Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir

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%E2%80%A6the 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.)