The Art of Men (I Prefer Mine Al Dente) (18 page)

We wore authentic corsets with our gowns. Corsets were designed to be worn from one to three hours, depending on the occasion. Poor women’s corsets laced in the front so that they could lace them themselves, while rich women’s corsets laced in the back because they had servants or slaves. We worked 12 to 16 hour days in the corsets, sometimes under the beating Charleston sun. By the end of week two and throughout the production, most of us stopped having periods, half of us had passed out, and the rest were just mean as hell. Sunday go-to-meetin’ corsets were not made for the arduous hours of filmmaking. But they did make our 24-inch waists compress to 19-inch waistlines. The point is, although we didn’t look all that authentic, we looked hot!

The men looked hot, too, especially Patrick, who had ridden horses his whole life. He was a beautiful rider. So when I laid eyes on him with his long brown hair flying in the wind, galloping down a mile-long tree-lined drive toward the antebellum mansion where we were sitting between takes, it took my breath away. It took it so far away that I immediately went in the house to get away from him. There are hot men, and there are dangerous men—he was both.

  •  •  •  

The expansive
North and South
and
North and South, Book II
, casts were mind boggling:

Elizabeth Taylor

Patrick Swayze

David Carradine

Lesley-Anne Down

Johnny Cash

Hal Holbrook

Gene Kelly

Robert Mitchum

Jean Simmons

Forest Whitaker

Lloyd Bridges

Olivia de Havilland

Jimmy Stewart

Wayne Newton

and so on.

I sat with Jimmy Stewart one day. He is on my top-ten all-time-great-actors list, and he was nothing short of stellar. We talked about our animals, and he told me he and his wife had monkeys, too. The monkeys had a special outdoor/indoor cage, and at night the Stewarts opened the cage into their bedroom where they played with the monkeys and let them leap around.

I was so honored to have met and spoken with such icons as Olivia de Havilland and Jean Simmons. It’s where I first met Elizabeth Taylor, who later became a friend. The same with Gene Kelly.

Between
North and South
and
North and South, Book II
, the filming spanned an almost-two-year period.

I got married in 1983 while I was simultaneously doing a TV series and
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
onstage. I’d done
Star Trek II
in 1981 and I was slightly crushed out on my young, bisexual costar Merritt Butrick, who became my friend. Sadly, he died of AIDS in 1989 at the young age of 29.

I’d done a movie in Greece while Parker and I were dating nonexclusively and made out with my leading man, Joseph Bottoms. My leading man on my short-lived TV series was Greg Evigan, and although he was very hot and sexy, he was also very married and taken.

What I’m trying to say is, I hadn’t been in a position such as I was in in
North and South
. It was my first experience going on location for a long period of time. When we were filming, I was away from home for at least four months, which turned into six. Other than the film in Greece, I’d only filmed in LA. Parker cheated on me when he went on location to film. We weren’t married when he did, but we were exclusive. So with this in mind, I guess I figured I had a “get out of jail free card” in my hip pocket.

The danger of Patrick was looming. He was married, but he exuded “anything was possible.” I purposely avoided him at all costs for the first few weeks. I would go to dinner with the entire cast but wouldn’t go out afterward. Then came the night that I agreed to go out for a few hours. We all danced into the wee hours, which worked for my character. The crazier she became in the story line, the more broken down she looked.

The shift occurred one night when we all went out dancing after filming and Patrick and I got drunk and decided to stay a little longer than the rest. This was several years before he made the movie
Dirty Dancing
, but when I tell you we were dirty-dancing that night, I can tell you it made that movie look like
Singin’ in the Rain
.

He walked me to my room that night and said, “I’m falling in love with you.”

Knowing he was drunk, it had little effect on me. Knowing we were both married apparently had little effect on me, either. After all, I did have that free pass in the hip pocket of my very tight, very sexy Fred Segal jeans.

The next day we were all off work. We congregated in my hotel room in Charleston. We had about 300 boxes of these tiny paper fireworks things; I think they’re called poppers. They are small amounts of gunpowder or something, about the size of a pea, wrapped in tissue paper. If you throw them at something or someone, they pop really loudly. Most kids have two or three boxes of them to spook people. We had 300 boxes!

Everyone was emptying the boxes into this one huge box about the size of a large hatbox, and we ended up with 3,000 individual poppers. It was rush hour in Charleston. The streets were packed with people below my third-story hotel room, and we were positioned at the open window. When the crosswalk light turned green, we would unleash 100 poppers. When they hit the ground, they would POP! All the people were freaking out, laughing, ducking for cover. We increased the artillery to the “500 popper drop.” SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! It sounded like a thousand tiny firecrackers going off. Patrick was exhilarated!! We all were in ecstasy torturing the poor rush-hour Charlestonians. It was juvenile but it was pre-9/11 and before the days of mass shootings. The people laughed when they realized they were poppers. Life was different then.

Most of us were in our early thirties but acted like 12-year-olds. There was a sense of summer camp each and every day, but we were getting paid for it. Hot summer nights, reminiscent of Tennessee Williams finest plays.

Patrick and I rarely worked in the same scenes. When we did, we milked it for all it was worth. In the story line, Virgilia and his character, Orry Main, were archenemies. But we decided that the subplot was that we were enemies with a hidden passion for each other. When we were on screen together, even if it was a scene filled with anger and adversity, our motivation was that of lust and submerged attraction. Lord! The extent an actor will go to justify his or her indiscretions is endless.

“I hate you!” (I really love you.)

“Get out of my house!” (Stay in the backyard and wait for me.)

We had it down to a ridiculous tee.

There were many days we never saw each other, as we would split up and film in different locations. Every time I laid eyes on him, it left me breathless. Then our spouses came to visit and threw monkey wrenches into the budding affair.

It was especially stressful because I was still in love with my husband, and he, his wife. They’d been in love since they were teenagers. And the worst part was, she was this beautiful, terrific person. I instantly fell in love with her myself.

One night we were all at dinner, Patrick, his wife, Parker, and me. Parker was so handsome and charming; she was engaging and so damn likable. Rightfully so, I felt like a horrible person. We hadn’t kissed or had sex, but we had dirty-danced and professed our love, which is probably much worse, much more dangerous than a one-night stand.

They seemed so pure and good, and we seemed so dark and naughty, which felt pathetic. I don’t know the exact mechanism that kicks into gear to make all your integrity and scruples go down the drain. Well, actually I do, but when I was in the grasp of the forbidden, it used to turn me on. Ahhh, what a tangled web we weave . . .

I spent time with Parker, Patrick with his wife. I can’t speak for him, but I couldn’t get him out of my mind. And all the while I knew I’d never seen a single affair that turned into a lasting relationship.

Filming and lusting for each other went on for months. The emotions and dialogue escalated daily. One night, toward the end of the shoot, I got fairly drunk, dirty-danced for hours, and then succumbed. We made out with each other. I decided it was a swell idea to just go for it and have sex. Now, this never happened to me before or since. Luckily, from some sector of the sane universe, came the voice of reason. Not my voice.

“Patrick, I wanna make love with you, I don’t care anymore, let’s just do it!” That wasn’t the sane voice of reason I’m speaking of, but here it comes. He started laughing . . . laughing!

“No! Come on, you’re drunk, Kirstie, you don’t really wanna do it. You’re not that girl, you will regret it for the rest of your life. If we’re going to be together, we’re not starting out like this,” he said.

I was pretty shocked. No one had ever refused to have sex with me! Especially someone who had daily conspired, even originated the idea of leaving both of our marriages to run away together.

I sobered up, lickety-split. “Seriously?” I said. “You seriously don’t want to have sex with me?”

“Of course I
want
to have sex with you, fool! But you’re the girl who freaks out and frets over hand holding. Can you imagine what this would do to you? It would eat you up.”

With all the crazy shit I’d seen Patrick do, and in spite of the stuff I surmised he had done, he was spot on.

What the hell is it about me that provokes men to protect me from myself? I know men refuse sex with women (rarely) when they’re not interested, but that was not the case. He couldn’t keep his hands off me. He’d spent every waking moment with me for months.

Five minutes later I was in the bathroom, almost on my knees, thanking god he hadn’t gone along with yet another of my swell drunk ideas.

I was near hysterics at the thought of almost having to tell my husband I’d cheated on him or look Patrick’s wife in the eye, knowing I’d banged her husband.

There was a knock on the hotel door. It was my driver. I hadn’t realized it was 5:00 a.m. and I was supposed to have left for the set at 4:45.

“I’ll be right down, Jimmy,” I meowed, looking like a cat had dragged me in.

Thank god I was shooting a scene in an insane asylum. I needed no makeup, and my eyes were black and swollen from crying. I’ve never been more grateful to a man for rejecting me.

There were two weeks left of shooting. Patrick and I spent every second together. The desperation was frenetic, with that sick indulgence that infidels wallow in. He asked me one last time to divorce my husband and make a new life with him.

He was very persuasive. The decision of whether to run off with him was torturous. But isn’t that the point of affairs? To be tortured? To take no responsibility for preexisting relationships?

I began to realize that although I might be willing to destroy my own marriage for him, I wasn’t willing to destroy his for me. I also knew in my heart that we might last two or three years, but we weren’t cut out for a life together. Patrick and his wife had something few people ever find.

No matter how much he told me he loved me, or how many romantic plans he devised, I knew that married people go through endless temptations during their marriages, especially actors. Some succumb to affairs. Some leave their spouses for another, only to find out it wasn’t really love. Some have sex with other people and confess and patch up their marriage. Some are left behind even when they wanted to patch it up, and the other person wasn’t willing to give them another chance. And some, like me, even amid the throes of love and passion, could see the truth.

As Patrick saw in me an inability to live with myself if I’d cheated on my husband; I saw an inability for him to be genuinely happy, for any length of time, with anyone other than his wife. I also knew he’d been drinking a lot.

Patrick did not let go of me easily. We spoke many times after we filmed. I found it painful and tempting, but I refused to meet up with him. It was still too dangerous and besides, at the end of filming I did what I always did, I confessed it all to my husband and went about the business of loving him and trying to be a good wife.

Over the years I saw Patrick three times. Once when I won a Golden Globe and once at a premiere. We just smiled at each other. The last time I saw him was at an event for Muhammad Ali, about six years ago. I was single. I walked to my seat at the banquet table. The hostess seated me next to Patrick and his wife. When she excused herself to use the ladies’ room, he turned to me and said, “There’s not been a day I haven’t thought about you.” I just smiled and thought,
You asshole, don’t even start.

The last time I saw Patrick’s wife was when she kindly asked me to speak at his funeral. There, I spoke my truth.

“No matter what Patrick said or did, no matter what occurred in his short, wild, dramatic life, it all boiled down to one thing, his passion for the love of his life—Lisa.”

Here’s all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.

—GEORGE CARLIN

The Art of
Costars and Lunatic Directors

I
N 1985 I was in Whistler, Canada, filming the movie
Shoot to Kill
. It was a taxing film, physically and mentally.

There I was, the only woman in the cast, 300 feet above a roaring river ravine, in a four-by-four-foot wire cage, precariously dangling from a one-inch twisted metal cable. I had to pull myself and one of my costars across the tremendous gorge all the while repeating my character Sarah’s lines, “Just don’t look down,” as I smiled and assured him that it was “perfectly safe.”

After each take, on the other side of the ravine, I would stroll behind this huge rock and bawl my eyes out. I was deathly afraid of heights, especially in the form of wire cages dangling from sky hooks.