Apparition of Success

Every night we have the battle to keep The girls from taking off all their clothing. So don't go away. Who knows? Tonight we may lose the battle.

Pasty-faced and crater-eyed, behind his boldly rouged cheeks, the lone figure onstage when the footlights go up on Broadway's hit musical, Cabaret, is a garish apparition indeed. He twists his scarlet mouth into an obsequious leer as he whines the lyrics of Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome. The character has no name, no dialogue. But in Joel Grey's insinuating performance, the sleazy, empty-souled, fanny-grabbing emcee of Berlin's Kit Kat Klub is not only the glue that holds the musical together but also the embodiment of a nation's depravity during the black dawn of the Nazis.

Although it does not call for star billing, the part is one of the strongest and most complex on Broadway, and Grey treasures it as if it were a long-awaited inheritance. With his wife Jo, he has worked out a gradually intensifying makeup scheme that transforms his face from mere decadence at the outset to a gaping death's head by the end. In the desperate name of gaiety, he paws the girls, dons tights and wigs to join the chorus line, and dances with an all-but-naked fake gorilla.

Take a Chance. Still baby-faced under his makeup at 34, Grey looks knowingly at Cabaret's world. "I've been there," he says. Son of a successful vaudevillian named Mickey Katz, Joel clicked with a cabaret routine while still in high school in California. In his teens he was a headliner at such high-priced playrooms as New York's Copacabana, Miami's Fontainebleau, Hollywood's Mocambo, and the London Palladium. "At that time," he recalls, "I would do almost anything to find a niche for myself. I had a bleeding ulcer at 20, and my life was falling apart."

With nothing to do, he did everything: TV, movies, summer stock, revues, nightclubs. He landed the lead as a replacement in two Broadway shows (Stop the World, Half a Sixpence), but he was still a crucial step away from the ideal niche. When ProducerDirector Harold Prince came after him for Cabaret, he succumbed instantly. "Everyone thought it was a very chancy show," he says, "but I knew I wanted to take the gamble. The tawdriness and decadence of cafe life is something I know."

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