Chapter 1 3 page

Lisa moved to New York in the summer of 1974, and I threw out a few people who’d been staying at my place, so it would just be the two of us. I wasn’t exactly sure what the situation between us would be, but I wanted to make sure we had the space to explore it without six other roommates getting in the way.

As I soon discovered, Lisa had very distinct ideas about what we’d be doing together—and not doing. Despite the fact that we’d had plenty of makeout sessions in Houston over the years, she made it clear we’d be living together as roommates, not as lovers. Lisa, who was now eighteen, had been dancing seriously for three years and she was absolutely driven to do one thing: make it as a dancer. Now that she’d made it to New York, she didn’t want any distractions getting in her way.

I wanted to make the Harkness company, too, of course, and I was incredibly focused on that goal. But my feelings for Lisa grew stronger and stronger the more time we spent together. After just a few weeks, I had no doubt that Lisa was the woman I wanted to be with. She was deep, talented, driven— and beautiful. As I played one of my favorite records of that summer— The Best of Bread—Lisa would catch sight of me gazing at her whenever the song “Baby I’m-a Want You” came on. She knew what I was feeling, and it frightened her.

But the attraction between us was so strong, and the intensity of our emotions so high, that something eventually had to give. And boy, did it. When Lisa and I finally got together in the winter of 1974–75, a few months after she’d moved in with me, it was like the dam had broken and the flood came rushing in. With all the fooling around we’d done in Houston, we’d never had sex together, but once we did—well, suffice it to say I’d never felt such passion in my life, and I couldn’t get enough of it. We were intoxicated by each other, and when we weren’t dancing or working, we were most often at our apartment spending every hour we could together.

We’d stay up all night, talking, laughing, and just enjoying each other. The intensity of it was thrilling—I never thought I could feel so strongly about another person. We were discovering so much about each other, and learning about ourselves, too, all in the excitement of first love.

Lisa felt it, too, but she was also scared. She worried about giving in to her feelings for me when she wanted to be totally focused on dancing. And she wondered whether she was making a mistake by getting so deeply involved with me.

Years later, Lisa dug up her diary pages from that time, and they show how deeply torn she was over what was happening between us.

I really don’t know what to do (concerning Buddy). I’m so frightened. I want to sit down and talk it over with him, but I’m afraid I might startle him too much or him think I’m jumping to conclusions….

Sometimes I wonder whether I’m being shallow and just getting carried off like so many girls I know always do. God, I’m so afraid. I’ve never done anything like this before and I feel danger in getting close to a person and caring more than I should….

I wonder if I should move out. I might have to. But I’d see him every day anyway [at Harkness] so there’s not much good for my head in that. What I should do is find a way to get out and away as often as possible. I can’t get my life too tied to his.

I had no idea Lisa was considering moving out, which was no doubt a good thing, as it would have scared me to death. Looking back, these are the musings of a young woman who’s feeling torn in different directions and afraid to make a wrong step. But I wouldn’t have seen it that way. I’d have felt that she was rejecting me, which would have rocked my fragile self-esteem to the core. My feelings for her were now so strong, and I was so sure of them, that I felt paralyzed at the idea that I might lose her.

I wanted to feel the way we were feeling forever, to lock in this relationship and this love. Lisa and I had talked a little bit about where our relationship was headed, but I never got the sense that she was anxious to commit to anything long-term. But I was. I wanted to marry Lisa. And one night in the spring of 1975, as we were playing around on the couch, I decided it was time to raise the subject.

We were wrestling and tickling each other, just messing around, and all of a sudden I said, “Lisa, why don’t we get married? Why don’t we just go ahead and do it?”

Of all the responses a man hopes to hear to this question, dead silence isn’t one of them. But Lisa was quiet for a moment before responding slowly. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “That could happen.”

I sat up, every nerve ending on alert. “When do you want to do it?” I asked her.

“Well,” she said, pondering, “how about fall of next year?” Meaning, the fall of 1976—nearly a year and a half away.

I could feel panic rising from my chest to my throat. For some reason, I just knew that unless we got married right away, it was never going to happen and I would lose Lisa forever. “No,” I said. “If we’re going to do it, let’s do it right away—like, next month.”

Now it was Lisa’s turn to panic. All the fears she already felt, of suppressing her own desires in order to be with me, of getting distracted from her dancing, were coming to a head right now. She was eighteen years old, and although she loved me, she didn’t feel ready to get married. But she knew me well enough to know how sensitive I was, and how hurt I’d feel if she turned me down outright. So she had tried to buy herself some time—but I wasn’t having it.

“Lisa, we need to get married right away,” I told her. And that was that—I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I told her I loved her and needed her, and couldn’t live without her. I even told her that if she wouldn’t marry me now, I’d run my motorcycle into a stop sign. I’m not proud of that particular moment, but it’s evidence of just how afraid I was to lose her. No matter how confidently I projected myself onstage and in everyday life, inside I was still a scared boy—afraid of rejection and willing to do whatever was necessary to stave it off. At the same time, I really believed that if Lisa didn’t love me now, she would love me later. I would win her.

This wasn’t the best of circumstances for starting a marriage, but to my relief, Lisa said yes. But the sting of her first response stayed with me for years. For the first decade of our marriage, whenever we had a fight, I’d accuse her of not loving me enough. “Well, you didn’t want to marry me anyway!” I’d say. “You only agreed because I pushed you into it!” This was a tremendous insecurity of mine, and though Lisa and I always loved each other, it took a long time before enough trust built up for me to feel confident in her love for me.

Lisa and I got married in Houston on June 12, 1975, just two months after getting engaged. We didn’t have much money, so we cut corners wherever we could: The ceremony was in her family’s backyard, the reception was at my mom’s studio, and Lisa made both her wedding gown and the three-piece suit I wore. She had been doing some sewing with a famous costume company in New York to make extra money, so she was able to make beautiful wedding clothes for both of us.

In photos taken during the ceremony, both Lisa and I have deer-in-the-headlights expressions. I think neither one of us could quite believe what was happening, and we both felt some fear about taking this step. Lisa cried through the whole wedding, except for one moment—when she tried to put my ring on and couldn’t quite get it, she smiled a sweet little smile. As she stood there with tears in her eyes, all I could think was, “She’s crying because she doesn’t want to marry me.” But she was actually just overwhelmed with emotion.

In fact, she later told me she had a realization during the ceremony. Looking at me, she had seen my vulnerability, and she suddenly had the thought that marrying someone is just about the nicest thing anyone can do for you. It’s making a decision to hold nothing back. I was making a public vow to commit myself to Lisa forever, and she was touched by how profound that was. Unfortunately, I mistook the look on her face for horror, and I don’t think I’m smiling in a single photo from our wedding ceremony.

Marrying Lisa was the best decision I ever made, and thirty-four years later I can say that it turned out better than I ever could have hoped. But looking back, I’m struck by how very young we were, and how little we really knew about each other, or anything, for that matter. There was a real passion between us, but that’s not what made it last. It’s the commitment we made—and kept—to work on the relationship as much as we needed in order to keep it going. Everybody goes through rough times, and we certainly ended up having our share, but we’ve always found a way to come back together, which is easier said than done.

Just as Lisa did, I found myself wondering whether, by getting married so young, I’d missed my opportunity to have real adventures in life. Right after high school, a friend and I had been offered the chance to crew a sailboat going around the world. We hadn’t done it, and it was one thing that I feared I’d regret later on. Part of me wondered how many other opportunities I might miss out on now that I was married. But the other part of me was so happy to have found the woman I could ride off with into the sunset that nothing else mattered.

For our honeymoon, Lisa and I borrowed a motorcycle and rode to Lake Travis, about 180 miles outside Houston. We were pretty much broke, so we just camped and brought along a little cookstove for meals. We stayed for a week, and although it was about as low-cost as you could get for a honeymoon, we both had the time of our lives. For all the anxiety we’d felt at the wedding, we were happy and excited to begin our marriage together out in nature, just the two of us.

This was the beginning of our life’s journey together. But as we discovered when we returned to New York, it wouldn’t be all sunshine and roses.

Chapter 4

Back in New York, the Harkness Ballet was sputtering to an end. Despite the support of Mrs. Harkness and the sparkling new theater at Lincoln Center, the company folded— and with it, my dreams of becoming a Harkness company dancer ended, too. Lisa had already left Harkness to train at the Joffrey Ballet, so she was set. But I needed to find a new place to continue pursuing my dream.

I managed to win a spot in the Eliot Feld Ballet, one of the most respected companies in New York. Every dancer in Eliot Feld was a soloist, so the quality of the dancing was extremely high. I was excited to join the company and immediately began striving to move up within it. I wanted to become a principal dancer, to get the best roles I could. The level of artistry in my dance was rising, and I wanted to make it to the top of the ballet world.

But as a letter from Lisa home to her mother describes, my knee problems were continuing to threaten my dance career:

Yesterday Buddy went to a doctor because his knee was giving him a lot of trouble again. A Dr. Hamilton, really good, specializes with dancers and has written books on their injuries. The first of many, many doctors that Buddy felt he could trust.

Nothing really new about the knee except the arthritis has set in faster than was expected. The bones are grinding flatter and flatter. He was given lots of exercises and we bought a brace to prevent it from moving too much…. He said he had the knee of a 45-year-old man, and in five years it will be that of a 100-year-old man. Cause for serious thinking. He might not be dancing much longer, a year is the limit.

This news had been especially painful to hear, because it came just as I was making real headway with Eliot Feld. Lisa’s letter went on:

Kinda awful because right now he’s at a crossroads and it’s just now that things are rushing out to greet him. Eliot is crazy over him, the things he has said to him are more than anyone could hope to hear. Cora [Cahan, Eliot Feld’s company manager] says he’s not just good on stage, he’s fantastic. And he is, and it’s just now beginning to be noticed.

But she also noticed something else, something deeper. One thing I’ve always loved about Lisa is her ability to see beyond the obvious things. She’s very intuitive and uncovers things most other people can’t see. And at this point, she was realizing things about me that I didn’t even see myself.

One thing about Buddy is that he can be equally fantastic if he does something else. His charisma, or whatever, shines as great. I think it will turn out well, he doesn’t have to stop dancing altogether, just not be in a situation that demands too much. And there are so many things he wants to do, but never has the time: writing, his songwriting, is an important part of him.

Everything’s kind of a blur right now, but something just hits me that Buddy will bloom when he has the freedom to give himself to all the things he wants to do. His reasons for dancing confuse him so much. He can enjoy it, but something drains him and downs him. As he said, this would show if it was dancing or not. I, personally, at this point think that dancing is a big part of him, but not his whole life, and that makes him feel guilty. Something bothers him.

Lisa was right—dancing was, and had always been, a source of conflicting feelings for me. It stemmed from trying to please my mother, from trying to make myself not just a good dancer but the perfect dancer, and from pushing myself beyond my limits. Everything Lisa said in this letter was true, and although I didn’t realize it yet myself, it was what would eventually save me when I had to stop dancing full-time—a time that was closer than I thought.

Meanwhile, our life in New York was a complete whirlwind. Between rehearsals, teaching, singing, and side jobs, we were constantly in motion. I’ve always been this way, trying to pack in as much as I could in a day, but looking back I don’t know where we ever found the hours to sleep. We were so busy running around trying to make ends meet, to survive, to accomplish, that we were in overdrive all the time.

In addition to the dancing, training, and part-time jobs, we also spent the first couple of years auditioning for musical theater roles during the ballet’s off-season. I performed in Music Man at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, and did the role of Riff in West Side Story at the Northstage Dinner Theatre in Long Island. But although these roles were fun to play and brought some money in, they were considered a step down for serious dancers. For a ballet dancer, the only real dancing is ballet—everything else just pales. Even dancing in Broadway shows.

Still, in 1975 I was happy to be cast as one of four featured dancers in Goodtime Charley. The show starred Joel Grey and Ann Reinking, and it ran for 104 performances. It was my first time dancing on Broadway—and also my first time meeting the cute, curly-haired young woman who would later play a big role in my life: Jennifer Grey. Jennifer is Joel’s daughter, and she was fifteen that summer, a bubbly, outgoing, sweet girl. Neither of us could have known that twelve years later, we’d star together in a movie that would change both of our lives.

In the midst of our whirlwind of activities, Lisa and I still had just one overriding goal: to become principal dancers in a ballet company and achieve the highest possible level of artistry in dance. I hoped that the Eliot Feld Ballet would be the place I could do it.

Eliot Feld is one of the premier American choreographers of the last fifty years. He has choreographed more than 140 ballets and won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship and an honorary doctorate from Juilliard. He also can be a hard-nosed bastard, quick to berate his dancers and stingy with praise. Eliot sometimes used ridicule as a motivator, but when he expressed pleasure at something you’d done, it was the greatest feeling in the world.

I wanted more than ever to move up in the company, and because of my knee, I knew it was now or never. Finally, in early 1976, I got my big break.

The company was planning to tour South America in May, but during rehearsals, Eliot’s principal male dancer George Montalbano had to pull out because of injuries. That hole had to be filled in all the ballets he was dancing—and Eliot chose me to fill it. Suddenly, I was going to be performing principal roles in the South America tour, but that wasn’t all. In addition to that, Eliot had big plans for the New York performances upon our return to the States. He started choreography on a new work that would have three company dancers—including me—dancing with none other than the great Mikhail Baryshnikov, who was coming in to perform as a guest star. This was a huge opportunity for a young dancer, the big chance I’d been waiting for.

Eliot started rehearsing me hard-core to get me ready, and I pushed myself even more, to a degree I hadn’t thought possible. My knee was giving me as much trouble as ever, but I was determined to overcome it. A couple of months before the tour was to launch, I had one more knee surgery in an attempt to stabilize the joint. Looking back now, I can’t believe how hard I worked my knee just after that surgery, and how much pain I forced myself to ignore. I also had no choice but to keep draining the knee, as it was swelling up as much as ever after eight to ten hours of rehearsing a day.

But as the tour dates drew near, I found myself having second thoughts about what I was putting myself through. Lisa and I had just gotten married, and I wasn’t thrilled to be leaving her for two months. I’d even be missing our first wedding anniversary, which upset both of us. And I was afraid of getting my knee drained in South America, worried that conditions there would be less sanitary than those in New York. I’d already had my leg threatened by one staph infection, and I feared the same thing might happen again.

But could I really bow out of this amazing opportunity? After all the work and sweat of the last three years, I was going to tour South America with one of the most respected ballet companies in the world, not to mention performing back in New York with Baryshnikov. How could I possibly step away now? Wasn’t this exactly what I’d been working for my whole life?

I decided to “cowboy up,” ignoring all the pain and burying my worries. But then, one afternoon, a single freak incident changed everything.

I was riding my motorcycle on the West Side of Manhattan, heading downtown for a rehearsal on a bright, sunny day. The lanes narrowed as I approached the West Side Highway over-pass, and suddenly a car cut right in front of me. I braked, but he’d cut too close—I had to maneuver to the left, trying to squeeze between his car and the guardrail. It was a dangerous moment, but it looked as if I’d managed to avoid a collision— until I suddenly saw a boy on a bicycle directly in my path. He’d been riding the wrong way down the street, and now there was nowhere for either of us to go as I careened toward him.

I knew in a flash we couldn’t avoid colliding, so I instinctively hit the rear brake and let my motorcycle shoot out from under me, sliding sideways along the road. That way, the motorcycle would at least hit the kid’s bicycle, rather than the kid himself. If we hit head-on, there was no doubt he’d be killed.

The maneuver worked perfectly: My motorcycle slammed into the boy’s bike and he flew off, ending up with scratches but no serious injuries. I was okay, too—at least physically. I had some cuts and bruises, but was still able to rehearse that day. Emotionally, though, this accident really shook me up.

All the rest of that day, I was haunted by the thought that in that brief moment, if the accident had happened slightly differently, my dance career would have been over. When you’re a professional dancer, everything hinges on your physical condition. I had worked my butt off, fighting pain and ignoring the signs of my body’s rebellion—but none of that would have mattered if I’d hurt myself in that accident. It was as if I realized for the first time that my whole professional life hung by a thread, and that I’d been fooling myself thinking I could have a dance career with the knee problems I had.

The next day, I still couldn’t shake these feelings, and all of a sudden I realized it was over. During a break in rehearsals, I talked to Cora Cahan. I broke down in tears, saying, “Cora, I don’t think I can do this anymore,” but she didn’t want to hear it. She tried to talk me out of leaving, but I knew I was done. I just couldn’t go on—not even for the chance to dance an important New York season with Baryshnikov. That week, I told Eliot I wouldn’t be going on the South America tour, and just like that, my career as a professional ballet dancer was over.

It’s hard to describe how devastating this decision was for me. I had worked so hard, and come so far, and just when it was all about to pay off I had to walk away. Even now, I get emotional thinking about it. With all the amazing experiences I’ve had as an actor, nothing really compares to the sense of joy and exhilaration dancing gives you. Leaving the ballet world created a void in me that I spent years trying to fill.

At the same time, I felt as if I’d let everyone down—Eliot Feld, the other dancers, my mother, Lisa, myself. I had wanted to be the best, and in the end it felt as if I had given up on my dream. Lisa tried to console me, pointing out that I’d gone incredibly far considering the injury and pain I was constantly dealing with. But it all sounded hollow, like lame justification. For so long I had been Patrick Swayze, aspiring ballet dancer. What would I do now?

Back when I was at San Jacinto Junior College, I’d had to deal with watching my dream of competing in the Olympics go down the tubes. That had been a huge disappointment, but it was not even close to the devastation I felt now. But fortunately, I had learned an incredible lesson from that first loss: When one dream dies, you have to move on to a new one. I could have fallen into serious depression when I left Eliot Feld, and very nearly did. But the lesson in self-preservation that I learned from that first disappointment saved me in the second one.

As I struggled to come to terms with my decision to leave the ballet world, two things kept me going. One was that I knew I had Lisa standing by my side, no matter what. The other was my growing interest in different spiritual philosophies, including Buddhist philosophy, which I had begun studying after I moved to New York.

Ever since I was a boy, I was always interested in the whole range of beliefs out there in the world. I’d gone to Catholic Masses growing up, and even considered becoming a priest at one point, but eventually I became disillusioned with Catholicism. The Catholic schools I’d attended were populated by the kind of mean nuns and knuckle-rapping priests you read about in books, which didn’t do much to lead me further into the faith, and I even got in trouble once as an altar boy for sneaking sips of wine in the vestibule.

I always was curious about spirituality, though, so I started exploring other options. In high school I devoured Kahlil Gibran’s writings, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery. These books spoke to me in a way church sermons didn’t, and I drank them in like a thirsty man. And because I had studied martial arts for so long, I was also familiar with the notion of chi—the search to connect with your true self.

Once I left Texas, I continued on this spiritual journey, studying different belief systems and trying out new philo-sophies. New York in the 1970s was a hothouse of spiritual exploration—everyone was looking for something to bring meaning to their lives. Lisa and I spent a couple of weekends doing est—Erhard Seminars Training—which was a hugely popular, and controversial, seminar. Founded by Werner Erhard, the est system aimed to tear you down hard and then build you back up to be better than you were, by teaching you how to take responsibility for your own life and actions. The training was wrenching, not least, as Lisa and I later joked, because they wouldn’t even let you go to the bathroom when you needed to.

We did learn a lot from est, though—just as we learned a lot from so many different philosophies we studied. One in particular that really spoke to me was Buddhism. I had begun doing meditation and chanting, and found that not only did it help me stay focused, it calmed the voices that were forever trying to undercut me. What struck me about Buddhism was that it didn’t exclude other religions. You could be Catholic, Jewish, or Hare Krishna and be Buddhist. And unlike some religions, which require you to look outside yourself for God, Buddhism was all about finding God from within—you have everything you need within yourself. This philosophy had very deep appeal for me, since I don’t like having to depend on anyone for anything.

But the spiritual journey we were on wasn’t about finding answers. It was about understanding the questions. Once you think you have the answers, you stop growing. Yet if you keep exploring, seeking, and opening your mind, you’ll find that the learning never stops. This has helped me immeasurably in the difficult days of my life, from dealing with injury, to career disappointments, to the most trying days of all, as I fight to keep on living through cancer.

With my ballet career over, it was time to figure out the next dream. Performing was in my blood, and I wanted to continue doing it, so I began studying with Warren Robertson, one of the best acting coaches in New York. Lisa was still dancing, but she was broadening her horizons and had started doing TV commercials and auditioning for theater. She started studying with Warren, too, in anticipation of career opportunities to come.

Warren was an amazing teacher, perfect for young people because he knew how to break down your “act.” Each of us has a way we present ourselves to the world—the “act” we show to other people as opposed to the true self, which we try to protect. Warren taught us that the degree to which you believe your own act is the degree to which you’re limited in drawing from the deep well of characters inside you. This was especially liberating for me, because although I’d been acting since boyhood, it was almost always in musical theater—the “presentational” school of acting. Warren showed us a totally different approach, a more organic way of approaching acting.

Even as we studied with Warren, we kept one foot in the dance world by taking teaching jobs. Living on a shoestring in New York, Lisa and I would take whatever we could get—we taught jazz, acrobatics, and gymnastics classes in places as farflung as Allentown, Pennsylvania; Fords, New Jersey; and Mt. Vernon, New York. We’d ride out on our motorcycle, whether through snow, rain, sleet, or whatever. The days were long and tiring, but the teaching brought in extra cash and kept us dancing.

Another way we made money was by doing woodworking and carpentry. Growing up, I had always enjoyed building things—the homemade motorbike was just one example— and while I was still at Harkness, I’d decided it would be a great idea to do a little carpentry on the side. I didn’t know much about it, but that didn’t stop me. How hard could it be, after all?

I had put word out that I was available for woodworking jobs, and it wasn’t long before Bill Ritman, the set designer for Harkness, approached me with a potential job. Could I finish converting three floors of an Upper West Side brownstone into an apartment for him? I had to stop my mouth from falling open. This was a far bigger job than I’d anticipated—and it was for the Harkness set designer, who knew a little something about quality work. Any sensible person would have owned up to not having the experience, and perhaps not being up for it.

“Sure!” I told Bill. “Ready when you are!”

I’d showed up at the brownstone with a backpack full of tools, but unbeknownst to Bill, the most important tool of all was my Reader’s Digest do-it-yourself carpentry guide. Let’s just say I spent a lot of time in the bathroom on that first job, flipping through that book and trying to quickly teach myself how to do all the things Bill was asking me to do. Fortunately, it was a good guide, and I was a quick study. The brownstone work went off without a hitch, and I was on my way to making money as a carpenter and woodworker.

Lisa joined me in the woodworking business when I got a job building an entertainment center. I started working on it in our bedroom, and at some point I said to her, “Lisa, can you hold this board for me, please?” From that moment on, we were partners. We built that entertainment center together, and in the months to come we worked on tons of projects, doing the work in our bedroom (and ending up with sawdust in all our clothes) and stacking the finished projects in the living room. Our apartment ended up looking like a furniture showroom.

When we finished a project, we’d deliver it the same way we got everywhere else—on the motorcycle. We’d carry it down the five flights of stairs, and I’d get on the back of the motorcycle and try to balance whatever we’d made on my head while Lisa drove. I can remember carrying an artist’s easel, about eight feet tall and four feet wide, on my helmet and just hoping it wouldn’t tumble off into the traffic. Fortunately, we had a big motorcycle—a Honda four-cylinder K model, practically a car on a frame—so at least we weren’t teetering along on a little bike.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 902