Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (22 page)

So I accepted the role of George M. Cohan—yet another song-and-dance man, although one of mythic proportions.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Winning a Tony meant more dinner invitations and press, but most important, it led to my first starring role on Broadway, while still playing the Emcee. Again without requiring an audition, I was offered the title role in the musical
George M!,
which was based on the life of George M. Cohan. The
Cabaret
producers were less than thrilled about my leaving the show after my yearlong contract was up, and I had my own conflicts about the decision as well.

Playing the Emcee had always been a satisfying experience. It was never less than exciting eight times a week. Not only was the production of such a high caliber, but as a Jew I also believed strongly in the important political message it relayed. Having birthed that character, it became a part of me. So the idea of my understudy taking it over felt strange and sad—kind of like leaving your child for someone else to take care of. But I was ready to take on the next challenge, and Jo supported me in that; she wanted me to continue to succeed and stretch myself. So I accepted the role of Cohan—yet another song-and-dance man, although one of mythic proportions.

Both the script and the concept behind
George M!
were terrific. The hard-driving performer, who never wore makeup and called everyone kid, was probably the most famous composer in the American songbook, even though he knew only four chords in the key of F-sharp.

The director, Joe Layton, and Michael Stewart, who wrote the book along with Fran Pascal, Mike’s sister, had a fresh approach to the real Cohan story that was challenging and risky. James Cagney had played Cohan wonderfully in
Yankee Doodle Dandy
, but as was the Hollywood habit, the film avoided the darker aspects of his life such as his anti-union positions and the heavy hand he took with his family. Mike’s version showed the dictatorial and temperamental side of the man who had written more than fifty plays and such beloved songs as “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “Over There.”

Then there was the style of the book. The form was impressionistic, with a unique set that gave suggestions of place instead of being conventionally realistic. Time passed very quickly from episode to episode of Cohan’s life, with only slight changes in costume signaling the transitions. Rather than being dressed fully in period clothing, the actors would start the play in contemporary clothing, and for each song a piece of period attire would be added, maybe an apron, hat, or vest.

I very much liked the complexity of this dark version. The only problem was that I worried I was wrong for the part. First there was the matter of Cohan’s Irish Catholic background. But if I could play an evil Nazi Emcee, I was hoping I could play Irish. More worrying was the idea of singing Cohan’s classics, and the most daunting of all was getting an audience to believe I was a superb tap dancer like Cohan—or for that matter, Cagney, who was also a phenomenal hoofer. All I’d had were a couple of months of lessons when I was a kid back in Cleveland. I thought of my initial worries about the part of the Emcee and how deeply satisfying and transformative an experience playing that character was. But I would never know what I was capable of if I didn’t try.

So after a year on Broadway in the season’s biggest hit, we took a quick vacation at Frenchman’s Cove in Jamaica (where it rained the entire week) and then went straight into rehearsal for
George M!
Joe Layton was a relentless and brilliant taskmaster, and the choreography was extremely complex, even for experienced tappers. The style of tap dancing Layton wanted wasn’t the Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly variety but a hybrid with Irish clog dancing that made it uniquely off-kilter and fresh. And he was very exacting about its execution.

The biggest challenge in learning to dance like Cohan wasn’t his style of dancing but the fact that he was the
best
tap dancer of his time. I began a crash course in tap with Bob Audy, the best teacher in New York, with a great assist from Layton’s right-hand man, Wakefield Poole. Every day I would walk over to his studio on Broadway not far from home and go through the basic exercises of tap. I did shuffle flaps, stomp rolls, and every other dance step until I was soaking wet. It took tremendous energy to do the basic steps over and over, but I couldn’t move on to combinations until I had mastered them.

After my work with Bob, who gave me so much confidence, I headed downtown to rehearse the book scenes and musical numbers for hours. This was a show where I was onstage for all but one number. During the endless and exhausting process, there wasn’t a day that went by when I didn’t wonder if they had hired the wrong guy. But there was no quitting. I’d signed my name to the show. They were putting up the marquee, with my name over the title, at the Palace Theatre, where I had seen Judy Garland and Danny Kaye’s names in lights. Opposite the theater, a statue of George M. Cohan himself kept watch as if to say, “Don’t mess this up, kid.” A lot of money was on the line, and a bunch of my wonderful and talented fellow actors were depending on me.

One of those was Bernadette Peters, who immediately nailed the part of Cohan’s younger sister, Josie, the minute she opened her mouth. It was startling when this young, adorably young girl sang; no one had ever heard a sound like that. We all fell in love with her immediately. Where there were about five or six actors being considered for every part, no one could compete with Bernadette; she
was
Josie.

She was a show-business kid who grew up in Queens in a Sicilian family. Her mother, tough and always around, was a real stage mom (albeit a likable one) who put her talented daughter on TV at the age of three and a half. By the time she was thirteen, Bernadette had become an understudy in a national tour of
Gypsy
. She and I got along immediately, and I quickly became a safe retreat when her mother was driving her crazy, which was often. I knew from mothers.

Everyone involved loved the show, and we were pretty confident when we headed to Detroit for the out-of-town tryout
.
All of the investors and producers came in from New York as well. The first upset: A newspaper strike was going on, which meant no reviews and lower ticket sales. And as if that weren’t unlucky enough, a historic snowstorm covered the city. As a result the Fisher Theatre looked like a half-empty school auditorium when the curtain opened.

There were many times I regretted leaving
Cabaret
; many, many times. But no more so than in that moment: facing an empty theater in the middle of an epic snowstorm in Detroit. It wasn’t lost on me that I could have been the toast of London, since a production of
Cabaret
opened in England while the original still ran on Broadway.

The situation went from bad to worse as the audience that braved the weather was less than thrilled with
George M!
Even in the cavernous space of the Fisher Theatre I could feel the tepid response as we knocked ourselves out. The loose style of the show that I had found compelling proved too abstract—arty, even. So there we were, a big, brassy out-of-town musical in trouble.

After the performance, Joe, Mike, my agent and great friend Sam Cohn, and the rest of the creative team and producers had what was reported to be a long meeting at their hotel, the results of which would yield the next step in “fixing the show.” They all agreed that what was missing were fleshed out production numbers of the Cohan biggies, such as “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” So the plan was to rethink and restage most of Act 2 to give the iconic songs their full due. Of course, in order to do this, other material would have to be cut—actors might lose their only big moment. The next day, there were frayed nerves all around. Everyone was exhausted, but we had to push on, rehearsing for most of the day, stopping for a quick bite and a nap, then back to the theater for an eight-thirty curtain.

Of course, narcissist that I was, I thought everything was my fault. For eight performances a week, I rarely left the stage, and for as many hours as the union would allow, we rehearsed a gigantic new twenty-minute production number for Act 2 that had all-new choreography to accomplish these fully realized versions of “Over There,” “Nellie Kelly, I Love You,” “Harrigan,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Expensive new costumes were made and new set pieces built, all of which would hopefully guide the audience more explicitly and conventionally through the great man’s life story. The big question that hung over the show as we came to a close in Detroit was whether the changes, as big and costly and exhausting as they were, would turn it around.

As we got closer to opening night of
George M!,
I was anxious even though the Detroit audiences seemed to like the show more with the new additions. I had just come off a big hit that some said had changed the shape of American musicals. This time, with my name above the title, if the show failed, it could put a hard stop to my momentum. It’s not unusual to blame the actor.

Many Broadway musicals, even those created by icons such as Richard Rodgers, Josh Logan, Irving Berlin, and Leonard Bernstein, have struggled out of town, giving their talented all to “fix a show,” only to have it ultimately fail on Broadway. The best of them, Michael Bennett, Hal Prince, Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins, have all had this experience at one time or another. That’s one of the reasons why musical theater is so completely thrilling when it does work.

The substantive changes to the material went very well at the Shubert Theater in Philadelphia, our second out-of-town run before coming to New York. Before the curtain went up, everyone onstage held hands like a family. After prayers and other preshow necessities, the lights went up, and from that instant, the audience plain loved it. They erupted with applause and laughter at every turn. It was pretty clear from the standing ovation we received at the end of the show that the flashy new MGM-style musical numbers had done the trick.

Fifty minutes before the curtain was scheduled to go up at New York’s Palace Theatre, on April 10, 1968, I headed out of my dressing room before putting on my costume. Amid the mayhem of opening night on Broadway, hardly anyone noticed as I made my way along the row of dressing rooms, down the stairs, past the orchestra’s pit, and under the stage, where I found myself alone, in the half light of a ghost light. I put on my tap shoes and ran through the very demanding solo in the show’s first number, “All Aboard for Broadway.”

I was terrified of blowing my first tap solo. The long and complicated sequence would have been challenging for any tap dancer. For a novice like me, it was truly scary. On top of that, I was about to perform it in a theater that contained the likes of Henry Fonda, Albert Finney, and Cohan’s daughter Georgette. I needed to run through my solo one last time before the curtain went up to make sure the steps were still “in my feet.”

My feet didn’t forget, and the opening was gangbusters. Practicing a half hour before curtain under the stage with the ghost light became my ritual for every single show during the entire run. The opening night party, which happened to be on my birthday, was held at the Plaza Hotel. One of our producers, Konrad Matthaei and his wife, Gay, hosted the red-white-and-blue-themed event attended by theater, business, and society elites Gloria Vanderbilt and her fourth husband, Wyatt Cooper; Henri Bendel president Gerry Stutz; and Liza Minnelli and Peter Allen. Men in black tie and women, who had been asked to wear red, white, and blue, danced to music provided by the renowned bandleader Peter Duchin and his orchestra. To me, no one there looked more beautiful than Jo Wilder Grey in a heavy ridged white cotton dress made for her by designer Gus Tassell. The dress was so simple and devoid of decoration (even the buttons were hidden under a fly front) that it reminded me of the gown she wore on our wedding day.

There was much cause for celebration—
George M!
felt like a big hit. But as it turned out, there was a general perception of the show as jingoistic. In 1968, an antiwar time, many people dismissed our show’s message as naive patriotism and not the dark cautionary tale about a brilliant but deeply flawed artist that it was.

The burgeoning politically radical era was only part of the problem. Despite all the revisions, the reviews were still not great. In the
New York Times
on April 11 (my birthday), Clive Barnes called the show “ill-prepared” and “mediocrely written.” However, he did praise my performance: “[Joel Grey] sang lightly and beltingly, he danced, with frenetic passion and a God-given sense of timing, and when all else failed, he even acted the script that they had been inconsiderate enough to give him.”

Not everyone, however, liked my performance. I was devastated when ten days after Barnes’s review, Walter Kerr skewered me in a big Sunday piece in the
Times
. In the article, humiliatingly titled
YANKEE DOODLE’S OUT OF BREATH
, Kerr went on for paragraphs and paragraphs. “Mr. Grey does not ask for a rest, though we do,” wrote the very same man who in
Cabaret
said I was the sun, moon, and stars.

I didn’t know what to do. I remembered what my father used to always say about critics; if they don’t like your show, audiences won’t either—because the show will no longer be running. Certainly having Walter Kerr lay into me in the Sunday
Times
could close a show. Jo, who saw me in a panic after I read the review, tried to lighten the situation with a more realistic and levelheaded perspective.

“This is just one man’s opinion,” she said. “You are wonderful and the audience loves it.”

“But it’s the
whole
page of the Sunday
Times
.”

“How about what Clive Barnes said? He raved about your performance.”

“Walter Kerr is more respected.”

There was nothing Jo could say that was going to make me feel better. I picked up the phone and called my great good friend Beverly Sills, the great soprano. She was not only smart but had a lot of experience dealing with the ups and downs of the press during her long, high-profile career. (A few years later, she landed the cover of
Time
with the cover line
AMERICA’S QUEEN OF OPERA
.)