David Addison wasn’t my only crush in 1985. It was also the year I was introduced to fellow Texan and future "Sexiest Man Alive" Patrick Swayze.
I boarded the Swayze train a couple of years before everyone else took notice of him in Dirty Dancing, and it was all because of my long-standing girl-crush on Genie Francis, who played Laura Vining Webber Baldwin Spencer Cassadine yadda yadda yadda.
By 1985, Genie had departed General Hospital and its fictional town of Port Charles, with Laura riding off into the sunset with Luke to live a whole new adventure as they began their family off-screen. Genie, however, kept busy working on other acting projects.
She was cast as Brett Main on the sweeping miniseries North & South, based on the books written by John Jakes. I hadn’t read the books, and I wasn’t especially fond of war movies, but if Genie was going to be a part of this 6-part television saga, that was good enough for me. #girlcrush
It wasn’t that much of a gamble. ABC pulled out all the stops bringing Jakes’s books to life, which included hiring many big stars to bring the story of a Civil War friendship to life. Johnny Cash, James Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, Gene Kelly, Linda Evans, Peter O’Toole, Olivia De Haviland and yes, even Wayne Newton, all contributed to this miniseries to end all miniseries. Its music was scored by Bill Conti, the sets were lavish, using these amazing historical locations. (I read somewhere that all they had to do to prepare parts of Charleston was toss some dirt on the streets.) And the costumes, my God. Everything was stunning.
But, again, I didn’t care about any of that. I only cared to see Genie in her new role. I settled in to watch the first episodes with high hopes that were quickly dashed. I knew from my handy dandy TV Guide what part she played, but the very first episode had a very different actress in the role… as it was Brett when she was a child.
I didn’t even get to see Genie at all until Episode Three, but by then I had found other reasons to tune in to the show. One of those reasons was named Patrick Swayze.
I hadn’t seen the Outsiders or Red Dawn, so he was unknown to me. I got to know him first as Orry Main, a Southern Carolina planter whose life would drive most of the plot.
We pick up on Orry’s story in the summer of 1842, when Orry is headed off to West Point to become a soldier. He meets the beautiful Madeline Fabray (played by the beautiful Leslie-Ann Down) on the way to the train station. Once he reaches north, he meets a cocky yankee named George Hazard.
These two relationships would alter the course of Orry’s life and drive most of the saga. The engine of this particular locomotive was, of course, the Civil War.
Having been raised a southerner, there’s a deep and abiding uneasiness that comes with the subject matter. We’re both taught to be proud of where we come from and face the grueling and vexing realization that the things our countrymen fought and died for were wrong.
There’s a lot of shame in that. More than a few folks with deep roots to the south can pull up records of their ancestors who literally owned their fellow human beings. For those of us who have evolved enough to know there is never any reason or excuse for this, it’s a tough pill to swallow. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say, and you can't really escape the horror of it as you grapple with what character you might identify with the most. Obviously I likened myself to those characters who took the risks involved to go against the grain.
In fact, I’d say of all the characters in North & South, the most challenging character was Virgilia Hazard, George’s abolitionist sister, brought to life brilliantly by Kirstie Alley.
Virgilia is on the side of right, but she’s cray. She was a smart, strong woman forced to find her place in a man's world, and didn't have much use for the social trappings that came with her lowly station as a female back in the 1800s. She constantly steps in it trying to do the right thing, much to her own detriment. But in her we see this resolute character who believes, rightly and unequivocally, slavery is an evil that needs to be destroyed, and she’s willing to risk EVERYTHING, and I do mean everything, to do that very thing.
It’s uncomfortable. The bad guys are deplorable, and play their parts so well I can't even WATCH them in anything else without holding a serious grudge. (Looking at you, Teri Garber and Phillip Casnoff.) The good folks suffer. Endlessly. The injustice of slavery slaps you right in the face as we get to see the brutality of it, both with overt violence and the watchful eye of passive indifference that posed as the cultural norm.
But it’s so damned engrossing I’ve watched both books and all 12 episodes twice a year since I bought the first VHS combo set. I truly love it, mostly because the bromance between Orry Main and George Hazard is irresistible, as they tried to hold onto friendship and honor in a time when it was nearly impossible to do either. These two friends on opposite sides of the battle lines have to find a way to maintain the close relationship they share, that started before the world started to change.
It gives you a sense of what it must have been like in that time, brother against brother. It was an unwinnable war, because we had to fight each other to do that very thing.
But if all that got too heavy, there was some 80s night-time TV drama, sex and eye candy to help salve the wound.
I noticed Patrick early on, because how could you not? It meant a lot to me that his character hated slavery and took a stand against brutality. (Not as much as Genie's character Brett, which makes me even prouder, as she befriended the people they used to enslave, she set them free and stepped up to do the work of her own plantation. She even put her life on the line to save her best friend Semiramis, who was once her slave, but became her sister of choice.)
But Orry had ethics and morals even as a pre-Civil War southerner, when his views were still slanted due to his upbringing. I remember when he returned from West Point and met Salem Jones, the new overseer his father had hired to get work out of the slaves. He found out Salem had been sleeping with (i.e., raping) Semiramis, and brutalizing her brother, Priam, whenever he naturally fought against it, and Orry was D.O.N.E. with that kind of thing. He took a stand against his very own father, who basically told him to remember his place, that he wasn’t running the plantation yet and had no business butting into it while he was off playing soldier. We saw how conflicted Orry became when he came face to face with his best friend, George, who had NO illusions how wrong slavery was. Orry felt compelled to defend the situation even when he himself didn’t agree with it… but he was forced to hold his tongue out of honoring his own father and his entire way of life. Seeing how he struggled with this and grappled with his own moral code and the traditions under which he was both raised and prospered, made him a good guy… or at least a good-er guy than people like Salem Jones or Justin Lamont, a neighbor of the Mains who is every bad thing you think of when you envision slave owners.
That Orry befriends a northerner at the dawn of his becoming a man of his own, then, becomes his saving grace, and you hang in there to see that change. You champion this friendship, this bromance, because you WANT to see him overcome. You want to see him legit turn into the “Good Guy.”
Patrick plays Orry with amazing depth. He isn’t just a purty face (though he is a purty face.) He plays the Southern Gentleman to a T, with poise, grace and elegance. (The outfits didn’t hurt. I was already primed from Prince to love a man in ruffles with long, luscious hair, and here Orry sported boots and capes and these beautiful silk vests. It was beautiful. HE was beautiful.)
In short, Orry made me give a damn about this character even though he fought on the wrong side. I understood him even if I didn't always agree with him, and it made all the "wins" that he had, where he DID come to terms with the changing world around him, that much more gratifying.
I loved Orry so much that it was hard for me to transition to Johnny Castle years later when I watched Dirty Dancing. Gone was the Southern Gentleman and in its place was a tough Northerner who danced to survive.
I got on board after one of THE sexiest scenes ever to be shot in any movie ANYWHERE.
I ended up paying homage to this scene in Beauty and the Bitch. Mine wasn’t as sexy as that, but it wasn’t written in any way to compete. I wouldn’t even dare.
By the end of Dirty Dancing, I was a Swayze fan. I went into Roadhouse a fan of both Patrick AND Sam Elliot, another crush that started in 1985 thanks to the movie Mask, because I mean, really....
I fell in love with bikers and gravelly voiced older men all in one fell swoop.
Roadhouse would go on to HEAVILY influence the first book I wrote, which has now become Chasing Thunder. Way back in 1989, I cast Patrick as Cooper “Snake” Scoggins, my romantic hero whose gravitas was equal to my badass heroine, M.J., who was in the unenviable position of trying to save her from herself (and Sam as her dad, who was one the main reasons she had both had to and refused to be saved.)
***
M.J. was as mad as a wet hornet when they finally pulled to a stop in the high desert of San Bernardino County. She flew off the bike and turned on Snake in a rage. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she shouted.***
“I was coming to your rescue,” he explained casually as he dismounted. “White knight,” he said, pointing to himself. “Noble steed,” he added, pointing to the bike.
“When did I ever ask you to save me?” she demanded.
“Darlin’, you were pole dancing in a seedy strip club. That’s not a cry for help. That’s a bloodcurdling scream.”
“I had it all under control,” she informed him coldly, and he held up a hand.
“Oh, I could tell. Only the best dancers get dragged off to a back room somewhere.”
She didn’t have time for this. She pulled out her phone. Snake was quick to grab it. “Gonna call your new partner in crime?” he asked as he held her phone out of reach. “Or should I say new partner in fighting crime? Since when do you work with cops, M.J.?” “Since never!” she spat as she jumped for the phone. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Please,” he scoffed. “Bob from Scottsdale? Give me a fucking break. I nearly had to tie him down when that guy grabbed you. So who is he, M.J.?” Snake demanded in a softer tone, his eyes angry and hurt.
“Are you serious?” she exclaimed. “That’s what this is about? You’re jealous?”
“Fuck you,” he said in a cold voice. They had a brief staredown before she backed off. He was a bastard for forcing her hand like this. Time was of the essence now. She still had one very important thing to do and had to depend on a wiseass cop to do it. She’d cave a little, and make him pay later. “Fine. He’s a cop. But I only used him to get inside the building. He was nothing more than a convenient tool, emphasis on tool, to execute the plan. Can I have my phone back now?”
The phone rang as he held it. He powered it down and then tossed it out of view into the dark shadows.
“I can’t believe you did that,” she said. She started to round the bike, but he grabbed her by both arms. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”
“I know one thing I couldn’t have done,” he said. “I couldn’t have gone one more night without doing anything.”
She saw the holster inside his jacket. “Snake, no.” She tried to wrench away, but he pulled her back against his solid chest. He cupped her face in one hand, drawing her closer.
“Like I ever had a choice. Can’t you see what you do to me, M.J.?” Her eyes met his.
“Can’t you see that if you ever got hurt—” She couldn’t even finish the thought. She looked away, so he tipped her chin with his thumb.
“Hurt?” he repeated. “I never know if you’re okay or if you need help. If you’re alive and well or dead somewhere in a ditch after pissing off the wrong person. You get hurt, you don’t tell me. You’re in danger, you take off and say nothing. It’s like having you and losing you all at the same time. And I never know which is which until you show up on my front door. You don’t think that hurts?”
She swallowed hard. She needed him, every bit as much as she needed to protect him. She had been weak because she missed those big strong arms holding her together, and the familiar scruff of his beard against her face that made her feel at home no matter where they happened to be. When she felt unsure, she knew she could draw from his endless well of strength. She knew it was unfair. But he had never sent her away for good.
Maybe if he did they would both be better off.
But it was the last thing she wanted as he lifted her up against him. The shirt she was wearing fell open, and her breasts swayed free against the thin cotton of his shirt. He groaned as he carried her back to the bike.
He sat astride while she straddled his hips. His hands slipped into the open shirt, sliding behind her and cupping her ass as he pressed her closer, grinding her down onto his lap. He captured her bottom lip tenderly in his teeth as he ended a kiss, and their eyes locked and held. “You break my heart, M.J.,” he murmured as he pulled away. “And only you can put it together again.”
Yeah, I poured all of my love for Patrick in Cooper. My love for Patrick helped me fall in love with Vida Boheme in 1995, ten years after Orry, developing my first girlcrush on a boy dressed like a girl. He played a drag queen so convincingly it was a shock to see him as a man anywhere in that movie.
And I can’t EVEN with the movie Ghost anymore. I haven’t watched it since he died. So, it was my honor to pay homage to him in the only real way I can… through my own creative work.
You can get to know Snake in CHASING THUNDER. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read it as part of your subscription, but today it’s free for everybody.
Enjoy! I know I sure did. ;)
