The real gang of 1950s Chicago high-schoolers that inspired the story of ‘Grease’
Frequently regarded as the greatest modern musical, the 1978 film adaptation of Grease has continued to maintain a remarkable amount of cultural stock in the years since its release, with its high-school romance plotline being the sort of thing that has the potential to forever connect with audiences.
The film, which was adapted by celebrated producer Allan Carr from the original 1971 play by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, ended up being far more successful than its source material had been in theatres through the power of its Hollywood glitz and the casting of stars like John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. However, when it comes to how faithful it was to the original story and setting that Jacobs and Casey told of the T-Birds and Pink Ladies, it appears that they took significant liberties.
The original play was set in suburban Chicago and was considerably grittier in its approach to telling the story, with Carr taking the decision to tone things down significantly in order to make it a more family-friendly affair. However, he and director Randal Kleiser also took it upon themselves to move the setting to somewhere more rural, in line with their own personal experiences of high school, meaning that a number of the true-to-life elements of Jacobs and Casey’s writing were abandoned.
Not only were many of the characters that the playwrights included in the story based on real people, but the dynamics between them were also based on reality, with some of them coincidentally being people who went on to have careers in acting after growing up in the Chicago area and attending Taft High School.
Actor Donna Mills, best known for roles in Woody Allen’s Broadway comedy Don’t Drink the Water and starring alongside Clint Eastwood in the 1971 film Play Misty For Me, alleged during an interview celebrating the 20th anniversary of the film that Newton-John’s character, Sandy, is based on her, having been a transfer to the same school as Jacobs.
Not only this, but the T-Birds, the greaser gang which Travolta’s Danny Zuko is a member of, is also allegedly based on a real gang that existed at Taft, as were the Pink Ladies that Sandy sororised with in the fictional work. While the gang in the original play were the Burger Palace Boys, according to an article published in the Chicago Reader in 2011, the gang they were based upon were known as the Goombas.
In an attempt to draw attention to how true to reality the original source material was, writer Cynthia Gallaher attested that the real-life gangs and groups had existed while her sister was an attendee of the same school that Jacobs had attended. In an interview for the article, Jacobs confirmed that the Pink Ladies were “the toughest broads I’ve ever seen, before or since,” noting how they carried razor blades in their hair to be used in any instance of requiring self-defence.
On top of that, the Goombas were the boys who essentially ran the school, often competing with rival gangs in the area in drag races and finding themselves in skirmishes on the waterfront. “We didn’t use guns, but some guys from Steinmetz High School came around one night, stuck a shotgun out a car window, and fired,” Leo Golda, a former Goomba, told Gallaher. “They put a hole in one guy’s car radiator, but that was the extent of it.”
It doesn’t necessarily make much of a difference that there’s inconsistency between the stories seen on stage and on screen, especially given how much both industries are simply there to entertain, but those out there who lived the reality of the story will always know that this is the case, and that despite being set at the fictional Rydell High, Grease is firmly a part of Chicago’s history.
