Out of the Corner: A Memoir

by Jennifer Grey Narrated by Jennifer Grey

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ¿ A deeply candid and refreshingly spirited memoir of identity lost and found from the star of the iconic film Dirty Dancing

“A funny, dishy, occasionally heartbreaking coming-of-age story.”-The New York Times

“Savage and engaging . . . Grey's memoir is interesting not only for her journey out of darkness but also for what her story reveals about what women encounter in the entertainment business, and the fortitude required to make it.”-The Washington Post

In this beautiful, close-to-the bone account, Jennifer Grey takes readers on a vivid tour of the experiences that have shaped her, from her childhood as the daughter of Broadway and film legend Joel Grey, to the surprise hit with Patrick Swayze that made her America's sweetheart, to her inspiring season eleven win on ABC's Dancing with the Stars.

Throughout this intimate narrative, Grey richly evokes places and times that were defining for a generation-from her preteen days in 1970s Malibu and wild child nights in New York's club scene, to her roles in quintessential movies of the 1980s, including The Cotton Club, Red Dawn, and her breakout performance in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. With self-deprecating humor and frankness, she looks back on her unbridled, romantic adventures in Hollywood. And with enormous bravery, she shares the devastating fallout from a plastic surgery procedure that caused the sudden and stunning loss of her professional identity and career. Grey inspires with her hard-won battle back, reclaiming her sense of self from a culture and business that can impose a narrow and unforgiving definition of female worth. She finds, at last, her own true north and starts a family of her own, just in the nick of time.

Distinctive, moving, and powerful, told with generosity and pluck, Out of the Corner is a memoir about a never-ending personal evolution, a coming-of-age story for women of every age.

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2022 - AudioFile

Fans of the cult classic DIRTY DANCING will be all ears as its female lead, Jennifer Grey, narrates the story of her rise to fame—and sudden loss of it—in this unflinching memoir. From her childhood with her famous father, actor Joel Grey, to behind-the-scenes anecdotes of the film, and beyond, Grey retraces her path from stardom to a mistimed cosmetic procedure, and then to her life as a wife and mother. Throughout, she displays grace, humor, and self-deprecation. This is a detailed exploration of how the rise to Hollywood fame can come with debilitating pressures. Grey is a lively storyteller who doesn't hold back any punches. Finally, she is being seen again, after nose surgery left her unrecognizable to the world—including family, friends, agents, and casting directors. M.R. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/11/2022

The Dirty Dancing star cracks open her turbulent past in this searing and heartfelt debut. Born to Broadway sensation Joel Grey and actor Jo Wilder in 1960, Grey grew up in the glow of “the biz” glittering lights and, after surviving a gauntlet of New York City prep schools in the ’70s, eventually set her sights on joining the family profession. “I didn’t know how they did it exactly,” Grey writes, “but I saw firsthand that it was possible.” With the same self-deprecating charm that made her “America’s sweetheart” (for better or, often, worse), she recounts her breakout role in John Hughes’s 1986 hit Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; dating costar Matthew Broderick—and later handing him over to his paramour Helen Hunt; her abiding friendship with her Dirty Dancing costar Patrick Swayze; and embracing her father’s sexuality after he came out at age 82. She’s also strikingly frank when contending with debacles both painful and public, including the botched surgery of her “Jewish nose” that left her acting career in shambles (“Overnight, I was basically reduced to a punch line”). In spite of the devastation, Grey emerges as a resilient star in her own story, candidly sharing with readers all her joy, confusion, and hard-won wisdom along the way. Fans won’t want to miss this. (May)

From the Publisher

What is truth? How does someone make sense of their life lived through a public lens? In Out of the Corner, Jennifer Grey peels back all the artifice, denial, obfuscation, and myriad assumptions and exposes a gorgeous, human portrait of her life, hard lived-in and fiercely fought for. Her chapter titles alone show the insights and whimsy that she brings to her memoir, along with the shattering public and private struggles and successes. It’s miles deep, sharply personal, bracingly honest—and if there’s anybody who deserves to step out of the corner into the light of her mind and indomitable spirit, it’s Jennifer Grey.”—Jamie Lee Curtis

“We all know Jennifer Grey as a talented actress, but Out of the Corner introduces us to a gifted writer. In reading her memoir, I understood the passion, love, and loss that has given shape to her life’s journey. Her narrative is nuanced, her words carefully chosen for maximum impact. She shares achingly human moments, like what it was like as a little girl to watch her father, the iconic Joel Grey, as he applied his greasepaint before taking the stage in Cabaret. Out of the Corner is a revelation, a work of emotional generosity and personal courage. It’s sneaky brilliant. Love it and love Jennifer. Baby got Book.”—Michael J. Fox

“The Dirty Dancing star cracks open her turbulent past in this searing and heartfelt debut . . . Grey emerges as a resilient star in her own story, candidly sharing with readers all her joy, confusion, and hard-won wisdom along the way. Fans won’t want to miss this.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An actor’s intimate self-portrait. In a gossipy, lively memoir, Grey chronicles her evolving sense of identity. . . . A spirited look at stardom.”—Kirkus Reviews

AUGUST 2022 - AudioFile

Fans of the cult classic DIRTY DANCING will be all ears as its female lead, Jennifer Grey, narrates the story of her rise to fame—and sudden loss of it—in this unflinching memoir. From her childhood with her famous father, actor Joel Grey, to behind-the-scenes anecdotes of the film, and beyond, Grey retraces her path from stardom to a mistimed cosmetic procedure, and then to her life as a wife and mother. Throughout, she displays grace, humor, and self-deprecation. This is a detailed exploration of how the rise to Hollywood fame can come with debilitating pressures. Grey is a lively storyteller who doesn't hold back any punches. Finally, she is being seen again, after nose surgery left her unrecognizable to the world—including family, friends, agents, and casting directors. M.R. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2022-03-31
An actor’s intimate self-portrait.

In a gossipy, lively memoir, Grey (b. 1960) chronicles her evolving sense of identity—as a woman, actor, wife, and, most satisfyingly, mother—in what she calls an “ongoing coming-of-age story.” Born into an “extended family of Broadway royalty,” the daughter of actors Joel Grey and Jo Wilder, she was frequently uprooted between Los Angeles and New York, where her world was enlivened by her parents’ famous friends: actors, directors, artists, writers, activists, and even New York Mayor John Lindsay. “We lived in some extraordinary places,” Grey writes, “among extraordinary, accomplished humans.” Determined to be an actor, she enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre while, like many hopefuls, she worked as a server at a series of restaurants. Although she went out on plenty of auditions, she attributes her lack of success to her nose, which made her “not quite ‘pretty enough’ for the popular girl, but not awkward enough to pass for the loser.” Two roles charged her career: Matthew Broderick’s sister in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and Baby Houseman in Dirty Dancing (1987) with co-star Patrick Swayze. Grey recounts in detail the challenges of making and promoting Dirty Dancing, a movie that few had faith in—but that catapulted her to stardom. She is forthcoming about her many relationships, including with Broderick; Johnny Depp; an older director; a sexy hairdresser; and director and actor Clark Gregg, whom she married, recently divorced, and with whom she has a daughter. Grey has dealt with some severe health problems, drug and alcohol abuse, and persistent anxiety and depression. “Ambition had a strangely distasteful and negative connotation to me,” she writes, continuing, “I had never been a big fan of competition and was quick to avoid conflict.” Yet at the age of 50, she enthusiastically competed on Dancing With the Stars—and won.

A spirited look at stardom.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176294293
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/03/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	912,543

Read an Excerpt

1

Life Is a Cabaret

When you’re born into a family you really have nothing to compare it to. There is no opinion, no preference, no judgment, no awareness of anything even existing outside of your reality. There is just the instantaneous and immutable devotion to these beings, your source for everything you need to survive, and an acute myopia rendering whatever is beyond this complete triangle, if indeed there exists anything at all, blurry and moot. Which is fine because, if you’re lucky, everything you need is right here. And it was for me.

I made an early entrance, a month before I was due, while my dad, the actor Joel Grey, was out of town, doing his nightclub act in the Catskills. My mother’s water broke while she was at a party in West Hollywood, and two of her actor pals drove her downtown to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where I was delivered via an emergency C-section.

When the doctor called my dad to tell him of my surprise arrival, it was six in the morning on the East Coast. The operator said, “I’ve got a person-to-person call for Mr. Joel Grey from Dr. Maury Lazarus,” and my dad, who picked up the phone in his sleep, promptly hung up. The doctor called back and yelled over the operator, “Tell him his daughter is born so he better accept the call!”

My dad had been acting professionally since he was a little kid, but in his late twenties, around the time I was a year old, he was hitting his stride, and his career was cookin’. He landed his first Broadway show, replacing the lead in the Neil Simon comedy Come Blow Your Horn. It was Simon’s first play, and a huge hit. So our family picked up and moved from the modest cottage in the Hollywood Hills where they’d set up house, to two floors of a brownstone on East 30th Street in New York City.

My mom, Jo Wilder, was a performer, too. Every baby’s their mother’s biggest fan, and I was no different, but my mom actually looked like a movie star. Visual timelines of my parents’ careers lined the walls of wherever we were living. Framed, black-and-white production stills of my mom as Peter Pan, with a pixie cut, flying in midair in green tights. As Gypsy Rose Lee in Gypsy, a femme fatale mid-striptease, her spaghetti straps suggestively hanging off her bare shoulders. As Polly Peachum, donning a man’s bowler in Threepenny Opera. With her cropped bangs, heavy brows, and winged eyeliner, she looked more than a little like Audrey Hepburn. Everything about her in these photographs exuded theatricality, her mouth impossibly wide, in full song. She looked like she was born to be on the stage.

I loved it when my mom would sing me the lullaby “Little Lamb” from Gypsy and tell me about how the real-life lamb would sometimes pee while she held it in her lap on stage, and she’d have to pretend it hadn’t. She sang around the house all the time.

She wasn’t a kid when she had me. She was closer to thirty than twenty, and had been at it, knocking around the business for some time, ready for her ship to come in when she met my dad. He was very keen to get married and start their family right away. She didn’t know what the hurry was, but got swept up in his vision for them.

My parents had lost a baby before me, and my mother had struggled to carry me to term. So when I was four and a half, my parents decided to adopt a baby boy. The three of us flew out to Los Angeles, and we left a few days later a family of four, bringing back with us to New York my newborn brother, James Rico. (Not the most Jewish of middle names, but my parents were fans of the painter Rico Lebrun.) Jimmy was one of those gorgeous babies right out of the gate. Blond, big blue eyes, white-white skin, and in addition to our genetic differences, my brother felt energetically almost like a different species from the three of us, but a breathtakingly beautiful one. He looked like an angel.

My parents referred to our gang as the four J’s: Jo, Joel, Jenny, and Jimmy. Being a close family was of paramount importance to them. There was a lot of love there.

My dad and I were tight. When I was little, I would wear his old crew neck undershirts, worn so thin and ridiculously soft the cotton was almost diaphanous. I remember the perfect stack of his white tees, folded with origami-like precision in his antique armoire, weighted down by a heavy round bar of Roger & Gallet soap, wrapped in its signature crinkled silk paper and seal. Opening the cabinet door filled my nose with the most intoxicating combination of lemon, bergamot, rosemary, orange, neroli, rose, and carnation. I’d sleep in his T-shirts as nighties, comforted by that warm scent, probably the closest approximation to what happens when a baby smells her mother’s breast milk. Does that sound weird? Well, so be it. I was never breastfed, but I felt utterly peaceful and held, enveloped in that sensorial refuge.

My dad was the one I woke up in the middle of the night when I was scared that I was about to be sick. He’d immediately get up and follow me silently into the bathroom to keep me company. He’d place the bath mat on the cold tile floor in front of the toilet for me to bravely kneel on as he lifted the seat. We’d sit in silence. He’d softly repeat, his eyes at half-mast, “You’re gonna feel much better once you get this out.” I hated that feeling so much, terrified of what was coming, my tiny body wracked with overpowering waves of spasms and retching. But with him at my side, his quiet presence, the cool washcloth he placed on my forehead or the nape of my neck, I could stay the course through this gastrointestinal storm. Afterward he’d have me splash my face with cool water, brush my teeth, and he’d tuck me back into bed.

I felt special, if not guilty, that I got what seemed to me the best of my dad. But within the family, my mother, brother, and I were a team, the spokes that sprung from the hub of the wheel that was my dad and his career. He was a rising star on Broadway, and when he was doing a show, we ate dinner at 5:30. Because theater folk are night owls, Jimmy and I were on our own on weekend mornings, expected to “quietly amuse ourselves,” watching cartoons and helping ourselves to bowls of cereal, so our parents could sleep in until eleven.

For me, there was no place cooler on earth than hanging out backstage with my dad on Saturday matinees, following his every move as his diminutive shadow. Watching him apply his Kabuki-esque makeup for the role he originated as the Master of Ceremonies in the stage version of Cabaret filled me with this deep knowing of how lucky I was to be right where I was. The years 1966 to 1968—when I was six till I was eight—were my Cabaret years. My dad performed eight shows a week, and though he wasn’t around most evenings, I was thrilled when I got him all to myself on a Saturday afternoon. I would sit quietly in his dressing room, fully cognizant of the special honor and privilege it was to bear witness to this sacred preshow ritual and transformation.

It felt like a delicious mix of fizzy and calm, but mostly of reverence. The makeup mirror was an altar, my dad’s face, like the center of a sunflower, both making the art and being the art simultaneously. One step removed, I’d watch every brushstroke in rapt attention, gazing at my father’s reflection from behind him, the image framed by the tiny globes of vanity mirror lights. I surveyed the scene like a detective, making mental notes of the accoutrements in evidence. The cough drops and good luck totems, photos of my mother, brother, father, and me in Lucite DAX frames. Taped to the outer edges of the mirror were opening-night telegrams from friends, along with pencil and crayon stick figure drawings my brother and I regularly made for him to wish him luck.

From inside his dressing room, I could feel the kinetic energy of the company percolating just outside his open door, the raucous laughing, singing, vocal warm-ups with booming scales echoing through the stairwell. Flirtatiousness was the native tongue of this sexy company, his spirited, fun-filled “work family” spontaneously popping their heads in, paying respect. My dad only momentarily averted his gaze from his painstaking task to proudly announce my presence through the mirrored reflection.

The only person other than me granted an all-access pass into my dad’s sanctuary was his dresser. The relationship between actor and dresser is an intimate one. In addition to dressing the actor from head to toe like a small child, the dresser is responsible for maintaining, mending, and laundering the costumes, as well as coordinating postshow visitors. Their job is to facilitate and smooth over everything the artist shouldn’t have to be bothered with, intuiting every mood and unspoken request, whether it be cheerleader or dead silence. The really good ones anticipate every need before the performer is even aware of it.

Quiet as an apparition, their complexion pale and waxy from lack of fresh air and sunlight, a dresser is like a ghost who has no needs other than to serve. A special breed, usually attired in all black to be invisible when moving in the shadows of backstage, they sport sensible shoes and an apron—the equivalent of a tool belt for costumes, stocked with solutions for any potential emergency: tape, tissues, safety pins, miniature flashlight for quick changes in the pitch dark. Dressers are Broadway’s selfless, unsung heroes.

Videos