Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (5 page)

Hurricane Island
, a real confidence booster, was an early, very crucial lesson in performance—not just onstage but also in real life. Learning to do things “as if” was a discovery that turned out to be an invaluable tool as an actor and as a person with secrets. I adopted a confident stride, different from my own, so that no one on the street would finger me as a sissy. That walk became so ingrained that I no longer remembered what my own true way of walking was.

I acted in a wide variety of children’s plays and parts from the title role in
Jack of Tarts,
to the wicked wolf in
Little Red Riding Hood,
to Little Black Sambo in a musicalized version of the classic children’s story in which a “Topsy” wig transformed my blond curls into cornrows tied up with little colored ribbons and makeup turned my white face black (not the Curtain Pullers’ finest moment). Through the much-needed framework of the Play House, I began to gain an identity—and a reputation.

After the artistic director of the Play House, K. Elmo Lowe, saw me in one of the Curtain Puller rehearsals, he asked Miss Mullin if she thought I could handle a part on the main stage. She said yes, and soon I was auditioning for the part of eight-year-old Pud in the Play House’s production of Paul Osborn’s Broadway smash hit
On Borrowed Time
.

For my audition, Mother dressed me up in high-top boots, a plaid mackinaw jacket, and the Daniel Boone coonskin hat that was all the rage with the under-twelve set. When I arrived for my meeting with Mr. Lowe looking as if I had got lost hunting rabbits, it was all he could do to stifle his laughter. Calling to his wife in the greenroom upstairs, he said, “Miss Paxton, you’ve got to see this.”

Walking behind Mr. Lowe into the room where the actors hung out between rehearsals and performances, I was keenly aware of the photographs of previous Play House productions that covered the walls. Serious young men and dreamy women stared out at me as I readied myself for a chance at a place in one of those pictures on the wall.

“Mrs. Katz, would you mind waiting downstairs,” Mr. Lowe said, breaking me out of my reverie. I looked at my mother, who, having followed Mr. Lowe and me into the greenroom, appeared just as startled as I was.

“Thank you very much,” he added, and Mother left the room.

It wasn’t hard to understand how he had been a matinee idol back in the 1920s (legend had it that in his early years at the Play House, the theater couldn’t hang his picture in the lobby because it kept getting stolen by love-struck women). With his thick crop of pushed-back black hair, natty tweed jacket, and six-foot-four frame, K. Lowe was the epitome of highbrow glamour.

He had joined the Play House in 1921 when Frederic McConnell—his classmate from the Carnegie Institute of Technology Drama School, in Pittsburgh—became its managing director. Together they brought national recognition to the amateur company, and it was now the nation’s oldest resident professional theater. Although Mr. Lowe continued to act as a member of the company, he had also become a renowned director who had influenced the careers of many successful Play House alumni.

I took off my coonskin cap and my jacket and began my audition. The material from
On Borrowed Time
, a dark comedy about Death in the form of a man named Mr. Brink who comes for my character’s parents in the very first scene, was heady stuff for a nine-year-old. By the second scene Mr. Brink has come for Granny. Then it’s Pud’s grandfather’s turn, but Gramps tricks Death by trapping him in a tree so that Mr. Brink can’t take him away from Pud, who has lost everyone. The only problem is that as long as Gramps doesn’t die, no one else in the world can, either.

When I finished with the line “Don’t want my whole life ahead of me. I want to go with you. I love you, Gramps,” Mr. Lowe looked at me like I had just said something he had never heard before. He paused for a beat and then asked gently, “What would you do if your grandfather said, ‘I can’t be with you anymore. I have to go with Mr. Brink’? How would you feel if he would abandon you like that?”

“I would feel very sad and mad, too, mad that he would leave me. You don’t love me anymore.”

“And what would that mean, ‘You don’t love me anymore’?”

“Who is going to keep care of me? I would be sad and angry.”

“That’s right. Let’s do the scene again.”

After I had done it, he said, “That was very good, and you’re a very good actor, Mr. Katz.”

As I tried to do what he asked, I felt something new coming out of me, something he had drawn out of me, that I hadn’t known I’d had. I put old feelings and experiences of my own short life into the scene. I thought about the deepest fear a kid can have—losing your mother. It made me angry and sad and scared all at once. And with that, the part was mine, and I stepped into the magical world of the Play House.

The weeks leading up to opening night of the play changed my life. First of all, I was allowed to go to school late, so that I could spend the mornings rehearsing. How I loved those mornings! Unlike the chaos and noise of school and home, there was such dignity and structure to the theater. At the Play House there were clear rules for behavior, and I was enthralled by the exceptional actors’ manners. In accordance with British tradition, all the actors were referred to by their last names and the appropriate titles before them. That included me. “Mr. Katz, come to the stage, please.”

The formality signaled to me that this was a serious art, of which I had the privilege to take part. No one in his wildest dreams would randomly change the playwright’s words. There were no excuses for not having learned one’s lines. Pride in craft was simply too high for that kind of amateur-hour stuff.

Although I was only nine years old and the Play House was the premier regional repertory theater, drawing tremendous talent from all over the country, I was treated as an equal. In the dressing room, veterans such as Johnny Rowe, who played Gramps, taught me the art of putting on makeup. I sat in front of the mirrors and bright lights, breathing in the spirit gum as the highly regarded actor turned into a painter, applying shading and lines to his face.

Showing up at the theater on time, learning my lines quickly, and remaining quiet when other actors were working, I was admired for my discipline and my naturalness. Even Esther Mullin, who was also in the production, respected me. (Esther played the villain of the piece, the terrible Aunt Demetria Riffle, who pretended she wanted to take care of Pud but just wanted the money—a real bitch
and
a great part.)

By the time I made my stage debut on opening night of
On Borrowed Time
, I fully understood the necessity of serious preparation, and the need for very hard work to create a successful theatrical production. As a result, I was prepared. I knew my lines and blocking. But I was
not
prepared for the weeping in the first and second rows! The 150-seat Brooks Theatre was filled to capacity. I heard audience members sobbing and blowing their noses during the last scene of the play—as Pud, having fallen from the tree and broken his back, lies helpless and in pain in Gramps’s arms. “Take him, Mr. Brink. Take him now. Take us both,” Gramps said. I stood up, smiling beatifically after all that pain, because my character had been carried to heaven and reborn—and so was I.

During the curtain call, holding hands with the seven other actors, a family, and having won the affection of the audience because I did a good job, I thought,
I want my life to always be like this.

After the show, people clambered around me to say how my performance moved them. “It was so powerful.” “How did you know how to do that?” “How could a kid so young understand all those deep feelings?”

Praise for my performance extended to the local press. “As for Joel Katz’ playing of ‘Pud,’ I only can say that the boy is phenomenal,” read the review of
On Borrowed Time
in the highly regarded
Cleveland Press
. “He is as completely at home on the stage without being the slightest degree precocious as any child I have ever seen.” My first review was better than I could have ever hoped for! (Who knew that it wouldn’t always be the case?)

But perhaps my biggest fan of all was Mother. She just loved the recognition I was receiving for my work onstage. If she used her husband’s success as a musician to boost her self-esteem and standing in the community, imagine what it would mean if her son became a star. I was her flesh and blood, so if I were admired, it was in large part thanks to her. The dream that had burned too brightly in her youthful imagination had been magically rekindled. I was to be famous in her place.

My mother’s pride in me had real perks. I relished her attention during the run of
On Borrowed Time
, particularly our late-night suppers at Wong’s after the show. I felt so grown-up rolling into the Chinese restaurant at ten o’clock with my mother as if we were on a date. She ordered all my favorites: shrimp chow mein, sweet and sour pork, egg foo young. The food, even those disgusting cardboard fortune cookies, was a prize for giving a good performance.

I was in
On Borrowed Time
for months, then another play immediately afterward. I continued to get part after part, never wearying of the performance or rehearsal schedule. I didn’t perform with the Curtain Pullers any longer, but I didn’t miss it. Nowhere was I more content than at the Play House. I found every nook and cranny of the theater fascinating. While I was in a production of
Family Portrait
, being performed in the Drury Theatre,
Invitation to Murder
was being performed in the other small theater, the Brooks (where
On Borrowed Time
had been). When I wasn’t onstage, I would go underneath the theater and wait below the other stage for the actress to lift the arm of her chair, causing a trapdoor to open. Night after night, she would drop straight down a hole in the stage, and I would be waiting below. It never got old.

One night, my father and mother each thought the other one was picking me up after a performance—so no one came to get me. Locked in the theater alone, I wasn’t the least bit frightened. It was a dream come true! Onstage, illuminated only by a single ghost light, I recited to an imaginary, yet deeply enthralled audience the Queen Mab monologue from
Romeo and Juliet
, which Mr. Lowe had encouraged me to learn.

O then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.

She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate stone

I wandered up and down the steps of the four-story building, in heaven, trying on all sorts of costumes in the wardrobe department and practicing my entrance onto the stage. I would have been totally thrilled to sleep there, but, alas, my father finally arrived to retrieve me. Almost in tears, he had absolutely no idea how happy I’d been.

There was a lot that my parents didn’t understand about the Play House. The Epsteins and the Katzes frequented Cleveland’s thriving Yiddish theater. They often went to the Duchess and Globe theaters, owned by a furrier who produced Yiddish plays during the warmer months, when fur sales were slow. Many famous Jewish performers appeared there, such as Molly Picon and a young Paul Muni (born Frederich Meier Weisenfreund). But the legitimate theater was not the world of my family—certainly not my grandparents, who lived an almost entirely Jewish existence.

My grandfather Max, a passionate opera-lover, always listened to the broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera on the radio, even while he helped me prepare for my bar mitzvah. Sitting next to him in his tailor shop at 74th Street and Cedar in the middle of winter—the windows fogged up from the steam-presser, an egg salad sandwich my mother had made for us to share resting on the display case—I was practicing my maftir when he stopped me. I hadn’t made a mistake in the recitation of my Torah portion. Rather, a recording of the late Enrico Caruso, one of my grandfather’s favorite singers, was playing on the radio.

“You know,” Grandpa Max said to me with his customary seriousness, “Caruzeh vas a Jew.”

In Mendel the Tailor’s worldview, everybody worthy of respect was Jewish—even the great Italian tenor. And who was going to deny it?

I, however, knew the difference between Gentiles and Jews—and there were definitely no Jews at the Play House. Except for one: Benny Letter, the head of construction and a fan of my father’s, kept an eye out for me, occasionally inviting me to share coffee cake during his break.

“How do you like it?” Benny asked about the Play House.

“I love everything about it.”

“That’s good … And I’m here, too.”

It was a reminder that Benny and I were indeed a little different from everyone else in the company. But I wasn’t afraid of that difference. The fact that I was appreciated, even admired, at the Play House relieved some of my Jewish wariness of the Gentiles. How could I be afraid in such an inviting and pleasant place?

Mr. Lowe and his wife, Dorothy, were certainly as different from Grace and Mickey Katz as one could imagine, and in my mind for the better. I loved visiting the tall, handsome, and urbane Mr. Lowe and the fine actress and Southern beauty Miss Paxton in their special dressing room for two. The storied duo were the Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne of Cleveland, often appearing together onstage, sometimes even as husband and wife.

They shared a professional life as well as a personal one, but that was not what distinguished them most from my parents. Mr. Lowe and Miss Paxton were educated, having both graduated from Carnegie’s drama department, where they met. They were polite and soft-spoken, not just with others but also—astonishingly—with each other. I didn’t know that kind of respect and gentleness existed between married people.

Because I came from a house where expressions of love were coupled with hostility, discovering a man and woman who respected each other in love and work, who were careful with each other, was a revelation. The relationship between Mr. Lowe and Miss Paxton couldn’t have been
that
perfect, but to me, it was.