Jeff Goldblum lost his virginity the same night he made his professional stage debut. It was Tuesday July 27, 1971, and he was a gangly 18-year-old from Pittsburgh who had moved to New York the previous summer to follow his dream of becoming an actor. He was studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse under the great acting coach Sanford Meisner, and had managed to get a part in the chorus of a new musical adaptation of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Opening night at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park was a success, and afterwards some of the cast and crew ended up at dinner together.
“There was this woman who seemed exotically older to me,” recalls Goldblum, his eyes sparkling as we wait for our breakfast outside in the patio section of the Chateau Marmont. “I think she was in her late 20s. Nine or 10 years older than me. She worked in the costume department. She’d been married and was now separated, living in a loft in some place like Tribeca or SoHo. This was all exotic to me. We’d flirted a little bit. After the meal she said: ‘Let’s share a cab home.’ In the cab there was some, uh, um… kissing. She said: ‘Come to my house.’ We went there, and, well, I won’t go into all the details but that’s where I lost my virginity.”
A momentous evening, by anybody’s standards. I ask him if he felt like a different person the next day.
“Another mosaic piece was laid into the final thing, certainly,” he says. “I told her, just before we did it. I said: ‘I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve never done this before.’ She seemed to like that. She said: ‘Really? Really?’”
The Collected Works of Kevin EG Perry 