The Time of My Life (7 page)

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.