Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 921 GREY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 GREY | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Broadway star and Academy Award-winner Joel Grey tells the incredible story of a life lived both in and out of the spotlight.Willkomen. Bienvenue. Welcome. Joel Grey, the Academy Award-winning Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret finally tells his remarkable life story. Born Joel Katz to a boisterous Jewish-American family in 1930's Cleveland (the son of comedian and singer Mickey Katz), Joel began his life in theater at the age of 10, starring in local Cleveland productions of touring Broadway hits. He was hooked, and the hunt for the spotlight takes him from community theater in Ohio, to seedy, gangster-filled nightclubs in Chicago, and finally to the lights of Broadway and the dizzying glamour of Hollywood.Master of Ceremonies is a memoir of a life lived in and out of the limelight, but it is also the story of the man behind the stage makeup. Coming of age in a time when being yourself is not only difficult, but dangerous, Joel has to act both on and off stage. Deftly capturing the pain and secrets of an age and time we have only just started to leave behind, Joel's story is one of love, loss, and redemption.At once a riveting, heartbreaking memoir, thrilling show business tell-all and a portrait of a changing time and nation, Master of Ceremonies is the poignant tour-de-force from a living legend.
Author Notes
Joel Grey is a Tony, Golden Globe, and Oscar-winning actor, producer, and director. In his seven decades in entertainment, Joel has acted in over a dozen Broadway productions, over twenty films, and countless television appearances. Along with his work on the stage and screen, Joel is a renowned photographer. He lives in New York City.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Joel Grey's iconic Cabaret Emcee leers throughout his chronicle of a life hiding his homosexuality. He "had worked for years to rise above the cheap tricks of the vaudevillian.the fag impersonations of a sleazy nightclub comedian," but found his greatest triumphs there (Tony, Oscar, and Golden Globe wins). Early success, touring with his father's Borscht Capades) was through his Jewishness, which was also something better hidden in the shadow of the Holocaust. Eventually he had a nose job to counter anti-Semitism. There are heterosexual interludes including a 24-year-marriage to the "love of his life," Jo Wilder. His first homosexual experience is at 10, and his entire memoir filters his life and career through the ambivalence about his sexual identity. After a threesome with a cantor and the cantor's wife, Grey begins a "lifelong relationship with therapy." The reader is pulled along, knowing that this 5'5" song-and-dance entertainer, with over seven decades on stage, in film, and on TV, will forever be prized by anyone who has seen him perform (most notably in Cabaret, Chicago, George M). Emotion kicks in when his first child dies, when his wife leaves, when he loses his friend Larry Kert to AIDS, and when he realizes that his mother will never accept him for who he is. The reader cheers when Grey finds playing in The Normal Heart, the AIDS cri de coeur, transformative. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
EVERY ACTOR BOTH craves and fears "the role of a lifetime": that warm mantle of fame, fulfillment and maybe even financial security that like the red shoes of lore can never be completely removed. Rather than try, Joel Grey has chosen to burrow down into his R.O.A.L., examine every fiber - even though it was a leering creep, the rouged M.C. of the Kit Kat Klub in Hal Prince's "Cabaret" and the utter antithesis of his own nice-guy persona. This unsavory character inspires his new memoir's title and its central conceit of a man keeping up appearances on the center stage known as life, performances humming along briskly even as chaos descends behind the scenes. Grey was born with a tube of grease-paint in his fist, to the boisterous family Katz of Cleveland. His mother, Grace, formerly Goldie Epstein, named him for her favorite movie star, Joel McCrea, and favored him over his younger brother, Ronnie. With unrealized ambitions to be an actress herself, she had married the Yiddish-inflected musician and comedian Mickey Katz, formerly Meir Myron Katz. Perhaps you remember the Borscht Capades? Glamorous but temperamental, the first of her relatives to get a nose job, Grace had a Joan Crawford streak, sometimes menacing her sons with a broom and once leaving young Joel alone in a New York hotel room while she went out dancing and drinking with a stranger. "I always hated your mother," one of her four sisters, Fritzi, wheezes on her death-bed. She had gotten the nose job too. So did our hero. (And in what seems like a modern fairy-tale curse, eventually his daughter, Jennifer.) Small for his age and teased because Grace dressed him like a "sissy," Joel found solace in the darkness of his father's orchestra pit and then among the Curtain Pullers troupe at the Cleveland Play House. "In the acting company, I found a family of an entirely different sort," he writes, in the noble tradition of children everywhere, reconstructing their damaged psyches in the theater. "Here, you could say and feel whatever was inside you." Well, not quite everything. Young Joel had what in those days was a shameful secret: He was attracted to other boys. Furtive gropes ensued, with a teenage elevator operator, a cousin and - after the family follows Mickey's career to sybaritic Los Angeles - the cantor at a local synagogue. Rejected coldly by Grace after confessing this liaison, Joel hurls himself headlong into showbiz and begins constructing not so much a double life as a corrugated one, which included attraction to women, convention and the public approbation each conferred as well as the exciting, shameful lure of the hotel masseur and the gay bathhouse. The guy had more compartments than a Biedermeier secretary. He writes with rueful tenderness of his long marriage to the actress Jo Wilder, during which his attraction to men receded somewhat and he was a curiously domineering husband who told her what to wear, discouraged her career and suffered hot pangs of jealousy: "I knew what happened in the theater, that very sexy place." There is industry gossip aplenty in "Master of Ceremonies," including the travail of making "Cabaret" into a movie under the direction of Bob Fosse. Grey, who starred in and directed productions of Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart," looks unsparingly at how AIDS devastated the theatrical community. Despite a side gig as an abstract photographer, though, he doesn't venture very far past the dress circle in this book. (I'm still wondering what he and Truman Capote talked about that time they went to Harry's Bar in Venice.) He is simply smashing, though, on the role that made him whole. "There he was," he writes of the M.C., sounding like Shakespeare or Beckett. "There was I ; there we were."
