August 19, 1987| Flashback: Spring 1983, Los Angeles. As the late afternoon sun casts lengthening shadows in the near-deserted coffee shop of the Westwood Marquis hotel, I’m talking with a very intense, very animated Houston-born actor named Patrick Swayze.
Warner Bros. set up the meeting while I’m in L.A. on other business, to promote Swayze’s appearance in a forthcoming Francis Coppola film, The Outsiders. (Neither Swayze nor I know yet that his meaty role has been edited down to a walk-on.) We talk a long time about his career, which has taken him from ballet companies in New York to a starring turn in the Broadway run of Grease, and a prominent role in a well-received B-movie called Skatetown U.S.A. At the moment, he’s playing a maverick cop in a short-run ABC series, The Renegades. Truth to tell, he’s not fond of the show — his commitment to it has cost him four movie roles — but he briefly beams with unabashed pride when a waiter recognizes him as a Renegade.
After an hour or so, we exhaust his TV and movie work as a topic of conversation. But we continue to talk, and talk. About growing up in the South, at a time when it wasn’t considered sufficiently manly to love dance — or, for that matter, movies — more than football. About the unfinished business and emotional loose ends left dangling when a beloved parent dies. (His father died not too long ago.) About the demons that drive people in any field to quick-march toward one success after another, without any hope of ultimate satisfaction.
Throughout our conversation, Swayze seems anxious, ill-at-ease, vaguely restless. He wants to be a star, he concedes, but on his own terms: Not as a teeny-bopper idol, not as a slab of TV beefcake, but as a serious actor. He’s insistent, very insistent, as though he’s trying to convince himself. If you could plug into his barely contained energy, you could power a fair-sized city. I find myself thinking: ”This guy either will become a big star, or run himself into a heart attack. Or both.”
Fade-out, fade-in: September 1984. Patrick Swayze is padding around his Toronto hotel suite, fiddling with a synthesizer, working at a musical score he’s composing on spec for Youngblood, a movie he’s shooting in town with Rob Lowe. (His music won’t be used in the film, which will open and close very quickly in early 1986.) The publicist warns me: ”He’s a little upset, because he knows you didn’t like Red Dawn.”
Actually, Swayze is not so much upset as defensive: He knows the new film, which has opened to great box-office but lousy reviews, has been perceived as bloodthirsty, right-wing rabble-rousing. But he sees an anti-war message in the film — that, he says, is why he played the role of a teen-age freedom fighter who battles Red Army invaders in Colorado. Even so, however, he doesn’t talk about Red Dawn very long. He’s got too many other irons in the fire.
Once again, the passion, the hard-driving enthusiasm, spill into his voice as he speaks of upcoming projects. He and his wife, dancer Lisa Niemi, are preparing a stage production of drama and dance, Without a Word. (It will open, to rave reviews, in Los Angeles several months later.) And he’s being offered movie scripts by the truckloads. And he wants to raise horses on his ranch in the foothills surrounding Los Angeles. And on and on he goes.
Again, the same impression: A man who wants to do it all yesterday, a man who may consume himself with his burning ambition. Again, after we part company, I find myself impressed. And a little worried.
Flashforward: August 1987. Patrick Swayze, fashionably attired in an expensive, loose-fitting suit, wears a smile of contentment on his lightly bearded face. Seated at a table of the Paradise Bar and Grill, he’s downing a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, to counterbalance all the coffee he’s been drinking during a whirlwind press tour through his hometown.
He’s lively, friendly, on top of the world. He’s got a new film coming out in a few days — Dirty Dancing, a period drama about a 17-year-old girl’s first romance at a Catskills resort in 1963. (Jennifer Grey is the girl, the pampered daughter of a well-to-do doctor; Swayze plays her lover, a poor but hunky dance instructor.) After that, he’ll be seen as a macho hero in Desert Warrior, which he describes as a ”Road Warrior-ish” adventure.
”It’s the most hard-core action film I’ve ever done,” Swayze says. ”See, I’ve had so much major knee surgery, and I’m 34. So I decided that I better get my jollies off now, when I can do my own stunts. Because I’m not gonna be able to do that much longer.”
Swayze also has a third film in the can: Tiger Warsaw, an emotional drama that he describes as ”either the best work I’ve ever done, or the most self-indulgent (expletive deleted) I’ve ever done.” He’s a prodigal son who has a painful reunion with parents Piper Laurie and Lee Richardson.
So Swayze has every right to be dancing on the ceiling. He has three completed movies to his credit, another film in the early-discussion stages. And, perhaps more important, he’s still benefiting from the international exposure he gained as a star of the smash-hit miniseries, North and South, Parts 1 and 2.
By just about anyone else’s standards, Swayze might really appear delirious, wildly overjoyed. But I’ve seen this guy before, I’ve talked with him before. And right now, compared to his behavior during those earlier meetings, he actually seems . . . well, calm.
Calm? Patrick Swayze? Can I possibly be reading this right?
Swayze nods, grinning appreciatively. He takes the observation as a compliment.
”Yeah, it’s true,” he says. ”See, all those things I spouted for so many years, about my passion and my purpose, and how I want to make a difference in the world, and I don’t believe in believing your own hype — I’ve been talking this stuff for a long time. On certain levels during those years, it was more to try to convince myself. To hold off the demons, the ego, the rejection, all that stuff. Whereas now, after years, I’ve seen that, hey, it is true. I can have an effect on people’s lives with my work. That it’s not some pipe dream that I just spout off in interviews. So I think that’s calmed me down a bit.
”I’m more into trying to prove something to myself. And less into trying to prove anything to the world. Before, I had to prove something to everybody. Like, I’d had major knee surgery, but I was gonna go to New York and dance with ballet companies for seven years, and prove that I could do it. Well, I caused four more operations, which was a little stupid. But, by God, I proved it.
”But I feel easier inside now. I’ve still got that same manic, kind of panther-like, quality in what I do. And I don’t quit. And I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire. But I have gotten smarter.
”Before, I used to put all the irons in the fire at once.”
Mind you, Swayze’s ambitions have not decreased, either in number or intensity. He and Niemi, who co-stars in Desert Warrior, have started their own production company, Troph Productions. ”Lisa and I have three scripts in development,” he says. ”Two of them are dance films. . . And I’m working with a guy on bringing back Westerns.”
They’ve turned part of their ranch into a recording studio, where Swayze can compose music for his movies. (He co-wrote and performed a song for the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.) And they’re hoping to revive Without a Word.
But Swayze has tamed a few of the demons that once nipped at his heels as he ran toward stardom. In fact, by agreeing to star in Dirty Dancing, he actually exorcised an old fear about his professional image.
”If I had started doing musicals and dance films right when I’d started out,” he believes, ”my vote would have been cancelled. Maybe critics in major cities would have heralded it. But from a small-town point of view, from the people who buy the tickets, they would not have understood it. . . .”
But after a series of straight dramatic parts, Swayze felt it was safe for him to put on his dancing shoes, to play the sexy Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing. ”It’s interesting, the way people look at things,” he says. ”If I’d done it then, and then tried to be taken seriously as an actor, it would have been, ‘Oh. Dancer turns actor.’ But now, it’s, ‘Oh. Actor with other talents.’
”I did Dirty Dancing because it was my opportunity for the first time on film to dance. And, it would wash better with the world, in that the dancing was something like an introductory course to, quote, Patrick Swayze fans, unquote, that wouldn’t be alienating. In other words, if I did a film about classical ballet, how many rednecks in Texas do you think would go see it?
”But, you know, I don’t consider Dirty Dancing to be my dance film. Because Johnny Castle is from the streets of South Philadelphia, you know. So he’s not a virtuoso . . . It was frustrating, but also very interesting, in creating character, and resisting my own ego. Because I’m a much better dancer than Johnny Castle. Yet to be true to the character, and try to make the character come to life, I had to make him from Arthur Murray’s. He was pretty good, for a street kid. And good enough for exhibition ballroom kind of stuff. But not as a truly trained dancer.”
That was quite a stretch for Swayze, who began his dance training at an early age under a very demanding teacher: Patsy Swayze, choreographer of the Houston Jazz Ballet company.
Swayze looks back with mixed emotions at his teen-age years. While a student at Waltrip High School, he frequently fought (and lost) when brutish classmates taunted him for his ballet activity. ”As a matter of fact,” he recalls, ”I almost quit dancing at one time because of that. In your teens, you’re fighting for your own identity, to know who you are. You don’t wanna be known as your mother’s son.”
In the end, though, the cruel taunts made Swayze all the more determined to dance. And that gave him a valuable insight.
”You could say I lucked into this pretty early,” he says, ”though I don’t believe a whole lot in luck. Or you can say I had the opportunity to learn a big lesson early because of that: To hell with what the world thinks, or what their opinion is, or their prejudices are. Or the mold that you’re supposed to be stuck into. I’m gonna go for what I believe in.
”So I could say the whole Texas redneck attitude really screwed up my life. On the other hand, it may be the only reason why my life now is working as well as it is.”
