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Chapter 8

Orry Main, the swashbuckling Confederate Army soldier in North and South, was the role that sent my career soaring. A twelve-hour miniseries based on the extremely popular John Jakes historical novels, North and South was a TV event that rivaled the epic Roots miniseries of the late 1970s.

The story revolved around the Confederate Orry and his Union soldier friend George Hazard, played by Jim Read. Orry and George meet at West Point, and the miniseries follows their friendship through the tumult of the Civil War and beyond. North and South was a huge undertaking, with more than 130 cast members, thousands of extras, nearly nine thousand wardrobe pieces, and fifteen thousand props and set decorations being trucked to different locations all over the South. It was a certifiable Big TV Event.

I was incredibly excited to win the role of Orry, and not just because he was the kind of Renaissance-man, courageous southern gentleman I’d always aspired to be. Playing Orry meant that I’d be starring alongside the most amazing cast ever assembled for a television series. Elizabeth Taylor, James Stewart, Olivia de Havilland, Johnny Cash, David Carradine, Lesley-Anne Down, Gene Kelly, Robert Mitchum, Jean Simmons, Kirstie Alley, Lloyd Bridges, and Waylon Jennings all had parts in North and South—and that’s just a partial list.

As they say in football, when you score a touchdown, you should try to act like you’ve been in the end zone before. So I was determined that, even though I’d be playing opposite some of the greatest actors of all time, I’d try to be cool about it. I especially tried to remember this the day I was scheduled to do a scene with James Stewart.

It was early in the shoot, so I hadn’t done many scenes with the big stars yet. Because Jim Read and I were the leads of the series, I wanted to project confidence. But when I heard James Stewart’s distinctive voice as I walked toward the set for our scene, my knees turned to jelly. And when I saw him sitting behind an ornate desk, in character as Miles Colbert, I couldn’t believe I’d been lucky enough to be cast opposite Hollywood legends like him. For a young actor, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

In addition to feeling incredibly lucky to be on that set, I also loved everything about my role. North and South was set in a time when men were men and women were women, and the courtliness and southern gentility of the time really appealed to my old-fashioned side. I loved walking down the streets on the set, seeing the men in their military uniforms and the women in their corsets and gowns, their cleavage spilling out as they fanned themselves in the heat.

The set even came equipped with “leaning boards,” as women couldn’t sit down in their giant ball-gown dresses without crushing all that crinoline. Instead, they’d prop themselves gently against the leaning board, resting their lower backs and legs without sitting. Walking by a row of corseted beauties, dressed in my sharp Confederate Army uniform, I felt like I’d gone back in time.



We filmed all over the South, in Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas. And because we were making not only the twelve-hour North and South, but also North and South: Book II, we ended up shooting for a year and a half. It was amazing to have that much guaranteed work, at a really good salary. Even on The Outsiders, which was not only a Francis Ford Coppola movie but also did very well at the box office, I’d received only scale pay. It was worth it, of course, to work with Coppola. But both Lisa and I were really happy to finally have some real money coming in during North and South.

I felt like I earned it, though, considering how intense the shooting schedule and conditions were. We shot six days a week, for no less than twelve hours a day. And some of the longest days were right in the middle of the South Carolina summer, when we’d sometimes spend up to eighteen hours shooting, wearing those heavy woolen uniforms. I even fainted once on the set, slamming my face into a cement column and breaking my nose before hitting the ground. But when Jim Read and I asked permission to take our coats off for one scene on a train, director Richard T. Heffron first had to confirm with a Civil War expert that it would be historically accurate before he said yes.

The producers did absolutely everything they could to ensure historical authenticity. Some of the costumes were made with nineteenth-century silk, and others were borrowed from actual historical collections or made from period drawings. The best source of costumes, however, was the hundreds of Civil War re-enactors who played in the battle scenes.

This was my first time meeting hard-core re-enactors, and I was amazed at how particular they were about everything. When they were re-enacting a battle, they not only wore clothes that were true to the period, even down to their underwear, but they also didn’t eat any food or use any tools or weapons that weren’t available during the Civil War. These re-enactors, some of whom were descendants of soldiers who had fought in the battles we re-created, looked as if they had walked in through a time machine.

The cast also had several different coaches, to help ensure we stayed in character. Our dialect coach, Robert Easton, made sure everyone spoke with the proper drawl or brogue, and dance historian Desmond Strobel taught us how to dance an authentic “Sicilian Circle” and “Lancers Quadrille.” The result of all this attention to detail was a miniseries that looked, sounded, and felt like a real Civil War setting.

Depending on the cast and the general mood, film and TV sets can be pretty wild places. On Red Dawn, we’d gotten into some crazy pranks, partly to defuse the tension of the shoot, which was both physically grueling and emotionally draining. But on North and South, the cast wasn’t into pranks so much as having a good time. It was a fun group, and Lisa and I loved hanging out with everyone in the evenings after shooting.

We did a lot of filming in Charleston, South Carolina, which is packed with fantastic restaurants in its tree-lined, beautifully preserved old section of town. One restaurant in particular, Philippe Million’s, became a cast hangout. We’d head there nearly every weekend, ordering drinks and enjoying the kitchen’s nouvelle cuisine. Some actors could be found there several times a week, including Lesley-Anne Down, who we’d heard had her own reasons for wanting to spend as much time as possible in expensive restaurants.

Lesley, who played my love interest, Madeline Fabray, in the series, had already starred in countless TV shows and films, including The Pink Panther Strikes Again and the BBC’s popular Upstairs, Downstairs. At the time we were shooting North and South, she and her then-husband, the director Billy Friedkin, were heading toward a bitter divorce. And it seemed to some in the cast that Lesley was aiming to spend as much of Billy’s money as she could before it was final.

So on the nights she was at Philippe Million’s, the Cristal was flowing and the food kept coming—courtesy of Lesley and, unbeknownst to him, Billy. She must have spent tens of thousands of dollars at that restaurant, to the delight of the rest of the cast. We’d all eat and drink to our hearts’ content, then head out the door to a nearby place to dance. It was a pretty lively group, and there were a lot of late nights.

Lesley also treated herself to an upgrade over the cast housing in Charleston, which was already nothing to sneeze at. She upgraded to a penthouse suite, which she paid for with her own money. And she was generous with that, too, inviting us all up a couple of times for drinks in her suite, with its fantastic view of Charleston.

On one of those evenings, a whole group gathered in Lesley’s suite and continued to party late into the night. The last thing I remembered was talking with David Carradine, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up the next morning in my hotel room slightly hung over. But the next afternoon, Lesley said to me, “Patrick, I was so worried about you last night!”

“Why?” I asked.

“Well,” she said in her clipped British diction, “you and David were out on that tiny ledge, outside the window, doing karate with bottles of Crown Royal in your hand. I was scared to death!”

I just stared at her. I had no recollection of going out on the ledge—why would I do a crazy thing like that? After all, her suite was up on the twelfth floor. But apparently, it was true. David was a big martial arts guy—he’d played the lead in the seventies TV series Kung Fu—and he and I had apparently gone out to the ledge to demonstrate our balance skills in Kata, a form of slow-motion shadow boxing. Thank goodness, even with alcohol in our bloodstreams, our balance was good enough to keep from tumbling to the beautiful cobblestones of Charleston twelve floors below.

Needless to say, Lisa wasn’t in Charleston with us that particular weekend. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been out there on the ledge in the first place. I definitely tended toward more drinking and late nights when she wasn’t with me—I never have been able to stand the inside of a hotel room alone. When I was missing Lisa, I just wanted the nights to go by faster, and staying out was my admittedly imperfect way of trying to make that happen.

The wild energy running through that whole shoot also included hookups among cast and crew. Lesley-Anne Down ended up in a relationship with the cinematographer, Don FauntLeRoy, and the two have been together ever since. Jim Read got together with Wendy Kilbourne. And Genie Francis, of General Hospital fame, started dating actor Jonathan Frakes, whom she married a few years later. It was certainly never boring on the set of North and South, either during filming or after hours.

But as much as I loved my fellow cast members on North and South, I probably loved the horses even more. There were some gorgeous horses on that set, including John Wayne’s last horse, Parsons. Parsons and I had an amazing connection—it was almost telepathic. All I had to do was think about what I wanted him to do next, and he’d do it.

There were plenty of good horse scenes in both parts of North and South, but the best one came in Book II. Orry, who’s now a general, is riding away from camp with two of his aides, when suddenly the camp comes under attack. The three of us have to turn around and come to the rescue, with guns blazing.

Just before we shot the scene, I had an idea. I was always trying to figure out ways to make the action scenes more exciting, and I knew I’d hit on something great with this: We should hold the horses’ reins in our teeth, so we could fire rifles with both hands as we raced through the battle.

The two guys who played my aides were hard-core, badass re-enactors. They had the long hair and grizzled look of real Civil War soldiers, and this was how they spent their leisure time—traveling around the country, putting on re-enactments, and handing down knowledge of the Civil War era to future generations. These were real manly men, with full beards, powerful builds, and leathery skin. I just knew they’d be ready to up the ante on this scene.

We were all three astride our horses, and just as the director was about to yell, “Action!” I said to the two guys, “Hey, dudes— we’ve got these double-barreled short shotguns; let’s ride with the reins in our teeth so we can fire with both hands!”

The guys just shook their heads.

“Come on!” I said. “It’ll be cool!”

They shook their heads again. “No way,” said one of the guys, sitting back in his saddle.

“Well, why not?” I asked, exasperated. We had a chance to make this scene really pop, and these guys wouldn’t even consider it.

“Teeth,” the guy finally said. And he reached up and popped his front teeth right out of his mouth. It took me a second to realize it was a denture.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “How’d that happen?”

“Riding with the reins in my teeth,” the guy replied, and calmly placed the bridge back in his mouth. “If that horse trips, it’ll knock your teeth right out of your head.”

Just then the director yelled, “Action!” We all took off, and despite the warning, I held the reins in my teeth for the whole shot. I kept my back as rubbery as possible, trying to absorb every little jolt with anything but my teeth. But I didn’t need to worry, because Parsons was such a good, sure-footed horse that he raced silkily around every obstacle, including the dozens of soldiers’ “corpses” on the ground. The shot turned out amazing, and fortunately all my teeth stayed in my head.

The first installment of North and South aired in November 1985, and suddenly Jim Read and I found our faces plastered all over newspapers, magazines, billboards, and TV shows.

ABC had ratcheted up its publicity machine, and that, combined with Americans’ enduring interest in the Civil War, turned the miniseries into a huge TV event. The television landscape wasn’t so fragmented in the 1980s as it is now, with hundreds of cable channels, DVRs, and the internet competing for attention, so millions of people tuned in to see the installments as they aired.

The floodgates were officially open. Patrick Swayze fan clubs started appearing and interview requests were pouring in. Now, whenever we went out in public, Lisa and I would find ourselves surrounded. Before North and South, people might recognize me on the street and ask for an autograph. But after the miniseries aired, fans were suddenly everywhere, approaching us on all sides no matter where we were. I have to admit, it was kind of cool.

But as the level of fame went up, the level of courtesy sometimes went down. People would interrupt a conversation, cut someone off, or even jump in front of our car to ask for an autograph. And when we went to events, the organizers would often take my arm and try to lead me away, completely ignoring the fact that Lisa was with me. In those cases, I’d interject loudly, “Have you met my wife, Lisa?” and they’d get the picture. But it wasn’t always easy for us to be polite in the face of the increasing whirlwind surrounding us.

Yet we’ve always tried to accommodate fans’ requests for autographs, photos, or anything else. After all, Lisa and I both know we wouldn’t be where we are if it weren’t for the fans, and we’re incredibly appreciative of all the support they’ve given us over the years. For the most part, people are very nice even when they’re asking for something, so it’s easy to be nice back. And of course, I’m the kind of guy who always wants people to like me, so I have extra motivation for being nice to those who approach us.

Lisa has always taken the attention in stride, even when women fans get a little more aggressive. She’s not the jealous type, for one thing. And besides, she knows as well as anyone that all the attention is good for my career.

Just after North and South aired, Lisa was talking to an actress friend of ours named Barb, who worked as an office temp when she was between roles. Barb had just spent the day at an office building in LA, and she was concerned about what she’d been hearing at the water cooler. “Lisa,” she said, “there’s a girl in this office who’s obsessed with Patrick. She kept saying she was going to find a way to meet him, that she wanted him and was going to find a way to get him!” Barb was seriously trying to warn her, but Lisa just laughed.

“Barb,” she said, “that’s great! This is a good thing! This is just what we need.” Barb couldn’t quite believe it, but that’s been Lisa’s attitude throughout my whole career.

But even though we were happy about my career taking off, we had to deal with some difficult situations after North and South. For one thing, my manager, Bob LeMond, who’d brought us out to LA and helped us get started, died of complications from AIDS. Bob had been a real mentor and friend, and we’d known him since our days in Houston. Losing him at this point in my career, just three years after my father died, was devastating.

Lisa and I also realized that we’d now have to take steps to protect our privacy. Even in those pre-internet days, there were still paparazzi all over Hollywood, not to mention some overzealous fans who weren’t above staking us out at home. When I got the role of Orry Main, it allowed us to buy a five-acre ranch, where we could keep horses and enjoy nature without being disturbed.

Yet although Lisa and I saw the potential for a dream home on our new property, when others saw it they were shocked. They thought we’d just bought ourselves a nightmare.

• • •

Nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains about twenty miles north of Hollywood, the piece of land Lisa and I fell in love with was just a weed-choked lot when we bought it.

Used-car parts sat rusting, tumbleweeds blew through, and dead tree limbs and river rocks lay scattered across the property. The house wasn’t even really a house—it was a couple of run-down cabins connected by a breezeway. The floors needed finishing, the kitchen needed renovating, the walls were made of plywood, and everything was generally a mess. But right from the start, it looked like heaven to us.

Ever since our first days of doing carpentry back in New York, Lisa and I felt ready to take on any project, no matter how large or small. This would be a very big project, but when we looked at those cabins and that land, we didn’t see work and toil. We saw the potential for what this place could be. Lisa and I both had plenty of ideas, and we couldn’t wait to get to work making them a reality.

We knew we’d need help, so the first thing we did was make it fun for friends to come out and join in the labor with us. We built the pool first, even before fixing up the house, so everybody who came out and sweated with us could have a nice cool dip afterward.

We invited friends to “rock parties” that had nothing to do with music: We’d fan people out across the property to pick up the rocks strewn everywhere, then have a big barbecue for everyone afterward. And a couple of times, we turned weed-cutting from a boring chore into a swordfighting lesson. I outfitted everyone with sabers and we all thrust and parried into the weeds, theatrically spinning and attacking our common foe. It was during one of these cleanup sessions that one of our friends gave our new home its name: Rancho Bizarro.

It was incredibly liberating to be out in nature again after all our years of living in LA and New York. Our ranch adjoins the Angeles National Forest, which made it feel as if our little five-acre spread was really a million-acre spread—we could ride horses deep into the wilderness, literally right outside our back door. The air was fresh and the smell of sage and oak permeated everything.

For the year when we were renovating, we lived in one of the small rooms and made tea and coffee on a little propane stove. We worked on the ranch every chance we got, creating a beautiful kitchen with terracotta floors and refinishing the wood floors ourselves—which Lisa says she’ll never do again. We got to add our own special touches to the place, which made it that much more meaningful for us. Over time, we built trellised patios, a master-bedroom wing, a music studio, a dance studio, a guesthouse, and an office.

We also built a sixteen-stall pinewood barn, because living on the ranch wasn’t just about fresh air and privacy. It was also about reclaiming the cowboy life. The smell of dirt and horse sweat and the raw masculine power of working on horseback was energizing for me, and I wanted to get back into it.

Lisa and I were lucky enough to know someone who could help us get fantastic horses. Gene McLaughlin was a world-champion trick roper, and his son Cliff had been a stunt double in North and South. To make ends meet between rodeos and trick-roping shows, Gene would buy horses down South and truck them to Los Angeles in a trailer, where he could sell each one for three to five times what he’d paid. We bought our second horse from him—a fantastic, talented horse named Cloud.

We called Cloud “Little Big Man,” because he was small but rode big. Cloud and I would explore the mountains in the Angeles National Forest behind our ranch, sometimes going out for days at a time. I’d pack some food and water and a sleeping bag, and Cloud and I would just hit the trails. Some of my happiest memories of this time of my life were of Cloud and me exploring the deepest reaches of the woods together, miles from people and civilization. It always reminded me of being with my dad, to the point where our journeys together felt almost spiritual.

Cloud was also an excellent calf-roping horse. Calf roping is the hardest rodeo sport, in my opinion, as it’s incredibly physical and requires lightning reflexes and excellent timing. You have to rope the running calf off your speeding horse, then use the horse’s stopping to propel yourself forward. You land on your feet running, hit the calf, flank it in the air, and simultaneously grab the feet to lace with the pigging string in a nice bouquet.

The whole thing takes about two seconds, but one wrong move can result in injury to you, the horse, the calf, or all three. Gene trained me, and I was off to the races—I loved getting down in the dirt and honing my skills. And with Gene, Cliff, and my cowboy friend Tommy Howell all doing calf roping, it was a really fun time.

With the pinewood barn finished and plenty of room for more horses, Lisa and I started thinking about buying the most beautiful, regal animals of all: Arabians. Yet even with the money I’d made on North and South, we still weren’t sure we could afford them.

Arabians are the steeds of the gods, and expensive to buy. Originally bred in the Middle East, they have a proud bearing and gorgeous bone structure, with arched necks and high tails. A particularly beautiful Arabian is the kind of horse that can make you gasp as it prances by. And not only are they stunning to look at, they’re also smart, with boundless energy. Arabians aren’t the easiest horses to train—I always joke that you have to be at least as smart as the horse—but the result is a real partnership between horse and rider.

I’d always wanted to own an Arabian, and Lisa and I were fortunate enough to know two of the best breeders in the country—or the world, for that matter—Tom and Rhita McNair. So we decided to stop by and see the McNairs at Glen-lock Farms one week when we were in Houston visiting Lisa’s family. We’d already told them we weren’t sure we were ready to buy, when a horse named Ferouk suddenly came trotting out of his gate. Ferouk was a stunner, an impressive, powerful, well-trained Western Pleasure horse. This was our first serious look at the Arabian breed, so we asked Tom’s opinion.

“This one’s a winner,” he told us. “You could win competitions with Ferouk.” Looking at that horse, with his gliding stride and dark, intelligent eyes, we knew it was true.

Lisa and I wanted to own Arabians to learn more and improve our personal horsemanship, and we also wanted to show them competitively. Tom knew this, and Ferouk seemed to understand it, too. He looked at us with those big brown eyes as if to say, “You and me! Let’s go!” We knew right then it would be hard to resist this horse. So we asked Tom how much it would cost to buy Ferouk—and his answer stunned us. It was a lot less than what we’d expected. As Tom knew, it was a price we really couldn’t say no to.

Lisa and I looked at each other and broke into big smiles. Without even saying it, we both knew we were about to buy our first Arabian.

And that was how we began showing horses. We didn’t know much about it, but being dancers, we picked up the physical nuances quickly. Your bearing and carriage have to be as impressive as the horse’s, as the horse takes its cues from you. After taking her first lesson in how to show, Lisa entered a competition the very next day—and placed third. She was hooked.

Ferouk was a smart, savvy horse, and he and Lisa bonded right away. They spent hours together, each bettering the other’s performance, and soon they were an amazing team. Lisa was a natural, and less than a year after we bought Ferouk, she took him all the way to the U.S. Nationals competition. She competed there with people who had been showing horses their whole lives, but that didn’t intimidate her in the least. Lisa’s skills were phenomenal, and she brought the best out in Ferouk. She placed in the top ten in the Nationals—an incredible achievement. And I went top five in Region 9, the most difficult region in the country.

We competed seriously for a while, traveling all across the United States for horse shows. People always seemed surprised that we did everything ourselves, from mucking out stalls to scrubbing down the horses to staying in the same Motel 6s our trainers stayed at. I suppose people expected a couple of prima donnas, but to us the whole point was to be one with the horse, and not to stand out. Both Lisa and I loved getting down and dirty, even if it sometimes led to a little bit of gawking from fans.

In fact, people sometimes couldn’t believe it was really us out there. I was entered in a regional competition one weekend, and was riding Ferouk around the ring. My hair was still long from North and South, and as I rode atop our beautiful horse, my hair flying out behind me, a guy turned to his wife and said, “That guy rides like he thinks he’s Orry Main!”

Lisa overheard him, but she didn’t say anything. When I got closer, she heard him murmur, “Wait a second. That is Orry Main!” Lisa just smiled.

Unfortunately, the more famous I got, the more difficult it was to compete in horse shows. Working with horses, like working with ballerinas, teaches you that it’s not about yourself. It’s about bringing out the beauty and precision and perfection of your partner—in this case, your horse. But as fans began to realize that I was showing horses, they’d come out to the arenas and sometimes hang over the rail, shouting, waving photos for autographs, or even worse, taking flash photos right in my horse’s face.

I ended up switching from riding horses to showing at halter, where you have the horse at the end of a lead rope. You teach the horse to stand in a certain way, pulling up the head and neck, and then you run, leading the horse through paces meant to show off its conformation and movement. This worked out a little better, though eventually, after Dirty Dancing, I’d have to stop showing altogether. It just wasn’t fair to the horse or to the other competitors.

As Lisa and I worked to get Rancho Bizarro in order, we accumulated more and more animals. Soon we had dogs, cats, horses, peacocks, and a chicken house that produced quantities of eggs. I loved being around animals and felt a connection with them that I felt with only a few people. Whenever an animal was upset, I could talk it down and soo the it—and they could do the same for me. Surrounded by acres of gorgeous land and our growing menagerie of animals, we felt that the ranch was a true haven.

And we’d soon need that haven more than ever, as 1987 would mark the release of my biggest movie yet—and the start of the craziest period of our lives.

 


Date: 2015-04-20; view: 674


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