Jennifer Grey with Katie Couric: Out of the Corner

hi everyone it's great to be back at the 92nd street y and so nice to see all of you tonight and i'm really excited to be in conversation as they say with the extraordinary jennifer gray i just finished the book this afternoon yes i'm a procrastinator and it's absolutely wonderful it's bracingly honest your writing is beautiful and so evocative and descriptive and you know when you stop and you re-read a paragraph or re-read a sentence that's the kind of book it is and i just loved every minute of it so and my husband's here tonight and he will tell you that i spent all day like that in the weekend as well that's okay no no no um so i guess the first question i wanted to ask you is why why now and has the idea of writing a memoir been gestating for a while with you um thank you first of all for coming here tonight and doing this with me it really it makes it so much more significant and special because of who you are and what you've meant to me in my life oh thanks that's so sweet can you all hear jennifer i feel like i maybe raise your mic a little bit we worked on this earlier but she's going to be able to blouse on be like this pump it up a little bit maybe i should do it the audio um yeah it does it sounds like a little mouse you look like one of those people on tick-tock i like that girl on tick-tock so this is my mini mic okay so i'm gonna just do this until somebody stops me okay okay or if it's just too annoying just say stop no you're fine um so i did did you see about how much i was grateful for this lady did you hear that part yeah she heard yeah okay all right thank you and i'm happy to be here and this is all about you i understand dude but let me just say i'm really grateful okay thank you so the answer to your questions because i believe it's twofold is why now and i believe that it comes at a time when i've had enough time to struggle and wrangle all of these questions about how i and thank you sir like it's hot okay how about this better hello anyway so as i was saying um i i felt like there was a lot of years that i i found it to be very ironic that i was known for the famous now famous line from dirty dancing nobody puts baby in a corner and i thought to myself i just noticed that there were ways in which i felt in the corner and that i couldn't get out and that someone had put me there and it was very counter to how i choose to live which is taking responsibility for my choices and my actions but and really i'm really not into any kind of victimhood or feeling like i just like to feel that i have more agency than that and i liked the idea of kind of unpacking my life in real like the real high points the low points every single thing that really stood out as things that changed me forever and made me and most of them are really painful things because good things are great but nothing is a teacher like hardcore trauma i mean it just changes you because you can't become what you were before after certain things and so i put all these things together and i was looking at the ways in which i had very bizarre things happen i had you know this incredible childhood very very rarefied air i was breathing i didn't know any different i knew that my parents were really good people and really talented and beautiful and all their friends were really smart and in fact i loved the part about uh you going you're you were uh you all didn't celebrate christmas you're you're jewish and you went to hal prince's christmas party every year every year and honestly i it made me so want to be at that christmas party was full of the most interesting intriguing people and then everybody got around the piano name some of the folks that were at that party on a regular basis i mean it was a very very um it was like the cast of characters didn't change it was sondheim and elaine strich and it was patti lupone it was every single bernadette peters just anybody um jerry orbach everybody who was later played your dad of course and dirty dancing we'll talk about him in a minute i mean it was just very and you know all of the greatest costume designers and all of the greatest set decorators everybody and it was this family and it was they embraced me because they loved my parents and they you know treated me me like i was their own and it was this you know they'd eventually stand around the big piano and sing show songs i mean all those people just it was just like it was like a dream but it was very normal for me well of course your dad was joel gray he still is right sorry sorry joel nothing harriet he's very much alive sorry your dad is joel gray your mom is joe wilder you all were known as the four jays right it was my brother is jimmy who's now james yeah joe joel and jenny yeah yeah so so it sounds like your childhood was so much fun and when you were a little girl i think you might have been seven if i recall correctly you would go to the saturday matinee when your dad was starring in cabaret on broadway and you write about it in such a descriptive fun way that i really felt like i was in that theater with you you describe how he put on his makeup and um it's so fun to read but i actually pulled out a part oh it's in my book sorry a part for you to read just to give everyone here sort of a sense of what it was like to be this little bitty girl with her dad because it was special such a special time for the two of you so if you could start here and just read through there that would be great and can you do that with the mic of course um so my dad originated the part of the mc in cabaret on broadway that hal prince directed and um it was just my dad was everything just my hero and had the f he was just the funnest dad and i was this i just felt very special because he would let me come with him to matinees and i wrote here so i was um okay so what happens is i would describe sitting in his dressing room and watching him apply the makeup of the master of ceremonies in a very um almost sacred it was just very i felt very barely breathing just knew to be quiet and watch that was really fun to read too do you want to read that instead of this no no no okay because all of this is really fun to read okay so after he had finished and it was time and the um the stage manager had called you know it's time for places when it was that time i'd follow him out of the dressing room he'd take my hand and lead me through the theater's dark maze of hanging ropes and huge moving flats of painted scenery mindful of every step i took because as he made sure to impress upon me the theater is a dangerous place the scantily clad kitkat girls warmed up their powerful legs like giant nutcrackers doing their grombat ma in the bowels of the broadhurst theater these idols of mine their powdery faces in dramatic showgirl makeup smelling strongly of hairspray pressing scratchy sequins and satin against me as they fawned over me joel's little girl jenny kissing and hugging me gingerly careful not to smudge their freshly applied grease paint the visceral pressure mounted as we drew closer to the entrance of the stage i could hear and feel the thrum of the audience's rowdy anticipation muffled by the heavy velvet curtain it was a serious thing this transition from skipping down the sidewalk with fun dad to focused dad gathering energy like a storm-timing landfall and then i go on to read yeah sure my destination the place of honor was the safe spot in the wings planted in front of the stage manager so close i could feel the vibration of his murmured lighting cues against my thin frame my shoulder blades sensitive as antenna the overture began the now iconic candor and ebb score played by an orchestra so close the musicians in the pit would nod or wave high to me my stomach felt funny turning over from the nearness to such strong energy that's great thank you you know it um and your dad later won an oscar for best supporting actress the tony he won the oscar for the movie yes he was definitely killing it that role was made that role was made for him and you do describe you and jimmy at home on your parents bed jumping around when he won the oscar you know you always hear these actors thank their families but in this case we kind of get a sense of what was going on and how just tickled you and your brother were when your dad got that award and how proud you were of him i mean i don't have many childhood memories but the things that i remember i remember like they happened this morning and i remember what it was like living in malibu in the early 70s and waiting for all of those incredible other nominees all of the cast of the godfather basically and just the idea it just was so normal there was something exciting but very normal it just felt like i had a magical father and a magical family and we lived this magical life and we were loved and they cared about my brother and me and we went on great vacations and there was a super tight that we were super tight and there was a way in which i knew how to navigate this family which was by being good and pleasing and being the perfect daughter until i wasn't until she wasn't and when she wasn't she wasn't but before we get to that i mean you all trav you you traveled obviously you went to and it just sounded like so much fun and your parents were both so loving and uh you know just kind of reminded me sort of of a childhood that was full of sensory overload in the best possible way but the downside was jennifer you you all moved a lot you know you'd move from malibu and then you'd move back to new york and you had to kind of go where the rules were for your dad your mom it was a gypsy life and i knew that i don't know if we're allowed to say that word anymore it was we were a traveling family [Laughter] we were i mean we went where i knew that we it was what we needed to do because our family was about my dad's career and her mom was an aspiring actress and it was an actress not just talented and had done lots of work and basically you know she just got on the train and we were on the dad train and it was his career was just taking off and it was it was it just felt very like she was being dressed by halston and it was just all very beautiful and i went to french school and we went to beautiful vacations and lived in beautiful homes but we weren't rich like we weren't we were we felt like artists that we never knew what we would get where the next job would be so we were very vulnerable so we kind of had to go wherever his work was and that made us very uh unstable just kidding it made us very um it just was challenging i think i didn't think of it as challenging i thought of it as pretty exciting except it was really hard looking back on it when i unpack how hard it was to go from malibu to dalton to the rippery side right around the corner and let's talk about that because i know you were very happy at your school in california you get here it's super high pressure uh you know we all know probably what it's like for at a lot of these new york schools and you were you know it was tough and that's when you became what i was always afraid my daughters would become when they were teenagers [Laughter] i mean you were i took the cake you were i mean i mean you can well why don't you actually i basically have uh two speeds off and high and uh as you wat right you know you were doing blow hold on slow down i mean it's like okay wait can you just can't wait can you give me dinner first oh my goodness all right hold on what you'd not you're 16. okay so what happened was when you grow up in a family where you're the luckiest girl you know you have the coolest parents they have the best food from zay bars we go to you know we go to the you know lincoln center we go to the ballet we see every show we're friends with bernadette peters we go to dames at sea i'm just you know listening to how princess for his christmas but i'm in my i'm in my room just looking at liner notes of you know dames at sea and um chicago and just just listening to musical stuff and thinking i don't really sing but i've been taking dance classes i don't know where i'm gonna fit in this thing but that's all i've really developed i'm i liked reading and i liked some classical music but i wasn't i was going to be an actor until i got to dalton and i realized i couldn't survive the rigor of what they i was like thrown in the at the deep end i think i write in the book and i was fortunate to have this incredible this incredible angel who was in this audience tonight tracy paulin we got to meet each other uh because we both were having um some struggles with the math that the new math was uh not our friend and we got to be the math fits and um it because of her i think i i met another friend as well in maggie jacobson who became maggie wheeler who you might know from friends she played jan as like oh my god so those two girls were basically my sisters and they they were the only reason that i survived high school because i checked out really tracy was not a naughty sister i would just like to set their maybe i don't know i'm gonna let tracy write her own book i don't i really try not to speak for anybody else i can just tell you what i did and it was good what i did until it was bad and then it was terrible but anyway but what i did was i was really individuating i was really figuring out who i was because i it's the natural course of things except i just took it really far and i lived this double life so they didn't really know and i was very good at that so i guess that's where the good acting came the training yeah i guess what uh jennifer's saying is you you've got to buy the book to read what kind of uh lifestyle she's like well i got i got into trouble let's say but it was my desire to feel powerful and i really really believe that like feminine sexuality is just it's okay for guys but it's not okay for girls and i just i just disagree and i believe that there are ways in which we i felt alone i felt alone with my i didn't feel like i was thriving in school and i tried to find something i could be good at and then i found it which one and and you know i learned that you don't say studio 54 you say studio or 54. yeah your pick yeah but you know you were you were staying out all night and yeah i was eating i was a dresser i was dating i was um i have a chapter that is called i started with men and i'm not kidding i really started with men i don't think i ever kissed a teenager in my life and so what happened was you asked me why i wrote this book i was trying to figure out what happened i had like a really good childhood what how did i find myself in this pickles of being really in over my head in waters too deep i believe i say for any young person to navigate but i had this this i didn't want to be a kid i wanted to be an adult and i wanted to be living this other life and i felt i felt powerful but i was harming myself without realizing it and in fact in the book you write dearest mom and dad i'm truly so incredibly sorry for what i put you through when i was a teenager i know i've said it before but it pains me filling me with healthy shame every time i think about it it's true it's um but you know the good news is they didn't know about a lot of it until they read this book um let let's talk about uh the acting bug you wanted to be an actor but your folks wouldn't let you act as a as a little girl they would let you dance and so you had this love of dancing but you also had this fear of dancing um in terms of uh you had a really hard time grappling with choreography and in ballet when you had to cross the room when it came time for that you would often just leave the class right um i i think what i've discovered maybe in the past 10 years or so was that i have learning differences as they call them now i believe and i think that's why i really thrived in certain schools and really i did not understand why i wasn't being taught to my kind of brain and that i realized i had adhd i didn't realize till i was like 50. and then i realized that i just have i'm really good at things when i spend about 100 times more than you would learning it like i can do it really well it just takes me a long time so i my love of dance never i never wanted to stop dancing i was just hated being humiliated by being not good across the floor i just felt had like a strange kind of asymmetrical brain development dance development and so i was taking classes where i could you know skitter away if i needed to if it got too intense and nobody would notice and that was fine but i just kept dancing anyway and obviously you you are a gifted dancer in in so many ways and that's a perfect segue to dirty dancing and uh because it's very smooth and there's yeah yeah i should do this for a living anyway um but we we we you have so many fun things about dirty dancing that we we played that on when my daughter got married in july because she got married in kind of a camp setting so that was the movie that we showed for like after the welcome party and it was really fun to watch it again and it was fun so fun to read about it and what was happening behind the scenes um you auditioned for dirty dancing you kind of danced with first you got the script and you were like oh my god baby is me right i got the breakdown because you know it was like we would i would be in my agent's office and they would get these little sheets of paper and they would say the breakdown these are the cast descriptions and all of a sudden then the basic idea the plot line so it was maybe a page and as i read the description of baby i just i i felt like i was dreaming or tripping i was just like what is happening wow this is me who else could play this and i thought if i can't get this i will never get a job so i have to get this one so you auditioned you danced to i want you back jackson five but yeah and you just kind of brought in the music and they didn't have choreography that was very good for me right really to you know i mean i had already gotten a job as a dancer on a dr pepper commercial by just not doing the choreography and just going off yeah louis falca was like wait what did that do that and i was like okay and i just as soon as you're asking me to do choreography i just can't do it but um if you just ask me to move to a song i really love like that song i i don't know what happens i go into a kind of dance blackout it's really fun and so i recommend it they they watched you you got the role which was so incredibly exciting and but it was a teeny weeny low-budget movie that we didn't know low budget movies would ever get an audience in those days it wasn't at all the trend was some company in connecticut the budget was like 4.5 million dollars or something like that which wasn't much um but so you your cast is baby and now they have to find uh somebody to play johnny castle and it's very rare for the woman to be cast first by the way it's almost always the man's cast first and this i don't even know how many times it's been and this i mean i just knew that was rare so they bring some people in uh one was billy zane right um and then they bunch of guys any guys who they thought because it was written like a swarthy street kind of young italian thug kind of guy yeah right the wrong side of the track yeah and then and then and then patrick swayze comes in and you're just not that patrick swayze doesn't come in they say listen there's this guy patrick swayze i was like i know patrick swayze and in fact you were not super jazzed about patrick swayze i had just spent three months in new mexico in the snow shooting ak-47s fighting the russians in red dawn with him and it was not you know my kind of movie to begin with it was something i you know just did and it all i saw was this macho guy who was the boss of us all and and then he was like doing pranks and putting firecrackers in you know under my door right before my big scenes at night and i mean i didn't know what he was doing i didn't know what was going on all i know is that he was bugging me he was really annoying you yes and you were not i was not that into him i was not into him and then when they said you but he's a dancer i'm like i know he's told me all about it and he wasn't super professional he showed up late and and you were just not really super excited to work with him again well i just it we i didn't the part wasn't written that way and it wasn't what i imagined right and then when they brought him in for the dance audition because i heard all these guys i was in there and i was just like okay bring in another one bring in another one and they'd be flinging me around showing me like hurting me or just like weak not knowing what they're doing and i was like this is bad and then patrick comes in and he basically you have to read the book but he basically takes me into the hall and apologizes to me and says i know you probably don't want i know you're probably not into this but like i'll say i love you i love you i love you i'm sorry and i i'll make this little you will not regret this and i was like okay and then you and i go dancing so we go in the room they put on a little music kenny ortega is there and just says just you know just like move and i was like and that's another story you suddenly were into him well he just is a brilliant dancer and it was this brawn and this he just had been part partnering women in ballet for like 20 years he's been he's married to this ballerina he's just so great he's so strong and he knows how to lead and it was like an easy chair that you just go oh i could just relax into this and he'll take care of the rest and i was just like well i guess we're gonna have to work out the rest because this is really great he was really it was clear and there was this energy that had its own it had its own life in fact you can watch the screen test on youtube which you mentioned in the book so i did today and it's fun to it's fun to watch you all sort of just really connecting on that level having said that it was a nightmare shooting that film which was another really fun thing to read about you know you think it's well no it was not in the catskills it was in places in virginia virginia and north carolina my home state of virginia but it you had to shoot it in the fall after all the guests had left before we had to get in it was cheap when it was empty so you had people painting the autumn leaves green exactly and it was and there were cold it was freezing in the lake freezing and you had to do that you had to practice the lift the lift in the freezing water with all the frogmen and full gear yeah i mean it was really they had ambulances it was just weird and we had to look like we were just in love in the summer and uh and a lot of people got sick patrick kept hurting his knee right i mean there was a lot of injury it felt and the mosquitoes i was i'm a mosquito magnet and um i wouldn't in the love scenes i would just have to stop in between every take and they'd have to cover my whole body which was just you know because it wasn't a book i mean a movie about you know the pox so we had to like deal with that it wasn't sexy and um and the fact is is that we were shooting fast we were shooting it really down and dirty and it was raining and it was it was mayhem mayhem and it just somehow i believe the heart of the movie emil artelino was our director who was just one of the finest human beings and i love kenny ortega the combat he was the choreographer and he's become an amazing director and just one of the most loving humans and he just made me feel that how i was as a dancer was great and it it makes all the difference in the world to have somebody trust you and believe in you and see what's great about you so in a way kenny was more like a real life johnny castle for me and he he just showed me it just i don't know there's just something about love that makes you do better he was great and gave you confidence but then when you started dancing with patrick um he wasn't kenny and he wasn't quite as supportive but and there there was this tension between the two of you because i would learn with i would learn with kenny and he would learn with miranda garrison so we would learn the dance with the pros or the choreographers and it was just a different thing all of a sudden it's like you know when you're horseback riding and they give you another horse and you're like i like the other horse but then it became part of the way it was all par it all worked for the story because that tension of him being frustrated that i wasn't lisa nimi that i wasn't you know a great dancer yeah i mean i think it must have been hard for him because i like for derek huff also when i do dancing with stars i mean ask any of them you know i try really hard it's just hard for me and then it's hard for them and then you had this daunting task of doing the lift which became sort of larger than life for you and so you were so trepidatious about this scene trepidatious i was paralyzed and terrified and refused i was just like wouldn't i wouldn't rehearse it no matter what like they'd be like we got to work no and they were and finally i think patience was wearing thin for you to to do this no there was no patience wearing thin i just didn't do it until we shot it okay so it must have been very nerve-wracking for them yeah and and i think you finally did it and i thought because this is such a sweet uh paragraph about not only doing the lift but about patrick swayze as we know died of pancreatic cancer he's he uh appeared at one of our early stand up to cancer events and uh this why don't you take it from there and this is all about the lift and let me just say that there's something more energetically exciting and vibrant about tension than just gooey i'm in love crushy there is something that worked for us because he was always such a good man like we just were different we were just not we were ill-fitted you know ill-fitting romantic partners but our bodies loved each other's bodies you know what i mean by that all right okay i'm just saying you don't it doesn't have to all be in the same package right i don't know that's it okay let me go back to this everyone began to pressure me oh my god would you just do it i didn't like being that person it wasn't as if i liked holding people hostage i couldn't help it do the thing you fear the most and the death of fear is certain emerson wrote but that's a whole lot easier said than done what if i failed the first time i did the lift was the moment we shot it which was probably in the middle of the night we were all exhausted they were using more cameras that day to grab as many angles as possible on each take there was a huge crowd all the cast members all the dancers all the extras in this case peer pressure was working in my favor it was go time i climbed up on the metaphorical [ __ ] high dive and ran toward the end of the board i leapt into the void and the net appeared you ever have a flying dream it was kind of like that glorious and exhilarating emerson was right after balancing me up there with pretter natural strength and prowess patrick slowly and with super human control lowered me down until i was safely in his arms what you see between us in that scene was also real real gratitude real pride real respect real care if that's not love what is i knew in that moment that patrick was the only person who could have played that part if i had the guts to jump he was always going to be there to catch me keep reading are you okay are you crying i don't have any tissues okay i wish patrick we're alive i wish we could get together i wish we could reminisce about how even though neither of us were kids we were still very young and dumb in the chaos of it all i couldn't see what we had in each other i wish i could tell him i'm sorry for the times i was judgmental or ball busting for not treating him with more empathy and compassion for not trusting that a man would actually show up for me i wish i could tell him what i now know i wish i could tell him what i know now that i was so scared and in over my head i wish i could tell him how lucky i feel to have had him as my baby's one and only johnny that's so sweet i'm sorry i didn't i wasn't intending to make you cry um but but i thought that was such a sweet sentiment because there had been you know a fair amount or under normal yeah it's just normal stuff but it's be under this incredible magnifying glass of this great famous screen love affair and it wasn't that it was bad it just wasn't what you saw there was other things going on that i think actually colluded to make the movie what it was and to make our connection what it was a lot of people didn't think the movie would do any business in fact your really annoying agent who i dislike intensely even though i never knew her susan smith is she still with us no she's not oh may she rest in peace but anyway she she she you took her to a screening oh no it was just her and me i'm getting a look sorry that's what i mean it was just the two of us yeah what would you call that a viewing of you sorry well under the surface you use the right words so i'm just kidding but um so you you showed her the film and she wasn't supportive at all she didn't she say too much of you or something no she basically um made a sound like this through the whole thing it was just her and me in a little screening room it was like a metronome a metronome of disgust and i i could feel that it wasn't good just from her mouth sounds and so i so i left there and i was supposed to give permission to use nudity that i had a nudity clause that i write about in the book where there was no um nipples bush or crack is that right what was it something charming like i said um yeah this is a this is an r-rated conversation apparently but well i think bush was always out but for everybody but it was like no nipple or butt crack i think that was it and they decided they wanted to use more of that and so this was a viewing to say whether we would give permission and afterwards she said let them have anything they want it's the only scene that works in the movie and then she said to me don't worry no one will ever see this movie see we really need to get something else in the can for you it's not your fault no one will blame you for this and you were like thanks i was like good times well you you proved dear susan smith wrong because the film was extraordinarily successful there was so much buzz about it word of mouth but what's really interesting jennifer here you get your big break and and yet you you were sort of i guess i don't know inexperienced or not used to this level of scrutiny and you didn't really you weren't really able to take advantage in retrospect as you write to this incredible opportunity patrick swayze got the lion's share of attention and you meanwhile are dating matthew broderick who you met on during ferris bueller's day off when you played his little sister big sister big sister sorry and um you all go to ireland the movie hasn't been released yet right and you go to ireland and something terrible happens you're in a very serious car accident a woman in her 60s and her adult daughter are killed matthew is very very injured you i think have less readily apparent injuries um but he ends up being in a hospital you end up with a lot of pain yourself by the way but he had to have surgery and go through rehabilitation and all that and this is all happening before the release of the film right is it ten days before it's very close yeah it's very close it's within two weeks um this tragedy happens and i am the sole living witness it was a head-on collision and he has amnesia and the other two women tragically died so i was very much the focus of the person who could tell everyone what really happened except i didn't know what really happened because as i say in the book in great detail i was putting a cassette in the cassette player so i didn't see anything that could inform anymore but there was a it was very very uh life-changing and it was very hard to have experienced this trauma exactly almost simultaneously with this like the biggest moment of my i couldn't even have imagined a moment of my career this this momentous because i didn't even expect the movie to be a success so it was a very confusing time and i was really torn between wanting to do the right thing and protect matthew even though there was nothing i could do to protect but it was so newsworthy and i was feeling so protective of him and so concerned about him he was so terribly injured and he was stuck in belfast for months it was really really devastating and there was a way in which i just made the decision to just back away well your mom helped you make that too she came over matthew's mom came over to be with both of you and then your mom came and you felt very torn uh he discouraged you from going to the premiere well i think he was very frightened because he was in a terrible terrible situation and i i understood i'm tend to be overly empathetic i would say if anything and it's a good quality to be empathetic but to not really have this same fight for myself is what i see in retrospect and have some regret about is i look back and part of why i was writing this book was to understand what happened to understand how i ended up in corners that i felt i had been put in and realized that on some level i was colluding i was going to say you put yourself in i was putting myself in these corners because i was making choices about relationships that were not uh supportive of me because i had a certain i was wired a certain way but was also echoes of your mom and the sacrifices she made and she wanted so much for me to go to my premiere and she's the reason she forced me to go and yet i was torn because there are certain things that are just hardwired that even though your prefrontal cortex knows better there's this limbic brain that just regresses and goes into something familial or familiar and i i really i think that ambition was something that i wasn't good at feeding i was better at feeding uh codependency maybe or putting others ahead of myself because that would and then basically self-harm because i made those choices does that make sense yeah it does i mean it does for me because i read the book and i think it's clear that sort of in this table about about how much can does a woman like it's i think it's specific to women that ambition is ugly or it looks there's something that's not i don't know there i just have always felt a slight conflict about really going for it and now that i'm now the new me i'm going for it and it's not easy because it's really like pushing myself to tell my story to take myself out of the corner and to own my story and to know that it will displease people and disappoint people and that's my journey is to understand that i have a right to be out of the corner that's well said and you know um you know i i didn't start with the prologue but it sort of is this whole notion is peppered throughout the book and to paraphrase help yourself gertrude stein a nose is a nose is a nose or perhaps a nose isn't a nose isn't a nose isn't a nose because the prologue is about this this huge event in your life and i felt so for you uh with what had happened and you were 29 years old you had this incredible success with dirty dancing um there was a motto in your household this this is sort of nose's identity and nose as assimilation there's so many i mean my my both my parents families had come over from ukraine eastern europe jews and they you know changed their name and my dad changed his name from cats to gray and everybody in show business specifically jews changed their nose and it was just normalized this assimilation and it was considered savvy and you had a motto in your family if broken break no wait no no it wasn't the motto it was like it was internalized in me okay what was it in case of emergency break nose yeah yeah and your mom encouraged you uh well my mom knew the business right and she thought i would have a better chance at getting parts because it turns out there's not an enormous surplus of parts for girls who looked like i did and who were jewish and it just there was not a lot of opportunity and she wanted me to have more opportunity she wanted me to have the career that she didn't have that was stopped mid you know trajectory you're 29 and you're working on a movie called wind well i do my nose and i do it very specifically and suddenly i can't stop working and my mom was right and i never wanted to get my nose done i don't like nose jobs yeah you loved your nose i you know i didn't love my nose i was trying to love myself i was trying to accept myself because i didn't believe in it i had like this very deep uh i don't know had this weird commitment to myself and i felt like if i did anything it would be capitulating to some group think that i just did not i did not agree with and i just it felt painful to me so i acquiesce i do it i just do it very in a controlled way so that the guy's making my nose not smaller but just go out so it doesn't go down so i suddenly can be a girl on a sailboat i'm looking like a ralph lauren ad i'm like on a sailboat i'm not jewish suddenly it's just the tip of the nose who knew that's all i needed and i'm making money for the first time in my life there's a slight problem with your first procedure though and you're a year later a year later and you're still filming that and oh thank you and you're still you're in the middle of filming and the director says there's a little spot on your nose you need to well the cinematographer john toll who's a you know academy award-winning cinematographer and he was shooting these incredible scenes and i was shooting for about four months out at sea 15 miles out at sea just on these sailboats racing and i had no makeup and very tan and he looked at me one day and he just like goes studying my nose and going what what is that i'm noticing a little white thing and it looked like you know you make a knuckle and it looks like that a little like white cartilage and i said yeah and i'd noticed it a little bit but i was kind of pretending i was just too sensitive and it would be fine and the doctor had told me it would take about a year for the swelling to really go down and it was all i mean we're talking about olden times okay we're talking about like you know early plastic surgery techniques and i guess they probably don't have this problem anymore but at the time he was the guy and he said i often have to go in and do a little cleanup afterwards almost always so when this happened i came back and i said i'm gonna have to do reshoots but what is this and he said oh it's just the piece of the graft i just have to go into your nose and just you know smooth it out and i was like can't you just do it in the office can't you give me an injection or just like you know bang it or something and you told him explicitly i like my nose i said i love it i love my nose no you solve my problem don't don't do anything but just i trusted him right because he was he was like the patron saint of nose jobs to me he was just like he could do no wrong he did exactly as i asked and i knew that he was frustrated initially i knew that he you know they like a nose to have a certain symmetry they know they don't want it to dominate a face and i was like i like meryl streep's nose he's like why would you like marilyn streep's nose and i was like her name is merrell like that like he just didn't get it and i was like i like a strong nose and i want a strong nose and i need to have this dominant nose i'm really well known i cannot look different i could not have been more explicit and then i came to and the bandage came off and something was just not right did you ever think of suing this guy i've been asked that many times but the thing is is when the guy when i took off the bandage i write about this in great detail in case you're interested uh because it's bizarre it was like an episode of the twilight zone right and so this man was like the granddaddy of nose jobs he was sweet and just kind and fatherly and he would never want to have done anything bad to me and when he looked at it he looked at me and i don't think i've ever seen such a dramatic change i was like you this is all you do and this one like why he didn't he didn't even own what it was he just know that he remarked about it so what i think may be what happened unless i had a video of what happened under the knife perhaps he just went a little like it's a little bulky let me just push the graft up a little i mean just i don't know what he did but he changed the proportion or something because he never took the bump out the bump's still there the bone's the same something he just sure he i don't know whatever he did it was it was interesting well i think the the the bottom line is that you look different right from when you started filming but i looked different in a way that made no sense right like nothing about it was i couldn't like track like i couldn't understand it one of the most heartbreaking parts of the book is the cruelty uh and people's reactions to uh this the latest surgery and you tell a story about a woman at the airport and not to mention you know even looking up some youtube foota videos of you i noticed some of the comments are just you know this is the world we live in but oh she looked better before why did she do this and you had pretty much everyone and anyone commenting on your face and specifically your nose which was must have been infuriating and embarrassing and tell me what that was like i believe it was the thing that gave me freedom i believe it was the hardest most lonely confusing it was so it was so i can almost i mean i write about it in great detail but when i think about it i almost like go blank because it was so devastating and if to be so misunderstood on a global stage for decades and the interest and the the the amount well the amount of like the lack of generosity in humanity hurt my feelings so much that i'd basically i couldn't get a job i couldn't support myself i was just i just decided i give up i give up i cannot ever ever ask anyone to approve of me again or like me and i've got to figure out who i am without this persona without dirty dancing without any of it and without it that loneliness is where i got to hit my bottom if you will of understanding like who i am and what my worth is in a way that nobody could ever take away again and it was like everything i had known to be the the the attributes of a successful person or life that i had grown up with which was you work hard you everyone loves you you get awards you make a living doing what you're good at you you know just work harder than everyone and be better than everyone and suddenly just nothing made sense i was like alice in the looking glass and then i had to just say okay well that's done i can't wait for this to blow over i can't wait for people to understand and people who knew me and loved me watched me go through this it must have been hard right tracy it must have been really hard because no one understood it the people who are close to me are like what are they talking about what is the problem and i started thinking maybe it's because baby was them maybe because they felt so identified because there's so few movies where the leading lady looks like them or isn't perfect or is more human or just doesn't get the guy and suddenly is seen as more than she even saw herself and so that is the only thing i could ever figure out was this ownership and that they were hurt that i was saying something about them that they weren't enough i don't know but i spent too many years trying to think about this and not coming up with anything except for rescuing myself that nobody was going to rescue me and i had to go and figure out just in this crazy life with all of these incredibly great and horrible things that have happened like i mean there was a moment when i wanted to call this book you couldn't write this [ __ ] because it was so dramatic and what i learned was i am a resilient human being and i have had incredible every single hard thing that has happened for me has happened for me and has changed me and i i would never want to be anyone else i mean i'm happier than i've ever been and it's just not been it's been i just feel so grateful that i have survived what i've survived and just i don't think about my nose or myself i just think about what am i contributing to this world in this life and how am i loving and how am i a mother and how am i a friend and how am i learning and this book i hope would be able to if anyone identifies even though my situations are extreme they're very wild and wooly but maybe you would identify with the feelings and that there's always a way out and there's always a way back to yourself and with everything that's hard it just shapes you into i don't know i just sorry that's it no i mean i think that's awesome because i would still be pissed off and bitter no you wouldn't because i'm i'm sorry i would be so mad at that guy i just tell you i'm so selfish i want to be happy and free yeah right and free and i gotta be honest i made choices and all of this i've never felt better so if it i felt worse than ever i guess i could be mad but i don't i feel genuinely like this is cool i don't need more and i'm so glad you wrote about this because i think there's you know in in a way i wish you had written about this 20 years ago and said hey this is i don't know but i don't know if if people are receptive because people are cruel the prologue was i started to write the prologue over 20 years ago because i wanted people to understand and i was so sick of it and so bored and so frustrated and i just i started i'll do an op-ed for the new york times and i'll tell them i've been maligned and i just that's when i started writing and then i realized that i just for whatever reason it just came naturally now and it came as the the pickle that i got myself out of you also um and and i'm gonna take some audience questions because we're gonna have to wrap up soon but you also had other extraordinary things happen in your life you had a daughter you married clark uh greg you um you know and you found being a mother incredibly fulfilling so you've been i mean being a mother is the greatest thing that ever happened to me i mean i'm just so grateful that i didn't miss it and i just love i love being married i loved having a kid and i love being single i love it i love all of these different stages they all have their own challenges and they all are so rewarding because it's like having different lifetimes it's true in different chapters um and this is a i'm going to end with this so let me uh somebody said this is from the live stream stephanie hi stephanie out there where where was your favorite place to spend time at mountain lake lodge while filming dirty dancing and have you been back since filming this was i think it was my bed because i was my bed your bed i was very tired i didn't hang out anywhere i was working every single day every single shot of the movie and by the way there's a really cute story a funny story about how you kind of had to become your own costume designer which i gotta kick out with tracy's help oh really oh that's right you weren't you've got some um my shorts some bermuda shorts like tracy hat on that's so funny um do you still keep in touch with any fellow dirty dancing co-stars i have stayed in touch with cynthia rhodes who i adore and i'm very close with kenny ortega oh nice he will be my fairy godfather for the rest of my life and i was so sad well obviously obviously about patrick but also jerry orbach terrible he was such an amazing human being right so exquisite so funny so real so dear so beloved so professional too right how about perfect yeah okay it's perfect that makes up for what i said about susan smith um how um how have female friendships help how have female friendships helped you is that arrive it's from sarah help you survive survive okay well obviously female friendships have completely carried me because i you know was always like swinging from the chandeliers in my romantic life and the only thing that saved me were my girls did you have it the cat i wanted to ask you this so robin thank you for asking this uh the the knish man of mountain dale's daughter okay robin um but did you have the catskills experience growing up i never went to the catskills my grandfather who was mickey katz who was really really well known everyone assumed he was a cat skill guy he wasn't he wasn't he was a porsche well he was a yiddish comedian and band leader and musician and he had like maybe 25 records on capital doing things like david crockett oh that's right he sang funny lyrics yeah baby crockett oh no to everything yeah yeah like you know um uh borscht wait borscht riders in the sky i mean it was really david crockett um tickle tickle instead of tico tico but it was just it was like with the weird al yankovic of the 50s and he would basically bring the old country to all of the immigrants who had to basically you know wanted to be american and they missed the old country and so he gave them he really leaned in and gave them a way to feel american do american songs with yiddish klezmer yeah the final ques this i think is a good way to wrap it up because i know one of your favorite favorite chapters jennifer is uh something called unbridled which is towards the end of the book and uh someone asks i think jen i have to put my glasses on too jen another jen what do you hope young women take away from your book because in a way the final chapters are sort of uh treat us if you will on sort of where we are as women and and how we sometimes or did sometimes supplement sublimate our own hopes and dreams and ambitions yeah um i love that question um i really feel that as a woman i believe that we have so many chapters to our lives and so many versions of there's so many there's i don't know there's i feel that there are ways we can be feel we can feel stuck in the corner throughout our lives and in motherhood in marriage in careers and losing career to be a mother and that there is no perfection it is just the perfection of imperfection of just knowing that it's like we have we have this malleable we're made of malleable stuff and we can adapt to being a mother or being a professional and trying to do both or trying not to do both or being home and that there are no rules and that you can always find your way out of the corner when you realize oh this is not this is not me happy joyous and free what can i do to um get more joy out of my life and be able to say like i can do anything i can stay in my marriage i can leave my marriage i can have a baby i can have a career that none of it's it's all messy it's all complicated and nobody has a silver bullet and that it's just an adventure and just keep going and don't give up well that's a good way to end the book is called out of the corner jennifer gray thank you thank you and as as susan mentioned uh jennifer will be autographing signing copies of the book i highly recommend it and i guess it's going to be outside in the hall i haven't been to the y for a while but you guys can figure it out you're smart thank you for coming [Applause] you

Channel: The 92nd Street Y, New York

Views: 24,293

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Id: iXigVl0sPiY

Length: 63min 22sec (3802 seconds)

Published: Sun May 22 2022