Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir by Joel Grey Read Free Book Online

to learn.
    O then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
    She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
    In shape no bigger than an agate stone
    I wandered up and down the steps of the four-story building, in heaven, trying on all sorts of costumes in the wardrobe department and practicing my entrance onto the stage. I would have been totally thrilled to sleep there, but, alas, my father finally arrived to retrieve me. Almost in tears, he had absolutely no idea how happy I’d been.
    There was a lot that my parents didn’t understand about the Play House. The Epsteins and the Katzes frequented Cleveland’s thriving Yiddish theater. They often went to the Duchess and Globe theaters, owned by a furrier who produced Yiddish plays during the warmer months, when fur sales were slow. Many famous Jewish performers appeared there, such as Molly Picon and a young Paul Muni (born Frederich Meier Weisenfreund). But the legitimate theater was not the world of my family—certainly not my grandparents, who lived an almost entirely Jewish existence.
    My grandfather Max, a passionate opera-lover, always listened to the broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera on the radio, even while he helped me prepare for my bar mitzvah. Sitting next to him in his tailor shop at 74th Street and Cedar in the middle of winter—the windows fogged up from the steam-presser, an egg salad sandwich my mother had made for us to share resting on the display case—I was practicing my maftir when he stopped me. I hadn’t made a mistake in the recitation of my Torah portion. Rather, a recording of the late Enrico Caruso, one of my grandfather’s favorite singers, was playing on the radio.
    “You know,” Grandpa Max said to me with his customary seriousness, “Caruzeh vas a Jew.”
    In Mendel the Tailor’s worldview, everybody worthy of respect was Jewish—even the great Italian tenor. And who was going to deny it?
    I, however, knew the difference between Gentiles and Jews—and there were definitely no Jews at the Play House. Except for one: Benny Letter, the head of construction and a fan of my father’s, kept an eye out for me, occasionally inviting me to share coffee cake during his break.
    “How do you like it?” Benny asked about the Play House.
    “I love everything about it.”
    “That’s good … And I’m here, too.”
    It was a reminder that Benny and I were indeed a little different from everyone else in the company. But I wasn’t afraid of that difference. The fact that I was appreciated, even admired, at the Play House relieved some of my Jewish wariness of the Gentiles. How could I be afraid in such an inviting and pleasant place?
    Mr. Lowe and his wife, Dorothy, were certainly as different from Grace and Mickey Katz as one could imagine, and in my mind for the better. I loved visiting the tall, handsome, and urbane Mr. Lowe and the fine actress and Southern beauty Miss Paxton in their special dressing room for two. The storied duo were the Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne of Cleveland, often appearing together onstage, sometimes even as husband and wife.
    They shared a professional life as well as a personal one, but that was not what distinguished them most from my parents. Mr. Lowe and Miss Paxton were educated, having both graduated from Carnegie’s drama department, where they met. They were polite and soft-spoken, not just with others but also—astonishingly—with each other. I didn’t know that kind of respect and gentleness existed between married people.
    Because I came from a house where expressions of love were coupled with hostility, discovering a man and woman who respected each other in love and work, who were careful with each other, was a revelation. The relationship between Mr. Lowe and Miss Paxton couldn’t have been that perfect, but to me, it was.
    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