September 3, 1995 | During his high school years in Houston, Texas native Patrick Swayze excelled in sports. But he also excelled in dance — his mother, Patsy Swayze, was and remains a noted choreographer — so there were times when he had to put up with rough kidding and unpleasant scenes. There were other times when his altercations with classmates went beyond words.
Back in those bad old days, Swayze admits, he often erred on the side of overcompensation while trying to come off as rougher and tougher than any macho dude who might question his testicular fortitude. Nowadays, however, “I don’t feel I have to prove my masculinity,” he says, “or that I can kick everybody’s butt. Thank God I lived through that. I’m beyond that sort of thing now.”
Indeed, judging from his latest movie, Swayze is far, far beyond such insecurities. In To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, the gracefully hunky star of Dirty Dancing and Ghost gets in touch with his feminine side as Vida, one of three drag queen performers on a cross-country trip from New York to Hollywood.
At first, Swayze says while unwinding in his posh Manhattan hotel suite after a long morning of roundtable interviews, “I thought it was going to be a lark, a good time. But that was because I didn’t realize that I was going to have to make Vida real, and not just a caricature. That’s when everything shifted gears for me.
“And I don’t think I would have been willing to go there, and do that, if I weren’t real comfortable with who I am as a man.”
When their car breaks down in a remote corner of Middle America, Vida and her two traveling companions — Noxeema (Wesley Snipes) and Chi Chi (John Leguizamo) — are accepted by the locals as real, live girls. In turn, the drag queens repay the townspeople for their hospitality by offering beauty tips, advice to the lovelorn and other life-enhancing information. But that doesn’t mean their behavior is entirely ladylike. At one point, Vida confronts the abusive husband of a battered wife (Stockard Channing). Says the husband: “Some ladies need to get hit.” Says Vida: “Then, conversely, some men need to get hit back.” And with that, Vida force-feeds the lout a taste of his own medicine.
Vida was the last of the three central roles to be cast, according to director Beeban Kidron (Used People, Antonia and Jane). “Wesley’s character has many wonderful lines,” Kidron says, “and John plays this wonderfully crazy kid. But Vida is the character who really pushes you through the movie. So I was looking for someone who was, in my terms, the mother of all drag queens. Someone who had some emotional weight. And that was difficult to find.
Swayze found it just as difficult to be taken seriously as a contender for the part.
“Early on, when I first heard about it, I couldn’t even get a script for it,” he says. “And my agent couldn’t get me in (for an interview), and they wouldn’t see me, because, you know, Patrick Swayze is terminally macho. It wasn’t until the end, when they had exhausted all their other possibilities, that I got to go in.”
And even then, Swayze wasn’t allowed to see the script until a few hours before the audition. He read a few pages, saw that Vida has several long speeches, and immediately realized he didn’t have time to properly prepare.
“So I told them, `Look, I can’t do these words. So if this is a case where I have to do these words, forget it. But if you let me come in, I’ll give you a half-hour monologue on my life as a drag queen, and see if I can turn into Vida while I watch her materialize in the mirror.’
“And I wound up giving them an hour-long monologue. I just took Patrick Swayze’s life, and told it as if he’d grown up as a drag queen in Texas. And that was a neat story. By the time I was done, I looked up, and everybody had tears in their eyes. And if I got the story right, Beeban took my screen test to (Wong Foo producer) Steven Spielberg and Universal, and didn’t tell them who it was before she let them see it. And they were going, `My God! It’s Vida!’ It was only afterward that she told them it was Patrick. So I thought that was kind of cool, since, like I said, for a long time, I couldn’t even be seen for it.”
Swayze has nothing but high praise for his on-screen “sisters,” but admits that -– because, hey, guys are guys, even when they’re in drag -– there was a fair amount of wisecracking, insult-swapping and similar horseplay between takes.
“I’d seen Wesley’s work, and I’d seen John’s work, so I knew going in that they’re both phenomenal actors. They’re both really talented beings. But I’d say that if anybody in this movie was having trouble with his masculinity, it had to be Wesley, because he was constantly practicing martial arts while wearing his gown.” And so, of course, “We were seriously merciless with each other. I mean, it was like, `Oh, yeah, you’re the dance dude who’s always swinging his ass around.’ And, `Wait a minute — I wasn’t the guy who got off the plane in Passenger 158, or whatever it was, and had to figure out a way to get back on it.’ Wesley said, `You probably run around your ranch looking like Auntie Mame.’ So I said, `Yeah, well at least I don’t look like Godfrey Cambridge.’”
Kidron insists that, when it came to casting Swayze, the actor’s appropriateness for the part wasn’t merely skin deep.
“I think Patrick has a humanity and an emotional quality that I thought would give the serious end of the movie a push,” she says.
“But I’ll be honest — I needed someone who looked good, too. I don’t think this movie would have worked if Vida looked like the back end of a bus.”
Swayze accepts the compliment with a hearty laugh, and a tongue-in-cheeky boast: “I am the prettiest, beyond a shadow of a doubt. I have elegance, I have sophistication, and I have class. What other of them bitches has that?”
But seriously, folks: “I thought my dance background was really going to help me with this. And it did from a choreographic sense, during our stage performances. But it didn’t in terms of making Vida organic. Because I came into it with the right point of view on my screen test. But when I got into the middle of the situation, and got into the `Miss Thing, girlfriend’ stuff, she became external in the rehearsal. And I found myself thinking, `Something’s wrong, something’s wrong. It’s not working for me.’ And it didn’t work until I realized each character’s function. Vida’s function is that she cannot be that outrageous girlfriend. She had to be based in reality because you couldn’t put this big drag queen in scenes with an actress like Stockard Channing and have her be believable unless I was going for reality. So, basically, that’s when I stopped playing her as a man in a dress, and started playing her one hundred percent as a woman.”
As he proceeded in that direction, Swayze says, “I began to see that to make a choice in your life to be a drag queen is a very, very courageous thing. Because what you’re doing, potentially, is alienating everyone you love in your life. And that takes a lot of courage. But all of a sudden, it also hit me: `What a healthy point of view to come from if this is who you are.’ Because it’s making a very conscious, specific choice to not be buried in your past and your pain, and not wallow in it. It’s a choice to make your present be different, so that you’ll have the hope of happiness in your future. And that’s when I got Vida. I just went to the Elia Kazan point of view, which is, your character is revealed by how you conceal the emotion. Not by how you play it or wear it on your sleeve. That’s not what we do as human beings. We go to our last breath trying to look OK, to try to look fine. Vida for me was the personification of that. Even to the level of trying to fix everybody else’s life. It’s only to try to make herself feel better, to like herself, to have a sense of self-worth. Sure, her pain’s there. But you don’t need to play that. I needed to play her nurturing qualities. So that’s what I started doing. I looked at all the parts of Vida that hopefully exist in all of us. The compassion, the loving, the nurturing. That’s when she started coming together for me.”
Appropriately enough, Swayze credits two women in his life –- his wife, dancer-actress Lisa Niemi, and director Beeban Kidron –- with helping him become the most womanly woman he could be.
“If I weren’t comfortable with my masculinity as Patrick, I would never be willing to go there. There’s where Lisa came in. That’s where she helped me, by going, `No! You’re holding back! You’re not letting yourself be her!’ And I’d say, `But, darling…’ But she was right.
“And as for Beeban – well, I obviously feel safe with women. Of course, Point Break was directed by a woman, too. But I don’t know if it’s so much the director-actor relationship as the woman’s point of view about a specific thing. I mean, Katherine Bigelow did a real good job with Point Break, but I still think it could have gone even further into the exploration of that intense bond between two men (played by Swayze and Keanu Reeves).
“Women directors are very interesting, because women know how to get intensity — but, at the same time, they know how to allow vulnerability. And not a whole lot of men know how to do that. It’s like, not a whole lot of men would be willing to play a drag queen. Because very few of us are comfortable with our masculinity. We’re always trying to prove something. I know that real well, because I’ve spent half of my life trying to prove something. I don’t know what it was I was trying to prove — that I was worthy, or that I was more than what I looked like, or what I could do with my body. I’ve also accepted that I am a wild man, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s a bad thing only if you screw your life up with it. But it can give you an edge, and give you a focus, and give you a passion when the world wants to drive that passion out of you.”
It’s the kind of passion, Swayze says, that has enabled him to ultimately win over directors who, truth to tell, initially were reluctant to cast him in career-defining roles. (He freely admits that he wasn’t the first, or even the fifth, to be considered for the lead in Ghost.) And it’s also the kind of passion that has enabled him to shrug off mixed reviews and disappointing grosses for labors of love such as City of Joy and Tall Tale: The Unbelievable Adventures of Pecos Bill.
“Each choice I’ve made — if you looked at the movie, it was a damn good idea. You know? But after that, it’s always up for grabs. Whether a studio’s going to get behind it, whether the director’s going to have the ability to pull it off, or whether that director truly has a vision. There are so many variables with a movie, besides whether they’re going to market it or promote it worth a damn. Like, do they share your vision? It is frustrating when you get into a situation where you care about a character, or care about a movie and what it has to say — and then you get the sense that the other people involved don’t share that. Or their investment isn’t as intense as yours.
“Father Hood was a situation like that for me. It was a wonderful idea for a movie. You’ve got this scumbag who turns out to be a hero for a day. And you got a producer like Nicolas Pileggi, who did GoodFellas, so you think, `Well, yes, it’s a Disney movie, but you’ve got the elements that could give it some weight and some power and some drama.’ But then you also have a young director. A very talented young director, sure, but you wonder, ‘Is he going to survive being squashed by a major studio? That’s always the danger I find in working with young directors. You wonder: ‘Do they have the strength to hold on to their vision?’ Because everything’s going to be around them to destroy that vision.
“And that was the danger with Beeban Kidron. But you look at her work, and her passion. You put me and Wesley and John in drag and tell us to be divas and then let us go — well, just try to control us. But it just so happened that Beeban was one of those directors who really had a vision. And you’d have to kill her to get her off of it.”
That Kidron was several months pregnant during production didn’t seem to crimp her style at all.
“There was, like, a football pool,” Swayze says, “a running bet with everybody on the set about when she was going to drop. And I swear — this lady held off the birth of this baby by will. By sheer will. And believe me, she could do it, because her will is that strong.”
Next on tap for Patrick Swayze: Three Wishes, a fantasy-tinged drama – directed by another strong-willed lady, Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl, Rambling Rose) – in which he plays “a quiet, Jack Kerouac kind of bum” who inspires Little Leaguers with Zen philosophy rather than gung-ho exhortations in a ‘50s era small town. It’s another change of pace for an actor who delights in upending expectations.
“I get offered ungodly sums of money for crap,” Swayze says. “How they get all this money to offer you for a piece of junk is amazing. But I’ve been successful at being true to the thing I’ve always said: I will never operate for money. Otherwise, I would have done that first Dirty Dancing sequel they came up with. But I really am hellbent to see how far I can take this craft of acting. And I don’t care how much money I make. Money ain’t gonna make you happy. I learned that real fast. You get a little bit of it, and, if anything, it can do nothing but screw up your life. And you just trade smaller money problems for bigger money problems. I learned that one early on.
“It’s only frustrating from the point of view of people’s need to stick you in a box. And, of course, if you want to be an actor, you have to battle that. Yet, if you get into that battle, then it becomes about the battle. And what I’ve been trying to do is figure, ‘OK, that’s the given. The hell with that battle. My battle is, ‘Can I be the kind of actor that I want to be?’ I don’t care how you try to box me in — I’m going to break your picture of me. And it’s going to be fun doing it. Every time you think you’ve got me pegged, I’m going to surprise you.
“I’m having a great time, because I’m getting to do what I want to do. And I feel very grateful that I got out of being sucked into that hit machine mentality. Of course I want hits. Of course I want movies that make money. Just so I can keep getting the license to do what I want to do. But I know that if I live from that point of view, my work will start falling down.”
