Years later, Horner was interviewed by Sue Tabashnik, who was doing research for a book that was titled The Fans' Love Story: How The Movie Dirty Dancing Captured The Hearts Of Millions!, which was published in 2009. Tabashnik's book is basically a series of interviews of various people who were involved in making the movie.
One of the people interviewed by Tabashnik was Steve Schwartz (also known by his stage name Steve Sands), who was Horner's dance partner at Grossinger's for many years. Horner considers that the stories she told about Schwartz to Bergstein served as a prototype for the character Johnny Castle. However, Schwartz was not interviewed by Bergstein, who based Johnny mostly on her interviews of another dancer, Michael Terrace. Schwartz and Terrace were friends.)
Anyway, Schwartz began working as a dance instructor at Grossinger's in 1954, when he was 17 years old (he lied that he was 20). As a young, single dancer, Schwartz from the very beginning of his employment took advantage of his sexual opportunities. His interview with Tabashnik includes the following passages (pages 23-24):
.... there were all kinds of dynamics that went on in the dance studio. You work for an hour or a half-hour with a woman and her husband, or a woman alone, or a man alone ... And you're dancing close to each other and all kinds of possibilities start to come up ..... which was an ongoing thing.======
It was ridiculous. The husbands would go away during the week, and they'd come up for the weekend. That was one of the major activities. ...
The two major hotels up there were Grossinger's and the Concord. Very tight security. So the "bungalow bunnies" were not allowed to come on the grounds.
Bungalow bunnies were not guests at the hotels. They lived for the summer in bungalow colonies, where were a much lower economic situation than the hotels. The husbands, working men, came up on weekends. They tried to sneak into the hotels for the entertainment, dancing and mid-week sex. There were little or no bunnies at Grossinger's or the Concord, since the security was very tight.
At the smaller hotels they were a factor. They made the staff (waiters and busboys) very happy. A very small number of bunnies may have gotten into the bigger hotels, but very few.
I'm talking about the guests at the hotel. The guests at the hotel conducted themselves as much or more so than the bungalow bunnies --- and who else but with the dance instructors? Because the waiter staff and the bellboy staff at these hotels were not permitted to mingle with the guests.
At the small hotels, it was a free-for-all ... Here, all you had were people on the athletic staff, or the dancers or the musicians, office people for the ladies to get involved with, or the ladies' daughters or sons. That was a major activity. A lot of that went on. And you can imagine, a seventeen-eighteen year old kid who wasn't too bad looking.
The kind of education I got. The women offering money and all that. That's all very true. It all happened. Big time. Big time.
Let me tell you a few stories about the Baby situation. Baby checked in every Friday and checked out the following Sunday, and new Babies checked in. And it wasn't just Baby. It was Baby's mother who took a lesson and we got involved with, and it was Baby's aunt, and it was Baby's grandmother. And this went on every week. Sometimes they stayed two weeks, sometimes a month. But there was always a fresh crop. I'm tell you this is what it was like.
The guys took much more advantage of it than the female guests. The girls weren't anywhere as promiscuous as the working guys were.
The Record Online website recently published an interview of Horner that included the following passages:
You knew the real Johnny?
That was Steve Schwartz, but he went by Steve Sands. He was my dance partner at Grossinger’s. He was a great teacher. He’d been dancing since he was a young guy.
And the women wanted him, that was true.
He was the one that was also blamed for all the robberies. We caught the little couple that was stealing also. Both of us had been teaching this couple. One night we go to the Evans Hotel, in the movie they call it the Sheldrake and the Evans was in Loch Sheldrake, and I see her take a fur coat off a chair. I said, `Oh my god, that’s the one taking money out of the cabana and stealing.′ That was true.
How did you reunite with Eleanor?
I get a call from Paul Grossinger, who says, "Jackie, you got to come up to the office." This is 1985. There sits Eleanor. She says, "After all these years I’ve been looking for you. You’re still here?"
She said she had an idea. That summer I took her all over the place. We walked all around the Grossinger grounds. I showed her all the things that happened and where they happened and how it happened. I wrote as much as I could. ...
They put it in exactly as I had said it. Exactly as it was written. Nearly every line I said to Eleanor they put in there. There were some things that went on! More that we didn’t put that in. There was enough stuff that went on, they could have given the movie an R-rating.
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