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Saturday, December 27, 2008

The Resort Hotel's Employees

None of Dirty Dancing’s dialogue mentions that anyone is or is not Jewish or addresses any particular Jewish concern. The overwhelming majority of the people who have watched this movie have not perceived that it takes place in particular Jewish cultural institution or that it has anything at all to do with Jews or Jewish concerns.

In fact, that very absence of Jewish concern is a major reason that the Borscht Belt disappeared. By the mid-1960s the Jewish population of New York had assimilated and prospered into American society. They could go to any resort and enjoy real upper-class life, not just a Jewish imitation. Every Jewish family had a television and could watch successful Jewish performers every day. Even the families that still did visit the Borscht Belt did so more as a familiar, family tradition that had become devoid of Jewish consciousness. Jewish families still preferred that their children eventually marry other Jews, but they also preferred that their children finish their higher educations first, so the Jewish parents’ mingling of their Jewish teenage children during summer vacations had lost its urgency.

A major irony of the Dirty Dancing story is that the main character, a 17-year-old girl in a prosperous family that is visiting such a resort hotel, prefers to spend her time and energy socializing with the employees who live in cabins behind the hotel and who dance in a vulgar, “dirty” manner in a dilapidated warehouse or in a remote forest, meadow and even a lake. For this girl, the cultural enrichment she acquires during her vacation is her encounter not with upper-class WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) society, but rather with a lower-class society comprising Irish (e.g. Johnny Castle), Puerto Rican, Negro and various mongrel dregs.

The resort hotel where the movie takes place is called Kellerman’s, and it is owned by a man named Max Kellerman, played by a 63-year-old actor (Jack Weston). He apparently owns two such hotels, the other one being called The Sheldrake. Max Kellerman is assisted by his grandson, Neil Kellerman, who intends to enroll soon in the Cornell School of Hotel Management and who appears to be about 20 years old. This grandson Neil indicates in a remark that he already considers himself to be the owner of the two hotels, foreseeing that his grandfather will retire when he himself graduates from Cornell.

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The hotel employs a big-band orchestra, which seems to comprise mostly Cubans of African ancestry. We can assume that this orchestra alternates evenings between the two hotels and that the orchestra members do not do any work at the hotels besides playing music.

When the producers were selecting a resort as a location for the movie, they looked for a resort with a swimming pool, because the movie was supposed to show that the swimming pool was racially integrated. The author Eleanor Bergstein in her running commentary mentioned that the Jewish-owned resorts racially integrated their swimming pools before the other resorts did so, so apparently her original script included a reference to that fact. However, the producers could not find an available resort with a swimming pool (we do see guests swimming in a lake). Therefore none of the movie’s dialogue refers to the racial integration of the swimming pool, although the dialogue refers several times to the Civil Rights movement that was developing in the South in the early 1960s. We can suppose that the African-Americans in the planned swimming-pool scene would have been the orchestra members, who were idle during the days.

Several of the employees who live in the cabins and who dirty-dance in the warehouse are African Americans, but they probably are not orchestra members, who are older and are busy playing their music in the evenings while the young employees are dirty-dancing.


The orchestra conductor is about Max Kellerman’s age, and Max Kellerman seems to treat him as a social peer. We should understand that the orchestra members are an upper and distinct social class of the hotel’s employees. The orchestra members are older and are professionally established, and they rest during the mornings and days and work during the evenings and nights.

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Another category of employees works in positions that interact directly with the guests. For example, the movie dialogue mentions explicitly that the restaurant waiters are college students who work in the hotel during their summer vacations. We can suppose that this employee category includes also receptionists, social-activity leaders, life guards, and so forth. Most such employees were former guests who had visited the resort in younger years with their families.

In a scene that follows soon afterward, Mr. Kellerman is instructing the restaurant waiters about their conduct rules during their employment. He tells them:

You waiters are all college guys, and I went to Harvard and Yale to hire you. And why did I do that? Why? I shouldn't have to remind you. This is a family place. That means you keep your fingers out of the water, hair out of the soup, and show the goddamn daughters a good time -- all the daughters, even the dogs. Schlepp 'em out to the terrace, romance 'em any way you want. Got that, guys?

Although these employees are only waiters at the hotel, they are university students and also (although not stated in the dialogue) Jews who might be appropriate marriage candidates for the young women among the guests. Furthermore, the Jewish parents might even welcome romantic interest from such employees toward their daughters. One of the waiters, named Robbie Gould, is a medical student, and so he is treated very warmly by the family father, who himself is a doctor. It is apparent that the father considers this medical student to be a good romantic prospect for either of his two daughters.

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As Mr. Kellerman is completing his instructions to his waiters, another group of male employees walks through the restaurant, and Mr. Kellerman instructs them differently:

Well, if it isn't the entertainment staff. Listen, wise ass, you got your own rules. Dance with the daughters. Teach 'em the mambo, the cha-cha, anything they pay for, but that's it, that's where it ends. No funny business, no conversations, and keep you hands off.

This second group of male employees is dressed in matching shirts and is carrying guitars in cases, so it is apparent that they are a musical band. One of this group is dressed differently than the others, and he is the one who Kellerman addresses as “wise ass” and instructs about how to conduct himself with the guest families’ daughters.


Mr. Kellerman addresses this second group as “the entertainment staff” but later in the movie we see some of them doing ordinary jobs on the hotel grounds. We can suppose that some of them cook and wash dishes in the kitchen, clean floors, mow the grass and do other such jobs. In fact, they might not be paid at all by the hotel for playing music as a band. They play in the band only for tips and for the opportunity to acquire some public exposure as a band. Probably they can use the stage on the evenings when the orchestra plays at the other hotel. Their exposure provides them with some possibilities that some families might hire them later to play at Bar Mitzvah, wedding and anniversary parties. Apparently there is also a shortage of male guests at the dance classes for the guests, and so these band members fill in only as needed to correct the male-female ratio for partner dancing but are not supposed to socialize further with the female guests.

(We never see this band play in the movie. The DVD’s commentaries and interviews inform us that the producers had great difficulty convincing Patrick Swayze to accept the role of Johnny Castle, and furthermore Swayze’s own agent advised him against accepting the role. Eleanor Bergstein, the movie’s author, in her running commentary, reminisces about how, before the filming began, Swayze gave her a tape recording of a song, titled She’s Like the Wind, that Swayze had written and performed with a band that he headed in his real life. Therefore I speculate that in order to convince Swayze to accept the role, the producers agreed to provisionally include a scene where Swayze would perform his song with his band. Apparently the scene was removed from the movie’s final version, but the earlier scene where the band encountered Mr. Kellerman remained. As a consolation to Swayze, his song was included in the soundtrack.)

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Such a hotel would hire also a lot of female employees to work as housekeepers to clean the rooms. We never see Mr. Kellerman address them, but we do see them hanging around in and around the cabins and dancing in the warehouse.

These ordinary male and female employees – who cook and wash dishes in the kitchen, who clean the floors and do repairs, who mow the grass, who clean the rooms, etc. – were not supposed to socialize with the guests. A major reason for this restriction is that these employees were not Jewish, a fact that is obvious from their appearances – many are African-American or Hispanics.

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Two of the employees – Johnny Castle and Penny Johnson – are professional dancers, and they comprise an employee category of their own. They work as professional dancers only during the summers at the resort hotel. Johnny Castle, for example, works primarily as a house painter during the rest of the year. Their employment at the resort hotel comprises several elements:

  • They performed special dances for the hotel guests while the orchestra played. They did so at both hotels.

  • Then they encouraged the hotel guests to dance while the orchestra played. They were available to give special dance lessons to guests who were willing to pay for such lessons.

  • They organized and conducted a talent show that was performed on the final night. Hotel employees were required to participate in the talent show and guests were encouraged to participate.

  • They taught the employees to do group dances that were part of the talent show.


An early scene shows Johnny Castle and Penny Johnson dancing together spectacularly during a ballroom dance on the new guests' first evening at the hotel. Neil Kellerman remarked (to Baby Houseman) that they should stop dancing with each other and start dancing with the guests, because they would not sell dance lessons if they danced only with each other. Thus it seems that the hotel received a cut from the dance lessons that the professional dance instructors sold.

Since these dance-instructor jobs involved much socialization with the guests, the hotel owners would have preferred to hire Jews for these positions, but there simply was a shortage of Jews who could dance so expertly. Therefore non-Jews were hired, but they were supervised closely.

The movie includes several instances of such close supervision by Max Kellerman or by his grandson Neil Kellerman. In one instance, Max Kellerman motioned angrily to the two professional dancers that they should stop their dance performance and begin encouraging the guests to dance. In another instance, Neil Kellerman intruded without knocking into a room where Johnny Castle was giving a private dance lesson to the 17-year-old female guest. Neil Kellerman remarked that the dance lesson must last exactly as long as the time that the guest has paid for and also insisted that the talent show’s group dance by the employees be done in a dance style that Johnny Castle had rejected.

The two dance instructors have non-Jewish names – Johnny Castle and Penny Johnson – and they have personal appearances that are far from Jewish stereotypes.

When Penny Johnson became pregnant after an affair with the waiter Robbie Gould, she and Johnny Castle feared that they might be fired by the Kellermans as a consequence. One reason, which is not stated, was that the Kellermans valued the Jewish medical student Robbie Gould more as an employee than they valued the non-Jewish professional dancer Penny Johnson. If the pregnancy became known, then there would not be enough room on the hotel staff for both Gould and Johnson, and so Johnson would have to go. Gould came from a Jewish family that had been regular customers of the hotel for many years, and now he was attractive to Jewish families who had daughters who were entering a marriageable age.

Another problem caused by Johnson’s pregnancy was that she would not be available to dance in the hotel’s special performances. The pregnancy itself eventually might have prevented such performances, but the problem that developed in the movie was that she decided to have an abortion that had to be performed on a particular night when such a performance was scheduled. This situation led to a decision that the 17-year-old guest would learn the dance sufficiently well to substitute for Johnson on that one night. Many employees were young females, but none of them are available to learn the dance because they all were too busy cleaning the rooms during the days and preparing for the talent show during the evenings.

Since Penny Johnson was a couple months pregnant and since the story took place at the end of the summer, she apparently became romantically involved with Robbie Gould at the beginning of the summer or even during a previous summer while they were both working at the hotel. Penny Johnson sincerely loved Robbie Gould and expected to marry him, especially after she became pregnant. She was an extraordinarily beautiful and talented woman, but Robbie Gould could not consider marrying her, because she had not even graduated from high school and (although not stated) she was not Jewish.

Although Penny Johnson's status on the hotel resort's staff was much higher than the status of the female employees who worked as housekeepers and other such ordinary positions, she was subject to the same sexual rules probably applied to her and to all such female employees. They were forbidden to involve themselves in personal relationships with the male guests or20even with the Jewish male college students who worked as waiters, and any scandals were grounds for immediate firing.

The producers originally had selected an Italian-American actor to play the role of the male professional dancer. The producers soon decided that this first actor would not be able to dance as well as they expected, so they eventually replaced that actor with Patrick Swayze. The author Eleanor Bergstein indicated in her running commentary that this character thus ceased being an Italian-American character and instead became an Irish-American character. None of the dialogue indicates that this character is Irish-American, and the name Johnny Castle is not distinctively Irish, but perhaps this point was made by some dialogue that did not survive into the movie’s final version.

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One of the movie’s characters is Johnny Castle’s young cousin, Billy Kostecki, whose name is Polish (indicating the employees’ mongrel pedigrees). In some previous summer, Johnny Castle had convinced Max Kellerman to hire Castle’s cousin Billy Kostecki to do odd jobs at the hotel. Kostecki was about the same age as the 17-year-old female guest and apparently had began a platonic friendship with her during a previous summer when they both were quite young.

Billy Kostecki plays what the author Eleanor Bergstein describes as an "expository role" in the screenplay. At various moments, he explained the developing situation to the young female guest and thus to the audience. In particular, he told her that Penny Johnson had become pregnant and then later that the pregnancy was caused by an affair with the medical student Robbie Gould. In some other moments, Kostecki's explanations advanced and clarified the story conveniently for the audience.


Billy Kostecki also serves as a means to bring the young female guest into the employees' secret world. Kostecki was supposed to carry three watermelons from the kitchen to the remote warehouse where the employees were supposed to be practicing dances for the talent show. He was not able to carry all three watermelons safely, however, so when he noticed the young female guest, he asked her to help him by carrying one of the watermelons. Thus she accompanied him to the warehouse, where she saw and joined the employees, who have been doing their own dirty dancing instead of practicing for the talent show. Without Kostecki's role, the young female guest never would have gone into that warehouse and become involved with the other employees.

The Borscht Belt

Every time I have watched Dirty Dancing, I have enjoyed its depiction of a subculture that has practically disappeared. In the Catskill Mountains, in the counties north of New York City, there was a large number of vacation resorts that were visited regularly by the city’s citizens. Some of these resorts attracted particular ethnic groups.

In particular, there was a group of resorts, called The Borscht Belt, that attracted Jewish Americans who lived in New York City. This Jewish clientele also called this area The Jewish Alps and Solomon County (a comic mispronunciation of Sullivan County).


In the first half of the 20th Century, there was a lot of discrimination and resistance against Jewish encroachments into WASP society, especially into the upper classes. Fancy hotels and resorts did not welcome Jewish guests and sometimes even refused to rent rooms to people who had obviously Jewish names and accents. Therefore there was a real demand for resorts where Jews felt they were welcomed and treated with dignity.

In addition, the resorts offered entertainment programs in the evenings. A good resort would employ an orchestra that would play live music for ballroom dancing. The Jewish guests enjoyed these entertainment programs all the more if they included the singing of Yiddish songs, the dancing of Jewish dances, and the telling of Jewish jokes. Many Jewish-American singers and comedians performed in these resorts before they became famous. Such comedians include Joey Adams, Woody Allen, Morey Amsterdam, Milton Berle, Shelley Berman, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, George Burns, Red Buttons, Sid Caesar, Bill Dana, Rodney Dangerfield, Phyllis Diller, Totie Fields, George Gobel, Shecky Greene, Buddy Hackett, Danny Kaye, Alan King, Robert Klein, Jerry Lewis, Jackie Mason, Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Allan Sherman, Jonathan Winters, and Henny Youngman.


Families would visit the resorts for a couple of weeks every summer for cultured activities. They would learn to play golf and volleyball, to do ballroom dancing and other such activities that socially upwardly mobile people should learn how to do. Dirty Dancing has one interesting scene where female guests learn how to put on cosmetics and style their hair.

During that scene there is an announcement over a loudspeaker, saying that a rabbi will give a lecture about the psychology of insult comedians. This is perhaps the movie's only explicit reference to the Jewish character of the resort hotel's guests.

There was a kind of dress code that included semi-formal clothing for evening activities, which included performances by comedians, singers and other entertainers from New York nightclubs. At the end of the stay, the guests and temporary employees were encouraged to participate in a talent show.

When the children of such families reached college age, many of them got summer jobs in these same resorts that they had visited as guests. They worked as waiters, life guards, activity leaders, and so forth. They were hired because they were familiar with the resort’s relationships and interactions with the guests. One of the key characters in Dirty Dancing is a college student who has been accepted into medical school and who is working as a waiter in the resort’s dining room during his summer vacation.

The adolescent guests commonly became involved in brief romances during these stays. Of course, that was natural and fun for the adolescent guests, but the hotel managements strictly prohibited the staff members, in particular the college-age, temporary workers, from engaging in such romances with the younger, high-school-age guests. This situation is a central element in Dirty Dancing’s plot.

These Catskill resorts blossomed during the years from about 1950 to 1965. Afterwards, they gradually became unprofitable and went out of business. One major reason is explained in the last scene by the resort owner, who owns two such resorts. In a conversation with the resort’s band leader, the owner explains that travel to Europe was becoming so cheap and convenient that more and more families were deciding to spend their summer vacation weeks visiting Europe. The families’ teenage children were becoming bored with the annual visits to the same resorts, and so they begged their parents to go to Europe instead. The parents themselves found that such travel provided a much more educational and cultural experience for their children, and so they agreed. Once a family broke its annual habit of visiting its summer resort, the family usually did not return to its resort in subsequent years.

After the decision to make the movie Dirty Dancing had been made, the producers traveled around in the Catskills Mountains looking for such a resort that they could rent for a summer in order to make the movie. To their dismay, they found that only a couple such resorts -- catering mostly to unassimilated Orthodox Jews -- were still in business. None of those still functional resorts was willing to risk losing its still regular summer clientele forever by renting itself for a movie production. The producers found several former resorts, but the all the buildings and grounds were in bad repair after years of abandonment. Since the film’s production budget was only $5 million, the producers could not afford to do the necessary re-construction, painting and landscaping that would have been necessary to restore one of these abandoned resorts to its former glory.

Another consideration was that the leaves in northern New York beginning turning colors already in the late summer. The producers feared that in some scenes the background trees would be totally green and in other scenes the trees would be turning yellow. Likewise, the grass on the resort lawns would be lush green and then browning.

Therefore, the producers looked at similar resorts farther south, in Virginia and North Carolina. In these area too, such resorts were going out of business, but the producers found a couple that still could be used for the movie. A Virginia resort still had a magnificent façade and front lawn and an upkept interior, and a North Carolina resort had a beautiful back side and an authentic area with small cabins for the resort staff. The latter area was important, because much of the movie takes place around and in the cabins inhabited by the hotel’s temporary summer workers – the waiters, dance instructors, etc. The producers therefore rented both resorts and filmed in both locations.


There is a small bridge over a brook that the actors cross several times in the movie. The audience perceives that the actors are walking back and forth between the front and back of the resort, but it would be more accurate to say that they are walking through a space warp that transports them instantaneously between Virginia and North Carolina.

The Virginia resort still had some beautiful white, wood fences from this brook to the resort's main building. Whenever the film crew moved from one location to the other, the crew would take these white fences apart and take them along to the other location, where the fences would be reassembled to give the viewers a false impression that the fences extended from both banks of the brook. On the North Carolina location, the white fences were set up to extend from the brook to the temporary employees' cabins.



When the producers contacted the owners of the North Carolina resort with an rental offer, they found that the owners already had sold the entire property to be subdivided. In fact, bulldozers already had begun to re-arrange the terrain. This bulldozing was stopped in the nick of time, and grass was replanted over bulldozed areas that might appear in the film. In a few such areas, the new grass did not re-grow fast enough, so the film crews spray-painted the dirt green right before the actual filming. After the filming was completed, the subdivision of the property resumed immediately, and all traces of that resort disappeared in the following months.

The Virginia resort has continued to exist to the present, but only because the movie turned out to be such a popular success. The resort still advertises itself as the location where the movie Dirty Dancing was made, and most of its clients come and stay there just for that reason. A stay in the resort includes guided tours of the facility, and the guests can look into the rooms were Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey supposedly lived during the filming. There is an evening entertainment program reminiscent of the program depicted in the movie. A souvenir shop sells books, DVDs and other mementos related to the movie and its stars.

Bit 51 - Closing Credits






Date of Scene

Sunday, September 1, 1963

Afternoon


Scene Description




Dialogue





Song Lyrics





Remarks