Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (13 page)

Never had I imagined when I agreed to meet my first cousin once removed on Fanny’s side that he would put me in that exact position. Cousin Louis’s plan was to see the show and then afterward go out and have a drink. He told me to meet him at a pub on Jermyn Street, and as soon as I walked into the traditional pub with its wood-paneled wainscoting and leather seating, I spotted my cousin. I could see a family resemblance in the dark, pleasant-looking man dressed like a typical English businessman in a suit, tie, and shined shoes.

But there was something else about my cousin. There is a look among gay men, whether they are interested in one another or not. When I met Louis, I got it. I ordered a drink and, looking around, realized there were only men in the bar. It could have been a gentleman’s club, but I knew better. The undercurrent of possibility was too strong. I wondered why my cousin had brought me here. I had never been to a place like this, not that I wasn’t curious. Maybe he was testing me, because if I weren’t homosexual I wouldn’t get it. Either way, I felt instantly unsafe. If I were recognized in this place, and the press found out—even though it was all very innocent on my part (I was meeting a relative!)—that would have been it. I got through my one drink and then made an excuse about needing to call it a night in order to rest my voice.

If there was any part of me that wanted to stay in that bar, to see what goes on in a place like that, I didn’t know it. I was filled with fear about all the bad things that could happen (and there were so many of them), and any possibility for desire was driven out. Riding in a black cab back to the hotel, I did, however, think about the lesson of Johnnie Ray: If you were going to be different, you had better be successful. Ever since I went on the road with
Borscht Capades,
I had this notion that achieving some level of fame could protect me from the kind of rejection I had experienced from my own mother after she discovered that I had had an affair with another man. I needed to succeed, and the best way for me to do that was on the stage.

The Palladium was a giant step in the right direction. After England, I reached a whole new level of prestige, and that meant booking lucrative engagements in Las Vegas. One of my first jobs was not in the new and flashy hotels such as the Flamingo, the Desert Inn, and the Sahara, but in the elegant El Rancho, which attracted a much more sophisticated crowd. The first casino resort built on the Strip, El Rancho was done in the style of a dude ranch but with Frette linens.

It was filled with West Coast society and celebrity types, such as those that went to the exclusive Racquet Club in Palm Springs. In Vegas, they came to gamble as well as be entertained and fed. El Rancho boasted the Chuck Wagon, the original all-you-can-eat buffet. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing in a hotel or nightclub. I ate there many nights, because if you were a performer, you were comped. El Rancho’s headliners—such as Betty Grable, Chico Marx, Dorothy Dandridge, and Joe E. Lewis—played for the crowd in the Opera House where patrons dined on prime rib roasted in rock salt. My first time there I opened for Betty Garrett and Larry Parks. He was fresh off a success playing Al Jolson in
The Jolson Story
, which was a giant hit. Garrett was a well-known Broadway performer and married to Parks.

The owner of the hotel, Beldon Katleman, was very gruff but also very fond of me. Pleased with my work, he took me out for coffee and showed me around the hotel—and sent two women to my room. Gambling and girls go together. The high-end call girls at El Rancho blended perfectly with the guests. The two dark-haired beauties in elegant clothing that arrived at my hotel room door were no exception. When I saw them after opening the door, I naturally assumed they had to be some mistake.

“I’m sorry; I think you have the wrong room.”

“You’re Joel Grey, right?” the woman in the form-fitting jersey dress said.

“Yes.”

“Mr. Katleman sent us.”

“We’re your birthday present,” added the other woman with heavily applied black cat-eye makeup.

“It’s not my birthday,” I said like a dope.

They laughed and walked right in.

Sex was part of every aspect of Vegas, especially its entertainment. When I was booked the second time around at El Rancho, I was to open for Lili St. Cyr, the sexy and famous stripper. She was striking with her platinum-blonde hair, strong cheekbones, full lips, and arched black brows over heavy-lidded eyes. Of course, few people were looking at her face. Ms. St. Cyr’s performance consisted of her removing her clothes in such unusual ways that she named a few of her acts “The Wolf Woman” and “The Chinese Virgin.”

For her El Rancho engagement, she took a bath onstage. She came out with a beautiful robe, and someone helped her into an elegant tub, which sat atop a pedestal. To introduce her, I asked Ray Gilbert to write something special. So when I finished my act, I came back onstage, all sweaty, after my bow. The lights dimmed and I introduced Lili St. Cyr with this poem (said with a very straight face):

I wish I was the stopper

That’s inside Lili’s tub

When she gets in to take a bath

Glub, glub, glub
 …
glub
 …
glub!

Late at night, when the second shows at each resort and casino were over, a lot of the acts, hyped up and not ready for bed, would gather. Besides hanging out (most of us were ravenous since we hadn’t eaten before our shows) at the Chuck Wagon or other restaurants, we would also check out other lounge acts such as the Treniers, Louis Prima and Keely Smith, who regularly held forth until five o’clock in the morning. That’s when the acts would cool down before walking outside to the sun coming up in 100-degree weather. Sometimes we would head back to the Chuck Wagon for breakfast (before sleeping until three in the afternoon).

In the moody and loose atmosphere of the lounges along the Strip, performers connected. That’s how Harry Belafonte became a good friend. We had both been bitten by the theater bug early in life. Like my experience with the Cleveland Play House, all it took was one show at the American Negro Theater to set him on his life’s path. He had been working as a janitor’s assistant in the forties when a tenant gave him a ticket to the legendary Harlem theater. His musical career singing in nightclubs was just a way for him to make money for acting classes. Serious about the craft, he participated in the New School’s Dramatic Workshop program where Marlon Brando, Bea Arthur, Tony Curtis, and Harry’s friend Sidney Poitier were also students. But his recording success happened first and got in the way of his acting, a dilemma I, too, knew something about.

There was a significant difference between Harry and me. Las Vegas during that time was virulently racist, and Jim Crow laws were strictly enforced at the new clubs and restaurants along the strip. Even the top black entertainers of the day, such as Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald, had to enter venues through stage or kitchen doors and stay in boardinghouses in the poor black area called Westside. When Sammy Davis Jr. went swimming at the New Frontier, the manager drained the “whites only” pool afterward.

It was hard to find restaurants where Harry and I could eat together. But when we did, we had great times talking about theater, music, girls. A few years later, we shared a bill at Bill Miller’s Riviera in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Harry had already released his album
Calypso
, which sold more than a million copies. I could barely get on after he sang “Day-O.” It was a sexy, thrilling performance, and it took about ten minutes for the audience to get him and that song out of their heads. After that engagement, I ordered a gold medallion engraved with
TO HARRY, MAZEL
!
LOVE, JOEL
as a closing gift to mark a successful engagement. But when it arrived, it read
TO HARRY MAZEL. LOVE, JOEL.
He’s worn it ever since.

Perhaps the most unusual friendship I made from my time in Las Vegas, however, was with another legendary stripper, Sherry Britton. Like Lili St. Cyr, Ms. Britton put her own twist on the art of taking her clothes off. One of her signature features (other than her hourglass figure) was her long, jet-black hair. When she wore it in front, it draped over her breasts; when she pushed it back, it covered her behind.

I met Sherry in Vegas during an engagement at the Desert Inn, and we hit it off instantly during one of those after-hours hang-outs. Sherry was truly stunning, funny, and smart—and Jewish! Like Gypsy Rose Lee, Sherry wasn’t just a bimbo who took her clothes off for money. The one-liners (“I strip, but I don’t tease”) rolled off her tongue effortlessly; this was a stripper who read the classics during her off hours. She brought intelligence and class to her act, removing elegant evening gowns of chiffon to the equally delicate music of Tchaikovsky.

Sherry was quite the sensation in Las Vegas with a long list of suitors that included many high rollers and members of the mob. After watching my show, she was effusive as well as affectionate. Of course, I laid on the charm as thickly as I could. I was impressed with her. She was tiny—even shorter than I—but onstage, she looked like an Amazon. Sherry was a goddess out there. I also liked how sought-after she was. When it came to flirting, she set the rules. But I could make her laugh, and she went for that. I felt something happening between us, and before anyone even had a chance to think about it, we were a couple.

There was real chemistry between us. You would have to be dead not to be turned on by Sherry. Her body was legendary, even among the jaded audiences of Las Vegas, who had seen an untold number of women take it almost all off. Any doubts I had about myself vanished when we were together. The sex was very exciting and powerful, and it felt right. It began with the fact that we really liked each other and had a lot to talk about. She was extremely literate and loved the theater. Given her profession, her erudition was delightfully surprising, and the fact that she was a Jewish stripper always made me chuckle. There was probably something to the fact that it doesn’t get more hetero than dating a stripper, and not just any stripper, a world-famous stripper. But at the time, my connection with Sherry didn’t feel as if I was trying to prove to myself that I was straight. It just felt right!

Of course, it didn’t hurt that with Sherry on my arm, my reputation instantly soared. I became known as some kind of a stud and was the envy of every man on her long list of her admirers. I knew they were all wondering,
What’s he got?
It was a fair question. Fourteen years older than I, she enjoyed a younger lover on his way to the big time (at least according to the local gossip columns). As a couple out in public—she the sophisticated older woman and I the energetic up-and-comer—we got a lot of attention. (At one point a gossip columnist in LA printed an item that we were on our way to the altar. In Vegas, that can happen in a second, and I got a panicked call from my dad, and I could hear Mother next to him.)

When my Vegas engagement ended, I flew back to New York, and Sherry joined me a couple of weeks later. We were going out to the theater, clubs, etc., and usually ending up at my place, on 57th Street at First Avenue. Not too long after, though, I found out that she had been in a longtime relationship with a much older man in New York and was still seeing him. I don’t know which of us was the guy on the side, but without any strain Sherry and I both took up with our previous lives. (I could hear the sigh of relief from Mickey and Grace all the way from LA.) There were never hard feelings between Sherry and me, and we stayed friends for years.

New York might not have had the high-thread-count sheets of Vegas suites, but it did have the theater. I went to every Broadway show, where I saw many legendary performances, such as Lee J. Cobb in
Death of a Salesman
, Mary Martin in
South Pacific
, and Yul Brynner in
The King and I
. Each of them inspired and depressed me at the same time. Those shows were thrilling, the acting magnificent, but though I wanted it desperately, I didn’t have a place in that world, and whatever success or name I had made thus far did not make the crossover in any way easier.

But I kept trying. I read
Variety
and
Backstage
from cover to cover; hung out at the Gray drugstore in the Theater District hoping I might hear about a promising audition; and bugged the William Morris agents in the theater department. I did everything I could think of, but legitimate theater producers and directors thought of me only as a nightclub comic. They feared that people like me from the “variety” world would sully the high-minded idea of the theater as a place of art.

Ironically, it was my father who called me in the summer of 1951 to offer me my first part on Broadway. Although
Borscht Capades
wasn’t as popular as it once was, it continued to play around the country and in Los Angeles. Its core audience was always going to be there for it, which was the rationale for my father’s latest plan. He was taking
Borscht Capades
to the Great White Way—and he wanted me to be the show’s Juvenile Star. My heart sank. I needed to break out of the stereotype of a song-and-dance man, not advertise it in the heart of the Theater District.

“Dad, this is big,” I said. “Believe me, I know this is a big thing, for you. And I have a really good feeling in my bones about it. But it’s not the right thing for
me
.”

“I understand…”

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“No, no, no. I can see where you’re coming from.”

“I hate to disappoint you.”

“No, sweetheart. I had to ask. But I’m sure you’re right.”

As horrible as it was to say no to my own father, he did understand. Even though he was thrilled with my nightclub career, he had long sensed my unhappiness with it. Not every gig was El Rancho. Not long before Dad asked me to join him in
Borscht Capades
on Broadway, I played the Town Casino, a massive club in Buffalo with all the charm of a warehouse. It was the dead of winter and nobody was going out, which explained why there were maybe ten audience members in a place that held 350. After I finished my opening number, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” a guy ringside who was feeling up his girlfriend turned around and yelled at me, “Get off the stage. Nobody wants to see you, anyway.” Respect and attention were rare in nightclubs, no matter who was onstage; it was just not that kind of an atmosphere. People came to show off and be outrageous, not listen. I finished the show, which I had been paid to do. But when my father met me at the airport in LA (accompanied by my mother and Grandma Fanny, who had brought along a thermos of her barley soup, because she was sure nobody else had fed me), I was sure I couldn’t go on doing the clubs.