The Time of My Life (23 page)

When the wardrobe guys first explained how the gender bender worked, I said, “You want me to do
what
?” But this was part of the deal, so I went ahead and rearranged everything down there, as I was asked. While wearing it, you essentially spend the day sitting on your member. It’s a very scary sensation after you do it for a long time, because your tallywhacker goes quite numb. And when that happens, you start to worry it’s going to fall off. So very quickly I learned to ask for lovely little dresses that allowed my manhood to remain in its rightful place.

I never knew how many categories of drag queen there were until we started doing research for
Wong Foo.
And by “research,” I mean going out to clubs with some of the most beautiful, statuesque, amazing queens I had ever seen. They were our “guides” to the drag world, and they showed us more than we ever knew existed.

We rented a huge limo, and John, Wesley, Lisa, the drag queens, and I hit all the Manhattan hotspots. We saw “royal court” queens, with their super-high-end couture gowns, and over-the-top comic drag queens, with huge hair, shaved eyebrows, and glittered eyelashes. There were drag queens who went for absolute authenticity, who looked exactly like women. And there were the down-on-their-heels drag queens who hung out in the seedy clubs by the waterfront and the piers by the Hudson River.

The level of talent in the drag world is phenomenal. These people could sing, they could dance, they could vamp. Some of the men singing as women had the most beautiful female voices I’d ever heard. We had a blast exploring their world,
hanging out with women with fantastic names like Candis Cayne and Miranda Rights. And Lisa was pleased to get a compliment herself, when a drag queen passed her on the street, looked her up and down, and said, “Beautiful!”

Spending time with these men was incredibly eye-opening. Not only did they have an amazing sense of humor, they also had amazing courage. It takes
cojones
to be exactly who you are, especially when it’s so different from what society has dictated for you. These drag queens weren’t afraid to be exactly who they were, and to expect the rest of the world to catch up. It was inspiring to see.

I loved working with John and Wesley, both of whom looked absolutely fabulous in drag. We had a lot of fun during filming, though occasionally John’s hyperactive energy started to drive me a little crazy. He’s got only one speed—full throttle— and sometimes it got to be too much. But it did lead to one of the funnier moments on the shoot.

I’d made a quick trip back to LA the day before, and then flown all night to get back for an early-morning call on the set. When I arrived, I was completely exhausted and just wanted to get our rehearsal done. But John was in typical high-energy form, cracking jokes and doing his whole improv comedy routine. Normally, I found him hilarious. This particular morning, I wanted to stuff a sock in his mouth.

On and on he went, interrupting the rehearsal with one crazy comic riff after another. Finally, completely fed up, I snapped, “Oh, God! Would you just shut the fuck up for once?”

Well, John is a scrappy little fiery Latino who can probably kick the butts of guys three times his size. He came right at me, fists up, yelling, “Come on, let’s go! You want to fuck with me? I’ll fuck you up!”

The two of us stood there, yelling insults in each other’s faces, our chests puffed out like a couple of roosters. But the funny thing was, we had forgotten we were dressed in half-drag. Both John and I were wearing stocking caps, makeup and eyelashes, and garter belts—we must have looked ridiculous, a couple of tough guys ready to go at each other while wearing panty hose. I love John, and I love that he went at me with fists up and makeup on. Not many guys would have done that, and though it didn’t seem funny at the time, it sure does now.

My goal in playing Vida was to be absolutely convincing as a woman. I worked hard at it, but I really enjoyed it, too. As a man, it was a fascinating exercise to get so closely in touch with my feminine side, and to see how differently people responded to me. In the end, I think I did make a pretty convincing woman. I wouldn’t have slept with me, but I know a lot of guys who would have, and not just at closing time.

Once I started dressing in drag, Lisa occasionally found me eyeing her clothes. “Girlfriend,” she said, “you stay away from my closet!”

“I’m not interested in your clothes,” I sniffed back, with Vida’s quiet indignation. “Just your accessories.”

I really didn’t mind wearing women’s clothes as long as the gender bender wasn’t involved. But Wesley absolutely hated it. When we wrapped
Wong Foo,
he held a ceremonial funeral for his gender bender, wig, and clothes. He burned them and buried the ashes in the Nebraska soil, relieved to be free of them. But I liked my clothes, and even asked Lisa if she wanted any of them after the shoot was over. She just laughed and said, “Buddy, you do realize we’re not the same size, don’t you?” In the end, she took a one-size-fits-all Armani shawl—the only thing that would fit her.

Wong Foo
went to number one on its opening weekend, but in the end it didn’t do as well as we had hoped. The reviews were mostly good, and the legendary reviewer Gene Siskel loved my performance and even predicted an Oscar nomination for me. I didn’t get one, but I did receive my third nomination for a Golden Globe Award. That was incredibly validating, because I’d really pushed myself to become Vida, to get to the place where I’d look at myself in the mirror and think, “Now, there’s a woman.” I loved Vida, and even missed her a little bit when she was gone.

Lisa and I both enjoyed the
Wong Foo
shoot, and my career was again on an upswing. But personally, that period marked the beginning of a difficult time, starting with two terrible, tragic deaths in our lives. It started with my older sister, Vicky, who committed suicide in December 1994.

Vicky was four years older than me, and she and I were close as kids even though we fought like cats and dogs. She was incredibly talented—a beautiful dancer and singer, and an amazing actress. Vicky had the same pressure on her as all the Swayze kids, to be the best and push the hardest, but as an adult she also had another burden to bear. She suffered from depression, and was eventually diagnosed as bipolar.

Vicky’s struggle with depression was long and intense. She had gotten married and had kids, but when her demons kicked in, she’d take off and disappear for long stretches of time. Like many families of bipolar people, we suffered through her terrible times and never knew what to expect when we saw her. Sometimes, she would come to see us and give vent to the anger within her, or she’d leave heartrending messages on
our answering machine. We weren’t sure how to deal with Vicky’s pain, and although we tried our hardest to support her, both emotionally and financially, it never felt as if we did enough. But the sad truth was, nothing would have been enough.

Vicky’s doctors had prescribed a variety of medications, which she hated taking. About two years before she died, we found her a doctor who specialized in getting people off psychiatric drugs. The terrible irony was that although this really seemed to help, and Vicky felt better than she had in years, it ended with her killing herself.

As her doctor explained to us, it was possible that switching medications allowed Vicky to get just well enough to see how horrible she really felt her life was, which made me feel as if our efforts to help had actually triggered her death. The fact that she’d died was devastating enough, but because she’d killed herself, all I could think was, could I have saved her? Did I do enough? I felt so much guilt, it began to throw me into a depression of my own. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was somehow responsible.

Vicky’s suicide really rocked my world, and not just because of the guilt I felt. It made me wonder how much of her was also in me. Being a Swayze is a gift and a curse, because we all do possess this kind of wild Irish temperament. That temperament unleashes powerful things in terms of creative work, but it can be an enemy as well as a tool. You have to keep it in balance to survive, and Vicky hadn’t been able to do that. I think all of us Swayze kids felt vulnerable about ourselves after her suicide.

Yet despite my own self-destructive streak, I’ve always had an even stronger urge for self-preservation. No matter how
much despair I’ve felt in any given period, even during my absolute lowest lows, I never came close to considering suicide. Part of the reason is that I have a strong optimistic streak—deep down, I always believe things will get better somehow. But Vicky’s death seriously battered that optimism. For the first time in my life, dark feelings of cynicism began to creep in.

I had never allowed myself to feel like a victim before. But it was hard not to feel, sometimes, that no matter what you do, life is going to smack you down. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how good a person I tried to be, bad things kept happening. I never admitted it to anyone, and I never stopped pushing ahead, but for the first time I started feeling that I couldn’t get a break. And then, as if to prove my point, things got even worse.

Not long after Vicky’s death, our beloved 140-pound Rhodesian Ridgeback, Cody, died. Cody was more than a dog to me—he was like my son, my guardian warrior, my conscience. He was a beautiful, special animal who’d been by my side since he was a puppy. And his death, coming on the heels of Vicky’s, just devastated me.

Cody had been with us through all the ups and downs of our lives for the past thirteen years. He was with me when I was a struggling young actor on the set of
Red Dawn,
and he was our protector when fame started changing our lives. The bond he and I shared was deeper than I had with anyone except for Lisa. When he was diagnosed with cancer, both Lisa and I were so crushed, we got him every treatment we could and begged for him to hang in there.

And he did, for a whole year. Cody willed himself to stay alive for us, as he knew how desperately we wanted him to live.
I learned so much about the struggle to live from him. When he started getting treatment, he went back to being his old self for a while. But the disease eventually caught up to him, and when he hit his next bad stretch we knew we had to let him go. Lisa and I held him in our laps as he took his last breath, and although I knew his spirit was free, I felt an incredibly deep sadness that he wouldn’t be here with us anymore.

When those you love die, the best you can do is honor their spirit for as long as you live. You make a commitment that you’re going to take whatever lesson that person or animal was trying to teach you, and you make it true in your own life. Their having been in your life changed you in some beneficial way, and making that commitment is the only way you can ease the pain of their absence. But more than that, it’s a positive way to keep their spirit alive in the world, by keeping it alive in yourself. I’ve tried to honor that with my father, my sister, Cody—with anyone we’ve loved who has passed on.

With everything that had happened over the previous couple of years, Lisa and I started to seriously reevaluate how we were living our lives. For too long, we’d been running in the whirlwind, taking on too many things at once and ignoring the needs of our spirits. Together, we decided to simplify things, to get back to the basics.

At its peak, our horse business—showing and breeding— had included fifty horses, the majority of which we kept in Texas. This was way more than we could be personally involved with, so we sold some and cut back on traveling to horse shows. We also got rid of some of the clutter that we’d been collecting at Rancho Bizarro. And we decided to focus more on the things that made us happy, rather than the things that ended up controlling our lives instead of enriching them. But the
biggest thing we did, by far, was to finally fulfill a lifelong dream of owning a real ranch.

Ever since we’d spent time in New Mexico during the shooting of
Red Dawn,
Lisa and I had been in love with the rugged beauty and fresh air of the mountains there. In the late 1990s, we had an opportunity to purchase almost fifteen thousand acres of gorgeous ranch land, near where we’d filmed
Red Dawn.
It was like buying a piece of heaven, so we jumped at the chance.

For me, this was the fulfillment of a vow I’d made back when my dad was alive. I was sorry he wasn’t here to be a part of it, but I was proud to be returning to my cowboy roots, just as he’d always hoped I would.

With thousands of acres of pine trees, scrub brush, sparkling rivers, and gently sloping meadows, Lisa and I could explore to our hearts’ content. And we did, every chance we got—running horses through the brush, camping out for weeks at a time, learning every square foot of that beautiful ranch. I got to test my survival skills once again, living off the land and being as close to nature as a man can get.

Lisa and I were now both pilots, so we could fly ourselves back and forth to New Mexico. And we did, every chance we got. Because being out in nature, out at the ranch we loved, always helped restore our spirits in trying times.

In May 1998, I was shooting a scene for the film
Letters from a Killer,
when disaster struck.

It was late afternoon, and we were trying to get a few final shots for a big chase scene. My character, Race Darnell, is riding a horse bareback, galloping through the forest with the
FBI in hot pursuit. The scene called for me to race my horse right under a diagonally growing oak tree, right by a camera. A small crowd of people had gathered near the tree to watch the action—but they were standing in the path my horse would be racing down. Several hundred yards away, as I waited for my cue to come over the walkie-talkie, I had no idea they were there.

When the director yelled “Action,” I spurred my horse to a gallop. We raced toward the tree, but where I needed the horse to go right, to match the previous shot, he wanted to go left. He’d seen the people milling around, blocking his path, and he didn’t want any part of it. When he started going left, I had to quickly pull him right again, or the shot would be ruined.