The Time of My Life (22 page)

“Of course not, Patrick,” he said in response. “I just hope you’re not disappointed that I directed it.”

Roland’s answer was just what I needed to hear, but the good feeling didn’t last long. I had put so much energy and
passion into
City of Joy,
and I had dared to hope it would mark a turning point in my acting career. That it didn’t do nearly as well as we’d hoped was devastating—even though the movie did change some minds about me in Hollywood, and the DVD sales are still strong. But the initial response sent me into a spiral that I didn’t know how to get out of.

I hadn’t been drinking very much over the previous year or so, having cut back after doing too much of it for too long. For a period of almost ten years after my father’s death, I drank copious amounts of alcohol, mostly beer and wine but occasionally hard liquor, which really messed me up. Lisa had been concerned about my alcohol intake for a while, and we sometimes got into fights about it. So I had cut back significantly, and while I was in Calcutta I hardly drank at all.

But the disappointment over
City of Joy
threw me right back into a self-destructive place. I gave in to those demons that were forever trying to undercut me and spent a lot of time beating myself up for not being good enough, or successful enough. These feelings were so raw, so consuming, that I started sliding into serious depression, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Adding alcohol was like pouring fuel on the fire. And did I ever pour it on.

The next movie I worked on after
City of Joy
was
Father Hood,
a drama about a wild man named Jack Charles who becomes a small-time hood. There were some interesting things about the character, and the director, Darrell Roodt, was fresh and talented. But compared to the kind of roles I’d hoped to get after
City of Joy,
this was a disappointment, even though the movie turned out to be good. Honestly, any role less than the caliber of Max Lowe would have been a disappointment.

What had long been the biggest frustration of my acting
career was peaking right now. Why couldn’t I pull in the level of projects that I wanted, and that I seemed to have earned? I had done good work over the years, and had always tried to turn down junk. I had studied and explored and worked my ass off, and had believed in myself against all odds. But I just couldn’t seem to break through. I can take a lot of pain and abuse, but if you get slapped around long and hard enough, the doubt just creeps in. You think,
Who am I fooling here? Maybe I’m just lying to myself.

My character in
Father Hood,
Jack Charles, was darker than the ones I usually played. He does make the right decision at the end of the movie, but he’s a desperado, on the run from the police. I’ve always had trouble dropping out of character after the director calls it a wrap at the end of the day, and this time was no different—as Lisa always jokes, “Please don’t get cast as an axe murderer! I don’t want you bringing that home!” So I was in the head of this bad guy all day and all night, which pushed me to darker and darker places.

I drank more while making
Father Hood
than I ever had before. One morning after a night of drinking, the crew had trouble waking me up. They were scared that I was slipping into a coma, but they knew that if someone called for an ambulance it would be instantly all over the news. They wanted to protect me, but what if I really needed medical help? I ended up being fine, but there were many mornings when I was slow to get going, hung over and already looking for a drink.

Lisa eventually had to ask Rosi, our assistant, not to tell her any more stories of what was happening on the set when she wasn’t there. It was just too upsetting for her, especially since she knew there was nothing she could do. But when Lisa came to Las Vegas, the last location where we were shooting, to
spend some time with me, she saw my most embarrassing moment of all. We were trying to shoot a scene in which I’m in the back of a car, but I’d had so much to drink, I kept passing out while the cameras were rolling.

For someone who takes so much pride in professionalism, this was about as low as it could get. I had never done anything like this, and I knew I was sacrificing my standards and integrity, but I just couldn’t stop. Pretty much in one fell swoop, I managed to kill the fragile sense of self-worth and self-esteem I’d had after wrapping on
City of Joy.

For Lisa, this was all incredibly agonizing to watch. She had tried everything she could think of, begging, arguing, fighting— but nothing worked. We got into terrible shouting matches, as our great passion for each other turned into intensely emotional fights. Tempers flared wildly and things got broken, and Lisa was almost ready to give up. Her survival instinct was kicking in, and she began turning from trying to save me to trying to take care of herself.

At the time, Lisa wasn’t sure how to deal with what was happening to me, and to us. She was trying to change my behavior, without realizing that the only person who could change it was me. Negotiating and arguing and threatening don’t work, though those are natural responses. But her actions had only been making things worse for both of us, to her frustration.

Everything came to a head when I returned home to LA after wrapping
Father Hood.
I walked in the door, and Lisa could see that I was drunk. She was sitting at the dining-room table with our friend Nicholas, and as she told me later, she turned to him and said, “I wish he’d just go back. I can’t do this anymore.”

Lisa didn’t say anything to me about it that night. But the
next afternoon, when I woke up and came into the kitchen, she said, “Buddy, what are you planning to do?”

“What do you mean?” I said. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Because I need to know what I need to do,” she said. The look in her eyes was as sad and serious as I’d ever seen. And I knew exactly what she was saying.

At that moment, I realized I wasn’t as in control of my life as I thought. With drinking, I always believed I could stop when I wanted to. I’d always felt that alcohol wasn’t the problem—the problem was the pain and insecurity that led me to drink. Alcohol was a symptom, not the disease itself. But looking at Lisa’s face, I realized I had been in denial about what was happening, and how it was affecting her. And right then, I began to accept that I was helpless in the face of the emotional energy that drove me to that self-destructive behavior.

“I’m going to go someplace and get my shit together,” I said to her. She knew I meant rehab, though I didn’t think of it that way. I just knew I needed to go to a place where I could get help restoring myself. I needed help getting back the zest for life that I’d lost, to help keep me from spiraling down further.

Two days later, I checked in to a treatment facility in Tucson. At first, I was put off by the fact that they seemed to want to talk only about alcohol, because there were so many other underlying issues I needed to address. I also didn’t like the feeling of being just another actor going to rehab—a victim, or a cliché. But after a month, I began to feel more in control. I began to take responsibility for my own life again, and the facility gave me the tools to do it.

One of the hardest things to realize is that taking responsibility is not the same thing as taking on guilt and blame. Saying “this is my fault” isn’t taking responsibility; it’s passing
judgment on yourself. For me, taking responsibility meant figuring out what was wrong with my life that was causing me to drink. If I’m drinking for emotional reasons, that’s when there’s a problem. And taking responsibility means being aware of it and taking steps to curb it.

The other thing about rehab, and the reason so many people, including Hollywood celebrities, continue to have trouble afterward, is that it’s not a quick fix—it just starts the process. It’s like a muscle you have to exercise every day. Because if you really want to change, you have to want it every day.

After I got back to LA, I tried to keep all these things in mind. But what really helped me get back on track was starting to pursue a new dream. I had wanted to be a pilot all my life, and I decided to start taking flying lessons. When you fly an airplane, you’re taking on all kinds of responsibility, so there is no room for wallowing in alcohol or allowing your demons to get the better of you. You have to study incredibly hard to get a pilot’s license—it’s like getting a college degree in a compressed time period. I threw myself into it, grateful to have a new challenge.

Once I began bouncing back from my drinking and depression, my relationship with Lisa began to heal. I joined her in New York, where she had been cast as one of the two female leads in
Will Rogers Follies
at the Palace Theater on Broadway. She played Ziegfeld’s Favorite, and opened the show with a solo that showed off her beautiful voice and great charisma onstage. Lisa was thrilled to be starring on Broadway, and I was glad to be there for her—offering suggestions for her performance, running errands, and just generally being her cabana boy. We stayed in New York for six months, our first extended
stay there since the late seventies. And we loved every minute of it.

In the meantime, I started looking again for good movie roles. Fortunately, the next role I got was a really fun one, playing a character named Pecos Bill in the Disney movie
Tall Tale.
Playing Pecos Bill allowed me to be a cowboy and ride horses all day, which was a balm for my soul. Any time I’m up in a saddle, the world around me just looks brighter. I had a hell of a lot of fun making that movie, and it brought me back into the hero role.

Little did I know it, but for my next big part, I’d be trading in that cowboy gear for a dress.

From the first time I heard about
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,
I knew I wanted to be in it. It would be an amazing challenge to transform myself into a convincing woman, and playing a man in drag would really stretch me as an actor.

But once again, it was the same old story. Steven Spielberg was producing, and he wasn’t keen on having me audition for the role. A lot of actors were being considered, including Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise, and Rob Lowe, but the part of Vida Boheme still hadn’t been cast. I wasn’t about to take no for an answer, so I got in touch with the director, Beeban Kidron, and told her I’d fly out to New York the next day for the audition if she would just see me. She agreed.

Before the audition at a loft downtown, I went to their makeup and wardrobe people to start the transformation into a woman. They gave me a dress and heels and a pretty little strawberry-blond cropped wig, and made up my face to look as feminine as possible. I had been trying out different mannerisms and voices, in an effort to seem like a real woman rather
than a caricature, and I thought I’d hit on a pretty good tone. Now I was about to find out if anyone else would buy it.

I had read the script for the first time the night before, so when Beeban asked me to perform a two-page monologue, I told her I’d have to improvise.

“No, no, no,” she said. “It has to be the words. You need to do the scene as it is in the script.”

“I’ll do the best I can,” I told her, knowing that I’d have to improvise anyway, and that I needed to absolutely blow her and the producers away with it. “I may not have everything in the exact sequence, but it’ll be close.”

The monologue was Vida telling the story of her life, so what I did was take the details I remembered for her, and then insert some of my own. I told it from my own perspective: the story of Buddy Swayze’s life if he’d grown up a drag queen in redneck Texas. I talked about getting beat up by five kids in junior high, and about getting teased by everyone at school. Everything I said was all true, except for the drag-queen part.

“There was nothing special about me,” I said toward the end, my voice soft and low, “until I became a woman.”

I don’t think anyone in that room really expected that the guy from
Road House
and
Red Dawn
could really transform into a convincing woman. But by the end of my audition, I knew I had. It was so strange—I could tell from the energy in the room that people felt that I had really achieved becoming a woman. They didn’t talk to me like I was Patrick Swayze. They talked to me like I was Vida Boheme.

After all the auditions were finished, Beeban narrowed the list to the ones she liked best, then took the tapes to Spielberg and the other producers. She didn’t say who the actors were,
but just invited them to watch the tapes and decide for themselves. Everyone agreed that I
was
Vida. But when Beeban revealed that it was actually me on that tape, no one could believe it—they were just blown away. I got the part, and just like that I was back in the game.

It takes a long time to turn a masculine man into a woman. First, you have to be incredibly well shaved, and not just on your face. All those places where men have hair and women don’t—face, neck, even ears—have to be smooth as a baby’s butt. Then, because men’s pores are bigger than women’s, the makeup department would apply a stuccolike filler, to smooth out your skin.

Then comes the makeup. You’d get a base coat of foundation, followed by powder. Lipstick, eyeliner, eyeshadow, fake eyelashes—the makeup artists are turning you into not just any woman, but a beautiful, glamorous woman. And my makeup guy on
Wong Foo
certainly knew something about that. He was Roy Helland, Meryl Streep’s makeup man. And at about six feet five inches tall, he’d once been a towering, gorgeous drag queen himself.

Makeup usually took about three hours, after which my costars Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo and I would go to the wardrobe room. I learned very quickly not to let them dress me in any cute little tight pantsuits, because that meant I’d have to use the assistance of an apparatus called the gender bender. This is a special piece of equipment, designed by some sadistic bastard with a sense of humor, which you tuck your manly parts into to make them “disappear.” In reality, the gender bender pushes everything back in the other direction,
between your legs. And yes, it’s every bit as uncomfortable as it sounds.