There is one interview tape that I will treasure always, long after micro-cassettes have gone the way of vinyl, and I am too arthritic to coax my rickety Dictaphone to life. The acoustics in the empty studio where it was recorded were less than promising. But, because he leaned in close to the microphone, the words are clear – and just as low, insistent and thrilling as when I first heard them all those years before. "Nobody puts Baby in a corner."
I had been sent to interview Patrick Swayze, who died yesterday from pancreatic cancer at the age of 57, in advance of his run as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, in 2006. We met at a dance school off Covent Garden and I recall him entering the room with his trademark hobble, the result of a teenage football injury. After chatting about fame, marriage and alcoholism, he graciously acquiesced when I asked him, hot-faced, to repeat that famous line from his 1987 film Dirty Dancing. The article never ran, due to a PR mess-up. In retrospect, I think that my editor was less interested in Swayze than in bringing an end to my relentless badgering to let me interview him.
The truth is, I didn't really want to meet Swayze. I wanted to meet Johnny Castle. I must have been 13 when I first saw Dirty Dancing on our new-bought VHS. Its certificate precluded me from watching it on the big screen, but older brothers and sisters had been and when it was released on video it was the talk of my class. We all wanted to lose our virginity to Johnny. When Lindsay Cameron was asked by our French teacher, "Lequel est le dernier film tu as vu?" and she replied, "Le Dirty Dancing", her status as coolest girl was confirmed until sixth year.
For the uninitiated, and I believe there may still be a few, Dirty Dancing was a coming-of-age romance, set in the early 60s. It was incredibly low-budget, with no proper stars, and was only designated for cinema release over a weekend. Then it became an international smash. It told the story of Frances "Baby" Houseman, a smart, privileged but gauche 17-year-old, who is spending her summer holiday with her family at the mountain resort of Kellerman's. Baby develops a crush on Johnny Castle, head of the dangerously working-class entertainment staff. When Johnny's best friend Penny discovers she is pregnant, and that the only day she can visit a travelling abortionist is when she is booked to perform a dance spectacular at the local hotel, Baby steps in. As Johnny teaches her the routine, both she and their relationship blossom. But they meet adversity at every turn.
Typing this synopsis, I'm struck by two things. First, that a dance movie based around the device of procuring an illegal abortion would never have traction in Hollywood nowadays. Second, that the bare bones of plot cannot convey how seminal, how sensational, how serious this movie was – and still is – for a lot of women of my generation.
The dialogue was quick-sharp and endlessly quotable, the soundtrack superlative and the choreography so sexy it was sometimes hard to breathe. But for those of us who were inculcated at an impressionable age, its significance is far greater.
It is not about some smushy hen-night-style nostalgia for the days when we all fancied Swayze, with his curiously feminine cupid's bow and improbably pumped torso. As an adult, I've enjoyed Dirty Dancing DVD evenings with some of the smartest women I know. And in many ways, Dirty Dancing was an astonishingly political film: Baby was a human-rights obsessive, named after the first woman in the US cabinet, craving to join the Peace Corps. And it was Robbie, the Yale student, who betrayed Penny, not Johnny, the bad boy who was essentially good.
But aside from this, Dirty Dancing resonated because it was about first love. Not those awkward exchanges I was having with David in the guitar practice room at the time, but the most perfect and validating way I could imagine an initiating romance to be. It wasn't a love that would last – I could never see Baby and Johnny arguing together in the checkout queue. Their exchange was finite, forbidden, and glorious because of it.
I am grateful that he has left me with the greatest final scene: Johnny and Baby performing their routine exquisitely in front of the Kellerman's doubters, having The Time of Their Life, proving that there can still be a dream – though maybe only in movies – that love will out in the last dance of the season.
