INTERVIEW: Dinah Manoff, of ‘Grease’ fame, pens cautionary Hollywood tale
Image courtesy of Star Alley Press / Provided by ABC PR with permission.
The accomplished actor Dinah Manoff is remembered for several prominent acting parts over the years, including her role as Marty in Grease the movie, plus characters in Child’s Play and Empty Nest, among many others. She’s also a Tony Award winner for Neil Simon’s I Ought to Be in Pictures. Recently, Manoff has put her creativity and history in Hollywood toward a new venture: an original book called The Real True Hollywood Story of Jackie Gold.
“The project began as a little, little, bitty, bitty germ seed many years ago when Princess Diana was trapped and killed by the paparazzi in that tunnel,” Manoff said in a recent phone interview. “It was the first time as an actress that I saw how dangerous those guys were, that they would go to any lengths to get their shot. At the same time that that happened, I was on a series. I was on Empty Nest at the time. Up until then, the tabloids had been really harmless, and then one day right after my first son was born, a guy showed up … at my front door to ask me some really personal questions about my child’s paternity. And because I was a brand-new mother, and that brand-new mother bear was inside of me, I chased him screaming off my property. I felt so violated, and that didn’t leave me.”
Over the years since that incident Manoff has seen the difficulties faced by Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Demi Moore and others, and she started to get the idea of a Hollywood actor by the name of Jackie Gold who lived in that world of flashing bulbs and constant questioning.
“Jackie Gold is a huge, huge movie star, unlike me,” Manoff said with a laugh. “I was never a huge movie star, but she’s a huge, huge movie star and a tabloid darling. Her boyfriend is People’s Sexist Man Alive, and she tells her story from her hospital bed where she’s lying in a coma having jumped off a balcony to escape the paparazzi. And so it gave me a place to vent out all this outrage that I had and also to tell her story in a funny and quirky way.”
The book began in earnest a few years ago when Manoff was a member of a writers’ workshop. She said that experience taught her how to properly write a novel. Previously she had taken a stab at some screenplays and even adapted one of her father’s books into a play.
“I didn’t go to school,” Manoff said. “I was a juvenile delinquent, so I had to really learn my grammar, paragraphs and punctuation. It was a whole learning experience for me. What started many years ago really didn’t come into fruition until the last few years. I had sent out a draft I guess 10 years ago to big, big publishers, and I got, ‘You’re a very nice writer, but not our cup of tea.’ Then when COVID happened, it kind of coincided with this accident I had. I thought, oh my God, I’ve got to send that novel out again, so I polished it up. And I sent it out to independent publishers, which I had never done, and I got two offers, one of which was my fabulous publisher and editor.”
Many high-profile people have blurbed the Jackie Gold book, including Jamie Lee Curtis, Didi Conn and Kristy McNichol. The novel came out in summer 2021, and now Manoff can check an important item off her bucket list.
“It was more than exciting for me,” she said about holding the book in her hands. “I don’t have much of a bucket list. I’ve done a lot. … I really wanted to turn out this work big time. This is a story I really, really wanted to tell, and it used the deepest part of me creatively. So, yeah, it was quite a moment because as an actress I’ve really been trained never to count on a job until you’re in front of the camera because everything can fall apart at the last moment. This was kind of like that. Even when I had the publisher, even when we set the date, even when the last draft was done, I didn’t believe it until I had the book in my hands.”
Manoff was quick to point out that Jackie Gold’s story is not her story; however, the character has Manoff’s voice.
“I approach everything with some degree of humor because that’s my nature,” she said. “The most fun part of writing this was to write Jackie’s scenes in the hospital where everybody thinks that she can’t hear them because she’s in a coma, and she hears everything they’re saying. And she’s commenting on everything and saying what she wishes she could say back. So I refer to this as a serious beach read. It’s entertaining and funny, but it has very serious themes throughout. It’s Jackie’s search for forgiveness, for her actions and for her mother.”
Manoff added: “These were all themes that were just so juicy to wrestle with in the book, but I did try to achieve it in a humorous way otherwise it takes the fun out of it.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Real True Hollywood Story of Jackie Gold by Dinah Manoff is now available from Star Alley Press. Click here for more information.
