Out of the Corner, by Jennifer Grey
Continued from Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, and Part 17
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Chapter 18, titled "Mrs. Broderdepp", tells about events from August 1987 into March 1989.
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Right after her Dirty Dancing premiere, Grey flew back to Belfast to keep Matthew Broderick company in the hospital there. Eventually they returned to the USA and moved back into the Manhattan apartment that they still shared with Meg Burnie.
Once we got home after the accident, my resolve to break it [their relationship] off vanished. We were living together in my apartment, along with my roommate, Meg. Matthew was gaunt, still on crutches, at the start of months of physical therapy to rehabilitate his leg.
I couldn't help but fall into a deeply ingrained mindset. I loved him.
Whatever Matthew's needs were, especially if they posed a serious threat to his health or work, they would have to take precedence. His grave injuries, the sudden question mark that loomed over his career, the public flaying that ensued, and the fallout that continued to swirl around him -- all of this rendered my needs, my life, my injuries, my career, inconsequential to me.
Their relationship continued to be troubled. Grey writes that when they ate out together in a restaurant, she would drink an entire bottle of wine and would weep at the table.
In January 1988, she was nominated for the Golden Globe award for Best Actress. Broderick flew with her to Los Angeles, where the awards show would take place. Instead of going to the show with her, however, he went to a restaurant to eat a meal with his agent. Meanwhile, Grey went to the awards show with her own agent.
I didn't see how much I needed help. I obviously had enormous ambivalence about going after what I wanted, though I didn't know it at the time. Ambition had a strangely distasteful and negative connotation to me; it smacked of self-involvement, entitlement, soullessness, being cutthroat and driven. I had never been a big fan of competition and was quick to avoid conflicts -- with Patrick, with Matthew, with my dad.
If there was going to be a tussle over who should stand in the limelight, I was out. Still, it didn't feel good that Matthew wouldn't be next to me, holding my hand at the Globes that January.
Broderick continued to earn a lot of money from his own movie career. He starred in the 1987 movie Project X, in the 1988 movies Biloxi Blues and Torch Song Trilogy, in the 1989 movies Family Business and Glory and in the 1990 movie The Freshman.
At about the end of February 1988, Broderick moved out of Grey's apartment into an apartment he had bought for himself. He did not invite her to move in with him. They broke up.
In spite of everything I knew, I still loved him.
We don't know Broderick's side in the story of their breakup. We do know, however, that he was a rich, successful movie star who attracted young women easily. He did not have to put up with Grey's addictions and emotions. Her own movie career seemed to be finished, but she was postponing motherhood indefinitely, in the futile hope that she too would become a movie star. If he ever married her, he might lose half of his wealth if they ever divorced.
Broderick does know how to be married. He has been married to Sarah Jessica Parker for 25 years, and they have three children. Back in 1988, though, he decided that a marriage with Jennifer Grey would be a bad risk.
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In 1986, Grey had earned $50,000 for Dirty Dancing. That amount would be about $135,000 in 2022 dollars. She did not earn any further money, such as a share of the movie's profits.
That $50,000 did not last long. I suppose she had to pay off her school loans and other debts. She had continued to work as a waitress until August 1987, the month when the movie opened in the theaters. After the movie made her famous, she felt too embarrassed to be seen working as a waitress.
She writes: "I was broke".
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She switched to a new agent, Sam Cohn, who had represented her father Joel Grey for many years. Joel Grey, however, had become dissatisfied with Cohn and therefore was angry about Jennifer's decision.
Cohn sent her a lot of scripts and arranged for some auditions, but her career did not take off. She was considered for roles in some feature movies -- she names Cocktail and Working Girl -- but ultimately was not selected.
In the months after Dirty Dancing came out, it seemed like everyone wanted to see me for their project, but something was off, out of alignment. Even though I was hurting for cash, I was turning down the jobs I was being offered. Out of fear -- fear of not being a good enough actress to overcome subpar material. And when I had an exciting audition for something A-list, I either didn't prepare adequately or got super close to getting it, which happened a lot, but for some reason ... didn't make the cut.
In late 1987 she was selected to play a leading role in the movie Bloodhounds of Broadway, which was filmed in January and February 1988 (eighty-eight) and was released in November 1989 (eighty-nine). That movie bombed. Its budget was $4 million, but its box office earnings were just $43,671.
Grey co-starred in the movie with Madonna, who was going through a divorce. Grey and Madonna became close and lasting friends. In her book, Grey writes a lot about their friendship.
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Madonna arranged for Grey to date Alec Baldwin, who introduced Grey to his brother Billy Baldwin, who then became Grey's boyfriend for a while.
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| Jennifer Grey dating Billy Baldwin |
Grey describes this time of her life as follows:
I'd been drinking and smoking -- cigarettes and weed -- pretty much on the regular for more than a decade. I also found it necessary to pop a Xanax or Valium whenever anxiety threatened to flood my system -- and around this particular time there was some pretty serious flooding going on.
It had never ever occurred to me that these coping mechanisms might be having a deleterious effect on my life. I had come to rely on them as helpful and necessary, to rescue me from "feeling too much." I couldn't see that while these habits were effectively turning down the volume on my overloaded nervous system, they were also muting the intuitive voices that were trying to save me from myself.
Silencing the voices saying, "Get out! Get the fuck out! What is wrong with you? Stop the madness!"
In June 1988, Broderick returned to Grey, begging her to marry him after all. She agreed to marry him, but they broke up again before the end of July. One of the reasons was that she thought he was continuing an affair with the actress Helen Hunt.
In the summer of 1988, Grey began a romance with the actor Johnny Depp. On their first date, they realized that they both loved to smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol. After two weeks, he proposed to her. Their engagement lasted for about nine months. Her book's description of those months is interesting.
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| Jennifer Grey dating Johnny Depp |
In March 1989, Grey flew to Hollywood to spend some time with Depp, who was meeting with a movie director to discuss a future movie. Depp left their hotel room in the morning to attend that meeting, promising to return to the hotel in a few hours. In the evening, he still had not contacted her, and she could not contact him, and she still was alone in the hotel room. She wrote a breakup note, left the note on the hotel room's bed, and walked out of Depp's life. I suppose they both, separately, were drunk during much of that day.
In a following days she also fired her agent and switched to Madonna's agent, Jane Berliner. These days were also when Grey got her nose surgery.
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Continued in Part 19
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