I Carried a Watermelon: Dirty Dancing and Me. Katy Brand
and choreographically challenging few weeks that go on to change her life.
A couple of nights later, Baby is reluctantly hanging out with the hotel owner’s grandson, smarmy Neil, who has taken a bit of a shine to her. By chance, she stumbles upon Penny, who is crying in a deserted kitchen. Baby runs to find Johnny, who comes to get his dance partner, and learns that Penny is pregnant by sleazy, spoilt waiter Robbie (who is by now romancing Baby’s sister, Lisa). Billy has found a back-street abortionist who will take care of Penny’s problem (it’s 1963, and so there are very few safe options open to her), but it costs $200, which they don’t have, and he is also only available on the night when Johnny and Penny have to perform a show dance at another hotel, the Sheldrake. Baby borrows the money from her father (without telling him what it’s for) and also steps up to fill in for Penny on the night.
This means she must very quickly learn the dance, with Johnny as her teacher and partner. As they work together, we feel the tension building– both sexual and fearful – can she pull this off? Finally, they go off in Johnny’s bashed-up old car to dance the mambo at the Sheldrake, while Billy takes Penny to have her pregnancy terminated. Apart from one small fluff on the dance floor, Baby gets through it. They are elated, but when they get back to Kellerman’s late at night, they find Penny bleeding and in agony. The abortionist botched the job.
Baby runs to get her father, who treats and reassures Penny, but is horrified that Baby is hanging out with people he considers to be reckless and unreliable. He gets the wrong end of the stick and thinks Johnny is the father of Penny’s baby, and is suspicious that he and Baby seem to know each other well. In his most ‘upright and loving father’ tone, he forbids her from having anything more to do with the dancers.
Baby defies her father, going straight to Johnny’s cabin, where she asks him to dance. This becomes one of the greatest seduction scenes of all time. After some earth-shattering sex, they start a relationship. How could they not?
Meanwhile, a lonely older woman, Vivian, who has been paying Johnny for private dance lessons and anything else that ‘comes up’, discovers this new relationship, and in a fit of jealousy, accuses Johnny of stealing purses and wallets around various Catskills resorts. Max Kellerman tells the Housemans he is about to fire Johnny, and Baby has to step in and reveal – in front of everyone – that she has been spending her nights with him, as this is the only alibi he has to prove he is not the thief.
Later, it is revealed that an elderly couple, the Schumachers, are responsible for the thefts, but Kellerman fires Johnny anyway for his forbidden liaison with a guest, and so he leaves the resort and Baby with tears in his eyes. Eventually, everyone realises that Robbie was the one who got Penny pregnant, and Lisa breaks it off with him. There is a great deal of misery all round, and Baby has some home truths to tell her father about prejudice, and snobbery, and what it takes to be a decent person.
It seems the summer has come to a bad end, and not just for Baby, but for everyone. Is this the end of an era? A wider loss of innocence? Max Kellerman seems to think so, as he laments times gone by – are cosy family resorts which feature wig trying on sessions and ballroom dancing lessons going to survive? Are they simply too old-fashioned?
But what’s this? It feels like the future has come to claim its place at the table. For at the evening talent show, on the last night of the season, Johnny Castle returns! Making a bombastic entrance, striding through the room for all the world like a man who hasn’t just been fired, he finds Baby sitting with her parents in the audience. He takes her out of The Corner nobody should have put her in. They spontaneously perform their mambo routine so perfectly – including the impressive lift Baby couldn’t manage at the Sheldrake (amazing what a life-changing shag can do for your confidence) – that everyone, even Max Kellerman and Baby’s dad, agree they are perfect together, that Johnny is a good man, and Baby is her own woman. The whole audience are up and dancing and they all have the time of their lives.
And breathe. Well, I didn’t check anything until after I’d finished. I just blurted it all out from memory. It was quite exciting, and hopefully, a helpful reminder as we take a deep dive into one of the greatest films of all time. Please do watch it though (who needs an excuse?), as it stands the test of time, and repeat viewings. It really is a phenomenal piece of work. Written by former dancer Eleanor Bergstein, drawing from her own life experience, filmed with a small budget ($4 million, which is nothing in feature film land) and a total lack of belief from the very studio that made it (they wanted it to go straight to VHS), it has grossed over $200 million worldwide, spawned multiple remakes, including a long-running live show, and thousands of articles, tribute events, wedding dances, proposals and even academic papers. It has also affected my life in the most unexpected ways.
Although I was not truly conscious of it until much later, in some respects I Carried a Watermelon cleverly started writing itself before I was even aware of my desire to explore and celebrate Dirty Dancing in real depth. A few years ago, I took part in a live show where the premise was you wrote a love letter to something very important to you, and then read it out for the audience. I chose Dirty Dancing, seemingly out of the blue, but once I started writing my letter I saw that I meant every word. I took it to the gig, stood up and delivered it, and I was amazed by the response. I thought people would simply laugh at me, but in fact I had a line of women, and some men, waiting afterwards to thank me, and hug me, and tell me how much it meant to them too. I looked for the letter when I started writing this book, and found it tucked away deep in my computer files. I read it again and still felt that burn of passion coming off the page. That letter became the start of this book.
What I began to realise, as I wrote my letter, was that Dirty Dancing has somehow shaped me and my choices, insinuating itself into my life in unexpected ways – it has shaped my sexual preferences, my attitudes to social class, good character, politics, love, relationships, casual sex, abortion, father/daughter issues and, of course, my understanding of whether it’s possible to learn a complicated dance routine to perform in public in only a matter of days, at the same time as losing your virginity and ensuring an old, thieving couple is prosecuted for their crimes. All off the back of carrying a watermelon.
But why do I love Dirty Dancing? Would it be too much to say it’s like the wind … through my tree? Yes, maybe, but it wouldn’t be far off. It has everything – daughters and fathers, sisters, neglected wives, fear of how a pregnancy will affect your career, low-life scum and rich wankers, and how to handle them all. It’s like an instruction manual for girls – well, middle-class girls anyway. Girls like me. ‘Normal’ girls who sometimes have a bit of a yen to get out there and do something a bit crazy. Nice girls who suddenly get an urge to carry a watermelon and get dirty with the ‘wrong’ sort of man.
I’m so glad Dirty Dancing got made, when it so nearly didn’t – Eleanor Bergstein struggled to find funding for her script for years, and eventually had to shoot the whole thing over a few autumn weeks in a cold and rainy hotel resort in Virginia, on half the budget she had originally intended. I’m so glad it was released, when it so nearly wasn’t – the company that stumped up the money couldn’t initially see much potential beyond ‘straight to video’ and so it might have fallen by the wayside. And the fact that there is an abortion storyline right at its heart meant that it lost sponsorship money – but still Bergstein bravely resisted calls to change her film and remove the abortion. She was clear that we should not ever be complacent about our rights as women, and I think she has been proved 100 per cent correct in this regard.
I’m so happy that Dirty Dancing is now widely getting the more serious recognition it deserves, when it so easily may not have. It was dismissed for years as an enjoyable but largely insignificant piece of entertaining fluff – a commercial hit, yes, but nothing more – when in fact it is an important rite-of-passage story for girls. The female lead, Baby, is about as active in the story as it is possible to be. She makes it all happen. Every last moment is down to her, from the funding of an illegal abortion to the offer to fill in and learn the dance, to the extraordinary first seduction, and then the exoneration of Johnny as a thief. She drives the entire plot.
It