To Joel Grey, the number 83 has no meaning. It happens to be his age, but he said, "I don't think of it at all, except when other people bring it up. There's nothing wrong with bringing it up, it's just that I just operate on being interested in the new day."
But when it came to writing his memoirs, the reality of his time on the Earth was unmistakable. "I do believe my age because the words are there to tell it," he said from New York. "I talked about my life from the very beginning, and I'm still talking about it."
Master of Ceremonies, published this month, starts with a preface on how his breakthrough performance as the emcee in Cabaret came to be. The story then moves back to his birth in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. His father was a musician and future Borscht Belt star Mickey Katz, a genial sort in contrast to Grey's withholding, status-seeking mother Grace. In the book, Grey not only reviews the strange trajectory of his career from child performer to Tony- and Oscar-winning actor, but his concurrent personal life with its emotional rollercoasters. Throughout it all, there is the struggle between his gay instincts and occasional behavior and the married-with-children life he publically lived and thought he wanted.
Grey is headed for San Francisco to talk about his book and career, and sing a few songs, for the Curran Theatre's Under Construction series that has audiences and performers onstage together. Grey will be at the Curran on March 8 for a one-on-one conversation with Kevin Sessums, the Curran's editor-at-large, in an event billed as Joel Grey: Drawing Back the Curtain. (Rock star Courtney Love and composer Todd Almond will precede Grey with a March 7 conversation with Sessums that includes performances from their musical theater piece Kansas City Choir Boy. Ticket info at sfcurran.com.)
Grey first spoke openly of being gay in a 2015 interview with People magazine. But it wasn't a surprise to those close to Grey. "All my friends and family have known since I left the marriage [in 1982]. But as far as the public was concerned, I was just used to not dealing with that because it was a no-no, a career-killer in my youth. And then I just decided that this is no longer appropriate, and I wanted to stand there with a lot of joyous, proud people, and be one of them."
In the book, Grey writes about several gay encounters he had as a youth, including with the elevator operator in his family's building and with the cantor at their synagogue. When the latter affair threatened to become public, he told his parents about it, with differing results. His father had a relatively easygoing reaction, while his mother said, according to Grey in the book, "Don't ever touch me again. You disgust me."
A wary detente eventually developed between mother and son, especially as Grey's career began heating up. "At the end, I really understood her, what her struggle was," Grey said, "even if it didn't make it any easier for me when I was growing up."
Years later, after nearly two decades of marriage, Grey's decision to open up to his wife, Jo Wilder, brought the union to a painful halt. "I had hoped she'd come to me after she had time to process what I had told her," Grey writes. "But she never did."
Despite its intimate details, Grey said his book was not a tell-all. "Oh, no, no, no," he stressed, suggesting there was a lot more that could be told. "I did not have any interest in being angry or negative about people or any of that," he said. "Whatever situations that were difficult, they're not today, and I was not about to write that way about other people. I was finally able to write the book when I had almost no axes to grind."
Master of Ceremonies includes plenty of the backstage stories of how a career was built. Starting as a child performer at the Cleveland Play House, he began working with his father in Yiddish-flavored revues. He was trying to distance himself from the image of nightclub performer and move to full-out acting roles when the break of a lifetime actually first made his heart sink. Offered the role of the emcee in Cabaret, the first thing he noticed was that he had no scenes outside of his routines at the Kit Kat Klub of Berlin.
"Performing the nightclubs all those years, I was learning all the stuff for the emcee, but of course I didn't know that when I was miserable in those nightclubs," he said. One night early in Cabaret rehearsals, he had a dream about a repulsive, homophobic comic he had seen years before. At the next rehearsal, he channeled that comic for the leering, lecherous emcee. "Hal just said, simply, 'That's it,' when he saw what I was doing," said Grey, referring to director Harold Prince.
In the memoir, Grey also reveals that Bob Fosse, who directed the movie Cabaret, wanted nothing to do with him, and even uttered an ultimatum. "It's either Joel Grey or me," Fosse said to the producing team. When the producers decided they'd rather have Grey than Fosse, Fosse backed down, although a chill remained between them �" perhaps assuaged when both won Oscars for their work.
Grey has no performing plans at the present, and once he is finished promoting the memoir, he will return to getting his latest collection of photographs ready for publication. "It's about the interior lives of flowers," he said. "I photograph them in very intimate ways, so it's very much the same thing as the book, which is about my interior life and its effect and power over me."
No long-term relationships have stuck in the years since his divorce. "I turned out to be a much better family man than a gay man," he writes in the book, and on the phone, added, "Yeah, I didn't have a lot of practice."
When he played the role of Ned Weeks in The Normal Heart, the character that playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer based on himself, during the original New York run in 1985, Grey had seen a lot of friends die, and the role became part of the impetus that let Grey become open about his sexuality. "I belong to a culture," the character says at the start of the play, going on to cite from the enormous pool of gay people who have made contributions to society throughout the ages.
"It's a pretty good culture to belong to," Grey said, "and I wanted a place in it."