Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (24 page)

When Bob came to the studio the next day, he had the usual cigarette hanging out of his mouth, but the whole left side of his face was black and blue. No one mentioned his injuries—or the backflip—again.

Even though the rehearsals were exceptionally long and exacting, they were exciting, too. Bob and I watched each other like hawks, but we definitely influenced each other’s plans and ideas. We quietly rose to the challenge of realizing that this thing was not going to succeed without the combination of both strong opinions living in the space we had reluctantly come to share.

For rehearsal, Bob often required temporary set pieces so he could see how the numbers were going to look. The decor and lighting for the Kit Kat Klub were directly inspired by the work of George Grosz and Otto Dix, two artists who painted pessimistically realistic images of Weimar society and war. The club set, on its own soundstage, was always thick with smoke, which gave the scenes a great look but also made people sick. There was lots of coughing, and no one coughed more than Bob, who, having recovered from his fall, immediately proceeded to come down with a bad cold that led to a respiratory infection, which dogged him the whole time we were filming. Still, I don’t recall having ever seen him without that dangling cigarette.

More than once we rehearsed a single routine for days only to have Bob throw it out, unsatisfied, and once more begin, “Five, six, seven, eight!” The “Money” number was probably the most complicated. He staged it two or three ways before he was satisfied.

“Hands, feet.”

“Look at Liza.”

“Look straight ahead.”

“Look to the right, exactly after Liza.”

“Remember, hands!”

For rehearsal, he wanted us in costume—not the real ones, which were being built, but a temporary long dress for Liza and a tailcoat, pants, top hat, and cane for me. This tailcoat came from “stock” costumes that were used for extras through the years. The pieces were cleaned after each actor used them, but the warmth of my body seemed to activate the old sweat. Let’s say it was an olfactory explosion.

“It’s like dancing with fifteen old Germans,” Liza said with a shriek. Then I shrieked. Then we both shrieked.

I adored her. From the beginning, it was a we’re-in-this-together relationship. I had known Liza before we arrived in Germany, but just as with Bob, only tangentially. I was bowled over when I saw her perform in a nightclub act at the Coconut Grove and on Broadway in
Flora the Red Menace
. And we would see each other socially from time to time, never failing to find something to laugh at.

Now, however, we were spending practically all day working and every night letting go. Each day started with an early-morning drive to the set from our hotel—the Residenz in Munich, where all the Americans were put up. My morning started a little earlier than Liza’s. I waited in the lobby for her since she always seemed to need a little more time. Her faithful secretary, Deanna Wemble, would ring me in the lobby to say, “Liza will be right down.” The cheerful English assistant, who rarely left the star’s side, was the messenger of all “Minnelli stuff.”

I understood Deanna’s instinct to protect Liza. Yes, it was her job, but there was something about Liza that invited you to take care of her. I relished our morning rides to the studio, during which she would often fall asleep on my shoulder. I would have been upset to disturb her even on the morning that the drab backdrop of Munich’s outskirts was transformed by Cat Stevens’s brand-new song “Morning Has Broken” playing on a German radio station. The song always reminds me of our odyssey and closeness. When we neared the studio, I would give her a whisper, as you would a child.

Liza retained an air of vulnerability despite the fact that her parents were the great Judy Garland and the renowned director Vincente Minnelli, and that she had been performing professionally since the age of seventeen. By the time we found ourselves in Germany, her first marriage, to Peter Allen, had ended, even though they didn’t officially divorce until years later.

We talked about her early life in Hollywood and my obsession with the theater over beer, schnapps, and dinner, which we shared most every night. (We often went to an Italian restaurant that Mussolini had apparently frequented; the food was great, even if the history was awful.) But we didn’t have much energy to spend on anything other than the film we were making.

I totally admired Bob’s relentless attention to detail and had just as high a bar for my own performance. I worked with a gifted dialogue coach, Osman Ragheb, so that my accent and dialect would be not just German but Berlinish, which turned out to be very specific (not unlike a Brooklyn accent vs. a Midwestern one). I had always loved languages, and Osman’s coaching was so precise that I was even able to convince the German extras who had been hired to play the denizens of the Kit Kat Klub that I was a German actor.

From the outset, the German crew was leery that we were making a film that would continue to demonize their generation by holding them responsible for the sins of their fathers. The atmosphere at the studio was tense on both sides. At the end of the first week, one night after the last shot, the producers sent beer to the German crew as a gesture. Getting a bit drunk, as crews can, they all started spontaneously to sing a beer-hall song in the style of “Deutschland über Alles.” It was upsetting and brought to mind the beer-garden scene from the show in which German youth lead the charge in singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

When shooting the audience members in the Kit Kat Klub, it was important that the extras playing them be actually relaxed and having a good time so that their expressions would be authentic. One day before a take, I asked assistant director Wolfgang Glattes to give me a Berlin expression that would crack them up. I tried it out with my studied accent, and it worked like a charm. From that day on, they never doubted my veracity: “Of course, he’s German. He’s so funny.” And therefore when the Emcee was entertaining the patrons of the Kit Kat Klub, the extras playing them were truly laughing. Amazingly enough, they took me, Mickey Katz’s son from Cleveland, as one of their own.

For me the turning point in making
Cabaret
into a film came when, after six weeks of rehearsing, prerecording the numbers, and fine-tuning them once more, we actually started shooting. At that time, everyone involved went to the dailies to see on-screen what we had rehearsed for weeks, and it looked amazing, like nothing any of us had ever seen. Whatever it is that makes magic was doing its job brilliantly. It was all there: cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth’s perfect lighting; authentic, compelling performances by Liza, me, and the Kit Kat Girls; and, of course, Bob’s genius and vision. From that moment on, I had only the deepest respect for him as an artist. The struggle had been worth it. More than worth it.

Even though there always remained some reserve between us, Bob and I began to let down our guard. Having grown up in the world of burlesque and vaudeville (one of six children born to a vaudevillian father, Bob was a regular in his hometown Chicago’s burlesque scene by the time he was in high school). He knew his way around sleaze and appreciated the blending of the outrageous and the sinister that I brought to the Emcee. He nicknamed me Mr. Porno. I knew he was pleased with a take when I saw a tiny smile on his face. That was like Fosse fireworks, an Oscar from Bobby.

Bob opened up somewhat to my ideas, but he was still pretty controlling whenever I tried to change even a single element of his direction:
No variations, please!
That lasted until the very last scene we shot. It was one with two women mud-wrestling on the stage of the Kit Kat Klub, and it seemed to take forever. As if it weren’t degrading enough for the two zaftig actresses to be down and dirty, they were also bleeding, because of sharp stones mistakenly left in the mud. We had already done many takes, shooting way past midnight, when Bob announced that we would do “just one more” before wrapping for the night. We were so exhausted that we didn’t know if we had one more take in us. At the very end of the last take, I, as the Emcee and the wrestling match’s gleeful referee, bent down, put some mud on my right forefinger, and smeared it across my upper lip. There was no particular button to this scene or indication for me to make the Hitler mustache and then give the “Heil Hitler” salute; it just popped into my head, so I did it. Bob screamed, “Cut!” Walking toward me in a rage, he asked, “Why did you do that?”

“That’s how I work,” I said calmly. “In that moment it felt like what I, as the Emcee, would do.”

He walked off furious, and Wolfgang shouted, “That’s a wrap!”

I was just glad to be done.

The next day, when the cast, crew, and extras were gathered to say goodbye, Wolfgang made a special announcement, bidding “alles sagen auf Wiedersehen,” which meant that everyone should say goodbye to the Emcee, “Herr Joel Grey, who leaves us tonight for his home in New York. He is an esteemed American actor, and we are so grateful he joined us for this film here in Munich.” Big silence. What? I wasn’t German? I wasn’t one of them? Their sense of betrayal was palpable. They had come to accept me as one of their own, and their wonderful reactions for the camera as audience members had been rich, broad, and wholly authentic.

I felt guilty for having tricked them, but the extras weren’t the only ones who wound up feeling betrayed. Many months later, Bob finished his cut of
Cabaret
and showed it for the first time. I was excited and of course nervous as the lights went down in the anonymous LA screening room, because the footage I had seen from the dailies in Munich was so good. Geoffrey, who had done amazing cinematography on
Barry Lyndon
, was one of my favorite people involved with the film. He was a quiet, classy, good-looking man, and I could talk to him about anything. His vision was unique, and the small pieces of the musical numbers we filmed in Munich that I had seen were incredible.

So when in that screening room I watched all the work I had done cut into a million pieces, I was stunned to the point of tears. In Bob’s first cut of the film, he used only snippets of the musical numbers. He had reduced the numbers to “ins and outs” so that they acted only as transitions or the glue between scenes. Not a single one was anywhere close to complete. That had to be one of the worst moments of my career.

What happened? Why? Perhaps it was total paranoia that was maybe connected to the idea that Liza should be the only star of the movie, which led Bob to make his first cut with only dribs and drabs of the Emcee’s numbers. Maybe he thought they distracted from her. There was also the possibility that Bob made the book scenes more important because of his desire to become a nonmusical director (which he brilliantly went on to do with
Lenny
, the Lenny Bruce biopic starring Dustin Hoffman) and
Star Eighty
.

I couldn’t believe that my work in the film had been decimated. I walked out of the screening room without saying a word to Bob, and then I went crazy in a nearby phone booth.

“Marty, I can’t believe what I just saw,” I said over the phone to one of the film’s producers. “There’s not one complete number. Not one number with a beginning, middle, and end. I’m just connective tissue!”

“Relax,” he said. “I know what you’re talking about. I saw it last night. Trust me. The numbers
will
be there—intact.”

Still, a few weeks later, when Jo and I and all the cast, studio heads, producers, and Bob flew up to San Francisco to see a sneak preview of the movie, I
was
worried.

The Northpoint Theatre had already filled with people for this unadvertised preview when we snuck in and hid in the back row. From the minute the film began, it was pure magic. All my fears vanished as the full version of “Willkommen” ended to an ovation—in a movie theater.

It all worked. Liza’s comic timing was unreal, her singing thrilling, and at the end of the film she truly broke your heart. The numbers were phenomenal, but the one that meant the most to me, just as it had on Broadway, was “If You Could See Her,” because it was the most overtly anti-Semitic. Being Jewish, I felt it was vital that we show those anti-Semites for what they were. Well, watching the scene on the big screen, it was more than ugly. It was hideous and just right. The line “She wouldn’t look Jewish…” came down like a nail on a coffin.

The audience in the San Francisco theater went crazy. We knew it was going to be something big, but just how big took all of us by surprise.
Cabaret
was not only an immediate success at the box office after its release, on February 13, 1972, but it also was winning many industry awards, such as a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture–Comedy or Musical. The biggest deal, however, was the film’s ten Academy Award nominations, including one for me as Best Supporting Actor.

March 27, 1973, the day of the 45th Academy Awards, was one of the hottest spring days on record. But truth be told, it could have been snowing and I wouldn’t have noticed. I was freaked out. Even though I had been nominated for an Oscar, I was all but sure I wouldn’t win. My parents, on the other hand, were already working on
their
acceptance speeches for friends, family, and the press. That’s how convinced they were that I’d take home the statue. My dad, now in his early sixties, never wavered from being my biggest fan. At home in LA, they dedicated an entire wall to my achievements with framed photos, newspaper clips, and a full-sized poster of … me, leading Dad to his joke that “the apartment is decorated in early Joel Grey.” My mother, meanwhile, gave an interview to
The Los Angeles Times
, which reported that I didn’t go into show business: “Says his mother, ‘I pushed him.’”

The Katz vote aside, Al Pacino was the clear front-runner for his role as Michael Corleone in
The Godfather
. Even if his performance hadn’t been perfection, which it was, musical movies just didn’t have the respect that serious dramas did. Yes, of course I was thrilled to be nominated. But it’s pretty much a fact that everyone really wants to win.