Chapter 1 2 page

I continued at San Jacinto, and the more time I spent away from home, the more I began to realize that there was a whole big world out there waiting to be explored. Even if I couldn’t be an Olympic gymnast, there were still a million other things out there that interested me. Yes, gymnastics had been my dream—and it stung like hell to know I’d missed my chance to achieve it. But I somehow knew instinctively that when one dream dies, you have to move on to a new one. The unhappiest people in this world are those who can’t recover from losing a dream—whose lives cease to have meaning. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. It was a revelation that would later save my life.

Once again, I faced the question: What did I want to be? Who was Patrick Swayze, and what did he have to offer the world? I still wanted so much—to dance, to ice-skate, to sing, to act. I also wanted to become a pilot, and I learned that if I finished two years at San Jacinto, getting my associate arts degree in aviation, I could go into the military and hope to get into flight school. For a while, that’s what I decided I would do, even though the Vietnam War was raging on the other side of the world, sucking young men like me into its jungles and sending them home changed—if it sent them home at all.

But before long, I realized the performing bug was just too strong for me to consider doing anything else. I rehabbed my knee again and kept working out at Mom’s studio, building my strength and flexibility with the goal of performing again. And of course, being at the studio meant I would see Lisa, who was in my thoughts more and more.

I was still intrigued by this mysterious, beautiful girl, but she acted as cool as ever to me. But then came the moment we first danced together onstage. And suddenly, everything changed.

We were performing an exhibition of classical dance at a junior high school auditorium in 1972. Lisa and I had learned and rehearsed the pas de deux from the ballet Raymonda. Just before we stepped out onstage, I kissed her on the cheek for good luck, but that wasn’t the magic moment. The magic happened when she took my hand to start dancing, and our eyes locked.

It felt like an electric charge suddenly coursed through my body. I looked into Lisa’s eyes, and it was as if I was seeing her for the first time. We moved together as one, and I felt a stirring deep in my soul. It was a fleeting moment, but I never forgot it. But after the dance was done, I didn’t mention it to her, afraid that the feelings had been mine alone.

Not long after that, we were paired up in yet another dance—one that threatened to make it embarrassingly clear how I felt about her. We were at my mom’s studio, rehearsing a more avant-garde dance with some pretty provocative moves. At one point, I was supposed to ease Lisa down onto the floor and then lie on top of her. Well, you can imagine the effect this had on me, a healthy twenty-year-old guy wearing tights.

The dance called for us to lie like that for a long, long while. I felt shy and could never look her in the eye, but it was the first time I really got to smell her. And she smelled good. When it was time to move away, I was afraid that someone might note my “primal stirrings,” and quickly turned away to stretch and adjust my legwarmers. Needless to say, I couldn’t wait for the next rehearsal.

Now it was clear that I really liked her, so I went ahead and asked her out on a date. But when you start to like someone who used to be a friend, you get shy—and that’s how I felt. I suddenly didn’t know what to do with myself when I was around her. Fortunately, she did agree to go out on a few dates with me, but they were hardly the stuff of great romance.

First, I’d show up at her house, and one of her five tall, steely Nordic brothers would answer the door. He’d give me the third degree—Where was I taking Lisa? What time would I bring her home?—before she finally came out and we could get out of there. Then, we’d go to dinner and have awkward conversations, which basically consisted of me telling her about how great I was and her seeming utterly unimpressed. I just didn’t have any idea how to talk to a girl—or anyone, for that matter. But I knew I liked her, and I wanted her to like me. I just didn’t have any idea how to make that happen.

As my time at San Jacinto drew to a close, it looked as if I might not even get a chance to try. As I was mulling over what my next step might be, I got invitations to join the Ice Follies, Holiday on Ice, and Disney on Parade traveling shows. I loved ice skating, and joining one of the ice shows would mean pairing up with an excellent partner, Rulanna Rolen. But I loved dancing—and the idea of playing Prince Charming—even more. So despite lingering knee troubles, I signed up to join the Disney on Parade traveling company as it toured all over the United States, Canada, and Latin America. It was time to see the world.

Disney on Parade was a huge traveling show, with dozens of dancers and a giant stage set. We would perform in arenas and coliseums, with billowing blue lamé curtains, a full-scale castle with towers, and a huge egg-shaped screen projecting the stories of Snow White, Fantasia, and other Disney classics. I was excited to have my first performingjob outside Houston—and excited to be traveling to places I’d only read about in books.

The dancers made $125 a week, which felt like a lot of money, especially since we all doubled, tripled, and quadrupled up in our living arrangements on the road. Most of the dancers were women, and of the few who were men, even fewer were straight men. So the opportunities for me in terms of finding women to date were just about endless.

Unfortunately, I still didn’t know how to communicate with women, or anybody else. I just sounded like an egotistical ass whenever I talked, as I couldn’t stop going on and on about myself. For one thing, my knee kept blowing up after each performance, the joint swelling painfully due to the rigors of the show. One dance in particular—the Russian Cossack dance, where you do repeated deep pliés with arms folded and legs flying—caused me no end of trouble. It got so bad that I had to go to the hospital in every city to get the fluid drained from my knee. And the more knee trouble I had, the more I had to talk about it.

But after I had initially alienated just about everyone with my incessant blathering, people started realizing that I wasn’t really egotistical, just insecure. And after a while, they started to accept and even befriend me. I ended up making a ton of friends during Disney on Parade and began to understand that I didn’t have to win everybody all the time—that in fact, trying to win people only drove them away. Like a puppy learning not to chew on things, I trained myself not to talk about myself all the time.

I began dating one woman who was in the show, a good-looking blonde who had a party-queen reputation. She was a wild one, the kind of girl who liked trouble, and at first I was drawn to her dangerous air. Part of me just wanted to see if I could win her, but once I did, I realized she wasn’t at all the kind of woman I was looking for. It sounds corny, but I really did believe in Snow White and Prince Charming—I wanted to find a woman whom I could ride off into the sunset and share my life with. I’m not sure I was even aware of it at the time, but subconsciously I was comparing all the women I met to Lisa.

Meanwhile, Lisa was back in Houston having problems of her own. She’d been having a lot of trouble sleeping, and her insomnia eventually got so bad she had to drop out of high school. She’d always had trouble fitting in, and now, with the onset of a creeping depression, she felt even more alienated. This was the beginning of what she later called her “blue period.”

Things at home were tough, too—her parents had a very contentious relationship, and their dynamic affected the entire family. Eventually, Lisa began lying awake at night in fear. Her house didn’t feel like a safe place emotionally, and she began to feel an overpowering sense that if she walked out the door of her bedroom in the middle of the night, she’d be eaten by wolves. It wasn’t a rational fear, but this was a scary time for a teenage girl who had come to feel that no place was safe for her. Finally, she decided that she had to get out of her parents’ house, at least until things cooled down a bit. So one day at the studio, she asked my mom if she could come stay at our house for a while.

My mother, who could be so hard on her own kids, had come to adore Lisa. For one thing, Lisa had started dancing incredibly late—no serious female dancer starts in her teens, as Lisa had. But Lisa was so determined, and so gifted, that my mother invested all her teaching skills and all the nurturing she could muster to help her out. Lisa had experienced a life-changing moment at age fifteen when she made a conscious decision to pursue dancing seriously. She’d stopped smoking dope and began working out at my mom’s studio seven days a week—she even got the key from my mom so she could work out when nobody was there.

Lisa’s dedication thrilled my mother, who in return was a mentor to her, providing validation and emotional support. So when Lisa asked if she could move into the Swayze house for a couple of weeks, my mom didn’t hesitate at all before saying yes.

Lisa stayed at our house for a couple of weeks, and as it happened, I was home for much of that time. Early on, before my mother really knew Lisa, my mom had told me, “Buddy, I don’t want you dating Lisa. She’s bad news.” But then my mother had watched Lisa transform herself into a serious dancer, and now she had a slightly different message. “Buddy,” she said. “I don’t want you dating Lisa. I don’t want you messing her up.”

My mom didn’t know it, but the attraction between Lisa and me had been growing for some time. She had seemed indifferent to me all those months, but it turned out she was interested in me, too—she was just shy, and acting like she didn’t care was her way of covering it up. But during those two weeks when Lisa stayed with us, she and I took every opportunity to steal time together. When Mom was in the kitchen, we’d be behind the swinging door in the dining room, making out. After everyone in the house had gone to sleep, we’d sneak out to the living room and fool around on the couch. We still weren’t technically “dating,” but man, we couldn’t get enough of each other.

In fact, I had been seeing other girls—and the very day Lisa came to stay at our house I had a date with a girl named Mimi, which led to an uncomfortable moment. Vicky Edwards, the daughter of Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, had gone out of town and loaned me her Corvette. With such a hot car at my disposal, I’d asked Mimi out for that Saturday night, to go to the Houston Rodeo. But when Lisa moved into our house that afternoon, Mom expected me to give her a ride to the rodeo, too.

The Corvette was a two-seater, of course, so Lisa took the front seat and Mimi squeezed between us, sitting on the tiny console. Mimi was a nice-enough girl, but she was pretty much the embodiment of what Lisa and I had joked about privately— the big-haired, heavily made-up Houston girl. To my embarrassment, Mimi kept tickling my ear and kissing me all the way to the rodeo, as Lisa sat silently. I felt ridiculous and embarrassed, yet even though it was clear to anyone paying attention that Lisa was the only girl I truly cared about impressing, I still didn’t understand what she meant to me.

When my time with Disney on Parade ended, it was time to figure out my next step. After all the rigors of the show, my knee was pretty wrecked, and I looked forward to having some time to heal. But fate intervened when I received a scholarship to study with the Harkness Ballet in New York City.

Touring with Disney on Parade had made me realize how deeply dance was rooted in my soul. Of all the things I loved to do, nothing came close to the feeling dancing gave me—a feeling of complete emotional and physical freedom, as if your spirit is soaring in all directions at once. It’s hard to capture in words the sheer joy and fulfillment that the act of dancing can bring. All I knew was, I wanted to do it forever. And Harkness was my chance to do it professionally, at the highest level.

My mother, who had pushed me and pushed me as a young dancer, didn’t want me to accept the scholarship. She knew that ballet dancing is just about the hardest thing you can put a knee joint through, and a company like Harkness was guaranteed to push me to my absolute limit. My mother didn’t want to see me go through that—but also, true to form, she didn’t want me to attempt something that she felt I couldn’t be the best at.

Of course, if there’s one sure way to get Patrick Swayze to do something, it’s to tell me I can’t do it. You don’t think I can dance with one of the greatest professional ballet companies in the world? Watch me.

So I packed up a couple of suitcases and got ready for the move to New York. This was it—Buddy Swayze was heading for the bright lights and the big city! I was excited at the chance to test my stuff against the best dancers in the business. And I knew exactly whom I wanted to spend my last evening in Houston with: Lisa.

I invited her to dinner at St. Michel’s, a fancy French restaurant in town. We ate escargot and talked for what must have been hours. Lisa and I had gotten more and more comfortable with each other, and we talked easily about dancing, life, and the future that stretched enticingly ahead of us. At the end of dinner, she gave me a fifty-cent piece. “This is for luck,” she said, pressing it into my hand. In return, I gave her a broken Mickey Mouse watch I’d gotten during Disney on Parade.

I didn’t realize yet that I was falling in love with Lisa, but I did know she was the kind of person I always wanted to have in my life. I gave her a card that night that she’s kept all these years. It gives a pretty good idea of how I was feeling about her:

Lisa, I really can’t tell you how much you’ve come to mean to me in such a short time, as a friend, and as someone I could really care for. Remember the happiness we shared and I hope in your mind you know that I don’t want what we shared to end! I’ll miss you very much and will think of you often. Work hard at your dancing and I’ll do the same, and maybe, someday …! My heart be united with yours, Buddy

It was a magical night—or at least, it was until I dropped Lisa off at her house and was driving home. As I was making my way through the suburb of Bellaire, I looked in my rear-view mirror to see police lights flashing. My stomach fell. Earlier that day, I’d realized the license plates on my car were out of date, so I’d taken the plates off my dad’s truck and put them on my car. The police were pulling me over because they’d run a check and discovered the plates were on the wrong vehicle.

The police in Bellaire had a reputation for being nasty and aggressive, and they certainly lived up to it that night. After they pulled me over, I tried to explain why I’d switched the plates, but the officers weren’t having any of it. They pinned me hard up against a chain-link fence, frisked me, and put me in the back of their car to take me down to the precinct. I was under arrest.

I spent half the night in jail, until my dad was able to come down to bail me out. He didn’t have enough cash on him to do it, though, and there were no ATMs then. So I fished around in my pockets and gave the police the rest of my cash, too—including the lucky coin from Lisa.

Getting arrested and thrown into a jail cell certainly wasn’t the big send-off I’d hoped for. But at least the next day I was on my way, with fingers crossed that my luck in New York would be better than my luck on my last night in Houston.

Chapter 3

My first apartment in New York City was at 45 West Seventieth Street. Unlike the clean, upscale neighborhood of today, the Seventies then were still rough around the edges. My street was at least decent, and affordable, and it had the bonus of being close to Central Park. But the apartment itself turned out to be less pleasant than the surroundings.

I was moving into a basement apartment with a fellow Harkness dancer, and as I descended below sidewalk level, I realized it wasn’t going to be pretty down there. The lack of natural light was depressing enough, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the rat droppings, the musty smell, and the water stains on the walls. My family didn’t exactly live in a mansion in Houston, but I could hardly believe this was the place I’d now be calling home—it was a hovel. At a Harkness trainee stipend of just forty-five dollars a week, though, it was all I could afford, even working extra jobs in my spare time.

I was scared to death about how my knee would hold up at Harkness. Part of me knew it was crazy even to have accepted the scholarship, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I’ve made a huge amount of headway in my life trading on the invincibility of youth: Whether I was truly invincible or not, I operated as if I were, and to a certain extent believed that I was. This would be no different—I would just dance and suffer and grit my teeth whenever it hurt. And it would be worth all the pain when I made the leap from trainee to company member.

For all the fear I felt about my knee, I should have been equally afraid of the infamous Harkness regimen. In addition to the physical stress of dancing in up to six classes a day, torquing and twisting your joints and pushing your endurance to the limit, Harkness also put some of its dancers on a special diet aimed at virtually eliminating body fat. The Harkness diet allowed dancers to consume just five hundred calories a day— basically, lettuce and a few bites of turkey, plus vitamin shots.

And that wasn’t all. The Harkness doctors also came up with a shot that was supposedly made from the extract of a pregnant woman’s urine. This extract was said to encourage your body to live off its own fat tissue, so even those who had almost no body fat to begin with still dropped pounds, as the small deposits of fat between muscles melted away. I had always been lean, through constant training, but my arms and shoulders were big—I looked like Godzilla compared to the other male dancers. But under the Harkness regimen, I transformed my body. I dropped fifteen pounds and developed the streamlined physique of a dancer.

The women in Harkness had it even rougher. At this point, nobody had written an exposé like Gelsey Kirkland’s 1996 book Dancing on My Grave, which detailed the dark side of the professional ballet world. Gelsey was dancing with the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre at the same time I was at Harkness, and I often partnered her at pas de deux class. The tales she told in her book of the rampant eating disorders, drug use, and emotional trauma that dancers faced matched what I saw during those years.

Female bodies aren’t really supposed to look like the bodies of ballet dancers, who are prized for their slender hips and prepubescent figures. So no matter how thin a dancer was, she was always encouraged to lose more by the Harkness tribunal, which kept tabs on dancers’ progress. “Lose five more pounds” was the mantra, even if the women had already shed pounds on intensive, crazy diets. The pressure was so bad that two women even died during my time at the ballet. They just pushed themselves farther than their emaciated bodies could handle.

Everything my mother had said was true—the amount of suffering you had to undergo to become a professional ballet dancer was overwhelming. I stuck to it, dancing and dieting to prove that I was ready to take my spot in the company. But the one thing I couldn’t control, of course, was my knee. And with the daily abuse of dancing, it got worse than ever.

As had happened during my days touring with Disney on Parade, my knee began swelling up like a balloon after I danced. I would always ice it to bring the swelling down, but at other times there was just too much fluid in the joint and I’d have to get it drained. This was an unpleasant procedure—I’d go to one of the company orthopedists who worked with Harkness, and he would insert a long needle into my knee to let the fluid out. There were times when the joint was so inflamed, I’d watch it swell right back up just after having it drained. Then I had no choice but to go home, ice it some more, and just hope it would be ready for class the next day. Yet even if it wasn’t, it didn’t matter. I’d have to dance anyway.

At one point, I felt a strange burning sensation I’d never had before, as if my knee was on fire inside. The joint swelled up worse than ever, and I began to worry that something was seriously wrong. I was taking antibiotics—some weeks I had to choose between them and food, as I didn’t always have enough money for both—but this felt like an infection. As it turned out, it was a fast-moving staph infection that ended up threatening more than just my dancing career.

When I went to the doctor to get it checked out, he told me I needed to stay overnight in the hospital for treatment. I told him that was impossible—I had too much to do. I couldn’t miss any classes, and I didn’t want anyone to think my knee wasn’t strong enough for the rigors of dancing.

The doctor looked at me with a grave expression. “Patrick,” he said, “this is a serious staph infection. If we don’t nip it in the bud, you could lose your leg.”

I stared at him, stunned into silence. I had been pushing myself so hard, it had never occurred to me that I could actually be putting my health in danger. Ever since I’d hurt my knee in that football game, I had forced myself to operate as if it was fine, as there was no other way to do all the things I wanted to. The doctor’s words scared me, but I knew that after I got it treated, I’d have to push on as before. I’d have to find a way.

If it hadn’t been for my knee trouble, I would have made the Harkness company already. Even though I had lost some weight and muscle mass, I was still a rarity in the world of ballet, a male dancer who actually looked like a man onstage. Most male dancers were slender and graceful, amazing dancers—but they didn’t look like what the ballet companies wanted. I knew that on the most fundamental level, the purpose of the male dancer was to make the woman look beautiful, and my performances were geared toward exactly that. I aimed to look strong and masculine, and to present the female dancer in the best light I could.

I was a good partner, and a good soloist, which is a rare combination in the ballet world. For that reason, I was a sought-after dancer—which of course made me all the more reluctant to give up.

Amid all this dancing, dieting, and worrying, I had to find ways to bring in more money. The stipend wasn’t enough for anyone to live on, so despite the fact that we were often exhausted from workouts and rehearsals, many of the dancers worked extra jobs to pay the rent.

I worked for a time at a Hallmark card store, and also life-guarded at a subterranean men’s health club near my apartment. I sang and played guitar in the clubs down in Greenwich Village, which was a hotbed of creative energy, with artists on every corner and an exciting vibe. New York in the 1970s was very different from the New York of today—it was rough, a little wild, with an anything-goes feel to it. Energy seemed to pulsate through the streets, and being young there made you feel as if you could do anything. And that anything could happen.

The next job I got was a perfect example of that. In early September 1973, I got word that the Harkness Ballet’s benefactor, the oil heiress Rebekah Harkness, had specifically requested me for a rather unusual assignment.

Mrs. Harkness had commissioned Spanish artist Enrique Senis-Oliver to paint a gigantic mural for the brand-new Harkness Theater then being built at Lincoln Center. Called Homage to Terpsichore, the painting stretched from the stage to the very top of the proscenium and down both sides, and consisted mostly of what Time magazine would later call “an agonized, thrusting morass of naked dancers.”

Well, those naked dancers were all me. Over a period of several weeks, I posed and flexed so Enrique could paint my nude form over and over in the mural. Enrique and I spent many exhausting hours perched on scaffolding thirty feet off the ground in the freezing theater while he painted the ceiling. As a thank-you he painted my face on the mural’s centerpiece—a towering twenty-foot-high portrait of me leaping naked toward the sun, with a cape of peacock feathers trailing behind me.

As a letter I wrote to Lisa right when I got that modeling gig shows, the fall of 1973 was a very good time for me in New York. I’d just returned after seeing her in Houston, and I was filled with the excitement of being young, in the city, and having my whole life ahead of me:

Well, Lisa,

I’m back! I was really dreading coming back while I was on the plane, but now that I’m back, it’s great! Everything is fine, my rent is paid, and everything is well at Harkness.

My first day was fabulous, I saw all my friends and had great classes. Plus Mrs. Harkness called the “House” and said she wanted me to do the modeling for the men’s bodies to be painted in the new theater! And they’re going to do a 20' portrait of me! Mrs. Hynes told me today, and it totally freaked me out! So I’m getting $25.00 per hour for modeling. Also the artist wants me to do some modeling for portraits and some shows coming up! And I’ve got an audition for that club (singing) tomorrow….

I went walking tonight after modeling, and the street was bustling, and the fountain at Lincoln Center was so neat, and everything seems to be going my way, that I just started running and singing! People thought I was crazy but I didn’t care! …

Well, I’ve got tons of work ahead of me but I’m looking forward to it so much. There is hardly anyone in class because of the summer students being gone, and it’s really fine! You know, I didn’t leave sad Wednesday, I really felt good; that is about you. I know if we are meant to be, that we’ll get it together one day. Over such a short time, you’ve grown to mean a lot to me, I want to always be great friends. Work hard and maybe you’ll be up here before you know it!

I miss you much and hope it’s the same. Tell everyone “Hello” and I miss ’em, okay? Stay happy, and write!

Missingly yours,

Buddy

My feelings for Lisa were growing, but I was still scared to admit it outright—either to her or to myself. I was hoping against hope that she’d get a ballet scholarship, too, and come up to New York City. But at the same time, I hedged my bets by continuing to see other women, most notably a fellow Harkness dancer named Deleah.

Just a month after sending the letter above, I sent Lisa another one, dated October 16, 1973, in which I told her about Deleah.

Lisa, I think I have found someone I care for, a lot. Her name is Deleah Shafer. We started out incredible friends, and have steadily grown closer. She is on tour with the company now, so it gets kind of lonely sometimes. Lisa, I really hope this isn’t just a passing fancy, because I feel so much love in me now, that I need someone to give it to. I guess the only thing to do is wait and see.

I did like Deleah very much, but deep down I think I was hoping to make Lisa jealous. The rest of the letter is all about how I was dropping Lisa’s name at Harkness, trying to help her secure a scholarship—and I even offered to have her stay at my apartment whenever she did make it up to New York. “It will save quite a bit of money, if it would be cool on the ‘home front,’ ” I wrote, presumably with a straight face. I knew Lisa’s parents wouldn’t approve of her living with me in New York, but I wanted to plant that seed anyway.

After sending that letter, I even called Lisa for advice on dating Deleah, though it was probably really an attempt to find out how she felt about it. Despite the intensity of the feelings Lisa and I obviously had for each other, we both were trying very hard to protect ourselves. We both came to the relationship feeling like, “I don’t want this person to get to me”—we were afraid of being too vulnerable, afraid of getting hurt. So both Lisa and I made a big show of just wanting to be friends, at least until the other person made the first move.

If I hoped to make Lisa jealous, though, I obviously didn’t know her very well. In fact, she had a completely different response—but one that was ultimately far better than jealousy. As she later told me, she came to a turning point of sorts after I called her for advice about Deleah. She realized that more than anything, she wanted me to be happy. The way she saw it, her feelings for me ran deeper than simply wanting to lay claim to me or own my attentions. She began to see me in a different light—as someone she cared really deeply for, rather than someone she just liked messing around and talking with.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this—I just knew that Lisa had reacted coolly to the notion that I had a new girlfriend. We kept writing back and forth and talking on the phone, though, so our relationship continued to grow even if we didn’t quite know where it was going. And it probably would have continued that way, except that in 1974, Lisa finally got her scholarship to Harkness. She was coming to New York City, and despite her mother’s hope that she’d move into the Barbizon Hotel for Women, she’d decided to take me up on my offer to live with me at my new place on West Seventy-fourth Street.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 850