This blog discusses the movie Dirty Dancing, which was released in 1987 and starred Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze. The articles discuss:
* literary aspects, such as characterization, motivation, interactions;
* the music and dances;
* the production of the movie;
* critical reactions.
Chapter 10, titled "Acting 'As If''" and Chapter 11, titled "When My Baby Goes to Rio" tell Jennifer's life from the middle of 1978 until middle of 1980, when she studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in Manhattan.
Grey never wanted to attend a normal college. She always wanted an acting career, primarily in live theater. She would have preferred to begin her career already in her high-school years, but her parents insisted that she graduate from high school. Her parents only reluctantly allowed her to take a few steps into her career (professional photographs, a few auditions, etc.) while still in high school.
Her parents supported her decision to attend The Playhouse School emotionally and financially. They paid for her to do singing and dance lessons after school hours. Jennifer worked in a clothing store on Saturdays to earn extra spending money.
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The school's webpage describes the first year and second year of instruction. The school must have changed much since the 1970s, but the school's obvious mission is to develop in the students practical skills to perform in live theater. There are classes in acting techniques, voice, music, singing, dance, Shakespeare, etc.
(Jennifer's mother Joan had attended the school, but had dropped out during the first year.)
Jennifer Grey describes the school as follows:
That summer [1978], I was accepted into the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. I was the youngest person admitted into the program. Most of my classmates had already spent at least some time in college.
The Playhouse was a full-time nine-to-five, five-days-a-week, potentially two-year program. .... The first-year class was made up of a hundred students, with only twenty-five "invited back" [for the second year].
The curriculum at the Playhouse was rounded out with classes in speech, Linklater voice work, along with dance classes and movement for actors. But the primary focus was on getting a solid foundation of the Meisner technique. There was the fundamental "repetition exercise" that Sandy Meisner, who founded the Playhouse, had invented, which was designed to force you to take the focus off yourself and put it 100 percent on your partner, which would eventually train you to "really listen to" and "work off" the other person. ....
An important element of the instruction was criticism -- often quite harsh -- of the students' performances.
No one was safe from being torn to shreds. When I was the one in the crosshairs of this ego-shattering event, it felt like I was getting mugged, but from the safety of my folding chair in the audience, when watching the teacher mercilessly go after one of my classmates .... this correction, as brutal as it was, somehow seemed to justify the means.
Inevitably, this devastated student became more beautiful, more real, instantly more compelling. If you could take what they were dishing out, the reward was doing good work. ....
That program was the hardest thing I had ever done. The pressure was great. Every exercise. Every scene. You did not want to fuck up. If you didn't do the work, it was obvious to everyone. Every day was brutal. And exciting. And I was committed to it.
Grey was accepted into the school's second year, and she graduated. She obviously feels the school gave her a good education for her later acting career.
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During her Playhouse years, Grey had a romance with a 39-year-old filmmaker named Patrice de la Falaise, who had a lot of family money. He and she did a lot of sex and cocaine.
After she completed the school's first year, he invited her to holiday with him in Brazil. Her parents tried to talk her out of this relationship and out of this trip.
While she was in Brazil, he paid little attention to her, having become more interested in the comedienne Gilda Radner, whom he had likewise invited -- unknown to Jennifer. Grey and Radner both got mad at him about this two-girlfriends holiday, and so they both broke up with him. Grey's Chapter 11 tells her experience with this man.
I was a paranoid, coked-up teenager, sleeping with a middle-age man I barely knew. .... I was stuck in some alternate reality. .... When I got back [from Brazil] to my parents' apartment ... I was almost catatonic. I was the most depressed I'd ever felt.
Grey got over that man, but she generally was living a life that was physically and emotionally unhealthy. However, she graduated from the Playhouse school in 1980 and then began her acting career.
Chapter 7, titled "Gypsies, Tramps, and Sleaze"; Chapter 8, titled "Good Headshot"; and Chapter 9 , titled "I Started With Men" tell Jennifer's life until the middle of 1978, when she graduated from high school.
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Jennifer had liked her eighth-grade year in California. Although her family lived in Malibu, she and a few friends commuted 45-minutes each way to a " super progressive private school" in North Hollywood.
The culture and emphasis of the place was on the individual and on the creative -- writing, music, dance, filmmaking, photography. Drawing outside the lines is what you were rewarded for. I felt challenged but not overwhelmed. I loved learning from these obviously very smart people whom I really looked up to.
All of a sudden, I understood about intellectual stimulation, the kind that happens in an educational setting that aligns with your highest ideals. To do something because you're excited by it. To have peers whose interests are in sync with your own.
It was such a heart-centered school, small but felt like a large family, where the older kids were big brothers and sisters. There were traditions, rituals, all-school assemblies, and monthly folk dancing at lunchtime in the courtyard, where we got to mingle a bit with the older kids.
Jennifer developed an eighth-grade crush on an older boy, Steven Doran.
I was horny, sure, but not enough to do anything about it beyond swooning over them [a couple older boys] from afar. And there was this other senior, Steve Doran. I had a crazy bad crush on him, and he knew it.
The only constant in my life, as far back as I can remember, is that I've always been in some state of romantic obsession, with the singleness of focus on an object of desire, a solitary crush, like an anchor. And Steve Doran was that guy for me in eighth grade. He seemed charmed by me, but nothing ever was going to happen. He though I was "cute".
He was part of the filmmaker crowd, with unkept, dark, shoulder-length hair. Always with a movie camera perched on his shoulder. He looked like a grown-up, had a five o'clock shadow, was scruffy like an arty filmmaker as opposed to a teenage boy.
My first drug of choice was romantic fantasy. It fired me up, focused me, and gave me a safe place to escape to.
In eighth grade, I continued my run of being "the new girl" in yet another school, but finally, I'd landed where I belonged. It was the happiest I'd been in any school ever. I loved it. I'd found my people. ....
However, Jennifer's happiness was interrupted because her father had been hired to star in a new Broadway musical play -- Goodtime Charley -- and so the family moved from Malibu to Manhattan in late 1974. (Patrick Swayze, then about 23 years old, was a dancer in this play.)
Goodtime Charley is a musical .... a humorous take on actual historical events, it focuses on the Dauphin of France, who evolves from a hedonistic young man enamored of women in general (and Joan of Arc in particular) into a regal king while Joan follows her voices to her tragic fate.
The show was originally announced under the title Charley and Joan, with Al Pacino and Barbara Harris as the intended leads. It underwent extensive changes throughout its development stage, especially when Joel Grey expressed interest in playing the lead. The script and score were rewritten significantly in order to tailor the piece to his personality and talents.
The producers were so keen on casting Ann Reinking as Joan they put everything on hold while she recovered from a back injury she had sustained while performing in Over Here!.
The delay would prove to be damaging, since Grey had been signed for the film Buffalo Bill and the Indians and had limited time to commit to the stage project. ....
The musical opened on Broadway on March 3, 1975 at the Palace Theatre, where it ran for only 104 performances and twelve previews, closing on May 31 when the producers were unable to find a name star to replace the departing Grey.
An original cast recording was released by RCA.
That cast recording includes the following songs performed by Joel Grey:
Joel Grey had to quit this Broadway show in mid-1975 in order to participate in the filming of the movie Buffalo Bill and the Indians. The movie starred Paul Newman, and Joel Grey had the second billing.
After that movie, Joel Grey returned to live theater, playing a leading role in the play Marco Polo Sings a Solo. The Wikipedia article about that play includes the following passages:
The play is set in "...1999, the place an island off the coast of Norway. Stony McBride [played by Joel Grey], a young movie director and adopted son of an aging Hollywood star, is writing a film about Marco Polo, in which, it is hoped, his father will make a comeback. Stony is also attempting to deal with his attractive wife, a former concert pianist whose lover, a dynamic young politician who has gotten hold of the cure for cancer, is also on hand.
Adding to the rapidly multiplying complications are Stony's mother (a transsexual, as she later confesses); a friend named Frank (who has been in space orbit for the past five years); a maid (who is impregnated astrally by Frank); and another friend, Larry (who is fitted with a set of mechanical legs).
There is also an earthquake; the discovery of a planet; and the birth of a new hero (Stony himself?); all coming together, within the bizarre action of the play, to yield some chilling, albeit very funny, glimpses of the future that may await us all.
The play was produced by Joseph Papp for the New York Shakespeare Festival at The Public Theater, from January 12, 1977 to March 6, 1977.
So, during the years 1974 - 1977, Joel Grey was prospering in his acting career.
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Meanwhile, Joel's high-school daughter Jennifer -- until then a well-adjusted "good girl" -- became a very bad girl. She failed some of her high-school classes, she went to movie theaters to watch pornographic movies, she began engaging in sexual intercourse at age of 15, she consumed a lot of cocaine, she spent school nights in night clubs.
The book does not explain clearly why Jennifer went off the rails during those years. Those chapters do not mention her mother Joan, and the main passage about her father Joel tells how he taught Jennifer to smoke marijuana.
I speculate that Jennifer's parents suffered severe marriage problems during Jennifer's high-school years. Furthermore, Jennifer was so pained by those problems that she could not bear to write about them in this otherwise detailed and frank autobiography.
In this blog article, I will not tell further about Jennifer's misbehavior during her high-school years. Buy the book and read it yourself.
Jennifer summarizes her high-school years as follows (page 122):
How does such a darling girl, growing up with all her earthly needs met, adored by her parents, a girl with so much spunk and moxie, find herself in situations I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy? ....
My parents didn't really have any idea of the kind of trouble I was up to, and though they weren't thrilled about my current romantic situation, they didn't feel like they had any recourse. ....
When I try to imagine my own daughter at sixteen, playing house, essentially living with a grown-ass man, doing tons of blow, popping Quaaludes, and going to Studio 54 -- not to mention being lied to, cheated on, then gifted various and sundry STDs and unwanted pregnancies -- it makes me physically ill.
No teenager should be swimming in waters that dark, at the mercy of grown men who know better, but when you're a sixteen-year-old girl, nobody's going to tell you to put you clothes on and go home to your parents. ....
In re-reading my deeply personal, raw, unexpurgated journals, I only now realize I survived these soul-crushing indecencies by minimizing them .... I thought I could handle some of the gnarliest, most messed-up shit. In retrospect that naïveté simply breaks my heart for my younger self.
I thought of myself as an adult. The last thing I wanted to be was a child.
Jennifer wrote a diary during those years and includes some excerpts in her autobiography.
Jennifer Grey, about age 16
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While researching for this blog article, I came across this YouTube video showing Joel Grey on a television show in 1954, when he was about 22 years old.
Chapter 3, titled "Keep Care of Me"; Chapter 4, titled "Spin the Bottle"; Chapter 5 , titled "Interesting" and Chapter 6, titled "August 9, 1974" tell Jennifer's life into 1974, when she was 14 years old.
The writing continues to be intelligent and eloquent.
Practically all readers of this books will be females. As one of the few male readers, I was particularly interested in Jennifer's memories of her own girlhood's concerns, perceptions and experiences. She writes about older girls she admired, about wanting to grow breasts, about getting crushes on boys, about going clothes-shopping with her mother, about being scared by a man unexpectedly pawing her, and about loving horses. This aspect of the book might be commonplace for the book's female readers, but it was quite new and interesting for me.
Jennifer's life during those years was unusual because her father was a successful entertainer. Her parents traveled away from home frequently, leaving their two children at home with the family's nanny. The family vacationed abroad. The family moved to a different home every year or two.
Although the family was not fantastically rich, it was financially very comfortable. Jennifer's mother dressed fashionably. Jennifer flew round-trip from New York to California to get her braces removed. Jennifer attended a private bi-lingual school where she learned to speak French with a perfect accent.
When Jennifer was about 11 and 12 years old, her family lived in Malibu, California, where her neighbors were the family of Larry Hagman, the male star of the television show I Dream of Jeannie.
Joel Grey and Larry Hagman became best friends. Jennifer was about the same age as the daughter Heidi Hagman, and Jennifer's brother Jimmy Grey was about the same age as Preston Hagman.
The actor Peter Fonda was a family friend. The future actor Sean Penn was a classmate.
Jennifer's mother Joan (the book does not explain why she went by the name Jo Wilder) was quite a character. She sometimes walked around naked in the home. She used lots of body lotions and perfume. She was a stickler for table manners. She practiced many health fads, including yoga and meditation.
The book gave me the impression that during those years Jennifer was happy, smart and well adjusted. The only misbehavior she mentioned was that a girlfriend talked her into shoplifting a bottle of nail polish.
Like most girls, she was self-conscious about her appearance. She was a late-developer. While some people around her were casual about nudity, she herself was always modest.
Her younger brother Jimmy, who was adopted, was a handsome, charming, blond boy. Jennifer's feelings were hurt when her mother praised him as the cutest child.
I was lying on the wall-to-wall cream-colored carpeting .... The living room, in the reflected afternoon light, was dappled pale green from the lush Connecticut summer. The air was humid and thick.
And my mother said, "Your brother is beautiful. You are .... interesting-looking. I was thirteen years old. I have no recollection of the context, or what prompted her assessment, or if I had even ventured to ask her opinion, but I do remember it knocking the wind out of me. It was like a gong, or an anvil from a cartoon landing on my head.
I knew my mom loved me, and if she was just stating an unequivocal fact, which it seemed that she was. I certainly don't think there was ever any conscious malice behind it, but it's almost all I can tell you about that summer [of 1973 when she had just turned 13 years old].
Chapter 2, titled "Who Jew You Think You Are?" (pages 40-53) is about Grey's Jewish ancestry, all of which was Eastern European Jews. Her paternal grandparents were born in the USA, but her maternal grandparents immigrated to the USA as teenagers. The book does not mention any religious activities beyond celebrating Hanukkah.
Several of her ancestors were professional entertainers -- or at least aspired to be such -- and socialized largely with entertainers and artists.
I had been born into this extended family of Broadway royalty. My parents' usual crew was not so exclusively show folk -- there were plenty of world-class writers, painters, and journalists -- but overall, their closest circle of friends was the créme de la créme of musical theater. I grew up surrounded by this community of legit geniuses, more legends than mortals. And with them loving me like I was their own because they loved by mom and dad.
Jennifer's paternal grandfather was Mickey Katz, a professional musician and comic. I already have written about him in a previous blog article.
Both of Jennifer's paternal grandparents grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. When Mickey Katz (born in 1909) was still a teenager, he began earning a living as a musician, playing saxophone and clarinet in bands. He married a Cleveland girl, Grace Epstein (Jennifer's grandmother), in 1930, and their first child Joel Katz (Jennifer's father) was born in Cleveland in 1932.
Grace was active in the Cleveland Play House and arranged for her son Joel to play children's roles in plays there.
In 1946, Mickey Katz began playing for a band called Spike Jones and his City Slickers, which featured a lot of spoof and parody songs.
Because that band was based in Los Angeles, the Katz family moved there in 1946. Mickey began developing his own repertoire of spoof and parody songs, with a Yiddish angle.
Mickey recorded his songs on record albums and also performed them live in a Los Angeles theater. Mickey included his son Joel in those theater performances. Then in the 1950s Joel began to perform, apart from his father, in nightclubs.
The following video shows Mickey and Joel appearing together on The Mike Douglas Show in 1973.
Jennifer's maternal grandparents immigrated to the USA as teenagers. Jennifer's maternal grandmother Clara wanted to become a professional pianist, but her family convinced her to study to become a pharmacist instead. Then at pharmacy school Clara fell in love with a fellow Jewish student, Izzie Brower. Clara and Izzie got married, and Clara dropped out of pharmacy school to raise a family. Izzie graduated from the school and did become a pharmacist in Manhattan. As a housewife, Clara continued to study classical piano.
Their daughter Joan (Jennifer's mother) worked in her father's pharmacy and took care of her mother, who suffered various health problems. In her free evenings, Joan participated in amateur theater groups in Manhattan. Doing so, she became acquainted with Joel Grey (he had changed his name from Katz), but they did not become romantically involved until they happened to encounter each other in Los Angeles (Joan had traveled there on business ). Joan and Joel married in 1958, and their daughter Jennifer was born in 1960. The Grey family was a show-biz family. Jennifer writes:
A life in show business was all I ever knew or frankly could conceive of. The most common denominator from whence I came was a desire to be a performer, and preferably a star, because that meant you actually would be able to make a living. Otherwise, you were just some schlub with a hobby or a dashed dream.
I didn't see anyone of my parents' crowd having to take a "job" job. They all seemed to be living their best lives, passionately engaged, fulfilling their calling, which looked like the most fun way to live in the world. Creatively alive, making use of all of themselves. Never a dull moment. I didn't know how they did it exactly, but I saw firsthand that it was possible, and I just automatically assumed that I would do the same.
Although Jennifer does not say so explicitly in her book, her female ancestors -- her grandmothers Grace and Clara and her mother Joan -- must have felt frustrated in their own artistic ambitions. They got stuck at home being housewives, mothers and helpmeets, while their husbands traveled and succeeded as professional entertainers. Jennifer's mother Joan did continue to perform occasionally in plays, but any such activities had to fit into her supporting Joel's career.
In Chapter 1 (pages 21 - 39), titled "Life Is a Cabaret", Grey tells mainly about her relationship with her father Joel Grey in the years 1966-1968, when she was six-to-eight-years old and he was performing in the Broadway musical Cabaret. This chapter is delightful.
Joel Grey had become a Broadway star in 1961, when Jennifer was one-year old and he played the lead role in the musical Come Blow Your Horn. In the following years he played a series of leading roles.
Then in 1966 Grey brilliantly created the role of the Master of Ceremonies role in Cabaret and continued to star in that Broadway hit into 1968.
He performed the role on Broadway eight times a week, and little Jennifer often went to the theater with him and watched him in his dressing room as he prepared and then from backstage as he performed.
For me, there was no place cooler on earth than hanging out backstage with my dad on Saturday matinees, following his every move as his diminutive shadow. Watching him apply his Kabukiesque makeup ....
I was thrilled when I got him all to myself on a Saturday afternoon. I would sit quietly in his dressing room, fully cognizant of the special honor and privilege it was to bear witness to this secret preshow ritual and transformation.
It felt like a delicious mix of fizzy and calm, but mostly of reverence. The makeup mirror was an altar, my dad's face, like the center of a sunflower, both making the art and being the art simultaneously. One step removed, I'd watch every brushstroke in rapt attention, gazing at my father's reflection from behind him, the image framed by the tiny globes of vanity mirror lights. From inside his dressing room, I could feel the kinetic energy of the company percolating just outside his open door, the raucous laughing, singing, vocal warm-ups with booming scales echoing through the stairwell. ....
The scantily clad Kit Kat girls warmed up their powerful legs like giant nutcrackers, doing their grand battlements in the bowels of the Broadhurst Theatre. These idols of mine, their powdery faces in dramatic showgirl makeup, smelling strongly of hairspray, pressing scratchy sequins and satin against me as they fawned over me, Joel's little girl, Jenny. Kissing and hugging me gingerly, careful not to smudge their applied greasepaint.
The visceral pressure mounted as we drew closer to the entrance of the stage. I could hear and feel the thrum of the audience's rowdy anticipation, muffled by the heavy velvet curtain. It was a serious thing, this transition from skipping down the sidewalk with fun dad, to focused dad, gathering energy ....
The writing is eloquent, full of sensations, details and thoughts. Although Jennifer was very young, she lived this experience many times, and she recalls it vividly.
After the matinee, the Grey family often ate in a Broadway restaurant "where all the show folk congregated, where my did knew everyone, everyone knew him, where there was always a good table and a warm welcome waiting. He was beloved, and he lived us."
In general, the Grey family's social life was full of actors, musicians, writers, directors, producers and other "show folk". There were many parties. Since Joel Grey was so successful, the family lived comfortably and happily in Manhattan's Upper West Side.
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Jennifer's mother, Jo Wilder
Jennifer's mother Jo Wilder was a theater actress too, although not as active successful as Joel Grey. She had to sacrifice her career somewhat to be a mother to Jennifer and to a younger, adopted son, James. As an actress herself, Jo Wilder fit in well with Joel Grey's theater life. The mother and two children were "a team" that supported the father.
Jennifer was a "daddy's girl", and he doted on her. She remembers that when she got sick, then he more than her mother took care of her.
Jennifer and Joel Grey
The book describes in detail how excited and proud she was to watch the television broadcast of her father winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the 1972 movie Cabaret.
Jennifer Grey basically wrote her autobiography herself but then hired a professional writer to help her finish it.
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In the Acknowledgments chapter (pages 333 - 335), Grey thanks the following people (links added):
Dani Shapiro, who insisted I had a book in me and that I needed to write it myself.
Elissa Altman, a gifted writer and teacher of memoir, who gave me such thoughtful notes, and steered me toward her editor, Pamela Cannon ....
My wonderful editor at Ballantine Books, Pamela Cannon, for trusting in my ability as a writer.
And Barbara Jones, a freelance editor, who was as close to a miracle as I could ever hope to have in my sidecar for the last stretch of this journey. What I couldn't have anticipated was that after months of exhaustive, intensive Zoom meetings, I would find in Barbara one of the most exquisite collaborators, someone I trusted implicitly, as well as a kindred spirit ...
From April to September of 2021, she [Grey] had daily coaching sessions by Zoom with Barbara Jones, an editor and publishing industry veteran who helped shape the memoir.
“The first thing Jennifer did was give me a massive manuscript, something she called the whole enchilada,” Jones said in a phone interview. “She’s one of the most highly verbal people I’ve ever met. I’d say, ‘You need a word here that means this’ and she’d spit out 10 synonyms, rapid fire. Then she’d pick one.
.... It was more like, let me just get down on my computer, with these two fingers because I don't even type ... really slowly, which made me actually take my time because of how slow I am with a computer. I would just try to get what I knew out. Once I got what I knew out, then I would put it aside. Then I would just get the next thing that I could remember. .... I would just do it in little dreamlike ... snapshots. Then I almost felt like it started to meet me. The book started to give me more. I remember when I was first thinking, maybe I should try writing ...
I was living with her [my daughter, born in about 2001] during the pandemic when I was, in earnest, writing every day. I'd started a couple years ago. Once the pandemic hit, all I was doing was working [on my autobiography]. ...
I wrote it pretty much for me, but also for her. ... She didn't know me as a girl. She didn't know me as a struggling actress. She didn't know me really getting beat up in the romantic world in my adventures. ... I thought, any way I can show her what is in her, in her genes, the trauma that's expressed in her genes and the anxiety and all these things as well as the incredible, great stuff I have ....
The writing of it was such a herculean effort for me. The fact that I did it myself and that I have this wonderful editor named Barbara Jones who I hired the last few months. We did hours just on Zoom, never in person. She helped shaped it. I can't believe I did it.
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Jones advised Grey to begin her book with a "Prologue" (pages 3 - 17), Grey writes about her nose. I summarize that chapter as follows:
At age 25, Grey was satisfied with her nose, but her mother talked her into consulting three nose surgeons. Grey's acting career was stagnant, and she was working as a waitress. Grey consulted two of the three surgeons soon, but then waited about four years, until she was 29 years old, to consult the third surgeon.
The Prologue does not explain that Grey was 25 years old in 1985. She was selected to star in the movie Dirty Dancing in 1986. She became famous when the movie was released to the theaters in 1987, but then her career stagnated again. Eventually, when she was 29-years-old in 1989, she consulted the third surgeon.
The third surgeon (he is not named in the book) operated on her nose, and Grey was delighted by the result. The Prologue includes this photograph of the new nose that made her so happy.
The surgeon removed the nose's hump and made the tip more pointed. Otherwise the nose remained about the same size, and so Jennifer felt that her appearance had changed only slightly..
The following photograph is not in the book, but it shows the previous hump on her nose:
I think her new nose is seen in the following video clip of a television appearance in February 1990, soon after her surgery. Her nose remains big, but the hump is gone. (Or maybe I am completely wrong; this might be her original nose.)
Grey felt that the nose surgery boosted her movie career. In about 1990, she was selected to star in a movie titled Wind, which was filmed in 1991 and was released to the theaters in 1992.
For next YouTube video, Click on Watch on YouTube and then skip forward to about 1:00.
Toward the end of the filming of Wind in 1991, however, a problem developed in her new nose. The white cartilage at the tip of her nose became slightly visible through the skin -- especially since her nose skin had become quite tan during the filming.
Therefore, her surgeon had to fix that problem. It's my understanding that the surgeon cut off some of that cartilage, and therefore the nose was shortened.
Grey was quite upset that her nose was shortened, because she felt like she now looked like a different person. People no longer recognized her. Also, she did not want the public to think that she vainly had decided to change her nose drastically.
In my own opinion, the surgeon did not botch the operation. He did change Grey's nose according to her desires, but a problem eventually developed, and so the surgeon had to adjust the nose. The result was not what Grey had wanted, but the final result is a pretty nose. (Here is an interesting article about Grey's nose surgery.)
Unfortunately, a few scenes of Wind had to be re-filmed after the final surgery, and Grey's shortened nose caused some complications in the re-filming. Later, when the movie did not succeed critically and commercially, the director Carroll Ballard (according to Grey) blamed Grey's nose problem.
After the movie Wind, Grey's career stagnated again for many years, and she blames her nose problem. Here is my basic thinking about Grey's movie career:
* She was born to star in the role of Baby Houseman in Dirty Dancing.
* She was born to play just supporting characters in all her other movies.
Before now, the only article I have written about the movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, was a 2017 blog article titled The Origin of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. That blog article was based on a radio interview with Peter Sagal who in 1998 had written a movie script about the real-life experiences of a young American woman who lived in Cuba during the late 1950s, when the Cuban Revolution happened. That script -- which did not include any music or dancing -- never became a movie, but several years later the script was rewritten to make the 2004 movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, which has some similarities to the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing.
Now I have re-read my 2017 blog article, and I read there that I had watched the movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights once, several years before 2017. Now, however, I have no memory that I ever had watched that movie until a few days ago, when I happened to notice it on my cable-television schedule. Based on my recent watching of the movie, I will share my thoughts about it.
In my opinion, the movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is a good movie, but not a great movie. Anybody who loves the great movie Dirty Dancing should watch also the good movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.
(My wife watched Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights with me, and she thought it was a great movie.)
Here are a couple YouTube videos that show some of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.
The second YouTube video's soundtrack is different from the movie's soundtrack, but the video provides a good visual selection of the movie's scenes.
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Why isn't Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights a great movie? I offer two reasons.
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Reason 1
The female actress Romola Garai corresponds to the female actress Jennifer Grey, and the male actor Diego Luna corresponds to the male actor Patrick Swayze. Garai and Luna are fine actors, but they are about the same physical size.
I don't care if a romantic couple comprises a man who is not significantly larger than the woman, but if you want to make a romantic movie that is great, then the actor lead must be significantly larger than the female actress. That size difference must be a principle of movie casting.
The producers of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights should have paid the six-foot-tall, untra-handsome Ricky Martin however much money was necessary to hire him for the male lead.
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Reason 2
There's too much politics in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. In particular, a few of the Cuban characters express a lot of resentment towards American tourists and businessmen. Maybe Americans deserved resentment and criticism from Cubans in those years, but the movie itself does not depict any American wrong-doing.
(The hotel's Cuban employees are forbidden to socialize with the hotel's American but that is just a normal prohibition at hotels everywhere.)
A movie's popularity in America will be limited if the movie includes a lot of gratuitous anti-American remarks.
Eleanor Bergstein's movie script included several political and ethnic remarks that were removed before the movie was finished. The removal of such remarks improved the movie Dirty Dancing.
Now I will summarize what Harvey Aronson's book says about Joey Gallo's friendship with Jerry and Marta Orbach.
Joey Gallo
In 1961, Gallo was convicted for extortion and so was imprisoned until March 1971. While in prison he read seriously and apparently decided to quit his previous criminal life. He thought he might earn a legal living by working as a consultant for books and movies about criminals and prisoners.
By coincidence, when Gallo was released, Jerry Orbach was involved in the filming of a movie that would be called The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight and that would be released to the theaters in December 1971.
Here is the movie's trailer, where at 0:30 you can see Orbach playing the role of Salvatore 'Kid Sally' Palumbo, a character based on Gallo.
Aronson writes:
[quote]
Joey was also looking for a sideline, and the entertainment field seemed custom-made for a man of his talent and experience. After all, look how well the book and film The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight had done. And that was just a takeoff; Kid Sally Palumbo, the book's protagonist, represented an author's license. Joey represented the real thing. They had filmed part of the movie just a few blocks from President Street [where the Gallo gang was based], and the [Gallo] gang was able to tell Joey all about it.
Especially Armando the dwarf, whose personality had continued to blossom. On one occasion, Armando had gotten someone to drive him by the movie location in a Cadillac. Armando sat up very straight in the car, turned on his best beetle-browed stare, and as they passed the moviemakers, he hollered out the window, "Smile pretty for the camera, you mother-fuckers. Later Armando and the dwarf [Herve Villechaize] who acted in the movie were brought together for a sitdown at which they discussed family trees to see if they could be related.
Another time, Jimmy Breslin, who had written the book, came down to watch the movie being shot. While he was there, Breslin, who had covered the Gallo-Profaci war as a newspaperman, drove over to President Street to see if any of the gang members were still putting on their dark glasses and $200 suits and sunning themselves in beach chairs on the sidewalk. Instead, he found Armando relaxing on a straight-backed chair in the middle of the street while ten hoods stood around him. To get by, passing cars had to go up on the curb. Armando never even looked at them. Breslin remembers thinking it sort of silly that the moviemakers were three blocks away spending money on make-believe scenes when they could have had the real thing for free.
Although he would phone Jerry Orbach, the star of the film, it's interesting that Joey never tried to get in touch with Breslin. Book projects were among Joey's ideas, and he did contact another writer — reporter Nicholas Gage, the crime specialist of the New York Times. After he got out of jail, Joey Gallo called Gage three times. The first time he said that he was interested in writing a book and that they should get together. He said he knew Gage was of Greek extraction and that he had a lot of Greek friends.
"We'll have to go to some Greek clubs together," Joey said. "Drink ouzo, dance some Greek dances."
The second time was several months later, and Joey apologized for the long interval. He said marital problems were the cause. "Are you divorced?" he asked Gage, who said no, that he was happily married.
"l'm getting a divorce," Joey said. "lt's a very emotional thing."
The third time he called, Joey had already met the Orbachs, but he said he was still interested in writing a book with Gage.
"It wouldn't be about what you want to write about [Gallo's crimes]," he said. "It would be about prison."
Gage said he wasn't interested.
The second phone call to Gage had touched on another twist for Joey Gallo's roller coaster. Joey and Jeffie's remarriage lasted only months. By March, 1972, Jeffe and their daughter were in Los Angeles, where Jeffe was getting a divorce.
Around this time, Joey told a police officer that he wanted to get into the entertainment world. He wanted to get together with a writer, he said, or become an adviser on films. Joey said he had a girlfriend who had theatrical contacts and that she would help him get into that field. He was apparently talking about Sina Essary, a bright, attractive dental assistant whom he had known briefly before he went to prison and whose daughter was a child actress.
In January 1972, shortly after the opening of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, Joey got in touch with Jerry and Marta Orbach. According to Marta Orbach, a police Officer of Joey's acquaintance had told him that he'd met the actor who was supposed to have played Joey in the movie and that "he was a nice guy, not like an actor."
Joey phoned the Orbachs, took them to dinner in Brooklyn and wowed them with his charm and knowledge. Marta Orbach found him "brilliant." It was at this first meeting that she nearly "fell into a plate of spaghetti" when he asked her whether she preferred Camus or Sartre.
Mrs. Orbach has been quoted as saying that she indicated a preference to Camus, whereupon Joey said he'd go with Sartre. He explained that he thought Camus was suicidal and that he preferred survivors.
"I challenged him on Camus being suicidal," Mrs. Orbach would be quoted as saying. "He referred to the auto accident in which Camus was killed and said that anybody who went in a car with somebody driving that fast was suicidal.
January [1972] was a good month for Joey. He met the Orbachs, and he was able to say good-bye — at least for a while — to an old adversary. [Gallo's main enemy] Carmine Persico's appeals ran out, and he was shipped to the federal prison in Atlanta .....
As the winter ended, Joey Gallo's acquaintanceship with Jerry and Marta Orbach grew into friendship. The friendship would last three months, and some of its aspects would be over-publicized. Joey knew his way around New York's night spots long before he met the Orbachs, and although they went out together, they were not constant companions on Manhattan's celebrity trail. The Orbachs and Joey attended three Broadway shows and two nightclubs together. They were also seen twice at Sardi's and twice at an East Side hangout called Elaine's. ....
More important to Joey, perhaps, were the Sunday brunches in the early evening at the Orbachs' home. It was there at informal gatherings where the guests chatted, played pool and helped themselves to spaghetti and salad that the Orbachs introduced him to some of their good friends. Or, as Marta Orbach told an interviewer, "to the people we loved best."
The Sunday evenings were described by Charlotte Curtis in an article in [the magazine] Harper's Bazaar. The article was entitled 'The Last Delicious Days of Joey Gallo or Mafia Chic." It started with Joey Gallo saying, "People like me are a plague on people like you," and Marta Orbach answering, "No, Joey. the reverse is true." In the article, Miss Curtis told how Joey spilled spaghetti sauce on publisher Thomas Guinzburg's shoes, cleared dinner plates and had a deep conversation with the modish D.D. Ryan, who said: '"He knew so much about life's values."
Mrs. Orbach said something that might be of special interest to Teddy Moss [the victim of Gallo's extortion in 1961]. She said Joey was very shy. "He needed people who were as bright as he was," Marta told Miss Curtis. "We never invited anyone who wouldn't understand this. Just our closest friends. Which meant that Joey got to meet people like publisher Guinzburg, writer Bruce Jay Friedman, playwright Neil Simon, producer Harold Prince, actress Joan Hackett and comedian David Steinberg.
Through the Orbachs, Joey also met writer Peter Stone and his wife. When the Stones' dog was stolen, Marta Orbach contacted Joey, who tried to be helpful. He seemed suspicious that a dog-napping ring might be involved and went out Of his way to help Mrs. Stone interview people who had answered an ad she put in the paper seeking the dog's return.
Most of his new acquaintances seemed impressed with Joey. ....
"Breslin's book had portrayed Joey as a clown," Jerry Orbach would tell Time magazine. "Then when I met Joey, I was absolutely amazed to find out that maybe he had been a wild kind of nut before he went to prison, but something had happened to him inside. He'd done nothing but read there, and it was startling to talk with him."
Marta Orbach told Time that Joey activated her Italian background, that being with him was like being with her father. She said he called her "Momma" or sometimes "the Big Job". She said it was hard for Joey to say thank you. "He might hug you or smile," she said. "But he wouldn't say much. When we had his wedding at our house .... Joey said in the car afterward, "Nobody ever gave me a day like that. I'll always be grateful."
The wedding was the marriage of Joey and Sina in mid-March. "It was some wedding," The New York Times reported. The Times account ... continued as follows:
Joseph Gallo, known before he spent years in prison for conspiracy as Crazy Joe Gallo, leader of an underworld faction in Brooklyn, married Sina Essary, a dental assistant. The wedding was performed by the Reverend William Glenesk, a minister best known for having united Tiny Tim and "Miss Vicki" in matrimony in a national televised ceremony. Allan Jones, the tenor, sang 'The
Lord's Prayer," and looking on approvingly were Jerry Orbach, the actor, and his wife, Marta Curro, who is helping Gallo write his memoirs. The wedding took place in Orbach's home.
A photograph from the wedding of Joey Gallo and Sina Essary (in the middle). Marta Orbach is on the left, and comedian David Steinberg is on the right. (The photo is not from Aronson's book)
Even outside his new social precincts, Joey played the responsible citizen. He had made friends with a chaplain in prison, and he spoke to Catholic youth groups. ....
Apparently, Joey's wife and sister and his new friends felt he was going straight. "I'll never go back there," Joey told Broadway columnist Earl Wilson in reference to the rackets. "I think there is nothing out there for me but death." Marta Orbach was quoted as saying she knew Joey was straight because she checked him out with a detective friend who said he was all right.
Joey pushed the reformation theme. The day before his birthday, he told a law officer that he was bored with President Street and the rackets. He said life in the underworld had lost its kick, that Albert was doing well and that the gang would now be able to succeed without him.
No, sir, said Joey, he was through with all that; he was going to concentrate on the entertainment world.
But it was also reported that during the week before his birthday, Joey was in Little Italy boasting that he was taking what he wanted. Neither federal nor city police officials in charge of investigating organized crime believed for an instant that Joey Gallo was giving up the rackets. Other people close to the mob scene felt the same way.
"His men were always moving in," says a crime reporter.
"That thing of his reforming," says a parole official, "that was the greatest myth of all." ....
Federal and New York law enforcement authorities had been keeping tabs on Joey Gallo from the moment he got out of jail, which, they figure, is when he returned to the rackets. ... With [Joseph] Colombo taking the initiative and New England Mafia boss Raymond Patriarca acting as a mediator, peace had been arranged with the Gallos [and the Colombo Mafia family]. But Colombo didn't entirely fulfill his promise to "spread the bread around" and .... Joe Gallo's position was that the armistice wasn't binding on him because he had been in jail when it was negotiated. ...
Police learned that soon after his release, Gallo demanded $100;000 from Colombo as the price for keeping in line. Colombo refused, and the Gallo gang moved in on Colombo policy and loan-sharking operations in Brooklyn. According to information obtained by federal authorities, the two gang leaders held a sitdown and Colombo made a money offer that Joey felt was insultingly low. Joey slapped Colombo and walked out.
If the Colombo gang believed that the shooting was organized by Gallo, then that belief could have motivated the murder of Gallo on April 7, 1972.
Having read Aronson's book, I now feel sure that Frank Sheeran had nothing to do with the murder of Gallo, except that he later bragged falsely to his own biographer that he himself had murdered Gallo. Aronson provides plenty of details indicating that Gallo was murdered by Carmine DiBiase.
Furthermore, having read also an article titled Soul Assassin: The Brief Life and Death of Jerome Johnson by Michael Gonzales, I now think it's quite likely that Gallo had nothing to do with the shooting of Colombo. Is so, then perhaps Gallo really was trying to live a legal life, as the Orbachs believed.
