They swooned over Hollywood’s leading man as he skipped into London, the clean-cut star of the recently released Dirty Dancing. But after soaking up the adulation at the film premiere, Patrick Swayze soaked up the minibar and then the bigger bar downstairs. He then trashed the hotel room, smashing windows, terrifying his wife.
While such behaviour would have shocked adoring fans, it could hardly be called an aberration. Another time, police called when he started shooting his .357 Magnum. James Dean crashed a Porsche and died: Swayze crashed a plane, allegedly while under the influence, and lived.
His sojourn in London this summer, nearly 20 years later, promises to be quieter with a West End run in Guys and Dolls at the Piccadilly theatre, beginning next Monday.
But while many thesps proclaim that they have beaten their “drink and drugs hell”, Swayze, 53, has not mellowed entirely.
“I am,” he says almost proudly, “a keg of dynamite. You go on track, off track, on track. I think I’m on the fifth refocusing of Patrick Swayze’s career.”
While Tom Cruise favours roles that portray him as the all-American hero, Swayze has worked assiduously to destroy his A-list status. Having been voted “sexiest man alive”, his image adorning the bedrooms of a million teenage girls, he went on to play a drag queen: to his actress wife Lisa Niemi he offered assurance with a line funnier than anything in the script: “Think of it this way, you’re not losing a husband, you’re gaining a girlfriend.”
Around this time his personal life was disintegrating. In 1994 his sister Vicky committed suicide and several friends died. Even his beloved dog died. After an ultimatum from Lisa he checked into a drying-out clinic.
But his bad luck continued. He only narrowly survived a bush fire and in 1997 he was paralysed from the waist down after he was thrown by a horse. After 12 operations his frame was rebuilt with titanium. Typically, he laughed: “I am the new $6m man. I trigger alarm bells on metal detectors.”
But while doctors rebuilt him physically, he remains damaged emotionally. “I have ceased to hope for happy,” he says, almost cheerily. “It’s bound to elude you. I had no idea fame would be incredibly alienating.”
Like many Hollywood stars Swayze has dabbled in every belief system from Scientology to Buddhism to cocaine. He even says, “There have been moments in my career when it was like God took over, he spoke through me.” Hmm, that might have been the whisky talking.
But Swayze, a self-styled “wild man”, is compelling. There is something almost Brando-esque about how he is torn in different directions. “I have,” he says, “always been conflicted.” And can you blame him? His father was a cowboy, his mother a ballet teacher. Swayze is a trained ballet dancer, which must have made growing up in Texas tricky.
“You see these knuckles,” he says, clenching a fist. “I had to fight my way up from the days I was little.” And he isn’t coming over all John Wayne for effect. “At primary school I was beaten to a pulp and hospitalised. Then I realised they would win if I played by those rules. I remember some of my macho Texan friends came to see me in Guys and Dolls at high school and thought, ‘My God, this isn’t poofter stuff.’ It made them wish they could do it.”
While he idolised his all-action father — who could also complete the crossword in The New York Times in 15 minutes — his mother was a taskmaster. But Swayze has come to appreciate her influence. “She ran the first all-black dance company in the south. Her view was never turn your back on talent, even if the soles were falling off our shoes as we couldn’t afford new ones.”
As his ballet blossomed he also became a stunt-trained football star; a character split evident throughout a career divided between blockbuster and art house: “When you reach a certain level, people want to control you. They try to squash the very things that built your career. So you become a rebel.”
Was that what his self-destructiveness was about? “Yeah, not wanting to be a billboard. You know you are not really the sexiest guy because you couldn’t get to first base with the girl in high school,” he laughs. “The only reason I got parts ahead of 50 better-looking guys was I had been working my arse off from childhood.”
But hang on, Patrick: your wife reports that when you first met her — at mama’s ballet class, you aged 20 just back from touring as Prince Charming, she just 15 — your opening words were “Hey there!” before pinching her rear. Hardly the behaviour of a man lacking confidence. “Ooh, I was very troubled really,” he smiles self-mockingly.
Swayze now looks a little strange. Muscular and slim with a thick head of dark hair, he is spookily boyish; yet he stares at you with old man eyes. While he spends eons in make-up before our photoshoot, he professes to welcome wrinkles. “Now I finally look like a man,” he twangs with the trace of a Texan drawl. “Not a man trapped in a boy’s body.” So he has not been under the surgeon’s knife? “No knife has touched my face, nor will it. And no artificial colour is in my hair.”
Yet, like the rock star asked to reprise his cheesiest song, Swayze will for ever be remembered for 1987’s Dirty Dancing, when he turned a wallflower into a dancing queen after he uttered the line: “Nobody puts Baby in the corner.” In 1994 he turned down £7m for a sequel: will there ever be one? “No way. If the sequel had not been a stupid, formulaic piece of junk, I probably wouldn’t have turned down a fortune. Same with Ghost: Whoopi, Demi and I had to turn it down.”
“Validation” he says, came from films such as Point Break, Road House and Next of Kin. “It’s the cult movies that have given me a career for 30 years. It wouldn’t have been worth it if I had been stuck as the leading man or the dance guy.”
If he is to be remembered as “the dance guy” he would rather it was for a spot of, well, clean dancing. He and Lisa starred in One Last Dance, based on her award-winning semi-autobiographical play about two ageing ballerinas. “It is my swansong at classical ballet: the last time I could pull that kind of dancing off. You must see it,” he says, eyes welling.
There is one role that he has played to perfection: that of husband. True, he has been a drunk, drugged, dangerous head-banger, but by Hollywood standards he has been a model husband, married for 31 scandal-free years. “I am honestly not sure I was born first or married first, but I sure like it,” he smiles. “I don’t want to learn how to trust again.
“It’s about looking into those eyes and learning how to fall in love over and over again. We are also a partnership ever since we danced together. We run a huge ranch together. We have a conservation timber farm. Our entire world operates as a team.”
It was ever thus: Lisa followed Swayze to New York to live in a rat-infested one-bedroom flat with nine other people. Swayze says: “I was so excited I kicked them all out except for three.” They lived on peanut butter and worked as builders with Lisa riding pillion, holding giant plasterboards on their motorbike.
The marriage has produced no children — she miscarried twice — but they are a creative duo. “All our coolest projects are emanating from London, the creative capital of the world,” Swayze says. “Every place has a time. Once it was career suicide to step on the London stage. Now you guys are cut some slack. The Brit way of looking at things is amazing. Almost all my friends are Brits because,” he cackles, “you are even sicker than I am.”
Swayze once said that whenever life goes well he feels obliged to sabotage it. Is that still true? “Thank God, I am much better. That came from my dancer mentality, that to even spell the word ‘artist’ you need to suffer.” He has learnt to control his “obsessions”.
“Each time I have gone down a negative rut I have just caught myself. I wouldn’t trade the darkness: I know pain, I know sorrow, I know loss. I know the things, whether you like them or not, that build character: the key is to live through them.”
