Out of the Corner, by Jennifer Grey
Continued from Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4
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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.)
The Wikipedia article about the play includes the following passages:
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.
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| 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.
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Continued in Part 6
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