Jennifer Grey, from ‘Dirty Dancing’, recalls plastic surgery and career implosion

The New York Times

Jennifer Gray arrived for breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills recently, apologizing for the state of her shirt and hair. (They both looked impeccable.) Before the waiter had a chance to pour the coffee, the “Dirty Dancing” star asked a question that could very well serve as a subtitle to her memoir, “Out of the Corner.” “, which will be released in the United States by Ballantine on May 3. “Why do I think everything has to be in the most perfect order to be enough?”

Some actors pretend to be shy in their autobiographies, forcing readers to delve into nondescript childhood memories and tepid revelations of fame before “opening their kimono” (Grey’s term) on the subjects for which they are best known. Gray doesn’t behave that way, in person — she’s welcoming, warm, and determined to make a connection — or in her book, which begins with a 17-page prologue about her nose and the plastic surgeries that derailed her career and ( almost) stole your identity.

At 62 years old, Gray is ready to take control of a narrative that has been in the public domain for far too long, and which has attained near-mythological status. In 2007, for example, The New York Times referred to “Jennifer Gray syndrome” – the phenomenon of too aggressive plastic surgery – as if everyone knew what the term means. How long must a person pay for a personal decision? And why should any human being be reduced to just the titular character of a dull joke?

Before delving into the topic of “nasal armageddon,” as Gray defines it, it’s best to step back a bit to explain the situation to readers too young to understand the significance of what happened.

In 1986, Gray landed the role of “Baby” Houseman, the main female character in “Dirty Dancing”, a teenager who falls in love with a hot dance teacher (played by Patrick Swayze) during a vacation trip to a resort in the Catskills mountains called Kellerman’s. The film had a budget of $6 million and made $214 million at the box office and, as The New York Times film editor wrote on its 10th anniversary, “shortly became a phenomenon, in a way that no one who has been associated with it can understand, even after all this time”.

One of Swayze’s lines, “Nobody leaves Baby aside,” became a motto for disaffected Gen Xers — who apparently enjoyed rumba, romance and nostalgia just as much as people from other generations, as the film revealed. Turned-over hem denim shorts and white Keds have become the official summer uniform for every teen, though not all perms and Sun-In lightened hair create honey-colored waves like Gray’s hair in the summer. film. At the age of 27, and after receiving a fee of $50K for her work, her name became famous across the planet.

“After the movie, I became America’s sweetheart, which you might imagine opened the door for me to fulfill all my dreams and hopes,” writes Grey, daughter of Oscar-winning actor Joel Gray. , and granddaughter of Mickey Katz, a comedian and musician who might have performed at Kellerman’s if the hotel really existed. “But things didn’t go that way. For starters, there were no roles left for actresses like me. My supposed ‘problem’ wasn’t really a problem for me, but since it appeared to be a problem for other people, and it didn’t seem that was on the way to disappearing ended up becoming a problem for me too”. “It was right on my face. In fact, on my nose,” she said.

On the advice of his mother and three plastic surgeons — one of whom mentioned watching “Dirty Dancing – Hot Rhythm” and thinking “why hasn’t that girl had her nose done yet?”, Gray underwent two surgeries for one. “fine tuning” your nasal appendage. The second, which was supposed to correct an irregularity caused by the first, was more aggressive than the actress expected. The new nose he was given looked “truncated” and “shrunken”. Gray has become unrecognizable, even to people who have known her for years. Photographers who had followed her a month earlier didn’t even recognize her as she walked the red carpet.

She remembers an airline employee who looked at her driver’s license and said, “Oh, Jennifer Grey, like the actress.” And when Gray replied that “it’s me, the actress”, the woman countered by saying that she had watched “Dirty Dancing – Hot Rhythm” a dozen times. “I know Jennifer Grey. It’s not you.” “Overnight I lost my identity and my career,” said the actress.

In the two hours she’s spent sitting in one of the booths at the Beverly Hills restaurant, eating a hard-boiled egg, buttering her rye toast and talking about her book, only one person seems to have recognized Grey. The woman’s face lit up, then softened as if she’d found an old friend who’d survived terrible ordeal.

“To be misunderstood on a global scale was very painful,” said Grey. “I think people really love to think in black and white. I prefer gray. My last name couldn’t be better.” [Grey quer dizer “cinzento”, em inglês].

Readers may be wondering why the actress decided to write about her life now, decades after many of the events she deals with. Gray – like Baby Houseman, who was about to start college at Mount Holyoke and later wanted to work in the Peace Corps – is starting a new phase in his life. In July 2020, she announced on Instagram that her marriage to Clark Gregg was coming to an end after 19 years. Stella, 20, the couple’s daughter, is working as an actress. Not that it has anything to do with her memoir publishing, but Dorothy, the family dog, who was 16, died three days before our conversation — another tipping point.

In Grey’s case, there is a sense of ending but also of a new beginning. It’s worth bearing in mind that the nose that earned her thousands of attacks, jokes and criticism has now been around longer than the one she debuted with, in a commercial for Dr. Pepper in 1979.

“If you lead a public life in any way, there’s a sense that you’re impenetrable, or that you’ve sacrificed your privacy,” said Dani Shapiro, a writer and friend of Grey’s. As for the timing of the book’s release, she added that “the time you choose to tell a story is also a story. There are books written out of anger, revenge or settling scores. But that’s not the case with this one.”

In 2010, after years of voice work, appearances on “Friends”, “Greys’s Anatomy” and a stint on the sitcom “It’s Like… You Know”, which was quickly canceled and in which she played a fictionalized version of herself. same, Gray was part of the program “Dancing With the Stars”, and won the competition. It was then that the idea for “Out of the Corner” began to form.

She had a “ragged and uneven” collection of diaries that she kept from age 14 to 41, so there was enough basic material to work with. “I started looking at the highs and the lows, and the way I adapted to all the dramatic turns. I wrote every word of my book on my own, which is pretty unusual.”

From April to September 2021, she had daily “coaching” sessions via Zoom with Barbara Jones, editor and publishing veteran who helped shape her memories “The first thing Jennifer did was give me a huge manuscript, something she defined as ‘all the junk,'” Jones said. “She’s one of the most verbal people I’ve ever met. I’d say she needed a word somewhere that meant such a thing, and Jennifer would come up with 10 synonyms instantly. And then she’d pick the right one.”

“Out of the Corner” isn’t just about regrets, survival or reinvention. It’s a fun, revealing, and occasionally heartbreaking book, a coming-of-age story that includes Gray’s recollections of breaking into the nightly ritual of sharing candy his parents shared, skipping classes at Dalton, and singing Broadway tunes at Hal’s holiday parties. Prince, with Stephen Sondheim at Steinway piano. There are escapades with Madonna, Johnny Depp and Tracy Pollan (whose “vintage” jeans inspired the costumes for “Dirty Dancing”), and glimpses of the actress’ crazy life years (think sex, cocaine and Studio 54, “although the cool people didn’t call the place that – it was either Studio or 54”).

There’s Gray’s delight at landing a much-coveted role in “Cotton Club,” followed by director Francis Ford Coppola’s unexpected announcement, “made with the unconcern of someone asking the waiter if the squid is all right,” that she would have to film her first nude scene. She writes, “If I couldn’t trust Francis to take care of me as an actress, who would I?”

(When asked how she would react to that kind of treatment now, Gray replied that “if it happened to my daughter, I would kill them all.”)

There are also revelations about the tumultuous romance she had with Matthew Broderick, whose surly sister she played in “Happy Life.” She remembers him saying the day before her audition for “Dirty Dancing” that “there’s no way you’re going to get the job. They’re auditioning everyone for this role.”

Shortly before the film’s premiere, Broderick and Gray were involved in a car accident in Ireland, in which two people died. He was behind the wheel and suffered serious injuries. Thirty years later, Gray would have to undergo spinal surgery as a result of the head-on collision. But in the meantime, news of the accident – ​​and questions about it – followed her in the wake of her greatest success. Howard Stern joked about it on his radio show; Bryant Gumbel asked her about what happened during a segment of the “Today Show” that was supposed to be about “Dirty Dancing – Hot Rhythm”.

“The idea that the most traumatic tragedy and the most impactful experience of my life were mixed together…” (Grey raises his hands, shoulder-high, and claps them together.) “The two things are inextricably mixed. The pleasure of that moment, the surprise of success… it never felt good. I never felt what I had hoped to feel all my life.”

She added that “we were too young. And not a week goes by that I don’t remember that. When I don’t think about those families. When I don’t think about Matthew. It’s who I am. It’s part of my topographical map, of the landscape of my life”.

Jamie Lee Curtis, a friend of Grey’s, helped create the cover for “Out of the Corner”, using what she describes as “do-it-yourself techniques I’ve learned from my apps”. The image she chose is casual, with a retro feel. “It’s nothing fanciful. It’s not a magazine photo. There’s a confidence, a sense that she’s establishing who she is. It feels like she’s on the cusp of something.”

Gray hopes readers who feel like they’re a victim of something, or who feel paralyzed, will be inspired by her story. “It’s like the Flintstones vitamins: they taste like candy, but you’re getting something you need.”

“I’m the person that others associate with ‘no one leaves Baby aside.’ If I died, they’d write that on my headstone,” she said. “In my past, I sometimes felt like I was left out. But when I started writing, I realized that many of these things I chose.” Gray added that “the truth is, when I had all those good things, I sure as hell wasn’t nearly as free as I feel today.”