The Time of My Life (13 page)

Lisa, Nicholas, and I got right to work, coming up with ideas and scenes through improvisations. Lisa would write all our ideas down and shape them, and we worked to make seamless transitions between talking and dancing. We wanted the dancing to say as much as the dialogue and monologues, which eventually led to our title:
Without a Word.

The centerpiece was three monologues, one each by Lisa, Nicholas, and me. We wanted to express our innermost thoughts and feelings about dance, making the piece extremely personal. The day we decided to create these monologues, Lisa went home and started writing furiously. She was so driven and focused, she wrote the entire thing in one night and set it to music. And the next day, when she read her completed, beautiful monologue to Nicholas and me, we just looked at each other. Nicholas said, “Well, she’s certainly set the bar high.”

Doing
Without a Word
was both frightening and exhilarating for me. One of the most important themes in my life is learning how to seek out another dream when one dies. Too many people get swallowed by disappointment when their dream doesn’t work out, and I had always made sure I wasn’t one of those people. But now I was digging back into that disappointment—poking and exploring it. The result was a tremendous outpouring of emotion. A catharsis.

We put on three preview performances of
Without a Word
in the summer of 1984, then reworked it for a month-long run at the Beverly Hills Playhouse that fall. Every single show sold out, and audiences left the theater in tears. A Who’s Who of Hollywood stars came to see it, including Liza Minnelli, Drew Barrymore, and Melissa Gilbert in just one night. Gene Kelly came to a performance, too, and he particularly loved Lisa,
whom he confessed to finding “very attractive.” He and Liza pressed Lisa and me to take
Without a Word
to New York or make a movie of it, and separately, Gene encouraged me to pursue more musical venues. Apart from Gregory Hines, there just weren’t that many male actors out there who could sing, dance, and act.

When all was said and done, we received six LA Drama Critics Awards, including Best Play, Best Direction, Best Actress for Lisa, and Best Actor for me. As an artistic endeavor, it was an amazingly satisfying experience. But that wasn’t the best thing about it.

The best thing about the play was the response we got, and continued to get even years later, from people who’d seen it. For years, people would come up to Lisa or me and say, “I saw
Without a Word,
and it just moved me so much.” They’d tell us about the dreams they’d had, and how they’d fallen by the wayside—until seeing our play. People were actually choosing to go back and follow their bliss, encouraged by what they’d seen onstage.

Without a Word
touched a deep emotional chord in so many people, and it also cauterized wounds for both Lisa and me. Of all the endeavors we’ve undertaken, we both remember
Without a Word
as one of our proudest artistic moments.

By the time
Without a Word
premiered, Lisa and I had been together ten years. We’d been through a lot in that time: the untimely end of our ballet careers, moving across the country, going broke, my dad’s death, my foray into too much drinking. But through it all, I still felt a magic with her, which our emotional work together on
Without a Word
confirmed.

In the decade we’d been together, I had seen Lisa grow from a naïve eighteen-year-old into a confident woman. She wasn’t afraid of anything, and jumped right into whatever we got ourselves into, from woodworking to acting to playwriting. Lisa was game for everything, and she never lost her sense of humor even in the hard times. The longer we were together, the luckier I felt that we’d found each other. And I even began to let myself believe she wanted to be with me, too.

One reason we fit so well together was that we shared so many interests. We both loved dancing, acting, traveling, being out in nature. We also both loved horses, and even shared a dream of possibly owning a few someday. But when we finally took the first step toward that dream, it was more like a funny misstep.

While we were on the set of
Red Dawn,
both Lisa and I had fallen in love with a horse in the movie named Fancy. As shooting was winding down, I asked the movie’s horse wrangler if he’d sell Fancy to us. We still lived in an apartment, so we couldn’t keep him at home, but we figured he could live at the equestrian-center stables in LA. Fancy was a gorgeous, high-stepping Morgan parade horse, with his head always jacked up so high that sitting on him was like sitting on the back of a seahorse.

I offered the wrangler $150, hoping it would be enough. To my relief, he agreed. He led Fancy out of a trailer and held out the lead rope. “He’s all yours!” he said.

I’d just bought a horse! What was I going to do with him now? I took the rope and began to lead Fancy away, and at that very moment one of the old ranch hands was walking by.

“This is my new horse!” I said, a big smile on my face.

“That horse is lame,” the old-timer replied. He pointed at
Fancy’s legs, and I was forced to admit what I’d noticed earlier but tried to ignore. Fancy had a slight limp in his right rear leg. We’d bought a lame horse, with bowed tendons, but I loved him anyway—he and I had been through that freezing winter together. And despite his limp, Fancy still turned out to be a great first horse for us.

Being the son of a cowboy, I had grown up with horses and loved them all my life. Our family didn’t have much money, but horses were cheap in Texas, so we kept a few at some rundown stables near our house. We’d barter with the stable owners, exchanging chores for boarding, so from the time I was small, I learned how to muck stalls and care for horses. And because those corrals were so ratty, the horses needed a lot of attention, for things like splinters and hoof injuries.

We even had an Arabian mare when I was growing up. She wasn’t necessarily well-bred, but she was an Arabian, and we bred her to have a foal, whom we named Princess Zubidiya of Damascus. We called her Zubi. I loved that horse more than anything when I was a boy, and rode her every chance I got. And I learned horsemanship from a master—my dad.

My dad was absolutely beautiful in the saddle. He was like John Wayne. He’d been riding since he could walk, and he came from a long line of cowboys. His father—my grandfather— had been a foreman at the King Ranch in Texas, which at 825,000 acres was the size of Rhode Island, and one of the biggest ranches in the world. My grandfather was shot to death by cattle rustlers before my dad was born, and according to family lore, the killers sat there smoking his cigarettes while they waited for him to die.

My grandmother remarried after that, and my step-grandfather was a cowboy, too, up in the Texas Panhandle.
When I was growing up, I used to go there in the summers and work with him on the ranch. His name was Cap, but we kids called him Pe-Paw, which he hated. Later, when we’d go into bars together, he’d say, “Little Buddy, you call me Cap in this bar, don’t be calling me that piece of shit Pe-Paw!” I loved him to death, but of course I’d call him Pe-Paw just to drive him crazy.

These were the men who passed on to my dad—and me— the cowboy way. Even though I moved to New York and LA, becoming a dancer and an actor, I never lost that cowboy blood. My dad and I used to talk about owning a ranch together someday, with a stable of horses and big outdoor spaces. He died before I could make it happen for us, but I kept that dream alive and swore to myself that Lisa and I would buy a beautiful ranch in his honor when we had the money.

In late 1984, five years after moving to Los Angeles, I finally got the role that would enable me to buy a small ranch and start moving back into the cowboy life. And ironically enough, I’d be playing a man who spent much of his own life on horseback.

Orry Main, the swashbuckling Confederate Army soldier in
North and South,
was the role that sent my career soaring. A twelve-hour miniseries based on the extremely popular John Jakes historical novels,
North and South
was a TV event that rivaled the epic
Roots
miniseries of the late 1970s.

The story revolved around the Confederate Orry and his Union soldier friend George Hazard, played by Jim Read. Orry and George meet at West Point, and the miniseries follows their friendship through the tumult of the Civil War and beyond.
North and South
was a huge undertaking, with more than 130 cast members, thousands of extras, nearly nine thousand wardrobe pieces, and fifteen thousand props and set decorations being trucked to different locations all over the South. It was a certifiable Big TV Event.

I was incredibly excited to win the role of Orry, and not just because he was the kind of Renaissance-man, courageous southern gentleman I’d always aspired to be. Playing Orry meant that I’d be starring alongside the most amazing cast ever assembled for a television series. Elizabeth Taylor, James Stewart, Olivia de Havilland, Johnny Cash, David Carradine,
Lesley-Anne Down, Gene Kelly, Robert Mitchum, Jean Simmons, Kirstie Alley, Lloyd Bridges, and Waylon Jennings all had parts in
North and South
—and that’s just a partial list.

As they say in football, when you score a touchdown, you should try to act like you’ve been in the end zone before. So I was determined that, even though I’d be playing opposite some of the greatest actors of all time, I’d try to be cool about it. I especially tried to remember this the day I was scheduled to do a scene with James Stewart.

It was early in the shoot, so I hadn’t done many scenes with the big stars yet. Because Jim Read and I were the leads of the series, I wanted to project confidence. But when I heard James Stewart’s distinctive voice as I walked toward the set for our scene, my knees turned to jelly. And when I saw him sitting behind an ornate desk, in character as Miles Colbert, I couldn’t believe I’d been lucky enough to be cast opposite Hollywood legends like him. For a young actor, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

In addition to feeling incredibly lucky to be on that set, I also loved everything about my role.
North and South
was set in a time when men were men and women were women, and the courtliness and southern gentility of the time really appealed to my old-fashioned side. I loved walking down the streets on the set, seeing the men in their military uniforms and the women in their corsets and gowns, their cleavage spilling out as they fanned themselves in the heat.

The set even came equipped with “leaning boards,” as women couldn’t sit down in their giant ball-gown dresses without crushing all that crinoline. Instead, they’d prop themselves gently against the leaning board, resting their lower backs and legs without sitting. Walking by a row of corseted
beauties, dressed in my sharp Confederate Army uniform, I felt like I’d gone back in time.

We filmed all over the South, in Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas. And because we were making not only the twelve-hour
North and South,
but also
North and South: Book II,
we ended up shooting for a year and a half. It was amazing to have that much guaranteed work, at a really good salary. Even on
The Outsiders,
which was not only a Francis Ford Coppola movie but also did very well at the box office, I’d received only scale pay. It was worth it, of course, to work with Coppola. But both Lisa and I were really happy to finally have some real money coming in during
North and South.

I felt like I earned it, though, considering how intense the shooting schedule and conditions were. We shot six days a week, for no less than twelve hours a day. And some of the longest days were right in the middle of the South Carolina summer, when we’d sometimes spend up to eighteen hours shooting, wearing those heavy woolen uniforms. I even fainted once on the set, slamming my face into a cement column and breaking my nose before hitting the ground. But when Jim Read and I asked permission to take our coats off for one scene on a train, director Richard T. Heffron first had to confirm with a Civil War expert that it would be historically accurate before he said yes.

The producers did absolutely everything they could to ensure historical authenticity. Some of the costumes were made with nineteenth-century silk, and others were borrowed from actual historical collections or made from period drawings. The best source of costumes, however, was the hundreds of Civil War re-enactors who played in the battle scenes.

This was my first time meeting hard-core re-enactors, and I
was amazed at how particular they were about everything. When they were re-enacting a battle, they not only wore clothes that were true to the period, even down to their underwear, but they also didn’t eat any food or use any tools or weapons that weren’t available during the Civil War. These re-enactors, some of whom were descendants of soldiers who had fought in the battles we re-created, looked as if they had walked in through a time machine.

The cast also had several different coaches, to help ensure we stayed in character. Our dialect coach, Robert Easton, made sure everyone spoke with the proper drawl or brogue, and dance historian Desmond Strobel taught us how to dance an authentic “Sicilian Circle” and “Lancers Quadrille.” The result of all this attention to detail was a miniseries that looked, sounded, and felt like a real Civil War setting.

Depending on the cast and the general mood, film and TV sets can be pretty wild places. On
Red Dawn,
we’d gotten into some crazy pranks, partly to defuse the tension of the shoot, which was both physically grueling and emotionally draining. But on
North and South,
the cast wasn’t into pranks so much as having a good time. It was a fun group, and Lisa and I loved hanging out with everyone in the evenings after shooting.

We did a lot of filming in Charleston, South Carolina, which is packed with fantastic restaurants in its tree-lined, beautifully preserved old section of town. One restaurant in particular, Philippe Million’s, became a cast hangout. We’d head there nearly every weekend, ordering drinks and enjoying the kitchen’s nouvelle cuisine. Some actors could be found there several times a week, including Lesley-Anne Down, who we’d
heard had her own reasons for wanting to spend as much time as possible in expensive restaurants.