Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (15 page)

The fight to become an actor wasn’t the only persistent battle in my life. Throughout my twenties, I continued to wage a sexual war with myself. No matter how many women I was sleeping with, my conflict with men was never
not
there. I told myself I was bisexual, because I was attracted to women and men. But if I really looked at it, I would have to admit that was because being gay was simply not an option.

Trying so hard to be what society, including my parents, insisted I
should
be was exhausting. Particularly because when I did have relationships with men I had to be extremely careful not to be discovered. During the year that Ted, a publicist, and I spent together in the mid-fifties, he often brought me home to his parents’ house for Shabbos, and no one ever suspected we were anything more than business associates and friends. Over a delicious dinner at their gracious apartment at 80th Street and Riverside Drive, his lovely family didn’t have a clue as to the true nature of our relationship. To them I was simply their son’s client, a nice young Jewish boy living in New York away from his family. They took me in and made me feel like a part of theirs.

Ted wasn’t my first hidden adult relationship with a man. Before him, there was Robby, whom I met while shopping at Bloomingdale’s. I was looking for linens for the very first apartment I lived in alone—a one-bedroom at 400 East 57th Street with a sunken living room and cork floors that was all very Paul McCobb. While I was feeling the thread count of the sheets, Robby, an up-and-coming interior designer, offered me some advice. I knew instantly that he couldn’t care less about linens. When secrecy is part of your life, you develop a heightened awareness to
the look
.

The look, a certain minuscule brightening, widening of the eyes, can’t ever be denied or reversed. It can be nonsexual—a perfectly friendly hey-I-get-it acknowledgment. Or it can be angry, as in the defiant look, which says,
How dare you know a secret about me that I’ll spend a lifetime denying.
But the best is the healthy admiring look and a smile that says,
Hey! We’re from the same shtetl
.

Connecting with someone was a relief; I could be unguarded and myself. But because the connection was forbidden, it was also electric. Robby, an erstwhile Orthodox Jewish boy from Brooklyn, had gone on to marry a Boston Brahman, joining a group of well-known figures in the design field who had put aside their sexuality (either permanently or intermittently) for the sake of wives and children.

I liked Ted and Robby a lot, but I knew deep down that neither would figure in my future. (I parted undramatically with both and remained good friends.) I never allowed myself even to imagine such a life. My agent, Charlie Baker, was gay, but no one at the office or the high society in which he moved seemed to acknowledge that discreet aspect of him. I stayed many times in his place in Sneden’s Landing, where some of the great theater people at the time had homes, but if he had lovers, I never met them.

And this was complicated by the fact that I wanted a family. I always knew this, from the time I was a little boy wandering around the Sovereign Hotel in Cleveland. Whenever there was an infant in the hotel, I had to stop and stare. The Davises, a couple who lived on our floor, couldn’t help noticing my interest in their baby and asked if I would like to hold her. Oh, yes, I would! I turned out to be very good at it, and Mrs. Davis let me give her six-month-old a bottle while she watched. I wound up babysitting little Nicole while her mother did other things; I loved holding, burping, and even diapering her. I knew right then that one day I’d be a dad.

Robert Anderson’s 1953 Broadway hit
Tea and Sympathy,
about a man who resolves his conflicted sexuality with a compassionate woman, had a profound impact on me. Directed by Elia Kazan and starring Deborah Kerr, making a remarkable Broadway debut, and a young John Kerr (no relation), the play centered on a seventeen-year-old, Tom, who is bullied by his prep school classmates because they assume his lack of ability with sports and girls means he’s a queer. Tom is drawn to the beautiful and sympathetic headmaster’s wife, played by Ms. Kerr, who in an act of unselfish generosity ends up validating him by taking him to her bed. In the quiet after making love, she says to Tom, “When you talk of this in years to come, and you will, be kind.” Broadway was shocked by this scene and the ideas the play dealt with so frankly, but I was inspired. I identified wholeheartedly with Tom during this confusing time. No matter how I conducted my personal life, becoming a husband and dad was my biggest desire, just as important as making it in the theater or becoming famous.

The only problem was that I was twenty-six years old and still single. That might not have seemed that old, even at that time, but I felt that it was. Many of my straight friends wed by twenty-one or twenty-two and were already on their second child. My primary example, my parents, married when they were seventeen and nineteen. Even Ronnie, my little brother, whom I had always dismissed as a baby, had a wonderful wife.

Ron took the path I hadn’t chosen: He went to UCLA, where he was Zeta Beta Tau and met Maddie, a nice Jewish girl from the sister sorority. They were immediate soul mates. Ronnie and I never had a lot in common and didn’t have a close relationship. Mother didn’t help by always showing her strong bond with me, the one who might make her famous. Growing up, the poor kid had to sit in the theater night after night watching everyone fall all over me during my performances in
Borscht Capades.
Meanwhile, I saw him as someone who was interested only in business.

Once he got married, however, everything changed. I instantly loved Maddie, who was so giving and easy and optimistic and gentle. She and I became like brother and sister (we always called each other that), and in turn Ronnie and I grew much closer. Maddie, the complete opposite of our mother, helped ease whatever competition our mother had stoked between us so that we could just enjoy each other. (Mother, not quite as big a fan of Maddie’s as the rest of us, took every opportunity to give her daughter-in-law helpful suggestions, such as “You shouldn’t wear that dress, dear. It makes your legs look even shorter than they are.”) Mother might not have loved her, but I was happy in their LA home and even more so when soon after their wedding they told me that Maddie was expecting.

With my younger brother doing everything I was unable to do, I started to feel old and self-conscious. Yet I couldn’t seem to stay on the straight and narrow.

There were nights when I went out of my way to pass the infamous Everard Baths, wondering what was happening behind the nineteenth-century limestone walls of the building on West 28th Street. What was I missing? Hidden from sight, I watched who went into the gay bathhouse (nicknamed “Ever-
hard
”). I desperately wanted to go in, but I was also deeply afraid.

This was the fifties, and a vehement crackdown on men having sex with men was well under way. President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an executive order, formalizing policy that had begun during Truman’s administration, which denied federal government security clearances to people because of their sexual orientation. The FBI conducted surveillance of gays and harassed them; the police continued to raid gay bars, hauling off well-dressed businessmen in handcuffs for photographers to capture, their families to see, and their lives to be ruined.

Even though I knew all of this, the arched entryway of the Everard proved too exciting to ignore. One night, feeling that
I have to do this
, I walked in just like a regular and paid my entrance fee. With an equal mix of fear and anticipation I took my key and towel from the clerk.

I was still in the locker room, totally naked, my towel over my shoulder and with no idea what awaited me, when I felt a poke on my shoulder and then heard someone say, a little too loudly, “Joel Grey. What are
you
doing here?”

I can’t remember what happened after that. The next thing I knew I was hailing a cab on Lexington and begging the driver to step on it. It takes a lot for me to cry, but it was all I could do when I got home that night. Beating myself up for wanting something that had the capacity to destroy me, I cried and cried. At some point I stopped, washed my face, got into bed, and tried to forget the whole thing.

This woman is a beauty
, I thought.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I moved through the fine mid-century modern furniture, just looking, not looking to buy—I didn’t need anything. A viewing for an estate sale at an auction house on the corner of Wilshire and La Cienega was always amusing. And, of course, you never know.

“Joel!”

I was looking up from an Arne Jacobsen chair I was trying out; it was Dan, one of my William Morris agents, and on his arm was a striking girl with dark brown hair tied up in a knot.

“Jo, you gotta meet this kid,” Dan said to his date, who turned her dark almond eyes on me. “He sings; he dances! The office is really high on him.”

At twenty-nine, I was hardly a kid, but I was more interested in this woman than in correcting him. There was something unusual about her beauty—high cheekbones and sexy buckteeth like Gene Tierney’s—that made me think I had seen her before.

After Dan gave me the trademark William Morris agent hug (performed while scanning the room to see who else was there), he introduced her to me: “Jo, I’d like you to meet Joel Grey. The office thinks he is going to do big things. Joel, this is Jo Wilder, an actress we just signed from New York.”

Jo Wilder? Something
was
familiar.

“Been in LA long?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “I’ve just come out.”

“Oh? Where in the city do you live?”

“On Lafayette, across from the Public.”

Then it hit me.

“You’re June Ericson’s roommate! We’ve met!”

The singer June Ericson was the girlfriend of Peter Matz (a successful composer for film, theater, and TV—and my good friend from Hami High). She was also one of three women who had shared a cool loft—before lofts were lofts—in the Colonnade, a landmark building on Lafayette right across the street from the Public Theater. (The third roommate was Charlotte Foley, who went on to originate the role of Electra, the stripper, in the Ethel Merman production of
Gypsy
.) About a year earlier, I had gone there one night with Peter to pick up June and met Jo quickly. The introduction clearly hadn’t made an impression on either of us.

Now, in the auction house, something was going on between us. She looked different to me.
This woman is a beauty
, I thought. An odd mix of feisty, vulnerable, and sexy, she had a presence. Even though she appeared to be Dan’s date, there was no doubt that something was sparking. While Dan was busy, she wrote her number on a Du-par’s matchbook and handed it to me. I guess she
wasn’t
Dan’s girl after all.

I couldn’t stop thinking about her that night—or for the next few days. I was living in LA for TV pilot season. “You gotta be here,” my agent said, because the bluebird of happiness (aka big money and security) was a TV series. Although I made several pilots throughout my career that didn’t sell, I never stopped pursuing that bird. So I always maintained a presence in the form of an apartment on the West Coast and would go back and forth between New York and LA.

Finally I pulled out the Du-par’s matchbook and called Jo. Why was I so nervous? After a couple of minutes of small talk I said, “I’m invited to a party at the top of Laurel Canyon tonight. There’ll be people from the business. It’s a great house, and they’re great pals.” She didn’t wait a second to say, “Yes, I’d love to.” I was shocked by how excited her answer made me.

Just as we had planned on the phone, I arrived late that afternoon at the apartment she shared with three girls, walked up the steps, and rang the bell. The door opened, and there was some other girl.

“I’m here for Jo,” I said. “Can you tell her I’m here?”

“Are you sure? She’s not home.”

Thinking she must just be running late, I asked, “Do you mind if I come in and wait? It must be 900 degrees out here.”

“Sure, come on in,” the roommate said before she went into what I assumed was her bedroom and shut the door. Looking hard at my watch, I was sure I specified six o’clock. Thumbing through a
Photoplay
magazine, I managed to kill ten minutes. After a half hour went by, my annoyance slowly turned into anger, and by seven o’clock I slammed down the magazine before slamming the apartment door. I had been stood up!

I gunned my little Fiat up the winding canyon, driving much too fast, and arrived at my friends’ house shaking with anger. The host tried to calm me down, but, humiliated, I didn’t want any of it. “Maybe something was wrong,” he said. “Maybe she got ill. Who knows what. Why don’t you at least call her?”

After a vodka gimlet, I dialed her number. She picked up.

“Jo?”

“Oh, Joel. Sorry.
We
were at the beach and then got stuck in bad traffic on Sunset.”