Dennis, Anyone?

Put Yourself in Dennis Quaid's shoes. It's the summer of 1984. You're suffering from a string of stinging failures: Your marriage to actress P. J. Soles has ended in divorce court. She was the jewel of your life, and now you're arguing over who will get the dogs. Urban Cowboy was written for you. You read with Debra Winger. Everything was all set. Then director Jim Bridges had to tell you that John Travolta wanted the role, which meant $33,000,000 in advance film rentals, which meant you were out on the street. You got away from it all by taking a trip to New Delhi, only to be awakened on a sultry Eastern night by a frantic call from your agent in L.A "Come back here now!" he said. "They want you for An Officer and a Gentleman! It's in the bag!" You flew halfway around the world; but by the time you were touching down at L.A.X., Richard Gere's pen was touching down on the contract Your only great news in those years--getting your dream role of Gordo Cooper in The Right Stuff--was dimmed when the movie fizzled at the box office. All your hopes were riding on the part of the rock-'n'-roll astronaut, the youngest of the bunch, the best damn pilot in the goddamn world.

Now The Right Stuff has come and gone, and nobody knows who you are. People confuse you with your big brother, Randy. They confuse you with Robert Carradine or James Keach or one of the five other actor brothers you starred with in The Long Riders. After seven years of working your way toward stardom in L.A., you realize something: You're losing it. Whatever passion and hope thumped in your chest when you rode west on that bus from Houston at 21 have escaped you. What do you do? What can you do?

This is what Dennis Quaid did: He bolted out of Hollywood and went to New York. There he co-starred with his brother in an off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard's True West. For four months, the Quaids lived the story of two brothers, one a screenwriter, the other a big, menacing, unpredictable bruiser. By the end of each performance, they exchanged identities and were grappling on the floor, trying to kill each other. Performing in True West would be a kind of cathartic cure for Dennis Quaid.

One night, after they'd lived inside the incredibly physical play for months, something went wrong. They met backstage as Dennis walked back from a shower and Randy trashed his performance by seething, "You quit."

"No, I didn't," Dennis said. And all at once, they exploded with a screaming, kicking, shoving, hitting rage. The crew stood back, aghast. People filing out of the theater turned to listen, thinking the brothers were rehearsing. The fight was broken up and Dennis stormed to his dressing room, vowing to leave the show and never see his brother again. There were two holes in the wall, left by his predecessors. He put his fist through the plaster beside them. Then he remembered it was January, his hair was soaking and the hair drier was next door. In Randy's room.

He went next door to get it. Quietly, the two brothers began talking about why they hated each other, why they loved each other, what they admired and envied about each other. They left the theater that night arm in arm, went out and had the greatest time they'd ever had together.

•

Whatever demons Dennis Quaid exorcised that year in New York don't seem to be bothering him in 1987. After appearing in last year's s-f flop Enemy Mine, he hit the screen with a succession of good, high-profile films: Innerspace, the Steven Spielberg--produced, Joe Dante--directed s-f comedy in which he plays Tuck Pendelton, a hot-shot test pilot who is miniaturized and accidentally sent zooming through Martin Short's veins; The Big Easy, a tale of police corruption in New Orleans, in which he has a steamy romance with district attorney Ellen Barkin; and Suspect, co-starring Cher, a courtroom murder mystery directed by Peter Yates, who also directed Quaid in his first major role, as a young Indiana quarterback in Breaking Away.

In June, I flew to Austin to catch up with Quaid on the set of a remake of the 1950 B-movie thriller D.O.A. He'd been filming in the Texas capital, close to his home town of Houston, for five weeks. Nearly all of it had been night shooting; this was the first day in a month that the crew and cast had seen sunlight. It was a set of zombies--people bumping into walls, teamsters snoring on folding chairs, key grips downing Jolt cola. Quaid and I went to his trailer, one of several broiling in the 95-degree Texas sun. He'd just come from make-up, where he'd been aged to look six years older than his 33 years, and wore only Nikes and a pair of loud shorts.

"This is Maggie and Jesse," he said, pointing to a lumbering basset and a hyper golden-retriever pup. "I bring 'em with me to the set; it makes it seem a little more like home." He plopped onto a beat-up brown sofa and offered me his "Jet-sons" chair, a jetlike turquoise-vinyl seat. He pulled out a cigarette, then scoured the trailer for a match. He held the cigarette a little gingerly; the week before, he'd cut his hand open busting out a window for a scene and had gotten ten stitches. He lighted the cigarette, inhaled it gratefully and said, "Kids, don't try this at home."

Even though Quaid was exhausted from the jet-lag switch to day shooting, he was cracking jokes, performing, talking in a high-volume stage voice. (As an actor, he's no brooding, mumbling Method type, no young Brando or pouty Sean Penn; he's closer to Jack Nicholson: brash, male, full of smirking humor.)

If Quaid were ten years younger, he'd be the age of today's hottest young movie stars--the young kids, the Brat Pack: Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Charlie Sheen and Rob Lowe. I tell Quaid about a People cover story on Charlie Sheen: how he claimed to have made the deal for Platoon on the phone in his black Porsche; how he said he'd had a girlfriend but "I got that piano off my back"; how he said he liked to go out in L.A. at night and "check out some butts."

He laughed. "Ten years from now, he'll look back and go, 'Ooooo! Cringe city!' I wouldn't have handled it very well, to tell you the truth. The danger involved in getting success early is losing that inspiration you started out with about why you wanted to become an actor. What happens is you get all caught up in wanting to be in a hit movie, caught up in the commerciality and the financial decisions, instead of the material and what you should be concentrating on. It seems to have happened to people I admire most--like Robert Duvall--in their 30s. It seems a lot of people who make it in their 20s don't really have a chance to live life, to garner some experience. After that, you become a spider in a glass jar. Life watches you instead of you watching it, which is how an actor gets his meat."

His ambivalence about stardom is reflected by his two homes: one in the Hollywood hills, in the thick of the L.A. scene, and the other in the wilds of southwestern Montana, a region noted for its lack of multiplex moviehouses. Quaid is buying a ranch he's rented for years there. It helps him fit a peculiar schedule: Half the time, he's racing like crazy to get the hugest audience possible; the other half, he's running away, holing up. Few people recognize him when he's in Montana; it's a place where he can be, well, just a rich young guy with his own ranch.

"It's gorgeous country," he said. "It used to be Warren Oates's and Sam Peckinpah's place. Warren was a good friend of mine; we were in Tough Enough together. We were great friends the last year of his life. Then he checked out. His bones are right out in back of the house, in fact, spread around a campfire where we all used to howl at the moon." He plucked a felt marker off a nearby table, held it up. "There're pieces about as big as this. You can pick him up. One night, I took him to dinner. Put him back, though, of course. He was a great guy.

"The ranch is 1400 acres, bordered by a national forest. You can go out the front door, make a right turn and go for 200 miles without crossing a road. It's pretty incredible. Four and a half miles of creek goin' right through the property. Go right out the front door and fish. Trout, German browns, natives, cutthroats. The Yellowstone River is about a mile and a half away. It's gorgeous in the wintertime. In Montana, if you see somebody on the highway, you wave. It's, like, 'It's another car!' I run to the window to see who it is if I hear a car coming down the road. But mostly, I just sit and watch the clouds go across the sky. The whole valley becomes your mind." He smiled. "Warren used to describe it as nine months of winter and three months of guests."

I asked him how he would wind down from his four-film run after D.O.A. wrapped; the production was heading down to the wire, trying to get it in under the gun of the Directors Guild strike.

"It's a ritual," he said. "First, I go to an island paradise, sit with my girlfriend on the beach, with a piña colada in my hand, and relax. Then Montana."

"What does she think of your place in Montana?"

"Who?"

"Your girlfriend." I knew he'd been linked to actress Lea Thompson, star of Back to the Future and Some Kind of Wonderful. I'd also heard they were on the skids.

"I don't have a girlfriend now," he said. "We split up about five months (continued on page 180) Dennis Quaid (continued from page 130) ago. Lea." He looked up at me. "Do you know Lea Thompson? We lived together almost--shoot--five years. It got to be that we just never were together. The time factor. It's just too tough after a while. Six months apart is just too much. So we're still great friends. But it's...tough."

"I guess it's a rough business to be in, in that respect."

He took a puff of his cigarette. "Yeah. It is true ... but everybody's got that trouble, anyway. If you're together all the time, you've got troubles, too."

He suddenly seemed faraway, staring at the cigarette clouds drifting around the trailer, thinking about things he preferred not to think about. I asked him if he were still into boxing, and he brightened some. When he was 18, he started to box to avoid taking a dance class for stage movement. He'd never been much of an athlete in school--he was kicked off the football team, which in Texas high schools is all that matters--but he found that he excelled at boxing. He even dreamed of competing in the Olympics, but he was a middle-class white boy who lacked the killer instinct, as he likes to say, and there was only so much he could do, only so many opponents he could knock to the floor. The muscles we saw on him in Innerspace and The Big Easy, the ropes of sinew slung across his shoulders as he slouched in his trailer were shaped by a dozen years of boxing.

"I broke my nose three times," he said. "Twice in movies. I broke it in Tough Enough [in which he played a boxer] and broke it in Long Riders. It was an accident--James Keach was supposed to miss, but on the tenth take he hit me, and blood was spurting out like this. We kept doing the scene, but we couldn't use it, because he had such an apologetic look on his face. My nose went to a melon, man.

"What the game does to people, if you keep at it, it'll tag you. You know what happens when you get knocked out? Your brain sits in a pan of fluid. And when you get knocked out, your brain tilts like this; and that pan, after a while of getting hit like that, I.Q. points start going."

He hung up his gloves after he saw his hero, Muhammad Ali, in a Santa Monica gym. "And he was ... sad, man. He was slow.

"Now I'm into yoga and golf." He laughed, then said he wasn't kidding. "It's embarrassing to admit that you play golf, because the image of white shoes and white belts and Pat Boone comes up. But there're a lot of cool people playing golf now. Bob Seger and I play golf. I figure, if Bob Seger plays golf, why not me?"

The hot summer seeped relentlessly into the trailer, vanquishing the barely effectual air conditioning, as we talked about many things: his nightmarish memories of making Enemy Mine, which dragged on forever, with fired directors, canceled locations on fire- and hail-ravaged islands off the coast of Iceland and, finally, a quick fizzle at the box office; how doing The Right Stuff started his love affair with flying--he even does acrobatics, snap rolls, lazy eights; how music is nearly as important to him as acting--he has written songs since he was 13 and has written and performed songs for a number of pictures, most recently for The Big Easy.

Finally, he was called to the set. After a long day of waiting, he was acting, finally getting down to business.

•

He wanted to take a break, have some fun. That night and the next, we talked about storming Sixth Street and beyond, drinking and catching bands at Antone's and the Black Cat Lounge. Here and there, we'd talk and I'd take notes. But every night, shooting would go overtime. Dailies from the week before would be screened late at night in north Austin. So instead of bar hopping, we'd ride in a big black limousine to the screening room, with the windows down, the dogs wrestling in back, a tape of Quaid's own music booming on the stereo and a huge grizzly bear of a man named Jim at the wheel. By the time the dailies were shown and discussed, Quaid would have eaten most of a huge jalapeño-laced pizza, and then he'd head for his place west of town to catch a few hours of sleep before his 7:15 A.M. call.

He called me one night at one A.M. "Listen, where are you?"

I gave him my address, in a quiet neighborhood north of the UT campus.

"OK. How about if I come over and we just walk the suburban streets?"

On a flat black stretch of Sky View Road, Dennis Quaid pointed out Saturn. He's an amateur astronomer and often looks at the Montana sky through a telescope. I asked him what the winking body was next to Saturn, and he said, "I don't know. A star." (All right, so he's not Carl Sagan. Give him a break.) He was walking with a beer in his palm, another cold one stuffed in the hip pocket of his shorts. The night was eerily quiet, except for the padding of our shoes on the asphalt, the chorus of crickets, the rumble of a distant train.

"Did you do this when you were a kid?" Quaid said suddenly. "Walk up and down the suburban walks? There's something very safe about it. I always wanted to be out of it. I always kinda envied those guys who grew up in the inner city of New York, who knew the real life, because of the boredom that goes on in the suburbs. But at this time of night, it's very mysterious sometimes."

We sat on a curb across from a row of darkened homes. Quaid popped his second beer. The long day had dragged him down, put some fatigue into him, and his gusto-filled Texas baritone had dropped to a scratchy, drawling bass.

We talked about Suspect. It's about a homeless man who's accused of murder and put on trial; Quaid plays a young Washington lobbyist who's on the jury, and Cher is the homeless man's public defender. During the trial, Quaid becomes convinced of the man's innocence and gets involved with both his attorney and his defense. While he worked on Suspect, Quaid became interested in the problem of the homeless, spending the night on a grate during the Great American Sleepout, and he plans to perform in a concert for them this Christmas Eve in Washington.

"Everyone in the movie is homeless," he said. "Including me, including Cher; we all live separate lives. We live alone. When we see the places we live in, they're barren, they're stark. A home is two people. Don't you feel that way sometimes? I do. It's a question of loneliness."

I asked him if he felt that way on his huge ranch in Montana.

"You mean in paradise? Yeah. You feel it in paradise. There's no way in the world you can geographic your way out of it. It's just a part of all of us that we're going to feel, you know? Relationships. That's what we're all after. It's love, man. To really get to know one person in your entire life, to really, really know one person. It seems to be our real quest in life, to escape our own loneliness."

We sat and sipped our beers. A light went on in a house across the street, went back out. "My dad died about three months ago. And I'm just coming to terms with, uh, dying. It sounds stupid now, I guess, 'cause here it is one in the morning and I'm dog-tired; I don't know what the fuck I'm talkin' about."

He shrugged, ran his hand through his hair. "Losing a parent kind of gives you a sense of mortality. Before that, I thought of myself as living forever, and that's all changed. He and I were great friends. He was a frustrated actor all his life--he used to tap-dance around the house and do Bing Crosby and Dean Martin impressions. He was a really funny guy, the reason Randy and I were both actors. There was a legend in the family that he was in San Francisco getting ready to ship out--he was in the merchant marine--and a couple of talent scouts from Columbia approached him and said he looked like Dana Andrews and wanted him to do a screen test. But he had to ship out. Probably not true," he said, managing a little laugh. "But it's a good legend nonetheless."

We walked back toward where the limousine was parked. Big Jim was walking around with Maggie and Jesse, whose tinkling chains were arousing the canine life of greater Austin. I shook Quaid's hand, minding the stitches. He had to get going. He was making a movie in the morning, and then he had to keep moving, working hard, making music, diving into other lives, making other movies. There were millions of people sleeping through that quiet American night who still had no idea who Dennis Quaid was.