1
WHEN I WAS A FRESHMAN at Harvard in 1952, I had horrible roommates and got slightly depressed. As a consequence, I moved into an awful run-down hotel in Boston to avoid them. When I went for walks at night, I would pass the Old Howard, Boston’s oldest and most famous burlesque house. I kept returning night after night, because of a stripper called Princess Totem Pole. I called her the Antonin Artaud of striptease, after the mad French artist who envisioned the “theater of cruelty.”
The Princess had built herself a raked stage, on which were great green abstract leaves she had painted. Upstage there was a large totem pole, with red lights that blinked on and off like eyes. She gyrated and bumped to the music of Yma Sumac, a Jewish American girl from Long Island who passed herself off as a Peruvian princess. Two large blackbirds would strip Princess Totem Pole. They would peck at her clothes, and the clothes would fall to the ground. Eventually, I became the Princess’s assistant. One of my jobs was to feed the blackbirds.
After telling people this story for years, I decided that it was so unbelievable, so outrageous, that it could not possibly have happened. I must have made it up. So I stopped telling it.
* * *
MY YOUNGEST BROTHER, Peter, says there are three stages in a life: Youth, Middle Age, and You’re-looking-great! I’ve reached the age of You’re-looking-great, and it’s all a mystery. Gloria Steinem cites a Native American saying that old age is, like childhood, a time of wonder, because both are near to the unknown.
And what a wonder my life has been. Or at least it has been a wonder to me. So many stories. I can hardly believe it all happened. As the narrator of my favorite childhood radio show would say each week, “incredible but true.” How true? Who can say for sure? Stories are slippery creatures, a bit like dreams, composed of what actually happened, filtered over time through the prism of selective memory.
* * *
GIVEN THE AMOUNT OF TIME I generally rehearse the plays I direct—sometimes four years, sometimes as many as fourteen—my next play, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, could be ready for an audience in time for my 100th birthday (as of this writing I am eighty-five years old). Yesterday as we were walking through a graveyard, my wife, Cindy, made me promise to live another twenty years. If I don’t, she said, she’ll kill me. And does it really matter if I complete the play? Isn’t the joy of work in the doing? Isn’t it the process itself that matters?
* * *
MANY YEARS AFTER I allegedly worked for Princess Totem Pole, I ran into a college classmate as I was leaving a restaurant. He greeted me warmly, as if we were old friends. Then he said: “God, remember how I used to come visit you at the Old Howard when you worked with that stripper? What was her name—Princess something-or-other—with those great big blackbirds?”
So it was true all along.
2
WE PERFORM THREE CRUCIAL ACTIONS in our lives. One is meeting the partner with whom we will spend our years, if we are lucky enough to do so. One is choosing a vocation—or surrendering to the vocation that chooses us. And the last is finding a spiritual teacher, should we be blessed to find one.
Our vocations come to us very early in life. My friend Richard Avedon, the photographer, once said that as a relatively small child, he would put up a black curtain in his doorway, poke a hole through it, and spend the day watching his family through his improvised lens. The birth of a photographer. Luis Miguel Dominguín, one of the great bullfighters of all time, was already, at the age of two, carving little bulls out of wood. The birth of a bullfighter. By the time my family arrived in America I had experienced so much—violence, dictatorship (including within my family), war, and flight. I already had so many stories to tell. That was my initiation into the world of the artist. You don’t necessarily celebrate or appreciate your vocation. In fact, at times, you wish you could escape it. But it never leaves you alone.
* * *
I WAS BORN IN PARIS IN 1934 to Russian Jewish parents who had fled to France after years in Germany. Hitler was elected Führer three months after I was born. Two years later the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow Show Trials began. More than eighty years have passed, and I still don’t know exactly what my parents did to survive, what kind of deals my father had to make to get away from both Stalin and Hitler.
While our life in Paris was beyond comfortable, the disquieting truth of what it meant to be Jewish in Europe at that time was coming into focus. My parents’ friends were leaving without saying goodbye; the choice to depart couldn’t have been easy. And to where? America? To my cosmopolitan parents, Grisha Josefowitz and Lydia Sliosberg, America seemed dangerous, disturbing, devoid of culture. America for them was John Dillinger gunned down in front of a movie theater, the gangster Al Capone, and the kidnapping of the Lindbergh child. They weren’t ready to leave their apartment in Paris, the city they loved, the world they loved. The only thing that could persuade them to flee to the United States was an even greater fear: the fear of Adolf Hitler and the coming of a second world war.
* * *
MY PARENTS MET in the late twenties shortly after Stalin came to power. My father, who had worked with Leon Trotsky during the USSR’s New Economic Policy, exporting furs to the United States, was by this time a representative in Moscow for IG Farben, a huge German chemical conglomerate, which a decade later would develop Zyklon B, the gas used in the Nazi death camps. Working for IG Farben meant my father had a German passport as well as a Russian one.
The Soviet secret police wanted one of its own traveling back and forth between Germany and the Soviet Union. As a Soviet representative with IG Farben, he was perfect, except for one thing: He wasn’t a member of the Communist Party. They needed their go-between to be a member of the Party. And so they arrested him. His arrest, he theorized, was a first attempt to get him to join. Once released, though, he used his German passport to escape to Berlin. He would spend the next several years trying to get my mother out of Moscow, too. (They had not yet married and, though they hardly knew each other, he had decided she was the one.)
Even before he left Russia for Berlin, my father worked to help other family members leave. He spent time in Warsaw, meeting with the Soviets, who had a small office there in which you could negotiate—as you would with Turkish rug merchants—for relatives already trapped in the Soviet Union. You would offer $10,000 for visas; the Soviets would demand $20,000. Somehow, by the time the war began in 1939, my father had succeeded in getting out of the USSR every single relative that he and my mother had there.
* * *
AFTER MY FATHER FLED THE USSR, he made a fortune in Weimar Berlin, one of the wildest cities in all of Europe at the time. The city of Marlene Dietrich and Louise Brooks, and, within a few years, groundbreaking films like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Dada and the new German Expressionism had taken root. All kinds of excitement awaited him: brothels for men and for women, nudity, nightclubs, freedom. He made money fast and drove a fancy sports car. Even as he worked to reunite with my mother, who was stuck in Russia, he had a girlfriend who was a dancer at the Berlin Opera.
While my father’s life was a cabaret, my dear, Mother was fighting the realities of everyday life in a dictatorship. When her wealthy father was sent to prison, the Communists seized their spacious home. They moved my mother and grandmother into an overcrowded former Leningrad brothel. The lice there were so prolific that the women shaved their heads. They set the legs of the bed they shared in buckets of gasoline to prevent the lice from climbing onto the mattress. One day at the window of the brothel, the story goes, someone began to shout. Everyone ran to look. The rats of Leningrad, starving, abandoning their empty granaries, were marching in a long line to drown themselves in the river.
Four years slipped by. My mother could hardly remember the man she was to marry. But suddenly, out of nowhere, he found a way to save her. He paid an impoverished German man with easy passage in and out of the USSR to “marry” her and bring her to Berlin. By the time my mother reached Germany, though, she and my father had all but forgotten each other. My father had become a sophisticate, and my destitute mother, a refugee from the Soviet Union, had never seen a lobster and didn’t know how to peel a banana. They didn’t even like each other. So why did they get married? I’ll never know.
* * *
BEFORE WE EVENTUALLY settled in the United States, my father kept us on the run, all the while laying the foundations for our future lives. From Berlin he and my mother fled to Paris, where I was born. From there he traveled to London, where my mother, my brother Alexis (born in 1936), and I joined him. We left France just as the Germans prepared to invade Poland in September 1939. The Paris railroad station was a madhouse, as if every Parisian was trying to get somewhere else. Our mother, in a station mobbed with people fleeing, asked a blind man to help us with our luggage. He did.
We arrived at our London hotel. I saw my father standing on the grand staircase and burst into hysterical sobbing. I couldn’t stop. My parents were great survivors, but they were wretched parents, negligent and self-absorbed, petty and often mean. My father, who’d gone so far to escape tyrants, was a bit of a tyrant himself. So why did I cry so hard when I saw him waiting for us in London? Had I missed him so much, or had I hoped never to see him again? Or was it simply the relief of feeling “safe” after the bedlam of getting out of France?
We spent about six months in London preparing for war. Alexis and I, like most children, were fitted for gas masks. Finally, my father, the escape artist, got us a rare booking on a ship bound for Canada. I was five years old.
Our sister ship sailed at the same time, maybe a mile away. One afternoon it was torpedoed. I can still see the scene in my head: survivors struggling in the Atlantic, rescued passengers sleeping in the hallways. I can still feel the mixture of excitement and terror when the ship’s alarm shrieked suddenly and we ran for the lifeboats. The alarm sounded many times, and each time we would run to the boats. They would lower us partway over the side of the ship, and we would hang there. When would we, too, be torpedoed?
* * *
BY THE TIME I was of school age, we were in New York City.
I attended St. Bernard’s, a private school in a little British enclave on the Upper East Side, established to train repressed, polite, withdrawn little WASPs, who would in later years head great institutions: banks, law firms, and charitable foundations.
We had three teachers: the headmaster, Mr. Jenkins, a pompous, balding, overweight Colonel Blimp, straight out of Dickens; Captain Fry, a handsome World War I hero; and the hunchbacked Mr. Strange (I’m not kidding), also out of Dickens, who would often sit at his desk leering at us as he cleaned his long, dirty nails with a lead pencil.
The first day of school my mother and my nanny, Isee, had to drag me screaming into the place. I was terrified. It took the school nurse over an hour to calm me down and lead me, petrified, to my classroom.
I was one of only three Jews at St. Bernard’s, including my brother Alexis and an Italian boy whose Jewish father had bankrolled Mussolini. Hardly kosher. There was no way at that time that parents could get two Jewish sons into a school like this without telling a whopping fib. Our name had been changed from Josefowitz to Gregory. The family fib was that we were not Jews but aristocratic White Russians who had survived the Bolshevik Revolution. The school bought it. Or maybe that year they were short on tuition. In truth, they probably knew we were Jews, but I didn’t. In those days, I actually believed we were Russian aristocrats.
But we weren’t. Anti-Semitism, as I would soon learn, had followed us all to America.
* * *
IT WAS THERE, at St. Bernard’s, where I found my calling. It began with an ill-fated crush on a girl. Her name was Patsy Cavendish. It was my second-to-last year at St. Bernard’s, and our innocent puppy love played out in letters and poems. I wrote her poems, and she wrote back, which is how we carried on into the summer until one day, unexpectedly, the letters stopped. So I wrote her some more and sent them off. Nothing. I was heartbroken. After a week or two I forgot all about it.
Later, as the fall semester was upon us, two friends and I were returning from Central Park when Patsy appeared on the balcony of her family’s new apartment. Surprisingly, she invited us up to listen to music and drink Cokes. Sometime after, her father appeared and dragged me from the room and threw me forcefully down the back stairs. At school the next day I was summoned to the headmaster’s office. I was grilled for a long time, forced to admit what “I had done.” But since I knew nothing about sex, I had no idea what they were talking about. To make matters worse, the headmaster made an example of me later in front of the entire student body. The fact that I was one of the most accomplished students in my class made no difference. It was humiliating.
The school officials told Phillips Exeter Academy, where I had been accepted for ninth grade, that I was morally unfit and revoked their recommendation. I cried uncontrollably.
Home, at the time, was no more hospitable. My father was slipping into depression, a darkness that would come to impact our little family. My mother had no time to deal with my school problems. She accepted the school’s version of the events without question and insisted that I make things right by apologizing, which I did, knowing within myself that I had done nothing wrong. It’s a terrible thing to be punished for telling the truth. It would take me years to forgive my mother.
Nonetheless, the episode turned me into a pariah at school, humiliated and lonely in a way I would never feel again. Other students treated me poorly. If I danced with a girl at a party, another boy would immediately cut in. The school, too, downplayed or ignored my accomplishments. I won a prize for an essay, “Woodrow Wilson, Hero of a Lost Cause.” At the awards ceremony, however, they announced that no prize would be given that year.
The one thing they could not take away was my role as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. I had studied the part all summer, and it was too close to opening night for anyone else to come in and steal my spot. I must admit that before I took the stage, I was a very polite boy who never openly showed hostility toward others. But as I looked at the audience of well-heeled gentiles, the very people who had shamed me and turned me into an outcast, I channeled a rage through Shakespeare’s dialogue I had never expressed before. Suddenly, in that moment, I learned the therapeutic power of acting.
From that moment on I could not live without the theater. It was my drug to relieve the pain of living. I had found my calling. And so, out of this petty but to me real and awful injustice—one of the prime traumas of my childhood—my vocation seized me.
3
FOR EUROPEAN ÉMIGRÉS WHO FLED the Nazi Holocaust, Southern California became the American Riviera. There were few automobiles, because gas was rationed. There had been little new building. Instead of being filled with high-rises as it is today, Westwood was a simple college town with one little cinema, one collegiate clothing store, and a bookstore. Shopping in Westwood, you could leave your children to wander barefoot and alone in the quiet streets. It was a paradise of lemon groves, orange groves, avocado farms, and, everywhere, flowers flowers flowers.
From about 1941 to 1948 we spent summers in a beautiful house on Sunset Boulevard, rented to us by Thomas Mann, who had written Joseph in Egypt there. The house had a stone bridge over the swimming pool, covered with mosaic and tile, like something out of Hearst’s San Simeon. My parents were young; they were making money. My father was buying up real estate—including the Brentwood Country Club—at depressed, prewar prices. Later, when he succumbed to bipolar disorder, he would lose his nerve and liquidate too early, missing out on millions of dollars of profit. With 129 acres in central Los Angeles, the club he sold his share of is now worth billions, I believe.
There were parties all the time, and my parents’ parties were filled with movie stars. I don’t know how they met them. According to my mother’s best friend, you could pay a woman in Hollywood to introduce you to celebrities. As my parents told it, though, in pre-Hitler Berlin, statesmen, businessmen, painters, and actors all socialized together. They had become friendly with Marlene Dietrich there, and it was she who, during our summers in Hollywood, introduced them to all these celebrities. However it happened, the house was filled with the likes of Abbott and Costello, Walter Pidgeon, Greer Garson, Charles Boyer, George Burns and Gracie Allen, the Marx Brothers, Erich von Stroheim, Greta Garbo, and Fred Astaire. These parties raged on as the war raged overseas.
When it came to work, mother was lazy, but she came alive in the evenings, like a vampire. She loved going to parties and loved throwing them.
She certainly had something. Brilliant artists, celebrities, and, especially, classical musicians adored her. Some of the great musicians of her time—Toscanini and Heifetz—sought her company. What did they see in her? When Vladimir Horowitz was having a nervous breakdown, we would go to his small Hollywood home, and he and Mother would play gin rummy before dinner. Horowitz was still recording during his crisis, but was unable to perform. Yet, after these dinners, he would sit down at the piano and play just for us.
My mother was witty, stylish, and sarcastic, but for all the romance around her, she was, to me, unknowable. She could certainly be seductive. One night I caught her in the garden kissing Errol Flynn behind a bush. She was having an affair.
Copyright © 2020 by André Gregory and Todd London
