Grey in the film version of Cabaret, screen-shot via YouTube
Joel Grey won an Academy Award for his performance as the Emcee in the film version of the musical Cabaret (1972). Grey also won a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe, National Board of Review and a National Society of Film Critics Award; all for a role he had already won a Tony Award for in the original 1966 Broadway production.
Despite having read everything about Grey since discovering him 50 years ago while listening to the Original Broadway Cast album of Cabaret, when Grey came out of the closet in 2015 at 82 years old, most of my friends were like, duh? After all those decades with an obsession with the star, you think that I might have noticed earlier. I usually have first-rate gaydar.
Grey:
“I don’t like labels, but if you have to put a label on it, I’m a gay man.”
In his amazing memoir Master Of Ceremonies (2017), Grey writes that director Bob Fosse didn’t want him for the film. Fosse’s choice to play the role was… Ruth Gordon! Gordon had won an Oscar as the sweetly sinister Satan worshipper in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and was much in demand.
Gordon being interviews at the Ritz Carleton Boston in 1970, Boston Public Library, public domain via Picryl
Fosse didn’t want to use anything or anyone from the Broadway production, except for the score. Sally Bowles went from being a Brit to an American; the male lead was changed from an American named Cliff to an Englishman named Brian. Screenwriters Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler went back to the original stories to restore the subplot about the gigolo and the Jewish heiress. They also drew on the writer of the source material.
Christopher Isherwood’s openness about his gayness served to make the main male character, a writer based on Isherwood, a bisexual who shares his bed with a male lover and Bowles. Fosse also decided to put the focus on the Kit Kat Klub, where Bowles performs, as a metaphor for the decadence of Germany in the 1930s by eliminating the musical numbers performed outside the club. The only outside number from the stage version is Tomorrow Belongs To Me in the film’s most chilling scene. It is also the only song not sung by Grey, Minnelli, or the Kit Kat Girls. The show’s songwriters, John Kander and Fred Ebb, wrote two new songs, Mein Herr and Money, and added a song they had composed in 1964 for Kaye Ballard, Maybe This Time.
Distraught that he was not being considered for the role he had created, Grey called his agent Sam Cohn, who also represented Fosse.
Cohn replied:
You know how it goes, at first they always want to reinvent the wheel. ‘Is Clint Eastwood available?’ ‘What if we offer it to Kirk Douglas?”’
Producer Cy Feuer and Allied Artists still wanted Grey. Fosse stood his ground and responded:
It’s either me or Joel Grey”.
They said,
Then it’s Joel Grey.”
Grey:
He wanted to control everything, but I couldn’t let him. I knew this character inside and out, and I was the keeper of the original musical. I had to stand up for it. I think he knew I was going to keep an eye on him.”
It was a tough shoot on location in Germany. Fosse choregraphed his dancers every move. He wanted Grey and the Kit Kat Klub dancers to be a polished company.
Grey:
“Fosse was a martinet, and the dancers loved him, because he was so good. But I’m a different kind of actor. I like to try new things, keep it fresh. And we weren’t supposed to be neat, perfect performers. We were supposed to be doing second-rate nightclub stuff. We were supposed to be crappy.”
Throughout the shoot, Fosse gave Grey no encouragement. He wouldn’t socialize with him. Yet, sometimes Grey would finish a take and note that he noticed Fosse smiling.
During a scene in which the Kit Kat Girls mud wrestled, Grey, embracing spontaneity, stuck his finger in the mud and smeared a bit of it on his upper lip, saying ”Heil Hitler!” and giving the Nazi salute. Fosse screamed at Grey and stormed off the set.
Grey saw a screening of the film several months later. Fosse had edited all of Grey’s musical numbers to bits and snippets. With no dialogue, his performance was now just a cameo. Furious, Grey called the producers. They told him not to worry, his songs would be restored in the final cut.
When the film had its premiere Grey’s big numbers: Willkommen, Two Ladies, If You Could See Her Through My Eyes were intact. And, the smear of mud on Grey’s upper lip and his ”Heil Hitler!” were also in the film.
Today marks Grey’s 91st birthday. Perhaps he will spend it polishing his many awards, including that Oscar!
