The Time of My Life (21 page)

The tricky thing about success is, the more of it you have, the more you fear it will disappear. On the surface, we had everything we’d been fighting for all these years. My career was soaring, we had a beautiful ranch, and we had each other. I got nominated for my second Golden Globe Award for
Ghost,
and “Patrick Swayze” had become the household name my mother always believed it would be.

But what would come next? I was proud of my work in
Ghost,
and I desperately wanted to follow it up with another great role. This felt like my big chance—my best opportunity yet to vault myself into the company of serious, respected actors who get offered the best parts. If I could just keep this momentum
going, maybe I wouldn’t have to prove myself to Hollywood over and over and over again.

That’s when I heard about the role of a lifetime, the chance to play an American doctor in Calcutta for one of the greatest directors in the business, Roland Joffé. The film was called
City of Joy.

I had never met Roland Joffé before, but I’d seen his films, including
The Killing Fields
and
The Mission
. I knew he was incredibly passionate about his work and a man who never compromised on his vision. In fact, he was such a maverick that he rubbed some people in the business the wrong way—including reviewers, who seemed to love to tear his movies down. But I knew instinctively that the opportunity to work with him, on a movie that really explored the human condition, had the potential to change not only my career, but my life as well.

City of Joy
is about an American doctor, Max Lowe, who becomes disillusioned and depressed after a young patient of his dies in surgery. He tries to escape his pain by traveling to India and losing himself there. To his surprise, he has a transformational experience, finding new meaning through helping Calcutta’s poor.

I loved the character of Max. In fact, I identified with him. Max never felt he was good enough, and he was constantly battling his inner demons. I’d been doing the same ever since I was a boy in Texas, fighting those voices that always told me I had to try harder and be better than I was. Max’s struggle was one I knew intimately, and I desperately wanted the chance to create his character onscreen.

I walked into the audition looking like a beach bum, with my hair and beard still bleached blond from
Point Break
. But Roland and I connected right away, and I opened up with him
completely about how much this character and story meant to me. This wasn’t like any other audition I’d been on—instead of reading for the part, Roland and I just talked. We forged a real bond that day, the foundation of a friendship that would last for life. He pushed me deep into exploring my own feelings, and I got very emotional as I tried to explain why I was so drawn to the part.

As Roland told me later, one thing in particular convinced him I was right for the role. It was the moment I told him, “If you will have me do this movie, I will work hard. But more than that, I will give you my heart.” Roland operates on instinct, and at that moment, he knew he wanted me. He knew I would hold nothing back for this movie—and he also knew I’d need that kind of passion for what lay ahead.

But when Roland went to the producers and said, “We have to have Patrick Swayze for Max,” the response was lukewarm. Despite the success of
Dirty Dancing
and
Ghost,
Hollywood still didn’t see me as the kind of actor who could carry a serious drama. Some even still saw me as just “that dance guy.” Roland didn’t back down, though. He said, “It’s Patrick. That’s it. He
is
Max.” Thanks to Roland’s perseverance, I finally had the role I’d spent years hoping to get. So it was off to the black hole of Calcutta.

When Lisa and I arrived in Calcutta, the first thing we noticed was the thick, smoky fog that enveloped us as we walked out of the airport. We had never been to India before, so we didn’t really expect to walk out into the hot night air to find the smog so thick you could barely see ten feet in front of you.

We loaded into a car, and the scene as we rode to our hotel
was surreal. There were a few streetlights, which cast some light through the darkness, but because of the soot in the air the light was diffused. So there was a strange eerie glow outside the car, with apparitions seeming to move in and out of the darkness. Women were dressed in flowing saris and men in loose-fitting cotton pants and shirts, and despite how late it was, there were people absolutely everywhere. Looking out the car windows, we felt like we were in another world.

As the driver navigated the crazy traffic of Calcutta we could see one cause of that choking smog. All along the roadways, poor Indians were cooking meals in open pots. The pots burned round patches of dried cow dung, the cheapest fuel available, which put out a pungent, thick smoke. Hundreds of millions of Indians cooked with these pots, contributing, along with coal smoke, to a massive cloud of black, sooty smog that hung over the country for months at a time.

Roland wanted to throw me right into the type of situation that Max Lowe found himself in. So the next morning, he took me straight to Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying—the place where the poorest of the poor Indians come to die.

Every country in the world has poor people, but the kind of poverty you see in India is staggering. Little children with spindly arms and legs, their eyes hollow from hunger. People missing arms and legs, their bodies covered with pus-filled sores. There’s a level of desperation among the poor in India that I had never seen before, but there’s a level of amazing spiritual richness, too. And Roland wanted me not just to see it, but to plunge into it—to care for the most destitute with my own hands, just as Max Lowe would do.

At Mother Teresa’s, I did whatever the head nurse asked of me. When she saw that I wouldn’t shy away from touching the
sick, she put me to work with them. I washed the hands of a dying man, sat with a frail woman’s head on my lap, helped clean up children who had soiled themselves. Yes, I was doing research for a movie—but this went way beyond that. It was impossible not to be touched by the incredibly deep need all around us. It humbled me, and made me realize once again how fortunate we are to have such comfortable lives.

The next stop was even more difficult. Roland took us to a street clinic, one of thousands across India that provide cheap medical services for people who have no money. There was a young boy, probably about eight years old, who came in for treatment while I was there. He had come in a couple of months earlier with badly burned arms, and the staff had bandaged them up. He was coming back because those bandages, now filthy, had grafted themselves into his skin. The boy was in a lot of pain, and those rotting bandages had to come off.

I took that little arm into my hands and began trying to pick out the putrid bandage threads. All I had to work with was saline water with some kind of milky antiseptic in it and a Swiss Army knife. His skin was raw and infected, but I just kept picking at that bandage. The boy could tell I was upset, so he even reached over himself to try to help, as if he were consoling me. He never shed one tear, which caused me to blink back tears myself. It took a couple of hours, but together we finally got the last remnants of that rotted bandage off.

The third stop of the day was a leprosy clinic in Titigar. Roland wanted to completely overload my senses, to put me in the place of this young, self-indulgent doctor who suddenly opens his eyes to the world around him. And he succeeded, because going to a leprosy clinic was definitely eye-opening for me.

We all sat down at a table with the head of the clinic, and before long a young man came in to serve tea. But when I saw a pair of fingerless hands gently placing my teacup in front of me, that was the moment I had to decide: Am I really in this or not? I didn’t know anything about leprosy, and I had no idea if it was contagious or not. But to refuse the tea because of who served it would be beyond insulting. It would be rejecting everything I’d come here to do.

Roland and I looked at each other, and together we drank our tea. It was trial by fire: This was the moment I decided we were in this for better or for worse, the moment I totally committed to what we were doing here.

During the four months or so we were filming in Calcutta, we faced every conceivable obstacle. The shoot took place during the first Gulf War, so anti-American sentiment was running high. Huge crowds would gather outside my hotel, shouting for the American to go home. Protestors hurled homemade bombs onto the set, and although they were packed with harmless jute rather than projectiles that could kill or injure, it was still scary as hell to see one coming over the wall of the set. The producers hired more than a hundred Indian policemen to act as security, but more often than not they’d just slink into the crowd themselves if things got really rough.

From the beginning, Roland told all the Americans and British in the cast and crew that if we were asked, we should say we were from Canada or Australia. A few weeks in, when it became clear how aggressive the mobs were becoming, he held a meeting with all of us. “If you feel your life is in danger,” he said, “you can go home with my blessing.” There are a lot of directors who would bully everyone into staying no matter what happened, but Roland was far too decent and honorable
a man to act that way. No one left. As the cast and crew took to saying, we were on a mission from God.

The Gulf War wasn’t the only reason we were unpopular in Calcutta. The subject matter of Dominique La Pierre’s bestselling book,
City of Joy,
which the movie was based on, was very controversial in India. Some felt that it showcased the absolute worst side of India and made the Westerner the hero. But Roland believed the story showed universal truths, that it got to the heart of what it means to be human and be connected as family. He believed strongly in the movie and was determined to make it, come hell or high water.

Roland had anticipated resistance in India, so he’d taken the precaution of building a giant set replicating a Calcutta slum. It was huge—five acres in all—and so realistic that when you see the movie, you can’t believe it was actually shot on a set. It took eight weeks for hundreds of workers to create the shanties, trash-strewn alleys, and running sewers of the slum. And it was surrounded by a high wall with concertina wire on top, not only to keep out protestors, but to prevent Calcutta’s poor from moving in.

It was filthy on the set, just like in a real slum, and for pretty much the entire shoot my clothes and skin were covered in dirt. We also battled “Delhi belly,” which made me so sick I had to learn how to throw up and have diarrhea at the same time. (For the record, you sit on the toilet and throw up into the bathtub. I don’t recommend it.) From the dirty water, I got conjunctivitis so bad I could hardly see, and I also accidentally got stabbed in the arm in one scene. I felt as if I
was
Max Lowe in this movie, feeling the shock of discovering India, and falling in love with it at the same time.

Coming back to the Oberoi Hotel after shooting was always
a strange experience. The hotel was a real oasis of luxury amid the poverty of India, and it always seemed amazing to come back to clean sheets and room service. But on the night when I settled in to watch the tape-delayed Academy Awards telecast, it felt even more surreal. Looking at all those Hollywood people dressed in their finery, with the women draped in millions of dollars of jewelry, felt bizarre.

Then came the moment that I’ll never forget. Whoopi Goldberg won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in
Ghost
—the first time in almost fifty years that an African American had won the award. The audience went crazy as she made her way up to the stage, but then you could have heard a pin drop as she made her speech. It was very short—she thanked her family, Paramount, and Jerry Zucker, and then singled me out by name.

“I have to thank Patrick Swayze, who’s a stand-up guy, who went to them and said, ‘I want to do it with her,’ ” she said. Sitting there watching in my Calcutta hotel room, I was incredibly touched by Whoopi’s unexpected thanks. It meant more to me than I could ever express.

The release date for
City of Joy
got pushed up by three months, as Roland’s financial backers were anxious to make back their money. Roland had wanted that extra time to screen the movie and build the audience, but he didn’t feel that he could say no to the people who’d made the film possible. So we ended up with a release date in April 1992.

Unfortunately, this was the month of the Rodney King verdict and the LA riots—the worst urban rioting since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. Los Angeles was
soon gripped by a wave of looting and mayhem, and the mayor declared a curfew over the entire city. So just as this amazing film was hitting theaters, no one in LA could go see it. And across the rest of the country, people were glued to their TVs watching coverage of the riots, instead of going to the movies.
City of Joy
ended up doing weak business in its theatrical release.

I was beyond crushed. I really believed
City of Joy
was an amazing, uplifting movie that might possibly become a classic. Everything I’d hoped for had come true—Roland had brought out incredible performances, the camera work was fantastic, and the final cut was beautiful. When I finished work on
City of Joy,
it was the first time I ever really felt I’d done absolutely everything I could on a movie, to the very best of my ability. Seeing it fare worse than I’d hoped after all that was just heartbreaking.

And of course, I went straight to a very dark place, thinking that maybe it didn’t do well because of me. The tremendous disappointment I felt over
City of Joy
tapped into every insecurity I still felt as an actor. No matter how obvious it was that external factors had played a big role at the box office, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had failed.

I called Roland the week after the film opened. “I hope you’re not disappointed that you cast me,” I said, my voice catching. He was such a good man, and such a great director, that I couldn’t stand the thought that he might regret having offered me the role.