Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (6 page)

Hoping one day to have a marriage like theirs, I turned Mr. Lowe and Miss Paxton into role models and surrogate parents. In her honeyed Southern accent, Miss Paxton would invite me to join them for dinner along with their two daughters, P.K. and Stanja. She listened to my stories about home and school, accompanying my tales with her hiccup of a laugh, and met all of my odd little quirks—such as the green bow tie I continued to wear or my becoming overly dramatic when retelling my day at school—with motherly affection. Miss Paxton, a real Southern belle, didn’t have moods, only maternal protectiveness.

Mr. Lowe also showed concern for my well-being—often by keeping Mother on a short leash. While watching me grow as an actor, he intuited that her motives behind her extreme desire for my success had more to do with her than with me. Elegantly, he protected me, asking her not to direct me in my lines or telling her I would be fine at the theater for the day and that she could go. He was able to succeed at what few had before him: putting Mother in her place. To her credit, she accepted it from Mr. Lowe.

Still, I had an uneasy feeling of guilt that by loving Mr. Lowe and Miss Paxton as much as I did, I was somehow dishonoring my parents. Caught in a confusion of allegiance, I was torn between wanting to be safe and heard and wanting to please my mother and make her proud of me. While I knew my dad’s love was a constant, something I didn’t have to work at and could take for granted, my mother’s affection seemed entirely conditional.

Above all else, I loved being with my mother, particularly when I could have her all to myself. So when she told me we were going to New York City, just the two of us, the prospect was over-the-top exciting. The purpose was to audition for the role of one of the sons in
Life With Father
. Based on a beloved book series, the heartwarming Broadway hit concerned a nineteenth-century Wall Street broker and his attempts to keep order at home with four lively sons.

Word had gone around the Play House that the Broadway hit production was looking to replace one of the sons, and Mom thought we should go for it. The plan was haphazard. Details on where this audition was to take place, or who had set it up in the first place, were sort of vague. But the biggest question I had was how I could play one of the boys, since they were all redheads. “Please!” she said. “If you get the part, they can dye your hair.”

Mother took me out of school, just as she had for rehearsal at the Play House, and we arrived at Cleveland’s Terminal Station all dressed up for our train to the Big City.

The train trip, while exciting and romantic, was nothing compared with arriving in the city that was the epicenter of the American theater. In the cab from Penn Station to our hotel, we sped through block after block of theaters, the marquees rising, blinking, and calling out:

BY JUPITER
STARRING RAY BOLGER

GERTRUDE LAWRENCE IN MOSS HART’S
LADY IN THE DARK

GEORGE GERSHWIN’S
PORGY AND BESS

CANADA LEE IN
NATIVE SON

I had never seen so many people on one street! There were crowds of people, smiling, talking, smoking, pushing. There were policemen on horses and guys selling hot dogs and pretzels. Street musicians competed with honking car horns.

Having arrived at 47th Street, we made our way into the Edison Hotel, the biggest, fanciest hotel I could ever imagine. The Sovereign, where we still lived, was grand, but the Edison was truly glamorous. The Art Deco lobby was just as chaotic as the street outside. Bellhops dashed in between men in suits and women in cinched cocktail dresses with lots of jewelry. New York was everything I had imagined—larger than life, full of possibilities, and fast. It was also overwhelming.

At some point, I turned and suddenly realized that my mother was gone. I looked frantically around the lobby. Where was she? Barely a moment had passed since she had been right next to me. Then I spotted her, just a few yards away, talking to some strange man. She was smiling, her mascaraed eyes glowing so that even I knew she was flirting.

A few minutes passed before Mother called me over and introduced me to the handsome, older man. I was confused, but Mother quickly moved us along. “Joel, dear,” she said. “I have the key. Let’s go to the room.” She said goodbye to the man, and we left.

Up in the room, the two of us changed for an early dinner in one of the hotel’s exotic restaurants. As if in a romantic scene from the movies, I ate my strawberry flambé and listened to this beautiful woman across the table telling me what a good actor I was and how my talent would take me far. By the time the check arrived, I was ready to go back to the room to rest up for my audition and a day in the city.

Back in our room, I couldn’t get over the sea of lights that shone below the window where I sat. I was so enchanted that I almost didn’t notice that my mother was changing her outfit again, this time into a tight-fitting dress.

“Why are you changing clothes?” I asked. No answer. She continued to apply her lipstick and to fool with her hair.

“Where are you going? It’s late.”

“I’m going dancing,” she finally replied. “There’s a famous place around the corner called the Havana Madrid. It’s a hot spot for Latin dancing.”

“Am I coming with you?”

“Children are not allowed.”

“You can’t…” I started to protest.

“Sweetheart, you know your mother loves to dance.”

“Are you going with that man in the lobby?”

“Yes, dear. But I promise you: One dance, and I will be back.”

“Mommy. You
can’t
go.”

“It is late, but you can stay up for a little while. I love you, dear.”

And then she was gone.

I was alone in a hotel room in New York City. I got so cold, I began to shiver. Then came the tears. Although I was considered mature for my age and spent a lot of time back home around adults or by myself, I was still just a kid. Left alone in a big and strange city such as New York was the scariest thing in the world. I looked out the window; I looked at the clock; I turned the radio on and off and on; I put more lights on around the room. Nothing helped. A series of terrible what-ifs raced through my mind. What if he was a bad man? What if he hurt her? What if she never came back? It was two o’clock in the morning when she returned. She came over to embrace me and I smelled alcohol on her breath.

“Why are you crying?” she said. “Mother’s here.”

“I hate you.”

There never was an audition during that trip. We were supposed to call somebody, or somebody was supposed to give somebody else a letter, but “somebody” never panned out. I don’t know what happened, and frankly I didn’t care. Mother tried to explain, but I was not interested. The only lasting impression of the trip was Mother’s volatility. Even if she said I was the greatest, “the sun, the moon, and the stars,” that couldn’t guard me from her unpredictability.

So it became clear: The only truly safe place for me was the theater. Over the next two years the Play House provided a harbor from the chaos of my mother, a place where I never found myself knocked between being wonderful one minute and bad the next, as I did during the Epsteins’ Sunday brunches. In the acting company, I found a family of an entirely different sort. Here, you could say and feel whatever was inside you. Problems were solved and decisions were made by listening to different points of view. There was an exchange of ideas, because no one way would satisfy.

Difference celebrated, contradictions used as creative fodder: The theater was a collective endeavor in which everybody had his or her part to play. The company was made up of so many types—so many ages, body types, personalities, and talents. Some had children; others didn’t. Some were married and some single. There were even men who loved men.

At twelve years old I already understood that Viktor and Bryan, two members of the Play House, were different. It was nothing I talked about with anybody, but still, I got it. They would leave the theater together and they owned a dog, a dachshund named Liesl. The snippets of conversation I overheard between them sounded just the way other couples talked. (“I took Liesl for a walk” or “Don’t forget to pick up milk for the house.”)

I didn’t know exactly how or why, but I felt the stirrings of kinship in the unspoken intimacies of these two gentleman. I was captivated by the notion of our similarity. It’s exciting when you recognize in others something in yourself that you didn’t even know was a part of you. And it wasn’t just about the kind of sexual connection I had experienced with Jerry, the bellboy. Viktor and Bryan were two men somehow sharing a life, a foreign but comforting concept. At the same time, the discovery that I identified with them frightened me. Everything I had heard up until now was that men who loved men were fairies, homos, limp-wristed perverts, sissies, and fags.

But Viktor was a very masculine leading man whom women swooned over. The discrepancy was confusing. None of those ugly words would make any sense in a sentence about Viktor. No way. Nor did they apply to Walter, another actor at the theater.

My relationship with Walter began when the two of us were cast in the same play. The theater is a very sexy place. It always has been and always will be. To inhabit another character, another presence, and another way of thinking, it is necessary to forget who you are. You strip yourself bare to give room to imagination. So you put whatever thoughts you have about yourself aside to become a killer, a philanderer, a genius—
anything
. The space to act out your dreams is arousing. That’s why a lot of people have affairs with other cast members. With the line between pretend and real blurred, permission is freely given.

Walter and I had both been cast in a production of, funnily enough,
Kiss and Tell
. In the family comedy by the popular playwright F. Hugh Herbert I was Raymond, the bratty younger brother, and Mr. Lowe was my father. (How nice was that?) Walter played Dexter, the boyfriend of my onstage sister. Because of our ages—I was twelve and he was sixteen—we bonded immediately.

Walter came from the poorer West Side, where my cousin Burton also lived. His family of Croatian immigrants, who spoke no English, spent night and day making ends meet at their butcher shop, where their sons were also expected to work. Often Walter arrived at rehearsal with his hair smelling of garlic from having stuffed sausages all night. On breaks, we played cards, raced each other to the corner deli, teased each other—little, quick Joel ducking around tall and gangly Walter. Our camaraderie didn’t arouse any suspicion because we were just the youngsters of the play. Why wouldn’t we hang out together? Why wouldn’t we be pals?

So when I asked my parents if I could sleep over at Walter’s house, they weren’t the least bit suspicious. By then, my family had moved to a house in University Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. Although it meant leaving the Sovereign, and Jerry, whom I never saw again, it was yet another upwardly mobile step for our family. It was also kind of far for me to travel home after dinner at Walter’s house, which was the perfect reason for a sleepover. Not that I really needed an excuse with my folks. They trusted me to be on my own. (“You don’t need to worry about Joel. He knows how to take care of himself.”) If Walter asked me to sleep over, and his parents said it was OK, it was OK.

In the small apartment above his parents’ butcher shop, our friendship went from playful and boyish to serious and grown-up. He locked the door to his room, and after that I didn’t remember any words—just being quiet. We had to be very, very quiet. We were both mature for our age and responsible enough to be trusted with challenging roles in serious, adult theater productions. That’s the only way this could happen.
This
was not being fooled around with by the bellhop or cuddling with my cousin but rather a full sexual expression of real feelings. With Walter, an intelligent, thoughtful, fellow actor, I learned that sex could be connected to love.

My friendship with Walter, which deepened over the course of the show and beyond, was of pure trust and affection; I loved him, and I knew he loved me. But I also knew that to others our love would be a disgrace.

The contradiction between those two realities didn’t make sense, but it was my life, so I made it make sense by keeping my love for Walter a secret isolated in his bedroom and other private places. When I left to go home, the experience disappeared (or at least receded) so I could freely return to being Mother’s pet, performing for friends who had come over to the house for mah-jongg. In this way I kept my life neatly compartmentalized. At school, I adopted the persona of the class clown to stay in the bullies’ good graces. At the Play House, however, I was as serious as any grown-up professional theater actor. I tailored my behavior to each group, so I could give the people what they wanted. It was exhausting. It takes a lot of work to keep everything separate, but just like any other skill, the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Me as an actor in the high school production of
Good News.