“Shame on you! How could you bring that up? You wanna see a grown man cry?” Joel Grey is berating me on Zoom. All I wanted to know was how he got the nickname Mr Porno when filming his role as the Emcee, the smirking ringleader he created on Broadway in Kander and Ebb’s Weimar musical Cabaret. Mercifully, he is teasing me.
It’s not for the first time in our chat. There is a glint in his eye when he impersonates a ventriloquist’s dummy, breaks into a snippet of Sixteen Going on Seventeen from The Sound of Music (he once auditioned to play Rolf) and punctuates answers with a high-pitched exhalation that sounds like air escaping from a balloon. When he asks if I want to go to the Oscars I half-believe he’ll take me. His party piece turns out to be an impression of Diana Ross, who handed him his statuette for best supporting actor for Cabaret at the Academy Awards in 1973. “Listen to this,” he says, coming closer to the screen. “And the Oscar goes to,” he half-whispers in a breathy, suspenseful sigh. “Joel … Grey!”
Grey is 88 going on 18. In a pale pink shirt and clear frame glasses, he pops up not with the Emcee’s willkommen or bienvenue but a perky “Hiya! How are ya?” He is in the office of his New York loft apartment, overlooking Hudson River park. The Oscar can be glimpsed in profile on the windowsill, alongside a Tony award for Cabaret. I’ve already taken a virtual tour of his loft – where his own photographs hang among artworks by Robert Rauschenberg and Duane Michals – as it was featured in an interior design video online. I compliment him on his airy bathroom where a giant photograph of Machu Picchu hangs next to a monolithic tub. “Well we’re not going in there today,” he replies briskly. “I don’t think it’s a good place for an interview.”
He has spent the morning making french toast and compiling a personal scrapbook of old pictures. It may be the next in his series of photography books, which have included a volume of vibrant closeup portraits of flowers. One of his lockdown hobbies is buying blooms at a nearby shop, then spending hours “pulling them apart and looking deep inside”. He disappears to fetch a large print of purple petals and holds it up. “It’s a face,” he says from behind the photograph. “A scary, beautiful thing.” It’s true: the flower resembles a glowing skull, somehow both richly flamboyant and ethereal. The picture remains held up, filling the screen. There is a silence. Do I talk to the flower? “Go ahead,” Grey chuckles from behind it.
With Broadway’s theatres closed by the pandemic, what has Grey been doing for entertainment? “I’ve been looking at TikTok,” he says. “What the fuck is that? Everybody is doing it. My grandchild is doing it. And I don’t know what it is!” Has he been going out much? “Less and less. I live across the street from the river and there’s a beautiful park. When we go there, it’s jammed with people – with masks mostly, but I get nervous.”
There’s a lot to fit into Grey’s scrapbook. He has been acting for almost 80 years. His professional debut, aged nine, was in his home town of Cleveland in On Borrowed Time, a macabre comedy about death. The experience “grabbed my throat and held me to the fire”, he remembers. “I knew I was an actor.” It resonated so strongly that he staged a revival of On Borrowed Time a few years ago and, this year, directed a Zoom reading of it. He has returned to Cabaret, too, reprising the Emcee on stage in the 80s. It will always be his most famous role, but there have been many others on Broadway: as the showman George M Cohan (in George M!, the closure of which was blamed on Richard Nixon visiting backstage); the Wizard of Oz in the hit Wicked; luckless “Mr Cellophane” Amos Hart in Chicago, also from Kander and Ebb; and most recently, wistful servant Firs in The Cherry Orchard in 2016.
A year earlier, Grey made headlines when he came out in People magazine at the age of 82. “I don’t like labels,” he told his interviewer, “but if you have to put a label on it, I’m a gay man.” It had taken time, he said, to “embrace that other part of who I always was”. In his 2016 memoir, Master of Ceremonies, he wrote about how, since his youth, he had felt forced to hide his sexuality. Grey detailed early relationships, including with a bellboy at the residential hotel where his family lived in an apartment, and described a permanent hyper-alertness about being “small, sissy, Jewish”. It is frequently a painful read: his mother is disgusted when he comes out to her as a teenager by telling her about a threesome he had with a cantor from their temple. When he tells his wife, Jo Wilder, about his past gay experiences it deepens a void between them that ends their 24-year marriage in the early 80s. Their children are the actor Jennifer Grey (Dirty Dancing) and James, a chef. Grey describes how important it was for them both to see him play a gay man on stage, in Larry Kramer’s landmark Aids drama The Normal Heart, to better understand their father.
One of Grey’s first film roles (as a smirking law student in Come September in 1961) was opposite Rock Hudson, who was leading his own double life as a gay man in Hollywood. Grey remembers him as “a really nice, funny guy”. When Hudson died of complications from Aids in 1985, it increased awareness of an epidemic that for many was “too horrible to accept or think through”, Grey says. Denial and misinformation were rife. One scene in The Normal Heart required him to kiss another man. “A friend of mine said, you ought to find out from a doctor whether or not you are putting yourself at risk,” remembers Grey. “I called this doctor who was taking care of Rock Hudson. He said: ‘Do you have to kiss the actor?’ I said: ‘Yeah, it’s important in the script.’ He said: ‘Then I wouldn’t do the play.’” Grey wrestled with it and chose the play and the kiss. “I said: ‘I need to tell this story. As an actor it’s my job.’ And it’s what I live for.” He remembers Kramer, who died this year, as a “tough audience”, but “very supportive of my work”.
It is theatre, rather than film or TV, that has been Grey’s passion since his childhood debut. Back then he was Joel Katz. His grandparents were eastern European Jews who settled in Cleveland. Joel was the first of two sons born to Mickey, a musician and comedian who found fame with his Jewish revue the Borscht Capades, and Grace, who named him after her favourite actor, Joel McCrea, and hungered for him to become famous.
A pair of contrasting scenes in Grey’s memoir find him alone as a boy. In one, his mother takes him to New York for an audition that never materialises, and leaves him scared in their hotel room when she goes out with a man. In the other, he is accidentally abandoned in the theatre after hours but is unafraid and revels in its backstage magic. “I didn’t want anybody to come and get me,” he tells me.
At nine, Grey craved a serious theatre career. “That’s all I cared about.” But after appearing in his dad’s revue, he became a nightclub performer and was spotted by the entertainer Eddie Cantor who gave him a spot on his TV show in 1951 when Grey was 18. His whirlwind routine is on YouTube: wide-eyed and elfin-featured, Grey cracks jokes, barks like a seal, does the charleston and dances like a dream. It’s a five-minute delight but the result, he says, was that “I couldn’t get any parts in plays. They’d say: ‘Oh no, he’s a TV guy’ or ‘He’s a nightclub guy.’ It kind of got in the way of my legitimacy.” His nightclub years included playing the London Palladium on a bill with Johnnie Ray, whose more fervent admirers threw Ray their underwear. “Sometimes they forgot to clear the stage,” recalls Grey, who then had to dance a path between the knickers.
He was considering giving up acting when Cabaret came along. Where would he have gone? “An art gallery,” he replies. “Or a hotdog stand.” The impish Emcee was the first theatre role he was offered without an audition. The songs may have been great but when he first read the script, he was alarmed that he had no dialogue and no direct involvement with the plot. The role was essentially a metaphor for seduction and corruption. “I was worried that it was one-dimensional, that he was a nightclub performer doing numbers.” That was precisely what Grey had been trying to escape. “I had to find out the psychology [of the Emcee] and who he was off stage so that hopefully I could bring that biography into those numbers.”
Six-year-old Jennifer would accompany him to the theatre, watching from the wings and even getting made up as one of the Kit Kat Girls in the seedy club. Elements of the Emcee’s look, notably the neatly combed hair and the bow tie, mirrored how Grey’s mother had dressed him as a child. Some of the makeup he used was his wife’s. His co-star Lotte Lenya – celebrated chanteuse, ex-wife of Kurt Weill, and James Bond’s nemesis Rosa Klebb – helped him with the German accent. Jill Haworth was Sally Bowles, the club dancer who longs for a gig at a respectable film studio – surely a feeling Grey could relate to.
What made Cabaret so groundbreaking? “First of all, it was about a heinous and terrifying subject: the Holocaust. There were a lot of people who just wanted to forget about it. They tried to write it out of textbooks.” The musical’s unflinching account of antisemitism and persecution remains horribly current, much like Fiddler on the Roof, which Grey recently directed in a Yiddish version at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. In the years immediately after the second world war, Mickey Katz had had hits with Yiddish parodies of popular songs (Haim Afen Range, for example, after Home on the Range). His father was, Grey wrote proudly in his memoir, “inserting Jews into pop culture, so that we belonged, too”.
Grey says he and the producer-director, Hal Prince, were in “lockstep” creating Cabaret together on Broadway. But when Bob Fosse came to direct the film version he did not want to inherit Grey’s Emcee. “There was a total standoff.” It was Fosse who called him Mr Porno, but Grey insists: “He was the original Mr Porno! He was in burlesque backstage when he was a teenager. He saw all that bizarreness as a kid and was attracted to it.” Grey came to believe that Fosse’s animosity towards him was because he wanted to play the Emcee himself. “He was an excellent performer,” says Grey. “He could have done it.”
At the Oscars, Grey beat three actors from The Godfather – James Caan, Robert Duvall and Al Pacino – and The Heartbreak Kid’s Eddie Albert. I imagine the Godfather mob glowering at him. “I don’t think they’ve forgiven me!” he laughs.
Cabaret matched its Tony awards tally of eight wins – including best director for Fosse and best actress for Liza Minnelli. When Grey’s name was read out at the Oscars ceremony, there was Minnelli behind him, dressed in canary yellow, rocking wildly with delight. She was a great choice to play Bowles, he thinks, and her own irresistible sense of fun came with a vulnerability, too. Minnelli would fall asleep on his shoulder on the early morning taxi drives from the hotel to the set. The pair went on to launch a nightclub act in Vegas that they toured around the US. One night, she introduced him on stage before he was ready but he strolled on trouser-less regardless. They performed separately and together, with a set list including Cabaret songs.
Decades later, people are still quoting the Emcee to him. Is it an albatross in any way? He shakes his head. “Just great.” He advances to the screen. “Let me come closer to you: just … great!”
It’s not the only boundary-breaking musical he has worked on. Grey has a small but joyous scene in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, tap-dancing in a courtroom with Björk. That looked like fun, I suggest. “Wrong,” he barks back. “Hard! The two of them [Björk and Von Trier] were not connecting. [We] were in the midst of doing something very unique, and the star and the director weren’t talking.”
We’ve rambled way beyond our allotted time and Grey has his scrapbook and his art to attend to. But he starts another story about visiting Cleveland’s art museum as a kid, finding rooms to hide in. “I’d be in the Egyptian place getting into one of those sarcophaguses. I had this idea that I could hide in one of them.” His high-pitch exhale comes back, this time turning into a full “Yahoo!” I wonder what he would say to nine-year-old Joel Katz, messing around in museums and embarking on his first stage role back in Cleveland. He replies: “Stick with it, be who you are. It’s going to be tough.” There’s a beat. “But it’s also going to be beautiful.”
