Jennifer Grey's Autobiography -- Part 07

Out of the Corner, by Jennifer Grey

Continued from Part 1,  Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6

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Chapter 12, titled "Reasons to Be Cheerful" tells Grey's life from the beginning of her acting career in 1980 until 1986, when she auditioned for Dirty Dancing. I am summarizing this one chapter in a series of four blog articles. This is the first.

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In October 1980 Grey was hired to be the under-study for the two female roles in an Off-Broadway play called Album.

It as a four-character play, divided into four scenes, chronicling the coming-of-age of two teenage couples during the sixties, struggling with impending adulthood and their awakening sexuality. The music of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys served as the soundtrack of their last few carefree years together. ...

The play was a hit, popular as well as critically acclaimed, and once it got the rave review from The New York Times, every show was sold out. The young actors were Kevin Bacon, Keith Gordon, Jenny Wright and Jan Leslie Harding, all exceptionally good. ....

Bruce MacVittie, the boys' understudy, and I were kept backstage for eight shows a week, until maybe a half hour before the curtain came down, just in case one of the actors fell sick during a performance. In a windowless prop storage room that stank of cat piss, Bruce and I were to run lines, a speed-through of the entire play, each playing two parts. From the purview of our peeling vinyl couch, we could hear the actors on stage delivering the dialogue we'd been reciting, interrupted by howls of laughter and the crack of applause through the scratchy backstage monitor.

On one occasion the actress Wright called in sick, and so Grey acted her role on stage.

After the curtain, the cast and crew gathered for a victory lap at Montana Eve around the corner, where we did tequila shots, toasting and celebrating our shared near-death experience by getting pretty loaded. I later went home to my fourth-floor walk-up studio apartment above the Madison Avenue Bookshop and promptly got wicked sick. ....

I knew how unusual and lucky it was that my very first gig was this long-running, popular and critically acclaimed Off-Broadway show, working with, if not directly, this bunch of wildly talented people at the historic Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village. It was not an easy job, or particularly satisfying ... but I learned a lot from the experience, and it got me my Actors' Equity card.

After I waited for the better part of a year for the chance to finally replace one of the girls [Wright], the producers asked me to be in a Chicago production of Album ....

The playwright (center) and cast of Album in Chicago
Jennifer Grey is the second from the right.

Although the book provides the above photograph of a four-member cast (including Grey) and of the playwright David Rimmer, the book says only that the producers "asked" her to be in the Chicago production. Grey does not reveal whether she actually did participate. She writes nothing about the Chicago production -- when, how long, reviews, anecdotes, etc. I wonder whether she is hiding something bad about the Chicago production.

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In 1982, Grey was hired to play a role in the movie Cotton Club. Grey played the wife of a gangster, who was played by the actor Nicholas Cage. 

Jennifer Grey and Nicholas Cage in the movie Cotton Club

Grey got the role by a fortuitous series of events that she tells in the book. The last such event was that the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was supposed to play that wife role, decided not to participate in the movie at the last minute, and so Grey was hired to fill in.

Grey was surprised that she was supposed to play a nude scene with Cage. Grey tells about that experience in her book. 

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In 1983, Grey played a role in the movie Red Dawn, which featured Patrick Swayze. Grey played his romantic partner. The movie portrayed some young Americans fighting against a Russian military invasion of Colorado. (Swayze's and Grey's characters were supposed to be about high-school age, but he was 31 and she was 24.) I already have described the movie in a previous blog article.

Acting with Swayze in that movie was a bad experience for Grey:

After weeks of relentless running, screaming, and killing, I was very much looking forward to shooting our tender post-coital love scene. It was shot at night inside a pup tent, and once Patrick, shirtless, slid into the sleeping bag alongside me, I could smell booze on his breath. Was this burly, manly man nervous?

He couldn't remember his lines. The script supervisor kept feeding them to him, but we could never get through the scene. John Milius, the director, finally gave up, saying he'd re-shoot it another day, which never happened.

I was crushed, but there was still my death scene to look forward to.

.... The night before we were scheduled to film my last hope for redemption. I'd smoked a joint, my nighttime ritual, and had gone to bed early, in preparation for what I considered to be my important and difficult scene of the shoot. Hearing what I thought were gunshots just outside my motel room .... my paranoia spiked and I couldn't sleep a wink. The more I couldn't sleep, the more anxious I got that I was not going to be able to deliver the goods the next day.

In the morning, when I found out that the "gunshots" had been a prank -- played by Patrick and his pack of restless "Wolverines" setting off firecrackers they'd stuck in the frame of my door — I was so angry I couldn't even look at him.

In the movie, my character has been mortally wounded, shot up by a machine gun, and she decides to blow herself up with a hand grenade so as not to slow the others. ... She begs Patrick's character to "pull the pin" for her. This scene was obviously crucial to the melodrama of the movie and hence to me. ... And this already tricky scene was made even trickier because I was furious with Patrick. I felt like he'd sabotaged my performance.

That is the end of Grey's writing about Red Dawn. The final movie included only a little of the Swayze-Grey romantic subplot.

The following video provides some more explanation -- by C. Thomas Howell, a friend of Swayze -- of Grey's anger toward Swayze because of that movie.

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So far, I have summarized about half of Grey's Chapter 12. I will summarize the rest of Chapter 12 in my next blog article.

Continued in Part 8