Frank Whiteley, Patrick Swayze’s bodyguard, was driving a Chevy Suburban through Sacramento’s rush hour traffic when the actor disappeared from the passenger seat. “I reach over to light a cigar and he wasn’t in the Suburban anymore,” Frank tells Closer. “We’re doing like 65, and I look out and see a shadow. He was standing on top of the Suburban with his arms raised out, doing the Titanic pose.”
Before Patrick’s untimely passing nearly 15 years ago, the Houston native did a lot of living. He’d emerged after nearly a decade of forgettable roles as an A-list star with 1987’s Dirty Dancing and followed it up with crowd-pleasers, including Road House, Ghost and Point Break, making him one of the most popular actors of the early 1990s. Even more impressive are the obstacles Patrick overcame in his personal life, including an unhappy childhood, a turbulent marriage to his childhood sweetheart, and a long cycle of alcohol abuse. “Alcohol breeds self-pity, and I’ve resorted to it on and off throughout my life,” said the star. “But I kicked it by making other things more important.”
Growing up, Patrick, the eldest boy in a family of five children, played football, practiced martial arts, acted in school plays and danced classical ballet at the behest of his choreographer mother, Patsy. She was a demanding taskmaster. “Our mother made us feel that we were never good enough. If I did anything, I had to be the best because that’s what my mother expected of me,” said Patrick, who confessed he harbored anger toward his mother for years.
He felt closer to his father. “All the love we got came from our father, Jesse, a Texas state champion cowboy,” gushed Patrick. “He was a gentle soul, an incredibly intelligent man who could do the New York Times crossword in 15 minutes.” Jesse’s sudden death in 1982, three years after Patrick made his feature film debut in Skatetown U.S.A., left him heartbroken. “His dad was Buddy, and they called him Little Buddy,” recalls Frank. “After his father passed, Patrick became Buddy.”
Patrick Swayze Married Lisa Niemi
Lisa Niemi, 67, met Patrick at his mother’s dance studio when they were both teenagers. “He had a kind of reputation as a Casanova; I had a reputation as a bad girl, and we were supposed to stay away from each other,” says Lisa, who became his dance partner. She remembers falling for Patrick the first time they performed together. “I put my hand in his, and we looked in each other’s eyes, and it was like ‘BANG!’ and this incredible magic happened.”
The pair wed in 1975, but Lisa admits they “wasted some time” before trying to start a family. “Both of us loved kids and always intended to have kids,” says Lisa, who calls the two miscarriages she suffered “heartbreaking.” When a long course of acupuncture didn’t result in a healthy pregnancy, she broached the subject of adoption with her husband, but Patrick said no. “He got very teary-eyed and said, ‘I want to have children with you,’” she recalls.
Patrick Swayze Found Stardom With ‘Dirty Dancing’
Dirty Dancing, a small 1987 film set at a Catskills summer resort, was never expected to become a hit. “Everything went wrong, everything was hard, and everything was on a shoestring,” Jennifer Grey tells Closer of the shoot. “We thought that maybe no one would see it.”
Instead, the film earned more than $214 million worldwide and made Jennifer and Patrick overnight stars. The actor used his new fortune to fulfill some dreams, like buying a ranch in New Mexico and taking pilot lessons, but mostly he didn’t care for the luxuries of stardom. “Buying too much overwhelmed him,” says Frank. “He loved the same old wornout T-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. They made him feel like a person still.”
Patrick also hated the isolation that fame created. “The reclusion of stardom really ate me up because I’m a people person,” Patrick explained. “It gets to be a real bummer. Limos and hotel rooms become the scariest, loneliest places in the world.”
Those pressures and another family tragedy — the 1994 overdose death of his sister Vickie — left Patrick feeling “cursed” and he entered a cycle of heavy drinking. “It’s very, very painful to see someone you love destroy himself,” says Lisa, whose life with Patrick became so difficult due to his drinking that they separated for a time. “Buddy loved that woman more than life,” Frank says. “They didn’t always get along very well. They had some good fights — both of them were dramatic, so their battles were intense — but he always came back to her.”
The cycle of binges and recovery continued for years, but in addition to Lisa, Patrick received support from his brother Don, who stepped in to help Patrick get sober in 2002. “He’d gone on a bender for a month or so while we were filming George and the Dragon over in Luxembourg,” Frank recalls. “Donny said, ‘Enough is enough, you need to get yourself clean.’ So they wound up mountain-biking 30 or 40 miles a day until the urge to drink went away.”
Inside Patrick Swayze’s Final Years
In the last decade of his life, Patrick shifted from leading-man roles to more character-based portrayals. “I got completely fed up with that Hollywood blockbuster mentality,” said the star, who turned down an offer of several million to star in Dirty Dancing 2. “I couldn’t take it seriously any longer.” His final role, as an FBI agent in 2008’s TV series The Beast, earned the actor some of the best reviews of his career.
Likewise, his relationship with Lisa entered a stronger, more settled phase after he quit drinking. “Things went from horrible to the best they’ve ever been,” recalls Lisa. “It’s like we finally gained the wisdom to have what we wanted and to know how to have it. I was really appreciative that that change had come before we found out he was sick.”
Patrick often suffered from digestive troubles and chronic pain, but in 2007 he noticed that his eyes looked yellow. “We went to the doctor, and the moment he looked at him and saw what was going on, he sent us immediately for a CT scan,” says Lisa, who recalls the agony of having to wait 24 hours for the reports to come back. The diagnosis of stage 4 pancreatic cancer upended their world. “It was a really tough time. Your life just turns on a dime.”
She was by Patrick’s side when he passed away on September 14, 2009. “I cherished our time alone, holding his hand, listening to music, sleeping with my arm around him, my head on his shoulder, wordlessly,” Lisa revealed in her 2011 memoir Worth Fighting For. “My last words to Patrick? ‘I love you,’ and those were his last words to me.” Lisa remarried in 2014, but she still dreams of Patrick and knows that they will be reunited one day. “He’ll be waiting for me,” she says. “And that’s a wonderful thing.”
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