Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (10 page)

BOOK: Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir
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Sitting in the audience of the Wilshire Ebell and watching all the people around me cheer and laugh during
Borscht Capades
made me want to be onstage again. It would be great to join my dad’s show, but I had never sung or danced onstage before, and I didn’t know if I could do it.

I turned to my godmother, Aunt Jeannie, for help in finding a suitable number that might work for the revue. Whatever I did had to appeal to the Yiddishkeit-loving audience of
Borscht Capades
but also capitalize on my seventeen-year-old energy. Jeannie had just the thing. In her living room, she took out “Rumania, Rumania,” a very popular song sung by Aaron Lebedoff, the Yiddish theater’s answer to Danny Kaye, and placed the needle on the record:

Ay! Rumania, Rumania, Rumania …

Geven amol a land a zise, a sheyne.

Ay! Rumania, Rumania, Rumania …

Geven amol a land a zisseh, a fineh.

The fast-patter song exploded with a million Yiddish words. With dizzying speed, Lebedoff sang of a Romania from before the war, “a land, sweet and lovely” where “what your heart desires you can get; a mamalige, a pastrami, a karnatzl, and a glass of wine, aha!”

I had never spoken a word of Yiddish, so Aunt Jeannie translated the lyrics, which I wrote down in longhand. I also wrote down the phonetic sounds of the Yiddish words, which my aunt helped me decipher, and memorized them. It was very difficult and very fast. The song was a real Yiddish tongue twister, but I sensed it would make a great, great piece of material.

In quick succession, Dad figured out an orchestration for the number, I rehearsed it with the band, and that very same night, I was on. My one request was that he not say I was his son when he introduced me; I didn’t want the audience to think I got the job because I was the boss’s kid. So instead, my father announced, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Joel Kaye!”

I came out, and the audience smiled at me as they would for any other nice Jewish boy. What happened next was a blur. I improvised all my dance moves while trying to remember the torrent of foreign words. I pulled from Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, and Mickey Rooney. I crossed my eyes and puffed out my cheeks. No body part was left unused. I jumped; I growled. You couldn’t exactly call it singing, but whatever it was, the audience loved it.

Clapping and singing along with the lyrics, they knew the song well. Its nostalgia for the vanished pleasures of the Old Country resonated with them. To have these Yiddish words usher from the mouth of a young person was the ultimate symbol of hope. Perhaps all that they once were was not lost. It was a showstopper.

When I was done, my heart pounding in my chest and sweat dripping down my forehead, the reaction from the crowd sounded like a helicopter’s landing. They shouted and shrieked, “More! More!” What I got from the audience was a rush, like a drug. This was not
On Borrowed Time
.

With my one song over, my father took the stage and came over to me. Borrowing from the famous curtain speech coined by George M. Cohan—the legendary Broadway performer and founder of American musical comedy—Dad said, “Joel’s mother thanks you. His brother thanks you. His Aunt Jean thanks you. And I’m his father. And I thank you, too.” The audience went crazy.

From that moment on I was a bona fide member of
Borscht Capades
. Dad always introduced me the same way, respecting my initial wish to be identified as his son only after I finished my act. He did make one small modification. “Now, ladies and gentleman,” he would say, “please welcome the Juvenile Star of
Borscht Capades
!” (To this day, my brother still kids me about it whenever he calls, asking, “Is the Juvenile Star of
Borscht Capades
home?)

I was an instant hit, but I needed another number. Dad, the writer, came to the rescue with “Yossel Yossel,” a parody based on the Andrews Sisters’ hit “Joseph! Joseph!”

When I was eight days old, they named me Yossel

Oh, what a simcha; such a celebration!

All my mishpuchah drank a toast l’chaim

while I was suffering a minor operation.

And later on, I went to kindergarten.

I said, “Teacher, Yossel is my name.”

She said, “The name of Yossel, it sounds like a schlomossel.”

From Yossel, my name became Joel Kaye.

“Yossel Yossel,” “Rumania,” and one more song Dad wrote for me about how much I loved the Jewish holidays became my act, fifteen sock-’em minutes of pure kvelling from the audience. I was everyone’s darling—including Mother’s.

“He’s never sung or danced before. Can you imagine?” she’d say. “Oh, no, he doesn’t speak a word of Yiddish. I don’t know where he gets it from.”

This was from the woman who had been so disgusted by and angry with me after she found out about my affair with the cantor that she wanted to send me to military school (an ironic choice, considering my crime). Now that I was getting a little bit of my own fame, all seemed to be forgiven. At least on her part. She could praise me to others as much as she wanted. No matter how much she tried to show affection toward me directly, I always kept a stiff arm. Mother was able to move on because, according to her, what had happened between Paul and me was relegated to the past. Right after the incident, instead of military school, she and my father had decided to send me to therapy.

It wasn’t my first time in treatment. I had gone to see a psychologist at thirteen, not long after moving to LA, because I was having trouble with a bully and didn’t want to go to school. Gertrude, the therapist, was civilized, intelligent, and compassionate, and I enjoyed talking to her in the little room in the garden in back of her house. I was able to discuss my feelings in a calm way I couldn’t at home.

Freud believed that all human beings started out bisexual, eventually turning homosexual or heterosexual depending on their early family dynamic. Beginning in the 1940s, however, psychoanalytic theory for the most part considered homosexuality a pathology. Horrific treatments, including electroshock therapy, chemical castration, hormone injections, and even lobotomies, were widely used in an attempt to cure homosexuals of their mental illness.

I was incredibly lucky with Gertrude (as well as with the other few psychologists I would have in my lifelong relationship with therapy). When I talked frankly about the same-sex desires I was wrestling with, she didn’t panic. I wasn’t a bad person for the thoughts I had or even the things I had done. On the contrary, she told me I was smart, capable, sensible, and funny. My struggles were never black and white. Still, Gertrude framed my interest in men as developmental, something I would eventually get over with work and understanding. That’s what I wanted, too.

I never discussed the sessions with my mom and dad. The girls I took out on dates after Paul had been run out of town were proof enough for my parents that I was “cured.” My homosexual experiences could be chalked up to adolescent experimentation—at least as far as Mother was concerned, so why would I let her know otherwise. In fact, I didn’t let her know anything.

Something fundamental had been broken between my mother and me. I saw her clearly for who she was, a painful experience but one out of which some good did come. From my earliest memories, my mother had led me to believe that my father was weak so that she could have me all to herself. (“Look at you. You’re just like me; you’re your mother’s son.”) After she shunned me, any distance that might have existed between my father and me closed. Although I always loved him, I realized he was in fact a man of substance, someone I could rely upon no matter what.

So when my father decided to go on the road with
Borscht Capades
, there was no question that I wanted to go with him. The tour went to every city that had a decent-sized Jewish community. As we traveled to Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Boston, Phoenix, Toronto, Montreal, and elsewhere, I learned on the road that there were Jewish communities in places where I had never imagined they existed—I became fascinated with the American Indian Baskets, beaded vests, and silver buckles I found in trading posts … often owned by Jews.

I loved traveling, experiencing the best a city or town had to offer in museums, restaurants, and shops—not to mention the hotels, where they changed the linens every day. But the road was also lonely. While on tour with
Borscht Capades
, I missed my graduation, prom, and being with friends my own age.

Not only was everyone who came out to see
Borscht Capades
old—at least in my book (at that point, thirty-five seemed ancient). But everyone in the show was, too. I spent a lot of time with Rickie Layne, who at twenty-five was closest to my age, but I wasn’t looking for someone to pal around with. I wanted to get laid, and even trickier, I wanted it to be with other young guys. Traveling with my father didn’t make the chance of that happening at all possible.

But when
Borscht Capades
rolled into Miami Beach in January of 1950, sexuality hung in the balmy ocean air. The Art Deco District, or South Beach, as it came to be known throughout the world, was
the
happening place at that moment. Particularly if you were Jewish. On the stretch of beach just over the causeway from Miami, the ghetto of elderly Jews sitting in folding chairs playing mah-jongg or the balalaika had given way to a boom of enormous hotels springing up along Collins Avenue as fast as weeds. These lavish resorts, fueled by a postwar country flush with cash, gave their clientele the latest in modern comforts. The Bombay Hotel was the first in Miami Beach to offer its guests a parking garage. Later, the Fontainebleau (designed by the Russian Jewish architect Morris Lapidus, who did many of the hotels on what became known as Millionaire’s Row) boasted the Staircase to Nowhere, a two-story staircase that led only to a coat check so that women, who had come up the elevators to deposit their coats, could make a grand descent into the lobby.

I loved it on the beach: the smell of Coppertone; couples decked out to stroll under the palm trees that lined the stretch of white sand; uniformed boys dashing in between with umbrellas with cocktails, soft drinks, and sandwiches for hotel guests. Men wearing guayaberas and smoking Cuban cigars played high-stakes poker games from private cabanas. Meanwhile, their wives, in full makeup, big hair, and even bigger diamonds, took cha-cha lessons by the hotel pool.

Over-the-top was part and parcel of Miami Beach, and
Borscht Capades
took it by storm. The show received unanimously rave reviews from all of Miami’s newspapers. The Roosevelt Theatre—a thousand-seat movie house for which Hal Zeiger spent $4,000 to build a stage—was sold out every night. As my father described it in his memoir,
Papa Play for Me
, “The lines at the box office every day looked like a sale at Macy’s.”

Mom and Ronnie, still in high school, joined us in Miami, where Dad had arranged for us to stay at the Delano in South Beach. The three-year-old hotel had private beach cabanas equipped with telephones and hot showers; a sultry saltwater pool, where night swimming parties were not uncommon; and seventeen stories that made it the tallest tower in Miami. Thanks to Dad’s friend and hotel manager Chuckie Goldberg, the Katz family was on top of the Delano for $35 a day.

Despite the family reunion, I was still able to find some fun of my own making. On most nights the show was at 8:30
P.M.
, which meant that I could still make it to the mambo contests after it ended. Most of the hotels held these events, where you could take lessons, compete, or simply soak in the sexy, dark atmosphere while getting drunk.

There were also plenty of gay bars that flourished in Miami’s permissive environment. But I never went to them. I was Mickey Katz’s son, now in his successful show. I couldn’t even consider going to any place as dangerous as a gay bar. First of all, I was terrified of being arrested, which was happening to people all the time. It was 1950, and homosexuality was considered a criminal act. But if the media found me out, it would be almost as bad. I would bring shame upon my family, ruin my father’s run, and end any future for myself. If I hadn’t known it already, the experience of revealing my affair with the cantor to my parents proved that nobody, not even those most likely to love me regardless of my actions, could accept that part of me.

I found my pleasure in a much more intimate place. Although I felt men’s eyes cruising me everywhere—an act that for many gay men leads quickly and directly to sex—I needed a partner who also risked losing everything if he told. That turned out to be the hotel’s masseur. He worked in the hotel’s solarium on the top floor. There the spa, encased in glass, led to terraces outside, where men on chaise lounges that had been covered in great white sheets because of the heat liked to sunbathe naked and drink Cuba libres. So when this muscled, bodybuilder-type masseur in his white uniform gave me a look, I knew it was safe. If he ever said a word about us to anyone, he would never work in Miami again.

With my masseur and packed audiences every night, I already felt like the toast of the town. But then one day, news arrived at our hotel suite that made everything else seem bland: Eddie Cantor was coming to
Borscht Capades
that night, specifically to see
me
. Mr. Cantor had a big reputation for discovering new talent. If he named you one of his “stars of tomorrow,” it could really mean something.

Like my Dad, Mr. Cantor had combined his talent with ambition to raise himself out of hardscrabble beginnings. Although he became one of the most successful comedians in vaudeville history, Mr. Cantor started out from the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where he was orphaned at the age of one. But just as Dad did, he performed in and usually won amateur contests for his impressions. His pay grew along with his talent. His salary as a featured player in the
Ziegfeld Follies
alongside one of his best friends, Will Rogers, prompted the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld to call Mr. Cantor the highest-paid comedian “in the history of the world.”

BOOK: Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir
10.87Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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