Chapter 7

You can call me the General,” Red Dawn director John Milius announced. “Swayze, you are my Lieutenant of the Art, and I’ll direct these little fuckers through you.” With those words, Milius put me in charge of the cast of Red Dawn— Tommy Howell, Jennifer Grey, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson, and others—for the grueling shoot in the mountains of New Mexico.

Red Dawn was a controversial movie right from the start. Five minutes into the film, Soviet and Cuban paratroopers float down to a small Colorado town and open fire with machine guns, launching World War III with an invasion on American soil. In the early 1980s, when we made Red Dawn, the Cold War was raging and fears of a Soviet attack ran high across America. But nobody would touch it as a movie plot— except Milius, who was just the man for the job.

Milius was a wild man and a military freak. He had a collection of firearms and an encyclopedic knowledge of arms and armaments, and he even kept a loaded gun on his desk at the 20th Century Fox offices. Milius wrote Apocalypse Now and cowrote Dirty Harry, and he loved war games. He consulted military experts while cowriting Red Dawn, even reportedly asking former secretary of state Alexander Haig for help. Milius wanted Red Dawn to be as realistic as possible, so he started with training his cast as if we were really a band of scared teenage soldiers, rather than actors on a movie set.

I played Jed Eckert, the leader of a group of high school students who manage to escape to nearby wooded mountains after the Soviet invasion. The movie follows our group— dubbed the Wolverines, after the local high school mascot—as we survive a freezing winter, foraging for food and skirmishing with Russian soldiers who track us down. To prepare us for our roles, Milius arranged for real mercenaries to train us in military tactics, after which we’d take part in real war games with a National Guard unit before filming.

The mercenaries taught us all about military maneuvers and survival techniques. We fired weapons, learned how to camouflage ourselves, and undertook stealth maneuvers through the woods. It was dirty, tiring, and physically demanding—and I loved every minute of it. When our training culminated in a giant game of Capture the Flag, with the ragtag Wolverines going up against the National Guard troops, I wanted more than just to show off what we’d learned. I wanted to capture that flag and win.

Our objective was to start from the cover of a forested mountainside, cross an open valley, and take the flag planted on the other side of the valley. We had three days to do it, with hundreds of trained National Guardsmen trying to stop us.

From the moment we set up camp on that mountainside, I became Jed Eckert. Right away, this game became a matter of life and death—I almost felt like my life really did depend on capturing that flag. And I treated the other Wolverines that way, too, yelling and pushing them to their absolute limits in the game. Charlie Sheen and Tommy Howell loved it—they were as gung ho as I was. But Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey seemed taken aback at my intensity. In fact, it’s probably safe to say Jennifer couldn’t stand me once I started barking orders at everyone.

Getting across the open valley was going to be tricky, and I doubt the seasoned National Guard troops expected much from us. But we had a plan. With the help of some crew members, we dug a network of shallow trenches and camouflaged them as best we could. Once they were covered with plywood and dirt and sod, you could even step on them in some spots without realizing anyone was underneath. In fact, during our assault across the valley, which took place at night, one National Guardsman almost stepped right on my face—and he never even knew I was there.

When we captured the flag after our all-night valley crossing, the National Guard troops were stunned—and pissed off. Milius, on the other hand, was elated and couldn’t wait to start shooting. He had his real Wolverines. We had bonded out there in the trenches, and we had transformed into a pack of high school mujahideen, just like he wanted.

The hard part was that once I became Jed Eckert, I didn’t ever want to step out of character. I really became this mercenary warrior, this almost-savage kid-turned-military-leader. When Lisa came out to the set, she couldn’t reach me—I was afraid to just be Patrick again, fearing that if I dropped the character, I wouldn’t be able to get him back. It was frustrating for Lisa, and yet I couldn’t stop. This was a huge role for me—my first real leading role in a big Hollywood film—and I had to nail it.

The film’s setting added to the realism. We shot in the area around Las Vegas, New Mexico, which had its own rough-and-tumble reputation. A hundred years ago, Las Vegas was the last point on the Santa Fe Trail to get supplies, get drunk, and get laid before heading into the Rockies to die in your wagon train. It has always been a real tough-guy kind of town, and it wasn’t the most welcoming place for random Anglos who ambled in.

This was especially true of the town’s bars, which were the kind of places where the men carried knives and half of them got pulled out on any given night. Tommy, Charlie, and I would roll into bars just about every evening, sometimes staying until the sun came up.

One night, Charlie, Tommy, Brad Savage, and I went to a bar to play some pool—Charlie was a great player, and he was giving us some tips. I never knew what started it, but suddenly all hell broke loose and every guy in the bar was flailing around, punching, slashing with a knife, or breaking a bar stool over someone’s head. Blood and beer were flying everywhere, and I looked at my guys and thought, “I gotta get them out of here!” Tommy and Brad were just kids, about eighteen years old, and I was Jed, their leader, responsible for getting them safely away from danger.

I grabbed a pool cue and broke it in half, then started swinging it around wildly, like a weapon. I just started whaling on whoever was in the way, trying to make an opening for us. Charlie, Tommy, and Brad pushed in behind me, shoving and punching all the way, and we finally got to the front door, where I threw down the bloody pool cue and we took off. The Wolverines had escaped the enemy again!

The funny thing was, Lisa and I ended up buying a ranch in that same area years later. And when we brought up those bar fights with a few locals, they remembered them. Apparently these were some of the biggest brawls in the history of Las Vegas, New Mexico. And they’ll probably never be topped now, because the town’s seediest bars have all gradually disappeared in the years since Red Dawn. It’s now a quaint, friendly historical town with a colorful past.

Despite the movie’s dead-serious theme—or maybe because of it—the pranks we played on the set were epic. Red Dawn was a violent war movie, with hundreds of explosions from bombs, machine guns, missiles, and grenades, so the crew had every kind of explosive imaginable. And unlike some directors, Milius was as wild as the rest of us, so I aimed pranks at him as much as at anyone.

One time, I rigged the toilet in his trailer with charges— M60s, which are like one-eighth-size sticks of dynamite. I packed them into a steel tube to direct the force, so they wouldn’t blow shrapnel everywhere, and taped them under his toilet. When Milius went in to do his business, I detonated them—and the explosion sent him running out the door in a panic. He’d barely gotten the words “Swayze, you son of a—” out of his mouth when I set off a second round of explosives, blowing two garbage cans sky-high and scaring the shit out of him.

Another time, I hid a bottle-rocket launcher in his room. I packed a few dozen little bottle rockets into a rack I’d made and rigged it to go off when Milius tried to open his door in the morning. Sure enough, when he pushed the door open the next morning, dozens of tiny rockets flew at him, driving him back into his room. Day to day, he never knew what might be coming at him—and he loved it.

Milius loved explosives, and he’d gone to amazing lengths to make sure everything on Red Dawn was authentic. I still get chills when I think about the scene where the paratroopers float out of the sky, landing on the field next to the high school and then opening fire with machine guns. All the helicopters, tanks, airplanes, and missile launchers were absolutely true to the era, which lent an air of authenticity to the whole film. Watching it today, you can still feel the fear that was so rampant throughout the Cold War.

The realism was also aided by the fact that we really did camp out during what became the coldest winter in years, with temperatures plunging at times to thirty below. My fingers became frostbitten from all the hours spent in the elements, and to this day they throb painfully whenever it’s cold. We really became those characters—scanning the skies for helicopters, rationing our food, riding horses across the mountains. And we even had to perform our own heroics when a freak accident nearly led to disaster one afternoon.

The actors playing the Wolverines were riding in a van, which was towing a horse trailer behind it. The mountain road was steep, icy, and treacherous, with a sheer dropoff to one side. As we towed the horse trailer up the road, it began sliding on the ice, right toward the edge of the cliff. The trailer slid to a wobbly stop just on the edge of this massive drop. If it went a yard or two farther, it would go down—and pull the van and us right over with it.

Everybody in the van was completely freaked out, but Tommy Howell and I jumped into action. “Get in the doorway!” I yelled. “Don’t get out of the van, because that’ll send the trailer over. But get in the doorway so you can jump if it starts to go anyway!”

While everyone crowded into the van’s doorway, Tommy and I jumped out to deal with the horses. There was a gap between the road and the horse trailer’s door, so we’d have to get the horses to jump across the gap to safety. The problem was, the horses were going crazy with fear. We gingerly made our way out to the trailer, unlatched the gate, and guided the horses one by one to the road, urging them to jump across the gap. Somehow, we managed to get them all to safety—and once the horses were out of the trailer, it was light enough for the van to pull it back up to the road. Tommy and I were as elated as if we’d single-handedly repelled a Soviet air attack, and we high-fived each other while the other actors breathed sighs of relief.

I loved playing Jed Eckert, and I enjoyed every minute of being the leader of our ragtag band, even if it was a little intense for others. As I mentioned, Jennifer Grey was probably the least impressed of all—she really chafed when I ordered her around, and rolled her eyes when I stayed in character between takes. But there was a moment at the end of the film when Jennifer seemed to warm to me. It was when we shot her character’s death scene.

Jennifer’s character, Toni, has been mortally wounded following a Soviet aerial attack, but Jed doesn’t want to let her die. In that scene, I scoop her up onto the back of my horse and flee the attack, but it’s too late for her. Toni and Jed end up taking refuge under a piñon tree, and she asks Jed to finish her off with a pistol. But he can’t.

It’s a very tender scene, and as I stroked Jennifer’s hair, it was a genuinely emotional moment. This was the first time she and I had a meaningful scene together, and I think it endeared me to her after all the friction we had. The funny thing is, most of that scene ended up being cut. But even in the shorter version that made it into the film, it was clear to anyone watching that Jennifer and I had chemistry together.

Red Dawn came out in the summer of 1984, just as Lisa and I were starring together in a very different kind of performance. In fact, Without a Word was just about as far as you could get from the freezing Cold War drama of Red Dawn. It was an intimate, deeply emotional reflection on dancing, dreams, and what happens when those dreams die.

It had all started months earlier, when Lisa and I danced in a special performance for our acting class. We were studying with Milton Katselas, a legendary acting coach in LA. We had waited years to get into his class, but it was well worth it. Milton pushed us further, and made us dig deeper, than ever before.

We weren’t the only dancers in Milton’s class—in fact, it wasn’t unusual for former ballet dancers to turn to acting once they left the profession full-time. But one thing we noticed was that all these former dancers felt like we did, that nothing really filled the void left by dancing. Lisa and I became close to one in particular, an amazingly talented former Paul Taylor Company dancer named Nicholas Gunn. We’d hang out together after class, sitting at diners and talking about the passion and pain of dancing, and how we’d drop everything in a heartbeat for the chance to do it all again.

These were little more than idle conversations until we were invited to dance for a special scene in acting class. There was a cellist in the class who was also studying acting, and he wanted to explore different forms of expression through music. He asked Nicholas, Lisa and me, and another dancer and actress named Shanna Reed to perform dance pieces while he played, with the class watching.

For our part, Lisa and I prepared a pas de deux. And the feeling I got while being onstage, dancing ballet once again, was far more intense than I had expected. I felt my heart swell in my chest as Lisa and I moved together, with the gentle moan of the cello guiding us. It had been so long since I had danced in front of others, and so long since I’d felt that amazing soaring in my spirit. It was beautiful, and painful, and in the end, devastating. No matter how much success I had begun to have in the acting world, nothing compared to the sheer exhilaration of dancing.

When the performance ended, Lisa and I went backstage and I just broke down sobbing. I was overwhelmed with feelings—all the feelings I’d buried when I had to leave Eliot Feld. I had forced myself to cope after leaving Eliot Feld, because I had to. My dream had been shattered, but I couldn’t let that shatter my life. What I now realized, weeping backstage at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, was that I had a lot of emotional unfinished business related to leaving the ballet.

Lisa and Nicholas felt the same way I did, so we resolved to do something about it. It was time to explore all those feelings, to truly give them voice. And Milton Katselas offered a vehicle for us to do it. He had started a program called Camelot Productions, which offered free space for people who wanted to develop new plays. We could write about all these pent-up emotions, create a combination drama and dance work, and produce it at Camelot.

Lisa, Nicholas, and I got right to work, coming up with ideas and scenes through improvisations. Lisa would write all our ideas down and shape them, and we worked to make seamless transitions between talking and dancing. We wanted the dancing to say as much as the dialogue and monologues, which eventually led to our title: Without a Word.

The centerpiece was three monologues, one each by Lisa, Nicholas, and me. We wanted to express our innermost thoughts and feelings about dance, making the piece extremely personal. The day we decided to create these monologues, Lisa went home and started writing furiously. She was so driven and focused, she wrote the entire thing in one night and set it to music. And the next day, when she read her completed, beautiful monologue to Nicholas and me, we just looked at each other. Nicholas said, “Well, she’s certainly set the bar high.”

Doing Without a Word was both frightening and exhilarating for me. One of the most important themes in my life is learning how to seek out another dream when one dies. Too many people get swallowed by disappointment when their dream doesn’t work out, and I had always made sure I wasn’t one of those people. But now I was digging back into that disappointment—poking and exploring it. The result was a tremendous outpouring of emotion. A catharsis.

We put on three preview performances of Without a Word in the summer of 1984, then reworked it for a month-long run at the Beverly Hills Playhouse that fall. Every single show sold out, and audiences left the theater in tears. A Who’s Who of Hollywood stars came to see it, including Liza Minnelli, Drew Barrymore, and Melissa Gilbert in just one night. Gene Kelly came to a performance, too, and he particularly loved Lisa, whom he confessed to finding “very attractive.” He and Liza pressed Lisa and me to take Without a Word to New York or make a movie of it, and separately, Gene encouraged me to pursue more musical venues. Apart from Gregory Hines, there just weren’t that many male actors out there who could sing, dance, and act.

When all was said and done, we received six LA Drama Critics Awards, including Best Play, Best Direction, Best Actress for Lisa, and Best Actor for me. As an artistic endeavor, it was an amazingly satisfying experience. But that wasn’t the best thing about it.

The best thing about the play was the response we got, and continued to get even years later, from people who’d seen it. For years, people would come up to Lisa or me and say, “I saw Without a Word, and it just moved me so much.” They’d tell us about the dreams they’d had, and how they’d fallen by the wayside—until seeing our play. People were actually choosing to go back and follow their bliss, encouraged by what they’d seen onstage.

Without a Word touched a deep emotional chord in so many people, and it also cauterized wounds for both Lisa and me. Of all the endeavors we’ve undertaken, we both remember Without a Word as one of our proudest artistic moments.

By the time Without a Word premiered, Lisa and I had been together ten years. We’d been through a lot in that time: the untimely end of our ballet careers, moving across the country, going broke, my dad’s death, my foray into too much drinking. But through it all, I still felt a magic with her, which our emotional work together on Without a Word confirmed.

In the decade we’d been together, I had seen Lisa grow from a naïve eighteen-year-old into a confident woman. She wasn’t afraid of anything, and jumped right into whatever we got ourselves into, from woodworking to acting to playwriting. Lisa was game for everything, and she never lost her sense of humor even in the hard times. The longer we were together, the luckier I felt that we’d found each other. And I even began to let myself believe she wanted to be with me, too.

One reason we fit so well together was that we shared so many interests. We both loved dancing, acting, traveling, being out in nature. We also both loved horses, and even shared a dream of possibly owning a few someday. But when we finally took the first step toward that dream, it was more like a funny misstep.

While we were on the set of Red Dawn, both Lisa and I had fallen in love with a horse in the movie named Fancy. As shooting was winding down, I asked the movie’s horse wrangler if he’d sell Fancy to us. We still lived in an apartment, so we couldn’t keep him at home, but we figured he could live at the equestrian-center stables in LA. Fancy was a gorgeous, high-stepping Morgan parade horse, with his head always jacked up so high that sitting on him was like sitting on the back of a seahorse.

I offered the wrangler $150, hoping it would be enough. To my relief, he agreed. He led Fancy out of a trailer and held out the lead rope. “He’s all yours!” he said.

I’d just bought a horse! What was I going to do with him now? I took the rope and began to lead Fancy away, and at that very moment one of the old ranch hands was walking by.

“This is my new horse!” I said, a big smile on my face.

“That horse is lame,” the old-timer replied. He pointed at Fancy’s legs, and I was forced to admit what I’d noticed earlier but tried to ignore. Fancy had a slight limp in his right rear leg. We’d bought a lame horse, with bowed tendons, but I loved him anyway—he and I had been through that freezing winter together. And despite his limp, Fancy still turned out to be a great first horse for us.

Being the son of a cowboy, I had grown up with horses and loved them all my life. Our family didn’t have much money, but horses were cheap in Texas, so we kept a few at some rundown stables near our house. We’d barter with the stable owners, exchanging chores for boarding, so from the time I was small, I learned how to muck stalls and care for horses. And because those corrals were so ratty, the horses needed a lot of attention, for things like splinters and hoof injuries.

We even had an Arabian mare when I was growing up. She wasn’t necessarily well-bred, but she was an Arabian, and we bred her to have a foal, whom we named Princess Zubidiya of Damascus. We called her Zubi. I loved that horse more than anything when I was a boy, and rode her every chance I got. And I learned horsemanship from a master—my dad.

My dad was absolutely beautiful in the saddle. He was like John Wayne. He’d been riding since he could walk, and he came from a long line of cowboys. His father—my grandfather— had been a foreman at the King Ranch in Texas, which at 825,000 acres was the size of Rhode Island, and one of the biggest ranches in the world. My grandfather was shot to death by cattle rustlers before my dad was born, and according to family lore, the killers sat there smoking his cigarettes while they waited for him to die.

My grandmother remarried after that, and my step-grandfather was a cowboy, too, up in the Texas Panhandle. When I was growing up, I used to go there in the summers and work with him on the ranch. His name was Cap, but we kids called him Pe-Paw, which he hated. Later, when we’d go into bars together, he’d say, “Little Buddy, you call me Cap in this bar, don’t be calling me that piece of shit Pe-Paw!” I loved him to death, but of course I’d call him Pe-Paw just to drive him crazy.

These were the men who passed on to my dad—and me— the cowboy way. Even though I moved to New York and LA, becoming a dancer and an actor, I never lost that cowboy blood. My dad and I used to talk about owning a ranch together someday, with a stable of horses and big outdoor spaces. He died before I could make it happen for us, but I kept that dream alive and swore to myself that Lisa and I would buy a beautiful ranch in his honor when we had the money.

In late 1984, five years after moving to Los Angeles, I finally got the role that would enable me to buy a small ranch and start moving back into the cowboy life. And ironically enough, I’d be playing a man who spent much of his own life on horseback.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 714