Eleanor Bergstein's Research for "Dirty Dancing"

The Forward website has published an article, by Abigail Jones, titled The Not-So-Dirty 'Dirty Dancing' Story. The article includes the following passages (emphasis added).

In the mid-1980s, Eleanor Bergstein returned to Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskills, where she had vacationed as a child during its heyday, to research her screenplay for Dirty Dancing. One night, she got a call from Hollywood.

“While I was on the phone,” she told the Forward, “the operator broke in and said: ‘You better hurry up! You’re gonna miss dinnah.’ I went downstairs. I’d gotten an off-the-shoulder dress; I thought, now I’m coming back as a grown-up, and it was so exciting. I looked at the room, and it was all filled with bearded men with yarmulkes! It was a singles weekend for Jews.”

The Catskills that Bergstein remembered from the 1950s and ’60s had been replaced by a struggling local economy and a growing Orthodox population. “There was almost no vestige of the way things were,” she said. “All I could do was re-create it in my 13-year-old imagination.” ....

To understand the Catskills’ golden years, Bergstein turned to hundreds of sources, including, first and foremost, dancer Michael Terrace, Bergstein’s Johnny Castle, who provided her with innumerable stories and unique access to the dancing world. Resort owner Paul Grossinger also consulted, as did dance instructor Jackie Horner, who contributed voluminous scrapbooks and details. ...

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Jackie Horner told Sue Tabashnik (page 13) that she was interviewed by Bergstein in the summer of 1985.

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I never heard of Michael Terrace until now. The Wikipedia article about Terrace includes the following passages.

Michael Terrace (born Michael Santiago Gutierrez; December 31, 1926 in Spanish Harlem, New York City) is a retired ballroom and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, actor, dance consultant, and writer. His stage and subsequent dance career spans a total of 60 years, during which he's made innumerable contributions to ballroom dancing.

Terrace played Bernardo in West Side Story with the national company ....

Terrace is particularly associated with the film Dirty Dancing (1987). His stories of the formative years of the mambo in the Catskills inspired Eleanor Bergstein's vision of lead character Johnny Castle (played by Patrick Swayze).

Terrace met and married Elita Cleveland and formed the dance team Terrace and Elita. ... Michael and Elita, were regulars in the Palladium Ballroom dance competitions and helped to bring the Mambo craze to mainstream America. ...

The Palladium Mambo website includes an article about Michael Terrace. The article includes the following passages.

Born Miguel Santiago Gutierrez de Lozano to a Dominican mother and a Cuban father in Spanish Harlem, Mike grew up dancing to Latin music at family parties. ...

It was not until after he was released from the U.S. Marines in 1946, however, that Mike began to take dancing seriously. Despite his limited dance skills at the time, Mike's good looks earned him a job teaching ballroom dancing at Murray Dales where he learned the popular ballroom dances of the day. Mike worked diligently on his dancing and soon secured a job teaching dance at the prestigious Lido Hotel in Long Beach.

In order to become more versed in the Latin dances, Mike frequented the Park Plaza in Spanish Harlem where he would offer to pay skilled female dancers to dance with him for an hour at a time. He also attended early dances at the Palladium Ballroom (then Alma Dance Studio) where he met and performed with Vera Garret, his first mambo partner, and his first wife Nilda, who became his first professional dance partner. ...

In the summer of 1949, Mike Terrace began working as a dance teacher at Grossinger's Hotel, the Catskill resort with the largest and most prestigious dance staff. Mike recalls that his life at Grossinger's was filled with temptations to service wealthy women in more than just dancing, much like that of the dance teachers portrayed in the film Dirty Dancing (whose creator Eleanor Bergstein relied on stories Mike told her in creating her fictional characters). ....

One summer, the tap dancer Georgie Tapps, an idol of Mike Terrace, came to perform at Grossinger's. As Mike recalls the incident, Georgie Tapps lovingly pulled him aside and admonished, “You're shit. You don't know how to dance. You want to learn how to dance; you go to ballet school. You sign up and take advantage of the GI bill that's rightfully yours. You become a dancer. You want to be a dancer, give up the shit. All you're going to do is become a gigolo here, and then they're going to discard you when you're too old.”

The interaction altered the course of his life.

Terrace quit working at Grossinger's, moved back to New York City, and began studying ballet through the GI Bill with the Vladimir Dokoudovsky at Ballet Arts. Through years of disciplined study, Mike acquired enough ballet skill to incorporate multiple pirouettes and double tours en l'air into his mambo dancing. ... Mike Terrace was one of the pioneers in ballet-mambo, adapting ballet adagio lifts for mambo shows. ....

With his first wife Nilda, Mike developed acts to mambo, samba, tango, and popular music. .... Their dance acts often included more jazz and ballet steps than mambo, making them appealing to broader audiences than mambo purists.

They performed throughout New York and beyond at venues including: the New York Palace Theatre, New York Radio City Music Hall, New York Winter Garden Theatre, Roseland Ballroom, Raleigh Hotel in the Catskills, Chez Paris in Chicago, and Bill Miller' Riviera in New Jersey. ...

I could not find any videos of Terrace dancing.

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During the year 2013, Terrace wrote a blog, which includes the following photographs.

Michael Terrace and his second wife Elita

Michael and Elita Terrace

Michael Terrace lifting a female dancer