The Time of My Life (18 page)

Once, I was scheduled to make an appearance onstage in West Germany, and even though there were at least a dozen bodyguards, the crowd managed to break through. Suddenly, people were climbing over people and grabbing at me, and the bodyguards were completely overwhelmed. They started pushing back at the fans, which threatened to make a bad situation worse—and the last thing we needed was for a riot to break out.

Suddenly, I had an idea. Rather than resisting the crowd or trying to push back, I just started shaking hands. “Nice to meet you!” I’d say, shaking a hand, then following with, “No need to push. How you doing? I’m Patrick. Let’s make some room here.” I shouted to the bodyguards to do the same. “Say hello to people! Shake a hand, keep smiling.” When the bodyguards started doing the same, turning the energy from hostile to friendly, the fans soon stopped shoving.

I learned little techniques like that for crowd control, like patting someone on the back as you shake hands, then gently guiding them to one side. The fact is, once you’ve talked with people and given them that moment they were looking for, they’re on your side. So you can easily turn a group of fans into a second line of defense if others are pushing and shoving. The most important thing to remember is that the people who are pushing at you really want only one thing: for you to look into their eyes and say, “Hey, how are you doing? Nice to meet you.” And I was always happy to do that.

The first time Lisa and I really saw what it meant to be famous was back in my
Skatetown, U.S.A.
days. Jaclyn Smith,
whom we knew from Houston, had become a huge star in
Charlie’s Angels,
and she came to the
Skatetown
premiere as a show of support. Lisa and I watched in amazement as she walked out of the premiere and flashbulbs began popping like strobe lights. I was feeling blinded by all those flashes, but Jackie had the most beautiful smile on her face, and she barely blinked. She knew she had to look good, so she had a completely calm expression, as if she was the only one there. I often thought of her example all those years later, when I became the one in the strobe lights.

Unfortunately, there’s a flip side to all the love you get from fans. The vast majority are perfectly decent people who reach out with an open heart. But once you become famous, some others crawl out of the woodwork—the ones who don’t hesitate to go after your money and your reputation, hoping to enrich themselves.

People will sue you for any little thing, claiming you bumped into their car with yours, or even that you injured them somehow with an innocuous handshake. And every incident requires a response from a lawyer. We’ve had a wonderful lawyer for years, Fred Gaines, who takes care of any issue that comes up, but the fact is, having to respond to every claim takes money and time, even if the claim is totally fabricated.

After “She’s Like the Wind” became a hit, at least five people filed lawsuits claiming they’d written it. Never mind the fact that if all five of these people truly believed they’d written it, they probably ought to be suing each other, too. These claims just came out of nowhere, from people we’d never met, and one suit even went so far that Stacy and I were no longer allowed to receive royalties. It just dragged on and on, but I knew we’d win because we had written the song. So Fred just
kept responding, point by point, and we figured the truth would eventually come out.

And it did, when the plaintiffs submitted their account of when they’d written the song. They claimed they wrote it just before
Dirty Dancing
began shooting—but of course, Stacy and I had written it, and even recorded a master, during
Grand-view, U.S.A.
back in 1984. I dug up that master and sent it to Fred, and that finally ended the lawsuit. But because it had dragged on so long to begin with, whoever sued us certainly felt the pain in their own wallets—just as they should have.

After supposedly “bumping and grinding” my way into movie history, I signed on next to do a serious family drama called
Tiger Warsaw
. I played a drug-and alcohol-addicted loner whose sister accuses him of committing incest—a dark, intense movie that pushed me deeper as an actor but ultimately never really came together. Despite having a strong cast, including the Oscar-nominated actress Piper Laurie,
Tiger Warsaw
was directed by Amin Q. Chaudhri, an inexperienced director who made some questionable choices. The film didn’t do well, making little more than a ripple at the box office.

But the film I shot after that,
Road House,
did very big business at the box office. And while
Dirty Dancing
had launched a kind of cult following for me among women,
Road House
created a cult following of its own among men. With its multiple bar-fight scenes and macho, tough-shit antagonists, it was a classic guys’ film.

The truth is, in some ways I was built to be an action star. All the running, jumping, and falling I did as a kid had taught me how to be my own stuntman. Gymnastics had strengthened
every part of my body and taught me balance. Studying martial arts, boxing, and sword fighting gave me a base of skills I could use in any kind of fight scene. And I could race anything—cars, motorcycles, horses, whatever was called for.

Road House
was an old-fashioned Western-style movie, where the good guy comes to a bad town to clean it up. I knew it wasn’t Dostoevsky, but I still wanted to give my character, Dalton, real depth, and not just play him as a campy hero. There’s definitely a guilty pleasure to watching and loving
Road House,
but it ended up entertaining a lot of people, especially men who liked watching a stand-up guy like Dalton, who had a strong code.

For the fight scenes in
Road House,
I trained with Benny “the Jet” Urquidez, a kickboxing pro who never lost a professional match. Benny was a short, stocky guy who used sharp, sudden moves to keep his opponents off balance. But when he tried to teach his style to me, I had a lot of trouble—it’s just not the way I move. I kept trying to mimic his technique, but we weren’t getting anywhere.

Suddenly, Benny said, “Wait a minute! You’re a dancer! I’ve got an idea.” The next day, he showed up on set with a boom box. He plugged it in and flipped a switch, and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” came blasting out.

That was all it took. Moving with the beat of Michael Jackson’s music, I finally got a rhythm going, and my kickboxing came together. It was a great moment—all the syncopation, speed, and subtlety of the art form suddenly were mine. And I loved it. I hadn’t done any martial arts for a while, but after studying with Benny, I got right back into it.
Road House
gave me the opportunity to hone an old skill that I never realized I’d missed.

I soon found out that I’d need all the fighting skills I could muster for this movie. Because the actor who played my primary opponent, Marshall Teague, was ready to kick my ass for real if he could get away with it.

From the very beginning, Marshall, who played the bad-guy enforcer Jimmy, treated me like some snot-nose know-nothing actor. He had served in Vietnam and was a Navy SEAL—which meant he was a serious, real-life badass. He had no patience for bullshit and would say so to anyone’s face. Marshall apparently thought I was a dilettante pretty boy he could knock over with one of his meaty fingers. But when we started training, he learned otherwise.

He and I started rehearsing our fight scenes, and soon enough he saw that I knew what I was doing, and that I could take a punch. “Let’s put some contact into it,” I told him, well aware that he could lay me flat out if he chose to. But I knew if we choreographed it well, we could have some contact without killing each other, and it would look amazingly real onscreen.

When you earn the respect of a man like Marshall, you earn it for life. He and I became friends on the set of
Road House,
and we’ve been friends ever since. Not that many people understood his mentality, but when I looked him in the eye, we really connected. It was a good thing, too, because the fight scene we shot was absolutely epic, and we very nearly killed each other.

We fought in a river, and I was wearing nothing but little hip-hugger sweatpants—no shirt, no pads, no nothing. So when I hit the ground, I was hitting the ground hard. Since both Marshall and I loved the adrenaline high of a fight, it was easy to get carried away, and we really started pounding on each other in this scene.

After a few minutes of us punching and kicking the shit out of each other, Marshall picked up a log and swung it over his head. My eyes got wide as I realized he was about to break it right over my back. Marshall apparently thought it was a prop log, which would have been perfect for the scene—but unfortunately, it wasn’t. He realized his mistake midswing, but it was too late: He cracked me right across the spine with a real log, breaking a couple of my ribs and knocking the wind out of me.

I dropped to my hands and knees, gasping for breath, but the scene called for us to keep fighting. I didn’t break character and didn’t give up—we kept fighting, and eventually got to the part where Dalton is forced to kill Jimmy. When you watch this scene in the movie, the exhaustion you see on my face is absolutely real. I barely had the strength to drag myself out of the river after that fight.

My next role was as another tough guy, a Chicago cop named Truman Gates in
Next of Kin.
But this time, the training I got wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as studying kickboxing with Benny the Jet. This time, some real Chicago cops decided they’d give me some training I would never forget.

They hung out with me on the set, took me on ride-alongs to get a feel for the streets, and told me all about the dangers they faced on the job. We spent a lot of time together, and I really bonded with these guys. They were the real deal, putting their lives on the line every day, and I respected their courage. Then they decided to test mine. Or at least, test how strong my stomach was.

They drove me to the Chicago morgue, pulling the squad car up out front. I already knew what I was in for—they were
going to show me dead and decomposing bodies, to test my mettle. But before that happened, there was a funny moment out on the sidewalk.

The cops were walking me up to the door, when a couple of junkies lying out front, really desperate-looking guys, peered up at me. Through a heroin-induced haze, one of them squinted and said, “Hey! Aren’t you that Dirty Dance dude?” I couldn’t believe it—these guys couldn’t have been to a movie in years, but I guess
Dirty Dancing
was everywhere you looked at that point, in newspapers, magazines, on posters, all over the place. But I just smiled and said, “Nope, sorry. You’ve got the wrong guy.” And the cops hustled me through the door.

It was a beautiful building, all pristine and pretty on the outside and nice and clean on the inside. But then the guys led me down into the bowels of the place, where the bodies were stored.

The first thing that amazed me was how many bodies there were. The ceilings were about fifty feet up, and there were rows and rows of shelves with nothing but body parts on them—a head, an arm, a hand, a torso, a leg. Some of them had apparently been there a long time, as they were in a pretty advanced state of decomposition.

The guys chose a particularly gruesome body to show me first, hoping to make me puke. It was a kind of tough-guy game—could I stand to see and smell all this, or was my stomach too weak? These guys had seen everything already, so they had a clinical detachment. They just wanted to see whether I could handle it. I couldn’t, but I didn’t let on. I felt the bile rise in my throat and started to throw up, but managed to swallow it back down. It sounds disgusting, and it was, but I wasn’t about to show these cops that I couldn’t handle it.

There was another, more serious reason I didn’t want to show weakness. Doing this kind of training for a movie is all about showing someone else’s world on film. The story is really about them, and what they do, and they’re teaching you out of pride. I wanted to be good for these guys. In fact, I wanted to
be
these guys on film. It was the least I could do for them. So I forced myself to behave and respond as they would. And just as I respected them, they respected my efforts to make my portrayal of their world absolutely true and real.

Lisa was also up for a role in
Next of Kin,
playing Truman Gates’s wife, Jessie. Once again, she would have been perfect for it—but she was reluctant to appear to be pushing for it as my real-life wife. Lisa has a lot of integrity, and it really came through in instances like these, where she didn’t push as hard for roles she could have won. Helen Hunt, who’d just started her career, ended up getting the role—and she was wonderful. But it was frustrating for Lisa, who’s a very talented actress.

The truth is, talent takes you only so far in Hollywood. There are any number of other factors that influence who makes it—and Lisa was up against some real obstacles from the get-go. For one thing, people in Hollywood have a thing about husbands and wives. The William Morris Agency, one of the most powerful in the industry, won’t represent husbandwife teams. There’s a perception of nepotism, even where there isn’t any.

A lot of people didn’t take Lisa as seriously as they should have, just because she was married to me. If I pushed for her to get a role, that was seen as favoritism—even if she was the best actress for it. She had to work twice as hard and be twice as good to be taken half as seriously, which is very hard to overcome.

Another big issue was that you really have to be able to sell yourself in Hollywood. As a Texan, that was something I loved to do—I loved the challenge of winning someone over, making that person want to hire me. Being from a Finnish family, Lisa had inherited a certain reserve. She had been raised to believe that the quality of what you do should speak for itself, and that if you try to sell to people, you’re insulting their intelligence. If success in Hollywood came from sheer talent, Lisa would have been a huge star. But all these factors conspired to keep her down—which was a real source of frustration for her.