Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (20 page)

“And there’s a role we think you’d be swell for!”

His words just kind of hung there.

“So cheer up, pal! We’re all going to hear the score at John’s in a few days. Annette in the office will call you, and I’ll see you there! Judy sends love, and—oh, yes! We’re calling it
Cabaret
.” And with that, he hung up.

That was a Tuesday. On Thursday, I found myself in a cab going to John Kander’s townhouse in the West 70s to hear the score. Equal parts nervous and excited, I had the hiccups, which I never got. This might actually lead to something—not just something,
the
thing I had been dreaming about for so long.

I had previously enjoyed seeing John and Fred demonstrate their material. Together, the brilliant duo (who knew each other so well that they practically finished each other’s sentences) could sing and sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. I had known both men long before they became well known. Before Broadway, Fred was
the
go-to guy for special material for nightclub acts. When he helped me with mine, Fred was appealing and truly funny. John and I became friendly while he was still writing dance arrangements. From back home in Kansas City, he knew Charles McArthur (who, with his wife, Julia, had so generously welcomed a chuppah in their apartment at the Dakota), and John had been kind enough to accompany me in the pit for some of my many failed Broadway auditions.

When I arrived at John’s handsome duplex, he opened the door, and we hugged. The room, packed with people involved in the show, had a New Year’s Eve vibe, with everyone hugging and kissing and anticipating. Hal walked over to the piano, shushed the crowd, gave a few words of welcome, and offered a brief synopsis of
Cabaret
: Like the play,
I Am a Camera
, the musical was based on Christopher Isherwood’s
The Berlin Stories
, an autobiographical novel set in 1930s Berlin as it teetered on the precipice of one of the worst moments in history. Then Hal introduced “the boys,” Freddie and John. Some people found seats, others stood, but all were at attention. John sat at the piano and arranged his music while faithful Fred watched him with obvious respect and affection.

Dead quiet.

John played a low tremolo on the piano, like that of a drumroll slowly growing louder and lower, which ended in a mimicked cymbal crash of the higher keys on the register. Then he began the vamp.

Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah

Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah

Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah

Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah

Fred turned to us and sang:

“Willkommen! Bienvenue, welcome! Fremder, etranger, stranger…”

Even from the vamp—the song didn’t sound like anything anyone had ever heard before. There was pandemonium before John and Fred had a chance to finish “Willkommen.” Meanwhile I was thinking,
That song is going to be mine
. We finally quieted down so that they could play the entire score but the room never stopped vibrating.

Hal hadn’t said much about my part—the Emcee, as he was called—but I couldn’t get over it. This was the first time I’d ever been offered a part in the theater without an audition. So when Hal’s office messengered the script to our new apartment, in a townhouse on 30th Street just off Park Avenue (not the fancy part), I opened the envelope immediately. I often procrastinate looking at scripts, but I had already spent so much time imagining this one that I had to read it right away.

With Jo in the kitchen and the kids out in the park with Nellie, our magnificent babysitter, I closed the door to the living room, sat down by one of the tall front windows, and began reading. Sally Bowles, an aspiring actress from England, was the central character. It was her story. That was no surprise. I liked her madcap character as I turned the pages. Her lover, Clifford Bradshaw, had been gay in Isherwood’s
Berlin Stories
. But this was 1966, and a gay character on Broadway was not possible. So he was to be a heterosexual American charmer. A few other characters, such as Sally’s landlady, Fräulein Schneider, and her Jewish suitor, Herr Schultz, made an appearance in the script, but by the time I arrived at the last pages of Act 1, there was still no indication of the Emcee. I quickly thumbed back through all of Act 1 to see if I had missed something. I hadn’t.

I got up and went to the kitchen; I had to get a drink of water before I began Act 2. Back reading, I came to scene 3, a big set change for a glorious follies-like number with five songs—“Willkommen,” “Two Ladies,” “The Money Song,” “Tiller Girls,” and “If You Could See Her.” All of those great songs I had heard at John’s house, which had made a kaleidoscopic impression of nightlife in Berlin during 1929, were the sum total of the Emcee’s part. My character had no interaction with Sally, Cliff, Schneider, Schultz, or anyone else in the play other than the Kit Kat Klub dancers and band. No words, no lines. No role. My heart sank. I was nothing more than a song-and-dance man—a German song-and-dance man.

I could feel myself losing perspective. This was an original Broadway role. Most actors worked their whole lives without ever getting that kind of opportunity. I was crazy even to question it. But what if this wasn’t
really
a role? Being so peripheral in a high-profile production might solidify a reputation as a featured player. I got myself so twisted up that I didn’t know what to think, so I took the script into the kitchen where Jo was reading a magazine and having a snack. Looking up at me, thin-lipped and gripping the pages, she could immediately see that I was upset.

“Honey, could you take a few minutes and please read this,” I asked.

She took the script into our bedroom, closed the door, and reappeared forty minutes later, walking straight at me and giving me a huge hug. “This is a fantastic script and a daring concept,” she said. “And you will be amazing in it.”

Jo had insight into matters of the theater and was rarely wrong. I trusted her above anyone else and needed to remember how smart she always was about these things.

“I don’t think there is a decision here,” she said.

We agreed I would do it, and so it was that I found myself ambivalent and a little apprehensive beginning rehearsals for
Cabaret
. As if the fact I didn’t have any lines wasn’t clear enough from the script, rehearsals were bizarrely split up between the dancers and the actors. In a wholly unconventional plan, Hal rehearsed as if there were two shows. The book scenes were rehearsed at the theater with the cast that included Jill Haworth as Sally Bowles; Bert Convy, as her lover, Clff; Jack Gilford as Herr Schultz; and in the part of Fräulein Schneider, Lotte Lenya, Brecht’s widow, who had appeared in
The Threepenny Opera
with Jo and attended our wedding. Meanwhile, I (in a tailcoat with satin lapels frayed from use that the costume designer Patricia Zipprodt and I had picked out at the Brooks Costume Company) rehearsed the musical numbers with the ensemble at a midtown studio. It felt a little like being seated at the children’s table.

I worked with the choreographer, Ron Field, who had a brilliantly elegant and sleazy take on the musical numbers. The veteran dancer Michel Stuart was also on hand to help with my tap dancing, although it was minimal. Still, something was missing. As rehearsals continued, my isolation from the actors in the play fueled my initial insecurity. I let it reinforce my constant worry that I didn’t belong. I fixated on the fact that I didn’t feel like an actor at all instead of accepting the real problem: I hadn’t found the character. Sardonic and dark songs didn’t tell me anything about the Emcee. I had no idea what I was doing. Meanwhile, somewhere between hearing the score at John’s and the start of rehearsal, the creative team changed their minds about the one big Act 2 production number (all six songs) and decided to intersperse them throughout the show.

The challenge was to seduce the audience into having a good time, just as Hitler excited the German people into genocide. The Emcee was grotesque
and
seductive. The musical numbers were there to subliminally comment on the book scenes, and the Emcee was a musical dictator, if you will, representing Hitler’s seduction of the Germans. I bade the audience to join me in the fun and kept them waiting with baited breath for my return. Only at the end would I reveal they had been duped. But how was I to do that in any kind of convincing way if the Emcee remained an enigma even to me? I needed to find the psychological nature of the Emcee. He needed to be a real person with a backstory and aspirations. I had struggled with the decision to do
Cabaret
precisely because I feared that I wouldn’t be able to find anything deeper than a nightclub performer. With every passing day of rehearsal my fear seemed to become more of a reality.

Then, a couple of weeks before the show’s out-of-town tryout in Boston, inspiration came from the most unlikely of places—the vile comedian I had seen perform in St. Louis when I was on the nightclub circuit and had reappeared in my dreams while I rehearsed for
Cabaret
. These two men—the Emcee and the comedian in my dreams—were one and the same: both totally corrupt, desperate for adoration, willing to do anything to save themselves. And so finally, armed with the motivation that had thus far eluded me, I
became
the comedian while Hal watched from his seat in the auditorium. I groped, ogled, and played the buffoon, catching the rest of the ensemble—and myself—off guard. Afterward, I raced offstage in shame, appalled that I had access to such a sleazy creep. But Hal was ecstatic. Talk about a breakthrough! It had taken me so long to “find” the Emcee because all my life he was who I never wanted to be. I’d seen his like from almost my earliest days of performing, and vowed never to be that.

Finally knowing who I was, I came up with an elaborate biography. I decided where he lived in Berlin and what his flat looked like; I knew he would force the Kit Kat Klub girls to have sex with him in his dressing room in payment for giving them the job. Men could also find favor with him through sex. The Emcee wasn’t just bisexual, he was any-and-every-sexual. Something I played with was the question of whether he in fact was Jewish. I never told anyone any of these details; they were strictly for me.

Next the Emcee needed a look. The man Hal had seen while in the service wore the sort of makeup a transvestite might. But we found that women’s products—base, rouge, lipstick, lashes—just didn’t work. My character was androgynous, not trying to pass as a woman. For me, he existed on two levels as a real, flesh-and-blood “second rater” in a tacky cabaret, and also the symbol of decadence. I needed to make him both highly specific and iconic.

I plundered Jo’s makeup case, which was full of old European makeup from her early days acting in summer stock. I searched out each color and texture, the way I imagine a painter does when starting with a blank canvas. In front of my wife’s vanity, I was transported back to the nine-year-old boy sitting in the dressing room of the Cleveland Play House watching with fascination as the older actors put on beards, mustaches, wigs, shading, and putty to create their characters. Only now I was the older actor, too.

I started with a stick called juvenile pink (the Emcee would want to look younger), matted down with Johnson’s baby powder. I then drew thick, dark, slightly arched eyebrows and dark orange underbrows, and layered blue eye shadow on the lids. Jo’s old lashes were so thick with mascara that they looked like black construction paper or the lashes of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Perfect. I applied raspberry rouge to my cheeks, and for the lips, not a lipstick (no shade looked right) but a type of old German shading stick called Leichner’s “lake.” I parted my hair in the center and flattened it against my skull with Dippity-do. I looked in the mirror, and there he was, “Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!”

Everyone involved in the show seemed inspired; something special was in the air. John’s score was brilliant, Fred’s lyrics evocative. Joe’s story looked unflinchingly at taboo topics while still managing to remain funny. Ron Field choreographed the Kit Kat Klub girls (“each and every one a virgin”) and me with evil charm. Boris Aronson—the son of a rabbi who got his start as a Tony Award–winning scenic designer making sets for the Yiddish theater—made the members of the audience complicit in the action by having them face their reflection in a large mirror placed near the vanishing point of the stage. And I brought the character of the Emcee, who turned out to be not only the glue but also the essence of the show.

The Emcee’s musical numbers—such as “Two Ladies”—are very specifically placed into the show to let us know that there are no limits in a world that is about to descend into chaos. But the Emcee also brings the alluring, prurient world of the Kit Kat Klub from the very opening of the show. Leave your troubles outside! The importance of transporting the audience to Weimar Germany, which has never stopped being a point of curiosity, cannot be overstated. It is one of the crucial elements to the show’s enduring appeal.

Opening night at the Shubert Theatre in Boston, however, we had no idea how the audience was going to receive the show. Of course, we were all anxious. Musical theater is such a fragile form. Making one work is an epic undertaking, and here we were singing and dancing about Nazism. Did the kind of person who went out to the theater to see a musical really want to deal with such complex and disturbing topics? Suddenly, it seemed crazy to think so.

Any last-minute doubts, however, were dispelled by the audience’s thunderous reaction to the opening number. They applauded, shouted, practically stood up from their seats! The applause went on so long that the opening number literally stopped the show. Backstage, the cast wandered around startled and confused, asking one another, “What should we do?” “Should we go out and do it again?” “How long do you wait?”

As the Emcee, I was confrontational, using my bamboo cane as if it were an extension of my randy, roving arms, or maybe a weapon to not so gently teach the girls a lesson. Despite the dark, bizarre atmosphere of Berlin, I promised the audience a good time. “In here, life is beautiful. The girls are beautiful. Even the orchestra is beautiful.” And the members of the audience, titillated during “Two Ladies,” were happy to become my accomplices.