drinking, smoking, eating, and laughing.

The atmosphere was so different from the austerely beautiful Play House and the seriousness of the theater. Though
Borscht Capades
was a revue with its share of shtick and humor, the theaters themselves in which we performed lent the show a sense of legitimacy. The Copa was a free-for-all. Even as the band struck up the opening chords for my act, the audience paid me about as much attention as they did the waiters rushing around the tables (actually, they paid those guys a lot more attention, since they were the ones serving the drinks). While I was performing, they laughed and talked, tucked into their Pu Pu platters (although the club was Latin-themed, it served Polynesian food), and smoked. My God, how they smoked! My eyes and throat burned with the stuff as I tried to ignore the talking and clinking of glasses and cutlery while singing my opener, “I’m Gonna Live Till I Die,” which had been a big hit for Frank Sinatra. Throughout the patter, I had no idea whether I was bombing or killing it; the audience seemed so distracted.

“They loved you,” George Wood, the legendary WMA agent, said as I came off.

Mr. Wood repped Sinatra. He also had many ties to the mob, including the Genovese crime family member Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, who not only set up the casinos in Florida and Cuba with Meyer Lansky but was also the best man at Wood’s wedding.

“You did great,” he said. “Now go home and pack. We’re going to Chicago.”

“What? When?”

“In the morning.”

My first 8 x 10 glossy, by the famous Chicago photographer Maurice Seymour.

CHAPTER FIVE

My four-week engagement at The Chez Parée was first class all the way. It started with the club itself, which was quite a coup for me to be booked into right out of the gate. The Chicago venue hosted all the biggest names of the fifties, such as Frank Sinatra, Ethel Merman, Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole. Jack Eigen, the “midnight spieler” who had a long late-night radio career interviewing celebrities, broadcast from the lounge for years. The Chez Parée was the place to be seen, especially if you were a gangster—and in Chicago in the fifties, there were a lot of gangsters. Every night, big-time mobsters and their tootsies dressed to the nines populated the swanky joint.

I stayed at the Croydon Hotel, where all the road bands and touring actors (not the stars) stayed. The hotel’s Circle Lounge provided the perfect meeting ground for vaudeville, cabaret, and theater performers looking to blow off some steam after a show. Oscar Peterson could often be found improvising on the piano, and the bandleader Harry James apparently proposed to Betty Grable at the big circular bar where I had my first grasshopper. I was practically on the floor after one of the sweet, bright green cocktails—I’ve never been a good drinker—but I wanted to fit in. Having a drink after the show is what a performer does; I was simply acting the part.

I didn’t spend too much time in the Circle Lounge, since the job was pretty exhausting. I did two shows a night (the midnight show didn’t get out until 2:00
A.M
.) and in addition hung out with the high rollers who had asked to meet me. After a show, I’d go to their table to listen to their boring stories and smile as if they were charming and funny. Socializing went with the job.

As I went on, The Chez Parée’s six hundred or so guests were just tucking into their dinners. I had to really work to compete with those rib eyes. My act was unusual for the nightclub circuit, where people out on the town for entertainment expected off-color material. Raunchy stories and blue language, however, didn’t sound right coming out of a nineteen-year-old’s mouth. It would have been like seeing one of their own kids talking dirty. So creating an act for me had been a challenge. But William Morris had enlisted its stable of comedy writers, who produced material for Danny Thomas, Danny Kaye, and its other top clients. The agency had also paid a lot of money for personalized orchestrations of the popular songs in my act.

The lyricist Ray Gilbert suggested I open with his Oscar-winning song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from Disney’s
Song of the South
, which I did. Ray is also responsible for giving me my name, Joel Grey. It had initially morphed from Joel Katz to Joel Kaye when I was announced on Eddie Cantor’s TV show. About six months after I began on the nightclub circuit, however, it became clear that Joel Kaye was too close to Danny Kaye to be good for business. I was working with Ray to create new material for my act when I got a call from William Morris saying that if I was going to change my name I had to do it that day, since the marquee for my next engagement was going up tomorrow. Ray, ever the improviser, came out with, “Olé! Joel Grey!” adding, “The two
e’
s will look good up on the marquee.” And like that, I became Joel Grey.

Jerry Seelen wrote me a piece of material called “Do You Remember?” The joke was that because I was so young, the “good old days” were last year. I brought up current events as if they were ancient history. Woven into the songs were impressions I did of the big stars of the day. I imitated Margaret O’Brien, the Shirley Temple of my generation, by crying, “Oh, Mr. Pasternak.” (Joe Pasternak was a producer at MGM, and she was a big on-screen crier.) I also did an impression of Carmen Miranda that came out of one of my sessions with Ray. He worked closely with the Brazilian star, and at his house in LA, he had one of her turbans, which I decided to try on one day while we were working. With a pile of fruit on top of my head, I sambaed through his living room, trilling, “Tico-tico-tico.” Ray roared at the sight of a young Jewish kid playing a Latin lady samba singer, and so did the audiences in the clubs. I finished “Do You Remember?” by saluting “a newcomer,” and then I did my best Eddie Cantor, a classic show business old-timer, singing “If You Knew Susie.” It was a good finish.