Patrick Swayze: Still Inspiring! written by Sue Tabashnik, reviewed by Sarah Kloth
Some celebrities get one biography. Patrick Swayze, it turns out, gets an entire chorus. Patrick Swayze: Still Inspiring! is Sue Tabashnik’s fifth book built around the actor, dancer, and Arabian horse enthusiast who died in 2009, and it may be her most generous one yet — not a conventional biography at all, but an oral history assembled from more than fifty interviews, written tributes, and archival quotes from the people who actually worked alongside him, grew up with him, guarded him, danced with him, and adored him from the other side of a stage door.
Tabashnik, a Detroit-area author and former social worker who became a Swayze fan in 1988 and has spent decades interviewing people connected to him, organizes the book into eight loosely themed chapters: colleagues and friends who worked with him behind the camera, actors and stunt performers who shared the set, the dance world that shaped him from childhood, family friends, a film critic and an entertainment journalist, devoted fans, the Arabian horse community he became deeply involved in, and a closing chapter of trivia and career facts. Each chapter opens with Swayze’s own words, pulled from decades of interviews, so the reader hears from him directly before the tributes begin.
What emerges, story after story, is remarkably consistent. Nearly everyone in this book — from Point Break castmates who trained alongside Kathryn Bigelow and Keanu Reeves, to North and South co-stars, to a Chicago hotel security guard once assigned to walk his dogs late at night — describes the same person: a movie star who insisted on doing his own stunts, who called crew members by name, who threw a football to a starstruck thirteen-year-old extra on the set of The Outsiders, and who once got quietly, memorably firm with a young castmate for allegedly looking down on a background extra. Friends and family return to one small but telling detail: almost no one who actually knew him called him Patrick. To them, he was always Buddy — a name from his father, offered to new friends only once he trusted them.
The book doesn’t shy away from the harder chapters. Several contributors describe watching him film the TV series The Beast while undergoing chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer — sick all weekend, back on set Monday morning with a joke ready. His longtime bodyguard and friend Frank Whiteley recalls all-night conversations about purpose and mortality years before the diagnosis came. More than one interviewee mentions, gently, that Swayze wished he’d had more time, and wished he’d been a father. These moments don’t dominate the book, but they give real weight to a subject that could easily have stayed at the level of pure nostalgia.
There is plenty of nostalgia here too, and it’s the book’s other great pleasure. Stuntmen recall him teaching himself to skydive before Point Break even wrapped. A young BoJesse Christopher describes talking his way into the role of Grommet by commandeering a friend’s audition. Terri Garber remembers Swayze knocking her clean off her feet during a slap scene on North and South. An extra on The Outsiders gets handed a business card that reads “Buddy Swayze, carpenter.” Christopher Riordan, who was himself discovered by Fred Astaire, spends much of his chapter remembering Swayze’s mother, the choreographer Patsy Swayze, who broke color lines in Houston dance schools and taught her son that fame was never a reason to stop working hard. By the time the Arabian horse breeders show up to talk about a chestnut named Tammen, the reader has been fully absorbed into Swayze’s world, from soundstage to stable.
Readers should know what this book is not. It isn’t a chronological biography, and it isn’t an investigative or critical look at Swayze’s career or choices — this is an homage, assembled with real affection by an author who has spent over two decades building relationships in the Swayze fan and professional community, and it reads that way throughout. The interview-transcript format, with dozens of contributors and some inevitable overlap between stories, rewards browsing chapter by chapter more than a single cover-to-cover sitting. But for the audience it’s built for — longtime fans of Dirty Dancing, Ghost, Road House, and North and South, or anyone curious what Patrick Swayze was actually like when the cameras weren’t rolling — it delivers exactly what it promises, story after story.
About the Book
Patrick Swayze: Still Inspring
by Sue Tabashnik
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