Chapter 10

Lisa and I peered out the window as the small plane we were in descended toward Swakopmund, on the western coast of Namibia. We were exhausted, having traveled for more than twenty-four hours, including a ten-hour layover in Frankfurt with nothing but chairs to sleep in. As we looked out at the desert terrain below, I said to Lisa, “Damn, it looks just like Arizona. Why’d we come all this way?”

Bone-tired from the Dirty Dancing shoot, I was only half joking. But we found out soon enough that the Namib Desert, where we would be shooting Steel Dawn, was a mystical and magical place. Our time spent doing this shoot would restore us in many ways, and lead to a lifelong love of Africa for both Lisa and me.

On our first day there, we piled into a Kombi Volkswagen van and headed out to explore. The Namib Desert borders the Kalahari, the second-largest desert in Africa after the Sahara. And although the word “desert” conjures images of sand and more sand, this desert was alive, especially in the morning.

In addition to beautifully wind-sculpted dunes, in some parts of the desert there were whole stretches of crusted black rock, like a moonscape. If you spend the night in that moonscape, thenwake up just before dawn, you can watch as the whole desert suddenly blossoms into green. When Lisa and I first saw it happen, we thought we were dreaming. But in actuality it was the lichen on the rocks opening up briefly, like a flower, to collect moisture. Then, as the sun rises in the sky, it suddenly closes back up, leaving nothing but scorched-looking rocks and the memory of what seemed like a mirage.

Ever since the days of camping with my dad in the backwoods of Texas, I’ve always loved learning about how people in different places live off the land. It’s partly why Red Dawn appealed so much to me—I take a certain pride in knowing I could find a way to survive in any environment. Here in southern Africa, I wanted to connect with local people who could teach me how to live in the desert. Where do you find water, food, and shelter in such a desolate environment?

Seeing the desert blossom into green was amazing, and it showed us that sustenance can come from the most unlikely places. Some African members of the crew had grown up in the desert, and they told us more—about the roaming herds of ostrich and other animals, and details about how to survive in the desert. Both Lisa and I connected in a very deep way with the nature all around us, and we loved driving out to explore different parts of the Kalahari during the shoot.

But although we loved being in Africa, I was exhausted from Dirty Dancing. I’d put everything I had into that shoot, and then we moved straight into Steel Dawn with no break. My Steel Dawn character, Nomad, is a warrior in a postapocalyptic world who travels across the desert fighting mutant sand people and outlaws. We shot a lot of very physical scenes, with sword fighting, martial arts, spear throwing, and hand-to-hand combat. All that activity, plus being immersed in this amazing place, was enough to make my head spin.

As always, Lisa was my rock. This was the first time we were acting in a movie together, and it was rewarding to share scenes with her onscreen, rather than just working behind the scenes with her. She played Kasha, a widow who lives in the desert with her young son and falls in love with Nomad. Lisa is a wonderful actress, and I was happy she was finally getting an opportunity to show her stuff. And I found that I was falling in love with her all over again, which led to a funny encounter with a woman who was working on the crew.

We were at a big cast-and-crew party toward the end of the shoot. Lisa and I danced together most of the night, and often had our arms around each other, which we’d been doing a lot of during our weeks in Africa. But at this party, one woman who worked in the wardrobe department kept giving Lisa the evil eye. She’d see us and just shake her head, or stand glaring at Lisa with a big frown on her face.

As it turned out, the woman knew I was married, but she didn’t realize Lisa was my wife! She thought we were having a “set romance”—which, believe me, happens on movie sets just as often as you might imagine. But finally, someone told her Lisa and I were married, and she sheepishly came up and apologized to Lisa, who just laughed it off. Lisa had already dealt with a few women on other sets who disliked her because she was married to me, so this probably felt like a relief.

I’d always said that the perfect woman for me is someone who’s interested in all the things I like to do—not someone who says, “No, I don’t want to get my hair wet!” When we were shooting Steel Dawn, I saw once again how open Lisa was to new experiences. She loved going out into the desert, and loved learning everything about Africa. Spiritually and emotionally, we’re just amazingly compatible.

After we wrapped Steel Dawn, we went on a safari, staying at the same place—Mala Mala—where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were married. It was incredibly romantic, a beautiful bungalow situated in the lush African landscape. By the end of our time in Africa, we felt refreshed and renewed. And it was a good thing, too—because when we got back to the United States and Dirty Dancing exploded into theaters, our relationship would be tested like never before.

The Deauville American Film Festival takes place every year in a beautiful resort town on France’s Normandy coast. It’s a prestigious festival, attended by the biggest movie stars, directors, and producers in the world. And in 1987, to our excitement, the organizers chose Dirty Dancing to open the festival.

Emile and Eleanor both flew to Deauville for the screening, and Lisa and I joined them there. We weren’t sure what kind of reception the movie would get, since the French are very discerning moviegoers, and this was just a modest little film about 1960s America. We settled into our balcony seats and waited nervously as the lights dimmed. And as we watched Dirty Dancing all the way through for just the second time, I was struck again by how well it had turned out. But we still weren’t sure what the audience was thinking.

When the movie ended and the lights came on, we stood up to leave. But all of a sudden, everyone in the theater turned around, looked up at us in the balcony, and broke into a thundering standing ovation that must have gone on for five minutes. Emile, Eleanor, Lisa, and I just stood there, dumbstruck, as the audience whooped and applauded. It was an incredibly gratifying moment, and gave us our first hint about how this “little movie” would ultimately be received.

A party had been planned for after the screening, and it seemed as if half of Deauville showed up. After a sit-down dinner, the music came on, and everyone danced into the wee hours of the morning, trying out their dirty-dancing moves and bringing a little bit of Lake Lure to the French coast. It was the perfect kickoff to a crazy time.

Dirty Dancing opened in the United States on August 21, 1987. It shot to the number-two spot, and within ten days it had sold more than $10 million in tickets—a huge amount back then. People went to see it multiple times, starting a trend that would ultimately shoot the grosses to more than $60 million in 1987 alone. Dirty Dancing, made for just over $5 million, was on its way to becoming a bona fide phenomenon.

If North and South had made me a household name, Dirty Dancing blew the lid off. It was everywhere you looked—on TV, in magazines and newspapers, and playing on multiple screens at the cineplexes. People dissected Johnny and Baby’s relationship, debated about Penny’s abortion, and talked about their own relationships with their fathers. We had never dreamed the movie would become anywhere near this big. But suddenly we were engulfed in a total whirlwind.

Lisa and I had gotten used to people stopping us on the street and asking for autographs, but now everything got turned up a few more notches. Rather than having a couple of people approach us politely, we were getting mobbed. People were knocking on the windows of our car, surrounding us as we walked into restaurants. Paparazzi began trailing us and even hanging around outside Rancho Bizarro, waiting for us to come out. We were thrilled at the success of Dirty Dancing, but on the other hand, it was becoming harder and harder to live anything like a normal life outside the haven of our ranch.

It’s hard to describe exactly what it feels like to be thrust into this kind of fame, but “whirlwind” comes pretty close. Everything around you is just spinning. You try to touch it, to get a grasp on it, but it just spins faster and faster. If I had found myself in the middle of something like this when I was younger, when I first came to Hollywood, it probably would have destroyed me. In many ways, dealing with fame is the purest form of dealing with your demons.

The easiest way to destroy people is to give them exactly what they want. You might not realize it at the time, but the struggle to achieve something is, in many ways, much more satisfying than actually getting it. The very act of striving is what keeps you alive, and it keeps you grounded. But then, when the thing you’ve been fighting for is suddenly in your grasp, it’s all too easy to look around and say—is that all there is?

Also, despite how proud I was of finally making it big, I was also torn about how I’d finally gotten to this place. All the fears I had about giving in to “dancer-turned-actor” typecasting were crystallized one evening when Lisa and I happened to catch a segment about Dirty Dancing on Entertainment Tonight.

We were getting ready to go out of town, and had the TV on in the background as we were packing. I heard the announcer say something like, “After the break, Patrick Swayze bumps and grinds his way into movie history!” My heart sank. I turned and looked at Lisa, who just shook her head. This was it—my worst nightmare come to life. I’d worked so hard to be taken seriously, and now this would be my legacy. I was definitely proud of the movie, but “bumping and grinding” was not what I wanted to be remembered for.

Yet it wasn’t only my role as Johnny Castle that was stirring up the whirlwind. The Dirty Dancing soundtrack, made for just two hundred thousand dollars, also shot to number one on the Billboard charts—and it stayed there for eighteen weeks. “She’s Like the Wind,” the single I wrote with Stacy Widelitz and performed with Wendy Fraser, went to number three on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and number one on Contemporary Adult. Along with “I’ve Had the Time of My Life,” it became one of the signature songs of Dirty Dancing.

Lisa and I flew to New York City for a record signing at the height of the Dirty Dancing craze. I was scheduled to sign copies from nine or ten o’clock in the morning, but when the reps picked us up in a limo and brought us to the Sam Goody store, we could see that people were already lined up all the way around the block and beyond. “They’ve been lining up since about 6:00 A.M.,” one guy told us, “just sitting out there on the sidewalk.”

The limo pulled up outside the store, and about fifteen security guys materialized to shepherd us through the crowds. Everyone started screaming when Lisa and I got out of the car—it was a madhouse. We had to go only twenty feet or so, from the curb to the door, but hundreds of women were pressing in, trying to get a glimpse of us. The noise was deafening, and the whole experience was absolutely surreal.

When we made it into the store, we could see all the fans outside, lined up and pressing against the huge plate-glass windows. It was a vast sea of humanity, waiting for a few seconds of conversation, maybe a snapshot, and an autograph. My head was spinning, taking everything in, when the guy from the store leaned down and said to me, “Now you know what it’s like to be the Beatles.” And he was right. Looking out those windows was just like looking at those vintage reels of screaming fans.

But strangely enough, when you’re in a sea of people like that, it’s actually a very lonely feeling. I was glad to have Lisa at my side, glad not to be facing this pandemonium alone. She stayed nearby as I smiled until my face hurt and signed so many CDs that my hand began to cramp. I kept going well past the allotted time, because I couldn’t imagine turning someone away who’d waited for hours on the sidewalk, and who was looking for only a few seconds of my time. So we stayed and stayed, until the last person had gotten through the line.

And it was like that every time people wanted autographs. If one person stopped me on the sidewalk to sign something, and someone else came up, then another, I’d end up standing there until everyone had come and gone. Once, at a baseball game, I must have signed a thousand autographs. These people were paying me the ultimate compliment, and the last thing I wanted was for anyone to walk away thinking I had too big a head to find a moment for them. It was my Texas manners coming through, but also my desire to be liked.

This could be hard on Lisa, though, especially if we needed to get somewhere, or we were hungry, or just needed to go to the bathroom. Once I even made her stand in the snow, shivering in the cold in high heels and a little dress. Learning how to balance the needs of the fans with Lisa’s needs, and my own, was a process that took some time.

The one thing I couldn’t abide was when people got aggressive. I’ll spend all day accommodating you if you’re polite about it, but if you’re rude, that’s another story. But even so, when people did get rude, I was still never comfortable just walking away. I wanted to find a way to turn the energy positive again.

Once, I was scheduled to make an appearance onstage in West Germany, and even though there were at least a dozen bodyguards, the crowd managed to break through. Suddenly, people were climbing over people and grabbing at me, and the bodyguards were completely overwhelmed. They started pushing back at the fans, which threatened to make a bad situation worse—and the last thing we needed was for a riot to break out.

Suddenly, I had an idea. Rather than resisting the crowd or trying to push back, I just started shaking hands. “Nice to meet you!” I’d say, shaking a hand, then following with, “No need to push. How you doing? I’m Patrick. Let’s make some room here.” I shouted to the bodyguards to do the same. “Say hello to people! Shake a hand, keep smiling.” When the bodyguards started doing the same, turning the energy from hostile to friendly, the fans soon stopped shoving.

I learned little techniques like that for crowd control, like patting someone on the back as you shake hands, then gently guiding them to one side. The fact is, once you’ve talked with people and given them that moment they were looking for, they’re on your side. So you can easily turn a group of fans into a second line of defense if others are pushing and shoving. The most important thing to remember is that the people who are pushing at you really want only one thing: for you to look into their eyes and say, “Hey, how are you doing? Nice to meet you.” And I was always happy to do that.

The first time Lisa and I really saw what it meant to be famous was back in my Skatetown, U.S.A. days. Jaclyn Smith, whom we knew from Houston, had become a huge star in Charlie’s Angels, and she came to the Skatetown premiere as a show of support. Lisa and I watched in amazement as she walked out of the premiere and flashbulbs began popping like strobe lights. I was feeling blinded by all those flashes, but Jackie had the most beautiful smile on her face, and she barely blinked. She knew she had to look good, so she had a completely calm expression, as if she was the only one there. I often thought of her example all those years later, when I became the one in the strobe lights.

Unfortunately, there’s a flip side to all the love you get from fans. The vast majority are perfectly decent people who reach out with an open heart. But once you become famous, some others crawl out of the woodwork—the ones who don’t hesitate to go after your money and your reputation, hoping to enrich themselves.

People will sue you for any little thing, claiming you bumped into their car with yours, or even that you injured them somehow with an innocuous handshake. And every incident requires a response from a lawyer. We’ve had a wonderful lawyer for years, Fred Gaines, who takes care of any issue that comes up, but the fact is, having to respond to every claim takes money and time, even if the claim is totally fabricated.

After “She’s Like the Wind” became a hit, at least five people filed lawsuits claiming they’d written it. Never mind the fact that if all five of these people truly believed they’d written it, they probably ought to be suing each other, too. These claims just came out of nowhere, from people we’d never met, and one suit even went so far that Stacy and I were no longer allowed to receive royalties. It just dragged on and on, but I knew we’d win because we had written the song. So Fred just kept responding, point by point, and we figured the truth would eventually come out.

And it did, when the plaintiffs submitted their account of when they’d written the song. They claimed they wrote it just before Dirty Dancing began shooting—but of course, Stacy and I had written it, and even recorded a master, during Grand-view, U.S.A. back in 1984. I dug up that master and sent it to Fred, and that finally ended the lawsuit. But because it had dragged on so long to begin with, whoever sued us certainly felt the pain in their own wallets—just as they should have.

After supposedly “bumping and grinding” my way into movie history, I signed on next to do a serious family drama called Tiger Warsaw. I played a drug-and alcohol-addicted loner whose sister accuses him of committing incest—a dark, intense movie that pushed me deeper as an actor but ultimately never really came together. Despite having a strong cast, including the Oscar-nominated actress Piper Laurie, Tiger Warsaw was directed by Amin Q. Chaudhri, an inexperienced director who made some questionable choices. The film didn’t do well, making little more than a ripple at the box office.

But the film I shot after that, Road House, did very big business at the box office. And while Dirty Dancing had launched a kind of cult following for me among women, Road House created a cult following of its own among men. With its multiple bar-fight scenes and macho, tough-shit antagonists, it was a classic guys’ film.

The truth is, in some ways I was built to be an action star. All the running, jumping, and falling I did as a kid had taught me how to be my own stuntman. Gymnastics had strengthened every part of my body and taught me balance. Studying martial arts, boxing, and sword fighting gave me a base of skills I could use in any kind of fight scene. And I could race anything—cars, motorcycles, horses, whatever was called for.

Road House was an old-fashioned Western-style movie, where the good guy comes to a bad town to clean it up. I knew it wasn’t Dostoevsky, but I still wanted to give my character, Dalton, real depth, and not just play him as a campy hero. There’s definitely a guilty pleasure to watching and loving Road House, but it ended up entertaining a lot of people, especially men who liked watching a stand-up guy like Dalton, who had a strong code.

For the fight scenes in Road House, I trained with Benny “the Jet” Urquidez, a kickboxing pro who never lost a professional match. Benny was a short, stocky guy who used sharp, sudden moves to keep his opponents off balance. But when he tried to teach his style to me, I had a lot of trouble—it’s just not the way I move. I kept trying to mimic his technique, but we weren’t getting anywhere.

Suddenly, Benny said, “Wait a minute! You’re a dancer! I’ve got an idea.” The next day, he showed up on set with a boom box. He plugged it in and flipped a switch, and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” came blasting out.

That was all it took. Moving with the beat of Michael Jackson’s music, I finally got a rhythm going, and my kickboxing came together. It was a great moment—all the syncopation, speed, and subtlety of the art form suddenly were mine. And I loved it. I hadn’t done any martial arts for a while, but after studying with Benny, I got right back into it. Road House gave me the opportunity to hone an old skill that I never realized I’d missed.

I soon found out that I’d need all the fighting skills I could muster for this movie. Because the actor who played my primary opponent, Marshall Teague, was ready to kick my ass for real if he could get away with it.

From the very beginning, Marshall, who played the bad-guy enforcer Jimmy, treated me like some snot-nose know-nothing actor. He had served in Vietnam and was a Navy SEAL—which meant he was a serious, real-life badass. He had no patience for bullshit and would say so to anyone’s face. Marshall apparently thought I was a dilettante pretty boy he could knock over with one of his meaty fingers. But when we started training, he learned otherwise.

He and I started rehearsing our fight scenes, and soon enough he saw that I knew what I was doing, and that I could take a punch. “Let’s put some contact into it,” I told him, well aware that he could lay me flat out if he chose to. But I knew if we choreographed it well, we could have some contact without killing each other, and it would look amazingly real onscreen.

When you earn the respect of a man like Marshall, you earn it for life. He and I became friends on the set of Road House, and we’ve been friends ever since. Not that many people understood his mentality, but when I looked him in the eye, we really connected. It was a good thing, too, because the fight scene we shot was absolutely epic, and we very nearly killed each other.

We fought in a river, and I was wearing nothing but little hip-hugger sweatpants—no shirt, no pads, no nothing. So when I hit the ground, I was hitting the ground hard. Since both Marshall and I loved the adrenaline high of a fight, it was easy to get carried away, and we really started pounding on each other in this scene.

After a few minutes of us punching and kicking the shit out of each other, Marshall picked up a log and swung it over his head. My eyes got wide as I realized he was about to break it right over my back. Marshall apparently thought it was a prop log, which would have been perfect for the scene—but unfortunately, it wasn’t. He realized his mistake midswing, but it was too late: He cracked me right across the spine with a real log, breaking a couple of my ribs and knocking the wind out of me.

I dropped to my hands and knees, gasping for breath, but the scene called for us to keep fighting. I didn’t break character and didn’t give up—we kept fighting, and eventually got to the part where Dalton is forced to kill Jimmy. When you watch this scene in the movie, the exhaustion you see on my face is absolutely real. I barely had the strength to drag myself out of the river after that fight.

My next role was as another tough guy, a Chicago cop named Truman Gates in Next of Kin. But this time, the training I got wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as studying kickboxing with Benny the Jet. This time, some real Chicago cops decided they’d give me some training I would never forget.

They hung out with me on the set, took me on ride-alongs to get a feel for the streets, and told me all about the dangers they faced on the job. We spent a lot of time together, and I really bonded with these guys. They were the real deal, putting their lives on the line every day, and I respected their courage. Then they decided to test mine. Or at least, test how strong my stomach was.

They drove me to the Chicago morgue, pulling the squad car up out front. I already knew what I was in for—they were going to show me dead and decomposing bodies, to test my mettle. But before that happened, there was a funny moment out on the sidewalk.

The cops were walking me up to the door, when a couple of junkies lying out front, really desperate-looking guys, peered up at me. Through a heroin-induced haze, one of them squinted and said, “Hey! Aren’t you that Dirty Dance dude?” I couldn’t believe it—these guys couldn’t have been to a movie in years, but I guess Dirty Dancing was everywhere you looked at that point, in newspapers, magazines, on posters, all over the place. But I just smiled and said, “Nope, sorry. You’ve got the wrong guy.” And the cops hustled me through the door.

It was a beautiful building, all pristine and pretty on the outside and nice and clean on the inside. But then the guys led me down into the bowels of the place, where the bodies were stored.

The first thing that amazed me was how many bodies there were. The ceilings were about fifty feet up, and there were rows and rows of shelves with nothing but body parts on them—a head, an arm, a hand, a torso, a leg. Some of them had apparently been there a long time, as they were in a pretty advanced state of decomposition.

The guys chose a particularly gruesome body to show me first, hoping to make me puke. It was a kind of tough-guy game—could I stand to see and smell all this, or was my stomach too weak? These guys had seen everything already, so they had a clinical detachment. They just wanted to see whether I could handle it. I couldn’t, but I didn’t let on. I felt the bile rise in my throat and started to throw up, but managed to swallow it back down. It sounds disgusting, and it was, but I wasn’t about to show these cops that I couldn’t handle it.

There was another, more serious reason I didn’t want to show weakness. Doing this kind of training for a movie is all about showing someone else’s world on film. The story is really about them, and what they do, and they’re teaching you out of pride. I wanted to be good for these guys. In fact, I wanted to be these guys on film. It was the least I could do for them. So I forced myself to behave and respond as they would. And just as I respected them, they respected my efforts to make my portrayal of their world absolutely true and real.

Lisa was also up for a role in Next of Kin, playing Truman Gates’s wife, Jessie. Once again, she would have been perfect for it—but she was reluctant to appear to be pushing for it as my real-life wife. Lisa has a lot of integrity, and it really came through in instances like these, where she didn’t push as hard for roles she could have won. Helen Hunt, who’d just started her career, ended up getting the role—and she was wonderful. But it was frustrating for Lisa, who’s a very talented actress.

The truth is, talent takes you only so far in Hollywood. There are any number of other factors that influence who makes it—and Lisa was up against some real obstacles from the get-go. For one thing, people in Hollywood have a thing about husbands and wives. The William Morris Agency, one of the most powerful in the industry, won’t represent husbandwife teams. There’s a perception of nepotism, even where there isn’t any.

A lot of people didn’t take Lisa as seriously as they should have, just because she was married to me. If I pushed for her to get a role, that was seen as favoritism—even if she was the best actress for it. She had to work twice as hard and be twice as good to be taken half as seriously, which is very hard to overcome.

Another big issue was that you really have to be able to sell yourself in Hollywood. As a Texan, that was something I loved to do—I loved the challenge of winning someone over, making that person want to hire me. Being from a Finnish family, Lisa had inherited a certain reserve. She had been raised to believe that the quality of what you do should speak for itself, and that if you try to sell to people, you’re insulting their intelligence. If success in Hollywood came from sheer talent, Lisa would have been a huge star. But all these factors conspired to keep her down—which was a real source of frustration for her.

Lisa kept pushing and working, though, and she got a recurring role in the TV series Max Headroom, playing a character named Janie Crane. She went out for auditions whenever we were in Los Angeles, but much of the time she was working with me on my movie sets—rewriting and helping me with my scenes and performance. Every movie I’ve ever been in, Lisa has had a significant role in fleshing out my character. She also started learning the tools of the director’s trade, spending time with the director of photography on each set and asking about the how and the why of a shot, becoming savvy about the inner workings and process of making a movie. Some spouses came to movie sets to relax, but Lisa always came to work and learn.

Liam Neeson and Bill Paxton were both in Next of Kin, and we became great friends. Liam and I enjoyed hitting the town together, a couple of Irish guys going to Chicago’s blues clubs and pounding the beers. He was a wild man with a sweet, gentle side, and as my dad used to say, he could charm the rassling suit off a pissant. Years later, when his wife, Natasha Richardson, died at age forty-five after a freak skiing accident, I felt for him like a brother.

With Next of Kin and Road House, I’d now done two macho action flicks in a row. I didn’t mind showcasing that side of myself, and of course I’d had a blast making those movies. I also had original songs in both those movies, so even though I was playing the action star, I still got to show some versatility behind the scenes. But I was feeling the itch again to get a deeper, more fleshed-out role, so I could stretch myself more as an actor.

The next movie I auditioned for would give me exactly that—but I’d have to get past an extremely reluctant director if I ever hoped to get cast.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 722