Jennifer Grey’s memoir is a stinging indictment of how we judge beauty

As the daughter of Broadway star Joel Grey, Jennifer Grey caught the acting bug early, at age 6. That’s when her father originated the role of the slick, menacing Master of Ceremonies in “Cabaret” onstage, in 1966. As Jennifer Grey writes in her keenly observed memoir, “Out of the Corner,” her Saturday treat was to sit in his dressing room while he transformed himself with false eyelashes, lip pencil and Dippity-do gel.

“Every one of his features was reinvented from scratch,” she writes. “This self-drawn mask blotted out any trace of my dad as I knew him.”

Those admiring words haunt the rest of her story, because Grey’s own arc of celebrity has been famously complicated by the reinvention, so to speak, of her own features.

Grey rose to fame in her mid-20s with a pair of films that became touchstones of the 1980s. She was the perfectly snotty sister in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” in 1986, and a year later she was adorable, endearing, sexy Baby, mambo queen of the Catskills, in “Dirty Dancing.” That surprise hit, pairing her with heartthrob Patrick Swayze, transformed her.

“I was America’s sweetheart, which you would think would be the key to unlocking all my hopes and dreams,” she writes. “But it didn’t go down that way.”

Grey chronicles the flatlining of her career with savage and engaging wit. But the pain is clear, and it is tied up with how much of her Hollywood value hinged on her features, and the price she paid for tweaking her face.

“For one thing,” she writes, “there didn’t seem to be a surplus of parts for actresses who looked like me.” That is, Jewish. Or rather, a bit too Jewish. So she did what so many Jews have done for ages - what both her parents had done, in fact: Grey got a nose job. She was almost 30, a celebrity, yet out of work. She told her doctor not to radically alter her looks, and he didn’t. Success! Grey started getting hired again. When a medical problem arose about a year later, another surgery was necessary - and the doctor wasn’t so careful this time. Now her life truly tanked, because she’d become unrecognizable.

Even Grey’s father told her (with what feels like brutal coolness), “I think it would probably be best if you just didn’t go out in public for a while.”

“Out of the Corner” is meant to be a tale of triumph, and it is, once Grey climbs out of career-crash hell. Swayze’s character, Johnny, famously proclaimed in “Dirty Dancing” that “nobody puts Baby in a corner,” but that’s where Grey ended up in real life. Alone. Rejected, as she tells us, by an ultra-conformist industry, and not helped by her own tendency toward self-destruction. She takes us on a wild ride through her star-studded youth (belting show tunes with Stephen Sondheim), her star-studded coke binges, and her many bad romances, featuring Johnny Depp, Matthew Broderick and a creepy zillionaire who flew the teenage Grey to Rio, where she tumbled into a bizarro situation involving her comic idol Gilda Radner.