BY JERRY TALLMER

When Harold Prince first started thinking, in the early 1960s, about turning the Sally Bowles story into a Broadway musical, his approach to it was off the beaten track.

“Everybody else,” Prince said to this writer not long ago, “saw it as a show about a woman standing on a table in a nightclub and singing. I saw it in terms of the Joel Grey character” — the sleazy, skull-like proto-Nazi compere, or emcee, of the Kit Kat Club in 1930s Berlin.

Willkomen, bienvenue, welcome!

It was Joel Grey who would bring that death’s head to life on stage and screen, but it was two other people — John Kander and Fred Ebb — who had put the music and the words into his mouth.

And what words.

In 50 years of writing the lyrics of more than 700 songs — 40 of those years to Kander’s music — none of all those hundreds of thousands of words were and are more truly, deeply shocking than those brayed by that smirking little emcee as he waltzes across stage with his amour, a beskirted female gorilla: “If you could see her like I do, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”

Perhaps only from the son of a clothing and furniture salesman on Delancey Street on the Lower East Side of New York City could come such a concise synthesis of the views of the Master Race on genus of the race it was exterminating.

“Underneath what seems like entertainment and is entertainment in a Fred Ebb song,” says the Joel Grey of today, “there is always something serious and quite deep and dark whether he knew it or not.” (You had better believe that Fred Ebb, a walking weld of the morose and the hilarious, did know it.) “The Gorilla song is a perfect example,” says Grey. “It begins uncomfortably funny and gets worse and worse.”

So much worse, indeed, that the “doesn’t look Jewish at all” was dropped — emasculated — immediately after the 1966 Broadway opening, for obvious box-office reasons.

“Fred was terribly upset,” says Grey. “For the film” — six years later — “we shot it both ways.” Director Bob Fosse demanded that the original line stay in and it did stay in, much to the integrity of that movie.

The Kit Kat Club emcee will have plenty of company from Flora the Red Menace, to Miss Sally Bowles (off that table), and Valentin the revolutionary, and Molina the super sensitive window dresser, and the Spider Woman, and meek Mr. Cellophane, and brash Razzle-Dazzle ’em Billy Flynn, and the whole teeming city of New York, New York, during the three-day (February 23, 24, 25) Life Is a Cabaret tribute to Fred Ebb being directed by Rob Fisher in this year’s “Lyrics and Lyricists” series at the 92nd Street Y.

It was in fact Fred Ebb himself who first proposed converting Héctor Babenco’s 1985 film version of Manuel Tuig’s 1976 novel Kiss of the Spider Woman into a Broadway musical. Oddly enough, the same Fred Ebb, morose or otherwise, had originally thought converting Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and John van Druten’s I Am a Camera into a musical was a lousy idea. “I didn’t know where the love interest was,” Ebb would dryly remark in later years.

The love interest in Spider Woman was less complex: two men, one homosexual, one not, thrown together in a cell in a fascist torture prison in Latin America. Ebb came to Kander one day and simply spoke the title. “Just once,” Kander has said. “I said, ‘Yes.’ That was it. No further conversation. We said the title to Hal Prince. He said, ‘Yes.’ And everybody else said: ‘A terrible idea.’”

Uh huh. Ran two-plus years.

Kander and Ebb have been a team ever since a music publisher named Tom Valando brought them together in 1962.

Fred Ebb, who did not like to talk about his age, was born April 8, 1933, or maybe not. He died 9/11/2004 at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, in his native Manhattan. Everybody remembers that he could perform his own stuff better than anyone else in the world.

“One thing that stands out for me,” says Kander now, “apart from wit and talent, which are things you can’t learn, is how extraordinarily disciplined and professional Fred was as a writer. Aside from inspiration, craftsmanship. There is nothing in anyway sloppy about his work. How shall I say this? Anything that seemed sloppy or that cheated in lyrics would drive him crazy.

“There had been a period in this country when professional was a bad word” — too establishmentarian — “but for both of us, the word professional was very important.”

The stunning actress/singer/dancer Karen Ziemba, a star who first hit the spotlight in 1991 (along with choreographer Susan Stroman) in a little Off-Broadway Kander and Ebb album called And the World Goes ’Round, laugh as she tries to think of the Yiddish word—“chutzpah, maybe”—that best applies to lyricist Ebb. “A gritty sense of life and survival—human survival, I should say, and not just that but something else too, transcendence of some sort, the ability to transform oneself.

“There was a very…not sweet, but a very romantic side to Fred and yet he could get down and dirty with the best of them, including dirty jokes.”

To this writer, the magical thing is how Fred Ebb could give flesh to a character out of a bare handful of precisioned words. Put down the knitting, the book, and the broom—nine words and yet as full a portrait of a human being as Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World or the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby.

In the end there is a simpler way of paying tribute to the son of a Delancey Street clothes and furniture dealer. Let Karen Ziemba say it: “Fred Ebb is a great American poet.”