Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (12 page)

Toward the end of my act, when you usually do your strongest material, the club got very, very noisy, because the waitstaff were clearing all the plates before the main act. In this case it was Jane Froman, a
Ziegfeld Follies
alum and one of the biggest recording artists of the day. I was intimidated by Ms. Froman because of her fame and the sadness of her story. Her life was so dramatic that it had been turned into a movie—
With a Song in My Heart
, starring Susan Hayward. In 1943, a USO plane in which she had been traveling crashed, leaving her permanently disabled and confined to a wheelchair. As I came off, she was sweet and complimentary. “Sounded like a great audience,” she said.

“They are just waiting for you,” I replied before she wheeled onto the stage.

Ms. Froman was being kind, but my act
was
successful. The rare sight of a nineteen-year-old kid working the club scene got a lot of press. My smart innocence in a place typically filled with dark and dirty humor was the charm of it. Everybody in the room felt as if they were discovering me.

That included the Chez Parée Adorables, the club’s showgirls who warmed up the crowd while wearing very, very little. Some did uncomplicated steps while others just stood around for decoration. All of them had great figures and weren’t at all shy about showing them off. Passing by the dressing room where they got ready, I saw more bare breasts than I had ever seen in my life. If they knew I was looking (and who wouldn’t look), they didn’t seem to mind.

I caught the attention of an Adorable, one of the shorter girls who danced in the chorus and who were known as the “ponies.” She was a little redheaded tap dancer named Missy, who showed no compunction in pursuing me. When I ran into her one night after the second show, it was almost as if she were waiting for me. Although I was always the passive participant when girls were drawn to me, I wasn’t cool to their advances. Because I had been my mother’s pet, having women fuss over me was something I was used to from an early age, and had almost come to expect. I knew my power and was excellent at playing the role expected of me. If Missy thought me a cocksman, I could do that as easily as ordering a grasshopper after the show.

I asked her out for a bite and a drink, glad to have the company. Over our late-night supper, I learned that she was from Canada and as excited as I to be making a buck as a performer. Missy wasn’t particularly sophisticated or glamorous, but she sure was really cute and kind—and before I knew it, she was on the floor in my room and in my bed. Even if I wasn’t especially interested in her, I felt pretty good about emulating the fabled life of a nightclub performer. A comedian and a showgirl, that happened all the time. And now it was happening to me. We slept together a number of times before I finished my engagement and returned home.

However, back in LA, two thousand miles away from the gig in Chicago, I got some perspective. I had a taste of the nightclub world and its money, girls, and travel, which were easy to get swept up in. But when I was honest with myself, I knew none of this was in the interest of my bigger dream of acting in the theater. Although they were both under the big umbrella of show business, a nightclub performer and theater actor were worlds apart.

While I was back home with Mom and Dad, I also learned that I had been accepted at UCLA. I had applied there during my senior year, while I was primarily traveling with
Borscht Capades
. My inspiration was Cousin Burton, who was already enrolled in UCLA. Burton and I were still close; he was straightforward and kind. And when I told him stories from the road, he was interested in the glamour but not so interested that it made me uncomfortable. Ours was an easy and trusting friendship.

My cousin and I had big plans. We were both going to pledge the Jewish fraternity, Zeta. I would study theater and be just another regular college kid on UCLA’s idyllic campus. As I conjured up images from
Good News
, an MGM musical about college coeds, I found more and more to criticize about the nightclub circuit. I thought about the constant talking and clattering dishes while I was on. I couldn’t say the audience was inattentive; there were guys trying to impress their dates, women getting drunk, couples making out. Some people thrived on the energy from a rowdy crowd and would be terrified to face the sea of quiet that marks the moment just before the start of a stage play, but I found the distractions disturbing. Part of the problem was that I was absolutely no good at ad-libbing, the stock-in-trade of nightclub performers. To be able to make something of the moment—a drunk in the crowd or a lady walking out to powder her nose—that’s a special talent. Because I had been trained that it was unacceptable to say a line that was not in the play, improvising was verboten.

So I decided: I was going to UCLA. But before I had a chance to tell my parents, George Wood from William Morris called to say The Chez Parée wanted me back for another four weeks. When I told my parents about the call, they were so thrilled. I was confused by their excitement.

“I can’t do that now,” I said.

“Why not?” my mother blanched.

“I was accepted at UCLA. And I’m going.”

I could see from their expressions how shocked they were.

“Son, you’re grown up now,” Dad said. “You have a career. You can’t turn your back on this. School is a couple of years. You don’t know if they will want you then. You have to strike while the iron is hot.”

My father—who still kept busy doing the occasional tour as well as performances in LA, though he no longer enjoyed the success that comes with being brand new—couldn’t fathom giving up a job that paid $500 a week to go back to school. A child of the Depression, he was fiercely practical.

“When you get out of college,” he continued, “you’re going to be looking for the job you have been offered right now.”

I spent several days in total confusion. My position was supported by Burton and The Sisters, who probably wanted me to go to college because they knew how unhappy it would make my mother. Yet I could see my parents’ point that this opportunity might not be there in four years. In the end, I decided to take the job and forget about college. It wasn’t to make my parents happy. Still, when I arrived in Chicago I was really, really down. I mourned the loss of a deeper education. The last thing on my mind was Missy, but there she was when I returned, still kicking in the line. She surprised me by leaving a rose by my dressing table so that I knew we were still on. After opening that night, I took her out, and she had another surprise for me.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

“How did that happen?” I asked, in shock.

“You know how it happens.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“I want to have the baby.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Why would I kid about something like that?” said Missy, who at this point was starting to get angry.

My mind raced. I liked Missy, but I barely knew her. I
didn’t
know her.

“Is it mine?”

“Of course it’s yours.”

How could she be so sure? There was no reason to think she hadn’t slept with someone else in the six weeks I was gone, but then again maybe it was mine. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do or to whom I could talk. I couldn’t tell my parents; that was for sure.

When I dropped Missy off at her place, she was crying, and I felt horrible. I hadn’t said what she wanted to hear. I tried to console her by saying that we were both so tired we couldn’t think straight and that everything would be clearer after we both got some rest. But it was just a stall tactic; I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen or how to deal with this.

Missy and I didn’t talk the next day. When I saw her at the club, we just waved to each other. I didn’t know what she was thinking, but maybe we could figure this thing out. Anyway, I had to get onstage, which was what I was being paid to do.

When I returned to my hotel after my second show, my time for procrastination was up. There in the lobby were two rough-looking men waiting for me. As soon as I walked in, they stood up from where they had been sitting and stepped in front of me.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“You know the problem, and we’re here to see that you make good.”

Make good?
What did that mean here? A ring for Missy? Or broken kneecaps for me? If I thought I was out of my depth before, now I was drowning. I felt as if I was going to faint. Instead, I darted around the thugs and ran up the steps to my room, where I locked the door. Then I called George Wood without a second thought about waking him up in the middle of the night. I told him everything and got scared when he said he didn’t like any of it and that he was calling the owners of the Chez, Don Jo Medlevine and Dave “Dingy” Halper, immediately. If anyone knew his way around the mob, it was George.

But the next day Dingy and Don Jo told me to relax.

“If I had a nickel for every time I heard this story, I’d be rich,” Don Jo said in their office the next day.

“You are rich!” Dingy said, laughing.

Don Jo began laughing, too, but they both stopped when they looked at me. I wasn’t laughing; I felt like I was going to be sick. Never in a million years had I pictured myself running from gangsters and a girl—who might actually be pregnant.

“Look,” Dingy said, putting a fatherly arm around my slumped shoulders. “It’s not your kid—if there’s a kid at all.”

But for “insurance,” I was accompanied by two big guys the bosses had hired for the rest of my time in Chicago. I was alone only when I was onstage. Missy and I avoided each other at the club. When the Adorables and I would pass one another to and from the stage, I would turn away so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact. Whenever she would see me in the dressing room, she would look the other way.

I felt like a creep. I wanted to talk to Missy and deal directly with whatever was going on. But in the same passive way that I had responded to her advances, I went along with this mobster mentality. The fact is I acted like a selfish kid more than willing to avoid the consequences, whatever they might have been.

After I left Chicago, I never heard from her again.

My engagement at the Chez was just the start of what William Morris had planned to be the beginning of a big nightclub career. They booked me in spots all over the country: good ones, bad ones, and everything in between. Some were really bad, but they kept me working. Then they called in the spring of 1953 to say they’d succeeded in booking me at the London Palladium! This was a fantasy of every American performer. The theater played the best acts in Europe and the occasional American star, such as Judy Garland and Danny Kaye. Meanwhile I was going abroad for the very first time!

This was a
very
big opportunity with tremendous pressure to succeed, and I consequently developed a terrible case of laryngitis. Illness is the bane of a performer’s existence. I always have a way of arriving at the worst possible moment—and my arrival at Heathrow
was
the worst moment for me.

Press agents from both the US and the UK had arranged for a gaggle of press to greet me as I came off the plane. The paparazzi blinded me with their large fan flashbulbs while reporters shouted.

“Look over here, Mr. Grey.”

“No, over here, Joey.”

“How do you like England?”

“Sing a few bars of something!”

My response: silence.

I couldn’t utter a word, and even if I had, my thin, weak voice wouldn’t have made a dent in the din. I was big news the next day. In my room at the Dorchester Hotel, where Danny Kaye always stayed, I read the tabloids, which all had variations of the same headline,
PALLADIUM SINGER ARRIVES WITHOUT VOICE,
accompanied by large, horrible pictures of me with a scarf wrapped around my neck and a look of agony in my eyes.

The press in England has always been a particularly vicious breed; they love anything that goes wrong. But luckily my laryngitis turned out to be a nonstory. Every day up until my debut, I saw a throat specialist on Harley Street who got me up and ready with a mix of gargles and meds.

I was one of a dozen acts that included a comedian, Jimmy Logan, who was a big name in Scotland; an acrobatic troupe; and an act called Vogelbein’s Bears. (My dressing room was next to the bears’; back home, I got a lot of laughs when I said I shared a dressing room with dancing bears.) The headliner was Johnnie Ray, a big recording star who had just released a monster-hit song, “Cry.” His single seemed to be the only thing playing on the radio.

Ray was a bobby socks idol. At the Palladium, the teenage girls swooned when he sang, “If your sweetheart sends a letter of goodbye / It’s no secret you’ll feel better if you cry.” When he belted the last line, “So let your hair down and go right on baby and cry,” the girls went so crazy that some of them threw their panties up on the stage. I discovered this because the stagehands hadn’t completely swept the stage after his act one day. When I went on for the second show, I found myself dancing amid underwear of all shapes and sizes. While doing my Joel Grey faux ballet leaps during “Rumania,” I improvised some steps to kick them out of the way.

Onstage, Ray brought to life the fantasies all these girls had while listening to his record. He flung himself around fearlessly, seemingly on the edge of losing control. Watching him was mesmerizing in the way that watching anything potentially perilous can be—he was like an accident just about to happen. He was a truly odd sex symbol—strange-looking to begin with, he wore a hearing aid, which in those days was not subtle. The apparatus had a wire that went down from his ear to his breast pocket.

Then there was the fact that he was gay.

Ray’s homosexuality was a widely known open secret in the business. He had been arrested and pleaded guilty to having solicited men for sex in the restroom of a Detroit burlesque house in 1951, before the release of “Cry.” Normally, the industry would have crucified him for being homosexual, but he made so many people so much money that it gave him some cover. Ray could take chances that I would never dare. Always petrified that anyone would think I was gay, I stayed far away from places or people that might get me in trouble.