Chapter 6

The Renegades was an updated version of The Mod Squad, a groundbreaking cop series that ran between 1968 and 1973. I played Bandit, the tough-talking leader of a gang of street thugs, although in my tight leather pants and sleeveless vests, I looked as much model as tough guy. Shooting The Renegades was definitely fun, and I was happy to have steady TV work. But I still wanted to find roles that would stretch me more as an actor.

All things considered, though, things were looking up. I was making good money, and Lisa and I were taking acting classes with the respected teacher Milton Katselas. We loved our apartment on La Jolla Avenue, and our circle of friends was growing steadily. Almost three years after moving to LA, we at last felt like we were settling in. We even made plans to finally move the rest of our stuff from New York.

Then, one day when I came home from shooting, everything came crashing down.

I pulled into our driveway and walked into the two-car garage we’d turned into our woodworking shop. I’d just started messing around with a project we were working on when I felt Lisa walk up behind me. To this day I couldn’t tell you how I knew it, but I knew right away something was very wrong. Lisa put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Buddy, could you come into the house? I need to tell you something.”

I wheeled around. “What is it?” I said. “Tell me now.” I could see she’d been crying, and I felt the blood drain from my face.

“Your mom called,” she said quietly. “Your dad had a heart attack. He’s dead.”

My knees buckled, and I sank to the floor. As soon as the words were out of Lisa’s mouth, I was sobbing, crying like I’d never cried before. I felt sick, like I’d been sucker-punched in the stomach. I don’t know how long I was on the floor, but it felt like I might never be able to get up again.

“He was walking with the dogs out behind their house,” Lisa said, rubbing my back. “He died instantly. There was no pain.” This would be a small consolation later, but I wasn’t ready to be grateful for anything yet. I just couldn’t believe my dad was gone.

My dad, the gentle cowboy, was my source of unconditional love while I was growing up, the steady hand on the rudder. My mother loved us with a fierce, proud, demanding love, while my father loved us without question or qualification. Big Buddy had taught me what it meant to be a man, and he’d shown me that a real man could be tough and gentle at the same time. Seeing his example growing up was a huge influence on me, and I loved him all the more for it.

Born and raised in Wichita Falls, in the Texas Panhandle, my dad had grown up on a small working ranch. There, he learned how to do all the things a cowboy does—doctor and brand cattle, repair fences, ride and groom horses. He was a cowboy in his blood, not just for show. And although his life wasn’t easy and they never had much money growing up, he always had a smile and a good word for everyone. In turn, everyone loved Buddy Swayze.

Dad and I had always loved being outdoors, and it was comforting in some ways that he died outside, with his dogs, in the beauty of nature. We used to go out into the wilderness together, with just a few supplies and his knowledge of living off the land to sustain us. I treasured those days with him, exploring the landscape and learning the most basic human ability: how to exist in the natural environment. I’ve always been proud of the skills I learned with him, and I still think of him whenever I’m outside, living off the land, or even just appreciating the sights and smells of nature.

As stabilizing a force as my father had been in life, his death had the opposite effect on me. Everything was suddenly off-kilter, and the pain I felt seemed bottomless. I’d never been much of a drinker, but one of the first things I did after my dad died was buy a case of his favorite beer, Budweiser. I hated the taste, but I popped open can after can, trying to get myself drunk. No matter how much I drank, I couldn’t feel anything. So I kept drinking.

My dad’s death was devastating for many reasons. For one thing, it just about killed my mother, who had loved and depended on him for all those years. She was crushed, and felt angry and alone without the man who’d always been there to support her. My mother is a strong woman, but her emotions run strong, too. And losing him nearly put her over the edge with grief. My brothers and sisters were devastated, too, especially Donny and Sean. Losing a parent is hard. But losing a father who was the embodiment of what you want to become as a man is crushing.

For me, my father’s death meant my very identity had changed. My whole life, he’d been Big Buddy and I was Little Buddy. But now that he was gone, I’d have to be the Big Buddy—I was the oldest male in the family, and now I had to step up and be a man. This marked a new level of responsibility, and it started right away. Lisa and I had to plan my father’s funeral and take care of all the details leading up to it. This was difficult enough, but there was one truly horrible moment that showed me just how strong I’d need to be.

It happened just before the viewing at the funeral home. I went down before the rest of the family arrived, to make sure the undertakers had prepared his body and everything was set. But when I looked in the casket, I was shocked. The man lying there looked nothing like my father—they had put too much blush makeup on his otherwise pale face, and his normally wavy hair was straight and stiff. He looked like a clown, I thought, as rage rose in my chest. And I knew it would kill my mother to see him this way.

“Take him back there,” I said to the undertaker, my voice tight. “I’ll do his makeup myself.”

And in the back room of that funeral home, I gently wiped my dad’s face while the tears streamed down my own. I desperately wanted to make him look like my dad again, but I just couldn’t get it—until finally, after a few fits and starts, I got the makeup right and managed to fix his hair the way he always wore it. When I was finished, I wiped the tears from my eyes and took him back out for the viewing. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

We buried my father in a simple wood casket rather than a fancy hermetically sealed one, as it just seemed right to let nature take its course, from dust to dust. I don’t remember much about the funeral, but I remember wanting to carve his initials into the casket just before we lowered it into the ground. I didn’t end up doing it, and regretted it. He’d always carried an Old Timer knife, and I did, too—it was part of our identities as Swayze men. But when that last moment came, I just watched as the casket was lowered, and then we threw dirt over it, and he was gone.

In the months after my dad died, I began drinking like I’d never done before. I was trying to get drunk, but I never could feel it. In some strange way, I felt like I was honoring my dad, by doing something he loved to do—drinking beer. Like many men of his era in Texas, my father drank a lot, probably too much. And in some ways, I think I was trying to see how much like him I really was.

One thing about being a Swayze is, you never do anything halfway. Lisa was concerned about how much I was drinking, but I didn’t want to stop. Late at night, I’d take my DeLorean up to Mulholland Drive—the twisting, steep part through the Hollywood Hills where car aficionados would come to race. I’d put a case of beer on the seat beside me and go, taking on any and all comers to do suicide runs up and down Mulholland. I never got into an accident, maybe because I never felt as impaired by the alcohol as I probably was. But all the same, it wasn’t safe or smart, and Lisa was understandably worried about me.

In all my life, I never drank for the sake of drinking; it was always a response to some kind of emotional difficulty I was going through. Drinking for me was a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. But it certainly caused problems between Lisa and me, as she grew increasingly worried about my behavior. She would plead with me to cut back, but I felt a deep, unstoppable need to go through with what I was doing. Every time a memory of my dad popped into my brain, it turned into a fresh, open wound again. His death had thrown me completely off balance, and I didn’t know how to cope with it.

All the insecurities I’d felt over the years came crashing down on me. I was still trying to find an identity for myself. Who was I? Was I just some teen idol, a piece of beefcake who’d never be taken seriously as an actor? Then what was all my training for? When my father was alive, I had his unconditional love to anchor me. I don’t think I even realized how much I’d counted on it. But now that it was gone, I felt the huge void left by its absence. And I felt angry, as if he’d abandoned me.

Lisa loved me unconditionally, too, but I wouldn’t let myself believe that. I still felt stung by her initial response when I’d asked her to marry me. Our relationship has always been passionate, in both positive and negative ways—our love for each other was incredibly intense, but so were our fights. This was the first really tough period in our marriage, and the intensity of it scared us both.

I knew all too well what had happened to so many creative artists—James Dean, Janis Joplin, Freddy Prinze, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix—who got swallowed by their ambitions and destroyed by the choices they made. I had studied their examples to make sure I didn’t end up going down that road myself. But as I soon discovered, whatever you resist, persists. I was drinking too much to prove I didn’t have to drink too much, in a cycle I didn’t know how to stop.

So I did the only thing I knew to do: I buried myself in my work. At my dad’s funeral, I’d made a vow to live in a way that would have made him proud. The moment when he beamed at me in my new DeLorean was forever burned into my memory, and I wanted to continue to live as if he was watching me. From that time on, that’s what I’ve tried to do.

After I became an actor, I realized my life had a certain pattern to it. In high school, I had worked to become the best football player I could be—and once I hit the top, winning a couple of football scholarships, I stopped playing. I then turned to gymnastics, and the same thing happened: I was working toward the Junior Olympics, at the top of my game— and then I stopped competing. At Eliot Feld, I was offered the chance to perform at the pinnacle of the ballet world, dancing onstage with the legendary Mikhail Baryshnikov. And once I’d made it there, I left.

In all these cases, my decision to leave came partly because of injury. But I also realized that, in reaching these pinnacles, I feared that whatever came next would be a letdown. After you make the Olympics, what’s next? Your face on a Wheaties box? After you dance with Baryshnikov, what’s next? I always needed a goal, something to push toward. And I feared what would happen to me if I reached the top of a given profession, and then had nowhere else to go.

But acting was different. For the first time, I was throwing myself into something that could never be mastered. Acting wasn’t like sports—you didn’t win the world championship and then settle into retirement. No matter how great an actor you are, you can always be better. Every role is different, and the learning curve is endless. I was excited to find something that would never stop challenging me and humbled by the chance to make a living at it.

And soon after my father died, I would have a chance to stretch my acting ability even further, by working with one of the greatest film directors in history, Francis Ford Coppola.

The auditions for The Outsiders were unlike any auditions I’d ever been to before. Based on the best-selling book by S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders focused on a group of “Greasers”—a gang of high school toughs trying to find their way in the world. Throughout the movie, the Greasers clash with the “Socs”—pronounced “soshes,” short for the social upper-class kids. It’s a classic coming-of-age story, fueled by testosterone and violence, and Francis wanted to find young male actors who could disappear into those characters.

The movie’s climactic scene is a giant fight, or “rumble,” between the two factions. So for the auditions, Francis invited dozens of young actors to stage improvised fights on a sound-stage. Usually when you audition, you’re alone in a room with the casting director, director, and maybe a few other people. Auditioning with a huge group of talented young actors brought out the competitive fire in everyone. And because Francis was a legend, having already made The Godfather and The Godfather II as well as Apocalypse Now, everybody was pumped to impress him.

There was method to his madness, because he ended up with an amazing cast of up-and-coming male actors. Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Ralph Macchio all played Greasers, as did a young Tom Cruise, in only his third movie role. Matt Dillon was already a budding star, having played lead roles in Little Darlings, My Bodyguard, and Tex, but the rest of us were just starting out. And we were anxious to make our mark.

We lived these roles, staying in character almost all the time. We became like a gang ourselves, hanging out together, smoking cigarettes, going out for drinks, and just generally running wild. Those were crazy days on Hollywood lots, with drugs, alcohol, and testosterone fueling everything—though the Greasers’ drug of choice was beer. And Francis ratcheted things up a notch with his style of directing, which was aimed at bringing out the most realistic emotions possible.

Francis was all about instinct and the pursuit of perfection. He was one of the most demanding directors I’ve ever worked with, and he stopped at nothing to get the performance he wanted. He’d talk to you and draw you out, finding your deepest, darkest secrets. Then, on set, he’d announce them over a loudspeaker for everyone to hear. This had the effect he wanted—my blood would pound when I’d hear his voice over that speaker—but it’s a brutal way to bring out an emotional performance.

Francis and I also clashed after I asked him about camera angles for a couple of scenes. I was curious about the art of filmmaking, and here I was working with the master—I figured it was as good a time as any to ask questions and learn how it was done. But when I asked him about why he chose to shoot in certain ways, he misunderstood why.

“Ah, everyone knows that all dancers are interested in is looking at themselves in the mirror,” he said to me.

This was a real insult, and it was all the worse coming from a legendary director. I didn’t care about how my face looked onscreen—I wanted to be the best actor I could. And if he didn’t believe that was so, why had he cast me? Francis’s comment really pissed me off, but there wasn’t much I could do about it, except show him how hard I would work in my performance. Which is probably what he was angling for in the first place.

With all that said, I loved Francis and would have worked with him on anything. He brought out performances we never thought possible. Anything went on that set—it was as if he’d given us all permission to create these amazing characters and live in their skin. The climax of it all was the final “rumble” between the Greasers and Socs, where we didn’t just act out a massive gang fight. We really had a gang fight, with fists flying and blood running and guys pounding on each other.

Francis brought in a bunch of local kids, and on a day when the rain came pouring down, he put us all together in a giant muddy lot to battle it out. He whipped us up, telling us to make it as realistic and violent as possible, and when he set us loose, everyone went crazy. Guys were beating on each other, punching and kicking and wrestling in the mud. In the middle of it, one guy came charging at me with a wild look in his eyes. He was coming to lay me out, and the only way I could keep from getting hurt myself was to hurt him. I punched him hard in the face and knocked him unconscious.

There was actually some choreography planned for the rumble, with each of us fighting specific people, but by the end everybody was just whaling on everybody else. But the really interesting thing was that all of us Greasers stuck together, watching each other’s backs like this was a real gang fight. Our survival instincts kicked in, and we fought with a kind of primal animal fury. It was a brilliant, reckless piece of filmmaking, and by the end of it we felt as bonded as any real gang.

Tom Cruise had the smallest role of any of us, but he worked harder than anyone. Even then, at age twenty and with very few credits to his name, he was as driven as anyone I’d ever seen. For the scene in the movie where the Greasers are heading out to the rumble, Tom’s character does a backflip off a car in excitement. I taught Tom that move, and in fact Lisa and I taught most of the other Greasers a few gymnastics moves to use in the rumble. I was the big brother in the movie, and I felt like one on the set, too.

I also taught Emilio, Tommy, Ralph, and Rob how to hop freight trains. Growing up, I used to hop freight trains to Galveston so I could go surfing at the beach there. There’s an art to it: You have to pick a spot where the train will slow down, such as a freight yard or residential area, and then time your jump so you sail into the open door rather than under the train. We spent a lot of time together, shooting pool and just hanging out, most often in character.

I had a blast working with all the guys, and I particularly bonded with Tommy Howell. We’d met on the set of Urban Cowboy, where his dad was a stuntman, and we had a shared love of the cowboy life. Tommy was a true cowboy—he loved horses and had even been a junior rodeo champion, and he and I remained close after The Outsiders. In fact, over the next year and a half, we would act in two more films together: Grandview, U.S.A. and Red Dawn.

When The Outsiders came out, the posters and promotional materials showed all the Greasers posing in denim and leather, looking tough with our hair slicked back. We all got a lot of attention from the film, including the inevitable Teen Beat and Tiger Beat magazine photo spreads for girls. Tom Cruise didn’t want to do those photo shoots, since he was self-conscious about his teeth and thought he wasn’t good-looking enough. But he got roped into it just like the rest of us, and before long, he became the biggest movie star of all.

One thing I’ve always loved about being an actor is getting the chance to travel all over the world for work. In the course of our careers, Lisa and I have been fortunate enough to travel to places as far-flung as India, Namibia, Hong Kong, Russia, and South Africa, as well as beautiful locations all across the United States. It was just after The Outsiders that we got to travel to our first exotic location—Thailand—for the 1984 film Uncommon Valor. I traded in the first-class airplane ticket the studio bought me for two economy seats, so Lisa could join me in Bangkok.

Starring Gene Hackman and Robert Stack, Uncommon Valor was about a group of Vietnam veterans who return to Southeast Asia to rescue a buddy who’d been taken prisoner in the war. I was excited to be working with Gene Hackman, who was already a huge star thanks to his roles in movies as diverse as The Conversation, The Poseidon Adventure, The French Connection, Bonnie and Clyde—and the list went on. Getting this role was another step in the right direction, continuing the momentum that was starting to build in my career.

It was a big break to be cast with Gene, and he took me under his wing on the set. He was unfailingly professional and very generous with his time and insight. He also taught me a very big lesson about acting, telling me, “You’re not here for yourself. You’re only here to serve.” This fed right into everything I’d studied in Buddhism—that it’s only through learning to serve that you can become a master. Gene devoted himself to his movies—even if it took twenty takes for the other actor to get it right, Gene would be right there, delivering his lines with the same energy and dedication. Every single time. It was mesmerizing to watch him work.

Meanwhile, my role called for as much fighting as acting. I played a cocky young Special Forces soldier who’s brought in to train the Vietnam vets. On the set, I was taught by ex– Special Forces guys, learning hand-to-hand combat techniques from the best in the world. In addition to traveling, that’s another of the things I love best about my job—getting the chance to learn new skills from the top experts in each field. I’ve been lucky enough to study martial arts, kick-boxing, surfing, skydiving, and many other skills on movie sets. It’s been like having my own personal training to become Doc Savage, my childhood hero.

For one scene in Uncommon Valor, I fought a character played by Randall “Tex” Cobb—a former boxer turned actor who’d gone fifteen rounds with heavyweight champion Larry Holmes just a year earlier. Tex’s character in the movie, Sailor, was crazy—but no crazier than Tex himself. He was a classic barroom-brawler type, a huge man with a fleshy nose that lay flat against his face, supposedly because he’d had the cartilage removed so he could take more punches. The beating Tex had taken in his fight with Holmes had been so severe, Howard Cosell had retired from calling boxing matches in protest that the fight wasn’t stopped sooner.

When Tex and I went at it in the river for our big fight scene, he was really hitting me—pounding and pounding my upper body in an exhausting series of takes. The man was a professional boxer, and the blows he landed were solid. I didn’t want to look like a wimp, but I finally had to speak up.

“Tex,” I said, “I know you’re supposed to kick my ass in this scene, but you’ve got to back off a little bit here.”

“What’s the matter, Little Buddy?” he spat back. “You can’t take it? Is it too much for you?” I liked Tex, but the sneer on his face as he taunted me was too much. And when he started pounding on me again, finally knocking me down hard in the river, I lost it.

Tex had punched me hard enough to spin me around and put me on my hands and knees in the river. I got up slowly, and without looking at him I took a hitch step backward, went one running step, and hit him square in the face—harder than I’d ever hit anyone in my life. The blow rocked his head back, and when it came forward again I saw that he had a big old smile on his face. And then he laughed.

“Is that all you’ve got, Little Buddy?” Tex said, chuckling. I just stared at him in disbelief. I’d hit him with all my strength, and he hadn’t even felt the blow.

It was as if nothing could hurt Tex. As a result, he seemed to think nothing could hurt anyone else, either. One time, he was carrying an AK-47 loaded with blanks, but instead of handling it according to the set’s safety rules, he aimed it right at my crotch and pulled the trigger. As he laughed maniacally, a burst of fire and smoke shot out, frying my pants and damn near turning me into a eunuch.

But as crazy as Tex was, he and I ended up becoming good buddies. Nobody else would share a dressing room with him because he was too much of a wild man, so I did for a while, until his partying ways got to be too much for me, too, and I pitched a tent for myself nearby. Tex loved Bangkok’s red-light district, Patpong, and spent plenty of nights there—as did many of the other guys in the cast and crew, some of whom later had to be treated for gonorrhea. But only one guy decided to stay behind after we wrapped filming: Tex. He cashed in his plane ticket home, and the last we saw him, he was heading back to Patpong. We did eventually see him a couple more times over the years, but whenever I’d ask how he finally made it out of Thailand, he’d just say, “Little Buddy, you don’t want to know.”

Uncommon Valor was a good movie, for what it was. But I still wanted to find roles that would stretch me more as an actor. In The Renegades, The Outsiders, and Uncommon Valor, I played tough young guys who knew how to fight. The characters were different in many ways, but only in degree. And I was getting tired of playing characters younger than myself—I easily looked five or ten years younger than I was, so that’s how I was always cast.

But after Uncommon Valor, I was cast in Grandview, U.S.A. for the role of Ernie “Slam” Webster, a Demolition Derby driver in a love triangle. Slam Webster had something of the wild child in him, too, but he was more mature than my other characters, making this the first time I was cast as a more mature man, rather than a young man. Tommy Howell was cast as Tim Pearson, my rival for the hand of Michelle “Mike” Cody, played by Jamie Lee Curtis.

Lisa worked on the film, too, choreographing a dream dance sequence—the first time she and I worked together on a movie. I was especially happy she was there because the town where we were shooting—Pontiac, Illinois—had only about ten thousand people, so there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do. In fact, Pontiac’s main claim to fame was its prison, which employed or incarcerated most of the people in town. Just about the only half-interesting place to go was the Courtyard Hotel, where the Teamsters and other movie crew stayed. We called it the Gorilla Villa.

Apart from getting drinks at Gorilla Villa there wasn’t much to keep us occupied in Pontiac, so Grandview marked the beginning of what became a tradition for me: playing elaborate pranks on the set. I may have been cast in my first “adult” role, but off camera I was playing pranks like a big kid. And I didn’t endear myself to the director, Randal Kleiser, with one I played on him.

One night, Lisa, Tommy Howell, and I had been invited over to the house where Randal was staying during the shoot. After we left, we got the bright idea of going back to sneak in, as we thought there might be something interesting going on with Jamie Lee Curtis. I can’t even remember what we thought might be happening, but we were bored and probably tipsy, so we headed back over to Randal’s place.

Lisa stayed in the car while Tommy and I found an open door and snuck upstairs. Jamie Lee wasn’t there, but we did overhear Randal in a, shall we say, private moment with someone else—so we turned around and hightailed it back out. Randal must have heard us and realized who it was, because the next day on set he was pretty cool to me. Lisa was embarrassed, and although Randal didn’t hold it against her, he did later make reference to the fact that she’d driven the “getaway car.”

But that prank paled in comparison to the ones pulled on my next movie, Red Dawn. In fact, everything on Red Dawn was epic in scale: the hard-core training, the controversial plot, the insanely rigorous shoot, and the antagonism between myself and a certain young actress—one who would later dance with me in the movie that shot us both to stardom.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 668